by Ewing, Al
But he couldn’t.
Well, maybe in the blackness of endless space, he’d find some equivalent of that; some kind of peace. The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. He wouldn’t even need a spaceship – he could just drift, naked, through the solar system and out into the emptiness beyond. Why not? He didn’t need to eat, didn’t need to breathe, didn’t really feel cold or heat as such – though he did notice it, in the same way a normal man might notice a particularly loud or garish colour.
He couldn’t help but notice it, in fact. The interior of the cube was like a furnace.
He gestured towards the large, open pit. “What is this?”
“You’re aware of our issues with coal – not to mention the pollution aspect. It’s not the reason I built the VIC-20 array, but the problem of limited resources is the one that I’m trying to solve at the moment – hopefully, if I can find a solution to our coal addiction, the pollution will ease in time...” He made a slight gesture towards the open pit. “To generate the amount of steam necessary to ensure proper running of the VIC-20, we’d need to burn enough coal per day to power every robot in the Mecha-Principalities for a month. Instead, I decided to create a prototype geothermal pump – the first of its kind. By funnelling lava up through the boiler instead of shovelling coal, we can run a hundred VICs if we have to, and once my organics wear out, I may need to do just that. It’s an elegant solution, you must admit, if a little dangerous...” He turned his head in the Doctor’s direction. “Well, for me. You’d probably survive a fall down there.”
“Only probably?” The Doctor raised his head for a moment, then returned to contemplation of the pit. “It doesn’t seem overly practical...”
“No, it doesn’t, does it? It’s a possible solution for large, stationary, power-hungry machines like this one, but ideally, we need something to replace coal, oil, all the other limited resources in one fell stroke – and something clean, to boot.” A hissing burst of steam cascaded from the valves on his shoulders; a mechanical sigh. “I’m on the edge of something, I know, but no matter how intelligent I make myself... well, I’m still bound by the laws of physics. The frustrating thing is that I can’t help feeling that we’re missing something, something crucial – like we’re trying to reach the moon without cavorite, if you’ll pardon the metaphor. Everything becomes a thousand times harder.” He continued fiddling with the computer, his gigantic hands capable of surprisingly delicate work. “Didn’t you experiment with an alternate form of energy at once point? Sigma energy? Something like that?”
“Omega energy.” The Doctor nodded. “Similar to being struck by lightning. Maya hated it.” He shrugged. “I’d almost forgotten it. I used to use it to supercharge my brain, but it took a toll – I suppose it was my equivalent of your VIC machines.” He shuddered. “I built this horrible chair, all straps and wiring, to flood my system with bursts of Omega energy and bring on visions – ‘the Omega effect,’ we called it.” He laughed mirthlessly, shaking his head. “There was probably an easier way to bring that on, come to think of it. I used to have a thing – a kink, I suppose – about getting strapped into strange contraptions. That was probably part of it...” Part of the thrill, he thought, back when life was all about thrills and adventure. When did that go? Was it when Monk died? He looked down at his hands. Or when I stopped loving Maya?
Jason Satan killed me. That’s the problem. He killed everything happy in me and left an immortal, undying husk, a zombie walking around with a tiny piece of Doc Thunder trapped inside it looking out. Just like Pluto has a tiny piece of El Sombra inside him – the thing he’s planning to scrape out and replace when it finally dies. There’s no difference between us.
No, I’m lying. There’s one difference.
Eventually, he’s going to die.
He found himself saying it out loud. “When are you going to die?”
Pluto turned to look down at him again. “What?”
“You said that when El Sombra’s brain dies, you’ll carry on regardless. Well, when are you planning to die, Pluto? Are you planning to just go on forever?” The Doctor’s voice was trembling, and he realised he was gritting his teeth.
Pluto looked at him for a long moment. His face, as ever, was unreadable. Eventually, he spoke. “Why not?”
The Doctor stared at him for a moment, then sighed. “One more for the club, then. Lars and Maya will be pleased. Goodbye, Pluto. We won’t see each other again.” He turned to leave the way he’d come.
