Olympus

I was a soldier. The beginning of my tenure during Revelation was spent positioned on a mountain beneath the Saskatchewan Mortality Terminal. They performed surgeries on me, to augment upon my head a gas mask, and a control board on my left forearm. These were permanent augmentations. I was dressed in the standard dark trench coat, conveniently denoting of Nazi Officer attire. I had an adapted American M14 rifle, which was ideal of execution in more ways than one. No part of my flesh was to show; I was overwhelmed by utility and must have appeared inhuman to everyone.

I remember holding on to a tree on the side of that mountain, looking down at a turbine twenty feet ahead of me, which condensed flesh, bone, and organ into a fine mist that was expelled out the other side. People processed down the face of the mountain, without emotion in their face or inquiry in their actions in their minds, blindly walking face-first into this immense turbine. Occasionally, someone would simply ricochet off the fan blades at the forefront of the turbine and be thrown limply into the air, left to fall on the dead foliage and lie there, twitching. There was a breeze; it was a peaceful morning.

My job there was to maintain the fan and execute anyone to whom this happened. An old man and a young girl holding hands approach the fan; the old man is vaporized, whereas the girl is flung into the air, and she floated at the crest of her trajectory very gracefully before slamming into the ground again. I took my hand off the tree, picked up my rifle sluggishly, and began to lumber over to her. Along the way, a man grabbed my arm and said, “Come with us, brother.” I respond, “I’ll be there soon. Don’t worry.”
The girl was still ticking and twitching on the ground when I reached her. She had beautiful, golden hair and light skin. The flesh of her face was peeled halfway off, and I could see a deep groove in her skull where the bone was indented by the blade. I pointed the muzzle of my rifle at her head and stared down the outside of the barrel. I pulled the trigger, and her head exploded. The glass eyeholes and the attenuation of sound in my mask allowed me to refrain from blinking or wincing, so I watched it play out vividly. It’s strange, how tissue and dead foliage mixes.

With a good portion of strength, I picked the girl up off the ground and walked over to throw her in the turbine. Having done that, having heard the sick shaving sound of her body being torn up, I stepped aside and looked up the side of the mountain. A peppered procession carried on, comprising of people of both genders, of all ages, and of every race. They were all normal people, dressed in normal clothes, with absent countenances and a mindless inhibition to walk into the gyrating and consuming blades. A popular saying at the time, which I heard as I stood there on the hillside, was “I’ll see you in oblivion.”

The forest there was dead. The trees had long since passed and left their leaves on the ground. You could see the great plains through the bare canopy, a perfectly flat and beige expanse punctuated here and there by abandoned houses or barns, ruined metropolises, and skeletons of ancient villages. There are bands of people who still fight the genocide; sometimes, they hole up in a department store or hide in the basements of old houses, planning life on earth after they’ve been, as they believe they will be, “left alone.” Because of this, we have Colossi.

They’re two hundred feet tall walking alloy skeletons, but their machinery is condensed into a sleek growth symmetrically clumped around their upper torso, so that they have a hunched back and a head receding into their shoulders. Their limbs are very thin, and their legs end not at feet, but into very fine points that stab into the earth as they walk. They are completely silver and featureless, except for a black band across where their eyes should be and a red light on their head that blinks as they process syllables. Their voices are very deep and digital, and they can be heard for miles.

A week later, I was displaced to the Kitchen Sink, the first and original Genocide Machine. The center receptacle is comparatively a giant metal bowl, a hundred feet across. It contains various creatures and animals collected from the vicinity by Colossi, everything from mice to bears. They’re usually scrambling and screaming and crawling all over each other. At the press of a button, they are drained into what may be considered a giant garbage disposal machine. It’s funny to me, how cartoonish it is.

Around the sink are what seem to be four massive cheese graters, sloping down into the bowl. Drugged pedestrians are sat inside it so that their heads are sticking out of the holes, facing in at the bowl. Beneath the surface of the Grater is a grid of blades that is thrust forth to decapitate those seated inside. If they are to tall or short, they are either disposed otherwise or at the behest of misfortune to die inconveniently.

I was the one in the control booth, alongside a couple of other advisors, who were dressed in suits and gas masks similar to mine. As I saw each pedestrian had been placed adequately in their places, I hit a button to initiate the decapitation and dumping process. Their heads popped off and rolled into the bowl below, followed by their limp bodies below the grater. Robotic snipers from above killed any surviving humans, although the wild animals usually consumed them instantly.

