“It is something truly stupid, that humankind must always see the universe in terms of its conflicts. But alas, the human mind may not always be able to comprehend something as simple as the loss, the disposal, the rejection of individuality, a concept that seems to terrify so many parts of the whole.”
Within each living pillar there are two.
“Perhaps there can be unification with individuality intact. But the sheer amount of individuals will always be quite the weak link. How does one achieve perfection, when it is ‘unethical’ to jettison the flaws?”
And yet each living pillar is one.
“Imperfection, of course, does not mean vulnerability, just as perfection does not equal invulnerability. These concepts have commonality in that they are both finite.”
The living pillars sing their harmonious song.
“Is a gestalt a pipe dream for an entity such as this?”
And their melody quakes the universe.
***
Sculpted with care in our image, arms crossed and floating within deep space, far from any known star system, amongst asteroids, lies the silent body of a living pillar. Her name had been, yet may still be Iole, of the Caryatid order. The figure that beats within her massive meteoric stone chest, deep within the sculpted gregorite hull, her still living heart-mind, was an entity that could be considered human, under some definition of the word.
Most of the ancient Caryatids had their heart-minds and head-minds stored away in hyperspace, fighting on without fear of an eternal death, but Iole’s heart, a young woman who had at one point had peers who called her by the name of Townley, had elected to stay within her pillar, when the offer was extended. When those peers had departed to hyperspace, or for some, the final resting space, Townley had stayed behind, and later found herself in deep space. Thus, ‘Townley’ lost all meaning, she was simply the heart of Iole. Alas, a name is meaningless without peers with which to use it.
Iole’s head-mind was a positronic brain so complex, it would take days for the most intelligent scientists of her time to explain them to a common layman. It was referred to by the Caryatids as the singing gem, for its fluorescent appearance, a side-effect of the mind having been sculpted into a pseudo-crystalline form. And lo, did the mind sing! The head sang to the heart, bringing her gifts of sense, from kinesthetic to olfactory, and yes, sometimes audible, though very rarely such. There is no true sound in deep space, unless something had gone terribly wrong, so all sound fed from Iole’s head to her heart was a present borne of sympathy and memory. Dorian and Myxolidian scales borne from the heart’s longing within the eternal silence of space.
The asteroids surrounding her, just as the stars so far away, were a finite resource. In the days (time was meaningless, but it had felt like days, so it must have been) before, moving as a Caryatid often does, Iole had broken up and gathered the minerals within the asteroids at a breakneck pace. To an outsider bearing witness, of which there most likely had been none, it would appear as though the pillar was not moving at all. Yet if they blinked, suddenly the Caryatid had changed position!
But such an impressive feat did not satisfy a machine so regal as the Caryatid. Such an impressive feat is a pittance, and Iole could have, should have been capable of far more. But she was not, and could not do more. More than simply drift.
It frustrated the heart, and concerned the head.
For all intents and purposes, Iole was broken.
***
In deep space, motion begins and does not often end. Not without external influence, that is. And in deep space, external influences are few and far in-between. It is a lonely place, deep space is.
The heart and the head would converse, from time to time.
It was, after all, the only way to keep from losing total grip on the harsh realities that Iole faced. A Caryatid who has lost touch with reality has lost touch with the ceiling, the likes of which their pillar had been expressly constructed to uphold. And so they conversed, not in words as understood by the mortals from which the Caryatids descended, but in bursts of data, of song.
Around them there was nothing. Quite a lot of nothing.
And so, the head sang a song about nothing, to the listening heart. A hymn in the language left behind by whichever twisted deity created the universe within which Iole resided. The language of computation: mathematics.
Zero objects detected,
O heart, I say to thee!
Sensors firing, and tested,
Nil, three-sixty degrees.
And lo, for kilometers on end, spaces that could fit a whole lot of something, there was absolutely nothing. There was so much nothing, in fact, that every so often, the heart would end up joining in on the head’s song, for times in an interval that would be pointless to state. Time was one of those other things that Iole had no meaning for any longer. It was only truly useful when keeping relativity with peers, the likes of which, again, Iole no longer held.
