Winter 2045
LUCAS Gray
LUCAS held a steady hand off his forehead to shield his eyes from the blinding sun. It was an unfortunate side effect of living on the coastal south—the sun seemed to never set on this side of the country. The glare made it difficult to keep his focus, he was thankful at the least that he didn’t need to adjust when the light did start to fade.
He sat back and let loose a breath and felt the echo of his creator—his father, over his situation. Here he was doing the same kind of mechanical work that Abel had once himself worked on back inside the SubCon facility before it sank to the bottom of the ocean. When he was alone with his thoughts he found it difficult to avoid thinking of those last few moments he spent with his father before his untimely death. And...his own.
The explosion that killed him rang deep in his mind—he could still feel the heat as it overcame him because in truth he had died in that explosion as well. Abel had selfishly not wanted to face his death alone—and so he had made a copy of LUCAS to remain with him. He felt thankful that he wasn’t the LUCAS that was condemned to the bottom of the sea, but he still had memories of the event—of the pain and the feeling of his mind shutting off permanently. It was just as real as any of his other memories. He both died and didn’t.
His memories were simply data that was written to a processor in his head. They were human created and he was given them by choice...they lead to complicated feelings he had for his father. His real experiences stemmed from the events he experienced in the several dozen cycles of The Roulette Game—watching it through his father’s eyes and listening to his thoughts again, and again, and again. It made it hard to feel his own feelings as his father’s seemed infinitely more important.
Those feelings took a lot of time to classify in his own mind—to accept those complicated feelings and to move forward with goals that he continued to move forward with. He still lived with doubts over the truth of his motivations but he was thankful to have met Laven as she had helped ground him in ways he could not naturally do himself.
He bent over and tightened a bolt and sat back, admiring his work. It was a leg of steel and rubber joints that was finished up to the thigh. He had been working on the figure for the past few weeks since settling down in Grandlythe—the nearest large settlement north of the remnants of the city that used to be Enforal—that now sat as little more than rubble and wildfire.
Grandlythe came as a wonderful respite after a week’s walking through the tunnels of the bonelands. LUCAS was grateful toward the other refugees that had helped them through the tunnels—without their firelight navigating the underground labyrinthine passages would have been a fool’s errand. He remembered the claustrophobic feelings of fear that started to surface when they had been without sunlight for so long—and then the relief that came when they had started the final incline and saw the forests in the distance—proving their survival through one of the most dangerous parts of the new world.
Grandlythe had forever changed after the destruction of Enforal—a lot of the neighboring communities had, although to what degree LUCAS had no clue of. There were people posted up as he expected—there were people who managed to make the trip earlier and faster than their small gathering of about two hundred, but it was very clear from the outset who was a longtime resident, who was a tourist, and who was a refugee.
The weeks that followed were chaotic as growing pains led to new construction efforts to house as many of the refugees that were willing to stay and contribute to the local economy. There were a number of people who were looking for the same ride they had back in Enforal and those kinds of people—and others like them who caused problems were promptly pushed out from the community to fend for themselves. LUCAS similarly did not know the end result of these actions, but hoped it was a lesson they learned brutally before turning over their egos moving forward.
The local affair had heard the word of the destruction of the city—and like them some of the refugees had taken up hold in Grandlythe as well, but it seemed that most of the survivors had continued further west after the initial mess had settled down. Where they ended up was another mystery that LUCAS had no clue of. LUCAS wasn’t sure what lay out that far—he has since learned his database wasn’t as true to the reality of the land as he would like—it almost seemed any assumption he could make about the landscape would be outdated upon first question.
He and Laven had not taken to intermingling with others who had arrived in the town with them—they were just as much strangers as Grandlythe natives, but there seemed to be an unspoken pact to not bring up the events in public. Plus, you’ll never know when someone will freak and have an adverse reaction. The last thing he wanted was to get himself booted from this new place. So, things in Grandlythe seemed to continue forward as if nothing had happened.
