“What’s that?”
“It’s a cyanide capsule. If you get captured. Bite down hard.”
***
Friday, May 23, 2123, evening.
Discussion of our escape plans had to stop. Drones were passing by each building like gestapo military police. Our previous missions (apparently) had found that the bridal shop was one of better hide-aways in the town. Then we could blend in with the mannequins or even hide under bridal gowns, yet still retain good views of any approaching surveillance drones. While the search continued, black cubes hung in formation down the street. It was a stance that seemed designed to provoke us into making the next move, Pawn to King Four. And we still needed to castle (bad chess metaphor). We still had to reach the castle. Gruyère had played this game before and had always won. It was following an established procedure.
“So what if we just walk down the street, hands held high?” I whispered.
“We die.”
“It’s been done?”
“Yep.”
“So guns blazing?”
“We die.”
“Sneak along the walls? House to house.”
“Doesn’t work. We’re detected, even with camouflage, and blasted to smithereens.”
“Just the roof space.”
“Yes, but eventually you have to leave to go on top of the tiles. That has worked. Up until now. See that drone?” T-7 pointed to a cube at the end of roof line towards the castle.
“Yep.”
“That’s new. Gruyère has built a new road block. That roof line route has now been cut off.”
“So how about a jet pack?”
“We haven’t got one.”
“Can we find one?”
“Interesting idea,” T-7 mused. She checked her G-phone. “Oh my Stevieness! We have a network connection! Let’s find out. Ok… checking… checking… checking. Aw shucks. No.”
“There isn’t one?”
“No.”
Brrr. Brrr. Brrr.
“What’s that?” asked T-7.
“My helmet…” I said in surprise.
“Is someone calling you?”
“Er, no. That’s my superpower.”
“Your superpower?”
“I’m Psychic Kid, remember? I have psychic powers.”
“Go on,” said T-7 skeptically.
“It’s just the supercomputer busting my balls over something,” I sighed.
“So nothing important then? It’s not a warning of imminent doom?”
“No, that would sound like boom-boom-boom. Something ominous.”
“So what is it saying then?”
I reluctantly put the helmet on and heard the gentle purr of the psychic warning system. The heads-up display was providing perfect augmented reality. The cubic drones outside were outlined in red, T-7 fringed was in green and er… something new. A hidden object with a slow throbbing pale blue. The light and the purr were synchronised. Ah-ha association! But what was it? I telescoped my vision to gain a close up of the highlighted objects. To the naked eye, they were invisible, enclosed in a building with multiple walls between it and me. Augmented Reality provided a kind of X-ray vision. I saw what it was. It was a jet pack. Maybe several jet packs.
“So?” said T-7 impatiently.
“My psychic powers tells there are jet packs on the second floor of the building 30 metres along the street,” I said as if I was able to predict such things all the time.
***
Saturday, May 23, 2123, morning
I broke into the room from the loft space above, smashing through the wood and plaster ceiling panel. I lowered myself through the hole and made an unpleasant discovery; the dusty bodies of Conrad and Karmen.
“Perhaps you shouldn’t come down here,” I called back to T-7 sadly.
She jumped down anyway.
“Aaron, you are about as tough as soaked paper hankie at a funeral. You need to man up. I’ve seen much worse. They’ve had quite a peaceful death.”
“I wondered what happened?”
“They must had got trapped here, injured... with no network. It looks like a suicide pact.”
“Suicide?”
T-7 merely tapped her teeth as an explanation. (The location of the cyanide pill). “Well, I’ll take their G-Phones. There might be some details.” She sighed. “It looks, to me, like a good Mad Scientist death to me. They died with their boots on, defending the planet against a monster created in their own laboratories.”
“Max’s monster,” I corrected.
“True. I was taking more of a shared responsibility stance.”
“And their data files? Can they be regenerated? Like me?”
“If we find their data files.”
“We’ve lost them?”
“We did the entangle-scan right in the middle of Gruyère’s occupied territory, you know. It’s easy to lose stuff.”
