by Lee Bond
“Are you certain?” Trinity demanded, voice hissing concern.
Enforcer Slate looked at the man on the HUD a final time, scrupulously considering the very near future. If Trinity wanted a visual ID, the answer was going to have to be an emphatic ‘no’; he was an investigative Enforcer, a data-gatherer, not a soldier like the others. His Suit wasn’t geared for the kind of punishment Ingrams could dish out.
Slate preferred dealing with the mercurial machine mind’s dissatisfaction than risk outright death by someone who looked like they got winded breathing. Shallowly.
Trinity’s bizarre insistence on maintaining the fallacy of ‘Ingrams’ … essence … was yet another reason why Slate had zero of intention on going anywhere but nowhere.
Enforcer Durn, who was down there on the beach with Kant, hadn’t been given a choice. Or, rather, Durn’s body was down there on the beach. Trinity had no qualms about spending Enforcer lives to trap Kant Ingrams, which was problematic for those who wore the Suit, because they all pretty much liked living and hated the fact that they were being routinely trounced by a goddamn Adjutant.
“Possibly? There’s definitely a normal looking NorthAMC citizen down there. Energy readouts indicate he was there during the death spasms of Enforcer Durn. Suit AI denies the possibility of any normal human surviving close proximity.” Slate shrugged again. “Are there any other men that look like this Kant Ingrams pencil pusher but who are secretly capable of beating Enforcers silly?”
On the HUD, Kant Ingrams took another step closer to The Dome, wringing his hands and licking his lips, looking over his shoulder every few seconds like he was doing something he knew he shouldn’t, but couldn’t keep from doing all the same.
Trinity’s answer chilled Slate to the marrow. “Analysis of records on hand suggests anywhere from twelve to fifteen others more capable of ‘beating Enforcers silly’, Slate, though Kant appears to be the only one willing to directly involve himself in such pursuits. Watch him. It’s taken a long time and cost many precious lives to con Kant Ingrams back here. If we are lucky, what happens next will be similar to what happened a hundred years ago. When that happens, many other problems plaguing Me will be resolved instantly.”
Slate shook his head in disgust. Twelve to fifteen more men like this Kant Ingrams, each capable of fighting Enforcers bare knuckled? What was the Universe coming to? “By your command, Trinity.”
Empty comm-space said Trinity was gone. Sighing, Slate reoriented on Kant and started watching, though he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what Trinity was hoping for; there was no data on what’d happened a ‘hundred years ago’. No matter this sudden pique of interest, Slate thought better of digging deeper, and for a very good reason.
You had to look no further than Enforcer Griffin. Of all of them, none had persevered in the dangerous desire to dig deep into the type of secrets Trinity held close to Its impartial, cybernetic bosom, and no one had seen the machine mind’s most cherished wunderkind in years.
If Trinity was willing to disappear an Enforcer who’d quickly risen in the ranks for a little peeking every now and then …
Slate was more than content to watch from a distance. As long as ‘Ingrams’ didn’t turn his attention his way, he’d continue to spy and feel bad for the Enforcer getting killed down below.
***
Erg looked down at the shattered suit of armor, tilting his head at the messy organic stew slowly congealing inside. It was the first time -at least as far as he knew- he’d killed an one of Trinity’s right hand men; prior to the gooey corpse at his feet, each armored lapdog beaten to a pulp by his mighty CyberPriestly fists disappeared in a violet haze of displacement energy before visibly expiring, possibly succumbing to mortal wounds on the other side, leaving a ‘Priest woefully uncertain about his efficacy.
But not this time. This Enforcer had kept coming back for more, kept taking bone-jarring, Suit-cracking punishment. Had done that, delivering equal amounts of abuse in return; Erg’s bones hurt, his very skin ached, one or two teeth were certainly loose and one of his most favorite shoulder-augments had been knocked off. Undoubtedly the cherished item was now resting on the deep ocean bed, home to the bizarre creatures that called Earth’s poisonous waters ‘home’.
