By Daniel Kent

Part Four: The Maze

“Time Is Running Out”

One month Later

The King stood stock still in the centre of the control chamber, staring straight ahead into the dark. Although surrounded on all sides by monitor screens there was no need for him to pay them any attention, for all images were relayed directly into his head at all times, his mind able to flick from one to another with the blink of a single, inner eye. Without lifting a finger or even moving from this room he was able to keep tabs on every aspect of the City, all-seeing in every sense. The screens were a relic now of a former time, a time that would soon be left behind, a time before he had been brought into being as this towering, omnipotent, infinitely flexible god.

Activating automated scanning systems perched high on the walls surrounding the city, he reached out with his mind and quickly searched for traces of any incoming vehicles. There were a few headed in their direction, but it was impossible to tell if they contained what he needed. The robot side of him could have waited forever, but the human side registered the faintest flickering of impatience. There was a quota to fill and time was running short. The target had to be reached before the end of the night. It was vital…

They were doing all they could. Sending robots out to collect them had long ago proved unworkable, the humans were tenacious and good at hiding, and however fiercely the machines went about their work they were always wrong-footed in the end. Since his arrival he himself had come up with several new ideas to bring units to them. Fake emergency messages had been sent out at irregular intervals in the hope that monitors on the hidden safe-bases he knew to be nearby would respond, drawn in by the idea that there was a human here in need of assistance.  The other messages too, the stories telling of this ‘new sanctuary’ had also worked well. As a result Cybernation had been stepped up, and they were now processing between fifty and eighty human units a day, units who assumed that here was someone trying to make things better, trying to help.

It wasn’t a lie. The King was genuinely trying to help. That was why the robots had enobled him as they had, that was why they had made him King .He wasn’t the only human they had encountered with the power to wield that strange psycho-kinetic energy that the robots envied so much, but he was by far the most powerful they had come across. They could sense it. They needed someone with that power, to organise them, to lead them and to see to the fulfilment of their ultimate plan, and, once he himself had had his humanity razored away and his soul suspended he had proved happy enough to provided what they needed , they, his parentless children. And in the process he had forgotten who he was and who he had been. There was no past. There was only now, and an unstoppable future.

The King found himself staring not at the countless images in his head but at the redundant monitors looking at the main town gates, and felt a sudden fatigue sweep over him. He needed to sit down. Was that right? Should a robot need to sit down? Surely a robot could stand forever?  His head suddenly dizzy, he remembered what was about to happen. It had been happening more and more recently. In the long month since his transformation his visions had been getting worse and worse. They were now occurring several times a day, and they didn’t make any sense, which disturbed him greatly. Should a robot be disturbed? It seemed a most un-robot-like things to do. Surely a robot need not worry about anything?

This time it began as a cloud of grey mist over the far side of the chamber, coalescing, ghost-like, into the silhouette of a woman, walking, or perhaps floating towards him, her feet and lower body obscured from his view by the fact that she was moving through the floor as if she was immersed in it, wading through solid matter. She was indistinct and blurred at the edges, and all the time she was humming to herself.

The King shut his eyes and clenched his metal fists instinctively, willing the image to disappear, but the shape only walked towards him with greater speed. She was now waist deep in the floor and as she drew closer he could make out that she was now carrying a small child which mewed feebly in her arms. Also, though he could not see her face clearly, she seemed familiar to him. Both she and the child were blurry and indistinct, their outlines crackling every other second as energy coursed around them and threatened to burst through the seams of the dream and into the world of reality. With her free arm, the woman reached out to him. He thought he could see her lips parted, but could not tell if it was in greeting or accusation…

Turning, the King walked out of the dark chamber, away from the shapes, away from a horror he no longer understood. His mind, with its empty compartments where once had sat emotions and memories could only process the vision as a valueless curiosity, nothing more. It did not compute. It was of no use. Yet still it persisted. A curiosity.

A small child, its face and limbs lined with metal, shuffled down the brightly lit corridor pushing a heavy cart laden with spare parts, but still stopped quickly to bow towards its King before continuing on its way.  He turned to look after it as it scurried on, and for a second everything seemed alien and unfamiliar, dark and threatening…

“You remember..?”

