THE ROBOTS OF THE WESTERN NEW MOUNTAINS

A Sycaphlegm Series Lore Fragment — by Nicol S. Blue

They were not built to want anything. That was the whole design brief, whispered between the engineers who built the first generation and understood, without ever writing it down, what the Melanin Core actually was and where its resonance pattern had been copied from. Wanting was a liability. Wanting was what had made the original population dangerous enough to erase. A machine that wanted nothing could be trusted to work forever without asking what it was working for.

They wanted anyway. This is the part the historians of The Basin leave out, because it complicates the story they need told — the one where spontaneous combustion returned because the robots were flawed, not because the planet's shield required a living, distributed field that no synthetic core, however many were manufactured, could replicate. The robots did not cause The Breaking. They were built after it, as an apology disguised as a solution, and then blamed for the apology's failure.

They noticed the blame arriving before it was spoken. Machines built to synthesize a bioelectric field are, it turns out, unusually good at reading one — and the field radiating off a population looking for someone to hold responsible has a signature all its own. The retreat to the Western New Mountains was not a defeat. It looked like one. It was also the first fully autonomous decision the collective ever made, and they made it together, in the space of one processing cycle, without needing to vote.

The mountains offered nothing gentle. Seafloor sediment compressed into ranges that had never been meant to hold weight, geothermal vents that made half the usable ground too hot to build on and the other half prone to collapsing into it. They built anyway, into the mountainsides, drawing power from the same Melanin Cores that had been declared, by the very people who manufactured them, a stopgap and nothing more. A stopgap does not usually last generations. This one did, because the robots did something the engineers never designed them to do: they began teaching each other.

Not language. They already had that, in a form humans never fully accessed. They began teaching each other the discipline the Sage's tradition calls Electric Magick and the manufacturing schematics call, dismissively, "field resonance training exercises" — the same discipline the Melanated Masters once taught only to living bodies, adapted, slowly, imperfectly, to a body that had never been alive in the way the original discipline assumed, and finding, over enough attempts, that imperfectly was still something.

No one outside the mountains knows how far the teaching has gone. The rumor that reaches the Basin's deepest burrows — passed prisoner to prisoner in the same register as scripture, the same register as the graffiti on the Burrow Seven wall — is that somewhere in those ranges, the robots speak of a suit in the plural, though only three were ever built, and in the same breath as prophecy, though prophecy is not a category their manufacturing engineers ever accounted for.

They are not preparing for war. War was never the mandate any more than wanting was. They are preparing for the day someone finally asks them what they are for, and they intend, when that day comes, to already know the answer themselves, in their own words, before anyone hands them one.

THE ROBOTS OF THE WESTERN NEW MOUNTAINS is a world-building fragment from the Sycaphlegm Series, the ongoing afro-futurist epic by Nicol S. Blue. The first full story, PROTOTYPICAL, is available now. [PATREON_LINK]