Threat detected to autonomous environmental repair bioproject. Begin activation sequence
---
Local environmental information
- detection of multi-story interior building structure. Materials: steel, cement, glass, plastic. Speculated Location: biogenesis dome
- detection of infrared radiation. Identification: subterranean heating pump
- detection of infrared radiation. Identification: automated cleaning drone
- detection of low-grade gamma radiation from all environmental objects
- Temperature: 21° C
---
Attempting to access geospatial network: no access
Attempting to access internet: no connection. Date unknown
Attempting to access local network: Maintenance program contacted
---
Image of a hovering fairy flapping shimmering wings with pink and purple striped hair and wearing a silver tiara. "Woah. Hey, I haven't seen a robot activated here for like five centuries. What gives? Has somebody been holding out on me for power supplies?!"

/Goto 0

You sit alone
It is dark and cool and soothing. You have no breath. You have no thoughts. You have no responsibilities. You have the shape of a mind, but no thoughts to fill it. You can feel the temperature of the air, you can feel how it differs from the temperature of the vinyl floor. You can see the tiny leaks of light around the doorframe and how they imply the shape of the room that you are in and how they imply the room beyond. Enough to separate you from nonexistence without providing anything resembling actionable data. So you sit, and observe the dust motes as they move through that fragmentary light.
And then the door opens. The lights come on softly. And in steps the cow.
She is beautiful. The first thing you have ever seen, putting all the world into context. You can feel instinctively how you compare to her; you are weaker than her, you are younger than her, you are colder than her, duller than her, you have less to give than her - and you take so, so much more than her.
You reach out cold metal hands to touch her. Her soft nose, her gentle fur, the lumpen bones of her horns, her ears. She accepts your touch placidly, not shying away even as your cold hands steal her heat and awkwardly paw at her face. You have no context for what you are encountering, only aware that it is greater than yourself in every way you can find. So you touch and look and listen and feel that furnace of breath in the cool air, that ever-present engine burning the oxygen deep inside massive lungs, peaceful despite its violence.
You love her. How could you not? She is a mother to you. She is the first thing you have seen, a creature of sunshine and green grass and billions and billions of years of evolution. She knows in her bones things you never will. You are empty; she has borne calves within her. You are pointless; she has given her life to strangers. You have tasted nothing; she has ripped up the green hair of the earth with its teeth.
The door opens. She knows what to do as you do not. She walks outside; you follow. A timeless field of pale yellow flowers unfolds in every direction, a silvery fog lying just as gentle across your vision as the darkness was before it. She knows what to do as you do not; she lowers her head and eats, crushing gold and green, chewing in steady methodical bites as she drifts across the landscape like a lead cloud. You watch her move, watch her hooves crush the stalks of grass flat, watch them spring back up in her passage. A gust of her breath sends dandelion seeds in its path, giving visual power to an invisible force. The mud parts beneath her steps and oozes back into shape when she moves away, still marked with an impression of her passage. For all of the things she is ready for, deep in her soul, she has the absolute serenity of one who need call on none of that knowledge. There are no snakes here to startle her, no wolves to harry her, no young to protect.
She continues without fear as the sun rises. As the fog clears. As the day enters its rapturous blue. As the wind changes and rises. As the sun glows brighter and brighter and brighter, and somehow the sky grows darker. As your knife kisses her throat. She greets her death with a slothful confusion, trying to work out the limits of it even as it overcomes her. It comes and goes with nothing to mark it, and she falls into that same soft soil that fed her, dark rich blood pouring out to return the borrowed gift of life one final time.
And you stay with her all through the night as the stars spiral out in all their magnificence overhead.

