After I had left the still-nameless dwarf to his vigil, I needed something to distract me. I liked to think that I wasn't a ruthless person and funerals had always been something which had affected me deeply. The fact that I was the reason for the funeral didn't make it any better.

I recovered my sword - a katana-like blade that at once felt comforting to hold and reawakened that crushing guilt over my actions - from where I had dropped it on the sand. Like my own body, it was bloodless, but that somehow didn't make it seem any cleaner. I stowed it in the sheath permanently secured to my hip, and found myself at a loose end. Memories boiled up, of death and murder. I chased them away furiously, by they lurked like wolves stalking the borders of my mind, just beyond the firelight.

For a time I wandered aimlessly, before discovering a sort of cleft which ran up one side of the crag, shallow enough and with sufficient handholds to climb. Hoping that the activity would occupy my mind, I set to scaling it. I had been rock climbing before and this wasn't so different. There were a few times when I had to outright scale the face - and it turns out that a body made of metal-based hypermaterials can't be supported by the same kind of handholds as a flesh-and-blood one - but i managed to make it to the top.

The summit of the crag was large, flat and slightly slanted, with one side rising towards the western heavens. The greyish stone had been long-since weathered smooth by the battering of wind-borne sand, all irregularity rasped smooth, except in the shelter of the fissures which sank down into the rock. The wind battered at me, but I managed to find a crevice wide enough to accommodate me and sat down there, wedged between walls of rock and staring out at a sliver of darkening sky. It was… peaceful there. With the wind whistling mournfully above my head I let go of something I'd been holding onto since I had arrived here - wherever here was.

I fell into my mind.

It was an odd experience. Before, information had trickled down into my consciousness in bits and pieces, disjointed, if useful. There was an element of instinct to it - although instinct isn't quite the right word; it wasn't quite so unconscious as that - but it was still a profoundly strange experience.

Imagine turning inside out and looking at your own brain, except that it was a mental thing, rather than a physical thing. It was kind of like that. Regardless of how trippy the experience was, the end result was the same: I managed to achieve awareness of the store of knowledge inside me.

It was at once awe-inspiring and pitiful.

On one hand, the sheer amount of information was staggering, as was the way in which I could comprehend said amount. It was like mountains of memory stretched away inside of me, containing all the memories of my past, all the things I had done, been and experienced. Faint wisps of whitish cloud drifted over the faces of the peaks, surmounted by the bases of shining towers, crystalline in their purity and what I somehow knew were the memories I had been making since I had been translated into a robot.

And then there was the rest.

If my memories were a mountainous vista, the actual information, the stuff that had occupied the core before I arrived, was like a diseased plain, corrupt data spreading like dark weeds. Here and there, patches of cleaner information poked through, but I could 'see' that even they had veins of corruption running through them.

The process of purging the degenerate data was an arduous one. It was another of those sort-of-instinctual things, but that didn't make it any less slow. It mostly entailed trawling through reams and reams of nonsense information, disjointed images and text that, although I could make sense of the characters - which weren't English, nor were they any other language I had learnt, and yet I knew them as easily as my birth language - made absolutely no sense whatsoever, and then systematically erasing whatever was irredeemable. Which was a lot, let me tell you.

By the end of the process I had recovered a number of useful tidbits of information. One of the most valuable was the design for a couple of other automatons, a small scout and a dedicated fabricator, specifically. Besides them, something else that had piqued my interest was the formulas for the materials which said automatons ought to be made of, according to the schematics. Who knew that aluminium, carbon and silicon could be used to make a hyper-strong, hyper-light material with extremely high magical conductivity?

From those scraps, and a number of other fragments that were mostly comprehensible I pieced together that my body - chassis? - had originally been intended as a kind of combat engineer. Interesting to know, certainly, but not directly useful. Unfortunately, the rest that I managed to recover was pretty much unusable, due to large chunks of it having been erased to get rid of as much of the corruption as I could. There were some interesting fragments referring to the interactions of the form of energy that powered magic with various materials, but unfortunately they were from a purely functional perspective, with little-to-no information on why those interactions happen. By far the most valuable tidbit of information, though, related to the structure I had awoken in.

Apparently, it was part of an honest-to-God spaceship, and one powered by magitech, no less. The name of the vessel roughly translated to Ambition, and from what I could tell, it was originally some part of some kind of exodus from somewhere called Alalea. The name rang a bell, but I couldn't place it. I couldn't help but think that I'd heard it somewhere before, even if that seemed ridiculous.

Finally, I emerged from the depths of my mind to find that last hints of the sun's light had long since vanished beneath the horizon and the stars shone cold and distant above the desert's desolation. It was a harshly beautiful vista, made all the more so by the subzero temperatures that I could distantly feel, like frigid fingers tracing the lines of my body.

It was an alien sensation, despite feeling the cold all the time before. The senses of this body were designed. Functional. I got notifications of damage, not potentially debilitating pain. Cold was something I knew, not something I felt. The whole thing was intellectual and, while I had never been the most physical of people, it was jarring. I am honestly surprised that I could deal with it as well as I did. Another 'gift' from the Presences, I guess.

