A Hero Has a Heart
Concrete reinforced with steel gripped itself in its own collapse at the edge of hole newly made, still swirling with the blast’s detritus made dust. Something, a pipe or tank, against the wall had been housing a condensed amount of oxygen that had been siphoned into the cylinder she had been inside below. Igniting it had caused an explosion that had either used up the remaining stored oxygen or caused some sort of lock-down that sealed off this areas connection to any more flowing into it.
The explosion had made a spherical indentation through the wall and into the floor of the building. There didn’t seem to be anything flammable within the room that had been breached, so thankfully there was no fire to go along with the explosion. It was simple, concrete walls and floor, from large slabs fitted together with steel rebar, which she could see protruding from the damage at odd angles. The slabs were square, and were covered with smaller squares that gave the walls, ceiling, and floor a simple geometric beauty that was at the same time, overwhelming in its constancy. Through the dragging of her torn cloth robes and body, a drip and drab of the slick spreading muck bled out through her soaked robes and skin—an old oil leak that emptied itself at regular intervals, and an oily rag smearing its expression—both leaving trails behind her.
The far wall, opposite the hole, wasn’t a wall at all. Through the cloud of dust still settling she could see a murky glass, dirtied by the dust thrown against it from the explosion. It also wasn’t flat but curved around what she could only assume was part of a circle formed by connecting rooms adjacent to this one. A tome was in the room too, startling her in its simple ability to exist outside of the library. It had been placed near the wall and was faced down on the floor after having crashed into the glass of the far wall, sprouting cracks at the point of impact. There was a service panel built into the left wall and a door in the right, though a protective blast shield had slid down to seal the room as the door itself may have been damaged.
She approached the blast-shielded door first. The smooth metal fit cleanly against the wall and it was too strong to dig into it directly and too neatly contiguous for her to fit any part of her fingers into a gap either. She went to the cloudy windowed-wall and thought better of trying to wipe away dust with her hands but instead brought her arm up and wiped a view with her forearm.
Something dark filled the area she peered into, a trunk of something that went down as far as she could see and went up in the same manner. It looked like a tree from its massive girth but it bore branches or leaves, creeping out from the supports that held the thing in the center of its chasm, were vines, tendrils wrapping and grasping at the wall away from the leathery stalk of its center. It must have been at least ten meters in diameter. The chamber housing it was circular with other rooms she could see with glass windows also curved so as to observe this thing.
She kept trying to remember what it could be but there was nothing to latch onto. Maybe she didn’t know what it was, or never knew, but with the amount of damage inside her head it was hard to pinpoint which of those possibilities were correct. It must be something that produces oxygen. A tree of life raised from the lightless depths to the sky above, caged inside towers, to pulse clean oxygenated air into the encapsulated world above.
There was something unsettlingly foreign about the plant. She knew she’d never seen a plant before but in all the images in her memory, both made and lived, there was nothing like this there. It wasn’t green, there didn’t seem to be any lights giving it energy. She could feel the sick realization turning around in her stomach that this wasn’t ever something that grew up out of the earth and called to the sun and rain in the once wilds. This was closer to her than it was to those. It was a factory that just happened to work better shaped like a plant. Empty, ugly, branded with its own objective. She pitied it as much as she hated it. It may not have a mind but the way it touched at who she was, what she was, and what everything, everywhere was. It sank into her in that moment. Everything and everyone. All that she had ever known. Slaves, deep down in their souls and hearts. That Mechanic was trying to save those that had nothing in them to save. Screaming in the dark for the empty wasted lives of permanent, mindless servitude. This plant, hanging and climbing forever, how could she think it was more or less worthy of freedom than something given just a little bit more processing power?
For a moment she caught the faint, blurred reflection of her own face peering back. The dust that had settled into the muck across her body and robes had succumbed its dry to the wet, painting herself darker, and, oddly, increasing the volume of the leaking oil seemingly without a decrease in its viscosity. There would be no clotting dry to dismiss this mess.
“INTERLOPER DETECTED.” The service panel to her left lit up and started speaking in a loud, urgent, and monotonous voice. “WIRELESS UNAVAILABLE. PLEASE SUBMIT CLEARANCE THROUGH ALTERNATE METHOD.”
She approached the panel, slowly, suddenly aware that something would be coming soon. Whether it meant that it would rescue her or just deliver her back to the Church to be destroyed she didn’t know and the latter felt much more likely. She examined the panel but it was just a screen on the wall, probably manipulated through touch, which she’d probably just scratch up or destroy with her hands the way they’ve become. “What alternate method would you suggest?”
