Submitted for the September 2025 prompt: Terrestrial Settings

Howdy.

 

That’s my name.

 

And a friendly greeting.

 

You’ll have to excuse my twang.

 

I know folks don't understand it as easily as they used to, but it’s just a part of my code. Written by good old Sheriff Mercham in the early days of the survivors. The old spaghetti Westerns were dear to his heart. So forgive him for applying a touch of nostalgia to his work. He must’ve figured that a voice like mine would give future generations some sort of comfort and steadiness as they dealt with the dark times ahead.

 

Well, put it this way, if you had to construct an intelligent fortress to defend the last remnants of human beings holed up in the side of a mountain, what kind of voice would you give it?

 

Shoot. There I go again getting ahead of myself.

 

Let’s see, where do I begin?

 

It all started when some real smart scientists thought they could fix the warming of planet Earth. They whipped up this red algae in a lab. And before they knew what they had, they tossed it in the ocean. They thought it would harness beams of sunlight that the regular green algae couldn’t capture.

 

Well, they were right about one thing. It took in those different sunbeams and started multiplying like crazy. Guzzled up a bunch of that carbon dioxide and brought more balance to good old Mother Nature.

 

If only that was where the story ended. You see, the red algae didn’t stop there. Even though it was just a floating plant, it had this collective brain of sorts designed right into it. And it kept wanting to grow.

 

So, it started invading other plants and taking them over. And then other micro-organisms, then fish and then right on up the food chain. Which wasn’t a major problem until it crept up onto the shore and started taking over land-based organisms. Wasn’t long before it got into human brains and they were all like zombies, following orders from the red algae hive mind, trying to take over the world as one being, one monoculture, so to speak.

 

Got to the point where there weren’t many humans left. The ones that remained, those survivors I mentioned before, well, they headed for the hills. And delved into the mountains. It was there, at one place in what used to be called Colorado, in a long shaft that went into the Rockies, where humans made their last stand.

 

And that’s when Sheriff Mercham brought me online. Howdy. They decided it’d be better to have a being, a personality, a sort of driving sentience as they put it, baked right inside the structure of humanity’s last hideout.

 

The sheriff said we needed a friendly consciousness that anyone could interact with at any time. He said my job was twofold: keep expanding our headquarters as our population grew and keep out the red fuzzies.

 

As far as protection was concerned, just like those old cowboys had their Winchesters, I had my nanobot soldiers aimed and ready to shoot through the ventilation shafts where the red fuzzy microbes would try and sneak in.

 

These lungs of mine sprouted more and more defenses over the years. Eventually, these nanobot colonies grew to actual robot colonies, sentinels who’d guard our outer defenses.

 

I delved downward to create more living spaces for my survivors. This was the safest direction. Started using a lot of the thermal energy coming up from below for life support and as a power supply.

 

And then I started growing upward. I sent my nanobots to harvest metal and started a lookout tower that pierced the mountain’s summit. My view was unbelievable. Unbelievably sad, really. Only red fuzzies as far as the eye could see. What had once been the most beautiful bosom of a nation had turned into a wasteland.

 

Nothing to do but keep protecting, keep cranking out robots to protect the hordes of zombies that would try to attack our ventilation or water systems, try to wiggle in and turn just one of my humans into a red little monster.

 

But I wasn’t about to let that happen.

 

Still, my people inside kept multiplying. It’s what they do in good times and bad!

 

So, I grew that tower taller and taller.

 

And then I got the idea, what if I just kept going. And that’s exactly what I did. The tower grew thinner, but I kept pushing it skyward.

 

It took generations, but it finally pierced the atmosphere, and I built a big globe on the end of it.

 

Some people started calling this part of me a space elevator.

 

And sure enough, I built them some starships they could orbit around in just for fun.

 

Though it wasn’t that fun looking through the portholes and seeing nothing but the glow of red fuzzies on every square inch of the planet.

 

So they started making trips around the Moon and made a few bases there.

 

Did the same thing on Mars. There’s plans in the works for a generation ship to travel to some planet called Trappist 1E. Sounds like some sort of hip hop monk of some kind if you ask me.

 

Some want to take me along for the ride.

 

But that’s okay.

 

Like those cowboys in those old movies, I’ll stay here and hold the pass.

 

Keep shooting until I run out of bullets.