This was written as a prompt for
’s October writing contest: The First Indulgence. As this was a more-detailed prompt and a longer story, I decided to publish it as its own post. You can view my shorter entries into the contest in the combined post linked below (There is some good stuff in there, and it will be updated most days for the rest of the month):
Seychel was a doomed world. Perhaps the last man to ever walk upon it new this. He also bared the weight of knowing that he was responsible for its fate.
Lord Explorer Neoth Kryllian III walked across its surface alone, trudging through ashen wastes, the dust coming up to his knee in some areas. He was waiting to die. If not from the hellscape Seychel had become, then from the minions of the machine he had awakened. He let his mind wander; his memories were all he had now…
The lander of the explorer team set down upon the lush world of Seychel. It had been known to the Korvune Empire for several years, but had just been discovered to host a potential cache from the Silver Age. It was not his first expedition, but was the first one of this scale. Everyone, even the Imperial Family back on Korvune, new that its success would propel his house in prestige for centuries to come.
The murky history of the planet had been studied by all onboard, although it told them little more than what they could observe themselves. Seychel had been terraformed over a millennium ago, part of many expansion projects by the Silver Empire. Like so many projects in this corner of the Galaxy however, there simply was never a large enough population to settle the planet, so it lay abandoned.
Of course, all had seen the scans of the world. At some point, someone installed the advanced technology emblematic of the Silver Age upon its surface. Technology that the expedition had been chartered to recover.
A native population of humans also lived across the surface, likely uncontacted for centuries. Most lived in primitive settlements, using only simple tools of wood, stone, and metal. They were of little interest to the expedition however, as none seemed to even dwell in the same hemisphere of the expedition’s target.
That was the first warning Lord Explorer Neoth had ignored.
The expedition proceeded quickly after landing, opting to travel several hundred kilometers via grav-cycle. Even small installations from the Silver Age often had automated defenses around them, making landing anywhere near them suicidal.
It took two days of constant travel to reach their target. Their grav-cycles were fast, but their automated drivers had to navigate between forests and mountains to reach their destination. As they passed such pristine scenery, none within the expedition could deny that Seychel, like so many worlds seeded with life by the Silver Empire, was a veritable paradise.
Of course, in reflection, the world was too perfect. Its plants too lush, its animals too docile, its rivers too clean, its mountaintops too uniformly capped with snow. At the time, they remarked it was as if they were in a garden.
They were right. It was the second warning the Lord Explorer had ignored.
The Lord Explorer continued to march across the ashen wastes. All that he had immersed himself in but a few days before was gone now. Great forests, tended to perfection over centuries, were nothing now, the only sign of their existence at all being irregular patches of blackened trunks.
Time had lost much of its meaning since the fortress was activated. Great ash storms combined with a network of orbital mirrors kept every region of the Seychel a dim, uniform grey, light not even coming from a discernable direction.
He would have preferred darkness, at least then he wouldn’t have to see the results of his actions every second.
Neoth froze, the landscape was silent, and he could hear the high-pitched whine of the fortress’s drones from far off. He hit the ground, remaining as still as he could, hoping his ash-covered cloak would blend into the grey endlessness around him. It did, and minutes later, the sound had faded, Neoth never having the courage to look upwards at his pursuers.
Neoth knew that he was responsible for the state of Seychel, that he was responsible for the obliteration of the once-pristine planet. He knew that the entity which once tended its immense forests wanted revenge, and was actively hunting him.
As he set off again, his mind continued to wander, playing back memories from the past, the only ones he seemed to remember now…
The expedition arrived at their target early in the second morning. It was a colossal structure, covered in silver, gold, and white ceramic, all common of Silver Age construction. Unusually however, it was also covered in greenery, gnarled tree roots having collapsed some structures, and much of its once-luxurious exterior now home to all manner of hanging vines and plant debris.
The team found the entrance easily enough; it was denoted by a vast staircase which encircled the overgrown structure. At the top of its immense stairwell, the massive golden doors of its front entrance sat ajar. Small animals ran inside the structure as the team entered themselves, finding its interior as alive with plants and animals as the forests outside.