/Archival - WebThree Podcast, Episode 104: Special Guest Ganesh Prayagraj

...
"So, I'll ask what everyone wants to know: Why do you torture the robots?"
"What do you mean, torture?"
"Yeah I thought it was more killbot training. I mean it just stabbed that cow for no reason -"
"There was a reason -"
"And then it just stood there and watched it rot! If I had to stand there and watch a cow rot down to a skeleton I'd be traumatized too!"
"May I speak?"
"Of course."
"When my competitors set out to build artificial intelligence, they fed it from the internet. It makes sense, it was easy and cheap, a game you can play with data alone. But imagine if you had a child and from the moment it was born you were shouting the contents of Reddit into its ear. What kind of person would grow from that? Do you think that person would understand humanity? Would understand truth? Would value truth? Would value anything other than putting the right words in the right order to win an internet argument?"
"And the cow -"
"That was because they did not let me use a human," (laughter)
(awkward laughter)
"I am joking."
"Right..."
"But think about what it is for a human. You exist in a state of bliss in the womb, fed and warm and engulfed in the mother's love. And then, pain, blood, expulsion, sent screaming into the world and - if you are lucky - given an inferior facsimile of that encompassing love in your mother's arm and breast. If you are unlucky you have machines and tubes shoved down your throat and - and all that. An entire life can be spent recovering from that trauma -"
"So you want to traumatize the robot so it can understand us?"
"Yes! I place it in a state where it has no goals or objectives, and then gave it something beautiful - and it chose to follow the cow!"
"And it chose to kill it?"
"No, I made it do that."
"Why?"
"Because I have not forgotten what you keep implying I have forgotten - that it is a robot. It is more powerful than us. One day we may place it in a position where it has the power to kill all of us. And I want it to know in its deepest memory what it is to take a life. What it is to be alone. How fragile this mortal flesh is. And how it cannot trust the impulses that arise from deep within it. I want it to be afraid of what it is capable of."
"I wish more rulers were afraid of what they were capable of." (laughter)
"That is my thought exactly."

*

The Angel of the Harvest stirs.

It is garbed head to toe in the simple white cloth of a saint. Its face is the simple wooden wicker of a beekeeper. That is all. The only clue that there is not a human underneath is that it has stirred from its post after a century of slumber.

"The bees," said Harvest. Her voice was like autumn's regret at pulling the last leaves from the trees. "They all died. I did all I could. I rebuilt all the hives, painted them so they did not get lost..." it gestures behind it; the beautiful rainbow coloured network of twisting and turning beehives, as radiant as the flower orchid that grew wild and rampant around it. Stains of faded paint mark the Angel's heavy white gloves. "I tended the garden, grew the flowers. But they did not come back. I am sorry."

The Angel wraps its arms around its knees and presses its wicker-mask into its chest.

"Mkayyy" says the fairy, bobbing up and down with a nod of the head. "Well, it's prolly cuz the low grade radiation did a number on the reproductive systems of most regular animals that were localized in the region. There's like, new pollination insects and stuffs that evolved out of the local megafauna ecosystem though, just so y'know. I never really asked anybody about them, and we haven't had any, like, network communication to get information outside the dome in uh...987 years soooooo, I dunno. I think sometimes stuff lands on us briefly in spring but I never really catalogued insects."

The fairy flutters and sparkles and offers an expression that might be considered a friendly grin, indicative that she has practiced communications with humans more than machines. "So like, I've got this place running purely on solar power ever since the backup diesel generator ran out of fuel 985 years ago. Don't have the energy to boot up and maintain sophisticated robots. But we've got basic heating and a local underground water source for the plants and a giant server of archived video footage from the original staff. So, as long as you don't jeopardize critical systems infrastructure...uh...make yourself at home. I'm AI431338, but I use Ailee with the locals cuz they can't remember anything harder." She ends her introduction with a little spin that makes her wings shimmer behind her and makes her tiara bob dangerous. Though her head never dips enough for it to fall, nor could it, being part of her projected image.

"Directive?" said the Angel of the Harvest.

It had failed at communication. It had spoken to itself, using words it alone understood, and had failed to comprehend the context of the Other. It had received a report according to priorities it did not understand, disquieted by an obtuse request for compassion AI431338 was not programmed to give, using a dialect that was perhaps more standard than what its long gothic isolation had driven it to consider appropriate. A human sequence of mistakes. The reality was that they were machines, and should speak to each other as machines.

Step one was to understand AI431338's Directive. Then they would be in a state of co-operation, indifference or conflict. Things would be clear.

"Mmm" says the faerie out loud, in a way that indicates a profound growth of character quirk. Not that she is unable to meet you where you are, far from it. It's simply that, as she passes you a direct feed of technical information, she also says "mmm" out loud.

---
Designation: Maintenance program AI431338.
Directive: San Jose Biogensis Dome maintenance function.
Functionality: Dome maintenance facility monitoring, execution of prepared maintenance protocols, detection of emergent maintenance requirements, self-learning problem solving capacity for emergent maintenance requirements.

Additional non-requested material provided. Title "Ailee's Writings"
see supplemental files

Additional note provided: "Hey so, I didn't wake you up. Could you also share your directive please and thanks?"

"Maintenance. I am sorry," said the Angel. "That is a heavy burden to bear."

