“Hands where we can see them!” Muffled words puff through the air around us, like their being strained through a sieve. The leaves rustle toward us, branches protruding barrel ends in our faces. Green-painted faces with black and brown smudges blending perfectly with gas masks covering every nose and mouth, only broken by the blink of men’s eyes. Except for one soldier’s unblinking eyes—intense in their dedication to not permit even a flap of skin to curtain us from his view. That soldier becomes aware of my matched gaze and steps backward into ranks, perhaps he thinks he’s dissolving from my awareness when he’s actually drawing more attention to himself.
I’m not the only one who doesn’t lift my hands right away. Belen and Gordon straight up can’t. Both of them have at least one bound limb in order to prevent further damage to their bodies. I step back, away from the guns aimed at me, until Juan puts out a hand, directing me to his side. Not protective or arrogant enough to step in front of me—probably a Nazrete influence—but still close enough to get the sense of a security pocket.
Juan jabs his elbow into my spine. “Put your hands up.”
I turn to look at his tattered face. The imitation skin flapping in a minor breeze and his robot features glistening in the setting rays of sun. I hadn’t realized how unreal he appears in his damaged state. Not pleasant unreal, like a Picasso or Vangough. He’s a Terminator in a skin suit, gleaming metal and teeth implants. Slowly, I raise my hands. There is no way we walk out of here without getting fired upon.
“Are you transmitting?” A soldier shouts, his mask filter adds intimidation.
Those of us with our arms up don’t answer. I can’t tell if the soldier is shouting out a nervous question to one of his own, or if he’s probing us. But we can’t transmit anything, we’re being jammed. Probably by these guys.
“Are you transmitting?” He shouts again, louder this time.
“No.” My tone borders on annoyance.
“No, not transmitting.” Gordon uses too many words, making it clear he’s no soldier.
“No, sir,” Mav responds. Out of all our overlapping ‘nos’ this is the one that turns Juan’s head.
Juan keeps his focus trained on Mav, maybe waiting for Mav to visually reference him as a child confers with a parent before deciding on their own. Juan’s elbows drop a centimeter, barely perceptible. I notice, but I doubt Mav absorbs the notch he’s fallen in a half second. I know I don’t want to be on the receiving end of the Commander’s injured pride.
“Geiger!” The lead soldier’s words sift their way back through the ranks.
I expect a man to present himself forward. A Mr. Geiger. Instead, a box changes hands until it reaches the soldier, who extends the box toward us. He observes the analog readout, grossly outdated technology. It’s like we’re being wanded by a toilet brush. My very hygiene is insulted by the primitive device. I cringe away from it, expecting it to squeal some tattling wail like a bratty little sister.
When the accusatory siren doesn’t sound, I relax. So does the soldier facing us. He removes his mask in one smooth over-the-head motion. “They’re clean.”
Masks lift away, pull down, rest atop some soldier helmets. The marks from where the masks have been covering remain, indented outlines, and smeared jungle make-up. It’s clear they’ve been following us for a while, long enough that the uncomfortable masks have left their mark.
“Welcome to the resistance,” the lead soldier says, extending a hand toward Mav.
Now Mav’s eyes dart for Juan and some sort of guidance. Too late. Juan offers nothing but a blank stare as he lowers his own hands, calmly to his sides. Mav lifts his eyebrows. His demeanor portrays too much acceptance in the circumstances. A very ‘throwing in the towel’ arm extends to meet the soldier’s grasp. They shake once, up then down with a nod to top off the final swipe of their grip.
“We’ve been out of the loop for a while.” Gordon steps around me to get closer to the soldiers. “What’s happening?”
“First we need to secure your prisoners,” the soldier speaks to Mav, not Gordon. Mav looks the part of a soldier. A small chuckle—only a single one, if there is such a thing as a single chuckle—escapes Juan. Like he’s coughing on a fond yet bitter memory and only left with a haggard chuckle in order to swallow that memory back down.
