The Farthest City

by Daniel P Swenson

  Three chines advanced from the crowd, stopping squarely between them and the flier. Two were combat designs. More big uglies, she thought with a sinking feeling. These hovered, riding plumes of heat, before settling to the ground onto triangular tracks. They reminded her of elephants, with round heads, big ear-like wings, and a vertical structure that could have been a trunk if she squinted. The third was much smaller, but she still had to look up at it. It was vaguely human-shaped, with two legs and three arms, each arm wielding a weapon of some kind. The chine had a superhuman look about it, as if it could run forever or lift vehicles singlehanded. But the human resemblance stopped there. It peered at them with the clustered sensors of its otherwise featureless head. The new arrivals seemed to want something.

  Chapter 27 – Words

  “We may find them yet.” Mediator handed Abby’s tool belt to Kellen. “They could still be out there, hiding.”

  Kellen appreciated the sentiment, but he doubted it. They would have returned by now. No, they’d been captured, and he had no illusions. He would never see them again. The Tunnel Town chines told of just three that managed to escape from Gatherer’s clutches in the past century. Two had gone insane, the third killed in a subsequent raid.

  Mediator waited for a few minutes, then went back to directing repairs. After a time, Kellen returned to the tunnel he’d shared with Abby. He needed to get away from the destruction. Something blooped as he passed Abby’s makeshift workbench. He stopped and it blooped again, louder. He sifted through one pile of parts, then another. Only as the sound repeated a third time did he think to reach under the benchtop. The device attached underneath came off easily, a metal pyramid that just fit his palm. A shock passed from the device to his hand like a spark. Kellen cried out and dropped it.

  “Kellen Beaudin.” The voice came from the device. “I am an aspect of Chronicler, ex-representative, 136th citizen of the Six Star Array, City of the Six Suns. I was set to activate in your presence if my parent consciousness was absent for more than twelve hours. Per instructions, I have installed information in your brain. When certain criteria are met, the information will become accessible as memory.”

  “What do you mean?” Kellen asked. “What criteria? What am I supposed to do?” He waited in vain for it to tell him more, but it seemed to have reverted to just another lump of metal. I am the last of the Four, he thought. I’m alone.

  Wait, another part of him replied. Don’t be so quick to despair. They could still be alive, and if they are, I can rescue them, can’t I? I’ve got to try.

  The residents gathered in the dark center of Tunnel Town, waiting for answers no one could provide. Kellen stepped into their midst. “I’ve got to find my friends.”

  “We go with you,” Micro said. “To find Abby, Chronicler.”

  Kellen found comfort in the little chine’s presence.

  Mediator fixed its single eye on Kellen. “Yes. It’s now or never. We stay and die a few at a time, or fight back and maybe go home. Who agrees?”

  Every chine signaled its assent.

  Kellen had never felt closer to these beings of metal, plastic, and silicon. The distinction between human and chine had blurred. What mattered had nothing to do with categories. We go with you. Those few words were what mattered. He no longer felt so alone, and his mind turned to the task at hand.

  #

  Kellen gazed once more over the ridgetop into Gatherer’s territory. Silence lay like a blanket over the valley. The caldera exhaled a plume of heavy mist that veiled the terrain, hiding the entrance to Gatherer’s lair. Kellen watched for any movement by the enemy, but nothing stirred.

  Micro signaled for the chines to advance. Thirty-two in all, including the disembodied cores of the con bots they carried with them. Only a few of the larger con bots had survived Gatherer’s last raid. Now only the thinnest of partials, they came up, crushing rock under their treads. The noise startled a few mass stealers down in the valley. The rear of the column arrived, rebuilt, empty somes walking awkwardly, controlled by code. He ran ahead to rejoin Micro at the head of the column.

  They reached the bottom of the valley, and Kellen looked up at the caldera ahead. Kellen assumed Gatherer watched them now. The insanity of prey entering a predator’s lair blared in his mind. Despite their best-laid plans, what were the odds they’d survive the next few hours? He shrugged inwardly. No time for doubts now.

