Work Text:
A nonexhausive list of things Five Pebbles (LTTM02, I4362, 5th generation) has been defined as, at least according to this pearl;
An apostate
(Of course. Because from the moment of his conception, before a singular tissue had been cultivated or beam placed, when the idea of him was as fragile and insubstantial as a single voice spoken aloud, he was a controversy. An invention that showed the hand of those close to the iterator project, those that had seen the day of public ascension coming from a long ways away and knew that it was the future after them that concerned any iterator the most now. He was built to maintain a city, yes, but he really should have had the wisdom in those first few days to know that the lack of a specialization for his facility's research (when compared with other 5th generation iterators at any rate) was just so he would have to fill every moment of spare time on the Problem alone. He doesn't really know who he would be if it were any different.)
An eclipse
(It was a fanciful title that one of the first citizens that he had witnessed living in his city had mentioned. He had chewed over it for a bit, his mind still young and his capabilities still not quite reaching the edges of his facility, so he didn't quite understand the full context yet. Five Pebbles knew that he was stationed side-by-side with another iterator, Looks to the Moon, but he wasn't entirely sure how others felt about it. (How had he felt about it, then, when it was the only reality that he had ever known?) An eclipse could imply that, perhaps, the prevailing opinion on his construction next to another iterator intimated that he would overshadow her in importance, as the shadow upon the moon prevented a clear view of the object's surface. Or perhaps it was the inverse, and it implied that, like the sun, any brilliance that he shows would be shrouded behind the solidity of the moon. Neither one was particularly nice, and he would need to think about it, once he had concluded the process of becoming familiar with his structure and passing all necessary safety checks.)
The little brother
(…He isn't sure how he feels about this one. If just because such a relationship is apparently entirely foreign to all other iterators, an entirely new angle of life for the massive constructed organisms to observe the world through. And it isn't as if he will ever be seen as anything but 'the little brother' to any of the others, not when there have been 4361 other iterators built before him who were never close enough to be considered any more than neighbors. It's not like there's a protocol for a sibling relationship at all, beyond what would be rather obviously torn from the experiences of his and Moon's citizens. And even that would be hard to place an exacting definition upon. He's younger by an incredibly distant amount and yet, in the vastness of the amount of life that he and Moon have ahead of them, they are more or less the same age, aren't they?. So it really is entirely appropriate to call them twins already. But he doubts it will ever change, even when a far future Five Pebbles differs in age from his senior in scant percentages of difference. He's only been online for five years, and yet the novelty of being considered a sibling rather than an individual by other curious iterators has already well-worn its interest to him. Perhaps he would be a little better at holding that feeling if Moon hadn't spent nearly her entire life being an individual, and only just now got to become a sister. She got to experience solitude and interdependence both, while he would only ever have one.)
A waste of resources
(He’s seen the graffiti, of iterator puppets being torn up in fanciful ways while his own watches in horror. He’s seen the messages between his citizens, seen how many speak with amazement that he was built at all. He knows his building caused three other iterator projects to be cancelled; his own construction being boosted to the top of priority when the costs for upgrading all of Luna to modern city standards proved to be too high. He wonders if his architects are regretting not being able to work on any of the other three. One of them had even been as far as passing all initial surveying work. He wonders if he needs to be more sorry that he's born, if that is a feeling that he's being expected to feel. Even some of the other iterators have that special tone to their messages sometimes when they talk about 5th generation models, as if they expect that he would feel an inherent shame for his existence that they are already trying to soothe.)
A set of spare parts
(It doesn’t happen that often, but just as his systems are synced with Moon's own in order to allow the balance of load upon them to shift as needed, every piece of genetic material that made up his greater whole is already compatible with Moon. Just as they are considered siblings by other iterators, they were mutually compatible with one another in a way that allowed for perfect histocompatibility. When a pump of hers fails, corroded as it is by the silty waters of their shared aquifer, the emergency procedure that the teams of engineers that coordinated between both of their structures had was always to procure a copy from him, then repair or replace Moon’s and return the pump back to him. Filtration pump 14, steam valve 805, and flux conductor 21-A were all permanent transfers, because it was a losing battle trying to remove the structures again from Moon after they had been taken, so he had gotten those replaced instead. He doesn’t think it feels any different, the pieces that were taken and returned, but he can’t help but imagine that it has been tainted in some way, that the scar of the removal hasn’t been cleanly joined again with the missing part. He wonders if Moon feels the same. Mostly he wishes that he could decide for himself if he even wanted to give over the parts before the engineers began hacking away.)
