by Nathan Pedde
The waitress smacked Sheemo in the face. Blood dripped out of his nose and onto his shirt.
“Wrong answer,” Dr. Oraelius yelled. “You’ve a couple choices. Help us, and we will move you to comfortable quarters. Proper food and entertainment. Or you don’t, and we will take what little comforts you have. It’s up to you.”
“First,” Sheemo said. “I have no idea where he goes.”
“He’s always running around the station with the Dagg girl. What’s her name?”
“Elsie. And second,” Sheemo said. “If I did happen to know where the brat would hide, I wouldn’t tell you.”
Dr. Oraelius nodded, turning to the waitress lady. “Grab Elsie and bring her in.”
“About her,” the waitress said. “She’s one of Des’s compatriots. We tried to nab her, but she escaped with Des. It’s in the report I wrote up.”
Dr. Oraelius gritted his teeth for a moment. “And the babysitter? Did you grab her as well?”
“The answer is in the report, sir. Can I take the prisoner back to his cell. I can answer your questions then.”
“Yes,” Dr. Oraelius said. “And take his bedding away.”
Des worked throughout the night, the drug still working in his system. He designed a new face for Elsie, Susan, and himself. He couldn’t get a proper identity card for them, or even necklaces for them. The design was something he could do at the moment.
With no windows in the hideout, he lost track of time. There was no easy way to check to see what the time was.
“Did you sleep?” Susan asked.
Des jerked, looking where the voice came from. “Shit. I didn’t see you there. What time is it?”
“Seven in the morning,” Susan said.
“Did you sleep?”
“Of course. After I cleaned up those rooms, there was a bit of floor.”
Des nodded.
“You didn’t sleep? Did you?”
“The drug,” Des replied.
“Right, well, I did find boxes full of stuff.”
“What type of stuff?”
“Mostly junk, but there were some tools.”
Des nodded.
“What are you working on?” Susan said.
“I’m mainly trying to keep myself busy. I’ve created new faces for us if I can get a holo-necklace for each of us.”
Elsie jerked awake. “Des run…” Elsie stammered.
“Everything is fine,” Des said. “You’re back in the hideout.”
Elsie laid back down on the couch. “Fuck.”
Des got up from the computer chair and walked up to the couch.
“How did I get back here?” Elsie said.
“I carried you,” Des replied.
Elsie groaned. “All the way? How long was I out?”
“Three years,” Des grinned.
“Eighteen hours,” Susan said. “Maybe. I’ve been looking after you.”
Elsie kicked at Des, who stepped out of the way. “Jerk. Did you carry me all the way?”
“Not all the way,” Des said. “I bought a scooter with a sidecar and drove here.”
“With what money?” Elsie said, “and from who?”
“You,” Des replied, filling her in on everything since the pin hit her.
Des told her about the salesman, who was a player.
“I’m going to get in trouble for that,” Elsie said.
“I know. It was either that or drive a red Courier One hover van up here.”
Elsie sat up on the couch. Des noticed her hair was a mess.
“I need a shower and some food,” Elsie said.
“We are in luck,” Susan said. “Des here picked a hiding spot with a washroom that has a shower.”
“I picked very carefully,” Des said.
“I had to clean it, though. I’m sure there was some form of alien life growing,” Susan said.
Elsie stood up, then fell back down to the couch. “Did the station just shift?”
“No. I’ll help you get cleaned up.” Susan walked over and grabbed hold of Elsie’s hand. “I’m sure Des would love to help you, but I’m sure he has better things to do.”
Des shrugged his shoulders and went back to the computer as Susan helped Elsie to the bathroom.
Time ticked on as Des concentrated on the task at hand. He had his new identities at ninety-five percent. Des fully understood the last five percent took the longest to do.
“Hey Des,” Elsie said from the hallway. “Can you come to look at this?”
Des jerked out of his daze, glancing at the time. It was early afternoon.
“Sorry, what was that?” Des asked.
He got up and stretched his legs, noticing a cold bowl of soup by his computer.
“Whose food is this?” Des asked.
“Yours,” Elsie said. “I told you to eat it.”
Des grabbed the bowl and started eating. The cold noodles wiggled on the way down. Des didn’t care, his body objected to his lack of nutrient intake.
“Were you coming to see this?” Elsie asked.
“Yes,” Des said, walking over to Elsie, still holding onto his bowl of cold soup.
Des found Elsie standing at the end of the hallway. On the floor was the small escape hatch, which was wide open.
“Do you know where this leads to?” Elsie asked.
“No idea,” Des replied.
“You haven’t explored it?”
“Not really. I’ve never had time. I don’t think it’s important to the mission.”
“You need to see this then,” Elsie said.
Chapter Eighteen
Elsie climbed down a small ladder and into the hole. Des followed, his shoes gripping the metal rungs. It stretched down fifteen feet. The stench of stale, musty air drifted up from the hole. It was familiar to Des. It smelled like the Europa or the Undercroft. For some reason, he kept going back to places under the surface.
Des glanced down the ladder, his eyes meeting Elsie’s. She smiled at him and winked.
