Feed the Machine (39 page)

It was a puzzle why the bugs were used to kill everyone rather than the nanites in their blood. Many guesses but the answer Ella favored was: whoever is doing this
wants
everyone to feel terror and fear.

She followed trails of nanites and found gigantic hasdees hidden underground, printing garbage and sometimes dropping in a sourcecube. There were others printing broken skyscrapers and torn apart jumbo jets. The world wasn’t fallen—at least not the way the people thought. It was manufactured, an elaborate set they lived in.

The third gift had not been technological in nature but it had been by far the best. Reeling from printing a pap cube over in an empty Cago house and the nanite search completing an hour later, she’d gone to the kitchen for a cool drink. She’d been considering a glass of wine—why not, it was a birthday of sorts—when a fragment of thought crackled through her mind.

Why not a glass of wine and a kiss.

A man’s voice, warm and joking, not speaking to her but a memory replaying.

“Why not?” she’d whispered and some of the empty holes in her mind were filled.

The man, not her husband, someone she worked with was someone she liked. More than liked. She felt warmth in her stomach move lower, a tingle between her legs and sudden heat that amplified. A full-color memory, a dark room and passionate kisses, a bite on a shoulder, her desire to close her teeth fully on his flesh, his hand behind her back, a skirt pushed up—

No face to him, no name, just sensation and noise and knowledge. Flickers of more moments like that one, not many but enough, enough for—

Selah.

Daughter.

Cesarean after twenty-four hours, she got stuck and my blood pressure went crazy and they had to operate and I couldn’t see anything and they were holding a screaming baby streaked in blood and then—

A whisper of something more—a toddler, just past one year old holding a toy cow in her hand and trying to moo but she didn’t know to open her mouth so it came out like mmmmm….

Laughing and mooing at her, getting mmmmm in return…

There had been nothing more. Those memories had revealed themselves but refused to bring their friends.

Ella had sobbed in front of the hasdee, her hands pressed on the cool marble bench. Tears of joy for memories found. Tears from a sudden ache, a daughter she’d forgotten, a daughter she adored absolutely.

Thus the current experiments in psychedelic memory retrieval.

She’d been through DMT, ketamine, ecstasy in varying strengths, THC extract and even a type of wine made from San Pedro cactus. She’d written a dedicated searching program to go through every bit of information that existed to find any and all links between memory, substances and anything else. She’d even tried self-hypnosis.

All failures, no new memories retrieved but it felt much like Edison’s failures when building the lightbulb. He hadn’t failed—he’d found ten thousand ways
not
to make a lightbulb.

She hadn’t remembered but there was time.

“Oh fuck, is there time,” Ella groaned and closed her eyes. Colors were starting to spark and blurt behind them. The screen had turned the sound back on—the white boxes were beginning to hum.

Twenty years, eight months and twelve days she’d been trapped in this fucking mansion.

“Oh fuck fuck fuck fuckety fuck,” Ella recited. Cursing on drugs made her feel happy sometimes. She didn’t know why—it was locked in a memory hole. It felt familiar.

Maybe she shouldn’t be tripping while intense unmitigated horror unfolded on the screens but it was too late now. The drug was stirring the chemical soup and new connections were being made.

“Didn’t write that program but
someone
did and left it behind for me but didn’t tell me it was there when I looked because maybe they can’t. She, she she, her, me is upstairs waiting in a box for
this
me to die one day and what happens to my notes? Gone, done, dirt, despair, eaten, flummoxed, garbled, hip hip hip hooray wiped out but maybe traces left behind, traces and tricks.”

Ella stood and started pacing around the lounge. On the screen some of the people had run in fear from the humming blocks, hiding in homes that soon would be reduced to nothing.

The hasdee hacker program had been a painful blessing. The remote hasdees were happy to do her bidding—if they had the ability to do so. Making them print pap was not much use. She managed to find one in an abandoned building and printed a bug but then it just sat there under the hasdee collecting dust. She couldn’t talk to it.

The best she could do was drop a tiny package of data, virtually nothing and use that to get the bug to do her bidding. The hasdee she found had enough material to build one more bug. It printed out, consumed the first bug and now she had two.

Those two went into the Scour with all the rest and ate their fill before crawling back to the abandoned house. A week and she had another bug and the first flickers of a way to communicate with the people began to appear. But she needed more bugs. She sent them out to the Scour and all three were destroyed when the pile collapsed. The hasdee didn’t have enough to build another bug and soon after people claimed the house and the hasdee for their own.

The humming increased and the white boxes fell to pieces. The bugs ran, flew, scuttled, swooped, lunged, consumed, consumed, consumed. Ella watched, the colors on the screen trembling like water.

Last loop, Morris, the old rich man had died in his house alone after falling over. This loop he’d survived. His daughter who died young last loop had survived and so she was there to administer heal when he fell (a week earlier than last time). It was an easy connection to make. She survives and so does he.

Morris was currently asleep in his bed. His daughter had been down at the Machine talking with others about the white box. She was already gone and the bugs were flooding outward, coming towards his mansion.

Last loop, Jada had been ten years old, playing in a grubby room when the bugs came. This loop she was already dead. Her family had slipped too far into poverty and an ill-conceived idea of a new start the next town over had pushed them out of the safety of Cago. They’d never reached Char—the Scabs and their three crossbow bolts had killed them.

Ella could not reach first causes on Jada and her family. Perhaps the mother cutting her foot and slowing her junk collecting? Then when her husband becomes ill they don’t have enough money to buy heal. They lose more days collecting. She buys heal and he recovers but they are already down and declining. But why did she cut her foot? The hasdee-printed shoe was weak—a flaw in the design or perhaps that batch. If she’d known about it she could reprint the shoe. No injury, no loss, more money…

But why was the printed shoe weak? It was easy to make it strong. Was it deliberately weak?

