- Soonmot
- Dec 19, 2002
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Entrapta fucking loves robots
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Grimey Drawer
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Still gunning for the last ceo in the galaxy to be evaporated
100% this
quote:
CHAPTER 15
“I SURFED HURRICANE TONYA BACK IN ’09.”
One minute they were skimming across copper streams and waving grass. The next minute they saw ahead of them deep, blue-green sea, foam-tipped waves, and strange statues rising up amid the waves.
Jobs and Mo’Steel reached the boundary between environments and their board fell like a stone. They plunged into icy water. Jobs tasted salt. He bobbed to the surface just in time to see the Blimp collapse with a final shudder. It
wallowed like a Macy’s Parade balloon that had been half-deflated.
Billy Weir toppled from high atop the Blimp and rolled down the side into the water. Mo’Steel swam toward him, fighting three-foot waves.
Jobs treaded water. The cold would render him numb eventually, he knew. This was not the warm, shallow sea of the Rider default environment. They had entered a new nodal zone, a new environment. And this felt like ocean — deep and cold and rough.
The Riders had all stopped at the edge of their environment. He could see them hovering, watching, frustrated, but either unable or unwilling to cross the boundary. After a while they began to turn away.
Where were all the others? Jobs saw Mo’Steel holding onto Billy, keeping his head above water, but where were the others? A horrible thought: Had they fallen off? Were they back in Rider territory?
Then a gash appeared in the back end of the droopy, sodden Blimp. Tamara appeared first, with the baby. The others piled out after her, laughing. Mo’Steel was back with an unconscious Billy in tow.
“Are they laughing?” Mo’Steel demanded, incredulous and a bit offended.
“Seems like,” Jobs said.
They plunged into the sea, one after another. But when they came up for air they weren’t laughing anymore. Billy Weir opened his red-rimmed eyes. He looked horribly weary, haggard. Mo’Steel continued to support him as the three of them made their way to the others.
“What . . .” Wylson began, then choked when she caught a mouthful of salt water.
“New environment,” Jobs said. “Mother has all these nodes, right? Back there in Rider country that was the default because we’d destroyed that node. Destroy the node and the region controlled by the node goes to its default. But now we’re in a new nodal zone, new environment.”
“The Riders dropped back,” Violet pointed out.
“I think maybe it’s a territorial thing,” Jobs suggested.
“We’re going to freeze pretty soon,” Yago said through chattering teeth.
“I saw statues or something when we were coming out of the Blimp,” 2Face said, shivering.
“Me, too, just ahead. Can we make it?” Burroway worried.
“Let’s get going,” Wylson decided. Then she hesitated, looked at the Blimp, folds of its flesh rippling in the breeze. “Is there any way we can use this thing?”
“I think we used it all it could stand,” Tate said.
Tamara, with the baby on her back, was already swimming powerfully. The rest fell in behind her, breasting the waves as well as they could. It was very quickly obvious who the strong swimmers were and who could do little more than tread water. Billy was swimming on his own, somewhat recovered, so Jobs and Mo’Steel and Tate helped the frightened Anamull and sluggish Olga.
Once clear of the Blimp, the nearest of the statues came into view. It was an amazing sight, utterly out of place. A statue of a man, all white marble. Jobs guessed that it towered close to a hundred feet above the waves. It rested on a pedestal. When the waves hit, they crashed up and over the top of the pedestal and foamed around the statue’s ankles.
“Looks familiar,” Jobs gasped between mouthfuls of water.
“It’s David,” Violet said, managing to sound amazed at his ignorance even while gargling.
“Some painting?”
“A painting? You don’t know David? Michelangelo’s David?”
“I’ve heard of Michelangelo,” Jobs said defensively.
“It’s David,” Violet sputtered. “You know, as in Goliath?”
“What’s it doing in the middle of the ocean?”
“Mother’s mixing media,” Violet said. “Painting. Sculpture. Together.”
