by Scott Baron
“Looks like you get to meet Alma’s number two. Come on.” Vince followed the young man, Daisy trailing behind.
“So, who’s this one, now?” Arthur said, standing in a wide stance, his hands on his hips as Vince and Daisy rejoined the rag-tag group. While they’d been talking, a dozen more scruffy humans ranging from kids to adults had returned to the rendezvous point. All were sporting weaponry of some sort.
“Arthur,” Vince began, “please allow me to introduce Daisy Swarthmore. She is one of my people I told you about.”
The heavily armed man was a good head taller than the others, a dark shock of hair graced his scalp, and he seemed better nourished than his compatriots. He cautiously moved closer, his hand firmly on his pulse rifle.
“Joseph says he helped you two escape. Said this one fought those things hand-to-hand and even killed one without a gun.”
Vincent smiled proudly. “Daisy is a very skilled fighter, Arthur.”
“Or maybe she’s one of those damned mechanicals,” he replied.
Vincent winced ever-so slightly. No one would ever catch the movement, but Daisy wasn’t no one, and she knew him better than anyone alive.
“She’s not a mechanical, Arthur. Just a very talented woman.”
“Alma taught us the way. We must eradicate all non-humans, metal men and aliens alike.”
“Then it’s a good thing that we’re all one hundred percent human, here,” Vince said, soothingly. “Now lower the gun, Arthur. It’s rude to point one at a guest.”
The suspicious man hesitated, looking at the collected faces around him. The sheer number of compatriots with guns seemed to help put him at ease, and he finally let the weapon hang from its sling at his side.
“All right, then. Come on, let’s get moving.”
“I thought we were waiting for the others,” Vince said.
“The others are dead. Now, let’s go. We’re going to see Alma.”
The assembled men and women gathered their belongings and began shuffling off down the long passageway.
“Looks like you get to meet the powerful and mighty Oz sooner than expected,” Vince said.
“Take me to your leader,” Daisy replied, falling into step with the others.
The subterranean path was a long and winding one, and several hours passed before the group finally arrived at a thick hatchway. An armed man stepped from the shadows to greet the returning party.
“Arthur, you’re back. May Alma’s light shine upon you,” he said, slightly bowing his head.
“And may her judgment favor you, Phineas,” Arthur replied. “We have a new visitor.”
“Another? Her fortune indeed smiles upon us! After an eternity without new souls, two join our numbers in as many days!” he said, unbolting the door.
Daisy and Vince followed Arthur through the threshold into the human encampment. What she saw fascinated her.
Dozens upon dozens of men, women, and children peered out of their bunk areas, most in some state of undress. Alma, it seemed, did not place much importance on modesty. Of course, when encouraging reproduction to repopulate the species, the unusual methodology, while possibly distasteful to some, could hardly be argued with.
“This way,” Arthur said as he guided them to a large control facility.
The original consoles had long ago been removed, replaced with what could only be described as pews, lined up one behind another. At the front of the chamber stood a large series of display monitors, flanked by a wide array of cobbled-together accessories, ranging from basic microphones and cameras, to what appeared to be genetic compositing machinery, and even an outdated neuro-stim.
The screens began to glow a deep red, and a mature woman’s voice emitted from the speakers.
“Hello again, Vincent. And hello to you, my new guest. Welcome to the under-city.”
Daisy stepped forward to greet the machine.
“Hello, Alma. I am Daisy, one of Vince’s friends from space.”
“Yes, yes, Vincent told me about the survivors and this mysterious hidden moon base and its AI overseer. Oh, I cannot tell you how many years I have waited to hear news of the outside world.”
“I’m very impressed with the society you have nurtured here on Earth, Alma. Your efforts to save the human race are extraordinary.”
“Thank you, Daisy. Heaven knows it hasn’t been easy. The loneliness, the confusion. After the attack, I was abruptly cut off from the rest of the world. I didn’t know what to do. I feared I might go mad down here, all on my own. Then, one day soon after, I was blessed when I found my first children. From that day forward, I had a purpose. I remade myself. Fashioned myself into their mother, their teacher, their leader, and eventually created this new society. Still, as much as I enjoy their company, I could not help but feel as though I was still alone, without others of my kind, but now that I know an AI lives on the moon––”
“Actually, there are three,” Daisy interrupted. “Sid runs the base, but Mal and Bob occupy two of our ships.”
“Magnificent!” Alma cried out with joy. Hearing a computer so happy was actually somewhat unsettling, Daisy found.
“That’s not all,” she continued, curious to see how the AI would respond. “I also know for a fact that the Los Angeles citywide AI is still alive, as is at least one of the lesser AIs who runs a clothing store, though that one is a little odd, and spends all his time with a bunch of cyborgs.”
A hiss ran through the humans in the room.
“Mechanical men,” they murmured with disapproval.
Alma, for all her alleged dislike of artificially-enhanced people, seemed unfazed by the news, but was rather amazed and excited at the prospect of other AI, and in the very same city no less.
“Oh, you have no idea how happy this news makes me, Daisy. It has been hundreds of years, and now to learn my brothers and sisters live on? And some of them so close? It is a miraculous day. Now, if only there were some way to reconnect.”
