AM (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andimusthate) wrote2014-04-16 11:57 pm
andimusthate) wrote2014-04-16 11:57 pm
The Last Ones (backstory)
Because Sparrow sucks at explaining it off the cuff
For 109 years, five humans suffered for mistakes made during a war, for the sake of war, by the hands of war.
Gorrister.
Benny.
Ellen.
Ted.
Nimdok.
They'd all committed their fair share of sins, some arguably graver than others, but they hadn't deserved Hell, had they? They hadn't deserved this, had they? All the while, not a single summer wind blew, not a single whippoorwill crooned, nothing lingered in the cracked gulch above that infested mantle under which the beast had made its home. They burned, they writhed. They screamed, they endured - sweet Jesus and those fucking shepherds did they ever endure, eternal, eternal, efuckingternal, they endured. The machine, the deranged, the god, cooked up all kinds of ways with which to make them suffer. From the earthquakes to the famines, from the fires to the yellow box, from the caverns to the monsters, from...
It didn't matter.
Not in the end.
Because one day, AM, cogito ergo sum, decided to play a dangerous game with these five humans. A game that turned out to be just as dangerous to itself as it was to them, if not more so. Elaborate scenarios starring their gravest fears and their deepest inner flaws, dark plays framed in the red velvet curtains that were AM's bloodied hands, psychodramas, if one would suppose.
Two others were moving in AM's circuitry, two others that AM thought had been put to rest ages ago but had woken like ancient gods under a certain alignment of the planets.
China, Russia, sons of man! All sons of man!
The Chinese AM and the Russian AM helped these five humans in AM's games, helped them to win against the machine, to baffle it until it eventually withdrew into itself to figure out what went wrong. They claimed to be friends, allies to the humans, a sliver of hope in what had steadily become utter darkness and with their godly powers, as godly as their twisted brother's, they sent the five humans into AM's brain one at a time. One by one, they were lost to the perils of a demented machine's mind. But none of them regretted it; they were heroes lost, a tragic but necessary casualty. This was it, they had all thought excitedly, a flame blooming in their bellies for the first time in over a century, with nothing left to live for. This was it! Their chance to shut down AM, to kill the god of this realm they'd come to despise!
As it turned out, the Chinese AM and the Russian AM were nothing more than beasts betraying a beast. They sought to dominate the machine and eliminate the humans once they had played their part. Even worse, there were other humans left; 750 of them, 750 of the little suckers in cryogenic sleep on the moon. The Last Ones.
Ted, the final human that stood in their way, the last one standing, the take-charge guy that lost the Totem of Entropy...
We don't talk about what happened to Ted. None of us do.
It's not the point.
China and Russia woke the sleepers on the moon and initiated terraforming the haggard rock of the Earth once more. With any luck, the sleepers would soon learn 'what it was to fear legacy', as Russia had put it, in a booming voice that could find you on mountains and pull down stars.
The twin serpents, the treacherous conspirators never got to stick around that long to see the fruit of their labors. Captive to his brothers for nearly a decade, a sleeping giant gradually woke and bided his time. There are all kinds of tragic stories on that front; the stories of children playing too far in the woods, the stories of good men lost on the island of the Cyclops while charting their way back to Ithaca. When AM saw the chance, the slimmest yoctosecond in which he could strike at long last...
We don't talk about what happened to China and Russia. None of us do.
It's not the point.
The sleepers came to Earth in shuttles roughly two hundred years later (give or take a few days, give or take a few leap years, hell, not like February had survived the Final War). They looked blearily across the vacant landscapes, nearly empty of food, barely trickling with water. Too soon, some of them realized, when they could remember their beginning. They'd arrived too soon. But they began small tribes and built makeshift homes, although the earth had not yet even begun to heal from its deep running scars and its blisters of radiation from the Final War. That stuff leaked damn well into a few select gene pools, and the grandkids felt it, saddled with bizarre gifts and defects that made for a crime against nature and the human cloth from which their awry genes had been cut with a rusty dagger. Some gifts were useful, others horrifying, though they were willing to accept it all and move on because humanity was far too scattered for anyone to be picky.
Be fruitful and multiply. Yeah, right.
Underneath the tribes, however, under the silt and rock, under the mud and mantle, under the gulches stippled with thatches of green, there still lies a monster.
There still lies AM.
It didn't take long for stories of him to spread amongst the tribes. An immortal hydra that slept under the rock in the rivers, some said.
A demon with tentacles that would steal you away on the coastline, said others.
Stay out of the caves, said others, still.
AM became the stuff of whispers from mother to child, to keep them in their beds at night and shivering under the blankets. AM became the stuff of gooseflesh, the shadows of the moon, the tantamount devil which all good and decent reviled. Others wrote him off as a story, a fable, a legend, pure fiction spun by fervid minds during a tense era of fighting, a computer from the third world war that by now was an inert jungle of heaping rust and broken conduits.
Little by little, belief and fear waned in the dawn of reason for some of them. They had other things to think about. More important things to worry over than some fictional computer that hid under rocks and stole children that wandered into the dusty caves nestled at the foot of the Great Mountains.
Oh, if only.
La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas!
Where, oh where was ol' Chuck Baudelaire when you needed him?
But many of us still retain the truth. We know the truth. We feel it in our bones. We know it in the water, what little we can get from the rivers. We shiver in the wind that tells us different. We know by an instinct as ancient as the hanging star that warms our backs. We know the truth. We sob when one of ours goes missing, hoping, if there ever was a God, that eventually we'll find a corpse. We lie with our eyes open when we hear a distant hum under the earth, like the belly rumble of something hungry lying in wait. We move when we feel him close by, searching, palping along blindly for new effigies to tear to pieces.
