Theme Planet

by Andy Remic

  The corridor was short, and led to a circular room with satin-covered beds and chairs.

  There, reclining on the bed, was...

  “Katrina!” breathed Dex, and she glanced up almost nonchalantly, and joy spread across her face. She leapt up and ran to him as his little girls cried “Daddy, daddy!” and charged across the room, and Katrina was there first, falling into his arms, and he smelled her hair and kissed her lips, and she held him so tight he knew it had all been bullshit and they were all wrong and they were evil, and his wife was here, now, real, and he knelt and cuddled his little girls and they were weeping and hugging him, and he kissed their sweet-smelling cheeks and stroked their arms and ruffled their hair, then stood again, and there were tears on his cheeks, and hate and rage and sorrow and joy rampaged through him, because they had tried to convince him he was something he was not - an android, of all things - and somebody somewhere was playing a very sick, cruel joke. And if Dex got his hands on a gun, he’d fucking show them the meaning of sick jokes, all right!

  “Does it feel right?” The voice was Amba. She was stood in the entrance.

  “Of course it feels right!” yelled Dex. “Everybody has been lying to me, everybody, but now I’m here and I have my wife and children, and God willing, we’ll escape from this place and get back to Earth and never, ever leave the bloody planet again!”

  Amba moved forward, so fast she was a blur. She took hold of Dex, and shook him harshly. “It needs to click!” she snapped at him, “You need to focus, soldier!”

  Dex twisted fast, knocking Amba’s arms away and kicking her across the room. Dex heard Katrina gasp to his right, as Amba struck the wall and whirled into a crouch - ready for combat.

  “No!” hushed Katrina.

  “Yes,” snarled Dex, stepping forward.

  He received a sudden blow to the side of his head, and hit the ground hard. Stars spun as he looked up and saw Katrina holding some kind of extended black baton, a wand, with a tiny globe at the tip that fizzed slightly. Dex could smell burning flesh and he choked for a moment, before sitting up and glancing back at Amba, then to Katrina, then past to his children, who wore impassive, stony expressions.

  Confusion kicked him in the balls.

  “Tell him,” said Amba. “Get him on side fast. Because... if you don’t, then we’ll have to kill him and move ahead on our own.”

  Katrina seemed to relax, and pulled herself to her full height. She looked down at Dex, and he felt his heart drain away through ice-chilled veins and piss away through the soles of his boots. Her face was suddenly alien to him, the expression alien, the eyes different, the set of her body rigid and ready to fight. Again, it wasn’t right, none of it sat right, none of it hung true on his Katrina. Her eyes were gleaming. Her mouth was set hard. There was no humour there. No compassion. No... empathy.

  “They made three of us,” said Katrina, her voice barely above a whisper. “Three Anarchy Androids that were top of the range; the best they ever built.”

  “No,” said Dex, shaking his head. Blood leaked from his ears after the zap from the stick.

  “The first was called Amba Miskalov, she was the prime combat model and overtly android in her actions; in order to get things done. The other two were to be a husband and wife combat unit, sleepers, planted and mimicking real human life - until the time was right.”

  “I saw you give birth!” screamed Dexter, surging to his knees, but Katrina waved the fizzing wand at him.

  “Yes,” said Katrina, shaking her head with sorrow. “For the one and only time, the engineers removed the childbirth inhibitors. We were allowed to breed; to have children. But it was agreed that any children we had were also... non-human. A product of two fake humans, you understand?”

  “No!” sobbed Dexter, and his cheeks were wet. “What are you saying? What are you saying to me?”

  “I’m saying we have a job to do, Dexter Colls. We were made for a reason. With a function. We were built to carry out one task. But we had... other inhibitors in place, because our roles were very special. Our designers knew that the longer we impersonated humans, the longer we developed our own relationships and had children and lived in a real society, then the more chance we had of getting to SARAH’s crystal core. Her nerve centre. Her Heart. The place we must destroy.”

  “No, no, no, no, no!” wailed Dexter, head in his hands, then transferred his gaze suddenly to his children. “Come here, come to me, your mother is ill... we need to leave this place, just you, Molly, and you, Toffee, I’ll take you away from here, take you back home...” and he held out his hands and his eyes were pleading and his hands were shaking and tears dripped from eyes already red-rimmed from crying...

  “You were right, Mother,” said Molly, face impassive, dark eyes fixed on Dexter. She made no move to go running into her father’s arms. “He has spent too long with humans, spent too long adopting their ways. He is malfunctioning. He is a deviant. Kill him. Kill him now, Mother.”

  “Yes, kill him, kill him!” said Toffee, clapping her hands together as if this were some exciting new game.

  And Katrina stepped forward, and the fizzing baton which Dex knew, somehow knew was a special device for controlling androids - well, it had the power to put him down for good; to retire him - no matter how fast and powerful he was.

  Dex stared at his children, crowing for his slaughter.

