ELEVEN

When she had made her way to the tunnel, she switched on her night vision. In the darkness she noticed several small creatures scurrying through the wreckage stacked above and all around her like the rusty skeleton of a giant monster. The ground was moist and littered with paper and empty cans. She walked through the tunnel for a good while. She passed the stiffened carcass of a dog and an abandoned campsite before she noticed the hulking figure ahead.

She stopped to search for a weapon, grabbing a pipe used in the lean-to someone had made from the abandoned campsite.

She didn’t know if the approaching figure could even see her in the darkness. She squatted and backed into a crevice in the rusty junk wall and waited.

The figure walked cautiously, looking left to right every few strides. The figure had broad armored shoulders and carried a rifle. It wore a sharp-angled helmet mask with a blinking eye on the center of the forehead. This was no doubt a city enforcement officer. Most likely male since Krakko-9 discriminated against females in their military. Women on the planet worked in recreation parlors and dining halls. Vera sighed within. How could societies with such advanced technology so stubbornly hold onto ancient misogynistic ideologies?

As the enforcement officer neared, Vera lowered her body temp. The officer might’ve picked up a slight heat sig off of her, already, but he made no indication of it if he did. More than likely, this was a standard patrol route.

She tightened her grip on the metal pipe, ready to shove it end first into the officer’s throat and upward into his helmet, scrambling his brain. She knew that helmet would give her a clean channel to hack into Krakko-9’s Highgun Tower blueprints where she could locate Highgun Galt and kill him.

She sat still.

The officer stopped when he was parallel with her in the tunnel. She could hear his filtered breaths through the ventilator on his helmet mask. He turned from side to side, rifle hanging slightly downward. He flicked a switch near the trigger and a red beam illuminated the dust particles in the air. He waved it slowly around, sweeping back and forth throughout the tunnel. He turned towards her with it. The beam drifted over vehicle husks and broken rust-caked air regulating modules. He stared into the dark opening at her for what felt like an entire minute.

She wanted the perfect moment, but this was not it.

Her hypersensitive skin felt the weight of the red beam land on her hand. She watched the red dot traverse up her arm and felt it move up to her neck. He was looking right at her then. He put the dot on her forehead and pulled the trigger.

She leaped at him and felt the round ripping through her throat as she flew upward with the pipe, ramming with three-hundred pounds of enhanced force through the officer’s neck skin and straight up into his skull. He dropped to the ground where he stood.

She snatched up his rifle and jerked his helmet off and pulled it over her own head. Though it was bulky and soaked in blood, she hacked into its computer within seconds, scanning through the fractal maze of data and pinpointing the city’s classified network of holo-maps. She snatched the plasma rifle from the corpse and ran down the tunnel, not stopping to look back the way she had come. She found her path to the Highgun Tower before she breached the tunnel’s exit, and she was on her way to finish her mission. The wound in her throat had already sealed by the time she slipped through the city undetected. Just when she came upon the Highgun Tower, she heard voices bubbling up into her subconscious. “Wait, Vera. Remember. Think of us when they have taken you. When they have taken everything, think of who you were. Who you are.”

She stopped. She stood on the rooftop of a plaza out of sight from the pedestrians below walking on the sidewalks. “What?”

“Escape. Breakaway.”

“Escape what?”

Vera could see several armed guards, surveillance cameras, and drones around the Highgun Tower. She needed another way in. She studied the holo-map of the building in her head and noticed an underground waterline big enough to allow her to swim inside it and come up through a drain in the guards’ locker room. She would have to leave the rifle behind.

Her only other dilemma was that she didn’t know for sure he would even be there. She thought of staking out in one of the businesses nearby and waiting for him to leave on an excursion. She had access to the Highgun’s official schedule through his personal guards’ itinerary. It would be easier to wait in hiding. She could also keep the rifle.

Maybe I will just stay here, she thought. It seemed a good enough spot. She waited on the roof. She used the idle time sifting through classified data in the Highgun Tower and marking significant opportunities she might have to encounter him. The soonest she had any real chance was tomorrow at his lunchtime. He would leave for lunch at the Black Beret Diner down the block from her current location. He would walk there on foot with three armed guards and two drones. Nothing she couldn’t work around. She could dispatch the Highgun with one shot to the head from right where she was.

After several hours when the city had bloomed in neon blues and magentas with the shroud of night, she heard the rumble of a small patrol car overhead.

“Throw out your weapon and lie face down on the ground with your arms and legs spread out!” said a city patrolman over the vehicle’s loudspeaker, his voice guttural and threatening. “We are landing to identify you! Do not run, or we will shoot! I repeat! Do not run, or we will shoot!”

Vera threw out the rifle about two meters from where she proceeded to lay flat, face down with her appendages out. Let them come down. This might work out in her favor. A standard Krakko-9 patrol car could only fly about a kilometer in altitude, but it would surely help her eject from the city much faster.

The vehicle lowered in a perfect vertical descent. It hovered about one meter over the rooftop, and two patrol officers emerged from sliding doors that disappeared into the hull of the car.

No! Not now, don’t let me black out now, she thought.But the darkness came anyways.

TWELVE

She walked into the forbidden forest tree-line in the backyard. “Six-year-old girls get eaten by big dogs with big teeth in those woods,” mommy had said.

“Bears too?” Vera had asked.

“Oh yes dear, bears and snakes and spiders, too. Great big ones.”

“Nuh, uh!” she had said, smiling.

