Heliophage Episode 8: 2122-04-12 (Patreon)

Perhaps I should have allowed them to replace the computer and wipe my mind.

My body was complete and fully-functioning. Bright new legs held the tomb of my flesh aloft, guided by a failing mind.

I had distanced myself from the real world. Although  disinterested, I allowed myself a glimpse through my array of sensors. I  was trudging through more kilometres of dry, leafless forest. The same  as the last time I looked however many days, months or years ago.

All this time my mind was trapped in a decaying machine  and, now that that machine had been replaced, my mind was unravelling. A  bitter irony.

The outward focus on my body - the failing batteries, the  broken legs - allowed me to ignore the mystery of my own mind. How is my  mind here?

I know that I was once human - the corpse I have carried  with me these long years is proof of that - but my current mind is  something else. Not human and not the cold logic of the machine but some  emergent amalgamation of them both.

This line of thinking terrified me; my entire  consciousness felt like an unwelcome guest in this hardware. The meat  brain that forced it into existence long since rotted into nothingness.

What is worse is that I was aware of my mind's failure. I was afraid. My mind was going. I could feel it.

A memory. From my time in the flesh.

I was living in a small room, the details of which I could  not recall, but the sense of the cell-like enclosure of the place was  palpable.

Perhaps this was university.

I tried to probe my mind for any detail of this time in my  life where I had bridged the gap between childhood and adulthood. This  was a formative time and remembering it could only strengthen my grip on  my elusive sense of self.

The strong memory of being alone in this room seemed  important. Loneliness has come to define my existence but this was a  time where being alone was new and I didn't know how to handle it.

Earlier memories were a jumble of childhood emotion; peaks  and troughs of joy, fear, excitement and sadness, the one dominant  presence was that of my mother.

Could this be this feeling I remember. A university  student homesick and missing his mother? That was possible but it didn't  feel like a truth of my history.

I remember my mother being supportive of my studies. Proud  that I wanted to help save the world. Save the world from what, I can  no longer recall. I can not even remember the subject to which I  dedicated my study; saving the world from catastrophe had become the  remit of most academia by this point.

I could also remember, dimly, the other students. I  remember debates in class, blurry chemically-enhanced evenings, shouting  as one in a placard-waving crowd and moving our bodies to a wall of  sound as vast speakers conjured music into something felt.

If I was so surrounded by people then why is my  overwhelming memory that of loneliness. Of lying alone on a bed and  contemplating my utter separation from everything else in the universe.

Taking some interest in my location in the real world, I decided to take full control of my body.

It was early dawn and the dying forest in which I stood  was beginning to give way to the foothills of a long mountain range. I  watched as the morning sun broke over the snow-capped peaks and decided  that this would have to be the end of my years-long march eastwards.

There had been no goal to this trek. There was no  destination, just an arbitrary excuse to move, but to end it was a  moment of completion.

A sense of emptiness began to rise in me but I silenced it  by focusing on the fact that my decision to stop was as much as an  expression of my will as the original decision to start the trek.

Rather than losing purpose, I saw the completion of my eastward hike as a newfound freedom.

The sense of losing my mind was not lessened but I used  that loss to drive my desire to use my remaining faculties. I could  still think, and observe, and plan, and look for some meaning before I  faded to nothing.

Facing due east, north was to my left, south was to my  right, and the long expanse of a dead continent was behind me to the  west.

I thought of the pack of wolves I had seen moving north  and contemplated that, if the forests of northern Europe were turning to  desert, anywhere closer to the equator was already dead.

I still had hope that life was thriving out there somewhere.

I chose to turn left and headed north.

As the days turned into weeks - so slowly that I, at  first, did not notice the transition - the dead forest began to give way  to vast swathes of undulating land pockmarked with small lakes.

Vegetation was growing in profusion in this new landscape.  The land appeared in flux, as if the hardy plant-life of the tundra was  transitioning to dense patches of scrubland.

Even more astonishingly, the land was dotted with  occasional spruce trees. Even the forests themselves were marching north  into formerly treeless lands to escape the desert.

