Ella went left and found she had to hop back over the front fence as the dome curved in. There was a wooden side fence and over that the neighboring house. There was even a window on the other house—it opened to about twenty centimeters of room and then the white wall.
She walked down the left side of the mansion and found a beautiful rear garden, a swimming pool and deck, a barbecue, some chairs and tables and a lush patch of grass so green it glowed. Just over the back fence the white wall cut off. There was a single tall tree in the yard—it looked like an Australian ghost gum—that appeared to touch the white dome far above the three-story mansion.
Ella walked to the barbecue and saw it was clean and powered up, ready to be used.
“Everything for a dinner party but no people,” she murmured.
An iridescent blue butterfly landed on the table for a moment and took off again, fluttering over to some green creepers twining their way around one of the nearby trees.
This is a prison.
It was worth considering. She’d been placed here. Although she didn’t remember committing any crime.
Maybe they cut it out of your memory.
“Why? So I’m punished and I don’t even know why?”
She left the yard and continued around the right side of the mansion. On this side the dome cut into the neighboring house also. Soon she was standing out the front, feeling the warm light on her skin.
“Warm but no sun. Indirect but must be mimicking sunlight. All the plants are growing.”
Ella looked at the dome and saw there was a blurry spot that seemed brighter than the rest. Perhaps the sun? It was directly overhead. Noon?
On cue her stomach rumbled. She returned inside, noting the front door was some sort of carved teak and went to the hasdees in the kitchen. Endless lists of foods, any cuisine she wanted. There were lists of raw ingredients too, if she wanted to prepare her own. She tapped through meals, trying to decide what to eat. There was a button marked FAV. She pressed it and it displayed a smaller selection of meals.
Scrambled eggs with smoked salmon, chargrilled spinach and Hollandaise sauce. Decaf cappuccino in a mug.
Her absolute favorite meal was in position number one. Ella hit print and silver liquid streamed from the hasdee. Within a moment her meal was steaming on a plate, the coffee frothed and perfect.
She ate at the kitchen bench (there was polished silver cutlery in the drawer) and instructed the bugs to clean. They ate the dirty plate, cup and cutlery down to nothing and took the materials to the nearest hasdee.
“Hello! Is anyone here? Is anyone watching?”
Ella yelled at the top of her lungs, her voice echoing through the mansion. No answer. Either they were very good at hiding or she was alone.
She went to the lounge and ordered the screen to turn on. It glimmered to life and showed a sun-dappled cobblestone street lined with yellow and blue houses. Some children went running by, laughing. They were shortly followed by a mother calling out for them to stay within sight.
Part of the wall beneath the screen rose to reveal a small alcove. There was a flat black panel in it. Ella took it out and sat on the lounge. The tablet screen lit when she touched it. It was a standard setup. Swipe to change views. Zoom in and out. Split screens to watch multiple views simultaneously.
Just like—
Ella frowned as she probed the edges of an abrupt nothingness in her mind. Something had been excised, she was sure of it. A memory of screens and…
It was incomplete. A blank gap that refused to fill in.
She closed her eyes and got the sudden image of her brain shot full of holes. The edges were pale and smoothed over, healed but it was clear there had been a knife at some point.
Ella returned to the tablet. She swiped a few times. A room in a house decorated with wobbly old furniture. The inside of a store selling hasdee-printed fruit. A muddy river entirely devoid of life.
She swiped down and a row of buttons appeared across the top. Files, Stats, Variables, Data, Results, Conclusions.
She pressed Stats and the image of the riverbank vanished and was replaced with an endless list of information.
Population, age, gender, race, blood type… it just went on.
Each one had thousands of rows of information below it. She found death and a list broken down by cause and percentage of population. Heart attacks, blood disorders, brain diseases, infant mortality.
She pressed on that one and found infant mortality was running at 5.2 percent. A list of locations appeared.
Adel
Cago
Carm
Char
Dar
Dirk
Ebb
Gola
Halote
She tapped on the first one. A map appeared in the corner of the screen as well as statistics on Adel for infant mortality. Leading cause of death: whooping cough.
Don’t get lost.
The warning came far too late. Ella knew she should be exploring the house, commanding the bugs to make a hole in the white wall (she suspected it wouldn’t work but hey, she had to try), looking around for clues as to why she was here.
But how could she do that in the face of so much delicious information? She could already see correlations between different measurements. The numbers connected and made sense and somewhere deep inside, it pushed a warm contentment. If she could understand all this then things would be okay.
She dived headfirst into the flood.
Chapter 52
Nola
The fighting was at a standstill. Nola spat blood on the cobblestones and tried to catch her breath.
A day and night of violence, blood and death. Fat Man and his guards had dug in around his palace, taking the far end of Cago for their own. Thousands raged against them, hundreds fought but to get too close was to face the deadly green guns. Every few seconds another crack like a bone breaking as one was fired.
