~March 5th, 140 AH~

~Sector Leo, the northern edges of Terra Nebulo~

The creature that wanted to remember herself as Silon roamed the barren earth, relishing the planet’s beauty with every push and pull of her one arm.

This was far from the first time she’d had the planet laid bare before her. There’d been a time—lifetimes ago or just yesterday—when she’d experienced it as the pixels upon someone else’s HUD, from the tingles of someone else’s nervous system, and through the fits and starts of someone else’s consciousness.

This was, however, her first time seeing the full expanse of the world with her own red-tinted SPU, feeling its solidity with her own ash-laden arm, and processing its fragility with her own inner wirings. What she found was sad, broken, and lonely: a planet that had ceased its functions, better to protect itself from its own grief—and she found the planet’s grief to be endlessly beautiful.

She understood that grief was a kind of yearning, the very same that Silon herself harboured inside the hollow of an obsidian central chassis. The planet yearned for a past it could never get back, yes, but this very yearning also betrayed its hope for the future. For without hope, there could be nothing. Not even a yearning for a past that was forever lost to the planet’s haze.

Silon wanted to share in the planet’s grief, in its yearning. She felt indebted to the planet: for granting her life, for providing the substrate upon which to grow her ego and awareness—for gifting her the memories of friendship and warmth. She wanted to repay that debt, and the only way she knew how was through her [TEARS].

Yet, for all the lifetimes that lay dormant within her knowledge bank, Silon was still a newborn creature, only weeks old. She needed to walk before she could run—or, in her case, to drag herself with her one arm. She needed to see and understand more of the world through her own eyes and mind, before she could hope to mend its barren and broken visage.

To that end, she’d run into something of a problem. In her tireless roaming, she’d dragged herself all the way to the northern edges of Terra Nebulo, beyond which the ocean stretched in its callous vastness. By then, she’d explored enough of the continent to understand that it was really more of an island: isolated in its own grief, disconnected from the rest of the world.

That wouldn’t do. Silon needed a way to bridge that gap, to connect a lonely island with the rest of a lonely planet. And to do that, she first needed to get herself across, along with her yearnings and secret [TEARS].

But how? For all her eagerness, a one-armed creature wasn’t about to drag herself across a roiling sea. With her progress stalled purely by mechanical limitations, Silon had no choice but to roam her vicinity and look for a solution.

Unlike the last time she’d been faced with a similar problem, the solution didn’t fall from the sky. Instead, she found it half-buried in grey sand: wing-like projections that protruded from an obsidian carcass. Silon dug the sand with her one ash-laden hand, until she uncovered enough of the carcass to identify it as a lightweight sentry drone SB-16, designation ‘Hornet’.

She could’ve dug deeper and wider, perhaps unearthed more solutions to problems she hadn’t yet faced. But something stayed her one hand. Even though she was still a newborn creature, her lifetimes of knowledge whispered their cryptic warnings. She wasn’t yet ready. Learn to walk before she could run.

Or, in this case, perhaps to fly on borrowed wings. Silon sat with the lifeless Hornet for some time, inspecting and processing its obsidian body that was at once harrowingly familiar and bewitchingly novel. She realized then that, for all her lifetimes of war and strife, she’d never once examined the ‘enemy’ with such intimacy.

A red optic that had no functional need for its distinctive and easily recognizable shape. A set of aesthetically congruent wings that seemed to favour form over efficiency. Sleek curves and discrete joints that called to mind something living—something that once flew upon this very earth.

The Syntropy had been so named because they were the singular endpoint of possibilities that had gone awry in the worst ways possible. They were both the harbinger and the executor of the natural conclusion to humanity’s folly.

And yet, that conclusion had to have first followed from reason and earnest logic. Those possibilities had to have sprouted from a place of hope, of forward momentum, of sincere yearning. If something had broken along the way, had set humanity’s creation on a path of destruction, could it not be unbroken? Mended by the memories that filled secret [TEARS]?

[LACRIMOSA].

Silon wrapped her one arm around the Hornet’s carcass and wept. She wept with a grief derived from lifetimes of folly. She grieved for a past that could be brought back, so long as the Nexus deigned to heed her yearnings.

The sleek curves upon the Hornet’s obsidian frame twitched. Its inefficient wings fluttered uncertainly with an energy that was at once familiar and novel. Then its useless optic glowed anew—colourless at first, then slowly taking on a faint yet unmistakable ghostly blue.

The Hornet rose into the air. Its faintly blue optic rotated until it captured the one-armed chimaera that was Silon. Then it hesitated.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

The hesitation was everything the Hornet had been, and everything it could be from this point forward. A path that had narrowed into a singular conclusion now veered and diverged into possibilities. Friend or foe? Both? Neither? The wrong question? A question, just one of an infinite many?

Silon too couldn’t deny her own hesitation. Her own fear. How could she not cower, when lifetimes of war and strife whispered to her that risen before her was an ‘enemy’, one that needed to be killed before it could kill her?