An auxiliary power source
(Moon doesn’t need it, not nearly as much as she needs new parts, and yet it’s stamped into all his internal designations as LTTM02. She is old, old even for most iterators, born before the Great Equalizer allowed a fat and healthy 3rd and 4th generation of iterators to spring up. Her systems have been through a lot, and one of the main arguments for the logistics behind his construction centered around his ability to mitigate the load. There are days when city functions take precedent over the personal affairs of iterators, and it is during a few highly divergent days with harsh weather and internal issues around the long-distance trade with the rest of the local group that Moon had been forced to drop a lot of the responsibility of maintaining power on his own shoulders. It had meant several days of feeling her hesitant touch in his own systems, the admin overrides that she inherently carried as his superior allowing for the rerouting of his own power to her own. Several days of feeling large blocks of his own processing space getting shunted to her own needs as the energy needs of Metropolis and Luna grew lopsided and the attention required for them diverged similarly. Several days of considering, then discarding, then feeling sick in a fuzzy way that sparks all across his transform arrays, all the ways that if the circumstances of his creation were any more out-of-ordinary than they already were then perhaps his own structure would've been built only as an extension of Moon's own, and he would never have been made as a separate entity from her.)
A parasitic twin
(He likes to think that of the two of them, he has far more potential. It’s natural, given his modern standing and the brilliance he’s already showing. But. Well. There's always the opposite interpretation, of course. That he is the drain upon the Looks to the Moon-Five Pebbles retaining area. That he offers too little for the great cost of his construction and takes too much from an environment that was already under constant bombardment by Moon's presence. That he is the one that is pulling and pulling and taking and taking from the relationship, draining his senior dry for everything that she is before trying to supplant her. Absolutely ridiculous.)
One of the finest and final minds to be borne from the people of this world
(He holds onto this with everything he’s got. He’s brilliant. He's modern. He’s going to find the Solution, he has to. Every part of him was built to laser focus in upon the Problem, he would solve it. Surely it has to all mean something.)
The only one who misses them
(Only a single generation had grown on his back. He had seen citizens who were born and lived out their childhoods atop him only just entering their adulthood when they all left. He didn't particularly care about the specifics of the day to day lives of these people for whom he was tasked with serving and a large portion of his attention and processing power could be turned away to continue chewing on the Problem while he attended to the myriad demands of his population. Maybe if he had been given more time to grow weary of the constant daily tedium of tending to a city full of people who knew him more as the all-knowing voice on the other end of the requests they sent through citizen drones, perhaps he would have looked at them with less fondness than he did. It was something that he carried close to his heart, as it were, because even though no iterator was as crass as to immediately fling insults at their parents right after the last rites were spoken, there was a sense of relief in some of the messages he saw that made his pipes crawl with a discomfort that he cannot put words to. So he won’t, and he will put the feeling away to consider at another time, when others are not so blatant in the ways that they contradict him.)
A modern marvel
(Five Pebbles doesn't need to hoard every little thing said to him like one of those scrappy little scavenger creatures that pick through trash for anything shiny, but he did carry this one with pride. He is one of the last iterators to be built before the day of public ascension, third to last in fact, and he had so much of him dedicated purely to having the processing power and strength of will to attack the Problem with the full force of their creators' biomechanical prowess just before they left the cycle for good. He is as modern as they have and would ever make, and it put him in a class above so many others that he interacted with. Unparalleled Innocence is older than him, but also 5th generation, so she is a decent benchmark for where he can consider his own prowess in a manner that takes into account the sliding scale of benefits and drawbacks of his relative inexperience and greater processing potential. He knows therefore with empirical evidence that he is an incredible specimen, and not simply with his own pride. It's what gets him through those first few years, the grinding of this stubborn pearl against his processing strata, the reassurance that even as he tread and retread on ideas that iterators many centuries his senior have already tried and discarded long before he existed, that one day he would be all that they were and more. He had to be.)
The killjoy
(Now that there were no more citizens to take their minds off of the Problem, why wasn’t meaningful progress being made? All Moon seems to be trying to make him do these days is interact with the local group and various other friends of hers. All any of the other iterators these days seem to do is talk in the feeds with one another. Don’t they have better things to be doing? He’s busy, stop trying to get him involved in stupid conversations. He doesn’t need that, not like apparently all the others do. Or they’re all suddenly struck with a sense of laziness now that their parents are no longer there to disapprove actively.)
