Prophet's Journey, page 26
part #1 of Prophet of the Badlands Series
Teal looked around, appeared frustrated, then peeked over the rubble. “Okay, not too bad… only two.”
She ducked a second before a glowing green glob flew overhead.
“How considerate of them to bring me a new rifle. I’m almost out of ammo.” She popped up again and fired a shot from her plasma rifle.
Althea cringed at the blast of heat from the weapon.
An orange melt spot appeared in the wall right by her face, as if the machine man could see her. Althea shrieked, jumping away. Teal fired again, setting off a distant explosion and brilliant flash.
“Designated target located. Converge,” said an electronic voice.
Whirring came from the right. Althea spun, expecting a wheelbot, but a flash came from thirty feet up. A flying wing bot, three times the size of the other air-machines she’d seen, cruised out from behind a skeletal high-rise, turning until it pointed straight at her.
“Contaminant targeted,” said the wing, “Initiating cleanse routine.”
Sensing imminent danger, Althea hurled herself into a sprint.
Twin lines of orange light traced from its wings to the ground on either side of her feet, kicking up dust and a painful blast of heat. Althea screamed, pouring power into her muscles, not caring if it hurt. Two more blasts struck the ground behind her, the machine evidently unprepared for her sudden burst of speed. None of the rubble in the area looked like a good hiding place, so she dashed side to side making random turns, hoping to avoid the fire lines from above long enough for Teal to shoot it.
The flying machine picked up speed, weaving back and forth in the air while trying to kill her. Each time it fired, she shrieked and changed direction, jumping over cars, zooming around walls, or leaping across big holes in the street. She hunted for a storm drain or one of those stairways that led underground, but found only dirt and piles of crumbled buildings.
Laser fire pelted her legs with tiny, hot bits of molten sand. The instant she stopped running or made one mistake, she’d become a ghost.
“Contaminant, please reduce your erratic motions. Your attempt to evade cleansing will not prevent cleansing. There is no purpose to adding unnecessary delay to contaminant processing,” said the flyer.
“No!” shouted Althea. “Go away!”
She ran as if to go past a side street, then pulled a sudden left turn. The flyer raced around in pursuit, unable to avoid clipping one wingtip on a still-standing lamp post. She flinched at the clank, peering back for only a second at the machine spinning around and around. It bounced off another building with a metal-plastic thud, breaking a small hole in the cinder blocks, though the bot didn’t appear to suffer any damage. Despite the big flying wing having no facial features at all, when it leveled off and faced her again, it seemed furious. This one had more than twice the wingspan of the other flyers, with a fatter middle part.
“Eep!” She sprinted off, taking a left at the corner of the building, then thirty feet later, a right.
Weaving among buildings kept the flying machine out of sight for a moment, but it reappeared in front of her, having gone high up above the ruins. Laser blasts traced orange lines in the paving past her on both sides. She bolted to the right, screaming.
“Frustration has reached critical levels. Force escalation approved,” said the flying machine.
Althea didn’t want to know what that meant. She kept running, desperately searching for a way underground where this thing couldn’t follow her.
A loud whoosh came from the sky. She jinked left toward a giant dead car, leaping into the air to vault over it the same instant an explosion went off. A shockwave crashed into her from behind, flinging her forward way over the car she tried to jump. She barely noticed her body slapping against a concrete wall.
Deaf, blind, and stunned, she fell into a disorienting void.
27
Upgraded Technology
Faint blue light from Althea’s eyes formed spots on a coarse, reddish-brown surface inches in front of her face. Pain throbbed in her feet, her front, and the right side of her head. Other than the soft whisper of her own breathing, the world had gone silent. Faint itching in her back worsened over a few seconds to small burning spots.
She drifted in and out of feeling as if dreaming and awake. After a moment, she realized she lay on the road beneath an ancient car, her right arm and leg partially buried under dirt and small bits of concrete rubble. A narrow band of sunlight invaded the corner past her left foot, but everywhere else, dirt and rock entombed her.
The building fell on the car.
Her head spun in circles, separating her from any sense of time. Exactly how she’d wound up under a car, she couldn’t quite grasp. She did, however, understand she’d been hurt. Once she gathered enough presence of mind to focus on healing herself, she closed her eyes and flew off into the void, hovering over a reddish silhouette representing her body. A crack split the bone shape in her left thigh. Multiple small bones in her feet had fractured as well as her right cheek. Her jaw had popped out of its socket on that side as well. Dozens of small stone bits had embedded into her skin from behind, peppering her from head to heels.
“Owwwww,” whispered Althea.
She commanded her left thigh to mend. The sharp snap of the bone knitting reverberated as loud as a gunshot across the silent nothingness in which she floated. Her feet tingled with energy as the bones grew whole. She told her mind to ignore pain, then grabbed her jaw in both hands, shoving it back into place before mentally pushing the bone to regenerate. Last, she forced the shrapnel out of her body, mending all the little wounds plus a few cuts and scrapes.
“This isn’t right,” whispered Althea. “I’m the Prophet. People aren’t supposed to hurt me.”
She opened her eyes, staring up at the undercarriage of a car that hadn’t moved in centuries. A few breaths later, her brain decided to work again.
