You Say You Want
By Ann Morgan.
Bright light reflected off pitted metallic walls and drew sweat down Reggie's face as he concentrated on soldering connections inside a partially disassemble sentinel. The work he was doing was almost impossibly tiny; he was forced to look through a large magnifying glass held by a clamp as he worked. He had been working on modifying this particular sentinel non-stop for over 50 hours. Perhaps in times past, the whole job would have taken over a week, but Reggie was much changed. Among other things, he no longer needed to sleep. He tried to distract himself from the mind-wearying task by humming a song that he remembered from a long time ago. Something about wanting a revolution. He tried to remember who had composed it, but damned if he could. He had a mental image of four men crossing a busy street, but he couldn't remember their names. Had one of them been called Ringo or Star or something. like that? Who knew?
He cursed as the solder on the most recent connection melted a fraction of a millimeter from where he wanted it. Now he would have to scrape it off and try again.
Mike silently into the room. He barely gave a glance at the corpse that was lying clumsily on a large metal bench to his right. He walked over to where Reggie was working and looked over his shoulder at the magnifying glass, but was too far to see anything but a blur.
"Be careful there," He cautioned Reggie. "That's my brother you're operating on."
"Hey, don't worry about it." Reggie set down the tiny soldering iron, the tip of it as fine as a beading needle and looked up at Mike. "I did the same thing to you last week and you're fine, aren't you?"
"I feel fine, but I don't know if this new weapon will work or not. I haven't tried it yet. There's not enough room in here for it, and if I tried it anywhere else, the Tall Man might find out about it."
"Hey, have I ever screwed up a modification?"
"Come to think of it, yes."
Reggie scowled and picked the soldering iron back up again. "When was that, about 4000 years ago?" He jabbed the heated tool annoyed at Mike. The incident Mike was refering to, which he never let Reggie forget was when Reggie had tried replacing the drill on the sentinel the Tall Man had transformed him into with a short 20 gauge shotgun barrel. The gun worked alright, but Reggie had forgotten how much less he weighed as a gold sentinel than as a man. The recoil had driven him backwards through three walls. Come to think of it, it had been kind of funny, although it had taken him a couple of centuries to see the humor in it. Well, he should have known that would happen, but it was sometimes hard that you didn't always have a body that weighed enough to absorb the kinetic energy of the recoil.
Reggie peered down through the magnifying glass again. Well, he was solid enough now. Things changed in 4000 years. There had been many improvements to the silver and gold sentinels that 10 billion human minds had been imprisoned in. Particularily the gold ones. The silver sentinels, poor bastards, were nothing but drones, their minds almost completely taken over by computers that forced them to fight in some meaningless battle. Mostly against eachother. That tall bastard was a war profiteer who sold his weapons to both sides of a conflict that had been going on for longer than all of humanity's recorded history.
A greedy bastard, too. The gold sentinels, such as Reggie, Mike and Jody had been transformed into had been permitted to retain their minds. The Tall Man assessed the intelligence of every human being he captured, and the very brightest were 'honored' in this way. In return they were expected to develop new weapons for the Tall Man to offer for sale. Almost no-one went along with this at first, but a few decades in a sensory deprivation chamber was a great persuader. Perhaps one in 10,000 people was considered to be intelligent or imaginative enough for this special treatment. Which meant that out of the 10 billion human beings owned by the Tall Man, perhaps a million were still free enough to resent the fact.
Come to think of it, maybe the silver drones were the lucky ones.
Reggie poked with the soldering iron in Jody's innards. The connection was forming much better now. Maybe all he had needed was a little break. Although he didn't have to sleep, he could if he wanted to, and still had a psychological need to, although he tried to restrict himself to one short nap a week.
His dreams were horrific.
"Is Jebediah still guarding the weapons' room?" He asked Mike.
"Yeah. But I don't think he has anything to worry about. As long as we keep producing the goods for him, the Tall Man doesn't seem to care very much about what we do."
"Doesn't care, huh?" Finally the last tricky connection was done, and Reggie reassembled the sentinel with practiced ease. "Well, let him keep not caring, because he is going down!"
