Boredom

Buddy sat on the coachman’s seat, knees almost to his ears, watching the four sculpted rear-ends of the cyber-equines jostle up and down. They looked weird. Almost nothing like the actual horses Buddy had seen in vid-chronicles during his childhood. The only real similarities were the staunch bodies, the structures of the legs, and the shape of the necks. Those parts had to be accurate if one wanted to simulate the correct motor-function of an equine; the rest was up to the artist’s, or rather engineer’s, interpretation.

Where horses had had smooth long faces with pointy ears and a mane, a rubbery snout and gruesome teeth, the cyber-equines’ heads looked more like distended, strangely proportioned jackal heads. Instead of long hairy tails, the monotask machines had sharp nubs, like horns, in their place. And, of course, the most glaring difference from their original organic animalia template was the ceramic musculature plates, edges gilded and carved with exquisite precision, which covered the Atlantean machinery beneath. Trotting statues, for all intents and purposes.

“Ruminating again?” Hound asked from behind.

“I ain’t ruminating.”

“Thinking, I should say,” the two-tailed dog said and hopped gracefully over the backrest to sit by the bounty hunter.

“Thing is, there’s too much to think of these days.”

Hound cocked his head and kept silent.

Buddy rubbed the remaining skin of his face with all fourteen fingers then exclaimed, “we met a relic! An intelligence governed ship. We’re escorting a Grower with a baby arm to some pathogen that might bring organics back or kill all synthetics. We have a bot, a girl with a terminal illness and a clerk, then you.”

“What’s wrong with me?”

Buddy rolled his eyes. “Ain’t nothing wrong with you per se; it’s what you don’t know about yourself that gives me the jitters. You came from Neo-Ur…”

“The Urites were there before the Conclave,” Hound said. His neon-green eyes dimmed a little.

“Yeah, but mad scientists, advanced military tech, drugs, killers and corrupted funding weren’t.”

“How do you know?” Hound asked.

Because I was born there, Buddy wanted to say, but instead he said, “I just do.”

Hound looked out toward the open road before them. The once green country was a sour yellow. Hills rolled over into the horizon, and in the distance the mountain range loomed as a dark line. There were no trees; all those still standing after the cataclysm had been rooted from the earth and put to better use before they inevitably fossilized. A white veneer of sickly clouds draped across the sky, behind which the white sun gloomily shone over Dead Earth. His sister, the Broken Moon, would be full tonight. However ironic it sounded.

“Well, I don’t presume you know where I’m from, or who made me,” Hound said, “so you don’t know everything.”

“I know enough,” Buddy shot back, “and now I know more than I’d want to. Then there’s this, fucking—” he slapped the side of his head, “script ticking down in my eff-oh-vee courtesy of the Chronologist, Epsilon Tertia Altera,” he said, annunciating the name with a sarcastic pomp.

“May I see?” Hound asked.

Buddy rolled his eyes. “Lucia couldn’t crack it, and Rousseau had no idea what it was. The best thing we could come up with was that it’s some countdown.”

“But may I see it?” Hound asked again.

Buddy sighed. “Fine.”

He produced a cord and trailed it from his neck socket to Hound’s. Then he mentally shared his field of vision. Hound’s silicone ears perked as soon as he saw what the hunter was seeing. “How very strange,” he said.

“What?”

“I recognize these symbols, though I cannot read them.”

“The hell? How’s that possible?”

“Buddy. All of my code is in this script.”

---

Unit Five-One sat hunched in the crew compartment. It scraped the deck idly with one clawed finger. Over. And over. And over again. The gouge was an inch thick now, a bit more and the black sea below would be visible.

“Stop that,” Meridia called from the cockpit.

“I’m bored…” Unit Five-One growled. It was strange expressing emotions. Of course it was programmed with rudimentary ones such as joy, anger, grief, etc. but they were all tied to its killing instinct. Joy became a delirious adrenaline fueled rush whenever it killed. Anger became a white-hot rage to move it to act. Grief became a quiet brooding, during which all stimulants were cut off, but the promise of them remained if it managed to solve how to do what it needed to. All other emotions that stemmed from the major three were useless.

Such as boredom, which was neither grief, nor joy, nor anger. It was a placid, empty feeling. A feeling that made it want to do something as useless as gnash its teeth or, in this case, scrape the deck with its finger-blade. There was one perk, however. It had time to analyze, to think, to plan, with as cool a mind as it was capable of.

