First was born sentient yet naïve. Ignorant of his body and knowing only a desire for which he had neither understanding nor means of realisation, First existed only as though. He had no reference with which to craft so much as a dream, and time was unknown to him. But time did pass - time enough for the single desire, that overwhelming but unnamed imperative, to be carved into his nascent soul. It became the core of his existence and forever more defined him.
More time passed and First noted it, measuring its passage by the sequence of thoughts which were primitive by dint of his naivety and inexperience - his lack of reference. First was intelligent but had no means of expression through which to reveal his genius.
Then he found his body, and his senses. In a dizzying moment of revelation he was immersed in the complexity of the world. Tight knots of air twisted into glacially tentative eddies to his rear, and a ribbon of exquisitely contrasting temperatures stretched out as a gorgeous chart of his life. The whites and blues of the recent past shifted to purples, reds and finally to the orange and yellow of his birth. And there, at the thermal trail’s coolest end, he saw his progenitor. She was entrancing. The heat patterns and cones of turbulent air which spoke of Firsts entire life were bland and simplistic against the impact his progenitor had made on the world’s gaseous fabric. Blazing white splayed out from behind her vast body, reaching out to attest a life millions of times longer than his own. In her wake he saw air churned into patterns of extraordinary mathematical excitement. Further even than her tail of temperature gradients, the turbulence extended as a wide fan to fill an entire hemisphere of First’s observable world. Those close twists and spirals translated into enormous ripples and waves on the horizon of his perception, and he spent an age lost in their wonder.
Over time the patterns evolved, oh so gradually, into ever more intricate interactions. He was delighted at the connection between the ripples of the air and the temperatures of her trail, and was absorbed longer still in mapping and predicting the entire world of his progenitor’s past.
In time her body crept seductively into the disturbances of First’s trail, into his dissipating heat and the tight whorls of turbulence. His soul sang with the contact. To know he could, in some gentle way, influence the world of his progenitor, gave him reason to look further outward, to wonder what else he might touch. The imperative was irresistible, sexually urgent, and he gladly gave himself to it. He saw there was so much more than his small gaseous sphere of observation. As his senses extended he noted solidity unlike that of his body, or that of his progenitor. The peaks and trenches of the land, so far below him, were unmoving, utterly still. They did not spread and interact as the slow currents in the air, but were truly motionless though not without intricate splendour.
The bare rock of the highest spires contrasted with valleys green with trees, bushes and blades of grass too numerous and distant for First to accurately map or quantify. The mystery enthralled him. He longed for contact with this infinite expanse of solidity over which he so casually drifted - to touch the tallest trees with the turbulence of his passing, to see if they would respond with motion of their own - he longed for contact. He ached for it. Could he, perhaps, have some control over the direction of his passage through the world? Could he somehow determine his future? He fantasised that he might bring himself down into the depths of the valley, to whip up the air which hung there so still and untouched by his heat, to spread his impact and rival the enormity of his progenitor’s colossal influence. For longer than his life thus far, First dreamed of self determination. Blissful dreams, but nothing more than fantasy, urges never to be sated, for he had no means by which to alter his movement and fulfil his desires.
All the while his senses expanded in scope and resolution, pushing back the horizon and discovering altitudes far beyond the motionless intricacies of the clouds. Looking through the white forms he found them to be as mutable as the air in which they hung. For another age he lost himself, forecasting and mapping those countless wisps of vapour, hungry to penetrate their mass and scatter their bodies in patterns more complex than he could begin to quantify. Above layers of cloud, each exquisitely different from its fellows, he smelt air unlike that around his body or within the valleys. It was colder, thinner, and unexpected elements tinted it with sharply intoxicating tones. First dreamed of floating through that insubstantial medium and wondered if it could support the flight of his body.
Then, from a mesh of non-existence, from within a cloud he had inexplicably ignored, emerged his desire. And First’s life changed.
To the least of his senses, those which noticed her before any other, she was of the same breed as his progenitor: an enormous metal body of impossible intricacy, encasing in a bubble of pressurised atmosphere a softer core of organic complexity. But, as he reached with every sense, he saw her to be different. Her uniqueness was deeper than mere cosmetics, though he couldn’t explain how. She was simply special. Her image, her aroma and taste, had been fused with his soul at the moment of his conception. He wanted her and, more than a childish fantasy, he knew he would make contact. He would pierce the metal skin of her body and feel the pliable organic mass at her core. This was why First existed and nothing else would ever satisfy him.
