by Lee Bond
Bosiele looked at Crimshawn, who just shrugged. “You want to make your own clothes?”
“It’s been more years than you’ve been alive, my dear, since these old hands of mine took needle to thread,” Chevy’s eyes caught the slight pause in their attention as the man and woman recalled what that might be, and their even slighter air of derision that someone would do something so menial and continued, “so no, I have no wish to fabricate my own clothes. But what I would like is to draw them out for your machines to make for me.”
Dorn took over, his slightly gender-neutral voice filling the lab. “The implication here, Chevril Pointillier, is that the items of clothing you wish to wear are different in some way. Perhaps possessed of the technologies from beneath The Dome?”
Oh, he were in it now, hey? Weren’t he just? Chevy hid his smile now, oh yes, and everything else about him that might betray what were on his mind, and he knew with dead certainty that no matter how hard the machine mind did try to pry from this time forward, it would get nowt from him he didn’t want, for when you’re trying to keep your lovely head attached to your manly shoulders when in direct parlay with mad Mistress Primrose, well, it were best that you seemed to be a talkative ghost, didn’t it just?
Any lad or lass as could snow old Primrose when she were clankin' right in front o' you could cert as cert pull the wool o'er any machine mind on the Outside.
“Oh, aye, machine mind, that is indeed the plan, hey? Though truth be told, it be more of a concession to my loneliness.” Chevy adopted a look of woeful sorrow. “For other than my old mate who is somewhere else in this vast world, I is alone, don’t you see? The jacket of my profession would make me ever so comfortable, and prone to reliving all the old moments of my life ‘neath The Dome.”
“Your profession.” Dorn stated plainly.
“Oh aye,” And here it came, that big, wonderful, juicy lie as had plopped itself into his noggin the moment the machine had spoken properly, “for ‘neath The Dome there, I’d been a tinker, you see, a crafter of gewgaws and thingamajigs, and other things as well, and me old coat, well, more of a long jacket, from neck to ankles and from shoulders to just past the old wrists here, hey, it’d been a part of me job. Part of me, truthfully. The first thing any proper smith builds is his jacket, to make a man’s life easier with the heavy lifting, and some of the finer work.”
Dorn paused. He knew that nothing this man could construct would assist him in breaking free from the comfortable-looking prison they had him in. He could contact his superiors to see what they felt, but he knew that Tynedale and Fujihara were willing to risk quite an astonishing amount in order to gain some understanding of The Dome, of the King, of anything. “How do you propose you provide me with the blueprints?”
“Oh, pencil and paper would suffice, though I don’t suppose in this fancy world of yours you’d have anything mechanical as would do the job quicker and cleaner, hey?” Chevy said this as nonchalantly as he could, not that it mattered.
“A drafting table will be provided for you in a few minutes. Bosiele, Crimshawn, you will ensure that this man understands the principles of how to operate it.”
“Absolutely.”
“Yes, as you say.”
Chevy leaned up against the glass. “Two things, if you please, machine mind?”
“You may call me Dorn. Go ahead.”
“Are there things such as cigars in this strange world? And if there are, could you provide your prisoner with a few?” When the AI mind calling itself ‘Dorn’ assented, Chevy continued, “The machines as will be making my long coat for me so that I might be more predisposed for garrulous chatting, it makes small things, yes? For in all honesty, my choice in apparel is quite complex.”
“The smallest unit we can fabricate is one fifteenth of an inch.” Dorn paused, then resumed warningly. “Be assured, Chevril Breton, if you seek to create weapons within this coat of yours, or anything that might assist you in escaping your prison cell, you will be met with not only failure, but reprisal as well. We are willing to go along with this particular vein of quid pro quo because it has been proven to be the most effective method. Should you try anything untoward, we possess a million different ways of extracting the information we require, now that you are awake. Do you understand?”
Chevy nodded. “Oh, aye, Dorn, I do indeed understand. I understand all that and more. I assure you, nowt in my coat will be able to affect anything in this world. ‘tis merely for an old man's comfort an’ nowt else. My shoulders do miss the weight. No weapons, no tools. On my honor.”
