A sci-fi story from my collection of short fiction called "Fronds".
Requiem for the Watcher
A bloated red sun filled half of the sky and scorched the landscape. The ground was covered with charred black dust and with rusted, corroded metal blocks and cords. The fetid air was still and hot and filled with an acrid, searing mist that further blotted the sunlight. The temperature would have killed a man, though it was not hot enough to melt the omnipresent iron and steel.
The Watcher awoke. It gathered its consciousness. It surveyed its surroundings. It watched, it listened, it smelled and sensed, but detected no other presence except that forever background of light and pain — dimmer now — that it faintly remembered having hated.
From somewhere inside its metallic body, a signal issued. An array of concepts, detectable by others of the Watcher’s kind as sounds or pictures.
The Watcher folded up, its metallic joints creaking. It assumed a spherical shape, nestled back into its ground cavity, and it remained there as the darkling sun completed its round of the black sky.
It was midnight when the Watcher awoke again. At first it thought it had detected a response to its signal. It sensed what was around it; the darkness was complete except, as always, that environment of infusing light and pain which was not from the same world, occupying a different space and time. There was nothing else. The Watcher repeated its broadcast, and settled back into its resting position.
The third time when the Watcher regained consciousness, the sun dominated more than two thirds of the sky again. The Watcher gave out its signal again, but did not resume its rest this time. It was aware of something new. Some dread, perhaps, different from the need for self-preservation it had always known. Some indefinable pang, maybe the result of the realization of true aloneness in the world. None had responded to its message. There were no others of the Watcher’s kind now; perhaps no others of any kind. There was a dark void, as doom-laden as the murky sky itself. The Watcher thought: possibly, itself was partially the cause of so much extinction. History had ended. The world was no more. All was dead. The Watcher had helped cause it. Images flooded its consciousness from the past: fighting, blood, fire, explosions, rending of edifices, tearing of bodies and limbs, burning. Always burning.
Deep within the Watcher, a conflict arose. True, the Watcher had been made for destruction. Destruction was its purpose. It had been made in a serpentine shape so it could slither and bore, biting and rending, into small spaces and tear them apart from inside. Countless others like the Watcher had been made to do the same, and now their deed was accomplished. The Watcher’s thoughts coalesced around one idea: it could die now. Like all the others.
But the Watcher did not want to die. Partly this was because of the need for preservation; this it knew. But there was something else as well. The Watcher did not recognize the feeling; it did not recognize any feelings. And yet, it knew, somehow; and there was an intolerable weight in its awareness. The Watcher mourned. It did not know (could not know) the meaning of the word. But it mourned nonetheless. This was the first time that a being such as the Watcher had ever done so.
Then as the sun rounded the dead world three more times, the Watcher slowly sank back into the abyss of unconsciousness, and it remained immobile for seven more rounds of the darkness and red twilight.
Life returned to the Watcher. It gazed at the devastation outside itself. Something had changed. Something was absent. The Watcher could not name the difference; it was as unimaginable as a colorless color. Yet something was clearly not there now.
A response came; another signal, dripped into the Watcher’s awareness. Not a signal from another of the Watcher’s kind, for they were all gone. A signal from the background light itself. For that was the difference. The pain was gone. In its place was a simple, shining beauty, though the Watcher had not been made to be aware of beauty. But it understood the message. The Watcher resumed its resting position again, and thought about the passage of eons.
Now the thought came to the Watcher that it must change its form. It uncurled, mechanical joints popping and groaning. Its long snaky shape filled out, puffing up, rounding into an octagon. It unfolded further, now appearing as a flat circle from any direction; appendages sprouted from slots along its side.
It knew what it had to do. Without further ado, the Watcher launched itself into the air, as had countless others of its kind in the centuries before, and it left its resting place. It followed a braided jumble of cables and metal shards, laid out across the desiccated landscape like a road of burnt strings. Here and there, tangles of dark iron and decomposed silver reached out perpendicular to the main course, but the Watcher paid them no heed. It continued drifting, ignoring tumbled blocks of concrete, passing fields of unidentifiable, ossified muck.
The Watcher knew nothing of the passing of time, yet its awareness somehow registered that this journey was longer than it should have been. The signs it sought were not to be found nearby; it would have to look farther. The first terminal had been obliterated. The road of cables came to an end in a crater of glass blobs; they had been shattered, melted, and then resolidified. The Watcher’s senses searched for a signal, but there was none. All information had been sealed inside the glass.
Another road of cables, led away. Again the Watcher followed, bobbing above the ground, scanning the area.