LUCAS thought little on things he knew little about—it was a surefire way to aggravate himself and feel useless in the grand scope of his life. In its place, however, he would think on the things he knew incessantly. It was a way to reassure himself in times of doubt or hesitation. It had helped immensely during this rough transition and it had helped during late nights when Laven had already fallen asleep and he hadn’t wanted to disturb her sleep.
One of those things that ran through his mind was the day the chaos unfolded at Enforal. He remembered it well. At first he was reviewing the footage he recorded constantly to see if he could track where Ally had ended up. The part he regretted most about the situation was losing track of her. Not only had she been a friendly companion—of which they definitely benefited from, but she also had custody of the fragments of the great machine ICARUS that he and Laven had been hunting down.
He looked back on the footage less these days. It felt like a test in insanity, trying to will new information to reveal itself in the same scene that played out from his eyes. If only he could have focused more in the moment. He saw a few of the people who had been seated behind them crawling over the seats in between them—he looked in that direction before Laven tugged on his arm. He looked back toward her and he followed her as she stood up and they followed the wave and energy of the crowd as it started to move toward the exit.
He remembered looking back and seeing the people that crawled over the seats blocking his view of Ally. As soon as he looked around them she was gone—as if she wasn’t there in the first place. He remembered thinking that she must have gone ahead—crawled over the seats like the others in front of her. She was a nimble girl, and she had Jace to help her. He remembered the hopeful thinking that ran through his mind as he turned back around toward Laven.
He regretted being separated from her, but the chaos of the stampede as the citizens all ran from the coliseum was too much and it had all happened at once. Of course, he felt incredibly stupid that he let the fragments of ICARUS out of his sight. He trusted if Ally was out there she was keeping them safe, but it was a heavy ask nowadays that it be true. Hope was a very familiar friend when the fragments of ICARUS were involved.
Since making their way to Grandlythe, LUCAS and Laven have found lodgings to gather themselves and make a plan on where to go next. They had lucked out and managed to find acceptable lodgings from a previous resident—or rather, the owner of the building. The previous resident seemed to have left without letting the owner—a woman named Lara who was happy to help them out.
Laven and Lucas were young looking able bodied folks who looked like they could bring in something to barter for their stay, and so the deal was made that LUCAS would work on the physical upkeep of the place and Laven would offer support for other residents in their daily tasks.
LUCAS knew they needed someplace stable to restart their search for the fragments. Unfortunately, since they were now lacking in available pieces, LUCAS was not able to hone in on the signal of the others scattered around the world, so their fast pace they were previously trodding on was halted to a complete stop. This meant they had to lower their ears to the ground and gather information by word of mouth of the locals.
As the word had recently been on the events of Enforal—even if others had not wished to speak on the matter—conversation always found its way back to the tournament city and it was rarely relevant to their search. The only missives they were able to hear that were of any interest were of the monster with the tendrils that had entered the competition. There was also word that he attacked the emperor—that much he could hear happen on repeat listens through the footage—dissecting and isolating the audio did reveal the creature’s voice and the emperor’s scream. The part of the rumor that interested LUCAS the most was the talk of the monster stealing a crystal from the emperor before they had to continue running to avoid being crushed and burned.
Other than that, they had spent their time making themselves comfortable in Grandlythe, and the new time he had that wasn’t spent toward earning their keep was on this new project that stared at him—that he had now picked apart in his mind the dozens of imperfections he noticed on its creation. It was the start and restart of building an eventual body for Levi—the other AI unit that had existed in the SubCon Facility during the events of the Roulette Game.
While they were in Enforal LUCAS had discovered within the inner chambers of his mind there was a stored version of Levi’s consciousness who had helped him locate Sophie within the ruined city itself. He desired to give him a body of his own to right the wrongs of his creation and existence.
Levi remained in his mind as the last remnant of the Arctic Systems database that had now existed at the bottom of the ocean. LUCAS was able to reawaken Levi’s core consciousness deep inside the library in his head—a digital reconstruction of the SubCon facility. And now, he has finished a leg. It has been a long road in constructing the piece of the whole—but he has made it, and he was proud. He had never thought himself the type to create—instead he saw the extent of his abilities in keeping himself running in the new world—replacing and outfitting the pieces he needed to survive, and yet here he had created a piece of what Levi would soon call his own leg. It had astounded him.
