Theme Planet

by Andy Remic

  “I don’t believe that,” said Dex.

  Amba said nothing.

  “What happened?” said Dex.

  “It was...”

  “Yes?”

  “A little girl. At the airport. And her mother. I... killed them. But it changed me. Something died inside me that day. Something changed in me. Forever.”

  “No. It goes deeper.”

  “No...”

  “There was something else...”

  “No...”

  Drifting, drifting down, drifting back through memories... Memories locked, and lost, the key thrown away...

  ~ * ~

  The small house by the river had white walls, and at one corner the brickwork was crumbling and she knew one day she’d have to get round to that damn repair. The windows were very old-Earth, traditional - wooden frames with peeling white paint and single panes of glass. The roof of the house had terracotta tiles, kiln-fired. Several were cracked, but such was the roof’s construction that no water leaked in. And that was good. Amba walked up the crushed stone path, her flat shoes crunching, and she breathed the heady scent from the pine trees surrounding her house. She saw the door. A pale blue door, battered and a little warped, with peeling paint. Behind the house, the trees sighed in the wind. Small animals scurried through woodland detritus. To the right, a river gurgled over rocks. To the left, the forest curved like a scar and rose up the flanks of another pine-clad hill to a circle of stones, which sat on the summit, ancient and magical, grey flanks shining.

  What’s behind the blue door, O little one?

  What song will you sing this time?

  What dreams will you savour ?

  Amba reached the door and stopped. The door terrified her. What lay beyond terrified her. She reached out, took the handle. It had been warmed in the sun. She turned the handle, and the door swung open. To reveal...

  Amba blinked.

  A little girl.

  “Mommy,’’ said the little girl, smiling warmly and holding out her hands. “Mommy!’’

  ~ * ~

  “You had A child,” said Dex, softly.

  Amba nodded.

  “And they took your child away,” said Dex.

  “Yes.”

  “And you accepted this decision?”

  “Yes.”

  “The problem now is that you’re learning your humanity all over again,” said Dexter, and his hand came up and softly stroked Amba’s cheek.

  “There have been... moments. When I doubted myself. Doubted my decision. But I always pushed them aside. I had to push them aside.” She looked at Dex then, and there were tears on her cheeks. “I shouldn’t have let them take my baby girl,” she said.

  “You were engineered to do so,” smiled Dex, kindly. “But now, you are questioning; now, you are fighting their creation. Whatever they planned for me, whatever they built into me - it has not worked. I am still human, and yet I was built an android. There is a blurring of the boundaries, Amba. Can you see that?”

  “I can see that,” she said.

  “And it must be the same way for you. We need to stop Oblivion’s plans to destroy SARAH; to destroy the Theme Planet.”

  “And then I can find my little girl,” said Amba, voice meek.

  “Yes.”

  “First, we must stop Katrina,” said Dexter.

  “And how will you do that?” said Katrina, and she was standing taut, with a snarl on her face. In her outstretched hand was a FRIEND, identical to Amba’s weapon. To either side of Katrina stood her girls, Molly, and Toffee, and each of them carried a fizzing, buzzing dark energy wand, and a pistol. Their eyes were gleaming, and Dex felt a thrill of fear spark through his system. His own little girls wanted him dead. That was a situation he could never have foreseen.

  “How long have you been listening?” said Dex.

  “Long enough,” said Katrina. “Throw down your weapon, bitch.”

  Amba dropped the FRIEND to the fleshy ground.

  Katrina turned her eyes on Dex. “You bastard. You betrayed me.”

  “I...?” He smiled, easily. “You betrayed yourself,” he said.

  “I am doing what I was built to do. But you? You are fighting it, Dexter, I can see it in your fucking eyes. In your brain. You are battling against the very thing for which you were designed; created! You’re a killer, Dexter Colls. You’re an Anarchy Android. Accept it! Until you relinquish full control, until you give yourself over to the joy and the purity of what you can become - you will never know freedom from the shackles of a weak inferior humanity.”

  “You’re wrong, Katrina. You have not found freedom; you’ve just locked the door to your own cage.”

  “No! I am more powerful than I have ever been! Stronger, faster, more agile! I can kill without remorse! I have achieved the pinnacle of all creation! I am the perfect human, without all those pathetic human hang-ups!”

  “No,” said Dex, wearily. “You are diluted, but your vanity precludes you from seeing it.”

  “You bastard,” said Katrina.

  Dex shrugged.

  “You’re fucking this bitch, aren’t you? You two are in this together?”

  “What?” he snapped. “This is nothing to do with sex, you idiot. And look at what a fine fucking wife you’ve become! You’re pointing your weapon at my head! Katrina, you are being a bad wife.”