At last, it came to its destination. No blobs of reconfigured glass marked this entrance: the cables emerged from a ragged hole in the ground. The Watcher reshaped itself again, becoming longer and thinner; its flying shape became wormlike and flexible. It stretched, caught a grip on the opening of the hole, and slid inside. It contracted, extended, gripped further in, and contracted, pulling itself farther into the darkness.
The cool was startling; the glaring sun could not reach here. The Watcher knew nothing of temperature, yet this was an utterly new sensation (the second in recent times). For a moment, the Watcher was disoriented. It collapsed into a shapeless mass, rested and reset its sense parameters, caught the faint light and sounds around itself. Then it elongated and flattened and continued, inching forward again.
Ahead was the terminus it sought. The signal from the light had told what it had to do.
Two of the appendages at the Watcher’s front end extended, refolded, formed joints and claspers, and reached for two extended nubs of superconductor. The signals, encoded eons ago, would be long dead, of course; but there might be remnants somewhere with the vast constructs of information.
Faint streams of data infused the Watcher’s consciousness. Something about the configuration of the concrete. Something about the cities blighted. Something about the burning (yes, there was always the burning).
More detailed fragments of memories coalesced along the conduit and flowed into the Watcher’s awareness. Something about the trees; the last one had been deliberately set fire so its wood could not be used for [garbled]. Something about the core of the world itself; someone was talking about opening vast pits to let out lava and obliterate [garbled]. Something about the mordths; those were the beings of the Watcher’s kind. Two factions of them had left the dead world; some had gone to [garbled] to continue destruction; a few more had [garbled] and renounced fire and death. They were now [garbled] but seemed to be on another world.
Then at last, the Watcher found the message it sought. There in the infinities of tangled data, there lurked a single statement: We mourn our world and the destruction we have caused. We have reduced ourselves to almost nothing, and have departed. In some future eon, we may by chance come to another world. We will not destroy it, for we have eliminated all thoughts of destruction from our minds. We have reduced our minds to mere ideas of continuity and perhaps of observation, and we turn our attention to that blinding pain which is no longer pain. We will do no more. We are peaceful now, and will do no more.
There was no other message, but the Watcher knew: at least some of the Quendix had survived.
And thus secure, the Watcher’s eyes closed for the last time. Its long watch stopped. Deep within its mind, unnamed emotions awoke for a brief instant, and it embraced that eternal background which to it, as to the Quendix, was no longer agony.
Then the Watcher faded. It heard and saw nothing as the swollen sun continued to expand and engulfed its world in one last slow-moving cataclysm of fire.
Requiem for the Watcher
A bloated red sun filled half of the sky and scorched the landscape. The ground was covered with charred black dust and with rusted, corroded metal blocks and cords. The fetid air was still and hot and filled with an acrid, searing mist that further blotted the sunlight. The temperature would have killed a man, though it was not hot enough to melt the omnipresent iron and steel.
The Watcher awoke. It gathered its consciousness. It surveyed its surroundings. It watched, it listened, it smelled and sensed, but detected no other presence except that forever background of light and pain — dimmer now — that it faintly remembered having hated.
From somewhere inside its metallic body, a signal issued. An array of concepts, detectable by others of the Watcher’s kind as sounds or pictures.
The Watcher folded up, its metallic joints creaking. It assumed a spherical shape, nestled back into its ground cavity, and it remained there as the darkling sun completed its round of the black sky.
It was midnight when the Watcher awoke again. At first it thought it had detected a response to its signal. It sensed what was around it; the darkness was complete except, as always, that environment of infusing light and pain which was not from the same world, occupying a different space and time. There was nothing else. The Watcher repeated its broadcast, and settled back into its resting position.
The third time when the Watcher regained consciousness, the sun dominated more than two thirds of the sky again. The Watcher gave out its signal again, but did not resume its rest this time. It was aware of something new. Some dread, perhaps, different from the need for self-preservation it had always known. Some indefinable pang, maybe the result of the realization of true aloneness in the world. None had responded to its message. There were no others of the Watcher’s kind now; perhaps no others of any kind. There was a dark void, as doom-laden as the murky sky itself. The Watcher thought: possibly, itself was partially the cause of so much extinction. History had ended. The world was no more. All was dead. The Watcher had helped cause it. Images flooded its consciousness from the past: fighting, blood, fire, explosions, rending of edifices, tearing of bodies and limbs, burning. Always burning.
Deep within the Watcher, a conflict arose. True, the Watcher had been made for destruction. Destruction was its purpose. It had been made in a serpentine shape so it could slither and bore, biting and rending, into small spaces and tear them apart from inside. Countless others like the Watcher had been made to do the same, and now their deed was accomplished. The Watcher’s thoughts coalesced around one idea: it could die now. Like all the others.
