The Children of Men

I



Found notebook, pen, in house. Bombed out. I'm tired.



II



Found some bots. Shot them all, dead. Feel to writing fun shit. Can't think right. Another day I hope alright again. Head hurts always. Not easy to write, it's not. Trying really hard.



III



Sky always white. Rains often. Mountains around valley, I am in the second one. Barren, houses around. Robots and zombies, they try to kill me, I kill them instead with gun. Gun easy to use, point and fucking shoot. Fucking shit ass bitch fuck ass, dick. Fuck you. Cursing helps me think. I write better when I fucking curse. Words go together alright then. At a fire I made, piece out.



IV



In valley, there are houses. I find food and good things in the houses. Rooms are bed, food, white bowl, clothes, dark, hollow sitting. Like bed rooms, great for sleeping. Always dead children in the houses. Fun to shoot.



Robots. They are like people or horses. Horses are hard shooting, people easy. Horses are big, people small. Horse fast, people slow. Make really scary noises, sound digtl.



Zombies. Are gray flesh people, crazy as heck. Try to eat skin brains or blood. I like shooting them and hear screaming. Robots have good scream, too. But scream from steeds, horses. Loud, screechy. This is a semicolon; [u]fuck[/u].



V



Remembered more things today. I remembered syntax. Real important, syntax. Fuck this is really hard. Head hurts and eyes drip with blood. Today is a shit ass day, fuck.



VI



Love the clouds. Vast, majestic. More words today. Why am I stupid?



Today I found some sunglasses. they say "Wayfarer" on side. They're cool as heck. They were in a bed room on a table of drawers with mirror. Lots of other colorful shit. Girl was on bed, mostly decayed. She must have had a fat ass, because it was not as thin as it should have been by then.



VII



Today I had an epiphany. I remembered language in its entirety, so now I can write better. Cursing helps me think; that has not changed.



Zombies are seriously goddamn annoying. They're all fucking decaying and loud and they try to tear shit up; it's gay as hell. My rifle is like an arm, though, and I can kill things real easy. There's always ammo around. Robots are usually the same, only they move faster and are real smart. After a bunch of them mobbed me I started getting the hang of how they all work. At night, I always sleep on the ground floor in a house with my ear on the floor so I am more sensitive to vibrations. Never act sensibly around them; always be unpredictable.



Houses are all bombed out and cracked up. There's unperishable food everywhere, in most kitchens. In the middle of the whole valley is a yellow house with a small kitchen. There's a small table, with two chairs by the window. There were two black skeletons sat at the table, not moving, of course. Cool.



I like jelly a lot I just take jars around with me and eat with a spoon. I don't get sick, but sometimes my eyes bleed. It really hurts. I wish they didn't, and I don't know why they do. I'm okay, though.



Sometimes I think about memories. They happen occasionally. I remember being at gardens in really nice places with peacocks walking around. There are a lot of really nice sculptures and fountains. The ground here is either tall grass or all broken up and cratered. The indentations rise up like waves, and they've grown to stay like that. I'm sure it was bombed. But I don't know if there was a war.



I'd like to write more, but I'm tired. Good night.



VIII



Found a campsite by the mountains that surround the valley. Lots of normal people like me. They all have guns and food.

I don't need to be here, because I find food fine, and I don't seem to be susceptible to robots and zombies. I've let them attack me before, and they can't seem to hurt me. They say I am cool.



When they asked me what my name was, I couldn't remember. But I was thinking about a couple memories when they asked, a movie I liked and a song I liked. ISo I said, Joaquin Robinson. It's a good name.



They have a book here called the Kapliad. They say it's about a city called Runark, which split in two. The new city was called Babylon. That name rings a bell with me. The main character seems really cool. He's chill as fuck. Wore a grey gas mask, red hoody, jeans, Chucks. They tell me he's still alive. Cool.



Some things I should have said earlier:



There's a city on the other side of the valley. It's called 9830389. It's populated entirely by robots. They won't tell me more about it. The valley is miles wide. It's totally enclosed by things that are either mountains or just cliffs. It's extremely hard to get out. Some people live in the mountains.



When I went outside my tent, I noticed there's a really big pyramid and a bunch of towers in the city. You can see the lights through the really thick fog. I feel like sitting and writing more, as long as I'm at the camp. I am still regaining thoughts. Very slow.



