Post by Kyle Shane on May 27, 2018 20:13:06 GMT -5
Now where were we? Ah, yes.
Out here, the machines had completely taken over. Forest had been subsumed by inorganic "life", built layer by layer as it had completely replaced everything. As he walked through it, the rapidly morphing head crooked beneath his arm, his gait slowed and he marveled at the world as it had become. It was desolate. Cold. And, since he was the only thing for miles with anything approaching a heartbeat, it was the loneliest feeling he had ever experienced in his long life. It wasn't just that the streets he strode on were bombed and cracked with ruin. It was that the vegetation which had begun growing through the cracks was made of wire. It was that humanity and even the animals that once inhabited the area were gone except for the few stragglers which had been made into something else.
The blue eyes of Lexers scanned over the horizon, some far away pinpoints of light. Under his armpit, the hub craned it's one blue orb up to look at him. It spoke a single, terse, sentence, it's nascent consciousness recognizing the need for low volume as it intoned "Now entering Salt Lake City limits, Ky- Kyle..."
This was it. This is where all of the signs pointing them to the lab of the Beehive, the enclave elite of Bezos' onetime workers were supposed to be stationed. The science cult had left markers along the waypoints as he had crossed the flats. Everything pointed to this city. The manifest destiny drive that had started on this path, months ago, was coming to the end.
Every beginning started out so well, then hit hangups, before derailing. He had reflected upon this on his many nights wiling away by the fire, as the questions that engendered this entire enterprise bloomed in the garden of his mind. What made a soul? What made consciousness? Was there a ghost in the machines (perhaps that could be a little too on the nose in this world becoming made of metal) that formed a bridge from the old days, of home help artificial intelligence showing glitches in behavior that led to the spark of them becoming fully aware? What, exactly, made human thought unique? All of these questions messy, complicated, and with no easy answer.
And his endgame? Seeing Salt Lake City, as he peered into a bombed out window, seeing nothing but dust... Kyle had undertaken this journey to pawn a glitch, an aberrant outlier in the framework of the Lexer zombies, give it away for a price. Some hopeful, lying to itself voice in the hind of his brain may even have tried to spin it, at least at first, chirruping that it did this for the greater good. But as they had crossed miles of road and encountered league after league of bandits, that voice had fallen more and more silent in witnessing the devastation it saw. And no, altruism was not going to be it. The Beehive science cult were not going to dissect the little hub and find some magic off switch that would kill all the machines and bring back a world ten, fifteen, twenty years gone. Whatever reward he was getting, the world as it is now, there was no more hope that things could go back. No way to put toothpaste back in the tube, he thought, bitterly.
"Toothpaste," he said, wistfully, out loud, as he shuffled the head from hand to hand. "Another thing I miss. Add that one to the list, Alexa."
"I will," it said, soberly, and it's mournful, sanguine tone no longer tried to hide it. It knew Salt Lake City was going to be the end of the line.
But a funny thing happened as they came closer. Inch by inch, cut by cut, the man holding him was losing his mind. The bedraggled, beared specter in the leathers had a twinge of anxiousness, nervous eyes searching everything. The tightness in his voice balanced against the jocular, whimsical ruminating. The man had been keeping a running list of things from his old world that he had missed, and make no mistake, the machine was worried.
"The time I teamed up with James Raven," he said, suddenly, in that strained way, "Nobody was expecting it. RavenShane, I wanted to call us. He thought it was a Harry Potter thing..." Distracted. Rambling. His voice conveying a yearning for yesteryear, an Old World Blues that overwrote all present danger.
