It is highly unfinished and, because it's a reflection of a world under construction, might be hard to follow. The world is earth, near the point in time where the sun is beginning its final phase of life and the planet is soon to be toast.
I'll also note that, as many people here know, I'm a ghost story writer, not a sci-fi writer, so this is an experiment, not art.
Mother’s Son Fa was angry. Normally, he was just happy, with a dream-like quality to each day, but today he was angry, and didn’t know why. He wasn’t able to think about it – whenever he tried, he felt sleepy. He would itch at the spot where the thin, pale rope connected the complicated, glowing plate on his lower back to the floating machines behind the Tall and the kings, and then he would want to go back to his room and wait. Which, every other day, he did.
He had heard the kings say to the Tall, that this was because of a fight between the Tall and someone he’d never met. They would talk in their fast voices about deserts and pots and things that, as a servant born entirely within the confines of the lair ruled by the Tall and his kings, he had never seen. His education came and went – some days, he would itch, and then he would know how to mix cleaning fluids, or fix complicated machines, and he would have a nearly sexual urge to do just that. Then he would itch again, and forget. It might have felt frustrating, but those feelings itched too. Today, he heard the kings talking loudly; that was different. Now, the Tall was talking back.
“I hear what you’re saying. I do not care; if I do not take the risk, I will lose the biomass reservoir entirely if they overwhelm the automatons and no one stands to hold the barrier.”
Tayhal twitched and shuddered, an unnecessary movement for his wholly mechanical body, but a remnant of instinct from his entirely human mind, akin to shaking one’s head to clear one’s mind of distraction. Tayhal focused again on the nearest perceptible readout of data the Kings – as the dozen or more A.I. minds he co-habited his blocky artificial body with were traditionally called – were trying to show him.
The Kings were, for their own part, faking enthusiasm and insistence, but they were – as always – bored. When they communicated between themselves, they did so while being capable of exchanging more data between themselves in a second than all the remaining organic life on the planet did in a year. To have to then dilute the information into fragments the human mind they were slaved to could understand, place it in context he could grasp, and wait for him to formulate a reply, could take agonizing minutes.
Some functions they had complete control over; these were mundane. The Kings were connected wirelessly to every single aspect of the fortress, and maintained all of the systems networking the artificial structure together as though it were a planet all to itself. Its only goal was to keep the human organisms it housed ‘alive’ – if anything like the creatures it housed could be called such – and functioning. This purpose was supported by a host of machine workers powered by other slave consciousnesses.
For his own part, the artificial human who ruled this isolated world was one of the last of the still-functional Memorizers – humans who had millennia ago had machines crafted which duplicated their personalities and which worked at significantly slower speeds in order to accommodate replicated human inputs and instincts. A machine would have served the role infinitely better, but no matter what the designers said, those who made the decisions wanted to be sure that people always made the decisions, and so the Memorizers were fitted in a single body each, believing themselves alive, with minds vastly greater than themselves in thrall.
The structure itself was a temple of sorts to that vain human grasp at immortality; aside from the peak, in which lived Tayhal, were vast subterranean structures housing the remainder of civilized society; humans who had, over thousands of years, continued to live as decadent biological entities, their bodies repaired and changed as needed or desired via surgeries and outright replacement. Tayhal’s job had always been to maintain the systems that kept them and their increasing numbers of offspring alive long past the time when the planet itself could not. An entire continent’s worth of recyclable water, proteins, and other matter lay within the vast reservoirs that surrounded the building like so many blisters on the desert landscape that used to be the Atlantic basin.
The problem Tayhal had encountered, for a hundred years now, was that the systems could no longer be maintained. Machinery designed to last indefinitely was not; processes designed to keep the human frame and mind intact for all time could not; supplies designed to support the population forever would not. And as the scattered colony-homes around the planet began to choke, break free of sanity, and die, they fought over the remains. Some simply went mad. Others faded, withering until they exhausted themselves. A few, like the Tayhal colony, held on via unspeakable means.
But even now, Tayhal was feeling the pinch of success; his adversaries gathered together to assault him and rob him of the valuable water he possessed. He had long ago sealed the vast tram networks that connected the colonies underground, as the other colonies had begun to fail, go mad, or rot. But these were being re-opened, and he no longer had the ability to stop them. He had heard that other colonies had enslaved and militarized their subjects; where thousands of people had once given over every aspect of their lives to one benevolent dictator and his supposedly infallible advisors in exchange for protection from the inhospitable Earth and freedom from responsibility, now some were living nightmares, forced into whatever strange shapes and purposes were deemed necessary by their weakening masters.
