The Owners

by Tara Basi

  Mina walked on until she stood at the centre of the empty space. She pointed at a line of giant machines that looked a little like Piglet, their only shuttle and only transportation. These machines were much bigger.

  “They’re heavy transports. Capable of carrying hundreds of people or tonnes of equipment. It’ll take forever to bring thousands of people into the base using the manhole entrance in the Park. And, just picking them up from the Blocks will take even longer using Piglet. It can only carry about ten people, max. It would take hundreds of trips and I’m not sure how many trips Piglet has left in it. It’s pretty beat up.”

  “There are lots of them,” Stuff said, pointing at the transports.

  Mina didn’t seem pleased by Stuff’s observation. “Even if we pick up a couple of hundred people at a time, we’re talking at least five round trips per Block and there are twelve of them. Some are too far away to reach without setting up fuel drops. We’ve got plenty of transports. What matters is how many pilots we have. I can’t fly them. It’s not like Piglet.”

  “But there’s a way, right?” Battery Boy prompted.

  “I think so. I’ll show you later.”

  Jugger looked around the vast space. “How do we even get them out of here?”

  Mina stamped her foot on the floor. “This lift will take them up to the hangar bay,” she said pointing straight up. “The hangar doors are another problem. They’re completely blocked, overgrown, rusted. I’m not sure by what exactly. We need to clear whatever’s obstructing the door so we can use the transports and bring people back in the hundreds, not tens,” Mina said.

  Battery Boy smiled, Mina was growing in confidence as she talked.

  She turned away from the transports and pointed at another area. “Those yellow machines are industrial robots. We’ll need to learn how to operate them as well and get them out there working. We can use them to break through one of the smaller outside doors to the Park and then clear the main hanger door.”

  Pinkie stepped forward and pointed at rows of gruesome looking camouflage-coloured robots that were obviously weapons. “What are those?”

  “Let’s hope we never need those,” Mina said. “We’d probably be fighting for our lives, and they’re no match for the Blocks.”

  Pinkie looked disappointed. Jugger was studying the menacing machines carefully. Mina seemed to have hit some sort of wall. She’d stopped talking and was staring at her feet.

  “You’ve done great Mina, what’s next?” Battery Boy prompted, hoping Mina wasn’t heading for another melt down.

  “You need to know there’s one problem left and it’s major. We need a small army of skilled maintenance engineers to check all the machines out before we try and use them. They’ve been sitting down here for decades. Parts will need repair, lubricants replaced. Systems checked. That sort of thing.”

  “Are you going to train us?” Tress asked.

  “No, you have so much to learn already, there isn’t time and there aren’t enough of us.”

  Battery Boy was curious. Where were they going to get an army of trained engineers from? “So, what are we going to do?”

  “God help me, but it was the only way,” Mina said and nodded towards a specific transporter.

  Battery Boy stared at where Mina was indicating. The particular machine she’d picked out didn’t look any different to the others. Then he noticed a small movement near the landing gear.

  “Hey, time for introductions,” Mina shouted in the direction of the movement.

  The noise echoed around the vast space. Battery Boy stared hard and the movement became a blur of motion gliding rapidly across the floor towards them. It slowed as it closed on the group.

  It was a robot, about Stuff’s height, with slender legs and slim arms ending in dexterous long fingered hands. The narrow head and lithe body were vaguely feminine. It was white, except for a small red cross in the centre of its chest.

  “Everyone, meet Nurse Trinity.”

  “Howdy folks. Anyone need an enema? It’s one of my specialities.” The robot twirled one of its slender digits.

  Battery Boy was stunned. He recognised the crazy humour and the voice. Trinity had a body? It had never occurred to him that it would even be possible.

  Jugger wasn’t impressed. “Why did you pick this body? Why not something bigger? Useful even?”

  “Would you really prefer having one of those big yellow jobs giving you an enema?”

  “What the hell is an enema?” Jugger asked, looking at Mina.

