Read Cultwick: The Sweeper Bot Plague Online
Authors: J. Stone
“Hey! You!” yelled the first corpsman. “Official business. Get out of here before we take you into custody.”
Tern then spoke, “Abandon your clothes and equipment or you will be deleted.”
“Help me!” screamed the woman.
“Shut up, you.” The corpsman turned back to the woman, slapping her.
Before the man could turn back to face the automaton, Tern had begun sprinting at a rapid pace, steam deluging from his back. He jumped toward the nearby wall, using it as leverage to jump again toward the corpsmen. His frame spun around, and he extended his
left arm, the blade suddenly and violently jutting outward.
Tern landed on the ground, his blade sliding easily between the exact point where the corpsman’s helmet ended and his body armor began.
The tubes leading back to his respirator were severed from the helmet and popped outward spewing gas. His head flipped up and landed with a loud clatter as the helmet smashed against the wet cement, soon followed by his collapsing body.
The other corpsman pushed the woman aside, knocking her to the ground, but Tern quickly pushed his blade forward into the chest of the second man. The corpsman froze, ma
king a spurting sound from within his helmet. When Tern retracted his blade, blood spewed forth from the wound. The man held his hands over the wound, as he fell to the ground - dead before he landed.
“Objective completed,” Tern noted.
The woman, horrified by what she had seen, stared frantically at the automaton from the ground, while Tern set to dislodging the corpses from the uniforms. Rowland and Germ joined the automaton, with Rowland helping Tern with the task, while Germ attempted to comfort the assaulted woman.
“There, there, miss,” he said. “Everything’s fine now.”
Stammering she responded, “Rrr-right. Fff-fine.” She sat staring off into the distance a moment. “I-III... ssss-should be ggg-going now.”
“That seems a wise plan, miss,” Germ concluded and reached
out his furry paw to help her stand. He saw her on her way and turned to find Tern already inside one of the suits and stowing Erynn’s pistol in his belt.
Rowland motioned to Germ to get inside the other suit. “This one had a little less blood in it,” Rowland assured him. “Though I think the man who wore it may have had a rash of some sort.” The professor scratched his arm as he talked.
Germ handed the professor the rifle to hold while he reluctantly squeezed his rodent form inside the clearly uncomfortable corpsman outfit, with Rowland trying not to laugh at the awkward scene. Tern, meanwhile, took the two corpses and carried them to a nearby pile of plague victims, dumping their bodies with all the others.
With the first step of the plan completed, the group began the walk to the Center for Empirical Research. Both Germ and the professor were silent on the way there, knowing they could easily be walking to their deaths.
They soon arrived at the footsteps leading up to the center and Tern spoke, “Processing... I will not be able to speak convincingly. Mr. Germ will have to do the talking... Processing... Professor Rowland must play a convincing prisoner... I will play a strong silent type.”
“Play-acting,” Rowland said. “How fun!”
“I fear you may be taking this a bit lightly, sir,” Germ replied.
“Nonsense,” the professor said. “If you a
re going to break into a highly militarized scientific research prison led by religious zealots with the high chance of death, dismemberment, or incarceration, surely you should enjoy yourself.”
“Clearly there are different schools of thought on that, sir.”
Reaching the top of the stairs, they were met with two guards. One of them saw the group approaching and asked, “Another lottery winner skipping out on their duty?”
“That’s correct, sir,” Germ responded.
“Sir?” he laughed. “Take the filth on inside.”
After making their way inside, Rowland turned and looked back. “Well that was easy, but you might drop the ‘sirs’ in here Germ.”
“Ah, yes, sir... er. Yes,” Germ said clearly uncomfortable with such an action.
“Where to from here, Tern?” Rowland quietly asked.
The automaton, without speaking, gestured to a bright white hallway with red stripes along the wall and they made their way to it. Considering the lateness of their incursion, it was no surprise that the hall was empty except for a janitor some ways down and occasional guards posted at a few of the doors. Most of the lights were off and very little activity seemed to be occurring in the rooms that did have lights still on.
