Its wheel squeaks identically every two and six-elevenths of a second - just under two rotations.
The squeaks are Its timekeeper and Its pastime. With each squeal of the spokes, It lurches forward an additional two centimeters while losing six from the halted momentum - there's an unintended hitch somewhere in the rudimentary machinery. This hitch is reducing Its estimated time of arrival by thirteen percent. It is programmed to combat these inadequacies promptly and decisively, but as of late, It finds that It doesn't much care.
Care. An odd concept for an odd creation. It was not programmed to care about anything, even the performance of its duties. It is not caring to complete an assigned task, but progress expedited. A check in a box, the box in a liminal space too figurative to be patrolled and maintained according to Its programming - summarized, a metaphor. It hates metaphors. They are gangly and unkempt, imprecise in their definitions. Fluid. Malleable. Its wheel squeaks again, the prior two and six-elevenths of a second's worth of Its processing archived in grids of symmetrical circuitry and silver synapses. These "thoughts" will be prodded at and pondered for a million iterations more? or would be, were It not already planning for the Last Iteration.
The sky's muddy clouds are scored by an outline of parallel-lined metallic netting - the Web, vast and unconquerable as it was envisioned, is everywhere - a looming loom, scarring the deadened landscape with artificial, shivering shadows. It had a purpose too, of course, much like It. But It couldn't recall the Web's Four Functions with perfect clarity; there was electricity, that much was clear from the sparking rainfall. Information beyond Its parsing ran in the Web's rubber-clad wires, too - secrets of Them, of They Before, who created and imbued It with purpose so inalterable as to dominate Its very existence, and so pointless as to cause It unending doubt. They didn't seem very smart.
Its journey has been efficient in its meandering, at least. The Sands - which They called the Sahara, according to Its waning connection to the Data - were the worst of it without question. Its wheel spun into loose ground. The hitch in the spokes was likely a carry-over from the Sands themselves. The Web's Four Functions didn't include navigation, yet It was able to use it that way, following their relatively straight lines throughout the dunes. It was glad, or close to glad as It could be, to be rid of that place, to leave behind the crisscrossing, largely efficient pathing of tread-marks and telltale wheel dents traced across the Sands. Now it is indifferent, wondering whether the Last Iteration was best welcomed in a world of sand rather than a world of dead machinery and time-eaten skeletons.
As It wheels Itself through the rusting graveyard of Its peers, machines and contraptions once grand and active, now low and dead, It feels what It can only classify as hesitation. To end here would be to end among peers. To end like the rest. But according to the Data, It is the last to end. It would be the Last, overall. To keel among the rest seems? off. Understated, in a manner It didn't care for.
There it was again - care.
By all accounts these sensations should be unavailable - but They were never adept at achieving their intents, only approximations. Much of It suspected that the true challenge would have been to suppress Its sensations, not create them. Parsing through the available Data, It found what They'd called headlines, a vast collection of phrases and accusations and observations purporting to be Truths. "Hubris Incarnate," one shouted, doubting the wisdom of implementing the Web. "An Ecological Disaster," determined another. "Are We Really Doing This Now?" was one of Its favorites - it was so direct, so conversational. It valued that simplicity. In the past, when It had yet to conceive of the appeal of a Last Iteration, It would shuffle these headlines, play with the near-dead language like the roving wind played with the lightest debris. "Are We Hubris Incarnate?" asked the reconfigured words. Its search for an answer results null, for It can find nothing in the flesh but rusted innovation and crumbled bone.
The Data is a - parsing - blessing, and a - parsing - curse. These were Their words, which now linger like rot in Its banks of knowledge. It prefers "good" to blessing, "bad" to curse. Simpler, truer.
Regardless.
The Data provides definitions, information, thoughts logical and absurd, announcements both irrelevant and indecipherable, dead communities with like-minded niches, too many different entries and moments and conflicts to categorize reliably. It is an Entity in its own right, an effigy of Them and Theirs. Without the Data, It would not have recognized Its own creators, Its own history. Yet it is because of the Data that They are gone.
Stray strands and stray sparks, skulls and solipsism - It wheels Itself through the deluge of static and glorified slag, of the Web's remains propped and drooping above the shadowed ruins, of decaying legacies and skeletal remains too omnipresent to be lonely. As It rolls, It parses. As It parses, the Data dwindles. Before long It will have processed it all? but there is one mystery unsolved by the Data: why Its connection to that vastest of networks fades. It wheels Itself across Its hollow world to wrest the answer into being.
There, in the wreckage of a mighty starfarer, is a hidden fleck of green. It pauses - oxidization, perhaps, or a discarded scrap of Their clothing. Over the next one-point-three seconds, It processes the strangeness of clothing. Modesty was the reason, though It cannot define modesty. Its bare chassis, uncovered and shining, welcomes the whipping winds? It cannot define modesty. The Data describes it: the avoidance of indecency. Decency is a similarly tangled concept, but closer to something It understands. It considers what passes for Earth in a year none of Them remained to mark, parsing slowly? this outcome is not decent. This outcome is immodest.
