Spinward Fringe Broadcast 10.5: Carnie's Tale

by Randolph Lalonde

  Alice couldn’t help but feel a little excited as Yawen and Iruuk faced off, he in a crouched position, and she in a side facing fighting stance. “You ready for this?” she asked.

  Iruuk smiled a little, but kept watching her closely. “Begin!” Rusher said.

  Iruuk made a snap grab for her leg, but by the time his hand arrived, it wasn’t there. It kicked up, catching him squarely under the jaw. Even though his suit moved into place in time to catch the hit, the class audibly cringed.

  Her foot came down on his hand, momentarily pulling him off balance and bringing his throat down so she could strike with her elbow and a backhand. “Multiple points,” the referee system announced while flashing a red number three over their heads.

  “This is for the pin, remember,” Rusher said. “Not points.”

  Iruuk was still off balance, and Yawen took advantage, stepping back just enough to lash out with a fast, but heavy kick to his knee. That was her tactic, to keep him off balance until she found a way to pin him.

  Just as Alice had the thought, Yawen surprised everyone as she grabbed Iruuk’s wrist, stepped up onto his kneeling leg, and leapt into the air, dragging his arm behind his back. When it was twisted as far as it would go, she used the arm to fling her body back down towards his back and land both her feet between his shoulder blades. Iruuk completely lost his balance and landed on his chest while Yawen twisted his long arm behind his back. “Submit,” she said calmly as she used all her strength to keep his arm pinned to his back.

  Even through his visor, Alice could see the amused surprise on Iruuk’s face. He tapped his free hand on the mat. “Well done, Level Five,” Rusher said to Yawen. “Next time I check your progress, I want to see that you’re level seven. Supervise your classmates through practice matches for two hours. Breaks and match opponents at your discretion. I want to see discipline, awareness and quick thinking.”

  “Yes, Rusher, thank you, Rusher,” Yawen said.

  Iruuk waited until their commander turned away, then bowed in front of Yawen with a grin. “That was very good, I would like to spar with you again sometime.”

  “I’d be happy to, but square up with Alice and Titus for now.”

  Alice enjoyed sparring with Iruuk, he was the ultimate challenge for her, especially since she was one of the smallest people in her class. He could see she was highly alert, and ready for anything she could throw at him. Everyone else in her class were set up with partners and spaced out on the large mat covered floor. The example power suit hung against the far bulkhead like a trophy.

  “Begin!” Yawen shouted.

  Iruuk tried to snatch Titus, a slightly older, but not much taller classmate, but missed. His grab at Alice’s leg was answered with a grab of her own, where he tried to leverage his thumb to turn his arm awkwardly, but it didn’t work. He turned his hand instead and grabbed her head. “Why!” was all she had time to cry before she found herself pinned on top of Titus’ chest.

  “I’m going to trip and flip you one day!” Titus said as he struggled under her.

  “Double pin!” the referee system announced.

  The rest of the training exercise went similarly, with no one pinning Iruuk, but many classmates learning a great deal about trying to defeat a superior opponent. Before the two hours were up, Alice won thirty-one of thirty nine matches using every technique and dirty trick she could manage. “Five matches with you,” Titus said in the last round. “I think someone like seeing us fight,” he nodded towards Yawen, “or wants us to get together.”

  Alice wasn’t distracted by the grin Yawen flashed their way, but Titus’ last comment was enough to make her lose focus. He had her in a hold before she had time to offer meaningful resistance, but reversed it just as he was about to pin her, lifting him with her legs, then turning him onto his chest. “I’ve won five out of five, what does that mean, you think?” she asked with a smirk. His body was thick, he was short and muscular much like she was, but had more power.

  “I’ll save face this round,” he replied. “I found your weakness: you’re a blusher.” Alice tried to ignore him as she worked to reinforce her hold.

  He kicked hard and flipped around, breaking her hold then took advantage of the leverage to break free. He locked her into a leg hold and pinned one of her shoulders to the mat, she barely kept the other from touching. A thought occurred to her then, maybe she could use the same trick to distract him. “I’ll let you take me out if you pin me,” she said with a wink. “But only if you can pin me.”

