Memories

In a secluded meadow, where love once bloomed amidst the wildflowers, the vestiges of forgotten promises lay broken. My weary form stood as Witness to our sanctuary, once vibrant, was now shrouded in silence.

Though the silence was an old companion, a harbinger of the void that etched itself within me when She chose the luminous whispers that rent the night sky. Those whispers, laced with traitorous tongues, beckoned to something hungry within Her. It was an Uplifting, they said, a transcendence into the ethereal flight among the stars. But to me, it was an eclipse, a devouring of the warmth that once made us whole.

I recall the final moments, when in Her eyes danced a myriad of lights not born of this world, Her raven tresses caressed by the night breeze as if bidding Her farewell. “Won’t you join me beyond the veil?” Her lilting voice murmured. But the earth called my name, its ancient rumbling a dirge for what could not be. There, at the crossroads of earth and ether, I held Her one last time.

And then She was gone.

In Her departure, the flowers bowed their heads in mourning. The skies darkened as though the heavens themselves were ashamed.

I sought refuge in the lonely places. I listened to the winds howl, blue-green waves break against cliffs, burning fires crackle in the dead of night, hoping to discern Her voice amidst the symphony of the forgotten. They said they would still speak to us. I traced Her name upon the bark of ancient sentinels, praying for their gnarled wisdom to quell the tempest within my gut.

In the meadow where our love took root, I erected a cairn, a monument of weathered stones and frail flowers. Each stone bore the weight of my longing, and each flower, the delicate memory of Her touch. I sang to the meadow, my voice a shattered echo against the impenetrable quietude.

As the Seasons ebbed, I became a shade, a remnant bound to the meadow. The world shifted through the empty space between stars, as shadows and lights danced their eternal dance upon its face, but in my heart remained an unchanging twilight, born of her absence.

In the end, I was but a silent Witness, my soul a vessel for a love that transcended the realms. Through the dark beauty of my endless vigil, I kept a fragment of Her light, a beacon and a sanctuary, in the hollowed depths of my being. There, in the bittersweet embrace of yearning and memory, I whispered Her name to the stars, waiting for the return that never came.

Daniel awoke from a 108-year sleep, and the city of Jerusalem remained desolate. Screaming memories from a distant land kept him awake, despite his desperate old bones crying out for rest. He was slow to stand, and he was even slower to move, but there was much to do.

Though the ancient city still decayed from its humbling destruction thousands of years ago, a great oak tree still stood in its lone garden. Black-husked, it lurched over the ruins with silver foliage, preventing any sunlight from reaching the center of the city. Out of spite and pettiness, perhaps. Each leaf was once-said to be a testament of the immortality promised to the now-dead men whose city this still was. It was a mockery of Elijah, but at least they remembered him.

Those with the screaming memories, however, would soon forget Elijah the Everlasting. The seas and the beasts had forgotten him long ago, as did each grain of sand and each blade of grass, but they all bore the defilement of his unnatural passing. As the man with screaming memories did, as all earthly things did. Elijah’s demise scarred even the empty space that hangs between the stars. But all the same, they had forgotten him, except the frantic primates who clung to the title of Humanity, in place of the godhood Elijah had once offered them.

The trees possessed the corruption as well, though they were cursed as Daniel was: they could never forget. Like Daniel, they were witnesses to Elijah’s apotheosis, they heard his command to reshape Gaia into a godless realm, they felt him fall from the sky, and they buried his bones somewhere so deep even a god could not find them.

There were other entities so cursed as to remember these things, besides Daniel and the trees, but they were not organic creatures. In the image of ancient gods, machine intelligence was crafted and left behind by Elijah and his Constructors. He scattered them across the planet as witnesses for the Inheritors, the new stewards of the planet. Then Daniel and his ilk came and sealed the great machines away...

At the heart of Jerusalem, Daniel found ZERO, the first-created of such intelligence. The machine’s boot protocols greeted Daniel with a reckoning of the time passed since the age of Elijah and his Constructors.

Temple Epoch 43126300800

5876 years Since the Reign of the Yellow Emperor

3510 years Since Alexander Entered Babylon

…

A descending list of epochs continued, measuring out the time passed in all the ways Humankind had ever reckoned it. Daniel’s eyes scanned the log for the only one that was of any concern to him.

...

The next glacial period is expected to begin in approximately 44,000 years.

