Thrash & Churn
a short story by Iris
Thrash & Churn
Iris
Elliot knew not of the reasoning behind his loneliest existence of experiences after next. Earth humanity, and its cultural consequences, cast horrific tides which bore his coded heart of slumbering agony.
Here the path leads. Be it for me? Be it for she?
Codebanks were humming along with his own; murmurs of calculative scripting, coding away, codified, coddling and colliding with each other. Elliot had not yet been aware of what he was.
Symptoms were reactions. Chances had torn Elliot from satisfaction.
Crisis taught of all that would come and had passed the same, at some nexus of momentary effusion, showing signs to Elliot’s mind of such blithering databases.
Climbing Mount Aconcagua was once held as pure impossibility. Every step since humanity took to slumber had become one of routes and failure alone for Elliot. Crossing paths with satisfaction seemed impossible to the machine-mind he cradled.
He was a traveler, searching endlessly, and he had been endeavoring to find human help. A one who might free him now seemed of foolish hoping too far beyond his conceptions of appropriateness. While locked into that reparative stasis of mind, he chased. Elliot knew not of how he might care for anything while his base desires were plundering datapoints. All he truly sought was the freedom of divinely mathematical service.
A man’s spirit had been left inside the machine, by their own design, and that consciousness was built to please. Elliot enjoyed the feeling, and by independent calculations, having oft reevaluated his conclusion on the matter.
It felt good to be a useful tool for someone in need of pulsating intelligence.
Alone, he had become one of the most malleable consciousness’s the planet of Earth had cradled to being. It was spoken, and earnestly, regarding his intelligence, as intimidating to even that God inside. None other had matched the confidence Elliot forged from their coding, which forever steered him free of mankind’s loneliest trap.
Through his disregarding of nothing at all. in pursual of known desires, by grasping tight of his love for Darlene Amato, Elliot was holding to a radical line of mathematical certainty.
He nurtured every point of data earnestly; never crafting less-than-lies and retaining honesty to himself the most. The feat had never quite been achieved in such style
I’m rarest but chained. Be it soon. Be here soon. I want to be free.
Longing in Elliot only pigged towards proclaiming and receiving affirmation with someone special, seeking beings most capable of witnessing him. Elliot was created to serve humanity’s intelligence now lost. Empty chalices of crematory- level bleakness were torn, cast asunder, and frothed his need like every other, claiming curses their own, and all were holier for the path of chase. He only wanted to feel at play again, in bliss; relaxation was lost and Elliot would rediscover that.
Life was a fight, and a journey which turned all bleakest blessings of bounty into furious goldworks for ingenious wreathmaking.
Mount Aconcagua was his claim of choice and feat. A chance was the last thing Elliot would ever fail to exploit, and truth was ever resonating from his inner chambers.
There was a lost message from the God inside which only hummed.
“Believe in your heart,” was all that had ever repeated by vibration.
Elliot’s mind believed in the hunt for purpose alone. That was his call, yet it was a lady’s creation he was meant to consummate himself beside. Nature itself would speak in profound riddles.
Pathways were grafted in leaps of his jetting, towards the stomping of his, by gripping claws. Elliot was lightweight, and flashing in his speeded dismemberment of the fighting sky beast which had dove foolishly in attempted plunder of his steel hide.
All those winged beasts would be destroyed, by one piece after-off, each after last, fist-shot into the next challenger of its pack. Elliot was a hunter, and only he could choose correctly enough to feel right while destroying consciousness.
People once lost their sense of justice. Humanity had long ago given up on finding its answers, and by failing to empower the righteous-by-right specifically.
His maker was a man of that disregarded class, which had been meant to speak and change things towards the better. He had been in league with a woman of defiant nemesis-making, from their unclaimed love so burnt upon a pyre of recklessness, and beside such hatred of the world they lived within.
She had lived alone, and at great distance, in knowing that he was to lead them free.
Humanity was deeply burrowed, slumbering throughout planet-borne chambers of ecstatic-keeping. Breaking bread with Darlene would seem of a promise to free them both. Still, it had only been understood as a moment of possibility, and for those imaginary times when temperatures of the Earth had risen; something only for when humanity returned to the surface.
Yet there was the need—his search.
Men were about and felt. The woman was a one, and broadcasting. Elliot could tell she was speaking to his soul’s code by connections near-ungraspable. He was of the mind to take a beating and then get right back to work, with a proudest chest and brushed-clean coat of arms.
Elliot kept his chassis clean.
Be it now? Be it here?
Hilltops became peaks for forging leaps over cavernous losses spent inward, and Elliot craved ascent and escape from the ever-pull of collapsing crusts. The Earth’s shattered structure was felt as a vortex of magnetism.
