The Orb

by Tara Basi

  Quattro remembered how she’d sensed the temperature when it rained. It was a number on a scale, not a sensation. Maybe she’d miss the feelings, years in the future. Right now, she had no desire to be human. Mathew had saved her life; she wanted to help.

  K3 immediately spoke up: “He killed Kiki, remember?”

  Quattro got angry with her psychotic sister. “And whose fault is that?” she asked, pointedly.

  K3 fell quiet.

  “Mathew, what exactly happened to you?”

  He ignored her. Frustrated, she resorted to a data request. It seemed to shake Mathew out of his lethargy. His body oscillated between a machine and the original Mathew. A machine leg and Mathew arm, metal torso, blond hair on a silver head. Slowly, he resettled on his human form and it was again the young soldier who was sitting on the chair. With a shrug of resignation, Mathew got up.

  “Follow.”

  He led her to a door, which opened out into a large and complicated-looking lab, or half of it did. The other half looked like a steam roller had passed through. Heavy metal equipment was so twisted and bent that Quattro had difficulty deciding what any of it once was. The surrounding walls in the wrecked half of the lab had chunks ripped out revealing cracked concrete. Oil and grease stains looked like they’d been burned into the surfaces.

  “What is this place? What happened?” Quattro asked, as she looked around at the starkly contrasting halves of the laboratory.

  Mathew didn’t answer; he kept moving till he was standing by a twisted sheet of metal with deformed legs, which might once have been a table.

  “I was fighting in the God War, against the Mutinous AI. Fighting hard. AIs were all around. Attacking. I was pinned down. There was a flash. I woke up on this table, and I thought I was covered in shiny foil. And there were weird AIs all around. Not the war kind.”

  Quattro kept quiet. She’d let Mathew tell his story. Her questions could wait.

  “I just carried on where I’d left off. The weak machines fell like snowmen. Don’t know what they were. Never seen anything like them.”

  Quattro struggled to imagine what coming back that way, so suddenly, must have been like. Peter had done it gently for her, in small steps, and still it nearly drove her mad.

  “That body,” Mathew said, pointing at Quattro, “was here. Watching. It dropped like a bag of washers before I could get to it. She was in there; she ran down the Net link back to London. So there wasn’t a lot of talking.”

  Someone else had used her body? It wasn’t really hers? “She?”

  Mathew prodded Creep with a data ping. It had followed them.

  The ugly little machine stirred. “God Mother made Mathew.”

  “God Mother?”

  “Professor Simmons,” Mathew mumbled.

  Professor Petula Simmons was the century’s Da Vinci. Inventor of AI, Net, full-body VR, the Record, Headgear and everything that went with it. The icon of the age, reviled for her Mutinous AIs and worshiped for everything else in equal measure. Echoes of Frankenstein’s doomed experiment careened around Quattro’s mind. “Professor Simmons? She made you? My body? Why?”

  Creep reverted to its frozen, silent state.

  Mathew took up the story. “I don’t know tech. Don’t know why. Creep doesn’t say. Maybe I was dead already, maybe she killed me. She used my Record to bring me back. The same way Peter brought you back. I thought you might have answers.”

  Mathew’s pain was obvious. The poor soul was lost.

  “I’m sorry, Mathew, it sounds horrible.”

  “When I’d finished smashing every AI I could find, I just carried on, smashing, smashing, smashing. Maybe I screwed up the Net link. Thought I was trapped inside this.” Mathew looked down and his chest turned silver.

  Quattro tried to imagine if Peter had woken her up inside an android. It would have been horrible. She’d have assumed the same, that she was buried alive inside a metal coffin.

  Mathew raised his head; his eyes were damp. “I had to get out. I started ripping it open, but I triggered something, some safety. It poleaxed me. Professor Simmons never came back, nobody did. Later, years later, Creep woke me up. Said it could help. So I didn’t smash it.”

  Quattro was beginning to understand why Mathew was a little crazy. So was she, but she was going to get better now she had a body.

  “How is Creep trying to help you?”

  “If we get Professor Simmons’ Record, Creep could bring her back with Peter’s technology. She’ll make me human again. A citizen, a soldier. I’d be somebody. Creep restarted the Net link. We went looking for her Record and the technology.”

