StarFall Comics
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Metal Fire
#9 False Maria 03
Afternoon passed into twilight, twilight to evening, evening to a dark, dry night. A light breeze came off from his left somewhere, and the tickle of a cloth or curtain caught in it brushed the hairs on his arm ever few moments. The silence was broken only by the rhythmic thumping of his own heart and the mechanical monotony of the tap tap tapping of keyboard typing.
The night dragged on slowly in the way it does when you're lying awake in bed waiting for Christmas morning. He held very still, listening to the typing, desperate for a change in its regularity. And he tried hard not to breathe quicker when that change came. Almost unnoticeable at first, but surely. The tapping dragged between taps, the space between keypresses growing longer and longer, until they stopped altogether.
He was left alone with the crushing sound of his rapidly beating heart and the whisper rasp of his breathing.
He didn't move right away. He stayed still, waiting, to see if the typing would resume, as if the person responsible would start awake suddenly. Or was testing him. But he stayed still even more. And he counted seconds to count minutes and when he lost count trying to keep track, he waited even longer. Just to be sure.
And only when he was sure, did Ed Babbage open his eyes. Not exactly open. One eye was amazingly sore, and kept skipping from blurriness to stark focus. The other wouldn't open at all, swollen shut.
Nearly two days ago, he had been abducted from his apartment and beaten to an inch of his life. Or, more correctly, his limp unconcious body had been abducted from the remains of his exploding apartment and he was beaten to an inch of his life while tied down in a chair. If you're going to do something, go all the way.
He had feigned unconciousness, trying to think of a way out of this predicament. It wasn't to big stretch on his acting skills. He had been unconciousness for a good stretch of time. Fading in and out, not really sure if he was awake or not, he hadn't felt this way since high school. On the plus side, less vomiting was involved.
He noted he was in a different chair than before, this was one of the crappy plastic metal types you find at thrift stores as part of an unmatched dining set. His legs were tied to the chair, and his arms were tied behind him, causing an annoying ache in his shoulders. If he twisted his head, he could almost see the ropes binding his wrists. He felt the knots with his fingers, and silently thanked his parents for forcing him through boy scouts as a child.
Gritting his teeth, he yanked at the ropes, feeling the knot slip. Yanked again, more space appearing between the ropes and his wrist. The fibres were cutting hard into his skin, but this time, he had enough leverage to barely get the end of the rope between two fingers. A tug here and a pull there, and the ropes fell. His arms were free.
The first he did was rub his hands and arms. They hurt like hell. Then he went about getting the ropes off his legs. He stopped once, listening, but the only sound he heard was the breeze and himself. Less than a minute later, he was standing, free.
Less then a minute after that, he was in the bathroom, taking a long, long piss. His bladder eternally thanked him.
He deliberately avoided looking into the mirror. He couldn't imagine how it could possibly look worse than it felt. If it was true, he didn't know if he could stomach it. He did take a moment to spit up a tooth, and wash the sticky dried blood that matted some of his hair.
Coming out of the bathroom, he let his vision focus to the darkness of the apartment, focusing on the mountain of computers and monitors and televisions stacked on and around the desk arcoss what passed as the living room. With the only light the flickering colors cast from the screens, you wouldn't be far off in guessing there was a teenager slumped in front of the keyboards, possibly asleep from working much too long.
Not too far off.
Eddy figured his first priority was to get the hell out of there before his abductor realized he was free. His stomach had other ideas. He honestly couldn't remember if he'd eaten in the past couple days. Or more correctly, been fed. Once in the kitchen, his appetite was willing to overlook the squalid selection in the cupboards and fridge, and soon he was enjoying a peanut butter and mayonaisse sandwich and a refreshing glass of warm, flat rootbeer. He was considering helping himself to the half empty box of sugary cereal, but the smell of the carton of milk seemed to lean more toward the curdled cheese area than he was willing to risk.
His hunger sated, he came out of the kitchen slowly, a bit worried his abductor might have been roused. He needn't have worried. With a bit of courage, and what might be growing limp, he walked right over to the unconsious form. Even his heavy footsteps weren't enough to get any sort of reaction from the girl.
A girl.
Even now, Eddy wasn't so sure about that. Here, up close, in better light, it was still hard to wrap his head around it. A teenage girl, it was fairly obvious, she wore not a scrap of clothing. She had shoulder length hair she liked to tied back. She had budding breasts that didn't need a bra just yet, but obviously would a couple of months down the road. She even had the lump of a callous on a finger of her right hand, the kind someone gets when they write or draw a lot.
