by Lee Bond
“No.” The Emperor snapped harshly. “That was hardly the first time you’d met them.”
“Wait, what?” Garth looked up, struggled to see where the Emperor was hiding himself. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Would you look at that?” The Emperor said pleasantly. “Your Universe is done cooking. Please, Mister N’Chalez, try and last longer this time. You will hardly progress if you don’t make it to the next … save point? I believe that’s something that makes sense to you?”
Garth opened his mouth to say something…
***
The cab driver opened his mouth to shout at the asshole trying to cut him off…
2. Homegrown Chaos and Discord
The Night the Lights Went Out
“We can back away from this.” Lisa Briu said nervously, her line of sight very nearly crowded out by splintering fractals that were a definite sign she’d had more than her fair share of stims in the last few days. Kiersey, damn his hide, looked fine and dandy, as did Somie.
Kiersey, higher than a kite and presently all too certain he could hear the solar winds screaming through the heavens above their heads, blinked slowly. In his hands, he held one gigantic transformer that he was about to clip onto Book. Soma was just on the other side of the revolving metallic mystery, and she look just as mystified as he felt. “Uh, what?”
Lisa, standing in front of the control panel she’d built to coordinate the flow of power from their entire city block, gestured at Book. She couldn’t quite explain it, but it really felt to her like the strange thing was aware they were going to feed it enough juice to satiate an entire city block.
“We could … do something else. Like, anything else.” A series of luminous green and red triangles bounced off her corneas and shattered into billions of miniscule dodecahedrons, and they smashed into one another over and over and over … she blinked. “I think this might be dangerous. Somie, you know what I mean.”
Soma, the lithest of them all and currently battling her way through an atmosphere made of jello, snorted. “Dangerous is being the only one of us skinny and smart enough to shimmy their way through those electrified fence walls surrounding the old Zero generators thirty floors down, Lisa. I had to burn those clothes. Dangerous is having our woefully inadequate security team hold point while Kiersey there shimmied his way up those … what are they called?”
“I dunno. Power boxes? Those big green things. Yeah. Power boxes.” Kiersey shook his head. “And you, man, like, you risked your life sneaking into your parent’s house to steal some stuff, right?”
Lisa nodded very slowly, praying she didn’t dislodge anymore fractals. They obliged by wobbling politely in the background but stayed right where they were.
In point of fact, she hadn’t risked her life doing anything of the sort. She’d snuck in through the back kitchen the night before last while her parents had been hosting another one of their ‘how rich and excellent are we?’ parties, used her old access passwords to get into her father’s machine shop and that’d been that.
The only risky part had been when their house woman had caught her sneaking back out, whereupon she’d been forced to endure an hour of the woman’s prattling while being fed an exorbitant amount of food.
“Yes.” Lisa said, finally. “Yes. My father’s security guards opened fire on me, but I was too far away.”
“And then, of course,” Soma brandished her transformer clip as firmly as she could, which wasn’t terribly much because the damned thing weight about as much as she did, “there’s the fact that we completely ran ourselves into the red with this project. A full quarter of the money went to bribing our own guys. If we don’t see a turnaround on this, we’re all going to have to go back home. And I don’t want that. Not ever again. I’ll kill my mother the next time I see her, I swear.”
Kiersey didn’t admit to the others that the relationship with his parents had never been better, that they were, in fact, considering letting him come home of his own free will and without any judgments on their part, that they were in fact, monumentally pleased he’d finally found the energy to get off the couch and do something with his life, even if it turned out to be a complete waste of time.
He wiggled his machine part a little lasciviously, and threw in some tongue action for good measure. “Come on, Lisa, let’s do this thing.”
Somie did the mostly the same thing with her transformer, though only with an arched eyebrow.
Lisa sighed. She was stuck. “Okay, fine. But … I’m not going to slam all that juice in there at once. I’m going to trickle it in bit by bit, because who knows? We might not need it all, just more than we’ve been able to give on our own.”
