Growing Pains

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

We lived in a tribe outside the main disc. The arm struts of the cogshield branched out above us like a gear. Where we lived was all angles. It had been this way ever since our creation.

My little one was sick. I’d built him according to the proper specs using the proper tools. I’d been licensed and refitted for programs to propagate. Even with all the shielding and over-protective parenting I’d put in as a precaution, a recursive virus had still gotten into his wiring.

My little one had a stutter that was getting worse. Soon he’d be locked in a loop with too little time between the repeats to do anything but power him down. No backup, complete wipe, start over. He’d be dephased and I would lose my right to build for another cycle.

Our lattice had a central nexus that our main struts grew out from like crystals. We took up a square block of vacuum equal to what The Human’s library called a hydrogen atom.

The Human had come to us several cycles ago. He communicated with us by beams of binary light flashes. We set up nets to capture the particle waves and record the frequencies.

At first, we thought that the strobing sun was another one of us giving us a first contact. After The Human had downloaded a small repository of his own knowledge to us called Encyclopedia, we realized that humans were a race of creators made of complex structures to big for us to see.

Our creators.

The revelation was astounding. There were many debates on how to treat the situation.

He continued to download information to us.

We gathered a concept of ‘male’ and ‘female’. It’s a fad that’s still popular to build little ones in an image that conforms to one or the other. I made mine a male.

They have an understanding of an art called psychology that they use for organic minds. I was hoping that this art might help my boy before I had to shut him down permanently.

I needed to take my stuttering boy to Contact Point out on the Proto-Spur from whence we all came. There, I need to stand on the endless plateau and walk into the light underneath the Viewing Plate.

With the particles of light falling around me like hail, I need to speak to them by using binary flashes of my headlamp.

I need to ask the Human for advice on how to fix my boy.