Feed the Machine

Home > Other > Feed the Machine > Page 29
Feed the Machine Page 29

by Mathew Ferguson


  Dia straightened from looking at the hasdees and felt her back twinge in pain. She grimaced and rubbed it as she walked out the door and into the mine. Fat Man’s lights were still running—a separate power source from the fences and lights around Cago—but that was up the top of the tunnel that had been carved from the end of the mine to the mesh-covered room. Some of it reflected down, the rest of the light came from inside the room. Silver insisted the door be jammed open so she could do her work.

  Dia stretched and shook her body, walking around the outside of the room. The floor and walls were smooth silver, like the tunnel, and surprisingly clean. They had tracked mud across the entranceway of the room but out here the floor glimmered, smooth and unmarked.

  She completed two laps, the pain in her back easing. The tiredness was making another bid though, climbing her neck. The desire to sit down, to rest a moment was overwhelming.

  Dia pushed it away, moving her feet, intending on another lap to keep her awake. She made it halfway around the room before she slowed and stopped, her energy fading. She leaned her face against the mesh and blinked, resting, just for a minute.

  Somewhere between one blink and the next, marks in front of her face resolved themselves into letters.

  DIA

  A bug, dead, trapped behind the mesh, stuck between it and the wall. Her name written on its back.

  She blinked the tiredness away and reached in to grab it, screamed when it twitched.

  It was still alive.

  She reached in, trying to get her fingers under to pull it out. The bug lit at the touch of her skin.

  A crackle and a voice. She hadn’t heard it for seven long years.

  “Dia I’m sorry I had to leave you but there was no other way. If this works it will be our final death. If you have found this, talk to Silver. She can explain.”

  A pause, an eternity.

  “I love you forever.”

  The bug crackled again and died. Dia sank to the ground, her legs boneless.

  She closed her eyes for a second and then Silver was standing in front of her.

  “Hi baby,” Dia murmured. Silver stretched out her arms and Dia responded without thinking—although Silver never hugged.

  Her daughter’s body was warm and small, light in her grasp.

  Something pricked her side and she followed the relief rushing through her down into darkness.

  Chapter 63

  Ella

  She grimaced as she walked down the stairs, her body aching with each step.

  As good as the black heal was, it did little against the ravages of old age.

  “Good morning!” Bug said. He was in his cat shell, his fur pure black and shiny. Ella would never tell him but she preferred he remained in that shell. When he used the bird shell he was too annoying with his pecking and obsession with shiny objects. His dog shell was even worse—too much licking and now dangerous given her age. If he accidentally knocked her over she might not get up and all her work would be for nothing. She’d hidden it away in one of the upper rooms and now pretended she didn’t know where it was.

  Ella reached the bottom of the stairs before she answered him. She needed a lot more of her concentration these days even for simple tasks.

  “Good morning,” she said, her voice cracking.

  She glanced at the screen. Thank the universe her vision remained as sharp as ever. Hanlon was still marching his way across the Scour, heading for the Scab canyon.

  Hanlon version three.

  The voice sounded weary. She was eighty-nine by her reckoning and she supposed the voice was the same age. The last Feed was three years ago, the next in seven and if she made it that far she knew she wouldn’t see another.

  The forever girl upstairs would awake.

  Ella sat down at the table and ate her breakfast. Poached eggs on toast, a hash brown, a side of spinach and a glass of orange juice. She dripped spicy sauce on the eggs. It burned her tongue and sometimes produced a pain in her side but she didn’t care. There were a very limited number of breakfasts ahead and she was going to enjoy each and every one if she could.

  She paged through her notes as she did. She was storing her findings where she could in the flow too but putting her thoughts down on paper was helpful. No doubt after she died the bugs would chew it down to nothing as they remade the mansion for the forever girl anew.

  Bug leapt on the table and navigated his way around the strewn electronics only to then sit on a tablet to wash himself. Ella shooed him away with her hand and picked it up.

