Nilologue - Part 3

"Bec, look what I found, fuck, can you not shine that right in my eyes?"

"Sorry." I said, heart hammering, and pointed the torch back towards the ground. Simon knuckled his eyes for a moment, then switched his own flashlight back on.

"Check it out." In his other hand, starkly lit by the white light, was a tangle of broken wires and shattered metal, glistening in the triangular glow. I blinked, and it took shape. Not broken, but meshed. Not tangled, but dangling. Not wires, but legs. Legs of thin tubing, left half-exposed for flexibility, wrapped ducting to avoid joints, legs that ended in little pneumatic suction cups, a squat rectangular body sheared in half, a tiny head of faceted cameras, hanging limp like a stunted seventh leg. The dead lenses sparkled under the torch beam, a different flavour of black than the still air around us. "I found it draped on the floor, a bit that way." said Simon. "I reckon it fell from above, shattered by the impact. Ingrid will have a field day."

I had pointed my torch the way Simon had gestured, seeing nothing but another diagonal row of metal cylinders stretching away. I turned back, careful to keep the beam pointing up and away from Simon's face while he talked.

The torch light bounced. Bounced back at me, from something that sucked in the light and drizzled it back over us. The softest mist, reflecting off of black glass. Glass discs, about the size of plates. The lenses whirred. As Simon fell silent, I could hear the click-click of the cameras as they adjusted to the glare of my torch.

Simon pressed a button on his torch, plunging us both into gloom. A sweaty hand wrapped around my wrist, squeezed my own frozen fingers until I let go. My torch went spinning, spinning into the dark, rotating like a collapsing lighthouse. My eyes drank in the moment as the beam flashed above our heads: legs like splintered gantries, blistered panels of armour, a twisted head festooned with clusters of twitching glass eyes, half the lenses rotating to follow the torch as it bounced and glittered among the forest of pillars, the other half locked onto our current position. Hydraulic pistons and suction cups the size of my head. Serrated blades. The snub-nosed violence of a gun turret over it's shoulder. And then we were running, Simon's hand breaking my knuckles, every clanging footfall a message, here we are, here we are, here we are.

I hadn't a hope to ever make it back by myself, but Simon knew the way like his own heartbeat. He had taken the broken device under one arm, and practically had me tucked under the other. We fled into the metallic night, doors slamming open and shut, rattlings in the walls, vibrations thumping up through the floor. Were we pursued? Were we hunted like? No way to tell. No need to know. Just run. I was breathless the whole way back, first from terror, then with haste.

Our flight ended in the gleam of lights, coming around the corner to meet us. The doorway was still open. We weren't stuck out here. Alone. With that.

Ingrid was sitting by herself at one of the far tables as we stumbled in. Simon remained standing, breathing heavily. I sat on one of the metal chairs, collapsed really, barely sucking down one lungful before needing the next.

"Back so soon?" said Ingrid. She was methodically stabbing at a cube of some brown-ish substance on a plate. "How'd you find it out in the halls Bec? Was it everything you ever - ooh, what's that?"

Ingrid abandoned the knife, the brown brick, and the conversation, scurrying over to Simon. She peered at the broken robot in his arms. "Some kind of... scout, I'd guess, maybe a servitor? Was this the whole thing, were there other parts around it? Others nearby?"

"Fucking - I'll say!" I finally got out, coughing with surprise. "Ingrid, we just got hunted down by this-" I coughed and spluttered some more. We were out there, risking our lives, barely making it back in one piece, and the sitters-and-quitters had already made plans to send you back before of five minutes. The nerve...

Simon gave Ingrid a run-down. She stopped him after a few sentences, found a black oblong device, and placed it between the two of them. And then had him start again, from the beginning. No, the very beginning, a painstaking account of every twist and turning taken. I got up before the recounting had reached the gargantuan cavern, to get Simon and myself a cup of water. Ingrid looked a little put-upon at my silent interruption, but said nothing. I only had two hands, to hold two cups, after all.

