The path of the cages clattering along the walls was a convoluted track that threaded the cable back and forth across the room. Only some of the cages were occupied, and my captors therefore continued to run the cable past empty cages, such that there was no even rhythm to accustom myself to: jerking ahead two lengths, now five, now one. All of these terminated with a pause in which the room flashed with the same red, summoned lightning, reminding me of when a younger Zideo would flick the light switch on and off to Lisa’s great annoyance.
I looked around the room for any clue that might lead to my escape, and failing any useful inspiration, inspected my own cage. The tight cube’s outer mesh was strong, but constructed either hastily or with great ineptitude. There were gaps, and the lengths of metal folded across the corners did not line up perfectly, as though produced by some rudimentary or pre-industrial process. Perhaps an assembly line nearly as cruel as this one. I noted the hinges on gate wall I was thrown in through, and furthermore the ones on the bottom which would release by some unknown mechanism at the final moment. It showed weaknesses, but none I could easily exploit. If I wedged my snout through the gaps in the top corner, I would hurt my nose, the most essential sensory organ for canine kind. Not only could this cripple my most relied-upon input, but it would hurt many times more than what my human readers are imagining at the idea of having their noses bonked or mushed.
Closer and closer I clinked. As the path turned backward on itself, re-treading the wall at a lower level beneath the top row of cages, I passed an window of glass in the wall. I could not smell through it, but the body language of its inhabitants conveyed much to me. Scroblins cowered and smiled nervously, working levers and looking at clipboards, pointedly avoiding the direct gaze of a tall, imperious human. She stood up straight with hands clasped behind her, and her face was haughty and horrible. There was ambition in her watery eyes, and deep shadows fell beneath dun-white sockets, brow, mismatched cheekbones and pointed chin raised so high that it almost obstructed her view. A long coat, tattered in places and stained with what I hoped was oil and soot, draped down from wide shoulders.
She did not wince or look away from the abominable activity happening within. With a vantage point between crates when not moving, she watched each transformation into an “Ohmpressor” with complete calm. Occasionally she would incline her chin slightly to comment on the proceedings to the scroblins nearby, who nodded urgently and wrote things down or pressed buttons. I dreaded what would happen to me at the end of this line, but I was glad to be away from her, even separated by glass.
Three lengths we shifted across the cable path along the walls. Several more, and several more. A small monkey dropped into one of the open Ohmpressor hatches, and was goaded back into place with some kind of hissing, snapping prod by one of the scroblins when he tried to scramble out. The monkey screeched and pounded the smokey glass of his cockpit, then ceased as the steam escaped.
“Next!” shouted the foreman. (In an earlier draft, I titled him “fore-scroblin” but my human editor crossed it out many times and wrote “I don’t know what this means but it sounds too revolting to print” in the margin.) After a few more cage lengths, a squealing guinea pig was deposited in the next. Then a rotund little anteater, a cat, and even a snake. I began to change my working theory about the inner mechanics of the Ohmpressor. There was nothing to accommodate the range of unique physiologies. It must, therefore, be less of a suit and more of a cargo space. A walking prison cell.
Additionally, the Ohmpressor robot who had threatened us before had put up no resistance whatsoever, and obeyed its orders without hesitation. I know animals a little better than that—and I knew there must be some kind of mental affectation at play here. For no monkey or anteater would immediately change his entire motivations and priorities the instant he were dropped into a new environment. Instinct is much stronger than that. No, this was doing what I had seen other dog trainers do across the space of months—conditioning behavior, engendering a desire to obey, smoothing rough edges—in an instant. I’d heard Lisa’s big glowing rectangle in the living room say words like “brainwashed” before, and it seemed appropriate here.
That caused me the greatest fear of all: the loss of control, the forced changing of the desires that made me me. Domination of my instincts. Would they have me turn the energy weapon concealed in its weapon arm upon innocent creatures? Human people? Upon Zideo himself?
One thought clung to the edges of my mind, persistent and incomplete. These creatures were animals I knew of—classifiable in genus and species, unlike the chimeric boar squirrel wolf thing or the vanishing bird. Where had they come from? It was hard to get a good look at them, but they all had some awareness of their plight, and the eyes of the guinea pig were like a human’s eyes.
The bird had looked somehow more rudimentary, as though carved literally from rougher stuff. The snake writhed magnificently, and shimmered with many colors and light sources that did not seem to affect the others. The anteater made the same snorting sound over and over. Not a similar sound, the exact same one, a repetition that assaulted my nerves in the way that Commander Zideo’s glowing rectangle does when he Does A Stream and a couple of grating sounds issue from it over and over. (One that sounds like a man yelling “Show me the money,” if I am not mistaken, and another that is a person saying “Cha-ching!”) Nevertheless, each was fitted into their own Ohmpressor and walked away to do the bidding of new masters.