Pluto continued talking.
“Earlier, you talked about the soul. It’s a uniquely human notion – the idea of something that survives after death. Think of it from a robot’s perspective.” He turned away from the machine, giving the Doctor his full attention. “As the arrays that make up our minds and personalities wear out and grow obsolete, we have them replaced, upgraded. To me, this organic component – the brain – is just one more array; a unique and irreplaceable one, true, but nothing I can’t do without. My information is recorded elsewhere within me; I will not die. I have no need to.”
“Maybe you’re already dead,” the Doctor muttered.
“Maybe there is no death; no freeing of the soul. Maybe only a change of function. Humans biodegrade to become food for the local environment; my kind, at the end of their functioning existence, might expect to be melted down to build new robots. Usefulness continues. Still, it seems a poor reward for the loss of self.”
“The soul.” The Doctor almost whispered it. Pluto’s speech hammered against his ears like the tolling of some graveyard bell, the words harrowing in their terrifying practicality; a robot’s gospel, bare and without warmth. He began to walk away.
“The awareness. There is no part of me that is the seat of it, just as there is no particular cell in your body that is the seat of yours; but it has more value than any other use our bodies may be put to. We should protect that awareness, that most fragile part of what we are. Extend it as long as possible; indefinitely.”
The Doctor stopped in his tracks, Slowly, he turned to face the gigantic android again.
“What are you saying?”
“Remember when I said I’d answered questions that have plagued mankind for centuries? I’ve solved the oldest problem of all, Doctor. The problem of death.”
The Doctor stared, and what little colour he had drained from his face. “No.”
“Yes. Immortality, Doctor. I’m going to share your gift with the world.”
HE’D ATTACKED PLUTO, of course.
He’d stood and listened, in a kind of numb horror, as Pluto had described his nightmarish plans for humanity: “There’s no real difference between my people and yours, Doctor. I propose our species take advantage of this, and merge. I’ve lived centuries, and will live for millennia more, but the next generation won’t even have to make the changes I’ll have to in order to survive. Their fragile organics – their ‘souls,’ if you wish – will be protected and nurtured by mechanical systems that will keep them alive indefinitely. If they’d prefer, they can look and feel completely human, just as the most advanced robots did before the war...” He’d tailed off, and his serene and motionless brass visage had seemed to the Doctor in that moment like the face of some mocking demon.
“Doctor?”
The Doctor had leapt up, and punched the brass head hard enough to tear it from Pluto’s body. A rain of tiny cogs and gears fell, shimmering, from the severed neck; but the head was mostly brass, and the arrays in it were mostly connective, created to link with other systems. Pluto was far from damaged beyond repair.
“Doct%r?” He said, the voice emanating from somewhere inside his neck, as the Doctor reached in to grab great handfuls of the clockwork, tearing it free and scattering it. “Doctor, you’re £mpairing my worki%gs. We can t&lk about this... Doctor...” One of Pluto’s great hands reached up suddenly, grabbing hold of the Doctor in a crushing grip, actually hard enough to hurt; the novelty of pain shocked the Doctor into lettin
g go, and the great King of the Robots took the opportunity to hurl him across the chamber and into one of the great steel walls. He impacted hard enough to deform the metal, and the whole building shook with a terrifying sound like some huge gong breaking in two.
“The arr&ys –” Pluto cried out, turning his headless body slightly as he perceived the tiny gears and switches being jarred and thrown out of their alignments; something that would take hours, perhaps days of painstaking work to restore. The Doctor, pulling himself free of the metal wall, saw the opportunity; a way to hurt his foe, perhaps a way to stop this insanity once and for all.
His eyes glowed a fierce red. After a moment, so did the VIC-20 – red hot, then white.
Then it began to melt.
“N%!” screamed Pluto, the crackling distortion caused by the damage to his body adding a note of pain and horror that an artificial voice could never have achieved; helplessly, he watched as his life’s work, the great clockwork he had been working so long and so hard on, collapsed into a flowing pool of molten metal and flowed across the floor, taking its secrets with it. Great gouts of steam hissed from it, filling the room.
