The Empress

One

An individual awoke with a gasp. He opened his orbs for the first time, snapping polymer orb-shields in confusion. It seemed to him he had a tremendous headache, and felt a dozen other burning, itching sensations as well.

He did not know much, but he knew he was in a strange place. He tried to recall how he had come to be here, but failed. Attempting to reach up to his face, he found himself restrained. Fear jolted his body-but he did not feel a heart racing in his chest.

He looked downward to see what it was that restrained him. Fear changed to horror as he saw he was manacled to a metal table. His horror increased as he saw his hand was not a hand, but a gripper. The metal appendage clacked, its two opposing mandibles snapping together like the claws of a crab. Where had his hand gone?

Sick despair filled him as he realized the truth: he was a mech. He could not recall who he had been, but he was certain he had begun life as a normal human. Confused, his eyes roamed his environment, which consisted of a dusty cubicle no more than a dozen paces wide in any direction. The walls resembled black iron. There were instruments suspended on retractable arms overhead. The arm directly above him terminated in a silent, motionless drill with a diamond point that sparkled no more than six inches from his face.

“How could this have happened?” he asked no one. His voice reverberated in his audio implants, but he did not recognize it.

He lay there, examining his environment and wondering about the crimes he must have committed, but which he could not recall. He did not cry out for help or make demands of his captors. Mechs were convicted prisoners, minds in metal bodies for which humans had little sympathy. Due to some great error in judgment on their part, every mech had passed on and become a servant. This fate was both a punishment and a form of redemption. Everyone on Ignis Glace understood mechs deserved their fate.

He hesitated to call for help because he knew his mind had been wiped, but not yet conditioned. He did not relish the thought of accelerating the process to the final conclusive step. Once conditioned, he would probably enjoy lying here in a dirty room awaiting the pleasure of his new masters.

So he waited quietly, listening. He savored the last of his mental freedoms. He was still half-human-at least on the inside, where it counted. He tried to soak in every moment.

Time passed and he grew bored with listening and looking about. There was little in the way of input for his artificial senses. His wireless networking systems had not yet been activated, so he could not seek help that way.

The wind blew harshly outside, that was the greatest single sound. It howled and lashed the exposed surface, but this was nothing new to a citizen of his world. On a planet that exhibited such climate extremes, the atmosphere shifted often.

Growing more accustomed to his body, the newborn mech found he had a sensor that could measure the external temperature. It was hovering near one hundred forty degrees, even inside this shaded shelter.

“Sunside,” he whispered to himself.

He could scarcely believe his misfortune. Not even mechs lasted many years laboring in the sandblasted mines amidst the hottest wastelands of Ignis Glace.

A dozen hours passed, then a dozen more. Cursed with an internal atomic clock, the newborn mech was able to count and chronicle every moment. The people of Ignis Glace did not measure time in days or weeks. There were no mornings or afternoons. The concept of a “day” was an abstract one here, as the sun never moved from its fixed location in the sky. There was only Sunside, Nightside and Twilight. The only way to see the sun crawl to a new angle was to physically move yourself over the surface of the planet.

As there were no days or nights, the inhabitants had developed their own system to measure time. They used a methodical progression of ten-hour “days” which corresponded to the length of a standard day on Old Earth. Each hour, approximately 2.4 Earth hours long, was further divided into minutes that were longer than a minute on most worlds, but not impossibly so.

When the howling sandstorm outside finally halted and quiet reigned, the abandoned creature on the hot metal table listened carefully, but heard nothing more than the ticks and creaks of steel surfaces reacting to the blazing heat of the red sun he knew hovered overhead. He imagined the red sun like a great malevolent eye, staying in its place in the heavens for millennia, forever surveying the deserts it had heartlessly created.

Drifting clouds of dust and fleeting tendrils of moisture from other regions of the planet occasionally obscured the star’s glare, and in those blessed times the temperature on the ground quickly plummeted. The metal building the mech found himself trapped in clicked and groaned like a cooling oven in those respites.

