by Lee Bond
Hanover wondered how she could get her hands on some of Gaston’s chocolates without having to play the role of willing girl and found no other recourse, save perhaps a midnight sortie. Her men would be up for it. Imagining a full scale war over chocolate wasn’t too hard to imagine, but in the end, she shook her head, bemused at the paths her own mind took.
“You disagree?” Bastille asked, misreading Hanover’s gesture.
“Oh, well …” Hanover fluttered a hand at her neckline. Perhaps a bit of girlishness would work. She drew a bit of a languid eye across Gaston’s thin Frankish face, a tiny thrill of victory surging through her at his slight stiffening. “They say he spent an uncommon amount of time, you know…” she mimicked putting her hand on something solid.
“Who might they be?” Bastille demanded archly. The thought that one of them would touch The Dome! Incomprehensible. Guards, surely. They did it all the time. Often enough, they started talking about gears and thuds and thumps and vibrations and stopped sleeping because of the ‘whirling nothing’ that waited for them in dreams. Guards as did that found themselves shipped off for less relaxing climates quick as anything.
“Oh,” Hanover fluttered a manicured, slender hand in the air, “they. The other Wardens. Mondulac and Prestier and Holcmobe, mostly.”
“Psht.” Gaston snorted derisively, immediately regretting his decision as a bit of chocolatey spittle trickled from one corner. He hastily grabbed a monogrammed handkerchief –ignoring the bemused looks from his friends- and dabbed the offense away. “Those three are thick as thieves. They gossip like children at boarding school. Besides…”
Hanover and Bastille knew the crafty look that stole across their friends’ face as he trailed meaningfully off. They exchanged glances over the monitors, nodded shrewdly and waited; Gaston was more Franco than British and as such, delighted in holding secrets. He was, in point of fact, extremely good at acquiring them. Luckily for his confidants, the Warden was also shit at keeping them for terribly long. All it took was silence, and a look of disinterest.
Gaston ate two more chocolates in a row, savoring the taste of the rich substance, eyeing his friends and confidants who … who were just sitting there. Bastille had gone back to his damnable archaic paperwork and Lady Hanover was … fanning herself idly with a manicured hand. He pressed his lips together for a second before bursting out with laughter.
“Fine, fine. Gods. You lot have me pegged, don’t you?” He slotted the highly illegal, incredibly restricted data file into the AI.
“Oh,” Hanover said with a wry smile, to which Bastille added a sardonic grin, “Gassy, we figured you out ages ago. Now what’s … oh my. Is that a …”
‘Gassy’ Gaston held up a hand to silence his friends. “Yes. A King’s Son rabble-rouser.”
“Looks dangerous.” Bastille put his pen down. “Peemes seems to like him a lot. Can we hear what they’re saying?”
“Alas, the audio is destroyed. Stripped by an … event.” Gaston pressed his lips together. He wanted to tell his friends to fast forward to the end bit, because, frankly speaking, it was the most amazing thing he’d ever seen in his life, and he’d once witnessed a star going supernova as he and his family fled through a Quantum Tunnel. Now, they all of them knew what’d happened with Peemes’ Ha’Penny House guest, but none of them had truly seen the goings on in all it’s … well, in all it’s majesty.
“An event?” Hanover was afire with curiosity; for once in his life, Gassy was being properly secretive. She could tell something amazing was going to happen simply by the way that Warden Gaston was all but sitting on his hands.
Whatever it was must be …
“Excuse me, marm.”
“Excuse me, milord.”
“Milord Gaston? A word, if you please?”
The Three Wardens hit pause on the video and snapped “What is it?” in unison.
“Barbarians at the gate, sirs. Wardens Messers, Falcomb and Shrutii are transporting their men to assist. It’s going to shit out here, sirs.”
“Bollocks.”
“Damn.”
“I should’ve been a pianist.”
