//------------------------------// // Clockwork // Story: First Draft // by Cherry Rie //------------------------------// All the King’s Horses A Conversion Bureau story. Chapter Six: Clockwork “She’s what?” Simon exclaimed, looking up from the desk through which he was rifling. Across the room the bottom half of Katrina wobbled atop a pile of precariously stacked crates, the rest of her concealed within the depths of warehouse shelving. After finding the girl wholly uncooperative when it came to questions about her personal past, the pathfinder had at last found a crack to which a crowbar of conversation could be applied. Though he wasn’t exactly sure where it was leading, at least she was willing to talk about her peculiar bodyguard. “Technically the term is ‘Rhetorically Deceased’,” she shouted, voice partly lost amid the array of unsellable stock, “It was the only way a corporation could get around the old human rights act- Oh! There’s a box of those creepy hopping rabbits up here!” Selectively ignoring the teen’s elated discovery, Fax abandoned his so far fruitless search and rested upon one of the wheeled office chairs. “Yeah, but you can’t exactly nominate yourself to be classified dead, can you? I mean, being dead has certain criteria.” “Don’t be so sure, Rakki-corp was crazy like that.” Having retrieved her prize, Kat reappeared and dropped down to floor level, clutching the disquieting ‘bunny’ to her chest. “They worked out some complex loophole. Daddy explained it to me a long time ago, but the gist was that someone could release their ‘body’ to the company even if they were technically still alive.” Simon cocked his head in disbelief “So you’re telling me that ‘Sarah’, your half sister, traded herself for your father’s accelerated promotion?” “I can think of worse things.” Kat shrugged, bouncing the toy along the shelves. “People fuck their way up the chain of command all the time, at least with her someone else benefited. She had a rough life and couldn’t cope with what happened to her, so she did the honorable thing by her family. Different times, before the War of Glass.” Tristan slid down the pile of supplies and came to rest next to the still uneasy equine form. “Earth history one oh one, freak.” He said aloud, retrieving a dogend from his jacket and squeezing the self lighting tip. “ ‘bout forty years ago, earth died. The last crop swept the world clean of all viable food sources, billions began to starve. As luck would have it though, the first nanites started becoming common place in manufacturing. You could fit thousands of those little buggers on the head of a pin and they could make just about anything, including a three course meal in a cube.” The man chuckled and gripped the cigarette between his teeth. “Only problem was how to power‘em. At first they could only be used inside stupidly huge city factories, with their own nuke stations. Something about using ‘magnetic fields’ to send electricity wirelessly, who the fuck cares.” Aware that he had the audience’s full terrified attention, the ganger paused to savor a drag from the vile luminous stick. “So, some smart guy in Eurasia discovers this freaky new element and comes up with a way to power nanites individually. But there’s a catch; this element is rarer then a tree in Texas. The result? Every major corporation starts scrambling to get control of the few mines in the world that had found this stuff.” “Turned out,” he continued, watching the rising smoke being drawn through the glassless shuttered windows, “that the biggest slice of the pie was sat smack under the Sahara desert. Now our good brothers in the shithole continent hadn’t been fairing so well with the new global market. They’d been shat on by just about every country going, but what they had been doing rather a lot of, was stockpiling.” “They weren’t about to let some foreign state try to take control of their rightful claim. So they figure, ‘hay, mines need people workin’ ‘um, so let’s make sure people can’t get there!’ And given that just about every weapon and piece of large robotics in the ‘free world’ was built in their country? They had the means and the firepower to hold the whole damn world to ransom.” “BOOM!” Yelled the excitable Katrina, throwing her arms into the air and nearly overbalancing from the thin wall she was walking along, “They drop a HUGE dirty bomb right in the middle of the desert, soaking the whole north of the continent in radiation that’d last a million bigilion years!” Dropping off the end of the crumbling plasta-crete barrier, she followed Simon through the gently lapping water as he scrambled into a washed out store front. “Then everyone was like ‘oh noes, what a terrible accident! We can’t get to our stuff and now we’sa gona die!’ But don’t worry everyone, Africa’s Mecha-co has it covered! So in they roll with their robots and drills, militarizing the whole desert with the machines other corporations paid them to build. Battle automatons, artillery mechs, caterpillar missile silos-” Striking a dramatic pose the girl flung her arms around as though pointing out the unseen air defense turrets and think-tanks. “Before the world can blink the desert is armed to the teeth and producing the new element at a bazillion credits a barrel.” “And then the world retaliated, yeah I know.” Simon rolled his eyes at the near word-perfect repetition of a hollo-vid afterschool special. “The regional governments handed over military control to the corporations, who intern united under the banner of World-Corp. Kinda’ hard to miss when you lived through it yourself. ” “Exactly!” the girl concurred, wading through the stagnant knee deep water to poke her head excitedly into an empty glass fronted freezer. “Their only objective; feed the human race no matter the cost. But did you know what happened next?” For a moment the pathfinder wrinkled his brow in confusion, sensing the trick question but answering none the less. “We fought them, we won, then they blew up the mines and poisoned the world. What more is there to tell?” “Wrong!” Kat chimed, “We lost, miserably. Completely crushed. Missiles couldn’t get past the ground defenses, troops died of rad-poisoning after only a few minutes on the ground, jets were shot down long before reaching their targets. Total. Wipeout.” Tapping out the embers, Tristan lifted out another stick and secreted it behind his ear. “In steps Japan’s ‘Rakki-Corp’, with a plan to ‘save the world’. Their idea? Make disposable troops that could survive the radiation, while still having the combat senses of a trained soldier.” “Take a normal human.” At this the man began to add gestures to his tale, not unlike serving up a large ice cream bowl. “Scoop out everything unneeded, stick a life support system in for everything left and give them their very own miniature nanite factory. No need to splash out on overpriced synthetic limbs when they could have their little worker bees build the rest for them.” “And right there,” He said, pointing to the still unmoving ‘dead’ woman, “Is the product. A ‘Revenant’. Part man, mostly plastic. A walking corpse with a cloud of numbers for a brain. Immune to radiation and will follow any order with the same flexibility of a normal thinking trooper. A hundred thousand of their kind did what half a billion humans couldn’t. They wiped out cities, destroyed the infrastructure of the continent and executed those controlling the machines.” “Millions dead by their hands, unkillable soldiers with not a hint of human weakness, like compassion. In the end it was all for nothing though. Those Mecha-Co bastards decided that if they couldn’t have the Sahara mines, no one could. Heh, some guy on the news said that, if there was anyone watching, the hyper-nuke flair should have been visible from Mars.” Despite her strong stomach for the gruesome facts of life on earth, Salve had a horribly active imagination. Through the ruined streets of a burning Trottingham, dozens of hairless doll-like humans bore down upon the helpless ponies that ran from their arbiters. They were machines of death, capable of sweeping life from a world simply because they were ordered to do so. And somewhere behind the plastic eyes, the screams of a sentient being cried out at its helplessness to prevent its own abhorrent crimes. Still silent in her private horror, the unicorn tried to shake the images from her mind. ‘The War of Glass,’ Simon thought to himself, only half listening while his teen companion babbled on about some new find within the last gutted building. ‘Ten percent of the world’s surface was turned to glass in one blazing instant. All that irradiated material in the mines blasted out into the atmosphere, contaminating the whole damn world. It fell across the land in burning rain, I remember getting caught in a storm once back home. That hair still hasn’t grown back. And by the second anniversary, the seas so heavily laced with the deadly toxin that nothing could live in them bar poisonous algae.’ ‘Still, at least it meant the mega corps could simply pull the material they needed out of the air and ocean. The world was at last fed.’ At this consideration the man grunted back a humorless laugh, the preposterous nature of the one positive defying all sane logic. ‘Thank god for small mercies I suppose.’ “It’s a nasty way to go when you think about it.” The sudden serious shift in the girls tone broke his inner monologue as they finally returned to dry land with their haul. “Every seven years it’s a whole new you.” Kat said distantly, staring at the rise upon which the convoy was parked. “But she doesn’t grow anything new, it’s all recycled. The nanites just use everything they can find, usually that means metals that her ‘lungs’ filter from the air. You can slow them down, feed them proteins and healthy stuff to fix little things. But eventually her brain’s gona be nothing but steel and circuits. She’ll be just a Husk. A human shaped lifting crane.” Now stood once more, Tristan made a mock gesture of admiration at the silent android. “Gota hand it to the Japanese on that, they really know how to build them. They don’t sleep, they don’t even need to breathe technically. Not to mention they’re able to repair themselves with just about anything. Why, I’ll bet half that scar tissue is from reconstituted mutie-rats.” He regarded the suddenly pail equine with a satisfied grin. It was like scaring a simpering wet child, easy but ever so satisfying. “Oh, that’s right. They can literally live off the blood of their enemies. Dice them up, shove the bits into any wound and let the nanites do the rest-“ “SHUT UP!” Salve screamed, suddenly bolt upright and glaring at the man. Nostrils flaring with every ragged breath, the mare gritted her teeth and tried to gather her usual masked composer, quelling the tears desperately trying to escape her pained blue eyes. “Be. Silent. Not even humans are that revolting.” With a casual shrug, Tristan lowered himself and lay down on his assigned mattress, neck aching from the sudden exertion and contained laughter. “No, Humans aren’t.” He announced confidently, the blatant lie covered by amusement. “But that’s why Revenants aren’t human.” “So there’s nothing up there then?” Simon asked, resting their box of salvage on a handy bollard while he tapped the side of his temple meaningfully. For a girl who was so reluctant to speak of her own past, Kat certainly must have wanted to talk to someone quite desperately. Most of the story had come with little or no prompting on his part, though the overflow of bottled emotions still remained hidden beneath the verse. “Hmm? Oh, no she still in there, somewhere. Well, something is at least. Why else do you think she didn’t just break Tristan’s neck? Or kill Salve when she attacked her?” Seemingly satisfied with their meager takings, Kat closed up the half filled backpack and looked back towards the now quite close roadway, the convoy glinting in the gradually failing light. “Technically she isn’t supposed to have any emotions left.” she continued, falling into step with the pathfinder as they carefully crossed the uneven pebble dash. “But given most Revenant’s didn’t live past their seven year expiry date she’s something of an exception. Maybe over the decades someone else grew in place where she once was? Either way, I honestly think she doesn’t like hurting people.” Struggling with the box between them, the duo gradually grunted their way up the embankment towards the awaiting trailers. “Certain things she has to do because her programming demands it, but I think after all this time she’s gotten used to naturally finding loopholes.” With the box finally secured on the truck that brought up the convoy’s rear, Kat mopped her brow and saw Simon’s compassionate expression gazing at the lead transport. She decided to head his thoughts off at the pass. “Of course, that doesn’t make her any less of a cold, calculating bitch. The world is still a bunch of numbers and statistics to her, even if they have meaning beyond face value.” More casually she added, “Your pony’s outside. Wonder if that dolt tried to escape after all?” “Wouldn’t put it past him.” Muttered the young man, “You head on back, I’ve got to chat with a few people here.” Shrugging at her dismissal, Kat wandered over to where the unicorn was taking slow steady breaths. A peek through the slatted shutters showed a distinct lack of blood or corpses. Tristan was laid on his bunk, twiddling his thumbs while Sarah still stood exactly where she been more than two hours ago. It was going to be a long journey, one that the scarred teen dearly hoped would be worth the torturous hours on the road. ‘The sooner I’m away from you, the better.’ A touch of something tickled the back of the girl’s throat. It might have been seething hate. She deeply hoped it was.