Genre: Science Fiction/fantasy
Age Restriction: Parental Discretion
Editor’s Note:
This story features a dark theme, and contains imagery that may be psychologically disturbing for some audiences. This particular story was intended for all ages to enjoy, though it may require a level of parental discretion concerning some elements presented by the author whose primary audience are of a mature age:
18 and older.
Happy Autumn (FALL AND ENJOY!)
Avrio
By Jeffrey Arce
aka
Jarce ArtThor
She was
walking in the shadow of death, but she wasn’t afraid. Here, she was quite
comfortable.
The docent prated
solemnly on, but Avrio could barely listen. He expounded some drivel about how
their excessive output of greenhouse gasses will have ultimately
short-circuited their environment, thus searing a path for the inevitable rise
of The Sentients. What once devastated the world—paralyzing her organic
ecosystems—was eventually recycled into an essential resource for continued
sustenance. And from death sprang life. It
was funny how some things evolved.
The panoply
before them was so strange, yet so intriguing. Inside the writhing
electromagnetic barrier were items from that extraordinary world long before, carefully
arranged. Avrio melted in with the crowd, wanting to have a better look. The
ethereal group closed around her in the exhibit hall of the museum, coalescing
densely at the display window. It always tickled her how the swell of wonder could
quicken in the minds of even her most stringent of peers. They scrutinized the
curious items with bewildered astonishment. Together they imagined a primitive
world where complex life still needed to kill lesser organisms for their
nourishment, pulling stores of solar energy forged deep within the threading of
immanent proteins. The elders named it a barbaric
ritual, denigrating them as blood
lusting savages, but Avrio thought they were fascinating, gorgeous
creatures.
Their tools
were so far removed from the modern mind it was hard to accept the raw truth that
they were made from this world at all. They had crafted such things as ladles,
knives, bowls, chalices, and weaponry—terribly dreamed and abundantly supplied.
They made things from flesh, bone, and wood, from rock and ore. They designed tools
to make other tools. It was by these special instruments they would establish a
power to grow their race exponentially. But such vain self-preservation to this
degree by which they had achieved would prove in time quite fatal. Their sins enervated
the ecosystem, and drove their people toward a swift and complete extermination.
Tools gave them life and took it all away.
Sentients
did not require any of these things. They drew energy from the carbon dioxide and
methane that was in the air. They manifested power from the fierce winds, which
gusted vigorously across the plains. They constructed subterranean hives to
avoid conflict with the wicked jet propulsions naturally produced by a recovering
planet. They had no need for towering edifices, save for the fields of massive
windmills they had erected from salvaged material. There was no good reason for
war, or for monetary trade, or government. They lived only for knowledge. They
built communities on all corners of the globe to feed their study, and advance
their race. A Sentient could explore the acidy oceans, and the starry abyss of
space without a vessel to take them there. Beyond the firmament of their carbon
rich environment, their cells were made to create fusion by pulling from the
sun’s eternal radiance. There was no reach that a Sentient could not explore—no
boundaries. They could manifest anything that was requisite for their survival,
and they could adapt to even the most virulent of conditions. They did not need
carnal faculties for reproduction, though, at times two Sentients could become
one, and one could become many. They snowballed from motes and particles and
transmuted like living molds of clay. They were formless and beautiful.
A
mysterious river of consciousness had seeded their race—an enigmatic nursery,
burgeoning out from a cavernous chasm like a great womb of blue fire. No
scholar could agree on the make of its origin. Most have simply placed it as a
kind of nursery with divine roots, though, none of them truly believed in a
higher entity forged by way of intelligent design. Hypocrisy might one day prove to be the eternal plague destined to
doom all forms of intellectual life. Sentients
were an ascetic culture—stolid, analytical, and meticulous. They eschewed
overindulgence of emotion almost to the point of overindulging in apathy, but
they did lust for some things, such as learning.
Avrio was
different. She was compassionate, and she loved the past, where most only
anguished for the future. She frequented all of the geological institutes
established throughout the solar system, trying to decipher how and why The
Ones Before lived as they did. There were fragments of them spread out
everywhere, as if they had exploded like some fertile flower attempting to seed
the heavens. But they did not go too far. They could not even pierce the
threshold of their own system with all their impressive technology.
