Future Furies (Endless Fire Book 1)

by R E Kearney

  Pion raises her eyes and studies Tena, whose tone unexpectedly reminds her of Magus Komfort. She stares silently. Confused.

  Again in slow and measured English, Tena directs her, “Say…please.”

  Pion drops her eyes again and hesitates before complying with Tena’s directions. “Please. Give me my WASP. I must repair it,” she softly requests.

  Searching for more correct English words and then pronouncing each one succinctly, Tena slowly informs Pion that they have become partners, “I will not give you the WASP. We will repair the WASP together. Take me to your tools.”

  Although Pion has never been to the plantation’s equipment garage, she knows that the tools she requires to repair the WASP are there. Thinking of leaving the familiarity and security of her work area and life-station distresses her. Such unexpected changes in her routine or her environment often upset her into immobility. But, the presence of Tena provides needed reassurance. Unexpectedly, Pion is discovering Magus’ calming reassurance, strength and steadiness she craves in Tena.

  “The tools are in the equipment room,” Pion reports as she opens the control room door to the corridors connecting the control room to the robotic WASP compartment of the equipment garage. “We will go together?” she requests as she pulls off her helmet.

  “We will go together,” Tena echoes Pion as she finally gives her the damaged robot and starts retracing her steps down the corridor. Pion falls into step close behind.

  In the WASP compartment of the equipment garage, Pion quickly locates the tools she needs and starts the repairs. Tena studies her every move closely, mentally noting everything she does. Within minutes, Pion completes the repairs and the WASP is flapping its wings and flying around the compartment. It circles the compartment twice before settling softly into its charging slot among the other WASPs.

  “I repaired the WASP. Do not break it again,” Pion lectures, as she turns to return to her work compartment.

  “Hawana kuumwa!” Tena stops, thinks for a moment, before finding the English words. “Do not sting me. I do not break WASP.”

  “Do not steal. I will not sting you.” Pion continues, “I cannot let you steal.”

  Tena sorts through her English vocabulary for a moment before responding, “Give me water. I do not steal.”

  Silently, Pion continues back into the control room, pulls on her helmet and returns her focus to monitoring the plantation. She is not being mean or intentionally ignoring Tena. Pion is just being Pion. She is adhering to her work routine. Although, she is unable to show it, she is pleased to have Tena in the room with her.

  Bewildered by Pion’s sudden change, Tena stands silently beside her and attempts to comprehend her strange actions. Tena squints and strains and twists her head attempting to peer into Pion’s helmet. She spots flashes of light, but nothing else. Bored with struggling to glimpse what Pion is seeing, Tena surveys the bare, dimly-lit control room. There exists little to consider. Except for Pion and her control chair, the room is empty. There are no windows and only two doors. Tena recognizes the door to the equipment garage, but the second door is a mystery.

  Twenty-one, short-legged, steps later, the mystery door slides open in front of a surprised Tena. She suspiciously enters the strange room. She has never beheld anything like this place with its antiseptic cleanliness, strange appliances and two silent, frozen women sitting at the table. She pauses just inside the door, hesitant to proceed.

  “Hello,” Komfort-bot greets Tena.

  “Nini! Nini wewe ni!” Tena screams, and jumps backward, startled by the Komfort-bot’s unexpected statement.

  After a few moments of using her heat signature sensors to read Tena’s bodily sensation map, Komfort-bot recognizes from the pattern of heat Tena’s mid-chest and face are emanating that she is surprised. But, her heat pattern is spreading and enlarging, extending into her stomach area indicating her surprise is now fear. Watching from her office Mugavus observes Tena’s heat pattern quickly flooding into her arms and anger. Knowing that human heat does not lie, Mugavus hurriedly instructs Komfort-bot to issue a distracting statement.

  Komfort-bot responds, “Mimi Ni Pion ya rafiki Na mshauri.” Then she repeats it in English, “I am Pion's companion mentor.”

  “I am Pion’s mother,” Pion’s Mother-bot joins the conversation.

  “Are you Pion’s befriender?” Komfort-bot asks a confused Tena.

  “I…do…not…understand,” Tena finally answers, as her heat signature cools toward neutral.

  “Je, wewe ni befriender Pion ya?” Komfort-bot asks again.

