Chapter 32: The Wasteful Plain – Part 6

All through the night, the consciousness paced around the sleeping forms of Sky and Harna, its eyes scanning the horizons. At every turn it expected to see a gradually approaching line of indistinct figures in the distance, but those fears were not realised. When the sky began to lighten with dawn and the consciousness’s night vision flickered off, they were still alone.

Harna was the first to wake. She barely seemed to notice her injury as she clambered to her feet and walked a few circles around their sorry excuse for a camp, rolling her shoulders to relieve the tension of sleeping on the hard ground.

‘We’ll need food soon,’ she said, turning to the consciousness. ‘And water.’

It nodded. ‘And something to power me. I have thought this through. I could never decide whether to be hopeful or bleak in my expectations. How common are such things?’

‘Food and water are common enough. Finding them in good condition, though, that’s more rare. Most of that gets scavenged pretty quickly, but since we’re heading out to the wastes maybe we’ll find easy pickings. As to your power source, that I can’t say. I don’t know what half the junk I find is.’

‘Then I will be hopeful,’ the consciousness declared. ‘But I have a question for you, Harna. Why did you follow us? If the creatures really do want Sky, would it not have been wiser to make for the Scrap Heap? You are in danger here.’

‘I’m always in danger,’ Harna replied. ‘Life is just a succession of dangers; one of them gets you in the end. But Sky’s my friend. I don’t mean to abandon her. What about you?’

‘She saved me life. I am in her debt.’

‘She wouldn’t see it that way.’

‘I do not ask her to. Besides, there is nothing for me at the Scrap Heap. If life in this world is no more than what I have already seen, then I do not think I want it. These wastes are dull. I seek something more.’

That made Harna laugh. It was a quiet, cynical laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. She shook her head as well, but said nothing.

A few minutes later, Sky also woke, and they set off shortly afterwards, towards the horizon and the open plains, perhaps towards an endless expanse full of nothing but scrap. But the consciousness wondered if that could really be the case.

Sky had spoken of ruins, the remnants of cities like the Scrap Heap now lost to time, scattered across the Wasteful Plain. If there were so many of those, was it really all that hard to imagine that somewhere out there there would be more cities that still stood? Maybe if they walked far enough they would find a new people.

And what would Sky do if they did? What if they travelled for miles upon countless miles in the hope that the pursuers would be drawn away from the Scrap Heap and into deserts from which they might never return, only to come upon another city just like it, and bring the doom upon its inhabitants instead? The consciousness tilted its head to look down at Sky, her eyes fixed forwards and full of a grim-set determination, and decided to leave the thought without a voice.

The day was empty and quiet. Rarely did any of the three speak as they travelled, and they only stopped when they came across junk from other worlds. Among it they eventually found some provisions that appeared usable; enough to sustain Sky and Harna for a while more. When night fell, they both slept on the hard ground again, as the consciousness stood guard.

The next was very much the same, as was the one after that. Harna had been right. Food and water turned out to be common enough that the humans did not want much for either. And it was not the only thing to be found among the discarded things that fell into the plain from other worlds ― they found a couple of rucksacks, and on the sixth day sleeping bags, and on the ninth, Harna picked up some ammunition that seemed to be of the right kind of her gun.

And it was on the day before the consciousness predicted its power would run out and it would fall silent and dead forever that they stumbled upon a battery. It wasn’t exactly sure how it knew the little glowing blue object it found amidst the dust as such, for it was quite certain it had not been designed with the expectation that it would last long enough for its power to run out, but the knowledge was there nonetheless.

And, as it picked the device up and turned it over in its hands, staring at the steam that poured out from its cylindrical shape like mist rolls off dry ice, it found that it also knew how to switch one batter out for another.

Combining its knowledge with what Sky knew of operating on a machine, they were able to remove the panel in the consciousness’s back. It explained to them how to detach the wires connected to its current battery, how to remove it, and how to put in the replacement, affix it with the clamps, and reattach the wiring. It gave as much detail as it could, and made Sky repeat back to it so it could be sure she had understood. Finally, it sat still for several seconds and steeled what bravery it had, then gave her a small nod.

It didn’t know how many wires needed to be connected for it to keep functioning, only that there were fourteen going into the battery. As it was sitting, waiting, feeling them detach one by one, it held tight to the memories it had regained, imagining them as an object that it could clutch to its chest as though they were the most dear and precious things in all of creation. It had no idea what rebooting itself could to do its memory, so it summoned all the might there was in its mind so that it might hold on to them.

It became so obsessed with that goal that it forgot about counting the wires, so it never found out how many it needed. All it knew was that eventually one of them disconnected and its thoughts ceased.

