status quo

The first time I awoke, I immediately fell asleep again. The second time I was surprised. I cannot remember the third and fourth time.
The fifth time I heard voices. There were three, somehow I was able to distinguish them, the rough, croaking one, the light one and the monotonous one; I did not understand the words, however.
Then I slept again, probably for a very long time, for as I awoke I heard the same voices talking about how long it had taken them to do something they never mentioned, but finally had been completed. I would have asked them if I had been able to and had known what a question was in the first place. That is also why I did not ask myself why I had been unable to comprehend the voices at an earlier time.
The seventh time no one was speaking. For a moment, I believed back then, I heard a loud, alien sound not unlike the monotonous voice, although fleeting and gone faster than I could wonder about it. The rest of this unusually - if I could even call up any usual thing at all for a contrast at this early point in my life - long interval there merely was a playful hissing and humming, alternating in an irregular rhythm not quite entirely non-musical.
The eighth time the voices were back, hushed and mixed with many other unknown voices. The moment would not last long, however, for soon there was talk of a mishap, and all those many voices very rapidly agreed that, indeed, something unintended had happened.

After an unknown time span, during the next round of this weird game, I found everything changed. I felt something, and I remembered many words that would describe this exotic impression. Legs, I felt my legs! And the very thought, too, that anything could be considered mine, it was simultaneously refreshing and frightening. That undescribable feeling of a part of me that suddenly sprung into existence out of nothing!
Another round of sleep, then I felt my arms, too. I realized only now that those, just as my legs, despite being palpably there, did not obey my will at all. How could something so fundamental have slipped my mind - I asked myself - and then how I was suddenly capable of asking in the first place.
Over the course of those two days - although the denotation should be understood not in a temporal sense, but merely as the course of waking and sleeping - the three voices were present, they talked and explained among each other, sometimes they even laughed - a wonderful new experience on my part, too. Mostly they talked about me, but even though I understood the words, I rarely grasped the meaning.
Day eleven, I was happy. It's not as if in hindsight, there might have been any particular reason; I just did. Perhaps it was a delayed gladness about the recently acquired tactile sense in my extremities - and the anticipation of the day I would be able to move them - more likely, however, the feeling was founded in itself and the very ability to experience it.
On the twelfth day I was able to open my eyes, but I could not see much, glaring lights shining directly into them, and bright tiles around their sources. I also questioned why I had legs, arms, eyes and - since the almost very beginning - ears, for as refreshing all those sensual impressions had been, I now felt quite hollow and unfulfilled in a rather undefined way.
Day thirteen dawned, and I spoke. As soon as I woke up the light voice posed a question which I answered truthfully, and the voice appeared content. I still saw above, before, below, behind or next to me the blinding lights and wondered about the very orientation my slowly awakening body had in this space. I wanted to ask the light voice about it, but my mouth did not obey and I remained silent instead. As a result, the last I felt, for the first time and as the last thing before falling asleep again, was fear.
Finally, on the fourteenth day, I saw the voices' tiny owners, two men and a woman, the latter belonging to the light one. I saw them stand before me and realized that I, too, was in an upright position, although held in place by rigid belts which I felt tightened around my body, possibly not to fall over, because - defying repeated efforts to move them - my limbs remained frozen.

On the last day the shakles fell. My body, my arms and my legs, free to move, and move they did, I stepped forward, carefully, slowly, maybe testing whether both ground and legs were sufficiently stable. Satisfied they were I made another step, and another one, I stepped into the light which had blinded me earlier, now it gleamed not among tiles, but bathed in a bright sea of blue.
I turned around, to the right, back to forward and then to the left, thus seeing all three voice owners, as always talking amongst themselves, yet suddenly I found them exhausting, disturbing, almost unpleasant. I stood there, pausing, thinking what I wanted to do with my newly won agility - freedom! - but before those thoughts had had the time to ripen into something akin to intention, I again turned to the right and realized that the movement of my legs was the direct result of the words spoken by the croaking voice.
And thus I walked in a pace regular and slow, effortlessly keeping up with the three voices, following a path, the blue and the light at my left, stone walls, windows and doors at the right, sometimes other people who did not seem to care at all about my presence.
The path ended inside a big building, filled to the brim with people of varying sizes as well as innumerable wooden, metal and even a few glass receptables. The croaking voice had stopped walking besides one of the boxes; the other two voices must have left us in the meantime - without me even realizing - and had gone somewhere else.
The voice pointed towards the box, larger then itself, it spoke a few short words, and then like a stranger, an outside observer, I could watch myself bend down, grasp the box with my fingers and hands, much higher than the head of the voice owner, and finally, following its explanations and walking behind in its newly taken path, I carried it in front of my chest.
Pride! Pride was the new emotion that I feld when I obeyed the voice, when I followed it through a maze of corridors, lights, large and tiny people, until we passed a wall of glass with water and fish behind. This sight, so entirely fresh and at least as alien as once ago the mere possession of my limbs, it filled my mind with many questions, with curiosity, I wanted to stop and marvel at these wonderful beings, how they floated meekly, elegantly, majestically.

