Engines of Empire

by Max Carver

  He saw men and women in pitiable condition, parts of their bodies removed and replaced with strange machinery. Many of them had portions of their skull opened, with cables and wires running directly into their brains. Several of them lay dead in their blood-soaked beds, waiting to be carted off.

  Horror flooded Colt at the sight of Simon Nix's experiments, but he'd seen suffering and death before, and he had to keep moving. He could deal with the nightmares later.

  Remembering her directions, he ran down the hallway of green curtains and took a left at the second intersection. He saw the med-bot just ahead of him and almost ran to it, until he saw another very similar med-bot cross another intersection a few meters ahead. They were both Nurse Kitty models. In the dimness, there was no telling which was the one that had helped him. Maybe neither of them were.

  Colt hung back, waiting for both med-bots to continue on out of sight. He could feel precious seconds draining away, but he couldn't risk getting spotted by the wrong machine. He also wasn't going to try to find another way around. This place was a labyrinth of green curtains and machinery, a vast warehouse-sized laboratory of horrors.

  He reached an area full of large clear cages. A person with a bulky, horizontal, tube-shaped mechanism for a head squatted on a ripped-up sofa in one cage, his heavily bandaged hand swiping at the clear wall beside him, like a compulsive movement he couldn't stop repeating. Cables connected him to packs of fluids overhead. A screen hung in one corner, playing a weirdly colorless 2-D movie about the Old West, cowboys riding horses.

  Colt slowed as he passed that cage. The person's long tube of a head turned toward him, and Colt realized the face had been completely replaced with a large video camera on a swiveling mount in the neck. The back of the person's head was there, the brain wired into the camera, but the face had been entirely removed.

  The camera-headed man leaped like a frog from the top of the couch to the filthy shredded-paper mess of the floor, moving in for a closer look at Colt. He hammered his bandaged hands against the glass as Colt passed.

  Colt reached a section the med-bot had called the “gallery of heads” while giving him directions. Now he saw why. Scores of people floated in tanks here, naked, their heads held in metal hoops above the water. The tops of each person's skull had been removed, exposing most of the brain. An array of experiments were underway on the live human brains; many seemed to involve a vast web of thin gold wiring plugged directly into the neural tissue. Mechanical arms tipped with needles, saws, and scalpels, cousins to the med-bots who'd sprung Colt, worked at the brains, eliciting sighs, cries, and screams from the human subjects.

  Colt wished he could help everyone here, freeing them from this miserable existence. But he was unarmed, empty-handed, and his time was almost up.

  He passed a display of a hundred or more human brain slices, each one paper-thin and held between sheets of glass. Blood and fluids moved through the paper-thin slices, apparently keeping them alive.

  Turning away from them, he saw the double steel doors in a cinderblock wall to his left. One door stood slightly ajar, held open by a dirty, broken syringe near the bottom.

  Colt pushed his way out the door and eased it shut behind him, careful to avoid the syringe with his bare feet.

  On the other side was a concrete stairwell, the walls badly cracked. Following directions, he headed down a flight, then cut across an underground level.

  She'd mentioned this area was called “the morgue” but it had barely registered before.

  The words hadn't prepared him for the staggering horror of it. The place overflowed with bodies and body parts, some heaped in clogged steel sinks, others piled on metal carts. Rows of doors stood open on the mortuary cooler across the room; it had been stuffed full of mutilated bodies, three or four per drawer, though the drawers were clearly only supposed to hold one body each.

  Colt fought his urges to vomit and to scream. He ran through the morgue, avoiding the bodies heaped pack-rat fashion on either side.

  He finally reached a chain-link door to another stairwell leading even farther down. The chain-link door had been padlocked, but the lock now lay on the floor, freshly sawed open.

  Colt scooped up the sawed padlock and took it with him, since its presence on the floor would be a red flag as to where he'd gone. A lock that had vanished altogether was less immediately noticeable.