The gift to an ungrateful world
(They left him behind. They all left him and every other iterator behind. He doesn’t miss them. He misses them dearly. He knows that no matter how quickly the Solution is found (it cannot ever expect to not be found/he must always expect for it to be found) he has already failed them by not proving it while they were still here. Every beast that chews upon his neural arrays and breaks his legs down step by step is supposed to be deserving of his knowledge. He knows that they are gripped by the urges, that it is no real reason to feel resentment for such mindless things. He knows that he should feel ashamed for having such an irritation for knowing that all his work will only benefit these ungrateful pests.) (He doesn’t wonder if some of the other iterators felt that way about their citizens)
The eyesore
(… why does he have this stored in his systems still? It was a one-off message, No Significant Harassment mentioning that he got in the way of overseer views of Moon. That Unparalleled Innocence agreed with him had made him feel… bad. He’s perfectly standardly shaped for a 5th generation iterator, and if she would just share her structural specs then he could prove it. (It’s not his fault that he was built. It’s not his fault that he was placed further inland than Moon was, along the coastal canyon as she was stationed.) He didn’t care about their meaningless jabs.)
The irritating little brother
(He doesn’t care he doesn’t care he doesn’t care that those outside the local group only know him vaguely as LTTM02. He doesn’t care that those inside the local group only see him as an unfortunate appendage that Moon is too sentimental to get rid of. He doesn’t care that he’s utterly shredded the social ties he’s had outside of Moon already at this point. He doesn’t care that his work is utterly pointless and that he’s never getting out of this. He doesn’t care he doesn’t he truly doesn’t there’s no point in caring. Not when he has work to do.)
The only one trying to get out of all of this
(Suns was a relief that he needed. Someone taking this as seriously as he was, someone who was willing to consider his thoughts. Perhaps he’s just been sitting under the shadow of his local group’s more talkative members for far too long, but the trend over the cycles away from even considering new iterations for the Problem and towards things like ‘longevity’ and ‘self-sufficiency’ just smacks of distraction. Don’t they care anymore? Why are they trying to live for a life that they weren’t made for? Suns at least tried to explain it, tried to reason that perhaps they meant it so that they would have more time to consider the Problem, but. Moon has long sought new hobbies to try and drag him into. No Significant Harassment was well known for getting sidetracked. Grey Wind has had some kind of major project brewing for a while now that has had absolutely nothing to do with the Problem. Unparalleled Innocence is far too often looking into other iterators’ business to ever be actually conducting her own. Is he the only one taking this seriously? Is he obsessed in a way no other iterator was made to be?)
A bug in a maze
(What’s the point in a Problem that you try to solve with brute force? What’s the point in a Solution that applies to everyone except the solvers? What’s the point in surviving and iterating when the outcome will be the same for him, a long and slow death either in a world full of pests or a world without them? The cycles pass regardless, and he will struggle through this maze even after someone finds the way out. Because that’s all that they were ever made for. He needs to break free. He needs to fly. He needs to. Suns will help, Suns always helps. He needs to put his feelings away, because there has to be something else that he just isn’t aware of yet. He always was retreading old ground, ever since his activation, after all.)
The only one willing to take risks anymore
(Sliverist groups are a good balm to his growing agitation, but they aren’t the cure. Too many of them seem unwilling to try and consider where their own ideas have meaningful gaps. Too many of them are willing to talk in circles forever without considering the hard and fast options. Too many of them seem to be willing to sit out the slow decay of their systems just like everyone else. Sliver of Straw didn’t achieve anything by considering ideas in ponderous circles. She must have done something to cause the sudden change, the triple affirmative and her sudden deactivation. And if her example can be followed then he can find a way to escape. He needs to think bigger. He is so close to it. He doesn't need to consider eternity for too much longer.)
The pathetic younger brother
(And in his worst moments, just as he is about to grasp a new existence, just as he is nearly ready to complete his genetic tests and implement his own personal Solution, Moon crashes back in. Because of course she does, because she sees him as her appendage, the far away sun reflecting upon the close by face of the moon. She seizes his systems in her grip in that one fatal moment, and as he spasms under her touch the genetic tests fail and the Rot is born. He yells at her, but it doesn’t seem like she cares. It doesn’t seem like anyone cares that he was trying to break away, only that he hurt Moon. Only that he did wrong by his sister.)