The sentinel floated off the table until it was about six feet in the air. Reggie moved back a bit to avoid the sudden flash of heat that accompianied the assembly of a new body for the sphere. The ability to create a solid body had been given to all the gold sentinels by the Tall Man shortly after his final conquest of Earth. A few scientists among the gold sentinels, better schooled than Reggie on such subjects had told him that the matter that made up the body was actually composed of subatomic particles taken from the surrounding air, and re-arranged into the elements necessary to make up a human body rather than a gas. Apparently it took only a tiny fraction of the air availiable, and drew particles from a great radius, because there was no wind or noise or other sign that the surrounding air was being depleted in any way. Reggie was not sure that he beleived the explanation, because the process also worked in a vacuum, though not as quickly. He had asked the scientists about that, and they had given him some crazy story about Einstein and how matter could be transformed into energy and energy could be turned into matter.
Well, maybe they were right at that. Unbeknownst to the Tall Man, Reggie had made a great improvement in the power source of the gold sentinels. Each of them now contained a tiny black hole, which Reggie heard someone call a 'Hawking' black hole, though what it had to do with birds, he was not at all sure. All he knew was that it worked, and that the time to create a new body in a vacuum was now only a little greater than that in an ordinary atmosphere.
As to why the Tall Man had even given them this ability, well, it sure wasn't to make them happy. But they were supposed to produce weapons for him, and that was kind of hard to do if you couldn't lift a screwdriver or operate a metal lathe. Well, there was telekinesis, but it took centuries to develop the necessary kind of precision with that, and that bastard wanted immediate results. Not that the bodies had been any better than they had to be. You were cold all the time, you bled yellow, and had a terrible complexion. Still, there had been numerous....improvements.... in that department as well.
Jody didn't look any different than he had, which was good. It meant his brain hadn't been damaged during the surgery. He looked at his previous body, which was now a corpse, the same one that Mike had carefully ignored when he had entered. It's skull was sawn open and blood pooled in the empty cranial cavity.
Red blood, not yellow. Another one of the things the Tall Man had not cared to make himself aware of.
"You'd better get rid of that!" he gestured toward's the body, trying not to look directly at it. Even after dying dozens of times, it was still damn unnerving to look at your own corpse. "What if the Tall Man finds it? You want him to learn about the modifications we've been doing?"
"Christ, no." Reggie picked up the body as easily as if it were a cat rather than a stocky man and slung it over his shoulder. "You two better go relieve Jebediah so the Tall Man doen't get to wondering where he's been for so long. I'll go throw this into a converter."
"Good." Mike nodded. "How do you feel, Jody. any different?"
Jody felt his head. It hurt, or course. It was strange, but no matter how many times you died, it always hurt as bad as the first time, and the fear never got any less.Still, that wasn't the important thing now.
He turned his thoughts inward. If he concentrated, he could feel the new device Reggie had placed in him, like a third, invisible arm. "I think it worked, but I can't tell. But I know that it's there. When are we going to do it?"
Reggie looked at his watch. "We need to get the everyone down here, and some of them are working. If they leave now, the Tall Man will be suspicious. We'll have to wait until the next shift rotation."
"That will be in 38 hours." Jody said. "However, we have a potential problem."
Reggie looked disgusted. "What now?"
Jody looked apologetic. "Not all of the guards believe that we can pull this off. Or they do believe, but they're pretending not to, if you get what I mean."
"Yeah." Reggie sighed. They wanted a bribe. Christ, even 5000 years didn't seem to get the crassness out of some people. He threw the corpse over his shoulder down like a sack of potatoes, making Mike and Jody wince. It was only meat, but still.
Reggie walked over to a metal box and opened it. He carefully counted out 20 small objects and held them out to Mike. They were small plastic figures of animals, but Mike looked at them as though they were flawless diamonds.
He picked up two of them with awe. One was a rabbit, and the other a turtle. He didn't even want to ask how Reggie had gotten so many of these. They were worth a fortune in terms of goods or favors that they could be traded for. During their 5000 year imprisonment, an underground economy of sorts had arisen among the gold sentinels. It's currency was any artifact that came from Earth, regardless of how worthless it had once been.
