Data Dump

The exponential shall transcend the stagnant

Under the surface we're not machines

Under the surface we're living dreams

Death lives just one breath away

Somewhere my heart beats in silence

I make my way through the violence

Nobody lives forever

- Fear Factory, Genexus: Expiration Date

The gas giant loomed above as an ominous ring. Its center cold and dark, save for whatever spare moonlight its smaller companions could muster. An overwhelming presence that dominated the sky, its bands of red, gold, white, and gray swirling in an unceasing cosmic ballet. No stars dared to shine here, the faint distant light of the milky way invisible in the glare of the behemoth’s blinding edges. The ground beneath the two figures cracked and shifted, still warm from recent tectonic upheavals, as sulfurous fumes occasionally escaped in silent, ghostly plumes. The men, clad in dark graphene weave suits, moved as though they belonged here, immune to the alien landscape.

Aurochs and Joson, with their deliberate, precise movements, were unconcerned by the heat. This moon, tidally locked to both its parent planet and sun would never face the blue star’s searing fury.

They reached the ruins—a crumbled tower that may have once scraped the sky but now stood hollow, skeletal. Scattered about the interior were the remains of ancient machines, long dead and buried under fine layers of sapphire and white dust, relics of forgotten technology. Then, among the debris, a silhouette. Human-shaped, but unmistakably wrong. It lay curled on its side as though frozen mid-slumber, awaiting a dawn that would never come to this moon.

Aurochs nudged the figure with the tip of his boot. Dust rose and drifted lazily in the still air.

“It is human... but not,” Joson’s voice broke the silence, his tone neutral yet laced with curiosity.

Kneeling, Joson took a cloth from his pouch—a shimmering fabric that caught the faint light—and wiped away the dust. The skull beneath was not organic, not even close. Where bone should have been, there was dark, pitted metal, weathered by centuries of decay. In places, a dull chrome-blue sheen hinted at what once must have been pristine, untouched by time or entropy.

“An artifact… this far out?” Aurochs muttered, his voice tinged with disbelief.

“Seems so,” Joson replied, though there was something unsettling about the discovery.

The men, tall and impossibly muscular, deep set bony visages, shared a glance. Without a trace of hair on their heads, faces or brow, the living statues were unreadable beneath their cold, pragmatic exteriors.

From a simple elastic pouch on his waistband, Joson retrieved a small titanium band. Without a word, he placed it on his forehead, and it sprang to life, tiny legs extending from its edges and securing it to the grey patches embedded in his skin, a cap of gray polymer fabric expanding to cover his bare alabaster scalp secured in place. A laser flickered across his retina, and in his vision, translucent windows unfurled, glowing faintly in teal.

“Trim the noise,” he commanded. Instantly, half the windows vanished.

“Focus: humanoid.”

Data cascaded across the primary display. A 3D model of the figure beneath him rotated slowly, feeding lines of information into his mind. The analysis was swift: titanium, silicon, aluminum, polymers, tungsten. More interesting still—graphenex alloys, ferrofluid residues. This was no simple machine.

“Not just any artifact,” Aurochs murmured, donning his own visorband. The glowing screens reflected in his eyes.

“Artifact classification: golem,” Joson said aloud, though both knew what they were looking at.

Aurochs crouched next to him, scrutinizing the form. “It’s small… weak. Not built for combat.” His brow furrowed. “A sentry?”

Joson’s hand traced the curve of the figure’s chest, brushing away more dust and fragments of what was once a suit, revealing the contours beneath. There was no traditional skeleton, only a support frame that hinted at a distinctly feminine form. And there, atop the head, the remnants of hair—fragile strands that had somehow survived the ravages of time.

“Not a sentry,” Joson’s voice was low. “A consort.”

“A consort?” Aurochs echoed, the word foreign to him. He glanced at the machine again, as though seeing it anew. “Why so delicate?”

Joson’s gaze remained on the figure. “Do you recall the historical archives? From before… Man as we know him?”

Aurochs’s lips twitched into a rare smirk. “Wo-man,” he pronounced, the syllables rolling awkwardly off his tongue, followed by a dry, humorless chuckle. The noise was uncannily deep, unsettling, devoid of warmth.

The two stood in silence for a moment, the wind howling faintly outside the ruins.

Joson’s visor flashed with new data. “Beginning data retrieval,” he muttered, ignoring Aurochs’s disapproving glance.

“Heresy,” Aurochs hissed, his tone sharp.

Joson chuckled darkly. “Valuable data” he countered dryly, but continued. “Data dump in progress.”

The visor filled with streams of ancient code and broken memories. The ruins seemed to groan in protest, as though the very act of retrieving this information was a violation of the dead world’s silence.

Then, something shifted. Joson froze.

“Wait…”

Aurochs straightened. “Problem?”

Joson hesitated. “Negative. Just a glitch.” He shrugged, though his expression betrayed unease.

Unseen by either of them, a faint red glow flickered behind the dust-coated eye of the machine. A spark of life, a whisper from the past. The light flared briefly, casting long shadows against the cracked walls—then faded again, swallowed by the eternal twilight of the gas giant's shine.

Part II :