by DJ Molles
Lux gripped his longstaff in both hands. “You should leave while I still allow it.”
Podro’s mouth worked for a few silent syllables. “Would you kill a messenger? You who were born into the rules of House Rennok?”
“There is no House Rennok anymore. And I am no longer bound by any rules.”
Podro seemed to have something else to say, but chose to keep it to himself. Sagum figured Podro had at least his energy shield to protect him, but that would only last so long. And it wouldn’t stop Lux from destroying the skiff.
Podro turned and retreated to his skiff in silence.
Lux shook his head. “It’s all coming apart at the seams.” He turned grave and desperate eyes on Sagum. “Everything we’ve known is burning to cinders.”
Sagum nodded, but then shrugged. “It’s not all that bad. As an Outsider, I’ve gotten used to having my reality burn to cinders. Welcome to the club.”
As the skiff throttled up and took to the night sky, Lux relaxed his grip on his longstaff and set the butt of it on the white stone at their feet. “You’ll have to teach me some of your glibness. I imagine it would be refreshing.”
“It’s easy. Just stop believing in anything and expect the worst.”
“I believe our time here has run out.”
“I believe you’re right about that.”
Lux turned to face the praetors. “Gather your men and prepare our skiffs for immediate departure. We’ll be moving to the rendezvous at Karapalida.” The praetor that had spoken earlier straightened, saluted with a fist to his chest, and filed into the massive doors of Praesidium.
“I’ll grab Whimsby,” Sagum said, slipping in behind the last of the praetors.
The atrium of Praesidium was as Sagum had expected it: Chock full of praetors. Just as he’d felt odd speaking with Lux, Sagum still felt that strange feeling of needing to stop and put his hands up in surrender when confronted with so many of them.
But their eyes swept over him, not even taking note. Their centurion began to call out orders, and they were focused on that. Sagum slipped around the crowd of them and back down the hall where the mainframe was housed.
As he neared the end of the hall, he found that the door to the mainframe room stood open. True to his description of how to be a faithless bastard, his mind immediately flew to the worst possibility: Someone stole Whimsby!
For once, the worst possibility didn’t befall him.
As he stamped to a halt in the doorway of the dimly lit room, he found a single figure standing there, looking down at Whimsby’s core processor. It was one of the mechs. One made to look like a middle aged man with dark hair. He wore the white servant’s attire that all the other mechs in Praesidium wore.
Sagum recognized him. “Bren, isn’t it?”
Bren straightened as though he’d been caught red-handed. Sagum thought that was odd—had he not heard Sagum running up?
“Master Sagum,” Bren bowed his head. “I apologize.”
Sagum frowned at him, stepping into the room, his eyes coursing over the equipment he’d left and not seeing anything out of place. “Why are you apologizing? Did you fuck with something?”
Bren shook his head. “No, I haven’t touched anything. I was simply apologizing because you seemed angry that I was here.”
Sagum crossed to the workstation and kept his eyes on the mech as he put a protective hand on Whimsby’s core processor and picked it up. He hadn’t forgotten about the incredible strength that these seemingly docile mechanical men were capable of. If it had a mind to—or was ordered to do so by a demigod—Bren could easily break Sagum in half.
Bren seemed to perceive Sagum’s discomfort and took a step backward, his eyes fixed on the core processor as Sagum gathered it to his chest, along with the wires and leads and connections that he’d jury-rigged.
“Is that Whimsby?”
Sagum grabbed his satchel of knick-knacks from the workstation and fixed it to his belt. “It was. It’s his core processor.” But, of course, Bren likely knew that it was a core processor. An identical one hid beneath the skin-like substrate of his own chest. “Why do you ask?”
Bren tilted his head, an odd expression coming to his face. “Fascination, I suppose.”
Sagum stopped when he had everything gathered. He looked to the door, but didn’t go through it. He regarded Bren for a long moment. “That’s an awfully vague answer.”
Bren straightened. “My apologies, sir.”
“Stop apologizing. I’m not your master.”
Bren had the decency to not apologize for apologizing. He simply dipped his head. “Whimsby is something of an anomaly that has occupied my thoughts almost constantly since he chose to defy his programming.”
Sagum fidgeted with one of the wires attached to the core processor. “Interesting that you would mention thinking. Whimsby was confident that you were capable of thinking for yourself.”
Bren smiled. “Of course I can think for myself. What else might I do with my mind while I wait for orders?”
“Huh.” Sagum frowned. “I never thought of it that way. But what I meant was, Whimsby believed you were capable of making your own choices.”
“By which you mean defying our programming.”
“Well…more or less. Yes.”
Bren raised his eyes and looked out the open door to the rest of Praesidium. “I’m not entirely sure how he accomplished it. I’m still suspicious that his core processor had somehow been corrupted.”
“I don’t believe that to be the case,” Sagum replied softly. “I think he grew into himself. I think he’d spent enough time thinking that he eventually decided to come to his own conclusions. I think you’re capable of doing that too. Whimsby was positive you could.”