Her skin shined silver the way a pop can does. Her breathing was more like the low whir of an electric motor. And where her arms met her shoulders, he could make out the sliver of space where the plates fit together. Without thinking, he reached out and touched her shoulder, her skin sterile and smooth, with just a hint of regular bumps or edges, like scales maybe.
A robot. A robot that looked like a girl.
This kind of thing was only supposed to happen in comic books, but there she was. Hunched over, arms crossed onto one of the keyboards before her, head tucked to one side, eyes closed. The most amazing thing he'd ever seen.
And she almost killed him. Twice. Sheesh.
He touched her shoulder again, boggled at the feel of her skin or shell or whatever it was. She didn't seem to notice. He put his whole hand on her. Nothing. Then he gave her a bit of a shake. She didn't even change the rhythm of her breathing. Was she sleeping? Do robots sleep? He shook her harder, this time almost pushing her off the desk. The only response was the blip and flicker of the computer monitors as the screensavers were turned off by the jostling of the mice and keys.
She must have worked herself into exhaustion. Eddy noticed it the night before too, when his hunger and thirst had dragged him from the pits of unconciousness. At first he was worried about waking the girl for a drink, worried she would smack him around again, but soon he realized he could probably conk her on the side of the head with a shovel without interrupting her beauty sleep.
After a couple hours, she would wake up and go right back to work, if last time was any yardstick. But for the meantime, Eddy frowned, his only company would be his bruises, and with any luck, he would be soon far, far away from here. Looking at the screen, he hoped she'd be more interested in whatever it was she was working on then trying to find...
Eddy looked at the screen. The computer screen in front of him. Then the one beside it. The others around, in all sizes.
Oh, he thought.
Oh shit.
Kimberly Roberts dreamed.
She dreamed she was seven. Or six. On summer vacation, playing in a park, on a checkered picnic cloth laid out under a sky filled to brimming with puffy white clouds. She had new presents. Her favourite toys when she was young. New legos. The kind with gears and rubber bands that you could make into moving cars and things.
She dreamed she could hear her mother to one side. Trying to get her to eat something. Chicken sandwiches and apple pie in tupperware bowls. Lids that made farting noises when they opened and made Kimberly laugh. She ignored her mother's half hearted scolding, indistinct compared to the building blocks she was playing with.
She dreamed her father was all smiles. Let her play, he urged, and gave Kimberly more of the legos. More blocks and pieces. Kimberly giggled.
She dreamed her mother was getting more desperate. Calling her name.
Calling her name.
Calling her.
Calling.
"...ake..."
A pop and hiss, the sound speakers make when they get used for the first time. Kimberly groggily squeezed her eyes, feeling sleep being dragged away from her. She felt so tired.
Tired. When was the last time she felt tired. She didn't even know she could feel tired anymore.
"Up! Up!"
Her mother's voice, already fading into that unreality dreams become when you wake up. Except for Kimberly, they drowned in system startups and program resets. Her mind reorganized itself, blinking on. The voice being recorded and processed and analyzed.
Male and desperate. Familiar. And closer than it should be.
"Up! Come on come on! Wake up!"
Her eyes snapped open. Literally.
She noted a few things fairly quickly. That it was late at night. The exact time appeared at the edge of her vision subconciously. That she couldn't move. System settings scrolled half noticed, all operational yet non responsive. That the man she had tied up was free. Sitting beside her. That the computer monitors in front of her were on.
An operating system she'd seen only once before, all bleeding edges and spiral logic. Micro universes birthing and dying in imagined binary processes, all organized into a psychological directory structure. Only once before, but she recognized it. As she had then.
It was her. It was her mind.
"You fuck."
"Listen, you have to listen to me..."
"You fuck you fuck you fuck!" she screamed at him. "I should have killed you! I should have killed you! I should have flattened your head on the floor I should never have stopped!"
"This isn't..."
Her vision took a red tint, everything derezzed into simplified geometrical blocks. Distance were measured in seconds from anything, objects were represented by weak points and pounds per square inch required to deform it.
"You're dead! You're fucking dead!"
"Greg? I think we have a problem."
Gregory Reeves blink furiously, digging himself out of the half sleep had fallen into. Already his back was aching from the uncomfortable position he had almost dozed off in.
The clock on the wall said it was the wee hours of the morning, just late enough to start calling it early the next day. Though you couldn't tell it from the featureless room and the unflinching flourescents. A timesheet somewhere would justify this as another long night of unpaid overtime for a vice president somewhere. An under the table paycheck from a nearly nameless party would justify it for Gregory and the two programmers he regularly supervised.
