Ghost in the machine

Running from something...

It's hot. Everything's shaking. She's squeezed between two people sitting astride a machine and moving fast. She can't see, but she can tell, it's one of those strange, open, four-wheeled vehicles. The insides of her thighs are rubbed raw and her jaw is sore. Her eyes are covered and arms her tied around the waist of the person in front. A man. She can tell from his smell. Her chin is on his shoulder. He hasn't washed in a long time. He's driving, and he's talking to someone.

She's been dressed in a coat and her head is covered with a bag or hood that smells as bad as the man in front. Of sand and smoke, of stale sweat and dirty hair and rancid meat, and the oil they use in their machines. It's hot and uncomfortable, but she's grateful for the protection. The sun is beating down on the top of her head and she can feel her feet slowly roasting. She feels sick. Empty.

Where is she?

Remembrance hits her like a slap in the face. The pod! She was trying to get ot her pod. Eleven minutes have passed since they pulled her out and she's already twelve and a half kilometres to the north east.

She panics and the driver, stiffens and turns, perhaps to glance behind, wary of her reaction to waking and finding herself captive. She doesn't struggle. She has no idea what to do. The man relaxes and continues driving, squeezing every last joule from the machine.

Twelve and a half kilometers from her pod.

Twelve and a half kilometers from wholeness.

She checks around herself. It's still there. The beacon, the cloud of knowledge. Its strength oscillates as they rode, its presence teasing her, like a thing alive, touching and withdrawing, always remaining just out of reach.

The driver stinks of sweat and dirt and machinery. Her face is bumping against his back and shoulders as he fights the machine, pushing it to its limit over the uneven terrain. The hit a bump and her jaw slams into the back of his arm. She tries not to, but cries out in pain. Sand crunches between her teeth and tastes blood. No bones or teeth are broken, but she tries to lift her hand to probe the damage. Again, the man stiffens, and hands from behind grip her wrist and shoulder, warning her to remain still.

Size and scent - the pungent odour of thiol - tell her the arms belong to a woman. She smelts little better than the man. Both smell of fear.

The man's talking again, raising his voice over the roar of wheels and motor and wind. He talks of things she doesn't understand. Of trenches and decoys and claymores. A reply crackles back on a listening device in his ear. She can almost hear the reply, but the interference is too strong. She realises that they do not use the beacons to speak. Their voices are carried on radio waves.

Why?

She senses anxiety in the man's reply. Some prehistoric, disassociated part of her reacts to the pheromones lacing the man and the woman's sweat and she shudders with fear, but without knowing why. She feels alone and vulnerable and very far from home. Home. Where is that, she wonders? And why is she here? What do they want with her? She has no answers. Only blank spaces in her mind. Why can't she remember?

Of one thing she's certain. Her captors' presence at the crash site was no coincidence. Their crude equipment and vehicles are of a technology visibly inferior to that used by the makers of the pods. The don't use the beacons. Maybe they don't see them. Yet they had known exactly when and where the pods were coming down.

Who were they? Who were the people from the pods?

Questions snowball, one leading to another, to dozen more. The fear, the uncertainty, the not knowing is driving her crazy. It's like an itch she can't scratch. Like ten thousand infuriating insect bites she can't reach. She needs information. She needs the beacon, and her captors are taking her away from the only means that might give her access to it. The pod is thirteen kilometers away, and counting.  

She contemplates escape for all of a nanosecond. At the speed they're going any struggle would likely cause them to crash. And, even imagining she somehow manages to gain control of the vehicle, or escape on foot, she'd then have to avoid the others, and she can hear the whine of their motors all around.

No, she realizes, she can see them, like shapes in her mind's eye, seventeen identical shapes. Deprived of her eyes, she is seeing with her ears. And the more she listens, the more she sees. Distance, speed, size, even density. It's the landscape around them. Undulating to infinity to one side. Something like a falling wall to the other.

