by Lee Bond
“Indeed, Mister Scourge, no one hereabouts knows what this ‘Welsh’ is, nor do we have any desire in discovering the ancient history of this place.” The voice boomed through the air.
“It’s Warden Peemes. You’re in for it now.” All the guards present save two stepped respectfully back; two scurried forward, one grabbing the unfortunate Orris –who had bitten his tongue off-, the other grabbing the rifle.
Since turning to face the guards who’d come to rescue their fallen comrade, Garth had been doing his level best to ignore the tremendously gigantic dome that utterly owned the skyline, but now that they were all waiting for the proper arrival of ‘Warden Peemes’, there was nothing he could do to stop himself from eyeballing it properly.
It was tremendous. Standing before The Dome was to lose all sense of perspective. The tarnished dark metal, complete with riveted plates, filled your senses until there was nothing left but this indomitable pressure. Even though Garth was standing outside, with the whole of Nature behind him, a tingling sensation of some kind of weird reverse claustrophobia grabbed hold. From where he stood, some three hundred feet away, a subtle thumping or thrumming pounded up through the soles of his feet.
The Dome of Gears wasn’t called that just to sound cool, after all. The thumping was rhythmic, the constant, persistent ticking of a wristwatch or grandfather clock, but only writ larger than was almost imaginable; a dome that big had to have walls hundreds of feet thick, and inside those walls, there had to be gears and cogs and all manner and assortment of machine parts to allow for the sensation rising through those who waited for Perdition.
Research while trying to find a way to get to Arcade City had revealed that The Dome of Gears covered very nearly forty-three thousand square miles of what once been the United Kingdom. The Dome was –if you could believe the reports- whole and solid all the way through, which hadn’t bothered Garth the moment he’d read that bit; did everyone inside live in perpetual darkness, or had the Mad Goth King come up with a way to keep his citizens on a diurnal clock? Other tales had The Dome as the largest thing in the Universe, but Garth knew firsthand this was flat-out FrancoBritish Loyalist propaganda.
It wasn’t the largest structure in the local Galaxy! Outside the Milky Way?
Forget about it.
Even still, there was something … something about The Dome that seemed to win out, regardless.
During his stint in Deep Strikes, megalithic structures like The Dome cropped up more than some would even believe. On the world called String, in the system known as Dollop, he and his men had almost literally stumbled right into a wall of handmade and artfully crafted glass stretching across the landscape for twelve thousand miles. At a staggering height of two kilometers, that was a lot of surface area to work with. They hadn’t had time to investigate the miraculous wall properly, but the four miles of it they had inspected had to’ve been an indication; every inch they’d marveled at had been carved with awe-inspiring precision, some of the sigils and glyphs no bigger than a thumbnail, while others had been as big as Zurich’s colossal ego.
Then there was Craterous Abyss, the inverse of the Glass Wall; a spiraling staircase starting with an opening as big across as a continent going down exactly six miles to end on a flat, shiny floor that was no more than ten feet from end to end. At first, they’d just figured that the people of the world had built the staircase to do something with the naturally occurring crater, but Zurich –who’d by this time become something of a novice archeologist when he wasn’t figuring out how to drop moons on people’s heads- had discovered tool marks on one of the furthest parts of the crater.
Garth wondered if anyone would ever find out why the people of that unnamed world had done that. Glass Wall made sense; when the suns on String rose to their highest point, beams of light struck that wall, causing the sigils to burn with fierce beauty. And as those suns set, different engravings caught different beams of light, and gleamed. Beautiful. But Craterous Abyss made no sense at all.
Garth was no stranger to giant structures. Glass Wall and Craterous Abyss were only samples of what he’d seen, but nothing he’d come across on the other side of The Cordon or even in Trinityspace seemed to compare to the overwhelming nature of the King’s Dome of Gears.
