Theme Planet (59 page)

Dex walked alongside silent
conveyor belts. A glance told him the trundling, well-oiled belts carried
machine parts, parts for rides or ride equipment. This place was a place of
genesis, of birth, and Dex could almost feel the integral sense of the new, the
created, the
born.
This was where Theme Planet was created, and had
always been created.

This was SARAH’s core. Her Heart.
Where she made the rides. Where she gave
birth
to the rides.

Dex stopped, and looked up at a
huge, pulsing, glossy black structure. It was as big as a fifty-storey tower
block, vast and leering, disappearing up into the darkness of the roof beams
high above; it was shaped like an intricate bulbous bottle, with a narrow neck
at the top and a bulge in the middle, tapering to several tubes leading to the
conveyors. As Dex watched, a frown creased his brow. The bulbous part was
pulsing and squirming in a disgustingly organic manner, almost like a...

“Like a birthing sack,” muttered
Dex, and watched as a bright yellow ride CAR was squeezed from one of the
glistening tubes and onto a conveyor. It was covered in thick clear slime, and
as it moved down the conveyor tiny drones flickered around it, polishing away
the... Dex grinned like a maniac.
They’re cleaning off the amniotic fluid,
he realised.
Holy shit, SARAH is giving birth to the ride CARs. Everything
on the Theme Planet, every ride, every CAR, every pleasure-giving device - they’re
all organic. All part of the alien world shell known as SARAH. Each
rollercoaster is a child. Every ride CAR one of her kindred. Every support beam
one of her ribs. Every nut and bolt are organic building blocks, every H
section a bone, every hydraulic unit a vein filled with SARAH’s pumping blood.

Dex wasn’t just inside SARAH.
Inside the factory.

He was inside her
womb.

The place where ride dreams were
born...

He caught movement up ahead and
focused on the task in hand. Katrina was here to plant her FRIEND and destroy
SARAH, destroy the core of Theme Planet. He had to stop her. He hurried
forward, Makarov against his cheek, moving with speed but making every footfall
as silent as possible - helped by the glossy black floor of SARAH’s womb.

Dex’s mind clicked into a certain
place, and he was back on the mean streets of London, regressed to his days in
the Police Urban Force that seemed, now, a thousand years ago. And he was
hunting down just another criminal, another bad person, only this time it was
his own fucking wife, a woman he loved and cherished and with whom he’d shared
his life; only none of that was real. She was an android with a long-term
implanted mission directive. Dex felt sour inside; he felt his soul torn out,
and fed as scraps to bloody, snarling fighting dogs.

I wish Jones was here,
he thought bitterly.
A bit of
backup is not something to be turned down lightly.
But Jones wasn’t here.
The jammy fucker was back on Earth, living out his normal life, probably
wondering in idle moments with a cold beer how Dex was getting on during his
fine, expensive holiday on the Theme Planet.

Oh, yeah. The irony.

Something was glowing up ahead, a
thick tube suspended in the air, glittering with spirals of twisting matter, a
million glittering spirals, like expanded strands from a DNA molecule hanging
in the air. This was SARAH’s core... her CPU? Her soul? Dex did not know, and
to be truthful, no longer cared. He only knew right and wrong. And Katrina
helping destroy the Theme Planet to aid Earth’s warmongering plans was a basic
evil he had to Stop-

Through the glowing strands Dex
caught sight of Katrina’s face. She was intent on her mission, and did not see
him approach. Her face was illuminated by the glow of SARAH’s core and she
looked incredibly beautiful, more beautiful than he’d ever seen her. She looked
so alive, so radiant, so dazzling; like an angel, like a martyr. It was untrue
to Dex; unbelievable she had turned against him.