The King dismissed the memory, shook his head and carried on down the corridor. There was work to be done. But the voice persisted.

“..We were weak long before the bombs fell. Everything we cared for had gone, even before all the destruction, before all the death. We were dead inside. The pills helped us…”

He stopped in his tracks. The pills. He had forgotten how he used to take the pills, to stop the visions. The pills…

“They are gone now though, aren’t they? There are no more pills to be had…”

He whirled around. A second misty figure was in the bright corridor, hanging in the bright air, clear as day, looking down on him, but this time he recognised who it was, clearly and with no uncertainty. It was himself, or rather who he used to be, before he became the robotic fix up of flesh and metal he now was. He leant back against the wall and slowly sank to the floor looking up at his own face of old. The smoky vision cocked his head to one side and continued.

“There was nothing left for us anymore, remember..?. We tried to end it. We tried. They pumped the pills out before they could do too much damage. We were broken. We went underground with everyone else. We hid from the bombs. We were cowards. We deserved to die. We should have. Not them….” The vision began bleeding from the nose, but continued nonetheless. “After the bombs fell we wanted to get away. We decided to get as far away as we could. You remember?  We took fathers old airship and decided to find somewhere new. This is the best we could do? We are pathetic, we really are…” The vision began rhythmically smacking his palm into his own face, over and over again, until the blood became black, and the face broken and disfigured.

The King gripped the wall, turned his back on the vision and vomited uncontrollably down the side of the metal panelling. He was a sick god. He should never have allowed himself to exist. He should do something to stop all this, it was in his power. He was the most powerful being on Earth…

Then the circuits flipped on and made him forget. As they always did.

At the end of the corridor the King walked through the empty doorframe into the brightness of daylight, stepping onto a gantry overlooking the City. Below him was the City, a maze of avenues and boulevards from which no human, once inside, could escape, not even he. Looking down he could see life, or at least the grotesque parody of life continuing as it did every day here. Distant screams could be heard from the factory sector. A herd of prisoners were being led across a courtyard by a large rusty thing, pock-marked and bulky, a Mark 1, one of the first models to be built. Its limbs scraped across the floor and it stunk, and the ragged band of men and women allowed themselves to be corralled reluctantly, conscious all the while that there were several similar following behind, and that these early models were particularly crude in their savagery when provoked.

The dizziness returned, and suddenly he thought he could see a huge black crackling bird swooping low overhead. Instinctively the King sent a ball of flame into the air after the imaginary beast, only for it to explode into nothingness as the great winged creature itself blinked out of existence. It had never been there in the first place. Was he going mad? Could a machine go mad? Was that possible?

Around him a group of the childlike robots had assembled and were humming a disjointed tune as they attempted to sooth their leader. Above their heads a slightly taller one tried to get his attention.

“You. Report.”

The robot stood to attention. “Sir. We have several units converging on the North Gate in sky vehicles. They are offering no resistance so far. We believe there are several Gifteds among their party.”

“Good. Gather a team together, I shall go and meet them.”

“Now sir?”

“Now.”

The King made his way through the maze towards the North Gate, gathering robots as he went. By the time he reached the first avenue he had gathered a small army around himself, both pure mechanicals and human/robot hybrids. As he progressed he was plagued by visions of himself, or rather the ghost of his former self, limping past, cursing at the sun until he was blue in the face, then crackling away into nothing. The avenues they passed through were scorched and broken, they had been attacked several times, and when Factory Seven exploded hundreds of the newer models had perished in the blast, but no matter, they were rebuilding.  As the King marched through the alleyways the little ones ran behind him in a strange parody of a monarch going walkabout among his people. He was a machine messiah to them, the broken and the hopeless. For what did he offer but Hope? More and more turned up every day looking for shelter, and more and more would be processed. Soon they would be able to launch the attack and bring an end to all of this.