I have spoken to a woman here in private. Her name is Laena. She told me that 9830389 has a few human inhabitants. When you get there, if you want to live in the city, they run a series of tests to confirm your ability to peacefully live in the city. Most people who go there do not survive the tests. I may go there if I have to.



Laena has gone to bed. I'm going to go to bed, too. Good night.



IX



I have decided to stay at the camp and read the entirety of the Kapliad. For some reason, I feel like it would be very liberating. It don't feel like I need to curse or pass destructive emotions when I am endorsed by intelligence in its simplest manifestation. At present, my comprehensive vocabulary has been released by some even fresher epiphany, however my imaginative and abstracting capabilities still seem to suffer some unexplainable depression. I am very passionately drawn in by words; I feel as if a grand expanse of turmoil and wisdom lies conveniently at my feet, summarized into a simple and plain series of vivid aphorisms. I will write again, only having finished reading this mysterious volume.



X



Many things have happened since my last entry, and lots of time has elapsed, so I'l try my best to summarize and address them as well as I can. I have fully remembered everything, and so I will begin from there.



I awoke in an underground test facility. The room in which I awoke was all white, there was a dead woman in a lab coat against the wall, and there was a TV in the corner near the door. The facility itself was strewn with the bodies of scientists and workers; everything was ravaged and destroyed. All the clocks were dead, and I had no access to the surface. I wandered this place looking for food for approximately ten days; there were multiple cafeterias all around, and I soon drew the conclusion that the place was remarkably enormous.



During this time, I was completely conscious and regular. Of course, I was incredibly confused, but everything was otherwise straightforward. All I had was a robe that I had stolen from someone's locker; eventually I took the uniform of a dead guard and his handgun as well.



The lab itself was apparently designed for research on cyborgs. I didn't appear to have any augmentations whatsoever. Some rooms were identical to the one in which I awoke, although it seemed as though the patients didn't exactly survive. One of them was the upper half of a body with the tailbone hanging down - no muscle or flesh, just organs suspended by a wire prefecture in the ribcage. He or she had crawled a few feet from the incubator before expiring, and the whole floor was pooled with blood. Their eyes were rolled back into their head, and so I guessed they had undergone leagues of pain.



Another one was essentially just a skeleton, only the brain and spinal cord were in perfect codition, and there was a metal box on the back of the skull. There were two grey spheres for eyesi n the sockets, and its bones were laced with a sort of metal wire concentrated to various points, which I assumed were its muscles. This one was sitting on the bench outside, a trail of blood leading to it. I tried to wake it up, but it wouldn't respond.



Another was just a shapely woman with a strange machine enclosing her head. She had apparently made it just down the hallway before collapsing; her skin, I soon discovered, was systematically sliced all over in patterns, and she was surrounded by a great pool of her own blood.



My wanderings were eventually concluded as I met up with two other survivors. One had a sort of silver visor for a head and the other a dark glass prism. Both of them appeared to be nothing short of robots, clad in lab coats, shirts and pants that they had taken from the locker room. They were peaceful, and actually very intelligent and wonderful to speak to, even in the midst of so much violence and destruction.



They told me they had been awake for about the same amount of time as me, and that they were both good friends before they were taken here. They remembered their lives before they came here, that they had both been fatally wounded in the war, and had signed up to donate their bodies for research. Apparently, I must have done the same, although they weren't sure what had been done to me. It soon became apparent that I had been internally modified to affect my physical capabilities, because I demonstrated running up and down the hall at inhuman speeds, I had exceptional strength (picking up a refrigerator, ripping off doors, throwing benches), and I had a photographic memory.



In the middle of the conversation they began to randomly ask me various questions. I didn't know the answer to any of them, and they concluded by declaring that I must have been human. They told me that I had hesitated and shaken my head before trying to come up with an answer, and that nothing I said was repetitive. Then they began to poke and prod me until I grew literally angry. Finally, they told me a joke that was hard to understand, which I laughed at after some deep deliberation.



The conversation eventually turned on them, and I asked them about the same dial boards that each of them had on their left arms. After inspecting them for some time, the one with the silver head pressed a button, and the board illuminated with blue lights. The other did the same. There were four dials, which read, "Anger", "Separation", "Depression", and "Revelation."



