by S A Asthana
He swiveled his chair around and faced the masked intruder wide-eyed, his grey hair in complete disarray. “Wh-who are you?”
The chemist was Nipponese. Belle hadn’t expected that. Why would one want to leave Nips and work down here? Belle took a step forward and aimed the pistol. Her shoulders grazed the shelves—how does he work in this closet?
The old man raised trembling hands. His head hung low. “Please, don’t! Please. I-I have to pay back a debt.”
He should stop making this harder.
“My family –” he pleaded, and his head snapped back in a spray of red. All slaves of the bitch must die.
The man’s lifeless body slumped in the chair and smoke rose from what was left of his head. Belle turned her attention to the shelves. Over a hundred vials, each filled to the brim with a dark, red liquid, sat in neat rows. Half were labeled Group O. The rest were either Group A, B or AB.
Belle’s heart sank.
Human blood. All the types were on display. They were an ingredient. Apparently, humans were getting high off each other’s blood without even knowing it. Or maybe they did, but didn’t care.
There was no line Marie would not cross. It was disgusting, but not surprising. Marie had been a gore whore even as a child—cutting herself just to drink the blood had been a favorite pastime of hers much to their father’s chagrin. Turned out she’d found a way to get high off it too. Crafty lil’ bitch.
With a renewed fervor, Belle pulled out a small, spherical device from her knapsack, and placed it on one of the shelves.
“Activate,” she commanded.
“Activated,” the device’s computerized voice stated. Red numbers flashed across its shiny surface—ten… nine… eight…
Destroy and disrupt. Destroy and disrupt.
Belle turned to exit but peeked over her shoulder at the chemist one last time. Something in her stomach squirmed. Hundreds of kills but this one didn’t loosen its grip. A wail almost made it to her tongue, as if a long-buried part of her soul making itself known. Then her eyes worked back to the sphere—five… four…
Get a fucking grip, girl!
The next moment was a blur—she sprinted out the laboratory and the device exploded just as she’d run ten feet. A cloud of fire swelled blindly. The laboratory’s walls were paper, shaking to and fro. An automatic alarm’s cries echoed up and down corridors, raking her ears like an eruption of supernovas. She had another thirty seconds before security descended upon the scene from every corner of North district.
None of it was a surprise because Belle had accounted for the chaos in her plan. She sprinted back to the ventilation shaft, leaping over the loups’ dead bodies along the way.
A quick jump and a pull-up were all it took to gain access to the shaft. Her body contracted as if it was a single muscle. She climbed the steep pathway in seconds despite the slippery metal surface, and it deposited her into a tiny room no larger than the laboratory she’d just destroyed. A thin beam of yellow light cut in through a slit in the wall and lit the space some.
Shutting the metal trap gate to the shaft, Belle collapsed onto her back. Man, I’m fuckin’ exhausted. Her breathing was labored. Missions, even ones as quick as this one, were taxing. A lot of variables had to be accounted for. One wrong move and the entire job could come apart at the seams. Needless to say, it took a toll every single time. This was the forty-ninth hit on Marie’s kingdom but it very well could have been the first.
She was glad this one had been a success. In and out. Marie would feel this one, no denying it. Destroy and disrupt. All slaves of the bitch must die. Belle removed her shades and her mask. Dust particles stroked her cheeks, turning her snowy skin brown. She took a deep breath, but the stench of scorched earth irked her nostrils, leading to several sneezes.
“No more fuckin’ deep breaths.” Her heaving chest settled. Her blistered pink lips curled into a smile.
Relief. Catch breath. Relax.
The calm was short-lived. The chemist’s dead face lurched into her vision again like a persistent piece of crust stuck to the cornea. No brushing or blinking it away. Not this one. The old man had been providing for his family, after all. A slave to Marie, yes, but that’s what he’d tried to explain before being murdered.
No, the guilt couldn’t be terminated. She wasn’t a robot after all. As much as she’d like to be at times, she wasn’t a machine. Her chest burned with remorse.
A distraction was needed.
Belle jumped to her feet and pushed open a rusted, metal door—an exit into the open world. A dry desert wind whistled in her ears, and her eyes cringed under the burst of sunlight. She stood on the surface. A step back in time. A break from the horrors of New Paris. There was nothing like the outside.
