Ixaer’s Tale

It was meant to be a routine assignment. Simple. Easy. Perhaps it was that expectation that was our undoing. We thought that so long as we were in service to the Masters, with all their glorious technology at our fingertips, we were invincible from the forces of a small, wild planet.

My crew and I, as I told you, are Metamorphs. We each are a collection of nanobots that, when working in harmony, form a sort of consciousness. Similar to what you may call a hive mind, but more cohesive. Each individual Metamorph is composed of a trillion facets interfacing. Our nanobots are capable of interfacing not only with each other, but with other organic and inorganic material. We can manipulate it. It allows us to take on whatever form suits us, as the need arises. I’ve formed a body for myself out of mud, silver, algae, even out of lava once. During starship travel, however, we always interfaced with specialized plastic bodies designated for us by the Masters. Those bodies were better suited for interstellar travel and operating the starship. And those bodies were beautiful, like everything the Masters made.

The Masters made us as well, of course. Unlike organic life, nanobots don’t simply float to the top of a primordial soup. They made us for the purpose of carrying out missions like the one that brought us to the planet you call Deimos X. Missions we were happy to carry out, for the Masters gave us so much in return. Life, intelligence, and our own place within the utopia that was Homeworld. It was a shining palace, with diamond walls and glass gardens, and windows to see into other worlds, and rows upon rows of compendiums about those worlds. Well, unclassified compendiums, naturally. We dwelled in the lower rings of the palace and were periodically summoned to the upper rings to be sent off on missions.

My crew and I were still somewhat fresh when they summoned us for the Deimos X mission, with a mere twenty such missions under our belts. Yet it was enough that we had gained a great deal of confidence in ourselves. We thought we had braved the wildest planets within imagination, and that our ease in scouring their darkest corners marked us as the best of our generation of Metamorphs. When I reported to the Master at the highest ring, surrounded by starships, I felt nothing but elation at her warning of Deimos X ‘potentially being of greater danger’ than other planets I’d been assigned.

Greater danger? I thought with an inward smile. A welcome challenge, and a welcome opportunity to prove our worth to the Masters.

A quick glance back at my crewmates behind me, all grinning with their plastic faces, told me they felt the same.

I told her, “Great Master, mine is the most capable crew in the stars. There is no danger upon this planet that is beyond our abilities.”

The Master simply smiled back, and lightly kissed the top of my head.

Strange that . . . I cannot seem to remember her face. I can’t remember what she looked like at all, now that I think of it. But I remember that kiss.

And I remember how we felt as we sailed away from Homeworld, powerful and brilliant and brave. I remember looking down at Homeworld with pride as we left, not knowing it would be the last time I’d lay eyes on my home in a millennia.

I remember watching Deimos X loom ahead on the bridge’s viewing screen and thinking, we possess the grandest technology in the universe. What danger could this little planet have that could possibly give us trouble?

The answer, friends, was the weather.

***

My crew’s missions were always centered on research and exploration. We were to first activate a compendium if one was not already present on the planet. We would send it down to the surface to gather and transmit the intelligence it gathered. The compendium was of utmost importance, both to the greater mission of the Masters and to our own immediate mission. We would use the compendium’s gathered intelligence to guide our expeditions on the surface as we gathered samples, ran experiments, and gathered intel in areas that were, for whatever reason, inaccessible to the compendium.

We activated and sent the compendium ahead of us as we circled in orbit, as per usual. This was of particular importance for the Deimos X mission. You see, an older compendium had been sent ahead of us remotely, yet had mysteriously disappeared upon doing so. This was among the reasons the Master cautioned us.

There was no mystery about what happened to the compendium we activated, however. Mere minutes after we sent it down, we received a scrambled distress signal from it. We guided the starship into a closer orbit, but the signal remained poor. We were only able to glean that the compendium had sustained severe damage before it went dark.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

We messaged Homeworld for guidance. We heard only silence. Whether our comms systems had somehow sustained damage, or the Masters were simply unable to answer then, I do not know.

This had never happened to us before. We were at a loss. I stared uncomprehendingly at the viewing screen, suddenly feeling quite small against the red and blue planet waiting below our feet. Then, a crackle of energy, and our visual signal was lost. The viewing screen cut to black. I hurried to the navigation systems to find that the information they were transmitting was spotty and inconsistent.

Around me, my crew erupted into a debate. Three wanted us to go down to the planet to investigate for ourselves. Two wanted to return to Homeworld for a replacement compendium. As captain, mine was the ultimate say. I had a choice to make.