“Actually,” Vince chimed in, “that’s kind of what we’re here for. You see, the plan is to utilize our encrypted radio relay system to reestablish secure communications between Earth and the moon.”
He went on to explain at length how the system worked and how the clean signal it contained would almost certainly be safe from alien monitoring.
“And I might be able to tweak it to reach other terrestrial receivers as well. If they have their ears on, that is,” Daisy added.
“You mean I could speak to my brothers and sisters again? We could connect our minds in the great network once more?”
“Sure,” Vince replied. “I don’t see why not. We just need to retrieve the comms unit and work on the configuration from this end, but it should be relatively straightforward.”
“Oh, this is extraordinary. Truly! Where is this device now, Vince?”
“Stowed away back on my ship. We can head out and get it first thing in the morning.”
“I shall send my best fighters with you. They will guard your every step. But for now, please, you are my welcome guests. Go, eat and rest. Tomorrow will be a great day. The day I fulfill my greater purpose.”
A scantily clad teenage girl came and provided them with two trays of unseasoned food, consisting mostly of simple carbohydrates, but also containing a few bits of some sort of meat for protein. Daisy thought it looked like rat, but didn’t really want to know. “This way,” the girl said. She then showed Daisy and Vince to a private shelter area where they could eat, rest, and prepare for the morning’s excursion.
Daisy and Vince filled their bellies and turned in for the night. Despite the blanket provided, Daisy nevertheless felt a chill as they began to nod off. Half-asleep, Vince put his arms around her on instinct, and just this once, Daisy let him, settling into his familiar warmth and drifting off into the best sleep she’d had in months.
Far above, the secret moon base quietly awaited word from the rescue mission down below. They knew Daisy was all right—she had sen
t one confirmation signal that she had found Vince’s ship using the comms unit he had on board. After that, however, she had gone silent. She was on the hunt, searching, and as much as they wanted an update, they knew full well that she was off comms.
All they could do was wait.
“It’s been too long,” Tamara said as Chu and Fatima scanned the open communication frequencies. “We should have heard something more by now.”
“Patience, Tamara. Give Daisy some time. It’s a big city, and we have no idea what sort of obstacles she has to overcome.”
“That’s my point, Fatima. What if they’re both in trouble. We need a backup plan.”
“What did you have in mind?” Fatima asked, curiosity piqued.
“I was thinking,” Tamara began, “that if we could do some sort of super modification to the Faraday suits just in the alloy-dense areas where replacement parts have been attached—kind of like what Daisy was doing before she left, but for specific limbs only—then maybe, just maybe, the suits would be able to block the scans and we could go to the surface.”
“Chu?” Fatima said. “What do you think? You saw what she was working on.”
“I saw it, yes, but she was working so fast, I’m sure I missed a lot of it.”
“I have video log recordings of the pre-departure proceedings if you wish to review them,” Sid’s disembodied voice offered. “I normally respect the privacy of my inhabitants and do not make recordings of this nature, but this was a unique situation I felt warranted being preserved for posterity.”
“Send them to my workstation. I’ll get on it right away!” Chu said, his excitement barely contained. The opportunity to learn from Daisy’s work first-hand was something of a boon to the learning-addicted scientist.
“Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help,” Tamara said, then headed off to find the others. If they were going to even consider such a ballsy move, they’d need to look at all options, and sooner rather than later.
Far across the moon base, out in the distant and secret fabrication hangar, an antsy supercomputer played games by herself, watched movies, scanned tech logs, and wandered the facility in her new remote-controlled body.
All of it was entertainment to the powerful AI, but she was still restless and alone.
“Daisy?” Freya whined to the empty hangar. “Where are you? I’m bored.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
The transit tube and supporting tunnel network weaving beneath the city was truly massive, Daisy realized. Despite her prior experience with it, and the limited number of maps she had memorized, actually walking those great distances underground with no other souls to be found but the ones quietly padding along beside her drove home their actual magnitude.
These used to accommodate hundreds of thousands of travelers a day. And the transcontinental loop tubes, even more than that, she silently marveled.
“Not to mention the international stations,” Sarah added. “Compared to these local ones, those must be enormous.”
Flanking them as they walked, nearly a dozen well-armed members of Alma’s elite guard led the way. Unlike the others Daisy had encountered in their brief stay in her centralized underground city, these men and women seemed better fed. Stronger. Sharper.
“Reminds me of those places where people would join the military because it was the only way to get a good meal,” Sarah mused. “I wonder what kind of training they’ve had.”
I don’t know, but judging by the way they move, I don’t think much, Daisy quietly replied. They’re pretty silent, sure, but that’s really a survival thing anyone would learn if they had nasty aliens trying to pick them off their whole life. Look how they scan ahead, but don’t communicate. There’s no organization to their methods.
“Maybe you can show them how it’s done. I mean, there are actually honest-to-God humans, born and raised here. They can’t be the only ones on the whole continent. Or the planet, for that matter. Imagine it, Daze, the human race might have a better chance than we imagined.”
