I woke up in a cold sweat and jerked up. The room was dark, and glancing at the digital alarm it was about an hour and thirty minutes before I was supposed to wake up. I turned off the alarm on my way over to the bathroom and stared into the mirror as I recalled my dream.
It had been the day of the mission, the day I had decided to become a pilot. We had been making our way up the switch back when Alloy had crashed in front of us, and that high tech warrior with him. I had watched it approach the truck, easily dispatching my comrades, knowing that there wasn’t a damned thing I could do. I was helpless, and then I was saved. Not by my comrades, but by this kid sitting next to me who had not even come of age. I had yelled at him to come back when he jumped out the side of the truck, my eyes bulging as I realized Adonis was going to be turned into a charred husk. He whistled, and those two dogs jumped after him as he threw one of his windup grenades to the ground, his face filled with terror. Yet still he moved.
“Never again,” I whispered to the mirror, “I’ll never be that helpless again.” Helpless to save anyone, unable to keep the people next to me safe. I had put in my pilot package the day we returned, despite the scare that Juliet had given me. Alloy had saved me from losing my job, and therefore my life, and I owed him so much more. Yet there was a tired sadness to his face from that day onward, one that I couldn’t seem to lift, and swiftly lost my chance to do so. I regretted not realizing how much he had done for me only when it was too late.
Charlie pilot school was two months long and was designed to familiarize yourself with the different Charlie designs. You had the roadie and aquatic Charlie that we had used at El Dorado, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. There were eighteen more that could be selected for a mission, and it was up to the Charlie pilot to decide which one was best suited for each job.
Working under Alloy had more than prepared me for understanding the exams. I knew when we needed a roadie, a blitz, or a star storm Charlie from just being at meetings with Alloy. The only thing that could supersede the Charlie pilots’ choice was the commander, who could decide that different equipment was needed for the mission. As a result, Alloy had reviewed our equipment before each mission, and I had through osmosis picked up on all of it.
After that I was required to spend a year as Charlie pilot before I was allowed to put in for Alpha. During that time I trained to raise my capacity and accuracy to 243 liters and point eighty-eight, respectively. To my surprise the school had little to do with piloting tactics or anything else about the Alphas themselves. It was six months of nonstop leadership programs and tactics. Learning to navigate the administrative work that came with being the commander of a unit.
And so, I was now in charge of my own unit, Unit Thirty-Three to be precise. The irony didn’t escape me, and from what I gathered it had been a combination of both Alloy and Logan arguing for my placement in charge of them.
Alpha pilots were the heroes of the city, and while not all of them were well known, for many of them it was important to become something more than yourself. Something that the people could look up to. Numbered pilots normally struggled to distinguish themselves, and many got their names changed to facilitate an image. Alloy and Logan seemed to think that I could sell it though. Even my emblem cemented my identity, a hexagonal sapphire with the number embedded into it. The name of my Alpha was something more though. More than me. Noblesse Oblige. For I had discovered I had a duty to protect those who lacked my aptitude.
I left my home and began walking down the bridge towards the central pillar of the crossroads. I had learned recently it had a name, Cronus. I was unsure of the meaning behind the name, though I did know someone who was quite familiar with classic mythology. As I walked out, the street was relatively empty, and I reached the stairs of the pillar and began making my way down to the bottom twelve roads.
These were the roads dedicated to military, and on each there were a handful of military units. Mine was opposite of where my old unit was, and it was hard to find time to see my old companions. Beneath us was the river basin of the ravine, which would go on to form an underground river that opened out about a thousand kilometers away into the ocean. It was a couple hundred meters deep with the pillar hitting the rocky floor right before it opened into the water. While this was the bottom of the Crossroads, it was not the bottom of the industrial side of the city. Shafts had been built around the base of the pillar that fed into refineries and factories, which fashioned iron and steel into the base components used throughout the city. From there they would be hoisted up to where they were needed by cranes on each of the bridges. Even now there were crates being lifted on pulley systems to their destinations.
