Archived Parts: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen Fourteen, Fifteen
Part Sixteen
The cylinder of flesh and bone was old and coated with dust, and the ends of the arm where the blood had pooled out had gone dry and black with age. Ernest's throat worked alarmingly, as if he were trying to swallow something, or perform the reverse of swallowing something, except there was nothing to swallow, nothing that he had recently swallowed—so the bitterness that previously had tickled at the back of his throat returned, and flooded his mouth with acid.
He staggered past the foul-smelling hole and felt his boot strike a small, dust-covered bit of rubble. Part of him knew he shouldn't look, that he probably was better off not knowing, but he looked anyway.
A grayish, withered thumb rolled to a stop at the edge of the hole. Ernest toed it the rest of the way in. The thumb fell. He didn't hear it hit bottom.
"Let's cut off his thumb and bring that."
It was more economical to recycle a thumb chip than to create a new one. The shunt held several precious components as well, tiny sensors that communicated with the POD's nutritional programming. And the stainless steel itself had value.
Apparently, the other parts of a body did not.
The apparatus began to hum louder. Ernest touched its side, imagined archaic conveyor belts drawing a stooped, wrinkled retiree through its bowels, extracting the components that could be reclaimed and discarding the rest.
He didn't want to be there to get a better look at whatever would tumble onto the demagnetizing strip, because once he heard that meaty thump again, there was no way he'd be able to stop himself from looking. And he didn't think he could bear to see what landed there.
The rumbling intensified, and Ernest's gaze swung wildly from one end of the exterior wall to the other, searching for somewhere, anywhere, to escape the part of the cycle that would come next. Only because he was searching for it with such pointed desperation, did Ernest make it out—the oval shape of a hatch door in the exterior wall, covered with months, perhaps even years, of ash and dust.
He ran toward the door, not even bothering to erase his own footprints, in his haste to escape the heavy, wet sound of a severed forearm hitting the demagnetizing strip, followed by the softer thump of a thumb.
With the side of his hand, Ernest cut a swath through the dust on the wall beside the hatch where a key sensor would be, while his mind parsed the possibilities, lightning fast, of what the security code might be, based on the name of the building, the movements of the security op who'd opened the holding cell, and the probability that all the security codes held the same number of characters in the same alpha-numeric pattern.
Columns of numbers and letters had already begun to form in Ernest's mind when he realized that where he'd expected a lock panel, there was nothing but a blank wall. The death apparatus rumbled louder still. At any moment, the horrible loud clicks would sound and the salvage would begin. Ernest wiped frantically at the dust, two-handed, ignoring the sickening pain of his decoupled shunt. Still, no panel.
The first heavy click sounded, and in desperation, Ernest clawed at the latch, and pulled. The door swung open. It hadn't been locked. It was not even equipped with a locking mechanism.
Ernest hurried through the door and shut it behind him, but not quickly enough to blot out the thud of a forearm hitting a metal platform, and the patter of a thumb landing beside it.
He shut the door behind himself and pressed his back against the door, a modern door—oval, plastic-amalgam, tightly sealed—and did his best not to hear the humming of the machine in the cremation chamber. Though the modern door blunted the sound, Ernest could still feel the vibrations carrying through the door, the walls, and even the soles of his boots.
"Increase lighting thirty percent." He realized, as the lighting swelled into a comfortable amber glow, that he hadn't actually expected it to happen—not after roaming Saint Peter's, with its old-time architecture, since he'd damaged his shunt—which, though it had been only hours ago, seemed like nearly a lifetime.
The chamber in which Ernest found himself had more modern proportions than old Saint Peter's. Its ceilings were low and its walls were close, which conserved materials, labor and energy. Tools lined the walls—brooms and brushes on one panel, prybars, wrenches and digital meters on another. It was the type of toolkit Audrey the POD-mod might have carried on her belt, but multiplied in scale, five, ten times, until it was formidable enough to repair the giant Reclaim machine.
Though the tool room was sealed, a light coating of dust covered all the tools, very fine particles that had managed to sift through the seal, or evade the grasp of the air filters. No one had touched the tools in a very long time.
Ernest pulled a wrench from its panel. The soft polymer setting held for a moment, and then released. The wrench he'd selected was longer than his forearm, and as heavy as a length of pipe. He hefted it, and gave it an experimental swing with his undamaged arm. Good. Yes.
Another modern door on the other end of the tool room had a simple access panel beside it. Ernest clasped the wrench in the crook of his elbow, held his fingers under the scanner, and the red laser came on. He twitched his fingers in the universal WHAT IS? gesture.
A series of pictograms shone from a pinhole in the top of the doorframe, and images of a person entering a hatch and exiting on another level appeared. The panel that he feared was a lock was nothing more than access to an elevator.
Did anyone lock anything in the Deaconate? Maybe not. Maybe, aside from the holding cells, they'd never needed to.
