I'll make a very tentative post as the One of the Waste. I agree with the compromise.

~Orykell~

A hectic time. I am spread thin, trying to keep all the machinery running at once despite various malfunctions. How much longer can I keep this up? How much longer before the high-dwelling humans' ignorance of what happens below will cause something crucial to run down? How long until the city dies? How long until I die?

This is worse than I've ever seen it. No sooner have I dealt with one problem than another one takes its place. The pace increases little by little. How long? How long? And then, quite suddenly, the answer hits me: not long now. Not long at all. I cannot simply fix the malfunctions and still hope to keep the city- and myself- alive. I must become the malfunctions, their machinery and their essence. Whatever barrier exists between me and the city must be surmounted.

My time has come.

It will require immense concentration. I must return wholly to my body, then let it die and take the city as my body. For the few minutes required, I must leave the machinery alone. Much of it will shut down without my presence, but then I will become it, and it will have me for as long as the city stands. The doing is ardouous. Every building or boiler or meter of rock I extract myself from is a battle. It feels wrong, so wrong that I begin to feel sick from the wrongness alone. But, finally, I feel myself take a breath, a real one, for the first time in...Decades? Centuries? I have completely lost track. But it is my final breath; that I know with absolute certainty.  And the last thing my old body senses, as my being spreads from it out into the city itself, is the girl-robot I have watched for so long. She has breached my cavern, but I no longer care.

Freedom is a wonderful thing indeed. 

This thread shall not die, ever, if I can help it, at least. Top!