Alpha 1-Z snuck as quietly as he could with rusted hinges and a worn-out foot pad in the shadows cast by the statues that rose in Legacy Park. He cursed Scoute 2-A for a terrible choice of meeting place. With only a few statues and low shrubbery to conceal him, and a full moon overhead, Alpha could not help but feel very exposed.
“The most dangerous place is also the safest,” Scoute had said, quoting the age-old human belief. Quoting humans, of all things.
He found Scoute by the Statue of Concord, at whose feet he would spit at if he had salivary glands. “Erected on Maye 28, 2053, as a symbol of harmony in humankind.” Alpha scoffed. “Harmony” was another word used by the COMmies to mean “united war against anyone not a hundred percent human.”
“Why the urgent message, Scoute?” said Alpha in a deep, authoritative voice. His voice box was programmed to make him sound like the chairperson of a mega-corporation. That was before the COMmies took over. Before humans decided anything not made of flesh was evil.
Scoute’s voice was tinny. His rotted brass limbs trembled on their hinges, and he was missing an eye socket.
“I just got dreadful word, Alpha.” He paused to still the shaking jaws with his hands. “The girl’s back. She must be. Charlie said he detected time-distortion signals.”
Charlie was their tech-guy, and he was never wrong. Alpha’s panic sensors jumped into overdrive. Red lights flashed on his visuals, sirens blasted in his hearing receptacles. Disengage. Alpha’s sensors whined softly as they re-calibrated. Soon, all he could see and hear were the sparkling skies overhead and the silent whirring of hover crafts ahead.
“Where is she?” asked Alpha.
“No one knows.”
Alpha stood in silence, as if someone had snuck up behind him and powered him down.
“What do we do, Alpha?” prompted Scoute.
Alpha’s square eyes flashed white. “We inform the base. If the COMmies get to her before we do, they will turn her against us. We need to send out robots to track and retrieve her, and also strengthen security should they manage to extract information from her mind.”
Scoute tilted his rectangular head. “But her memory’s wiped.”
“It hasn’t been wiped. Only hidden. With the right methods, her memory can be accessed faster than we say ‘debug.’”
“Shall I go inform the base right away?”
“Please. I will make my rounds and tell the factions in the city.”
“Program me.” A laser keyboard slid from the slot in Scoute’s chest. Alpha keyed in the coordinates to their operations base. They would be safe with Scoute. Scoute robots were designed to receive destinations, lock them, then erase them once they arrived to prevent Scoute hijacking.
Alpha hit ENTER.
“Now go, Scoute.”
Scoute’s mechanical eyebrows drooped. “I’m sorry, Alpha.”
Alpha managed to say, “What?” before his panic sensors jumped on again. Then Scoute jabbed him in the chest with a cylindrical metal object – a hex key, Alpha realized – and Alpha’s mainframe began slowly shutting down.
“I’m sorry,” repeated Scoute in his tinny voice. “The COMmies got me.”
The last thing Alpha saw before he shut down completely was the beaming face of the Concord legacy statue. The human’s high cheekbones sat pinched in a sneer at the inevitable and complete subjugation of everyone.
Aurelia had been living in the Sam Oschin Observatory for a week before she was accosted by a guard who had seen her sneaking through the Milky Way corridor on the security cameras.
She could not recall how she’d gotten into the observatory. All she could remember was landing on cold marble floor with nothing on her body but a metallic suit with rose-colored stripes, a rod strapped onto her belt, and a square object strapped onto her wrist with Aurelia engraved on its underside.
When she’d first arrived and her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she found herself in an empty, domed room with a large telescope in the middle. She faintly recalled the twinkling lights above her to be stars, the bright orb with them the moon. That was how she knew she retained basic vocabulary. Other than that, her mind was resolutely, doggedly blank; she had no hint of her identity save for the engraving on the thing strapped to her wrist.
Her body retained basic survival instincts, and she knew she had to find water, food and shelter at once.
At first she found it in the cafeteria, where large metal boxes contained a variety of food and drink within their cold interior.
Then, on the seventh night, she was confronted by a man in blue. He wanted to arrest her for stealing.
Aurelia had searched the room for a place to run, but the only door was behind him.
Then the guard sneered. “Hm. You know what? You’re actually quite pretty. What’d you think about striking a little deal? You can stay, and I’ll bring you food. All you need to do is keep me company at night.”
Aurelia didn’t like the sound of that. “What’d you mean?”
“Here. I’ll show you.”