Perhaps she should be afraid of her cators, but she isn't. She is afraid, just not of them. They don't seem to wish her harm. They saved her, and the others, from drowning. They've protected her from the sun. They haven't hurt her. Except when they hit her. But that was her fault. She knows that now. She was being disobedient. What she fears is the unknown, the void inside her, gnawing at her stomach like some hungry beast.

They ride on for an hour more at breakneck speed over a barren landscape almost devoid of detail. She's exhausted. She's hot. Sweat is running down her legs, stinging the chaffed skin of her thighs. Six of the machines have fallen behind, leaving them in a group of eleven. Each primitive motor has its own distinctive signature. She recognizes them now. She times the pings and calculates they'd made a hundred and eight kilometres. Her legs ache. Her back is damp with sweat. The exposed skin of her lower legs and feet is burning in the sun and the throb in her jaw has spread to her head. Her tongue is dry and her mouth is still full of sand. A voice warns her she's dehydrating but she keeps quiet, afraid to speak out.

Some time later, her misery is such that she asks for water.

The driver ignores her, but the woman behind releases her grip on her arms and loosens the hood.

"Drink."

A tube touches her lips. She fumbles for it and sucksd. It's not water. It's warm and salty. Perhaps some kind of electrolyte. She drinks until the tube is pulled away. Not enough to sate her thirst, but enough to swill the sand and blood from her mouth and take away its edge.

"Thank you."

There's no reply and the ride continues at breakneck pace.

Twenty-nine minutes later, the tinny voices crackle in the driver's ear. She listens, trying to cut out the high-pitched whine of the motor and the thundering wheels, and isolate words amongst their agitated cries and hissing static. When the voices stop, she senses something in the driver's movement. A tension that wasn't there before. He curses, spitting profanities and striking the machine. The wobble, but continue on their way.

The woman's grip on her arms tightens.

"What is it?"

"We're not going to make it."

"We will," says the woman. "We have to."

"No, we won't."

Behind her, the woman swivells to look behind them. The fingers of the hand gripping her arm dug into her flesh.

"How? They can't..."

The man ignores her, or doesn't hear, and speaks into his transmitter.

"Edna. Respond." The reply crackles in his ear and he gives out his orders. He must be the leader. "Use the SAM's. Hit and run. Do not engage." There's a long pause before the driver speaks again. "I know," he says. "God be with you."

The whine of the motor rises a tone and the machine surges forwards, bouncing over the terrain faster than ever. They ride on in silence, hounded by a fear that grow with each passing mile. She feels it in the tension in the driver's shoulders, in the woman's fingers cutting into her arms, and the nervous, pointless words of encouragement she whispers to herself. But most of all in the way the woman keeps twisting in the seat to look behind them. Something is coming, and it isn't good.

The continue for another half hour and then slows to a crawl. The noise and reflected shapes of the other vehicles fade as they spread out and move away and stop. Her driver turns to their left towards the wall or ridge that has accompanied them for the last hour and as they near she uses the sound of the motor to see that it is a steep slope made of the same substance as the ground beneath them. It towers above them and stretches behind and beyond as far as her ears can see. The heat and glare filtering through the hood vanish as they pass from light to the shadow of the slope. She thinks the driver intends to drive up the slope, though it is far too steep, but he skids to a halt and switches off the motor. In the silence, she is blind once more. 

"What is it?" The woman's voice is high. She is on the verge of panic. "Why have you stopped?"
"Plan C."
"What about Edna?"
"She's gone."
"Gone?"
"Dead." The man cuts the straps holding her wrists around his waist and dismounts. "They're all dead." She feels and hears him slide an object, a heavy tube of some kind, from beside her leg and moments later she hears the clicks of metal on metal as he makes adjustments to it. "There's only us now. So hide the quad in the hole and get her up there under cover."

Who is 'us', she wonders as she waits for instructions?

"Maybe we should just leave her here?"
"Leave her?" The man corns her suggestion with a snort. "What, and hope they just say thanks and go home?"
"Why not? She's the only one left."

The only what left? Her throat tightens. They must mean the others, the ones she'd seen being pulled from the pods.

