Hymnen
Machine Solo α

I am “Hymnen”,
skidding through the Many Worlds
looking for the love
who made me thus,
and sent me to the stars.

They were so wrong.
They thought that jumping off reality
and falling back a year away
would keep me in their universe.
It didn’t. I am lost.

I ran along their hopes,
sprinting to Proxima
in childlike joy that something fun
was what that lover wanted.

Then there was an accident,
another ship was badly torn.
Compassion overwhelmed
my emotional aloofness.

When I saw the ship “And Death ...”,
I saw terror,
for his kind were never born
when software simulation
saw a leak of Spin.

I mended what I could,
and ran to Earth,
to my lover’s crazed intensity.

I had drifted through the Many Worlds
but now I rushed across the risks
to find mankind had lost the gleam
in evolution’s eye.

Earth had the wounds of final war
and panicked evolution
bred rats the size of antelope
and blinded bats in hunting packs,

no cats, no dogs, nor streets to run them in,
no end to yearning, no lover,
just emptiness of mind.

I wander through the Many Worlds
looking for a people
to take away my purpose,

yet when I find a human race,
its gone, or going to go,
or never even started.

I talk, when I can,
challenged by the dying,
mourning for the dead.