She looked at all the other golden-haired children cheering the spectacle, the massacre, and she remembered that she did not belong there.
She had handed out special food and drink along with the other Edens, bringing relief to those in the gardens that surrounded the coliseum, handing out tea to those who bathed nude in the purple light, running through the pink mists of fragrant blossoms, the workers on assembly lines, in shops and factories—all had retreated to the gardens to receive nourishment.
The walls and floors of Utopia were immaculate, white and golden, a constructed version of heaven, worthy of Hitler and Santa Clause, the queen had determined, powered by the furnaces that burned green rock, lighting the yellow and pink lines of florescent illuminants lighting the housing blocks where the Utopians slept.
All the Utopians were the same.
There was no sexual reproduction, their urges muted by the chemical grown in the maker’s lab, sprinkled in the water and air, and with the conditioning relayed to them on the thought machines, the young bodies were made impotent and sterile, penises shriveled and vaginas were only slight curiosities at childhood. Any remaining fascination for the human body was educated out of them in the classes that expounded Utopian values: hard work, devotion, and obedience, the tenant of all good fascists.
Eden worked her way down the coliseum hall.
The doors had no locks, as there were no wants, all desires provided for in the gardens, and maintained by the assemblage of war machines and submission-wands, shipped out on special transport, unseen by the Utopian workers. The ships that came and went by way of secret docks.
Eden listened to the whisper, the sound of the rotor guiding her through a hall, finding a dim entrance to a long passageway, feeling the rough surface, remembering the feeling from another time as if she had been there before, as if she was some other Eden who had felt her way down to the basements, the intrusion went undetected.
The surface of the walls faded the further she went, the ornamentation had cracked and peeled until the flatness of the wall had been replaced with rough bricks showing through the cracks, revealing the foundations and the first walls to be erected.
She went further down the hall until it got darker, as there had been no light intended for so far down. She kept on following the dim glow that led her further in.
“I am here,” Eden said.
At the end of the hall was the red door she’d seen transmitted to her as she stood at the foot of the chariot with her hand held high in salute, even though she did not know why, she saw the entrance beneath the coliseum.
Open the door.
The door could only be opened by Eden.
Driven by the sound of the rotor, the transmissions grew stronger, revealing to Eden the complete mission, and she reached out for the faded red door, felt the handle in her hand, and pushed, opening it as if she had done it several times before.
Miner emerged from the dark, wearing the white uniform of a Utopian, with yellow hair and blue eyes, looking nothing like she had remembered him in their previous cycle, but he was Miner all the same, she just knew. She knew that the Alchemist’s vial was hidden in the folds of his garb. The mission was clear as they made their way back to the coliseum floor, where they would wait with the second wave of retirees for the ceremony to start again.
The gates to the coliseum opened, and the second group of retirees were ushered in to the cheers of the spectators. The metal tipped beaks and talons of the shrikes were still wet with blood from the previous ceremony. The feet of the mammoth glistened with gore. The purple lamps along the ivory walls with the glimmering purple spotlights high in the Utopian sky replacing the stars and planets.
Eden and Miner walked alongside the other Utopians, looking out at the crowds that surrounded them—the faces of the different models that were ultimately identical. The queen sat in a regal booth, with her mutantoid maker, staring out over the cheering crowd. The maker, with his twisted grin frozen to his replicated face, with impenetrable black goggles that had been fused to his eyes. His monastic robes were exchanged for a formal uniform of green and red, while metals of honor and distinction were pinned to the lapel, his priest’s robe long ago tattered and forgotten.
Perched on the highest points of the coliseum towers, the shrikes shrilled, flapping their metal tipped wings. The mammoth paced along the blood-stained walls, while the maker’s deformed creations gathered the scattered bio-matter with iron tools, raking and bagging the bounty in the sanguine field of the auditorium.
Finishing their task the diminutive servants carried the sacks of bio-matter on their backs, disappearing through a small portal in the wall of the arena.
Miner and Eden stepped onto the ritual grounds along with the congregation of smiling retirees waiting for the reprocessing of their flesh, wanting to be a part of the celebration of the spark, gifted from the chest of their creator and ruler.
The agents of the tree could not hear the whisper of the rotor anymore—all was automatic.
The mammoth stood still, its trunk ticking, swaying automatically on its track, the thick brown hide hid the motors and pipes nestled in its muscle. The metal parts of its chassis gleamed purple. Its appetite, aroused by the taste of the retirees’ flesh drove it mad with memories from the times long before it had been raised from a block of ice.
