The Spawn of the Death Machine

by Ted White

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

'You are an artificially constructed human being, a mobile gathering device.' That is what the computer's metallic voice tells Tanner when it releases him from his cell. Naked, unarmed, with no memory to guide him, he emerges into a savage world, into the ruins of Manhattan in the 23rd century where wild animals roam and men have become cannibals in a frantic struggle to survive. Who has unleashed this chaos upon the world? Has Tanner really been dispatched to gather facts to help save the tragic remnants of humanity? Or is he to be the final instrument of its destruction?

Release date: May 31, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 175

Sample

I was dreaming.

It was a place of darkness, lit only by a faint red spark. In my memory—how real?—that spark had been a deeper, more lustrous red, the rich red of flaming hair that wrapped itself protectively around me, as I had been enfolded in … her… arms.

The blackness was a gulf, a chasm, into which I endlessly fell, the spark a dying ember far away … above … and receding. I longed for … her… arms with an ache that instead of dwindling seemed to grow, spreading painfully throughout my limbs.

Then I was awake.

I hurt.

Every muscle in my body seemed to have its own distinctive ache. My skin was peppered—as if needles were lancing every square inch. I vibrated with racking pain.

After a while I tried opening my eyes. I closed them again. Dry steel wool was cemented to the undersides of my eyelids.

The needles were being pulled out; only the heat remained. It was soothing. I almost fell back into my black gulf of sleep. Then the heat receded, and I felt the chill metal surface hard under me. It was flat, cold, and uncomfortable. My shoulder blades dug against its hard surface.

I opened my eyes again.

The light was a deep blue, flickering at the edge of my vision. Near ultraviolet.

I turned my head to my right.

A blank metal wall, highlights on its dull polished surface resonating to the violet glow—only inches beyond my right shoulder.

My neck was stiff and felt as if someone had been holding it in a hammerlock. But I turned my head the other way.

Another metal wall. Further away, this time. And, closer, the edge of the surface upon which I was lying. A shelf? Metal, like everything else in this cell.

It’s uncomfortable, lying flat on a metal shelf. Without pausing to check my body’s willingness, I sat up, swinging my legs around and off the shelf.

My toes grazed the floor. Shrugging, I stood up.

The cell was seven feet high and seven feet long. The shelf upon which I’d been lying was three feet wide, and jutted straight out from the wall on its side. The space in which I now stood was another three feet wide.

An absolutely featureless, metal-walled cell, seven feet by seven feet by six feet, and filled with the glow of near-ultraviolet light. No doors, no windows. I was completely contained. I was trapped.

Claustrophobia closed down on me with sudden impact. For a moment I felt the walls actually growing closer.

I’d been put through a machine; pummelled, maybe tortured. But when I examined my naked body, there were no scars, bruises, or any signs of physical abuse. It puzzled me.

I stopped and peered under the metal shelf. The violet glow penetrated well enough for me to see a thin slot just below the place where the shelf joined the wall. I put my hand to it. Fresh air kissed my skin.

The closeness of the stale air was only an illusion. My quickening breath was a purely psychological reaction.

A metal cell: what did it mean? How had I been put here? And why?

No facilities for eating; no sanitation. Just fresh air. Why?

“Tanner!”

The voice reverberated deafeningly in the tiny room.

Tanner? Who? Me?

I grunted.

“Tanner, listen. You have been asleep for a long time. You’ve been in the cold sleep.”

“Yeah?” I said. My voice was rusty in my throat. “I don’t remember.”

“That is not necessary.” The voice spoke coldly. Its inflections were as metallic as the cell walls. “You have been awakened for a new purpose.”

“You,” I said. “Who are you?”

“This is the Com-Comp. Your creator.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“You are an artificially constructed human being, a mobile data-gathering device.”

There was no point in trying to contradict the voice. I didn’t know.

“It has become necessary to gather fresh data. You have been reactivated in order to seek out new and relevant data.”

“Meaning—?”

“These are your instructions: You will go out into the world of Man for the period of one year. In that year, you will accumulate a true knowledge of the present state of humanity in the outside world. At the end of one year, you will return here.”

My pulse quickened. Outside—! It evoked no images for me, but somewhere something stirred in my slumbering unconscious. More immediately, it meant escape from this barren cell. “How will I know what’s relevant data for you?” I asked.

“Everything you accumulate in your memory banks will be relevant,” the Com-Comp said. “Your memories have been wiped clean of prior knowledge. When you return, data retrieval will be one hundred per cent.”

“All right,” I said. “When do I start?”

“Now.”

The long wall at my side suddenly slid back, revealing a doorway three feet wide. Beyond was a narrow hallway, lit by the same violet glow. I stepped through.

The air smelled long-confined and dead. There was an antiseptic cleanliness, an absence of dust or even mustiness. Like distilled water, the air was chemically pure, but inert.