“Understood. Bosiele, Crimshawn, the unit arrives. Chevril, there are a large number of weapons pointing at you. Docile behavior is expected.”
Chevy smiled toothily and backed away from the glass keeping him from the rest of the room, lacing his hands behind his head, nice and polite as a gearhead under threat of a thorough splashing.
In the back of his mind, a booming echo resounded. At first he’d thought it unwanted recollections of Ickford’s demise, but no, this were too … timely.
Summat was going to happen soon, oh yes, it were.
***
Dominic Breton looked out at the strange new world with fresh eyes, eyes he’d never had before, and did not like what lay before him. From his vantage point so terribly high in the sky, higher e’en than he reckoned the very top of The Dome had e’er reached, all the displaced Gearman could see were too many people.
Aye, true enough, he couldn’t actually see them, but once he’d figured out that them blocky structures he were looking at were buildings, and his brain had caught up to the size of them all, and he’d done some basic math, well.
Not too far a leap to figure that this world he’d been reborn into were teeming with unwashed masses of men and women, a kind of replicated Ickford, only a thousand thousand times worse.
The thought o' all them scurrilous savages did make his skin itch, didn't it just?
“So this is the Outside, hey?” Dom pressed his face flat against the cool glass window and did his best to stare upwards instead of downwards.
There. Just there, a tiny sliver of brilliant blue, as blue as anything the King ‘neath his Dome had e’er allowed his people to see. It were refreshing, it were, but he knew that if you were one of them poor sods trapped in one of them buildings that looked big as Arcade City, only going straight up into the sky, you’d be lucky to see that thin blue sliver but once or twice a lifetime.
Dom Breton turned his back on the window to the Outside world. He didn’t like the thought of so many men and women milling about. Brought to mind too much of Ickford, and while he rather suspected the rulers of these … citizens … were more like Matrons than Agnethea the Vile, he also suspected that there were going to be places where those rulers and leaders didn’t rule, couldn’t lead.
And here on the Outside, that meant decay. Danger. Darkness.
“Why do you call it ‘The Outside’?” Doctor Chandra Visser asked at her AI’s prompting.
Dom leaned against the other glass partition in the room, tap-tap-tapping the resilient surface with a thumbnail. He’d heard one of the lads on the other side call it ‘ferroglass’, and while he weren’t long in this new world yet, it didn’t take a genius to reason that ‘ferro’ were a shortened version of ferrous, which were a metal-sounding word if there’d ever been one.
Which meant that while it looked like glass, it weren’t. Them on the other side obviously thought it were keeping him right where he were, only, summat whispering inside Dom suggested that might not be the whole truth, hey? For didn’t he feel different? Hadn’t he died ‘neath The Dome, battling ‘gainst his brother in armor for the Book, only to wake up here, in the Outside?
Dom weren’t certain, but it were as though he could break the glass, were he of a mind.
He weren't there just yet, hey, but soon. As a Gearman, he weren't too keen on bein' locked up, were he?
It were quite the disgrace.
Doctor Visser repeated the question, shaking her head at the AI’s surreptitious analysis of the man’s physiognomy. Short of cutting him to pieces to get one hundred percent validation of the AI’s findings, it seemed that this … Arcadian … was about as pure a human being as you could ever hope to find. His bloodwork, modeled DNA sequencing, neural pathways, bone, tissue … every single bit of the man was fresh and pure.
And that was something of a miracle. Doctor Visser considered herself one of the pure –so to speak- in that there’d been no modifications to her family’s gene structure in well over three hundred years, which was something of an accomplishment in a Universe where you could change who you were on a genetic level by lunchtime.
But the man tapping on the glass so idly, with his earnest, round face, his keen blue eyes and his straw-colored hair?
Perfect. Pure. Unsullied.
But that wasn’t all.