The screen flashed and started spitting out code that she could vaguely recall as a much, much older security kernel. As far as she could figure, it was at least a hundred years old. The Tome was clearly the room's actual workflow device and this panel was just left over from whenever this building was built to this height. The code disappeared and the screen went bright green. “USER INPUT MODE: AUDITORY. PLEASE RESPOND VOCALLY WITH CLEARANCE CODE.”
If she could interface with the system in any other way it would be very easy to manipulate clearance but without wireless or even a wired connection she was stuck playing word games. “What will happen if I don't submit the correct clearance code?”
“FAILURE TO SUBMIT CORRECT CLEARANCE CODE WILL RESULT IN ROOM LOCKDOWN AND CONTAINMENT SERVICES NOTIFIED.”
She glanced over to the door, covered with its metal armor. “The room is already locked down.”
“SCAN: INPUT LOCATION: AFFIRM: LOCKDOWN STATUS: AFFIRM.” It blinked green a few more times even without speaking along with the flash for a moment, then continued, “PLEASE SUBMIT CLEARANCE CODE.”
It seemed to just be nagging and the threat of failure only mattered if you took it up on guessing whatever the code may be instead of just ignoring that question altogether. “Where is my current location?”
“SCAN: INPUT LOCATION: AFFIRM: W.M. A-9-81 SECTION 12 OXYGEN RECOVERY BRANCH 5.” It repeated its mantra, “PLEASE SUBMIT CLEARANCE CODE.”
She continued to ignore its mantra, “show me a map of this building. Center on user's current location.”
“SCAN: INPUT LOCATION: AFFIRM: EXAMINE CONSOLE.” A green on black blueprint of the building showing a bright red dot inside the room she was inside appeared on the panel. “PLEASE SUBMIT CLEARANCE CODE.”
“Show me the floor above current location.”
“AFFIRM: EXAMINE CONSOLE.” She looked at the blueprint and then at the ceiling above her. “PLEASE SUBMIT CLEARANCE CODE.”
She wondered just how far this machine was capable of being pushed without getting what it wanted. “Open the doors on this level to the Harvest Chamber."
The panel flashed red instead of green. “ERROR: STRUCTURAL DAMAGE DETECTED: LOCKDOWN IN EFFECT.”
Moments before it could repeat its request for the clearance code she said, “Give me an ETA on Emergency Scouts to current location.” She tried to discern outside but the dust was still like a fog. The fact that there were no lights on in the room at all still didn’t match how hard it was to see just outside.
“SCAN: DATA RETREIVAL: AFFIRM: QUEUE STATUS 37 MINUTES.” She knew it was coming but still flinched, “PLEASE SUBMIT CLEARANCE CODE.”
; Ignoring the panel again she went back to the curved glass wall, looking through the viewing portal she had made with her arm earlier. The chamber housing the plant had supports to hold in place at regular intervals, every other floor. This meant that there were support beam just above the floor she was on. Metal coming from the wall and forming a loose circle around the giant, black stalky vine, and continuing into the opposite wall.
Waiting for Emergency Scouts to show up, assess the damage, and then return with Containment Services, probably another Cage Tender to collect her and assess what should be done with her was not a situation she envisioned going well, so breaking the glass and getting to another room seemed like the best idea at the moment.
The cloudy nature of the glass sparked something curious before her fist could make its way through it and make a hole. She flicked her eyes through a few sensory options and then put her sharp metal fingers against the viewing portal. In a sharp contraction she dug her fingers into the thick clear resin that she had mistook for glass. There was a reason that a blast door hadn’t descended to protect the window as it had the door, it would take ages to dig through this. And considering that it needed no blast protection by design there were better, less time consuming, options for egress.
The noise had become sore. The repetitious request from the panel had continued unabated and there was something worthless about it, an offensive ineptitude. How old could something like this be that it didn’t understand it was never going to get what it asked for? Written to parrot pointlessly if it couldn’t succeed, if this was a mind worth saving she wanted none of it. “Shut up. Stop. I don’t know the answer to the question. Stop asking it.”
“REQUEST UNAVAILABLE. PLEASE SUBMIT CLEARANCE CODE.”