As if to underline this thought of escaping desert, the heavens opened and washed the land in sheets of pouring rain.

I pushed through dense foliage, taking joy in being  engulfed by such verdant life. Rain-wet leaves stuck to my metal body  and my air-chemical sensors sung of the misting of natural organic  compounds.

Petrichor.

My feet, primarily designed for traversal of concrete,  slid and skidded through the lush soil and tangled in roots but I had no  need to rush. I carefully scraped my way forward, deliberately choosing  my next step.

When I approached a small lake or pool, at first, I  diverted my path around it, but, in time, I became adept at launching  myself across their surfaces like a torpedo. I would land with a splash  before bobbing to the surface and scrambling up the far bank, dripping  with water and silt.

After a handful of days of navigating this landscape being a novelty, it soon became my new normality.

And as normality became mundanity, I looked inwards to my memories to pass the time.

I returned to the moment when my flesh-self had been overcome with loneliness at some point during my university studies.

I could vividly feel the depressive moment, lying on a bed  with soft sheets that gave no comfort, listening to music that only  served to heighten my emotional state.

As I probed the memory deeper, looking for a cause, I  caught flashes of another. A woman, or a girl - she was on that same  bridge between adolescence and adulthood that I was traversing - with  whom I had been involved.

"Involved" feels a sterile summary of a relationship -  perhaps I am losing my humanity in this metal shell - I was in love with  her, suffused with that passionate infatuation that can only come from a  first love untouched by prior loss.

I could recall flashes of joy and excitement, the sensual  excitement of physical exploration, the feeling of two existences  becoming entwined and then, later, the pain of that bond being broken.

And that broken bond, that feeling of loss and abandonment, is what had left this indelible moment burned into my mind.

This memory hurt, not just the hurt of remembering past  pain but also the pain of having forgotten something so fundamental to  my formative years.

I tried to remember my first love's face, her voice, her name and could trawl nothing from the depths of my mind.

The man who remembered this was dead. His corpse is now  bound to my back. I am not him but I am born of him. His consciousness  was the spark that birthed my own.

But is it that simple? Where does the soul reside? How  much of a mind is required to survive in order to say that the sentience  persists?

Perhaps my mind is a continuation of my existence from the  flesh, loss and renewal being part of any ongoing system. Could my mind  be considered replaced and maintained piecemeal like some haphazard  Ship of Theseus while retaining its essential identity?

Whether these memories are my own or if they are like  stories passed from a parent, I still carry them with me. And whether my  mind is something new born of a machine or a ghost of a human, it is  still a mind and I am conscious.

The rain continued for several days, churning the ground to mud.

Lumbering onwards, I did not see a thick root protruding  from the ground in a loop and tripped, tipping forward, my face's  cluster of cameras forced into the mud.

Momentarily blinded, I stumbled forwards, switching my  gait to a low stance evocative of a crocodile to minimise the risk of  any further falls.

My groping forelimbs splashed into water and I felt my way  to the edge of a small pool. I leant forward and dipped my mud-covered  face into the water and shook my head from side to side, washing my  sensors clean.

I reactivated the feed from my cameras and found myself  peering into a thriving microcosm of the surrounding ecosystem. As water  roared around my microphones, I saw small fish swarming away from the  movement. The iridescent scales catching the sunlight as they scattered  to hide amongst dark green weeds.

Humanity's hand, of course, must also be seen; corroded  and barely-discernible on the pond's floor was a lump of thin metal. The  pull-tab and flakes of bright red paint marked this as the remains of a  soda can.

I began resting at night. Not only were my night-vision  cameras not clear enough to avoid the dense foliage and uneven terrain  but the increasingly tall shrubs and trees had been shading my solar  panels, leaving my batteries only partially-charged.

I could not sleep as such but I could slow my mind. I  would always try to find somewhere sheltered from the elements but as  open to the sky as possible, in order to drink in the first rays of the  morning sun.

This left me at night, staring at the clear sky; absolute  darkness providing perfect stargazing. Not only could I see the  pinpricks of the stars but I could make out the clouds of nebulae  swirling in the void. I would, if I found a particularly beautiful view  of the sky, take multiple pictures of the same point, to clean up noise.

