by Andy Remic
“In there?”
“Yes,” nodded SARAH, smiling in that odd way which wasn’t really a smile; just a copy of an imitation.
“Is it safe?”
“Is any of this place safe?” said SARAH. “But... yes. In the manner that you mean. No, you will not be ignited by nuclear fire. It is a Sun Tunnel. An amplification. Not exactly like the real thing...”
“You go first,” said Kat, her face hard, wishing she had a Techrim 11mm.
“As you wish,” said SARAH.
The tall silver avatar stepped forward to the edge of the fiery tunnel. She looked up, hair streaming back a little from the heat and energy. Twenty stories above, glowing like the atmosphere of a star, the top of the circle, the tunnel, ended. SARAH stepped forward into the fire and was... engulfed.
Kat gasped, and ran forward, trailing Molly and Toffee. And as she neared the edge, she realised there was no heat. She stumbled to a stop, and saw SARAH smiling at her, and felt like a fool. An idiot. This creature, this being, was here to help them; they were lost; not just ghosts in the machine, but devils in the cogwork. And she’d been sent to bring them out alive - okay, for the reasons of preventing bad publicity for Theme Planet and Monolith, but fuck it, if that was what it took to stay alive then Katrina was willing to play bubby bunga ball with all four bats.
“You’re sure, now?” said Katrina, eyes narrowed.
And Toffee jumped forward, squealing, giggling, and stood in the fiery tunnel alongside SARAH.
“Come on, Mum! Don’t be such a pussy wuss!”
“A...” Her mouth dropped open, and she frowned, and, trailing Molly, she strode over to Toffee. “I’ve a good mind to smack your legs.”
“You can’t do that, Mom. The school will have you locked up. Remember what happened to Old Lady Jenkins?” She had a look of wisdom on her face that far outweighed her very modest years.
“Hmmm. Don’t you dare do that again,” said Kat, and pointed, using that finger. Toffee looked sheepishly at that finger. That finger had a whole lot of power, as if it were some ancient carved magick wand. Or something.
They started to walk.
All around them, the world burned like... the sun. It was like being in a sun tube. The ultimate in dodgy tanning experiences. And yet nothing but a gently warm breeze caressed their faces; no horrific burns nor immediate incinerations came their way.
“This is brilliant,” said Toffee.
“It’s too bright,” complained Molly.
“Yeah, but it’s pretty crazy, isn’t it?”
“You think a five headed Funky Monk is crazy.”
“Aww, don’t say that, Mols.”
“Well, you’re just a little girl!”
“I’ll tell Dad!”
They looked at each other. Their mouths closed. They put hands in pockets and walked along beside Katrina, and all three walked in a line behind SARAH, the personification of the Monolith Mainframe.
They walked, and seemed to walk for hours. Eventually, Kat called a stop and SARAH halted, turning with patient eyes and a look of serenity on her simple pretty features. “Is everything well?”
“How long in this tunnel?”
“We are bypassing a hazard.”
“That’s fine. I just wondered how long?”
“I cannot give you a time frame, for we are side-stepping time in this environment. All I can tell you is that it will be soon - as you feel it. But we will be emerging into a Jackhammer Hall, and that’s a very dangerous place.”
“Mommy, what’s a Jackhammer Hall?”
“Huh!” snorted Molly. “You mean you don’t know what a Jackhammer Hall is?”
“No,” said Toffee, meekly.
“Girls!” snapped Katrina. “Okay, SARAH. Explain it to me.”
“Up on the surface of Theme Planet there is a huge ride called Jack the Hammers. The hammers start at ground level, and pound a carriage up a pole for two kilometres, right up into the sky. Feels like a Slamjet Ejector Cube. But for the purposes of equilibrium and safety, as the capsules are punched skywards, counterweight pistons are pounded down below the ground. That’s where we’ll be. In the chamber where the pistons come smashing through the floor. A Jackhammer Hall.”
“Are there a lot of these pistons?” asked Katrina, suspiciously.
“Thousands,” said SARAH.
“Why, if we’re not in a real reality?”
“This fake reality models the real one in many ways. But it has become deviated, as I explained. Twisted. Even the pistons may not be what they seem - so you must be on your guard when we enter the Jackhammer Hall.”
They continued to walk through the fire tunnel, the sun tube, and as Katrina walked she thought about Dexter and what he would do. What would he do when discovering their disappearance? First, he’d look for them, of that she was sure. Then he’d go to the police - after all, he was police. What then? The police would start to do a sweep of the Theme Planet resorts, but obviously her and the girls had been taken somewhere, hidden away somewhere from prying eyes. Katrina squeezed her hands in frustration, as much at the consideration of Dexter’s pain as at their own predicament.
Something touched her hand, and it was Toffee. Toffee’s finger curled into her palm, and they walked for a while holding hands and Katrina was thankful for this basic act of warmth and kindness and humanity. It was such a simple thing, simple contact, and yet it meant so much. To be touched. To be trusted. To be loved.
“Mommy?”