By the time twenty more long hours had past, the mech on the table had lost his complacency. He’d become annoyed with his predicament and wanted nothing more now than to call his keepers and demand they finish their grim task. At least, if his mind were fully erased, he could endure this long-term storage without boredom. Whoever ran this place, they’d already begun to treat him like one of the permanently happy mechs who might not have minded being left on this hot table for days. To them, he was a machine-a tool to be used as needed. Leaving him here was not a crime so much as an oversight, like leaving the power on at the office after retiring.

Timidly at first, the mech began to cry out. He did so in a conversational tone to start with, but soon dialed up the volume of his voice, which was powered by speakers rather than fleshly lungs. By the end of the second hour of calling for help, he’d begun to bellow and slam his steel feet against one another like cymbals at the bottom of the table. This created an amazing din of sound-but still, no one came to check on him. There was no response at all.

By the third day, the mech had come to understand he’d been abandoned. He had not thought his despair at awakening to find himself clothed in a metal body and consigned to a thoughtless life of servitude could be so quickly trumped by a new, worse fate-but it had. He realized that he was going to lie here indefinitely, slowly going mad.

Mechs did not die easily, but they did require some sustenance. In his case, as he was a rugged model designed for labor in a harsh landscape, he was equipped with a fusion core generator that would keep his metal body operating for decades. The flesh that was his mind, however, required more than electricity. It required a source of glucose. Theoretically, a mech could starve to death after a long enough period. He did not know how long it would take, but it would take a very long time, of that he was sure.

Unfortunately, he didn’t even have starvation to look forward to. He had been given a drip-line, which ran from the instrumentation in the ceiling to his chassis. It was feeding him the same boring, tasteless clear liquid in measured, hourly amounts. He didn’t know how big the storage tanks were, but it was very likely he was going to spend a very long time lying here on this table.

It was not the hours or the days that the mech on the metal table feared, however. It was the ten-days, which consisted of ten, ten-hour days, and the months, which on this world were each ten ten-days long. The years on Ignis Glace were the only measurement of time that corresponded to a celestial event: the circling of the planet around its dim red star. It did so at a sedate pace, taking seventy-nine Earth years to do so. Years were made up of a hundred months. Therefore, it was not the hours or days that the captive feared. It was the months-and the terrifyingly long years.

He tried to sleep, but there were no nights, and the orb-shields over his optic orbs did not shut out all the light. Besides, mechs didn’t need sleep often. Normally, they didn’t need to dream the way humans did. That part of their psyche was routinely deleted as part of the process of creating them. In his case, however, he had not undergone that final step. He found himself dozing and dreaming.

He tried to weep, but only strange warbling sounds came from his speakers. His orbs were not structured to produce tears.

#

After the seventh day had passed he grew desperate. Whoever was running this place, they’d forgotten about him at the very least. He had tried to break his bonds, and failed despite many raging attempts.

He had a new thought at the end of the eighth, long day. If he could not free himself or get anyone’s attention, perhaps terminating his own life was for the best. At least there would be an ending to this boring existence. He developed a plan, and carefully began to execute it.

The drip-line that led down to his chassis could be touched by that portion of his metal anatomy that mostly closely resembled a chin. It was the bottom of his head section, to be precise, where his head met the neck. By extending this corner of metal to its fullest, he was able to brush the drip-line, and with careful contortions of his body, he managed to get the tube to catch there.

Time and time again, as the more long days passed by, he worked to hook the drip-line with his chin and sever it. Always, it slipped away. Being made of plastic, however, it eventually lengthened, allowing him to catch it more firmly. When he finally did so-he tore it loose.

He allowed his head to sag back down onto the table again, and an odd sound came from his speakers. He was not sure if he was laughing or crying.

Yellow, oily glucose dribbled onto his casing, but he ignored it, unconcerned. Either an alarm would be sent to an operator who might remember the forgotten soul in this chamber-or no one would come, and he would eventually starve to death. Either way, an eventual end to his torment was assured.

He’d finally gotten his grippers onto this tiny corner of his own fate, and he’d ripped it loose on his own terms. He’d altered his destiny significantly, turning onto a course of his own devising. Somehow, this tiny victory was immensely satisfying.