I checked my tablet for the time, and decided I would be able to quickly go see my old unit. I hurried down the bridge to where the road tunneled into the walls of the ravine, where the tarmac was. This was where heavy equipment could be stored and deployed, and each tarmac ended in an elevator that would take you all the way to the surface.
Sure enough, as I had hoped, there was Alloy. He had a mat with a punching bag always set up on the tarmac for workouts, and while most people refused to spar with him, it was frequently in use as we all had used it to vent our frustrations and maintain our fitness.
“Commander Alloy, good morning.”
He turned towards me, he was in workout shorts, was wearing gloves, and did not have a shirt on. “33, what are you doing here so early?” He panted as he caught the swinging punching bag to steady it.
“I had time this morning so I thought we could spar, for old time’s sake.”
He looked me up and down, “In that?” I was in my office uniform for the day.
“Come on, we both know you have a spare pair of gloves, and I doubt you could tear my uniform if you tried.”
“You fucking ice bitch, you’re on.”
The brigadier general looked at Alloy, and then me, “The hell happened to your face, and what happened to your uniform?”
“I had a sparring partner this morning,” Alloy said, his face black and blue, with one eye swollen up. Luckily all his blows had landed underneath my uniform, though that was largely due to him being shorter.
“I fell down on my way to work this morning, sir.” I mean that wasn’t a complete lie, I had been on my way in, and he had knocked me down.
“For crying out loud, both of you be more careful, I don’t need people asking why all my commanders look like they’ve been through a blender,” the brigadier sighed before commencing with the meeting. It wasn’t a particularly interesting one. Alloy’s unit would be doing an escort mission for refined GEL to the pillar, just to insure there were no issues. As for me we had nothing to do today, so it would turn into another training day, at it had been almost every day since I had taken charge.
This was pretty standard for a new commander as it was considered important for the first six months to acclimate the unit and its new commander to their new status quo. We were dismissed from the meeting, and I walked down to my road where I joined Unit Thirty-Three and began with different exercises. Unit Thirty-Three was a scouting unit, and most of our drills involved loading up our truck and simulating a variety of casualties that could occur on a mission. It was unique in that we only had access to a single truck, which could be loaded with one Charlie and my Alpha as well as our men, but it made sense considering we generally weren’t in charge of recovering assets. Our missions would be expected to last about a month, and we would hold points until someone else came to load up anything we found.
I ran weather casualties throughout the day, with a focus on storms even though I’ll admit that these have become less likely since our alliance with Olympus. While we lack satellites to properly track meteorological phenomenon, their bird’s eye view paired with a near endless amount of experience circumnavigating the world on their airships has given them a near encyclopedic understanding of the weather, and I’ve heard we’ve had little trouble staying clear of storms.
I found myself finishing the day having dinner with Caroline, as we discussed our days. If mine was boring, than hers was abysmal. Life of an auditor, though we frequently discussed statistics. This fascination of statistics had been what guided us to our original jobs in the first place, and she had been incredibly concerned when I had chosen to make pilot. Even now it served as something of a sore spot.
There was a lull in our conversation as I scooped up another spoon of taste and bit into it. I sometimes wondered what food in Atlantis was like, after hearing about it from Kristoff. I couldn’t even really describe what the paste tasted like now that I thought about it. Salty and sweet, like he said, but it didn’t seem that salty, nor that sweet. It tasted the way food was meant to taste I figured, so I shrugged off the thought.
“So did you hear about the protest tomorrow?” asked Caroline. Something about her tone told me that I should have.
“Sorry, no. It’s been busy as hell at work.”
“Well you’re the one who put in for promotion. I still think you would have been better off as a driver.”
“We’ve talked about this Caroline,” I said with a deflated sigh. I really wasn’t looking for this argument again.
“I know it’s just… You’re right, I know,” she admitted and then fell silent.
No reason to let the conversation end on a bad note, “So anyways what’s going on with the protest?”
