Server Extant

In the city of the Kysairons, the fighting was dying down, as increasing numbers of defenders were either tagged or decided to flee, but total suppression was not possible, yet. The maze was too large, too familiar to its defenders, and there were too many tenacious and skilled fighters in Kys, experts long committed to violence for its own sake. But the P-Fed controllers, in the ships above, working their battle maps, were able to wrestle with the war beast in a way that the atomized defenders couldn’t. With the Block destroyed, they held the air completely, pouring fire down into the open street canyons, at the increasingly hit-and-run resistance. For the city’s remaining citizens, there was a debilitating feeling that the situation was passing beyond their control, and D00mcaster’s lie was offering a too-tempting excuse for many who would otherwise, even reluctantly, have fought. ’Truce! Truce!’ Blared the P-Fed war machines, from loudhailers and amplifiers, ’All citizens who wish to take the truce, put your hands in the air and make your way to the central ring.’ One by one, or in groups, clusters of Kys-1’s citizens emerged, hands up, to move, nervously, past the guns of the P-Fed tanks and soldiers, like the tributaries of a stream, becoming rivers and tangled currents of people, climbing through the passages blasted by the soldiers or pressing down the longer avenues, towards the center, where a great column of black smoke still rose above the ruins of the Block.

Given the anarchic situation, with fighting still going on, the progress was not smooth. Sometimes groups of Kysairons pretended to give up, only to turn on the P-Fed forces when they were close enough to strike, other times P-Fed soldiers gunned down surrendering citizens, unable to resist the temptation of easy targets but, increasingly, the sombre rivers of truce-takers moved towards the middle, and thickened into crowds, as the shooting dimmed to a staccato rattling and booming. Now the streets were full of silent citizens, being herded, sullenly, by wary cordons of P-Fed soldiers, who were beating down doors and barriers and finding stragglers to force before them. The press of bodies got thicker, as the population was corralled towards the center, where the Block had been, burning in its center like a great volcano, above the abyss. As it became compressed, a muttering moved through the great animal. The light was red as blood, the multiform crowd of Kysairons, in their endlessly variated bodies, bleated and protested and pressed against itself, its back to black abyss. The closing rows of P-Fed war machines pressed in, in tightening the cordon, and sealed off the side streets. There was a long moment, something of significance. Th crowd seemed to intuit, by some sympathetic telepathy, what was about to happen and a ripple of panic and rage spread through it. The P-Fed controllers in their ships, seeing the crowd surge, and sensing they had milked the most advantage of their deception, gave the order. The guns opened fire and the massacre began.

* * *

Morghain and PRod had gotten almost to the outer walls when they heard the voice of the multitude. The great beast of the city, shrieking and cursing with a thousand mouths, was being butchered.

PRod had found Morghain. It hadn’t been easy but it also hadn’t been as hard as he thought. All he’d done was follow the loudest sound of fighting, trying to keep alive as long as possible. PRod’s Id was light, he couldn’t take much damage, but he was fast, and he knew the strip. The perforated maze was now a sieve. Twice he’d been forced to pretend to surrender, walking past P-Fed forces with his hands up, only to duck into side streets when they were distracted. A dozen times he’d come close to being tagged, he’d been frequently shot at, it was hard to tell by whom, in the murk, and, several times, nearly killed by a random explosion or some collapsing structure. He worked his way towards the battle, moving past it’s residue, asking any Kysairons he encountered if they’d seen Morghain, until, against his own expectations, he’d found her.

She hadn’t been doing anything dramatic, just sitting in the lee of a wall, in the darkness cast by the long shadows of a burning building. The street was full of Kysairon and P-Fed bodies. It was a fantastically dangerous place to be. PRod could hear the enemy’s heavy units, grinding in the rubble-thick streets, just across the canyon wall. This area was conquered, and the only thing keeping either of them alive was that no K-Bee or drone had yet seen them. She seemed strangely detached, and wouldn’t answer PRod, past a simple greeting. The effect, her physical self being obscured from him by her Id, was of being in some kind of reverie or trance. He found it disconcerting, because he could not pick enough cues to intuit what she was thinking. But soon she had stood. ‘Just thinking’ she’d said, and smiled, and PRod felt relieved. ‘Let’s keep going. Want to try for the walls?’ She meant the outer ring of the city. Having no better plan, PRod agreed.

