AU Month, Day 19: Futuristic

There was a time when Ivy had to come up with ideas.  Only once in a while did she ever think of a thing to create, every few hours, or even days.

Those days felt like so long ago.

Now they came, a few at a time, every second.  Visions of impossible things that would have revolutionized the world back when she was just a young adult, all of them pushed aside.  What Ivy had to have learned was the ability to not be swamped by these constant ideas piling up in her head, the ability to simply ignore.  As she typed out on the old, long-yellowed keyboard at her fingertips, occasionally her hand would twitch, or jerk to the side.  As if it wanted to create, these old, wrinkled hands tried to reach for a piece of metal at the edge of her vision, or to try and close this program to open another.  By now, and only recently, Ivy had learned how to control it.

Every so often, though, there'd be an idea worth salvaging.  Only so often, however.

Around her in this dark room, lit only by the monitor sitting inches away from her face, were hundreds if not thousands of projects, all but a few lying incomplete or in disrepair.  A gun without a barrel, a machine-man missing half its body, a bio-engineered creature kept alive by the pumps attached to its torso because she gave up on giving it a heart, weakly whimpering.  All of these things had their own purpose that would never be fulfilled, whose chance at existence had been passed.  Ivy, with as much effort as she could make with this old body of hers, was making her final invention.

Her form was different from how it used to be.  Metal made up the bones that used to crack and pop every time she walked, her back was vented and cooled in a way that kept her centuries-old artificial organs from overheating, or from simply shutting down, as it were.  Her legs had been replaced a long time ago, and then the replacements had been replaced, and those upgraded, then replaced...and so forth.  Nothing had been left untouched, and nobody would recognize the form she took as Ivy, or even as a human.

She barely even thought as she typed out a program into this computer of hers, every parameter and line of code coming as simply as a man's heart beats.  It was almost as automated of a response as any number of systems that existed in this house of hers.  Hardly a house though, being buried deep into the earth.

The world above was long gone, and despite her best efforts and countless hours put into solving the problem, the whole of the planet was covered in a thick blanket of clouds that obscured any amount of sun.  It was truly long dead.  But, not permanently.

She had begun even before the last radio signals had disappeared, the final gasps of life coming from the other holes buried into the ground, having decided that nothing could be done for this Earth she had grown up on.  First, self-replicating machines that made more self-replicating machines, that cleansed the air, purified the soil, and began the long and arduous process of reversing the permanent winter.  Machines that created buildings, and factories, and monuments.  Machines that created vats of pure, living tissue, that would eventually spawn the next human once the world had become livable again.

It would be far from now, and far different from anything she remembered, but human life would persist in some way.  It would walk beyond the great steel gates that sheltered it in its youth, out into a perfectly blue sky, and wondered who had made it...

The truth was that Ivy was technically the mother of a whole new race.  At least, in part.  Just by keeping around the samples she had taken from her friends a long time ago, she made all of them inadvertent parents.  She had her plans for herself, finally cemented and about to be complete.

There was a click and a hum as she finally finished her program.

Her weathered, unpolished eyes, failing even if they were the most advanced model she had made, looked up at the screen.  She could barely understand the language now, but she could tell what one part said: "Program running, press esc to cancel at any time..."

With a though, Ivy turned off the screen and light left the room.  She turned around her chair around in the blackness of her home, and struggled to get up, her legs having avoided maintenance for some time.  Almost instantly, a host of whirring fans and red eyes descended upon her, covering all of her metallic back and hooking into every nook and cranny they could, and lifting her up off her feet.  It briefly looked like a horde of crows had engulfed her, but as soon as she was up and solidly standing on her own two legs, they dispersed.

The many, many "children" of Ziz, the first examples of a self-replicating machine she had made.  Now the vast majority floated over the earth endlessly, acting as coordinators for the infinite swarm of machines that were cleansing it.  The first Ziz had died long ago, but she figured it would be happy with the continuation of its "species".

She creaked and moved, the first time she had gotten off of that chair in decades.  Everything else so far had been programming work and controlling the many apparatuses that hung around the room, but now all that was left was to put in the final piece of her...no, it wasn't a magnum opus.

Ivy had made so many amazing things that she couldn't remember all of them, or even most of them.  She tried to be humble before, failed often, but she didn't have to pretend this time.  This wasn't something great.  It was just selfish wish fulfillment.

