by Andy Remic
This was SARAH’s core. Her Heart. Where she made the rides. Where she gave birth to the rides.
Dex stopped, and looked up at a huge, pulsing, glossy black structure. It was as big as a fifty-storey tower block, vast and leering, disappearing up into the darkness of the roof beams high above; it was shaped like an intricate bulbous bottle, with a narrow neck at the top and a bulge in the middle, tapering to several tubes leading to the conveyors. As Dex watched, a frown creased his brow. The bulbous part was pulsing and squirming in a disgustingly organic manner, almost like a...
“Like a birthing sack,” muttered Dex, and watched as a bright yellow ride CAR was squeezed from one of the glistening tubes and onto a conveyor. It was covered in thick clear slime, and as it moved down the conveyor tiny drones flickered around it, polishing away the... Dex grinned like a maniac. They’re cleaning off the amniotic fluid, he realised. Holy shit, SARAH is giving birth to the ride CARs. Everything on the Theme Planet, every ride, every CAR, every pleasure-giving device - they’re all organic. All part of the alien world shell known as SARAH. Each rollercoaster is a child. Every ride CAR one of her kindred. Every support beam one of her ribs. Every nut and bolt are organic building blocks, every H section a bone, every hydraulic unit a vein filled with SARAH’s pumping blood.
Dex wasn’t just inside SARAH. Inside the factory.
He was inside her womb.
The place where ride dreams were born...
He caught movement up ahead and focused on the task in hand. Katrina was here to plant her FRIEND and destroy SARAH, destroy the core of Theme Planet. He had to stop her. He hurried forward, Makarov against his cheek, moving with speed but making every footfall as silent as possible - helped by the glossy black floor of SARAH’s womb.
Dex’s mind clicked into a certain place, and he was back on the mean streets of London, regressed to his days in the Police Urban Force that seemed, now, a thousand years ago. And he was hunting down just another criminal, another bad person, only this time it was his own fucking wife, a woman he loved and cherished and with whom he’d shared his life; only none of that was real. She was an android with a long-term implanted mission directive. Dex felt sour inside; he felt his soul torn out, and fed as scraps to bloody, snarling fighting dogs.
I wish Jones was here, he thought bitterly. A bit of backup is not something to be turned down lightly. But Jones wasn’t here. The jammy fucker was back on Earth, living out his normal life, probably wondering in idle moments with a cold beer how Dex was getting on during his fine, expensive holiday on the Theme Planet.
Oh, yeah. The irony.
Something was glowing up ahead, a thick tube suspended in the air, glittering with spirals of twisting matter, a million glittering spirals, like expanded strands from a DNA molecule hanging in the air. This was SARAH’s core... her CPU? Her soul? Dex did not know, and to be truthful, no longer cared. He only knew right and wrong. And Katrina helping destroy the Theme Planet to aid Earth’s warmongering plans was a basic evil he had to Stop-
Through the glowing strands Dex caught sight of Katrina’s face. She was intent on her mission, and did not see him approach. Her face was illuminated by the glow of SARAH’s core and she looked incredibly beautiful, more beautiful than he’d ever seen her. She looked so alive, so radiant, so dazzling; like an angel, like a martyr. It was untrue to Dex; unbelievable she had turned against him.
Katrina’s hands moved into the glowing strands, parting them gently, and with a jerk Dex came out of his reverie - realised what she was doing. His mouth opened to scream “No,” but he didn’t get that far. Katrina’s eyes lifted, met his, she smiled, and removed her hands. There was a dark flicker among the folding shifts of entwining strands, and Dex saw it, saw the FRIEND deep down in the core, saw it spin and twist, and the word came to his lips, his eyes fixed on Katrina’s, as the world... shuddered. And SARAH screamed.
The floor shook, the whole womb shook, and Dex was knocked violently from his feet. A shrill, piercing noise descended into existence, a shrill piercing whistle that slammed through Dex’s mind as a constant pain and forced both hands against his ears in agony. It was SARAH’s scream, and it cut him.
