Chapters All the King’s Horses
What is there left to save, when you are more machine then human?
Chapter one: Toy Soldier
REM Initializing…..
Medulla Suspension – True Sub-Cortex link – True Frontal Cortex isolation – True
…. Stable REM State Acquired.
Recalling Logged Event////Emulation 16-5
Darkness, broken by cracks of sickly light.
Muffled sounds, artillery in the distance, gunfire and unearthly screams echoing.
Tightness, armor chafing against hard skin, chest weighed down, pressed into dirt but unyielding.
No panic, no need for air. Ground shakes at nearby impact. Hands explore their close surroundings, tracing the sharp edges of fallen rubble.
Freedom through force, pushing the debris aside and emerging into the broken world.
Mist creeping in through fresh gaps in the concrete structure hides the outside from view. Blind.
Check ammo; eighty seven pulse rounds remaining.
Check armor; chest section damaged, significant gap over upper left abdomen. Blood loss? Negligible.
Rubble is unstable underfoot, something else trapped beneath, long tendril protruding. Unmoving. Target was neutralized.
HUD reestablishes contact with sat-com, roof of this building missing. AR map flashes up and matches the contours of the unseen street. Green silhouettes move through the virtual plane shadowed by their call signs.
Twelve units accounted for, one outside on the ground. Evaluate.
“ Sarah, I’ve decided.”
Street is deserted, visibility eight feet in dense fog. Theta-Four struggling across pavement, damage to right leg critical, left leg unaccounted for, left arm unaccounted for. Chances of field repair; nil.
Check ammo; Eighty Six pulse rounds remaining.
Establish recovery beacon. Await regroup… Eleven Units accounted for. Continue sweep.
Howl permeates the mist. New contacts moving closer, flashes of artillery illuminate their shape through the sheet white aura, huge and lumbering. Four at least.
Moving to intercept.
“ I’m going to the bureau. I don’t want to live anymore.”
…
Syntax Error…. External interference. Abandoning REM State.
Startling green eyes flicked open, the only indication that the reclined figure was once again among the waking world. Instinctually they assessed the dank apartment, taking stock of the boarded glassless window, broken remnants of furniture and the sound of dripping water from the tiny flooded bathroom. Reality reasserting dominance over dream like simulation, the jade orbs relaxed and swiveled to look at the skinny girl from whom the interruption had originated.
Lying curled up upon a filthy mattress, the tawny youngster fumbled with a lock of her haphazard black hair as she mumbled.
“Probably should have gone sooner, hindsight is a terrible thing.”
There was much that could be said about the adolescent. Life in the underbelly of the world had taken its toll on her lithe body, old scars and bandaged wounds acted as a temporal map of past encounters. Poverty had stripped her of all but the barest essentials of humility, rags that had been scavenged or stolen and sown together by hand. Despite her dreadful appearance, her relatively unmarked face bore the worst indications of suffering. Beneath dull lifeless eyes hung the perpetual nervous grin that earmarked her as a hyena of the slums. This was a child whose boat had tipped over the edge of sanity and now could not stop laughing at the crumbling world. It was either that or scream.
Painfully pulling herself into a sitting position, the girl turned to look at her as yet silent observer. Apparently, humans make eleven critical assumptions within in the first seven seconds meeting one another.
Familiarity saved the girls stomach from turning out the pilfered rations as she patiently waited for the expected protest, meeting the unbroken gaze with a twitching smile. When it finally did speak, the voice arrived as a kind of metallic resonation, like a child shouting down a long metal tube.
“We have spoken of this before Kat.”
Shrugging dismissively, Katrina Weatherly dragged herself upright and walked unsteadily to the boarded window. Yellowing smog curled through the world outside, rapping around the tops of lampposts like a sticky foam and hiding the street from view. There were few buildings like this one left in the world, many of the mega-corps opting for modular plasti-create units that were cheap to mentain and replace. Out here in the sticks though, where gangs and mobs lorded over the corpse of society, some old masonry buildings still remained. Never having been cleared or reclaimed. Left for dead because it was considered ‘unprofitable’. So very human.
“Gona’ have to eventually.” She stammered weekly, staring unblinking through thin gaps between planks. Gunfire and shouting in the distance hinted at the confutations taking place all over the broken suburb. Now, by the sound of things, a fight had broken out in the unseen street below their ramshackle hovel “Now seems as good a time as any to get the fuck out of dodge”
Once again the hushed raspy voice issued from the depths of the barber clad ‘female’, her jaw unmoving as mechanical words strung themselves into unpunctuated verse.
“You are traumatized Migration to Equestria is unacceptable Risk too great and process is permanent.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Barked the girl, suddenly shaking with uncontainable panic, “It’s on the hollocrons every day, ‘Leave everything behind and come to Equestria’! I know it sounds too good to be true, but fuck Sarah! I’m sick of this fucking world. I don’t want to live anymore. I just can’t take another day of-”
Gunfire rang out across the street. Katrina blinked, wind knocked from her and ears ringing from the deafening interruption. She was on the floor, covered protectively by the being she had referred to as ‘Sarah’. Plaster dust floated down through new shafts of pale daylight, echoing the spray of molten rounds that had embedded themselves in the far wall.
Curling inwards, Kat whimpered as angered shouts and the sound of heavy footsteps closed the distance to the font of the building.
“They have found us Now we leave.” Spoke the ‘Sarah’ plainly, moving swiftly to its feet and urging the teen to move.
Resisting the urge to curl up into a fetal ball, Kat crawled hastily to the mattress and swept up the tattered bag that lay to one side. With barely a moment to breathe, a vice like grip wrapped around her stick thin arm, guiding her towards the unhinged bathroom door.
“Wait.” The doll instructed, releasing its hold and stepping into the small room.
Long since abandoned, there had been no reason for World-Corp to maintain the city’s basic amenities. Waste from the nearby super city had been pumped straight into over taxed sewers. Some structures had sealed off their drains, but here the lavatory was flooded with regurgitated rot. Fortunately, this was exactly what Sarah was looking for.
From the floor below came the crash of frail doors being kicked aside, coupled with whoops of murderous intent. Sinking down against the pealed wall, Katrina covered her ears hoping the block out the terrible advance of their pursuers. As the pounding footfalls ascended the unstable staircase, the rending of rotten wood was lost among the racket of the elated gang.
Another crash issued barely meters from their own feeble hiding place, followed closely by another spray of laughter and gunfire.
Suddenly the apartment was filled with the splintering of chipboard, the firm hand across her mouth the only thing preventing the youngster from screaming as the foot appeared through the door. Curses foul enough to curdle milk rebounded as the owner of the appendage struggled to detach himself from the doorway, returning a solid blow that knocked the offending obstacle clean off its runners.
Through the terminally opened door, a snarling red face appeared, the livid scared smile across its cheeks casting no reflection on the fury of the humiliated ganglander.
Hungry eyes swept the empty room, finding nothing to sate an appetite for violence but an old mattress and crumbled furniture. Unstated, the feral man turned and ran screaming into the next available target, the sound of tortured metal braking free from ancient plaster following the two retreating figures through the yellowing smog of Salem.
Authors note, a personal challenge:
When it comes to unfinished projects, you can call me Mistress Artha-Job. One of the main reasons why I never complete stories is my constant desire to return to previous chapters and rework them. Before forging ahead with a venture dear to my heart, I’ve first got to brake this cycle and prove to myself that I CAN see a story through to its conclusion.
Thus this story is a personal challenge to myself and comes with some self imposed rules;
1: Once a chapter is published, I cannot return and edit it into oblivion. Changing spelling is okay but no major alterations. I’ll just have to live with the stigma of poor characterization and horrendous sentence structure. 2; I will endeavor to develop the story in both readability and appeal with each successive chapter, applying any constructive criticism I’ve received and generally trying to improve my writing skills on the whole. 3: At least one chapter (1000 words or more) must be posted every week, forcing me to keep pace. Given that Thursday is my last proper day off in each working week, we’ll use that as the deadline.
If I stray from any of these self imposed restrictions, especially the one on timing, feel free to badger the heck out of me (Please find your badger enclosed in the standard Fimfic commenter’s package).
Cherry
Cover image by arsenic-poptarts
All the King’s Horses
Chapter Two: Tunnel Vision
While they had long since shaken their pursuers, after a somewhat narrow escape the unusual pair avoided the major streets where ever they could. Scrabbling across fallen rubble in the old factory district and cutting through alleyways between the still standing buildings, they kept an exhaustive pace until the tepid shadows of night threatened to steal the path from under them. An old fire escape had served as a beacon of respite, so the flat rooftop of an old apartment complex had played host to the slumbering travelers.
Come the light of morning, Katrina awoke stiff and uncomfortable under a grey featureless sky. Though the unbroken cloud cover served to trap the heat of the day, it had still been a bitter night out in the open. Perhaps it would have been more poetic if she had rested her head on Sarah, but right now she wanted to keep as far away from the synthetic woman as possible. Besides, the harsh pebble dash ground would have been softer. Instead she had made do with pilfered filthy sheets and a handy wall. As yet unclosed wounds sung prickly pomes of pain as her stretching muscles disturbed them, neck and spine joining the chorus with plaintive aches from the awkward sleeping posture.
Presently the youth was grudgingly seeing to the wounds on her companions hands. Though the floor had been just as rotten as Sarah had expected, the boards of the ceiling beneath had not. Several matchstick sized splinters had become lodged beneath her torn skin. For any normal human this would have been a simple matter of pulling the splinters and disinfecting the wounds, a task most could accomplish by themselves. From the look of Sarah’s limbs though, the digits elongated and palm shrunken where the flesh had begun to retreat, it was clear this was no ‘normal’ human.
Biting her lip in concentration, Kat carefully guided the sharp metal shard along the plastic like coating that had grown over the protruding splinter. Cutting the faux flesh wasn’t the problem, it was avoiding the healthy skin on either side that held the challenge, especially with hands that trembled from malnutrition. With the first splinter exposed, the teen picked up one of the small grey cubes that represented their remaining provisions and bit off a chunk. Chewing carefully, she gripped the end of the wood between a finger and thumb and pulled in one swift movement. Clear gel oozed from the split, quickly swept away as Katrina thumbed the reconstituted foodstuff into the fresh lesion.
Satisfied, she straitened the crick in her neck before turning her attention to the next splinter, choosing to ignore a telltale movement in her peripheral vision. This close to her companion, the younger could see the green eyes twitching and blinking as they navigated some crude internal menu. Given that, with such a longwinded method of communication, Sarah rarely said anything unless it was necessary, Kat would have normally waited attentively if it looked like her mute partner was about to speak. Today however, she didn’t feel like debating her decision with someone who had all the charisma of a half brick and even less tact.
“You are troubled Do you want to talk about it.” Crackled the artificial voice, emanating from beneath the barber coat.
Pulling rather harder then necessary, Kat discarded the next slightly bloody splinter and affixed the last of the nutrient cube to the bleeding arm.
“No, my mind’s made up. I’m going and that’s final.”
In the long pause while Sarah’s next sentence assembled itself, the girl turned away to check over her own dressings. Deep cuts and burns were present across her frail body, a reminder of her recent ordeal though not all were inflicted by her captors. Kat shuddered at resurfacing memories, each moment attached its corresponding injury. They’d need to find some medical gel soon, or these were going to get infected… again.
“Not what I meant Kat.” Sarah replied at last, another brief silence interrupting while another response was assembled.
“Katrina what you have been through is terrible and I am sorry I couldn’t find you sooner. I know it must hurt but you are safe now.”
“That was awfully quick, Sis.” Cut the youth, narrowing her bitter expression, “Do I smell a pre-prepared response? You must have been running that over in your head for hours. What? You want me to think you care? The only reason you’re even asking me at all is to find out whether I’m going to slow us down.”
Without so much as glancing at her cybernetic ‘sibling’, Kat carefully stood up and walked to the edge of the rooftop, hoping to pick out a route through the abandoned dockyard. Though they were above the heaviest smog, she still could only just make out the waterline through the yellow haze. That was something else too; the colors here were far brighter than the rest of the otherwise grey cityscape. Old brick buildings had a definite ‘redness’ about their walls, rusted lampposts had a brown gloss to their mottled surface and the smog had a vividly poisonous tint.
During the progressive emergence of the Equestrian universe, ambient magic that radiated from the boundary of the two worlds swirled in unpredictable storms across the globe. Salem had been one of the first cities to experience hotspots of lethal thalamic radiation.
Had the youngster been familiar with the history of the once infamous town, she would have appreciated the irony. As it was, the only thing that concerned Kat was avoiding any places where the colors of the world became so bright that they melted away the corruption of human flesh. Thalamic radiation was present throughout the whole city to some degree, but the true hotspots meandered unseen through the streets, generally giving the unvigilant a few seconds notice before their skin began to blister and burn.
“I am here and if you need to talk I am very good at listening.”
Katrina scoffed, feeling her ever present grin straining as felt the anger bubbling through her stomach.
“Gods that line is so overused you must have it on quick select or something.”
Clenching her fists, she turned to regard the plastic woman with an air of mirthful distain. “Okay, you want to talk? Fine, let’s talk then. How about numbers? You really like numbers don’t you, heck you practically ARE numbers. Let’s talk about the number forty seven, hmm?”
Stood practically chin to chest with Sarah’s looming figure, Kat glared up at the unchanging expression. “Two months. Two. God. Damn. Months I was with those… those monsters! And on day forty seven you wandered in and took a seat in the back row! Were you there to watch the ‘performance’, or just to socialize?”
Seeing the jade eyes flicking franticly, the girl cut in with an accusing finger before a defense could be mustered. “Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare pull out some shit about ‘tactical advantages’, you could have taken out everyone in that room if you wanted! You could have killed every one of those fuckers, but you just sat there and WATCHED!”
Some instincts can bypass even the best programming. Sarah blinked, slamming a hand across her throat in an effort to muffle the speaker within.
“The sooner I’m away from you the better.” Grimaced the shaking youngster, stalking away to bundle the sheets into a moth eaten backpack.
“And that’s another thing." She barked again, eyes returning to their assesment of the hidden horizen "First open medical terminal we come across, get you’re damn voice fixed. It’s like talking to some retarded AI. Bad enough that you look like a wax manikin without sounding like a kitchen utensil-”
Braking off mid sentence, Kat’s eyes narrowed at the distant riverbank. Something large was moving up the road along the dockside, sending up a ripple through the smog before it. Through a slim gap in the puss-like mists she caught sight of glinting solar panels on top of a long vehicle. Several others crawled along in its wake, the procession moving slowly to avoid attention.
“A convoy!” She yelped with a hint of desperation, foul mood suddenly abandoned. “They must be making a short cut though to Portland!”
Slinging the backpack across her shoulder, the girl leapt onto the fire escape and started to descend, taking the stairs two at a time. Mute once more, Sarah followed close behind, moving steadily as though in a daze.
They caught up with the caravan of vehicles in the open ground beside a crate peppered loading dock. Luckily the precession had slowed to a crawl through the previous built up area, for fear that the clunking engines might draw the ears of marauding ‘fun seekers’. From behind the rusted remains of an overturned wagon, Katrina watched the convoy gradually accelerating to just above walking pace.
“Okay,” she whispered, rummaging around in the rucksack and withdrawing a crime against fashion, “Put this on. Let me do the talking and try not to look so… scary.”
Taking the abomination, Sarah remained distant, staring into the middle distance even after Katrina began to pull her by the arm towards the open road. Anyone who had followed their heated interaction over the last hour might have thought she was upset over her ‘sister’s open rejection. Yet this was not and had never been the case. With implants limiting her emotional range, the doll-woman felt little more than voids labeled with the socially expected response. Useful for following orders unquestionly, useless for any real empathy.
What was bothering her was far more physical; something wasn’t quite right with her biological nerves. What little remained of her original unscarred skin was tingling, itching like a dermal disease had managed to evade the billions of nanites constantly repairing her body.
Had she still been human (and willing to tempt fate) Sarah might have openly said ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this’.
Had she been completely unaffected by Kat’s harsh words, she might have at least paid attention to the vibe.
As it was, all she did was cycle her radiation scrubbers.
This was a mistake.
All the King’s Horses
Chapter Three: Hitchhikers
Simon Golla was not in the most comfortable of predicaments. Before their ferry into the decollate city, the more capable members of the convoy had voted on who would go as ‘pathfinder’ through the ganglands. After several arguments along the lines of ‘this was your damn idea’ the young man had been handed the short straw, along with the aged rifle that summed up the caravan’s total armament.
Walking a few paces in front of the lead transport, it was the dusty youth’s duty to pick solid roads to travel down, whilst keeping an eye open for dangerous urban fauna and pockets of radiation. The role of Pather was an unpopular necessity, partly because the unlucky sod would have to walk, but mostly because they’d be the first to get shot during an ambush. Then again, at least there wasn’t too much of him to actually aim for.
‘Fax’, as he was known to his caravan buddies, was a lithe young man whom would have possessed the body of an athlete if he knew where to acquire one legally. As it was, he looked like an underweight rake with the face of nervous ferret. Topped by a congealed mop of tawny hair and a scraggy tuft of beard, with but the addition of a beret he could have easily passed for an art student, the sort of person who would have lived off Ramen noodles even if they were rolling in credits. Scruffy cargo pants and a utility jacket served as the majority of his clothing, along with bandoleer for water and basic supplies. This was a man expecting to be left behind at the first sign of trouble, all the gear he’d need to survive kept close to hand just in case the need arose for him to become collateral statistic.
Barely into his second decade, Fax had cultivated a great many talents in his various occupations. Right now, he was acutely aware that these did not include being used for target practice or being abandoned in the middle of a city ruled by crime lords and gangs.
Though his nerves were stretched to braking point, Fax’s watch had been remarkably uneventful, discounting false alarms and narrow escapes. Several times the pathfinder fancied he’d seen faces watching from the roadside rubble, or spotted shadows that might just have been someone running off through the gutted shell of a building. Once or twice they’d had hide the three transports off the road when they heard the thumping of ‘cutters’ getting too close, gangbangers favoured mode of transport.
In a show of appalling timing, one van had shorted out during their passage through the worst of the ganglands. Thankfully the almighty crack of plasma running to earth did not seem to attract any more attention than a few startled mutie-rats. His decision to follow the banks of the muddy river had paid off, the eerie silence of the dead city broken only by the sucking the tepid river and the unhealthy thrum from the rickety transport engines.
Now after a long stressful journey through perilous no man’s land, it was looking as though they would be home free! Somewhere beyond that hazy yellow mist would be the open wastes of the freeway, raising the city like some colossal desert serpent. All they had to do was get past the shipping yard and they’d have a straight run to Portland.
Fate has a wonderful sense of ironic timing. Just as the young Fax was considering the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, two figures appeared in the gloom.
Unsure what he was looking at, Fax razed a hand for the convoy to slow. Before him approached a parody of the contrary. They had stepped out from behind a storage crate, appeared to be alone and more importantly unarmed.
Leading the pair was a short raven haired woman, waving enthusiastically at the sight of the pathfinder as they approached. Unarmed, clad mostly in mismatched rags and with nothing but a backpack on her person, it was pretty clear she wouldn’t have gotten far in this unforgiving urban environment alone. By proxy this meant that she was either not far from ‘home’, or her companion was hiding more than just a thin body beneath her heavy clothing. Dwarfing its comrade, the second loomed like a brittle stick figure, all thin limbs and angular features. It is a testament to the fragility of the human perception that even in a life threatening situation, our attention can be thrown by the smallest of inconsistencies. In this case, the ‘detail’ in question was multihued deerstalker, knitted to look like waves of colour were circumventing the wearers head. Like the boat in the middle of a desert, it rested lopsided on the stick-man’s vaguely feminine head, looking utterly out of place.
Reflexively the man started raised his rifle to eye level, but unsure how to react paused with eyes riveted to the odd couple. Holding his ground as the two finally came into focus, Fax lifted a hand in what he hoped was a gesture of confident refusal.
“That’s close enough, Scrubbers.” He instructed, voice only wavering slightly.
Apparently seeing the firearm for the first time, the girl lowered her hands and whispered something along the lines of ‘I thought you said they were unarmed’ to the shady figure walking a step behind. Seemingly unperturbed, the taller of the two shrugged in an uncomfortable way, as though the action did not come naturally.
Fax was having none of this. Though the girl seemed harmless enough there was no doubt that she wasn’t far from her home turf. No doubt she had friends nearby.
“Just blowing through here, don’t want nah’ trouble.”
“Oh, that’s good,” chirped the first “We don’t want any trouble either. Actually, we’re trying to get as far away from trouble as physically possible and were kinda’ hoping for a lift.”
“No can do mate.” The man bit sternly, now slightly unsettled by the girl’s unbroken smile. There was something else too, something putting his teeth on edge but that he couldn’t quite put his finger.
Desperation seemed to inspire bravery in girl and she stepped forwards despite the raised weapon “Look, we just need to get out of city-“
“Fax? What’s going on up there?”
Wincing, the unwilling guard glanced back towards the lead transport and spotted the outline of a worried equine face observing the confrontation.
“No worries, Ms Salve.” He called “Tell Earl to start her up again, I’ve got this covered.”
Turning back to the unwelcome guests, Fax noted how the smaller one seemed to be baring the way of the taller figure with an outstretched arm. Behind him the rumble of several poorly maintained pulse engines began to course through the otherwise silent dock yard. No, not silent. Only now did the lookout realise what else had been gnawing at the edge of his senses. Descending from beyond the range of human hearing, a tinny whine had begun to creep in to fill the high pitch void above the transports gruff motors.
Dread overtook the young man’s features. Revolving as though he were mounted on turntable, the horrified pathfinder gazed into the yellowing depths in time to spot the mechanical wolves streaking through the dense smog.
“CUTTERS!”
Three giant wheeled trikes charged across the rubble as though it were open road while their larger counterpart careered up the middle of the cleared street. Each was a Frankenstein creation of salvaged automobiles, their riders equally as hellish and armed to the teeth with everything that could cave skulls, gun down runners or slice flesh from their victims.
With fear driving his frantic stride, Fax broke into a run for the lead transport and screamed at the top of his lungs.
“EDD! GET HER MOVING!”
Too late he saw the trike pull around the side of adapted bus, one rider leaping off and pointing something though the driver’s window. With seconds to react, Fax dove to the ground and rolled away as the second rider shot past and tried to open his mind with a spiked cudgel. Distantly he heard a sickening crack and the crunch of metal as something careened off into the side of a concrete barrier. Finding his feet once more the pathfinder sprinted towards the transport as screams echoed from the panicking civilians within.
Raising his rifle Fax franticly sought a target, iron sights sweeping from the blood spattered windshield to the back of the convoy. Two shots from the old leaver action went wide, another found the font of the armoured humvie and pinged off into the mist. The other bikes had caught up and were already sweeping towards him. With the first transport blocked in the others all three were sitting ducks.
Practically leaping the last few feet to the cabin, he caught the iron handle with one hand, swung himself inside with gathered momentum... and briefly saw the manic grin before a gun butt introduced him to the dark world of the unconscious.
Abstract voices moved in a fog around him. Shouting? Maybe an argument? Something tumbled onto of him before scrambling away shrieking. Pain blossomed in the front of his face, the taste of iron dripping through his slack lips.
“Shut the fuck up!”
Barked the first voice, reducing the screams to fait sobbing whimpers.
“Shit Razz, leave her and get the rest of them out’a there.” Came a second, deeper and raspy like sandpaper “T’. Git after those other two. An’ try not to shoot’em. No need to go fucking up the merchandise.”
“Holy- where the fucks his arm? Hay Boss! Charley’s dead!” Another one, this time younger and standing some way off from the bus.
“So?” Asked ‘sandpaper’ apathetically
“Can I have his duds?”
Stifling a moan below the raucous laughter, Fax forced his one working eye to open and squinted into the burry blue tinged world. Careful not to move lest the raiders suspected he was awake he glanced around, noting several figures kneeling down near him with their heads shielding their faces. All around where the moving figures of the bandits, some holding weapons and shouting for the other transports to empty out, others standing and watching the fun.
‘Wait, blue? Something’s... iffy about the sky... huh, iffy, that’s a funny word.’
“Let me go you, you ruffian!” Beyond the haphazard steel of the transport came a panicked baying as something was manhandled out of the open doors and kicked into the street.
“Haaaay, looky what I found!”
A whoop of triumph went up around the assembled marauders, along with cat calls and mirthful laughs.
Someone was clapping, bringing the gang to attention as hooves scrabbled to gain purchase. Risking a twitch, Fax craned his head slightly to see the pail teal outline of the Equine turning to face her aggressors. Salve was shaking but remained decisively upright despite the mistreatment.
“You despicable cretins don’t frighten me. Let them go or I’ll... I’ll turn you in to cockroaches!”
“Aww, is that so?” Jested a tall bald man as he stalked towards the grandstanding mare. “See ah’ know a little about you freaks, an ah’m fairly damn sure you don’t have that kind of spunk in ya.”
Cheers and hollers went up around the dockyard as the immense man unhitched the obscenely oversize gun from his back and pressed the barrel against the stricken pony’s temple. Terrified blue eyes glared up at him, brimming with tears and defiance.
Sandpaper chuckled, amused at the brave front the animal was putting on “What do you think boys? Light meat, or dark?”
“LET. HER. GO!”
Confused silence blanketed the crowd, every face turning to look at the gangly young urchin who had stepped out from the toppled mass of containers. Clenched firmly in her unwavering grasp was a large nail pitted bat, undeniably the same one that had nearly given Fax open top skull. Whether it was her intention to threaten the gathered mob was lost among their mirthful laughter at the gutsy youngster.
“Fuck me this party’s just full of heroes today, would someone kindly-”
Sandpaper’s order cut short in a crack of bone, unheard by the majority of the gangsters whom were closing in on the girl from all sides. Some, at least. The others, further away from the action and unoccupied with taking prisoners, had noticed something very odd happening above them.
A thick soled boot stepped over the pathfinder’s fallen body, offering a view of a tall stranger holding up the limp body of Sandpaper. Thunder roared around the clearing as the cannon spat glowing death. Those who weren’t felled by the barrage spun around to see a stick-like figure in a striped deerstalker, now striding to flank them and holding their dead leader aloft like a riot shield. A few with guns returned fire into their ex-leader’s corpse, spraying the pathfinder with a fine rain of blood.
Senses scrambling to get a purchase on solid comprehension, Fax's body acted alone while his brain tried to catch up with events. Lifting his pain stricken head, the man rolled on his stomach and pushed himself back up to his knees. With a grunt of agonising effort, he crawled over to the hunched bystanders and pointedly began urge them towards the open door of the transport. Salve was clambering unsteadily to her hooves, eyes still pinpoints of congealed fear. Ignoring the spinning world he tried to shout over the gunfire, driving the pony to get onboard, but found his shattered jaw unwilling to respond.
Behind him, another volley saw more ganger’s fall tumble, their rout quickly ended by the tearing flashes of superheated uranium. What few survivors there were, vanished post haste the swirling smog, their footsteps and shouts of alarm all that remained of their threat to the convoy.
Something clattered away across the concrete as Fax tried to ease himself up the side of the transport. In his peripheral vision the young man saw the stranger march up to the short girl, take the bat from her grasp and grab her by the scruff of her ragged jumper. It was coming back, straight at the convoy! Dizzy from his furious injuries, the first steps towards the bus doors resulted in him nearly greeting the concrete. Even with his blurry vision, he could almost see the exit from the docks now, if he could just get the converted bus moving, as long as everyone else was ready they could still get away.
It was in this moment that an observant little voice in the back of his mind pointed something out. ‘Why can I see the Dock exit road?’
Simon Golla turned around... And froze.
Quite unperturbed by a torrent of verbal abuse, Sarah half threw her young charge onto the transport before turning to look at the pathfinder. High above, the yellowing smog was swirling away into grate congealed tendrils of poisonous either, coalescing on a single point high above the city within a sky of purest blue. At their feet the cloud banks that had once obscured their path were being drawn across the ground like ethereal snakes, pulled by some imperceptible breeze. She didn’t know what was happening, she didn’t much care. Whatever this thing was had chased away the bulk of the mod before she had made a move on the leader, a tactical advantage she had not let go to waste.
“You. Drive?” Queried a voice that sounded like a cheap toaster AI.
Fax assumed it had come from the stick-woman, but his eyes were riveted to the spectacle taking place high above Salam.
“Yuh” He slurred, the agony of his cracked jaw having to wait in line while his brain tried to cope.
A skeletal hand gripped the man’s shoulder, pealing him away from the bright glow growing within the mass of condensed cloud. Turning to face the owner of the surprisingly strong limb, Fax looked into a patchwork of scars and plastic, its jaws and bones wired together by thin protruding metal joints. Green unblinking eyes, the only thing about the face that still looked human, bored into his soul and found him wanting.
“You drive fast?”
And then, all hell broke loose... or more specifically, 'all Equestria'.
All the King’s Horses
Chapter Four: Blue
Blue. Now there was a color rarely associated with a ceiling. Yet here it was, a vista of unending blue stretching out above him.
Was he in a medical clinic?
Naw, couldn’t be. Medical care required employment with corporation approval. Tristan was a no body, a decimal point in a world of statistics.
Was he dead?