  He carefully closed the chain-link door behind him and hurried down, his bare feet providing the gift of silence as he passed down the rough, dirty concrete steps, though he had to avoid broken glass and loose rusty screws and nails.

  He descended to one landing, then another. It was getting very dark very fast, and he had no night vision goggles or flashlight this time. He wondered whether she'd taken that into account when giving him directions.

  Soon he was in total darkness, and it was freezing cold. He shivered, keeping his arms close.

  Alarms sounded above. His escape had been noticed. Mohini had said she couldn't hold them off long.

  He ran, which warmed him up a little. He descended four levels, then followed a hallway, his fingers trailing along the wall for some guidance in the solid darkness. He cursed as he stumbled over unseen debris, constantly getting tripped up by it. He would never get away; reapers would be pouring into the underground corridor any moment.

  He counted the doors as he passed them and opened the fourth one, as instructed, into a maintenance and supply room that connected to the building's water and sewer network, through which he could descend even deeper.

  There was a good chance he'd get lost before he made it that far, which meant a good chance of freezing down here in the dark. There was also a good chance the machines would catch him and kill him, and even a non-zero chance of getting attacked by rats in the dark, just as a fun alternative.

  Still hearing the machines rumbling somewhere overhead, Colt bolted forward into the darkness.

  Hold it there, kid, a woman's raspy, tobacco-scarred voice said inside his head. Mother Braden. What happens when you step blindly into a three-story ladder hole and fall to a concrete floor? Use your head.

  Yeah, use your head, stupidiot, his sister's voice echoed, using the combination of “stupid” and “idiot” she'd favored around age eleven.

  Don't pile on, Hope, Mother Braden admonished. It wastes time.

  That was one lesson Hope had never learned. She never missed a chance to pile on, especially at Colt's expense.

  He wondered about Hope and Diego. He was sure they'd made it back home; melting away into the ruins and disappearing was what scavengers did best. Still, it would have been nice to know for sure and to let them know that he was alive and safe.

  Alive, anyway. Safe was still up in the air.

  Colt felt his way toward a long, cluttered workbench in the corner. Given that he had absolutely nothing, the odds seemed good that he might find something that would help him survive the long, cold, pitch-black road ahead.

  He nicked his finger on an old saw blade and cursed. But he kept pawing around, though a little more cautiously.

  His hand closed on a steel cylinder, and he gasped a little, daring to hope. He found a button on the flashlight's side and clicked it.

  Nothing happened. He gave the flashlight a hard shake, and it sputtered to life with a weak, uneven yellow glow. The battery was low, but he was lucky it worked at all. They had really built things to last in the old world. He couldn't think of a better civilization to be squatting in the ruins of.

  The light helped him find a handful of other tools and a foul-smelling old leather tool belt to carry them in.

  Far more foul-smelling were the rotten old shoes he found kicked under the workbench. They looked like they might have been nested in by rats who'd since moved on to greener pastures. He had little choice but to shake out the rat dung and slide his bare feet into the creaky blackened interior of the shoes. He tied them on, mourning the loss of his crisp new Chicago Bears socks.

 
The sirens continued overhead. He wondered whether the machines had figured out where he'd gone yet. Reapers were probably already on the way.

  His heart pounding, he found his way to the ladder, a narrow steel one leading down through a world of pipes and valves to a landing several meters below. If he'd been careless, he could easily have stepped through the open hole in the dark and fallen to his death.

  He turned off his flashlight to save battery power and to help him avoid detection. He climbed down the ladder in total darkness, trying not to think about how far he could fall, glad he was unable to see the distance. The tools on his belt clanked, and he winced at the noise; he would have to secure them more tightly when he reached the bottom.

  Colt just hoped the sewer-tunnel portion of his journey wasn't unexpectedly flooded, as those areas often were. At least he wouldn't have to worry about ruining his shoes. He was pretty sure he could already feel the spores of rat-intestine diseases invading the gaps between his toes.

