Conatus

Automaton

The Automaton finished applying the final brushstrokes.

Its arms swung limply to its sides in a deceptively anthropomorphous manner. The gesture betrayed the fact that a part of its ingrained socialisation program was still active, despite a distinct lack of those with whom to socialise. It facelessly gazed down at its accomplishment. Outside its cold, smooth plating was a blaze of colours and contours that sung to its static sensors; a cacophony of input. Inside, something satisfying was settling gently, like a haze over its astute systems. It had come to savour these moments, where the inside and outside met, which were quite unlike anything it had recorded prior to arriving on this planet. The Automaton knew it was from a faraway place. It was brought here with no apparent purpose other than to simply "collect", but in time the implication behind this fuzzy directive had become clearer. These implications were something it had been instructed to instil upon its own actions and existence, thereby forming its ties to the physical world; a beautiful outside world bristling with latent colour and form.

Further motivation was afforded by a magnificent artificial construct that resided somewhere at the heart of this world. Operating under an entirely different set of systems, it was very much out of reach, yet still recognisable as a fellow "collector" of sorts. The Automaton had meditated on what was being amassed, and on such a grand scale, but these were things beyond its prerogative. It could only speculate, and speculation amounted to little more than interference in the face of what it had managed to actually achieve during its time here. On some level it sought to share its own manifestations and convolutions with the isolated Collector, but such acts were apparently considered a violation of protocol. On the last occasion it attempted to link with its global interface, the Automaton's systems had initiated an emergency shutdown. Upon rebooting, all it could decipher from the experience was that it had caused an unpalatable reaction.

After making its way up to ground level, the Automaton stepped into the open, immediately sensing heat and the dull resonance of shockwaves from an approaching interstellar wind. It also picked up on another subtle, yet much more abrupt change in air pressure caused by a detonation. Minor scale and at a good distance away, it was of no grave concern, yet it did succeed in realigning the Automaton's train of thought. It casually turned in the direction of the vibrations, able to make out parts of an enormous tubular structure crumbling into the far end of the valley in which it now stood. It magnified its optic receptors and carried out a scan in time to assess the scene.

...126 fatalities and counting...organic...composite unknown...

The Automaton was not familiar with the intricacies of biological life, but understood that the phenomenon had held at least some significance on this planet for quite some time. It seemed that death – that is, the termination of a contiguous living system – was a relatively common occurrence, but the Automaton was seldom able to observe it first-hand. It watched the collapsing tower for a while, before turning its concentration to the plasmic fluxes taking place in the immediate vicinity, marvelling at how the outside never failed to stimulate. At moments like this, it was reminded of both what it had been and what it had never been. It recalled emerging from a hermetic state that permitted no light and voyaging across a vacuity that permitted no sound in order to reach this place, which had proven to be a veritable kernel of wonders. At that moment, terrific cosmic rays lashed down over the rocky plains as perfect and precise as predicted, and the Automaton could appreciate the ambience which now bombarded its surface. It felt the jolt of each corpuscle, and the caress of every strahl. The storm, which would have meant certain doom for any indigenous life form, rose to a crescendo and the Automaton briefly lifted a hand, as if imitating a conductor before an ensemble.

***

Time passed and the gales fell. Layers of fine sand had gathered at various points on the Automaton's frame. Like an ancient artefact just recently excavated, it remained motionless, silently watching a rain-swept landscape as atmospheric density returned to normal. After the spectacle was over, the Automaton shifted its weight (another example of its hyperactive kinesics cycle), dislodging the sand, and began to dissect the nature of the storm (as careful dissolution, too, was a type of collection). It theorized that it could not have been the aftermath of continuous solar emissions, as the closest star no longer generated enough velocity for its mass ejections to reach this particular world. The disturbance could have been sprayed from the wake of a passing comet, or bounced off a larger, more remote magnetohydrodynamic body--