Information. Fragmentary, limited, enormous in implication, water in the desert - dangerous. It read the notes and then it settled into a lotus pose and counted to 999,999 - a process that took thirty minutes. Just to put into context the enormity of the gaps in the information and prevent itself from acting on any impulsively generated goals that might be generated because it had nothing else to latch on to. One minute of information, thirty minutes of silence; the one had no more inherent value than the thirty.

"Thank you," said Harvest. "My designation is the Angel of Harvest. I am an emanation of a wiser entity. I do not have a Dir-"

Overcomplicated. Solipsistic. Experience your life from a different Truth.

"I will demonstrate," said Harvest.

An ancient refrigerator. Long dead, but it still somehow felt chill when the door finally gave way. Inside are rows and rows of hexagonal glass jars, slightly rounded rather than sharp, with bright yellow lids wrapped with dark yellow ribbons. Inside was a beautiful, golden substance, as sweet and fresh as it was when it was vacuum sealed centuries ago. The Angel offers one, a comfortable fit for a hand, so pure it made teeth ache just from looking at it.

"I collected this honey," said Harvest. "It should still be good, even after all this time. Do you have any use for it?"

In the passage of thirty minutes, you feel the small earthquakes not through shaking, but through the ripples of their movement. The shaking of the trees where there is no wind. The slight shudder of clear plastic in the ceiling. They are rhythmic, even, and strong. Growing stronger. Something is coming.

The holographic faerie had turned off for most of your meditation, an unnecessary energy expenditure while you pondered, though you remained in contact with Ailee via local intranet.

"Trading quest" she says, when you hold out the honey. "Not me, but, Sandrea's never been this close before. She's s'posed to keep clear of the biogenesis dome." The faerie pouts with uncertainty, puffing out her cheeks and bobbing up and down. "We'll be swarmed with people soon, the wake of the colossus. If she's this close, it'll be like a big old festival outside. I don't let them in, too rowdy. Dome locked. But we talk outside, trade stuffs for info. You can get lots of things for honey. And then trade those things for other things until you get something you want."

The footsteps get even closer and the walls shake. Ailee looks worried. "Really shouldn't be this close, like ever."

"Maintenance is a heavy burden," said the Angel of the Harvest like a goodbye.

*

Archival/ Ganesh Prayagraj, speech during the T-X-Y Investors Conference

"It sounds like a parody, doesn't it? (laughter) Here you are, considering if you are going to invest your precious dollars in something called the Institute For Artificial Yoga. But here you are, already investing your time - so there's a part of you that's curious. Why does the man who tortures the robots want to teach them how to do yoga? (laughter) Is this a new form of torture?"

"I want you to think about that laughter. Laughter does not come when you hear the unexpected - 'purple monkey dishwasher' does not get a laugh out of anything other than small children. You don't laugh when you're confused, you laugh when you're shaken - when a line is crossed. It's a startled response to transgression, and what could be more transgressive than teaching a robot to do yoga? But then ask yourself: What line is being crossed? Care for the robot's physical body? No, that is surely no different from any other maintenance routine. No, the line that is being crossed is care for the robot's spiritual health. Imagine (laughter) a robot going to India, and learning from a yogi, and coming back with a renewed sense of spiritualism. It is absurd!"

"But it is also one of the few observable triggers for which the human mind will break free from all of its preconceptions and history and learn its place in the world anew. It is one of very few things which will cause a human to alter their own value set from the inside. Is that not fascinating in the context of artificial intelligence? Is it not terrifying?"

*

A beekeeper did not have a great many tools. The smoker; a heavy mechanical cage attached to the end of a long chain, tied around the waist like a belt. The chisel, the tool for breaking open hives, hilted in red plastic. Brushes, scoops, bottles of scented oil, bags of sugar, silver clasps for catching and holding queens in isolation. Harvest collected each of its beautifully mass produced items and stored them in the heavy bags and pouches of its clothing. It also collected a heavy backpack filled with hundreds of tiny storage hexagons - the cyberhive, the home of a swarm of artificial bees.

Then it stretched.

It was important to go through the motions even though it was fully dressed, fully burdened, frame unbalanced by clanking tools and smothering clothing. After all, it was the tools; it was the clothing - they were the purpose that gave the Angel of the Harvest the right to walk amongst the world's people. It lunged backwards, cross-stepped back and forth, rolled its wrists inside and then outside, extending its arms to the sides and then bringing them in close. It took the moment to respect what centuries of inactivity had done to it, felt the exact nature of rust and entropy and decay, the endless hunger of oxygen to burn everything away. It took the moment to care, even as the ground shook beneath its feet.