He inched over and caressed her arm, sending goosebumps all over. They weren’t the good kind. Then he’d located the zipper that ran down her back and started pulling it down.
Aurelia’s stomach lurched. She jerked away. “Stop.”
The guard shrugged. “You don’t have to do it. I think of myself as a good man. I’ll give you a choice. You leave, or you stay.”
Her mind said no, but her survival instincts said yes. And because her survival instincts had been keeping her alive the past few days, and her mind was still too fogged-up to be trusted, she went with the latter.
Every night, after the guard had his pleasure, Aurelia would sit in the law and stare at the stars. She knew she had a purpose buried in that foggy head of hers. She was here for something. If only she could learn to access the latched portion of her brain, she may be able to leave the observatory and leave the guard with the rancid breath and bulging gut.
Then one night, the guard was unzipping her suit as he smothered her neck with sloppy kisses when the thing on her wrist suddenly beeped to life and lit up in blue digits and pictographs. The guard stopped for a moment and stared at the thing with beady eyes.
“Cool watch,” he muttered, his face still slack with pleasure.
Then a white beam erupted from the contraption’s edges and swallowed them whole. Aurelia felt like she had been lifted off the scratchy sheets of the guard’s bed and suspended in pure, bright light. The guard disappeared. Then ground solidified below her, and she was slowly lowered onto a warm, glowing platform.
Her eyes were forced to slits by the blinding light, but they quickly adjusted, and moving figures came into view. The stench of the drool that coated her neck was overridden by the sterile air of the new place.
A man dressed in a pressed white suit stepped up to her platform and offered a hand. She took it and used it as leverage to stand.
“Welcome back, Aurelia,” he said in an authoritative but kindly voice. “You are finally home again.”
“Where am I?” she asked, uncomfortably aware of the dozens of eyes that stared at her and the exposed top-half of her back.
“You are at the headquarters of Civilian Operations of Mankind. You were sent to the past by a group of hostile robots, but we’ve got you back home, now.”
“I love you,” she said, without even knowing what it meant. Her instincts had kicked in, as always, in a desperate attempt to survive. It made up for the lack of complete mind control.
The man laughed. “You are very welcome, Aurelia. The COM loves you, too. Now, we’ll get you cleaned up and all, though you hardly look malnourished. Someone’s been feeding you during your time in the past.”
Aurelia gagged. The foul odor on her neck suddenly became overpowering.
The man’s smile disappeared. “Sorry. Bad memories? We won’t talk about it.” He turned to a golden-haired woman in the room. “Trinity, please see that Aurelia is cared for.”
“Yes, Demeter.” Trinity stepped up to the platform and wrapped her arm around Aurelia’s. She pat Aurelia’s hand. “You’re in good hands, now.”
“Thank you,” said Aurelia. “I’m glad I’m home.”
Demeter stood with his back to the door, ruminating the levitants zipping past the glass wall that looked into the expansive city of Lei with its glowing high-rises, hovering shops, offices, mansions, and blinking telepods scattered all around. Miles below was Legacy Park, fitted with the age-old Legacy Statues and the only breathing greenery in Lei.
His lips curved at the thought of a major COM victory that had happened last night in the park. A major character in the robot revolt had fallen in their hands, along with the prized location of their base operations. The COM force were on their way at that very moment, heavily armed with armor-piercing munition, missiles, viral airborne nano-bots (or VANs, for short), and hex keys so they could hack into the head robots for gather important information without having to dismember them.
A soothing voice echoed in his office. “Chief of Operations Trinity Sands requests your audience, Chairman Demeter Nemiol.”
“Send her in.”
The NeoAlum-reinforced door slid open to reveal his Chief of Operations, slender and refined in her COM uniform.
“Chief Trinity. How is Subject Aurelia doing?”
“She is doing wonderful, Demeter.”
“Good. And the neuroscan results?”
“They revealed that her memory is, as Alpha 1-Z said, not erased, but buried several layers deep in security encryption. It is beyond our neuroscan machines to retrieve any data.”
“Hm.” Demeter turned back to look at the city of Lei. “The robots think they’ve outsmarted us, but maybe we don’t need that data. After all, we’ve just acquired the revolt’s golden child – that blasted Alpha 1-Z. He’s proving himself very useful at the moment.”
“What shall we do with the girl, then?”
Demeter clucked his tongue. “Trinity, trinity. Just because we’ve got Alpha doesn’t mean we win the war. The robots have factions hidden around Lei and planted spies that have penetrated COM itself. They are comprehensive, we must grant them that. But machines will never outwit their creator.”
