by Lee Bond
“Christ.” Garth spat the word out. “Hard as nails, just like me. Good. Okay, fine. My father was First for the Heshii, and for many, many thousands of years. He had powers and abilities beyond comprehension. He was most trusted and most valued in their little pantheon of handmade Gods and Goddesses, and in me, he found cause and reason to suddenly doubt the view of the Universe he’d been spoon-fed. Like I said, he trained me, showed me how to become the weapon that would spell their doom.
But he knew the lure of freedom from their yoke couldn’t last. No one ever truly left the cloistering embrace of the M’Zahdi Hesh. We’d lost his wife, my mother, decades before, and while she retained enough sense of self not to turn us in or to reveal my Father’s secrets, she was gone, and he knew he’d go eventually as well. So … when the time was right and the war was at it’s worst, with all the nations of Man joined together in a singular effort to defeat the nastiest enemy they’d ever encountered, I … arranged for my Father to return. Fully and completely. With his knowledge, naturally. Protecting the Earth, laying down the bones of my plan, ensuring everything that needed to happen –more or less- the way it was supposed to, all of that demanded my Father leave. Without his help, the Universe could not be reborn. I showed him the plan, explained to him that he’d need to seed the Milky Way –don’t ask, it’s one of those things you can’t properly imagine- with machines devoted to a specific task and that, when the time was right, me and mine would rise up to free him, and then we’d ride forth and give birth to a new Universe, a proper Universe, one where the civilizations would have no fear that at any given moment, their worlds wouldn’t disappear in a flash of light.”
“And he agreed, did he?” Agnethea wasn’t so certain she’d go along with a plan like the one Garth was describing, not even if it meant that unthinkable numbers of men and women and children would benefit in ways beyond measure.
“Wholeheartedly.” Garth nodded. “But only because I lied.”
“What of it?” Agnethea demanded light-heartedly. “I lied to my father all the time, as a girl. It’s what children do. How bad a lie was it, Master Nickels? How bad could it truly be?”
“As I laid down the plan before my Father, the man who’d never once been anything but righteous and valorous to me, I lied. I told him the plan hinged upon me and the other soldiers being out of sight, out of mind, for a hundred years, maybe as many as four, that the situation needed to grow truly desperate, that the Kith and Kin and the M’Zahdi Hesh needed to believe they’d won completely.” Garth laughed until he wanted to weep. “I kept hoping, you know, that he’d look at me with that look he had when he knew I was lying and say ‘I call bullshit, you fucker, what’s the real plan?’ but … but he never did. Hell, I even kept hoping that he agreed because he had no choice, that he knew deep down in his guts that I was lying but, because it had to be that way, he went along. But you know what?”
“What?” Agnethea asked, her voice small.
“He believed. The whole of it. Every last word.” This time, he did sob, though only once; a great, hitching, metallic moan of pure sorrow that echoed across the flat plain stretched out around them. “I checked. When I was given the opportunity to see how my grand scheme to rebirth the Universe had played out, I checked. I know the Kith and Kin, not to mention my Father, well enough to know that if he’d even remotely heard the lie, things would’ve been different. The layout of the vast machine I created is nearly perfect, Agnethea, the kind of perfection that requires steadfast adhering to a plan. If my Father had doubted me, or had figured out the lie … things would be very, very different.”
Agnethea’s hands fluttered at her heart. She wished she could give Nickels solace, but … that wasn’t going to happen. “So you lied, and he believed you, and your … Reality 2.0? Your new reality is going to come to pass. In all things, I say the lie you told is one that can be forgiven. Besides…”
“Besides?” Garth demanded, incredulous; he’d tried to reconcile his grief with sentiments very similar to Agnethea’s, tried and failed. “What besides can there possibly be?”