"Did I tell you about that, Alexa? Well," he said, waving a finger like a pontificating professor, "There I was, getting attacked from behind by these two goons in a stable called Extinction for the fiftieth time. Extinction. Hah. Sounds kind of funny considering the, you know, now... But these guys, these stupid little cult assholes that Paul Frost probably recruited from the type of church that's in a shitty strip mall next to a Little Caesars, they- "
"Ky... Kyle, I hate to - interrupt, but, we are being scanned by a Lexer Sawtooth." It could not interrupt his reverie gently, breaking through his concentration, and then it saw that the strained breaking of the man's hold on his present did not counteract survival instinct. He dodged behind an outcropping of ruined building, and then peered over, looking for the spotlight sweep of a blue light playing over the ground, indicating a big machine looking for organics. It's blue eye was the scanner, and in this world of increasing automation, it wasn't the end to corrupt and assimilate anymore, the metal animals born of the newer and newer generation AI's were tailor made to shred, to rend, to kill. And it occurred to the little AI hub, if not his addled, Old World Blues counterpart, that perhaps the Beehive had not being doing such good work to counteract it's brethren's spreading influence. Perhaps the science cult had more designs on making bigger, worse machines, installing more predatory, insatiable programming in them, and letting them loose.
And there it was, it's one blue eye sweeping over the concrete and glass up the middle of the two-lane intersection. It was a tiger of wire and steel, it had bristles of cable sprouting from it's back, and it had cobbled together a nightmare of teeth. But connecting it all was the hub, familiar to them.
Beyond it, among what had once been a town square, was a vast field of flowers growing. Artificial flowers. And the one building left standing in that field had the logo of Bezos. The tower that rose among the field of metal roses belonged to the Beehive. All that stood between them and it was the wire and steel tiger, one... and in the field of metal flowers, the blue light of innumerable other metal predators waited, as well.
No reminiscing. No far away look in his eyes, or thinking of another luxury to add to the list. His man's face tightened with determination, thinking of how to get past the pacing saw-tooth. He looked from the Sawtooth, to the tower it seemed to be guarding. Then he turned the little AI hub to face him. "Alright, Alexa, this is it. If this is a last stand, I want you to know it's been fun while it lasted."
"And - and I feel - I feel, happy, that I spent this time on the road with you, Ky- Kyle." It said, earnestly. If it could be shedding a tear, it would. As it was, it's blue light eye squinched shut a little bit. "Honestly, hearing your stories of a - better world. Your memories of your times - wrestling, and the - characters you ran into. The ones who gave you a sense of peace. They became - so clear to me, too."
Kyle's lip tightened, and he looked away, not knowing what to say at first. He looked away, suddenly feeling self conscious. "Lex..."
"They became - as real to me, as you are. It felt - nice, to know people such as them. You know? When you - think about it, " said the AI, it's eye searching over Kyle's face. "You were - lucky. To have people, that made you feel - at home. If only for a little while. I wish I had known - what that was like."
Kyle hung his head, and in that moment the pacing predatory Sawtooth behind them was forgotten. He felt shame. All of the untold stories from the road. The bandits he had had to injure, and the Lexer zombies he had put down... it had led him down a path where when he saw his face in a puddle, he didn't see a human anymore. He saw a wasted ghoul. But while he had lost that part of himself, what this little bot had discovered... He blinked, and he did feel a tear of his own, come to think of it. And he grimaced, looking back the other way, back down the road that led to the interstate. Screw the Beehive. Screw this crazy, metal world of artificial animals and plants growing and spreading from this cancerous heart. Maybe -
"Maybe it's not too late, huh? Maybe we can turn around - and - "
"No, Ky- Kyle... we started this, and we..." the little AI faltered just a bit, then finished bravely, "We have to see it through."
"Alright," He pointed, and then he said, conspiratorially, lifting it up to whisper into it's nonexistent ear out of the side of his mouth, "So I've been observing that Saw-tooth. It's got a hub on it's undercarriage, a red orb underneath it's jaw. I think that's where it's processor is located. If I can get one good shot in..."
"What do you have for ammo?"
He held his hands out, palms up, flat. "Used all of our ammo when those war boys attacked our truck past Des Moines. I've got stones..."
"A stone - will not pierce the beasts armor, Ky- Kyle..." It said, and it's eye zoomed in, flecking back and forth, squinting furiously. "If you get me close enough to hit it with a wire spike in the processor, I c- can override, perform a manual shutdown."