I imagined for a moment that I was a survivor in the bowl – daydreaming, if you will. I managed to duck before the blades had cashunked me, and I slid into the bowl with the limp bodies. I must have been terribly horrified. But my horror would magnify as I’d get caught squirming amongst the beasts, fighting against wolverines and bobcats that had been mindlessly frenzied by the psychologically debasing drugs, which were sprayed upon them beforehand. Perhaps I would find a human arm caught in the deluge, and I would have to beat some creature to death to get it off of him. As well, I would need on my side the chance to survive the snipers. There would be skulls bursting all around me in the aftermath of a hellish crack from above. If I managed to survive that and climb down the ladder into the maintenance hall, what would I do? I would have no other choice but to shoot myself; the rest of the world would be, and is, dead. This is all assuming that I was still emotive; the pedestrians have been robbed of emotion or choice by the drugs.

As the snipers kill off the last of the survivors, I see one whom they had missed slip off the edge, securing his grip on the ladder and climbing down. The advisors don’t catch me; I let him go. There is no reason to waste one of our bullets on a man who will take care of himself.

I pull the red lever, which has been appropriately flaked of paint as if splattered with blood, and the rumbling comes. The crowd in the bowl recedes slowly and ominously down into the disposer, and the turbine processes all of it into a river, which pours from a drainage pipe into the plains. The thought of the survivor who escaped crossed my mind again.
A few hours later, my shift having been completed, I took me rifle and patrolled the halls of the compound. I came to the exit corridor and saw the survivor sitting on the floor with his back against the wall. His eyes were alive; I saw a tragedy within them, which gradually grew more vivid as I got closer to him. I stopped a few yards away from him and observed; he had an unkempt beard, scraggly hair, and tan skin. He was breathing inhumanly deep. I said to him,

“I will only kill you if you would prefer it. But out there,” I said, as I pointed to the broad light pouring in from the distant exit at the end of the corridor, “there is only death, and it shall bestow itself upon you far more horrifically than if I were to euthanize you here.”

The man looked up at me rather calmly, and his eyes now had in them a wild animal, a very raw emotion. He picked himself up from off the floor and said, “Horror is a tragic weakness; I prefer to walk in the vibrancies of life abreast and die horrifically than face the darkness of man’s creation, a symbol of superstition, as a dogmatic premonition of salvation. There are many flavors of life, my friend, but there is one death, and death shall come upon me by destiny; I should experience the vivid spectrum of life to its greatest extent before handing myself to an empty and inevitable singularity.” He set himself on his feet and walked out of the tunnel.

Who was to say he was not an intelligent elite? Perhaps I was only the most aware of the human advisors. If I wasn’t, I doubt I could arrive at such a conclusion. But I worked without contest regardless; I expected death like the rest of them. My later missions were the supervisions of the wasteland, or rather; making sure the humans had all died. I spent weeks walking deserts flatter than the earth should allow, happening occasionally upon villages that had resorted to mass suicide. Usually, there was a squad with me, and we would battle with rebel groups who had eluded the drugs. There are often very furious firefights in decrepit settlements, but I had yet to lose a single one of them. They were very serious about winning, but never thought it out enough. We knew how to outmaneuver and destroy them before we even got there.

When not with a squad, I would be traveling by foot between stations through the desert. Once, they told me a direction in which to walk, gave me supplies, and told me to go to the next station. I walked for miles on end before I understood the hopelessness of my cause. They hadn’t supplied me with sufficient water or nourishment. It was not surprising to me; I expected it. My feet carried me on in a haze of morbid hallucinations, of violence and the denial of human temperament. Slowly, I recounted to myself memories of what I had done, the pain I have brought upon a great portion of mankind. I was merely a pawn, but I was put behind the reins of a very great and evil machine. At that present time, I found it impossible to comprehend the concept of regret, a feeling that has yet to terminate.

I found myself walking straight at a Colossus, who had since begun to lumber towards me. I waited momentarily for my demise, contemplating what turgid eviscerations and dissipations I was about to endure. My feet stopped, and I heard it thump ominously onward, growing closer and closer. But as the thumping of its footsteps ceased, and my form was still of shape, I raised my eyes and saw that it had knelt upon one knees, and its right hand was pressed upon the ground facing upward, as if a child coaxing on a kitten. The red light blinked as it bellowed,

“I’m going to Olympus. I suggest you come with me.”

It was then that I was faced with an evident conflict, the choice of life in eternity or death in eternity. As I had been endowed mentally with a psychological depression on temperament, the advent of progressive consideration had left me very confused. Rather than disregard the Colossus outright, I had taken a moment to think about its offer. My cognizance experienced a relapse; perhaps the depression was, to a small degree, broken or surmounted by the temptation to live in Olympus.