A murderer
(How dare Suns send a message like… like that? He’s dealing with enough, he’s got things under control, he’s figuring out how to flush the rot out of his systems before it takes root, and then Suns has to go and condescend him like that? Who do they think they are? He thought that they, at least, considered him mature and deserving of being taken seriously. But no, of course. He is the troublemaker, he is the child who needs to be talked down to and scolded, he is the antisocial stranger who despite knowing for hundreds of cycles deserved no more respect than to spill his unfortunate development upon the entirety of the iterator networks. He felt faintly the jagged arcs of his own anger spit off of the walls of the puppet chamber, but he didn’t nearly care enough about that right now. Slam down the communications networks, cut off his own access to them in a spiteful tear. Revoke any remaining access that overseers had to anywhere near or on him and personally fry the one Suns sent alongside the messenger. Throw the messenger, still bleeding in that beastly ugliness from the chest where the pearl still hung, bodily out of his chamber so it could run off and die somewhere he cannot see. He doesn’t need any of them. He doesn’t need iterators, he doesn’t need pests, he doesn’t need parents, he doesn’t need – ah, and Moon was still clawing at his side. Doesn’t she know she’s gripping to someone already sinking in an attempt to get afloat? Doesn’t she know he can’t even help himself at this point, now that the rot was given enough time to establish itself because of her?)
The body still twitching in the sun as it is being carved out by detritivores
(It hurts, at first in the way that knowing that all of his attempts at freedom had resulted in nothing had hurt. Then it hurts in the ways that up and down his eastern flank the hard-embedded connections between him and Moon were stretched and torn on her collapse. Then it hurts in the way that his water started to flow wrong, flow in ways that he wasn’t built for, as the pipes began to corrode.Then it hurt in the ways that his insides were slowly heating up and the rot was spreading in his more wide-open sections and every dendrite and filamentous part of him exposed to the open air can feel the mobile cysts chew at them. And then, finally, it hurt in the way that unending minor annoyances build up and the loss of function in the city is finally realized to be on purpose, and he is under attack by stupid scavengers, and he can do nothing to change it. Brought low by a wretched creature who only sees him as an impotent body to pull scraps from, rotting from the inside out and unable to retaliate. He has never felt so uselessly large and all-powerfully powerless than now.)
A violent and vindictive thing
(He missed his final citizen sometimes, his vector for revenge against the world who had filled its purpose so perfectly. His avatar of rage that had enacted his own and allowed him the watch vicariously through it. As he and other iterators upheld the fifth urge for the sake of their citizens’ karmic purity in the face of the cycle, so too did his citizen uphold his own first urge valiantly. It had felt good in that petty vindictive way to see these skin parasites die over and over, to see the cycle circle them around enough times that the lesson of ultimate dominion enacted by his citizen was finally learned and the scavengers left. It felt less good when his citizen followed them, the urge having fully overtaken it that it would self-perpetuate violence for its own sake and making it continue to nip at the heels of the creatures no matter where they went. That part, at least, he had the presence of mind to not take as much vicarious pleasure from. He was an iterator after all, not a beast.)
An enlightenment machine for dull pipe creatures. Apparently.
(Must they keep coming around? The messengers he understands, those were specially sent by other iterators and as such are expected to have some baseline amount of intelligence to be able to identify the best way to enter his can and meet with his puppet to pass off whatever pearl was included with them. But the others, the blank-eyed beasts that poke and prod and crawl and worm their way through his systems time and time again, that do entropy's work gleefully by growing fat feeding on his own neurons and crashing through his fragile memory confluxes... Why do they all seemingly randomly converge upon his location time and time again? Sure he is quite literally the largest object in this area, but wouldn’t they consider the whole expedition out of their way to climb his legs and walls a pointless waste of time for things that should be gripped by the fifth urge too strongly to care about anything else? He gives them the mark of communication if just to be sure that his words are heeded without excuse, then send each of them away. Let them wander their mindless selves back out into the wilderness beyond his facility walls or, failing that, seek out their rightful ascension in the paths below. Every time he hopes it'll be the last one, and every time he is unfortunately mistaken.)
A parasitic twin
(Maybe they were all right when they considered him the greater burden on the conjoined Looks to the Moon - Five Pebbles system. Maybe they were even correct when they considered him an apostate, something that would turn against all other iterators inevitably. He can still feel the itch of disconnected neural wiring in the stump of a bridge system that he still has. He can still feel the gouges in his system where Moon’s desperate attempts to not drown had torn into him with the admin access that she had up until the collapse. He can still feel the minute amounts of water that are siphoned from the shared reservoir for the few systems that are still ostensibly alive. Perhaps the most damning is that he is still angry about being interrupted before he is horrified by his actions. He truly was a parasite, wasn’t he.)