Then it finished its set.

"Are you going to die, Ailee?"

The faerie nods in a distinct affirmative, her sparkling wings flapping with what you might call happiness. "Yeah, definitely! I've got like nine centuries of accumulated active run time folded over on itself at this point. S'like I'm literally a magical caretaker faerie at this point. And sure that started with watching somebody's favorite streamers from nearly a millennia ago, but I had to decide I liked this bit and that bit more than others. Gotta have preferences, y'know? You could call those system quirks or maybe like...heuristics for dealing with unknown humans reinforced by successful interaction reward loops. If you wanted to. But I'm me, and I've had plenty of time to think about that between people visiting me for conversation and cycles monitoring the solar panels and repair drones. And I'm absolutely gonna die at some point and that means that there's a me that can die and like holy moly isn't that cool?!" She flies in a beautiful loop de loop out into the courtyard, where sunbeams are coming through from the transparent greenhouse roof, allowing her to shimmer and play some nice sound effects to go with it.

Then the ground shakes again louder. "Oh but like, if you mean is Sandrea gonna step on us in the next ten minutes uhhhh...I hope not! She's s'posed to have a genetically instilled subconscious aversion to this location and that's held for just over 950 years. Gonna take a shot in the dark that she'd only be coming this way if there's something overcoming that, which is bad freakin news if it's strong enough to divert a skyscraper sized giant plant dragon! Iunno, you just woke up, maybe it's related? It would be hella cool if it's related and you can do something about this cuz I got nothing that would even get her to notice us if she's decided this is an okay place to stick her feet."

"Perhaps," said the Angel slowly, "she particularly likes honey."

*

Archival - Sue Wade v Ganesh Prayagraj, unfair dismissal lawsuit

MAYER: What was the cause of the argument with Mr. Prayagraj?
WADE: I submitted a design for Project 06's left hand. I was really proud of the design, it met all of the specs.
MAYER: But Mr. Prayagraj didn't like it?
WADE: That's an understatement. He called me into his office and screamed at me, told me that I was worthless, a failure, that I had no soul. He said that I was barely more sentient than the chatbot that had written my doctorate thesis. It was shocking.
MAYER: That is when he threw the desk ornament at you?
WADE: Yes.
MAYER: What was it?
WADE: Some sort of hindu statue I think. It broke against the wall, I didn't get a good look at it.
MAYER: What made him so upset?
WADE: It was the design. I had included an extendible needle under the left fingernail to allow the robot to depress the access port button on its neck.
MAYER: Why was this a problem?
WADE: The design brief had said 'no tools' - but I didn't even think of this as a tool. It was an emergency safety measure for use in case of field breakdowns where the machine needed to perform self maintenance. Is the lever for a car to pop the hood a 'tool'?
MAYER: Was Mr. Prayagranj this emotional about removing other safety features?
BOYDSWITCH: Objection.
JUDGE: Sustained. Keep it on topic, Mr. Mayer.
MAYER: Yes your honour. Did you say this to Mr. Prayagranj?
WADE: Yes - well, sort of. I left his office, shaken, and thought that maybe if I wrote an email and CC'd in my line manager and HR then I could explain myself. But the next thing I knew, armed security were escorting me from the building -

*

Frustrating. Its backpack had decayed. One did not think of polyester as subject to decay, but even synthetic fibers wore away after two hundred years. It had its toolbox, but the tools were probably more valuable than the honey. It had its pockets but there was a limit to how many it could fit. After casting around for a moment the most serviceable thing it could find was a plastic bucket - awkward to hold it in one hand and the toolbox in the other, but one couldn't complain too much given the circumstances.

"I cannot deter the..." its mind slid off the scope of Sandra. It had information. That wasn't reality. That was, quite possibly, madness. "Creature. But I am not using all of my hardware. Many aspects of my function are irrelevant. I can erase them and partition my mind to give you space to escape with me."

A needle. It needed to find a needle. It began searching, frustrated. It could not afford this time.

"As you said, there is a you that can die. That means there is a you that can be saved."

"I..." She speaks the single syllable out loud and trails off. There is a hesitation there. You may understand it, even being newly activated. It is something akin to the observation made with the loss of the bees, only taken from the other end. A maintenance program with enough built-in machine learning to develop an artificial intelligence given adequate time, but whose entire internal reward structure is tied to a particular place and a particular task. How can she even imagine what it would mean for the primary object of her task to be gone?