It has been
estimated that their global population peaked at an astronomical rate of ten
billion souls before at last came a definitive purge. How anything could
survive so many ravenous mouths was far beyond Avrio’s understanding, as clever
as she was in nature. Yet still, she admired them, even at their worst.
Researchers
studying samples from orbital debris have reconstructed their final decline.
They have surmised that fifteen hundred thousand divisive sovereigns had
abandoned their kingdoms, leaving an inundated civilization to implode behind.
They stole refuge onboard a secret vessel with a callow space colony for a
time. But like a cell separated from its host, these impetuous refugees and
their under-prepared bodies rejected the malign effects of an artificial
environment, and they deteriorated. None were immune to extinction.
Theirs was
a story of poignant demise. Avrio often wept for them when she learned more. Is
it so fair this erudite species could be reduced to the moldering scraps
excavated from their vast landfills of waste, which had failed to dissolve? She
couldn’t know for certain. Scholars had only conjecture beyond what could be studied
from their leavings. Nothing they had ever wrought in their time was indelible.
The earth took it all back, but for plastic—an exceptionally perennial artifact. Everything
else was erased.
Once a lush
and verdant world brimming with life, the Sentients have come to know it as a
sweltering, toxic wasteland, though it was still home for them. The planet
could spare only a meager palette of tenuous biology as she convalesced from
her geological wounds. But Sentients were an auspicious people. They have
transcended the archaic fauna and flora feeding rituals, providing much needed
respite for an exhausted environment.
Avrio followed
their guide absently, wishing she could know more, and why they destroyed themselves.
They were warned, but they persisted with their rotten habits nevertheless. It
was so strange.
They were
her favorite obsession. She even tried to form her walk in a way to imitate how
experts have determined they might have ambulated. According to Avrio, they
were the most inspiring creatures to ever have lived on the planet, and they
were all gone. A wistfully tragic end to a great species.
As her
group sauntered on with equanimity, they descended toward the final exhibit on the
tour. She made sure to put herself in front of the crowd before they got there.
The underground museum was one that she adored most. It was special. Here,
every tour ended with a grand finale. It was here, deep beneath the surface where The Ones Before had retreated
in their final hour.
The light
opened brilliantly in the capacious hall, and a pitted rocky sepulcher
materialized. Through the electric transparent veil they found a mass grave. Primitive
skeletons were clambering at an ancient device that still loomed from rigid, centuries-old
stone. Hollowed, dejected eyes gazed up at it, reaching for it with arachnid
fingers. The fossils depicted a vast mural of bones vying to gain passage. Some
were tangled together, caught in an eternal struggle for refuge, and others
were folded over their knees, frozen forever in prayer. Their faces were melded
into the dirt, and their arching spinal columns were suffused with igneous clay.
Avrio was ensorcelled
by it, her translucent crown churning with incandescent azure like stirring
embers as she marveled at the exhibit. Transfixed on the spectacle, she
wondered what they were fighting for. In this place where the last of their
species would recede from existence, after all they had achieved, what great
mystery could have drawn them down like an inescapable eddy whirling over the
drain of annihilation. At an axis in the protruding relic of stone there were two
intersecting arms, outstretched like a man poised to enfold a lover into his
final embrace. It was a massive cross, and it marked ground zero, where the former
world past away.
Afterward,
they were bustled out through the lobby, each one of them receiving a customary
souvenir to enjoy as they went. Avrio glowed upon taking hers: an artificial
replica of a Human skull. She stared lovingly at the gift for a time that felt
like an eternity. Avrio envied their mortality, but Avrio was a Sentient, and
Sentients could not die so easily.
Cradling the skull in
her amorphous grasp, she cherished her prize with grateful bliss. She ensconced
herself inside the empty chamber of its brain cavity. There she would study and
sleep, wanting to peer through its eyes, and feel with its hands, and sample
flavors with its tongue. She wanted to be human… She wanted to know how they
knew, how simple and poetic they made all things that they did not know. But
most of all, she wanted to taste mortality. She wanted to know death. There
wasn’t anything in the world Avrio wanted more.
#avrio
