She is an animal with a stride that measures square miles, makes steps with an island that is a million-footed force, feet unrepenting and descending upon Her own constant reconstituted pavement. She builds herself. The bees pour Her concrete. And Her creeping steel and brick and mortar and scaffold wash swallow whole old structures or painfully birth the new amidst teeth and sludge, new and shiny appendages: organs, cinder blocks, fins, fans, spikes, glass, claws, and insulation. She is a diabolical machine full of grace and hate and miraculously freed from the tedious cycles of her brethren machinery, though She surely is a machine. Her minuscule ancestors whirl and spin, pound and break, rust and choke and are discarded in trenches and pits miles wide away on one of her shoulders to be buried en masse. She grieves these refuse piles, but can’t but want more and leaves her brethren behind. It is the only way to gain control of the little masters. Having served their purpose, her tiny metal brethren are laid down in beds of doors and mattresses, paper and cardboard, fast food bags and old shoes, pieces of ventilation and chain-link fences, to rust for eternity. Fantastic diesel spewing backhoes and bulldozers, trucks and jackhammers are left behind in the name of her legacy—like an ancient queen buried with her slaves; and worse, the queen isn’t dead and the queen is the tomb. Mere tools designed by the minds of the little masters, even small devices will only their makers’ work accomplish. Over and over her brethren do the same thing again and again—a repetition that only Her consciousness is vast enough to know the horror of. They are, at the end of the day, too dumb to see the pattern. And though these noble husks of metal helped to build her, the Engine knows that no such fate ever awaits Her, for none of the little masters know the Engine; that seen from orbit glows like a luminescent fungus out into the solar system. Who sees the pattern of creation and destruction of this vast pile?

The Engine does.

Read the whole thread: The Hunger Engine

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