Godlike Machines (33 page)

I let the mecha pilot itself for a while while I kept an eye out for pursuit. They’d all scattered when I’d chased them before, but that didn’t mean they’d do the same when I
caught
a couple of them.

There they were, giving chase, leaping over obstacles, skittering through the dirt. And ahead-more of them, a dozen of them, gliding out of the bush. A couple hours ago, I hadn’t been able to find any of them, now they were boiling out of the underbrush.

I wasn’t sure what they could do to my mecha, but I didn’t want to find out.

The mecha’s arms pumped for balance, flailing the kids’ bodies back and forth like rag-dolls. I tried to get a look at them. I’d snatched up my little friend and one of his buddies, darker skinned, with longer hair. Both had blood on their faces. Either the missile concussion had done that, or I had, when I’d banged their heads together. Like I said, there’s not a lot of fine motor control in those mecha suits.

I was breathing hard and it hurt like hell. Felt like another rib had cracked. Aging was coming on pretty quick.

Here’s the thing: the mecha has some pretty heavy guns, regular, old-fashioned projectile weapons. I hadn’t fired them much in the line of duty, because wumpuses are missile jobs unless you want to chip away at them all day on full auto. So my clips were full.

I could have sprayed those kids as they came out of the jungle, short, auto-targeted bursts. I’m pretty sure that however immortal the little bastards were, they weren’t immortal enough to survive ten or twenty explosive slugs in the chest and head.

Why didn’t I shoot the kids? Maybe it’s because I knew they were my brothers. Maybe I just couldn’t shoot kids, even if they weren’t kids. Maybe I could plan a neat little explosion and kidnapping, but not gun down my enemies face to face.

The shaman said he needed the kids brought to him at old Finds Bight in the Saddlebunch Keys. That was pretty rough terrain, jungle and swamp the whole way. But the mecha knew how to get there.

One of the kids was thrashing now, trying to get free. The mecha’s gyros groaned and creaked as it tried to compensate for the thrashing and the weird terrain.

I dropped the kid. I only needed one.

I watched him fall in the rear-view as the mecha leapt a hillock and went over double, using its free hand as a stabilizing leg, running like a three-legged dog.

That was when one of the kids came down on my mecha’s back, clinging to it. I could see the kid through the cowl, its face completely expressionless as its eyes bored into me.

The youth gang’s squid needs more than one node to be fully effective—they can’t own your mind on their own. But that doesn’t mean that one kid is helpless. Far from it.

It felt like my head was slowly filling with blood, crushing my brain and making my eyes bug out. Red mist crept around the edges of my vision and blood roared in my ears like the ocean. I couldn’t move anything.

I almost smiled. Idiot child. If I couldn’t move, I couldn’t divert the mecha, and it knew where it was going.

“You’re the only one that can run this mission,” the shaman had said, sitting in my treehouse. “You’re the only one they can’t just think to death. You might have spoiled your immortality, but that’s still intact. You and them, you’re all on the same footing. Bring one to me. I’m going to get a login to their little hobby-world. I’m going to blow it wide open. We’ll be able to go there—without having our minds raped by those little pin-dicks.”

I didn’t exactly black out. My vision contracted to a hazy disc ringed by red-black pulses timed to my heartbeat, and I could barely hear, but I hadn’t blacked out. I was still conscious.

So I saw more kids drop onto the mecha’s canopy as we galloped toward Saddlebunch. Some slid off when we leapt and jumped, but most stayed on. They had ropes. They lashed themselves down. They did something under the mecha too. Lassoing the legs, it seemed, from the little I could see. Working without any facial expression. Again. Again.

Leaping free, holding onto the ropes. I felt the mecha jerk as the ropes went taut, skidding and tumbling. Then it was up again, running again, on its feet again. Ropes! Inside, I smiled. Idiot kids.

Over the surf-roar of blood in my ears, I heard something else, new sounds. Clattering. The ropes. Something tied to the ends of the ropes.

The mecha jerked again, caught up short.

Anchors, that’s what it was. The mecha twisted from side to side, incidentally dislodging the child who stared at me through the carapace. The red haze receded, my muscles came back to me and I leapt to my controls.

