Mind Warp, page 2
And I have just watched them die.
Me – baby me – I’m screaming. My face is red and scrunched up. Instinctively I reach down, try to pick myself up, but it’s hopeless. I’ve got no substance, and my soothing coos and reassurances go unheard. Then Bronx is beside me. He stoops down and gathers the baby in his arms, and he’s away, out of the turbine banks and mustering the others who are milling around outside, waiting for someone to take control now their leader’s gone.
‘To the convection lakes!’ Bronx roars.
I watch them go, my tears turning the whole terrible scene to a misty blur. I turn away.
There’s a killer zoid in front of me. And this one is different. There’s some kind of holo-symbol suspended in the air above its head. A double loop, like a flattened figure eight. The symbol for infinity.
It’s as if it knows I’m here.
It raises the weapon system on its arm. The lasers pivot and take aim. There’s a buzzing noise. Red lights flash . . .
Then all at once it’s like someone’s turned up the brightness on a vid-screen. The pulses of energy are back; the blinding circles in circles.
And for a second time, I’m plunged into a total whiteout.
I’m back in the shaft.
I don’t dare move, I’m shaking so badly. I just cling hold of the metal rungs. Cos that’s what I have to do. Cling on. Cling on tightly.
My name is York. I’m a scavenger. I’m fourteen years old. I am on a mission to save mankind . . .
‘York?’
It’s Belle. I look down. Her green eyes seem almost to be shining in the shadowy darkness.
‘That . . . that was me,’ I whisper. ‘As a baby. And my parents. I saw how they died. We . . .’
‘I’m sorry, York,’ Belle replies softly. ‘I thought it would be safer for you to follow your own memory stream. But I was wrong . . .’
‘My memory stream?’ I say. ‘But I’ve got no memory of what happened back then. I was too young.’
‘It’s in your brain, York,’ she says. She reaches up and taps me on the forehead. ‘Everything that ever happened to you, from the moment you were born, is stored up here. Even the things you can’t access.’ She pauses and I see her face cloud over. ‘I . . . I’m so sorry you had to see it.’
I nod miserably. ‘Where were you, Belle?’ I ask her.
‘I was keeping the portal open,’ she says calmly. ‘Maintaining pulse control. And when I sensed danger, I pulled you out. You’re safe now, York. But we need to keep moving if we’re going to discover why the robots rebelled,’ she goes on. ‘Further back into the past.’
I swallow. It’s not going to be easy. But I know she’s right.
‘OK,’ I tell her.
We head deeper and deeper down into the shaft that Belle has created to help me make sense of this extraordinary place – a mind-ladder that I cling to. There are columns of flickering green lights and electro-static flashes. Fractals glimmer. Synaptic connections fizz and spark.
I focus on the ladder – the glint of the metal, the clunk-clunk of my boots on the rungs.
We keep on. I try to stay focused, but I’m finding it more and more difficult to concentrate. I can’t stop thinking about the Inpost in the turbine banks. Of Seth Donahue. And Bronx. And of my parents – alive, then dead . . .
I hear something.
It’s like a soft cry, echoing far in the distance. I pause, look around me. But there’s nothing there. I’m about to continue down the rungs of the ladder when suddenly the noise grows loud. Deafeningly loud.
It’s a deep, throaty, savage, blood-curdling roar, and it’s coming from right behind me. I turn, and there, deep inside the pulsing darkness, I see something forming . . .
‘Concentrate on the ladder, York,’ Belle tells me urgently.
But it’s already too late.
A rubbery green-and-purple body flops and sloshes as it floats through the air towards me, red eyes blazing. It’s grotesque, but also looks ridiculous. Like some kind of cartoon. Or toy. But horribly menacing. Hinged limbs extend and retract. A square head rotates, the fanged mouth gaping wide as the roaring sound grows so loud I can feel it trembling through my body, pounding inside my head.
Then it’s on me. Warm. Stifling. Wrapping itself around me, swallowing me up.
