Of all the marvelous inventions of man, the one thing man has not yet re-invented is himself. I’m speaking of a true reinvention of body and mind, not merely a mental placebo.
Arnon D’Bvaym
ZED WOULD NEVER understand how his tortured metal shell could simultaneously feel agonizingly hollow and overstuffed with mind-numbing sensation. He felt a stranger within his own head, trapped within a billowing tent, eternal in size, perfectly dark, and entirely empty—he knew his metal shell was there, but it wasn’t his, and it never would be. It just was.
And despite all this emptiness that composed his entire being, a sharp throb of pain somehow repeatedly thrummed through the middle, like an angry vein pulsing heavily, every throb sending invisible waves of agony into every corner, the emptiness unable to soften, absorb, or deflect the metronomic sensation. He knew all too well how utter madness could easily settle upon a rozie and had felt it himself many times.
Zed closed his eyes and flared his nostrils, breathing in and out for a bit. He didn’t need to breathe, but mimicking his old, mortal body sometimes brought scant amounts of comfort—comfort he desperately needed right now. He could feel the feral instinct at the back of his mind, the call to rip, tear, feast, and repeat, growing stronger as he stepped deeper into the crater that was Fort.
He felt like his mind was amply reflected in the ruins of Fort. In the epicenter was a depression deeper than the rest of the crater, the electric heat and force of the explosion fusing the earth into some sort of shiny, smooth substance. Radiating around this relatively small nucleus of explosion, the settlement was reduced to rubble and dirt, with a rare skeleton of a building left standing. The occasional blackened metal frame of a rozie grimaced through the ashes, recalling to Zed’s mind his many demons that he worked so hard to silence, all resting just under a sea of ashes in his mind.
Every life taken was a voice inside his head. Calling for vengeance. Worse, calling for peace.
There would be no peace. Not for him, nor any other fallen angels trapped in hell.
Zed climbed over collapsed buildings and walked around exposed basements, those that weren’t filled with debris. Today the crater in his mind had an epicenter in one location and that location was nearby. He felt the call, quiet and insistent, yet piercing, metronomic . . . Like the pain, but opposite.
He reached a spot of particularly deep ash and broken stone near the wall and began digging toward the source of the metronomic call. If there was one thing to be said for his metal shell, it was strong. He easily lifted and tossed to the side large sections of road that had been thrown outward by the explosion. Unfortunately, much of the rubble was soft and crumbled under his fingers, rendering his strength useless when the debris of blown-up buildings crumbled into fine ash. Still, Zed did his best to keep his mind entirely focused on his task, ignoring the passage of time. And his digging eventually yielded fruit—his friend, the Lady, was soon revealed, buried under several layers of rozie skeletons, some of which retained pieces of synthetic skin that weren’t burned off. He felt them staring at him as he pulled their bodies apart and tossed the pieces to the side. Their empty stares were the worst of accusations—they knew who he was: one of them. He couldn’t pretend to be more under that gaze.
The Lady almost freed, Zed found himself picking up a rozie skull and staring deeply into its eye sockets. The inside of the skull was a blackened mess where a brain once had been suspended in a nutritious solution and surrounded by highly proficient technology designed to keep it alive—no, preserved was a better word—far longer than it should be.
Madness gripped Zed briefly. He felt the feral instinct washing over him like a wave of barking hyenas, rabidly biting everything in their path. His fingers tightened on the skull until it began bending inward, then cracked. Zed split the thing in two and screamed at it, “I am not one of you!”
The skull didn’t reply.
Disgusted with himself, Zed dropped the skull. Of course he was one of them. How could he deny it when he acted like that?
The Lady shifted, stabbing her legs into rubble and rozie alike while pushing herself upward. Once freed, she turned and faced Zed, the woman’s face etched on her front as expressionless as ever, but she nodded her rectangular body in appreciation. Zed smiled and rested his hand on her surface.
“I’m glad that you made it out alive. I’m sorry it took me so long to get here—even across the valley, the feeling from this explosion nearly made me . . .” He shivered. “So, the boy did choose to run toward the storm rather than away from it?” A spike of concern shot through Zed with the thought that the technomancer boy might have destroyed himself in the explosion. It would be far from the first time that Zed’s prey died before he could secure it, but that didn’t make failure any easier.
The Lady made subtle movements with her trunk body as she and Zed climbed out of the wreckage of the home and began walking toward the edge of Fort’s crater. She clacked her lid several times emphatically.
Zed didn’t know how he understood the Lady—but they’d worked together long enough that he couldn’t deny something in his head was translating her motions and sounds into comprehendible ideas, if not words. Often Zed worried that, somehow, his madness allowed him to do this; if this were true, the resultant dilemma of keeping his friend or curing his madness created an itch inside his head that agitated his feral instinct. Zed shook his head violently to rid himself of the thought and help him pay more attention to the Lady. She’d explained how she’d skulked about the settlement, eventually finding the boy. She’d agitated local rozies into attacking him and his friends with the intent of flushing the boy out and separating him for easier capture, but he’d blown up some large particle batteries before she succeeded.
Explains the static feeling in this area, Zed thought. Although that’s not so different from being empty . . . White noise is a different kind of emptiness.
A few more clacks from the Lady. Zed scowled. “He’s surely gone?”
The Lady stabbed the ground emphatically before nodding her trunk body and clacking several times, explaining that, between taking cover from the explosion and the great deal of electromagnetic discharge and signal interference created by the explosion, she’d lost the boy, but she had every reason to believe he survived—he was driving directly toward the wall on some vehicle, ahead of the explosion, if only just.
“So what direction was he headed?”
The Lady clacked and motioned toward a nearby hole in the wall, then led the way. She and Zed wandered through the hole and out of the settlement’s crater and looked around. It didn’t take any time at all for Zed to find a totaled ATV, and shortly after that tire tracks leading around the walls of the dead settlement, hugging the forest. Zed narrowed his eyes and stalked forward, a suspicion lurking in heart. He’d made the mistake of telling the boy that Id had attacked his home, and if these tracks went all the way around the wall to the main road, then onto that road, the boy would be exactly on the path to Id.
But the technomancer boy wouldn’t be stupid enough to go anywhere near a rozie factory. Right?
The tracks nearly disappeared several times over harder patches of dirt, but Zed was fortunate near the end that the ATV had picked up some mud on its back tire, leaving a clear trail for a few feet that went onto the broken road leading away from the settlement. Zed stopped and stared down the road, mind running through his options.
The Lady rubbed a leg against Zed and clacked her lid. Zed rubbed her leg and shook his head slowly.
“No, that’s precisely where the fool’s headed. Whatever happens, I will claim what’s mine, and I will never be her pet again.”
\ END INTERLUDE
Copyright © 2023 by David Ludlow
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