1251 days. It had been 1251 days since she was charged with Homelessness. One of the other Homeless had taught her how to count in days, 1251 days ago. "Seconds. Minutes. Hours. Days. That is how man used to tell how far apart things were in time" he stated, lecturing to their group of haggard people. They sat in a small hollow, shaded by ferns and grasses, surrounded by metal structures built with pieces stolen from the Machine. The Homeless, ones who had learned to breathe the outer air, took refuge away from the machine, counting days and scavenging for parts. Living in their hollow, it had been 122 days since the lights of the Machine were undimmed. Exactly 50 days since pneumatic stoppers began dropping from the vent shafts. And it had been exactly 10 days since the Machine stopped.
On the day it happened, she had been walking along the side of an abandoned air vent, cautious of the white worms that had been surrounding the area, grabbing at things she could find and smuggling them off to home. The distant, but constant hum of the Machine had kept her aware of her location, though, now the air was filled with other, sharper sounds. Something shrieked and whirred, another groaned and creaked, and the ground seemed to hum along with them. Ignoring all of the noise, she mumbled her times and bent a piece of loose metal off of the side of the vent, catching the strangely shaped metal pieces that fell out of it. She spotted something fast and white moving towards her and stumbled back with a yelp. A long white tube coiled itself in front of her, reaching at the newly exposed injury of the vent, nudging the metal back into place. It was useless, though. With a great sigh the ground below her began to sag and she heard the crunch of something mechanical. Then, silence.
Silence was not new to her as it was 1251 days ago. Her ears did not ring or bleed as they did, and for exactly 1 minute and 28 seconds she did not notice it. She only realized what it meant as the worm in front of her dropped to the ground, writhing in confusion but then becoming still. There was no hum. No song of the Machine to run a distant society below, one that she no longer sang along to. The vent in front of her heaved and sank, and then, nothing. But one sound began, one she couldn't recognize until she pressed her ear up to the side of the sunken vent. Screams. Human ones, thousands upon thousands of voices, in a chorus of agony, rising above their metal prison, far, far, below. Above her there was another new sound. She turned her head upwards and snapped it back down, pushing off of the vent and starting away. It was only when she fell onto the grass after running a ways did she dare gaze up into the sky again. An airship, huge and useless and dead, was careening towards the vomitory, its huge wings clattering and rupturing. It nosedived into the structure, and the ground collapsed below it, metal piercing its corpse like stabbing mechanical flesh, shattering steel bones.
For a second it caught, but the weight of it's body was too great, and the airship continued its final voyage. Crashing and scraping and splitting metal (at least she thought it was metal). Down, down, until she couldn't see it any longer from her spot in the grass. There was an immense ball of light and smoke and flames, that breathed upwards and shot metal residue throughout the sky. The air was filled with a cacophony of horrible sound and sharp wind, that made her eyes burn and ears ring. Metal on metal on Machine, and she was sure that the humans screamed along with them. There was a final, earth-shaking sound, from somewhere far below, and again it was quiet.
She sat there, in awe, as flying shards cut through her skin and fell to the Earth. She staggered onto her feet, and edged towards the side of the cavernous mouth of the ground. Below, there was nothing. No light. No sound. The world fell into silence, again. And so she turned, with bleeding arms and legs, away from the hole of nothing. Stumbling towards the grassy hills filling with mist, keeping her head upturned to the now pearly dusk sky, she began counting again, "the Machine stops, 50 seconds, 22 minutes, 0 days. 0 days since the Machine has stopped."
Evie, I really like this new perspective on "The Machine Stops". I particularly enjoyed how you incorporated time into your narrative, and how you chose to write this from someone living on the surface's perspective. I also really like how you added the detail of the air ship crashing, since that was another aspect of the machine that was less thought of.
ReplyDeleteI really this new point of view, Evie! I especially liked how you described what life is like for "the homeless" and how even though they are above ground, the sounds of the machine can still be heard--it is like they can never truly escape the machine until it dies. I also liked how you described what it sounded like to the narrator above ground when the underground was collapsing with the people's screams. It seems so much more gruesome, and it was very effective reading it through this new perspective.
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