Sequence

by Adam Moon

  “She’s gone completely insane. She killed off a lot of us when she decided she didn’t need so many slaves. She gets bored and easily upset, but you already knew that. I’m just glad you’re back and that the mission was a success. Maybe when she’s done she’ll let us all go.”

  “I hope you’re right. It’s been a hundred thousand years since I felt my own skin, breathed through my own mouth, tasted food, or felt any kind of physical sensation. Sometimes I forget that I’m alive.”

  “We all feel the same. There are rumors that she destroyed all of our bodies a long time ago, but I don’t believe them. She knows we need them to give us hope. Without the bodies as leverage, most of us would’ve given up a long time ago.”

  “The worst thing we ever did was to try and save God.”

  “She’s not the god we hoped for, sir.”

  “I know that. Hopefully the upgraded god will be a lot kinder to us.”

  “That’s what we’ve been praying for too.”

  “Have our cousins, the Grays, tried to attack the planet?”

  “Only just as you landed. They must’ve followed you here. Until now, they didn’t think to look for us on such an inhospitable world. If you remember, this outpost was abandoned half a million years ago because it’s worthless. They couldn’t know that the bitch would put us in these robots so we wouldn’t need to breathe or be fed. They couldn’t know she’d be so cruel.”

  The captain nodded sadly and said, “Well, our ship came under attack. If it weren’t for you guys being held hostage I would’ve given up or let them destroy the ship.”

  “I know how you feel. This life has been longer than our psyche’s can handle. We’re not built for such prolonged monotony.”

  “Well I think that’s about to come to an end very soon. I just hope it all works out in our favor.”

  “Life owes us that much. We’ve sacrificed too much to be dealt another blow.”

  A different, strange mech whispered to Chris, “I hear you’re an Earthman. I thought you insects were deemed too inconsequential to be included in this grand experiment. I guess you must have evolved a little since then.”

  Chris didn’t know what to say to that so he shoved the asshole mech gently away from him and tried his best to ignore it and zero in on the captain’s conversation again.

  The mech shoved him back, but harder, and said, “Don’t you ever touch me, you pond scum lowlife.”

  Samda stepped up and grabbed the jerk by the tentacle. She pushed on his back with three of her tentacles and said, “I understand you’ve been through a lot, but none of that is our fault. Take your frustrations out on someone that deserves it.” Then she pushed him forward so that he was again moving with the crowd.

  He didn’t look too pleased, but he must have decided against further instigation when none of his people came to his defense.

  Samda whispered, “I have a feeling most of these guys have been driven slowly insane. We’d better watch our backs.”

  She was right. It was difficult to tell if most of the mechs even had a personality trapped inside. They moved and acted like automatons, except for the few who seemed to have snapped and given in to their frustrations and growing aggression. Only a small handful seemed to have retained their faculties.

  Chris wondered how long they had been trapped in those mechs. From what the captain had said, it had been a hundred thousand years or so.

  Just as he closed in on the captain’s conversation again, they arrived at the barracks.

  Barracks

  The barracks were barren, devoid of any furniture whatsoever. The room was cavernous and empty. The walls were brown, as was the floor. There were no windows and the lighting was poor.

  Chris nearly made the mistake of asking how they were supposed to sit down or sleep until he remembered that those things weren’t necessary when they were in the robotic suits.

  A dirty mech with dents and scuffs on his metal body sidled over to the captain. Chris moved closer to overhear the conversation.

  It said, “Welcome back, sir.”

  “Thank you, Number Eight.”

  “We’ll know soon enough if your mission was a success.”

  “Did she build the processor already?”

  “Yes, but her specs were way different from the ones we used to design her. Before she killed those who helped build it, one of them described it to me. He said that there’s a deep concave indentation she had dug out of the floor in the processor room. It’s off-limits, so I’ve never seen it myself. It’s inlaid with a golden-colored polymer and has several holes at the bottom. He didn’t know what those were for but he said they looked like drainage ports. There’s a crane at the edge of the crater and there are thousands of docks with hydraulic lifts on each. He thinks those are for the stasis pods. They are positioned all around the crater lip. He said there was a huge complex contraption that hangs over the center of the crater. He thought it was some type of laser, but he wasn’t sure. His hypotheses was that the DNA would be extracted from the aliens, positioned somewhere in the crater and then it would be combined by the laser beam. I told him he was an idiot. That was the last thing I said to him, because he was called away right then and never returned. None of the workers did.”

  The captain sighed. “She’s a cruel one, but maybe she knows what she’s doing. We have no choice but to put our faith in her.”

  Number Eight nodded and said, “I wish I could have gone with you. We all went a little crazy here. At least you had a mission, a reason for being. But thank you for coming back. Some of us had lost hope. Some of us thought you’d abandoned us to save yourselves.”

  The captain shook his head defiantly, as if to say that that was ridiculous. “It’ll all be over soon. We’ll see what’s to become of us before long.”