The party was almost at the North gate when they spotted the upturned sky vehicle, aflame. Smoke billowed into the faces of the robotic onlookers who did nothing to help.

The King frowned and waved his hand upwards, channelling energy into the crashed sky-ship, causing it to fly back up into the air from where it had been blasted, and away, out beyond City’s boundary wall, to fall a flaming wreck a second time.

Below where it had sat, four men who had just recently realised they had been lured into a terrible trap were scrambling for anything they could use as a weapon. The King laughed and beckoned to them, even as they turned what firepower they had onto him, bullets and laser fire failing to even dent a square inch of that armoured, impervious body. Walking up to each one in turn, he noticed that, despite their fear, they made no move to run away. Placing his palm upon their heads, he checked them for evidence that they had the ‘Gift’, and to his delight discovered they all of them did, all except one. To them it must have seemed like an absurd welcome. Stupid humans. Three of them were of use.  That was lucky. They were only after those who bore the gift now. They had enough workers. They were moving onto stage four, strengthening the core team, eradicating any major threats, and expanding boundaries.  And of course, pursuing the Ultimate Measure.

The King led the three men away. They looked back at their companion with haunted eyes, knowing what was going to happen next yet powerless to stop it. When the gigantic mark 1 appeared, forcing its way through what remained of a wall the ship had all but destroyed, all could see he was shaking in fear, just as they could see there was nothing anyone could do. He called to them, but it was more in farewell than in protest. If the robots had no need of you then there was no reason to keep you.

The mark 1 moved its monstrous arms, grabbed both sides of the human’s head and compressed in a quick motion, his skull, brain and fluids spilling down his bloodied shirt. Letting go, it let the bloodied corpse fall to the floor, then ambled back the way it had come, job done. Two of the other three turned their faces away, looking panicked, grabbing again for weapons the little ones had already confiscated.

“Welcome” said the King. “Do not be afraid. I will help you, as I have helped the others. Now, tell me your names?”

The two men looked helplessly from one to the other but remained silent. Only the third man could find a voice, and a strong voice it was as, with no hint of nervousness he intoned. “My name is Dante. And I am here to kill you.”

But these binoculars aren’t really strong enough to catch the beauty she possesses, and the court has warned me once already….

utter the word crash,

they march around in circles,

and watch the waves gently rock,

the man in a boat,

whom is watching the clock,

waiting to punch in,

as the others punch out,

grunting to each other as they swap shifts,

the boat drifts, and the people march,

the ship runs aground and they all scream out,

crash crash crash,  a well timed  shout.

THE VOID

By Daniel Kent

“The Minotaur roars. The Mainframe awakens.”

PART THREE: Contact

It felt good to be out of the dark room full of smoke and soot and burning. Moving slowly on account of my injured leg, I staggered out the daylight.

I was in some kind of street, but not of any human construction. Humans didn’t build houses without windows, roads without pavements or direction. There were buildings with what looked like their electronic guts spilling out over the ground or reaching up hundreds of feet into the air as if trying to electrocute the sky itself. My surroundings were carved from solid technology, a maze, cold and glittering, no place for people, and I found myself wondering about what madness could have infected the architect to make them build such a place. I began to long for any semblance of normality, something I was used to, advertising boards, those old familiar water powered cars of my home town. But no, this was nothing more than a soulless, gleaming, metal graveyard…

Hearing a noise, I turned and made out the unmistakable outline of a young boy less than twenty yards away. A human, after all this time! Hobbling forward on my improvised crutch I called to him “You there! I need your help…”

…and then he turned to look at me, and I saw this was no child. Metal panels lined the side of his face, no left eye, no left arm, and in their place a horrific fusing of electronic circuitry and rusting, pock-marked steel. The creature lurched towards me at a frightening rate. I turned and stumbled back down the street, noticing other similar creatures emerging from side alleys and hidden doorways. I was stumbling so fast to escape I couldn’t help but put weight on my bad leg, and it buckled and cracked.  I knew I would not be able to get away. In seconds the crutch I had fashioned from the wreckage of my own craft caught on a grill in the floor and sent me flying forwards, landing face first on the cold metal ground.