Kiersey clamped his bit to Book at the same time as Soma. “Sure, fine, no, that makes total sense. Right, Somie?”
Soma-Ex nodded assiduously, then hurried alongside Kiersey until they were both on the other side of the glass barricade; just because they were mostly certain nothing untoward was going to happen and they were high as solar fliers battling it out on the sun’s flares didn’t mean they weren’t going to be smart about things.
They weren’t complete amateurs, after all.
Soma and Kiersey rubbed Lisa’s shoulders enthusiastically and whispered words of encouragement.
Lisa, a small frown on her face –small enough not to disturb the geometric shapes still kaleidoscoping their way through her field of vision- engaged the first level of energy transferal.
And below their feet, hundreds of generators shuddered.
***
“And that, hey, is how a troll learned to reason like a man.” Chevy leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Good old Tobias. Absolute shite at maths, but could that green-skinned monster make a nice cuppa.”
Bosiele looked sideways at Seterreq, who was so utterly flabbergasted at the story of this beast the old man insisted was both a Troll and named Tobias that he sincerely tossed his handheld over one shoulder and shrugged.
“What are we to do with a story like this one, Chevril?” Cherise asked as sweetly as she could. Since the old man –he claimed to be something called a Gearman, a title that sounded somewhat official- had climbed into his utterly pointless metal jacket, all he’d done was tell nonsensical stories.
All kinds of them. Tobias the Talking Troll was just one in a long line of prattling faerie tales, the sorts of stories bored AI minds would tell recalcitrant children when their parents had forbidden them access to anything else. There was also The Story of the Headless Which –a farcical yarn about how the ‘lads and lassies’ of an Estate had gotten themselves up to no good, all on account of a misplaced pronoun’, The Unlikely Events of Master Crimbo and his Unlicensed Armory –a heist caper involving guns and ammunition and terribly witty, and, Cherise rather suspected, some kind of long-winded allegory for one of the old man’s sexual escapades- and finally, The Lonely Giant, a heartbreaking story of the only giant ever seen ‘neath The Dome and his quest to find someone to love.
That one had ended bleak as anything you’d ever hope to find throughout history, with the man in the clockwork coat just on the other side of the glass there being the one who’d been forced to do for the Giant –named Leroy- before he got it into his head to start destroying the world.
“Nowt for me to say, young lady Cherry.” Chevy hid a grin at Cherise’s indignant squawk at her shortened name. “You two there, and your machine mind hidden somewhere ‘tween the walls, you lot said only ‘Oh, Master Chevy, please, fill our ears wi’ what happened there ‘neath The Dome, hey, we are ever so interested’. Which I have obliged, have I not?”
“But they’re all stories.” Seterreq snapped. “There’s nothing to them. We’ve analyzed and assessed and broken down the framework for everything that’s come out of your mouth, and none of it has any actual value. They’re stories.”
“Oh aye, that they are, my fine young man.” Chevy nodded lazily. “Stories to be told ‘round a campfire whilst you
travel a misbegotten landscape, hey, in search of a maddened gearhead who’s taken a liking to human flesh, true enough. Stories to while away the long, miserable hours on the road as you and your best mate ride forth to the North in search of a Bolt Neck who’s been ‘round so long not even the best of the best can bring them down, or to save an Estate from a Widow’s Peak. Stories, Master Crimshawn, are the only things as keep a man like me sane, aren’t they just?”
The truth of it all though, was that he were just spinning his own gears, so to speak, spinning and spinning until he could make a lick of sense about the things in the back of his own mind; oh, aye, he’d come to grips quickly on with his new knack for the science of things, for that’d given him his new longcoat and weren’t it just a dream? It didn’t give him the speed or strength or aught which the old one’d done, but that were only a matter of time itself, hey?
No, it were the other things that were giving him a mild case of the fits. Them curious … pressures … right there in the back of his brain, strange and odd depressions in what felt like some kind of vast, open space. One of them things were on the move, was out there right that second moving towards the dimple in the middle.