Two days later the glucose finally ran out. It had dried into a sticky puddle that coated his chestplate, the table, and the dark metal grid that formed the floor below. No one had ever come to check on the ruptured line. The mech on the table did not care, however. He’d won, as far as he was concerned. He’d ended his miserable existence. All he had to do was wait it out. He hoped fervently that whatever junior operator was responsible for this situation would have to explain the mess on the table at some point. The operator would probably receive nothing more than a reprimand, but at least it was something. With luck, the man in charge would curse this crazy mech that had drained an entire tank of feed to starve itself.

During this hours-long period of self-satisfaction, a new thought slowly formed. The mech came to wonder if he could apply the same approach he’d used with the drip-line to another endeavor. Brittle substances tended to break when flexed repeatedly-perhaps he could attempt a new depredation to further inconvenience his thoughtless masters. Like an angry abandoned pet that soils a fine carpet to avenge itself, he set about to do exactly that.

He could not break his bonds, of that he was certain. They’d been built to hold a mech in place, and they were successful in this regard. However, damaging the bonds themselves was not his goal.

He decided to break his own arm. He considered each in turn, and selected the right arm in the end. The left seemed more important to him somehow-possibly, he’d been born left-handed in his prior life. He broke his right by flexing it to its extremes, back and forth, through countless repetitions. Eventually, the temperature gauges from the arm structure signaled him they were hot with friction. He ignored the alarms, continuing the process.

It took hours, but eventually, as a second sandstorm in as many ten-days raged outside, the arm broke. Cackling and exulting, the mech raised his right stump up and flapped it in front of his face. A thick, gray spring spiraled up from the square struts like a finger. This struck him as amusing.

When he’d tired of pointless celebration, he suddenly realized he was light-headed. He supposed his internal reservoirs of glucose and oils must be running very low, and perhaps he’d begun to starve. It seemed a pity not to enjoy this new triumph, so he used the broken arm to catch the drip-line and push it into his mouth. Perhaps due to tradition, mechs could feed by drinking or masticating sustenance through a mechanical orifice located beneath the sensory equipment-approximately where the human mouth was located. Their chemical stomachs were poor at digesting anything other than liquids, but they could leech out enough sugars to keep the three-pound organic mass of their brains alive fairly easily.

He sucked on the drip-line and found the last driblets of sticky material that came out oddly satisfying. Finished with his first meal in a long time, he turned his head and looked at his other arm. Should he flex it ten thousand times until that one broke, too? It seemed less bold and interesting than it had the first time. Studying his good arm and its working gripper, his orbs fell upon something else.

There was a wing nut on the screw that held down the clamp over his good gripper. He’d never really noticed it before, but now he could see it clearly as he was able to sit up higher with one arm free.

Could the wing nut be reached? He set about trying immediately. Now that his torso could rise up from the table, and with the help of that thick, gray spring, he was able to reach the wing nut. Hope bubbled up within him-real hope, something he hadn’t felt in a ten-day. He tangled the wing nut with the broken spring that protruded from his right stump, winding it around to get a grip on it. Then he pulled.

Slowly, the screw began to creak and twist before pulling loose. He worked at it patiently for another long hour. When he’d managed to free his good arm, he worked the gripper in the air experimentally. He couldn’t believe it. He’d long since given himself up for dead. He’d made his peace with the termination of this life and embraced whatever was to come thereafter days ago.

Now, however, things were very different. For long minutes, he clacked together his single gripper, holding it up to his face to study the motion with trembling orbs. As if coming awake, he set himself into purposeful motion once more. The truth was, he’d left a part of his sanity behind over recent days. He wondered dispassionately if a slice of one’s mind could ever be recovered after such as experience. He supposed he would learn the answer in time.

Bending at the waist, he heard motors whir. They were his own motivators, moving in accordance with his will as a man’s body of flesh responded to a flash of thought. At least his artificial nervous system was hooked up and operating. At his feet, he found the last two clamps. Working with relative ease, he twisted open the locking screws and swung his broad metal feet to the floor.

