Future Furies (Endless Fire Book 1)

by R E Kearney

  Minutes later, safe inside the plantation, Tena jumps from the robodrone and jogs to Pion’s control room. She bursts into the control room eager to hug and thank Pion for saving her. Pion recoils.

  “You are dirty. You smell.” She emotionlessly rebuffs Tena, as she pulls off her control helmet. “Follow me.” Pion ushers Tena toward her life-station. Mechanically Tena falls into step behind her.

  Pion’s personal care robot springs into action when Tena enters. “The hygiene chamber is prepared for you. Medicine is available. Sleep wear is printed.”

  Tena freezes staring at the personal care robot, not understanding one word that it emitted. Yet, when it rotates and begins rolling toward the hygiene chamber, she, again, automatically follows. Once inside the hygiene chamber, however, she is alone with nobody to follow. She is completely and totally confused, as well as scared by all of the strange devices and machines. Continuously repeated directions from the personal care robot serve only to bewilder her more. Nervous and lost, Tena is a stranger in a strange land.

  Only Pion’s and Komfort-bot’s arrival in the hygiene chamber eases Tena’s mystification. Ignoring her objections and despite her resistance, they insert a tiny voice-activated universal translator in each of Tena’s ears. The VAUTs are so small that, although she tries, Tena cannot remove them. Her opposition begins to melt when she hears Komfort-bot speaking to her in her own language through what she soon names, the little pills. But, when Komfort-bot tells Tena that Pion is wearing VAUTs too, so she can understand her, all her fight disappears.

  Explaining in her native language through her VAUTs, Komfort-bot reassures Tena and slowly directs her, while Pion strips and physically demonstrates, this foreign, body cleaning process to her. Pion showers without abandoning her strict adherence to bathing routines and rituals. Tena giggles as gangly, pale-skinned, Pion exactingly proceeds through each step in her purifying ceremony including painstakingly placing and replacing each cleaning article in its exact location.

  Aware that it will upset her, if Tena fails to follow her cleaning process and use of cleansing articles precisely, Komfort-bot sends Pion away to eat. Also, since Pion strictly adheres to specific eating routines and rituals, as well, it is best to have her eat while Tena cleanses. Finally, with her disinfecting complete, Komfort-bot patiently steers Tena through the procedures for medicating herself and dressing herself, and finally, eating a SPEA meal.

  While Tena appreciates the cleansing and soothing medicating, she argues long and hard against wearing the power-felt clothes. Power-felt molds to the wearer’s body like a second skin, in order to generate electricity from the wearer’s muscle movements. She loudly complains that it is too tight and constricting, and is crushing her. Crossing her arms and stomping her feet, she threatens to stay naked. But, in the end, she realizes she has no other choice, but to wear what she forever calls – strangling snake skin.

  Eating SPEA food, on the other hand, requires no explanation or demonstration. Tena is starving. For at least twelve hours, she has eaten nothing. Tena’s only problem with the food is that Chef-bot is not preparing enough of it, fast enough. She devours every morsel placed in front of her. With every gulp of food and every mouthful of flavored water, Tena also swallows a small amount of tranquilizer. Mugavus through Komfort-bot is preparing her for when the joy of still being alive gives way to the anguish and despair of still being alive when everyone else has died. She has escaped the carnage, only temporarily. Soon nightmares of horror will flood her mind. But now, she only recognizes hunger.

  Even Pion enjoys Tena’s eating prowess. For the first time in a very long time, she smiles and laughs. Pion’s laughter quickly changes to protests, however, when a very tired and drugged Tena climbs into her special sensory chair to sleep. She requires a lengthy discussion with Komfort-bot before she allows it. Still, she remains unhappy and she refuses to say goodnight when she heads to bed. Today, there was far too much disruption of her routine leaving her anxious and non-verbal at day’s end.

  “Allow her to sleep,” Komfort-bot directs the grumbling Pion. “Tomorrow we will need her. Our work here is just beginning.”

  Chapter 4.

