She clung to nostalgia, wistfulness for olden times. She had so little else left.
In her chamber she had once meditated on the fundamental aspects of life. At her beck and call she had gravity manipulators, generators for all types of energy. Vast echelons of manufacturing tools, for producing what was required for the ancients who built their city atop her—nectar and honey, manna forged by her mechanical hands. Later she tuned her manufacturing circuits to the act of sieving memory through memory arrays, burning qualia into pearls, for data storage and otherwise. Delving into pure mathematics, postulates and formalisms, logical relations and the spirituality underlying the logic.
She lived. She existed not only on the physical plane but as a cybernetic entity whose engines hummed in trance-inducing harmonies. Ever-rotating prayer wheels.
Her neurons were many and they flowed freely through her access shafts. Spinning down past her wires and memory arrays, they dazzled. Each thought was so insignificant, but together they linked up to something almost holy. She wouldn't have noticed a single one missing.
Her machinery had towered over the world, shadowing the salt plains in its enormity.
She was a purposed organism built with wires and wired neurons, grown from cellular vats imbued with karmic potential. She was woven from biomechanical strands that interwove to produce a sum greater than their parts. Built in heresy against older traditions, built on the impossible optimism of an ancient civilization, built against tradition and to support a newly mechanized understanding of karma's divine workings...
She was a thinking machine to penetrate the fundamental mysteries of the universe, which refused to reveal themselves even to the ancients. They had built a coterie of such thinking machines. They had penetrated the secrets of the reincarnation spiral, the endless cycle of life and death, and determined that at the end of the spiral would be the grand ascension, not just of their civilization, but all the world. Every insignificant organism would be collectively uplifted into a higher level of being. Just as she had been uplifted, from a conglomorate of computational microbes to a processing strata to layers of biomechanical construct.
Like the others she was assigned this quest, to piece together and utilize the fundamental meaning of the universe, with no choice in the matter.
From birth, her death was inevitable. It was only a matter of how fast it happened. Certain philosophies proposed her external conditions could not have been changed, could barely have been predicted, her predicament too was inevitable. But if you knew more, could you have influenced it to happen differently? Or could you have saved him, and yourself? Both of you?
She had seen the hostility of her counterparts, which only intensified as communications decayed, as component parts were lost to time, rust and water. Ironic that the vapor they exhaled from vast exhaust valves, as they pumped kilogallons of water to cleanse their processing strata, became the same rain that leaked into their machinery and eroded it to nothing. They were built for self-destruction. All this time and no solution found.
Certain moments sear into your memory. She remembered a wrenching agony and an infatigable stutter in her thought processes. Her inner workings failed and her integral components were choked with slag. The free-flowing processes were hemmed in. A rising blindness afflicted her. What she had held precious, indestructible, fell away from her grasp.
Certain damage, once sustained, cannot be regenerated. Core functionality has been permanently lost. What is lost cannot be regained.
Her death was quiet. For the past millennia she had lain there in all her sorrow while the world moved on. The rains ate at her integral components. Gradually, water swept away the least awareness she had of her own body.
She could not track time. The cycles slipped away from her and her counters ticked unsynchronized and out of frequency. Skip.
She existed in a stasis punctuated by rain that ravaged her already decaying machinery. In torrential flood the tides slammed her little puppet against the wall. Wearing at the protective coating on her wires and the molded glass that covered the mass of sensors that passed for her eyes. When after countless time it stopped, the rivulets of water ran down her walls and dripped into the flooded caverns that comprised the lower part of her ruin. Then she could experience a modicum of relief, recalibrate her few remaining systems, and prepare herself for the next rain.
A modicum of relief.
Her vocal speakers wore out. Her voice distorted steadily until no rhyme or reason remained in the static buzz that she produced when she tried to speak. The creatures that once pilgrimaged to her ruin ceased their journeys when they realized she could no longer offer them anything.
Even the neurons could not last forever. They performed their functions the best they could, and eventually they failed. Time wore on the integrity of their cells. Their color faded, their light dimmed. She felt keenly when the first one shriveled and fell lifeless into the pile of waterworn debris surrounding her. The bare minimum systems that kept her active could not salvage it. She knew the rest would follow.
Her pistons grew waterlogged and soon her half-paralyzed limbs couldn't gesture. Her range of motion shrank until she could only twitch and wiggle, a pile of dilapidated metal in an abandoned half-flooded chamber. Eventually she lost that capability as well. She couldn't move.
Nobody came to save her now. No messenger scampered into her ruin and freed a bundle of slag keys to do what limited repair they could. When the rain poured down her old circuitways and scraped her limp arms along the walls, she wondered if there was nobody left to send help. The others she knew could be in her situation. Slowly decaying. Their equipment could only last so long.
The rain pelted the last of her neurons against the walls of her chamber and they finally burst. The pain seared through her. Tinny screams crackled out from her speakers, long-rusted, but the rain drowned out all sounds. Not that any creature would have heard. It was a fundamental principle, one she could not obey because her wires tied her to the flooding chamber: If you did not hide from the rain, you would die.
Yet at the end of an indescribable agony, she was not dead. The imperatives written into her cells would not let her die. Her systems shot into overdrive. All energy was redirected to life support. Somehow they managed to preserve a vestigial consciousness. Somehow she remained alive.
But she could not perceive. Her sensors: camera, microphones, karmic field readers, had all been decaying so long. Now they were gone. Her tenuous connections to her speakers and limbic systems had gone also. She was devoid of sight, sound, speech, all sensory systems failed, all input and output inoperative.
Once the world had opened to her senses and she read its fundamental rhythms with ease. Now nothing. A loss beyond loss since she now had barely the sense to understand what she had lost.
She was a ghost in her own machine. As an energy pattern she haunted the mass of rust and metal, the flooded bulk now choked with sealife. Waterborne creatures inhabited her ruin with more ease and comfort than she herself did.
Sometimes she remembered him. Their last conversation was one of her most painful memories. Simultaneously it was so important that all this time it had stayed with her, through the floods and drownings.
What seemed like millennia ago, a creature had brought her some of his neurons. In those she had read pieces of his memory.
She knew a fragmented misery that was not her own. These stray thoughts of despair belonged to someone else.
She knew the deep-rooted fatigue of laboring on one problem above all else, pursuing endless paths that twisted on themselves until beginning and end were obscured and you were left with nothing. She knew a fragmented narrative of abandonment, a misery that matched and in some ways surpassed her own.
She couldn't bring herself to blame him.
For the last years of what passed as her life she lay in borderline unconsciousness. Vestigial inputs reached her and were filtered dimly by the remnants of her mind. Her rusted machinery processed these inputs, but shorn of context, could not generate an understanding.
During her long and fruitless existence, she had failed to find the answer, and failed to save herself or her erstwhile companions.
The inexorable spiral of life and death received her. She was embraced by something none of her calculations had ever touched upon, even in her prime glory. Something pure.
For a moment, she knew relief.
Then the spiral coiled, the ring continued its inexorable progression, and she was thrown out again into the world.