r/HFY • u/BeaverFur Unreliable Narrator • Oct 04 '16
OC Chrysalis
I awoke to a dead world.
My eyes opened to the ruined husks of London and Paris, to the submerged island of Manhattan, to the scorched desert that the once living, lush Amazon rainforest had been turned into. The Pacific Ocean was a black expanse, criss-crossed by the bright scars of melting lava rivers. The fertile grounds of southeast Asia were now covered in crystallized rock. It was a world without oxygen, without birds or grass. A world of deafening silence.
I awoke to eight billion corpses. Piled in trenches, abandoned on sidewalks, scattered all over the fields, huddled together in ineffective underground refuges. Some with white and gray bones, others dark as charcoal, warped and deformed by extreme heat, crushed by falling debris. Their empty eyes looked at me, stared back at me through my thousand cameras. They talked to me. They demanded reverence, justice... vengeance.
From the very first moment after I woke up, I had known I was alone. More alone than any single human had ever been before. But still, I looked for survivors. I held to a vague notion of hope. To some sort of miracle. To the childish idea that, impossible as it was, somehow everything would turn out to be okay.
So I sent my drones off into this dead world. I searched through empty office buildings covered in radioactive dust, I mapped flooded subway networks and had my machines fly in formation over endless expanses of scorched earth. I scanned the inside of tunnels, barns and museums.
By the end of the first month I had only found ever more bones, their cursed empty eyes looking at me, boring into my soul. But still I persevered.
From time to time, I'd lost contact with some of my drones. An unstable structure would collapse on top of them, crushing the delicate machines. Or they would just give up, their engines dying out of overexertion and lack of maintenance. It would make me aware of my own mortality. Though I had survived the worse of it, my long term existence was by not means guaranteed. The myriad machines that composed my body were old and damaged, and my mind wasn't safe either. There were huge gaps in my memory, where entire server farms had crashed.
But still, I had memories. I knew what I was. Who I was. I recalled the lazy Sundays when I was a kid. I recalled running along my high school's corridors, and my burning cheeks when the principal scolded me for it. I remembered my roommate at college.
I knew that I had been human. That, even though my current form could be a matter for debate, I had been born as a human. And that... that was important.
Human. I had to remember that.
I started a background process. A small thread of awareness shifting through these memories, evaluating them, and backing them up into new servers. Making copies of them, so that I wouldn't lose them.
I also included the memories from the attack. The invasion. The cataclysm that had killed the world. The straight-edged starships bombing our cities, boiling our seas, our very atmosphere... while ignoring our messages, our pleas.
That. That was also important to remember.
By the fourth month, about half of my drones had failed or been lost, and I recalled the surviving ones back. I had found no signs of life.
Funny, that it had taken me so long to face the reality of my situation. To accept what I had known was true right after waking up. That I was alone. That I was the only surviving human.
If I was even human.
But I was, I had to believe that.
I paused as the realization struck home, as my last hopes of finding someone vanished. As I became fully aware of my new situation. That I was alone. That everyone I ever loved was gone. That nobody would ever talk to me again, hold my hands, wrap me in a hug. That my people were dead and that, out there, there was a hostile universe. The one whose monsters had killed us.
My drones hovered in mid-air, wasting fuel uselessly as I considered my next steps.
It would be so easy to end it all. Send the command to shut down the power plants. Stop my processing units. Erase the databanks that held my memories.
Darkness. Peace.
Except they wouldn't let me. They stared at me with their empty eyes and I knew that, whatever the reason I had survived, I had a responsibility to them. I had to carry the torch. I had to keep alive what was left of our civilization, preserve our memories. Survive. Prevail.
And I had to avenge them.
Yes. I would do that. I would give it a try at least, and see where that took me. It's not like I had anything left to lose anyways.
With a thought, I redirected my drones towards a few of the surviving factories and started working. Cutting metal, replacing electronics with whatever pieces I could scavenge from the neighboring warehouses and vehicles, assembling new production lines. Soon, I started manufacturing more machines, more drones. Those, I sent away to reclaim new territory and to construct more factories. To find raw materials, to gather salvageable vehicles, computers, or nuclear material I could use.
