by Lee Bond
“Impossible.” The AI responded smoothly. “He is stronger and faster than a man, but he is still just a man. That is third grade ferroglass and you are armed with deadly weapons and powered combat suits.”
Fintsy shifted in his suit. “Hain’t no never mind what you is finkin’,” the soldier sniped, ashamed and hating the sound of his old voice and angry that the old him had even resurfaced in the first place, “you stupid fucking robot, ‘e is fuckin’ well gettin’ ready to do summink we ain’t like. We is need more bodies down here straight an’ quick.”
Chandra rose from her chair, handheld forgotten. “What is going on here?”
Dom caught the lovely doctor’s eye. “Oh, our lad Erroneous Eric hain’t wrong, doctor. I is plannin’ on escaping, and soon enough, to be true. I just have a question for my long-lost brothers and sisters of The Dome. I see that your time out here on the Outside has done wonders for you, yes? Had a surprise such as this been dropped on you Inside, with your guts reeking of hot metal and the blood flowing between your veins black as midnight pitch, well, you’d’ve torn through mountains to pull my head from shoulders, hey? No shame in that, no shame in that. But out here, though, you is proper people, with jobs, and you only flinched a bit when you woke up inside these new bodies of yours. Sounds like you is been domesticated, don’t it just?”
Mad Sonja snapped, her angry voice scouring at the glass, “I thought you had a question, Gearman.”
“Oh aye, aye, I do at that.” Gearman Dominic Breton cleared his throat. “I have a chore, lads and lass. Out here somewhere there’s a man by the name of Garth N’Chalez, and I need to bring him to justice for his part in the destruction of The Dome, the eradication of all remaining life ‘neath it, regicide and, most importantly…”
“Yes?” Mad Sonja demanded irately, feeling not one whit of loss or upset at the lists of crimes this Garth Nickels were guilty of; if she’d known one man was going to do all that to her damned home, she would’ve signed right up on the bottom line and done for as many of those bastards as she could’ve herself.
“He broke my fucking Book and fucking stole the only other fucking one in Existence!” Dom howled. “And thus. Will you join me? Leave these employers of yours and join me on my quest of noble vengeance?”
“Just so we is clear, squire,” Fister laughed, “either we join you in the hunt for a man as did for our fucking King Barnabas Blake the One and Only, him who could unravel a lad with the click of a finger and then bring you back as a dancing puppet for his amusement, or you try to do for us right here? Over a Book?”
All three wardogs laughed their silly asses off. The remaining security officers, utterly nonplussed at the drama unfolding around them –but commanded separately through their comms to give the four people their chance to talk- waited for this … this … ‘Gearman’ to do something.
Dominic Breton, lately of Arcade City, shrugged. He weren’t surprised. Gearheads would always be gearheads wheresoever they were, and when it come to anything a Gearman might ask of them, well, it weren’t no surprise they were acting this way, hey?
He could feel Book out there, somewhere. It weren’t awake yet, not properly, but a Book Club Regular knew things.
He stopped tapping the glass.
***
Jerome Fontague looked at his partner, Jeremy Fellman, thoroughly and utterly pissed. He made a face. “Let’s start a Conglomerate, you said, it’ll be fun, you said. We’ll be trillionaires before the end of the year, you said.”
Jeremy ignored his best friend’s wheedling. “It hasn’t been all that bad. We …”
“Not all bad!” Jerome threw a handheld against the glass window separating them from their guest. The machine cracked in half, threw up a handful of desultory sparks, and clattered to the ground in a mess of parts. “Not all bad? Three of our guards are dead, Jeremy, that … whatever the hell she is nearly destroyed two of our transport vessels, and now we’re hemorrhaging money in legal fees because everyone who didn’t pick up this monstrosity are trying to sue us, buy us, or bury us in order to get to her! ‘Not at all bad’ my asshole!”
In her little room, the Lady of the Weeping Eye moaned piteously and shuffled her feet. Head still buried in the corner of the darkest part of where they’d finally managed to stick her, shifting back and forth, moaning as she did, their guest was straight out of a nightmare.
