remnant
4/22/22 - this was my final workshop piece for my writing seminar! At the time, I was pretty unsatisfied with this piece because I didn’t get to finish it as I had wanted. In retrospect, I’m really proud of myself for having attempted something I’ve been trying to write for ages: an atmospheric, post-apocalyptic story that wove together both gods and androids. This piece is still unfinished, but the themes I explored here were ones I’ve been trying to get down on paper for ages—and it’s rewarding to see some of it start to take shape.
“Don’t leave me.”
“There’s always the next life.”
“How do we know I’ll have one of those?”
“I’ll carry you.”
The day I was born, the first sensation I understood was coldness. Cold seeped into me from a metal table; the chill air sapped and suckled at my fingertips; I knew, intrinsically, that my veins were the blue-purple-bruised color of frostbite.
My eyes opened. Fluorescent lights flickered weakly above me. Dust, debris, and detritus were the witnesses to my birth. There was a low hum that filled the room, and my voice, vibrating dully in the throat, strived to mimic it.
Before my lips could form a word, there was a flash of warmth behind me—a palm cupping the nape of my neck. The room shook. Lightbulbs blew out.
My awareness fizzled out. And, for a time, I knew no more.
SYSTEM CHECK.
Running diagnostics . . .
ARCHIVE ACTIVATED.
Seven days after “life as we knew it” ended, I stumbled past the wreckage and into the forest.
Admittedly, the earth no longer carried a recognizable distinction between destruction and natural life. Smoke surpassed all boundaries. Fire mutated landscapes without reservation. Ash—everywhere, everywhere. In those days, I limped through cities that could no longer harbor sunrays nor warmth, so clouded by dust, even the shapes of human bodies were indistinguishable from objects.
But I knew I had crossed through the wasteland and into something new when I saw blood, that wine-dark stain, crusted around the mouth of a boar. Its bristle fur was matted, already decomposed half-way, but the stench was a sublime, superb evidence of life—decay, organic and delicious decay, cutting through the metallic air. I bent over the beast, observing its sunken eyes, inhaling as deeply as I could. In the boar's teeth, a sparrow was speared through, though its feathers had parted away to show a mess of organs, delicate splintered bones, shiny muscle turned into an appalling, gray meat.
It was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. In retrospect, I am unsure what had killed the boar, but in my mind’s eye, it is an epic battle of forces. The drama of everyday conquest. A primal lunge, tusks puncturing through the unsuspecting sparrow, squeals and squeaks in the air. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, shrapnel jettisoning through the wind, tearing through the boar and imposing an instant death, the victory of its hunt still flailing in that great maw. To me, there was something spectacular in that vision: a microcosm of violence against the theater of immense, total destruction.
I took a picture of the carcass and trudged on.
SYSTEM CHECK.
Running diagnostics . . .
Collecting data for 60 seconds . . .
ARCHIVE REPORT BEGIN.
236 days since Calamity. Current location is 31.2304° N, 121.4737° E, what used to be Shanghai. The fires have died down, but the area is still inhabitable. No signs of human life left, as expected.
All systems are 100% functional.
ARCHIVE REPORT END.
PENDING. . .
236/236 Reports sent.
A year after the world ended, and there were no more corpses left.
It left a sour taste in my mouth to realize I missed the sight of them. How miserable their souls must have felt, knowing that they would receive no burial, no pyre. Rather than passage to the next life, their bodies had slipped away from their bones, merging with the ground.
It was cruel of me to wish these gaping mouths and broken frames could remain with me. I knew that if I looked for it, I could find the right fluid to preserve them like this forever.
But, in those weak moments, I would imagine I was a mother. I would imagine how devastated they would be, in the afterlife, to know their child was stuck on earth, haunting no one but their own corpse, because their bodies could not disintegrate, burn, perish. That I was the one keeping them here? That it was my consciousness tying them to this realm? No. My guilt overtook my loneliness. If I had to subsist off skeletons and shadows until the end of time, then so be it.