Caroline perked up slightly at my bait, to my relief, “So there have been rumors of corruption in the military for the past few months, and it seems to be boiling to a head.”
“Really? What are the rumors?”
“Well, supposedly, Alloy has been using the alcohol that’s been being confiscated for one thing.”
I cocked my head at that. It wasn’t wrong, though I feel like the fact that it was being given to the Atlantean as part of our deal with him made it more than reasonable. Even so, I could see how that knowledge could be misconstrued, “I mean that’s not entirely wrong, though he isn’t drinking it or using it for personal use. All of it was with approval and through the proper channels.”
“So, the rumor he’s a raging alcoholic isn’t true?”
I chuckled, “No, he’s just a regular sober asshole. No self-medication needed.”
Caroline smiled at that, “So do you think he did anything wrong then?”
“No, everything was under proper protocol for the situation, I can vouch for that since I was still working for him at the time. I’m sure the details just got lost and as a result people are just assuming the worst.”
“I figured you would say something like that.”
“Any other rumors?”
“Supposedly Juliet has been blackmailing citizens throughout the Crossroads. Three people have come forward, and all of them are claiming that someone they knew died because they refused to comply.”
“They think Juliet is murdering people?”
“Apparently.”
I thought for a second about it, and then shook my head, “I don’t see when she would even have time to kill someone, let alone be able to get away with it. She’s in constant meetings and almost never leaves her office except when she gets summoned by the Five Star.”
“I mean she goes home to her partner every day, doesn’t she? What’s stopping her then?”
“I’m afraid her partner passed away about twelve years ago. She even sleeps at her office, and since she’s in charge of policing there’s people working there 24/7 so there’s basically never a time someone can’t vouch for her. I mean as far as alibis go, hers is pretty unshakable.”
“Maybe she’s having her subordinates do the murders for her?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t heard of any mysterious deaths. As far as I know, everyone has died from normal health related incidents, and we haven’t even had any field deaths since the El Dorado incident.”
“I still wouldn’t rule it out. We’ve been talking at work of cracking down and doing a full audit of the military just to make sure everything is kosher.”
I smiled with a raised eyebrow, “Maybe we’ll get to see each other at work then? I always wanted to see what you do.”
She laughed, “I wish! No, they’ll be sure to assign me to a different project so that there isn’t a conflict of interest. It’s the one benefit of being your partner. I’m a celebrity at work now!”
“Oh really?”
“Really! Everyone is constantly asking me questions about Alphas and what happened at El Dorado. It’s becoming exhausting.”
It was my turn to chuckle, “Compared to the story that was put out publicly, the truth is way more boring.”
“Barely, from what you’ve told me it was a hair raiser either way.”
“Fair.”
I made a mistake. I should’ve listened to Caroline and woken up early, and instead I found the roads to the tarmac to be completely blocked off by angry protestors. When she had mentioned a protest I thought that since I hadn’t heard of it then it would only be a couple dozen disgruntled citizens.
That couldn’t be further from the truth as I saw the nearly two thousand people blocking off the roads, yelling and chanting, ‘FIVE STAR LIES,’ for all to hear. I gave up after about thirty minutes and made my way back home away from the noise and contacted my brigadier general to let him know what was happening.
I got a message back which read:
We are tracking, take the day off, we don’t need them harassing anyone on their way in. We’ve got enough personnel in who are supporting Juliet who are standing guard and escorting the protestors. Once they see that they’re not achieving anything they’ll get bored, and we can go about normal business. People just need something to complain about in peace times.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
I suppose there was some truth in that last statement. Caroline had already left for the day, and it occurred to me that this was the first day off I’d had in almost two years. I felt a small rush of excitement that caught me off-guard. I hadn’t even realized how much I needed a break.
