The shrine sat on an altar, decorated with the bones of his victims, sitting beside the shrine was the book that had been opened to the formula for resurrection, necromancy, the continuation of life. The shrine powered the lights and computers, connected wire, and specific artery parts of human kill, braided and designed to transfer energy, a technique discovered in the caves among the purple light. The priest harvested the power in the shrine, sending the energy through the weave of wires connected to a partial body, constructed from parts of bio-matter and metal pieces he had fabricated out of material found in the ruins of the city—A torso. A metal and bone frame. He forged the bits of flesh and mechanical parts and held them together with chemicals from vials in the airtight boxes of the laboratory. An amalgam of machinery and flesh, and the priest placed the shrine in the chest of his creation. A single empty socket in a head of bone and molded steel, a light bulb found intact in the complex’s peeling walls, lit up with the purple light and the eye, powered by the shrine. Connected to a circuit of computers that the priest was able to restart, with some basic history of the world remaining in data form, flowing into the creation’s brain through nerve ends carefully woven. The machines in the lab squawked and blinked. The priest adjusted the controls reciting in the speaker phone, code needed to activate the machine. The lights of a glowing computer screen, uploading the information that would allow his creation to think. A fascist king, and a god called Saint Nicholas—just enough to build a world on.
He entered the code into his creation, injected it with power from the shrine.
In time, the priest’s body had grown feverish and weak, yet he did not want to die just yet. He refused to sleep, to leave his creation alone and unfinished. But he had done all that he could, and while the priest died, he programmed his cybernetic creation to help him live again, and in doing so—the creation would save its maker.
When the old heart of the priest finally stopped, the arm constructed of metal wiring and bone collected in the ruins of the labs removed his infected and damaged flesh, replacing bits of the dead priest’s heart and brain with the machinery that he had grown, and prepared the flesh with science from the book, injected with black-mass, from the shrine in the chest of his hanging creation.
The wired bone of the android’s fingers felt the cool cheek of its maker.
The one glowing eye following its work, following the directions the priest had given it before slipping into a coma and dying.
The cybertronic hand opened the valve to the shrine, releasing the energy that traveled from the android’s frame to the body of the priest, whose lungs and heart had already been replaced and regrown in tubs of chemical algae, smoking with a purplish glow.
The priest remained on the table without feelings of death, hunger, or cold; his senses had not yet recovered from the resurrection, and he was only beginning to emerge from the whispers of the stream.
The green firmament was gone—the blue sky remained.
Grown in the womb of the Robot Queen’s tomb, the animal-faced humanoids carried the remnants of fallen cities on their backs, crossing snow-covered land. She was sealed inside a steel ark, wired with the power from the shrine embedded in her metal chest.
The android in her tomb with symbols of the moon and stars etched on its surface—glyphs of the night children in their monastic robes coming from the caves across the desert, carrying the books, and a shrine of black-mass destined to lie in the heart of a new capital.
The nights had become colder, the further north they went.
With their mother’s transmissions, ordering them to gather the building materials and genetic stock leading them, they had marched slowly towards the ice, carrying the large steel box that held her body.
The mutanoid priest continued his work on her android frame—after himself being risen from the dead by her.
She transmitted frequencies from purple-lit arrays positioned on top of the metal crypt.
The mutantoid priest had forged parts for her in the roving workshops, pulled on carriages by the offspring, who were mixed and grown from the bio-matter collected, stored, and sorted inside the ark. The maker put her together, one part at a time—made from delicate alloys and minerals, sifted out of the rubble and sand, the precise construction of each piece, taking generations to complete.
Bits of bio-matter infused with purple glow from the living shrine still inside the traveling tube.
They guarded her, and gathered up material needed to build their capital, filling their carts with brick, metal, wire, and glass. The massive caravan of wagons, pulled by the creations deposited through a birthing hole in the side of the tomb, bred to survive the freeze—powered by the purple glow.
The hybrids slung ropes over their shoulders and drove the carts.
At the head of the procession was the metal box being carried on a thick wooden frame by her animal-faced children, receiving transmissions sent from inside.
The maker walked alongside the metal cube, wielding a long staff, tending to the dials, monitoring the gauges built into the ark’s side, adjusting the environment inside. Carrying the shrine among the bio-savage that had taken the land. He communed with her where she lay inside, placing the palm of his gloved hand on the crypt’s metal surface, feeling the vibrations. The squawking crows shooed away from her tomb by the soldiers and laborers of the queen’s army, who feared the maker and his pallid, pieced-together countenance. Artificial looking like a mask, wearing black glass over his eyes, the hood drawn over his head, still dressed as a mutantoid priest.
The maker would replace his own worn-out flesh, assisted by the deformed humanoids, born of botched experiments, the maker’s personal assistants, who followed close behind him, shuffling along, huffing and snorting close to the ground, with claws and beak-like proboscides, more snout than nose.
