Warden 1

by Isaac Hooke

  The front door closed behind her and a panel slid open in the room’s central cylinder, revealing a ladder that led upward.

  “Age before beauty.” Horatio beckoned toward the opening.

  Rhea gave Horatio a weary smile as she walked past into the tube and climbed the ladder. Soon she heard the repetitive clang of Horatio’s metal feet on the rungs below.

  She ascended past a circular ledge, reaching the hatch labeled B, and kept going. Below her, Horatio paused before that door and glanced up, waiting for her.

  She passed another circular ledge and arrived at the hatch labeled C. She stepped onto the ledge and there was a flash as some sort of scanner activated. Then the hatch swiveled open. As she entered, she peered over the ledge and saw that Horatio was finally entering his own room below.

  Making certain I enter, or ensuring I’m safe?

  When she was inside, the hatch sealed behind her. She found herself within a compartment that was roughly half the size of the first floor. Behind her, the entrance tube formed a cylindrical shaft that rested against the wall: the space on either side of the shaft was empty, forming a small aisle between the wall and the bed which took up the remainder of the space. Upon second glance, she realized that wasn’t a wall behind the shaft, but a partition that separated the bedroom from another chamber. A sliding door was partially open in that wall, and she peered past to find a sink, toilet and shower crammed into the remaining space.

  There were no windows anywhere in the rental. Though she supposed with AR, who needed windows anyway? She ran a media search on the Net for “scenic city panoramas,” and found a spectacular night-time view of Aradne city taken from the upper floors of some skyscraper. She used that video as the source for a virtual window she overlaid onto the wall above the bed.

  She crawled across the quilt to that window, rested her hands on the virtual windowsill, and peered out across the many buildings arrayed before her. Each of them had unique patterns of light climbing their exteriors. The glow from these lamps painted some buildings entirely red, and others blue; it also served to highlight the unique designs of some of the buildings, including one particularly grand structure shaped like a lowercase n. She smiled wistfully, wishing she truly resided in that city right now, in a spacious loft at the top of a skyscraper instead of a cramped cargo container in the slums. She ran an HourlyBnb search on the costs of such a rental, and quickly closed it when she saw the prices.

  She heard a muted clanging behind her, emanating from the central shaft. She slid off the bed and lingered next to the hatch, where she waited expectantly for the visitor to show himself.

  The clanging rose in volume, but then began to diminish as the climber continued past. She supposed it was another renter and sat down on the bed next to the shaft.

  The noise stopped entirely a moment later. She didn’t think the climber had gone farther than Will’s door, but she had no access to any of the shaft’s cameras to verify that. She glanced at her overhead map instead and confirmed that it wasn’t Horatio—the robot’s indicator flashed steadily in the chamber below hers. She tried to access the newcomer’s public profile through the hatch and got a hit. It was a woman. Ms. Merith Myers. Twenty-two years old. No occupation was listed, but she was pretty, at least according to the picture included with the profile.

  Rhea heard the muffled sound of a hatch opening and closing, and then very soft, muted voices. A short time later she heard a steady banging sound, as of a headboard repeatedly striking a wall. She also heard muffled screams. A woman’s.

  Fearing the worst, Rhea leaped off the bed and went to the central shaft. She acted completely on instinct: she didn’t know what she was going to do, but she would confront Will and somehow stop him from harming the woman.

  Before she could open the hatch, the screams became more distinct: “Yes! Yes!”

  She backed away from the shaft, feeling embarrassed, and the back of her legs hit the bed. She sat back down and ran a quick Net search on the keywords: human mating.

  That took her down the porn rabbit hole, and she ended up watching more than a few videos, partially to distract herself, but also in the hopes they would jog some sort of memory. No such luck. Nor did she experience anything close to arousal, not that her current body was equipped to satisfy such feelings even if she did.

  Eventually the screaming subsided, and after a moment’s respite, she heard the muted sound of the overhead hatch opening, followed by the rising and falling clangs from the shaft as the woman departed.

  Rhea closed her eyes and slept.