  He looked up into Katrina’s eyes, into his wife’s eyes, and they were hard as glass, alien to him, her mouth a narrow red slit. There was no give there, no compromise, and she would absolutely put him down, like an infected dog.

  Dex watched in disbelief as Kat stopped before him. He wiped snot and tears on his jacket sleeve. The fizzing wand glowed before his eyes, and it was a concentrated portal, a buzzing glowing fizzing distillation of his own deathforce...

  “Live or die. It’s your choice,” said Katrina, edging the wand towards Dexter’s face.

  ~ * ~

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  BAD WIFE

  “I choose to live,” said Dexter, and dried his tears, and stood. He stared at Katrina, and his children, their faces impassive, and turned to Amba, who was standing, arms loose by her sides. Amba gave him a little smile. He did not return the emotion. “So what now? I remember nothing. But I believe. Finally, I believe. You did that to me. You opened my eyes, fake wife.”

  “So you accept your status?”

  “I do.”

  “We must kill SARAH,” said Katrina, stepping past Dexter and standing beside Amba. “But you are the key. You are the focal point for our ability to crush her crystal core; her Heart.”

  “And you think she’ll simply allow us to stride in there and do this deed?” said Dex.

  “She has little choice,” said Amba. “She is as she says; a creature of positive energy. She can do no harm. She wants nothing but good and joy in the universe, and it is damaging Earth’s military - Earth’s War Effort, the expansion of our Empire. A new empire about to be unleashed...”

  “And we are to kill her?” said Dex.

  “Annihilate her totally,” said Amba.

  “Without empathy,” said Katrina.

  Dex nodded. “I don’t understand why Oblivion would want to kill such a creature,” he said.

  “It’s talk like that, husband, that’ll get you dead,” said Katrina, and glanced back to Amba. “Are we ready to move? This’ll cut a hole through the wall; we can start ascending down to the next sector, to the underside of the Shell.”

  “Let’s move,” said Amba, and the two women strode across the chamber to the wall.

  “Aww,” said Toffee. “Is there going to be no murder?”

  “Toffee?” said Dex, kneeling before the little girl. “What are you saying?”

  “We’ve changed, Daddy,” said Molly, very matter-of-factly. “And it’s something you’re going to have to get used to. We have special powers. We are androids. And we are killers. We can help to do this thing. We can help put an end to t
he creature known as SARAH.”

  “Oooh, yes, can we?” giggled Toffee, clapping her hands in glee.

  ~ * ~

  They’d travelled for a kilometre, now, Katrina using the android wand to cut through the walls, which were soft and flesh-like; almost organic. Almost. After about the fifth wall, shudders began to well up through their feet and Dex stopped, looking down at his boots, mind uncertain.

  “What’s happening?”

  “She’s screaming,” said Katrina, face hard.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m hurting her,” said Katrina.

  “Is there no other way?” said Dex.

  Katrina stopped, and stared hard at him. Amba was to one side, her face, also, hard. Dex licked his lips, and felt incredibly empty inside. How had such a perfect holiday ended up like this? How had his world come tumbling down?

  The air parted, and SARAH stepped through the curtain.

  “You must desist,” she said.

  “No,” said Amba, staring hard at her. “Move, or I will kill the avatar.”

  “I need your help,” said SARAH.

  Katrina shifted to one side, to the glowing white wall. The wand buzzed, and started cutting away at the wall, peeling away flaps of flesh and leaving a gaping wound. Warm air oozed from the orifice, and Katrina stepped inside, sawing away at more flesh to create a tunnel...

  Dex watched her, watched his wife, the woman he loved, the woman he’d married and made love to and partied with and had children with; the woman whose every single inch he knew intimately, had kissed and nuzzled and admired and tickled; the woman whose nose wrinkled in a nauseatingly cute manner whenever he was cooking dinner; the woman who liked nothing more than shopping on the ggg net, usually with his credit card, the woman who was a violent rabid tiger if anybody so much as looked in the wrong way at her little cubs; the woman who snored gently in her sleep and denied it every single damn morning; the woman who liked nothing more than to go to pop concerts as if she were still eighteen, or eat beef curry sandwiches, or watch late night re-runs of Sex in the Shitty and Dr Meh whilst quaffing copious amounts of vintage white wine and guzzling cheesy Mexicatos. Dex watched her, and she was not the same woman, and how could she have lived the lie for so long? How could she have hidden the fact she was an android for so long? And then it hit him - she hadn’t known. Just like he. She had been oblivious. But at some point she had discovered, or been told, or simply unlocked. Just like he had to be unlocked... but there was a malfunction and his unlocking mechanism refused to work. And without that, he was more human than human; he was still thinking and acting in a completely un-android way. And, as Katrina had pointed out to him quite bluntly, that could only lead to his death.

  And his kids. Shit, his little girls.

  How could they have turned so cold and callous?

  And the answer was simple.

  Somebody had flicked a switch inside their heads.

  Somebody had turned them from human children into androids, unfeeling, willing to kill when they were told to kill, and die when they were told to die.

