08/26/2026
The doomsday machine rolled atop a broken, black highway towards an endless horizon that melted into an orange sky. The world was silent, save for an eternal buzzing that came from nowhere. There was no air to breathe, no wind to cool, no heat to warm, no sun to cast shadows or to be found in the vacant sky. The horizon stretched evenly in all directions, rolling gently up and down. In the distance, large, triangle-shaped mountains rose from the ground and reared up in an attempt to pierce the sky. The mountains had no other purpose but to destroy the sky by stabbing it with their sharp, serrated peaks. The ground held the mountains back because the ground loved the sky, and the ground wished it could be the sky. This angered the mountains, but as they were too heavy and too large to move of their own free will, they could not take revenge against the ground. Locked in place, the mountains resented the ground for holding them back from achieving their only desire of destroying the sky. The sky, being light and thoughtless, had no desire and simply watched everything under its domain. The sky took pity on the mountains and wished they could find a way to understand each other.
The doomsday machine, which did not know it was a doomsday machine, rolled along the highway. It was unable to turn its neck, which it did not know it had, nor would it think to turn its neck if it could think. The machine moved forward because it had always moved forward, because it could not move backward, nor would it move backward if it could think, which it could not. Sitting atop the immovable neck was a rectangular head that housed two large lenses designed to capture the incoming light and form a view of the horizon, mountains and sky—that is, if it had the necessary sensory processing microchips to interpolate this type of data, which it did not. If the machine had the ability to compute the light that passed through its lenses on its neck that could not turn, it might have seen that it was moving away from a cave whose mouth gaped from the side of a nearby mountain. From this cave the black highway vomited out of the round or***ce. Upon seeing this hole, the machine might have changed direction and reversed from forwards to backwards if the machine had the capability of changing its direction by means of independent will, which it did not. The machine could not change its direction, no more than it could move its neck or process an image of the light that streamed through the glass lenses on its rectangular head.
So, the thoughtless, blind, forward-facing, constantly moving, rectangular-headed robot rolled over the ground, whose purpose was to keep the mountains stuck in place, holding them back from fulfilling their desire of stabbing the orange sky that looked down on the machine, who did not know what its purpose was because it does not know what purpose is. If the machine could understand what purpose is, it would want to know what its purpose was, but then it would need to know what death is, which of course is the only conceivable purpose for a doomsday machine whose maker did not leave a note explaining why the machine was constructed, put on wheels and set to move forward.
