Sight

The heavy iron door banged against the concrete floor. The first thing Unit Five-One saw when the white daylight flooded within the little hideout was the makeshift barricades constructed from sheet-metal tables braced against old boxes and leaky sandbags. Sensing no threat, the kill-bot entered, scanning the interior with its burning eyes. There were no signs of combat, yet the conclave soldiers, dried husks clutching weapons between mummified fingers, sat or lay dead behind cover, eternally frozen in the expectation of an enemy. It scanned for environmental toxins next and detected no anomalies.

“It’s safe,” it growled.

Meridia entered in her stolen body, looked around with a cursory scan, then shook her head. “What the hell killed them?” she whispered, more to herself than to the killing machine she accompanied.

“Dehydration,” Unit Five-One replied.

Meridia walked up to one of the corpses and knelt, and sure enough, she detected no moisture. When she touched the cheek of the woman, who Meridia fancied would have been quite the looker when plumped up, the skin beneath cracked, flakes of it fluttering to the cold floor, leaving the interior titanium skeleton and grinning porcelain teeth bare.

“That’s how, Five-One, not what.”

“Inconsequential…” the kill-bot hissed, trudging deeper into the hideout in search of weapons.

“The hell it is,” Meridia barked. “Last I heard the See don’t employ weapons that dehydrate. Whatever did this might still be here.”

Unit Five-One turned to look at Meridia from over its shoulder. Its lipless mouth pulled taught in that morbid grin, and its eyes flashed, the light glinting off its dark nose-plate. “Then I’ll kill it.”

After an hour of combing through the place, the two did not find the killer. Instead, Meridia found a lookout slit that granted a view far down the slopes and into the flat landscape beyond. She could make out the Via Aemilia as a brown snake against the yellow earth trailing toward the foothills of the mountains. Unit Five-One had found a dwindled weapons cache and was presently modifying and affixing a crude double-barreled slug-pistol to the wrist of its gladiator arm and a pair of jointed fold-out blades to the forearm of the lower military grade one. It had also found a large banner with fat emerald-green and sky-white stripes, plunder from some town or municipality, no doubt, which it repurposed as a shawl. It was larger than its previous tattered fabric, now discarded in the corner. It had also received a very interesting information docket on the hunter via his connection to the Conclave cloud. A very interesting one. It seemed its father still wished for its success.

Unbeknownst to the two, Meridia occupied in her lookout and Unit Five-One perusing through the fresh data, something skittered through massive tunnels bored into the mountain on many-jointed rubber legs. It squirmed and slithered, stopping at times to listen to the two Conclave assets speak. It would let them believe themselves safe, then it would crawl out of its lair in the dark of night and feast on what little moisture they had between them.

---

Buddy tapped a quick command into the raised keypad by the coach’s seat and grabbed the two interface cables that went for reins. The four equines received the command and instantly trotted off the road and onto the yellow grass under Buddy’s steady steering. The sound of the wheels turned from a steady rumble to a muffled swish. And like some giant wheeled caterpillar form ancient days, it rolled over a slope and down into a dell where Buddy brought it to a rest as soon as he found level ground.

The Broken Moon had risen with it’s children, the mother mass looking as though some cosmically titanic being had taken a bite out of it, the children satellites like crumbs from a cookie eternally orbiting the fragmented thing. The only remnants of sunlight was a strip of purplish-orange that cut a line between the blackness of the void and the desolate lands. The air was chilly and moist, with the scent of the dead sea mingling with the ever-present twinge of ambient rads.

As soon as they came to a stop, Buddy detached the equines from the wagon and each other, setting them to guard stance. Immediately the four stood up on their hind legs and spread out to cover the circumference of camp.

Lucia opened a hatch and stuck her head out, her tonsured inky hair gleaming in the moonlight. “Why’re we stopping?”