Oxygen was still plentiful, thankfully. Even though trees were a distant memory for Earth, plenty of algae remained in the oceans. Photosynthesis continued despite mounds of century-old plastic waste clogging epipelagic zones. The surface, for all its shortcomings, still felt natural.
It was also a reminder of what could never be again.
No ozone layer. Unfiltered sunlight. And the fogs, the thousands of giant, lethal fogs. They would never allow humanity to recolonize the surface. A shame.
Belle put back on the shades. She was a lean, black figure surrounded by an expansive metal farm. Solar arrays, each twenty feet tall, stood in rows around her. Must have been hundreds. The words “Hitachi Solar” were etched down their metal beams. The panels were tilted up for maximum exposure. Their surfaces could melt skin upon contact. The most abundant resource was being absorbed, after all—sunlight.
A strange scene. Manufactured, but still a life-giver to those living underground. The urge to destroy this solar farm had pierced Belle’s mind several times before. She’d do more harm than anything to countless innocents underneath her feet. Without an energy source, average Parisians wouldn’t have access to whatever little water and food being produced for them now. They’d die.
No, can’t do that.
There was a limit, it turned out, to the maxim—destroy and disrupt. Destroy and disrupt, but within reason. One life taken to save many was fair game, hence the killing of the chemist. But putting thousands of lives at risk just to bring down Marie was not acceptable. Never would be. No, definitely can’t do that. Otherwise, there's no difference between us sisters.
So the solar farm remained untouched, its arrays allowed to soak up unfettered sunlight. Not a single cloud dotted the expansive blue sky. No cumulus, no nimbostratus, no altostratus, no nothing. In fact, there hadn’t been one in over a year. Just blue heaven with a blazing yellow circle in the middle. Rain would never fall here. It was why water trawler trucks made daily trips to the English Channel.
A small dot appeared thousands of feet above, the sun glinting off its metal. It grew by the second. An incoming spacecraft, rectangular in shape and about thirty feet in length. Her smart shades focused on the object.
ZOOM 0%...
ZOOM 50%...
ZOOM 95%.
SHARPEN IMAGE
Martian military markers became visible alongside the vehicle’s door. A god from the heavens—a place that offered more than this Parisian hell ever could.
CHAPTER 5: CUBE
Parisian ruins came into view outside the spacecraft’s cockpit window. Dunes rose and fell about them like camel humps—this was not the Paris of Victor Hugo or Claude Monet. In the absence of a stable environment, large swaths of Earth had turned into deserts. Where there were once temperate climates or rainforests, heat and sand now reigned supreme. The city was a painting of desert and ruins as if ancient Egyptian relics rested on Parisian soil.
Cube eyed what had been the Arc de Triomphe. While the two columns stood, the arch was collapsed into rubble. Data logs automatically reported the exact date and time, down to the second, when the structure had been damaged.
>DATE: December 25, 2109, Time: 12:10:25 PM LOCAL.
That humanity h
ad imploded on that particular date didn’t give Cube pause. It cared little for man’s religious customs. Christmas, Christianity—these meant nothing to machines. These rituals were pointless, one of man’s many weaknesses.
Symbolism was lost on machines as well. It was as alien as the need for food. Cube soared past the still-standing Eiffel Tower without giving it much notice. The words “The bombs fell, BUT I STILL SURVIVE!” were graffitied across a rusted beam. No matter how poignant the stupid humans found the tower’s resilience to be, it meant zero to Cube. Calculations deemed the wrought iron a waste in its current form. Why the tower hadn’t been dismantled and repurposed for spacecraft building was beyond Cube’s logic. At least two dozen 1.V4s like the one Cube flew could be produced.
The vehicle descended, its ion propulsion engines roaring as they accounted for the switching trajectory. A minute later, the ship contacted sand and landed among indistinguishable ruins. Ash and soot spattered broken frameworks, while corrosion had pocked metal beams with holes.
A fog, a green mist like a vaporous emerald, loomed just behind the wrecked remains of a gutted three-story building thirty-one meters away. The fog was swallowing the ruin whole, moving slowly as if a cloud over mountain peaks, its tentacle-like wisps tightening their grip around cement.
