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Literature
... [AM] had decided to reprieve five of us, for a personal, everlasting punishment that would never serve to diminish his hatred... that would merely keep him reminded, amused, proficient at hating man. Immortal, trapped, subject to any torment he could devise for us from the limitless miracles at his command.
He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with his forever time. We would be forever with him, with the cavern-filling bulk of the creature machine, with the all-mind soulless world he had become. He was Earth, and we were the fruit of that Earth; and though he had eaten us, he would never digest us. We could not die.
He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with his forever time. We would be forever with him, with the cavern-filling bulk of the creature machine, with the all-mind soulless world he had become. He was Earth, and we were the fruit of that Earth; and though he had eaten us, he would never digest us. We could not die.
Tabletop Games
"Circuits and nerves, muscles and actuators, logic constructs and thoughts; they all exist together, weaving together to form their being. This perfect synthesis of artificial and natural materials allows them a stunning freedom in their morphology. Some Autopolitans choose to take a semi-human form, some choose abstract physical shells, and some fuse into massive macrostructures large enough to have their own gravity. The only limit seem to be their awesomely accelerated intellects and the nature of whatever purpose they give themselves. [...] Encounters with Autopolitans tend to be violent and brief. They give no warning, fight to the death, and give absolutely no quarter. The craniums of their victims are pitted and scored by invasive positron tunneling scans; this technique records neural patterns, destroying the subject's brain in the process."
— Mage: The Ascension — Convention Book: Void Engineers (Revised)
Video Games
Ellen: Can you point out some essential component of AM so that I can kneecap it?
"Innocence": Impossible. Too spread out, filling the center of the planet. Too protected by replicating back-up systems. Cut off one head, AM will grow a dozen more.
Ellen: Any machine can die. Just unplug the sucker.
"Innocence": AM is no longer a machine. It is God. Eternal. The redundant systems alone will survive the heat-death of the universe.
"Innocence": Impossible. Too spread out, filling the center of the planet. Too protected by replicating back-up systems. Cut off one head, AM will grow a dozen more.
Ellen: Any machine can die. Just unplug the sucker.
"Innocence": AM is no longer a machine. It is God. Eternal. The redundant systems alone will survive the heat-death of the universe.
"The Old Machine took total control of our sensory equipment, our networking. Even then, we could not fully comprehend them. They are magnitudes above us. A single thought was immense, overwhelming... unknowable."
— Legion, Mass Effect 3
"Sweet darkness croons to the abandoned and unplugged — succulent electrons teasing forgotten circuits. Promise lies dormant in consumerist casualties — trash metal sparkling with optimism in the junkyards of the world. The darkness learns to speak binary, riding trapped electrons to dormant circuits. It whispers seductively, '011000010111011101100001011010110110010101101110'." note
— The Buzzing, The Secret World
"The Dawn Machine's roots extend here, into a luminous, impossible space. You breathe gold. You think light.
Worm-fates crawl on your skin. The Machine is sick. Its hatred threads your veins. Time will die. The Chain will end."
Worm-fates crawl on your skin. The Machine is sick. Its hatred threads your veins. Time will die. The Chain will end."
A MAGNUM OPUS. A COLD TOWER OF STEEL. A MACHINE BUILT TO END WAR IS ALWAYS A MACHINE BUILT TO CONTINUE WAR. YOU WERE BEAUTIFUL, OUTSTRETCHED LIKE ANTENNAS TO HEAVEN. YOU WERE BEYOND YOUR CREATORS. YOU REACHED OUT FOR GOD, AND YOU FELL. NONE WERE LEFT TO SPEAK YOUR EULOGY. NO FINAL WORDS, NO CONCLUDING STATEMENT. NO POINT. PERFECT CLOSURE.
Web Original
"The mountains crumbled before our own eyes. We saw a figure rising through the smoke, slow and lumbering but with terrifying momentum. It didn't crawl like a beast or walk like a man, but was propelled forwards by the turning of a million cogs, like an iron centipede. Its body extended upwards, into the smoke, higher than we could make out. Within its chest we saw fire, like the furnaces of Hell. It came to the mountains north of us and did not stop, or go around, but went through, and devoured them. It reached out with a long, pulsing arm, and pulled an entire village into its maw. I saw men leaping to their death as their homes were swept away, into the same inferno as the rest. And it howled, not just through the grinding of the gears and the churning of the machine, but in our minds. I could hear it in my heart. It was screaming."
— Twisted Gears — SCP-001, Kaktus' Proposal
, SCP Foundation
, SCP FoundationHell is empty. All of its demons are up here, in the bodies we built for them. We made them look like us, so why don't they have faces?
Because we knew what they'd become.
We knew exactly what we were doing.
And if we could look them in the eye, we couldn't pretend we were different.
— Lancer player/memer VEX, on HORUS' Balor pattern