***
“This is a terrible idea, Faraday.” George kicked at a pile of sand at his feet. His sole friend in the world –the other CyberPriests refused to even recognize his presence- was positively enthralled by The Dome. They’d been stood at the threshold for nearly an hour now, waiting for the others to get to ’their’ Doors, and in that time, well, George could only guess as to what his friend was doing, but he figured it had a lot to do with digging through quantum substrates and other probing things.
“It’s the only idea we have.” Faraday snapped, frustration mounting ever more. “We need Erg. He’s the only one of us who can actively bring the fight to the enemy. Without the Unwritten Scriptures, we have no idea how to prepare ourselves for the conflict. If we are forced to deal with the Heshii and their soldiers with no preparation, if they are permitted to strike first, we’ll lose. And that cannot come to pass.”
George Stevens crouched and started doodling in the sands with a finger. The War –or Conflict, as the ‘Priests had taken to calling it, as if the lesser word somehow made the actual fighting bit seem less dangerous- held little interest for him now.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. From a philosophically nihilistic point of view, filling the void of Existence with nothing but itself was intensely exciting. You didn’t spend thirty thousand years believing in that kind of ideal only shake it off the moment you were no longer useful. George supposed it was more accurate to say that he didn’t care how it happened.
As Sine364 and Coulomb6 took great pain to remind him, since George Stevens wasn’t Anode221, there was no way in hell that he was going to be allowed to witness the process firsthand.
“I think it’s a shit idea.” George announced, stepping back to admire his sandy handiwork. “This Dome has stood for as long as we have, Faraday, and in that time, the only one of us who’s ever visited was Erg. And we all know why. Look what happened to the poor bastard, too!”
Faraday turned angrily to George. “That’s hardly fair.”
George spread his hands submissively. “Look, he was the last one through the Enlightningment, that’s all I’m saying. The first of us went all wonky weird and killed himself fairly early on. That’s because the jolt of power was strongest when it struck him. Erg was the last. It’s a simple thing to understand. The power was weakest, making him the weakest out of the bunch. That’s even math I can do. Not to mention all that time he spent as Kant Ingrams. The things that man destroyed … there’s no telling what we could’ve used.”
“We.” Faraday sniffed. “Half the time you talk like one them, the other like one of us. Which is it?”
George threw his hands up in the air and shook his head. “No clue. This is still a terrible idea. Have you even figured out what The Dome is yet?”
“Immune to scanning. I can sense a multitude of machinery inside the Dome walls but only for a few hundred feet. Then things sort of die.” Faraday turned his attention back to The Dome and the Door. “Microscopic grooves on the gears built into the Door suggests that this … configuration … is not what it was.”
“And this is the Door Erg came through.” While he was CyberPriest no more, George Stevens was still no dummy. He might not have access to the powers of a ‘Priest, but he could still think. “The Door’s mechanism was shaped one way, Erg came and knocked on it, it opened, he disappeared, the formation changed. That’s …” George shook his head. Faraday –and therefore by extension, the others- was enraptured by the colossal Dome and everything that went with it. Their minds had been stolen away, just as Erg’s had, and it was up to one lowly reconverted CyberPriest who didn’t even care any longer. “Don’t you think that’s kind of worrying? I do, and I’m just me now. And the idea is shit.”
“Maybe Erg changed it. You ever think of that?” Faraday snapped. His mood abruptly changed when th
e brothers announced that the forces at all the Doors were engaged. “Come on. We’re going.”
George shook his head. “I don’t like traveling through the Void now. It hurts my head.”
Faraday wanted to punch his old friend in the head so hard he knocked the man’s soul out through the back of his skull. As a CyberPriest, he naturally and rightly loathed everything there was possible to dislike about the messily inefficient and loathsomely organic species known as Man, but there was something intrinsically worse about a man who’d once been a CyberPriest, especially when he divided his time equally between whining about life and eating food in front of them.
“Well,” he snapped irately as he roughly grabbed hold of the human’s arms, “you don’t get a choice. We’re all going to go in. If your Door doesn’t respond, just wait. I’ll find a way to bring you in once I’m on the other side.”