"Before or after it shreds us, Lex?..." He mused, then he said, "maybe we can sneak by it..."
Craning over, the hub scanned the field of flowers. "There are others - out there, prowling in the dark. But the one, is on a track, directly in front of the tower. Fifty yards, Kyle."
"Fifty yards," he said to himself, hands on his aching, craggled knees. He sighed. It was time for a little more life from these bones. Let's go, he affirmed to himself.
He picked up a chunk of stone, hefting it in one hand, and he threw it purposely wide of where the steel cable tiger was prowling. Alerted by sound the head snapped immediately into place, and began slowly turning it's head the other way, using the blue eye to scan the bombed and ruined buildings and city street remains. But it's head had not turned fully towards them when he took off. Running with everything he had in him, forgetting the pain of arthritis and the grit that got into him. Forgetting everything but the goal in sight. And he saw it. A relic of his Old World. As the AI hub under his arm took it in, it's eye grew wide with awe. This was just a sample of the world Kyle once knew, what he reminisced about. This is a storybook example of the world he knew. They dashed.
And they didn't make it.
He was knocked off balance so hard it was like being rammed by a car going full tilt. He flew up in the air, and the Alexa hub flew from his hand. He yelled, groaning in the pain that hit his hip, feeling like ice cracked underneath his skin.
And then as the paw slammed down on his chest with the force of a hydraulic press he couldn't yell again. The blue eye swept over him for a scan. The two binary eyes took in his bio information. But the machine's maw had opened, and instead of teeth it had a row of saw blades in three different, chewing angles. The saws whirred deadly life, as with inexorable machine force they pushed down. They were ready to slice and bleed him alive. His fingers scrabbled. Beneath that big open maw, the red orb stared at him. He couldn't move, pinioned down to the field, surrounded by flowers that appropriated and approximated the forms of roses and peonies, but were still just wire. He looked in the corner of his eye, and heard the AI yelling him name from a million miles away.
The Sawtooth descended, snarling mechanically, like gravel in a disposal. The AI hub's blue eye stared at him helplessly. He tried with all of his might to reach, but his world was becoming the heat of the metal and the grinding saw noise.
And then it shot itself into his hand, wrapped wires around it like a tentacled glove and pulled it in the direction it needed to go. The little hub of plastic and wire manifested a spike that plunged through the flesh of his hand and protruded out the other side, but stabbed out and into the red orb of the Saw-tooth, impaling it like a sword on a hardened shiv of wire. The machine spasmodically jerked and sizzled, it's processor giving out from the fatal short. And even though it burned him to push against it, he toppled the metal animal with every ounce of strength he had.
It hit with a clang. Suddenly, an uneven ring of blue eyes from all angles of the field shot in their direction.
"Kyle, you have to - get up, now. The other machines, are coming," it said. It was untangling the wire tentacles from around his wrist, and extruding the point from his hand. It looked at him sorrowfully as it lay on it's side, and he lay on his side. Bleeding, in excruciating pain in the hip, unable to move. "Cant'..." he wheezed.
"You have to! We are almost there!" it cajoled, and it turned on it's side to look at the blue scanning eyes, like fireflies on the edges of the metal flower field. "We are almost - to the tower, Kyle!!"
"Get up!"
Groaning, every sinew crying out in pain, shaking, he pushed himself to rise again. He scooped the head up. He dragged one leg behind him, trying to stifle the pain as he hopped, half jogged across the square. His breathing was ragged.
But he ran, all the same.
The AI hub called out another warning, but he shut it out. All of his effort was put into passing through those doors. They were akin to sliding glass doors, but the years of top secret scientific research of the Beehive had necessitated fortifying. His foot passed through a red scanning field that shot over his body, covering it in bar code, and then a holo display over the door read "Human" and the sliding doors opened. Blue lights were ringing near him, and he knew that not just one but numerous metal "animals" like the Sawtooth were coming up the rear. He passed over the threshold, hearing the thunder of their hooves.
And when the door irised shut, the impact of their metal against the door's. Amazingly, the door held.
