Feed the Machine

by Mathew Ferguson

  The cat, Kin, had fought off the hazel, shredding its eye but then had been crushed and gouged. His back legs were broken, his spine too. He was gasping in the mud, his breath speeding up. The nanites were still alive there. His numbers were tipping out of alignment.

  The boy, Ash, was blistered and bleeding. From what she could see he’d lost both his hands. It was hard to tell. He was on the ground in a pile of dead bugs.

  It doesn’t matter. Let them die. You don’t need them.

  “I do! Silver does!”

  Her sadness will drive her. Her fury will free us.

  “I don’t want that,” she said, tapping frantically. She’d gulped black heal but her fingers were still hurting. The dull burning pain in her side refused to move. The way her clothes hung off her, she knew she was losing too much weight.

  She couldn’t see her own numbers but knew they must be slipping out of alignment. It wouldn’t be long before an inevitable cascade began.

  Ella found Dia behind the secret room. She was unconscious, sleeping under Silver’s drug. She found the hasdee loaded with a medicine sourcecube. Ella printed three bottles of black heal (all it could do). The hasdee sprung to life.

  “How to wake her up, up, up, wake up,” Ella muttered.

  Dia was still infested with nanites and she could push her, maybe even get her up and running but she couldn’t control her like a puppet all the way.

  “Damn it!” she swore and ripped through the flow. Patterns appeared and were discarded. Wild ideas (make the cat crawl down the mine?) flickered and were extinguished. One glimmered with promise.

  “Purification,” Ella whispered.

  She grabbed the nanites in Dia’s body and told them to destroy Silver’s drug. It was a rough grab—Dia would lose vitamin C reserves as well as some iron. It couldn’t be helped.

  The nanites swarmed and in an instant Dia’s blood was cleared. She stirred, opening her eyes.

  Ella grabbed the dead bug she held in her hand, commanded the nanites to power it.

  “Dia! Take the black heal inside and leave the mine! Kin is dying outside on the left. Save him. Your son is next to the Mach—”

  The bug overloaded and exploded, showering Dia with sparks.

  “What did you say?”

  Dia was on her feet shouting at the bug but Ella couldn’t answer her. She watched as Dia ran into the room, grabbed the three bottles of heal and then started the long climb back to the surface.

  She checked on Kin. His numbers were sliding.

  It was going to be close.

  Chapter 68

  Nola

  Fat Man was full of shit.

  And blood. And guts.

  When she’d hesitated, Silver took the knife from her and sliced into his arm down to the bone. It was silver metal, just like Hefnan.

  Fat Man woke screaming in pain but by then, Nola didn’t care. All she could see was Fat Man sitting on his chair watching Hefnan get torn apart by the bugs from the Machine.

  She carved that motherfucker up.

  First his upper arms, hunks of bloody flesh falling away. The floor was soon slick with blood. She carved down to his wrists, the knife scraping against the metal bones.

  Fat Man yelled and screamed and threatened but soon grew still as he was reduced piece by piece.

  She cut his clothes off him, revealing his grotesque belly, his hidden penis. She carved it all away, up to her arms in blood and guts.

  Silver pulled her white liquid out of the door and tipped it into the ruins of his body. She tapped the screen and the liquid gulped down the dead meat and shit. Nola hardly noticed what Silver was doing or wondered how.

  She was with Garrick, a knife stuck in his chest. She was standing all night in a room full of spikes, unable to sit down. She was in the brothel, a stinking drunk yelling at her to help with me boots.

  She was fury.

  She was vengeance.

  Soon Fat Man was a bloody metal skeleton lying in the ruin of his own tissue. She’d left his hands and feet intact as well as his face. Everything from the neck down was gone.

  In the mess of it she saw he had a beating heart and fatty organs. She’d cut them out, dropping them on the floor to be consumed. Fat Man didn’t die.

  He was heartless silver bones that did not draw breath but still moved, sometimes struggling against his bonds.

  “Stop that or else,” Silver said.

