by Lee Bond
With no time to cook the numbers or fudge the displays, they’d lost more than fifty percent of their precious research projects, a devastating blow to the Science Department. Office gossip had it that Weapons and Detonations had been burned down to the ground, being left with a paltry ten projects to develop.
If Jordan Bishop were still alive, well. He wouldn't have lasted much longer, not with his head exploding from all this rampant evisceration.
Voos thanked his lucky stars there seemed to be a resurgence on improving Mankind beyond their already fairly vast limits.
“What’s she doing?” Ariel demanded after a long silence, startling some of the men and women into coughing or awkwardly sneezing.
Voos, prepared for the tactic –he’d been caught unawares fifteen times with that particular play during their first, momentous meeting- answered smoothly. “Sleeping.”
“Sleeping.” Ariel knew damn well the woman was sleeping. She’d been mirroring the department’s data and research on their mysterious guest since the moment she’d been brought to this secondary Zanzibar holding facility days ago. She knew everything they knew.
And a damnsight more, as far as she was concerned.
Through the usual sources, Ariel Bishop knew that Voss_Uderhell and Tynedale/Fujihara each had themselves a man, each man doing the same thing as their silver-haired wisp of a woman. She knew that –however improbable and unlikely it was- that CalEx~Briu had some kind of heavy brass-bound and geared book that was currently defying their best efforts at even opening and that FontagueFellman had themselves some kind of zombie or mummy or something that did nothing but cry.
Info on the crying zombie woman was particularly sparse, even more so than the stuff leaking to her from CalEx: FontagueFellman wasn’t even really a Conglomerate yet. Just a barebones start-up in Stack 17.
That lack of status, that incremental step towards conglomeration. It actually made FontagueFellman considerably safer from espionage than any of the other groups.
Ariel had to admit she’d squander a fifth of her fortune to get her hands on either the weeping zombie or the unopenable book because a quietly sleeping woman was perhaps the least interesting thing she’d ever seen.
Voos cleared his throat nervously. “Well, yes. Sleeping. But we have all sorts of data…”
“Manage to get a blood sample yet? DNA? Anything? Stool? Perspiration? Expelled carbon dioxide? Anything at all, Voos?”
“Err.” Voos felt his team shuffle away and wanted to curse them out for being cowardly bastards. “Well. There’s a Full Probe coming from Esselein. Should be here in a week or so. Nothing else in the system has … proven effective.”
That was the only reason this underground project was being funded at all.
Their mysterious sleeping woman, she of the intensely silver hair and nearly elfin features, was … invulnerable. To everything. When using the usual non-invasive measures to bring her to consciousness had failed, they’d switched to the equally usual rough-and-ready steps, intent on using everything from powerful drugs to force her system into overdrive down to tremendously illegal cybernetic or organic implants to do the same, only to discover …
Only to discover that nothing worked.
The skin of the sleeping woman couldn’t be pierced, cut, burned, incised or otherwise invaded by anything they currently possessed. Neither could hair or fingernails be trimmed, or eyes poked out, tongue yanked out by the root. Internal insertion through the mouth, nose, ears, vagina and anus revealed nothing. Any secretion they managed to acquire came back as utterly, boringly, human. Voos’ assertion that the Full Probe –a brutish, beastly thing that Ariel really didn’t want in-system but had approved nevertheless- would work was their last ditch attempt at gaining anything usable because the machine possessed a handful of Offworld interrogation tools that –used judiciously- could be turned to a more medical purpose.
Ariel spun angrily in her chair to confront the small group of terrified scientists. To a one, they flinched under the withering force of her disproving glare.
Good.
They deserved to be frightened. She’d made a promise to herself to be nothing like her father, perpetually tossing simply obscene amounts of money down nearly every available research black hole in the hopes that something worthwhile would come of it. To his credit, Jordan Bishop had been the best Conglomerate leader in thousands of years, but he’d used that machine, Spur, to get there.
With Spur gone, BishopCo was going to take a different route. A better one.
She had different plans. Better plans.