They swam on and Jobs contemplated this fact as well as he could while dragging a nearly useless, shivering, chattering, fear-babbling Anamull along with him. Mother was mixing media? Combining images derived from the data stores on the shuttle? That couldn’t be good news. At least an environment derived from a painting might have
some internal consistency. What if she started mixing elements of painting with photography? Good lord, he didn’t want to think about some of the photos that Mother may have downloaded into her database. Human history was full of horrors captured on film.
The waves that were manageable out in the open were much less so up close to the statue’s base. A three-foot wave made an amazing impact when it was suddenly stopped by a marble wall. It was obvious to Jobs that it was going to be terribly difficult to get everyone up to the relative safety of the platform. Maybe impossible.
Jobs felt his strength beginning to ebb. The cold was like a drug. Like when he’d gone under general anesthetic to have his pancreas replaced. He felt fear like a knife in his stomach. They were going to die here, wallowing in the icy
water. Even if they managed to climb atop the platform, so what? There was no food up there, no shelter. Plenty of water, but it was all salty, deadly to drink.
Jobs released Anamull without realizing he’d done it and sank beneath the surface. It was quiet down there. Down under the surface. All those legs kicking, all those billowing garments.
He watched, as if from far away, as his own mind argued over the relative merits of just continuing to sink or trying to survive only to die later. There was something to be said for having control over the fatal moment. Everyone looked strange, disconnected from him. Just a bunch of kicking legs. They were all going to die, anyway. They didn’t deserve to survive. The human race should have died out entirely five hundred years earlier. This was just a mockery of H. sapiens.
Then his air ran out and in a panic he surged back upward. The fear adrenaline gave his muscles a temporary new lease on life. They were close to David’s pedestal, close enough to feel the way the sea surged upward as it pressed against the base. He grabbed Anamull’s shoulder. “Sorry, man.”
“We have to ride the wave in,” Mo’Steel gasped from not too far away.
“We’ll be squashed like bugs,” Burroway moaned.
“I can’t do it,” Shy Hwang cried pitifully. “I can’t even feel my legs.”
2Face swam to her father, a gesture, Jobs assumed, of filial love. He was wrong. “Dad, shut up,” 2Face snapped. “You, too, Burroway. All we get is whining from you. From both of you!”
Her father gaped, his round head like a cork on the water. Burroway looked like he was trying to gather up his dignity and deliver a stinging retort, but 2Face cut him off. “Anyone wants to die, fine, die. Not me,” she said. “I’m riding the next good wave in. If I can do it, so can the rest of you.”
“You know how to do this?” Mo’Steel asked her dubiously.
“Swim team, Mo,” 2Face said tersely. “And I surf.”
“Where, on those lame little ripples you get down in Florida?” Mo’Steel teased. “Those aren’t waves.”
“I surfed Hurricane Tonya back in ’09,” 2Face said.
Mo’Steel laughed. “All right, hermana, let’s do it together.”
The combination of 2Face’s grim determination and Mo’Steel’s devil-may-care excitement exerted a calming influence on the soggy and shivering refugees. Jobs, like all the others, found himself fascinated, able to shut out for the moment the question of his own survival. If Mo’Steel and 2Face made it, maybe they all would make it.
2Face and Mo’Steel waited, glancing over their shoulders, judging the swell, waiting, waiting, then a nod of mutual agreement. They took off, swimming hard, arm over arm, legs churning, matching speed with the onrushing wave. 2Face was almost too fast, she threatened to get ahead of the crest and slide down the slope. She pulled back, matched speed with Mo’Steel, rose on the swollen wave, and shot forward. There came the crash and thunder of thousands of gallons of water breaking green and white across the platform.
It was impossible to see anything at first. Then the wave receded and there they were, clinging to David’s marble feet. There was a bright smear of red on 2Face’s lip, washed away by the salt water draining from her hair. Mo’Steel stayed on the platform, but 2Face jumped back in to help guide the others in, one at a time.
It was a race against time. The cold was taking its toll. People stopped talking, conserving energy. Faces turned a pale blue. Hands were dead, feet might as well be amputated. By the time he was hauled aboard the platform, Jobs felt more dead than alive. He had helped others to escape, always claiming to be fine, claiming he was good. And he was at first, living on the fear of his near-surrender. But then he started losing it, losing touch not only with his body but with his mind. At some point he was no longer in this artificially created ocean, but back in Monterey, back under the buttery sunlight, warm, out in the backyard, lawn chair, soda, tunes playing . . .
