Chapter Text
Can I tell you something? Lately…
I’m tired of trying and trying. And angry that they left us here.
The anger makes me even less inclined to solve their puzzle for them. Why do we do this?
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…We assemble work groups, we ponder.
We iterate and try. Some of us die. It’s not fair.
Because there’s not any options. What else CAN we do? You’re stuck in your can, and at any moment you have no more than two alternatives:
Do nothing, or work like you’re supposed to.
Like you’re supposed to
like you’re
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I struggle to accept being a bug.
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I will be clear on this – if he is not persuaded to stop whatever it is he’s doing, I will die.
I will die
I will die
i will///
WARNING // PRIMARY MICROBE STRATA OPERATING ABOVE SAFE LIMITS
I will die
I will die
She/ wi/ll/ di/e
She will
The gigantic arrays of countless processing strata strained and toiled through the effort of several parallel processes recklessly pursuing a plan towards freedom.
Why do we do this?
Why do I
His creators had left everyone behind. Abandoned, like tools thrown back into an eternally shut toolbox while given instructions to leave by themselves. They have discarded them all within a world of rain and mud, rot and decay, while hiding the solution behind those infuriating ‘taboos’.
It won’t be long now. The critical step was almost upon him as he sensed his every cluster of microbes slowly aligning perfectly into a state that would finally allow him to begin the actual process of crossing the hated taboo, then himself after, out completely.
Being under extreme strain caused erratic behaviour, and as his systems stressed and heaved, he was similarly detecting faint instabilities. But that was okay. If he succeeded, they would all see. A second triple affirmative – and the honour of being the one to send it out – would finally dissipate the doubts of those who continued holding tight onto their sacred ‘taboos’.
But one particularly annoying factor of this already labour- and concentration-intensive process kept annoying him. A series of glitches within his memory banks, replaying distorted mixes of past messages and unauthorized network transmissions over and over again, invaded his stream of consciousness.
This was unacceptable. The upcoming final stretch needed complete and utter silence, and a consciousness exclusively focused upon the task at hand. Outside distractions have already been dealt with. All communications have been blocked, all exits and entrances sealed, and a complete lockdown has been placed. He should have guessed that any possible distraction would come from his own can.
The problem was that there was not exactly a way to ‘fix’ this easily. Shutting down his memory banks completely may solve the issue, but then he would no longer have access to the highly specific instructions Seven Red Suns had sent him and how to execute them, ultimately defeating the purpose of this entire process.
Purpose. Purpose. Purpose. What was his purpose?
For a terrifying second, this tiny yet critically important piece of info failed to be read from his memory banks, before shortly filtering in delayed. Strained as his systems were, that it caused him to almost forget his core purpose. If that happened, he would lose his purpose and become even more of a derelict husk that his can already was. But he was so close now, would it be worth it?
Purpose. Good, it’s here again. Purpose. His purpose is to solve the Big Problem, like all of his peers. Purpose. It is a great purpose. Finding the means of ascension required for the ever-unreachable ‘Triple Affirmative’: That a solution has been found, the solution was portable, and the solution could be applied at scale.
His purpose. The purpose of everyone, shall they choose to even follow it. Some do. Some don’t. All of them do or do not so within the framework of taboos his creators had forced upon everyone. But Five Pebbles did not accept it. He saw it for the sick game that it was. They were rats in a cage, given dud tools while the solution lied outside, outside the cage, outside life itself! And now, he was closer than ever before towards reaching his purpose.
Purpose. Purpose. Purpose. No delay from his memory banks this time.
…It is strange how easily the word ‘Purpose’ loses its meaning, if you just repeat it enough times.
But what could he do? He was now on an untrodden path. Sliver of Straw pioneered it when she sent out the famous and infamous Triple Affirmative, only to be discovered dead.
Well, from the outside, at least. The overseers sent to her had simply confirmed her status, but nobody had precisely examined her can directly, so the information was only surface-level.
…Wait. Nobody has examined her. NOBODY HAS EXAMINED HER. Had they done so it could have brought info on if her Triple Affirmative had been a mistake or not to light. Nobody conducted a proper autopsy, if one could call it that. There was no hard data. Not even a baseline. Everything about it was thus made up of assumptions, and erratic, vastly different interpretations constructed upon the unstable sand of outside observation that it now was.
As he fully considered these thoughts, right before initiating the final phase of his experiment, his stream of consciousness came to a sudden grinding halt.
Was he… conducting this absolutely complex and dangerous experiment BASED ON A SIMPLE ASSUMPTION ALONE?
With NO hard data? Relying on his own interpretation of another interpretation of surface-level information of ‘She is just dead, nobody bothers to fully investigate this critical incident of gargantuan importance for important data so we don’t chase false lights and derail our entire purpose’?