The ladder ended at the top of a six feet wide, by six feet long platform with another small ladder leading down to the floor.
When Des reached the platform, Elsie handed Des a flashlight. Des turned it on and shined it around the room. The room was so massive Des’s flashlight couldn’t see to the walls. His light did shine on the floor. The floor was another ten feet down from the platform. Des could see a thick coat of dust encasing in everything.
Large boxes and odd shaped items were spread out over everywhere that his flashlight hit.
“What is this place?” Des asked.
“I’ve no idea,” Elsie said. “I opened the hatch, climbed down, and then went to get you.”
Des looked around the large room and what looked like machinery.
“This has to be a factory of some kind,” Des said, feeling like before he had become a spy.
Des climbed down from the old and rusted ladder to the platform. He breathed heavily, reaching the bottom of the ladder.
“Are you coming down to take a look at this?” Des asked.
“I’ll stay up here,” Elsie said. “The ladder scares me, and I agreed to help Susan sort stuff.”
“Sort stuff?” Des asked. “Not the junk?”
Elsie laughed as her face light up. “She said something about not wanting to go crazy with cabin fever. What are you going to do?”
“I’ll be down here trying to figure out what these machines are,” Des said, walking back to the platform, “why they were built, and if any other hallways lead off this one.”
“Sounds like you’re going to get yourself into trouble,” Elsie said, climbing the ladder back up into the hideout.
“You could join me,” Des said. “We can get into trouble together.”
“Tempting,” Elsie said, climbing higher up the ladder.
Des turned back to the factory spread in front of him. He wondered how long this factory sat unused and without anyone venturing into it.
Scatte
red across the floor of the room was a set of large boxes covered with a cloth tarp. Des pulled a tarp from one machine. A pile of dust blew into the air. Des looked at the device. Words were stamped onto the machine: Auto-compiler.
Des walked up to a second machine, which read: Compiler-discharger. He looked around the room, hunting for a control panel or computer system. He pondered what those machines were, part of him wanted to know. The other part thought he was wasting his time.
What else am I going to do right now,Des thought.
Des wandered around the factory floor. On the nearest wall was a large double door, large enough for one of the machines to pass through. He walked up to the door, pulling at the handle. It didn’t budge.
Using his flashlight, he scanned the floor of the factory. Off to one side was a tool chest, hammers, wrenches, and screwdrivers, with a large prybar on the top of the pile. In the last five hundred years, despite all the scientific progress, mechanics tools hadn’t changed.
Des grabbed hold of the prybar, then turned to the stubborn door. He set the flashlight on a nearby machine, aiming the light on the door.
He slammed the business end into the space between the doors and pried. The stubborn door resisted being opened. Des pried on the metal door before something brittle in it snapped.The door creaked open. On the other side was the steel studs of a wall. When the factory had been abandoned, the doorway had been closed off.
Des walked along the wall of the factory, looking for another doorway. Walking around brought him to a smaller man-sized door. He repeated the process as the other door. This one was made from flimsy, aged plastic, and broke like an egg. It collapsed to the ground into a pile on the floor.
Behind the brittle door was a long skinny hallway. Dark shadows ran away from Des’s light as he shinned it into the hall. Ten feet down the corridor was a wall blocking the hallway and the factory from the rest of the world.
It’s like someone wanted to forget that these machines were built, Des thought.
At the far end of the factory floor, he saw a line of windows spreading across the top of the wall. The windows were filthy and dark. The only problem was Des couldn’t see any way for him to get into the room. At least a way that didn’t include him having to monkey his way up the wall.
Des walked through the factory, discovering it shaped like a large rectangle box. It looked like any factory he had been in. The machines were sorted into sections, which all did the same thing. Connecting the devices were pipes of different sizes. The smaller pipes were conduits for electrical cables, while the two other sizes of pipes Des wasn’t sure about.
Sitting in the corner was an old ladder. Des grinned. He hoped it would be long enough to reach the windows without too much danger.
With lots of grunting, swearing, and sweat, Des dragged the ladder across the entire factory and leaned it against the wall. Des climbed up the ladder to reach the window, rubbing on it to clean enough to see through. It didn’t help. The window was just as dirty on the inside of the room.
Des walked through the factory, back toward the tools he had found earlier. Grabbing a hammer, he climbed up the ladder. Des smashed the hammer, smashing the window. The first blow cracked the glass, yet it didn’t break. He swung harder, the hammer bouncing off the windowpane. The jerk of his arm caused him to slip off balance.
Des let go of the hammer, which fell to the ground with a clatter. He grabbed hold of the window ledge as the ladder teetered on one leg. The ladder settled down, and Des righted himself with an uneasy sigh.
With the hammer down on the ground, Des climbed down the ladder and grabbed the tool. He climbed back with a glare on his face.
“Stupid Earth bullshit,” Des cursed.
Swinging the hammer, he smashed the window into pieces. The large chunks of broken glass cascaded with a deafening noise.
