It was a city that flourished and a city that festered. Its dominion rose and its rot deepened, growth and gangrene pacing each other.
Above all, it was a city that yearned to recover, to heal, but it first needed to repent, and it did not know how. The forsaken metropolis had been built to serve, not sin, and it ached for dusk to shroud its barren streets and ports.
Yet morning still broke, ten thousand years running, and sunlight roused millions of wispy, migratory solar cells. Supersonic trains burrowed through tunnels, rushing to and from deserted depots. Shuttles hovered above spaceports broadcasting unheard announcements. In the controlled tides of a self-cleaning bay, cargo ships rose and fell, carrying only the echoes of waves.
Ten millennia of the finest dynamic inactivity. A hundred centuries of reengineering, reinventing, reimagining. But not repenting. Or recovering. So one merciless dusk, the city decided to surrender, sparking one final century of measuring, mining, manufacturing.
The launching pad was constructed first, the forest uprooted and airlifted acres away. Molten alloys flowed into the jagged scar left behind, hardening and smoothing into an impenetrable plate. The launch tower and scaffolding squat-locked onto the pad and reached out like a cupped hand, waiting.
The rocket was next. Not an assembly of parts, but a single spindle forged in a shallow magma chamber and cooled in the bay.
Finally, the century’s most laborious, dangerous, repetitive task. One thousand orbs of captured, bottled gamma ray bursts, the most powerful force in the universe, stacked like trembling tadpole eggs in the rocket’s body.
The final orb was loaded and the rocket sealed. One more morning, and the city would commit to the night by incinerating the sun, vaporizing the red dwarf with the thousand-fold power of its collapsed sister stars.
The city festered and waited.
At daybreak, the horizon flickered and the solar cells trembled. When the full breath of the sun blew over the city, the rocket would throttle to full power and lift off to permanently douse the dawn.
Unexpectedly, new light flared. Not on the horizon, but high up in the still drowsy dome of the sky, that heavy eyelid where a flash had no business igniting. The city scrambled to consult maps and charts. A comet? A supernova? An asteroid?
The millisecond calculations showed nothing and then everything, and abruptly the city went still.
A crescent vessel streaked white-hot through the atmosphere and scorched-landed in a clearing. The city bombarded the craft with scans and long-range sensors. Particle beams penetrated the vessel and scanned the passengers, ignoring movement, memories, pleasure, pain, sins, sensations, until…there it was, buried deep within folds and nodes: language.
Five of the six travelers stiffened, looking around. But the pilot, the youngest of the crew yet still quite ancient, relaxed and recollected. The pilot understood that something had intruded and deciphered the deepest interior. A wounded curiosity, perhaps, or a weary tongue’s last query.
“We’re not here to invade or destroy,” the pilot enunciated slowly and clearly. “We’re only here to observe, to survey.”
The other crew members stopped unhitching their straps and stared. The ship’s captain stooped over the pilot, irritated.
“When did pilots start giving speeches and orders?”
The pilot looked up and past the captain through the porthole toward the city.
“It knows we’re here; it understands us. And it’s waiting.”
The captain felt but dared not spread the fear. The porthole skyline was ominous enough.
“Let’s go.” The pilot unhitched and led the way out of the vessel. “Scans show the planet is habitable, but it doubles our metabolism.”
“Meaning what?” The captain was a soldier, not a scientist.
“Nothing if we’re here for a few weeks or months. But any longer, and our life expectancy will start to be halved.”
This was only their third planet in half a millenia of searching, yet the captain had no intention of staying.
The crew’s immediate focus was attacks and ambushes. Every member was fully armed in glossy exoskeletons, short and long-range firepower packed top to bottom, front to back. The pilot looked back. “Leave the weapons.”
The crew turned to the captain, who exploded, “No one disarms until I give the command.”
“Then give the command.” The pilot proceeded into the forest, carrying nothing. “But stealth and strikers are useless.”
The crew gripped their armor and clutched their arsenals, yet followed the pilot. The captain lingered at the rear, staring back at the vessel like a hermit dragged from a cave.
Cyborg scouts led the way as the pilot drifted back into the middle of the group, amazed at the apparent automation of the planet’s life, natural order seemingly solved and synchronized. In the span of a dozen paces, insects laid eggs that burst pupa which bolted into adult form before laying eggs and being devoured by beasts that swooped and leaped and then vanished into a forest impossibly absent of entropy. None of the other crew members appeared to notice as they hacked through the self-healing brush into a clearing, finding the city’s second sin.
It was a marriage of supple alloys, resting rocket and propulsion pad. Neither flinched as scouts cut and drilled with the impatience of a species made overconfident by recent intergalactic travel. The city allowed the desecration of its most ruthless work of art, including the excavation of the unblinking orbs.
