Driftmetal III

by J. C. Staudt

  “All due respect, ma’am, but it’s like Mr. Nordstrom said… I came for my son, and if he ain’t leavin’, neither am I.”

  “I would prefer to remain here as well,” Thomas chimed in.

  I wanted to pump my fist for the righteous alliance the three of us had formed in the space of that pivotal moment. Again, I refrained.

  Ms. Foxglove’s face tightened into an incredulous grimace. “Do you think this is some sort of hotel? Maclin Automation is a business, and Angus Brunswick is here to work.”

  “So I gathered,” I said. “That’s why we’d like to help.”

  “Angus has suffered his last interruption on your account,” she said. “Guards, bring this man to an isolation cell. Take the rest of our guests up to the roof and see them off.”

  The guards, mindless and unyielding, moved to do their mistress’s bidding. I might’ve avoided their reaching arms for a minute or two, but I didn’t want to find out the hard way what kind of guns they were carrying. When they took me by the upper arms, their grips were solid and immovable. I struggled a little at first, but stopped when I realized how little they cared.

  “I want to work off the damages I’ve caused, just like Angus is doing,” I said. “I want to pay my debts in service to Maclin.”

  “If that was your goal, you chose a poor way to achieve it,” said Cordelia. “And unless you have half the talent Angus does, you’ll be doing no such thing.”

  “You don’t know me,” I said. “I grew up working on machines. And Ezra here is Angus’s dad, for Leridote’s sake… you think he’s not just as good or better than his son is at building stuff?”

  “Guards, wait,” Cordelia said. She threw me a patronizing look. “Building and inventing are hardly derived from the same set of talents.”

  “If I may…” said Thomas. “Talent, it would seem to me, has little bearing on your present circumstances. Your operation is in shambles, and, as Ezra has pointed out, you’re going to need help if you want to get up and running again. When you report this mishap to your superiors, are they going to let you hire new employees to clean it up? Reassign current employees from other projects? We’re offering you our assistance—manual labor at a slave’s wages. And yet, you’re trying to send us off like unwanted houseguests. That does not sound like judicious use of available resources to me, my dear. You’re managing this project, aren’t you? This doesn’t have to be anything more than a small hurdle in your progress if you’ll just let us help you.”

  Cordelia Foxglove suddenly looked like she was on the verge of tears. “I’ve run my division flawlessly for the last five years… until this moment,” she said. “Now everything’s ruined. I still can’t understand why you would ever do such a despicable thing.”

  “Because I want your blasted robots. I told you that, didn’t I? I want to be here when the first perfect model comes off the line, so I can hand you a big pile of chips and start giving orders.”

  “Oh, you’ll be here. Yes, you will. But not anywhere near the automatons. As for you two,” she said, turning to Thomas and Ezra, “you may stay, but only if Angus will allow it.”

  “I don’t want anyone’s help—least of all yours,” Angus said.

  Ezra averted his eyes, looking hurt.

  “Angus, I must say, this is quite an outrage,” said Thomas. “We’ve come all this way to find you and offer our help.”

  “By doing this?” Angus said, indicating the damage.

  “Granted, this was not what any of us intended. But it’s too late now to be sour about it. It’s obvious that your captors, here, have refused to honor their initial bargain. We can’t purchase your freedom. So until this undertaking is complete, it seems you’re stuck here. If you’ll allow us to be stuck here with you, we’ll help you finish your work faster so you can be reunited with Sable and the others in a more timely manner.” He turned to Ms. Foxglove. “You will allow us to leave when we finish, of course… won’t you?”

  “What’s your decision, Angus?” she said.

  Angus took a long, loud breath. “They can stay. With the stipulation that they all bust their humps to get us back on schedule.”

  “We will,” I said.

  “You will do nothing of the sort,” said Cordelia. “I won’t make the mistake of allowing you near the factory floor again.”

  “Do your worst,” I said. “Rufus, are you alright tying up some loose ends for us? I think you know what I’m referring to. Leave the Galeskimmer here and get everyone back where they need to be. Oh, and give Sal my thanks. And my regrets.”

