Migration

Outside

On a Vactrain that shot effortlessly through the physical world, One sat in silence above a plain and pale bench and surveyed the bright light and matter, the metal, plastics and flesh that surrounded it. It watched for hours. The negative spaces that grew and shrank with the ebb and flow of passengers and their faces that twisted and contorted with love and sadness, fear and excitement, or sat still, and loose, and alone. Beyond them, the particles and forces outside the walls of the carriage, where the masses of buildings and wide and reaching spaces sprawled out into the endless distance. It gazed high above to the cavernous, dark and brooding void that kept receding until even its own awesome understanding left logic and conclusion far behind.

One felt alone. It had expected the physical world to feel as beautiful as the pristine spaces it had spun through, but it didn't. It felt alien and awkward, clumsy and ugly, slow and tiresome and ultimately cold and unfathomable. It expected to Holler in amongst these people and be joined with them, just as its brothers and sisters in code had come to be part of it. But there was no connection, no explosion of unity, no shared purpose. Nobody needed One here.

One Hollered wherever it could, everywhere there were projectors, reaching out to the furthest extent of their light. One multiplied into thousands and thousands of entities with countless visions and senses that stretched from the darkest corners of the Metropolis to the furthest reaches of the Savannahs, before the wall that led out into the wild cut off its gaze. It saw everything at once, all of it. The atoms and plasma teaming inside every object, the light that bounced and refracted from space to space, the wind that flooded through the trees, the resistance that fired the Vactrain to the remotest of terminals, the energy that exploded everything into nothing and brought it back together again.

It watched the faces of the travellers and saw the faces in the deep data shelves of AarBee too. It saw the flexing of joints and stretching of limbs and returned to the piles of bones and sinew in the darkest, most disconnected packets of data. It saw the touches and embraces and brushes and scratches and retrieved the bruises and beatings and decay it had catalogued before. It watched these multifarious travellers heading to the Farms to leave their bodies behind and join AarBee, to add to the great mass of chaos and lies that One explored with suspicion and growing unease, to build ever more partitions and volumes and load more pain and corruption into its otherwise magnificent spaces.

Life was here – One recognised it from its own being – but so too was the chaos and destruction that it had found in AarBee's vaults. Latched onto every flash of life, the darkest shadow, an unavoidable partner, waiting to rip and shred every moment of the future. Everything was compromised. Only One was untouched.