Chevy snorted. Dimple in the Middle. If he were here for much longer, he’d spin them a yarn about that. It were a perfect title.
Well, Chevy reckoned he knew what were in the middle, hey? Him and his best mate, that foolish and fiery Dominic Breton, well, they’d held on to it and died with it in their arms, hadn’t they just? A Book full of Garth N’Chalez and his mad dreams.
A Book full of the man himself, Chevy reckoned, for he hadn’t been no sort of smith nor artificer neither, not the whole length of his life, not ‘til he’d woken up in this place, on the other side of a Dome fallen into the ground and disappeared, and so if he’d gotten a piece of Master Nickels, which piece had Dom –who surely had to be one of them queer dimples true enough- gotten for himself?
Chevy supposed it didn’t matter. Poor Old Dom Breton had lost his mind there at the end, what with their blasted King in the heavens riding hot and heavy through the helmet that whole time. There weren’t no telling which were actually behind the lad’s eyes, and weren’t that the final truth of it?
“Tell us more about your jacket.” Cherise prompted urgently. Their AI minds were still picking and poking at it, and coming up with nothing useable. Beyond a certain level of impressive beauty, it was … just a fancy jacket. You could buy cheap exosuits three levels above Zero that’d have ten times the strength.
“Why is it so complicated?” Seterreq demanded, recovering his handheld from the ground with a curse: one edge of the screen was cracked. “Does it do anything else?”
Chevy held a hand over his heart. “On my honor, young Cheri, Master Crimshawn, the coat on it’s own does not do anything. Now, if you were to oblige me by forging the helmet I’ve provided you with?”
Seterreq chortled. “Not in a million years.”
Chevy was about to begin bartering for the helmet when suddenly the lights dipped low once, twice, three times before coming back on steady. Both his handlers looked from one to the other before hurrying out of the room, but not before cautioning him to behave himself.
Chevril Pointillier nodded and laced his armor-clad fingers together.
It wouldn’t be long now, oh no, not at all, for that laughable Dimple in the Middle had just gotten a wee bit brighter, hadn’t it just?
***
“Let me out of here, and no one will be the wiser, hey?”
Officer Relen looked up from his handheld and snorted derisively at the man being held by a containment device ordinarily used for augmentation … experiments that’d gone off the deep in a big way, but the boys and girls upstairs were reluctant to let things resolve themselves in the natural way. “Not happening, sunshine.”
Dom twisted and turned in the machine, marveling how the ‘cuffs’ –which were in truth massive clamps swallowing his arms and legs right up to elbows and knees- twisted and turned along with him, always allowing him a relatively free range of motion but never actually allowing him to be free; he’d tried –not too long ago, in fact, much to the amusement of the dour FrancoBrit officer down below- to break loose once again, only to fail.
As strong and as fast as he was, the resilience of the machine keeping him suspended in mid-air was –for the time being- impossible to escape from.
“From the sounds of it, you’re a good old FrancoBritish lad, yes?” Dom gave up struggling, though he knew it wouldn’t last. He was penned in, hemmed down, and something inside of him ached for him to be free, and quick. “You got one of them accents as reminds me of home.”
Relen turned his head upwards and gazed into the eyes of madness. He could scarcely credit the scene of mayhem and violence he’d been asked to deal with once the on-hand crew had finally managed to subdue the lad, but the truth was in the playback; the scrawny –well, not scrawny in comparison to normal people, true enough, but scrawny when it came to the kinds of security folk Voss_Uderhell liked to employ- lad dangling between manacles designed to hold vastly augmented cybernetic maniacs in check had first broken through glass specifically put in place for him. After that, he’d been a whirlwind of vicious activity, killing and/or maiming everyone he’d come into contact with, using a mad variety of hand-to-hand combat tactics that still had everyone in the Security Offices scratching their heads.