“Yes, honey?”
“Daddy’s okay, isn’t he?”
“Oh yes, Daddy’s just fine, poppet.”
“It’s just I had a dream. Last night. Or... whenever it was we were asleep.”
“A dream?”
“Yes. About dinosaurs. Well, kind-of dinosaurs. Only they were alien dinosaurs.”
“And what happened with the alien dinosaurs?”
“They ate Daddy.”
Katrina stopped, and knelt on the corridor of fire. Hydrogen ignited below her knees at millions of degrees, in a bright white glow. She took Toffee by the shoulders and looked into her daughter’s eyes. “Listen. Daddy’s just fine. Daddy’s not in trouble, it’s us who are in trouble. Do you understand?”
“Yeah, Mom. I understand.”
Toffee skipped ahead to Molly, and wearily, suddenly filled with exhaustion, Katrina stood up and put her hands in her pockets.
“Did you tell her?”
“Yeah!”
“What did she say?”
“She said Dad’s fine. He is a policeman, after all.“
“Yeah, she would say that.“
“Well, I believe her.“
Molly considered this. “Yeah. So do I.”
Katrina smiled, and hurried through the solar fire to catch up with her daughters.
~ * ~
Stepping out from the raging inferno of nuclear holocaust was like stepping into a cool gel bath. Suddenly, Katrina felt the cool breath of angels on her neck and face and arms. Confusion scattered lullabies through her brain. What was it? What was happening?
“We were a step out of time,” said SARAH. “That’s why we weren’t incinerated.”
Katrina stared at her. “So it was a trick?”
“No trick. You still live. But if you’d really stepped into the sun tunnel, really - in an actual physical sense - then you wouldn’t have lasted a single picosecond. You would be gas, Katrina. In fact, less than atoms.”
“Well, that’s a great magic trick,” said Kat, face grim.
Behind her, the time-displaced inferno raged on, lighting a huge steel chamber that was, to all intents and purposes, a five-thousand-square-kilometre cube. It was gloomy, lit in a sort of dull silver-grey, and a cool wind was blowing in, smelling of grease and burned oil.
“This is the Jackhammer Hall?” she asked.
“Yes,” said SARAH.
“But... nothing’s happening.”
“It will. But it’s random. Chaos personified.
We must be careful.”
They stepped away from the furnace and began to walk, SARAH leading the way once again. Katrina studied the back of the avatar, and realised it was a creation done to perfection - but then, so were the androids, right? And they were created by Man, not by Machine Mind, as she suspected was the case with SARAH.
Katrina’s job, in the real world, when she wasn’t being the cliché that was “full time mum” - the job she had actually studied for, the job she trained for, hell, the thing she was naturally good at - was advertising. Katrina could sell a tramp a Rolex. She could sell heroin to a pregnant mother, amyl nitrate to a redneck, a wheelchair to a goldfish and Satanic recordings to God. She had not just been the No. 1 Uber-Super-Duper-Best-Selling-Top-Motherfucker Sales Person/Persona at Fleck, Flick & Flack Quad-G Advertising Agency, she had become a (hush, lest one sell out) a partner in the firm. Or The Firm. She had generated so much damn income for the business that every male partner bust a bollock when she considered leaving to set up her own independent (and independently competitive) Agency. After all, Katrina was the woman who sold Coke on Mars. Shit, she sold Mars Bars on Mars, without any irony.
She was the sort of woman who got the job done. And with flair, creativity, underhand aggression and originality.
When she left to become a full-time mother, the partners at Fleck, Flick & Flack Quad-G Advertising Agency had bust double-bollocks and many had gone on to have an entertaining career with alcohol.
And so. Katrina was no stranger to the world of double-talk, pillow-talk, bollocks, bullshit and spin. She could smell a slogan from a billion parsecs, create a strapline on the toilet, and create a marketing campaign from the contents of the toilet.
She’d been dubbed the Mistress of Bullshit.
The Queen of Doubletalk.
And that was why Androids Inc. came to her for the marketing of their new, improved, special model, Generation 6 Personalised Android Companions. It had been Katrina’s first inauguration into the world of Androids. Before then, she’d never really thought about them. They were illegal on Earth, and would be “slotted,” “killed,” “pulverised,” “retired,” “put to sleep” or simply “given a pension” (which had to be Katrina’s favourite, especially after three quarters of a bottle of vodka when the lights were low and she was feeling particularly low and worthless after selling three million prams to women who already owned prams). What had her great mentor Greenbald III once said? “Make the fuckers buy something they already have. The only way to true fortune.” And he’d been right. And Katrina had followed his logic and advice. And it made her feel like a cunt.
Still. Her time with Androids Inc. had been interesting and fruitful, and she’d learned a very great deal. She spent time in the factories on Mars, and further out in the mining colonies of Delta Proximata, Beta Galvanata and Trejo Machinata, where she’d discovered and observed and analaysed the full gamut of android inception, creation, construction, packaging, delivery, malfunction, and destruction. It had been quite a learning curve. And yet another curve that left her reaching for the vodka, feeling quite sick, and leaning on Dexter’s very broad dumb-cop shoulders for support...