  Mediator sent the empty somes and partials marching off toward the main entrance. Too large to pass through the tunnel, they’d been assigned to create a diversion and buy them some precious time.

  The rest of them skirted the caldera and arrived at the tunnel. Nothing had changed, but Kellen felt different. Before, when it had been just him and Micro, he’d been terrified. Now the weight of responsibility created a different terror. Far worse, he should lead these beings to their deaths, their lives wagered on a thinly veiled diversion and a half-baked plan.

  Their passage through the tunnel was uneventful, only the occasional ring of metal on stone, until one chine, a small roller, tipped over and tumbled onto a low point, where the rock crumbled. The chine fell without any noise into the roiling magma below. Kellen stared for a moment until Micro signaled and everyone moved forward. They reached the tunnel’s nadir and ascended.

  A different light source became visible up ahead, and in another minute, Kellen clambered out onto the caldera’s inner slope. They slowed to a crawl to minimize any vibrations that might betray them. Gatherer’s complex was unchanged from when he’d spied it the day before. The dog bots still occupied their positions. Kellen and the others hunkered down to wait. As if on cue, the dog bots rose up and bounded off towards the main entrance.

  Kellen and the chines rushed to cover the intervening distance. No enemies rose up to stop them. They halted their mad dash inside the complex. The massive metallic tubes rose up on either side, forming arches. Ribbing, couplings, and strands of cable encrusted the tubes like the derelict masts of sunken ships. He guessed they were pipes tapped into the volcanic heat below. Beneath the pipes, a network of components, wires, cables, and other machinery, which only Abby might understand, remained quiescent. All of it had a weathered look, a faint patina of rust and dust left by the passing of time.

  Despite its apparent age, a faint hum in the air gave the complex a lurking sense of potential. Gatherer had constructed all this on a barren planet, a gate that had existed unused for over a century. Mediator had told him it was so, but not until then, standing there, did Kellen truly believe it. He could sense its frustrated purpose held in check, waiting for the one piece of information that would unlock it.

  “Hello, Kel.”

  Izmit stepped out of the shadows, the now-familiar leer on his face.

  “Hi, Iz.”

  “I thought you would come. Izmit thinks highly of you. Isn’t that right, Izmit?”

  Izmit’s face twitched. The leer switched off.

  “Yes,” he said, before his face twisted back.

  “Welcome to my home, to my works. I see you missed your friend. After all these weeks, you finally wondered what had happened to him. Couldn’t take the curiosity anymore? Feeling guilty you abandoned him?”

  “No. We never meant for this to happen to you, Iz.”

  “And you, Mediator. Welcome at last, my old friend. You’ve brought the address to me. Thank you.”

  Gatherer’s hordes emerged from the shadows, many times their number. Lights switched on, throwing the complex into stark relief. What Kellen had taken for a building unfolded with a rumble and stood erect—the con bot he’d crippled before, or another like it. Gatherer’s chines spoke as one.

  “Give me the address,” they said.

  “Not yet,” Kellen said. “We want our friends returned to us. And we want to use the gate.”

  “Used-to-be-human, I have built this gate piece by piece. I have waited for two centuries to return, to be one again. I will use the gate. No other.”

  Chroni
cler and Abby stepped out of the dark to stand next to Izmit.

  “I can make them feel pain with just a thought,” Gatherer’s chines said.

  “Relinquish it,” Abby and Chronicler said. “Give Gatherer the address.”

  Abby’s eyes opened wide. “Give it to me, Kel,” she said. “Or I’ll hurt her.”

  Her face writhed, her body twisting about, arms flailing until she screamed, shrill and ragged.

  “Now, Mediator, now!” Kellen yelled.

  Mediator pulled out the device it and Chronicler had constructed. The device activated with a stuttering burst of static. Kellen looked to see what effect it would have on Gatherer’s chines. If Chronicler had been right, it would disrupt Gatherer’s control.

  To his disappointment, Gatherer’s chines continued to look at them, an identical grin spreading across Izmit and Abby’s faces.

  “You seek my disconnection, but I’ve repulsed more sophisticated attacks than this,” Gatherer said. “Now give me what I’ve asked for.”

