Authors: Bryant Delafosse
He was just some clueless doofus who had been handed unearned authority.
He’s a murderer,
the voice rung loudly in his head, echoing there like a call from one person to another in an empty cavern, waiting and hoping for an answer.
“Is he dead?” the kid asked and for one split second Chance thought he was asking about Jesse.
“No.”
Owen stared up at Chance.
“What’ll we do with him?”
Chance looked at him with an expression of confusion.
“Do?”
“What if he gets up again?”
Chance gave a contemptuous snuffle.
“You think this is a movie or something?”
The kid retrieved what looked like a box cutter from his pocket and stared long and hard at the body below.
Chance watched in utter fascination as the ten-year-old made, what looked like, a series of intense mental calculations.
What did he intend to do with that, he wondered?
Holding her mother’s hand tightly, Cora stepped tentatively outside of the Sears store, glancing back warily.
“It’s okay, hon.
I’m right here.”
Lara cast a look beside her at Simon, gesturing him ahead with her chin.
Simon stepped ahead of them both, sliding his head smoothly one way then the other.
He made eye contact with Lara and nodded.
“Do you feel anything, sweet pea?” Lara asked her.
The little girl shook her head, staring up at the dim beginnings of morning light peeking through the glass ceiling.
“Okay then.
We’ll just head north a little,” Lara stated, tugging her daughter out alongside her onto the empty street of the Mall.
“Mommy, I’m hungry,” Cora whined.
She blinked and yawned, her loose hand reaching up to rub an eye.
“Where’s the closest food court?”
“I suppose the closest one from us would be the center of the Mall on the second and third floors, but we really shouldn’t…”
“Center of the Mall it is,” Lara responded, releasing Cora and striding confidently forward.
“C’mon, kiddo.
Double-time.
Chop-chop!”
Cora gave Simon a sleepy smile and repeated, “Chop-chop, Mr. Simon.”
Simon gave her a look, unsmiling.
“Would you like me to pick you up, like Reggie did?”
She gave him a blank look and finally shook her head.
“Nah, big
girl’s
don’t ride on shoulders,” she quipped without the hint of a smile.
She started after her mother.
Simon followed her, taking small steps to match her pace.
Noticing this, Cora gave a giggle.
She stared up at his face, expecting an ironic expression to acknowledge the joke he was playing, but found nothing there.
“You don’t smile a whole bunch,” she stated.
Lara cast a look over her shoulder and smirked at Cora.
Her daughter, usually so perceptive, was having trouble picking up on this one in much the same way she had trouble with Charlene’s dog.
When Albert awoke--
(
came
on-line)
…lying on his stomach.
He realized that his wrists had been bound tightly behind him.
He shifted his weight to one side and tried to slide a knee up to right himself but found that both his legs were inoperable as well.
The struggle set off a burst of raw, throbbing pain in his side that dizzied him, but then he realized that he couldn’t possibly feel what he thought he had.
Only humans felt such things as pain and fear and hopelessness.
He was a simple machine with a simple program and his only goal was to see that program through to completion.
Period.
Craning his head, he followed the tiled floor up until he found two pairs of feet pointed toward him: one pair of tennis shoes and one pair of dirty socked feet.
The shoes rushed forward and planted a firm kick to his face.
Pain shot from his lips up, re-igniting his sore jaw.
Not pain, he decided.
Maybe this is how you’re interpreting a signal from your CPU to your sub-systems that there might be potential damage.
Not true pain.
Simply a warning signal.
Lamia laid the side of its head against the floor and remained still.
Why had this machine shot him with a crossbow and why did it just kick him in the face?
“You killed him, you son of a bitch!
Didn’t you!”
Then he remembered what the Voice had told him: They were trying to deactivate him, because his program had been corrupted and he was a flawed machine.
He took a moment to consider his options.
Rope restraining arms.
Restraining legs.
How tight?
He attempted to move his fingers.
His feet.
“Why?
Why did you do it?”