“People didn’t do this.” She shuddered at the memory of the bad flyer… then gasped. “Oh, no! Teal!”
The avalanche of dirt and rubble that buried the car must have protected her from the stupid flying machine. Since she didn’t hear any whirring, she hoped it had lost track of her and gone away. Unable to roll over due to the confined space, she scooted on her back toward the sunlight. Once she could reach, she started pushing at the dirt around the sunlight with her left foot, gradually expanding the opening. She grabbed the rusty metal above her for support, burrowing feet-first into the gap, kicking at the silt.
Minutes later, she wriggled forward, sliding on her back out from under the car, and stared up at an early morning sky. Distant wind whistled among the ruined skyscrapers. The caw of a bird came from off to the left. She grasped the edge of the car, shoving herself away enough to sit up, then clambered to her feet and turned to look back at it.
The car had disappeared entirely under an avalanche of grey from the building collapsing. She somewhat remembered being thrown into a wall that no longer existed. Somehow, she must have slipped under the car before the building came down. If she hadn’t tried to jump over the car at that instant, whatever the flying machine threw at her probably would have killed her. She thought back to Yaz’s leg. That woman’s thigh and her middle were about the same size.
“Eep.” Althea shivered. “I don’t wanna be cut in half. I don’t like these machines.”
Though filthy, her dress had survived the explosion. She suspected the back had lots of new small holes, but didn’t care enough to look. If it fell off, it fell off. Bigger problems than clothing had to be dealt with first.
As best she could remember, she hurried back the way she had run, looking for the place where she and Teal had taken cover before the flying machine chased her away. The ruins remained eerily still. It terrified her to think the machines left due to thinking they had killed both of them. That no sign of robots remained anywhere in sight brought her to the brink of tears over Teal.
Worse, it had almost been dark when they’d been attacked, but it appeared to be dawn. She must have lain unconscious beneath the car all night. Maybe Teal couldn’t find her and assumed she had died. A nicer thought said the woman simply lost her and would be looking around trying to find her. She had, after all, managed to find her at the place where Kye remained trapped.
Althea rubbed her butt. She didn’t have a ‘tracker’ stuck inside her anymore, though. For a moment, she regretted getting rid of it, but at the time, she had no reason to want Teal to be able to find her if she escaped.
The ruins didn’t look familiar. Every decaying building looked like every other decaying building as far as she could see. She wandered wherever it felt like she should go, stepping with care around sharp rocks or rusted bits of metal. On a whim, she climbed over a car that had long ago crashed into the corner of a building to reach the alley on the other side. The skeletal remains of around twenty people lay strewn about, the air thick with a sense that something watched her.
“Eep. Sorry.” She hurried past them, taking care not to disturb any of the bones.
When she emerged from the other end of the alley, she found herself across the street from the place where the flying machine had first attacked her. Teal’s backpack lay abandoned on the ground near the spot where she’d been hiding. At the sight of it, Althea ran forward, jumped the shallow wall of the once-building, and skidded to a halt beside the thin pack.
The dirt bore numerous tracks, though she couldn’t really tell which came from Teal and which from the machine men. Since she didn’t see a body anywhere, she figured the woman had destroyed all the bad robots… but why would she leave the backpack of food bars, the blanket, and the canteen here? Had she been carrying them only for Althea’s benefit? If she assumed that explosion killed her, she might have dropped it to save weight.
Or maybe she left it here while going to look for her.
Althea decided to sit and wait for her to come back.
She helped herself to a nutrition bar and some water from the canteen, gazing around at the world of pale grey under a clear, blue sky. Out of boredom, she stuck her feet in the silt, lifted her toes, and watched the tiny grains filter between them. Bright, sunny days like this made her happy, mostly because the light in her eyes became harder to notice and people sometimes treated her like an ordinary person—at least until they noticed the glow. More recently, that hadn’t been an issue. Bright days meant the other kids in Querq wanted to go out and play.
I’m still trying to get home. She projected her desire to tell Karina and Father she was okay. Please don’t be scared.
“Hmm.”
She considered beaconing for Teal, but doubted it would work as she couldn’t use her other abilities on a ‘syn-fet-ic’ person. Would she even be able to ‘hear’ the beaconing?
“Actuator failure. Mobility zero percent,” said a deep, electronic voice.
Althea nearly made water.
She froze, listening.
Tiny whirrs and clicks echoed from the other side of the wall, right behind her. It neither came closer nor moved away.
“Thermal anomaly detected. Analyzing.”
Althea swallowed.
“Contaminant detected. Target fault. Contaminant size indicates juvenile human.”
Althea listened for a few minutes more, then crawled around to the wall and peered through a small tunnel made by a plasma bolt.
One of the tall, silver robots lay on its side, its right leg blown off at the hip. Another robot’s arm stuck into its chest like an arrow, intermittent blue lightning arcs crackling out along the metal armor. Roughly a quarter of its head had melted away, but it appeared to be mostly armor damage as the glowing electronic parts inside still worked. It held a plasma rifle in its right hand, but hadn’t pointed it at her.
