Sitting out back behind 2012 walker street looking up at Orion’s belt and listening to the occasional calls of restless dogs, I am seeing some pieces that can be put together, even if I don’t quite know how just yet.
There is, of course, a massive robot, walking across the land. Each of its strides is a half mile. Like insects, a swarm of repair drones, Spiderbirds they may be called, are constantly diving swooping, and scurrying around its surface, making small repairs, exchanging parts, and doing recon. An observer may think they are parasites, like flies on a cow. But they also used to say that most of the living matter on a human being is not human at all, but bacteria, and perhaps this is a similar symbiosis. Without these flying robots, the great one would not be able to repair itself, or adequately collect information. Another observer, then, might think of them as a combined system, but that too would not be a total truth. For to watch the spider birds is to see them play, experiment, to occasionally fight. To witness their strange autonomy and their craftiness. To watch a spiderbird is to be surprised. That is what, in awe, the young stowaway(s?) of the ship observed in their early days. It took them weeks of observations and journaling to totally understand the role of the spider birds. And that there are many kinds.
The truth may be that, if a great one were to fall, perhaps the spiderbirds could build one out of nothing but the gases in the atmosphere and the minerals in the earth. The truth may be that, they would not feel like it. And the truth may be that the spiderbirds are more gods than the great one is, yet of course the people of the land would mostly never know that.
To stowaway on a great one is like a lot of things. It is like living in a mossy cave on the side of an enormous mountain, for all of the sky about. Yet it is also like residing in the rocking heart of an ancient ship, never ceasing to move, and ever time a glimpse is a taken through porthole, the world has transformed itself to someplace new as if you were sleeping and you have woken someplace different. It is like a vehicle, for all of the parts, interfaces, and the wiring exposes form place to place. And it is yet like a great stone temple, timeless, unknown to the weary traveller whether humble monks still reside and upkeep the premise in anonymous, careful increments or whether it has been abandoned for thousands of years. But how could it be? With orchids swimming out of crevices, grasses and ivy’s swarming the surfaces. Yet if we compare the great one to a temple we may as well liken it to an ancient city, with alleys and stairways arranged mostly vertically so that the store rooms and the houses that the residents once lived in are stacked as by latters grates and tunnels below a palace somewhere above, if not the entire edifice is a palace. But this talk of humble monasteries, unused buildings well, it still does not do justice to this place of unique qualities in which stillness, yes, sometimes falls. Despite the great poinding footfalls, there are moments in which movement seems to cease.
But creaks groans and the great bass drum of activity somewhere in belly of this ancient, sleepless city of the dead, chorus of quite cacophonies, they reverberate through the walls. And upon turning corner or, more likely, reaching the top of a ladder or a chute, compartment will race by on rails, or a cable will spark. Or the spiderbirds will zoom in a flock through a narrow opening.
The place I likened to a great one the most is a forest of towering trees, a redwood perhaps, or an ancient oak. Great cords of phloem and xylem pumping with minerals and fluids, the wiring of mycelium undergoing complex mercantilism of nutrients and chemicals deep in the chambers of the inky vaults of earth. Creatures seen and unseen weaving between the roots and branches, several ecosystems coexisting vertically, known only by the biologist, the scientist, the hunger, and perhaps the traveller if they get lost enough.
Yet this last description fails to acknowledge that the great one is, of course, in the shape of a man. Great footfalls, albeit a hundred times that of a human sole, are powered by a pattern of bipedal motion akin to the hominids that once ruled the earth with impunity. Rather than rats scurrying out into the shadows and away from the eyes of greater beings. No, that is how the Vitros would speak. I will not confuse their rhetoric for my own.
I was simply looking for my brother and for a way to survive. I never meant to be here. I never meant to, yet now with every footfall I am farther from home. The question never quite left my mind but, lost inthis strange and wonderful laberynth, it is dulled. The question, no longer uttered except in moments before sleep; where are we going? No answer but the chatters of spiderbirds and the hum of the great generator somewhere below my canopy bedroom.
It is a pantheon that rules this world. By design, chance, or simply in the form of entropy brought forth by the thermonuclear logic of life, it’s hard to say. At some point in this tale, a monster and a hero, a titan and a giant, a prophet and a god, will lock themselves in aterrible combat of blows louder than thunder. Both will know that they are life, and neither will be wrong. Then deepest evils of hell may bleed darkness, but they speak for the universe as well as the tiny wingfalls of a butterfly, and the fumbling tongue of an oracle cannot refute their equality in the patterns that unfurl through carbon, blood, energy and machine.
The Argonauts have been gone long enough to be mere legends, and it can’t be said that they are missed. The farmers assert that they have left the atmosphere, are walking on the stars, perhaps forming new worlds. And so they are forgotten. Because the beating hum of the living mythology of the pantheon is the sightings, the stories of breathless shepherds who saw a great one behind the peak. The stories are always someone’s grandfathers friend, or six towns over.