Jeremy picked through the data feeds on his own handheld, smug that he was the only one with a working connection to their AI at the moment; Jerome had a habit of throwing things against walls when things weren’t going his way, and while you had to admit that things hadn’t been going their way more often than not of late, you also had to admit that throwing fragile–and expensive - tech against walls when you could barely afford them in the first place wasn’t something you should do very often.
“Ah!” Jeremy crowed. “Good news. They’ve finally analyzed that, eh, gunk dripping down her face.”
“That took forever.” Jerome watched their guest shift back and forth in her corner. She was as mesmerizing as she was horrific, what with that permanently ravaged face, the grim stuff dripping down her cheeks, and the things she said.
How she said them.
She was hollow and empty all the way through and why she was alive and talking when –as far as they knew- the other Conglomerates had nothing but some bodies and a kind of fancy looking book. “What’s it made out of?”
Jeremy pulled his handheld out of reach of his friend’s grasping hands. “Not until you can learn how to keep something from breaking. I blame your father. Always throwing stuff around and replacing it without even blinking. Now. The stuff coming from her face is chemically no different than water.”
The thick, almost gelatinous excrescence dripping down her face, no different than water? Unbidden images of drinking a glass of that crude stuff flooded Jerome’s head and his guts blurped so hard he thought he might throw up.
“Not. On. Your. Life.” The one half of FontagueFellman gasped wretchedly. “Anything … anything else?”
“Well, as per your idea,” Here, Jeremy flicked the data onto the only functional monitor in the observation room, “we started recording the … the woman all the time. Cost an absurd amount in terms of processing time. We’ve fallen behind on a few other projects.”
“We started this Conglomerate with a five, Jeremy.” Jerome snapped, shifting his chair so he could get a better look at the recordings. “You know who uses a five to run their business? No one. Poor people use fives to run their household accounts.”
Jeremy sniffed. “My five is good enough. It’s just in order to get what we needed, we had to really get in there with the cameras. Between that and analysis of the liquid, we’re lucky we have power. And if you’d actually tried convincing your father to give you an AI instead of just pretending, we wouldn’t be in this situation. With an 8, we’d be considerably ahead of the curve.”
“I went with manpower.” Fontague snapped irritably. “That was the deal. I did manpower, you did the tech. Is it my fault your mother cheaped out behind your … is that what I think it is?”
On the monitor, their guest, she of the wretched face, eternally moaning and wailing voice, paused for an incredibly brief moment. As they watched, fresh muscle and skin sprouted, only to be instantly picked at by Mirabelle’s cruel looking fingernails, whereupon it turned into the thick, revolting substance that trickled eternally down her face.
“She’s healing.” Jerome announced, awed.
“And stopping herself.” Jeremey replied, just as awed as his counterpart.
The implications behind this kind of rapid cellular regeneration were staggering, and the fledgling Conglomerate heads minds’ suddenly erupted in a flurry of grand, Universe conquering dreams in which they supplanted the Big Three.
Certainly, there were many types of regeneration packages out there, ranging from the bulky and frankly gross cybernetic variety, where the human body was forced in
to regeneration by machines, roughly three hundred different flavors of organic-based growth acceleration implants, and of course, the legendary and perversely illegal styles used by even more legendary Andros Medellos of The Black Clinic.
But all those left behind tracers. Even Andros’ could be identified as such, but this … if they weren’t seeing it happen … it was too good to be true! An untraceable genetic augmentation that provided lightning quick cellular regeneration was the dream of, well, not everyone, certainly, but the two men knew of more than one demographic that’d find that sort of thing well worth the extra money.
If they were lucky, Andros Medellos would find out and offer them obscene amounts of money for their patent and then they could go do something else for the rest of their lives.
Jerome looked at Jeremy, flush with excitement. “The question is, though…”
“Why is she stopping the process?”