For a few moments, I watched them curiously and carefully turning the knobs, before I looked up into the darkness of their metal helmets and saw something incredible. The one with the silver head had only a black strip before his eyes through which to see, whereas the one with the prism of glass had an entire face through which to portray what I saw: it seemed as though their every thought was meticulously displayed in their faces, which suddenly became a remarkably vivid collage of LED images. They seemed to be computer monitors without pixels, as if I was staring at real life. I saw beautiful stretches of woods from the backseat of a car, I saw the stars at night, a birthday party, images of classical paintings and films, television, music videos, and various other beautiful, as well as ugly, displays of human imagination.



I indicated this to them by saying, "Wow, I wish I could do that." They soon recognized this on each other's faces and spent a while transacting their thoughts. We soon discovered that they could manipulate what emotions they felt and what appeared on the screen by turning the knobs on their arms. They managed somehow to generate very distinct and clear images, like smiley-faces and lines from poems they ad memorized. A moment of silence fell on us as they spent time reveling in their own fascination. Across the face of the one with the prism head, I saw an inscription that read much like the [i]Kapliad[/i] in diction, although I didn't quite know what it was from. Having accessed my photographic memory, I can now distinctly recall that it said, "Thou turnest man to destruction; again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men."



But soon this fascination passed as a noise came from down the hall, and the three of us looked to see a humanoid machine, or a robot, standing at the end. Both of them seemed to react rather frightened, but I managed to step forth and attempt to interact with it. Suddenly it came bounding towards me, and I instantly deliberated that it was attacking. Without thinking I brandished my handgun and shot it to the ground. I said it was strange that I had wandered for days without seeing anything, but was attacked as soon as I met up with other people. We decided that marauding machines were likely attracted to a multitude of people, and that we should either keep moving or leave each other.



The latter idea seemed like the worse one, and so we carried on through the lab, until finally we came upon the lab's server hub. All the computers in the facility were blackscreened, and we reckoned that they all worked on the same network. The two of them took on the task quite enthusiastically, and I stayed behind on the lookout for more machines. They managed to turn them back on within minutes, and we accessed the computer outside the hub.



I asked them if they would find the records regarding all of our designs, out of a very sentimental curiosity. They sat at the terminal as I watched guard in the hallway. We were attacked three times in the first half our or so, and we soon realized that we had attracted many marauders after the initial attack. Fortunately, I had taken a few extra magazines from the guard just in case.



They had to move back and forth between the server hub and the computer, because they had to continuously break through authorization requests, although I never inquired to how they did it. The attacks became more frequent, and they began to come in two's and threes. There were feral robots, outcast humans, and even what I can only describe as robotic quadrupeds, like robotic panthers or tigers. Either side of the hallway was littered with bodies, and I began to hurry my two friends.



First, they accessed their own records. They had a completely robotic exterior, but they retained their own brains and vital organs. After accessing mine, they found that I did retain my vital organs, but there were no notes regarding my brain. I accepted this a little uneasily, although we concluded simply that nothing happened to it. However, none of the records were updated after about six months ago from that time. They owed this to the several racks of destroyed servers in the hub, which were probably the last ones used.



Not long afterwards, finding nothing more to research and having become overrun by ferals and outcasts, we decided that it was about time to leave. Before we left, they looked up a map of the facility (which was harrowingly complex) and quickly found their way to the security locker rooms. Once there, they took uniforms like my own and we all took rifles and plenty of ammunition. They proved to be just as skilled at shooting as me, and so we managed to safely make our way to the exit and fight our way out. which was through a long, dark corridor of stairs leading straight up. Suddenly struck by a diverse feeling of intrigue, I decided to let them go ahead, having warmly embraced them at the approval of my survival, and I returned to the desk in the ravaged lobby to access the computer there. I heard them fighting off a few ferals outside as I would occasionally turn and kill one of my own.



