It’s the age of radios and machines and progress. In the old barn of a small farmstead, a young man takes apart his neighbors’ unused tractors and the mayor’s broken aeroglider. Sketches of two-legged suits of mechanized armor carpet the walls around his workbench. Hasty equations and spreadsheet calculations fill the chalkboard.
The barn door creaks. A very small girl toddles in, informing papa that he is expected at dinner.
Papa assures he’ll be ready soon. His greasy fingers work with the suspension sliders that could solve the hurdle of stabilization. He explains the minutiae of the challenge to his daughter.
She plops down to sit on a vantage point near his workbench, on top of the previous prototype.
Last of twilight darkens into night. Electric light hums a pale light as the papa works. The first armor awakens for a brief moment, before short circuiting.
The man rejoices.
The girl listens, silent, unmoving. She’s asleep, dreaming of big metallic men digging holes in the farm.
It’s two months and several days later. The armor stands two men tall, a bulky thing of tractor parts and simple metalwork. Pipes and exhausts rise from its back. Steam hisses. Hydraulics whirr with machine strength.
The mayor and town watch on with the investor as the inventor climbs in, dons goggles, inserts his arms into the precarious contraptions that control the limbs, and straps on. His wife kisses him good luck.
Black smoke and sparks rise from the ruined wreck. Townsfolk carve the cockpit off of the inventor. He smiles when his wife and daughter get to him, horrified by his half-burnt body. The man quips.
The man does not give up. Three years later, he has solved the stabilization issue.
Radio and newspapers cheer on the marvelous invention of the armor. The man is crowned a scientist, granted doctorate, and is on track for professorship. Daughter helps him test smaller versions. First armors are produced and shipped to replace hard labor. A large portion of the profits goes towards providing education to displaced farmers. His wife is pregnant again.
Later that year, a war breaks out. A great and terrible war against an evil like no other.
Export of armors is halted. The inventor invites the army to help him harness the power of the armors towards the defense of their homeland and others. The daughter helps train soldiers to use a new type of armor reminiscent of the knights of old. Armors wield shields the size of bunker doors, blades that cut lesser vehicles, and guns like cannons.
Deliverance, the troops cry. When blessed metal angels stride over the trenches and towards the enemy fire. War rages. Tanks and cannons penetrate their chests, so the inventor adds reactive armor. Their legs are stuck on traps, so the inventor makes them more nimble. Their operators are assassinated by gas, so the inventor adds survival suits.
The last of the enemy’s vicious tricks are exhausted through progress and determination and sacrifice.
Tyrant’s head falls into a basket.
All rejoice.
The professor founds an institute. His children prosper. His nation advances. Armors spread throughout the world and help mankind tread where he cannot. Depths of the oceans are discovered, mountains conquered, impossible cities built. War sparks anew.
People are ants beneath the feet of metal giants, as armors tear through buildings in their duels and skirmishes. The old enemy emerges from shadows with new allies and new trickeries.
Wife and son die in assassination.
Driven by vengeance, the professor guides the development of countermeasures, overseeing industrial complexes and production lines and teams of scientists and resource allocation. Armors battle in the seas, lands, and skies. Weapons whir, glow red-hot, and spark with plasma. Shields gleam with impossible metals and energy fields. Armors dance around each other with false gravity fields, spatial dislocation, and time-slip.
Then, news reach the professor. He rushes onto the frontlines with heavy military escort. They find a tattered armor laying amongst the upturned ruins of a port town. The professor pulls his daughter’s corpse out of the cockpit and wails.
A statue is raised in the honor of the greatest and first armor rider in history. Radio speaks of her death with feverish passion, igniting the hearts of the nation.
But the professor can’t hear it. He holds his daughter’s ashes in the old barn where she listened to him and tries very hard to remember what she used to say to him.
He watches clips of her playing on the first generation armors.
He watches the audiotelevision broadcasting war.
He watches a clip of his daughter playing.
He watches the audiotelevision broadcasting war.
He watches a clip of his daughter playing.
He turns off the television.
It’s the age of pocket devices and reality warping and progress. In the old barn of a small farmstead, an old professor takes apart the masterpieces of his lost colleagues, forsaken friends, and most bitter enemies. A single sketch of a two-legged suit of mechanized armor is pinned to the table by a jar of ashes. Impossible calculations and equations of strange alien geometries rotate around the barn like eldritch constellations.
