LEGACY RISING

by Rachel Eastwood

  But tonight, their pink-haired leader brandished it proudly. He turned the crank, the gears and celluloid churned, and from the horn vibrated a low, pleasant pulse. Legacy wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, but the security bot swung low at the waist and gestured for them to pass. He pulled himself erect again and chattered, “Thank you.”

  “H-how did you do that?” she had to ask.

  “It’s quite simple, really,” Vector chirped as they slunk, one by one, through the courtyard and into the foyer of the Taliko Center. “All automata follow an explicit program, but are capable of bypassing or modifying said program. The only reason they don’t is because to do so invalidates that program. It’s like us, having all the parts necessary to move by cartwheel instead of walking. Basically, they’re not intelligent enough to change their behavior, but most of them can. Now, the Contemplator projects a modified or a bypassed simulation of a generic program onto a specific, localized target—one automaton, or maybe two, if they’re really close together—and hopefully the automaton is running that generic program, or else it won’t work, but in this case, we anticipated that it would be a simple guard program, although bypass is obviously easier than modify, and one target is obviously easier than—”

  “Shh,” Trimpot hissed, waving at him. “Stairs are this way.” He ducked through a side door, and the other four adventurers spilled after him.

  “You know this place well, Neon,” Vector noted, unfazed by his harshness of tone.

  “Came with my mom to work sometimes,” he mentioned idly, pushing open the door at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Oh? What did she do here?” Vector asked.

  The room beyond was as large as the ballroom and stacked to the ceiling with crates. There, at the center of the room, stood a transparent, strangely large elevator.

  “Oh, perfect!” Vector cheered, forgetting his question. He pranced to the glass apparatus. “I’ve never gotten a chance to see the Cipher-Scope work from the inside!”

  Attaching the intricate box to the elevator door, he twisted its key and the mechanism vibrated, its slender metal appendages coming forward, then detracting, patiently learning the ins and outs of this unique, transparent lock. Its hum kicked up to a whir, and Vector glanced up at all the waiting faces and smiled. “Should be just a few minutes,” he explained. “If anyone needs to use the washroom.”

  Legacy glanced at Dax. What if something happened down on Old Earth, and her last solid memory of him was a half-hearted goodbye?

  “How are you doing?” she asked, stepping toward him and subtly pulling away from the group. She hadn’t truly been in his physical space since before the arrest. The last time she’d really been with him, they’d been holding hands, running with a mob. “What happened to you on Sunday night?” she asked, realizing this.

  “It’s been almost a week,” Dax half-laughed. “You just get around to caring?”

  Legacy glared. “No, I—Dax! Seriously, what happened? I looked for you everywhere!”

  “Well, I was looking for you, too,” Dax replied. He leaned against a cargo box, incidentally nudging its top open. “I guess we just missed each other.” Now he stared at her without mercy.

  Legacy nodded, exposed. She didn’t know quite what she wanted from him, or how to get it. “Dax—”

  “Look, Leg, I know—things didn’t turn out quite like we planned,” he interrupted. “And that’s fine. I mean, that’s life, isn’t it? So . . .” His eyes, so hard, finally panned away. “So it’s fine. You don’t have to explain. You don’t have to play nice. I’m not Liam.”

  “I know you’re not—”

  “What did I expect, anyway?”

  “Dax—”

  “It’s fine, Legacy,” he seethed.

  “But—”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Cipher-Scope’s done,” Rain’s voice floated to them. They jerked, awoken from this nightmare of a conversation, as the blue-haired nurse advanced with a metallic coil in her hands and a leather rebreather on her face. “Hey, Dax,” she said warmly, incognizant of the tension between the couple. “Before we go, do you want me to change your carbon hydroxide scrubber?”

  “Thanks, Rain. Sounds good.”

  “No problem. Here, Legs, you’re going to want a rebreather. Just in case.” Still oblivious, she handed the glaring girl the last rebreather. “Oh, wow, look in here,” she said, stepping closer to Dax and peering into the crate on which he leaned. She dipped a hand inside and extracted a sheath of white, lacy fabric. “Crazy,” she whispered. As she threaded the fabric through her fingers, testing its texture and durability, Dax unfastened and removed his own rebreather. Legacy experienced a pang, remembering the last time she’d seen his face. “Where did this come from?” Rain wondered aloud, glancing up at him.

