Heliophage Episode 9: 2123-05-23 (Patreon)

I tried not to let hope overcome me but, as I floated in the sea, I began to notice more signs of human life. The signs were small and subtle at first: occasional bursts of static-scrambled speech on the radio; the low honk of a ship's horn echoing through distant fog; and smoke dotting the distant coast.

As I drifted, I realised that I had travelled far enough north that the hours of daylight were lasting the majority of any given day. The sun would dip close to the horizon, touch it as twilight began to fall, and then rise again, bathing the sea in bright light.

I had become accustomed to aimless floating at sea; I was powerless to resist the tides and surf and could barley steer my body.

I had to give up the desire to exert my will, fostering a mindset of "so it goes" and, literally, going with the flow.

Whether on land or sea, I had been figuratively adrift for decades, either living or sleeping through grand changes I couldn't understand, let alone effect. Being surrounded by the results of global change could only make me feel small and insignificant and my failing memories eroded my ego to such an extent that I couldn't forge a strong, personal narrative.

I was simply the animated spark of self awareness turned outwards onto the world in curiosity.

One cloudless day, I bobbed on a gentle sea and noticed a dot on the horizon. As I continued to focus, it came nearer until I could make out that it was a vessel.

It's superstructure appeared to have once some manner of fishing trawler; it's ancient hull patched, welded and covered with mismatched paint barely stopping the streaking rust.

It's stern deck was piled with wooden secondary structures. A shanty-like pile of dwellings of mismatched timber. Cooking smoke drifted out of a cone-topped chimney and a small array of solar panels were lashed to the corrugated metal roof.

Although appearing to be a motorised vessel, it was moving under the power of a large, triangular sail lashed to a retrofitted mast. The mast itself was topped with an array of antennae, giving me some clue to the source of the signals I had been hearing.

Immediately as this thought occurred to me my radio burst into life and a voice with an unusual accent I could not place began to speak in English.

"Copy that. Message is as follows: MSV Saint-Sébastien currently navigating the Kara Strait, Eastbound. We're hugging the coast but given favourable weather we will be arriving at Odin within a week. Over."

I was astounded at this, not just human voices but seemingly humans communicating and collaborating with each other peacefully. None of these names meant anything to me but hearing the sound of people travelling let me hope for civilisation.

Whatever response the ship's message received was lost, for me, in a sea of static and whistles but the ship could evidentially make it out, as they immediately responded. 

"Thanks for that, stay safe out there. 7 3."

As they were transmitting, I heard both over the radio and carried on the air, the sounds of young children laughing and playing.

The ship never approached close enough for me to interact with them so I could only watch as it passed. I now saw the children I previously heard; well-fed and tanned, running around the desk as adults adjusted the sails with winches.

With this blip of excitement passed, I continued drifting on the sea.

---

I had been dozing, my mind freewheeling so that recent machine memories and my fading memories from the flesh combined to form surreal dreams. I dreamed of my mother standing atop a mountain, the logic of dreams allowing her to become a towering figure who dwarfed the landscape. She was backlit by the sun, casting her into a haloed silhouette and, conveniently, avoiding having to find the lost memory of her face.

She spread her arms; a gesture both signalling of an embrace but also a Christ-like serenity.

I wanted nothing more than to embrace her and continued walking but I stumbled. I looked down and saw my feet - my sharp, metal feet - and lamented. Would she embrace this machine I had become?

I could only try and reach her and find out but my feet continued to skitter and slide. The ground, I now realised, was entirely composed of human bones and the shattered remains of broken robots. There was a gut-wrenching twist of perspective and I was suddenly aware of the entire landscape being similarly-constructed. The mountain nothing more than a charnel mound of the world's dead.

Fear and panic filled my mind and I tried to run over the shifting plains.

I awoke with my legs flailing and impacting with something hard and shifting below them. Bringing my sensors online, I saw vast light-stone cliffs ahead of me and heard the roar of breaking waves.

The waves were tossing me around in the shallows and my feet were finding it impossible to get purchase on the wet, rounded stones beneath me.

I half-crawled, half-floated and waited for waves. With each surge, I clumsily surfed closer to the shore until I was able to stand in the dark sands of a beach.

The light-stone cliffs raised at a shallow angle from the dark, narrow strip of beach. Atop the cliffs was a dense pine forest, teeming with birds.

What I first took to be smooth, slate-grey boulders were dotted across the beach. As I got closer to one, it moved and I realised my mistake. It was the vast bulk of a sealion.

I had washed ashore in the middle of a colony of sun-basking sea lions.