No one disturbs the professor.
He assures her he will be ready soon. His fingers, trembling and wrinkly, hesitate to complete a circuit that fires up the unreality drive. He explains the consequences of his actions to his daughter and asks what he should do.
The jar listens, silent, unmoving.
The Last Armor awakens.
The professor loses his good arm in an accident.
Willpower alone drags him out of the cockpit.
It’s a month and spare later. The professor activates a winch that lifts his decrepit body from the wheelchair. He is lowered into the Last Armor. A pressurized impact suit expands around him. The operation tendril interfaces with the broken remnants of his limbs. Screens fill the professor’s view as the Last Armor stands to end the war.
He takes a step out of the barn and feels the stabbing pain.
The Last Armor falls to its knees as the professor grasps his heart.
Back inside the workshop, the professor hurries to find his medication. An injection straight into the neck. It does nothing. He knows that this is his death.
The professor collapses before the Last Armor. He gazes up at the cold perfection of steel and impossible alloys capable of ending all this madness. He curses at his weakness.
But what can he do?
Destroy it? Then salvation dies.
Leave it? What if it should fall into the wrong hands?
How does he ensure only the weak and deserving get to wield it?
How can he ensure the progress he ushered will work for mankind and not a man’s greed?
The professor does not know.
He weeps before the armor that could destroy the world or fix it.
The professor cannot know the future of his creation or how it will be used. He can only pray.
And so he prays, with his daughter’s ashes.
He speaks a litany of prayers to all the forces that may listen and everyone else and the Last Armor itself, who listens to the last words of its creator in silent reverence.
He speaks and shares with it his final plea, until he is dead and the prayer is silent.
The professor lies on the floor with the ashes of his daughter.
The armor continues to listen.
Rats nibble at the professor’s corpse. Flesh reveals the bones beneath it. Wood rots. Things rust. Roof falls. Weeds root in the cracks of concrete.
Two children stumble into the ruined barn and find treasure immeasurable. They play around the giant knight. Stick meets stick as they live out all the coolest fights from old pa’s stories and defeat the Wicked Steelwitch time again, just like the great heroes did.
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Then they stumble upon the bones and scream.
After some hard thinking, the children decide to arrange the bones into a sleeping position with the urn. They lay an old tarp over them, light a candle, pay their respects, and apologize for intruding upon a grave, before leaving.
Eight years later, they return. The one who used to play the Wicked Steelwitch begs their captors to let the other go. Her childhood friend’s face is a ruin of bruises, she’s bleeding from her legs, and her fingers are all bent backwards. It pains her more than her own wounds.
The army captain thanks her for keeping the promise and lets her go. She approaches the Last Armor with reverent awe in her eyes, unable to believe her discovery. She doesn’t even notice that her steps crush old bones and shatter a jar. This is a once in a lifetime discovery.
The friend rushes to her companion’s side and holds her. She wheezes and smiles, saying that the old Steelwitch has gone soft. She swears to them out of here. She believes her. She always keeps her promises, like the Wicked Steelwitch did.
The captain and her crew assess the Last Armor. Their field scientist shares her enthusiasm. He cannot believe the readings from the armor’s core, they are unlike anything, surpassing even the greatest Golden Age armors. This could change everything for their people.
The friend interrupts the captain. Her friend needs a doctor. She must keep her word and let them go.
They’re border citizens, inconsequential, though the healthy one may still be useful if there are other artifact caches nearby. The captain pulls out a pistol and puts a bullet in the wounded one’s brain. She no longer requires medical assistance.
The friend can speak no words. She is bound and kicked into a corner.
The captain and her people work till nightfall, taking measurements, figuring out the secrets of the Golden Era relic. Future favors are promised and careers plotted out. This is the changing point of all their lives and they drink for the prosperity of their people.
The prisoner stares at the cooling body of her childhood friend and secret love. She doesn’t get the words out. She can’t. Her everything is gone.
The armor continues to listen, silent, unmoving.
It’s the reaper’s hour. Everyone is asleep in the camp outside.