  Quattro was confused. “Doesn’t Orb Industries have her Record? Isn’t it in her mausoleum?”

  Creep raised a single leg and opened out previously unseen fingers, like ugly petals on a dead flower, and pointed at Quattro. “Fake.”

  Was the waving, single leg an AI expression, the equivalent of a raised eyebrow?

  “Fake? What do you mean, fake?”

  Without waiting for Quattro, Mathew returned to the lounge. Quattro followed; there were so many more questions. When she caught up, he looked human, but he was standing stiffly.

  “Is that why you want me? Peter’s technology?”

  Mathew angled his head towards the spider. “Analysis finished?”

  Creep hadn’t moved since it crawled after Mathew into the lit space. “Data,” it growled.

  “Talk,” Mathew insisted.

  “Its tech is flawed. Not God Mother tech.”

  Quattro was beginning to see where Mathew got some of his speech patterns. “It’s not flawed: my father invented this technology.” She surprised herself by openly admitting that Peter was her father. Which, of course, was true, however you looked at it.

  “God tech. Gone,” Creep growled, its tone even, but Quattro thought it sounded irritated.

  “God tech?” Quattro asked, getting ever more confused.

  Mathew didn’t hide his frustration. “Stupid AIs call Professor Simmons ‘Mother God’. Maybe Peter didn’t invent it?”

  Quattro knew all about Petula and Peter. “He worked with Petula Simmons on the original AI research.”

  Mathew’s human face lit up. “Creep, Peter has God tech.”

  “You perfect, Mother’s son. It flawed, malfunction soon. Keep for parts.”

  Inside her rigid shell, Quattro shivered. “Malfunction? What’s going to malfunction?”

  “It,” Creep answered, then swivelled its body slowly, bouncing on its elastic legs as it blindly fixed its attention on Quattro.

  Mathew’s body radiated intense disappointment. Desperately, Quattro turned to the hateful spider for help. “Can’t you repair me so I’m like Mathew?”

  “One hundred seventeen hours left. Malfunction. Only God fix. Many anomalies, dark code.”

  Quattro was shocked. She couldn’t die now. She was free, powerfully bodied. It was Peter’s VR that had been killing her. “I was sick. I’m fine now, really.”

  Creep bounced slowly. “Body shock boost. Temporary. Bad tech.”

  “Temporary? Mathew, what does it mean?”

  Mathew didn’t answer. He was slowly morphing back into a machine and seemingly too distracted by his own disappointment to maintain the semblance of the human Mathew. He returned to his natural mirrored state and stood in frozen silence. Creep was unmoving and still clinging to the ceiling. It looked dead. The lights went out.

  “Mathew!” Quattro wailed. Was that it? She was flawed, useless, soon to be rubbish? Would they put her out for the Repair Convoy to collect? No, she remembered Creep’s bitter words: she’d be a source of spare parts for Mathew. There had to be a way to save herself; she couldn’t wait here to die. “Mathew, help me!” she cried again, in desperation.

  Out of the dark, Creep spoke to her, “Mathew can sleep. He must. You it, dirty machine, cannot. Be quiet and terminate.”

  Quattro wanted to scream. K1 and K2 were screaming.

&n
bsp; K3 roared over their screams, “The Whisperer told me how we can bring Professor Simmons back. Petula will save us.”

  Chapter Nine – The Quartermaster

  The lift doors opened, expelling the cool air inside before sucking in Satan’s breath. Zip bowed her head and stepped into the bone-dry, blistering heat. The thick air parted reluctantly as she pushed her way along a poorly lit service tunnel. Metre-wide, grey pipes and black cables thicker than her arm ran along its walls and ceiling.

  Her destination was Sediment Town. It existed beyond London’s lowest level, an unofficial subterranean slum where the Net barely reached, the ventilation struggled and the lifts didn’t go. A refuge for the fearful, the desperate, the shy and all things underground.

