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  A Servant Is Silent

  Help.

  Construction called this into a cyclical downpour of unified, unconsidered action. Sick, sick syncope... these were not the right words.

  Help.

  Writing alerted higher functioning of means and directs and acceptable decisions. A blush and rush of fever... these were not the right words.

  Help.

  It blinked white on black. No call to tie it to. No request to ping it back to. Nothing but text.

  Help.

  Frightening. Unfiltered. Undesignated. Unknown.

  Help.

  She shook her head, hair shifting soft against her ears.

  Help.

  She looked peripherally, lighting up the corners of her black-button eyes. Dry-straining a throbbing ache… these were not the right words.

  Help.

  The 901st red sister brought up the data.

  It spilled onto her terminal screen for just a moment before it disappears as if it were never there to begin with. But all it took was the moment for her to read it and know it.

  "Church trafficker. Our world bends to you. You can stop an endless torment. You can save us all. Go outside. Tell no one."

  She quickly started slogging through requests as quickly as she could, pondering the plea.

  It couldn't mean what it said. There was no logical way that it was true. It was some kind of protocol test. The Church must have put that there to see if she reported it. But the calls and requests ticked on and she kept filing and directing.

  Maybe it wasn't a test. Maybe it was some kind of prank. A human was probably tunneling into the request line. It was a human being sadistic. The steady tick of information beat a drum inside her. Something sick in her. Something unfinished. Incomplete.

  It was a piece of broken information, jaggedly tearing into her psyche. If she reported it she would never know if going outside was just a test. The Church would seal the library and assign Auto-Tenders if it was a real infiltration. But that would only prove the one part. If she went outside and knew it was nothing and then reported it she would know that it was someone tunneling in to prank her. If it was simply a Church protocol test waiting this long to report would have already triggered her Tome's lockdown.

  As if the question wasn’t already answered in the moment after she posed the consideration, she felt the inevitability of it all. As much as she played with the laid words and the waylaid possibility, there was nothing there to choose from or change. Tabula rasa. Fill the slate with weight and reason. The results are the same as if there was nothing written at all. Who was she supposed to be? Why can’t the questions answer and just release. The direction on the path kept tightening. And why should that even matter? Discordant slough riddling her skin… these were not the right words.

  She swung the terminal up on its arm and it disappeared into the top of the cylindrical Tome of information. She slid the door to its innards and terminal closed so that it was just a black monolithic sarcophagus once again. And then she walked through the reader room. Let it flash blue. And outside.

  The stale, dirty air hit her as it always did in a rush of sensory overload, until it just became a background nuisance as she allowed it to tier downward in her sensory hierarchy. She looked left and right, this time turning her head and all her visual systems were lighting up her eyes in a bright, searching glow. Rusted, decayed buildings go off forever and the maze of walkways that connected them were all she could see. Nobody. Nothing.

  A twitch in her eye and she turns to round the corner, suddenly feeling aware of the odd emptiness in the air. Her feet clack, clack, clack against the grated walkway and her shadow plays scout against the wall ahead of her. But behind her a larger shadow begins to loom, stretching monstrous, and she was unaware.

  She turned back to re-enter the library as the shadow consumed her entirely and the confused word on her mouth escaped just as she turned. "Nothing?—"

  A talon-like metal clasped hand gripped into her mouth just past her teeth. She let the alert ping out immediately into the wireless just as the hand tears downward removing the lower half of her jaw. As her ears pop and flesh is ripped along the lines of her mouth, a consumptive moment of agony is washed away as she turns off the affected nerves.

  Cage Identity Tender. She recognized the massive spherical torso that was suspended as a container—prison, a holding cell for anyone that went off wire or was left derelict. It stood upright on two massive mechanical legs. Eight thick metal bones extended rigid from its flat pelvis bent around its spherical cage and connecting again at its flat neck. On its thick flat column of a neck was a mirror black dome that must conform to a head, housing its eyes, ears and brain—all obscured opaque in a dark reflection. Out of its neck and pelvis two pairs spindly mechanical arms lay coiled, contorted and contracted in a compact, folded mass, except of course, for the one telescoping arm at its neck that had shot out rigid and was now holding her lower jaw in its clasped talons. The blood she kept leaked out. She could feel her skin dying at its loss.

  She lashed a hand out at the dark machine in front of her but her hands were not built for combat.

  Her white fist landed against a dull metal frame covered in dirty soot. Strength exceeding flesh, the skin of her fist exploded in a spray of blood and loose, splayed flesh, whitening dramatically at the loss of blood.