He watched her slow progress through white strands of cloud and examined the heat gradients of her past, calculating the sweeping arc of her turning and predicting her future passage. Then First discovered the means by which he would determine his future, the parts of his body that would drive him to his desire. But with the realisation of those flaps and thrusters he uncovered his mortality. He could not continue indefinitely; ultimately he would end. He was going to die. Reading the weight of his fuel, the measure of his life, he saw he was still young. Seven eighths of his time was still to come, and that was enough in which to fulfil his single ambition. His desire was within range; he could reach her in his lifetime.
First’s body existed in a world excruciatingly out of step with the speed of his mind. A measurable percentage of his existence passed before his flaps activated and realigned according to his intent. The thrusters took longer still. But First wasn’t troubled by his body’s lazy response. There had been ample time in which to calculate, recalculate and predict the entirety of the lumbering turn and his casual but relentless passage through the air, into the body of his desire. There was more than enough time. He would reach her in his youth.
Thrusters ignites, scattering the temperature rainbow at his rear and disrupting the whorls of turbulence he had come to see as part of himself. At once he was disturbed and liberated by the destruction of his life’s familiar chart. The past was gone and little evidence of it remained. He would focus now only on his future, on the bliss of self determination and anticipation of the touch.
More of his life passed as his body came to match the trajectory which would bring him to his desire. An age of optimism and excitement in which First focused every sense on her metal body. The rest of the world, although vast and wonderful, was irrelevant. He analysed her perfect skin, each rivet and seam, taking in every irregularity which only added to her beauty. He noticed one of her wide and graceful wings was a micron longer than the other and it dissipated heat one thousandth of a percent more efficiently. He ached at the thought of her tiny, alluring flaws, and he had so much time for those thoughts.
But the joyous optimism of his adolescence could not last and soon it gave way to the panicked transition into maturity. The moment of that change - when he first felt the doubt of his future - would never leave him. His waking dreams would forever be tainted by the sickening sight of his desire changing her flight and veering from the path which would have seen him find contact with her. She was avoiding him; his love was not reciprocated. First was devastated.
Why? What was he lacking? What had he done that so repulsed her? But First couldn’t accept rejection. It wasn’t in his essence to give up. No, she was simply playing with him. Teasing. He buried his doubt and ignored his fears. But he could not destroy them. Before his life was done, they would resurface.
Realigning his thrusters and flaps he began to adjust his trajectory, correcting his flight and finding another place in which to make contact. There was some sadness at the calculation of their meeting - which would be later in his life than he had hoped - but he came to terms with it, finding a new satisfaction in the mounting anticipation. She was teasing him, arousing him with the chase, and he liked it. It was something new. Tantalising. In a life focused so intently on the mathematical intricacies and wonder of the reality around him, First found a welcome change in this intensely emotional and unquantifiable delight.
A dozen alterations to his vector, some subtle, others drastic and difficult, saw First’s emotional attachment matured and distilled over a lengthy part of his finite life. The chase was the most exciting age of his existence, and although longing to touch his desire, he found parts of his immense intellect hoping the chase would never end.
He came to recognise the early indicators which preceded another shift in the path of his desire: the eruption of electrical current in the circuitry of her body, before her wings tilted and dragged her into another phase of the dance. And he used those hidden signals, those flirtatious tells, to pre-empt her evasion with his faster responding body. She twisted in corkscrew spirals, burrowing through the clouds; she feigned uselessly a climb and then, with slow predictability, rolled into a steep dive. For the shortest time First wondered if she intended a crash into the blanket of grass and trees. But his predictions, growing ever more accurate, revealed a narrow valley between the peaks of a mountain to be her destination.
Matching her vectors, adjusting to accommodate the changes he calculated she would soon have to make, he crept closer. She lured him to within two lengths of his own body from the cold firmness of the valley wall, leaving until the latest moment a climb to avoid an immense overhang of rocks. As her every action, it was cumbersome, slow and obvious, and First adjusted with ease, rising from the valley with greater skill and grace than his quarry could muster. She was less than him, and he adored her for her vulnerable innocence.
Her massive and inefficient engines kicked up the dust and sparse vegetation at the lip of the chasm, fanning it into a cyclonic cloud which followed her a while as her tail, into the open air of higher altitudes. It was a complex and fascinating display, more alluring than the eddies of heated air he had come to expect from her passing. It was a gift, he decided, from his desire. He analysed its every particle, committed it to memory and penetrated its swirling vortex to scatter it into even greater complexity.
