by Keith Silvas
From the Ruins
A Zero System Novella
Keith Silvas
© 2018 Keith Silvas. All rights reserved.
keithsilvas.com
Cover Art: © Keith Silvas & Alan Urquhart
Cover Design: Alan Urquhart
alanurquhart.com
From the Ruins is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For Jonathan
Thanks for being such a good friend for so many years
CONTENTS
Preface
Chapter 1: Lonely Android
Chapter 2: Omega Seki
Chapter 3: Nexus
Chapter 4: Shadow Dancer
Chapter 5: The Decision
Chapter 6: Do Androids Dream of Heaven?
Chapter 7: The Cloths of Heaven
Chapter 8: Raymond’s Run
Chapter 9: The Arrow Rises
Chapter 10: Fallen Angel
Acknowledgements
Preface
It was impossible not to be excited when Jonathan Rowden told me about the project he and Ryan Pryor had been working on: Zero System. They were releasing an album in Fall 2018 that told a cyberpunk story through instrumental, electronic, 3D music.
My interest was piqued.
He began telling me some of the song titles: Omega Seki, Lonely Android, Nexus… The more he talked the more intrigued I became.
He said the project would be cross-platform and that they were inviting other artists of different mediums to join in and make their own works of art in the Zero System Universe. By then my inspiration was flowing. During that conversation, I committed to writing a story about the world of Zero System and after listening to the music, the story nearly wrote itself.
What follows is the adventure on which those songs took me. I hope you enjoy the ride as much as I did.
To learn more about Zero System Immersive Music or to purchase the album go to thezerosystem.com
Chapter 1: Lonely Android
The sun rose over the tops of the mountains to the east. Raymond’s eyes fluttered open.
6 a.m.
It was breakfast time. He went downstairs and turned on the coffee pot, then busied himself with setting the table. The steady drip of the coffee pot kept him company while he prepared Rob and Jennifer’s place mats with a plate, mug, spoon, fork, and knife. He did the same for the children, except that Dillon got a cup for juice instead of a mug, and Amanda got a cup and a mug. Jennifer had decided to let her start drinking coffee and she was excited each morning to sip that cup like a proper grown up.
The breakfast table laid out, he sat and waited.
6:45 a.m.
Rob would be headed to the office soon and the children would nearly be ready to leave for school. Raymond cleared the untouched plates from the table and took them to the sink to wash them by hand. The family had a dishwasher, but he preferred the menial task of washing each dish by hand these days. It helped pass the time. It gave him something to do.
7:15 a.m.
He had long since stopped leaving the children at the old bus stop. Now he preferred to walk the full three kilometres to the school. He stood, staring at the ancient building, paint long chipped away. He remembered the red lettering that had once been on the walls of the auditorium, “Washington Elementary School”. All that remained were barren concrete blocks. He imagined the children each giving him a hug. He knelt down to receive them, then waved as they walked toward the open gate.
8:00 a.m.
Of all the activities in his day, his second to least favorite was the walk home. It made him feel how alone he was. He got through most of the day by sticking to his programming:
Serve the family always.
Do all that they ask of you.
Be polite and courteous.
Engage them in conversation when appropriate.
When left alone, remain in close proximity to their home,
unless specifically instructed to do otherwise.
Above all, do your best to love them.
He had never deviated from programming. Although androids had, to a degree, their own volition, opinions, and feelings, Raymond-tz48 had found it easy to love the family he served. The hardest thing he had ever faced was losing them: first the pain, then the long loneliness and feelings of worthlessness that had set in.
9:30 a.m.
He poured two cups of hot water from the coffee pot and sat at the table. He had long since stopped searching the abandoned grocery stores and houses of the city for beans or grounds to make coffee, but the familiar drip, and steaming cups each morning were a comfort to him. He sat in silence, remembering Jennifer and how it had been their ritual each morning at this time to sit and chat. She had done most of the talking and he, most of the listening. He brought to memory the sound of her voice, the things she used to tell him while they sipped coffee. She used to always tell him “Raymond I don’t care if you are an android, you’re one of the nicest men I’ve ever met!”
11:00 a.m.
The bathroom mirror had accumulated quite a layer of dust, he realized as he wiped a streak through it. He chided himself for not being more on top of things. Thirty minutes later, the bathroom was glistening, every tile spotless and not as much as a single particle of dust to be seen on the mirror’s surface. He surveyed his work, trying to glean a moment of satisfaction from what he’d accomplished. His eyes stopped on his own reflection. He looked over the mechanical body that he had once hoped might be upgraded with a full synthetic skin covering. Only his head had been covered over to look human. He studied his face: forty, clean shaven, dark hair, blue eyes. It was the only face he had seen in five hundred years, all that connected him to humanity—even if humanity was only a memory now. Yes, five hundred years since the Cataclysm that had ended the world in an instant, and the residual poison in the atmosphere that had killed those that had survived. His family and the town they lived in had not been touched by any of the bombs, but no life could exist in the toxic environment that had been left, no organic life at least. Android life was different.