Katrina’s hands moved into the
glowing strands, parting them gently, and with a jerk Dex came out of his
reverie - realised what she was doing. His mouth opened to scream “No,” but he
didn’t get that far. Katrina’s eyes lifted, met his, she smiled, and removed
her hands. There was a dark
flicker
among the folding shifts of
entwining strands, and Dex saw it, saw the FRIEND deep down in the core, saw it
spin and twist, and the word came to his lips, his eyes fixed on Katrina’s, as
the world...
shuddered.
And SARAH
screamed.

The floor shook, the whole
womb
shook, and Dex was knocked violently from his feet. A shrill, piercing noise
descended into existence, a shrill piercing whistle that slammed through Dex’s
mind as a constant pain and forced both hands against his ears in agony. It was
SARAH’s scream, and it cut him.

The womb was vibrating, rocking,
shifting, and the scream lessened a little, Dex crawling to his knees and
glancing up - as Katrina’s boot kicked the Makarov from his hand, and the
second kick caught him under the chin, knocking him up and back. Dex rolled to
his feet, even as Katrina powered for him and he took four - five – six - seven
- eight strikes to his forearms, each blow feeling like a slam from an iron
bar.

Katrina took a step back, turned,
and walked away from him. Then she turned back, and her eyes were glowing.

“Why, Katrina?” said Dex, holding
his hands out wide. “Why the hell are you doing this? Come back to me, come
back to what we had; we can stop this thing, end this evil. We can fight Earth’s
invasion. It doesn’t have to be this way.”

“It does, Dexter. This is what I
am. This is what I do, you poor, foolish boy.”

“I disagree,” snapped Dexter,
face a snarl, edging sideways. He wanted to sprint past Katrina, grab the
FRIEND, wrench it from SARAH’s core - end the screaming, which was like a
screwdriver in his brain. “This
isn’t
the woman I met, and fell in love
with, and married, and had children with. What happened to that beautiful young
girl? What happened to that wonderful bright person?”

Dex charged right, but Katrina
moved to stop him and he checked himself. She folded her arms, and smiled, and
he realised - her aim wasn’t to kill him. It was to wait for the FRIEND to
detonate and take out SARAH... How long did he have? Minutes?
Seconds?

“Talking of our children,
darling,
what have you done to Molly and Toffee?”

“I didn’t kill them, if that’s
what you mean.”

“There you go. That’s a human
response,” said Katrina, a dark smile on her lips.

“Good,” said Dexter. “I suppose
you would have killed them, bitch?”

“Without a single backward
glance,
husband.
A single bullet in each young skull. Regret is for
humans, Dexter Colls. And we are not humans. We are androids. We get the job
done, and we fucking do it well. That’s the way we were engineered.”

“I’ve evolved from my
engineering,” said Dex, and darted left. Katrina met his charge, slamming into
him with a grunt. There was an exchange of punches, and Dex felt
just wrong
slamming his fists into his wife’s face. He hated men who abused women.
But
this isn’t a woman,
he told himself, as he broke her nose with a right
hook, and blood sprayed out.
She’s an android, and she’s trying to kill
me... trying to kill us all.
Her knee sank into his groin, her hands found
his hair, and she dragged his face onto her knee three times, sending stars
spinning through his skull. And all the time Dex was thinking of the ticking
bomb in SARAH’s core. Katrina was willing to die for this. Katrina was willing
to die to destroy the Theme Planet.

She released him, and he
staggered back, eyes filled with blood. He blinked, clearing them, and looked
up into a pair of boots as they smashed him back and onto the ground, his world
full of pain. A great weight bore down on Dexter, and as his eyes flickered
open and awareness came creeping back to reality, he realised Katrina was
kneeling on his chest. She’d wound something around his throat, a metal cord,
and as he blinked the blood out of his eyes and realised what was happening,
his fingers shot up under the cord reflexively as Katrina’s hands pulled
viciously tight. The cord bit down on his fingers and throat. Such was her
strength his fingers were squeezed into his windpipe and she started to slowly
strangle him, and he struggled, legs kicking, free fist punching at her ribs
and kidneys, gurgling and spitting, face turning purple as he gradually,
inexorably, began to die...

