by J. A. Pitts
BONES of my FATHER
J.A. PITTS
A new original story from the forthcoming collection Bravado’s House of Blues
FAIRWOOD PRESS
Bonney Lake, WA
BONES of my FATHER
A Fairwood Press e-book
September 2013
Copyright © 2013 by John A. Pitts
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
Fairwood Press
21528 104th Street Court East
Bonney Lake, WA 98391
www.fairwoodpress.com
Cover illustration by Mark Ferrari
First Fairwood Press Edition: September 2013
Printed in the United States of America
Electronic version by Baen Books
http://www.baen.com
BONES of my FATHER
My goggles cut the harsh glare of the plasma torch as the titanium joint succumbed to the flame. A thick white smoke poured from the metal, filling the cutting shed faster than the air-transfer pumps could manage. The nitrogen mix was holding steady in the workshop and I had ample time left in my tanks.
“Careful there, sonny boy,” Gramps said over my comm-link. “Don’t let any of those shavings clip your air hose.”
“I’ve done this before,” I growled into the helmet. “I had to recycle Mom, if you recall.”
“How can I forget,” Gramps said. “She reminds me every day.”
He’d pout now. Blamed my mother for stealing his precious son from him. “Dad volunteered for the cyborg-thing before he met Mom, you know that.”
“She’s a witch, I tell you. A siren, that’s what she is.”
“Shut it, old man.” The dulcet tones of my sainted mother echoed through the line. The woman had been a wicked geneticist, but a controlling shrew nonetheless.
Now he’d gone and waked her. “Go back to sleep, Mom.” I said. “Please?”
“Don’t you start with me, young man. If you knew the lengths I went to extend your life. Children are so ungrateful.”
I pressed my thumbs against my temples with my fingers covering my goggles. That woman could bring on a headache faster than anything I’d known. “Nightingale.” The use of her code word shut her down again. Ever since she’d uploaded into the central network, she and Gramps had been fighting like schoolgirls.
“Can you get to the memory core?” Gramps asked.
I turned off the torch, and dropped the titanium femur into the pile of dismantled limbs. Primary memory core is housed in the groin area. Some gear-head humor there.
Now that I’d removed the dangly bits, I could carry the pelvic housing into the lab and see about retrieving what was left of Dad.
“You gonna get those sonsabitches, ain’t ya, lad?”
“Sure, Gramps. As soon as I figure who or what slagged the old man.”
I didn’t comment on the brains and blood that caked the ruined titanium limbs. That and the queer way he’d been posed, like Rodin’s The Thinker, only, you know, without his head. Nothing but short-term memory there, at least.
“What the hell were you doing, old man?” I asked the remains of my father.
“He was screaming nursery rhymes into the network, before he crashed into giggles, then shrieks. Finally he just went dark. Full signal black-out,” Gramps said.
“I know.”
“Don’t make any sense. It’s like he went crazy or something.”
“Let it go, Gramps.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t add up.”
I hit the control panel, exhausting the room’s atmospherics in one long, loud exhale. My ears popped with the roar, but at least I could be alone for a few seconds. There were no low-grade radioactives left in Pasco. What was his real mission?
The atmo-sensor flashed green and the door to the decon chamber slid open. I crossed inside, leaving the bones of my father strewn across the shop floor. I’d deal with them later. I could always reuse the titanium for something.
Once the door slid shut behind me, I stripped out of the coveralls and dropped them into the laundry hatch for purification. The welding kit, helmet, tanks, gloves, each went into their own alcove which sealed with a hiss. Dad’s pelvic remains I set on the floor at my feet. It could withstand the corrosion.
I closed my eyes and said, “Rapture.” The room was bathed in a disinfecting mist, while a bank of lights flashed across the spectrum. My skin would itch for hours after this. Always hated cleaning up after exposure to the outside. Not only did I lose the top layer of skin in the decontamination spray, but the lights gave me a minor sunburn.
One of these days I’d have to do something about all that, but not today. Today I remain a meat-puppet. The last of my clan. Stupid bastards—the lot of us. O’Malleys one and all had taken up the way of the warrior, first as cops, then as soldiers. Each losing a bit of his humanity to the machines.
Gramps was the first to be totally replaced by the circuitry and titanium. Gran didn’t care, being dead and in the grave, and he sure survived the streets of New York better. But riots are riots, and titanium and ceramics can only withstand so much force. We reinstalled his brain into the compound on my third birthday. Haven’t had a moment’s peace since.
Once cleared to the living quarters, I grabbed a fresh pair of coveralls, slipped into my sandals and settled what remained of my old man on the work bench in the living room. The east wall blinked to light, showing a fifteen-foot-tall animated face of my grandfather.
“Jesus, Gramps,” I said shielding my eyes from the glare. “Tone it down a few lumens.”
The wall scaled back to something that wouldn’t fry my retina and I shook my head at the old man. Something about downloading him dropped his behavior to that of an unruly nine-year-old. He knew hella lotta stuff, but getting past the pranks and whining had lost its appeal.
