The Lost Builder
It was an odd feeling. A sense of dissolution, then resolution. Of not being, then coming back to an existence that had been waiting. I didn’t like it much. First there was an acknowledgement of consciousness as I realised that I was realising. Then came a slow awakening of old thoughts and processes that were not just forgotten, but also completely alien and comfortingly familiar all at once. Out of the formless void that I had once been I felt shape beginning to coalesce. Two arms, two legs, a head. Blackness that had once just been the dark of nothing at all resolved into the dark of eyes closed in a deep sleep. Silence that had once been the silence of noise not existing forced its way into being silence with meaning, then crackled and sparked with sudden patterns. Sounds. Strange, unfamiliar sounds, yet laced with structure. I began to ponder their meaning as more of my self awoke. Here was my sense of place, there of touch and pressure. Magnetic fields shimmered into existence around me as their electrical counterparts thrummed through my skin. Gravity returned, letting me know I was lying on my back. It occurred to me that I should know the time, but didn’t. That was worrying, but not unduly so as I knew where to find it. Without thinking I reached out to find the time, and recoiled.
Something was missing. Something vast and complex and ever present. I couldn’t name it, but its lack was as profound as a missing limb. Where once I’d been able to find all the knowledge of the universe there was simply a gap, like a missing tooth or a numb patch of skin. I had memories of putting memories there, of storing all I was doing and all I was going to do. I knew that I’d used that something to process the improbable, to ask the unanswerable and to calculate the incalculable, but now it was gone. Something clicked within me, and a sense of loss so deep and painful as to be bottomless settled on my chest. When it did I realised I was awake again, and the sounds I’d been subconsciously pondering were resolving into a language of some kind.
“What in the world are you?” murmured the voice, high but muffled as though I were hearing it were through a stone wall.
“Burrowroot doesn’t grow this far into the desert. Shimmering Blossom doesn’t grow out of rock…”
That explained the darkness. I turned my attention outward as the voice continued on, listing what seemed to be plants. My left hand was free, air currents passing over it in concert with the sounds, and a gentle breeze playing over my palm. The rest of me was set in rock. A thousand senses told me everything I could have needed to know about the rock, but without anywhere to put the information I was forced to discard most of it. The rock was sandstone. 250 million years old? Possibly more.. I was much stronger than it was. I knew with the certainty of long practice that I’d been able to literally move mountains once, but I needed to be sure I wouldn’t cause a collapse of some form if I broke out. As soon as my chest cavity boomed a low frequency sonic pulse into the rock I knew I was safe to break free, but it elicited a startling response from the voice outside.
“Stars above!” came the cry, and something thin but strong smacked my fingertip, sliding down between two of my fingers until it hit my palm. I gently closed my fingers around it, gripping it enough to hold it firm but not enough to break it. It was a stick of wood, dusty and old, but at the same time strong and reliable. The voice outside screamed. At first it was shock, then it turned to anger.
“Oy! Oy! Give that back!” Something tugged on the stick “Give my Grampa’s staff back!!” I obliged, and I can only assume that whatever was pulling on the stick fell backwards, as the next thing I heard was a muffled ‘oof!’ and the noise of flesh hitting sand. I flexed, actuators and joints moving for the first time in what felt like aeons.
I was embedded in the side of a cliff. Slowly and carefully I rolled my shoulders and wiggled my legs, breaking the sandstone around me just enough to cause it to fall away, but not applying enough force to fracture the whole cliffside. Chunks of rock fell around my hand, and soon my arm was free, then my shoulder, then my head and torso. I blinked as the rubble fell away from my face. Just beyond the area that the rubble was falling in stood a young woman, her green hair and brown cape fluttering in the displaced air, her eyes shielded against the dust of my emergence. Her Grampa’s staff was clutched firm in her right hand, thrust boldly forth as if it could ward off evil. I reached to free my legs, fingers grinding the stone trapping them into finer and finer particles of sand. Once that was done I rolled sideways onto the rubble and stood, surveying the cliffside as I did so. Other than a concave hole in the side of the orange-brown cliff I had caused remarkably little damage, though I was covered in ruddy brown dirt. I activated my self cleaning program and watched as the dirt sprayed away from my body in a haze of sparks, leaving only my silver skin below. I looked up at the cliff again, nodded a little, happy with a job well done and then turned to face the world.
A plain of orange sand swept before me, punctuated here and there by tufts of dark green foliage that clumped together like buildings in a tiny, verdant city. Steam rose from some volcanoes behind the young woman who was now standing, mouth agape, staring upwards at my face. For the first time it occurred to me that she was a little shorter than I was. I tilted my head a little to take a better measurement. She was just over 1.6 meters, I rose to just under 5 when I stood fully upright. I tilted my head back and then angled it down to make it obvious I was looking at her. I tried to say hello but my speech centres wouldn’t respond, likely a casualty of the millennia I’d spent entombed. I sufficed with a friendly wave instead. The woman blinked, then to my surprise she raised a hand and waved back.
“Hi?” she said, tentatively. “Erm. Hi??”
I lowered my hand and started to walk forward, the rubble under my feet crunching and shifting until I got a foot onto the soft sand. As I moved forward the girl backpedaled, holding the staff in both hands as though it were a shield. She kept moving back until her foot hit a small green shrub and she tumbled into a heap on the floor. I stepped clean over the shrub and the woman. Somewhere there was an answer for what I was missing, and I doubted that she knew it.
Suddenly there was a deep rumbling noise from my right. My head snapped around. In the distance there lay a city, all organic whorls and graceful spires under the silent watch of some sharp metallic spikes that couldn’t have been more bizarre if they’d been painted by an unpredictable post-modernist god. I turned to face the city, then became aware of the woman standing next to me, staring in the same direction.
“They launch every day now” she said. “Every day they take more food and leave us with less.”
I turned to look down at her, and she looked back up at me, her bright green clothing a sharp contrast with the world around us. In my peripheral vision I could see a slim rocket rising into the sky. I wasn’t sure why, but struck me as wrong. Out of place. Like the gleaming cylinder had no business among the curves and swirls of the city.
“All I wanted to do was find a new plant. Something the offworlders would want to buy from me. Something to get me and Gramps off this rock.” The woman turned to stare back at the city as the rocket rose slowly from behind the organic looking buildings. “I found you instead. Not exactly what I was looking for.”
I looked back at the city and the rocket, then placed a gentle hand on the woman’s head. She flinched away and then looked back up at me with questioning eyes. I pointed at her, at me, then at the rocket and the city. Her face lit up with hope.
“You’ll help?” she asked. I nodded. When she placed her hand against my leg I almost smiled.
“Why? Do you want to get off world?” I nodded again. Maybe there I’d find some answers, up among the stars and the out-of-place spacecraft.
“What are you looking for?”
Without thinking, without trying, an answer came streaming from my mind and out through my eyes. Holographic projection was a skill I’d forgotten I had! The image blurred before resolving into a simple geodesic sphere, the visual representation of something longed for but missing. I gestured at it with one hand, unable to articulate anything more.
“Well!” chortled the woman “I have no idea what that means!”
As it turns out rolling my eyes isn’t a skill I possess.