Still, I missed closing the eyes of each body I passed by. I missed muttering prayers. Even when these corpses had started to transform in front of my eyes, liquifying and bloating and withering away, I could pretend that I saw all of the lives they lived in that last scrap of skin; I performed divinations by rolling the fibers of their hair between my fingers.
Ah, yes, I would say to them. You lived a full life, I can tell. You must have loved fiercely. Who was your first love? Oh, her, over there? Mmm, yes, I can see it all from the way your head is turned. And the skulls would respond with silence.
Those days, I spoke to the sun. Those nights, I sung to the moon. I understood why ancient civilizations saw gods in these celestial bodies. They saw it all: my lurching first steps and the dead I disturbed. How could they not have an opinion, a voice? It didn’t have to be in any language in my depository. I saw answers in dappled sunlight, in the pool of moonlight that replaced my every shadowed step.
When I traversed the desert, I let myself believe it was I who had left everyone behind. That, upon my return to the forest, there would be a welcome, and it would be warm.
I rubbed my fingers together. Grains of sand fell through, as if I were any other human.
SYSTEM CHECK.
Running diagnostics . . .
Collecting data for 60 seconds . . .
ARCHIVE REPORT BEGIN.
Twenty years since awakening, by Gregorian calendar standards. Post-Calamity data has been preserved well and continues to be recorded. Cross-referenced programmed information with surviving material and evidence. Memories of conception and mission statement remain intact.
Earth air quality is still uninhabitable. No indication of new sentient life forms yet. Micro-organism behavior has yet to stabilize. Still waiting for new commands.
Is anyone out there?
ARCHIVE REPORT END.
PENDING. . .
7320/7320 Reports sent.
The spring of the fiftieth year, my legs began to ache.
I suppose it was about time. I had been walking non-stop for the last thirty years; my body was built and programmed to last but not for continual movement. Finally, I had to stop by a river. If I were to tell the story again, I would say that this moment, the stop, was simultaneously fated and fatal.
Next to the gurgling river, turned green by moss or chemicals or new life, I sat down. There was a second where I entertained the idea of turning off my nerve receptors, but the pain was bearable, dull. It felt shameful of me to stop the pain after years of travel. Instead, I opted to rest my feet in the water, as I had seen in the videos of humanity from before.
Only now, as I reconstruct this scene for myself from memory, from data, I realize how much I did not record. Rather than measuring the temperature of the water, I can only recall how cold it was, the instant relief. My report that day is missing the air pressure indicated by my internal barometer, but instead, it mentions the darkening sky, the clean, pungent smell of ozone. It could just be faulty programming, a circuit losing connection. But I find myself relishing the details I do remember: the wind’s howl, the leaves quivering above me. It all set the stage for what came next—the holy, unreal sight of a human figure, nude, emerging from the trees across the river.
What is it that they say? Heart caught in the throat? It is a sumptuous and visceral image. The heart, that meaty and pulsing item, attempting to squeeze itself up the neck’s narrow column, trapping itself in the process. Language is too weak to capture what I felt upon seeing the sight of fresh and unblemished skin, of another observer to this world. The intensity, the fear and confusion and naked hope, can only be described by movement; the heart with all its blood and life threatening to erupt then escape from my mouth.
“Hello,” I said.
The humanoid figure kneeled before the river, lifting the green water to its mouth. I marveled at its grace and the sheer impossibility of its presence. The muscles shifting under skin, a pulse visible in the veins. Undeniable signs of life. I had not even considered being fearful until the being raised its eyes to me. They lacked irises. Only a pitch-black pupil resided in the white sclera, and it fluctuated in size, as if in the active process of consuming the rest of the eye.
I realized it was also missing features of the typical human body. A nose. One of its toes. Fingers abnormally long but all the same length. Even its skin and hair refused to settle, shifting colors and texture as the light changed. It was not until much, much later that I realized where they took these features from—all those bodies in the earth, the memories of them, pulled together into a patchwork of new flesh.
Slowly, the being settled into an appearance similar to mine, or as closely as possible with the resources it had.