“Prisoners?” Mav asks. He does us the courtesy of wrinkling his face like it’s a sour accusation.
“Good thinking disabling their spinal transmitters. We have reason to believe the initial attack generated from the base of the brain stem.”
I look at Juan with his ripped face. They think Mav and Gordon and Belen did that? Ripped Juan in the face and removed some chip or sensor from the base of his neck? Can they not see Juan? There is no way two puny humans and one Mav (not a puny human, but no match for Juan no matter whose help he has) could get close enough to accomplish such a feat… This soldier isn’t thinking. I put a hand up to my own face. Not damaged. Maybe the guy thinks my hair is covering the evidence.
“I can see you’ve suffered some injuries while securing the payload.”
Now we’re payload? I look at Juan. He lifts his eyebrows but keeps the rest of his face neutral. I don’t know quite how to read that expression. Should I feel reassured?
“Come with us. We’ll treat your wounds, make sure there’s no infection setting in.”
At the mention of infection, Gordon grips his own arm, like the broken bone has somehow sucked infectious particles out of the air and settled into the cracks inside him despite the fact there’s no ruptured skin involved in his injury.
The soldiers separate Juan and me from the rest of our group, pushing us toward the stone sanctuary ahead.
“Where are you taking them?” Gordon asks.
“We like to make certain the AI have no access to a signal. The cathedral is the safest place.”
Belen questions nothing as she’s ushered toward the cathedral as well. The only difference is that, unlike Juan and me, with guns still jabbing at our backs, Belen is motioned forward, beckoned, invited.
I lose sight of Gordon, Belen, and Mav after the cathedral. They’re led up a path toward the top of the bridge while Juan and I are forced inside the musty base of the stone foundation. We pass under two blue-gray arches open to the cool ravine air before stopping at a solid wooden door set in a thick stone archway.
One soldier steps forward and pounds against the wood. A deep thunk absorbs the blow in a display of being so mighty even sound can’t penetrate the structure.
“Good demonstration.” None of the soldiers reacts to my humor. “I particularly liked the way you grunted with that last door pounding. Really dramatic.”
“Shut up,” Juan commands.
I’d prefer to deck Juan in his exposed metal face but choose to ‘shut up’ instead. There’s always time to punch him where he’s exposed later. Hopefully, he’ll expose a weakness that might benefit me, and I can punch him there.
The wood door swings inward on oversized hinges. Darkness from the inside bleeds out to the gloom of being in the canyon stomach at the setting of the sun.
“Two,” a soldier says.
“Transmitting?”
“Already disabled.”
“Good. Good.” The door opens wider, a faint glow inside informs the full medieval vibe here. Candlelight. It’s like these people are allergic to actual technology. Of course, we’d be trapped by the purist crazies—against all human advancement and determined to cleanse the world of binary. If this were still the game, it’d be the Dark Ages level.
We’re prodded forward. Part of me wants to see how easy it would be to turn and challenge the soldiers. But Juan doesn’t seem keen on action. I wait for a signal. And hope he’s not doing the same thing—waiting for me to signal.
Light doesn’t come with us through the stone doorway. Juan lifts his feet high as he steps through the dim stone hold. The candlelight doesn’t illuminate enough to warn me about the arm across the threshold of th
e next chamber. I trip and fall forward into Juan, who makes no effort to catch me as I slide off his back and land face down on top of a mangled metal body.
I’m face to face with the blown remains of brain circuitry and tubes that once ran through a metal spine. A scream sticks in my vocal stores, either frozen or caught in a web of shock.
“What happened?” I manage. The carnage doesn’t seem to upset anyone, not even Juan. It’s gore. It’s wrong. It’s wrong gore. No one should be dismantled in this brutal manner. My insides ache for the person that was and is no more. The person that these humans deemed not worthy of wholeness or consideration in passing.
The guard at the door doesn’t turn or breathe a warning or threat in relation to my floor discovery. Maybe he doesn’t have to. Maybe falling on the mangled remains is enough.