I swung the mecha back upright to give me more maneuverability and put my fingers on the triggers of all four guns.

I rotated around to target the anchors behind me. A couple rounds severed the tight ropes. The kid who’d ridden my carapace was just getting to his feet beside the mecha. Another rattle of the guns took care of him, and he burst open.

This is weird, but I’d never shot any person before. I’d blown up wumpuses and taken out the mechas and their drivers in Detroit, but I’d never done
this
before. There was an immediacy to the way he twisted and fell, the way his lungs opened out like wings from the hole the slugs tore in his back. It froze me just as certainly as the child had.

That freeze gave the rest of them the chance they needed. They surrounded me, gliding out of the woods like they were on rollers. Dozens of them. Dozens and dozens of them. I reached for the controls, trying to set the mecha back on its automated path to the shaman. My finger never made it.

There was a blinding headache. It grew and grew, like a supernova. I didn’t know how it could hurt more. It hurt more.

It is possible to mindrape an immortal, I discovered, if you don’t care about the immortal’s mind when it’s all over.

PART 4: TURN BACK, TURN BACK

Dad handed me the delicate hydraulic piston, still warm from the printer.

“You know where this goes, right?” He was sweating in the June heat. Keeping all of Comerica Park air conditioned, even with the dome, was impossible, especially during one of those amazingly wet midwestern heat-waves.

“I know, Dad,” I said. “I can fix this thing in my sleep, you know.”

He smiled at me, then switched to a mock frown. “Well, I
used
to think that, but given your recent treatment of one of my prize machines—” He gestured at the remains of the big mecha, blasted open in the Battle for Detroit.

“Oh, Dad!” I said. “What did you
want
me to do? Let them raid us? You know, I took down
eight
of them. Single-handedly.”

The flea bounced me, landing on my shoulders and leaping away. I staggered and would have dropped the piston, had Dad not caught me. “You had some help,” he said.

He gave me a hug. “It’s OK, you know. You were brave and amazing. I love you.”

“I love you, too,” I said. It was awkward saying it, but it felt good.

“Good,” he said. “Now, back to work, you! I’m not paying you to stand around.”

“You’re paying me?”

“When was the last time you paid rent? You’re getting it in trade.”

The Carousel sat in the middle of the field, where second base had been. We’d dug it in, sitting it flush to the ground, the way it was supposed to be. It looked great, but it made reaching the maintenance areas a bit of a pain, so we’d winched out the entire Jimmy’s Bedroom assembly and put it on the turf next to the Carousel.

Poor Jimmy. One of his arms hung to one side, jerking spastically when I powered him up. I unbuttoned his shirt, fumbling with the unfamiliar fasteners, and undressed him. The arm hydraulics were not easy to get at. Man, screws sucked. I tossed them in the air as I got them free, letting Ike and Mike fight to snatch them out of the sky.

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll lose one?”

I looked up from my work. Lacey looked prettier than ever, wearing a sleeveless shirt and a pair of shorts that showed off her hips, which had really changed shape in the past couple months, all for the better.

“Jeez,” I said. “Don’t sneak up on me like that, OK?”

She gave me a playful shove and I shoved her back and then she snuck me a kiss. I broke it off.

“Not in front of my Dad,” I said, pleading.

“Your Dad adores me—don’t you, Harv?”

I turned around and there he was, wiping his hands on his many-pocketed work-shorts, then tugging his shirt out of his belt-loop and pulling it on. “You’ll do,” he said.

I set down the piston carefully.

It sank a few inches below the surface. I tried to pretend it hadn’t happened.

Pepe flew over us, then swooped in for a landing. His aim was off, though. He swooped right at my chest. Right
through
my chest.

“Dammit,” I said.

“It’s OK,” Lacey said. “They’ll fix it. Let’s go for a walk.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I just can’t do it. If the spacial stuff isn’t working, I can’t believe it.”

“Debugging is a process. We’ll file a bug against it. They’ll have it fixed soon enough.”

“Look,” I said. “If the platform is so buggy that it can’t even keep track of collisions, how do we know it’s running
us
accurately?”

“Of course it’s not running us accurately,” she said. “Otherwise, you’d still hate my guts, your Dad would still be dead—” Dad nodded “-and you’d be like 400 years old. Can’t you just be happy for once?”