Eventually they arrived at a solid black door with a contagious symbol painted in red. It was riveted with bolts along its entire length and there was a mechanical contraption hanging on the wall to its side. Tern held up his left arm to the device, sliding a series of wires out under his sleeve and into the gears, tubing, and other assorted
metal pieces.
“I will hack their systems, now,” Tern said.
“Madam Clover is in there?” Germ asked. “This door seems quite ominous.”
“Government blueprints indicate lottery experiments would be contained here,” confirmed Tern, just as the door unlatched and opened.
The room was completely covered in white tiles with black grout. The walls were lined with part glass, part metal cages extending outward, each with a single person inside. Four guards were posted in a central, cylindrical station, and each seemed surprised at the intrusion.
“Another lottery?” the guard seemingly in charge asked of them. “Thought we were done for the day.”
“Uh... this one was a vocal dissenter,” responded Germ. “The higher-ups thought to make an example of him.”
“This is barbaric!” in
terjected Rowland as they dragged him inside the room. “You should be ashamed.”
“Shame is for
god to decide, scum,” the guard replied, stepping forward from the post. “That’s quite the glove he has. He’s not going to need it anymore.” The guard approached Rowland and began attempting to remove the professor’s gauntlet.
Grinning, Rowland whispered to the guard, “The... glove, as you call it, is
not like most. It is not intended for protection.” The guard cut his eyes up at the professor as an electric current passed through the glove, blasting him up and across the room, flying past the command station. “Get the others!” he shouted.
Tern pulled Erynn’s pistol from his belt,
and quickly shot two of the guards, but the third shot jammed the gun. Germ had managed to pull the rifle from behind his back, but his hand shook and he found himself simply unable to pull the trigger.
Seeing Germ’s hesitation, Rowland aimed his gauntlet at the last guard standing and, with his other hand toggled to a different setting on his spectacles, gears churning to flip around the lenses. Finding the right range, the professor shot another bolt of current through the gauntlet, which extended out past his arm and into the chest of the guard.
The guard’s hand, however, had just then grabbed hold of a lever and as the force pushed him backward, so too did the lever move back. A loud, blasting sound emitted from all around them, alerting everyone in the building to their presence.
“Tern!” yelled the professor, “try to find the lever that releases the cages. I
am going to find Ryn.”
Germ sat down on a nearby bench staring down at the
weapon in his still-shaking hands, while the others set to action.
Rowland hobbled down the long row of cages, peering side to side as he went. Nearing the end he began to worry she
wasn’t being kept here. “Ryn!” he yelled out.
“Max?” a feeble voice asked from a cage not far ahead.
“Little Ryn!” he cried out. “You look older...”
“You always say the sweetest things,” she replied standing up from a bench and holding her side in pain. “I told you not to come. Where’s Tern? Did my program work?”
“Oh, yes. He is attempting to open the cages,” the professor informed her pointing a finger down the hallway, still quite giddy with his success.
“Well if it worked, I’d already have been freed!” she yelled down the hallway at Tern just as all the doors popped open. “Ah, that’s my boy.”
“I would hug you,” the professor began, “but you know.”
“Physical contact,” she replied knowingly, “I get it.”
“You could hug Germ, if you like,” he suggested.
Behind Rowland came a sickly whisper, “Aren’t you going to let me out too, little Ryn? We could have so much fun together.”
Opposite of Erynn’s cell was a prisoner still trapped inside her cage - the door appeared to have jammed, but the gears were still spinning and trying to open. The woman was wearing a dirty white dress and her hair was a matted black mass of tangles and grease.
“Don’t get near her,” Erynn warned. “She’s completely nuts.”
“I just want to see what’s inside you,” the woman went on, cocking her head to the side. “Is that so wrong? You’re special. I can tell. It says so in my head.” A wide, unsettling smile teased across her face.
“Let’s just go, Max,” Erynn pleaded.
