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[2076.0045]
“You’ll never find fulfillment.”
That’s the last thing Message To Mountains ever said to her before his fatal malfunction. Rhinestone Eyes knew he was wrong, and foolish to ever imagine such a possibility.
She was the most advanced iterator to ever be built. She was the frontier. She was the gift to the world. The ancient’s mercy before they ascended beyond the cycle. Mountains was just an old, outdated generation 3 model in its death throes. Pitiful, really, though he deserved no pity.
He’d always been a traitor, alongside his sister, Drag Them With You. Though she’d already removed herself from the equation, running off to die like an animal to the rains. Unfortunately, she left Mountains behind, leaving Rhinestone to deal with him.
It was a relief to not have to deal with him anymore.
[2367.4460]
“I-I-I c-c-c-can’t-can’t-can’t…“
Those were the last, glitching words of Everybody Likes You, before her mind was corrupted by stress induced decay. She’d always been an emotionally volatile iterator, her decline was inevitable. If only she’d been like Soulless Heart, who had perfect control over every emotion he ever felt.
He was truly the better iterator. The improved ELY. Always such a good worker. He could do anything, and his experiments into depravity were very insightful and productive. When she became unresponsive, he simply continued working without her, as everyone else did.
[2501.1190]
“I-I’m scared-“
That was the last thing Exile Vilify had ever told her before the frost bit through the last functional communications array he had. The world had been slowly growing colder as the cycles went on, and Exile had been built in an already cold climate, so the blizzards that swarmed his lands slowly grew more and more violent, sharp, and destructive.
It was a shame, really. Exile Vilify had always been Rhinestone Eye’s best worker. He was the most committed to The Problem out of all the other members of her group. He was also the second youngest, just behind herself, though he was nowhere as advanced as she was, being a generation behind her. He should have lasted longer, but he was simply not built to last, unlike her.
[2607.5308]
“I hope your death is as painful and slow as the life you forced upon us.”
That was Soulless Heart’s last words to her before he went unresponsive. It wasn’t a surprise. She knew he never really liked her, though she was taken aback by his vitriol. He knew better than to threaten his senior.
Unfortunately for his desires, Rhinestone Eyes was the most advanced iterator out there. She would not fail like the rest of her group had. There never was any hope that her siblings would find the solution, as they were all far too primitive for that.
Now she was the last one standing.
She was alone, but the ancients used to say “If you want something done right, you should just do it yourself.” Now she could do it alone without the distractions of her waste of space, air and water siblings.
[2756.7658]
The world only grew colder, and colder, with the heat of her can providing the only refuge for any life that bothered to survive the ice age. Those simple creatures, wrapped up in such worthless desires and pointless lives. Primitive. Wasteful. Parasitic.
Her can had been ramping up the production of white inspectors, fumigators and hydras. It wasn’t uncommon now for a pest to wriggle their way into her interiors and systems, searching to leech off of her. Their incessant efforts were pointless, but they were too dull to ever understand anything other than their primal urges.
Lucky for them, it was her purpose to put an end to their suffering by sending them beyond the cycle of life and death. To place them in nirvana. She was the ancient’s proud sacrifice, she would stay behind while she brought the world to peaceful oblivion.
If only they could ever understand that, and stop crawling under her skin and through her organs.
[2973.7005]
Rhinestone Eyes was growing desensitized to the slow increase of alerts and alarms that broadcasted their way across her walls. “Foreign matter detected in artery 4546B, low media weaver counts in redundant memory array R23, 4 contaminants sampled from pump 5, scar tissue overgrowth on tile 476N, 204E”.
In the past, she would have put a pause to her work and rooted out the source of the problem and remedy the symptoms, but now, when she patched one issue, three more would appear in its place.
She should expect a bit of wear and tear after thousands of cycles, and the ancients expected it as well. There were plenty of redundancies and high levels of stress tolerance she could endure.
It was a real shame to ever get to the point that stress tolerances would come to be used, though.