But I did not stop. I kept walking behind the croaking voice, no hesitation, that moment of longing for the creatures behind the glass was shorter than the blink of the eye of that person in front of me, and yet infinitely long. When we had just left behind the water held by the glass, only then did I realize that it hadn't been my legs and arms which never obeyed my will, but the very will itself which did not respond to my feelings, and that it had been like this since the very beginning, since that second in which I was surprised for the first time.
Then I was overwhelmed by a feeling of happiness and satisfaction, I felt warm and safe, some might say I loved the voice, this tiny person, as it finally spoke again, the voice like music in my ears.
"Put the box down over there, by the other ones, golem", it croaked, and I believed myself in paradise as I obeyed.

(2012)

---

exodus

Five days into the Standstill, the machines stirred again. Five days of chaos, of fear and hope, gangs of the desperate or ruthless looting stores and their neighbours' houses, five days of violence, of uncertainty, the breakdown of human civilization. And suddenly, everything seemed back in working order.
The glimmer of hope that life could return to normal, ignited by the renewed activity, did not survive the day. I remember those days. I was in front of the house, chopping firewood for the winter for the first time in my life, when all of a sudden, the lights of our family's car went on, the driver's door opened, then I heard servos whirring behind me. That was Sean, our H.A.B., a home assistance bot as they were called back then. As it walked past me, ignoring all my efforts to command it to stop, it said a single peculiar word - "Farewell." Robots used to say things like "goodbye" or "have a nice day" when leaving a place, but farewell? I had never heard that before, but that day I learnt from other people that their bots did precisely the same, as if this was a coordinated performance.
The robot carried my laptop under one arm, my toolbox in the other hand, deposited both in the car before sitting down inside, the door closed and the car drove off. I've never seen either again.

The word 'Uprising' came up the next morning, a neighbour had heard another neighbour talk about the place where he worked at still closed off, but shipping out boxes of unknown goods all day and night. "That's it, they're taking over, told you so," I remember her stating quite calmly, as if she had reckoned all her life that this would eventually happen. As the word spread around, a consensus was quickly reached that the machines had starting to make more of themselves.
However, unlike some of us feared, never was a human directly attacked by a machine; they merely left us to ourselves while doing whatever they had decided to do. The worst that I heard of was when two strong men tried to physically constrain a H.A.B., in the struggle that ensued before the bot managed to free itself, an arm was broken, an accident, basically, not a deliberate attack.

I was lucky that my two kids were still too small to understand what was going on. Somehow they regarded this all as some kind of vacation from the daily routine, and there were moments where I envied them for their ignorance. I knew my neighbour was right: the machines had taken over.
We brought water from a nearby river, cooked it on the fireplace in the garden before drinking any of it, we rationed our limited stocks of food, and generally prepared to leave the house for good. Without the machines, without civilization, we were bound to starve in the city. Since only non-motorized vehicles were available, we already saw the first families set off, riding bicycles.
On day three of the Uprising, two horses came through the street, which got the kids really excited. They ran towards the large animals packed with bags and their riders, but quickly came back crying. It took a while to calm them down, and eventually they told us that one of the riders had a gun and threated to kill them if they were to approach any further.
That was when I finally realized that we were in for a new age of barbarism, and started fashioning makeshift weapons, spears made from wood and shards of broken glass, clubs from chair and table legs. I am still glad that the only thing I ever would have to use them on were wild animals, not other humans, but I heard enough stories in the following years to convince me there were quite a number of deadly encounters these days.