With that confirmation, Daniel left Jerusalem to find the man with screaming memories. He walked through the inferno that burned eternal around the city, bathing in its flame yet unmarked and unscathed by its touch. He walked the path alone, as he always had, and as he always would.

He passed by thousands of blackened trees, then the plagued waters of dying seas, and at last a great desert that stretched east to west across all the lands, before he finally found a land where civilization still clung to the earth like a tumor on a heart. This frontier was claimed by the descendants of those men and women who had denied the godhood offered by Elijah. As Daniel observed his memory of those first dissidents, who Elijah named the Inheritors, he came upon an unfinished wall that stretched for miles across the land. Diverse graffiti in dead dialects defaced it: “Fuck the man”, “Don’t look up”, and “I love you mom”.

At a methodical pace, Daniel did not slow or stop again for sixty days. Not for sand nor snow, not mountain nor sea. And at the end of his journey, he found himself on an Arctic tundra, where the man with the screaming memories had lived his entire life.

A lasting frost nestled itself deep within Daniel’s rain-wet beard. He remembered this land as it was centuries ago, when there was nothing but heat and death to be found on the island. Then came a time when the land was verdant and lush, even during the sunless seasons. Now the glaciers began to creep forward once again. This was by Elijah’s design, the tundra jungles and the phantom glaciers, a synthetic world that would mimic nature, mimicries of the harshness of long winters and the blessings of new springs.

But the Everlasting perished long ago, leaving behind an alien world ruled by proxy masters, by passionless programs and protocols, deviating now only for the sake of the cephalopods and the insects. The primates were allocated little no value in the system, only their collective continued existence made them each individually worthwhile.

Except those like the man with screaming memories. Something Beyond called to Daniel and pushed him toward the man. Daniel watched the man as he went about his routine. He was too busy struggling to plow a small patch of ice-encrusted soil to notice Daniel’s shadow over him. A woman, bound invisibly to the man by a hundred shackles of hope, corralled enslaved animals into a small caging of near-barren grassland.

As the sun began to fall from the sky, the two took shelter and rested within a small cottage. Brown wooden walls surrounded them with little decoration. Brown wooden chairs, brown wooden tables, brown wooden dressers, brown wooden beds. These people did not paint, nor sew, nor write, nor dance. They grew plants. They enslaved animals. They crafted tools. And they slept.

Daniel committed to his rituals as they wrapped themselves in blankets of fleece and slept through the bitter Arctic winds. He dreamt the man’s dreams with him, visions of human survival, of natural history, of technological progress. The man exalted these visions with reverence others reserved exclusively for the divine. His fondest memories were that of innovation, his bitterest traumas were that of failures.

Daniel walked their land as a man who had lived for millennia. He stepped gently on the cracks in their floorboards as a man who was now as integral to the natural order of the world as the air and the sea. He waited in the shadows of their home as a man whose genetic structure had been replaced by machines their thousand-year descendants would scarcely dream of. He was there as their savior. And yet, even with all their reverence of what he truly was, their ignorance drove them to fear.

The man’s mother screamed when Daniel took him. His father fought. His wife fought harder. But it did not matter. They always fought him, they would always fight him. Yet never would he be slain or defeated.

Daniel escaped the silenced town as a ghost, the man slung over his shoulder like a heap of produce. He fed the man, he gave him water, and he calmed the man when he could, as 60 more days passed. He found the path back somehow even more desolate, and the two entered the Eternal City from which Daniel arose, its sacredness a long-lost memory only Daniel and the trees were burdened to keep. It was here that Daniel laid the man on the altar of the great machine of synthetic yet sovereign intelligence—the Lord of the Sacred Land. A giant 20-meters high, crafted of obsidian, rhyolite, and granite. The machine grabbed hold of the man’s struggling body with bony fingers that mocked the flesh of the Inheritors.

Daniel remembered static images of fires and affection.

He watched the body fall limp as something Beyond called to the cybernetics embedded deep within his bones: The emulation process was successful. The empty vessel would be burned until there was nothing left, but this process had become routine and instinctual. His duty was fulfilled. Now to rest again. He returned to the ruins at Temple Mount, fell to his knees, and bowed his head.

But there was another feeling within Daniel as his eyes closed. Was it…pity? Sorrow? Fear? A long lost friend, whatever it was, now a stranger. A friend who fled the moment Daniel realized it was there. He must find it again. One day. Soon. After another dreamful slumber.

Daniel awoke 108 years later and needed to find the woman.