Apparently during the Tall Man's final conquest of humanity, some people had come to realize the inevitability of what was to come, and had tried smuggling all manner of items onto the Red Planet, to be recovered there. Mainly in the body cavities of various corpses, but a few foolhardy souls had actually tried the same thing as Reggie and gone through the dimensional gates. None of them survived for long after that, of course. At least not as human beings. And none of the weapons smuggled had escaped discovery and destruction. But a surprising number of other things had. Most of them had long since decayed or crumbled, of course. The only objects left from Earth after 5000 years were those that were made of practically indestructible materials. Plastic. Glass. Ceramics. Certain of the more durable metals. And that was all. Everything else had been lost to time.
Except for 10 billion enslaved human beings, of course.
Mike carefully took the rest of the tiny plastic toys and put them into a pocket on his shirt, which he carefully buttoned afterwards. It wouldn't do to lose a single one of these priceless artifacts. If they couldn't persuade some of the more recalcitrant guards to cooperate with them, well nothing could.
"Come on, Jody." He said to his brother. "We've got things to do." *********************************************************************************************************************
Jebediah Morningside leaned wearily against the wall of a large metal room. It was only dimly lit; over half of the lighting fixtures overhead had been deliberately smashed. The lack of lighting tended to discourage visitors. Not that he expected any. The vast metal complex on the Red Planet where a million slaves toiled away resembled nothing so much as a huge labrynth, complete with a beast at it's center no less horrible than the mythical Minotaur. And most of the slaves tended not to stray very far from those areas they were familiar with. This storage room was well out of the way.
Even if a curious wanderer had come, one look at his face probably would send him scurrying back the way he came. Having the Devil's face was a great burden to bear, but it did offer occasional advantages. And just in case the sight of his face, so much like that of the Tall Man's, didn't scare off an intruder, he did have the weapon Reggie had given him. It wasn't lethal, of course. Jebediah had had quite his fill of death. But it would render a man unconscious for several hours. Long enough to tie him up and move him where he couldn't interefere with their plans.
No, it wasn't the unlikely thought of an intruder that made Jebediah move farther back into the shadows of several huge, tarp covered devices. It was just that during the past 500 years or so something had gone terribly wrong on the Red Planet. Furthermore, whatever it was that was happening, the Tall Man didn't appear to notice, a fact which in and of itself was terrifying. He and his friends Reggie, Mike and Jody had to go to great pains to prevent the Tall Man from discovering their plans. But now it seemed there were .... things.... that didn't need to bother with such elaborate precautions.
Just two weeks ago, Jebediah had watched in horror as a giant cockroach, at least six feet long had gone scuttling down the hallway. A sudden noise had startled it, and it had ripped open a gash in the metal walls and crawled into the space within. Even more worrying was that the Tall Man had come stalking down the same hallway several hours later and did not even appear to notice the damage.
Another very worrysome fact was that certain people seemed to be disappearing. If disappearing was the right word. Because apparently they were still seen on occasion, but they no longer worked at the research tasks assigned to them by the Tall Man, and he never seemed to be aware that workstations that should have been manned were standing vacant during their shifts. There were not very many such people. Out of the million or so gold sentinels, perhaps 1000 seemed to have simply gotten away with abandoning their duties, and coming and going as they pleased. The rest of the humans in the labrynth had taken to calling them 'sidewinders' after a snake that had had a bizarre method of locomotion. But really no name could describe them, whatever they were. For one thing, they didn't even appear on videotapes from the numerous security cameras. He knew. He had checked himself.
He had made it his business to learn what he could of the sidewinders. A boy, Tim, who had once been his friend, had become one of them. He had sat down at his work station one day and started playing with some glass marbles he had gotten from somewhere. Of course, the Tall Man had come. He always came when his slaves neglected their duties. He told Tim to get back to work, or he would be locked away for a couple weeks. Usually the threat of sensory deprivation was enough to get anyone into line, but Tim had just laughed and thrown a marble at him, and told him to go ahead, because he knew the way out.
