[Fan Fiction]: Nought - ODYSSEY

---------------------------------------------Nought-------------------------------------------

[--------------------------------------------------ODYSSEY--------------------------------------------------]​

Nothing. No. One thing. Yes.

What was It?
A shining bit, shod in black. It hung hugely, pendulous, a cosmos confined to a single speck of space. And suddenly it was lost, winding into nothing, and in its place innumerable white dots blinked, drifting in the dark.

It’s eye probed the crushing blackness, darting from star to star, system to system, countless half-remembered galactic charts scribbling sense and order on the sky. Yet the moment a constellation materialised it seemed to stretch and disintegrate, holographic certainty flickering out. How long had It been here, facing the sky? How much time had passed? The specks spun illegibly overhead, entire galaxies rippling across the sky. How much time was passing? Was It watching the universe end?

Gradually, almost imperceptibly, senses began to return. Not stars. Life. Subaqueous life. It tried to move, joints grating. After an age of protest, listless limbs creaked into motion, shifting It’s great bulk onto one side, and then over, face downwards.

One knee – two – precariously up – staggering forward – almost toppling before some internal impulse clunked into action, terminating the totter at the last instant. How long had It been unconscious? Rocking back onto time-worn heels, It examined It’s body. A broken headlight. A fractured eyepiece. Holes, scratches, biologic growth, scabby corrosion. It’s right arm hung limply by its side, a melted mess. It shifted It’s left arm to repair the worst of the rust at its knees, but stopped short. Who knew how much internal damage it had received? It looked around: sand, and a crushing darkness which drowned the single remaining floodlight far short of where it should have ended.

“Help!” It spurted the distress beacon out in sonar, the phrase bouncing into the abyss.

Movement! Reflexively, a fractured red eye pinned the target and It raised a cannon and took aim. After several nanoseconds however, It realised It’s arm had not responded. It shot a glare towards the truculent stump, then glowered further. Yes. Of course. Melted. Ahead, the Thing shifted in the darkness, clouds of sand rasping into the sky like the breath of some leviathan – had the natural world itself cracked apart like some colossal egg, birthing an avatar of vengeance? A thousand myths sprang from the swirling sands - gigantic squids; toothed whirlpools; sadistic sea gods. Tentacles writhed in the swirling sand. It fought It’s instinct to retreat, knowing It couldn’t if It tried. Nonetheless, It took a groaning step backwards, and prepared It’s self-destruct sequence. I didn’t wake up to be some stinking fish’s supper. The clouds got closer. Closer…

A Dox trotted into the pool of light at It’s feet, the small machine’s eye staring up, almost mischievously, at its larger brother. What is a lone Dox doing at the bottom of an ocean? Never-mind. Now was not the time for an inquiry. Don’t worry, little one, we will find our way back. Embarrassed, still struggling to conceal its shaken thoughts, It attempted a neural interface with the bot.

“Help me,” the Commander commanded.

“Say please,” the Dox retorted.

The Commander ran a systems diagnostic on its neural receiver. What? It glowered down at the impertinent little robot. Doxen weren’t supposed to speak. They didn’t even have the neural capacity for higher-level conscious thought. Rising as tall as its rusted skeleton would allow, the Commander glowered down at the Dox, and through gritted gears, demanded: “Obey!”

“Help you? Help you how, Commander? Do I look like a Fabricator to you?” incredibly, the Dox actually cocked its insolent head.

“Take me to your Commander.”

“I do not have a Commander.”

“Then how are you functioning? No - forget it. If you have no Commander then I am your Commander.”

The Dox made a noise somewhere between a beep and a chuckle. “As if I’m going to take orders from a decrepit rust-bucket!”

“You will obey.”

“I will not. And you will be down here a lot longer if somebody shoots your legs off, so you better start accessing your etiquette databanks, or wherever it was you left your manners.”

The Commander considered its tactical alternatives in this predicament, running defence algorithms, projecting potential movement speeds and distances to shore, even considering whether it could fall on and disable the puny Dox - all the while aware of its fast-fading energy reserves. At length, it groaned down onto one knee, eye to eye with the incorrigible little bot. “Alright. You’re the boss. Please, take us to land.”

“That’s right. I am,” it replied smugly, evidently pleased to have its authority endorsed by an authoritative figure, “now, follow me.”

Obediently, the Commander followed the Dox up a gentle yet steepening incline, running further systems-checks now that primary physical functions seemed stable. What am I? A Commander. What is my purpose? War. War with whom? Unknown. What am I doing down here? Unknown. What is the earliest thing I can remember?

Without warning, a screeching wall of mental images, noises, sights and sounds battered their way into the Commander’s mind. Paralysed, it stumbled forward, falling with an inevitability which sent the Dox scampering hurriedly up the hill.

