Feed the Machine (35 page)

Purpose.

Her illness was deliberate and directed, she was sure of it.

But by whom? The mysterious
her
inscribed on the tabletop? Was that why it told her to build a bomb and to go to her? To destroy?

Silver turned away from the flow of information, letting it fall away. She’d swum long enough. There wasn’t enough time to crack the sourcecube, to make it obey her. The countdown was draining away—just another day—and she knew terrible things would happen when that timer reached zero.

The hasdees, the blocker cage, the instructions… they were all too neat. She was being directed again, this time explicitly. The dead Silver and Hello were a trick perhaps, someone clever with dust machines had built what appeared to be dead bodies. It was designed for maximum engagement. A mystery that bothered like a loose tooth.

Here are the mysteries and here are the instructions and perhaps if you follow them you’ll come to understand.

For all she knew the timer may end, the block may break open and the bugs fly away.

Perhaps she should do nothing at all.

We both know that’s not going to happen.

“No, it’s not,” Silver said, running her fingers over the engraved map. There was no time—she was going to follow the instructions and kill Fat Man.

“Wake up Hello. We’re going back to the city.”

Chapter 54

Ella

Time dilated and compressed in unequal measure. There was never enough, there was too much.

Five years slipped by between one breath and the next, marked only by the hideous annual Feed displayed on the wallscreen.

A thousand experiments, maybe more, big and small. She was running one right now, climbing the ghost gum to touch the white dome overhead to see what would happen. She’d passed the second floor of the mansion, the rope tight around her waist. Inside was the impenetrable glass room with the white box. The glass could not be broken, burned or eaten away. The hasdee would not create acid but she made components and brewed her own. Hydrochloric, sulfuric. Not a mark, except on the floor and the bugs repaired that. Hidden under the floor was the same silver metal running through the entire mansion.

She’d discovered the white dome was an egg shape, symmetrical, perhaps twenty meters down. She could not dig to the bottom—the bugs got agitated if she went below one meter and kept trying to fill the hole in. She had to estimate the size from measuring the curvature of the wall. Nothing could wear it down. A direct flame applied for an hour and it remained cool to the touch.

There were countless books and films running from the dawn of their art forms until cutting off in 2082. Ella scoured videos, news reports, research papers, preserved websites but there were no giant blaring signs pointing to the
why
of the end. It just… ended. Certainly nothing verifying the tales the people in the cities told each year.

Ella hitched the rope and climbed higher, telling herself not to look down.

There were holes, in the file, in the mansion, perhaps above her head. Taken as a whole, it was almost perfect but
almost
wasn’t good enough. The small variances rubbed her mind, their rough edges wearing away at her. In return she worried at them, examining from every angle and collecting every flicker of nonalignment.

Two years ago she’d disassembled a hasdee and spent time questioning the chip within. It talked too much so she built a questioner to wade through everything it said. Hiding deep in the files about Muscat grapes of all things was a fragment of code. It was nothing, incomplete but it hinted at more fragments. Six months passed before she found another, stuck to a file describing the origin of the word
immaculate
. This fragment was gibberish, an encoded mess.

But it
was
something out of place. On such things hypotheses formed and were tested.

Today she was testing if the mansion would let her die. She was lying to herself that she was merely climbing the tree.

She hitched the rope and climbed, the tree thick and strong under her fingers.

Ella didn’t know when she started thinking of the mansion as an entity. Perhaps around the one-year mark the idea had sidled in and began coloring her thoughts. Something had built this beautiful prison and she’d acknowledged to herself that she knew this to be true. The mansion was an expression of intent. It was not the cause but it was useful to name it as such.

Assigning a
cause
to all this came as a surprising evolution. It opened conjecture about the state of mind of the mansion. Why do this? Why bother?

At the one-year mark she told the hasdees to print bottles of champagne, beer and spirits. She played loud music and split the wallscreen into multiple windows, each showing a bar. People drinking and shouting and stumbling. She drank, shouted and stumbled along with them, separate from them but as close as she could get.

She drank too much and fell down the stairs from the first floor. All she remembered was a dizzying rush, jarring pain and a gap of missing time before she awoke on the floor, her arm broken, a bottle of black heal sitting next to her. She’d gulped it and was healed and sobered in one minute flat.

That injury sparked an idea that became a hypothesis: I cannot die here. It won’t let me.

Now she was three stories up, the tree growing thinner, her arms starting to hurt from the effort and she kept climbing despite the whispers that she would die.

Ella glanced down at the ground, looked away as her body clenched in fear.

“Keep going, keep climbing, just going to the top.”

It was a necessary lie she told herself. Get to the top, you’ll be safe. Then she intended to slip.

There were easier ways to kill herself but she wanted a clear test. Not gulping down sleeping tablets and waking with bugs crawling around her. She wanted to break her body so if she were saved it would be obvious.

A few gulping breaths, her heart thudding and she reminded herself she was only climbing a tree, nothing special, nothing dangerous. Her body was convinced and so she continued her ascent.

She’d cracked certain parts of the hasdees using the same method. She found a tiny place to drop some code, innocent, and another place and the code worked together to break a hole. It wasn’t much of a hole—she could now dose food with chemicals—but she was still working on cracking it completely.

The tree grew narrower. Now she could encircle it with her hands. There was no breeze—not within the dome—but it was swaying as though buffeted by wind. Ella lied to her body and managed another halting grasp upwards but then she froze in place. This was dangerous and stupid and she could be killed.