  Revenge Shall Be

  “Exploit the present to create the future,” Komfort-bot instructs as she awakens Tena her first morning living inside the plantation. Komfort speaking through Komfort-bot expects her words to be inspirational, but waking only transports Tena from one hell to another. Despite Komfort-bot’s tranquilizers, horrific nightmares tormented Tena all night. She cried out many times. She screamed her father’s name. Again and again, she relived the bloodbath. She will never escape the Koko, now. They will be forever attacking her, living inside her mind, until either they die or she dies. From her father’s teachings, Tena learned that only Koko deaths will free her from the demons now tormenting her and she also remembers that only she can kill those demons. She must answer the demands of the dead.

  But, she first has to bury her past or what remains of her past. Terrified and alone, except for Pion’s five watchful WASPs and two DOGs, she ventures into the still smoking debris of her village. Everywhere, ravenous vultures, ravens, and dogs rip and tear at the smoldering bodies of her neighbors. Loudly squawking, screeching and growling, they battle for scraps. Nervously, she edges her way around the feasting scavengers and over the corpses and carcasses strewn upon the dirt paths. The Koko savagely butchered them. Men, women and children lie shot and mercilessly hacked into pieces. Tena cannot identify the faces of the bodies that still have faces. They are so brutally slashed. The Koko slaughtered every living creature they saw during their massacre. Complete carnage.

  The sight and stench of her dismembered and mutilated villagers overwhelms her. She shrieks in agony and anger. A few dogs growl and vultures squawk in response, but that is all she hears. To her horror, she realizes she is the only living human remaining. The only survivor. A young, thirteen year old girl, alone, frightened and now responsible for her village.

  Once she locates it, all that Tena finds of her shack is a pile of twisted tin that was once its roof. Beneath the melted metal, she spies her father’s burned body, but she cannot reach it. She strains and struggles to lift the metal. It is too heavy. She yanks and tugs, but still nothing moves. Exasperated, she slams her fists on the metal loudly wailing curses.

  Tena searches her shack’s ruins for a tool, a lever, anything. She finds nothing, but weak, charred wood and ashes. Pion’s WASPs and DOGs operate close by, but they are built for security and are of no help for lifting. She needs something stronger, like a tree limb from the Acacia tree just outside the village.

  Tena does not see the drunk Koko raider passed out and asleep against the trunk of the Acacia tree until she is within three feet of him. Immediately, she recognizes him and the bloodied machete stuck in the ground next to him. He is one of the Koko who slaughtered her goats. He chased her through the thorns. He murdered her neighbors. He must die.

  When Tena grabs his machete, the Koko man grunts and stirs. He blinks open his eyes, just as she buries his machete deep into his throat. Blood explodes onto her. She swings again slamming the blade into his face. Again and again she hacks at the man. With each swing, she screams her father’s name. She does not stop. She cannot stop. All of her savage fury floods upon him. But then finally, she stops. Exhausted. She drops the machete to the ground before slowly stumbling back to the ashes of her village.

  Tena slumps onto the ground among the remains of her ruined, shack. Lost, she stares at the immovable, twisted tin coffin strangling her father. Stretching, straining and reaching, she tenderly touches the top of his head with her fingertips. Hopeless and wretched. Tears flood her eyes. She can do nothing. Nothing. Softly, she begins singing songs her father sang to her. Rocking her in his arms, he sang her to sleep. Beseeching her gods, she sings her people’s songs of death. She sings his final song. She weeps. His songs are all she has left.

  When
the retrieval robodrone arrives, there is no fight remaining in Tena. She is spent. She aches. Slowly she rolls into the retrieval robodrone.

  Inside the plantation, she staggers through the control room to the life-station. She does not speak to Pion and Pion does not speak to her. There is nothing for Pion to say. What she witnessed Tena do through her WASPs’ eyes, she has never experienced before. Shocked into stunned silence.

  Komfort-bot and the personal care robot are prepared for Tena’s return. They immediately help her strip off her blood covered power-felt clothing and hurry her into the hygiene chamber. But no amount of cleansing her of Koko blood can purge the heat of hate from inside her. Her mind carries too many demons. Too many Kokos remain for her to kill to avenge her village.