“This needs to be made sense of. Now. Today. It’s been three months and none of us have any appreciable intelligence on any of this mess. This woman, the two men, the book, that … thing at FontagueFellman, all of it needs to make sense. The land that was once beneath The Dome needs to make sense. There is a mystery there greater … Yes, Voos, what is it?”
“The … the …” And then Voos, who’d been chain-smoking ReadySteady Functional Narcosmokes since the day before yesterday in order to keep up with the rest of his crew –who either had organic mods or cybernetic ones that allowed them to function for weeks at a time without the need for sleep- fell over backwards, eyes rolling into the back of his skull.
Ariel turned her chair back to see what was going on.
Had she not been the daughter of Jordan Bishop, had she not been prepared for something out of the ordinary –while Voos’ response had been the most comical, the rest of the technicians hadn’t done any better in hiding their fear at what was happening behind her back- Ariel had to admit she might’ve responded similarly.
Their diminutive slumbering charge was no longer slumbering. She was, in point of fact, tapping curiously on the glass, cocking her head to one side then the other as she did so.
Agnethea deRois’s eyes glittered thoughtfully. Her ears rang with a cry for help from Chad Sikkmund, and she reckoned in some way that the bonny lad’s panic and fear at being eaten by … eaten by whatever that massive golden monstrosity was, was responsible bringing her back to herself.
Ring her ears might with a plea from the First Brigadier, but now she was awake, there were other things that needed doing. It did seem to her that somehow, there were a clock ticking inside her soul, and that she needed to be well prepared for when it hit zero.
“Shall someone bring me a cup of tea,” Agnethea asked, still tapping on the glass, “or shall I just pop out and fetch one for myself?”
***
“What’s he doing?”
“Staring out the window.”
“How long has he been doing that for?”
“Three months? Give or take? For the first little while, he just sort of stood there, looking like he was going to vomit everywhere. Now it’s this window-staring.”
“What could he possibly be looking at? It’s just … Zanzibar out there.”
Doctors Bosiele and Crimshawn exchanged glances of uttermost confusion; what, indeed, could the man be looking at? There was nothing exciting or interesting out the window. It was all just … stuff. Backdrop. Not worth paying any attention to.
“Excuse me,” Chevril Pointillier asked, unable to tear his eyes from the scene unfolding before him, “how many people did you say were here, hey? Summat like twelve million people, give or take?”
Bosiele, the one who’d been studying the slumbering man when he’d woken up, nodded. She cleared her throat. “No, well. That number is just for this building.”
Dominic nodded, saying, “Ah.”
Crimshawn looked through the data of the man’s awakening once more, glad that the AIs were finally lifting their weight; prior to this moment, each of their prohibitively expensive artificial minds had been doing the equivalent of shrugging their shoulders and fobbing the lack of data off on everyone else in the room.
Ancient Tynedale had been damn near ready to scrap the entire project’s AI roster –putting them back several days, if not months, dependi
ng on availability- where his partner, Fujihara, had been willing to do the same, only with the people.
The man’s awakening couldn’t have come at a better time. For everyone’s sake.
“Have you seen these readings?” Crimshawn asked of Bosiele, nudging her with the handheld. “He’s …”
“Just a man, I know.” Bosiele couldn’t make heads nor tails of it either. Neither could Dorn, their level 9; very clearly the intelligent equivalent of a giant, capable of handling billions and billions of individual computations while still overseeing half their projects, Dorn was at an utter loss when it came to the revelation that the slumbering old man they’d worked so diligently to rescue from impossibly forested New Arcadia was just that: a man.
Dorn –and the other minds- were sulking now, leaving no one but Bosiele and Crimshawn to look after the crotchety old FrancoBrit. Tynedale and Fujihara had no interest in anything an old man might offer them, not unless he held within his brain the secrets of how to build an eternally replicating, utterly indestructible Dome made of gears and cogs. The rest of the team was back on their old projects now, unsubtly expressing their happiness at shedding a dead weight for the bright possibilities that’d awaited them before the Dome had fallen.