“Thirty thousand years, Master Nickels, is a long time. Surely he is dead, is he not? Whatever rage he felt must’ve passed…”
Garth interrupted with another hollow, mocking fit of laughter. “Right. I fucking forgot to mention. He’s not dead, Agnethea. He’s out there, on the other side of The Cordon, coming this way. The Kith, Kin and their miserable children are true immortals, Queen. Barring actual, physical death, which is fucking hard to engineer … barring that, we can theoretically live forever. Hundreds, thousands, millions of years, growing steadily greater the entire time. And at the time of my great plan thirty thousand years ago, dear old Dad had been close to five thousand years old, give or take. Already as close to immortal and impervious to harm as was possible, what changes would six times that length wreak in him?”
Garth flung a hand bitterly to the Dome. “No, he’s out there, Agnethea. Waiting for me. By now, he’s undoubtedly the maddest thing this Unreal Universe has ever seen. If I’m not one hundred percent ready to deal with him and the madness in him when The Cordon falls, this Universe and everyone in it will suffer. Suffer in ways I can’t explain. The cruelty of the Kith and Kin is legend, Agnethea. I can well see my Father prolonging the destruction of this Universe long enough to ensure that everyone has experienced the kind of pain and madness he endured. Because of me.”
“And for this,” Agnethea grasped for words, “and for this, you choose to hold on so tightly to your rage that Specter will hover just behind that lovely blue eye of yours? Until the end of everything? Surely, becoming the best of what you could be is the right path! Counter his madness with your sanity, his rage with your cool temperament…”
“If I do as you wish, Agnethea, I can’t do as I need to do.” Garth took a deep breath. “If it were somehow possible to go through King’s Gauntlet and stay untouched by Barnabas’ meddling hands, if I clawed my way back to the light, metaphorically speaking, then, when the time comes, I won’t be able to destroy this universe. Because purity and nobility and honor and all that comes along with such romanticisms would prevent it. And that, Queen Agnethea, is why I must stay as I am. No good man, no kind man, no honorable man could ever do as I must.”
Agnethea couldn’t think of anything else to say, could find no counter to Garth’s argument. She’d seen Platinum Brigadiers in action, witnessed firsthand the repercussions their decisions had caused. Frequently, doing the ‘right’ thing seemed to’ve caused greater problems down the road, but Garth’s plan …
It seemed it was a labor of love. A love of an entire Universe.
A love so great that he willingly suffered an agony keener than the sharpest blade through softest skin.
”I shall need to reflect on your argument, Master Nickels, if I am to offer any reasonable counter. The concepts you’ve treated me to are alien in every way.” Morose dejection rolled off Garth’s broad metal skin in waves, so it was time to change the subject to something more current. “Why do we head towards Sliver Hills, Master Nickels? If, as you say, it was where you entered, what good can come of visiting places you’ve already been?”
“The reclamation cylinder, Queen Agnethea.” Garth pointed. Already, the vast expanse of Dome that curved ever so gently skywards was visible. “Dark Iron gnaws away at whatever it fuels, which means that if I felt like spending the next thousand fucking years as the fucking Iron Giant without doing something risky, eventually the armor would fall off all on it’s own. But I … we … don’t have time for that. Whatever the King’s been working on for the last thirty thousand years is coming to a head soon. So I need that hungry-toothed cylinder.”
“You can’t be serious.” Agnethea’s hands flew to her mouth. “You…”
“Fuck yes I am, Agnethea.”
The cylinder’s edge would work. It had to.
His metallized voice echoed across the barren plain.
“I am the most serious
thing in the entire Universe.”
***
Garth remembered very little about Sliver Hills; the jarring experiences of coming through the Geared Doors, running into his very first gaggle of gearheads –and, let’s be honest, having his head banged like a drum- and then coming eyeball to incredulous eyeball with the Big King had all conspired to make the Door Estate a dim, foggy memory.
He could recall, with a little prompting, that the buildings and everything had been quaint and proper, just like something you’d expect to see on Coronation Street. So long as you chose to ignore the fact that there was a massive fucking Dome over your heads and you –and everyone you’d ever known, like as not- had no fucking concept of simple, basic things like ‘suns’, ‘moons’ and … and … proper goddamn weather.
“Still on about the weather, hey, Master Nickels?” Agnethea teased gently. In his darker moments, Garth tended to bitch about apparently insignificant things. Over time, though, the Queen of Shattered Ickford had come to think that nothing capturing Master Nickels’ attention was truly insignificant.
