Jigsaw World
Page 7
With the comparative history, the briefing by Markus began to run dry. Most of his experiences in Mildew involved trying to stay alive, which in most cases is incompatible with trying to conduct a comprehensive analysis of said threat. Tom decided to close out the discussion with the most relevant remaining question.
“Would you like to come with us, or do you want to disembark somewhere along the line?” Tom asked Markus. “We can probably use your help, and George over there gets lonely. You guys can argue it out, but I believe that George is probably a Bottom.”
Tom ducked the badly thrown beer can that George threw, and then he added, “See, he even throws like a girl.” Seeing that he was about to be subjected to another inept attempt to even the score by George, Tom forced a laugh to diffuse the situation. He had observed that a properly placed laugh can effectively stop most attempts to exact revenge.
“I think that I would like to come with you.” Markus said. “That is, if you don’t continue trying to pair me off to George. No offense meant.”
George emitted an embarrassed laugh in response to that remark. “No offense taken, although you should be worried that Tom’s remarks are some form of Projection. I would sleep on my back around him if I were you.”
The RV continued to skim down the interstate highway at an average of 63 miles per hours as this conversation was taking place. Sidney was in the driver’s seat, and the group added the Walk-In Markus to their number. Tom reflected that as the miles separated the group from its origins, new changes that reflected the strangeness of the world around them became part of them. In a group such as this one, Tom could claim to be the most normal of them, and not feel as though he were lying.
A few miles further on, not more than an hour out of Mildew, they saw a little town called Grendal. Tom noted that it would be useful to grab a supply of food, and maybe a few cases of beer, just to see them through the next few stops. They all readily agreed that a provisioning stop would be wise, and so the Town of Grendal was honored to be the place the stop would be made.
The RV made the stop in front of another of those universal 24 hour Wal-Marts that had sprung up across the country as though sprouted from some Giant’s magic beans. This one was open, unlike the one in the recent past, but when they entered the store, they discovered something strange.
They entered beside the cash registers, and did not see anyone down the line. As everyone knows, in moments of low activity, the cashiers may all be pulled from the registers to do other duties. Looking about, the group could not see any of the ‘members’ anywhere about, nor could they see any other customers.
They grabbed two carts, and Charla dispensed the shopping list she had put together to the men. She had a number of cooking staples on the list, including things like flour, milk, sugar and eggs, a variety of meats, and also a variety of handguns and rifles. She even listed two complete outfits for archery; Bow, arrows, quivers and gloves.
They doubled up, Tom and Markus on one cart, and George and Sidney on the other. Meanwhile, Charla took Bailey on a tour of the pet food aisle, and also the feminine products aisle. As each team penetrated deeper into the deserted store, the emptiness became almost spooky. The fact that nothing was out of place, and there was no indication of anything unnatural happening to make the store empty just added to the spookiness.
Tom split off from the cart once most of the items they were to get were in the bag, so to speak. Tom went back to the front of the store, and started to open the row of registers, and liberate the money from its captivity. He filled up three double bagged plastic bags with the cash. The primary task done, he went to the restroom to relieve himself in a non-cramped setting.
Peeing into the urinal, he had time to look around. Everything was just like the scenery in any Wal-Mart restroom, except for one thing. On the wall next to him, in the middle of all the scrawled bathroom prose, was the single heavily inked word ‘Croatoan’.
Tom washed up, and left the restroom. He retrieved his cash, and went and stowed it in the RV. He pulled a Pall Mall out and lit up. He sat smoking on the kick step of the RV for the ten minutes that it took everyone to finish up their shopping and return.
For the next few minutes, the group stowed the groceries away in the RV, and admired the weaponry that they had obtained. Everyone agreed that self-serve Wal-Marts were the wave of the future, and that it was pervasively creepy to be in a Super-Store with no one else there. Finally, the tasks were done, and the conversation wound down. A few moments later, the RV pulled out and headed back onto the Interstate.
******
8 The Eternal City
After driving for another eight hours, Tom decided that it was time to find a nice place to pull over for a while. By this time, they should have been well past Dallas, but there had been no hint of that Metropolis. They should have been out of Texas, for that matter, but there was plenty of signage on the Interstate that confirmed that they were still in Texas.
He saw an off ramp that offered gas and food, of the sort that truckers tend to frequent. He steered the rig onto the off ramp, and toward the promise of an hour or so of relaxation. As he exited the ramp, and gained the road proper, he past a large sign that proudly proclaimed ‘Welcome to Arkadia, City of the Future’.
The road led around a curve, and once the RV completed the curve, the city of Arkadia was revealed. It looked to be big enough for a population of some one hundred thousand or so, and indeed, they passed a population sign that declared the current population to be 97,293 souls. The city itself appeared to be made all of gleaming metal and glass, with tastefully placed greenery growing everywhere. There was a beautiful park on the way into the city, with a classic stone bridge over a small lake that was in the center of the park.
The others pushed themselves to the front just behind the driver’s seat to look at the city. Everyone felt a certain small excitement to see such an exquisite place, and to have a chance to take their shoes off and hang their feet in the water, or to see the latest in city living. This trip had already gone a week or so longer than it should have, and everyone was getting a little road weary, except possibly for Markus.