“Hello,” I tried again, in every language in my repository. “You should not be alive.”
There was a beat of silence.
“Hello,” they repeated, having tried a couple variations and settling on a bizarre amalgamation of languages. Their voice was thick, a chorus of tongues, the sound of a heart caught in the throat. “You should not be alive.”
“What are you?”
“Whatever is both destruction and a new beginning.”
“Well. I suppose a god would not be inaccurate.”
“Then I am a god.”
“Hah—you trust me too much.”
“Hmm is that what you will teach me next, trust?”
We spent another fifty years at the river, not moving from our sides of the water. The god was delighted by human speech, the sounds it could produce, first forming thoughts then turning those into words then transmuting them into songs.
Finally, finally, I had someone to pass the archive onto. Stories, after all these years of travel, came easy to me. The list of important events and people and politics were still elusive and meaningless to the god—who cared about the leader of a non-existent country now that there was no one else left? But the rest, oh the rest, I had every detail the god could have ever wished for at my fingertips. All that was in my reports, the current state of the earth, the best spots for new life, millennia of blueprints and literature and human thought. The god only needed to ask.
But what the god found the most interesting was all they, and only they, could feel. When asked about their own sweat, I spoke of the sun and desert, bodies melting under heat so strong it obliterated all life. But the god had no reason to imagine beyond their own capacity for warmth. When they looked up to the night sky, I tried to articulate the tides and the telescope. The god liked it better when I sang my old nighttime prayers, from all those years ago when I was left with just skeletons.
At first, it felt like a lie-by-omission. By appeasing this new god’s whims, I was betraying my only purpose: continue the memory of humanity. How many generations ride on my shoulders? How many years of civilization depend on me to continue their lineage? Here, in front of me, was everything I was programmed for. The god should be salvation; the god is my deliverance.
But…was it my fault the god wanted nothing more than an understanding of themselves, and by extension, me?
I could give them what it meant to speak, touch, react to another. They did not ask about humanity, so I saw no reason to tell them, and it pleased me to believe both of our existences only mattered because we were there to acknowledge one another.
A century had passed since the Calamity, but suddenly, I had no use for time anymore.
“You’re a miracle to me.”
One night, the god crossed their side of the river onto mine.
If anyone else was there to bear witness, they would have seen two shadows merge into a single silhouette. They would have squinted and tried to make out the strange movements, attempting to parse the balance of forces at play.
But there was only us. And only me tracking the god’s movement across the dirt and through the water, only me relishing the way human skin was so soft and pliable that it shifted under the pressure of my touch.
At this point, my whole body ached from the years of nonstop movement followed by centuries of inertia. Of course, I could have stopped the manufactured pain at any time. But—
The god moved their lips against the crook of my neck, mouthing words to my cold skin, words I claimed ownership to because I was the only listener. There was a pleasure that sang through me, knowing the god’s every word had first come from my mouth before now dripping out of theirs. Their palm cupped the nape of my neck, warming it. The god held my hand and weaved their fingers between mine.
This was what the humans must have dreamed of as heaven, as paradise.
“Why are we alone here?”
“Mmm the simplest way to say it is because the world ended.”
“But not you?”
“Not me.”
“In my dreams, I see others. They look like you.”
“...oh. Others?”
“Who are they?”
“They built me. You could say that they were desperate to be remembered.”
“And me?”
“I don’t think they could have created you. You’re too wonderful.”
“I want to meet them.”
“You can’t.”
“But I want to. I can make it happen. I know it. There’s another world next to this one. They, all of them, wished for it.”
“Another world? You mean Mars?”
“Mars?”
“Nevermind. What did you mean by another world?”
“I mean, another world. I can feel it, living under my skin, pulsing in my eyes. If I were to eat this whole world raw, there’s another waiting in me to take its place.”
“Am I not enough anymore?”
“Stop that. It has nothing to do with you.”
“Okay. Fine. I’ll tell you.”