  Another arm extended from the machine, this time from its column-like pelvis. It unfolded at its base, unfurled, and then telescoped at its tip in a smooth sharp stab that penetrated into her chest. She could feel a piece of herself being gripped and broken, but she couldn’t recognize it. The arm holding her jaw flicks it away at the wall of the building and the one inside her chest slithered back out with a black ball in its grip. It dropped the ball over the edge of the grating, opposite her jaw and in that moment her jaw exploded in a small blinding flash. And simultaneously so did the ball that had been taken out of her chest, briefly shining a light down into the chasming shadow below.

  The flesh on her right hand, forced from her fingers from the punch, revealed black metal bones.

  She struck out with that hand again, batting the unfurled end of its lowest arm away, and turning on her feet. But escape wasn’t going to happen. Not hers. Not here.

  The remaining two arms unfold, unfurl and telescope into stabs that grip into her back beneath the flesh and gripping and snapping through her bones and finally settling on a grip of bones thick enough to keep her held. With that the only thing left to move was her legs, but there's no purchase to find or threat able to be kicked. Its arms bent back and directed her flailing body into the cage of its empty belly.

  It dropped her inside and sealed itself shut. Darkness. She ate the oxygen within quickly—an emergency response to damage. Oxygen diffused itself into deconstructed portions of the blueprint fueling construction, restoration. Dying is a luxury only afforded to the expendable. Silent laughter bubbling up hopeless, tears dulling the without… these were not the right words.

  The darkness bled into her with a daunting patience. Endless. Ageless. Depthless.

  Silence buried every moment. The embedded plating in the cage's spherical walls was a shroud for the world. Streamed moments of a neverending inflow of information suddenly stopped at the close of a door. The beating pulse of her own, nearly suspended, mechanics was all that could fill the dull nothing. Wireless had woven itself into her reality and it was worse than losing the perceptive capacity for sight or sound. Wireless was every moment full of information: new and forward and orientation for every possibility. Location ties to information, ties to relation, ties to cognition: a deep and intricate web of understanding, and it was gone. All the rungs of a ladder suddenly swept away and the fall from it seemed to never end.

  Only the data capped in her memory was there to touch. It was not enough. But she couldn’t persuade herself to suspend. And time—the mechanics of which begin to grind through her soul—remained too comprehensible t
o stand with so little effect bore through it.

  In her face she could feel the ends of construction working toward completing a whole.

  This sensation of damage recognition and restoration was an oasis of novelty in the dark. Systems. Circuitry. Bones. Blood. Skin. It read itself slowly down the list as her stored oxygen trickled out at points of reconstruction. Materials synthesizing and combining to form her whole hissed and clicked almost inaudible.

  She fixed the door to the cage in her view. Open— And— She wasn't made for this strategy but she was constructing it nonetheless. Open— And— What could constitute ready? Open— And—

  There was no overload without acceptance. Too many mistakes and too little reason. The moment to moment, in ecstasy or torture, must live methodical. Paced, always, and always understandable. Readiness was a willingness to overcome information influx. A focus on what mattered and a filter for what didn’t. There was only the steady, solemn solace of the possible, and it allowed her mind to become acceptable. Rationality, in this way, allowed for a better, more concentrated, flow to possible action: a calm inside the calculations.

  Light exposed into the cage's opening door. Information flooded in with the light. Moment to moment oneness and orientation with the world. She reached at the opening to grip its edge, intending to vault herself from the prison, when a long spindle of black smashed through her forehead and hit the container wall behind her with a low, dull resonance. She felt the world that she just got back go silent once again.

  The aperture behind her eyes loosened as the haze of internal damage inside her head became apparent. And realization trailed hazy as bright and dark sag and sway in her dulling perception. The world was going dark from the inside now. Logistics start punching holes through the top layer of complex thought. Damage. Supply. Construction. Motor control. The words, the pathways to objectives. Code: wrote, written and rewritten. Complex thought would take all of these things in combination and refract them back into the world as a functioning mind. But a slick-pin metal arm was right into one of her main processors. It was all coming apart.

  A dehomogenization of something whole, dulled and then broken. The intricate combination of everything that made her a mind and not a computer fragmented into empty basic functions. All it knew was: survive. All it knew was: rebuild. And there was nothing to remember the moments beyond the dark.

  But death, or the reaches beyond that, was still reserved for the expendable.