And all the while she spoke. His
wife spoke.

Katrina spoke to him.

“You think you were a fucking
good husband, well I’ve got something to tell you, mister, I
hated
every
fucking second of it, hated your smiles and jokes and the slaps on my arse, I
hated our walks in the park, hated our fancy meals in posh restaurants with
so-called educated
cunts
looking down their noses at us, I hated our
cosy evenings in with bottles of wine and movies, hated cuddling up to you on
the sofa, resting my head on your chest as you pawed my breasts and fumbled
between my legs like some high school virgin...”

She released the pressure for a
moment, and Dex gurgled, froth at his lips, and she got herself a better grip
and yanked tight again with a grunt of effort, “...but the worst thing of all,
you miserable little bastard, was the sex, feeling you squirming inside me like
a fucking maggot in a pot of honey, thrusting and humping me like a side of
sick beef - well I want you to know, Dexter, before you die, I faked every
fucking sigh of pleasure, every tiny murmur of contentment, every moan of
enjoyment, every squirm of fun, I faked every screaming, bed-thumping orgasm, I
faked every bite and suck and fuck, because you were the worst, Dex, the worst
I ever had - and to top it all, I gave you two kids, two screaming, parasitic
little fuckers whom I should have strangled at birth. So think on that as you
crawl your way down into the pit of android Hell. Think on that, Dexter, my
love, as I strangle the last atom of oxygen from your dying, worthless,
pointless fucking carcass!”

~ * ~

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

STRANGE BROTHERHOOD

A
thousand Big
Belly Bombers droned
across Theme Planet, going their separate ways, each with precisely logged
coordinates of impending destruction. Computers whizzed and buzzed, bomb doors
opened with slick alloy clicks, bombmasters yelled commands, and payloads fell.
Below, on the mammoth colourful cartoon landscape of Theme Planet, where
rollercoasters coasted, ride CARs jumped into the air and zoomed beneath the
oceans, where families strolled and mothers laughed, fathers wore flip-flops,
children ate ice cream, babies chuckled in strollers, puppies yapped and
everybody was having a funtime-goodtime-joytime, below, the first HD bomb
struck. The detonation roared as a kilometre-wide ball of flame vaporised
everything -
everything -
in contact vicinity. Flames and gas roared and
screamed, ride CARs were tossed up, spat up, spat out like fire confetti from
the heart of a raging volcano. Bodies burned and were blast-disintegrated. And
high above, a computer gave a little tick in a little digital tick-box, and
relayed the information to Earth in a series of neat spreadsheets.

Monolith’s ethos in its operation
of Theme Planet was
the show must go on.
Through drought and flood,
volcanic explosion and earthquake, never once did it cease operation of its
thousands of rides and pleasure systems; during tsunamis and vast forest fires,
only those rides
directly affected
halted. After all, money was money,
and business was business, and pleasure was pleasure, right? and
the show
must go on, right?
Theme Planet gave pleasure to billions. That was what it
did. Core function. Prime directive.
I give fun, therefore I am,
as the
marketing slogan went.

The one
unnatural
disaster
which Monolith was not ready to accommodate was one of which it would never
have dreamed. Military Invasion.
Why
would anybody want to destroy the
most fun place in the Four Galaxies? Theme Planet was not geared up for war.
Monolith commanded no army, despite what Romero might have originally believed.
Guards, yes. Secret Police, yes. But not trained for battle... And it had basic
defence missile systems installed in the event of, for example, an impending
meteor strike. But now, Monolith’s High Command turned these basic weapons on
Earth’s ships, and missiles slammed through the skies to connect with Big Belly
Bombers. Bombers exploded with screams and bangs and plummeting debris. On
beaches across Theme Planet, where turquoise oceans lapped at white, sandy
shores, lasers cut across the sky like some incredible themed display, and
explosions roared, and detonations blossomed, and pilots burned, and people
died.