George Stevens, once Anode221 went to shake his head, but the greasy, nauseating grey spiral of the Void enveloped him.
***
George Stevens sat with his back to the massive Geared Door, twiddling his feet unhappily. In his hands he held a transmitter that was relaying everything that Faraday and the others were experiencing as they traveled through the vastly thick walls of The Dome.
They were –whether they knew it or not, whether they’d ever admit it if they did- acting like a bunch of children on a field trip to the local museum. None of them were ‘oohing’ outright or anything, but listening to them comment with ecstasy on the miracles they were witnessing bordered on the obsessive.
“If I hear them talk one more time about how well-designed the machinery is inside this bloody Dome,” George banged his head irritably against the Door, which was still doing nothing, “I will leave.”
Except he couldn’t. Not yet, anyway. If he was lucky, someone at one of the Door camps had gotten off an emergency call to someone before being murdered by raving CyberPriests. Then, assuming this magical thing called ‘luck’ held out long enough, this alleged, heroic someone would arrive at his Door before Faraday or one of the others figured out a way to get him inside. Thereupon, once discovering his relative innocence and decidedly non-murderous behavior, he would be joyously whisked away to some other place and he could live out the rest of his days, possibly working in a repair shop on some world somewhere, waiting patiently for the End of Existence.
The ex-‘Priest didn’t even bother trying to banish thoughts like that any longer. It seemed a part of being human –even if you’d once been something as awesome as a CyberPriest- meant that, when you were least expecting it, parts of your stupid organic brain you had no control over made you think towards the future.
George hated it.
As a ‘Priest, he’d been in total control of his thoughts. Everything he’d done, everything he’d said, everything … everything had been done and coordinated through the Unwritten Scriptures and all of that had been geared to assist in the eventual destruction of the Spheres.
As a man, though, all he really wanted to do was sit in a chair somewhere and fix broken things. Possibly while humming a song. Certainly being paid for his efforts. Maybe once in a while he’d visit some friends.
Friends as didn’t make him feel like he was an idiot for being different.
George banged his head against the resilient metal Door once more. The human brain. Thirty thousand years into the future and he was being hijacked by inner cravings for connection.
It was total bullshit.
George cradled the communicator in his hands, turning an ear to what was being relayed. There wasn’t much going on right then. Naturally not; there was only so much ‘not-oohing’ you could do when all you were looking at was a bunch of gears. Faraday, their resident mechanical expert, was engaged in a lively debate with Coulomb6 over the nature of the epically-sized machinery.
So far, Faraday was convinced that –whoever he really was- Mad Goth King Blake was a holdover from the War against the Hesh, some sort of leader from the Armies of Man or perhaps a stepping stone to the thinking machine that ruled the rest of Humanity so well. His argument was being received fairly well by the others in the group, but Coulomb disagreed; the irascible CyberPriest was of the opinion that The Dome was of The Heshii, that whatever claims being made by the FrancoBritish warriors who escaped to freedom were false, that either Trinity Itself had come up with a method of capturing and detaining Heshii or that the extra-dimensional monsters had built the thing themselves.
George found both ideas were plausible and exciting. He got ready to throw his two cents in when the communicator suddenly went dead. Nothing but the steady, quiet hiss of empty space.
George Stevens pursed his lips. Then –having suddenly realized an inherent flaw in their little escapade- he pushed himself up off the ground and went looking for a structure that was still standing in the hopes that he’d be able to find something to eat and drink.
Probably not, though; once the FrancoBritish detail protecting each Door had roused themselves to attack, the defensive measures employed by the ‘Priests had –in Garth’s colorful vernacular- ‘really fucked all that shit right the fuck up’.
Stupid ‘Priests.
George hoped they couldn’t find their way out.
