The tree’s roots anchored into the rocks of the shore, its large trunk of flesh gleaming with effluent running from its pores, glistening with the bright orange glow emanating from its center.
Waves pounding the black rocks.
The discarded bio-matter, the abnormal and disfigured mutations, born before the golden-haired children took over, surviving beneath the Utopian foundations. The Robot Queen was fed memories of the fascist king—the history of an empire claiming a thousand years, claiming a perfect race.
“He looks like one of them,” the Alchemist said in a growling language. “The transmission was successful.”
The coven gathered around the yellow-haired human on the floor, clicking and grunting in conversation.
Caught on a stream of air blowing in through the crevices in the rock walls that lined the crater’s edge, the birth sac broke free from its umbilical made of leviathan fat, drifting to the middle of the lake, floating down to the surface of the waves.
The hooded figures moved along the edge of the emerald water, clouded with milky swirls, wisps of steam rising from its surface.
The fusion light from the chest of the tree burning white, randomly changing color, dependent on how it felt, providing warmth and illumination for the underground world. The ripped, pinkish birth sac disappeared into the water to feed whatever lived in the crater’s ocean. Waves splashed the shore with the sound of a muffled engine pumping rhythmic, mechanical whispers.
Beads of sweat clung to the obsidian pump assembled from parts grown in the pits of old technology in the ice under the layers of forgotten city blocks, buried by the queen’s war machines.
Her sensors and electronic eyes were not so precise, not so all-seeing in the foundries and furnace rooms, in the clanging and steam of the dark workshops, where the war machines slept, and the old sentinels breathed through iron lungs.
Tentacle-like hoses rose out of the lake, carrying the warm water across the shore up the wet rocks, into the jungle, to the tree and its flesh pulsing with purplish veins. The sound of the machine thumping in rhythm with the light from the great tree as it glowed orange-red, then blue, then purple.
The Alchemist covered the newly-born body with a thick brown cowl.
To Miner, the thumping sounded like a hammer and pick swinging and spiking the rock, echoing high up in the recesses of the cavern. Then sounding like the rotor he had heard, sitting before the nursing mother, the baby suckling while the embers fell onto the young mother’s hair. Caught in old memories of rotating spheres, pulsing and spinning, he found himself deep underground, cold beneath the cowl, hearing lake water splashing onto the stone next to him, spraying the coven that had gathered around him. The pain diminishing.
Sacks of bio-matter being held on placental strings glowing in the air above him, like planets, or the ashes rising to the top of the pyramidal form in the desert from which he came.
The robed humanoid with a bestial face knelt over Miner, speaking through clacks and snarls: “He looks like one of them, but how is the mind?”
“Give him time.”
“Look at him. He has blue eyes.”
The arms of the coven gathered him up from the smooth stone where he’d landed and carried him off the beach toward the gray jungle, following the black tentacles that led from the water of the lake into the interior of the small isle. The cocoons gleamed and floated above the waves that existed half in night, and half in day. The light from the tree rotating as they carried him through the hanging branches in the light changing from purple to gold. The claw-like hands held Miner high over their heads, carrying the body among the thick gray vines, with the yellow and purple flowers that drooped down across their path.
Pipes steamed from the vent portals, so high above them, that there were parts of the cavern’s ceiling that could not be seen, even with the light of the tree. Vapor skimmed the water with a wind and rain effect, leaving drops of dew on the flora that vined and curled with violet petals and tangled thistles.
The bio-matter had washed down from the drains of Utopia, fermenting in puddles of mud, growing animals hidden in the sludge that were round, with thickly-haired bodies and stick-like appendages, with multiple joints that allowed their limbs to bend in different ways. Their tiny, eyeless heads tracking the bio-sludge pits for food, feeding off of leviathan shedding.
The stone of the temple was only a little grayer than the hoary vines that had slid along its surface, working their hook-tipped horns between the cracks, with nests of worms slithering along the branches. The coven set the body on a stone slab next to the temple’s entrance.
“We will have to get him to the surface.”
“It will not be easy.”
“We know.”
“We remember the plan.
“Remain faithful.”
The strange voices snarled and hissed.
“I am faithful.”
“Enough! We all know without being told,” the Alchemist finally said.
“You did it. You were able to replicate it.”
“The way he looks is correct, but what about the rest of him?”
Miner was emerging from the haze of his birth, and the program that had been downloaded started to run. He could hear the clacking and growling of animals, but what he was hearing was the coven murmuring along the temple walls. He thought he heard birds squawking in a soft rain among the thickets and vines, the thumping of the engine within, the piping that ran from the lake through the jungle into the temple, bubbling the cauldron on its pedestal.
Miner opened his eyes and found himself on the edge of a stone slab. The animal faced humanoid in a hooded cowl approached him with a clay bowl. The hooded figure gently placed the bowl on his lap. He looked down into the clear liquid, seeing a face that he did not recognize, yellow hair and blue eyes submerged at the bottom. He put his hand in the fluid to touch the face, a complexion much lighter than the dark complexion he had remembered, features much different than the faces of the other miners and prostitutes of the company town, who were all brown, bald, and covered with mine dust.
