Chapter 5.
The Tribes packed up and slipped out from their tents silent as the night, each tribal acutely aware of the danger stalking ever closer. Whether by discipline or in mimicry of their elder caretakers, the children too packed up their sleeping bags and left the cave without a groan or whine. That shared grim aura of descending doom hung around the necks of every Displaced as they tackled their absolute necessities, rolling up tents, snuffing out tiny stew pots and brushing away their tracks as neatly as possible. Soon the Mutant's old gathering spot was as bare and empty as it must have been before either of their groups settled there, and the Tribals followed the lead of Lari along the tunnels that snaked towards the deep train tracks.
The Traveller hung at the rear of the camp as they left, ear to the rock of the cavern, intently listening for any indication of their assailants approach. The beat of drums, the march of feet, the drawl of bad Latin. But the caves offered nothing. Still, he posted himself diligently, caravan shotgun in hand with very last couple of shells tucked into a make-shift cloth pouch slung around his neck. At this point there was no question of 'if' their predators would manage to pick up on the Tribal's trail through the mountain caves; the hunters had managed to follow the group this far already, it was already a forgone conclusion their red banners would cross over the same rocks. The Traveller could only hope their pursuers were sleeping nights.
Once the Displaced were carefully and silently escorted down the caves all the way to the cavern intersection which split into the smooth tunnels of the train tracks, their number started to loosen up along with their nerves some small bit. Tensions unknotted, limbs unclenched and the children stopped holding in their breath.
With that temporary peace, the Traveller ran ahead to catch up with Lari and Catha, both leading the procession in front of the Elders and Apothecaries, each of whom were sharing the weight of old man Pinac in a sling between them. Letting old men and women sling a whole human's weight by themselves felt irresponsible, but one merely had to look at the tough forearms and unwavering resolve of each bearer to remember that Tribal elders do not reach their age by living soft. That was part of what made theirs a presence to respect.
Lari beckoned The Traveller over to the huddle that he and girl were keeping outside the range of the Displaced's ears. "Well? Did you hear anything? Are they behind us?" The Traveller shook his head. "Tsk. Why do you think they threw that dynamite in the first place. Maybe they want us to know how close they are? Scare us?"
The Traveller threw a glance back down the train of Tribals and kissed his teeth. "Nah. What'd be the point? The way I figure, I think maybe they bumped into some stranded Cazadore and one of the Legionnaire's got a bit antsy. Or maybe a Mutant? Either way, I don't think any tracker worth their salt would tip their hand like that on purpose. My guess is they don't know how close they are."
Catha let out a sharp breath she had forgotten she was holding in. She leaned close to the Traveller's ear and whispered. "Are you certain it's those Legion?"
"No, not certain. But who else is going to be spelunking all the way down here? People looking for all of you, that's who. We need to put road between them and us, with some luck we might score some fortifications behind that gold-wreathed gate of yours, something they'll make them think twice about pushing onwards."
"I never thought they would stalk us so far." The girl grumbled. "I mean we must be miles underground at this point, but they've tracked us all this way? For what?"
The Traveller gave himself an experimental slap around the chops, stirring the tiredness for his overworked, and still lightly medicated, face. "Well, they don't have much of a choice."
"Eh?"
"Joining The Legion isn't a 'walk up and sign on', sort of deal; there's trials and tasks and... hazing, to put it mildly. Back in their prime you'd hear stories out west of Tribes being given a handful of sticks and told to beat their neighbours to death. The survivors get to join the fold."
A shared shiver ran up the spines of Lari and Catha, as their minds jumped to equally savage and dark places.
"Nowadays, however, they don't really have the presence for all that pomp. Wasting eight tenths of a Tribe? Terrible for licking wounds. My best guess is your Uncle has been given an ultimatum, 'come back with the Dead Trees in chains or don't come back at all.' Something to that effect. Chasing you down is his only shot at a future with the Legion. However much a future like that is worth..."
The kids fell quiet as that dour predication washed over them, swallowing the implication of potentially never being left to go free. That was the same foreboding still hanging over them when their number trundled up to the pristine underground station; a station granting the three their own preview of a particularly grim site. Wedged up along the station platform that Lari and The Traveller had explored, leaving just enough room for the Tribals to climb up two at a time, was the defaced backside of the subway car. Splattered dark red with the blood of Ghouls soaking mangled limps and bone chunks sticking out of the undercarriage extremities.
The Traveller whistled. "I hope your folk ain't squeamish."
"I'll get some of the elders to cover the little one's eyes." Catha said, hopping off to catch the unsuspecting Tribals.
Lari just stared at the carnage, unblinking. He took it all in, the suffering, the death, the smell; and then he took it all in again. Not letting a single detail slip away into murky half-memory or fanciful embellishment, he had to take that time, he has to absorb everything. It took several shakes of the Traveller manhandling him by the shoulder to snap him out of the little trance. "You okay, kid?"
"I... yes, I am." Lari reminded himself.
"Good" The Traveller frowned "Because I need you to keep your head on straight, we're almost out of the other end of this."
No one was quite interested in settling down on the train station with their tents and sleeping bags, not when they were expecting their 'Dread Bull' to come raining down over their heads at any minute. Each man and woman stood ready to dash in any and every direction at the drop of a hat, but were equally scared sick by the prospect of maybe having to. Even the youngest of the kids seemed to taste that despair in the air and rather than run around playing, just sat on the edge of the platform miserably poking at dust mites.
The Traveller took the eldest and gave them ground rules: keep a tribal on rotation at the head of the train tunnel and report any activity they spot through the dark, split the Displaced up between groups under the supervision of a single elder, ensure each tribal know exactly who to defer to in an emergency. Oh, and don't go exploring up the stairs to the promenade. No sense rolling a die and assuming he and the boy had already woken all the nasties on their first visit.
As Lari and The Traveller were going over the reminder of their gear for their last scouting trip, along the rest of the Tunnel and hopefully out the otherside of the mountain, Catha approached the two of them with a resolute, but nervous, announcement.
"You are not coming with us?" Lari echoed, bemused. He glanced over to the carefully lain hammock with Pinac's unconsious form and attendants around him. "If this is about what Seer Pinac said, I know how you feel but you have to live for yourself. You were right, a Chief needs to lead from the front of the pack, especially in the tough times. We need a Chieftain like you, Catha!"
The Traveller nodded absently as he focused on juggling his remaining arsenal with his duffle-bag reserves. "We could have really used someone your size on that last scout, and I just bet we can find some use for you on this one."
Catha smiled in a manner that touched her cheeks but not her big brown eyes. " 'A Chief leads from the front' " She whispered. "Like papa used to say. He always did, too. He lead right in front of everyone, in front of every tribe that came to us. He was always there to hear out their worries and fears, to teach them to be strong. I think that needs to be me. Here."
"But...but." Lari stuttered. "I thought we were partners!"
