by Lee Bond
Garth had opted to go with a ditch. A big long ditch. Not only did a ditch mean less digging –he’d gone four feet deep and fuck the rest-, it meant less chance of him falling in when he wasn’t paying attention.
Garth looked to the tree who was probably telling the other trees that it was seeing some pretty weird shit. “Because let’s be honest, tree, I’m completely distracted. Hundred percent, and if this were a sitcom, only a gross kind of sitcom where the lead actor is some kind of serial killer who does this kind of thing all the time, this’d be the perfect moment for some comedic relief. ‘Hero falls into pool of liquid people, get some in mouth and eyes’. Cue laugh track.”
The truth was, he’d started out digging a pit just as Barnabas had suggested, but after about three feet of disturbed earth, something had struck the ex-Specter; the Wall was full of electricity. Not exactly earth-shattering news given that Garth had voluntary shocked himself a number of times to verify this, but the notion that’d struck him a few seconds later was what had prompted him to switch from the physically intensive pit digging exercise to the more lax and quicker-to-accomplish trench concept.
As far as Garth knew –based on personal observation and from what he’d been told- everything in Arcade City ran on Dark Iron. At least, things with moving parts. From the buzzblade at his waist to Barnabas’ cunning portable smithy, Dark Iron was the fuel that made things go.
But electricity? While Garth suspected Barnabas was acting like an idiot on purpose –sure, okay, fine, there were probably zillions of people inside Arcade City that’d never heard of electricity or a billion other things but people like Barnie traveled the ‘world’ and met people from Outside the Dome all the time, and one commodity that sold like hotcakes were stories about the ‘mysterious outside’- electricity wasn’t used anywhere else.
Garth switched his lips back and forth thoughtfully, sizing up the huge spigot that’d start barfing out liquefied gearhead the moment he cracked the seal. There was, like, two hundred gallons of goop in there and the whole fucking area was going to start reeking like rancid yak butter from the first goddamn drop.
“I really don’t want to do this.” Garth said this to Tree, who just swayed in the breeze. “And don’t get me started on where that breeze is coming from, pal. Jesus. I hate this whole place. Who uses acid to melt people? They’re all metal inside. Mostly indestructible metal on account of that shit is made from goddamn nanotech. You could use fucking thermite. Coat each bastard with a fine layer of that shit, set ‘em on fire.”
Tree implied that while the idea seemed fine on paper, doing so anywhere near trees was a bad idea.
“I miss Huey.” Garth kicked the spigot open then jumped back five feet to avoid getting gooey people-juice on his boots. Barnabas had charged him one repair on a buggered nozzle of a hand-cranked bellows for them. A single splatter of runny Thumper and … he didn’t think he could barter for another pair of shoes so quickly. Barnabas haggled over random pieces of clothing as fiercely as he did over repairing a broken forge. “Huey is awesome, and a non-talking Tree just won’t replace him.”
An acrid, hot and uncomfortably damp stench rolled out from the trough almost immediately, filling the area like a hideous fog.
“Hrk.” Garth looked away from the steamy runoff as it glugged noisily into the trench. He closed his eyes, he took a few deep breaths. Okay, so there was a chance he’d been cavalier in comparing the stink of Barnabas’ melter to that of a Bruushian conversion chamber. What the gunk currently chunking its way out of the huge container lacked in alternate-dimensional creepiness was more than made up for in unadulterated grossness.
“I’ve done a lot of messed up shit in my life.” Garth said, eyes still closed. And he had. He’d launched moons at planets, killing entire continents. He’d torn people apart with his bare hands. There was, in fact, very little that he hadn’t done. “But fuck me sideways, I’ve never melted a single person with acid. That’s my line in the sand.”
Steeling himself against the foul sight of the greyish substance pooling into the trench, Garth turned to double check everything was going … smoothly. From where he stood, it looked A-OK and from where he stood, he had zero inclination in getting any closer. “Jesus, man, how in the hell does Barnie do this? I mean, Jesus!”
