by Andy Remic
He sensed the vertical cylinder full of gunk before he was in it; it slammed his sensors with its power, its pressure, its ferocity. With a sudden intuition Cam fought his direction of flow, realising instantly the danger into which he was being sucked... only too late, he was squeezed through an ever-narrowing complex network of tubes, the pressure building and building and building and he was forced unceremoniously into the cylinder where he was dragged down and fed into a circular loop. Gunk compressed his shell with a crackle. Under intense pressure, Cam started to quickly become very, very hot, and he fed heat to his outer-shell and allowed the coolant to do its job. But, conversely, it didn’t seem to be working. Cam felt himself growing hotter, and hotter, and hotter as he spun around the base of the cylinder in an entrapped circuit. His motors whined, trying to eject him from the drag. He could not escape. With the heat buildup reaching 600°C Cam started to feel the extremities of circuits malfunctioning. Growing desperate, he began to pump heat into the surrounding coolant and suddenly realised why it wasn’t working as his synapses slowed and his multi-core CPU began a binary twitch. The coolant outside was hot. Hotter than him. Which probably meant he was near the core of whatever was being cooled. Cam tried to think. Images jagged across his sliver-spitting memory. He thought of Xakus. Which path did the dead man’s body take? Had it been compressed? Or maybe boiled, like a lobster in a pot—the current fate being applied to himself? Cam cursed again, and with a final, heavy-duty surge he attempted to escape the coolant cycle in which he was trapped... at the same time, cycling through a million blueprints until he found one, and it stopped, revealed to his inner senses:
Ahhh, he thought.
So that’s where I am.
Inside The Sump.
The base of the entire cooling system for NanoTek HQ.
Cam strained harder, his actions tinged by an edge of atomic panic. With a pop one motor burned out, smoke pluming from Cam’s case to be absorbed by coolant. Then another died.
Then a third.
Working now at under 50% efficiency, Cam limped around the bottom of the central coolant cylinder known as The Sump—like a dying goldfish with one fin going round in circles at the bottom of a bowl. And the only problem with being a dying goldfish at the bottom of the bowl was that, well, all the other goldfish were cannibals, and it was only a matter of time before they clocked terminal distress and closed in for a good ol’ feed.
Warily, Cam scanned his surroundings.
And with a jolt, realised he wasn’t alone...
~ * ~
The SIM advanced on Keenan, whose arm came back and sent the narrow blade speeding with unerring accuracy to pierce under the SIM’s left mechanical eye. The SIM went down on one knee, letting out a gasp. But, despite the knife piercing its brain, it glanced up, mouth a sour line, and bared its teeth at Keenan... who charged, growling, and leapt, both boots smashing the SIM’s face. It toppled back, sliding to one side, legs cartwheeling over the abyss and pulling its body after it. The SIM slithered across steel, nails dragging along metal with screeches, then with an outstretched arm it fired a line which whipped around Keenan’s legs and brought him crashing to the ground. The SIM slithered off the high H-section walkway, the line buzzing from its forearm as it swung, pendulous, and Keenan grunted with pain, hunched, taking the SIM’s weight.
“Bastard,” he hissed, and again tried to scrabble for his MPK. Again, he could not work the weapon free. Slowly, he slid in several painful jerks towards the edge of the walkway, his locked boots kicking and pushing. He glanced down at the SIM, which swung. It was laughing.
“Let go!” he snapped.
“What?” The SIM looked up, Keenan’s blade protruding from the front of its face like some bizarre sculpture. “And deprive myself the satisfaction of knowing you, too, will die in the fall?” The SIM chuckled again. It was an evil, binary sound.
Keenan glanced around, panic rising within him. The line was growing tighter and tighter about his ankles, just below his WarSuit, cutting off his blood-flow. His boots, whilst solid, did little to halt the compression of three hundred pounds of SIM.
Then he saw it. The SIM’s knife. He leant, grunting, and almost lost his grip on the precious ledge. He stretched, muscles screaming, and shuffled millimetre by millimetre towards the curved, gleaming blade—and salvation.
Keenan’s fingers closed around the weapon. With a triumphant scream, the blade slashed down, only to bounce from the line. Savagely Keenan hacked away at taut fibres, but it simply would not part.
“TitaniumIII, an interwoven mesh line,” said the SIM conversationally, from where it swung above the frozen zombie army. Blood had run down its face, giving it a blood mask in an inverted V.
Keenan stared down, past the SIM. Still the zombies were motionless, despite the battle above. It’s as if... they’re dead. Laughter welled manically in his throat, in his brain, vying with the intensity of pain in his ankles. Keenan hurled the SIM’s knife, but the SIM twitched to one side, and looked down, watching the blade flash over and over to half-sever a zombie’s head far below. Still, the distant, deviant creature did nothing. It stood, head hanging half-off, lolling to one side and showing pink sliced tendons and a lode of squidgy neck fat.
“Pull me up,” said the SIM.
“Get to fuck.”
“Or we both die.”
“Then we both die,” snarled Keenan.