I accessed my records again and skimmed over them madly. Eventually, the two of them were far enough away that the outcasts were more attracted to them, and after a few minutes there were only those who remained in the compound. At that point I had become overwhelmed by the horrible banging and screeching of the machines, and I soon became horribly annoyed at the prospect of seeing another one. As I pulled up another tab in my profile I read a particularly important note, which told that I would, within the first two weeks, undergo a violent impairment of mental capabilities that will serve as an automatic reset button designed for reeducation. But there were no scientists or lab assistants around to reeducate me, and so I was left to fend for myself in the wasteland.



I was overcome by insufferable rage and hatred towards absolutely everything that crossed my mind. I murdered every living thing I came in contact with, to the extent that I learned to survive based on my very nature of the time. Everything was subconsciously inherent, and almost nothing was a fully conscious endeavor. I was, for something like six months, an absolute child, scrounging for ammunition and nourishment at every hour of the day, until I felt like going to sleep. The act of murdering and taking was a game, and I became a champion. Sometimes I fear that I had perhaps murdered even the innocent, a potential reality that has recently grown to haunt me. But as I began to emerge from this stupod, I soon concluded that I was only inclined to kill that which might kill me.



The world began to change with the reading of the [i]Kapliad[/i]. Everything I knew and all with which I was familiar suddenly developed meaning and consistency. Living organisms were born, experienced sensations, judged these emotions, and died. The sun rose in the east, settled in the west, and was followed by the landscape of the Cosmos. Intelligence was the greatest tool a survivor could ever know, the ultimate weapon of a champion, and the final resolve of all death and suffering in the universe.



As soon as I had completed the first few chapters of the tome, I reveled in a terrible depression that was occasionally enlightened by faint and inconceivable nuances in my intellect, that flowers had color or that the world carried on in cycles. After a while, I left teh camp, curious to wander the wasteland and reflect on all I had ever seen in the last few months of my self-reeducation.



I took time not just to scrounge for food but to admire the figures of robots strewn across the ground, the vacant expression in feral mens' faces, and the story to be told of a bombed out house whose family was left huddled and dead in the basement. Perhaps they all committed suicide. Perhaps they froze during winter. Was there a war here? Was it genocide? Or was this a degree of civilization that had almost made it - a society of outcasts that had almost met with success, but failed the testament of reality, and collapsed under its own futile attempts. Gradually I became more and more horrified, having learned the true nature of the wasteland.



Throughout my wanderings of the Valley itself in the last few weeks since I left the camp. I feel much less like a child, more like an adult, at last. There's nothing more horrifying to me than the knowledge that I was once blissfully ignorant and conceited, that I may have once murdered an innocent person, or perhaps a multitude of them, and taken all for which they were worth. The simple idea of killing something that wears clothes, builds houses and preaches peace is enough for me to turn to suicide. But I refuse to succumb to such a fate, and so I will press on, so that I might manage to transgress all that makes me ill with myself and formulate a far more reasonable future. Hopefully, one day, I will escape the Valley. I may even care to move to Babylon.



XI



The Valley is home now. There's really not much to it; it's incredibly wide, almost no features, dilapidated houses everywhere, and everything is shrouded in some degree of fog. The ground is always changing elevation, so you're either walking up or down at any point in time - and it's not uniform, which makes me think this place was bombed sometime in the past. Imagine a giant bowl enclosed by immense ridges on every side - and no matter how long you walk, the ridges never seem to get any closer. This all is then surrounded by a hundred miles of mountains, also in every direction, and borders on the Fields of Runark in the north. Leaving is a big deal.



9830389 lies at the southern end of the Valley. Through the fog, you can always make out the citadel and a couple of towers on either side - all of it is sparkling with lights everywhere, as if someone dashed the whole city with glitter. The citadel is a giant pyramid, and I think the two Dukes live there. I don't know much else about the city, other than that it's a city of robots. Sometimes I think about trying to live there, but I hear the only humans who go there are people who want to die. The Admission Council will readily execute anyone who asks. And besides, the admission test usually rejects anything covered in tissue. But maybe I'll pass, who knows?



That's pretty much the Valley in summary. I spend all my time moving from house to house, gathering up supplies. Every new house is like a puzzle: trying to find out where the family ultimately expired, where they thought it was a godo place to hide ammunition, where their food stash was, what kind of people they were based on what stuff they had lying around, rich or poor, good people or bad people. I spend the day there fighting any robots who discover I'm there so that they don't eat me at night. When night comes, I usually sleep in the attic or something, so I can just jump off the roof and run my ass out of there if I need to. Oh yeah - I can withstand some pretty heavy falls. Feels good, really.