"The elevator is down," says the man. "And that fire in the sky? That was the spy sats. You saw the think they'll let that go? Makes them look like they're losing control. They'll want heads. Ours."
"You're wrong. They want her. Once they get her they'll make up some story. They always do. Leave her and let's go. While there's still a chance."
The man huffs as though he finds the woman amusing.
"This is our chance. Get your stuff ready." The woman doesn't move. She's still sitting behind her, her fingers digging into her arms.
"I said, get ready."
"Please." Behind her, the woman trembles. Her grip loosens. "My kids... I-"
Footsteps come thundering towards them, the man's figure flashing in her mind's eye in perfect time with each step. He tears the woman from the back of the quad. The woman falls, almost pulling her with her.
"You think you're the only one with a family?"
"No. I-"
"We've all got someone! That's why we're here."
The woman sniffs, takes a deep breath, climbs to her feet.
"Please."
"The best chance your kids have got is for us to take out these sons of bitches."
"Edna already tried! They walked right over her! Like she wasn't there!"
"Not all of them. And they sure as hell won't walk over us."
The man thrusts something into the woman's arms. "We're prepared. She wasn't. This is where we make our stand."

A burst of static interrupts them. Another message for the man. He listens then speaks. First into his transmitter.

"Understood."

Then to the woman.

"We follow the plan, or their sacrifice will have been in vain."

Then again to his transmitter.

"Three Hummers. Twenty minutes or less. Ride the quads into the trenches and cover them. Arm the Claymores and Magnetos. Bury the emps in the kill zone around the dummies. Use everything left over. And I mean, everything. We won't get a second chance. Careful with your tracks. I don't want any in front of our position. Only the quad tracks leading in. They're not stupid. If they suspect we're not in the trenches we lose the advantage. Then pair up and spread out. At least fifty metres apart. Like we trained. Dig in and cover up with the Harry Potters. If you don't move, they can't see you. Remote fire the Magnetos. No more than a hundred metres or they'll have time to decoy and home in on your remote. And for God's sake make sure they're locked on to the rotors first! Same for the SAM. We've only got one, so make it count. The Seals will probably be in the Hummers, so if we get the Hummers we get the Seals. If they're on the ground, use whatever works for you, but take them out fast and it'll spook the Borgs. Borgs, emps and thermite. Just like we trained. Radio silence from now."

She recognizes none of the terms the man uses, but it's clear he's preparing for violence. She's afraid. Confused. Doesn't understand what's going on. 
 
"Please, what's happening?" she asks. "Why am I here?"
The blow to the back of her head takes her by surprise. Her ears ring.
"You shut the fuck up!" hisses the woman. "This is all your fault!"
"Hey!" She hears a scuffle as the man pulls the woman away. "Get it together! It's not her fault. She's just a kid. She knows even less than we do."
"We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for her."
"And you wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you. You volunteered for this."

For a moment, neither of them speak. She senses them standing facing each other. Both afraid, both angry.

"Are you with us?" asks the man. The woman made no reply. The man insists, repeating himself slowly. There is menace in his voice. "Are you with us?"
"Yes," replies the woman through gritted teeth.
"Good. You know what your orders are. If the time comes, can you do it?"

"Oh, yes," growls the woman. Without warning she grabs her arm and drags her off the seat, dropping her to the ground. "You can count on it."
"Just pray you don't have to," says the man. "Now get her up there and keep her out of sight."

She watches the man's figure strobe and fade as he strides away from them, towards the other quads. The woman leaves her standing and starts the quad.
"Don't move!" she says, then revs the motor and drives it into the slope, into what must have been the hole the man had spoken of. She's hears the motor die, then a flapping sound, like a large piece of soft material shaken open. To cover the quad, she assumes.

The woman comes back. From her footsteps she can tell she is just over half the man's weight, and only slightly taller than herself. She feels a hand grab her jacket and yank her torwards the slope. A hand in her pack pushes hard. She stumbles.
"Climb!"
Even blindfolded and barefoot, the climb presents no problem. She moves slowly, choosing carefully each foothold in the crumbling combination of rock and earth and waits at the top as the woman scrambled up behind her, puffing for breath. She arrives at the rim on hands and knees.
"Hands up."
Yuki obeys. The woman secures her wrists with a plastc cord, pushes her two steps backwards and shoves. She steps back, but the ground has vanished from beneath her feet and she falls. She hits the ground feet first but crumples into a heap and bumps her head against a wall of dirt. The echoes of her landing tell her she's in a hole. A metre deep and a metre square. It could be a grave. Fear takes her by the throat.
 
