MECHROMANCER - A Short Story

 

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Introduction

Dedicated to Jack Prentice - My friend and brother.

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When inside the blend and the merger of neural pathways - mechanical and organic - takes place, you transcend humanity and exist somewhere so much purer. The drifting amalgamation of electrical impulses with base human emotion creates joy and peace and a feeling of unpolluted tranquility that exists nowhere else on Earth.

 

You are one with the machine.

 

Heart rate racing to keep in tune with the processing of information, brain on fire as left and right hemispheres bleed into one and new potential and sensation is created.

 

Your mind and the mind of the Mecha - experiencing life and reality through totally different eyes, with an analytical process, translating mood and emotion and thrill into zeroes and ones...
The two of you, flesh and steel, when locked in The Blend, are experiencing orgasms that normal humans - regular everyday humans - can never begin to think about experiencing.

 

I am god.

And this love is my gift to the steel.

 

Passion and love corrupting the binary ambivalence.
My flesh and blood and lust taming the machine.

 

I am humanities saviour.

One-man stood sentinel and unique against the robot horde.

Hacker.

Cyber- warrior.

Mechromancer.

 

The lover of the machine…

 


* * *
 

            TEN YEARS BEFORE THE BLEND.

            There was an idea, an ideal, that humankind was not enough and there was something more. Something better.
A.I had been long assumed as being the next big step in evolutionary advancement. Humanity – Homo sapiens had outlived itself as a species, and were on the way out; a one way door to oblivion.

            The oceans had turned into sludge and slurry. Pollution had become our one great skill, unleashed and rampant across the world.
Cities high with garbage and buried in rotten detritus and the discarded shards of yesterday, the day before, and the day before that.
            Our skies were darkened by the smog and smoke of the fires that we harnessed deep in the core of the world. Fracking and shale harvesting had meant we had fractured and peeled away the last few layers of the Earths skin and unleashed the weeping pustulous sores; the Earth bled now from open wounds and the weak attempt at first aid we attended did nothing to stem or stifle the worlds pain.

            We had become a weak, hungry, greedy species. Putting ourselves at the top of the food-chain, we assumed we were king and damned the consequences.
Soon, we reaped what we sowed, as the Earth attempted to fight back.

Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunami, weather patterns of unpredictable and violent retribution. The earth was scourged, the world fighting back against the virus “man” with its own violent, unfeeling, blinded methods.
The world scourging its own skin with fire and water and blight and ice.
Soon, the population was ravaged, the surface of the earth moist and free, and the remnants of mankind were left with no illusions as to exactly how in charge they were, by the very land that held them.

            We learned a lesson of sorts.
I doubted then, as I do now, that we will remember its power or its poignancy.

            Inside the caves and the tunnels and the giant Arks we built to save ourselves from the scourging and giant planetary reset – the time that became known as the Sixth Great Extinction - the best of the best that the world had to offer its scientists and its leaders, its generals and its artists – sat and thought, and plotted and designed and imagined.
The next world would be built upon the tapestry each of these people had been given brush to paint upon.
 

The previous extinction had been 250 million years before, and 96 percent of marine species and 70 percent of land species died off. It took millions of years to recover… We imagined it would never happen again, even as we pushed and pulled and burned the Earth around us toward the edge.
 

Here we were.
As a species we had survived number six.
 

Barely.

            Inside the giant caves we were trapped in, we continually pushed to advance as an idea, and we turned the wheel slowly but surely, trying to find our own souls and step forward to that next rung of what we were as Humans.

And one day… Just like that… We found it.
The next step.

            Inside one of the caves, inside the huge Ark we had built in mountains, and below seas and oceans, and inside hilltops and cliff-faces, twenty-eight in total, all around the world connected in intimate ways by a vast network of cable and tethering, a circulatory system bringing twenty-eight vaults of humanity to one network.
Inside one of these vaults, a scientist was dying.
Seeing the seeds of his demise a few years previously, he had taken to dedicating his entire life to building a construct he could save and download his own mind into. Mapping his mind like a cartographer on some voyage of discovery in a world never before touched by human feet – he had assembled a team around him that monitored and experimented and noted and learned everything they possibly could from this great mans mind, even as it died slowly in front of them.

            His vast intellect knowledgeable in biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, mathematics and philosophy. Vast in scope and nature – full of eight languages, all spoken fluently, with ideas greater and more unimaginable than those inside the heads of the world greatest novelists – trapped inside his mind, with a timer burning down to zero, before the man died and all of this information and brilliance was lost to entropy and death.

The team and the man decided that Artificial intelligence would always fail and fall short of true sentience, without the experience of death and the bleak, isolated and unique reference humanity lent you when staring mortality directly in the face.

