"Problems, sir?"
"Oh, it's just not as straight forward as... I need to think on the problem."
"Could we consult the Chief Engineer?"
The Assistant Engineer became quiet for a moment. "No."
"He may have some valuable insight."
"No, we will not do that." The Assistant Engineer scowled and went back to his desk. He pulled out the specifications and notes that were provided by the Foreman.
Gobble Dawn looked down at the floor, sitting on the chair that remained from dinner set created when it arrived. It felt awkward, like for the first time in a long while it did not know what to do. A lack of... direction? Purpose?
It looked around the room with its mute head. Doors lined it, undoubtedly going to different sections and areas unimaginable. There was a sense of wonder in the thought.
That night, though, the mute head whispered in the ear of the other. It asked a simple question: "Where is the Chief Engineer?" Gobble Dawn sat up in bed. The Assistant Engineer went into a side room to sleep, and had left it there with it's bedroll in the spacious office. There were other doors that lined the sides of the room, unlabeled.
It began looking behind the doors. One led to rows and rows of cabinets in a huge closet. Another led to a long tunnel way. Another contained various tools and instruments.
It went down the tunnel way. The entire passage had an upward slope. After several hours of walking, it came to another door. The door was plain, made of wood. Gobble Dawn took a breath as it rested its hand on the handle. Turning the simple iron knob, it opened.
The sun. The sun shone down from above. Gobble Dawn had never seen the sun before. A field of flowers stretched out before it, leading to a simple house on a hill. The flowers were every color imaginable, with trees... real trees, not the engineered wood masses that Gobble Dawn was accustomed to. It knelt down and plucked a flower from the ground. The flower felt... different.
The mute head smiled. "We're here. I know it. I'm not sure how, but this must be it. I have so many questions." Gobble Dawn's mute head did not know what to say.
They walked toward the door to the house.
~ ~ ~
Bone Teeth rested. That was all he could do. He'd decided, in the effort to find a task for himself, that he would guard the staircase. Even he had to acknowledge how comical an idea this was. All that an attacker would have to do is run up the stairwell twenty feet and they'd be free.
He rested on the ground, alert. In the distance, he saw two figures coming down the tunnel way. Suspicion. Vigilance. He would not let things be interrupted.
It was Fidget and an old woman. Fidget, that traitor. He'd become a traitor in Bone Teeth's mind. Fidget did not care about the rose, the mission. He only cared about himself.
"Bone Teeth, where's Gobble Dawn?"
"He's with the Assistant Engineer, deserter."
Helena sighed. "Troy."
"We need to see him." Fidget glared. At this point he just wanted some order to everything. Helena hadn't talked to him about what had happened much, but he knew that there were things in motion well beyond his control. He just hoped that when order reasserted itself, he wasn't crushed by the process.
Helena crouched down and looked at Bone Teeth. "I need to see Troy and I need to see Frederick. I understand that you feel that you need to protect this, but there are things here that...I need to do this, too."
Bone Teeth was unsure. He wavered. He fortified his conviction. "No one can pass. What is in motion must stay in motion."
"I must talk to Troy."
"Who is Troy?" asked Bone Teeth.
"The Assistant Engineer. I must talk to him. I am much older than you, as old as both the Engineers." She looked at the stairs. "I must go now. Fidget, may I take some food?"
Fidget sighed, and gave her most of his packed food and his bed roll. Maybe there will be a reward, he thought to himself. Maybe, but not likely. Better not to be crushed.
Helena took the pack and began climbing the stairs.
Fidget sat down on the stone floor, across from Bone Teeth.
"Where did you find her?" Bone Teeth grunted.
"At the end of a maze."
"Oh, I see." Bone Teeth really didn't.
~ ~ ~
"Call me Fred. What can I do for you?"
Gobble Dawn looked around the room. It was simple. Wooden chairs, and a table. There was a computer console, simple and unobtrusive, along one wall. Much of what was there seemed hand made.
"I think your assistant... is having problems."
"What kind of problems?"
"The rose is dead." It seemed ironic to Gobble Dawn. There were flowers everywhere outside.
"Ahhhh... yes. The fail-safe."
"Fail-safe?"
"Yes, I made sure Troy set it up so that if no one is around it shuts everything down. It seemed too tempting to just hole up underground and never leave. In hindsight, it's kind of ridiculous. Every few hundred years the thing dies, and eventually Troy comes up here grumbling about how he somehow can't replicate it. I don't have the heart to tell him that I modified the replicator so he couldn't. That would kind of defeat the purpose if he could.
The old man, with his long white hair and beard smiled. "It's been a very long time since anyone other than Troy came to talk to me. I had the original idea for this place."
"The city? The furnaces?"
"What's that? No, I mean everything outside. City?"
"Yes, the great underground city, with the Lady in Scarlet's factories, and the furnaces above."