The way he groused on about the weather and the lack of things flying in the air, combined with his intellect, suggested there was something a great deal more wrong with those missing things than everything else going on in Arcade City.
Try as she might, the once-Queen could not imagine what sort of problem a lack of bees and rain could engender.
“Yes.” Garth glowered sullenly at what little remained of Sliver Hills, wondering gloomily if there would ever be a time in his life when death, destruction and chaos didn’t follow him around like faithful pets.
Then he remembered his audacious –and desperate- plan and had no other choice but to laugh.
“Sliver Hills has definitely seen better days.” Agnethea prompted.
Hadn’t it just? Like most of her kind, Agnethea had visited the Geared Doors and the Estates that ‘protected’ them as came through on more than one occasion, and, well, it was true that Sliver Hills had seen better days.
The damage was near enough total to make no never mind. With his augmented Big Robot eyeballs, it was easy enough to survey the whole stretch of land that had once belonged to the men, women and children of Sliver Hills from a nice, safe vantage point, and to put it bluntly, Agnethea was completely underselling the destruction.
From the moment he’d laid his eyes on the cylinders as they’d rocketed their way down from the Heavens –or in this case, Barnabas’ fucking Dome of Bullshit- Garth had reflexively known they were different than any other reclamation canister ever seen before. Batting them away had been as automatic as avoiding bullets, but it was a bittersweet thing.
True, some few Ickfordians may yet live to fight another day, but the cost of that survival was tallied in Sliver Hills lives; the cylinder had flown on an unerring path –almost as if guided by unseen hands- right to where he’d first set foot in Arcade City, crashing down on the utterly unaware population.
The people of Sliver Hills had been well trained by Nicked Jimmy, though.
The moment they’d realized the danger, they’d fled, sadly abandoning friends and family trapped on the far side of the hungry maw to their own devices.
It was cool solace to know that some Sliver Hillsfolk had survived, but it hardly mattered: those that did live –for however long that would be- they’d be tormented by the knowledge that brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers had either been eaten clean into nothingness by the machine.
Finally witnessing firsthand what the King’s revised reclamation cylinders were capable of put both Outsider and Golem back on their heels for a long, sorrowful moment.
Thanks to the destructive edge of the deadly machine, the overall damage eerily reflected Ickford’s own awful death, only ‘cleaner’; from the haphazard collection of partially destroyed homes and business and odd, scalloped dug deep into the earth stretching from the Door to –roughly- the center of town, their best guess was that the cylinder had slammed into the Geared Door at full speed, thereafter skipping through the Estate like a stone over water.
Although where a rock over water left nothing but ripples that were quickly reabsorbed, this hungry metal-toothed device had shivered buildings –not to mention poor Arcadians- into easily reclaimed atom-sized bits of raw material before coming to awkward stop on the central fountain. Resting now at a shallow angle, the King’s cylinder had incised half the town on a mathematically precise forty-five degree angle. As the Vorpal edge of King’s cylinder grew closer and closer to the end of the Estate, fewer and fewer buildings showed signs of disintegration.
But hope could be found with the off-kilter ruination!
“Your King is an asshole.” Garth moved closer, eyeing his ‘prize’ pensively.
The design was nearly perfect, though with all things, the Engineer considered the ways it might’ve been done differently, consequently making it better. The King’s matter-eater operated only along a single, flat plane, which worked well enough, if a little short-sighted; everything the hungry, white-hot teeth came in contact with was instantly broken down into particulate destined for some other purpose, causing everything above the generated field to collapse downward into the field. Those first, consumptive bursts of matter had probably gone into fueling the engines to full effect, pushing the flat, circular scythe-like field to it’s full length.
Destined as he was to be the Engineer of destruction for an entire Universe, Garth couldn’t help but wish the King had gone that extra step by replicating the designs of the BAM-series of weapons. It would’ve been much more elegant and way more efficient than a stupid plane.