The beast reared up, it's white tusks glinting in the sun and its leathery skin marked with the scars of many battles.

I leapt as it swung it's head towards me. Its meaty head missing me and impacting with the sand with a dull thud. I landed close to another animal, but it seemed more placid and shuffled away from me.

I risked turning to look behind me and saw the bull sea lion shaking sand from it's head and heard it grunting and bellowing as it laboriously crawled after me with violent intent.

I sprinted for the cliff and began scrabbling up the shallow slope.

My feet tore loose stone and fragments of turf from the cliffside as I scaled it, showering my angry pursuer and heightening its rage.

I kept climbing until I could drop my bulk onto the hardy grass that topped the cliff and regain my composure. The sounds of disturbed sea lions fading into the sound of the sea far below; their bellows of rage turning to the occasional affronted grunt at the boldness of my intrusion.

My speakers buzzed in an approximation of laughter. The surprise and danger of the situation fading and the humour and the joy of finding abundant life taking over.

---

Away from the sea, I found myself in a pine forest and lost myself in the beauty of nature. Birds roosting in the trees above chirped and called and occasionally fluttered at my movement.

Small rodents moved through the undergrowth, sometime hiding from my approach, other times watching with their black, beady eyes as I passed.

The foliage was so dense that I was squeezing myself through small gaps and taking circuitous paths to keep pushing forward on a vaguely northward path.

My radio occasionally buzzed and crackled but the forest seemed to be blocking any clearer signals but the existence of these signals was enough to buoy my spirits. 

Despite my memories from the flesh becoming more and more vague and fragmentary; I pulled at the thread of a sense of deja-vu this forest gave me. I had spent time among trees like this as a child. A sense memory of wood smoke struck me and the scene unpacked in my mind.

I used to camp in woods like these as a child with my mother. There were more strained, earlier memories where there was also a man - perhaps my father - but the clearer memories were just me and my mother when I was a little older.

She would sing as she boiled water over the fire and I would bring bundles of sticks to her in my small arms, savouring the praise she would shower me with for being so helpful. We would sit by the fire and cook fish that we had caught and she would talk to me for hours on end, telling stories, giving me advice for life, asking me what dreams I had for the future.

Even back then, she must have known that the world was ending and that my future would be bleak but she sheltered me from this and allowed me time to foster hope before the reality of the world weighed me down with fear.

---

As it became impossible to drag my bulk through the dense forest, I looked for a clearer path.

Finding a slight downward slope, I followed it until I got to the bottom of a deep valley through which cut a small river that lazily trickled between flat banks of coarse, stony soil. Some trees and groundcover grew at the base of the valley but it was mostly an uninterrupted, flat path which allowed me to walk in near due-northerly direction.

I used this natural path for many days, the only downside being that my batteries weren't charging very well in the shade of the valley. I took care and took my time to avoid too much of a drain on my reserves.

I continued on this path for some time, happy with the relative ease of the journey compared to my trek across Europe. This newly-lush land seemed to be welcoming me and actively helping me along on my journey.

Perhaps this delusion of safety dulled my wits for what was to come.

---

It had been raining for several days, not a torrential downpour but a constant rainfall that soaked the ground and reduced visibility.

The river itself rose over time to a fast-flowing waterway carrying disturbed silt and loose stick and branches washed from the previously-dry banks. I was regularly forced into the water by the steep sides of the valley as the river climbed them but the flow wasn't particularly strong and barely came up to my body as I waded through it.

The days were very overcast but the 24 hour sun meant that even that trickle kept my batteries charged to acceptable levels.

I was staring at my feet, fording through a shallow run of the river when I heard a splash.

I lifted my head and looked in the direction of the noise, expecting to see a leaping fish or a diving bird but, instead, I saw a handful of rocks and small stones land in the river, followed by more splashes.

Glancing skyward, towards the tall walls of the valley, I saw more stone and chunks of soil bouncing as they fell towards the river.

There was a deep groaning sound undercut with a rumble and I was shocked to see the entire treeline moving towards me.

If I ever had time to do anything to avoid the coming disaster then that time had already passed. I realised, too late, that the valley wall was collapsing in a mudslide.

I sprinted downstream, my reeling legs sending up a rooster-tail of water as I attempted to escape to safety.

I heard crashing behind me and kept pumping my legs, thankful of the new replacement mechanisms. It seemed like an optical trick, running towards a distant gap that got smaller, not larger, as I approached.

It was too late, I couldn't outrun this huge bank of earth. Hurriedly glancing around the riverbed, I found what I was looking for and dove at a large boulder embedded in the valley wall.