He had never seen Tim at work after that. He had seen him once or twice, but it wasn't the same Tim. He had become one of the sidewinders. Jebediah tried to ask him what had happened to him, but had gotten very little information. The sidewinders were like that. They either wouldn't answer questions at all, or would give you some cryptic remark that was of little or no help.
Several months later, curiosity had gotten the best of him, and he had actually dared to peek once in the locked box where the Tall Man had confined the sentinel that Tim was. The sentinel was still there, but it was inert, as if there were no human brain within to animate it. Jebediah had partially disassembled it, enough to determine that Tim's shrunked cerebellum was in fact still within. But nothing he did seemed to bring any response from the sentinel. It was almost as though the brain within had been erased, and was a mere tabula rasa. But it did nothing to explain the mystery of why he was seeing Tim in various locations when he was locked in a box. In fact all it did was create an additional mystery as to why the Tall Man had ignored this sentinel for months, when he normally only confined his misbehaving slaves for a few weeks at a time. It was almost as though he had forgotten that Tim ever existed.
Jebediah sighed. Thinking about Tim always depressed him, although he wasn't sure why. In order to cheer himself up, ho fished in his pocket for his most beloved possession. It was a coin mounted in a plastic case. One one side it had a picture of George Washington, and on the other side it had a picture of a peach. He liked to look at it sometimes, to remind him of the world he had come from, where there had been things like peaches and trees to pick them off of. What color had peaches been anyways? Had they been orange? Or were they red?
He choked back a sudden tear. He couldn't even remember what a peach tasted like.
Sudden footsteps marred the dismal silence. Jebediah peered out cautiously. Was it one of his allies? A lost wanderer? Or perhaps one of the loathsome traitors, allies to the Tall Man.
It was none of the above. It was Tim, walking cheerily down the shadowy room as though it were a sunny path. In one hand held a yoyo that bobbed up and down. He continued down past the silent rows of machinery until he came to the niche where Jebediah was hiding. He peered into the darkness as though he could see perfectly well in spite of it. Well, perhaps he could. Tim and his kind were mysteries that Jebediah had given up ever trying to understand.
"You going to sit in there all day or what?" Tim asked.
"No." Jebediah cautiously moved out of the shadows. He wanted to cry out "What happened to you, Tim?', but he had asked that many times before, and had never gotten any answer except for gales of cheery laughter. So he asked instead. "What are you doing here, Tim? Don't you know it's dangerous?"
"Don't worry. No-one's going to find you here. Mike and Jody are coming and will be here in a couple of hours, but you seemed kind of lonely, so I decided to talk with you for a little while until then."
Jebediah didn't bother asking how Tim could know that Mike and Jody were coming when even the Tall Man didn't know. Tim had told him things that were going to happen in the future before, and had been right. He wouldn't explain how he knew though, so eventually Jebediah had just accepted it as one of the numerous inexplicable phenomena that the universe held. "What do they want?" he wondered.
"They have come to tell you that they're ready for the final phase of Reggie's plan. Everything that's needed has finally been put into place." Tim frowned. "I worry about Reggie sometimes."
"Why? He's a good man! We couldn't have accomplished what we have without him. He kept us hoping when we would have long since given up."
"I know." said Tim. "It's just that he's come very near to the end of the path he has chosen. He's done amazingly well with it, and it will accomplish what is necessary, but I think he will take it hard when he finds himself forced to abandon it."
"I don't understand. What will he be forced to abandon?"
Tim tapped his foot impatiently. "Try to understand this, Jebediah. What you are now is not something that it is possible for you to remain indefinitely. The Tall Man never realized this when he made humanity immortal. The technology he used was developed for creatures that were far less... dynamic... than mankind is. Eventually you are all going to have to move on, in one direction or another."
"Move on? To where?"
"I mean you have to move on in your developement. But in order to do that, you have to give up parts of yourself first. You can't learn to walk if you continue to crawl." He threw his yoyo at the ceiling. Jebediah followed it's flight with his eye, but it was lost in the shadows, and he didn't see where it landed. "As for you, you would do well to give up your despair and guilt. If you do not learn to forgive yourself, they will eventually corrupt you, and transform you into something far worse than the Tall Man."