Ingrid placed her head sideways on the table once Simon had finished, staring at the black sightless camera lens without touching it. "If the larger one was armed," she began,

(the empty black hole of the gun turret barrel, lined up perfectly with my face)

"Then presumably these aren't just lost archival tools or anything like that. The larger one could be releasing these as scouts and... following them."

She gingerly turned over the broken robot with the tines of a nearby fork. It was, without a shred of doubt in my mind, entirely dead.

"It's broken." I said, trying to be helpful.

"Can never be too careful with these things," said Ingrid without looking my way. "I'll take it apart, right now."

"What, after Simon and I went to all that effort to bring it back, you're just going to smash it to pieces?" That got her to turn, and smile.

"Don't worry. Maybe if you took it apart, it would be worthless scrap. Isn't it lucky we all have different skills."

I just watched her leave, without either of us saying another word.

Simon left me sitting where I was, and got food. Lunch today was one of the big brown blocks that Ingrid had been stabbing at. It seemed something like a large compressed cube of bread crusts. Filling. Depressing. Simon shook his head at my plaintive expression.

"We've tried a bunch of times. Whenever something good comes for a day, we pull out dozens of meals but... it never lasts. There was this meat stuff that was just- really good. Well, it was good the first day. Less good the second time. Not so good the third time going down, and definitely not the fourth time, coming up." He grimaced, stabbing his crust-block with a fork. "I figure that this is supposed to be whatever I want, right? And if I want it again, I can just get it again. No need to store it for later, when it can be conjured up fresh every, single, time." each word punctuated with puncturing the offending brown cube in question, thunk thunk thunk.

We lapsed into silence, chewing, gulping water to wash it down, chewing some more.

"Ingrid wants to take the food-dispenser apart. Like everything that works around here, it's halfway to not. I say no. Gen says no. Not until we have a different, more reliable food supply. But, of course, if we had that then there'd be no reason to bother fixing this one." I thought back to what Gen had said about better food.

"Is that what you're looking for? Out there, I mean."

For a moment, I couldn't exactly recall the difference between in here, sitting at the metal mess hall table, and out there, in the corridors beyond the sliding doors.

Simon shrugged, "Maybe." He twisted in his chair, to look the way I was staring. Somewhere, a dark lens looked back at us. "That or just... anything. Food, sure. Tools, even better. Allies, maybe. Some fucking answers, for a change. Some way to fix this mess, the food, the pods."

I shuddered.

"Nobody should have to come out of a cryopod like mine."

"Oh, no." Simon turned back to look at me. "Yours is the first I've seen do anything like that. Most of the time..."

I pushed the half-shredded remains of lunch away, put my elbow on the table and rested my chin on my palm. "You're talking about these 'screamers'." Simon closed his eyes.

"I wish Jack hadn't - yes, I guess I am."

"What are they?"

"I'm not going to," started Simon. "they aren't," he tried again. Then sighed. "Look, I don't want to explain it to you, not here, not like this. If it was up to me, I'd prefer it if only I had to open the pods. Nobody else should really have to get involved, have to face it."

So obviously, I got myself involved.

The cryopod receiving area reminded me of the showers. Five large metal plinths dominated the far side of the long room, spaced evenly apart. On the floor in front of each plinth, the metal tiles sloped towards wide drainage grilles. On the low ceiling above each plinth was an adjustable telescopic mount, thick as a leg, supporting a thicket of cables and status screens and inscrutable control panels. The setup furthest to the left drooped, dark and deactivated. The plinth right in the centre had been badly scorched, and the one right next to that had been electronically disembowelled. Only two of the setups looked fully functional.

Simon saw how I glanced between the charred equipment, and the set that had been salvaged to bring me back to life.

"Don't worry about that." he said. "It's not like we are using more than one of these at a time. I think this place was built to churn through pods constantly, through-put you know. Now, well, that's not a priority any more."

"If you say so."

"I do. Alright Bec, you've seen it now, shall we head back and - no? Are you sure about - ok! Fine. Fine. Don't say I didn't warn you."