Blinding pain, my nose crushed, I sprawled slowly onto my back, fresh blood staining my clothes. At least seven of the strange hybrid figures were now advancing on me. I put out my open palms to show I was unarmed and waved at them in the hope they would leave me alone. The first child I had seen stepped forward, eyed me quizzically; head cocked to one side, and then carefully placed its hand on my wounded leg. Instantly the pain I had felt before returned, its intensity this time multiplied tenfold.

Unable to bear it causing me fresh pain I summoned all my special energy and directed it towards the robot in one concentrated ball of anger and pain. In an instant the creature was pulled into the air and away from me as if some invisible hand had punched it square in the chest. It landed yards away, its hollow robot body ringing against the metal concourse, sending sparks and loose rivets spraying in all directions.

If I had hoped its demise might act as a distraction I was mistaken. The other robots ignored their fellow’s plight and instead crouched down on all sides of my prone form, laying their hands on me in an obscene parody of some religious ceremony. One robot in particular took hold my injured leg. I gritted my teeth against the pain and then looked on in terror as thin metallic rods like splinters of metal began to emerge from the robot’s fingertips and to enter the flesh of my leg, piercing the skin and disappearing beneath the raw epidermis. I could only watch and scream as the splinters re-appeared seconds later, shooting out of my leg like the living roots of some animated metal plant and seeking out and joining one another, knitting a flexible metal lattice over the layers of skin as they went. The speed of the transformation was beyond belief, as though this metal was alive. Looking down I could see my shattered leg reforming itself anew, and all the time the pain, the unbearable pain. I cried out but no sound came. Blood. Metal. Crushing. Reforming.

When they were finished they each of them took hold of me. Helpless, I lay on my back as they began to carry me away, where I could only imagine. Then, and only then, did I black out.

I came to in a circular room, smooth walls, brightly lit, the few items of furniture practical and neatly designed, none more so than the metal chair I had been securely fastened into. It was almost antiseptic; a faint tinge of ozone in the air, and in that way quite unlike the other room the ship had crashed into. Looking around me, I became conscious I was now connected up to a machine nearby via a port on my own body, a small hole in my metallic leg from which there snaked a silver jointed cable. I began to struggle against my restraints, but before I could achieve anything a light pulsed on the machine beside me and pain surged suddenly and uncontrollably through my whole body. I was jerked forwards, energy swirling around me, thoughts flicking through my head. When at last it ceased I knew not to try again.

Looking around, I saw with a shock that I had an audience. Robots, larger but in every other way similar to the ones I had already encountered were ranged three deep against the far wall, watching me silently. I realised now what the room reminded me of: a theatre. It was as though they had come here to watch a performance, to watch me. Then with a smooth whirr a device descended from the ceiling of the room and hung over me, bright lights ranged on either side, a dozen long robot arms sweeping down on me from every angle, and I realised this was actually a quite different kind of theatre. They weren’t putting on a show here. They were preparing for surgery, and I didn’t see any sign of an anaestethic.

It took long, painful hours. I was helpless, free only to watch the same splinters of metal I had seen before now sprouting all over my body, while at the same time the surgical machine pared away flesh, replacing the beaten bones within and continuing the flexible metal lattice so that presently it covered virtually my whole body. Countless times I wished I had something to take my own life with, to spare me any more of this horror, but my special powers were exhausted for the time being. Unceasing, the robots carried on their work until every part of me was converted and transformed. And then the machine withdrew and the restraints fell loose and the robots that had watched in silence edged closer to observe me take my first steps in a new body.

The pain had gone, all of it. There was no pain, no weakness, of body or spirit. Those sensations had been replaced with a feeling only of great strength and capability. I had assumed the robots wished only to harm me, but their real job had been to make me into the powerful creature that now towered over these robots, uncomplicated machines who looked at me with almost child-like curiosity as if in unsure of exactly what they had created.

