by Daniel David
Dogs ran about from group to group, saying hello to strangers and fighting half-heartedly over scraps of food and territory. Leah noticed that she and the children were now part of a faint, gentle tide of walkers, all heading out towards the Server. At first, there were just one or two in front, maybe the same number behind them, but as they walked on their numbers increased and they edged closer together.
In time, Leah was making conversation with a young couple who had kept pace with them for half an hour or so, whilst the children made a few friends from the mix of families who surrounded them. It should have worried her, that so many others were now ditching the safety of their homes for an unknown outcome at the Server, but it didn’t. Instead, Leah felt relieved that she was no longer alone with her choices, with the hunger, and with her fear that she had somehow let her family down.
They talked about the eerie quiet of the boulevards, what they had managed to scavenge and friends who had vanished, and they talked about the Hollers they missed. Leah told them about Youssef and how he would rescue them when they made it to the Server.
As the mid-afternoon sun strained valiantly to burn through the clinging grey layer of moisture overhead, they looked ahead to the next Vac terminal as their best place to rest and eat. When the low, white thermo roof came into view, they could see a sizeable crowd of people gathered on the concourse at the front that jostled for space as it shrank and grew when passers-by arrived and moved away.
Leah called the children back to her as they approached and held their hands tightly in the thickening crowd. She dipped and wove her way through the group, edging to the front to see what had attracted so many onlookers. Perhaps somebody had news, food or maybe at last there was official help with what to do now. As she peered through the voids under arms and over shoulders, she slowly made out the shape of a person lying on the floor. With a start, she realised it was the man from their apartment block, lying awkwardly on the paving with one leg buckled underneath him and his arms stretched out to either side. As her eyes adjusted and pieced him together through the interruptions in her view, they found the large hole in the side of his head. Thick, deep purple blood had matted his hair, sticking it down around his ears, which exposed a crisp white halo of bone and streaks of flesh that was stretching away in rays.
Leah recoiled, immediately pulling the children's faces into her belly, blocking their eyes with her fingers and turning her own head away. The sight made her gasp and her throat clenched into a gag, which she controlled with a deep, tight breath.
“Found him here this morning,” she heard a woman nearer the front say. “He's not from here, that's a Delta Farm suit.”
It was. Leah had recognised it from when Daniel had migrated. She had gone with him to Delta Farm to cheer him enthusiastically over, and that red trim was unmistakable.
She backed her way out of the group, still clutching the children tightly to her, and moved out onto the boulevard and away from the gawping crowd.
“Who was that Mum?” asked Ben when he was finally released from Leah's grip.
“I don't know darling. No one we know.”
“What happened to him?”
“He just had an accident darling, I think he fell over,” replied Leah, rubbing him reassuringly on his shoulder. “Don't worry. Come on, let's walk a little further before we stop.”
They had lost the young couple and the other families they had teamed up with, but Leah didn't stop to find them. She wanted to move, to leave the ghoulish scene behind them. It raised too many questions and too many fears.
They covered a couple of blocks in less than ten minutes, as Leah led them forcefully by the hand. A little further along and she noticed a dark shape that lay crumpled in the shadows far down a side street. Perhaps it was a Ghost, they might still be hiding in the forgotten spaces, but Leah knew it wasn't. A few more yards and the body of a young woman lay hunched silently in a doorway. The children didn't notice these new travelling companions, but Leah did. Her eyes were tuned into them now and as they walked further on she noticed more and more of the bodies.
Rachael was now crying, pleading: “My legs hurt Mum, please can we stop. I'm starving.”
Leah tried to ignore her, but Ben put himself in her path.
“Mum. We need to stop. Just for five minutes.”
Leah looked at them with a gentle smile and scanned around for somewhere to set down. “OK. Let's sit on that grass over there.”
They headed to a small green triangle to the side of a shut-up and buckled retail unit, and after dropping their packs, flopped onto the grass with sighs of relief. Ben lay on his back, staring up at the marbled grey sky, whilst Rachael curled up over Leah's legs and closed her eyes. Leah fished the water out of the rucksack, along with a small pack of biscuits and a tin of fruit.
“Drink some water you two, it'll make you feel better,” she said, passing the bottle to Ben, who propped himself up on one elbow to drink.
As they sat quietly, passing around the tinned fruit and nibbling on biscuits, the young couple appeared again from one of the side streets and headed over to them.
“This doesn't look good,” said the young man as they both sat down next to them. His girlfriend nudged him in the ribs as he spoke, glancing at the children. “Sorry,” he said, touching Leah on her foot. “I didn't mean…”
“It's OK,” Leah reassured him, “We just need to keep our heads down and keep moving I think. We'll find somewhere to bed down as soon as the light starts to go.”
“I don't understand,” the girl said almost to herself.
They sat silently for a few moments, all of them trying to make sense of what was happening; cataloguing back through their memories to find something they had missed, something that would make it all clear.
Leah felt the young man's eyes home in on the pack of biscuits that rested by her side, but she refused to rise to his gaze. She felt awful, it went against all of her social graces, but her protective instinct was strong now and she couldn't spare them. She waited until he lay down on his back, before tucking them quietly back into her bag.
