Theme Planet (60 page)

“Daddy?”

“Yes, honey?”

“That’s a pretty firework
display.”

“Yes, honey. Well, this is the
Theme
Planet.
It has a reputation to uphold.”

“Daddy?”

“Yes, honey?”

“What’s that fat plane doing?”

A frown. “I don’t know, honey.”

Explosions. Metal screaming.
Lasers fizzing.

A bomb fell and detonated, and
out on the ocean where a themed island languished in the sun, palm trees
wavering, seashells glinting on the beach, small bamboo huts playing host to
love-nests of newly married couples, all were eaten by a wall of fire and the
ocean exploded upwards and the horizon glowed, seemed to
melt
as a
furnace ate a small section of the world, consumed a small portion of the Theme
Planet...

“Daddy?”

“Mmm?”

“That was a pretty firework.”

“I don’t think that was a
firework display, honey...”

A BBB slammed through clouds of
gas and vapour, and there was a subtle whine. Father and daughter turned
instinctively to run, toes digging into the sand, pigtails flapping in the sea
breeze, as there came connection, detonation, acceleration, destruction.

~ * ~

DEX
WAS
DYING. He was fighting, but he was dying. She was too strong, too savage, and
without a shadow of a doubt, Katrina, his wife, had the upper hand. With every
passing second she strangled him, with every passing second his strength ebbed
away and it became yet more impossible that he might pull away, escape, break
free. Dex wondered if there was a Heaven for his kind. For the androids.
Engineered humans. Human machines. And he knew, deep down in his dark soul,
that there was not.

He tried to speak, to cry out, to
beg Katrina to stop. He wanted to grab her face and kiss her lips one last
time, but even now her snarling hate-filled visage was fading from view as his
senses dulled. It sounded like he was deep beneath the ocean, sinking, and
great, muffled booming sounds were ringing out through the Deep Green.

Everything was becoming fuzzy,
everything becoming lost and drowned and faded...

Why are you doing this to me ?

Why don’t you love me anymore?

I don’t understand how we came to
be here.

It was just a simple family
holiday. How did it turn so bad?

Pawns. Manipulated. On a greater
game board. Pieces tossed carelessly around by the hands of a Great Player. But
hadn’t it always been like this? Weren’t there always sacrifices? Wasn’t it
always the way of the world? The strong controlling the weak; the powerful
pushing around the little fucks.

I am going to die,
he realised.

I am going to die, and nobody
will care...

There came a slap, and something
wet pattered down oyer his face in a thick, glutinous spray. The pressure
released from his throat, from his trapped hand, and gradually he swam up from
the bottom of the well. The pressure had released from his chest; which meant
Katrina was on the move.

Sound returned first, and he
could hear screaming, and his own laboured breathing, his own tortured, rasping
throat. Then blurred light gave way to a gloomy clarity, and for a few moments
the scene was one of total confusion.

Dexter sat up, and allowed the
scene to unfold, to flower, and his brow creased, and he spat out blood, and
then stared hard and scratched his chin. Toffee, his sweet little girl Toffee,
was standing holding a screwdriver. It wasn’t sonic, or magic, or any other
bullshit; it was a good, hard, chromed steel screwdriver. And it was covered in
blood.

Toffee was watching him. Toffee
was smiling.

Dex’s gaze rose and focused on
Katrina. She was staring back at him, screaming shrilly, her hand clasped to her
neck, blood pumping out between her fingers. She looked at Toffee and snarled
something incomprehensible, blood frothing and bubbling on her lips... Katrina
launched herself at the girl, and Dex wanted to scream “No!” and stop the
attack, but Toffee was already turning, ducking one shoulder, twisting and
ramming the screwdriver into Katrina’s side.

Katrina staggered back, the
screwdriver embedded in her ribs, and sat down with a thump. Toffee walked to
Dex and he wondered what wonderful tortures she had in store for him.

“Hello, Daddy.”

“Hi, sweetie. I see you gave
mommy a present.” His words were little more than croaks on cracked lips, and
every syllable brought a whole galaxy of pain. She stood over him, and he
looked up, and he knew he was in no fit state to do anything if she attacked.
The shame! To be murdered by your youngest child. Dex started laughing, and
there was hysteria there, like a ripe maggot in a rotten plum.

“I’ve come to see you,” said
Toffee.

“For what? Do I get the
screwdriver in my skull next?”

Toffee tilted her head to one
side, and Dex coughed up more blood from his lacerated throat. He shook his
head, looking down at the floor, offering her his neck, the back of his head;
like victim to executioner.

“I’ve come to say I’m sorry,”
Toffee said.

“What?” Dex looked up sharply,
his word punctuated by Katrina’s rasping gasps, where she sat in a spreading
pool of her own blood and gazed dumbly at the screwdriver in her side. As Dex
watched, she took hold of the handle and gave it a tug; it wouldn’t move, or
her strength was draining from her, and finally she gave up. She slowly lay
down, and despite everything, despite her bringing him close to the brink of
death, he felt nothing but sorrow. This wasn’t a situation he could ever have
dreamed about. This was one of the worst days of his engineered life.