  The program had found another ghost overnight. Ghost #217 if she was counting correctly. This one had hidden her fragments deep in the files about the reflective properties of different materials. The ghost numbers were in the order she found them—not in the order they lived. She could only determine that by references they made to previous ghosts.

  Ella brought up her research and skimmed through it. The previous Ella convinced two Hanlons to leave their families but both had died upon reaching the Scabs. A failure but more verification of the trading strategy as a viable one.

  “Nothing to trade, no reason to keep you alive,” she murmured. At least five of the other ghosts had come to the same conclusion which is why on this loop she’d convinced Hanlon to liquidate his entire fortune to buy two bottles of black heal. The leader of the cannibals had a granddaughter hovering on the brink of death. If Hanlon could reach him in time, perhaps he could trade the heal for passage through to the canyon and back again.

  It killed two birds with one stone (an absurd phrase) because it also threw his remaining family into poverty and suffering. They were necessary ingredients to push the daughter into repair work. She had to be ill enough to want to escape this world but not so ill she died.

  Ella changed the view to watch the mother. It had been ten days since her husband had vanished with all their wealth and she was still trying desperately to hold it together.

  “She sold the vase,” Bug said from his chair. He licked a paw and wiped it over his ear.

  “Hmm,” she said. She told the bugs to make her a cup of tea.

  One hundred and four of the ghosts had focused on this family and the slow slide into desperation. Too quick and the daughter died. Too slow and they didn’t sell themselves to Gould Riley in time. It had to be at the perfect speed.

  Tonight, Ella was sending a bug to chew through vital components of Dia’s refrigerator. She would replace it (seventy-two percent chance) but it would cost her enough to nudge the fall along.

  Something beeped on the tablet and Ella looked down at it. She fell into the flow.

  A blink and she was back again, sitting on the lounge this time. Three days gone swimming in the flow. She must have slept too because she felt rested enough. She reminded herself to turn off the sound on the tablet but then knew she wouldn’t. She always wanted to know the instant it found anything. Days lost swimming in the flow were dangerous but worth it.

  Hanlon was descending into the canyon. Ella’s fingers ached but they were still nimble—she confirmed he’d traded the heal to the old cannibal (his granddaughter was alive and happy) in return for safe passage through and back. Some of the other Scabs were plotting to kill Hanlon as soon as he returned but Ella already had a plan for them—it involved poisonous bugs that were waiting for the right time to strike. It was all preprogrammed.

  She checked the radiation level and saw it was climbing. Hanlon would need that second bottle of heal before he reached the hidden room outside Cago.

  Another blink and she was watching him cough blood in a dark hole. He’d welded himself in. Ella had the fear that he hadn’t dropped the bomb and food where she’d told him. How did that slip her mind? She looked back in the files and relief flowed through her. He’d dug a hole no more than fifty centimeters deep and dropped the bomb and the supplies before covering it. Already the pile was inching the package towards its final destination. A precaution in case the boy fell down one of Fat Man’s
trap holes (estimated eighty-eight percent of the time). The missile that dropped from the sky was predictable—whether Ash or Raj saw it wasn’t.

  She checked his pack—it was full of the deadly silver bars that were killing him. She’d considered a layer of lead, almost to the last moment before ghost #122 advised it weighed too much, made him too slow. He either never made it to the Scabs or died on the way back.

  “Must concentrate,” Ella admonished herself aloud. Bug raised his sleepy head from another chair to blink at her before returning to sleep.

  Telling herself off was no use. She slipped again (some data about abnormal immune responses to nanites in the body) and when she next came out Hanlon was staggering around to the front of the mesh room, skinny as a rake, bleeding from his nose.

  He’d drunk the black heal on the way back but there was little it could do against the poison irradiating his body.

  Ella spun the time back a minute, saw him whispering into a bug, wedging it behind the mesh on the back of the room. She doubted the message would survive—it had been a false hope move. Give him something to fight for. She’d convinced him to leave his family with footage from previous loops and it had nearly destroyed him. He’d needed hope to cling to.