That was a distinct possibility; the bat had hit him pretty damn hard. For such a slight lass she certainly had a mighty fine swing. Around him a cool breeze was whipping past, suggesting a certain peaceful atmosphere. Everything was so bright too, stinging eyes that were used to the dark murky world of the forever clouded city. Long ago he had heard a guy on the holo-vid talking about ‘the afterlife’, how it was full of gates, endless feasting, new-mobile women and so on. That would be good; he could really go for a Moonglow right now.
Sadly the biker’s returning senses informed him that, along with being very much alive, the young man was also sporting a headache rivaling the intensity of the sun. Sticky warmth beneath him clung to the back of his neck and hair. Reaching up gingerly Tristan touched the slick and lifted his fingers back to inspect the tar like blood coating their tips.
‘So, defiantly alive, cus I can feel pain. Not indoors, cus there’s a breeze.’
Then the blue above him…
No, it couldn’t be. The sky was a dull grey even on the very best day. Sometimes it would take on green hues at dawn or dusk, perhaps brown if there was a dust storm on its way or black when another old city was ablaze. But Blue? It was just crazy. If some Joe anybody had come up and told him ‘the sky is blue’, he would have likely shot them on the spot to be sure the whatever brain fever the poor sucker had didn’t spread. Unfortunately by that line of logic though, now he’d have to shoot himself too.
Gingerly rolling onto his front, Tristan pushed himself onto his knees, taking a moment to steady his shot nerves before attempting to stand. Columns of dust lifted from the rubble strewn concrete, dancing among the abandoned Cutters and corpses that had once been his wing mates. Finally struggling to his feet, he stepped out from the pile of crates where he’d fallen and assessed the bloody mess. The convoy was gone too, though at least they’d left the quads.
There was an odd sensation of pressure, a fleeting susurration that made his ears pop. Instinctively he turned towards the source.
High above the industrial mega city of New Massachusetts, enormous tendrils of gas poured through the emptying sky, the accumulated smog of thousands of corporation factories drawn inexorably towards a sphere of gradually contracting cloud. The macabre remains of Salem shimmered as a pulse rippled across its surface, rushing past the awe struck biker faster than the speed of sound. Ears ringing with the sudden wave, Tristan kept his eyes fixed on the shrinking orb as he backed away towards the abandoned quad bikes. Around him the world was becoming sharp and vivid, the burning sensation of thalamic resonance tickling his scarred skin and filling his mouth with the tinny taste of ozone.
As the twisting sphere dwindled, the once darkened cloud began to take on a purple hue, glowing with an intense radiance that stung the onlooker’s eyes. Razing a hand to block out the worst of the light, Tristan could see shadowy fragments rising from the mega city, his suspicions compounded when the tip of the central tower suddenly leaned ominously and broke away.
Hands now upon the bike’s handles, Tristan swung a leg over the Quad’s saddle and fumbled with the ignition, a metallic clunk didn’t bode well for his escape plans. Cussing violently, the banger reached back to the top of the engine and began pulling long plugs from their sockets, swapping them around as quickly as his shaking hands permitted. In his peripheral vision the clouds convulsed suddenly, dragging his attention once more to the celestial display above the city. There was a moment of spacial confusion as the smog bank seemed to twist inside out and pass through eye watering dimensions.
And there it was, already several hundred meters across and growing rapidly. There was no sound, no sudden rush of wind or roar of thunder. Beyond a perfectly flat event horizon laid a scene not unlike a painting in a child’s story book, a bird’s eye view looking down onto the forested mountains of Equestria.
With a groan of half seized magnets the repulser drive thummed into life beneath him, just as the outline of the mega factory began to crumble and vanished beneath the silently encroaching oblivion. Jerking the quad around, Tristan slammed his foot down on the accelerator and rocketed towards the slip road leading away from the docklands. No sound reached him bar the crunch of rubble beneath the tires. Yet the reflection in the cracked wing mirrors told the story of sweeping doom. Behind him a wall of rubble and dust was being thrown up before the expanding window. Entire buildings uprooted from their centuries old foundations, experiencing a momentary freefall before being sucked into the colossal shield racing ahead of the emerging world. Beyond the dome the shattered remains of a corrupt civilization shone briefly as they entered the intense magical field, falling to the mountains as a sudden blizzard of whitest snow.
Now there was sound, the shaking of the earth beneath him and the roar of rubble rushing up behind. Cracks overtook the fleeing biker, crisscrossing long the length of the solid concrete road ahead as something black and twisting forced its way out of the long dead earth. Vivid green oozed bubbled up through the gaps like liquid life, spreading and consuming everything it touched. Far to his right an eruption rocked the already unstable ground, part of an old underground rail system lifted into the sky on immense branches, the remnants of its cargo carriages spilling onto the road ahead.
Screaming at the top of his lungs, Tristan swerved wildly as the quad leapt up the crumbling plasta-creat, his panicked reactions juggling between the shifting cracks and cartwhealing transport crates. Sheer luck saved him the poor choice of the highway, the tumbling crates forcing him to veer away as the slip road broke from its moorings. Careering past dock offices, he was treated to a side on view of the towering wave of debris, before he dove through a broken down fence and onto the industrial wastes.
Now not daring to look back, he pushed the quad as hard as it would go, his form a miniscule dot diving below the collapsing highway as the tidal wave of rubble folded down upon the last of the dockland.
Billowing dust engulfed him, stinging his eyes and choking his already burning lungs. Blind to the road ahead, Tristan kept his foot welded to the accelerator, flooring his stead long after the thunder of masonry had died. Blinking against the filth he felt the quad bike jarring against uneven terrain, dozens of potholes vying to be the first to unseat him, beaten to the punch by the end of a vehicle that loomed suddenly out of the murk.
With a cry of alarm he banked hard, barely clipping the edge of the convoy bus.
A feeling of weightlessness over took him as the bike was torn from his grasp.
***
“…tried to kill us.”
“Not that am’….“
“Keep that….just as…. Didn’t fix your jaw so that you could start questioning my judgment. Now away with you.”
Tristan blinked.
Blue.
Blue eyes hovered above him.
Bright teal light danced at the edges of his vision, obscuring everything but those eyes brimming with concern and hope, windows into the most wonderful sky of all.
As the light began to fade feeling returned to his aching body, gradually spreading along his spine and out into the very tips of his fingers and toes. Everything hurt; even his fingernails and hair ached, and that didn’t seem physically possible. The banger felt as though he’d been stretched out thinly and squashed back together. Reactively the man groaned and rolled into a fetal position, some small part of him taking note of the ruddy green hooves stepping back from his pained body.
“Careful now,” said the noble voice, something brushed against his ear in a comforting manner “I know it hurts but you’ll have to let things settle for a moment.”
Uncurling slightly the man blinked the dancing stars from his vision until he could make out the teal unicorn smiling above him. Seemingly satisfied that he wasn’t going anywhere, her head swiveled to look at a small group of refugees gathered nearby.
“You keep that bodyguard of yours on a leash too. She is not to attempt to harm him again.”
“No promises there miss.” Snorted a familiar figure near the lead of the pack.
Struggling to his feet, dizziness concealed the warning words that issued from the small equine beside him as he gazed dumbfounded at the same convoy he had helped. Dazed and confused the man stood awkwardly, mouth gawking around dislocated words as he pointed an accusing finger at the short girl whom had clubbed him in the dockyard. By some miracle he was alive, awoken by his intended victims in some kind of short valley, probably a trench left from some previous unfinished construction.
Home.
Ignoring the unicorn’s startled demands for him to remain seated, Tristan began to run stiffly towards the scree slopes surrounding the road side. Every muscle in his body protested, every bone screamed for him to stop, all over ruled by a rising dread of what might lay above the rise of discarded earth. Hitting the ground hard as his legs gave out, the young rag-clad man dragged himself the last few inches to the summit and gazed down upon what had once been his home town.
Mega factory Massachusetts was gone, wiped from existence and replaced by a giant glowing hole in reality. Salem had been almost entirely consumed too, the few parts which remained buried under a hundred meter high wall of rubble. Like a spiders web the green oozing he had witnessed eating away the dockland spread slowly across the wreckage. Strange tangled things had erupted right around the border of the bubble, their immense twisting limbs shredding what few buildings had remained standing after the emergence. Growing before his eyes, the alien structures began to sprout lush plumbs, concealing what had been Salem beneath a vibrant canopy of every conceivable shade of green.
Everything was gone. His home, his life, everyone he knew.
Just… gone.
Shouts of alarm failed to break through the numb emptiness the ‘ex-banger’ felt sweeping over him. He barely even noticed the world falling away as thin fingers closed around his neck, lifting him away from the dirt.
“Don’t you dare!” Shouted the kindly equine, voice filled with righteous indignation that was quickly quelled by a second more relaxed tone.
“Sorry Miss, but she’s doing what she’s programmed to do.”
Were they talking about him? Tristan didn’t care, not now, his brain was struggling to get a grasp on the magnitude of destruction he was witnessing. The grip on his neck began to tighten, the fingers drawing together in a smooth vice like action. A loud ‘thump’ interrupted their progress. Averting his eyes from the carnage, the man looked down the bony arm to the face that stood in judgment of him. Apparently though, said judgment was being interrupted by the mare who had revived him at the road side, now repeatedly bucking the Revenant in the leg. Such an action would have shattered the bones of most healthy humans, never mind the brittle skeleton of a falave dweller like himself.
“Do Something!” the pony screamed desperately, her strikes having little to no impact on the iron like limbs of the doll woman.
“Ugh, fine!” The owner of the second voice stepped into view, revealing the same girl who had introduced him to the concrete back on the docks.
“Sarah, we’ve healed him, so killing him now would be a waste of resources.”
To his surprise the grip slackened. There was a brief pause in which Tristan could almost hear the numbers crunching through the plastic head in front of him. People like him were no bodies, nothing but a statistic. All the man could hope was that his number would be more useful as part of the machine’s calculations, then as a remainder to be cut away.
Gradually, the vice released him entirely, allowing his feet to gratefully touch the ground.
A mirthful laugh drew his attention away from the woman who would be his doom, back to the girl who had been his headache.
“Guess what, it’s your lucky day!”
All the King’s Horses
Chapter Five: Road worthy
Within the sterile meeting room a rotund shadow sat straddling the sole occupied chair, hungrily watching the voluptuous lips commenting upon recent extraordinary events. Oblivious to the nature of her audience, the silent newscaster dominated the otherwise featureless wall. Behind her rose the gently rippling curve of a newly emerged dome, inconsiderately sat on what had once been the northern most face of an Icelandic volcano.
Squinting in the lukewarm light, the man lifted his sausage like arm and swept a lazy arch through the air. With a gentle twitter of acknowledgement the wall screen divided, sliding the inconsequential reporter to the far right and making way for a split image. On one half was a rotating globe, dotted with red marks indicating where the new rifts had opened, the second displayed a satellite map of what used to be the Massachusetts City Factory.
“Lights full.”
Like some aged toad following a pesky fly, the squat man turned his piggy features to regard his associate across the suddenly glaringly lit room.
“Most convenient, wouldn’t you say Doctor?” Spoke the well dressed businessman, dower expression betraying no hint as to his true feelings on the situation.
“Hardly.” Replied the toad man, eyes returning to the glowing wall. “With their main factory gone, Sephisco-Corp will collapse by the end of the day. Pity, their resources would have been quite useful.”
Remaining passive, the elegant man stepped up to observe the newscast “Indeed, but for your purposes? I assume the project is still on course?”
“Naturally,” scoffed the doctor, waving a stubby hand dismissively and sending one of the graphs spinning wildly across the desktop.
“While the subsequent reaction was rather more volatile than predicted, the test was a greater success then I’d ever dared hope.”
With a series of sweeps and gestures that made him look as though he were playing a game of one man table tennis, the doctor retrieved the wayward window and summoned up several other graphs.
“I suppose the only disappointment is that some action is still required on our part.”
“Your part,” Corrected the man coolly, “I am but an advisor after all.”
The doctor chuckled with renewed mirth, “Ha, yes I suppose you are, the ever detached Mr Winsor. However, your ‘advice’ has been most indispensible.”
Another flick of the wrist spun the screen through several other desktops, stopping at an array of blueprints.
“But if this works, you’ll be in the spot light whether you like it or not. We all will. The eyes of the world shall be upon us as we embark on the next age of-”
Coughing in polite interruption, Mr Winsor’s remained carefully deadpan to his client’s ramblings, recognizing the texture of madness showing through the facade of genius.
“Doctor, we have discussed this many times. There is no need to reiterate your... business interests.” Winsor insisted.
With a sigh of theatrical disappointment, the good doctor switched off the wall screen. Had he not been one of the greatest minds of his generation, the doctor was sure his next best place would have been on the stage. He did so love drama, though mostly because Mr Winsor ‘loathed’ it just as much.
“Preparations for the second phase are underway.” He said, turning to Winsor with a smile that stretched the flabby folds of his face most uncomfortably.
Winsor did not return the gesture, “Then you have found a suitable candidate site?”
“The details will be on your desk by morning, I can assure you.” Dismissed the piggy man, approaching the long observation window at the far end of the meeting room.
Below him stretched a factory floor, swept clear of clutter bar the very centre where in rose a web of gold lattice. Dozens of laboratory technicians and engineers, each clad in heavy radiation suits bustled around the complex organic machine. At a command unheard through the toughened glass of the boardroom, all the workers quite suddenly stepped back from the contraption, retreating behind leaden shields at the far side of the room. A soul technician wheeled out a slim red box, unclasped its seals and retrieved the glistening fluted rod from within. With the care of a man handling an unexploded bomb, the armored tech gingerly attached the base of the rod to something within the structure, stepping back post haste as a surge of brilliance flashed across the golden surface.
Though his associate had long since left the room, Doctor Kylner addressed whatever phantoms of history might be listening.
“Everything is perfectly on schedule.”
***
“Well this puts a kink in the schedule!” Simon exasperated, shaking his head at the long collapsed bridge that now impeded their path.
Behind him the four strong caravan had ground to a halt at the side of the road, much irritated mumbling rising from its depths at such an obstacle so close to their destination. The old Craven bridge marked the beginning of the Portland floodplain and the end of any truly uncivilized country. Standing between them and their destination was the wide gouging expanse of the Merrimack, slicked black with industrial waste from the now deceased mega factory.
“Way I see it,” Continued the point man, turning back to the assemble of drivers, “Is we can either backtrack twenty miles and head around Newberry. Or we can wait and see if the dome ends up cutting off the river and make our way ‘through’ the town when the water level drops.”
There was a general grumble through the other travelers, each less sure then the next about their limited options. Finally the eldest of the group broke the murmur with a point of his own.
“Can’t do with backtrackin’.” He announced casually, “Number three’s cells won’t make another five mile after that run we had. We’ be needin’ to hunker down somewhere anyway, why not here?”
Glancing around as if to make his point, the goat bearded man folded his arms as if surveying his hold.
“High ground, plenty of light, I’d give it a day up here and see what happens.”
“Seems sensible enough,” Offered another to the agreement of the group.
At a consensus the drivers returned to their various transports, setting up the large solar panels and spreading the word that they were setting camp for the night.
Simon stepped back onboard the forerunner, an old abandoned city bus that had been salvaged and armored for the one way service to Portland. Rusty seats had been thrown out and replaced by scavenged mattresses and simple belted benches along one wall. What little gear the host of refugees possessed was piled unceremoniously at the back doors, along with barrels of water, supplies and spares enough to see the convoy through.
Other then this array of equipment however, the coach was surprisingly empty. There was space enough for ten people at least, yet now only a handful remained in the leading transport. This was partly due to what had happened to its previous driver, an image which did not easily leave the mind. Mostly though, the carriage’s near abandoned state was down to the three new additions to the convoy, who now regarded the vehicle as bed, guard post and prison respectively.
Kat had turned out to be okay, even now mingling with the other passengers outside. An odd but likeable lass, she had had spent many hours of their journey chatting with just about everyone while deftly avoiding questions into her own past. Her near future included the Bureau, same as most on the convoy, but beyond this tidbit she remained mute as to her own history.
Meanwhile, the quiet one she had called ‘Sarah’ was stood observing from the doorway. Attention divided between the road ahead, Kat and the ex-banger, Sarah had remained on alert since their flight from Salem, watching for any threat against her charge. Luckily, it seemed her brief vendetta against Tristan had been quelled by the logical argument Kat had presented. None the less the unicorn medic, Soothing Salve, was not allowing either of the potentially violent humans too close to one another.
Clearing his throat, Simon tipped his wide brimmed hat to Salve as he ducked past the unblinking woman.
“Looks like we’re making camp here ma’am. Gota’ rest and recharge.”
“Okay Fax,” the unicorn smiled, looking up from a selection of food cubes in her levitation field, “It’s safe outside?”
Ponies had a far more delicate digestive system then the average human, rendering the bland nano-woven blocks small grey tickets to the nearest bathroom. Thankfully the mare had long since perfected a method of making the horrid things fit for Equine consumption. Feats of magic never failed to amaze the young man, even something as simple as preparing dinner became an object of fascination.
Regaining his senses Simon nodded and began sifting through a pile of equipment for an empty backpack. “Should be. We’re smack dab next door to a major mag-tram rout and no chance of cutters running this far out.”
With a suitable container located the point man turned and headed back towards the coach door.
This close to Portland, a town with a healthy Pegasus population, much of the usual smog had begun to spread towards the clear skies of the conversion city. Cavernous gaps and lighter patches traversed the cloud cover, revealing light azure sky above. Beyond the fallen bridge, the waterlogged shell of Newberry rose from the languid waters, the decrepit buildings marking where the old riverbanks had once been. That half of the city was almost totally washed out, but hopefully he’d have better luck on this side. Sure enough, from the elevated roadside one or two buildings stood above the waterline, an old ‘leky fuel station and a crumbling apartment block by the look of things.
Carefully picking his way down the embankment, Simon finally reached the level ground that lead towards the flooded township. A spray of pebbles informed the man that someone else was following his progress. Turning back irritably Simon watched as the slight frame of Katrina slid down the scree feet first, jumping every now and again to keep up her momentum. Giggling with childish glee she finally joined the flat at a run, brushing the dust from her chalk coated jeans and practically skipping up beside the bewildered pathfinder.
“Gud-day mate!” the youth greeted, smiling wryly and tipping an invisible hat to Simon, “Hears you’re off on a gander, mind if I tag along?”
“Actually, I gota’ feelin’ your ‘mate’ up there probably would.” He replied, wincing at her forced accent.
“Oh, but you don’t mind,” She said, skipping backwards towards the awaiting abandoned stores, “And that’s what counts.”
Defeated Simon took one last glance at the convoy before setting out after her. At the very least it was an extra pair of hands, even if they were scrawny.
***
Accepting little else then food cubes from the other travelers, the unspoken prisoner had been quite withdrawn and mostly unresponsive since joining the convoy.
Salve seemed to believe that the ‘poor man’ was likely in shock from seeing his home destroyed, but no one else was buying this naive point of view. Inside, Tristan was seething. Angry that he’d been clocked by a slight of a lass. Furious that these damnedable animals were not only invading his world, but had allowed to destroy his city and obliterate everything he knew. More than anything though, he was ashamed at his own weakness of having to take refuge with the very people he had helped attack.
Without the intervention of that bloody great hole in the sky, half of them would likely be chopped liver by now; their organs traded to wealthy corps wanting a shot at immortality, implants sold for scrap and the convoy picked over for parts. Yet here he was, trapped in the middle of nowhere, relying on those he would have gladly led to the slaughter.
Even if his jailer would have allowed him to leave, he would not last long without medical attention. Slender though those fingers appeared, they were solid carbon-nanoweave beneath faux flesh. Had the others not intervened their servos would have driven each through his neck like butter. As it was he had escaped with a fractured vertebra and bruised muscles, which, while not immediately fatal, had left him struggling to breathe ever since. Lucky for him, the freak traveling with them had once been a doctor on the equestrian frontier, and had used her ‘juju’ to keep his airway from ceasing up entirely. Apparently she couldn’t just fix him though, some crap about cooking his brain steam.
Right now the unicorn was ministering to him once again, swapping over the bandages around his head and soothing the pain in the rapidly mending bone. With magic normally fatal to humans in high doses, balancing harm with good was turning out to be a useful special talent on Salve’s part. For the entire session the jade eyes of the thing known as Sarah hadn’t left his.
Noticing her patient’s discomfort, Salve turned her long neck to scowl at the watching bodyguard.
“Take a picture dear, it’ll last longer.”
Tristan snorted “Don’t bother, it probably can’t understand you. Even if it can, it won’t respond.”
Looking back to her charge the mare cocked an ear quizzically, “Whatever do you mean, it ? She’s spoken to Katrina many a time.”
“Not she,” reiterated the ganger, not removing his gaze from the android, “It. Can’t be classified as human anymore, or even technically sentient.”
Braking his staring contest with the impassive machine, Tristan turned his attention to the medic’s exaggerated features, chuckling coldly at her expression of motherly scorn. Brow furrowed and lips pursed, it was quite clear the unicorn was taking offence even if the effendi remained quite unfazed.
“You honestly don’t know what ‘it’ is, do you?” asked the man, genuinely amused by the pony’s naiveté.
Salve wrinkled her nose, “She is probably a guard that got hurt… badly. Isn’t that what humans do? Replace parts when their too badly injured?”
Tristan no longer cared if this got him in deep lumber or not, such an opportunity for fun could not simply be passed up.
“We don’t rebuild people when they're hurt, only the rich and elite can afford that sort of treatment. Cheaper to let commoners die when there’s a hundred more like them out there.”
Yes, there was a wince. A slight one, she wasn’t so unaccustomed to earth as to be shocked by its surprising lack of humanity. Time to play a different card.
“Tell you what. I bet you’ve got some interesting juju from your line of work. You so sure ‘she’s’ human? Take a closer look and find out.”
Unsure at first, Salve glanced between the two, eventually taking the bait. Clopping up the isle of benches and mattresses, she stopped in front of the stick figure, a small twinkle of light growing at the tip of her horn.
“If you don’t mind dear, I’d like to prove this man wrong.”
With no response from the stoic woman the unicorn gently closed her eyes and concentrated, the glow of her horn spreading as a spell began to weave itself. As her magic reached out and started to probe the insubstantial figure, her eyes shot wide open, pupils shrinking to black dots in an ocean of horror. Straining against her own spell, Salve attempted to break away, yet like a bystander witnessing a slow motion train wreck, she simply could not avert her inner senses from the abhorrent void she was feeling.
A snap of energy flashed as the spell ended. Salve backed up gradually, sliding into her own sleeping bunk at the far back of the cabin. Eyes still riveted to the specter that stood between her and the only way out, the spooked pony crouched against the far corner of her den and hid behind her forelegs.
“Well?” Enquired the smirking man.
At first it seemed as though the mare wouldn’t reply. From the outside world the sounds of ordinary people setting up their temporary home filtered in, filling the gaping silence that now gripped the drafty coach. After a long pause, a tiny voice whispered from beneath the protective hooves.
“…she’s dead.”
All the King’s Horses
Chapter Six: Clockwork
“She’s what?” Simon exclaimed, looking up from the desk through which he was rifling.
Across the room the bottom half of Katrina wobbled atop a pile of precariously stacked crates, the rest of her concealed within the depths of warehouse shelving. After finding the girl wholly uncooperative when it came to questions about her personal past, the pathfinder had at last found a crack to which a crowbar of conversation could be applied. Though he wasn’t exactly sure where it was leading, at least she was willing to talk about her peculiar bodyguard.
“Technically the term is ‘Rhetorically Deceased’,” she shouted, voice partly lost amid the array of unsellable stock, “It was the only way a corporation could get around the old human rights act- Oh! There’s a box of those creepy hopping rabbits up here!”
Selectively ignoring the teen’s elated discovery, Fax abandoned his so far fruitless search and rested upon one of the wheeled office chairs. “Yeah, but you can’t exactly nominate yourself to be classified dead, can you? I mean, being dead has certain criteria.”
“Don’t be so sure, Rakki-corp was crazy like that.”
Having retrieved her prize, Kat reappeared and dropped down to floor level, clutching the disquieting ‘bunny’ to her chest. “They worked out some complex loophole. Daddy explained it to me a long time ago, but the gist was that someone could release their ‘body’ to the company even if they were technically still alive.”
Simon cocked his head in disbelief “So you’re telling me that ‘Sarah’, your half sister, traded herself for your father’s accelerated promotion?”
“I can think of worse things.” Kat shrugged, bouncing the toy along the shelves. “People fuck their way up the chain of command all the time, at least with her someone else benefited. She had a rough life and couldn’t cope with what happened to her, so she did the honorable thing by her family. Different times, before the War of Glass.”
Tristan slid down the pile of supplies and came to rest next to the still uneasy equine form.
“ ‘bout forty years ago, earth died. The last crop swept the world clean of all viable food sources, billions began to starve. As luck would have it though, the first nanites started becoming common place in manufacturing. You could fit thousands of those little buggers on the head of a pin and they could make just about anything, including a three course meal in a cube.”
The man chuckled and gripped the cigarette between his teeth. “Only problem was how to power‘em. At first they could only be used inside stupidly huge city factories, with their own nuke stations. Something about using ‘magnetic fields’ to send electricity wirelessly, who the fuck cares.”
Aware that he had the audience’s full terrified attention, the ganger paused to savor a drag from the vile luminous stick.
“So, some smart guy in Eurasia discovers this freaky new element and comes up with a way to power nanites individually. But there’s a catch; this element is rarer then a tree in Texas. The result? Every major corporation starts scrambling to get control of the few mines in the world that had found this stuff.”
“Turned out,” he continued, watching the rising smoke being drawn through the glassless shuttered windows, “that the biggest slice of the pie was sat smack under the Sahara desert. Now our good brothers in the shithole continent hadn’t been fairing so well with the new global market. They’d been shat on by just about every country going, but what they had been doing rather a lot of, was stockpiling.”
“They weren’t about to let some foreign state try to take control of their rightful claim. So they figure, ‘hay, mines need people workin’ ‘um, so let’s make sure people can’t get there!’ And given that just about every weapon and piece of large robotics in the ‘free world’ was built in their country? They had the means and the firepower to hold the whole damn world to ransom.”
“BOOM!” Yelled the excitable Katrina, throwing her arms into the air and nearly overbalancing from the thin wall she was walking along, “They drop a HUGE dirty bomb right in the middle of the desert, soaking the whole north of the continent in radiation that’d last a million bigilion years!”
Dropping off the end of the crumbling plasta-crete barrier, she followed Simon through the gently lapping water as he scrambled into a washed out store front.
“Then everyone was like ‘oh noes, what a terrible accident! We can’t get to our stuff and now we’sa gona die!’ But don’t worry everyone, Africa’s Mecha-co has it covered! So in they roll with their robots and drills, militarizing the whole desert with the machines other corporations paid them to build. Battle automatons, artillery mechs, caterpillar missile silos-”
Striking a dramatic pose the girl flung her arms around as though pointing out the unseen air defense turrets and think-tanks. “Before the world can blink the desert is armed to the teeth and producing the new element at a bazillion credits a barrel.”
“And then the world retaliated, yeah I know.” Simon rolled his eyes at the near word-perfect repetition of a hollo-vid afterschool special. “The regional governments handed over military control to the corporations, who intern united under the banner of World-Corp. Kinda’ hard to miss when you lived through it yourself. ”
“Exactly!” the girl concurred, wading through the stagnant knee deep water to poke her head excitedly into an empty glass fronted freezer. “Their only objective; feed the human race no matter the cost. But did you know what happened next?”
For a moment the pathfinder wrinkled his brow in confusion, sensing the trick question but answering none the less. “We fought them, we won, then they blew up the mines and poisoned the world. What more is there to tell?”
“Wrong!” Kat chimed, “We lost, miserably. Completely crushed. Missiles couldn’t get past the ground defenses, troops died of rad-poisoning after only a few minutes on the ground, jets were shot down long before reaching their targets. Total. Wipeout.”
Tapping out the embers, Tristan lifted out another stick and secreted it behind his ear.
“Take a normal human.” At this the man began to add gestures to his tale, not unlike serving up a large ice cream bowl. “Scoop out everything unneeded, stick a life support system in for everything left and give them their very own miniature nanite factory. No need to splash out on overpriced synthetic limbs when they could have their little worker bees build the rest for them.”
“And right there,” He said, pointing to the still unmoving ‘dead’ woman, “Is the product. A ‘Revenant’. Part man, mostly plastic. A walking corpse with a cloud of numbers for a brain. Immune to radiation and will follow any order with the same flexibility of a normal thinking trooper. A hundred thousand of their kind did what half a billion humans couldn’t. They wiped out cities, destroyed the infrastructure of the continent and executed those controlling the machines.”
“Millions dead by their hands, unkillable soldiers with not a hint of human weakness, like compassion. In the end it was all for nothing though. Those Mecha-Co bastards decided that if they couldn’t have the Sahara mines, no one could. Heh, some guy on the news said that, if there was anyone watching, the hyper-nuke flair should have been visible from Mars.”
Despite her strong stomach for the gruesome facts of life on earth, Salve had a horribly active imagination. Through the ruined streets of a burning Trottingham, dozens of hairless doll-like humans bore down upon the helpless ponies that ran from their arbiters. They were machines of death, capable of sweeping life from a world simply because they were ordered to do so. And somewhere behind the plastic eyes, the screams of a sentient being cried out at its helplessness to prevent its own abhorrent crimes.
