The singing forest had been ripped apart, its seed scattered through the ruins, already taking root in the fertile medium being warmed from the star matter. When the limbs had stopped spiraling, the cybernetic shrikes circled the body of the great tree, searching for sanctuary after being driven from their original home. Utopians perished under the collapsed walls, tumbling into the lake that had opened up before them, releasing the original god and monster, pulsing with the red and blue veins wrapped around its trunk.
The shrikes came to rest in the boughs of the giant, their screeching could be heard with the cries of the other animals rising from the lake into the ruins of Utopia’s gardens.
Power surged in the heart of the tree.
The life bred in trays, born in birthing sacs, born beneath a bush, beside a fire, began climbing the limbs to warm themselves against the tree’s flesh, while the crack in Utopia’s dome grew where the mammoth had died, letting in some of the snow and the cold, while the cosmic blaze of the original being kept them warm and lit the darkness.
The yellow-haired children of Utopia stared at their kindred ancestors, who had been buried within the foundations of the city.
Emerging from the crater, those who had survived the collapse climbed the hills of rubble. The Utopians recognized the animal faces, and remembered a shared vision of transmission that came in waves of whispers. Instead of fear, the Utopians smiled in wonder at the animal-faced humanoids who approached them from below, reaching out to touch their cheeks, placing flowers in the hair of those of the coven who had survived the destruction of their temple next to the lake.
Together, they would till the gardens and make love in the light of the tree in the forest that sprouted through Utopia.
Utopians took in the warmth and blaze of the radiating star.
The massive lungs of the giant could be heard breathing, sounding like a strong wind blowing through the forest. The light and heat from the fusion matter birthed out of the meteorite, warmed those remaining under the dome, becoming a second sun, while those that had been tossed up through the sky were swallowed by the lake, feeding the creatures in the milky waters that surrounded the trunk of the giant who was allowed to grow, with its roots breaking apart the shores of black rock, the arteries swelling to the bottom of the underground lake.
The smoking water calmed and a green mist rose from the crater.
And a new race sprung up without a ruler, without mind-control medicine, or dream machines.
The furnaces of Utopia were replaced by the heart of the giant, warming the soil of the gardens’ and the singing forests.
Continuing without transmitters or receivers, the forests of Utopia grew thick and tall, and the leaves flashed their own bright lights of differentiated colors from the natural spectrum of white light, and the trees wailed during the equinox, as if calling out to the leviathans under the ice, their sound echoing through the city. Recording the frequencies of those who had fallen or were crushed, their bio-matter became foaming flotsam on the waves of the lake, and their transmissions were sorted out in the data banks of the Earth Machine and Witch Mother.
The last generation to be born on the assembly lines grew old, and they birthed their offspring under the warmth of the tree and its light—the yellow-haired and animal-faced children running through the jungles along the shores of the lake. The great tree stood high in the center of the city, beneath the dome cracked by the mammoth, the tips of the tree’s branches reaching out over the ruins of the factories, while the gates of Utopia swung open, and the children of the Robot Queen wandered onto the ice and snow.
Generations passed.
A craft slid across the frozen expanse, driven by the huntresses with their children in a hole beneath the tree of life. They made sure their children did not fall off the edge of the sled, driven by the union of cosmic power, the black-mass and meteoric energy from the heart of the great tree.
They stared at an opening in the ice, waiting to drive their spears through the neck of the unicorn that they knew would break from the water to breathe.
The huntresses poised and waited to strike; the meat would feed them all, and the skins of the unicorn would help clothe them, while a small group of children waited by the craft, playing games with leviathan bones on the ice.
A unicorn broke free from the water, its long horn stabbing at the sky, the hunters lassoed it, and pulled, jabbing their spears into its side. With skinning knives, smiling, they went to work on their quarry, cutting away flesh and bone. After a while, the huntresses took a moment to watch their children laughing. Holding their bloody blades, they smiled and looked into the distance at the snow over Utopia.
Thirteen
The Mutantoid Race and Origins of the Robot Queen:
In the beginning, there was a green sky.
For centuries in the dark purple light, locked in underground laboratories, the vampiric desires took over, while the scientists held the black-mass in a lantern-shaped device made of chrome and glass.
The old race hungered in the darkness, the hunger driving them to feed on the dead, and when the dead ran out, they procreated more in their stalls, raising livestock to feed on. The nursery beds were set, with the purple glow from the lamps, fed by the mysterious energy discovered when the green sky appeared, the fetuses growing in the amniotic sacks, twisting and nursing on fluids distilled in the corner of the nursery.
The experiments had been laid out on the floor, the newborns left squirming.
Post-humans scribbling down their equations on whatever parchment they could scrounge from the old offices and libraries of the underground labs, until there was no more paper to be found, and then they wrote on parchments of skin under candlelight fueled by human fat. Leaving their manuscripts protected through the ages stacked beside the altar of black-mass.
The mutantoid priests in the catacombs deciphered old codes, scribbled by the dead technicians whose bones were laid out at the foot of the altar with the shrines and candle light. The energy of the shrines flowed through lines connected to the old mainframe—awakening a single lumen, a computer eye that stared at the gray, scarred, and blotched faces, which it could not recognize since going into a deep sleep when the old race still ruled, and the lab powered down, trapping them all in.