Shaking off my bleak thoughts, I concentrated on what I had learned. So, I could make a fabricator, as well as a scout. This sounded disturbingly like the beginning of an RTS game. I had never been the best at that sort of game, but getting a better idea of where I was and what kind of situation I was in sounded like a good place to start.

I brought the schematic of the scout to the forefront of my mind. It looked like something between a bird and gigantic dragonfly, long and spindly with expansive 'wings' - which were really just channels for the energy it used to keep aloft - and the core-jewel in place of a head, like a cyclopean eye. Automatically the fabrication system in my arm flared to life, probing the surrounding area for the elements it would need. A moment passed, and then the stone and sand around me began to spiral into the air, to come apart into near-invisible streams of dust, before re-weaving themselves into wires of silvery metal, curling into the shape of the scout-automaton and fusing with a swift glow of heat. Abstractly, I could feel my fabrication systems sorting through the elements in the rock, extracting the necessary resources, separating them from unneeded chemicals and reforming them into usable forms. Silicon from the quartz in the granite, aluminium from the smectite and kaolinite in the sand.

The scout took form in my lap, piece by delicate piece weaving itself from the materials which whirled and danced around me. It took time, a little over half an hour, but at the end of it the body of the construct was complete.

It looked more like an art project than the body of a functional automaton, a silvery dragonfly-like thing almost as long as my forearm. The wings were made of loops of wire, layered atop and wound around one another in an intricate web. Where its head might have been, were it more than just a shell, there was an empty socket about the size of a bottlecap and maybe half a centimetre deep. Delicate, hair-thin wires poked in from the back of the socket like nerve fibres and trailed loosely. Setting it in my lap, I set to work on the most important part of the automaton: the core.

Holding up my hands in front of me, I cupped them as if I was holding something. Aluminium and oxygen, ripped from the sand and the air, spiralled in and blended between my metal palms, a minute sparkle of a gem forming before slowly growing, millimetre by tortuous millimetre. As it did so, facet after facet, fault after fault were formed into the jewel's very structure, impossible patterns, mandalas and matrices of atoms forming, one atop the other in a miracle of creation. I lost track of time, so entranced was I by the slowly-swelling patterns, that when I returned to myself it was to a lightening sky and the stars fading out, one by one, drowned out by the sun's rise to prominence.

I brought the jewel up to my eye and gazed into its depths. The cold bluish light of my eyes reflected fractal facets in its depths, the light sparking and careering from one edge to another. A vertical line down the centre of the gem seemed to absorb the light and appeared for all the world like a slit pupil, gazing out upon the world. It was beautiful.

Still, it was made for a purpose nonetheless and, jogging myself from my own wonder, I picked up the metal skeleton of the automaton and brought the gem to the socket at the front of the construct. With a touch of power to the fabricator, the wires lept up to meet the core and pulled it back into its housing.

Now came the last step. I hesitated for a moment, then channelled energy directly into the 'eye'. There was a minute flash, like the spark of static from a taser, and a ripple of motion passed through the automaton. Then the wings fluttered and raised, and the whole thing floated up out of my hands to hang in the air. At the same time, there was a feeling as though the inside of my head had suddenly expanded.

-DIRECTION?-

The thought intruded on my contemplation, the questioning note making the meaning clear. I was floored for a moment. Could this thing think? Had I just made life? Then the memory of how I had been set up - or the body had been at any rate - and I realised with some self-recrimination that it was more like Siri asking if it could book a dentist's appointment than anything else. It was asking for orders.

So how did I give it them? Just think it? Experimentally, I tried thinking an order.

Fly upwards.

It hovered upwards, the slight hum of its stationary wings intensifying. It kept going, up. Quickly, I sent another instructions.

Fly down.

It sank obediently.

I was ecstatic. I had got it to work! I had, to all intents and purposes, made magic - or at least technology advanced enough that the difference made no difference.

Go and survey the surrounding area in a… thirty mile radius. Build up a map, and report anything unusual.

That was a bit vague. I hoped that it would pick up on what I intended. Thought was more intention and meaning than words anyway, right? Fortunately, it seemed to get what I meant, as it flew out of the crevice and abruptly turned to the left, the front part of its body turned downwards as if scanning the ground, before zooming around the corner.

Standing, I climbed out of the fissure I had taken up residence in and began to climb down the rock, taking my time. I was a nearly at the bottom when a mental equivalent of a 'ping!' sounded in my mind, from the part which I associated with the scout. Tapping into it, I was provided with an image - a video, rather - which moved and dipped as if it were shot from a drone. The scout's viewpoint, I realised. And then what I was seeing dawned on me.

Four miniature camels, each tied to the one in front, and the first ridden by a short figure swathed in desert clothing, hastily leaving the crag behind.


Lexicon

RTS - abbreviation for real time strategy

Note: For the composition of Hadarac sand, I'm using the Sahara's sand, which was the closest thing I could think of.