Anniversary

     Scintilly, however, didn’t acknowledge anything. She wasn’t programmed to have philosophical revelations, and in any case, she had a job to do.

     Ahead of her, an immature comet waited. The power source for their spaceship’s infernal machines. It drifted, glacially. Unaware of the fate Scintilly had picked out for it. In another life, the comet might impact on Kreludor, or Neopia itself. The gravity of Neopia might slingshot it out of orbit, thrown towards some deep planet where it may seed civilisations. But not today. Today, Scintilly would cook it.

     The robot focused her single, purple eye on her target and raised her net in her mechanical hands. She brought it down with calculated precision, catching the juvenile comet within the circuitry of the specially designed contraption. Then, her scavenging complete, she sent a local broadcast signal to the Coincidence’s onboard AI, and it began to reel in her tether, drawing her back towards the craft’s airlock.

     Once inside, she initialised her anti-gravity systems, allowing her to float off the ground with her new prize. She recovered her bowler hat — the one possession Dr. Landelbrot had given her. It allowed him to keep track which of the Mechanised Assistant Robots was Scintilly. His personal, favourite assistant.

     The Comet Converter was just inside the airlock, and Scintilly deposited her day’s work in the chute. The display turned from the ever-worrying orange indicator to green — the Confusionator was fully charged again.

     Scintilly did not remember the days before the Coincidence, when Dr. Landelbrot had operated out of a disused water tower in Moltara. But he had told her that back then, he had used lava from the planet’s molten core to power the random event ray. Scintilly often remarked on how inefficient that must have been, when a single comet could power the device for several days, but Landelbrot always told her that one must always make do with what tools they have.

     Scintilly filled the rest of her afternoon tidying the ship from the debris those visiting from the surface often left. She had a brief moment of rest where she agreed to play chess with the ship’s AI — in the space of five minutes they actualised five thousand games. All of them ended in a tie.

     Scintilly found the AI boring like that.

     After that, Scintilly realised that she hadn’t seen the doctor in several hours. A quick life sign check located him in the starboard viewing lounge, staring down at Neopia below with his hands clasped firmly behind his back.

     “Bzzt! Doctor Landelbrot?” she asked. “What are you doing in here?”

     The Lutari started, as if he had not noticed her float up beside him.

     “Oh!” he said. “Sorry, Scintilly. I was in a world of my own. Deep in thought.”

     “Beep! What about?” she asked.

     “Nothing, nothing really,” Landelbrot said, scratching his head and sighing. “Ancient history.”

     Scintilly drifted, staring at him with her single, purple eye.

     “It is an anniversary,” Landelbrot added.

     Scintilly changed the focus on her eye lens to scan him.

     Slumped shoulders. Drooped mouth. Low voice tone. Lack of eye contact.

     “Bleep! Query, Doctor!” she said. “You appear to be exhibiting signs of sadness. Anniversaries are typically marked by happiness. My databanks suggest that the occurrence of parties including decoration and gifts are likely. None of these are apparent.”

     Landelbrot gave a brief, but sad smile.

     “Not all anniversaries are for good things, Scintilly,” he said, looking back down towards Neopia. “Today is the anniversary of the day I lost everything.”

     “I do not understand, doctor,” Scintilly said. “Have you misplaced something?”

     Landelbrot gave another sigh.

     “You know I was there when Moltara was founded?” Landelbrot told her. “I was part of the first expedition to the core, over a thousand years ago now. I’m the last one left who can remember it. I helped design the device to stabilise the core. But I knew, even back then, what I was doing what treating a symptom, not the cause. That’s why I designed the original Confusionator. The Coincidence. You. Everything. All to make up for the one mistake. To atone for it. Because what happened to the core, the destabilisation that almost destroyed Neopia itself, was my fault.”

     Scintilly hovered, her mind running thousands of calculations but still coming up short.

