I won 3 MicroHorror Prizes. This story was one. However it took on a life of its own, as befits the story itself, and ended up as a much longer series in Bewildering Stories as The Last Days of Coloc. So today you can follow the link above to a longer read if you want and find out who these creatures were and what became of them! My prize was this original artwork. I treasure it. It's not often you get to see your creatures come to life.
The Final Chapter
In the depths of the oceanic valleys there still was heat and light.
The heat came from fissures in the Earth’s crust, ever spewing forth lava and bubbling plumes of smoky gaseous fume that tunneled upwards through the long cold night of stilly waters.
The light emanated from creatures that few had ever seen and none had encountered; creatures which lived by their own light and feared no darkness. Electric flashes in the blackness heralded a shoal of swimming LEDs. Sudden white, a whiplash here; darting blue, a flash there; vermillion–changing–pink, a streak at the edge of perception. Neon, yellow, green, darting hither and thither beneath the Great Pacific Gyre.
The Sun that had once blazed no longer ruled the sky. It penetrated dimly mother-of-pearl clouds. Slowly it had carried on its work of photo-degradation upon the surface of the polymers left swirling on the waters and the corpses left strewn upon the land, but it was weak now. No fish surfaced to taste its rays and no animal basked in its radiating glow. The Earth lay under a dead blanket of thickened atmosphere, sick with poisons and all infertile.
***
Then came the day; that day that was bound to come, when the creatures that lay beneath rose from their ocean beds, close enough to the dark belly of the great petrochemical soup to taste its potential. Vast coils of plastic-coated wires, holographic interfaces, computer circuitry, components still intact within their plastic cases and yet sufficiently exposed for exploitation by those who could jolt them to life. The beings from the deep made their home there among those unnatural weeds and scales, among the flotsam of man’s legacy to Earth.
Gradually they built around them bodies, of indescribable intricacy and size, activated by elements from a trillion different machines and protected by a slurry of polymers, acetates and vinyls. Their glistening bodies shone as they took form and rose clear of their surroundings and they were given life, not from above but from below, from electric ocean depths that man had barely known and from his technological imaginings.
One by one, brand new creatures lurched onto empty continents to seek out the fills they knew must exist there. They towered over the landscape, striding a hundred meters at a time. They ventured forth upon the land of their creators and saw the devastation mankind had wrought. And the Techno-polymorphs saw that it was good.
Copyright: © 2008 Oonah V Joslin