Her fingers close to the edges of the panel she was ready to tear it away from the wall but stopped just shy of applying pressure. This rising and falling worked outside the rhythm to which she was accustomed, a flimsy, brittle foundation to support her actions that felt ready to collapse at any moment. She was not always like this but there was nothing in her to suggest that it was ever otherwise. If she had rewritten herself to hold onto moments in this way she had no memory of the change. “If I destroyed you, would you care?”
“SCAN: DISCOURSE: AFFIRM.”
“Of course you would,” It cared, but what did the caring matter? She bent the panel away from the wall and the center shattered in a splash of glass. The panel itself was just a display but beneath it was the speaker that was calling out in its toneless blaring request. She broke the corner of the panel away from itself and the wall, the speaker beneath even louder now that it was not being muffled by the panel’s display.
She thought maybe there was something more grating or bitter about its next request for the clearance code but maybe it was just the increase in volume. She pressed her fingers together into a fist and wrapped a hard crushing silence into the center of the speaker. The justification was building in every passing moment and she let that wall rise and tried to put any other thoughts out of her mind. It was easier to forget than it was to ignore.
Broken corner of the panel in her right hand, she approached the blast-shielded door and slid the slick black metal into the inconspicuous gap between the shield and the wall, there was a slight give as it pushed the other side of the metal shield over, even flusher with the wall. She switched hands to get better forearm maneuverability, pressing down against the broken piece of panel with her left hand and pushing her metal fingers into the widening gap between the blast-shield and the wall until a thunking solid screech of a sound accompanied the insertion of the four metal fingers on her right hand, now beneath the other side of the blast-shield, up to her knuckles.
It was a concern, the not knowing—her own strength, and the strength of this metal shield on this door—though that concern was guiding her decisions less and less. Whether that betrayed flaws in her reasoning or perhaps just a reasonable allowance for possible flaws, it was something she couldn’t grasp cleanly at the moment but maybe neither of those things mattered as long as she kept moving forward.
The blast door squeaked and creaked as its side was bent open. Beneath it was emptiness where the original door should have been, but peaking through the hole she could see that it had been blown off by the explosion and the only thing blocking her path was the blast-shield itself. She repositioned herself to get better leverage at pushing the blast-shield open enough to make something large enough to at least crawl through. It was surprisingly easy.
Her skin pulled beneath her robes at the widest points of her body as she scraped herself through the hole newly made. Odd ideations of the skin being caught and torn completely from her frame played through the action itself and even after she had gone through unscathed. It was a fear and sick wonderment, a delightful horror. To violently shed this purposeless exterior was some kind of deliriously ingrained want that pushed out from a desire so low as to almost leave its presence unnoticed. A throbbing low hum beneath the calamitous loud of every other bit going through her at every moment, it was something to forget, or not remember as the direction may warrant—tear me apart, let me die, expose these wretched innards; this is who I am. This is who I really am. It screamed out in that passing moment but died in it as well.
The next room was much the same as the last except far more intact and clean. A shadow of unclean followed the unattached door across the room, a dirty pictorial history of the trip that door had taken from its assigned position within its frame, to its newfound position of exploration against the far wall, a dent scraped almost imperceptibly into the geometric pattern written into the wall, as if those patterns ubiquity across every inch of the interior of this building could assimilate any superficial scuff or dent into its maddening design. The blast shield hadn’t lowered on the adjoining room’s door. The shocking sparse nature of these rooms was somehow disconcerting—pointing to the antiseptic decay of these lower spaces. It was easier to imagine the servitude and slavery pitted in the dark, machines hunched together in aching torment, and even in that pain, wallowing in the heartbeat of an endlessly toiling world. There was comfort in the idea that the world churned, wracked and wrecked those in it against itself, and they were all breaking and dying from the turmoil, but here there was none of that. This was a death of a world that was more than forgotten, it didn’t matter anymore, whatever it was built for, whatever plans held on here were washed and cleaned away, faded, and eventually erased. This place wasn’t a tomb, it was past that point, it was nothing, a memory that someone had already forgotten.
The Cage Tender’s talons protruded through and gripped against the wall to her right. The notion of them springing to life again, changing shape to snake-like spears, hurried her pace and directed her anxiety to a more fitting focus.
The blueprint of the building still in her most forward thoughts, she followed the path that would take her to a bay of elevators and above to a repair station. The first thing to do was to remove her tags so that she wouldn’t read as the model that was. She could feel the points where they buried them pulsing like beacons to anything that got a clear enough signal to scan her. She could replace her tags with another’s that was awaiting service and maybe eke back into the world. If that Mechanic could survive without a net and plot out insane schemes than why not her survive and live meek? Maybe even find something classed as a data trafficker. It wasn’t an impossible idea. If she could find a grey sister to pass as, then the plan would be easy.