Of course, I'm not the only one looking for places to sleep and things to eat; there's always another band of marauders I have to kill from across a depression, or feral things I have to tear to pieces before they give up. Population-wise, the Valley is surprisingly rich. Not as though you're bumping into people, but you're always going to happen upon someone else throughout the day. Where do they come from? I don't know. But they're always hostile, and they're always trying to murder as many things as possible. Maybe they understand they won't survive anyway, so they're just trying to make their way while they can. Although, as long as they're shooting at something, they're probably not going to survive. It's a very obnoxious paradox.



All of the other marauders carry subordinate guns to mine, and I'm physically adept in comparison anyway, so I always leave a fight unscathed. I'm really afraid to get shot, but I know it's going to happen eventually. Still, no reason worrying about it. I don't ever expect to die, but I'm still very sure that it will probably happen one of these days. There's no way you can tell. Marauders are scheming, and ferals are in more places than you think. I'm constantly getting jumped on and shot at, and I can never tell when it will happen. One of these days.



XII



The idea of an actual wasteland didn't sink in until the last few days: it was, without surprise, a land that had been laid waste. Judging by the wide array of dilapidated buildings all around the Valley, which are all stocked with food and supplies for war, I could hardly help but deduce that this whole place was once at war. Everywhere, I see similar models of robots and the horrendously decayed figures of men who seem to have missed the part where they became skeletons, and remained dark grey cadavers for eternity. There is the occasional maddening roar of industry from the City, which thunders overhead like the voice of a god.



The whole landscape is incomplete without the addition of fleshy and metallic corpses sunk into the ground, usually gripping rifles, or something of the sort. There are bunkers still burgeoning with maniacal humanoid machines and walking corpses caught in a fury. Earlier today I entered a cement building on top of a short hill that seemed like some kind of battlement. Everything was close-up, so I only had my handgun out. It was a cramped array of hallways and windows that had all been broken in. Relief is the indication of a place being clear; I wave my gun around the hallways without making a noise, and the sheer degree of potential chaos, the fear of the unknown and the probability of extreme danger, is so nerve-racking that I've actually exceed my wits and commenced to screaming and curling up on the ground.



The robots are completely silent, except for the sound of machinery working inside of them. That's the most horrifying aspect, the fact that they're next to silent. Sometimes it feels like I'm staring at the skeleton of a metal human being. Maybe that's just my imagination. It always feels, to some degree, painful, whenever I rip a robot to pieces with my bare hands and throw it on the ground. I sometimes wonder if my brain is a machine, too; but I always remember that tearing a human apart is ten times as terrible as tearing a robot apart.



Like I said, all the robots look essentially the same. More importantly, so do the humans. They're 97% men; women are always dressed like they had just been doing the dishes. There are children, too. This is all excluding the houses, which are only occasionally single-family houses. There are often entire families there, and all the houses are crazy barricaded. If they were just plain old houses with holes in them, I would never consider squatting there; they're all boarded up and plated with iron. Sometimes, though, I find a family that's been absolutely torn to pieces; there are just bones and rotten flesh everywhere. They were either people or soldiers; either way, I never take those ones.



An update on my physical attributes: I'm horribly strong. I can punch out walls and run like a leopard. I can break spines with either my arms or legs and throw people up to ten feet. At one point I kicked a guy in the lower stomach and he landed about ten feet away on his face. I think he was dead, too. I'm punched a skull so hard I broke it, I fell twenty feet and it hardly fazed me, and punches to the face are only annoying.



XIII



It was a war between humans and machines. No one won, I guess. I'll have to go into detail as to how I've discovered this:



There was what must have been a very expensive estate sitting on a plateau around the north of the Valley (in other news, I've managed to visibly grow closer to the ridges). It was surrounded in hedges, gardens, dry fountains, a gazebo, and plenty of wrought iron things. The back half was slouching from the rest of the house; the whole thing was split perfectly in two, it seemed, the earth beneath the slouching part having been badly eroded with time.