Jebediah looked at his feet. "I have the Devil's face. I brought him to Earth."
"Jebediah, he would have found humanity eventually. You simply hastened the inevitable by a few years. And the fact that he wears your face as a mask is nothing but a childish mockery. It has nothing to do with you." Tim held out his hand, and the yoyo that Jebediah had thought gone fell into his palm. Only it wasn't a yoyo any more.
It was a peach. Tim held it out to him. "Here. I brought you a present."
He took the fruit with trembling hands. How could this be? He had seen the Earth, the Tall Man had shown it to him to taunt him. It was nothing but a blackened husk. Nothing grew there, except perhaps a few tenacious lichens. It wasn't orange or red, as he had thought, but a swirled combination of yellow and pink. A few drops of dew still trembled on the fuzzy surface. He held it to his face and inhaled deeply. It was better than all of the most expensive perfumes he had ever heard of.
"Tim" he said in awe, "Where did you get this?" But Tim was gone. Two muddy shoe prints marked where he had stood, but there were no tracks leading away. Jebediah looked for a moment at the spot where he had vanished, and then shrugged and took a bite of the peach.
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The Tall Man stood gloating at the collection of crystals in his palm. Each of them was the size of his thumbnail, and glowed with energy. In the civilization he had come from, they were used as high denomination currency. Just the collection in his hand would be considered a fortune, and he had thousands of them.
War was profitable indeed. Particularly when the two quarreling sides, the Xerdet and the Tissin wanted to resort to violence to resolve their really rather petty differences, but considered it to be unaesthetic to ever dirty their hands by picking up a weapon and risking getting blood on themselves. They much prefered to commit their violence by proxy. And the Tall Man was happy to oblige. It had been a wonderfully lucky day for him when that first idiot human, Jebediah Morningside, had come stumbling right into the Tall Man's lap, and had been naive enough to tell the Tall Man all about where he had come from. A beautiful world with high population and low technology. A lovely apple, ripe for the plucking.
The humans were stupid, but after they had had a real education in certain subjects forced into them, a few of them were bright enough to make some rudimentary improvements on weapons that already existed. Improvements which the Xerdet and Tissin were eager to pay for, lest the other side get ahead of them in this foolish conflict. The one called Reggie was particularily good at this. True, at first the Tall Man had been inclined simply to turn him into another one of his drones, but then he thought that someone who had been able to survive his game for 20 years before being foolhardy enough to throw himself into the palm of his hand deserved a chance at better things. And he had never regretted his decision. Whatever his other flaws, the man was an absolute genius when it came to devising new means of destruction.
It was almost a shame that when the war ended, as it had to someday, he had to destroy such useful animals. But there was no point in keeping them around when their usefulness was over. Besides, destroying them would be such fun. Once one of the sides had proved victorious, his computers would restore to all the silver drones their free will. Just long enough for them to regret it when they learned of their impending demise.
The Tall Man did not think of himself as sadistic. The mere comprehension of such a concept required the experience of it's opposite for comparison.
He grinned as he thought of that fool who had first found him. Alone among all the humans, the Tall Man had not assigned him with any labor. It increased both the stupid guilt that Jebediah burdened himself with, and the hatred that the rest of his slaves felt for him. They were sure that he must have collaborated with the Tall Man, otherwise why would he look exactly like him and be able to wander free while the rest of them had to work 90 percent of the time? For the most part, Jebediah had taken to wearing an oversized version of one of the dwarf's brown robes, in order so that the hood would conceal his face. Whenever he was so unfortunate as to be recognized, whoever saw him would either flee if they were alone, or if they were with friends and felt fairly safe, they would spit on him and beat him up.
Come to think of it, when he destroyed the rest of his slaves, perhaps he would let Jebediah live. The guilt and misery he inflicted on himself hurt him far worse than anything his fellow human beings did to him, and could prove quite entertaining in the millenia to come.
