Feed the Machine (33 page)

Something is wrong.

“Yes it is.”

Her voice cracked and she had to clear her throat. Mucus in her lungs. She coughed. It felt familiar.

She stood, her muscles cold and weak. The air around her was warm and pleasant but she was chilled through. She took note of this.

Through the glass window there was a long white box—like a coffin—sitting on the tiled floor. Bugs were scurrying around cleaning spilled liquid. The room was lit by discreet lights embedded in the ceiling. Except for the box and the bugs, it was empty.

She tried the door. It swung out to reveal a flat featureless wall of silver. The door was decorative only. She knocked on the wall. It sounded solid.

“Hello?” she called out.

A memory swiped at her, bursting like a firework. Calling out Hello but not in greeting. Something else…

It crackled away. No one answered.

Ella walked down the corridor opening all the doors. They led to furnished rooms. Beds, bookshelves, bathrooms. Each was comfortable but pristine as though it had never been lived in. The first mirror she saw was a small shock. She knew she was twenty-six and the face and naked body in the mirror was twenty-six. Layered over that was an echo of a thought. Being older. Lines at the corners of her eyes, breasts being tugged down by gravity. A scar somewhere below her navel. She stoked her stomach. It was flat and strong. No scar.

She found clothes that fit her in one of the wardrobes.

That’s weird.

“I agree.”

She walked down the flight of stairs. She’d awoken on the third floor. She checked two rooms on the second floor (bedrooms with bookshelves) and walked to ground level.

It was a mansion, clearly belonging to someone ridiculously wealthy. There were multiple hasdees sitting in different places, bugs hiding in discreet locations. She gave them an instruction to form a circle and they did.

They were
her
bugs. Or at least put temporarily under her control.

The lounge room was gigantic. Plush leather sofas, beautiful end tables, subtle lighting that seemed to make everything glow and colors pop. There were plants scattered around the place—one was a peace lily—adding a touch of nature.

In the lounge there was a large black screen that filled an entire wall.

She passed it by and went to the front door. It opened to a warm day, a flowering garden, a brick path that led to a white picket fence. There was a sidewalk, a gutter and a hint of black road before the world cut off in a semitranslucent wall that glowed a warm white. Ella went to the wall and pressed her hand to it. There was a low buzz running through the smooth surface. It felt pleasantly warm to touch. To the left and right it curved around, encircling the mansion. It rose up above, like a protective bubble.

Ella went left and found she had to hop back over the front fence as the dome curved in. There was a wooden side fence and over that the neighboring house. There was even a window on the other house—it opened to about twenty centimeters of room and then the white wall.

She walked down the left side of the mansion and found a beautiful rear garden, a swimming pool and deck, a barbecue, some chairs and tables and a lush patch of grass so green it glowed. Just over the back fence the white wall cut off. There was a single tall tree in the yard—it looked like an Australian ghost gum—that appeared to touch the white dome far above the three-story mansion.

Ella walked to the barbecue and saw it was clean and powered up, ready to be used.

“Everything for a dinner party but no people,” she murmured.

An iridescent blue butterfly landed on the table for a moment and took off again, fluttering over to some green creepers twining their way around one of the nearby trees.

This is a prison.

It was worth considering. She’d been placed here. Although she didn’t remember committing any crime.

Maybe they cut it out of your memory.

“Why? So I’m punished and I don’t even know why?”

She left the yard and continued around the right side of the mansion. On this side the dome cut into the neighboring house also. Soon she was standing out the front, feeling the warm light on her skin.

“Warm but no sun. Indirect but must be mimicking sunlight. All the plants are growing.”

Ella looked at the dome and saw there was a blurry spot that seemed brighter than the rest. Perhaps the sun? It was directly overhead. Noon?

On cue her stomach rumbled. She returned inside, noting the front door was some sort of carved teak and went to the hasdees in the kitchen. Endless lists of foods, any cuisine she wanted. There were lists of raw ingredients too, if she wanted to prepare her own. She tapped through meals, trying to decide what to eat. There was a button marked FAV. She pressed it and it displayed a smaller selection of meals.

Scrambled eggs with smoked salmon, chargrilled spinach and Hollandaise sauce. Decaf cappuccino in a mug.

Her absolute favorite meal was in position number one. Ella hit print and silver liquid streamed from the hasdee. Within a moment her meal was steaming on a plate, the coffee frothed and perfect.

She ate at the kitchen bench (there was polished silver cutlery in the drawer) and instructed the bugs to clean. They ate the dirty plate, cup and cutlery down to nothing and took the materials to the nearest hasdee.

“Hello! Is anyone here? Is anyone watching?”

Ella yelled at the top of her lungs, her voice echoing through the mansion. No answer. Either they were very good at hiding or she was alone.

She went to the lounge and ordered the screen to turn on. It glimmered to life and showed a sun-dappled cobblestone street lined with yellow and blue houses. Some children went running by, laughing. They were shortly followed by a mother calling out for them to stay within sight.

Part of the wall beneath the screen rose to reveal a small alcove. There was a flat black panel in it. Ella took it out and sat on the lounge. The tablet screen lit when she touched it. It was a standard setup. Swipe to change views. Zoom in and out. Split screens to watch multiple views simultaneously.

Just like—

Ella frowned as she probed the edges of an abrupt nothingness in her mind. Something had been excised, she was sure of it. A memory of screens and…

It was incomplete. A blank gap that refused to fill in.