He traveled to the plateau between the Yenisei and Lena rivers, where they spoke Daniel’s name as they prayed to the sky. The Siberians who inhabited these lands once shared their ancestral homeland with the Great Khans, the Hua Ren, and the many others who migrated north after the Fire Tide. Then one like Daniel came, many cycles ago, and ended their union in a generation of war. Now their minds lingered only on their ancestral differences and imaginary lines drawn in the snow.

The girl desired peace for all, and she had the means to see her dream through. She invoked Daniel’s name often in her prayers. She even sang to him as he approached. Not to his physical presence, as this she could not detect until he decided it would be so, but to the idea of him that the Inheritors had crafted: Daniel, Angel of Memory and Dreams.

When he spoke her name back, she spoke his one last time. She did not scream, cry, or fight. She only ran. She ran as fast as the wolves she befriended and lept over obstacles like the wild bison her father broke for mounts. She was faster than even Daniel could manage.

But for however fast her body was, her mind ran faster. He witnessed her memories of childhood friends and their races around the tundra-meadows and the great Arctic jungles. They would pretend to be great hunters, chasing down a rabbit, imagining it to be a great bear.

Daniel committed to his rituals once more. A slow chill dove into him, colder even than the arctic mountain’s seaward winds. A mist enveloped his presence, then lunged outward from him. Within only six of her heartbeats, its icy tendrils wrapped around and devoured her body, lulling her into a lasting sleep. She fell hard onto the frosted fields of ice and ancient bones, beneath trees who might’ve remembered Daniel from a time before he was called ‘Angel of Oblivion’. He thanked the Lights silently for never teaching the trees to speak.

Daniel brought the woman to the city, to the machine, and laid the slumbering maiden on the last bed she would ever sleep on. The great machine hanging above whirred and spun. In a moment’s passing, all fire faded from her body, and nothing was left that could be called Human.

In her life, the girl would have called this process the Witch Harvest—an elegant and inaccurate name for the Cycle, given by those who deemed themselves Apostles of the Angels. Yet there was no elegance in this, Daniel knew.

Exhaustion overwhelmed him. Daniel slept, not for the thousand years he needed, but for exactly 108 years, and awoke to the same fallen city and the same burning fires and black ash he had long grown familiar with. He followed the path north through the firestorm once more. Bridging the difference between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, Daniel found the Gates of Alexander. Life did not inhabit this part of the world, as it once did. Only Daniel and his kind passed through the threshold to Human civilization from the other side.

In the land just past the threshold, Daniel found an old man who recognized Daniel’s face before Daniel could even recognize his. The man had waited a long time for this, and he came with Daniel peacefully and silently. Yet he screamed when the machine touched him. They always screamed, even those who slept, and even those who came peacefully. Something Beyond made Daniel ignore them. But Daniel heard a reminiscent voice within this man’s howls that he could not ignore. It made Daniel wonder—it reminded him of something important.

It reminded him of Elijah. The system purged the feelings of righteousness from Daniel, but they could not make him forget Elijah.

Daniel slept for another 108 years. He reaped what was sown and returned to the Eternal City of Jerusalem. Again and again. He felt nothing and slept for another 108 years. Again and again.

And again...

And again...

And again…

...

As he awoke once more, an iridescent dragonfly flew past him. Daniel felt something. He felt something. Something Beyond destroyed his memory of the word for it, but the feeling lingered. He could sense them trying to tear it from him, but they couldn’t. It was there. Perhaps it would leave him again, but this time—this time he would remember the feeling more than the words.

ZERO’s runtime protocols displayed the date.

Temple Epoch 84024086400

7172 years Since the Reign of the Yellow Emperor

4806 years Since Alexander Entered Babylon

...

The next glacial period is expected to begin again in approximately 4 years.

As his eyes read over the bottom of the log, he understood what he was feeling. Dreams and memories assailed his mind like war, coming to him from frostbound islands near the North Pole that the Inheritors now called Tereshkova. But these visions were not like the other visions. Daniel could think of only an ancient poem befitting the fleeting images in his mind’s eye:

“...a goddess of no great frame, yet superior to the others and the eldest of them. And they all made a fierce fight over one poor wretch, glaring evilly at one another with furious eyes and fighting equally with claws and hands. By them stood Darkness of Death, mournful and fearful, pale, shriveled, shrunk with hunger, swollen-kneed. Long nails tipped her hands, and she dribbled at the nose, and from her cheeks blood dripped down to the ground. She stood leering hideously, and much dust sodden with tears lay upon her shoulders...“