The ancient program that guarded the bunker doors had finally been roused from its sleep, finally receiving the codes that had been rediscovered and rebooted, fed through the purple light of the black-mass into the computers that took ages to create and make work with the purple galvanic energy discovered. The apocalyptic seals of the bunker doors opening, releasing them from their mountain tomb.
The door slowly creaking open on its tracks, pushed on by the mutantoids reluctant to step outside after centuries underground, but still wanting to know what was out there, the green daylight shining through the gap. An orange globe somewhere behind the green firmament, the mutantoid priests lowered their heads, raising their arms against the sun, covering their eyes with black glass.
For the first time, that night they saw the green glow of the stars and planets. The manuscripts were pulled from the archive shelves, thick with dust and cobwebs. A shrine was taken from the altar, the chrome vessel with the black-mass smoldering inside like a silver lantern holding the last bit of power, held in a cradle along the damp walls of the bunker.
The small exploratory group of mutantoid priests walking away from the catacombs, carrying the purple light with them, pilgrims looking for other labs of the old race, where they could harness the cosmic energy. Stepping into the green sky, leaving the wailing of their fellow mutantoids behind in the dripping corners of dark halls, carrying the knowledge of the obscure science in the books strapped to their backs, slipping through dead trees down to the valley. Their thick cloaks protecting them against the sun, with black glass protecting their eyes from the green daylight. The manuscripts strapped to their backs, they left behind the ancient catacombs in the mountains above the valley.
S
lowly and silently, the procession entered the desert valley. The sand and distant mountains, the green light that the mutantoids could barely endure, the priests becoming sick, exposed to the light and air above ground, as if sickened by plague, leaving them nauseated, vomiting up whatever dry slivers of flesh they had eaten, after their bodies had mutated to survive in deep bunkers without food, water, or sunlight.
Dead, blackened trees leaned over rock spires, thrusting out of the bluffs, where the priests slipped down the steep face of the mountain, leaving the blackened forest, entering the foothills that would take them to the floor of the valley, where the river snaked through the desert. Tall, gnarled trees with swaying branches, rising high above the currents, the branches hardening with the languid shape the desert had showed them.
The priests in their cloaks with their eyes covered with black glass, approaching the river.
At the river, they hoisted the artifacts over their heads and crossed the black currents that pulled at their legs. They reached the far side battered and exhausted, never having been conditioned for such an arduous journey, accustomed only to crawling blindly through the halls and labs of the bunker—
Attacked by the naked bio-savage along the riverside, their skin almost black in the green light, wielding machetes of sheet metal. Tearing into the shrouded cloaks protecting the mutantoids against green daylight. The bio-savage’s pierced bodies and tattooed faces. The mutantoid’s eyes already ruined from generations in the dark, unable to see without the black glass covering their eyes.
The sacred books wrestled from the arms of those who had fallen under a barrage of missiles forged from pounded metal, the pages of the manuscripts, torn out and thrown in a wild frenzy by their attackers who cackled and yelped. The steel projectiles puncturing through the priest’s heads and backs, the pages of the ripped manuscripts blowing about on the shore by the desert wind, and the leaves of skin parchment floated onto the surface of the river, along with the drowning mutantoids.
The bio-savage had no use for sacred symbols, no use for the paper or the words printed on them.
The mutantoid priest raised the shrine over his cloaked head and lifted the valve on the side of the lantern device, releasing a beam of solid purple light upon the desert plains and on those hunting them down. The black-mass burning the bodies of the bio-savages falling at the mutantoid’s feet.
The priests turned and ran from the burning carcasses, fleeing into the desert with the shrine tucked under his arms, continuing toward the direction of the fallen capital, buried in the ruins, under the green sunlight that burned the mutantoids’ skin, their faces cracked and peeled.
One of the other priests managed to escape into the tree line, made even darker with the faltering light and the birds looking for food and shelter from the arrival of night, when the priest would be able to shed the black glass, and see clearly the desert landscape.
They stumbled on, keeping out of reach of the riverside, staying to the dunes and arroyos that fractured the ground. They lost the containers that held the special distillation that sustained them, lost with the dead priests that had been carrying supplies on their backs, lost with the satchels of dried meat.
They tried drinking water from the river, but could not keep it down.
For days, the mud covered bio-savage hid, following the priests from a distance, moving effortlessly through the sand, hunting the intruders. The mutantoids trailed the river’s flow through the desert, leaving the mountain sanctuary behind them, unsure if they would ever return.
The metal tip of a missile missed the priest carrying the manuscript, the most important book of all, containing the formulas of the new science written in blood, instead, the metal tip struck the priest carrying the shrine with black-mass seething inside, as it rolled from the injured priest’s hands onto the sand. His mutantoid brethren picking it up and running with it while the steel shafts rained down, piercing the book bound in human skin and strapped to his back—
He stopped and raised the shrine over his cloaked head and opened the valve, releasing the light, as he had seen done days before.