The light shifted and the colors of the jungle trees shifted with it from purple to red, then yellow to blue.
In the alternating light of the subterranean sky, Miner looked up at the face, beastly and twisted, beneath the hood. He started to stand. The aberrant creature took the bowl from his lap before it slipped and fell, reaching out with its other claw to grab Miner’s arm and steady him. Miner seeing the yellow eyes, the narrow pupils wildly fluctuating with the colors of the jungle and its changing luminance.
“Do you know who you are?” A female voice said, crackling, struggling to speak Miner’s language.
A vision flashed of frozen seas and the giant tree, along with the mountains he and Eden had journeyed over.
“Where is Eden?” He said.
“She is in Utopia,” the female voice said.
“Utopia? Are we close?”
“Very close,” the yellow-eyed female said, lifting the cowl over the bare white flesh of his shoulders.
He stared at her, as if he’d seen her face before. He thought he could see traces of Eden, despite the twisted features of a face he had never known.
“How far?” He asked.
“Not far,” she said.
The coven with their bestial gazes under their cloaks, watching the work of the Alchemist move and speak.
The Alchemist stepped forward, taking the bowl and handing it back to Miner.
“Drink,” the Alchemist said.
Miner took the bowl, lifted it to his lips and sipped.
The coven surrounded him.
Night and day came and went in the subterranean world.
Miner was unable to stand, although he could see the great tree with a small sun trapped inside it, shining from across the lake, shimmering its own brilliance, glistening, its fleshy limbs lifting up to the underground sky lit by the meteorite in its chest.
Miner shivered, the
potion working its way to sustain his body or else he would go insane within the next rotation of the tree’s glow, flowing through him, feeling like a worm wrapping itself around his ankles, driving its devil-tipped tail up between his thighs, through his guts and out his mouth. He gurgled, the froth surfacing up out of him, shaking on the temple floor.
The coven gathered in a circle around him, holding hands, chanting, waiting to see if the worm had saved the spurious human convulsing before them, the worm’s serpent tongue, flicking back and forth before slithering back into the ground, releasing him. The frenetic light he had seen while paralyzed on the stone floor went away. A calmness that he had never known—the poison of the worm contained the cure of his creation.
He looked through the entrance of the temple and saw the long, metal tentacles squirming among the vat of green, glowing bio-matter being pumped in and out. The walls of the Alchemist’s machine whispering with the rotor, transmitting messages from Witch Mother.
The furnaces of Utopia were running out of ore to burn, but the program went on.
“In Utopia, everyone is content, and no one goes without,” the Robot Queen said, speaking through her silver mouth, fused together like the grate of a furnace. She spoke from an open carriage that hovered on beams of purple light.
Her voice went out among the crowds and gardens, the volume on the municipal speakers turned up to blast her voice over the cheering crowds.
“In Utopia, nobody gets old. Instead, they are reincarnated in the garden, in the icy fields of our saints, providing product for all good bio-matter, finding glory in the workshops, forever and ever, amen!”
“Amen!” The crowds shouted.
The queen’s maker sat, a slight smile permanently pressed where flesh had been grafted over the decaying face underneath, his binocular goggles permanently fused to his pallid face.
She passed by her golden-haired children in their white garb, lined up in perfect order along the parade route.
“Utopia is perfection!” Her voice went out through the speakers
“Hail! Hail! Hail!” Crowds chanted. Their admiration for her was unconditional. They would all cheer whatever she said as they were programmed to. Utopians did what was required of them. They had heard her words over and over again—in ceremony, in the voices in the walls, on the screens.
The cybertronic bear flanked the open carriage.
The steel paws walked on the flower petals that had been picked especially for the occasion by the diminutive hybrids bred by the queen’s maker. The petals floating down onto the parade grounds, dusting the route for the procession, leaving a violet membrane on the path to the coliseum.
The Robot Queen’s voice rang out, and her image was projected above the crowds on the dome. Her long, silver face and phosphorescent eyes, a teardrop mouth with a purple flame burning inside.
“Utopia is an island of perfection on a frozen planet. You are all perfect!”
The roar came up: “Hail! Hail! Hail!”
The golden-haired children of Utopia cheered for their creator. Their emotions were real, innate reactions, and the Utopians lined up along the street to watch the procession. The carriage’s engines putting out purple exhaust, propelling the metal frame that was heavy enough to crush the crowds along the path.
The bear, its fur bristling, its metal limbs and eyes glowing red, following its master.
The great symbol of Utopia—a strong arm wielding a hammer—emblazoned on the front of her silver carriage.
The queen stood like a silver statue, saluting the crowd, the goggled mutantoid priest sitting beside her. The trans-human priest who created the machines that ran Utopia.
The parade approached the coliseum.
The park’s golden rollercoasters blasted and corkscrewed up toward the dome of the Utopian sky.