“Amazing, is it not, Mister Scourge?” Warden Peemes asked, standing beside Garth and making a big show of eyeing The Dome himself. Which, of course, he need not do; he’d been Warden for the small town outside Arcade City for most of his adult life. Why, he could feel the internal gears turning on their axes after all that time. The shadow of The Dome was comforting to him, though it wasn’t to many, especially those poor bedraggled bastards that’d won themselves a one-way ticket to damnation.
Warden Peemes considered himself a big man in a small pond, that much Garth gleaned from a single glance. From the man’s immaculately clean uniform to the ludicrously waxed moustache that would’ve been more at home in the 19th century than on a dying planet, the Warden was a prideful man indeed; his men weren’t strictly grubby, and they looked as though they had enough to eat and all that, but Peemes clearly gave himself a bigger slice of the pie.
“I’ve seen bigger.” Garth said, intentionally gouging away at the man’s pride. Sure, it was probably a big deal that he was in charge of prisoner transfer and that he got to live just outside The Dome, but it wasn’t that big a deal.
“I rather doubt that.” Peemes replied frostily, puffing his chest up. He gestured with a manicured hand, and the two of them started walking towards The Dome. “Constructed, they say, well over twenty thousand years ago by methods unknown by man or Trinity, The Dome of Gears has never once needed replacing, repairing, or even thinking about. It is a perfect structure, Mister Scourge, stretching over all of what once used to be a land called Londonengland.”
“You don’t say?” Caustic sarcasm crept into Garth’s voice, but Peemes missed it altogether. He was like a used car salesman going on about the wonders of a Ford Pinto.
On either side of them, restless, frightened prisoners jostled back and forth, eyeing the limitless Dome and muttering to themselves and each other. The prison guards stood stock still, rifles at the ready; a situation like this was rife for an attempted break, not that it’d do them any good. The ‘island’ on which they stood was dominated by Arcade City and there was no way they’d get off, not unless they got assistance from one of the guards, or if they felt like swimming through the poisonous muck as passed for an ocean hereabouts these days.
Peemes nodded. His feet picked up the heavy ticking and tocking from the wall the closer they got. “Indeed. Out of all the races of Man, we FrancoBrits have done our absolute best to maintain ties to our ancient motherland.”
They were close enough to touch the wall, now. Peemes saw the almost hungry look in Mister Scourge’s eyes –well, eye, at any rate- and he nodded like an overindulgent Uncle. He placed one of his own hands on the slick surface of the vast metal dome. The faintest of tremors, a whirring that seemed to grow stronger the longer you held on.
What vast and wondrous things were on the inside, Peemes wondered, to need such massive machines? There were days he considered perpetrating a crime so he too, could be ushered inside. To see their King’s greatest accomplishments with his own eyes would be a wonderful thing.
Garth eyed the wall distrustfully. Now that he’d been given permission to touch it without incurring the wrath of any of the impatient and harassed looking guards, the Eye was all but demanding he take the chance. Its semi-sentient insistence there was something interesting just on the other side of The Dome’s thick walls showed itself in the glyphs it used to initiate override protocols in anything remotely computerized; they pulsed and spun and generally made a terrible nuisance of themselves.
Garth quirked an eyebrow. He wasn’t overly fond of the OS’ ability to link with random pieces of tech without his permission, and even less fond of the fact that it needed direct physical contact to merge with whatever was
running The Dome.
He knew so little about what waited, though…
Peemes nodded again, mistaking Garth’s eyebrow quirk for doubt. He enjoyed these moments, taking one or two prisoners aside and giving them a bit more attention than the rest of the rabble-rousers waiting for their punishment to begin. It caused no end of jealousy and no doubt generated all sorts of problems for the ‘chosen’ once everyone was through to the other side. “Please, feel free. It’s most exhilarating.”
“In for a penny, in for a pound.” Garth shrugged and slapped a hand against the cool metal of The Dome. Why not? What was the absolute worst that could happen, really? He had an indestructible body that was powered by an operating system that could turn him into the most powerful being –more or less- in the Galaxy.
How bad could things get, when you took all that into consideration?
