Heliophage Episode 10: 2180-03-04 (Patreon)

It was a bright, clear day and the sky was an all-encompassing blue expanse. An old part of my mind, from deep in the meat-memory of the pilot, remembered childhood skies never being this clear but, instead, being criss-crossed with vapour-trails of aircraft. I also remembered the slow decline of these trails until they were a rare oddity and, finally, just a memory.

Barely a handful of years after the last plane flew, I remember encountering a group of children peering through the chain-link fence surrounding an old airport and how they refused to believe me that the vast, rusted hulks sitting on flat tyres beyond the fence once filled the skies.

---

The ground on the forest floor was noticeably more stable here. The deep-rooted trees and lush ground-cover provided a stable footing. No ash, sand or swamp here; this was rich, dense soil. Warm and vital.

The rabbit was behind my head. I could not see it but it was so close to my microphones that I could hear the constant crunching and grinding of it pulling leaves off of the vine-like plant that grew out of my neck cavity. It would hop off me and explore if I lowered myself to the ground but would immediately squeak and rush to clamber aboard my body if I made any sign of movement.

We continued through the woodland. Each day's travel northward displaying more lush signs of life.

---

I stepped out of the treeline into an area that had once been cleared but was now returning to the forest. The remains of rough, hand-hewn fences littered the ground, which had been leveled and cleared of trees. Ditches bordered the field, draining the soil, but I was amazed by the movement at the edges.

As I stood motionless and watching, grey fuzzy shapes resolved at the treeline and stepped into the clearing. There were perhaps a dozen of them of various sizes and shades and it was a moment until I could fathom what the creatures were. They were sheep. Dirty, matted and feral but clearly the descendants of the standard farm livestock of years past.

The sheep returned to grazing, having collectively decided against me being a threat and let out the occasional bleat as they passed each other.

I stepped through the abandoned field, careful to move slowly so as not to spook the animals.

At one corner of the field was a rusted structure of scaffolding poles to which clung scraps of waxed canvas in a military olive colour. What was once the inside of the structure had a compacted earthen floor and the charred outline of a long-cold firepit.

The day had become late, the trees and sheep casting long shadows across the grass. I lowered to the ground, collapsing my legs against my body and rested. Moments later, the rabbit bounced from the hollow it had dug into the silt caking my back and explored the closer parts of the field, never more than a few steps from my metal bulk.

---

Despite my sense of wonder at the natural world around me, I still had the feeling that I had only a tentative grip on my mind. It felt complete and currently functioning but I couldn't throw the sense that it was as ephemeral as a house of cards and my consciousness could collapse into oblivion at any moment.

I don't remember being this aware of my mind's fragility when I was in the flesh; my conscious mind was always the single source of truth while the material world and, by extension, my own body were trivial artifacts of matter subject to the control of my will.

My mechanical body forced me to physicalise my mind. I was aware of the computer socketed into my carapace inside which a shadow of my human mind dwelt. A ghost residing in a lump of matter. Not a haunting - that would require my mind having an external will with which to effect the world - but rather a summoning. Machinery emulating, or simulating my mind, as transient software.

An aspect of my memory that had become totemic of the incomplete nature of my mind was the inability to remember my mother's face. When I thought of her, I could only conjure vague visual outlines and sense memories of her soft touch or the scent of her perfume as she held me.

I was even losing more recent memories; memories created in this new mechanical body. I could remember exploring the ruins of my city and the horse racing track before it flooded but I don't remember when I woke in this new body with my lifeless corpse perched atop it.

I got into the habit of scanning the radio channels before I settled down into full overnight hibernation. traveling north, I had noticed that the nights getting shorter so these hibernations only lasted 4 hours or so. The glorious hours of daylight were keeping my batteries fully charged.

I was drifting into slumber - idly noting the humour of watching sheep as I did - when my radio locked onto a signal. It was weak but I heard a voice say "Hello world..." before the it faded to static and whistles.

I slept that short night dreaming of what the strange voice could be announcing to the world.

---

Over the next weeks, I continued through the mostly wooded parts of this Northern island that I had decided was the best path to civilisation.

As I walked, the rabbit rode on my back, eating the various foliage I carried and digging in the clods of earth that entombed the pilot within the cockpit.

I am glad that the rabbit survived and was evidently old enough to process solid food. With my tenuous grasp on reality, watching this little life grow kept me grounded. I couldn't provide the soft care of the small animal's late mother but I could be an island of safety for it until it felt able to pursue its own path in life. 