  To her surprise, he lifted her off the mat then slammed her back down, firmly pushing her shoulders down. Holographic numbers counting her out appeared above their heads as she struggled to get free, but he had too much leverage. “Pinned!” It announced, flashing a green light on Titus, marking him as the victor.

  “You don’t have to, it was a good distraction, but it had the reverse effect,” he said as he gave her a hand up.

  “No, she has to,” Yawen said as she passed. “She could use a break and some good company.”

  “All right, we’ll find the time before we get our assignments,” Alice said, wishing she wasn’t blushing. “Our schedules are finally clearing up.”

  “Aw, why not tonight?” Yawen asked, feigning disappointment.

  Alice pushed her away. “I have to work on a report I’m not allowed to talk about.”

  Everyone knew what she meant. Every Officer Trainee at their level had one, and they were not allowed to share details. “I’ll send you my schedule,” Titus said. “See how things line up. I can’t wait.”

  Part Six

  The quarters Alice and Yawen shared in the new training facility were the best part about the space. So much of the academy was as yet unfinished, and that’s the way she preferred most of it. Some hallways were skeletal, without safety covers or beautification, so all the cables, pipes and other systems were in plain sight. There was as much current technology, serving as backup and temporary systems as there were new generation technologies. Seeing the two together helped her understand the new systems everyone was rushing to understand from the Lorander database.

  As much as she liked seeing technology open for viewing, Alice was happy that the habitation section she was in was finished. The dark grey and blue décor suited her tastes, but more importantly, their adjustable bunks were comfortable. Just as nice as the beds aboard the Triton, only smaller. It suited her, she didn’t need much space so the standard officer’s bunk was big enough for her to stretch out in. After the melee session she just had, that was exactly what she did. She thought about her bouts with Titus for a moment, recalling how pleased he was with himself after he bested her. He deserved the win, she did beat him four times before that, after all. The promise she made him brought a smile to her face, and she enjoyed the prospect of having dinner with him later for a moment before shaking her head. “I don’t have time for anything but a new friend,” she said. “That’s what I’ll have to tell him straight away, no time.”

  With that set firmly in her mind, she took her playback disc from where she’d stashed it in the pull-down drawer above her bed and put it on her forehead. “What happens next, Carnie?” she asked as she started the playback.

  I followed the Lieutenant. I didn’t know what to do, but he seemed to know what to do next, how to handle whatever this disaster was. “What is this place?” I ask him. “Some kind of military base?”

  “It’s one of the main Commerce buildings, processing sensitive trades, holding precious materials and holding reserve power for industry. Turns out the armour here is thicker than anything in this hemisphere. We call it the Commerce Complex.”

  We get to the top of the winding hallway and armoured doors thicker than my shoulders are wide open. There was a command centre through there with a few projected scenes of military robots fighting human forces in hover tanks, low flying heavy ships and on foot. Even though I don't know much about that kind of fighting, I can see that humans are in retreat
everywhere I look. The bots don't care if they get crushed or de-limbed, they throw themselves into the fight like they've hated us for generations.

  “You sure you don't remember anything else from your trip here? Maybe something the last system you were at talked about a solution they were using? Why weren't they infected?”

  “We were in hyperspace for two weeks, coming from Denault. Everything was cool there, the bots were normal.”

  “I was afraid you'd say that,” the Lieutenant said. “It looks like your best chance is to throw in with us. There's no way you're getting back up in the sky, and we're pretty much stuck here for the duration.”

  A woman in a white business outfit, long coat, longer skirt and a computer console on her arm was giving orders to the upper ranks in the room. There were only a few who looked like her – rich business types – but there were a hundred soldiers, most of them higher ranking like the Lieutenant who came down to meet me. “I'm Noah,” I tell him as he's starting to turn away. “Noah Lucas.”

