Avrio (science fiction)

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