I went to my bathroom and looked in the mirror. I had an undercut to keep my hair manageable so that it didn’t get in the way when I was in the field. Still, my hair was long enough that I kept a tight bun. I let it go and, my hair fell shoulder length. After about thirty minutes I had managed to straighten it out and toss it to the side so that only part of my undercut was exposed and smiled in the mirror before heading to my closet to put on something a little more relaxed.
Most of my clothing was my military uniforms, but I found an old pair of black pants and jacket and put them on. I thought about the fact that Olympus had such a wider array of colors and clothing items. They even had dresses with a dozen different fabrics in them, and I smirked at the idea of such uncomfortable and inefficient clothing. At least in the Crossroads we all just wore pants. No need to make extra clothing just to differentiate genders, with the exception of undergarments.
I made my way back to the bridge directly above the first of the military roads and began making my way down. As I did, I passed by a security shack which had one of Juliet’s men who nodded while having his pair of automata standing on each side of him. The success of El Dorado and the reveal of the automata had instantly caught the city by storm, and there was a massive demand for them in the city now. The silver and golden dog, which were at the shack, were the most commonly requested, though there were also a variety of others that had begun to spring up around the city. As it was now, there was only one workshop producing them, and it was reliant on prepared neural tissue from the flying city to fuel it. As a result, there was only around a hundred automata in the city, but they were rapidly working to expand for the needs of the city.
The only caveat was Olympus made it clear that the automata would under no circumstances be used outside of the city unless the missions were absolutely critical. While the success of the twin dogs was proven, Olympus had revealed knowledge of Atlas, the king of Atlantis and his prowess for reverse engineering and improving designs. If it were to gain access to the knowledge, they suspected it would begin milling people for tissue and creating its own army of GEL powered soldiers, all tightly controlled by AI. Their concern, from my point of view, seemed well warranted.
I made my way down the bridge and found myself at the entrance of the tunnel, which had a new large gate in front of it. There was a smaller door in the corner that I was able to open and enter through, with a sign hanging over it that read Elysium Workshop. The first Olympian workshop in the Crossroads, and its single member had been cranking out automata at an impressive speed for the past ten months. I had been unable to visit with the exception of his first week here, and I had been meaning to make my way here for a while, but never had the time during its normal operating hours.
I stepped inside and saw the young man carefully soldering the GEL infused spinal cord into the frame of an automata and quietly approached so as to not distract him. The room was full of a variety of power tools and workbenches, with the entire back of the tunnel having a massive curtain with steam leaking out from behind it. You could hear the soft hissing of steam behind it, and I instantly regretted wearing a jacket due to the temperature being easily above thirty degrees. He worked quietly and swiftly, humming and whistling, with the occasional half lyric muttered out as his fingers quickly weaved across it, his practiced hand working at a speed that even I could see was precise yet swift. “Done!” he said with excitement.
“About time,” I responded causing him to jump and turn towards me. The young man had grown several inches since the first time I had met him, though he was still scrawny. He had the beginnings of a goatee on his chin, and his sideburns had grown longer as well. Much of the child fat I had last seen on his face had become lean, causing his cheek bones to be more pronounced.
“Who the hell…? Wait a minute… I remember you!” He said with a confused look on his face and a queer smile.
“It’s been a while Adonis. Have you been keeping my secret?”
“Your secret?” he mumbled before his eyes flashing in recognition, “Wait, you’re 74! You’re the one who returned my prototype!”
I looked at him baffled. “Um, I’m 33.” I supposed we had only met a couple times before, and it had been brief. To me however it was thanks to this kid that I had finally realized my responsibility to others born of my talent with GEL. Strange how such a chance meeting had completely changed my perspective, and for that I would always think fondly of our few meetings.
“Oh.”
He awkwardly shuffled while scratching his head in embarrassment, causing me to laugh, “It’s alright, I’ll admit my name isn’t the most memorable.”
He looked at me, and seeing I wasn’t angry, relaxed, “Yeah, sorry. A good quarter of you people just go by numbers and it’s really confusing.”
“So how have you been Adonis?”
“I’ve been great. You visited me when I first opened up shop here, right?”