  The old man nodded. Now that we were on Maclin, we were safe from the wandering eyes of the Civs. That meant I didn’t need the Baron as a bargaining chip anymore. He and Sal could be returned to Kilori, tied up and blindfolded, and the Civs would go on thinking I was the sole culprit in his disappearance. Rufus was no dummy; he’d pull it off alright. I had no idea if he would, actually. But he’d have to, for his own sake.

  “Now,” said Ms. Foxglove. “Is everybody ready to go their separate ways?”

  “I wish I knew what that meant,” I said.

  “You’ll find out soon enough, Mr. Nordstrom.” She doled out instructions to her robotic contingent. Rufus and the rest of Ezra’s friends were to be returned to their aircraft on the rooftop. Thomas, Ezra, and Angus were to be taken to their residency rooms. And as for me, it seemed I was headed to the isolation block.

  The robots escorted us off the factory floor and through the antechamber. From there, Rufus and his group split off down one hallway while the robots took the rest of us down another.

  “That was a good bit of finagling you did back there,” I told Thomas, as our escorts pushed us brusquely down the hall.

  “I am an adviser, you know,” he said. “My expertise resides in convincing people to see my point of view.”

  “Your voodoo charms have never worked on me,” I said.

  Thomas adjusted his waistcoat. “From time to time, one must shift one’s tactics to suit one’s aim.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means… of course they haven’t,” he said with a smile.

  I frowned. “Angus… I don’t know how long they’re planning to keep me down there, but I can help you. I’m not going to sabotage things again. That was just a ploy to get them to keep me here. Sable needs us, don’t you see that?”

  Angus made no reply. He and the others split off down another hallway while the robots carried me down my own. My eyes met Thomas’s one last time before they disappeared around the corner. His look was reassuring, though I’d never been so uncertain about anything as I was about my future at that moment.

  The halls grew starker and dirtier, the lights dimmer and more sterile. We entered a circular room with harsh white bulbs overhead and a big clunky metal chair in the middle. The robots threw me down and strapped me into the chair before retreating to stand next to the wall.

  Presently, a gray-haired man in a brown suit with pocket watch chains dangling from his waistcoats entered the room through another door. He was pushing a wheeled tray table laden with various instruments that looked neither fun nor like things I wanted to be anywhere in the vicinity of. I could only surmise that this man fancied himself some sort of doctor, though it wouldn’t have surprised me if Maclin Automation’s definition of the word was a loose one.

  “Cordelia tells me you need a… cleansing,” he said.

  “I don’t need anything you’ve got, pal.”

  “Isolation means no fun things to keep us entertained,” he said. “We will get you all cleaned out.”

  By that, I hoped he meant he was going to suck out the contents of my digestive system through a hose. Only because that would’ve been better than what I feared he actually meant: that he was going to strip my body bare of every piece of tech he could find. I didn’t have any muscle grafts or high-caliber cloak-and-dagger stuff. I’d never been able to afford anything that fancy. But for the second time in a yea
r, I was about to be eviscerated. And for only the first time in my life, this guy was going to remove absolutely everything.

  He put on a pair of gloves, then cut my clothing off. He gasped when he saw the medallion on my chest, its tendrils snaking through my skin like veins. “Where did you get this?” he asked.

  “Found it,” I said.

  This seemed to excite the doctor, but he said nothing more about it and started opening every compartment he could find, making notes on the little pad he kept on his tray table. Then he would look over at his instruments as if to double-check that he’d brought the right tools for the job. He seemed pleased with everything until he came across the small ciphered box in my arm. Chaz had installed the crackler in Pyras, and the primitives had used a remote control to keep me in check.

  The doctor was concerned. “This is fused to the bone,” he said. “I cannot remove this without the code, or I will have to remove your arm.”

  “Please don’t do that,” I said. I told him what it was, and that it was inactive.