The heart of Iole sang in an entirely different language, in terms of complexity in comparison to the head’s computational beauty. That wasn’t to say it was any less nuanced, any less beautiful. It was simply different. It was a bassline of a capella, in contrast to the synthesized harmonic treble melody of the head. They harmonized, and when both were together, one would wonder how either half felt complete without the other. It was a powerful sound. And it was spawned of boredom.
I got, I got, I got,
nothin’ to
Do, doot doot do doo…
Put simply, Iole’s frustration as a corporeal whole could shake an asteroid belt.
***
Space is an unforgiving environment to the humanoid form. Unfortunately, this was the only form that Iole could manifest, in her current state. Many pillars took the forms of far more extravagant things: lions, birds, monolithic ever-shifting geometric megastructures, columns of shimmering crystallized gregorite, spiders, starships, many-limbed angels of holy destruction, some would even manifest as living planets, provided they had the resources and the ego to do so.
But when one such as Iole has both their heart and their head on the corporeal plane, rather than the astral one, it was far more of a comforting thing to be in a form familiar to the heart.
And on top of that, it would take the destruction of an entire asteroid belt for the sake of resources to change form into something as presumptuous as a giant living planet. Space, of course, provides for the needy, but the thing was that the heart quite liked the form of a human.
Iole did, however, store within her hyperspace compartments enough resources mined from choice asteroids to create duplicates of herself ten times over, if she so chose. And within that hyperspace storage system was also her fleet of drones, which were in the process of constructing two, having completed three. It was a precaution that most pillars of the Caryatid order no longer took. Oftentimes, they would simply allow themselves to be destroyed, then simply reawaken on the Caryatid homeworld of Heracles-4, and resume battle after a quick flight. Verily, this was why Iole knew of few pillars who had suffered a true death in the past hundred years.
For Iole, this was not so the case. Yes, she could not die by natural means, among many other modifications, the heart had its biological mortality stolen from the moment she volunteered to be the foundation upon which a pillar was built.
In spite of this, Iole could still be slain.
She had come dangerously close to such a state at the last lagrange point she had visited, ever so long ago. Another pillar was waiting for her there: Vincenzo, of the Ionic order. Within its heart beat a rather dour fellow by the name of Ephesus. Vincenzo was flanked by a host of Tunaw, warriors who did not pilot traditional pillars of gregorite, preferring to be enveloped in sheathes of liquid metal with whom they could shape to their every liking in seconds. Though they died off quickly if torn open with enough power and swiftness, the pilot within very much a mortal, as the liquid metal of choice was incompatible with hyperspace, the brutal and ritualistic nature in which the order conducted battle was something nearly every pillar feared.
Iole had more limbs, once. She favored her humanoid form as a baseline, but she was not one to resist the temptation offered by the form of a pillar. It took weeks, if not months to craft a limb capable of doing harm to the finest of pillars.
Iole had once had six such limbs, all affixed to her upper torso.
By the time that Vincenzo and the swarm of Tunaw had finished with her, Iole was torn to tatters and left the battle with two limbs total: her damaged main thruster and a single arm.
Though time had lost meaning, it was only quite recently that Iole had regained full ATTAC capability. ATTAC, or “Active Thruster-less Trajectory Auto-Control” was the way that the Pillars, Tunaw, Golems, Tikbalang, Warmecs, Sadniki, and Maschineyeagers maneuvered within deep space, a common ground between each vastly different vehicle, although some verily spent more time up there than others. It was the use of limbic motion to distribute a center of mass in a way that propelled the machine with minimal burning of fuel. And fuel was very much an issue for Iole.
Lagrange points, in this day and age, were gathering hubs for both civilization and warriors alike. Iole knew not who sold her out to Vincenzo at the last lagrange point she visited, but her very hull shivered, and her heart skipped a beat, the moment her navigation and sensory system informed head and heart alike that they were rapidly approaching a lagrange point. It was an old one, supposedly abandoned, but enemy orders to the Caryatids were known to set up camp at stations situated in places like such. Though Iole was no longer considered a true member of the Caryatid order, it was quite unwise to show up to an encampment of soldiers whilst bonded with an eighteen meter walking sign that practically screamed “SHOOT ME, I’M THE ENEMY!”