"We are!" She nodded empathically. "We definitely are! And we're working together, right now. You will clear the way, and I will keep everyone together and motivated. And then- together we lead all the tribes out of here! Like partners!"
"And you're certain you don't want to get involved?" The Traveller asked, waving his large Bowie knife in the air like a tantalising haunch of cooked meat. "There's a lot of good you can be doing from the front with us, probably a lot more than you'll get in camp."
Catha shook her head. "But the Displaced would be destitute. Pinac was the closet thing we had to a unified Chieftain, and without him to bring everyone together... I have to be there, for Pinac."
"And Coloumbia?" Lari hissed, grabbed by a manic bout of desperation. "The other Elders? They have practically been looking over us this whole time, can't you just let them be the leaders and stay close to m- to us? Please, Catha, you don't have to stay behind!"
A knowing sadness crept into Catha's face, cutting much older lines into her face than that of a small Thirteen year old girl. "No Lari. Scouting the caves is your job, being here and keeping the spirits of the Tribes back home is mine. I think- I think we've been avoiding that, haven't we? Being away from each other. That's why I used to escape and go playing on the rocks back home. Who wants to miss all the fun out there with scouts and hunters? Who wants to be stuck being the scratching post for everyone in the Tribes when the real world is out there?
Leave that for the Chief! Leave that for the Seer! But we don't have a Chief anymore, do we? And I- don't think we're going to have Seer soon... I want to be out there with you two, but I have to be where I'm supposed to be. It's where Dad would be." The girl nodded to her own sentiment, utterly resolute.
Lari's voice sank to a whisper "You'll be left behind... What if the Legion attacks while we're gone?" The girl's eyes narrowed, mirroring the exact same concern behind their glaze. This was not the look of the Catha from a day prior, but the steely glare of a girl who knew the possibilities and made her decision despite of them. No- because of them.
"Don't be gone long."
The railway tunnel coursed like a stream cutting over drylands the deeper that Lari and the Traveller progressed down the length of it's track. Bends and turns and slight ascending slopes leading upwards, whoever had carved that track through the mountainside had likely worked around huge deposits of bedrock and other dangerous-to-mine through patches. No self respecting, or job fearing, official would sign off on such a wild and haphazard train tunnel; at least not how the Traveller had come to understand their work from vicariously picking through two-century-old effects over his years as an explorer. The old world fascinated him, unhealthily so. And exploring it, understanding how the people who made it thought, tended to prove more transferable than many of the modern day would assume. For example, by identifying every way that no public planner in America would sanction the very rails he was walking over, the Traveller was able to hone in on the likely secretive and off-the-books nature of that train route. Likely military, probably connecting to some sort of long defunct black site. All deductions that would help him prepare for what was at the other-end of that tunnel long before they turned that last corner to spot the breaking rays of a very early morning sun peaking through the darkness. (And all of which gave him the hunch to pre-emptively draw his laser pistol from his duffel bag. Just in case.)
As it happened, that egress from the mountain-tunnel did not lead out into the wilds like the streaming pale sunlight might suggest, but instead to a large dilatated American-military-star stamped warehouse with crumbling rust-coated metal sheet walls and long-since smashed out, dusty windows through which the outside morning beckoned. The place was clearly an unloading station back in the Old World, what with the lumbering piles of olive green 'white star' crates and containers balanced atop one another. Maybe the only connection between whichever aspect out the outside world hung on the north end of that mountain train tunnel, and this long-abandoned facility which, judging from the sharp chill cutting through their light-wear; was nestled somehow high up into the cliffs.
Recalling his last encounter vividly, with monsters that seemed to crawl out behind the crannies and crooks of the very walls, Lari was extremely cautious to proceed through the warehouse of boxes, even as the curiosity-driven Traveller sauntered about the place, peeking into opened crates, eager to gauge the nature of the place they had found.
Most of the boxes were packed with long rotted food supplies, as the man expected, but a choice few were stuffed full of electronic parts. Capacitors and motherboards picked clean; none of which were packaged or sealed, all sent in pick-and-mix style boxes. Building on his previous theory, the Traveller contextualised these as perhaps replacement electronics parts, intentionally sourced from recycled and decommissioned computers so as not to leave some sort of paper trail. Further bleeding into his vision of a clandestine 'Black Site' for the discreet, but also opening up further speculation; whatever could the staff there have been working on which required whole crates worth of untraceable electronic parts?
A slight whooshing noise brushed the very edges of their hearing, calling to mind images of soft air jets brushing over dusty floors, before fading into the middle distance. They shared a glance between them and progressed careful around the maze of crates and boxes, towards where the 'jet' sound vanished, placing careful and cautious steps around the tumbles of detritus littering the warehouse floor. On the far side of that maze, large black doors opened up further into the facility.
Lari delicately drew his rustic hunting rifle and the Traveller palmed the grip of his laser pistol, squeezing just that little bit tighter. Both silently ensured the other's readiness before proceeding deeper.
Those heavy double doors scrapped painfully against their squashed joints, pushing open up onto the back end of a dour reception space, for a particularly uniform office building bearing all the rigid hallmarks of a stuffy military building.
Hallways trailed off the first and second floor, marked with directories labelled for 'Barracks', 'Armory', 'Mess Hall' with 'Storage station' above the the way they had just come. Most doors seemed to sport small keypad locks, that could probably be wrenched out of their sockets easily enough. Not that the engineers who installed those locks would have expected such rough treatment from careless scavs two hundred years after the fact, but the Traveller had received enough hawkers trying to pawn emancipated Keycard readers at him to know Old World security measures were not quite as 'ironclad' as they might have once been.
In the centre of the reception, gold to the eyes of the Traveller, was a visitor's terminal set up for the operative convenience of some long gone-to-dust greeter. A window into the Old World and, as luck would have it on that particular day, a piece of bait on a hook.
The very moment that the Traveller, with Lari sticking close to his back conspiratorially scanning the shadows, leapt over the desk to begin excitedly 'forcing access' into the OS of that old computer terminal, the seemingly dead military office building abruptly sprang to life.
Lethal-looking robotic bubble-turrets automatically folded out of concealed wall emplacements, jutting out their tri-barrel lasers topped with glowing red sensors. Combat fitted assistant robots floated out from behind every passageway, their jet-propelled cyclical central unit reinforced with three spindly robot appendages tipped with surgical saws, flame shooting spouts and laser weaponry, and guided by three equidistant optical processor eyes, all operating with an autonomous unity. And the biggest of the bunch, a tri-legged tank-class combat bot, eight-feet tall and equipped with several inches of sturdy ballistic armour and two mobile turret emplacements for fists; rolled out prominently from the central office space on the landing floor.