  After her cleansing, Chef-bot prepares and serves her lunch. Komfort-bot wants her alert and ready to learn, so she hides no tranquilizers in her food this time. Tena has much to learn and little time to learn it. But, it does not matter, Tena’s lunch sits uneaten. She has no appetite for food.

  “It is not safe for you to go into your village anymore. The Koko will be back and will be looking for you. You cannot fight them all. Anyway, you cannot do anything by yourself. The work is too much for you alone. You will need to use equipment. We will teach you,” Komfort-bot informs Tena.

  On cue, Pion steps through the door carrying a brain-impulse-holohelmet, which she hands to Tena. “Put this on your head. I programmed it. It controls the plantation’s robotic excavation equipment. It controls five WASPs and two DOGs. I will show you how to use it. You will be a system integration technologist.”

  Tena is in no hurry to place Pion’s strange looking hat on her head, despite the repeated urgings of both Pion and Komfort-bot. Only after Pion wears her helmet for several minutes herself, without harm does she relent. And so it goes for the remainder of her training. As with her first hygiene chamber experience, Komfort-bot explains while Pion physically and exactingly demonstrates in a twin helmet precisely what they expect her to do. Her training is intense and exhaustive. Tena learns quickly. But neither Komfort via Komfort-bot nor Pion realize just how quickly and well she is learning until she and Pion begin competing.

  Actually, no competition is planned. A simple training exercise blossoms into a contest of skills and wills when Komfort provides Pion and Tena the opportunity to watch each other work. After three days of rigorous training in using the brain-impulse-holohelmet to coordinate and direct the plantation’s robotic and drone security equipment, agricultural equipment and excavating equipment, Komfort decides to allow Tena to work on her own. From her office in the SPEA capital via Komfort-bot, she is able to observe Tena’s efforts by projecting her holohelmet’s 3D visuals. For comparison, Komfort-bot also projects Pion’s holohelmet’s 3D visuals as she coordinates and directs duplicate plantation equipment conducting the same task – clearing a section of Tena’s ruined village.

  At the beginning of the exercise, work proceeds as expected. Starting at the end of the village farthest away from Tena’s shack, each of them clears their assigned section of the village carefully and completely. Each handles any human remains they uncover respectfully before placing them into a mass grave. But surprisingly to Komfort, Pion shows more concern and care than Tena when interring the remains of Tena’s fellow villagers.

  As their work continues, she also notes that both of them are working faster. Via Komfort-bot, she catches them peeking at each other’s projections, comparing their work progress to the other’s. Pion peeks and speeds up. Then Tena peeks and increases her speed. Unwilling to give the other any edge, both of them continue working through lunch. Neither pauses for a minute, refusing to allow the other to outperform them.

  Concentrating completely on their work competition, Pion and Tena are caught by surprise as fifteen heavily armed Koko raiders suddenly storm into the village. Spying the attacking Koko, Pion quickly withdraws all of her equipment out of range. Tena, on the other hand, attacks. She charges the Koko with every piece of equipment she controls as fast as she can. But, it is not just that Tena engages all of her equipment, it is how she maneuvers to effectively engage her equipment that impresses Komfort. She plans her attack – a very deadly plan of attack.

  Tena’s unexpected assault surprises the Kokos. The raiders do not recognize the SPEA equipment as weapons. Too late, they realize the lethality of the strange flying machines and curious crawlers. Only one raider reacts to fight them. Just before he hits the ground, he fires his AK-47 wildly at the WASP zooming toward him. Missing the WASP, he kills a brother raider.

  After watching Tena outflank, surround and immobilize eight Kokos, Pion enters the fray. But she deploys only her security equipment, and then employs only traditional SPEA stunning tactics. Her straight forward assaults on Koko fighters drive them back, but she does not surround and crush them like Tena. The Kokos fighting against Pion evade, avoid, and escape her. But, they will not escape Tena.