  * * *

  The sewer, only partially flooded, did eventually get him to the old underground highway marked U-20A. The road had twelve lanes on either side of the concrete barrier, with parallel magnetic stripes, but he could see why it might not be heavily patrolled by the metalheads. The arched concrete ceiling was cracked, leaking, and occasionally raining down chunks of worn concrete. These littered the road like boulders, making it impassable by any vehicle, except possibly an expertly driven motorcycle.

  Old cars and trucks were scattered on the road, abandoned since the war. Several had been crushed by fallen concrete. Like most cars and trucks of the old world, they were round or oval-shaped, skirted with bumpers, designed to drive themselves while the humans rode inside, just trusting the machines with their lives. For Colt, that seemed almost impossible to believe, but Mother Braden had told him it was true.

  Colt took a wide path around waterfalls of dark filth leaking down from the roof. A piece of concrete the size of his head broke loose and toppled to the road a few meters behind him, crushing the windshield of a rusty oval-shaped van with big flowers painted on the side.

  He hunkered down behind a wrecked car and froze, waiting for any metalheads that might come to investigate the sound of the falling concrete. He didn't have a lot in the way of weapons, just a hammer and a small drill from the tool bench. They were only slightly better than nothing.

  After a couple of minutes, it seemed like no machines were coming. Maybe the machines had grown accustomed to the crumbling and falling of the tunnel roof and now ignored any sounds from it. It was possible the machines simply weren't monitoring the area at all, but that was never a safe assumption. It was best to assume they were out there all the time, listening and watching.

  When he resumed walking, he felt emboldened enough by the lack of metalhead response to start poking around in the wrecked cars. He was hungry and thirsty. There was no telling how long it had been since the reapers had captured him, but he hadn't exactly had a full stomach then, either. The machines had taken his backpack, including his canteen.

  One car yielded a pack of fruit gummy candies, melted and rehardened into a solid mass over the years. He ate it greedily, savoring the sugar and the fake fruit flavor.

  A wrecked truck had a cooler in the back. The cooler's battery unit had long since died, and the inside of the cooler was thick with black remnants of rotten food. But there were two plastic water bottles floating in the filth. Colt fished them out and wiped them off on his hospital gown as best he could, but his gown wasn't all that clean.

  The bottles were unopened, labeled with the words MOOSE SPRINGS. Apparently the water had been imported from somewhere way up north, deep in the arctic wilds of Canada, and didn't need to be boiled, filtered, or treated.

  He unscrewed a cap and took a long, deep pull of water, feeling it soak his insides, like fresh rain on parched earth. He drank down the entire bottle, then tossed it aside and saved the other one for later.

  He continued down the road, still hungry but momentarily revitalized by the sugar and water.

  The road would take him most of the way home, but it was a long way, and he kept having to avoid spills of dirty water and heaps of broken concrete, kept tripping on debris. He wondered if it was raining up on the surface. Or maybe Lake Michigan was pushing its way in from the east and would one day fill this highway tunnel, turning it into an underwater cave.

  Not today, he thought. Just don't do it today.

  He didn't find much more food. After hours of walking with only an occasional break, his second water bottle was depleted, and he was exhausted again.

  He did find a round dry cleaning delivery truck, its interior a long oval-shaped rack hung with fine clothes sealed in zippered garment bags—heavy coats, silk shirts, colorful dresses, strange artifacts of the old world.

  Not a shoe or sock in sight, though. He cursed silently about that.

  He ripped out the truck's old CPU. The truck's battery was long dead, and it was almost certainly impossible for the CPU to come back online, but he wasn't taking any chances. He smashed it to pieces.

  Then he covered himself with a heap of clothes to help him stay warm as well as hidden.

  He slept on the floor of the delivery truck for an unknowable amount of time. There was no way to judge day or night in the sealed tunnel, any more than there had been in Simon Nix's windowless concrete laboratory.