Simon put down the crowbar we had collected from Ingrid, and strode up to an intact plinth, the second from the left. He pulled the set of screens down to eye level, and rotated the whole setup to face the other way. Digging his fingers into the plastic behind a keypad, he popped the case open with a practised motion and twisted two wires together. The screens all flashed off, and began lighting up again. Simon reached into the control panel and held something down, while hammering the 'power' button as quickly as he could. The screens kept popping up REBOOTING messages, on and off and on again. "Sometimes this takes a few tries," said Simon, not letting up the button mashing. He hit PROVIDE ADMINISTRATOR CREDENTIALS two times, each time he had to undo the mess of wires in the back and start over. On the third attempt, the panels all clicked off except one. The main control screen was smothered with red text:

DATA BUS ERROR, REBOOTING...

REBOOT FAILED, ANALYSING...

ANALYSIS PAUSED, RECONNECT DATA BUS.

Simon just tapped CONTINUE until the red messages stopped appearing. "Alright. Now, we just browse for our next guest."

CONFIRM MANUAL SELECTION? (y/n)

NEXT AVAILABLE POD? (y/n)

CHECKING POD A16B-9...

POD A16B-9 CONTENTS: NON-VIABLE

PURGE? (y/n)

Simon hit 'yes' and 'next' before I realised what was happening.

CHECKING POD A16B-10...

POD A16B-10 CONTENTS: NON-VIABLE

PURGE? (y/n)

I grabbed his arm. He looked at me, finger poised above 'yes'.

"Bec. I told you. I would've preferred that nobody else gets involved in this."

"But, you're just - you're in here. Killing people."

"They're not. I mean, they are already dead. The system can't bring them back."

"But, I mean, you're just flushing them down with the fucking garbage? We could, you said all the systems were broken, maybe Ingrid could fix this. Or someone else. Just something!"

"Bec, listen to me. I know where you are going with this. But a non-viable pod is just. It's just dead slush in there."

There was a question on the tip of my tongue, and a sour taste in the back of my throat. Simon answered before I could ask. "Because I checked, Bec. That's how I know." He shifted his arm slightly. I let go.

PURGING...

NEXT POD? (y/n)

CHECKING POD A16B-11...

We were quiet for the next few minutes, except for the tapping of the confirmation key. Simon never went any faster, always carefully reading the message before interacting with the console. I went and sat down on the floor near the door, staring at the back of his boots. The screens started flickering, Simon

"Got one." I looked up.

POD A16B-45 CONTENTS: STATUS UNKNOWN

"Does that mean... it's good?"

"Well, no news is no news. Only one way to check."

RETRIEVING POD A16B-45

INVALID REQUEST. POD A16B-45 CONTENTS: STATUS UNKNOWN. RETRIEVAL CANCELLED

OVERRIDE CANCELLATION? (y/n)

OVERRIDE ACKNOWLEDGED

RETRIEVING POD A16B-45

STANDBY...

The plinth grumbled to life, with much clicking and squeaking of sticky mechanisms. Muffled clangs and hisses came from beneath our feet, and yellow hazard lights blinked up, marking the area that was about to open. The steel surface of the plinth parted down the middle, folding up like the covers of two books. The summoned cryopod rose into the open space. For a moment, I could see through the gap between the floor and the rising pod, a glimpse of a deep dark space lined with rails and tank-treads.

Clamps locked the cryopod into place, and articulated cables descended from the control panels, writhing like worms before they sunk into the matching sockets. More screens lit up, I recognised breathing and heart-rate monitors, the others were a mystery to me. About half of the screens showed nothing but error messages and question marks, a quarter were green, the rest lit yellow. "BPM of... one?" I asked, but it was already rising steadily. A few of the other warning lights blinked to green. Simon nodded as they swapped over. "Good so far. This next bit can get a little messy, so watch your step. Pass me the crowbar?"

OPEN POD? (y/n)

CANCELLED.

MANUAL OPEN POD? (y/n)

CANCELLED.