The CyberPriest knew well why Trinity kept throwing Its Enforcers at him; since returning to the Brotherhood, Erg had to admit he’d been somewhat less circumspect in remaining hidden. Now that Trinity knew what he was and what he was capable of, the pathetic machine mind was scrambling to lay hands on him once more.
This time –no doubt- with the intention of capturing the brothers.
It claimed It was incapable of true emotion, of expressing anything beyond the clinical and rational, but Erg knew differently. Trinity’s nearly obsessive drive to track him down and capture him revealed an emotion, all right.
It was afraid.
In the beginning, when things had gone so horribly awry and he’d been captured, the systemic AI had been under the illusion that he was unique in the Universe, and had reacted according to Its whimsy when it came to the rare, the legendary. It’d preserved Erg, never once knowing that there were more CyberPriests out there in the dark.
How Trinity must’ve loved using one unique monster to fight other irreplaceable monsters. How It must’ve laughed to Itself of the irony.
Erg sneered. Well, where once It had been pleased with Itself, now it was terrified. Ever since engineering Naoko Kamagana’s kidnapping from underneath both Jordan Bishop and Spur the Android, the CyberPriests were dominating Trinity’s processors. The brothers were out there, spread as thin and as far apart as they could be and still maintain contact through their cybernetic links, and they all reported the same thing:
Trinity Itself was on the hunt. Where it should be using Enforcers to discover a method through the truthfully impressive energy shield surrounding an entire solar system, It was instead sending them door-to-door, interrogating everyone who may have possibly ever encountered something as strange and as mysterious as a CyberPriest. It was devoting more resources to sussing the whereabouts of a handful of cybernetic misfits than had ever been used for anything else save, perhaps, Tannhauser’s Gate.
Stomping the Enforcer’s helmeted head flat, Erg sneered again. It might want the other brothers dead, but Erg knew one thing for certain; Trinity wanted him back, wanted him for some new role. He was different than the other CyberPriests now. He’d been places and done things in Trinity’s name, things not even Enforcers could do, not in a million years, not if the machine mind gave Its minions technology fifty thousand years more advanced.
But Erg would never return to Trinity’s cold, mechanical embrace. There were other things on his mind.
Then he looked up at the thing he’d been avoiding ever since the Enforcer had landed on the beach.
The Dome of Gears. The TikTok Dome. A thing of myth and legend. Ranking up there with the Emperor’s mystical dome, Chadsik al-Taryin, 9-Nova-12. Trinity’s passionate protection of the rare, the unique, the mysterious always confused mortal men and women, had them buzzing and chattering and speculating on the reasons why their august artificial intelligence would seek to protect things that were obviously –blatantly and painfully- in direct contravention of rationality.
But to men like Erg, there was no confusion. Oh no, to men like Erg, Trinity’s motives for keeping things like The Dome, like the King, alive and well made sense. Trinity needed them. It needed all of them, or imagined It might. When the war came, when the Heshii arrived in Trinityspace, when those extra-dimensional locusts shattered the Cordon shield … far more than armies and Enforcers were going to be required. Hoarding all those strange and powerful things across thousands of years had proven the right thing to do, as those in the know had witnessed when Tannhauser’s Gate had broken wide. So it made sense –even more so- that The Dome remained standing until the final fight against the Hesh.
The ‘Priests approved of this tactic, naturally
. Why, they themselves were doing the same thing with Trinity. The moment they’d realized -oh, it must’ve been twenty-five thousand years ago or so- that Trinity was destined to become Humanity’s Leader by defeating ADAM, they’d settled back and let the machine mind triumph. They would let Trinity battle the Heshii monstrosities to a standstill and then they, the CyberPriests, would roll in and finish the job.
After that?
Blessed silence.
Just as the Unwritten Scriptures promised.
Erg licked his lips, took a step forward, eyes trained on The Dome. He realized he’d been staring at the massive metal cap, mind almost completely blank the whole time.
He shouldn’t be here. It was transparently obvious to the CyberPriest that Trinity had been working diligently to lure him to this point –no doubt in the hopes that that century-old mistake would be repeated a second time- but … Erg was powerless.