Even experiencing his very first contact with man-made robots in that very moment, that intrinsically oppressive cloud of overwhelming force crushed Lari's impulse centre. The boy froze with his weapon slack in his hand. Keeping in the Traveller's step, the boy loosened his grip on his hunting rifle, letting the weapon hang slack on it's shoulder strap, and slowly raised both hands over his head; acquiescing to the mercy of cold machines.
"I knew it!" screeched a tinny voice over the ancient 'Public Address' system, projected from every corner of the military base like the voice of omnipotence itself. "I knew it could not have been ghouls who made it out of that tunnel. I told Gerald, I told him; dumb organics won't just grow a brain. Flesh deteriorates, never upgrades! But Gerald- he was stubborn, he always is. Gerald wanted us to flood the tunnels with napalm the very moment our motion detectors sensed your presence. I was more... ambivalent."
Menacing though they seemed, the gun toting robots that surrounded the two of them hovered in a state of docility, a single command away from eviscerating both Lari and the Traveller into superheated dust particles perhaps, but presently docile. The Traveller took that as strong enough invitation to reciprocate. He spoke upwards, as though to the ceiling. "Well, I appreciate your... ambivalence, then. because we don't mean no harm, me and the boy. We were just out spelunking our way through those tunnels back there and stumbled up into your base, ain't that right, Kid?" Lari nodded along, himself trying to locate the disembodied voice and finding only unyielding metal automatrons staring back.
"My base?" The voice gasped in a shrill. "Yes, yes I suppose it is my base now, isn't it? How do you like the sound of that, Gerald? Mmm, I thought so too..." A drop of menace grew inside the voice, like the uncoiling of a desert python as it bears its fangs. "And what would possess you... Organics, to trespass in my military base?"
The Traveller easily spotted the hook, fishing for a reason to let loose. "Trespass? Oh, we wouldn't dream of trespassing, would we boy? No, we're just a couple of Prospectors exploring these here caves. Now it's pretty clear there ain't nothing valuable down this way, we'll try our luck up the other end."
"Prospectors?" The voice sneered. "Vermin picking through ancient graves for shiny baubles. Pickpocketing from the dead to fuel their slumlord-living. We told you, Winston. This is the face of the Wasteland, not the noble dusty-heroes waving the tattered flag of humanity. Thieves! Graverobbers! The kind best serving as hot ash beneath our evolved feet."
"Woah, hold on there!" The Traveller butt himself in to the invisible dialogue whilst nervously eyeing the various plasma injectors and cold laser barrels pointed squarely at his particulars. "Now there ain't no need for this to end all violent, like. Me and the boy ain't impeached on you and yours and we don't intend to. We're sorry for the inconvenience, now if you don't mind-" He made to try and leave without actually moving his body for fear of triggering some movement-based redundancy program in the bots. That overly folksy bumpkin persona had wormed out of stickier situations in the past, but some alarm in the back of his head was ringing the 'crazy bell' whenever he heard that voice from the other side of the intercom. And the deranged tended to be the hardest to play up to. Or the easiest. Really depends on the luck of the draw.
The intercom line buzzed for a hot mic, but no projected voice for an agonisingly prolonged stretch. Lari exchanged a worried glance with his Traveller partner, who took the opportunity to silently communicate. He looked first to Lari and then nudged his sight over to the double doors they had entered through and bobbed his head slightly their direction.
Lari's eyes went wide as soon as he understood the meaning and he shook his own head as violently as he dared, which ended up being little more than a vibrating tremor across his body. The man tried to empathetically insist as much as one can with body-exclusive sign language and facial expressions, but the equally as static boy was stubborn. Whatever hole they had stumbled their way into, they could dig out of it together. Afterall, what sort of Pathfinder runs away from the threat?
The communication channels blared to life once more. "Gerald brings up a good point. You say you haven't imposed on us, but here you are walking around in a top secret military base, feasting your eyes on it's clandestine wonder and proposing to simply skulk away like a coyote come dawn. The very knowing of this base's exsistence is a privilege exclusive to myself and the corpses who litter it. Oh, and the ferals we had to drive out. I assume you met the previous tenants?"
"A lovely lot." The Traveller replied flatly.
"Aren't they just? Violent and simple. The most honest of Organics, wouldn't you say?" The man's nose twitched at that word again: 'Organics'. Very pointed. Accusatory and exclusionary. A label that painted a whole tapestry of possibility about the man who used it. Vocal synthesisers tended to have a robotic tell to them, a flat-line tonality or the odd synthetic hick-up in their audio replicators. The Traveller had known exceptions here and there, however; and should the voice he was hearing today belong to a metal edifice; then that voice would certainly go down as the most strikingly authentic he had heard. That level of hardly masked mania would be challenging for any robot to reproduce. "Your imposition is impertinence. A failure to show deference unto me and my kind. A crime for which most all of your kind is culpable."
" 'My kind?' " The Traveller challenged. "You'll have to suffer my ignorance a little more, friend. What 'kind' would you be talking about?"
"Open those hick eyes!" The voice hissed "Each metal marvel you see is my own child, built under my own immaculate supervision! Yes- yes and you, Gerald. No, I don't think so, Winston. Deflate that vast ego of yours for a second..."
The Traveller cast his eyes once again at their robot retinue, armed with an eye for construction. The voice was largely right, on second glance he could quite easily make out the welded shut patches where rust must have eaten away at the dome carapace of the floating Mr Gutsy units. And the Laser Cannon attachment of the bubble-shaped ceiling turrets were almost all retrofits from commercialised laser weaponry, likely welded together after the original unit was blown apart. And yet- "Are these all retrofit models? Building a robot and simply stitching together discarded parts pulled from old wrecks are a world or two apart. What I mean to say is; even I've jury rigged a fusion reactor or two in my day. And my fingers are far from immaculate, let me tell you." The Traveller chuckled humourlessly, instinctually flexing flat digits that jerked and tremored in peaceful moments.
The line went fully dead, without a hint of background static, for a single prolonged exhale. Then the voice returned. "What do you know about machines?" It demanded.
"Enough." The Traveller said with an impish smirk. "Enough to guess you recycled most of these models from the scrap heap of this very base, didn't you? Probably tapped into the security terminals to switch up their IFF targeting. Making friends out of otherwise staunchly programmed guard dogs. Is that about right? I guess they're not so much your children then, more like... foster kids?"
The voice purred. "He's arrogant. But perceptive. A dangerous combination. Winston thinks you worth more than hot ash, Organic. Tell us, have you ever bypassed military encryption?"
"Here and there."
"Fortuitous." The intercom mulled. "For you, that is. You may earn back your worthless lives with some servitude; very fitting for your kind, don't you think?" A shrill laugh echoed against itself, ringing both from the intercom and faintly through the air. The Traveller's ears were sharp, whoever was speaking to them was nearby, just upstairs and behind the hefty sentry bot. He figured, cowards always hide behind the biggest body. "Child thing!" Lari jittered in response. "You look inoffensive enough, come serve as insurance whilst your rugged friend runs our errands like the faithful pet he was born to be."