  In unscripted cooperation, as if they were joined by the mind, Amba and Dex rolled apart in blurs and attacked, launching themselves at Kat and the girls. The FRIEND and the wands spat and fizzed, and guns blasted holes in the glowing white walls. Amba hit Kat full in the chest, knocking her back onto the ground, Amba atop her. Dex felt the blast of Molly’s gun skim his face, blowing a wide hole in the roof. He knocked the weapon from Molly’s hand, then crashed into the wand, which she dropped. Molly snarled at him, kicked him in the stomach, punched him in the face, and he grabbed her arms and tasted blood and stared into the dark eyes of his eldest daughter. “How can you do this to me?” he yelled. “I’m your father! Your own flesh and blood!”

  “You’re just another android to be killed,” said Molly, and head-butted him on the nose. He released her arms, and she was a whirling dervish, delivering punches and kicks that drove Dex back against the wall. Toffee was waving her wand around madly, and dancing a little on the spot, unable to get a clear shot at Amba or Dex with her gun.

  Katrina had dropped her FRIEND, and was trading punches with Amba as they rolled around on the floor. Dex, finally, blocked two blows and delivered a punch that threw Molly right across the room, where she cannoned into Toffee and both went down in a tangle. He picked up Zi, and crawled across to the tangled mess of Amba and Katrina.

  On his knees, he put the gun against Katrina’s head. All action ceased.

  “Get off her,” he said, his voice thick with emotion.

  Slowly, Katrina climbed free and stood. Amba got up, panting, her face bruised and bloodied.

  “Kill her,” said Amba.

  Dex stared down the barrel of the FRIEND.

  “He can’t,” said Katrina, and glanced sideways at Amba. “He’s a fucking human coward. What did you expect?”

  She moved fast, rolling sideways and... disappearing into the hole she’d blasted through the wall. Dex ran forward, kneeling at the edge, and saw the newly created corridor went along - then down, into a deep dark nothingness below...

  Even as he knelt, Molly and Toffee hurtled past him, leaping into the abyss and disappearing in the blink of an eye. “No!” Dex cried, stretching out to them in a moment of reflex, and nostalgia, and hurt, and wishing everything was back to normal, to the way it should be. The way it used to be. But sometimes, you can’t go back. Sometimes, it’s too broken ever to be fixed.

  Dex looked back at Amba. His face was ashen. He felt like he wanted to be sick. And, he realised, Katrina had taken her FRIEND. The weapon. The bomb...

  “What now?”

  Amba picked up the compressed ball that was all that rem
ained of the avatar. “SARAH? Can you hear us?”

  “Of course,” said SARAH.

  “If we were to help you, what would you have us do?”

  “Katrina and the girls are even now cutting their way towards my crystal core. My Heart. If they plant the FRIEND, I, and the millions of holidaymakers on Theme Planet, will be destroyed. I am willing to sacrifice myself -but you have your fellow humans to worry about.”

  “I know what to do,” said Dex.

  “Yes?” Amba raised her eyebrows.

  “We must bring Romero and his Ministers of Joy to us. Then we can pursue Katrina, stop her planting the FRIEND.”

  “And how do you propose we do that?” said Amba.

  “Easy,” smiled Dex, touching his face where Molly had given him a beating. “We’ll tell them what we know. Tell everybody what we know. SARAH, do you have communication facilities down here?”

  “Our Theme Planet Advertising Broadcast Station, TPABS, is an hour from where you stand. I can direct you. It has the power to broadcast across the entirety of Quad-Gal. It is the source of all our Quad-Gal advertising; the selling of Theme Planet holidays. It is very powerful.”

  “I think it’s time to give Oblivion Government the publicity they deserve,” said Dex.

  “If we do that, Katrina will get to SARAH’s core. We can only do one thing or the other.”

  “We’ll have to split,” said Dexter.

  Amba read the anguish in his face; and she understood. “You go to the TPABS. I’ll go after Katrina.”

  “No. No.”

  Dex closed his eyes for a moment, and then opened them again. He took a deep breath, summoning up courage from deep within. “I will go after Katrina. I will go after Molly and Toffee.”

  “Are you sure you can do this?”

  “Yes,” nodded Dexter.

  Amba stepped forward, and kissed him. It was gentle, slow, and sincere. Dex stood, stunned.

  “For bringing me back to life,” said Amba, remembering her daughter, remembering her own cowardice. Then she turned, and vanished into the cut flesh walls...

  ~ * ~

  Romero sat on his dark ebony throne, flanked by a thousand silent, immobile Ministers of Joy - the enforcers of Earth’s Oblivion Government, and by default, Earth itself. Romero had his chin on his fist, his long, glossy black hair was drawn back with a simple circlet of silver, and his dark eyes were like glass, his face unreadable, his mood tangible and quite obviously not filled with joy.

  Doors slammed open at the far end of the chamber, and a tall, powerful soldier strode forward. He wore Oblivion’s black uniform, and the silver insignia of the military elite, along with the single bar of a general. This was General Kome of the Chaos Infantry; possibly the most brutal, harsh and feared soldier within the Ministers of Joy, or anywhere.