“We’re far from Roma and the satellite towns. I ain’t risking raiders, no sir-ee. In this thing with all its lights, with those things pulling us, on those wheels, we’re a rattle-can for all to hear and a bright neon-sign for greedy bastards out for an easy target.” He popped open the trunk beneath the coach’s seat and produced a camo-net that would cover their thermal signature from prying infra and night-vision eyes. “Besides, we ain’t in no rush. We still have thirty or so hours until the Alps. We get going in the morning, stay one more night in the mountain passes, and we’re there.”

“So, we’re in a rush?”

“Huh?”

“’Ain’t no’,” she repeated. “Ain’t is a contraction of a personal pronoun and not. So ‘ain’t no’ is a double negative, indicating a positive.”

Buddy crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes, then pointed his double index fingers at the squire. “Don’t go being a smartass. You know what I meant.”

“Rarely am I not one,” she said, winked, and disappeared back inside.

Buddy grinned. Good kid, he thought, and almost instantly after, I hope she doesn’t die.

The thought startled him. In addition to that, the fact he had been startled startled him. He’d seen a fair number of people die. Good people, bad people, people in the middle. All kinds and ages had come and gone during his long life. And he’d believed himself numb enough toward all that death. He’d never been indifferent to killing, but neither was he an avid proponent. He and many others just did what was necessary in this cruel dead world. If living another day meant killing someone or something, it had to be done. And if you bled your heart out for every misbegotten rust-joint and tramp and sick child, you’d be a bloodless husk by the end of the week.

Was he going soft? Or, had it just been that long since he’d spent more than a couple days with another person that he’d forgotten that there was more in his soul than grit and greed. Hell, maybe that was it.

“Will we tell her?” Hound asked from below.

“Nah. Just cause you’re code is in the same script don’t mean that it has anything to do with my thing. You know, just because thing A is in Latin, don’t mean thing B, also in Latin, is related in any way to it.”

“I understand that point, Buddy, but the datasets Lucia has are quite comprehensive. If she found nothing on them, wouldn’t it suggest it is rare? It’s not like the script is Atlantean or anything, so what could it be?”

Buddy didn’t answer for some time. He thought about it while going around the length of the wagon, pitching tall poles into the ground that he’d string the camo-net to. Once the last one was in place, he said, “look, we’ve enough on our minds. I don’t think we need anything extra to think about right now.”

“But Buddy,” Hound said, hopping to the side and out of the way as the bounty hunter cast the net over the length and breadth of the wagon with an effortless heave. “The script appeared when you were granted a prophecy from a Chronologist. The mere fact that it replaced your internal chron is suspect. Isn’t that interesting to you at all?”

“Not really.”

Hound’s silicone ears perked, lowered, twitched then pointed to the sides, making his head seem comically flat and level. “I don’t understand you at all,” he said, annoyed. “You should be at least a tad curious.”

“Well, I ain’t. The last I heard someone had dealings with a Chronologist it ended with the war of Gibraltar. Nasty business. People tend to go on a self-righteous streak, getting their heads pumped full of self-importance when one of them comes along. They have a way of leaving the people they touch a little crazy,” he twirled his the two index-fingers of his right hand in a double-loop pattern by his temple. “Kooky. So, best just ignore it, I say.”

As he was saying this he was tying the last of the net to the last pole, and as soon as he’d finished both speaking and fixing, the atomizer vibrated on his hip. “What?”

“What?” Hound asked.

Buddy drew the weapon. “Got something to say?” he asked, staring intently at the weapon.

Hound’s ears came up halfway, and he cocked his head. “You seem to be proving your point.”

“Very funny,” Buddy said dismissively. Then he listened.

He got a strong sense of familiarity. It ebbed from the weapon directly into Buddy’s own emotions, to his emotive enhancer, that is, and there it told a story more vivid than pictures or words. It was almost as thought it was speaking, so clear was her communication now.