“This is Outside to me, miss.” Dom stretched and chuckled at the armed response from the other men in the room; wherever he was, whoever had him –oh, he didn’t think it were the lady in the white coat with the talking machine in her hands, no, she weren’t the one with the power in the room- didn’t trust him very much, for there were an even dozen men and women clamped into summat as reminded him most keenly of his own longcoat, and they each of them carried Ickfordian-style guns.
He resumed, adding a storytelling cadence to his tone, “As I were born ‘neath The Dome, and it were above my poor head for the entire length of my life, well. Always been Inside, hain’t I? Every lad or lass as had an opportunity to chat with someone as gets put through the Geared Doors does all they can to hear about this Outside world, and e’en though we know how it is out here, well, we can’t help but think of it as Outside.”
Chandra barely heard the answer. The man’s neurokinetics were off the chart. His muscles were talking to his brain a hundred times faster than she’d ever have imagined possible without the use of implants, stimulants, or modification.
“How old are you?”
Dom smiled at the gun-toting soldiers. He knew at least one of ‘em were from Arcadia from the way she stood, knew it in his bones. When he broke loose, she’d have to be the first one to fall, aye, that were a dead cert, as she’d be the only one to offer him any kind of sport.
“Well, Doctor, we hain’t normally ones to count the days of our birth as anything special, as we consider ourselves well lucky if we make it to adulthood wi’out havin’ our faces peeled from our skulls or summat, but I did count how long I was employed, and that were in the neighborhood of eighty years. So … let us say a full and even one hundred years.”
“And did you, at any point in your life, receive gene therapy, genetic modification, engage in the process of cybernetic implantation or anything else that might have caused significant changes to your person?” Chandra could scarcely believe the man’s claims of being a hundred years old! He barely looked twenty.
The Gearman squinted his eyes thoughtfully at the long list of words rattled off by the doctor. This line of questioning felt awful familiar to him for some reason, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. “I don’t recognize none of them words, Doctor, but I’ll tell you this for true, and I warrant the one lass in the armor over yon will agree when I say it plain, as I know she can’t quite put the feelings into words her own self. My world hain’t like yours, not in any way, Doctor Chandra Visser. It’s a crucible, hey? The weak die, the strong get stronger, and they have their babbies, who is stronger still, and so on and so forth, and unlike your world, which ‘as ‘ad it’s rough patches called Dark Ages –oh aye, we know of ‘em ‘neath The Dome, Doctor, them as break the King’s Law and find themselves reborn as Arcadians tell tall tales of the world Outside being plunged into Darkness, we aren’t savages- my world hain’t never had those problems.”
Dom chuckled, “Which hain’t to say we was problem free, oh no, not by any means, but … our King, the Dark Iron King who you called Mad and Gothic, he bred all of us to be strong and fast and whipcrack smart, he did. Over thirty thousand years. So I reckon if your invisible machines are telling you I am stronger than I appear, and smarter than I should be, well, aye, there you have your reasons. But did I sip-sippy the crudey-crude?”
The Gearman felt awful when not just the woman but two other lads flinched so violently the muzzles of their guns swept left and right, but that were the way of it.
“No,” the Arcadian continued quite sincerely, “I never did. Your three soldiers there, they were Inside. Then they fell Outside, as happened from time to time, when our King, Barnabas Blake the One and Only did decide that you lot out here needed reminding of what were what, but the difference ‘tween them and me, lady doctor, is that I never did pass through The Dome to get here. The Dome did fall around my ears, and I were reborn.”
His story, told at long last, had a profound –but not unexpected- effect on everyone in the room. The soldiers –even the ex-gearheads- shuffled forward even closer and pointed their weapons even more transparently at his head, leaving the Gearman with no illusions that whatever ammunition they possessed would pass through the ferroglass with little difficulty. The Doctor was busy speaking quietly into the slim machine she held in her hands, looking more and more harried with each passing second.