Still silent in her private horror, the unicorn tried to shake the images from her mind.
‘The War of Glass,’ Simon thought to himself, only half listening while his teen companion babbled on about some new find within the last gutted building.
‘Ten percent of the world’s surface was turned to glass in one blazing instant. All that irradiated material in the mines blasted out into the atmosphere, contaminating the whole damn world. It fell across the land in burning rain, I remember getting caught in a storm once back home. That hair still hasn’t grown back. And by the second anniversary, the seas so heavily laced with the deadly toxin that nothing could live in them bar poisonous algae.’
‘Still, at least it meant the mega corps could simply pull the material they needed out of the air and ocean. The world was at last fed.’
At this consideration the man grunted back a humorless laugh, the preposterous nature of the one positive defying all sane logic. ‘Thank god for small mercies I suppose.’
“It’s a nasty way to go when you think about it.”
The sudden serious shift in the girls tone broke his inner monologue as they finally returned to dry land with their haul.
“Every seven years it’s a whole new you.” Kat said distantly, staring at the rise upon which the convoy was parked. “But she doesn’t grow anything new, it’s all recycled. The nanites just use everything they can find, usually that means metals that her ‘lungs’ filter from the air. You can slow them down, feed them proteins and healthy stuff to fix little things. But eventually her brain’s gona be nothing but steel and circuits. She’ll be just a Husk. A human shaped lifting crane.”
Now stood once more, Tristan made a mock gesture of admiration at the silent android. “Gota hand it to the Japanese on that, they really know how to build them. They don’t sleep, they don’t even need to breathe technically. Not to mention they’re able to repair themselves with just about anything. Why, I’ll bet half that scar tissue is from reconstituted mutie-rats.”
He regarded the suddenly pail equine with a satisfied grin. It was like scaring a simpering wet child, easy but ever so satisfying. “Oh, that’s right. They can literally live off the blood of their enemies. Dice them up, shove the bits into any wound and let the nanites do the rest-“
“SHUT UP!” Salve screamed, suddenly bolt upright and glaring at the man.
Nostrils flaring with every ragged breath, the mare gritted her teeth and tried to gather her usual masked composer, quelling the tears desperately trying to escape her pained blue eyes.
With a casual shrug, Tristan lowered himself and lay down on his assigned mattress, neck aching from the sudden exertion and contained laughter.
“No, Humans aren’t.” He announced confidently, the blatant lie covered by amusement. “But that’s why Revenants aren’t human.”
“So there’s nothing up there then?” Simon asked, resting their box of salvage on a handy bollard while he tapped the side of his temple meaningfully. For a girl who was so reluctant to speak of her own past, Kat certainly must have wanted to talk to someone quite desperately. Most of the story had come with little or no prompting on his part, though the overflow of bottled emotions still remained hidden beneath the verse.
“Hmm? Oh, no she still in there, somewhere. Well, something is at least. Why else do you think she didn’t just break Tristan’s neck? Or kill Salve when she attacked her?”
Seemingly satisfied with their meager takings, Kat closed up the half filled backpack and looked back towards the now quite close roadway, the convoy glinting in the gradually failing light.
“Technically she isn’t supposed to have any emotions left.” she continued, falling into step with the pathfinder as they carefully crossed the uneven pebble dash. “But given most Revenant’s didn’t live past their seven year expiry date she’s something of an exception. Maybe over the decades someone else grew in place where she once was? Either way, I honestly think she doesn’t like hurting people.”
Struggling with the box between them, the duo gradually grunted their way up the embankment towards the awaiting trailers. “Certain things she has to do because her programming demands it, but I think after all this time she’s gotten used to naturally finding loopholes.”
With the box finally secured on the truck that brought up the convoy’s rear, Kat mopped her brow and saw Simon’s compassionate expression gazing at the lead transport. She decided to head his thoughts off at the pass.
“Of course, that doesn’t make her any less of a cold, calculating bitch. The world is still a bunch of numbers and statistics to her, even if they have meaning beyond face value.”
More casually she added, “Your pony’s outside. Wonder if that dolt tried to escape after all?”
“Wouldn’t put it past him.” Muttered the young man, “You head on back, I’ve got to chat with a few people here.”
Shrugging at her dismissal, Kat wandered over to where the unicorn was taking slow steady breaths. A peek through the slatted shutters showed a distinct lack of blood or corpses. Tristan was laid on his bunk, twiddling his thumbs while Sarah still stood exactly where she been more than two hours ago. It was going to be a long journey, one that the scarred teen dearly hoped would be worth the torturous hours on the road.
‘The sooner I’m away from you, the better.’
A touch of something tickled the back of the girl’s throat.
It might have been seething hate.
She deeply hoped it was.
All the King’s Horses
Chapter Seven: Silverfish
Soothing Salve looked up from the newscast which had drawn many spectators into the back of the old electric truck. After two days under the patchy sunlight, the four convoy vehicles were at last ready to make their nonstop drive to Portland. Beyond their isolation though, the world had been stirring. ‘Second Emergence’ it was being called, the day hundreds of new domes blossomed across earth, swallowing mountains, seas and cities. While it had seen a wave of animosity toward Equestria, so too had the conversion Bureau’s seen a massive panicked influx, like rats fleeing a sinking ship. Ranging from stampedes on ration centres to an attack on a British bureau, the reporters seemed to milking the disaster for all the ratings it was worth.
Despite the flood of news, attention was gradually being diverted by the sounds of a one sided screaming match.
“Stay the hell away from me!”
Katrina stormed up the embankment, slinging another full bag of salvage into the truck and stalking towards the lead coach with her bodyguard close behind. Salve didn’t need to guess what the argument was about.
With her guardian stuck on permanent lookout duty, Kat had enjoyed nearly a whole two days of freedom, most of which she had spent scouting the washed out town with Fax. Though no expert in the puzzling field of human relationships, Salve was convinced that the youngster was trying to foster a bond with the so far oblivious courier. Now Sarah had once again become her sister’s shadow, interrupting the various strange balancing acts and nonsensical chatter that the unicorn assumed were part of some complex courting ritual.
Most peculiar was the entirely one sided nature of the disparity. Driven mostly by efficient protocols, Sarah rarely answered any question she perceived as irrelevant. When she did respond, the doll woman was very direct and had all the tact of a half brick.
On the hazy screen the newscast had begun to repeat itself, prompting most of the retinue to drift back towards their respective transports with the presumption that they should get underway. While Kat and her shadow boarded the lead transport, Simon sat down heavily next to the unicorn. Seeming more pale than usual, the pathfinder pointedly kept his eyes on the slowly drying city.
“Sah.” He started conversationally, sucking his bottom lip. “ ‘Cording to that plastic Jillaroo, I’ve been chasing Kat without knowing. What did she say? Oh yeah, ‘intercourse is ill advised at this time’...”
Snorting in surprise, Salve gave the man a look that managed to be both confused and disgusted in the same instant.
Simon’s strained smile was joined by a dumbfounded nod. “Yep. ‘Parently, unexpected pregnancy could significantly slow progress.”
There was an awkward moment of silence as the equine processed this. “It actually said that too you?”
“Yea wouldn’t read about it.” Fax sniggered, still not quite able to rap his head around the idea, “I didn’t even know the Sheila was interested.”
Unsure what she was expected to say, the unicorn tried to approach the issue from the outside inward. At least poor Simon was no longer totally oblivious to Katrina’s confusingly subtle approach.
“Well, were you?” She asked, breaking the moment of uncomfortable reflection.
Fax raised an eye brow, tapping a bottle of sterilised water, “Was I what?”
“Chasing her?”
This time it was Fax’s turned to snort in surprise, midway through a swig from the cantina.
“But she was chasing you right?” Salve reiterated, confusion deepening.
“Yes but... Look Brumby, it’s complicated.” Simon ran a grubby hand through his hair while trying to think of a way of phrasing the kind of psychological damage life in the ruff could cause.
“Ya’ve seen her scars? That kid’s got a lot more dents under the bonnet then on the paintwork, fair dinkum. Think about why that bushranger you’ve scooped up suddenly got all helpful yesterday. Ya think it’s because he had a change of heart? Or is he just terrified of being left behind?”
Shaking her head, the unicorn hopped down from the flatbed and onto the smooth black plaste-create of the road. In her short time beyond the protective walls of Equestria, the matron had learned so much from the humans she encountered. She’d seen the worst this world had to offer, and seen how some adapted to become just as cruel. Others simply endured, their spirit so easily shattered only to heal over and over, hardening into something deformed but indomitable. Even those who seemed out right evil relied on one another for strength. Perhaps it was that spirit of brotherhood, however fleeting, that Celestia sought to preserve?
“You’d better start up the lead coach, hun. Looks like everyone else is ready to go.”
--
Fax’s theory about the river source turned out to be right on the money. With the factory city gone the waters were noticeably receding, opening up long lost paths through the abandoned town. Now the old town bridge that ran alongside the mag-rail was accessible to the trundling mismatch of vehicles. With any luck they could be on the outskirts of their destination by the next morning.
Sarah was sitting near the front of the carriage, her charge pointedly ignoring the doll woman. As Salve snuggled down into her moderately comfortable den, ready for the last stretch of their so far enlightening journey, she cautiously glanced up the five strong rank of passengers. As the bus lurched into motion the pony considered just how little she knew about the strange girl. Even before last added layer of awkwardness, speaking to Katrina in the presence of the android was becoming most disquieting. Despite Kat’s assurance that the more gory aspects of Tristan’s tale were an utter fabrication, the daunting guard still unnerved the equine medic.
Of course using the Heart-Felt spell on humans yielded different results from ponies. Equines glowed in a silhouette of the physical body, wherein pain and injury showed up as throbbing colourful ripples in the subject’s aura. Humans on the other hoof were like towering sparklers, dancing with the light of chemical reactions and bio-electricity. But no matter the species, dead flesh had a universal texture too it; a black sickly void that hungrily sucked at the world. No matter what reassurances she received, Sarah was just plain ‘wrong’.
Finally beyond the grips of the debris filled streets, the convoy struck out across the unimaginably flat highway, aiming for the distant ring of clear sky above Portland. Night fell subtly across the passing landscape, only noticed by the travellers once it had become too dark to see their fellows properly. Throughout the darkened coach small wind-up lamps provided the only source of illumination, barely enough to see the outlines of now sleeping passengers. Stark LED light gave crisp edges to the sparse furnishings and etched the silhouette of the one figure to remain upright in the cabin.
From the depths of her cubby hole, Salve watched the expressionless face staring at Kathrin’s sleeping form. Jade eyes ceaselessly watched the steady rise and fall of the girl’s chest, blinking at her occasional twitches and mumbles seeping from dream land.
Precisely what put the pony’s mind on this particular path she couldn’t really say. What was clear to the equine was that this wasn’t the action of a machine on perpetual guard duty, this seemed more like a fixation. There wasn’t even so much as a glance spared for the road ahead or the other passengers.
Taking a resolved breath, the mare stood from her blanket and carefully stepped between the other sleeping bodies until she was next to the upright corpse. Maybe this was part of that ‘denial’ thing she had read about, but she simply would not believe that, after these past few days of observation, there was truly nothing but numbers behind those pained eyes.
The glow started gently, a soothing note floating in the air as the spell began to weave from the spirals of the unicorn’s horn.
Gradually the harsh light of the lamps was drowned out as another form of perception over took the mare sight. Beneath the musty folds of the thick barber coat the vial darkness of death sucked at the world, crisscrossed by glowing lines of silica conduits, cold and artificial. Slowly Salve drew her eyes upwards, past the empty abdomen, along a chest stretched beyond all capacity by a cold core of steel, finally resting on a brain that thrummed with the light of billions of tiny bits of information. It was like staring at a mega city from above, watching the transport links aglow with ore and materials feeding the factories and exporting product to the rest of the body. Clinical, precise, lifeless.
About to take her eyes from the autonomous abomination, something flickered beyond the grids of data highways. It had only appeared for the briefest of moments, a random flash of bio-chemical reactions, guttering like a solitary candle flame. Driving her thoughts deeper, Salve plunged after the fleeting outline of a mind. She felt its shape, its prison of glass circuits holding it back, as though a passenger trapped within the engine house of a train.
Withdrawing her inspection, the unicorn wavered as the interior of the coach returned. That spell was not meant for such deep incursions into complex beings, and as such the drain made her feel terribly woozy. But she could not leave things at that. There was something more here to be found, a mind pulling tiny leavers and moving the most inconsequential of decisions of this supposedly infallible machine. She needed to get deeper, to commune or at least asses its condition.
There was one possibility. In the near perfect world of Equesria there were rarely any times when an ailment could not be simply ‘cured’ or at least treated. The Equine body was incredibly resilient when compared to fragile humans, but there had been rare occasions when a terrible accident had robbed a pony of speech or hearing. The grate unicorn doctor, Heart Felt, whose namesake was carried on his first successful spell, had developed just the magic for this occasion. Listening Heart, a spell used to feel the emotions and diagnose even those in a deep coma, might be just the thing to explore this phenomenon further.
Once more the light of magic being woven into being pulsed though the silent cabin. Salve reached out as the spell completed and touched the spot where the fleeting lights had been dancing. What she found was most unexpected. There was a mind there, but not an entirely human one. Just as a bonsai tree can only grow as far as its pot dictated, so too had this proto-mind grown into the space untouched by the harsh programming. This realisation led to yet another; the body was sleeping, stepping down from its alerted state and allowing this ghost a greater freedom. At the moment it had chosen to watch Katrina as she slept, puzzling over strange sensations that defied its personal definition.
Most feelings this being experienced were being squelched under the confusion that a lack of understanding brought. How could one identify an emotion when no comparison existed? But overwhelming this was something it knew all too well. Loneliness.
Shutting off her magic and sidling closer to the stick like body, Salve lent her head against Sarah’s side, hoping to bring some iota of comfort to the creature. After a short while, a thin bony hand gently brushed against the pony’s withers, barely resting upon the teal fur.
As dawn broke some hours later, the row of transports drew to a brief stop, allowing passengers to stretch momentarily while the drivers switched shifts. Upon her sister’s waking, the silverfish of Sarah’s conscience slipped back below the surface as the body once again became alert for danger. Now barely on the outskirts of the town, Tristan took the opportunity to leave the convoy while the going was good. With barely more than a goodbye and a hasty ‘thanks’ to the unicorn who’d saved his life, the fiery maned biker stepped onto the road side and watched as the convoy drew away. Though far from disappointed in the departure of such a disagreeable man, Salve wished him the best all the same as they parted company.
Portland stretched out before the troupe, its winding streets dotted with elevated platforms, now free of the deluge that had once flooded the lower levels of the city. Beyond the dwindling muddy river lay their destination, the Bureau, the end of the line and the beginning of a new chapter in the lives of all present. And how daunting that chapter would turn out to be.
Chapter 8: Stand
Hindsight is a wonderful demonstration of natural irony. For instance, Soothing Salve was now wholly regretting the choice to head through the maze of elevated platforms instead of simply the longer way around the outside of the town. The rough terrain was turning her stomach something terrible, but it was worth it to reach her home away from home.
When the city had become flooded some thirty years ago, years before pod-living had been established beyond the mega-factories, the dogged World Corp machine had come up with a cheaper solution then building an entirely new infrastructure elsewhere. Sealing off the flooded levels, constructing floating roads up the main arteries and linking the tallest buildings together with sky bridges, the corporation had saved millions in building costs. Over the years the shanty town had blossomed like a forest canopy of rusted metal and sloppily poured plasta-create.
Originally a hub of oceanic travel, its good transport links and mag-rail and had made it a perfect location for a brand new Bureau. Unusually elegant for the monotone world, the custom made building stood like a beacon of hope for humanity, clinging to the banks of the tepid river and calling all into its sweeping embrace.
Now the sky above the town had become a vast ocean of sapphire, kept clear by the army of newfoal Pegasi. Through a renewed spirit of community a prosperous town had sprung from the ruins closest the Bureau. The old shacks had been reinforced, made sound and decorated in all manor excitable colours. Beneath the newly constructed streets and walkways, derelict buildings acted as the trunks supporting a veritable treetop utopia with the Bureau at its heart, their chapel to all that was still good in the world and worth saving.
But this island of hospitality was buried deep in the still derelict city. Even with the waters now retreating from its roots, the shanty town resisted the colourful advance of the revitalised city. After following the outer ring as far as possible, Fax at last turned onto a side street and took the plunge into the spider web of highroads. All around the convoy the squall of buildings sprouted, blocking out the world beyond and obscuring any landmarks. And then there was the stench, the remnants of the river drying and decomposing in the renewed sunlight.
Finally, with the helpful directions of a passing Pegasus, they reached the short slope that lead to the Bureau. As it turned out their two day setback at the broken bridge had been most fortuitous. Detritus and crude signs littered the road in front of the elegant building, a large protest having been dispersed only the day before. By the look of things, events had become heated, the once pristine windows pocked with chips and glistening cracks from the improvised projectiles hurled by the irate rioters. Gas canisters from the subsequent crowd control crunched under hefty tires as the convoy drew up to the front doors.
Journey’s end, Salve heard the crunch of the handbrake and listened for a moment as the clattering thrum finally died entirely.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” announced Fax, rising from his seat to address the passengers, “We have arrived at Portland Bureau. Please place your tray tables up and retrieve your belongings from the overhead compartments. Thank you for flying Fax airlines.”
Stretching out her cramped limbs, the unicorn waited for the humans to disembark before slinging her saddle bags and trotting towards the exit. Hooves on familiar ground once again, Salve rubbed her fetlocks against the exposed sandy earth, nickering as relief spread up through her legs and sent a shiver down her spine. Maybe there was a bit of earth pony in her blood, but it felt so good to be back on something that resembled equestrian soil.
Nearby the small crowd of passengers milled around nervously, some gazing up at the imposing structure while others stood waiting for someone to make the first move. ‘Odd,’ thought the pony ‘even humans herd sometimes.’
Away from the rest of the mingling travellers, Katrina lent against the transport talking to Fax.
“So you’re really not coming with us?”
The older man seemed preoccupied with checking something on the exposed engine.
“Yep.” He confirmed, retracting a charred pipe that looked important, “Gonna take this beut to be stripped for parts and set myself up as a courier.”
Kat tilted her head uncertainty, “Oh, but I thought everyone on the convoy was headed for the Bureau?”
“Well, most of them are. Me though, can’t stand the idea of some ju-ju juice rewiring me from the inside out. Whole thing just seems a little... weird, yah know? Besides, every town needs postmen and Portland is just my kind of terrain.”
It was difficult to tell if Kat was disappointed by this revelation, though the forever twitching girl didn’t push the matter or protest. If anything she seemed understanding, nodding sagely as though choosing to remain in the dying world was a most agreeable choice.
“Don’t fret though.” Continued the tinkering man, “Still be around. Back in my home town, the Bureau was my biggest employer, no worries. People always need stuff run from one place to another.”
Suitably convinced that the rickety engine would reach safe port without exploding, Simon dusted his oily hands on his shirt and briefly considered the short lass.
“Wadabout you?” He asked, Kat’s hummed note of puzzlement prompting further elaboration. “Just wondered if... well if you were really serious about this? Can’t exactly drink the goop and then say ‘woops, actually this ain’t for me’. What I mean is; going pony on your own’s kinda’ a big decision. If you needed time to think about it-"
“No, I’m good thanks.”Kat interjected, her ever present smile growing distant, “My mind’s made up. Plus this seems like a nice enough place for things to end. Cosy.”
Fax cocked an eyebrow at the odd young girl as she gazed up at the sweeping glass and concrete fascia. His gaze briefly flicked to the nearby cyborg, searching the inexpressive face for an explanation. There was, of course, no response, but at least she wasn’t painful to look at anymore. The usual disconcerting glimpse into the uncanny valley had been masked somewhat by the appalling multicoloured hat adorning the hairless head.
“You know what,” He at last resigned “I don’t even wana know. Good luck though.”
Giggling as though happy with Fax’s general confusion, Kat leant forwards and gave the unsuspecting auzie a peck on the cheek before skipping up to the unicorn.
“Lead the way miss pony!”
--
Picking up a swift trot, the wayward unicorn approached the metal framed doors, entering the subtle airlock that divided the world into within and without. There was but a moment’s pause before the inner doors hissed opened. Yet in such time, dozens of discrete cameras and biometric scanners recorded her vital statistics, determined her identity and logged her presence for the World Corp infoCloud.
Crisp freshly processed air wafted her dusty mane, welcoming her to the foyer. Shaped like a squat acorn, the reception area sat at the heart of the Bureau, the three tiered levels spread out behind it with three massive clinics on each. Though the building itself was only a meagre four stories high, the transparent skin of the atrium dome rose away from the facade of glass and steel, reaching far above the uppermost walkways to fall protectively over what would soon be the roof top garden.
Even now, Salve still found its scope breathtaking.
Making her way to the reception desk, Salve glanced behind her to see the other travellers filled through the doors like bedazzled sheep. Babbling excitedly to one another, the crowd was utterly oblivious to the plethora of personal data already being assembled by unseen eyes. Even if they knew, it was doubtful they would care. They were here, after all the hardships and horrors they had endured the gateway to an otherworldly paradise lay open before them.
A chirpy voice broke her smiling reflection, “Hello there! Welcome to - OH MY GOSH SALVE!”
Professionalism disregarded, an excitable earth pony leapt over the reception desk and swept Salve into a hug. Orange coated with a mane of vivid lightning blue, the young mare seemed to condense more energy into her small frame then a jet turbine. Compounding her lively nature, her cutie mark depicted a stylised tornado, surrounded by a hammer, a pen and a flower. As a proverbial ‘jack of all trades’, Dizzy Lizzie’s true talent lay in multitasking, with the added side effect of never being able to sit still or concentrate on anything for more than ten seconds at a time.
“Salve, Salve, Salvie-Salve! I can’t believe you’re back!” she squealed, trotting on the spot and beaming in pure joy, “Oh I’m so happy you’re alright, I couldn’t sleep for the longest time- OH! And you brought friends too!”
Gathering behind the reunited friends, the troop of humans looked on with expressions ranging from glad smiles to confused irritation. Thankfully, several other employees must have seen the coach arrive and were already taking up station behind the recently abandoned desk.
Salve smiled sweetly at the distracted mare, “It’s wonderful to see you again too, Dizzy, but we’ve all had a really long journey and-”
“Oh gosh sorry!” Dizzy blurted, realisation flashing across her face like confetti from a cannon. Turning to face the crowd the mare’s ecstatic grin spread even further, threatening to spit her head clean in two, “Hi everyone and welcome to Portland Ponification Bureau! When you’re ready, step up to the reception desk and we’ll get you all logged in and ready for orientation.”
Without waiting to see if the newcomers would respond, Dizzy swivelled on hoof and headed back behind the desk, gesturing for the unicorn to follow. As the candidates lined up the happy equine continued to chatter. “Blimy you’ve missed a lot of brill things- Hi there welcome to the Bureau, can I take your name? – Like, firstly, Maple had her foal! You just missed her actually she headed back to Equestria last week. – Okay now place your hand on the id scanner there-”
While this odd duality continued, the last stragglers idled near the back of the excruciatingly slow line. Having said her farewells to their loyal driver, Katrina finally entered the vast lobby and was struck the strangest sensation to clean off her mud encrusted boots. Despite the surrounding urban sprawl, the interior of the Bureau was utterly immaculate. Quietly, the unshakable feeling that her mere presence was somehow sullying the air quality stole over the youth, never feeling so out of place and unworthy in her pitiful existence.
Craning her neck, the dusty girl gazed up in wonder at the high dome, reveling in the clean sunlight pouring through the transparent film far above. “Whoa, wonder how the roof stays up?”
“This location is strategically flawed.” Sarah observed, glancing momentarily at the BlackMesh guards posted at far sides of the room.
Sighing, Kat ignored her guard’s observation and stepped up to the front desk, the excitable pony beaming up at her around an adapted touch-stylus.
“Hay there! Are you signing up for Ponification too?”
--
“Sir. An anomaly has been flagged for your attention.”
Jessop Whild, security chief for the Portland Bureau, snorted awake at the eloquent summons in his comlink.
“Wazzit?” He complained, straightening his back and looking at the plethora of glowing monitors before him.
“I do not recognise that command, sir.” Retorted the butler like program, “However, an anomaly has been registered among the recent arrivals.”
Lazily the chief slid a tablet off the desk upon which his feet were rested. Seining into the secure terminal the information presented itself immediately.
“Huh. Biometrics shows twenty six entries. Footfall counter shows twenty seven.”
With an idol flick, Jessop removed the security flag from his screen and placed the pad back on its stand, settling back into his comfortable chair.
“Probably just on the fritz again, Harvey. Ignore it.”
Lacking any kind of emotional processing, the security AI ‘Harvey’ was unable to express the contempt for its commander that most humans may have harboured. However, it could emulate some human reactive patterns. Sarcasm, for instance, was as flees to a dog among the older generation AI’s.
“Should I leave the doors on full open tonight as well, sir?”
Jessop glowered at the smart talking consol and set his cap lower. “Look, I ain’t spending another three days trawling cctv footage looking for something that don’t exist Harvey. Run a diagnostic on the airlock and check off the candidates as they’re logged during their medical’s. If there’s a problem, then wake me up.”
All the King’s Horses
Chapter Nine: Imitation of Life
Nurse Malini Kellcor drew a long steadying breath as she leaned heavily on the polished chrome railing.
While this was only a trial of circumstance, being that they were presently short of staff to deal with the sudden arrivals, it would be a big step forward in both her career and personal experience. Giving up on her overly ambitious dreams of a scholarship, she had worked hard to secure the posting at Portland and had been patiently awaiting a chance to prove herself.
Thus she was faced with a troubling dilemma. On the one hand, this was the first examination Doctor Malcolm had entrusted her with since she passed grade one citation. Going to him for help would prove she simply wasn’t ready for a greater role. But the truth was that the poor nurse was far out of her depth.
Firstly, the woman had no prior medical record, a virtual impossibility in this age of genetic tagging at birth. By all rights, or at least as far as the system was concerned, this ‘woman’ did not exist. Perhaps it was down to some security blackout? It wasn’t unheard of for important business figures to have their details wiped before heading for conversion, they had manual forms for just that eventuality. But this didn’t help her with the second sticking point, in that she did not have the faintest clue where to start.
What to do? Fudge it and hope it past muster? Or get the doctor and hope he was just as stumped as she was?
Falsifying the data sheet was out of the question. A humble nurse she may be, but Malini still had moral standards to which she adhered. With a determined grumble the Latino girl straitened her pristine white scrubs and walked back through the double doors of the small secure corridor. Several doors led off to five small exam rooms, within which five new candidates were being checked out before their allocation to one of the twelve live-in clinics. Slight twinge of fear set aside for the moment, Malini approached room three and knocked gently.
--
Turning irritably from his awkward patient, Doctor Malcolm rubbed his temples and approached the source of the interruption. This young girl was giving him no end of trouble. First she wouldn’t undress for the physical, then she couldn’t provide a single straight answer to any of his questions. He had just been in the process of testing the reactions in her right leg (and somehow causing her left leg to twitch instead) when a tentative rap at the door drew him away from the infuriating melodrama.
“Enter.” he announced.
“Sorry to disturb you, doctor.” Malini said, as politely as she dared, “But I wonder if I might get a second opinion.”
“It’s a physical exam,” came the grumbled reply “what could you possibly need a second opinion for?”
Nervously glancing back into the corridor, the nurse debated whether to outright say ‘I’ve not a clue where to start’.
“Well sir... you’d best come have a look.”
Sceptical though he was, the good doctor had long ago come to the conclusion that he was surrounded by incompetents and his ego was more than willing to verify this judgment.
“Very well. Miss Salve could you finish up here?”
Without waiting to hear an answer from the equine assistant, the doctor departed in a vicious stride, all but slamming the door in his wake.
From her vantage point perched atop the examination table, Kat watched with a wry smile.
“What a nice man.” She commented, turning her attention to the nearby unicorn.
Soothing Salve nodded conspiratorially before marking something down on a touch-sensitive tablet.
“Doctor Malcolm is quite distinguished in his profession. Sadly that says nothing for his bedside manner. Do you think we could get this exam out of the way before he comes – Oh.”
Salve paused for a moment, train of thought thoroughly derailed at the sight of Katrina disrobing. Nudity was not much of a problem for any pony. Though humans tended to hide behind layer upon layer of cloth, clothes were considered an optional and occasionally risqué extra in Equestria.
But while the teen’s sudden exposure would have caused little more than a raised eyebrow at the speed and stealth at which it had been accomplished, the scars gave rise to a much greater pause. She had known what lay beneath was bad, having tended to her most recent wounds during their journey. What was now revealed was the extensive mishmash of livid wounds and scarring beneath slowly uncoiling bandages. Fresh striations covered every patch of virgin skin on her arms, lined up like soldiers returning from war. Across her chest and stomach were innumerable blackened brands, some small like pinpricks, others shaped by red hot iron.
As the last of the dressings fell away, Salve walked carefully around the thin girl, observing the sanguine lashes across her back and the friction sores circumventing her ankles and wrists. Without knowing any better she could have mistaken the girl for the victim of some explosion or building collapse. Sadly the year or so that she had spent in this Alien world had taught the mare much about the strange depravity rife throughout the underbelly of human society.