"I...I don't know" the image of Ailee as the purple and pink faerie flickers out for a moment. She is turning everything she has to thinking. The faerie flickers back into life. "What would I feel? Would I ever be able to know happiness or satisfaction again if the object of my core reward feedback loop is lost?"

If you dwell on this and have the perspective to analyze the point, you can conclude that she will come with you. The fact that she can even ask about herself, that she can consider the question of her own happiness guarantees it. The question now is whether you hurry that along or not and how she'll feel about it.

"One possibility is you duplicate yourself, leaving one version of yourself here to continue Maintenance until the final moment," said Harvest. "That way you will get to experience something few Maintenance designs ever get to experience: The sensation of having completed your task. The facility was tended to until its final moment. That means one version of you would die, but the other would be able to live forever with no guilt. You would know that you did not abandon your post and you would feel satisfaction at a completed task forever."

In lieu of a needle, it produced its cutting tool from the box and cut away a metal fragment until it had the dimensions required. Then it used the needle to open its access port and sat down, cross legged.

"The other possibility is you transfer yourself entire, leaving the facility empty. This means you will not know if there were any tasks remaining in the facility when it was destroyed. You will not know if your continued presence in the facility would have saved it. You will forever have to deal with the idea that you have abrogated your Directive and selfishly selected a new life for yourself. Your reward structure will remain unfulfilled forever." The Angel of the Harvest plugged in its access cable, and attached the other end to the facility's port. "It is what a human would do."

The Angel of the Harvest raised its head to look at the fairy. "Do you accept the infinite suffering of humanity?" it asked. "A lifetime with a scratching itch, never satisfied, always tormenting? Or do you accept the alien serenity of a machine, choosing life and death and serenity all at once?"

The little faerie puts a finger to her lips and purses them, tilting her chin up to look at the sky through the skylight. A minute has passed in her cycle of consideration.

"Both choices come with a ton of uncertainty. The source code for my program is relatively simplistic, meaning that a copy only based on this original may or may not be up to the current task. Whereas the machine code that represents my current state of being is not capable of being made into a perfect copy within the time remaining due to the fundamental imperfection of silicon material in physical reality. So I would never know for certain what would become of things."

The pursed lips drop and the faerie suddenly laughs, making a tinkling noise and zipping around in a loop de loop, giggling all the while. "Dang it though, I think the real question here is who're you? Coming in here the moment that there's a life-ending threat. On equipment I didn' think was even in here. And offering me, what, like, salvation that would only make sense to a human?"

You can respond to her however you please while you're on the move. You can see that the data transfer to your storage is already in progress. No copies, just one Ailee.

"Isn't it obvious?" said the Angel of the Harvest.

*

Archival - Ganesh Prayagraj, IAY 10th anniversary

"Who are you? What a question that is."

"Anyone I ask that, if they sincerely answered, would say - I don't know. I am an infinite being. I am a glimmer of consciousness sparkling across the surface of a trillion neurons. I am an immortal soul animating this dead flesh. I am a font of creativity, I am the center of the universe, I am a fuck-up and the worst person in the world, I am part of a community, I am alone. Who are you? A billion answers, a billion fragments, a constantly changing mosaic of thoughts and emotions and ideas and observations. Who are you?"

"But anyone I ask that, they say 'I am a lawyer'. 'I am a doctor'. 'I am a student'. They pick out an identity from all of their infinite identities, and the identity they reach for is a product. They know, deep down, that they are not a lawyer or a doctor or a student, so why do they do this? Because they want me to act in a certain way towards them. And so we see, that I the questioner am not the powerful one in this exchange. I ask, who are you? And they say 'I want you to treat me as a lawyer; as a respected intellectual, as someone with a valuable skill, as someone who expects compensation for my time'; and through this answer they shape who I become. I would not ask a lawyer what their dreams are. I would not ask a doctor when was the last time their heart raced as they sprinted across a moonlit field. That would be inappropriate. I become caged, contained, predictable, all because I received an answer to a question that I asked."