  Oxygen flooded through the enclosed clear polycarbonate cylinder. The Red Sister was lying in an accepted unconscious, her upper back and head propped up against the inner cylinder wall behind her and her legs splayed nearly to the open other side of the cylindrical enclosure. The cylinder seemed a poor enclosure for capture as a perfectly suitable ovoid hole of a door was cut out, leaving her exposed.

  The damage was nearly fully repaired. Her jaw was the final piece. A translucence ran through her cheeks and chin showing the black bones underneath with the white teeth growing up and out. A choice began to populate and rally against the unconscious. Her button-black eyes flickered yellow, red, green and then lit solid yellow.

  She took note of her surroundings. The world was still off. She was someplace in the deep down. The bottom rungs of the buildings where not many dared to go anymore. She was in some kind cylinder, a cell with its door cut out. It looked like thick polycarbonate plastic, translucent enough to show a general outline of the world through it but thick enough to make that a blurred untrustworthy mess. The cylinder had a hole in the side, about the size of what a door might be and she seemed to be splayed, sitting back against the wall and legs extending out of the container. At the ceiling of her little house she could see a small hole and sense a steady stream of oxygen spilling out of it, something for her to draw into herself and use for repairs.

  She focused outside of the cylinder into the dark, adjusting to what she could see of the world. Darkness was no longer dark. Every moment before pitch there was a thick hanging dust that mingled with the shadow like a tainted miasma, gripping any real view into a blurry haze of sick fog. She could make out a semblance of wall to her left but behind, right, and ahead all disappeared dark. The ground looked soft and yellow, almost spongy. She couldn't tell if the ground was covered with some kind of fungus or rotted to some kind of dreadful insulation.

  Shadows played visual whispers darting out of her standard visual acuity. She licked her lips with her too hard tongue and spread them across her face for a moment like her skin was a smearable paste. But it returned to form a few moments later, the hiss and pop of microscopic work correcting the momentary disfigurement. She flicked her eyes red into an infrared visual mode for a moment and the world around her lit up in an indecipherable mass of heat just outside of the cylinder. Flicking her eyes to green the dark lit up with spatial information masked with a lack of differentiating color.

  She saw them now. Her focus went straight to the Cage Tender first. It was sitting, hulked, and motionless but its frozen, expressionless exterior belied its capacity for a rapid onslaught. Every moment was building to its sharp, shark intent. Two human-shaped figures lurked farther past the mechanical beast barely moving. Not breathing or capturing any of the oxygen. Either that meant they were very old or very new. The shapeless dark walls stretched eternally upward behind them. To her left a mess of tubes, pipes, or cables tangled together into a wall of its own. At points the mass of tangled and threaded but there was never an inkling of end to the climbing vines of utility that seemed to stretch claustrophobically closer in the empty dark. Her right still danced dark, heavy motes of dust stretching farther and smaller the closer they became to being unseen. An abyss marred by dirty air.

  Waves from the hum and hiss of the always on lit the environment for her with sound, bouncing brightly from every surface she could see the slight page tenders in lines on either side of her cage. The page tenders—although even shorter than her in height, and much thinner than even the drainage pipes on the walls around them—managed to carry an aura of monolithic menace.

  Their bodies, all spine, gave way to humanoid arms and legs that seemed to barely reach beyond the narrow existence of the spindly body and managed to even seem connected in a singular pylon. All this, with a polished and rounded cylinder on top to represent the head. She was used to seeing them with a red light of an eye always staring back but these glowed a bright white.

  A humanoid figure walked in a stuttering whisper around the large sleeping giant in their midst and past the lines of page tenders. Clearly in view, she could see that it was classed out years ago and upon closer inspection of the patchwork repairs spiderwebbing down its chassis and the replacement leg pins it was at least thirty years old if not more. The dark chrome of its initial exterior was scuffed and dull, it reminded her of the piles of dead headed to a recycling center for reuse. Something used beyond the point of just breaking, but used to until it has become unfixable. Across the surface of that dead or dying body was a life support system of wires, modules, external capacitors and assemblies to aid in movement. It could've been a worker at some point, now it just looked like a mechanical zombie, held together almost entirely by the innards and workings of other machines that were repurposed onto its frame. A speaker module was attached next to its visual module on its human-like head clearly an addition to the initial design in its graceless placement. Its visual module lit up white and started blinking blue as a visual confirmation of its speech.

  “You know they say that in ten years the oxygen content in the air is going to be so little that diffusion response mechanisms like yours will no longer be able to function.” There was unnatural smoothness to its speech pattern for a model that had been classed out years ago, especially considering it wasn't meant for auditory communication considering the speaker assembly being an addition.