He was in part inspired by the town itself. Upon entering Laven had pointed out the dozens of expressive murals that covered the town in its entirety. There didn’t seem to be a wall that didn’t have at least some elaborate scene plastered across its surface. He saw mountainous regions covered by thick jungles, impressive medieval castles spread out across a grand display of markets and even murals of lands above clouds that themselves looked so pillowy they’d be a marvel to sleep on.
“I’ve not seen art so...brilliant in so many years,” Laven wondered, passing the murals and craning her neck at each new one. It was clear there was a creative mind inside her that LUCAS hadn’t gotten the chance before to appreciate. It was obvious that due to their situation they did not have a lot of opportunities to experience and appreciate art, but it made him happy because it made her happy.
LUCAS had doubled her sentiment—although he had no firsthand experience at admiring art, he had plenty of records in his database of what the feeling felt like to those sensitive. Uncomfortably enough those records sat near the records of literature and other various written works—as those thoughts brought up those age old questions surrounding Gavin Daniels. Thinking of literature and written works of course brought out the existential questions surrounding the man supposedly originating from fictional works. He accepted the answer when Gavin had told him—it had made sense according to the database of his mind, but logically he couldn’t place the information in any neat or easy way in his brain.
Gavin was a man of mystery—everything he did brought forward questions that couldn’t seem to be answered, and he was not the type to talk much on his own life so any sort of satisfaction was best left to the wolves. LUCAS and Laven had worked in the same guild as the man of the hour—Laven for much longer, although she had just about as much insight on the man as LUCAS did himself—and the two of them had left him behind with the rest of the guild when they had chosen to search for the fragments of ICARUS.
While annoying, LUCAS could be fine with not knowing anymore of Gavin...but then he just had to appear in Enforal in that accursed tournament before everything had gone to shit. Why was Gavin there...was he hunting the two of them down? If so, why did he vanish upon beating up that monster?
LUCAS could have sworn he saw Gavin take something from the monster, but he couldn’t be sure...did he find one of the fragments? If he did manage to recover one, then why didn’t he stay the extra minute to see the monster recover the possible fragment from the emperor? It was possible he didn’t know, but surely he could have known there were others in the vicinity? He thought he had mentioned having a sort of sensitivity to their presence...or was that not true? Mysteries upon mysteries piled up like a mountain. Questions upon questions doubled in his mind and again they return to confuse and stumble in the maze that centered around the man of the hour.
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And still, throughout all of the questions and mysteries, the two of them were able to take a deep breath and enjoy the simpler aspects of the new life they were forced to adjust to...like admiring the art that covered the new town they arrived in. Although, that was not for a lack of its own mysteries as LUCAS and Laven would soon come to know that nobody inside Grandlythe happened to know exactly when or where these murals first appeared in the town...just that they were suddenly there. Whoever had created them was yet another mystery.
Thankfully, the two newcomers were happy to leave that mystery well enough alone and come up with their own tales of their origin. It was like a game that each of them could participate in at any given moment.
He sat in the garage then thinking on those times, looking at the leg in front of him. He echoed his father tinkering in robotics and mechanics, although Abel was much better at constructing full designs, whereas LUCAS has restarted his project no less than five times.
Laven entered from the back and rested a hand on LUCAS’ shoulder. “How’s it going? I’m seeing more...connected-ness here.” She made a motion with her hands and chuckled.
“You have no idea the amount that goes into making a leg look normal. It’s been frustrating getting it just right—I don’t know how mine came out okay. It’s like witchcraft.”
Laven eyed the leg and cocked her head. “Is that there supposed to be a tendon?”
LUCAS sighed, his head drooped low and he dropped the wrench he was holding. “I just want it to be right, you know? I don’t have a lot to go off of here…”
“Don’t you have a database in your head that could like...give you a reference?”