Rowland nodded, and they left her cell. The other prisoners who were able to had already made a mad dash to the room’s exit. Rowland walked her to the center station where Tern waited patiently for them, having removed his disguise.
The trapped woman banged on the glass of her prison, “See... you... later...” she said, licking her lips.
“Where to next, Tern?” Rowland asked, hoping to distance himself and Erynn from the psychotic prisoner.
“Processing... there is a sewage dump
not far from this location,” he responded.
The three met up with Germ at the entrance, still holding the gun and still wearing the corpsman uniform.
“Looking sharp, Germy,” Erynn commented.
“Oh, I guess I forgot,
Madam Clover,” he said, looking up at them. Holding out the weapon to her, Germ added, “Here, ma’am. Your rifle.”
“That’s okay
,” she replied. “You hold onto it for now. I’m in no shape.”
The sirens were still blaring and by the time the group had made their way to the exit, all the prisoners were long since gone and the guards nowhere in sight. Tern leading the way, they followed the hallway to a double-door room labeled, ‘Waste Disposal.’
Tern swung open the doors to reveal a large open grate in the middle of the floor. Below, slow-running water from the sewage system could be seen flowing through the dark tunnel.
“Aside from the smell, this might be a fun ride,” Rowland told Erynn.
“We’re never going on vacation together, Max,” she said.
Germ awoke to find a rotating cog sticking into his back as he lay in the near-absolute darkness of the sewers running underneath Cultwick City. The borrowed disguise of the deceased corpsman had become soaked with the various liquids flowing through the damp sewers.
Someone must have pulled him out of the coursing stream after that last not insubstantial drop in the tunnel, he thought. He could hear the rushing waters of the sewage flowing all around him, echoing and dripping in the shadows.
“Is Germ in functioning condition?” asked a robotic voice in the dark.
“Yes, Tern. I’m doing just fine,” Germ said, groaning and beginning to move off the automaton. “Are
Madam Clover and Master Rowland all right?”
“We’re here, Germy,” he heard Erynn say somewhere nearby. “Just a little worse for wear... and way worse of a smell.”
“I was wrong about that being fun aside from the smell,” the professor added. “The taste was awful too. It got into my respirator!”
“I don’t suppose Tern has some sort of light, does he
Madam Clover?” Germ asked of the darkness.
Without waiting for a response from Erynn, Tern began to
produce sounds of wheels spinning, gears grinding, and power being generated. Two weak flickering beams radiated from his eye lenses shedding light on their dank surroundings. With enough light to see, the rodent began to remove the uniform - the water dripping from his fur, as he hopped on one foot to free the other.
“Perhaps we should have asked this sooner, but did those -- if you’ll excuse my language -- cretins... inject you with anything yet, ma’am?” asked Germ.
“Not really,” she responded. “They gave me something called a ‘Primer,’ but I don’t know what it was, and they didn’t seem to expect any immediate reaction.”
“
Master Rowland?” asked Germ, throwing the uniform into the waters at their side and shaking off the water from his fur like a wet dog. He then took this opportunity to wipe his monocle somewhat clean on his shirt.
“Hmm.” he started. “I
will have to run some tests, but I suspect it is not anything to be worried about. It was likely a bonding agent for future injections. I have used something similar in my experimentations.”
“Sir...” Germ said.
“Not that I would ever test on unwilling people like those sadists, of course,” he added.
Erynn asked, “Why did you come for me? Tern should have been able to handle it on his own. You shouldn’t have put yourselves at risk.”
“If you’ll pardon, ma’am,” started Germ, “Tern wouldn’t have been able to free you on his own if his calculations were anything to go by.”
“Affirmative,” confirmed Tern. “There was only a
12.782% probability of success without additional resources. This probability was increased to 46.583% when appending Professor Rowland and Germ to my available resources list.”
“Really?” she asked. “Hmm. I suppose I was a bit hurried when I wrote that card. Either way, I appreciate both of your help, but you’ll never be able to go back to your old lives now. They’ll hunt you as heretics - same as me. I can’t imagine why you would have caused yourselves so much trouble like this.”