“Well we need to get them back. They’d only just changed their bragbook status’s to in-a-relationship. After all these years of secret yearnings...”
“And we never heard the story about the radioactive panda herd either.”
“Right. We can’t let it end like this.”
“Come on, hand me their jet packs.”
Fortunately the pair had already taken off their packs, I didn’t have to disturb their bodies, although T-7 was leaning over their bodies, helping herself to equipment from the two of them. “We might need this stuff,” she said happily.
After it was determined that I was too weak to climb back unaided, T-7 helped me into the roof space and passed the two jet packs up before climbing back up herself. We then clambered through the contiguous timbered roof space of these medieval buildings, to an opening in the tiled roofing leading to the misty morning outside. It was so misty that we could not see the shimmer of the force field. The castle was a murky shape a two hundred metres up the hill.
I jumped onto a flat roof extension and T-7 passed the jet packs down before following me onto it. We strapped up. The jet packs’ fuel was seriously depleted. We had about twenty seconds of flight, a bit longer if the flyer was prepared to unexpectedly fall out of the sky.
“What’s the decision, Terri?” I asked. “Fight or flight?”
T-7 gave me a burning look; I called her Terri rather than T-7. She didn’t correct me. Instead she called the real Terri on her G-Phone. She turned away while she made arrangements with the boss at HQ.
I looked around using augmented reality from the safety of the flat roofed area at the rear of the main street. There was only a single cubic drone between us and the castle, with another dozen the other side of the roof, on the main street, and a couple further downhill.
T-7 turned back. “Terri has a message for you. She says good work for finding Conrad and Karmen, and the jet packs.”
I nodded my head nonchalantly. It was the supercomputer’s work. I did not feel as though I had anything to do with it.
“You must have triggered a probability model routine within the supercomputer,” she added.
“Yeah, I do that,” I said, inadequately.
“Take off your helmet?”
“My helmet? Sure.” I took off my helmet.
“Bend your legs. Stand still,” commanded T-7
I did so. Then T-7 came up and gave me a quick kiss, a peck on the cheek.
“What’s that for?”
“That’s Terri saying thanks.”
“What happened to rule number one?”
“It was an override. Terri ordered it.”
“You are some passion-bot!” I said jokingly.
“You can assume, Aaron, that I understand sarcasm perfectly. Don’t go smug on me.”
“Hmm. Ok, what’s the plan?”
“Fly into the castle courtyard. Apply maximum damage. Terri will provide synchronous attacks elsewhere as cover and distraction. Strap up.”
“Should I have some of the virus? Loaded into my dart gun?” I asked.
?
??We don’t have the virus yet.”
“We don’t!?”
“It will be delivered.”
“When? We’re just about to enter the dragon’s den and we don’t have the ultimate weapon yet?”
T-7 unzipped a bag and threw me a heavy weight machine gun. “We have these…”
“Museum pieces?” I said disparagingly.
“Don’t worry,” said T-7. “Terri will dispatch the virus to us when she can. She’ll slip something through during the distraction.”
***
Saturday, May 23, 2123, afternoon.
The distraction was an understatement of epic proportions. It was, in fact, an all out battle between humanity and cheese. Humanity was represented by the industrial capability of the planet coordinated by the commander of human forces on planet Earth, that is, Terri Shiraz, (yes, my Terri!) with an army of tens of thousands of Mad-Sci-Soc Replicants; Clouderas, Captain Kittofferys, Improbleons and Majestros, on jet packs (unfortunately just mere X.25 replicants, not Terri-bots or Bombz). These were supported by human forces: city-block-sized tanks, clouds of drones of different sizes, missile-carrying fighter jets and Quadcopters armed with lasers and projectiles manned by all the world’s armies (which by 2123 mostly consisted of rapidly retrained paint-ball weekenders and survivalists).
On Gruyère’s side was a range of robots, some as small as vac-u-bots, but with fridge-based monster cyborgs, as large as skyscrapers... And an army of zombie humans! Somehow Gruyère had re-purposed the humans it had conquered into a slow, disheveled, fleshy army. The zombie army was followed by the cubic drones that maintained a moving grid of defence around Gruyère’s not inconsiderable territory covering most of Europe and the Middle East.
