Sequence (11 page)

Overdue
Reunion

As they walked, a couple of mechs made their way towards the captain. One of them conspiratorially said to him, “It’s good to have you back. How was the trip?”

“It was a long one
, but at least I got to get away for awhile. How were things here?”

“She’s gone completely insane.
She killed off a lot of us when she decided she didn’t need so many slaves. She gets bored and easily upset, but you already knew that. I’m just glad you’re back and that the mission was a success. Maybe when she’s done she’ll let us all go.”

“I hope y
ou’re right. It’s been a hundred thousand years since I felt my own skin, breathed through my own mouth, tasted food, or felt any kind of physical sensation. Sometimes I forget that I’m alive.”

“We all feel the same. There are rumors that she destroyed all of our bodies a long time ago
, but I don’t believe them. She knows we need them to give us hope. Without the bodies as leverage, most of us would’ve given up a long time ago.”

“The worst thing we ever did was to try and save God.”

“She’s not the god we hoped for, sir.”

“I know that. Hopefully the upgraded
god will be a lot kinder to us.”

“That’s what we’ve been praying for too.”

“Have our cousins, the Grays, tried to attack the planet?”

“Only
just as you landed. They must’ve followed you here. Until now, they didn’t think to look for us on such an inhospitable world. If you remember, this outpost was abandoned half a million years ago because it’s worthless. They couldn’t know that the bitch would put us in these robots so we wouldn’t need to breathe or be fed. They couldn’t know she’d be so cruel.”

The captain
nodded sadly and said, “Well, our ship came under attack. If it weren’t for you guys being held hostage I would’ve given up or let them destroy the ship.”

“I know how you feel. This life has been longer than our psyche’s can handle. We’re not built for such prolonged monotony.”

“Well I think that’s about to come to an end very soon. I just hope it all works out in our favor.”

“Life owes us that much. We’ve sacrificed too much to be dealt another blow.”

A different, strange mech whispered to Chris, “I hear you’re an Earthman. I thought you insects were deemed too inconsequential to be included in this grand experiment. I guess you must have evolved a little since then.”

Chris
didn’t know what to say to that so he shoved the asshole mech gently away from him and tried his best to ignore it and zero in on the captain’s conversation again.

The mech shoved him back, but harder, and said, “Don’t you ever touch me
, you pond scum lowlife.”

Samda stepped up and grabbed the
jerk by the tentacle. She pushed on his back with three of her tentacles and said, “I understand you’ve been through a lot, but none of that is our fault. Take your frustrations out on someone that deserves it.” Then she pushed him forward so that he was again moving with the crowd.

He didn’t look too pleased
, but he must have decided against further instigation when none of his people came to his defense.

Samda whispered, “I have a feeling most of these guys have been driven slowly insane. We’d better watch our backs.”

She was right. It was difficult to tell if most of the mechs even had a personality trapped inside. They moved and acted like automatons, except for the few who seemed to have snapped and given in to their frustrations and growing aggression. Only a small handful seemed to have retained their faculties.

Chris
wondered how long they had been trapped in those mechs. From what the captain had said, it had been a hundred thousand years or so.

Just as he closed in on the captain’s conversation again, they arriv
ed at the barracks.

Barracks

The barracks were barren
, devoid of any furniture whatsoever. The room was cavernous and empty. The walls were brown, as was the floor. There were no windows and the lighting was poor.

Chris
nearly made the mistake of asking how they were supposed to sit down or sleep until he remembered that those things weren’t necessary when they were in the robotic suits.

A dirty mech with dents and scuffs on his metal body sidled over to the captain.
Chris moved closer to overhear the conversation.

It said, “Welcome back
, sir.”

“Thank you
, Number Eight.”

“We’ll know soon enough if your mission was a success.”

“Did she build the processor already?”