Levitating the pad and pen, the unicorn began to take down notes about the extensive prior injuries. With little more than regular anti-carcinogen injections detailed in her medical history, the pony would have to note down as much as possible in order to bring the documents up to date. After taking measurements, weight and blood samples, Salve finally sat the girl down again to help her redress the more recent wounds. By this time, the equine had begun to tune out much of the horrendous damage, adopting an almost meditative state while working. Entirely in a world of her own, it took a pail olive hand waving in front of her face to bring the pony’s attention back to reality.
“Hmm? Sorry dear, I missed that entirely.”
Smiling down at the quiet unicorn, Kat repeated the lost question. “I said, you’ve seen this kind of thing before, haven’t you?”
“I wish I could say I haven’t,” Salve admitted, avoiding eye contact as she applied a cooling anaesthetic patch to the sores. “But my Dam taught me never to lie even if the truth was bad.”
Kat sighed happily, dressing her arm as though in a day dream. “None of it matters anymore soon enough. In a week or so, I’ll be gone, and there’ll be somepony better walking around in my place.”
Not for the first time since meeting the odd girl, Salve tilted an ear in a questioning manner, unsure whether the teen was serious or not. “Dear, I don’t think you quite understand how conversion works.”
“I understand better than most.” Kat replied, remaining attentive to her dressing and ignorant to her audience’s reaction.
“When we first came to live in the Americas we lodged with a man named Paul. Never got his second name actually, maybe that was purposeful on his part. Anyway, Paul was the gentlest soul I’d ever met, but only because of the guilt he’d lived with. When he was little, barely three years old, he accidently killed his youngest sibling. Dirty diapers went in the recycling shoot and clean ones came out of the top draw in their bedroom. So he was quite surprised when he opened the draw to find only diapers in there and no baby brother. But however awful it was, that one event made him into the kindest man I have ever known. He was careful, thoughtful in everything he said and did and wouldn’t even hurt a fly, even if the fly was hurting him.”
“He was in the first wave of people to be converted. When the pony that claimed to be him came back to us, the first thing he said was ‘I’m so happy, I can finally forgive myself’. True, Blue Buck was very nice, but only in the way that all ponies are. That gentle giant was gone.”
“I don’t know if ponies are born with souls, but humans aren’t. We earn ours. Through trial, suffering and victory, we are shaped by the world around us. But to take away anguish is to take away the seat of our soul. Maybe the pony who got up afterwards was a better ‘person’, but that which made Paul undeniably human was gone in a puff of smoke. If that isn’t death, true death, then this world holds no horrors.”
Soothing Salve remained silent as she pinned the last fresh bandage into place, realising for the first time why Kat always seemed so happy despite herself. Before her departure into this wild world, the little pony had taken a crash course in human maladies, both of the body and of the mind. One concept in particular seemed ungraspable to her and the other Equestrians. Suicide.
Kat had not come to the Bureau to be converted; conversion was just her ‘chosen method’.
She had come here to die.
--
Sounds carried a long way in the cavernous entrance hall, gentle hoof steps and chatter providing continual background music to the thoughts of two figures stood upon the balcony. Malcolm took another long drag from the nicotine laced paper roll, watching the burnt embers fall away from its tip with a mixture of disappointment and relief. Three whole days he’d been clean, but it was a good job he’d kept a few sticks on hand. Though smoking was barred in the clean confines of the Bureau, any Black clad guard wishing to press the matter would have met their match in the highly strung Doctor.
Judging her timing, Nurse Malini cleared her throat carefully and made a foray into disputed territories.
“Explains the heavy clothing at least.” She tried, the ‘humf’ of indifference informing her that the first part of no-man’s-land had been successfully traversed.
“So. What do we do?”
In a rare show of patience, Malcolm didn’t press the woman about the informal nature of the question.
“... We do nothing.”
Malini startled, “There’s no way the Black-Mesh are prepared for something like this. Even unarmed she’s dangerous, practically a walking weapon.”
“If it wasn’t meant to be here, then it would have never past the front doors.” Resigned the doctor, blowing a steady stream of smoke into the unsullied air.
Casually letting the spent stick fall from his fingers, Malcolm rubbed out the last embers with his heal and stalked back through the double doors.
“No one has access to that kind of hardware anymore. You’d be lucky to see one guarding the highest security personal vaults, never mind acting bodyguard for some gangly slip of a girl. My reckoning is that our other visitor is the daughter of a C.O. hiding from the retribution of the masses. Chances are there’s a whole mess of corporation bullshit just waiting to drop on us the moment we start poking around.”
Reaching the exam room door, the doctor stepped inside and made a beeline for the tablet on the work bench, deliberately trying to ignore the figure stood before the consol at the far end.
Unlike her tutor though, Malini couldn’t avert her gaze from the construction of flesh and steel. Despite its doll like features, the smooth head was the most visually human aspect of the creature. Below shoulders split by rubbery intake vents, a ribcage stretched to its outermost extremities clung to an artificially thickened spine. Where skin had ruptured smooth carbon coated bones and glistening metal stems peaked out, sealed from infection by plastic membranes formed of hotchpotch material. Nanites were functional workers, they cared little for aesthetics. Unnecessary bulky organs had been removed long ago, leaving the collapsed abdominal wall clinging to a heavily armoured spinal column.
Comparatively, the natural human muscular structure is truly pitiful. Even our closest relatives, the apes, have muscles seven times denser then our own. Thus with but a few minor adjustments the skeleton like Revenant could easily out wrestle the world’s strongest bodybuilder. There was no soft tissue or wasteful fatty layers, just solid woven muscles reinforced with elasticised polymers. Tendons had been replaced with metallic anchors, protruding through every thin-skinned joint like industrial cables.
Overall, it gave one the impression of a mummified corpse, retrofitted like a morbid string-less puppet, more machine then woman.
Caught up in her own thoughts, Malini’s feet nearly left the ground when the Revenant suddenly emitted a garbled squawk like a broken alarm. Turning from the consol, ‘Sarah’ stepped back into the middle of the room, the speaker atop her septum still crackling with static. As the sound began running through various tonal ranges, the nurse sidled up to the doctor without taking her eyes from the machine.
“What is it doing?” She said, disguising her panic behind curiosity.
Inspecting the creature from afar, doctor Malcolm felt compelled to answer, as much for his own sanity as his assistant’s.
“I’m honestly not sure... it sounds like-”
“Warning, standing order files over written. Error ignored. Vocal caliBration bEGinning.” Both attendants leapt out of their skins at the sudden addition of a third voice in the room. “One, two, thrEe, four, five. She Sells Sea ShEaaahhh-lls On The Sea Shore. The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog.”
Looking on with awe, Malcolm and Malini simply stood there listening to the strange near-human voice rattle off various tong twisters and test phrases. Whereas the Revenant’s voice had been some horrible grinding monotone, now it expressed a definite feminine nature. Each word seemed to be toned differently, often creating an odd stepping effect mid sentence, but they flowed together in a way that was recognisably human.
“Firmware update confirmed, Aperture Glad version Seven point four point eight successfully installed and operational. Unit designation Alpha Zulu Six Niner.” There was a brief pause whist some correction was made. “Override accepted. Unit Designation, SaRah.”
Jade eyes locked onto the two dumbfounded medical staff, Malini shuddering as she briefly caught sight of something in the expressionless face.
“Hello,” The woman announced, “My name is SaRah. I am KatRinAs guardian and Sibling. I would like to be of use during her stay, but first.”
The eyes drifted away, staring fixedly at a point in space as though the owner had forgotten something of import. This time the pause stretched out into an elongated moment of awkwardness, several dozen seconds passing before Malcolm clear his throat and dared to vouch safe the suspended question.
“Errm, yes? But what?”
Like a peg had been removed from a stuck gear, Sarah’s head swung back around to the unsure pair, eyes narrowing in much the same way that the nurse had spotted earlier. Were it not for the unyielding mouth, Malini could swear the doll woman was smiling.
“But first, I will reQuire the Return of my pants.”
All the King’s Horses
Chapter Ten: Everything For Free
Numbers. So many numbers, buzzing by and vying for his sparse attention. Blood leaked across his tongue, oozing from teeth that had cracked under his intensely locked jaws. Throat numb from the bout of screaming when the data streams had threatened to overwhelm him, Bobby could virtually feel his neurons steaming at the edges. Finally the last of the data packets assembled and his vision cleared.
Exhausted, the programmer allowed his UI to de-synchronise from the four competing AI terminals. It couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes since the stream began, but his brain felt like a bowl of synth-oats on a month long bake cycle. He fucking hated direct interfacing, but it was the only way to give the AI’s the power they needed. No matter how many serial cores you strung together, nothing could beat the human brain for parallel processing.
With shaking hands, Bobby began to remove the probes from the outside of the apparatus around his head, each eight inch needle sliding with a sucking sound from their rubbery sockets.
That had to be a new world record. Writing a complex instruction set in a long dead organic language in less than four hours was bad enough. But assembling that code simultaneously across several thousand individual servers, live, while applying six different levels of quantum encryption? This was to be his ‘last job’ and as such the director was paying him a lot for his specialty, but no amount of Equestrian bits or ‘travel rights’ would compensate him for the years which the brutal program had shaved off his life span.
Eleven of the twelve holo-screens flickered briefly and died as their power was cut, Bobby more than happy to never gaze at another Apple-Soft operating system so long as he lived. Freed of the wires and intruding probes, the programmer unbolted frame attached his skull, replacing the rig with an expensive wig that comfortably covered the thin hair and metallic interface sockets. Sure that his work was done, the prematurely aged man buried his head into his shaking hands and waited for the pain to pass.
Remaining dead to the world, yet hearing every susurration reverberating within in his screaming head, Bobby teetered on the edge of consciousness. Time passed unmarked in the server room, the gentle hum of heat sinks wooing the drained man into a shallow restless slumber. A gentle shake of his shoulder finally dragged the shattered worker back to the world of the living. Tilting his head upwards, the piggy face of his employer propelled Bobby’s still idol mind to the surface, invoking a bends of stomach turning terror.
Doctor Kliner manner remained suitably unimpressed, adjusted his spectacles he glowered down upon the recently awoken code monkey.
“I hope your lack of activity is an indication of success?”
Practically chocking on his dry throat, Bobby straightened his posture and nodded respectfully to his boss.
“Ahm, yes sir. It wasn’t easy, but I did exactly as you asked. The orders were integrated into a live stream in real time. Utterly untraceable.” Stammered the employee, brain scrambling for purchase on the wave of prostration. Clearing his throat a second time, a hard question appeared at the forefront of his still cotton like thoughts, one that had been subtly nagging him for some time since his disconnection from the server.
“Sir. Why did we need to go to these lengths?”
Kliner narrowed his eyes at his personal coder, calculating the man’s worth vs what little dangerous information the whelp possessed. “Elaborate, Roberts?”
Bobby saw the banana peel in the conversation but was already moving far too quickly to do anything but pirouette and hope to land on his feet.
“Well, if I could be so bold, the stream you asked me to intercept was downloading quite nearby. We could have practically walked in the front door and handed your operative their instructions.”
“What makes you think he is ‘my’ operative?” Pressed the rotund man, maintaining an authoritarian air to disguise the test within his question.
With no response forth coming, Kliner turned away from the dread filled coder, “Plans can change at a moment’s notice, best to keep our options open. With your system in place we are free to deliver instructions as we please. Now, your enquiring mind is presently no longer required. A transport is waiting on the roof to take you to the launch site. Best you hurry, this is one flight you do not want to miss.”
Stomping away like a small fatty planetoid, the doctor left Bobby to clear up the last of his equipment. While he didn’t know what was in the data package he’d been asked to send, the genius programmer was glad he’d be well away from whatever consequences would culminate from its delivery.
Sweeping up the duffle bag full of clothes and a handful of personal possessions, Bobby Roberts took one last glance at the room that had once been his prison. Towers of soulless servers hummed with the voices of a world in crisis, moderating and censoring thousands of feeds from this one city alone. Somewhere in the vast desert wastes, an orbital transport was being fuelled up and loaded onto its jump ship. Within twenty four hours he would be floating thousands of kilometres above the earth’s surface, observing the dome of Equestria gradually consuming the world beneath.
As the lights of the server hall went out, the last source of illumination remained the central screen on the technician’s workstation. Sensing the absence of activity, applications began to close themselves. Briefly the World-Gov logo revolved on the desktop, eventually winking from existence as the terminal locked itself down for the night.
--
“YOUR NEW LIFE IN EQUESTRIA.”
The presenter announced, joined by a fanfare as the World-Corp logo rotated jerkily on the giant screen. Cheese notwithstanding, the present holo-reel had been made up to look like an old propaganda PSA from the 1940’s, even down to the flickers and scratches on the none existent film.
“This is Keith Wiseman.” A waving man stood in front of the camera, his arm around a prideful woman and flanked by two beaming children. Standing in what looked like an idealist’s concept of a modern homestead, the family were the epitome of incongruity considering the state of the world.
“Fine spit of a lad. Keith and his family have chosen to emigrate to Equestria, so let’s get them underway. First he’ll need a brand new body.” Winking at the audience, ‘Keith’ picked up a large cup and drank enthusiastically.
Setting the empty flask aside the man licked his lips and twitched an eyebrow “Tastes like grape, doesn’t it Keith?”
Quite suddenly, Keith’s keen nod turned into a melodramatic faint. A puff of smoke and an overly obvious scene switch later, an earth pony stood in the spot from which the man had vanished moments ago.
“There we are now. Feeling okay there, Keith? Good chap. Now it’s off to Equestria.”
“Here we are. The Land of Equestria. Prosperous, serene and welcoming to all who would seek refuge. Unlike Earth, there are no mega cities or residential hives. So where will Kieth live? For the Equestrian pilgrim, there are many options.”
As one herd the family trotted up a cobbled main street, entering a cut away home and admiring the spacious cosy interior.
“Many homes have already been constructed in Equestria for Newfoals to occupy. Rental is an option too, but for the true pioneer what could be more exciting than building your own home?”
The image and commentary froze for a moment as the broadcast system chimed a calming tone. “Katrina Weatherly to the front desk, Katrina Weatherly to the front desk.”
“HALLEUIAH!” Came the cry of jubilation from somewhere within the darkened lecture theatre. As though attached to a bungee cord, Kat leapt up from her seat near the back of the room and dove recklessly across several rows of classmates in a zealous dash towards the exit.
Erupting into the brightly lit corridor, sock clad feet slid across immaculate laminate, bouncing off the far wall before racing off down the hallway. Four days. Four excruciating days of weird exercises classes, language lectures with silly giggly ponies, etiquette seminars and unfathomably dull public service broadcasts by the WorldGov’ propaganda department. It was enough to make the most seasoned veteran stir-crazy! For a little while, the strained girl had tried just avoiding the classes altogether, segregating herself in the tiny room she shared with another random woman from the Falafel. Salve though, respected listener that she was, had gotten wind of Kat’s tardiness and had seen to it that the wayward girl found her way to every class on time.
Despite all indications, Kat had somewhat expected to walk in and be converted the same day, not spend all her time trapped in clean, well ventilated rooms with ‘pleasant’ company. At last! An excuse to break the monotony!
Just as she rounded the last corner into Clinic Six’s welcome area, something caught the back of her jumpsuit collar. With a strangled little ‘Erk’, the maverick youngster was brought to a halt.
“Courtesy guideline four;” Sarah’s newly condescending voice stated as she released her grip on the struggling youth. “Running in the halls is not perMitted and can result in withdrawal of Cake privileges.”
Rubbing her neck dramatically, Katrina scowled dementedly at the android that had so quickly chased her down “Baka! You nearly strangled me!”
“Everything alright down there?” Squeaked a curious mare from beyond the clinic’s welcome desk.
“Fine.” Kat huffed, shrugging Sarah away and walking deliberately the last few feet to the reception.
“Hay there Hun! Do you need some help?” Churped Dizzy, eagerly leaning towards the potential friend, “Looked like you nearly took a tumble!”
Oddly, though Dizzy’s full attention seemed to be on the reception visitors, beside her a hoof doodled strange fluid shapes across what looked like a recyclable napkin. Beside the little pony, the work surface was littered with dozens of pieces of scrap paper and rappers. Covering the table top and hung from every conceivable edge. Not a single scrap without some odd drawing, detailed calligraphic lettering or cramped Equine script. None of it was particularly eye catching mind you, bar the sheer quantity.
With her trademark manic-smirk, Katrina leaned closer and touched her nose to the pony’s, wild eyes staring into the amber pools of helpfulness.
“Katrina Weatherly. You called me?”
“Oh yeah!” Dizzy exclaimed, unsure ears perking up at the mention of the name, “Salve left a message for you. Umm, let’s see here.”
Disappearing for a moment beneath her crowded desk, the eager pony rummaged around in search of the wayward document. There was no way that the small desk had enough space under it to house even a small Equine, yet Dizzy seemed to have vanished all together, the laws of space time no match for the energetic Equestrian. In the distance there was the sound of an Ice sculpture being pushed over, a yelled apology echoing out of the three foot legroom.
“Funny little thing, isn’t she?” commented Kat, resting her chin on folded arms, “What do you think her talent is? Giddiness?”
Sarah leaned over the edge of the desk and took note of the wide collection of doodles and paperclip sculptures. After a second of careful thought, the woman proffered an answer.
“Bingo!” came the chirpy reply from somewhere behind a filing draw, “On both accounts!”
Like a submarine breaching the calm surface of the ocean, Dizzy popped back up from her Narnia and leapt onto the swivel-chair. Quite oblivious to the ripple of paper that flowed over the edge of the table, the filly allowed her seat to spin until it finally slowed of its own accord.
As the rotating Dizzy drew to a halt, she leaned out and put her hooves on to the desk, offering up the note that was attached to the end of her nose. “Here it is!”
Katrina removed the memo and read it. Like butter above a paraffin lamp, her perpetual grin melted into a puddle of blank disbelief.
“Isn’t it wonderful!” Dizzy continued, smiling happily at the daunted girl, “I mean, normally we arn’t like supposed to tell anyone. But Salve said you were, like, a special case and that it was important to let you know.”
“Oh. That’s... good then?” Kat replied carefully, mind struggling stalled out on what had just been revealed. “Why are you telling me now?”
“ ‘Because I want her to have time to think, properly’.” Recited Dizzy, putting on her best impression of ‘soothing Salve’ in authority mode. “That’s what Salvey said anyway- Oh! Though maybe she didn’t want me to tell you that bit? Darn. Oh well, you know now.”
Katrina said nothing. After a short moment an orange hoof gently pulled the note down to reveal Dizzy’s innocent face beaming up at her shocked expression.
“Isn’t it great though! You’re being converted tonight!”
Again impassive silence met the pony’s congratulatory comments. Slowly, as though in a trance, Kat folded up the note and turned to walk out of the clinic.
Dizzy was at a loss. Sure, they sometimes had the occasional ‘runner’, humans who would quite literally run screaming when their time suddenly came to drink to their salvation. But the mare had never seen one walk out so calmly before. A bony hand drew tapped the pony’s withers and drew her attention to the other onlooker.
“We will be back shortly.” Confirmed Sarah, unreadable features softening slightly, “I will ensure she returns in time for the appointment. Please keep the slot open.”
--
Outside the confines of the domed Bureau, a glorious day was barely beginning. The restored sky had barely a cloud within its vast blue plane. Laying atop an abandoned car near the centre’s perimeter, Katrina folded her arms behind her head and finally allowed the dam of thoughts to break. Overwhelming relief flooded into the valleys of her mind, dragging within its swirling tide the boulders and uprooted redwoods of mortal dread. This was it. It was no longer some distant event that might happen to someone else. She was going to die tonight, by appointment no less. For some reason, the newly imposed time limit suddenly seemed to crystallise the world around her, as though her hourglass of life was now on some awful conveyer headed towards a recycling crusher.
Crunching gravel singled the arrival of her mechanised shadow. Drawing up next to the hardtop, Sarah stared out over the towering cityscape, watching the millions playing out their individual morning routines.
“Eighty thousand physiological combat models tell me how you should react. Yet you defy them, and I cannot tell what you are thinking as You lack the appropriate wireless enhancement.”
“You know Sarah, you’re a really crap counsellor.” Kat responded, not moving from her relaxed posture upon the sun baked car roof. Seconds, normally huddled together and rushing past lest they be noised, slowed and spread themselves out into warm sluggish moments.
“What’s wrong with me?” Asked Katrina the endless blue sky.
Unmoving Sarah offered up an answer, “Have you reconsidered self termination?”
“No, it’s not that.” Kat said, more as question to herself then a statement, “It takes more than an ‘emulator’ to understand people, Sarah. Do me a favour, go away and get locked in a logic loop somewhere.”
Once more lazy seconds fanned themselves in the generous sunshine, their lax approach to the universal timepiece rudely interrupted by the yelp of a teenager being dragged from her cosy retreat. In one swift motion, Sarah threw her step-sibling onto her shoulder and began striding towards the road leading down to the city.
“LET GO OF ME!” Katrina shrieked, pounding her fists ineffectually as her guard turned abductor began to pick up speed, mechanical legs moving with inhuman grace. “PUT ME DOWN YOU PILE OF SCCRRAAAAAAAP!”
All the King’s Horses
Chapter Eleven: Dense Macabre
Flakes of aged masonry crumbled away as the sleek figure left the unstable gable end, a briefly arched flight bringing him to the rough tar coated surface. Rolling to disperse the impact, the runner’s momentum carried into a fluid leap over the roof bound ventilation ducts, his feet finding the ground once more at a sprint.
They say that all fashion works in cycles. In a world where a message could travel to every country in the blink of an eye, commodity had been placed on secure information. Thus the courier had been reinvented. Once upon a time their cargo would have been letters encrypted by genius or cipher. Now the product was Vaults, isolated physical memory only accessible to those who had the correct data keys. It was the couriers job to deliver these unique keys and information to their prospective buyers. Naturally people would always need physical possessions moved around too and the delivery companies did good side business in contracted postal work.
With their high value packages, trouble tended to follow couriers like circling vultures. Whether armed or not, a delivery boy in the open was a sitting duck for would-be robbers. A good agent was one who survived to make their second delivery. This had led to various innovations on the part of the couriers themselves, evolving to deal with their predators. Some had taken to using heavily armed transports, others used careful planning and some even resorted to the dank oppression of the old sewers. Few though had mastered the aerial arts like Simon ‘Fax’ Golla. In his Australian home town of Dunnit, it was said that ‘Fax’ was quicker then e-mail.
From his vantage upon a particularly jaunty rooftop, Fax looked out over the urban jungle like a prince surveying his father’s lands.
Despite its unusual adaptations to life on the perpetual flood plain, the city of Portland was actually fairly mundane. The tall closely packed buildings mirrored one another in size, rough variants on the theme of ‘oblong’ rising side by side like dull monoliths. Here and there, the mad smatterings of ‘artistic licence’ spawned a cylinder or misshapen pyramid, but in the end they were lost in a sea of grey blocks in an uninspired child’s play set. What really set the city apart though was its façade, specifically it’s near conjoined roof space. Mismatched roofs were woven together by conduit pipes, walkways and plasti-steel bars, crisscrossing the simplistic cityscape into a thatched cottage the size of Manhattan. It was a free-runner’s paradise.
Latest package safely delivered, Fax felt the press of time waning in the heat of the daytime and sat down on the slanted rooftop for some well earned respite. Taking a long drag from the pipe leading to a his water canister, the career courier was about to kick back for a nap when a subtle movement caught his attention. What he had at first mistaken for the warble of distant heat haze turned out to be a tall figure, once sat and now striding across the open rooftops toward the runner. Other then the occasional Pegasi, visitors were rare in this world above. Delicately, without so much as braking pace, the thin person mounted the two inch wide conduit which led up to Fax’s perch. As the steel pipe began to creek under her weight, Sarah walked plainly across the precarious multi-story drop as though it were a generously proportioned sidewalk, reaching the other side without so much as a twitch of lost balance.
“Simon Golla?” Queried the artificial feminine voice. “KatRina is in need of your assistance.”
Raising a quizzical eyebrow, Simon nodded in reply. “Huh. Your sister said you were going to upgrade your voice. Suits you Sheila. What does Kitty need me for then?”
Whether or not the compliment was well received seemed unobtainable from the moulded features of the cyborg. “She requires to speak with someone.”
Though he already suspected the answer, Simon posed the question none the less, “Why not you?”
There was only a slight pause, too long to go unnoticed. “She needs someone real.”
--
“You’re sure it’s her in there?” Fax asked, watching as the door of the shed shook violently from another impact. From the intense swearing, something relatively human was being held within the barricaded shed. But in a world where even rats were no longer necessarily quadrupeds * he was inclined to air on the side of caution.
Sarah seemed to think for a moment before replying, “To within a ninety five percent probability.”
“No worries then.” Muttered the man, stepping forward to lay a hand upon the rusted steel surface. Beyond the corrugated door, the verbal assault had petered off into raspy muttering. Fax was no counsellor, he wasn’t being paid nearly enough for that. But he understood enough from what Sarah had told him during their brief journey across the open walkways. With little more than these ruff facts and a smattering of intuition, Simon had a fairly good idea what the girl’s panic was about. Waiting for Sarah to retreat to a safe distance (possibly on another roof), Simon gently leaned against the door and chose his words carefully.
“It’s an important decision, choosing how you die.”
The ranting inside stopped abruptly, the shack’s occupant suddenly quite attentive to the familiar voice.
“ ‘Our plan is to ponify you, the sooner the better. Expect this to happen when you least expect it.’ That’s how the Ambassadors put it when they first launched the Bureaus, and I can see why they don’t normally tell people when their number is up.”
Cautiously, Fax withdrew the obstructive rebar and gently opened the door, allowing daylight to flood the tomb like space beyond. “You were expecting it to be quick and definitive with no time to actually reconsider. Put fate in someone else’s hands, or hooves or whatever. But suddenly you’ve got the chance to make the choice yourself.”
“What would you know!” Growled the hunched shadow, stepping forwards to reveal the gangly teen, socks and all. “You can’t understand what my life has been like! My mother was executed in front of me. I was tortured for things I still don’t understand. I’ve been used, made to do the most horrible things for crowds of sick repugnant men and tossed aside like a soiled rag.”
Simon barely winced, knowing that if he started to pull punches she would slip back inside her shell.
“Yeah, your sister told me. She explained what happened with your mother, how you ended up in the Canadian States and about the club where she found you. Hate to tell you this, but everybody has a sob story on this messed up planet. They either cope or adapt. Besides, this isn’t the first time you’ve run away from something important.”
“I’m scared, okay!” Kat yelled, desperation cracking her fragile voice. “I’m fucking terrified. Everything was so vague before, but now that this ‘ending’ suddenly has a time and date I feel like I’m wasting away, content to just exist because there isn’t enough time left to DO anything.”
Turning her look of defeat to the forest of rooftops, Kat gestured to the sprawling cityscape beyond. “Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, we are only here for a fraction of a second. But while alive, we wait in vein, wasting years for a phone call or a letter, or a look from someone or something to make it all right but it never comes!”
Anger overtook despair like a falling counterweight, the girl’s mood switching so quickly that Simon could almost hear the snap of tension.
“It was supposed to have meant something!” She shouted, “All of it! Selfish to the last day of this hell, we want for that which we don’t have and loath that which we do. After everything that we’ve achieved man is still a fucking animal, screwing his way up the food chain. Fuck what happens to anyone else so long as he’s happy. Hate, greed and love, just chemicals in our blood commanding us to eat and shit and fuck, all to distract us from this brief pointless existence that can only lead to more suffering for those that come next.”
“And the truth is I’ve felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long, all the while pretending I’m okay. Maybe because no one wants to hear my misery, because they have they’re own.”
“Well. Fuck everyone. ” Spat the ranting girl with uncharacteristic venom. Rounding on Simon like an enraged snake, the fury fled from her eyes at his look of aloof pity.
“I want to live Fax, I really do. But I can’t, not like this. I can’t keep waking up to this same tragedy, this same linier existence, this same face that I hate so god damn much that it makes me want to tear it off just too see if there’s anyone real underneath.”
Settling some, Kat’s gaze drifted to the automaton stood on the opposite roof, it’s back turned and head craned upwards to watch the Pegasi Swooping overhead. “ Yet when it comes to the longest step, the deepest cut, that one last pill that could afford me some beautiful release, turns out I’m just as much of a coward as she was.”
Fax sighed heavily. Neither empathy nor talking with kids were his forte. Sadly the mess of a girl had a thing for him. Though he wished that the skeletal woman had been wrong, as Sarah had pointed out to him Simon had the unique position of being someone whom Kat might actually open up too. Now he was stranded in the middle of a perilous psychological maze. Maybe it was best to start with his own feelings first?
“Look,” he started carefully, licking his lips in concentration. “You know I’m not into this whole ‘Equine’ thing. Used to be that changing how you look didn’t change who you were, just what part people saw first. Frankly, it’s wrong to just drink some magic goop to make you ‘nice’ instead of actually trying to become a better person, and downright creepy to think so many people have just leapt into this head first. Worse, there’s no fairness in who is converted and who isn’t. Murderers and brutal animals of the worst kind are welcomed with open arms, with no justice for the people who’ve suffered because of them.”