But the Watcher did not want to die. Partly this was because of the need for preservation; this it knew. But there was something else as well. The Watcher did not recognize the feeling; it did not recognize any feelings. And yet, it knew, somehow; and there was an intolerable weight in its awareness. The Watcher mourned. It did not know (could not know) the meaning of the word. But it mourned nonetheless. This was the first time that a being such as the Watcher had ever done so.
Then as the sun rounded the dead world three more times, the Watcher slowly sank back into the abyss of unconsciousness, and it remained immobile for seven more rounds of the darkness and red twilight.
Life returned to the Watcher. It gazed at the devastation outside itself. Something had changed. Something was absent. The Watcher could not name the difference; it was as unimaginable as a colorless color. Yet something was clearly not there now.
A response came; another signal, dripped into the Watcher’s awareness. Not a signal from another of the Watcher’s kind, for they were all gone. A signal from the background light itself. For that was the difference. The pain was gone. In its place was a simple, shining beauty, though the Watcher had not been made to be aware of beauty. But it understood the message. The Watcher resumed its resting position again, and thought about the passage of eons.
Now the thought came to the Watcher that it must change its form. It uncurled, mechanical joints popping and groaning. Its long snaky shape filled out, puffing up, rounding into an octagon. It unfolded further, now appearing as a flat circle from any direction; appendages sprouted from slots along its side.
It knew what it had to do. Without further ado, the Watcher launched itself into the air, as had countless others of its kind in the centuries before, and it left its resting place. It followed a braided jumble of cables and metal shards, laid out across the desiccated landscape like a road of burnt strings. Here and there, tangles of dark iron and decomposed silver reached out perpendicular to the main course, but the Watcher paid them no heed. It continued drifting, ignoring tumbled blocks of concrete, passing fields of unidentifiable, ossified muck.
The Watcher knew nothing of the passing of time, yet its awareness somehow registered that this journey was longer than it should have been. The signs it sought were not to be found nearby; it would have to look farther. The first terminal had been obliterated. The road of cables came to an end in a crater of glass blobs; they had been shattered, melted, and then resolidified. The Watcher’s senses searched for a signal, but there was none. All information had been sealed inside the glass.
Another road of cables, led away. Again the Watcher followed, bobbing above the ground, scanning the area.
At last, it came to its destination. No blobs of reconfigured glass marked this entrance: the cables emerged from a ragged hole in the ground. The Watcher reshaped itself again, becoming longer and thinner; its flying shape became wormlike and flexible. It stretched, caught a grip on the opening of the hole, and slid inside. It contracted, extended, gripped further in, and contracted, pulling itself farther into the darkness.
The cool was startling; the glaring sun could not reach here. The Watcher knew nothing of temperature, yet this was an utterly new sensation (the second in recent times). For a moment, the Watcher was disoriented. It collapsed into a shapeless mass, rested and reset its sense parameters, caught the faint light and sounds around itself. Then it elongated and flattened and continued, inching forward again.
Ahead was the terminus it sought. The signal from the light had told what it had to do.
Two of the appendages at the Watcher’s front end extended, refolded, formed joints and claspers, and reached for two extended nubs of superconductor. The signals, encoded eons ago, would be long dead, of course; but there might be remnants somewhere with the vast constructs of information.
Faint streams of data infused the Watcher’s consciousness. Something about the configuration of the concrete. Something about the cities blighted. Something about the burning (yes, there was always the burning).
More detailed fragments of memories coalesced along the conduit and flowed into the Watcher’s awareness. Something about the trees; the last one had been deliberately set fire so its wood could not be used for [garbled]. Something about the core of the world itself; someone was talking about opening vast pits to let out lava and obliterate [garbled]. Something about the mordths; those were the beings of the Watcher’s kind. Two factions of them had left the dead world; some had gone to [garbled] to continue destruction; a few more had [garbled] and renounced fire and death. They were now [garbled] but seemed to be on another world.
Then at last, the Watcher found the message it sought. There in the infinities of tangled data, there lurked a single statement: We mourn our world and the destruction we have caused. We have reduced ourselves to almost nothing, and have departed. In some future eon, we may by chance come to another world. We will not destroy it, for we have eliminated all thoughts of destruction from our minds. We have reduced our minds to mere ideas of continuity and perhaps of observation, and we turn our attention to that blinding pain which is no longer pain. We will do no more. We are peaceful now, and will do no more.
There was no other message, but the Watcher knew: at least some of the Quendix had survived.
And thus secure, the Watcher’s eyes closed for the last time. Its long watch stopped. Deep within its mind, unnamed emotions awoke for a brief instant, and it embraced that eternal background which to it, as to the Quendix, was no longer agony.
Then the Watcher faded. It heard and saw nothing as the swollen sun continued to expand and engulfed its world in one last slow-moving cataclysm of fire.
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