Future Winds (20 page)

“That is insane,” Aisha paused to try and reflect on what she was just told. “No one would agree to artificial intelligence controlling their mind.”

“Most of the human populace are sheep to the flock. If presented in a way to make the bill desirable, they will abide,” Fox said in a condescending manner to convey a truth she held to a standard as high as the law.

“We would never have the resources to fulfill the proposal. We mustered everything we had just to arrive here.”

“The developmental phase is behind us. The nanobots carrying the software can self-replicate, making the process of mass production cheap and easy to achieve.”

“How could that ever be presented as desirable?” Aisha said with doubt.

“People can be convinced. If I didn’t present the facts and instead told you of all the different possibilities in which life as we know it could be improved. That we have developed a means that could detect crime before it happened. We could fix the broken mind, and not only eradicate the existence of atrocities caused by man, but truly unify all beings under one banner, a flag representing peace and prosperity? In those scenarios, wouldn’t you take the injection?”

This is crazy,
Aisha thought.

“Natalia, I can get you out of here. I can-”

“I thought you to be smarter than that, Miss Sayegh,” Fox interrupted as if angered at the thought. “Let us forget you even conceptualized suggesting an escape plan. I have served my country well in life and no one can choose when and how to die. Passing on the bridge of my ship is an honor and I could never in a million years think of a more fitting way to leave this world. Though I admit, I would have liked to live long enough to see our new city built, but that's okay, no need to be greedy.”

“But I can’t do it,” Aisha wailed tearfully.

“I have been sentenced to death and you have been given an order, Miss Sayegh. Now please do me the favor of carrying out my last wishes so that I may die at the hands of a friend, perhaps the only one I have ever had.”

She brushed lint from her uniform and adjusted her collar before standing straight with perfect posture and interlocking her hands behind her back. Her final moments were spent looking across the bridge of her ship that had escorted her safely across galaxies and into the heart of their new home on Flare. Her ship was the lead carrier in the fleet designed for species self-preservation. The gears were in motion and some of the most difficult of times in human history had been conquered. Vice Admiral Natalia Fox was at the helm in overcoming countless obstacles and solving a myriad amount of those challenges.

Aisha grasped her blade firmly and took a deep breath. The more force she put into her swing, the cleaner the kill would be. Suppressing her emotions, she focused on the task at hand. She raised the blade, taking aim and positioning it directly behind Fox’s neck before pulling it back and swinging it horizontally with as much strength as she could muster.

Natalia’s head was severed clean off and Aisha couldn’t bear to look down at the body that thumped to the floor in a pool of thick blood.

Turning with tears in her eyes, Aisha wiped the blood from her blade onto her shirt, like a badge of honor for her service, then she sat in a seat at the head of the table while Natalia’s decapitated body bled out on the bridge of her ship, New Horizon.

***

You have been chosen, young hunter, to join the forces that march off to battle. Bring honor and pride to our clan as you become an instrument of war
.
Make your way to the outskirts of the city with all of the others chosen to enlist and assemble with your peers,
Kio-Kai’s queen whispered into his consciousness.

Though the odds were not in favor of him being chosen for this draft, he had suspicion that he would make the cut. He obliged to the demands of his queen and made way towards the city of Sta-Bel’s main highway where the draftees were rendezvousing to ship off to battle.

He searched through the crowds for Qaz-Kai, who was at the front of the lines assigning captains to squads for better control of the troops in the thick of the fight to come. In spotting him, he fluttered ahead and landed beside him.

“Qaz-Kai,” he called out in admiration as he approached.

Qaz-Kai turned and squinted at first to recognize the hunter who called him by name.

“Kio-Kai?” he called out with a laugh. “It has been far too long since I last saw your face,” he added in putting his hands on the much younger hunter’s shoulders. “You have grown so much.”

“Of all the clans to choose from, a general being selected from the clan of Kai is quite the honor. I could not think of anyone I would rather follow into battle,” Kio-Kai said in praising his elder.

“Thank you. Your words are kind. Now stand behind them in giving me your all in the heart of battle and we might just stand a fighting chance.”

“Your plan is audacious; I will give you that. It sounds to be promising in avenging our fallen brothers and sisters,” Kio-Kai added, before shifting the conversation into a sad direction to convey his respects for his fallen companion. “I am sorry for your loss in Lai-Kai. She was my friend and a wonderful huntress. A true example of what it is we should all strive to be.”

“Aye, that she was and I hold hope that perhaps she may still be.”

Kio-Kai wrinkled his face in confusion.

“Her wounds were greatly severe, and while her chance of survival is minimal to say the least, she is currently still technically alive, submerged in a rehabilitation cocoon.”

When I was recovering within lady Kai’s spawning pools, Lai-Kai was only a cocoon or two away
, he thought.
I was in such a hurry to leave for the announcement, I did not even notice her there.

The ground began to gently rumble and Kio-Kai looked over to see Brutalius approaching the troops. He was closer to the anolem than ever before and couldn't help but feel uneasy about his strength. At any given minute, he could pull apart their limbs with ease and smash their bodies into pieces. He towered over all of them with his body of sharp and jagged stone. Being this close, Kio-Kai could see that the veins of the anolem had a red like glow to them that radiated through his thick, grey skin. Perhaps the rumors of being born within volcanos were true.

“Looks like we are nearly ready on my end. The queens have made their selections and the remaining forces are assembling now,” Qaz-Kai informed the anolem.