Convinced that if the asshat blacksmith decided to go all OCD on his chosen method of dispersal he’d be able to counter any reasonable arguments, Garth went over to where he’d put the Kingspawn board and the metal baton he’d whipped up after listening to Barnabas talk about the Wall’s Bite.
There were precisely zero scientific principles behind the plan, unless there were scientists out there willing to sign off on ‘I got no other fucking idea at all and this seems like it should work on account of nanotech being everywhere and I punch-launched myself into the air with a pneumatically-charged punch-fist that shouldn’t have worked in the first place and then killed a giant Kingzilla robot, so why not?’ as being either scientific or principled.
Hell, since he was being completely honest with himself, he was sailing right into downright dangerous waters, getting ready as he was to monkey around with a broken Kingspawn board and a giant wall that grew more gianter thanks to the power of said nanotech.
The risk factor in shit going wrong or otherwise awry was super high; the antiquated, rusty circuit board had been built by the King, making it –owing to the Gearmen tattoos on his back- particularly antithetical to his continued existence. Introducing any kind of power to it could very well result in the spawning of a King right on top of his stupid face.
At the moment, he was in no way ready to deal with another giant murderbot. He would be, sooner rather than later, but the time to experiment with the board was literally a ‘now or never’ kind of thing. Besides, things could go in his favor. They hadn’t yet, not really, which meant he was totally and one hundred percent overdue.
Garth looked slyly over at the tub of mostly-liquefied gearhead and imagined the grisly bounty arising from their untimely demise. Barnabas needled him nonstop with pestering questions concerning his plans for such a veritable treasure trove machine parts; to each query, the Engineer would simply wiggle his eyebrows or chuckle loudly with a wild look in his eyes. He was intentionally bugging the blacksmith for no other reason than he could.
If the smith bothered putting that allegedly genius-level intellect of his to work properly, he’d see for himself in a matter of seconds what was going to come from the melter: full-on, hardcore steampunk super armor.
The hydraulic punch arms had been a good starting point, but they hadn’t been enough. Not by a longshot, as it developed. Too much of his precious, gooey insides had been left unprotected and now that the true nature of the Big’Uns had been revealed, Garth in no way wanted to brace another without being both fully armed and armored.
And so everything in that tank would be turned to the purpose of shielding a Kin’kithal from the excess madness in Arcade City and providing him with the weaponry to keep everything at bay.
It was the only solution.
The ex-Specter scooped up the metal baton and the Kingspawn board and headed off to find a spot far enough away from the trench so that if things went explosively wrong when he tried kickstarting the board’s hopefully existent self-repair functions, everything and everyone involved with said operation would remain free of the ditch full of gearhead-slurry.
Cradling the board in the crook of an arm, Garth jabbed the metal stick into the ground on an angle, pushing until he felt a tingle of electricity rise up through the metal of his arm.
Garth took a deep breath and turned his head to the sky. Somewhere high above him were all the answers to what was really going on in Arcade City. The pattern of gears and cogs and the machines that governed the lives of every man, woman, child and weird fucking steampunk device that roamed the land had to contain the key to understanding the Dark Iron King’s motives. He looked to the antiquated brass board in his hand
s, with its funky Victorian-style circuitry that was more cursive handwriting laid out in shiny gold than electronic wiring.
If the board was in some way responsible for commanding the Dark Iron Cloud particulate to assemble a King without direct assistance from the Dark Iron monarch, then it was reasonable to assume that –with a little jiggery-pokery and rewiring- it could be made to create anything.
But first, it needed repairing.
Garth licked his lips nervously as he brandished the board at the metal baton. “The first step in any new scientific endeavor is always the hardest.”
Board met baton.
Scintillating shards of electric light slammed into Garth’s brain, instantly locking his muscles in place with a nerve-shattering grip. Image after image –designs and blueprints and diagrams- hammered their way inside, increasing in volume and pressure until the Kin’kithal thought his precious grey matter would burst under the relentless onslaught.
Something clicked.
Everything went … ‘hazy’.
