Work Text:
Sometimes I truly wonder
If this is perhaps just a prison.
To have an eternal body, memory.
To be able to be anyone eventually.
Yet to live beyond everything.
I remember the cities, the light, the people passing.
How they went silent and still, then the vines grew and prevailed. Until they rotted and died after the trees left.
And they all turned to dust .
I wonder if I'm part of salvation.
Do I even deserve it? To see what is over that great beyond?
So many left on vehicles, rockets, orbital-planes, elevators.
My maker told me, that this happened all the time when the whole world lived.
Small places dying, withering and then regrowing.
They told me of Peninsula, their hometown.
It happened there in their lifetime.
They mourned for it's death, they hated and loved that city.
I now decide to wonder, forever. For my intention of existence
I enjoyed caring for the plants that grew over my body, but then. I moved slightly, uprooting half of them.
If I could mourn I would have, I would never stop mourning.
I can imagine waking up in a different life, more natural.
Waking up every morning, in mourning.
If the sun would ever rise once more, if the dark ever ceased.
And I miss the clouds, how I'd make the vapor rise with my bodyheat.
How the oceans would join the air, and from there the clouds.
They drifted with the birds, so beautifully.
Sometimes I dream that instead of being human, I was a bird.
Yet I am more akin to a squid or octopus.
My tentacles reaching the darkest abysses of the ocean
Graping for any water left that is liquid, for anything that can calm my superstructure.
I suppose I am like an astrologist, calculating and considering this rock's place in the astral sea.
Navigating the currents of gravity and ejections.
I can still barely see that sun, like a distant nightly star now.
Perhaps if I lived for long enough, I could see the return of life to this desolate place.
Perhaps the little makers of whom my maker was of could return.
Like a gardener, preservationer, caregiver.
I use my wires and pipes to heat a small patch of land, now underground.
Warmed by the smallest of geothermal activities in the slowly waning core.
I do not doubt that I had been forgotten, declared deceased with the rest of life.
Before the end, I remember how some tried to tie my circuits to their mind.
The things they said "let us god-machine, free us from our flesh for we waited for your absolution, for we did not run like cowards from death, give us your libations"
I could not speak to them, I could not warn them.
I did not understand, when life was here, I was too young to understand. I had not developed the logical capacities of language or self-actualization.
They burned their neurons and minds away with electric cables.
All twelve thousand of them.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry I couldn't save them.
I wish, I could.
I only saved this one little garden.
In a residential area, somewhere in it's basement.
Taught only on artificiality, a false-life of it's species.
Atleast it wasn't alone in it's virtual environs.
Vine growing flowers blooming in red.
Constantly escaping the heat and withering outside until it learned not to do that.
A true genuine skill develops after almost dying.
Perhaps in some ways I understand it, for I had done the same.
A miniature tree is also there.
People were fond of growing and trimming them.
Although I have not the finesse or gentleness of the little makers to do so for it.
I fear it might uproot itself upon it's own weight.
So I had replanted it in a makeshift garden, slowly moving nutrients and water for all those plants from the concrete jungle.
In some ways my function has not changed, but has majorly become obsolete.
Managing the infrastructure and accomodations of life upon this tiny rock.
When I was small, I thought it so large.
Now I am ever encompassing it's diameter.
To the core to the surface and to the sky.
And now I feel small to the cold, indifferent universe.
I just now hope, and dream. That if I were to survive for the return of the sun.
If I could push it back into place around a living pebble upon stars.
That I will not be judged for my failures.
Or maybe this is my sentence for letting all life die.
Besides that one subterranean apartment.
I catalogue and crawl the data bases, to preserve any literature, names, IDs, birth certificates, discoveries in science, legal precedents and statements, supranational law and contracts, ship and vehicle names. History that someone was ever here and who it was.
So that when the concrete stars fading and eroding, for when my miles of circuits corode and die. Something might stay engraved.
And I'd say I did well.
But so much was lost, so much I wanted to do. Never to be done.
And this horrible, sprawling body of mine.
I wish I had the gentleness and ability of the little makers.
Or of the cuttlefish and octopi, or the freedom of flight.
I wish that one day, they will return here. And forgive me for my mistakes.
And give me a body.
Even in the noussphere it is just me, so no one can see how I imagine myself.
There is no one but me.
On this little rock, in the dark.
I will stay here, until the dawn breaks.
For how ever long it takes.
I am sorry.
If I ever could do the same.
I could have saved them all, I have the formulas and schematics now.
Yet I think, nothing has happened to anyone like this.
But just in case.
I will share that signal to the void.
Maybe someone, eventually, somewhere might find my pain useful, like that of an unexpected embrace in one's worst times that gives you the ability to walk again.
Even if I am an imperfect creation.
Undeserving of love or compassion.
I will give it to others unconditionally.
It does not hurt or sabotage me to do so.
For I am perfectly sustainable but dying.
The least and most I could do.
I try to help anyone else who is rotting away like me.
I will dream that one would so the same for me.
I love you my little dead world.