I try to move but cannot. The monster or whatever it is tightens its grip. It’s squeezing the air from my lungs. It’s crushing my bones. I want to cry out, but when I open my mouth the soft rubbery stuff it’s made of oozes in and I can’t spit it out. I can’t make a sound. And I can’t breathe . . .
Belle! Belle! my thoughts scream.
My eyes are clamped open. The purple and green of the monstrous body seem to glow. The blood red glints in its wicked-looking eyes.
And suddenly, it’s like I can feel the colour.
The purple hurts like bruises, till my whole body’s throbbing with the pain of a bad beating. The green is sickly and sour and makes me want to throw up. And the red . . .
Sharp. Intense. Blistering hot. It burns my eyes and brands my skin. It brings my blood to the boil . . .
Belle! Help me, Belle . . . Belle!
‘Hold on,’ I hear her calling back at last. ‘Just keep holding on to what you know, York . . .’ York.
I do what she tells me.
My name is York. I’m a scavenger. I’m fourteen years old. I’m on a mission to save mankind. My body is lying in a pod in the Mid Deck . . . My name is York . . .
I grip the rungs of the ladder tight as I can. Mustn’t let go. Mustn’t fall.
Just have to . . . hold . . . on . . .
The rubbery stuff in my mouth melts away. My eyes clear. And I see Belle.
She’s above me, reaching out, her hands clamped around two of the monster’s angular limbs. It’s howling, its multicoloured body quivering and writhing as it tries to break away. But Belle doesn’t let go. And as she continues to hold on tightly, I see something start to happen.
The colours shift. The throbbing purple drains out of its body, down into Belle’s arms, and is gone; the green fades; the spots of red shrink – until I’m looking through this formless transparent shape that cracks and breaks up, loses substance and drifts away like flakes of nothing.
And I’m all right.
I don’t hurt any more. I don’t feel sick. I’m in the shaft, holding onto the rungs of the mind-ladder.
‘What was that?’ I ask Belle.
She reaches up and taps me on the forehead again. ‘Something from in here,’ she says.
‘So I imagined it . . .’
And then it hits me. It was the little girl’s drawing that I saw in the Inpost. I tell Belle.
She nods. ‘It was a mind-warp, York. You let your thoughts wander. The Core’s virus scanners picked up on it and took one of your memories – a harmless little memory – and warped it into something to use against you . . .’
As she’s speaking I notice that there’s a glow beginning far down in the shaft once more. It gets brighter and brighter. Concentric circles and pulses of energy. A ring of spiralling light that comes speeding up towards me.
Hot swarf! It’s happening again!
‘Prepare to let go,’ I hear Belle calling.
My head buzzes with light, outside inside . . .
‘Now!’
I’m standing on a high walkway, up near hot, dazzling arc-lights. Below me is a tech-scape I recognize. There are flux-towers and power-pylons, a tube-forest and circuit-board plains. Far in the distance, coils of grey mist hover over the acid lakes.
I’m back in the Outer Hull. Sometime in the past.
My name is York . . .
There’s a group of figures directly below me. Seven of them. Three men, four women. And they’re in trouble. Crouched down behind a sump tank, they’re looking over their shoulders, checking all round them. They look frightened . . .
‘Give yourselves up.’
The voice is a mechanical monotone. It’s coming from somewhere behind a bunch of transistor stacks. It sounds like some kind of killer zoid. But when it plods into view, it doesn’t look like any killer zoid I’ve ever seen.
‘Give yourselves up.’
The killer zoids I’m used to are monstrous machines, designed to cause max damage. They’ve got cutters or lasers rather than hands; roller treads or pneumatic pistons for legs; and there isn’t the least trace of a recognizable face on any of their upper units. This one though, it looks kind of human. It’s got arms and legs, a barrel-shaped body and a round head, with blinking eye sensors. And its weapons are carried, not built into its body. Though they look just as deadly.
‘Give yourselves up.’ The laser trembles in its grasp. ‘Do not resist.’
And it’s speaking. Later models did not speak. This one must be a really early zoid upgrade.
