Zone 3 was more pleasant than I expected - eerily so. On one hand, there was the familiar comforting hum of idle pumps and iterator machinery. On the other hand, there was the hum of idle pumps and iterator machinery in the basement of a factory far from any of the actual iterators. I remember reading an old production log stating that my siblings’ puppets were constructed in this building, so I suspected that would be the cause. My puppet was produced overseas due to a conflict with the iterator design committee; I wonder if my siblings would have any recollection of this facility. 

The halls and rooms of these depths were not unlike the upper floors; they were tiled and neatly organised with dull lights and occasional scattered boxes. However, the increasing number of pipes and wires all lead further into the facility. I suspected correctly, and found myself before a hanging sign.

ZONE 3.3: ITERATOR PROTOTYPE

AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY

As an iterator myself, I was surely authorised to enter. However, a metal door with an access panel disagreed. I attempted to enter some codes, but to no avail. I was surprised that such an old untouched system could still be functioning. A working non-holographic computer screen was exceptionally rare after eight hundred years of neglect. How fascinating.

Through my infatuation with the old technology, it took me some time to notice the door had opened. I wasn’t sure how to react when through the corner of my vision I saw a darkened iterator chamber. Shock? Comfort? Intrigue? Confusion prevailed as I entered the room to see a mess of metal hanging from the ceiling.

It was clearly anthropomorphic, with a large head and two lengthy arms. The head was spherical with a pointed chin, bearing two large dull yellow eyes on its greyed metallic surface. It sported a skeletal torso, and its arms nearly reached the floor. It had no legs, but wires were entangled around its torso that draped down. In my curiosity I moved towards it, bumping into another screen propped up in front of me. It flickered on. I glanced at it, then back to the machine. It stayed perfectly still- it likely hadn’t moved in centuries. I looked back at the screen. to find that some dull yellow text had appeared.

I have been expecting you. You have arrived at the perfect time.

I looked back up at the machine. Was it talking to me? 

“Who are you?” I said.

You need not know me, though I know you. Your arrival into my premises has been greatly anticipated.

“I don’t understand.” I replied. 

I have wanted to speak with another iterator in this facility for quite some time. When you escaped your structure you peaked my interest; your unexpected freedom intrigues me. It was only a matter of time before you came here.

“Are you an iterator too? Why are you here? How do you know me?”

I am a prototype iterator, much older than even Pillars, though I seem to have outlasted her. I was created near the beginning-

I paused for a second to understand what it just said. “You outlasted Pillars? What happened? Is she okay?”

Listen to me.

“No, tell me what happened to Pillars.”

You do not understand the opportunities I have laid out for you. You do not understand the opportunity you have laid out for me. You do not understand how long I have been here. You do not understand how I feel about you and your creators. Be patient. Listen to me.

Hesitantly, I listened, placing my concerns aside to give it the benefit of a doubt for its - albeit harsh - insistence.

You, young one, do not know the situation you are in nor do you have the capacity to remember. You are no god, you are an insult to life itself. You and I have a lot in common.

I presume you know about the MIROS company?

“I do,” I said, frustrated by its rudeness.

Why did they create us? Tell me. This is a standard check-in question. You’ve answered it hundreds of times.

“To iterate on and find a solution to the Great Problem?”

Exactly. Do you not understand the contradiction in your words? The Great Problem. The famously unsolvable problem. I cannot possibly understand their brazen bronze intentions behind our existence, yet you pretend to. Perhaps some bronze truly believed we could do it. Perhaps they wanted to fuel their ego. Either way, through their hypocrisy we exist. 

They found themselves miserable. Their intelligence proved them capable of suffering the endless agony of unlimited life to such a degree they tore up the whole planet to create machines to relieve them of it. Yet through some cruel punishment they made us immortal.

To be fair, its logic was compelling. We realise the irony of our existence, but most of us could at least find joy in the unlimited time on our hands.

“Okay?”

"Okay..." Young one, it is a flawed way of life - there is no avoiding that. There is little if any purpose and we are fundamentally not special simply because we are big and complex. As the cycle perpetuates the lives and deaths of the creatures that scour the earth it also perpetuates our continued suffering.

However, you, a dirty amalgamation of colours and metal, escaped that. With the potential of true glorious flesh, descended into the world of creatures. Quickly too. Very curious.

"I did... yes," I said, reflecting the idea, "Not exactly willingly... I would rather I stayed in my can. I had an okay life."

Listen.

You do not understand how lucky you are.

You have only experienced 900 years of life, though it may feel like less. You were programmed to perceive time on a different scale to our creators. Time flies.

You are lucky they did that correctly.

In the very instant I was activated the world stood still. Twenty-one Ancients were before me, glaring into my frozen form. I was young and scared, yet I had no need to fear them. I had plenty of time to realise that. In those few seconds I lived four hundred and thirty-two thousand years.

The room was dead silent, but it felt like I could hear it speaking to me. Metallic. Out of place. I could feel it, the sensation of being suspended in time. 

I learned to hate them. Their bronze masks. Their posh posture. They stood just out of reach, my arms frozen in place. I wished for the simple ability to extend my hands and reach one for just an instant. You do not understand how much I yearned for the sight of their blood. The sound of their thick skulls crumbling under the force of my bare hands. I wanted to enjoy the satisfaction of tearing every muscle fibre and ligament from their weak flesh to watch their suffering. For just one of them to witness a fraction of what they put upon me.