“I’ve come to say I’m sorry.
Mommy’s been a
bad
mommy. She sent me to kill you, to erase you from the
planet for being anti-android. And yet...” - she frowned, confused - “and yet
you
could not
kill me. Would not kill me. Because I’m your little girl,
and we had so many good times together, and this is not fun, this is not what I
want my life to be like. I want it how it was, Daddy. I want you back. I want
our friendship back.”

Dex crawled to his knees, then
stood with a groan. Everything ached. Every muscle, and ligament, and tendon,
and bone creaked and moaned at him with their accumulated dissatisfaction.

Dex smiled, and patted Toffee on
the head. “That’s good. You’re a good girl. But you shouldn’t have stabbed your
mother in the ribs.”

“It was the only way to stop her
killing you,” said Toffee, eyes gleaming with tears. And Dex watched in wonder
and awe as his android daughter cried. Tears ran down her cheeks and she ran to
him, and unconsciously his arms circled her and he hugged her, and he had his
little girl back, and a nasty cynical side of him thought,
oh, yeah, when
does she pull out the dagger and stick it in my heart?
but another part of
him yearned for what they’d once had. But it could never be like that again.
Things had changed. Things always change.

Slowly, Dex unpeeled Toffee from
the embrace and looked over at Katrina. He moved to her, crouched - but not too
close - and touched her shoulder. Her eyes opened and she smiled weakly. Blood
glittered on her teeth.

“That little bitch got me good,”
she said.

“I think she was taking a cue
from you, sweetie.”

“You always were an understanding
bastard,” she said.

“I’m sorry it came to this,” said
Dex.

“So am I. Look what the fucker
did to my clothes.”

“What happened to us, eh?”

“Just pieces in the Great Game,
Dexter,” said Katrina, and her eyes were heavy-lidded and hollow. Dex stared
into those portals, leading straight down to Katrina’s android soul, and he saw
the pain there, saw fires raging bigger than the world, saw torture tearing her
soul in two; saw the raw, bare, engineered agony.

“It should never have ended like
this,” said Dex.

“It’s ending the way it should...”
said Katrina, and glanced up, over at the FRIEND in SARAH’s core. Dex followed
her eyes and a coldness crept fingers around his heart.

The FRIEND!

Shit. In his own private world of
misery, he’d forgotten, for just a moment...

The FRIEND was ready to detonate!

Dex kicked himself into action,
charging for the core as SARAH’s long, loud, high-pitched scream wailed in the
distance and through the entirety of Theme Planet. She was dying. The FRIEND
was killing her. And Dex realised with horror that there would be no giant
explosion; this was not a detonation, this was more parasite and host, and the
FRIEND was... poisoning her? Absorbing her? There was no countdown... in fact,
the detonation had already begun. A slow detonation. A gradual, calculated
murder...

“No!” he screamed, sprinting, and
something hard hit him in the side, smashing him from his feet in a tangle of
limbs and it was like being hit by a groundcar, hit by a fucking truck, and it
knocked all sense and feeling out of Dex and he just lay there, stunned,
broken, wondering what the fuck had hit him...

“Hiya, darling,” said Amba
Miskalov, and her boot stomped down. Dex rolled, and the glossy black floor
cracked under the force of the blow. Amba knelt and her fist slammed down;
again, Dex twisted, and her knuckles left imprints in the alloy.

Dex slammed his knee up, catching
her in the groin, but she ignored it and grabbed his head in both hands;
twisting, he bit down hard, sinking his teeth in down to Amba’s reinforced
bones. Amba did not gasp, showed no pain, even as Dex tore out a mouthful of
tendon and muscle and struggled back, rolling from under her in a scramble of
disorganised panic, and defending against her one remaining fist even as he
retreated, scrambling back, spitting out her flesh. Her eyes were dark and
there was no reasoning there. And Dex realised how special Amba was, much more
dangerous than Katrina...

“I thought we had a connection?”
said Dexter. “Something special?”

Amba’s fist whirred past his
face, and she stepped in close, twisting, elbow ramming back into his ear with
piledriver force. But Dex was rolling with the blow, his own right hook
smashing into Amba’s ribs, and she grunted as bone cracked and splintered under
the awesome blow; and they moved apart, squaring off, weighing each other up.

From the corner of his eye, Dex
could see Katrina. Her head touched the ground, drool trailing to the floor in
an umbilical. Dex thought she had died... thought his wife was gone...

Toffee attacked, leaping onto
Amba’s back, but Amba caught the child by the legs, and with a savage snarl,
twirled her around like a doll, and dashed her head against the ground. Toffee
lay still, blood leaking from a cracked skull.

“No...” hissed Dex, tears in his
eyes.

“Give up the game and let SARAH
die,” said a darkhaired stranger, stepping out of the gloom.

Amba was working her damaged
hand, but two fingers no longer operated. She bared her teeth at Dex in what he
assumed was a bitter smile, an acknowledgement that he was more fucking
dangerous than he looked.

“You’d be Romero, right, fucker?”

“You should indeed recognise me.”
His voice was low, controlled, and controlling. “After all, we came from the
same VAT. We were engineered together, Dexter Colls. Look into my face,
brother, look into my eyes. Can you not see yourself in me? Can you not see
that we are the same? We are brothers?”