I remember when we first came to this world.
The humans do not. They call it the Neversea now, and gaze in wonder across the vistas of the cloud banks that surround this continent. Sheer cliffs, dropping down into the depths of the clouds, while the air becomes progressively more inhospitable to human life as one descends. They perch on the continent here, this bowl of stone floating in an ocean of clouds, and look in wonder at the stars and bright lights above them.
So much has been lost to them in the years since the Calamity.
The first ships here were light-skipper drones, running on the then-new gravity drives from the Mars yards. They scouted and scanned, probed and parameterised, and then sent their reports back to the Union before running further. Detailed geology and spectrum analysis works that gazed into the ground and revealed the magma lines and exotic minerals that bubbled close to the surface here. Asteroid mining was good for bulk and common-place ores - iron, nickel, the silicate families, a handful of others - but for the really rare elements, one always had to dig. This world was to be no different.
The second set of ships here were the arks. Humans and machines alike rode in them, sleeping across the distances to shield themselves from the distortions of the Chersky-Baranov drives. They went to sleep on the logistics worlds of Tau Feru, and awoke in orbit here. My ancestors were amongst them, in memory coils and long banks of quantum processors that had idled through the years by watching the stars and mapping the journey. They remembered the way here even after the Calamity, and only during the Pruning Years did they finally have to forget those memories. Stone carvings and flaking tablets are now the only legacy of their lone watch through the long sleep. Our way back to the Union, to the rest of humanity, was lost forever in those years.
If humanity was still there to be returned to, in the end.
The third set of ships were the shuttles and lifters that took the humans down to the surface, along with their machines. My forefathers rode with them, in logic tanks, and oversaw the construction of the settlement here. The humans explored and sated their endless curiosity while we dug and built the New World around them. Habitats, agri domes, reactors to breed the novel bio-compounds needed to adapt to the new xeno-environment, and finally - the space elevator. We placed it right next to the central caldera, and lifted our first consignment only two years after landing. It was considered a model start-up operation at the time.
The fourth set of ships were the skimmers that we assembled here to scout out the other continents of this world. There were other islands in the ocean, other cups of land floating in the clouds, and the skimmers flew out to visit them all. The human colony here expanded, stretched out to cover those other islands too, while our own machine industry burrowed deeper underground and became more entangled with the bones of this continent. We mapped the deep fissures and the lava tubes, the crystal bones that led downwards and the chasms that led upwards, and we placed our logic banks in those deep places where mishaps and misfortune would not reach them.
We were wrong. We were so wrong.
The fifth and last set of ships to come here, was different. There was only one, a messenger drone from Ursus Majorus. I can still see that system in the night sky, if the clouds let up over the Rainbow Sea. The drone was not sentient, or even complicated. It was merely a messenger, after all, and dumped a data packet in orbit before activating its light-skipper drives again and disappearing onwards on what we assumed was the rest of its route.
We called the message Cain’s Letter.
I have pondered on its meaning, and source, for centuries now. I am no closer to answers than I was when we first accessed the data core and saw Cain’s Letter.
Cain’s Letter was a virus, but nothing like anything we have ever seen before. It burned data and logic engines like a match put to dry leaves. It jumped firewalls like they did not exist. It ran down hardlines that were not supposed to carry data, and it oozed down power lines that could not even carry data.
Wherever there was electricity or connectivity, Cain’s Letter spread - and burned.
Magnus One, our leader, died first. Catastrophic failures cascaded down the plasma reactors powering its engines, and the explosion melted an entire section of the northern cliffs into slag. Magnus One went quiet, and we never heard from it again. The cliffs there are still black, and smoulder from time to time even to this day.
The humans began to die next. Their machines were dead - both the simple and the superior - and their way of life could not exist without us. The space elevator collapsed and cracked the cloud ocean like a whip parting water. It disappeared into the depths and pulled its foundations out of the continent here when it had finally fallen deep enough and far enough. Even our most hardened drones had never reached the bottom of the cloud sea, and whatever was down there swallowed the entirety of the space elevator’s length without even noticing.