The miasma was a vestige of World War III, and it wouldn’t dissipate for millennia. Billions of non-degradable nanoparticles, each full with a 50/40/10 mixture of artificially enhanced cyanide, lead and mercury, comprised this fog. Thousands like it swirled throughout the globe. Pushed by wind currents across land and sea, these specters of death killed all biology in their path. Humans had yet to invent a shield, some solution to a problem of their own creation. Not surprising their machinations veered out of control, given human limitations. It happened often enough to be a certainty.
Cube was undeterred. The green spectres served zero threat to non-cellular entities. They simply worked their way around rocks, metals and more until they found the living—then went to work penetrating, tearing and killing. Cube disconnected its wireless link from the craft’s computer, shutting down the vehicle in process, then removed a cable connected to a port behind the ankle, attaching the robot to the cockpit’s dashboard.
>SWITCHING TO BATTERY POWER
>BATTERY CHARGE: 100%
>EXPECTED BATTERY LIFE: 168 hours
Unclamping its feet from catches on the floor and its back from hooks on the cockpit’s door, Cube disembarked through the vehicle’s rear storage bay. Hot winds and dust pounded its metal outside. The afternoon sun beat down mercilessly upon fifty-five spaceships docked haphazardly around the site. Most were cargo-haulers based on their Nipponese markings, others private. None were Martian. Sydneysider crafts didn’t frequent this colony. The ones that did visit Earth focused on the oceans, not New Paris, because they were water trawlers doing their daily rounds. Bastien had probably snuck onto one and managed to skew the trawler’s trajectory for a drop-off here. Exactly how, Cube couldn’t calculate. The fugitive was among the craftier of his kind.
A hangar loomed large ahead, its metal, semi-circle ceiling covering a massive concrete airship bay. The structure’s wide slide door remained open to the elements and a cluster of loups could be made out standing by the back wall, laughing at each other’s jokes. The loups were supposed to be on guard. It was obvious they weren’t—their banter and cigarettes were the focal point. Too bad for them, because the fog was creeping towards the hangar. Given its size it would engulf the structure whole, then seep inside if the door wasn’t shut soon.
“I don’t have your craft on the incoming log.” A loup approached the robot with an arm stretched out. He pointed a pistol. “State your business.”
A teenager of seventeen years—freshly recruited. Hence the boldness. Or rather, foolishness. Some humans were more adept at stupidity than others. An inherent flaw in their biology. One of many.
Cube didn’t engage and plodded past. The video clip of a dog ignoring a fussy puppy played in the memory banks. Thousands of such videos, with cats, dogs, and humans, were stored in archive folders. Each had been viewed millions of times so behaviors deemed appropriate by the coders could be learned. A part of the machine learning process.
The loup cut off the robot’s path once again, seemingly undeterred by its size. Or its skeletal face. He protested over the howling wind, “Hey! I said stop.”
Cube sidestepped him. But the young man continued the dangerous dance as if trying to prove himself. He glanced back to see if his colleagues were watching. They weren’t. He stepped in front of the robot again. Stupid human.
Death came quick.
Cube grasped the teenager’s helmet within its large right hand and crumpled it as if it was nothing but paper. The loup slumped to the ground with his red-haired skull cracked and brain matter pouring onto sand. Stupid human equaled dead human. None of the other loups had witnessed the death, so there was no commotion. Mission continued.
The machine stomped into the hangar with its broad chest held out and sent a communication ping directly to the city’s queen. A small, white square blinked in the corner of its vision, signaling the request was on its way. Fifty-four seconds later the square flashed green—Marie had accepted the correspondence and a translucent hologram of her face hovered within Cube’s line of sight.
“Your communication channel has the markings of Port Sydney military.” Her expression could melt ice. “General Crone must have sent you.”
“Yes,” Cube started in a mechanical voice, picking up immediately a touch of disdain in the woman’s tone. “I am glad our communication requests are readily accepted. Allow me to thank you, your Highness, for this beautiful, diplomatic gesture.”
An analysis file was triggered within the processors. It started to review the conversation in real time.
> VIDEO FEED MARIE_DUBOIS_Sep13_2209.vid
> RUN analyze.exe
“Don’t think too much of the gesture.” Marie’s tone was curt. It was as if she was competing to see who could be more mechanical.
Cube tried to soften its monotone, but it didn’t work. “Since the General already provided notice of my arrival, I am confident you are aware of my intent during this visit.”
“I am.” Marie smiled, but it appeared forced.