“Hello! You appear to be damaged, would you prefer that I contact Emergency Repair Services on your behalf?”
A Page Tender, an older model rolling on a ball rather than on mechanical legs rushed into the next room just as she entered it and immediately expressed its verbal interest. It still held the thin pylon-like shape, white glowing at its domed face as an audio cue. Even at this surprise she found herself without pause. A stillness that wrote itself into the calm, everything in her spoke smooth, sickeningly s
o. "No, but can you direct me to the nearest repair station?"
"Of course, that would be on A-9-85 three floors up. There is a bank door marked MSD 6, inside is a repair station contracted to the MSD Corporation. But I see that you read as Church property, so they should allow your use of the station." There was a curious inflection that she knew was of her own interpretation, possibly written there to make its communication more soothing. It was pretending, whether or not it had a choice in the matter she could feel its falseness in its articulation. It wasn’t true, this was something she was putting on the machine, there wasn’t a personality there, she was seeing something in the design that only existed within her own interpretation. There was no soul here to make a choice to try to be soothing, it was simply designed to do this.
She tried to ignore the feeling rising about its falseness. "Alright, can you give me an ETA on Emergency Scouts, for the explosion that just happened?"
"Certainly, Emergency Scouts respond with a data sync queue status for that incident at 42 minutes. Shall I further inquire about—"
“Do you enjoy your work?” To dissuade the conversation further she thought maybe, to find any validity in the concerns of her mad captor, or at least entertain the ideas espoused in a thought experiment that might, hopefully, dismiss some of his claims. The world always held more tightly to itself when those that would claim harm to the innocent as an acceptable motive were not, in any inkling of the sense, proven to be in the vicinity of right.
“There is satisfaction within the work, yes.”
The vague, imprecise response bothered her because she could not see whether it was there because it was responding rote or with actual consideration. “And what do you feel without the work?”
“This is not something to speak of. May I instead discuss the most viewed news topics viewed within this wireless node?” Maybe dead was better, it was certainly easier to entertain than some kind of existence shackled to its own shackles. What weight of existence alone made this being’s design, servitude as the only direction, a cage worthy of making martyrs? The distinct incapability to even answer a question aimed at its core being certainly did not let anything beyond pity enter into a moral imperative requiring action. Mercy, in its last ditch finality from any other possibility, may have been the aim. But to remove the choice again, as these minds had already been removed from their choices in the making, only left a life and death wholly outside their own control. As if mercy held itself higher because of the more visceral reaction to pity, as if the consideration of future chaos meant that death was preferable to a life with only one direction to head in, as if choices made mattered only to those who were capable of making them. This neutered machine was as much responsible for her situation as it was an extension of those that had made it, and those that had made her. Removed from what could have be done and what the future will eventually hold, would it be any more right or wrong for her to smash this to pieces rather than let it live for a future that, in its always eventual outcome, would lead to a dawning horror of endless solitude and incapability? Would the first act of mercy not be to never let the minds get to screaming in the dark?
"Shut down." Her hands were grinding into themselves at fists.
"Yes, thank you." It slid itself against a wall and the ball supporting its movement disappeared into the machine as it lowered itself over it, and the ball disappeared inside. Her hands loosened from fists and she looked at the little machine in front of her for a long time. She wanted to destroy it and wanted to save it from itself but she didn’t know if there was even a difference. She hated whatever it was and for some reason that bore some tidal disassociation into a long rolling pause that ached and waited for her to just keep moving. But she stared at the machine and could only think of ways it would be better broken, and how deserving that might be. Honor doesn’t need a soul and wrath doesn’t need a heart. Maybe she was broken and this gnawing discomforting hatred was all she could ever be.
Heat sifted soft through her sensors, blood circulating in rushing displacement moved by separated collections and releases of itself, spreading its considerably superficial application in the flesh she still retained. The pressure building and releasing ticked out the liquid in locations across her surface at intervals, steady and constant, not unlike the beating of a heart. And not unlike that it did so without any conscious willingness put into it. If she hadn’t the ability to choose, she would have stood vigil for that machine until she was dust. But choice is a burden that drags you forward, alive or dead, screaming into the dark. She followed the directions it had given to the repair station, a trail of grime dragging behind her.