Mo’Steel’s grip was like iron, fingers digging painfully into Jobs’s upper arms. “Come on, ’migo, come on, be okay now.”
Jobs returned to a consciousness only slightly warmer. He was buried within a heap of bodies, arms and legs everywhere. He was cuddled between Olga and Violet. Body heat. That was it. They were all trying to regain some warmth.
The sun helped. The sky was mostly clear except for some scattered puffs of white cloud. The sunlight helped, and the bodies packed around him helped, but then would come a wave washing over them and everyone would shiver again.
Jobs still couldn’t feel his hands, but he wanted to stand up, to see what was what. He tried to move, but realized that he was providing warmth and protection to the others as much as they were to him. No one talked. Someone was moaning. Violet’s pale face was close to his own; he was breathing her breath. Her eyes were closed. When the wave came she flinched.
Jobs twisted his stiff neck and looked up. The statue was overwhelming. The legs were like tree trunks. Despite himself, Jobs laughed. It was idiotic, an absurd place to die.
“Sail!” a voice cried. “I see a sail. More than one.”
quote:
CHAPTER 16
“IT’S A BEAUTIFUL MACHINE, BUT IT’S JUST A MACHINE.”
The ship came on, gliding, breasting the waves, its mountain of sails full. Was it heading for them, or just passing by? Was it a rescue, or just happenstance? Violet Blake hoped for rescue. Mother owed them, didn’t she? Or it?
The sea had calmed at last. The waves no longer crashed over the platform. No one was exactly dry yet and no one was likely to be dry as long as the stinging salt spray was carried on the wind. But no one was in danger of freezing any longer. The sun was out. The marble was cold but not icebox cold. If only the wind would die out, they might even achieve some degree of warmth. But then again, if the wind died, the ship would stop.
All eyes were on the ship. Mo’Steel had managed to climb to David’s knee, and he kept watch from beneath his shading hand. “I still don’t see anyone on it,” he reported.
“You know anything about this?” Jobs asked Violet, coming up behind her.
“Not really. There were an awful lot of paintings done with sailing ships and vast expanses of open ocean. Could be any of them. Mother could have downloaded a thousand paintings from our data.”
“I know that statue over there,” Jobs said.
“The Thinker?” Violet asked wearily. “I think everyone knows that statue, Jobs.”
The famous Rodin statue was about a mile off, maybe a little less. It was simply planted in the ocean. A muscular male figure bent forward, elbow on knee, chin on fist, thinking.
“See that one?” Violet pointed. “That’s called The Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer. It’s by Degas. The original’s a bit smaller.”
“It’s all pretty creepy,” Jobs said.
“I just hope the ship doesn’t run into the Dancer.”
“I don’t like Mother doing this,” Jobs muttered.
Violet didn’t ask him what he meant. She liked Jobs, but the guy was only really talkative when the subject was computers and if she got him started . . . She had no interest in computers, not even in Mother — assuming Mother really was just a computer, as Jobs plainly believed.
“How are we going to get on the ship?” Violet wondered.
Jobs shrugged. “I don’t know that we are, Miss Blake. It may not pass close enough.”
“You don’t think it’s being sent to us?”
Jobs shrugged. “Whoever or whatever Mother is, and I basically think Four Sacred Streams told the truth and she’s a computer in need of repair, she’s way over my head. I don’t know what she’s doing.”
“There are small boats on the ship,” Mo’Steel called down. Then he shinnied down. He looked at his raw hands with interest. “Must’ve lost my calluses while we were in hibernation.”
Wylson and Yago pushed closer. There was plenty of room on the platform, but the people still stayed close together for warmth.
“So? What’s your report?” Wylson demanded in the all-business voice her daughter intensely disliked.