Crimshawn wasn’t willing to accept that this man was just a man. He couldn’t be! FontagueFellman had that … whatever ‘she’ was, and CalEx~Briu had that amazing book. He cursed under his breath. If only someone hadn’t stolen their heavy ship! They could’ve dismantled all the other vessels crowding that new land –not to mention any people as got in their way- and taken everything they’d wanted, all without breaking a single law.
But no. Someone had stolen their main Exploration Vessel, right from under their noses, and disappeared. Crimshawn prayed fervently that Security and Investigations found the culprits sooner rather than later, because whispers around the water cooler had it that T/F were thinking of charging the exploration teams for lost and/or damaged property. Punitive action like that would ruin almost everyone on those teams.
“And is the whole of this City like this?” Chevy wondered.
“Yes.” Bosiele took a step forward, put a hand on the solid ferroglass sheet separating Chevril Pointillier from the rest of the lab. “And as I’ve already told you, Zanzibar covers roughly twenty million square miles, with the average zone having structures between one and one half miles high for most of it. People in this megacity live and work for Conglomerates, and the work we do here provides for most of the …”
Chevy nodded. “Aye, Universe. I did hear that word on more than one occasion on the Inside, Mistress Bosiele, I did indeed. Met a man in fair Ickford, spoke at great length on the nature of the Outside, though I confess, I never did expect to see it, much less confront it so … boldly.”
Cherise Bosiele blushed at being called ‘mistress’ and Seterreq Crimshawn snickered.
At the monitoring AI’s insistence, Crimshawn asked a question. “Why didn’t you expect to see this City?”
Chevy turned away from the window at last, mind no longer reeling at the vast complexity of a city as big as this Zanzibar. Getting there had taken awhile, but get there he had, and in all honesty, it’d been easier than he’d imagined, hadn’t it just; though there were no Domes over this enormous place the two … doctors … called Zanzibar, it were more or less the same thing as Arcade City in it’s own way, hey? Just more … dense.
The Gearman eyed the man and woman in their white lab coats as crucially as they were eying him. He hadn’t forgotten those first few minutes upon awakening, eyes and ears ringing with the not-quite-terrified plea for help from Master Sikkmund, when they’d started shouting at someone not in the room, a someone who’d guided them through the process of introducing themselves to him in a way that’d been designed to be non-threatening.
Odds were that the doctors had themselves summat similar to a Nanny, them things that old Garth Nickels had called an artificial intelligence, and that were fine. That meant no matter what they might want, now he were awake and doing things, that metal mind would keep him alive as long as he proved useful; he was a citizen of Arcadia, and unlike them poor wardogs as woke up on the Outside, stripped of their memories and with hearts full of holes, he was as hale and hearty as anything.
Chevy reckoned the whole of Garth’s … Universe … would be dying to know what he knew. He moved closer to the window keeping Mistress Bosiele and Master Crimshawn safe from an old man, thoughtful, thoughtful eyes cataloguing everything he saw that defied his current understanding for some later date. “Why, as I were a dead man, weren’t I just? Towards the end there, hey, our King, him as you knew as the Mad Goth King Blake, well, he’d finally gone all the way off his pot, so to speak. Grew tired of living, I reckon. As would happen, I suppose, when you been alive for summat like thirty thousand years.”
Chevy saw the derisive look that passed between the two people and held a hand to his heart. “Disbelieve all you shall like, Master and Mistress, but I do swear with an honest man’s lips, that all you ever did hear about Arcade City, Arcadia, the Dome of Gears and anything else as might’ve crossed your ears hain’t only true, it’s a mere dribble o’ all as went on ‘neath all-covering Dome o’ Gears, hey?”
Crimshawn ignored the flowery, almost singsong rhythm the old man’s voice had adopted, following the AI script. “You say you were dead? Actually, physically dead?”
“Oh, aye.” Chevy nodded sadly. “’tis true, laddie. Me and my brother, Dominic Breton, we had ourselves a most wretched falling out, hey, and we did for each other. Enough to break my heart, it is.”
