Girl in the Glass Planet

  Copyright © 2017 by S.T. Cartledge

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Bizarro Pulp Press books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

  Bizarro Pulp Press, a JournalStone imprint

  www.BizarroPulpPress.com

  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  ISBN: 978-1-945373-77-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  JournalStone rev. date: March 26, 2017

  Cover Art: Matthew Revert

  Interior Formatting: Lori Michelle

  www.theauthorsalley.com

  PRAISE FOR S.T. CARTLEDGE

  The Orphanarium

  “Stunning imagery and language use that plain blows the doors off the ordinary or conventional.”

  —Christine Morgan, author of the Raven's Table

  “An ambitious literary experiment that rewards careful reading.”

  —Writing WA

  Day of the Milkman

  “S.T. Cartledge is one of those rare authors who seem to have an innate understanding of how the bizarro genre works and what needs to be done to deliver great stories.”

  —Gabino Iglesias, author of Zero Saints

  “Day of the Milkman is one of the weirdest damn things I’ve read. And I’m Garrett Cook.”

  —Garrett Cook, author of A God of Hungry Walls, Time Pimp, and Jimmy Plush: Teddy Bear Detective

  Beautiful Madness

  “It’s a lyrical whirlwind that’s as emotionally bombastic as it is flourishing in the creativity of an inspired madness that’s both breathtaking and a blast to suck in.”

  —Peter Tieryas, author of United States of Japan and Bald New World

  Wizard and Robot in the World of Sand and Bones

  “This is a love story like no other; a wholly original bizarro fable.”

  —Danger Slater, author of Puppet Skin and I Will Rot Without You

  PART ONE:

  A SECTION OF A SKULL, ILLUMINATED

  The glass was cold as ice.

  Some of it was ice.

  All of it was cold.

  Cold was for the computers running constant in the planet’s core.

  The closest sun was a distant marble, an opalescent bead so pale and blue, a soft sun whose warmth was blown away by galactic winds long before it could reach us.

  The light was small, but here the glass reflected it. The glass refracted it. The glass consumed it and illuminated the light for us to harvest enough to make our days for counting.

  The longer distant suns played their part too.

  We were alive and energized out here on the surface of this planet mostly glass. We prayed to silicon gods who hummed alive in their vast and vivid television minds. We knew their prophecies were either true or false. We saw the ocean of statistics in our minds and assumed no false prophecies, no false gods.

  Out towards the horizon there were the crystal ranges. Stretching out the other way, there was the sleek black shine of the Mirror Sea, through which we could see perfectly the sky.

  Beyond the sea there were the remains of what cities used to be here, before the earthquakes fractured the masses and the crystal rain came shattering across the fragile surface of the world.

  We painted the space above and the glass surrounding as an image in our minds, logged into our memories, mementos to remember for when everything else is buried.

  Clouds of a deep, dark purple were forming near, swelling crystals within, indicating that the rain would be here shortly. They were our silent alarm that we would have to head back to the underground city of Kojima soon if we didn’t want our skulls to crack open from the falling crystals, if we didn’t want the fluid from our cybernetic cradles spilling out across the Mirror Sea.

  The silicon gods were not for mercy. Kindness was not in their programming. Absence was their natural state of being. Observation was for the petty gods who concerned themselves with mortal lives.

  We were here, out on the Mirror Sea, coming home from an exploration of finding nothing very much, but hoping we might catch a glimpse of the Shinkai in passing.

  We didn’t.

  The giant shifting bodies with silhouettes we saw from the underground. The elongated feet balancing their wide bodies. The long limbs with strong arms wielding diamond sledgehammers. The soft glow of their wet faces, too far away to see what eyes or mouths existed within.

  They lived always on the surface.

  They came out almost never when the rains weren’t here for cleaning up. Their figures were lonesome shadows moving hollow and distant in our minds.

  We imagined sunken eyes and hooded skulls. Bodies ripped with skin layered over muscle stretched out over bones hard and sharp, twisted like the night where long dreams distort a sleeper’s algorithms.

  We saw them in our minds, the details somewhat blurred, unfocused from our cobbled memory of mind. Once they had smashed their crystals small and collected them, we could see the Shinkai disappearing beyond the Mirror Sea out to the ruined cities where they had built a colossal empire shining with all the fragments of collected rain, moulded together with the heat of their plasma torches.

  We were dreamers.

  We wanted to see the Shinkai for real and know their story. Who they are, where they’re from.

  But the sky crackled with static and the first gems came down, which sent us running for the entrance to the underground.

  The staircase down into Kojima was hidden beneath a slab of black mirror, blending seamless into the sea. There it shined invisible. It was only in the fragments of light cutting into its frame that we could see, only knowing what exactly to look for.

  We had lifted this trap door countless times. The soft glow of light in its electric hum, the action and the shifting air, an invitation down into the geofront. We disappeared down into the passage. We came home like every other time before. We felt the air inside snap shut as the trap door sealed us in.