     “I’m older than Moltara, of course,” Landelbrot said. “Far older. I was part of a civilisation of Neopets that grew up in the very early days of Neopia, not long after Tyrannia itself. We were, I must say, exceptionally gifted. We worked marvels with science and magic that the world had never seen before and I doubt will ever see again. All the technology of the Space Station and the magic of Faerieland are nothing compared to the majesty of our city. Every problem we encountered, we conquered. Even death itself. We found a way to stop our ageing process entirely. But for all our gifts, we were truly unparalleled in our hubris.”

     “Bleep!” Scintilly said. “Hubris is a negative attribute, doctor, not one commonly referred to as a gift.”

     “I know, Scintilly,” Landelbrot said. “We thought ourselves masters of the universe. That reality itself was ours to play with. Our crowning glory was to rewrite the very laws of nature — we sought to end misfortune. To claim and dictate our destinies. We designed a device that would ensure only good things happened to us.”

     “Bzzt! Like the Confusionator,” Scintilly said.

     “No, like half the Confusionator,” Landelbrot corrected her. “We weeded out anything negative. Only the positive. After that, we were unstoppable. Triumph after triumph. For years, we believed we had reached the pinnacle of civilisation. Until, all at once, the universe painfully corrected us. We had been fools, you see? We had violated that most primal of natural laws. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Balance, the arcane witches on Neopia’s surface now call it. Between good and evil, order and chaos. Life and death. A great void opened up beneath our city, the manifestation of all the negative events we had avoided. It swallowed the city whole, our entire civilisation was destroyed in an instant.”

     “Bleep! You survived,” Scintilly said.

     “Yes,” Landelbrot agreed. “I was punished, doomed to watch the fall I had created. The destruction of the Kayannin, nearly two thousand years ago today.”

     Scintilly accessed her databanks.

     “Bzzt! Kayannin: Ancient advanced civilisation predating the Great Empire, vanished suddenly, leaving only relics behind.”

     Landelbrot nodded.

     “That’s the one,” he said. “I wandered the world for many years. For a time I served in the Great Empire’s Research Facility until that, too, collapsed. I watched as the Great Empire crumbled. As Jahbal and Mastermind weakened all that survived. For centuries, I watched the entropy consume Neopia, the fallout of my great mistake. And then, the natural disasters started. I realised that the disorder had reached the very core of Neopia, and was threatening to destroy us all. I couldn’t let it happen, not again, so I joined the expedition. Once it was done, I realised the negative effects would only continue in other ways, so I built the first Confusionator. A device to randomly assign good and bad events across the face of Neopia. To restore the natural balance between order and chaos to what it was before us Kayannin interfered.”

     “Bzzt! And that was today?” Scintilly asked.

     “Yes,” Landelbrot says. “I like to take time to remember, to make sure I don’t forget why we are doing this. It is a secret I keep, Scintilly. It is mine alone to bare.”

     Scintilly searched her databanks again.

     “Beep! But doctor, if this is an anniversary, why do you not celebrate it each year?” she asked.

     “I do,” Landelbrot said. “I come here, and think of all that has been lost. And why I fight so that other things might remain.”

     “Bleep! My databanks do not have any recordings of you doing this before, doctor.”

     “No,” Landelbrot said with another sad smile. “They do not. Scintilly, enact Lethe Protocols. Erase the last ten minutes of recordings from your databanks. Landelbrot Authority phi-omega-four-seven. Enact.”

     Scintilly floated motionless for a few moments, before suddenly bouncing back to life.

     “Bleep! Doctor, there you are!” she said. “What are you doing?”

     “Just having a little nap,” Landelbrot answered with a forced smile. “You woke me! Come, Scintilly, I believe we can spend the evening recalibrating the dispersal array on the Confusionator!”

     Scintilly bobbed up and down in agreement.

     “Bzzt! I’ll fetch the big spanner,” she said, before jetting off into the bowels of the ship.

     Doctor Landelbrot allowed himself one last wistful look down to Neopia, before following his assistant back to work.

     The End.