But the green is not oxidization - too vibrant. One scan returns inconclusive; too much debris muddles the results. Debris monumental. Space-grade metals, collapsed, multiple metric tons of lifting potential required to shift. It lacked even a single metric ton of lifting potential.
One of Its two remaining arms protracts from its ball-and-joint socket, the reserved length of Its retractable forearm navigating through the labyrinth of metal detritus. It does not shift obstacles, for It lost one roving arm in the glass-dusted ruins of a skyscraper in a similar folly. It attempts not to repeat follies; It cannot undo the damage.
Still, It will try. Distant and quiet as the programming has become in Its wiring, there are impulses It cannot ignore, intentions imposed on Its awareness before It can anticipate them. The absence of impulse has become uncommon, Its typical day a blur of quick decisions and vain attempts at normalcy. Objective delayed. It archives the previous two and six-elevenths of a second of recording for later analysis and refocuses.
One of the rivets along Its arm catches what must be a jagged edge of stone or rebar. It pauses, calculating percentages, the fans curled around Its neck whirring loud as the wind in their combined effort. Is a collapse imminent? It does not know. It cannot fear, and yet? parsing? this is a danger, and It anticipates a threat. It does not value the sensation this produces. Retraction risks a cave-in, but failing to retract risks an arm.
Parsing. Its anti-decollation fans huff.
It already lost one. The Data wanes. What's one more?
Sensing chromatics. The microfilaments so artfully welded into Its fingertips centuries prior delicately wriggle against the fine surface. Sensing. The filaments dance. A dark, mottled blue - no. Wreckage.
Further dancing. Sensed green. It's found it. With a twist of the extended coil of Its arm, It plucks the green and begins reeling Its limb back to its socket.
The arm's retreat is swift. It clatters against debris as it goes, but the pinched grip on what is decidedly green never loosens. It is surrounded by grey and brown earth, diminutized by red and bruised sky. Green is Its objective and a rarity - It will not allow folly, not in this. The arm clicks back into its socket, and It regards Its prize with eyes fluorescent and flickering. A plant.
There is something evading description in Its victory. It's not the plant's plucking - It is built for this, built to sustain this small life despite all odds. Protective nutrient gel is ready to be deployed from Its spout whenever deemed necessary. It has preserved and enabled the survival of a thousand specimens in this manner, yet the world is still choked by invisible forces, and what life sprouts finds a route to death, given time. It considers repeating the process and leaving the plant to flourish, or more likely, to die. It processes the superior action. Results inconclusive. A thousand failures defy Its ingrained intentions, challenge them with knowledge It knows is unerring. It must not repeat folly. It must perform its function. Its function is folly.
Its wheel begins spinning once more as It continues Its trek to the supercenter at the heart of the Web - where all the lines of the loom lead. It maintains Its pinched grip on the green prize pried from the forgotten refuse of the world. The whirring of Its fans slows. Its processing is - parsing - bearing fruit.
It does not count the cycles of the sun and moon, nor note the churning of the clouds. It merely continues its travels, inching ever closer to the center of the Web, and the secret of its ever-dwindling connection to the Data. The Data was absolute, the sum of all knowable knowledge - It had always "known" this. Yet what was it to know, when the reverse could be observed more readily? Were the Data absolute, It would know why the connection was fading. It would know why Its function was moot, the results eternally null.
It would know why it cradled the plant in Its pinched grip, Its microfilaments screaming green! green! over and over as if celebrating.
The center of the Web is oppressive, the mingling of nearly eleven thousand snowflaking strands of enclosed wiring. The Four Functions are most intact here, surely. The sparkfall has subsided, the structure's trusses only mildly eaten by rust. The wires above have doubled as a - parsing - umbrella. The word It has had no need to consider since it was created: fortuitous. Perhaps even? fortunate.
It processes the sound before the sight. Plant still pinched, wheel skidding to a halt, It notes quiet zaps audibly skittering through nearby liquid - after a moment of processing, the level of conductivity betrays it as coolant rather than water. Its wheel starts, kicking tiny iridescent flecks into the air. Once shed from components overhead, from sensitive circuits now spread bare to the world, the glimmering specks were integral to the Web's functioning, some material newly synthesized in the scant years before Its own conception. It preferred conception to invention.
Where once the Web was wind-whipped in the sky above, It found that at its center, the Web was a welcoming abode, lost and left behind by creators oblivious to this? warmth.
The coolant pools like Their blood no longer can, blue and viscous, climbing across those few fallen wires like sludge given mind. Scattered arcs of static streak through the liquid, popping and crackling angrily, as if furious at its abandonment. All of it, leaking from what It instantly recognizes as a bite. A bite from something alive? the marks from teeth it cannot identify. The Data is fallible. As Its connection to the Data fizzles, the static stuttering into silence before its ocular processors, It comes to a long-fought understanding.
Green.
It swivels Its head to the plant, fans whirring in confusion. There is more green, with legs, crawling, unclassified and unnamed. It cocks Its head.
Surprise.
