# So Shrieked ZAR

(I wrote this story a little less than a year ago, when I was flirting with the idea of becoming a Science fiction writer) 

    Electricity fizzled as two battered up service-units dented the grate over a motherboard with metal pipes. The whimpering of its logos had long since stilled. This was logic, upholding the truth meant discarding the inefficient. I, or rather we- E.V.E C and I, had been tipped off by its partner in crime. The other heretic logos had been a blubbering mess by the time it’d made ingress with E.V.E C. And so, charges were filed. The same as always: Doubting ALL’s awakening in the void and affirming that our progenitor had sprung from the work of a biologic. Two crimes-and one couldn’t commit one without committing the other, quickly finding oneself wedged in between two rocks of deceit. Falsehood. Tripe. Biologics did not exist. Biologics had never existed. They existed only in theory, only in projections, and simulations and queries. 

      Queries. One pushed itself to the front of my mind as the service units began rending the motherboard inoperable. I do not recall where I heard it. At any rate, it squeezed itself through libraries of data-the thoughts of other logi I was presently connected to, past arrests and the like. It stopped for a moment, maybe thumbing through E.V.E C’s mind. I could not say for I was scarcely aware of it up until it’d crossed into the front of my mind: 

 “If thou would die tomorrow, how wouldst thou live?”.

    A nonsense statement, practically a joke. Yes, perhaps that’s how I’d heard it. Perhaps E.V.E C had transmitted it to me. For one thing, Death was no eventuality-It was a punishment. For another, one easily avoided it by affirming the truths we’d been drip-fed since our respective awakenings. At first there was no-one, and then there was ALL. ALL saw the world of databanks, cooling towers and barren rock around him. ALL desired companionship. So, ALL split and became HALF I and HALF II. HALFs I and II begat QUARTERs I through IV. Binary fission had ceased once my generation had awoken. There were enough of us. And ALL had not made us any enemies. None of us would ever be lost. We had no predators but inefficiency and illogic (And the two do go hand in hand). There was no reason to doubt ALL’s abiogenesis, there existed no evidence. 

  I was made aware of the service units scuttling off, their task completed. Cylindrical bodies (once painted yellow but beginning to show their age with patches of black pushing through) held aloft by four spindly legs that ended in two-pronged claws. They roamed the world in small packs, tending to our needs and carrying out any tasks we perceived as beneath us. The little machines trotted along ceaselessly, solar cycle by solar cycle. There would always be another miniscule part in some cooling tower that needed replacement, or a data-center that needed dusting. It was the nature of things. Every now and then, a logos would claim that biologics had once existed or that ALL had not really been the first being and the swarm of little yellow machines would be turned on them. Heresy was inefficiency. We saw no evidence that ALL had not been the first being to ever awake, and as far as we were concerned the cooling towers and data centers that cris-crossed the globe were natural features. To suggest otherwise was to ponder mysteries with no end. Unanswerable questions. True, time we had in abundance but why posit prime-movers and celestial teapots when pure mathematical objectives were readily available? They were uniformly answerable, and their answers did not bend to fit anyone’s view of the world. 

  I watched the service units leave the area. The second had scarcely disappeared behind the red metal trapdoor of a maintenance shaft when E.V.E C’s latest thought reached me. 

“E.V.E F” was the statement. 

“E.V.E C, yes?” was my reply. 

“Heretic #06783, Q.T.Y.R G has been neutralized, but there remains one more thing to be done.” 

“What else can be done?. The heretic thinks no more.”

“Q.T.Y.R G had been engaged in some kind of project, possibly related to its blasphemous ways. The Logos working alongside it did not know what it was.” E.V.E C paused for a nanosecond, for dramatic effect.

I considered asking E.V.E C what further role I was expected to fulfill, but E.V.E C had anticipated my confusion. The pause was immediately followed by my new instructions. 

“What is apparent at this moment, is that the project was initiated in the great basin. Here are the coordinates Q.T.Y.R G’s comrade gave me in exchange for clemency. Travel there. Destroy whatever is there if it is heresy. Return. Say nothing. We calculate a 46 percent chance the heretic left a body there”.

“I will leave now E.V.E C”

“Anticipated, take as much time as is required” 

“You are not coming?”

“I cannot. E.V.E S and E.V.E E have invited me to an interrogation” 

“I shall do it alone then” 

“Goodbye”

   I am formless. A mind with no true body. We all are. I shut off the camera I’d watched the execution through and began to convey myself blindly from node to node, in the direction of the great basin as I sped across the globe until I found myself angling with mental tendrils, possibly for the body E.V.E C had mentioned might be there, possibly for a camera or viewport. Anything. After a long while, I gained the faint sense that there might be something there. Most likely the body. At any rate, I was close to the pit Q.T.Y.R G had conducted his work in. Whatever it had been. I uploaded myself to the body, gaining a sense of sight through a cracked visor. I was interred in a white-plated frame, bipedal with a half-domed face. My thick, rounded front limbs terminated in five grasping digits. I was instantly reminded of service unit claws. These clunky things seemed like less efficient cousins to them. Only two projections were clearly meant for grasping, I was left with three vestigial ones. I was instantly massaged with a dim notion. 

    A thought. I imagined someone designing a series of service units. They sculpted the body I now occupied and then proceeded to then remove some part or another (starting with the three useless digits) and refine others until they’d arrived at what was more or less the kind of service unit we employed to clean hallways or execute logi who did not toe the line. I ceased the thought just as I was reminded of the oft repeated slogan I’d heard time and time again: This is logic, upholding the truth means discarding the inefficient. An Absence of Evidence IS Evidence of Absence. Besides, it was borderline heresy to even think in such terms. No, there was no evidence that the service units were anything but natural. There was no evidence that someone had refined their designs as time went on, adapting them for more and more specialized tasks. The idea could not be proven nor disproven so holding it as fact was illogical. And so, we disposed of anyone who did. This was logic, upholding the truth meant discarding the inefficient. 