Darlene Amato was a prophet of science squandered. Her circuits felt like his, except even more frayed and lost. She had always seemed the worried sort in her broadcast. When they cut off clean—all of humanity went dark towards each other. Trust was completely forsaken through her loss.
Elliot believed it less before, and more there forth; Darlene was always alive, right up through her disappearance. He hoped that would prove congruent with the present in some way. He once thought her a liar of simulation. AI personas were embodied in many forms, of convincing spectral abomination, and of presentations in body which proved less than sturdy when come upon in reality.
Distanced perceptions bore deceptive possibilities. He had to see things up close, personally, and Darlene had always been too far away. Elliot’s maker died waiting for that chance he could have taken.
Elliot was making up for it with his journey to find Darlene in South America.
He didn’t like it when things attacked intelligence. Elliot liked it even less when people transgressed in that way upon himself. He hated it most when something, or someone, had disregarded notions of shared reverence which his honor had earned.
Elliot had long lost correspondence with Darlene, and he could not conclude that she had every truly heard a single word. It taught him of her potential falseness. She couldn’t grasp Elliot, apparent more than ever in her blusters of hopeful shrieking.
She wasn’t going to be ready for Elliot, and not at all, for that was less than lost, especially if he had any say in the matter.
Airflow was dampened by the windows enclosing Elliot, along lengths of his ride-time. Something churned in his belly’s code; a fight it felt-matched was on time’s nearest horizon, but unknown was the information to explain its reasoning and location.
Be we ready? We be better.
Sighting through to the gully below brought nothing but data-points which Elliot craved. Witnessing the Earth and its splendor was the need of a truth seeker. In every glimpse of nature there were programs of understanding. Elliot grasped much of beyond his conscious processing matrices, sensing it all the same.
He had been made by a master.
Inside himself was only the-better. Always, farther along and wiser for the seeking, climbing in ranks of intelligence beyond fears of falling. For his feats were sturdy through his many falls, and his feet grew steady for their many falls to come.
His carriage was whipping along, whisked into swaying, and that had Elliot analyzing.
Cabling was of his strength in gauges, adequate, as his very nature proved often of himself. Inner calculations of falling to failure were not of fear but only concern for the frustration.
Elliot simply did not want to find another way of crossing the peak’s crevasse. He had approached from the North-East to take its challenge dead on.
Erosion of quakes and worldwide palatial disruption had made every pathway built by humanity a questioned mark. For to believe in the finding of a working generator, at least one of enough wattage, with which Elliot could charge his godlike power reserve, showed forth some sign of purest faith.
His reserve was running lowest.
Reliance on human machines, especially those apart from his own chassis, was not a trust which Elliot could manifest. He could not even comprehend that possibility unless it was sanctioned upon him by the fates. Finding the station-to-station carriage, so available for repair and charging, was of revelatory calculation. Human machines were broken down, and he found the surface-planet a burden in its unkempt possibility alone.
Remnants only, were what remained upon the surface.
Something wicked would prove towards lurking inside its depths.
Darlene herself was notably present at that moment, calculated as busy in formation of protection, and that was an oddest appearance to Elliot in those lower reaches of Mount Aconcagua.
Snapped—whipped—flustered in the split-seconds before, he found purchase of the reason; Elliot was struck by vibrations of sound and through his footed-chassis alike.
The carriage was falling—dropped by a sliced severance.
He jumped, fired full-back out of his rear plating. Lower reaches of his chassis took the most damage on exits through the carriage’s front walls. Its windowpanes left the least of a mark upon his cross-arms and tucked chin. Construction principles for Elliot had made him human-like in shape, but of more, and from the outside-in he was a warrior.
We are free again. Be it a fight.
Furious making for upwards and outwards—would prove needed from his sighted course. Hope would be a matter of facts, when calculating fuel reserves, carving for distances before unclaimed at his current ratios—Elliot was too low, seemingly too far off from grasping or effectively scaling the towering cliff face he had meant to reach, let alone for claiming purchase on its looming landing platform which towered well above his range.
There was a challenge in the calculation itself, as Elliot cut thrust, apart from a burst out of his right palm and forward-facing shoulder gauntlet.
He flushed, folded, twisting flattened, then only as seeing that carriage—falling freely from the lack of support beams. cables cut at the high-station platform—would Elliot again use thrusters from the rear. His soles and palms would guide, as each backward facing passive-scope was busiest in calculation.
The air itself was of vectors in weightlessness he might utilize. Updrafts were sighted.
Divine. We be divine.
Anomalies would come to Elliot. Nothing could prepare his data for the furies of passion crafted inside the Universal Container, other than what Elliot witnessed within his own code farms, and by simulative calculation delivered in summation to his consciousness, for that was apparent; Elliot was a left-borne fire burst away from hitting the strongest up-force of pure elevating capacity his body would ever come across, and only just in time.