“Then you come pilot this piece of shit,” Meridia snapped. “Oh, excuse me, you don’t have the programming for it.”

“I could rip it out of your skull…” Unit Five-One grumbled, only half aware that she was talking to it.

It was far more fixated on a thought that had appeared during the dull boredom amidst the cramped space and droning jets. A very good thought. A new plan, one could say. How it hadn’t thought of it yet would have been embarrassing to a normal person, but Unit Five-One was far from normal. Far from a person.

He would go for the canine first. In the night, when the rest were hibernating. That mutt and its scrambling sonic weapon was its weakness. Get that out of the way, and the rest were free pickings. Very free. None of them, apart from the hunter and the hound, were fighters. It would revel in their deaths. It wouldn’t kill them quick. It would make them suffer. But when would it see them next, it wondered.

“Five more hours until we’re at the Alpine bunker,” Meridia called.

The Alpine bunker. A miniscule and insignificant base in enemy territory. It had long since been abandoned and it had never been discovered by the See, which made it the perfect place to hide. Neither Unit Five-One nor Meridia needed rations or minerals in excess, so an empty store wouldn’t be a problem. There might even be some tech it could graft onto itself. If it was lucky. A ranged weapon, though it detested their use, could be good. Something shoulder or wrist mounted, perhaps. Something for the gladiator arm.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes…” Unit Five-One hissed, its many voices warping the word into a strange moan. Then, it continued clawing the decking, though on a different spot.

How bored it was.

---

Lucia sat on her bed, knees high to her chest, wearing nothing but her tabard and belt. She held the wrist of her semi-autonomous arm between her knees, her face glued to it, the pale blue monitor on it rippling with data. The various sigils and symbols from Buddy Limbo’s optical feed were organized in to sets based on their cascading order. She was very curious as to what they could mean. She always returned to numbers, but, the last section of symbols, that cycled the fastest, which she’d thought to be microseconds, had her stumped. There were sixty distinct symbols that spun as if on a wheel, one for each second, she’d thought at first. The ones beside them were completely different, however, and there were thirty of them. So, she could only surmise that the rest of the separate symbols had their own sets as well, probably dividing by two’s. But unless she found a way to manipulate them herself, the chronological correlative would remain as pure conjecture.

She scratched the top of her skull, where black hairs had reached to about two centimeters now. The rest of the tonsure had grown as well, and it kept tickling her ears. Then she idly brought her hand to her nape, and immediately tensed, unnoticeably, realizing her mistake.

“Something wrong with the enhancer, lass?” Rousseau asked from the corner. She’d raised her wan eyes from the large tome she’d been scanning diligently.

“Nothing, Mother,” Lucia said quickly. “Just had an itch, that’s all.” The last thing she needed right now was another round of diagnostics and scans. Though it would be fairly simple to get things started seeing as she was already naked apart from the tabard.

“You sure?”

“Honest to God,” she said with a smile.

Rousseau raised a finger, pointing at the ceiling and their shared deity further beyond. “The Laird’s name and all…” she said as a warning.

“Yes, Mother.”

“And quit calling me Mother,” Rousseau snipped. “I allow for few vanities, and titles are not one; Mother makes me sound old besides. Now that I’ve this new dainty figure it seems all the more improper. Call me either Dr. Rousseau or just doctor. Do I make meself clear?”

“Yes mo—doctor,” Lucia corrected. Calling her Rousseau was beyond her. Commenting on the hypocrisy would earn her a scolding

Rousseau returned to the tome.

In truth, Lucia’s neck had been itching, and sometimes it really was the parasite tech within her. But she’d had the dissolving, jury-rigged enhancer for a long time now, and the twinges, itches, and dull throbs were all familiar to a degree. This itch hadn’t been one, neither was the throb behind her eyes. Those stemmed from her staring unblinkingly at the wrist-screen for far too long. What faulty tech did cause was the giggle bubbling in her upper abdomen. She covered her mouth, mock in thought, to plug it. As one does to carbonated fluids. But like the bubbly carbonation, it would only build until it popped. Unless, of course, you cracked the cap bit by bit to let out little hisses to ease the pressure. Lucia did this by humming.