Like the rabbit, I had lost my mother. Not as I had lost everyone I once knew during this apocalypse but I had lost her in my past life, the life in the flesh. I hadn't accessed this memory before, perhaps having buried it due to the pain or perhaps simply because I had never probed this introspectively.

There were many new diseases, close to the end. I didn't even know the name of the one to which she was slowly succumbing. The doctors all spoke of experimental drugs and gene therapy but we all knew that resources were so low that none of this was realistic. In the same hospital where my mother was dying were people who were dying of simple infected wounds. Antibiotics being rare and, on the whole, useless against the adapted superbugs.

It was hard to dive into the memory and visualise her clearly. I didn't want to remember her how she was at the end. Her face was narrow and drawn, dark circles under her eyes and the dark flush of someone in a fever. She was attached to machines by wires and a tube that seemed too thick was pumping air into her lungs. This wasn't my mother, this was her husk. She was technically still alive but she would never wake again.

The grief stopped me in my tracks, the strength seeming to disappear from my legs as I let my metal body tip forward into a kneel. My speakers made disgusting warbles as the software tried to translate virtual sobbing.

Why must this be the memory of her face I can recall? Why can I only remember the time of loss and not the happy memories of my childhood?

---

When the overwhelming grief passed, I continued to walk, attempting to simply exist in the present moment. But my mind felt damaged, like my probing had knocked this obscene mockery of a sentience loose from a computer not designed to house it.

Hitting the limits of memory and emotion just served to highlight the inadequacy of my current mind. I was a barely-functioning automata with delusions of humanity.

There was a sickening feeling as my mind inverted and twisted, trying to both be the observer and the observed. I held a dark mirror to my conscious self and saw nothing but a loose amalgam of junk data, no spark of humanity, no elusive soul.

Intellectually, it would seem impossible for a mind to contemplate the entirety of itself. The perception of the whole requiring an outside, and unexamined, observer.

I tied myself in knots and paradoxes and slid further from reality. I was dimly aware of the real world and my robot body's traversal of the landscape but I couldn't force myself to contextualise it as something that was happening to me.

---

Fragmented and lost, I could barely hold myself together as an idea. I came to consciousness, some time later, to the sound of the rabbit whining close to my face. I gathered the mental strength to examine my video feeds and saw its small face nudging my cracked lens.

I came forward and wrested control back from my robot body's subsystems. The rabbit, noticing that I was flexing my limbs, hopped onto my back.

I held tightly onto the tiny spark of sentience I could muster and forced myself to keep walking.

Reality, memories and fevered hallucination blended in my mind. At times I thought that I was in my flesh body, walking through the forest until I stumbled and was aware of righting myself using four legs.

The verticals of the trees morphed into figures and patterns of leaves became faces until I had the presence of mind to focus on them and drive away the phantoms.

At one point, I lay collapsed on the ground face to face with the rabbit. It took all of my mental reserves to determine if I was the small animal or the machine it was staring at. Once I ascertained which entity I thought that I was, I fell into unconsciousness before I could act on this information.

Slowly, I regained my faculties but didn't fully connect my mind with the experiences of the machine. It was like I now knew the shape of my mind and couldn't make it fit in the wrong-shaped computer.

---

I continued the journey north experiencing varying degrees of consciousness and disassociation from my metal body. I was here but in what capacity and for how long was unclear.

Occasionally, I would find myself in conversation and stop, realising nobody else was with me and I was babbling alone. I couldn't even be sure if I was having the conversation in my mind or blaring it out of my speakers in a synthetic voice.

Some time later my cameras caught a sudden increase in light and I looked skyward just in time to see a vast shooting star flash across the sky and hit the ground some distance into the forest. Everything was silent for a moment before the roaring sound of its transit and the boom of an explosion caught up with the visual phenomenon.

My sensors warned of potential seismic activity and the birds took flight from nearby trees. This seemed to confirm that, despite the more likely explanation being that I hallucinated the whole thing, I had really just witnessed something fall from the sky in a fireball.

I watched the cloud of smoke dissipate from the impact site before peace returned to the environment, leaving me again questioning the voracity of my own experience.

---

Days after the flaming object fell from the sky, I clambered through an overgrown treeline to find myself in front of a structure. I hadn't seen any signs of human activity for many days and this was an astounding discovery.

The structure was set into a hillside and made of cracked concrete slick with green streaks of moss and white accumulations of minerals. It had no windows but there was a black metal door, shining in the diffuse light of the forest. It stood slightly ajar and I moved closer, noting my reluctance.