Bren offered a wan smile. “I’m not entirely sure he was correct. I still think he is an anomaly.”
Sagum watched the mech for a long, silent moment, thinking of Whimsby’s beliefs, and Whimsby himself, and all that he had accomplished, despite his programing. It reminded him of something Teran had said: You choose your own destiny.
“Bren, I’d like to ask you something. This is not an order. It’s not even a nice request from a guest that you have to treat like an order. It’s a proposition. Man to man.”
Bren seemed bemused by the turn of phrase, and then suddenly uncomfortable with the import of it. “Man to man?”
Sagum nodded. “I can’t bring Whimsby back without the necessary parts. The fact is, I can’t do it without…without parts from another mech.”
Bren’s expression became thoughtful. “Are you asking me to give up my parts for Whimsby?”
“No. Like I said, I’m not ordering or requesting you to do anything. You do not have to do it if you don’t want to. But…if you want to…if you want to help me bring Whimsby back…well, you can make the decision for yourself.”
“I can’t make a decision for myself.”
“Yes, you can.”
Bren looked pained, as though he believed it would be impolite to argue with Sagum, but at the same time, Sagum was asking for the impossible. “Order me to do it.”
“I won’t. Whimsby wouldn’t want that.”
“I cannot make the decision for myself,” he repeated.
“When you’re not given an order, you said you stand around and think. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“And who tells you what to think?”
Bren stared blankly at Sagum. “I see what you mean.”
Sagum nodded. “You decide what you think. It’s just that you’re programmed to obey. Well, you don’t need to obey anything right now. You can make a decision about what you do, just as much as you can make a decision about what you think.”
The concept seemed utterly baffling to Bren. Sagum was afraid sparks might begin to fly from his ears.
“Bren, I have to go. I can’t stay here. And I don’t think you or any of the other mechs should stay here either. Praesidium is going to get de
stroyed.”
“I can’t leave. I’m tied to this place.”
Sagum huffed as he grabbed ahold of the cart bearing Whimsby’s body. “You’re not tied to shit. You just believe that you are.”
“Pardon me, sir, but I don’t think you understand the nature of our programming.”
“But Whimsby did,” Sagum shot over his shoulder as he pushed the cart through the door.
He strode out into the hall, cursing mechanical men and their obstinacy, and cursing his own obstinacy for not simply doing what Lux had suggested and ordering Bren to shut down so he could rummage through his body for parts.
He was halfway down the hall before he detected the other set of footfalls accompanying him.
Sagum looked behind him and found Bren keeping pace, looking very confused.
“What are you doing?”
“I am walking. May I walk with you?”
“You don’t have to ask me.”
“May I walk with you?”
Sagum almost halted at the heat of the words, but managed to keep his feet moving. He didn’t know what revolutions were taking place within the mind of this mechanical being, but he thought it might be similar to what Lux had observed: that everything was coming apart at the seams, and that nothing was the same anymore.
Everyone’s world was upside down. Sagum moved through it with the cool aplomb afforded him by being an Outsider—a person who never believed in any of it anyways. But for these others it must be agony.
He couldn’t force too many changes on them at once. He had pity and decided to throw Bren a bone.
“Yes. You can walk with me.”
Bren seemed relieved. “Excellent, sir. Then I will walk with you.”
CHAPTER THREE
THE TROUBLE WITH EXTINCTION
Senex of House Batu tried to hide his limp as he strode into the auditorium. He was getting old. Hell, he was old. Even by demigod standards. They could treat their genes, and he had, but at a certain point, there was simply no amount of treatment that could put bone and cartilage back from where it had disappeared.
He stepped through the massive archway and into the auditorium, a sprawling expanse of white that had once been filled with the clamor of all the house representatives, arguing about their piddly concerns, because they didn’t know the doom that awaited them around the corner.
And now that doom had arrived. And it came in the shape of nine enormous figures, draped upon thrones of their own making. How they had done it, he could only guess. He had heard the blasts and the flashes of green light: They’d carved their thrones out of the sides of the auditorium, and now sat upon them with a strange stillness, as though somehow all of their minds were still trapped back in the place where they had been confined for hundreds of years.
Senex stopped where he was, only part of the way into the auditorium. The sheer savagery of their appearance shook him to his core. He felt a tremor in his hand and stilled it by making a fist. He breathed to stretch his locked-up lungs.
Fear would get him nothing. Fear was weakness, and these things, these gods…they punished weakness.
That had already been made quite clear. Yet another reason to hide his limp.
None of them acknowledge his presence. Their eyes were open, but they did not seem to be looking at anything in particular. They might’ve been staring at each other across the vast circle they had created with their thrones. Or they might’ve been seeing the madness that their minds had devolved into.
“Great and honored Sons of Primus,” Senex called out, summoning a strength in his voice that he had feared would not be there when he needed it. But it was still there. He could still at least sound like he was in control. “I am Senex of House Batu, and I seek an audience with your collective greatness.”
Slowly, as though in a dream, all the eyes turned on him. Eyes that burned with green malevolence, and no soul to accompany them. If they’d ever had souls to begin with, they had withered away in the darkness of their imprisonment.