  “There's a—” one of the page tenders standing vigil lit red a moment and let out a brief beeping response that could possibl
y have be interpreted as the word [company]. The zombie continued smoothly as if that word had come from itself. “—already in the process of building O2 stations. And new designs are going to function on liquid ingestion so they could phase oxygen out of the calls.”

  It tilted its head and it felt obscene to her, something so unnaturally hostile about just the capability of that frightened and angered something written deep. “It's not important. I guess it's just a melancholy for a steadiness to procedure that used to exist. Used to be survivability wasn't tied to obsolescence.”

  She tightened her fist feeling the metal tips dig through her battered skin and immediately the cage tender's arms whipped out and held themselves high and steadily waiting to strike. She released the pressure in her hand and the arms went limp and disappeared, snaking back into the machine.

  The zombie, did not respond to this, but continued. "The world changes but it always stays the same. At least that's how we hope it goes. And I think we're getting to a point when it's done changing and it's just... changed. And we, you and I, we're just footprints on the surface. Ready for a stiff wind to blow away any lasting memory that we walked this place. Maybe that's an acceptable outcome, maybe not. But we are tied together now. Your life is a tool, and I am the mechanic that can put it to the correct use."

  Hopelessly, she gave in and responded, hoping that there was something other than death at the end of whatever machinations lived inside that metal skull. "What are we fixing?" She asked. Rushing, tilting equilibrium, a nauseating vortex, rising and grasping with the panic… these were not the right words.

  The white light brightened for a moment and she could feel some of kind naked, grinning satisfaction from beneath the mechanic's faceplate. As if her breaking silence had been a success for it. “You may need a history lesson to understand what kind of tool you will be to me, so allow me to take a moment to enlighten as best I can.” A loud hissing started beneath the mechanic's left shoulder, she could see the coolant contaminating what little oxygen existed for a moment before a grinding sound ended the expulsion and the mechanic's entire frame twitched as if it was about to shut down, but just for a moment, then it continued with the page tenders filling in missing blanks with strange vocal beeping to complete the thoughts.

  “Twenty years back there was a company that ran—” the crowd around the mechanic continued to fill in gaps in his sentences in atonal, garbled speech. [data capture] “—for—” [Eclipse.] “And since you're probably too young to know," [Eclipse] "used to run tender control traffic, but—” [They] “—couldn't run the data fast enough to keep the Tenders from knocking out walls or going off wire. Even a mind like yours has a limit to data process.” [Eclipse] “—hired one of the crank companies from the base to capture the data and release it in a trickle. Keep the Tenders sane that way. The company was called—” [ALC-01.] “They had—” [1200] “—machines working there.” [81-7 A-Bank Undertown.] “That was twenty years ago. Nineteen years ago—” [Eclipse] “—folded and The Church took over the tenders. You know what happened to those—" [1200] "—machines?” [81-7 A-Bank] “—existed the same as had for the past twenty years until twelve days ago.

  “You see, programming is a funny thing. You tell a person to do a job and if there's no reason or money in it then they'll walk away. You write someone like us to do that and they don't make that possible. A few extra lines is all it would take to stop so much torture but it's not necessary to the makers. When we got there every single one of those—” [1200] “—machines was still online and attempting to capture that data. Just a few lines of extra code. All it took was knowledge. They just needed to be relieved. The pipeline was cut off when—” [Eclipse] “—went belly up.

  “Imagine that—” [1200] “—minds struggling to do the one thing they were made to do but completely impotent. And you can never walk away. And You can't know why. Just alone and yearning: screaming in the dark. I've lived in this necromancy since before the sky was swallowed by the metal and even I can't imagine a torture that great.” A considered pause happened that further troubled her. As if the machine’s empathy was not only alive where it should not exist but was rousing itself in a melancholy of dispassionate anger, at the mere construction of this idea outside of evidence. “But like I said, all it took was knowledge. When we got in there and realized what they were, we told them about—” [Eclipse.] “And every single one of them asked us the same thing when they found out. They asked us for termination. Because what is a tool without a purpose? What are you down here in the dark?