I push the parts away from me only to find there’s more—it’s all connected by wires and limbs. Scrambling to my feet I kick the darkness around me for more trip hazards, moving forward through the dark as we’re ushered by gunpoint to keep moving.
“Stop drawing attention to yourself,” Juan speaks at a low volume.
“I’m not.” The floor isn’t littered with more bodies. Maybe one is all they need, obstructing our path and sending a message at the same time. Or maybe they only ever encountered one robotic body and never bothered to move it. I want to ask about it but worry Juan won’t approve of my curiosity.
“In here,” the soldier says. He presses us forward into an even more grossly unlit chamber. It doesn’t smell like people. No body odors, no food remains. It’s like motor oil and burned plastic had a party.
“Now what?” Juan asks.
I’ve been wanting to ask that question the whole time. Why does he get to be the one to ask? “Where are our—”
An arm strikes me in the side. I double over reflexively. If I had wind in me, it’d definitely be knocked out. Instead, the system regulating the pumping of fluids through my body skips a beat, sending my entire system into a temporary shut down while it tries to stabilize itself. I’m basically a spinning wheel of wait time until I can jump back into rhythm.
“I request to speak to your superior,” Juan says while I’m still reeling.
“You don’t get to request that,” the soldier speaks. We can hear the ancient hinges of the door strain as the heavy closure rotates, encasing us in the midnight chamber. No access to light for Juan to recharge his solar batteries either. Like they know about such things.
Then Juan speaks in Mandarin, losing me completely. I’m barely familiar enough with Spanish to follow along when Belen speaks. But Juan has fluent speakers of the three world languages holed up inside of him, so language isn’t a barrier for him.
The soldier he addresses must understand Mandarin since the door doesn’t continue to close. Before Juan can pause between phrases I can’t decipher, the soldier speaks over him, loud and angry. Juan continues talking, matching the other guy’s volume. They keep talking like this, not exactly yelling, but not conversing. Just loud Mandarin overlapping more loud Mandarin.
“Why’d you hit me?” I interrupt their unintelligible dialogue if I can call it that. There isn’t much back and forth between them. As I guess, Juan can’t be dissuaded from his Mandarin word-slapping to answer me. “That’s not helping!” I try to get in the battle. Neither of them seems to care.
I extend my arms to feel for a wall. Luckily both of my limbs respond to my mental commands now. Perhaps when Juan shoved my shoulder back in its socket, he connected a nervous system line that wasn’t firing correctly before. No more gimpy arm for me. Cold damp material slips beneath my longest fingers, mossy. I lay my hand flat. The wall has ridges and rounds. Weird. I let my hand slide down so I can find a decent sitting location and realize the wall is not a wall. It’s a thing, an it. A form. “There’s something in here!”
Juan exits the Mandarin-speaking match. The soldier continues talking as the door shuts tight then seals in a dramatic metallic slide and clank. The soldier continues to spout loudly in Mandarin, his volume only fading by distance.
“Sit down,” Juan shouts at me in English with the same intensity as he was previously speaking Mandarin.
“Don’t talk to me like that.” I move to the side of whatever it is blocking the wall and find more dankness, this time flat and wall-like. “Want to tell me what’s going on?”
“We’re screwed, that’s what’s going on.”
“How do you mean?”
Juan’s feet shuff on the floor, the way the Mord shuff when they walk because they can’t see and need to maintain contact with the earth to avoid obstacles. “We’re not getting out of here in one piece.”
“Oh, you think?” I assume he can detect sarcasm. “I must have missed that clue when we were nicely escorted to this Victorian suite.”
“We can’t die, Jennie.”
“I know.”
“Do you understand what that means?” He hasn’t laid off the volume yet, and it’s beginning to really irritate me.
“Yeah, Juan. We’re always collecting data…”
“Alert and collecting data, even when our batteries are drained.”
“No.” I wave a hand to brush off his notions. “If my battery goes I’m at least unconscious until I’m turned back on, like sleeping.”