She closed her eyes and got the sudden image of her brain shot full of holes. The edges were pale and smoothed over, healed but it was clear there had been a knife at some point.

Ella returned to the tablet. She swiped a few times. A room in a house decorated with wobbly old furniture. The inside of a store selling hasdee-printed fruit. A muddy river entirely devoid of life.

She swiped down and a row of buttons appeared across the top. Files, Stats, Variables, Data, Results, Conclusions.

She pressed Stats and the image of the riverbank vanished and was replaced with an endless list of information.

Population, age, gender, race, blood type… it just went on.

Each one had thousands of rows of information below it. She found death and a list broken down by cause and percentage of population. Heart attacks, blood disorders, brain diseases, infant mortality.

She pressed on that one and found infant mortality was running at 5.2 percent. A list of locations appeared.

Adel

Cago

Carm

Char

Dar

Dirk

Ebb

Gola

Halote

She tapped on the first one. A map appeared in the corner of the screen as well as statistics on Adel for infant mortality. Leading cause of death: whooping cough.

Don’t get lost.

The warning came far too late. Ella knew she should be exploring the house, commanding the bugs to make a hole in the white wall (she suspected it wouldn’t work but hey, she had to try), looking around for clues as to why she was here.

But how could she do that in the face of so much delicious information? She could already see correlations between different measurements. The numbers connected and made sense and somewhere deep inside, it pushed a warm contentment. If she could understand all this then things would be okay.

She dived headfirst into the flood.

Chapter 52

Nola

The fighting was at a standstill. Nola spat blood on the cobblestones and tried to catch her breath.

A day and night of violence, blood and death. Fat Man and his guards had dug in around his palace, taking the far end of Cago for their own. Thousands raged against them, hundreds fought but to get too close was to face the deadly green guns. Every few seconds another crack like a bone breaking as one was fired.

They had taken some guns themselves from overrunning guards but it wasn’t enough to come anywhere near the palace, not even dosed on black heal. Samuel Dorrit had appeared out of nowhere with two tempcubes loaded with a thousand bottles each. He told Nola that Silver had given them to him. He didn’t know where she was. They’d used the first bottle of heal on Sheriff Toll but he’d been dead too long.

The fighting had grown vicious at that point. Desperate people drank black heal and charged down the street. Even a direct headshot didn’t kill them. It took a shot to the head to take them down and more to break their body into pieces to prevent the heal from working. Burned off limbs grew back within minutes. The streets were filled with dismembered bodies and slick with blood.

But Fat Man’s guards were drinking black heal too. One would drop, his arm missing and a few minutes later he’d be on his feet again.

To make matters worse, it was clear they were printing the green guns at record pace. Most of the guards were now armed.

Jarrah crept down to her, making sure to stay behind the building. He passed Nola his canteen. She drank from it gratefully, the cold water landing in her empty stomach. She hadn’t slept and had barely eaten, fueled by rage and by sips of black heal. It revived absolutely, wiping away tiredness.

The young deputy was smudged in ash, his fingers black. Most of the fires were out now but not before they’d puffed their load of fine ash into the air. It was drifting over Cago in a haze, clumping and falling like dirty snow.

“We’re down to six guns,” Jarrah told her. “Two rushed together a few streets across and got cut down. The guns are fine but we can’t get to them.”

“Fucking fuck.”

“Yeah.”

Nola had one of the guns taken from the guards. The others went to whoever grabbed them first. Somehow in the fighting she’d become the leader, people turning to her and in the madness she’d seized the role. She’d sent those with guns out to block streets, one gun per street and ordered them to hold their positions. People were soon running messages back and forth—kids too—risking being shot down just to report people dying.

Now two of those people with guns had gone off on their own and were dead, their weapons dropped.

Why the fucking fuck couldn’t people do what she told them!

Things were breaking apart. The furious mob was now separated, working alone, leaderless and dying.

When the sun had risen the gates had opened and entire families had fled, heading to Char. Any travelers arriving at Cago today would be told to head back where they came from if they were stupid enough to ignore the danger signs.

Someone whistled from the other side of the street. Nola didn’t know his name. She just called everyone YOU and told them what to do. She peered around the corner.

A guard, fat with an overhang belly was walking down the street towards them, his green gun in hand.

“What the fuck is this?” Nola said. Was he insane?

The street was strewn with dead bodies which he took his time stepping over.

“Go back!” the man on the far side of the street called out. He had a pile of rocks next to him and a slingshot. A woman was crouched beside him holding a crowbar. The end had been sharpened into a vicious spike.

The guard kept moving, coming closer.

“Your funeral,” Nola said and shot him in the face.

The gun cracked, the red light flashed out and bounced off him. He appeared to shimmer and blur, his outline fuzzing like a ripple had swept through it. A smoking hole appeared in the wall beside him.

The guard stopped and looked at the hole, reached out and tapped it with his finger. When he touched the still-glowing wood, a slight ripple ran up his arm.

Nola shot him again.

The laser flared off into the sky. He rippled again.

The guard raised his hands in the air. He had something stuck on his inner arm. A gray disk.

“I’ve come to discuss terms,” he called out.

Slingshot dude flung a rock at him. It hit him in the forehead and bounced off. Ripple.

Nola shot him again, this time in the leg and then fell backwards when the beam reflected at her. It charred the wall near her head. Another few centimeters and she’d be gone.