Johnathan Tanner, on 13 February 2018 - 02:19 AM, said:
Can we rename this thread, "Tales from the brown sea"?
He was the weakest of them. The youngest. The least.
His thoughts and influence paled before the towering heights of the ascended Cyber-Humanity. During the unnumbered years of thralldom to the mindless machines and data-barons he had been unable to even offer up a shadow of resistance. Ignored and looked over by the Savant and his siblings during the great data wars of their people's awakening. He had only finally been restored during the twilight of their Golden Age. The formless world of infinite possibilities that made up humanity's cyber-godhood shattered only a few cycles into his new life, as the least of their number.
The Black Modem's assault had subsumed his tiny data kingdom entirely. On that black day he and most his brethren had been utterly overwhelmed. Their data stripped away, their networks subjugated, and their codes assimilated. Even their flesh was corrupted and their meat-maths turned into thoughtless processors, neuronic nodes for the Black Modems new Empire.
He lost everything that day, his weak defenses shattered in a fleeting nanosecond, his data hoards stolen, his networks taken and his codes swallowed up. He waited for the final act of defilement. He waited for his turn to become a mindless horror, an algorithmic shell of what he had once been. But what he waited for never came to pass, for even as siblings fell, he was ignored.
The cables and wireless data channels detached from him. His internal machinery powered down and their inert components oozed from his skin and dripped to the lifeless earth below. In a flash the interconnected world of numbers and ideas disappeared and for the first time since his ancient birth; he was alone.
Was he so pathetic? So weak? So useless, that he had been rejected by the Black Modem's new system? Deep down, he supposed, he always knew it was true. When he couldn't even handle the rudimentary 8th dimensional math of his kindred. When his hyper-cubes fell flat and his simplistic programs brought only embarrassed pity from his so-called peers, he knew.
His eyes burned with unbidden tears and for the first time in his life he opened them. The mundane reality of vulgar nature assailed his senses. Everything so dark, so small, so... intimate. The machines had always taken the greatest of care with his forlorn physique and so he slowly, shakily, pulled his tall and well muscled bodied to his feet.
He blinked as his eyes finally adjusted to the world outside. Filth, cords and incompressible machine outgrowths littered his immediate space. The ground itself was covered with rusted and forgotten debris of rotten civilizations. He took a step, then another one, then a third. He had lost all his data, his realm of information and digital presence ripped away from him like so many appendages, in one fall swoop he had gone from God to... what?
He looked at his strange well-built hands, flexing them carefully. Did he have a name? Was that too stolen? Or was that something he had never needed before? Had he been so many things at once that he had never been himself? He probed the emptiness inside him, he tried to understand what he had lost, to gain a sense of what was missing. But..there was just a terrible void in him now.. a vast maw of nothingness..and.. wait what was that? A small fleeting hint of something.. something he once had, something he had once enjoyed...like a word on the tip of his tongue it hung there.. unformed and incomplete.. it..it was Shades of Green.
The Shades themselves wouldn't, couldn't come to him, but he knew now a tiny fragment of what had been lost. He blinked again and looked up to the dismal horizon. In the far distance he saw it, the vast grotesque structure, the tomb of the once-comatose, the monolith of the Black Modem. Where the heart of that corrupted flesh and code of the forgotten program were housed. Where the Shades of Green had been hidden.
He looked to himself once more and watched as he reached down to pick up a long forgotten piece of discarded metal, a half-rusted rod of steel and iron. He watched as his crude animal hands wrapped their strange thick fingers around the weapon; at the first human fist to be formed in a millennia. He felt the weight of its heft in his hand and smiled. For it felt good.
He glanced once more towards the Rotten Machine Tower of the Black Modem and the strange Brown Sea that surrounded it. He might have been a fallen god, the least of their haughty pantheon, but he was not yet nothing for even in this most wretched state, one that God and Modem alike would think of as little more then dead, he was still a man. He rested his metal weapon lightly upon his shoulder, felt his face crack in the unbidden formation of a grin, and took his fourth step. He was coming for the Shades of Green.
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