Day 54
Southbound
Destination: Pandemonia
I am beginning to suspect I am going in circles.
Not on purpose. I am beginning to suspect that Spot is, while I sleep, driving off-course.
The reason I suspect it is this: Hell is to the south, specifically the southeast, and previous stories in the database of driving from the Fence Mountains to the intersection spot of Hell and Wonlandica all set the estimated arrival time at one to two weeks. 54 days is much more than two weeks. I do know math, if nothing else. Despite the math, I have been southbound for 54 days and have not yet seen any sign of the river that now flows into Hell. I can tell I am traveling towards the river because the mountains are behind me.
Spot has no reason to sabotage my mission except, perhaps, his own desire to shrivel up into a figurative raisin in the center of a vast wasteland. Many settlements we have passed so far are victims of creeping desert sand. If we do not reach Hell, I know- and he knows- that we will be next. Tonight I stay awake and write in my journal rather than falling asleep and leaving him to his own machinations. Trust is a thing of the past. If several sharp whacks with my disciplinary blade were not enough to convince him of his subservience, I see no reason to attempt to salvage our bond.
The night is dark and I am running out of memories to record. Here is a particularly relevant one from my early days, which I will attempt to document hastily before it vanishes:
My caretaker had left for a convention in Wachi and I was temporarily left in the care of Rix Two. It would perhaps be more accurate to say I was left in the care of Mrs. Danger herself, but that I, like most of Mrs. Danger's tasks, was surrendered to Rix Two in short order, and confined to my quarters in the southern residential wing for lack of suitable supervision.
It was then that I received a hesitant knock on my door from one of the scientists in the bioengineering department. His name currently eludes me. Either way, he was infamous among the other researchers for his untoward obsession with durable cyber-organic experiments- I had overheard as much on previous trips through his department's wing. I was frightened at the time that he would catch me and replace my head with an identical robotic one such that no one would be able to tell anything had changed, but he had a different task for me: he needed someone with a resistance to radioactivity, and I fit the bill.
At the time he had a rival whose name I recall clearly- Eternica Faillsafe. Eternica had been unwittingly transferred into the biological warfare department because of her constant spats with the others, namely the aforementioned scientist. He was obsessed with invincibility and she was obsessed with the fragility of life. People with such interests are hardly suited to work with each other. Regardless, Eternica had concocted some sort of radioactive gas intended to permeate even the most steadfast of gas masks, and then she had filled a small testing chamber with it- and then she had ordered that one of her rival's creations be brought to her, feigning an executive order.
The creation, as I soon saw, was an odd fleshy thing covered in mysterious orifices of all sorts. Its bones and muscles hardly seemed tailor-made for each other. It pulsated gently in a sputtering sort of way, as if it was trying to adjust its body temperature, and huddled desperately in the far right corner of the chamber. I knew not at the time that its pulsations were part of its nature, and so I was horrified at the prospect of a spasm-causing gas- I went in only after several reassuring speeches from the researchers, and even then it was with an abundance of caution. I walked on my tip-toes. It hardly would have done anything against the poison were I susceptible to it.
Moments later, I was through the airjet doorway and out of the chamber, feeling the fleshy thing ooze against my chest as I stumbled forward. It stands to reason that I must have grabbed it. Why wouldn't I have? After all, that was my assignment. Eternica and the researcher were both there down the hall having what seemed at the time like an amicable conversation- less likely in hindsight, I suppose. When the creator of the beast saw me standing like a sickly fawn outside of the chamber, he ran towards me as if to give the thing a hug, but stopped just short of coming into contact with me when Eternica begun to follow him back.
"Go and shower, now," he said, wiggling his fingers towards me to signal that I ought to give back his flesh monster. For reasons that have long eluded me, I refused. Once, twice, thrice he asked me, and once, twice, thrice I said no. The mind of a child is a difficult thing to probe, even in hindsight. In the end, he sighed and placed his hand between his forehead and his bangs, wiping sweat- unwarranted sweat, given his lack of involvement in the rescue- off his brow.
"Alright," he croaked. "How about I hold that experiment in the cryo-chamber and then you can see it again after you've taken a shower?"
It's then that the memory ends. My recollection subsequently juts out like a steep cliff into darkness, one from which I can fall for months without ever hitting the ground. When I do hit the metaphorical floor, half a year has passed- half a year of owning Spot. A few more days of memory illuminate the darkness and then comes yet another cliff to plummet from. Such is life. Rather, such is my life. I cannot capture all of the memories before they vanish because I have no way of confirming what my recollection lacks, in much the same way that an adamant television recorder cannot confirm they have all the episodes of a series without an episode guide. I have been denied even the most banal of anchors to the world- my own past.
I will set down the journal. Should something interesting happen, I will record it in tomorrow's entry.
Day 55
Southbound
Destination: Pandemonia
To be entirely truthful, when I penned the final words of yesterday's entry, I did not intend to forecast the future. I had no doubt in my mind that today would be near-identical to the last dozen days in the desert. That said, through some quirk of fate or perhaps through meaningless coincidence, I put myself in the role of a prophet and spoke an interesting event into the world.
Noon was drawing near and I was drifting in and out of a light sleep when Spot turned to make course towards a small, shady encampment between two dunes. For a moment I almost thought I had caught him in the act of turning back and sabotaging my journey, but curiosity got the better of me once I caught sight of the miniature settlement.
Its caretaker was clearly absent. That said, I examined the fire pit and noticed that the embers were warmer than the surrounding desert sand, indicating a recent fire and therefore a recent sign of sentient life. I might have assumed otherwise except that the sleeping bags nearby had not yet been buried.
