Conatus

Transient

The Transient winced inwardly.

He had technically been awake for some time now, still in a state of paralysis. The central nervous system was supposed to be one of the last things to form during the laborious reconstruction process; a detail he was thankful for at a time, though one which had gradually lost significance over the course of his travels. He was growing accustomed to the way in which bone minerals, muscle fibres and connective tissues were sewn back together on each occasion. The sensation wasn't entirely dissimilar to pain, yet not as concentrated. It felt as if the knowledge of what was happening had slowly clotted, forming a twisted mesh framework for the nociceptive stimuli. Much to his discomfort, his mind had started prematurely filling in the blanks.

His eyelids obediently peeled apart just before the door swung open. He staggered forward out of the regeneration capsule, which was pushed up at an incline by unruly foliage. A vapour stream followed as he landed in the thick undergrowth, surrounded by a grove of stilt roots. He had been here before, and had known that this is where he would emerge.

Ancient thinkers, in all their haughty pretence, might have likened the marvel of regeneration to being stirred from a lucid dream, the specifics of which can be recollected almost perfectly. But for those who had endured the treatment to such an extensive degree, it was a far more unsettling affair. For one thing, it wasn't originally intended for operation post-mortem. A subject was left with the haunting aftershock of death, and a nightmare dispersal of the consciousness, which they were to endure for the entirety of the process (and sometimes much longer). A vague, morbid image rose up despicably inside the Transient, and his body shook with an age-old need to retch; yet nothing came up, for he was empty. Nourishment from food intake had not been a concern for many centuries, but even if something was ingested out of habit, it would be discarded along with any necrotic tissue during regeneration. The Machine was very particular about what should and what shouldn't carry over, using a shrewd combination of gene regulation and negligible senescence to do so. The Transient knew all this because the Machine had told him, time and time again.

His head was still beset with these tremors even after his insides had settled, and in his delirium he hazarded a guess as to why the impulsive coagulation of his consciousness was causing him such grief. Not so much the physical agony itself, but the acknowledgement that he was the one behind it. It was the Transient's own reckless intellect that was making involuntary connections ahead of time. The Machine couldn't fake that.

Naturally - he mused - if it was capable of simulating something like pain, whether physical or emotional, then we would surely know nothing else. No, we need to experience pain, amongst other things, for ourselves. Not out of some fatalistic, unbreakable hominid tradition, but because there's no other choice. As it turns out, even as members of the newly unified, all-knowing, all-powerful ecotype, we are broken all too easily.

The Transient tried to stop his feverish train of thought, but his mind acted as a beacon, calling to the Machine, which wasted no time in imparting the enormity of modern history on its subordinates at any given opportunity. He was promptly inundated with visions that simultaneously filled him with wonder and horror. Instinctively, futilely, he put a hand to the area of his helmet covering his left temple as the past flashed in and out of view. He trudged on, and the flood of repressed, borrowed memories eventually seemed to subside. He had made some headway, almost clear of the grove. The roots and their trees had grown much larger, as had the distances between them. Before long the Transient arrived in a small glade overlooking a valley. Past the valley he could make out the cylindrical, ringed silhouettes of megastructures hundreds of metres wide, towering into the troposphere and beyond. He peered at the distant shapes in disbelief, finding his thoughts still in disarray. Even with the immeasurable communal knowledge of the Machine at his disposal, he would often struggle to accept what transpired before his eyes.