The womb was vibrating, rocking, shifting, and the scream lessened a little, Dex crawling to his knees and glancing up - as Katrina’s boot kicked the Makarov from his hand, and the second kick caught him under the chin, knocking him up and back. Dex rolled to his feet, even as Katrina powered for him and he took four - five – six - seven - eight strikes to his forearms, each blow feeling like a slam from an iron bar.
Katrina took a step back, turned, and walked away from him. Then she turned back, and her eyes were glowing.
“Why, Katrina?” said Dex, holding his hands out wide. “Why the hell are you doing this? Come back to me, come back to what we had; we can stop this thing, end this evil. We can fight Earth’s invasion. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
“It does, Dexter. This is what I am. This is what I do, you poor, foolish boy.”
“I disagree,” snapped Dexter, face a snarl, edging sideways. He wanted to sprint past Katrina, grab the FRIEND, wrench it from SARAH’s core - end the screaming, which was like a screwdriver in his brain. “This isn’t the woman I met, and fell in love with, and married, and had children with. What happened to that beautiful young girl? What happened to that wonderful bright person?”
Dex charged right, but Katrina moved to stop him and he checked himself. She folded her arms, and smiled, and he realised - her aim wasn’t to kill him. It was to wait for the FRIEND to detonate and take out SARAH... How long did he have? Minutes? Seconds?
“Talking of our children, darling, what have you done to Molly and Toffee?”
“I didn’t kill them, if that’s what you mean.”
“There you go. That’s a human response,” said Katrina, a dark smile on her lips.
“Good,” said Dexter. “I suppose you would have killed them, bitch?”
“Without a single backward glance, husband. A single bullet in each young skull. Regret is for humans, Dexter Colls. And we are not humans. We are androids. We get the job done, and we fucking do it well. That’s the way we were engineered.”
“I’ve evolved from my engineering,” said Dex, and darted left. Katrina met his charge, slamming into him with a grunt. There was an exchange of punches, and Dex felt just wrong slamming his fists into his wife’s face. He hated men who abused women. But this isn’t a woman, he told himself, as he broke her nose with a right hook, and blood sprayed out. She’s an android, and she’s trying to kill me... trying to kill us all. Her knee sank into his groin, her hands found his hair, and she dragged his face onto her knee three times, sending stars spinning through his skull. And all the time Dex was thinking of the ticking bomb in SARAH’s core. Katrina was willing to die for this. Katrina was willing to die to destroy the Theme Planet.
She released him, and he staggered back, eyes filled with blood. He blinked, clearing them, and looked up into a pair of boots as they smashed him back and onto the ground, his world full of pain. A great weight bore down on Dexter, and as his eyes flickered open and awareness came creeping back to reality, he realised Katrina was kneeling on his chest. She’d wound something around his throat, a metal cord, and as he blinked the blood out of his eyes and realised what was happening, his fingers shot up under the cord reflexively as Katrina’s hands pulled viciously tight. The cord bit down on his fingers and throat. Such was her strength his fingers were squeezed into his windpipe and she started to slowly strangle him, and he struggled, legs kicking, free fist punching at her ribs and kidneys, gurgling and spitting, face turning purple as he gradually, inexorably, began to die...
And all the while she spoke. His wife spoke.
Katrina spoke to him.
“You think you were a fucking good husband, well I’ve got something to tell you, mister, I hated every fucking second of it, hated your smiles and jokes and the slaps on my arse, I hated our walks in the
park, hated our fancy meals in posh restaurants with so-called educated cunts looking down their noses at us, I hated our cosy evenings in with bottles of wine and movies, hated cuddling up to you on the sofa, resting my head on your chest as you pawed my breasts and fumbled between my legs like some high school virgin...”