Peering through the door, I could see decades of leaf litter, not disturbed by human feet, and the remnants of rotted furniture. One of my mysterious sensors began clicking slowly and showing a warning glyph. I thought of the rabbit and decided to retreat. Added to my internal clicking there was an audible rumbling deep in the bowels of the structure. I rushed away from the doorway, imagining sleeping machines intent on harm.

As I panicked and retreated, I had an audio hallucination of a voice chanting names. Fearing this place was either feeding my madness or housing some technological apparition, I fled deeper into the forest.

---

Fleeing the structure dislodged another previously unreachable memory. My last memory in the flesh.

I was piloting the machine down a street that was flooded to waist-level. A few small boats and improvised rafts were steered by distraught-looking civilians carrying as many of their essential belongings as possible. Clothing, tinned and dry food and the now-ubiquitous handheld radios popular after the cellular networks became unreliable.

With a thought, I activated the machine's external speakers and announced that those fleeing the floods should head North where a community mutual aid organisation had been providing food and shelter.

I clicked off the speakers, deciding that it would not be useful to let these people know that there hadn't been any communications from any government department in weeks and that all the military bases and police stations were picked clean.

An elderly man wading through the waters shouted up to me. I disengaged the machine's camera feeds and looked at him through my own eyes. He shouted - in the broken Finnish of a recent refugee - that there were people in the building at the more flooded end of the street. I thanked him, storing his photo and categorising him as cooperative with rescue efforts. We had begun storing our own local records and sharing them when we were close enough for direct comms as the networks all blinked offline.

I directed the machine to splash its way down the street, its legs kicking up a spray of water as it sprinted.

The building was an older-style concrete structure, a multi-family apartment block. One of my subsystems overlaid a diagram of the building's structure in the top corner of my vision.

The water-level was more than half-way up the building's double doors and, through the narrow wire-reinforced window slits in the doors themselves, I could see that the water level was the same inside as out.

I willed myself into full-control of the machine, its senses and mine melding so that I could feel and move its body as if it were my own.

The doors were held to the concrete by metal brackets. The bolts looked solid but the wooden doors would be the weak spot. I lifted one of the machines front legs - feeling like my own - and thrust it forward into the wood. It splintered and cracked as the sharp metal point speared it. I thrusted at the wood three more times and the hinge flapped uselessly as the door began to lean, buckle and twist, attached now by the lower hinge alone.

I crouched and leapt the machine into the door, smashing it from the frame.

Glancing at the map overlay, I headed for the stairs and scaled them to the first floor. This part of the building was dry but in disarray, with tenants' discarded suitcases broken open and spilling belongings onto the tiled floor.

The red-painted door to the residence on this level was open and I could hear the sound of a baby crying from inside. I ducked the machine and my own head and slowly squeezed through the doorway, the vehicle's bulk scratching the sides.

Inside, a woman clutched a crying baby to her chest, looking fearful. She had tears streaking her cheeks and wore an oversized yellow raincoat. 

The woman's fear was to be expected, these machines looked terrifying, especially when their arrival was a complete surprise.

I dropped the connection to the machine enough to control my own body and leant out of the cockpit, pushing back my helmet's visor. Seeing my human face, she relaxed and began to understand the situation. I told the woman not to worry, that I was a search and rescue unit and that I would help her get to safety. No need to tell her that I wasn't sure that the organisation that I worked for still existed.

She explained that she couldn't safely carry her baby through the flood waters and I had convinced her to place the baby in my cockpit and to wade behind me until we could get to higher ground.

Our conversation was interrupted by a tearing sound followed by a loud crack somewhere on the floors above us. I leapt my mind back into the machine and shielded the mother and child with the armoured chassis. Fragments of ceiling and support beams crashed down around us.

I glanced at the woman and saw that she and the child were safe before spinning around to check the exit. The path was blocked by some debris. I sunk the machine's sharp forelimbs into it, dragging it free.

There was tortured groan of solid material being pushed past its limits, the sudden pain of a hard impact on my back and then cold darkness.

---

I couldn't feel my body or open my eyes. In fact I had no sensation of my body whatsoever.

All that I could sense was the subsystems of the machine I rode, the EQUUS unit. The solar software reported that it had woken the power system from hibernation as the solar panels were now receiving a small amount of charge.

I experimentally powered on its sensors and was greeted with a shocking and deeply sad sight. A corpse, its skin pulled back from its teeth in a silent snarl, sat wrapped in the folds of a dirty, yellow raincoat. A small bundle lay by the body's side. I was too late to rescue them, seemingly by years.