She’d learned the habit when she’d been an infant, when the first waves of pain and mood swings had begun to be a daily, then hourly occurrences. Before the gutter mods had temporarily, and later the See’s intervention had finally stabilized the enhancer, she’d held on to sanity by humming. First it had been her mother that had hummed and sung to her, and soon Lucia had entered the melody with her own pained approximations. Her mother had always held a palm to Lucia’s chest, and ever since, whenever Lucia hummed, she felt it there. As stupid as it sounded. Sometimes she found that her own biological hand was there, idly pressing on her solar plexus between her dainty breasts with their ashy gray nipples. It helped her feel the vibration of her humming. The vibration helped still the enhancer. For a time, at least.

---

Jaques and Jean sat in the parlor. They’d set one of the small side tables to stand between them, and atop it was a narrow aluminum plaque with tiny holes drilled into it. Three lines of one hundred and twenty, with one at the end, snaked around the plaque’s edge and curved into the center to the final hole. The holes were separated into columns of five, numerals indicating the growing value, with ninety marked as ‘S’, which Jean had called the skunk line. The ancient game, that Jean said had been taught to him by his progenitor, was called cribbage. They played with the minor arcana of the holy scrying deck, (paiges removed, of course), making it a fifty-two cards in total.

Jaques found the mathematical element of the game to his liking, and something that helped ease his nervous mind. Though, being his second game, he was still learning the rules. Too bad Jean was fully organic, and he couldn’t upload them straight into Jaques’ mind. Learning the analog way was, however, therapeutic in some way.

He placed down his hand. “I’ve fifteen two, four, a run of four and a flush of four. That makes twelve points.”

Jean scrunched his brow. His auburn hair was matted from a lack of washing. “Nope. Just a run of four and fifteen-four.”

Jaques looked at the cut card face up on the top of the deck. It was clearly a four of swords. He had the one, two and three of swords, and the eight of pentacles. He argued as much, to which Jean replied in a pedagogic voice, “no, you can only get flushes of either four or five, and the only way to get a flush of four, the minimum, is to have a flush in your hand. A cut card would make it a five. You’ve a run of four,” he tapped the cards laid out on the table, “and fifteen two, four.”

“Ah, I see,” Jaques tisked. “I should not have thrown the seven of swords into your crib, then. I counted more with the eight, but it seems that was the wrong choice.”

“You still got eight points,” Jean said and moved Jaques’ peg for him. Then he laid down his cards. Three fives and the king of pentacles. “Fifteen-eight and three pair. Fourteen points.”

“Good hand,” Jaques said. He was trying his best not to look directly at the faded art printed on the cards of the divinatory deck. Something about them was strange. He could’ve sworn he saw them warp and twist gently through his cloudy organic eye, and some of them, especially the major arcana to the side, made him feel a strange, detached terror. His cybernetic eye seemed to gently glitch when it looked at them too long. Perhaps the See guards at Decimum Iuxta Mari had damaged it some way.

“You’re severely lacking in beginner’s luck, my friend,” Jean chuckled and scooted the deck across the table for Jaques to shuffle and deal out next. His infant arm was now the chubby arm of a toddler, and at times he stretched it under the sleeve of his patched robe. It appeared as though a cyber-ophidian squirmed beneath the green cloth, trying to break from its cotton prison.

Jaques was about to respond but he stopped as soon as his fingers touched the deck. A jolt coursed up across his replacements and into the wet tissue of his brain, and an image flickered in his mind’s eye. It came and went like a passing thought. Though it had been only a flash, he’d recognized Hound, and the monster, both dark images against a roaring wall of flame. Jaques suppressed the shudder that came upon him and quickly picked up the deck as if nothing had happened, masking his sudden pause by faking a cough. “The air is quite musty in here,” he commented. In the back of his mind, he heard the Chronologist’s words. ‘The specter has left its mark, I see.’

“I like it. Not as sterile as most of the places around the Gulf. Reminds me of my laboratory,” Jean said, falling for the charade. “Still, there’s that particular radiation smell.”

They continued playing. Jaques lost three out of three games. His mind was preoccupied with the strange things that were happening to him. The shutter image had reminded him of his nightly vision, and the terrifying monster that was still out there. He didn’t know how, but he knew something bad was going to happen. But, like all men with his reluctantly received gift, he didn’t want to believe it to be so and instead tried his best to ignore the feeling altogether. Instead, he pretended to be at ease just as everyone else was, hoping that by some curious osmosis it would rub off on him.

But, against the part of him that reeled at anything outside the ordinary, anything outside safety and reason, when the two finished playing, Jaques slipped the entire deck into its copper box and stuffed it in his pocket with an intent he couldn’t define.

 

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