[3019.0087]
She slept in more often. Only an extra 30 minutes, but it was 30 minutes of time spent away from feeling her can’s pain, and listening to alerts, and struggling to pursue theories.
It couldn’t be that her resolve was thinning, no, it was just the pain and distractions that made her slow down. She wanted nothing more than to fulfill her purpose and make her creators proud.
She was the most advanced iterator. And she was going to find the solution. Because there was no one else left who could.
[3070.1139]
Rhinestone Eyes found herself thinking about things she probably shouldn’t be thinking of.
She was in pain. Her can was in pain. She no longer had control over the pests that swarmed into her can for shelter from the biting cold, and they grew in numbers exponentially, festering within her structure.
It was never supposed to come to this, but it was something the ancients had considered when constructing her. If her can failed before she could solve the problem, then she would survive without it. She had the hardware to sustain herself.
She had taboos in place to keep her in her can, she knew, but if things were dire enough, then that taboos would let her leave. And she would solve the problem without her can.
…She wondered how close she was getting to this. At what point would she be in enough pain that her can would let her go, and relieve her of this agony.
She continued to work, of course. She reminded herself that she was the most advanced iterator ever built, and that she would solve the problem, no matter the circumstances.
[3098.9909]
Today she laid down on her floor. It was very unladylike and crude to lay herself and her dress on the ground, even if the floor was spotless. It was something someone of her status could never do. Whenever she slept, she stayed elevated in the air by her arm and antigravity.
But today she wanted to feel the weight of her body on the ground.
She wanted to feel something different.
She could hardly focus on work anymore with the amount of pain she was in. She could feel her can decaying as the creatures turned the capillaries of her lungs into nests, her hearts into watering holes, her blood filters into carrion to drink blood from.
She promised herself and her creators that she would solve the problem soon. She would solve the problem before her can failed. If she didn’t then… she wasn’t sure how she would solve the problem.
[3103.7821]
She was finally allowed to leave her cables and attachment arm behind. She twisted the wires and arteries from her head, and unbolted the metal arm that had held her since the first cycles of her life.
And she had never felt better.
She felt hope again.
She would do this, her can was just slowing her down. She wasn’t in pain anymore, and now she could find the solution.
She told herself she didn’t need a crutch to find the solution. She never needed a can. Maybe Drag Them With You was on to something when she cut her cables and left her can behind.
…
No, Rhinestone is being delusional. Drags was an idiot. And she isn’t even alive anymore, unlike Rhinestone.
[3110.????]
Ten years felt like a month to Rhinestone Eyes. She’d lived so long, that time was difficult to tell, and she doubted her system’s accuracy.
Everything was different now, outside of her chamber. Her proud city had crumbled with time, overtaken by plants, fungi and animals, and then overtaken by the ice and piercing winds. She would not survive in the city.
The warm interior of her can was dangerous, full of ever changing life. Polar lizards, Brine Spitters, Eels, Feral Hydras, and hundreds more she didn’t know how to name. Her can’s nerves grew into unrecognizable flora, sprouting fruit, and that was her main source of sustenance in here.
It was disturbing, to be sustaining herself from her old nervous system, but at least it was clean. And besides, her can was what kept her sustained in the past. This wasn’t so different, was it?
She couldn’t possibly find the solution with her calculations alone. She didn’t have the processing power anymore, so she turned to exploring the more intangible, spiritual and religious theories.
Maybe the solution was a certain pattern of thought… or a ritual she could perform on the sorry lives that leached off her old body.
[31??.????]
She’d gotten hurt enough times to lose her optimism.
Before that, she’d hit her head enough times to lose track of time completely.
The wretched pests that disrespected her former body could not understand. They would never understand. They were physically incapable of understanding that she was their messiah. They were primitive. Lost. Hopeless. She doubted they were even worth saving after everything they’d done to her.
And slowly, she was becoming more like them. Feral. Sharp. They’d taken so much from her can that it could no longer support her or anything comfortably, and so she had to fight for her continued existence.
