11.07.2005 - 8:08 p.m.

I wrote this ages ago but (obviously) have only just posted it, it's not going to gain any prizes for prose but i like it and now it's here i can forget about it....go to the next or previous entries which are slightly more interesting. 'slightly'

They had no concept of the past or the future, they just were. They had no name for themselves, they existed and that was enough. Their population was huge, diverse and long lived but there was no history they were aware of, just the passing of time.

The planet though was a hostile environment to them, exposure to its caustic, oxidising and radiation bathed environment meant near instant destruction. Over thousands of millions of orbits around the local star, they learned to manipulate their surroundings at the molecular level with precision and dexterity. They created armour around themselves from the local material so that they could withstand the environment, and interact with it. Over time they refined this armour through trial and error into immense and hugely complicated machines and they roamed unchallenged over the face of the planet.

There were disasters. Meteorites fell from the skies and volcanoes erupted from the ground, poisoning everything around them. After their population was decimated time after time the survivors picked up where they could and carried on, the dead were dead and no longer contributing, only the living could shape the future.

The population was sexual, unions produced offspring and the offspring inherited from the parents the knowledge to survive. The desire or need to survive was all that drove them, never go back, never regress, move forward and adapt or die. Mutants came and went, some were advantageous, some failed, the lucky ones found they were stronger or faster, they survived at the expense of the weak.

The need to expand led them to exploit everything the planet had to offer. Certain aspects of the population found they could specialise to progress to new and fresh locations and use new resources, other parts of the population were content to rest in forms that had not changed in millenia, and had no reason to change.

Over time, the Machines they built to protect themselves became smarter, and learned to think for themselves and to question what they saw. Cocooned inside the Creators resided, the evolution of the Machines was a natural progression of their own existence and was no threat. The Machines looked deep within themselves and saw the resting creators, they did not fully understand the Creators or how they came to be there, they had to accept it as part of their existence. They were symbiotic with the Creators and dependant on them for their own continuation, where one leads the other must follow.

The primal need to expand, to be part of the larger picture led them to look up, beyond the atmosphere of the planet was boundless space. The Creators had no knowledge of space, their Machines did understand, but they only knew that their destiny lay in the stars, though it would be millions of orbits more before they left the planet. In all that time the Creators would still be there, a ghost in the machine, guiding and leading their creations, time is irrelevant, only the ceaseless drive remains.

The story never ends, for the Creators time has no meaning, and as long as enough of the population survived the periods of natural destruction to re-populate they would never die.

The Machines knew only what they could discover for themselves, they could not communicate with the Creators and would learn nothing even if they could. They were driven by deep, ingrained instincts to expand and explore, to colonise everything that was available to them, they were now a population in their own right, but they were and always had been merely vessels for the Creators.