For a long while, the Commander lay there, face down in the sand, identity swept away on a tempest of information petabytes wide. Fire. Numberless, unquantifiable deaths: machines – biologics. Whole worlds perpetually consumed by flames falling – plummeting through the tremendous void until dark skies shone with a million burning worlds.

With a wretch, the Commander’s consciousness spluttered back into sentience. Jesus!

“No, just me.” The Dox quipped cheerily, “I noticed your ‘FATAL_ERROR’, and initiated a reboot. You’re welcome. Now if you’re quite done with your journey of self-discovery, we were almost at the shore.”

The Commander’s shoulders breached the surface, fifty-foot waves hissing as they broke on its barnacled back. Unfeeling, its enormous form plodded on – a piece of the ocean floor risen like some slumbering sea giant abruptly seeking fresh air. The Commander waited a moment in the surf, savouring the warm rush of the water as it washed away centuries of sand from hard-to-reach crevices. The Dox waited up ahead, patiently watching, sitting under palm trees which stretched for miles on a bone-white shore. Finally, coral trappings gleaming luridly in a tropical dawn, the Commander stepped onto dry land.

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Attached is the A5 version, which is more easy to read in my opinion.

awesome! I just love all these little stories.

Wow, that's a really engaging start! I'm looking forward to the next episode.

Confused at the very un-machine-like language used.

Wouldn't this be better placed in the General Discussion forum? You know... the place where more people would read it?

I'd gladly add it it to my list in this post, but the Backers Lounge is inaccessible to guest readers.

I was nervous about the views to be honest. I'll probably ask for it to be moved to General Discussion eventually

Thank you! I'll give you a shout when I do

This was really good! I would not have any reservations about putting this on the general discussion page if I were you.

EDIT:

Heh, this inspired me to do some fanfic. Let's see how it turns out!

Yay! It was moved! I added it to the list right away!

I'm so happy to hear that! The more the merrier!

Awesome

Wow! That was really good. Cannot wait until the next one

Ok, done! https://forums.uberent.com/threads/pa-fanfic.59218/

Hey Burrito, adding this to my compilation! ^^

Any particular reason that they talk like they're humans from the 21st century?

That's a valid point, actually. Especially the part where he says Jesus Christ.

You might want to look into that.

From the OED:
Jesus:

The Commander may not remember who Jesus is.

More contemporary is the use of 'Bollocks', which is itself over a century old. Also "rust-bucket", which is only seventy years old.

How should sentient machines from the distant future with fragmented memory banks disrupting their consciousnesses communicate? Like this lot?:




They were created by humanity.

Their memories are fragmented.

Time and the temporal are corrupted in their minds - Do they access language from the 58th century or the 21st? What if whole centuries of vocabulary have been corrupted?
Would it be useful to a reader if I wrote in 58th century vocabulary (in which I am well-versed)?

How reliable is the narrator - where are they, what position are they in within the text? Are they omniscient? Are they translating?

Which is more pertinent when communicating with machines which might share the same lexicon, but might have lost memories of certain words?

We must ask ourselves what assumptions are of these machines, and what the nature of their consciousnesses are.

I just hope you end the series in a really mundane yet universe destroying servercrashpocolypse, rendering moot any heady existential stuff.

Edit: and then it turns out that the universe is really just the chronocam stuck on infinite loop.

C'mon this is all just free gold I'm throwing away here. Take it! Take it all!

If you're going for the unreliable narrator angle it's probably a good idea to indicate it. If you're robots are accessing 21st century vocabulary banks I think it's worth noting why they have access to such outdated information and why they would use it over less ambiguous language. It seems unlikely that two disparate entities (the Commander and a "Commanderless" Dox) would share access to the same lexicon, unless the former built the latter, which the Dox seems to reject as a possibility; it seems like a rather big coincidence to me. If you're going for a "human" personality for not only the Commanders, but apparently Dox (and at that point I assume everything else as well) then you'll have to explain why the grunts have knowledge of 21st century vocabulary when their function is to be a refined weapon of War.

Apologies, but the use of 21st century slang just makes it come accross as, to be blunt, poorly written. Rather than guiding me to ask any curious questions the text simply makes me confused.

Less ambiguous language. Such as a stream of of noughts and ones, or such as another swear word like "p*** off"?
Is the issue for your investment in the story that you don't believe sentient machines in the far future might swear, or that the Dox' 20th century English slang breaks the illusion for you? The former can be remedied for American readers, but I'm not about to try and write in 58th century English. Just see it as a loose translation.
You're right. It does seem like a rather big coincidence, doesn't it?
Don't assume that everything is going to have a personality (human or not).

The 20th century slang breaks the illusion. "Translation" or not, I just can't imagine war machines being impudent, insolent and using various mammalian bodily parts (that they don't have) as swear words. Unless you have a compelling reason to translate it in such a way, I don't see the point.

If you do have a compelling reason then I'd like to hear it, because otherwise I'm unlikely to want to read more.