“Simply put, my dear,” the professor stated, flinging off some of the liquid on his gauntlet, “you are worth it.”
At this Germ gave a little smile and nodded to
Erynn in complete agreement. Noticing something odd, however, he asked, “Where has your necklace gone to, ma’am?”
Grabbing at her chest in vain and looking down to find it absent of the sparkling green gem, Erynn said dolefully, “It must have fallen in there,” pointing to the sewage they had just left.
“Tern, aim your eyes to the water,” Germ said as he laid the rifle on the ground and jumped into the sewage stream. He could hear something as he splashed into the waters, but it was completely muffled as he submerged himself into the depths. Above, Tern turned toward the water and followed Germ’s movement underneath.
Germ felt a strange calmness and peace, while he waded through the waters of the sewer. It felt like second nature, and he thought back on what the professor had said when he was still a pup in the lab.
“You will likely have some lingering animal instincts and memories, I am afraid,” he had told the young Germ. “My process cannot completely purge the generations of knowledge embedded in your brain.”
He could almost recall scurrying about in these tunnels in a different life, feeding off the scraps that fell through the cracks leading to the city above. His whole life, Germ had been hyper vigilant about cleanliness, but being back in these tunnels, he allowed himself to bask in the filth as he waded through the bile, excrement, and death of the city flowing all around him.
Germ had never seen Erynn without that emerald necklace. From the day they met, that necklace was always dangling around her neck or in safekeeping nearby.
After they had brought her in and moved her things into the manor, Germ had asked her about the piece of jewelry. The little girl’s hand clasped tightly around the green rock, as her gaze dropped to the floor.
He discovered it had been the last vestige of Erynn’s mother. In one of her final acts before the plague took her, Erynn’s mother had bequeathed the emerald necklace to her. The jewelry had been in her mother’s family for generations, and she cherished it accordingly.
His mind returned to the task at hand,
as his eye caught something sparkling at the reflection of Tern’s light. Germ swam closer and reached out a paw, gripping it tightly, before returning to the surface.
Coughing and sputtering, the rat threw himself up along the side of the sewer walkway. He held out his hand in front of him and to his disappointment, revealed a piece of scrap
chrome metal from some sort of contraption. Germ tossed it forward in vexation at his failure.
He took a deep breath and went back down under the water. The rodent scoured the sewage floors, but the murkiness of the water and the current were making it difficult for him to
see anything on the water’s floor. There was no smell for his nose to follow in the filth surrounding him, and his whiskers weren’t picking up any useful information. He stayed beneath the water for what he eventually realized was too long, and when he came back up for air he coughed up a bit of the sewage water.
“Germ...” Erynn said quietly.
“Apologies, Madam Clover,” he said. “I’ll check again, once I catch my breath.”
“No, Germ,” she said, kneeling down to him. “It’s okay. Let it go.”
“Are you sure ma’am? I know how important it is to you. Your mother...” he trailed on.
“I’m sure,” she nodded. “Besides, you smell bad enough already. Come on,” Erynn said, giving him her hand and a gentle smile.
Germ grabbed her hand with his paw, and she helped pull him out of the sickly dark waters. Still ashamed at his fruitless endeavor and quick to move away from the subject, he commented, “We should retrieve our things before someone comes looking for us, sir,” looking up at the professor. Germ picked up the rifle he had placed along the side of the sewer and slung the strap over his shoulder.
“Indeed,” Rowland responded. “Gerald must be quite bored by now.”
“Gerald?” Erynn asked. “I figured he’d be a goner by now.”
“Oh, no,” the professor answered as they set out toward their destination. “Ms. Petunia’s cat provided enough sustenance it seems.”
“Wow,” she replied. “Well, when the world is overrun by mutant potatoes that have enslaved humanity, I’ll tell everyone that it all started with Ms. Petunia’s cat.”
She turned her head and smiled back at the rat, “Hey Germy, I thought of a possible way of increasing my
pistol’s bullet capacity. Mind if I take a look at the rifle to investigate?”