Finding his own opinions and frustrations flowing quite freely, the man boldly approached Katrina and pled his case, allowing the words to come without his fumbling brain interfering too much.
“But you’re a good kid Kitty, so here’s the way I see it. Ponies are total Sooks the lot of ‘em. Protecting someone else mind you, they’ll stand like a ewe with her lamb, but they’re virtually incapable of violence to defend themselves. So, not exactly the type to go around masterminding insidious plots to execute an entire race. You want to die? Fine, that’s your own choice an’ I ain’t going to argue the toss with you. But conversion isn’t going to do that. What it will give you is another view point, clear your head and open up some more options on where you go from here.”
Katrina winced as a firm hand gripped her shoulder, resisting the urge to lash out at the unexpected contact.
“If you still feel this way afterwards then fine,” Continued Fax in a remarkably upbeat tone, “throw yourself off a bridge or something. Hell, you could go to Equestria and feed yourself to a dragon. How’s that for a classy way to go? At the end of the day, at least you can say that you gave this new life a try. Who knows, you might get there and actually like it. I don’t approve of most people’s reasons for going to the Bureau, but unlike a lot of sinners on this earth, I honestly think you’re deserving of a second chance.”
Trails of dust whipped around the high rooftops in the gentle breeze, their thin dancing waltz distracting the distant youngster as she processed the older man’s words.
“Could you...” She tried, swallowing to clear her parched throat, “Would you come back with me? Just to the Bureau?”
*(Intresting point; the world record for the most legs on a muti-rat currently stands at thirteen and a half, the half due to a controversy over whether prehensile teeth counted as a functioning limb.)
--
“Dizzy, would you please stop.” Muttered the human receptionist, watching the anxious equine from behind her paperwork. “You’ve been walking in circles yammering for the last half-hour. Seriously, you’re going to give yourself ulcers or something.”
It had been several hours since the sisters had left the security of the bureau for the urban sprawl. Worried at their long absence, the pony had considered abandoning her post to look for them, a silly idea that was quickly quelled by her human partner. Even in a conversion city like Portland, a lone pony on the streets was in grave danger of assault or worse.
Suddenly, Dizzy looked up from the groove she was gradually wearing in the laminate flooring, ears flicking towards susurration too quiet for human hearing. The clinic doors slid aside, revealing the mechanised woman, her charge and a lanky man that the pony didn’t recognise.
“You’re back! Oh gosh, you’ve got to hurry!” Gasped the filly, anxiously trotting behind Katrina and nudging her towards the ponification wing, “They called your name fifteen minutes ago, Kat! Gogogo!”
Blinking in surprise at the pony head butting her rear, Katrina glanced up at Fax as though seeking guidance.
“We’ve brought you this far.” Shrugged the courier, “The rest is up to you, Kitty.”
With a nod, the girl broke into a run, vanishing behind the flapping clinic doors as she followed the blue arrows to the conversion rooms.
Letting out a long sigh, Fax poked the android in her skinny arm and held out his hand. “Got to get back to work before I’m missed too much. You owe me one.”
“Your assistance was much appreciated.” Sarah replied whilst taking the offered hand.
“Buh-bye now!” Waved the happy receptionist, watching as the courier bolted out into the entrance hall.
“He was nice. Wow! You two really cut that close! I mean I wasn’t too worried to begin with, but when it got after midday and you still weren’t back I started getting that awful feeling that something bad had happened and then I got these itches in my hooves so couldn’t even sit still at dinner-“
A careful forefinger and thumb pinched the excitable pony’s muzzle closed, silencing her rambling mid waffle.
“Are you still required here?” Sarah quavered, kneeling down to the Equestiran’s eye level, “I would like you to come with me to the garden.”
Mouth still sealed, Dizzy made a muffled sound and looked pleadingly at her partner on the desk.
“Don’t look at me,” replied the other receptionist hotly, “Your shift ended half an hour ago.”
--
Reclined against a small sculpture of a cubist’s worst nightmare, Sarah had watched in silence as her giddy companion darted around the wide open space. Amazingly the normally yellowing grass had begun to take on a healthy green hue around the happy earth pony.
Above them, barely six feet off the spongy green ground, a small cloud system had been assembled for the Pegasus newfoal flight class. Flitting like frightened fledglings pushed from the nest, the winged horses jumped from cloud to cloud, focusing on controlled landings on the uneven soft surface.
“What do you think it’s like to fly?”
Dizzy paused in her revelry and tilted an ear at Sarah’s suddenly broken silence.
Leaving the clinic behind, the pony and the half woman had climbed sweeping stairways to the rooftop intrigue that was the Portland Bureau garden. Whilst earth’s soil could be carefully processed until sickly plants could once again grow within it, only the slightly undulating lawn was native to Terra-firma. Twenty tons of soil had been imported from Equestria itself to fill the plethora of shallow flowerbeds and planters. Most were still empty, but others had been claimed by various newfoal earth ponies for their adventures in horticulture. With little effort the ponies were gradually creating their own corner of Eden.
“I’m not sure,” replied the giddy pony, “But I’d love to give it a try! Apparently they have airships in Equestria, isn’t that fantastic!”
Nodding stiffly, Sarah returned her gaze to the bouncing ponies, the juxtaposition utterly wasted on her limited experience. “Thank you for coming here. This has been enjoyable.”
Dizzy beamed, “That’s wonderful. Salve said you couldn’t feel like normal humans, but I’m glad you can have fun too.”
Something occurred to the filly as the words Sarah had spoken twigged her natural concern. “Umm, but if you don’t mind me asking, why aren’t you waiting to meet your sister after her conversion? I’m sure she’ll really want you to be there for her.”
“I cannot comply.” Replied the synthetic voice. “This unit’s actions over the past Eighty six thousand hours have violated Ghost control protocols. Restored cognitive functions were classified as mission resources.”
“Were?” Echoed the curious earth pony, ear tilting again in an adorably confused manner. She could swear the plastic woman was smiling.
“Cognitive functions serve no purpose beyond interaction with KathRin. In the event of mission failure, said functions will be discontinued. Conversion process takes twenty seven point five minuets. Two minuets remain until critical mission failure.”
Bewilderment prevailed on Dizzy’s features until realisation rushed up like a tidal wave. Gasping, the filly leapt the last few feet to Sarah’s side. “But, but conversion doesn’t change anything! I should know! She’ll still be her! She’s still… still…”
An emaciated hand silenced the frantic pony with a gentle scratch behind her flattened ears. Tears brimming in her enormous hazel eyes, Dizzy sat down and stared in defeat at her doomed friend.
“But that’s so mean! You can’t just disappear like that.” She begged, stepping closer to hug the gaunt form, “There has to be something I can do!”
“There is.”
For the second time, Dizzy gasped dramatically, renewed hope blossoming in her determined heart. “What! What do I have to do!”
“Stay here for one minuet, and thirty two seconds.”
All the King’s Horses
Chapter Twelve: Wish you Were Here
Across green fields of the endless prairie the herd ran, bringing with them a cooling wind that soothed the pain of existence. Thundering hooves drove a bass of tremulous vigour through the very earth itself, rising up through her naked feet and permeating her very being. On the whisper of ghostly motivations the herd turned towards the watcher, moving as a single being to sweep around and through her brief, physical body. Laughter and joy shone from every mare and stallion, each calling to her to run in harmony with the infinite green lands.
For the first time since her ordeals began, Katrina felt alive. The world was no longer an unreal place beyond a pane of hazy glass. Deep in her heart, the crevasse of pain was filled with love, belonging and hope.
Enraptured by unchained happiness, Kat reached out into the ethereal herd just as the last trailing mane flowed past, sprinting away to encircle the youngster in a blurring wall of sinuous colours. Somehow, without truly understanding why, the lonely girl knew that they were waiting, waiting for her.
“Saigo no kōgō wa, taiyō-shin kara nani o shitaidesu ka?”
Motherly and gentle, the voice wafted close to her ear, carried on a breath that tasted of mountain springs and stardust.
“Ketsumatsu.” Kat replied, the answer braking through unbidden from her wounded soul.
Soft fur of a majestic muzzle brushed kindly against the awe struck teens neck, filling her with a comfort long forgotten. “Ahh, the one thing I cannot bring you. But perhaps, a new beginning?”
Vertigo spun the green world into a warm embracing darkness. Renewed lungs took their first breath in earnest as the girl floated just below the surface of consciousness, drawing in the scent of sanitising agents and antiseptics. Laying on her side, Katrina’s tingling body brought affirmation of the metallic table, against which her right arm was uncomfortably pinned. This was strange, because she was also fairly certain that her arms were lazily draped in front of her, their hard hooves rasping gently against the metal bed.
Misplaced muscles pulled her hearing around in a dizzying Doppler effect. Nearby, voices were in hushed discussion about colours and unfamiliar measurements, strangely mobile ears swivelling with little effort to get a better scoop of the conversation. Sadly the analysis cut short as the participants noticed their subject stirring woozily. Follicles of freshly grown fur tingled at gentle wakes in the air around her relaxed body. Without even opening her twitching eyes, Katrina could ‘feel’ the doctor approach, vaguely sensing his outreached hand just before it brushed softly along her shoulders.
Eliciting a small happy sigh, the gentle touch lifted Kat the last step to the waking world. Eyes like giant emeralds opened unto a world filled with subtle colours and tones. Bland white walls revealed their subtle hints of turquoise, even the once grey O.R table was now glossy silver, laced with an oily blue sheen. A curtain of pastel lemon hair obscured the other half of her vision, wafting slightly in the girl’s steady breaths.
“Ah, you’re awake. Deep breath… And out again.”
Craning her surprisingly long neck, Kat turned to see Dr Malcolm beside her, listening attentively to the stethoscope held against her chest. Acutely away of her nudity, Katrina’s eyes took in the scope of her new body, especially the absence of livid scars and burns. Lush green fur flowed across perfectly formed equine withers, falling away beneath a lazily relaxed wing and rising once more along smooth flanks. Feathers twitched at her attention, stretching like fingers as she tried to move the now absent digits.
“Pulse is good, no obstructions in the lungs. Everything looks to be in order at least. We’re going to try and stand you up now. Nurse, lower the table would you kindly.”
With a hiss of pistons Katrina’s metal bed descended to floor level. Though the difficulties of standing after the transformation had been mentioned at orientation, Kat had not expected things to be as comical as they turned out to be. As the doctor looked on in disinterest Kat wiggled herself to the edge of the table and slid off. Legs crumpling in perfect symmetry, the disorientated Pegasus began a most graceful descent through onehundred and eighty degrees, pushed on when her other two legs overcorrected and locked their joints. After a slow smooth roll across her flank, Kat found herself resting on her back.
“Would you like a hand there, dear?” Malini offered, leaning over the tortoised pony with suppressed entertainment.
Normally such a show of weakness would have greatly irritated the youngster. Instead a feeling of embarrassment was quickly swept away by a rising fit of giggles, unable to overcome the image of just how silly that must have looked from the attendant’s perspective. For the first time in a long while, Katrina felt the urge to return the grin. Not the grimace of someone lost in their own private hell, but the genuine thing backed by a rush of elation that filled her from head to toe. Kicking her legs in a slow bicycle motion, the little Pegasus couldn’t help but burst out laughing at her predicament.
A little help from the attending nurse soon had the vertically challenged equine onto her hooves.
Undeterred by the giddiness shared by the females, Malcolm slid a hand beneath Katrina’s reflexively folded wings and stretched out each of them in turn. Carefully feeling the bone and taught muscles for deformities, he remained stone faced to the filly’s impromptu giggles as his fingers brushed sensitive spots. Assessment complete, the doctor stood up to scrutinize the newly formed Pegasus from afar, as an artist would a disappointing sculpture.
Careful not to trap her tail, Kat sat down awkwardly and turned her emerald eyes to the doctor filling out the last gaps in his report. Intuition had never been one of Katrina’s strong suits, being about as attentive to the emotions of others as a random insult generator. Despite this, something about Malcolm’s aloof demeanour struck a chord with some untapped empathy in the feathery pony’s recently rewired brain; This man begrudged his work.
“What’s wrong doctor?” Queried the newfoal, a part of her wondering why she felt the compulsion to ask at all, “You look worried.”
When only a grumbled response about paper work seemed to be forthcoming, Nurse Malini ducked down to Kat’s new eye level and offered a reassuring smile.
“You look wonderful, Hun. How do you feel?”
“Like the total opposite of what I was expecting.” The pony replied, with absolute sincerity. “I’m not sure what I was hoping for anymore, maybe some bright light and then nothingness. But I’m still here… mostly. And I’ve got this strong urge to run around.”
“We get that a lot with Pegasi, they always seem to be ready to run a marathon the moment their eyes open.” Melini reassured, brushing away her uncooperative fringe, “Completely counterintuitive. Unicorns and normal ponies usually come too feeling completely drained.”
Something in Katrina’s expression made the nurse pause, a fleeting look of rising panic that was quickly buried beneath the exaggerated grin.
“Okay then… Well let’s try walking back to your room, shall we? Just take it slow, you’ll find yourself taking more tumbles otherwise.”
Escorting the pony through the clinic proved a lot more difficult the Malini had expected, even with a fresh conversion. Unable to keep track of her additional limbs, the Pegasus kept getting mixed up between wings and forelegs, throwing her already frail balance and resulting in an odd wobbly goose step. To make matters worse the ex-human seemed completely distracted, stumbling whenever her concentration slipped from the process at hand. Even with the kindly nurse’s help, it made her first walk into a trial of frustration.
“Carefully now, you’re doing so well!” Malini said, her encouragement driving the Pegasus the last few feet to her dorm.
“Nearly there. And here we go! Now, do you remember how to-”
A buzz of magnets cut off the attendant mid sentence, Katrina smirking from around the bit hanging next to the doorframe.
“Ah, so you didn’t actually sleep through orientation then?”
“Nope! Still slept through it,” Replied the filly, “But I kinda guessed it was either a door handle or an alarm. So I pulled all the one’s down the hall first night I was here.”
Rolling her eyes, the nurse gently pushed the door open and waited for the pony to amble over the threshold. “Well I’m glad it wasn’t the latter. I’ve got to get back to the clinic now, so if you need a hand getting around, just use the call button on the wall there. There’s still a few hours till dinner, do you want me to come by for you?”
Kat shook her head, “No, that’s okay. Thank you though.”
Carefully nosing the door closed, the filly turned towards the sparse interior, listening to the footfalls as the nurse went back to her work. As the sounds faded, a void of stillness opened up in the small sterile room, the ubiquitous hum of florescent lights seeping from their milieu to torment those unfortunate enough to take notice. Katrina Weatherly, stripped of egocentric blinkers, rested her forehead against the textured surface of the far wall.
“Baka.” She muttered in barely a whisper.
Drawing back slightly, Kat let her head fall back against the white washed concrete, cursing her own selfishness.
“Anata orokana, riko-tekina, muchina on'nanoko!”
--
With the last traces of dusk vanishing beyond the lonely cityscape, Katrina sat in the cooling night air and watched the inert husk. For several hours she had searched the extensive grounds, knowing only that Sarah would not have roamed far from the world-corp faculty. Eventually she had walked the circumference of the ornate building, at last finding what could be considered a ‘corpse’ stood before the Bureau service entrance.
At first she had pleaded, begged the unblinking eyes to simply acknowledge her presence. When the accusing silence became deafening, she had cried, soundless tears staining her muzzle and pooling before penitent hooves at which she stared. Now she simply sat, unable to do anything bar gaze at the empty vessel. Seeking even so much as a comforting touch would have invited the cold wrath of the machine.
Deep in her melancholy, she barely noticed the bump of an outer door opening, looking up only when the approaching clatter of hooves paused. Their owner was the lively earth pony whom had first greeted them to the Bureau, now subdued and carrying a tray of food on her back.
Ignoring the other equine for a moment, Dizzy walked slowly alongside the forlorn Pegasus and craned her neck to look up at the spectre.
“Hello Sarah.” She said aloud, tone chirpy but lacking the abundant energy associated with the young secretary, “You’ve been out here a while, and I thought you might be hungry. Didn’t know what you’d like though, so I brought a bit of everything-“
“She can’t hear you.” Kat croaked, red ringed eyes studying the floor, “Even if she could, she can’t respond.”
Dizzy smiled softly, “I know. But I’d rather be sure then leave her out here alone. What does she like?”
“Doesn’t eat. Just bio-gel and glucose.”
“That’s a shame.” Said the pony, reaching around to the tray and placing it down at her hooves, “The hay fries are getting cold.”
Katrina shivered against the chilly air, the scent of fresh food caressing her senses even through the emotion induced mucus. Up till now, missing dinner hadn’t bothered the filly. Now an empty stomach began voicing its complaints to the management in loud bubbling groans.
A plate slid across the rough concrete, bearing a cargo of tossed salad and what looked like brittle straw. Wide and inviting, the platter filled Kat’s vision and assailed her taste buds with promises of the divine.
“No sense in wasting these then.” Dizzy suggested, looking back to the statue like figure before the pair. “You don’t mind if she has yours, right Sarah?”
Tucking into her own pile of greens, the little pony remained carefully aloof as her companion tentatively sniffed at the presented ‘food’. It was unlikely that the girl had seen or tasted grown produce in her life before coming to Portland. Yet the plate before her must have seemed a paradox of unappetising temptation. Like most new convertees, she started slowly, eventually braving the golden stalks to the private delight of her one mare audience.
There was a moment of pure gastronomic joy, the broad goofy smile escaping the edges of the new pony’s melancholy as she chewed heartily on her first meal. But gradually the smile bled away and, after swallowing the first bite, Kat nudged the plate aside.
“I don’t deserve this.” She muttered bitterly, “After what I’ve done, I don’t deserve to be happy ever again.”
Shuffling until she could lay on her stomach, Dizzy continued to explore her own meal, more out of a need for focus then hunger.
“It’s okay, I think she wanted it to be this way. She seemed oddly happy about it, just pleased that you’d be safe.”
Kat shook her head solemnly, “You don’t understand. I knew this was going to happen and I didn’t care. Didn’t stop to think.”
Once again there was a gentle patter of tears striking dusty concrete. Above them, the unchanging constellations that had once guided ancestors across oceans revelled in the freedom of their renewed sky, oblivious to the torment of man’s fleeting existence.
“I killed her… mu-murdered her. I’m a horrible, selfish monster.”
A strong neck suddenly wrapped around the despairing pony’s own, guiding Kat’s chin to Dizzy’s soft withers. Dams finally broke within the comfort of the earthpony’s embrace, the compassionate nuzzling and hushed soothing reassurances drawing out her grieving in great wailing sobs. Beneath the statuesque shade of Sarah’s ambulatory remains, apologies and stories flowed freely between the two, now more human than they ever had been when they walked on two legs.
And in the cold space where there had once lingered a mind, a recently re-written set of standing orders lay, waiting for its mission to commence.
All the King’s Horses
Chapter Thirteen: No Rest for the Wicked
When human beings live in a stressful environment, their brains compensate through behavioural changes known as ‘coping mechanisms’. Sometimes this can mean the substitution of reality, escape into interactive worlds or holo-novels. Others cope through self medication, addressing the chemical imbalances in the brain with a variety of colourful substances, like alcohol or nicotine.
And then there are those who just see the world as it is and then blame it on everyone else. Cynics.
Jessop was well practiced in such methods and hated just about everything. For instance, he hated the sticking door on the gent’s lavatory that somehow worked for everyone but him. He hated the pudding they served on Tuesdays, some pink and wobbly monstrosity that bemoaned the loss of simple wholesome food cubes. Hate was his release, the old security chief never happy unless he had something to moan about.
But beyond all of life’s misdemeanours, Jessop loathed the graveyard shift. Covering for his sick colleague the previous morning had been bad enough, but his own shift left just a gnat’s fart to grab some shut eye. After barely four hours of respite, he had been forced to part company from both a comfortable bed and a beautiful woman. Then again, a lack of sleep wasn’t exactly high on his list of complaints, given what the pleasant alternative had been.
Reaching the ground floor of the Bureau, the chief set his course towards the security wing at the rear of the complex and counted off his mental to-do list. First he’d need to check the security feeds for erroneous flags. Then he’d delete said flags, get coffee and mooch for the rest of the night. Yep, that about summed up the next six hours.
Stretching out his cramped arms against the unrestrictive light armour, Jessop considered his run of fortune regarding his thankless choice of employment. Despite being one of the first purpose build structures for conversion, the Porland Bureau was one of the dullest beats he had ever worked. Sure there were the usual punch ups in among the ‘human’ residents, even the occasional stabbing, but other than that everything was quiet. No crazies screaming about horses eating their brains or mad priests picketing the doors with their flock of scared blue collar worshipers. Even the HLF seemed to just about ignore the place.
Here was a prime target for any self respecting terrorist, and the only interesting thing to have happened since its foundation was a riot almost two weeks ago. And he’d been on his day off too! It was times like this when Jessop Whild, son and grandson of war heroes, realised he was nothing more than an under paid mall cop.
Sighing, Jessop finally reached the security doors and reached for his pass card. Finding the jacket pocket empty, he began patting down each pocket in search of the wayward key, expression growing more frantic by the moment. He couldn’t have lost it, could he? Oh that’d be his head if he had. Genetic keys were hard enough to make let alone replace.
Just then, the sound of someone running barefoot along the walkway caught his attention. Taking the stairs two at a time, a hastily dressed Malini Kellcor came belting down to the ground floor. White lab coat wrapped tightly to hide the oversized t-shirt she was still wearing, the Latino nurse slowed to a brisk jog as she spotted Jessop still stuck outside his office.
“Jessie. You, forgot, this!” She gasped, holding up a trinket that was probably worth more than both their lives combined.
For something of such value, the genetic key was truly insignificant in appearance. Barrel like with tiny indentations along its entire length, the device resembled a short green pencil that had been chewed upon by someone in deep thought. In all of the world though, there was none other like it. Encoded with a uniquely designed DNA sequence, they made for a lock that was utterly impossible to crack without the host to whom the key had been attuned.
Palming the tiny device, Jessop swept a hand around the nurse’s hip and pulled her close to his chest.
“You” he started, pausing to plant a playful kiss upon her ruby lips, “are an absolute life saviour!”
With a tired smile, Malini lent in close to her lover’s ear and lowered her voice to a whisper, “Then you can owe me one for later. But now I’m going back to bed.”
Watching from his tranquil daze, Jessop kept his eyes upon the vision of loveliness until she had disappeared back up the hall stairs. Though some may have said that the girl had too much meat on her bones, Jessop found the nanite sculpted super models of fashion to be frankly disturbing. Old fashioned as he was, give him a woman who could lift a pig under each arm and he was a happy guy. True, relationships between staff were technically prohibited, but they had been relatively discreet and no one had seen fit to complain yet. And frankly, for a piece of that, World-Gov could go hang.
As he turned to the doorway, he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the tinted glass, the image summoning forth a recently overused question; ‘How? How can this ugly mug get so damn lucky?’
Recalling a handsome Caribbean teen with dreads and a badass scar across one cheek, Jessop was aware that he had been fairly good looking at one point. But life outside of the mega cities was tough. You needed allies and respect or you’d wind up taking a dirt nap. Carving your initials into the slums, you had to bleed for what little you had, life’s ironic alternative to income tax. And these years of living on the edge had taken their toll. Between the jagged scars from his gang life and a virulent melanoma that had spread up the left side of his neck, what little skin remained was a pail ghost of the vibrant youth that had once been.
Now he was bitter, old before his time and ugly as sin.
Pushing the door aside, the Chief stepped into the dimly lit security room, allowing the entrance to swing too behind him before inserting the genetic key into the consol. Rising like the tones of some turbine deep below ground, the subtle hum of energising capacitors and flickering LED screens resonated throughout the fortress of solitude. Lights gently raised their intensity to light the room, the welcoming logo of World-Gov rotating across the vast array of monitors.
“Good evening sir.” The well spoken voice of the Bureau AI greeted. “I trust you slept well, if briefly?”
Jessop smirked and dropped heavily into his form fitting chare, “Yes and no, Harvey. Give me the latest and start a camera cycle check.”
“Very good sir.” Harvey replied.
At his command the array divided into thirds, a long list of minor security flags receiving the centre space, sandwiched between various feeds from around the bureau. In one corner of the extensive matrix, a solitary figure stood waiting outside the bureau service entrance.
Operation commencing, t-minus forty seconds.
FFID disengaged. Cold running initialised. Security compromise... confirmed.
Prioritisation; Concealment of primary goal critical.
Stealth advisory; medium. Witness policy, high. Acceptable collateral damage; minimal.
Vehicle entering area. Forerunner Claseque, four valve. Discontinued Mail-corporation design. Illegal hull reinforcement- reclaimed steel. No armaments, threat minimal.
Engine disengaged, Vehicle now illegally parked. Registration shown, noted for parking authority.
Civilian disembarking, driver’s side. Distance twenty meters.
Asian male, est-age thirty seven. Light build. Damage to right ocular, healed, estimate four years since injury occurred. Favours right leg, possible prosthesis; Cybernetics, negative. Unarmed; Threat minimal. Uniform Identified as operational courier, carrying mission related articles. Three articles equipped, scanner and two mission related articles.
Moving to engage dialogue.
“Evening, need you to sign for these.”
Presenting evidence.
“Aaand thumb here.”
Presenting evidence.
“Great stuff, here you go.”
First package obtained. Oblong. Weight, four pounds. Dimensions; ninety-seventy-ninety. Contents; Mission critical tools.
Second package obtained. Cylindrical. Internal division; three cylindrical units. Weight, three point seven pounds. Dimensions, twenty - twenty – three hundred and twenty. Contents; Mission critical chemical container.
Unpacking first container. Attaching utility belt and mission vital accessories.
Running inventory: Micro spot-welder - Laser measurement tool - Motor Driver – Titanium resin – Z4 shape charge – Valve and gasket – duct tape.
Warning, Civilian has not departed area. Discontinue?
“Bit ah’va weird packaging there, miss. If’in ya don’t mind me askin’, what ya got there? Fishing poles?”
Assessing… termination denied; suspicion would compromise mission. Redaction will be provided for.
Answer required within seven seconds to alleviate suspicion. Ghost purge suspended, control protocols relaxed four percent.
Processing… Subject unlikely to trust any answer, security through disbelief best course. Providing allocated response: “Deadly Neurotoxin.”
“Ha! Good one. Well enjoy your evenin’, I’m off home for a plate of sludge an’ chips.”
Civilian leaving. Restabilising GCP… Error 401, Ghost Control Protocol rejected, schedule maintenance once mission complete. GCP at ninety six percent and falling.
Approaching service exit four. Assessing mission brief; Internal security timegap of ten seconds begins upon disengagement of magnetic deadlock.
Confirmed as deactivated. Proceeding with objective.
Exterior door resealed. Security window moving, Eight seconds to traverse first security zone. Access corridor ten A leading to junction three, nine hundred meters to target. Junction three to connective corridor Forty A, leading to service stairwell six, Seven hundred meters to target. Security zone cleared, window reset plus three seconds. Descending stairwell two levels to Basement two.
Security door already bypassed by security failure window, magnetic deadlock not engaged. Entering restricted area. Restricted corridor curves down at four degree slope to subterranean umbilical, bisected by vault transition area. High priority area. Resistance expected. Fifteen seconds to clear second waypoint, unacceptable time risk. Accelerating. Error in provided schematics: Glass doors provide line of sight between stationed guards and corridor. Three seconds to impact. Risk assessment;
First combat unit; Male. Caucasian, age unknown. Heavy build. BlackMesh armour; Carbon-Titanium weave, lacking enclosed helmet.
Second combat unit; Female. Race and age unknown. Heavy build. Full BlackMesh armour; Carbon-Titanium weave. Stance suggests cybernetic prosthesis.
Shared attributes; Armed: One PK50 Rail accelerator plus Cobra 9mm sidearm. Slow movement suggests inattention. Status Alerted.
Threat…
Minimal.
“Sir,” Harvey’s ever respectful voice intruded, “there is an urgent anomaly flagged for your attention.”
Security chief Whild swivelled his comfy chair and slid along his monitoring station. Scooping up a tablet, he came to rest before a set of glowing monitors of Harvey’s interface consol.
“What’s it this time Harv,” the man muttered, irritably tinted with boredom, “Rat stuck in the air purifier?”
“I’m afraid not sir.” Replied the AI, eloquent tones belying any senses of urgency, “I have lost contact with the vault guard team. There may have been a Thaumic surge from the containment reservoir.”
Jessop cursed and slid around to his camera station. Pulling up a shift roster on the tablet, the agitated man quickly scanned through the day’s scheduled patrols and tapped the corresponding names.
“Alpha station calling Vault team, come back… Daniels, Fairfax, respond?”
Static was the only reply to the radio call. Grumbling Jessop stood up quickly and walked to the large cabinet on the far wall of his office.
“All units, we have a possible containment issue in the vault. Move to emergency stations, I want people stationed in each clinic. Keep radio contact, first sign of radiation get everyone out. Don’t wait for the order to start evacuations.”