Without any further instruction, one of the floating dome bots, the only present robot lacking the olive green finish with a military star, poked at the boy's back indicating him towards the stairs. Lari's eyes locked with the Stranger, who offered only a grimace and a nod. If the kid had run like he suggested, all of this would have a been a whole lot simpler. Messy, perhaps, but simpler. Then again, he begrudged, it's not as though the single laser pistol in his holster was a worthy foil to the arsenal of weaponry primed to melt him into radioactive goo.
For as long as the two of them still held each other's vision, as Lari was led up and around into the bowels of the black-site outpost, the Traveller did his best to silently tell Lari not to panic, he was going to get the both of them out of this. Of course, all Lari saw was the man making wild darting eyes all over the place, and thus just assumed this whole situation was indeed spiralling as far out of both of their control as it seemed to be.
Another military model robot led the Traveller on his own path across the ground floor, behind the receptionist's desk and through the staff door labelled 'Maintenance'. He was led past open doorways to several plainly tiled maintenance rooms with overturned desks and ruffled-through documents, before being sharply turned inside of a large server room, close enough to the back of the compound for the whistling wind of the mountains to squeeze through the thin material walls.
That server room was a still thrumming hive of eight foot computer units that touched both the floor and ceiling, glowing with pulsing red strip-lights that ran up their body. A single personnel terminal was wedged between two oversized units, angled down above a tiny three-foot stool-of-a-seat; undoubtedly the cause of acute back-pain issues for whatever technician was unfortunate enough to work here back before the world fell quiet. So many units stuck together in a small space like that, there was no way these computers had been running for the past two hundred years. From the very moment he approached the door a wave of sweltering heated air fell on the man, no doubt the cooling system had died long ago, this whole facility was an overheating malfunction waiting to happen. That voice over the radio must have seen that when he switched those units on, anyone with half a engineer's brain cell would notice such a glaring complication, but something down here was apparently well worth such a risk.
"Take a seat." The voice flared up again the very second the Traveller entered into his sauna-of-a-computer room. The Traveller glanced about curiously in an attempt to pinpoint exactly how his progress was being tracked. His gaze fell an optic-eye-tipped appendage sticking out the dome-like body of his escort Mister Gutsy. "All the better to see you with." The intercom snickered as the robot poked him forward with the barrel of it's plasma-thrower arm. "I know of your kind, Organic. How duplicitous and traitorous you can get. You didn't really think I'd leave you unsupervised in the heart of my base, did you? I'll suffer your intrusion only as long as it takes for you to serve your purpose."
Lari was guided through his own tour of the upper floor of the military base, at plasma gun point. And as he passed by each office and break-room new metal-man machines unlike anything the boy could have imagined passed him by. The oldest stories of the camp told of the wonders of innovation that the Old World had enjoyed before the end, robot servants and limitless energy, but the pictures in his head tended to conjure more humanoid shapes. Not the bulky, tube armed waiter-robots with their giant transistor-heads or the floating 'light bulb'-shaped silver balls propelled on mini air jets. Somehow it all seemed so terrestrial and disappointing, that even the precipice of luxury turned out to be held together by blunt objects rather than wonderous works of art.
Snaking through those corridors bought the boy and his escort to what could only be the hub of the compound. A large meeting space with a single prominent desk and dozens of chairs lined up against the walls or slotted under the tables, all set-up to seat more bodies in one space than the Tribes did in their tents. It was hard to imagine sometimes, a world that was once so full of people that even a meeting room had to be packed up like an old supermart can.
At the head of the meeting room, glued to the intercom machines through which his voice was broadcast all over the facility, was a being that viscerally repelled Lari. Perhaps it was a man at one point, but somewhere during the process of replacing the right half of his skull with an oversized red optical globe, or the back of his spine with exposed-wire consoles and his left fore-arm with a gun-metal pincer claw, he had lost that shape.
Each grotesque robot adornment looked to be welded onto ungrateful and corroded flesh. Like the bulbous robotic protrusions of a metal butterfly caught mid-metamorphosis at the height of that biological horror. A diode poking out of the back of his head flashed for a second, and then the body turned to see the boy with his only remaining eye. A drooping, dead-lidded orb that seemed to be trying to slack off of his face. Only a faint fluttering on his brow indicated any life left inside that mask- that and the gnawing of metal-tipped teeth.
"You do look soft." The creature spoke through a vocal modulator emanating somewhere beneath it's grimy shirt. It's lips were still, only a faint glow beneath the shirt fabric hummed along with it's speech. "Gerald was right, you make a fine bargaining chip." It's claw lifted the radio receiver to it's chest. "Your boy is here." That voice echoed out of sirens across the base.
Lari feared approaching the thing, not so much for its danger, it looked a sad and unintimidating facsimile of life in the flesh, but for the stench of death that would surely cling to it. But as a fascination drew him closer regardless, Lari senses picked up on nothing. Not the bitter curling tinge of melted flesh like the blackened crispy flays of skin around his metallic implements promised. Nor the stench of sweat and perspiration under the midday summer sun. The smells of life. He was stale, and cold, like an old rusted fork hung in the wall of a musty shed.
It continued to communicate, as though the boy were somewhere else. "Now for purpose, as we discussed. Yours is simple, that unassuming terminal before you- yes that one, it hides from me. Hides secrets and stories; wonders and technologies; gifts I want. That we deserve. The Organics who locked it were clever- devious, that is better word for it, thank you Gerald. Safeguards restrict our superior methods of breeching it's depths. But an Organic of middling intellect, you, can be my surrogate. Can't you?" The red robot eye in his head swivelled to focus on the boy and narrowed with receptor shutters. "Your fleshy friend will keep us company for the meanwhile."
That Amalgam of a man let the radio receiver fall dead then, free of distraction, it regarded the boy fully; limp eye staring off into the empty spaces whilst the robotic red lamp greedy drank in Lari's whole being.
"Hmm, yes, yes- I was right, wasn't I? You boy, you were a farmer not so long ago; weren't you? You wear it on your thumbs and fingers!" Lari self-consciously glanced at his own digits, they looked pretty normal and standard to him. "I recognise those hands, those callouses and scrapes, where years of toil and effort broke you down and knitted your body back together, stronger. Stronger, but still, lamentably, human."
The Amalgam unfurled itself from it's hunch onto standing a proud seven-feet high, with its head-diode scraping on the ceiling tiles. Under his knees the place where his flesh had been stitched to elongated metal leg appendages stood out grotesquely, giving the impression of an amputated man balancing on stilts rather than an appropriately grown giant. Beneath the thin fabric of his loose vest shirt, a dim white glow thrummed from deep inside his chest, with the irregular throbbing of a diseased organ.
