“No, but I can’t sense much from behind this armoured door.”
“We’ll wait a few minutes before we take a look. I don’t want to step up and come nose-to-nose with a flying murder machine.” I tried not to move, wishing I had that rifle with target seeking bullets on me. There wasn’t a sound anywhere, not even a bird in the sky, but I’d find out why later.
“It’s been a few minutes,” Theo said, nearly making me jump out of my skin. “Three, actually.”
“Think we should wait longer?” I asked.
“I’m not sure, this is still all very new to me.”
“Do you think you’d get shot if you checked alone?”
He thought for a moment, then stepped out into the open. “Dapper,” Lurk croaked from my collar, where he took a snap of one of the most striking sights I’ve ever seen. The golden sundown light was sending shafts through the bank of windows in that hallway. Theo stood in the middle wearing his battered business suit. It looked like he was staring right up into the light coming in through the transpesteel. I realized much later that Lurk got a perfect shot of that, and it’s as artful as any of those ancient paintings the masters put together back in the day.
“It scanned me and has gone,” Theodore said.
“Man, you’re going to get yourself killed experimenting like that,” I told him as I came out from behind cover. “Be careful, all right?”
“I’m sorry, I just ran your question like a logic puzzle and knew it wouldn’t shoot. It may have fired on the car more out of uncertainty – not knowing how it was being driven – than knowledge. Artificial intelligences can get strange when they’re corrupted, I supposed.”
“Strange. Homicidal, more like it,” I said. “Thanks, man. You saved me a bunch of ducking and hiding there. I guess you should take the lead from now on.”
“That would save you ammunition,” Theo said.
I followed him into the mall, and the moment we opened the inner doors, I turned around and lost my lunch. The smell told me there were a lot of dead things inside. I wrapped a chunk of my sleeve around my mouth and nose then we checked it out as best as we could. There were a lot of dead bots inside, but many more dead humans. No one or nothing had come to clean up, either. It’s like some of the bots tried to paint the walls with the shoppers and workers, decorating the floors with whatever was left.
I remember that like a landmark, because we kept on finding buildings just like that, over and over again. Not many bots survived in the area we were in, moving between clusters of civilized areas as we made our way to the main port, and the few that did still operate were half-fried or easy to avoid.
We didn’t find any living humans, either. That pocket of civilization I found near the shore when I was running from those raiders must have been some kind of rarity, because everything else I saw for a couple weeks after made it look like Iora’s human population was dead.
When the White Gull Spaceport was in sight, I was relieved, and terrified at the same time. We weren’t the first to get there. We ducked behind a concrete barrier and Theodore peeked over the edge. “They are human soldiers in green uniforms.”
“Can you tell where they’re from?” I asked.
“No, but the small cargo shuttles they’re loading have Order of Eden written on every side.”
“Are they loading or unloading?” I asked, not knowing which would be worse.
“Definitely loading. In fact; I see several automated tugs affixing themselves to ships that are landed on the outer pads of the port. It looks like they are taking all the ships into space, or orbit at least, without powering them up at all.”
That was the worst news. Not only was I too late, but the Order of Eden were working to trap everyone who was left alive on Iora there. I didn’t even wonder why at the time, instead I pictured the same thing happening at major ports across the planet.
“Do you think this is happening elsewhere?” Theo asked.
“They’re trapping us here, man,” I told him. “Don’t know why, don’t much care, but we’ve gotta find a ship fast before they’re all slagged or taken off world. You remember seeing anything we might try to fix on our way here?”
“A couple hover cars, perhaps, but nothing that can actually fly.”
“Damn, we’ve gotta keep looking. Maybe we can find a small ship in a rich house, or an apartment hangar. I get the feeling these Order assholes have all the ports locked down.”
Part Twenty-Five
We were kilometres away from the port and thanks to some kinda mental slip, I thought that was far enough. Even under cover, rushing between thickly built structures that were made to stand up to the test of weather and time, military scanners can catch you. I should have known that.
If Order of Eden were interested in catching me and a small rogue ‘bot, they would have. There is no doubt someone was watching as I put distance between me and the port for two days. That marked the beginning of the most frustrating time of my life.
Theo and I had great luck raiding shopping malls, only running into the occasional security bot here and there. They didn’t recognize him as a threat, so he always led the way by a few meters, giving me ample warning. I was able to find food and ammo, but my dreams were haunted by the desecrated corpses of shoppers that stunk up the place like you couldn’t imagine.
Surviving on packaged foods, depending on stolen gear and ammo wasn’t the frustrating part. Moving around, raiding abandoned stores and a few homes didn’t bother me much. But what we were after were ships, and we went from landing area to landing area and even risked checking a few minor ports. Five times I ran into the Order of Eden and watched from a distance as they either stole everything that could leave the atmosphere, or just slagged them in place. The other landing pads we found – you know the ones on top of those malls we kept hitting – were empty.
The malls and manufactured town centres were starting to show their age already. Weather ranging from hot sunshine to a couple of pelting hailstorms wore at their cheap facades revealing the boring, grey square construction underneath. Those fancy trims, signs, statues, and other embellishments were made of hardened foam and affixed to the sides of the buildings with glue.
