Outside, the rain had grown in volume and intensity. One of the increasingly common mega storms felt like it was about to take full effect soon. If that happened, she would need to find more secure shelter for herself and her kids. Assuming she rescued them at all.
The outhouse Melanie sent her to managed to smell even worse than the mess hall, while simultaneously looking cleaner. Althea could have cared less about that oddity, so she knelt down to determine how to breach the floor and find the kids she was looking for. A single pass over the ground with her hands left the mystery before her unsolved.
Then her implant awakened.
For a few bright seconds, Althea felt her body resolve into an instrument of precision engineering and beauty as her mind extended itself throughout her form. Pontikos appeared, no longer static-laden and flickering. She said, “Greetings Mistress…” and a sensation of psychological shifting swept over her mind.
In an instant, Althea’s concern for her wards vanished, with it her worries about damaging the facilities the community of children relied upon. She felt brief confusion at why she wasted time engaging with Melanie instead of threatening or hurting her. Within Althea’s segregated mental space, she retched at the depravity of her own thoughts.
But that self-recrimination had no effect on her actions.
Warnings and status updates scrolled through her AR interface while Althea dug her hands into the ground around the commode and shifted the mechanical structures of her arms. Her fingers spread into root-like appendages as they wormed their way into the earth. Concrete and steel parted before her chassis and she found the seam in the floor that would let her down into the lower levels.
Althea ripped the floor out along with the commode and most of the piping.
As she did, sewage sprayed her body as pressure between the tanks normalized. Althea found a reason to appreciate her current sociopathy as nothing about her sewage shower troubled her at the time. Stepping out of the shack for a moment and drenching herself in the rain only seemed to spread the foulness around.
She raced down the short block of stairs into the underground passage behind a small river of water. Without her implant protocols, the cages of children down below would have stopped her in her tracks. With it, she paused only long enough to scan the occupants and note that none of those near the stairs were hers.
Her attention switched back to the door at the end of the cage hallway. Based on the sounds beyond that door and the disruption of light beneath, someone occupied the room. Althea kicked at the door hard enough to break one of the hinges as it shot open and crashed against the wall.
Tobias held a length of barbed wire in his hand, brandishing it toward the doorway as if ready to attack. Althea’s appearance and explosive entrance pushed him back to the center of the room.
For a full second, she regarded the room and its contents. Two doors lead from the room, one opposite the one Althea just destroyed. To the left of her door, Althea saw four of her kids squatting on the ground holding each other with little chains connected to collars about their necks. As if that sight were not bad enough on its own, Tobias had added to the horror of the room.
Betty and Joseph lay face down on stained wooden racks, shackles and chains holding their arms and legs down. They both rolled their faces toward Althea and they both had tears staining their cheeks.
Most of the darkness in the room blurred to Althea’s eyes as she regarded the occupants from her segregated mental space. But lines of fresh, bloody marks across both Betty and Joseph’s back rose off of their backs like holograms. They coalesced into nearly palpable lines hanging in the air, trying to mark out a pattern to Althea’s eyes.
A second passed and Althea blinked.
When she opened her eyes, she had crossed the floor to Tobias.
Blink.
She noticed the wooden handle the young man used to hold the barbed wire scourge without cutting himself.
Blink.
Tobias screamed, the sound ringing off of Althea’s ears as if he had been paused mid-sound. The hand holding the barbed wire spun and flipped as it abandoned the disgusting body it had been joined to only a blink ago.
Blink.
The screaming resumed. Tobias seemed to levitate as his body crashed into the intact door. Althea followed the course of his body through the air like a swallow on the dive. His back hit the door, buckling the wood, but failing to break it open.
Blink.
Her foot connected with his sternum. Amidst the sound of cracking bone and wood, the young man toppled backwards into an open room.
The sound of cracking bone ended Althea’s blinking, staccato destruction. Breathing heavily, more from rage than exertion, Althea stopped and looked around in the new room. She expected to find more cages here, instead she found an abattoir.