  He stops and shakes my hand. “I'm Lieutenant Ruben Oman, stick around, we might need more pilots.”

  Any confidence Lieutenant Ruben instilled in me with his firm handshake dissipated when I saw that his team was welding the heavy door behind us shut. I’d seen enough war movies to know what a last stand looked like. I looked around the room and noticed that the only people in the large command centre were military or business type people. The floor we were on had thick metal windows, so thick that the view was distorted slightly by the shape of the transparent metal like an old funhouse mirror, only not quite as bad. I should have felt safe, but I got a sinking feeling as I watched smoke rise in broad black pillars from the city skyline in the distance.

  I found a seat against the wall and put my helmet on. I knew it would make no difference to a load-lifter or recycling bot, they’d have me cut apart and processed just as fast either way, but it made me feel better. “There’s only one solution left,” said the lady in the business suit. If someone told me she was an android, I’d believe them. Her face looked chiselled, too perfect.

  “We’re not doing that, Emrine,” Lieutenant Ruben said. “We’ve still got some fight in us.”

  “The Third Mechanized Division was just annihilated,” Emrine said, her eyes not looking away from a large holographic projection with a power plant in the middle. “This collector is almost fully charged, the machines are defending it, but we’re still connected. There is enough power in there to fry every circuit in the hemisphere, and plans are underway to secure a connection to the southern power reserve station.”

  “We wipe the robots out, but we also knock out our food production, communications, and any ship not hardened against high EMP blasts.”

  “Look,” Emrine said, bringing up a secondary hologram. A group of hundreds of people were moving into a housing complex that looked like a luxury resort. Robots were escorting them like honoured guests who had their pick of captured military weapons, and tables filled with food. “We caught this from one of our glider drones before it was knocked out. This is evidence that this Order group is responsible. Banking records verify that every one of them sent a hundred thousand core world standard credits to Regent Galactic or the Order of Eden over the last two months.”

  “So we tap into the banking systems and send payments out for everyone trapped in here or in the main hall. You should have access to corporate funds, maybe spend some of the reserve funds in the vault.”

  “No,” Emrine said, bringing an eruption of raised voices across the room. She raised her hands in a placating gesture, quieting them enough for her to expand on her answer. “I’m the administrator of this facility, so I can get you access to any part of the installation, but all we have are United Core World raw currency, so if these machines take cash, yes, we’ll all be saved, but I can’t give us credit, and I can’t access any of the banking systems from here. There are blocks in place to specifically prevent an employee of the treasury department like me from using the serial numbers on the currency slips down there to guarantee a loan or extend credit. The air gapped bots that process that kind of thing aren’t in the building, and who knows what kind of shape they’re in?”

  “Maybe we should go down there and start shovelling the credits out a window,” said a soldier with his rank – Senior Sergeant – tattooed on his cheek.

  “Didn’t you hear me, grunt?” Emrine asked. “Whatever’s got the bots didn’t set them up with cash payment in mind. We have one chance.” She brought a hologram of their building, the intertwining armoured ovals dominating the island. “We’re all charged up, our power reserves will be enough to send an electromagnetic pulse to three emergency power nodes, and they should go off too. The chain reaction should cascade across the entire hemisphere, and, if we’re lucky it’ll cause the equatorial linkage to go off too. Only a few bots can survive that kind of electromagnetic pulse.”

  “Big overload, bigger electromagnetic pulse, and we’ll have to fight those privileged bastards without comms or high tech firepower.” The face-tattooed soldier said, pointing at the repeating playback of the resort.

  “One hundred of you must be worth five thousand of them,” Emrine said. “You can make the arrests.”

  “Arrests?” Lieutenant Ruben scoffed. “We’ll capture a couple who know what’s going on and execute the rest.”

  “Whatever you think you can live with whenever we get our society working again,” Emrine said. “Just warn me so I can be far away when the rounds start flying.”

  “Wait, far away where? Where would you go?” the Sargent asked. “You have a bunker somewhere or something? Just for you corporate types?”