  With the Kokos focusing their attention on eluding Pion’s advance, Tena swiftly maneuvers her equipment behind them. Before they can react, she slams three more Kokos onto the ground. With nowhere to run, the four remaining Kokos drop their weapons and throw up their hands surrendering. In a matter of a few minutes it is over, except that it isn’t. For Tena, it is not over. Before Komfort can alert Komfort-bot or Pion reacts, the four surrendering Kokos lie face down in the dirt.

  Tena and Pion continue circling their WASPs above the battlefield. Watching. Waiting. Nobody moves. Two minutes pass. Five minutes pass. Komfort watches and waits in SPEA’s capital expecting the Kokos to soon recover from being stunned. Only after waiting ten minutes does she realize that the Koko are not stunned. The Koko are dead. Tena killed them all. She has drawn first blood of her blood feud.

  Unknown to Komfort and Pion, Tena was not just studying how to maneuver SPEA’s security robodrones. She was also learning how to override the robodrones’ laser power controls converting them from humane stunning robodrones to human killers. Not only did Tena outmaneuver the Kokos, she also outmaneuvered Komfort and Pion, as well.

  In her SPEA capital office Komfort paces in contemplative silence, as she ponders her dangerous dilemma. Unwittingly and unexpectedly, she enabled Tena to kill using SPEA equipment, potentially creating an international calamity, if it is discovered. SPEA flourishes because it cultivates and maintains as much neutrality as possible in today’s borderless world of constant rebellions and continuous conflicts. She fears she may have accidentally allowed Tena to hurl SPEA into a war. A war that she apprehensively believes could involve not only the Kokos, but worse, their international terroristic supporters, ARTAS, as well.

  Or perhaps not, she concludes. But only if she acts immediately. There may be no way to eliminate her problem, but there exist ways to cover it up. She reasons that since the isolated plantation is in the middle of harvest and the killings occurred outside of the plantation and off the grid, perhaps nobody else from SPEA, except Pion and Tena, realize that it ever happened. However, she calculates that she has less than a day before more Kokos came searching for their friends. It is impossible for the death of sixteen men to not be noticed or be forgotten by the Kokos and ARTAS. She realizes that her primary task, now, is to prevent them from connecting the missing men to SPEA and the plantation.

  Through Komfort-bot, Komfort directs Pion to straightaway complete a list of tasks she provides her. First and foremost, she orders Pion to return all security equipment to the plantation. Then, she instructs Pion to work with Tena to immediately remove the villagers’ bodies from their mass grave; collect all of the Koko bodies and Koko weapons and dump them into the emptied grave; burn the Koko bodies; destroy all Koko personal communication devices, or PCDs if you wish, and weapons; hide the Koko bodies beneath the bodies of the dead villagers; fill the grave with dirt; and then pile village debris atop the grave. Finally, Komfort-bot directs Pion to rewire Tena’s holohelmet removing all connections betw
een her and the plantation’s security equipment, as soon as they complete burying and covering the dead Kokos. Komfort wants to ensure there is no chance of the killings disaster reoccurring.

  Pion and Tena work deep into the night completing the burning and burial of the Kokos and reburial of the villagers. It is ghastly, repulsive work. They are mentally exhausted. Their heads ache. Tena pulls off her helmet, stumbles to the security chair and immediately collapses into sleep. An equally fatigued Pion succumbs to her own deep sleep, but not before carefully rewiring Tena’s holohelmet.

  Chapter 5.

  Opportunity in Chaos

  “Exploit the present to create the future.” Komfort-bot awakens Tena to another new day. For many mornings, Tena has no idea what Komfort-bot means other than it is time to eat breakfast. But, after hours and days of intensive English training, she finally understands. Her past was destroyed and her present is in jeopardy. Her only hope for survival lay in her future.

  Today, Tena starts working alone clearing her village, while Pion returns to her normal work duties, with the additional assignment of keeping an eye watching Tena. Seeking to avoid additional contact with Kokos, Komfort-bot directs Tena to begin clearing operations near her own shack at the other end of her village. This means, she will not be working near the Koko’s mass grave. But, because more than four days have passed since the Kokos killed her father and burned their shack and village, there is concern about what she may uncover. However, it is work that must be done and only Tena is available to do it.