"Impressive, aren't I?" The Amalgam preened, flexing spindly limbs wrapped in ugly metal. "And to think that all what I am came from a package as humble as yours. A weak boy of flesh, born to a family of flesh, on a dust farm under a freeway no one cared about leading into a town no one remembers. My parents had hands like yours. Fashioned from years trying to coax Tato-plants to grow in the barren ash; enough to feed us or trade for necessities. Always one or the other, never enough for both. They were a sad couple, my parents. I'm not sure they ever really thought about why they wanted a child, or if they ever even planned for one to begin with. They had no vision, no talents, no prospects, no hopes. And that's what they thought they wanted for me, another body to keep them company. Maybe just to be there to roll their bodies in a hole once they finally gave out." For a moment it almost seemed as though the dead eye rolled itself over to stare at Lari, but the boy quickly realised it was the aimless lulling of movement. No life was alight behind that glassy stare. "Do you know what it's like, to stare the barren expanse of your future down like the barrel of a gun?"
Lari shook his head with weak conviction, still flabbergasted by the sheer spectacle of the man and the even more unbelievable concept that he was once a human, especially a boy that was once anything like himself. He was the kind of nightmare fantasy that the bigger kids would invent to scare him and Catha around the campfire at night ,a fanciful flight of a grim imagination. Things like him were not meant to exist.
"Nor did they. Not my parents, nor my sister when she was born. They only saw the limits of the dust heap they called theirs, whereas I saw all the world reflected in the hull of the first scrap unit my Father hauled home. I saw that untouchable, unaging perfection in it's rounded globe, decommissioned by circumstance but a simple few repaired wires and patched up servitors from picking right up where it left off. From breaking the conventions of death with it's own eternal beauty!" Wonderment danced across it's glaring eye as it floated off into the memory, drunk on the rich taste of that single special moment. All the world must have vanished in such a naked state of ecstasy. "Mechanisms and computers always spoke to me, in a way. Not loudly, but through whispers in their own silent language; one only my feverish little fingers could decipher. Putting my first Mr Handy back together was the work of two months. The next was two weeks. Then two days." For the first time his chittering mouth actually responded. With a jolt of electrodes reflected in his head-diode, his lips peeled back in a twitch, resembling a twisted grimace. Just for a second, before the effect released and the whole human face fell slack once more.
"I was meant for greater things. To be a greater man. But they couldn't understand that. My family tried to hinder me. To stop me. They presented a choice, held up my robot friends to their dusty coffin of a farm and, when they didn't like my answer, they thought they could answer for me. 'They need me'. 'I would tear the family apart'. What family? What life?" His vocal synthesiser growled louder and louder, until his head diode flashed once brightly, and his whole being shifted back into calm. "It's funny; the day I choose to leave them it felt like the most important choice in the world. Like the most drastic decision I had ever, and would ever, make. But now- now I don't even remember their names. Their faces. Just their voices, rattling around in the back of my head. They used to be louder. When I still dreamt." That pensive reflection seemed to bother the Amalgam somewhat, frustration buzzed under his tone for a nagging all his replacement parts and subdermal diodes could not fully erase. It was especially annoying nowadays. He could not forget anything.
"Do you ever dream about what life might provide for those brave enough to seek it, child? Do you ever dream beyond the constraints of your farmland, or your caretaker down there? They don't have to remain dreams. Let me show you."
Under the oppressive wave of heat in the server room, the Traveller confronted the antiquated network defences of his dingy maintenance terminal. In their time the public had become so impressed with the 'sleek' and 'tomorrow-man' stylings of a single 'Operating System' manufacturer that every service in all fields sought their patronage, which made the job of the humble rubble picker two hundred years later a lot easier. Discover the vulnerabilities in one terminal and you have a backdoor into every system you could dream of, and these days even a child could slip behind the digital firewalls of a simple enough Old World kiosk or a personal planner system. Rare and impressive were the personal OS systems, rarer still were the well-coded personal OS', such as the one guarding the deep secrets of that particular backroom terminal.
The Traveller had grown up playing with terminals, both inside and out. Wiring and coding his own little box to mess around with on quiet nights when the other kids were out bashing their heads together for fun was a deep soothing pleasure in those days. Even older and rougher as he was, a new challenge stoked that old child-like excitement.
What really fascinated the Traveller were the precautions that the programmer made. Targeted keyloggers designed to identify robotic infiltrators and shut them out, eliminating remote and computerised threats. Whoever was in charge of security must have nursed a healthy fear of computer-based infiltration, even on top of this terminal sitting in the middle of a blank spot on the map. Even after he had cracked through that initial firewall and was granted access over a general base directory, through which he could peak at the considerable number of reactivated military robots connected to the core bae system but somehow receiving commands from an unspecifiable external router, the actual guts of the servers, hidden under the sub-category 'Archives', were locked beyond yet another layer of even more complex firewalls! Whatever this black site was maintaining was important enough that even knowing of it's charges was unacceptable. Information can be deadly, certainly; but information deadly enough to still be valuable two hundred years after the world had ended? That certainly seemed like the kind of infomation one should not just happily hand over to any old robot-radical despot.
But the corner he was backed into hardly left room for choice. The Mister Gutsy combat model floating just a foot behind him seemed intimately keyed into his every move, watching as he breached each firewall with rapt attention and even waving that plasma pistol arm attachment every time the Traveller experimentally flexed his arm and tested the limits of his hostage situation. Odd behaviour. RobCo bots, even the military models, were fairly rudimentary and command-line driven, to be watching over his every move the way that metal ball was definitely seemed uncharacteristic, there could only be an intelligence behind that protruding optical unit of his metal menace.
Yes, he was sure of it. The voice over the radio was somehow keyed directly into the 'brain' of his robot watch-dog, and even subtly influencing his movements. Fascinatingly unique, and unprecedented in all robots he had ever known, but more presently a concern if he wanted to try and weasel himself and Lari out from their very pointed interment. He had been in the proximity of enough madmen to know that after you give them what they want, they are not typically of a mind to let you walk free.
Certainly not when the most valuable currency of trade will be the words he was working to call onto his screen. The Traveller's work would only end up turning him and the boy into loose ends; and soon-after, vaporized ash. He needed to concoct some sort of exit strategy.
The Amalgam of a man slumped across the room with heavy lurches, like the gait of a man carrying a fully trussed boar entirely on his own back, to the far viewing window looking out at the orange sun-baked mountain side on the otherside of a bottomless gulch. He tried to beckon over the boy with giddy wave of his hand, but Lari kept his distance from the thing; having seen enough surprises out of beings that seemed to be men but were anything but.
It pointed a finger, tipped in jagged bolts, over the horizon. "Do you see there?" It asked. "Laying on the crest of the land?"