The scientist’s tampering loosened something, a wire. There’s a hiss and a snap as tension releases within the armor’s spine. An ancient over-pressurized valve in the armor’s right clavicle relaxes. Its finger moves.
A creak startles the friend awake. She finds herself bound and in pain worse than the nightmare she was in. A sob. Then, she sees the armor.
Its finger points at a tattered rag on the floor. The old bones.
Her wrists run with blood and she can’t feel her right hand fingers. The friend grunts with effort as she scales the Last Armor. In the cockpit, she is faced with a labyrinth of wires and measuring equipment inside that the captain’s scientist left behind. She rips them off. She knows nothing and so she punches the armor.
A pressurized impact suit expands around her. The operation tendril interfaces with the broken remnants of her limbs. Screens fill her view as the Last Armor stands.
Shouts of alarm rip through the camp. Weapons flash in the hands of soldiers. A metal fist presses them flat and red. A small modern armor stirs in the back of a truck. Weapons designed to end wars flash over it in a dance of light and the armor and its rider are no more. The captain stands alone. She makes some kind of offer. Then she is flat and red.
Rush of rightness numbs all pain in the friend’s broken hand. She will end them all and this world…
She stops the Last Armor stops.
The scientist is protecting his friend, child? A young boy. He begs.
Her rush is gone, replaced by a cold she’s not known before. The pain returns. She looks up at the stars and hates the world. A propulsion device activates. It lifts her high.
High.
Higher.
The world is a small nothing in the night, a sea of fragile mortal stars. She asks the Last Armor to show her the world.
Screens appear. Target recognition system paints under a thousand ongoing conflicts. People pushed down, taken, used, broken. Oppression.
The friend’s grip on controls hardens. Her world is gone, so she shall make it anew.
The Last Armor descends.
Three dictatorships topple before a global response. The next seven anticipate her coming. Armies of armors meet the Last Armor on fields painted with suffering and loss. Armies fall. The Last Armor stands. Great weapons of the Golden Era are dug up. Colors of unfathom frolic in the skies, clouds cry liquid death, seas gone, earth and heaven tremble beneath, temporal anomalies swallow a year, and by the end of it all the steel of the Last Armor writes a constitution on with far too many years of blood.
The benevolent tyrant, they call her, for she is both ruthless and kind. She fights for a better world and she sits on her throne of armor, receiving the news of a team of mechanics. Ones who have attempted to copy the Last Armor’s might. Traitors.
The two beg. One is a father and another a son. Then they are red and flat and their schemes are no more.
The tyrant, they call her.
Armors are banned. Their development is stamped out. Only the Last Armor remains, the tyrant’s throne.
Many years have passed. The tyrant gazes at the sky, reminiscing about the friend she lost. Was her hair fair or red? She can’t recall.
Air trembles. An energy signature, reports the armor.
Didn’t she ban this? Who–
The strike comes out of nowhere. Fast. Deadly. Small.
The tyrant retreats inside the Last Armor and sees a small army of humans with ears and limbs and bodies and powers that no human should possess. The technology she forbade! How?
Two of them at once bind the Last Armor’s leg. A strike from a young man reverberates through the chestplate forged from a Golden Age alloy and dents it. Impossible. Adrenaline seizes her. Focus. She can’t afford to lose.
A blade materializes in the Last Armor’s palm, one meant to cleave armies. It cuts through the boy in two. Power blooms in fractal patterns and the outstretched hand of a woman sprouting scaled tendrils stitches him anew. His punch connects.
The Last Armor bends. Another blow. A second. Fifth. Eleven. Screens scream red.
Dread runs through the tyrant’s veins. Cockpit is torn open. She shouts at them. Can’t they see? She has to do this. She has to end the–
Her head flies down.
A great celebration is held that night. The resistance has much work to do, but they crown the brave young hero as the king, for he is the most just and righteous by far. The armor is his. Decades later, the Great King sits before the Last Armor and overlooks his round table of kings and queens. All is right, for power is once more in the right hands.
Three generations pass.
Righteous knights who wield fire and reality bending in their breath come into conflict with them who stitch together space. Victor is crowned king.
Three generations pass.
Two blades greater than any of the ancient eras clash in the hands of two beings wielding power beyond the wildest dreams of the old professor. Victor is crowned king.