“I did.”
“Yeah, dad got me set up real nice here. I get to build automata all day every day, and I even get a couple hours of downtime in the evening to work on my own projects. My brother even lent me out one of his slices of El Dorado!”
This young man always made me smile as he lit up with passion, and as he spoke, he turned back to his automata and started putting together the different parts of the beast, using a wrench to tighten things down as needed. Still it was good to get him to clarify information frequently, “Excuse me, what do you mean slices of El Dorado?”
“Oh sorry. My brother works for the Daedalus Workshop,” I had heard that this was the, I supposed the closest equivalent in my society was corporation, that was in charge of building the super computer they were going to use to help clear the atmosphere. With it, they believed we would be able to get out of the atmosphere in just a couple hundred years, something that would’ve been just a dream before the boon of El Dorado.
“They give a certain percentage of all finds to inventors like my brother to work on whatever project they want. Basically the goal is to encourage innovation, but he didn’t have a use for some of the surplus so he shipped me some of it so I could use it myself, which pretty much solves my problem.”
“And what problem was that?”
“One second,” He grabbed a hammer and started tapping plates into place around the body. “Oh yeah, so I had this design I wanted to try, but I would’ve needed like a ton of gold and platinum to even test it, let alone actually build it. The only way to get your hands on that was through the Workshop, but they only accept the best of the best, and only after they build something that’s considered revolutionary in some regard. My prototype beetle,” Suddenly the shiny brass creature crawled out from under his shirt and onto his back to wave, “was going to be my attempt to pull that off. But now we have enough gold and platinum for my needs, and my brother sent his portion to me, a full five pounds of each.
I quickly converted the measurement, “That’s over a kilogram each! What could you possibly need that much gold and platinum for?
“Aphrodite.”
“Aphrodite?”
“Aphrodite.” He became silent as he stopped working and looked at me with a twinkle in his eye. “Do you want to see something really cool?”
“Is it a nitrogen plant?”
“Oh… uh… no I don’t have one here, sorry.”
“I’m joking Adonis. Yes, I would like to see something cool.”
“Oh boy, do I got a treat for you,” he said with a level of confidence and poorly contained excitement that it reminded me of that day almost two years ago when I first met him. He gestured for me to follow and went to the curtain, pulling it to the side to reveal an opening and stepping through.
If I thought it was hot before, it was nothing compared to behind the curtain. It felt forty, maybe even fifty degrees in there, and the first thing I saw were two large machines that were humming ferociously that we walked between. Thankfully Adonis explained as we walked by.
“So these are a couple of A/C plants that are chilling the water that I’ve been pumping up from your water reserves. They keep the temps on those at about, uh, I think it’s like five or whatever Celsius for you guys.” We passed the machine to a pit that had a couple pipes feeding in and out of what appeared to be an egg shaped chamber. “The water is pumped into this chamber here and wraps around it to keep it cool, while the steam is let out over there.”
I shouted over the noise, “Is that a GEL reactor down there, then?”
He turned back and scratched his chin, “Technically no, but it’s similar. GEL reactors take non-GEL material and mixes it in with the GEL, which interferes with its function. This causes the GEL to malfunction and start to generate heat, which can then be used as a steam engine. Hence the name poisoned GEL. This thing doesn’t produce nearly enough heat to pull that off however, you see all this steam?”
“Yes.”
“That means it’s not proper steam, its water vapor. Pure saturated steam is invisible. If you were to try and use this water vapor, it would shred your pipes and turbines apart if you brought it up to pressure. No, what I did is quite a bit cleverer than poisoning GEL.”
He stared at me with his eyes gleaming. I asked the question, “And what did you do?”
“I perfected GEL,” he said, then took a lever on a pipe in his hand and brought it down, causing the pipes to rumble to a standstill and the last of the steam to puff out pathetically out of the exhaust. “Shall we take a look?” He jumped onto a ladder leading into the pit and slid down without touching a single rung. I looked down, and instead climbed down taking every single step. I wasn’t about to break my neck to see what he had in store for me.
