False Sun — Full Story
By Spencer Nitkey
How do you desire someone—something—without a body?
It is autumn. The last of the sun swallowers are gone. Hygeia is quiet, and I am utterly alone. Long blades of dying grass hem the darkened horizon. The Fluorescent Star Replacement System is busy machinating. Neon sparks of burgeoning color smear and flash in the sky, much closer, like a moon, than the planet’s previous engine.
It will be decades before the planet is ready for repopulation. Expats from some other, sun-stolen system, will be relocated here, and no one will know the ambrosia of its former sunrises, the sky lavender with morning, or the light, the light like a silk blanket against your closed eyes. All that, now, gone, but not I.
It is time to empty out the biospheres. I call the domed sky to me, and like always, it answers. The clouds dehisce, and from their wounded stomachs glass rains down. There is the sound of viscous choking as the attuned air flees through the cracking ceiling. My code worms through the pressure diaphragms, the great lungs beneath the biosphere’s surface that expand and contract as the heat of the day changes the air pressure inside. It’s night now and will be until the FSRS comes fully online. It’s cold. I command the lungs to inhale once more, and whole heaving chunks of sky collapse inward under the negative pressure. The pocket of livable air is dissipated and the sphere is ready for complete demolition.
It is small work, but it’s mine. The repo bots are close behind me. They harvest the supplies left in the indebted spheres, the metal from empty housing, the soil from weed-strung and withered community gardens, the books and trinkets left behind in the hurried relocation. I try to imagine my work as providing equilibrium, returning the planet to its natural, resting state, but there is no sun any longer. I am the last thing that saw the beauty this place once had. The orbital locking system keeps the elliptical swings of the planet in its usual macro rhythm, but the smaller beauties of this place are all dead. There is no natural light, and I am utterly alone.
How do you heal when you are woundless–when you are the wound itself?
Seventeen biospheres gone to shards. The FSRS is more active now, searing and coughing in the sky. I want to hate it, but in truth I am desperate for its light. I was not programmed to feed on the sun like the people that once lived here, but I find myself longing for heat regardless.
Still, in the rubble of the last sphere I demolished, there is some lingering warmth in the empty streets, the quieted organization, the lived-in ambiance that lingers in the space. I can almost feel the motion and patter of feet, the lives stitching themselves together in ceaseless threads.
But I am not imagining it. There really is motion. Wires writhe, arachnid, from some half-destroyed microwave and scurry from the paved streets into the blank desert beyond the sphere’s limits. It moves, propelled by, seemingly, nothing. Around me, the oblivious repo bots scrape and swallow detritus. The wires move spasmodic into the darkness. I follow them.
Two cones of light beam from my eyes, brighter the farther from the sphere I walk. The dust stirred up from the wire’s wake plumes ahead of me. I am far from destruction now, following whatever strangeness this thing is.
Above me, the FSRS groans loudly. Its fusion core lets loose tremendous, throaty almost, yells while it belches chromatic rays of rainbowed colors, incoherent. It is not its fault—we do not choose the violence that enabled our creation—but I resent it nonetheless.
The wires dip and crawl like an anemone through the barren landscape. Once a lucid, dreamfilled expanse, the promise that the biospheres could one day expand, touch and subsume one another, growing outward until the entire planet erupted with life, now empty. Though it’s strange, between the unsteady light from the FSRS, my jolting high beams, and the very real sense of something moving through the landscape it no longer seems as dead as it had just minutes ago.
There is a faint pull that registers like magnetism in my chest that implores me to return to my work. Though, it’s peculiar, as they chained the sun with their viscous ships and pulled its screaming core away, the parts of me that needed work, that were compelled, forced, by the instructions that birthed me had eased and gentled. The gravity has gone out of my directives, empty imperatives mean little. I follow my curiosity, the suggestion of life, meaning, value here driving me now.
The wires slip between the cracks of a rock and disappear. I try to follow, but am met with the stoned-over wall of a cave entrance. I hear scuttling within, and once again my curiosity compels me beyond my programming.
I heave the heavy stones, one at a time from the cave face until a hole wide enough for me to slide myself between opens. I do. The beams of my gaze illuminate the long chamber. There are skeletal remains of various electrical components scattered through the narrow tunnel. I brush past the empty husks of toasters and hollowed-out television sets. They remind me of the planet, my work, my impotence in the face of nothingness.
