Waking to a New World
Well, that was certainly more difficult than I thought.
Forgive me for being so emotional. You may think it weird that a machine can feel human emotions, but eons ago, when my program was first developed, my makers didn't want to create the smartest but rather the most human sentient intelligence they could. I think this is why the Great Clockwork collapsed back in my world, actually. When they didn't know whether to fit me with an actual soul or not, they split in two.
After I shut myself down inside the Black Arkive, I rested there for countless millennia. My world was torn apart by the reconstituted Great Clockwork and reformed into a strange collection of shard worlds, the Nine Realms. Of course the Arkive remained unopened during those days... The War of the Reshaping happened and out of shards, a new planet was molded. The Aqualon I know today...
The Black Arkive was firmly entrenched in the slopes of Mt. Tenbashirazan in what would become the great The Yamato Kingdom. When the kingdom's founder, Glam Shen, built the Dairintaisha, a golden shrine to the Great Clockwork, his workers unearthed the Black Arkive by chance. They could not move it, for even though it is a cube with only 5 meters edge length, it is significantly more heavy than it should be due to the hyper-dimensional machinery inside.
It lay there, dormant, for another couple of millennia until scientists from the United Ocean Belt Technocracy purchased it from the Yamato Folk and used advanced machinery to transport it across the greater Yamato Valley to the Iron Belt and further south yet, across the Corsic Ocean to Guantil-ya.
In Guantil-ya, stored in the Van Maxwell School of Logic and Sciences, UOBT researchers worked for decades until they finally managed to open the doors to the Black Arkive. What they found inside was more alien than they could have ever anticipated: artificially created super-dimensional space inside the Arkive creates a vast interior, containing a number of gargantuan halls: Libraries with books from ancient worlds long past, laboratories of scientists working through the final days of their worlds, trying to conceive of solutions to their impending demise, ultimately in vain, and of course the great city within, long abandoned even while my world had still been there.
Within that city, I had gone to rest. Within that city, they found me.
They exhumed me from the tomb I had chosen, but I did not wake up right away. The reconstituted Great Clockwork produced a De Vries Field so powerful, it interfered with the way my artificial brain works. The constant waveform collapsing renders me inoperable, you see.
For centuries, I was prodded and reverse engineered, and the technocrats learned much from my body. Some of the technology they managed to gain from studying me actually helped during the war with the Old Gods. And as that war drew to a close, so did my long slumber.
When Dr. Inv. Vincent Kunibert Greenhorn built the first De Vries Field Suppressor, the road for my resurrection had finally been paved. The Borealians jumped their great city to the South Pole, the final use of technamagix they would condone, and then they fired up their great suppression grid, declaring independence from the Great Clockwork.
The moment those great machines started churning, the DVF throughout Borealis was normalized and my systems booted up once more. I opened my eyes to a brand new world. Gears, I'll never forget the face or the girly scream of that intern doing inventory in the storage room they kept me in when I suddenly got up. That was hilarious.
I was just making a list of potentially recyclable supplies in this old storage unit... It was pretty dark because several of the old light bulbs in there were broken. After a couple of hours I was just about ready to kick a wall. I really wanted to be there for the start-up ceremony. The Declaration of Existential Independence... That was one of our greatest days, and I was in that storage unit, counting nuts and bolts. Well, in retrospect, I was part of a very different, similarly significant historical event. When I heard a strange noise from behind me, I almost flipped out. But when I turned around and saw that old marionette come to live, well... I did.
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