The aim of Terri’s attack was to penetrate as far as the castle as she had no expectation of winning against Gruyère in this battle. The sole purpose of the attack was to provide cover for T-7 and myself in our stealth mission into Gruyère’s lair.
In the movie version of the story, this would be the climatic end section, occupying one whole third of the movie run time, or perhaps the last movie in a trilogy. As it is, I can summarise in just a few paragraphs.
Terri had already mobilised a huge force. It was all ready to go and do damage. All it needed to do was provide enough of a problem to keep Gruyère occupied while T-7 and I slipped into the castle for our suicide attack. At least, probable suicide.
The opening move… The Quadcopters flew in first. They passed into the unmarked borderlands of Gruyère’s territory and aimed their weapons at the enemy fixed defensive positions. Gruyère had built fortresses resembling land-based battleships across the countryside. They were crammed full of radars, sensors and projectile weapon systems.
The result of any conflict between fixed installations and a mobile adversary is well understood in history. Gruyère’s fortresses were being knocked out one by one.
In response cubic drones flew out from massive underground factories to reinforce the front line. (Gruyère, it seemed, was a great believer in Just-In-Time production techniques).
The human operated Quadcopters were quickly beaten back, many were destroyed with much loss of life.
Then came the second waves of attack. Hundreds of Su-U replicants arrived on the scene by jet pack, to defend the remaining Quadcopters. Formations of identical Clouderas (Terri seemed to like this model most of all), followed by waves of Captain Kittofferies and Improblieons working in tandem and backed up a few Majestros who seemed to have created solely for the purpose of distracting the opposing forces and being blown up.
But even this mass of zapping, flapping, super heroes was no match for Gruyère’s riposte. From ruined houses and from behind walls, even rising up out of the mud, dead humans were revived as zombies! These corpses were now under new management and, while not fast, they were persistent. They rose up to encircle the super heroes, after their jet packs fuel was exhausted, and drag them down. Their aim would be to strangle and crush since they carried no weapons. The zombies could sustain immense damage and they seemed immune to electrical bolts. Force weapons merely slowed them. The only way to destroy them was with an asteroid load of bullets from projectile weaponry or, if they were close enough, just like in any zombie movie, severing the head cleanly off the body.
While the zombies provided distraction and cannon fodder, cubic drones closed-in and sniper-ed off the replicant super heroes.
The superheroes were backed up by drones of their own and the remaining Quadcopters, and so the conflict reached World War One levels of carnage.
Then Terri unleashed the third wave of attack: massive tanks systems, the size of apartment blocks. The tanks crushed the zombies and were able to drive the cube drones away.
The human side was now making progress into Gruyère’s territory, going past the fiery remains of fixed battleship-shaped fortresses and taking out drone factories.
The tanks were closing in, just a few hundred kilometres from the Alps, and Gruyère’s castle.
However hiding in the deep valleys were Gruyère’s signature weapon system, the giant fridge-constructed cyborgs. These giants rose up vertically from dammed lakes, subterranean bases, and from caves hewn from valley sides. The battle between cyborg and tank was one-sided. The cyborgs could take out the giant tanks with a single punch. One cyborg could take out a row of tanks with its missile systems. And these metal and cheese monsters could side-step any shell launched from a tank lucky enough to fire before it was destroyed.
The cyborg counterattack was so fast that the jet aircraft Terri had arranged to support the tanks arrived too late to save any. The jets loosed their missiles from their maximum target range, losing any surprise advantage. The cyborgs easily snatched the missiles out of the air. As the jet fighters closed in they too were either swotted or intercepted.
Soon not a single tank was moving or fighting. Then Gruyère’s forces began reclaiming ground.
A subsequent wave of jet fighters was launched as a mass attack but these were not delaying the giant cyborgs progress. They continued to trudge forward swotting missiles and aircraft. Gruyère not only recovered its territory but looked like it was about to extend it even further.