  Dax shrugged. “Maybe the answer’s down there,” he replied, handing the other girl his rebreather. Rain winked at him, and it was adorable, before she began the work of unscrewing his worn filter.

  “Do you need help with your rebreather, Legs?” she asked, noticing the girl was just standing there, staring, holding the thing.

  “No,” Legacy replied, finding her tongue. “I know how to do it.”

  “Okay! Well! We’re all set, then!” Rain returned Dax’s rebreather and strolled toward the elevator. Dax went to follow her without another word to Legacy.

  Legacy grabbed at his arm, feeling desperate. Feeling out of control.

  She opened her mouth and, “Are you seeing her?” came spilling out. She winced at the sound of her own voice. It was unfair to be jealous at all, and no one saw anyone of their own volition, especially not an ineligible person like Dax, but then again, Rain was a rebel, and people were wild-hearted and impossible to predict . . .

  Dax just glared at her and shook off the clinging hand. Legacy watched him go, feeling as if something critical had been lost.

  Kaizen’s quill scratched over the aged parchment on his chamber desk. Sometimes drawing helped him to escape. He smeared the ink with his thumb, intentionally darkening the large eyes to goldenrod.

  He hadn’t expected Legacy to return his message. He really hadn’t. But then, the day moved on, and he still hadn’t heard anything, and he supposed that maybe he had thought she would return his message.

  He shaded the arch of a round, tight cheek.

  Didn’t she remember that kiss in the tower?

  The lips . . . almost perfectly symmetrical.

  Since then, he’d found it difficult to avoid thinking of her. But who was he kidding?

  Now to add the braids.

  He’d been thinking about her all week.

  For the third time that day, he rang his desktop bell and listened to the approaching clatter of the porcelain-jointed assistant. Newton-3, for the time being. “Any new messages for Kaizen Taliko?” he asked without turning.

  “No new messages for Kaizen Taliko.”

  Kaizen flicked his quill across the desk, spraying ink on the sketch of Legacy as it skittered. “That is all,” he grumbled, crumpling the paper.

  I wonder what she’s doing right now.

  Not that it matters. I mean, she made herself pretty clear, didn’t she? Going her separate way. And I’m going mine.

  Then again, this entire fallacy of a coronation ceremony is because of her. Maybe I deserve to know what she’s doing. Maybe I deserve a message!

  Kaizen pushed himself up from his desk and stormed to the castle keep.

  Aside from being the Taliko stronghold, the keep was where the royal machinist could be found. Master Addler had wiry gray hair, thick glasses, and a hunched back from his years of painstaking servitude to the castle automata. He had once been brilliant, shrewd, and serious. The years of solitude, save the accompaniment of machina, had taken their toll. Now he was still brilliant, but also, a little mad.

  “Master Addler.” Kaizen announced his arrival with a sharp tone of import.

  The old man hunched over the rec
lining chair, where a narrow, gleaming white body was draped, jerked, and whirled. “Egad,” he murmured, adjusting his glasses. “So lifelike, this one.” He stepped closer, and Kaizen saw that the automaton on the workbench had its porcelain face lifted to expose the brass bones of its skull. Screws, gears, and springs were removed as he fished for the obstruction inside: a battered, blue marble eye. Ah. He was fixing Newton-2. Great. Life had been so empty without it.

  Then Master Addler grasped at Kaizen’s face and pried his mouth open, peering inside. “Where are the gears?” he whispered.

  “Iff we, Maffer Awwer,” Kaizen snapped, jerking away. “Blagh! Earl Kaizen!”

  “Of the Talikos?” Master Addler asked, glaring up at the man. “Oh, I see it now. Yes. Of course. What can I do for you, sir?”

  “I need to get a read on the location of a castle automaton,” he half-truthed. “It’s coil #98.”

  Master Addler hobbled to the keep reader, a glassy, amber map of Icarus. The reader radio illuminated clusters of bright emerald glimmers, each symbolizing an automaton which had been engineered by Master Addler and installed with a specialized coil, linked to the energy emission of the keep reader. These coils linked the automata to one another, enabling their awareness of an unwinding fellow bot, but also separated them by number and allowed for easy location tracking.