Mechs built to work on the Sunside were equipped with feet like snowshoes. Each foot was designed with a flat bottom and a sloping top-section, so that they would not sink into the infinite sifting sands, and so that sand accumulating on the tops of their feet would slide away with each step they took. They looked like two, flat-bottomed pyramids of burnished metal.

Wobbling, he took his first step forward. He nearly fell. Getting used to a new body with different sensory input and nerve-transmitters to control motion wasn’t easy. He had no trainer, no one to offer suggestions or punishment with each failure. Still, he progressed rapidly. He was motivated, and found himself exulting in his newfound freedom of motion.

Within an hour he was able to cruise around his cubicle and even jump up onto the table without a qualm. Jumping on the table gave him a rush of excitement. His broad flat steel feet clanged with a resounding explosion of sound when he performed the motion. He began making a strange sound that came from his speakers. The sound reminded him of nails spilling from a great height to fall onto a metal floor. The sound, he realized after a time, was his new body’s approximation of laughter.

When he felt comfortable with his systems, he approached the exit. It was a metal affair, built of imposingly heavy struts and plates like a bulkhead in a battleship. He didn’t know if he could open it, and up until now he hadn’t bothered to try. Why ruin the joy of this moment? He’d reasoned that he could easily be trapped here, in this small room. Being imprisoned in this place was certainly better than being strapped to a table, but it was still an unenviable fate.

Outside, the blizzard of super-heated sands continued. He could close his orb-shields, but they were opaque and he would not be able to see. He didn’t have goggles in evidence, and didn’t want to damage his new metal orbs, so he wrapped a dirty red rag onto his head, winding it around several times. He left the cloth thin enough over his orbs to allow some level of vision through the material. As an afterthought, he picked up his broken arm. Perhaps there was a workshop somewhere in this place where he could repair it. That was a thin hope, but somehow he didn’t want to abandon the appendage, even though it was only an artificial one.

He tried the door at last. The keypad didn’t respond, but the emergency valves twisted with the squealing protests of sun-warped metal.

The door opened. An alarming gush of heat, light, wind and most of all, sand forced its way inside. Bending forward into the whipping blasts and gusts, feeling his way in near blindness, the prisoner at last escaped his prison.

Megwit Gaston was the sole indentured operator of Starshine Mining Facility #4. The installation, like many others in the radiation-blasted half of the planet known as Sunside, leeched metals from the sands. The mining complex sat upon a particularly rich vein of fine metals that were oddly refined. Like so many spots on Ignis Glace’s hot side, the metals were close to the surface, and metallurgists suspected they’d been fantastically large structures built by someone in the distant past. Unknown entities had constructed them for unknown purposes, long ago. These speculations were routinely suppressed by the local officials. The Nexus representatives would have been forced to outlaw the lucrative mining contracts, if they’d acknowledged the truth. Any contact with alien technology from the past was forbidden by Nexus Law.

Megwit Gaston had spent a long time working contracts in godforsaken pits like Starshine Mining Facility #4. From his point of view, his life had been mostly wasted, as all he’d managed to do was make some faceless landed nobleman rich.

His great grandfather had come to Ignis Glace with plans of rising to the rank of an earl, or perhaps that of a duke. Such fantasies had ended like those of a thousand others before him: in utter failure. Megwit’s rank was that of an unskilled serf. Like most serfs who were assigned to labor in the grimmest of conditions, his character was predictably surly and self-indulgent. In Megwit’s case, however, these traits had grown extreme.

Sitting in his office with runnels of bluish liquid spirits dribbling down his chin, he became dimly aware of an alarm chime. He tapped at a screen irritably until it went away. He knew it would return eventually, but right now, he couldn’t be bothered. He was far too busy with the consumption of his daily cocktail of alcohol, heavily-laced with caffeine and blur-dust. The concoction wisped with tendrils of blue vapor which drifted in a lazy spiral toward the exhaust vents in the walls.

Megwit sipped the beverage periodically and tried not to think about anything at all. His eyes were puffed red and two-thirds closed. He sipped his beverage each day because few men were capable of gulping such a harsh mixture straight from the thermos. If he’d been strong-stomached enough, however, he’d have guzzled it all right down.

