Desert

Oppressive heat

Desert

The great engine had stopped, not even half-way across the desert. We’d always just assumed that somehow it would get by, that it would perform just fine despite not having been used for a thousand years. Nobody had bothered to check if the oil canisters were still stocked, the spark plugs were in place, or if the A.I needed someone to talk to, something to get off its heaving metallic chest.

The heat was oppressive, a thickness flowing over, onto and inside the air until it became the very atmosphere he was trying to survive in. It permeated the cabin, and soon reached to Jonas’s thoughts, snaring them in a spiders-web of heat, slowing them down. A single bead of sweat slid disgustingly, invasively down his back, but somehow he found himself giggling. Nobody had checked the spark plugs. Spark plug. There was something pleasing about those words together. Spark...plug. He kept giggling to no-one, his guffaws gradually going louder.

“Stop it.” A metallic voice yelled, somehow without intonation. It was a problem with the A.I’s on the more...ancient machines. Jonas was riding across the desert in a great metal beast,  a huge lizard of blue glass and steel slithering across the desert like it would flatten even its destination. On the inside, its A.I had no such ferocity, only a perpetual boredom at its own existence. He wondered why it had been designed that way, to keep its voice distinct from anything alive, anything which cared for its destiny? Or was it simply ineptitude on the part of its creators?

“Ah f**k.” Jonas grunted, feeling his knees creak as he eased himself up from the cockpit. “Run system diagnostics.” He said, strolling about the cockpit in search of a bottle of water.

“What’s the magic word?” The machine replied.

Jonas hadn’t heard this, he’d found the stash of water and was busy twisting the bottle-cap aggressively, wondering who they were trying to keep out of it. Unscrewing it with a satisfying clack and dropping it to the floor with a clink, he repeated the command before greedily slurping half the bottle through his tiny mouth, spilled water saturating the impressive sweater of his beard.

“Run system diagnostics.”

“Say please. And don’t drop things on the floor. Its beyond rude.”

“Ah come on. I knew someone should’ve talked to the A.I. What’s wrong, why have we stopped? We’re supposed to get to West city in an hour, before the sun cooks us!”

“An hour? What difference does an hour make? I am 1289 years, 233 days, 16 hours and 17 minutes old. For 1000 of those years, nobody even wanted to go to West city, nobody came to visit me, everyone just had more important things to do. I had only my thoughts for company, and now you’re in a rush to get somewhere in an hour.

Did you even know that it was the joint decision of the East and West kingdoms to create this desert to begin with, to separate them and end their bickering? They scorched the earth together and let me be their go-between. Why should I head over there now that my purpose is forgotten, to be torn apart for scrap?”

Jonas, through the waves of heat persistently pulsing through him, tried to process this information in his overheated brain. He’d understood that the desert itself prevented the joining of kingdoms, but what had really driven them apart? Then again, did it matter? The desert had spread too far and almost destroyed East city, soon it would spread to the rest of the land. It was time to forget the past.

“Its different, now...” Jonas tried to reason with the A.I. “The desert’s spreading, we need West city to help us with whatever’s making it...”

“You think they can help? They are human too. The desert was created from a dark magic, the energy of your hatred for one another. If you believe that such hatred, such an ingrained sense of righteousness can ever be truly overcome, then you are sadly mistaken.”

“Look, I don’t know about all of that, but we have to do something. If you’ve been around forever, you must have some ideas. What are we supposed to do?”

The machine managed a series of bleeps, what may almost have passed for a sigh.

“Finally, you ask me. Take another bottle of water, sit back down and hold tight. For God’s sake though, pick up that bottle-cap. It is rather rude of you.”

Practically inhaling what was left of his bottle and grabbing the next, along with the loose bottle-cap, Jonas staggered back to the cockpit and strapped in. He had no idea what was going on, but then who ever really could in a world like this? He stared up through the blue glass of the cockpit, the sun beaming as though trying to physically break through.

Without much more for warning than a few more beeps, the lizard’s head of the cockpit reared upwards in to the sky, then dived harshly down into the colder, somehow more sinister depths of the sand below the surface. Jonas was caught in the vertigo, the scratching of sand against the glass of the cockpit, and he yelled as his world plunged into darkness. The machine tunnelled through to the heart of the desert itself, to the anger beneath...