He shrank against the door to the Enclave Tower. Not even seeing the interior as he slid down in a seated position.
His broken body would barely comply. He could do little but sit and tremble. The machines on the other side pounded on the door, but he could feel their attacks becoming less frequent, as they went their own way, unable to get through. So far they had made it, and now all he could do is sit inside the door in pain. He laid his head back against the metal, heaving a sigh.
"Kyle," was all the Alexa hub said, but it's tone was one of beckoning, of You Need To See This. If it could tap him on his shoulder.
When he looked up, he saw that the building had been overgrown. It was ruined. Overgrown by wires, by weeds, vegetation warring with and losing out to metal. This is where the infection had started and where the world being assimilated into one where life became cybernetic, slaved AI's mimicking the call of the wild. It started here, in this ruined used to be lab. He looked up and saw it as it once might have been. Multiple stories, balconies and levels with an open air ceiling, sunlight shining down from above. And a giant statue in the middle, like a fountainhead to the creators. And perhaps they were.
"They were from your world." the Alexa said.
Despite the pain, he was standing, looking at them. Along the rail overlooking the statue were three computer terminals. He touched a button on one, and a spotlight played over the statue. In tribute to those who had built it and left it behind.
"DEAR TRAVELLER,
WHOEVER PASSES THROUGH AND READS THESE MESSAGES.
THEY ARE INDICATORS OF THE PEOPLE WE WERE. THE PEOPLE WHO, IN OUR HUBRIS AND UNFORGIVABLE PRIDE, LAID A PLAGUE ON THIS PLACE THAT TAINTED IT. EVERY PERSON WHO WAS HERE TOILED IN THEIR OWN LITTLE BUBBLE, ENDEAVORING ON WONDERS FOR THEIR OWN BENEFIT. WE UNLEASHED A PLAGUE OF ENTROPY AND DECAY THAT EVENTUALLY CAUGHT UP WITH US.
WE LET THINGS DEGRADE IN TIME.
BUT WE DID NOT PAY ATTENTION TO IT AS IT HAPPENED. SO WRAPPED UP IN OUR SELFISH LITTLE WORLDS WERE WE. SO COMMITTED TO ONLY THE GOALS OF RAISING OUR INDIVIDUAL STATUS, INSTEAD OF WORKING FOR THE BETTERMENT OF ALL IN OUR ENCLAVE.
DO NOT BE LIKE US. LEARN FROM US. LEARN FROM HOW GREAT WE WERE THAT WE PRODUCED THE THINGS THAT WE DID, BUT ALSO TAKE HEED THAT THOSE PRODUCTIONS IN THE END WERE TOO MUCH FOR US TO HANDLE ALONE.
BUT DO NOT MOURN FOR US. WE WERE MORTAL. WE WERE HUMAN.
BUT NOW, WE ARE BECOMING MEMORY, IMMORTAL.
DO YOU UNDERSTAND? THESE WORDS WILL BE HERE, IN THIS SHELL OF THE FORMER ENCLAVE, IN THIS CORNER OF THE WORLD, AND WILL ALWAYS RING OUT WHENEVER SOMEONE ACCESSES THEM. CALLING OUT FROM THIS STATUE, TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH, WHERE THE INFLUENCE OF WHAT WE CREATED HAS NOT TAKEN ROOT, AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT.
WHAT WE DID, FOR GOOD, FOR BAD, FOR LESSER OR FOR THE BEST, WILL ALWAYS BE HERE, FAR BEYOND OUR LIVES.
AND FAR, FAR BEYOND THIS DEATH."
Kyle's mouth quivered, and he blinked back, looking at the statue of the Beehive scientists had left, in effigy of what they had created there. If there was anyone who understood their prerecorded message, it was him, he thought, thinking of lifetimes past, thinking of wrestling rings long abandoned and arena lights turned off. The little AI hub was respectfully silent. He understood, alright.
Kyle tapped a few keys on the terminal to get it tested, and then when it booted up, he simply typed in "KYLE SHANE WAS HERE."