The maker would not die, living through generations of disposable bio-mass that had grown and died along the long trail that reached over the mountains and across the plains of crumbled cities.
When they reached the ice glaciers, the animal-faced humanoids, covered with fur, tended to their mother’s womb and the chutes that spilled children out through its ports.
The maker’s deteriorating flesh, the purple glow in his head—powered by the shrine. The maker made sure that the queen was alive, that a living god still existed inside, tethered to the arrays, transmitting her commands, directing the giant caravan onto the ice and snow, conquering holy mountains, taking the metal and bio-mass from whatever remained of the old race.
The ghost of the fascist emperor—downloaded from wrecked memory banks in the labs of the fallen capital, and the queen’s creator inputted the code and equations from the flesh parchment, carried along in her metal crypt, seeking stock for cultivation, seeking the uncommon biogenetic spoil—yellow hair and blue eyes.
The rags and blankets of those left out on the plains blew in the frozen winds. The shacks on stilts in the distance, and the villagers ran for cover from the approaching army that was like a wide river stretching to the horizon, with the gleaming surface of the queen’s tomb leading the way.
Her maker took the material from the gathered bodies, those who yelled and cried to a lost god they would never find. Their children were marched away, tended to by the animal-faced nursemaids that snarled and grinned at the children of the old race. Among candles and whispers of incense, the queen and her maker drained the bio-matter into vessels, using it to regenerate the dead parts they had collected.
At night, in the camps, some of the animal faced creations would slip away over the glaciers, some becoming lost in the crevasses, others took to the forests and hid themselves, while the migration continued on, seemingly not to care, as more of the amalgamations took their place.
Seeds carried in pots on the wooden carts. Youth receiving the tune of the Witch Mother. The grunting turned into language, and they started clothing their naked bodies.
They left a trail of bones where they
had fallen.
She took her army onto the ice, driven there by some kind of message received in deep sleep, or as far as she could see in death, frequencies sent and received on waves of black-mass and purple light, and she would continue on until told to stop, and she would order her children to build the foundations of Utopia.
In the flickering flames of their torches, there were other transmissions being whispered to the creations without her knowledge, coming from under the ice:
Arbol de Vida, seis, sies, seis. Arbol de Vida, seis, seis, seis.
The queen did not exactly know why she had stopped when she did, for the march could have gone on until all of her creations had frozen to death, and she would be left with her creator in the snow, frozen forever.
The dreams had told her to stop, her sensors lighting up, telling her where to build. The obscure knowledge of the great tree—its heart of star matter, radiating cosmogonic energy, calling to her.
The first kings had sought its power to rule their neighbors’ kingdoms, the location hidden away to protect it, and those in its coven were tied to the stake, died screaming, burning, unwilling to reveal the tree’s secret location. And Witch Mother had been created in the technological towers of the cities that stood before the age of the green sky. An agent for the first, the first mother—the first father—first child—alive since the beginning. Its seeds floating in oceans, taking root on newly formed shores. The secret of the great tree remained with the living program that continued to transmit.
The queen’s children froze, clutching tools created by every civilization, the picks and shovels. Torchlights barely stayed lit in the arctic winds, while they erected thick foundations and walls to hold a giant glass dome over the city. The giant transparent dome was lifted piece by piece, until the dome covered Utopia with help from machines designed by the mutantoid maker. They secured the dome in place to protect the city’s gardens, the queen’s temple, and birthing chambers.
She opened the door to her tomb and stepped out of the purple glow—the shrine set within her metal chest. The soldiers and slaves started to look more human as she refined the development of a new masterful race, a perfect strain with yellow hair and blue eyes as the fascist king had proclaimed as perfection. The animal features drawn out of their blood and left dead in frozen trenches that would become the foundations for Utopia, built over the bodies of the bestial race.
The betraying mother encased her unwanted experiments in the ground.
The furnaces of Utopia burning the green ore, harvested by a slave race created in distant lands. A purple spark ignited the Utopian furnaces that converted the green ore to purple flame, and the dreams of the mutantoid priests, seen in visions of purple light. Tapped into the transmissions of the tree of life and its servant, Witch Mother.
The Robot Queen sat on a large metal throne, the cybertronic bear sitting at her side. Metallic shrikes perched in the glowing belfries.
The cybertronic bear stood and paced the floor of the chamber, stepping gracefully around the brood, still crawling on the floor in her purple light.
The bear stepped out to the temple’s balcony, looking beyond the dome to the blue sky. Its limbs, replaced with steel, pumped hydraulic fluid. Its ivory fangs in its enormous head peeked out between fleshy lips, beneath circuitry-eyes, glowing ember-red. Its half-mechanical hearts were built from tubing woven from harvested biomass, with implanted metal casings. The bear cub born under purple lights from the same DNA as its ancestors, captured centuries before, lolled on the carpet—another one of the her experiments—newborns that fell from birthing sacs, crawling out beside the bear cub, which had been grown for parts, or to replace the mechanical bear altogether.