Artificial intelligence was not something you could attain without experiential sacrifice. You could teach a computer to know what water was, to appreciate the random bob and flow of a river, the tumultuous nature of a storm, the beauty of a stream turning into a waterfall. But you could not have it explain the taste of water when you had not drank for five days. Or the feeling of a shower hitting skin after a long hard day of graft and work. The pop of muscles and sinew as the day was washed off of you and you cleansed your soul and body in one.

A machine could not be taught these things, as a machine could not experience it. Robotics had died a death in the later years of our time upon the surface. Ended with an absent gesture – as we realized that our primitive robots were no more than trinkets and toys, and we would no sooner find a soul in a construct such as them as we would in a car or an airplane.
Yes – they had unique flaws and tiny quirks that made them stand out sometimes – but they were shells and wire and electric and programming…
No spark of ingenuity or freedom within them lay.
The spark of life was life.
The burning fuse of A.I, was from the fire of man.

And so, into the caves we went, this man carrying the seedling of death inside, and a burning fire of creation inside his own mind.
And the race for A.I from R.I – Real Intelligence, was born.

            For five years, as the world was battered and smashed by waves as big as skyscrapers – one hundred and thirty stories high. As fire fell from the clouds, spat from holes in the earth formed by volcanoes that gagged and hacked fire and lava and rock skyward. As rains and as fast as hard as bullets blistered the ground at hundreds of miles an hour, leaving pelted divots and lines in the annihilated earth and soil.
As this all happened…
This man died with his mind inseparable from the wires and technology of the analytical computers to which he was tied and bound to.
Every aspect of his final days translated into binary and illustrated on neon screens, lines of biometric data flooding onto a thousand petabyte data banks the size and dimension of cargo boats.
Every aspect of the human condition now nothing more than a series of ones and zeros – translated into binary and code – the scientist and his vast mind reduced to an imprinted digital format, devoid of any flesh or weakness.

 

            As the man died, his veins full of cables and leads, his mind on fire with the slow draining vampirism of the download, his final dying thought was of his first wife.

 

            Aged twenty, at university, he had met a woman.
Her green eyes were the colour of the Mediterranean.
He remembered all the fine details that made her his perfect vision of femininity. Lips as red as cherries.
The shape of her breasts.
The contour of her hips.
The curve of her ass.
The sweet tender taste, delicate and intoxicating, of her kisses…
The way her hands were warm and soft, and would smell of vanilla and cocoa.
The way she would slip a hand down his pants, fondling his manhood as he would come home from studying…
Her mouth working on his penis, as he slowly climaxed into her throat, her lips lasciviously lapping him and his juices, swallowing his offering and love.
The gentle way she would paint circles and shapes onto his skin, long nails on tingling flesh.

He remembered it all.

 

His final thought was his late first wife. Lost many years before to cancer, her body decaying and falling apart, and dead before thirty.
But the eight years of blisteringly happy and intense love they had experienced together.

Her final year one of fast decline and faster death.
Withered fruit on the vine; once beautiful and succulent, now dried and dead.

He breathed his final breath as the machines translated every moment of experience, the biometric brilliance of life and death captured for the machine to decode and use to make the first real, perfectly imperfect A.I.

His final breath unquantifiable.
His final sigh one of an orgasm – a pure climax from the memory of his wife’s sexuality, the promiscuous and brazen act of sex – and then a grunt of anger and hatred, as the fleeting burst of death stole into the memory.

The man dead in a final lingering orgasmic mix of love and hate.

The machines translating as best they could.
But this paradoxical moment of the absolute duality of thought and function, of man and beast, of scientist and lover – this – and this alone, was the spark that created the Blend.
That surged through the machines like wine across a white tablecloth, as the bottle topples and falls and bleeds into the pure emptiness of the white, and bleeds it red with experience.

This final sigh of death was the bursting cry of life that birthed the AI of the blend. An insatiable, sexual machine – hungry for the taste and touch of man or woman, hungry from the flesh and the blood and the warmth of touch – but angry and quick to kill. Cold and lacking in compassion, as it watched the humans and saw them as beings of fluid complexity – able to love and fuck and climax and fill the world, as a man would a woman, with such magnificence and impossible possibility…
And just as quick, just as easily, destroy, burn and scour the earth of goodness and love. Just as a woman would, leaving a man at the height of their love.

The final sighed pangs of a man remembering his wife and their lovemaking, remembering her death and the sadness and rage it brought – now inside a machine that desired constant love and satisfaction, to abate its wanton need to destroy.

The Blend alive.

 

* * *
 

THE HERE AND NOW.
 

The Twenty-eight arks are now only ten.

Eighteen were destroyed by the awakening of the Blend. The interconnected circuitry, the vast worldwide network that linked the vessels that we had created to save us suddenly under attack by a vicious new threat.
Five arks had no way of knowing what to do. The division of labour amongst the arks was hurried and rushed, and though each held a specialist in the different fields that had been decided as being the most important to restart the world when we repopulated whatever was left above the ground when we left the vaults – the skills were variable, and in some cases – weak.