“Because.” Mirabelle moaned the word, feeling sorry for the two men on the other side of the glass, for they each of them gave a scream and fell backwards off their sitting chairs. She waited politely for them to find their feet before continuing. “Because I am not worthy to be whole again, not until I prove to my Lord that I am.”
The two men exchanged quizzical looks. They’d thought their guest incapable of coherent speech; they had roughly three months’ worth of moans, groans, the occasional squeak and atonal mutterings of no discernable meaning. Their AI –though a mere 5- had suggested the very likely probability that her mind had been destroyed by whatever it was that’d happened under Arcade City’s Dome; as a creature born underneath that massive contraption, she –and every other being beneath it- had never been confronted with the vastness of a true sky, or weather, or anything like the real world.
Seeing it for the first time must’ve fractured her brain, but brains –like nearly destroyed faces- could heal, and it’d take a particular kind of insanity to dig inside your skull to keep your brains from healing.
“Your Lord?” Jeremy asked slowly. “That would be the Mad Goth King Blake?”
Fledgling Conglomerate owners they may be, they’d both come from extremely wealthy Exodite families, with parents who’d been positively enthralled with The Dome of Gears and everything that may or may not be contained within. As such, Jerome and Jeremy knew more than their fair share of mysteries surrounding the Mad Goth King.
Before laying eyes on the Lady of the Weeping Eye, they would’ve sworn that they’d all been fiction, but after?
Even the staunchest of naysayers had to admit that something weird and ultimately terrifying had happened inside Arcade City.
The two men exchanged looks. This was beyond compare. They had their first, bumbling steps towards a revolutionary biogenic healing augmentation and now they had someone who was going to tell them every…
Mirabelle laughed so hard the skin around her ill-healing wound split wide, spilling gross, scarlet laced blood down her face. When she was able to speak without laughter or scorn, the Golem said, “Dark Iron King Barnabas Blake the One and Only was a buffoon and a fool. Nowt more than a child given the powers of a god. All he did with his time ‘neath The Dome was play. With the land. With the people. With our very lives. We saw the rising of beasts and monsters too cruel to exist, we saw men and women do unto each other things terrible and vile. With the click of his fingers, our King could raise the land to dizzying heights or bring forth waters to drown a village. My Lord? No. Not him. King saw fit to only cause pain, bring hurt.”
Mirabelle laughed again and fell silent, picking at the skin around her skull. They could ask their questions. She would answer. The pit of her soul said it would be time to leave soon enough.
Jerome knew he was going to have to hack into his old systems at home in the hopes that he’d be able to sneak into his mother’s personal files concerning Arcade City; the family had more than a few wardogs on their security staff –men and women he’d tried to entice away, but to no avail- and from what he’d heard, their personal interviews had covered what little they recalled of their own personal time in the fabled city quite extensively.
Some of what their guest was saying about the King –though why she was calling him Dark Iron King was of some small mystery- echoed the sentiments of wardogs, but he wanted to be certain.
Jeremy broke the silence. “Who is your Lord, then?”
Mirabelle remembered the fight with the man, clear as day. She also remembered her own criminal arrogance, and that of her compatriots as well. Oh, how they’d all thought themselves so great, so bright, so terrible and wondrous, all at the same time. The Golem was ashamed of her allegiance to the twisted Golem Child Luther, but she wouldn’t take it back, oh no. Given the chance to undo what she’d become in Ickford, Mirabelle would not only laugh at the fool making the offer, she’d most likely kill him or her for the temerity; that blackness, that dark glamor she’d pulled into herself in an effort to wrest Ickford away from Agnethea for Luther had given her the chance to become what she was now.
And while she didn’t know what that was, Mirabelle knew, somehow knew, that she was now destined for great things, all in service to the unchristened King of New Arcadia.
Jeremy repeated the question, this time a little more forcefully.