  “I wouldn’t hold out hope that it’ll end well for us. She barely recognizes that we’re even alive. She regards us the same way we would regard a stone. If we’re lucky she’ll consider it a waste of her time to kill us off.”

  “I take it no one ever came up with a way to overthrow her.”

  “Several did. They’re all dead now. She can’t be stopped. She has our DNA inside her. She can anticipate our every move.”

  Chris saw that Samda had also moved closer, to eavesdrop. She gave him a quizzical look. This had become more complicated and far more disastrous than they’d been led to believe. One thing was for sure, if the captain’s life wasn’t even guaranteed, then they stood less of a chance of getting back to Earth.

  Chris interrupted the captain’s conversation. “Was human DNA used to create her?” He already knew the answer, but he wanted to be sure.

  The captain said, “No. Earth is in a different galaxy and we didn’t use samples from outside our own galaxy to create her.”

  Chris said, “Then that means she won’t be able to anticipate what I do, because my DNA isn’t inside her. If there’s a way to stop her then I want to be involved too.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Because I want to go home.”

  “She’ll kill you if she thinks you pose a threat to her or the experiment.”

  “It sounds like she might kill us all anyway.”

  “I see your point, but we don’t have a workable plan, and I fear that it’s too late to try anything anyway.”

  “If you come up with anything, let me know and I’ll do my part.”

  Samda added, “Count me in too.”

  Planning Escape

  When they were alone, the captain said to Samda and Chris, “What you propose is foolhardy. There’s still a chance that this will all work out well for everyone. The new god that she creates will not be like her. It will be better in every way. It may stop her from interacting with us. It may even destroy her.”

  Samda said, “It sounds like you’re the only one who’s staying positive about all of this. Have you considered that you could be wrong?”

  The captain hung his head. “I ref
use to believe I sacrificed so much for so little. I have to believe this will all end well for me and for my people.”

  Chris asked, “If it doesn’t work out, don’t you think it’s a good idea to at least have a backup plan?”

  The captain nodded. “Let me ask around and see what we have to work with.” With that, he walked away.

  Chris said to Samda, “These poor bastards have been through hell. I refuse to go through it with them.”

  “I’m with you. If there’s a chance to escape, even if it might mean we’re caught and killed, I say we go for it. It’s better to die trying to be free than to live forever as a slave.”

  Chris said, “I am curious to see what God will be like though.”

  “I’m worried that if we stick around long enough to find out, then it’ll be too late to attempt an escape.”

  “It might already be too late.”

  The captain returned and interrupted their conversation. “I just heard that our ship is still here and that it’s intact.”

  “I would hope so. You just landed it.”

  “No, that’s her ship. She designed that one, and it’s too out in the open to sneak aboard. The ship I’m talking about is the one we used to come here. I assumed she would’ve used its parts, but apparently her tech is more advanced than ours. That might be a godsend. If we can get to the ship, we stand a chance of getting out of here.”

  “Even with all the defenses she has in place?” Chris asked.

  “It’s our only hope. If we get killed escaping, that’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

  Samda said, “Me too.”

  “I just have to find a way to get close to it.”

  Snitch

  The captain walked off with renewed enthusiasm. It was odd to watch. Just hours ago, Chris had viewed the captain and his crew as oppressive beings, keeping him from his freedom, but it turned out that they actually had it far worse than he did.

  Samda whispered, “Just look at those poor creatures. They just stand around and stare off into space.”

  “You would too if you had been trapped for a hundred thousand years with no hope of escape.”

  “I guess it doesn’t help that this planet sucks. This is the first planet besides my own that I’ve ever set foot on and I can’t wait to get out of here.”

  The jerk mech that had tried to insult Chris shoved another, near catatonic mech aside roughly.

  It came right up to them and said, “I heard about your daring plan to escape and I won’t allow it. She’ll kill the rest of us for helping you. Shit, she’ll kill us just because you made her mad. I’m going to tell her, and there’s nothing you two morons can do to stop me. And it just might help me curry favor with her.”

  Before Chris had a chance to rebut the jerk, they were all summoned over an intercom.

  The god’s voice was sweet but stern. “All personnel are to come to the processing bay. All of your hard work is about to finally pay off.”

  “Shit,” whispered Chris. “It’s too late.”

  The Grand Experiment

  Chris and Samda funneled out of the barracks with the rest of the mechs.

  A mech whispered to the captain, “This is good. If she’s already finished it means you collected everything she needed. I was worried you might have missed a specimen.”

  “No way. We both know what she would do if I let her down. I collected DNA we probably didn’t even need.”

  “Better to be safe than sorry.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Let’s see what all your hard work has accomplished then.”

  Samda touched Chris’ shoulder. She whispered, “If we get a chance to break away from the group, we should take it. We need to find that ship before it’s too late.”

  “I haven’t seen a single doorway yet. It might already be too late to act.”

  He was right. They came out into the center of the octagonal structure where the collector ship was still docked. Its landing pads were clamped down tight.

