Girl in the Glass Planet Page 2

  Take a look around you.

  We did. Everywhere ruins. Chaos in the broken homes, Kojima broken beyond repair.

  Take a close look. You think you’re alone here. See what’s really going on.

  The voice echoed in the air real thin and hollow. It was pained by suffering. It took a moment to register the words, like a puzzle whose pieces don’t fit quite right. And then it clicked into place. We were at parallels to the reality of it. The silicon lifeforms now seemed mostly disinterested in us. Here and there along the streets lay the cracked perfect halves of the steel eggs which birthed them.

  They didn’t all swarm here. They existed after the fact.

  This place wasn’t as empty as we’d thought. The streets weren’t void of corpses. We were numb, we were blinded to them. The trauma of one thing blocking out another, protecting us from the worst of it. Bodies bursted, emptied of their fluids, burnt out organs dying on the sidewalks.

  It couldn’t have been the Shinkai, I said. They couldn’t have done all this.

  It wasn’t. The voice rasped and coughed.

  It came from a bisected body near our feet. A humanoid we recognised but couldn’t quite place the name.

  You saw what did all this? Darko asked.

  She nodded real slow. Her eyes were flooded with the trauma of it. Don’t ask me what it was. I don’t know. But, she coughed hard. It was heading out towards the birthing pools. Sounded like nothing I’d heard before. Her head tilted back and her eyes glossed over, opaque glass. Fluid pumped from her body until she was gone.

  We were somewhat awakened to the new horrors of our world, and yet we were still numb with disbelief.

  Along the footpath there was a blasted finger, an amputated foot, and further down, a hollow chest cavity and a broken, discarded skull.

  We tried to tread careful. We stepped on some of these parts by accident. You couldn’t not. And these objects gave us nightmares.

  There were no more safe places.

  We passed many bodies dead or dying on our way to the birthing pools. All of them were in far worse condition than the humanoid from our neighbourhood. Some of them tried to call out to us, probably to warn us of similar dangers to the ones we’d already heard. Their blood-gargled cries were horrors enough to keep us moving on.

  We were thankful to be alive. To be spared from such pain and suffering. The city had been in this state for how long before we returned, we didn’t know. Long enough for the damage to be done. For the linger in the aftermath. We could feel in the air the ache of open wounds still ebbing away.

  We built a timeline in our heads. We built scenarios like mental cities but the pieces always all crumbled down as we came up with nothing sound. Loose dreams bouncing off glass and coming back to the dead faces and broken limbs of those scattered around us. The cyborites didn’t bother much with the living, yet they feasted something terrible on the dead. They ripped the silicon flesh from our brothers and sisters, our family and friends. They tore and slurped and sloshed fluids on their faces, sucked the very souls into their demonic eyes. They came up to us and stared us down. Those sleek white porcelain faces emotionlessly mimicked us, taunted us without words. Gazed deep into us and registered nothing. My many blades clicked loud and angry like a swarm of violent crickets. The plasma torches hummed, ready for the twins to blast these creatures to oblivion, see if then they would stop consuming our people and start on their own kind.

  Through the tunnel to the birthing pools, the glass walls were cracked. Fractured in ways we’d never seen. Webs of spiralling patterns, a madness foreign to us. We stared at the patterns and touched them, fascinated by their unprecedented mystery and horror.

  The pools themselves behaved like nothing we’d seen before.

  We had known them to be calm. Deep pools of cloudy fluids wherein the organic bodies of silicon flesh was formed. From these pools the bodies of our brothers and sisters would rise. They would be mindless at birth until we, the technomancers, would take them from here and implant them with the memory boards and exoskeletons moulded from tempered glass. We would fit them with the components they required to live as conscious, articulate lifeforms in Kojima. All the androids, from the harvesters to the glaziers, the auto-guards, the data-miners and technomancers, were built from nothing just to see how far we could push our own existence.

  To dream of bigger things, build a better future for our people.

  To be able to sit by the river just beyond the city limits, watch the water trickle down into the earth while we contemplate things which are bigger than ourselves.

  We were a wild collection of mortals and half-mortals and machines. The mortals were a dying breed, those rare creatures which needed no birthing pools or electric currents to create new life. We knew also that the birthing pools would not last forever.

  What we had curated so carefully here was the fusion of our minds. The common goal to thrive within an organised society.

  We would be nowhere without it. We would be indistinguishable from the cyborites.

  The surface of the pools were vibrating, a constant shiver across them all. The product of a long and low unearthly sound echoing through the air.

  It was gentle. Without knowing what created it, we couldn’t tell if the thing was soft or distant.

  The chamber was wide and tall as the birthing pools were many. The illuminites glimmered in the glass walls and ceiling, their reflections danced off the shimmering surface of the pools. There were no cyborites here yet, no stench of bodies to draw them in. There were only a few hatched eggs and a few left unhatched, forming a trail leading around the pools to the far corner of the chamber.

  We followed the trail and the strange sound grew louder. It became accompanied by the scratch of steel on steel, the centipedes clawing to hatch their way out.

