by L. C. Mawson
She thought back to her original design, quickly cycling through every available target for her blow.
After several quick iterations through the vulnerable spots, she had run out of time.
She plunged the point of the disruptor into the side of the neck of the first automaton to reach her. It spluttered and stopped, informing her that she had successfully shut it down.
She didn’t have time to celebrate, however, as the second automaton didn’t hesitate at its fallen comrade.
She ran back to where the others were, knowing that Ivy had a disrupter of her own, but the strength of the automaton’s legs far exceeded her own, allowing it to swiftly bound up and trapped her in its metal grip.
“Let me go!” Ruth screamed as the automaton dragged her back to the factory, hoping that one of the others was at least within hearing range.
She wished that she hadn’t brushed aside having one of them keep her within their sight at all times. She had thought keeping an eye further afield would give them a better head-start if guards had approached the far side of the factory.
She hadn’t imagined the factory being booby trapped and automatons lying in wait for her.
Why would that have been the case, unless they had known of her plan?
The automaton stopped as Ruth saw two figures approaching. She hoped beyond hope that they were her friends, but she was disappointed to realise that they were men as they got closer.
“That’s her!” one of them announced, and Ruth recognised the voice as belonging to Sally’s brother.
“Yes, it is indeed,” the other figure said and Ruth’s blood chilled as she recognised the owner.
“Banks,” she spat. “I should have known it was you.”
“Yes, you should. For being so intelligent, you truly are dim-witted at times.”
She didn’t have an intelligible response, so simply gave a yelp as she tried to yank herself free from the automaton once more.
Banks responded by bringing up a small device, which sprayed her face with a fine powder.
She coughed it away, but the world swiftly melted to black.
12
Ruth awoke to find her extremities numb and her eyesight gone. After a few moments of frantic blinking, she realised that her eyesight was fine, but the room was pitch black.
She wiggled her fingers and feet in an attempt to regain feeling in them, but she found that they didn’t move more than an inch or so. After a few moments, feeling returned and she realised that she was strapped down to the hard surface she was lying on.
A door opened at the far side of the room, introducing a fleck of light. Someone entered, lighting lamps as they went, illuminating the room.
“This feels awfully familiar,” Ruth said, in an attempt to bolster her confidence.
The figure approached, allowing her to see that it was Banks.
“You’re going to tire of kidnapping me eventually.”
He smiled. “My dear, I’m already tired of it. Which is why I’ll never have to do it again.”
He moved his hand past her head, before she felt something large and metallic press against her skull in several places.
“What is this device you’ve strapped me to?” she asked, doing her best to keep alarm from her voice.
“Well, you have proven to be uncooperative, to the point at which this would be most easily solved with a well-placed bullet, but it would be such a shame to waste a brain like yours. Of course, I’m sure you know that many people have wondered about the possibility of utilising the automatons as a way to extend human life. If they have their own consciousness, why couldn’t we implant them with our own?”
“Because they wouldn’t be us!”
“Now, come, my dear, don’t tell me that you’re fretting over the soul. Surely a woman with a mind such as yours appreciates that it is a ridiculous concept made up as part of a system to keep the masses placated.”
“I’m saying that it would just be a copy.”
“But what is a copy, if the making of said copy kills the host? Surely, at that point, it is a transference.”
Ruth struggled to keep air flowing to her lungs as she realised that he had every intention of killing her. “And what if it doesn’t work? My mind will be wasted as surely as if you had used a bullet.”
“No, my dear, not quite. At least, if you die like this, I can use this attempt to see that my next one is more successful.”
“No, please, you’re going to kill me!”
“One way or the other, that is the point,” Mr Banks said as he pulled a lever by her side.
Ruth was immediately racked with the worst pain she had ever felt. Her screams echoed in her head, leaving her with just enough coherence to wonder if either death or childbirth - the two events she had always assumed were the most painful in life - could be so excruciating.
Surely not.
Mr Banks just smiled at her. “Now, my dear, you may want to save the screams. It’s only warming up.”
He turned back towards the door at that, leaving Ruth alone with nothing but her screams.
13
“What was that?” Ivy asked Sally as she heard a faint, high-pitched echo through the trees. “A wild animal?” she asked, hopefully.
Sally shook her head, quickly sprinting towards the sound. Ivy ran behind her, doing her best not to trip over the rough, unfamiliar terrain. Somewhere along the way, Chepi re-joined them, and Ivy felt her concern for Ruth threaten to cloud her thoughts as she did her best to refocus on not tripping up.
Sally stopped dead in her tracks, halting the other two behind her by outstretching her arms.
“What is it?” Ivy asked.
“Look,” Sally prompted.
Ivy pulled her goggles down over her eyes to get a better look, despite the dark and distance.