  From the underside the black mirror slab was clear glass, a one-way mirror through which we could still see the sky. The Mirror Sea was made of this exact same kind. It was like we never had a ceiling in this place at all. The glass walls just climbed up and disappeared out into the sky.

  As much as we wanted to see the Shinkai up close, we had seen them from a distance from below. We knew what they were capable of with their diamond sledgehammers lodged tight in their fists.

  We made sure the mirror slab trap door was closed behind us so they couldn’t follow us. We didn’t want them accidentally finding their way into Kojima because who knew what would happen then?

  The passage was narrow.

  We walked single file, a line of three.

  First there was Darko. Then there was Basho. Then there was me.

  Cyberia.

  The Technomancer.

  The android girl.

  The motherless child.

  Above, the Mirror Sea was thundering with crystal rainfall. The clouds were bursting with rain of varied shape and colour.

  It was dark down here, and growing darker, but I had my own light source in the cybernetic glow beneath my semi-translucent
skin, focusing bright into a beacon in my skull, a commanding screen which held my mind together.

  Darko and Basho were silicon children who were left to wander in the dark. They were twins.

  Children of the silicon gods.

  The modified ones.

  The transplants.

  They relied on the living, breathing creatures, illuminites, in the walls and floor to guide their path, the phosphorescent beings breathing so slightly, glowing gently as we passed.

  None of them noticed us.

  The steps opened out into a giant archway cascading out into the city.

  Darko stopped and Basho stopped behind him.

  Go back up, he said.

  I could hear the creatures before I saw them. Even above the heavy rainfall, the gems drumming wild on hardened glass, there was the clicking of steel limbs, with no mistake or trick of mind, the massive scuttling and scratching of the cyborites, the silicon centipedes.

  Go back, Darko repeated.

  Kojima was lit up by more illuminites grown into the walls and in the ground, hung like lanterns down the streets. They gave the city its warm white glow, an angelic aura. There was draped also the ice cold blue, the phosphorescence bleeding, glowing, from the eyes of the cyborites. Over the buildings, through the streets, they left an awkward trail of their light and colour. They tilted their humanoid faces up at us. They gifted us with their penetrating gaze.

  Darko shoved us back. We tripped over the steps, activating an instinct which allowed us to gracelessly stumble-fly upwards, knowing the closest of these cyborites would have seen us and heard the panic in our movements.

  In our minds we could see them behind us coming forward, dripping their trail of vitreous hues after us, salivating from their eyes.

  We tried to open the trap door. We activated it, but it moved not much at all. We pushed on it with our limbs, with our shoulders and our backs, but already it had been weighed down heavy by the gemstone rain.

  We turned to face the approaching centipedes, still somewhat tripped up on how so many of them got in here in the first place.

  Kojima was a sealed entity. Each tunnel was reinforced. We often saw the cyborites scuttling through their own tunnels, building nests within their own systems. Their paths were illuminated with hue, lit with that chilling winter blue, while their older tunnels faded with disuse. Their eye-mucus dried out and became cloudy.

  They cut through the glass walls of their tunnels with sharpened limbs. They scratched and shaved the glass and sucked the shavings up into their mouths. On the odd occasion there would be a stray cyborite or two which would break through into the city, but not a whole colony. Never a whole colony. Not like this.

  We knew them to be mostly placid creatures and we had heard stories of people long ago keeping them as pets, riding them between the cities before the cities of the surface had become a distant myth.

  Now we had a countless number of them in our home. We heard the scuttling of their legs up on the steps coming for us. We saw them fragmented in the glass walls as the path twisted and turned its way up here, simmering ghostly in the light of the illuminites.

  We waited.

  The twins had plasma torches on them, drawn from the sockets on their hips. We weren’t sure how much damage they could do to these creatures. They’d never had to try. My fingers twitched, vibrating as the fractal blades within them slid from their chambers within my wrists, spiralling out ready to slash anything which came too close.

  At the first sight of the cyborites, Darko shot a blast of plasma at them.

  Their distance was too much and the plasma was too little. It touched the body of the closest cyborite and melted nothing down. There was barely a blemish made on its synthetic skin.

  The centipede legs scuttled smooth up the stairs. Its body flowed like water, winding its way towards us like a swimming snake.

  We allowed the length of us to float between, maybe a little more. We waited until the first cyborite was close enough to see the vapour of its breath, smell the neon clouds which formed the iris of its eyes. The smell was hot and wet, like the blood and bones soup-broth of the birthing pools in the caverns just outside the city where the cyborgs came to life.

  Darko fired. Basho fired. Two shots sunk into the eyes of madness. These shots burst the skull into chunks, painting bright their blue phosphorescence on the floor, walls, and ceiling. On our skin the phosphorescence touched us cold, like the frost which sat in colder caverns further out from home.