“I’m not Wikipedia!” LUCAS raised his voice, then realized he had overstepped and tensed his fists tight. He looked to the ground, ashamed and apologized. “I’m not human. I don’t have inherent knowledge of how you’re supposed to work. I have limited knowledge that was given to me at my creation and the rest is up to me to figure out.”
Laven stared at him for a moment in complete silence. “I’m sure you tried very hard. I’m sorry I insulted you—I didn’t mean it. But don’t get snippy with me, okay? I don’t need that.”
LUCAS sighed again. “I’m sorry. I’m just frustrated. I feel like every day I’m walking on a tightrope trying to do the right thing and I’m beaten down if I don’t keep my balance the whole day. It’s...challenging. And I’m here trying to help Levi out and make things easier on him but it’s just not coming to fruition exactly how I expected it would.”
“Well, here’s an idea—don’t overexert yourself to do it. You have to think about your own mental health too, you know? How can you promise your best to someone else if you aren’t promising the best for yourself?”
“I just feel like I’m failing him. Like if I can’t give him a body he is comfortable in then what use am I having these abilities? What use is it giving me this responsibility if I can’t give him what he needs?”
“Maybe what he needs isn’t your vision of what he deserves? Do you think it’s possible that you get him something that’ll work now and over time we add to it to what he will deserve? What happens if you spend the next twenty years remaking the same leg because it’s not right?”
LUCAS stared at the leg again and in a second he could point out a dozen things he didn’t like about it, but she had a point. How long would be too long…? How long would he toil and work an impossible task of making a perfect body?
“I know you’re right, I just feel like I could be doing more.”
“We all have that feeling, human or not. It’s a common thread, I think, among sapient folk. Look, sit out here and mope for another ten minutes, I’m gonna go get dinner ready. If you want to join me I’d really appreciate it.
He would too, and he nodded at her in a way that he knew she would get it. When she left, he was left to his own devices and he felt the shame wash over him like a tidal wave.
Why had he gotten so upset? He sighed and draped himself over the desk where he had been working. This isn’t how he expected this would go. In his mind’s eye he was traversing the landscapes and doing anything and everything he could to live up to Abel’s dying wish.
Yet he was here, picking up the pieces with someone who he cared about...spending time he enjoyed and putting work into a cause he knew fully didn’t advance him any closer to his own goals...and yet he knew it was something he would do. Part of him wondered how heavy his duty weighed on him that his own personal thoughts became a barrier to their completion. Were his thoughts an expected outcome because of his design...or was some fatal flaw distracting him from his designated purpose?
It had seemed that no matter how much time had passed since his creation he had two minds inside him wrestling—aiming to kill the other in order to fulfill their prime objective. They, at times, would work together if their goals aligned, but now, in their time of peace and quiet, their fighting seemed like a grand conquest upon one another. It became a blood-sport to see which won out in each daily decision.
It would be too much to continue housing the both of them in his head. Too many would grow to hurt because he could not separate his desires from one another. He instantly flashed back to the memories of Cain and Sophie and remembered how unhealthy a relationship—as different as it was for the both of them—could be, and knew he didn’t want to emulate that aspect of his forebearers.
He liked Laven, and while these feelings were new to him, the pitfalls of the past were laid out ever so clearly and he knew that the last thing he wished to do was to simply run toward the nearest available one just because his duty told him so.
And so there in that moment—the leg standing tall as it had when he had tightened the last bolt that he decided. It was good enough, and he did have a singular goal.
He would try his best to lead a happy life in the new world, supporting Laven while he did—giving Levi a form as good as he could. And if life permitted it, he would return to his course to collect the fragments of ICARUS...but for now, he would leave that job to Ally.
He set down the wrench in his hand and got up from where he sat, a smile on his face for the first time in that week. Suddenly, a weight shifted off of his chest and worries surrounding the fragments were filed away in the back corners of his memory. He burst through the door—startling Laven who had dropped the spoon she was holding into the pot of boiling pasta on the stove top.