“How you managed to travel with that … that man for more than a month and not figure out who he really was is either a testament to his skills as a liar or a marked comment on your absolute and utter boneheadedness, Master Nickels.” The Obsidian Golem could scarcely believe it.
A month! Together, the two of them loathing each other more and more with every passing second, two bombastic, arrogant alpha-males somehow always managed in all that tome to keep from revealing their true identities.
It was something of a miracle, if you asked her.
“Ha frickety ha ha.” Garth crept closer, eyeing the ground beneath his feet with trepidation. Based on where the last of Sliver Hills’ outbuildings had collapsed, he was mostly sure that the cylinder’s reclamation field was at maximum range, but with Barnabas, it was generally a safe bet to be more than ‘mostly’ anything.
‘Mostly’ was a surefire way of getting yourself dead in Arcade City.
He moved as cautiously as a gigantic robot body was capable of until they’d gotten as close to a ‘door-side’ crevasse of the cylinders resting as was wise, then kind of casually leaned forward to see if there was anything worth seeing.
Perched precariously on Garth’s neck, Agnethea held on tighter still as the giant robot peered over the lip to stare down into the deepest, darkest abyss she’d ever seen. Haunting memories of her time stuck down in the bowels of that Shaggy Man warren greeted her with vicious blood-stained teeth and cruel, dirty claws. The Obsidian Golem clamped her eyes shut.
Certain he couldn’t know how terrified she was, Agnethea forced humor into her voice. “That’s an awfully long way down.” She winced. Not humorous at all, she thought. More like bloody obviously frightened.
“Mmm. Yeah, yeah it is.” Garth straightened and looked around for a likely tool for his experiment. Finding a downed tree not too far away, he lumbered over, grabbed hold of the Bunyan-worthy clobbering stick, and brought the thing back to the hole. “Here goes nothin’.”
The tree went into the hole, and Garth watched most closely as the dead thing tumbled end over end en route to it’s demise. It struck an invisible, unyielding source on an end, fell over, and began sliding along the unseen surface, trailing brilliant sparks of energy all the way. The more it slid, the more profuse the sparks until, quite abruptly, there was nothing.
“I’m neither s
cientist nor engineer,” Agnethea said once the shock of seeing something destroyed so thoroughly passed, “but it seemed to me that, towards the end there, your experimental tree did slide past where we stand now, if only by a smidgeon.”
Garth, lips pursed, was thinking the same thing. “The Enforcers have a thing…”
“Enforcers?” Agnethea raised a brow at that. The way Garth pronounced the word rang like a clarion bell and she knew immediately what they were. “Similar to our Gearmen?”
Garth was about to deny the similarities, then simply nodded. Pound for pound, environment for environment, the two posts were almost identical. “Yeah, you know, they totally are, though I gotta say, Gearmen are way fucking crazier.” He continued once Agnethea stopped laughing with wild sarcasm. “Anyhows, they got these weapons called ‘BAMs’. Stands for Balanced Automatic Massacre. Tiny little orbs the size of my … uh, well, yeah, my totally regular hand and not the giant robot hands I got right now … hah, uh. Yeah. They’re weapons, you see, with a varying degree of bloody devastating efficiency. The Full-BAM is a lot like this, or vice versa. Get it?”
“You explained nothing at all in that sentence, Master Nickels, except for a moment where you underlined how truly unhappy you are in a giant robot body.” Agnethea decided to shift back to the safety of the man’s cavernous eardrum. He was gallivanting far too close to a yawning void full of stuff that she was certain could kill her quite dead.
“Hah. Yeah. Well. You try being stuck in a body like this. See how focused you stay.” Garth shook his head. “The fucked thing is, this isn’t even the first time this has happened to me. Though last time, the body was made out of solid energy and was, like, only ten feet tall. Ugly as sin. Harry Bosch. I had a blast. Anyways. The Full-BAM. A machine that eats what it’s programmed to eat and keeps chowing down until there’s nothing left. Full range. You could program it to eat all the people in a thousand mile radius but leave everything else standing, or, like, all the windows. Or whatever. Only the BAM does it in an expanding circle, unlike dumbass Barnabas’ hungry cylinder, which travels on a plane.”