She could see that the ventilation grate was slightly pulled away from the wall, and the spiders were lying, inert, on the ground. She flicked down a different lens, only to see pitch black. No signs of aether anywhere.
“Their aether cores were deactivated,” Ivy said. “Someone must have anticipated this tactic.”
“Any sign of Ruth?”
“No, nothing.”
“They’ve probably taken her.”
“So, let’s go and get her back!”
Sally held her in place, stopping her from heading towards the factory.
“You’ll be walking into a trap.”
Chepi nodded in agreement. “If they knew that Ruth would use this entrance, they probably know that we would be with her. It would be better to return with reinforcements.”
Ivy glared at both of them before turning her burning stare to the factory, as if she could clear herself a path with nothing more than her fury.
She took a deep breath before turning to the other two and nodding. “Alright. Reinforcements.”
She turned away, but every step further from the factory felt like she was leaving Ruth to die.
“DO YOU THINK THEY’RE alright?” Michel asked the two men with him as they sat at the table of their room. Thomas and Hall were drinking some kind of local spirit, while Michel added his observations of them to his information on the effects of alcohol on humans.
Hall sighed, shaking his head. “As we’ve told you the last dozen times you have asked, we don’t have any way to know.”
“I know, I just...” He wrung his hands together. “I’m worried.”
“So are we, but wearing your hand motors out won’t help anyone.”
Michel nodded in agreement as he stopped the restless motion, just in time for the door to open and reveal Ivy, with Sally and Chepi close behind.
“Michel!” Ivy exclaimed as she entered the room, running over to him and wrapping her arms around his neck as she buried her face into his chest. He quickly checked for signs of distress, such as sobbing, but he only found that she was gripping him with so much pressure that she may have hurt him if he had been human.
&n
bsp; “They took Ruth,” she told him. “They captured her.”
“It’s going to be alright,” he assured her. “We’ll get her back.”
She pulled away, allowing him to see the fire in her eyes. “I know. And we’re going to make them pay for taking her.”
Hall stood up at that. “Perhaps it’s time to consider some more upfront tactics.”
Ivy nodded as she turned to him. “Get me enough aether and I can blow that place right to hell.”
14
“That’s it,” Ivy declared several hours later, as she leaned back from the workbench. “Ten aether bombs. That’s more than enough to shut down everything in the factory, with a couple for redundancy.”
Michel nodded. “I’ll alert the others.”
“Wait,” she said, stopping him in his tracks. “Michel, if we’re going to be detonating aether bombs, you should stay here. You can’t risk being near them.”
“No, I refuse to stay here.”
“Look, I know you want to get Ruth back, but we can handle it.”
“And what about you? If you’re worried about getting Ruth, who’s going to worry about you?”
“Michel, the others will be there as well. I won’t be alone.”
“But I don’t trust them to protect you. Thomas will put retrieving Ruth above you, Hall will put Thomas above all else, and Sally and Chepi will put stopping WestTech above all of you.”
She shook her head with a smile. “And what makes you think I need protecting, Michel? I can handle myself.”
“As can I, and yet you’re still trying to get me to stay here. I’m expendable, Ivy. If my functioning ceases, Ruth can build another mechanical man just like me. The same cannot be said of you.”
“Don’t say that, Michel, you’re not expendable,” she told him firmly, stepping closer to him in an attempt to drive home her point.
“On the contrary, I am the very definition of expendable,” he countered, closing the rest of the gap between them.
“Not to me!”
Before he had time to argue that point, her lips were on his. He had no idea what to do, and was frightened of hurting her, since his mouth wasn’t designed for sensory input, so he stayed perfectly still until she pulled away.
“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I know that you don’t... I just...”
He stepped back towards her, closing the gap once more before taking her hands in his, prompting her to look up at him.
“Ivy, just because I may have had to have the concept explained to me rather recently doesn’t mean that I am incapable of falling in love.”
She stared at him, wide-eyed and disbelieving. “So, you...”
“Ivy, I have been in love with you literally since before I knew what that meant.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you deserve a real man, not some poor facsimile.”
“Michel, ‘real’ is something for the philosophers to debate, all I know is what’s in my heart, and I love you as surely as I could love any flesh and blood man.”
He smiled before pulling away a little. “I suppose that is something we can discuss once you’re back.”
“So you’ll stay?”
“I am not happy about it, but I suppose you are right. There is too high of a chance of me being caught in the blast.”
She smiled before giving him a quick peck on the cheek. “I promise that I’ll return to you.”
He nodded before moving his left hand to his right wrist. One of the gears had been acting up, and he had been meaning to replace it. He tugged it free from his arm, knowing that it would only slightly hinder his range of wrist motion.
“Here,” he said, pressing the small gear into her palm. “So that part of me will always be with you.”
“For a man who argues he’s not real, you certainly have a fine grasp of sentiment,” she commented as she pocketed the gear. “Thank you, Michel.”
“CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING?” Sally asked Ivy as they approached the factory once more.
Ivy frowned, changing her lens for a stronger one, and still seeing nothing. “There’s aether and machines giving off heat, but I can’t see anything resembling a person.”
“It can’t be abandoned.”
Ivy simply shrugged.
“We stick to the plan,” Hall told them. “Move out.”
The others nodded, all taking their aether bombs and moving to designated points around the building. The blast of the bombs would move through the walls, shouting down any automatons or other aether-powered machines within their range.
Ivy used her pocket watch to time carefully, only detonating her bomb as the designated time arrived.
The bomb gave off a blast of blue light and she waited for the others to return.
They made their way back to her in short order, just as she had finished with the lock on the door.
“Still nothing?” Hall asked her.
“A couple of machines in the middle of the room are still active, but I can’t see any sign of people.”
He nodded, though seemed uneasy as he moved to kick down the door.
He moved in first, with the others coming behind him. They fanned out, checking over the powered down machinery for any sign of life.
“Maybe the factory is mostly autonomous,” Sally figured.
Ivy gave a hum of agreement. “It would explain how so few people know about it.”
“The question is, where is Ruth?” Thomas said.
Ivy moved around the room, looking all around with her goggles. She stopped dead as she saw a flash of blue, seemingly beneath her.
She moved back to get a better look, realising that she was seeing aether underground. When she moved too far, she lost the signal entirely, telling her that the floor was making it weak.
“Beneath us,” she said. “There’s something below.”
Hall scouted for an entrance to the basement, finding one rather quickly.
“You girls investigate,” he told them. “Thomas and I will double check for any sign of whoever did this.”
Ivy nodded, heading quickly down the stairs, her disrupter drawn. The weapon cast an eerie blue glow around the room, illuminating a large contraption with a figure strapped into it. Her hair and clothes were caked to her body with sweat, and she was moaning unintelligibly.
“Ruth,” Ivy said, rushing forth. She quickly found the lever to shut off the machine as Sally lit a lamp to better illuminate the room.
Ruth gave a relieved gasp, but otherwise didn’t respond as the machine shut down and Ivy worked to unstrap her.
“It’s okay, Ruth, I’ve got you,” Ivy assured.
“Ivy...” her mentor managed to mumble as the final restraint was released and she almost collapsed to the floor. Ivy was the only thing propping her up.
“Come on, let’s get you out of here.”
Footsteps came down the stairs, and Ivy instinctively aimed her disrupter at the intruder, before realising that it was Hall.
“Whoever did this is long gone,” he told them.
“Banks,” Ruth managed to mumble.
“Banks?” Ivy repeated. “He locked you into that machine?”
She gave a weak nod.
“What was he trying to do?”
“Steal my brain.”
Ivy didn’t want to think about what she had meant by that, so she turned back to Hall.
“We need to get her out of here.”
He nodded before moving to help Ivy carry her.
“We shouldn’t head back to town,” Sally said. “If Banks isn’t here, chances are he’s there. We’d be delivering her straight back.”
“What do you suggest?”
“We can camp in the woods tonight. Let Ruth rest in peace. If she takes a turn for the worse, we can always go back.”
Ivy and Hall nodded in agreement.
15
Everyone was already settling in for the night before Ruth felt coherent enough to fo
rm full sentences, though she still felt as if she had had one too many glasses of wine before being trampled by a horse.
She pushed herself upright against the tree Ivy had lain her next to so that she could get a better look at her friend, who appeared to be fidgeting with something metallic.
“Thank you,” she managed, her voice rasping, though it was enough to draw her friend’s attention.
“Pardon?”
“Thank you, Ivy. For coming to get me.”
“Oh. Well, of course I did. You’re my friend.”
Ruth smiled, though it was barely a twitch. “Still... I appreciate it. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Ruth glanced around the camp to see that Ivy wasn’t alone. In fact, everyone had come with her, it seemed. Almost everyone.
“Where’s Michel?” she asked with a frown.
“He’s still in town,” Ivy explained as she started fidgeting with the piece of metal again, allowing Ruth to see that it was a gear. “We used aether bombs to shut down the machines in the factory. We thought having him close was too much of a risk.”
Ruth smiled as she recognised the gear in Ivy’s hand as Michel’s. “‘We’ thought, or you thought?”
Ivy gave a reluctant shrug. “I thought,” she admitted. “Michel wasn’t happy about it, but there was just too much risk of him being caught in one of the blasts.”
“I’m glad you managed to convince him to stay. I would have hated it if any of you had been seriously hurt while retrieving me.”
“We all knew the risks when we came for you. If we had been hurt, I don’t think any of us would have regretted it.”
Ruth decided that she was too tired to continued arguing, so she just silently nodded as Ivy returned her attention to the gear in her hands.