  “I…do…not…understand…befriender,” Tena explains.

  “Are you helping Pion? Are you from the village?” Komfort-bot questions her again, speaking the words slowly and distinctly.

  “I come for water,” Tena attempts to explain with her limited English while edging backward toward the door.

  “Wait. Do not go. You can help us help Pion.” Komfort-bot urges Tena to stay, as the door behind her quietly slides closed.

  Tena strains against the door, but it will not open. She is stuck. Frantic, she desperately searches the room for another exit. She discovers no way out. She begins to panic.

  “Will you help us help Pion?” Komfort-bot asks again in her most soothing robotic voice, attempting to cool her heat of anger.

  “Help Pion? How help?” Tena asks as she continues struggling to open the door.

  “Be yourself,” Mother-bot replies. “Be Pion’s friend. Be her buddy.”

  “What is your name? Jina lako ni nani?” asks Komfort-bot, attempting to relax her by changing the subject to something more familiar.

  Tena stops fighting with the door and takes a few hesitant, exploratory steps toward the two humanoid-bots. “Mwanga wa jua. Jina langu ni mwanga wa jua,” Tena replies with pride and a smile.

  “Mwanga wa jua is your name? Your name is Sunshine? Pion calls you Tena. We will call you Tena. Tutamwita Tena,” Komfort-bot states.

  Tena points at herself. “Jina langu ni mwanga wa jua. Mwanga wa jua. Not Tena.”

  Komfort-bot bluntly directs, “We will call you Tena. Tutamwita Tena. You are Tena.”

  Tena inches forward and tentatively reaches out to touch the forehead of the mother humanoid-bot. Hesitatingly, she pushes the tips of her fingers against Mother-bot’s pale, fleshy, ROBOSKIN cheeks. Tena leans closer scrutinizing the Mother-bot from top-to-bottom, front-to-back. Composed of silicone, spider silk, electroactive polymers and ferrofluids, Mother-bot and Komfort-bot look nearly human and are capable of humanlike movements. The sensitive tactile electrodes in Mother-bot’s ROBOSKIN react to Tena’s tender touch by wrinkling her face into a small smile. Tena runs the tip of her finger along Mother-bot’s raised cheeks and her red lips.

  “We are humanoid-robots. I represent Pion’s mentor, Mugavus Komfort. You are touching Pion’s Mother robot. We are here to help Pion, but we are not humans. Pion needs a human friend. Pion needs a human friend who is trustworthy, friendly, reliable, willing to learn and sensitive to her needs. Can you do that?”

  Although Komfort-bot speaks slowly and succinctly, Tena does not hear or understand most of what she says. She is not listening. She is running her fingers through Mother-bot’s blond, human-hair wig. She fingers Mother-bot’s straight, dry hair with her right hand and her own curly, oily hair with her left hand. A frown creases her contemplating forehead. The differences confuse her.

  “Will you be Pion’s friend? We will give you water,” Mother-bot offers, tilting her head, so she speaks directly to Tena, scaring Tena who jumps away from her.

  After retreating back by the door, Tena inquires, “Water? More water? Be friend for more water?”

  “Yes, you be Pion’s friend for more water,” Mother-bot repeats her offer.

  “But, you must be trustworthy, friendly, reliable, willing to learn and sensitive to her needs,” insists Komfort-bot.

  Mother-bot rotate
s her head so she is looking at Komfort-bot. “Why are you confusing her? She does not speak English.”

  Standing next to the door, Tena silently stares at the two humanoid-bots. She remains confused by all of their talk in a language that she does not understand. What do they want? Why do they say that they will give her water? What is a buddy? Even when the dark-haired woman speaks in her language, she does not understand what she means.

  After much thought, Tena finally replies, “Give me water. I go.” Tena waits. Nothing happens. “Give me water. I go!” She repeats growing impatient.

  “Yes, we will give you water,” Komfort-bot assures her. “Pion is preparing it.”

  Behind Tena, the door slips open and Pion appears. “You must go now.”

