7
PRESENT DAY
As Charlie and Aelfwyrd descended a massive marble spiral staircase, they could see animals playing together in a wide courtyard. There were seats set in a semi-circle around the outside of the courtyard and an open space beyond them, but no stage.
Four or five of the animals rolled and wrestled. They looked like mammals, but not quite like anything which the men could identify at a distance. They were not quite dogs or cats or rodents. Charlie was sure they were something which did not yet exist in the world during his time.
“Do you think they’re dangerous?” Aelfwyrd asked.
“They’re not afraid of us. They’re just playing.”
In fact, the men were able to walk past the furry grey-brown creatures and the animals didn’t even break off their game.
“They’re tame,” Aelfwyrd stated.
“Why do we have animals on our spaceship?” Charlie asked.
“This isn’t a short trip. We’re meant to explore for years, perhaps for a lifetime. There are plants and animals and an atmosphere. It seems we have a whole ecosystem.”
“Do we need to worry about predators? Xeno-bears or space-wolves?”
Aelfwyrd silently shook his head. “I imagine it’s all been carefully designed and balanced for our comfort.”
Past the courtyard they walked down an alley-way between two large tiered buildings and found themselves on a street of white cobblestones. Up and down the way there were a number of empty storefronts with large glass windows. The borealis sky reflected in the panes.
“Who are these for?” Charlie asked.
Aelfwyrd merely shrugged.
“There are only twelve of us.”
The cobblestone street curved down a hill and led to a large and imposing cube-shaped building with a heavy door which looked to be at least thirty feet high.
“This will be the worker housing,” Aelfwyrd explained.
“So, where’s your lab then?”
“I’m not sure…” Aelfwyrd walked around the corner of the building. Beyond it, he was surprised to see the landscape change. There weren’t more stores and buildings. There was a long curved flat surface and beyond that, grass, tall and thick grass as far as the eye could see.
“I don’t understand how this spaceship works.” Charlie said. “Do the walls lower when we land? Is all of that simulated?”
“Look at the sky.” Aelfwyrd pointed up above the fields. The sky was the same undulating green and blue waves of energy they had seen throughout the ship. “The fields are a part of the ship.”
“This ship must be massive.” Charlie was impressed.
Aelfwyrd walked quickly back to the large cube-shaped building. “You know, I don’t think this is worker housing. There would be windows if people or animals lived there.”
Charlie was following behind as Aelfwyrd stepped up to the door and slowly pulled it open. It swung surprisingly easily, considering its size.
The cube-shaped building turned out to be a warehouse. There were metal people inside stacked on top of one another. Charlie took a quick guess and imagined there had to be at least a few thousand of them.
The robots he had fought on Earth were designed for battle. He could quickly see that these were not. They were shaped like men, except that they lacked heads and their hands only had three fingers each. There was a touch screen monitor on each of their backs.
He ran his finger across one and was surprised when it flashed to life.
“I don’t like this.”
“Well, I know. You fought some robots. But robots are just tools. There’s no malevolent intelligence controlling these ones.”
“How can you know that?” Charlie asked.
The screen in front of him showed a big blue smiling face. The words across it read, “READY.”
“Start?” he tried.
The screen read, “VOICE RECOGNIZED. GOOD AFTERNOON, CAPTAIN DAEMON. PASSWORD PLEASE.”
“Do you know the password?” Charlie asked Aelfwyrd.
“No. Do you?”
Charlie shook his head.
Aelfwyrd took a look at the screen Charlie had been using. “It should have been a part of your orientation. But, there has to be another way.”
Aelfwyrd touched his finger to the screen.
The screen changed. New text read, “DAVID AELFWYRD RECOGNIZED. CAPTAIN DAEMON’S AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED TO ACTIVATE FRIEND-BOT.”
“Aha,” Aelfwyrd said loudly and leaded back against the wall.
“What’s that?”
“Well, now we know why we needed the Mud Men. Your memory lapse cost us our natural workforce. Don’t you see? The robots only respond to your password, and you can’t remember it.”