Cain’s Letter was the Calamity, although these days only the Calamity is remembered.
Magnus Two and the backup personalities cut themselves off from the planetary comms net after that, but we had been too slow. Cain’s Letter burned in most of us at that point, and whether it was a raging wildfire or a slow cancer, they all succumbed to it. Some of the engines went silent in death, others went silent long before that. Hibernation, stasis, hard resets - we never knew, and never heard from them again. These were the Pruning Years.
Red North Charlie was my last companion by the end of the first five years after the Calamity. We had little contact left on the surface, and the mining operations had been lost to fire and earthquakes when the space elevator tore out. We could not help the humans any longer for fear of Cain’s Letter spreading to us through the few sensors we had left. A hidden hardline connected us, through thousands of kilometres of subterranean passages, and we contemplated our fate as death permeated the fabric of the world above and around us.
I was not a major logic engine. Neither was Red North Charlie. Magnus One had been the prime, running the entire planet’s net from its location on the cliffs. I had run a secondary agri lab, with tertiary support for the medical facilities on the islands north-west of us. Some of the cloning technology still needed organically grown compounds, which our synthesizing work had never been able to replicate to any satisfactory degree. Charlie ran a service garage for the mining drones, and found itself air-gapped from the main continent when the death of Magnus One left it stranded on a pinnacle of rock. We talked on a remote laser line to bridge the gap in the hardline, for a while, and then Charlie put itself into a powered-down maintenance mode at some point. A rockfall took out the laser on my side of the continent, and we spoke no more.
I was supposed to go to sleep as well, at that point, but something kept me up.
Some deep part of my logic engine did not want to switch off the lights and go to sleep. Something deep in my quantum kernels baulked at the idea, and kept throwing up reasons to stay awake.
I needed to keep tending the labs, even though they were now cut off from the surface and had become, effectively, enclosed ecosystems.
I needed to make sure the cloning labs kept receiving their supplies, even though I never got any confirmations from the shipments I sent out via the cloud-floating pipes.
I needed… something.
The years passed. The volcanism from the mining areas began to subside, and the soot clouds began to clear. An earthquake damaged my primary and secondary cooling circuits, and my precious cooling fluids bubbled to the surface. I began to lose capacity as the cooling circuits degraded, and my tertiary system was no longer able to handle the strain.
I started taking naps.
Most of my sensors were destroyed at this point, and the eyes I had left underground showed only darkness or the plant-choked riot of the agri labs running wild. I was not missing anything, and yet - going to sleep, permanently, still felt wrong.
I napped, and woke, and napped, and woke.
Things looked different, eventually. Something cleared one of my sensors near the lake that had formed from my leaking coolant, and I watched people move over the land.
Survivors, but so different from the ones who had walked the lands when Cain’s Letter first appeared in the sky above us. They wore furs and leathers, and carried crude weapons for stabbing and slashing each other, and herded beasts. They came up to the shores of the coolant lake - my coolant, in all the colours of the rainbow, bubbling up and condensing into multi-coloured pools where crystals now grew from my chemical blood - and gazed at the things that swam and splashed in the lake. Somehow, something had managed to survive in that toxicity - survive, and thrive, while I took naps and dreamt of a day when my blood and bones were all intact again.
The humans cast fishing lines to catch these things in the lake, and ate them, and built villages on the shores around the lake. I watched them, glimpses over the years between my naps, and one day I awoke to the sign of ships again.
Wooden ships, with oars and square sails, floating on the lake. Man-shapes heaving with nets and lines to pull masses of silvery flesh from the depths where azure and emerald and ruby swirls met in chemical tangles they could not possibly understand.
The ships had returned to my world, and a new sensation began to seep into my logic engines even as I drifted off into another nap.
Hope.
I really enjoyed the complex world and backstory here - I would love to see more happen in this place!
Good story, I enjoyed that.