  Fat Man looked at her.

  “You’ll regret this for eternity,” he said, his voice emanating without lungs to push it.

  Silver tapped away on her tablet and the pool of growing white liquid flowed over him. It collected at his exposed shoulder joint. There was a grinding snap, a burst of sparks and his arm tore off. The white liquid flowed to the other arm and then his two legs. Snap, snap, snap.

  Soon he was but a torso and a head.

  “Can you lift him on the table?” Silver asked Nola.

  She started out of the drowse that was washing across her. Visions of blood danced across her mind. After she’d been forced to murder Garrick she’d fantasized a hundred times about driving a knife in Fat Man’s stinking guts. Now she had and… nothing. Tiredness. Not satisfaction or happiness. A flat dull.

  Nola grabbed his gleaming ribs (the white liquid had cleaned away the last shreds of muscle and skin) and heaved what was left of Fat Man onto the table.

  Silver then attached the clamps to his head and instructed the white liquid to turn them.

  “Please don’t do this,” Fat Man blurted out as the clamps began to tighten.

  Nola pressed the tip of the knife against the end of his nose.

  “Why did you make me kill Garrick? He was innocent.”

  “It wasn’t my decision.”

  The clamps dug into his head as the white liquid twisted them.

  “Please, I want to live, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  His forehead split—first the skin and then the metal skull underneath. It cracked open and white light gleamed out.

  Nola leaned forward. Inside his head were three glowing white cubes joined together by a silvery nerve cluster.

  “Twelve percent of babies wanted to live too,” Silver said and tapped her tablet. The white liquid seeped into his head and cut the nerves apart. She reached in and pulled the cubes out. Fat Man jerked and died, his eyes going dull.

  Nola looked down at his dead body. His cracked-open head atop a silver spine and ribs like the bars of a cage. She wanted to laugh, cry, hurl things, sleep forever. This was it? All the deaths and now Fat Man was dead himself? It seemed unfair to trade one death for thousands. His suffering, if any, had been short and sharp.

  “We need to leave now,” Silver said. She dropped the cubes in her bag, instructed the white liquid to open the door.

  Something wasn’t right. Nola looked down at her body. She was covered in blood. Her legs, her clothes, both arms. She was filthy with Fat Man’s liquids.

  “Why did you get me to cut the flesh off him if you just wanted the cubes in his head?”

  The door creaked and swung open. Jarrah and the others stood outside.

  “Because he deserved it,” Silver said and slipped out between them. The white liquid followed her, a living puddle.

  “Fat Man is dead!” she called out from down the corridor.

  Jarrah walked into the room and took the knife from Nola. He put it on the table next to the gleaming skeleton.

  “Fat Man is dead,” Nola whispered.

  Chapter 69

  Silver

  She dipped her hand in the white liquid and told it to clean any foreign nanites out of her body. A quick passing dizziness and black liquid appeared at the tips of her other fingers and dripped onto the ground. She’d picked them up on her way through the fence. It didn’t take long before she was purified.

  Once clean, Silver breathed in. No catching, no twinge. No pain whatsoever. She was still scarred from head to foot but the old wounds didn’t hurt like they
usually did.

  She wandered over to the two remaining hasdees, eating a cold sausage. After vomiting she’d been hungry but there was no way she’d eat the pastries piled in Fat Man’s room. Not with what Nola was doing. She’d raced back, narrowly avoiding Dia rushing through town crying for some reason. The bench hasdee was empty but she instructed the white liquid to collect organic material and printed herself some food.

  The white liquid was running in a stream through the door and up the sides of both hasdees. Their completion numbers were rushing upwards. Soon the blocker (whatever that was) and the bomb would be complete. When she’d passed Fat Man’s warehouses she’d instructed her trillion machines to consume all his resources and bring them down the hole.

  Silver returned to her table and the three cubes she’d extracted from Fat Man’s head. She’d connected them in series to her tablet. Hello had had a few pecks at them before she’d shooed him away. Now he was sitting on the hasdees against the wall watching the white liquid flow in.