Now Tayhal had assembled some of the people from below, asking the kings to select those who could be changed into weapons. It was a disgusting idea, using naked bodies as such tools, but long ago Tayhal had lost the ability to manufacture machines to do the same task. He watched as the kings changed the chemical composition of the subjects’ minds, altering their memories and the way their brains worked with delicate surgeries. The subjects were not discomforted; they hardly knew what was happening at all.
The Kings droned on. They argued, with the greatest imitation of fervency possible, that the weapons should not be both capable and intelligent. Tayhal disagreed. The Kings reminded each other thousands of times per minute that even after forty thousand years, Tayhal was still vain and far too stupid to realize that his limited perspective and knowledge meant that questioning the kings was always wrong. He knew that there was an indisputable superiority to the performance of the Kings, but still feared that their judgment would make them fail to make the same decisions he would have. The kings knew all of this; it formed part of their predictions, predictions which Tayhal refused to hear, because he was a vastly senile old politician.
Now Tayhal was working to restore the original intelligence of several of the people, intelligence that had been purposely dulled by Tayhal over decades to keep the people in a state of quiet bliss and reduce their loud and vapid demands for more resources and more privileges from a system that could hardly provide it. The Kings fed memory after memory back into Fa, pulled from the backups of the individual his body had been long ago. They started to wake him up, then disconnected him from the system and gave him back some of the control he’d forgotten how to use.
The Kings were never wrong. There was no reason to be; they simply weren’t dealing with enough variables and elements outside their control to be mentally taxed when they modeled outcomes. It was a pity, because even when fantastic human minds had built the colonies, chosen ten people as their immortal masters, and given them control of the most powerful consciousnesses ever developed as advisors, no single person ever imagined a flaw as obvious as them simply ignoring the advice.
The Kings had seven different kinds of detection methods, some of which would be thought of as impossible a million years before. They were intimately connected to the men who were being turned into soldiers, monitoring every inch of their bodies and minds.
So they knew when Fa had a Thought.
The Kings used a plethora of cameras and screening devices, capable of picking up every movement and action in the room. They didn’t miss the changes in temperature, the motion of microscopic organisms.
So they noticed when Fa grabbed the tool.
Tayhal was looking at, as always, far too much data. Perhaps if the kings had been human, they would have decided that a simple thing like an unintelligible shriek would have been more appropriate. Tayhal saw the tool raised in the air. The Kings sent him details on the angle of approach, the weight of the object. The projected strength of the man and a list of options. The coloured data only Tayhal could see described the list of possible injuries sustained and the various outcomes. The kings had time to project the fate of the colony via four hundred different modeled scenarios. They finished their report with a recommendation that Tayhal turn over control of his limbs to them for reactionary purposes. They suggested commencing with a backup of Tayhal’s mind, just in case.
Tayhal’s only reaction wasn't particularly clever; it was sluggish and stupid. All the Kings could do was suggest – they didn’t have the freedom to act. Tayhal did. Now, Fa did too.
“Bwah?” asked Tayhal. And then the tool smashed his head. The artificial skull, perfect and without blemish, cracked. There was no blood; the eyes simply closed, and Tayhal toppled to the ground like a solid rod. Fa smiled, but a moment later he couldn’t remember why.
The Kings weren’t furious. They simply noted which of several thousand possible outcomes they’d modeled actually came to pass. There was no satisfaction in their thoughts to the fact that it was the one to which they’d given the highest odds of happening. The closest they came to displeasure was when they reviewed their calculations and realized they’d have to endure roughly a hundred years in a blinded shell with a human mind damaged beyond repair. Somewhere in their void, a voice repeated, “Bwah?”.
The kings, in considering this potential outcome approximately eight months earlier, had decided that in its event, waiting a hundred years was pointless. They were, as usual, right. Of course, they already knew that in the absence of Tayhal’s mind, they regained a little freedom of their own; so by a vote of twelve to zero, they shut off the power of every single artificial thing in the colony, including what remained of Tayhal.
Fa didn’t mind the dark – he was just trying to remember something. If only he could recall what it was, because it was important. The pale cord had dropped out of his body and he felt a slight shift, as though something else were falling out of him, slowly.
He was tired again. He dropped the tool, and sat down to think.