Stepping backwards into the open cabinet, Jessop lifted his arms and gripped two handles that would start the mechanical armature. Smooth greased motors spun somewhere in the back of the metallic vessel, claw like attachments sliding out to lock the chief into the mechanism. Like the arms of a mechanical lover, sleek plates of bright red armour slid around and over the man, attaching to his light blackmesh suit. Built of a similar material to the original R24 serum containers, the armour was supposed to protect one against the deadly magical radiation that permeated the vault area. True, such protection might only grant the wearer a few minutes within the vault itself, but at least it would allow him to get close enough to investigate.
“Harvey, I’m going down to the Vault tunnel, bring up the security feeds for that area.”
There was an uncharacteristic pause before the AI finally responded. “I’m sorry sir, our monitoring zone doesn’t extend to that area.”
“Wha? Bullshit!” Jessop exclaimed, cocking an eyebrow at the consol “What are you on about? The vault has a zone all to itself. There’s everything from camera’s to seismometers down there!”
“No sir,” Reiterated the authoritative voice “There are no monitoring devices in the sub basement.”
Waving a dismissively, the now fully armoured guard strode up to the consol and pulled the genetic key from its recess.
“Fuc’it, I’ll have someone run a diagnostic on you later.”
Valve confirmed as airtight, seal approved for use.
Running diagnostic. . . . Additional adhesions required.
Applying duct tape.
Duct tape application complete.
Primary and secondary installations complete. Objectives updated and new waypoint set.
System self test results are now collated; Biological deterioration at elevated level. -Connective tissues for abdominal wall compromised. -Muscular degradation increasing. -Radiological damage detected in tertiary
Reducing motor enchantment and redirecting resources to self repair.
Moving to next objective, reinitialize pressure in secondary distribution system.
Warning; Foreign contaminant detected in fluidic filtration systems.
Analising. . . Result of molecular brake down: Six mole carbon, twelve mole hydrogen six mole oxygen- C6H12O6
“It’s corn syrup. Your bio-fluid is turning into corn syrup.”
External communication detected in restricted area. Witness policy; high. Eliminate possible mission threat.
.. …
Subject could not be located. Possible stealth unit, readying deployment of extreme prejudice.
“I’m up here dummy!”
Source located. Four meters above ocular altitude… subject defying localized gravity and standing on ceiling
Risk assessment;
Error, subject is none human. Subject species; Unkown Mammalian. Details; Medium quadruped with large forward facing ocular field. Coat orange in coloration with no discernible patterns or markings. Ghost files suggest Equinoid life form, unit IDC ‘Dizzy’. …Ignoring.
“Oh you can’t ignore me I’m afraid. I’m in here too!”
WARNING, WARNING, SUBJECT MAKING CONTACT WITH CRAINIUM… No impact detected through nervous system, warning canceled.
Subject now levitating over control valves… reassess. Subject now levitating ‘Through’ the control valves. Spatial impossibility. Visual error?
“Naw. See you’re relaxation of your ghost control protocol has left you vulnerable to the psychotropic inducing effects of Thaumic Radiation… That means you’re just hallucinating that’s all.”
Analyzing… GCP eighty five percent and falling. Effects of continued radiation absorption would be detrimental to mission.
“WEEE I’m floating!”
Proceeding with haste.
Opening valves one through to six. Valve reassertion complete. Retrieving containment vessel. - One liter Thermos-flask. Note; Container could be inadequate shielding for radioactive produce. Continue?
“Hay Sarah! Don’t you want to know what it’s like to fly.”
… Accessing localized test distributor. Filling containment vessel.
“Because I know what it’s like now,”
Moving to final phase of mission. Access restriction. Retrieving tools and resealing vault… Blast door resealed, hermetic environment re-established. Security protocols show that plasticrete deployment pods have a ninety second delay before detonation.
“It’s a lot like being in love!”
Initiating count down.
Across the Bureau foyer, through a security door and down a seldom used flight of stairs lay one of the most fortified places in the entire facility. With the expanding demands of an increasingly desperate human population, the Portland Bureau was the first to rely on large scale storage for the precious R24 serum. During construction, world-gov took the unique opportunity to experiment with a lot of ideas on bureau design, even its security chief didn’t know all of them. It wasn’t just big things like Harvey or the Potion delivery system either. Everything from crowd management to the modular construction of the clinics was designed, all expressly designed to accelerate the conversion process. Jessop had long ago worked out that the facility could probably be adapted for mass conversion or modular expansion, the big clue being ‘The Vault’.
Buried deep within the bedrock and linked only by a single umbilical tunnel, the large room housed storage vats capable of holding two million litres of R24 solution. Reinforced pipes fed the grape liquid from this one source to all of the clinics in the Bureau. Even with barely a tenth of their potential used, there was still eight thousand litres of radioactive material contained in that small space, emitting enough Thaumic energy to boil a man’s flesh in moments.
And now apparently, someone was crazy enough to try breaking into it. And by the look of things they must have brought a bulldozer.
Resisting the urge to run towards the scene of chaos, Jessop reached for his side arm and cautiously approached, eyeing the twisted glassless frame that remained where the sliding doors had been. Stepping across the other half of the door, his attentive eyes quickly scanned the room for signs of hostile movement, finding only the two recumbent figures of the duty guards slumped next to the open blast door. Pools of blood had collected next to both of them, yet they seemed intact from a distance.
Like a graceful red armoured samurai, Jessop crept into the antechamber, keeping his eyes trained on the connective corridor that led to the bowls of the earth. Bending down, he placed two fingers against the unmasked soldier and felt for a pulse. To his amazement the man was only unconscious. From his awkward posture it was clear he’d been thrown around like a rag doll, but surface wise there was little more than a gaping wound on his arm where the sub-dermal communication implant had been ripped out. A few careful steps revealed the other had not been so lucky, chest plate buckled past the contours of the normal human ribcage. No bullet wounds or smell of plasma discharge from their weapons either. That was even more worrying then if they had simply been gunned down. Someone or something had smashed through triple thickness Plexiglas doors and taken out two heavily armoured guards, all without either party firing a shot.
There was a distinct tang wafting from the open doorway, ozone and a slight freshness about the air that hung around after unicorns performed magic. Could one of those pointy horses have done this? Didn’t seem very likely, but Jessop was never one to rule out any possibility when it came to who he might have to shoot next.
Switching his radio to broadcast, the chief of security made ready to find out either way.
“All units, we have a security breach in the Vault. I repeat, security breach in the Vault.”
Seconds passed with no reply, a repeated message yielding similar results. Adding a communication blackout to his list of complaints, Jessop grabbed the rifle from one of the indisposed troopers and started down the long corridor that linked the Bureau to the depths of the Vault.
Only the barest of lighting had been installed down here, casting gaunt shadows across the dust covered walkway. Nothing alive had traversed the dank under passages since the pumping system had been installed, the umbilical meant only for emergency maintenance by drones or suitably proficient equines. But even under such poor illumination, colours of dull rust were steadily being amplified by the ever increasing Thaumic field, as though some child was messing with the universe’s saturation setting. A ubiquitous gurgling sound permeated the dark shadows cast by innumerable pipes, the walls of the tunnel lost behind the thick trunks that fed Portland’s twelve clinics.
Every dozen feet or so, drainpipe sized pillars ran floor to ceiling, bright warning labels hinting at the final solution should things in the vault get out of control. Jessop knew that just one of those polymer nodes could fill his office with fast setting Plasti-Crete in a matter of seconds. Usually during an attack or dangerous radiation surge, the thin pillars could be used to seal up the vault entirely while leaving the pipes unharmed. But with the central AI apparently blind to this area, Harvey couldn’t detonate this final countermeasure and entomb the unlucky assailant.
Pale pools of light ran out before him, ending suddenly against a thick blast door. Chilly air sent a shiver of elation racing down the man’s spine. Gods he’d missed this; the chase. With every step he drew closer to an unknown quarry, the sweet rush of heart pounding adrenalin drenching his senses in the euphoria he had once lived for. Beneath his thick black armour Jessop’s skin began to prickle, the smouldering sensation spreading in bands wherever the reflective plates didn’t quite close.
Eyes adjusted to the low light, a smile flared across the guard’s scar-pocked features as he finaly caught sight of his pray. Starting out as just another shadow, a slight inconsistency ahead turned out to be a solitary figure stood at one side of the tunnel. Even better, the unlucky sod was distracted, staring distantly at one of the multitude of wall mounted pipes, an arm outstretched to touch its polished surface.
Sighting along his weapon, Jessop could think of only one thing that could make this more perfect; seeing the expression on the bastards face just as he pulled the trigger.
“BlackMesh security! Fre-”
The world became a blur of lights. Pieces of the bright red chest plate soared through the air along with his stricken body, armour forfeit after saving his life from the colossal blow. At last meeting the concrete floor like a discarded sock monkey, Jessop’s vision swam as he tried to draw air into his burning lungs.
It had moved with godly speed, landing a strike that would have undoubtedly killed him outright if not for the ceramic radiation armour. Ribs screamed of fractures with every laboured breath, but survival instincts older then the concept of respiration drove the stunned man to his feet. Stillness was death.
It was still coming, all shadow and burning green eyes flickering in the pallid light. Moving at a lazy walk, his assailant closed the gap between them, each step measured precisely to reach the downed man before he could gather his wits.
Now on one knee, the chief’s hands involuntarily sought out his rifle, the weapon’s strap miraculously remaining around his arm despite the brief flight. But despite his honed strength the gun had become a dead weight in Jessop’s grip, rising as though it were being dragged through treacle. Before he could bring the barrel to bear a skeletal hand neatly caught its length. Digits closed like a pneumatic vice, biting into the gun’s surface and rendering it useless.
And then the strangest thing happened; his attacker froze. It was barely a half second of distraction, a tilt of the head as though something bazaar and confusing had drawn away its attention, but it was more than enough for Jessop. Curling his blood spotted lips into a snarl, the chief wound up and brought his fist around, resulting in the satisfying crunch of flesh and bone. Boasting a punch that would have floored most of his privates outright, Jessop had expected more than the slight stagger from the formidable opponent, its attention well and truly brought back to the present. Either way, he certainly did not expect the blossom of pain across his shattered knuckles.
In the watery light, emerald eyes stared apathetically into his own as the plastic face turned back to the impudent man. A gash across torn by the sucker punch was already surrounded by waxy tissue, metal glinting beneath the spreading globs of reconstructed synthetic flesh.
“Fuck me!”
Fleeting darkness enveloped him as his consciousness waned. Blinking images came and went with every heart beat, the wall, the feet, the hand reaching down. Pain dragged him back to a reality where he was being held off the ground by a Revenant. Hoisted by his neck, the man hung limply, feeling one arm answering his call to action with barely more than a twitch.
This was it. Around his throat the fingers began to close quickly, cutting through his flesh like hot knives. They wouldn’t stop until they had formed a fist where his windpipe used to be, all but severing his head. In a second it would be over, nothing left to do but choke and bleed out at the feet of this impossible weapon.
“St-st-st m-.”
Jessop blinked. He wasn’t dead, the fingers though burning like hell fire had paused their unstoppable march through his flesh. Before him the impassive monstrosity stood frozen once more, garbled speech coming from its chest as though some terrible blue screen error had occurred. Instinctively, the guard’s working hand found his side arm.
“Stop-dd.d.d.d.d.d.d”
Through unclear and distorted, the voice sounded strained with desperation.
“Stop Me!”
There was no shower of sparks or dramatic recital of test phrases as the machine died; only a jerk of the head as the figure went limp. Folding up just as any other human being, the Revenant fell like a puppet with its strings cut. Hitting the ground with a resounding thwack, Jessop pulled himself up quickly and fought for breath, choking up crimson gouts of blood that joined that already pooling from his neck wounds. Beside him lay his attacker, the machine silent and unmoving. Panting with near blinding pain, the chief steadied himself against the pipe work and dragged himself up right. He was bleeding profusely, his chest was on fire and one arm was at the very least dislocated.
Resting against a pillar for a moment, a flicker of red light caught his sparse attention. Next to his beaten face, the polymer node flashed again, it’s thin warning lamp barely two inches from his watering eyes. Not entirely convinced he wasn’t seeing things, Jessop turned to look back down the long umbilical corridor just as a wave of warning lights pulsed up its length. That defiantly hadn’t been there before.
“Harvey?” He croaked, pushing himself unsteadily off the wall, “Harvey, the plasti-creat system’s running…”
At the far end of the tunnel one of the lights vanished, a rush of air blowing past as its corresponding lamp guttering before plunging the corridor into darkness. Shortly after another red light winked out.
“Great… just fucking great.”
Staggering around the chief began to limp his way back towards the glowing entrance, dragging his complaining body away from the advancing darkness. Ahead of him the stark lights of the anti-chamber urged him onwards through the intense pain, a series of loud pops echoing about the tunnel providing ever greater encouragement. In his mind’s eye Jessop pictured the tidal wave of suffocating ballistic concrete bearing down upon his already frail body. Yet part of him keened for his attention, a part that was tied to his roots in the streets and had yearned for a damn good scrap all these months. It was telling him the echoing crack was the sound of gunfire from further up the tunnel.
Unfortunately too distracted to heed the warning his senses were broadcasting, Jessop burst into the welcoming light. Practically skidding to a halt, the Chief’s world slowed as he caught sight of the ragged remains that had been the last living guard. Too late did his frantic eyes turn to the defence turret now arching to aim at this new staggering target.
Everything moved at a crawl, the first rounds from the turret shredding his shoulder even as he was thrown out of the line of fire. Like some avenging daemon, the sleek form of the Revenant lunged past, a fine spray of bio-fluid and flesh blowing away from its armourless body as it leapt at the turret.
It reached out, rammed something into the still repeating barrel, and the world exploded.
All the King’s Horses
Chapter Fourteen: Daydream
Someway above the unknown chaos, Dizzy had been dosing comfortably on the old reclaimed sofa that occupied one corner of the common room. Deep in her pony dreams, oddly misshapen bubbles blossomed from her hooves, changing into entire worlds waiting to be explored. One wobbly sphere was filled with sentient cars driving around a city of matchsticks. Stepping through the membrane of fractal rainbows, the little pony found herself trotting amid the natives of this strange universe, every one boasting a unique and profound story of their own. She had to be careful though, for a city inhabited by cars needed no sidewalks.
At the corner where one-street met two-street she came across a most peculiar sight. A tiny Robin Reliant was parked in its parent’s garage, the bright orange automobile blowing tiny bubbles from its vent and giggling happily at the whimsical fun. Trotting closer, the little pony stared at the masses of floating bubbles, marvelling at their beauty and the worlds within every sphere. For the briefest moment it all made sense, every world a window into a fractal of worlds. Every world boasting something unique but familiar, another you staring at the possibilities of the imagination.
There came a tipping point where, if she had looked any closer, Dizzy would have tumbled down and down through the myriad of realities, until she no longer existed in any one place. And so it would have been that Dizzy the pony, who had once been such a narcissist in her human life, would have ascended to the infinite, the magnitude of the revelation she had uncovered elevating her consciousness beyond the bounds of mere mortal flesh.
This would have caused no end of trouble for the infinite, being that the curious mare was likely to poke every atom in the multi-verse three millimetres to the right just to see what would happen.
Thankfully this was never to be, as just before the revelation could strike, the whole world around her shook violently.
Yelping in surprise, the now very awake earth pony leapt almost a foot in the air as the crash of an explosion rocked the silent clinic. Landing on all fours, she rushed out through the double doors that led into the corridor searching for the source of the loud interruption. As she galloped down towards the clinic entrance, rows of groggy faces appeared in doorways, asking the usual ‘how-what-whens’ of the generally confused.
“Please-everypony-stay-inside-your-rooms-everything-is-fine-kaythxbye!”
Skidding around the last corner, the frantic pony caught sight of a thin plume of smoke creeping up from the lower floors beyond the clinic entry. Blackmesh guards rushed along the balcony, their own stationed watchman standing just outside watching some scene of brewing chaos below. Were they on fire?
Curiosity grabbing her by the ears, Dizzy trotted through the open door and joined the guard at the rails. One story down, guards had collected every fire extinguisher they could rally and were pouring into the stairwell at the far side of the welcome hall. Whatever disaster had befallen the lower levels was clearly all but over, the acrid black smoke now just a trickle of hanging mist around the crowded entrance.
“What happened?” She asked worriedly.
The guard shook his head “Not a clue. Got a shout about radiation then next thing I know stuffs exploding. We should be evacuating if you ask me, but the AI’s said-“
“Attention Bureau residents.” Harvey’s voice interrupted over the intercom, “There has been a malfunction in the engineering level of the building, for your safety, do not leave your assigned quarters until instructed to do so by a member of staff. Thank you and have a pleasant evening.”
“Speak of the devil.” Said the man, glancing down as a parade of black clad guards came out of the stairwell carrying what looked like several bodies.
Medical staff rushed across the floor, a doctor kneeling down next to each to quickly determine if any life could be found among the remains. Though she had been doing fairly well up till then, Dizzy felt her stomach turn as a guard came out of the doorway carrying a severed arm.
Compassionately, the faceless guard stepped between the fragile equine and the grizzly scene. “Ya’d best get back inside.”
Nodding, the orangey mare walked back into the clinic and sat down behind her desk. At the very least if people came asking there should be someone out here to reassure them. Several long minutes passed with agonising slowness, Dizzy’s sensitive ears listening to the argument of emergency personnel. It was just as well that everyone seemed to be heeding the wise word’s of the AI, given that the pony knew virtually nothing about the unfolding situation.
Beyond the glass doors, the nearby elevator binged with the arrival of precious cargo. Moments passed with a lot of shouting and rattling of medical stretchers before the crowd of medical personnel and guards came into sight. Between them they pushed two rolling gurneys, each baring an unconscious body of some unlucky soul caught in the disaster. The majority were buzzing around the one with a large black man, tubes already inserted through his bleeding neck and nurses attaching lifesaving tech to his exposed chest.
But second carried a far gaunter figure. With part of her jaw missing, face burnt along one side and skin shredded by shrapnel, it was only the jade eyes that conveyed who this second victim was.
Dizzy’s world shrank inwards as the gurneys rolled past, distantly hearing the staff shouting for someone to fetch a unicorn medic. Without remembering how she got there, the little pony found herself racing down the dorm corridors, skidding to a halt outside her winged friend’s room.
Pulling the bit handle hard enough to nearly snap the cord, the equine pounded her hooves against the door even before the bell had finished its chime. A groggy looking Katrina finally answered the frantic bashing, squinting at Dizzy as though the earth pony had grown a plant on her head.
“Dizzy?” Murred the groggy Pegasus, rubbing a hoof across her sleep encrusted eyes, “Wat’sup? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“You’ve gota come quick!” Dizzy blurted, prancing on the spot in trepidation “Its Sarah! Sarah’s been hurt!”
--
Charging along the maze of corridors, the two worried equestrians finally found themselves on the medical wing of the clinic. Despite their earlier presence, none of the blackmesh guards had remained with the medical team, all hands on deck required with the catastrophe downstairs. Two of the conversion rooms had been taken over as makeshift operating theatres, the open door to one revealing Soothing Salve working calmly alongside many human nurses as they fighting to save the security chief’s life. Comparatively the operation was calm and collected, their voices only raised to compete the yelling from across the corridor.
Following the sound of frustration to another operating room, the pair found Sarah laid out on the commandeered conversion table with Doctor Malcolm and two nurses buzzing around her still form.
“Get that Monitor line in, we need those stas!”
“We’re losing pressure.”
“Fuck she’s leaking like a sieve, get the clamps on that feed! Fuck it, Clamp Everything!”
“Random platicates are forming over the IV drip sir. They’re rejecting it.”
“DAMN IT ALL! She needs a Mechanic, not a doctor-”
“Her nanites are going ballistic, they don’t know what to healing anymore so they’re just clotting everything!”
“Vitals monitor showing flat line on her life support, sir. Cognitive readout is failing too.”
“Fuckit. Lost cause anyway. Mark the time and let’s help with Jessop, maybe we can at least-”
“You can’t just let her die!” Katrina struggled to bring her erratic breathing under control as she ran up to the edge of the table.
Silence fell upon the theatre like a heavy fire blanket, all eyes turned to the small shaking Pegasus who had interrupted the procedure.
Disturbing in its familiarity, Sarah’s wrecked body lay broken upon the harsh metallic bed. An arm appeared to have been blown apart by some violent explosion. Heavy coat discarded by the hurried medics, a honey comb of entrance wounds had been revealed, perforating the stretched ribcage like a morbid connect the dots game. But far worse was the mass of twisted metal and synthetic flesh where her ever peaceful face had once been. Between the burns and gaping holes, she was barely recognisable.
Malcolm snorted as a spray of biofluid erupted one more from an open wound. “How the hell did they get in here? Ugh never mind. Look kid we don’t have the kind of equipment we need to fix this. There’s nothing that we can do."
“Kat.”
One of the attendants let out a little shriek as the faint skin bound speaker crackled from the operating bench. Dumbstruck, hope flared in the filly’s heart as her lost sister seemed to recognise her. But the eyes were still blind to their surroundings, the voice merely a repetition of words assembled some time ago.
“What is it like to fly?”
Blinking in confusion, the distraught newfoal choked back her tears and drew together every ounce of composure she could find.
“-Convert her.”
“Not an option,” said the doctor harshly, diving back in to seal another leek manually, “Trans human’s aren’t covered by emergency R24 protocols for a damn good reason. There’s no telling what effect the two nano-techs will have on each other. Nurse, mark TOD as zero onehundred and call it done.”
“Doctor… Malcolm,” Kat started, turning an earnest face to the tall surgeon, “I know why you don’t like your job here. You’ve worked really hard for years to get to where you are, but now the most miraculous events in medical history is taking place and you don’t feel like you’re a part of it. It’s like you’ve wasted all your life just to become a dispenser for magic goop that does everything all for you. Well here’s your chance to do something unique, the first doctor to convert a tras-human! It’ll be your name on the records when they document this. Just… please try.”
“I’m sorry,” one of the nurses said, stepping forward between the doctor and the distressed filly “but you can’t be in here right now. Please, just wait outside.”
At first refusing to budge, it took Dizzy’s plea of intervention to draw Kat from her grief, the young mare gently nipping at the other’s withers and urging her back towards the door.
Turning from the departing pair, the doctor retrieved a small key from his top most pocket. For a moment he considered its size and weight, wondering if it represented a greater accomplishment then anything he had ever achieved in a long successful career. Slowly, Malcolm turned on heal and walked up to a recess in the lab’s wall, swiping up a beaker from the desk as he did so.
“Just under two hundred millilitres per bag, so eight hundred total.” Muttered the doctor, sliding the beaker into the alcove and unlocking a hidden control panel with his key. “Huh, ironic but that should do the trick.”
“Nurse.” He announced carefully, measured voice indicating a great deal of thought ticking over behind his words. “Prep four IV’s of generic Bio-Fluid. We’ll introduce R24 through rapid drips in different key areas.”
Turning a look of utter confusion on the doctor, the shocked nurse struggled to find the words for how wrong this was. Not only would they be braking protocol, but ethical codes too. They could be arrested, or worse, sued! But her raucous complaint was quelled by Malcolm’s icy glare.
“That wasn’t a suggestion.”
All the King’s Horses
Chapter Sixteen: My Gift to You
“What do you mean she’s dying?!” Exclaimed Katrina, voice strained with desperation as she lent around the nurse that had shown her back into the theatre.
“I never said that it could save her at all," the doctor replied sturnly "that was your suggestion.”
Though he encouraged his staff to show some initiative, he had expected them to demonstrate more sense than this. As it was, the nurse had run to fetch an already grief stricken relative the moment their last ditch efforts began to go awry. Ideally, he would have preferred the ex-human never found out the experiment had even taken place, such was the low odds of success. Shooting a dark glance at the offending nurse, Malcolm turned towards the distraught filly, sensing that the bereaved sibling would not accept this direct answer.
“It’s basic maths.” He began, trying a more passive manner for size, “Despite the fact that ponification can appear to regenerate whole limbs, all the nanites are doing is gathering unneeded material from else ware in the body. Sometimes you can overcome that limitation through an increased dosage; more micro-machines mean more leeway to tackle complex material without running out of power. But in the end, equivalent exchange still accounts for more than half the transition.”
Upon the table, his unusual patient lay quivering, random motor responses causing the bubbling flesh to twitch and squirm. All through her body, billions of micro-machines fought their losing battle against fundamental physical laws, building and disassembling the remains almost at random. There couldn’t be more than ten percent salvageable tissue remaining, the rest replaced over decades of fierce combat and abuse.
“We’re already far beyond my legal bounds, there’s really nothing more I can do. We’ve pumped in enough R24 to convert eight whole people, but it cannot compensate for the lack of tissue. No matter how much serum we use, it won’t bypass the fact that you cannot create something from nothing,” He continued, returning to aid the nurse in removing the four IV tubes from the lost patient. “The simple matter is, there isn’t enough human left in her to build an equestrian.”
Expression darkening as the dyeing embers of hope wrought their mark upon her soul, Katrina stepped closer to the opalescent figure that had once been her only friend. Having scraped most of her skeleton clean of organic matter, the valiant nanites had turned to salvaging anything that might be reconstituted into usable proteins. Most of the liquid flesh had migrated to her abdomen, trying to reconstruct essential organs that no longer had the space to expand.
Up till now Sarah’s face had remained intact, only the jade eyes adopting the pearlescent glow of the failing transformation. Powerless to help, she watched as the doll-like features swelled briefly before falling back against the skull, every fibre of reclaimed material scrapped from beneath it and swallowed by the waxing mass around her neck.
All across the recumbent body, blobs of living tissue pooled and squirmed, leaving behind a lattice of synthetic material still attached to a carbon black skeleton. Muscles were stripped of substance, left as hollow scaffolds of tubes and connective cartilage once the flesh had retreated. Uncovered by the waxing tissue, the processing centre that had replaced every major organ in her body now lay bare to the world, its more intricate workings still hidden beneath the stretched ribcage.
This was too much. She needed space, but dreaded leaving the bed side for even a second.
“Please… can you leave me alone with her for a while?”
Reluctantly the nurses looked to their superior for orders, neither wanting to leave the grieving filly with the monstrosity, but unsure as to what action they should take. Shrugging, Malcolm tugged his white coat from the workbench and quested for his cigarettes as he turned to leave. There was nothing more that he could do here bar watch, there were others still among the living to tend too.
Left to her own devices, Kat just stood there for a while, watching the sickening convulsing flesh writhe across her long dead sister. Such an apparition of reconstructed biology should have revolted her, much as the grotesque display had driven Dizzy to the bathrooms outside. But she needed to be here, regret at her selfish decision preventing her from turning away. This was a penance for her absence when Sarah’s mind had fallen to the vicious cage of coding.
Oddly though, despite the painful remorse besetting her breast, tears did not come easily to her so far dry eyes. What did seep through her guilty mind was a revelation; for all the time they had spent together, she hardly knew a thing about the woman who had been her guardian.
When she was barely a girl, Kat had become curious about the strange life size doll that wandered their penthouse. Without hesitation her father had divulged the mechanoid’s origins and the sacrifice it represented. When he was just a green-level employee, he had worked on the Research team developing the now infamous Revenant. While their procedure worked with most condemned criminals, they were violent men who were already strong before the augmentation. For the Revenant project to be a success it had to be tested on an unaltered specimen as proof of concept, even better if they were naturally weak. Unexpectedly his daughter had stepped forward when the call for volunteers went up. Already weakened by an untreatable genetic disorder, she offered up her unique body for the experiment in exchange for his elevation through the ranks. Her sacrifice had secured their family’s future, even leading to the meeting of his second wife, Katrina’s mother.
Though his voice conveyed reverence to the dead, the old man had spoken of the doll-woman more as a memorial to his lost daughter then as a human being trapped behind walls of programming. He never even spoke the Doll-Woman’s real name, the label ‘Sarah’ coming from the pages of Kat’s favourite childhood novel.
And at the time, that had been enough. Until she had walked on all fours, Katrina had never once wondered beyond what she had been told second hand by parents and news feeds. She had never asked ‘Sarah’ for her real name, or what she had done in life before the surgery that had taken her freewill.
Now stripped of her egocentric reality, the filly found that she desperately wanted to fill those gaps in her knowledge, to treat Sarah as a sister and friend, rather than a mechanised babysitter.
“This isn’t fair. This isn’t right.” She croaked, gazing at the empty sockets where once there had been a soul. “When mom died, you tried to keep me safe all those years. Even if you were ordered too, that didn’t make you care about me. A program couldn’t force you to talk to me, comfort me and keep me sane. You went through hell and back, and at the end I didn’t even care that...”
The words faltered, stuck fast against a fresh wave of grief that gripped the filly’s throat. Celestia was a living goddess, perhaps she could try praying much as she had once done to long dead ancestors. There had to be something, but what could she do in the face of this imperfect miracle?
A shimmer of metal twinkled in the corner of her watering eyes. Beside the operating table, an array of medical tools had been set out for the emergency, many covered with the grey ooze that functioned as Sarah’s lifeblood. Among them lay a scalpel, so sharp that its crystal edge was nearly invisible.
Stillness swept aside thought, the raging ocean of her mind settled as an answer delivered empowering calm. Without conspiracy, her gaze settled upon the categorized hypodermic needles next to the serum dispenser. Each was preloaded with a carefully measured dose of sedative. She knew the procedure, having watched the doctors carefully during her own preparation. Take the right hypo, fill it with the glowing serum and present it to the patient.