Getting up, he walked across the room to the desk of a twenty something whose name he couldn't remember. He managed to mutter something that sounded like an appropriate question.
The kid directed his attention to the screen, specifically to a telnet window with scrolling variables and status updates. Heavy traffic on the wire.
"What am I looking at?"
"System memory usage for the upper consiousness."
"What?" Gregory was wide awake, watching the numbers spike.
"Hey, what's going on?" called the other tech, across the room. "Emote systems just went over to red."
The numbers starting reorganizing themselves, scrolling by at terrifying speeds. Gregory's stomach started to do flip flops as he realized what they meant.
"She's awake."
"What?"
"She's awake!" Gregory desperately tapped the kid's screen. "She's consious. Why did you wake her?"
"I didn't wake her!"
"She's definately awake! Look at those upper cognitive processes!"
"Oh fuck, is she pissed!" from across the room. "I'm completely in the red here! Her reflexes just switched to military mode!"
The kid was frantically typing away at his keyboard, switching between programming windows and status updates.
"I don't understand it," he said weakly. "Her movement is still locked down, her power's still in standby. She shouldn't be able to move."
"She can still trace us!" Gregory almost yelled. "Hit her with morphine emulation. Flood the braincase with oxygen." With any luck, that would effectively drug the system, giving them enough time to put it back into heavy REM mode.
The red tint washed away suddenly, replaced by a pastel blue. Everything Kimberly saw suddenly shifted into shades of blue, threatening to mix into each other. Caught midway through her tirade, she shut her eyes, and growled.
"Damnit, no! No!" the man's voice spun away from her, and was followed by speedy tapping on at least two different keyboards nearby. He was doing it again, right in front of her. He was raping her mind.
She couldn't think straight. She couldn't move her arms. They felt like lead weights at her shoulders, like she would slump over any second. Her head was filled with cotton, making thoughts thick...
Cotton... Kimberly...
Calling her? Daddy?
A stream of words against the blackness of her shut eyelids, and she felt letters being dragged back together again. Her thoughts weren't as muddy anymore, just quieter. Like whispers.
"Come on, open your eyes. Please."
Doing so, she found the blue splash still on everything, only the shadowed edges of anything being visible in a darker hue. Her tormentor sat nearby, facing her again. She snarled at him, but felt almost impotent, her rage tucked away somewhere.
"My head..."
"It's not me." said the shadow. "You have to believe me, its not me."
"Fucking liar."
"Think about it, why would I? Even if it was me the first time. Look, I'm free, I got out of the ropes. I could have just left. I should have just left."
She didn't reply. She didn't get angry. She wanted to get angry. She wanted to kill him, right now. But the blue seemed to wash over everything. She hadn't felt this way since she had tried those mushrooms with Sally Bickham in junior high.
He did make sense. He seemed to, anyway. She almost killed him last time. She almost killed him when she blew up his place. No way anyone was stupid enough to do it again, right?
Then again, he seemed like the stupid type.
Why was she thinking so slow?
She tried to think back. Only remembering wasn't the same as remembering used to be. Now the flashes and triggers of memories were filenames for detailed logs. If she wanted too, she could switch over to a state of photographic memory.
She thought back to last night. This night? When had she fallen asleep? There. A couple hours ago. She was working, typing. Then she fell asleep. She didn't even know she could sleep anymore. She remembered he was tied up. Distinctly. Then how did he...?
She skimmed ahead, increasing framerate. There, there it was, when her mind was opened up to the outside. Like a door being opened, and a flood of people wandering around and touching everything.
She could see it all now, now that she was looking for it.
She could see everything about her they were trying to change.
Or erase.
And she could see the name of the man responsible. Hidden in the recesses of her mind, amid logic bombs of code and binary.
"Hamilton."
She opened her eyes, the haze of blue still there. The man's shape had turned to look at her. The bottom of her vision was blurred, the pixel resolution smudged and undefined.
"Are you okay?" he said.
"I'm crying." Kimberly whispered. Hamilton had done this to her. Was doing this to her. She could still feel it, the dirty awful dragging of findernails against her thoughts. Clumsy changes to her head. Hamilton was trying to finish her father's job. Finish making her into a monster.
The bottom of her vision squirmed, shifting colors like a magnet next to a tv. She could feel the tears slide down her blue steel cheek.