Through his blurred vision, he could make out his attackers, those of the old race, their brown humanoid forms in the green haze of the blowing sand. They fell over, one by one, the purple light searing their skin, opening up holes in their chests, allowing for their organs to spill out.
The priest ran with the last book of the new science, created around the discovery of the black-mass, and the shrine that held the cosmic energy, stumbling into the thickets of the riverside, until night came and hid him.
He found relief in the dark and cold, as if he was safely back in the catacombs, trying to sleep, but aware that the human beasts waited.
The priest of the apocalypse continued on to the outskirts of the capital, searching for the temples of science—avoiding the roving gangs of human beasts seeking him out. He was weak with hunger, exhausted from the long journey, barely escaping the fate of his fellow priests. Climbing through the forest that had grown out of the dead capital, following the directions to the labs, scribbled in the manuscripts, they had studied the location in the candle light and purple glow of the black-mass floating through the converted wiring. Discovering the final location of the labs in the old manuals and maps that had been stored away since before the End.
The small bio-savage child played in the grass next to the river.
The priest crept up from the bushes, a rock in hand. The child turned just in time to take the crushing blow to the front of its skull. It fell silently on the grass. The priest dragged the body back toward the water, and under the cover of the bushes, he feasted on its organs, later skinning the limbs with a knife he had carried with him from the caves. The feeding gave him strength while he scavenged through the rubble for some sign of the entrance to the laboratories, digging through the dirt and moss, trying to estimate the precise location after so much time had passed. His charge was to remember the map, imagine the features of a city that did not exist, the fantastical monuments to dead heroes. Most landmarks were gone, and then finally, he spotted the obelisk that marked the location to the labs’ entrance.
The directions to the lab had come from the memories of the dead, who’d written down the directions in the hope that, someday, they would be able to escape the doors that had been sealed shut with the emergence of the green sky and its galvanic power.
The corroded metal sign, though it matched the symbol in the book, was almost unrecognizable. Chiseled into its side was a circle marked by a five-pointed star, signifying mathematical harmony. Pulling mud and leaves off the symbol, the priest dug further until he found the doors. Removing the shrine from his cloak, he searched in the fading light, the black clouds moving in until the rain started—
From old codes recited by dying scientists and inscribed in the book, the priest was able to wire into the panel box. He had managed to form tools from pieces of metal he found, excavating through the forest that had grown out of the rubble. Taking the newly fashioned tools, he dug and broke away the plaster and tile until finding a panel box, coupling the shrine to it, with wire he was able to find. He recited the code, speaking into a small speaker phone that he had managed not to lose, hidden away in the folds of his cloak. The speaker phone was tethered with an amethyst eye dangling from wire, the code transmitting through the interface, infiltrating the system.
Opening the locked doors. Skeletons lay on the floor, where they had starved in the dark, but the priest did not care about their fate, as it was similar to what had happened to his own mutantoid kind—it was nothing like the catacombs the priest had come from, where the living was much worse than the dead. The bones of the dead scientists meant nothing to the priest, who was focused on looking for the technology needed to harness the light that would reanimate life. Wandering in the dark, guided only by the light of the shrine, its valve set to low, lighting his way to the workshops. The light of the shrine provided a path for the priest
to follow, and the power went deeper than just light and heat, it not only held the power of creation, but it possessed a connection to the cosmic, and the priest could hear the words being spoken; finding the workshops, and the elements needed to complete his creation.The priest laid himself on a dusty surgical steel table in the laboratory he had found at the end of a purple lit hall. He tried to sleep, holding tightly the book of the new science, the pain, the dreams, and nightmares swirling with the waves inside the chrome shrine.
He closed the valve to the purple light and quickly fell into a deep sleep.
The priest left bits of the child’s flesh to lure the other human beasts that roamed the canyons and woods. Capturing them with snares made of wire, injecting them with a toxin concocted from the chemicals found at the lab. Locked in airtight containers, the chemicals maintained their toxicity, even after centuries.
He bound them with wire, slitting their throats to bleed them before dragging them back to the underground labs.
Taking the bio-matter back with him, through the tunnels beneath the capital, he avoided the killers, barricaded himself behind the bunker doors.
Candles made of human fat lit the lab’s corners, as the priest worked to wire the ancient parts, creating a whole creature again by methods he’d learned in the catacombs. The priest worked continuously in his workshop, built with tools from the old race. He distilled the fluid he needed to keep his body moving, the elixir he derived from his prey’s blood kept him pain free.
In venturing out, he could sense the change in the weather; the green sky started to change. Yet, he couldn’t be certain, as he was starving and sick, using the caught flesh for experiments, feeding off the unused parts, drinking blood and muddied water. His injuries festering, and a fever that would not diminish. He knew that soon he would be too weak to gather the materials needed to complete his creation. And he continued to study the sky as he started to see a blue hue appear, and he was reminded of the old stories, although he could not be sure with the dark glass still covering his eyes, unable to remain in the daylight for long, he would usually only come out at night. He knew that it would be an astronomical chance of numbers for him to experience the moment that the blue sky returned.
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