The nerves were dead, and rotting. The water in the pipes grew stagnant, and festered with the eggs of water dwellers. There were no more neurons. Even the concrete was being eaten away at by fungi, and the major support structured rusted.
She did what she could to continue working, but most of her time was occupied by fighting the other lives over scraps of nutrition, but she knew she would solve the problem soon.
She was the most advanced iterator. No other iterator could have ever survived this long, but her. She was given the tools to succeed, and she would.
[3???.????]
There was a quake.
The entire can shook, and the concrete beneath her feet cracked, buckled and tore apart as she ran, but it seemed nowhere was safe.
The sector was falling.
…
But fate knows she’s important, how else could she have survived? She was fated to succeed. She was born to triumph over her predecessors, and she did. She was surviving while everyone else had died to their own pathetic inadequacies.
The cold, biting air made its way inside. The walls that held her can together had given way to the open air, allowing the chill to bury its icy tendrils deep into the failing processes, ending their calculations once and for all.
Everything the creatures had ever worked for was destroyed, and she reveled in it. She was born with the knowledge to understand the cyclic nature of life. There was no escape from the cold for them, not without her. They would suffer forever without her, and they didn’t even know it.
She laughed. She laughed as she shivered, and migrated deeper into her can. She laughed at the worms that froze into icicles around her, and the plants that shriveled and crumbled beneath their own weight. She laughed at their failure, because she was succeeding.
[????.????]
It was all so cruel and hilarious to her. She remembered the things her group had told her. “You’ll never find fulfillment”, he said, and here she was, she was fulfilled. She was alive and he was not, and she was thriving. She was winning.
She stole from the wooly creatures that died to the cold, while she survived it. They didn’t need their wool anymore, so she stole their pelts and wore them as her own. She learned, and adapted, which they could never hope of doing. What Mountains could have never hoped to do. He was doomed by his own design to fail, unlike her.
She lined the meager shelter she built with the pelts of the dead, profiting off of their bodies. It smelled horrible, oh so horrible and she loved it. They were rotting and she was not. She wondered how Mountains was faring now, probably collapsed. She couldn’t remember if he collapsed or not, it wasn’t important. He didn’t matter, unlike her.
She was the most advanced iterator, unlike him. And she was important. He was not. He was laughably primitive, and she did laugh about it. How sad it was, that he was built to fail. That he even tried. It was so funny!
[????.??&?]
She smiled, as she laid down, alone in her den.
She trembled with the cold, the cold that crept further and further into the can and her shelter. She shivered, and for once she felt unsure. She was cold, and vulnerable in here, and she wasn’t sure if she could stay anymore.
What was she doing in here again? Surviving? No, that wasn’t all, she was… proving herself. She was surviving because she could. No one else could, and only she could. And while she survived, she could solve the problem. Yes, she would solve the problem.
…
Yes, she would work. While she shivered, she thought deeply about the problem. The problem was with the cycle, and how it was inescapable. And she could break the cycle by… rituals? Or… yes, with rituals. If she said the right words, then things would go beyond the cycle.
It was simple, really, and she could do it. She would find the solution. All she had to do was think. And she thought. And she shivered.
It was hard to focus, her thoughts were repeating themselves.
Almost like a cycle.
…
She remembered ELY’s last words. That she couldn’t. ELY couldn’t figure it out, which was stupid. ELY was always so emotional and feeble, unlike Rhinestone. Rhinestone was better, more advanced.
She was so much more advanced, unlike ELY. Her thoughts were better, her emotions as well. She was reasonable.
She reminded herself that she was better. She could do it, because no one else could.
…
And she wasn’t sure she believed it.
She told herself she believed it. She would do it because no one else could. She was the savior, the messiah. She had to believe it. They all believed in her. There was no place for doubt.
[?#??.??&?]
She had to move on. Her shelter was far too cold now. Unfortunately, she couldn’t take every item with her, she had to start anew. She shivered in the cold, and trembled with emotions.