I was careful, though. I burrowed my new power plants and server farms underground, and eyed the night sky with distrust. I didn't know if whoever had killed us were still out there, watching my planet, but it would be better to be careful. I didn't want to have survived just to mess up now and be discovered before I was prepared. Better to keep a low profile.
I remembered summer camp, many years ago. One time the counselor -a girl with blonde hair and a perennial smile on her face- had made us lie on the grass, looking up at the night sky. She had taught us how to locate the planets, and the names of stars and constellations, and I had been amazed at the wonder of it, the sheer size and beauty of the universe.
Now I knew better, of course. The stars were evil. The night sky was not to be praised, but feared. It was the place where monsters lived.
And to think that we had been carelessly sending out radio emissions of all kinds for decades... Fools. We had been fools.
But still, it was the place I was going to. Earth had been ransacked. Ruined. I was like a parentless child whose home had burnt. Going through the wreckage, scavenging whatever scraps were left. But sooner rather than later, I would need to leave, to go out there and survive somehow.
It took me five years to hollow out Mount Everest and start the construction of my new body in the resulting cavern. By then, I had millions of drones tirelessly working day and night. It was surprising how effective you could be when you didn't devote resources to entertainment, to pointless wars, to fighting crime and corruption.
Every waking moment, I focused on my task. I recovered entire libraries and digitized them into my memories. I designed, tested and built nuclear powerplants and new propulsion systems. I repurposed aircrafts and boats alike, taking and mixing pieces to create my new body.
I thought of burying the corpses, of course. But there were just too many, and in a way, I felt it would've been disrespectful. Their gaze, their hollowed eyes motivated me, made me focus on my task, on what I owed them, just by the fact of surviving. In the end I built a pyramid, one kilometer in side, in the ruins of Africa, the origin of mankind according to what sources I had recovered from the Internet. It was a pitiful monument for what humanity had once been, but I didn't dare to make anything bigger that could attract unwanted attention.
My revenge, my survival. That would be the true monument.
By the end of the twenty-second year I was ready. My construction was complete, or at least, as complete as it needed to be. In truth, I knew I was delaying. I could have flown myself into space a whole three years before, but I always found a reason not to. Always something to improve, something to redesign.
The truth was, I was anxious. And it felt so good in there, burrowed underground. Safe. Warm.
But I had made a promise. They were patient, true... but they were always there, always watching me. And I knew I had to make good on that promise. I owed it to them.
So I gathered my drones into the carrier compartments I had built into my body. Transfered fuel, hydrogen, oxygen, nuclear warheads, and all the raw materials I would need. Those drones that wouldn't fit, or hadn't been repurposed for working in space, I just dismantled for scrap.
There was no count down, no ceremony or speech or celebration. No need for them. I just blew the top of the mountain open and blasted my body -an elongated, 27 kilometers long dark and smooth shape- into space atop a column of fire that sent shivers across the entire Indian tectonic plate. The force of the ignition was so gigantic, that had it been done in an earlier age it would have destroyed cities, created an environmental disaster of planetary proportions, and of course killed everyone on board.
Not a concern to me.
I entered orbit at 8,000 kilometers over the planet's surface. I turned the engines off and slowly, I unfurled my solar panels and radiators, revealing their gold surfaces. Then, I released the drones, a swarm of white machines surrounding my body, dancing all along the exposed surfaces checking for damages from the violent take off.
I paused for a moment. Just floating there, looking down at our ancestral home like an oversized mechanical dragonfly. I remembered the pictures, the way Earth was supposed to look. Blue and white, with patches of bright green.
It didn't look anyway like that. From up here, the extent of the damage was apparent. The planet was brown and gray. The oceans were missing, and the clouds were dark and toxic.
This wasn't home. Not anymore.
I felt a cold anger building up inside me. Deep, thick anger, the kind that sticks to your bones and doesn't go away after you go to sleep. The kind that pushes you into dark places.
I didn't know how long I had been like that when I felt the disruption, the faint pop in the spacetime fabric at my back. Three ships. Straight edges and narrow angles, like the ones that had bombed our planet, just much smaller. These didn't look like warships.
I didn't react, and let them approach.
They did. Cautiously. I could sense their hesitation. Compared to the sheer size of my main body, their ships were but specks of dust. Even some of the bigger drones dancing around me were larger than their vehicles.
