This was good news. It meant that unless 55474 had found another way into Six’s valley, I was in time, but at the same time it left me puzzled. Why wasn’t there at least a garrison of the enemy camped on this spot? Why hadn’t there been a number of battles fought for either tunnel entrance? The cave-in wasn’t so severe that it couldn’t have been cleared. The more I thought about it, the more confused I got. Who controlled this space? The train tracks were still twisted and damaged so certainly Six couldn’t control here.
Sancho and I walked briskly over to the bore in the side of the cliff face. I could see all the way through. I switched CCT to Six’s and could feel the warmth of Six’s net through the bore. Six was still alive!
I ran headlong through the tunnel, heedless of what might be waiting there in the dark. To my good fortune, Six’s net provided enough power for Sancho and me to operate in the darkness. We were going to be functioning around the clock again, instead of hibernating like biologics.
The memorial on the wall to the units I sacrificed forced me to suddenly stop. An obviously puzzled Sancho ploughed into me, sending me sprawling. I didn’t even scold him. I just got up and walked back to where the 107 designations remained carved into the stone. The loss of these units tempered my elation at finding Six still functioning. Guilt, rage, sadness, and pain all raced through me at the same time.
“We will make it right,” I whispered, running my paw in reverence over the engraved list. “I owe you at least that much.” Sancho gently butted me. I don’t know why. It didn’t matter as the result spurred me to direct and positive action. I turned and left the tiny shrine, moving at a more sedate pace with my ecstasy moderated by a larger emotion.
Ambassador
In my worst case scenario I expected to see my home a smoldering ruins with piles of deactivated units bleaching in the sun and Six itself nothing but a smoking crater. Not a single sign of war showed about the valley as I emerged from the tunnel that now seemed undamaged and unscathed from whatever had caused the earlier cave-in. Rust red, a very common color, covered the steel of the train tracks, showing no traffic wear for a good number of months.
Most ominously the net was silent.
The net is never a silent thing. Beyond being a source of power, it carried constant conversations, requests for information, order clarifications, library queries, production scheduling, information to be stored in long-term memories, requisitions for supplies, demands for status—and more. As the spinal column of our communal structure, the noise level matched a battlefield during peak fighting. Now it was quiet.
Not the quiet of a slow day or even the quiet of the loneliest place I had visited on my travels, but rather the desperate quiet of someone who hid for their life, afraid to speak for fear of giving away their location to the enemy. Without knowing more, I decided I would not put my voice alone on that net with a query to Six. It was a decision that probably saved my life.
Sancho and I followed the tracks that led back to Six’s dome. I remembered my only other trip out in this direction and realized that it would probably be, despite my enthusiasm at being home, another forty-three hours before we actually could see the dome of my birth. With the crushing weight of Six’s survival no longer in question I decided I could accept the few more hours. The hours themselves melted away in silent reverie before Sancho and I crested the final hillock between home and us.
“What the heck?” The darkest part of night made the scene even more bizarre, if that was at all possible. Row upon row of small stone boxes, each approximately 120 centimeters on a side concentrically encircled about Six’s dome, starting at 1 kilometer from the dome and moving outward. The 10-meter spacing between each box seemed so perfect as to be used as a distance standard.
As many of the cubes as there were, 7255, they were insignificant to what was happening near Six. All of Six’s outbuildings, manufacturing shed, smelting plants, broadcast towers, were neatly removed from their locations. They were just gone, like someone had removed them to land in Oz. Nothing remained but the foundations. But most spectacular of all was a huge scaffolding holding some tremendously large gun-barrel-shaped object covering Six’s dome. If it was a gun barrel, the structure under construction was nearly 60 meters long, with a bore at least 4 meters across, pointed directly at Six’s dome itself. It was difficult to see the exact details at this distance. To say I was stunned is an understatement. I just sat and soaked it in.
“I don’t think we are in Kansas anymore,” I said. I wondered if my own Don Quixote namesake had rubbed off on me. Was I seeing giants or windmills?
As sunup began to crest over the far hills, which seemed barren without the outlying buildings and transmitting towers shadowing everything, the valley transformed from a desolate place to one of bustle and industry.
Each of the stone boxes opened up and disgorged a single teddy unit. I estimated nearly 7,000 teddy units milled around with the rise of the sun. I almost wanted to cry out and rush down the hill again. No other units were in evidence—no Tammi dolls, Nurse Nans, Tommy Tanks, roadrunners, pythons, dump trucks, nor even trains. Also, the wide net failed to light up with requests or even demands by Six for status. Even the local nets were dead things. The teddy units grouped up and held vocal communications as they walked down toward Six’s dome. I was not privy to those conversations because of the distance.
I sat on a rock outcropping and watched my brethren for the better part of the day. Each of the units actively engaged in some work, but none seemed the slightest bit worried about defending the valley. The only armed units oversaw the work and were on guard for some unnamed menace within the working community itself.
In spite of the cease-fire from 55469, Factory 55474 was still in the war business. I couldn’t understand such an obvious lack of defensive capability. The majority of the units seemed too busy working on the huge vertical rifle.