At first, there was nothing. The quadronium filling every inch of his body occasionally had difficulty picking up vibrations and other sensations that fell into the ‘absolutely miniscule’ area; if he wanted to feel the wind on his face or the golden heat of a rising sun –for example- he had to ask the Eye to shift things around.
It wasn’t something he did very often, and for a few reasons. One, Garth couldn’t understand how quadronium could be shifted away from anywhere. The damn stuff was bonded to every single atom. It wasn’t like he was a Terminator 1000, comprised of liquid metal and able to change shape. He was permanently man-shaped, with extruded Reality matter forcibly hammered into every atom, every cell, everything.
Yet, move the quadronium could. And move, it did, which brought him to the second reason he avoided it whenever possible: it was probably the creepiest fucking feeling around.
Garth considered himself a thoroughly well-experienced guy. In just the last few years, he’d dug bullets out of his body in the back of a speeding cab. He’d become trapped inside a solid hologram that’d nearly wound up becoming his permanent body. He’d fought a gigantic God soldier on his way to ascending to a full Harmony soldier and, in the process, had ballooned up into a naked, Hulk-sized version of himself. He’d run through the ex-dee and come out the other side to be slammed against the wall like he’d been punched by the fist of an angry God. He’d done all those things, and a zillion others, some so esoterically bizarre that he’d have to invent an all new language complete with a brand new array of colors to make himself understood properly, but nothing … nothing was weirder than feeling ‘metal’ break free from the fabric of your own personal being and ‘drift’ to some other place.
Peemes beamed at the shiver rippling through Mister Scourge. The Dome affected every prisoner who laid hands on it in the same way. Once their fingertips detected the shifting of the gears, the thudding of the cogs, the pumping of the pistons, it was as though they suddenly realized that there was no getting away, no turning back.
Some small percentage of the Escapees remembered enough to tell horror stories of what they’d experienced inside Arcade City. They remembered, and they told anyone who’d listen. Those tales spread like wildfire through the FrancoBritish community and traveled from solar system to solar system as fast as AI communications networks could carry the feeds. Then, one day, when the brotherhood of escapees heard about them telling tall tales, those who whispered … disappeared.
Oh no, no one really wanted to know what happened inside Arcade City’s impenetrable walls, no they didn’t.
Mister Scourge, who stood before him, hand pressed tight against the dark black metal of Arcade City’s Dome, had had himself a personal encounter with a wardog who’d gone off the deep end into barmy town. The man wasn’t saying what Edmund Meech and he had talked about and sadly, the Baskerville’s captain didn’t record everything the prisoners said, but it didn’t take a genius –or even a fool, for that matter- to see the encounter had been traumatic.
Every one of Peemes’ men had had to deal with Escapees going off the deep end. Sometimes it took everything an Escapee had to make it outside. And once they got outside, when they had nothing left, they started shrieking and hollering and gibbering about Dark Iron and prizes and trials and all manner of nonsense. It was quite hair-raising and often, even in the weakened state that Escapees were delivered to the outside world in, it took the concerted efforts of two or three soldiers to bring those poor bastards down.
“What did Meechy say to you, hey?” Peemes whispered the question so none of his men would hear. “Did he talk about Dark Iron? Of the poison in the blood? Did he say summat of the King?”
Garth ignored the Warden’s query. The Eye had found … something inside the wall of The Dome, some thing that felt like computerized machinery but danced and skittered away from any of the trillion or so different connection requests it had available. Beneath his rough, calloused fingertips, Garth could feel dozens of different vibrations, ranging from the miniscule whirring inner workings of a pristine Swiss-made timepiece all the way up to mountain-sized gears thundering through a single, ponderous tok every minute. He could feel the jittering collision of all that, happening everywhere inside the epic Dome, all the time.
The Eye asked for and was given permission to access his memories of when he’d designed The Cloud. Either because the damn control system was finally figuring out that his experiences with The Cloud numbered highest on things he’d rather die than remember or because it was a waste of processing power, The Eye broke everything from that time into dry statistics.