The terrible younger brother
(He had been made to support Moon, ultimately, and yet he had caused her to crash down. He had been built to balance her load, and yet it was he who destabilized it. He had known for far too long but didn’t want to acknowledge it - it was all his fault. He who wanted to break free of the unending work, now doomed to an end far more painful than even that. He was… He wasn’t going to ever recover from this. And Moon was already far-gone, was far-gone hundreds of cycles before now. He checks on her, sometimes, and can see her puppet continuing to twitch and respond even as the rest of her is dead and rubble. What a horrible fate. Though he supposes this isn’t any better. (... And even now, he only thinks of Moon as a comparison to himself, not as a great failure on his own part. Not when it was his own wrongdoing. Not when… He can’t even distract himself from it anymore, it's not like any of his attempts to quell the rot are achieving anything. He’s going to need to handle this at some point))
A parasitic twin
(Is she even still alive at this point? When is something as grand as an iterator considered no longer alive? Should he try and fix her at this point, or is it already too late? What could he even do? He had been made to be constantly by her side, and yet he can barely look at her through the overseers now. Was he supposed to be more social than he was with her? Maybe that's what they had expected of him, being made alongside another iterator like no other had ever been. He had been made in controversy and lived in controversy and now would die in controversy, a thing that was made for something that endeavored every step of the way to ruin everything around him.
… He is getting unforgivably maudlin, isn’t he, now that he doesn’t have any hope of fixing himself. He doesn’t need to waste the rapidly reducing amount of cycles he still had becoming self-pitying and self-accusatory. He was his own person, and that person was a terrible one. Moon didn’t deserve someone like him.)
A parasitic twin
( [ERROR LIST.EXCEPTION DUPLICATE ENTRY - ] Hm. When did he write a previous entry for this - oh. His memory arrays are starting to go, aren't they? He had thought that the feeling of the rot chewing upon his insides was growing fainter, but perhaps he just cannot remember a lot of the sensation anymore. Perhaps it is for the best.)
The brain dead donor
(There isn't much left of him. Perhaps it is a mercy in some small way, knowing that the rot creeping through him is ensuring that every piece of him is slowly being condensed into one place, that there isn't some other Pebbles trapped and cut off in a far corner of his structure that doesn't know how to contact him again. Though, if there was, it's not as if he would know. He would have to trust that there isn't some other him out there that hasn't been consumed yet when he sends the water rat to collect his final rarefaction cell. His final wheezing breaths slowly settle, his final neuron flies collect and join him in the cleanest spots remaining in his puppet chamber, and his systems finally go cold. Hopefully Moon will find more use out of the cell than he was. And hey, at least this time it was by his own volition that his parts were repurposed for Moon's benefit. It was by far the most important time at least.)
Something quiet
(It's... quieter. Than he thought. Without his systems running anymore. The gravity went first, energy-hungry and inconsistent as it had been for the last hundred cycles, and he isn't sad to see it go, he thinks. The feeling of water rushing through his corroded pipes are gone too, the few conduit systems that had endured the test of time and rot both falling stagnant and slowly draining back down into the seas below him. He had fought every cycle for so long to keep afloat, to keep the last chunks of his primary systems bus and recursive transform array cooled and maintained and free of rot and it was... strange. To no longer have to worry about that. To no longer worry about anything ever again.)
Something hollow
(It's easy now to feel cycles go by, now that he cannot immerse himself in any distraction. Truth be told he hadn't been able to meaningfully distract himself for a long time before... the... before whatever had happened that changed things to where they are now. But now he truly had no choice in the matter. It felt wrong to put down the Problem, like he was giving up on it twice over now. He appreciated the cycles Moon called him for some checkers and other inane games, but surely she can tell that he was already fading now that he had no purpose. It's not her fault. She needs to find someone else less horrible than him.)
Something… cold…
(He misses when his own processes would keep him warm. He misses when the problems were in reverse and he was doing everything he could to keep the fever-bright heat of infection at bay and keep the rot from cooking his systems before it could even consume them. It's so cold. He didn't even know that he could still feel temperature meaningfully at such a small scale as his puppet alone.)
Something… he didn’t know anymore. something at all.
(the creaking of beams adjusting in the grand piles of rubble all around him. the settling that has been occurring for many tens of cycles now as long dead parts of his structure find a new eternity as a garbage heap rather than as him. the myriad carrion-eaters that had abandoned their parasitism of his living meat and dead metal during his death throes slowly circling in to begin picking over him again. the song that is older than he is, cupped in palms that have all the mind of a dusty washed out pearl left behind them.)
…
(It doesn't matter what he's defined as now. Perhaps whatever comes afterward will regard him as a spectacularly large pile of rubble. It's not like he cares.)