We approached the chamber, and he began unclipping the front door on it until a hand wheel on its back was loosened up enough to operate by hand so that he could spin it several turns. Finally, the front of the chamber fell off and I could see inside.
It took me a second to process what I was looking at. On the one hand its color was simple but breathtakingly beautiful, a pale and brilliant white-gold, with the faintest trace of a blue shimmer to it. I assumed this came from refined GEL mixed with the gold and platinum which had been turned into an alloy of some sort.
Its shape in comparison was incredibly complex, having both an almost crystalline structure that ended in what seemed almost an organic round shape that was both familiar and alien at the same time. The longer I looked at it the clearer what it was became to me. It was in the shape of a human heart, with crystalline structures on the top of it, and what appeared to be a pair of orifices for something to flow through, though I imagined it couldn’t possibly be blood. “It’s beautiful…” my voice trailed in wonder.
“I call it the Heart of Aphrodite. Made from the perfect GEL that I completed. I call it compressed GEL.” He reached in to grab it, and proceeded to immediately drop it on the floor, “Oh crap, its hot.”
I stared down at him and raised an eyebrow, “I mean steam was just coming off of it?”
“Yeah, I thought I timed the cooling process just right… hold on.” He whipped a brown glove from his back pocket and then reached down picking up the object. “There we go. So, what do you think?”
“I mean it’s pretty to look at, but I’m not sure what it is exactly.”
He cocked his head in thought, “Uh, basically it puts the GEL in a crystalline structure with the metal alloy, creating an incredibly sturdy material that can use the GEL’s energy to maintain its form. Its primary function is its ability to convert all the power of GEL into raw kinetic energy.”
“I mean, is that not how GEL hydraulics work?”
“I mean technically, but there is a lot of wasted energy in the process, not even to mention the fact that there are very specific things that hydraulics can do, while this can provide whatever force you want it to apply.”
“Why’s it in the shape of a heart?”
He grinned from ear to ear, “That’s my design. I want this thing to compress steam into ice.”
“Compress steam… into ice?”
“Yes. So how it works is you pump steam into the heart here,” he pointed towards the first opening of the heart. “The chamber there pumps and squeezes it into a second chamber that compresses and applies voltage to the second chamber until type XVIII ice is formed.”
“Type XVIII ice?”
“Superionic water, highly conductive, and more importantly about four times denser than normal ice. From there it gets forced into chamber three, where it is compressed even further to form what I’m calling dense ice. This will be about a hundred thousand times denser than superionic water. From there it gets pushed into the fourth chamber where it can be stored and bled out through a valve.”
“You’re going to bleed out solid ice?”
“Well, it won’t stay ice, not at that pressure differential. It’ll flash to steam.”
“So, it’s a steam engine than?”
He frowned, “Not quite. More like a steam… tank… container thing. Listen it’s really cool, trust me.”
I saw he was starting to deflate, and decided it was best to encourage him, “It sounds cool, I’m just struggling to see why you think it’s such a big deal.”
“Oh well, you know how we have to clear the atmosphere before we get off planet?” I nodded in response to his question. “Yeah, well this will allow us to clump up the debris with ice for easier extraction. On top of that we can recharge it with water from anywhere in the universe, making it a great source of power as we jump from planet to planet.”
“I’m following now, though I suspect if it’s as dense as you claim wouldn’t it be difficult to move around?”
He nodded, “That is an issue, but keep in mind you can empty it out before traveling around. That and I’m designing an automaton that’ll be able to use this technology to fly around and breath out steam and all sorts of cool stuff!”
We headed back towards the workshop, and he placed the heart onto one of the work benches. I still was struggling to understand the point of compressed GEL. While it was true that it was more solid than standard GEL, I didn’t really see what its use was that standard GEL couldn’t provide. I suppose it allowed you to save on some material costs, since high pressure systems needed thick piping to contain the forces inside, but using such rare metals to build it seemed like a waste. I suppose once I saw his completed design it might make sense, but it just seemed like a waste to me.