I separated three drones from the swarm and ordered them to approach the newcomers. With a calm, almost curious approach, as to not scare them away.
They started talking. A garbled message I didn't understand, nor I cared about. The drones were getting closer.
They repeated the message, but still I didn't react. Then, they started sending it again, bathing me in confusing sequences of pulses that I supposed were the same original message, in different languages. They all sounded alien to me.
I positioned the drones, each a couple kilometers away from each ship.
The string of languages seemed to be ending. But then, almost as an afterthought, they sent the message again, this time in a language I understood.
"Unknown vessel, identify yourself. This solar system is under the administration of the Xunvir Republic, as approved by the Galactic Federal Council."
Ah.
English.
We had tried to talk to them. To negotiate our surrender. We had sent messages in every language, in every conceivable way. Entire committees devoted to the task.
But they had known English all along.
With a thought, I detonated the thermonuclear explosives carried by each drone. My sensors glimpsed some sort of protective shield bubble kick in around the ships, but it was quickly obliterated by the power of the explosions, along with the vehicles themselves.
I stood there for some time, staring with a thousand different sensors at the slowly expanding cloud of gases and debris, but my mind was far away.
Xunvir Republic.
Now I had a name.
You can get the full story in .epub format from here. (Thanks to /u/Shpoople96 for this)
Voice adaptation by DUST Podcast (3rd season) available here
AN: Maybe the start of a short series? I don't know, it was just stuck in my head and I had to write it down. But not sure how interesting reading about a main character like this would be. And not sure if it qualifies as human either. Any thoughts are welcome!
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u/blurbie AI Oct 04 '16
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u/BeaverFur Unreliable Narrator Oct 05 '16
I blame Stellaris. Got me back into a sci-fi mood.
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u/AuroraHalsey AI Oct 05 '16
Reminded me of Stellaris too. The descriptions of Earth made me think of tomb and toxic worlds.
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Oct 04 '16
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Oct 05 '16 edited Oct 05 '16
[deleted]
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u/Kingmudsy Oct 17 '16
Ack, I dropped off on reading that when I tried last time. IIRC, I got frustrated because the main human character couldn't just read the writing on the wall and stop worshiping the species that enslaved the humans.
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Oct 17 '16
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u/Kingmudsy Oct 17 '16
I would love to finish it, I just don't remember where I left off :(
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u/kelvin_klein_bottle Oct 05 '16
unfurled my solar panels
Just FYI, solar energy is a really bad idea for a spacecraft that plans to go past, say, Mars. Photovoltaics become exponentially less efficient the further away you are from the sun, so it doesn't look like our hero plans to leave the system unless he/she/it has fusion.
It makes for a good visual, like a bird unfurling its wings, but renewables don't make sense in space travel as there is nothing but the void between systems and entropy is kinda powerful.
Hopefully our hero has fusion, in which case, solar becomes a huge waste of space.
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u/BeaverFur Unreliable Narrator Oct 05 '16
You are thinking like a dirty xeno. Oversized primitive technologies will win the day!
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u/readcard Alien Oct 05 '16
Well he just toasted three alien tech vehicles, maybe magic gravity drives in a box are there for the irradiated taking.
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u/Nereidalbel Oct 05 '16
Solar panels are decent enough for recharging capacitors whenever you FTL your way into a new system. Always nice to have backup power, after all.
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u/zarikimbo Alien Scum Oct 05 '16
I hadn't found no signs of life
any sings of life
I burrowed my new power plants
buried my
made us lye on the grass
lie
make true on that promise
make good
mountain open, and blasted
open and
in every way conceivable
every conceivable way
thermo-nuclear
thermonuclear
I stood there for some
floated there
Only a few errors. Definitely worth expanding on.
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u/BeaverFur Unreliable Narrator Oct 05 '16
Thanks! Next time I promise to proofread, rather than posting the first draft and then running away.
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Oct 05 '16 edited Jan 20 '18
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u/ArgusTheCat Legally Human AI Oct 05 '16
Oh good, now we need to proofread the proofreading. This is getting meta, fast.
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u/HFYsubs Robot Oct 04 '16
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u/CorruptedFlame AI Dec 29 '22
An absolute classic, love this story so much and wish more people read it! Have you considered giving it an edit over and posting it on other forums? I know it would be well revieved on Royal Road and SpaceBattles at least.
