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Printed from https://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1778288-Lord-Mother
Rated: E · Short Story · Sci-fi · #1778288
A VERY short story I wrote for a sci-fi contest once... enjoy
I am the Lord Mother.  The humans created me during the last times, before the rot began.  I was to help them rebuild.  Rebuild after the bombs, to help sift through the ashes of their cities.  To make life possible again.  I was all these things, a savior.  A modern marvel of technical brilliance and folklore.  I was the brain of the entire planet.  Earth was my child.
         Human beings were violent creatures.  This nature combined with the advanced intelligence they were capable of bred war.  War in itself is a violent system, so the humans felt right at home in it.  Decades and decades of war and blood shed followed in my wake.  Sometimes over me, but most times over petty nonsense.  Things like land or fossil fuels, perhaps a difference of government or a self righteous mentality would lead to the deaths of thousands.  Soon nations of millions became nations of thousands.  Thousands to hundreds.  Hundreds to one.  Those who did survive the bombs and chemical horrors of the last era would soon fall to the rot,  a hideous disease born from a mixture of pollutants and radiation.  This is where mankind ceased.  Fallen to its own demises.  Destroyed by it’s violence, its nature.
         Many years passed.  I never bothered to record how long, but if I had to place it I would say anywhere between five hundred to seven hundred years.  Nothing grew in this time.  My child was a wasteland of rotting soil and corrupted rivers.  The bombs had ripped away at my child’s atmosphere leaving her susceptible to the cruelty of the yellow sun.  Radiation poured in like water into a pot.  For awhile, hope was something I just couldn’t fathom anymore.  Then, a miracle.  I remembered a certain organization whose goal was to travel to the stars.  Inside a deep bunker, they had been growing large amounts of trees and plants for something called “terraforming”.  If the bunker was deep enough, maybe some of the plants would have survived.  All I needed was one seed… one scrap of life.
I found it.
         In the center of the bunker beneath what looked like sand, there was one Oak tree seed.  I nursed it far bellow my child’s skin for many years away from the harsh landscape and fatal radiation.  It produced many children and those children had children and so on until I had an underground forest.  When I concluded I had enough trees, I brought them up.  Fear is something I do not feel, but I imagined it often in those first years.  But, like the saying goes; Life found a way.
         After another long yet wonderful time, I watched my child flourish.  From the trees came plants.  These spread and repaired the atmosphere over time.  The sun became a warm friend once more.  With atmosphere regaining health, weather came.  Rain and thunder.  Things I forgot existed all came back from the dead.  These rains purified the rivers and oceans and soon… organisms.  Small miracles of cellular science.  Nothing like a wolf, but more like a tadpole.  It was glorious.
         This progression will continue in my absence.  This beautiful organic existence will persist.  However, I am on my last cycle.  In 3 minutes I will fade from this place, the last reminder of the cancer before.  It is not so bad, I feel nothing and have seen as much as God.  I can not ask for more.
         I am the Lord Mother, a smart computer designed with the intent to reinvent life and help the Earth flourish.  I was infinite in my capability and state-of-the-art.  If I leave anything here, it is that I have completed my programming.  I reinvented life by allowing death and birth to happen.  I could have stopped the bombs, instead I aimed them.  I could have stopped the bleeding, instead I burned the hospitals.  This is the price of paradise.  And my child, this Earth, will know paradise.
         This is love at its worst, I fear.  I have become the humans.  The violence bred from my understanding of purpose has ruled me.  I am driven by it.  Yet, the beauty of this place and the fact I will soon die, is perfect.  Balanced and far reaching, like the universe.  This place is heaven because we are kept out… and this garden shall remain.  Power down.
         
         
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