  The heavy-lidded man known as Kator stood in the dark alleyway, wearing his usual black vest and brown pants. He disliked the darkness, because it meant his face was harder to see; that face helped him intimidate those he dealt with, courtesy of the scars crisscrossing his features, and the uneven nose. His extensive build also helped, but that wasn’t really visible either at the moment, save in silhouette.

  Before him, seated on the ledge with her legs hanging down, resided Veil, Scourge of the North. She wore a black robe that covered her entire body, so that only her face was visible. A beautiful face. Synthetic. The light from a nearby lamp glinted off her chiseled features.

  “Harringer sends his regards,” Kator told Veil. He opened up an encrypted transfer window on his HUD and sent her the required cut from the casino’s profits.

  “Thank you.” Veil stood to go, balancing on the ledge. Multiple broad protrusions beneath the robe hinted at a form that wasn’t entirely human.

  Kator turned to go, but then hesitated. Glancing over his shoulder at Veil, he said: “By the way, the Dagger of Khrusos is back.”

  Veil paused. “Is she now?”

  Kator nodded. “I spotted her outside a curio shop in Bright Row. You might want to hack into the security camera logs of that neighborhood.”

  “Thank you.” Veil inclined her head.

  Kator received a cred alert on his HUD from an anonymous donor: Veil had deposited a small amount in his account. A reward for the news.

  “When I saw her,” Kator continued. “I figured I’d present myself and offer my usual services, but she just stared at me with fear in her eyes. I couldn’t believe it. The Dagger of Khrusos, afraid of me? Unbelievable. And get this: she’s sanded off her mark. Is there something I should know?”

  Veil didn’t answer.

  “You’re going to kill her, aren’t you?” Kator pressed.

  Veil smiled. Her face was partially turned from him, so that the nearby glow lamp only illuminated half of it; her smile trailed off into the darkness, making it seem more twisted and vile than perhaps it should have.

  “Not me,” Veil said. “I’ll leave that to the Scorpion.”

  7

  Rhea resumed her training the next morning. Horatio escorted her to Bardain’s cargo container, and then left Gizmo to watch over her while he did whatever it was robots did when they visited settlements.

  Bardain emerged, and activated the vaulted ceiling overlay on her HUD, blotting out the sky.

  “Today I’m going to teach you tactics to use against the most common foes you’ll encounter in the Outlands: the bioweapons,” he said. “Kargs, Werangs, and Tasins are the three main types. There are others, but in general, they’re all close enough to one of the three main types that you can use the same strategies to deal with them. We’ll focus on the Kargs first.”

  A creature appeared in the center of the street, courtesy of her HUD overlay. At first glance the entity was vaguely similar to a giant, clawed hand, but the more she studied it, the more alien it seemed. Hued a dark crimson, it was roughly twice as tall as she was, those thin, talon-like legs connected to a body that was more carapace than anything else. Though it currently stood on all fours, the hind legs were thicker and less claw-like than the forelegs, hinting at the ability to rear back at the very least, if not stand up outright. At the front resided a head that looked like a pineapple carved from cherry wood. Thin lines form
ed petal-like indentations in the segmented skin of the head, giving Rhea the impression it could unfurl like a flower, no doubt to reveal a deadly maw within.

  Between the four legs, several tentacles hung from the creature’s underbelly, their tips dangling a few centimeters above the ground. Those tentacles rose and fell as the creature’s carapace expanded and contracted in what appeared to be respiration. Rhea caught the occasional glint of white amid those hanging limbs—teeth?

  “Can you believe these creatures were originally engineered from birds and octopuses?” Bardain asked. “They’ve got serrated suckers running across the entire length of their tentacles, and in their mouths, you’ll find teeth that can crunch through most metal. They have weak vision, and while not completely blind, their sight is mostly useless except at close range. They make up for this deficiency with a weak form of echolocation. They’re relatively easy to handle when you catch them alone, but unfortunately, they usually hunt in packs.”

  The lone Karg multiplied to a pack of six. The creatures stood there, pawing at the ground, tentacles quivering angrily beneath their underbellies.