“I am prepared to meet my maker. He stamped the back of my neck with a laser logo. However, Mr Keenan, are you ready to meet your fictitious God?” The SIM laughed long and loud, but Keenan caught the sound. The laugh was fake. Ersatz. A SIM had no emotions. It didn’t know how to laugh. Its comedy was a mimicry of the human shell it so despised.
“How,” said Keenan, staring down, “do you know my name?”
The SIM gazed up, mechanical eyes clicking. It did not speak.
“What game is this? Tell me what’s going on.”
“The simplicity of the human mind. The simplicity of human trust. It’s what will instigate your downfall as a species, Mr Keenan. It’s the factor that will doom your race.” The SIM smiled. Its teeth glinted with blood.
Keenan worked his way into his WarSuit, and pulled free his PAD. Now it was his turn to smile. He activated the laser, and then glanced down at the SIM; it shrugged.
“Even your PAD laser won’t cut through Titanium-III interwoven mesh line,” said the SIM, voice almost smug, blood-masked face curled into a snarl of contempt. “You really are pathetic.”
“Who said anything about cutting the line?” growled Keenan, and directed the high-intensity short-range beam. Leather and armour sizzled, followed by the stench of cooking flesh as the laser ate through the SIM’s arm. There was a squelch, a moment of hiatus, then arm and SIM parted company. The SIM fell, clutching its cauterised stump, tumbling down over and over and over to eventually slam the ranks of motionless zombies far below. The SIM spread itself over quite a large area.
“I hate fucking bureaucrats.”
Keenan pulled up the line still attached to the severed arm and WarGlove, and with a grimace he unwound the leash from his numbed feet. He tossed the arm after the splattered SIM, then stood, and toppled over with a cry. His legs wouldn’t take his weight.
Keenan crawled along the beam, and watched tiny stick-men in white coats rush to the splattered SIM. They glanced up at him, and he resisted a sardonic urge to wave with grinding teeth.
So much for covert entry. But then, the SIM knew his name. Which meant...
“There he is!” Bullets whined, slapping sparks from the beam. “Don’t move pep motherfucker, or I’ll cut you in half!”
Keenan glanced left, then right. Ten SIMs had moved onto adjacent beams. They all bore guns, trained on Keenan’s trapped and helpless figure.
“OK, OK.” He rubbed at his useless legs, realising that even in death the splattered SIM must be laughing. He’d condemned Keenan as readily as cutting off the soldier’s feet.
&nb
sp; Two SIMs worked their way to Keenan. They removed his weapons, bound his hands with raze-wire, and took his weight, shuffling along the beam and into a wide corridor. The walls and floor gleamed like polished granite. The SIMs surrounded Keenan.
“What now?” he said.
The butt of an MPK smashed his head, dropping him to the ground where he glared up, through blood and strings of saliva.
“The pep not talk or we put bullets in the pep’s skull. The pep is to accompany us to The Palace. If pep try to escape, we have permission to kill the pep. If pep try to be funny wise-guy, we have permission to kill the pep. If pep try to take our weapons, we have permission to kill the pep.”
“OK, dickhead, I get the idea.” Keenan climbed to his feet, spitting blood and a sliver of tooth.
“Wise-guy shut up. Wise-guy need to walk. Now! Or...”
“Yeah yeah, I heard. You have permission to kill the pep.”
The SIM leered close to Keenan, and poked an MPK barrel against his teeth with a clack. “The pep learn fast,” growled the SIM, and nudged Keenan along with a growl.
~ * ~
Franco was dragged for what seemed like miles by the GKs, and it hurt his neck to keep his head up so in the end he stared at the passing floor tiles. They changed in colour, radiating through the spectrum from yellow to pink to red to green to blue and finally, to black. Tiny inset jewels sparkled deep in the black. Ever the mercenary, Franco wondered if he’d be able to get a knife inside to prize one free.
With a violence of shock, the GKs dropped Franco to the floor and he banged his nose. Pain flared through his skull, and he felt blood roll down his nostrils. “You buggers! You could have warned me! That was bloody buggering unfair, that was!”
He rolled to his side, and realised nobody was listening. The GKs had their backs to him, smooth black bodies resting and at ease. And that made Franco’s blood boil. “Well, of all the damn and bloody buggering cheek! Those little stick-men can-openers! I’ll bloody show them, I shall!” He surged to his feet, and for a long, long moment all thoughts of violence and damaged pride were expunged. Franco stared from his high vantage point in... awe.
Pippa turned. She gestured to Franco, and he staggered forward, arms tight behind his back, and stared down at...
“This is The Palace,” said Pippa, voice a gentle hum. “Beautiful, isn’t She?”
“I’d rather have a naked fat whore...” began Franco, but his voice petered out. He had to admit it. The Palace, at the core of the NanoTek HQ, was stunning indeed.
The chamber was big. No, BIG. From their high vantage it soared away as far as the eye could see, and it took a while for Franco’s beleaguered brain to work out it was at about 1:5 scale. He squinted, recognising some areas from vid, but unable to put names to them.
“What’s that one, there? It’s from Old Earth, right?”