  The frequency of the low tone was constant, but the acoustics reflected clear off the walls. There were pockets of dead silence and pockets much louder, confusing the point of origin, aural waves washing over us and swimming, looping, in our skulls.

  We kept our eyes on the egg trail, should the fresh ones hatch and find themselves possessed with the hunger for flesh.

  To be safe, Darko and Basho fired their plasma at the nearest eggs as they passed by, sending shrapnel and flesh bursting out across the pools. What eggs were only cracked or left behind were sliced to pieces with my fractal blades. What creature could have left us with such a nightmarish gift?

  This was not just a simple cyborite infestation.

  At the back of the cavern we found a tunnel which had not been there before. The surface of it shimmered, freshly made.

  The sonic waves became more focused. The tunnel perfectly round contained the same patterns scratched into the glass, the fractured webs which had formed in the tunnel to the birthing pools. The sound became a vortex in the tunnel, focusing the vibrations, moving through us, creating a sense of dread while it also drew us in.

  There was no turning back. Nothing to turn back to. No more salvageable components of home.

  There were no illuminites in this tunnel. No phosphorescent light trailed from cyborite eyes. I led the way with the glow from the screen in my skull. It felt even brighter now that we were embraced with darkness. The markings on the tunnel walls meant the glass was mostly clouded here. The light didn’t pierce the glass as it would. It reached the patterns and stopped. It fell on the occasional cyborite egg and stopped. The twins took turns firing their plasma torches, as the silver orbs radiated light enough for us to see how far the tunnel stretched straight ahead before it twisted back into darkness.

  The tunnel grew wider the deeper in we went. Wide enough that we could walk side by side. Up ahead where the plasma had hit the glass, the fractured patterns had melted away and the glass had become clear, forming small windows for us to see just what else was tunnelled in this planet around us.

  With the torches turned down, Darko and Basho melted entire sections of wall back to smoo
th clear glass. We could see our full reflections and we could see through them to sections of tunnel which twisted away from us and stretched into the distance. We could see the unreachable ceiling which was the surface, the Mirror Sea still above us in its vast expanse, still carrying the dull percussive thunder-sound of gemstones falling constant on top of each other, blocking out the stars with darkening combinations of colour.

  The volume in the tunnel continued to increase. The echoes were so strong we couldn’t tell the proximity. The sound was all we had to follow. We were in pursuit of peace. Silence. A future unobstructed by violence and reckless destruction. If we couldn’t find our peace we would surely meet our demise. The creature or machine which must be stopped before we could rebuild.

  We didn’t know what else our lives stood for any more. All we had was this.

  We came upon a crossroad.

  Two paths. Two monsters?

  We waited and listened. Tuning in to the shape and direction of the sound.

  It’s coming through louder on this side, Darko pointed to the left.

  Basho started walking into the right tunnel.

  Why are you taking that path? I asked.

  He shrugged. No sound means no monsters down there, he said. Seems safer.

  But if we can stop what’s doing all this we know we’ll be safe. For good, I said.

  Darko started off into the right tunnel too. What’s the harm in looking? he asked. Something’s got to be down here.

  They were right. Of course they were right. At least we knew these tunnels were connected. There was no harm in looking. No greater harm than what we already faced.

  Darko and Basho melted windows in the frosted glass to see if we could make out where the tunnels led. Just in case. To the right, the tunnel led further down into the earth, opening up into some crystal cavern. Probably not unlike the one we had back home. To the left, the tunnel tilted up and continued climbing right out to the surface.

  There was something there beyond the Mirror Sea.

  We thought back to the Shinkai. What we knew of them didn’t seem to fit the situation. How we didn’t really know much about them at all. What they were. What they were capable of. What if there were a variety of different Shinkai species? What if they weakened the gemstone rain with sonic waves before smashing them down with their diamond sledgehammers? There could be countless things they do or behaviours they have, things we never dreamed of, never imagined were possible because we didn’t know them. We never saw them or heard them or felt them with our own senses.

  The scenarios expanded out, an infinite spectrum of simulacra in our minds, the Shinkai transformed by the evidence of destruction which lay behind us.

  We shook these terrors from our minds.

  I followed Darko and Basho before they could vanish completely from my sphere of light. If the Shinkai were truly such savage beasts capable of all this, maybe I didn’t want to face that reality just yet, or at all. I welcomed the twins’ decision to take the safest path first.

  From the window we could see the cavern, but we couldn’t see the damage which was done throughout this tunnel. Things which mirrored the grave images of home.

  Countless more centipede eggs were littered, burst open. The glass here was heavily chipped and scarred, gouged. Sections of the tunnel had broken, slabs of frosted glass fallen down across the path. Abnormalities such as craters and boulders littered everywhere. It felt like the tunnel would not hold up. There were cyborites still here, both dead and living ones.

  There were humanoids here too, lifelessly discarded into crude piles to the side. The bodies of strangers were just as heartbreaking as the ones we knew back home.

  Where there were other people, we should have felt hope. This was a sign telling us that we were not alone in the world. There had been other groups surviving here in the underground. Where there should have been hope, there was only emptiness.