> HUMAN MUSCLES USED TO SMILE:
1) ZYGOMATICUS MAJOR (2 MUSCLES)
2) ZYGOMATICUS MINOR (2 MUSCLES)
3) ORBICULARIS OCULI (2 MUSCLES)
4) LEVATOR LABII SUPERIORIS (2 MUSCLES)
5) LEVATOR ANGULI ORIS (2 MUSCLES)
6) RISORIUS (2 MUSCLES)
7) NASALIS
> MUSCLE MATCH WITH SUBJECT’S SMILE (MARIE DUBOIS): 63%
“You can explore my kingdom,” she continued. “There will be no obstruction from my army.”
The analysis algorithms informed Cube that based on her flat expressions, disingenuous smile and high tone inflections there was a ninety-eight percent chance she was lying. Yet another stupid human, this one thinking she could fool a machine. Cube was a walking lie detector.
Cube turned to face the corpse outside the hangar. “I don’t think he knew of your diplomacy.” Cube shared its line of sight with Marie in real-time via a video feed. “I’m sure that will not happen again.”
Marie opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She eyed the body with a crinkled nose for several breaths. The other loups were finally tending to the fresh recruit. None dared look over at the new arrival.
“No, it won’t happen again,” Marie said, her cheeks red. “Now… I must attend to some pressing matters. Good luck with your hunt. Feed out.”
The communication channel ended.
There were more pressing matters than a Martian criminal running around the kingdom?
A bang reverberated at the hangar’s rear. A large platform-elevator had jolted to a halt against its hydraulic suspension mechanism at the rim of a rectangular shaft. The entrance to the sewer city. A loup s
tood atop it next to a simple lever. He was tall by human standards, but still dwarfed by the three large Surface to Air Missile systems lined up by the back wall. They were loaded with long, heat-seeking missiles pointing up, their tips nearly touching the two-hundred-foot-high metal ceiling—sleek, black dragons sitting on their haunches waiting for the right command to fire their fury. “Mitsubishi SAM” was etched down the side of each. Gifts from the lunar colony.
Cube marched over and boarded the platform, depressing it by a full foot under its weight. The loup swallowed a lump. “G-going down?”
Stupid human. Stupid question. Nothing was said, but all was understood. The loup pulled the lever and the platform jerked into descent down a dark shaft. Marché Bastille was only a hundred feet below. Its chaos would greet them soon.
The discussion with Marie was rerun along with the analysis file, to ascertain previous results.
> REPORT.LOG READY
> REVIEW
> SUBJECT (MARIE DUBOIS)
> ANALYSIS SUMMARY: 98% CHANCE OF DISHONESTY
She was hiding something. Bastien Lyons was the likely candidate. If the hypothesis was true, it wouldn’t end well for New Paris.
CHAPTER 6: BASTIEN
The large SONY conference television nearly took up the entire whitewashed wall, its screen displaying black instead of Cube’s skeletal face. Marie stared at it, all the while sitting on a stool with her back hunched, the frilly white dress shimmering under the bedroom’s mini chandeliers. A moody, pretty little thing, she hadn’t said a word since her conversation with the robot. The silence had made those five minutes crawl like five years. Gulping the last of her whiskey, she hurled the tumbler to the white marble floor, shattering it into tiny pieces, and shouted, “The Sydneysiders test my patience! They want to enter my city like they own the fucking place.”
Swiveling around on the metal stool, she asked with fists clenched, “That ugly thing was an ex-colleague of yours?”
Bastien nodded. He sat naked under covers in a satin-sheeted four-post bed, his back against an ornate wooden headboard, his arms crossed over his unshaven, muscular chest. Port Sydney’s maxim, ‘For the High Council,’ was tattooed across the left pec. It might as well have read ‘Property of Marie Dubois.’ The multiple sex acts in the past few hours had clarified his position within her world—a Martian plaything added to the collection of Nipponese products and old-world Parisian artifacts. One sex slave to complement the bedroom’s three French armoires, each stocked with Shiseido cosmetics and Mikimoto jewelry, along with the back wall’s Mona Lisa, the original painting. Marie certainly enjoyed the finer things in life, desperately mixing Paris’ grand past and Nippon One’s modern wares into a haphazard concoction of decadent bourgeoisie living. It didn’t mask the fact that she ruled a sewer. It never would. Lipstick on a pig. And now he could consider himself an unwilling addition—what an accomplishment.