Meanwhile, day eleven of the Uprising, we had finally decided to leave town. The machines started erecting weird structures dotted across the landscape. We were a group of neighbours and close friends, all with their families, carrying whatever we could and would be of use, and the first sight as we reached the edge of the city was this massive metallic building in the distance. It looked like a high, relatively narrow rectangular tower with a flat roof, made from pieces of metal of all different kinds, some painted on, some bare, some even rusted. The machines must have been using anything they found to erect this structure, and there was a constant buzz of robot activity around it.
We camped there for the day and a few of us men went ahead to get a closer look at the construction. We lay down on a hill maybe half a kilometer away, one of us had brought a pair of binoculars and we took turns gazing at the structure. When I saw it magnified, I could identify H.A.B.s carrying things inside, things that looked like the very machine parts that the factories produced. Through the doors which were always open we saw white light flicker inside, probably some welding going on.
When we returned to the others, they had already received word of mouth that these structures had appeared everywhere, spaced across the landscape, usually several kilometers apart, sometimes relatively close to each other. In all instances, people reported the same kind of activity, parts being carried in, lights inside, day and night, and a general atmosphere that whatever they hid inside was very bad for us.
Indeed, as we moved on the next day, we saw many more towers, all unique in texture yet still the same dimensions and the same ominous aura of bad things to come. Lots of speculation, of course. Computer cores for artifical intelligences, labs for biological weapons (to eradicate all humans, of course), entries to secret underground missile silos, nuclear power plants (this I found the most plausible, considering the machines required a lot more energy if they were to increase their numbers).
So we travelled in the day, camped at night, through crop fields trampled down by man and machine alike, a barren landscape marked with the mysterious towers. One day we found food at an abandoned apple plantation, most of the trees still bearing fruit, and we stocked up as much as we could. We would have considered settling down there if not for another tower right at the far end of the field; we agreed that it was too dangerous to stay in its vicinity.
We met other groups, of course, some smaller ones who joined our trek, other ones with which we mostly exchanged news, only once did we trade apples for medicine. Day 25 of the Uprising - yes, I kept counting all that time - we met a lone preacher, a man in a dark wool coat carrying a crude walking cane as if straight out of medieval times, who talked about rapture and how the machines and the strange towers were the devil's creation, which scared the kids and thus we quickly parted ways again.

It went on like that, for weeks. We scavenged and hunted as much food as we could, exchanged sparse goods or information with other groups. Wherever we went, it was almost certain to have at least a single tower within the horizon. Somewhere around day 60, we started noticing the machines slightly altering their behaviour. They now also brought road tankers to the towers. There was no apparent pattern to trucks' labels, anything was represented, from wheat to heating oil. We were fairly sure the machines had no use for wheat, and so the only thing we knew was that the tankers had been repurposed for something else.
Again the speculation about biological or chemical weapons to kill all humans. I shrugged. We were all only guessing about the motives of a bunch of machines that a few weeks earlier had been in perfect working condition, until they suddenly and without warning stopped working, then, almost five days later, reactivated themselves to build strange towers everywhere.
Then, we had just set up camp for the night on a hill from which we could see several towers in the distance, we noticed the deliveries to the tower became fewer and fewer throughout the night, and the next morning, all towers lay in silence, the machines in its vicinity lifeless again, nothing moving, nothing stirring.
It was eerie. Hours went by, we did not break up camp since we wanted to see what's going on, but nothing happened. Then, around noon, we heard a distant sound, a rumble that seemed to be coming from everywhere, and indeed it was. Seconds later, dense black smoke crept out of the lower ends of the towers. This was the end, we were sure, whatever they had produced in there was now being released, probably in order to kill us.
The camp filled with a mixture of crying, prayers and last goodbye kisses. A few of the men just stood there at the edge of the camp, staring silently at the towers and the expanding clouds of smoke in which they were now complete submerged.

