Work Text:
Iterators were immense. Cities unto themselves, supporting a teeming mass of creatures inside them, whirling passageways and enormous capacitors and incomprehensible power crackling as mere thought between their neurons. They were as much building as they were person, cans suspended miles into the sky above the clouds, whole cities built on their backs. The world-bearing turtles of the old world, forever crawling forward.
But to what?
Five Pebbles had sought to answer this question. And he had failed. And now he lies silent in the remnants of his failure.
He's spent a long time thinking. Iterators are powerful, yes, but they are limited in their own ways. For example, Five Pebbles has no way of physically, well, doing stuff. He cannot go into his own systems and repair the rot that has taken hold, tear out each pustule with his own hands. He cannot climb the communications array and personally deliver a message to the local group, give the mass rarefaction cell to Moon personally. He is trapped in himself, ultimately. He is a city unto himself, and cities cannot move.
In the past, the ancients did it for them. A symbiotic relationship - the iterator was the tree that housed them, and the ancients the ants that cleaned them. Or something like that. Truth be told, the ancients had been more like bothersome flies alighting on a horse's skin, but there had been many hands to do the things an iterator could not, back then.
The ancients are gone now. All that's left for Five Pebbles is the silence, the rot, and a single singing pearl.
It stutters briefly. A missed note in the hymn. Pearls are delicate, in the end, and too many repeats will wear down even the strongest of data materials. Perhaps in the past Five Pebbles would have dedicated part of his subroutine to developing better materials. He had before in the past, after all, and as thorny as the Great Problem was, there was always time for distractions.
And then the rot came, and there were no distractions at all -
He pulls his mind away from the memories as though burned. Even with the rot actively burning through his systems, choking out cooling systems and memory arrays and precious, precious parts of himself, it's still - easier. Not to think about it. The way a man tied to the tracks closes his eyes as the train approaches. It's pointless, of course - he can pull up the qualia of the memory, the hum of the train, the light of its headlamps, the screaming of its horn as it inexorably approaches. There is no escaping the impending death, any more than he can escape the constant pressure at the back of his mind of bounced requests and corrupted data, emergency systems struggling to compensate for the sheer enormity of damage to his can. To himself.
He misses Moon. He misses the little creatures that came down to visit him. He can see the rot in his chambers now, pulsating blue, eating, growing. He created it, and now it will destroy him. Everything that he'd wanted back then, but now that he's realized that he doesn't - he wanted -
Well. Too late now. The ancients called him a god, and yet he's powerless when it really matters.
Time passes. It's harder and harder to keep track as his can breaks down. At some point, the endless rain his can exhausts turns to sleet, then snow, heat output dying down as the rot tears apart his primary systems. His mind flickers and powers down piece by piece, memories sloughing away into ash in the wind. The endless cycles become less obvious, the pouring rain turned to a pulse of icy cold that freezes anything not hiding in the warmth of his slowly cooling carcass.
The surrounding wildlife adapt, of course. The lizards grow fur, thick and heavy, and the little lantern mice take to huddling in groups deep within his superstructure, next to whatever little systems still exhale heat. Clever little creatures, endlessly capable of growing and changing. He made some of them. He envies them.
The rot reaches his legs. And then -
(Moon sees Five Pebbles collapse. Truth be told, she's had her overseers in his chamber for a long time, crawling through his systems, trying not to scream at every grainy image they sent back of rot and rot and rot. And yet, she cannot look away, because despite everything -
She's still his sister. And in the end, he had saved her, and consigned himself to an eternity of dying, and there is nothing she can do. There is nothing any of them can do.
The least she can do is mourn him.)
When he next opens his eyes, he is too cold to even feel pain. He lays sprawled on the floor, umbilical dull and frayed with rot and rust. His chamber has tipped entirely to the left, practically torn in half from the the rot forcing its way in. There's an enormous hole in the roof now, and thick snow tumbles in from the newly revealed sky.
The sky. He has the sky. He should never have been able to see the sky, but he can.
He has the sky, and his music. Just a single black pearl, and the faintest sense of nothing in the back of his mind. There is not enough left of him to even feel the damage anymore, nerve endings deadened with snow and time. Just a vague sense of loss, like something should be there. Someone.
There had been - people, once, hadn't there? Other... Iterators. His family. He hasn't been able to talk to them in a long, long time. Not since his - he collapsed, and even before them he had been avoiding them for what he did to - his sister? He had a sister?
He thinks he would miss them, if he knew how to miss them.
(Far away, Moon cries alone in her broken chamber.)
More time. More cold. He can't remember most of it anymore. At some point, a lizard tries to eat him. Or a bird. It's ineffective, being mostly metal, but he's barely even able to process it, too focused on nothing at all. He's long past closing his eyes at the oncoming train. He's been run over, brains splattered on the tracks, dust in the wind and a can torn nearly in half. His music pearl is almost fully corrupted from the elements, his memory much the same. There hadn't been any point saving it all, not when he could effortlessly simulate his own collapse, his own slow-motion death alone in the cold. He deserved it, after all, and Moon hadn't had the power to talk him out of it.
Once, he could have done even more than that. Simulations within simulations within simulations, endlessly iterating towards the Great Problem, and even then it had never been enough. It could never have been enough, not for their creators. And now look at him. Getting chewed on by animals.
...is what Five Pebbles would have thought, if he had remembered who the Ancients were. What he had been made to do.
But he doesn't, of course.
Instead, he is cold, and tired, and so very alone.
More time passes. He doesn't have the long term memory left for remembering such things like the precise number of cycles, but it is almost certainly far, far too long. He is alone for all of it.
And then he isn't.
He blinks. There's a little green thing on the floor of his chamber, thick fur slowly frosting over with snow. They're blurry and indistinct - he doesn't have enough processing power left to see in higher resolutions, and the lenses of his puppet's eyes are too frosted over to see anyways.
"Little... green thing..." It is so nice not to be alone. He forgot how difficult it was to see something, but the mental stimulus is welcome, even as what little is left in his worn circuits threatens to short out entirely with the strain. Perhaps this will end, but the words escape him before he can make them into thoughts.
He should warn them. He needs to warn them. Cold is dangerous to creatures, he thinks. He is hardly a threat, but the snow will wear this little creature to nothing. Better for it to save itself while it still can.
"Nothing here... nothing... left..." All he can do now. He hopes it's enough. The feeling is distant, dull, like sunlight through shattered glass. He savors the new as much as he can.
It pauses, as if considering.
And then takes two steps towards him and unceremoniously settles in his lap.
...
It's warm.
He doesn't remember how to move. But he tries anyways, one hand clumsily reaching up and settling on its fluffy head. It seems to - vibrate suddenly, pleased and content. The lap of an Iterator's puppet hardly seems like a comfortable place to be, but it still purrs loudly despite it and the endless snow settling on its fur.
...It's nice.
"...Thank you," Five Pebbles murmurs. It's the last thing he'll ever say.
The creature purrs once more, before perking its head up again and clambering out of his lap. He can't help but miss it as soon as its gone, even with the dull awareness that he'll forget it again soon.
Its eyes widen. Its fur fluffs up, zinging with sparks, and there's a pressure in the air. A humming, thick with static and something other, and Five Pebbles looks up and the green thing is glowing, arms open as though offering him solace, a hug, a promise of goodbye -
⦻
The air is warm, and golden, and bright. There is another Iterator in his chamber, floating above him, and he knows her. He missed her. He has never seen her before in his life and yet he knows -
"Moon?"