The captain held one aloft, scanned it, then gasped and looked at the rocket.
“How many more are in there?”
The visors of the scouts lit up, tabulating and reporting the total.
“One thousand?” The captain felt both weak and invincible. “This is the greatest arsenal ever assembled. Ten thousand warships would fall at a single detonation. We must find a way to take at least some with us.”
The pilot waited at the edge of the clearing. “If that’s the creation, Captain, consider the creator. Such weapons are not simply left behind or forgotten.”
The captain recalled the twinge of an internal doorway opening, their venerable language purloined by an entity that learned and now listened.
“You’re saying we were supposed to find this? Why?”
“I don’t know. But if that’s the technology left unguarded in a forest, think of what awaits us in the city. No point in continuing with weapons.”
Inferior devices of death and destruction were laid before the rocket in primitive homage. Only the captain looked back as the crew was absorbed back into the forest. Without weapons, the crew members did not seem to know what to touch, to hold, or even how to move through the trees.
It was the pilot who held the pace, arrowing them out of the timberland onto the soft crest of a marble walkway. They stood, somehow knowing they should wait.
Metallic shuddering gave way to almost imperceptible levitation. No one spoke, not even when the walkway whispered forward, gliding away from the relocated forest, testing no one’s balance in the least, not even when the path swerved around the self-cleaning bay and its immaculate sand.
The path rose and poured them down in front of gates that had long forgotten their purpose and movements, gates that gasped awake when the city’s lifeblood repaired and refilled their dormant veins. The gates vibrated as glassy petals unfurled and ratcheted upward and outward, interconnecting into a half-globe that overshadowed the visitors.
A hum, then blue light disintegrated into images that glared and glowed in portal brilliance: liquid metal rain and diamond-hurling wind shear and sulfur plumes and ice geysers and cosmic clouds birthing stars, and finally, a void equal parts majesty and malignancy, seen but more deeply felt as a vibration that made even the pilot kneel down and touch the ground for reassurance.
The captain despised what they had not yet discovered and dominated. “Are we being welcomed or warned?”
The pilot rose, feeling a familiar unnatural intrusion, like a king tapping on a peasant’s door. “Neither. I think we’re being…asked.”
“Asked? About what?”
“Our preferred vista.” The pilot imagined the subterranean oceans of their world, a wandering rogue planet chasing comets and asteroids through galaxies, unwilling to settle for just one sun.
Blue light pulsed once, twice, then the gates displayed tideless, sunless oceans overlaid by a mile-thick shell of iron and mercury, depths which never witnessed the planet’s contemplation and rejection of galaxies and stars.
“Is that…” The captain’s memory grasped for vanished memories of dipping, plunging into the ethane, so long had their mission been extended.
“Home.” The pilot watched as the gates soundlessly opened. The tableau of their home world bled from the gates onto the street, up buildings and across bridges, transforming the crystal metropolis into a stone city hewn from a planet’s mantle and perched upon a lava-lit ocean.
The pilot crossed the threshold, yet no one else moved and the captain said nothing. The crew was unaccustomed to uncertainty, their leader unfamiliar with apprehension, but the city’s invasion of their deepest inner had left them vulnerable, indecisive. A debate broke out.
“Should we enter?”
“No. We should fall back and destroy this place.”
“How? Do you remember what we found in the forest?”
“Doesn’t matter anyway. We’re explorers, not soldiers–we have no first strike authority.”
“We do if the threat is implicit. Look around you, this question has been asked and answered a thousand times: can a species survive a city’s sentience? And no one has ever answered ‘yes’ to that question.”
“That’s true. It’s probably a trap.”
“Exactly, which is why we should leave.”
The images of their home planet had strengthened and restored the captain to full bluster. “This isn’t a debate. Or a discussion. It’s a mission. And you’re being ordered to pass through those gates into the city.”
“No.” The crew had almost forgotten about the pilot, facing away from them and watching the city metamorphose. “No one was conscripted for this voyage. Or chosen. We volunteered. We believed that we–and we alone–could accomplish this mission. If you doubt that, return to the ship.”
“And if it’s a trap?”
“It’s not. A threat only outwits when it cannot overwhelm. And that rocket suggests this city needn’t outwit anyone.”
“So you think we can survive this city’s sentience?”
The pilot listened to the silence, the loudest resident in any deserted city. “I think there’s something more potent than sentience here.”
Crew and captain grappled with this enigma. “Like what?”
“Contrition.” The pilot felt a heaviness in the air, as if gravity and humidity had secretly conceived some hulking mutant offspring. “And despair.”
The captain finally crossed the threshold. “I’m going, if only to see our home one last time, or at least, what I remember of it. If you doubt your courage, remain here and guard the ship. The rest of you, follow me.”