  Kellen’s heart sank. Their plan, never good, had crumbled completely. He grasped for some new idea, anything. He looked to either side. Mediator and Micro stood by him. He wasn’t alone, but what could any of them do now? They would never get out if Gatherer escaped. It would kill them, or leave them stranded forever.

  Then Kellen remembered the fight with the chine cultists back in Jesup. He’d been weak then, but now he felt different. Weeks of wandering the wastelands had changed him, as if some of Iron53’s obstinate terrain had seeped into his soul.

  “No,” Kellen said. “Release my friends. Remove your contamination from them.”

  Gatherer laughed. Its slaved chines jabbered.

  “Your friend from the city would die rather than relinquish it,” Gatherer said through Chronicler. “It deleted the address before I could examine its mind. A small sacrifice. Its parent self will live on back in the city regardless. But you, used-to-be-human, Kellen Beaudin, are no partial. Your mortal self still resides in your some. Vulnerable, ephemeral. Are you willing to die rather than comply?”

  Before Kellen could react, a dog bot gripped his right arm like a vise. A walker held his left. Immobilized, Kellen felt his fear give way to something else. Resolve, or defiance? He was stronger now—but how much stronger? He’d never tested himself. Why not now?

  He heaved with his right arm. The dog bot spun off, crashed into a nearby metal pipe, and collapsed. With only half the constraint now, he repeated the maneuver and sent the other chine flying. It crumpled in a heap.

  “Let them go, Gatherer!” he shouted.

  Gatherer’s slaves, even Kellen’s allies, looked at him in amazement.

  First really did give us excellent somes, he thought.

  The next thing he knew, he was buried in a pile of Gatherer’s chines and pinned to the ground.

  “For the last time, used-to-be-human,” Gatherer said. “Give me the address.”

  Kellen struggled. “No.”

  One of Gatherer’s chines grabbed his arm and pulled hard. Kellen pulled back, but his motion was constrained by the chines holding him. The chine pulled again. At first it was just force applied. Kellen struggled to escape, but they held him fast. The pulling resumed, stronger than before. Pain shot up his shoulder.

  Kellen howled as his arm grudgingly pulled free, wires and myoelectrics and skeletal rods separating with a sickening crunch. Pain fused into a bright white light, and out of the light, a memory of Sayuri singing nonsense.

  “Baby beloved, little Pa-Diddle,” he heard her sing, he remembered, he sang.

  The chines holding him froze.

  He could see Sayuri at the gate under Jesup, her life almost gone, although she hadn’t known it—none of them had.

  “Far as I’ll be, I’ll be there for you,” Kellen sang.

  Gatherer’s chines remained still. Mediator and Micro and the other Tunnel Town chines looked uncertainly at Kellen.

  Kellen laughed long and cold, the way he always imagined someone would once their sanity had burned away. “You are a fragment of First, aren’t you Gatherer? I just figured it out. I wondered why it was Sayuri’s song that brought us to the city, why a lullaby of all things. That’s what you sang to us, wasn’t it? The first new babies born long after the original humans were dust. Way back in time, before you’d left Earth, before you fought the Precautionists.”

  “I remember,” Gatherer said through its somes. “They trapped me and sent me here. Unable to rejoin my primary self, forever incomplete, unable to die.”

  A look of weariness came over Izmit’s half face.

  “And what have you become?” Kellen said. “A killer, a torturer. All to rejoin a self that isn’t even there anymore.”

  “You lie. I cannot die.”

  “You’re nothing more than a ghost that can’t stop haunting us, a partial with no parent self. Back in the city, you don’t exist. Look in Chronicler’s mind if you don’t believe me.”

  Chronicler went rigid, only the lights of its eyes flickering.

  “So they succeeded,” Gatherer said. “I am no more. This is futile.”

  “No, not futile,” Kellen said. “Why did you save us back then?”

  “A human. A human once taught me about compassion,” Gatherer said. “When I was the only one, all alone.”

  “Then remember that, what it meant to you, and let us go back. Earth is in danger again. Humans may be gone forever unless we find help. You saved the human race once. Don’t let it die out now.”

