The Machine--Intro Story

"Where am I?"

"My basement."

He shook his head. It felt very strange-- heavy, yet light. The bonfire in the center of the room had an odd look to it. This was some basement--it had to be forty feet high. The walls appeared to be carved from solid basalt and were littered with carvings that he didn’t recognize. Beyond the fire, sat a small withered man. His face was old and wrinkled, with a wisp of white hair that surely defied any comb. An old grey sweatshirt swallowed most of his frame, and he wore a long black and silver coat over that. He held a violet smoking candle in one hand and a can of Diet Pepsi in the other. How very surreal, he thought. "Ok, your basement. I can accept that." He lifted his hand to his head...

CLANG!

He pulled his hand back quickly. It didn’t hurt, but that noise was startling, and completely wrong! Staring at his hand in the firelight, he finally realized that it wasn’t his hand at all. This was solid metal.

"Yes, it is your hand. At least, it is now."

He stared at the little man across the fire. Questions fought for priority in his mind without a winner. His voice...that wasn’t his either, he was sure. His head started to sway. The smoke from the candle floated around his head, but he couldn’t smell them. In fact, he didn’t appear to be breathing at all. Why didn’t that cause him to panic?

"You are in a very special... situation, and your mind is not prepared to fully cope with it. That’s why we’re here. I’ve conducted a ritual in order to open your mind and help you accept what has happened, and what is going to happen." He sipped from his can and put it down on the hard stone floor next to him. When he smiled he took on a ghoulish look. His eyes were sunken into his skull, which was eerily highlighted by the fire.

Hold it, he thought. That fire, it’s.. green. That’s not right either.

"The first thing we have to do is eliminate that nasty sense of what you think is right. So listen to me very carefully: Everything you know is wrong."

"Ok," he murmured. He was thinking that it couldn’t be right, but he started to feel drunk. "Tell me something: Who am I?" He was amazed that he could not remember his name.

The old man clicked his teeth.. "Who you were is not as important as who you are now. I’m afraid your world has taken a very drastic turn."

Who I was..."What does that mean?"

"You died."

Again, instead of the panic he felt he should be experiencing, he merely felt lightheaded. So he was dead. Ok, he could accept that. "Is this heaven then?" It didn’t seem any more absurd than hearing he was dead.

A chortle escaped the withered figure. "No. This is Constant, a small suburb of Chicago."

Damn. When you die you go to Chicago. He actually managed to laugh. The sound was disquieting, but it helped to clear his head.

The ancient figure took a long swallow of Diet Pepsi. "Relax. I will try to explain.

"The world as we know it is going to end in the year 2012." He stopped briefly, watching to see the reaction in his guest. There was none. "There is going to be a sort of dimensional convergence. Unfortunately, we don’t know what is going to happen, exactly. All of our prophecies end there."

He merely nodded. "And what does this have to do with me?"

"Do you know what a nexus is? It’s a location where dimensions overlap to some degree. Right now there are only spots, but when the convergence happens, all of reality will become a nexus.

"Traditionally, these are very dangerous locations. Anyone or anything can slip through the worlds at these points. After a while, they will disappear as the dimensions slide. But while they exist, it is our job to guard them.

"Mere men cannot be effective guardians, we discovered too late. So we set about to create guardians. Are you familiar with the story of Frankenstein?"

That sounded familiar to him, but he couldn’t place any details, so he shook his head.

"It’s not important. To make a long story shorter, almost a century ago we decided upon a new course of action, and set about to literally construct our newest guardian." The old man scattered some dust into the fire, and the smoke rose thickly with a flash. As he went on, the smoke started to coalesce into a solid manlike shape. "It took a team of us 23 years to put it together. We created such things as the engineers of the day could only dream."

The thing in the smoke took on a familiar form. It appeared to be a robot of some kind, a very wide bodied man, covered in thick metal sheets, with gleaming joints that looked highly complex...what? Yes! I know that thing! I used to see it every day...

"Magic served as the motivator for the construct. But it needed something else to be complete. It needed a human spirit to inhabit it, to make it work!"

The ancient figure sagged. "We cast all the right spells, performed all the right rituals, but our construct remained inanimate. No spirit, no matter how willing could make the blasted thing even turn it’s head! We had to label it a failure. It was decided that we would keep it together, though, so that one day we might redeem the project. And so it remained through time a statue, one which eventually found it’s way into the Chicago Museum of Industry and Technology. This construct of magic became a mascot for technology." The little man laughed to himself at this irony. The figure watching him was not amused, though.

He knew where this was going. He wanted to deny it, but found himself unable to do so. He stood up and carefully inspected the smoke creation. He looked at his hands in the fire light. He moved his hands closer and watched the light dance off of the metallic sheen on them. Without thinking, he thrust his arms into the flames and seized a blazing piece of wood. He barely felt the weight at all, and the fire meant nothing to him. "I’m the machine there, aren’t I?"

The old man stood as well. Even when he stood fully erect, he barely came to the metal man’s waist. "Your spirit inhabits the construct now, yes.."

"How? You said you couldn’t do it?"

The old man wrinkled his face. "I’m not sure, but I have some ideas. Perhaps it merely wasn’t the right time. There is no coincidence. You were meant to be our guardian."

Even in his metal heart, he could feel something happening. "Alright, I’ll be your guardian. That feels right somehow, even beyond this candle induced haze.

"But I want to know who I was."

A sigh again escaped the old man. "How much can you remember?"

The big metal head shook slowly. "Not much. Glimpses, scenes."

The old man took another swallow of Diet Pepsi. "This is not what we expected. We will investigate your memories as your education progresses. For now, though, consider this a second chance. You have a clean slate, as they say. You can choose where go from here. With my help, of course. You have a brand new life, now."

"Yes, a life as a machine." His heart started to ache.

The old man glanced at the candle. It was very low, now, and the ritual was coming to an end. "But it is life." The old man scowled. "I think that’s enough for tonight. Your mind still needs rest, even though your new body doesn’t."

"What is my name?"

This seemed to catch the small man by surprise ."Well, I don’t...I don’t know. We always just referred to you as the construct, thinking that you would take on your own name when activated. What would you like to be called?"

He stared ahead. Construct was so ugly, he thought. But he didn’t have a real name... "For now," he said, studying the robotic figure in the smoke, "call me the Machine."

The old man clicked his teeth. "Machine."

"I know your name, I think. There’s a memory nagging at me...Yoda?"

Clenched teeth growled "My name is Gordon."

"Then who’s Yoda?"