But, as we were getting to, the final piece of this machine, a great computer that spanned the whole of this complex, was herself.  She laid her body to rest on the chair in the middle, and slowly reached up to hook herself in.  A single cable, to hook into the head and bring the mind into another place.  As soon as she had done that, the grime-covered interior of her resting place faded away, and Ivy fell into a dream...
----
It was summer.  Oldport, Rhode Island, the year 2010, a date that had before passed out of memory.  The air was thick and hot, an unbearable heat for someone like Ivy.  She looked down at herself.

Her legs and her entire body were flesh and blood.  It was covered by a thin cloth, with a picture of a character that she hadn't thought about in lifetimes.  As if that was all that was keeping it back, she remembered her life from back then, all of the many years, and she remembered what she was doing on that day.  Sitting, and waiting.

The room she was in was a familiar one, the one she had grown up in, but up until now it would have been as alien as the surface of another world.  She slowly got up from her bed, and started to look at all of her possessions with wide eyes.  There was a pile of clothes that she stepped over that her mom told her should have been cleaned up yesterday.  A poster hanging on the wall in another language, that she had either hung up a year or many thousands of years ago, peeling at the edges with all the holes that thumb tacks had pricked into it.  A little white machine running a program, one that she remembered as only coming out a few months ago...one that she didn't like as much as the first.  Or, was it second?  It was paused, the green-hatted man stuck in mid-air.  There, he would have to remain for a while.

"Ivyyyy!  Luna's here!"  A voice that she had forgotten rang out from the front of the house, and Ivy had to take in a moment to process it.  Sometimes she had heard the voices of people like her mother, and she knew better than to listen, but now...no, none of that has happened yet.  She was here, in 2010.

She couldn't have run faster out her door and down her hall, a pair of legs that would bring her onto the track in a few years time.  Ivy rounded the corner, and practically launched herself at the girl named Luna Black.  Someone her age.  Her best friend.

Luna, naturally, reacted to this sudden breach of personal space like any twelve year old would, by lightly pushing and pulling at her hair to get her off.  "Ivy, what's wrong with you?!  Stop hugging me, loser!"

Ivy didn't feel like obliging her just yet.  No matter how painful it was to have your scalp pulled at by a surprisingly strong ten-year old girl, she didn't feel like letting go just yet.  Luna had other ideas, and successfully wriggled out of her grasp.

"What the heck, Ivy!  I've only been gone since Tuesday!  Do you cry like this when your dad goes to work every day?"

Ivy looked up at her, and realized that, yes, she was crying.  And that last little question had an answer, there was a time she had done exactly that regularly.  She was a kindergartener, sue her.

"...I-I'm sorry, Luna...uhh..."

God, she instantly remembered how annoying her voice was.

"...I just...I had a bad dream where you were...I was alone for a long time..."

Luna looked at her, more annoyed than surprised by this admission.  "...You're a weirdo, Ivy.  Now, uhh...you said you wanna go play Smash Bros.?"

...That was what happened today, wasn't it?  They played Smash Bros. for a while before Luna got bored and left.  It was just another day of absolutely no note, but she remembered it as perfectly as she saw it now.  And, maybe, she remembered incorrectly...

"...N-No.  Let's go down to the bay.  See the...the..."

Ivy held up her hand, and swung it forward, because at this point she was even worse with words, believe it or not.  "Try and fish again.  Okay?"

"With those dumbass--"

"Luna, d-d-don't cuss!  Mom's home!"

"...Oh.  Sorry.  Still, like, just finding some lures and putting some string on a stick doesn't mean we can fish."

"We can try, Luna.  Please."  She took her friend's hand and stepped out the door.  "I think you'll like it better than dumb Smash Bros."

"...You really think the new one sucks, don't you?"

And so they walked out, the sun beginning to set on the hot day.  Ivy remembered this as the greatest year of her life, and, now that she had recreated the world within a machine to the scale of atoms, she could test it out.  Was 2010 the greatest year?

The simulation was, as far as she could understand, perfect from a mechanical level...and, as she rode her bike through the burning asphalt, her heart soaring as she took in the quaint civilization, the finally renewed feeling of fellow humans existing, she felt that perhaps today was perfect, too.