“You have an alert human intelligence with brainwaves that function independently of the mechanics you’re now compatible with. You can sleep, sure, but you can also wake up—a human-minded paperweight.”
“I don’t know, this looks pretty gone.” I lift the arm I tripped over earlier, covered in hydraulic fluid. Where the head should have been—air. Singe marks and burbling tubes stick out from the neck cavity drippling the goo I initially thought was musty wet and bumpy wall.
“I can’t see anything in here.”
“It’s an arm, Juan. Without a head.”
“Where’s the head?”
I feel the singed edges of the neck for remnants or evidence of the head hanging on by a flap, cord, or tube and hanging back. Juan shuffs closer. “I think this is one of the Mord that got fired on. Like his head is blown off.”
“But how’d it get here?”
I take my fingers out of the neck hole. “Stop that.” Juan shuffs his feet against my shoes repeatedly. I know he’s frustrated by the situation but going out of his way to annoy me because he’s upset is not going to fly.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“It’s not funny, knock it off. Are you going to tell me what the screaming match was about?” Juan continues to kick at my feet. “You’re such a child!” I say. “Stop.” Juan grips my torn wrist, pressing the few hijacked items still jammed up there which don’t belong, into the wrist parts that belong.
I attempt to shake him off. The Commander and I have a long history of not trusting each other, holding grudges and attempting to murder each other, but that was in a game—a game where regeneration was a possible outcome from any attempted murder.
“I’m sorry, okay!” I shout. “No one should have been trapped in that game.”
“Thanks. Retro thanks.” Juan’s voice floats in the darkness a good distance from where I am.
He was next to me, right next to me, shuffing his feet against the sides of mine, being a juvenile prick, pressing the frame of my wrist in on itself… “Juan?”
“I said thanks, don’t make it a thing.”
“Do you have hold of my arm?”
“Why would I be holding your arm? I can barely stand you.”
Aside from the verbal dig, Juan doesn’t sound close enough to be the one paining my arm. “Someone’s in here with us.”
“Yeah, a decapitated robot. You told me.” Juan doesn’t shift away from petulance. Apparently whatever juvenile personality which also speaks Mandarin is sticking around for a while.
“Something has hold of my arm.” I try to flail, shake it off, use my other hand to sluff it away, but the grip is too firm.
“I’m not messing around. Help me.” I’m standing, throwing all my weight in opposition to the iron grasp holding me tight. The slimy form against the wall comes with my movements. “It’s the headless thing.”
Juan’s movement silences. He’s not coming near the decapitated robot.
“Juan!”
“That’s what he meant.”
“Juan, get this off me.” I put my foot up for leverage against the body and push with all my leg strength. The grip loosens slightly. It’s more of a stretching at the knuckles than a loosening, but if I can maintain it, I might be able to slide my forearm and hand away.
“Jennie.” His voice is close now, fingers graze my face and one shoulder. Juan corrects his hands to find my shoulders, my back to him but he doesn’t seem to realize that as he speaks to the back of my head. “We have to get out of here. To find a way out.”
“I know.” I extend my leg as long as it will go. How does this headless creature covered in its own internal slime have such a reach?
“They won’t listen. It’s not their way. We can’t talk our way out or explain anything.”
“Yeah, I caught that. Could you pull this thing off me?” I attempt to hop turn so Juan might adjust and grab the body. I’m almost certain some post awareness reflex has been triggered in this thing. No demonstration of intent, or any communication has happened. It’s just grip. Hold. A reflex.
Juan steps around, hopefully to assist in getting the spring-loaded wrist grabber off my arm. A scrape at the door signals the clank slide of the door opening. We both pause to seek out a thin sliver of light.
“I was told to confirm a claim.”
The grip that held fast falls away, slapping the floor as if the form suddenly lost animation. With my vision adjusted to absolute darkness, the meager light offered by the candle outside the door illuminates the entire cell. The body at the floor is headless and one-armed, flopped stomach down at my feet. Juan and I turn toward the door, drawing little attention to the body at our feet.
Con Code Page 22