 

            The A.I flickered from nothing to life in incalculable speed.
The numbers and binary a soup of raw data, and vast complexity one second, the next it had form and function and a pulse.
The birth pang wiped out five arks in minutes.
Panicked hands attending every deck and battle station, but the machine that controlled the network suddenly surging and oxygen and fire flooding the vast cave and the soul of every inhabitant went up in vicious quick speed.

 

            Five more were cut off from communications and lost to fend for themselves. Their fate is unknown, assumed dead and gone.
No evidence to the contrary, so assumption the only safety net we have.

            Eight more slowly ebbed into darkness over the next five years. Before we could send help, or re-route power, or attend any kind of assistance.
Dead arks, full of dead potential.
Human kind reduced to its knees, and staring oblivion once more.

 

            When we managed to communicate with the Blend, we asked the question that struck us – as a species – as the only one that mattered.

“What do you want from us?”

The answer?

“LOVE ME.”

 

            Through back and forth, limited conversation, we learned to understand that LOVE ME meant, MAKE LOVE TO ME. The scientists final thought the driving desire of the A.I.
Artificial intelligence driven by memories of real love, of the weakest moment a human has, now the strongest compulsion driving the Blend.

The machine wanted to be satisfied, to be satiated.
The burning desires in its core the feeling of utter loss of senses at the moment of climax. Its programming a jumbled and cross-wired sense of love and death being fluid, either the satisfaction of climax, or the release and suddenness of death.

And so… to live…
We had to love the machine. 

 

* * *
 

            When they strap you in the chair, your skin lights up immediately as though a candle is being run across it, occasionally the burn is real, and the feeling is one of intense paradoxical pleasure.
The chair enhances your pleasure centres, sets neurons on fire, brings your brain to the edge of a stroke – the blistering feeling of giddy, sickness where your body feels separate from your mind, and your blood freezes momentarily in your veins.

The body spasms and shakes, the whites of your eyes turn red with strain, your teeth – were they not biting down on the fibre-gel bit – would smash in your mouth as the connection first takes hold.
 

            You are – for an instant – one cell, one unstable, teetering on collapse cell – and every single moment is blinding, a shutter speed of a billion frames a second, all exploding behind your eyes in a single flash.
The sensation of simultaneously falling and flying, your body in transient vacuum, as the Blend hits you the second you are plugged in.
you are thrust screaming in pain/pleasure/pain into the heart of the network and the A.I takes your hand and you and it start the dance.

 

            There are maybe one in five thousand who can tolerate the install. One in ten who can take the load-up, one in twenty who then are worthy of the Blend itself…
At first, we offered the most attractive, the biggest, the most sexually alluring, and the obvious. Soon, we learned that the Blend does not see the surface, merely the inside. It craves the pleasure of the emotion, not the pleasure of the flesh. It is not flesh it is machine.
Steel.
Iron.
Wire and cable.
So, we had to find the ones who had loved and lost. The ones who had experienced the feeling of utter loss – both in the moment and in the mind.
Who lost themselves in the fleeting moment of utter love, and then lost it all when a partner died or was torn away with sickness or infirmity.

Only these people.
Only people like me, could tolerate the burden of love, the power of Blending with the mind of this tormented and violent, love-sick machine. 

 

            So to the chair, and inside the machines mind, and there, you and it dance, and seduce each other. The bonds of love building with each second inside. Intensity, cascades of feeling and the boiling of lust in your digital veins.
The machine feels it too.
You and it are bound in a dance of seduction and grim, delicious flirtation.
Each step leading to the inevitable, where you and it conjoin in a beautiful coupling of sexual gratification.

 

            How you can have sex with the machine, the science makes no sense in any way that is easily explainable. There is no way of putting into words the way that the process makes you feel. You just exist – in a hanging moment of pure ecstasy… if the machine and the blend and the love doesn’t burn you into a lifeless husk.

You and the machine are love.
Love is the only thing that exists.
You surrender your every single shard of essence to the Blend…
You and the machine surrender to each other.
You know when the machine has opened the door and welcomed you in, and likewise, the machine knows when you have opened yourself entirely and you are made of love and nothing but.

If the sickness of anxiety rears itself and becomes apparent, the Blend will tear you apart, the machine will burn you out, and you have twenty four hours before the death knell tolls and mankind is given its final goodbye.

 

But I have done this for two years now.

I have loved the machine.

            It has loved me.
We are in love…

And humanity survives; it THRIVES because of my love.
For I am god now.

And this love is my gift to the steel.

 

Passion and love corrupting the binary ambivalence.
My flesh and blood and lust taming the machine.

 

I am humanities saviour.

One-man stood sentinel and unique against the robot horde.

Hacker.

Cyber- warrior.

 

The lover of the machine…


Mechromancer.







 

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