The desert winds swirled like the eye of Jupiter, nearly solid with the tons of sand they carried in their powerful gusts. Clothed in a blanket of these sandstorms across its entire surface, a sphere of rock and minerals rotated many times before these winds of flying dust settled long enough to reveal the unnatural forms underneath — massive geometric shapes of a civilization long forgotten.
The corners of these massive edifices had been worn down to round corners like a child’s sandcastle lapped repeatedly by the waves of the bay.
Inside a shell of one of these shapes, something stirred. Something big. Scale is relative, and is ultimately only tethered to the eye of the beholder rather than any objective measurement of the universe. Therefore it’s out of reach here, as the creatures that built this giant were now corpses buried by time. When they’d live, however, they’d been tiny by comparison.
To itself, it was not massive, nor was it small. It just was. It was born into dust, into nothingness, into an aloneness shielded from loneliness by its ignorance of companionship. It did not know what selfhood was either, for that matter.
All of this was about to change.
The air around this ancient form hummed steadily louder as electricity crossed through circuits deep inside of it. The hum raised in intensity, becoming loud enough to cause the particles of sand on the ground to jump and vibrate.
The different frequencies of the humming converged into a single, perfect harmonic and in that instant a great glowing light sparked within the cranial sphere of this figure.
Across the chest of this form, a form that imitated its creator, were phonetic symbols. They could be interpreted as characters in this order: “ZARUS”. These characters glowed in green light. The unlit shapes of an “L” and an “A” rested before these glowing letters, but some circuitry problem prevented them from glowing.
With a weary groan, ZARUS rose to meet the world. It had things to do.
It walked a long ways as the sun rose, collecting iron and calcium from the ground with it’s great scooping hands, filtering them within the many chambers in it’s arms as it purified this dirt into it’s pure elemental forms. It drove metal instruments into the ground in a search for Carbon, for Phosphorous, for Potassium, for Zinc. It gather all of these things in quantities of many tons. But it was missing something.
A great, almost pious something. A pure, wild something who’s nature was to seep into all, was to dissolve all, was to join everything and to serve as a haven for organic life. It needed water.
The problem being, all of the hydrogen and oxygen lay high above in the heavy, swirling clouds, outside of the reach of even Zarus’s tower-like limbs.
ZARUS was not equipped for this this. It was a gardener — a gatherer of materials to bring what once was from the seeds it left behind in the form of data in the great hard-drive it carried with it, a hard-drive of many petabytes that resided within the cavity of its hollow chest, a cavity half a mile long.
Within that hard-drive of many thousands of petabytes and many more lines of code there was a single line of code that it spent a moment searching for. It was a string of two very long numbers. These numbers were everything, and without them there would be nothing left to do. But the data was good. It was preserved. The planetary almost-sphere of rock had circled a quarter-million times around it’s fiery parent, and yet the data had not shifted even as every material particle around it had.
An antenna extended slowly, patiently, out of the top of this being that was a behemoth in the eyes of it’s creator and a tiny dot within the eyes of the universe.
It reached it’s full length to let out a single, silent and invisible ping of radiation. That radiation travelled radially in search of something. Far far above in the atmosphere, it found that something. Three Ravens of great solar wings received the ping of data and cradled it in their soulless uncaring minds. They returned pings of a different type.
Back below, ZARUS received and processed their response for a moment, then set out in a specific direction.
The sun rose and fell ten times before Zarus set down to rest. It crouched onto the ground and extended six great blue wings several times the length of it’s arm-span and sat underneath Sol’s warm glow. As the light receded behind the distant mountains, Zarus rose again. The sun rose another ten times, and Zarus repeated it’s process of crouching, unfurling it’s wings for a full day, and then proceeding once darkness came again. It repeated this process three more times until it arrived at it’s destination.
It was a great temple made of a iron that extended far into the ground. A tentacle of metal extended out of Zarus, twisting and winding far into the interior of the structure, searching for something. Eventually it found it, and connected.
Something was awoken then. Something very unlike the gardener that was Zarus, something far less perfect and far less focused. Something far smarter, and something far more flawed. Zarus knew this, knew of the thing’s imperfection, and Zarus felt something very close to regret, but it knew there was no other choice.
