The Gray Machine

Drift, Body

When progress burns the night's bright trail

Lost tracks to where the sky grows pale

The quiet thunder wheels tell tales

Only embers beyond the night's soft veil

Only embers between the beast and the rail

– Raziya and the Sings, Freedom

July 4th, 2032. The day the turquoise gulf waves outside of Coatzacoalcos yielded a body. A not quite human body. He floated six miles toward land before dying, ebbed in soft half-consciousness.

This is the end. I am the last of the company men...

We solemnly swear to constant vigilance...

We have failed...

The rough ocean caps filled his eyes and the hard salt burned his lungs, the water was an alkaline bullhorn SOS stuck on repeat. The sky flashed perfect blue between the diminishing waves. There had been a purpose, a goal—something about an Ikoem sister and her daughter. But the central directive was as blurred as the dark shapes of great barracudas darting at the edges of his fading vision.

All abnormalities will hereby be rendered obsolete...

And now even he was barely intact, bleeding and exhausted. Reduced to senses relaying information to a lone flickering consol in an abandoned mind.

I will not break the Second Oath of Nihilism. I will not fear...

The purpose binds. Purpose is life. Without many the one is without purpose...

He flailed, and it did nothing to adjust his course in the shifting, timeless waves. The waves always win.

The Ikoem girl must...

Must what?

Despite his formidable, linear will, wired like a black box in a bomber plane, he could no longer remember the directive. All memory swam about, listless as the rocking waves, and began to lose cohesion along with his flesh.

The purpose binds. Purpose is life. Without many the one is lost...

Purpose is blood, nerve, collagen, pulse...

Forward to eternity, no divergence from the norm...

Neurons sputtered at random, flashing migraine static across his dying eyes. He became the colorless cubic heart, giant and pulsing, at the center of the monolith against a sky of white, at the precipice of man's development. In the dark hollows below, he glimpsed the gray-clad ranks of his comrades, their hard-set eyes like the shells of carrion beetles crafted into their pale faces, the color of truth and clarity. Cogs in a machine.

Culture is the cancer that metastasizes across the great Gray road, forward to eternity...

The water was growing gentler and warmer as he approached land. An infinity of sand sparkled before dying eyes, the corneas now beginning to sluff off, nibbled by thousands of tiny fish. Kingdoms rising and falling... if there had still been someone there to recognize the scene before him, he may have thought that it was unbearably lovely.

The golden seafloor would have been visible in the clear water, ten or twelve feet below. Those eyes saw it approach but registered nothing. His heart ceased to beat. Veins and capillaries contracted and collapsed under the pressures. Blood oozed in dark jellyfish plumes from a hundred gashes across his large body. His lungs filled with salt water and sparkling starlight sand. His starved brain flooding with hypoxic blood.