  Kome approached and snapped to attention, delivering a precise salute, and Romero stepped down from his throne and returned it. Romero, a tall man himself, looked up at the heavily scarred face before him. Kome refused to have any plastic surgery whatsoever, believing a man should bear his scars proudly - and on his front. Kome had no scars on his back. He never turned his back in a fight. Kome was the first of the Anarchy Androids, and the most deadly. He had been assigned human status by Romero for services rendered. This was the one thing in his entire existence for which Kome had shown some gratitude.

  “You have news?” said Romero.

  “Yes. All your implants, all your spies, all your rogue humans down there on that shitty ball of diseased fun -well, between them, they’re doing a fine job of fucking it all up.”

  “What’s the sit-rep on the Anarchy Models?”

  “Amba has performed sterling service. She has assassinated several of the individuals on her list of targets. Katrina and the two young androids played their parts well, and met with SARAH inside and convinced the freak they were human; for a while, at least. For long enough. Long enough to infiltrate. It is this Dexter Colls who presents a problem.”

  “Aah. My old friend Dexter.” Romero thought back, remembering the android’s engineering, his breeding, his growing, his implanting. Romero had taken a very special interest in Dexter Colls. It was a matter of personal pride. “I have high hopes for Dexter.”

  “Don’t get them too high, sir. It would appear he has malfunctioned.”

  “Malfunctioned? How?”

  “We tried to activate his internal switch; but it refuses to work. He remains in his fake human form - working with the same thought patterns, the same emotional concepts, the same empathy. We cannot regress him to base android status. It is a crying fucking shame. An abomination, in fact.”

  Romero considered this. “What are the computers saying with regards probability of mission success?”

  “Ninety five percent success rate. The Monolith Mainframe, the organic computer which calls itself SARAH and is, as we suspected, covering the entirety of the planet, is completely non-violent. There will be no fight there. Our War Machine will roll over her and fuck her violently from behind.”

  “How is the Fleet?”

  “We are positioning in readiness for the initial bombing runs. Cardinal, when this begins, the whole surface of that fucking place is going to be a warzone. Those dumb-ass pleasure seekers won’t know what the fuck hit them.”

  “Good,” said Romero, rubbing his chin. “Serves them right for being so weak. If they had backbone, they’d be a part of our plans for expansion!”

  “Of course, sir,” said General Kome.

  “One last thing. I want you to initiate contact with Amba and Katrina. I want to know where they are, how far into the game they are - yes?”

  “You will break their cover.”

  “I think we’re so far into the game, Kome, it matters little. We are in position to began our wonderful Act of Aggression in... how long?”

  “One hour, sir.”

  “Then one hour it is,” said Romero, dark eyes showing no emotion. Indeed, very like an android’s.

  ~ * ~

  Katrina lay on the trolley, smiling bravely up at Dex. She wore a blue hospital gown and her dark hair was tied back, face radiant with the beauty of being “with child. “ Dex leaned forward and kissed her gently, first on the lips, then on the forehead, and his hand touched her lips, then moved down across the coarse fabric of the hospital gown, over her breasts, coming to rest gently and protectively on the pregnant bump.

  “Everything’s going to be all right,” said Dex, eyes bright with tears.

  “Who you trying to convince? Me, or yourself?”

  “Both of us,” admitted Dex, with a grin.

  “It will be all right,“ Katrina said, and her hand moved and took Dex’s fingers. She squeezed his hand as if to reassure him, and then the doors opened and the doctors and midwives appeared; they smiled warmly, kindly, at Dexter and there were far too many teeth. Dex didn’t like people smiling. In the real world, he didn’t trust anybody.

  “I’ll be okay,“ said Kat, as they wheeled her away into the birthing suite.

  “I love you,“ said Dex.

  “I love you too,“ mouthed back Kat.

  The doors closed, leaving a generously bosomed midwife with Dex. “We’ll prepare her for the section,” she said, “and then you can come in and watch - if you like. Is that your preference?”

  “Yes,” said Dexter.

  “The Caesarean is being carried out by Jojo Brunstfield III, a Doc+7 birthing machine with, as you’ve probably guessed, a Doc+ rating of 7. That means, to the layman, that it’s as technically accurate as seven whole doctors put together!”

  “I’d still rather have a human doctor do it,“ said Dex, unhappily.

  “We’ve been through this several times, Mr Colls.“

  “I know, I know, it’s just...”

  “You don’t trust machines, especially machines that are trying to be human. I understand. I’m the same... and as for those new androids!” She shivered. “They give me the creeps,
they’re so human! Thank God they have no emotions and they’re easy to spot and exterminate, that’s what I always say!”

  “Yes, thank God,” said Dexter.

  “We call them Plastic Hearts down our street,” said the midwife, and Dex clicked. She’d been sent out to make small talk whilst they prepped Katrina for surgery. Keep him occupied. Keep his mind on other things. Dex frowned.