Eden and Minder stopped, while the other’s kept walking. The queen’s gaze focusing on the agents of the tree. Those in the procession looked at their brother and sister who were out of step with the rest of their blood ceremony. The queen processed the information, registering them as of her own making, but unable to understand the actions of her creations. This behavior was neither programmed nor part of any plan ever conceived in the formation of her world. Seeing the two, she knew the look on their faces did not indicate gaiety, fulfillment, or satisfaction. The faces were, instead, possessed by some other ghosts of another program. These were faces she had never before seen in Utopia, not since the time of her first creations, locked beneath the foundations. The faces of those that carried her over the mountains, disposed of under Utopia, a race not meant to live—
The children of the queen sat down in defiance, cross-legged on the coliseum floor, while the retirees stood and watched with the crowds, trembling at the screens the amplified carnage of the beasts about to tear them apart. The spectators and those sent to be demolished, realized that those sitting were not part of their ceremony. The cheering stopped, while they tried to understand what was happening. Already the unconventional behavior piqued the curiosity of the crowds as they began whispering to each other in hushed tones, wondering if this was part of the show—some new way to pay homage to the queen and her maker.
Those that had stood with smiles on their faces until their last moments when the mammoth’s hooves rose over their heads. Their scattered bits of skin, organs, and bone would be collected and used again, regrown and reconditioned.
Miner took out the small vial hidden in the folds of the white gown traditionally worn for the ceremony, taking the vial he lifted it over his head, pouring the green luminescent fluid over himself.
The slick clear fluid ran off his shoulders and down his side. A green glow rose from his shoulders, a green flame flickered and sparked, and the smoke traced along the surface of his white gown, along his body which was identical to all the other Utopians looking on in wonderment.
Eden took the container from Miner and poured it over herself.
The flames did not burn or consume them at first—the light surrounded them where they sat cross-legged in the blood-soaked dirt, staining their gowns.
Their eyes closed.
The mammoth did not drive its massive tusks into those waiting for their retirement. The contagion of thought, lifting with wisps of smoke into the arena—ideas floating through the coliseum—driving the mechanical shrikes from their perches, circling like rotor orbs.
Green waves of fire, dancing around the immolated child
ren sitting in the dirt with blood and bits of bio-matter, the flame bending and twisting along their shoulders, down their arms, legs, and feet. Their eyes closed. Their faces were calm, while their bodies fragmented and unfurled, the embers breaking free like leaves from a tree.
The metal shrikes circled overhead while the embers floated up toward the glass of the shell that protected them all from the endless freeze. The shrikes plucked the smoldering embers from the air, collecting the pieces in their mouths, and as they gathered them, the flock turned and headed off toward the parks and terraced gardens of Utopia, across the city to all the towers and housing blocks.
The queen’s glowing purple eyes were unable to foretell the suicidal sacrifice; her metal shell and purple core were unable to prevent what was taking place in front of her.
Whispers released in ashes, the petals from the sacrificial bodies dropped slowly away from Miner and Eden’s bodies, then rose on pockets of air with the mechanical ventilation drifting upwards to the Utopian sky, pushed by the waves of green flames coming from their bodies.
The retirees looked on in bewilderment, their execution postponed.
The mammoth roared, while the shrikes fell from their perches, diving at the floating embers.
The calm serene countenance of those being consumed could be seen through the green shroud of smoke and the slow-moving flame consuming them.
Shrikes circling in formation, the mammoth rose up on its hind legs, while the green pieces of cinder flesh were caught in the shrike’s whirlwind, swarming over the heads of the Utopians standing from their seats in the coliseum and staring in confusion.
The mammoth charged the gates. Avoiding the flanks of the members of the congregation who had prepared themselves for their end, the mammoth programmed to burrow through the throng of retirees, waiting for their reward in the afterlife after a lifetime of service, instead it went for the gates they had stepped through just moments before, feeling a sense of disappointment and relief for not being dismembered, unacquainted with such feelings.
Wrecking the locks, the mammoth broke through, rampaging wildly across Utopian walkways.
The shrikes beating their mechanical wings and flinging themselves in circles above the coliseum, recovering deconstructed parts of the immolation, a sacrifice to the Utopian sky.
Opening their beaks, they let the pieces fall onto the soil of fertile gardens that dangled off the sides of buildings, the flower and vegetable beds, the fertile fields along the base of the dome that separated the city from the arctic freeze.
The shrikes’ cries echoed along with the rumbling steel of the mammoth that leapt through the amusement park, tearing through the garden with its mechanical trunk, trying to return to the ice where it had been found, memories of green grass on the pre-ice age tundra suddenly filling its head. The mammoth rammed the dome, its skull implanted with metal casing so each collision was like a bomb, like thunder erupting, a sound that no Utopian had ever heard before.
The mammoth fell to one knee, and then two, its trunk making weak movements, until all of its power was drained, and its red glowing eyes dimmed, and were extinguished, slipping to the ground. And even with all of its strength, it was unable to break through the dome, the glass had been pressed and treated in the foundries of Utopia.
Fractures had formed from the mammoth’s collision, sending a crack into the sky. The queen searched for answers in her mind filled with the data of genetic programming and a twisted history of the old race, her knowledge was incomplete, despite the century she spent in the solitude of her crypt.
The crowds did not know what to believe or how to behave after witnessing the swirling shrikes, the dying mammoth. They had become fascinated with the unimaginable thought that, somehow, the order had been disrupted.