She released the pressure for a moment, and Dex gurgled, froth at his lips, and she got herself a better grip and yanked tight again with a grunt of effort, “...but the worst thing of all, you miserable little bastard, was the sex, feeling you squirming inside me like a fucking maggot in a pot of honey, thrusting and humping me like a side of sick beef - well I want you to know, Dexter, before you die, I faked every fucking sigh of pleasure, every tiny murmur of contentment, every moan of enjoyment, every squirm of fun, I faked every screaming, bed-thumping orgasm, I faked every bite and suck and fuck, because you were the worst, Dex, the worst I ever had - and to top it all, I gave you two kids, two screaming, parasitic little fuckers whom I should have strangled at birth. So think on that as you crawl your way down into the pit of android Hell. Think on that, Dexter, my love, as I strangle the last atom of oxygen from your dying, worthless, pointless fucking carcass!”
~ * ~
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
STRANGE BROTHERHOOD
A thousand Big Belly Bombers droned across Theme Planet, going their separate ways, each with precisely logged coordinates of impending destruction. Computers whizzed and buzzed, bomb doors opened with slick alloy clicks, bombmasters yelled commands, and payloads fell. Below, on the mammoth colourful cartoon landscape of Theme Planet, where rollercoasters coasted, ride CARs jumped into the air and zoomed beneath the oceans, where families strolled and mothers laughed, fathers wore flip-flops, children ate ice cream, babies chuckled in strollers, puppies yapped and everybody was having a funtime-goodtime-joytime, below, the first HD bomb struck. The detonation roared as a kilometre-wide ball of flame vaporised everything - everything - in contact vicinity. Flames and gas roared and screamed, ride CARs were tossed up, spat up, spat out like fire confetti from the heart of a raging volcano. Bodies burned and were blast-disintegrated. And high above, a computer gave a little tick in a little digital tick-box, and relayed the information to Earth in a series of neat spreadsheets.
Monolith’s ethos in its operation of Theme Planet was the show must go on. Through drought and flood, volcanic explosion and earthquake, never once did it cease operation of its thousands of rides and pleasure systems; during tsunamis and vast forest fires, only those rides directly affected halted. After all, money was money, and business was business, and pleasure was pleasure, right? and the show must go on, right? Theme Planet gave pleasure to billions. That was what it did. Core function. Prime directive. I give fun, therefore I am, as the marketing slogan went.
The one unnatural disaster which Monolith was not ready to accommodate was one of which it would never have dreamed. Military Invasion. Why would anybody want to destroy the most fun place in the Four Galaxies? Theme Planet was not geared up for war. Monolith commanded no army, despite what Romero might have originally believed. Guards, yes. Secret Police, yes. But not trained for battle... And it had basic defence missile systems installed in the event of, for example, an impending meteor strike. But now, Monolith’s High Command turned these basic weapons on Earth’s ships, and missiles slammed through the skies to connect with Big Belly Bombers. Bombers exploded with screams and bangs and plummeting debris. On beaches across Theme Planet, where turquoise oceans lapped at white, sandy shores, lasers cut across the sky like some incredible themed display, and explosions roared, and detonations blossomed, and pilots burned, and people died.
“Daddy?”
“Yes, honey?”
“That’s a pretty firework display.”
“Yes, honey. Well, this is the Theme Planet. It has a reputation to uphold.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes, honey?”
“What’s that fat plane doing?”
A frown. “I don’t know, honey.”
Explosions. Metal screaming. Lasers fizzing.
A bomb fell and detonated, and out on the ocean where a themed island languished in the sun, palm trees wavering, seashells glinting on the beach, small bamboo huts playing host to love-nests of newly married couples, all were eaten by a wall of fire and the ocean exploded upwards and the horizon glowed, seemed to melt as a furnace ate a small section of the world, consumed a small portion of the Theme Planet...
“Daddy?”
“Mmm?”
“That was a pretty firework.”
“I don’t think that was a firework display, honey...”
A BBB slammed through clouds of gas and vapour, and there was a subtle whine. Father and daughter turned instinctively to run, toes digging into the sand, pigtails flapping in the sea breeze, as there came connection, detonation, acceleration, destruction.