The hall stopped at a metal-runged ladder that climbed a vertical shaft. There was nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. I started climbing.

I climbed at least sixty feet before the shaft ended and I stepped out upon a landing. As I did, the wall at the far end slid back, and a minor deluge of earth, sod, and shrubbery fell in. The odor of crushed leaf-mold was pungent in my nostrils, and the sudden bright shaft of yellow sunlight wrenched at my eyes.

As I knuckled the tears from my eyes I heard a second panel slide shut behind me. I was cut off from the stairs and the cell below. I felt no loss.

I drew several deep breaths of fresh air, picking out a multitude of scents which I could not then identify, but which smelled rich and satisfying. There came a scrabbling sound at my feet. I looked down. Tiny metal tentacles had darted out from the base of the walls. Wherever they touched the broken clods of dirt, the metal floor was instantly clean again.

It came to me very forcefully then that I did not want to stand upon this dead metal floor any longer. I no longer wanted to breathe canned air, nor have my eyes assailed by the marginal flicker of violet light. Beyond the ragged opening stood the outside world. I needed no more urging to enter it.

Tall trees stood sentinel around the hillock from which I emerged. Coarse grass sawed at my ankles. Ahead of me, tangled wilderness. Behind me, a raw scar of fresh dirt and gleaming metal. The portal was closed. I stood alone, naked, defenseless, in a world about which I knew nothing.

What was I supposed to do? Go out into the world for the period of one year? I was there. Accumulate a true knowledge of the present state of humanity … ? What humanity?

The sun was almost uncomfortably warm on my bare skin. I caught the distant keening of insects on the sluggish breeze. Overhead fluffy banks of warm white clouds drifted against a hazy blue sky. The underbrush thinned under the tall close trees.

I found a narrow meandering trail, and followed it through the forest. It paused by a narrow brook and then climbed across a naked outcropping of worn rock.

I almost missed the fire hydrant.

It was chipped almost free of its paint, and the metal was pitted and rusty. It was the color of a tree-stump. Fire hydrant. I was staring at this obviously human artifact, and the two words came reflectively to my tongue. “Fire hydrant,” I said aloud. Then, “But, what’s a ‘fire hydrant’?”

I didn’t know. I felt I knew, but nothing followed those two words. No explanation rose to the bidding of my conscious mind.

Short, squat, a truncated cross that was half-eaten by corrosion: fire hydrant: human artifact—half buried by leaves in what seemed otherwise virgin forest. I shook my head and left it behind me.

The trees began thinning. Then, abruptly, they were gone.

I faced the fallen ruins of a city.

Grass and creepers covered the wide open place between the trees and the ruins. Beyond, skeletons of stone fought free of their verdant bondage to point empty fingers at the sky.

Manhattan, I thought. New York City.

And then, again, I wondered why.

“Your memories have been wiped clean of prior knowledge,” the Com-Comp had said. But obviously not completely. I knew enough to talk and to understand what I was told. I knew enough to use my body as I must once have learned to do—walking, climbing, running.

And odd, unknown words kept returning to me. Words: labels: meaningless beyond their obvious connotations. Symbols of another time, and another memory.

I had seen this city once before, then.

It felt as though that must have been a long, long time before.

I prowled the ruins until sundown without flushing anything bigger than a furred animal the size of my forearm. This must once have been a vast city, for its ruins stretched on as far as the eye could see.

Dusk brought with it strange pangs in my midsection, and the urge to find shelter for the night. The dimming light did not seem in itself sufficient reason to stop my explorations, but my limbs ached, the soles of my feet were sore, and from somewhere I recalled the vestiges of a dream.

It would be nice to sleep and find that dream again.

I found a basket of vines in a niche-like building corner, and wormed my way into them. Then I closed my eyes on my first day, and fell easily asleep.

It took me six days to establish that these were indeed the ruins of a vast city—and that as far as humans went, they were quite unpopulated.

I also discovered hunger. It did not come upon me immediately, but on the fifth day it was a pervading ache that filled my midsection. When the first cramp hit me, I doubled up as though from a blow, and fell to my knees. It was then that the strange thought came to me: I am hungry. I must eat. And immediately I remembered …

I remembered with a fullness, a depth and breadth of associated senses so rich that I was dizzied. Sitting in a chair, before a table, the still-sizzling steak wafting its odors of rare, singed beef, brushed with garlic. It was in a room of delicate golden illumination. My sleeve brushed through the salad to my right, picking up some of its cheese dressing. It annoyed me, and I spoke … to someone …

It was gone. That was all there was of it: that and no more. I had, encapsulated, one tiny fragment of my past life, meaningless in terms of the life I’d once lived, perhaps, but enormously rich in suggestions. I found my mouth full of saliva at the remembered odors, while my consciousness struggled with those subtler remnants. Clothing. I remembered the feel of the clothing draped around and fastened to my body, and suddenly I felt naked—naked as I’d not felt at any moment before. I was unprotected.