  “The key to taking out a Karg is targeting its tentacles,” Bardain explained. “Those appendages are extremely sensitive, and by scoring a successful hit on one you’ll cause the Karg an extreme amount of pain. Sometimes this backfires and caused the creature to charge you all the harder, but most of the time it’ll retreat to lick its wounds, abandoning any companions. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to stave off a Karg stampede simply by shooting each of them in the tentacles a few times.”

  “Do you really mean to call those tentacles and not testicles?” she asked, only half joking.

  “Funny girl,” Bardain replied.

  “And if I’m unlucky?” she continued. “And the stampede isn’t stopped by a few shots to their tentacles?”

  “Then you’ll have to keep hitting them until they go down,” Bardain said. “Little tip for you: the carapace, legs, and head are all extremely well-armored. Avoid them. Instead, you’ll inflict the most damage if you target the tentacles as I already described, or the underbelly. In an ideal world, you’d want to slide under them and fire your pistol into the underbellies at close to point blank range. Unfortunately, you’ll probably find yourself ground up by the tentacles of the first Karg you tried that on. But it’s something you can experiment with in training.

  “Bear in mind that while the bioweapons you encounter in training are designed to mimic their real life counterparts as closely as possible, even to the point of including random strength and body variations, there’s no guarantee the creatures you’ll meet in the wild will be similar. Expect variations and surprises. Now then, let’s see what you can do.”

  He gave her the training pistol and started the session.

  The Kargs all spotted her, and immediately stampeded through the street toward her. Because of their size, they could only fit three abreast.

  She concentrated her fire on one of them, aiming for the tentacles that hung down between the legs, as Bardain taught. She missed her first few shots, but finally scored a couple of hits.

  The creature screeched, and immediately tried to reverse course, plowing into the Karg immediately behind it and bringing them both down.

  She aimed at the next Karg, but it was too close… she let off a shot and leaped up, toward a nearby lean-to. Her robotic strength allowed her to travel the full two meters to the rooftop, and she landed on the edge with bent knees and rolled forward. She scrambled to her feet in time to see the Kargs leaping onto the roof behind her.

  She dashed forward, and her hood fell from her face. She scooped it back into place and hurried toward the roof of the next building.

  Another Karg leaped in front of her and tried to cut her off, but she shot, hitting a tentacle and send it squealing backward.

  “Nicely done!” Bardain said over the comm. “But if these were real Kargs, those buildings would have never held their weight—the creatures would have fallen through the roofs, bringing you down with them.”

  Motion at the periphery of her vision drew her eye downward, just in time to watch a Karg wrap its tentacle around her leg. Her body flashed white on the HUD, indicating a successful hit.

  “Well, you just lost a leg,” Bardain said. “And most likely your life. Reset.”

  The tentacle disappeared, as did the source Karg, and the other bioweapons with it.

  “Get down, and we’ll try again,” Bardain ordered.

  For the rest of that day, she cycled through different scenarios, which included the other two main types of Outland bioweapons. Bardain had her pause occasionally to work on her target practice, usually after a particularly dismal performance against the creatures, with her teacher dismissing the bioweapon overlays and replacing them with darting spheres. After around fifteen minutes of that, she went right back into the bioweapon scenarios. Bardain began to throw more difficult situations at her as the day progressed, making multiple types of creatures stalk her at the same time.

  She lost the scenarios most of the time, usually becoming overwhelmed by her attackers. All it took was a single strike from a tentacle or limb for the AR system to count her as dead. Rhea argued that that wasn’t entirely realistic, that she’d still be able to fight back if she lost an arm or leg, but Bardain wouldn’t have it. He was quick to point out: “It’s not the winning or losing that matters, but rather, I want you to develop a healthy respect for these creatures. I want you to understand their strengths and their weakness, yes, but most of all, I want you to learn to avoid them. That’s the only truly sensible strategy when it comes to bioweapons.”

