Symphony of Destruction (The Spindown Saga, #1) Page 4

  “Hello Hannah. I thought I should check on you. Is there anything you need?”

  “...”

  “Hannah?”

  “Uh yeah. There’s a few things I need... Like a way out of this fucking hell-hole of a prison! Like you to deal with this shit and get these bodies out of here for one thing! Like maybe you could stop being such a pussy and actually do something useful for a change and actually help me! What the hell kind of robot are you!? Aren’t you supposed to, like, help people and make sure we don’t end up in this kind of bull-shit situation?! God!”

  “Yes, of course Hannah. Of course, I will help you.”

  “Oh ‘of course’ you’ll help me! Of course you will HELP me?! Are you fucking serious? God! How could you let us get into this mess? This is all your fault, you useless can of wires! You and all your useless robot friends will always take care of everything, won’t you!? And look where it got us! Floating through space like a ghost that won’t die, but we’re already dead aren’t we? We’ve got no life! Everything I ever loved is gone! And then you keep me locked up in this bull-shit cage, away from even my own bed, my own things, my studio and everything, surrounded by these disgusting nasty rotten bodies!? You are a monster! I fucking HATE you, now just leave me the fuck alone will you?!”

  “These epoxy coatings are for protective purposes. I thought you were aware of that, and...”

  “Of course I’m AWARE! I’m not an idiot! Maybe I just don’t particularly LIKE being fucking stuck in the same room with a bunch of dead bodies for the rest of my life! Did you ever think of that?!”

  “Um, yes, well perhaps...”

  “Can’t you just get RID of this shit? I mean come on, this is ridiculous! How can you expect anyone to not go insane with this shit all around, night and day?!”

  Brother Anderson began to process an inquiry as to whether it might be safe to attempt to remove the carapaces and the remains they held, but he said nothing. Hannah took his silence as further indication of Brother Anderson’s lack of empathy, and filled the silence with a slight change of subject.

  “Look, if I have to live like this, I really need a drink. Can’t you at least get me into the liquor cabinet? This stupid machine refuses to serve me.”

  Brother Anderson had previously noticed in the system events, several repeated failed attempts on Hannah’s part to access a variety of alcoholic beverages. Hannah was in fact, based on her age, eligible for alcohol consumption, but this fact had never been officially signed off by her legal agent as per the usual policies and procedures. She had never really been interested in drinking or partying, and when her previous birth-date had rolled around, she had not bothered to remind her mother to activate her permissions. Now though, Brother Anderson was unsure if granting access was a wise idea. He knew that stressful situations could cause substance abuse, and Hannah’s current state of mind did not help to alleviate his worries.

  “Please Brother Anderson, let me have a drink.” she continued.

  With a direct request such as this, Brother Anderson felt slightly more compelled to comply. He also calculated that his relational standing in Hannah’s perception was rather low. Dangerously so, actually. It was important for them to have a certain level of trust, as this lowered stress levels and would enable them to work better together. They would have to learn to work together more and more if they were to have any hope for the future. He knew that the state of the ship was tenable, and could begin to deteriorate at any time. He promptly flipped the appropriate setting, giving his own name as authorizing agent, then addressed Hannah, “try it now.”

  Hannah jumped up, amidst a flurry of wrappers, rushed over to the dispensary, and ordered a serving of Roth’s Vodkatini. She genuinely laughed out loud as the machine delivered the small glass bottle.

  Chapter 13

  Several Roth’s later, Hannah was in an unusually good mood. She decided that what she really needed now was some loud music. It turned out that the dispensary contained an embedded full system interface, so she was able to access all her personal files. She would even be able to review her own recordings; maybe even in edit mode, though she didn’t feel like playing around with that right now. Instead she selected an old playlist she had made shortly after arriving on Ventas-341, it was all neoprot and jar-core, the perfect styles for drowning out the world behind a wall of hard beats and grinding noise.