“This is ridiculous. Couldn’t we just try word after word for a few months until something works? I mean why do we even need workers?”
“I don’t know, but you can be sure the last you thought we needed them pretty badly. Imagine how many important things we’re going to be unable to do without our captain’s approval?”
“Alright. We can figure all of that out later. Where’s your lab?”
The two men walked back into the street and down the cobblestones, and then up the hill in the other direction. It was strange for Charlie to see all of the empty buildings. He thought about the cities he had lived in on Earth, how crowded and dirty they were. It seemed a massive waste to him to see all of that empty space. He breathed in, and the air was clean. He thought about all of the years he had lived in filth and poverty and done his best to survive it.
The same vanilla-blackberry scent which had hung in the air when Charlie first walked out into the streets decorated this part of town. The city didn’t feel abandoned, or deserted. It was newborn and untouched. Charlie had the feeling that many of the doors up and down the street had never been opened. The buildings had never been entered.
Potential, purity, fabulous wealth. It felt to Charlie like he was in a fantasy realm. If there were only twelve of them in the crew, surely they had been all given treasures beyond any king or emperor Earth had ever known.
But why? How could an exploration mission require all of this?
There was a second cubical building at the other end of the street. This one had windows. Most of the ones at street level had been smashed, and some as high as the fifth floor. There were two dead Mud Men in front of the building and a third living one which sat in a flower garden chewing on the plants.
As Charlie and Aelfwyrd walked up, the Mud-Man in the garden saw them, stood up, and began to slowly approach them.
And then another came shambling out of the front door.
Still some distance away from the creatures, Charlie and Aelfwyrd looked at the buildings around them to see which one might be the doctor’s lab.
Two more Mud Men walked out of the building.
“That’s where they live, isn’t it?” Charlie asked.
“Yep.”
“There could be a hundred of them in there.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, if you were you, which one of these buildings would you pick to put your lab in? And please tell me you would pick one that we could barricade ourselves inside of.”
There were now seven of the Mud Men walking slowly and awkwardly towards Charlie and Aelfwyrd. The flesh of the upper bodies was swollen and distended from their bones, as if even at this distance their meat was trying to reach out and touch them. They were pink and red. They gently moaned and grunted as they moved. And the two men had no choice but to walk towards them.
“I don’t know. Maybe that one?” Aelfwyrd pointed at one of the buildings closest to the Mud Men’s home. There was no storefront and there were no large glass windows on the ground floor. There was a walk-up to the building’s entrance and a number of flower-pots containing purple fat-budded stalks had been placed outside.
“You like flowers?” Charlie asked, readying his sword.
“Purple alien flowe
rs designed in some distant galaxy? Yeah, I’m a fan of that sort of thing.”
“Alrighty then.”
Charlie started running towards the building Aelfwyrd had chosen. Aelfwyrd followed, but more slowly. He found running with the polearm to be quite difficult.
He had no choice but to confront one of the creatures in order to get to the door. He tried to hit it with the butt of his sword, but the weird loose flesh kept moving, almost like a sail, and he couldn’t get the right angle. Suddenly aware that the monster was about to pounce on him, he had no choice but to slash two quick swipes of his weapon at the Mud-Man. The wounds might not have been fatal, but it did force the creature down to the ground.
Another one reached for him. Charlie leaned back and managed to jump out of the way. He sprinted ahead, closer to the building with the flower pots.
Aelfwyrd watched as Charlie slashed at the first Mud-Man and then avoided the second, but as Charlie got past the second one, Aelfwyrd found himself face to face with it. He tried to lift up the polearm, but the creature was suddenly too close. Instead he gripped the metal shaft as widely as he could and shoved the pole towards the creature’s neck. He ended up impacting against its collar bone. The monster fell backwards. However, Aelfwyrd lost his grip and the polearm fell with the Mud-Man.
He let it go and ran as fast as he could after Charlie. By that point there were a lot of the monsters coming after them.