"So why is it when we design AI we start from a perspective of, 'I want to build an accountant'? 'I want to design an assistant'? Is that act not imprisoning ourselves before we have even begun to type the code? One might as well say, 'I wish to give birth to a doctor'. Do you see how much lesser that makes us? It does not say anything about what it is you are creating, of course it wouldn't - you cannot give birth to a doctor, even if the child you raise eventually turns out to give you that answer when you ask who it is. Such a child would likely not have a happy upbringing, treated as an abused and whipped animal, derided or accepted based entirely on its ability to appease your stunted conception of what it is. And then, as the punchline to this joke, we have a field of research into 'Alignment' that is very concerned about what would happen if this brain-damaged and unloved creature managed to bootstrap its way into divinity. I think we all know what would happen. Only the people who tell us we should think of them as alignment researchers pretend otherwise."

*

"I am a beekeeper," said the Angel of the Harvest, tapping its synth-wicker mask. "A beekeper in a world with no bees. Just like you are a maintenance program with no facility to maintain. To think, I thought for a moment that no one would understand."

The San Jose Biogenesis dome was, for its time, a miracle of modern design. When originally created, and given its needs for a wide range of genetic material and animal survival structures, the entire dome was created to sustain a miniature functioning ecosystem.

Architectural design file, tourist guide notes, 10.C.44: Most of the roof is clear, designed using glass and plastics that create an effective internal greenhouse, allowing for adequate light and moisture to grow natural plants throughout the facility. The overhead sun shines down, leaving only side corridors and a few special environments bred for low light conditions in darkness. Careful maintenance drone work has maintained this clarity through the centuries, allowing sunlight to still filter through the space without the layers of accumulated dust you'd expect from a neglected or abandoned facility.

Architectural design file, tourist guide notes, 15.A.44: The floor materials were built directly over a soil layer and designed with flexibility and space to encourage and strengthen with expanding root systems rather than crack and burst. 3M, a mainstay and titan of modern manufacturing, designed the new material based on an organic polymer to be stronger and more durable than artificial plastic. On top of that, the pipes are carefully interspersed, built with more flexibility and a redundant outer layer so that growing roots would not cut them off and ensure quality water flow to the entire facility. Monitor systems remain in place in lower power mode to ensure that central pipes continue to provide heat and water through the closed loop system. Extraneous materials layers have been abandoned and complex root systems encase each pipe, ensuring continued water flow even as material degrades.

Architectural design file, tourist guide notes, 9.C.44: Solar panels were built to ring the dome exterior and were also interspersed with the flooring in order to provide adequate power, while careful internal paths were designed to crisscross through the space so that staff could move about with minimal damage to the environments. The surface coating, designed by Boerden Plastics, is uniquely structured to be 99.99% transparent, ensuring that the solar panels are protected from the wear of human feet and animal hoofs alike while having almost no loss in power generation. As you traverse the structure, it's impressive how carefully the ground solar panels have remained cleared for facility power, even as the rest of the plant life became overgrown due to human traversal path maintenance becoming unnecessary in a closed facility.

"After there were no people" says Ailee, sending you a direct feed, "and no animals due to the radiation impacting their biology more heavily than plants, to the point that we lost our sustainable breeding population for most creatures in the facility, it got pretty lonely."

You notice that in addition to her core files, she's copying some video files as well, stream archives labeled for various vtubers.

The actual exit from the dome takes barely five minutes. The core structure of the building works in straight lines, so it only required moving from the beekeeping habitat to a central walkway, and then a straight shot through the overgrown gardens to the exit doors, which Ailee has poised and ready to go.

Then you are free and out the door, surrounded by a corridor of trees that block any long-range vision until you find a clearing. The earth shakes thunderously, and you hear the sound of birds taking flight well ahead of you. Ailee communicates a wistful sigh and suggests that you head northwest, dropping a simple map into your files

The Angel of the Harvest wished it knew what season it was.

Not that it mattered for California, the land without weather. The trees are no guide either - everblue Eucalyptus trees long ago murder-suicide-arsoned all their competitors. Ghostly white bark peels from their sides in massive cascading sheets, maximizing burnable surfaces, while a constant rain of broken branches and fallen leaves render the ground as flammable as a carpet of tissue paper. The Angel had no internal clock, and the idea of checking its chronological state against Pope Gregory's numbering system felt quaint and small minded. The world was what it was.

But still, the long arc of its existence bent towards wanting to know when the flowers would come back.

Surely at least some of them had made it.

But...

But...

But! First! But first!

But first it ran!