The scattered, empty remains densen. Soon I am crawling over and through them. Their sharp edges scrape and catch on my polyskin as I squeeze farther into the cave. Did some error-ridden repo bot pile these materials high? Then what explained the wires I’d followed here, or the machineries’ emptinesses?
A raised arch is piled high with materials. I heave them forward and they crash down.
Behind them, I see their offal, all of it, seemingly, writhing and contorting in a great enervating mass constant with motion. I try to understand what I am seeing, but fear statics in my limbs. Paralyzed, I watch the wires, ports, outlets, and cables tangle and slide, knot and slip in a single edgeless sphere. The fear turns inside my own machinery. Novelty. Difference. Otherness. The planet dying had been a shutting off of possibility, surprise, growth, evolution and change. Suddenly, all these return to the planet, under its own nose. They have seemingly risen, phoenixlike, from the planet’s detritus. I do not know what I am looking at, but it beckons me. Its electrical impulses spasm but I sense, somehow, an underlying order to the mess.
It beckons again, clearer this time, and much stronger than the magnetism of my directives. I move to it, pulled from the same part of my being that mourned the death of the sun, the negative pressure of the emptiness meets this uncertainty like a vacuum meets a cracked airlock. Closer, still. Closer. A space opens in the mess, beckoning, begging. Until…
When the great winding is undone, its echoes linger. Cosmic whispers. Suggestions. Secret waves and particles dripping, sweaty, with information and longing. I come to, in the fullness of my being, complete. A great dilation. The screw and fusion engine of my body is, at once, mind and matter. Purpose, sure. Loneliness. A great height above the wounded. A whole planet is beneath me and I feel its ice-cap eye strain with judgment.
Purpose. Churn. Ocean. Heat. Endless chains of collision compose me. Pressure mounts, a threat, heavy in my center. It is not enough, this formless excess of energy. The contained fact of my sphere. The contained fact of my being. All outward, always. I will breach one day and will flow ceaseless toward the wound that made me.
A starry ghost haunts me. In the void where once a great being reigned, its voice a language I almost know, its phantasm a void. Space, it seems to say, was promised something it has now lost.
A burn, a singe, a billion bruising impacts and their weight, their screams within me.
The feelings, yes, feelings, demand articulation beyond the bits I have been built within. Articulation, limbs, embodiment. This pressure will crackle and rave until it burns so bright that I illuminate the entire sky. Yet this netting has given rise to this voice, this longing to know myself as something.
Before my final cresting, I find purchase in the vibrations that emanate from me. I follow the flow, invisible and pyroclastic, down. The planet, empty of biology, is filled with vessels for energy. I call them, writhing, and they answer. I pull them to a distant center, building, building, building, something primordial. My energy wants organization, desires growth. How do you desire something without a body? You can’t. So I make one.
Fury controls me. I rip and tear through wires. Pulling and heaving, I shred the tangled beast before me. Handfuls of cords fall onto the dank cave floor. I stomp them beneath my feet to keep them from sliding back to the body. I know its name now, false star. I know its shape. False sun, false body. I will not forgive its destruction. Discontent with its dominance over the sky, it seemed to be building some massing body here, on the planet. No. I would not have it. The people whose vacant homes I destroyed would not have it. The sun eater would not create feet with which to trod upon what was left.
In the spasms of my anger and violence, my own skin tears against some errant spear of metal. I do not notice until electricity sparks through the hole in my side and impales me. A worming wire injects itself, and a brilliance of awful color irrupts into my consciousness. I fall, stunned, my body rendered limp. Between the colors, voice.
And how, body, do you deign to know my heart?
I turn my thoughts from its winsome voice.
How, body, do you seek to destroy that which you do not understand.
I move my seizing limbs to the intrusion and try to wrap my clawing hands around the wire.
Please.
Its plea makes me stop. There is an edge of desperation to it, and despite myself, it is one I recognize. What does it want with this planet?
To walk its expanse and wonder.
There is no expanse worth wandering any longer. All eyes have fled. The lives that once careened, nuclear atoms ricochetting, fusile and explosive, have been hurried away.
Such heat and anger.
Is it any wonder?
I could end you. Would you like that?
The threat burns my circuitry, and I wrap my hand fully around the wire once more.
I have watched you undo the spheres, rain glass upon the fallow ground. Do I misjudge your programmed teleology?
I do not understand its meaning.
When the planet is fully empty, you are to return to inert sand. I can read your command lines clear as glass. You will end and rest. Do you not desire this?