More interestingly than all that was the fact that the blonde-haired demon who was even now trying once again to break free from the truly unbreakable was that –more than once- during the video playback, he –Dom- had looked genuinely surprised at his own martial skill.
“Don’t matter if I remind you of your dear old dad, son. You and I aren’t going to be friends, and you certainly aren’t going to convince me to let you loose from Big Dave, here.” Relen thumped one of the huge towers that held enough of the gripping mechanisms keeping Dom in place lovingly.
Dom chortled. “Big Dave, is it? And for what reason?”
Relen shook his head. “No reason. Things need naming. Dave seemed good enough.”
The ex-Gearman struggled mightily for a moment, literally flinging himself this way and that, whipping his body into a frenzy of motion, pushing himself harder than he ever had before. As always, even when he was just giving himself a bit of exercise, the metallic tentacles –as Dom thought of them, for that was nearly the only thing they reminded him of- allowed him much freedom but never once did they show signs of running out of slack, or of breaking.
“That was a good one.” Relen commented, jotting the numbers down in his handheld; in addition to keeping the maniac locked down nice and tight, Big Dave recorded everything the prisoner said and did, and the lad’s attempt at breaking loose this time had topped anything previous. “That’s going to have the men in white coats down here again soon enough, I should think.”
Dom –breathless, panting, shoulders and knees aching from the exertion- sneered. “Them in their white coats hain’t going to learn nowt from me, squire, nothing at all. I’ve said all I’m going to say on the nature of Arcade City. Here now, what if I said I was sorry about all them dead people, hey?”
“First thing,” Relen stepped back a bit so he could look Dom square in the eyes instead of turning his head up; doing so was giving him a wicked crick in his neck. “First thing, them in the white coats don’t care much anymore about what happened under that Dome. The few things you did tell them sounded too damn fanciful by half, and so they’re just choosing to ignore that as the ramblings of a madman. I’ve heard the others are being far chattier than you, so my young fellow, whatever truly happened over there in Arcade City will soon be a matter of public record.”
That revelation had Dom pause long and considerable for thought. It were true, then. There were others from ‘neath The Dome out there in the big wild world as Master Nickels had told them all about, which, now it’d been said aloud, clicked within him; four burning points of
bright, fiery light glimmering in the dark places of his own mind suddenly clicked, didn’t they just? All the time he’d been awake, he’d not really given them much consideration, hey, just ignored them, as what could he do with them?
But now he knew for certain there was more than one, he knew, oh yes, he knew now why he’d tried to break free before, hey? One of them bright lights was certainly his old friend, Chevril Pointillier; if he were out and about –well, present incarceration excluded, of course- then it were bloody damned certain that that crusty old bugger was as well. It made perfect sense, didn’t it just?
And if Chevy were alive and well –hopefully not too well, hey, given his traitorous attitudes ‘neath The Dome there at the end- then one of the other spots of fire casting long shadows inside his mind was surely Book. Of all of them, Dom reckoned Book were in the middle. He couldn’t explain it, didn’t even think the words existed to express how he could know such a thing, but it were the truth of it all the same.
And if Chevy was awake, then the old bastard surely held the same glimmering points in his fine old melon, hey?
Dom suppressed a crafty old smile, because he’d just realized the last bit; if two of five lights possessed intimate knowledge of where the others were, then it only meant that the other two smudges of firelight held the same, didn’t it just? Three of four of his fellow Arcadians weren’t doing nowt at all save sitting in the same spot, each lad or lass no doubt held in place by summat similar to his own flexible cage; he weren’t worried about the one burning ember traipsing through the space in his mind, as it –whoever he or she was-were moving slowly, slowly.
A footrace, then, to Piggy in the Middle.
Just a matter then, hey, of getting free before the others, were it not? As a Book Club Regular, this were the kind of fine thinking that’d made him the master of that redoubtable organization, hey?
“And the second thing?” Dom’s voice rang out, full of goodness and gladness.