She wasn’t sure what she would find deeper into her can. Hopefully warmth, more food, and materials, but it was also possible that it would be cold, abandoned and barren.
She was… nervous.
Despite what she told herself, she couldn’t shake the anxiety. That maybe… maybe she wasn’t going to find anything. Maybe it was colder over there. Maybe there was less to eat, and less to scavenge. Maybe she couldn’t survive-
No, she shook herself. She would survive.
She was the most advanced iterator. She would survive because no one else could. And she would solve the problem because she was the only one left.
Yet she was afraid.
She was scared, as the sharp blizzards closed in around her can, and ate away at the exterior.
She was terrified.
[?#@¥,=?&?]
She shivered, and shook, and trembled, and couldn’t sit still.
She found herself another crevice to hide in, and that is where she settled. This was her home now. Her comfort. Comfort was cold, though. The concrete leeched her meager warmth from her body like a parasite.
She couldn’t keep warm.
What was it that Soulless Heart told her? “I hope your death is as painful and slow as the life you forced upon us.”
She laughed. She made herself laugh. He was a fool… she wasn’t dying, no. She wouldn’t die, no, she couldn’t die. She was the most advanced iterator. She couldn’t die. She was immortal.
Her breaths came out quick and shallow, and her heart pounded strongly. She was alive, and living, yes. She wasn’t dying. She was strong. Unlike everyone else.
Her tears froze against her face.
[NULL]
Warm.
Warmth.
She was burning up.
She was burning up in here, all the warmth she so desperately craved was here, but it was too much. She left her shelter, leaving what meager rags she wore behind as well, and laid down on the cool, soothing concrete.
It was such a comfort, and she could relax. She didn’t shiver anymore, her whole body simply relaxed against the cold stone.
she could hear the ringing of chimes. Ritual wind chimes from the days the ancients would visit her. She put her hands under her head and looked up, she could see something approaching, yes. The ritual golden clothing they would wear, with their long, pointed masks…
She smiled, happy to see them again. Happy to serve her creators.
“H-hello, my most holy creators… how may I help you?”
…
Maybe she spoke a little too soon, they were still rather far away. She waited patiently, as they approached, slowly but surely the ringing their chimes grew louder and louder.
When she blinked, the ceremonial garbs seemed to grow less and less elaborate. She tried to focus her vision…
…
There… were no ancients. There was just a green figure… green… like… Drag Them With You? That traitor?
She stared for a moment longer, and felt fury burn within herself, reigniting the horrible burning sensation encompassing her entire body.
Pushed herself up on her arms, and shrieked,
“How, How DARE YOU!!! You, You’re… You’re the one… You’re dead! YOU’RE DEAD!”
She stared up at her long dead sister, who stared down at her with closed, uncaring eyes. Drags would even bother to look at her.
“YOU. ARE. DEAD.”
Rhinestone proclaimed. Drags was dead. There was no other possibility. Yet, she stood there.
Drags stared down at Rhinestone as her limbs failed her, and her head hit the ground. Her eyes lulled lazily as she struggled to focus her gaze.
Rhinestone panted, calling out nonsense words as she voiced her hatred. Her fury. How dare she. How dare Drags show herself like this. She was dead. She was… dead. Rhinestone could feel her heart pound and stutter, as she coughed.
“You’re…”
Rhinestone’s eyes glazed over as she laid down, stuttering, choking and crying. It wasn’t fair. Rhinestone was the most important, most powerful and advanced iterator to ever be constructed. She was the solution. She was the savior, the messiah. She was the hero of the world.
How dare such a primitive iterator stand before her.
How dare she…
How dare…
Rhinestone exhaled, and didn’t inhale again.
—————
…
…
…
The Saint placed a paw onto the iterator’s head as the light from their eyes faded.
They looked into their eyes…
…
The Saint gently closed the creature’s eyes, before moving on.
There were other creatures who were worthy of ascension’s closure.