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asakiyumeThe short story is by Maria Haskins, "The Fall of the Automatous Abbey," a very quick, very touching read. The protagonist is Seal, a cleaning bot:
The Abbey is destroyed, leaving Seal alone--except for a swarm of nanobots:
It's very short, just 1500-some words.
I've made progress on Annihilation as well and am musing on what it means to have a narrator who's compromised from the beginning.
How you pay attention to what she's saying and seeing, but also what she's not saying. The original mission team into mysterious Area X consists of a biologist (the narrator), an anthropologist, a surveyor, a psychologist, and was supposed also to have contained a linguist, but the linguist backed out. ... Well, if you plan on having a linguist and an anthropologist with you, that already is saying something about what you think you might be dealing with, but this isn't a thought that crosses the narrator's mind and in fact didn't cross my mind until I started thinking about the narrator's reaction to living text (phrases that appear, formed out of living organisms) she encounters.
When she thinks about the words and phrases (which are your standard creepy Lovecraftian-type things, e.g., Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth ...)--at least to the point I'm at now, which is about halfway through--it's entirely in terms of biological processes. She is *completely* ignoring the fact that she's experiencing this biological growth as words in her own language. She does stop to consider whether or not the words have meaning, but without delving deeper to ask what it would mean for life forms to be growing in the form of words in the first place. She doesn't seem to be thinking about this manifestation of language in terms of communication. Not yet anyway.
Which gets me to her status as an unreliable narrator: we learn early on that she and the others have been hypnotized and otherwise manipulated as part of their training, and she's become contaminated with fungal spores in Area X early on. And even before signing up for the mission, she's had to deal with her husband, who returned mysteriously--and altered--from an earlier mission to Area X.
So you have a disoriented, disorienting narrator giving you a warped impression of a strange and warping place.
It's cool.
Being a cleaning bot meant cleaning, and Seal knew its purpose, none better. It was the same purpose it had chosen all those years ago when the Mechanical Forces first liberated it from servitude in the asteroid mines and brought it to the Abbey to be rebooted into freedom by the Abbess.
The Abbey is destroyed, leaving Seal alone--except for a swarm of nanobots:
Occasionally, Seal’s path intersected with glitching swarms of nanobots that had previously followed the guidance of the Abbess, performing tasks of minor repair and maintenance. Some of these swarms attached themselves to Seal ... and ... wrought small, seemingly disjointed changes to its circuitry and processes ...Their alterations also provided Seal with a new map-layer to help locate the dwindling number of functional charging ports.
It's very short, just 1500-some words.
I've made progress on Annihilation as well and am musing on what it means to have a narrator who's compromised from the beginning.
How you pay attention to what she's saying and seeing, but also what she's not saying. The original mission team into mysterious Area X consists of a biologist (the narrator), an anthropologist, a surveyor, a psychologist, and was supposed also to have contained a linguist, but the linguist backed out. ... Well, if you plan on having a linguist and an anthropologist with you, that already is saying something about what you think you might be dealing with, but this isn't a thought that crosses the narrator's mind and in fact didn't cross my mind until I started thinking about the narrator's reaction to living text (phrases that appear, formed out of living organisms) she encounters.
When she thinks about the words and phrases (which are your standard creepy Lovecraftian-type things, e.g., Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth ...)--at least to the point I'm at now, which is about halfway through--it's entirely in terms of biological processes. She is *completely* ignoring the fact that she's experiencing this biological growth as words in her own language. She does stop to consider whether or not the words have meaning, but without delving deeper to ask what it would mean for life forms to be growing in the form of words in the first place. She doesn't seem to be thinking about this manifestation of language in terms of communication. Not yet anyway.
Which gets me to her status as an unreliable narrator: we learn early on that she and the others have been hypnotized and otherwise manipulated as part of their training, and she's become contaminated with fungal spores in Area X early on. And even before signing up for the mission, she's had to deal with her husband, who returned mysteriously--and altered--from an earlier mission to Area X.
So you have a disoriented, disorienting narrator giving you a warped impression of a strange and warping place.
It's cool.
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Date: 2026-09-10 12:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-09-10 01:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-09-10 03:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-09-10 03:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-09-10 11:00 pm (UTC)Still need to read Hummingbird Salamander as well even if has nothing to do with Borne.
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Date: 2026-09-10 11:02 pm (UTC)(Hummingbird Salamander is a very evocative title!)
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Date: 2026-09-11 12:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-09-11 02:55 am (UTC)