"Hmm... that sounds like Troy's side project. I've had an idea here and there, but that's been mostly Troy. Always complaining about how one thing isn't working or another. I've told him to just drop it. I suspect you're one of the results of the project? I've met one or two of the others, briefly."
Gobble Dawn nodded. "I believe I may be."
"I think I may have met someone who could be the lady you just mentioned once. She was nothing compared to Helena, though."
"Helena?"
"Yeah. She just... disappeared one day." The old man looked sad for a moment, lost in memory. He pulled himself back from the thought. "So how is the city? I may have to visit."
"Hundreds are in chaos since the rose died. The furnaces are less efficient, so they've begun burning the prisoners for fuel. Soon they will begin rounding up citizens that have done nothing for the fires. Meanwhile, nothing is being done. People are listless, needing work and food. Everyone fears being burned alive to keep the machines running."
The old man's face screwed up in revulsion. He put his face in his hands. "God damn it, Troy."
~ ~ ~
The next day, The Chief Engineer went out back of his house, and cut a new rose for Gobble Dawn to take back, beyond the furnaces and the great tower of the Lady in Scarlet. He resolved to go with Troy's creation back to the office of the Assistant Engineer. Sort things out.
Troy was fond of breaking things down for Frederick, even though Fred understood them already. "It starts with the idea. Then you setup the means of production, the raw materials, then comes production." The idea was beautiful, but every step along the way it could get corrupted. This is what Frederick saw. Arrogance and corruption.
Helena always kept things in context. If she'd still been around she would have looked into what Troy did. Stopped it.
The Chief Engineer felt like a fool. An old fool with his flower garden.
Gobble Dawn and Fred walked to Troy's office, down the deep tunnel way.
When they opened the door to Troy's office, he looked up. Anger, shock, and confusion were all expressed at once by the look on his face. "Uh... how's it going, Fred?"
Fred pulled up a chair, and sat down next to Troy. "I had a visitor, Troy. It seems that you are having problems. Anything I could do to help?"
Troy leaned back in his chair. "Oh, it's just the rose issue again. You'd think the system could handle it; I've been able to replicate h
undreds of other biological specisms before. Just the damn roses."
"It is a fail-safe, Troy. The roses are supposed to come from me."
"I know, but I figured I'd save you the trouble."
"Trouble indeed. It's been hundreds of years, and I haven't seen anything from your factories you've been claiming to set up."
"Ahhh... yes... I've been perfecting a few processes."
Fred looked at Gobble Dawn. "And this is one of your robotic workers? Seems very biological."
"There were a lot of good reasons to go with biological models."
"Seems very... sentient. I know you were creating management systems with intelligence, but if I understand this correctly, all Gobble Dawn does is watch the rose. I wouldn't think you'd need a fully conscious being as an alert system."
"Maybe not. It may have been a poor design decision."
"And burning these entities alive when the fail-safe fails."
Troy sneered. "Materials reclamation. Their holographic matrix isn't destroyed, and they're programmed to find their way back here to I can reintegrate it." A knock came at the door. "Who the Hell is that?" Troy gestured for Gobble Dawn to get the door.
"Look Troy, you got to play God for a while, I'm just saying stop it." Fred hung his head and looked at the doorway. Helena was standing there. Fred's jaw dropped. "Helena?"
Gobble Dawn noticed Shadow slip from her shoulder and disappear inside the replication chamber.
"Hello Frederick. Troy." The Assistant Engineer's name came out with venom.
Frederick ran to her. "Where have you been? I've waited and wondered for centuries. You remember the garden we used to talk about? It's huge! What happened?"
"I was imprisoned."
"How?"
"Troy, you bastard. You left me behind a trapped maze in that damn cave. It seemed like an eternity."
As rage built up in Fred, Troy shrank back behind his desk. "Things are going to change, Troy. Starting now. The only thing you're going to be in charge of is a damn shovel." Fred turned to look at Gobble Dawn. His voice calmed. "Take the rose I gave you, and let the Foreman and the Lady in Scarlet know that change is coming. The... what did you call it? Prophecy. The prophecy is broken. After everything is running smoothly again, I want them to meet me here. We need to untangle this mess." He looked back at Troy. "Your mess, you incompetent."
"You created a race of monsters out of boredom," said Helena.
"No, he created a civilization of monsters. Better get your shovel, Troy."
Troy got up and left, going out the door to the surface world outside. He seemed wounded, punished. With a sad expression he took one last look over his office, and left. As the door closed behind him, Gobble Dawn spoke up. "May I make a request, Fred?"
~ ~ ~
Bone Teeth and Fidget sat glaring at each other. Sometimes one or the other would get up and pace, but there wasn't much for either to do other than wait. And they waited.
They waited until Gobble Dawn appeared, coming down the stair. It did not have its pack, but did have a rose. Bone Teeth looked at the flower, and filled with joy. The cycle of prophecy had run its course.
