Theme Planet (55 page)

She picked her way speedily
through the field of corpses, and broke into a run once more through the
outcroppings of rock, past startled mechanics and engineers, FRIEND booming
occasionally to clear her a path towards the Theme Planet Advertising Broadcast
Station.

It didn’t seem such a long way,
as there was so much killing to be done.

Eventually, drenched in blood,
and panting a little -which was unlike Amba - the Anarchy Android reached the
high fence and scrambled up it like a monkey, vaulting over its
twenty-foot-high summit, carefully avoiding the organic AI body-invading razor
wires, and landing in a crouch, FRIEND by her cheek.

Nine hundred and ninety eight,
said Zi.

What?

That’s how many SIMs you just
killed.

Oh,
said Amba, and felt a twitch of
remorse. But then, this was what she was built for. This was why she was
created. She pictured Dex in her mind, and chewed her lower lip for a moment.
He wouldn’t have approved. He would have gone for the stealthy option. Covert
infiltration. But then, in justification, this was to save
the whole
planet...

Stop worrying,
said Zi.
You’re becoming more
human by the bloody hour. At this rate, we’ll be lucky to get the mission done.

Oh, we’ll get it done all right,
said Amba, and then privately,
because
that’s the only way I’ll end up with Dexter, and with his girls, and with our
new pre-packed family unit.

She smiled, recognising the
absurdity of her dream.

Amba stood, and moved down a
narrow glittering path.

Behind you!
cried Zi, but Amba was already
moving, spinning, crouching, and the FRIEND kicked in her fist and massacred
the two approaching SIMs before they could fire a single round from SMKKs.

A thousand
, said Zi.

I like round numbers.

~ * ~

The Theme Planet
Advertising Broadcast Station was a testament to
advanced technology. It was a hive of digital action. It was filled from wall
to wall and floor to ceiling with the highest-grade components ever devised,
and created to an alien specification that even Monolith did not understand.
Amba picked her way through narrow corridors between huge blocks of glittering,
sparkling machinery. Sometimes modules buzzed and clicked, sometimes the
machines stayed silent, inert. But she got the feeling they were working;
working damn hard.

Amba, covered in SIM gore,
positively
dripping
blood and bone shards onto the alloy tiles, moved
through the gloom of alien technology.

Staircases wound upwards, and
with her FRIEND primed, Amba hunted down the control room. It took a while,
since the layout of the TPABS was illogical, with corridors cutting back on
each other, oddly laid out angles and ridges, and stairs that sometimes went
sideways so that, after only a few minutes, Amba was utterly disorientated.

It was Zi who finally guided Amba
to the control suite. Peering inside, expecting enemies and
big guns,
Amba simply found herself
alone at the broadcasting console. It looked simplistic, but as she scrolled
through the controls on the screen, she realised it had an inner depth that
allowed trillions of broadcast permutations.

Amba flicked through the million
or so channels currently being broadcast across the Four Galaxies Major Streams
and realised, with a grin, that she could hijack each and every one of them.

“What a powerful piece of equipment,”
she murmured.

You better believe it... this
thing can beam an image into every TV, filmy lounge, mental kickpack port, ggg
interface and brainscreen across trillions of klicks; whatever you send out on
this, it’ll fuck Romero good and send his Ministers of Joy scampering for their
resignation cards. And it’ll show everybody what an underhand bunch of
scum-sucking warmongering empire-building back-stabbers the Earth lot really
are!

Amba hit a series of screen
buttons, scrolled through various controls, and set the wide field broadcast
spectrums; then she did a very naughty thing, and ran the main Theme Planet
advert across all channels, phasing out over a million transmissions and
effectively hijacking the entire Quad-Gal’s information network.

The filmy began its play. It ran
thus:

AUDIO
[deep male voice]:

The
Monolith Corporation™
in
association with Earth’s
Oblivion
Government
presents,

A
Theme
Planet™
Production!

VIDEO
[close up]:

A
man dressed in colourless, shapeless clothing. This man is a bland and
colourless
human.
He is bowed with age, face wrinkled and worn by the
ravages of time. The dude is defeated and... queuing... what he is queuing for
is not quite clear, but the old bro is queuing and the queue is a long one; a
very long one -
[camera pulls back/ smooth tracking shot]
.
The queue is an incredible and horizon-bending vast and terrible queue! A queue
to make you sick! A queue to make you slit your wrists!

VIDEO
[close-up]:

Watery
blue eyes surrounded by wrinkles convey an inner message of emptiness,
frustration and despair.
CUT TO:
The old man’s feet shuffling forward a
step, then pulling back again to show thousands and thousands of people
shuffling forward... all by a single step.

AUDIO
- A deep and throaty sigh:

Are
you tired of your life? Your existence? Your age, dude, your fucking
age?

Are
you disgruntled with an eternity of pointless queuing?

Like
you get in
every
damn theme park
ever created, bro?

VIDEO
[close-up]:

A
nod. Resignation. Disillusionment.

