Feed the Machine (34 page)

“I think we need to talk to him,” Jarrah said. He was holding a shockstick in his hands.

“Have you seen Silver anywhere?”

He shook his head. Nola had asked a few people but no one had seen her since yesterday. She was last seen visiting Bell Dorrit. Nola needed her—this was an escalating technological war.

“You still have those bolas you used to knock me down? Get ready to throw them.”

“I don’t think they’re going to work. He has some sort of invisible shield around him.”

“Put your gun down and we can talk!” Nola yelled out.

She peeked around the corner. The guard was coming down the street, gun in hand.

Nola signaled Jarrah to get ready. Hoping she wasn’t about to get her head burned off she stepped out from behind the building. Jarrah moved out next to her.

“You need to put
your
gun down,” the guard said. “It’s useless now anyway.”

“You guys have a shield now?”

“Something like that. Put your gun on the ground and step back so we can talk.”

“Ah, fuck. I don’t think so. Jarrah?”

The guard was close now, only five meters away. Jarrah went from standing still to hurling the bola in no time at all. They passed Nola in a blur and wrapped around his knees. The guard fell forwards. He had his gun in his hands, hung over his body by a strap. He let it go but tried to take a step to halt his fall. He crashed into the ground face first, landing on his gun. He was too fat to get up quickly.

Nola ran over and tried to stomp on his head but her foot was diverted, slipping to the side to hit the cobblestones. She drew her knife and brought the point of it down on the guard’s neck. About a centimeter off his skin the tip of the knife started buzzing. Nola slowed, feeling like she was pushing the knife through a thick gel. Whatever the shield was, it didn’t stop sharp slow knives.

The guard froze when he felt the blade touch his skin.

“Jarrah, take that thing off his arm. Go slow.” Nola knelt on the guard. A buzzing started in her legs.

The device was a round disk, dull metallic gray with a single button on the front. Jarrah knelt beside the guard and reached for the disk but couldn’t get his fingers on it, no matter how slow he went.

“Let me guess, you have to turn it off?” Nola said, pricking the guard’s neck.

“Yeah.”

“Reach to turn it off.”

“You’ll kill me if I do.”

Nola pushed on the knife, sliding the tip of it into his neck. He stiffened beneath her and gasped.

“It’ll be slow but I think I can drive this knife through your spine. Wanna try?”

“Okay, okay. You need to promise to let me go.”

“I promise.”

Nola kept her weight on him as he moved his arms above his head. Between the gun and his weight, it was slow and awkward. He got a finger to the button. The faint buzz she’d felt around her knees and feet vanished.

Jarrah took the disk. It came free with a slight tug. Nola put the knife back against the guard’s neck.

“How does it work?”

“Put it on your arm, button turns it on. That’s it.”

“Slide your gun off.”

Nola sheathed her knife and stepped back, pointing her gun at him. With Jarrah’s help, he managed to get the gun off. They let the guard stand.

“Walk back to your people and tell them to stop fighting us. We only want Fat Man and a few of his head people. Gardner, Candle. The thin man with black hair.”

Jarrah looked at her with a slight frown on his face. The pure rage running in the streets was against Fat Man only. Not these extra people. Nola ignored him—there was a reckoning coming for those three. Tirrel too.

“There’s no point! No one is going to join you!” the guard blurted out. He looked behind him, towards the palace, fear in his eyes.

“We promise safety for any slave who surrenders.”

A lie.

“You don’t understand. He can detonate collars.”

“No he can’t.”

“I saw it. That little kid they use for the medbeatings…”

“So why doesn’t he do it now? C’mon Fat Man, explode my collar!”

Her voice echoed through the streets. There was a faint reply of cracks somewhere to the west.

“You need to surrender or he’s going to kill all of you.”

The guard started walking backwards, not asking permission to go. Once he’d taken a few steps he turned around and jogged back the way he came.

“Do you think that’s true?” Jarrah asked.

A cold room, feet aching, a concrete barrier. Two hulking guards dragging a tiny boy between them, naked, his ribs sticking out.

The crack and snap of bone.

Nola seared the guard’s head off his shoulders. His body joined the rest clogging the street.

She turned to Jarrah and held out her hand for the disk. He gave it to her. She pressed it against her arm. It stuck there, somehow. She hit the button. A faint buzz trembled up her arm and over her body.

“If he can detonate our collars whenever he wants then we have to keep fighting. We will never be free.”

She didn’t add that somewhere in Fat Man’s area there was a hasdee printing junk and sometimes in that junk there were sourcecubes. This shield was something new and powerful. They had to kill Fat Man before he stumbled on an unstoppable weapon.

Nola turned the shield off and slipped the disk into her pocket. She needed Silver.

Chapter 53

Silver

The heal sourcecube loved to talk but it would not listen. It was like the Collector’s house—a thousand wonderful things hidden away behind unbreakable glass.

Silver circled the sphere of code but it was smooth. No divots, no cracks, no rough spots to drop a fleck of code that would start digging.

She’d found the dose quantity limit was arbitrary. The cube happily reported it could be changed to any number, including unlimited. The strength of it had levels above black. They were not color-coded. The highest level was at least one hundred times more potent than black but what did that mean? Black would regrow limbs, save the newly dead from the grave.

Except your brother.