The glare of the midday sun beamed shimmers of heat upon the valley in a way that made the air wobble and shake in place. Lari had to squint out the obtrusions and access his scouting eye to perceive the silhouettes on the skyline. Jutting sticks and boxes, like far-off fauna of some immense size, the image sparked no comparison.
He shrugged. "What is it?"
The limp face twitched into a grimace. "That is the crown of a city. Just over that valley lip, the city where the mist settles. The first home I wasn't given, but found. I take it you've yet to see your first. City, I mean."
He knew of the idea. Boundless tribes full with so many faces it would be impossible to know them all, or to like and live in harmony. A conflux of cultures, peoples, creeds and moralities; stacked atop one another and prone to friction and conflict. All the world was like that once, before it stopped. "No. I mean- yes. I've never..."
"Just like me." It whistled a simulated note, too musical to be contemplative. "My father would leave the farm to trade when the harvest was good, and where we lived no traders or bandits ever stumbled our way. The people I met in that city right there; the 'citizens of the new world', they were the first people outside of my family I ever met. Since then I've crossed hundreds of settlements small and big, and the first impression I found there stands paramount. A shining example of the state of our world."
Lari sometimes considered the old of the clans and wondered how it could be that they were ever the same as him. As small and young and unsure. Trying to make that same comparison between himself and that badly-fitted flesh-puppet felt almost insulting, but undeniably intriguing. "What did you see there?" He found himself asking. "What impression did it make?"
It's red eye twinkled his direction. "They robbed me. Oh yes, at gun point a group of leathery, muscle-bound road warriors rolled me over for the Brahmin skin off my back and the 20 caps hidden in my shoe. See, those were 'Strong men' of the apocalypse. And that is what the wastes make of people. 'Strong Men' that leech off the farmers and growers and the survivors. That is what it all boils down to, the sheep struggling to survive and the wolves feeding off of them; that is the ultimate destination of all Organics, love them or... see them. The man that was with you, the bigger one, I saw it clear as day on my receptors; he is one of those 'Strong Men', isn't he?"
"What? No, I don't think..." Lari stumbled over his words. He felt right about defending the Traveller, his friend; but what did he really know about the man? He did seem to offer up his own services freely enough, however. "He's been good to me, at least..."
The Amalgam continued, unabashed. "Organics are born in a broken, fallen world and choose, invariably, to shed from themselves in order to survive. It is their basest instinct, its all that they know. Walk the wastes as I have and you'll find the legacy of man; Cannibals, Bandits, killers- A humourless joke. See, you know what I saw when I saw the Old World up close? When I dug through the bowels of the dead? Inspiration, majesty, wild unchecked affluence which birthed the luxury of myth! Look at these constructs that I merely revived; have you ever imagined anything so incredible?"
Lari took in it's example, the floating metal ball that was never too far from the boy, it's noisy floating jets constantly irritating in the back of his head. It truly was an object the mind struggled to grasp, perfectly round and mobile enough to float but clad in silvery metal and clearly heavier than bricks; even the stories about the robot handmaids of the Old World lacked the complex dichotomy of staring a working model in it's three metal eyes.
"Can you imagine anyone today creating something so impressive?" It continued. "Or making anything at all? The wasteland breaks Organics. Every one of them. Only they can withstand it. Persist and remain what they are, remember who they are supposed to be. Some sturdy constructs still go about their day even now, you know! Mete out algorithms written my a people scattered to nuclear dust. God, how I envied them..."
As the Amalgam dreamily leant on the window sill, the loose fabric of it's shirt lightly fell open, exposing the horror show of its body. Everything, chest and stomach, was carved out to the spine and muscle to be replaced with squashed blinking units and black rubber tubes actioned with mechanical pumps. It had the look of a walking autopsy beset by some form of bizarre mechanical decay.
"It frightens you, doesn't it?" The Amalgam observed, spotting Lari's evident repulsion written on his face. "Gerald said it would. He's always been the most intuitive out of us. Of We. You and I differ there. When I first upgraded myself I felt no fear. All that was weaned out long ago. I was excited. I was taking the first steps towards forcing this world to make sense."
"Who... who is Gerald?" Lair asked timidly, expecting a second abomination to spring up from the floorboards.
Its receptors narrowed, affronted by the obliviousness of such a question, and then loosed into a realisation. "Ah, of course; I forget how... lonely it can be for Organics. Gerald, and Winston for that matter, are right here." His claw-like digit pointed to one squarish black box sitting in his chest where his heart should have been, out of which were stuck a row of flickering tiny light filaments. The first three were very activate, blinking red, green and yellow respectively, whilst the other seven sat cold and lifeless. "Although it might be more appropriate to say they come to life here." Its finger travelled up to indicate the mess of mechanics that made up his head, and presumably a brain therein. If indeed any grey matter still existed in the thing.
"I created them." It explained for Lari's dumbfounded convenience. "When I first started to improve myself, to become perpetual, I knew how lonely it would be. It took the experimentation of years before I figured out a solution. Digitised and simulated brain waves kept within this computation unit and transmitted into my flesh, similar enough to my own brain wave patterns to ensure enlightened talk, but different enough to create distinct personalities for variety. So that I can be my own community. Bit it doesn't just end there! With the way I've upgraded myself, transmitting flesh to electrics, I conjoin my will with the robots I spent my childhood with! The model you see behind you, was the same one I left home with; still every bit the companion it was that day. Ever unchanging. And every day more join the community in my head, every one of them another eye I see the world out of, a network of interconnection at every moment! I may not have the resources of our forbearers, but I like to think that spark of ingenuity still lives in me somewhere." It chuckled, coldly; and Lari had to wonder who exactly it was he was sharing this conversation with.
"I'll make more in time. More personalities, more communities. Life without legs, all the benefits of company, wit and discussion, none of the bodily waste and selfish personability. Well- yes, I suppose Gerald can be grating, but I enjoy his spunk, Winston. Debate nurtures discussion." That red eye flicked off entirely whenever it went off to speak with his 'community' like that, and the big bulb out of it's head flickered wildly; transmitting the Amalgam into a forum of it's own.
"Before I created them, I had been alone since the farm. It's a crushing disease, loneliness. Like an industrial press squeezing down on your chest, snapping you apart until your heart just pops. What is any of it for? Creativity, hope, genius; without people to share it with? No, I wouldn't wish that hell on anyone. I want... I want to bring this to others. But not just the inner-community; the longevity! Do you have any idea how old I am?"
Limp though that mask of a face hanging off his metal frame was, Lari caught the stubble and once-sharp chin of a face not too far away from many of the Dead Tree warriors he had hunted under back in the basin. "Twenty? Thirty?"