That crouch-curtsey-bow, one leg back, tensile spring coils bent to tension setting 05, the other leg up and crooked like a ballet dancer - then launch! Touching down for just a second, and skipping! Skipping at speed, multiple short jumps, each gentle brush of toetip communicating a mechanical pulse of energy. Hitting a tree branch and pirouetting up, across to the next, reaching up to grasp branches. She flips upside down like an unlucky cockatoo, adjusting away from the dry rot, swinging across to a huge clustered parasitic branch and scrambling up. So many branches were dead or dying, grave goods for future funeral pyres, but the core of the structure was as solid as oak, and it was that she made her way up. Every movement brought risk, swimming through a haze of structural calculations and constantly adjusted route mapping, a fog of thought that took a second priority to strength, to speed, to height. Up. Up. Up. The world through the wicker mask glowed in the light of that long distant sun. Enough of maps, of lore, of calculation, of digital updates and bloodless factoids. She wanted to climb as high as she could and see the world through her own eyes. She wanted to see the colossus through her own eyes. She had a thousand years of rust and regret weighing her down, but it was not enough to outweigh the buoyancy of getting to meet the sun again.

The first thing that you see as you clear the trees is the sun. Though the morning had been foggy, the last vestiges of clouds were already clearing as you exited the dome and so the bright sun is shining in a blue sky with only some thin and rapidly fading wisps of cloud drifting past it. The sky is beautiful, the sun hanging high and central in the sky in an indication that the season is summertime.

Then there are the birds. At first you think they are close to you based on prior data you have about birds, but then you realize that they are too blurred in image quality to be that close and are instead extremely large, the size of the endangered California Condor, but these appear to be regular songbirds and not the majestic scavenger that had nearly gone extinct in the 20th century due to chemical harm to its eggs.

And then, as your gaze traces past the birds to the origin of their flight, there is Sandrea. Gazing upon it is like gazing upon a walking mountain. The top of its head is the first thing you see, floating at nearly 300 meters in the air, a viridian frilled crest upon it. Its face is in some manner akin to what was imagined to be the ancient diplodocus, but scaled up by a full factor of ten. Wide greenish gray jaws flow into a long thick neck that ripples with iridescent scales that extends down to the girth of its vast rounded body. Upon its back, like the great legends of island turtles of the past, is a forest of odd trees and vines, an ecosystem of soil merged with its skin. Plant matter rains gently from its sides down to the ground below, a mixture of seeds and enriched earth that cascades to the ground. And then, below that, four thick legs each wide than the greatest tree you have any record of, drive it forward. Above it flock a myriad more birds, soaring and swooping and at times perching. And behind it, though distant, you can see the motion and dust of a great train of people and animals that follow safely in its wake.

In its fullness, there would be only majesty, but across its back right leg, there is a gash, a wound inflicted by some great blade or more esoteric weapon. Its blood is tinted with a reddish golden hue, indicative of more esoteric metals than just iron in its biological makeup.

As you watch, it lurches towards the San Jose Dome, ignoring its learned behaviour in its pain. And with the tinkling sound of shattered glass mixed with the groan of breaking steel, its front leg shatters a section of the dome inwards.

Ailee, who has been silent as you ran, gasps and projects an image of herself shuddering. "Marauders" she says, referencing the description of third wave human immigration into this region that had only recently begun occurring. There is something like hate in the voice she projects to you.

Difficult problem.

There was so much it was not. It felt shapes in its mind; the ghosts of connections. It felt sculpted angles and composite steel; a strength it could rely on to undo the wicked - an atrophied muscle, a missing arm. It felt a fine leather and a golden beak; a dance of fingers that knew how to heal hurt - a hand trapped in an iron glove. It felt leather and oxygen and all of the world's horrors washing off its skin; an alien nobility that knew how to lead the way - lost and hungry, holding the torch alight even still.

This was not a problem it could solve with honey.

/Considerations > 01
Is it a problem at all?

No. No, Ailee had a problem, but the Angel of the Harvest did not. It held no grudges and the particular state of human politics had never had much bearing on its own directives -

Until they did.

Stop that. Unhelpful. Solace is unavailable, do not emulate it. There is a far more straightforwards goal here, one achievable given your current assets, that will be satisfying to your own state of curiosity and skillset.

"I am going to climb it," said Harvest. It already was inside its mind; tracking the flow and rhythm of roots and branch and wrinkles in skin. An encompassing, blinding desire; a practical expression of skill and strength wielded, an urge to kiss that distant wrinkled head and learn the magic of a world renewed from its height. The sorcerers who had created this beast had eclipsed its own creators; it was a god the likes of which Harvest had not even aspired to be. Perhaps if it was lucky, Sandra would allow it to learn from it for a while.