Lawns were turning from green to brown in most neighbourhoods, and storm damage went unrepaired, as low quality homes with crushed roofs were avoided by squatters instead of fixed. The Order of Eden aerial bots that had me worried for a while got rare unless there was an Order shuttle nearby. I got close enough to one of them to see a bunch of survivors – probably people who paid up before the whole robot massacre started – were picked up and shuttled off into the blue yonder.
There were bigger sites too, places where the Order of Eden had some major operations going on. There were explosions that shook the ground every once in a while. Theo said he could see large excavation ships landing in the eastern hills one day, and there was a buzz of cargo shuttles there. We decided to keep our distance, which was fine since there was a lot of continent left for us to get lost in, more than I could have explored on foot over twenty years. Oh, and as time went on, there were fewer and fewer bots around. People were becoming the problem instead.
We were taking a break under a low bridge one grey afternoon. I was having a chocolate chip muffin I saved for a while and Theo was taking five minutes to regenerate when I heard a footstep overhead. I popped the half muffin in my loose shirt collar and lowered my hand to my gun. A grizzled man wearing a couple blankets like a poncho dropped down in front of us, his pistol pointed at me.
He looked surprised when he noticed that I’d drawn my own, the blade shooter I called Needler, raised. “Give me your pack, or me and my friends will kill you for it,” he said.
Looking at his scraggly hair, his yellowed teeth and shaky hands, I found myself wondering if I was in that kind of shape. I mean, I hadn’t paid attention to a mirror in weeks, maybe months. Amused that I wasn’t shaken by this guy or his threats, that I was more interested in m
y looks than that exchange brought a smile to my face. “In a minute my companion here will activate,” I told him. “He’s an assassin droid. Pretty good at keeping me alive. Better at making people like you dead.”
“That scrawny bunch of wires? Looks more like a butler to me.”
“You look more like a homeless man who found a gun to me,” I told him. “That thing even work? I bet it got fried with most of the rifles around here.”
“Drop your gear and your guns and walk away, boy, or I’ll kill you right here.” There was a new seriousness to his tone that made me pay better attention. “I’ll burn your head off.” He activated a switch on the weapon and I heard it begin whining. “Right off, nothing but a charred stump left, ratty-boy.”
“I’ve got a couple extra condenser bottles, and I can leave you some food, man. I’m not going to dump all my gear.”
“No deal!”
Theo’s eyes opened and he started moving, drawing the guy’s attention away from me for a second. I fell to my right, firing Needler. I caught him in the neck and drew a line of dozens of pierce points across his face and forehead. He got a shot off, but missed me and Theo. The rifle shot turned a spot of concrete the width of my hand to black glass.
The guy dropped twitching, his body still realizing that his brain had been chopped to pieces inside his skull as the tiny blade rounds shattered inside his head and bounced around in there. I dragged Theo with me further under the low walking bridge. “Have a good recharge?”
“Yes,” Theo said, surprised. “What happened?”
“Someone trying to scare me into dropping all our stuff and walking away. You distracted him long enough for me to say ‘no’ in a language he understood.”
“He is dead,” Theo said.
“I know, looked like the only way. Can you see anyone else around? Listen for motion or something?”
“One moment,” Theo said. “Turning my audio receptors up to maximum and analyzing the ambient sound.”
I waited with my gun in hand and fished the second half of my muffin out of my shirt. I’d be finding crumbs for a week, but I was happy to have a few more bites as I watched the bridge.
“I can only detect one heartbeat now; yours,” Theo said.
“What kind of range did you cover?”
“The wind is not particularly strong today, so I estimate you’re the only person alive for at least seven hundred meters. I’ll do a visual inspection of the area.”
I let him poke his head out and look around while I fished through our visitor’s pockets and pack. He had a couple emergency survival bars, a hand sized lamp and nine clips for his gun, which I deactivated and put into my pack. “Man, we could have been buddies, or at least traded,” I said as I found eighty three platinum in loose change and a hand sized cutting torch in one of the outer pockets of his bag. “But you had to come in threatening and greedy.”
“There is no one in the area, I’m certain,” Theo said. “Why didn’t he try to trade with us first?”
“Maybe someone else robbed him a while ago,” I said. I took two small condenser bottles. They were both filled to the brim with clean water already. Fishing in his pockets was no picnic, he was filthier than me by far. “Doesn’t look like he was keeping hydrated.” Then I found the last clue I needed. A small case with a variety of pills inside. I recognized some of them – blue with devil’s horns impressed on them – and nodded. “Then again, he’s been taking Red Ride. Addictive, makes you think you’re immortal and the world is there for your amusement after a while. Speeds up all your reaction times and keeps you awake at first, but after a few days things start going wrong. Everything goes the other way towards stupidity and it slows you down. Still keeps you awake and grinding your teeth though.” I looked at them for a moment and wondered if they’d be good for trading, then shook my head and tossed them down the street. “Yeah, he probably went crazy. I bet he was a couple days away from dying of dehydration.”