AUDIO:

Are
you tired of your...
molecules?

VIDEO:

The
eyebrows lift, questioning. That old face is now full of dawning wonder, and
suddenly filled with intelligence and inspiration and hope. Hope! Open, in fact,
to the suggestion of a new and incredibly life-changing experience!

AUDIO:

Well
dude, there’s no need to be.

VIDEO:

Suddenly,
this world-weary example of humanity’s disintegration is disassembled, beamed
through the glowing atmosphere of Theme Planet™ - and reassembled with a look
of total orgasm. The old man’s face is filled with
new youth.
Vitality.
Eagerness.
Energy, baby, fucking energy!
He looks horny as hell.

AUDIO
[sung, accompanied by happy jolly music]:

It’s
better than drugs!

It’s
better than sex!

It’s
fun, it’s fast, it’s neat...

If
you haven’t been sick, you soon will be!

Zip
through a thousand light years on...
The Molecule Machine™!

VIDEO:

Molecules
swirling to form an old man’s young smile.

LETTERING IN FLAMES:

Brought
to you by
Theme
Planet™

The
Theme Planet Advertising Broadcast Station (ggg)

and
The
Monolith Corporation©

As it was running, Amba hit a few
scrolls and a camera fizzed down from the ceiling and fastened its black eyes
on her. Once the TP ad rolled to an explosive end, and the tinkling music and
final dialogue fizzed out of existence, the Quad-Gal’s information highway was
filled with Amba’s face, against a simple black backdrop. Amba could almost
hear
fifty trillion angry gasps, and huffs of annoyance, and spilled coffees and
dribbled kukunga burgers. But more importantly, she could
sense
fifty
trillion fingers, suckers, tentacles, blocks, hooks and babbages reaching for
the remote control... or nearest alien equivalent.

So she spoke quickly...

“My name is Amba Miskalov. I am
an Anarchy Android, built and controlled by Earth’s Oblivion Government. I am
broadcasting from Theme Planet on behalf of its creators - creators who are
about to be annihilated. Even now, a War Fleet of Earth origin is bound on a course
of destruction and murder, of invasion and massacre, of empire-building and
genocide. I appeal to you, the good people and aliens of the Quad-Gal, to
intervene in this atrocity. I appeal to every government of every planet to
send Warships to halt Earth’s evil machinations. For, and trust me when I say
this, we Anarchy Androids walk amongst you, torturing you, murdering you, and
we are sent out daily by Cardinal Romero, Commander-in-Chief of Earth’s
Oblivion Government.”

She cut the transmission, and
caught a red blinking light to her right. She reached out and picked up a small
ECube.

“What the fuck are you doing?”
screamed Romero.

“Hello? To whom am I speaking?”

“Amba, oh, you back-stabbing
fucking bitch, you are so, so,
so
dead when I get my hands on your
pretty little throat.
Kome!
Not
there, over
there!
Listen,
Miskalov, you get back on that powerful piece of alien technological shit and
you fucking retract those words you just spoke... do you understand what you’re
doing? Do you, bitch?”

“Fucking up your clever plans of,
oooh, the last twenty years?”

“You have so much to answer for,”
said Romero, his voice heavy as lead.

“As do you, my sweet.”

“Do you understand what SARAH
actually
is?
What she -
it
- is capable of?”

SMKK rounds blasted and screamed
in the tower below her, and Amba leapt from the couch and lifted her FRIEND.
Into the ECube she spat, “No, but I understand you, Romero, I understand you
made me how I am -well, fuck you, now this is
my
time, time to be human,
time to be a
woman!”

The lead SIM poked his SMKK round
the door, and Amba blew his head clean through the wall of the TPABS. Showers
of sparks cascaded, lightning shrieked through the chamber and stairwell, and
more SMKK bullets thundered from the darkness as Amba crouched, and bullets ate
the screen behind her, and the whole flashing groaning world seemed to descend
into...

Anarchy.

~ * ~

The Central War
Fleet
Command Vehicle,
DeathX,
had its command centre and control deck at the
core of its massive, donut-like body. But what it seemed to lack in aesthetics
(it was spherical, in order to best drop in and out of wormholes) it made up
for in weaponry. It was an awesome ship. Awesome, in terms of its technology,
built for the dealing of death. For invasion and genocide. For aggression and
warmongering. For down-and-dirty, simple, raw
firepower...

Romero sat, alone, on the control
deck. The lights had been dimmed so that he was illuminated only by the flicker
of screens and information. His chin was on his fist, his features dark and
thunderous as he brooded. To his left were at least a thousand messages of “Retreat
and Desist” from a thousand different planets and governments; and more were
pouring in. If he didn’t act fast, didn’t
attack
fast, then this act of
aggression would have an unanticipated, sudden bloody battle on its hands, as
Quad-Gal clustergangs homed in on his location and started giving him a bloody
nose - something he could deal with, but he wanted to concentrate on taking
Theme Planet
first.
And Amba had screwed it all up. Destroyed his
continuity.