Ernest keyed OPEN DOOR TRANSPORT UP ONE LEVEL, which, due to his data clerk experience, he executed in under .3 seconds. A happy face pictogram appeared, and the hatch whispered open.
The interior of the elevator had the same amalgam finish as the inside of the cell in which Ernest had decoupled his shunt, and the sight of it sparked the impulse to turn and retreat. But where would he go—back to the Reclaim machine, with its body parts and its gouts of stinking ash?
Ernest steeled himself, clutched the heavy wrench against his chest, and forced himself into the elevator. As it rose, he hefted the wrench higher, poised to strike at anyone who might be waiting for him, but the elevator opened on another empty storage room.
The chamber was similar in configuration to the tool storage room, but instead of polymer grip panels, the inventory was stored behind clear sliding panels. Ernest scanned the readouts. Temperature. Pressure. Time. Whatever the contents were, they required a controlled atmosphere. The code on the access panel got Ernest's attention. Q25-38. Not only was it a locking panel, but the last person to use it had fumbled his key gestures and generated a logic loop that would ensure that even with the access code, no one could get at the contents.
Ernest glanced at the door at the opposite end of the chamber. Each step he'd take had carried him one step closer to the outside. But he couldn't simply walk by and leave a code Q25-38 unresolved.
He placed his fingertips in the reader and keyed.
ABORT COMMAND
RESET
A pictogram holo appeared—above eye level, he noted, so that he had to tilt his head back to read it. Four X symbols. A password was required. Was it alpha? Numeric? Both? The columns of password possibilities that had presented themselves to Ernest as he fled the sound of the horrible machine came to mind, but now, without the sheer panic spurring his movements, Ernest doubted he'd be able to crack the password without setting off an alarm.
Back when he'd been employed, Ernest's least favorite duty rotation, The grid in sector 12, was continually shorting out and rebooting. Sometimes it threw a dozen Q25-38s each and every shift. And afterwards....
Afterwards he overrode the password with a key combo that was a data clerk's equivalent to Audrey's saliva trick. Ernest's fingers remembered the motions well.
ADMIN OVERRIDE
CTRL-ALT-DELE
The panel went dark, then lit up again, showing the readout, ADMIN.
Ernest keyed, LAST USE?
Date and time appeared. The control panel had been jammed for several weeks.
OPEN
The clear hatch slid down. Ernest's first thought was that the compartment was full of coffee—and so, of course, his second thought was that he'd lost consciousness from the pain of his decoupled shunt and was currently hallucinating. He leaned the heavy wrench against the wall and removed a sealed syringe from the climate-controlled chamber. The wrapper's pictograms showed the needle approaching a shunt—with an arrow, in case, somehow, one couldn't deduce in which direction to insert a needle into a shunt after spending one's entire life shunting in. The instructions then depicted two simple faces: one with eyes open, another with eyes shut.
Forced slumber in a syringe.
Ernest tucked several wrapped syringes into his pockets, then turned and headed toward the next door. It, too, was open. He took a deep breath, adjusted his grip on the wrench, and carefully keyed OPEN with the hand of his injured arm.
When the door unsealed, someone screamed.
Ernest shrank back out of sight, but the screaming continued, high and shrill. It was punctuated by a male voice. "Down. Hands there. Yes. Down, you. Stop."
Zach had presumed Ernest had a vocabulary like that? Ernest cringed, and ventured a look through the door. The room beyond was larger than most, with an apparatus in the center, a horizontal, cruciform container in which a person could lie down. Currently, a female retiree was doing her best not to lie in it. She was thin and withered, but in her terror, she was putting up a fantastic fight while a tall, broad-shouldered, shaven-haired man in white tried to force her in.
Since the security op was distracted by the old woman, Ernest crept through the door and scanned the layout of the room. The apparatus bisected it. A door was set in the wall across from Ernest, one step closer to the outside world.
The op shoved the woman's arm down into one of the arms of the cross, but her opposite arm flailed up and battered feebly against his shoulder.
Ernest was suddenly very aware of the sedative syringes pressing against his body from every pocket. Indignation filled him. The horror of knowing that nothing would be demagnetized but the computerized components was still fresh in his mind. But watching the great oaf try to force a fragile old woman into the input of the terrible apparatus, to send her toward the blades that would chop her to pieces, and, should she survive that long, convey her to the fires—fully awake?
He imagined the feel of the security op's skull collapsing beneath the wrench. It would feel good.
Ernest rushed up behind the security op, arm raised. The op was tall, but the wrench was large. Through the stubble of the op's shorn hair, Ernest could make out the ridge of the occipital bone curving along the base of his skull. One swing. It had to count.
"Hey! Look! Man…uh…back."
A second op was seated on the opposite side of the apparatus, shielded from view by the walls of the cruciform container. He stood, with colorful holo cubes from his W3 game raining down all around him, and pointed urgently at Ernest. The first op turned and raised his arm to deflect the blow.