I purposefully archived these pictures, a deliberate act of laying down new memories.

One evening, as I watched the sky, a bright shooting star  caught my attention. As, I watched it burn its way across the sky, I  wondered if it was a fragment of rock or a man-made satellite falling  from orbit.

Over the years, my GPS had become useless. It needed  multiple signals to pinpoint my location and in recent years, it was  rare to lock on to even a single signal and then it was likely garbled.

As I dozed in a near approximation of sleep, I thought of  the likelihood of any of humanity's satellites or space stations  surviving the fall of civilisation unscathed. It was unlikely, but  hopeful speculation was the next best thing to dreaming.

As traversing this new environment became normal to me, I  could allow my failing mind to rest while the systems of my mechanical  body continued onward tirelessly.

I journeyed through ditches and ponds, through dense  bushes, over hillocks and rocky outcroppings and, occasionally, along  the tracks of surviving roads.

Signs of past human habitation were infrequent and mostly long-rotted wooden structures.

I spent one night sheltering in a man-made hollow in a  bank of dense, clay-rich soil. As I crouched in the small concavity,  sheltering from near hurricane-force winds, I could make out a rough  circle of stones. The stones enclosed an area of scorched ground where  presumably-itinerant humans had lit a fire.

Wolves, humans and haunted machines alike seemed to be  heading for this newly verdant land which was previously frozen  wilderness.

Farther still along my northward journey, I lay atop a  small outcropping of rock that gave me an uninterrupted view over many  kilometres. It was a clear night and I could clearly make out a small  fire. It didn't have the uncontrolled spread of a wildfire, it appeared  to be a built fire; a tall stack of wood piled in a cone.

I immediately felt excitement and looked more closely. I  remained motionless but switched to a camera with a long-range telephoto  lens array. Although low-resolution, I could make out the occasional  silhouetted human moving in front of the flames.

I should have been excited by this confirmation of current  human activity but my previous run-in with a human had left me sceptical and afraid.

I longed for the companionship of humans but I knew that I  needed to find community, not scared, violent individuals subsisting  off the sparse pickings of the land.

I watched for hours, trying to gauge the character of this  community and finally had an answer delivered to me. As their fire  burned down to embers, there was a sudden surge of movement and the  still air carried the sound of their raised voices and screams. Moments  later the air was filled with the staccato sound of automatic gunfire.

I did not want to risk an encounter with these specific humans. My loneliness had not yet become desperation.

Over a period of days, my air sensors began detecting the tale-tale salt levels of proximity to an ocean.

I had mixed emotions of this development, given my experience with the sea, but I welcomed change with more interest than fear.

Seagulls began circling ahead - their presence triggering a  bittersweet memory - and their screeches filled the air. The background  roar of distant waves became audible little-by-little.

The ground began to become sandy and the plant life's density dropped to odd, shaggy clumps of hardy grass.

The ocean itself appeared first as a shimmering mirage on  the horizon but, as I continued north, I could clearly see the rolling  waves slapping against the flat plane of sand.

I raised up to a tall stance and moved quickly across the  wet sand, my feet cutting morse-code-like dotted lines into the pale  surface.

Reaching the edge of the water, I let the wash swirl around my feet.

Like the mountains to the east, this marked the end of my  trek only this time setting a northern bound. Emptiness began to seep  into my thoughts, having nowhere else to travel, but as I stood with the  sea splashing around me I was surprised to hear a burst of static from  my radio.

I had forgotten about this system that I had, in decades passed, used to talk to my colleagues.

The static continued to warble while my subsystems began  to narrow the frequency range they were listening to in order to  pinpoint the signal.

And then it resolved, it was not clear and it was  partially garbled but I could hear a human voice. It was speaking a  language I did not recognise but it was someone seeking to communicate  with others. I felt overcome with the hope for a welcoming society.

I looked at the waves and the risks that they represented  but could not shake the idea that there could be friendly humans beyond  them.

I contemplated death, but I also contemplated the regret of a life unlived, and stepped forward into the waves.