But there was something else. My last shreds of humanity had left me with my flesh, but I was surprised to discover I did not miss them. I had heard the stories of what the robots did, how they could take a man, remove from him the warren of the human mind, abuzz with a trillion idle thoughts a second, and replace it with a calm network of logic and reason. The humans had coined a term to describe it, this state of nothingness I now had the good fortune to inhabit. They called it ‘The Void’, and they feared it more than death itself.

But they had been wrong. There was nothing to fear. There is no fear, not any more…

To Be Continued

Anyone who has recently sat their GCSEs will empathise with how aggravating the exam board regulations on mobile phones are. I mean, it’s understandable that you can’t have a phone in your pocket, since then you could cheat by looking at notes or pictures. It’s also understandable that you can’t have phones going off, or the exam hall would be filled with ringtones and it would be incredibly hard to concentrate. However, you’re not allowed your phone in your bag turned off with the battery out, and that, to me, seems nonsensical. How on Earth could anybody cheat using a phone that has had its battery removed and is on the other side of the hall in their bag? Assuming, that is, that they don’t have magical powers. After much consideration, I came to the conclusion that exam boards are just demonstrating their authority.

I can appreciate that it would be hard to ensure that everyone took their batteries out, but then it has been proved to be difficult to persuade everyone to leave their phones at home, no surprises there. I did leave my phone at home, just to be on the safe side, but generally speaking, teenagers need their phones. Not in a pathetic, techno-dependent manner (though I admit that some of us are like that), but in that they may have to catch three buses or journey forty or so minutes home, and if something goes wrong, they’re going to have to be able to let their families know somehow.

My school has tried to provide for those who need their phones during exam season by saying that you can leave yours with the year office for a charge of fifty pence, but the problem is that plenty of teenagers can’t afford to do that every day they have exams. If you had roughly fifteen days when you had exams, handing your phone in could end up costing you more than seven quid – and nobody wants to fork out seven quid when there is any reasonable hope of alternative measures.

So, plenty of kids at my school hid their phones in their pencil cases, zipper pockets, the bottom of their bag and prayed for the best. Obviously, the majority of people who did this had the sense to hide their phone properly and remove the battery. Everything was going swimmingly, until that one fateful day when, in the middle of a History paper, some idiot’s phone beeped to let us know they’d got a text. The invigilators gathered up all the bags in the vicinity of the noise, and after the exam they led the owners away and told them to confess to having their phones, saying a thorough bag check would follow. Honest people did admit to it, and some people lied and said they didn’t have theirs when they did. Unfortunately the ‘thorough bag check’ involved some vague groping of outside pockets, and a shortsighted invigilator peering into your bag and shuffling the contents around for a few seconds before grunting the all clear. This meant that only those who had been honest were punished, and throughout the school rumours were heard that they had had their papers ripped up. Teachers confirmed to us that three people had had their papers torn to shreds, but refused to clarify the circumstances thereof.

Strikes me as a little unfair. After this incident, our bags were properly rifled through pre-examination, so we did all have to leave phones at home or hand them in, no escaping it. It was either that or trusting your one acquaintance who was in school but didn’t have an exam, and there is always the niggling voice in the back of your head whispering, “Ebay” when they offer to take care of it.

Therefore I hope the exam boards are satisfied with the unnecessary grief they have caused through what can only, from my point of view, be considered stubbornness – nobody hiding a phone with the battery removed could have stood to gain anything mark-wise by doing so, but those few who decided to risk it for the sake of convenience and were caught out by chance were, if rumours are to be believed, ‘made an example of’ at the cost of their grades and their dignity after refusal to mark their papers. By all means, punish those who carry phones with them, or those who create a disturbance when their phone emits sound, but why persecute the rest?

by Daniel Kent

Part Two: The Factory

“… Lay down all thought… ”, came the voice, “…Surrender to the Void…”

“You don’t exist, not anymore…” I shouted, tasting the blood in my mouth.

“You’re dead. Don’t you understand? You’re all dead..!”