Dom continued, tapping the glass and whispering, looking right into the eyes of the helmeted woman. “I were a Gearman, young lass, a man in the longcoat with the deadly splashgun and the horse big as your nightmares, and I did ride hither and thither ‘cross the bruised landscape of Arcade City, from North to South, East to West, aye, I did all that. And as our King went mad and broke the world, I were forced to hunt your kind more often than not as you lot couldn’t keep it in your pants, hey? Do you remember who you was, ‘neath The Dome? D’you recall the hot sap burning through your veins? The shrieking, screaming demons o’ anger and lust and rage as caused many of your kind to go sour, or were you lucky? Did you pass through The Dome before our King went Gothic?”
Doctor Chandra’s handheld blossomed with startling data, not from their suspiciously chatty prisoner, but from the soldier’s suit; identified as Madja Sonik, the FrancoBrit’s –tagged as one of the revered ‘wardogs’ that were allegedly from Arcade City- system flooded with chemicals related to panic.
More worrying, two other of the soldiers were experiencing the same levels of panic and stress, and her AI was tagging them as wardogs as well. Chandra didn’t know much about these wardogs –this was her first serious experience with any of Voss_Uderhell’s security staff- but she had heard they were the most intense, most hard-core of all.
The AI made no suggestions, though; it was as interested as she was in this sudden and strange moment, and was starkly keen to see what took place.
When the girl made no comment, Dom continued, riffling through the lists of the missing and presumed gone that all the Regulars worked on when there weren’t much else to do.
“Let me see, now, hey? Who would you be? I doubt you’re Gargantuan Ginny, as that were a girl who were twice the size of a Big King and three times as nasty as a Bolt Neck, weren’t she just? I reckon if she …”
The female wardog gestured irritably, and the entire task force arrayed themselves more perfectly around the room. She authorized the charging of their beam weapons, and the lab filled with the peculiar click-whine of their deadly Kannouer-15’s priming. She licked her lips beneath her helmet.
She’d not been feeling right since the moment the man’d opened his mouth, sure enough, this gig had felt strange to her right from the start. She knew that Errelson and Fintsy felt the same, but it hadn’t been until this Dominic Breton person had started going off about The Dome and the King and him being a Gearman that the blood in her veins had turned to ice and her ears had filled with a curious, not quite present sound that filled her with a nameless dread.
A steady, soft, persistent kerchunk, kerchunk, kerchunk, as if she were stood beneath a blacksmith
's endlessly running contraption.
Kerchunk. Kerchunk. Kerchunk.
Mind still a blur of names, fingers still tapping on the glass, Dom continued. “Why, now I see you more clear, my pretty little thing, I do reckon you would be either Red Rita or … no. I do have your name now. You is Mad Sonja, hey? Red-headed terror of the inner circles, weren’t you just?” The Gearman looked this way and that, taking in the rest of the crew; only a blind man would’ve missed the second wave of terrific flinching from the male wardogs in the crew, or the mounting tension in the room. “The things you done. Had you not fallen prey to a badly summoned Big King and a wandering Bolt Neck, me and my brothers were bettin' 'pon when we’d be sent out to hunt you. But you went missing, and out we went in search of a gearhead who’d gotten smart. Didn’t find nowt, so on the list you went, and Arcadia did breath a huge sigh of relief.”
They’d deployed at Mad Sonja’s orders, but they weren’t going to open fire until the thinking machine in the doctor’s hands told them to, and the mad Gearman rather suspected that, if it were going to happen, it wouldn’t happen until the situation had escalated quite a bit more than it already had.
“I … I …” Madja squeezed her eyes shut to rid them of the sudden, inexplicable tension mounting there, only to find she were being assaulted by a violent kaleidoscope of terrible images suffused with blood and fire, fire and blood. “Erroneous Eric, Fancy Finster the Fister, do not l…”
Dom clapped his hands in victory. That easy, hey? That easy to whisper words into the ears of wardogs as had been on the Outside this whole time, to bring them back to themselves? No challenge at all.
Errelson spoke over the comm links, directly to the AI, wincing when his voice filled he lab. The name Madja had called him rocketed through his very soul, making him ill to his stomach and terrified. It were time to call this to an end. “This man is preparing to escape.”