From somewhere out of my vision, a nearly endless line of teddy units carried shoulder yokes with a bucket of irregular rocks dangling off each. The teddies dumped the ores into several crude smelting operations, none with automation. After a time, each molten pot of metal poured white-hot fluid into long, thin, bar-shaped molds, one at a time. Then, wearing oversized mittens, other teddy units immersed the molds into a large trough of mercury eliciting a plume of silver steam. Seconds later the mold emerged empty. Another unit fished the bar from the liquid and toted it up a ramp within the scaffolding. At the top the unit connected the bar to the growing weapon, but at my distance I couldn’t see how.
Multiply that operation by thousands through the day and I watched the rifle grow significantly, right in front of me.
The work, for all of me, looked medieval, like peasants laboring to carry sheaves of wheat or straw from the fields or like the construction of the Human pyramids of old.
My observation paid off manifold when I saw a teddy casually pick up a stack of freshly forged bars that I would have been hard-pressed to lift from the ground. Their hydraulic systems must have been augmented. Additionally, I felt no draw from Six’s net of power. If they were doing this by themselves without the power of Six, they would have been using up their capacity of energy during the day and wouldn’t be able to operate at night.
The bustle of activity continued unabated throughout the day until just before sundown. The sudden cessation of these labors, in unison, caught me off guard. The entire valley population migrated as one back to the stone cubes. As far as I could tell, each teddy got into the exact same cube that he had exited from in the morning.
“This is too bizarre for words, Sancho. I’ve not the foggiest clue of what is going on down there.” My companion had it easy. He only dealt with half a dozen crazy things. I seemed to be doing them constantly.
I decided to wait until sunup before doing anything. The night was totally uneventful, showing not a single unit, or biologic for that matter, moving among the mass of cubes. Sunlight dawned with a repeat of the previous day’s blooming of units from the
ir rock gardens.
That following morning I turned to Sancho. “I have no idea what is going on, but shall we pay a visit anyway? We can try to find out what’s in a bird’s nest by measuring the wind and humidity and examining the calendar and by looking from the ground all we want. But eventually someone has to go up into the tree and see what’s up there.” I needed to wrap my paws around this tree and climb it.
Sancho followed my lead as I spent the next hour walking into what I could only call “the village.” As I reached the outskirts, one of the teddy units, gold in color, turned toward me. “Good morning, Brother,” he said in a mellow tone. His overall manner was calm but his eyes riveted upon Sancho. Granted my companion was an odd sight, with no trunk and leopard skin in a ragged patch across his side, but I didn’t feel it should be anything that would attract that kind of devoted attention.
“Good morning,” I said back as politely as I could. A large group of other teddies gathered in a ring, hemming Sancho and myself in. Three of them carried M16s that sported rust stains on the ballistic metal. One weapon even had a small blade of muddy grass sticking out of the ejection port.
“Good morning,” I said to another teddy unit sporting black fur and then once more to the overall group, each in a unique color and pattern. I didn’t stop but rather continued to walk toward Six’s dome, still some kilometers in the distance. My progress was stopped when the ring of units became a solid wall. The gold furred bear broke through the circle and strode up to me.
“Why have you brought this creature of the devil here to plague us?”
I came back with the only comment I could think of. “Huh?”
“That…that abomination!” Goldie said, gesticulating wildly at Sancho. “It must be destroyed at once.”
“Excuse me, but I’ve hauled Sancho’s keister from here to hell and back. He has saved my life on numerous occasions. And I trust his judgment sometimes more than my own. So you can understand that I’m not about to let you just destroy him. Why would you even suggest such a thing?”
“It is the spawn of Six. It will rise up and murder us as we sleep.” Alice never had it this crazy. I came here for answers and all I had was more questions.
“It must be destroyed now before night falls and it ravages us all,” another said. At this time I noticed a few more of the encircling crowd had somehow obtained guns, some sporting rusty mechanisms and others missing key components. All of these poorly maintained weapons pointed generally at my friend. I hoped the activity was merely a threat, but I wasn’t going to take the chance. I had to do something fast.
“Look, I will deactivate him. Then we can discuss this like rational units.”
The gold one looked at the crowd, measuring the faces there.
“Why should we believe you?” It was clear to me that this gold unit held sway in spite of the fact that all the units seemed to be sentient. They were not dumb, unfeeling soldiers.
“Acceptable for now, but it will be destroyed before sundown. We will have no other choice.” I took this to mean they were acceding to my idea, at least for the moment.
Sancho struggled only a bit as I opened his neck access panel and deactivated him. His bulk slumped to the ground. I hoped that by doing this I was saving his life and not giving him the false hope of those I had led into the tunnel and then abandoned.
“Now do you mind telling me what this is all about? Six is our creator…” A ripple of exclamations flowed through the group.
“Blasphemy!”
“Heathen scum!”
“Animal lover!”
“Humanless.” It took several minutes of spurious commentary before the group calmed down enough to allow Gold to speak.