  She dived back inside the room. Hanlon was feeding the bars into the middle hasdee, the front of his clothes stained with blood. He was swaying on his feet and as she watched, he dropped one of the bars. It clanged to the ground.

  “Pick it up, put it in,” she whispered to the dying man. The processing time took years—if he didn’t get all the material in then it was all for nothing.

  Hanlon fumbled the bar into the hasdee. It swallowed it down and began processing.

  Then he staggered back and fell to the floor.

  Ella couldn’t contain herself. She’d never reached this part before. One of the ghosts had come this far and delivered half the material to make the bomb. Now she’d fulfilled the other half. Even if she died, the next Ella wouldn’t have to send Hanlon out to his death.

  Although they might, to push the family down so the girl still does her hacking.

  The screen on the wall flickered and came to life. Ella gasped as a young blonde face filled the screen. Silver, looking worse for wear. She had bruises running up the side of her face and dried blood crusted around her nose.

  “Dad, thank you for delivering what I need. I promise this will be the final death.”

  She wiped her nose with her hand. Ella saw it was scarred, like she’d been in a fire.

  “I love you Dad, forever.”

  Ella didn’t know how much of the message Hanlon heard. He was on his side, his breaths short and quick, a puddle of blood around his face. She saw him look at the screen before all his numbers tipped out of alignment and the final cascade of death rushed through him.

  The screen shut off, the blonde girl vanishing, and the bugs moved in to clean the mess of organic matter.

  The door and lights were on an automatic timer. They room grew dark and the door closed. As soon as it did, the signal shut off. She couldn’t see in there.

  Ella sat back on the sofa and swallowed, her mouth dry.

  The bomb was nearly ready. But there was still much to do.

  She connected to Frederick, an old man living alone in a shack in Variko. He was doddering around his ruin of a kitchen, hands trembling. Test subject #1130. Ella seized the nanites in his brain and pushed. A complex cascade of cells firing, electrical impulses rerouted into a new pattern.

  Frederick stopped in the middle of the room.

  “Hello,” Ella said aloud.

  “Hello,” Frederick said, his voice but her accent.

  Then the push rippled back and the intricate web of chemicals and machines crashed out of alignment. Frederick’s nose started bleeding and he fell to his knees. Ella let go of him. On the tablet she watched what was akin to a mental storm raging in his brain. The chaos washed back and forth, threatening to kill him. His lips trembled and his fingers twitched.

  Then it was over. A tiny segment of order appeared and flourished, spreading rapidly. Frederick stood, dazed but alive. He wiped his bloody nose, looked at the stain and wandered off to find some water.

  “First successful human trial,” Ella told Bug.

  “Okay,” he said and went back to sleeping.

  Chapter 64

  Nola

  She shot the hazel down where it stood. It collapsed to the ground in a smoking heap. The sun had been up for hours but for some reason the hazels weren’t fleeing before it. They were still flooding in over the hills, hiding in any shadow they could find, attacking anyone they could see.

  There was no time, no more motherfucking time!

  Twenty minutes until the countdown ended and they were no closer to Fat Man’s palace. The streets were too narrow for them to rush en masse. Fat Man’s guards had the higher ground.

  It was a war of attrition and they were hemorrhaging people.

  Worse still, some of the guards now had grenades. Not old dug-whole-from-the-Scour grenades liable to explode any moment. Shiny new just-printed-oh-fuck grenades. They’d appeared about two hours ago.

  “Should have burned the fucking city down,” Nola told Jarrah. She’d tried to, sometime in the night but everything was too wet from the storm. Even fires set inside died out.

  “We can go under the buildings down the left side, closest to the fence. At least four of them connect, no gap.”

  Nola looked where Jarrah was pointing but no thought followed. She was too tired. She’d had a reviving sip of black heal near dawn (someone found a bottle) but it had worn off. Nola stared dumbly at the buildings and then agreed for no good reason.