She certainly hoped so.

I bet there are more code fragments to find.

“I’m sure there are,” Ella whispered, her eyes closed. The voice, alternately helpful and insulting had very set views on the subject of testing suicide. It landed very heavily on the “how about we don’t die” side of things. Ella disagreed and after it became quite heated they’d agreed not to discuss it any further. So now the voice tempted her and sometimes she allowed herself to be tempted. It knew all the buttons to push. Her love of numbers, of finding correlations, of mysterious things. If she could not understand it, it became her obsession.

Ella tilted her head back and opened her eyes. The white dome was close, only a meter or two away but she couldn’t reach it. The tree thinned out to a stick, easily broken. Even now, if she swayed too far it would splinter and—

You’ll die. Climb down now!

Ella squeezed her eyes shut. A gentle rock from side to side. I am on the ground, holding on to a pole. She managed to get a hand down to the rope around her waist and let it slip free. It dropped away, thudding on the deck. Quick as lightning her mind measured the delay between letting go and when it landed, threw in acceleration due to gravity and returned with a number describing roughly how far she was off the ground.

The number bloomed in her mind, sending swift tendrils outward, colonizing her, freezing her shoulders, pumping her heart, flooding her with adrenaline. The fear swamped her but the sway in the tree was too great.

Fibers of wood gave way, worked beyond their stretching point, stressed and pushed and they broke in a sudden shock. As soon as one severed the force on others grew, an unequal distribution of pressure and energy that cascaded, producing a complete state change.

The tree snapped and Ella fell.

Time, elastic and boundless on a warm afternoon reading a book on the deck cruelly compressed. There was wind, noise, the front edge of a threatening wall of agony and then nothing.

Sometime later the nothing evaporated away and Ella opened her eyes, her body a furnace of searing pain. She was in the dirt, smashed wood all around her. The deck. Bugs were churning around nearby, clicking and clacking, black heal resting near them. Ella reached, muscles ripped and barely functioning and touched the bottle. Her hand was bloody, still red and wet. She gulped the heal down.

Not a minute this time but perhaps an hour. Deep pains arose and faded away as her broken body was healed. She lay there in the destroyed deck and breathed a soothing pattern. Finally the heal washed through her head and swept away the languid sleepiness crouching there. She stood, seeing her clothes were ripped and wet with blood. She climbed her way out of the deck.

The bugs moved in to clean and rebuild. She looked up—they’d already repaired the tree.

Ella wandered inside, her body healed but her mind slipping like a dislocated limb. Her injuries were severe—the amount of blood attested to that—but she hadn’t died. She was sure the bugs didn’t tip black heal into her wounds while she was dead. The only way to test that though was to die in a manner where they couldn’t get to her.

In the kitchen staring blankly at a hasdee, her thoughts bumping around unsure of their place, she heard a faint beeping noise from upstairs. She followed it, the terror of her possible death retreating in the face of a new puzzle. Not the first floor. She climbed the stairs knowing she wouldn’t have to open any rooms. It would be coming from the white coffin room.

Soft lighting, pink and red roses printed on the wallpaper, the unbreakable glass wall, the white coffin, and her.

Ella. Twenty-six, naked, a pale brown.

Her body almost complete. The bugs down at her knees printing furiously.

Calves formed and then feet and toes. The bugs crawled over the body as though checking their work. The beeping from some unseen speaker faded away.

Ella pressed her head against the glass and looked at the copy of her younger self.

Behind unbreakable glass.

Unattainable.

Chapter 55

Dia

She’d been on hands and knees scrubbing a shower when the fighting had started. There had been explosions outside the palace but the woman who watched over them screamed at them to keep working and so they had.

Their ridiculous work. To clean that which bugs could clean better and faster. To scrub and work on aching knees, your back crying out.

It was deliberate. Fat Man
wanted
them to scrub and suffer.

Soon there were screams outside and rushing guards hauled them away. It seemed every family member they could get their hands on was shoved into one of the warehouses. The guards demanded compliance with shocksticks and their new green guns. A kid who didn’t move fast enough had his foot burned off.

Fear saturated the air.

The boy, the fragile bird of a boy was dragged out naked and thrown on the floor. The guards backed off and a thin man with black hair shouted at them if they did not fight for Fat Man, if they tried to run well—

The boy stood, his eyes dull, waiting for whatever terrible pain came next.

A snap and a sudden plume of fire and his head burst off his shoulders and landed on the concrete floor. His body dropped to the ground.

“The collars explode! OBEY!” the thin man shouted. The guards came to take them away.

Threat layered upon threat. Obey, defend, kill.

Or… boom.

Dia had shuffled with the rest of them into another room where they were issued with shocksticks and put under the control of a guard. A few hours later they went back one by one and swapped their sticks for green guns.

Now she watched Nola through a gun sight. Her daughter was being too reckless, exposing herself.

Dia sighted the wall near her and fired. The gun cracked and part of the wall collapsed. Nola and those with her scattered and hid.

The guard was watching. One guard to ten of them. The only thing that stopped Dia from turning the gun his way was the gray disk stuck to his arm. An invisible shield.

Another guard crept up followed by his ten.

“You are relieved,” he told them.

Not at all, Dia thought.

They swapped guns and moved back into Fat Man’s compound. There was still food to eat but the mess was lost, burned down. They were taken to a cold warehouse and given crispy pork belly and orange juice. Fat, protein and sugar.