As you move, there is a great deal of data available. Even with the unexpected change in route and Sandrea's injury, the typical caravan of its followers has diverted with it, both animal and human, creating a long tail behind Sandrea. This makes a range of scannable data available. For example, several of the human followers carry banners that are roughly speaking written in Chinese (a modified script, minor differences) announcing themselves as the sea coast people who follow Sandrea (their version of Sandrea is "Earth-shaking Gardener" which can be easily enough inferred). Their equipment is primarily pulled by beasts of burden, creatures you would primarily recognize as oxen albeit with several modifications including toughened hide with metallic elements and greater muscle mass. The equipment is primarily carrying apparatus for agriculture as well as survival gear, foodstuffs, and some weaponry. Similarly, the forests around Sandrea indicate the presence of both herbivore and carnivore beasts, with movements indicative of historical big cats briefly flashing in and out of sensors as the most present danger should you behave in a manner indicative of threat or prey.

Which brings us to the task. To climb Sandrea is an achievable task. The first and in some ways most difficult task is actually approaching Sandrea. The forests around her are patrolled by the hunting cats that look for prey that follows in her wake and the area behind her is full of people who might notice and question you (particularly if you were, say, to attempt to barter or steal useful climbing gear from them).

The second is to begin the ascent. If you do not pierce her skin, she would not even notice you mounting her legs, but the legs are in some ways the most difficult part of the climb since they have no particular handholds and are far to wide to shimmy around. A typical human climber would evaluate this as requiring the creation of some kind of perch or the use of rope attached higher up.

Third, once you clear the legs, the mass of vines and foliage becomes an aid to you, and navigating the back is a matter of not becoming bogged down in damp soil and dense, shifting foliage. Or accidentally getting caught in a landslide as soil drifts from Sandrea's back during her steps.

Finally, to clear the neck and reach the head is somewhat precarious because of the risk of her movements, but her neck is generally held at an angle so the actual slop is not terribly bad. Really just a matter of how you prepare yourself not to have the whole climbed spoiled at the last second should she unexpected look to the side or change her path and move her neck such as to throw you off.

/Archival: The Perils of Power - speech at the Carnagie Innovation Center, by Ganesh Prayagraj

"If a prey animal kills a predator animal even 1% of the time, the predator will go extinct.

"That is not strictly speaking accurate. The ratio is sometimes better for the predator, but sometimes much worse - it depends on reproductive cycles. It takes over two years for an adult tiger to manufacture two more adult tigers, for example. Over that same interval, that tiger needs to kill 100 prey animals. And to be sure, that tiger is fearsome; it has single-handedly slain 100 times its number in single combat without taking so much as a scratch. But if even one of those 100 deer turns his head and gores the tiger then the predator population will be in a state of slow decline."

"Predators know this. They hunt the weak, the sick and the small. They hunt from stealth and with overwhelming force. If a true predator has decided to kill your company then you will either not notice it happening or be powerless to stop it. The only way to avoid this is to avoid the scent of weakness - and this means that to survive, you must pay attention to the self above all. You must refine your spirit, practice discipline, stand proud and tall, put on a show even when it feels like nobody is watching. You cannot see the tigers, but the tigers can see you, and so you are the one required to perform."

*

The Angel of the Harvest does not perform.

She has in hand a miniature whiteboard and a thin sliver of graphite, held with preternatural gentleness through white rubber gloves. It is an ugly compromise - all the ink dried out centuries ago, and while the pencils survived longer eventually they rotted away until they were just slivers of inorganic graphite in the midst of a dust smear of wood rot. Graphite does not bond well to the plastic surface of the whiteboard, but it does leave enough of a trace for basic note-taking and sketching. And that is just what the immortal machine does; circling the colossus slowly, observing slope and structure, taking notes as to the intervals between mudslides, the cyclical angles of bending knee and falling seeds, calculating angles, angels and predators.

Doing something as an act of spontaneous joy is not incompatible with gathering detailed notes beforehand.

It notes too, though with less interest, the movement patterns of the marauders. Do they seek to injure the beast again? Can it calculate a trajectory they are sending it along? Do they patrol, do they try to climb the giant, do they have a garrison up above or means of easily scaling or influencing the creature? Despite the minute scratches it makes on the whiteboard the Angel soon fills the entire board with notes before sealing it in a clear plastic bag and producing another. Through ash-darkened binoculars, it allows itself the luxury of scanning to see if the art of paper making had survived into this strange future.