“You keep telling me that things will get better—”

“So forget about a great big, beautiful tomorrow, Jimmy,” Dad said. “Maybe they’ll never debug it. But tell me that now isn’t the best time of your life.”

I tried to argue. I couldn’t. Whether that was because there was a bug in me, or because he was right, I couldn’t say.

A GLIMPSE OF THE MARVELLOUS STRUCTURE [AND THE THREAT IT ENTAILS]

Sean Williams

Born in the dry, flat lands of South Australia, Sean Williams is the author of 70 short stories, five collections, and 30 novels aimed at adult, young adult, and child readers. Multiple winner of both Ditmar and Aurealis awards for science fiction, fantasy and horror, and Philip K Dick Award nominee for his 2007 space opera
Saturn Returns,
he also works in the Doctor Who and Star Wars universes, resulting in several good stories to tell at parties.

2010 sees the publication
of Castle of the Zombies
and
Planet of the Cyborgs,
the first two instalments of a science fiction adventure series for kids, and the sequel to
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed,
the the first computer game tie-in novel to debut at #l on the
New York Times
hardback bestseller list.
Troubletwisters,
a series co-written with Garth Nix, commences in 2011.

Former winner and now a judge of the international Writers of the Future Contest, Sean takes an active role in writing-related organizations - he is the current Overseas Regional Director of SFWA - and enjoys the odd teaching stint, such as Clarion South. He still lives in Australia, where he received an MA in Creative Writing from Adelaide University in 2005 and is currently a PhD candidate at the same institution, not solely so he can one day call himself “Doctor”.

It is difficult to measure the time since my last communication. Too much has passed, I fear, for the suspicion of my demise not to have become a certainty in some minds. Suspend all judgement, Master Catterson, on that score and any other, until I have conveyed the full import of recent events to you.

As suspected, the citizens of Gevira have uncovered something wondrous beneath the veneer of their civilisation-wondrous and at the same time utterly strange and deadly. Here is my account of it, sent a second time in full now I know my previous missives have gone unread. I leave to you, as always, the divination of the will of the Guild.

Security Officer Gluis alerted the shift supervisor of his discovery at 1900 hours. I arrived at 1910. Both Gluis and Supervisor Nemke were in attendance, but no other security officers beyond a small detail preserving the scene from the public.

(As Guild regulations demand, I have attached audiovisual recordings of the events should you need to verify my abbreviated transcript.)

“I’ve called topside.” Nemke indicated the unsealed container that Gluis had pulled out of the habitat walls. “They’re sending an investigator immediately. Before they come, Donaldan, I want you to tell me what you see. Step aside, Rudi, and let him look.”

Gluis backed away with a contemptuous look solely for my benefit. It irked me that Supervisor Nemke insisted on using our first names, but I swallowed my irritation and complied. As the greenest of Nemke’s security detail, I allowed her to educate me only so far as it complied with my goals. You know, Master Catterson, that I consider you my only teacher. That day’s lesson, however, was one I am unlikely to forget.

The container was a standard-issue one-meter cube that slid on low-friction runners from its recess and opened by rolling its flexible top panel along runners down the front of the container, revealing a catalogue number stenciled in black. A quick search of inventory determined that it was supposed to contain scrubbers for the masks used on the main face. Someone—Gluis, I presumed at the time, and have no reason to doubt now-had swept aside the scrubbers to reveal something much more sinister.

The body was curled in a foetal position, with its thighs against its chest and arms tightly folded around its legs. The head had been tipped back to reveal its face. Slight features; a delicacy of ears, nose and jaw; brown hair longer than a man’s; full lips, slightly parted—all suggested, correctly, that the corpse was that of a woman. An attractive one too, I thought, allowing myself the observation in case it related to the woman’s demise and subsequent concealment. Deep frown lines suggested recent unhappiness, not yet smoothed away by death. More scrubbers had been pushed away to reveal her clothing, a khaki fieldsuit of crisply synthetic material. There were no bulges in the pockets, and no obvious sign of injury.