***
Saturday, May 23, 2123, late afternoon.
Terri had already devised the final defence against the invading giant cyborgs, with the Mad-Sci-Soc team providing the backbone. (or, at least, the X.25 replicants of the Mad-Sci-Soc Team).
As the giants approached the Rhine, an Improblieon-bot, her back to a wall, blasted an incoming cyborg, while a cloud of Cloudera-bots circled around blasting the monster with lightning bolts. A Captian Kittoffery-bot landed on the cyborg’s shoulder, ripped off the missile system that was hosted there and opened up the armour like a tin can to reach fleshy cheese. Then a Majestro-bot took over and dive head-first into the gooey mass to deliver the coup de gras; a virus bomb.
One by one the giant cyborgs ground to a halt. Those in the front were bashed down by the ones following but quickly taken out. Eventually the battleground grew quiet as the last of Gruyère’s monsters stopped in its tracks.
The result was a vista of frozen robots, broken tanks and smoking battleship emplacements as far as the eye could see over the north German plains.
As a distraction, hopefully it was a success. But as a war, the area was still a no-man’s land for humanity as it was patrolled by zombies and cubic drones; it was just another stalemate.
***
Saturday, May 23, 2123, afternoon.
The war was far away. Through the gloom, T-7 could only see flashes and lightning bolts hitting Gruyère’s force field over Fribourg. Neither of us imagined Terri’s distraction attack would make much difference to our mission.
We strapped up quickly and ran diagnostic checks on the jet packs. All fine. We then had the countdown until the prearranged attack time. We checked our weapons as well as the M.S.S superpower devices we both had projectile weaponry, “machi
ne guns” with multiple magazines with a few seconds of ammo in each.
Three… two… one… The war outside continued as a colourful display, a cross between organised fireworks and an interior view of a Van der Graaf Generator. However it all seemed peaceful inside the town walls.
“Ok, switch on all your camouflage effects and deflector fields and we’re off. Let’s make some fondue. We have twenty seconds until party time.”
But things went wrong straight away. I took off fine but not T-7. She took off and immediately started to lose control. The diagnostics checks obviously had not spotted the mechanical failures in one of the nozzles in her jet pack. The gyro control tried to compensate but after a few metres in the air at roof level, she spun towards the ground and landed heavily in the back street behind the building.
I looked behind, losing precious milliseconds of flight time.
She broke communication silence protocol and through gritted teeth said. “Go on, PK. I’m fine. I’ll get the drone in front of you.”
Drone? I looked forward again. A single cube drone was on its way to intercept me. I fired my gun weapon at it; bullets going every way but none actually hitting it. I tried changing magazines while trying to control the jet pack and dropped the weapon. I was 30 metres up and it fell, as though in slow motion, into the street below.
The drone was still coming straight at me so I had to take evasive action, spinning down and round then up again to remain on track towards the castle. The cube was now behind me, blasting me with projectiles. Some were penetrating my private protective force field and hitting my back, on the jet pack and helmet. My deflector field had reduced their impact and I just felt a series of pokes but no real damage was being done, just a lot of noise.
The projectile noise stopped. I heard a boom behind me.
“Got it!” said T-7 over the comms channel. Somehow she had taken out the drone chasing me.
I was just over the walls of the castle when I heard T-7 again. A loud cry of pain. She had been hit. I tried to look down and saw a swarm of cubes at the end of the building we had just travelled from. I had a moment’s indecision while hovering over the wall of the castle. I could see the courtyard that I was supposed to reach but wanted to go back to T-7 and see if I could help her.
I checked my fuel. How long did I have left? Uh-oh, minus five seconds. I was running on vapours.
Then all decisions were taken away from me. I was blasted with something, a lightning bolt or force wave, I couldn’t tell. And the jet pack gave out and I fell into the castle, hitting slate roof tiles, then down past the guttering, falling towards the interior cobbled courtyard. I was able to buffer my fall with a single remaining flatulent blurt from the jet pack that sent me straight into a wall. I crashed out.