tried my hand at drawing some of the other managers as well :)

bonus fucked up looking chip when i attempted to draw him for the first time without realizing how his face actually worked

Caffeine Challenge #26 : Ruins

(The challenge)

The ruins of Cathal Dun stretch out before us like the wreckage of nightmares. Twisted trees are born up from broken earth like something escaping wounds, the branches dragged back down no matter how high the trees grow. Everything is grimly cold, so empty it could not be haunted. The rest of the expedition had given up days ago upon realizing Cathal Dun was not a city but the remains of the world laid out before us like a puzzle none could solve. Several members had flat-out refused to leave the spaceport itself upon seeing what the world looked like. Magnificent, beautiful devastation.

I walk slowly over sundered plasteel and moldstone. Not the same as the ones I know, but similar enough for all that the latter is new and these ruins older than time. Not something I will put on a report, but it feels like that. I turned off the warnings in my biosuit days ago, as it simply can’t cope with the world. Twisted metal pathways fill the sky above us, remains of some transportation infrastructure that somehow survived when everything else perished.

No people, of course. Nothing lives here any longer and we are but visitors. Myself, and one of the architectural assistants who has remained with me. He is seventeen, and human. So close to the human baseline that such a mod must have been very expensive, if he was not grown somewhere by the kind of people with more credit than sense. He keeps an easy step beside me, seemingly unfazed by the silence that stretches about us like a glove. Even our own breaths become hard to hear, and the noises that say ‘this is a world’, the ones that say ‘people live here’ are all gone. Nothing alive, no machines remain.  

“The silence that comes after the dead.” The young man has come up beside me, studying a conflux of distance metal stands in which the three stars make it seem as though light flickers off and on.

“You seem – comfortable here,” I offer, the first words we have spoken in hours that feel like days. I will not pretend this world is not getting to me.

“I enjoy exploring ruins. What was lost, what can be found again, what can be made from dreams almost forgotten.” His smile is almost shy, the gentleness of it taking away from the impression of age that lies in his eyes.

“You are here for dreams?”

“What else does anyone seek?” he asks lightly.

“This could be a bus station, or something kin to it,” I say as I pick up the pace again. “At least six lines converge on that one point. We can assume some form of light rail, presumably whatever is affecting the few trees made using the ground for travel unwise.” I pause, attempting to access System, but even the vast galactic AI is somehow out of reach of my implants today. “I have forgot your name,” I am forced to admit.

“Jay, Doctor Quith,” he says, seeming not put out at all.

Even with the warnings from the biosuit off, I can feel myself flagging a little as we begin to approach the structure. A nest of metal tracks meeting into some vast half-melted ball of plasteel, metals, fibrealloy. To breathe it in would probably be death in itself now. Not the broken would that could kill, but everything people had left behind to stain it.

“They built the city across the entire world,” Jay says quietly. “Buildings and hydroponics, laboratories and shops, blocks separated only by flickering lights denoting neighbourhoods, the transit paths a mesh of translucent tracks above them. The vehicles and passengers were translucent as well during their journeys, so the sunlight was still the sunlight and the world seemed like any other. A city without roads, so imagination travelled invented streets instead, warrens of tunnels between and under buildings because the desire for connection is the oldest desire of all.”

I turn slowly. “Boy. You sound as if you’ve been here.”

He laughs easily. He does everything easily; it would annoy, if he was not so – himself. “Some reading, some extrapolation. Travel enough, and every place does become like every other in some parts. I was thinking of other places and people I’ve met, what conversations with strangers would be like on buses that render you translucent. If you can see through people, would you trust them more? It is the sort of thing this world could have solved, I think.”

I snort. He is young, for all the impression of being otherwise. “Trust can’t be solved. You trust no one, especially those you should. You don’t become a doctor at Hive in this time without knowing that compassion is weakness and kindness a trap. The sooner you learn that, the better.”

“And a conscience?” Jay asks.

“Just a noose people put around their necks. I have no desire to place it around mine. Do you know what they did here in Cathal Dun?”

“Experiments. On themselves, on others, if the stories are to be believed. An architect is more interested in buildings than people, I am afraid, even if the people explain much about why they made the buildings. You are here because of the experiments, Doctor Quith?”

I say nothing, having said too much already. He is too easy to talk to, once you begin. We reach the remains of the transport hub, looking like some insect hive all its own, but there are at least tunnels in it leading deeper into the heart of the world. Where the real labs were. Where some could remain, even after all this time.