“That is Babylon, Mr Haggis.”
The voice oozed from behind, and the man walked with precise steps as Franco turned. He wore a glass suit, and was small, slim, a delicate man. Franco eyed the bald head, the brown eyes, and then, as Oz smiled, the pointed, gleaming teeth. They shone red. They dazzled. Franco calculated their worth with the practised eye of a jajunga thief.
“The other proud cities you see ranged before you, in perfect miniaturised scale, are London, New York, Cairo, Sparta, Alexandria, Rome. It took my historians twenty years to assimilate the data needed for this model; they travelled the Quad-Gal, visited tens of thousands of planets, talked to relatives of relatives of relatives who had once walked our ancient birthplace, cradle of humanity, Earth, and had been witness to stories passed down through thousands of generations. It took my engineers another ten years to build the place. If you look, you can see each city is divided by a natural rolling plain, a barrier, so to speak. Each sector has its own micro-climate, its own miniaturised people and animals... although nothing as populous as those real cities would have possessed during their correct existence.”
“You’re Oz, right?”
“Your intuition astounds me.”
“Where’s my Melanie?”
“All in good time, Mr Haggis. You will get to see your beautiful little Melanie very soon, although my, hasn’t she grown up recently? Matured, you might say, into an almost perfect killing machine.”
“What did you do to her?”
“Me?” Dr Oz smiled. The smile was worth a billion dollars. “I did nothing. I simply allowed vanity and greed to perform the invitation; and the nanobots did the rest.”
“So the biomods did transform people into zombies!”
Dr Oz laughed, nodding his head as he steepled his hands before his chest. “Ah, now I see why Quad-Gal Military think of you as such a prize possession, Mr Haggis! A specimen worth treasuring, no less! Although I, obviously, have my own misgivings regarding this whole venture.”
Franco glanced sideways at Pippa. “Is he taking the piss?”
Pippa said nothing; her grey eyes were as blank as the matt metal disks in the sculpted, sweeping faces of the GKs.
Franco snarled, and fought at his bonds; but they held. Oz tutted, as if disciplining a particularly naughty child. He turned back, gazing out towards the sweeping granite corridor which led to this, his Palace; then held up a finger to his lips. Ruby sparkles edged like gaseous blood around his fingers.
“Say hello to your friend,” said Oz, as, at the end of the corridor a squad of SIMs came into view. They dragged with them a limping, bruised Keenan, and marched him unceremoniously along the expanse to dump him at Oz’s feet.
Keenan crawled onto his knees, hawked a mouthful of blood, phlegm and saliva, and spat it onto Oz’s polished boots. He grinned upwards through the bruises of his beating at the hands of the SIMs. It had been an eventful journey. “Hey, if it isn’t Dr Fucking Oz. We meet at last, you metal cripple.” He eyed the man’s diminutive size. “You’re bigger than I thought you’d be.”
Oz smiled an easy, rolling smile, and reaching down, helped Keenan to stagger to his feet. “I must apologise for your... treatment at the hands of the SIMs. It was not what I anticipated.” He made a swift and complicated hand gesture, to something just out of sight. There came a sudden blast in the corridor and the ten SIMs were picked up and thrown violently down the entire length, bouncing from walls and the floor and ceiling, whirling and spinning, limbs cracking, bodies breaking, skulls pulping as they were snapped away in a terribly vicious violent instant.
Keenan and Franco blinked, then looked at one another. Keenan released a slow breath.
“That’s a pretty good weapon,” he said, voice low.
“I agree. I designed it. It’s in the walls. As a deterrent, you understand. Now, follow me.”
Dr Oz moved towards the edge of the horizon which looked out, and down, across this— his miniature, created world. In the distance a false sun was rising. Sunlight sparkled across desert and jungle, cities and snowscape. “I had to synchronise the sunrise and sunsets, obviously,” said Oz, “although different climates are handled at ground-level using mid-level ion filters and hydrogen scales. Please, step up onto the black circle.”
Keenan and Franco glanced down. Before them squatted a circle of metal, and Oz moved to the forefront. Keenan glanced over his shoulder, where Pippa and the three GKs had eased forward, hemming the two Combat K soldiers in and brandishing MPKs with a honed and honeyed threat.
Keenan feigned to see Pippa for the first time. He gave her a nasty smile, and winked. “How’s it going, Killer?”
Pippa prodded him in the back with her MPK, and he stumbled forward, growling. Franco followed, as did the GKs, until the small group stood atop the smooth metal circle.
“I call this my flying carpet,” said Oz, and a tiny device materialised in the air at waist height. Oz reached forward, and skilfully manipulated compressed air controls. The disk lifted and eased out, sweeping and dropping low over a range of desert dunes. Aboard, they could smell hot sand and baking heat. “The Sahara,�
�� said Oz, by way of explanation. “It could be said I am obsessed by our heritage, by Old Earth. This is a personality flaw to which I openly admit. After all, Earth was the primus of our creation, yes? The point from which we stemmed. The original sperm and egg for our decadent species.” He smiled, teeth glittering blood-red in a face ravaged by power.