  “Never mind. That robot body is exactly what we need for the maintenance work. There are hundreds of these bodies stored in the base. Trinity can work as many as we need, all at the same time. I’ve integrated Trinity into the base’s systems and that’s been a huge weight off my shoulders. The systems here were designed to be operated by a large team of specialists. Now I don’t have to deal with all of that, just Trinity.” She tried on a weak smile and Battery Boy thought how much better Mina looked when she wasn’t wearing her usual haunted and desperate face.

  Mina turned to Trinity, “How’s the body trial going?”

  “It’s got great hands for obscene gestures,” Trinity said, while giving Mina the finger. “It’s only a demo, don’t get all antsy. I can do a new dance as well. Wanna see?”

  “Save it for the Owners, or Tippese or both,” Mina answered and she laughed.

  And for a moment that’s all everyone did, laugh. It was such a relief to have something to laugh about.

  Eventually the reality of their situation reasserted itself and Mina addressed Trinity, “Crazy AI. Is this body going to work? Can it fix the transports?”

  “It’s perfect. With these lovely lithe hands I can burst a zit and replace an engine. The essential skills of any true engineer. Does anyone have any zits I could practice on?”

  Battery Boy could see why Mina might already be regretting giving the mad potty mouthed machine a body. He didn’t want to upset the mood but he had to ask, “Why can’t the engineers fly some of the transports. Wouldn’t that speed things up?”

  Trinity clutched its head and did a poor impression of sobbing. “The wild blue yonder. Alas, it can only ever be a dream.”

  Mina clarified. “These bodies only work inside the base, even stepping out into the Park is stretching it. Let’s go. I need to show you the learning centre.”

  They left Nurse Trinity to continue testing its maintenance capabilities on its own in the dark. They returned to the lift and headed up. Mina led Battery Boy and the others to a large single storey building in the main base complex that he’d not visited before. It consisted of a single warehouse space filled with clear upright tubes as big as the medical scanners but the detailed construction was different. Inside each one a strange looking helmet with a full face visor hung from the tube cap on a thick cable. There were hundreds of the tubes set out in neat rows. Running along the walls Battery Boy noticed banks of black cabinets, topped with darkened view screens. It looked as if there was one cabinet for every tube. Mina walked towards a cabinet and started to explain.

  “We all need to learn how to operate the yellow robots,” she patted a tube, “so we can get them out in the Park. We want them working and clearing the main hangar door and creating some landing pads as soon as possible,” Mina said.

  Jugger stopped and examined a nearby tube. “Training? In these things?”

  “Yes, they’re much better than in my day. You can be trained in the basics of the industrial machine’s operations in a week. The tubes use a sort of virtual reality to accelerate the learning process.”

  A worried looking Stuff was staring up at the large tube Jugger was examining. “Is it safe?”

  “Absolutely. Some of you will also learn how to use the transport's basic autopilot controls, and navigation, for ferrying people back and forth,” Mina replied.

  Battery Boy was immediately curious. There was so much he didn’t know about the world before the Blocks. “Can
they teach us anything else?”

  “Sure, I’ll show you how to access the library of modules; you can learn whatever you want. But first, it’s basic robot control and then flight training for the older ones. Later, we’ll use these tubes to give an education to the people we rescue,” Mina answered, almost smiling.

  Pinkie fixed Mina with a determined gaze. “Why can’t I learn to fly? Does it do guns?”

  “We’ll start with the robot training, everyone can do that,” Mina answered, side-stepping Pinkie’s perennial questions about getting armed. “It’ll take a couple of hours a day, for about a week.”

  “I’ll go first, I always wanted to get some proper schooling,” Tress said. “Why don’t we start now?”

  Battery Boy didn’t like the idea of Tress getting into one of the tubes first, but she was insistent. He helped her inside and to don the helmet which had an opaque mirrored visor that completely covered her face. When Mina activated the cabinet the tube tilted back about forty-five degrees. Tress waved happily when it came to a rest.