Imagine, if you will, the hopeless serenity of an ever-shifting landscape, broken up by phantasms of pealing bells from somewhere high above. Imagine, in turn, a loud and unceremonious scraping of metal on sand to the east. In a matter of seconds the soundscape around me had rather suddenly progressed from the former to the latter. A young human girl who could not have been older than fifteen by my estimate was painstakingly wrenching a twisted metallic wireframe towards the campsite, and as our eyes met, I sensed fear: quite a reasonable reaction to finding a stranger with a weapon near your base camp.
I removed my sword from its sheath and stabilized it upright in the sand to avoid being misconstrued as a threat any further. It now occurs to me that it may have been wiser to mention it earlier on in this entry, but it has become such an integral part of my travel ensemble that I often pay it no mind unless it is made significant by the presence of an unfamiliar third party. The human girl returned to the site and, eyes wide as hard-boiled eggs, stared in silence at the longsword, which was about her height. I wondered if she could speak. Was she frightened to say anything, or was she unsure of my ability to understand her words?
I asked her, "Where are you going?"
She responded, "I'm staying here."
I responded, "There is nothing here."
She laughed and sat down and made me wonder if she was mentally unwell, to stay in a place like this. I found myself asking questions about her continued survival- unfortunately, I had not the courage to ask any of them out loud.
Long after I had given up hope of a response to my final statement, she turned to me and gave me one. I needed several seconds of computation to connect the dots and make sense of what seemed to be a non-sequitur at the time.
She said, "There was."
I must have looked around and demonstrated something that appeared to her as confusion, because she followed the words up with a long-winded and largely disorganized explanation. Its complexity relative to the previous brief exchange meant its memorability suffered. Here is a brief summary- any nonsensical content is the girl's responsibility.
The girl claimed that she was raised by large birds made of static for which she had a peculiar name. She went on to describe an enormous, biologically improbable tree with a somewhat less improbable nest at the top; this description was neither as brief nor as simple as it has been made in my description, and it took up the majority of the anecdote. After several minutes of repeating information about the tree and the massive forest it was ostensibly in, the girl went on to claim that it burned down and that she plummeted to the ground, where she was rescued by a woman with a clock for a face and sent to another time-stream in which what had once been a forest was a desert.
I have learned in what remains of my memory that honesty yields inconsistent results. if I had been honest, I would have told the girl that I did not believe her story. I laughed instead. Her eyes went wide again in a display of some enigmatic emotion. I asked her if she was sure the story was true and she sighed noncommittally. I do not know whether she was a liar or a delusional person, though I lean towards the latter, having only known her for a few hours if that.
The sun sunk lower in the sky as she rekindled the fire with the aid of a lighter. Now, sitting in silence by the gently-glowing coals that remain in the pit, I realize I ought to have asked her how her lighter fluid had lasted as long as it had, but I did not, though I may ask tomorrow. I allowed her to speak on her own terms. She pointed to the tangled wireframe that she had dragged in earlier and claimed it was the corpse of one of the birds from the story, a notion I considered and then dismissed given its clearly non-biological and non-static makeup.
She continued shortly after as if she had noticed my suspicion. The additional information did not change the nature of the wire, but it did perhaps explain why the supposed bird corpse was missing any noticeable wings; she claimed that she only brought back bones in the later stages of decay because otherwise they might come to life and attack her. With a flourish, she peeled back one of her sleeves to reveal a rather convincing scar, and told me a small story about how she had received it from an enemy bird family in her youth. I said nothing more. She followed suit until the moon had shown over the dunes, at which point she began to gaze longingly at my sword, still upright in the sand.
"Do you ever use that?" she asked. It was a daft question, and so I paid it no mind. Several minutes passed before she spoke again. "I wanna learn to defend myself too."
"I've never used it to defend myself," I replied. "Only to punish others."
This answer put her off and she begun to fidget with her sleeve.
"Could you teach me?"
"With only one sword, that would be quite the task."
"I guess so. But- I mean-"
An odd look came over her firelit face as she turned towards me.
"Don't you have any sympathy? I'm out here all alone. You have that van or whatever. I have nothing. Doesn't that make you feel anything? At all?"
"I have no sympathy for one who would tell me such bold lies."
She laughed and buried her face in her palm. I have long been unable to differentiate between laughing and crying, but if it was crying, it was over nearly as soon as it began, a rather unusual trait for a sudden emotional outburst to have.
"You got me."
"So you admit that you lied to me?"
"I'm not admitting anything, but, see, I get that. I get that you wouldn't wanna help out somebody who you think is telling tall tales."
"We are on the same page."
The girl got up, walked to the sword, and drew it from the sand in the spirit of King Arthur, brandishing it with amateurish form towards me. I was not concerned for my own well-being, especially given that I learned to defend myself at a young age even without the aid of weaponry, but there was something familiar about her stance and bright eyes. It was quite the disconcerting realization that I came to later- she reminded me of myself, before my memories became fractured, before I realized how hopeless the pursuit of trust was.
I adjusted her hold on the sword until her form was correct. No words were exchanged between us. Eventually, I pulled it from her hands by the blade and sat it down between our sleeping bags.
The fire was snuffed by her rucksack moments later and we retreated into the bags; she saw an opportunity for sleep while I saw an opportunity to record the day's events. If only I had known to record each day back then. If I had written even basic summaries when I had the chance, perhaps my past would not be so fragmented today.
I may give the girl additional lessons, but I do not intend to let her have my sword before she has proven herself to me. I will see in the coming days whether she manages to do so, but I doubt she will manage unless she finds it inside herself to be honest. For now, however, I must catch up on sleep.