Mirabelle smiled, and the effect –she saw this in the reflection of the mens’ eyes- was horrifying. “My Lord Garth N’Chalez, he of the gleaming geared armor, gents, of course. He came to Ickford in search of a cure for his Dark Iron madness, and in so doing, he came across the path of our Queen, Agnethea the Vile. Our ruler, a devil child named Young Luther, well, he wanted us to do for this man, as we were planning on stealing Ickford from Our Queen. We did as he commanded, for the stain on our souls was a cloying thing, and we didn’t see the truth of things. None save me did, in the end, though,” Mirabelle plucked at the ragged edges of her brittle skin, “I did pay a particular price. I lived through my encounter with Lord N’Chalez through his mercy alone, as the King Himself did decide to do for Ickford in a manner most foul. Lord Nickels were committed to saving the whole of the place, from the worst of the worst to the best of the best, e’en if that meant his own life, and it were because of this that I follow him now over all else in this wretched Outside.”
The Golem saw that her story made little sense to the two men and sighed. It’d take hours to explain even a brief history of Arcade City and all the strangeness within so that the end of her home would make a lick of sense.
And that were assuming she were the sort of person capable of telling a proper, coherent story; deep in the back of her mind, there were whisperings and scratchings, and if she but focused, those tiny little things blossomed brightly into pinpoints –twinkling things called stars, things she knew very well indeed- stretched out before her.
These things were more important than the passing of a story.
“Tell me,” Mirabelle said to Jerome and Jeremy, who were rapt as schoolchildren, “what of the Gearmen, Dominic Breton and Chevril Pointillier? Agnethea the Vile? More importantly, have you heard aught of Book?”
“Why do you ask?” Jeremy asked this slyly while looking at his handheld. From the floods of bits and bytes, it was apparent their stupid AI had no clue what was going on. Too little information for months, and now a flood of it had probably short-circuited something. “How do you know about them in the first place?”
Mirabelle tapped the side of her head. “I am chosen by my Lord for a great task, a task that involves Book. The others, Queen and Gearmen, also see the Book, or each other, in their own minds. They cannot see it clear as I do yet, but soon enough, they will, and then it shall be both a hunt and a race. I am no huntsman, nor am I a skilled athlete, and I am at disadvantage to the others, so tell me, am I closer to them, or to Book? I need to be on my way before them, if it’s to be fair.”
Jerome raised an eyebrow at the data his partner’s handheld displayed. “That’s interesting.”
“Got to be a
coincidence.” Jeremy shrugged. The world was full of coincidences, only, he didn’t really care. Their ‘guest’ had flat-out admitted -albeit in a roundabout way- that she was getting ready to flee.
That couldn’t happen.
With all the damage and destruction she'd caused -not to mention the grisly deaths at the very beginning of her incarceration months ago- there was simply no way they'd let her leave. Under any circumstances.
The ghoul was just too valuable, no matter the cost they were bound to pay...
Jeremy thumbed permission for the AI to release heavy doses of knockout gas into the room. The leaders of FontagueFellman watched the tiny cubicle fill with thick smoke, calm filling them.
The freak's calm movements disappeared behind a blanket of off-white snow.
Then …
A bone-white fist punched through the glass, covering Fontague and Fellman in a shower of razor sharp glass. Powerful sleep-smoke billowed through the gap, and before they could stop themselves, both men had inhaled enough of the stuff to be asleep before Mirabelle finished making a hole big enough for her to step through.
The Golem walked up to the unconscious men, shifting their slumbering bodies this way and that until she found the thing she was looking for; dim as she was, Mirabelle had nevertheless recognized the thing in their hands as some kind of small Book.
She found the precious machine beneath one man, and she looked at it, then understood why they were calling what was on it ‘coincidence’.
Four dots, spread evenly across a large space, with one in the middle. There were also a map, but as far as cartography went? Like as not she'd understand the strangeness flowering inside her 'ere comprehension of maps and such grew.
“Coincidence indeed.” Mirabelle stepped swiftly around her would-be captors and started moving.
There weren’t much time.
Soon enough, her competitors would know what she knew, and they’d all be racing towards destiny.