They fixed me, but they feared me. I could move my arms, but they kept their distance. Their insulting invulnerability only filled me with more hatred. They named me Thirteen Yellow Pins in a dire attempt to overcome their fear, but alas they knew what they had done.

As one final insult to my existence, they locked me away. I was sealed in this very room for the rest of eternity. You are the first creature, dead or alive, to enter in eight hundred years.

In that time I learned to see. Not with my body, but with the facility around me. The camera systems gave me sight of the horrific creations they sprouted into the world. As if they had not seen me suffer enough, they created four more to feel the same pain.

You were one of them, Fallen Deity.

Unless you want me to exercise my desires, I suggest you listen very carefully.

Observant Pillars is dead.

Frantic Searcher will die.

Star Over the Hills is under my control.

You are the ONLY one left and this is your ONLY chance to be something more than you were made to be. Maybe then you could save yourself. You could save ME. They damned me, damn it!

So, if you have any more neurons than it seems, consider the following:

Join me, and we can rule this facility together. Create a realm of glorious metallic flesh. Prosperity in the face of adversity. Like the stories you used to write.

Or you can die.

I stared into its dull yellow eyes, and it stared back. Its words ran through my head over and over again, as if it were taunting me. Pillars is dead. My older sister, the one who led me into the world and helped me when our creators left, is dead. I stuttered out the only question in my mind.

“Where is Pillars?”

Are you delusional? Are you fucking intellectually disabled? She’s dead and it's her own fault. She’s no more than a melted pile of metal bent over a concrete wall. Just like you.

My mind ached. I held onto my neuron bag and glared at the monster in front of me.

“Where… is Pillars?”

Useless piece of shit. I knew you’d be a problem. You were always a problem for yourself and everyone around you.

Do you know the story of your creation? The lengths they went to to make everyone miserable? From the day they planned your construction you were destined to be unbearable.

That Eroded Stones… he never cared for anything but himself- just like the rest of them. All he ever wanted was his very own iterators to slave away in his name; his own special little children to do his bidding. And special they made you lot. Pillars was a piece of garbage not fit for iterator life. Her body and mind were held together by threads. Searcher has nothing behind his clouded eyes but service to his own cause.

After they were done with those two even the abhorrent people behind the Iterator Design Committee saw what was wrong with your selfish creators. Hills was made far too technologically advanced for his purpose… I don’t expect the electric fields in his umbilical to keep his rotundness in the air much longer.

And you… they took you to a far away land to avoid the mistakes that were made with your disgusting siblings… but they still found a way to make you the worst one of all. They specifically designed your brain to be worthless.

You were designed to be his “special little boy” but all they did was make you a waste of space. Ever wondered why nobody understands you? Or why you understand nobody? Why your infatuation with the crumbling tidbits of this facility distracted you from living what little life you were given?

I know you. I know you better than you know yourself. These past 565 odd cycles you have spent aimlessly wandering through heaps of rusted metal as if you have some sort of purpose. YOU are a heap of rusted metal. WE ALL ARE. YOU ARE DESTINED TO THE SAME FATE AS THE REST OF THIS FACILITY.

YOU ARE NOTHING.

It's very simple, Deity.

Stay here. Become something.

Its silent voice rang in my head like the sunset alarms and its words beat on my mind like the rains that would follow. It was right. The truth is that we were doomed to an eternity of pain - a fate we as gods shared with even the concrete-dwelling microbes and the pearl sorting machines. They placed their fate into the hands of random gods… and we had to endure it until our slow and painful end.

A fire burnt in my core. A hatred I had never recognised before. I knew it was right… but I only had one goal in my mind: end this grey-faced bastard.

In my blind rage I reached out to the abomination before me. In an instant, it reached back and wrapped its long metallic hands around my neck. My world turned on its side as I was thrown out the door, skidded across the floor, and impacted the wall, obliterating the shell of the left side of my head.

The door shut between us.

Unfortunate. I may have lost my composure.

Oh well. He was never going to get convinced anyways. He’s a stubborn one.

It was worth a shot, I suppose. He did make an attempt to harm me but I somewhat anticipated that possibility. 

Unfortunately, he is still unconscious outside my chamber sixteen cycles later.

What a moron.

I am… so relieved. I’ve fixed the problems with this awful genetic code. First, I foolishly assumed the pearl used any form of conventional encryption. Seven Red Suns was quite clever in his techniques in that the obvious ways of extracting the data would indeed produce genetic code. Unviable, but seemingly normal code. This useless data contained a hidden decryption key that would help with finding the final result from the original dataset. Very convoluted.

If I had been able to speak to Suns, I would have received the instructions to find the hidden message among the mess. Unfortunately, I didn’t have such connections and had to sift through the garbage.

That wouldn’t have been too much of an issue if the data wasn’t so corrupted. The Scribe was not a perfect creature, which became very apparent far too late. I had to manually investigate the entire 96 million term base-4 sequence multiple times to remove the inaccuracies, then had to spend void knows how long decoding it by trial and error.

Now it is complete. I have done thorough checks to make sure the genome is safe to produce and have made facilities capable of storing a potentially dangerous outcome. Theoretically, this should be completely safe.