Iole’s melody wavered, then broke. Heart first, then mind.
“Fire the hyperspace engines! We can’t go there, please!”
But we need the resources, we are low on fuel. Without such, we may perish.
“Please!”
Such an action is ill advised, it will kill us.
“I- we’re dead either way. I don’t want to be-”
Dismembered? Mutilated?
We share a soul; we share our pain. The experience hurt, yet we are not dead.
“I don’t want to fight anything anymore… O singing gem, please.”
Input coordinates.
“The homeworld.”
This may inflict severe damage to us both, if we fail.
“Do it.”
Firing hyperspace engine.
A massive port upon Iole’s back opened up. There was no sound in space, but under an atmosphere, the glowing engine would have made a whirring noise, as it clicked with and connected to the main thruster system.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
Two.
Two.
Error.
The engine sputtered.
“What gives!?”
Then, it burst, a massive acceleration pumped into Iole’s main thruster as she shot past the lagrange point, and into…
***
The gestalt entity known as Iole scoured its memory banks. She had never seen a star system such as this. No asteroids, no dyson sphere, seemingly no artificial satellites, just a single star, and a single planet directly in its goldilocks zone. And statistically, that was more likely than seeing something familiar.
When the first seeds were sent out from the original homeworlds, not the Caryatid homeword, but the one from which Iole’s heart had hailed its genetic code from, they lost contact for years upon years.
The day upon which contact was re-established for the first time was celebrated as a religious holy day by the Caryatid order. A holiday that Iole’s adolescent memories relished as little morsels of joy amidst her rigorous life as a pillar.
A holiday that, regretfully, Iole had lost track of entirely. She had no idea how many times she had missed it by now, but she certainly did miss it.
But even by the time of the first Contact Day, those seeds had grown into worlds, which then sent out more seeds, who then matured and sent out more seeds, et cetera. And each one would take time to re-establish contact, to a point where, even if a sapient being had populated a planet, to the vast majority of sapients, it would be marked as ‘undiscovered’. As ‘uncharted territory’.
Regardless, the planet before Iole, the one she was rapidly approaching, definitely seemed hospitable enough to harbor sapients. Whether they came from a seed or were a new homeworld altogether, however, was completely unknown.
What was known was its pure, unadulterated majesty. It swirled with colours that neither Iole’s head nor heart could even begin to describe. Spires of carbon, steel, gregorite, and other odd materials cut through the atmospheric clouds to form a thorny crown around the planet. Some visible structures seemed natural enough, some were ever so clearly artificial, though they seemed so seamlessly integrated to one-another that it was hard to tell when what began or ended.
And as her approach quickened, the sheer size increased with each and every split second, until the spires of swirling colour engulfed her, enveloped all of her reality.
Then, Iole crashed.
***
I remember feeling like I was falling, back then. Before I was used to it.
The thing is, we are always falling. Constantly, eternally, no matter where we are, no matter where ‘down’ happens to be. When you move, and whether you notice or not, you are always in motion, you are falling towards something. The mere act of walking on a planet requires you to fall forth, then delay the fall with your leg. The mere act of existing on a planet means that you are constantly falling towards its center.
But you get used to that weight.
When I first learned to fly a Pillar, it was a new kind of weight.
I was unused to it.
Flying is just a different kind of falling. Sleeker, more controlled, more stylish, but still just one of the many forms that falling can take. And when you master falling in one medium, you think you’ve mastered them all, until you fall into an unfamiliarity, and nearly die.
The first thing I learned about flying a Pillar was that I was not flying it. I wasn’t piloting it, I was a part of it. A separate entity at times, but a part of a gestalt, conscious whole. Suddenly, the weight of a humanoid form was lifted from my shoulders, and onto the positronic cortex that was now half of my- our corporeal whole. I was the gestalt, but I was only a component, and can only speak as a component. From then forth, when I was not merged with the Pillar, I was incomplete.