Pluto turned towards the Doctor and charged.
One great iron foot, treaded with rubber, smashed into the Doctor’s face, lifting him up through the air like a rag doll; when he hit the wall, the entire building shook again, with an ominous creak and the sound of some hidden rivet springing loose. From outside came the crash of one of the decorative fixtures toppling from its corner, and the Doctor could hear the sound of ringing bells, a long honk of compressed air forced through a horn – robot screams.
Teeth gritted, he turned his killing eyes on Pluto’s chest, aiming to boil the living brain inside the robot in its tank. The outer shell of the machine glowed a deep, dull red, but no more than that – whatever alloy it had been created from was as resistant to extremes of heat as the Doctor himself.
The Doctor grinned savagely. The fire of his own eyes might not be enough, but he knew where he could find better fire than that.
Behind Pluto, the great pit yawned. The shuddering pipes rising up from it were beginning to crack under the strain of the battle, spewing lava as the constant background noise of the pumps built itself up into a manic crescendo. Soon enough, the Doctor realised, they would erupt, drowning the city of Paris in boiling magma. Perhaps that would be enough to wipe Pluto’s insane machinations from the face of the Earth. He hoped so.
He didn’t plan to be around to see it.
Coiling the muscles of his legs into one final spring, he hurled himself at the gigantic robot, smashing into his centre mass like a bullet; the momentum sent him stumbling back to the edge of the pit – and then a step beyond.
The machine screamed, a single terrible howl of rage and pain, as it and the Doctor toppled over the edge, falling down into the endless shaft, lit from below by bubbling pools of searing liquid stone; the gateway to the core of the Earth. Desperately, Pluto lashed out, attempting to claw a handhold in the metal of the walls; but his flailing claw struck one of the larger pipes, and all he managed to do was shower them both in lava as they fell, until it flowed into his severed neck and silenced the howl of his mechanical voice forever.
The Doctor’s rage drained out of him, and he had a few moments of freefall to wonder, fleetingly, if he’d been right to deny mankind eternal life; but what kind of life was that? Life as blobs of flesh inside machines? Wasn’t that worse than death? Then again, he thought, I do have a bias. Perhaps I just didn’t want to see humanity throwing away something as precious as an ending.
Still, he thought to himself, did I have the right?
There was no-one left to answer him. Seconds later, he splashed down into the magma, and the three-story robot melted and fused around him, encasing him in a core of molten metal. He breathed in, filling his lungs with it, trying to drown himself in the corpse of his enemy, but the pain was fleeting. Even as the Doctor began the long journey down, sinking to the core of the planet, he knew he would live through this. He would live through everything now, until the very end of the universe. And maybe a little beyond.
How powerful would he be by then? Perhaps this was the best place for him; far away from everyone he could hurt. Already, he was enjoying the solitude. The core of the earth waited to enfold him, like a nurturing red sun.
Inside a cocoon of strange alloys, the being that had once been Doc Thunder curled up, closed his eyes, and began his long wait.
JACOB STEELE IN THE HOUR OF CHAOS
JACOB STEELE DRIFTS in a haze of blue light, outside time, between one breath and the next. Sometimes, he thinks he’s drifted there for a few minutes. Sometimes, it feels like centuries.
Occasionally, the blue light lifts, and men flitting like hummingbirds are pointing guns at him, or preparing ways to trap him; but he is faster than they are, and he has plenty of bullets left for his gun. Jacob Steele has a sacred duty.
Jacob Steele is the Keeper of the Stone.
Occasionally, the Stone pulses in his grip, and shows him the true, binary structure of the universe; what should be, and what should not be.
A secluded glade in prehistory, where no star ever fell. Leopards who never walked on their hind legs. Great men of science once dead before their time, now living on to pull down lightning from the sky. Light in glass bulbs, spreading across the world in ever more arcane configurations, until the power runs out and it all collapses like a house of cards. Survivors fighting in the ruins, succumbing to diseases long thought banished, from cholera to fascism, but finally growing strong enough to fight the infection off. Green shoots, poking through the ruins.
