The SIlver Evolution by Alex Tarbet The Golems' world was perfect. It was flawless - every minutest detail on the smallest stone was unblemished and pure, and every matter was balanced, as if it all stood on a pin and was not teetering the slightest bit. Equivalence gave the world its beauty, covered its features in a comfortable velvet, and spread its wings in phenomenal perpetuity. It was a pristine and brilliant image - the Sun rose and fell day by day, the landscape laid staring at the sheer, undiminished and infinite azure sky, and life stayed beautiful and meaningful, an image of perfection.Besides trees and vegetation, the Golems were the life upon this world, the inhabiting creatures who flavored it with serene movement and motion. They were all shapes and sizes - some small and quick, some large and lumbering, but all in coherence with the others, in a simple equilibrium. They were made out of the matter of the world, the rock and stone, as well as the air and water, mixed into every shape imaginable. Their bodies were made out of clay, and minds made out of all substances. The Golems were creatures of almost mindless inhabitancy, following instinctive dwelling and upkeep of themselves. They lived in conjuncture with such equality that morals did not exist; the creatures had not the ability to decide on right or wrong, good or bad. There were no diversifying emotions and no difference of purpose but to survive heartily in their perfect world. In the very beginning, before the slights of development, there were only Brown Golems, which were the original dwellers of the world. These were in every shape, molded into usable forms for survival. They ate the trees and the plants of the world, and some made use of others' physical content as a food source. After many years, circumstance and deviation let some Golems become huge and reflective, which became Silver Golems. These were nusually stable-bodied and intelligent -- however - to define the intelligence of a Golem would be like comparing the colors of two sheets of glass. The Golems did not make decisions in a preemptive, uncontrolled manner. There was the Voice, something no Golem understood or questioned. It was the languageless instruction in the mind of every Golem, which contrasted pathways and used reasoning - the animator of the Golems' judgement. It was the internship holding up the natural harmonic with the world. It was never considered undefined, as it was the definer, and let Golems go about their lives in an organized, comfortable, beautiful way. The Silver Golems were unusually resistant to the Voice, even before they lost it altogether. They had developed over years of the world's perfection, a composite of reflection and mass physical prowess. Their flesh was not deeply colored and hard as was the Brown Golems'. Instead it was mirror, a ruminative coat that bent and banished the Sun at the same time. These different creatures were unpredictable even to the Voice itself. One early morning when the Sun was barely reaching its golden forearms across the horizon, a Silver Golem was completing afresh his menial tasks and perpetual somatic survival actions, as were the rest of the Golems, when he suddenly felt very ill (which was odd, for a Golem being ill was something that happened only under the most scrutinizing circumstance), and fell to his knees. He gulped for air and hacked and coughed, his instinctive tactics awaking in the presence of immanent death. However, these were to no avail, and the Silver Golem soon lay flattened on the dirt, yelids shut, his breaths short and painful. As he lay there unconscious, the Silver Golem underwent a revolutionary change. The illness, a disease that would never be seen in another creature, climbed from his chest into his head and began shredding and tearing and organizing the contents into an engineered mass. His thoughts were scrambled and discarded, the instinctive glands severed, and the entire mass perturbed by the tools of a biological physician scurrying around inside. The Brown Golems that passed by this scene inertly saw nothing but a giant sleeping mirror twitching and jerking as if in a sudden, painful dream. All of the Silver Golems fell to the ground like this - some screamed in a way that had never been heard by the world before - and the disease crept and crawled across their bodies, reformatting and dismantling them, rupturing the essence of equilibrium inside their heads, and mutating their original state into a confused, hissing, fighting personal drive. The disease disappeared in the same time it had come, suddenly vanishing, spiraling away screaming and struggling, as if some minute, benevolent arm had caught it at the final moment before the painful death of the Silver Golems would have occurred. Unfortunately, as a result, the Voice would never be heard by a Silver Golem again. The Silver Golems awoke as one, and climbed to their knees, then to their feet. Their eyes were no longer directionless and content, but passionate and emotional and restless. One Silver Golem's face melted in a grimace of figuring as he bent and grasped two stones from the ground, and hit them together until they were broken into fragments, like a wondering, speculating child might have. The Golems were now in a strange emotional pain, now suffering under the cold, open sky and heartless council of horizons, now fearing the Brown Golems that crept by them in such an aimed ambulation. The Silver Golems had gone mad, and the equilibrium of the world had been disrupted. The Silver Golems searched for shelter from the disconsolate, inanimate sky, shakily testing their legs for the first time without the Voice there to guide them. The Sun was overhead now, a bleary dome of sunlight descending upon the world's face, seemingly discorded and saddened by the retreat of the Silver Golems from its embrace. The landscape turned from bliss to stone, disheartened by the sudden loss of a forever companion, a harbringing of baleful change nearing. Every Silver Golem gathered with another in caves and under great trees, and started to develop the greatest accomplishment in all of that world's history - communication. They started using their hands to tell of structural ideas and commands, then advanced to using their mouths to form sounds. This estranged a factor of the Brown Golems, in which the mouth was used for eating, and sounds used for warning and immediate aid requestance, nothing more. The sounds began to be shallow and deep, began to develop meaning and personality. Secluded areas across the world began to be filled with the infantile jabber of thousands, and the Brown Golems precociously took shelter far from these areas, suddenly feeling the fear that would exist for the rest of time. The Silver Golems had soon developed a culture based around guttural communication and began to work together to achieve a common goal: survival. However, survival was accomplished easily, as the single-mindedness of a group of Silver Golems was never outmatched, and bigger things were to be had. The forests of the planet consisted of exotic plants and towering trees made out of clay, made ceramic by the Sun. They drank undercurrents of water beneath the dirt, and lived silently, giving the world a feel of adjunctive mass. These forests supplied Golems with nutrition, as the