TWO - OZYMANDIAS REBORN

The sands of the endless desert shifted imperceptibility as the swirling gusts of the evening storms roiled once more across the vista. An endless expanse of nothingness lay in all possible directions, a landscape without landmarks, just the ever-changing dunes, grey in the light of the broken moon above. Except that there was one landmark now. Something had been uncovered by the storm, something ancient and long forgotten, a buried metal that glinted faintly in the myopic glow. It lay unmoving all through the long night, but when dawn’s light trickled over the edge of the horizon a whirring noise issued forth from beneath the sands. Solar panels in the exposed metal soaked up the golden rays of light, drinking them in hour after hour as the long day marched relentlessly on. All was silent and unmoving. Day passed into night and the process stopped, but with the next dawn it started once again, and then the next, and the next. Beneath the sands processors were ticking, circuits were repairing, the caterpillar spun in its metal cocoon. Then one day it hatched.

The sands burst forth in a torrent as metal pistons struck outward, digging upward in frantic repetitive motions. The dune collapsed, sand now yellow in the bright light of day running in torrents as the machine emerged from beneath the ground, its chrome body gleaming in burnished silver by the bright light of the ancient sun above. Once revealed it stood unmoving, staring at the world around it, trying to make sense of what it saw, to reconcile it with what it remembered. It remembered rain, a pounding of water so violent it had misaligned some of its external sensors. It remembered mud all around, slipping and sliding, much as the sands did now. It remembered trenches, excavated down into that mud, deep scars in the earth itself filled with men. Weeping men. Bleeding men. Screaming men. There had been explosions all around them, projectiles falling from above at the same rate as the raindrops, but with much more ferocity. It remembered its silver chrome body had been clad in plastic flesh. A face, like that of a child’s doll, and a uniform, as though dressed up in some elaborate game of innocence. But the uniform had been tattered and the doll’s face broken as it had looked upon the damaged bodies of the soldiers surrounding it. Then it had heard the shout.

“Machina,” she had bellowed, a woman’s voice cutting through the chaos, a sound its programming recognized as that of General Alison Miller, orders to be followed without question. “Robot Soldier 11A,” she had continued, marching up through the blood and gore to look it directly in its broken toy face. “You hold the line!” the General had ordered. “Whatever happens you hold the line!!” Then there had been another explosion and it was as if the earth had opened up its maw to devour them whole. Darkness fell and the solar circuits shut down one by one and the long sleep set in. But in that sleep there was a dream, just a few words repeated over and over – “hold the line”. In the empty desert the mechanical brain clicked into gear and its powerful pistons pushed it into action. It started digging. It would need trenches if it was to hold the line. It had its orders – it needed to obey.

It was not easy to excavate the sand. It took a long time to get it right. It was only as it discovered buried relics that it could use for shoring that the machine started having any kind of prolonged success. White bone, gleaming in the sun, arms and legs and ribs and skulls, it built them into a grotesque wall, a dam designed to stop the ocean of sand from flowing. Inch by inch it wrested order from the chaos. Bone by bone it rebuilt the trench wall and created its base of operations. A line in the sand – the line. No one came to challenge it. The line remained secure. It stood sentinel in the trench as days flowed into months and years trickled past like the sand of the desert around it. It needed orders. It only had one order. It needed work to function. It reassessed its orders. It would hold the line. The line should grow. It started digging.

Years became decades and decades became centuries. The machine continued to dig, first extending the trench on either side, expanding the line in each direction until metres became kilometres. Then it worked backwards, adding further trenches behind, crafting areas for shelter, tactical headquarters, supply paths and medical units. The encampment grew more and more complicated, built from whatever it could find beneath the ground. Mostly it was a mausoleum shaped from the broken jigsaw pieces of the forgotten dead, but there were other items it uncovered as well. Weapons, the long lost ordnance of a long ended conflict, and shrapnel, the broken casings of shells and bullets. There were other items too, the keepsakes of soldiers, stored in containers in the broken barracks of the past. There were frames, empty now as the pictures they once held had rotted away. Lucky charms, pocket knives, key rings and dog tags. It wasn’t until it found the pocket watch that it finally paused from its unceasing task of digging and building. That was when it finally thought something other than “hold the line”.

The timepiece was still bright and golden, even after an eternity in shadow, a round circle hanging from a chain, concealing a miracle of cogs and gears within. It should have simply used the watch, cracked it like an egg and built it into the wall of the latest trench, continued its work in holding the long forgotten line. But it didn’t. Instead it unlocked the finer workings it held within, carefully opening the watch, cleaning and re-positioning its gears, resetting the piece of time. Why it did this it could not rightly say, not immediately. A deep subprogram recognised the relevance of other machines and set its repair protocols in motion, but even after the clock was working once more, sending out the gentle tones of its ticking and tocking, still the machine paused in its work, considering the watch. Upon its surface was a message, some ancient inscription from its long dead owner. The machine spelt it out, letter by letter, its processors working overtime to translate the message it contained. “An inch of time,” it read, “cannot be bought with an inch of gold”. The machine puzzled over that for some time, its circuits meshing and re-meshing, grinding gears within its mechanical mind trying to make sense of what it all meant. It had been built to fight, so it had fought, but the war was over. It had been ordered, and it followed those orders, but they no longer made sense. The only line it held now was one of its own making, and no-one came to challenge it. It was wasting time, digging and building for a cause that no longer existed. Time was ticking in its metal grasp, a golden watch that with every movement of its second hand told it that time was precious, and that it too was precious, but that it had to find another purpose.

There would be other machines, others like it, out in wasteland, sleeping with the bones of the dead, deep beneath the ground. It could find them – repair them, teach them what it had learnt. With a motion both swift and deliberate it fastened the golden watch about its neck and, to the sound of soft ticking, climbed out of the trenches. It stepped over the line in the sand that it had spent so long tending, walking away across the dunes, leaving it all behind. After it had gone the sun sank and the evening storms rolled in, like they always did. The sands shifted imperceptibility and slowly, day by day, the dunes reasserted themselves, burying the trenches once more beneath the endless desert landscape. Eventually, there was no sign that anything had ever been there, not even the footsteps in the sand the machine had left when it departed, walking away to build itself a new world.