Feed the Machine (38 page)

Many people were. The boxes had stood still and silent and now they were humming, fine cracks forming on their surface. It was five minutes until noon.

Oil dripped from the pizza onto Ella’s lap and she remembered her food. She forced herself to take another bite, her stomach already ridiculously overfull. Another experiment—could she get fat? It had been running for one year but no matter what she ate, she couldn’t gain more than ten kilograms. In a week if the weight gain continued to stall she’d quit. Then it was time to begin the starvation experiment.

Since the white boxes had risen out of the ground rather than the expected electrical generator and water pump, Ella had been watching almost continuously. When she got tired she drank black heal. After the first seven days she’d slept when the heal hadn’t wiped away the fuzzy feeling that had crept around her brain, as though it were wrapped in soft cotton wool. She’d been awake for five days now and her mind was sharp, crackling with ideas.

When the boxes appeared she’d zoomed into them. They were filled with silver bugs, the same as the ones that lived in the Machine. Nothing special about them. Ella sent her questioning program to search through every conversation anyone had ever had, looking for mentions of the white boxes. Prior to them appearing there were none. They were a new and unexpected event.

Now they were humming and cracking, so close to noon. There was no doubt there was a precise countdown in effect.

Ella forgot her food as the minutes dragged by like eons. She tapped from screen to screen, watching people in every city gather around the boxes. It was the rich and the middle rich. Everyone poor was in the Scour scavenging.

Two minutes then one and crack.

The bugs came pouring out in the flood, their jaws clacking.

Obliteration.

All the people, all the cities.

No one was spared. Ground down to component atoms by the bugs and the Machine.

It took a day, the bugs flying deep into the Scour to find the last man sleeping in a hole, unaware he was the last. The bugs set upon him and reduced him to nothing. They didn’t even leave a smear of blood on the junk. They took the wealth of the cities and randomly distributed gold, platinum, diamonds in the Scour. Precious sourcecubes were dropped haphazardly or buried deep.

Another day and the cities were rebuilt from the ground up. White coffins with people inside them were printed and moved into position by thousands of bugs. The coffins cracked open and flaked away to nothing in the middle of the night and not a single person blinked an eye. They slept or fucked or ate food, totally unaware. People stood from the floor of the bar, shook their heads and carried on.

Printed as easily as the forever sleeping version of her upstairs.

The next day, her mind humming like the boxes, black heal unable to push away the tiredness, Ella sat at the screen, moving from town to town, searching, seeking for mentions of bugs or white boxes and then she saw Jada’s mother, enormously pregnant, waddling down the street.

“Holy fucking fuck,” Ella said.

Her stomach rumbled and she decided to abandon the starvation experiment for now. This new puzzle required all of her attention.

Chapter 60

Nola

The night was a furious roar as the storm moved over Cago, lashing down freezing rain, lightning cracking and being answered by guns and screams in reply.

The old generator keeping the fence electrified and lights running was struggling. They were dropped into darkness, blinded by light. Hazels surrounded Cago, growing bolder as the periods of pure night grew longer.

They were losing this battle.

“Left, left, left,” Nola screamed. She couldn’t hear her voice. It wasn’t only the storm—something had exploded too close an hour ago and her ears were still ringing. She needed black heal but there was none. No one knew what had happened to their supply.

The blue bug scuttled down the left side of the street towards them. They only had three guns. Nola fired, along with the two others but no one hit. Others threw bricks and stones but the bug was too quick.

They’d seen the first one at midnight, before the storm had hit. It had run down the street and they’d fired upon it, fearing it was a weapon. It reached the front line and ripped a man’s jugular out, leaping and clawing with sudden viciousness. Two more men died before a woman smashed it with a brick, crippling its back half. They’d finished it off after that.

The battle had twisted and flowed and was hanging on a knife edge. They were only two streets away from the warehouses Silver and the others were looting to feed the hasdees underground. If more of these blue bugs came running they’d be wiped out and they’d lose the warehouses.

“Bricks!”

Nola took another shot, the laser burning a hole in the wall beside the bug. She swung her gun behind her back and grabbed two bricks. They were cold and wet in her hands.

Jarrah was down the end of the line, bricks in hand. Beside him was the woman who’d been with Dia. Nola didn’t remember her name. All she knew was she hadn’t found her son and after Fat Man had exploded ten kids and teenagers, the woman had gone cold and violent. She’d been fighting at the front all night. There were others holding bricks and slingshots, men, woman and teenagers huddling in the rain, fighting for their lives.

The bug dodged a thrown brick, ran up the wall and launched itself at one of the random men. He got a hand up and lost his fingers as the bug slashed at him. He screamed and shook his hand but the bug was already gone, leaping down the line. It stabbed a woman on the shoulder, a single sting and jumped again.

Dia’s friend swung her gun and swatted the bug out of the air. It hit the cobblestones, shooting sparks. They dived on it, smashing bricks, hitting each other, frantic, yelling until the bug was a twisted pulpy mess.

Nola stood, feeling her fingers stinging. She was bleeding—a long scratch from a brick or something down her hand.

“Back in position! Wounded to the rear, get them heal!”

“Fuck,” someone shouted.

The man who’d lost his fingers was jerking around on the ground, his mouth foaming. The woman stung on the shoulder dropped to her hands and knees and folded into a ball before she joined him.

“Poison,” Dia’s friend yelled. Her eyes went glassy and she dropped.

The three of them died in quick succession, shaking and foaming before a sudden full-body clench went through them. They relaxed from it and slipped into death.

“Nola, your hand,” Jarrah said.