  The tablet lit and she went for a swim.

  The cubes were eager to help. There was no trace of a personality in them. They would do anything she wanted. She connected the heal sourcecube and told the cubes to crack the encryption. A brief flicker of light and it was done.

  She made a heal sourcecube that could be duplicated unlimited times. Endless heal of all strengths (she left it at the set strengths as she didn’t know what the top level was capable of). She printed a bug to take the cube to her mother. It scurried off with it between its jaws.

  “I want endless food next,” Silver said and reached for the tablet. It beeped before she touched it, the request flowing across the screen. As she watched, the cubes connected to the hasdee and produced a new sourcecube. Silver glanced at the list—it went into the hundreds of thousands. Every meal imaginable.

  “What is a lobster?” she asked the tablet.

  It pulled an info file from the hasdee chip and displayed it.

  Protect yourself or someone will take all this from you.

  Silver compulsively looked behind her at the open door. The mine had been dark and she’d had to use what little light the white liquid could generate to find her way. Anyone could be out there, ready to run in, take her tablet, take her power, to take, take, take—

  “Close the door and keep it shut,” she snapped.

  The white liquid obeyed. The door slammed.

  She told the machines to bore a small hole in the door so they could come and go. The flow of materials resumed and the hasdees kept swallowing them down.

  It’s not enough. You must protect yourself!

  Silver turned back to the tablet and the cubes, her heart thudding. The voice was right—she could be killed down here, crushed to death, flooded, anything. She had to be safe.

  She printed a bug and instructed it to go to the center of Cago to build a hasdee. This one would be different from any other ever made. It would print unlimited bugs for anyone who wanted them. Those bugs would make whatever you wanted. Right now it was only endless food, heal and clothing but as soon as she found more source material she’d make them better. Happy people with endless food and bugs to do their bidding wouldn’t be a threat to her.

  The bug scuttled out the hole.

  “I want to see defensive weaponry and strategies,” she told the tablet.

  The cubes were happy to oblige and she lost herself in their flow.

  Chapter 70

  Ella

  Silver had cleared a kilometer of junk from around Cago in under two hours. The city was now sitting in the middle of a flat plain, a gigantic dead spot Ella couldn’t enter.

  Dead spot wasn’t exactly true. Silver’s machines teemed through Cago. They’d pushed out every other nanite, wiping out Ella’s view with frightening speed. She couldn’t access them at all.

  Then the bugs had come rushing out of the ground, churning and chomping. They ate and reproduced, growing exponentially. The terrified people of Cago could only watch as the Scour was eaten down to the ground. The bugs were still going, eating their way through millions of tons of junk and building more bugs as they went.

  The prospect of endless food didn’t seem to calm them at all.

  Ella was currently soaring with a crow high above Cago. She didn’t want to get any closer for fear Silver’s machines would leap up and eliminate her view.

  She took a breath and let it out slowly.

  “Fuck, shit, fuck, shit, fuck,” she said, letting the words roll off her tongue. When had that memory arrived? Thirty years ago? A sister who cursed. No name or face, just a comforting warmth if she mimicked her.

  The wallscreen was split into squares currently showing the Machine in the center of every city. Twenty-six in total and all pumping out vicious silver bugs like mad.

  Some were continuing their task of reprinting the buildings and people they’d destroyed. Most of them were flying across the landscape heading for Cago. None of them were flying across the Gap of course. They streamed around the border of it like water diverted by a stone.

  There were hundreds of thousands of them and more every minute.

  As she watched, the piles of junk surrounding each town dissolved away, the materials flowing into the Machine to build the bugs. It wasn’t as fast as Silver’s clearing but there were far more of them.

  By her calculation the first bugs from Char would arrive in a little over an hour.

  “Stop defending yourself and strike at the source,” Ella yelled at the screen.

  The bomb would be ready now. The blocker too—if Silver dropped the three cubes in when it asked.