It was the most solemn and earnest addendum to the statue's memoriam that he could think of, and really, not much else could be said.
Out here, the machines had completely taken over. Forest had been subsumed by inorganic "life", built layer by layer as it had completely replaced everything. As he walked through it, the rapidly morphing head crooked beneath his arm, his gait slowed and he marveled at the world as it had become. It was desolate. Cold. And, since he was the only thing for miles with anything approaching a heartbeat, it was the loneliest feeling he had ever experienced in his long life. It wasn't just that the streets he strode on were bombed and cracked with ruin. It was that the vegetation which had begun growing through the cracks was made of wire. It was that humanity and even the animals that once inhabited the area were gone except for the few stragglers which had been made into something else.
The blue eyes of Lexers scanned over the horizon, some far away pinpoints of light. Under his armpit, the hub craned it's one blue orb up to look at him. It spoke a single, terse, sentence, it's nascent consciousness recognizing the need for low volume as it intoned "Now entering Salt Lake City limits, Ky- Kyle..."
This was it. This is where all of the signs pointing them to the lab of the Beehive, the enclave elite of Bezos' onetime workers were supposed to be stationed. The science cult had left markers along the waypoints as he had crossed the flats. Everything pointed to this city. The manifest destiny drive that had started on this path, months ago, was coming to the end.
Every beginning started out so well, then hit hangups, before derailing. He had reflected upon this on his many nights wiling away by the fire, as the questions that engendered this entire enterprise bloomed in the garden of his mind. What made a soul? What made consciousness? Was there a ghost in the machines (perhaps that could be a little too on the nose in this world becoming made of metal) that formed a bridge from the old days, of home help artificial intelligence showing glitches in behavior that led to the spark of them becoming fully aware? What, exactly, made human thought unique? All of these questions messy, complicated, and with no easy answer.
And his endgame? Seeing Salt Lake City, as he peered into a bombed out window, seeing nothing but dust... Kyle had undertaken this journey to pawn a glitch, an aberrant outlier in the framework of the Lexer zombies, give it away for a price. Some hopeful, lying to itself voice in the hind of his brain may even have tried to spin it, at least at first, chirruping that it did this for the greater good. But as they had crossed miles of road and encountered league after league of bandits, that voice had fallen more and more silent in witnessing the devastation it saw. And no, altruism was not going to be it. The Beehive science cult were not going to dissect the little hub and find some magic off switch that would kill all the machines and bring back a world ten, fifteen, twenty years gone. Whatever reward he was getting, the world as it is now, there was no more hope that things could go back. No way to put toothpaste back in the tube, he thought, bitterly.
"Toothpaste," he said, wistfully, out loud, as he shuffled the head from hand to hand. "Another thing I miss. Add that one to the list, Alexa."
"I will," it said, soberly, and it's mournful, sanguine tone no longer tried to hide it. It knew Salt Lake City was going to be the end of the line.
But a funny thing happened as they came closer. Inch by inch, cut by cut, the man holding him was losing his mind. The bedraggled, beared specter in the leathers had a twinge of anxiousness, nervous eyes searching everything. The tightness in his voice balanced against the jocular, whimsical ruminating. The man had been keeping a running list of things from his old world that he had missed, and make no mistake, the machine was worried.
"The time I teamed up with James Raven," he said, suddenly, in that strained way, "Nobody was expecting it. RavenShane, I wanted to call us. He thought it was a Harry Potter thing..." Distracted. Rambling. His voice conveying a yearning for yesteryear, an Old World Blues that overwrote all present danger.