  The void of other possibilities now eliminated.

  We felt exhausted at the sight of them. We didn’t even know their names. Only their faces. Each and every one we couldn’t ignore.

  Darko touched each person gently, a tactile prayer for their peace. I whispered my thanks to them for enduring the horrors we still could not yet imagine. For knowing they were helpless to this fate and guessing our fate too would be similar. They would have done anything to be in our position, still living, and yet we saw in them our future, our bodies dead and discarded in a tunnel far from home.

  Basho walked down the middle of the path, staring down the guts of it. He couldn’t look at them anymore. He had nothing to say. There was nothing for him here but to move on. To recognise their sacrifice and continue. He wore a mask of strength and determination.

  The tonal noise was growing quieter, and we could hear down the tunnel, a faint sound ahead, like some creature suffering on the brink of death. Quiet, but certainly present not too far away.

  There were more sounds. Voices. Frantic whispers, like too much noise would bring the tunnel collapsing down, a torrential downpour of death and suffering raining upon them.

  My light reached out to a point in the tunnel where the path was blocked off by massive glass boulders fallen over. They were cracked, and in their fractured form they spewed out little rainbows from the light. Through them we could see infinite warped variations of these figures which stopped talking when we came closer. We couldn’t make out the features of their faces. No eyes, no light coming from them, but we knew they were looking through the glass at us too.

  Hello? A girl’s voice called out. Who’s there? High pitched, her voice was muffled somewhat by the blockage. There was a tubular echo sound, the voice resonating off the walls.

  Don’t worry, Darko said. We don’t want to hurt you.

  Who are you? she called back.

  My name is Darko, he said.

  Basho, his brother said.

  I said my name was Cyberia.

  I’m Irie, she replied. The tunnel collapsed while we were trying to escape. And Jiro, he’s stuck. You have to help us, please!

  We heard the ragged breaths and haunted moans of a man in terrible pain. The outline of a misshapen figure beyond the pile of fragmented glass.

  Darko and Basho stepped up to the glass and started melting it down with their plasma torches.

  It looks like this could take a while, Irie, Darko said. How long have you been trapped here?

  I don’t know, a couple of hours? she said. She paced back and forth on the other side, her shape distorted behind the glass.

  Darko and Basho slowly moved through the blockade. The glass melted down, dripping, forming small veins of rivers sliding off the fragments and splitting out into nothing. Irie and Jiro gradually became clearer to us.

  Where did you guys come from? I asked.

  We followed the tunnel from Koike. There’s nothing left there for us. Where are you from? she replied.

  We’re from Kojima, I said.

  We didn’t know there were more people out here. This tunnel wasn’t here before. We thought Koike was the last city left.

  She turned to Jiro and spoke softly, gently, like he were a child. We couldn’t hear the conversation, but we knew it was a dialogue of hope. The dream of clarity in a clouded world. What answers we could provide them with. What future unbroken. We had those same ambitions.

  We’re nearly there, Darko said.

  We could see clearly her face from here and tell she was young. We could see that Jiro looked older. He had an android body. From the shape of his construction I’d say he was an auto-guard. It would explain the scars and dents which covered his body.

  Do you know what caused this? I asked. What happened where you came from?

  She came across to the middle portion of the collapse, where we could see each other the clearest.

  Koike is ruined, she said. Wrecked so bad we couldn’t recognise it. We’ve never seen anything like it. Jiro and I, we were hiding from it. We heard the no
ise it made and knew it was bad news. We hid amongst the steel sculptures on the edge of town, replicas of the old giant ones. We climbed inside this giant steel skull. Everything else had crumbled, but we were safe in there. When the noise went away, we climbed out and saw that we were the only ones left.

  The plasma torches broke through the glass.

  Do you know what could have done it? Basho asked.

  She shrugged. Your guess is as good as mine. Koike was overrun with cyborites though. They’ve been eating all our dead. Some of them started following us, but Jiro always managed to fight them off.

  We came through the fresh opening and saw a medium-tall girl with blood-blue palms torn fresh where she had tried to dig Jiro out. She crumpled down by his side, waiting for us to melt the glass around his body to set him free.

  Irie was a cyborg and Jiro was an android. In many ways they felt just like us. Scared and confused. Lost and alone. We weren’t programmed for this. We had to protect each other.

  We wanted to follow them back down into the chamber where we would find their city. We wanted to explore the ruins and see the steel sculptures for ourselves, and yet we were hesitant.

  Whether this place was the same as ours or completely different, their city was ruined, and their city too was overrun with cyborites, and not a single humanoid soul remained alive inside it.

  We had more in common in that moment than we thought was possible.

  We wanted to follow the tunnel and glimpse into the life and operations of another part of the same machine. We were curious, but we felt it would be identical in state to our home. We weren’t sure if we could relive that trauma.

  Darko and Basho turned to the glass slab which had pinned Jiro down. They freed him with their plasma torches. I pulled him to his feet. He was much older than me, yet, despite being programmed different genders and different classes, some of our parts were identical. We were made from the same components. Were we constructed in the same factory? Or were we just designed from the same generic plans?