They had taken some guns themselves from overrunning guards but it wasn’t enough to come anywhere near the palace, not even dosed on black heal. Samuel Dorrit had appeared out of nowhere with two tempcubes loaded with a thousand bottles each. He told Nola that Silver had given them to him. He didn’t know where she was. They’d used the first bottle of heal on Sheriff Toll but he’d been dead too long.
The fighting had grown vicious at that point. Desperate people drank black heal and charged down the street. Even a direct headshot didn’t kill them. It took a shot to the head to take them down and more to break their body into pieces to prevent the heal from working. Burned off limbs grew back within minutes. The streets were filled with dismembered bodies and slick with blood.
But Fat Man’s guards were drinking black heal too. One would drop, his arm missing and a few minutes later he’d be on his feet again.
To make matters worse, it was clear they were printing the green guns at record pace. Most of the guards were now armed.
Jarrah crept down to her, making sure to stay behind the building. He passed Nola his canteen. She drank from it gratefully, the cold water landing in her empty stomach. She hadn’t slept and had barely eaten, fueled by rage and by sips of black heal. It revived absolutely, wiping away tiredness.
The young deputy was smudged in ash, his fingers black. Most of the fires were out now but not before they’d puffed their load of fine ash into the air. It was drifting over Cago in a haze, clumping and falling like dirty snow.
“We’re down to six guns,” Jarrah told her. “Two rushed together a few streets across and got cut down. The guns are fine but we can’t get to them.”
“Fucking fuck.”
“Yeah.”
Nola had one of the guns taken from the guards. The others went to whoever grabbed them first. Somehow in the fighting she’d become the leader, people turning to her and in the madness she’d seized the role. She’d sent those with guns out to block streets, one gun per street and ordered them to hold their positions. People were soon running message
s back and forth—kids too—risking being shot down just to report people dying.
Now two of those people with guns had gone off on their own and were dead, their weapons dropped.
Why the fucking fuck couldn’t people do what she told them!
Things were breaking apart. The furious mob was now separated, working alone, leaderless and dying.
When the sun had risen the gates had opened and entire families had fled, heading to Char. Any travelers arriving at Cago today would be told to head back where they came from if they were stupid enough to ignore the danger signs.
Someone whistled from the other side of the street. Nola didn’t know his name. She just called everyone YOU and told them what to do. She peered around the corner.
A guard, fat with an overhang belly was walking down the street towards them, his green gun in hand.
“What the fuck is this?” Nola said. Was he insane?
The street was strewn with dead bodies which he took his time stepping over.
“Go back!” the man on the far side of the street called out. He had a pile of rocks next to him and a slingshot. A woman was crouched beside him holding a crowbar. The end had been sharpened into a vicious spike.
The guard kept moving, coming closer.
“Your funeral,” Nola said and shot him in the face.
The gun cracked, the red light flashed out and bounced off him. He appeared to shimmer and blur, his outline fuzzing like a ripple had swept through it. A smoking hole appeared in the wall beside him.
The guard stopped and looked at the hole, reached out and tapped it with his finger. When he touched the still-glowing wood, a slight ripple ran up his arm.
Nola shot him again.
The laser flared off into the sky. He rippled again.
The guard raised his hands in the air. He had something stuck on his inner arm. A gray disk.
“I’ve come to discuss terms,” he called out.
Slingshot dude flung a rock at him. It hit him in the forehead and bounced off. Ripple.
Nola shot him again, this time in the leg and then fell backwards when the beam reflected at her. It charred the wall near her head. Another few centimeters and she’d be gone.
“I think we need to talk to him,” Jarrah said. He was holding a shockstick in his hands.
“Have you seen Silver anywhere?”
He shook his head. Nola had asked a few people but no one had seen her since yesterday. She was last seen visiting Bell Dorrit. Nola needed her—this was an escalating technological war.
“You still have those bolas you used to knock me down? Get ready to throw them.”
“I don’t think they’re going to work. He has some sort of invisible shield around him.”
“Put your gun down and we can talk!” Nola yelled out.
She peeked around the corner. The guard was coming down the street, gun in hand.
Nola signaled Jarrah to get ready. Hoping she wasn’t about to get her head burned off she stepped out from behind the building. Jarrah moved out next to her.
“You need to put your gun down,” the guard said. “It’s useless now anyway.”
“You guys have a shield now?”
“Something like that. Put your gun on the ground and step back so we can talk.”
“Ah, fuck. I don’t think so. Jarrah?”
The guard was close now, only five meters away. Jarrah went from standing still to hurling the bola in no time at all. They passed Nola in a blur and wrapped around his knees. The guard fell forwards. He had his gun in his hands, hung over his body by a strap. He let it go but tried to take a step to halt his fall. He crashed into the ground face first, landing on his gun. He was too fat to get up quickly.
Nola ran over and tried to stomp on his head but her foot was diverted, slipping to the side to hit the cobblestones. She drew her knife and brought the point of it down on the guard’s neck. About a centimeter off his skin the tip of the knife started buzzing. Nola slowed, feeling like she was pushing the knife through a thick gel. Whatever the shield was, it didn’t stop sharp slow knives.