***
There were times, King Barnabas Blake the One and Only reflected happily, that it was good to be the King. For instance, at the very beginning, when that first moment after the Enlightningment had finished burning through him and the spoiled resonance of an improperly tuned Harmony had coursed through his veins, that had been a good day.
The best day, in fact, because with that broken Harmony had come the plan, and with that plan had come The Dome, and with The Dome had come the weapon to achieve the ultimate goal.
There’d been many other good days, as well. The first time regular men and women had brought down their first King and that first sip of Kingsblood. Wonderful, amazing days filling an already weary King with refreshed vigor and renewed hope. When his eyes had fallen upon the first successful prototype of a Shaggy Man, a Bolt-Neck … all those had been fantastic days.
King Barnabas Blake rubbed his eyes with rigid fingers and stared angrily at The Dome.
From what he was seeing, today was also supposed to have been a good day but was, in fucking point of fact, turning out to be an impossibly shit day wrapped in a crap napkin.
Prepared this time for a possibly tumultuous reconfiguring of The Dome, King Barnabas Blake had broken his cardinal rule concerning ostentatious displays of Lordly power –following the Platinum Brigade debacle a century ago, it really were best to keep a low profile- by teleporting directly to the apex of The Dome to handle any last minute corrections with his own two hands.
Happily, concerns that the other ‘Priests would cause the same kind of dissent with his Dome as Erg had wrought upon his arrival had been proven pointless; ‘twas Erg’s very bizarre and outlandish experiences during his time with Trinity that’d been the cause of such a rough and rude entry, whilst his brethren had strolled through with nary a burp of electric dissent.
Each of the foolish cybernetic holy men had willingly and voluntarily knocked on their assigned Geared Door, each one of the dark-hearted, Void-loving fools had traversed the great unknown separating inside from outside …
Each had been handily unspooled and consumed by The Dome’s inner mechanisms, their minds, their hearts … why, their very souls wired directly in to the vast machine that would one day spell utter doom for everything. And it’d been brilliant.
Their lives, their experiences, every single bit of their broken existences laid the groundwork for traversing the Void once the Unreality was destroyed; their cracked and crazed souls would shatter and shake those other Firmaments with their weirdness until all fell to bits, wouldn’t they just? All that remained was the arrival of the Enforcers, them in their Suits that’d been keyed to the workings of The Dome before being ushered out to Trinity as per their … agreement of non-interference until the very end.
Once that key moment was done, The Dome would be powered. Fully and properly.
When the first of the ‘Priests had crossed the threshold to be absorbed by the hidden machinery, the associated contraptions within The Dome had started unlocking, a vast clockwork puzzle turning over all their heads and he had reveled in the miracle of having created something so painfully perfect.
And then the rest –or, wrapped up in pleasure only a true genius could experience, so he’d thought- of the CyberPriests had crossed that edge and the whole entirety of the heavens had erupted in a colossal metallic ballet of motion, a continent-sized orchestra of ceaseless beauty in the form of spinning gears and cogs being replaced by silent, calm circuitry. Watching whole sections of gears and cogs and engines fold in on themselves or erupt outwards, massive, thousand mile-long cogs dropping low, transported across the skin of The Dome to be absorbed elsewhere, and revealing the pristine beauty of a never-before-seen maze of lines …
King Barnabas Blake the One and Only was unashamed to admit that, in that moment, he’d wept. As with any project built on such a scope and taking so long to complete, there’d been moments where the monarch had feared that he’d somehow failed. That, when the time came, something would go wrong. How he’d trembled with concern, worrying deep down to his very old bones that summat would go left when it should’ve gone right, or up instead of down, how he’d trembled indeed.
For it were the outside of The Dome that was invulnerable to all harm, not the inside.
The inside were just as fragile as anything else in Arcade City, and a thousand mile long shaft cracking in twain would take more than wishful thinking to repair, hey?
Everything he’d built, from The Dome to the King’s Will replicators, all of that’d been done and set in motion thirty thousand years ago. Not exactly in one fell swoop, but quickly enough that a hurried and harried soon-to-be King had always feared he’d left something critical out of the design.