They’d met up with two dozen other fighters, in the escape and encountered and killed three P-fed skirmishing groups.

Now they stood, listening to the death-cry of the city until it fell silent. There were only seven of them left. All were glowing with pale wounds.

‘What now?’ whispered one. ‘The walls? We’re near.’

‘I just came from there’ replied a newcomer. ‘They have pick-up crews outside the city, watching for stragglers, and there’s less cover out there. I say we stay in the city and find some hole to hide in.’

‘You can do what you like’ said Morghain, ‘but I’m going out.’

‘I’ll come’ said PRod.

One of the survivors decided to join them, but the others wished them luck and turned back into the mazes. In the wide clearance field outside the walls, originally a defensive, clear-fire measure, now a trap for those trying to escape, they were fired on, escaped, chased and fired on again. Morghain shot down two Killer-Bs and the rest pulled back. Without eyes in the air, the P-Fedders lost contact and returned to their ambush points.

PRod and Morghain pressed into the broken terrain. Their companion was gone and neither one could remember seeing him die. In a long, shallow spillway, which ascended towards the rough of the sever wild, they found, by some weird destiny, the corpse of the Fat Controller. He had been hacked into roughly even slices, like a cake. His interior geometry was impressively detailed. Organs and loops of intestine sagged from his cross-sections, with immaculate soft-body simulation. Someone had taken his token, but there was no sign of his killers.

They moved on.

‘We’re gonna make it’ said Morghain. The city had subsided to a dim red glow, like a volcano after a particularly satisfying eruption. She looked back. The P-Fed armada could pound away at Kys-1 from orbit for months, plow every structure under, and yet there might be, still, unseen redoubts and fortresses under the rubble, from which defenders could emerge to harry them. But Morghain knew that was not Motor’s plan. A cim settlement would be established, tended and protected, until it was big enough to be irresistible, a cheerful, metastasizing monster that would vomit out hundreds of thousands of tireless, expendable cims, dissembling Kys-1, like ants skeletonizing a cow, and building something in its place that had no memory of the past. Everything Kys was would vanish. It was a lonely thing, to know that.

All reality is virtual, she thought.

‘You know,’ said Morghain, ’when I was a kid, my parents bought me and my sister all the presents we could ever hope for, for Christmas. No expense spared. Then, after we unwrapped them and were playing with them, they said, ‘now we are going to take all these presents and give them to the less fortunate.’ Despite our tears, they gathered them all up, and we had to drive down to some charity drop-off or other and dump them. They couldn’t get the smiles off their faces. Then they went on social media to brag to their friends about how their socially enlightened kids insisted on handing over their toys to the poor, and bask in the glory and praise of progressive parenthood. To this day, I can’t see a homeless person on the side of the street without feeling the urge to swerve and run the filthy fuck over.’

PRod remained silent.

‘They were preening, self-righteous sadists, the most disgusting people I’ve ever known. I didn’t recognize that, as a child. When you’re a kid..’ She trailed off, staring at the nighted sky. ‘When you’re a kid, you accept the world as it is and try to deal with it on the terms it sets.’

There was still fighting going on, Morghain was proud to hear, but it had dropped to isolated pops, with the loader rumble as some heavy weapon of the P-Fed dealt with nest of survivors in some hole or other. The silence was taking hold.

‘All dead,’ said Morghain. She watched the distant city and PRod watched her, dim against the glow. ‘Fuck!’ She leapt suddenly sideways. In the shadows of a stony wall, a shape, in the form of and old, ragged beggar, with a vaguely samurai movie vibe, sat with his back to the wall and a long staff resting in his folded arms. They hadn’t seen it in the gloom.

‘Just a bot’ exhaled PRod, the blood was thumping in his chest.

‘What are your words?’ it whispered, from under its wide hat.

They ignored the thing.

‘Come on’ said PRod, and they went on. They were wounded unto death, leaving the stones marked with pale, glowing pictograms of blood, which were as good as sign posts, to any pursuers they might have. They were expecting to be ambushed and hacked like the FC had been, but pressed on, unattacked, and it was only much later in the day, almost eight hours, long after the events at Motor’s tourney had been resolved, that they were finally cornered in the broken territory of Extant’s empty land and killed. In those hours, they spoke of many things.