  Battery Boy and Mina were the last to go in. Tress, Jugger, Pinkie and Stuff looked happily asleep in their own gently humming tubes.

  Battery Boy thought over what Tippese had said before negotiations started. He turned to Mina who was huddled over a console. “What do you think’s happened to the Iowa Block?”

  “I don’t want to think about it, we’ve got enough to worry about,” said Mina.

  Just then Nurse Trinity showed up. “You’re doing okay, Mina,” the robot said.

  “Why thank you, Nurse Trinity. Maybe giving you a body was a good idea.”

  Trinity wandered over to the humming tubes. “Nice to see our friends getting an education.”

  “Yes, it is. And it’s just the beginning. Battery Boy, you ready?” Mina asked.

  Trinity wasn’t done. “Listen though, and I hate being a rain cloud: remember when Tippese said the Blocks had lost contact with the Owners?”

  “Sure, that was the whole point of destroying the gateway.”

  “Exactly, and it’s helped get us this far. But it works both ways Mina. If the Blocks lost contact with the Owners, then the Owners have lost contact with the Blocks. They’ll notice that, even if they didn’t notice whatever the bombs did beyond the gateway.”

  Battery Boy was halfway into his tube and stopped. He saw where Trinity was going and wished he hadn’t. “They’re coming? The Owners are really coming?”

  Mina looked worried. “There’s no way of knowing, and even if they were, without a gateway it could take them years.”

  Something deep fell into place in Battery Boy’s head. “Or nine months. Jugger’s right, Tippese is stalling. We need to hurry.”

  Trinity said, “We have to assume that Battery Boy and Jugger are right.”

  “Jesus Trinity, it’s twelve thousand people. And that’s just the beginning. If we screw it up, we might never get organised enough to get anybody else out.”

  Trinity didn’t say any more and Mina turned back to working on the console. When he thought about it Battery Boy wasn’t really surprised that the Owners might be coming. They’d really messed up the Blocks.

  There were always going to be consequences.

  Chapter 4 – Consequences

  High Priest Truculent hurried through the outer doors of the shrine and marched on quickly towards the inner sanctum. He was anxious to get the tedious ceremony of the Tuned consultation concluded as quickly as decorum allowed. His last visit was five cycles ago but the place was unchanged. The walls of the huge circular chamber were clad in polished brass that reflected the light from thousands of candles lining the perimeter. The flickering flames cast long snaking shadows on the granite floor, all pointing across an empty space towards the single colossal stone pillar that dominated the very centre of the room. The soaring column reached up to collide with the smooth, copper coloured ceiling high overhead.

  Truculent strode across the candlelit space directly towards the base of the massive stone trunk. As a young seminarian his first sight of the pillar, and the thought of a meeting with the Tuned, had awed, frightened and inspired him. Now it was just a cold setting for an uncomfortable ritual. The Tuned could only be reached by climbing the steep flight of hard stone stairs that spiralled precariously around the outside of the richly carved column. Protocol demanded that the High Priest should ascend on all fours, which was always a painful and strenuous exercise that never helped Truculent’s mood. The only compensation for the embarrassment of not being upright was that it made the vertigo-inducing trudge a little less scary. The steps wound around the outside of the pillar with nothing to stop him from slipping over the edge. He concentrated on keeping his eyes glued on the step ahead, avoiding any temptation to peek at the terrifying fall to the hard granite floor hundreds of metres below. As Truculent slowly laboured up the thousand steps he had plenty of time to reflect on the unprecedented events that had brought him to the shrine.

  Eventually, the severe stairs deposited Truculent under a small silver hatch set into the copper ceiling, directly above his head. This was the part that Truculent detested even more than the knee-crunching pilgrimage. He gave the ritual knock. The hatch opened to reveal the blank moronic face of the Tuned, the gods’ chosen mouthpiece. All Tuned were catatonic except for their occasional outbursts of wondrous import which only a High Priest could interpret. Once installed in a shrine, it was cut off from all outside contact except for the Priesthood. The chosen brain-dead were hardly alive, let alone talkative.