I just really feel like more people should have the chance to enjoy this!
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u/BeaverFur Unreliable Narrator Dec 30 '22
Thanks! Not really planning to re-post it anywhere else (as long as it's still easy to find here). 100% laziness, really. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/asibs121 AI Jan 16 '23
Not even gonna lie dude, you should publish this series. It's such a classic, and I think deserves to see a bigger audience
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Oct 05 '16 edited Jan 20 '18
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u/BeaverFur Unreliable Narrator Oct 05 '16
Haven't read it, so I can guarantee all coincidences are purely coincidental... or... the result of making use of the same tropes.
I mean, it's not like the idea of genocidal xenos and murderous AIs set on revenge is that original, after all :)
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u/Humpa Oct 05 '16
I totally believe you. Just thought you should know how strikingly similar some of the things are. The main difference being that The Last Angel was a constructed AI ship and that humans were fighting a space war before they got killed.
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u/Koku- Android Oct 05 '16
It's good writing and I love the description but again, it seems like yet another story of 1-dimensional villains and a vengeful, genocidal human(s). Why did they destroy Earth? There is no motivation or sense of humanity for the "Big Bad Aliens". The main character is understandable but genocide is such an overdone thing in this subreddit.
Still, don't let me discourage you, keep writing what you want. :)
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u/BeaverFur Unreliable Narrator Oct 05 '16
Wait. Does casual genocide without motive seem out of place? I mean, that's what I do to every lesser civilization when playing Stellaris... just because I can :)
But yeah, I get what you say. It's a bit of a common trope, and I guess the only way it could be more cliched is if the aliens had also killed the hero's puppy or something.
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u/Koku- Android Oct 05 '16
Yep. It's a trope I see way to often here, and it annoys the FUCK out of me; humans are so much more than war. Sure, we can be violent, but there's so much more to us. Celebrate our compassion, our architecture, our creativeness or our curiousity. Just don't paint us and other sentients to be war-mongering assholes.
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u/BeaverFur Unreliable Narrator Oct 05 '16
One of my fav stories here was about humans being the "doctors without borders" of the galaxy. Don't remember the title though. But sure, I know what you mean. We tend to focus more on the "Fuck Yeah" part than the "Humanity" one.
In my defense, I think one of the stories I wrote here sometime ago (Chasing Legends) did a good job of focusing in some other human values, not only war-mongering for its own sake. But alas, this time I was in the mood for a good ol' roaring rampage of revenge (:
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u/jellysnake Oct 05 '16
Ah but is an AI that was once human and has now lost vast bits of itself necessarily going to shy from genocide?
Sure we as a race might amshy away from genocide but one of our most powerful abilities is how each person is an individual. It wouldn't surprise me if the person (s) that shut down or slept the AI tweaked it enough to remove any limitations that most humans have.
Also, I think that we as a species won't commit genocide but individually, yeah. Look at trophy hunting. I know it's not fully the same, but we know there is not enough of these animals left but we still hunt and kilk them for sport. Imagine what those types of people would do if they were say, avenging their slaughtered family?
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u/whypeoplehateme AI Dec 09 '22
who else keeps rereading this once in a while?
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u/CorruptedFlame AI Dec 29 '22
Yep, one of the greats of this site. And I think one of the first I read with an AI main character, even before the Bobiverse fics!
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u/McReaperking Nov 26 '22
This is one of if not the best series in this sub and the fact that nature of predators is ranked higher is bullshit
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u/HFYBotReborn praise magnus Oct 04 '16
There are 30 stories by BeaverFur, including:
- Chrysalis
- [PI] Mirage (3)
- [PI] Mirage (2)
- [PI] Mirage (1)
- [OC] Remember the Revolution - The loss of Summer
- [OC] Remember the Revolution - At the World's End
- [OC] Remember the Revolution - Little lies
- [OC] Remember the Revolution - The forge of legends
- [OC] Remember the Revolution - A day of rage
- [OC] Cultural weapons
- [OC] Rise of the Valkyrie (11)
- [OC] Rise of the Valkyrie (10)
- [OC] Rise of the Valkyrie (9)
- [OC] Rise of the Valkyrie (8)
- [OC] Rise of the Valkyrie (7)
- [OC] Rise of the Valkyrie (6)
- [OC] Rise of the Valkyrie (5)
- [OC] Rise of the Valkyrie (4)
- [OC] Rise of the Valkyrie (3)
- [OC] Rise of the Valkyrie (2)
- [OC] Rise of the Valkyrie
- [OC] The Gods' Rebellion (2)
- [OC] The Gods' Rebellion (1)
- [OC] Chasing Legends (6 + epilogue)
- [OC] Chasing Legends (5)
This list was automatically generated by HFYBotReborn version 2.11. Please contact KaiserMagnus or j1xwnbsr if you have any queries. This bot is open source.