  Two people in white business suits glanced at Emrine warily. “Everyone has a vacation spot,” she said. “Mine doesn’t have any artificial intelligence driven androids or computers because I believe they intrude on time off.”

  “Bullshit,” Lieutenant Ruben said. “You paid up. You could walk right out there and the machines would just go on ripping everyone to pieces while you move in wherever you want.”

  Emrine kept staring at the hologram, enlarging the image of the control room for the in the neighbouring oval building. I could see where the two buildings connected, and now that I look back at it I’m sure she was showing everyone in the room that because she knew what was going to happen next. “Of course I paid, anyone who could afford it did. Do you realize what the Order was offering? Eternal life at point one percent of the cost, the opportunity to earn your way to a paradise, and safety from what they said was an inevitable darkness. I didn’t know this was what would happen!” she said as several soldiers began raising their rifles, aiming them at the three business types. “This is horrible, I didn’t know it would happen, and I’m here, trying to fix it when I could walk out safely.”

  “We should waste her,” a soldier with a long ponytail said. If she didn’t have murder in her eyes, she could be beautiful.

  “I’m the only one left who can log into the remote systems from here,” Emrine said. “You won’t know what’s going on in the outside world unless I’m here and alive.”

  “Remote stations are going offline, we’ll be blind in a couple hours either way, so what good are you?” the Sergeant said.

  “Listen, I stand to lose a great deal if you agree to destroy most of the electronics on the planet,” Emrine reasoned, looking away from the barrels pointed at her head. “If the legal system reboots after we win, if we win, I’ll face property damage charges on a historic level. I just want the killing to stop, just like you. I don’t want to see anyone else lose their family.”

  “Don’t talk about our families, rich-bitch,” said Lieutenant Ruben said. “We still have units fighting out there, some of ‘em were winning from the last I heard.”

  “They won’t for long,” one of the terrified white-jackets said. “For every human on this planet there are nine artificial intelligence programs running. That’s including a lot of thi
ngs that can’t hurt us, like fabricator systems in food dispensers and in small communications networks, but at least half of our artificial intelligences are installed on mobile frame machines – that’s your androids, your repair bots, messenger pods, you know, everything that can move itself around – so by my estimate we’re outnumbered at least four to one.”

  Everyone in the room jumped as something exploded against the transparent wall. I didn’t see what it was, but I saw that it blasted through at least a third of the armour. “Time to go,” I whispered to myself. I looked at the schematic hovering between Lieutenant Ruben and Emrine again. There was no way back with the doors welded, but there was a way to the neighbouring building. I stood quietly and started walking along the walls furthest from the outside. “Where’s he going?” asked a soldier, momentarily waving his rifle at me.

  “Gotta pee,” I told him, putting my hands up. “If you keep pointing that at me, or another missile strikes, I’ll just go right here.”

  “He’s got a point,” Lieutenant Ruben said. Five square-headed robots landed on the transparent side of the room and began cutting. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Part Seven

  I didn’t take any chances that someone would stop me from getting out of that room while several bots that looked like they were built to break through heavy metal cut through the transparent metal wall. I’d seen plasma cutters like those before, nothing could stop them, they’d get through given enough time. So, I was first through the interior door, where I was confronted by dozens of people who had holed up in what looked like a large waiting room. Some of them were workers, I could tell from their protective bodysuits, but the rest looked like some kind of tour group. At first I couldn’t see a door leading further into the installation, and I was stunned a little at the size of the crowd until one of the soldiers bumped me aside. Then I saw it, a pair of sliding doors. In my fantasies I was a gun slinging hero, or a fighter jock saving the day, but in real life I knew I was no such thing. So when I chose to run for those doors, I was more surprised than anyone. You see, what I was planning would piss the soldiers off, I was sure. They didn’t look like the brightest people in the room, but I had a feeling that they would realize that I wanted to follow Emrine’s instructions before long. The instructions that would blast all the machines on this half of the planet at least with an electromagnetic pulse that would take most of them out.