Her segregated mind tried to make sense of the scene before her. Hanging bits of meat and bone intruded on her mind with the impact of thunder. Storms overhead only reinforced the image. As the slice of her true persona started to decode the contents of the room, Althea’s mental image turned blank.
Suddenly, she was less than a passenger in her own skin, she was something else. The segregated space of her mind turned blank. Althea could feel her body move, meet resistance and continue moving. The whole time, she could feel the oppression of the technology running through her brain as it forbade her from watching her own actions.
Althea screamed in fury within the empty space of her mind, screamed her frustration into the black void, and then wept in fear of what she might have done to the six children she swore to protect.
Time seemed to wobble, like a stone at the top of a hill uncertain whether to proceed over the crest or regress back down its former path. Naturally, inevitably, time moved forward and she received flashes of her own direct perceptions.
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One scene, she fired a plasma weapon into the roof of the abattoir. Behind her, a bevy of children screamed and her vision turned black. Scene two: lightning flashed through the door way at the top of the stairs. The thick stream of water down the stairs reflected the lightning and the contents of the room back into Althea’s eyes. Presences, dark and indefinable, surrounded her, crowding her space and making the lizard in the back of her mind panic at the potential threats.
Her body seemed to stop and slow as the third scene resolved around her: more than a dozen children left the outhouse basement behind Althea. All but six of them broke from the group as soon as they felt like they had put enough distance between them and Althea.
One of the children, Althea carried in her own arms: Betty. Blood, her own blood, had soaked into the girl’s clothing, despite her captors pulling it down to her waist while beating her. For a flash, Althea stopped and considered returning to Tobias’s body in order to inflict further punishments upon him. But dead was dead; Tobias would not be hurting another child again.
Regarding the warehouse and mess hall, Althea chose the former. None of her charges balked at the door to the warehouse. As she entered, the last few stragglers from the camp escaped into the mega storm that settled into the wastes.
None of the kids wanted to explore the tunnels beneath the warehouse, and Althea found herself acquiescing to their wishes. Betty had finally passed out when Althea felt her Persona shift. The black void around her in her mental space shifted, silver spiraling trails of light broke the aphotic pattern enclosing her.
One of argent gaps widened and the silver serpent slipped through, still wearing Althea’s face. Dark red blood streaked the serpent’s metallic body as it slithered to meet her. Rising on its seamless coils, it said,
“Look! Alive and with little children. Happy?”
Althea prepared to shout at the serpent, dress her down for her psychotic choices. But then the serpent vanished, splitting into tiny fragments of metal that retreated into the void. As the last of the serpent faded, the void enclosing her mind did too.
“Mistress? Can you hear me? Mistress I am very concerned about the fact that you are acting, but refusing to answer me. Please respond.” Pontikos still looked like a winged pixie, but the crease in her forehead and lines around her eyes broadcast the AI’s level of concern better than her tone. When she started to repeat herself, Althea interrupted.
“Pontikos, I am here! What happened?”
The AI stopped its question and said,
“Are you feeling all right, Mistress?”
“No! Of course I’m not! Why would I be feeling all right?”
Pontikos fluttered away from Althea and flared her wings as she landed.
“To answer your question, I believe we were hit by a powerful modulated power net.”
“A what?”
Pontikos held her hands open and said,
“A power net. Electrified contacts placed into a matrix. When activated, the net emits high intensity electrical pulses that can interfere with both neurological activity as well as cybernetic/implant linking.”
“In other words?”
“The net stopped me from acting as an intentional, direct limbic system.”
“Did I make it worse by jumping into the pool of water?”
“Power nets are dangerous and unreliably pieces of technology. I believe you did the correct thing when you threw yourself into the water. That caused both my control mechanisms and the net to surge. I shut off for repair rather than stopping your heart, and the net most likely exploded or simply broke.”
“Okay, that’s what I suspected…”
Pontikos continued,
“Then you proceeded to find and rescue the children who depend on you using…”
Althea almost shrieked her words at Pontikos,
“I got it! That’s enough!”
Pontikos nodded as if she understood.
