Feed the Machine (45 page)

He’d been enjoying what he was doing.

Someone hit him in the face with a brick. At the sight of his blood, Silver’s fury had peaked. Without any verbal instruction the nanites carried out her will.

She burst all the blood vessels in his brain and he died.

Then her fury had abated, leaving only confusion. Why did he want to steal? Why did he want to be selfish and violent? It made no sense!

Copy them all and start again.

It was simplicity itself. Her nanites knew the position of every cell, the precise balance of every chemical. The people were nothing more than complicated meat. With a thought she could obliterate them all. Remake them.

It was clear someone had done that to her and Hello, leaving them dead down a hole.

It would be gentler than the bugs erupting from the silver boxes. She could make them all go to sleep first (a nudge on the brain of certain chemicals) and when they awoke they’d all be rich and healthy and happy.

In her version of Cago, twelve percent of babies wouldn’t die. They’d all live.

The bug ratio was down to 1.5. In places where her bugs were thinnest, the ones attacking had gained perhaps a meter.

But the man with the sword… he was a shard of glass stuck in her foot. He’d known there was unlimited heal. Unlimited food. Unlimited bugs. He could have printed himself a bug and a cube and built himself a palace.

If she remade Cago and put him in it, would he one day snap and do the same thing? Would he steal and hurt for no reason at all?

If you leave here you’ll die.

Silver glanced at the map and message carved on the table. She’d made the bomb—a bright blue cube with a yellow button atop it. The blocker wanted the three cubes and Silver wasn’t willing to give them up. According to the cubes it would produce a bug which would build a sort of shielded self-driving cart. It would take her and the bomb across the Gap to the glowing light.

To
her
, presumably the one who begged and pleaded via her dropped nanites. It was a clever ploy but now the people were safety hidden away in the palace and buildings around it, she couldn’t talk to Silver any longer.

The cubes chimed and displayed their finds in a list down the side of the screen. Weapons of deadly power. Silver scrolled through the list and dismissed them one by one. If she were fighting armies, robots,
entire cities
then they would be useful. But she’d only two battles now: the nanites and the bugs.

Her machines were stronger and faster than the ones that had infested Cago but again, it was a question of numbers and access to materials. She’d cleared all of Fat Man’s warehouses. Even if she ate Cago down to the ground there was more junk in the Scour than she’d managed to take in her frantic expansion.

The bugs would creep closer and wipe them out. Then the nanites would recolonize the area in an invisible flood.

She imagined a single drip of ink into a glass of water. It would hold for a moment before dispersing.

“I am not a puppet,” Silver said. No one answered. Hello was outside, sitting up on the mine entrance, waiting for her to come out.

She knew it wasn’t true though. She’d been led, pushed and pulled, the entire way. The cat, Gress, helping her. Sheriff Toll letting her go after Hello stole the gold, his nose bleeding. The mysterious
her
had been helping at times but Silver was sure she’d administered pain too. She hadn’t stopped her from being ill all the time, dragging her family down into poverty with her constant need for medicine.

Who knew what terrible things were planned and executed upon them?

She looked across at the bomb. It was incredibly powerful, a type of fusion weapon and would only detonate at her touch.

She might die.

You deserve it.

“Fuck you,” Silver whispered. The man on the screen swayed and died again, every blood vessel in his brain bursting at once.

The bug ratio ticked down to 1.3.

The voice yelled back for her to fight, to struggle, to kill all the bugs, to kill all the bad people and
then
would come silence and peace.
Then
she could swim in the endless flow and solve the puzzle of evil. Clear the Scour, grow plants and trees, protect the babies, take away all the pain…

Silver closed her eyes. Even down here under the junk she could hear the roar of her bugs fighting just over a kilometer away.

She could see it. No more suffering. She could even reprint her father.

But first she had to destroy this
other
. The one who made the nanites. The one who controlled it all.

She opened her eyes and saw the man with the sword get hit in the face with a brick. This time the sight of his blood produced no response.

Silver walked to the table, disconnected the cubes and threw them in the middle hasdee. It gulped them down and printed a bright yellow bug. It chirped at her and jumped to her outstretched hand. It scuttled up her arm and sat on her shoulder.

She checked the screens—her brother had found paper and was writing frantic messages to her. He must have guessed she could see everything.

He didn’t understand though. All his pleadings meant nothing in the face of a million bugs coming to kill them.

Silver printed food and water and a long sharp knife. She put it all in her bag. Then she gave her instructions to her brother and the people of Cago huddled in the compound.

The bomb was heavy. She instructed the bugs to carry it for her. Then she opened the door to the hidden room and began to make her way to the surface.

Chapter 73

Nola

The hasdee chimed and spat out the cube it had been working on for the last hour.

Ash touched it to the tablet Silver had sent.

“Art and history,” he said when he saw her looking at him.

“Hoo-fucking-ray.”

She was too tired to say anything else. She’d been eating when Silver’s voice echoed out of the walls asking Ash to collect as much knowledge as he could. Most of the bugs that had herded the remaining population of Cago into the compound had rushed inside, scaring the living shit out of everyone, but then dived into one of the large hasdees. It had printed a shiny tablet.

On it was… everything.

A billion billion things. Ash had pressed weapons and been told it would take eight months to make the thirty-four tempcubes required. He’d had to go into categories, diving down, searching for anything useful.

Silver had said they had maybe a day before it would all probably vanish.