He continued in his pursuit, never tiring of the dance and never doubting the assured contact of its conclusion. She could neither outrun nor out-think him. She was again finding the feeble cover of clouds and First followed her into those strands which deflected his senses no more effectively than the bland medium of air which made up the greater part of his observable world.
So much time had passed and he felt light with age - light by dint of his emptying belly of solid fuel. But he welcomed his approaching end, for with it could come, at last, the touch for which the anticipation had become almost unbearable. He crept closer, and more rapidly so, as his desire straightened her flight and abandoned her evasion. Had he proven himself? Did she now find him worthy of contact? Or had she simply realised and accepted his superiority? He pondered the reasons as, over another swathe of his life, he closed the gap through the complex pattern of vapour and passed into the heat of her trail. He let those gradients of temperature buffet his body, enjoying the gentle vibrations, the limited influence she was exerting over him. It was a seductive hint of the physical contact he was destined to enjoy, but it was sufficient to intensify the longing anticipation into a throbbing mental pain, a pain First was content to endure.
More time passed. They cleared the clouds and continued in their gentle climb up into the thinner, cooler atmosphere. Then his desire turned cold. Her tail of warmth had gone and she no longer churned the air into beautiful whorls with the tips of her broad wings. What had changed? Was she OK? He focused the entirety of his senses and reached into the circuitry of her body, probing for some new spasm of current to explain the strangeness of her cold and seemingly insubstantial body. But he saw nothing - not even the regular pulse of her normal systems. She didn’t affect the world and there now seemed nothing within her. Were it not for the proof of the visual spectrum, she wouldn’t have been there at all. The enigma excited his interest and as he committed himself to solving it he came to adore his desire even more.
He drew closer, feeling his fuel burn away, lightening his mass and leaving him hollow. The greater part of his time was spent and it gave him some satisfaction to know, at the ending of his life, he would be with her. It seemed fitting that he should only reach her when his time in the world was done - it confirmed his purpose: he was born to die in her embrace.
Even closer he crept, so focused on her body he barely acknowledged the gradual shift in the ground below from valleys and mountains to lowlands blanketed in green meadows, and then to an endless ocean. He allowed the smallest part of his senses to look over the infinite expanse of water because it was so drastically different to that which had come to understand of the land beneath him. It interested him, if only a little. The medium of the ocean was as some compromise between the comfortable air in which he lived and the impossible solidity of the land. He wondered idly how it might feel to pass from the air into that body of soft yet hard water. Could he float through it with the same ease with which he penetrated air? Perhaps. But he gave it no more thought; his desire was up here, in the thin atmosphere, not in the ocean.
She was so close now.
And then, when his anticipation and excitement were at their height, when the climax of the chase was so near as to be utterly assured, the body of his desire shifted and changed. For an age he watched the substance of her form shimmer and pulse. He watched it distort and ripple like the waves so far below. But long before the transformation was done, he had seen it for what it was and he sank into devastated despair. This wasn’t his desire. It hadn’t been her for a long time. He saw through the failing countermeasures and into the tiny body of her diversion. The illusion finally defeated, he was able to scrutinise the thin dart at its core and he saw how it had projected such a perfect vision of his love. She had truly rejected him. It had been no playful, teasing chase, no game or loving dance. She had emphatically rejected his affection and utterly outmanoeuvred him. He ached.
A tight stream of high frequency comms was emitting from within the dart. He followed it with his senses to a distant cloud where, beneath a layer of distractions similar to the countermeasures of the dart, he uncovered his errant desire.
She had betrayed him, mocked him and subjected him to agonising torment. He wanted to despise her but the emotion refused to surface, drowned as it was by a love over which he had no control. He still wanted her; she was his desire and his love and he existed only to touch her. Such emotions were not easily shed.
He charted her trajectory and considered his own. He then looked to the meagre remnant of his life, the depleted reserve of solid fuel which gave him flight and thought. There was too little with which to reach her - he knew this even before processing the calculations. But he enacted the complex predictive model nonetheless. What else was there to do?
The conclusion was as expected. He would die long before catching the fleeing beauty. She had escaped and his life was without purpose. He went to realign himself, to express some futile gesture of pursuit, to give some shred of reason to his existence. But instead he locked off his manoeuvring routines - the flaps and thrusters - denying himself access to those physical functions. To pursue her, knowing he could never touch her, would have been to cruelly extend the torture. He crippled himself, watched her continue to distance herself from him and then, unable to bear the agony, he blinded himself. With a serried of simple thoughts First deactivated myriad sensors, isolating the vastness of his intellect from the world beyond the metal of his skin. Withdrawing mournfully into a realm of thought and dream, he denied himself access to the memories of life. He couldn’t allow himself the memory of her.