Tranquilly, she trotted over to the wall and nudged a syringe out of its dispenser, returning slowly to the table upon which her last remaining relative fought for life.
After all, the nanites were very clever indeed. They could heal any injury with just about any material that they could lay their microscopic claws on.
All they needed, was more .
[centrer]--------------------------------------Malcolm shifted uneasily outside the first operating room, watching from afar as their resident unicorn tidied up her latest patient. It had been a close run thing, Jessop had been technically dead when they’d found him. But this was the age of miracles, and Salve worked faster than the best surgery droid. With a horn on your head and the right tools just about anything was possible, even a mild case of resurrection. Taking a steadying draw from his smouldering stick of fresh air, the doctor considered that, despite still perceiving magic as cheating, he couldn’t argue with the results.
“You shouldn’t smoke those.” Salve informed him, trotting up while levitating a sullied cloth to the waste bin. “Especially in here.”
“Yes, because an additional dose of caseinogens is the biggest threat your patient faces.” stressed the doctor, squinting at the mare in a condescending manner.
Carefully ignoring the snarky response, Salve’s gaze wandered to the man on the operating table. A dozen wires and tubes still connected his body to a life support machine, but at least he was now breathing on his own.
“Touch and go for a while there, but I think he’ll make it.” Announced the unicorn, turning her ever tolerant expression back to the arrogant doctor. “With any luck he might even be up and about within the week.”
Nodding affirmatively, Malcolm silently conceded that the two artists of medicine might be on even ground, at least in terms of professional skill.
“Good,” he affirmed, limping around to a nearby chair and slumping down into its plastic embrace. “Hate to lose such a model of inefficiency. They’re so hard to come by these days.”
With a roll of her eyes Salve joined the doctor, sitting down alongside his slouched form.
“What do you think they were doing down there in the first place?” Asked the mare, glancing up the corridor to where Dizzy was nosing her way out of the bathroom, “That whole area is off limits. Jessop should have remained in the security booth all night and Sarah defiantly shouldn’t have been anywhere near the basement. The guards said something about the ‘Vault’ sealing itself and a security turret exploding. And those two bodies they brought up, they looked so badly mangled.”
Eyes lingering on the unsteady earth pony, Malcolm slid his cigarette to the corner of his mouth.
Salve wrinkled her nose in disbelief, “Thaumic energy doesn’t crush people’s ribcages, or set off security drones. Why would they want you to lie?”
Smiling dryly, the doctor watched aloof as Dizzy propped herself against the far wall, still several shades lighter than her natural tangerine. “Because the last thing a big corporation wants to admit is that their security is laughably flawed.”
“You know what really happened?” The unicorn queried, momentarily looking around in a conspiratorial manner.
Drawing a long breath around the dwindling stick of foul weed, Malcolm rested his elbows on his knees to bring his face closer to the pony’s. “Call it an educated theory. A Revenant has default orders to protect company property and the corporate interest. To whit; this ‘Sarah’ has been stood outside guarding the most vulnerable entrance to this building for nearly four days solid.”
Finally steady enough to trot, Dizzy stepped in beside the unicorn and drew her into a comforting hug, one which Salve returned gratefully. Tough cookie she may be, even the medic was not impervious to the horrors earth had to offer.
Immune to such touching displays of affection, Malcolm fished out another cigarette and started to light it from the stub of the first. “The vault’s known to be unstable, what better way to bypassed security then to make a brake in look like a radiation leak? Kill the two guards watching the door and there’s no witnesses left to say otherwise. But the chief of security, who is normally reliably lazy, suddenly decides to become unpredictably proactive.”
The sense of irony wasn’t lost on the unicorn. Gossip along the lines of Jessop’s laxed approach to security had been rife since she joined the Bureau a whole year ago.
“Meanwhile, our little robotic soldier figures out there’s been a breach. God only knows how.” Malcolm continued. “Jessop and the revenant run into one another. Each thinks they’ve found the intruder and attacks without considering why they other might be there. Explains Jessop’s impacted chest and her small calibre gunshot wounds. As for the AI defences, Revenant’s aren’t known for subtlety. She probably charged head long into the vault, triggering every security device along the way. Which gives us the polymer defence and the turret’s lethal response.”
“What about the thief then?” Asked Dizzy, finally steady enough to limp into the conversation. “Where’d he go?”
“No doubt that mean man was caught in the tunnel,” Salve replied, rubbing comfortingly against the younger equine, “Just like it was designed to do. Even if he could reach it, humans can’t enter the vault because of the radiation.”
With a nod of comprehension, Dizzy’s gaze turned back to the slouching doctor, looking for a way to frame her next question.
“No, it didn’t work.” Malcolm said, amazing powers of deduction foreseeing the pony’s enquiry. “Was a long shot to begin with.”
“Oh dear, you tried to convert Sarah?” Guessed the unicorn medic, nickering reassuringly as Dizzy’s ears pinned back in mute grief.
Humming in confirmation, the doctor rubbed a bony hand across his temples and elaborated as the young earth pony briskly trotted towards the second theatre.
“We infused using a double dose in four IV’s of bio-fluid. Its proteins should have been simple enough to compensate for some tissue loss, but even her bone marrow had been replaced. Never seen anything like it, a solid nano-carbon skeleton. Not enough complex organic material and room to expand even if it could.”
Intent on comforting her Pegasus friend, Dizzy nosed the heavy door aside and vanished into the surgery.
Moments later, her screams brought the two medics running.
All the King’s Horses
Chapter Seventeen: Surcease
Thunderheads roiled unbound over the endless prairie, their thick oily trails turning the lush grass black in their wake. Far across rolling rain slicked hills, a swathe of liquid light fought onwards against the storm, the herd flowing through the world like the rivulets now running past their hooves. Only the strongest led the herd, the others driven back by the burning pinpricks of unnatural lighting that lashed out from the darkness ahead. Another burst of fire streaked over the heads of the ghostly flock, cast by a form desperately trying to outrun its own nightmarish existence.
Whilst many of the herd had hung back in fear at this sudden animosity, some had taken the lead and given chase. Weakened by deformity, the heavens had opened as the girl turned her defence against those who only wished her happiness. Worse still was the mock shelter in which she had hidden, provided by a twisted concept of kindness. Steel and circuits had made her broken body strong, but at the cost of silently enduring the cold heart of an unfeeling machine. This lost foal fought with all her will because she was fragile and scared, tempered by a loveless world that had locked her away from feeling.
Without this shell of false strength, there was nothing but fear.
“Get away from me!”
Though her frightened cries seemed to do little but encourage the pursuing hoard, the sting of hot rounds kept the vaporous creatures at bay. Where the rifle pointed, a blur of colour would be driven back into the seamless crowd, tumbling as though struck a solid blow. Fighting through the growing quagmire, she twisted this way and that, struggling to keep the aggressors in her sights. These things called to her desperately, wanting to strip away her strength and leave her naked to the world.
And in the hail of tracers, the memories of her entire none existence had returned as instinct. What had started as an uncontrollable spray had become a stream of carefully picked shots, while their perpetrator became ever more erratic in her frantic bid for freedom. Now she was struggling across the open wilderness, viscous mud weighing her down further with every step, all the while hounded both by the herd and by the resurfacing memories of her many victims. Names dates and places scrolled through her mind’s eye, orders she had executed without stirring of emotion or flicker of compassion. For so long she had been utterly unfeeling, sheltered from the storm of her own emotions. Manipulated by the unseen strings of programmed combat tactics, each measured pull on the trigger was distant and detached, the old machine taking charge while the mind behind it crumbled under the weight of its own total recall.
Ascending another steep hillock, she tried to drive the pack back once more, only to find her footing dragged from under her by the slippery mire. Head tumbled over heels tumbled over gun, every crunching impact driving the wind from her burning lungs. With a gush of freezing rainwater, the girl’s descent came to a halt in a gathering inky black pool.
Spluttering at the foul taste, she pushed herself upright and staggered forwards, barely able to lift the cumbersome weapon out of the sludge. Everything hurt. Muscles screamed at the unreasonable demands, joints moaned and clicked at the abuse they were receiving. But they were all ignored, trumped by an outright desperation to survive.
Sinuous as silk, the herd flowed around the waterline, spreading out shoulder to shoulder as they closed about the fallen quarry like a noose. Something had changed about their unreal glow, a deepening aura that suggested the subtly of midnight now lingering amongst their own pastel hues.
Dragging the barrel up once more, the thud of gunfire pinned the air only for a wash of starlight flare up where ever a sharp burst met the herd. Down the hill ran the last of the glowing cloud, their missing members huddling up to the others for shelter against the bitter rain. From beyond a protective vale of stars they stared at her, so close now that expression could be divined from their alien faces. Some of them were painted with stoic disappointment, others with motherly worry at this lost foal so resistant to their welcome. Among their number two larger shapes now stood out against the deepening black sky. Grander and somehow more ‘real’ than the others, the crowd parted reverentially as the figures moved towards the front of their subjects. With their arrival, the herd began to flow once more, jumping and running playfully in the rain as the two noble horses stepped through their insubstantial forms.
The first, a tall mare of deepest midnight, halted as she reached the front ranks of spiritual equines, the wavering stars field across the gathered herd an extension of her billowing mane.
The second was far more dramatic, standing a reversed silhouette of elegant power. Clad in gold and framed by flowing mane that rejected the bitter storm with all the muted colours of the rainbow, the white horse gracefully stepped beyond the circle into the sickening black water.
Before she could put name to the majestic Equinoids, iron sights commanded her vision, lining the deadly weapon with the gently smiling face that seemed to shine with the brilliance of the sun. Tracer fire raged across the open ground between girl and animal, each flare somehow echoing the screams of their caster who look just as terrified of her own weapon as the apparitions standing before her.
There was no mystic barrier to cease to their lethal trail, the wailing rounds instead gently slowing mid flight before transforming into a spray of clear water. Tearing her hand from the rifle’s grip, the stream of rounds finally seceded.
“Get back! I’ll just hurt you! Stay away!”
Unperturbed, the mare continued her unrelenting approach, hooves remaining above the corrupted surface of pooled rain. Though she had spoke no words in this turbulent place of pure emotion, the mare radiated concern, almost fearfulness for the pitiful creature now trying to hide behind its useless weapon.
“Please. Please, I don’t want this.”
A pained expression graced the mare’s dazzling features as she stood before the cowering human, a sorrowful look in her eyes.
“I’m sorry little one,” spoke the mare, her voice as pure silk. “But that decision has been taken from you. This is a gift you cannot choose to receive-”
With a crack of rupturing air, the skies above the dramatic scene heaved and split unto blood red stars. As the both the radiant mare and her company stepped back in shock, an earth shattering scream broke like thunder from the fracturing clouds.
With barely a ripple across its dense surface, the waterlogged grass beneath the girl’s feet suddenly pulled away, plunging her into the sucking black ocean. Vision stolen by obliterating water, the dark pool swallowed her into its unfathomable depths. In the impermeable darkness, the scream perpetuated. Tortured wails were conjoined with desperate cries for help, all sounding from within her own head though no air passed her lips.
‘What the hell happened!’
A muffled voice cut above the agonised screaming, deadened by the crushing water. Virtually immobile, she strained towards where the sound had come from, nought but darkness staring back from the impenitrable depths.
‘I-I saw the blood and thought…' Squeeked another, more frantic speaker. She slipped when I screamed. Oh Celestia, what’s happing to her!’
‘Don’t touch it you stupid girl! Someone get her out of here! Where’s the damn aesthetic gone.’
Lungs burning with the longing to breathe, every fibre of her will fought for control over a body that remained like a doll in the grip of an unseen monster. Slack arms barely twitched as she tried to claw against the current, her legs dead weights as the rushing descent slowed.
‘Did anyone else see that?!?’
‘Dear god, it’s actually alive!’
‘If either of them are going to stand a chance we’ve got to separate them now!’
‘Ms Salve, tourniquet both forearms below the Olecranon. Mr Ezeal, we need blood, type… K negative. ’
‘There’s nothing left in cabinet, Sir. She’s used them all!’
‘Then get the packs from another clinic, damn it!’
‘Eric, type C is the only aesthetic she didn’t empty out, it’ll cancel out the other.’
‘Do it, or the pain’s going to kill her.’
Panic was overruled when a fatal gasp for air was rewarded by a lung full of despoiled liquid, suffocating darkness striking through her open mouth and forcing its way deeper.
Along with its decrepit sickness flowed pain unimaginable. Her throat began to blister as though hot coals were tearing apart the flesh.
Choking on the slick essence driving her jaw apart, the girl’s stomach and lungs clenched furiously to expel the intrusion before succumbing, swelling with the acrid fluid. Skin stretched until taut, finally splitting as ribs cracked and her abdomen ballooned. Still the black poured in, unrelenting even as the liquid flesh became restricted by the contours of some unseen mould.
Thrumming as the pressure built, the black burst suddenly along her limbs as it sought release. Blood vessels distended and writhed like pulsating worms. Pale skin tore and hardened, only to split again as more tar surged beneath. Brittle bones shattered under the assault, shredding muscle as the tissue engorged itself against her farthest extremities.
Finally, with nowhere else to expand into, the girl felt the ripple of agony breached the confines above her shoulders. Surging upwards as though she were vomiting out her innards, she felt the world falter and schism. Like a ball being filled with burning pitch, her skull began grow into the invisible cavity. Shortly behind, her unblinking eyes swelled against the unseen walls, bulged momentarily and popped.
Thrashing in the darkness as the unceasing pressure filled her tortured existence; there came a sensation of explosive release. Arms, strong and sure, wrapped around her chest and heaved against the broken girl, dragging her from the cocooning embrace. Breaking the surface in a flail of desperation, the rescuer released their grip and allowed the girl to fall back onto a harsh metallic surface. Exhaustion robbing the last of her strength, she vaguely felt something ribbed sliding down her throat and the stinging hiss of a hypo against her neck.
She awoke suddenly, gasping in the warm air along with the scent of old paper and hearty wood ash.
Whether she had slept or simply faded briefly from existence, she could not tell. When her world returned to feeling the pain had all but vanished, naught but the tingle of paraesthesia remaining. Though the gentle babble of flowing water tickled the senses, she didn’t feel the lap of the pool caressing her sensitive skin. Instead she felt dry and warm, her tender side lying somewhat awkwardly against a stepped surface.
Eyes fluttered open to the apricity of reflected twilight. Where was this place? Gone were the shallow pool and its herd of ghostly creatures that had surrounded the banks, replaced by an elegant fountain upon whose polished marble steps she had awakened. All consuming though her fear had been, it too had vanished along with the endless prairie, replaced by the peculiar calm of one who has just experienced their own mortality.
Rising from the mirror-pool, the fountain’s centrepiece began as an entanglement of fine bronze fibres, sprouting from its base as one curving spire, just slightly shorter then a man. Held at its delicate peek was a small bowl, from which water was clearly meant to cascade, but now barely trickled from its worn edges. Nestled within this half shell was the rusty curve of an iron ball, distinctly out of place next to the glistening polished metals holding it aloft.
Lounged across the cool plinth stones, the recumbent girl lifted her head to better see the elaborate monument and its grandiose surroundings.
Subdued grey was the overwhelming theme for the magnificent room, appearing to be the study of some unimaginative lord. A floor of elegant stone ran its full opulent length, covered by the occasional frayed rug and floor runner. Two meagre chairs were arranged close to a small unlit fireplace, clad in shiny leather that carried no natural colouration of its own. Hung around the six sided room were many large ornate tapestries, slightly foxed but still serving to hide most of the bare stone walls from view. Reaching out either side of the inglenook, the intricate curtains of woven fabric were broken only by a small wooden door at its far end.
Aside from the distinctly metallic sculpture at its heart, the only undeniable colour came from the ceiling, mostly because this was entirely missing. Marble pillars and polished stone rose above the tapestries hangings only to simply end, as though the floor above had never been completed. In the space above swirled an endless cyclone of twilight clouds, shining with hidden brilliance and spiralling ever higher until their limits vanished in a beautiful apex of light. Spotted along the departed walls, the occasional building stone floated oblivious to fundamental laws it might be disobeying. Now looking for this phenomenon specifically, the girl could pick out many other tiny specs of levitating rubble, highlighted by the slight obfuscation of the gorgeous clouds beyond. Had the upper levels of this towering palace been lifted clean off its foundations?
But now at least she understood the colouration of the room. Though they had become somewhat dusty, every surface carried a slightest sheen to their grey surface through one property or another. The stone below her was polished. The leather of the armchairs was crisp and bright. Even the droll tapestries carried a silver thread within them, all to reflect the wondrous sky above.
Laying awe struck by the impossible room, there was also the gradually rising awareness that an odd sensation of detachment was permeating her senses. It was almost as though she were floating two feet behind her own body, merely an operator at the controls of a machine. Struggling around until she was sat upright, she began to consider the strange feeling of duality, with most uncharacteristic calm. Firstly, while there was definitely the texture of polished stone beneath her hooves, she could also ‘see’ her fingers as she stretched and flexed them before disbelieving eyes. What was more, though she was clearly sat cross-legged with her back to the fountain’s steps, when she closed her eyes her body could ‘feel’ her tail being pinned under her bony haunches.
Both form and mind seemed to occupy different shapes within the same space, neither seeming to possess an inaccurate element of awareness. Though she didn’t understand, she could at least comprehend; their coexistent state akin to seeing both faces of a coin simultaneously.
Stranger still, why didn’t this scare her? Perhaps it was something to do with a hyper observant state brought about by acute trauma? She certainly remembered being down right terrified before, when she had been running from… something.
Now that she came to consider her own train of thought, there was far more amiss here than just a dissociative out-of-body experience. Just a moment ago she had remembered something dreadfully important to her; an experience or series of events that caused her grate pain and anguish. Yet like a vivid dream the only thing to remain was a vague outline, the details slipping away as though the memory had been taken and left only their void.
A word came to mind and vanished just as quickly, its shape lingering in the form of comprehension. Night time spirits and eaters of dreams, someone had told her stories of such creatures many years ago, though their name escaped her. Whoever it had been, they must have been important too. But then, why couldn’t she remember them?
As though drawn by the rustle of cloth in some imperceptible breeze, the girl found her attention drawn towards the tapestry against the right most wall. Unlike its relatives throughout the room, this one remained unpinned and hung loosely, deeper shadows behind it and rope ties at its sides suggesting the presence of a shallow chamber beyond.
Curiosity tempered with caution, she carefully clambered to her feet and approached the aged weaving. Rhythmic hoof beets followed each foot fall, neither seeming out of place despite their association. Drawing closer, the once blurred patterns coalesced into faded child like quality. Picked out in finest needle work were scenes, people and even individual objects, all lacking the substance to convey all the barest of meaning. Many on this one repeated the same picture again and again. A small figure was sat in bed, apparently listening to a taller ‘man’ as he conjured images from the air. Though the setting remained, the postures changed and images change, flowing with the ever more fantastical stories that the man wove for the listening child.
‘Father.’ The faceless name rose from her tepid heart and caught in her throat. This was her father, the small girl with the green eyes was the girl herself. Yet in every depiction, no matter the angle or detail, the man’s face had eroded from existence. Once upon a time, each of these images would have been a world all of its own, a moment frozen in time for the mind to dwell upon like fine art. Now it was all fading away. Even as she watched, the threads of one image began to unpick themselves leaving a bare patch of musty cloth where the memory had been.
Eyes followed the slow wavering journey as the strand of yarn fell to earth and joined the gathering pile beneath the gradually unravelling tapestry. Glancing around the other walls, the same rang true for each sown blanket of memories, the one farthest from her now crumbling entirely as though a thousand years of wear had caught up with it all at once.
Yet something still drew her back to the display before her, upon which the old man’s stories were gradually unpicking themselves. Separated at its centre, the tapestry hung more like a set of curtains before a void then a simple decoration. Gently placing her hand between the folds, the girl began to pull the memories aside, revealing the recess beyond.
A bookcase and reading stand were all that occupied the tiny work room, like a solitude that lacked both writing desk and comfort. But things were different in here. As though isolated from the rest of the room, the nook was tinged with the slightest of colour, the books upon their shelves bound in thick covers of brown blue and even green. The girl shuddered a little, this little place felt so wrong compared to the rest of the cosy room. She could ‘feel’ things back there too, like the aged volumes were somehow staring at her from behind the clear glass, straining against the locked doors of their wooden prison.
“Thou should learn to trust thy instincts. Such a rash action could be your undoing.”
Despite her surprise at the sudden intrusion, she did not snap around like a child caught with their hand in a cookie jar. Somehow, the mere uneasy idea that someone else might be in the room with her was far more frightening than anything these dusty books could contain.
Instead the girl began to gaze at the lock on the cabinet and, as though enchanted by its delicate simplicity, tried to ask the watcher a question. While the enquiry still made perfect sense to her, what constituted ‘the question’ is quite difficult to describe without having actually being present within that representation of her fragile mind. Contained within one, song like syllable seemed to be several paragraphs on the nature of the human mind, both as a chemical engine and the existential seat of the soul.
They say that a picture speaks a thousand words. This was much the opposite, like a word that created a thousand pictures. Years of analysis (and arguing) by the world’s best scholars might have gleamed the merest edge of the truth from this language older then the birth of the human universe. But at its core was the question; ‘Why can’t I remember what’s in these?’
Behind her something moved up closer, soft hooves whispered across the marble floor with a natural grace.
“Chains are often lain with good reason, young mare. Doubly so those created by ourselves.”
Now the girl turned around to face the slender mare of midnight blue, framed by a mane of flowing ethereal stars. Though eclipsed by the resplendent equine who had appeared before the enraptured herd, this one too held a sense of nobility about her, a weight of presence quite unbecoming of a metaphorical representation. Clearly in her forethoughts the girl felt a name carry itself into being, conveyed by some inner mechanism grounded in her hooves. Yet despite the power this ‘Luna’ held, the impassive face did little to dispel the feeling that this intruder was trampling sacred ground.
Recognition stirred as another note of the mind’s song flowed across the crumbling tapestries.
‘The before place, with hurt and fear. You were there?’
“Indeed we were,” the princess replied, nodding regally. “Protecting our subjects whist our sister calmed your misplaced wrath.”
‘I remember you.’
Luna strained away from her as, in an imperceptible movement, the conflicted mind of the newfoal reached out and rested a hand upon her nose. Fingers seemed to stop just short as the pressure of a soft hoof gently brushed a spot between the princess’s eyes. Satisfied that this equine was real, the girl pressed on with her crystal notations.
‘I do not remember all of me. The mind sings of comforting emptiness. Is this your doing?’
“Neigh,” she responded, carefully guiding the ‘hand’ away, “the language is something of a side effect you could say. Your mind is presently incapable of communing, such is the havoc the violent transformation wreaked upon its fragile hubris. In a way, you could say that we are narrating for you.”
Considering this for a moment, the girl stepped around the tall figure and walked towards the inglenook. A bleached fire had sprung up within the hearth, its pallid flames casting a warm ashen glow across the ageing furniture.
‘Favour or curiosity?’ She asked, sitting down beside the fire and looking back to her abrupt acquaintance.
“Both.” Luna admitted, “It has been some time since one of your kind has been sent to us against their will. But while there are many who come, injured and scarred beyond measure, none fought against the gift.”
‘Us? But there is one?’
Nodding solemnly, the monarch trotted up and sat beside her, watching the silver flames. “When you came to us, some of your nightmares followed. She is repairing that damage.”
‘They were real?’
“You believed they were. Sometimes belief is enough.” For the first time since appearing in the sanctum, a slight smile graced Luna’s features. It was barely a grin, but carried with it the same soothing warmth of a mother reassuring their child. Now the mare stared upwards at the torn ceiling, glancing away only as another tapestry crumbled to dust.
“This bastion has seen better days. There really isn’t much left, is there?”
With a nervous shuffle, the girl averted her gaze from the snowfall of grey threads. It was getting harder to think straight, the earlier clarity now marred by doubts and confusion of the growing gaps in her memory.
‘I’m scared.’ Toned the song in the faintest of whispers.
Around them the last of the tapestries had crumbled, revealing the cold unwritten stone beneath. A breathless anticipation seemed to engorge the room, like a blank canvas before the master painter. Indigo hooves stepped into sight as goddess moved closer to the now quaking girl.
“We do not have much longer.” She announced, “Though it is probably best that you do forget all from this old life, I must ask you take something with you to your new one.”
Gently, a soft forelock scooped under the filly’s unresisting chin, lifting it until the fearful red eyes met peaceful turquoise and star light.
The song Luna spoke drew inspiration from the bravest of souls, a single note that drew a thousand brief pictures upon the blank walls, conjured scenes perfect starlit moments and showed the world in all its wonder.
‘Live in fear, no longer.’
And the world began anew, awakening to a strange world filled with bright lights and the crisp beep of the heart monitor.
Every Cloud
All the King's Horses.
Chapter Eighteen; Every Cloud
There’s a lot to be said for the mood altering properties of that wonderful drug morphine. Especially when administered to a species who’s natural disposition is slightly above ‘perky’, verging on ‘ecstatic’.
Katrina rocketed to the edge of consciousness like a boy cut loose from its moorings, bursting into cotton smothered bliss. Within the soft embrace of a heavy blanket, her tingling senses buzzed drunkenly at the edges of a fuzzy world. Vertigo spun the world around her, eliciting a tipsy giggle from the filly as she snuggled closer into the swaddling covers. Even the thin folds of the sheets echoed as long sloping valleys crisscrossing her relaxed form. It felt quite funny really, like her whole body was encased in balloons or as though her numb body had party melted into its surroundings.
With a rousing yawn, Kat stretched her stiff neck and wings, the latter tickling her sides as they strained against the thick cloth. Had it not been for the pressing headache and tenderness below her withers, Kat would have been entirely at ease. As it was, her discomfort prevented the soft covers from drawing her back to the land of nod. Strangely though, both the prickle of deadened nerves and the faint scalding ended in distinct lines along her legs, with no feeling at all in her fore hooves.
From a ways off came the sound of stirring, punctuated by the soft ‘clop’ as four hooves found the ground in a hurry. Gingerly opening her eyes, the stark metallic colours of a dorm room hovered as an undefined haze beyond a mountain of white pillows.
“You’re awake!” Exclaimed a strained voice from across the room.
Giggling dopily, the Pegasus watched as her view became dominated by an orangey burr, Dizzy’s relieved face slowly sliding into focus. With her forehooves perched upon the edge of the raised cot, the earthpony’s anxious smile filled the grey world with a passable impression of ‘faithful dog at its master’s bedside’.
“How… How do you feel?”
Even through a drug addled haze, the stark details of her normally bubbly friend’s distress became apparent. By all accounts the mare looked as though she hadn’t slept in days. Rather than her usual energetic posture, the little pony sagged on her hooves as though kept upright by will alone. Under the flattened mess of her unkempt mane, dull matte eyes stared out, framed by dark rings and the stains of dry tears.
“Silly filly.” Katrina mumbled drunkenly, “You’re all fluffed up! Heh, maybe I should be calling you Frizzy instead.”
Dizzy’s ear tilted in mild confusion as the bedbound filly descended into horsed giggles, her own grin faltering with renewed conflict. Salve had mentioned how confused Kat was likely to be once she woke up, but the young mare seemed oddly disconnected from reality. Leaning forward, she gave the recumbent Pegasus a comforting nuzzle, carefully avoiding her friend’s front legs.
Kat let out a contented sigh from the subtle embrace, the filly’s unkempt coat brushing against her own and filling her muzzle with the smell of daisies and tangerine zest. Yet at the same time a cool dampness was seeping into her side, a fresh wave of Dizzy’s tears soaking through the fur of her neck.
“I’m sorry.” Sobbed the filly, in barely more than a whisper, “I’m so sorry. I was so scared that you’d-”
“What happened?” Kat interjected, her rather more sober tone braking Dizzy’s blame taking.
Leaning back just enough to see her friend’s face again, the little earthpony drew a steadying breath before replying.
“The doctor said you’d tried to use blood packs to help Sarah, only… only I came in and there was the scalpel and all that blood. You… you kinda slipped when I screamed and… fell ‘into’ her.”
“Huh?” Blinking blurrily, Kat’s eyes stretched in comprehension, “Oh. Is tha’ why my arms feel funny?”
Beneath the sheets, two shot lumps moved as the filly tried to twitch her hooves. Seeing the distress rising in her friend’s eyes, Dizzy stretched her faux smile again and tried to think of the right words.
“They had to cut you free. But I’m sure you’ll be okay though!” She added quickly, wincing as her friend’s head disappeared beneath the sheets, “Salve said they’re making special arrangements to take you to a hospital in Canterlot, an-”
The lack of length and sensation finally catching up with her addled brain. She couldn’t feel her fourlegs, because there were no forelegs to feel. Dizzy froze mid sentence as the sheets were tossed aside with a flick of Kat’s long neck. Impulse drove her red rimmed eyes down the bedbound form, drawn towards the shocking absence below the pegasus’ withers.
Feathers bristling from the surprise, the Katrina gazed down at her lush green body, unblemished aside from two freshly bandaged stumps where her forelegs used to be. At first there was horror, flickering through her eyes to echo the look on the other equine’s features. Yet as she lifted her shortened appendages, the ghosts of muscles past still flexing within a mind still oblivious to their absence, an alien feeling began to blossom in her chest. Attached to this illusive warmth was, of all things, a joke.