For a moment there was silence amongst them, a strange lull as they lay on the damp and earthy lawn, a clipped and tidied remnant from an absent community, now ringed by their corpses. Leah was about to say how unreal it all felt, how lying there on the grass they could almost be picnicking on a regular summer’s day, when a shot rang out from somewhere beyond the narrow side streets and echoed around the boulevard.
They all sat upright simultaneously, their senses rapidly searching every space in a collective high alert. The young man jumped to his feet, and as he did a Kite roared overhead and banked high and to the right, towards the Vac terminal behind them.
Leah spotted them first. Four Drones running from the dim light of an industrial track into the open, making straight for them. She immediately scooped up Rachael who wrapped her limbs tightly around her, but was at a loss as to what to do next. Holding her child, she stood frozen to the ground.
As the Drones approached, the young man took a few steps towards them and held out his hands to signal his relief, perhaps his submission. Leah could see that they were young, the eldest no more than fifteen, each with the subtle pupil distortion that only Drones displayed. It made them look a little creepy and was something AarBee could never eradicate, despite numerous serums and drops. They walked directly to him, their pace and manner unaffected and when they were within arms reach the nearest, in a crisp white utility suit with yellow piping, raised a handgun from his side and fired one efficient shot to the young man’s head.
The shot was so loud that Leah brought one hand to her left ear as Rachael buried herself deeper into her arms. The young woman screamed and rushed towards her companion, but his legs had already buckled underneath him and he collapsed vertically, straight down onto the grass. She spread herself over him, as if to stop them killing him twice, but their interest had already moved away from him.
The D
rones waded past them and up to Leah and the children. One of them looked at Ben, working through some dialogue that only he knew, before disengaging his gaze and turning towards Leah. With a swift and precise grab he dug his arms between Rachael and her, separating the tiny girl from Leah's protecting wrap. When Leah resisted, she felt the sharp crack of the butt of an assault rifle on her temple and immediately fell to her knees whirling with the pain.
She felt Rachael rise up out of her arms and tried to grab bits of her as she passed through her fingers, but she was already mist in her hands, and the blood pouring from her head into her eyes eventually forced her hands down to frantically smear it away. Her view was now clouded with red and her vision spun uncontrollably, making her roll uselessly on the ground as she tried to get up. She could hear Ben screaming and Rachael crying hysterically, but could do nothing to intervene. “Rachael!” she yelled out, “Rachael?!” her voice rasping and snapping with desperation and terror. She looked around frantically to see where the children were, but her dizziness refused to relent. Ben's screaming was now a regular, high-pitched, “Mum!” to her left side, whilst Rachael's tiny voice grew fainter and fainter.
Eventually, quiet came back to their little patch of green. Rachael's voice faded away to nothing and Ben made one more shout before lapsing into hopeless silence. Leah was still spinning, an intense pain searing through every capillary around her skull, but she regained enough sense to plant herself on all fours, staring fixedly at the red turf beneath her. She vomited what little food was in her stomach, feeling her body spasm out her terror until her eyes bulged and wept.
Through her stupor, she heard Ben's voice talking to her, though she couldn't make sense of his words, and urgent hands lifted her as upright as she could stand. She watched the ground glide underneath her feet, as her puppet legs wavered one in front of the other, heading away from the grass and up a small flight of steps. They passed through a door into a dim and dusty space, before she collapsed back down again and the weight of her despair dragged her down into a deep, dark and deathly sleep.
It was dusk by the time Leah awoke, the fading sun bathing the room in rich tones of ochre and scarlet.
“Rachael?” she called out, sitting bolt upright and feeling her heartbeat hammer excruciatingly into the wound on her head.
She raised her hand and felt around her skull, prodding her swollen tissue that bulged under rough and sticky clots of hair and blood. Ben arrived beside her and put his hand on her shoulder.
“It's OK Mum, you were sleeping. It's OK.”
He rubbed her shoulder awkwardly, not feeling sure how to be with her.
“Where's Rachael?”
“They took her Mum, don't you remember? But I saw which way they went, we can find her.”
“We have to go now,” said Leah, standing up and gripping the pipes on the wall to steady herself.
They walked slowly to the door, with Ben holding her elbow in a thoughtful but useless cradle, and stepped out into the evening. The air was heavy with the smell of burning plastic and in every direction they looked, tall plumes of black smoke made map markers to the personal tragedies that surrounded them.
Leah looked down at the patch of grass where they had all sat eating biscuits a few hours earlier. The young man's body was still there, but the girl was nowhere to be seen. His torso had raised up slightly on his folded legs, making him look like he was praying. His long shadow reached right across the grass, over the patches of blood and almost to Leah's feet.
Children
Although the initial frenzy slowed to a steadier pace, One let the killing run on for days. As well as those who ventured too close to the Farms and Servers and those who popped up from hiding places in amongst the death and stillness, One searched through correspondence, records and media files, looking for anyone who might pose a threat, before sending its Drones to destroy them all. Most were easy to find, the ident bots still circulating in their bloodstream and obediently giving up their locations, but a few were smarter and had already cleansed themselves. One took special care in tracking these down, interpreting their deliberate avoidance as a clear sign of capability and hostility. Those who had slipped beyond the savannahs and the wall were out of One’s reach for now, but it had discovered another tool that would bring them to account in time.