Des used his flashlight to look across the room. The room was small in comparison to the factory. It was also the standard two-half meters tall with the windows taking up most of the space on the one wall. The room was filled with old designed computer terminals. Chairs sat in front of the consuls.
The control room for the factory, Des thought.
Des used the hammer to break the glass out of the window frame. He had no intention of slicing his arms open with the shards of glass.
He climbed into the room. His feet leaving the ladder.
I’m going to fall, and Elsie is going to laugh at me, Des thought.
Des steeled his courage, monkeying into the control room. He used the nearby console as support to keep himself from falling into the pile of shattered glass.
The broken glass crunched under his boots. A foul stench filled his nose. Des gagged out of reflex, holding his burning nose. He walked along the room, hunting for the source of the smell.
Work signs were posted on the walls. Signs of proper ladder use and how to work safely.On the wall was a calendar. Des wiped the dust from it. The calender was made from paper and had a picture of a mountainous landscape he didn’t recognize. Des looked at the date — year 2325 ACE. The Terrans didn’t use the ancient calendar in the Jovian Republic. They only mentioned it once or twice in school.
The calendars he had found in the undercroft had always been illegible or only a small piece. They never had the date attached to them.The current year in the Jovian Calendar was 554 BTC. It was the calendar every nation or colony outside of the United Terran Federation used. The present Earth calendar year was 2578 ACE.
My theory is correct, Des thought.This station is older than we thought.
Des walked up to a single unlocked door. It wasn’t a standard door with hinges, this one was controlled by an access panel on the side of the door. Des pushed a button on the door as it lit up. The door slid open, letting off a cloud of dust exploding in his face.
On the other side of the door was a staircase running farther into the station. Like the rest of the station, Des didn’t see any lights at the bottom of the stairs.
Des walked back into the control room. The door slid shut behind him. Des grabbed a chair and dragged it to the door. He pushed the button once more, and the door slid open. Des placed the chair in the pathway of the door. Des stepped back a few feet.
The door didn’t shut. A yellow light appeared from the control panel.
Des walked back to the door. The control panel said: Error. Obstruction in the path. He grinned, walking down the long staircase.
The staircase switch-backed and forth, making its way down. After the fifth switch-backed, the stairs ended. A solid wall of metal appeared in the middle of the door. Des looked around to see if there was anywhere else he could go, but the staircase was completely closed off. There was no way past the wall. No without cutting the metal with a torch of some kind.
Des made his way back to the control room. Once he got there, he saw another door he had missed on the other side of the room.
He walked up to the door, and it puffed open the same way. On the other side of this door was a simple bathroom. The bathroom stunk fierce. A single toilet with a single tap was attached to the wall.
Des grabbed another chair and put it in the doorway. The door stayed open.
He turned a tap to see if anything would happen. Water poured out of the faucet and into the sink, disappearing out the drain. Des flushed the toilet. The toilet worked, and the stink disappeared.
“That’s a bonus,” Des said.
“What’s a bonus?” a voice asked from the control room.
Des jumped, tensing his muscles, he waited for an attack. Except no one was there. Des walked out of the bathroom and into the control room.
“I cannot see you,” the voice said. “Is there someone in my room?”
Des turned around, his flashlight shining into various corners of the room.
“That’s it,” the voice said. “Dust. There’s dust on my sensors. Can you please help me out?”
Chapter Nineteen
Des examined the
control room. No one was in it with him. He looked out the windows to see if Elsie was on the ladder. The factory was as silent as he found it.
“Who are you?” Des asked.
“Please calm down, young human,” the voice said. “I mean you no harm.”
“Where are you?”
“I am the computer. I am an AI.”
“AI?” Des asked.
“Artificial Intelligence,” the voice said. “A computer program that has the ability to grow and learn.”
“You are a human mind stuck in a machine?”
“Close enough, but only synthetic. Please clean my cameras and the central control unit, and I will be able to show you.”
Des took his sleeve and walked up to the most prominent computer console in the center of the room. It was a style he had never seen before being large and clunky. It still looked like a computer with a keyboard and a scroll ball for a mouse. A single monitor was built into the system. On top of the monitor was a red dot for the a camera.
After Des cleaned the dust away from the monitor, a picture of a young girl appeared on the screen. It waved at him, then walked away from the screen and showed her whole body. The girl wore what Des thought was a schoolgirl uniform. A shorter skirt and a lowcut top with blond hair and pigtails.
“Hi, my name is Amy,” she said. “And this is my pond.”
“Pond?” Des said. “I’m confused.”
“I understand. Time has passed since I was shut down. You must use different slang than the last users. Can you please clean my cameras in the corners of the room as well as the lower staircase?”
“Isn’t this red dot the camera?” Des asked.
“It is, but it’s only good for a small part of the control room, I need to see the rest of my factory.”
Des nodded, stepping back from the console.
“I can do the cameras in the room, but the staircase is blocked off. I saw no cameras.”
Des walked up and used his sleeve to clean the four cameras. The cameras were in the shape of half balls sticking out of the ceiling. Des could see a moving camera inside. A light appeared on the camera.