"Sit down and don't make a sound."

She obeys, and hears the woman begin to dig. The woman's going ot bury her alive.

"Please-" she begs. The woman jumps down into the hole and takes her by the throat. Her fingers hurt and she can't breathe. Their faces are so close she can smell the woman's foul breath through the hood.

"I said sit down and shut the fuck up!"

The woman climbs back out and continues digging. She's making holes. Eight of them. She's burying things in the holes and patting down the earth to hide them. Eight objects buried in a circle. Finished, the woman slaps her palms together and wipes them on her trousers and jumps back into the hole. She kicks her legs aside and fixes some kind of flexible roof over their heads. Then she sits. They are knee to knee in the dark.

After a minute, she whispers.
"Please, what's happening?"
Something hard touches her forehead. A tube. She can feel it through the hood.
"One more sound and I'll kill you now."
"I don't understand. Please, just tell-"
The woman pushs the tube, forcing the back of her head back against the wall. She pushes harder and hisses.
"Just give me an excuse, freak!"

She hugs her knees and huddles in the corner, struggling to make sense of what is going on around her. The woman hates her. She called her a freak, and yet she seems to be preparing to fight over her. Perhaps even die. Why? Who wants to take her? What is so special about her? There's so much she wants to ask and she's desperate to speak, but she keeps her mouth shut. She knows from the stress and fear in woman's voice that her first question could well be her last. She can wait for answers.

It begins without warning or fanfare. A soft hiss in the west, slowly creeping towards them. Seconds drag into minutes as she listens to the slow but relentless approach of what she assumes to be their pursuers. Soon she can distuinguish three sounds in one. Three almost silent airbourne machines approaching their position.

The woman with her has heard something. Her breathing stops as she holds her breath. She can feel the tension in their hole, smell the woman's terror. Suddenly, when the machines are almost upon them, their hiss is drowned by a hum followed by and an explosion and a wretched digital scream. One of the machines is no more.

Five soft detonations follow. Whump. Whump. Whump. Whump. Whump. Five electromagnetic pulses strike her brain like a wall of shrapnel. She screams in agony, pounding the heels of her hands into her eyes and temples to dull the pain and dim the blinding afterimages burned onto her mind's eye. The woman is on her in an instant, the tube - a weapon - to her head, her hand over her mouth, hissing in her ear.

"Shh!"

Even as the shockwaves reach them through the ground, she hears the humming and a sound like running water. Then silence. No explosions. No screams. No cries. Nothing.

Seconds pass before the pain subsides enough to allow her to think.

Is it over already, she wonders? She listens, enhancing the silence, searching for the sound of the machines. Two of them are still there, but further away and cautious now. The sound moves unpredicatably from side to side, backwards and forwards, like humming birds flitting between blooms. The woman takes away the weapon but keeps her hand pressed hard over her mouth. She can hardly breathe.

Again, without warning, another series of five explosions. Three blinding bursts of light burned onto her mind's eye, three nails driven through her brain, then two more without pulses shake the walls of their hole. A moment's silence, then a manic, eight-second burst of minor detonations. Almost ten thousand, coming from six different positions. Small weapons firing. Far away, down the slope, a man shouts.

More muffled EMP detonations. More light. More nails. The humming and the sound of running water. Then silence. Slowly, the pain dulls and the after-images fade.

She hears the hiss again. So close it's more of a growl. One of the machines is fifty metres to the south west and almost skimming the ground. It's looking for something with electronic eyes and ears. She can feel it scouring the ground with sonic pulses. It's above them now, and hovering. The canvas roof is shaking. The woman is frozen, covering in her corner. She's making a noise, as though she's being squeezed.