clay of trees funded the clay of golems. Brown Golems were also an excellent source of food for the Silver Golems, as their content was a practical restoration. So the Silver Golems moved onto something that would demolish the perfection of the universe forever. They found greed. The forests were torn down by large groups of Silver Golems, now vividly communicating and able to accomplish the building of massive structures. Clay from trees and water from rivers were given to the Sun to make shelter from it, and soon gargantuan creatures lay waste to the forests, and trampled the Brown Golems underneath. These were cities, and would be the first step across a long, lonesome, breaking bridge. The Brown Golems stayed with the Voice, living as equal as ever, but were blatantly stunned with the sudden attack of Silver Golems. They were crushed into bits and dealt out to the Silver Golems ritually, or were enslaved into shackles and forced to help construct the devices that would conquer their own world. Silver Golems soon had empires everywhere, but greed would not be satisfied. The work to achieve perfection in their eyes could never be done by Golems alone, so the ingenious, communicative minds set themselves together to construct something that could. Metallurgy was discovered in the form of chips of rare, hard stone pressured together under massive weights. Soon weak and skeletal machines released desert from drought, but upkeep of these, the need of oiling and reconstruction, destroyed all that was left. These were not enough, however, and not a single Golem was satisfied. Fire was discovered when lightning shot down and devastated one city; the Golems knew not of a way to stop the spreading of the destructive orange stuff, and set their minds to using it instead. Soon metallurgy was greatly improved by heating and melting the hard stone. The Golems finally did not need Sunlight. Sunlight itself was growing more and more despised by the Golems, as they found it crusted their stony flesh and permeated their bodies with unwanted warmth. Forests were despised because they were full of dangerous Brown Golems (dangerous because the Silver Golems could not stand being stared at by dumb beasts), and problem after problem needed solving to achieve perfection. Thus from the intelligence and actions of the Silver golems, life began to grow enjoyable and easy to live, instead of savage and meaningless. Sociality developed as communication grew more powerful and important, and soon was hung like a noose around the necks of every Silver Golem in the world. Social classes and hierarchy evolved from useless equality, and organization was derived where there was none. Personal opinions appeared, communications grew as minds did not, and war broke out. War was something the world had not seen before - was merciless and violent, with little purpose for either. Opinion was a phantom, being chased by hundreds of strangling Golems, each keeping no distance from the others. The world was growing up quickly, and its adolescence was chaotic. The drowning need for happiness plagued the minds of the Golems, and soon another factor appeared - Science. Science was born as a result of the needs to survive in a greedy world. Life needed to be shaped right so that hungry persons could swallow instead of taste. Along with science came wonderment and the question of purpose. Seeing such a perfect world, precious few Silver Golems thought that it must be controlled by someone somewhere, so they slept for years in order to obtain those rare sacred visions that determine what the truth is. Most never stopped sleeping. Soon altars were erected after visions were had, and more wars were fought over the truth of these, and more science was invented to prove everyone wrong about it all. The Voice compassionately whispered on to the Brown Golems throughout this. ********************** After thousands of years of chaos, the Silver Golems had finally developed a perfect world. There were billions of Silver Golems by now, ten for each crying, bleeding, or domesticated Brown Golem. Society had become the tyrant of the intelligent and the mentor of the foolish, and communications had inbred into an easy-going mainstream. Cities had grown and quadrupled in size and frequency, as had the Golems themselves, and the world couldn't get less Sunnier. The world was finally liveable. Life was pre-determined by an eager society, intelligence was measured in stature, the mysteries of the world had been explored and discovered, and the Voice had nearly been purged from the universe. Perfection. Unfortunately the forests and resources of the world were under constant detriment, and close to being completely consumed, but the public was unaware, and therefore safe. Society shook a finger at those very, very few who sought to improve the fate of the world, and life went by majority-rule, which was beautifully rich for the majority. Those who saw immanent pain where there was supposed happiness were called pessimistic, and ignored. Those who lived slowly and truly happily were moneyless and homeless, because someone else owned the homes and the money. The Purpose had been devised by everyone - and everyone had devised their own Purpose. To soothe the conscience of a bleeding community, fellowships were created that stated that Silver Golems were the rightful owners of the world, and that the resources would never be depleted, and that social differences will be punished accordingly - so all these things were fine. If the rightful owners of the world were an army, then life had become a march, wherein all feet were to step at the same time, same colors of wear were to be shown, and faces were to be all happy, no matter the puddles that were marched through. Life had become redundant due to an over-fluctuation of Golems that thought they should tell others how to march. Science had begun as a way to further the happiness in the lives of the Silver Golems. Unfortunately it had mostly destroyed the lives of everything else. In these perfect times, science had become the retarded little man in the bell tower, there to tell if an enemy's army was approaching. Science had become the foreseeing pull when society ignorantly shouted, "Push." Science had played hard in conquering the Voice, and in the perfect times began to see its mistake, began to see the detriment and hurt of a vanishing lifeblood, and began to reform its ways to help the entire world instead of the Silver Golems' selfish, greedy need for happiness. Science turned around after thousands of years of marching toward obliteration. The world was indeed perfect, and would stay perfect without a difference somewhere... However... A drop of water can fall into a pond and create waves ten times its size. The Voice droops wearily - it is too weak now, too unheard of, to ever fight against the vast flow of marching footsteps. It needs the help of a drop of water, and waves to wash the detriment away, lest it, and everything else, be destroyed forever. The new flawlessness of the Silver Golems is the destroyer of their world, and without some hope (it takes but one single drop of water!) of reconciliation against the blunt ignorance of society and the doubtfulness of victory over defeat, there is no chance but for science alone to save the Silver Golems' perfect world.