  With a sigh of relief, Tena happily trails Pion to the retrieval robodrone. Inside the waiting robodrone, Tena finds four bottles of water. She turns to tell Pion goodbye, but discovers that she has gone. Tena quickly climbs inside the robodrone and lies down. The robodrone hatch closes and latches and a few moments later Tena is airborne. Four minutes later, the robodrone gently lands in front of Tena’s shack where it rotates and rolls Tena and the water out and onto the ground. Tena still lies on the ground as the robodrone disappears out of her village.

  But she is not alone. Five WASPs are hovering above surveilling her. From inside the plantation, Pion watches Tena quickly grab her water bottles and rush into her shack. She hugs the water bottles close to her body, hoping nobody from her village is spying on her and learns that she has water.

  Inside her shack, Tena quickly hides her bottles of water. Possessing water in her drought stricken village can be deadly. Everybody is thirsty and frantic since the water well SPEA drilled for them filled with sand. Tena wants to share her water with her father, but she must be secretive and careful. Nobody must know that she has extra water, including her friends. People in her village are killing each other fighting over water.

  Residents of neighboring villages frequently raid Tena’s village seeking water. Each day without rain, the villagers of Tena’s valley grow increasingly desperate and dangerous. The villagers have repeatedly attacked and tried, but cannot breach SPEA’s strong security, which separates them from their historic water sources. So, they fight each other for the remaining water dribbles and drops. The weak prey upon the weaker.

  Chapter 3.

  All is Lost

  After hiding her water, Tena hurries to gather her family’s goats and herd them into their pen before nightfall. Since SPEA seized their soil from them, Tena and her father, and fellow villagers survive by raising goats. Goats, like water, are the difference between life and death in Tena’s valley. Goats provide them with food and a small amount of money. And goats, like water, instigate fatal fighting between villagers and between villages. Her cousin died fighting to protect his goats from raiding neighboring villagers, and she lives in constant fear that she will also be killed for her goats.

  Tena races back to the brush where Pion’s WASPs had attacked her. Her goats are gone. Examining their tracks in the dust, she quickly determines that her hungry goats have wandered northeast searching for a few green leaves. Tena charges ahead clambering through the dry weeds and thorny bushes after her wandering goats, hoping to catch them before they graze their way onto the lands claimed by Koko villagers. Pion’s WASP swarm, flying above the brush, closely trail Tena.

  Tena shudders with fear at the thought of entering Koko territory. The Koko are a warrior clan who are terrorizing neighboring villages throughout the valley. Like her family and village, the Kokos had also been shoved off their land. When the government leased the Koko land to China for a massive Chinese farming operation the Koko, along with several smaller tribal villages were wedged into this narrow river valley. Life in the overcrowded valley was not easy, but was possible until the Chinese completed their hydro-electric dam. Then, the valley’s river dried to a trickle. The river’s fish died. Crops failed. Cattle died. The villages’ wells dried up and the Koko started raiding.

  Koko men are the people who killed her cousin for his goats. Koko men also stole the electric generator SPEA had given her village. Unlike her village, the Koko had weapons and were fighters, not farmers. SPEA confiscated the weapons from her village. But when the Chinese expelled the Koko, they had hidden and kept their weapons. The Chinese solved any problems they had with the Koko by ignoring them. As long as the Koko did not attack them, the Chinese did not bother the Koko.

  The Koko are also receiving weapons and training from the worldwide anarchic rebel group, Active Resistance and Terrorism against States or ARTAS. As members of the landless, cybernation ARTAS, the Koko are rewarded for each successful attack against government forces, government facilities and non-ARTAS aligned villages. The landless, state-abandoned Koko have nothing and, therefore, have nothing to lose. The vicious and cruel Koko are constantly on the attack, earning rewards and profits by continuously pillaging and plundering the valley.

  Tena creeps deeper into Koko territory. She does not spot her goats, but she can still follow their tracks. She has never been in this land before. It is unfamiliar and unfriendly. Thorny bushes slashes her skin and tears at her clothes. Sweat burns her eyes. She is scared. Her pounding heart deafens her.

  Trapped! Surrounded and trapped. Tena never senses the Koko raiders coming. Without warning, out of the bushes they leap. Five of them. Two aim their antique AK-47s at her. Three more swing bloodied machetes. She cannot fight them and she cannot outrun them. She drops to the ground and crawls beneath a zareba of thorny bushes. Cowering amidst thick, thorn-covered branches, she awaits death.