The two had already gone over their strategies of war long before the public announcement to inform the hive of the decision for battle. Brutalius was to lead forty thousand above ground to engage one assault, while Qaz-Kai worked through the underground network with his forty thousand for the flank.

“Good luck, my friend. We will see you on the battlefield,” Qaz-Kai said to golem.

“
Akanta sumanta butal fanokous
,” the living, breathing rock chuckled out loud in his indigenous dialect before turning to his legion of four thousand and shouting a phrase in the Vai-Zik native tongue. “Today may I die a thousand deaths for my queen so that my hive may live to serve a thousand lifetimes!” His war cry was in a broken accent, but no one seemed to care. The fact that he had taken the time to learn the ancient phrase, not many Vai-Zik clans even knew today by heart, was an inspirational moment in history.

Kio-Kai felt the very basin of his spine tingle as Brutalius’s troops erupted into war cries and cheers alongside Qaz-Kai’s battalion and the millions of other Vai-Zik that had come to see the armies off to battle.

He began flexing the bone-like blades from his forearms, outwards and inwards, again and again in repetition. This was it. The moment of vengeance was upon them.

***

Tyler roused, sweating profusely and gasping for air, to see Aries but inches away from his face. Startled by seeing the bot so close, he flinched back and she ascended above him, discarding an empty stimpack.

“Where did you get that?” he gasped, still choking for air.

“I went back and collected a satchel of them,” she explained.

Looking about his surroundings, Tyler noticed that they were in the cave. While he slept they had arrived, but how exactly they got there, he was unsure.

“No one stopped you?” he questioned.

“No, no one stopped me.”

“You just walked in, took a satchel of stimpacks, and then left.”

“I cannot walk, but yes, in terms of human vocabulary, I did just that.”

Jeez,
Tyler thought.
I would have been shot dead for trying to enter the city.

“
Well, how did we get here?” he pressed, his mind feeling misty and confused.

“I levitated you.”

“Ah, right, well thanks,” he said scratching his scruffy face and climbing to his feet. “It was quite literally like sleeping on a cloud.”

“Shall we continue?”

“Yea, sure.”

The two of them walked down the cave for a few minutes, while Tyler shook himself back into full consciousness. In looking up, he noticed that the enormous bats that once lingered in the cavern were now nowhere to be found. He figured the blast from the bomb must have scared them out from their home.

“Did you dream, Tyler?” Aries asked, as she lead the way.

“Uhm, well I don’t know.”

“I dream sometimes,” she added.

“You dream?”

“Yes, when engaged in standby mode, my mind still races in thought. Though all my other functions are dramatically slowed down to conserve as much power as possible. Sometimes like humans I cannot recollect my dreams, as my memory banks hold very little storage in standby mode.”

That makes sense,
Tyler thought.

“What do you dream about?” he asked.

“Of home, and friends, and sometimes even whales. I am very fond of whales. Usually though, my dreams are very abstract in their layout, making it tough to draw logical conclusions from them.”

That is fascinating,
Tyler thought.
How is that even possible?

“This should be it,”
she said stopping to investigate an opening off to the side of their path.

Plain as day, a hole in the side of the rock leading down into unknown territories. It was large enough for a man to walk through if he ducked his head just a bit.

“How did we not see that the first time we were here?” he questioned with a grin.

“Because you three were not looking for it.”

Tyler kneeled down and looked in the opening. A few yards in, it shrunk in size and would become too small for him to walk through, but large enough for him to crawl comfortably.

She drifted in ahead. Slinging his rifle behind his back, he hunched down and followed her through.

The channel was lit up by neon flora of green and blue, beautiful little plants that swayed back and forth despite the lack of a breeze or draft to give them a push. Reaching out to touch one with his glove, the little blossom reacted by illuminating brighter, so much so that the exterior became transparent, and Tyler could see the thousands of cells within, that made up life for the spectacular flower.

With a smile on his face, he looked up to Aries who stared at him and the plant, as if right alongside of him, she too was observing the magnificent piece of life they had stumbled across.

After sharing in a moment of awe the two worked their way through the tunnel which declined deeper underground. Every few feet, the air became cooler by a degree or two.

The shaft began to resonate as pebbles fell from above. The two of them advanced quickly towards a point that opened up into a chamber large enough to stand in. Looking back, rocks continued to vibrate and the floor gave way, revealing a much larger tunnel that ran horizontally below.

“Holy shit, we were crawling across a bridge,” Tyler gasped.

The hole in the shaft revealed the source of upheaval tremors below. It was a large golem made of red and brown stone, behind him were thousands of the insect like creatures: locust and larva alike.

“My God,” Tyler said in awe. His eyes were as wide as a deer standing in front of a car's high beams the moment before impact. “Where do you think they are all going?”

“I do not know,” Aries admitted.

“They look to be marching,” he whispered. Then he paused as the realization swept over him like an upsurge of high velocity water. “They are going to attack the city.”

Aries said nothing as the two peeked over the ledge above as the legion of locusts and maggots followed the golem.

“We need to warn them,” Tyler cried.

“We would never make it back before them,” she pointed out.

“Well, do something,” he screamed. “Send them a transmission, a warning, anything!” After his brief uproar, he looked back down to see if any off the bugs had heard him but luckily they were oblivious to the man and his robot that dwelled but thirty feet above.

“Our depth underground and the radiation from the bombing is interfering with my long distance com systems,” she explained. “I could try and overload my core to get the message out, but I do not know if it will work. Also, doing so, would definitely both physically fry you and literally alert them of our presence at the same time,” she added.