A TALE OF THE DARK DAYS LOST AND THE WISDOM GAINED
The wires stuck in his throat like coal dust. The feeding tube performing its task diligently; with the cold methodical ability, inherent of it’s class. It gauged his taut, racked frame meticulously with all that would ever be required to perpetuate his living slumber eternally. A death rattle sigh ejected past his parted lips. It caused no ripple in the air about his face; no disturbance of the centuries old dust coating his entire being like a dry fur film. The sound was unearthly and unintentional, caused by the gradual decline of his workings. His skin, which had the look and fragility of the most ancient parchment, appeared almost completely transparent, with so subtle a mottle hardly ever noticed through the aura of dust. His eyes stared – the blank dead stare of the subconscious – abhorrently across the brass and copper chamber, their surface as dry as his husking skin, belay naught of their truly moist and watery depths.
An astute observer could even, if only attentive enough, gaze upon the flow of time itself, as measured by the ebb of his pulse, by watching the synthetic blood work its way through the bulging veins protruding from his eyes within their sunken shadowy hollows. The majority of his joints had all but calcified. Knuckles of stone kept his grip firm upon the edges of the rusted throne. Atrophy made what little muscle left like knotted cords fused to the shards of rock bone that stood in aching support of every silent creaking iota of the live statue upon its derelict alter.
Wires and tubing of indeterminable variance flooded from the decrepit pillar in the middle of the vault. Each strand and cable with its own purpose, indiscernible against its innumerable brethren, formed a metallic structure beyond their ward like wings constructed gawkily by an ungainly spider of gargantuan proportions. The only sound that penetrated the room was the harsh, low hum of the machines that propagated his life. Each machine, as vast as his diminutive cavern itself, surrounded the man’s most sheltered and immobile existence. They formed the very building blocks of his bastion, but from his peerless position, they were all in their entirety shrouded away by wires and wires and wires in his cold little hall of copper and brass and rust.
The last time the eternal corpse found itself coaxed into communication, with anything but his haunting memories and hallucinations, the life supporting machines had increased their monotonous drone to an odious cacophony, just to produce enough energy for the synthesizer. This was not part of the original design, more a construction of retrospect, when the Elders realised they could use the Founder’s wisdom, even in his living death, to verbalise his tattered thoughts into garbled vocals. During the ‘Great Divide’ his hallowed words, which required translating from the old speech and deciphering from the static of the synthesized monotone voice, reconciled the dispute, but not before the parties involved had resorted to bloodshed; his continual slumber deemed far more sacred than the lives of a few dire subjects.
Millennia had passed since the Founder’s placement upon his sustaining throne. Since time immemorial, incalculable pilgrims had clawed their way, across a barren stretch of waste to the isolated cumbersome bastion, to pay homage and respect in solitary solace, or organised mass rituals. Only the Elders had authority to gaze into the Founder’s hermetically sealed vault, to extend the glass corridor to within mere feet of all civilization’s patriarch and gape in reverence upon his tarnished alabaster robed form. And of course, in times of only the most perilous strife, to ask, on behalf of all of humanity’s empire and populace, as to what course of action must be taken for the good of the imperia of man.
Beyond the glass corridor lay a vast balcony from which the Elders addressed the assembled servants and pilgrims during their ornate traditional ceremonies. Their pedestal fronted by a giant ethereal mural of the Founder before his fall from the natural mortal coil; and backed by a screen that arched into the lofty rafters of the memorial chasm’s heavenly reaches, that glared down upon any persons gathered below the balcony with the face of the High Elder as he made his speeches and sermons. Beyond even the balcony stretched and plunged a canyon between the walls formed from the encased machines, upon the floor of which congregated the crowded worshipers of only the poor and unfavourable, while those of ascending wealth perched upon floating gantries above the base of the abyss. Above all hung and descended the omnipresent wires. Each straggling its own personal pathway to their individual parent machine, all along forming unnatural vines and creepers of dense cold metal.
The gawping unwieldy rabble gathered in the colossal cathedral had churned the natural floor under the pounding and trudging feet of generations of pilgrims into a swamp of clay dust and the condensed perspiration of millions of souls in turmoil and questioning. On the rare occasions when a surge of inspirited passion and excitement pulsed through the crowd, those unfortunate enough to be gathered at all but the rear edge of the hall, were kneaded into the man made marsh, or melted by and fused to the super heated walls of the machine cases. Those unfortunate enough to unintentionally endure such horrific deaths were seen as martyrs by their compatriots. It was the popular belief of those forced into the throng that the poor souls killed in such circumstance were called by the Founder himself to live in his machines with him in eternal sleep. A belief, the wealthier witnesses high above on their floating gangways and parapets, viewed as coming more from guilt and fear than from any rational thought or reasoning.
In smaller gatherings, by specific pilgrims, these poor martyrs, more commonly referred to as the ‘Machine Spirits’, worshipped in their own right. Offerings were commonplace in these hallowed grounds, but brought by only those that could afford to. Amongst the lower classes situated on the earthy, sodden floor, an offering would be little more than some simple artefact from an individual’s home. Though if the worshiper were truly inclined to show great faith, they may sacrifice their very living wage to procure a more expensive token to present to the walls of the Founder’s bastion, and it’s machine spirits. Sometimes groups may pool together to leave a grand bequest when the individuals could not spare enough to present something on their own. These gifts of the floor would be left and distributed as the pilgrims saw fit, but never moved for want of space, their placement viewed as reverent and predestined.
Those amassed on the hovering bulwarks left donations freely, as was expected among the affluent. The denizens of the highest levels had the wealth to leave vast donations to the great machine’s upkeep, and all fought to outdo the other names and families of wealth and reputation. This fiery zealous belief and faith of the floor, coupled with the greed and competition between the gods, meant the Elders were never short on funds or manpower whenever they may be required. Though none but the High Elder knew it, the Founder’s bastion, with its fathoms and acres of machine houses, was created under harsh attention to detail, filled with advanced technologies far beyond their time, all culminating in a single clockwork incapable of decline or self-destruction. The funds lay as a keep safe, a contingency, against the bastion’s impossible erosion, and any expense of the Elders.
Inside his chamber, the Founder woke and slept, slipping from the unconscious to consciousness, again and again, with his eyes wide, held open and hydrated by infrequent intruding droplets. The machine spirits spoke to him, haunting his mind, penetrating even the sanctum of sleep with grotesque apparitions, and deafening silent screams. The creators of his perpetuation, though not with the thought of the restless dead in mind, had seen to the degeneration of his sanity by having a machine pump his system with drugs to quell any rise or possibility of madness. This worked, as did every other concoction of compounds his body maybe filled with to reduce his decline, in suppressing the maddening images of all those souls dying in homage of his name, among the putrid depths of the floor beyond his vault and the Elder’s balcony outside.
During one of the lulls in proceedings, only a bushel of lunar passings before the grand founding ceremony, a commemorative ritual held once a decade in memory of the bastions founding, there was a disturbance snaking its way through the pilgrims of the floor. With each small group it melted through, only a scattering of persons – specks as viewed by those in the gods – left in its wake. The swarm grew from the opening of the canyon floor as it made its way through every minute gathering, over the course of several hours, eventually halting at the base of the immense mural some furlongs below the balcony. At the front of the now exodus sized group, stood a single figure, an almost radioactive quarantine area radiated in a semicircle beyond their flank. Every offered prayer, cry of penitence, whisper of suspicion, halted. The entire assembly waited in bated breath. The prophet had returned from his pilgrimage, and all were expectant on his word. A sermon was to come.
Just Another Adult 