***
Slate, hanging out by the moon, impatience growing monumentally with every day that passed with no Enforcers arriving to assist in figuring out what was going on with The Dome, sent all the data he’d recorded to Trinity. The CyberPriests were daunting. Whatever was in that Dome was drawing out some very powerful beings, beings hidden from sight for a truly impressive amount of time.
The Enforcer waited. Trinity would get back to him. The assault on The Dome was one of the most impressive displays of force ever recorded. Trinity would get back to him and It would change It’s mind. It would authorize him to go down there now and find out what the hell was going on. There was one lone human left by The Dome, and that human had come with the CyberPriests.
“Do nothing.” Trinity’s most cold voice hissed through the headspace of Slate’s Suit.
“I’m … I’m sorry? What?” Slate was imagining things. That was it. “Nothing?”
“Correct. Your brethren are having a difficult time arranging transport. Do nothing. Do not engage. Do … do nothing. Wait. By my command. If you fail to adhere to these commands, if you move in before the others arrive, you will die. Say nothing of what you saw here today. To anyone. I will issue statements to everyone on that planet, and anyone who might feel compelled to be irrational. I will make them all aware that you are present. The threat alone will keep the fools and the suicidal at bay. Are we clear?”
Slate nodded, whispering his understanding. Trinity’s presence vanished. The Enforcer heaved a trembling sigh of relief; he was accustomed to being threatened by the machine mind, but this time, there had been something more in It’s voice.
Emotion. Undefinable, but emotion nevertheless.
Slate willed his Suit to send him to sleep. It was the only thing he could do because he sure as hell wasn’t going to think about a machine mind experiencing emotion.
24. The Great Wall of Arcade City and Other Surprises
“Is it everything you imagined it to be?” Barnabas demanded spitefully, caring little at this point whether his annoying companion took offense or not; ever since the man had taken a fully armored King down, not only with no help, but without losing his temper, well, the monarch-in-disguise had to admit that he was in a foul mood.
Who did that? Who was capable of that?
The construction of the Dome, the thing that powered it and fueled the Dark Iron nanoparticles suffusing the whole breadth and width of Arcade City rendered everything from the outside world completely and absolutely inert. The rules were different inside. The rules were absolute. Carved into the very essence of the world.
Trinity’s tricks had never been able to work.
It was driving the King proper mental, this impossible thing
.
Men like Garth Nickels had come to Arcade City throughout the long years. It was inevitable. The mysterious metal cap covering one of the oldest and largest landmasses left to Old Earth called to the powerful and the strange, a veritable Siren’s lure, a beckoning call to those who had no challenges left to them.
So-called ‘Deep Strikers’, for instance. Barnabas summoned to mind the few heavily Cordon-altered cybernetic-and-organically enhanced super-soldiers that’d come knocking, some eighty years ago. He’d let them enter free of charge, without the necessary pretense of doing harm to a King’s Son, and all to see if what he’d felt to be true was true.
Enter those powerful cyborgs had done. And powerless they’d become. In essence, those cyborgs –or whatever you chose to call the one with the weird organics- had been no different than Nickels, not really, not at the end of the day; power was power, strange was strange, whether it came from beyond The Cordon or from one of Trinity’s secret labs.
The very nature of the Unreality insisted that anything was possible, a fact which forced Barnabas to admit that –though he’d held sway relatively unchallenged for thirty thousand years- it was sadly probable that the loathsome Universe could, in fact, toss something like Nickels into his sandbox. It was this quantum-level error that Barnabas was willfully exploiting, and when everything was powered up, nothing else would matter.
Until then … Garth was an infuriating that was, to be honest, driving the King fucking mad. And that conundrum was standing not far off, willfully poking of his Walls with a metal stick. It was as if Nickels was begging for electric execution.
Madness!
“I said,” Barnabas cupped a hand to his mouth and added as much joviality into his tone as he could muster, “is it everything you imagined?”
Garth ignored Barnabas and kept poking the wall with the metal rod. He was in a foul mood and was doing his best to keep things cool.
There were a few reasons why this was taking more self-control than usual.