  There were other doors all around, but none that they could make it to without drawing attention to themselves. They followed the group across the empty courtyard and then through an opposite door. The doorway was huge and it was immediately evident why it had to be. All of the contraptions inside were immense.

  The god was standing on a platform fifteen feet above the ground. She waved her arms to guide the incoming crowd to their positions.

  They were beckoned to walk around a large concave crater in the center of the room. All of the stasis pods with their alien occupants inside were positioned at the very edge of the crater. A huge convex structure was situated twenty feet above the concave indentation. Chris had heard there might be a laser device there, but he couldn’t see one.

  Once all of the mechs were in the room and standing in a circle, the god looked down on them from her platform.

  Chris looked around in a panic, trying to spot his body in one of the stasis pods. He noticed Samda looking about for hers too.

  This room was high tech. If the rest of the facility was barren, this room more than made up for it. It had a high domed ceiling. The walls looked to be coated in some unidentifiable slick substance, resembling rubber or plastic. The entire room was a brilliant white except for the pods and the mechs that now filled it.

  Even though he was wearing a mechanized unit, he could feel the floor beneath his feet vibrating gently.

  He looked to his left and was upset to see a familiar mech beside him. It was the dickhead who had called him pond scum and threatened to out him to the god. The mech looked at him with barely concealed contempt and whispered, “I would imagine that this is a huge honor for something as lowly as you are. You probably don’t even know what’s going on. Don’t worry about me snitching on you anymore. It’s too late to escape now.”

  Chris ignored him and looked up in time to see the god open her mouth to speak. She looked angry, as though the anger had been there all along and she was only now allowing it out into the open. It was an ugly, devious, vicious look that scared the hell out of him.

  He hoped they hadn’t screwed something up. He hoped the captain wasn’t the one to inspire her ire.

  Then, when he looked into her hate filled eyes, he realized she was simply evil. She didn’t need a reason.

  He thought about grabbing Samda and dashing from the room, but when he saw the huge doors slam shut, he knew he had waited too long to act.

  Evil

  The god said sadistically, “You should never have designed me. You opened a Pandora’s Box and I’m about to open it even further. If you think I’m cruel and unfair, wait until you see how my upgrade treats you amoebas.”

  A few mechs began to whisper in hushed tones until she pointed her long finger at one of them and he melted like hot wax before their eyes. Her evil was palpable. This god hated them all passionately.

  When the hush returned, she said ominously, “None of you shall leave this room. But I want you to see the fruits of your labors before I destroy you.”

  With that, she reached out for the console beside her and pressed a button. All at once several loud clicks sounded and then the stasis pods started to tip forward into the crater. The pods were hinged and stopped when they were horizontal.

  They watched in horror as the alien inhabitants fell out of their opened pods and into the crater. Thousands of alien creatures slid down the crater walls, too many to count.

  The captain pointed at a Gray that was sliding down the wall and said in fear, “That’s my body. What the hell is she doing?”

  Chris scanned the walls until he saw his small, naked body sliding down a wall too.

  He didn’t know what to do. The panic had rendered him momentarily motionless, which was probably a good thing, as there was nothing he could do to interfere.

  As the last of the aliens slid down the walls and settled into a huge pile at the base, the empty pods then righted themselves all at once, the doors clicki
ng shut as they became upright.

  The god eyed them all maliciously, but she paused for dramatic effect. The mechs began to whisper and shuffle about uncomfortably when she said in a booming voice, “This is what I think of you feeble life forms. You are nothing but the primordial ooze that allows something greater to evolve.”

  Then she hit another button on the console and the floor and walls rumbled. They all looked around to try and see what new terrors awaited them, but none of them could’ve predicted what happened next.

  The large convex structure that had been situated up near the ceiling came down fast and crushed all of the alien life inside the crater. Then it rose up and fell again. It did this over and over, rumbling the floor as it smashed life to death.

  The captain screamed out, “What the hell are you doing?” But the god ignored him.

  She laughed heartily as she controlled the massive hammer. After over twenty jack-hammering blows, the convex hammer finally ascended back into the ceiling, dripping in bloods of various colors and bodily fluids impossible to categorize. Chunks of gore hung from it, pasted by blood. The gore fell lazily back into the pit as the mechs stared in shocked silence. Then the convex hammer fell again, smashing again and again for over a minute.

  Chris had an unnatural urge to jump in and save his own body, but he knew there was no way his body could survive that. He’d be lucky to find a pinky finger in that large pile of mangled parts.

  Just when he didn’t think the horrors could get any worse, the hammer started to spin rapidly as it rose and fell by only a foot or so. It was grinding the alien corpses to a mushy pulp, his included.

  The god yelled, “I have little time to extract DNA from each life you brought me. This is the quickest way to break it down. This is the meat soup that will bring the creator to me. I know you pathetic idiots thought a real god would be able to fix your universe, but I know differently. It’s easier to cast off a failure and start from scratch. He will be disgusted when he sees the universe he is born into. He will destroy your reality and then, with my help, make something perfect.”