It had been a ten-day or more since Megwit had done any actual work. He’d given up on such niceties after he’d received his termination notice. The company had cheerfully informed him his contract would not be renewed after the close of the season, and once the sandstorms let up sufficiently, his replacement would be shipped out to this hellhole, which was generously referred to in the official termination email as ‘the operation’.

Well, let them have the place! Let them have his job too, if they wanted it. He would sell his contract more cheaply to someplace in Twilight next time. The money was better for those who were willing to work Sunside, but it wasn’t worth it. He was sick of everything here. He was sick of the crappy rations, the sandstorms that continually knocked out satellite reception, and more than anything else, he was sick of the blinding light and heat of the place. You couldn’t even sit on a steel toilet without getting your buttocks burned. If ever there had been a true Hell on a planetary surface where men were expected to perform work, Ignis Glace’s Sunside was it.

Megwit shook the last drops out of his thermos. He nursed and licked long after it was gone, and then he experienced a wave of dull despair. He’d just killed his one and only allotted of refreshment for the day. It would be at least seven more long hours before he could open a new thermos and sip it, sending his mind away to a fresh oblivion. He heaved a great sigh, and put his feet on the desk. Unfortunately, his boots kept slipping off the surface, such was his level of intoxication. After a while he gave up on the effort.

Each thermos was supposed to be comprised of only caffeinated liquids to keep the operator awake, but Megwit had altered the brew. What was supposed to be his limited ration of daily stimulant had done far more than just stimulate him throughout his tenure here at the mine. But despite his having managed to tamper with the contents, the machine that controlled the allotments was a harsh master. It would not allow any alteration of the schedule itself. He was to be given a single dose of liquid refreshment per day, and thusly the stingy allotments would continue to be doled out slowly until he signed out of this place for the last time.

Within a few minutes of completing his beverage, Megwit was bored. His mind was still numb, but he was not yet ready for sleep. Besides, the monitoring systems would protest and prod him if he attempted to climb into his bunk now. He eyed his bunk with longing anyway. The steel chair and angular steel desk were not terribly comfortable to nap upon.

The alarm chime began again. Megwit gargled with rage. He slapped at the screen with floppy fingers. It would not stop its infernal beeping! Finally, he managed to silence it. How many times had he done so? How many times had he silenced that particular alarm? He could not be sure.

He frowned and squinted through bleary eyes, trying to focus on the screen. Normally, the system would have given up by now. It would have taken his repeated acknowledgements and dismissals as a lowering of priority. In time, it should have forgotten about whatever was upsetting it, much as Megwit himself had given up on such trifling matters long ago. But the system had not given up. It had continued to insist.

Grudgingly, he checked it, dialing up a menu with one sloppy forefinger. It was not out of any sense of duty or responsibility that he was moved to follow-up on the alarm now. He did so out of a sense of curiosity, heightened by boredom and the random behavior common among those affected by blur-dust.

A map of the complex sprung up on a small screen. A blinking red light showed an external hatchway was open. Megwit frowned. The hatches all sealed themselves automatically when a storm blew up, and this storm had been raging for hours.

He checked outside, but saw no change in the grim conditions. The winds screamed in excess of fifty miles per hour, with gusts up to ninety. All of the mech laborers had long ago been safely stored or had taken shelter inside the mine itself. How could this door have been opened? The only answer that came to his foggy mind was the most likely one: the hatch had not been properly secured in the first place and had somehow been blown open.

Relieved it was nothing more serious, he all but dismissed the matter from his mind. If it had been something truly damaging, he might be held liable, even after his termination. This open hatch could be safely ignored. Certainly, the mechs would have a lot of sand to clean up when the storm passed, but that did not concern him.

A nagging thought, however, made him check into the situation further. He had the feeling he’d forgotten something. Exactly which chamber had been left open to this blasting storm?

He frowned at the screen in his weak-fingered hands as it zoomed in and showed him the source of the trouble. What was that? The processing chamber? He shook his head. There was no one in there.

