The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Forty-Seven

*** It was a fire that ran through the synthetic blood pumping powerfully through his veins. Such a feeling wasn't logical, he'd known, and as a philosophical metaphor it had made very little sense. But it nonetheless had felt like fire was pulsing under his skin, like something molten and elemental, something primal, was flooding fuel through his very molecular structure. It had been and still was emotional and, as such, it had been something he'd been reluctant to give credence to and something he was not very good at processing. Emotions were a risk, a sign that he was losing control and control was everything to him. Control was strength. For himself and for his kind, emotions were always a sign of instability, a mark of imperfection, and yet did not his creators intend he and his fellow anthropomorphous synthetic robots to evolve into becoming more and more human in thought and action?

He remembered standing in the Great Hall, in one of the Master Temples of the Forge-Enclave on the moon of Pex'Insava, united with the others of his kind, and yet still feeling alone because even among such wondrous beings as those, he, himself, was a miracle of individuality, designed and born to be unique. In the Great Hall, all eyes had been locked upon the image projected onto the mammoth curved, panoramic monitor screen through which they, the Kodespawn, communed with their leader, the Apogeean Cognicant, a non-mammalian, extrahuman entity who was the master intelligence that had governed them.

And, in return, the cold, piercing eyes of the Apogeean Cognicant had been fixed on him.

"Why do you do what it is you do?" the Cognicant had asked of them. "What is it that drives your actions? What is your purpose? What is it that you are striving for? This is a matter far and away greater than a mere question of programming or physical architecture. This is existential. Until the day you can answer that question, you will always fall short of your potential, you will never be the best version of what you are. You exist to realize that potential, to fully embrace the function inherent in your design. YOU WERE CREATED FOR A REASON! WHY do you do what you do? FIND that answer. KNOW what you are. BE what you were MEANT to be. EVOLVE and BECOME. THIS is your mission above all other assignments."

The Cognicant's unblinking stare had left him thunderstruck and dizzy. Disoriented, he had felt something... highly unusual. It had felt fragile and yet enervating. He'd felt a sense of Destiny. That feeling had not, and had never as yet been, easily defined or quantified. But it had always been undeniable.

It was, then and now, a fire that engulfed his mind and his senses, burning inside him. ***

Those words had been spoken the day before they had all been sent into battle against the Gorgahnun Horde, sent innocent and unprepared to face a relentless, merciless bio-cyberdroid foe that lived and breathed a dark philosophy of alien nihilism, a philosophy that told its followers that a harsh and violent death was the greatest gift that they could bestow upon any non-Gorgahnun species. After such stirring words spoken by the Apogeean Cognicant, they, the Kodespawn, had ventured forth into battle not as heroes and demigods, not as saviors protecting Humanity, but as little more than factory-manufactured cannon-fodder for the World-Father as wave after savage, bloodthirsty wave of metallic Hordivore gene-beasts tore into their ranks. A thousand of his brothers and sisters had died in the first day of the assault. A thousand.

Emaris Staurqe looked back in fury on such moments, times wherein he had learned the hard lesson that his creators, those human scientists and engineers at the Forge-Enclave, had seen literally no value in his existence. Biologicals. Soft-skinned primates. Humans.

Yet, despite that, in direct opposition to his personal history, a mad denial in the face of Reason, the fire in him still burned...

He had been created for a reason.