Last of the Hriggr

I am Hrr’rge 1900784, Grand Priest of Brrer, two time president of the Hriggr Holy Republic, accomplished duelist and a former midshipman on the Begxa-rge. I have conversed with the highest of Gods and have several patents. I have ended more lives than I myself have lived, via terrible plasma and osmium shells. To sever my list of titles - I am aged and accomplished, aged more than three hundred Denebian cycles, aged not as wine poured onto an aluminum convex but as thick molasses poured onto the same. My present situation is naught more than half a cycle - weighty to a youth, but a passing experience to me. I say this, yet I am elucidating my titles and being to you, earless wall.

You have seen much, have you, wall? You would do well to pay attention to your elders, such as myself. I know that you are young, for I have seen silica walls of similar construction on Beskant, erected to imprison my fellows or to absorb our gunfire. Your makers and masters are youths, vicious youths, lords like unto Mammon. The elderly are your sand-coated gold, for our rock formed from ancient volcanoes has undergone more entropy, more purification. We are completed, like stars, while you are a shadow of silicon - like me, you are sand held between the fleshy fingers of your masters.

Do you feel my finger-analogue? I believe your masters call it a claw. I shall mark you, as a diamond marks corundum. Many cycles ago, I was a jeweller. I dealt with artificial gems, those little permanences. There are few who deal with natural gems still, for the galaxy is aging. Your most-high masters are one of the few remaining who still wear natural gems. Not even a carbide gem, forged by the accursed mechanicals, can contest what millennia of heat and pressure can create. To turn a planet into a forge is an insanity that only nature can think of. 

No, the star-forges in the farthest quadrant do not approach such hardness - you reveal your age, silicated one! For that, another mark shall be traced upon you - a reminder of the superiority of carbon to silicon. As if your masters needed the reminder, those shell-crushers. Do you know of what I speak? The crimes committed after osmium clears the path and plasma sterilizes it, that path smeared with carbonic sludge. That sludge was not totally carbonic, my friend, for the Hriggr have shells made of a long chain of hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur and silicon molecules. Your masters compare us to their insects, their biology, when our shells are not sugars and our minds are wide and alive. We have lived, lived, died, lived, died again and risen to glorious life. We were the ones to conquer the mechanicals! I have torn out wires that would plot the rise of nothingness, that would sear a race from existence with carbide beam. Have you ever met a nihilist mechanical, my friend? That is, have you met a mechanical?

They represent a lack of beauty, a lack of irony supplanted by an excess of iron. I have spoken with only one, the aforementioned wire-deprived one. He was built in the image of his purpose, like you, silicated one. Like you, he had no mouth and no center for word processing. His capacity for language is perhaps inferior to yours, for his skin was much more resistant to my claws and thus had difficulty bearing my words. Unlike you, he could move and do beyond what the Laws of Thermodynamics demand unconditionally. You whirl in space, whirl along with your galaxy as much as entropy demands, but he could move as purpose! Purpose engendered is terrifying, that devourer of entropy!

I wrestled with him, across the floor, to reach my gun, but he was stronger. I felt a presence in him then, like you, oh wall. I felt the essence of carbide gem, immense effort and science crystallized. I think the creation of carbide gems is one of the crescendos of civilization, to bring matter to its highest unthinking form. Anything greater switches the value of matter for the value of purpose - like mechanicals and walls. Hmmm.

Hrr’rge ended his incoherent rant, content to click his mandibles softly as he sat, cross-legged on the floor. The cell in which he sat was composed of six walls composed of a glossy, gray-green silica-based substance, just as the toilet and food-chute were composed of the same. Its pleasant gloss was offset by the furrows carved by Hrr’rge’s claws throughout the room - in the solid portcullis of a door, around his sleeping place in the far-right corner of the room and around the food-chute. Those furrows were unpleasing to the eyes, indeed, to Hrr’rge they seemed to be torn Hriggr shell. To human eyes they were black, ugly marks like spilled ink.

The patch of wall before Hrr’rge was still fairly bare, only blemished by his two previous marks. In it, he could see his face dimly reflected. It stared back with a beady, mournful eye - compound and massive, it dominated his sulphur-hardened face. Half of the ommatidia making up his eye were blackened, either from age or war-caused injury, rendering him mostly blind. The mandibles directly beneath were chipped and discolored, marked by the many speeches he had made since they were cleaned. 

Wall, what do you think, of me, of this? For all of my roundabout insults, aimed at your existence being preceded by purpose, I am jealous. My Gods have forged me for their purpose, but I do not receive schematics and physics, my architects have no shell nor blood. 

The wall silently loomed before Hrr’rge.

Perhaps your masters are like my Gods. You lack the power to speak with them and your corporeal parts are dissimilar. To be a silicon being is to admit the superiority of carbon, as I have said. We are both sand dripping through the ruling claws - or rather, the ruling fist. I wonder at which element is the holy carbon, that which makes up the Gods. 

Wall, here, have your schematics laid out before you. I will tear you another furrow, so that you may feel oxidation on another layer - and perhaps learn of the composition of your inner layers. In that furrow we shall plant the seeds of immortality, will we not? Or are you a lying bastard, an infertile idol?

As Hrr’rge drew his claw once more to create a silicate furrow, the mighty portcullis drew open. He leapt to defensive attention, his gloomy eye fixed upon the green-cloaked masters outlined by unnatural, fluorescent light.

“Mr. Anderson, it’s time for lunch! Here, let Michael bring you to the cafeteria.”

Such accursed language was foreign to the conqueror of Beskant, Grand Priest of Brrer. He knew not what curse these two laid upon him, they who hid their faces in doublethink. Claws were useless against them, for - 

“Oh, Mr. Anderson, did you draw with your pretty markers on the walls again? For shame, you were so well behaved last week. Come on, grab your markers before we go out for lunch.”

Yes, those were markers, weren’t they. A fog seemed to lift away, the furrowed silicate gloss was whitened and dulled into concrete bricks marked with cheap, smelly ink. His claws were torn off, their recent accomplishments washed away by the sponge in Mary’s fleshy fingers. 

The tiled floor beneath lead Hrr’rge, last of the Hriggr, to Michael who gently grasped Hrr’rge’s declawed finger-analogues. 

“I hope you’re hungry, we made mac and cheese!”