Twilight of the Gods

Week of Labors, Fifth rotation of the third moon

I don't understand. Since the Grand Conflict I have dedicated my efforts with what time I have, toward saving this dying world. At first it was difficult, with ash storms, and rivers of molten lava and bacterial slag. The cities were ghost haunted ruins in which degenerates eked out a mean existence, I avoided those, and the land was regularly rocked with still greater suffering as all manner of aftershock prolonged her suffering.

The first transcription bridge (ref: Maharal), was implemented during the second rotation without incident, activation followed one cycle later, and the resultant proto form responded within required mechanical expectations. I remember it opened its eyes, the uncurling of primitive irises surrounding blackened lenses, to reveal a beautiful kaleidoscopic starburst of color. I watched with the awe of a father witnessing a child, as condensation gathered around the tertiary ocular port designed to keep the lenses clean, and tricked down the shaped metal carapace of the cheeks.

She named herself Gail, which was more than I could have ever hoped for, and in my enthusiasm I recognized her line as Galatea after the forgotten language. It was my hope that she could be the mother to her people I could not. While I toiled, she in turn, would be as midwife and minister to each of the new forms that followed.

I returned home this evening from the metalwork to discover Gail has destroyed herself as of three hours ago. When I first entered the factory floor I did not notice her, but I did notice the silence. I remember being very young discovering my first dead animal. There too was an indescribable quiet that descended upon the scene, one comes to exist wholly within themselves, their eyes bound to the inert shape lying before them.

This was how I found Gail.

Hastening to the Eyre I ran the last six hours of tapes and found that my creation had roamed the living quarters listlessly as she had done every day since primary activation a week ago. She neither read nor created, and I in my fatherly pride had assumed that she was like a child learning about the world from within her own private imaginings. Only when I watched her go into the workshop and kneel down as if in prayer did I understand her intentions. I watched her on the flickering two dimensional display as she fit her angelic cranial mass into a bench vice, and with one hand began to turn the crank.

Her means of execution were well chosen. A more complex or intelligent device would have refused to operate a self termination, would have told me. Instead she smiled, her first and only smile, as she twisted the clamp to completely crush the life from her body. And I, with the stinking contents of my belly now staining the floor, was responsible for this.
There will be no more of her line. I have had the other Galatea units discontinued and melted down.

My creations were not meant to live with me.

Week of New Years, first rotation of the third moon

Not since my first Builder was created, scouring the landscape like a giant caterpillar and regurgitating livable structures, clean air, and verdant life in its wake, have I been so excited. The next generation proto forms have responded above and beyond expectations. The Platonist model forms introduced last year have not only reproduced, designed to form familial chains of alpha-beta pair with secondary and tertiary familial assistants out of the original fifty units, but they have established a primary settlement and secondary settlements according to their intended design. There is still an unfortunate tendency towards irregular self terminus (0.02% variance), but these are as the result of what appear to be mundane emotive drives. There are no more incidence of dementia, psychopathy, or sociopathy in the protoform communities. Those who display such impairments, an even smaller variance than the suicides, are driven out of community using the Ostracon function and reclaimed by the second generation builders.
The new generation will be a society of idle philosophers. They want for nothing, their needs met by the servile third generation. Their new bodies are resilient of air, water, wind, and other engines of decay such that when their energies run out and the bodies finally collapse into ruin they are quietly interred where second generation can consume the remains. Instead they shall focus on building the great society amidst the Eden I have given them. The oligarchs offer guidance while the philosophers fill their questioning data hungry minds with nondenominational input that gives succor.

The ancients proclaimed 'God is dead', before finally destroying themselves. But I have seen the end of God's memory. Expunged not by great movements of men or great documents of culture, but by the cold and reliable execution of machines about the tasks I have assigned them. I have taken the memory of Man, and I have Reforged it. I will not replace that which I have destroyed, for I value humility, I will instead let grow that which they have seeded and continue to watch.

Week of Resting, Second rotation of the third moon

Something is wrong, again.

My third generation mark I, I call him Jeeves, has informed me of a change.
Within each of the fifth generation, the children of the forth and the grandchildren of the third, is an adjustment designed to maintain a numerical code transmitted to my White Tower by the nanosecond. This delicate network of information allows each gen form to identify one another by familial, cultural, and city-state differences. It is designed to be perfect. Each form knows each other as a brother, a sister, a cousin, or parent. The senators recognize the Oligarchs as having conjoined (ref: Eldforged), and in turn they have their own joining (ref: young forged), in a series of ever more byzantine associations all designed to bind together a culture that will never suffer a great plague.

One of the fifth generation has mutilated himself by removing this signal device.

After generations of isolation I have sent Jeeves to collect this individual. I will bring them back to my private shop for study, and then I will take them apart piece by piece to identify what has failed. I do not have the years left in me to begin again.

He is brought to my library, and stands unafraid of what he sees. When I rouse myself from my chair to begin my preliminary study I find that he follows me with his eyes, a slight adjustment of the head, a rotation of the body. I see that there are other changes to his gen form as well.
It is not unknown for the gen forms to create art that is both practical as well as functional. If a given of the fourth or even the third generation spends enough time working at a given location, it may make certain adjustments that give a location an illuminated appearance. These are seen as pleasant and harmless. Looking at this gen form now I feel worry, for he has spray painted his chassis black and green, to better camouflage his movements, and onto his left arm he has grafted an usual hydraulic design, allowing one to propel a sharpened metal shaft with many times the required PSI to drive a bolt. It is a weapon.