“Yes
, but her specs were way different from the ones we used to design her. Before she killed those who helped build it, one of them described it to me. He said that there’s a deep concave indentation she had dug out of the floor in the processor room. It’s off-limits, so I’ve never seen it myself. It’s inlaid with a golden-colored polymer and has several holes at the bottom. He didn’t know what those were for but he said they looked like drainage ports. There’s a crane at the edge of the crater and there are thousands of docks with hydraulic lifts on each. He thinks those are for the stasis pods. They are positioned all around the crater lip. He said there was a huge complex contraption that hangs over the center of the crater. He thought it was some type of laser, but he wasn’t sure. His hypotheses was that the DNA would be extracted from the aliens, positioned somewhere in the crater and then it would be combined by the laser beam. I told him he was an idiot. That was the last thing I said to him, because he was called away right then and never returned. None of the workers did.”

The captain sighed. “She’s a cruel one
, but maybe she knows what she’s doing. We have no choice but to put our faith in her.”

Number Eight nodded and said, “I wish I could have gone with you. We all went a little crazy here. At least you had a mission
, a reason for being. But thank you for coming back. Some of us had lost hope. Some of us thought you’d abandoned us to save yourselves.”

The captain shook his head defiantly
, as if to say that that was ridiculous. “It’ll all be over soon. We’ll see what’s to become of us before long.”

“I wouldn’t hold out hope that it’ll end well for us. She barely recognizes that we’re even alive. She regards us the same way we would regard a stone. If we’re lucky she’ll consider it a waste of her time to kill us off.”

“I take it no one ever came up with a way to overthrow her.”

“Several did. They’re all dead now. She can’t be stopped. She has our DNA inside her. She can anticipate our every move.”

Chris saw that Samda had also moved closer, to eavesdrop. She gave him a quizzical look. This had become more complicated and far more disastrous than they’d been led to believe. One thing was for sure, if the captain’s life wasn’t even guaranteed, then they stood less of a chance of getting back to Earth.

Chris
interrupted the captain’s conversation. “Was human DNA used to create her?” He already knew the answer, but he wanted to be sure.

The captain said, “No. Earth is in a different galaxy and we didn’t use samples from
outside our own galaxy to create her.”

Chris
said, “Then that means she won’t be able to anticipate what I do, because my DNA isn’t inside her. If there’s a way to stop her then I want to be involved too.”

“Why do you care?”

“Because I want to go home.”

“She’
ll kill you if she thinks you pose a threat to her or the experiment.”

“It sounds like she might kill us all anyway.”

“I see your point, but we don’t have a workable plan, and I fear that it’s too late to try anything anyway.”

“If you come up with anything, let me know and I’ll do my part.”

Samda added, “Count me in too.”

Planning Escape

When they were alone, the captain said to Samda and
Chris, “What you propose is foolhardy. There’s still a chance that this will all work out well for everyone. The new god that she creates will not be like her. It will be better in every way. It may stop her from interacting with us. It may even destroy her.”

Samda said, “It sounds like you’re the only one who’s staying positive about all of this. Have you considered that you could be wrong?”

The captain hung his head. “I refuse to believe I sacrificed so much for so little. I have to believe this will all end well for me and for my people.”

Chris
asked, “If it doesn’t work out, don’t you think it’s a good idea to at least have a backup plan?”

The captain nodded. “Let me ask around and see what we have to work with.” With that, he walked away.

Chris said to Samda, “These poor bastards have been through hell. I refuse to go through it with them.”

“I’m with you. If there’s a chance to escape, even if it might mean we’re caught and killed, I say we go for it. It’s better to die trying to be free than to live forever as a slave.”

Chris said, “I am curious to see what God will be like though.”

“I’m worried that if we stick around long enough to find out, then it’ll be too late to attempt an escape.”

“It might already be too late.”

The captain returned and interrupted their conversation. “I just heard that our ship is still here and that it’s intact.”

“I would hope so. You just landed it.”

“No, that’s her ship. She designed that one
, and it’s too out in the open to sneak aboard. The ship I’m talking about is the one we used to come here. I assumed she would’ve used its parts, but apparently her tech is more advanced than ours. That might be a godsend. If we can get to the ship, we stand a chance of getting out of here.”