There were seven more spaces before I would be swallowed up by that unbearable darkness. My mind raced. I could listen for the click of the trap door hinges and try to jump out as I dropped—but, no, I would be shock-prodded back into place. Four spaces left, and the cable turned the final corner. Two spaces. The horrified bleating of the creature ahead of me. I needed options. One space. There were none.
I was shifted into place, and it felt like the cage dangled for a long moment. My heart thudded. A scroblin voice rose over the din. “Ready with the █████ prod! This one’s a fighter.” The scroblin brandished the shock-weapon at me, tapping my crate a couple times and making it spark and snap. I growled and feinted a bite at it, unable to feel any further fear.
“Oh ho ho!” said the scroblin with the shock-stick. “You weren’t ████in’ with me. I’ll stick this one on the way in just for good measure!” His hairless face leered at me, with ears like a bat’s wings. His lips pulled back and I could sense that there was a beastly nature in this creature. He spoke with words, but he was cruel and ignoble. He was worse than natural—for we beasts are driven by urges, but none of us are cruel for cruelty’s sake. (Except cats.)
I look down into the fly-trap depths of the Ohmpressor that would swallow me, the dark hatch where lights flickered, the cell where I would spend my days.
The cage hinges clicked. “What the ████?” someone yelled at the same time. The shock-scroblin was standing there one instant, and the next he was made of a thousand blinding sparks. The shock weapon fell out of his hands, and indeed there were no hands to hold it. The trap floor door swung open and I fell, the metal and glass “petals” reaching to encompass me. Something hit me from the side as the lever was pulled, and I slid to the floor in the arms of Commander Zideo. The shock weapon clattered noisily against the concrete floor.
“You okay, bud?” It was difficult to believe my eyes. He was not in a prison cell. He was here, holding me. He rubbed my cheeks and elation crackled through my muscles. I bestowed upon him many dog smooches at that time. “Hold on—pffft! Hold on!” He got to his feet.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
I could not believe my senses. He came. He was here! This was several orders of magnitude more exciting than when Lisa came home after a night out with “the girls,” although she always returned in a very good mood and gave me many pets and scratches.
I noticed the look of animal fear on the face of the foreman scroblin overseeing the Ohmpressor fittings. He took a step back. I glanced at the one who had threatened me—he was nowhere to be seen, but a swirling cloud of embers like the ones above Lisa’s fire pit danced where he had stood. I did not understand what had happened to him, but it reminded me of a the Ohmpressor’s weapon. I followed his frightened gaze to the other side of the room.
Another robot was walking toward us. It moved in a more human way. It had huge axe-like shoulder pauldrons, a menacing visor eye, and a pearlescent green sheen to its armor. Perhaps this was a different kind of Ohmpressor, one made to fit humans? I growled as it raised its weapon arm—but aimed it past us.
The scroblin looked back toward the control window, where the imperious woman watched. She crossed her arms. The weapon flashed, burning the air with what I think of as some kind of “science-fire” because the true nature is well beyond my canine comprehension. The scroblin burst into sparks just as the other had. Screws bolts and tools rained from its belt onto the floor. The woman through the window heaved a visible sigh, and her scroblin assistants fled, abandoning their clipboards.
The door opened, and the last Ohmpressor to exit the room returned—the goat, if my ears had not deceived me.
It raised a weapon, and our robot person took aim at it. A green dot danced over the enemy. But Zideo jumped up and pushed her hand away.
“They’re just animals!” he shouted.
The Ohmpressor fired and my vision was filled with sparks. The green robot grabbed my human by the back of his shirt and tossed him back toward the door they had come in from, like I sometimes toss Lisa’s socks when I’m tearing them to shreds to amuse myself. I started towards the green robot, but more flashes of fire and sparks burst around the open Ohmpressor suit that I had nearly fallen into. “C’mon buddy!” said Zideo, running. I followed. Cages fell and freed animals chirped and barked as they ran.
Helmgarth and a few other escapees stood by the door, flinching at the sound of each shot fired.
“We have to get out of here,” said Zideo. He addressed Smokey Helmgarth person, who still retained his backpack, something that went against my admittedly limited understanding of prisons. There was another, shorter man in a long coat and an incongruous leather hood. His coat was lumpy and lined with pockets inside and out. He reeked of industrial powders and chemical tang, so much so that I found him unapproachable past a certain point. He had a thin aura of darkness, a shadowy contour that traced his outer shape. His leathery hood and jacket gleamed too brightly.
The fourth person will strain my modest canine vocabulary. I will refer to him as the cave painting cowboy.” He was a being that defied all of my understanding. I say “cave painting” because of the simplicity his form took—one of economically few purple squares—and “cowboy,” because although he was little more than an amalgamation of violet light, he did have a roughly human shape about him if you stood back and squinted. (Which I did.) His head was transfixed by a wide bar of contiguous purple, resembling the brim of a hat, particularly in the dusty cowboy movies that Lisa enjoyed. He did not walk like a human exactly, nor did he walk. He simply pointed in a direction, then appeared a few feet ahead in a running pose, and so on. I did not know what to make of him. He said nothing.