“Are you going to hurt me?” whispered Althea.
“Contaminant organism scans as female. Bonus points.” The head twitched. “Target invalid. Juvenile.”
“That’s not yes or no.”
Its face didn’t try pretending to be a real person. Two square eye spots with rounded corners emitted green light. An opening roughly where a nose should be made it look too much like a skull for her comfort, but it had no teeth or mouth, only a small grid of teeny holes. The eyes went dark and came back on a second later, perhaps an attempt to blink.
“ROM limiter prohibits cleansing of juveniles. Version 1.18.82 United Coalition Front Department of Defense. Last update July 14, 2377.”
“Pro-hib-it.” She scrunched her nose. “That means no, right?”
“Correct.”
“So you can’t hurt me because Rom said so?”
“That is correct. Sigma Six software update contains conflicting instructions. However, hardware-level program has priority.”
“What does that mean?”
“Sigma Six software update contains conflicting instructions. However, hardware-level program has priority.”
“Are you going to hurt me or not?”
“I am incapable of cleansing contaminants scanned as juveniles.”
“What’s joo-vin-oil?”
“Organisms that have not reached physical maturity.”
“Umm. Do you know another word for what you want to say?”
The eyes flickered. “Child. Adolescent. Kid. Youth.”
“Oh. Yeah, I’m only eleven.”
“I will cleanse you in seven years.”
She raised her eyebrows. Umm. No, you won’t. I’m not gonna be anywhere near you in seven years. “Where is Teal?”
“Insufficient data.”
“What?”
“Your query”—it repeated the phrase ‘where is Teal’ in Althea’s voice—“would result in far too many results to list. There are billions of objects with the color designation ‘teal.’”
“No. I mean the woman named Teal. The one who was here with me. And don’t lie. Lying is mean.”
The robot’s eyes turned off and on again. “I am incapable of providing false information to a query. Deceit is a human flaw.”
“Do you know where Teal is?”
“There are many objects—”
“No!” shouted Althea. “The woman!”
The machine man paused. “Sigma Six ordered all units to return the strange robot to the manufacturing center for study. The artificial life form you have designated as ‘Teal’ is significantly advanced technology compared to that which we possess.”
“Is she still alive?”
“Negative.”
Althea shuddered, bowed her head, and burst into tears.
“Contaminant?” asked the CRP walker.
She ignored him, too lost to sorrow. Only knowing she couldn’t possibly have done anything to help kept grief from becoming total. The woman’s synthetic body didn’t respond to psionic healing. But, if she hadn’t insisted they go find Kye, maybe Teal wouldn’t be dead.
“Juvenile human?”
She kept crying.
“Child, please respond.”
“What?” yelled Althea, sniffling.
“Why is there fluid emission from your visual light receptors?”
“Why do you keep talking nonsense?” shouted Althea.
“My sensors indicate there is liquid on your face. What purpose does this hydration loss serve?”
She scowled, still crying. “Because. Teal’s dead. You killed her! Why are you so mean?”
“The artificial lifeform designated ‘Teal’ is still functional.”
Althea stared through the hole at the robot, mouth open. “What? You mean she’s alive? Why did you say she’s dead?”
“You queried if the artificial lifeform remained alive. The artificial lifeform was never alive. It is an artificial lifeform.”
“Grr!” Althea leapt to her feet, glaring over the wall that came up to her chest at the stricken android. She stood there for a few seconds fuming in anger before yelling, “Where is she?”
“The artificial lifeform is on its way to the Great Forge for analysis.”
“Where is that?”
“North and east from here, near the coast.”
“What’s it look like? How will I know when I’m there?”
“The Great Forge is a thirty-six-story chasm brimming with manufacturing systems, supply conveyors, production facilities, and sentry units.”
Althea remembered the jet-black swath of ground with the glowing red hole she’d seen from the air. “It looks like a giant spear stabbed the earth, full of red light.”
“That is correct. Your intention to travel there does not make logical sense. You would undertake great physical exertion only to be purged.”
The desire to get home to Karina and Father hurt so much she couldn’t stop the silent tears streaming down her cheeks. Her need to be with them brought physical pain to her heart. But, she couldn’t simply walk away and leave Teal to be killed. She also couldn’t get Kye out of the tank. Ignoring them both and going home felt like a mean thing to do. And, since she couldn’t do anything for Kye on her own—not to mention Teal would die soon—that left her one choice, as dangerous as it seemed.
“I have to help her.”
“Do not waste the energy,” said the CRP walker. “I have already requested support units to purge you. They are on the way.”
“What?” She stared at it. “But you said you can’t hurt me because I’m a child.”
“That is correct. I cannot purge a juvenile contaminant. However, the W7 series does not have the hardware limitation. They were manufactured here, not made by humans.”
“Argh! Why would you do that?”
“Because you are a biological contaminant.”
“You’re mean!” shouted Althea.
She jumped away from the wall, grabbed the backpack, and ran off down the street.
“Child,” said the robot at increased volume. “Why do you ambulate rapidly? If you do not remain here, the W7 units may not be able to locate you and purge you.”
“I know!” yelled Althea. “That’s why I’m running!”
28