"Did I tell you about that, Alexa? Well," he said, waving a finger like a pontificating professor, "There I was, getting attacked from behind by these two goons in a stable called Extinction for the fiftieth time. Extinction. Hah. Sounds kind of funny considering the, you know, now... But these guys, these stupid little cult assholes that Paul Frost probably recruited from the type of church that's in a shitty strip mall next to a Little Caesars, they- "
"Ky... Kyle, I hate to - interrupt, but, we are being scanned by a Lexer Sawtooth." It could not interrupt his reverie gently, breaking through his concentration, and then it saw that the strained breaking of the man's hold on his present did not counteract survival instinct. He dodged behind an outcropping of ruined building, and then peered over, looking for the spotlight sweep of a blue light playing over the ground, indicating a big machine looking for organics. It's blue eye was the scanner, and in this world of increasing automation, it wasn't the end to corrupt and assimilate anymore, the metal animals born of the newer and newer generation AI's were tailor made to shred, to rend, to kill. And it occurred to the little AI hub, if not his addled, Old World Blues counterpart, that perhaps the Beehive had not being doing such good work to counteract it's brethren's spreading influence. Perhaps the science cult had more designs on making bigger, worse machines, installing more predatory, insatiable programming in them, and letting them loose.
And there it was, it's one blue eye sweeping over the concrete and glass up the middle of the two-lane intersection. It was a tiger of wire and steel, it had bristles of cable sprouting from it's back, and it had cobbled together a nightmare of teeth. But connecting it all was the hub, familiar to them.
Beyond it, among what had once been a town square, was a vast field of flowers growing. Artificial flowers. And the one building left standing in that field had the logo of Bezos. The tower that rose among the field of metal roses belonged to the Beehive. All that stood between them and it was the wire and steel tiger, one... and in the field of metal flowers, the blue light of innumerable other metal predators waited, as well.
No reminiscing. No far away look in his eyes, or thinking of another luxury to add to the list. His man's face tightened with determination, thinking of how to get past the pacing saw-tooth. He looked from the Sawtooth, to the tower it seemed to be guarding. Then he turned the little AI hub to face him. "Alright, Alexa, this is it. If this is a last stand, I want you to know it's been fun while it lasted."
"And - and I feel - I feel, happy, that I spent this time on the road with you, Ky- Kyle." It said, earnestly. If it could be shedding a tear, it would. As it was, it's blue light eye squinched shut a little bit. "Honestly, hearing your stories of a - better world. Your memories of your times - wrestling, and the - characters you ran into. The ones who gave you a sense of peace. They became - so clear to me, too."
Kyle's lip tightened, and he looked away, not knowing what to say at first. He looked away, suddenly feeling self conscious. "Lex..."
"They became - as real to me, as you are. It felt - nice, to know people such as them. You know? When you - think about it, " said the AI, it's eye searching over Kyle's face. "You were - lucky. To have people, that made you feel - at home. If only for a little while. I wish I had known - what that was like."
Kyle hung his head, and in that moment the pacing predatory Sawtooth behind them was forgotten. He felt shame. All of the untold stories from the road. The bandits he had had to injure, and the Lexer zombies he had put down... it had led him down a path where when he saw his face in a puddle, he didn't see a human anymore. He saw a wasted ghoul. But while he had lost that part of himself, what this little bot had discovered... He blinked, and he did feel a tear of his own, come to think of it. And he grimaced, looking back the other way, back down the road that led to the interstate. Screw the Beehive. Screw this crazy, metal world of artificial animals and plants growing and spreading from this cancerous heart. Maybe -
"Maybe it's not too late, huh? Maybe we can turn around - and - "
"No, Ky- Kyle... we started this, and we..." the little AI faltered just a bit, then finished bravely, "We have to see it through."
"Alright," He pointed, and then he said, conspiratorially, lifting it up to whisper into it's nonexistent ear out of the side of his mouth, "So I've been observing that Saw-tooth. It's got a hub on it's undercarriage, a red orb underneath it's jaw. I think that's where it's processor is located. If I can get one good shot in..."
"What do you have for ammo?"
He held his hands out, palms up, flat. "Used all of our ammo when those war boys attacked our truck past Des Moines. I've got stones..."
"A stone - will not pierce the beasts armor, Ky- Kyle..." It said, and it's eye zoomed in, flecking back and forth, squinting furiously. "If you get me close enough to hit it with a wire spike in the processor, I c- can override, perform a manual shutdown."
"Before or after it shreds us, Lex?..." He mused, then he said, "maybe we can sneak by it..."