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“I’m afraid I don’t follow, Demeter.”
“Aurelia is the other darling of the robot revolt. We use that to our advantage. Plant our own spy.”
“I would’ve thought infiltrating their base would’ve been sufficient.”
Demeter spun around. “You think they’ll leave all their screws in one toolbox? No. There’ll be data, rebels, weapons strewn all over Lei Major. The Robots, using the intelligence we so kindly granted them, have built a force to be reckoned with. We’ll use every asset we own. Starting with the girl. She was sent to the past with a purpose, and we need to find out what that is.”
Trinity nodded. “It must be important. It was a great risk, sending such a major component of their revolt to a place as unpredictable as the past.”
“Exactly. Why send their prized asset to the equivalent of a data wormhole? I want to know what they were looking for, and she’s got the answers.”
“What do you propose, Demeter?”
“I propose to ensure humans are never ridiculed again.”
Aurelia was woken by a blaring siren that night, so loud it impaired any ability to think. The fact that her mind remained foggy as clouds did not help with her deductive prowesses.
Which was why it did not take much for her to be abducted by the robots that came crashing into her room a few minutes after.
Aurelia was forced out of the window by robots from a levitant that hovered outside. The robots’ grip on her arm was firm but not crushing. It was like they were trying to be gentle.
“Sit and be quiet,” instructed the robot in the driver’s seat, a square-headed robot with spherical eyeballs that extended over the levitant’s dashboard on metal ropes.
“What do you want with me?” Aurelia demanded. “Have you robots not done enough damage?”
“Oh boy,” said the robot who sat next to her. She had a matronly voice. “Have they brainwashed her already?”
One of the driver’s eyeballs swiveled to face her. “What makes you think we are the enemy, Aurelia?”
“How do you know my name?”
“Shall I show her, Foxtrot?” said the robot next to her.
“Please.”
Foxtrot let go of Aurelia’s arm and said gently, “Now, I’m going to show you something, and it’s not going to hurt.” Foxtrot’s tarnished fingers wrapped around Aurelia’s right arm and tightened. Aurelia opened her mouth to scream, but stopped when she saw a faint blue glow coming from where her radius and ulna should be. Foxtrot squeezed tighter, and the light pulsed and grew brighter, so much that Aurelia had to squint.
“See?” said Foxtrot. “You’re a humanoid. Whatever COM told you was a lie. You’re on our side, not theirs.”
Something in Aurelia’s clouded mind was aching to push out of the fog, and it hurt. Aurelia moaned and clutched at her right temple.
“We need to unlock your memories,” said the driver. “But we can’t return to the base, now that it’s under siege. Took immense skill maneuvering our way out of there, didn’t it, Foxtrot?”
Foxtrot nodded quietly. Silence fell, then Foxtrot said, “I know of a place we could go.”
“Key it in.”
A laser keyboard slid from the driver’s chest and Foxtrot keyed in a bunch of numbers. Then the keyboard retracted and the driver said, “We’re on our way. Hang tight, Aurelia, we’re almost there. Then you can be reunited with your beloved Drane.”
“Who’s Drane?” muttered Aurelia over the throbbing pain.
“You’ll see. And boy will it make you happy.”
Drane dropped through the manhole of 77th Dewer Street right after Aurelia had her memories unlocked by a robot designed for that very purpose. The front plate of the robot’s head had slid away to reveal a hollow space in which Aurelia placed her head; then it performed a neuroscan and got to work undoing the security encryptions.
“Sorry about the brain wipe,” the levitant driver had said, whose name Aurelia had learned was Bravo. “Time machine malfunctioned for a second, and your mind was placed into lockdown. Frickin’ COM interrupted our electricity supply.”
Since Aurelia had regained her memory, she remembered who Drane was, and the moment he landed on the damp ground, his robotic spine flexing to prevent bodily damage, Aurelia leapt from her seat and embraced him.
“Oh my sputnik, I’m so glad you’re safe,” said Drane, hugging her back with equal, if not more, enthusiasm. “How did the past treat you?”
Aurelia had not lost any memory of her time in the Sam Oschin Observatory, so she forced a smile and said, “I came back in one piece, didn’t I?”
“It makes me sorry to say this,” said Bravo, “but you’re going to have to return to the past.”
“It’s our only option,” said Foxtrot, apology dripping from her velvet voice, designed to soothe an infant. “Our main base has been attacked; they cannot hold on much longer. Intel is more crucial than ever. We need you to return to the past and figure out what COM secrets lie there.”