At first, I approached it calmly and slowly, but soon enough I realized that there was no one there. Sometimes I come to a place where I'm positive there's nothing dangerous around, and I'm usually right. I walked through the front gate, even though I came at it from the side - it seemed like a more dignified thing to do. There were, of course, bodies of robots and humans everywhere, sunk into things and lying over the hedges like they were stretching their backs really hard. A lot of humans were lined up and hunched in at the fountains, as if they had all been drowned.



The interior of the house felt like a haunted mansion - which it probably was. The front room immense, and seemed to conceive of the whole house. An immense staircase sat just ahead of the front door; the very top of the stairs marks the household divide, and the back half seems to abide by a slightly more brutal degree of gravity. I hopped over the gap that had cracked between the top step and the second-floor walkway - the house shook as if read to fall over. The chandelier behind me, about fifteen feet wide, fell and shattered on the floor.



After that, there was total silence. As the inane ringing faded out, I looked back ahead of me and saw something run through the forward doorway. It walked in two legs and hardly made a noise. I tiptoed through the door with ballerina-grade carefulness and found myself before a window that encompassed the entirety of the outside wall. There was only the sight of dead people all over the garden and those impossible ridges on the other side of a horrible stretch of nothing, all shrouded in mist. I looked around, and the whole place was empty. There were bookshelves against the three inner walls, all of them brimming; one table sat diagonally before a glorious armchair, and the carpets on the floor were more ornate than my brain.



I looked behind the armchair and didn't find it; the only other place to look was a doorway on the opposite side of the room. It was the darkest doorway I'd ever seen. Flashlight in hand, I entered the room and found the Royal Bathroom, evidently installed just for the Royal Study. There was a little girl in the tub. She wore a white dress, had blond hair and blue eyes, and looked about eight years old. Immediately I said,

"Don't worry. I'm not going to hurt you. What's your name?"

She was crunched up in the corner. She peeked out of her arms at me with red around her eyes and shakily said, "Dalli."

"Well," I said, "how'd you get here?"

"I ran away," she said.

"Wow," I told her. "That's brave, but you shouldn't have done that. It's extremely dangerous out here. Do you live in a safe place?"

"Yeah," she said. "We live in a bunker."

"There you go," I said. "And I guess you don't know the way home from here?"

"No," she said. "I've never seen this place before."

"Are you hungry?"

"Yeah," she said.

I gave her some bread and over-fried ground beef from my backpack and let her have some water. I asked, "Is your family okay?"

"Yeah," she said.

"Why'd you run away?" I asked.

"Because my sisters said they hated me," she replied.

"Man," I said. "They didn't mean that. They probably don't know what they're talking about."

She just kept crying.

"I'll help you find your way home," I told her.

"You will?"

"Yeah, definitely," I said. " But you gotta be willing to be brave again. You're not gonna get hurt as long as you're with me. We really gotta find your home, you know."



She agreed to come with me. I let her have my bullet proof vest, and I got her a little girl's robe from a bedroom in the mansion. We met with plenty of violence along the way, and none of it was well received. She became more and more disturbed as time went on. I could hardly stop her crying sometimes, and I began to consider just leaving her. I definitely decided against it. Whenever we met with maniacs with guns, she would just hide behind me and wait until they were all dead. I once had to protect her from straight-up feral men, who seemed more eager to destroy her before me. I think one of them slapped her once; but only because I kicked him seven feet away as he reached his hand out at her.



Along the way, I happened to say, "What is all this, anyway?" I spoke in the context of all the dead things lying around.

So, she told me the story. I reckoned I should have told you all of that just to take care of the reason I learned it from a little girl.



It was a war between humans and machines. The formation of a new kingdom had gone horribly wrong. The founders were split between two sides; those who wanted it built on the work of machines, and those who wanted it populated by men. A robot majority would eventually result in the eradication of all human life; generations would simply cease to reproduce, and machines would take over. On the other hand, if only humans ruled, the result might be a series of tragedies and the ultimate downfall of the kingdom. Battles were fought all throughout the Valley. Once, the Valley was populated by sparse communities of free peoples, until the kingdom decided to take it for itself. After fifty years, everything became what it is now.



