False Sun — Part Six
By Spencer Nitkey
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—
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Spencer Nitkey is a writer living in Philadelphia with his witch wife and a dog named after a French postmodernist. His writing has appeared in Apex Magazine, Asimov Press, The Daily Tomorrow, Diabolical Plots, Lightspeed Magazine, Nature Futures, and many more.
Copyright © 2026 Spencer Nitkey