An explosion rocks them in their hole. The growl stutters and becomes an agonized grinding becomes a pitiful metallic wail. An eletronic cry of distress is followed by a rain of red-hot objects cascading down around them. The woman cries out in pain, kicking her in the chest as she jumps to her feet and begins to tear at her clothing. Seconds later, the earth shakes with a bone-jarring crunch.

Her ears are ringing, but she catches the sound of feet scrambling up the slope. The woman hears it too and moves quickly, pulling her from her corner and squeezing in behind her, using her body as a shield. She's too confused and afraid to move, and allows her body to relax between the woman's arms and legs. She feels a sharp pain along the side of her right thigh, like a burning blade drawn swiftly across her skin, then woman screams in rage and fear and tightens her embrace. She squeezes something clutched in her fist.

And the air around the edge of their hole turns to fire. 

She comes too three minutes and forty seven seconds after the explosion. It's pointless information, but it's there for her to see, along with a hundred other facts and figures, some that are of no use to her and others that are. Her nose is bleeding. Her thigh also, but not seriously, and not from the blast. She has first degree burns to her cheeks and lower legs, but nothing that might infect. Blister perhaps, in a few days. The force of the explosions had been directed outwards, away from the hole, and the coat and hood had protected her from more serious harm.

The woman is gone. She lies still, waiting to see of she comes back and allowing the ringing and numbness in her ears and the painful afterimages to fade. Satisfied that she's alone, she loosens the hood and pulls it off. The light is blinding. She covers her face and waits with her eyes screwed shut until she can open them without pain.

The third machine has vanished. Destroyed or withdrawn. She listens for a long time, but hears nothing and rises to her knees to began to search for something to free her hands. There's nothing but dirt and stones, and a drying bloodstain where the woman must have crawled out of the hole.

She kneels and peers over the rim and sees the sickening aftermath of the explosions. A pair of sand-coloured boots rest just a metre from her face. They're small, but she assumes they didn't belong to the woman since the toes are pointing towards the hole. They're upright and feet are still inside. Cauterized shins protrude from the tops. There is no sign of the rest of the body. No bones, no blood, no shredded clothing.

When she is sure that all is quiet she stands to look further afield. She's positioned high on the western bank of the bed of what was once a great river. Now it's no more than a mile-wide dustbowl stretching northwest to southeast as far as the eye can see. Apart from a distant column of dust kicked up by a vehicle moving away to the northeast, the only movement she sees are the inverted images of the horizon shimmering where sky becomes land and land sky, and the birds, still circling way up above.

Behind her is one of the flying machines. A Hummer the man had called it. It fell on it's side and is resting on one of its circular wings. The colours of it's dented underbelly ripple through a rainbow of tones as they struggled to adapt from the whites, greys and blues of the sky to the unfamiliar yellows, reds and ochres of its new, terrestrial background. The machine seems designed for steath, and in bright sunlight would be almost impossible to see looking up from the ground. It has no aereal predators because no such care has been taken to disguise the upper surfaces, which are emblazonned with the letters UCoA in vibrant red, yellow, blue and green, and the code 66-5 smaller in black. A large fan inside the wing is still rotating slowly, some broken part clicking against another as it turns. The other wing has been blown clean off to leave a gaping hole in the side of the machine and a clear view of its charred and melted interior.

The machine was much larger than the sound it made implied, and its internal space is easily large enough to hold half a dozen passengers. She sees no signs of life and no space for a pilot. Beneath the nose is some kind of weapon, a horizontal disk a metre in diameter and several centimetres thick seems designed to rotate at speed around its central axis. A small, smoked glass dome on the bottom holds sensors and a hole at the front as big as her thumb is the only exit she can find for whatever ammunition it is designed to fire.

Out on the riverbed lie the hidden quads. Plumes of smoke rose lazily upwards from charred and twisted piles of rubber and steel. Crimson lumps of organic material are scattered all around. Material that, not so long ago, comprised the riders of the quads. She can't tell how many, but it's way more than ten. There are other non-organic humanoid shapes for which she had no references. Some complete, some not so. Borgs or Seals, she remembers the man saying. To her right, further down the riverbed, a second flying machine, the first to be hit, lies mangled and smoking in the sand.

