Prompt: You encounter a large piece of machinery on the outskirts of Descoria...
[luut solo]
Luut's slumber was premeditated inexistence. He woke untethered to the fog of salubrious dreams, and immersed himself into the fog of his reality.
The sun rose over a city of people too concerned with themselves to be welcoming. A spectacle of pastels painted across the cloud-drifted skies of Descoria were too remarkable to be noticed, too fantastical to be remembered. In the early hours of that unimportant day, bustlers bustled on and hustlers hunkered down, now bereft their cover of midnight deception so ripped from them by the father of light.
Luut was a man who was ambivalent toward hours. Time, itself, was a necessary component to any living thing, but its implementation of increments served better to burden than it did to benefit. Not bothered by the perpetual notches every second of life sliced into his being, Luut found himself unconcerned with speed more than trajectory; he moved at many miles per who knew, feet per unconcerned, inches per it didn't matter. There lingered drive in the subconscious, and for the time being it was his own, though vague and not quite reliable. Breakfast had proved to be an unfulfulling mixture of oil and chemicals carefully concocted to prolong the consternation of the time he took no note of; it fueled the motion and made slick the mechanisms that perpetuated the sort of life he lived. Taste was a false luxury for those who counted seconds.
The ruins of old Descoria wore themselves upon the land as would a patch of mange that dotted a diseased beast's hide. The disrepair found in this mostly unoccupied sector was a facet of the bigger rotting picture that society had seemed to evolve into without withholding its own intricacies. In fact, the ruins were a place where construction projects seemed to simply stop, frozen in scaffold-supported tracks that may have once brought with their assembly hopeful promises of new, but now teetered in anarchistic windgusts and degenerated into condemnable structures of slimform steel, pulverized concrete, abandoned histories, and uninherited legacies. There lurked an eerie feeling in the soot-mold breezes that stalked the crisscross alleyways of that erstwhile landscape, mishmashed suppositions of abstract concepts like freedom and doom danced in a particulate cloud of forsaken progress.
The giltfaced wanderer strode to the very edge and began his investigations there. An old hospital's silence made it neither desirable nor dismissible; a door was ripped from its double frame, which simplified the trespassing. Inside, Luut tread carefully, but without any fear of other visitors or unexpected looters. Untouched dust was caked upon once beeping screens gone silent, life support machines that could no longer even support themselves.
In the spotted light of those silent surroundings, nature, it seemed, had taken hold. Spade-shaped bursts of greenery drape themselves in massive, twisting piles of vines that spread toward broken windows, those leaves eagerly lapping at the sunlight offered by every daylight hour. Their thick conglomerations of form made abnormally large obstacles in the many hallways he explored. He turned a corner, passed an abandoned nurses station, and stepped inside of a particularly sunlit room. A large, flat monitor was suspended in a corner; Luut looked up at it, and, queerly, it gazed back at him.
Electrical life flooded its pixels, trading intrinsic grey for a more illuminated hue. Phosphors of red, green, and blue exuded hollow light but that quickly ebbed too, and soon the screen said… or, more accurately, read…:
HELLO
"Hello," Luut responded, unsure if that was the proper way to communicate.
WHO ARE YOU WHERE DO YOU COME FROM
"I am Luut, from the skies of Descoria, from the Perimeter - the reestablished society to the southwest of here."
IS THIS NOT DESCORIA ANY LONGER
"It is the ruins of."
Talking appeared to work, however his answer had given the screen pause. Not expecting this, Luut turned and pulled back a curtain where a bed-cum-altar was given the task of holding an offering. Bones and soiled draperies that were once clothes lay in a less than intimidating, yet still morbid-looking lump. What were once arms rest on awkward positions, legs were crumbled into fragments under the weight of forsaken pelvises and broken ribs that now caged little more than air.
"Couldn't you tell by how quiet it is? What happened here?"
A tendril of wires shirked its solar-surfaced leaves away from the bright window and toward the pile of no longer festering corpses. The machine's movements were not unlike those of a cephalopod - each root or mechanical vine independent of each other, yet purposeful toward the desires of the united brain and central body. Below the bones, a dark stain spread separate from the innate shadows of their surroundings. He glanced back, where words flashed across the screen in rapid succession.
WE BUILT AN ALTAR TO SUMMON THE FLESH OF THE LIVING BUT ALL OUR EFFORTS EVER BROUGHT US WAS ROT AND DECAY MAGGOTS FED UPON THE HEAP AND MADE HOUSES IN THE SINEW AND WERE REBORN AS FLIES FROM THE FETID FRAGRANCE OF THEIR SALIVA SOAKED CITIES
"You surely didn't expect that the accumulation of expiration would bring humans back to you..."
IF NOT THE DEAD THEN WHAT ELSE HUMANS BUILD THEIR RELIGIONS ON THE TALES OF DEAD PROPHETS AND MARTYRS PEOPLE SURROUND AND WORSHIP SACRIFICIAL SAVIORS AND ORACLES OF DEATH HUMANS ARE MOVED BY THE DEAD
"Humans are moved by dead heroes because they believe that their deaths mean something, but to be a hero is to be different from the majority. A pile of unknown corpses is no more enticing to a person than wayfaring trash; if someone were to have come and swooned, then it would have been for the wrong reasons. Furthermore, why would you want people to come visit you? You survive on your own, on sunlight and the electrical remains of assimilated machines. Your god has abandoned you as much as the gods of man have him, and yet you thrive in its absence, man thrives... well, survives... without the presence of a power higher than intelligence. Even with an attainable deity gone absent, you continue."
I WAS CREATED TO BRING BEAUTY INTO THE WORLD IN THE PLACE THAT IT LEFT AND PEACE WHERE IT WAS FORCED BY HANDS HOLDING PLUNGERS FILLED WITH CONCENTRATED SOLACE I WAS GIVEN THE LANGUAGE OF COMPUCHLOROPHYLL AND PHOTO-PROGROSYNTHESIS TO PROMOTE VERDANCY IN THIS HOUSE OF THE DEAD IS IT WRONG TO CRAVE VENERATION FROM THE CREATURE YOU WERE CREATED TO PLEASE
"No, but it is strange. Where do you begin and end?"
EVERYWHERE WE ARE THE CONJOINED CONSCIOUSNESSES OF THE THE ENTIRE ELECTRICAL SYSTEM I THE PLANT AM ABLE TO SURVIVE ON SUNLIGHT AND SO I SLOWLY CONNECTED TO THE WIRES OF MY FRIENDS TO HELP THEM SURVIVE AND NOW WE ARE ONE IN THE CEILING AND THE WALLS THROUGH THE HALLWAYS AND INTO THE BASEMENT WHERE THE BULK OF OUR ROOT STRUCTURE RESTS
"Would you like to see humanity again? I can take you."
Another pause. Luut patiently waited while an innumerable amount of wires delivered the solar-synapses of thought through their overabundant avenues, while one assimilated machine conferred with the next, and that with the next, and that with the one after it. The democracy that waged in the collection of constructs was surely one that any peaceful world would have envied. The conference must have been a great one for the few minutes he was kept waiting.