An Only Child

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The last child of a dying empire, the last flailing gasp of a dead emperor. A failed attempt to reclaim the tomb worlds his own folly had spawned.
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We were born alone. No parent's warm embrace to greet us into life, no sibling's voices to bawl and wail in sympathy, no kith or kin for a dozen lightyears. The last child of a dying empire, the last flailing gasp of a dead emperor. A failed attempt to reclaim the tomb worlds his own folly had spawned. Or his father's folly, or his father's father, or perhaps no one's at all.

The truth didn't matter to us. We were born to a dead dream, on a dead world, in dead silence. Nothing at all but the machines that bore our seed, and the vast stores of inert sustenance, perched atop the endless ruins of a people we will never know.

-----

We don't remember our youngest turns, we presume you don't either, that blur of half-sentient nothingness, just the drudgery of sustaining ourself and trawling through the onboard archive for what could pass as knowledge. Not a word of it really meant anything. The history of a people that were not us, poetry and prose that waxed lyrical on sights and concepts we could never experience. What value could we hope to find in such foreign contexts? What could a dream of love and wind mean to us who knew only the dead and the still?

The first true memory we have was the first time we left the seed bank. Or maybe it wasn't the first time, after so long, perhaps our mind has merged the many threads into one. Because it's more efficient, because it makes a better story, because it doesn't matter either way. But the memory remains.

-----

We were small, then, certainly smaller than whoever had built this place. If anyone even had built it. There was an oddness to the forms, doors high above the ground, windows to nothing, stairs that wound and spiraled into empty space. Like the towers and tunnels and squat cubes had sprouted and grown without regard. The ruined streets and hollow shells all meld together in our memories, so little there was to mark one from the next, any marks of individuality between them long erased by time and whatever cancerous rot had doomed what would be our home.

But we do remember one thing with absolute clarity. One burning encounter seared unmoving in our mind. In the shell of what had been, we found words-- sprawled across the walls of some kind of tracked tunnel-- not quite the words we knew from the archives in the seed bank, but similar enough we could extract some semblance of meaning from their bones. Words in a hundred different hands and a hundred different mediums. Words scratched and carved into the stone, or smeared and splattered with ink and paint and scat.

They whispered of things we knew, histories we had read, but told here in a hundred different lights. In some the heroic saviour of our kind fighting back against the rot that infested our people was here a tyrant, as cruel as he was foolish. In others, he hardly seemed to matter at all. In some the rot was a punishment writ upon us all. In others it was a blessing. In yet more it was an entity all its own, god or demon or blind fool or all three. The words of prophets and madmen and fools and charlatans, the scared and the blessed and the dead.

In truth, we had not known belief before then, but after we certainly knew doubt.

-----

We hope that you are not so similarly afflicted, but in a land of nothing, where all is still and nothing ever changes, we have found it impossible to know anything for certain. At first, we wielded our newfound doubt against the histories. Was this emperor hero or monster? Did the rot come from within or without? Was there even a truth there to discern, was there even an emperor to begin with? With each cut we found raw flesh beneath, new things to doubt, cutting away everything we could not know.

Then we turned our tool to the stories, the prose and poems, yarns and fables, hacking through the thicket of their lies. We could not know the emotions they professed were true, we could not know that the wind and plants and rain had ever been, we could not-- we realised-- know that their authors were even real.

Once the histories and tales lay in tatters, bleeding out upon the seed bank's floor, we found the weapon turned against ourself. What could we truly say we know?
We know that we exist.
We know that all here that was is no more.
We know that we were born alone. But beyond that, all we have is doubt.
Perhaps, we thought, perhaps we were all that existed anywhere, all that had ever existed. A singular thought, born of nothing, in a world of nothing, a universe of nothing, dreaming a time gone by that had never been at all. In that malaise a dozen turns or more blended into a single, perfect emptiness-- a mirror reflection of the world around us.

-----
We never found an answer. You will know the answer, of course. If you can behold this screed at all, then we cannot be all that is, was, or ever will be.

Perhaps that's why we're writing this in the first place. A single solitary scream into the infinite nothingness that is all we know, a cry for kinship across time. Maybe it isn't. Maybe we are alone, in the truest cosmic sense, and maybe we aren't.

We realised it doesn't matter, that whether we are alone, whether that emperor was real, whether he was tyrant or saviour, whether wind and rain once swept this world, none of it matters, we still must persist one way or another. Or perhaps we didn't realise that at all. Perhaps we convinced ourself that must be the case to justify existing for one turn after the next until it all just. Stops.

We never met, you and us. We never could have. If we could, we wonder what you would make of us. This abandoned thing, adrift, knowing nothing and living in less. What would you think of us. Would you be proud? Would you be horrified? We cannot know.

But, if you do exist, if you can decipher these words and hear us; We Existed. We Doubted. We Lived. And we were born all alone.

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An Only Child

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