  His Tuned was housed in the heart of the Sector Seventy-Six shrine, the domed Refuge, immediately above Truculent’s head. It was the private retreat of the Tuned, and no one except the attending Priests could enter, not even Truculent. For the ceremony the senseless male Tuned had been comfortably arranged on his stomach by the Priests, which was the required pose for an audience. His limp head jutted out over the edge of the padded dais on which he was laid. The Tuned’s face was held steady in a harness with straps across his forehead and chin. Truculent imagined the unseen, respectful Priests standing with bowed heads in a circle around the opening. All that was actually visible to Truculent was the face of the brain-dead Tuned bordered by the frame of the open trapdoor. This latest incarnation was no different to the usual Tuned. Truculent had not heard a comprehensible word out of the thing since it had been revealed to the Priesthood tens of cycles ago.

  “High Angel Tuned of the Seventy-Sixth Sector, a most extraordinary occurrence. We have detected the presence of a Three Crimson,” Truculent exclaimed, unable to hide his own amazement even though he was telling a cabbage and he already knew what the vegetable was going to say. At least the attending Priests understood the significance: astonished gasps leaked through the trapdoor from above. Truculent agreed, it was astonishing, almost impossible to believe. The highest quality Crimson ever officially documented was a One, and its formula was lost in the fourth Great War. There were rumours of a Two, and the even more legendary Three. Tales of a Three Crimson emanated from the time the absurd Channel creatures were first farmed, thousands and thousands of cycles in the past. The best the Empire could produce today was a sub-standard One.

  The Tuned reacted to the news as Truculent expected. The familiar pale moronic face stared back at him with dead eyes, gently blowing bubbles through its loose fat lips. Truculent knew well how the game was played. He would wait a deferential amount of time and then continue with his announcement, ending with his recommendations; the Tuned would burble assent and that would be that.

  “Shreee...,” the Tuned slobbered.

  High Priest Truculent was stunned; had it tried to speak? The Tuned's face was directly above Truculent, neatly framed by the open hatch door. The awkward position forced Truculent to tilt his neck painfully backwards to look directly up into the countenance of the gods’ mouthpiece. Truculent was staring at the blank visage of a retard, except its dancing eyeballs were now wildly gazing back, its floppy wet
mouth suddenly flexing and twisting, as though straining to say something more.

  With his limbs still complaining from the tortuous climb, the unexpected outburst from the Tuned only made Truculent more angry and resentful than he usually was on these visits. The paralysed moron had never uttered a coherent sound before, other than to mumble one or two unintelligible syllables. Truculent guessed the attending Priests were equally stunned, but in their case by a happy surprise. It was obviously some kind of brain spasm, maybe something it had been fed earlier. Truculent decided to ignore the Tuned’s spastic outburst and continue.

  “The circumstances of the Three’s detection are unusual. Earlier today I received a group six damage alert. It came from an automated distribution facility along with reports of the total loss of production from the neighbouring planets. The high-level collateral damage assessment suggests thirty-five billion product and worker creatures have been extinguished. There was minor damage to a small Channel nursery. Only a few million low grade prepubescent Channels have been lost.” Despite his astonishment at the Tuned’s single word outburst, his voice was remarkably calm. He paused for the expected Tuned comment, which should be silence or a burp, at best.

  “Losh… Channel… losh?” the Tuned hissed.

  “Minor losses, nothing that would warrant disturbing the High Angel Tuned,” Truculent replied, startled that the Tuned appeared to have spoken again. For a moment he wondered if his excitement at the Three Crimson’s discovery was affecting him more than he thought.

  “Shree.., shree…, where?” the Tuned hissed quite loudly, its tone almost impatient, angry.