Bosiele quirked an eyebrow. “This would be the other man you were found with?” The handheld informed them their AI was already trying to verify whether or not this was the truth, but she was doubtful: proper communication between the Big Three was notoriously scant and full of lies and fabrications. The Voss_Uderhell teams –if they owned this ‘Dominic Breton’- were most certainly going to keep their mouths shut on anything they discovered.
Crimshawn looked at Chevy. “Do you know why you woke up? We tried everything from …”
“Laddie, if my arms and legs ache as they do with tiny little pinholes of pain, I do reckon I know what you tried and you didn’t try, and for what it’s worth, I’m glad you stopped short of cutting my head open to take a peek inside.” Chevy smiled that old garrulous smile of his. “And as to why I woke, well, who’s to say? You say I were asleep, I say I were dead, and of the two, for you, there’s little doubt in me mind that the former is of more comfort to you than the latter.”
The old Gearman paused, running a hand along his jaw. “Come to think of it, so am I, for if I were dead and now I hain’t, the methods for that sort of resurrection hain’t the sort o’ thing I would be well excited about, hey?”
Weren’t that the truth? He hadn’t had any of the old black stuff in his system. Never once during his long life as a Gearman, but close proximity to Dark Iron was the most likely source of his prolonged span o’ years in the first place, weren’t it just? The Matrons had never questioned him on the subject, and the few times he’d broached the topic of his own free will, them damnable Nannies had started spouting off about cookies and tea and he’d suddenly discovered a perishing urge to go skulk about the deserts looking for them lunatic gearheads as lived ‘neath the shifting sands or to hie himself to the Great Frozen in search of The Last Troll or the First Bolt-Neck.
He shivered. Trembling awareness blossomed into full realization. No more Nannies. No more gearheads. No more Dome. No more of good honest folk plying a land that could shift under their feet at a moment’s notice. No more craning your head upwards, wondering if your absent King e’en cared if you were alive or dead.
No more wonderin' nor worryin' that Himself might appear at yer feet, eyes glazed o'er wi' simmering madness.
No more Ickford. No more Big Kings howling and screaming for an eternity, no more watching rock solid Dark Iron Bastards fighting
to their deaths, the candles of their lives blown out wi' a single huff or puff
If Chevy had his helmet, he reckoned he’d be turning it over and over, round and round, in his old hands, yes he would. No more madness.
“You’re saying that people came back from the dead under that Dome?” Skepticism warred with poisonous sarcasm in Bosiele’s voice. Data from the handheld told both her and Crimshawn that their talkative guest was not only telling the truth as he saw it, but that, for a moment there, the pattern of his thoughts had turned positively dark.
“Oh, aye.” Chevy nodded cordially. “And I shall tell you all this and more, if you were to do an old man a kindness.”
Dorn prompted them to agree to damn near anything the old man wanted, excluding the obvious things like ‘freedom’, ‘hope’ and ‘guns’. Tynedale/Fujihara had been apprised of the situation and were most keen to hear anything the Arcadian might have to say, even if they were lies; they –better than most- knew that you could learn just as much about a man from the lies he told as came from the truth.
Chevy gestured to the non-descript white shirt and loose-fitting pants he were wearing with disgust and embarrassment. “This hain’t what I’m used to wearing, kind sir, kind miss, and I …”
“We can get you any kind of clothes you like.” Crimshawn said this a bit impatiently, but he had good reason. Any minute now, the other members of the original team were going to hear that their sleeping old man was awake and talking –not to mention that he’d already dropped a few subtle bombshells about the world beneath that Dome- and they’d all be clamoring to come back.
Neither of them wanted that, because that asshole Fricka had seniority and anything they learned, anything at all, would become his intellectual property, and this was the sort of thing that could make a person rich.
“Oh,” Chevy grinned, “I hain’t interested in anything as the people of this time might call clothes. Tell me, do you have machines as can make other things? Of course you do, what am I thinking? A … a world such as this one no doubt uses machines to make everything from their beds after they’ve risen to their food when they sit to sup, hey, and all manner o’ things in between those moments.”