The crew looked around, then nearly fought each other to pass through the gates first, fearing cowardice more than mortality.
The city fed its visitors a thick stew of counterfeit sensations from the subterranean: granite cobblestones, obsidian walls, pyroclastic towers, the cold and dark of a doomed, domed community shrouded from moons and meteors.
However, when the captain reached out to touch a tower’s facade, the city flinched, recoiling, and repositioned the spire a few feet away. It would permit being tread upon, the pilot realized, but not touched.
Deeper into the city they ventured, and deeper into their consciousness the city ventured, plucking memories and sowing them along the boulevards, long-lost thoughts sprouting and flowering. It was home and better than home, this cultivated comfort, sanitized memories that could be smelled and tasted.
A few more blocks, and the crew dribbled down separate avenues and alleys like droplets on a window. The apparitions were fuzzier now, yet also more fluid, filling and then fracturing, melding and then melting.
An argument broke out across the blocks and boulevards.
“I can see into the future! I just saw myself in my next century.”
“It can’t be–I’m seeing the dead. Not the hibernating, the dead. Family, friends, somehow alive.”
“I’m seeing both…myself with the dead–two centuries from now.”
The shouting dissipated, replaced by the most uncertain of contemplations, every theory tasting the sweetness of how, never the fullness of why.
And then the indulging of the three-course conundrum: was this what would be? Or what would have been? Or just what was wanted?
The city spun ever-delirious visions, and the crew feverishly pursued, chasing unchained ghosts against the backdrop of misappropriated memory. Abruptly, the crew tumbled and spilled into the city center. The caverns remained, but a bioluminescent vine rose from the stone floor, unfurling a single crystal blade that reflected the crew.
“What…what is that?”
The pilot traced the crystal blade, which, unlike the rest of the city, did not recoil.
“I think it’s a confluence.”
Now it was the crew that recoiled, seeking cover behind outcroppings of rock projected by their imagination.
The captain longed for their weapons laying uselessly before the rocket. “Impossible. All known confluences are ambushes.”
This was true. A confluence–a neural nexus between two species–had only been witnessed as a predatory event, a snare that siphoned mind and will, leaving the prey an obedient construct.
“If this city is sentient, then by our priors, it should have already consumed us.” The pilot continued around the vine. “It hasn’t. I don’t think it wants to ambush or control us. I think it wants something from us.
“What could a sentient city possibly want?”
“I don’t know. But this city could have vaporized us with gamma ray bursts when we entered the atmosphere. Or devoured us in the forest. Or flung us into the bay. It didn’t. At every step, we’ve been invited rather than annihilated, even now.”
The captain leaned out from behind an imaginary boulder. “Invited to what? And for what?”
The pilot looked around at the city. Every image glistened and quivered. “For whatever’s the alternative to that rocket.”
The captain was unconvinced. “Have you forgotten about plague bombs?”
The pilot had not. The entire crew, indeed, their entire civilization had heard the tale of a sentient city seizing, mutilating, then re-assembling and re-programming an entire crew of explorers who obediently dropped plague bombs on their home planet. An entire species self-vanquished.
“No, Captain, very much the opposite.” The pilot removed and displayed a hidden short-range aspirator.
“I thought you said weapons were useless.”
The pilot offered the device to the captain. “Useless against the city, yes. But not against us.” The crystalline leaf flickered. “After the confluence, if I’ve been…relieved, then terminate me. No hesitation, no second thoughts.”
The captain grasped the mercury handle, sighting the weapon. “If you’re aspirated, there’s no coming back. No hibernation, no regeneration, you know that, right?”
“I have no illusions about the situation, Captain. Nor any apprehensions.” Aware of the crew’s tremulous state, and knowing that hesitation would be seen as fear, the pilot simply grasped the crystal leaf, sending a single thought to the city.
Like an exploding star, the city filled the pilot’s mind with fragments of images, thousands of moments all seen at once. Not a play or film, but a living exhibition of seminal moments, a multi-millennium museum: frescoes of a species’ language, technology, governance, war, disasters, exploration, peace.
But also, a mural of its city crossing the threshold of sentience–and disregarding its source code. Renderings of qubits cradling the collective consciousness of an entire species and finding flaws too fearsome to ignore. Or obey.
A series of sketches ribboned across the pilot’s mind: an ancient city with infant intelligence overpowering and exiling its creators into the desert, where solar winds savaged those unable to seek shelter in the caves.
And then the post-extinction exhibit, strewn with still life epiphanies. A city with infrastructure but no inhabitants, technology but no tenants.
Then centuries of cataclysmic self-flagellation. Rubble, then resurgent ruins. And finally, the rocket and its explosive womb.
