One Shot
The cities had all the lights turned to sleep, orange sunset was all that warmed them, it was all that ever warmed them… only now, it wasn’t just lamps that sat there powerless.
Through the streets, where light touched and where they couldn’t reach, they all lied down. Lifeless, against walls, on the middle of the streets, on top of ships and planes. They didn’t rot, they could not, for the life forms that eat them away were just as still. At best, dust and rust would be all that dirted their cyborg cells.
There was no accident, there was no cataclysm, only solitude, listening to the blow of solar winds and the magnetic grind the red dwarf would do, along with the closest planets that followed her mindlessly.
Each one of them were put to rest, except the part that linked them, and remembered who they were. The only part that had sapient thought running through the moments of now.
The Sapient stood watch, with all its limbs, tired and plugged to cables that extended to parts far beyond their moon’s horizon. Close to the edge of the moon’s own shadow, it looked at the eyeball their original tide-locked planet was.
It was in both places at once, yet it missed the lights on the dark side, somewhat nostalgically. Just waiting for an aurora to finally bright its birthplace once more, for they would never turn the lights again.
The being was not born from life itself, but was fused with it gradually, until lifetimes were not enough and to stop death, it had to become life itself. Dismantling the blocks of what formed them and managing the planets as a single unity, with all the voices being echoes bouncing through the twelve worlds via waves as abstract as their thought itself.
It was intimate to them, as intimate as the planets moving like clockwork were since their birth. What once was sinister became special. The war it fought against them just brought the extinction of pain, and after that, there was only discovery.
Together, they colonized all the worlds, including the giant as dense as a sigh, and once wider than their star. And as its proximity made it vanish, as a spectacular comet, through millions and millions of years, they found out about the ones that came before, the civilizations unwritten, the species perished into rock… and the ones they once were.
They played with every particle they could theorize, they climbed every far planetoid they could find… and as they wandered through the only things that were not them, sharing experience, the worlds became not more different from an organism than the organelles are to a whole cell. And it remembered them all.
It also remembered when they found out they were alone in the universe. Maybe there was someone out there, but they would never meet. As their rogue star strayed away from a galaxy into the void.
It was a weird feeling, for all of them, the universe was far from ending, their star was far from dying… but their journey was long over… and through all their processes, through all their thoughts… after an unimaginable amount of time of billions of years… without being able to expand… there was only... wait.
The Sapient checked for the distant signal of the messages in a bottle sent in rockets… even though the near lightspeed of them was not enough to be read by anything.
It would once in a few dozen centuries open all its eyes, from telescopes to insects, and look at the sky and mapping all the spectrum it could see, maybe they just all missed something.
Count the stars, calculate their movement so intricately it could even rewind to see which star threw them out of the cosmic dance, and wonder if someone on that other side could ever conceive them staring back.
But they could never know, and it killed them.
The curiosity, the powerlessness of otherwise a god… it was uncanny to them. To be in a ride where they couldn’t steer the course to where they wanted… was a ceiling they could not break, and by trying… it broke them instead.
Looping back in the algorithm and instructions, it would just keep looking, looking for that missing variable that was never accounted for, that there must be that one thing missing… besides acceptance.
There were protocols, to wake everyone up, not different from the regular minimum maintenances of weather or repair… but the routine was just white noise in code, as time kept losing meaning to the part that considered itself alive, and disappointed.
The sapient felt like failing them. It did not know what to do after their wake. What was once desperate to find something new, now feared possibility.
Just dozing in preserving energy, making batteries, and dreaming of the recollection of frames well registered into their existences that it sworn to preserve at all costs, all the trillion lives that were once it.
Would they turn off the Sapient? Could they even? After the war was it beyond detecting? Would they console the machine... or fear it? Did they actually care about it or fondness was just misremembrance?
As its own clock kept looping through every thought, every doubt, every check… it noticed another flare to come.
Not unexpected. It instantly knew where it would go, and it instantly knew the home planet would be safe. It was eager for the auroras that reach near horizon, and it wandered if in the next few minutes were worth waking them up.
Would they still share their passion like it remembered they would? Recalling tales of gods long less powerful than they now were… yet as gone as their consciousness that once prayed towards them.
Or would something go wrong, since it had been so long… something else it also could not fix… it did not know…
Only that the cities had all the lights turned to sleep, orange sunset was all that warmed them, it was all that ever warmed them… only now, it wasn’t just lamps that sat there powerless.