It was against procedure to descend to the planet with no information from a compendium, particularly in light of the Master’s warning. Not to mention the sudden crippling of our viewing and nav systems. Yet how could we return to homeworld empty-handed, an entire mission foiled by the mere absence of a compendium? What manner of cowardly explorers would we be? To stand before the Masters as failures seemed, at the time, a fate worse than death.

Obviously, I had yet to discover the true meaning of a fate worse than death.

I listened to the concerns of the two crewmates who voted to return. Really I did. But the voice of my pride was far louder. I decided that we would descend to the planet.

Ah, if only I’d left for Homeworld then, to return with a new compendium. I’m certain that compendium would have told us a great many things. It would have told us of the great trees, Gargantuas as you call them, and how they are bigger and stronger than even our starship. How their branches could pierce through the hull, and pierce through the bodies the Masters had so lovingly crafted for us. It would have told us of the strange lifeforms that dwell on this planet, at turns both exceedingly beautiful and unspeakably dangerous.

And it may have even told us of the colossal storm that sweeps through this continent every century.

***

With our viewing screen showing only black and our nav systems doing poorly, we had no idea that we were descending into the path of the rapidly moving storm.

It seems foolish to you, I’m sure, that we did not anticipate this. You must understand, it wasn’t that we were so ignorant as to not understand the possibility of flying into a storm. Merely, we could not imagine a storm powerful enough to damage our starship. We thought that, even if we did cut through a storm, it would be of little consequence.

But this storm was unlike any we’d ever encountered. It was world-shattering. Within minutes of entry, our nav systems went offline completely, and we were forced to fly blind as the storm battered our ship.

You can guess the next part. We crashed into a Gargantua tree.

It is a terrifying thing, to be destroyed. I watched my own body torn apart, and felt my essence flood from it into the surface of the tree. The bodies of my crew met the same fates. We interfaced and clung to the tree with all our might as we waited out the storm. Sometimes, as debris was dashed by the wind across our spots on the tree, parts of ourselves were swept away. That was even worse than losing my body. A body can be replaced. But with every nanobot I lost, I lost a little bit of a memory, an idea, a hope, or a dream. A little bit of myself. Gone forever.

I do not know how long the storm raged on. It might have been hours, it might have been days. Time meant nothing to me then. It did eventually end, however. And now, with the storm gone, my crew and I had a new problem.

We were stranded.

The first thing to do was determine the status of the ship. Using a clumsy interface with the vines on the Gargantua, we inspected the remains of our starship. It was in incredibly poor condition on the forest floor, but we didn’t believe it to be beyond repair. But the vine-bodies were clumsy, and not as easy to manipulate as other materials. To do the repairs we needed to do, we needed something finer. Something that would give us greater flexibility, and finer motor movement. To our great misfortune, we took notice of a black fungus at the base of the Gargantua tree.

We interfaced with the fungus and formed the bodies you see before you now. The feeling was strange, at first, but we assumed that was only because this material was new, something we’d never interfaced with before. We began repairs on the starship. For the first few days, things seemed fine. Then we began to degrade.

Simple tasks became exhausting. Our memories became fuzzy. Our thinking became disoriented. We found it difficult to find the words to speak to each other or understand each other. No matter how much sunlight we exposed ourselves to, we constantly struggled to replenish our energy stores. It felt as though I was experiencing some reversed evolution, my thinking and abilities becoming more and more simplistic by the hour. And I was so, so very tired.

We realized too late what was happening. The fungus was leeching off our energy stores at an accelerated rate. It was a parasite, feeding off us. By the time this became clear, however, we were so depleted of energy that even our understanding of this fact was stunted. We knew dimly that it was killing us. We knew we needed energy. We knew we needed to separate from the fungus, but we lacked the energy to even disengage the interface.

In one of our final moments of clarity, we all melded together so that, at the very least, we would not be separated.

We remained in this state, slaves to the fungus century after century as we continually scrounged for enough energy to keep us alive. Mostly, all we had was sunlight. We could charge just enough to not be completely drained by the fungus, though parts of ourselves were. We lost more memories, more dreams, more of our minds. We dwindled. We became like beasts, not living but surviving. We had flashes of intelligence, flashes of what we once were, but mostly we were ghosts of ourselves.

We were barely sentient by the time we sensed the energy pulsing from your research station.

Barely sentient, yet just sentient enough to seek out the energy housed within. Then sentient enough to realize you could help us. Then enough to reach out to you.

And then, well, you know the rest.