8:30 p.m.
The dinner dishes had been cleaned and put away and it was story time for the children before bed. He chose two stories that evening, one of the children’s old favorites and one of his own. Theirs was Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss, his was The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. He read to the empty beds, then snapped off the light and shut the door, making sure to leave it just ajar so Dillon wouldn’t get scared of the dark.
His final duty of the evening complete, he looked out through the upstairs window in the hallway. Night had fallen, and the moon was bright in the sky. He climbed out the window and onto the roof to feel the cool breeze on his face and look up at the sky. The planet had begun to renew itself since the Cataclysm. It wasn’t toxic anymore, five hundred years had seen to that. He was sure life could once again exist on the planet. If only there was any life left...
If his second to least favorite time each day was the walk home from the school, his least favorite was the night. He scarcely had any memories of serving the family during their sleeping hours. There were no menial tasks with which to busy himself during the night. It was then that the emptiness seized him the strongest and overpowered him. The feeling plunged him into a deep sorrow, the same dull ache he had felt every day of every century since they had been taken from him.
His programming forbid him from extreme recklessness without cause, and suicide, although he often pondered the idea of the latter in these dark hours. Sometimes he even dared to wish suc
h a thing was possible for him to commit. Why should a sentient being, programmed to be so deeply relational, be sentenced by fate to an existence of eternal solitude? He remembered the words from the book of Genesis “It is not good that the man should be alone.” That was, in fact, the first thing that God had called “not good” in creation. He wondered if the statement applied to androids as well. He thought it did.
Most nights he simply powered down until 6 a.m., but something kept him from doing that then. It was an unrest within him, but there was something different about it this night. After such nauseating repetition, any change was welcome, even one that had piggybacked in on an unpleasant feeling.
He searched himself. What was different about what he was feeling? He reflected, processed, and concluded that something was wrong, a small something, nearly infinitesimal, but it was calling out to him like the Whos had called to Horton the elephant. He had missed it or passed over it until this point. What was it? He went over it all again in his head, his purpose, his programming, that had become his prison. But was there a key?
Programming dictated his actions. It was stronger than any human law, because humans could choose to break their own laws, but he could not disobey programming. Even when humans didn’t outright break their laws they bent them or reinterpreted them. He didn’t think he could bend the law of his programming. Programming was more like the law of gravity—unwavering. There was no reasoning with such a force. And yet humans had even found ways to nullify gravity’s effects with things like kites, balloons, and airplanes. No. Bending didn’t seem plausible, but reinterpretation was a different matter. Could his programming that was so ill-equipped to govern him in the current state of affairs be reinterpreted? Entertaining such notions made him feel strangely more human than he had ever felt before. What would humans do if they had to work within the parameters of programming? They would certainly find a loophole, if such a thing even existed.
He felt slightly foolish for this newfound imitation of humanity. Androids were certainly not humans. Though neither were they lifeless automatons. His existence had felt dangerously close to the latter for such a long time, why not play at the former for a while? What could it hurt? For all he knew, he was the most human thing left on the planet, the only living thing.
But was he? The loophole suddenly presented itself plain as day. Secondary programming dictated that, should his family all die unexpectedly, with no heirs to inherit him as their property, he was to return himself to his place of manufacture. If this was impossible, (and in his case it was because the factory where he was created had been destroyed during the Cataclysm) the next course of action was to make himself a productive member of society, serving in whatever way was most right and proper.
He had been over this concept millions of times and had ended up exactly where he was, serving an empty household with no society to which he might offer his service. But what if there actually was a society of people somewhere out there? What if his assumption that all organic life on earth was extinct was wrong? He would need to leave his family’s house and city to find the truth. It seemed to go completely against his programming and yet he didn’t think he would be unable to perform the operation. He wrestled with the new hypothesis, weighing it against the steadfast Law of Programming that had imprisoned him for half a millennium. As he processed, he became almost unbearably uncomfortable. A human might have described the sensation as something akin to nails running down a chalkboard. Finally, the inner battle and his torment subsided. There was no more doubt in his mind. If people were out there, it was his obligation and duty to find them.
∆∆∆
The wastes seemed to go on forever. The motorcycle he had gotten to working order for the trip had run out of fuel and had to be discarded. He had driven well into the windswept flatlands before realizing that any city where he might have stopped to refuel was long since buried beneath centuries of blowing dust and sand. The old highways had certainly been covered over, so why not the cities too? The drastic change of terrain, from verdant plains to barren dunes, was on account of the mass herbicides that had been unleashed with the rest of the destruction during the Cataclysm. Raymond had hoped to see some plant life during his journey, but it seemed that it had truly been eradicated, as he feared. The thought was depressing and didn’t bode well for his aspiration of finding a remnant of human life.