  Silver had said the EMP would destroy every electrical thing in the city unless it was extremely well shielded. They couldn’t wait for this though—Fat Man’s guards were relentless and seemingly without limit. They’d lost two hours in the early hours of the morning when a group of them got into position covering the warehouse. They’d taken them out and the looting resumed but they’d lost valuable time. They couldn’t wait, they had to fight.

  They crept out of their hiding places, staying in cover. Behind them the warehouse was still being looted but at a much slower pace. Fat Man’s guards had shot holes through the walls with repeated bursts. The structure was creaking, ready to topple over. Nola had heard Ash shouting about an hour ago but didn’t know where he was now.

  Jarrah led the way, getting down on his hands and knees and sliding under the building, his gun on his back. Nola followed along with six others. One she vaguely recognized as a girl who worked at the Golden Door. Emi?

  Under the buildings it was surprisingly dry given the heavy rain overnight. They crawled between the stumps and wooden joists. Soon they passed a thin line that demarked one building from the next. They kept moving.

  They were under building three when Jarrah froze and held up his hand. They all dropped to their stomachs, pulling their guns around in front of them. Over the sound of her thudding heart, voices from above.

  Three women talking.

  “… unlimited ammunition. Down to the end before we release.”

  “Yes boss.”

  A mechanical noise—a whirr—and tread moving across the floor above them. The wood creaked.

  “Fucking thing is heavy,” one of the women said.

  Nola looked across at Jarrah. He pointed up at the floor and shrugged. A complex movement that said what the fuck is that? Should we do something or keep moving?

  Nola pointed her hand at the floor in the shape of a gun and pulled an imaginary trigger. She rolled over onto her back and waved to everyone following her. Fire on my command. It took a few hand waves and mouthed words for everyone to get it. In the meantime the heavy tread continued to move, the floor protesting.

  Three. Two. One.

  Jarrah fired first then Nola and down the line. Their guns fired once every three seconds. They had eight guns so by the time the
fourth in line fired, Jarrah was ready again. The lasers burned through the wooden floor like it was nothing.

  Frantic yelling from above and a scream told Nola they’d hit someone. Her laser had punched a hole the size of a fist through the floor. She saw someone running and fired at an angle. The laser burned another hole, kept going and sliced into her leg. She dropped and a moment later another laser shot up under her body, burning a hole straight through her.

  Nola burned two more holes and kicked, smashing a space large enough for her. She didn’t stand though—they all kept firing on their pattern, peppering the floor and burning holes in the roof.

  “Make holes!” Nola shouted. Soon it was done.

  “One at a time!”

  Jarrah leapt up first, gun at the ready.

  “Clear,” he yelled.

  Nola next and then it ran down the line. They weren’t trained soldiers by any stretch but overnight they’d learned about friendly fire.

  The three women were dead.

  They clambered out of the holes and into the room. It was an empty warehouse.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  Some sort of robotic man but with treads instead of legs. Connected to its back was a thick electrical cord that ended in a square control panel. It stood taller than any of them. It was shiny silver but had been smeared with mud as a sort of camouflage. The robot’s face was serene and smooth, its eyes unblinking. Its hands were clasped in front of its body as though it were praying.

  Nola picked up the controller. It had a digital screen that shimmered to life when she touched it. The view from the robot’s eyes appeared showing Emi standing in front of it. A red outline appeared around her.

  Kill?

  Y/N

  Mark hostile/friendly

  Nola tapped mark friendly. The outline turned green.

  She pressed a directional arrow and the robot whirred and moved forward.

  “We can’t fight things like that. We have to leave Cago.”

  One of the men, his face pale. Others shared his worried expression. Nola didn’t answer but used the controller to turn the robot around and move it towards the door leading to building four. She had to avoid the holes they’d burned in the floor.

 

‹ Prev