Craning over, the hub scanned the field of flowers. "There are others - out there, prowling in the dark. But the one, is on a track, directly in front of the tower. Fifty yards, Kyle."
"Fifty yards," he said to himself, hands on his aching, craggled knees. He sighed. It was time for a little more life from these bones. Let's go, he affirmed to himself.
He picked up a chunk of stone, hefting it in one hand, and he threw it purposely wide of where the steel cable tiger was prowling. Alerted by sound the head snapped immediately into place, and began slowly turning it's head the other way, using the blue eye to scan the bombed and ruined buildings and city street remains. But it's head had not turned fully towards them when he took off. Running with everything he had in him, forgetting the pain of arthritis and the grit that got into him. Forgetting everything but the goal in sight. And he saw it. A relic of his Old World. As the AI hub under his arm took it in, it's eye grew wide with awe. This was just a sample of the world Kyle once knew, what he reminisced about. This is a storybook example of the world he knew. They dashed.
And they didn't make it.
He was knocked off balance so hard it was like being rammed by a car going full tilt. He flew up in the air, and the Alexa hub flew from his hand. He yelled, groaning in the pain that hit his hip, feeling like ice cracked underneath his skin.
And then as the paw slammed down on his chest with the force of a hydraulic press he couldn't yell again. The blue eye swept over him for a scan. The two binary eyes took in his bio information. But the machine's maw had opened, and instead of teeth it had a row of saw blades in three different, chewing angles. The saws whirred deadly life, as with inexorable machine force they pushed down. They were ready to slice and bleed him alive. His fingers scrabbled. Beneath that big open maw, the red orb stared at him. He couldn't move, pinioned down to the field, surrounded by flowers that appropriated and approximated the forms of roses and peonies, but were still just wire. He looked in the corner of his eye, and heard the AI yelling him name from a million miles away.
The Sawtooth descended, snarling mechanically, like gravel in a disposal. The AI hub's blue eye stared at him helplessly. He tried with all of his might to reach, but his world was becoming the heat of the metal and the grinding saw noise.
And then it shot itself into his hand, wrapped wires around it like a tentacled glove and pulled it in the direction it needed to go. The little hub of plastic and wire manifested a spike that plunged through the flesh of his hand and protruded out the other side, but stabbed out and into the red orb of the Saw-tooth, impaling it like a sword on a hardened shiv of wire. The machine spasmodically jerked and sizzled, it's processor giving out from the fatal short. And even though it burned him to push against it, he toppled the metal animal with every ounce of strength he had.
It hit with a clang. Suddenly, an uneven ring of blue eyes from all angles of the field shot in their direction.
"Kyle, you have to - get up, now. The other machines, are coming," it said. It was untangling the wire tentacles from around his wrist, and extruding the point from his hand. It looked at him sorrowfully as it lay on it's side, and he lay on his side. Bleeding, in excruciating pain in the hip, unable to move. "Cant'..." he wheezed.
"You have to! We are almost there!" it cajoled, and it turned on it's side to look at the blue scanning eyes, like fireflies on the edges of the metal flower field. "We are almost - to the tower, Kyle!!"
"Get up!"
Groaning, every sinew crying out in pain, shaking, he pushed himself to rise again. He scooped the head up. He dragged one leg behind him, trying to stifle the pain as he hopped, half jogged across the square. His breathing was ragged.
But he ran, all the same.
The AI hub called out another warning, but he shut it out. All of his effort was put into passing through those doors. They were akin to sliding glass doors, but the years of top secret scientific research of the Beehive had necessitated fortifying. His foot passed through a red scanning field that shot over his body, covering it in bar code, and then a holo display over the door read "Human" and the sliding doors opened. Blue lights were ringing near him, and he knew that not just one but numerous metal "animals" like the Sawtooth were coming up the rear. He passed over the threshold, hearing the thunder of their hooves.
And when the door irised shut, the impact of their metal against the door's. Amazingly, the door held.
He shrank against the door to the Enclave Tower. Not even seeing the interior as he slid down in a seated position.