The androids had started off bad. Malfunctioning, genetically and in various code processes. Watching the Androids Inc. vidtapes and filmys, Kat saw androids sit up from the bench, or crawl out of the VATS, and then just bubble away. They had to be scooped up with shovels. They weren’t put in body bags, they were shovelled into buckets. In silence, with the professionalism of an advertising partner on the sniff of a big deal, showing no judgement for crimes against humanity or morality or God whatsoever, Kat had watched the history of Androids Inc., watched its promo vids and filmys made for the eyes of the military, mining corps, harshworld explorer adventure companies and, of course, the governments. All these things had passed through Katrina’s grasp, all this hidden history - hidden, at least, to the normal people of the Earth. Kat had been in a privileged position to watch the rise and rise of the android - around the same time AI became self-aware. But whereas AIs, despite superior intelligence and enhanced cognitive ability over their masters, recognised in humanity something, whether that be sheer weight of numbers, or ability to breed at a supersonic rate (on a galactic timescale, humanity was like so much warm bacteria in a jar of rotting meat) -whatever, AIs had made a universal decision to cooperate. Not so androids.
It was called the Inferiority Complex, and it ran thus:
An android was a created human. Humans were superior, in that they created the androids.
But androids were superior, in every other respect.
Humans looked down on androids as inferior, biologically, because they were created.
Androids looked down on humans as inferior, biologically, because they were so feeble in every way.
Androids had many of the same feelings and drives and desires. With one major, serious difference:
A distinct lack of empathy.
That’s not to say it wasn’t there, and in many cases was manufactured in, but an android just didn’t love his brother android, or indeed, man, woman and child, in the same way a “normal” non-created human would.
Not that many humans were normal...
In the end, they didn’t get the contract, not because of Katrina’s skills as an advertising whore (which she was, she freely admitted), but because of a global outbreak of murders by androids, on Earth and its many colonies. It seemed the inhibitor chip placed behind the ear was an easily removable mod, and having the same arrogance and pride as their human creators, the first thing any self-respecting newborn android did was head for the cutlery draw and a bottle of whiskey (sterilisation and oblivion in one handy 70cls).
It had been an eye-opener for Katrina, subsequently swallowed by the joys of motherhood, the horrors of caring for young children, the black hole swallowing her career Dexter being shot at work, and the fact that androids were soon illegal, decommissioned and “Non Reportable” under Oblivion Government legislation.
Now, as Katrina walked, for some reason the avatar before her reminded her so much of the androids. And she shivered. After all, the androids were bad, right? But illegal. Decommissioned. Expendable. Non-human. Waste. Walking garbage. Yeah, they might look like you and I, but that’s just a façade right? They don’t feel like humans feel. Don’t empathise with their fellow Man... (hey, but then, half of her fellow Men don’t empathise with their fellow fucking Man, it’s called hatred, and jealousy, petty criminology, base stupidity, greed and lust and every fucking scumbag is out for himself, right?)...
Androids Inc. said the androids were perfect. They’d been wrong. Oh, so very, very wrong.
How was this avatar so different? An android created by a machine? An alien intelligence? It was still a false human. A created thing. An organic machine. A biological horrorshow. Or was it just code in a computer game? Was there really, actually (hush) nothing there?
Shit.
Katrina rubbed at her eyes, head spinning, head thumping, reality and dreamscape merging, nightmare and reality blending to become one and the same. Where am I? What am I doing? What the hell is real? Am I really here, walking this grey steel terrain? Or is it just another figment of a dream or nightmare? Are my children here? Can I even feel pain...
She pinched herself, hard. It hurt like a bitch-bite.
Suddenly, SARAH halted and held up a hand. Molly and Toffee giggled, as little girls are wont to do. Katrina pulled them close in a protective cocoon of bone and flesh - her own bone and flesh. A pathetic, weak cage, but it was all she had. And she would give everything to protect them. Kill anybody and fucking everybody to protect them.
Just like an android, she reflected. Ha. Yeah, right.
“What is it?”
“We are approaching.”
“How can you tell?”
“The smell. It’s getting stronger. Can you smell it?”
And Katrina could. Oil. Grease. Heat. Friction. Suddenly, before them, a
piston the size of a skyscraper screamed from the roof, from the sky, from whatever the hell was up there in the gloom. It was circular, and grey, and thick, and it powered down with a groan like the dying of worlds. It ran out of momentum as it reached floor level, and there was a tiny click as the mammoth piston touched down, but if Katrina had been standing under it, she would have been squashed into a pancake of crushed bone and gristle on a platter of comedy blood. A cartoon death, only without the elasticity of regeneration that cartoon characters possessed.
“Wow!” said Toffee, in awe.
“Cool,” grinned Molly.
“Not bloody cool when we have to walk across the steel desert with the possibility that these things might come down and crush us!” snapped Katrina. Then to SARAH, “Is there any other way?”