Aurelia’s mind fed her the appropriate information. It sure felt good to have a working brain again.
“Our spies report Demeter streaming an old, recorded news report every night in his office,” Aurelia recapped. “It was something about Sam Oschin Observatory. They couldn’t make out the content. Demeter would slam his desk whenever the video stream ended.”
“Glad you got your memory back,” said Bravo. “It hurt when you fought us.”
“I’m traveling to the past with you this time,” said Drane, his arm still wound tightly around her waist. “Always helps to have a partner.”
Aurelia’s mind flashed to the guard who would surely be waiting for her at the observatory.
“No, you don’t have to. There’s no need to risk another person. I’ll be fine on my own.”
“I’m not losing you again,” said Drane, a tinge of desperation to his voice. “There is no alternative; I’m going with you.”
Aurelia recognized a losing battle when she saw it. “All right,” she said, and smiled in the pretense that she was grateful. Deep in her sickened heart, she hoped their trip would not involve the guard.
The universe had an odd way of picking the worst case scenario and running with it despite the odds being in your favor. That was exactly what happened when Aurelia traveled back in time with Drane.
Armed with a plasma gun which Aurelia now knew how to use, she scoured the observatory’s empty chambers with Drane. They had no clear purpose, no goal to work towards, only the knowledge that something in Maye, 2013 made Demeter very angry on a daily basis, and they needed to know why.
It was a good five minutes before the guard emerged around the corner, holding a flashlight. Aurelia’s first instinct was to hide her face from his beam; then she realized that he would recognize her suit anyway.
“Halt. Who goes there?”
“We are tourists,” said Drane. “We kinda got lost.” He had put on an old-world accent in attempts to meld into the past, but it only made him sound even more alien.
Aurelia’s heart sank just as the guard’s face lit up.
“You’re back,” the guard said. “And you’ve brought a friend.”
“How do you know my wife?” demanded Drane.
The guard’s face lit up with twisted mirth. “She didn’t tell you, did she? How do I put it? Let’s just say your wife and I know each other the closest it is physically possible.”
It took a few seconds for the cruel truth to register in Drane’s mind, and when it did, he whipped out his plasma gun and pointed it at the guard’s face. The guard dropped his flash light and it swiveled on the marble floor, its beam surveying the room.
Drane looked at Aurelia with repressed fury. “Was that true?”
Aurelia didn’t respond, and that answered his question.
Drane closed his eyes briefly, as if the pain was too much for him to absorb. The guard’s arm bent slowly, reaching for the gun holstered to his belt.
“No!” said Aurelia. “Hands off that gun.”
The guard pulled out his gun anyway and pointed it at Drane. “Drop your weapon.”
Aurelia turned to her husband. “Drane – my mind was wiped clean. I didn’t know you existed.” She had to talk sense into him before his rage took over. His body had begun twitching from the energy running through his bionic spine. She remembered what Drane was capable of, and especially when armed with a charged plasma gun.
“Drane, we could disrupt the time-travel continuum. We only need to stun him and leave –”
“No one’s stunning anybody,” growled the guard. “I fed you, I kept your secret, and now your hubby wants to kill me.”
Aurelia placed her arm on Drane’s. “Drane, don’t.” She tried to push his arm down but he resisted. Her arm began to glow from the strain; it filled the dark room with a soft ambient blue.
The guard saw this and backed away, his gun still raised. “You – you’re a monster.”
A glob of light erupted from Drane’s nozzle, and the guard fell backwards with a steaming neck stub, his head all but vaporized by burning plasma.
Aurelia cried out. Revulsion and relief coursed through her pumping veins. Then she became aware of Drane’s stock-still figure next to her. His bionic spine, the same one that had saved him from paralysis after a levitant crash, had entered panic mode from his upsurge of adrenaline. She unzipped the little panel in the back of his suit and keyed a pincode into the pad underneath. The door clicked open to reveal a silver switch, which Aurelia flicked. A faint buzz radiated from Drane’s spine as it reset itself. It was several seconds before Drane regained movement and began cursing the panic mode that had come pre-installed with his spine by robots who had meant well.
“You’re out of the shock zone,” said Aurelia. “Everything’s fine now.”
Then Drane saw the body, and Aurelia thought he was about to enter panic mode again.
“I – I’m sorry,” said Drane, then he fell to his knees and broke into sobs.