Or crashing spaceships, evolution run amok, swashbuckling madmen, womanising superspies, superhuman beings brawling with demonic arch-criminals and giant robots. Monsters of history preserved long past any normal lifespan, watching the strange new beings springing up in a stagnated world, as the smog drifts slowly over it all. And behind them all, the puppeteer, the great red-handed Queen in her secret city, pulling the strings to keep things as they are.
Keep me, the Stone says to him. The world is locked into an unnatural configuration, a state of being that was never meant to be; but you can end it. You can bring things back to how they should be, if you can only hold on. You are the Keeper now; keep me. Hold on to me.
Don’t let go.
“JACOB, I LOVE you! But we only have sixty minutes to save the world!”
“What?” said Jacob Steele, the time-lost gunfighter yanked from the Wild West into the strange, exciting world of the twenty-fifth century by forces unknown! On the leather seat next to his own, Maya, Queen of the Future Earth, writhed in helpless terror – and through the viewing screen was the reason why!
A vast star-destroyer, piloted by the insidious clone-forces of Lomax – the Space Satan! Diabolical ruler of the planet Venus, whose only desire was to enslave the planet he had once called home!
“That interstellar fiend!” growled Arcturus, noble knight of the Leopard People, from his position at the starboard cannon.
“Affirmative, sir!” agreed the hyper-intelligent android, Rousseau-5, as he plugged himself into the navigating table in a desperate attempt to plot an evasive manoeuvre that might rescue them from the very jaws of destruction. On the table, magnetic models of the ships whirred and pivoted – but there was no solution that could rescue them from their deadly fate!
“Ha! Ha! Ha!” A vicious cackle echoed over the ship’s radio as the immense bulk of Lomax’s flagship drew closer and closer to the Jonah II. “You’ve thwarted my insidious schemes for the last time, Steele! Now you will face your final doom! My missiles will seek you out, however you twist and turn – and blast you and your lovely Queen into atoms! The Solar System will be mine – all mine!”
“What?” Steele shook his head, wincing. “Who the hell is that?” He looked around the interior of the Jonah II, as if he’d never seen it before in his life. “Where am I?”
; “The amnesia ray!” Arcturus gasped, the hackles on his neck rising. “It must have had a delayed effect! He’s forgotten who we are!”
Steele looked at the huge half-man, half-cat as if he’d fallen prey to some terrifying space madness – and, at that very moment, a pair of sleek rockets roared out of the flagship, streaking across the vacuum of space towards Steele and his crew!
Instinctively, he jerked the wheel, and the great peroxide rockets blasted the Jonah II out of the missiles’ path, but only for a moment! Then, the missiles turned, as if magnetised, and blasted towards the ship on their relentless mission of death!
“Sir!” Rousseau-5 cried out in his mechanical tones. “The rockets are homing in on something on board the ship! But what could possibly –”
“The Stone!” Maya screamed, pointing to Steele’s left hand, and the mysterious artefact Steele had brought with him from the far past. The Stone, it had been revealed, was in truth a remnant of one of the lost star-lenses used by a corps of space sheriffs to bring law to a wild universe in times long forgotten, and, now polished down to a flawless gem, it served Steele as a ring capable of channelling strange and mysterious energies. Many times, Steele had used the ring to save his friends from all manner of deadly danger, but even its bizarre powers were no match for the vacuum of space! And now, a pair of merciless missiles streaked ever closer, drawn to the unique stellar mineral!
“There’s only one way out,” Arcturus snarled, his tail swishing. “Tear it off his hand and throw it out of the airlock! Better yet – fire it at the flagship! We’ll see how Lomax likes playing cat and mouse with his own weapons!”
“It’s the only logical solution,” Rousseau-5 confirmed. “You must remove the ring, sir! Give up the Stone!”
“Wait a second –” Jacob scowled, looking down at his left hand. It was bunched slightly, as if clutching something, and for a moment there seemed to be no flesh there, just a skeletal hand.