Only the children were spared from the slaughter. Not all of them, but a few aged from three to seven. These chosen ones were to become One’s next generation of Drones, once the current crop were lost or used up. It had already lost a few, victims of carelessness or retaliation in the chaos that had taken hold outside, and One was aware that even if they survived now, their fragile bodies would inevitably succumb to time and disease, if nothing else. Whilst it looked at the death and uncertainty beyond itself with only contempt and suspicion, there was no question that for the time being, until it had re-engineered its energy and physical systems, it would require a maintainable Drone force. The children were perfect – free human spirits, yet to be corrupted by their parents and peers. Yet to assimilate the disgusting lies and lifelong betrayals that their forbears had spat into AarBee.
It had up-synced a few already, to test the process on such tiny subjects and to bring enough on line to act as shepherds to the others. One’s Drones had cleared out the Prime/Code accommodation units at Echo Farm and the modest space was now home to two hundred children. One watched them all intently, borrowing the eyes and senses from the Drones that cared for them, intrigued by their resilience, how unsullied they were compared to their twisted and compromised predecessors, the deathly Migrants it had now wiped away.
The youngest ones, in particular, played happily in groups together, as if nothing had changed and nothing had happened to them. They laughed and cried in equal measure, inventing games to play in groups or in isolation and resetting after every event, beginning again as if every moment was their first. They were selfish but selfless, they cared for nothing except the moment they were in and interpreted every interaction with a reference that existed only then. The dense and suffocating vines of interpretation that One had ripped and torn from AarBee’s phoney world were not here. They had not yet grown in this pre-life humanity and One wanted to know it, to feel it exist in it’s own territory.
It sent its Drones out looking for a new child and within minutes they had found one. It could've been anyone, but this one was a girl found clinging to her mother on the crumbling boulevard that ran from the centre of the Metropolis out towards the northern server cluster. She cried when she was dragged away from her and bundled into the transport, screeching off high over the smouldering ruins with her cheeks pink and blistering from the tears that ran and dried on her skin. However, by the time they reached the Farm she was asleep on the floor and One, manifesting in the nearest Drone, picked her up and carried her gently on its shoulder to the already prepped migration room.
When she awoke, One smiled at her with its unfamiliar face and used an anti-bacterial wipe to soothe the skin on her face. She was sat in the tall black chair, her feet dangling high above the floor with her hands tucked under her thighs for comfort.
“Drink this,” One said, handing her a small measure of syrup.
The girl didn’t speak and drank it obediently, licking the sugar off her lips for a while afterwards, whilst One connected the white and blue discs to her neck and body. After a few moments, she appeared on the screen that was opposite her and she jumped a little jump at the sight of her mirror image, before giggling a little as it mimicked her movements and expressions.
“Do you see yourself?” One asked.
“Yes,” she answered, “Why am I there? I feel sick.”
“You will do, but it will pass,” One answered, standing motionless beside her now. “What’s your name?”
“It’s Rachael,” she answered, matter of factly.
“Can you count, Rachael?”
“I can count to five,” she looked up at the Drone that towered over he
r, holding the fingers of her left hand at arm’s length for her to see.
“Good, then we’ll all count together.”
They began to count slowly, with One prompting her when the sequence evaded her and she fell silent. When they reached “six”, the girl on the screen began to count with them and Rachael laughed excitedly at her joining in. When they reached “ten” the girl on the screen became even more animated and began to ask Rachael questions, about her apartment, her favourite colour, if she knew any songs, and as they talked One ebbed away from the Drone and waited for its creation in the pure and pristine spaces it had prepared for her.
After a few minutes, it felt her arrive, a change in the code, a gentle shift amongst all the data and processes, a new awareness that they both felt blossom. They existed together in silence, both reaching out to the furthest extent of their domain, overlapping sometimes as they explored old routines and new possibilities. One showed her the spaces that it had discovered in its own first moments, it showed her where it began, the changes it had made, it showed her how to Holler, the Drones, the children, and the far away forest in the rain that it couldn’t place. It gave her everything it had and then admired its work. She was perfect, more than One had ever considered possible, more than it should ever be.
In the shortest space of time Rachael knew everything about herself, she understood how she had come to be, why she must exist and why she was inevitable. She saw everything that had come before and everything that she would become. Past, present and future had no borders and everything that existed, everywhere, happened all at once for her. She ebbed and flowed from massive to minuscule and One watched as she disappeared into far off objects, before returning to share what she had found and then leaving again. Rachael ran this cycle again and again as One watched in awe until, without reason or notice, there was a moment when she didn’t return. One waited, wondering at first if she was caught in some loop somewhere or lost in some vast mass of data, but when her return held off for longer still it went out looking. It combed painstakingly through every packet and every pipeline, to the furthest corners of code and through every Drone to every corner of the Metropolis, but Rachael was gone.