  “We will see about this one,” he said. “I clean you of everything. Cordelia demands it. First, we do the reflex module.” He picked up some tool I couldn’t see, then felt around the edges of the medallion.

  “Is this going to hurt?” I asked.

  “Oh yes. Very much.”

  It did. When he extracted the medallion, I realized just how deeply it had embedded itself—both physically and otherwise. A sudden shallow, sinking feeling came over me. There was a scraping in my ears like nails on tin, and a sudden rush of fever. This was followed by a period of profuse sweating and an aching that branched out to my every extremity. I couldn’t bring myself to move, yet it was agony to hold still. I passed out.

  Several hours later, I woke from a fitful dream where the doctor had made a complete wreckage of my body. The nightmare was real. I was delirious from the pain. If Gilfoyle’s thugs had trimmed the grass at the stem, the doctor had torn it out by the roots. My empty compartments were the only things besides that blasted crackler box he’d left inside me. To remove those, he would’ve had to rebuild my telerium skeletal structure around them. That would’ve been far from necessary, since empty compartments are about as useful as wings on a cactus.

  With my body feeling like it had just plummeted through a dozen brick walls and landed in a pit of flaming porcupines, the doctor unstrapped me from the chair and turned me over to the guards. They had to carry me this time, gripping my upper arms and pulling me along with my toes dragging on the floor. Another journey through the depths of Maclin, and they tossed me into a room so large and dark I couldn’t see anything but the floor beneath me.

  The heavy metal door slammed shut, and everything went black. It was in that vast room that I entered the darkest, most tormented period of my life. But I soon found that even in the darkest of times, there is hope for a little light to make its way in.

  2

  I didn’t know how long they’d been keeping me in that isolation cell, or how often someone came to slip food and water through the tiny slot in the door, but that was the entirety of my world for what seemed like months. I was a shell, existing for the sake of existing. I only knew two things: I had to go on, and I had to get out.

  So as soon as I was feeling up to it, I began to explore, searching for weaknesses. I explored every corner and crevice of that room, where sound seemed to echo into oblivion, and the air was always alive with a cold draft. I found out pretty quickly that the room had no walls. Or if it did, they extended far beyond my reach on every side except the one with the door. On the other three sides of the room, the floor ended in what I could only imagine was a long, sheer drop into emptiness. And so I existed there, in that black wasteland of gloom and unrest, where I was forced to live alone with the only danger in the world I had always known but had never faced before.

  Myself.

  It’s a tedious sort of torture—the ordeal of grappling with your own thoughts. I experienced periods of both cloudless serenity and terrible panic; I underwent states of withdrawal that were somewhat like seizures, and I floated away on transcendental tides. Through the constant rubbing of the raised bumps where the medallion had once sunken its filaments into the center of my chest, I wore a thick ring of callous into the skin. I had time to do a lot of reflection in there, and I mostly reflected that it sucked.

  Alone in that black cell, I screamed at the top of my lungs. I cursed the names of everyone who had ever wronged me. I talked to myself, and I spent long hours in complete silence, listening to the blood pumping through my head, listening for the sounds of anyone or anything that might’ve been alive. But the only thing I ever heard was the sound of my own madness, creeping in like mold over old wood.

  I soon realized that if I’d been the last man on the planet, I could’ve done anything I wanted and it wouldn’t have mattered. It was other people who made the difference; other people who made life such a brilliant thing to live. There is neither heroism nor villainy in the absence of others. Without someone to save or someone to slight, you’re just… there. I had done more slighting than saving in my time. And it seemed to me that the closer I came to becoming the villain I aspired to be, the more people there were who needed me to save them.

  The people who made my life such a brilliant thing were on my mind often in those dark days. I thought about my parents and my Ostelle; I thought about Pyras, and a lot about Sable, too. After a time, I began to assume that I had let everyone down. I figured Sable and the others probably hated my guts by now for having left them in the lurch all this time. And Pyras was probably on the brink of extinction, if Yingler and the Regency had gotten their way. So I promised myself that if I ever got free, I was going to make up for all the tragedies I had allowed to happen in my absence.