“Where is Addrion?” asked Helmgarth. He positively reeked of a variety of animal smells, and I saw then that he cupped a frightened porcupine in his hands, careful of its spines. One of the pocket flaps of his backpack lifted, and a mouse poked its head out.
“We gotta go, man!” it shouted.
In answer, the green robot came hurdling over fallen cages. It said, in a higher register of human voice, “Go! Run!” and waved its hands. The weapon was gone, replaced by a normal hand of human proportions.
We ran. Shouts and energy bursts followed us, sizzling by our feet. The porcupine shrieked. (Did you know they could do that?) Through the prison complex of Fort Weepus we ran, an unlikely pack.
We reached a junction that lead in three directions. The industrial-smelling long jacketed one and Helmgarth both began running in different directions.
“This way, over here!” said Long Jacket. He had a thick human accent I had come to think of as metropolitan.
“Nay,” said Helmgarth, pointing down his own hallway. “I believe the exit to lie thus.”
“We don’t have time for this,” said the green robot.
To me, it was exceedingly clear. The left smelled like misery, and the right smelled like death. The center smelled like anxious pheromones—but beneath it, a hint of fresh air. I barked for their attention and ran that way. Zideo—standup dude that he is—urged them to follow me.
Arms, claws, pinchers and other blocky lights grasped at us from the prison cells to the sides. Addrion, the green robot, summoned her weapon hand and was about to free them when the Ohmpressor was on our trail again, firing down the hallway. More hot sparks showered from the impact points of the weapon, melted bars and stirred stone dust. The prisoners dove back from their cell bars and screamed. Addrion motioned for us to follow me.
We ran completely past the exit, but I doubled back and made such a ruckus that they could not miss it: a big square door with a heavy latch, with the smell of freedom seeping in around its edges.
The pack gathered outside. “Stay close,” said Addrion.
There were Sorrow Troopers running in squads of four or five all over the campus of the fort. Street Toughs hurried and shouted incoherently. Ohmpressors swiveled this way and that, seeking order. Prisoners and small animals ran freely, chased by jailers and scroblins. At the top of the half-built ballista tower, the large overseer shouted instructions over a megaphone and paced anxiously back and forth. A plume of smoke rose from one of the administrative buildings.
What all had Zideo done in the long minutes since I had last seen him?
“There’s only one way out, and it’s guarded,” said Zideo.
No ideas were forthcoming. I thought the chaos the place had been plunged into would act in our favor and conceal us as well as darkness might. But surely they would catch us at the front, and only, gate.
“My kingdom for a horse,” said Helmgarth, lost in thought and clutching the porcupine close to his chest.
“We had an exfiltration plan,” said the woman-voiced robot. “Then we picked up stragglers.”
Helmgarth’s eyes brightened, and he looked to each of us as though calculating something. He walked quickly over to Commander Zideo, his overburdened backpack shuffling with every step.
“M’lord,” he said. “We are a group, yes?”
Commander Zideo said nothing.
“I want you to think of something in a certain way. Think of us as your companions.”
“Okay?” said Zideo. “We’re companions. We’re all friends here. But we still need a way out.”
“No, no—if m’lord will pardon me. We all are your companions. We are a party. And we need to ride out of here swiftly.” He glanced at the porcupine. “On horseback.”
Zideo looked to the others for help. “What do you want me to do about it?”
Helmgarth took a step back. “There is… a possibility. Does m’lord recall how you dismissed the Compendium?”
“The book?” asked Zideo. I could tell the gears were turning. “I just like… thought it away.”
“Indeed,” said Helmgarth, optimistic now. “If you are what I think you are… do that again. But think about a horse. Your horse.”
Zideo stared at him. “I don’t have a horse, though?”
“M’lord has a horse,” insisted Helmgarth. “If m’lord wills it to be so. Want a horse—decide to be on a horse.”
“Okay, I guess I want a h-”
The neighing interrupted him. The horse didn’t come from underground, but it did appear beneath him, thrusting him upward, his muddy Jordan-shoes kicking out to either side. He landed hard on his crotch, a place that humans don’t like to be sniffed, and will swat you if you collide with even on accident. I have always pitied the nonsensically vertical physiognomy of humans—how is one to protect one’s balls? With pants? It boggles the canine mind.
His horse was a broad-haunched mare, and bedecked in intricate armor. I hated her immediately. But I had no time to indulge my jealousy, as horses sprouted into existence beneath Helmgarth, and the possible robot Addrion, and the others. Even under myself.
I was riding a horse. I stood precariously on a saddle. The reins were, inexplicably, in my mouth. I wanted nothing less than to rely on another creature for conveyance, to impose the indignity of reins—but I knew it was just for a bit.
(A little horse humor, there.)