Another cramp struck me, and that brought me back again to my real problem: hunger.

What did I eat?

Somehow I knew, without needing explanations, that a meal of steak and salad was a processed sort of food. I could not expect to find it here, in the wilderness.

Meat came from animals.

I was fairly certain of that. Therefore, it followed: catch an animal.

I caught an animal. It was about the length of my forearm, its fur striped in shades of tan and white, its tail suddenly puffed to twice its normal thickness when it saw me.

I’d seen its tracks in the dust, and climbed to a crumbling ledge overhead, where I’d lain prone in wait.

The sun was low on the horizon and the rubble-filled once-street below was heavy with shadow when the animal came skulking out of the vines, sniffed around suspiciously, turned, looked up, and saw me.

Time seemed to freeze.

We stared into each other’s eyes, the animal and I, and I saw that it understood. I was hungry. It was food. Its ears laid back on its head, its back arched, and its tail fur seemed to swell out. I saw all of this even as I struggled upward, against a strange great weight, flinging myself up and off the ledge.

Very slowly, almost as in a dream, I fell for the animal, which seemed unable to move. My feet struck the dust, my knees buckled, and I was straightening when, lazily, the creature made a hissing noise and began rearing back, humping its back impossibly, its forearms still outstretched before it, claws extended.

I felt my pulse hammering great ponderous throbs at my temples as I strained forward, thrusting my hands through liquid air at the animal.

It squirmed with a rippling violence. It seized my left wrist with its teeth, then its claws were raking at my left forearm, its hind feet kicking my hand and tearing away strips of my skin.

But my left hand was at its neck. With my right hand, I grabbed its head. I twisted.

A snap. Then it was limp.

I dropped it back into the dust and stared at my left hand and arm.

Blood welled from the long slashes on my forearm, from the chunk bitten from the side of my thumb, from the lacerations in the heel of my palm and the outside of my wrist. It was a darkening red, and for a moment I let it drip off the ends of my fingers. My hand hurt.

Somehow, this seemed altogether wrong. I lifted my arm, and examined it. The blood was thicker now. It was no longer flowing out unchecked. And it was darker. Even in a nearby patch of rust sunlight, it was blackening.

But nonetheless, I felt much less hungry.

Later that night, when my hand felt only numb and no longer hurt, I ate the animal. I ate it raw, and I ate some of its fur. It did not taste very good—nothing like my single memory of other food—and I did not enjoy the experience. But the cramps left my stomach, and the feeling of satiation was satisfying.

It was clear to me, however, that this was a wholly unsatisfactory way to eat. It didn’t make sense to chance wounding or maiming myself for another meal as unpleasant as this one.

The next morning, when I awoke to the brightness of day, a more pleasant surprise awaited me.

My hand had healed. The scabs had fallen away from the claw cuts and slashes, leaving bright pink skin. The side of my thumb was still crusted with dried blood, and itched interminably, but seemed better. I could move and flex my hand, and the only pain was a sort of dull ache when I strained against the crust of my remaining wound.

Perhaps this hunting for one’s food was not such a bad sort of thing after all. I’d gone five days before needing to do it before; in another five days I’d probably not mind doing it again.

I was on a peninsula, or perhaps an island; it was hard to tell. But I’d established the fact that from the place where I’d first entered the ruins, they progressed southward without pause until the land met water.

To the east across a stretch of water I could see tiered terraces and more ruins. There were also abutments which suggested bridges, but none stood. To the west was a wider stretch of water, and, on the opposite shore, yet more empty-looking ruins. To the south, water. Only the north offered any hope.

Not once had I come upon even the suggestion of human life. Animal life I’d found in fair abundance—although most of it, to judge by the tracks and glimpses I’d had, was no larger than the creature I’d caught and eaten. Birds were plentiful. But the narrow trails through the underbrush and the rubble were the hunting trails of small animals, and I found not one single sign of human presence.

I ventured into the subterranean depths of the ruined city only once—on the sixth day.

I was returning slowly north, this time along the eastern side of the island. I’d found a relatively wide and open boulevard and I was making better time than usual. The sun was hot on my back, and my feet scuffed up dust that hung in little clouds in the still air before settling behind me. The ruins were all brightness and shadow, very stark in the morning light.

To my left, I saw an open hole in the street. Stairs led down into the darkness.

Could it be that humans might live below the ground, I wondered?

The rubble that was strewn upon the steps seemed to belie that notion, but still I was intrigued. An obviously inviting set of steps that led down into the underground: who could resist?

Cool air closed in around me with t. . .