Chapter Text
Save for the absent humming of pearls and the ever-so-often groaning of tired, shrugging machinery, the air within Pebbles' chamber was still. He paid it no mind, his thoughts were elsewhere.
A lizard baked in the sun on the outskirts of an old industrial plant; a pair of arthropods bumped against one another and began a spinning dance, and further still into the shadow of his structure a family of lantern mice curled together in preparation for the end of another cycle. Each creature took notice as the humidity rose and the crackling threat of rain hung in the air. At the first drop he watched as some shaggy, carnivorous plant dipped below its waters to hide. In the stagnant pools of last cycle's rain, leeches ceased their hunting and retreated into safer depths. Even jetfish, limitless in their intelligence, sensed that it was time to go.
The overseer he had been traversing through sent him a warning that conditions were becoming dangerous. The rest of his overseers had dipped into circuits below the surface, and he allowed his final overseer to follow them.
He opened his eyes, once more in his chamber. His observations were quickly logged, joining the cycles before it. Charts and graphs surrounded him, repeating back what he already knew, the menagerie of knowledge he had gained through extensive attendance. His attentions had been paid to little else for some time. Pebbles could almost imagine the chiding of his local senior, his peers, at his absence; the hypocrisy of wasted time, but imagination was all it was. He had made sure of it.
Five Pebbles opened a screen to begin summarizing this cycle's study. When the rains came and he could no longer observe, he documented what he'd seen. The habits of the many species of local reptiles; the ancestry of a strange variant of grub... His files were affixed with dozens of diagrams and illustrations, marking the many influences on the ecosystem. The activity resembled something his citizens had created long before their extinction; a collection of illustrations from a hundred different artists wrapped together in a single small folder, which he’d been surprised to find stored neatly in his archives. The majority of the records he held were political or religious in nature, so it was rare for him to find records of mundane crafts such as this so well preserved.
Pearls were the preferred tool to those high and boasted figures of influence which had frequented his attentions so demandingly in their time —the homes of the people used paper and stone, cheaply made and easily destroyed— It was the reason so little of them remained. The gaudy vices of the powerful infested the cracks of their world, pearls of extravagant color holding the most trivial of their communications, while those mundane memories deemed lesser were washed away.
It was typical, unavoidable, a bias repeated endlessly, and his frustration at the parading drivel of council sponsors locked into his memory banks was unavoidable in kind.
A chime from another screen shook Pebbles' attention from the journal. His overseers were notifying him of the waning rains. He quickly made a few final notes and returned his attention to the screen.
The connection took only a moment. His studies had left off at the edge of an eastern shoreline, where he’d been recording the area’s surviving cephalopods, and across the endless expanse of water he could see the visage of his impatience; the place he always returned to, for want or desperation.
Moon’s structure towered above the fog gathered at the surface, even now in its decrepit state. Remnants of a great bridge that once carried the distance between them now stretched to the sky, somehow intact despite the violence of her fall. He moved forward.
It took only a moment to reach the superstructure. His gaze traveled upwards, wincing at the rebar bent at unnatural angles. Groans sounded from within it, shaking the water as it shifted under the weight of itself, countless systems no doubt dutifully striving to repair her even now, unable to communicate with their God. Billions of purposed organisms, trapped within the cycle as all else was.
In the wake of her collapse, Pebbles had poured himself into his isolation. The loss of his one chance, his doom to a wretched eternity… He’d blocked all incoming communications, ignored every routine maintenance request from his facilities…
It was only when he felt a large growth of rot push through a neglected set of piping that he realized how stupid he’d been. His panic had done nothing but rob him of precious time, of the tools to fix the mess.
And so now he stood at the edge of Moon’s structure. The ruins buffeted the waves away in the cold command of indifference. Once again great black clouds rolled in from the distance… sooner than he’d like. Too early he felt the winded breathing of an approaching storm, skating off the surface of the waters now higher than design beneath him. There was always meant to be enough for two.
...He was stalling. Pathetic. He took another deep breath, and instructed the overseer to move forward.
The inside was well-lit. Between the punctured walls and luminous bacteria still inhabiting them, it wasn’t difficult to navigate. As it happened, Looks to the Moon had been built with far more love than he was. A group of ecologists had put a monumental effort into influencing her design, and anything that could be efficient within a closed ecosystem would be. The bacteria in the walls were a result of this movement, and while it worked spectacularly well it was never implemented in the design of Five Pebbles, for reasons unknown to him.
He moved his overseer further into the structure, passing a couple of scavenger cubs as they fought over some sort of fruit. With only a short moment of hesitation he continued to the central room, and zipped to a hidden groove within the walls of the chamber.
This was not the first trip he'd taken here. He had never actually let her see him, couldn't bear for this to be the way he faced her. In his fury at her betrayal he’d reveled in the sorry state she was in; her quick and succinct collapse was far preferred to the way he would be slowly broken down… but in the fury of his own he’d wrapped himself in solitude, a pitiful defense. He’d refused to reach out, for anger or regret... then it had been too long, and he had nothing to offer to bridge the gap he'd made.
Moon’s puppet was looking up at the sunlight streaming through a crack in the ceiling. Her umbilical stuttered upwards as if caught in some unconscious urge to lift her, but if Moon noticed she gave no indication.