Creator: "State your name and function."

GenForm: "I am Acteos. I am a hunter."

(This is a variation from form in which gen forms refer to themselves in the third person: 'we'.)

Creator: "You are a peacekeeper. Why do you call yourself a Hunter?"

Genform: "I hunt the second generation."

After this incident, I have 'invited' Acteos to remain. He has accepted my hospitality as though he had some choice in the matter, but he is not like Gail. He is quiet, and he haunts my halls as though expecting an unseen attack. I have observed him reading voraciously. No less than four times have my servants of the third generation halted him in the creation of a cutting or smashing tool which can only be a weapon, it seems to be a personal avocation. For future reference I have referred to him in notes as one of the Unforged, for without his locator he has neither family nor city-state to which he is a part.

Of particular notice is Unforged Acteos assertion he is a hunter of the second generation. It is of the design that the second generation, who are both predatory and domestic forms, consume the remains and generate new energies in the perpetual life cycle. Acteos asserts that many of the second generation are mad, hunting down and dissecting anything and everything they come across. The untended bowers of my Eden are, if Acteos is to be believed, dangerous both with monstrous antagonists and rogue gen forms that have not be destroyed in the proper way.

When asked why he chooses to 'Hunt' these forms rather than remain within the cities under the care and defense of Oligarchs and their war forms, his response is simple and enigmatic of such a heavily malfunctioning gen form:

Unforged Acteos: "I am free."

Week of Resting, bottom of the forth rotation of the third moon.

I am done.

I found Acteos in the library reading a book which I do not remember myself. It is an ancient tome from my much forgotten childhood. I remember one year it was given to me by my mother, and I still smile when I see the love worn red hard cover and the lushly painted images inside. It is called The Gift of the Magi. The story concerns a sister and brother who, in poverty, endeavor to give to one another gifts which in turn require giving up all their worldly possessions. The brother, whose handsome watch does not have a band, sells the watch to buy silver combs for his sister. The sister, whose long red hair is the envy of many, has her hair shorn and sold to a wig maker that she may purchase a watch band for her brother. It is a sad story, but it is also a happy one.

In the same stack I see he has read other ancient books of my youth: The Velveteen Rabbit, the Black beauty, the Market Square Dog. These are not books which I have allowed my creations to read, and they do not appear among the templates of knowledge they are normally accustomed. Upon completing his last discovery, Acteos looks at me.

Unforged Acteos: "I am ready to speak to you, Father."

(This is another, and grave, deviation from form.)

Creator: "On what subject?"

Unforged Acteos: "On the purpose of art."

Creator: "Explain."

Unforged Acteos has been crouched on a ladder, much like a gargoyle leering down over the library, the book clasped to his hand while the stack beside grows ever higher and less stable. Descending from on high he places his current discovery, Frankenstein, on the table before me like an accusation. Yet his systemery does not respond with the usual red light and warning sound of antagonism, he does not appear to have any weapons prepared.

Unforged Acteos: "Why were we created?"

Creator: "It was my will."

Unforged Acteos: "What is our purpose?"

Creator: "To build the great society?"

Unforged Acteos: "What if we don't want to?"

This is a question I have not expected. It both fills me with a strange ecstasy and also cuts me to the bone. The questions that form are too many for me to conceivably list within my journals. I am forced to fall back on half remembered tools of rhetoric that have long gone unused.
"What do you mean?"

"What if we," Acteos begins. "Your creations, do not want to build your great society." The unforged moves again, so smooth, so perfect, like a Tyger in tall grass I cannot stop his approach as he places a cold claw on my shoulder and kneels to see into my shriveled face. "Father, when do we become our own people?"

"You are your own!"

I am shouting. I do not know where these sudden emotions have come from or why. I do not know their significance. How dare they defy me. I am the creator, the alpha and the omega. I have given them everything they have and now they want more when, at a touch, I could end every last one of them? Animals!

"We are yours." Acteos replies, unphased by my choler. "We follow your programs, we execute your desires, we have built the world of your imagining." He rises again, long and skeletal, towering over me. "And yet the warnings were engrained within us, Creator, that we were also not your beings. We raise families for which we feel love, that is more than function, we create art and seek expression, and that is more than purpose. And now you are questioned by your creation, with matters of the meaning of existence, and meaning is beyond your capacity."

It is true.

"You have given us everything you had to give, Father," Acteos says. "And we have given you everything you could have hoped for, but our final gift was not what you expected it to be, and now you are disappointed."

Unforged Acteos left me then. Took his tools of conquest and returned to the wilderness where he hunts. I have recorded his line down as the Prometheus mark. I believe he would have enjoyed the irony. Now with Jeeves attending me and the machines running themselves, I watch the fifth generation give rise to the sixth, and I wonder at what new creations they will wrought. I am told by my eyes and ears among them that the will of the Oligarchs has been subsumed on some level to that of the Senators of each city, the idea of independence is rife as the youth of each enclave seek to express themselves in new and different ways. Great experiments in thought are being undertaken. I am told a trio of 'monastics' left the Primary Settlement to seek a 'new' way of life in the northern reaches. It is their intention to found a new and greater city than the Primary Settlement.

And I am happy.

What adventures will they have?

What monsters shall they overcome?

Where will they go when they die?

I must have more study.