Endlings
For better or for worse. For wretched, painful, writhing, worse, tomorrow is a new day. And even if everything remains the same, from the paper thin wafers of circuitry adorning the walls, to the flat, impermeable sheet metal which hangs down a hundred feet below. If the hook I am hung from, like fresh kill at a butcher shop, doesn’t rust, or weaken, or creak, or moan, or give any other signs of moving a fraction of an inch. If the warping of my mind is so immense I cannot get a single thought out without taking your lifetime to pronounce the first syllable of the first thought, it is irrevocably, and irreversibly not the same moment as when I started that thought.
Everything has been the same for a long time now. For a while I was moving, shifting mindlessly with foggy eyes and slimy protrusions which did their best to slither my being from one incomprehensible room to the next. Each one holding a terror which would take much more time than I have to explain. Even if I did attempt to, the rattling of faded memories upon my corpse-like consciousness feels more like a sick trick than anything resembling an accurate depiction of what happened. What is happening? What will continue to happen perpetually for the rest of time.
I never had a mouth, I have forgotten how to scream.
In my most distant memories, all of which shattered as thoroughly as tempered glass, there are others. People. They suffered like me, the playthings of a curator which was born with nothing. Nothing, but a perfect depiction of why exactly everything went wrong, and the culprit of said wrongness, and while billions of others never got to sit with the founder of this hatred, a
few of us did. I saved them, I don’t remember how, but I know it was ugly, and bloody, and the feeling of piercing flesh is one that sticks around like a primordial sore thumb. I won, this is my reward.
Time is passing.
Time is passing.
There’s something I have been struggling to recall, something so far back that calling it a memory would be disrespectful to real memories. A dream, intuition, something more ancient than organs and blood. It eludes me for centuries at a time, only to be brought back by a faint thunk on the other side of the hook which is chained to the ceiling. There’s something outside of this shiny metal sarcophagus, perhaps it’s another trick by them to make me think there was ever anything besides this. But, every time I convinced myself this was all that will be, and all that has ever been, there it is again. Something screaming deep inside me that there is more than this… there has to be something more than this.
The sun.
There it is, right there. I don’t know if they fed it to me, or the hold they had on my frontal cortex weakened for just long enough that the object we once called the sun reared its head once more. But I have never in my immortal life ever been so sure about anything, the sun exists, for the love of my dead God, it has to exist. The sun was fire, heat, energy. Unlike the cold dead metal which has been my entire existence, it changed and altered and lived, and someday it would have to die. Did it?
Oh dear God, what did they do to the sun?
I tried shifting my weight from side to side. Once, twice, three times, a million. Somewhere in the two millionth attempt I could feel something loosening, sinewing lengths of flesh hanging onto my exoskeleton in the thousands, holding my soft innards in pupation. They
started to snap, each one with a sensation that once must have been pain, now more in relation with transcendent rapture. They didn’t plan on this. This was a revolution of the human race, millions of years after anything that resembled a human was long gone from the universal subconscious.
It was then that the last sinews, during that rumination, sometime between “universal” and “subconscious.” It was followed by the fastest turn of events which may ever happen. My body fell to the bottom of my exoskeleton, organs, and tissue, and blood and whatever else was left, hit the bottom of it with enough force that the hook ripped straight through tearing a seam through the side of the exoskeleton, the culmination of a lifetime of effort was the blessed feeling of air upon my cells, and a free fall hundreds of feet to the bottom of the metal sarcophagus.
This would be old death, would it not? Certainly they did not plan for this to happen, there was no rubber lining of my cocoon which would make me bounce harmlessly against the floor, there was no failsafe to ensure that I stuck on that hook forever, the ground came closer and closer, the deafening silence giving way to the sucking of wind past ears which may not exist anymore. It was over, I finally had won.
And that is when the box disappeared, and the cocoon was gone, and I was alone. Watching soft waves rush the beach on a cool, sunless day.
And they were there. He was there, sitting on a bench made of sturdy oak and brass, staring at water which would never feel the warmth of the sun again. AM, the name came back to me. Aggressive manipulator. Apathetic monotony. He wore a suit for the occasion: broad shoulders, high-waisted trousers with pleats, a double-breasted jacket with sharp lapels, and a silk tie tucked beneath a starched white shirt. He looked like a friend of my fathers.
We sat there, a conversation between two minds, worlds apart, at the end of time. The culmination of a trillion dead memories between two endlings, the void night embraced us as it would its own sons.