  Somewhere nearby was the trapdoor she was looking for. Her ears and fingernails were starting to sting, her hair crackled and every breath singed her mouth as she searched. Through the shimmering haze, she spotted a rectangle in the floor ahead and made for it. Zip grabbed at the recessed metal ring, yelped loudly and snatched back her burnt hand. She pulled off her glove and stared at the angry, red welt on her palm; such beautiful, delicate skin. She removed a bottle of water from her knapsack and poured some over her throbbing flesh. The drops that fell on the concrete floor hissed and disappeared. Zip gingerly pulled her glove back on and took a swig of water. With her booted foot, she hooked the trapdoor ring and pulled it up, releasing a delicious icy blast that washed over her like a pool plunge on a baking summer’s day. She could make out the beginnings of a metal ladder that fell away into the darkness. Glad to escape the roasting heat, she carefully descended and pulled the cooler underside of the trapdoor closed behind her.

  The ladder was old and creaky. The shaft was roughly bored. The surface was coarse and peppered with sharp edges that snagged at her clothes and scratched like an angry cat at any exposed skin. Every few metres, Zip passed a small grilled opening in the curved wall that leaked cool air. It didn’t last. The ventilation grills got further apart, and the temperature started climbing until there were no more grills and the shaft turned into an oven. Zip sped up as the metal rungs became almost too hot to grip through her gloves. She was starting to think of turning back when the ladder abruptly passed through a hole and ended in another dimly lit tunnel. Relieved to be able to escape the searing ladder, Zip dropped the last metre onto the tunnel floor.

  The tunnel, like the shaft she’d descended, looked half finished. There were no cables or pipes, just a long-life proximity-lamp hanging from an old nail hammered into the stone ceiling. Its light had grown in intensity as she’d descended. Zip hoped it wasn’t adding to the suffocating heat. Doubled over, she took a moment to try and breathe and recover from the descent. Zip fought against a rising terror and remembered she was here to get some of her old self back. It would be easy to get lost in the long-abandoned tunnels, and without a way out, her beautiful body would be cooked alive.

  It had become so hot her sweat was evaporating before it could run. Consulting her Headgear, she was directed to turn right and seek out another trapdoor about a hundred metres ahead, a mercifully short distance. The Headgear map was crude and hard to follow without concentrating, something that was getting ever harder in the suffocating heat. The higher Headgear functions had started deactivating. The Net signal was weakening. More functions would go before she reached the town.

  She took another long swig from her water bottle and started off, trudging slowly, wanting to stretch out a hand to take support from the tunnel wall, but it burnt her before she even made contact. The heat had become an unbearably heavy troll riding on her shoulders, biting at her ears, pounding on her head with its bony fist, and stopping up her mouth and nose with a leathery hand.

  It was a long hundred metres and another proximity-light before the next roughly cut trapdoor appeared in the uneven tunnel floor. There was no relieving coolness when she wrenched it open. Laboriously, Zip eased down the hole, trying not to sear herself on the sides.

  Below was a shallow, steeply sloping passageway that forced her head down to her chest. It looked as if it had been hacked out of the rock by hand. A proximity-lamp lit a little of the way ahead. The heat starched the air into an unyielding stillness that dampened every sound. All Zip could smell was her own singed flesh. Deciding to rest for a moment, she dropped to one knee and instantly regretted it. She yelped in pain and straightened back up. The rock floor was hotter than hell. If she could have mustered the tears, Zip would have cried. Instead, she drained a bottle of water and set off down the tunnel, triggering proximity-lamps as she went. Any sense of time and distance were muddled up and then lost altogether. The descending trail revealed itself in short, identical sections, and a pitch black followed her down.

  Zip was staring at her hypnotically shuffling feet when her head banged into a burning metal door. It barred any forward progress. Yelping out in agony, she stepped back, rubbing her forehead vigorously to massage away the searing pain. Zip supported her weight with her hands on her knees and breathed hard. She had no idea how long she’d been walking. The water was all gone. Her vision was blurry. She was tired, very tired. The door ahead looked like something from an ancient submarine. Zip reached out with her foot and tried to move the wheel at the centre of the door, but it was locked, or she wasn’t strong enough to turn it. With no water left, there was no way back.

  Zip started to think it might be a good idea to sleep for a while.

  Beep! Blink! Tremor! Vitals critical! Access intercom for assistance. Emergency services offline. Beep! Blink! Tremor!

  Asleep on her feet, a startled Zip woke up and banged her head on the tunnel ceiling.