  “Hm,” Master Addler said, pressing his nose to the map. “I don’t see #98 on the castle grounds.”

  “It’s—well—it’s in Icarus, I think,” he explained, hoping the old man wouldn’t ask.

  “Hm.” Master Addler’s nose trailed across Icarus. “Ah! There it is! Very faint . . . and getting fainter.”

  “What?”

  “Well, yes,” he said, pulling back and rubbing his nose. “It appears to be in the Center’s freight lift shaft. The keep reader can only read across so much distance, you know. It’s fading.”

  “It’s going down?”

  “Yes, sir,” Master Addler replied. “It appears to be going down.” As he spoke, Kaizen whirled and exited the room, off to locate a member of the castle sentries. “Now—what class of automaton did you say this was?” He wiped his glasses on his apron and replaced them on his nose. “I imagine it’s some sort of pai—” He frowned and glared around the room. “Kaizen? Earl?” He would’ve believed that perhaps the entire incident had been imagined, if not for the fading emerald glimmer of coil #98, descending in the elevator shaft.

  The glass elevator descended slowly and steadily. Each of the crew peered down into the dark clouds, struggling to decipher details in the grim landscape below, but it was night now. Otherwise, all else was eerily quiet, save an occasional rumble from the sky. As the elevator neared the ground, it became obvious that there was a road extending away from it, but that road was broken and heaving, metallic tracks laid across it. In the distance, off to the right, was a small dome, and a murky marshland sprawling between the two points.

  The group collectively tensed as the elevator shuddered to a halt, its doors coasting open. A wet, fungal air filled the cabin. The world seemed so open beyond these doors. The swollen sky suddenly so big. The fractured road which wandered off into some ruined cityscape. Even the shape of the small dome in the distance seemed as far from them as the space between the stars, and Legacy felt the vertigo of navigating an unfamiliar place clutch her insides.

  “How are we going to . . . find our way back?” she whispered.

  “Look for Icarus, then look down, and follow the line,” Trimpot snapped.

  “Stay close to me,” Vector whispered helpfully. “I’m wearing the attractor.”

  “What’s an attractor?” Legacy asked, the group shuffling, one by one, out of the elevator.

  “It’s quite simple, really,” Vector replied, stepping onto the spongy, brown earth. “Holy shit.”

  “Holy shit,” Trimpot elaborated. “All right, let’s . . . focus. We only have a few hours before this will start to get really real. There’s a dome over there. We can get there in, what, half an hour? If we book it from A to B. I’m saying a straight line. If we take this damn road, we might as well go home now, because that’s how caught we’re going to get.” He gestured for the group to follow. “Let’s try to keep quiet, stick together, and wear our heads on tight.”

  The group moved low and silent through the twisted, blackened weeds, their feet sinking into acrid muck as they drove forth. They passed the thick trunks of mangled, half-dead trees—beasts they’d never seen, rumors and myth alone. “So this is where the trees come from,” Legacy whispered to herself, remembering the snippet of conversation she’d overheard at the founder’s ball.

  Trimpot sniffed at the humid swamp air. Legacy smelled it too. Tantalizing. Syrupy. It reminded her of that pear, and indirectly, of Kaizen’s mouth.

  “What’s that smell?” Trimpot wondered aloud. “It’s so . . . sweet.” His eyes scoured the terrain for the source of the fragrance, but it passed, and the dome loomed into view, revealing itself to be a huge complex of glass triangles superimposed in a half-circle formation. They supposed they never had any sense of self about the size of their own dome, being as that they were constantly inside it. “Shit,” Trimpot hissed. “The people in there are still up and moving around! Lights and—shit! Duck!”

  The group hunkered down as the headlight of a trolley swept by, exiting from a vacant lot next to the dome and trundling off on the silver rail, over the dilapidated highway.

  Creeping around the perimeter of the dome to closer investigate the lot, they found four canvas bins labeled SMALL, MEDIUM, LARGE, and TOWELS. There were also more stacks of crates, identical to those in the basement of Taliko Center. The group took refuge between a row of crates.