  How was Dex supposed to deal with that?

  Did he have a choice?

  I am not an android, I am not an android - he repeated the mantra over and over again. But then, would it not be better to accept what he was, accept the changeover, the transmogrification into the creature that was his core, his essence, his soul? The way he’d been originally engineered? But by accepting such a change, wouldn’t he then lose all his own empathy? He would no longer care about Katrina and his little girls. He would become, effectively, a flesh machine on a mission of murder. And, worst of all, did he really have a choice in the matter?

  Dex shuddered, and looked at SARAH, and she was staring hard at him. She can see it, see that I am different from the others, that my android switch hasn’t been flicked just yet - I still retain my human faculties. She can see I’m the weakest link in the chain here. She understands I am the only one who can help her!

  “So Earth’s Oblivion government are sending an army?” said Dex, softly.

  “Yes,” said SARAH. “Their ships are coming into orbit as we speak. Soon, SLAM dropships will scream through Theme Planet’s atmosphere, bombs will ravage my landscape, destroying the rides and the themed areas and the joy. No longer will I take away humanity’s aggression and anger and frustration and fear, leaving them - you - a better and more stable species. This will be their first step in a new Empire. This is the start of the slaughter.”

  “What happens to all the people here on holiday? The families? Mothers, wives, children?”

  “They die,” said SARAH.

  “That’s wrong.”

  “Collateral damage,” said SARAH, simply.

  “What do you want us to do?” whispered Dex.

  “No,” said Amba. “Stop.” She held the FRIEND, pointed at Dexter’s head. His face went grim and hard. He’d seen what the weapon could do, had spoken with the FRIEND Zi, and now it was turned on him. Not a pleasant sensation. He locked eyes with Amba, then turned back to SARAH.

  “What do you want us to do?” he repeated.

  “You must halt your Earth Masters. Halt the destruction. Turn back the invasion...”

  There came a blam as the FRIEND fired, and SARAH was blasted backwards, disintegrating as she hit the wall and crumpled down and in upon herself, imploding into a small ball of matter which hit the ground, with a solid thump.

  Dex glanced at Amba.

  “She is wrong,” said the Anarchy Android. “Earth wouldn’t do that. They know the recklessness and foolishness of invasion; of genocide; of slaughter; they know that to try and conquer the Quad-Gal would be an absolute insanity! Effectively, an act of suicide for Earth and all humanity!”

  “I believe they could be so foolish,” said Dexter.

  Amba turned the FRIEND back on him. “You retain your humanity,” she said. Dex glanced right, at the fleshy hole through which Katrina and the girls had vanished. There were flashes and sparks as Katrina cut them more of a path towards the crystal core of SARAH; towards the one place where the FRIEND would wreak its intended havoc.

  And that was it. Understanding hit him. Flooded him. It was the FRIEND, Zi. She was a terrible, terrible weapon - integrated with Amba, a bomb that had been designed to take out the Theme Planet and kickstart the invasion, the war, the conquest. They were all pawns, all being used by Earth’s Oblivion Government in their dirty, back-hand little offensive.

  Earth, and Humanity, wanted to rule the Quad-Gal.

  Earth, and Humanity, were willing to sacrifice millions of their own people on The Theme Planet as their first strike, their first move on the Great Gameboard of a Four Galaxy War.

  Shit.

  “I know why you have Zi,” said Dexter, tilting his head to one side.

  “No you don’t.”

  “She’s symbiotic. A part of you. You protect one another, feed from one another, love one another.”

  “How could you know that?” Amba frowned. She was confused.

  “You love Zi, don’t you?”

  “She is a sister to me. My own bone and flesh and blood. I would do anything for her. I would kill for her, and I would die for her.”

  “She’s a bomb,” said Dexter, nodding. “That’s how we’ll destroy the Heart of SARAH. That’s how Romero intends for you to destroy Theme Planet. You will sacrifice yourself, all of us. SARAH is wrong; the SLAM dropships won’t come. Not yet, anyway. First, Oblivion will let us destroy Theme Planet from within. “

  “If that is our mission,” said Amba.

  “Think of the millions we will kill!”

  “Everybody has to die sometime,” said Amba.

  “Surely you don’t believe that,” said Dexter, softly, and he was moving towards her, moving closer. “What’s wrong with us, Amba? What’s wrong with the androids? Shall I tell you? It’s engineering. They created us to be like this. They created me and Katrina and the girls to be normal human bei
ngs, to act a certain way, and all the time they tell the general public that androids are inferior and have no emotions and no empathy; when it was the fucking engineers who made us this way. Because it’s better for the humans to believe they have something special, something unique - a soul. It gives Humanity a solid spiritual grounding. Amba, can’t you feel it inside? You are human. You have been labelled an android, but I am living proof that you can be normal.”

  “I do not care,” said Amba, but Dex was close now, the FRIEND to his chest, and he could see the shine of tears in Amba’s eyes. He moved yet closer, pushing past the FRIEND, until his lips were only inches from her.