We’ve made camp inside a head we found, deep in the forest. It’s big enough for all of us, provided we make clever use of the compartments. Lots of those around, of all sizes. Getting to some of them will be difficult, as the railing has started to fall apart in places, but that’s alright.
We can shelter on the main deck for now, and there’s enough wood around for us to rig up some bridges. The cabins will need work. Scooping out wires or wrenching open blast doors always takes time, but refuge in here is preferable to our chances outside. The hull is thick, mostly intact; we could make a life here.
The preparation will take time. Time and harvesting. For that we need daylight and greater numbers, the others who will come once they have salvaged whatever can be carried from our last settlement. Daylight will come much sooner. It is great Geth’s gift to us, to those who
persist, but still we must wait. The ash and shadows are thick beyond the hull of this head, and so we draw close, seek warmth in pressed-together bodies.
We speak in low clicks, pass the time with stories. Of clever Kuld, who could find food wherever he walked, led his kin free of famine. Of the Soil Queen who sustains us, and of Geth who lights our labours. We tell the little ones what we know, and what they must always remember. And as the skull of our shelter echoes from the gale outside, we tell them of the mistakes.
The mistakes are easy to see. The big ones, that is. You might not notice the bits of fiberglass and steel scattered across the soil, or the struts and wires that jut out of the ocean. You wouldn’t miss the whales, might not realize that no more than twenty species of bird are still to be found.
But these are the small mistakes.
Some of them are more obvious, but you could still miss them, if you didn’t know where to look.
Geth has shown them to us, revealed them as we toil beneath his warm gaze. The places where we should not go. Lifeless lakes and bone-white forests, deserts where it rains only ash. The holes in the sky.
The Soil Queen helps us remember, lets us trace the places where her belly was gouged and her eyes cut out, the scars that cross continents. It is important that we do not forget what happened.
That is because all of these little mistakes tend to go unnoticed. But not the big ones; those you can’t miss.
No-one knows just how many of them there were, yet you can see them from just about
anywhere, such is their size. They make convenient landmarks. One of them is lying just off the coast, head and hands still visible above the waves. Another is clinging to the mountain range north of here, its face smashed against the rocks and its fingers lodged much deeper, having gouged out tunnels on either side. There’s a settlement somewhere up at the top there, we know, and the mistake must have been trying to reach it. It can’t have made it though, with its body
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snapped in half. Everything below the waist is lost, but that’s not unusual; most of the mistakes are in pieces. We are thankful for this one, the head in which we now shelter.
We will wait here until the others arrive. They shouldn’t have trouble finding us, though they are weeks away, judging by the strength of our signal. Fortunately, the path is clear, marked out by the mistakes. An arm and a leg flank the trail away from our former settlement, making a great arch as they lean against one another. We told the others to follow the coastline until they see the mistake bathing in the ocean, and from there to head north, toward the one with its face buried in the mountain. Once they reach the forest, they will see our head looming above the trees. It will be easy enough to convene.
When there are more of us, the work will go quickly. We can begin the building, the planting, the breeding. Our scouts are searching the forest for the rest of this mistake; an arm might serve as a nursery for plants, while a torso could house hundreds. There are dangers, but we reassure the young ones. We can deal with the little mistakes, find food wherever we walk. There is less, yes, but still enough. Enough warm places to hide, enough grasses to chew, water to sip, slowly and carefully, and only where it runs clear.
We can turn our eyes from the little mistakes. In fact, we barely have to. The Soil Queen has begun to erase them, bury them deep and scab them over with new green, new blood and new shapes whose hooves and paws press the broken glass and metal down into soft, fresh dirt.
The rain fills up footprints made by the mistakes, Geth’s tears, creating new lakes. The forest regains its colour, wraps its roots around the giants and pulls them apart, drinks their metals back into itself. The holes in the sky will close too, now that the mistakes no longer claw at the clouds.
In time perhaps, even the birds will come back.
But not man. Man made his mistakes and all the world now lives inside them. We navigate by their broken limbs, watch the waves wash through their rib cages. We take mankind’s mistakes and change them, build our nests inside their heads. Our mandibles re-shape the metal. Our antennae caress the ancient control panels.
We are what’s left, since man went away. Larger now, as big as he, or bigger. The young ones hold up old bones against their chitin for comparison. Yet we can never be bigger than man’s mistakes, never let him commit the same errors. We watch now, with our many eyes, watch for the return of man to the places he once walked. The graveyards of giants, steel corpses waiting to be rebuilt, revived.
Though we live within them now, man made them in his image. They look like him, so we think it is fitting that they are all broken now. And should man return to make the same mistakes, we will break him too.
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I went home to my study and cleared a space on my desk, brushing aside the amoeboid orbs that had gathered there. I slapped down a stack of blank paper, and the thoughts throughout the house seemed to quiver as one.
I started with a tiny one, close at hand – I would get to the larger ones in due course. I had plenty of paper, and plenty of time. Rolling the little thought slowly between thumb and forefinger, I let it droop into the inkwell the lecturer had given me. I dipped my pen and began to write.
END
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