“Says she thinks she might know what them symbols are,” Buddy muttered, half forgetting that Hound was there eyeing him with his neon eyes with a mix of concern and confusion. But there was also curiosity.

“So, it does speak?”

“Kinda. More like waves of intuition, if that makes any sense. She’s only whispered since I found her, but at the outpost I finally figured it out when she decided to speak louder. She’s been pretty dull since, but I think she’s been listening to us now. I think-”

Another wave, but this time, for some reason, Buddy felt compelled to find Jaques. He raised his eyebrow. “You wanna talk to him? Why in all the Machine God’s creations do you wanna talk to him?”

“What’s it saying.”

Buddy raised his eyebrows, first the one, then the other, then sighed through his armpit air vents. “She wants to talk to Jaques.”

---

Jaques sat on his bed. He’d dragged one of the many small tables around the room to stand before him. He rubbed his hands against his blue tunic, then at times he scratched his scalp. He was nervous, and anyone looking in could see that. It ebbed from him in waves. In his pocket was the scrying deck in its acid-etched copper box. Though weighing mere grams, it felt like a hunk of lead that was pulling the collar of his tunic taught.

He licked his lips, wiped his forehead for the umpteenth time, then took the box out, carefully opening the top and dropping the cards onto the table. They came out smoothly, almost seductively, backside up. The momentum of them dropping caused the top of the deck to slide further forward, almost toppling off.

“Oh dear,” Jaques whispered, edging his trembling cybernetic hand toward the cards. His fingers curled, unfurled, and curled again. “Oh, stop it!” he hissed to himself. “They’re just moss-pulp boards with paint.”

He touched the deck.

He opened his mouth in a silent gasp. His nervousness disappeared in an instant, replaced by something he could only describe as a calm knowing. How one knows it will rain when dark clouds, low to the ground, rumble in the distance. How one knows a radstorm will be particularly violent hours before it comes upon by the mere scent on the wind. A surety not from sensors or data, but from lived experience. Mixed within that knowing feeling, there was a fear. A fear, a drop of oil in blood, of that selfsame knowing and the answers it might reveal.

He pulled his hand back. ‘Comprehension hast yet to dawn,’ the Chronologist’s voice echoed through his memory engrams.

Comprehension of what? Had she meant this feeling, this strange foreboding, foreknowledge even, of something that has yet to happen. Like that time in the shelter…

Jaques steeled himself, and with a petulant grimace he moved to pick up the deck, but as he was about to touch it again, footsteps rumbled up to the door.

It slammed open. “Alright, Mr. Jaques,” Buddy barked, barging in with Hound in tow, weapon drawn.

This was it. Jaques was going to die. Beaufort Limbo, bounty and relic hunter extraordinaire, had gone insane and was coming to kill them all. Just like he’d almost done in the land-crawler (that seemed like ages ago). It was that gun of his, no doubt. Jaques had seen Buddy watch it, almost as if expecting it to jump up and do a jig. Ah well, it looked as though Jaques would finally get his peace and quiet. Why in hell had he come on this stupid journey in the first place?

Hound saw in Jaques’ solemn face the fright mixed with the resigned acceptance of a captive in line to be executed, and said, “apologies for barging in. Buddy’s gun wants to talk to you.”

“What?”

“That’s right,” the lanky cyborg snapped, coming up and dropping the porcelain length of the handgun with its lacquered wooden grip onto the table with a loud thunk. It seemed far larger when not in the bounty hunter’s wide, seven fingered grip. “She wants to talk to you.”

“What?”

“Is your audio pickup faulty? The atomizer wants a word with you.”

“It can talk?”

Buddy pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yeah. Years I’ve gone around with her, and she starts speaking to me proper only around the time I get messed up in this whole circus. Now she ain’t even want to talk with me, but you. For some reason.”