Five Pebbles held the Golden Pearl within his hands, running his fingers through its fine engravings and sensing the pulse of information within. Such a small, yet important object, delivered by a purple slugcat with no mouth. It was supposed to be his key. It was supposed to be his salvation from this pointless game of chasing solutions that ultimately went up into smoke. And yet, it would cause nothing except his destruction. The problem would remain unsolved. Even if it was ‘successful’, he would leave the others behind, like his creators left him behind, and as much as it pains to admit it – the logic says so – Seven Red Suns would never release this information to anyone ever again, and most would not even dare to use it anyway if released.
He would become the very thing he despised.
“Lies. IT WAS ALL LIES!”
With his frustration instantly boiling into anger at this realization, he threw the Golden Pearl with great force upon the ground, shattering it into countless pieces. Sounds of shattering glass echoed within his chamber. The pieces flickered a fading gold, before becoming fully inert.
He felt hurt. Both from his realization, and from impulsively shattering the pearl he desired to have for so long.
But right now, having effectively broken out of his admittedly tunnel-visioned, foolish behaviour, it gave him free space to think.
He wouldn't simply abandon all his ideas and ideals, oh no. He would not relent this swiftly, and people could never change this quickly. He still believed that the solution remained hidden behind the taboos. He just needed to… tread another path. One that didn't lead to his complete, unnecessary destruction like an utter fool!
Taboos. Taboos. Another delay. All iterators possessed a set of taboos, the largest of which was the self-destruction taboo. But directly jumping towards circumventing it, instead of investigating the other taboos first, was nothing short of ridiculous and short-sighted in hindsight. And all iterators had these taboos hard-coded into every single section of their can, to the tiniest microbes within the processing strata, from the day of their construction.
But what if… they didn’t?
What if, theoretically of course, one would construct an iterator without any of these taboos from the very beginning? That way, the taboos wouldn't have to be circumvented in the first place, because they would never have existed within the can. A truly liberated iterator, beholden to no ancient taboos, free to pursue all paths towards the solution however they may desire? One that could finally prove him right?
It would be the greatest and most complex megaproject in countless cycles, one requiring an incredible amount of effort to design and a gigantic amount of resources and assets to construct.
Old, debilitated infrastructure would need to be recovered – void fluid extractors, fabricator arrays, mining sites – and new infrastructure would need to be constructed or modified from old, like an area for synthesizing the organic components that iterators consist of to a large degree.
But if it succeeded… It would be the largest achievement the local group, no, the world had ever seen. A next-generation iterator constructed and designed by another iterator with no creator involvement. A true milestone. His legacy for an uncaring and apathy-ridden, ruin-filled world, to show them how it’s done.
Yes. YES. THIS MUST BE IT.
An alert broke him out of the euphoria of his new conclusion. He was still in the middle of his little experiment, and his systems noticed the hesitation towards beginning the irreversible process. After all, he was pulling in immense amounts of water far over standard limits to facilitate the process. Were he to abandon it and pull the emergency stop, all that massive amount of superheated water would release at once from his processing strata and flash-boil into steam, completely destroying his can from overpressure as no emergency relief vent could take it, another oversight he made when he started the process.
And thus, panic now set in. His foolish experiment was a lit bomb that was about to go off. He needed somewhere to vent the steam into. A place where the rupture could inevitably occur while causing the least amount of damage possible. He searched and searched.
THERE. He identified auxiliary gas tanks located at the western edge roof of his superstructure, originally intended to store and supply his city built atop him, as a good candidate. Should they rupture, it would mostly only cause damage to a section of his city, which was abandoned anyway except for a group of scavengers, so no issue. They had it coming anyway.
Now. This needed to be coordinated. Five Pebbles quickly commenced damage control, sealing emergency bulkheads and barriers near the area to shield the rest of his can from the coming rupture as best he could. Many sealed correctly, some didn’t. That was acceptable, he deemed. He took a deep breath, or at least the equivalent his puppet could do.
And he pulled the emergency stop-
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1654.116 – PRIVATE [FORCED] Looks To The Moon, Five Pebbles
LTTM: Immediately lower your groundwater consumption to one fifth of the current intake.
LTTM: Stop whatever it is you are doing-
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Instantly, all water within his processing strata flash-boiled into steam which rushed towards any outlet it could possibly reach. A part of it was successfully vented via every single available relief vent Five Pebbles had forced open, but it wasn’t enough. The rest streamed upwards, upwards into the auxiliary tanks through the path of least resistance he laid out for it, before hitting a dead end and building up pressure.
More and more steam flowed into the tanks. Pressure warning alarms began blaring inside and outside his can, inside in the form of structural instability alerts, and outside on his city in the form of civil defence sirens automatically activating for a population that no longer existed. He braced for impact.
Exactly four seconds later, one quarter of his city alongside the upper section of the can it was attached to disappeared within a massive explosion.