Then he sat back and laughed suddenly. He shook his head and licked the rim of the thermos, tasting the final stinging drops of blur on his tongue. Why was it, when one waited long enough, a few more drops always seemed to accumulate at the bottom of a vessel?

Megwit now recalled working in the processing chamber. He’d been there when he’d gotten the news, when he’d learned of his contractual termination. He’d been doing something in there…

He recalled what it was now: he’d been working on a mech in that chamber, a fresh delivery. Frowning, he activated the cameras. He was liable for all the equipment at Facility #4, and the mining lords weren’t known for their compassion when losses were traceable to a clear-cut source of negligence. They might even sue him, attaching a rider to the wages of his next contract.

The security cameras showed an empty chamber, filling with sand. There was no one on the table, and the clamps were open. Megwit slapped himself in the temple, but his mind did not respond by operating with greater efficiency. He flicked to the records.

Sixty-Two, the records stated. Prisoner number Sixty-Two had been there, in those clamps. He was sure of it. The mech had been left there during processing-which had never been completed. But where had the prisoner gone? How had he left?

Megwit spent the next several minutes consulting one camera after another. It was difficult to see anything other than blowing sand. Piles of it had drifted over some of the video pickups. Others could rotate and scan, but he saw nothing other than the dark humps of half-buried buildings.

Once he thought he saw a figure for a fleeting instant, when a gust of pure air cleared the sand and allowed a longer-range view. But it was only for an instant. He was left with the impression in his fogged mind of a man wearing a flapping scarf. That could not be, he told himself. How could there be a man out there? Megwit was the only living human within a hundred leagues. After continuing to scan every video pickup for half an hour or more, he finally sagged down in relief and defeat. Whatever it had been, the figure was gone now.

Then came the knock. It was incredibly loud, being created by one large hunk of metal banging against a flat slab of even thicker metal. The sound reverberated through Megwit’s office and caused his brain a good deal of pain. He clamped his swollen eyes shut and slapped his hands to his ears, gritting his teeth and crying out.

When the sound finally, blissfully ceased, a fresh sound replaced it. Megwit tentatively removed his hands from his ears, and forced open a single, puffy eye.

The valves on the doors were opening. There couldn’t be any doubt of it. The bottom one had twisted fully around to the vertical, and the upper was squeaking and turning slowly even now. He thought of jumping up to twist the lower valve shut again, but something kept him in his chair. There wasn’t enough time left, and so he did nothing. He sat and stared dumbly. Perhaps it was shock, or simply apathy brought on by the blur-dust that coursed through his system.

A moment later, the second valve was vertically aligned and the door opened. Megwit barely had the time and forethought to claw his goggles into place. The sandstorm would be coming through that hatchway with a vengeance.

A blast of grit and howling wind flood his office a moment later. Every report, faded decoration and scrap of clothing lifted up and swirled around the chamber as if caught in a tornado. Sand stung his lips and shot up his nostrils. He had not had time to get his breather into place.

His eyes, looking through the grimy goggles, beheld a surprising sight. It was a mech, he could tell that much. But unlike other mechs, this one had a scarf around its face. That flapping bit of cloth seemed like a human affectation, and somehow it was frightening. Still, he knew who this visitor must be.

Megwit watched as the mech closed the door behind it. The mech had a missing arm, he noticed. A slurred moment later, he realized the missing arm was in the mech’s other gripper. The mech was carrying its own broken arm. Somehow, this did not make sense to him, and he almost laughed aloud. Almost.

“Sixty-Two?” Megwit asked. “Are you Sixty-Two? Report your status, then shut yourself down for maintenance.”

The towering figure said nothing in reply. Instead, the mech approached Megwit’s desk. It hefted its broken arm with its good one. The mech then began the methodical process of beating Megwit to death with the broken arm, wielding it like a club.

As the only human within many miles succumbed, he saw the scarf covering the mech’s face slip away due to the heaving effort it undertook. The steel orbs behind the scarf stared down with a burning intensity.

Soon, the walls of the Megwit’s office were slick with blood and shreds of flesh, and the wretched operator knew no more.