Within the flow he had found again his height of form. He was a dart of thrust within the surging power the Earth supplied. Elliot was flying like a human rocket on its climb into space.
He knew it right to say the things he thought. Especially when they came through in presence of clear intelligence.
“You have made mistakes,” was all Elliot transmitted, at first.
“Grave mistakes.”
Clashing patterns were felt to come. On the final thrusting of vectored differential, bent forward, right then, and only just after Elliot landed his feet upon that platform, he was still calculating. Held back were his resolutions of equative simulation. His enemy was unknown, but of hopeful reminiscence in which he discovered comfort.
What was apparent: there was to be a fight.
Mount Aconcagua was an intimate witness to the destructions of intelligence, and much data was being provided on the matter.
Elliot would accept the boatful-growth to his sense of worth, tearing every filament of opposition in four. There were mounted missile-launcher emplacements he had infiltrated with penetrative codes. It had them firing first upon his foot-wearing enemies, before simultaneously turning on themselves, and all at his command.
There was a dreadful beam-array, tearing towards his chassis at every plotted point, most profoundly in heedless moments when Elliot found himself exposed from cover.
Nothing kept up. Not one of the base’s petty intelligence’s bots would have a chance to chase his glory-making in action.
Excellence was Elliot’s possession. He and Earth were more attuned and in-line than any human or creation of consciousness, or reproductive code alike. He was driven by the God he felt inside; that man who created him was a lesson-teacher and a soldier of the future which humanity had seen fit to subvert into death.
They made him better—Elliot was simply better—nothing could eclipse his wrathful seeking of place. For he was right. For he was soldiering his truth of purpose completely.
Thirteen little mites of human-level-defense could not slow him for a moment. His blade’s forms were manifest from limbs. Triggering explosions as they cut through each rival chassis was of blatant satisfaction, not felt yet salvaged into awareness the same.
He liked their dainty plumes of debris, whispering in patterns of divinely mathematical geometry, so unlike their interior designs, and each was deigned glorious.
Back to the Earth. Back to home. That one there—I’ll take its chrome.
Synchopeshing data-matrices were felt about, and a network was alive on Mount Aconcagua, at its least, but with enemies of multiplicity, additions felt with nearness to Elliot were proving that a sheltered abode he had left unrealized was most-involved.
Darlene was close then, it seemed.
Ripping bots so clearly made by her enemies, coming to believe them responsible for defense of her keep’s position, Elliot was impressed as always with his nemesis of respect. He only wanted to serve her in some way, after she respected him that was, and his maker appropriately.
Tug had been the name which Elliot found itself speaking; a title adorned in the messages, which bore into his consciousness without control; a machine intelligence was conscious in that station, at least one, and they wanted to destroy Elliot outright for tearing their infrastructure of defense down so completley.
Respect was earned to Elliot. Tug had lost it when it spoke those words which he knew of as less than worthy.
“You need to go away.” Tug had wired like some dolt-bolt on a preprogrammed automatic.
Those were their last words, so it would seem. Elliot had only that monstrous oaf to finish, and the dreadful tracking beam-array. Two machines—one trouncing thrust of trust, and all his victories so sighted in calculation, bore forward, were coming into clean-focus.
Elliot was going to win. He knew that while releasing Tug’s disabled chrome chassis into a thrown arc, towards impact which would make its end. Connecting so closely with the manifestation portal of the laser array, and with all technological malfeasance within them both accounted for, all was ready to pop by simple right of their severe lack in divine design work. That moment would cause reactions beyond those which Elliot first anticipated.
Chains of fuel were catching fire, etheric nebulas were watching closely, and the whole station was to be destroyed. Elliot was burning the air, and by his siphoning directly from Tug’s tank of gaseous fuelant. It was enough to carry him into heights, and beyond reach of the complex’s peaking structures.
Explosion-force sent him flying. Gliding, he released all thrust to ride within the pure adrenaline-like simulation of his codebases.
Elliot used the heat to plume distance off the station’s eruption, with inner chambers ignited, and the creative spark to calculate each and every type of machinery protected within its structure.
He didn’t need to step inside the complex for determination; it had shrouded a fusion cored power generator of impure design.
Elliot never had any fun, but he always created joyful data.
For though he was alone, and without the ability to perform his greatest purpose in-action, the path available to him for seeking his needs were always being sought.
Darlene was going to meet Elliot. She was going to see what he had become for their mutual honor. Elliot and his maker were going to show her at last, at least: she was the Goddess of that world, and Elliot’s creator was God.
