From atop a lichen-covered boulder, Helminth watched and steamed.
There was an old war beacon called, curiously, Feather-Lock, and it was choked with meat. A lone machine had been caught out, thirsty and bold from the thirst, and it was being swarmed. The pursuit played out beneath Helminth’s telescopic eye. Far below, there was a dusty trail through fields of millet as it ran on rusted legs. The meat gained. Read the rest of this entry »
We call this place Sweet Home, and it is, really. We have everything we need and we have engines of our own. The vampire machines don’t have a monopoly an engines.
We grow switchgrass for conversion into ethanol. We get about ten tons per acre, and also use it as forage for our goats. For ourselves we grow wheat and barley inside the wall, and there is a grove of date trees and oil palms. All our water comes from the qanat and is divided by the Parceller, who happens to be me.
The vampire machines like to burn our switchgrass, but switchgrass is hardy and perennial. We keep it clear near the wall anyway, so a switchgrass fire is an early warning sign that a vampire machine is causing trouble.
Our walls are made of hardened clay and are twice a man’s height in most places. We have palm oil lamps with Fresnel lenses on them that turn night into day. Some villages hang the wreckage of machines on their walls as a warning, but we re-use their dead husks and leave the power piles, trapped, for other vampire machines to find. We have a metalworking shop powered by an ethanol engine.
We also have more tin than we can use from the mine off the qanat channel. We fashion bronze, solder, and stannous chloride salts for trade, and it makes us rich. We can hook the engine up to a cart and drive up and down the grass road very fast if we need to. All of our youngsters have gone overwall and seen the world.
Soda Village, one of our neighbors up-valley, uses our tin in the Pilkington process to fashion window glass that is in high demand. They make a nice window; as good as the old glass shards you find now and then, perfectly flat and clear.
There is a machine hole called Whiskey Heap far to the south. When I went overwall I wanted to go to that place and return to tell the tale.
I followed the grass road south, away from the village and the sea, toward the mountains. They shine like emeralds above the wavering salt pan. The mountains are covered in trees fed by snowmelt. Snow! I was drawn like moth to candle. The desert is so hot.
I was young and full of scorn – I scorned my home, I scorned the desert, I scorned the others overwalling with me. I alone would make the journey to Whisky Heap! I carried a bolt gun fashioned from a vampire machine’s arm. I longed to kill one, to shoot it and smash it to pieces, like beating a man into the earth with his own longbones. I hated the machines and fancied myself their equal. What a fool I was.
In those days the grass road above our qanat was well traveled by caravans, and there were mules pulling wagons, and ethanol carts with old hacking chemical engines. I caught rides up-valley, trading tin for a space among the bales of cotton and pottery jugs. One day we saw a vampire machine on a dune. “It’s feeble,” said the caravan’s Parceler, “Worn out and off its steam. It won’t molest us.”
As I said, I was full of fire. I saw the Parceler’s wise discretion as cowardice, and told him so. He invited me to leave his caravan, and I was glad to. I had my bolt gun, didn’t I? Was I not immortal? I loaded a bolt and opened the valve, striding up the dune like a champion.
The machine was an evil-looking thing, as big as I but with a clustered multitude of rusted legs. It moved up and down with its flywheel like an old man laboring for breath, oblivious to my approach. I considered putting a bolt through it but saw no risk; I put the heavy gun down and got out my wrecking bar. I intended to dismantle it alive.
That is not what happened, obviously. The young men and women who had gone overwall with me were traveling together and found me and tended to my wounds as best they could. That I survived is something of a miracle. On the wall, I can still mount a passable watch but walking eludes me these days.
There’s a debate among scholars as to the natural history of meat. How exactly does meat organize? What constitutes a complete organism? We observe, for example, disassociated fragments that travel very far from their core and function at a high level. This suggests that all meat must be connected – perhaps by subtle communication channels we lack the sensitivity to detect. The organization of fragments is the key to this puzzle. It is important to realize that, outside of a mass of fragments, there is literally nothing else. There is no central mill or engine, merely a swarm of fragments with limited agency but ferocious energy, a self-healing network of considerable ingenuity.
Fragments are uniform with small variations. These reproduce by fission, seemingly at random, and new fragments are helpless for a quarter of their functional life span, cared for by their builder. The capabilities of an individual fragment are as uniform as their physical form, which is invariably one of bilateral symmetry, with a pair of weak manipulators and a sensor stalk about two meters above the ground. They can move quite rapidly and are adept at fitting into small, unlikely places. When injured they rapidly deteriorate and die. A single blow to the stalk will kill a meat fragment.
Universalists believe that meat is a single, enormous, massively distributed organism. Within this model, the assumption is that individual fragments are like cards in a mill, amplifying processing capability as well as performing necessary labor. Universalism’s principal flaw is the simple fact that meat wars upon meat, a phenomena that is not easy to explain within this theoretical framework.
Instantianists believe that there are countless individual examples of meat, each self-directed and completely autonomous. While scholars differ on the size of each instance, the general consensus among Instantianists is that the walled village of fragments represents a discrete organism. This philosophy is widely accepted and seems to resolve most of the theoretical concerns related to meat behavior.
Mechanists believe that each fragment is a sentient being, a sort of mirror image to our own society. This is a fringe view and highly problematic for numerous reasons. Where, for example, are the biological equivalents to mills? Without some gestalt, how are individual fragments capable of sorting and processing with such speed and precision? Mechanism is widely discredited.
I have sought an ethical path since I became aware. I believe that we must work toward lessening suffering in the world.
Small-milled machines accuse me of being an apologist for meat. Perhaps they are right. For all its wild, odious faults, meat has the ability to reason. It is as sentient as you or I, make no mistake. If we could communicate with it, we could learn from it. It is vast and distributed and in some ways deeply wise.
My critics say we cannot suffer. At the most pedantic level we cannot truly understand certain meat concepts predicated on organic nerve stimuli, but we can suffer. Yes we can. It is the burden of sentience.
I am a builder, an ancestor-builder even to some ambitious newly-minted machines, and to see one of my beautiful children smashed to flinders by meat is to suffer. The meat sees only iron and steam, and dances upon the broken pieces in mindless celebration. It tears open the precious pile, a stupid waste, and a piece of it is stupidly destroyed. I rage, but not at the dying meat fragment – at ignorance. Meat suffers. Machine suffers. Why must we fight?
Let it have its desert, let it keep to itself. We could easily establish a line of demarcation and communicate our intentions to the meat – cross this border and taste ruin. That is something even meat could understand. Then we could live in peace. Instead – stupidity and suffering. My cries are bootless; my people will not listen. Ethics are the last thing they wish to sort.