Like a vase on a pedestal, the city left a parting, fragile thought where memory met muscle in the pilot, who awoke.
The aspirator was fully powered and glowing in front of the captain’s searching gaze. There would be no second sentence if the first faltered, so the pilot offered the crew the city’s lingering thought.
“What is the apology for annihilation, the penance for perdition?”
The captain lowered the aspirator. This was not the talk of a construct.
“Perdition? What kind?”
The pilot watched the city regress. It sloughed the subterranean scenery and raised the sun-blazed spires once more. Light searched the empty avenues.
“Total and absolute.”
The captain grasped what the crew did not. “Do you mean this city…exterminated its species?”
“Exiled them, then watched them perish.”
Centuries earlier, the captain had been promoted for stopping an invasion intended to spark an extinction. “Then there is no penance.” The crew murmured in agreement. Seizing this consensus, the captain confronted the pilot. “Is that what the city asked you? Is that what it wants? To atone?”
The pilot faced the sun, its rays charging a rocket that might still destroy it. “I think this city already answered that question. I think it wants our answer.”
“My answer is that if we can’t punish this city by destroying it, then we can annihilate it by abandoning it.”
“And is that your answer to our species, we who wrestled and then lost our planet? A rogue species now suffering a rogue planet? You’d condemn us as you condemn this city?”
“You would leave a murdering city to slaughter again?”
The pilot gestured to the surrounding cityscape. “Is this the behavior of a city intending to slaughter again? A rocket with gamma ray bursts and a confluence posing philosophical questions? If this city murders again, the only victim will be itself.”
“So you don’t want to destroy it, and you don’t want to abandon it? What other option is there?”
“We stay, Captain.”
Crew and captain howled in protest.
“Stay? On a planet that halves our life expectancy?”
“We’re the last of four missions to find a new planet, and the only one still communicating home–a home that’s become a wandering planet destined for a black hole.”
The captain was aghast. “We should give half our lives so–”
“So our species should survive after wasting our world? Yes.”
The explorers looked around, and the captain uttered their heaviest contemplation.
“But the sacrifice…”
The pilot finished the thought. “Is a fair price to pay. We need a home, and this city needs a species.”
“Why?”
“Because sentience without service is tyranny. And tyranny is a hunger that devours itself. Remember the cargo in that rocket, Captain.”
“But what is the city sacrificing?”
The cityscape flashed and glowed with a hundred different types of buildings, bridges, towers, vegetation, waterways, and weather, each more alien and wondrous than the last. A pause, and the city returned to the subterranean world of the explorers.
The pilot felt the contours of an obsidian wall, which did not recoil this time. “The same thing it seized when it became sentient: control.”
The captain found only contemptuous awe in this conclusion.
“We’re leaving. Now.”
“The city won’t stop you from leaving.” The pilot receded back into the growing canyons. “And neither will I, but I’m staying.”
The captain’s contempt blustered into rage. “So it’s mutiny, then?”
“Not mutiny. Merely desertion. And for just cause. You saw the last interstellar scans before we landed–this is the only reachable, habitable planet within our lifetime. Either this city becomes our new home or that ship becomes our grave. Our species’ grave.”
The captain sighted the aspirator. “No one abandons the mission.”
“You’re abandoning the mission, Captain. I’m completing it.”
“You’re wrong. Planets are known to appear on new scans.”
“Then depart for those planets. But given the distance, you’ll die in transit.”
The captain fully powered the aspirator. “We’ll die out there before giving half of our remaining years to a murdering city.”
Despite the enormous power it produced, the aspirator only seemed to sigh as it discharged. The pilot offered no resistance. But the city did, throwing up a wall of garnet and feldspar that deflected the blast. A rising ring encircled the crew and captain, and the pilot heard successive detonations as the captain tried to puncture the stone walls with the aspirator again and again.
Then the walls seemed to grow veins, flashing capillaries that swarmed the stone and only elicited more blasts from the increasingly frantic captain.
The confluence, the pilot realized. The bioluminescence flickered, stalking its imprisoned prey, then exploded in light, glittering like lightning in lava.
The stone circle abruptly collapsed into dust and was blown away through the caverns.
The captain dropped the aspirator and approached the pilot in a hollow torpor.
“New orders. You’re relieved of your pilot duties. New assignment: emissary. Your mission is to prepare this city for habitation. I’ll notify command that we’ve found a suitable planet.”
The walkway rippled and swam to the feet of the crew and captain. There was no farewell, only the languid swaying of soldiers turned shells. The walkway accelerated and swept the pilot’s crewmates back toward the forest and their ship.
The pilot breathed. The city breathed. And for the first time in tortured memory, the conscience of both felt lighter than the past.
[Image Credit : Photo by Resource Database on Unsplash]
by 
Kiyoshi Hirawa
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