"I'm fifty. Yet I don't feel a day over Twenty-five. With the cocktail of nutrients feeding into my body, I calculate no limit to my preservation. And I only improve more every year! Someday I might even learn how to preserve all the flesh too- can you imagine? But those philistines of the Wastes; those 'Strong Men'; they run from what I offer. Fearing what their tiny brains can't even comprehend, they shoot their guns and throw their sticks at an open hand offering them real immortality! Can foolishness like that even be salvaged? Should it be?" His voice turned bitter and despairing, reliving a hundred rejections from the 'clueless'. "They would rather waste away in some irradiated hovel until someone younger and stronger puts them out of their misery. 'A noble end' to their addled minds. They lack imagination. Brutality does that to you, I have surmised. How do you envision a future you can't believe in?"
Genuine sadness touched at his red eye unit, and the corners of his flesh mask. Dismiss it though he try, the Amalgam could never quite peel humanities' tragedy off his mind and soul. He wore it in his disgust and anger, as well as in his frustration and confusion. Why wouldn't the broken let him fix them?
"No." He sighed. "The 'Strong' can't be saved. They're stubborn and infantile. They live lives drenched in violence and death, and it taints them. Makes them cruel. What I present is the opposite of cruelty, this is... it's synthesis. They'll never see that, no like you or I do."
Lari jumped a little. "Me?"
The Amalgam nodded carefully, so as to not further task the flapping face flesh. "I see it in you, we all do. The others have disregarded me as a freak, ran from me as a horror, tried to kill me as a monster, and though you find me frightening you've stayed and heard my words, haven't you?"
Truly, The Amalgam was the most fascinating marvel Lari had met in his packed travels, and whatsmore he actually seemed like the least violent. Sure, it had held the two of them hostage with a small army of robot drones, but if he had a face like a split-terminal screen Lari could see himself probably being just as cautious with newcomers. But there was a pressing matter he had danced around which the boy couldn't just sweep away. "Why are you keeping us here? What are you looking for?"
"Secrets." The thing breathed with a hollow rattle emanating from deep where a throat should be. " This country drowned itself in secrets before the end. Secret agendas, secret governments, secret states... secret weapons."
Lari grimaced. "So that's it- this is all about a weapon."
"No!" It's diodes sparked. "This movement doesn't stop at any weapon- it starts with a deterrent. A stick- loud and big enough to keep the world at arms length while I- while we establish a new frontier. A new evolutionary step, fronted with cybernetic supremacy!" It hung on that ambition, studying Lari's face as it dropped. "You're unsure. That's perfect, it's exactly what I've needed; an ear to think and learn for itself. You don't have to trust me, I don't expect that. Not when I have a whole world of literature to introduce you to. Works I've amassed over a lifetime! Treatises on Transhumanism; 'Guided Evolution', 'Mankind Redefined', 'God in the machine'; the records of true visionaries. Then you can decide for yourself!." The towering mess of metals turned stiffly to face the boy, and slid down on it's knees so as to not loom quite so aggressively. There the red eye fixed him with fierce intensity. "All I want to do is to give you the same information I found, to see if you find any merit in this experiment of mine. If you disagree with my conclusions, then we'll go our separate ways. But if you see what I see..." Anticipation bubbled to the edge of desperation in his words. "That will be the start. Then I can show how to escape this slaughterhouse, how to become more than that 'Strong man' down there could ever dream of becoming!"
Inspiration sparkled as much as it could from the dead-lens of a robot eye, and sincerity leaked out from whatever rough approximation of a heart it had. That Amalgamation of man and machine, that thing; held a faith both infectious and impassioned. The world it painted was so sure, so hopeful. The Traveller was an old boot in comparison, rough, worn and mean. He lived his whole life in the Wastes, and not just around the desolation, but inside all of its chaos. A world Lari grew up hearing nightmares about. And it showed on every nerve. The machine was right, he certainly fed his bitterness and hatred first, but he also listened. It, on the otherhand, was an idealist; fuelled on dreams and honey. Worshiping the ingenuity of an ancestry which killed itself. Dreaming of a future propped up on the past. Bedazzled by the romance of it all. Trapped in his Old World blues.
It was pitiful.
"What did Gerald decide?" Lari asked, making up his mind.
If the red eye could blink, it would have. "Gerald? About what?"
"About your dream. 'Evolution', 'Human-ism' and robot-borg-ing... What did he decide when you offered this all to him?"
Some sound similar to exhaling nostrils flared. "I fail to-What exactly is it that you want to say?" It tired to say without snapping.
Lari shrugged his shoulder's innocently. "There is nothing to say exactly, not when I am still figuring your whole idea out. The way you tell it, everything you stand for is about... um... well it's choices, I think?"
"Absolutely!"
"And choosing to combine yourself with all of these... these..." Lari waved his hand noncommittally at the mess of a man still crouching in front of him.
"Transhumanistic cybernetics." The Amalgam said without missing a beat.
"That!" Lari snapped his fingers "Subjecting yourself to these 'improvements'... that would be an extremely important personal decision."
It's diode delayed for a few extra miliseconds before flashing. "Without question."
"One that you would never force upon someone without their will?" The boy held back a grimace as his trap closed.
"It would be impossible to force. The dysmorphia alone would-"
Lari ignored him"So what did Gerald decide when you asked him to be a part of your experiment. Or... Harold? Was the other one Harold?"
The Amalgam hovered in silence. It's red eye stiff and narrow. "I see where you going with this, but listen here-"
"Because Gerald is a real entity, isn't he?"
"Of course he is!" The Being snapped. "Entire distinct neural patterns simulating every facet of their brains, the seat of life, are running their algorithms. They are sovereign entities. They might not bleed or breathe but they're every bit as real as you or I!"
"Then by your own admission they deserve a choice." Lari's eye flickered to the chest box with the multicoloured lights, just to spot the second two active bulbs go silent. "Like a choice in whether or not they want to take part in your 'transhumanist' experiment. Present to them everything were going to for me, let them decide if they are happy strapped up to your idea of the future forever and ever. Then present their testimonials to me. Maybe then, I would give you a shot." Inexplicable disdain slipped into Lari's snarl. Unfairly so. Despite it's misguided zeal there was something innocent and bright about this fifty year old dreamer, he could not bring himself to hate it.
"No I- but you see..." The red dot flicked off as the discourse travelled inwards. "You are valid, Gerald. No, I- I wouldn't keep you written into my hard-drives if I didn't respect you now would I? Now Winston, don't you- for god's sake, don't be such a drama queen!"
And as the Amalgamation raged inside of it's own head-unit, just as the boy expected, the three eyes of his floating butler lost their focus.
The real trick of feigning productivity whilst under direct supervision is the repetition of looping tasks that look busy to the untrained eye. The Traveller had drummed up significant evidence to assess the 'eye' behind his custom-built Mr. Handy guard robot as being computer-literate but not exactly to the level of a programming expert. Everytime he breached into another sub-directory of the military servers and hovered across the directory titles a little too long, the bot world whir it's jets menacingly and, he could only imagine from behind a turned back, probably shook it's plasma spewing arm with intent.