“Even with all the defenses she has in place?”
Chris asked.

“It’s our only hope.
If we get killed escaping, that’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

Samda said, “Me too.”

“I just have to find a way to get close to it.”

Snitch

The captain walked off with renewed enthusiasm. It was odd to watch. Just hours ago,
Chris had viewed the captain and his crew as oppressive beings, keeping him from his freedom, but it turned out that they actually had it far worse than he did.

Samda whispered, “Just look at those poor creatures. They just stand around and stare off into space.”

“You would too if you had been trapped for a hundred thousand years with no hope of escape.”

“I guess it doesn’t help that this planet sucks. This is the first planet besides my own that I’ve ever set foot on and I can’t wait to get out of here.”

The jerk mech that had tried to insult Chris shoved another, near catatonic mech aside roughly.

It came right up to them and said, “I heard about your daring plan to escape and I won’t allow it. She’ll kill the rest of us for helping you. Shit, she’ll kill us just because you made her mad. I’m going to tell her, and there’s nothing you two morons can do to stop me. And it just might help me curry favor with her.”

Before Chris had a chance to rebut the jerk, they were all summoned over an intercom.

The
god’s voice was sweet but stern. “All personnel are to come to the processing bay. All of your hard work is about to finally pay off.”

“Shit,” whispered
Chris. “It’s too late.”

The Grand Experiment

Chris
and Samda funneled out of the barracks with the rest of the mechs.

A mech whispered to the captain, “This is good. If she’s already finished it means you collected everything she needed. I was worried you might have missed a specimen.”

“No way. We both know what she would do if I let her down. I collected DNA we probably didn’t even need.”

“Better to be safe than sorry.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Let’s see what all your hard work has accomplished then.”

Samda touched Chris’ shoulder. She whispered, “If we get a chance to break away from the group, we should take it. We need to find that ship before it’s too late.”

“I haven’t seen a single doorway yet. It might already be too late to act.”

He was right. They came out into the center of the octagonal structure where the collector ship was still docked. Its landing pads were clamped down tight.

There were other doors all around
, but none that they could make it to without drawing attention to themselves. They followed the group across the empty courtyard and then through an opposite door. The doorway was huge and it was immediately evident why it had to be. All of the contraptions inside were immense.

The
god was standing on a platform fifteen feet above the ground. She waved her arms to guide the incoming crowd to their positions.

They were beckoned to walk around a large concave crater in the center of the room. All of the stasis pods
with their alien occupants inside were positioned at the very edge of the crater. A huge convex structure was situated twenty feet above the concave indentation. Chris had heard there might be a laser device there, but he couldn’t see one.

Once all of the mechs were in the room and standing in a circle, the
god looked down on them from her platform.

Chris
looked around in a panic, trying to spot his body in one of the stasis pods. He noticed Samda looking about for hers too.

This room was high tech. If the rest of the facility was barren, this room more than made up for it. It had a high domed ceiling. The walls looked to be coated in some unidentifiable slick substance,
resembling rubber or plastic. The entire room was a brilliant white except for the pods and the mechs that now filled it.

Even though he was wearing a mechanized unit, he could feel the floor beneath his feet vibrating gently.

He looked to his left and was upset to see a familiar mech beside him. It was the dickhead who had called him pond scum and threatened to out him to the god. The mech looked at him with barely concealed contempt and whispered, “I would imagine that this is a huge honor for something as lowly as you are. You probably don’t even know what’s going on. Don’t worry about me snitching on you anymore. It’s too late to escape now.”

Chris
ignored him and looked up in time to see the god open her mouth to speak. She looked angry, as though the anger had been there all along and she was only now allowing it out into the open. It was an ugly, devious, vicious look that scared the hell out of him.

He hoped they hadn’t screwed something up. He hoped the captain wasn’t the one to inspire her ire.

Then, when he looked into her hate filled eyes, he realized she was simply evil. She didn’t need a reason.

He thought about grabbing Samda and dashing from the room, but when he saw the huge doors slam shut, he knew he had waited too long to act.