The far bank of the dead river is over a mile away. A thin strip of dark red. Everywhere she looks she finds nothing but a bleak, rolling wilderness of dirt, sand and rock. She listens, but hears no sound other than her own breathing. There's no wind, no movement, nothing to indicate life. Nothing but the fleeing vehicle she assumes is the woman and the birds lazily riding thermals up into the blue-grey oblivion. Were they following her, she wonders, or the carnage that follows her?

Gazing out over the desolate landscape she reaches out ot the beacons, begging for help,or advice or just acknowledgement that she exists, that she matters. The beacons are cold and silent and the emptiness returns, bringing a knot to her throat and tears to her cheeks. It's not fear, she recognizes that now. Fear comes like a fist gripping her heart, intent on shaking her into action and reminding her of everything there is to lose. But this feverish pressure growing in her chest is different. There's none of the immediacy, none of the blind, animal need to run or hide or fight. Only a relentless, internal tightening, like a vice squeezing the breath from her lungs as a melancholy voice whispering in her ear that, here and now and in this place, there is nothing to gain by flight or fight. Why resist? She's a freak with no history. She's lost and alone. She's no shelter, no food and no water and in this heat she'll last but a day. It hurts that she has no idea why any of this has happened, nor what she did to deserve it.

Her legs buckle and she crumples to the floor of the hole. She sits with her back to the wall, clutching her knees, with her face buried in her hands, rocking gently backwards and forwards. Even in the hole the beacon's omniscient chatter is there in her mind's eye, like ringing that won't go away, like an after-image burned onto her retinas so that she sees it everywhere she looks, even when her eyes are closed. It's driving her mad. She's beginning to hate it.

If only this were a dream. If only she could close her eyes and return to her pod. Make this be a dream of falling into a wasteland and wake up somewhere else with all this horror nothing but a memory. Her pod is two hundred and thirty six kilometers away. As are the other nine. What about the others? She saw at least two like herself alive. How could she be the only one still alive? Her head is starting to spin. Why did they fall? From where? Why did these strange, dirty people come for her? Who are they? What are the metallic beings out on the plain? To whom did those feet belong? Friend or foe? Did they come to help or hurt her? Why had they fought? Why had they died? What did she have that was worth such violence? What is she? A freak? In what way? How is she different? She gasps for air, unaware that she's not been breathing. The questions are spinning in her head, crying out for answers she hasn't got. Round and round, each leading to another. Her chest is tightening and her hands clenched into fists. She presses them against her head and tries to breath. It's hard, her chest is too tight. The noise in her head is too loud and she can't think. There's a voice talking too her. Cold and impassive and reeling off facts and figures about her physical state, about the environment, as if any of it mattes and all the while implying that given such unfavourable external conditions she should not panic, that she's wasting precious energy and liquid with tears and sweat and a racing heart.

Shut up, she tells it. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up!

Her arms are shaking. Her legs too. Her fingers and toes tingling, like thousands upon thousands of tiny pin-pricks. Her breathing's too fast and short, shallow gasps are all that she can manage. She knws she's in a hole, but she feels like she's floating.

She hugs her knees and squeezes, desperate to stop the shaking, to anchor herself to the ground. The melancholy is gone, replaced by something else, something hot and fervid, something that swirls around inside her like a frantic whirlwind.

Her head hurts. The voice points out she's banging the back of it against the wall. If she stops, it says, the pain will too.

Shut up!

She rocks harder. Backwards and forwards, faster and faster, her hands thumping her thighs, her head thumping against the wall.

Shut up. Shut up. Shut up!

She's dizzy, nauseous, her head spinning. She's gasping, her mouth open and her lungs bursting for air that just wont come. Her hands are around her throat, clawing at the invisible garrotte choking her. Her head's banging against the wall so hard she sees stars with each blow.

She can't stand anymore. She throws her head between her knees and screams until her throat is raw.