“This is insane,” said Dexter.
“It’s insane you won’t accept the
facts staring you in the face.”
“I am human,” said Dex, grinding
his teeth in stubbornness, and staring at Amba, his eyes blazing hatred and
fear. Bright fear.
“If I take you to your wife and
children, if you hear it from their mouths, will you believe it then?”
Dex remained silent.
“Will you believe it then?”
insisted Amba.
“Why do you care?”
“Because I need your help,” said
Amba.
“Why?”
“I cannot do this alone.
Monolith, and SARAH, they’re a lot more powerful, a lot more devious, a lot
more
advanced
than I could have ever thought possible. That’s how they
caught me. That’s how they tortured me. But now, now I’ve seen inside the
machine soul, I
understand
SARAH. Understand how it operates.”
Dex stayed silent, staring at
Amba.
She turned, and moved to a low
table. Reaching down, she picked up a small black weapon and placed it against
her chest, and Dex blinked as it seemed to
merge
into her flesh, leaving
something like a birthmark between her breasts.
“Will you help me?” said Amba.
“Take me to my family,” said Dex,
through a grimace of bitterness.
~ * ~
Amba led the
way,
her FRIEND before her, eyes alert, walking in a half crouch, muscles tensed,
waiting for the next kill. Dex stumbled after her, mind whirling, thoughts
tumbling like planets into a black hole. It just didn’t make sense. How the
hell
could
it make sense? His past life was all a sham? As of when? He
still remembered meeting Katrina, in a night club with flashing lights and
pounding music. He’d fallen over her, drunk as he was, out with other trainee
Police Urban Force dudes the day after graduation. It had been their PUF
initiation celebration - and so they’d naturally gotten completely shit-faced.
As Dex, after many pints of Blue Monster, stumbled his way around the nightclub
in one of those inebriated never-ending search for his vanished “mates” (who,
by this time, were probably in the kebab shop, or lying unconscious in the
gutter), he tripped over something on the floor and did a mad dance attempting
to stay upright, which ended with him hitting the ground arse-first. He dragged
himself to his feet, scowling, and turned to shout at the irresponsible person
who thought it was a good idea to sit on the ground, legs outstretched, waiting
to trap unwary drunken stumblers. The person in question was a beautiful young
woman, with a dodgy perm, admittedly, but cutie pie features, a genuinely warm
smile and apologetic glowing eyes. Dex felt his heart tumble down through his
stomach. “Hello, there,” he said, and within minutes they were dancing, and
luckily she was nearly as drunk as he, and so managed to put up with his
drooling and slurring, and did not attempt to climb out of the toilet window in
an attempt at escape. At least, that was Katrina’s version of events.
And so. Here they were. Now.
Dex remembered the marriage like
it was yesterday, Katrina (now, thankfully, without her dodgy perm) in a
dazzling white dress floating up the aisle like an angel. She’d been
fashionably late, due to her drunken-arse father needing
just one more beer,
but hell, at least she’d
arrived
and Dex was just fucking thankful she’d
not changed her mind and done a runner to some exotic island with the plumber.
They’d stood, staring at one
another, enraptured by the event. They’d said their vows, exchanged rings, and
pow!
Married. Just like that.
The honeymoon - on a slow, lazy
luxury Wedding Cruiser around Jupiter and Saturn - had taken a month, and had
left both Dex and Katrina exhausted, and Katrina successfully impregnated. Dex
joked that this would be their Star Baby. Which she was. For a while, at least,
until she beat the comedy teen stereotype by at least a few years and started
wearing black and listening to moody miserable music and generally being a
moody
miserable pain in the arse.
Dex rolled these events round and
round his mind. The births of Molly, then Toffee. He’d been present at both,
eyes wide in awe at the wonders of birth, the first stream of piss as the
midwife lifted Molly high in the air and gently placed her on the weighing
scales. He remembered being handed the scissors to cut Molly’s cord, but was
quite simply
unable to do it,
in the belief that he would cause his
newly born Star Baby some kind of injury, or pain. “You silly bugger,” laughed
Katrina afterwards, and Dex had to sheepishly admit he was an idiot, but how
never, ever would he be able to cause his own child physical pain. How could
that all be fake? Invented? Made up? How could it not be fucking
real?
He’d been there, seen it all, experienced it all, the memories were there
bright in his mind like exploding stars. He remembered the touch of baby skin,
the smell of the operating theatre, the taste of the hospital vending machine
coffee, the feel of his firstborn baby in his arms... how could that not be
real? Why would they pull the wool over his eyes for so many, many damned
fucking years?
However. Look at the facts.
Why did Monolith want him off
Theme Planet so bad?
Why had they taken his family?
Why had Jim first saved him, then
tried to kill him?
How had he survived against the
SIMs? The police? The military?
How had he fought his way
here,
to the entertainingly chameleonic Monolith Ride Museum, to find himself in
confrontation with Terry Napper, head of Monolith Secret Police,
whom he had
killed without any effort at all, and against all the odds escaped a
body-ripping at the hands of an industrial accelerator?
And finally, Amba. Amba Miskalov.
Self-proclaimed Anarchy Android.
She’d known him.
Known him.