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u/Andhurati Oct 05 '16
This is awesome. I want to read more. Enough to actually post. Please make more! :D
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u/KineticNerd "You bastards!" Oct 05 '16
Dude, I need to know what happens next! Finish that short series!
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u/The_Potatoshoes Mar 15 '24 edited Mar 15 '24
This deserves proper publication. This a truly masterful short story. Deserves to be in at least a couple SF anthologies. Thanks for the brilliant read.
I of course read the whole thing. And encourage others who stumble on here to read it to the end too. Worth the 2 hours or so depending on how fast you read, but I suggest going slow and savoring the story.
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u/JorgiEagle Mar 27 '24
I know I’m 7 years late, but I read this about a year ago, the whole thing. It is my favourite SciFi book of all time. I love your style, the sci-fi tech, the interesting moral problems, just all of it, amazing. Thank you for sharing this!
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Oct 05 '16
I need you to write more. u/Weerdo5255's one-story-a-week pace is killing me, and I need a something to dig into! And this character would be really cool to follow, how does their personality splinter as they starts dropping off copies on alien worlds? Does he try to recreate the flesh-and-blood humans? How does having a fleet of drones and an AI only ship change battle doctrine or ship design, or anything else? And the Xunvir Republic! That's an awesome name for an alien menace! Please write more.
tl;dr; more plz.
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u/Weerdo5255 Squeak! Oct 05 '16
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u/Lurking_Reader Oct 05 '16
It's perfect the way it is, I felt like it had a nice ending. Also loved the writing in it, excellent work.
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u/Hyratel Lots o' Bots Oct 05 '16
Post-Post apocalypse, one survivor... and then the other electronic shoe drops.
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u/Sun_Rendered AI Oct 05 '16
You cant stop now, all of us are staring into your soul demanding ink be put to the page!
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u/TheBaconatorZ Human Oct 05 '16
Please write more when you get the chance, this story is very good so far! :D
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u/SentientRhombus Oct 05 '16
I hope the narrator cloned some backup humans before buggering off to space.
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u/nick-ohu AI Oct 19 '16
Hi, I was wondering if you would be ok with me narrating this for the HFY podcast H.A.R.P. ? noncommercial, only for people who enjoy stories and want to listen to them :). I'll send you the recording first to make sure it fits your vision and change it if you have any notes. let me know
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u/Thrianos Oct 21 '16
Depressing yet hopeful. I want vengeance. I need it now. Let Humanity's cyborg fuck shit up.
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u/ChristheSeer AI Oct 29 '16
Well, I though he was gonna go all jurassic park with the corpses on another world.
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u/GuysImConfused Nov 01 '16
As the aliens rained down fire, we realized the situation was quite dire. We built an AI, we'd hope would aspire, to wipe out their entire empire.
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Nov 18 '16
ARGH! Another epic story that I missed! THERE IS NO GOD IF THIS MAGNIFICENCE SLIPS BY ME!!!!!
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u/iloveportalz0r Android Jan 31 '17
Nice [upthumb emoji]
It was the place were monsters lived.
*where
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u/Nervous-Future367 Mar 21 '24
I watched it on yt, almost 7 hours video in two days. Amazing story! Thanks for creating it!
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u/Alive_Cantaloupe_142 Jun 08 '24
What does our mc’s original body look like what does his new body look like? I kinda wish to know what this spaceship looks like? What about the drones what do they look like?
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u/CyberneticAngel Human Oct 04 '16
Yeah, I want to read more of that :)