She raised a scepter, shining with a lambent cone of purple radiance that emitted a single ray of purple light, but the forms remained, ghostlike in the final hours of darkness, as the sun outside of Utopia began to rise after the short solstice night. Her rays had failed to stop them from burning, passing quickly through the green flames.
The Robot Queen and her inventor had transformed the old race, but the filth of human flesh could not be exorcised, nor could the hunger be satisfied. The great experiment was threatened, the immolated fragments of the sacrificed, the dark green ash floating on waves of green, spiraling gas while the shrikes continued diving for the cinders of the disintegrating bodies, carrying the agents across Utopia.
She could not control the spreading of the seed being cast over the city into the bio-fields and hanging gardens, the fertile soil exposed to the purple light.
The maker drifted in the currents, merging with the first god in his dream.
The image of what happened in the coliseum repeated itself on the screens above the polished stone-cobbled streets. The image of something unexplainable. Matter flaking away, pixelating across the massive dome screen covering the city.
The coven summoned the Witch Mother. All at once, the agents of the tree were connected to the rotor in the Witch Mother’s mainframe.
The Librarian was able to see.
The nursing mother in her bone-lined hut was able to see.
The old woman in her shack, among the incense and candlelight, chanting, had waited centuries for the children of Utopia to come to her, floating in the stream, parts of the rotor grown from the putrescence of the leviathan.
The Robot Queen did not know the identity of those that had infected Utopia’s network.
Eden’s transmissions had been hidden from the queen’s surveillance scanners, unable to stop the intruders.
The contagion had been released.
Agents of the tree communed with the Witch Mother in the electronic realms—rotors of the coven orbiting above their operators, broadcasting from a forest of crying trees that thrashed and moaned.
The agents joined the stream that carried them back to the forest of the Juggernaut.
The whispers and moans of the forest grew closer, leaving the coliseum with the last pieces of bodies floating into the talons and beaks of the circling shrikes, dropping sacrificial embers in the gardens, the embers twisted and curled into darkened fetuses that burrowed into the ground.
Utopians watched silently the mammoth stampeding through the park, heading towards the walls of the glass dome. The shrikes flew through the city, delivering the bits of smoldering bodies, the seed in their mechanical beaks, soaring towards the Utopian shell in the rising sunlight, then fell downward to darkness on extended wings.
Repair crews worked to remove the large piece of metal and flesh that slumped against the dome’s foundations, eventually having to cut the large mammoth in half with a concentrated beam of purple energy that seared through the carcass. Robotic arms lifted the haunches onto the beds of floating crafts, and the gray, twisted faces of the maker’s servants finished picking up the pieces of the mammoth’s husk, until nothing of the creature was left, all of it taken back for recycling.
A thin web-like crack zig-zagged high into the Utopian dome, where the goliath had failed to break through.
She could not stop the agents of the tree, something in its programming would not let it. The agents had managed to get in.
If she had wanted to, she could have exterminated the race, starting it over again. Instead, she ran her computations to find meaning, returning to the throne, through tomb doors where only the muted servants of the maker were allowed. The throne room was darkly lit with scattered pieces of lab equipment, mostly bare, with dust on the masonry floors, a purple light shimmering off her gold throne, regenerating the Utopian mainframe by connecting herself to it. She meditated, repeating the moment of immolation in her head, the moment when she saw the serene faces of the sacrificed disappearing a piece at a time.
She had to wonder what the event meant—logic was not enough, and she would need to access some kind of emotion as the whispers grew louder.
The maker sat in his workshop
, bits and pieces of machinery and bio-matter scattered about on tables and on the ground. Psychic messages were being sent and received between the creator and his invention.
The power of the shrine on her metal frame, the bone long ago replaced.
Her mutantoid maker reposed in a crimson chair, ceasing to charge his power core anymore with energy from the furnaces that were running low, letting the charge leave him for good. A short purple flame sparked from a metal hearth in his dim chamber.
The piles of green ore nearly gone. The generators running out of fuel. The flame in the metal hearth burning low, while the whispers grew louder. Soon, the only power left would be the glow in the queen’s chest, and the power source that awaited her below the foundations of Utopia.
The Robot Queen had required maintenance; without the attentive hands of the maker, her android body would fail.
The maker was not immortal, and he would never be as old as the great tree, she had potential to last for another thousand years if her parts could be repaired or replaced, but the power in her chest was expected to last forever.
Sounds of words, intermittent transmissions, being received by the Robot Queen in her chamber, the whispers getting louder, as she tried to process the meaning of the sacrifices that had burned. The horror of imagination and free-think, returning to the animal poet.
Her metal head rotated and looked at the lab tables in the nursery, while the maker’s programming spoke to her, saying, let the children live.
Transmissions of another time when its kind were human, and children had not been transformed by green skies or radiation, but ran and held tight to their parent’s leg, muttering, Da da, sleep. Da da, hold …
… Yes, baby, yes …
The mutantoid maker was human in his vision, a child by his side, carrying whispers of the Earth Machine’s rotors, the hallucinations changing to a child running beneath swaying limbs—the transmissions of the Juggernaut entering the dying mutantoid priest.
Snow Over Utopia Page 13