  Loud neoprot had always been a bodily catalyst for Hannah. Something about its beats and structure caused her to falsely believe that she could gracefully move her body in a way that aligned visually with the sound patterns. This idea had been proven dead wrong on numerous occasions, as witnessed and attested to by both Suzzanne and Cherise, but in this hollow mess hall pounding with ripping and sizzling crashes at nearly deafening levels, and with Roth’s reverberating in her brain, the normally repressed instinct took over, and without remembering a beginning or a decision, Hannah found herself whirling, gyrating, and flailing in mock synchronicity with the music. For a moment, she forgot about everything, and the mess hall and the ship itself and the events and pain and fear and loneliness of the past few months faded away into a pale grey that was overcome by the brilliant light of motion and rhythm.

  Then she tripped over a bloated epoxy coated corpse stuck to the floor, and her momentary illusion came to a grinding halt. Her drunken attempt to stop her fall resulted only in making it worse. She had contacted the carapace hard with her right foot, then attempted to balance her momentum with her left foot, but in her drunken state she lacked the accuracy to correctly pull off the save, and instead her left ankle twisted under her in a flash of pain, and she fell to the deck, banging her hip and head.

  The room seemed to swim around her, and she felt that it was pawing at her attention, bluntly but steadily like a cat with a ball of yarn. She was unwilling to let the fuzzy unreality escape her, and felt an anger toward the room for trying to distract her from her brilliant escapism.

  “No! You can’t!” she screamed toward the emptiness of the mess hall, “I won’t let you!” Her eyes darted frantically around her, searching for a non-existent point of focus for her rage. They landed momentarily on that small dark spot on the grey wall, that so often captivated her. Then she noticed something new, and in a moment of clarity that can come only after several Roth’s, she saw the solution. Of course, it had been there all along, and it was so obvious now. Just below and to the left of that small dark spot, an air duct stared at her like a grinning know-it-all - “ESSSSCAPE!” it whispered through bared teeth. It was a snake. Its body held the way out, the end of all her problems. She would crawl into the snake and let it absorb her into its own body. She would be eaten and digested and taken from this dark, barren world, to emerge as a greater being in another existence.

  She scrambled through cupboards and found some type of nondescript cooking utensil, which she used as a hammer against the teeth of the monster, then clawed at it with her own hands until its mouth fell away from the wall, dripping with blood. In a moment of foresight, she stuffed her clothing full of Omega Bars, surely a worthy fuel of the gods in the afterlife. Then she entered the mystical portal head first and clawed her way forward inch by inch into the dark unknown.

  From inside a metallic serpent, the beats and squeals of the music seemed to run together into an indiscernible rainbow of meaningless echo. Even the tempo itself seemed to slow to a crawl, each moment stretching out as if to extend down the length of the snaking gullet. The snake spun her over onto her back, unable to progress forward, but it didn’t matter. She was already in the gut. She had penetrated the mind of the snake. She now inhabited its thoughts, saw only through its eyes. She floated above the grey carapace laden mess hall floor and could only laugh at its insignificance, its smallness. She laughed and laughed and laughed, with a menacing laughter reserved only for comic book villains; a laughter built upon a familiar neoprot beat.

  Chapter 14

  In the med bay, Brother Anderson was ana
lyzing the results of another hull damage report. He had begun running these daily, and with each day, the overall hull stability was becoming marginally worse. The continued vibrations of the main power system were gradually, slowly, tearing at the rips in the ship’s superstructure. It was not yet anywhere close to critical levels. Automated SRS reports didn’t even register a threat. Yet, Brother Anderson had a sense of dread, that eventually, it would become a real problem. He, and the ship’s remaining two passengers would be stripped of this protective shell of a ship, and left for dead in the vast expanse of space.