"The rose!" he said. He waddled to the base of the stair, and sat with his friend. "You have it! Quickly, let's get this back. The Lady will be overjoyed."
Fidget smiled. Maybe everything was going to work out.
"Yes friend, you need to bring this to her, but I will not be going."
"Why?"
"Because, I've asked the chief engineer if I could stay with him. It's wondrous friend. It will take time, but you'll see."
Bone Teeth was beginning to absorb what was said. "I see. The Chief Engineer! I'll miss you, but I'll envy you, too."
"You'll be in charge of the rose, but only for a while I suspect." Gobble Dawn's normally mute head spoke up. "Let the Lady in Scarlet and the Foreman know that the Prophecy is broken! After everything runs smoothly again, they must come here to plan what needs to be done. The assistant engineer is no longer in charge, and they must report directly to the chief engineer, Fred."
"Fred?"
"Yes, Fred." Gobble Dawn patted its friend on the back. "Good luck. I will see you again."
"Aye."
Gobble Dawn handed the rose to Fidget, and watched Fidget and Bone Teeth begin the long journey back to the city of the Lady in Scarlet.
The Prophecy was broken.
A Crisis Of Faith
The beaming image of trans-galactic pseudo-Christ peered down at us from the electric neon console, driving us to go on into that sweet, sweet abyss before us. We were riding the strangest wave. It was a mission that we'd received from the television, and we were compelled to obey by the charm of the screen and the zeitgeist. Our frontal lobes were cut up and romanced, mutilated and given dinner and a new dress. Beauty.
I suppose as we plotted our course to the center of the Omega Sector, that was ultimately what we were looking for. That beauty. Selena and I were the final guard, the witnesses to the last crime scene, the only ones that would be able to create the documented history before history blinked out. It was our mission, our plan.
She punched in the last set of coordinates, pseudo-Christ still peering at us, the glowing two dimensional rendering of his eight dimensional tentacled visage giving us strength. I looked at him, and gently whispered, "I love you pseudo-Christ."
Selena smiled warmly in agreement. "I love you both." Someone who didn't know her better would have assumed that this was blaspheme, but it wasn't meant like that. She was as devout as I was. It was her that connected the final set of dots that led to this, our last voyage.
I finished the last few entries in ship's gravitational correction metrics and took my headset off. "I'm so filled with joy... no, fulfillment... that I could touch myself."
Selena gave me that warm smile again, and said, "Touch away."
I gently caressed my cheek, a sacred act as dictated by The Man On the Television. That is how we referred to him. He was the man in the skin care commercial that we saw in the intergalactic video stream. It was this man, who at one point gently caressed his own cheek, that brought into stark clarity the fact we needed to travel here, be here, at this time.
Selena carefully brushed her own cheek, and after a moment of reflection got up from her seat. "We have another six hours before we arrive. I'm going to get a cup of coffee."
"Indeed, darling. That sounds like an excellent idea." I followed her to the small, bright-white kitchen area in back, and sat down with her at the short, steel dining table. We sat there in silence, contemplating. Occasionally, for just a brief moment, we'd make eye contact, then our eyes would dart away with a smile. As time passed, though, it became obvious that the revelry had passed for her. Something else was on her face.
Soon she looked straight at me. "John...do you...do you ever wonder if this is really what we should be doing?"
"What do you mean? We're going to watch the last great collapse."
"Oh, I know," she said, "but it's... how can we really be sure? I mean, we both know the facts, and saw the same thing. There's no denying that. But do we really have all the facts? We could be wrong. We could be...missing something."
I chuckled, although I was getting nervous. "The next thing you're going to tell me is that you believe in God now."
"Well, what if he, or she, or it does exist? What if?" I know I acted dismissive when she said that, but it was impossible to ignore a sigh from my core like that. She saw my expression, and leaned in. "Don't just treat me like I'm crazy John. What do we really know? How do we know that's true? Maybe there's some Creator instead? Obviously not like our pseudo-Christ, but powerful and able to throw everything we've thought of out the window."
"So what if there was? So?"
"He's a creator. Maybe he doesn't want everything destroyed."
I leaned far back in my chair. "Well." I didn't have any answers, and it shook me a little. I coughed, partly from the strange emotions I was feeli
ng and partly from wanting to buy time in the conversation. "Well, what does he do if he, or it, creates everything? Gotta destroy things to be able to make more."
She was quiet for a moment. "Maybe it... just makes more things."
"More things? Just like that? No conservation of existence...just more things?" I broke out laughing. She cursed and walked out of the room. I shouldn't have. I know I shouldn't have. This was one of the most important moments of crisis that Selena would ever face, and instead of giving it the reflection it needed I treated it like a crass joke.
I finished my coffee and went back to my room.
Dreams and Legends Page 6