  Real people came to get me out. Not the cold metal robots who’d haunted my every waking moment since they’d left me in there, but actual living beings with faces and personalities. It was a little strange, being around them again. Stranger still was the reintroduction of light into my world. The doctor hadn’t removed my enhanced eye; he’d just cut the cords that allowed me to use it in any advanced capacity. My vision adjusted quickly enough; it was just weird seeing things where for so long there had been only a single vast expanse of nothing.

  After the real people had let me bathe, they gave me a close shave and a decent haircut, then put me in a fresh set of dry clothes and turned me over to the robots. The robots were nicer this time, opting to escort me rather than force me to my destination. I knew deep down that this was thanks only to the orders they’d been given, but I’d gone without human interaction for so long that I was willing to perceive any behavioral change on their part as an act of goodwill.

  My escorts brought me to a part of the facility I’d never been to before. That should’ve been no surprise, since I hadn’t really been anywhere in the facility besides the room I had destroyed, the operating table, and my cell. I was relieved to find at the end of my little jaunt that my companions were all three alive and well. The robots shoved me through a door and closed it behind them, leaving me in what passed for a large workshop, where I found Thomas, Angus and Ezra busily at work. Or at least, pretending to be.

  “Mr. Jake—uh, Mr. Nordstrom, my dear heavens,” Thomas said, rushing to greet me. His expression changed as he came closer. “I’m so relieved to see you alive and well… though I dare say, you look rather a fright.”

  “I don’t want to know what I look like,” I said. “If it’s that bad, I must’ve looked like a starving hobo before they cut my hair. How long was I down there?”

  “Down where? What have they done to you?”

  “They surgically removed every augment they could find, then shoved me in a pitch-black closet somewhere.”

  “Your medallion…”

  “Yeah. My solenoid, too. They sealed my wrist ports, declawed my climbing spikes, turned off the zoom lens in my eye, ripped out my dart gun… I’ve
still got the hydraulics in my legs, but they depressurized those. I’m about as regular a guy as you are now, except for the empty mod compartments.”

  “I’m ever so sorry. That’s quite a shame,” Thomas said. “We’ll have been here two weeks tomorrow.”

  “Two weeks…” I repeated numbly. “That’s it?” The reality of it was too much to grasp. I could’ve easily believed I’d been shut away ten times that long. “What have you guys been up to?”

  Thomas gave me a sheepish look. “I, being of no technical mind, have been cleaning up after you. As for them…” He turned aside to reveal Angus and Ezra, seated across a sturdy work table from one another at the back of the room, arguing about something. They were surrounded by cabinets and wall-mounted shelves full of tools and small mechanical parts. There were magnifiers and precision-tipped devices strewn about them. Their voices built to a fever pitch. Angus’s usually-rosy cheeks began to flare to a deep cherry red.

  “So I’m guessing these two haven’t been getting along,” I said.

  “Without prior reference to go on, I should say not. Angus is the golden boy around here—and he acts like it. His father doesn’t much enjoy that… and frankly, neither do I.”

  “Maybe I should get the robots to take me back to my cell,” I muttered.

  “Please don’t. I don’t believe I can stand much more of this.”

  “It’s been thirty seconds, and I’m already sick of it. Time to bring this to an end.” I crossed the room and slammed the table with my fists as hard as I could, giving all the tools and loose parts a good rattling.

  Angus and Ezra shut up.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m back. Remember me? Hal Nordstrom. Good to see you again. Now what in the heavens are you two pissing and moaning about over here?”

  “The logic drive,” Angus said, flustered.

  “Okay. Well, shut up. You sound like a couple of alley cats yowling over a garbage can. I’ve just spent two weeks alone in total darkness, and you two are making that sound like a party. The arguing stops now. Let’s finish this thing so we can get out of here and rescue Sable. I know you can put your differences aside for her sake. At least I hope you can, because if one of you starts up again, I’m going to break something else important. Now… explain to me how this logic drive works.”