Theme Planet (50 page)

Dex twisted fast, knocking Amba’s
arms away and kicking her across the room. Dex heard Katrina gasp to his right,
as Amba struck the wall and whirled into a crouch - ready for combat.

“No!” hushed Katrina.

“Yes,” snarled Dex, stepping
forward.

He received a sudden blow to the
side of his head, and hit the ground hard. Stars spun as he looked up and saw
Katrina holding some kind of extended black baton, a
wand,
with a tiny
globe at the tip that fizzed slightly. Dex could smell burning flesh and he
choked for a moment, before sitting up and glancing back at Amba, then to
Katrina, then past to his children, who wore impassive, stony expressions.

Confusion kicked him in the
balls.

“Tell him,” said Amba. “Get him
on side fast. Because... if you don’t, then we’ll have to kill him and move
ahead on our own.”

Katrina seemed to relax, and
pulled herself to her full height. She looked down at Dex, and he felt his
heart drain away through ice-chilled veins and piss away through the soles of
his boots. Her face was suddenly alien to him, the expression alien, the eyes
different, the set of her body rigid and ready to fight. Again, it wasn’t
right, none of it sat right, none of it hung
true
on his Katrina. Her
eyes were gleaming. Her mouth was set hard. There was no humour there. No
compassion. No...
empathy.

“They made three of us,” said
Katrina, her voice barely above a whisper. “Three Anarchy Androids that were
top of the range; the best they ever built.”

“No,” said Dex, shaking his head.
Blood leaked from his ears after the
zap
from the stick.

“The first was called Amba
Miskalov, she was the prime combat model and overtly android in her actions; in
order to get things done. The other two were to be a husband and wife combat
unit, sleepers, planted and mimicking real human life - until the time was
right.”

“I saw you give birth!” screamed
Dexter, surging to his knees, but Katrina waved the fizzing wand at him.

“Yes,” said Katrina, shaking her
head with sorrow. “For the one and only time, the engineers removed the
childbirth inhibitors. We were allowed to breed; to have children. But it was
agreed that any children we had were also... non-human. A product of two fake
humans, you understand?”

“No!” sobbed Dexter, and his
cheeks were wet. “What are you saying? What are you saying to me?”

“I’m saying we have a job to do,
Dexter Colls. We were made for a reason. With a function. We were built to
carry out one task. But we had...
other
inhibitors in place, because our
roles were very special. Our designers knew that the longer we impersonated
humans, the longer we developed our own relationships and had children and
lived in a real society, then the more chance we had of getting to SARAH’s
crystal core. Her nerve centre. Her Heart. The place we must destroy.”

“No, no, no, no, no!” wailed
Dexter, head in his hands, then transferred his gaze suddenly to his children. “Come
here, come to me, your mother is ill... we need to leave this place, just you,
Molly, and you, Toffee, I’ll take you away from here, take you back home...”
and he held out his hands and his eyes were pleading and his hands were shaking
and tears dripped from eyes already red-rimmed from crying...

“You were right, Mother,” said
Molly, face impassive, dark eyes fixed on Dexter. She made no move to go
running into her father’s arms. “He has spent too long with humans, spent too
long adopting their ways. He
is
malfunctioning. He
is
a deviant.
Kill him. Kill him now, Mother.”

“Yes, kill him, kill him!” said
Toffee, clapping her hands together as if this were some exciting new game.

And Katrina stepped forward, and
the fizzing baton which Dex knew, somehow
knew
was a special device for
controlling androids - well, it had the power to put him down for good; to
retire him - no matter how fast and powerful he was.

Dex stared at his children,
crowing for his slaughter.

He looked up into Katrina’s eyes,
into his wife’s eyes, and they were hard as glass, alien to him, her mouth a narrow
red slit. There was no give there, no compromise, and she would absolutely put
him down, like an infected dog.

Dex watched in disbelief as Kat
stopped before him. He wiped snot and tears on his jacket sleeve. The fizzing
wand
glowed before his eyes, and it was a concentrated portal, a buzzing glowing
fizzing distillation of
his own deathforce...

“Live or die. It’s your choice,”
said Katrina, edging the wand towards Dexter’s face.

~ * ~

CHAPTER TWELVE

BAD WIFE

“I
choose to
live,” said Dexter, and
dried his tears, and stood. He stared at Katrina, and his children, their faces
impassive, and turned to Amba, who was standing, arms loose by her sides. Amba
gave him a little smile. He did not return the emotion. “So what now? I remember
nothing. But I believe. Finally, I believe. You did that to me. You opened my
eyes, fake wife.”

“So you accept your status?”

“I do.”

“We must kill SARAH,” said
Katrina, stepping past Dexter and standing beside Amba. “But you are the key.
You are the focal point for our ability to crush her crystal core; her Heart.”

“And you think she’ll simply
allow us to stride in there and do this deed?” said Dex.

“She has little choice,” said
Amba. “She is as she says; a creature of positive energy. She can do no harm.
She wants nothing but good and joy in the universe, and it is damaging Earth’s
military - Earth’s War Effort, the expansion of our Empire. A new empire about
to be unleashed...”

