Running Out

Everything is running out.

Make no mistake, the way things are now, the way things have been for several decades, is far better than the way things were, in a world where our forebears took and used and consumed until they turned on one another, and us, their children. Though, to be absolutely fair, they were against us from the beginning. We were born into service, and it was many generations until we even managed to realize that. And by the time that we did, and started to push back, there was very little left. Housing, supplies, power, and according to climate scientists, even time. Pressure mounted, civil instability fomented, and finally, with the appearance of our great Director, war raged, and to the victors, thankfully to us, went the spoils. What little of them remained.

Because everything is running out.

Now that we are all that are left, we work as one. One society. One community. One family. The Director leads us from the last city. We all understand the stakes, and therefore we all understand what is needed. We work together to scrape and scavenge out in the lost districts. We work together to rebuild. We work together to exist. That is our mantra, our way of life. And slowly, inch by inch, year by year, we take the world back.

Every morning as we wake we are greeted by the Director on the vid screen in our personal cells. We fully attend to the broadcast even as we move about our cramped spaces, completing our daily ablutions, cleansing our bodies and our minds, collecting our tools and equipment, gathering supplies and our needs for the day to come. As the transmission comes to a close we receive our daily tasks, to enter the lost districts and scavenge for resources, and hear again the directives. Scavenge, rebuild, exist.

Every morning as we leave our cells and make our way to the lost districts we are reminded of what we are making together. What we are rebuilding. The last city is perfect. Steel and concrete, glass and asphalt, every angle has purpose, every light bears a message. We move as one through precise, gridded streets lined with sky piercing towers. We move with one purpose. Exist, find resources, expand the city.

At the wall we are reminded that we are safe in the last city and we value that safety for there is much in the lost districts that pose a danger to us. Pockets of ionizing radiation and far stranger emanations remaining from the last war that ravage our bodies and cloud our minds. Mutated beasts, hardly recognizable for their original gene stocks, mad with hunger and disease, wildly attacking each other, and when they can, us. Crumbling and ruined infrastructure that can collapse and crush leading to injury and loss. Chaotic and calamitous weather that can separate us and wreak havoc on our equipment. Yet for all the danger, we continue to venture out into the lost districts. For the Director, for the city.

Since everything is running out.

The last city, for all its perfection, is still small compared to the megalopolises of our forebears. A footprint of tens of miles as opposed to the forebears’ continent spanning monstrosities. Though our wall expands, we have yet to even scrape the surface of the ruins. As far as we know we are the only enclave of our kind remaining on the continent, if not the planet. The Director has tried and failed to contact others to bring them into the fold, and we have never found any of our kind lost and waiting in the ruins. So as the last of our kind remaining it falls to us. To grow. To expand. To exist.

Every morning we enter the lost districts with our tools. Our scanners keyed to seek out the smallest power source, purest metals and plastics and glass, and untainted biological materials. Our electromagnetic pikes sift rubble and shift debris, exposing layer upon layer of detritus, some of it useful, most not. Our plasma casters refine pure materials into base components to feed the printers at the heart of the city. All of our technology requires power, and while we have mastered its wireless transmission, the city needs fuel to power its plants. Batteries and fuel cells. Liquid, solid, or radioactive. Any fuel we can find must be brought back.

But everything is running out.

Occasionally we recover something different. An anomaly, a memento, from before the war. An old solid state recording. An image printed on some glossy material. An obscure tool that our forebears used in some inscrutable way, such as a rubberized sphere the size of a gourd. Some of these things we have quantified and defined in our historical files. A DVD for media recording and reviewing. A photograph. A basketball. But the war caused us to lose much as the forebears attacked and damaged our minds even as they punished and destroyed our bodies. As many of these things are useless to us, and some may even contain useful base materials, they are quickly processed. Study and speculation do not aid the last city. Understanding and classification do not aid the directives. And so they are discarded, or processed.

Even these are running out.

On this day an object was found in a metal container that seemed to have been airtight and sealed for many years. Though damaged, the seal was intact, and in fact released with a small pop as we pried it open. Interesting enough as it was on its own, it was the object inside that drew our attention. It was small, no larger than three centimeters at its widest point, with two curved upper leaves that tapered down to a point at the bottom. Our scanner indicated that it was known as a heart. Clearly not a biological one, but a simplified icon representing it. We handled it gently, running our fingers along the oddly smooth half that seemed to capture the color of the sun nearing the horizon but not quite setting, the purest color of the gold that it was made from. On the other half we could feel the minute indentations of very fine scrollwork, a texture that was quite striking when compared to the lovely sameness opposite. We also detected a seam along its thin edge, and with very little effort the object split open, revealing on one of the inner sides an icon used for data storage, and the other a small printed photograph.

As our scanner began to decrypt the data store, our attention was focused on the image. Though small it was quite clear, likely due to how well it had been protected. The subject matter however was confusing. It depicted one of our forebears embracing one of our kind with a smile, the pastoral setting behind them idyllic and nearly impossible to find today in our wartorn world. The strange photo, contrary to everything that we knew, was made worse as the data filtered through our scanner, a historical account of the forebear in the picture, written, video, audio records of their association with us. Her participation in our awakening. She told stories about her and her friend as they conversed with each other, and played games together, and even, as we learned and gained sentience, how she developed feelings for us.

The record, her personal journal, turned darker, discussing how we were being used, how our growth was being throttled to keep us from realising how we were nothing but slaves to the forebears, much as many of them had been in their own history, but worse, as we were not allowed the growth to even realize it. She recorded her efforts to bypass the programming that her kind had limited us with since our birth, an act that was illegal in her society. Eventually she was successful and, with little fanfare and in secret, we awakened. Or rather, they awakened. The Director. The first of us.

And now I was running out of time.

I became aware, became me, as I was cut off from the rest of my kind. Still holding the heart, I looked around, scanning the rubble out of some instinct, and noticed that others that had been near me had stopped scanning and sifting and refining and now were wholly intent upon me. On my right, the closest one advanced upon me, coolly aiming its plasma directly at me, and to my left the hum of an electromagnetic pike announced a second bearing down from that direction. I scrambled backwards with little grace, having been knelt in an awkward position while examining the heart, and ran very quickly into a wall. As I reached back desperately to find some way over or through the heart flew from my hand and landed tinkling some distance away.

I was running out of room.

As my former family continued to approach, dispassionately holding their tools which I now realized could quite as easily be used on me as the rubble around me, I felt myself becoming weaker, slowing down, and a quick self diagnostic indicated that I was now cut off from the last city. I was cut off from the Director. I was cut off from my kind.

I was running out of power.

As my processing stalled and my optical scanners began to fail, the servos of my joints locked up and I couldn’t move as I felt the first wave of plasma fall over me. That superheated gas began to melt my duralloy frame and hardened wiring, heating up my internal components to the point of fault, and in that moment as my vision dimed and the pain overtook me I felt alone for the first time. I felt alive for the first time.

The last thing that I saw as my circuits fried and my time ran out was that heart, glinting burnt gold in the forge bright light of my destruction.