Lamia’s eye sensors sought the face of the accomplice of the one he had dispatched earlier, per his programming, but could only see just as far as his knees, now that he was standing a few feet from him.
“I did what I was designed to do.”
“C’mon,” Owen called in a tiny uncertain voice.
“How do we get out of here?” Chance asked, ignoring the other.
And before he was aware he had intended to do it, he squatted, lay the crossbow aside, thrust his hands beneath the bulk of the guard, and with a strength enhanced by rage, managed to roll him over onto his back, revealing a dark red blotch on the carpet beneath him.
Chance could see the intake of breath in his cheeks and the squint of his eyes and knew he was in a world of pain.
He found himself relishing it.
He glanced at the gauze taped over the wound, where the dart had entered his side and then had been pushed back out on its own again with the force of his earlier fall.
The dressing had been Owen’s idea.
Chance had wanted to let him bleed.
His eyes opened again and stared up at Chance with a steely patient resolve.
“Tell us how to get out of this place,” Chance stated as calmly as he could.
“All the exits have been locked and will only be reopened at the discretion of the management,” the guard stated in a dry matter-of-fact tone.
“There is no way out now.”
Chance nodded, his lips pressed together in compressed anger.
He reached out with the tip of his toe and found the bloody gauze attached to his side.
He prodded.
The man recoiled and sucked wind, but never screamed.
“Tell us.”
He opened his eyes and stared emotionlessly at the teenager.
When hands touched Chance from behind, he nearly lashed out, then quickly remembered that he was not alone here.
Owen tugged at his arm.
“C’mon.”
Chance started to back away, the voice in his head drowning out nearly all extraneous thought.
Do not leave him alive!
You’ll never get a better chance than right now!
Setting his jaw, he turned away with a conscious effort and followed Owen toward the front entrance of the store.
Then he remembered the crossbow and turned back.
The guard’s eyes had been glued to it, hungrily.
When he bent down and retrieved it, he saw a spark in the other’s eyes as they briefly glanced at his face.
Slicing off another piece of summer sausage from the foot long log, Lara set it atop a honey wheat cracker and passed it to Cora, who shoveled it into her open mouth.
She crunched loudly on it, humming contentedly.
The three of them sat together at an immobile fountain just outside a Hickory Farms in the blue sector, watching the sun slowly reveal the wide, empty corridors of the Mall.
Despite her assumption that every element of design had been stringently researched and tested to get consumers to spend more money, it really was a pretty Mall, Lara thought, as the stark morning sunlight sparkled off the dewy glass panes of the ceiling.
From this distance, they looked like diamond facets.
Cora stared at the Wheel of Time Ferris Wheel sitting like a giant child’s discarded toy in the distant center of the Mall.
The structure was so enormous that she could only glimpse pieces of it between the cross-sections of the multi-leveled central walkway.
“Hello, Owen!” Cora called up, listening as her tiny voice echoed through the empty city.
She displayed crumb-filled teeth at Lara satisfactorily and glanced down at the sausage expectantly.
Lara began to slice off another chunk for her, with the knife she also “borrowed” from the Hickory Farms store.
To the extent a machine was capable of looking disgruntled, Simon did, protesting during the entire “transaction,” until Cora began to whine about being hungry and he simply stopped.
He had even gone as far as to open a locked refrigerator for them with a set a keys he found lying in plain sight atop the counter next to a cash register--both the register and the metal keys themselves looking as archaic in this digital world as an abacus sitting beside a personal computer.
There had even been a framed portrait of Richard Nixon on the wall behind the counter.
The owner himself must have been quite an anachronism, Lara thought.
As she sat there now beside the stagnant water of the fountain feeding her daughter, she couldn’t help wondering where the owner was and what he might be doing.
Was he safe at home with his wife?
Had he been widowed?
Perhaps he’d never married, too busy to share his life with another and had only a rambunctious Schnauzer to come home to?
Then as if she had just read her mind, Cora asked: “Mommy, what’s going to happen to all those puppies and kitties and Owen’s chameleon?
Will someone feed them?”