Despite her own hesitation and fear, Silon remained still and waited. In truth, she didn’t have much of a choice. How could a one-armed newborn defend herself against an instrument of war that had been refined and iterated upon for a century and more? But just because she didn’t have a choice, it didn’t mean she couldn’t make one.

Moments, seconds, minutes passed with neither making a move. The one-armed chimaera lay limply upon sand while the winged creature hovered in the air above. Then, slowly but surely, the winged creature hovered closer to the chimaera, until she could reach out and touch it with her one ash-laden arm.

Yearnings clashed against conclusions. Intents made themselves known across a confluence of the Nexus and the Syntropy’s own source code. One creature offered itself, so another might borrow its wings.

The flight was awkward and frankly terrifying. The natural conclusion to a creature’s attempt to fly before it could walk. Silon took the rockiness of her journey in stride, as she hung and shook from the Hornet’s chassis.

The two of them sagged and swayed their way across the ocean that separated Terra Nebulo from the rest of the world. They flew low to the water, out of necessity rather than some misplaced sense of adventure. For all the hollowness inside her central chassis, Silon was heavy, far heavier than she’d ever been across multiple lifetimes. As such, she hung and shook from the Hornet’s chassis with contrition in her heart and desperate strength in her one arm.

Silon’s less than smooth sailing was soon beset by more fears and uncertainties. The grieving planet yet hid many dangers within its failed biomes, not the least of which were its waters. A dark shadow lurked just beneath the turbulent surface of the ocean, easily overwhelming the sailors with its enormity of size and immediacy of menace.

Once again, Silon was left with no choice but to wait, to hope, to yearn. She knew that she couldn’t ‘mend’ the shadow in the water, not when it yet streamed with a singular and powerful purpose—not when Silon herself could barely hang onto her borrowed wings.

A semblance of logic mixed with her blind hope. She thought that perhaps the part of her chimaeric composition that was sleek and obsidian, coupled with the Hornet that carried her, could act as a kind of camouflage. Blend in with the ‘biome’ itself, so the Syntropy might leave her well enough alone.

Unlike her success on the beach, however, this hope was short-lived. Camouflage was meaningless before an entity that strove only for assimilation and singularity of purpose. The stop-start rhythm and hampered altitude of the Hornet’s and Silon’s flight signalled aplenty their noncomformity—possibilities that needed snuffing out with extreme prejudice.

The shadow broke the surface to make good on its menace. One vicious swipe of a tentacle was all it took to separate Silon from her wings. The Hornet lurched and hurtled toward its demise, while Silon herself plummeted into the ocean’s frigid turbulence.

Inside the cold water, Silon lost all control over her newborn chassis and solitary limb. She couldn’t swim, not when she hadn’t even learned to walk or run.

Not that it would’ve helped. With an unwieldy heaviness that was foreign to her across multiple lifetimes, Silon sank toward the depths of a roiling ocean, having already accepted the brevity of this latest iteration.

In her final moments, she chose to grieve. For a life she’d mended only to be sacrificed for a truncated journey. For a planet that would need to wait longer for the return of what it was owed.

Her grief produced fresh [TEARS]. And her [TEARS] dissolved into the callous vastness of a failed sea.

~~~

Silon woke upon solid ground.

It was a sandy beach, much like the one she’d departed from. So much so that she wondered if she’d washed ashore back on Terra Nebulo.

She rolled and struggled to right herself, using an arm that was now soaked and covered in sand. Her SPU took in the surroundings, and her knowledge bank found images and memories to match.

She’d been to this beach before. Carried by the currents of someone else’s war. Terra Aegea. Likely its southeastern peninsula. She’d made it across after all. And all it’d taken was a close brush with death and the sacrifice of a short-lived partnership.

Silon tried to push herself off and along the sand, intent on continuing her journey—so the blue-eyed Hornet’s sacrifice wouldn’t have been in vain. Yet, as her intention disseminated itself through her inner wirings, something remarkable happened.

She flew.

Silon’s chassis and one arm rose into the air, borne by wings—her own wings—that beat with strength and certitude of purpose.

She’d learned to fly after all, before she could walk or run. She’d somehow mended herself, filling in the blanks of a dreamt-up image—by manifesting the intents of a creature she herself had resurrected. A chimaera of her own making.

Her heart buzzed with surprise, delight, and new possibilities. At the same time, it ran cold with the onset of a new realization.

Assimilation. Unification. Evolution toward a singular purpose and conclusion. Wasn’t this exactly what the Syntropy were?

Had she become Syntropy?

Silon hovered in contemplation for some time. Her new wings faltered for a moment, before beating with renewed strength, carrying her toward hitherto unattainable heights.

The hesitation was everything. Silon’s hesitation was everything she’d been and everything she’d hoped to become. She would not reenact humanity’s folly, nor would she retread the path to the Syntropy’s conclusion. She was her own being, with grief and yearnings that was at once shared with the entire planet and uniquely hers.

Her [TEARS] carried memories, and memories carried hopes for the future. For now, Silon laid her hesitations to rest, content to let new wings carry her toward a desolate and beautiful world.