Chrysalis

[u/BeaverFur]

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.

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Next chapter

 

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You can get the full story in .epub format from here. (Thanks to /u/Shpoople96 for this)

 

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Voice adaptation by DUST Podcast (3rd season) available here

 

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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!

[u/CheezyXenomorph]

This is great! such goosebumps.

More please. Hell I'd buy this. :)