Garth heaved a small sigh of relief, all too aware that Warden Peemes was starting to get antsy and that emotion was spilling over into the guards. He didn’t care; being spared The Eye’s ability to replay memory as if it was happening for the first time was a gift.
The answer didn’t take long. Garth didn’t know how to measure the intellectual or processing capacity of a computer made from quadronium and was willing to bet that more than ninety percent of what the damn thing brought to bear was devoted to keeping the implants –his body- under strict control, but he figured The Eye could get up to at least a six when it needed to.
The comparison was inconclusive. The Cloud in Gorensystem wasn’t nearly as complex as the supposed Cloud-variant that’d given birth to the myriad gears and what have you inside The Dome, but there were enough similarities to suggest it was possible; his Cloud and whatever was going on inside Arcade City were both capable of producing fiendishly complicated machines, and that was enough.
Then The Eye asked for a favor.
“Oh really?” Garth smirked. The Eye took –it seemed to him- great pleasure in denying him conscious control over all he’d taken for granted since coming into his full Kin’kithal heritage and here it was, admitting it couldn’t do everything.
Warden Peemes opened his mouth, but Mister Scourge interrupted with a barely hospitable raise of the hand. What in the devil was going on here?
“Warden Peemes,” Garth dipped his head apologetically at Peemes’ obvious discomfort, “I need a favor.” Beneath the hand pressed tight against the blackened metal of the massive Dome, the whirring and the ticking continued on. Was it a clock, counting down to some penultimate goal? Was it a titanic machine, staggering towards some unforeseen accomplishment?
Peemes held up a hand of his own, staying the guards once more. He caught a few dark looks on some faces, and knew he was mollycoddling this Scourge more than he ought. He couldn’t help himself, though. None of the other prisoners he’d invited to rest a hand upon The Dome had shown such interest, such … capacity to feel what hummed just on the other side.
None of his guards had manned up to touch the wall. They avoided contact like the metal would burn them alive.
“And what, Mister Scourge, would that be?” Peemes’ pocket watch chimed. Ah. They were almost ready. The Door would open soon, and that’d be that, as they said.
“I,” Garth cleared his throat and positively beamed as a rush of power flowed through his body, “I am going to punch the fucking shit out of this he
re Dome, Warden Peemes. Some craziness will happen. Your guards will probably spaz out and start shooting. I encourage you, for your sake, to totally prevent that from happening.”
“Mister Scourge,” Peemes smiled indulgently, though his patience was finally wearing thin as well, “two things you should be reminded of. One, The Dome has stood for thirty thousand years. It has withstood punishment unimaginable, even by one such as you.”
“And the other?” Garth flexed his free hand. With The Eye keeping him ‘normal’ most of the time, it was an eye-opener as to how truly powerful he’d been. Was. The speed and strength flowing through him right now was almost mind-blowing. With it, he could kill everyone in range of the Eye and be off towards Zanzibar in a stolen ship before anyone, anywhere, knew what’d happened.
No wonder he’d turned into such a colossal asshole. He owed the God soldiers a debt of gratitude simply by being who they’d been; the ongoing anxiety surrounding their similarities to Harmony soldiers had instilled him a healthy appreciation for the fact that he wasn’t the only being in the Unreal Universe to be at the far end of the ‘normality scale’.
Peemes smiled again, this time with far less bonhomie. “You, sir, are within range of their guns as well.”
“Meh.” Garth shrugged flippantly. “Not a gun around as can hurt me, Warden Peemes. With your permission?” The ex-Specter flaunted a fist, pointed at the wall with his head and wiggled his eyebrows.
“Make it snappy, Mister Scourge. We’re almost ready to usher you into the last few minutes of sanity you’re likely to experience before a grim, painful death at the hands of a cannibalistic lunatic.” Peemes stepped back. Though his guards knew not to open fire, they may do so anyways. Scourge had them all on edge. No sense in getting splattered, eh?