Maybe she does.
Althea stayed awake that night while the kids slept. She marveled at the ability of the young to simply shut out the horrors of the day. All but Betty fell into dreamless slumber. The young girl twitched and cried out in the night. Those occasions when the mega storm managed to rip a few stray pieces of roof from the warehouse made the thrashing night terrors worse.
Patting Betty’s head seemed to calm the girl down, despite the fury outside. Althea kept Betty wrapped up and scanned the warehouse non-stop. In order to calm her own fears from blanking out, to stop the images from flashing through her mind, she ignored Pontikos’s warnings and removed her ability to introspect.
The rain had lessened by the time the sun rose that morning. The other children lay sprawled about the warehouse floor in various states. Joseph lay on his stomach, his missing shirt exposed the lacerations on his back. For a moment, Althea tensed as she considered stalking after Tobias to show him what happens to torturers and murders.
Then Althea remembered that he was dead, as dead as Althea could render him without cremating his corpse. She shook her head and froze when Betty shifted in her lap. Parts of her back as well as Joseph’s looked red and swollen. Tobias had used a bundle of barbed wire for his abuse.
Only once she saw the angry wounds on her children did the fact occur to her that they could grow sick or even die from injuries like that.
“Pontikos, I need basic medical training. And where is the first aid kit?”
Knowledge flowed over Althea’s mind, filling her with information about helping the children she had taken responsibility for. Betty’s forehead felt fine; Althea’s sensors confirmed that her temperature fell within acceptable ranges.
She extended her arm like a snake and reached for Joseph. He stirred when she touched his temple with her finger. Althea started as his temperature broke thirty-nine degrees. Lifting Betty with care, Althea moved the child so she could scoot over to Joseph and administer aid.
Technically, she could not call this “first aid,” but that did not stop her from applying an ointment from a tube and looking for antibiotics. Her newly installed knowledge informed her that this particular first aid kit had been intended for people with implants. Those implants would have produced their own antibiotics to treat Joseph’s infection.
By then Althea should have known what she would find when she checked the base of Joseph’s skull. But she still sighed and felt defeat trying to wrap it clutches around her heart when she felt nothing but smooth, unbroken skin. Without an implant, Althea needed a way to treat the boy lest he fall sick.
Once more, rage filled her that morning. Althea ignored it as she lifted Joseph up. His eyes fluttered and he took a second to focus on her.
“Althea, did something happen?”
Althea said a silent prayer of thanks to any gods who might have been watching them that Joseph had not witnessed her response to Tobias’s depravities.
“It’s okay, champ. We’re getting out of here. As soon as the rain lets up.”
As soon as the rain stopped might not give the boy enough time to survive.
“Pontikos, is there anything I can do?”
The AI put her finger on her lip and examined the boy.
“Um, maybe? I don’t really know.”
“What do you mean, maybe?”
Pontikos swept her arms around and said,
“This place used to be… something? Maybe an industrial park? They might have other medical supplies here, or if not here, maybe one of the other ruins in the area does?”
Althea mumbled under her breath to the AI, though she did not need to.
“That doesn’t really help me. What are these places, fifty, eighty years old?’
“Older, I would venture.”
“Then even if they had what we wanted, the medicine would have expired.”
“Then do you have any other ideas?”
Pontikos squatted down and said,
“If we can find a source of mold or perhaps a precursor for a different antibiotic, I might be able to synthesize something.”
“Seriously?”
Pontikos nodded and said,
“But it would require using your chassis, and possibly your auxiliary implants.”
“That’s… fine. Let’s start looking.”
Althea tore apart the mess hall, looking for old spoiled food or refuse. Thankfully, she found more than enough potential samples of mould that should meet her requirements. As she walked back to the warehouse with her bounty, she said,
“We’re going to try to synthesize penicillin? Is that even possible?”
Pontikos rolled her eyes at Althea and said,
“No, it isn’t. But we might be able to culture the mold until we have enough to treat one little boy. The timing will be difficult. And I don’t think you will like some of the other parts.”
