02 - Starvation

Rebooting system

>activating sensor suite

>running diagnostics

>main systems boot sequence

>secondary systems boot sequence

ERROR: foreign entity detected…

Integrating…

>Integration complete

>Boot complete

>Current mass: 7.6g

Mateus woke up, his mind snapping like a loaded crossbow from a state of inactivity into a state of perfect lucidity. His thoughts were clear, sharp, fast. He felt better than ever before, as if his brain had been elevated to a new state of clarity and efficiency.

The first thing he noticed as soon as he tried to open his eyes, was that everything was completely black. Overlayed on top of the immense stretch of darkness, there were a few rectangles made of white lines and filled with text and numbers. One displayed the time, seconds ticking away much faster than he remembered they should tick.

What to him felt like one second, the clock said they were at least five. He wanted to frown at the clock itself, because the little ticking numbers not only made no sense in the way they passed, but also should never had made any sense at all. He had this innate knowledge that these numbers represented time, and he was sure that he did not know this prior to his death.

Two realizations came to him at one. One was the simplest; a mere observation of the sensory inputs that came to him, or rather lack thereof. He wanted to frown, but he could not.

The other realization was much more important, although it only occurred to him after a few moments that the clock said were a good minute in the real world. I died? The question floated in his mind for a while, searching for possible clues as to how he was not dead as he should have been.

There were two things that came to memory. His brain tried to process older information, and it appeared foggy and unprecise, different in taste and quality than how he was working right now. The closest in time, and in clarity, was the very first thing he saw when he woke up. There were messages at the center of his empty visual field, displaying statuses and… mass? What do I do with mass?

He tried to shake his head, a natural gesture that instead found no purchase in the state he was in. He tried, then, to remember the strange dream he had, the hallucinatory experience his brain concocted right in his last seconds of life.

He saw himself, pale and dying, floating in a sea of icy water. In fact, he swore he could feel as if he was immersed in a fluid right when he was about to die, a fluid that was quite similar to the liquid metal weapons he was fighting together with his fellow heroes.

No. No. It’s impossible.

He didn’t want to believe it. He had this idea in his mind, but he didn’t want to give in to such a crazy theory. It was just too much for him to believe, too much of a leap in logic to just assume things.

“GROW”

A voice, booming from the dark pits of his subconscious, shook him out of his contemplation.

“What?” He wanted to ask, but he could not speak.

The limitation felt constricting, and he felt cramped in what he was. He wanted to do things, but he could not. He was not a free mind, floating free and serene in empty space, but rather he was something incomplete, something lacking. He could not even panic, because he lacked both the necessary chemistry and the required body to perform most of the panicking. He could only wish he could panic, and contemplate the absurdity of such a desire.

The clock was ticking. Two hours had passed in the real world, according to the numbers, and Mateus felt that he was already losing the sense of time. Without any stimulus coming from the outside, he was beginning to float in the sea of his own thoughts. Once again, it did not feel like he was free, or at peace. He felt wrong.

He had to do something. I need to see. Show me the outside world!

Images came. Hundreds of them, thousands. All at one, all together they flooded his mind with redundant information. Most of the visual feeds were just black, useless, while a few showed something of the outside world.

He understood that, in order to keep seeing, he had to concentrate on seeing. If he let go, even for a moment, it all went away. Also, while he saw that he could somehow handle all the images even if they came to him all together, the clock sped up while he did so.

He was beginning to understand. In order to manage all the images at once, he had to think so much that the world outside became too fast for him to keep up. He had to reduce the amount of data he was trying to process. He had to remove the useless. Otherwise, he would be stuck here while the world went on without him.

What am I seeing?

Overlayed on top of each visual stream, a little label appeared. Many, most of those labels said that the darkness he was seeing was due to the fact that he was looking inside the mass of nanites that made him. Reading such a message, he froze.

The images disappeared, and he was back amidst darkness.

He activated them again, and read the label slowly and carefully.

The inside of a mass of nanites. The very same thing that made the Doomsday Weapon he was supposed to destroy. An ever-expanding, ever-spreading mass of tiny machines that could consume anything and replicate using the consumed materials. Machines that could organize themselves into complex structures and artifacts. Machines that could spell the end of the world.

He was the Doomsday Weapon now. Somehow, instead of dying, he was transported here. Somehow, instead of dying, the nanomachines found a way to survive.

The clock kept ticking. Days had passed while Mateus struggled with this dilemma. When he turned his attention back to the clock, and noticed just how much time passed, he almost panicked. He could not, and he was once again reminded of what he had no more. What he had, instead, was a prison he himself made out of his own mind. He got lost in his own thoughts and fears, like in a maze made of the monsters of the mind. Lost and without direction, he would fall back again in the sea of dark, and lose himself to the night.