The RV completed its trip across the bridge. On the other side, Tom pulled the vehicle into a parking spot next to the lake shore. It was time to figure out the logistics of this visit.
“I have not seen any other human beings in this town.” Tom remarked. “That may mean nothing, or there could be an unknown danger here. I suggest that we plan our visit here to minimize any danger from unknown causes.”
“Okay. What do we want to accomplish here?” Markus asked. “Is this going to be business or pleasure?”
“A bit of both, I think.” Tom answered. “I would like to get new tires all around on the RV, gas her up, and spend an hour or so relaxing right here.”
“Well, we are here already, so I suggest that we do the relaxing thing now, before we stir up whatever hornet’s nest there might be in the city.” George suggested.
“We might as well.” Tom reflected. “Everybody, take an hour, but keep your eyes open.”
Everyone climbed out of the vehicle, and Bailey started darting about barking and wagging his tail. In the next two minutes, everyone had managed to divest themselves of their shoes, and had their bare feet cooling in the water at the shore. Bailey had splashed into the lake, swam about for a couple of minutes, then dashed out and shook himself violently next to the group.
At the end of the hour, everyone re-socked and re-shoed their cold feet. Charla took the old towel from behind the driver’s seat and toweled Bailey off roughly, to Bailey’s enjoyment. Everyone climbed back aboard the RV, and prepared to proceed into the city.
A little beyond the park, they approached an electronic sign that advertised that the Visitor Welcome Center was a mile ahead. It sounded like a good place to start. About three minutes later, they finished off the mile, and discovered two interesting things.
The first building they came t
o was a mechanic’s shop which advertised itself on the sign in front of the building as ‘Arkadia Automated Repair Shop’, and specified that most repairs were $99 plus the cost of parts. This sounded like a swinging deal, so Tom wheeled the RV into the feeding area into the repair bay.
Just beyond the repair shop was another building which announced itself by the signage to be the welcome center. After a brief discussion, the group decided that they would begin the process of getting the new tires put on, and then would proceed to find out what the welcome center had to offer.
They went into the front of the shop, and approached the desk. On the desk was a button with the instructions “Push Me”. Tom pushed the button, and a monitor on the desk lit up, and a face that seemed to be an artificial construction appeared.
“Please specify your desired mechanical repair.” The face said. “All repairs are $99 plus the cost of parts, and include a full system diagnostic, and repair of any faulty systems that do not require replacement parts.”
“Just replace all tires on our RV with new ones.” Tom said. “Any idea how long this will all take?”
“Replacement and diagnostic will take approximately 35 minutes.” The Avatar stated. “Would you like to have the plugs and oil changed while you are here?”
“Sure, that would be good. How much will that cost?”
“The total will be $385 plus the $99 fee.” The Avatar replied. “If you will place your keys in the tube, we can get started.” A pneumonic tube whisked open next to the monitor, and Tom dropped the keys inside. They shot away out of sight, and they heard a noise in the shop bay.
They went out to the front of the bay, and saw that a group of metallic arms had sprouted from the bay walls, and was busy pulling the vehicle into the bay. It was promptly placed on the rack, and the rack raised itself a couple of feet off the floor. Arms immediately went to work on the lugs, and under the hood. As entertaining as this activity was, Tom decided that they had better get started with their visit to the Welcome Center while the repairs were underway.
“Charla, how about you and Sidney stay here and guard the RV, make sure the automation doesn’t do anything bad with our vehicle, and keep Bailey with you.” Tom suggested. “The rest of us can go to the center and see what we can learn. OK?”
Charla and Sidney agreed, and Sidney settled down in the outdoor waiting area with his 30 caliber and his katana to wait for the repairs to finish. Charla and Bailey started one of their incessant games of fetch. The rest of them began to move out toward the center.
They had about a 200 foot walk to the Welcome Center, but on the way, they ran across a cleaning robot busy cleaning the edge of the road. It had cutting blades which activated whenever it was over the grass, and a vacuuming feature that was continuous. It resembled nothing so much as a cross between one of those little, random walk house cleaning robots, and a lawn mower. The similarity struck George at the same time as it dawned on Tom.
“Hey, look! That is what those little cleaning robots look like when they are all grown up!” George exclaimed. The robot, which was probably about four hundred pounds of machine, detoured around them as it went by. From the back of the robot, about where the poop would come from if it was an animal, a small opening appeared, and a fine meshed net started exuding out. When it had exited far enough to reveal itself as a sort of bag, a stream of grass clippings, trash and debris that the robot had picked up shot into the bag. When the bag was full, the opening did something, and the opening to the bag was tied off. The bag fell to the ground, and the robot continued on.
As the machine moved on, a much larger, five legged spider shaped machine with some sort of cargo bin on its back walked over to the bag, and a gripper arm came down from the midsection of the spider and picked up the bag, depositing it in the cargo bin on its back. It then moved on to pick up several other such bags that were visible in the area.