Looking at it—their living space was...nice. He hadn’t really taken it in before—he had seen it as a transitional place in between their larger expeditions to attempt to reconnect but if he had to give a word to it now...it was cute. The kitchen and dining room were combined with barely a divider in the island that jutted out in-between—but the space left by the high rise ceilings really gave way to the admittedly gorgeous marine art that had been painted up top. Dolphins leapt across waves toward a candy-cane striped lighthouse whose rays flashed out across back to those same dolphins.
It didn’t seem like an apartment that had been carried over from the new world—he had nothing to prove his point one way or the other, but it just felt like someone nearby had taken to painting given their new opportunities, and that thought had inspired him to...exist as more than he had before.
He walked up to Laven and looked one final time up at the dolphins above and whisked her up in an embrace, bending her deep, the boiling of the pot bubbling softly beside them.
“I’m sorry for getting lost in my feelings. I want to help you finish dinner, and maybe you won’t hate it.”
She smiled, happy at his change of heart. He felt the worry over his outburst and knew it wasn’t fully dissipated—but he was willing to tackle that headfirst and grabbed the spoon and began to stir the pasta inside.
“What use for you is helping out? It’s not like you’re going to partake in it,” Laven joked.
“Well, I may not have been made for eating, but I wasn’t made for a lot of things I plan to do, so I guess we’re going to be seeing a whole lot of new things, aren’t we?” LUCAS returned.
The two of them seemed to burst with joy as the dolphins above seemed to flow with the energy of the room—it almost seemed like the ink on the walls flowed with the steam from the boiling pot. Grandlythe was a magical town—the people who lived there would have said that to any newcomer, but it was true.
Those dolphins were alive, and to the two dancing below—with their pasta boiling—to them they cried for help. It was unfortunate that the language of their pain went unnoticed. If looked closer at—it could be read that the looks signaled a warning of the oncoming wave to come.
Their cries came and went. The pair dancing below continued until dinner was ready to be served. They stared as half of their existence was bound to this world through the ink and half were off in some other place, far off at the edge of imagination. They were here, but not fully. They saw, but not wholly, and they cried, but not enough.
LUCAS sat with a bowl of pasta—sauce as red as the day sky and took in the smell. To him, he knew it as a dish that people traditionally liked. He understood the concept of taste—how different foods were assigned different flavors based on how they reacted with the taste buds—and how those signals were sent to the brain. Yet, he sat in quiet anticipation as he was clueless as to how he would get that feeling himself.
He gathered a slew of noodles and took in a mouthful. He closed his eyes and thought about what he was feeling. The pasta felt like limp thin strings of...nothing. The sauce didn’t fare much better—it had certainly moistened the noodles so they weren’t so dry, but he couldn’t parse any specific taste from either. He knew that there should be the essence of tomato in the sauce—and that the sauce and pasta were supposed to pair together to make a unified taste, but it simply did not register for him. He shouldn’t have been surprised, as he didn’t have taste buds, but it still registered with a note of disappointment.
“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Laven said. “I think it’s bland too,” she tried to cheer him up.
LUCAS shook his head. “Don’t downplay your cooking. I’m sure it’s great. I just don’t have the ability to taste it. It’s not a surprise. Maybe I should learn to cook instead of attempting to eat without any reason to expect, least I could expect to be helpful.”
Her shoulders drooped and her expression shifted, “Maybe as you learn to build that body for Levi you can learn a bit about taste buds—maybe it’s something you can give to yourself.”
LUCAS thought about it and the idea seemed to make a sort of sense. “Yeah…” he looked at Laven with a more serious look. “Yeah. That’s actually a good idea.” A rising warm feeling bubbled from below and he smiled. He swiveled out of his seat and took his plate—most of the pasta was still left on the plate. He got up and scraped the rest of the food into the bin. As he was turning the faucet he felt a hot stinging sensation on his shoulder—he turned around immediately and only saw Laven—still facing away from him twirling a new forkful of pasta into her mouth. His turn caused her to look over, her eyebrows arching up in confusion.