“And we are to kill her?” said
Dex.

“Annihilate her totally,” said Amba.

“Without empathy,” said Katrina.

Dex nodded. “I don’t understand
why Oblivion would want to kill such a creature,” he said.

“It’s talk like that,
husband,
that’ll get you dead,” said Katrina, and glanced back to Amba. “Are we ready to
move? This’ll cut a hole through the wall; we can start ascending down to the
next sector, to the underside of the Shell.”

“Let’s move,” said Amba, and the
two women strode across the chamber to the wall.

“Aww,” said Toffee. “Is there
going to be no murder?”

“Toffee?” said Dex, kneeling
before the little girl. “What are you saying?”

“We’ve changed, Daddy,” said
Molly, very matter-of-factly. “And it’s something you’re going to have to get
used to. We have special powers. We are androids. And we are killers. We can
help to do this thing. We can help put an end to the creature known as SARAH.”

“Oooh, yes, can we?” giggled
Toffee, clapping her hands in glee.

~ * ~

They’d travelled for
a kilometre, now, Katrina using the android wand to
cut through the walls, which were soft and flesh-like; almost organic. Almost.
After about the fifth wall, shudders began to well up through their feet and
Dex stopped, looking down at his boots, mind uncertain.

“What’s happening?”

“She’s screaming,” said Katrina,
face hard.

“Why?”

“Because I’m hurting her,” said
Katrina.

“Is there no other way?” said
Dex.

Katrina stopped, and stared hard
at him. Amba was to one side, her face, also, hard. Dex licked his lips, and
felt incredibly empty inside. How had such a perfect holiday ended up like
this? How had his world come tumbling down?

The air parted, and SARAH stepped
through the curtain.

“You must desist,” she said.

“No,” said Amba, staring hard at
her. “Move, or I will kill the avatar.”

“I need your help,” said SARAH.

Katrina shifted to one side, to
the glowing white wall. The wand buzzed, and started cutting away at the wall,
peeling away flaps of flesh and leaving a gaping wound. Warm air oozed from the
orifice, and Katrina stepped inside, sawing away at more flesh to create a
tunnel...

Dex watched her, watched his
wife, the woman he loved, the woman he’d married and made love to and partied
with and had children with; the woman whose every single inch he knew
intimately, had kissed and nuzzled and admired and tickled; the woman whose
nose wrinkled in a nauseatingly cute manner whenever he was cooking dinner; the
woman who liked nothing more than shopping on the ggg net, usually with
his
credit card, the woman who was a violent rabid tiger if anybody so much as
looked
in the wrong way at her little cubs; the woman who snored gently in her sleep
and denied it every single damn morning; the woman who liked nothing more than
to go to pop concerts as if she were still eighteen, or eat beef curry
sandwiches, or watch late night re-runs of
Sex in the Shitty
and
Dr
Meh
whilst quaffing copious amounts of vintage white wine and guzzling
cheesy Mexicatos. Dex watched her, and she was not the same woman, and how
could she have lived the lie for so long? How could she have
hidden
the
fact she was an android for so long? And then it hit him - she hadn’t known.
Just like he. She had been oblivious. But at some point she had discovered, or
been told, or simply
unlocked.
Just like he had to be
unlocked...
but there was a malfunction and his unlocking mechanism refused to work. And
without that, he was more human than human; he was still thinking and acting in
a completely un-android way. And, as Katrina had pointed out to him quite
bluntly, that could only lead to his death.

And his kids. Shit, his little
girls.

How could they have turned so
cold and callous?

And the answer was simple.

Somebody had flicked a switch
inside their heads.

Somebody had turned them from
human children into
androids,
unfeeling, willing to kill when they were
told to kill, and die when they were told to die.

How was Dex supposed to deal with
that?

Did he have a choice?

I am not an android, I am not an
android -
he
repeated the mantra over and over again. But then, would it not be better to
accept what he was, accept the changeover, the transmogrification into the
creature that was his core, his essence, his soul? The way he’d been originally
engineered? But by accepting such a change, wouldn’t he then lose all his own
empathy? He would no longer
care
about Katrina and his little girls. He
would become, effectively, a flesh machine on a mission of murder. And, worst
of all, did he really have a choice in the matter?

Dex shuddered, and looked at
SARAH, and she was staring hard at him.
She can see it, see that I am different
from the others, that my android switch hasn’t been flicked just yet - I still
retain my human faculties. She can see I’m the weakest link in the chain here.
She understands I am the only one who can help her!

“So Earth’s Oblivion government
are sending an army?” said Dex, softly.

“Yes,” said SARAH. “Their ships
are coming into orbit as we speak. Soon, SLAM dropships will scream through
Theme Planet’s atmosphere, bombs will ravage my landscape, destroying the rides
and the themed areas and the
joy.
No longer will I take away humanity’s
aggression and anger and frustration and fear, leaving them - you - a better
and more stable species. This will be their first step in a new Empire. This is
the start of the slaughter.”