  Tena listens and waits. She overhears the Koko men talking. Then, she identifies the scraping of them approaching through the brush. She curls into a tight ball struggling to shrink into the ground. She waits and listens.

  Unexpectedly, the men begin yelling and shooting. But, they are not shooting at her. One man screams loudly about being blinded. Another man cries about being burned. She recognizes another man’s cursing and the sounds of him struggling to escape through the bushes. More shots are fired. Listening closely, she determines that they are from farther away. Yelling, screaming and cursing continues, but it is weakening and growing more distant. Then, silence.

  Cautiously, Tena crawls from beneath her thorn shelter and peeks toward where she last saw the men. They are gone. Instead, Pion’s five WASPs hover where the three men holding bloodied machetes stood. Torturously, she edges her way through the bushes toward the WASPs. As she negotiates her way closer to the WASPs, she begins smelling the stench of blood and to hear the buzzing of flies. And then, she sees them. All of her goats butchered.

  Tears flood her eyes. She has lost everything. The goats are all she and her father have. She collapses to the ground. With a shaking hand, she gently strokes the still warm side of her favorite dam. For the first time in her life, she does not know what to do. Gently, she rests her head on her goat’s side and, quietly sobbing, falls asleep.

  A stinging pain in Tena’s arm shocks her awake. One of Pion’s WASPs has stung her and now hovers, out of reach, in front of her. Above her head, circle the four other WASPs. Slowly, she begins to realize why the WASP stung her. The Koko are returning. She hears them talking and loudly crunching through the brush. There are many of them.

  Leaping to her feet, she scurries to escape through the thorny brush. Thorns snag her and stab her. She struggles to escape. Slowly, she breaks away from the gripping brush. She starts running. But, it is too late. The Koko have seen her. She ducks her head and races as fast as she can through the brush and tall, dry grass. Above her, Pion’s WASPs form a flying shield.

  Tena gains some distance on the Koko as they struggle through the same thorny brush that had clutched and clung to her. Breathless, bleeding and exhausted, she staggers into her village. Her father sprints to catch her.

  “Koko! Koko!” she gasps to her father, as they stumble
toward their shack. They scramble inside. As best as he can, he barricades the door and blocks the windows. He flips the table on its side and slides it against the shack’s back wall. Behind the table, he covers Tena with his body.

  Shooting and screaming horrifies Tena and her father. The Koko are slaughtering everybody. Bullets rip into the walls of their shack. With a crash, the shack door collapses. A Koko steps inside the shack and sprays bullets into every corner and into the table. Tena’s father grunts and jerks, as the Koko’s bullets burn deep into him. The shooting stops. Then, she smells smoke. The Koko are torching her village.

  Tena drags herself from beneath her dead father and crawls to where she had hidden her water. Bottle after bottle, she dumps water all over her body, soaking her clothes and hair. Coughing and choking in the smoke, she desperately kicks some boards loose in her shack’s back wall. Finally, she squirms and squeezes out of her burning shack and into her empty goat pen. Hidden in the billowing smoke, crawling on her stomach, she sneaks away from the burning village and toward the SPEA plantation.

  In front of Tena’s burning shack, Pion repeatedly circles her WASPs. While Tena and her father hid in the shack, Pion fought with her WASPs to stop the Koko fighters, but there were too many of them this time. She could only watch in agony, as the Koko slaughtered the villagers and burned their shacks. She piloted her WASPs above a few villagers who tried to escape the rampage by running into the brush. She repeatedly fired lasers at the Koko fighters chasing after them shooting and shrieking, but could not slow them. Pion circled Tena’s shack, but never saw Tena escape. So now, her WASPs hover, as she peers through the thick smoke, searching.

  After what seems like forever to her, Tena finally reaches the plantation’s boundary. Straining, she stretches out and trips the plantation’s intruder alarm. Then drops, quickly flattening onto the ground hoping no Kokos saw her, but that Pion has. Twelve hours earlier, the appearance of Pion’s WASPs above her sent her running in terror. Now when the WASPs swarm above her, she welcomes them with a sigh of relief. Pion found her. Moments later, the retrieval robodrone lands beside her.