He’d seen it in her eyes. Read it in her facial expression. And just because
she was an android, with damped down feelings and emotions, with a killing
streak so wide it could accommodate a Military B5 Battle Cruiser, she had no
reason to play a game with him, no reason to fuck with his head. And he’d stood
against her, avoided her bullet and kicked her down the room. That wasn’t the
sort of thing your average man from down the pub could do. It wasn’t even the
sort of special ops activity a normal PUF officer was capable of carrying out.
Yeah, he could do drug raids and shoot murderers in the back. But military ops?
Assassinations?
That was why they’d created the androids...
Amba stopped, and Dex stopped
behind her.
The corridors had changed now,
losing their slightly comedic faux-medieval representation and shifting, subtly
at first, into dark, oppressive corridors. Eventually the stone was replaced
with steel and alloy, and the worn slabs underfoot became thick mesh grilles.
And even though they headed
upwards,
up dark alloy stairwells, badly lit
and filled with swirling ink shadows, the castle seemed infinitely tall. By Dex’s
reckoning, they had climbed -what? Ten stories at least. And yet on the
exterior, the castle itself was three stories high and filled with neon
clutter.
As if reading his thoughts Amba
said, her words quiet as she shifted, so her mouth was close to his ear, “The
internal dimensions do not mirror the external dimensions. Monolith can play
with reality, I think. I saw it, in the mind-games they were playing with me;
in the Halls of Engines, where the engines came to life and everything started
to twist and turn. We’re in an alien place here, Dex. A totally alien
environment. Keep your wits about you, and don’t be afraid to kill.”
Dex said nothing.
“Do you hear me, soldier?”
“I ain’t no soldier.”
“You are now,” said Amba, as
gently as she could, and patted his arm.
They moved down a narrow
corridor, which suddenly seemed to shift and blend, merging with another
corridor that had popped into existence and crossed their path. Amba held up
her arm, and stepped forward, peering in both directions down this newly
materialised thoroughfare.
“Not good,” said Amba.
“You get the feeling we’re being
fucked with?” said Dex.
“All the time,” said Amba. “It’s
never easy. Why should it be? If it was easy, they wouldn’t need the likes of
us.”
“Will you
stop
saying
that!”
“Why?” said Amba, turning to him.
“You need to accept what you are, Dexter. Real fast. Or we’ll both end up dead.
And believe me, Zi thinks you’re a liability already; her advice is to put a
bullet in your dumbfuck skull and go it alone.”
“Why don’t you, then?” said Dex.
“Because Zi isn’t always right.”
“And when do I get to talk to
this delightful
Zi?”
“You don’t, Dex. She’s my burden
to carry alone.”
~ * ~
They came to
a
huge cavern, open and wild and dark. An arched metal bridge stretched off into
the gloom, rising out of sight. Amba and Dex looked at one another; the cavern
was an impossibility,
within
the already-impossible structure of the
castle. The cavern itself was
larger
than the castle, by at least a
factor of ten.
“Where the hell are we?” said
Dex.
“The Monolith Ride Museum,” said
Amba, smiling to keep any perceived sarcasm from her words. “I know what you’re
thinking, and you’d be right. This place is impossible. But if you think about
it logically, the whole of Theme Planet is impossible. It’s said they used
ancient terraforming equipment to build this place; the theme park, the entire
damn planet. It was created by a group of machines they found - old, alien
machines, alien even to the provax. Who knows what they discovered, creating
the Theme Planet? All
I
understand is that this HQ is beyond the bounds
of normal comprehension. It twists space into something malleable. “
“We go forward?”
“Yes. But make sure your SMKK is
ready; this has all the hallmarks of a trap.”
Their boots echoed on the alloy
as they climbed the arch of the narrow bridge. It spun across a vast abyss
filled with darkness, like oil. In his mind, Dex wondered if it really was oil;
and if an answer to his problem, an end to his self-torture, was to simply
leap. Three quick footsteps off the edge - a long silent fall - plunge under
the oil, plunge into an eternity of dark fluid which would accept him, fill
him, drown him, absorb him.
Death. That was an option.
Dex smiled, and felt quite sick.
As they reached the apex of the
bridge, Amba stopped for a moment, holding up her hand. And Dex heard it too;
tiny buzzing sounds like motors, revving high and fast and accelerating even as
they heard them...
“PopBots... be ready!” snarled
Amba.
Dex levelled the SMKK, and from
the gloom burst a shower of small black balls, showing no colours but with
obvious intention. They slammed around Amba and Dex. Dex’s SMKK blossomed into
fire, bullets screaming to
ping
and
blat
from PopBot shells,
whilst Amba’s FRIEND gave massive, near-silent
bams
of energy, which pulsed through the PopBots like a net
through fish. Dex watched, frowning, as his SMKK was pretty much ineffectual at
stopping the little machines, whereas Amba’s sleek FRIEND slaughtered them with
lazy arrogance.
Several, however, made it past
the FRIEND, and Dex twitched left as a PopBot hammered past where his face had
been. He palmed his Makarov, and sent three rounds drilling the case. The
PopBot described a graceful arc, falling down into the darkness trailing sparks
and smoke...
Dex fired at more of the tiny
black missiles, and dodged them when they charged him, buzzing as they whipped
and snarled around his head. More Makarov bullets took down the PopBots, and
Dex realised with a grim smile that the gun was police issue; it obviously had
a specific function. PopBots were supposedly AI. Maybe they went occasionally
berserk? Whatever, the Makarov was a useful tool against their charge...