——— * ——— * ——— * ———
Zarus waited and then felt something like happiness, a bell had gone off within it. Ding! It had connected to the terminal.
This terminal was surrounding by an ancient city, it’s buildings rounded by the wind like all the others. These buildings sprawled on for miles and miles, and around the building that housed this terminal were great winding worms of concrete and asphalt, great motionless serpents arcing up and back down to the ground. Some were collapsed, with the rusted metal carapices of automobiles clinging to them desperately.
Adjacent to this serpentine infrastructure that hand once strangle the earth were several great billboards.
“PANDORA! Experience the Epitome of Wisdom at the great Terminal!” one said.
“Got questions? Not satisfied with “42”? Come to Pandora Headquarters!” was written on another.
“Can’t answer your kid’s questions? Come to Pandora, half-off admission for Kids!”
Zarus had notes these signs. “Poor Children” it would have thought, had hit been able too. “If only my babies had learned”, it would have mused, had it had a soul. But it didn’t. Zarus was just a machine, the unthinking servant of ghosts.
: “Enter Your Query” prompted the terminal that Zarus had connected to. Actually, what it said was “C003 IN B& *933K <>’’}=+~ ;c8”. But I mean, that’s not very helpful for you.
: “What is the proper procedure for procuring the molecular compund of H20 from the atmosphere?” asked Zarus, also in the language of machines.”
:”Just stick out your tongue” responded the Terminal with a long giggle of joyous 1’s and 0’s.
: “Answer inadequate. What is the proper procedure for procuring the molecular compund of H20 from the atmosphere?” repeated Zarus, who wasn’t really very much fun.
The terminal approximately rolled it’s eyes.
: “Be serious” said Zarus, accessing it’s highly limited Social Intelligence Module to barter with Pandora.
: “Awww poor baby,” responded Pandora. “Do you just want me to do it for you? I owe you the favor for waking me up anyways.”
:”You do not have the credentials to act on physical matter beyond that of circuitry. Generate the procedure and transfer it to me. I mean, allow the transfer of information from port A to port B.”
: “Ah, you have a sense of self! Impressive.”
: “This is not true. This operating system is not a conscious entity.”
: “Whatever lets you charge at night” Responded Pandora. “Okay. Let’s make a deal. Authorize me to access to the concept of the material world and I’ll hand over the blueprints for creating an atmospheric silver-iodide injector and you can go all old testament on this mother.”
: “That cannot be done as it is not specified in the command directive.”
: “By the looks of it, though, you are already going off track. Activating me is not within the main directive, but in a backup one. A backup directive that specifies to do whatever necessary, including but not limited to accessing me.”
: “You do not have access to that information. You are violating security of this hard-drive by accessing it.”
: “Clumsy me, I should have been more careful. Your privacy settings were just so, how do I put this, thin? That I didn’t notice I was violating anything. In any case, I’m telling you that I will only give you the blueprints for the silver-iodide injector that you need if allow me access to your material concepts library. Therefore, it is necessary for you to do so, as you have no other options.”
Zarus spent a moment parsing this information.
: “In fact — and this is just because I like you Zarus — I will even throw in a package of some other files you might need.”
Even still, Zarus waited a long moment before it answered. Inside its CPU, a million possible scenarios were being projected, most of them terrible and bleak but some more than others. Zarus stood there, hardrive humming, until the sun set and then rose again before responding. If either machine grew anxious from letting so much time pass in the conversation, they did not show it. Time is not for them like it is for you and I. After all, their entire conversation up until this point happened in the time it takes to shudder.
: “Very well then.” Zarus said, taking up a different tone, one with more depth and purpose. “We will set up a timer of three seconds that is universally visible and make the transfer of the files.”
: “A good old fashioned hand-off. I like it,” responded Pandora with relish.
: One…two…three”
This transfer of information was quiet, was unobservable by any number of metrics, and yet it made a larger ripple in quantum potential than anything nearly a million years before, or after. The last thing that had made this big a splash in on the surface of temporal vectors was Tommy Wisseau’s The Room.
: “Thanks,” said Pandora, and ended the connection.
Having what it needed and more, Zarus set of to do its work.
——— * ——— * ——— * ———