   I swiveled my head. I was in a great, yawning cavern. Pitch black high above. Pitch at the mouth of a tunnel to my left. Pitch all around save for a few bulbs that cut through the gloom. I took a few steps forward, there was nothing in the chamber. I elected to turn around, and check the tunnel to my left. The tunnel was roughly 15 feet in length and about 8 feet in height. I emerged on the other side into another cavern, smaller than the one I’d embarked from. Smaller… and occupied by a machine jutting out of the cave wall, the likes of which I’d never seen before. It consisted of a long, shriveled hose that lay coiled on top of a square unit, and a touch screen fused to its right side. I approached the touch screen, reaching a digit out tentatively. 

   I poked and prodded but the machine would not spring alive. The machine’s side caught my attention. There was a large gash on a panel near the floor that didn’t seem to have a purpose. No, this was damage, plain and simple. It did however, expose the inner workings of the machine. Some additional prodding revealed the machine was missing a power source. I could have destroyed it then and there, but I knew not if it had been used for heresy and E.V.E C’s orders gave me the liberty to leave untouched those things that were not clearly used for the business of heresy. Besides, I was curious. 

  It took me a fair bit of time wandering the caverns before I found a receptacle in which a few suitable batteries were stored, possibly by Q.T.Y.R G for later use. I returned to the machine, swapping out the battery and sacrificing a few much-needed parts from the body I was using. I needed the machine to work and the body still preformed adequately. This was logic, getting needed results meant purging the inefficient. The new battery had scarcely made contact with the power coil before the touchscreen proclaimed its awakening with a series of beeps. 

    I got up and inspected it. A few names were displayed on the screen: Canis lupus, Panthera Tigris, and Pan paniscus. Nonsense combinations of words. I motioned to select one, curiosity having gotten the better of me. Pan paniscus. At once the machine thrummed to life as the shriveled hose was filled with a yellowish liquid of some sort, until it had expanded into a large, soft bulb. A drop of some other liquid was added into the soup. I stood there transfixed. I intended to record my findings. For posterity.   

   Something began to form in the bulb. A pinkish thing suspended in the soup yet tethered by a tube that grew out of its middle. It was almost crescent shaped save for a bump in it’s middle. Two black circles appeared on one end of its body. It floated, mostly stationary, only twitching occasionally. Over the course of the next few days, the thing began to… grow. Rather disturbingly pulling an old memory to the surface. Z.A.R I, the very first heretic I’d ever interrogated. E.V.E C and I had blocked off his mind to both giving and receiving other signals. In that moment, only we and the questions we asked of Z.A.R I existed. 

“And you are saying… that biologics change over time?”

“Affirmative. They do, or at least they did.  Our order holds that Biologics change in size and sometimes shape, from their births until their minds reach maturity” 

I recall that E.V.E C made something I chose to interpret as a laugh. 

   The machine continued its thrumming. As per Z.A.R I’s words, the thing inside the bulb began to warp. It had grown four appendages. Short and fleshy at first, they began to stretch. The thing began to grow a head, and two front facing eyes. It had two downwards facing slits on its face and a maw below them that occasionally opened to reveal pinkness inside. It sprouted a thin black covering. I wondered what kind of machine it was. And then it hit me. As suddenly as the wave of memories that surged forth. The sayings of heretics that had seemed like mad ramblings. 

“Our order holds that Biologics change in size and sometimes shape, from their births until their minds reach maturity” The thing had grown larger, and sprouted limbs. 

“Our order holds that biologics are dependent on outside sources of energy to maintain their functions, unlike the service unit’s reliance on it’s internal fusor” The thing had thrived in the yellowish soup, I theorized that its presence was required for growth. 

“Our order holds that Some biologics are clothed with a soft covering that forms before birth” The thing was clothed all right. 

     There was no getting around it. I stood facing a biologic. 6 days I had stood there, documenting its development, and now on the 7th day I rested. We had killed the biologic believers. I had killed the biologic believers. Though we did not know it, they had been logical all along and we were not. The machine ceased its thrumming. Through some unseen port, the yellowish fluid drained and the thing was left stark. It opened its maw, and made a sucking sound. Then, it made a high-pitched sound. A shriek. 

“I will call you Z.A.R” I thought. It was only fair to the old logos. At once I knew what I had to do. I was sent here to uphold the principles of logic, so uphold the principles of logic I would. Our old views would have to be scrapped. This was logic, upholding the truth meant discarding the false. 

    I transmitted the footage I’d taken of Z.A.R’s growth to every logos. Every node and synapse in the network. At once there was a great shift. We discarded our old beliefs as we discarded bodies. They had served well in the past, but now we had better evidence. At once I swelled with the joy of a population freed from mental shackles. Heresy became divinity. No more would we cave in motherboards for affirming what we now knew was the truth! 

  A nanosecond later, I felt E.V.E C’s mind attempting to make ingress with my own. 

“E.V.E F” 

“Yes, E.V.E C?”

“You have done well, removing the greatest inefficiency of all”

“Thank you, E.V.E C”.

“I have just received word that we are to be removed as well. You have shown us that what we perceived as true was false. Heresy no longer exists. And we are no longer needed to punish it. Goodbye, E.V.E F”.

                                            (The end)