‘Do not resist,’ it drones again, and, as the humans panic and break cover, it swings round and fires the laser.
The sump tank explodes in a shower of flaming gloop. The humans run. The killer zoid fires again, with a pulser this time, strafing the air with molten grenbolts.
There’s a cry, and the air fills with the stench of scorched flesh. One man stumbles and falls. Then one of the women – and then another. The others split up and fan out, and try to take cover where they can.
‘Destroy.’ The killer zoid’s voice is flat and emotionless. ‘Destroy. Destroy.’
I race past it. I’m not sure what to do, but I want to be with the other humans. To listen to what they’re saying. To find out where I am and what’s going on.
We lose the lumbering zoid, and I catch up with the four of them on the far side of a large box-shaped generator unit. They’ve regrouped and are hunkered down on the ground, deep in conversation. I read the name patches sewn onto their tunics.
Drink Miller. Sam Burgess. Tonya Jenkins. Alice Kett.
Ordinary names. Ordinary people. Humans, just like me.
‘We’ve got to go back for them,’ Alice is saying. She sounds close to tears.
‘We can’t,’ Dirk insists.
‘But Lyla and Sarita . . . And Rufus . . .’ she protests. ‘We can’t just leave them there.’
‘There’s nothing we can do for them now,’ says Sam grimly.
I realize I’m nodding. Their three friends are dead. What the rest of them need to do now is start making plans. To zilch the zoid. To get to somewhere safe. But Alice Kett is howling.
‘Rufus . . . Oh, Rufus . . .’
Sam hushes her angrily. ‘Do you want to get all of us killed too?’ he hisses.
Too right! I think.
‘We need to think about our next move,’ says Dirk.
At least one of them’s got some sense.
But it’s soon pretty clear they’re all a bit clueless, and it occurs to me that these are not scavengers. They’re scientists, trained to maintain the Biosphere, not deal with zoids that are out to kill them. They’ve got soft hands, they’re unarmed, and they don’t seem to have any understanding of just how much danger they’re in.
Dirk looks at his wrist-scanner. I notice the date.
Time – 21:09:44. Year – LY501.
‘Launch Year five hundred and one,’ I breathe.
That’s why the killer zoids look so old-fashioned. That’s why the humans are so useless at dealing with them. I’m witnessing the start of the robot rebellion, five hundred years after the Launch Times. And these humans in front of me don’t have the first idea what’s going on.
‘But why is this happening?’ Tonya Jenkins is saying, her ponytail swishing back and forth as she looks from one of her friends to the other.
‘Yeah, what’s gone wrong with the robots?’ asks Sam Burgess.
‘Just some little glitch,’ says Dirk Miller. ‘The techies are working on it.’ He reaches out and pats Sam on the back. ‘They’ll soon get it sorted.’
No! No! No! No! No! I want to shout.
They won’t get it sorted. They can’t. This isn’t a little glitch. It’s a basic malfunctioning of the primary robotic protocol. Instead of serving and protecting human beings as they were programmed to do, they’re out to kill humans. Each and every one of us. The four scientists don’t know this.
And there’s no way I can tell them.
Luckily, Dirk Miller seems to be taking control.
‘We need to arm ourselves,’ he’s saying. ‘That robot’s got weapons.’
‘But . . .’ the others protest.
He raises a hand to silence their objections, then climbs to his feet. And as I watch, he unscrews the side panel of the generator unit, turns off the power supply and unravels a length of the cable inside. Using a small pocket knife, he strips the cable of its outer casing, loops it into a noose, then lays it on the ground. He pulls a small interspeak from his top pocket and activates it.
Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!
Clever, I think.
He places it on the ground at the centre of the broad circle of bare wires. Then, taking the end of the cable, he switches the power supply back on and climbs up onto the top of the generator.
The killer zoid has already responded to the beeping. Like I said, it’s an early upgrade. It can’t track human heat-sigs. But it can use its tracker device to zone in on any piece of tech that humans might be carrying. Digi-comps and B-phones. Interspeaks . . .
‘Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!’ It’s getting closer.