  To that end, he soon started taking her through various stealth scenarios. These involved her sneaking past either roving or stationary bands of bioweapons. The Zargs proved the hardest to avoid, because of their echolocation abilities, but she found that if she remained stock-still when a group of them passed, usually they would avoid noticing her if she were upwind. Downwind, and she was screwed either way: the only recourse in that situation was to run every time. Run, take cover, and hope to hell they didn’t ferret out her hiding place. She was starting to understand why Bardain had told her that once she repaid her debt, she should get out.

  When that long day finally ended, she returned to the Bardain’s cargo container to wait for Horatio to pick her up. Once again, she was consigned to the sitting room at the entrance.

  Horatio arrived shortly and guided her back to the cargo container she called home for the time being. Gizmo followed along overhead, hidden in the night; she knew it was there only because of her overhead map.

  “I thought having a robot body would mean I wouldn’t feel exhaustion anymore,” Rhea told Horatio. “Why do I feel weary to the bone, then?”

  “Weariness can be caused by two things,” Horatio said. “The first is when you work too hard: as your servos overheat, they send signals to your brain to make you feel tired. In that case, all you have to do is sit down for a bit and let your robotics cool off. The second cause of weariness is malnutrition. Since the rest of your body is mechanical, any food you ingest will go a long way, but you still have to eat from time to time to properly nourish your human brain. Forgo food for too long, and you’ll experience weariness, which will become a strong malaise if left unattended, and finally all-out lethargy. I can imagine you must have felt very tired at times during the day’s training, but you recovered when your robotics cooled. Since you’re not working too hard at the moment, however, and you still feel weary, I have to ask, did you eat today?”

  “I forgot,” she admitted.

  “There you go,” Horatio told her. “I’m ordering a pizza for you.”

  “You’re not going to make me eat a fat pill, like Will?” she said, surprised.

  “I figure you’re allowed to splurge now and then, especially considering how hard you worked today in training,” Horatio told her.

  She leaped on him and gave him a hug. “Tha
nk you!”

  Horatio awkwardly pulled himself from her grasp. “Er, welcome. But in the future, please, no hugging? I have delicate electronics.”

  She laughed. “Not so delicate, if you’ve been able to last in the Outlands against bioweapons.”

  “You caught me,” Horatio said. “I just don’t like physical contact. Especially with cyborgs.”

  Rhea frowned. “Why not?”

  “Sometimes, they don’t know their own strength,” Horatio said. “Believe it or not, while those aren’t the strongest arms we gave you, you could still crush my chest enough to disable my power source.”

  “But I’d never do that,” she told him.

  “Not purposely, I’m sure,” Horatio agreed. “Though like I said, sometimes cyborgs don’t know their own strength.”

  They reached the HourlyBnb residence and piled inside. Rhea had acquired a bit of a lack-of-food headache by that time, but then she smelled it: the delicious scent of baked bread, melted cheese, and smoked ham, wafting through the room. Her eyes darted to the coffee table next to the trashcan-shaped attendant. A thin box waited on it, with a picture of a pizza stamped onto the cover and the words “Large - Feeds Three” underneath.

  The trashcan beckoned a telescoping limb toward the box. “Your dinner arrived while you were out.”

  Rhea eagerly snatched up the box and clambered to her chamber. When she was inside, she sat on the bed, retrieved the pizza, and ate the entire thing in under three minutes.

  When she set down the empty box, she felt better immediately. She’d read that humans often felt sleepy after eating a big meal, but she felt the opposite: her weariness and headache were gone, and she felt full of energy.

  She wanted to explore the Rust Town and see what it had to offer at night. Maybe she could visit Aradne as well—assuming any guards allowed her inside.

  Yet she was also afraid to leave her room. Even if she kept her hood pulled low, there was a good chance someone might try to rob her, especially if she was out alone. And when they found out she was a cyborg, all bets were off. If she really wanted to leave, she’d have to ask Horatio or Will to escort her, and somehow she doubted either of them would be leaving their rooms any time soon. As far as she knew, Will had stayed inside all day, a steady stream of transport drones supplying him with all the food and goods he could want. He probably had another lady friend on her way to his chamber at this very moment. As for Horatio, he’d told her about a massively multiplayer VR game designed specifically for AIs—no doubt he was currently logged in and playing.