Ernest's imagination hadn't prepared him for the shock that would follow on his end of the hit. The security op staggered, but remained standing. Ernest's hand went numb from the jolt, and he dropped the giant wrench.
And all the while, the old woman screamed.
The op who'd been playing W3 games scrambled to get around the loading end of the apparatus, but the machine had been designed to have one op working either side, with no need for either to reach any farther than the center of the conveyor, so it was very broad and difficult to climb.
"What…you?"
"Who am I? Is that what you mean?" Ernest feinted as the first op made a grab for him. The big brute wasn't very fast; he was probably accustomed to dealing with retirees who'd shunted in so many times they'd become decrepit and slow. Ernest lunged for the wrench, but the op was at least smart enough to deduce that he didn't want to be struck by it again.
"Stop, you," the second op called. The old woman was on her knees, now, with one leg over the side of the cruciform container.
"How long have you been sending people into Reclaim wide awake?" Ernest demanded.
The security op didn't answer, and instead aimed a punch at Ernest's head. Ernest ducked back, barely in time. He felt the air stir against his face with the passing of the op's fist.
"Is it too much trouble to have your supervisor unjam the panel? Just like it's too much trouble to speak in sentences? Or do your job instead of playing a game?"
Ernest's anger made him careless. He didn't duck back quickly enough, and the second punch grazed his jaw. He reeled back, and his arms windmilled as he struggled to keep his balance. Pain flared in his decoupled shunt, and the sharp bitterness flooded the back of his tongue again.
The security op advanced. If his fist actually connected, it would do nearly as much damage as the wrench would have in Ernest's slim hand. If he struck back at the op's face, Ernest knew, his blow would be as effective as one from the shrieking retiree. But there was another area where even someone as small as he could cause enough damage to slow the huge adversary down.
Ernest grabbed for the security op's shunt. He caught it, pulled and twisted.
The op's howl of pain rose, guttural and eerie, over the retiree's screeching. His knees buckled, but Ernest held fast to the shunt and twisted again. It didn't decouple, but screws ground against bone. "You stay on your side," Ernest called to the second op, "or I tear it right out of his arm." His voice seemed overloud, and he realized the old woman had stopped screaming, and was staring at him, bewildered.
Steeling himself against the pain in his own shunt, Ernest fumbled a syringe from his pocket, opened the wrapper's seal with his teeth, and plunged the needle into the first op's shunt.
The op's panting and moaning stopped. He slumped to the floor.
Ernest pulled a handheld Taser from the slumbering op's toolbelt. The big oaf could have used that on the old woman instead of trying to send her through Reclaim fully conscious. Either it was too much trouble, or it hadn't occurred to him to use it. Imbecile.
Moron.
Ernest caught the retiree's eyes. "You want to leave? You must be quiet. Do you understand?"
Her mouth worked, and Ernest feared she might not be able to speak at all. And finally, in a hoarse whisper, she said, "Yes."
"You." Ernest pointed his Tazer at the second op for emphasis. "Throw me your weapon."
The op stared at him blankly.
Ernest pointed at his Tazer, then the guard's toolbelt, then to the center of his own chest. "Throw that here."
The op's brow furrowed. Maybe he'd understood Ernest perfectly well. Maybe he he'd also realized that he could easily overpower Ernest—half his size, and injured as well—rather than submitting.
"Throw it," Ernest said, "or I will have your supervisor check your W3 log for gaming activity during work hours."
The op went pale. He unhooked the Tazer from his belt and tossed it over the apparatus. It landed on the floor beside the first op.
"Woman," Ernest said. "What is your name?"
"Elizabeth," she said hoarsely.
"Come here. Take the Tazer. The black plastic thing."
Elizabeth found her footing very carefully. She moved as if her joints pained her. The papery smock she wore was torn in places, and it crinkled as she climbed the rest of the way out of the apparatus.
"You," Ernest said to the second op, without bothering to ask his name. "Send this container on its way empty. And be thankful I don't taze you and stuff you inside it first."
The guard keyed a simple sequence, and a telescoping metal cover slid out over the container. Before it shut, Ernest got a look at the deep metal grooves at elbow and wrist on the left side of the crosspiece, and diagonal through the hand on the right side. And part of him wished he really had stuffed the op inside.
"We must go now," Ernest told Elizabeth. "The Reclaim process takes a few minutes, but then they will bring in another retiree and begin again."
Ernest reached for Elizabeth's arm to steady her as she stepped over the prone body of the first security op, but she flinched away from him as if he'd raised a hand to strike her. Strange, but there was no time to work through what it meant. Ernest turned and headed for the door, and Elizabeth followed.
A short plastic hallway connected the loading end of the great killing apparatus to a room where a handful of people waited at molded tables and chairs. Ernest hadn't thought there would be people there—but of course there were. People waiting to die.
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