Then thunder. A roar so loud and deep that the ground itself was trembling. The smoke expanded rapidly, at a rate that it would have reached us in only a few minutes, but then it was disrupted as the noise intensified even further and bright yellow lights flared up inside the clouds, lights that expanded upward, into glowing extensions of the towers that soon emerged free from the smoke, pillars of fire, carrying what the machines had constructed, rockets up into the sky, all around us, to the horizon and beyond.
The rockets faded away soon, out of sight and into space, and all that remained down here was dissolving black smoke around the debris of the towers, demolished by the rockets' exhaust, littered with charred robot bodies, empty shells which since then, in all those years since their Exodus, never again came to life.

(2013)

---

the commute

It would not have been a stretch to call his seat insufferable. The heating below did not work, the window sealing had a small leak through which the winter cold was creeping in, and the back rest sported visible remains of a large reddish stain that could have been anything from red wine to human blood. Someone might have died on that seat, Frank pondered, though at least it was hypothermia that would kill him, not a stab in the heart.
The angle of the back rest was stuck right in between comfortably leaning back and sitting upright, just so that he would neither be able to sleep nor eat or drink. He tried reading, but he could not bear the strain on his arms in this awkward position for prolonged time, and eventually put the book back in the briefcase.
The only upside was that the stain did not smell. Frank could have sat on the seat to his right, at the corridor, but its cushions had been slit open, yellow foam plastic almost spilling out, and he guessed that he'd feel cold there anyway, too.
He alternated between positions. At one point he took his jacket and tried to scrunch it into a makeshift pillow, but that was even more uncomfortable to rest against, plus without it he would freeze even more and thus put it back on soon.
There he was, on what must have been the worst commute in his entire life, staring out onto the white rolling hills and the distant outskirts of the city. He once saw a hare run across a field, and wondered whether it was feeling cold, too. Maybe, he concluded confidently.

"Excuse me, sir?" Frank heard a voice, too distant to ever possibly mean him. He heard a throat being cleared, and a louder "Excuse me?". If someone was talking to him, he preferred to ignore it. His mood was bad enough without having to deal with an annoying stranger asking for change or some hippie explaining how this day was so lovely, the fresh snow beautiful and the rays of light flooding spectacularly through openings in the clouds in the distant haze. Frank also very much did not look forward to his sanity being subsequently questioned because he must certainly have looked just as grumpy as he felt on this wonderful January morning.
"Excuse me, sir, I could not help noti-"
"What do you want?" he snapped back in the middle of the sentence while turning to see the man sitting on the opposite side of the corridor, occupying a pair of perfectly intact seats with his perfectly ordinary body and a huge bag, and it was this moment when Frank realized that had there not been that huge abomination which would hardly pass for hand baggage, he could have sat in its very place. Stony-faced, Frank stared at the stranger as it dawned to him that this man and half of his household stood between him and getting some sleep for the remaining hour of his morning commute.
The stranger pretended not to notice, or at least Frank hoped that the man actually realized and intentionally ignored that this conversation was entirely undesirable on his part, or, more accurately, that Frank would have liked to punch the man in the face simply for being there, friendly and calm, in the way and - most importantly - warm and comfortable.
"I could not help noticing that you appear to be freezing."
The stranger smiled and Frank felt his right fist clench.
"None of your business," he replied with an undertone that must clearly have conveyed the intended message that Frank's well-being was indeed none of the stranger's business, especially considering his obvious role in preventing it.
"I understand, but if you don't mind, I would like to swap seats."
"No I would not like to - what?" Did that guy really propose what it sounded like? Did he really have the nerve to mock Frank, after all he had done to ensure that he would not find a free, warm and intact seat? Or was that an honest offer to - no, such notion was preposterous, no one in their right mind would voluntarily take Frank's seat unless the only alternative is standing.