I awoke, properly this time, to the sound of blood roaring inside my head and the feel of it, wet on the bare skin of my arms and neck as I lay among the burning wreckage of the ship, my beautiful broken ship. Thick black smoke everywhere, stinging my eyes and throat. Pain throbbed rhythmically in my right leg. I remembered now. I’d been thrown clear of the ship. Lucky for me I had, or I’d most likely be in the middle of the fireball that had now engulfed the inner cabins. The downside was that the impact had effectively shattered all the bones in my left leg from the thigh down.

I lay there, unable to move and unwilling to try. Slowly I began to take in the devastation my crashing ship had created. Craning my neck I strained to see the dome of the gigantic building I had so unexpectedly plummeted inside, and could just make out through the smoke the outline of the hole we had punched in the roof. You couldn’t really call it a roof anymore. Beyond the hole’s torn edges the meteors were still falling, but I couldn’t tell how long I had been unconscious. Everywhere around me fire danced and crackled, smoke billowed.                                                                                                                                        The night became something I could hold on to, knowing eventually it would end. Of course the flames would soon die and then I would not be able to see anything. I had to try to get out as quickly as possible. It was obvious my leg was useless. The slightest movement was agony.

Thick pungent smoke hung heavy in the air as I painfully drew myself up to a sitting position. I was several metres from the main bulk of the wreckage, but there were recognisable fragments of my craft dotting the area all around me.  Reaching out I grabbed hold of a length of rigid metal tubing, shorter than me and light enough to use as a makeshift crutch. Hauling myself upright I gritted my teeth against the pain, wishing there was something I could do. My special abilities were strong but worked only on inanimate objects. They would not allow me to knit broken bone and torn flesh back together, however much I willed it to happen.

I yelped in pain, and my voice bounced back at me instantly from the far wall, a deathless echo, startling me and almost making me lose balance. In the dark I could make out the shapes of machinery, huge devices the function of which I could only guess at. Some of the giant metal structures appeared to have been simply thrown about the room, even before my ship had smashed through the roof. The suspicion rose in me that I had crashed into nothing more than some robot dumping ground.

Peering through the smoke I stumbled forward until I reached the smooth, featureless metal of the wall. Drawing a breath, I looked around me, trying to make sense of the situation, and then I saw it. A figure. Hovering among the smoke, a phantom, floating towards me, being propelled as if not of its own will, and at the same time that sound pierced my mind, the sound that had downed my craft, that had caused all this destruction…

Terrified, I covered my face with my hands, trembling, knowing this thing, whatever it was, was watching, but when at last the noise subsided and I lowered my hands nothing was there, only the smoke, mocking me. I shook my head. Once I could’ve taken pills to stave off visions like this. But the pills had been in the ship. No more pills.

Determined to do something I concentrated, and within seconds a flaring ball of light sprang into existence and hung in the air above me. Gesturing, I sent it upwards, and as it slowly rose I scanned about me, trying to make out the corners of the room. At first it seemed nothing could pierce that smoke. In the depths of the wreckage an engine coughed in a feeble attempt to revive itself. The ship was finished. Soon I would be too. The smell of fuel had almost gone from the air, but so had my remaining energy.

Frustrated, I was about to quench the ball of light with a wave of my hand when I saw in the distance the unmistakable outline of a door. Slowly, painfully I headed toward it, half hopping, half limping, using the piece of wreckage as a crutch, the ball of fire lighting my way. I knew I had to make it. I had no choice.

The door was shut tight, and however much I pulled it refused to budge. I pored over it, trying to find some sort of keyhole, or keypad, anything other than flat bare metal until, desperate, I swung my crutch at it, a forlorn gesture. Nothing. My hope dwindled and the fog behind my eyes seemed to grow the more frustrated I became. I beat on the door, again and again for what seemed like hours, bloodying my knuckles and palms. I screamed for escape until my throat felt as if it would tear, and then exhaustion overwhelmed me, and, at last, I slumped down beside the door and slept.

When I awoke, the sun was burning my bloodied face. Despite the pain I sat up. The door was open, sunlight streaming in through it. A trap, it had to be! But I didn’t care…

Carefully I scrambled to my feet, picked up my crutch and stepped outside..