"I'm crying," she repeated. "I'm not the monster they want me to be. I won't let them make me the monster they want me to be." She looked at the blue shape before her, his face only distiguishable by an image stored in her short term memory. "I won't let them. I'll need you to help me."
"It's not working. Its not working," the kid said. He rolled around in his chair, knocking away papers off his desk. "If I can find a base version on CD, I can dual boot the system and force unconciousness."
Gregory was no longer hovering over the kid's shoulder. He was at the desk beside him, slamming away at a keyboard, watching with horror as their latest uploaded system patch not only wasn't updating the intended software, but was being disassembled.
"She's taking it apart!" a yell from behind him. "She's taking it apart, she's decompiling it to source code." A pause, then, "Oh shit. Oh shit, I commented that code."
Gregory wasn't listening to the others. He had already figured out what was actually happening to their source code. And like the other two programmers, he had left comments in the code. Like reminders and notes and cheat sheets to make it easier to understand the structure of the system. Dates and times and names.
And he was watching it being unravelled and decrypted.
In a few minutes, the most powerful mobile weapon on the planet would know who had been fucking with her brain. And they'd just spent nearly a year making her a more aggressive, violent murder machine.
"Purge it!" Gregory spat throught gritted teeth. "Purge it all!"
"I can't! My admin access is being assigned to someone else."
"Then purge the patch. Don't let it be decoded. Rename the files and then erase it while you're still the original user."
Gregory's screen blinked and went black. Disconnected. He heard the telltale winking sound from two other screens. Disconnected.
"I just got booted," said the kid, surprised.
"The file?"
"I... I got it. I deleted it. I think she might have copy pasted maybe a couple dozen lines, but I trashed it before she got anything important."
That remained to be seen.
Gregory held his head in his hands, sweat racing from his pores. His stomach was worse then ever before, it knew how much trouble they were in. He knew it was only going to get worse.
He left some instructions to the two programmers to go through the offline logs. Find out what went wrong, find out where they screwed up.
Gregory went into his office.
He had to make a phone call.
Author's Notes
So, this is the third issue of my first four issue Metal Fire arc. It was written a couple months after writing issue 8, but never posted. And other than passing it to a friend for some basic grammar and spelling checks, is exactly as originally presented. So, though it doesn't carry the REPOST imprint, this is an issue I haven't written recently.
Which means, of course, I haven't incorporated any of the excellent critical advice I've been receiving :) And that brings us to...
Letters Page. Tom Russel has been kind enough to review issue eight of Metal Fire. If you haven't read over it, you can read it here.
First, yes, I have worked in a cubical environment in the past, though not as a manager. It is a little impersonal, but I can't believe that all managers are just trying to pass off more work and terrible deadlines to their charges just for better stock options and more golf time.
Tom makes a couple good points concerning issue eight. The pacing I'm particularly happy with, and glad it worked well. I worry though because (as you're sure to notice, most likely having read the above issue before getting to this point) this issue seems to hit all the same beats.
Worse yet, not only do we have the switching of point of views, but this time it *does* jump "in and out of the room". Hopefully it comes across as not too jarring. :)
Next point: Kimberly. I like where Eddy is, in terms of character, I'm pretty comfortable with him. I'm trying to write Kimberly as a character who's not only been through a lot, but who has had her brain turned into a computer program, and then had that computer program messed with to be a robotic weapon of sorts. As if I, as a man, wouldn't have enough trouble writing a teenage girl to begin with :)
So, expect her characterization to be all over the place. Well, truth be told, until I get more experience in writing in general, expect everyone's characterization to be all over the place :) But for Kimberly in particular, I want to make it more all over the place. Because of what's happened to her, I have a built in story excuse for her to suddenly shift moods, ideas, etc. Cheating, yes :P
More Reeves here, and he'll appear again next issue. Poe will be in next issue in person, as well. Hamilton will only be mentioned and (sorry Tom), still no Val. The nanites and Val's subplot is going to be moving, but at a snails crawl in comparsion... so I'm experimenting in trying to keep that popping up without making it's (and Val's) appearences suddenly and obvious ("oo, remember this, oops, its gone again"). Clumsy attempts for a bit, I apologize in advance :)
I will endevour to have anyone who appears in person be a little more than one dimensional. It will, in all lieklyhood, come across as forced next issue, but I'll figure it out eventually.
And finally, Tom's observation of the dangerous dichotomies and moral extensions... damn, more good stuff I didn't intend, but may have to keep in mind when drafting future issues :)