Here, on Old Earth, was one of the greatest mysteries of all time. This Dome, this one, made of metal and gears and clockwork and capable of absorbing damage that could tear a world in half … this one mystery had always captivated Erg, from the moment it’d risen up out of the earth’s crust to enclose almost all of what’d been the British Isles.
Erg started walking slowly. It was a trap. His brothers, spread throughout the stars, were all but screaming at him to stay well away from the thundering walls.
They neither understood nor shared his fascination with The Dome. They never had. To the other brothers, the TikTok Dome was just one more reason why the Unreal Universe needed destroying, and in a hurry.
Errant concern welled up inside Erg, left over emotion from the human psyche that the ‘Priest had been forced to endure for a hundred years. The raw feeling stopped the CyberPriest short for a moment.
Erg knew he should leave. This was how Trinity had trapped him into the body and mind of Kant Ingrams for a hundred years, how It’d used him to destroy ancient and archaic weapons and horrors better used to further the destruction of the Unreality.
Shutting his eyes for a moment, Erg recalled that fatal moment, a century ago, when, after thousands of years of avoiding The Dome, he’d walked across this very same shore, head filled with this very same yearning to understand the secret. The clarity of that memory was pristine. Erg, walking on the shore, walking up to The Dome, feeling the thunderous –exciting- clunking of gears hundreds of feet across striking against one another, the beautiful precision of the moment.
Rumor had it that The Dome hadn’t always been thus, but those stories were told by the humans guarding the Geared Doors. Organic minds were messy and disorganized at the best of times, and the FrancoBrits standing vigilant were prime examples of Humanity’s inherent weaknesses.
An identical feeling rose through the balls of his feet right that moment. Nothing in the mechanics of The Dome had changed since that last, epic visit. He could tell. Every fiber of his being remembered every single soft tick, every thunderous tock.
Erg opened his eyes and turned his head up, enjoying the swell of emotion rising in him. The clamor from his brothers grew louder. They, like Trinity, were terrified. With one of their brothers still trapped in the pseudo-psyche hammered into him by that bitch Kamagana, they were a man down. As the ‘Priests prepared themselves for war, they couldn’t afford to lose another, especially not to Trinity, who surely had forces in the area ready to swoop in and steal Erg away for a second time.
But they couldn’t understand.
He, Erg1, was different now. Better.
He’d been to Latelyspace, seen N’Chalez, stood in his presence, felt –now that he knew what’d been going on- the waves of extra-dimensionality rolling from the man when he himself had still been mostly ignorant of his true nature.
Erg knew he would survive whatever … power … The Dome held. This time, this time things would be different.
This time when a hand fell on the shuddering, juddering metal plates holding Arcade City apart from the rest of the damaged Unreality, Erg knew he would be just fine.
Trinity’s Enforcers -wherever they were- were going to be sorely disappointed.
The CyberPriest started moving again, recalling how slick The Dome’s outer surface had felt beneath the palm of his hand. And the vibrations! Large and small, fast and furious, slow and plodding. The sensation had stolen his mind away for a moment as he’d tried to fathom the purpose behind such a colossal machine.
The thunder of the gears grew heavier, literally stealing his breath away, one tumultuous rotation at a time. The CyberPriest smiled wistfully at the century-old memories. All was the same. No one could properly understand why this one perfect thing out of all the perfect things that inhabited their Unreality was so captivating.
They never would, either, because they were short-sighted fools clamoring to the End too eagerly to pay attention to the other players in the game.
Back then, Erg1 had done the only rational thing after slapping his hand onto The Dome. He’d reached inside, pushing the vaunted and powerful disharmonized mind belonging to every CyberPriest deeper and deeper into the pristine clockwork of the TikTok Dome until … until …
Nothing.
The emptiness inside The Dome had eaten away at the chaos of his broken soul, leaving him ripe for Trinity to steal away, to repurpose, to …
Erg cursed. He was at Geared Doors. His fingers tingled and his palms itched. He stared up at the sky. He should leave. This was a trap laid by Trinity. If everything about The Dome was unchanged, then, by that same token, everything that had happened would happen again.