The city concluded on a harrowing compromise; the kingdom would be populated by men, but all of them were to be augmented by machines. At first, this seemed like a gloriously peaceful resolve, but soon it became an enormous mistake. The applied cyborg technology served as the government's grip on all citizens; politics and economics were eradicated, and everyone worked regardless of their own free will. They're allowed minimal amounts of free time, which is growing shorter and shorter every day. I asked her how she knows all this; she said they listened into the city's underground radio, which is clear all the way past Babylon. She says the DJ's are two robots who only entered in the last year or so. Cathedral bells rang in my my head; I told her I may know them.



We arrived at her bunker after about a week. It was in the middle of an abandoned village that still had salvageable materials in the houses. In the last few days, she began to recognize the countryside a lot better based on the landmarks, and at last we found her cement abode peeking out of a short hill. She departed from me in the last stretch of fifty feet or so and when screaming towards the door. Before she even reached it, the door swung open, and two girls a little older than her came out and embraced her. A beautiful grown woman rushed out behind them with one hand over her mouth and the other on her chest. Home at last.



A quadruped machine jumped out from behind a burnt-out townhouse. The girls dispersed and screamed violently. Before I had my rifle in my hands, the steed had pounced, and in a second, Dalli was the only one not scraped into a mess of flesh and blood against the ground. I placed seven bullets in it and threw my rifle on the ground. I fell on my knees and squeezed my head; Dalli just screamed and buried her face in the ground. The steed fizzled out and died at last. Of all the fucking shit I've ever seen in this fucking Wasteland, this is the fucking worst. Why did I have to see this? Why is this happening to me? Who the fuck am I, and why the fuck am I here? What the fuck am I trying to do?



I took her inside and we didn't sleep through the night. I scribbled this out and now I'm just about ready to have some nightmares. Good night.



XIII



It's been seven days in the bunker. Six days ago, I shoveled up the remains of her family and buried them in a shallow grave.



The bunker is stocked for seven people to survive for three years. There's plenty of coffee; I usually have five or six cups a day. There are cigarettes, too, but I only smoke outside, because the vent system isn't direct enough to act as a sink for the smoke. Every day is corrupted by the reminder of what happened. Nothing relieves the mortifying pain of tragedy. Death is very easy to grasp, but tragedy is a whole other world apart - a much, much greater world.



The city is practically calling to me. It's visible outside the door, looking down the street. Two towers, the one on the right taller than the other; between them is a pyramid more immense than anything I've ever seen. There are light sparkling everywhere. On the opposite side of a hopelessly wide stretch of wasteland lies paradise, unparalleled.



XIV



I still have the Kapliad on me. Thumbed through a few pages, read the last few chapters. Apparently, it was written by a rabbit; although the idea of a classic historical account being written by a rabbit is ridiculous, it still seems like a pedestrian sort of idea. Dalli confirmed that rabbits are normal in "this world." She told me this planet is called War Planet. There are ten kingdoms and about twenty billion inhabitants - at least, that's as many as they can count. There are portions of the world that have yet to be discovered, so there may be sophisticated life there, as well. Rabbits hail from Leporia; humans hail from Silvarum; saxonites hail from Antoria; mariners hail from any given place in the ocean. The first two are the most prevalent; the second two are usually considered third or fourth down the list.



We've discussed going to 9830389. She told me they might let her stay there simply because she's a child, but I'd be much more of a dilemma. If I don't even know what sort of a being I am, then I'm not sure how well I'd come across. Apparently, they operate on interrogations and extended surgery sessions. And, of course, they execute anyone who asks. Maybe I'll ask them about that.



She always thanks me for saving her. All that does is revive the fact that her family was mercilessly robbed from this world in front of her eyes, before she blinked. When I go out to smoke, I just stare at the quadruped and flourish with rage. This is always followed by a glimpse at the city. Maybe that means something; maybe it doesn't. I remind myself of the message I saw in the robot guy's face: "Thou turnest man to destruction; again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men." I didn't find it anywhere in the Kapliad, I don't think.



So that's what they are, those dead and feral abominations of metal and flesh: they're the children. They were conceived by unobliging intentions; they were set into motion on the basis of a surely reasonable goal; left to their own designs, they were machinated into self-genocide. The men that made them look away, rubbing their chins and pondering. The data is in; the experiment concludes. A kingdom of loathing results.