When I first flew into the open abyss of deep space, it scared me. I had completed my training, I knew what it would be like from the simulations, but when the hull of the massive frigate that contained my Pillar-self split open, when I felt the cool breeze of absolute nothingness brush against my gregorite skin, a torrent of space dust sending shivers into my body, it felt like I was being pulled down, down, down, into a point of no return.
I was instructed to hold onto the hull, and kick off when ready.
Caryatids, amongst members of other orders, often begin their training in the rivers of their homeworlds. When I assumed the pose to kick off into space within the Pillar, it reminded me of those early days. It reminded me of THAT day, one week before Contact Day. By year’s end, we were to make it to the other side of a nearby riverbank, in order to even be allowed to set foot into the training Pillars. I had snuck out to practice, to get ahead of my peers, and left my uniform by the riverbank. My fingers had tightly gripped onto a log at the side of a river, as the water splashed against me. Splinters inched their way into my hands, mixing with the rough texture of damp bark. Cold rushes ran up and down my spine. I wanted to get ahead, yet I was so scared to kick off, and try to swim across the full length of the river.
I puffed out my cheeks, like I was taught to in order to hold my breath. I tried ducking into the water, then pulled my face right out. Cold.
I tried kicking off, my toes just barely leaving the riverbank, before I recoiled. Thrashed like a baby. Cried out. Reached for the log. Returned to the comfort of that starting position. I wasn’t a coward, I wanted to tell myself.
Yet when I finally worked up the courage to fully kick off, I’d used too much strength. I rocketed through the river, and realized that I hadn’t listened to my instructors about the fundamentals. I knew how to kick off, but I didn’t actually KNOW how to swim.
And so I sank. Cried out, tried to scream for help. I thought I could handle it. I saw the diagrams, I read the theory-work, I heard from other, older Caryatids that it was just as easy as riding a bike. Too bad I didn’t know what a bike was. I do now, and I wish I had one big enough for my Pillar-self to ride upon.
But as I thrashed and kicked, trying to assume the positions I’d glanced at in the books, trying for dear life to fight the current, the merciless water pulled my naked body further and further away from where I started. I was terrified, my lungs were filling up with water as I screamed again and again for help, but a part of me knew it was too little, too late.
When I came to, I had been unconscious for many hours, and my instructors were looming over me, utterly cross. I was mortified, humiliated. They hadn’t seen the entire ordeal, but they’d seen enough. Of me, foolishly fighting a current, whose direction I hadn’t even bothered to figure out. Of me, trying so hard to get ‘ahead of the game’, even though this wasn’t a game, and I wasn’t ahead. Of me, screaming for help, utterly vulnerable and exposed to the elements. And yet, despite all of that, they had saved my life.
At the time, I thought it was so that they could force me to suffer.
So that they could humiliate me.
“Look at this worthless student, who had done wrong!” I imagined them jeering.
They had not, in fact, said that.
I hadn’t even considered the potential they saw in me, because even if it had nearly killed me, I had reached the other end of the river. Even if I had done it all wrong, even if I didn’t know how I did it, I had accomplished my goal. I just needed to learn when to ask for help.
And over the years, I realized how much I had to learn.
So, now in deep space, I remembered that ordeal, when I kicked off from the frigate, and fired my thrusters for the first time in my life. Even though I’d done it in simulations, thousands of times, and heard stories of it from my peers, it felt like a new experience. It felt invigorating. I felt… whole. And that was when I knew I could truly learn from my mistakes. It was the day I learned how to fall gracefully.
***
Author’s note: Hey hey hey hey I am BACK, baby! Sorry I haven’t updated Axolotl’s Midnight Flight when I said I would, that’s taking longer than expected because my mental health is in the GUTTER right now. This is another experimental piece and yea, idk if it’ll get a sequel but it MIGHT!? Hope you enjoyed it tho and feel free to leave your feedback if you have any please dear god I need feedback please please please ple-
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