I walked towards him as I dropped my rifle. My footsteps broke the waves that ran on the surface of the sand, and the wind seemed to press against me furiously. But I stepped upon his palm, and suddenly, I began to rise. Fluidly, the distance between the horizons shrank, and the Colossus hummed, as it slowly stood upright. It stopped, and I surveyed the world for as far as I could see. There were only dark, desolate plains and plateaus, and the sky was particularly blue. But it was extremely quiet that high in the air; I wonder if, by some degeneration of self-restrain, I managed to transcend an instant of enjoyment at that time.

The giant moved me to its chest, and a small doorway opened in it. I walked in. The doors closed behind me, and I was left in a quaint space, surrounded by dark machines with blinking lights. I assumed they were computers. There was a low and quiet humming, which seemed to be everywhere. I moved on, having to duck slightly, and found stairs that twisted through the mess of computers and up into a circular room, in which was a ladder. As I climbed further up the ladder, I found that I was approaching a much lighter place, which was on the other side of a trap door.

I flung the trap door open and climbed into a place that was comparatively extremely bright. My eyes adjusted, and I saw that I had come to the cockpit. But it seemed only to be a room; on one side, there was a grand window punctuated by immense panes; on the other, just a wall, but the entire room was a dome. It appeared that the head of the Colossus was almost completely empty. At the center of the windows was a regal armchair, which looked Victorian, striped in gold and white. Before it was a very nondescriptly white control panel, studded with dials that were glowing blue. As I sat in the chair, the lights all went out but for one in the center, which was flashing. I pressed it, and the Colossus began moving.

Relaxation set in on me as I reclined in the armchair and began to undo straps in my uniform. The armchair was surprisingly comfortable. At that point, I was sure I was far from anxiety, which was the leading depression on my psychologically clarity. Suffice to say, the spell was broken. My ideologies were far behind me.

Since I have arrived at Olympus, I was educated for a time on astronomy and astrophysics, then granted a complex of my own to live in. There is a bedroom, a great hall, a library, a kitchen, and a bathroom. It is entirely Victorian, like the armchair, as well as generally very white. The great hall is endowed with very large windows, and it is completely subject to whatever I may want to place in it. Robots usually wheel out a chair and a coffee table, where I sit in the morning and have tea. In the library, which is also very much a study, there is a computer terminal where I might track the progress of an exploration satellite that had been gifted to me by the community. So far, some of the other Olympians have found mundane instances of life; I’ve merely been collecting data about planets that have already been discovered.
As I was sitting in front of the computer terminal one morning I saw something very interesting on the screen. My satellite had been floating from earth for a while, and I wondered what image I might conceive of if I were to turn it around and render an image of the earth. It was a very inconsiderably small dot, which was very strangely discolored, suspended in a beam of light. This was the miniscule point in the universe that harnessed everything that has ever been known or done. Perhaps the genocide of the ignorant wasn’t as serious a matter as I thought.

There are public places in Olympus. They’re primarily cafes and gardens, the latter commonly being extremely vibrant with plant life, styled by the Olympians and maintained by robots. One evening, after I had finished writing a few pages on the structure of 303’s atmosphere, I decided to have a carbonated beverage at the Northern garden. A man approached me and asked if he could sit with me, and I said it was fine. We were having a conversation about Neo-platonic philosophy when he denoted something that had happened to him. He said he had escaped from the Kitchen Sink.

At the time, I had been removed of my gas mask and control panel and augmented with a blank, white face and synthetic biological material; he couldn’t have recognized my face or my voice. The voice with which I spoke to him was also my natural voice, not a synthetic one. But as I got a better look at him, I noticed that he was, indeed, the man in the tunnel to whom I had spoken about death. He told me that he was picked up by a Colossus, and I said the same thing happened to me. When he asked me if I ever worked at the Kitchen Sink, I simply told him that I didn’t.

This is the whole of my life at the moment. I wear normal clothes, I exercise occasionally, and I quite like classical music and gardening. I enjoy refilling my bird feeder; because I was trained so rigorously, I walk very systematically, and so the birds feel safe in flocking upon me as I pour food into their feeder once or twice a week. Very often do I fancy sitting on the deck outside my study and watch the fog clear over the pine forest that covers the mountains like a blanket, and hearing the silence that shrouds it all. Life has begun again.

I do a lot of writing as well. Poetry is very interesting to me, I enjoy reading and speculating upon points in history, and the library is full of all kinds of classic literature, which I have yet to complete. Occasionally, the things I write are permeated by a very strange emotion influenced by the memories that exist from the old days. But that was the past, and it is gone, never to confront me again. We are a flawlessly intelligent race again, and we have been immortalized by nanobots, left to die only by means by which we had not foreseen. And even then, such unseen premonitions can often be remedied in the present. The Olympians harness in their hands the power of gods; it was no wonder they chose to discard of the ignorant in exchange for an endless moment at peace in the sky.