Her metallic arm was locked in a statuary salute, stretching toward the dome video. The crowds returned her salute, their faces smiling uncontrollably for the love of their silver leader who kept them safe and warm beneath the dome, and re-created what it meant to be human.
All the golden heads with bright blue eyes watching the hover craft approaching the entrance to the garden where Eden and her copies waited anxiously to greet the hovering craft.
Eden felt the urge overtaking her.
Her body wanted to make the sound that all the others were programmed to make, to scream. She could feel the urge from somewhere deep in her programing, and as the carriage approached, she heard herself crying out, “Hail!”
Then something happened. Her body surged with a new kind of excitement. She was unable to control herself in the crowd that was screaming, raising her arm in salute, all downloaded into the Utopian mainframe. She suddenly realized her reason for being there.
The caravan stopped at the entrance to the coliseum.
The Utopians screamed as if they were riding one of the corkscrew rollercoasters, or free-falling drifters connected to the underside of Utopia’s sky dome.
There were different models of Utopians, but all were doing the same thing at that moment—the ecstatic screams of all the Utopians on the parade route.
In the coliseum, the date-stamped retirees prepared themselves, and all those that had gathered to welcome her, filed into the stands to watch the ceremony, along with Eden who followed all those set to cheer for the destruction of their peers.
Cybernetic birds with iron sharpened beaks and spiked talons squawked above the coliseum bleachers, waiting on their perches. Mammoths grown from material found in the ice caps among the foundations of Utopia, waiting in their stalls, their trunks and tusks replaced by robotic iron designed to destroy the humanoids. A mammoth’s metallic wail rose up from the stalls in counterpoint to the Utopians chanting: “Praise the end! Praise the end!”
The coliseum lights reflected off the Robot Queen’s silver shell. The Utopians watching her and the cybernetic bear that followed her, its crimson eyes flashing. The speakers reverberating with her voice replaying the words set to a specific tone, attuned to the crowds: “Let those that have served go on to the garden.”
The retirees entered the floor of the coliseum, and their fellow workers gleefully waited and cheered for the ceremony to begin, conditioned to anticipate the ceremonial slaughter since their fate was first shown to them as children. They knew that the only way out of Utopia was to walk across the coliseum floor. It was a reward for time served—the promise of being born again into a new perfect body somewhere down the assembly line. Recycled, to be used over and over again.
Without thinking, the citizens of Utopia believed in the Proclamation of Perfection. In the factories, they happily worked, producing products for the colonies.
The retired Utopians eagerly waiting for the bloodied gates of the coliseum to open. They had seen the retirement ceremony many times before, but it was always some other generation whose clock had run down. They knew no other way but to stand and smile. With glorious arms outstretched, waiting to be torn apart by the cybernetic beasts. The scattered parts would be gathered from the coliseum floor and recycled in cauldrons under the purple lights of the queen’s lab, the collected pieces of bio-matter processed to grow more golden haired children, while some of the material was deposited down the drains into the underground lake.
Fusion from the heart of the tree created the steam that rolled in a green fog across the underground lake, where life crawled out on the shore next to the temple machine.
Their deaths had been symbolic. Sacrificed so that the hive could continue. The act of retirement fulfilled the human need for ceremony. Without it, the experience would have remained empty and incomplete. The citizens would never be allowed to get too old or too wise.
The stall gates opened and the hulking body of the metallic mammoth charged out at the retirees, their smiles replaced with terror. They had been reassured from early conditioning that the transition would be peaceful. But that did not stop the rage and violence they now faced.
/> The locomotive mammoth charged, its large motor heaving a mechanical trunk, giant tusks ripping through those who stood passively by and awaited their end.
The screeching metallic shrikes, circling above the coliseum, diving, decimating their targets—tearing the bodies apart, spreading the bloody pieces of flesh across the coliseum floor until it resembled the gardens at full bloom.
The retirees screamed. The spectators clapped.
The queen assured the crowd of the beneficence of the state: “Fellow Utopians. Those screams are not screams of terror, but of glee and glory.”
Her voice echoed out from the speakers over all of the city.
Meanwhile, the humans inside were being torn apart, limbs spread about on the coliseum floor.
“They will be delivered to the next technological plain of greater perfection, where they will not have to think at all, and all will be provided, and the unit becomes a single plant in a garden, and a single ant in the sand—such perfection,” the voice blared through the coliseum.
The viewers could see the terror in the eyes of those being trampled by the mammoth, picked apart by the shrikes. But they suppressed the morbid thoughts, ignored the screams. They too would be marched out to the same fate.
The crowd could not help but enjoy the spectacle because it was all they knew.
Spectators to their own deaths.
Eden watched horrified at the trampling of human flesh beneath the iron feet of the behemoth, its bones dug from the ice, its bio-matter extracted and grown in the labs of the Robot Queen and her maker, under the purple lights of the birthing chamber. Parts of the mammoth had rotted and died in its life time, but replaced with metal and tubing from the maker’s workshop.
Eden wanted it to stop.
Snow Over Utopia Page 12