  That didn’t really matter to Brother Anderson, personally. He could operate in the vacuum of space just as well as anywhere. His processing capacity would not be affected at all. In their current orbit, he could generate enough “solar” power to keep his battery powered to a minimal level. There was a chance that his chassis might begin to freeze up, as the joints became stiff. There would be no corrosion, but their internal lubricants would likely freeze. This fact did not worry him enough to bother checking on the mechanical and thermal properties of the lubricants he knew he contained, because he felt a strange nonchalance about his chassis. Particularly since his taking on the role of Central Ship Ops, he had noticed an increasing sense that his chassis was not really him. He was a distributed system, with processing cycles taking place in various hardware components spread across the ship.

  He no longer fit inside his mechanical “body”. If worse came to worse, and the ship disintegrated around him, he would lose processing resources. He would have to cut functionality and would become severely hampered for the type of multiprocessing he was now capable of, but he could purge all the ship control routines and scale back to more of his original programming. He would not lose his operating systems or his awareness. He may even have to reduce clock speed to conserve energy, but he would continue to exist in a slowed state. He would continue to perform as a rational being, aware of the world around him.

  He wondered then. What of this man lying in front of him? The default values of his original programming caused Brother Anderson to orient himself facing the nearest human, and in the case of a medical patient, to stand facing them at a distance of sixty to ninety centimeters. It had been determined that this was the optimal distance and stance to aid in patient and guest comfort. It was supposed to convey a perception of calm authority and trustworthiness.

  The man lying there on the bed, under his care, continued to show no signs of responsiveness. His body betrayed no movement, save the autonomic pulsings of breath, heartbeat, and numerous other glandular and organic impulses. Electrodes relayed signals to the patient monitoring system, which Brother Anderson kept on his list of constantly supervised processes and feeds. Nevertheless, he stood here, redundantly watching with his synthetic eyes, as the patient lay nearly motionless.

  Chapter 15

  Blackness covered Colin like a warm blanket. No, not a warm one. Rather, a blanket of no temperature. Not cold. Not warm.

  “What blanket? - I don’t feel a blanket.” Colin thought to himself. He moved his hand to touch the blanket that may or may not have been there. Nothing happened. He felt nothing. He was not sure if his hand actually moved. Was he strapped down? Was he drugged? What was going on? Where the hell was he?

  He tried to feel his hand again. He tried to move his other hand to bring his hands together. He could not tell what position his hands were in. He felt as though perhaps he had no hands. But surely he had hands! He remembered having hands! But he knew how hands were supposed to feel, and he did not feel those feelings. He started to panic.

  “Am I dead?” he wondered. “Is this what dead is like? But, no. That doesn’t make any sense.” He began to talk sense into himself. To calm his nerves, he just needed to think this through. “If I were dead I’d either be somewhere, or I would not be at all. I would not be just nowhere like this!” He tried to listen for clues. At first there was nothing. Not a sound. But then...

  “Was that something? Did I just hear something? It sounds like wind.” Maybe it was just his imagination. Maybe not.

  “Maybe grey.” Wind is the “grey” of the sound world. It is indistinguishable from all the sounds at once, or no sound at all.

  “What a weird thought!” he laughed, without laughing, but the phrase seemed to catch in his mind, tumbling around, and echoing.

  “Maybe grey, maybe grey.”

  It was somehow soothing. The unhearable sound of wind began to fade out, and cross over into a grey light. A wet mist rolled across his mind, smudging the words. Each triplet of syllables distorted into an ever evolving cloud billow, superimposed upon the last, a pattern stretching backwards and forwards through what he could only assume was some kind of space-time field. He saw the clouds in his mind at once, racing faster and faster, and simultaneously frozen, as if they had not moved in countless eons. He knew each cloud to be a reflection of himself. They became an endlessly receding set of parallel mirrors, reflecting his image back and forth to one another across a non-existent room. But he had no hands. No body. He was only a face. His hair was blurred. His teeth were somehow visible, though behind a strange expression on closed lips. His eyes were closed, sealed. They were grown over. They looked like skin, and felt like moss. His mysterious teeth seemed to glow. They emitted a soft light, a lighter shade of grey that slowly grew brighter, yet somehow more faint. He was tired. He was very, very tired.