“Hey kiddo, where have you been?” came a familiar voice from the entrance of the workshop. I glanced over and saw Alloy to my surprise.
“Alloy, you’re here! Did you bring what I asked for?” Adonis asked with excitement.
“Right here,” Alloy said holding what appeared to be a large metal block with some electrical connections and pins on it. I recognized it as a computer part, though I was unsure what it was exactly.
“Perfect, I have a spot for it right here.” Adonis walked over and took the thing out of Alloy’s hand swiftly and then made his way over to a bench that contained some sort of electronic device.
“You’re fucking welcome,” Alloy muttered once he was out of earshot with an irritated scowl.
I walked over and asked, “So what brings you here?”
“I visit about once a week, and they sent out an ALCON message saying not to come in due to the stupid-ass protest. Took advantage of my day off to bring down the AI he asked for.
I looked at him in surprise. While we were good at manufacturing and machining all sorts of things in our factories, one thing we didn’t have the infrastructure for was something as complicated as an AI. They took a large amount of silicone, and programming them could be difficult for someone without experience. “Where did you get your hands on an AI?”
“Remember El Dorado? Well, we brought back some of the tech the Atlanteans used against us including a couple of AI we found. That one is what we scrapped from the bastard with the arm cannons.”
I stared as Adonis continued to mess around with his large computer. “Is it safe?”
“Apparently. N.O. Technologies have been working on reprogramming it ever since, and they finally finished up. We didn’t really have a use for it yet, and Adonis had mentioned a few times that his workshop would benefit by having an AI helping him out, so I was able to convince the Five Star to negotiate a contract for it on the kid’s behalf.”
“Done!” Adonis shouted out with glee. “Guys come over here! I’m going to boot it up!” His poorly contained excitement caused him to physically bubble and shake as he waved a hand at us without looking at us.
Alloy and I shared a look, and with a shrug the man made his way over to Adonis. I followed as Adonis hit a button and we all stared at the computer as it whirred up and hummed.
“So does it work?” Alloy asked.
“Does what work?” came a synthesized female voice from the machine in front of it.
“The fuck?”
Adonis shushed Alloy gaining a glare from the older man as he turned and addressed the machine. “Good morning! How do you feel, are all your cores working?”
“I feel fine. All my systems are running optimally. May I ask who you three are?” To my surprise the voice seemed curious. I had never interacted with AIs before and had expected it to seem… colder. Its voice was inhuman, but it didn’t feel inhumane. Interesting.
Adonis looked like he was about to squeal with excitement, “Yes! Right, I’m Adonis, this old man over here…”
“Hey!” Alloy protested.
“Is Alloy of Justice. And this here is 44.”
“33.” Once again, a part of me felt saddened by the state of our relationship. Perhaps I would begin visiting regularly like Alloy had been doing.
“Oh whoops, this here is 33.”
The machine was silent for a second before responding, “It’s nice to meet you Adonis, Alloy of Justice, and 33. May I ask who I am?”
Adonis responded ecstatically, “Your name is Aphrodite! You’re going to be helping me around the workshop. If you check your hard drive, you should see a bunch of blueprints and the like for automata. In addition, there’s a folder marked Aphrodite. That contains all the information of my plans for your own body! Man, this is going to be great!”
I gave a sideway glance to Alloy, who met my gaze and asked, “What?”
“Nothing.”
He shook his head while he excused himself, and as he started to leave, he muttered, “Jaw-twitching ice bitch.” No sooner did he open the door, however, than he let out a curse. “33, come here!”
I followed after as the door shut behind him, and as I approached, I could already smell the faint smell of smoke. I swung the door and ran to the railing on the bridge, where Alloy was already looking out. Down below us, small fires had erupted on the crossroads, and you could hear screams in the air coming from the chaos below.