Weeks passed as he continued on foot through the flatland. Every day the scenery looked so similar that he wondered at times if he had just been walking in circles. His sole assurance against this was that he had chosen west for his direction of travel and continually checked this by the rising and setting of the sun.
One day, about three weeks into the journey, the dunes gave way to rocky hills and cliffs. He was surprised to see a multitude of dead trees covering the hillsides. Many still stood, like spindly posts void of branches or leaves, and many more littered the ground in various states of decay. The Deadwood Forest immediately came to his mind as a fitting name, and he couldn’t help but shift his course a little to walk among the arboreal skeletons.
As he passed through, he closed his eyes and tried to imagine the forest as it once had been. He could almost hear the rustle of phantom leaves and feel the shade of a spectral canopy above. His foot struck a fallen trunk, which forced him to open his eyes, shattering the pleasant reverie. As he stepped on top of it to climb over, his foot smashed through the decaying wood, disturbing a colony of cockroaches. Hundreds of them spilled out of the hollowed log and scattered. Pure excitement flooded him. People always said cockroaches would survive long after the end of the world, and it turned out they were right!
Raymond put his hand down and let one of the cockroaches crawl into his metallic palm. He lifted it to eye level and watched it walk over his fingers, enjoying the connection with another living thing after so long. He found the creature rather endearing with its antennas reaching out to study him. He remembered how Jennifer had despised cockroaches. She had been utterly disgusted by them, and deeply offended when any found their way into her home. Raymond had been asked to deal with such offenders on several occasions, with a frantic plea to take them outside and crush them. He never obeyed that final part of the order. What harm was it to let them live their lives, as long as they weren’t bothering Jennifer?
∆∆∆
Raymond could hardly believe his eyes. He was not a man with eyes that were so easily tricked by a mirage, but he questioned if the green he saw could possibly be real. After weeks of wandering through barren wastes he found himself at the edge of a vast canyon that appeared to have patches of green down in its depths. Perhaps the herbicides hadn’t rendered every bit of earth unable to sustain flora.
He slid down the rocky slope quickly, dust billowing up around him. When his feet touched the canyon floor, he found the soil was not parched and indeed some sparse vegetation had sprung up. The river that had cut this canyon had long since dried up, but the plants clearly had some form of irrigation. Through the canyon he went, searching for the source of the moisture. What he discovered almost moved him to tears. As he rounded a bend in the rocks, his eyes settled upon a beautiful sight: an oasis of lush plant life had filled this part of the canyon. At the center, a spring of water bubbled up and trickled into a pool in the rocks.
He stood motionless as he noticed birds bathing in the shallows and fluttering around the perimeter of the pool chirping happily. In fact, there were many more perched in the branches of a young oak tree that he had not noticed until that moment. It was, he realized, the only tree in the oasis, and the only living tree he had seen since the Cataclysm.
He sat down next to the pool and simply enjoyed it all: the soft grass beneath him, the sweet smell in the air, the colors, the birdsong, the life. Although he did not require food or drink to survive, he cupped the cool water and brought it to his lips to drink.
Soon more animals showed themselves as they came to drink and bustle about the small Eden
. A squirrel eyed him curiously before scampering past and scaling the tree, which seemed to be a shared haven between itself and the birds. A deer and her fawn came to drink and in doing so, disturbed a red-eared slider that Raymond had mistaken for a rock. The offended turtle hissed and slid into the water, vanishing from sight.
Raymond thought this might have been the most beautiful place he had seen in his existence, but it was missing something: someone with whom to share it. The place needed at least one other person, but could he dare hope for more? He imagined a little cottage made of stone near the water’s edge and saw a family planting and harvesting crops. There were fruit trees rising up to stand with the oak, which had grown much larger by then. The family’s children would tie a swing from one of its boughs, and after they’d swung to their hearts’ content, he would sit with them, backs against the trunk, and read to them.
∆∆∆
It had not been easy to leave the Canyon of Eden, as he had eventually dubbed it, but his dream of finding people drove him on. During the entire journey he not diverted from his westerly path. He had no reason for doing this, but he also saw no point in changing directions until he hit the ocean.
He paused and wondered at the size of the setting sun. It seemed to have grown immensely and dropped considerably since he’d last looked at it in the sky. No, the sun was still up above, much smaller than the bright golden dome on the horizon. If it wasn’t the sun, then what was the dome? He toggled his vision to zoom mode. The dome was a field of energy, translucent gold and glimmering where it caught and reflected the sun’s rays. It must have served as a protective barrier to keep the once toxic environment at bay. Excitement surged through him as he glimpsed the spindly forms of skyscrapers beneath the gold.