I lifted the machine from under rubble, its limbs screeching with rust, and looked upwards. The flat roof of the complex, along with all the floors above this one had collapsed, revealing a blue sky. And battery-refreshing sun.

---

My mind unraveling, I stumbled onwards. I could no longer differentiate between the input from my sensors and the flailing invention of my crumbling sentience.

I looked ahead through trees that swam with the nightmare creatures of crude AI pattern-finding. Green identification reticules overlaying my feed to highlight entities that only existed as tricks of the light.

Above the treeline, a bright burst of light appeared and my mind instantly warped it into a halo framing the silhouetted form of my mother, again presented as a winged angel beckoning me forward.

I forced my will into the gulf between my mind and my legs and jerkily trotted through the forest.

The light, and my hallucinated maternal apparition, disappeared and was replaced by some manner of tower looming over the upper canopy of the forest.

The light returned again and then, after a moment, blinked out, and then recognition dawned. I was looking at a lighthouse, its light an intermittent beacon to travelers.

My mind flared with an agonising burst of confusion; I was unable to differentiate between the parts of my own mind and the subsystems of the robot body. Memories, desires, emotions, protocols and data clung together in loose spider-webs of association before the connections were erased and new threads spread between the elements.

Many of my feeds stopped returning any visual data other than endlessly-scrolling, white-on-black text that I could not read.

I had to resort to my damaged main camera with the cracked lens; its quality further diminishing into inconsistent frame-rate and resolution and the occasional cloned polygon-snow of frame glitches.

The sound from my microphone array had reduced to a single, mono feed, making it impossible to ascertain the direction of any sounds around me.

It took all of my mental capacity to force a linear train of thought and a real-time feedback loop.

My bulk slammed into a tree and the rabbit gave out a frightened chirp, the sound muted and tinny in my audio feed.

I pressed my body upright and tried to address my legs. They felt distant and appeared to be operating independently, no longer marshaled by software designed to mimic the movement of animals.

I willed one leg forward and then tried to brace with it as I tried to move another. The leg collapsed and all four of them buckled under me. My chassis fell to the floor with a thud followed by a flurry of leaves from the plants growing out of my back, using the pilot's... my body as nutrients.

I tried to gather my mind together and hold some part of myself for as long as I was able. The thought of my own mortality bringing back, unbidden, the memory of my mother's death bed.

She held my hand and I could tell that it was all the strength she had that she was using to squeeze tightly as she told me how proud she was of me and told me to keep helping people. She said to remember her as she was, not like this - she loosely tugged at some tubes connected to her body - but to remember our times together.

Within this memory, other memories flooded back, my mother's beautiful, radiant face smiling widely under slightly pink-tinted cheeks held up by high cheekbones. Her deep, brown eyes, wet with tears of joy, showing deep love and compassion as I ran to her, as a small child, and dove into her embrace.

This memory drifted into the void and I was left watching through my shattered lens.

I lay motionless, unable to move any part of my body, not remembering how to fit my mind into this shell, I could feel other systems in the computer shutting down but I was no longer in any position of control over them.

After some time the rabbit hopped down from my back and sniffed gently at my sensors. With an effort that shot a bolt of pain through my failing mind, I extended one of my manipulators. The claw-like tip of the manipulator contacted with the rabbit's ear and I gently, carefully brushed it back. The small animal pressed itself against the manipulator, the ear popping back up in the process. I then lost control and the small arm dropped, dangling uselessly from the bottom of my head.

I watched as the rabbit explored the immediate area, sniffing at the ground and chewing on the occasional plant.

It returned to me once more but I was unable to acknowledge its presence, having completely lost control of every part of my body. It looked at me for some time before slowly walking away, stopping twice to look back before entering a clearing near the lighthouse.

I tried to follow it with my broken camera, the x-shaped crack on the lens rendering it as four animals.

I continued to fade. I knew I was at my very end now and I contemplated my life. I hope that it was a positive ripple that would be felt, in whatever small ways, by the people who survived me.

I was startled by the sound of a human voice making gentle noises of encouragement.

I attempted to focus my dirty, cracked lens but could not force a clear picture. All I could make out was the blurry outline of a man, kaleidoscoped into a quartet, bending to pick up the rabbit.

The actuators that controlled my head failed and my vision tipped skyward to be washed out to bright white by the lighthouse's glare. The camera failed but a ghost of the halo of light remained in my head.

As I slowed towards oblivion, I heard the man say, in the voice of a little Russian girl, "Look! A bunny!"

and 

      then 

            nothing