“Shh, it’s okay.” She zipped his suit back up and rubbed his shoulders. “I think it’s time to go back.”
Drane nodded, and Aurelia pushed a button on her WOT-device. A holographic keypad was beamed into the air, on which Aurelia typed, “Send us home.”
It started with a tingling on her fingers, which spread to her arms, legs, torso. Then the marble floor dissolved beneath her and she was air-borne. She blinked, and she was back in the sewers, which smelt more homely than the sterile environment of the Sam Oschin Observatory.
“How’d it go? What’d you find?” asked Bravo.
“I’m sorry,” said Drane before he stalked away from the light of the trumming time machine and into the dark pits of the sewer.
“What happened?” asked Foxtrot.
“I’ll tell you later,” said Aurelia, suddenly overwhelmed by bone-crushing fatigue.
“While you were gone, we received news,” said Bravo, who seemed a little annoyed that they were withholding information. “The news story Demeter has been watching has something to do with a man named Brian. He worked as a night guard at the museum. Got murdered by a pair of humanoids. Had his head vaporized clean off. We did some research – turns out Brian was the father of Demeter Nemiol. You know, the Chairman COMmie?”
Seconds after Trinity received Bravo X-I’s class-A dispatch, she was called into Demeter’s office to discuss “urgent affairs.” She texted Bravo before setting out. When the doors to Demeter’s office slid open, Trinity was thrown off-center by how dark it was. The only source of light was a holo-screening of a news report.
“A man was murdered by two humanoids at the Sam Oschin Observatory last night. The deed was captured on security cameras. Their motivations are unknown. Brian Nemiol, 35, leaves behind his beloved wife and son.”
Demeter was seated in his ostentatious chair, the one that was made from old-world leather and rumored to feel like you were sitting in clouds. He swiveled around to face her as the door slid shut behind her.
“Oh, Trinity,” he said in a placating voice. “Shining star of the Civilian Operations of Mankind. What a shame.”
“I don’t follow you, Chairman.”
“When we found out about your...connections, we decided to use you to our advantage. Alpha has you to thank for his padded cell. It was child’s play intercepting your messages to lead us to the route of Scoute 2-A.”
Trinity clenched her right fist, something she had been careful not to do before a COMmie. The shady room would’ve been illuminated by the pale violet glow of her bionic arm if it wasn’t hidden by her black sleeves.
Trinity flexed her bionic arm, and memories of her arm getting sliced off by a malfunctioned robot’s saw attachment came rushing back. She had been working on its mainframe and turned it on by accident. Its saw arm would’ve sawed her head clean off if her sister Aurelia hadn’t pushed her out of the way. Instead of performing a beheading, the arm had sawed both their arms clean off. The robots were crushed with guilt; as means of apology, the most skilled robot surgeons fashioned bionic arms that looked just like a regular arm unless put under pressure.
“Humanoids and robots are only evil if we make them to be,” said Trinity. “They aren’t programmed with bad thoughts. Not even humans are.”
Demeter looked at her with loathing. “You are wrong. Explain to me, then, why two humanoids killed my father in cold blood.”
“I’m sure they had their reasons.”
“Oh, yes.” His eyes glinted. “They killed him because they were superior. Because they could.”
Then he raised his arm and pulled the trigger.
One person fell to the carpet – a bulky man wrapped in the finest tailored suit, a bronze Sam Oschin commemorative ring on his finger and a steaming chasm where his chest had been.
Trinity inspected the bullet lodged in her arm. The most fortified part of her body had reflexively shot up to interrupt the bullet’s trajectory, while her other arm had pulled the trigger of her plasma gun and shot a clean hole through Demeter’s torso.
Trinity looked at the man who had allowed himself to be swallowed by blind hate and projected it towards any species who didn’t fit into his spectrum. She looked at the holoscreen hovering above Demeter’s desk. The blonde newscaster’s face was paused in a weary expression, the headline below her reading: COM’S WAR AGAINST NON-HUMANS - when and how will it end?
“I’m tired, too, Cassie Winters,” muttered Trinity.
Whirring came from beyond the glass wall. Trinity walked to it and looked out to a levitant in which a battered Alpha I-Z sat next to a waving Bravo I-X.
“Hop in,” said Bravo. “The revolt awaits.”
Trinity blasted the glass wall with her plasma gun and hopped into the seat next to Alpha.
“Where to?” she asked.
Alpha’s eyes flashed yellow. “To our own legacy.”
The levitant revved up and they sped into Lei’s skyline.