On the occasions where he dived ahead into picking apart the wall of gibberish code consisting of the next firewall, the robot seemed utterly disinterested as he took his sweet time, as long as he pressed some random key every now and again. Unfortunately, wasting his and his watcher's time wasn't going to buy the man another forty years or so of living, unless he really committed to the bit, so something would inevitably have to give.
Besides, he had glanced at another few file titles as he clicked through the servers to get a rough idea of what this secret black site was keeping so tightly under lock and seal, and it would not be long before every last sealed lid was cracked totally open. And after that, no more happy travelling. Not that these past few days scrambling about underground in sweaty old riot gear had exactly been the time of his life recently. The company was not so bad, at least.
The Traveller chewed on his lip as the scope of his and the boy's shared predicament stumped him once again. He had been between a rock and a hard place before; heck, he ended up there so often he would have a solid case claiming squatter's rights; but with the boy's life as a bargaining chip the usual plan of 'wing it and see how things turn up' was not a valid option. Whatever happened, he had to make sure Lari escaped from the base with his molecules solidly un-disintegrated. But, by that same merit, he was not really in a position of power to finagle such a circumstance, cramped over a dingy terminal in the back rooms of a military base crawling with a small army of retrofitted bots and reactivated military hardware. For the first time in as far back as he cared to remember, he was utterly on the back foot. Unless-
Theoreticals and ideas slotted together in his head with a spark of excitement as he came to the realisation, all he needed to turn the tide was right in front of him, and the idiot upstairs had just dropped into onto his lap on a slivery, floating, platter. All he had to do was deal with his current hovering pest.
Before he could think better of it, the Traveller accidentally glanced over his shoulder. An act that, he had learned from experience, typically earned a threatening Plasma shooting appendage waved in his face and a shortening of everyone's nerves.
But not this time.
This time the robot simply floated there placidly as it's charge quickly spun back in his seat, then trepidatiously turned back around to study the phenomenon. The three red optical eye-units poking off it's central unit, left affixed to the back of his skull at all times, no longer tracked him as he experimentally waved his head back and forth. Nor did they react when he then, growing perhaps dangerously confident, slowly reached down to his belt buckle and unhooked the AEP7 laser pistol and gently, as if not to provoke the strike of a growling coyote, lifted it's muzzle to point at it's massive ball-of-a-body.
Is this a trick? Some trick, letting the prisoner arm and prepare themselves without reacting in the slightest. As it stood, not an iota of independent action seemed to emanate from the thing whatsoever, not even the basic protection protocols of your basic out-the-box Mr Handy unit. Which meant two things were true; these custom built robots were designed specifically to follow the exact orders and commands of an independent receiver without deviation, and that receiver was not currently at his post.
That was an opportunity he would be a fool to miss out on, but it meant his confrontation would have to be a step speedier than the Traveller would have liked. But is that not just the way it always goes? Start a plan, run short on time, do the best you can... and end up chucking it all in the end anyway. He just needed to make sure he got to the boy before it all went to the dogs.
A rigidity suddenly shot through the Amalgam's body. It stood tall on it's towering frame and stiffly erect, with its red visual-unit darting towards the direction of the floor.
"I've lost my eye." It whispered sharply. Then, louder, to a melody of radio signals invisible to everyone but himself. "Swarm the lobby! Block all access points up the stairs! Cover the windows and- Sentry, come to me!"
A bustling hive of activity erupted all across the compound as every robot unit bounded to the call and dictation of their master. Military grade Mr Gutsy robots flew on their jets to the upper floor to take vigil next to their silvery custom-built brethren; bulbous 'Protectrons', with their clunky humanoid legs and arms, lumbered into position inside of door frames across the lobby, knowing well how their cumbersome frame made for effective door-stops; and the solitary massive Sentry Bot, with it's high-powered gatling laser on one arm and a short range missile launcher built into the other, slowly rolled towards the direction of it's caller to play a game of 'protect the principal'.
To Lari, all this came as a larger reaction then he planned for. He figured a distraction would free-up the Traveller to do something, but did not figure it would be so soon or immediately set the entire base on alert. "What happened?" He asked as innocently as plausible.
The red-eyed beast turned on him with electronic fury burning in that synthetic glow. "Your 'friend' just gunned down one of my personal watch dogs. Just shot him in the eye with a... yes, it must have been a laser pistol. Damn it, I told you we should have stripped them first, Gerald! This is what I mean when I tell you about these Organics, back them in the corner and they'll go for the throat!" With unnerving speed, one of the Amalgam's long arms swept out and grabbed Lari by the shoulder, the metal spike-tipped fingers pressing painfully, but moreso threateningly, into the flesh around his chest. "What is he planning?"
"I have no clue!" Lari insisted, praying the innate honesty of his statement shone through. "But he does have violent tendencies, maybe he's trying to shoot his way out?"
"Through my army? Not unless he's a fool." It snorted. "But all those 'Strong men' do tend to foster unrealistic expectations of their abilities... Maybe it's primitive mind really believes it has a chance. Luck of the die- like the gambler's fallacy. I'll bet a man like that has spent his whole life cutting bets and cashing chips, confidant he can ride through the storm until the day his account runs dry." The red pupil flickered with a cruel glint. "Would you like to witness that day?"
A nervous energy seemed to buzz from the countless floating metallic ball contraptions that floated down the hallway past Lari and the Amalgamation as the boy was forcibly encouraged towards the lobby space at sharp-finger-point. Everyone froze, for a moment, when a muffled rumbling explosion vibrated through the floor for one teeth-chattering second.
Then the machines rushed towards their posts with a renewed frantic buzz, and even the seven foot monstrosity of man-and-flesh, thrusting Lari before him like an increadibly ineffectual human shield, seemed to tremble as he asked. "How dangerous is he?"
Lari looked back at the thing, the narrow of it's singular red eye, fraught with apparent trepidation. "I suppose that is what we are both about to find out."
The Amalgamation knew exactly what to expect before he led the boy out onto the mezzanine floor of the lobby, his mind was drawing from a constant feed of every bot under his control, like the thousand lens eye of a spider. He saw it from every angle when, not so long ago, the man who had claimed to be just a simple scavenger voluntarily emerged from the back corridors he had been left down, hands raised and killing implement sheathed. At that moment the Amalgamation could have very easily, with but a thought, ordered his killing. A barrage of laser turrets, Protectron beams, and Gutsy laser bolts would have ripped him apart at a metabolic level and left little more than glowing residue.
That power still rested in his hands, of course; especially as the stranger came to rest exactly where he was originally caught, right in the middle of his legions of robots across the receptionist's lobby. For another of those arrogantly violent and eternally confident 'strong men', he really had tied his own hands by presenting himself so openly. It was an unusual move for an Organic to make, unless they believed themselves somehow still on the superior foot.
Unusual enough that they had to meet.