Different varieties bred, isolating the traits that would bring to perfection a species that had nearly gone extinct, to be released into Utopia, to function harmoniously with the fantastic, automated inventions, to find pleasure in their work on the assembly line. They believed they were blessed, allowed to live until their day of retirement in the coliseum.
The Robot Queen monitored her domain. Modified shrikes flew over the city, transmitting what they saw to her android brain. Devices tracked movement in the street. Surges of energy, floating across the top of the world, triggering alarms, and she sensed the ghostly patterns registering a presence, yet she could not detect the ghosts that channeled through the system, possessing the body of a single Eden, who served in the pink perfumed tearooms of the coliseum gardens.
In the catacombs, the mutantoid comptrollers stood beside the screens, with the purple light shimmering off the lenses of their goggles.
The female was lost.
Our signal was blocked.
The male’s signal is weak, cannot get clear reception.
Other transmissions instead.
The mutantoids, who monitored the control boards, gathered around, listening to the voices echoing from the wall speakers, from the gray, ashen heads awash in purple glow.
On the screen were the blue human eyes, floating in static. Random thoughts passed, processing through the catacomb’s machines.
The continuum smelled of sweat, rotting meat, and the ferric scent of fresh spilt blood. Programmed voices reverberated from torn speakers. They held one another’s genitals, stroking and rubbing each other without emotion among the stale smells of human wax and black smoke that stained the catacomb floors. Amid the purple energy of the black-mass in the chrome and glass shrines that lined the laboratory walls, they slept and ate, feeding on processed flesh from the stalls.
The bodies of the continuum climbed over one another like a knot of earthworms, forming a single body that ebbed and flowed in the main hall.
The mutantoid priests bred the human beasts, descendants of the ones that had attacked them centuries before. Fed them mutantoid breast milk and other choice cuts, made them sterile, free to fornicate, high with animal stimuli. High on the toxic emissions of their ancestors’ experiments. They stared up at the giant screen in the hall, processing the thoughts, forwarded transmissions of the psychic stream, entering data into the machines.
The Baron’s imagination and the Manager’s fanaticism had taken time to process. The circuitry had been long ago frayed and eaten by rodents; now the purple light traveled through damaged wires.
Images playing over and over again—the vision that the Baron had come to believe—the delirium induced by yellow potion and acrid smoke—the sensation of a psychotic hallucination pushing its way through airwaves, the psychic stream of the continuum, infesting the machine with bad dreams. The cult of the Nighttime World was becoming too real for the goggled spectators.
To the mutantoid priests, it was the ultimate mystery.
They want to believe.
Thoughts circuited, projections flickered, voices murmured from speakers. In their perfect isolation, the mutantoids excitement grew.
Nighttime World.
Gods become real.
Insanity. A human trait.
Images on the screen of the posse plummeting off the edge at night, raining down, the sounds of horses wailing and tumbling through darkness.
Mutantoids looked on with fascination at the screen, experiencing the hunt through the deputies’ eyes. Looking into the forest, trying to find feeling, the gushing and heaving body of the Manager on the ground. Their attention had finally been piqued after so many years of the same images, the same sounds on the speakers.
Something had happened. Their hearts pounded.
Mutantoids tuned by the machine.
Can we reestablish connection?
Interference from some other source.
The continuum sucked on the psychic transmissions.
They watched a giant—its massive body tearing up the land, battling flying machines. It was real, tearing through the old city, the built towers of the old race extinct, toppling over in explosions, the metal hawks diving, feeling the deafening power dive. The mutantoids raising their hands, as if batting aw
ay the metal hawk’s talons, clawing at the giant’s eyes.
Mutantoid eyes gazed at the video screens, watched the thoughts that had streamed in from a demented brain, infecting the feed. The Baron believed. His fanaticism traveled the stream.
The gray-skinned beasts of the apocalypse hunted the catacombs—smelling their way in the dark. The transmitters, grown in their brains, connected them, sharing their emotions, sharing the same dream. And the infection broke free. Logic merged with mammalian appetites.
Scattered images on screen.
Perhaps the male is dead, all the voices said.
Scarred lips released a simultaneous breath at the possible elimination of the miner, a central character in the Messiah’s story unfolding on screen.
The continuum seethed, the bodies held one another, rubbing whatever body parts were available to them.
The miner started the revolution.
Have you found him.
No.
We need him.
He is different than the others, the voices said.
Why?
He was the first to break free.
Mutantoid voices chimed on the speakers, and their thoughts of the miner’s muscular proportions were projected everywhere—images swirling in a digital static of purple, looped and repeating.
Shall we love him?
They hungered for more sensations.
Shut all transmissions.
We cannot, we would die.
Why?
Emptiness.
The mutantoids logic subverted by faith.
Snow Over Utopia Page 16