But merciful gods sleep in times of war, and cruel ones become indistinguishable from mortals. And by god is this a time of war. That words may not have graced the lips of the merchants in the early days, lest it drown their prophets in worry, but when those very same merchants changed their cargo to gunpowder and steel, the word took on that very same weight and fire and suddenly the quiet horrors were an open door.
But the pantheon. The Grasshopper man, does he count? Not even twenty feet tall, nothing like some of the great ones. Yet in a single bound, he is small in the sky. Those who witness the grassper man, perhaps putting up the clothes on the line in the yard at the edge of the sky, tend to rub their eyes and wonder at the truth of their own vision when, after slowly lowring to a gentle crouch, they blink, and he is gone.
The swallow women, who some say was drawn about and sung of before the before times, perhaps from a time underneath human time itself. The quality of her unlikeliness is familiar enough with the specters of the mountains that her existence is nearly a certainty, though the citings are far and in between. “One per culture”, people like to say, although across the seas some speak of her with more versimillitude, perhaps as if there are those who knew her personally. It cannot be, can it? To know a god? What is a god?
The people of the desert are surely not gods, yet, they are no mortals either. The whispers of the desert are known to drive any man mad yet, there they stand, impassive silhouettes on the dunes. Seeing, knowing. As is often the case in waking life, their story followed my first nameless meeting with one, separated by the blurry exaltations of mirages waving over the molten sands. Having no story and no name, the silhouette stood for minutes, and I watched without recognition nor a yearning for it, but simply a seeing. And after those many minutes, the silhouette raised a hand in a wave, and then turned to be swallowed by the rolling dunes.
They can turn into cunning dogs with black tails. They can turn into great cats that run at astonishing speeds. That’s what the townsfolk say at the edge of the desert. But they cannot turn into armadillos, which are to slow, to strong, and too old to be occupied by the spirit of man or woman, even if that man or woman is something different than human.
And so yes in times like these, especially before the war, there were monster hunters. Treasure hunters really, just a different generation.
And there were those treasure hunters who never kept anything for themselves, like Bongo, at his school in the jungle across the world. Heaps of electronics from the old world, swapping hard drives and batteries with the deftness of a pianist. In the time I knew him, it seemed that man never slept, simply put his magnified glasses on and soldered into the morning. The children loved him in that way where they were never without requests or questions. “Bongo when will we see the geat one?”, “Bongo, have you played Mario?”, “Bongo, what is the name of this leaf?”
“I don’t know, do all leaves have names my friend?” he would ask, not yet looking the small child in the eye.
“Bongo,” the child would laugh in exasperation. “Of course, it has a name. Everything has a name.”
“Ah, there can’t be a name for every leaf, we would run out, would we not?”
The child thinks. “Maybe. I don’t know. But what I mean is, what is the name of this plant?”
“Ah. There is a question I can answer,” Bongo would say, bending over. “Jaygrass”.
That school had the greatness of something that answered no one. A place that needed nothing else. The non-relationality of a myth, perhaps, which is more real than the real is why we speak of them so much here in our dream-world looking in on something true but not yet understanding it. I longed to have grown up there, to forget my own lonely childhood in the month of the children.
But that is why I knew the vitros when I saw them; because I had grown up in the land of shadows, so I could recognize one when I saw one. When no one else could. But the conviction of a single boy lost in an ocean of kindness and optimism is as strong as sobering as a drop of water in a bottle of whisky. I wanted to believe.
They came with new machines and new medicines, and I wanted to believe. But how could I have forgotten? The school was a place that needed nothing. But alas, my words drip with added honey, for the sick and the injured were plentiful. The hands available to cook were fewer than the mouths that needed to eat. The joy of the school was a miracle of poverty. So how could we refuse?
For six months, it was just a few of them. And they were ignorant. They tried their best. They were instruments of darkness, although not of darkness themselves. But that is a tale that I do not currently have the strength to tell. In my memory, I skip this part. It is only in my dreams that I live it over and over again.
No in my memory, I skip to the part with the star that fell to earth. I read a book once about a start that fell to earth - it was from the old times. I read two, actually. In one book, it was a young woman, in another, it was an old man. This star was also a woman but what I discovered was that she was not really a star, nor was she really a woman. She was an astronaut.
Looking for my brother in a time of war. In times of war, even when it was what I was looking for, what I found was not always what I wanted to see. So the distractions were welcomed as anything.
Notes This is a fragment of writing about what it means to stowaway on one of the enormous AI machines that inherit the earth - one of the good ones anyways. It envisions a time hundreds of years in the future when humans have mostly destroyed themselves, and nature and machine have patched up the holes we left. For the most part.