But he couldn’t help himself. There was a mystery inside The Dome’s unbreakable walls, a secret that sang to him.
Feeling reckless and wild, Erg raised a hand …
***
“I, er, shouldn’t do that, I were you.” Warden Peemes wrinkled his nose at the sight of the man. The fellow didn’t look FrancoBritish, which was a bit odd; it was strange to come across anyone other than wealthy FrancoBrits hoping for a bit of a sneak peek at a Geared Door just shortly after a crop of King’s cons was ushered through into their new, hellish life on earth, and with Scourge having willingly passed inwards, Peemes seriously doubted any of the Universe’s … stranger … inhabitants would come calling so soon afterwards.
Peemes furrowed his brow as he tried to recollect just what had brought him out of the offices in such a screaming hurry. Some sort of to-do a while ago, hey? Out across the ocean and all the way up to their front doorstep, as it were? The Warden thought that felt right, but … the chap just staring at the Door in that way, well, it just seemed as though the longer he looked at the odd duck, the reasons for coming melted away.
The Warden shrugged. No matter. Was probably the same old thing, anyways, no matter the fella looked like he couldn’t afford a proper meal. Now the Door had opened and closed, it was a Warden’s sorry lot in life to tell those who’d come for a lookee-lou that they were wasting everyone’s time.
“Why not?” Erg’s hand was millimeters away from The Dome. Electricity or some other power danced across his itchy skin. “There is no law against it, is there? People come all the time, to gaze in wide wonder at this ancient miracle, don’t they? Now law against looking.”
“Well,” Peemes wanted to look at the man wanting to touch The Dome but couldn’t. His eyes just kept sliding right off. “Well, not as such, no. The King couldn’t care less what you do, which is the only law around here that I obey but Trinity Itself…”
“Trinity Itself is a machine, Warden Peemes. A foolish, stupid machine. If only you people knew how foolish, how stupid. You would consider it a miracle of impossible proportions that you are all still alive.” Erg refused to look at the simpering fool in his foppish clothes and ridiculous moustache.
The Geared Door –with all its moving parts- was singing. There was a perfection to the orchestral thundering that made him, with all his intentional imperfections, ache for something similar.
It was a seriously uncomfortable sensation, yet Erg couldn’t look away.
Loyal to the King as Peemes was, he was still no fool; Trinity Itself was the absolute power in the Universe and you heard stories all day every day about how It disliked being badmouthed. Why, if It were listening right then, they’d all be in a passel of trouble by lunch, no two ways about it. The Warden danced nervously from foot to foot for a moment before changing tack. “Not that it’ll do you any good, knocking.”
This drew Erg’s attention. He turned to confront the nervous Warden Peemes. “Oh?”
Peemes blinked suddenly, and threw his hands up in absurd fright. There was … there was something … he blinked again and whatever nightmarish images he’d imagined to be snapping and slicing the air around the skinny fellow were gone. He stammered an apology.
Pressure from The Dome beneath his feet had him distracted, Erg realized. It was a rare human being who could see through the veil of disinterest generated by ‘Priests. Peemes’ reaction, though, was a step beyond all that; it was as though he’d actually seen the slightly out-of-phase machinery that was the true visage of a CyberPriest.
Most … distressing.
Erg did his best to smile and motioned for Peemes to continue. In the back of his mind, the memory of touching The Dome played on and on. The sensation of the pattern ground out by the clockwork guts was inscribed on his bones, the burst of light … the blankness that was Kant Ingrams … over and over again, over and over. The itching in his palms grew.
There was a part of him that wanted to leave, just as his brothers demanded, but the other part, the part who’d been out there, who’d seen things the brethren could only imagine … that wild part demanded action.
Peemes straightened his collar, glad that his men were just out of sight, ready to attack should things go poorly. There’d been another reason, something to do with … something, but that was gone like yesterday’s dessert. Even his men –overhead through a cochlear implant- were suddenly wondering aloud why they’d come armed and ready for danger when it was just one weird looking gobshite hoping to rap rap rap on their Door.