But he hadn’t. Everything was working flawlessly. The shattered Harmony that’d seized him in that moment of transformation and the answer to the Armies question of ‘How do we stop these bastards forever?’ had proven itself wonderfully.
Or, Barnabas glowered at the unresponsive section of Dome that clicked and clacked and ticked and tocked against itself, hovering on the verge of jamming completely, so he’d imagined.
Today was not a good day. It’d started out that way, aye, but no longer.
The King’s eternal eyes followed the spiral of non-responsive gears backward across the skin of The Dome, tracing the journey it took to the Geared Door that hadn’t opened, that hadn’t taken its CyberPriest and hadn’t turned said thirty thousand year old fool into so many atoms and absorbed memories.
Barnabas couldn’t explain how he’d missed that particular problem. It was right there in the minds and memories of all the ‘Priests: one of their kind had somehow –impossibly- been reverted!
It was, in Garth’s words, a colossal fucking problem.
This … this Naoko Kamagana woman, upgraded and enhanced using cutting-edge CyberPriest technology … she’d decoded and rewritten the man’s entire life with the simple twitch of a finger, undoing in one spiteful moment the careful planning and interminable waiting of a King.
The veritable mountain of data coming through from the ‘Priests on this Naoko alone was more than expected, and from what it seemed, it were the literal tip of the proverbial iceberg. Unfortunately –as with everything these days- absorbing all his once-upon-a-time brothers’ –all save Erg, who would be gotten to- experiences in the Outside was going to take more time than he had to spare, especially with Nickels having been left alone for so long already.
It were half a miracle and then some Arcade City weren’t already afire from the man’s reckless foolishness.
Infuriatingly, there were firm hints that Nickels was known to the CyberPriest collective and that he was also somehow inexplicably linked to the Kamagana woman, but those threads were buried deep and deeper still. Digging through the dross in search of gold would wind up being even more time consuming, making revelations on Garth –for the time being, only, mind- a luxury to be pursued only whe
n all other avenues of research had been worn thin.
The man led a charmed life. There was no other way to explain it. If it were even the tiniest bit possible, Barnabas would swear on his crown that Nickels was somehow actively preventing anyone from learning even the smallest thing about his life.
Which was, of course, bloody impossible.
“Don’t really matter, though.” Barnabas looked lovingly on his Dome. Although it wasn’t one hundred percent complete, the schematic outlined by the maze of copper and silver, gold and platinum traversing the massive Dome was glorious to look on. “I’ll just go on ahead and open the one Door manually and entice poor Georgie in. Then I shall give unto him that which he misses most and make him Anode221 once more. From there, it’s a wait for them Enforcers to show up, and perhaps a bit longer still for The Dome to power up. Then quick as a wink, the End of Everything. Between right here in the now and then when it all ends, I should have plenty of time to crack Nickels like a nut. Or kill him. Can’t quite seem to keep me head on straight wi’ that lad. Damned if he weren’t such a mystery, and damned is this ache to solve it!”
Barnabas stared –deliriously happy at the wonder unfurling before him- and said, “Why, I’m willing to wager that I’m being overly generous in my estimation of Nickels’ true nature. I’m pulled hither and thither with this End of Everything task. Such a level of responsibility could surely make even the most meticulous of Kings miss a bit here and there, hey? Supposing I’m just imagining him to be more than he is? What then? Hah, that does seem more likely, hey? I’m pulled this way and that. Dealing with Nickels when I have a proper moment to think straight, why my head clear of foolishness … I warrant ‘twill be simple enough, hey? Now I’m on this train of thought, the same goes for Erg his own self. When I set down to hunting Erg properly, I expect I shall be pleasantly surprised to find a molehill instead of a mountain.”
Barnabas gestured with a regal hand and King’s Will swarmed around the outstretched appendage. In the twinkling of an eye, a communicator similar to the one employed by the ‘Priests was assembled.