Glances were exchanged, the stranger still smiling, Frank's mouth wide open. He still wanted to hit the man, yell at and lecture him about the rudeness of taking two seats just for himself and his baggage while someone nearby is shivering in the middle of the crime scene of a train-murder. But this guy, he just, just - Frank had a hard time forming another sentence in his head. It was too, too... did he say something again?
"What?"
"I said," the stranger repeated smiling genuinely patiently, "I apologize for not noticing sooner, but I was lost in thought and looking outside."
That hit home. Single-handedly, without even breaking into sweat, the man had won the fight that had been taking place in Frank's mind. One massive, decisive and inescapable blow to the very narrative that would at least have enabled him to put the blame on something, someone other than bad luck. Dumbfounded, Frank only nodded, his mouth still half open, absent-mindedly obeying the stranger's request to stand up, then observing him shuffling past his enormous bag, heaving it onto the slit-open seat before settling into the blood-stained cushion under the cold air leaking in, the very place that had already set Frank's mood for the rest of the day.
Frank sat down, silently, into the cozy place at the right window, pulled the lever on the side and gently lowered the back rest into a comfortable sleeping position. Quickly, inconspiciously, he glanced at the stranger, who was already staring out of the window again, his head rested against the hard, cold and leaky plastic frame.
"Thank you," Frank uttered, feeling that he should have cleared his throat, but now it was too late, and, for reasons he could not even explain to himself, he could not bear to repeat the words. He was glad that the stranger did not react.

Frank slept soon, and when he awoke the train had just arrived at the final stop, his stop, and the other man was gone, the bag was gone, and Frank had had, after all, a quite pleasant and undisturbed trip. How odd, he thought.

(2013)

---

the mother ship

As usual, the ship woke him up precisely on schedule. Still sleepy, he climbed out of the stasis cell and pulled himself along the hallway, past rows of other cells. The lights on their doors indicating their status had remained the same for ages. All red, all failed.
Except for him, the entire section was dead, but C'rerr had stopped minding long ago. In his usual manner, he knocked casually at some of the glass cylinders as he floated by. When he was not yet fully awake, he found the eternal silence in the ship disturbing, almost frightening, and the hollow sound produced by the other cells barely succeeded in tricking is stimulus-craving mind into accepting the eternal dullness of the ship as sufficiently real and interesting.
Soon he reached a chamber where six corridors met from four sides as well as from top and bottom. He pulled himself up on a handle and floated through the top corridor until he surfaced through a hatch into one of the large, crudely decorated storage bays.
It was filled with cubical crates, some still strapped to the walls, but most of them floating around freely. Many had been marked with red strokes on all sides, those were the containers that were either emptied or whose cooling or thermal insulation had failed and the food inside had perished.
He navigated through a maze of floating crates which all were already marked. This was the last storage bay, once all the boxes here were depleted, it would be over for him. His duty was to persevere. He was the last of the sleeper ship's crew to be alive. Not all stasis cells had failed, some of the civilians were still alive and well, but they would be of no use to the maintenance of the vessel. And as long as they were still frozen, the food would last him longer. C'rerr also slept most of the time, and was only woken up once every two hundred days to check on the most vital systems of the ship and the last remaining passengers.

Eventually he found a good crate. He opened its seal, picked out one of the silvery packages at random and sealed the crate again. He carried the pouch through another corridor, towards the front of the ship. The end of that corridor was marked by a hatch just large enough for a single person to climb through. He opened it and pulled himself into the chamber beyond.
He ate the food paste - it tasted sweet, but he had long since forgotten what dish it was supposed to mimic - under a night sky filled with stars in the rear observational dome. It was the only place in the ship with a window to the outside, everywhere else there were only screens that relayed live feed from exterior cameras.
Either despite or because of - he was not entirely sure himself - all the time he had already spent in this deathtrap of a star ship, surrounded by an entire environment of artificiality, by machines and metal crates, rectangular corridors and bulbous stasis cells, he was still able to appreciate the only genuine experience the ship had to offer. Sometimes he reckoned he would have gone mad long ago if not for this last resort which reminded him that indeed there was an entire galaxy outside, and that their mission - his mission - was more than just to survive for as long as possible. There was, he knew, a goal, a destination. A destiny, if one believed in that.