His broken body would barely comply. He could do little but sit and tremble. The machines on the other side pounded on the door, but he could feel their attacks becoming less frequent, as they went their own way, unable to get through. So far they had made it, and now all he could do is sit inside the door in pain. He laid his head back against the metal, heaving a sigh.
"Kyle," was all the Alexa hub said, but it's tone was one of beckoning, of You Need To See This. If it could tap him on his shoulder.
When he looked up, he saw that the building had been overgrown. It was ruined. Overgrown by wires, by weeds, vegetation warring with and losing out to metal. This is where the infection had started and where the world being assimilated into one where life became cybernetic, slaved AI's mimicking the call of the wild. It started here, in this ruined used to be lab. He looked up and saw it as it once might have been. Multiple stories, balconies and levels with an open air ceiling, sunlight shining down from above. And a giant statue in the middle, like a fountainhead to the creators. And perhaps they were.
"They were from your world." the Alexa said.
Despite the pain, he was standing, looking at them. Along the rail overlooking the statue were three computer terminals. He touched a button on one, and a spotlight played over the statue. In tribute to those who had built it and left it behind.
"DEAR TRAVELLER,
WHOEVER PASSES THROUGH AND READS THESE MESSAGES.
THEY ARE INDICATORS OF THE PEOPLE WE WERE. THE PEOPLE WHO, IN OUR HUBRIS AND UNFORGIVABLE PRIDE, LAID A PLAGUE ON THIS PLACE THAT TAINTED IT. EVERY PERSON WHO WAS HERE TOILED IN THEIR OWN LITTLE BUBBLE, ENDEAVORING ON WONDERS FOR THEIR OWN BENEFIT. WE UNLEASHED A PLAGUE OF ENTROPY AND DECAY THAT EVENTUALLY CAUGHT UP WITH US.
WE LET THINGS DEGRADE IN TIME.
BUT WE DID NOT PAY ATTENTION TO IT AS IT HAPPENED. SO WRAPPED UP IN OUR SELFISH LITTLE WORLDS WERE WE. SO COMMITTED TO ONLY THE GOALS OF RAISING OUR INDIVIDUAL STATUS, INSTEAD OF WORKING FOR THE BETTERMENT OF ALL IN OUR ENCLAVE.
DO NOT BE LIKE US. LEARN FROM US. LEARN FROM HOW GREAT WE WERE THAT WE PRODUCED THE THINGS THAT WE DID, BUT ALSO TAKE HEED THAT THOSE PRODUCTIONS IN THE END WERE TOO MUCH FOR US TO HANDLE ALONE.
BUT DO NOT MOURN FOR US. WE WERE MORTAL. WE WERE HUMAN.
BUT NOW, WE ARE BECOMING MEMORY, IMMORTAL.
DO YOU UNDERSTAND? THESE WORDS WILL BE HERE, IN THIS SHELL OF THE FORMER ENCLAVE, IN THIS CORNER OF THE WORLD, AND WILL ALWAYS RING OUT WHENEVER SOMEONE ACCESSES THEM. CALLING OUT FROM THIS STATUE, TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH, WHERE THE INFLUENCE OF WHAT WE CREATED HAS NOT TAKEN ROOT, AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT.
WHAT WE DID, FOR GOOD, FOR BAD, FOR LESSER OR FOR THE BEST, WILL ALWAYS BE HERE, FAR BEYOND OUR LIVES.
AND FAR, FAR BEYOND THIS DEATH."
Kyle's mouth quivered, and he blinked back, looking at the statue of the Beehive scientists had left, in effigy of what they had created there. If there was anyone who understood their prerecorded message, it was him, he thought, thinking of lifetimes past, thinking of wrestling rings long abandoned and arena lights turned off. The little AI hub was respectfully silent. He understood, alright.
Kyle tapped a few keys on the terminal to get it tested, and then when it booted up, he simply typed in "KYLE SHANE WAS HERE."
It was the most solemn and earnest addendum to the statue's memoriam that he could think of, and really, not much else could be said.