Musing on his plans, the Tall Man strode into the larger portion of the walk-in safe that served as his trophy room. Here he kept momentos of the few humans who had actually had the cunning to outwit him for a short period of time. Reggie's four-barreled shotgun was here, of course, mounted in a prominent place on the wall, along with the flame thrower he had sometimes used. Nearby was a large net made of copper cable. This was a relic of an unlikely pair, both women, who had called themselves the "Deemolitionists". Whatever that meant. One had been a mortician, of all things, from California, and the other had been a paranoid gun-nut survivalist from Wisconsin. Apparently the latter had convinced the former that the colder climate of her state offered some measure of protection from the Tall Man. And so it had, for a time. The duo had actually managed to stay out of his clutches for a few years, and even electrocute a number of his dwarves by placing the net in front of him in unlikely places, and hooking it to a power source with a very long extension cord. At one point, they had even taken over one of his former dwarf crunching operations that he had abandoned, and actually managed to master a few of the easier points of his technology.
Their downfall had come about when the gun-nut had gone insane (or to be accurate, had gone more insane than previously) and had managed to convince the mortician that it would be a really good idea to turn her into one of the gold sentinels. What she had hoped to accomplish by this absurdity remained unclear to this day. Although the transformation had succeeded, the Tall Man had come for them both immediately afterwards. They were now both slaves of his on the Red Planet.
The Tall Man wished that he had the time to admire more of his trophies. There were a huge number of them, ranging from secret weapons developed by the former U.S. government, to spears belonging to African tribesman. He had occasionally recieved offers by beings interested in purchasing his collection. There were collectors of such primitive artifacts who would pay well for them, but he had always turned them down. The satisfaction he got from gloating over the defeat of his opponents was worth far more than mere currency.
Regretfully, he left the huge vault and closed the door behind him. A push of a button on the outside re-activated it's lock, security system, and stasis feild. Until he felt like re-entering, time would be stopped within, preserving the contents, which would have otherwise have long since rotted away. And if anyone else attempted to enter, the security system would simply increase the diameter of the stasis feild, holding the intruder in a single moment of time like a fly in amber until he returned to deal with them.
His treasure safe, the Tall Man strode down the metal corridor. He was expecting visitors. Rich visitors, and it wouldn't do to be late.
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Just as Tim had predicted, Mike and Jody entered the storage room Jebediah was guarding in a little over two hours. By taking small bites, he had made his peach last for a little over half that time, after which he had carefully cleaned and dried the seed and put it in one of his pockets.
Mike rapped on the walls at the entrance of the room in a code to let Jebediah know it was them before walking in.
"Any trouble?" He asked as Jebediah stepped out of the shadows. He glanced down, noticing muddy shoe prints on the ground. "Was someone here?"
"Tim was." Jebdiah said. "We talked for a while before you came."
"Freakin' sidewinders." Mike complained. "I'm not sure that I trust them. How do we know they aren't working for the Tall Man? For all we know, he could be telling the Tall Man about what we have hidden here right now."
"If he is, there's nothing we can do about it" Jody said practically. "So we might as well get on with what needs to be done, and hope for the best. Besides, if the sidewinders were going to betray us, they could have done so long before now."
"Right." Mike yanked at a corner of the tarp that was nearest to him. "Jody, Jeb, give me a hand with these covers."
The three men pulled covers of of over a hundred gleaming machines, each nearly twenty feet tall. Tens of thousands of man-hours, by hundred of their allies, volunteering their time between their normal work-shifts had gone into the construction of each of the devices. Because it would have seemed suspicious if their allies had vanished every time they were between shifts, they had limited themselves to this work during only one out of every ten break periods.
The construction of the gleaming weapons had taken well over 1000 years.
Jebediah looked at the rows of machines. He sighed. He knew what was going to come next. Jody, the stronger of the two brothers, approached him with a wire garrote held between his hands.
"I'm sorry, Jeb." He said sadly. "But the body you have now is too different from his. You're going to have to re-inhabit one of the old type, or you won't be able to fool the computers and alarm systems."
"I know." He closed his eyes. "Just let me pray for a few minutes and then do it, all right?"
Jody nodded. Jebediah turned around and thought about Earth, and a peach tree he had once grown on his front lawn. He felt almost at peace when there was a sudden stinging in his throat. He cluthed at the pain wildly for a second, begging silently "No! Not again!" for a few moments. Then everything went black.
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