“We need to get back—”

Nola’s mouth went numb, filling with saliva. She spat it out on the street. Above, the storm cracked lightning and the lights around Cago died.

Ten seconds of darkness lit only by lightning strikes and the glow over the horizon.

The lights came back and Nola was still standing.

She looked behind her at the gathered faces of her shrinking army. After Fat Man had exploded the collars of those kids they’d lost many people. Those who remained were the most angry, the most desperate, the most crazy.

But they were absolutely going to die and lose if they continued to try to hold the line, to keep Fat Man and his guards in their palace.

Green guns and gray disks and now poisonous bugs… Nola knew Fat Man would be frantically duplicating tempcubes, building hasdees, printing as many of those motherfuckers as he could.

Even ten together might be unstoppable.

Nola took the gun off Dia’s friend and gave it to another woman. She put it on and knelt down in the street, focusing on the enemy.

Ash had told an incredible story—their little sister had discovered bombs in the Collector’s house and told Raj and Kin to plant them. She’d found a hidden room and in it was a weapon—an EMP bomb—that would wipe out every hasdee, bug and weapon in Cago.

The bomb wasn’t only for Fat Man—it was to destroy the bugs in the block. They had to protect the warehouses so they could loot them.

In her tired state, Nola had missed some details—who made the hidden room—but as soon as Ash told her about the EMP she was on board.

Dwindling though her army was, they still outnumbered Fat Man and his guards three to one.

Nola had asked Silver if she could work out how to overcome the gray disks or how to make them but her sister had told her there was no time. They had to make the bomb and destroy the bugs inside the white block. She’d left the disk with her.

Considering what she was about to do, she wished she’d kept it.

“Jarrah, send a message out. We need everyone gathered here. Abandon all street ends.”

“His guards could get behind us though. They could ambush. We can’t fight on two sides.”

“We’re not. We’re going to attack the palace with everything we have. If Fat Man is printing those bugs then we can’t stay here.”

Jarrah glanced at Fat Man’s palace. Some of the interior lights were still on but most of the grounds were in darkness, lit only by Cago’s fence. The street was littered with dead bodies and dismembered limbs.

“Jarrah!”

Nola stepped up to him and grabbed his hands. He was surprisingly warm.

“We stay here, we die. Spread the word, get everyone here.”

He nodded.

The lights around Cago died.

The hazels outside howled in triumph.

Chapter 61

Ella

“Forty-six years, eight months and twelve days old,” Ella told Bug. He scratched a leg on his nose and made a sort of chirping noise at her.

She’d found animal behavior packs stored away in the flow almost as soon as she’d started her hacking all those years ago but had been thus far unable to download them to a chip. They were readable—the thousands of rules and patterns that made a cat a cat or a giraffe a giraffe for example—but the hasdee chips and everything else thwarted her attempts to directly build a pet.

So she built and programmed the bug herself, making new rules for how to move its legs, how to see, how to use its senses, when to hide, how to recognize predators. She wasn’t making it a bug but rather giving it a complex mix of anything she thought useful. One day she decided it was male. Ella named him Bug because she couldn’t think of anything better.

“English please,” she said.

Bug had a light on his shell that flickered once for every few thousand processing cycles. It flickered now as he churned language.

“That is very old,” Bug said. Then he chirped again and scratched his nose.

Ella smiled and stroked her fingers on his shell. She’d been thinking of making it fur for the tactile sensation. Or perhaps feathers, although Bug could not fly.

His chirp and nose-rubbing routine was a little tiresome but at the same time it was wonderful because it was emergent behavior. He did not have one rule that told him to do those things. They had appeared from the thousands of rules she’d programmed in him. When they spoke he chirped and rubbed. If she was sad, he sometimes touched his nose against her hand, cat behavior breaking through.

Another reason to cover him in fur.

Bug’s emergent intelligence was even stranger for the fact that it had arisen from just six new rules being added to his programming. He had changed from bug, a dumb robotic-flesh hybrid, to Bug, a clever, thinking and responsive creature. Even more odd was when she removed the six new rules he did not revert to his old stupid self. He remained clever.

The mystery of it was delicious and gave her something to focus on.

Ella checked the time—it was nearing twelve. Another ten minutes or so. Soon the white blocks would start humming, the people would worry and shortly thereafter their worries wouldn’t matter because they would be component atoms, recycled into the Machine to be remade again.

She glanced at the screen (muted) and tore off another small square of paper she’d soaked with her own version of LSD. She put it in her mouth and let it diffuse into her saliva.

On her fortieth birthday (counting birth as the day she awoke on the floor naked) she’d received three extraordinary gifts.

The first had been finding a code fragment that linked to another and another. She’d pulled on a thread and instead of it snapping she’d hauled up an entire program. Once she assembled it, she saw she could send instructions to distant hasdees. She found a hasdee in Cago and told it to print a pap cube. Then she watched on the screen as a hasdee in an empty room spat out a cube on its own.

The second had been the confirmation of the nanites. She’d had a long-running program analyzing the ones that lived in the heal and searching for others similar in nature. Eight years it had been sifting through the flow and on her birthday it found them. As she suspected, they were everywhere. Every surface of the cities she watched was covered in them. They were in the cells themselves of the people. They interfered down at the cellular level, ensuring the same people were born again and again. She had an answer as to her magic screen that could see anything and everything. The mystery of the complete lack of vegetation was solved—the nanites destroyed any plant that attempted to grow. That conclusion birthed a new hypothesis: there must be green somewhere in the world or there would be no oxygen in the air. She saw the nanites for what they were: total control, total surveillance. The nanites ensured nothing grew so the people were reliant on the Machine.