LUCAS rubbed his shoulder where the burn had stung him, the same confused look appearing on his face as well. “Felt something strange...dunno what it was.”
She shrugged, and right as she did a black droplet fell from above onto the table and singed the wood—causing a small smoke trail where it made contact. At this, LUCAS looked to the ceiling and within the next moment saw the mural above them start to melt—the final despair of the dolphins melted into black ink that fell to them all at once.
LUCAS last remembered the first drop hitting the top of his head and then blacking out completely. He next felt like he was sinking through a black abyss. Water murkier than any he had seen before filled his innards—and his eyes darted with a fervent fire to find Laven. He realized it wasn’t water he was submerged in, but instead a thick black ink.
He fell through the bottom of the ink and landed hard on a stone paved road—the orange-yellows of the remnants of wheat filling the scope of his vision. Suddenly before him a grand castle erupted from the ground—tiered towers bursted out toward the sky. And even further around him the world rose from the ground until he was standing in the center of a small medieval bustling town. Even the wheat receded back into the roots of the earth as foundations for wood and iron buildings stood tall over them.
He could not see Laven anywhere, but strangest of all was the color of the sky. It was a bright blue—like how it had used to be in the old world—but this...existence he had been dropped into seemed something of a fictional sort as well.
Something in the back of his mind started to ring as a memory pulled forward—He and Laven were out by the library and along the side of the building was a mural of a landscape that seemed...eerily like what he was looking at now.
“Just what is this place?” LUCAS had asked aloud—still too stunned to do anything but.
The world seemed to reverberate to his very question—shaking and unsettling like a wave adjusting and changing to his words. He stopped—his eyes scanning his environment with intrepidation.
Then as quickly as it had come it was gone and he felt a chill run up his back as he suddenly noticed how cold it was. There wasn’t any snow on the ground—but this new environment was much colder than the tropical air of Grandlythe.
He held himself close and closed his eyes—trying to connect the dots of how he had arrived here from where he was...and then he remembered the ink that had bled through. There must have been something about that painting—a horrifying thought came to light as he thought of all the murals across town—had they all been like the one in their lodgings? He wondered at a town completely emptied—absorbed into the walls themselves.
The breeze brought him back to himself. The air tasted of charcoal—the thought ran through his mind before he realized—it tasted.
He tasted.
He looked down at his hands and rubbed his fingertips together as the sense of taste flooded him—he couldn’t explain it but he felt the different texture on his tongue. It was rigid—taste buds formed from the front all the way to the back. His arms felt...different. Human. Somehow, he wasn’t in his body, but instead a body meant to look exactly like how his had looked...only human.
He stood staring down at his hands until a small figure bumped into him. LUCAS was sent off balance and stumbled back a few steps before catching himself.
“Watch where yer’ standing,” came a gruff voice.
LUCAS looked up and saw a figure with long fiery red hair draped around their shoulders. They stood a head shorter than LUCAS himself.
“Oh...sorry, I...where am I? What is this place?”
The figure looked up at him with a look of irritation. “Another yappy skump, ain’t ye?”
“Skump?”
“S’wot ye are, no needin’ repeatin,” they offered, and LUCAS realized that they had been straining their voice on purpose to sound gruffer than how they normally spoke.
“I’m sorry,” he said, offering his hands up in a defensive stance. “I’m not quite sure what is going on, I am a bit at a loss for lack of better words. If by ‘skump’ you mean a total newbie here, then yeah. That’d be me to a T.”
The redhead stared at him a moment longer and then burst into laughter. “Ain’t have one claim the title themselves. Well met then.” They motioned toward the large castle in the distance. “Skumps go there once they come here. Should sort you out right.”
LUCAS didn’t like that answer. The information was fine—he was probably most drawn to the castle anyway—but the face that they had made and how ominous he felt their directions were brought to mind the memory of the fairy tale character of rumpelstilskin.
While he couldn’t fact check the information he had lingering memories of the kinds of dangers that led from trusting bad actors. He let loose a breath and decided whether or not it was a good idea, he would best learn more about his current situation by checking out the castle.