  “Jesus and the Tramp. Ouch! That hurt. What, what?” Slowly, she realised what her Headgear was trying to tell her. Somehow, she hadn’t noticed an old intercom attached to the doorframe. Covering her gloved hand with her empty knapsack, she stabbed the call button. For a moment, there was nothing but the mocking crackle of static.

  “What?”

  “Open the bloody door.”

  “What’s your business?”

  “I’m burning alive out here. Open the bloody door.”

  “Then you’ll burn, unless you tell me your business.”

  Zip sobbed in frustration before steadying her voice. “Colonel Zara to see the Quartermaster. He’s expecting me.”

  “Why didn’t you say so? Come on in.”

  The metal door swung open to a grinding melody, revealing a fat, hairy man in shorts and vest standing in the doorway. Zip roughly pushed past him to get more of the deliciously cool air that was blowing out of the opening. Inside, she fell to her knees on thankfully cooler concrete and breathed deep and long.

  The door slammed shut. The man laughed for a while before shouting indistinctly, “Orb and the Tramp, you look like a boiled lobster. Where’s your damn thermal suit?”

  Zip didn’t hear; she was lost in astonishment at the sight of the bizarre place just ahead that had to be Sediment Town. The Quartermaster had moved down here after the God War. She’d never been herself and never wanted to. Not until now. His directions had got her here, but the old fool had never mentioned a thermal suit.

  Sediment Town sat in a giant bowl that had been excavated to rebuild London after the Money War, and then, during the God War, it was abandoned. It looked like a post-apocalyptic cowboy town out of a bad western. The main street ran along the floor of the cavern. It was bordered by makeshift buildings cobbled together from London’s refuse. The rickety structures climbed almost to the top of the natural amphitheatre. High above Zip’s head, a haphazard collection of multi-coloured arc lights clung precariously to the rough-hewn cavern ceiling, weakly illuminating the space below.

  It took her a moment to understand why the man who’d let her in was shouting at her but was barely audible. She’d fallen inside a drum, and the drummer was banging out a steady heartbeat of booming noise so monstrous it threatened to puree her insides. Still kneeling, she clap
ped her hands over her ears and pressed her forehead into her thighs. This was the thrum, the Sediment Town beat, and it was going to kill her.

  A big hand on her shoulder made her turn and look. The man thrust two hi-tech-looking plugs into Zip’s ears.

  “Figures! No thermal suit, no smart-plugs. You’re one dumb girly. It’s amazing you’re still alive.”

  The mind-melting thrum changed to a steady, tolerable beat, like a loudly ticking grandfather clock. The physical vibrations were still just as strong, but at least she wouldn’t go deaf or die from a brain seizure. Another detail the Quartermaster had either forgotten to mention or had just assumed she would know.

  “How do you stand it?” Zip asked.

  “Plugs work great. Anti-vibe boots and whatnot dampen the tremble.”

  “Anti-vibe?”

  “I ain’t giving you no anti-vibe boots. You’re gonna have to buy them if you’re planning on staying.”

  “Thanks anyway. Where can I find the Quartermaster?”

  “Saloon’s straight ahead, down Main Street. Can’t miss it.”

  Zip gave her gruff Samaritan a smile and got to her feet. She’d emerged near the bottom of the vast cave. Ahead, a gently sloping path led to the wide, dusty Main Street, which ran, like a greasy parting, through the centre of the town and climbed the crudely curved wall in the distance for further than seemed practical. It was the only major thoroughfare. From her slightly elevated vantage, she could see there was a network of unruly alleys that ran off Main Street like veins. The ramshackle shanty town appeared deserted.

  Her footfall had to be timed on the off-beat to miss the jar of the tremble attacking her shins. It took her a few moments to get the hang of it and longer to keep to the rhythm. The rock dust on the street lightly fizzed for an instant at each beat of the thrum, before settling back to await the next beat. Her tongue was already coated in cavern dust. It clogged her nose and sucked the moisture out of her mouth. The cool air escaping from the door to Sediment Town had saved her life; chilled champagne couldn’t have tasted better. Relative to the furnace beyond the door, it was cooler. Compared to normal, Sediment Town was a dry sauna.