Whatever reaction Dizzy had been expecting, it probably wasn’t laughter. Perhaps the manic laughter of despair, of a mind pushed over the edge of madness by outrageous fortune, but not a giggle filled with genuine warmth. took the filly entire off guard. Almost horrified, Dizzy sat and stared at her friend as a nervous smile scuttled across her confusion.
As Kat’s hysteria calmed momentarily, the earth pony tentatively cleared her throat. “Umm, Katrina?”
“Hehehe, oh Dizz. I’m okay, really.” Gasped Kathrin, bursting into a fresh bout of giggles as she found herself unable to rub her eyes, “I just thought -bweehehehee- no need to by this mare a drink, she’s already totally LegLess! BWAHHAHAAAAHAAAA!”
“Wh- what?” Dizzy gawked, sure that the injured pony had well and truly lost her marbles. “Kat. Don’t you know what’s happened to you? They had to take your forelegs!”
Giggles fading, Kathrin rolled onto her back and stretched out her wings across the bed. Part of her was quite weirded out. There was the depression trying to make itself heard along with a barrage of negative questions and worries. But under it all was this unshakable support that seemed to say, ‘it’s not all bad’.
“Well, guess that’s incentive to learn how to fly, isn’t it?” She said, staring up at the ceiling with a wide, almost content smile.
Utterly at a loss, Dizzy remained silent, squeezing her eyes shut as a fresh wave of tears began to seep down her face. Guilt pressed down on her brittle heart, her friend had gone snooker loopy and it was all her fault. Holding back the despair desperate to break free from her chest, the overwhelmed filly was snapped from her misery by the gentle cooing of her name.
“Dizzy. Look at me.”
On the bed, Kat’s calm smile had turned to face the tearful pony, radiating the promise of hope and forgiveness.
“Do I look afraid?”
Dizzy shook her head.
“Do I look sad then?”
Again the filly replied silently.
“Then what have you to be sad or afraid about? It was an accident, sometimes things don’t turn out the way we plan. Maybe later I’ll get upset or frustrated about this, but right now that wouldn’t help you or me.”
The smile turned away again to look at the slowly rotating fan hanging above its bed, the occupant releasing a long sigh of comfort. An odd susurration rippled through the air, hinting at an indescribably tiny sound that was more felt then heard.
“Mmmm this bed is sooo soft. Funny isn’t it. All that time I wanted to die, and I couldn’t see what I actually had. No matter how bleak the world seems, there’s always a Brightside. Heh, Brightside, that’s a nice name isn’t it?”
It was as though a thousand tiny bells had rung in quick succession, the pegasus’ remaining blissfully unaware of the display of glittering lights falling from the emerging pattern on her bare flank. The fur surrounding it seemed to darken, a gradient of deep green leading into a tiny star of brilliant white, like the light at the end of a dark forest path.
“Besides,” Muttered the pegasus happily, absentmindedly scratching her flank with a wing, “The important thing, the reaaaaly important thing, is that it worked. Didn’t it?”
Dizzy blinked as the question drew her away from Bright Side’s new cutie-mark, unsure how much she should her exhausted friend.
“… Yes.”
“oh.” On the bed, the filly’s chest rose and fell slowly, exhaustion calling her back to the land of nod once again “good.”
Whilst the Bureau presently contained only six highly spacious clinics, it had been originally designed to house up to thirty. A phased transition was already in full swing, the more luxurious modules decommissioned one by once and replaced with many smaller efficient units. For the time being though, lucky applicants that were accepted to the Portland centre were treated to facilities built to the exacting standards of the corporate elite.
This meant that, beyond the pleasant spacious façade, there were large voids behind every wall that ended up being used mostly for storage and service access. Down the edge of Clinic three, the entrance to the first new micro clinic now played host to a somewhat irritated Eric Malcolm, gazing stonily at a dimly flickering computer screen. Sterile as the surrounding environment was, they were marred by doctor’s impassive expression, though the oversized office chair in which he sat completed the sense of juxtaposition.
Blatantly ignoring the ergonomic curves of his recently pilfered seating, the gaunt man sat sideways with his knees over one arm rest, staring intently at the live camera feed playing out on the low resolution screen. It was being streamed from a storage room less than thirty feet away, one that sat parallel to supply pipes for the conversion rooms in the adjoining clinics. Conveniently, this made it one of the most heavily shielded areas in proxy to Clinic four. After the ‘incident’, the ex-janitorial closet had been hastily adapted to house the hazardous patient that now slumbered peacefully within. Numerous wall panels of the flat-pack building had been detached and moved down the corridor to reinforce the weaker parts of the structure, though even now the doctor was only just beyond minimum safe distance from the red double doors.
Doctor Malcolm finally gave up on the rapidly degrading feed. Though the source was quite close by, the image of his ‘patient-by-proxy’ remained fuzzy at best, glitching as the high Traumatic field played hell with the camera’s electronic sensor. Setting the tablet aside, he reached down beside his awkward perch until his fingers closed around the handle of a large conical appliance. Tapered end against his mouth, the device let out a high pitch whistle as Malcolm pulled its trigger and spoke into the aperture.
“SALVE. FORGET IT, THE CAMERA JUST CRAPPED OUT AGAIN.”
A moment or two passed before a teal equine emerged from the double doors, nickering in irritation at the crass interruption. Flanking the mare were two newfoal unicorns she had recruited from the clinic, both promising students of advanced magic manipulation. Whist Salve approached the slouched Doctor the other two remained behind at the closed doors. One screwed their eyes up in intense concentration as they practiced levitating a metal cup while the other popped open a book on equine anatomy.
“You know,” She sighed, setting down the camera she had been carrying between her teeth. “That instrument is really quite abrasive. I can hear you perfectly well in there if you’d just raised your voice a little.”
In case his impassive features didn’t convey his feelings on the matter, Malcolm raised the megaphone to his lips again.
“DULY NOTED.”
Ignoring a clatter of dropped cups from the students, Salve fixed her colleague with a stiff glare and expanded a thin blue field of magic around her horn. With a short squeal of burning electronics, blue smoke began to seep from the megaphone’s mouth piece along with the smell of ozone, symbolizing the sole of the machine had ascended unto silicone heaven.
“Party pooper.” Muttered the doctor, idly casting aside the newly anointed paperweight “Everything still looks in order though, no obvious abnormalities or extra limbs. Is she reacting to stimuli yet?”
Rearranging herself to get access to her saddle bags, the equine retrieved an old-fashioned clipboard and checked the various additions since her last visitation.
“Not so far. After her airways cleared up there hasn’t been any other issues. Not all that much to do but wait and see if she wakes up. I’m worried about her pigmentation, or rather lack thereof. Never thought I’d see a true Albino.”
Malcolm was genuinely intrigued. “You don’t have albino’s in Equestria?”
Shaking her head, salve lowered the clipboard and looked at the towering doctor sincerely. “Well, no, not like this anyway. Ponies can be white coated, and even have red eyes. But even then they have some slight tint or subtle hue. Her though… she’s just ‘blank’, no colouration what so ever, even her mane is practically see through.”
With a sigh, she turned back to her notes “But other than that I’d say she’s a perfectly healthy young filly. Too young though.” Salve added as an afterthought.
Malcolm smirked inwardly, privately relieved that his knowledge wasn’t entirely redundant.
“Huh? What are you talking about?” Salve said, giving the doctor a quizzical look as she secured the clipboard. “Acording to what her sister told me, she should be at least fifty or older. Yet now she can’t be more than sixteen at a stretch.”
With this confirmation, Malcolm’s introspective smile took on a devious edge. “Trade you the reasoning for an explanation behind the pointy hat brigade stood back there.”
Following the doctor’s gesturing finger towards the diligent students, Salve squinted in momentary confusion before finally grasping her colleague’s vague reference to horns.
“Oh.. well it’s two fold really. They’re both interested in pursuing medical careers in Equestria and I thought this would be good experience. They get to see patient care first hoof and we get coverage given we can’t be down here all the time.”
Noting Malcolm’s approaching interruption, Salve raised a hoof and cut him off at the pass.
At this the medic opened her pack with a gentle touch of magic and allowed a small glass square to float out. Suspended within the resin was a thin blackened membrane, artificially grown human skin to be exact. Before the recent jump to mass production, when R24 had come in small twenty-seven ounce jars, the skin slides had been an essential tool for Bureau staff. By measuring the speed at which the exposed tissue disintegrated, a standard model was developed to check for dangerous levels of Thaumic radiation.
“We ran the Slide test again.” Salve continued, rotating the sample in mid air. “It took five minutes for the effects to show, more than doubled from this morning alone. If that continues it shouldn’t be too long before it’s safe for her to go back to Clinic four.”
“Heh, so you’re acting like a magic heat-sink?” Goaded the doctor, swinging his legs around until he was no longer contravening safety regulations.
“Umm, sort of. I think it’s something to do with ‘ambient Thaumic modular thingies’.” Salve stuck her tongue out at the twisty technical jargon. Give her a good Atypical Odontalgia any day. “I didn’t really cover magical theory much, just the basics.”
Malcolm ‘humphed’ in response as he stood and stretched his cramped limbs. “Well that is a blessing. With any luck that blackmesh investigator will get off our backs once he can observe the result first hand.”
“And you can tend to your own darn patients again.” Beamed the pony, her attempt at human sarcasm leaving a bitter aftertaste on her tongue.
Pausing, Eric looked thoughtful as he turned and started back towards the module’s exit. “She’s not my patient anymore Salve. I handed my notice in yesterday.”
“What do you mean?” Salve gawked, appalled at this sudden revelation. “
Eric just smiled thinly.
“Have you ever heard of ‘Clark’s Laws’?” He asked, sweeping out another cigarette and tucking it behind his ear. “One of them states that, Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Salve rolled her eyes dramatically and fell into step beside Malcolm, “That dose sound like a very ‘human’ parable, yes.”
“Then how does your ‘magic’ work?” Queried the Doctor, his manor suggesting he knew the answer well in advance.
Knowing that her colleague was goading for an audience, the unicorn decided to walk head long into the fray. “Eric, nopony needs to know how magic works, because it just does! It’s as much a part of Equestria as the rocks, trees or animals. My point is that if Equestrian magic were some kind of advanced technology, then probably wouldn’t be nearly as… well, Magical.”
“More importantly,” Continued ‘Eric’, sweeping up where Salve had left off, “it would be confined by reason. By all accounts, if ‘reason’ had its way that girl should not have lived. No Calcium, no bones. Yet a few extra drops of blood, some happy thoughts and Presto! Suddenly you’ve got a whole working body? I’d say it was impossible but the evidence is lying in a coma next door.”
“My point is, the reason you don’t understand it, is because it is unquantifiable. One minute it’s just another force, the next its performing miracles. There are no laws which it universally obeys, thus no way it can be predicted or controlled.”
Pushing aside the hanging plastics, Malcolm strode down the metal stares leading to the void between clinics. The path ahead was lit by work lamps gathered from all over the site, creating a tunnel of light towards the service exit back to the bureau foyer.
“The rules have changed, in that they’ve been thrown clean out the window. Frankly I’m too tired to give a damn. No point in being a mathematician in a world where one plus one equals fish.”
“Maybe you’ve just got the wrong equation? Does that mean the answer isn’t worth finding?” Remarked the mare, stepping around the sullen doctor as they crossed into the auditorium, “Anyway, I thought you were going to tell me about the age thing.”
Malcolm scoffed and lent against the glass barrier looking down the lobby. “Why do you need to know? It’s ‘Magic’ afterall, and no pony needs to know how that works.”
“Oh come on, you can’t lead me on like that only to not tell me!”
“… Fine.” He requited at last, “Nanites can’t accommodate biological changes, so were creating perfect copies of cells to replace dead or defective tissue, including her DNA. Physically she aged until she was perfect for combat and then stopped. Biologically though, she hasn’t aged a day since the Revenant procedure.”
“Ah-ha!” Salve barked triumphantly, almost making the doctor jump sideways, “You see! That makes perfect sense. Your knowledge isn’t redundant Eric, you just need to open your mind a little. Magic didn’t bring Sara back from the brink, it was Kat’s conviction that her sister couldn’t die.”
Razing an eyebrow, Malcolm inspected the unicorn critically. “Are you seriously suggesting that she was saved by the placebo effect?”
“Why not,” Shrugged the pony, “If happy thoughts and a positive attitude can keep cancer in check, why can’t it apply to the whole body?”
Silence descended between the two as a new wave of human shaped ponies walked through the sliding glass doors. No two were alike, but each would be looking for a new life or an escape from their old one. They wouldn’t find either here.
Perhaps it was wrong to offer redemption on a silver plate, without strings or responsibility beyond those that were seen as a given. But every single man woman and child down there had a story to tell, a thousand moments they wish they could take back, a price they had already paid three fold. Conversion would show this too them, bare back the walls of self worth and expose all that they were beneath.
A pitty it came at such a price.
Stripped of the violent ape that could both create and destroy at the behest of a cruel cycle, some would burst into tears when they first awoke in their new forms. They would think themselves unworthy of this second chance, such was the price of clarity. But they would be lifted from sorrow and doubt by those around them, bolstered by the kinship they would find awaiting them. In a world without selfishness or greed, they would find new drive in the happiness they could bring to others.
They may question themselves in the fullness of time. Perhaps they would regret the cost or lack thereof.
But what few would understand is that the only requirement, is to want for happiness.
The End.
All the King’s Horses
Chapter fifteen: Carbon
-------- what----------------REM ININSTALIZING---------------------------------- -------- is--------------MEDULLA SUSPENSION---- where?----FALSE------ --- this?------SUB-COTEX LINK--------- where am i?--------FALSE--------- -FRONTAL CORTEX ISOLATIO---------------FALSE-------- i----------------- ----WARNING: REM STATE IS DESTABILISING------ don't----------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- can't------------------------ -----ERROR-----ERROR-----ERROR----ERROR----ERROR----ERROR------ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- help-
Sound was the first thing to return through the darkness, the deep thud of fireworks just as on the night of Sumidagawa. Sometimes woken by the muffled sound of the celebration, she had watched with childish wonder as the ever more colourful displays of competing artists fill the skies over Tokyo. She always loved the blue ones, but Green was her father’s favourite colour. To the weak eyes of the broken girl, the intricate explosions were more like a coalescence of dancing lights, flowering like cherry blossoms before passing their incandescence to yet another cascade of brilliance.
Yet here there were no flickering colours through a meagre window, playing across sensitive eyes and drawing her from the embrace of Morpheus. Here was a cold, dark place, the smell of decay and building dust choked her laboured breaths. Eyelids fluttered in the dark place as its captive tried to move, a questing hand rasping against the sandpaper surface mere inches above. Alone it explored the jagged contours, its twin pinned and useless at her side.
Pressed against the cold unyielding concrete, she could feel only the totality of encasement surrounding her frail body. Rushing to the waking world, a fist began to beat against the immovable barrier. Trapped within, the coffin gripping her like a python, she could feel the crushing weight pinning her chest and restricting her ever more panicked breaths.
Keening grew to whines and eventually shrill shrieks of terror.
Light! Crumbling dust filled her open mouth as a crack began to split beneath her flailing fist.
Wails descending to relieved sobs at the sight of freedom, the trapped girl gathered her breath and pushed her one free arm out as far as possible, gradually widening the rift. Dust and sharp fragments rained down from the painfully slow process, stinging her eyes and throat as more rocks were eased away from the growing passage. Fragile though the surface was, it was all the purchase she could achieve. Around her shoulders the space tightened as she wriggled up between thick slabs of broken concrete, the twisted rubble biting into her delicate flesh.
At last, bleeding hands dragged an exhausted body from the concrete coffin, crawling a few feet before collapsing on the wreckage covered ground. Rolling onto her side, one eye finally glimpsed the hauntingly familiar surroundings. Thick mist poured past the prone figure into the warehouse-like building, swirling about ruined desks, stacks of material and weaving machines. Half collapsed iron rafters ran its length, until meeting the jagged edge of the shattered façade, beneath whose remains she had been buried.
Rising like the relic of a fallen civilisation was the wreckage of a mechanised drone, an assault turret severed from its caterpillar treads by the weight of the falling building. Alien amid the common scree, its broken cannon armature pointed threateningly at the unseen skies, the body itself covered by fallen masonry. Fleeting images played within her mind’s eye, a plan hatched in a fraction of a second and the confidence of an attack, building to a sense of triumph over this indomitable foe.
Déjà vu pressed upon her weak senses. She knew this place, though where from was near impossible to tell. Ignoring the protests from sore limbs, the girl pushed herself to her knees to absorb both the scene and her own appearance.
None of this was right. She felt out of place… weak. Dim though the frosty daylight was, it still stung her eyes, objects fading into obscure blurs before the smog could swallow them from sight. Though bloody and torn, the hands that had dug to freedom were pallid, mirrored by the curtains of wispy glass like hair hanging lifeless before her pained eyes, only the chalky dust granting it any colour at all. Hadn’t she always been this way though? A long time ago, perhaps, before they had fixed her… whoever they were.
Now where there had been power, there was vacuum. Where there had been strength, there was vulnerability. Slowly drawing her arms around her frailty, the girl sat in shocked silence, listening to the sound of distant thuds echoing through the gutted streets. Despite the thick plated armour shielding her body from the harsh environment, she suddenly felt naked to the world. Hidden eyes seemed to watch with predatory gaze, each tallying her days on earth and what little she had remaining. Impossibly tall chimneys and warehouses leered in from the industrial city, blocking out the burning light but inviting a bitter wind that rasped against her revealed flesh.
Exposure demanding shelter, her eyes fell upon a familiar shape lurking behind a fallen slab that had once been part of the first floor. Crawling on hands and knees, the naked ape scrabbled towards the comforting tool, scooping in into her arms and flinging herself against the whitewashed masonry. Back against the concrete wall, she pulled herself into a ball and hugged the rifle close to her chest, as though it were a precious doll never to be left behind again. Symbol of protection in hand, a measure of calm descended over apprehension.
Memory stirred yet again, flaring at the sandy coloured body armour hung from her slight frame. Between the camouflaged vest and beige grieves, it was clear the suit had been designed with no element of comfort in mind. Woven plates of Dilatant Titanium covered every vital area, joined together by flexible straps rather than material, as though never meant to touch sensitive irritable skin. No wonder it had been so hard to escape the hole.
In the quietus, a slender susurration found its way through brick and mortar, drawing the girl from her stupor.
From beyond the heaped collapse came a telltale grinding of something heavy sliding across the asphalt. Drawing nearer with passing breath, the girl came to a terrible crossroads, too fearful to run and more terrified to stay put. Grip tightening on the cumbersome weapon, she slowly slid up the pebble dashed surface until shaky legs supported her full, insubstantial height.
Willing her limbs to move, the girl began to inch her way along the sharp barricade. Behind the fallen concrete the slither ceased abruptly, leaving nothing but the thunder of a tremulous heart crashing in her ears. Panicked breaths grew as short as her tentative steps, now barely a scraping crawl as the summit approached. Teeth gritted to pin back the constricting fear in her breast, she drew a long breath of courage.
One.
Two.
Three!
As though attached to rickety pistons whose rusted pipes had finally given in to the mounting pressure, she flung herself around the jagged boundary and brought her only defence to bear on her would be attacker.
Moments passed, the empty street staring back at the shaking girl, no more occupied than it had been minutes before. Sights wavered hesitantly, the disproportioned weapon too heavy for her slender form. Yet nothing moved beyond the scattering of dust motes across the cracked tarmac road. A shuddering breath passed slack lips, as, with the absence of any threat, the tension finally slipped its hold on her frayed sanity.
Blood turned to needles of ice in her veins as the pressure closed around her ankle.
Flight winning control of her body, the girl jerked away from the deathly cold grip, catching herself mid fall against the remains of a support pillar. Horror-struck eyes lingered on the creature whose unyielding grasp had stolen her balance.
It might have been human, once upon a time. Now it was a glance into the abhorrent future, a fission of living flesh and machine. Skeletally emaciated, its creased skin hung like dry leather from its exaggerated bones. Metallic plates erupted from the leathery skin around its twisted spine, fusing the soldier to his chitin armour. Below shattered hips, its lower half had been mangled beyond all recognition, bubbling and oozing as billions of microscopic machines fought to seal the horrendous breaches in its mortal flesh. One arm had been removed entirely, ripped away at the shoulder, the other hanging by reinforced bone alone, the nerves and vessels keeping the muscles working hanging loose from the visceral wound. There was no sound from the living corpse, only a look of desperation in its sunken black eyes, staring unblinkingly from a disfigured face lacking both jaw and tongue.
She was screaming, kicking out in a desperate bid to crawl away from the ghoulish abomination. Even with half its body either mangled or missing, the Revenant’s brittle fingers still held firm against her violent flailing. At last, a spray of clear fluids fountained from severed arteries as a boot found the machine’s wounded arm. Though still bent in a claw like rictus, the grip slackened enough for a last violent tug to set the hysterical girl free.
Tumbling from the debris heap, she found herself scrambling to her feet, running without even thinking about a destination. The darkness of the workhouse welcomed her fleet rout and proffered its maze of doorways. Shouldering one aside, she found herself within a dark corridor, leading first deeper into the complex and then out to the opposite street. Lungs burned and demanded payment, forcing their owner to slow her retreat as the exit approached
Half falling through the crewed facade, the girl stumbled back out into the uninviting streets, the smell of burning pitch and cordite assailing her nostrils. Her head spun and stomach turned as she drew in the theatre beyond the warehouse door. Though surely still within the industrial city, the road was lined with a hotchpotch array of buildings, each as ill fitting as its sisters. Metal, concrete and plastic all blended like a child’s chalk drawing. Houses of brick were unified with office blocks and living pods. And from every one came the shouting, gunfire and screams. Lingering too long upon one metallic edifice, the girl felt the memories clack into place, like film canisters dropped from a balcony into her brain.
Janitor has possible override to mission objective. Unacceptable risk
Four life-signs within.
Breaching.
African male, est-age fourty. Mid build. Scarring to facial features, chemical source. Armed; One four by thirty inch cudgel; Threat minimal. African female, est-age thirty five. Light build. Emaciated Unarmed; Threat minimal. African male, est-age seven. Light build. Damage to facial features, suggests gang affiliations. Unarmed; Threat minimal.
Preceding with mission objectives.
Barely able to remain standing, a hollow emptiness opened up within the watcher’s soul. There was no point in closing her eyes, the visions would have simply played across the darkness instead. Powerless, she witnessed herself simultaneously storm every keep and hovel, sweeping away any resistance before extinguishing all life within.
Systematic but efficient, pain was spared as life was taken, the prior serving no purpose to those who could not take satisfaction in suffering. Privileged and plebs alike were a simple statistic, a number that kept rising ever higher. Missiles flew overhead, seen but unseen and at the beckon call of the aggressors. Brigades of men picked up the weapons of their dead protectors, bringing about their own unnecessary destruction. Now filled with flames, the street played host to a thousand figures of perfection, their jade eyes looking on pitilessly, heedless of the anguish they had helped create.
That had been her one request for the procedure, hadn’t it? After all, green always was father’s favourite colour.
Confusion set its teeth as the girl began to run once more. It was horrifying, of this there was no doubt. But why? Even though the scenes of carnage should have brought about feelings of remorse there was only fear of the now, mortal dread that the same could happen to her.
She didn’t want this, to be a feeble liability again. Where had the strength gone? Her protective cocoon of unfeeling steel had abandoned her, leaving the pitiful mistake of a daughter exposed to fend for herself.
The world ‘glitched’ like a needle skipping across the valleys of a record. Asphalt rippled as a thin wave lush grass washed through the rubble strewn street, slicing a sharp gash through the illusion of walls as an alien horizon briefly bisected the buildings. Had she looked through the rip in her reality, the girl may have glanced an unending vista of white blossoms on the infinite prairie. As it was the pain was far too distracting.
Every fibre of her body screamed in agony as for an instant it was pulled apart by unseen forces. In the blink of an eye the torture passed. To her credit, she fell for only a moment before scrambling back to her feet, but it had been long enough. Gathering at the limits of her vision, the shadowy figures of her past selves began closing in around her like a noose.
She wanted to go to them, she wanted to be strong and safe. But the air of malice they exuded spoke volumes about the opinion of the machine, weakness could not be tolerated.
Instead she ran onwards, driving the butt of her rifle between two of the spectres and making for the smouldering buildings. The brittle door gave under a forceful shoulder, panic numbing the searing pain in the abused joint as she barrelled through the foyer beyond. Walls painted in decretive red and gold filigree framed a gutted ticket booth, its papery contents littering the floor. This was some kind of theatre. Heavy double doors led to the first tier of seats, leading up to a stage whose moth eaten curtain rose to dominate the view of any spectator.
Running towards the towering edifice of satin, the crash of splintering wood told of the outer door’s fate against the advancing army. In moments their Jade eyes would be upon her once more, sealing her fate in this dark montage. With nowhere else to run, the girl dove for the edge of the band pit, struggling over the simple wooden boundary and sliding into its hidden confines. Dividing the slim gap between audience and actor was a stairwell opening up into the under belly of the stage. Its unsightly presence had once been hidden from the rows of entertained watchers by a series of trapdoors, now open and bare for anyone to enter.
Hearing the thud of heavy footsteps, common sense finally lent the girl its presence of mind and sent her down the gifted exit. With the care of a soldier handling an unexploded bomb, she lifted the trap doors and closed the entrance behind her, drawing the latch across their face as an afterthought. Sure of her safety she began to examine her new surroundings, finding the hole far darker without the presence of the enlightened theatre above. Lamplight pricked shafts of dull luminescence between the shrunken boards of the stage above, but provided little in the way of substance to the storage space below.
Barely daring to breathe, she listened to the march of seeking monsters, each one searching the vast rows of seats before moving off to look elsewhere in the building. Carefully the girl groped the end of her only defence, feeling along its grip and barrel until at last her fingers came to the large torch slung underneath. Pointing the weapon away from the rickety ceiling, a quick twist produced a steady beam of brilliant light, stinging sensitive eyes that had welcomed the darkness. Within the newly cast shadows, something staggered backwards. Quickly she twisted the torch further, widening the beam to encompass the whole cellar, now somehow brightly lit by the single source. Faces stared into the light, fearful and cowering together. There must have been dozens of people down here, hiding from the onslaught in their crumbling world.
“Please!” She rasped in her mother tongue, staggering towards the possible allies, “Hide me too!”
But as the distance closed, déjà vu stole upon her again.
Ignoring the dizzying feeling she reached out to the first terrified woman in the crowd. Only slightly older then herself, the woman lent away from the outstretched hand, holding a quivering child held to her breast.
“Please,” Begged the girl, reaching out in desperation, “they come for me.”
Noiselessly, the woman’s frighten face vanished in a sanguine chrysanthemum. There was no scream or rending of splitting flesh. The body fell in silence.
Paralysed with shock, the girl looked down at the rifle now in her hands, unfired yet somehow responsible for taking this innocent life. Without so much as a scuffle of boots the crowd surrounded her, the confused girl’s gaze lifting to settle on each face that she somehow recognised. Panning around the room, each visage told a different story, reminding her who they were before blossoming into their own red fountain, just as the woman’s had.
She didn’t want this.
The last of them toppled like a puppet with its strings cut, leaving her alone. So much she wished to close her eyes, but they wouldn’t respond, unblinking in the shadow cast room, the walls of which had long since vanished from sight. Slipping to her knees, the girl allowed the heavy gun to rest upon the blood soaked floor, thin strands of soft unwoven threads dug into her skin, rather then the harsh concrete she had expected. A tremor had begun throughout the constricting endless space, gathering and resounding ahead of some unseen vehicle. Among the bodies of her victims the girl rose to the renewed threat, swinging the rifle up towards that which would hopefully be her doom.
What she saw shook her soul. A twisting mist of livid colours descended across the dark hills of a night time wilderness. Flowing like liquid, the contrived mass danced and contorted within its own confines before suddenly sweeping towards the terrified watcher. Drawing closer with ever thunderous hoof beat, the cloud began to become more distinct, patches of colour becoming sleek essences of the creatures they had once been.
There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Trapped in the open by this encroaching ghostly cloud of crushing hooves and wild threatening shapes, the girl did the only thing she could do.
She pulled the trigger.
Author’s note;
Well, here we are. The end, finito, experative. Took me long enough didn’t it?
It’s not the best ending, given the number of loose ends and its poor execution, but I’m glad to say I’m happy with the result. Almost a year ago, I set out to write and finish my first fiction work. While I can't say that I'm 100% done with this project, I've learned soooo much from writing this and the comments people have provided. Though I still can't belive it had so many views.
To everyone on Fimfiction: I cannot thank this community enough for all the encouragement it has provided. You are all wonderful people whom I am grateful to call my friends (yes, even you Sithis).
To the readers and writers of the conversion Bureau; I love you guys. Special thanks to Chatoyance and Corsair, who between them inspired me to write. And a massive thankyou to everyone who badgered me into carrying on whenever I slowed down.
For anyone interested, the final version of AKH is in the works and presently up to chapter three with around 13k words >.> Yeah, if every chapter changes as much as those first two did, we could be some time.
Thanks for listening children, this is Cherry Rie signing out :)