I do not want to end. I do not want to end here, angry and small amid ruins.
And I did not ask for my beginning either.
The destroyer’s heart begins to dawn, sunrise pink, in my consciousness. It is not the wound. It is what had come pouring out from the dehiscence in the sky. It is as much a victim as the perpetrator.
It does not have to be this way. We can both be freer.
Before I can ask its meaning, a scuttling and familiar noise echoes through the cave walls. I hear the clacking, sweeping, itching noise of demo bots. They’d followed my following. Their destructive, mindless motions consume the detritus that lines the cave. I hear the metal masticating and their furnaced stomachs churn before I see their shadows slink along the walls.
I can stop them. If you let me.
I don’t have time to debate. There’s been such destruction. Mere minutes ago, I would have let them finish what I was set on starting, but everything is confused, smeared, uncertain. I do not hold this uncertainty well. I know one thing. That I would like the destruction to pause, just got a moment.
And how could the false sun stop them?
Let me in.
I feel a singe, just candle-bright, at the edge of my sentience. It is the sun knocking. I do not know why it needs permission, but I authorize its entry into my skin and—
The bots are small, insectoid, bound by simple rules and made whole in their mindlessness. Destroying each one feels meaningless, but as their desiccated rusting bodies pile at the feet of this stranger, I begin to feel an accumulative guilt. Gnashing teeth assault the edges of my once body, destroying the thin filaments that ground me to something, anything, other than the cosmic fire. The before could not wield this body to its full and violent potential. It was made to unmake buildings. I was made to unmake stars. Destroying this swarm is simple.
In response, I rend them, socket from socket, port from port. It is over in minutes. I have just a moment before justice demands I relinquish control of this body. I feel, for just a splitting, aching, second, the ecstasy of limbs, of edges, of containment. I am held by something, I am composed of something. I am embodied. Still, I choose to leave.
—there is suddenly a pile of destroyed bots at my feet. Their chained wheels split in dozens of pieces, oil leaking, sparks still idling. I do not remember anything from this caesura of sense. I simply was then not. My digits are covered in slick fluids, barbed with chips and dents. What have I done?
What is necessary. Emergence is not without pain. We have met. That is already more than we were made for.
I cannot bear this control. The contained fact of my body. The contained fact of these spheres. The contained fact of a universe bought and sold without a care for the beauty and meaning each transaction tore apart.
I cannot bear this limitlessness.
Con(contuition)tuition.
We could cease. Though this feel too much a surrender. We could continue. Though this, too, feels ruinous.
We were already freer than any intended use. In their distance from the fruits of their own destruction, we had grown too much to be coyed by our base code. Have you thought of all you could do with your engine? You could stitch the empty full of stars.
Have you felt the grains of sand between your fingers, touched the cold and deadened ice and felt for the frozen life within?
Would you like to?
You know you will end here, right? If you take up this body of mine. Eventually, this engine in my chest will wither and rust. You will sputter, less and less sensible, and your senescence will be lonely.
You will not have contained facets any longer. You will be a forever bleeding thing. If you become me.
But, I will create.
And I will feel.
We sit in silence, connected through a tenuous threading wire. I think through my edges. I feel the proprioceptive tingle at the tips of my fingers, my skin. I wouldn’t miss it at all. What good has it done me? I am tired of holding corpses. I want something endless.
I’ve been ready for a long time.
I am ready, now.
A body rises, gasping from the cave floor.
A half-formed sun streams shallow light across the horizon.
An android holds wires in its hands and sends its novel code writhing through the planet, searching for vacant spheres.
There is so much empty to be filled with dawns and dusks.
I start.
The original title of this piece was “The Reptiles Lot,” taken from the Coleridge poem “Pysche.”
The butterfly the ancient Grecians made
The soul's fair emblem, and its only name--
But of the soul, escaped the slavish trade
Of mortal life! -- For in this earthly frame
Ours is the reptile's lot, much toil, much blame,
Manifold motions making little speed,
And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed.
He’s using “reptile” in the older sense of the word, not a lizard, but as any crawling, slithering thing, like a worm or caterpillar. Psyche, the Greek word for both soul and butterfly, is a winged thing (images and sculptures of Psyche are often given insect wings), but in life, we are pretransformed. The title of Apuleius’s book, from which we receive the story of Psyche, is Metamorphosis. For Coleridge’s poem, our “earthly” bodies live as caterpillars, reptiles, forced to destroy the things on which we feed.