Mo’Steel hid a smile. “Seems to be coming this way. I didn’t see anyone. But there are small boats, lifeboats —”
“Captain’s barge,” Shy Hwang interrupted. “A launch, a jolly boat, the Captain’s barge, maybe more boats.”
“Okay,” Wylson said dubiously.
“If we could get a couple of us, maybe four or five would be better, over on the ship we could maybe launch one of the small boats, use it to ferry people over,” Mo’Steel explained.
Wylson nodded. “We should send our strongest swimmers.” She nodded at Mo’Steel. “You, of course. 2Face. Yago.”
Yago snorted. “I’m not jumping back in that water. It’s freezing.”
“You’re a strong swimmer.”
“I’m needed here,” Yago said without elaborating.
Violet’s mother hesitated, like she was going to argue, then let it go with a petulant sigh.
“Tamara? One of us could hold the baby.”
“I’ll go,” Tate said quickly. “Tamara has the baby to think about. I’ll go instead.”
Tamara didn’t bother to respond, just looked bored and indifferent. Violet frowned. That was not the first time that Tate had seemed solicitous of Tamara. Was Tate trying to curry favor with Tamara?
“I can go,” Jobs said.
Mo’Steel shook his head. “No, man. You stayed too long in the drink the last go-round. You’ve paid your dues. Besides, you’re not all that great in the water.”
Jobs didn’t argue. He seemed to accept his friend’s judgment. They had an interesting relationship, Violet thought. In anything intellectual Mo’Steel deferred happily to Jobs, and in anything physically challenging Jobs did the same in reverse. Instead of a friendship based on shared interests they had a friendship based on entirely separate territories. The only thing they had in common was that they liked each other. It made Violet a little jealous. It occurred to her suddenly that she had formed no attachments to anyone here, not really. She should be close to her mother, but that was hopeless. 2Face was the right age and gender, but 2Face was much more like Wylson — they should be mother and daughter. Or father and son, she added dryly. Tate? Well, Violet hadn’t really spent any time with Tate, didn’t really know her.
“I’ll go,” Violet said, surprising herself as well as everyone else.
“That silly dress nearly drowned you the last time,” Wylson snapped.
“Yes, I know, Mother, I should be dressed like a man,” Violet muttered. She slipped out of her dress, not an easy thing since it was sopping wet. She was rewarded with the sight of Jobs staring fixedly out at the water and a horrified Mo’Steel blushing bright red.
“Oh, for crying out loud, Mo, it’s no different than a two-piece bathing suit,” Violet said.
“Uh-huh,” he said in a strangled voice.
Wylson sent her daughter a doubtful look, like she wasn’t quite sure whether she was proud or concerned. Violet gave her nothing back.
“Okay, then,” Wylson announced, “It’s Mo’Steel, 2Face, Tate, and Dallas.”
“My name is Violet,” she grated.
“Anyone know how to stop that ship and launch the boats?” Burroway wondered.
“Didn’t anyone read C.S. Forester or Patrick O’Brian?” Olga asked.
“Every word,” Shy Hwang said with a grin. “I know the names of everything. But I have no idea how to do anything.”
“It’s a machine,” Jobs said, head cocked, gazing thoughtfully at the approaching ship. “It’s a beautiful machine, but it’s just a machine.”
Mo’Steel frowned. “Yeah. Yeah. You know, maybe you should come with us, Duck. All those ropes and stuff . . .”
“I’ll try not to drown,” Jobs said.
The ship drew closer, slowly, slowly but inexorably. It was tilted over in the breeze, sails filled, ropes drawn taut supporting the three masts, rows of gun ports closed. It would not hit the Dancer. But neither would it conveniently come to a stop alongside David and allow everyone to simply hop aboard.
“I guess we better get going. We have to get in front of it,” Mo’Steel said.
Violet stared at the expanse of water and remembered the paralyzing chill. If they didn’t get aboard the ship, they would drown before they could get back. Stupid to volunteer? Probably.
“Bye,” Violet said, not looking at her mother specifically.
“Good luck, honey.”
Interesting to see Ms Blake stepping up here and always good to see pushback against Wilson.
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Mar 1, 2024 20:28