~ * ~
DEX WAS DYING. He was fighting, but he was dying. She was too strong, too savage, and without a shadow of a doubt, Katrina, his wife, had the upper hand. With every passing second she strangled him, with every passing second his strength ebbed away and it became yet more impossible that he might pull away, escape, break free. Dex wondered if there was a Heaven for his kind. For the androids. Engineered humans. Human machines. And he knew, deep down in his dark soul, that there was not.
He tried to speak, to cry out, to beg Katrina to stop. He wanted to grab her face and kiss her lips one last time, but even now her snarling hate-filled visage was fading from view as his senses dulled. It sounded like he was deep beneath the ocean, sinking, and great, muffled booming sounds were ringing out through the Deep Green.
Everything was becoming fuzzy, everything becoming lost and drowned and faded...
Why are you doing this to me ?
Why don’t you love me anymore?
I don’t understand how we came to be here.
It was just a simple family holiday. How did it turn so bad?
Pawns. Manipulated. On a greater game board. Pieces tossed carelessly around by the hands of a Great Player. But hadn’t it always been like this? Weren’t there always sacrifices? Wasn’t it always the way of the world? The strong controlling the weak; the powerful pushing around the little fucks.
I am going to die, he realised.
I am going to die, and nobody will care...
There came a slap, and something wet pattered down oyer his face in a thick, glutinous spray. The pressure released from his throat, from his trapped hand, and gradually he swam up from the bottom of the well. The pressure had released from his chest; which meant Katrina was on the move.
Sound returned first, and he could hear screaming, and his own laboured breathing, his own tortured, rasping throat. Then blurred light gave way to a gloomy clarity, and for a few moments the scene was one of total confusion.
Dexter sat up, and allowed the scene to unfold, to flower, and his brow creased, and he spat out blood, and then stared hard and scratched his chin. Toffee, his sweet little girl Toffee, was standing holding a screwdriver. It wasn’t sonic, or magic, or any other bullshit; it was a good, hard, chromed steel screwdriver. And it was covered in blood.
Toffee was watching him. Toffee was smiling.
Dex’s gaze rose and focused on Katrina. She was staring back at him, screaming shrilly, her hand clasped to her neck, blood pumping out between her fingers. She looked at Toffee and snarled something incomprehensible, blood frothing and bubbling on her lips... Katrina launched herself at the girl, and Dex wanted to scream “No!” and stop the attack, but Toffee was already turning, ducking one shoulder, twisting and ramming the screwdriver into Katrina’s side.
Katrina staggered back, the screwdriver embedded in her ribs, and sat down with a thump. Toffee walked to Dex and he wondered what wonderful tortures she had in store for him.
“Hello, Daddy.”
“Hi, sweetie. I see you gave mommy a present.” His words were little more than croaks on cracked l
ips, and every syllable brought a whole galaxy of pain. She stood over him, and he looked up, and he knew he was in no fit state to do anything if she attacked. The shame! To be murdered by your youngest child. Dex started laughing, and there was hysteria there, like a ripe maggot in a rotten plum.
“I’ve come to see you,” said Toffee.
“For what? Do I get the screwdriver in my skull next?”
Toffee tilted her head to one side, and Dex coughed up more blood from his lacerated throat. He shook his head, looking down at the floor, offering her his neck, the back of his head; like victim to executioner.
“I’ve come to say I’m sorry,” Toffee said.
“What?” Dex looked up sharply, his word punctuated by Katrina’s rasping gasps, where she sat in a spreading pool of her own blood and gazed dumbly at the screwdriver in her side. As Dex watched, she took hold of the handle and gave it a tug; it wouldn’t move, or her strength was draining from her, and finally she gave up. She slowly lay down, and despite everything, despite her bringing him close to the brink of death, he felt nothing but sorrow. This wasn’t a situation he could ever have dreamed about. This was one of the worst days of his engineered life.