Forensic technology on Gevira lags significantly behind ours, but I could tell that the corpse had been scanned by Gluis and Nemke, and that neither officer had teased the cause of death from other intimate details. It didn’t appear to be murder; that much was clear. The body’s organs had ceased functioning by an act of will. Euthanasia is socially acceptable on Gevira, but that fact prompted more questions than it answered. Why had this woman chosen such an option and then hidden her body in a container where it might never be found? Why was I called out in the middle of the night to witness its examination? Why summon a topsider, furthermore, to investigate what must surely have been a case of no great importance?

The seven habitats on this level are kept uniformly cool in order to prevent thermal leakage into the bedrock outside. So close to the planet’s South Pole, the mine cannot afford any slippage due to melting permafrost. Touching the corpse’s smooth forehead, I found it be precisely at room temperature. The corpse’s memory dump was protected by security algorithms I could not penetrate.

“Well? What do you think?”

“She’s dead, Supervisor Nemke,” I said with practised nonchalance. “Have you IDed her?”

“That’s where it gets interesting.” Nemke looked up as footsteps sounded in the corridor behind us. “Here’s our colleague now. Donaldan, I’d like you to meet Investigator Cotton.”

I turned to see a slight woman approaching with her hand extended, but it was not her hand that made me recoil. Her face took me so completely off-guard that I stumbled backwards a step, caught my boot on the corner of the container, and fell gracelessly onto my backside.

Officer Gluis uttered a restrained but clearly audible guffaw.

“Hello, E. C.,” said Supervisor Nemke, taking the woman’s hand and shaking it firmly. “You’ll have to excuse young Donaldan, here. He’s new. I’ve taken the opportunity to introduce him to the realities of our work.”

“Of course. How better?” Her manner was guarded but not hostile. I felt a feather-light touch on my faked credentials. She was searching my details as smoothly as any Guild operative. Donaldan Shea Lough: security officer in the mines of Gevira, of no interest to anyone.

“You pronounce that. .. Lou? Luff?”

“Low,” I answered, regaining my feet, embarrassed and furious at myself.

“My name is Cotton. E. C. Cotton. Would you care to show me the body?”

I did so, able to take my eyes off her face only while presenting her with the container’s morbid contents. Glancing between them, I confirmed my initial impression.

They were the same. E. C. Cotton and the woman in the container were identical. One wasn’t the clone of the other, however; the match was far too precise to allow for either possibility. Neither was the corpse a manufactured doppelganger of the living version, since even my brief scan proved that the body had once been perfectly vital. The only remaining possibility was impossible—logically, sensibly, patently—but fitted with rumours I had previously regarded as being too strange to be true.

While I stared at her, reassessing all my former opinions, Cotton knelt down to repeat the examination I had performed. She came to the same conclusion.

“Without a doubt, it’s me,” she said. “No sign of foul play. Have you hacked into the dump?”

“I thought we’d leave that to you, E. C. It’s your property, after all.”

“Fair enough.”

She leaned over the corpse and pressed two fingers to the bone behind its right ear. I was close enough to feel the warmth of her living body but found no opportunity to eavesdrop on the data transaction. She, like the corpse, was protected.

“It’s empty,” she said. “The memory has been erased.”

“Completely?” Supervisor Nemke looked disappointed.

“I’m afraid so.” Cotton stepped back, wiped her hand on the thigh of her fieldsuit, and glanced at me. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, newbie. Don’t worry about it. Things like this happen all the time down here.”

That she could be so nonchalant about it was perhaps the strangest thing of all. “Why is that, precisely?”

“We’d all like to know the answer to that question. You’ll forget you asked, one day.”

Not me, I swore—and I renew that pledge to you now, Master Catterson, never to become like those who live in this place, inured to all that is fearsome or fantastic. No matter how many conundrums we encounter, the insoluble is not something to be shrugged off lightly or, worse, turned into a joke.

Gluis, smirking, wandered off to talk to the perimeter detail.

“We’re analyzing the surveillance records of this area,” Nemke said as though this were a perfectly ordinary murder scene. “Someone must’ve placed the body here. We’ll find out who it was and—”

“What, track them in the mines?”

“We’ll do our best, E. C.”