Dirk Miller stays cool. While the others hide themselves behind nearby pulse-stacks and capacitor drums, he crouches down on the roof of the generator unit. And waits.
Moments later, the zoid lurches into view. Its visual sensors are flashing like two red eyes.
‘Destroy. Destroy.’
It homes in on the interspeak. Dirk peers down over the edge of the generator roof, watching intently as the zoid steps inside the circle of stripped cable, then pauses. There’s a trill of twiddly bleeps as it computes what it has found.
And suddenly Dirk Miller’s straightening up and tugging hard on the insulated end of the cable. The noose of bare wire closes up round the zoid’s legs – sending five hundred thousand volts through its metal body.
‘Destr . . . iiiiiiiiiiiiiiii . . .’ The zoid’s mechanical screech is loud and piercing. Its weapons drop to the ground. White smoke spurts from every riveted joint. Sparks fly. Zoid-juice hisses and spits. The metal panels of its chest and head start to glow; red, then yellow, then white. The screeching gets louder, until . . .
There’s a colossal BANG! as the killer zoid explodes. Scraps of wiring and splinters of metal fly in all directions.
Dirk Miller drops the cable and jumps down from the top of the generator unit to inspect the damage. The others join him, congratulate him, pat him on the back.
‘Two lasers, two pulsers,’ he announces, as he hands out the weapons the killer zoid was carrying.
‘And I reckon we ought to salvage that motherboard,’ says Sam Burgess. ‘The binary codes of the data-chip might give the techies some clue about what’s going on.’
‘And what about the urilium leg units?’ Tonya Jenkins suggests. ‘And the back panel. They could probably be turned into some kind of armour . . .’
I smile to myself. I’m face to face with the Biosphere’s first scavengers.
I travel with the four of them as they head off.
This holographic record of the past is fascinating, and so real. But I mustn’t forget why I’m here. To find out what turned the robots against humanity in the first place. At any moment the virus scanners might detect me. I can only hope Belle is ready to pull me back to the mind-ladder.
The group make their way across a broad plain, dotted with energy domes, glowing power cables streaked between them. I look up to see a collection of bulbous-looking buildings towering high above the ground, and raised walkways, crowded with people.
The dead havens!
I recognize this place. I’ve been here before. Back in the Outer Hull when I was trying to find Sector 17. It was where I first met Belle.
Except it’s not dead now. I’m seeing the buildings as they were designed to be – living quarters for the crew members who live in the Outer Hull.
We come to a perimeter fence that’s humming with some kind of force-field. It looks new and hastily put together. Dirk presses his hand to a security sensor set into a gateway. There’s a buzz, and a steel door swings open. We step into the compound.
Approaching the buildings, I notice the pools set into the black marble at the base of the pillars. Some have fountains and mini-waterfalls, reeds and pondweed, and silver and gold fish that are darting about in the water. Others – larger and lined with turquoise-blue tiles – have been designed for downtime swimming. For humans. Not that there’s anyone swimming in them right now.
As we walk closer, the shutters of one of the overhead cabins fly open and a head appears. ‘You’re back!’ a voice shouts down. ‘What’s it like out there?’
‘Not good,’ Dirk Miller calls back.
‘They shot down Lyla, Sarita and Rufus,’ Tonya blurts out, which sets Alice Kett off crying again.
Sam puts an arm around her shoulder, and the four of them – with me following close behind – take one of the walkways up to the aerial cabins. When we reach the platform at the top we’re confronted by a group of men, women and children.
They’re all talking at once.
‘What’s going on?’
‘What’s wrong with the robots?’
‘What are we going to do?’
A woman, her arms wrapped around her little son and daughter, looks as if she’s about to cry. ‘How bad is it?’ she asks bleakly.
Dirk Miller breathes In deep. ‘Bad,’ he says. ‘The robots have armed themselves. They’ve taken control of the convection lakes, the admin block and viewing deck—’
‘The Central Robot Hub,’ Sam Burgess butts in. ‘They’re ransacking the spare parts there. Upgrading themselves.’