UNLOCK POD? (y/n)

Simon finished tapping at the screens, leaving the last confirmation window open. Digging the tip of the crowbar into one corner, he steadily worked his way along the edge until he reached the mid-line. "Oh, this will be much easier with two people." he said over one shoulder. "Press the cancel button when I say. Hold it, Bec, I said the cancel button. Yep. Alright. On three. One, two, three."

On three, I pressed the button, and he leaned his full body weight on the crowbar. There was a pop, and pale grey fluid splashed through the small gap, spilling onto his boots and dribbling towards the drains. Simon passed me the wet crowbar, and started easing the lid the rest of the way off with just his hands.

DETACHING...

DETACHING FAILED

"Shit." said Simon, when I pointed out the latest message. "That normally works." he pulled harder on the lid, and it flipped all the way back with a clang.

Inside the pod, was a body, lying on its side. Not a corpse. It had a heartbeat, and there it went, twitch, twitch. But I didn't want to call it a person. Not yet. It was wearing a black mask across its entire face, half a dozen tubes of varying sizes erupting out of it and connecting to the walls of the pod. An equal number of small pipes met right in the centre of its back. It was wearing an exact match of the uniform I was in. It had no hair, like me, it was thin and bone-pale, like me.

DRAINING...

More of the grey sludge poured out of a side channel, the body floated down until it rested on the floor of the pod.

DETACHING...

DETACHING FAILED

MANUAL INTERVENTION REQUIRED

Simon learned into the pod, sliding out the various tubes attached to the black mask with a pop pop pop. The thickest tube was long, so long, it kept on going, and going, as Simon gently eased it out, but eventually it flopped wetly amongst the remaining grey fluid. Simon paused, with his fingers on the rim of the mask. He looked up at me, a drop of damp on his forehead. "This can be the worst bit Bec. You might not want to look." I shook my head. My eyes were dry. I couldn't even bring myself to blink. The mask came off with a slip of suction. Beneath was.

A face.

Just a face.

Slight indentations where the mask had pressed against the cheeks and forehead. A small nose. No eyebrows. Then the eyes fluttered open, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach. Soft hazel irises. Wide pupils. Drugged wide. Starring at nothing. There was nothing in those. It opened its soft, wet lips. Simon had already dropped the mask back into the pod with a squelch, was standing up and away from the edge, grabbing at the control panels.

"Hhmmmahh." The body made a noise, like a sigh, like a groan.

"What's... what's wrong with it." I said. Simon was busy doing something. I couldn't tear my eyes away from those empty, empty sockets. A different screen lit up.

CONFIRM POD A16B-45 CONTENTS: VIABLE / NON-VIABLE?

"The brain." said Simon, fingers hovering above the control panel. "It's just - dense. Solid. Like cold grease. Ruined, but still connected. To everything. Everything. So..."

Right on cue, the body spasmed. Every muscle swung wide, every tendon standing out like steel cables. The jaw stretched open, the whining moaning noise getting louder and louder. Every limb bashed against the walls of the pod, not to escape, just to bash. The heart-rate monitor hit two hundred beats per minute, then zero, then two hundred again.

STATUS CHANGE - POD A16B-45 CONTENTS: NON-VIABLE

PURGE? (y/n)

CLOSING POD...

LID LOCK FAILURE. CONFIRM POD SEALED? (y/n)

Simon swung the lid closed. It bounced, hard, on the hand of the body. He shoved the hand back in, and slammed the lid down. It closed with a loud click, but not as loud as the shrieking still coming from inside.

TRANSFERRING POD A16B-45...

The cables popped out and winched back up into the control panels, the orange lights flashed once again, the clamps disengaged, and the pod descended. Back into the dark beneath our feet. Once the plinth had sealed back up again, I couldn't hear the noise of the screamer any more. The only remaining trace was the remaining grey pod fluid, slowly gurgling towards the drains.

STANDBY...

PURGING...

NEXT POD? (y/n)

I walked out, over to the bathrooms, and threw up. Then I walked back. Simon and I opened five more pods that day. Two were screamers. One pod was completely empty. One was - missing bits. The last pod contained a corpse. The tubes attached to the mask had been torn out. Three tubes were held in it's left hand. Three in the right.