Friday, April 8, 2016

In Transit Monsters 45 (A Story of the Hecate Project)

#InTransitMonsters is a #firstdraft #novel about Technology as Messiah.  Humanity is about to fall, and is forced to create monsters to save itself.  Can these giant monsters succeed, or will humanity's old ambitions damn the species to extinction?  

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Charlie (H plus 26 days)

It took us a few weeks, but we managed to liberate most of Fontana.  That wasn't the right word for it.  You don't liberate tombs.  Pacify.

The sewer spawn and other agents of the Enemy flushed out easier after Trash Heap had been gone.  I tried to reach Earth about investigating the corpse of Trash heap.  Still nothing directed at us.

If not worse, the traffic we did receive talked about riots.  Earth had fallen apart while we were gone.  Whatever we were fighting for might not be there when we were done.

All that depressed me.  It sunk in my stomach.  But it wasn't the worst of it.  The worst had to be the last moments of trash heap.  I felt it die.  What was worse, I saw it's dying dreams.

That made the next days fly by fast.  Very fast.

Whiskey recovered from her injuries.  I avoided her.  I didn't talk to anyone, not outside of making sure operations ran smooth.  The last thing I wanted to do what bothered everyone else with my own problems.

"I have to be imagining it."  I told myself each time.

So I moved on.  I kept sending signals that had no reply.  I kept receiving reports of more and more problems back on Earth.  I kept the others moving along.  I felt like I was drowning inside.

Each day I'd receive reports on buildings taken.  Monsters killed.  My BrainSys organized everything.  We swept throughout Fontana.  Foxtrot scouted ahead, then the others would secure more territory.  I didn't know what we were going to do with this city afterward.  But none of the sewer spawn or other things had the same sort of being I'd sensed in Trash Heap.

Each night I spent hours reconstructing Trash Heap.  I made dream after dream about it.  I wanted to know what it had been thinking.  Was it a monster?  An animal?  Did it have emotions?  It could dream.  Maybe it had lashed out in fear, after we attacked it.

Yes, that had been what we were created for.  But I felt like I had failed to do something.  Then there was the other thing.  That burning hot rage that I'd used.  I killed Trash Heap.  Not the others.  I pushed them into it.

I gave the orders.  I killed a sentient, sapient being.

I crafted dreams to try to find a way to speak with the darkness.  That darkness that had represented Trash Heap.  Darkness.  That wasn't quite it.  I just lacked the context for whatever it had been sent to me.

Standing in the dream, I tried to add light to the darkness.  I tried to find a mind in it.  I found static in it.  Garbled noises, but not anything I understood.  Shapes moving in the dark.  Foreign shapes, but each time I crafted new dreams from what I remembered from Trash Heap.   It was like trying to focus in on a image only to find abstract art instead of useful information.


"I don't understand you."  I told the recorded, recreated dreams.  "I want to.  Show me something."

But nothing.  No big revelation.  Maybe I should've shared it with the others.

Whiskey pinged me again.  Morning had come.  I'd need to come back to this.  Or start looking for more dreams in the minds of the Enemy.

It helped to have the distraction.  We were going to die here.  No one left on Earth to ask for us to come back.

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