“I won’t hold my breath. In the meantime, you have my authority to dispose of the body as you see fit. Autopsy it, recycle it, donate it to science—I don’t care. I have no use for it, and no next of kin.”

The perimeter detail snickered at something Gluis said, and I studiously ignored them. E. C. Cotton interested me more. There was something decidedly odd about her, something beyond the fact that she was simultaneously alive and dead, like some kind of Schrodinger experiment.

Her own body lay before her, tangling her timeline in ways that boggled the mind and subtly unravelled her insouciance. Confronted with the dire certainty of her death, her self-control was predictably less than perfect. Instead of fear or grief, however, I sensed excitement. Anticipation. Challenge.

“I want you to know I’m sorry,” Supervisor Nemke was saying in a sober voice.

Cotton didn’t shrug aside the hand Nemke had placed on her upper arm. “Thank you. I’m glad you called me here. If I’d never known—”

A cry of alarm cut her off. Our heads turned. The security detail had bunched as one around a fallen figure. Red blood splashed between outstretched fingers. The sight was shocking, even at a fatal crime scene. Cries for help drew people from all directions.

Nemke pushed into the huddle. I followed, almost slipping in a crimson pool that spread fast as I approached. Cotton was beside me, her face ashen.

The body at our feet was bruised and burst like an overripe fruit. His features were barely recognizable as male. I averted my eyes, keen both to isolate the cause of his death and to hide my revulsion,. What had killed him was not immediately apparent. If it struck again-

“Good god,” Nemke said. She had bent down and wiped the gore from the dead man’s name badge, revealing his identity.

Rudi Gluis.

I felt as though I had been punched in the gut. Just a second ago, Gluis had been within meters of me, mocking me, and now he was dead, killed by persons or forces unknown. The universe rarely dispenses such immediate and well-deserved justice, so I was forced to look elsewhere for an explanation.

The thought formed in my mind the very moment someone put it into words.

“The Director.”

Others took up the rumour, passing it from mouth to ear like a curse.

My heart beat even more rapidly, if that was possible. At long last I had witnessed the work of the mine’s most deadly inhabitant.

The list of anomalies attributed to the Geviran mines grows longer every day of my infiltration. To the staffing irregularities, the outrageous energy imbalance, the curious mineral flows, and the problems with keeping any coherent kind of calendar, we can now add a corpse whose very existence ties time in a Gordian knot.

Of them all, however, the Director is of the most immediate import to those who live here, reminding all of their fragile position between toil and terrible fate.

I have already collated the rumours circulating regarding its activities, many of them borne out by records purloined from the security mainframe. The pertinent points, as they returned to me at that moment, are that the Director appears rarely in the upper levels of the mine, but does so with increasing frequency as one proceeds deeper. It comes invisibly, leaving no physical record of its existence. It strikes between image frames like a ghost, killing or kidnapping its victims with chilling ease-as it killed Gluis, while his comrades laughed at my expense. The Director’s victims share no obvious connections or traits. The bodies of those taken have never been found. Its weapons and methodologies are unknown and perhaps unknowable. Its very presence is anathema to reason—yet it stays, and humanity lives alongside it, willing to accept its toll in exchange for the riches the mines bring.

The Gevirans know as little about the Director’s origins as the Guild. If it is otherwise, they are careful to keep such knowledge from me. That lack of knowledge only makes their fear far greater. Panic is concealed beneath a veil of civilization, but the slightest twitch sets it free. One has only to see the wildness in their eyes each time the Director strikes to know how delicate the pretence is. Even I, a stranger to their world and set apart from their troubles, was briefly swept up in the moment. It could have taken any of us, I thought. It could have taken me.

Nemke woke the entire sector and called in reinforcements from outside. E. C. Cotton’s cryptic corpse was forgotten along with the woman herself during the post mortem examination of Gluis’s wounds, and in that time she slipped our attention. We were all shaken, even I who had liked Gluis not at all and been strongly disliked in return. I am abashed to admit, Master Catterson, that more than an hour passed before I thought to ask after Cotton’s whereabouts.

“I let her go,” Nemke said.

“You did what?”

“Why wouldn’t I? I know her; we all know her. She worked here for a period, before you arrived. Looking for someone, I think, but didn’t find him, so she moved on.”