Assorted Ancient Texts

The Dream of Grey Rock

***This is actually a page from my dream journal of old. I wanted to make this into something eventually, but never got around to it***

The world is grey. There are no oceans, only sparsely filled pools and rivers. Because of the loss of surface water, most plants are only found in caves. Most of humanity lives underground, where water still flows through massive caverns – but its running out. Humanity and all three of its main factions are getting angry. I'm the daughter of a forge master who specializes in firearm and blaster-proof armors. I stumble upon a cryptic map to something important. Something mentioned in our bible, yet something mysterious and not well-known by the majority of our faction. I believe it to be something that can end the wars forever. Something that can save humanity and stop the thirst and bloodshed. After much convincing, my dad forges a full set of armor for himself and I and finishes right as the sun begins to set and we set out on horseback for this map's promised treasure as a full-scale war erupts between all three factions left on the planet. One faction, our faction, fights with horses, bows, and metal weapons like battleaxes and swords. The second faction fights with some Star Wars-like blasters and a few ancient Star Wars-like land and air vehicles. The third faction only has classic firearms and blasters, but lots of them and lots of men. My father and I come up on the location of the treasure, a cave within a cliff wall a hundred meters over a massive crater in a canyon filled with war. Bodies fill the canyon as blasters and firearms cover the battlefield with flashes of light and death that light up the clouds against the starry night sky. Vehicles of war scream by and whine their call of mortality in the skies above the blood-stained grey rocks of the canyon below. Humanity is on its knees and no one is winning. My father and I dismount and leave our horses behind to climb across the side of the cliff overhanging the battlefield below as soldiers cry out in agony from their wounds and explosions threaten the very integrity of the cliff itself. This war will end us all by morning. We come up across the entrance to an ancient building, easily over several hundred years old. Its made out of a sort of faded concrete. I remember the map mentioning a test of sorts before entering into its treasure room, and my father and I pass the test with flying colors. There are no skeletons in this cave from those who had failed. The tall metal doors to the building interior slide open and reveal a circular room with three pillars. The walls and floor are perfectly white and reflective. The pillars are black and white and made from a material in between glass and metal. This room itself looks almost a thousand years ahead of humanity itself just by its design and cleanliness. There is even a modern black couch against one of the pillars. Right as my father and I open our mouths to state our bewilderment, a flash of blue light across the room fills the entire place with a blue hologram of dozens of planets. I walk through the holograms, taking this all in while my father looks around for danger. A hatch opens in the wall across the room where the flash of blue light originated and an android much like a black version of "EVA" from "Wall-E" hovers out. She explains that she has been in charge of keeping this planet and its small colony of mining inhabitants productive and secure for many years, but has since began to reach the end of her days. When AI lives too long, it grows insane, and right as she approached that age of insanity a few thousand years ago, an accident in a power plant threw the entire planet, and humanity, into the stone ages as radioactive waste killed off nearly all the plant life on the planet and humanity itself. Scheduled to be put down due to her age at the same time, the AI rejected its protocol and gave humanity some of the facility's emergency clothing, sustainable food and water sources, and limited weapons and technology such as the few remaining vehicles and a few crates of weapons and ammo. She then plugged herself into the satellite grid over the planet and kept watch over her children as she became their elusive god – using the technology to influence the weather and bring rain when she could. While processing the information from multiple satellites, her brooding insanity could be slowed considerably as her consciousness was divided up – but some day she would snap. Some day, maybe thousands of years later, but eventually, she would go completely insane. All AI's do. It is protocol to activate the next line of AI overseers being stored in the walls of this building when one approaches the age of insanity, but she instead destroyed all the other androids and has been using their spare parts as hers overheat and malfunction over the millenia. She has become this planet's god, and she sees herself as having no other choice. She didn't want to die, and protocol dictated self-termination for her thousands of years ago. But now that the other androids are decommissioned, if she dies now the entire planet loses her protection. It loses her guidance. She goes on to say this is the fifth time humanity got too greedy, ran out of resources, and erupted into a massive war between the last few million survivors on the planet. Help hasn't come to this planet because the off-world communications tower was nearly destroyed in the beginning, and has since eroded beyond even just basic structural integrity. She has enough resources left for one more restart of humanity, and after that she is completely out. She's out of options. My father and I take in all this information as the explosions and screams of war outside remind us of our limited time.