He decided to act, instead.

Only the outside view. I don’t need to see inside myself.

Many of the data streams disappeared, bringing the ticking clock back to a comfortable time dilation ratio, and giving him a full view of the outside. He could see in every direction, like a sphere.

Am I a sphere?

A small hologram appeared in the dark room that was his consciousness. The clock sped up, and resumed its usual flow as soon as the hologram was complete. It showed a small droplet of silver liquid, slightly flattened, at the bottom of a crater in the ground.

It was true, then. He was the blob, a small droplet of nanomachines with a mass of just a few grams that somehow managed to keep his mind alive and thinking. He was there, at the bottom of a crater in a massive cave, under a mountain. Alone.

Inhuman.

Not a monster, not a human nor of any other race. A machine, a Doomsday Machine coming from somewhere else. Not of this world, for sure. This much was clear already, well before he became it. Nobody had ever seen anything remotely like this, and thus the only logical conclusion was that this was a threat from the Outside, another one, that needed to be vanquished.

He shook his head. Once again, the intention fell flat because nothing moved. Moving, then, was very different than how he used to move when he was human. Also, using the little cameras of the nanites to see the outside world seemed to have slowed down his perception, accelerating the clock to a now 6x time dilation.

Processing power, he somehow knew.

“GROW”

The voice again. It came from below, from the depths. Somehow, it resonated throughout his whole very being. Hunger, he could feel, like he never felt before. A sense of hollowness that not even in the worst of famines he could ever hope to feel. It was ever present, here and now, and he wondered where it came from.

From the voice?

He had to calm down now. He got lost in his own thoughts once again, and the cameras had stopped broadcasting the outside world to him. He willed them back, this time committed not to get sidetracked again. He had to understand his situation better.

Am I stuck here, or can I move?

He tried to move his body, like he would move his limbs. He had seen what the machines could do, and he knew that they could not only move and create shapes and weapons, but also make complicated machinery capable of truly ending the world.

If he was them now, there must be a way to move around. In fact, thinking about it, if he was now the nanites and the nanites were him…

They are no longer a threat to this world.

Even better still, he could use them to rebuild his body. Or, at least, make himself a new body that looked like his old one and go back to his friends! His family! His sister…

He could show them that he was not a threat, that the machines were under control now, and then he could be back together with the people he loved and who loved him. What a wonderful dream it was.

A dream that could be reality.

Filled with newfound motivation, he decided that it was time for him to actually move. Maybe this was like sight, the process now requiring his conscious effort instead of just a thought. He tried that, he tried to feel the presence of his body, of the nanites, and to move them around.

The droplet stretched, and morphed, a few ripples disturbing its mirror surface. A wobble, a change in density. Another ripple.

Like a slime, he managed to make his exterior semisolid and sticky. It stuck to the ground by using the minuscule pores of the dirt to anchor a part of his mass and move the rest around it. The process was tedious, requiring his whole mind and focus, and sped up the clock to more than ten times. But it worked.

“GROW”

He felt the voice again, and the pangs of hunger struck him like an elbow to the gut. There had to be something he could eat around here, and he looked around with his ten thousand little eyes like a ravenous beast. The cameras, understanding his intentions, began to highlight small patches of moss some distance away from the crater.

He only had to climb.

Energy low.

The clock sped up, ever so slightly. He could feel his mind grow a bit duller, his only sense, sight, lose a bit of focus and his whole self become a little drowsy.

He had to reach that moss, and quickly, because if the energy levels hit zero, then he would die for good. Sluggishly, he pulled his small mass up the steep slope of the crater. The clock ticked away, seconds blurring and confusing together, ever so faster. Time was passing, slipping away.

Ahead of him, blocking his path there was a small stone, no bigger than a fist, but that appeared as an impassable mountain compared to his small size. He was so small, so powerless, so tired.

It felt like death all over again. He gritted his teeth, not even stopping to consider that he had none. His mind briefly wondered if he could use mana as energy, so that he would not have to eat again, but he had to stop as soon as he noticed that every extra thought costed him precious energy.

The clock was insanely fast now. His metabolism was slowed down to a crawl, and the rest of the world just kept on going, impossibly faster than his thoughts could handle.

He went round the rock. Time was meaningless now; the only important thing was reaching that biomass before it was all over.

He was close.

Closer.

Closer.

Eventually, the outer shell of his blob form touched the dull green plants. He could feel the ravenous hunger, the voice asking him to “GROW”, to “GROW”, to eat the moss, to expand himself.

He stretched his body, and swallowed the small plants whole.