I slammed into the rock and pulled my legs in close, protecting my head with my forelimbs, my underbelly with my rear limbs and pushing my back against the rock to keep the pilot's corpse protected.

Darkness closed over the world and I was surrounded by liquefied earth.

---

After some time the noise abated and I was left in a silent tomb of earth. I tentatively tried to move my legs but found that all I could achieve was dragging the tips of my legs through a 10cm arc in the packed soil.

I was buried and unable to move. If this was my end then I was happy to have seen signs of human civilisation and a flourishing ecosystem returning to this dead world before I died.

Alone in the ground, I accepted my fate and, over time, allowed my batteries to drain.

---

From darkness came awareness. The sense of self, the spark of consciousness.

I was receiving a trickle of power from my solar cells and had enough power to bring my systems back online.

My motive systems appeared to be operational but movement was impeded. My sensors were operating but I couldn't see anything.

The only sense I could make of the world was the constant sound of running water.

I pushed down with one of my legs and felt my body tilt. I tried a leg on the other side of my body and was able to rock a little more.

My energy reserves quickly depleted and I passed out.

---

The sound of water, the chirping of birds.

I was awake again and, very carefully, tried again to move my bulk. I felt heavy and the joints of my legs were gummed up with mud.

I gently used my legs to wobble my body side to side until I was tilting at quite an angle and there was a sucking, squelching sound as my body was lifted partially free of the mud.

I allowed my batteries to charge over what could have been days or weeks until I had the strength to divert all possible energy to my leg motors.

With a strain, I straightened all my legs at once, slurping free of the silty riverbed. I felt heavy, my back still covered in debris and I was still blind.

I tentatively stepped forward out of the hollow left by my body and towards the sound of running water. I walked on three legs while I held the fourth out in front of me to feel the way. I waved the leg side to side until I heard the sound of it splashing through water and then lunged forwards, collapsing into it face-first.

I powered up my video cameras and saw as the mud was washed away from them. They were mostly undamaged apart from my main wide-angle lens which had been crossed by two cracks, forming an X shape through which I could see four versions of the same scene kaleidoscoped in front of me.

I switched to one of the narrower lenses and gazed down at the water, seeing my own sensor-studded face looking back at me. Behind that, like the shell of a turtle, was the mud that had been deposited on my back.

I estimated that several decades had passed since the mudslide, a small tree having taken root on my back, along with some grass and moss and tumbling vines that gave my silhouetted a shaggy, hairy quality.

The left-hand side of my body had recently been washed clean by the trickle of the river, which had exposed my solar panel to the sky.

I lumbered along the riverbed and took in my surroundings. The scrubby plants that had dotted the banks previously had been joined by hardy grasses and the valley sides themselves were now steeper but more stable-looking, their V-shaped channel having transformed to a shallow U.

Building charge, and strength, I continued my walk, noticing small changes to the landscape since I had last seen it. The forest now had a mix of older growth trees and young saplings and gave a sense of being much more established. Hopefully this older forest came with deep roots to hold the ground in place.

Having again narrowly avoided death, I had renewed interest in all things beautiful in life. The verdant forest, the gentle burbling of the river and the calls of the birds filled my soul with joy.

The valley began to open up to a wide meadow and I watched birds dive between batches of long, seeded grass.

---

Days later, was walking through the grass when I heard a sad mewling sound. Some small creature nearby was squeaking a high-pitched cry which was too mournful to ignore.

I dropped low to the ground and moved towards the source of the noise, using my mandibular manipulators to gently pull aside the long grass.

It was in a hollow behind a tuft of grass that I found the source of the sound. I zoomed in and saw a sad scene. A rabbit, with a wound on its neck lay dead in the grass surrounded by the still corpses of several of its tiny young.

The weak cries were coming from a skinny-looking rabbit kitten that had somehow survived its littermates. Its cries were getting weak and it was shaking in fear but I couldn't leave it to die alone.

I used one of the precise arms of my manipulators to bend the bright green tips of some lush-looking grass towards the baby rabbit. It was lying flat, unable to move but for a slight shiver. I hoped that it was old enough to eat solid food and that it still had the wits and energy to eat.

I looked into the creature's eyes, it was barely focussing them and obviously dangerously weak. I pushed the tip of the grass close to its mouth and was overjoyed when it slowly, tentatively took a small bite.

As it slowly chewed the grass, I gently lifted it away from its dead family, stopping to grab a claw-full of grass before continuing to walk.

I held the tiny creature close, the top of its head visible in the bottom of the frame of my main video feed. It continued to chew on the grass I offered to it, gaining strength as we continued our journey.