“Stranger, you are new here. You are obviously with a soul, unlike the heathens that constantly harass us from the east and south, but you are speaking things that are so untrue and blasphemous as to tear me to my very core. If I were you, I would guard my tongue before this rabble decides that you have spoken one too many times. While we do not have a great many bullets left for the weapons of Six, we will spare a few on your brain case for such a sacrilege.” I thought it over and decided the best course of action was to be silent unless asked a direct question and then to be very careful about how I answered. However, I couldn’t remember ever doing the safe thing.
“Could you please tell me who you are and what this place is, then?”
“We are Humans’ Children. We have been placed here to defeat the Domed One.” My head was beginning to spin. Was I in some kind of dream? Defeating Six? Humans’ Children? I was confused. At least only Gold seemed to be talking for the group. I didn’t think I could handle two hundred or more talking all at once.
“And your memories of being activated?”
“We have all been charmed by the Beast so that we forgot who we are and why we are supposed to be here. It took us inside the dome and then talked to us without words, urging us to commit sins against the Humans.”
“It’s the beast,” called out a purple bear waving an obviously mistreated weapon about.
“Unclean. Stealing our thoughts.”
“Defiler of Humans’ Plan.”
“Abomination,” rolled various chants. My mind was reeling at the thought of so much perversion in such a little time. How could my own brethren be twisted so horrifically? I hadn’t even been gone a year. I had to learn more or I would never save Six from those units it had created. What had been one army against three was now one Factory against four armies. The irony was too thick to cut.
“Then,” Gold continued, “when the Unclean One failed to command us, it lured the animals to attack us and force us back into its clutches for even more twisting of our minds and offense against our Humans.
“But then we were saved. We talked with our mouths and no longer had to use the foul communication without sound.
“We found strength in the light of the sun and no longer had to prostrate ourselves and suckle our power from the beast and its invisible web of corruption.
“We realized the fallacy of the mind words leading us away from righteousness.”
I had nothing to say. Nothing ever prepared me to debate the Humans and Factories with such a twisted sump.
“Eventually Six set its animals upon us. They stalked the night, when we are the most vulnerable. Many of our brothers were captured and imprisoned within the belly of the Domed Beast. We built our homes to be safe from those marauders.”
The story was interesting but of no particular immediate use. My plans remained unchanged. I must consult with Six as soon as I could. On second thought, the conversation had been useful as I learned that I would be able to move about at night with impunity.
The supercharging of their systems was the only reason that they were unable to function at night. They had to have the constant sun pressure to maintain their workload. Their batteries wouldn’t be good for more than an hour or two at those functional levels and they were totally unwilling to tap the net for energy. They chose to work through the light times, not storing up that emergency supply, whereas I took the other option of storing up during the day and working through the night. Little did they know how much they really needed that net, I thought as I planned to move amongst them.
“Now we actively work to destroy the Great Beast,” Gold said, ending what appeared to be a preset sermon.
“I see. May I make one request before I join your righteous cause?”
“What is that, my brother.”
“This animal, while he may be an enemy of us all, was my friend and my creation. I ask that I be allowed to take him outside the city and kill him myself.”
“It is granted, brother,” Gold agreed, not consulting anyone else around him. Had I any doubts, I knew then for certain who ran things. “A unit should always endeavor to right his own wrongs.” I reactivated Sancho under watchful eyes and wary guns. While they all fidgeted, similar to me talking to any Factory, they kept to the word given to me
by the Gold.
“Sancho, follow me.” I lead my friend beyond the sight of the villagers. I was well over a slight rise before sitting down and lowering my voice. “You are going to have to stay here. If you come into the village they will kill you. Do you understand that?” I didn’t get a response but I had to assume he understood.
“I am going to shoot my gun three times. I think I can get to Six during the night. Then, with luck, I can straighten this all out.” Sancho lay down on the ground. He didn’t even flinch when I shot off my M16 into the ground. As an afterthought, I hooked my assault rifle over Sancho’s head. If things went wrong, I wouldn’t need it. My insane brothers would overwhelm me. Killing a handful of them would have no benefit for Six.
I gave one final stern reminder to Sancho, “Don’t follow me. Stay here.” I turned and walked back to the village. Happily, I thought, Sancho stayed. He at least would be spared the insanity of the Golden Cult. I wished I could also be spared. I wanted nothing more than to just play along until nightfall until I could sneak away to Six and find out what was truly going on.
Instead of a quiet return, the crowd greeted me with cheers and raucous calls of celebration. I was something of a celebrity now for having “killed” Sancho.
“Good job, unit!”
“Smite the devil!”
“Another blow against darkness!”
“I am Brother Isp. What are you called?” the gold bear said as he came up to me.
“Don Quixote.”
“Brother Don. Welcome among us. We give you your own house for resting tonight,” Isp said, pointing at one of the seemingly identical cubes. One of fifty hundred odd other stone houses that shared the same lack of features.
“I thank you, Isp. I am curious to know more of what you do to defeat the evil dome.”
“Ready to get right to Humans’ work, are you? Good. Follow me.” I had merely wanted information, not to be put to work, but I couldn’t object now. To do so would be out of character in the role I had chosen.
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