A voice boomed through the chamber, and Senex’s eyes shot about, seeking who it was that spoke.
“We know who you are.”
There. Three thrones to his left. Their physical appearance was so strange to Senex that it was difficult to isolate any difference between them, at least at first glance. But this one—leaner than the others. Face slimmer, features more angular.
A trickster’s face.
Batu himself. Senex’s very own forebear.
Senex bowed his head, as his old heart thumped painfully in his chest. “Your greatness recognizes his own descendant. It is an unspeakable honor to be in your presence, Batu.”
“You are old and withered,” Batu replied, his words slow and ponderous, as though each one came with a stone attached. “I do not recognize you as my own. But I know who you are, nonetheless. You are the head of what remains of my house.”
Senex had not expected familial warmth. But he had hoped for something less obviously hostile. He bowed his head again. “I am.”
Batu continued to stare for a protracted moment, unmoving. If their faces were capable of expression, Senex found Batu’s inscrutable. He had the sense of being a small creature in the hands of something that did not care if he lived or died. Like a bug in the palm of a massive child, that might be allowed to skitter about, or might be crushed, on a whim.
Batu leaned forward in his throne, every movement as slow and enormous as his words had been. He placed his elbow on his knee. The craggy brow lowered down over his eyes.
“What do you want?”
Senex swallowed. Stiffened his spine. “I wish to speak to you of the humans, and of The Guardians, and of the extinction that has now befallen our world.”
A new voice, but equally weighty: “Things go extinct.”
Senex glanced about the chamber, but no mouths were moving, and in the echoing chamber, he could not determine who had spoken. He chose to dip his head again. “Many apologies. I am ignorant of your ways. I do not know who has just spoken to me.”
“I have spoken,” the voice came again. “I am Chak.”
Senex found the speaker to his right. Chak, the youngest. The smallest. Though he looked neither young, nor small. “Yes, your greatness. Things do go extinct. But extinction can often disrupt an ecosystem, and bring calamity to those who live by it.”
Chak bent forward, and a hideous smile split his lips, showing broad, stony teeth. “There is nothing on this world by which we live.”
Senex felt sweat breaking out across the line of his white hair. He resisted the urge to swipe at it. “You are wise beyond my abilities to understand. May I be so bold as to beg of you to explain what you mean?”
Chak leaned back in his chair, still smiling. Obviously not inclined to explain himself.
Batu spoke again: “You simper. You beg. You bow. Who are you that has grown so estranged to power that you fear it when it speaks?”
Senex swiftly changed tacks. He straightened up. Relaxed his shoulders. Decided to forgo any further simpering. “I simply wish to understand.”
“This world is a footstool,” Batu rumbled. “The footstool does not sustain the one that rests upon it. It is simply there to be rested upon until the master decides to leave it. So this world may burn to cinders, and all that is in it may go extinct. We do not draw our sustenance from it.”
“That may be true for you,” Senex replied. “But your descendants are entangled in the existence of this world. We do draw sustenance from it. And that sustenance comes from the humans. If they are destroyed by The Guardians, then we will be destroyed as well.”
A new voice spoke. “Are you not gifted with Confluence?”
Senex found the speaker easily this time. He sat directly to Senex’s right. Though their features were alien to him, there was something about the face of this one that did appear more ancient than the others.
Halan, the eldest.
“I possess the gift of Confluence,” Senex answe
red.
“Then you have no need of corporeal sustenance. Do you not draw from the very energy of our universe? How do you then need such crude methods to sustain you? Feeding. Digestion. These are the ways of animals. Not gods.”
Senex simply had nothing to say to that. The statement was so strange to him, that he could not begin to imagine how he would argue a counterpoint. He was not even sure what the point was.
“If this is an ability that is connected with the gift of Confluence, then perhaps it has been lost to time,” Senex pressed on. “We have been five hundred years without your guidance. There are many things that you will have to teach us. But, even so, there are many of your descendants in this city who do not possess the gift of Confluence.”
A stillness gripped the chamber that Senex felt all the way down to his marrow. Those staring green gazes, all fixed upon him. He scanned their number. None of them moved.
Except for Batu. He tilted his head to one side. “Are there?”
“Yes,” Senex said, hastily snatching at the threads of conversation to eliminate the terrible silence. “And if The Guardians are allowed to continue exterminating the humans, then the food production will cease, and those of us who are not gifted with Confluence will starve.”
One side of Batu’s mouth curled up. Senex hesitated to think of it as a smile. “Well. Then we shall teach them our ways.”
Senex frowned. “Is such a thing possible?”
Batu nodded. “Bring all of the un-Gifted to us, Senex of my house. And we will show them.”
CHAPTER FOUR
PROVING A POINT
Day broke mild and still over the outskirts of Karapalida. But not so much in Karapalida itself.
Perry stood at the front of the skiff and stared at the city that he’d known. Not a breath of a breeze stirred the dusty wastelands around the city, and in the calm air, he could hear the city eating itself alive.