Ash was frantically searching through the tablet but it was like floating atop an endless ocean and you could only take a few cupfuls to last for the rest of your life.

“Electrical engineering? Do we need that? Four hours.”

Nola stared at him, her head aching. She needed sleep and soon.

“Get the videos. We can copy stuff.”

Ash had shown her while the first cube was printing. Billions of files. A cat walking across a table. A child riding a bicycle across a green lawn, laughing.

“That’s eight hours,” Ash said, tapping the screen.

“So fucking get fucking pictures of people’s assholes I don’t care I’m going to sleep.”

She left him next to the hasdee and staggered around to the bathrooms. Fat Man’s palace was full of them. There were long lines of people at every one. Nola wandered upstairs until she found one with a shorter line and stood there leaning against the wall, waiting.

There wasn’t a single guard in sight. Nola hadn’t seen it but apparently there had only been twenty of them left defending the place. They’d been threatening a hundred slaves to fight for them.

The twenty guards had been beaten to death and she didn’t care one bit. She hadn’t seen Gardner, Candle or the thin man with black hair but she knew they weren’t in the mansion. Anyone who was a guard for Fat Man was dead or had fled the city (for all the fucking good that did them with the hurricane of bugs roaring outside the gates). Her grand plans for revenge had failed. They were dead and gone—that was all that mattered. A guard begging for his life had told them Fat Man never had the ability to explode collars—it was all a trick. That information didn’t save his life.

Soon it was her turn in the bathroom. A woman told her she had five minutes. Order was resuming and although they had unlimited pretty much everything else, hot water was in short supply.

She showered, washing the last remnants of Fat Man’s blood off her. After they’d left the palace, she’d cleaned somewhat with Jarrah’s help but had nothing to change into.

She cleaned herself of Fat Man, dried and dressed in new clothes. Someone took the old clothes away, dropping them into a hasdee.

The palace had hundreds of rooms but there were thousands of people. The corridors were filled with families, huddled and fearful. Every bedroom was full. Outside there was still a thin line of snapping bugs keeping people inside the compound. Beyond that, the rest of Cago was gone, chomped down to the ground for materials.

Beyond the gates the hurricane of swirling bugs fought for dominance. It had been creeping closer all day. A constant rain of dead bugs fell where the city used to stand. They were immediately broken down, flowing in lines back to the hasdees churning out more bugs.

“Nola, hey, come with me.”

Jarrah out of nowhere. He was clean too, his hair damp, wearing standard hasdee clothes, his law uniform beyond recovery.

He held out his hand and she took it. She allowed herself to be carried along behind him, her legs moving of their own accord. Through a door, a corridor, a closet and a secret door.

Inside was dim and warm, the only light coming from the edges of a thick curtain. A large bed in the center of the room. They lay down. It was soft, unbelievably so. Nola relaxed, the tiredness set free, covering her body, pulling her under.

Without intending to, she kissed Jarrah.

Then they were asleep.

Chapter 74

Silver

The mysterious
her
had thought of everything. Silver adjusted the dark goggles which blocked out most of the intense glow. Hello had retreated to her bag when hiding his head under his wing wasn’t enough.

They were nearly there.

Two intense moments of fear behind her, still reverberating.

The yellow bug had gulped resources and built a type of sled with a low soft chair in it. The three cubes had reappeared, incorporated into an amulet that hung from a golden necklace. Silver put it on. Then she loaded the bomb onto the sled and climbed into the chair.

A clear glass bubble formed over the sled. It rose off the ground with a soft hiss and took off towards the glow, gaining speed as it went. A compass appeared from the floor pointing direction and distance.

The first terrifying moment: passing through the wall of fighting bugs. Her army was putting up a strong resistance but had already been pushed back three meters. The noise, even through the glass, was incredible. Silver expected they would be torn to pieces but the wall of bugs parted and the sled shot through. It was soon behind them.

Soon they hit the pile, riding up and over it. The rubble and junk flashed by, the sled navigating the hills with ease. They crested a hill and there was the Gap. The sharp edge was a sharp as ever. Silver’s father had taken her there when she was a child. The memory was vague but there was one clear spot: throwing a rusted can onto the featureless dirt and seeing it dissolve.

She understood now that a trillion nanoscopic machines lurked there, protecting the glow.

Her fear leapt but the sled did not slow or stop. They shot out over the edge. The amulet on her chest chimed once and they continued on, the soft hiss of sand beneath them.

Silver squinted through the goggles but still could not make out the source of the glow. It seemed sitting in a depression.

Three minutes.

“Thank you,” she replied. The voice had become strangely helpful. She knew it was thinking about the knife in her bag.

Her own thoughts were a whirlwind. She’d built an EMP before lunch, helped kill Fat Man shortly thereafter and by midafternoon had almost cracked the secrets of the universe itself. If the bugs hadn’t attacked she would have cleared the Scour, collecting all the materials, any sourcecubes she could find and stacking blocks of pure materials around all the cities for use. Nice and orderly. No need for anyone to risk hazels and Scabs and being crushed to death in the pile.

“Are we there yet?”

“Soon.”

Hello moved around in the bag, grumbling to himself. She reached in and scratched the back of his head.

The ground sloped up as the sled ate the distance. The glow brightened until it was unbearable, even through darkened glasses. Silver had to close her eyes.

The sled slowed and stopped. She felt the cool touch of the air as the glass retracted. It was almost night, the sun soon dipping behind the horizon.