“Dehydration?”
“You forget to take care of yourself when you’re that high. His bottles are full, so that’s what I’d say was about to kill him. Until he ran into me.” I braved the blood on his face so I could close his staring eyes and pull the blanket on his back over his face. “Rest in peace, man.” I washed my hands using one of his bottles and put both condensers into my bag.
“He was your enemy,” Theo said, that curious look on his face.
“Yeah, he was, for a minute. If he wasn’t high, he might have become someone we could trust, or at least trade with. If I found a bunch of pills to make this world seem rosier, instead of finding you, this could have been me.”
“I understand. I wonder, though, would you ever treat the Order of Eden with such respect? You seem to hate them.”
“That’s different. They’re a corporation picking at the bones here. They could help, but nah, they’re just feeding on this planet like a vulture on someone else’s kill. From what I’ve seen, they may have had something to do with everything going sideways too, so yeah, I’ve got no sympathy for anyone wearing their colours.”
“So true malice and greed without the same kind of tragic cause as the robber,” Theo said. “Sober intent instead of desperation.”
“Exactly,” I told him. “Let’s move on.”
I ran into people a few times after that, and every time they ran away from us the moment they saw Theo. The allies to the Order of Eden, the guys and gals that paid for safety before everything went nuts just weren’t around anymore. The people who were left were terrified of anything that could have an artificial intelligence installed, and they didn’t seem to have much gear, let alone weapons or something that could help them in a fight against a bot. The first couple times I thought it was just chance; maybe those people just weren’t good at surviving under the conditions on Iora. I left a little food and a spare condenser bottle since I had no trouble finding that stuff in malls and retreated.
After running into the fifth group of people who ran away from us like we were flaming devils, I started wondering what the deal was. No matter how I tried to entice them back, they just kept running. Something had scared them so bad that there was no way they’d stand still near Theo. Even after he hid, they wouldn’t come out to talk to me. Every time I took a step towards that last group, they would take a bunch of running steps in the other direction. What’s extra weird is that they weren’t speaking a language I recognized either.
So, the Order of Eden was staying ahead of us and our quest for anything that would make it past orbit, and, no matter what we did, we ended up alone for more months than I was willing to count. The walking and the work I put in did something good for my bod though. That last growth spurt put me past two meters and I was in better shape than any carnie that I’d ever met. In the moments where I had to run and gun – another thing I was getting better at – it came in really handy. The biggest problem was finding new boots for my feet every month or two. Apparently extra-wide sizes are hard to find even when you have the whole mall to yourself. The self-adjusting systems in most shoes were fried, so I had to live with the near sizes I could find, which made for some pretty nasty blisters sometimes.
After nearly a year or so on the ground I finally fell down on my ass in the middle of a low road. I didn’t want to take another step. My long hair fell into my face and I didn’t sweep it away this time, just closed my eyes and scratched my blonde beard. Theo stopped and looked at me, puzzled. “Are you all right?”
“No, not really, man.” He rushed to my side and started checking my vitals. I pushed his hand away and shook my head. “The problem’s in my head, not much you can do. I just don’t know what we’re doing out here. We can’t get to a ship, it feels like the Order is playing keep-away, and I know they’re not out to kill us. I figure there’s only one thing I haven’t tried: stopping right where I am and seeing what happens when the world realizes where I’m making camp. Maybe we could start a fire, put some real signals out there.�
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“I don’t see how setting fire to things will resolve any of our problems,” Theo said, looking around. “Though that barley field looks particularly flammable if you’re set on your course of action.”
I hadn’t even realized that we were crossing more farmland. The planet seemed to use most its land mass to farm natural ingredients, though most of the crops were failing without automated irrigation, harvesting and planting systems. “What do you think we should do? We’ve gotta change it up somehow.”
“You are lonely,” Theo said, helping me to my feet. “I can’t be your only companion for such a long time span, especially since my social skills are not as sophisticated as most humans. Perhaps stopping cautiously is an option, but I would propose that we be constructive with our stationary time.”
“I could take up a hobby,” I said. “Whittling, maybe. There’s a bunch of trees down there, I could take off a branch and start carving.”
“Or perhaps you could put your mechanical skills to work. We could stop long enough to repair a proper hover vehicle. Then, instead of staying still, we could move at a much faster pace. If the Order of Eden seem to be ahead of us all the time, then perhaps we should make an effort to catch up.”
“That’s a little crazy, man. I think they haven’t slagged us so far because we’re just two harmless blips on their scanners, always at a safe distance. What if we get too close, or we get ahead and they come up behind us?”
“You wanted ideas,” Theo said with a little shrug.
I thought about it for a while then started walking down the street. There was an underpass with a cluster of vehicles beneath. “Yeah, I’m so bored that I’m gonna try it. We’ll fix something up and get some real speed going, maybe figure out what’s going on here. I’d rather be informed and in trouble than bored out of my mind.”
Spinward Fringe Broadcast 10.5: Carnie's Tale Page 16