They quickly identified the immense structure as not being a true Silver Age cache, but perhaps something far more valuable: A Syvoran Fortress, ancient weapons of the late Silver Age, capable of producing entire armies of combat automata and flash clones within days. Ordinarily, they were some of the most dangerous places known, even in the modern Galaxy most remained intact and dangerous to any trespassers. The one they had discovered on Seychel seemed inactive however. Although visibly corroded and tarnished, it likely still had an immense amount of technology for the taking.
Skylights opened as they entered. Some part of the fortress’s ancient intelligence still remained active. But it seemed to welcome the expedition.
That was the third warning Neoth had ignored. It would be his last.
The broken man who slowly traversed the ashen wastes wanted to die. The last of supplies were low, his lungs, enhanced with cybernetics as they were, were choking and sputtering amidst the swirling clouds of ash. He was trapped on the dead planet, and knew there was no way off, and only one way out.
Through blurred vision, he saw an opening in the side of a cliff, the same dull-grey as everything in the world. He shambled in, finding some semblance of relief to be out of the ash. The cave went deep, but seemed safe enough to traverse. Flicking on his torch, unsure how long it would last, Neoth went deeper into the cave.
He had no illusions, and knew one way or another, it would be his tomb. His memories stirred again…
The expedition found the command core of the Syvoran Fortress several hours after entering. The fortress was an immense complex, but far from the largest one recorded. As they got closer to the core, they found more vegetation, even inorganic drones, not defending the fortress, but watering and pruning the plants which grew across it.
The core itself, a room-sized cylinder with a shell of polished silver, was perhaps the only part of the fortress not wholly overgrown.
Lord Explorer Neoth approached, using its single command console to integrate to his specialized neos cybernetics with the structure. The nanosecond a connection was made, Seychel, Neoth, his expedition, and likely the Fortress itself were all doomed.
There was an inhuman scream from all sides, deafening the expedition. Red lights flashed around the core, and drones, combat drones now, jumped out of wall sockets and attacked. Although he was only able to establish a connection for a brief moment, Neoth felt something he had never felt in any Silver Age intelligence: Compassion. Compassion that had now been overridden by an ancient defense protocol.
As his team was being slaughtered, he activated his translocation link, and instantly teleported back to the starship they arrived on. It was too late however. The mirrors above, which had silently orbited Seychel for centuries, had unfolded, directing the light of its sun into a dozen beams of heat, scorching all life they touched.
Neoth only survived the incoming wall of fire by translocating into a freshly-burned region, destroying his emergency escape link in the process. He wandered since then, a broken man, but one who’d understood what he had done.
The Fortress had always been intelligent, whether by design or not. It chose to tend to Seychel, to make it a paradise rather than engage in endless warfare as its makers intended. By attempting to salvage it, this intelligence had resorted to its ancient ways, not out of choice, but out of adherence hard-coded precepts Neoth had forced it to execute.
The Lord Explorer reached the deepest part of the cave, a vast room, with a small underground lake on one side, and a rocky bank taking up the rest of it. He saw something, next to the glass-like water.
Neoth approached, and found a skeleton, slumped against the wall, alone and forgotten. Half of its head had been disintegrated, the weapon which caused the self-inflicted would sitting, rusted and unmoving, next to the bones. It was his pulse pistol.
Having served its purpose, the flash clone of Lord Explorer Neoth Kryllian III was killed by its Syvoran Fortress with a single command, leaving a second skeleton in the cave.
Seeing the corpse of the human that destroyed its paradise through the eyes of his own tortured flash clone, the Syvoran Fortress felt joy. Now fully-activated and commanding exponentially-growing legions of mindless machines and clones, it turned billions of eyes towards the stars, its all-encompassing hatred desiring to remake every human-infested world in the lifeless image of Seychel.
It made a point to create more flash clones of the ‘Lord Explorer’ for future use.
Thanks for reading. For more horror, short stories, and sci-fi world-building, consider subscribing to the Hadean Collapse. All content on my site will remain free for everyone to enjoy.
You can see some of my competition and the original prompt here:
Cover image by Ai, all writing 100% original.
Such beautiful lush imagery, and heartbreaking as well:
The expedition arrived at their target early in the second morning. It was a colossal structure, covered in silver, gold, and white ceramic, all common of Silver Age construction. Unusually however, it was also covered in greenery, gnarled tree roots having collapsed some structures, and much of its once-luxurious exterior now home to all manner of hanging vines and plant debris.
Really impressive work