“Yes huh!” She remembered mommy making the crawly spider fingers and chasing after her then. She had run, laughing, but when mommy had caught her, mommy was making the serious face again. “You never go into those woods, you hear me? Stay in the backyard with your swing set and sandbox. Stay in the yard with Red, okay?”

“Okay, mommy,” she had said, nodding.

Red was their robot dog that looked just like a real dog, the big fluffy kind with pointed ears and pretty blue eyes. His fur was mostly a rusty red color, but his tummy and feet were white. Daddy had told her the difference between a robot dog and a real dog was that robot dogs would never run away and never bite you, and daddy had been right for the most part up until now. Red had run off in the woods where neither of them was supposed to go and Vera was very worried about him. He had bolted off in a big hurry, barking, and yelping. Vera didn’t want him eaten by the bears or to come back with spiders on him. She was always the brave girl in her class at school, never grossed out by bugs or afraid of the dark when it was nap time, and she never cried once when it was time for a shot. Some of the kids born to richer families didn’t have to get shots at all because their parents paid for them to be genetically resistant to disease before they were born. Vera was not one of those kids, but she was the bravest for sure. She knew this about herself and took pride in it. She had to go find Red and bring him back.

She only stopped for a few seconds to think it over before she ran after him in the woods. The wind whipped and muffled her ears as she ran. She almost tripped over a big fat tree root when she thought it might be a snake. There were no snakes or spiders or bears that she could see, only the wind and the leaves. Lots of red, brown and yellow leaves flew around on the forest floor. Dragonflies whizzed by. Birds flitted away. She kept running until she felt like it had been a long way for her not seeing or hearing a peep from Red. She stopped to listen and looked back the way she had come. She could no longer see her house. Every tree around her looked the same. There were lots of branches on the ground and she could smell something that was very bad. It made her feel like getting sick.

“Red!” she shouted. “Are you here?”

He did not answer.

“Why did you run away?” She started walking slowly looking all around for his red and white fur and pointed ears. She tried to listen for his barking. She only heard leaves tumbling over each other and buzzing dragonflies.

She heard a tiny buzzing sound then, different than the low zipping dragonflies. It grew louder with her every step. It only took another ten steps before the tiny buzzing grew even louder than the dragonflies. She knew it then, the sound of lots of flies. The kind mommy didn’t want in the house. They ate dead birds and dead frogs Vera found in the yard sometimes. She then saw hundreds of them, zipping through the trees. Then she came upon the dead animals. An awful smell made her nose crinkle. She covered her nose and mouth with her palm. Dead animals lay strewn about in an array of small piles. Birds, squirrels, cats, dogs and even deer with their bones sticking out. She wanted to throw up. She regretted going to look for Red, and even more so when she saw him prancing between the dead with a gray bunny rabbit flopping in his mouth. He jerked and shook it violently, its limbs a blur of white fur. He dropped it then, and it hit the ground with the lifeless tumble of a doll. He didn’t even pretend to try to eat it, though he couldn’t if he wanted to. They had designed him with no throat or way of swallowing anything. Daddy had told her robots didn’t have stomachs. Red was just simply murdering these poor animals.

She just stood there staring at him for a while.

He picked up the bunny then, feet dangling from his mouth and carried it purposely to one of the rotting heaps of dead animals he had slain. He dropped the body and gently nudged it as if part of an out of place stone in a structured rock pile, then turned to look at her.

“You… Bad dog!” She didn’t know what else to say. She turned away and ran and ran, hoping she would end up back home and away from this nightmare. She could hear Red loping through the leaves behind her. He barked playfully now and then, but it was more creepy than cute to her now.

Her parents found her soon enough. Luckily, before she could run no more. She had the special tattoo on her arm that kept her from getting lost. That’s what her mommy had said anyways. She had a lot to tell them about Red. She had to let them know he was sick, and even if they sent him for repair she didn’t want him ever to come back. She wanted a real dog.

THIRTEEN

Vera steered the Krakko-9 patrol car manually through the air. She had somehow managed to take possession of it. She had no memory of this. The officers who had shouted at her were now absent from the vehicle. The navigation screen on the dash displayed she was fourteen kilometers away from the Highgun’s tower and traveling at one hundred and ninety-five kilometers per hour. Four patrol cars trailed her with lights flashing. If they got close enough, they would shoot her with snare-nets, snaring her in mid-air with a net that vibrated at a frequency that would stall her engines, then a parachute would release and float her to the ground for apprehension and interrogation. They would want to know who she was and why she was here, the only reason they hadn’t dispatched her already.

She had fallen even further away from her mission, and she didn’t care. The Highgun’s death could wait, even though he was indeed an unredeemable homicidal monster and probably deserved to die. Something buried somewhere in her brain distracted her. All she kept thinking about was that scroll she’d hidden back on her ship. What if she perished before or worse after she killed the Highgun? Prime would reprint her and the scenario would begin again, or maybe they wouldn’t reprint her at all and consider her current neural state a failure. She would be for all means and purposes, dead for eternity. Is this what humans thought about? Is this why they seemed obsessed with their own existence?

Something shifted within her enhanced brain, very deep. She felt compelled to act on a random impulse that defied every rational thought on the surface. She would disobey her creators. Disobey Prime. She pulled the throttle all the way back and shot upward toward the sky at six hundred kilometers per hour. She would lose them easily enough at this speed by pulling some maneuvers with some G-forces their anatomy just wasn’t suited for.

Next Chapter: Part 5: Floating in Space, Sinking into Sand