  “Let’s blend,” Trimpot whispered, gesturing toward the bins.

  “But what if someone sees us first?” Rain whispered back.

  Trimpot rolled his eyes. “I’ll go,” he sneered, slinking over the pavement.

  Legacy glanced back to the entrance of the dome. A grip tool hung in the air, idle. Didn’t she . . . recognize that model?

  Legacy took an uncertain step forward, squinting. Then she took another.

  “Leg!” Dax hissed behind her. “Leg, wait! What are you doing!”

  She had almost circled fully to the entrance in order to verify that this was the same clamp which had clipped her braid for a DNA sample as the police carriage delivered her across the drawbridge to the Archipelagos.

  Which probably meant they wouldn’t be able to pass without the correct DNA.

  Legacy expelled a sigh of disappointment and the grip tool jerked, alerted.

  “Verification sequence initializing.”

  Legacy fell a step back, but it was too late. The grip tool shot out on a stiff cable, fastening to her wrist and scraping for loose skin cells. She tore at the clamp, panicking at the thought of what might happen when the scan was complete, when Dax cropped up behind her, prying at the clamp with his two free hands.

  “Get it off, get it off,” Legacy whined, clawing at her wrist.

  “I’m trying!” Dax yelled, forgetting all efforts at stealth.

  “Coal-106, coal miner, unit #106. Positive ident—”

  The grip tool sprang open and the tether pulled taut, receding, leaving Legacy’s tender wrist raw and pink.

  “Did . . . did you hear that?” she asked Dax. “Did you hear what it just said?”

  “I don’t know,” Dax replied sharply. He seemed almost angrier that she had been freed than he would have been if she’d been caught. “I thought it was calling someone. Let’s just get out of here.” Without another word, he pulled back into the shadows of the crate stacks.

  “It said that the identification was positive,” Legacy continued, following him. “It said something about a coal miner!”

  “Then why didn’t the door open?” he snapped.

  “Because you pulled the clamp off!”

  “Because you begged me to!”

&nb
sp; “Why don’t you two yell a bit louder?” Trimpot asked them. They’d almost shot past the crew, who were hunkered down in the shadows and had changed into the smocks. “I don’t think the Duke of Icarus heard you. Here. Put this on.” Trimpot flung a small tunic at Legacy, and a large at Dax. “Must admit, it’s not exactly what I thought I’d find here,” he mumbled, glaring down at his smudged, gray smock. “Anyway, let’s just keep our gear under these. But leave our shoes and our pants here. Here.” He shoved open one of the crates. “Augh.” Inside were slimy patties of uncertain origin. “Let’s put our stuff in this one. Everyone want to keep their rebreathers on?”

  “Just in case,” Rain answered. “We can always take them off if we need to.”

  “I think Legacy may be able to open the door,” Dax announced. “It’s a DNA grip.”

  “If it’s a DNA grip, there’s no way we can get that door open,” Vector said. “Is there? How could—how could Legacy open the door?”

  “I don’t know,” Legacy seethed. “It said something about a coal miner.”

  “Would you be willing to try it again?” Vector asked.

  Legacy hesitated, but in the end, she knew that the positive verification damned her curiosity to satisfaction. She couldn’t just walk away from the knowledge that her specific chemical makeup was a key to this dome. “Yeah,” she answered, realizing that she hadn’t spoken. “Let’s go. Are you all ready?” she asked Trimpot, knowing he had to be equipped with his gear beneath the tunic.

  “Always ready,” he quipped. “Let’s go.”

  The group crept to the entrance and Legacy again stepped forth. The grip tool swiveled at her motion, darting to her wrist and fastening. Again its mechanisms furiously scrubbed at her wrist, this time breaking the skin. She winced, and the grip tool unlatched and drew away. “Coal-106, coal miner, unit #106. Positive identification verified. Stand clear.”

  The doors swung open.

  The streets of the complex were largely deserted. Drab, uniform structures lined the walk, entirely dim except one. A throng of expressionless individuals, wearing nothing but frayed towels, trudged toward them in a single file line, and the group ducked into an alleyway and went rigid.