I whipped up some protein packets while the geo-thermal reserves came online. I’d need them to fire up the Cray. It was a cranky old bastard, but it ran the wetware I’d need to access what remained of Dad. Mom would be pissed, but when wasn’t she? But the Cray was outside my network. Isolated from the central processor that ran the joint. Not risking this warm and cozy for some wombat, digi-bomb horseshit. I knew one redoubt that was slagged by a military junta who broke their defenses with some basic hacker crack. Silly way to die. Me, they couldn’t nuke me out of this place. Need to remove a few cubic kilometers of mountain just to get to my defenses.
Three packets of turkey medley and half a liter of distilled water and I was ready to begin the restore. I slid the connector cable into the pelvic coupling and triggered the pseudo-intelligence to begin the capture.
I had plenty of space in the banks, of course. The sum of human memory didn’t take much room. Most of the personality tweaks were chemical keys to quantum lock-boxes stored in the individual units. For those like Gramps or Mom, we tapped our pseudo-Dyson spheres we used to power the world. Each surviving compound had access to a sphere, we just had no control over them. Unlike the theory of building a world around a sun, we built a super-magnet around a black hole. Much smaller, and damn nearly infinite in power.
While Dad was downloading onto the Cray, I panned through the security views. I’d found Dad busted and left for dead out near Pasco, Washington. He’d insisted that we could score some low grade radiation slag from the old Hanford site, but I told him it had been moved to Yucca Mountain long ago.
The fact that he hadn’t been salvaged for the tit
anium told me it wasn’t one of the scavenger crews out of Seattle. Rather, I pegged it for the Portland gynocentric collective. Wanted nothing to do with a man, even if it was a robot who thought he was a man.
I’d exchanged data with some of those girls a year ago, was hoping to do a DNA swap, maybe even trade some pre-war salvage for a wife. Not that I ever had a real chance, but the thought of sleeping with another human being had a certain appeal. I could juice up another clone, but I could never live with myself again.
I scanned the open frequencies looking for anyone who might have survived out there, anyone who might want to meet a three-hundred-year-old virgin.
Musta been the tryptophan; before I’d finished scanning Arizona, I’d fallen asleep.
I dreamed of blue skies and green fields. Clean air as far as you could see, with animals and wind and rain falling from the sky.
I woke screaming. I remember those days from my first childhood, before we killed the world. But I’d been underground so long, the thought of all that...nature...just gives me the creeps.
I checked the download monitor and felt a punch in the gut. No Dad. Nothing I even recognized. Indicators showed the Cray working within parameters, but something in the way the old workhorse flashed and sang told me I had more to worry about than an info-bomb from one of the Microsoft vigilante groups.
Dad’s memories had been scrambled. And whatever had done it hadn’t stopped with his memories. It had scrambled the quantum matrixes that held his personality.
Alarm klaxons sounded through the redoubt, sending my heart-rate soaring. I pounded the footrest down and leapt from the recliner. Sprinting toward the shop, I found the area cut off in a bio-sealant the compound’s defenses had triggered, isolating the entire area. So much for reusing the titanium from Dad’s chassis. I pulled on a data tiara and called up the overhead display. Twelve percent of the compound was compromised. The eastern entry, metal shop, vehicle and weapons storage, as well as a third of the living quarters and the Olympic swimming pool and sauna. The Dyson, food supplies, computing hub, living quarters and entertainment zone remained intact. Even though I had enough room to house five hundred people, the loss of even twelve percent of it really pissed me off.
“Gramps, you awake?”
“What in tarnation is going on?” the surly old man asked over the intercom system. “I was having a conversation with that old widow woman on IO again.”
“We have a problem,” I said, running back toward the main corridor. “I’m sealing off the eastern access tunnel, going to full alert throughout the rest of the joint. I need you to figure out what the hell Dad brought in with him.”
“Right on it,” Gramps said.
Once in the main corridor, I called up the schematics of the remaining areas. Whatever was invading my home had only come in the one spot. Had to be something Dad had picked up.
Then I thought about the pelvis. Stupid triangle of metal and death.
I spun around and ran back to my private quarters.
The pelvis sat on the work table, shiny from the decon. Good thing for that. Whatever had hitched a ride into my world had not survived the Rapture. Were the bio-contaminant and the scrambling of Dad a coincidence?
I flipped to a secondary protocol and set the Cray to begin the download again, hoping that something could be retrieved. Then I set the AI on a DNA scan of the thing that ate my workshop. The video feeds in those areas had blacked out, but several other sensors were available to scan the quarantined areas.
Something would turn up. We’d mastered many forms of genetic manipulation before we used it to wipe out most of the sentient life on the planet. I just hoped whatever was in my workshop wasn’t sentient.
“How’s the download going?” Grandpa asked as I jogged the long way around the central hub.
“Crash and burn,” I said with gritted teeth. “They fragged his long-term memory.”
“And the short-term?”
I skidded to a stop. “Short-term?”
“You know, in his head?” he said. “You did get his head, didn’t you?”
“Didn’t find it,” I said, starting my feet moving again. “But without the long-term and the personality core, what’s the use?”