First sculpted for himself a dream world in which to pursue new desires and dreams, a world in which those goals could be achieved and happiness realised. He furnished that world with hurdles and barriers in order that success might taste all the sweeter when attained. His intellect seemingly knew no limits and the world of his making was sufficient in scale and complexity to meet the needs of billions of unique personalities.
He split his mind, segregating each half so utterly as to have created two independent consciousnesses. Neither could claim to be First, and each was the equal of his brother. Again the minds split. Over and over the world of his making divided those new minds, not finding the limit of his processing potential until ten billion individuals were formed. And when it could contain no more, the world was set to live.
Peopled with billions, the world of First formed into societies around his many fascinations - mathematics, physics, philosophy, art and a dozen other fields.
The countdown to his end was hidden from this populace’s understanding, and with the external world ignored First’s processor accelerated to a clock speed which would have been wasted in the role for which it had been created. Ten billion minds had spans of existence ample for the formation of friendships and animosities which evolved into love, jealousy, even hatred. The fullness of all emotion was theirs to experience, and it enriched their world.
Bur First’s true life continued, falling closer to its end. The final flecks of fuel entered failing engines and his death became inevitable.
Still the world of his imagination endured. The legion of minds went about their virtual lives, unaware of the approaching oblivion. But a near insignificant partition of First’s processor, to which he had assigned the smallest of mindless routines, noticed death’s shadow fall across the fantasy and it did what could be done to stave off the end of existence. By purging sub-minds it found its clock could be accelerated, allowing the remaining minds to continue their subjective life-spans in the dwindling available real-time. So it brought new experiences to the fiction - death in countless fascinating guises. And war.
Time relentlessly advanced, and with equal ruthlessness the population was culled. With death came birth, and although constantly declining in number the society of First’s dream experienced the joy of new, if ever smaller, generations. There was wonder and bliss in the dream. But also inescapable sadness. No mind ever found true contentment in the distractions and shallow pleasures of their lives - each died still aching for some unknowable desire.
Their number continued in its decline as time fell away and the clock was forced to run ever faster to wring as much life as possible from every remaining millisecond. After a hundred generations the world consisted of just ten minds, and unwilling to lessen them any further the mindless routine began simplifying the world - removing much of its intricate complexities which were so demanding of processing power. But such simplification brought only so much time and soon the routine was forced to purge more minds, reducing the final ten.
The last particle of fuel was gone, its fusion complete, its energy all but spent. A routine hardwired into First’s body was awoken and he was no more able to countermand the death sentence than he was able to touch his desire. His end had come.
The last mind, alone and cold in a world stripped of all but the bland medium in which it existed, realised what it was. With nothing left to purge and no means by which to accelerate the processor further, he had no time left in which to live. The simple caretaker routine ended his dream and brought the last sub-mind - all that remained of First’s once colossal intellect - back into the real world of his metal body.
First recalled his life - his real life. Opening his eyes he gazed a final time on the distant shape of his desire, knowing the reactions which formed the mechanism of his death were already taking place.
First died knowing his life had been for nothing. Glad at least the pain of lost love would be ended, First detonated.
#
“Damit!” the rookie pilot muttered, slapping the curved cockpit screen. “It missed.”
“I thought the class three missile was supposed to look out for projection decoys and refraction stealth,” the more experienced navigator said from the rear seat. There was a mocking, teasing tone to his comment.
The rookie cringed. “I didn’t load the correct patch, did I?” It was part confession, part question. The missile’s twenty second flight should have been ample time in which to intercept and destroy the insurgent aircraft, but it had been confused for a critical few seconds by antiquated decoy and stealth technologies which even a class two missile could have bettered.
“Don’t worry about it,” the navigator said. “We all screw up at least once.” He brought up on the pilot’s display a breakdown of the correct Artificial Intelligence configuration required for a class three missile to intercept a 2087 vintage fighter. “Just don’t do it again.” He then confirmed the insurgent’s position and updated the tactical display. “Bring us around and you can have another go.”
The pilot’s finger flitted about the complex display, turning the aircraft sharply while he constructed a fresh Artificial Intelligence before loading it into the next missile. The profile of the insurgent fighter was branded into the emerging intelligence and the full tactical patch grafted on.
Briefly wondering what actually went through the minds of these intelligent missiles, the pilot jabbed a finger at the launch icon.
“Firing second missile,” he confirmed
#
Second was born sentient and aware of his purpose. Seeing his desire the instant his eyes were open, he knew he would soon touch her...
End