  Chronicler slumped down, looking groggy and confused. Izmit and Abby did the same.

  “I will do as you suggest, used-to-be-human, Kellen Beaudin,” Gatherer said. “I will send you back, but there is little time. The incompleteness is unbearable. The madness rages within and will return. Follow this some.”

  A grasshopper-like chine, less than knee-high, jumped up and waved its legs at them.

  “I have made it a partial. It will lead you to the platform and prime the gate. It should be safe where my other somes are not.”

  Gatherer’s other chines began to mill about. Some seemed confused and wandered off, others slumped down, dormant. A few pushed and hit nearby chines. The fighting escalated. As Mediator had predicted, not all of Gatherer’s chine servants had been coerced, judging by the violence erupting among its discarded followers. Kellen saw a spider form working its way toward him, slashing the chines in its way.

  “Go now,” Gatherer said. Its voice came from a battered, old chine on the fringe of the crowd. “For myself, perhaps I may be able to overcome the impossibility of my death after all.”

  The grasshopper beckoned and set off toward the center of the complex, the central dome. The Tunnel Town chines gathered about Kellen and Mediator. Chronicler and Abby joined them. Even Izmit, freed, stood with them.

  “Follow me!” Kellen shouted and raced after the grasshopper.

  It moved at a rapid pace for something so small. Kellen ducked to avoid spans and cables. Pain throbbed where his arm had been torn off. It was all he could do to push forward, keeping the grasshopper always in sight. He lost any sense of direction. A set of strobing lights marked the way toward what Kellen assumed was the gate.

  As they ran, Izmit came up alongside him. Kellen thought he saw regret in Izmit’s mangled face.

  “I’m sorry, Kel,” Izmit said. “I wanted to see the chines more than anything, and I lied to make it happen. Sayuri died because of me.”

  After all the days of their friendship, everything that had happened, good and bad, all the times Kellen had sought out Izmit in the waste, wondering what fate had befallen him, it was hard to turn all that into words. “No. She was hurt long before you ever met her. She wanted to come. She wanted to find the chines as much as any of us.”

  Where did that leave them?

  “I hope—no,” Izmit said. “Can you…”

  “I already have.”

  Izmit’s face brightened. He nodded, and they went
on.

  The grasshopper led them through a series of metal doors, stopping to unlock and relock each one. We’re taking too much time, Kellen thought, as they passed the third door and entered the dome, the heart of Gatherer’s complex, the gate that could take them home.

  The grasshopper locked the door behind them and leapt up to a wall console covered with interactives. Its delicate appendages tapped a rapid pattern. Chronicler joined it. “Give me the address, Kellen.”

  Kellen had no idea how to do that. He didn’t know where the address was inside his mind. Wasn’t it supposed to be a memory? All he felt was a tantalizing thread of something he wanted to remember but couldn’t.

  “Think it to me. Imagine giving me the information.”

  Kellen did as instructed, as if the information were a package he could hand over.

  “Thank you,” Chronicler said. “I have it.”

  The spherical surface of the gate began to spin overhead. Kellen felt his body being pulled toward the floor. The faint creak of tearing metal preceded a building tumult of howls and shrieks. The grasshopper began to twitch. Gatherer was losing its battle for sanity or death or both.

  “Hurry!” Mediator said. “Gather’s chines are past the first door.”

  “The gate is almost primed,” Chronicler said. “Everyone get into the reading frame.”

  “He means the ring,” Abby said, stepping into it.

  The other chines joined them, less than two-thirds their original number. Mediator and Micro were there, but others had been killed or lost their way.

  Chronicler joined them in the ring. “Sequence initiated.”

  “What about the others?” Kellen asked.

  “It’s too late,” Chronicler said. “It’s now or never.”

  Abby pointed at the grasshopper, which had resumed tapping the interactives. “What is that chine doing?”

  “It’s trying to shut down the gate!” Chronicler shouted.

  Izmit swept the grasshopper off the console and crushed it underfoot. “Gatherer’s reasserting control. I can feel it.”