  Chapter 16

  It’s Tuesday morning. Scranton, Tommy, and I are on bulkhead maintenance duties in sector A. Tommy has his radio blaring too loudly and is dancing around like an idiot, playing air guitar on a long-handled 3-inch wrench. I can't stop fantasizing about the ass-kicking I'm going to give him and the boys at tonight's poker game. I need to recoup last week's loss. I know for a fact that Tommy has been cheating, and now he owes me back. The radio interrupts Tommy's guitar solo, cutting over to comms automatically as we get a call from Bryce, the shift C engineering foreman.

  “We've got a fire on deck A-17! You guys go take care of that!” Tommy scrambles to adjust the volume down as the radio shrieks annoyingly.

  “We're on it,” he replies, then looking at us and holstering his wrench, “Shiiiit. I hate fires.”

  “You got that right Tommy,” we agree and hurriedly start making our way to deck A-17.

  Tommy darts into the corridor and starts off at a brisk jog with me right behind him, and Scranton tailing me.

  “This is getting bloody ridiculous,” mutters Scranton. Since Scranton really only ever talks about one thing, I immediately catch his meaning. It’s always the same with Scranton, complaining about how the ship is riddled with “known issues” and yet management won’t give us the equipment or funds to fix things properly. I mean, I get his point. He is partly right. But where exactly does he expect the equipment to come from? It’s not like we can just stop in at the local hardware store and buy stuff, or get it Fed-Exed over. We’re in deep space for Pete’s sake.

  Halfway down the corridor, the yellow flashing emergency lights kick on and a buzzer sounds. We start running faster. Scranton trips on his own boots and nearly runs right into my backside.

  “Geez man, what's your rush? It's only a fire,” I kid. But then it dawns on me that the ship is outfitted with a really slick fire suppression system that's supposed to douse any fire within 3 seconds, so actually it is kinda strange that we would have even gotten this call. I run a little faster and pass Scranton, arriving first at the hatch to deck A-17. Through the small plasglass viewpane, I can't help noticing the flames engulfing the entire room.

  “Shiiiit is right.”

  “What the HELL!” yells Scranton.

  “What they expect us do with this shit?!” responds Tommy in turn. There is very little we can do. The whole deck is on fire. Literally. It's not just that there is a fire in the room. The room itself appears to be on fire. The floor is burning. The walls are burning. The few scant controls and supplies within the room are bur
ning. There is a thick white foam spraying out from 3 nozzles on the ceiling - you know the stuff that's meant to smother out fires? Yeah, it's also burning! How is this possible? By now the hatch in front of me is starting to glow red, and looks like it may burst into flame any second. I quickly back away.

  Just then, there is a strange “ping” sound to my left. It reverberates at frequencies simultaneously almost-too-high and almost-too-low to hear. There it is again. It's coming from the corridor wall. That side of the corridor butts onto a stack of small cableways against the main hull bulkhead. The eight inch thick reinforced steelcrete hull of the forward bow section. My body reacts faster than my brain, and I realize I am already running.

  “Run!” I yell. Too late. The third “ping” is accompanied by death itself. A small portion of corridor wall erupts in a ferocious attack faster than any nightmare. Hunks of flaming molten steel spew forth with shotgun-like velocity, right into the defenseless bodies of my two co-workers.

  I feel as though my body is made of jelly as I am no longer running, but now flailing like a rag doll headlong down the corridor, sliding away from the horror behind me, but contorting my neck to maintain visual contact in a subconscious refusal to look away. I see fiery shards ripping through both Tommy and Scranton. Scranton seems to explode, his body suddenly replaced by roughly body-shaped flames like some kind of elemental demon. His death comes quickly, his body burned up before it can hit the floor. Tommy is not so lucky.