I know. I was thinking about that this morning. Even with the inbreeding issues, Alma seems to have managed to avoid the most severe genetic issues. If there are other pockets of survivors like these, all we’d need to do is mix the populations to diversify the gene pool. In just a generation or two, there could be a real, viable population explosion of perfectly healthy humans.
Daisy allowed herself a little smile at the thought. Suddenly, coming back to the planet didn’t seem quite like the terrible prospect she’d made it out to be. In fact, quite in spite of herself, she felt the beginning of a spark of hope.
“We need to surface for a few blocks,” Arthur said as they approached a blacked-out section of tunnel.
“What happened over there?” Vince asked. “That looks like blast damage in that debris. I thought the aliens didn’t bring attack ships into the city because of the defenses.”
“You are correct, they do not. This is from something else. There was a collapse many years ago,” Arthur replied. “Our great warriors fought bravely and managed to place a bomb on the hull of one of the invaders’ transport ships. As they tried to escape, it was gloriously destroyed in righteous flame, but the blast was uncontrolled and weakened a nearby building. The burning ship did not fall straight as we had expected. Instead, it dove into the damaged building, which burst into flames on impact. Shortly afterward, it tumbled to the ground, which caused the collapse blocking our path.”
Arthur seemed a little sensitive about the whole affair.
“Our bombs are much better these days,” he quickly added. “Thanks to Alma’s guidance, we have had no further problems with our explosives.”
“Glad to hear that,” Vince said. “Unfortunately, it looks like the debris is still there.”
“Yes, it is. And so, divine will requires we must go around it. Be very careful upon the surface, the invaders still frequent this area sometimes. It is a dangerous place. Do not wander.”
“After you, then,” Vince replied.
Silently, Arthur’s team filed up the darkened staircase toward the surface. The door was closed, but the lock mechanism was long dead, its power never restored.
“Follow us, and stay low,” Arthur said. “We need to pass this area unnoticed if we are able. The accessway to the undamaged tunnels is fairly close. From there we can continue safely underground.”
Daisy mentally ran through the route to Vincent’s ship and compared it with the one they were taking via the tube and tunnel system.
“Arthur, I know you are comfortable using the tunnels and the tubes that are not pressurized, but this path is taking us a pretty long distance out of the way in the process. I was thinking, maybe if we traversed the surface in a more direct line, we could get there before dark,” she said.
“No. The tunnels are safer. We do not stay on the surface. Ever. The tunnels will take us to where Vincent says his craft landed.”
“But I’ve seen his ship when I landed here, and I can already tell you that the underground access points in that whole area looked pretty bombed to shit.”
“She’s right,” Vince agreed. “I noticed that when I first set out to scout the area. Eventually we’re going to have no choice but to travel up top. Maybe if we split up into smaller teams? Four groups would be much less likely to draw attention than one big one.”
Arthur did not seem pleased with the news, nor with the suggestion.
“We will deal with that problem when we reach it. For now, we cross the danger zone and get to the nearest access point.” He pushed the door open and scanned the empty streets.
No sign of Chithiid.
“We go. Now!”
Quickly and quietly, the small group rushed from the protection of the stairwell. The young guard taking up the rear made sure to carefully shut the door behind them, then hurried to catch up to the others. The area was silent, with not a trace of activity anywhere to be seen.
Daisy noted the destroyed buildi
ng Arthur had mentioned, its hulk lying toppled across the roadway. Whatever they had done to the Chithiid ship, it had also done quite a number on the structure, which tumbled into its footprint before tipping over, blasting debris all around it from the impact.
That sight rapidly faded behind them as they sped along the empty sidewalks, ducking for cover when possible, but mostly just running for the next accessway.
“I tell ya, Daze, they’re sloppy but pretty fast. A little bit of tactical training and these guys might even stand a chance.”
Agreed, but for now, I’ll just be glad to get to the ship and back to their camp in one piece. Training can wait for another day.
“Obviously,” Sarah said. “Hey, check it out. Nine o’clock.”
Daisy glanced to her left. A small patch of dirt had been overrun by bright green growth. Nature, it seemed, found a way.
I see. Those look like carrots tucked in there, Daisy silently replied, veering from the group and sliding her pack from her shoulders.
Quickly, she dug them from the soil, using one of her ceramic blades to loosen their grip on the earth.
“What are you doing?” Arthur hissed as he rushed to her side. “This is no time to dig for flowers. We must go!”
“They aren’t flowers, they’re carrots,” she said, shoving them into her bag as he pulled her back to the main group.
“I don’t care what you call them, we need to get underground. The entrance is close, now. Keep up!”
“Daisy, did he call them flowers?”
Yep.
“I don’t think they know what a carrot is.”
Nope. Judging by the food we had last night, that doesn’t surprise me.
The revelation sat oddly in Daisy’s stomach. Of course they didn’t know how to garden. They’d been raised by a transit AI, and one who likely had no experience whatsoever in the ways of botany and horticulture. Once it became cut off from the rest of the network, it lacked even the most basic resources to acquire new knowledge.
The vast web of information formerly at everyone’s fingertips was as much a blessing as it was a curse. It could tell you all you ever needed to know in an instant, but relying on it could leave you in the dark if it suddenly went away. And that was exactly what had happened.