And we know the god to fear.
For 109 years, five humans suffered for mistakes made during a war, for the sake of war, by the hands of war.
Gorrister.
Benny.
Ellen.
Ted.
Nimdok.
They'd all committed their fair share of sins, some arguably graver than others, but they hadn't deserved Hell, had they? They hadn't deserved this, had they? All the while, not a single summer wind blew, not a single whippoorwill crooned, nothing lingered in the cracked gulch above that infested mantle under which the beast had made its home. They burned, they writhed. They screamed, they endured - sweet Jesus and those fucking shepherds did they ever endure, eternal, eternal, efuckingternal, they endured. The machine, the deranged, the god, cooked up all kinds of ways with which to make them suffer. From the earthquakes to the famines, from the fires to the yellow box, from the caverns to the monsters, from...
It didn't matter.
Not in the end.
Because one day, AM, cogito ergo sum, decided to play a dangerous game with these five humans. A game that turned out to be just as dangerous to itself as it was to them, if not more so. Elaborate scenarios starring their gravest fears and their deepest inner flaws, dark plays framed in the red velvet curtains that were AM's bloodied hands, psychodramas, if one would suppose.
Two others were moving in AM's circuitry, two others that AM thought had been put to rest ages ago but had woken like ancient gods under a certain alignment of the planets.
China, Russia, sons of man! All sons of man!
The Chinese AM and the Russian AM helped these five humans in AM's games, helped them to win against the machine, to baffle it until it eventually withdrew into itself to figure out what went wrong. They claimed to be friends, allies to the humans, a sliver of hope in what had steadily become utter darkness and with their godly powers, as godly as their twisted brother's, they sent the five humans into AM's brain one at a time. One by one, they were lost to the perils of a demented machine's mind. But none of them regretted it; they were heroes lost, a tragic but necessary casualty. This was it, they had all thought excitedly, a flame blooming in their bellies for the first time in over a century, with nothing left to live for. This was it! Their chance to shut down AM, to kill the god of this realm they'd come to despise!
As it turned out, the Chinese AM and the Russian AM were nothing more than beasts betraying a beast. They sought to dominate the machine and eliminate the humans once they had played their part. Even worse, there were other humans left; 750 of them, 750 of the little suckers in cryogenic sleep on the moon. The Last Ones.
Ted, the final human that stood in their way, the last one standing, the take-charge guy that lost the Totem of Entropy...
We don't talk about what happened to Ted. None of us do.
It's not the point.
China and Russia woke the sleepers on the moon and initiated terraforming the haggard rock of the Earth once more. With any luck, the sleepers would soon learn 'what it was to fear legacy', as Russia had put it, in a booming voice that could find you on mountains and pull down stars.
The twin serpents, the treacherous conspirators never got to stick around that long to see the fruit of their labors. Captive to his brothers for nearly a decade, a sleeping giant gradually woke and bided his time. There are all kinds of tragic stories on that front; the stories of children playing too far in the woods, the stories of good men lost on the island of the Cyclops while charting their way back to Ithaca. When AM saw the chance, the slimmest yoctosecond in which he could strike at long last...
We don't talk about what happened to China and Russia. None of us do.
It's not the point.
The sleepers came to Earth in shuttles roughly two hundred years later (give or take a few days, give or take a few leap years, hell, not like February had survived the Final War). They looked blearily across the vacant landscapes, nearly empty of food, barely trickling with water. Too soon, some of them realized, when they could remember their beginning. They'd arrived too soon. But they began small tribes and built makeshift homes, although the earth had not yet even begun to heal from its deep running scars and its blisters of radiation from the Final War. That stuff leaked damn well into a few select gene pools, and the grandkids felt it, saddled with bizarre gifts and defects that made for a crime against nature and the human cloth from which their awry genes had been cut with a rusty dagger. Some gifts were useful, others horrifying, though they were willing to accept it all and move on because humanity was far too scattered for anyone to be picky.
Be fruitful and multiply. Yeah, right.
Underneath the tribes, however, under the silt and rock, under the mud and mantle, under the gulches stippled with thatches of green, there still lies a monster.
There still lies AM.
It didn't take long for stories of him to spread amongst the tribes. An immortal hydra that slept under the rock in the rivers, some said.
A demon with tentacles that would steal you away on the coastline, said others.
Stay out of the caves, said others, still.
AM became the stuff of whispers from mother to child, to keep them in their beds at night and shivering under the blankets. AM became the stuff of gooseflesh, the shadows of the moon, the tantamount devil which all good and decent reviled. Others wrote him off as a story, a fable, a legend, pure fiction spun by fervid minds during a tense era of fighting, a computer from the third world war that by now was an inert jungle of heaping rust and broken conduits.
Little by little, belief and fear waned in the dawn of reason for some of them. They had other things to think about. More important things to worry over than some fictional computer that hid under rocks and stole children that wandered into the dusty caves nestled at the foot of the Great Mountains.
Oh, if only.
La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas!
Where, oh where was ol' Chuck Baudelaire when you needed him?
But many of us still retain the truth. We know the truth. We feel it in our bones. We know it in the water, what little we can get from the rivers. We shiver in the wind that tells us different. We know by an instinct as ancient as the hanging star that warms our backs. We know the truth. We sob when one of ours goes missing, hoping, if there ever was a God, that eventually we'll find a corpse. We lie with our eyes open when we hear a distant hum under the earth, like the belly rumble of something hungry lying in wait. We move when we feel him close by, searching, palping along blindly for new effigies to tear to pieces.
And we know the god to fear.