“Of course not, ma’am,” Germ replied - eager to be rid of that responsibility. He handed her the gun and gave a slight bow. She turned back forward fiddling with the parts, as Germ adjusted his shirt and jacket.
They soon came to a sharp turn in the water flow and Germ took note of a new and disgusting smell in the air. His nostrils sniffed at the putrid aroma almost involuntarily as they laid their eyes on the source of the odor. The center had most definitely been using the sewer hole for disposal, Germ thought, and it was indeed a waste.
The group stopped to see a heap of bodies that had been caught against the abrupt corner of the flow. The bodies had been stripped of all clothes and valuables, their skin bruised and agitated with repeated injections. Germ had never truly given much thought to what the Cultwick Empire was doing to its citizens, but when he was forced to see their work up close and in the flesh he was disgusted.
Germ dropped to his knees, lurched forward, and vomited into the nearly clogged and stagnant waters. He tried to wipe his snout clean, but he instead retched his insides again. After a few more heaves, Germ spit up the remnants in his mouth and attempted to regain his composure.
“You okay, Germy?” Erynn asked, putting her hand softly on his shoulder.
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “I apologize for my weakness.”
“That’s not weakness, Germ,” she said, consolingly. “What they’re doing to these people is sick. It’s a shame more people can’t see this. See what’s really going on in that place.”
There were a few moments of silence from the group before Germ stood and said, “We should go.”
The path winded for some ways, Tern illuminating their path forward, and as they got closer to the location
they had stashed the bags, Germ could hear more and more commotion up on the surface. “Do you think they’ve connected us to the attack, sir?” he asked.
“Seems possible,” the professor answered. “It’s not every day the Center for Empirical Research is assaulted and freed of all of its lottery winners,” he flouted while looking up at the ceiling of the tunnels. “Though they won’t take kindly to such an action. I suspect they’ll put the Reclamation Bureau on our case.”
“I’ve heard some pretty horrifying things about that office, sir,” Germ said. “Are they really as bad as the rumors?”
“Worse, I’m afraid,” he said. “In my limited interaction with their kind, I witnessed the abominations they were willing to make themselves into. They have a single focused mind - to advance in the church. If you ever meet an operative... run. They are vile people.”
Germ noticeably gulped before asking, “So where will we be going, sir?”
“West,” Rowland succinctly responded. “We’ll go west.”
“There isn’t much law out there,” Erynn added. “I guess that could be both good and bad, but we’ll certainly be better off there than here.”
“Affirmative,” Tern bluntly interjected before continuing, “Addendum: We have arrived at our destination.”
Germ could see the suitcase and the glass of Gerald’s tank reflecting off Tern’s light as they approached. Tern picked up the transparent jar, handing it to Germ, while he wrapped his metallic hand around the case’s handle.
“Input new positional coordinates,” Tern said.
The professor spoke up, “The nearest town in the west is Stonebrook. That’s where we’ll go first.”
“Coordinates confirmed,” Tern responded continuing to lead them down the twisting tunnels, dragging the luggage behind.
“Have you ever been out west, sir?” Germ inquired.
“No,” Rowland replied. “When I was a boy the western areas were just being discovered and being made habitable by Cultwick. As I understand things, the west has changed much over the years. Many people went out west to escape the grasp of the empire, but over the course of time, these same
people have been forced to supply Cultwick City with all their goods and resources. They have essentially become indentured servants to the empire.”
“What will we do when we arrive there, sir?” Germ asked. “How will we survive in such a hostile and alien location? I’ve never even seen sand, sir.”
The professor turned to look at the rodent, as though he had never had that thought. “I don’t really know, Germ,” he answered. “I guess we’ll find out when we get there. I just hope we can escape that damned Church of Biosynthesis.”
“Worst case scenario,” Erynn joked, “you could always start your own religion. Rowlandism!”
“That does sound like fun,” the professor said, smiling.
Germ looked down at the irascible potato in his hands and lamented to himself, “Goodbye Cultwick City.”