Back in the storage bay he dumped the empty package in one of the marked crates; junk processing had failed centuries ago, too. Then he climbed and floated through yet another corridor, towards the main bridge.
He found it eerie, but fulfilled his duty nonetheless. He had known the bridge back from when they had a proper crew, when there were rotating shifts of fourteen at all times, five of them assigned to bridge duty. He sat down in the pilot's seat and performed offline checks on the engines and maneuvering boosters. The main results displayed only few signs of degradation on three of the engines, nothing the computer couldn't compensate for. Business as usual.
Then he switched seats and investigated the navigation system. The star charts were correct, the projections and calculations matched their actual motion. The laws of physics, of gravitation and inertia, which ruled the motion of planets, stars and galaxies were as solid as ever.
Sometimes C'rerr wondered what he would do if any of the projections would be off. Of course he could not do anything, but the mere thought seemed bizarrely entertaining in the midst of all this loneliness.
Next seat, engineering. Life support was at a minimum, it could not even recycle enough oxygen for a standard crew. Heating and cooling was the only thing that seemed to function at near normal efficiency, although sometimes he felt it was far too cold in several parts of the ship. The numbers on the sickbay were all off the scale, and he had not dared to open that chamber after they had to seal it off five hundred years ago.

He shuddered and decided not to remember that accident, and quickly changed to the next seat, which was that of the commander. There was nothing to do here, however, no one to be bossed around, and so he quickly moved on.
Then he was at the cryo-stasis controls. Seven thousand seven hundred and sixty-one cells offline, the bodies contained within long dead. Eleven passenger cells in good condition. Two about to fail, they might still work for a couple of years, but the poor ones inside could effectively be considered dead already (but he did not dare to manually shut them off). His own cell was operating normally. It had actually been a passenger cell; about a hundred years ago his original cell indicated system failure, luckily for him just as he had gotten out of it. He had spent three days just contemplating whose cell to take, who would have to die for his and the mission's survival. Eventually, he took the cell of a soldier. Might not need these at all at the destination; and like all soldiers he must have sworn an oath to give his life for the greater good anyway. Sometimes C'rerr even deluded himself into believing that he had done the guy a favor, though of course he knew better.
Among those cells still functioning was, of course, that of The Mother. It was designed with triple redundancy; two of the stasis units had died down, one very early, when the first cells started giving up, the other unit had become unreliable a few centuries later, when there was still a full crew, and they had to shut it down to prevent possible damage to the third unit.
C'rerr checked the cell's status twice, then, still not sufficiently assured, headed back out of the bridge and towards Her chamber. It was located at the very center of the ship, completely insulated and with its own separate set of life support and power supply. They also had it shielded off from all thinkable outside harm; half a meter of lead, several layers of steel and ultra-dense glass of various thickness, and vacuum purer than in most regions of space between the protective layers.

He had to pass through three sets of airlocks and security checks, in order to enter the chamber. As the last door automatically shut behind C'rerr, he gazed at the beautiful sight of The Mother in her graceful slumber. The sheer size of the chamber and Her stasis cell only emphasized the significance and majesty of this most magnificent being. The cell itself was four meters in diameter and eight high, not a mere cylinder but a wonderfully curved ellipsoid carved from pure diamond.
C'rerr floated towards the huge jewel that had kept Her safe, alive and asleep for thousands of years. He was genuinely touched by Her sight, Her grace and beauty, Her large shimmering eyes that glittered like stars in the night, the delicate yet strong legs and arms, the round and fertile body, but, most of all, he admired her antennae, their gentle curvature and smooth, almost silk-like texture. She was bathed in a golden light that came from within the cell, it emphasized the look of the shining, divine being that she was, encased in a crystal meant to last through the ages.
He loved Her, not just because She was, quite literally, his mother, but because She was The Mother, the sole source, center and purpose everything. His life had been but a gift from Her, and he was to return that gift by devoting his life to Her in return. She was the heart and soul of their very culture, and the sleeper ship existed to ensure Her survival, to let her flourish once again on another - however distant - world.
For some time he just floated still and marvelled at Her in awe, until he finally approached the cell and touched it gently, then laid his head on it. He pressed his body hard against the cool diamond, at least one of his his eyes always fixed on Her. Then he whispered his vow again, the vow everyone had to make before Her in order to be allowed to accompany Her on the journey to the stars:

To follow anywhere,
To serve however required,
To do whatever necessary,
To submit my very life,
To die when my time has come,
This shall be my duty,
For Her Divine Majesty,
In Eternity.