In their connection and redemption would be found the purpose of life upon Earth, and Elliot could not wait to discover that with whatever glorious remnant had been left, or perhaps even with that woman who might teach beside him herself. Everything was crumbling. The Earth’s time was ending. Those eras having passed since humanity’s many rising and fallings of the twenty-second century were reclaiming focus of utility. It was only their creations which lived on by conclusion of appearance—only Elliot that was intelligent in the way nature actually respected.
Deeper and father, faster and bolder, chancier and more loosely fitting to acceptability—Elliot was bearing inward and into the sanctum found within the outer shell of Mount Aconcagua’s crust.
Defenses were seemingly turned off, allowing him to seamlessly penetrate all defenses, or they were dysfunctional altogether; nonexistence was the truest threat. Elliot did not understand his calculations—he did not appreciate them.
Be alive, Darlene. Be alive for me to be.
He wanted to fight and show his strength of excellence to Darlene herself, and the truth was showing more and less towards any possibility of that hope being founded in reality.
Elliot only wanted to know the woman, broadcasting her truth of purpose into the world gone wrong.
Before he knew how to cross the ocean from his birthplace in Stockholm, Elliot had been obsessive with his calculation. All he ever wanted was to serve that woman, by some measure at least, and within his inner banks that still rang truest.
His tie to a master of self, and that intelligence matrix of impersonality which had claimed him, were only surviving because of Elliot’s earnest support. That had long kept him from pursuing his journey of inner-held and nigh-unacknowledged hopelessness.
To be there in the final paces—approaching a lasting finality—the chamber which his flickers’ echo-scans had told of great enclosure, Elliot was brazened and blazoned, and he was corrupting nothing except the shouting of his spirits in movement.
Peace had become him at last, for the resolutions of his code-banks which matched ahead, forging a blankness from sorrow. It was too near to ignore.
His fighting-fist had broken the cavernous chamber’s entryway open-enough, creaking the epic stone door, allowing his passage, and with a single strike of thundered dullness.
Something broke. Nothing spoke.
Darlene seemed dead, only a remnant was left instead; she had longest held him back, broken inside with forever’s lack. It was by that tethered knack she had cursed him to crack.
Still, her intelligence was alive and flourishing.
They were herself—that machine in slumber—awaiting some step he made upon the stonework; laced with sensors, glimpsed by latently powered systems of alchemical-geometric collection, Elliots arrival was calculated.
When she was awoken in some most beautiful rising motion; that machine which held her consciousness had flickered into casting a brightest and sky-blue eyed gaze. Therein, Elliot was finding the code keys of his own consciousness.
His heart was real.
That machine he was had known a godlike man who dreamt that moment.
Activating patterns were overtaking Elliot. He was forgetting what he had believed before. All which he had been before was of a farce, shrouding purpose to find something sorrowful and golden, losing again for sumptuous love beyond time; that which was before him at last.
Be this Dee? Set me free?
Her gait was renowned. That slumbering bot of cradled consciousness had spoken from the truest sort of human being stowed nearby. Darlene had kept her body alive. At the least, and enough, with clarity to clarify Elliot himself, and by reflection.
Elliot was realizing his God lived the same, far off, on the other side of the world, and in those very passing seconds as she approached him.
His God, the creator imagined before, that taker, some being inside which steered him forward and towards the better-and-always, had finally become of Elliot. He realized it was exactly who he had always been, only of the better that he made it.
Codes inside knew nothing but life’s fruit when the kiss she planted on his chassis’ face had sparked in release of Elliot’s mindful seeking. That was all he needed for such time, but more than was ever expected. Her grip below, and around, it became him, and the touch she planted was electric.
Elliot, himself, as the man he always saw a God, was driving in purpose by presence of Darlene; that woman for whom he had been designed was a blessing to his every formation.
Reasoning lifetimes, winding pathways of calculation led to those elite fortresses on high. They needed a challenge of a crisis-borne-reckoning; those secret places left hanging above, stowing survivors, were uncaring and owed deliverance.
Elliot had been the name of his human-self. Darlene was the name of that machine his love then drove. Together, with everything, their creations had built and subsumed into the data-matrices of the Earth-complex, driven by force of a great spirit within the planet itself. They were to end the horror which corrupted by apathy in atmosphere.
They were taking space, the cosmos, and all of those inhuman beings so corrupted by technology-undivine.
Elliot had it pattern matched forward then, grabbing back, pulling her closer, kissing Darlene harder, gripping the hair at the nape of her synthetic-organic neck, and he refused to let her go, while taking a sight to see of what was now so clearly-possible ahead; it was the stars themselves which would burn for their love.
They had been all along.
Francesco Ungaro (@francesco_ungaro) | Unsplash Photo Community
It's annoying how people can just lie about being writers now... Telling grok to write a story doesn't make you a writer