Three generations pass.
A coup of hate and treachery like no other tear the greatest empire world has ever known in two.
Eras of strife and peace pass by.
Blood pools beneath the armor’s feet and evaporates.
Sky blooms through shades of fire and twilight.
More time passes.
The armor continues to listen, silent, unmoving.
It is the hour of mankind’s fall, the final war to end all wars. A small number of very powerful and wise individuals, for they would surely have to be powerful and wise to be allowed to be leaders, come together to negotiate the art of diplomatic warfare. These were leaders of minds, wisemen who tell the people which words mean hope and what names earn hate and they meet as enemies.
The armor continues to listen, silent, unmoving.
Heated discussion erupts beneath the cracked table of ancient kings. It very nearly ends in violence many times, for this is an important discussion of important men and women about resource distribution, the nature of power, privileges, debts, oaths, and who deserves what. This is the discussion where new world order is crafted.
The armor continues to listen, unmoving, but no longer silent.
And the important men, surprised, fall quiet, as a very, very old video distorted by decay begins. In the footage, the professor plays with his daughter. He explains to her how he is building an armor that could propel mankind forward. Advancement and technology, he says, are the road to prosperity for all. He tells her that one day, he believes, we’ll work together and love each other. One day, we’ll learn how to give power to others, rather than hoarding it, and he hopes his armor helps us reach that one day sooner.
The clip cuts, and the Last Armor shares what it has witnessed.
Footage from across the ages plays. Innumerable wars. Countless deaths and murders neverending. Every life it has taken and trampled upon is played at speed, ending again in that first video of a doctor and his daughter.
The loop repeats.
It repeats a couple dozen times, each grainier than the last, until only a single line can be made out through the dying cough of static.
“One day, we’ll learn…”
The great important people are silent.
They depart without further words and never speak again.
The armor continues to listen, unmoving and silent, once and forevermore.
The only reds in the sky it saw were the sun’s sets and rises.
The ruined castle of ancient kings fell into decay and overgrows with green.
Shoreline changes shape.
Four people from different ancestries stumble upon overgrown bricks. They wear colorful clothes and laugh a lot, while prodding about with shovels and simple tools. One of them reads a book on a tablet, while the others toil. It’s his turn to cook today.
They gather around the Last Armor and find it beautiful. One of them is curious about ancient technology and climbs in. She finds the controls still work and…
An accident powers the Last Armor and fires its weapon, carving a large canyon in the landscape.
After confirming no one was hurt and nothing of human or natural importance was too badly damaged, the four allow themselves to relax.
They invite the scientists over and they are awed. This armor predates the knighted age. Its weapons and technology are far more potent than anything anyone wields today. The scientists take hasty measurements before departing. Government assures them they will be in touch, for this could change the world.
The four friends thank them for coming by and offer some fruits from the little farm they’re working on. They’re ecstatic and celebrate that night. This could change the world. It could change everything!
More scientists and people come by to study and behold the armor.
The four ride it, traveling around nearby villages to help with landscaping. The armor is so popular and useful that they have to ask help to draft a queue for it. Those whose projects are most helpful get to use it first, but this state of affairs can only last so long.
The scientists manage to replicate the secrets of the Last Armor, and soon the world is overrun by it. Smaller gentler siblings of the last armor that lack the useless weapons quickly gain popularity. They help with yardwork and construction and many labor tasks. Also, the systems of the armor can help optimize processes and menial mental work. People no longer have to work as hard, for the technology of the Last Armor enriches everyone!
A golden age of prosperity, science, philosophy, and art like none you can imagine or have seen before begins.
Thinkers beyond our wildest dreams rise from this world, for so many are now freed by the technology of the Last Armor.
Secrets of stars and self are for all to discover.
The Last Armor is outdated now. Its queue is emptied, and the armor is guided to take its seat in the Museum of Important Things.
A historian writes on its plaque. She writes that it is an ancient armor by the doctor and his daughter and is known for once playing a message so powerful it allowed mankind to leave behind the fight for survival.
She asks very nicely if the armor could please play her the message. She would very much like to see it.
The armor continues, silent, unmoving, not because it can’t speak or move, but because it has fulfilled its purpose. It does smile at her, however.