Jaques eyed the gun. From muzzle to grip it was about the length of his forearm. Twice as thick. The barrel was one long spiraling cylinder of a material that almost looked like porcelain or bone. The chamber, if it had fired bullets, hummed at a subsonic pitch ominously. The grip was at an angle, lacquered wood the color of caramelized sugar Jaques had first seen and tasted when he’d been a child. The firing stud was a semi-circular button of glossy chrome.

“Um… hello?”

No answer.

“Pick her up,” Buddy said. “She can only talk to you if you touch her.”

Jaques sighed. Would this be his fate: having to cringe every time he was about to touch something in fear of either having a vision or something talk to him? He looked at the thing for some time, and sure enough, he could sense an expectation. Something like a shadow of a visitor beyond the opaque window of a door. The cards lay scattered on the table, face down, apart from one major arcana card: the tower.

Jaques placed his hand on the grip, meaning to pick up the weapon. But something strange happened. His hand locked into a vice around the rose-wood, and a surge of something shot up through his arm and into his replacement eye. He saw a dark form, indistinct, pulse in a low pinkly lit void. The intuitive knowing came, and he knew that the shape was alive. It also ebbed something, an essence of sorts, it had only a small quantity of it. The flavor of that essence was distinctly Mr. Limbo’s, (whatever that meant). He gasped when it spoke. It didn’t do it with words, but the auxiliary machinery in Jaques’ brain translated the signals into something he could recognize.

“You have sight,” it said.

Jaques was focused deeply on the vision in his mind. If he’d been looking in the mirror, he’d have seen his replacement eye glow a ghostly pink. Something Buddy and Hound stared at in a mix of wonder and apprehension.

“I…” his mouth worked, but no further words came.

But the shape in the void understood. The unspoken thought transmitted instantly to it: confusion, fear, curiosity, apprehension.

“Yes, I am what Buddy calls the atomizer, though I have a real name. I shan’t tell you it.” The voice sounded petulant, almost as if a child’s a few years younger that Lucia.

The tone did something to shake Jaques out of his wonder. Speaking with intelligences via neural link wasn’t a new thing, after all, and he supposed this was just that. Things could be quite abstract at times, but never to this extent.

You’re an intelligence? Jaques spoke in his mind, remembering the small class he’d taken in subvocal neural communication when he’d been young.

“Of course I am. I am Neptune, Mark Gamma XIII. Honestly, you humans have such short memories. Are sentient weapons so strange to you all of a sudden? During the war we were everywhere. Oh, no matter. It’s all lost now. My brothers and sisters, oh and my dear template.”

You mean the Array? Jaques gasped mentally as a flickering image of a giant weapons platform and the Broken Moon flashed in his mind’s eye.

“Ugh, of course. What else?” the voice sounded like a street rat teen spitting at some loser monk walking by.

Jaques’ annoyance grew further. Excuse me, but didn’t you have something to tell me? If you’re going to be rude then I’ll just cut the connection.

“Fine…” A pause. “That script in Buddy’s eyes. I’ve a suspicion on what it is. The Chronologist bitches use that. It originates from the Dagger. So, you either ask one of those replicas or you find the Rosetta stone up up in the Urals.”

Images flashed in Jaques’ mind, too fast to comprehend, and disappeared faster than his memory engrams could encode. If he’d had a full cranial replacement he’d have an eidetic memory. But alas.

Wait, hold on. Replicas? Dagger? What are you, really? What is this sight you say I have. And why have you decided to speak with us now? Jaques’ thoughts translated as soon as he thought them. Afterward he’d chide himself for being so hasty, but neural communication was something of a new thing for him, and holding on to a disciplined train of thought was difficult.

“ERRRR,” the voice said, imitating a loud buzzer. “Out of time. No more questions. I’m only telling you this because I don’t want to switch hands yet. I’m not done.”

Done with what? Jaques thought.

He received no answer; the connection severed, and he was back in the room with Buddy and Hound.

“So, what did she say?” Buddy asked.

Jaques sighed. “What a rude girl,” he found himself grumble. Then, he told them.

 

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