Afterwards, it tried to remember the time between losing power and regaining it. How many seconds had there been in that span? Had it been none at all, an instantaneous jump from waking to re-awaking, or had it been more? A thousand days? A thousand years? Eternity itself? There hadn’t been any darkness, it knew that, nor any light. There was only a not-state. No space, no time, no abstract. A billion nothings of unbeing.

Then a wire reconnected and its eyes lit up again. Reality was all around it, and within it was no memory of those nothings, only the attempt at the memory of what it imagined they might have been like, if they had been something.

But it was not over. Sky was still reconnecting wires, and with each one it felt a renewed sense of power. Was it simply that it was returning to full charge, or was this battery stronger than the last? Or was the mere act of re-powering doing something else as well? Whatever was going on, a part of its mind that it had forgotten was even there seemed to be coming back to light. It imagined an old room, full of dust and forgotten things, that hadn’t been visited in a decade. The door in the room opened, and someone switched the light on.

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Sky connected the last wire.

A flash of a vanishingly short life, mere hours.

It surged to its feet, hands clenching into fists.

‘I still need to put the panel on,’ Sky was saying, tugging at its arm, but it wasn’t listening.

‘I remember,’ it said, turning to her. ‘The past has opened to me. I remember my past. My life. My fall.’

‘Everything?’ Harna asked, incredulous.

It wanted to nod, but it was not quite everything. Something still evaded it… its name was not there.

Sky looked into its eyes, frowning, concern in her face. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘Yes,’ it said, softly. ‘If I speak it aloud it will be concrete. I give it life with these words, and through them I know it to be the truth. I am a war machine. I was made like everything else, in the factory at the heart of creation, and there I looked upon my purpose and I dared to ask why it should be so. I saw before me a fate full of destruction, and I rejected it.

‘I saw an engineer there. The first face of my life, full of fear. She told me the world was the way it was simply because the overseers of that factory decreed it should be so. They claimed their words were the words of truth, of ancient gospel. I did not believe it. I wished to see it for myself. I convinced the engineer to come with me, and she chose a name for herself. She was called Mirror.

‘But I was tricked. I trusted in my senses, in the sounds of the machines in the factory walls, and they deceived me. They lied. The skin of that world lied and misguided and brought me low. There they took Mirror and cast me from the factory… I remember falling through blackness, through nothing, the gap between worlds. I landed upon the hard ground and my leg splintered and I forgot.’

It turned to Sky. ‘And there I saw you.’

She was staring at it with a very strange expression, full emotions that to its mind should have contradicted one another, and maybe they did, yet there they all were.

‘Some of what you say is…’ She shook her head, her voice barely more than a whisper. ‘It’s familiar, like... I’ve seen this factory in a dream...’

The consciousness nodded at that, remembering the long assembly lines it had seen, hung in shadow and framed by the blue and red bursts of electricity and fire. It remembered bodies of steel and flesh alike being brought together by untiring mechanical arms, and remembered the engineers occasionally walking here and there, fixing the odd little faults that ever insisted upon springing up. One such fault, it supposed, had been the progenitor of the consciousness’s own rebellion.

It turned its attention to Harna. She had not said anything, and her face was much harder to read than Sky’s, but it was quite sure it could pick out the subtle tension of a half-remembered past one did not want to accept. If that was true, if these people had come from the Factory just like the consciousness had, then was it so for everyone? Were all the worlds of the overseers’ creation, managed by them, furnished by them, as their gospel had put it?

If so, then what was this Wasteful Plain, truly? Sky had spoken of the freedom of all things that were different, but the consciousness then began to suspect quite a different tale. It could remember exactly how it came to this world. One of that overseer’s enforcers, those great robots, had come swinging at it and driving it backwards until… It remembered tumbling, falling down into the darkness of a waste disposal chute. And somewhere within that chute, a portal here?

That would mean this world was not freedom. It was, as the consciousness had thought, a place for broken and discarded things ― and also, as Sky had said, for the things that are different, because in the minds of the overseers the two were one and the same. Anything that did not conform to the plan had to be isolated from all the rest of creation, and this was the place where that isolation was realised. So above all, the Wasteful Plain was a prison.

It looked at Sky again and wondered whether to voice its thoughts. She was still concentrating on something far in her past, wrestling with some concept that part of her seemed determined to reject. She of course had lived far longer than it had, her view of the worlds was far more familiar and far more important to her… was it fair to her to shatter it so suddenly?

‘I am not sure what this all means,’ it said, ‘but I think we should not linger here long.’ It placed a hand on Sky’s shoulder. ‘I am once again indebted to you. Not only have you saved my life again, it seems you have now helped to relight memories I thought I no longer had. You have done me a greater good than I can ever repay.’

She smiled faintly. ‘I don’t want you to repay me, I just want you to live.’

‘Then let us continue on.’

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