The guard froze when he felt the blade touch his skin.
“Jarrah, take that thing off his arm. Go slow.” Nola knelt on the guard. A buzzing started in her legs.
The device was a round disk, dull metallic gray with a single button on the front. Jarrah knelt beside the guard and reached for the disk but couldn’t get his fingers on it, no matter how slow he went.
“Let me guess, you have to turn it off?” Nola said, pricking the guard’s neck.
“Yeah.”
“Reach to turn it off.”
“You’ll kill me if I do.”
Nola pushed on the knife, sliding the tip of it into his neck. He stiffened beneath her and gasped.
“It’ll be slow but I think I can drive this knife through your spine. Wanna try?”
“Okay, okay. You need to promise to let me go.”
“I promise.”
Nola kept her weight on him as he moved his arms above his head. Between the gun and his weight, it was slow and awkward. He got a finger to the button. The faint buzz she’d felt around her knees and feet vanished.
Jarrah took the disk. It came free with a slight tug. Nola put the knife back against the guard’s neck.
“How does it work?”
“Put it on your arm, button turns it on. That’s it.”
“Slide your gun off.”
Nola sheathed her knife and stepped back, pointing her gun at him. With Jarrah’s help, he managed to get the gun off. They let the guard stand.
“Walk back to your people and tell them to stop fighting us. We only want Fat Man and a few of his head people. Gardner, Candle. The thin man with black hair.”
Jarrah looked at her with a slight frown on his face. The pure rage running in the streets was against Fat Man only. Not these extra people. Nola ignored him—there was a reckoning coming for those three. Tirrel too.
“There’s no point! No one is going to join you!” the guard blurted out. He looked behind him, towards the palace, fear in his eyes.
“We promise safety for any slave who surrenders.”
A lie.
“You don’t understand. He can detonate collars.”
“No he can’t.”
“I saw it. That little kid they use for the medbeatings…”
“So why doesn’t he do it now? C’mon Fat Man, explode my collar!”
Her voice echoed through the streets. There was a faint reply of cracks somewhere to the west.
“You need to surrender or he’s going to kill all of you.”
The guard started walking backwards, not asking permission to go. Once he’d taken a few steps he turned around and jogged back the way he came.
“Do you think that’s true?” Jarrah asked.
A cold room, feet aching, a concrete barrier. Two hulking guards dragging a tiny boy between them, naked, his ribs sticking out.
The crack and snap of bone.
Nola seared the guard’s head off his shoulders. His body joined the rest clogging the street.
She turned to Jarrah and held out her hand for the disk. He gave it to her. She pressed it against her arm. It stuck there, somehow. She hit the button. A faint buzz trembled up her arm and over her body.
“If he can detonate our collars whenever he wants then we have to keep fighting. We will never be free.”
She didn’t add that somewhere in Fat Man’s area there was a hasdee printing junk and sometimes in that junk there were sourcecubes. This shield was something new and powerful. They had to kill Fat Man before he stumbled on an unstoppable weapon.
Nola turned the shield off and slipped the disk into her pocket. She needed Silver.
Chapter 53
Silver
The heal sourcecube loved to talk but it would not listen. It was like the Collector’s house—a thousand wonderful things hidden away behind unbreakable glass.
Silver circled the sphere o
f code but it was smooth. No divots, no cracks, no rough spots to drop a fleck of code that would start digging.
She’d found the dose quantity limit was arbitrary. The cube happily reported it could be changed to any number, including unlimited. The strength of it had levels above black. They were not color-coded. The highest level was at least one hundred times more potent than black but what did that mean? Black would regrow limbs, save the newly dead from the grave.
Except your brother.
Silver moved around the sphere, asking questions, riding the flood of information that returned. The voice was a distant whisper over the mountains, easily ignored. Near it sat packages of pain Silver had dropped. She saw them as red glowing things connected to her by fine gold strings. So long as she remained in the flow, they couldn’t hurt her.
Maybe Ed and Michael are dead. Your mother is dead. You care more about Ed and Michael than your mother.
“Please help me. We need to understand this.”
Hello awoke from his sleep but then closed his eyes again. He was leaning against a new hasdee sitting on the bench. Silver had instructed the bugs to build it and surprisingly they’d obeyed.
Silver slipped out of the flow long enough to look across at the three hasdees lined against the wall. Hasdees loved to talk and these ones were very happy to tell her what they were making. She’d used her tablet to send them questions. It was all she could do down here—the metal mesh around the room stopped the hasdee chip information from updating. It sat still and quiet. If she stepped outside then it began changing again.
The answer was clear enough: there was a signal around them. Stepping into a blocker box stopped it. But why would you want to stop such a delicious flood of information? Another mystery, like the three hasdees.
The first hasdee was printing a bomb. Not a conventional bomb but rather one that would release an intense burst of electromagnetism. It had about sixty percent of its required materials.
Feed the Machine Page 24