The iguanodon Taxchan, the beagle, and the yellow-robed woman from the district government building are escorted by a pair of armored marines down a broken alleyway. The marines' heads seem puny, protruding like shaved warts atop the bulky contraptions that the two soldiers are wearing - the technology is more akin to robotic body-prostheses than mere equipment.
The imperious Lady Zesiro, however, implicitly refuses to be escorted. She goes before the marines, who - more concerned with the dinosaur on their six - make no effort to restrain her.
Haim: What does some old bag collecting pets have to do with transitioning into a new life form?
Jeul: Aw, cripes!
The dog tramples an anthill, the last example of its species. The queen has already died and for many days now the workers, having finally found some leisure time, have been debating their existence.
Though they are not unique, the technologies employed in this universe have impressed Taxchan. Under most circumstances, Taxchan's forms were those of the dead - the forms of extant species are not his. Yet, the form that these technologies had forced him into was a morphology very similar to that of his captors. He had not previously considered that there could ever be a machine capable of not only forcing him into the form of a living species, but of practically working him into the mythology, the worldview, of another species.
Taxchan recalls the mindless humanoids of the previous plane of Earth. There, too, he took a human form in the midst of wave after wave of ravenous of human bodies. There, the humans were already extinct. On every world he had yet encountered - indeed, in his own world - the humans were already dead. Anna's world and Anna's species were no different.
In the mythology of Anna's species - the pattern-mad hierarchy of cyborgs and Knights and Popes - the god of extinction could only take one form:
their own.
So be it.
- da solomon
- Text by da solomon. To contact by gmail use gordianphock.
Taxchan Choth
is The Last Dinosaur, The Stone of Forms, the last scion of Iguanodon bernissartensis.
2 comments:
Stepping through the newly made painting of your home is not as easy as the travel through the other paintings. Though hard to describe, the terms warmer and rougher come to mine. After much concentration, you are able to bring the painting to life and immediately push through. As you survey your home, you may have found the source of the problem.
Mu Merai is devastated. Somehow you feel as if it’s still alive, yet barely so. Rushing into the small building where you were deposited, you can see that the Earth, well Earnst’s Earth, has been destroyed. Mu Merai was struck by debris, even as it tried to flee. It has not completely ruptured, but the wounds are great. Not to mention several of the habitats and wildlife areas have been completely destroyed.
With quick analysis you can see the source of the explosion was the area where Golem worked his science.
The Last Dinosaur tends to the wounds of his world. It takes him several days, but there is not much that he can do, for he has never understood the ancient, alien biology of the giant seed - not in the three million years that he has been riding upon its head.
In this universe, he remembers, there is no life but that on Earth. And it is dead now.
Taxchan Choth, Mu Merai: the last living things in the cosmos, but there are so few shapes to recall, and none of them are suited for completing the necessary procedures on the ailing planetoid.
After he has done what he can, he sheds the iguanodon. Wearing a face that he thinks looks very much like Ernst, Taxchan returns to Mu Merai's cottage and pilots. He tries to find the source of the explosion - Golem, the key to the next world.
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