  If not, the oncoming waves of bugs would eat Cago down to nothing. Everything would be lost and they’d spend another fifty years just building a stupid hidden room. Not her. The next one, upstairs girl, having to snoop around until she found a hint of a hint where they could hide it safely.

  Ella went back to Cago and measured the gap around it. More bugs meant faster chewing, faster chewing meant more bugs… she did the calculations there. If nothing stopped her, Silver would clear the entire Scour in two days.

  Ella wondered if she’d told the bugs to leave the cities and people alone. Or were they programmed to consume everything outside Cago?

  She stared at the growing gap and wondered if Silver would see it and understand.

  Print some bugs to kill her.

  Ella shook her head. A stupid idea. It was far too late for that.

  The only pile of junk that remained was the one covering Silver’s room. Perhaps to stop a missile dropping from the sky.

  The crow dived, following its basic programming. It skimmed low over Cago, almost touching the rooftops before spiraling up again. Ella saw a flash of silver surrounded by people out the front of Fat Man’s palace. She flicked the image back. Fat Man’s stripped body. That had been a surprise. The viciousness of it.

  The crow floated high on an updraft, taking in the view. In the distance towards Char a faint blur appeared on the horizon.

  The idea came galloping out of nowhere and smacked her in the mind. She started typing, instructing nanites to build a hasdee as fast as they could.

  Chapter 71

  Ash

  The agony had been unbearable and he’d spent the first ten minutes screaming as his hands grew back.

  Eventually the pain had subsided and his mind cleared. He was sitting in a pile of dead bugs. His mother was next to him. Kin beside her. He walked over and pushed his head against Ash’s new hands. The skin tingled at his touch.

  “You fought the hazel?”

  “Stupid hazel,” Kin purred. He was muddy and streaked with dried blood.

  “I’ll find you some water to wash that off,” Ash said.

  Kin looked alarmed. “No you won’t,” he replied and stalked away to sit next to the dead Machine.

  “A voice told me to bring heal to you and Kin. I was underground… I think Silver drugged me.”

  His mother wasn�
�t sure she was drugged but there was a mark on her arm and she’d slept without intending to.

  Ash pulled himself off the ground and hugged her. They both smelled terrible—sweat, blood and mud.

  “Fat Man is dead,” Dia whispered. “He was metal inside like Hefnan. What does that mean?”

  “Silver will know.”

  His stomach rumbled and a sudden weakness in his legs. His body had cannibalized itself to grow new hands and flesh.

  “I need food,” he said, swaying on his feet.

  Dia made him sit. She went to a hasdee near the Machine, joined the queue in front of it. People were printing tempcubes and bugs like crazy. She printed some food—warm porridge with berries—and brought it back.

  Ash gulped it down, the sugar reviving him.

  Near the edge of the crowded square angry voices arose. The crowd parted and a group of women appeared, their arms laced through dull silver collars.

  “These are from Fat Man’s palace!” one shouted. They dumped the collars in a pile.

  As he watched, people picked up collars and took them over to the Machine. But it was dead. The screens were black and unresponsive. The collars were labeled with small strips of paper tied with cotton. People started calling out names and any family members present rushed forward.

  Ash stood, his legs feeling better now, and looked around. There were dead bodies everywhere. People were covering them with sheets and blankets. Others were walking around with black heal, administering it to anyone injured.

  Raj appeared from a side street, a grin on his dirty face. He rushed over to Ash and hugged him.

  “Motherfucker, it’s done! Fat Man is dead and your sister, the little one not the—” Raj glanced at Dia “—I mean, Silver, she’s cracked the cubes or something! Her bugs have cleared the Scour!”

  He held a bluish tempcube.

  “This is unlimited bugs, heal and food! Infinite duplication! We’re fucking rich!”

  “Silver did it? What do you mean she cleared the Scour?”

  “You gotta get out more and like, not spend so much time being dead and shit. Silver went down the mine and now there are like a thousand zillion bugs running out. She sent an unlocked heal cube to your mother. The Scour is gone. In the distance.”