Silver moved around the sphere, asking questions, riding the flood of information that returned. The voice was a distant whisper over the mountains, easily ignored. Near it sat packages of pain Silver had dropped. She saw them as red glowing things connected to her by fine gold strings. So long as she remained in the flow, they couldn’t hurt her.

Maybe Ed and Michael are dead. Your mother is dead. You care more about Ed and Michael than your mother.

“Please help me. We need to understand this.”

Hello awoke from his sleep but then closed his eyes again. He was leaning against a new hasdee sitting on the bench. Silver had instructed the bugs to build it and surprisingly they’d obeyed.

Silver slipped out of the flow long enough to look across at the three hasdees lined against the wall. Hasdees loved to talk and these ones were very happy to tell her what they were making. She’d used her tablet to send them questions. It was all she could do down here—the metal mesh around the room stopped the hasdee chip information from updating. It sat still and quiet. If she stepped outside then it began changing again.

The answer was clear enough: there was a signal around them. Stepping into a blocker box stopped it. But why would you want to stop such a delicious flood of information? Another mystery, like the three hasdees.

The first hasdee was printing a bomb. Not a conventional bomb but rather one that would release an intense burst of electromagnetism. It had about sixty percent of its required materials.

The second was printing a cube with a single bug inside it. It came with an instruction to take it to the junk pile but wouldn’t say what came next or what it was for. Also at sixty percent.

The third was printing a bomb also. Something big and powerful. It had already swallowed masses of highly radioactive material, had processed it and was ready to build it into something even more deadly. Sixty percent.

After the instructions to kill Fat Man and crack his head open, it was written:

BUILD THE BOMB

DESTROY THE BUGS

BUILD THE BLOCKER

BUILD THE BOMB

GO TO HER

Build the electromagnetic bomb to destroy the block of bugs. Hasdee two was the blocker, whatever that was and hasdee three was the other bomb that presumably she had to take to
her
.

Whoever she was.

If you go, you’ll die.

Silver looked away from the hasdees and back at the tablet but she couldn’t dive in. The voice had crept up on her while she was thinking. The packages of pain wouldn’t be far behind.

She closed her eyes but only saw horror. Her brother, a smoking mound of flesh. Nola trapped in a room, a dead man on the ground. Kaleen’s book and twelve percent of babies dying.

“No, I’m not doing this,” she said.

Bell Dorrit gulping black heal, sliding back from the brink of death. Her numbers were in alignment now.

Freeing Nola from a locked prison, her sister hugging her.

Taking the heal sourcecube from Munro and using it for good rather than profit.

The voice protested but Silver brushed it aside with her list of good things and returned to the shimmering sphere. Faint accusations about her burning Munro’s leg off at the knee floated on the breeze.

What she needed was another sourcecube for comparison. One that made something with different levels. She needed to see if it was infinitely variable, examine the walls, find the way in.

Make it obey her absolutely.

Just like Munro
.

The voice had yelled in glee about hurting Munro and then arrived with its dose of guilt, as though it had never cheered. Once she pushed aside the pain, the entire event was there to examine. Another puzzle. With the gun in her hand she’d had power and she used it for good. But she’d hurt Munro, scared him, cut his leg off and given him a weaker dose of medicine than he needed.

She’d seen the gun could melt through the vault door so it was all rather unnecessary. The arguments rose and were found to be flimsy.

Time was of the essence!

Shoot the floor, the wall, shoot off his foot but give him black heal.

He deserved it for all those dead babies!

Munro is a slave to Fat Man. Fat Man who had a boy beaten to death and revived just to do it again. What had he done to Munro to control him?

He took joy in his power!

That was the weakest of them all. He was a slave but because he appeared to enjoy exercising his power he should be hurt and made to feel fear?

The green gun was sitting on the table next to the map etched in gold. Silver wasn’t sure she wanted to pick it up again.

Silver asked more questions of the cube and swam in the flood of answers, letting them stream through her fingers. Some grit stuck. She wiped away everything and examined it. The
how
of the medicine. Tiny machines. Nanoscopic. Billions upon billions of them. They could cut and join, rebuild cells from scratch, replace the sick with the healthy. The recipe for the machines was
right there
. She could make her own if she wanted.

Heal was a fine dust that saturated every cell. The strength was the quantity of machines, the cleverness of them. They weren’t very smart alone but together they were brilliant. Exponentially more intelligent.

Silver sat back from the table staring at nothing as the world moved, enormous pieces thudding into position.

Big machines and little machines and like the variables inside the cubes there was no upper or lower limit. Machines could exist on a near-atomic scale. And if you could create and control such things… you could do anything.

What was a spoon? Metal in a shape, a curve and ratio of handle to end. Metal that could be shaped by machines finer than the finest dust.

What was a steak? Cells of meat, assembled.

What was a person?

Silver sneezed, the world blinking back into existence and saw the red scars on the backs of her hands, the marks of ancient battles, her body fighting against itself.

But no.

Not against itself. Against a billion machines.

She tasted blood on her lip—it had cracked when she sneezed. What was in it? An invader that had been attacking her since birth?

It was always blamed on her bastardo blood. Sneezing and coughing like the ones who traveled from place to place, never returning home. In a way it
was
the blood.

If only she had a blocker box for her body.

Perhaps somewhere in the hasdee flood there were numbers describing the billions of machines. Numbers that contained and directed their behavior. Like the twelve percent of babies, Silver being ill was an outcome of a system. Not chance, not fate.