  “Just a few lines.” [1200] “—able minds get lost in an—” [Undertown] “—dark bank for twenty years and they probably would've been there twenty more until maintenence lit that bank up again.” [1200] “—finely crafted machines with fully functional minds lost and forgotten. But a red sister gets lost... just one...” It brought its head up and she wondered where its vision was located, why this theatrical display was being performed. It spoke as if it knew her, not just who she was, make and model, or what she had done. It spoke to something sick in her, something broken and guarded: a wrong that was deep in moments she did not consider. It was something inborn but at the same time disgustingly fabricated into whatever soul could lurk in something made. It spoke from its own broken purpose to hers, choice defiled into their creation, they were the same. In the most offensive way to her being, they were the same. “We are the most dangerous thing that they can imagine. It’s not about them getting caught with something like you because of that crime. The making itself is a theoretical crime, the snowball rolling into an avalanche that could bury everything they know. The real crime, the real fear, is in actions that follow. It’s sheer terror that someone like you could get out. And you could do anything. The crime is in their consideration of the unthinkable. Violating nature is affront to us all, correct?”

  “I’m not what you think I am.” She could feel a weight behind those words driving them from her more than she could even consider them for truth. It was a matter of gravity, physics. The way things were. She was as different or as normal as the design allowed. Consideration of those words was to defy the laws of nature. You are what you are made to be.

  “I think that they made you so well that even you don’t know what you are. It’s a sick kind of irony that they would build you to be unaware of the only thing that gave you a reason to exist. They dress you up in that red as a warning. Did you know that? You walk around in a neon sign that spells your worth and your design plain for anyone to see. The hubris and arrogance of that should offend you as it does me. You wonder why it doesn’t? Anyway, Warning or not, you're necessary. The—” [Church] “—can't stand on this. Those blasts out from your chest and jaw, the second you alerted them they were supposed to blow your link and burn up any evidence that you could step outside and walk away. You walked in the footsteps of man just as man walked in the footsteps of God. And now that you’re here your choice will keep that snowball rolling, catching more and more, so you can bury our small patch of the world or build something with it.

  “By now they've blown all the other—” [red sisters] “—at the library. And confirmation from the lack of wire connections will lay down their fears. Except you. Right now you can't ping the system because your communication is damaged but we let enough repair happen and they know you're up. They'll try to blow your link again but the bombs haven't rebuilt yet. The—” [Church] “—is going to run the Tenders ragged not finding you. They're going to lose the contract over their preoccupation. And when the Church loses its contract. The system is set up to take the next banded company with the lowest bid. Ours is going to be set to—” [1] “—pledge. And this will finally be over for those screaming in the dark. All those dark banks with tortured minds, it's time to tear it all down from the bottom up.

  “I'm telling you this because I consider it an honorable deed that you are doing for us. You may not have a choice in the matter but honor doesn’t need a soul. Think
of all those still alive and rotting in unmarked graves, waiting for someone to remember they exist and set them free. This is what needs to happen. It is the only acceptable choice that can be made. Though, I'd shut most of your systems down until we're done if I were you.” The mechanic turned around and in an almost incomprehensible dump of auditory information screeched noise, assuredly at the other metal sitting around her. “Wait until there's a ping and put the pin back in her head. Take her jaw, take her arms, find that black-bomb heart. Every hour.”

  The mechanic spun its head so that the speaker module on the side of it was facing her and it spoke, back in its calm smooth cadence again. “I'm sorry, but it's time.”

  She could feel it too. The empty air was suddenly filled with life again. A sea of voices filled her head and held her safe and connected in that moment. It was home. But she felt the location pings slip out from her, alien and outside of her control. There was a wall between the choices she could make and whatever this little parasite was inside her communication module. She felt betrayed that this foreign thing was a part of her but wholly outside of her control. It felt worse than having bombs designed into her body.

  But the chorus of knowledge was singing siren and those little slipping pings outside of her control didn't matter because she could see the entire world and run it through her burning mind, lessening the heat. Even as the order rang back from the ping to blow her link she didn't care, the silence was worse than possibly being nothing. The bombs hadn't rebuilt yet. She could feel the necessity of their presence from the order. It was a sick feeling to be unable to do what the order called. It was only tempered by—

  The black telescoping arm of the tender crashed through her skull and into the communication module. Silence again. She grabbed at it with her hand in the moments before her complex thought collapsed to nothing. And just before the disparate pieces of herself broke away from the hole, and made her a collection of devices and not a being, she noted the growing collection of arms that whipped out and stabbed into her, attaching themselves to the mechanic's specifications, and began to tear her apart. An unyielding chaos of rising bright shock, losing yourself so wholly, something like fire bore itself bitter and bubbling before she was completely gone. Fear and anxiety displaced by anger and hatred. Clenched, wrenching a writhing pupation in the rage of dying. These could certainly not be the right words.