  Nightmares filled his sleep. Strapped to the bed with Simon Zorn looming over him, lashing him with electrically induced pain. Worse, he saw visions of his own friends and loved ones trapped in the lab—Mother Braden strapped to one bed, tangles of wires plugged into the diabetic sores scattered all over her body. His sister, Hope, floating in a tank, the top of her skull removed while tiny automated tools worked inside her.

  When Colt awoke, he was covered in cold sweat. He dressed himself in a dark gray suit and a black cashmere overcoat, which would keep him warm and also blend into the shadows.

  He grimaced as he pulled on the rotten old shoes again.

  At the last moment, he thought to grab a dark purple coat that looked big enough for Hope's tall form.

  Soon he was on his way again, walking with a thick garment bag over his shoulder. If he did get attacked, maybe the bag could slow down a reaper's blade for a second or two. It certainly wouldn't stop a bullet or a laser.

  He was hungry and thirsty, but at least he wasn't cold anymore. He'd left the paper gown crammed under a seat in the clothes truck. His new clothes didn't crinkle and rasp as he walked, so that was another improvement. Socks or underwear would have been an amazing bonus.

  Colt walked and walked, kilometer after kilometer. He heard nothing but his own footsteps and heartbeat, the constant splashing of water from overhead, and the occasional crash of more concrete coming down.

  He grew exhausted after more hours of walking. It must have been days since he'd last eaten anything substantial.

  He kept his dying flashlight off most of the time. It barely cast a glow anymore, anyway.

  Finally, when he was closer to home, he walked into the building she'd mentioned. A two-story bronze tiger statue with a watchful expression guarded the front, crouching behind a stand of chemically petrified bamboo.

  Colt entered through a loading dock at the back, then found his way to the hardened underground security office. It was the nerve center of the building, the natural place for his new hacker friend to set up shop.

  He stepped into the room and looked at the tall back of a chair facing scores of projection screens, though only a few were lit up.

  The chair turned. Mohini looked him over.

  “You're here,” she said, springing to her feet.

  “I'm here.”

  “How?”

  “The old-fashioned way. Lots and lots of walking.”

  She moved closer to him. “Can I touch you?”

  “Okay.”

  She took his hand, then ran her finger along the back of his neck. �
�You're warm. You don't feel like an android, unless you're a really good spy model.”

  “Or maybe you're a really good spy model,” Colt said, mostly joking. But not completely. She had planted the idea of “a really good spy model” in his head, though, which didn't seem like something a really good spy model would do.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I'm just suspicious. Living in these ruins is driving me crazy. I think every sound is a reaper on its way to get me.”

  “Is it not that way back home?”

  “No,” she said. “I mean, yes and no. It's less intense, I suppose. There's more activity here.” She moved in close and timidly embraced him. “Is this all right?”

  “Sure.”

  “I'm glad you're alive,” she said. “But how?”

  “Because of you. Wasn't it? You hacked the med-bot and cut me loose. And gave me directions. It was a girl's voice. You said it was you.”

  “I did?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I said 'Is that you?' and you said... yes.”

  “Wouldn't the answer be 'yes' for anyone?”

  “Huh?”

  “You asked, 'Is that you?' No matter who you ask, the answer is always 'yes,' isn't it?”

  “Yeah, but... if you didn't... who else was going to hack in and get me out of there? I don't know anyone else who can do that.”

  “Not even the rebels here in Chicago?”

  “I don't know. But if they could, they'd probably use it for something more important than rescuing a random scavenger like me. That place is full of people who need rescuing.” He shivered. “Are you saying you aren't the one who helped me escape? It was a woman's voice. I just assumed it was you.”

  “I'm just messing with you.” Mohini punched him playfully on the arm, though there was some awkwardness in her attempt to be playful. “Yeah, it was me. I'm your magical hacker angel. But you can call me Mo.”

  “Mohini isn't your real name, though, is it?”

  “Of course not. A girl has to be careful with her identity when she's trying to bring down the imperialist system. Don't tell me 'Colt' is your actual name. I mean, why that? Why not pick 'Stallion'? Or 'Mustang'?”