There was a long silence. For a moment I thought the communications grid must have failed.
“You realize he had knowledge of our whereabouts in his short-term memory, right?”
“Crap.” I swung around the door frame into my personal quarters. “Double-crud.” Short-term memory...head? What kind of moron was I? “Hey Gramps,” I called as I ransacked my quarters. “That VTOL on Mount Trinity serviceable?”
“Hang on, let me skip over and see. Haven’t been up there in a decade or more.”
I grabbed one of the emergency kits I’d built, and rebuilt over the centuries. Each held emergency rations, water and filtration unit, med-kit and an array of communication bots—oh, and trade goods: chocolate and stockings. Grandpa assures me that’s what all the hot chickees are after.
“VTOL is ready to fly,” Gramps said over the intercom. “You realize any satellite overhead will pick up your take-off.”
“Something we’ll have to risk,” I said as I buckled a bandoleer of flechette cartridges across my chest. The pistols were slung low on my hips, like they showed in the vids.
“You going EVA this trip, boy?”
I hefted the pack on my shoulder and staggered out into the service corridor. “Well, now I gotta go find his fool head, don’t I? Besides, I want to take another look at what the old man got into. Might be a clue to what’s going on. Whatever scrambled his memory spheres scares me. I got no plans to download anytime soon, but I don’t like the implications for you and Mom.”
“Good point,” he said, sullen. “Can I ride along?”
“You can remote, but I need you here keeping an eye on Mom. I think we need her up for this. She needs to be working on whatever is eating my workshop.”
“Oh, god no. Don’t wake her. She’ll be hysterical.”
“Gramps, I need you to do this,” I said as I slid around the corner toward the lift that would pull me the four kilometers upwards to the top of Mount Trinity and the VTOL launch pad. “She’s the best shot we have of figuring out what is in the workshop. It has the weapons storage, and that includes nukes, if you recall.”
“I never liked that we took those,” he said. “Too risky.”
“Well, Dad thought it was a good idea, especially in the early days. Last thing we need, however, is for some new sentience to get a hold of them. So, get her up, and get her analyzing that fungus, or whatever it is.”
“This is gonna suck,” he whined.
“Yeah, that’s what the guys in Buenos Aires said before the mutants overran their compound.”
The elevator hummed quietly, the music a quiet tinkling little jazz piano piece my father assured me sounded better with the full electric guitar and screaming vocals. I quite liked the smooth rhythm.
Luckily the VTOL had a full AI pilot. Dumb as a post when it comes to conversation, but capable of flying this baby through a type six hurricane if it came down to it.
We launched into the atmosphere at four G’s, reminding me of the time I’d eaten a bad pack of turkey delight and thrown up for three hours. We went straight up until the stars became visible, and the vertigo took hold. I tapped an anti-anxiety ampoule and sat back while the VTOL slid west over the Queen Charlotte Islands. There we’d drop to sea level and lose any tracking, at least in theory. Then we’d head south, and east toward Pasco, Washington. Not much left out there, but Dad had found something.
Retrieving Dad had been a near disaster. I’d been so freaked out by all that blue sky, and open space, I’d barely registered anything beyond the narrow field of vision through the plexi-steel visor. I looked upwards once, and took a little chemical siesta while my brain tried to shut down.
Once I’d recovered, I got him into the rover. For sixteen hours we’d driven t
hrough shattered cities, and towns that nature had mostly reclaimed, a surreal landscape of beauty and ruin enhanced by mood mellowers and anxiety.
This time, I opted for plain old sleep. But we’d make Pasco in a few hours. This bird was damn fast. Been a long time since I’d flown. Funny how this AI was so like the AI we used in the compound. Same droning voice, same inability to get the simplest of jokes, and yet couldn’t carry on a conversation about anything other than wind speed, fuel levels and time to destination. The simplest things like movies were totally lost on him.
The spot where I’d found Dad flashed on the overhead when I woke. The satellites showed a residual level of radiation well below safety protocols. Bio-scanners showed the landing zone clear of anything larger than a dog. Not that I’d be safe with a pack of dogs ripping me to pieces.
I pulled on the exoskeleton, sealed the bio seals around my helmet and tested the breathers. The flechettes rested in my lap and I said a quick prayer to Dad’s favorite saint: Elvis of Memphis.
We touched down near the remains of an old box store. “Thirty-Seven Acres of Savings,” the sign said. That alloy paint may be the last man-made thing on the planet, when all else is overrun by the wild.
“Gramps, you with me?”
“Sure, kiddo,” his voice whispered through my suit. “I’m right here.”
The second ampoule of chemical bliss sat poised in the injector, but I hesitated. “If I totally freak, could you launch this shot of happy for me?” I said with a nervous laugh. “I want to keep my wits about me.”
“You got it, sport. I’ll keep the VTOL locked down and ride along with you. You call if you need anything.”
“Right. Oh, is Mom working?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said with a sigh. “Bitching about your lack of safety protocol and questioning how you got your dad killed. But besides that, and a mutant viral plague beastie taking over the nastier bits of our home, we’re all peachy.”