It was only a few hundred cycles ago that she’d woken up; a sneeze amidst the eternity an iterator faced. A sickly pink creature sent by No Significant Harassment had revived her with a set of slag reset keys. A slugcat, he’d assumed, but the awful lesions and growths made it somewhat difficult to scan with certainty. It had visited Pebbles on its way back to NSH, and he had done what he could for it, but truthfully he knew very little about repairing such a physiology. His experience with keeping the rot at bay was limited to what his taboos would allow, and it would be a miracle if the creature had survived the trip.
Still, he was grateful.
Pebbles watched as his sister moved to the edge of the water to stick the tips of her feet in, swirling them around a school of tiny fish which resided in the surrounding waters. He once again returned to his contemplations. What could he do? All his esteemed mechanisms, his influence, built above the clouds and the creatures of the earth, he had calculated and tested and simulated and still he could think of nothing. All his boasted purpuse, all his processing power, and yet he could do nothing. He was an iterator. The breadth of his creation was to solve impossible problems. There must be a way to fix this.
Turning his overseer around, he traveled through the circuits of the structure. He dove beneath the waterlogged wires and flooded neural systems, surveying the damage for the thousandth time, and once again began to record everything he could find. New damages, new rust… Precious few systems could still be fixed. Even if he could find a way to miraculously lift her superstructure back into the sky, it would be unimaginable to repair what had been left rotting for so long.
He didn't know what to do. The structure loomed around him, the grandness of it overbearing, and in an instant he felt impossibly small. He could hear distant sounds amplified through the water. From far deeper into the structure came the echo of another piece breaking from her and falling to the sea floor; all around him was the muffled roar of the waves overhead and the indifferent movement of the millions of tiny creatures which had taken residence in her circuits and walls.
He was furious, but in all the time since the collapse he could never articulate why. Distantly he could feel the hands of his puppet clench as he remembered, as he played through the memories yet again. He'd spent so long thinking about what he would say to her, how she'd destroyed his best chance at finally being done. If she'd just— if he could've...
Void.
He sighed, listening for a moment to the sickening silence all around him. Another crack, the groan of metal bending in a way it shouldn't; the sound of something that can't die dying. He… wanted to fix what he’d broken.
An alarm blaring in his chamber shook him out of his musings. His overseer had begun panicking as the rains made the structure creak, threatening to buckle. It was only a creature in and of itself, after all. Pebbles waved away the screen and allowed the overseer to retreat.
Again he’d found nothing useful. Even if he called to her now, what would it matter if he had nothing to show for the experiment he'd sacrificed so much for? The experiment that he had sacrificed her for...
No. Void, he couldn't do that, not after everything. He had to offer something.
- - -
More cycles passed, unremarkably, and with little to show for his contemplations. All his ideas were worthless, half-considered things that would do nothing but prolong the inevitable, but still he continued. If the solution existed, and truly it might, it would kill him to figure it out after it was too late to implement.
And so he sat, and he pondered.
And... his mind began to wander. He thought about the help of the creature sent from No Significant Harassment, his nearest neighbor after Moon. NSH had always had an affinity for purposed organisms. Their advanced medical facilities made it easy, though the cancerous growths present on this last organism were more than enough to gauge how they were handling their eternity without mechanics. Regardless, the sheer volume of work that needed to be done to fix Moon would be far too large for a purposed organism, for a multitude of reasons.
It would take hundreds of cycles to design and grow their body. In his deteriorating facilities there was no guarantee that he would even be able to do it safely. He would have to teach them how to live, how to hunt, how to be a self-sufficient animal in an uncaring ecosystem…
He paused, before suddenly shooting up into the air, umbilical screeching with the speed.
“I—”
he—
Oh, but if—
It was ridiculous. It was a terrible, ridiculous idea that had little to no chance of working. It would take every moment of effort he was capable of, it was poorly thought out and stupid, terrible idea, echos damn him he…
He had an idea.
His facilities whirred to life. Power surged through them, barring the rot with more fervor than they’d felt hundreds of cycles. He had to do this right. He had to get this right the first time.
He pulled up dozens of screens, observing the viability of his remaining labs. To his left he brought the results of his scans on the little pink creature from before. The rot had been present, and in very advanced stages, but he had its information all the same. He dove into his archives looking for anything on the physiology of slugcats and imprinting everything he found onto his puppet’s immediate hard drive. Social behavior, food sources…
He sent his overseers to a slugcat colony that existed just outside the walls to record as much as they could. In the meantime, he was going to plan. He had been right before; a single purposed organism could never complete a job like this. It would need to be a small group, a family, each with their own set of skills painstakingly designed for the task ahead of them.
And together they could build something safe, and unremarkable, and far kinder than the grotesque, massive structures of sinew and metal made only to bear eternity and ponder ridiculous questions. This was the answer.
Maybe he couldn't fix everything, but maybe he didn't have to. Maybe she was too far gone, but he could preserve what was left of her.
He could get her out of there! He couldn’t fix the structure and could never build her back up to what she used to be, but maybe he could build her something brand new. Somewhere stable, high above the clouds or deep below the earth where the rumbling of the rain felt like the movement of railroads through her cities once again.
And maybe it would be better. She'd never liked it, he knew; the grandness of her supposed stature.
He took a moment to push the feeling of panic from his system. He couldn’t rush this, couldn’t cut corners like last time.
It would be perfect. He would fix everything. It was possible... it was finally possible.
(Author's note: This work is currently undergoing a complete rewrite, so if you're reading this, congrats! You're one of the last few! The final few chapters will likely remain unchanged, save for a few tidbits here and there, but the first 5 chapters or so will be relatively unrecognizable. The story will remain the same, so no worries there. Thanks for reading!)