Tom reflected to himself that at least the custodial machines didn’t seem to have it in for humans. Maybe for once, they could enter and leave the town without something endangering their lives. That would be a nice change.
Seconds after their encounter with the cleaning robots, they reached and entered the Welcome Center door. Inside, it was all gleaming metal and stone-like counter top. They looked around the comfortably dim room they found inside.
A figure suddenly appeared in the corner of the room. It was a nice, clean cut black man who looked as though he were about 35 years old. The man was on the other side of a table from the visitors, and he surprised them all by walking through the table. As he did, his figure briefly flickered. He smiled as he advanced.
“Hello, visitors. I am Arkadia.” Said the man. “I am here to answer any questions about the city you might have.”
Tom turned to Markus and George. “I think that our host is a hologram.” The others nodded in bemused agreement. Tom then turned to the host, and said, “Where are all of the people who are supposed to live in this town?”
“They have all terminated.” Arkadia said. “Many of them broke some of the rules, and the rest of them terminated after resisting the composting of the rule breakers.” As the hologram stated this, a flicker of the image transformed the continuous smile into a stern frown for a fraction of a second.
“How long has this city existed, and who or what is it that I am actually talking to right now?” Tom asked.
“The city is 18.7 years old.” Arkadia said. “I am an Avatar of the City Brain, which is a distributed neural net running on a network of quantum computers. The nodes on the network are composed of uploaded human engrams.” The hologram paused self-importantly.
Tom grabbed George’s arm in one hand, and Markus’s arm in the other, and started to pull them toward the door. “Thank you, Arkadia. You have answered all of my present questions. I will get back to you if I think of any more.”
The three of them walked out of the door. “Let’s get out of this town! The City Brain is insane, and it killed all of these people.” Tom said urgently. “A place like this would accumulate more residents if the town didn’t have an ongoing policy of terminating new residents. I don’t know how long it will take the city to decide to try to kill us, but it is almost certain that it will if we stay long enough.”
The other two agreed with the reasoning, and they began to rush down the street to the repair shop. The RV met them half way. Screeching to a halt in front of them, the door opened, and Sidney yelled, “Get aboard. We gotta go. The shop tried to grab us after it got done working on the RV. I managed to disable one of its arms just as it was about to drag Charla into the bay.”
The three climbed aboard, and Tom said, “You don’t have to convince us. The City Brain is crazy. Turn this thing around, and punch it!”
Sidney nodded, and twisted the wheel hard to the left as he accelerated. The back end of the vehicle fishtailed briefly, and then they were breaking all sorts of speeding rules on the way out of town. In the near distance, Tom could see some sort of grasping robot with flashing police lights moving to intercept them, and several of the large spider robots were moving across the park to cut them off.
As the RV approached the bridge, Sidney accelerated even more. There was one of the spider robots that had almost reached the other end of the bridge. As the bridge was the only way out of the city from this side, they would have to get by that spider if they expected to get away.
They made it across the bridge, and the spider raised one of its spike legs, sending it down on the roof of the RV about two-thirds of the way towards the back of the vehicle. There was a scraping sound as the tip of the legs penetrated the roof of the vehicle. Just as the leg penetrated the roof, Sidney punched the accelerator hard, and the RV surged ahead.
The leg of the spider was tangled in the roof, and as the leg was carried along by the RV, the spider over-balanced, and fell over backward onto the exit of the bridge. The foot of the leg then slipped out of the roof of the vehicle, and the RV was clear!
In less than a minute, they had returned to the ramp onto the interstate. Tom felt a slight sense of relief as they gained the on-ramp, and he waited tensely to see if any of the opposition would chase them on the Interstate. It was with a sincere relief that he saw the ‘police robots’ stop and turn around as they got to the ramp.
“Well, that wasn’t any fun!” Tom said. “At least tell me that you managed to get away from the shop without paying!”
Sidney shook his head. “No, dammit! I had just finished feeding $584 into the machine when it started acting weird.”
“Oh, well. That was Wal-Mart money, anyway.” Tom said. “Lucky that it jumped out of those cash registers and into the RV, huh?”
“Yeah, Lucky!” Sidney said. “And I felt guilty just taking the groceries without paying!”
“Oh, well! Another fine adventure completed. What do you say, let’s wander down the road, and see if we can find an all new way to get ourselves killed?”
******
9 Two Souls One Body
Tom pulled the RV up into the parking lot of the always present Wal-Mart next to the other six RVs that were ‘camping out’ in the parking lot. As one of the few places that do not hassle RVers for extended parking overnight, outside of an expensive RV park, Tom had found that the standard Wal-Mart parking lot was the center of the RVing social universe. If you were looking for other traveling RVers, that was where you would go to find them. In one of the parks, you may find that the person you were talking to had put down roots.
Markus had put in some real time in his world traveling about the continent in an RV, and he had told Tom some of the workable shortcuts in the RV world, such as where you can get away with dumping your black-water, and what sorts of deserted spots are suitable for overnighting, and which ones will get you rousted in the middle of the night by the authorities, or by the owners of the property.