  The first cyborite down twitched its carbide legs. Spasms carried out, scratching against the walls and floor while we watched and waited for it to be still, to be sure, while the remaining cyborites explored Kojima at will. We didn’t know how many more were coming for us. We didn’t know how this place became so overrun or how no one had fought them off yet.

  Another cyborite came up, climbing over the body of the first. Darko fired, too far, only singed its cheek. It cracked the skin, breaking off chunks like it were some ceramic mask. The faces of these silicon beasts didn’t seem like faces at all. The eyes not really eyes. Sure, the shape was there, but the emotion was absent. A hollow replica of our own.

  Basho shot at its face and shattered it into countless smaller pieces, sent the remaining bulk of it sliding up its skull. Therein was the cyborite’s throbbing muscle, its flesh slick and black. Its true face revealed, its true eyes shining at us. The stench of oil permeated the air between us. Its mouth was a cavern of hideous flesh, jagged teeth shining and clear, crystal daggers the better to eat us with.

  And yet it was curious in its menace. Its gaze remained unbroken. Slow and cautious in its approach, crawling through the viscera we created, the slick gore of sibling violence moulded across the stairs.

  My fractal blades pushed into its soft flesh, through its carbide bones. The limbs kicked and flailed. There was the agony of the fearful beast in deep pain. Smashed was the back portion of its body against the walls. Still smashing as the blades sunk deeper, a natural instinct crawling through my limbs. I could feel the blades penetrating its brain, invading with precision. Inside its skull there was the blood flow lighting up from the incision, spreading out as the blades unfolded and unfolded and unfolded. A tree of wounds formed inside it becoming a beautiful terrible thing, becoming another lifeless thing blocking the passageway. Through the flesh we saw those wounds unfolding.

  I retracted my splayed claws. My hands were stained blue from the blood-thick fluids and smelled black like oil. I slid past Darko and Basho and past the two awkward twisted lumps of dead cyborites and took the path back to the city, to see what kind of madness we were dealing with.

  Above the cavern the gems were building up fast. The light from outside filtered through them a soft rainbow light drenching everything down here in colour. We wandered through the archway to Kojima where the cyborites were crawling frantically over everything as if looking for . . . what? We had never seen them behave like this. They were frantic. Possessed. Their jaws opened and closed with vacant rasping, gurgling sounds coming out.

  Where the rest of the civilians had gone, we didn’t know. Perhaps the cyborites had eaten them all. The jaws beneath their faces were definitely capable of it. They seemed now to have the thirst for raw silicon flesh.

  So many buildings here were torn or shattered, scattered on the streets with such force we couldn’t process the scene with logic.

  Our homes . . . Basho said. He spoke real quiet, just in case the cyborites heard us and came after us again.

  Cyborites couldn’t have done this, I said.

  And still, my hands unfolded automatic into fractal blades, and the fractal blades in my back unfolded wing-like as the nearest cyborite passed nearby, breathing deep and loud. It felt as though my body knew something my mind did not. Separate processes forming different conclusions. My trust was spliced within.

  What do you think? he said. Another earthquake?

  We would have felt it on the surface, I
said. Not an earthquake. I don’t know what could have done this, but it sure wasn’t an earthquake.

  He nodded. He understood, although the mystery wasn’t any clearer.

  We waited for the closest cyborite to give us some distance, then we entered the streets which not long ago had been filled with people. The structures had been clean and unbroken, now gutted and in ruins.

  The streets were laid out in a perfect grid, the buildings were committed to our memory. We knew the gardens periodically spread throughout the city, beacons of light with many varieties of illuminites growing. The crystal trees once glowing now had the life spilled out of them. Cyborites curled around the branches, hung on awkward angles, watching the remainder ransacking their way through Kojima.

  Soon there would be nothing left.

  As the rain grew thicker, the shadows became darker. It was harder for the sunlight to penetrate through the glass ceiling of the Mirror Sea. The sound of scuttling limbs and rainfall became background noise, highlighting the silence from the lack of humanoid voices and the sound of the humanoid-like things which punctuate the daily life.

  We crossed Kojima into our neighbourhood, blades and torches ready to take down any mad beast which might try to stop us from coming home. Our eyes darted in all directions, drinking in the ruins, making mental notes of each street emptied of their people. We counted the streets like this and they were all of them. Our eyes counted the cyborites, their dripping faces begging to be ripped apart.

  Darko’s trigger finger twitched. The city had been broken down so much it was now rendered unfamiliar, yet our limbs still knew the way home. They knew forever the way to go, no matter the damage, no matter if the buildings themselves were destroyed.

  Could have been the Shinkai, Darko said, you think?

  I shrugged.

  Basho nodded. Could have been.

  We stopped walking. Our homes were collapsed, as with the rest of the neighbourhood.

  Why did we come here? We couldn’t have expected anything different.

  Where else would we go? I truly didn’t know. We were guided by impulses. Nothing more, nothing less. This was the space were Darko and Basho grew up. The factory which built my body existed round the corner from here. This place too was abandoned now.