I point out the structure of one wall to Jay, and use the breaker when he is looking at it. A simple, crude tool made during a war over mining rights decades ago. One hit from it fries the biosuit of the other person; death is at least swift though painful. I move on as he drops to the ground, having no desire to see his death in person. Death is what I came here to escape. The reminder of it pushes me onward.

The darkness is empty too. Ruins of old tunnels, ancient paths between buildings and places that no longer exist. I double-back often, use up the food packs in my biosuit sooner than intended before I finally arrive an actual door. The breaker unlocks the door, but that uses up almost all of the charge left within it. A crude weapon, in that it can be drained, but that allowed me to smuggle it this far without being noticed.

The past is never over, all after. Often it is not even past. The door opens; no air on the other side, which is a surprise. There is a room. And a figure sitting in a chair, staring at some old security system. My passage was tracked, then. The figure is thin, translucent, perhaps human once. Sickly grey light seems to pulse through what were once veins and it stands and turns toward me.

“Did you come alone?” is asked in a whispered tone.

“No.”

“Good. Good. I was worried. But this is good. You are here because of our experiments?” it asks, moving toward me. The movements are stiff, wrong, and I step back without intending to. “Do not forgive this one, but it is hard to remember how to move my body. I have waited a long time.”

“Centuries?”

“Longer. That is why you are here, the longer?”

“The legends claim immortality was achieved here.” Even speaking that aloud feels foolish, even in this place. A dream in a place without even nightmares to call its own.

“What does it mean to be immortal? A long time ago, I was fool enough to think the answer my mission.” The creature makes a sound that is not a laugh. “I did many things, you understand. Destroyed. Stole. Murdered. Anything for forever. But I was wrong.”

“Wrong? To be immortal?” I ask.

“No.” The voice behind me is sad, and tired. I turn. Jay is standing behind me. Still human, still seventeen. Only without a biosuit at all, and seemingly fine in a world that should have killed him hours ago. Hours? Days? I am not certain how long I have been down here now. I am certain he is not real.

Jay smiles, then, Small, sad, and knowing. And real. More real than I am. More real than the one who has gone so still behind me that the stillness screams out with need. “Seeking immortality is not an evil, Doctor Quith. Not even in the why of it. But the means? If you murder and destroy, if you desecrate and bring to ruin: what kind of future do you make? What kind of immortal are you, if you get to be the only one existing in an empty castle of your making?”

“The cowardly kind. The wrong kind,” the creature behind me says in a whispering plead. “Please. I know that now. What I sought was never evil, but how I sought it – what else could happen but death, when all I used was death?”

“A failure of imagination, that,” Jay says mildly.

“Please.” It moves past me, cold and thin, the stillness replaced by a yearning I have no words for. “I am forever. I have been here so long. So long without even ghosts to haunt me. I cannot die, I cannot – please. Will you release me?”

“Only to judgment,” Jay says, and his voice seems deeper, certain.

“It is all I have grown to desire.”

Jay reaches out with one hand, and the dream, the entity, the path I have sought is unmade in a moment. Not a breaker. Not a weapon. Nothing so crude as that.

“What are you?” I ask, and my voice is small and scared.

“Jayseltosche, in some circles.”

The name is vaguely familiar; old stories, but ones I never really listened to. “That is a name.”

“Also a what.” Jay sighs. “I released Ois from the prison they made, because it was time to do so. And came because I was curious why others wanted to visit a world where war had killed everyone, where nothing living remained. It was less than ten seconds, the final conflict. I do not know if one can even call that a war. But everything was gone and only Ois remained. So I left them to remain, and to learn. Given long enough, even immortals can learn what the living always do.”

“Learn what?” I demand.

“You want to be immortal?” Jay’s smile is only sad now. “Even after that?”

“I will walk in forever, see the –.”

“But you won’t be immortal. Even the universe is not immortal. In time you would end, no matter what you pretend. There are no immortals inside the universe, Doctor Quith. And Outside there is chaos, and wildness, and not time in the way you’d understand it, so no immortals there as well.” Jay stares at me, and through me, and his eyes are older than eyes should be. “What is immortal is still mortal, still driven mad by the desire to escape. Like trees trying to reach the sky and always pulled to earth. Eternal is something else entirely.

“And far more alone even when not lonely.”

“I do not know what you are, but you have power! You could –.”

“I do not make immortals. I am not that cruel.” And he turns, and begins to walk away.

“I do not have enough food and air to reach the surface!”

“You can make it if you run. If you wish to live, and for more than your own ends. Consider that a kindness.”

And he vanishes, as if he never was at all.

And I run. And I run.

And the darkness does not end.

it’s no use to try and hide it

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