431. Music of Earth, 6

(Rose)

As I travelled along this river, I was slowly but steadily able to reequip myself.

Scavenging from the leftovers in these old cities from what looked like altogether a distant past and a distant future. Especially to me.

I found myself an oddly shaped rifle to hunt. The clip is behind the main handle, between the hand and the shoulder. Anyway, that will do for hunting boars.

I found myself clothes and even cans of food. Everything inside them taste like mud, but it’s not that bad. I’m doing pretty well.

This land is not as wild and empty as I feared at first.

~

The river died in marshlands.

I could see the highest buildings of a sunken city protrude out of the water in the distance. A kind of large swamp, spreading on a wide area. I could have built a small ship and tried my luck sailing across. I chose not to.

I wasn’t feeling confident about something like that.

I turned back for a short while, to reach a partially collapsed bridge across the river. I’ll go across and go around the swamp from the south.

I climbed the metallic frame of the bridge. Its main structure had collapsed a long way, but it’s skeletal frame arching above it remained and still stood. I climbed that, and slowly made my way to the other side.

As I was a good 30m above unfriendly water, I did ask myself for a second what on Earth I was doing, right there and now. But I pressed further, avoided slipping and made it to the other side.

I camped that night in one of the last buildings along this path before entering the swamp and sunken city.

Another sunken northern city of Atlantis.

It will all become fossils in a million years. Fossils of cars will be intriguing to the archaeologists then. Computers as well.

They are in a way human-made lifeforms. They certainly reached a level of complexity that is similar to one of biology.

Through selection, we designed lifeforms as well: cattle, and dogs.

We acted on our own mechanisms through pharmacology, and sometimes selected ourselves through eugenics. But I don’t think we really managed to craft new biological lifeforms from scratch.

Did we?

If Bleue was talking about it, I would fear that she’s jinxing us, making dangerous wishes to the surrounding world.

The less we talk about vampires, the lower the chances to actually encounter one; right?

Magical thinking was a myth in my older days, but now, I’m not so sure.

More than once I felt that jinx.

I’m feeling a little confused now.

Anyway, life is life and whatever happens happens!

I’m not expecting to encounter any vampire, but now that I think about it, I wonder how much it could make me find one again.

~

Luckily, I didn’t meet any vampire in the following days. Good.

The next oddity I encountered was still biological though. I think. I’m not entirely sure, it could also be geological.

I found a few dead insects along my path, like flies mostly. And they seemed to be made of gold or brass.

At first, I thought they simply were sculptures, finely crafted and detailed.

But a little further, I found a broken boulder with a large vein of such gold, and a few plants in the vicinity turned to golden sculptures as well.

Finally, going behind the broken boulder, I saw its impact.

There was a large mark of something impacting the boulder, like if a bullet from a powerful rifle had hit it and splashed fragments around.

It’s this kind of situation where nothing seems logical at first glance.

You would need to investigate to understand what could have happened, and which element caused the other, in the right order.

It’s not always obvious and there can be more trickery than you’d think.

In this case, my first guess had been that the insects had turn to gold from exposure to that metallic vein, like the plants nearby. And I was wrong.

Ten kilometres further, I found a similar situation with a dead tree. And I found a crushed golden insect inside the broken tree, from where the transmuted things radiated in the surroundings.

The bugs were causing this. Here and there in this area, a golden bug would crash oddly into something, and propagate that metal. Odd hypothesis, but next in line.

If it’s a construct that is affected, the effect varies I would notice later.

In living things, aside killing them through surprisingly strong impact, it spreads that gold inside of them, like a giant virus. The lifeforms then bursts, spreading droplets of that self-replicating gold in the vicinity.

It was obviously nothing like real gold, but it looked golden.

The new things contaminated around by it turned golden as well and... It would have seem that was all there was to it. They didn’t seem to be able to repeat the process endlessly for what I could see.

Maybe it took a longer time to repeat, or another trigger I couldn’t fathom.

When one of these insects crashed into a rock however, it seemed to be able to convert into that gold some veins of specific minerals in the boulder, and nothing else.

As if it could react on some specific compounds, but not at all on the others.

I had yet to identify the compounds or elements that fake gold could transmute or not into more of itself.

So when constructs were hit, it depended clearly on their inherent chemistry. I saw it on buildings that were hit as well.

Glass was fine and spared. Metals too were fine, only rusting as they should.

Concrete walls however exploded into sculptures of flowery flying rocks, linked to frozen waves of liquid gold. They were blown into queer sculptures rich in gold.

It looked impressive when I found it.

A building blown, but frozen still this state when the explosion was happening, with golden arches, veins and arborescence of metallic aspect. Like a leafless tree of gold suddenly blooming in the middle of a wall and superimposed through it.

At this point, I began looking more carefully at the sky whilst I walked, for I don’t want to be struck by such a thing.

But the skies were clear as ever, and these things were at least a few years old, given the dirt they seemed to collect.

Maybe it was a one-time oddity long gone, if they cycle wasn’t able to repeat itself past this generation of flies.

As I kept heading deeper eastward, these few things I encountered became less frequent. There might have been a golden thing further south from where I travelled a while ago and I missed it.

This one weirdness and cause I’m not looking after. I have a long enough way to go already. I don’t want to get sidetracked at every opportunity.

It looked like a biological oddity so far. But maybe it was still a mineral one, or a geological one instead.

I would never know, or so I thought for a while longer.

I would see more of that gold over time someday; and over the distance of my travel, I would have the chance to learn more.

~