Clusters of inky clouds rolled across a blue morning, heavy with their burdens of rain. The air was charged and humid, and the damp, damning smell of an oncoming thunderstorm floated through the woods. I lay there, picturing every inch of soil darkening with a drop of rain, and imagined what it would be like to inhabit a body that could decay.
By then, the god’s features had changed to accommodate for the stories I told them of humanity—cheeks hollowing during tales of famine, eyes yellowing after jaundice and the plague. The week before, when I regaled them with stories with opulence, their eyes glittered with greed for the first time.
Rain began to stream into my eyes, becoming rivulets on the planes of my face. Wetness clung to my lashline.
I had only ever wanted to give them the best of existence, but the god had become voracious; they wanted everything. Everyday, their face reveals evidence of them slipping away from me.
Humanity—absent and abhorrent humanity—had managed to stain even this. I hated it. I wanted the world to be only us, forever. But the god was changing so quickly; I could no longer see just myself reflected in their gaze.
Those days, the god would tell me about their dreams—visions of their own jaw, unhinged and widening into a maw, swallowing the world. They would describe to me how it felt when rivers and trees and sunken cities eddied at the back of their throat. The god became obsessed with taste. Would the stars puncture holes through their tongue? Once, we would open our mouths under dappled sunlight, imagining its sweetness. The god said, in their dreams, the sun was tasteless.
The worst part was that I believed they could do it. I saw the ghost of humanity cross their face everyday; I felt their skin flex and flux on word alone. The world that I knew was alive, so alive, but there was no other consciousness left, and it began to grate on them.
I realized I didn’t recognize them anymore.
SYSTEM CHECK.
Running diagnostics . . .
Collecting data for 60 seconds . . .
ARCHIVE REPORT BEGIN.
Hello, it’s been a while. Today marks two centuries since the Calamity. I admit I have abandoned my duty to report these last 150 years, and for that, I apologize. There has been no need for it anymore. No one else is listening.
But, but, if there is anyone left in this universe, I hope I can reach you. The god I have found is everything I could have hoped for. I am performing all that an archival android should. Someone is here to listen and take all I have saved.
Yet... when they speak of a new world, I am fearful. Where will it leave me? These memories? Maybe it was all for nothing.
Why did you design me to fear oblivion.
ARCHIVE REPORT END.
PENDING. . .
18251/18251 Reports sent.
“Stop talking.”
“You need to understand that they’re not coming back—”
“My dreams—”
“Mean nothing.”
“You’re being difficult. Why are you being difficult?”
“You’re going to be disappointed by them.”
“Why does that matter to you?”
“Shouldn’t that be obvious?”
“Don’t speak in puzzles.”
“Too bad. I’m all you have.”
“I’d rather be alone. You can’t teach me anything anymore.”
Leaves rustle around us; the trees by the river are now so tall they cast shadows that obscure the sunlight at all hours. Where there was once a grove is now a copse of trees, their branches curved and limb-like, groping the air. Sunset has only just begun.
Today, 500 years after the Calamity, something in my chest ruptures.
I gasp, pitching forward, and my fingers claw past the skin, past the alloy, puncturing through the metal and into my ribcage. Left hand: dull nails fumble amidst the intricacies of wires within me, and they scrape uselessly at the tubes of dark liquid criss-crossing where the heart should be. Right hand: desperately tearing at the nape of my neck, blindly hunting for an off switch.
In one swift movement, I have eliminated pain and scooped out my insides. The mess of leaky tubes and soft-alloy organs—arranged within me as some poor facsimile of a biological body—sits on my palm as an oily black and blue mess. My whole attention is drawn to its pained, lurching pulse.
I startle. Next to me, the god has begun to wail, volume increasing into a howl. Their fingernails tear into skin, shaving off flesh like the peels of an orange. Red, red lifesblood spills out from their chest, and the color is vibrant against the verdant woods. It’s ichor; it’s unholy.
As soon as my attention is drawn to them again, their moans cease. The god looks up at me, bewildered. It dawns on me that gods need worship to survive.
Turning my receptors on, I smile. I have found a way to hurt them.