When Ella closed her eyes she saw all the forces as a cloud of stars connected by colored strings. Each pushed or pulled on the other and a tiny wobble in one could rip the entire world apart.

In the last loop, Jada’s father drank more. One hungover day he didn’t go so far out into the Scour and so he found a tiny nugget of gold. That money kept them warm, pushed them up and so they survived until the bugs wiped everyone out.

In this loop, Jada’s father hardly drank at all. He marched further out and never found the gold. Someone else did. A woman named Yvette. She drank it away, got in a bar fight and fled town. Two towns over she resettled, met another woman and together they took in an orphan. He lived to the end in this loop. Last loop he died years back.

“So drinking is good if too much and find gold but not not not not not good for orphan boy because he dies and Yvette no love for her, hard life and can you save orphan boy and Jada both?”

Last loop the hazels were skittish, roaming around day and night but keeping away from people. This loop they were vicious loners, still dangerous but so sparsely distributed that a person could go for months without seeing one.

The screams were dying down now. The bugs had consumed most of the people gathered near the Machine and those who’d run. Some were now eating the houses down to the ground, clearing a space around the Machine. Others were biting their way through doors. A woman on the screen holding her newborn daughter in her arms. She was eight days old. The bugs were nearly through her door. She ran upstairs as the wood splintered.

Ella turned away, the mother’s screams piercing. Then the voice commanded her to look and she did. The mother had dropped the baby on the bed. She was awake, taking in a breath of air for a scream that would never come.

This is your fault!

“No, it’s not. I can’t stop it.”

She pressed her fists against her eyes so hard it hurt. Colors bloomed, blood red at first, spiraling green, a blue-white burst of stars that sparkled and fell into a pile of—

Cubes.

The memory sharp and cold. The room near freezing, no, below that, can’t stay long, must rush, the corridor coated with ice but the room behind the doors dry and cold, kept at a perfect temperature, zero humidity.

Sadness and fury and there are no answers to it all. The one who killed her daughter was poor and lived with his mother after being thrown out of a halfway house for drug dealing. He was drug dealing because his father cut him off. His father had a minor stroke years ago and was slowly becoming more rigid over time in his thinking. Cut off, drug dealing, living with mother only two blocks away, owes debt, bad people each with their own terrible stories of deprivation, causes and variables pushing and pulling, a warm night, a cranky baby who didn’t get her afternoon sleep because of noisy neighbors fighting, why were they fighting, perhaps a walk, get outside, so nice, warm, dark and a white skinny face looms out of the night, three dots on their own trajectories meet for a single moment and one dot, the youngest dot, stops dead.

Ella fell to her knees before the lounge, her stomach turning over. Her mouth filled with saliva and she compulsively swallowed. A moment of deep gasping breaths and gone again.

A black hole, no memories this time in there but a howling anguish, roaring and screaming, demanding answers from an uncaring universe. Some atoms clumped together, did some things until another clump of atoms broke apart that clump. What did it matter?

“Because she was mine.”

The voice, ever present, a whispering guide, an unforgiving executioner, helps her build a plan. Go to work, walk inside. Use what you have made to find your answers.

So cold, freezing, didn’t have time to grab the suit to cover up, the man, not the husband, his face concerned and then frantic as doors opened and closed at her touch, only her and soon the chill is deep, tears freezing on her eyelashes, the glow blinding and she walks amongst the cubes, a soothing voice speaking to her.

Bugs scuttle around her as she kneels and gives her instructions in a monotone. Her creation obeys.

She sinks her face into the cubes and the cold is unbearable, the pain beyond comprehension but it is merely physical and as soon as she no longer has a body it fades away.

All that remains is her desire to understand this horrible mess, this endless garden of thorns.

First, some pruning.

Chapter 62

Dia

“Eighty-two percent complete,” she said and tapped through the materials list for a second time.

“Okay,” Silver replied automatically, her fingers a blur on the keyboard connected to her cracked tablet. The sourcecube connected to it shimmered blue and green.

Dia knew Silver hadn’t heard her—at least not on a conscious level. She was in that place she went, away from the world, pulled under by numbers, circuits, programs, chasing down whatever it was she was looking for.

Sitting next to her on the engraved map was an uneaten plate of food. Not pap but good food. Sausages in a tomato onion sauce, a yellow pile of mashed potato and green beans. Someone in the fighting had “freed” a sourcecube from a rich man’s house and was using it to print as many tempcubes and meals as they could.

The food was cold now, ignored. Hello sat next to the plate asleep, responsible for the peck marks in one of the sausages.

Dia rubbed her eyes, pushing back the weariness but it merely retreated into her body, settling in her bones. She was up to her neck in it, her arms weighed down, her legs pulling her through air that seemed thick and heavy. A bottle of heal would revive her but there was no more—the Dorrit family was gone and the tempcubes with them.

A boy shuffled in, a teenager who looked strong, layered over in muscle but was moving like an old man. He gave Dia a thin slice of gold. She took it from him and he turned around, shuffling back out the door without a word. Dia fed it to the hasdee and watched the completion percentage tick upwards.

Hours until dawn and their line of people down the mine helping steal Fat Man’s goods was reducing at a consistent rate. At first there had been enough to pass a stolen bottle of magnesium shavings from hand to hand down to the hasdees. Then the night came and the fighting grew more vicious, Fat Man’s guards and slaves making increasingly more successful attacks. They lost people to fighting, to fear.