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"Orphan Train"
Images and text COPYRIGHT
2004 TED BALDWIN
Somewhere in the last
third of the tale:
- Chapter 47
-
Meribeth and Poly had
come to an icy impasse- Ahead of them lay the surest route to Meribeth's teddy
bear, but in the immediate foreground was a clear sheet of ice covering an
enormous hole in the tunnel floor. Above them, glowing bright blue in the
darkness, the outline of the plasma river could be seen, swirling around the
ceiling. This had been some sort of air shaft in the dim past, but a plug of
crystal debris and ice filled the hole above, just
like the one below.
Unless you
looked, you wouldn't notice.
Meribeth was looking at everything now. Poly threw a rock and it came
to a noisy, sliding halt just beyond the center of the plug, then it fell as a
crack opened up in the floor. It did not look promising. The plug was very big,
wider than the saucer, so Poly would not be able to stretch over it. Behind
them was the army of the Earth, and they knew what fate awaited them in the
Government's hands.
Meribeth
thought of her mother, and the little bear she had given her. She then
remembered the bright flash and explosion - her mother's car falling from the
sky. She lowered her eyes, then looked at Poly with grim determination. "I want
my bear." They looked at each other, then at the hole, and started slowly to
cross the creaking mass. Hugging the walls, they inched across the chasm, while
small pieces of rock and ice fell into the darkness. Before they knew it, they
were on the far side of danger.
Meribeth heard a noise behind her - a slight whirring sound filling
the chamber, echoing off the sheer pink walls, seeming to come from
everywhere.. Slowly she turned and saw the blunt edge of the saucer hovering a
few yards from her. She froze instinctually - a swollen lump of fear rising in
her throat . Casually, almost carelessly, Vic stepped through the portal onto
the edge of the saucer, the ray gun in his hand - pointed straight at her.
The evil
robot stepped up behind him, glowing a menacing dark crimson in the eerie light
of the tunnel. "Apprehend her!" Rektor hissed. Vic got right to the edge of the
saucer. "Come here you!" he growled.
"To heck with you".
Meribeth snarled furiously. "You make me!" Rektor was a brighter red. "Get her
NOW. We are running out of time."
Vic blasted the
crystals on the tunnel wall next to Meribeth. Meribeth fell back and Vic smiled
as he pointed the pistol back at her.
Suddenly a little pink rock
flew across the void and hit Vic right on the side of the head. "Ow!" was about
all he had time to say before he fell off the edge of the saucer to the tunnel
floor. The ray gun clattered off of the slick crystalline surface to Meribeth.
Vic didn't look down, but he was on thin ice.
Rektor was furious. "You stupid organics are trying my patience. Come
up here now!"
Meribeth walked up to
the ray gun and grabbed it.
"HEY!"
Vic shouted.
Rektor readied himself to jump off the edge of the saucer. He pulled
himself up short when he saw the pistol.
"You know what?" Meribeth
eyed them as coldly as a nine year old could. "I've had it with both of you.
Get back on your thing and get out of here."
Rektor started
to make his little noise like gears grinding. Under control for the moment, it
was going to be bad when he finally let loose.
Vic scrambled up and
lunged at her. Her first shot went wild, under the saucer, a violent purple
blue spasm of raw naked energy - and the ice bridge gave it up. It completely
dissolved, and the whole plug fell down into the depths of blackness. Her
second shot was on target, but Vic was faster, falling backwards however, over
the edge of the pit. The blast took out the retaining wall on the other side of
the ship. Vic's fingertips could be seen slowly creeping away from the edge.
Beneath him, the debris had fallen out of sight to the bottom of the bright
pink hole. Uttering an oath, he lost his grip, and fell silently to his death,
yet some 20 minutes away.
Rektor,
momentarily distracted by Vic's sudden disappearance, realized she was still
aiming at him. He turned, just as Meribeth sat back on her haunches and let
another blast go from the gun. Rektor fell back from the force of the rays into
the portal of the saucer, then the entire ceiling of the tunnel came down on
top of it, jagged crystals and ice rushing down to smash the Robot and his ship
to oblivion.
They went the only way they could - down, disappearing into the hole
beneath them, right on top of malevolent little Vic. The whole plasma river was
now falling through the ceiling, following the robot and his saucer, as
Meribeth and Poly ran up the sides of the depression surrounding the bottomless
pit. The plasma tried in vain to reach them, a deadly, freezing slush that
lapped at their heels and splashed on their tempersuits. With the mad machine
and his organotron falling into hell, surely this was the end of their
troubles.
As Vic fell, face first, a few seconds ahead of the saucer, he
wondered about his impending death. The smooth pink glass walls of the
downshaft were becoming increasingly dark. He angled his body to the right and
flew off into the wall, at about 120 miles an hour. The ricochet propelled him
off the wall and onto the other side. "OW". He yelled this over and over for a
mile or so before he got it under control
It was
suddenly much darker, and Vic was sure he was near the bottom. Before he
realized it, he was dead. And in that moment of death, he imagined was back
inside the saucer, still falling, still without gravity. Still looking at the
damnable machine that brought him to this place, chasing this God-forsaken
little girl for some penny ante reward, and the robot was still barking orders
at him - "Wake up you fool."
Hell was not
going to be fun.
Rektor, at the same moment the second blast hit him, fell back
into the cockpit of the saucer and pulled down on the grabstik. The saucer, in
free fall, was only a few feet ahead of the mass of crystals. In the few
minutes he had to survey the situation, he exited back through the portal and
walked to the edge of the saucer, looking up at the mass overhead, the whole
kit and caboodle falling together. He could not see Vic, but knew he was there
somewhere beneath him. To get control, he'd have to flip the saucer over, but
he didn't want to get caught up in the cold, falling plasma.
Though it wouldn't hurt him, the
ship was not strong enough to survive the cold and the brittle crash at the
bottom of wherever this was leading, and he thought he still might need
transportation.
Somewhere in his head, a relay clicked. It was a small click,
because the relay was a quantum mechanical computing element roughly the size
of three germanium isotopes and some beryllium atoms.
The shaft seemed familiar to him,
but it was from a long time ago, a very long time ago. He pushed up on the
nearest crystal, effectively moving the ship down faster. As soon as he had
enough clearance, he went back inside and rolled the ship.
Now upside down, he pushed up on the drivstik and accelerated
away from the mass of debris and towards Vic, who was plainly in sight. Rektor
thought this was the way it would happen, and slowly rotated the saucer until
the portal was over Vic, accelerating enough to pass him - thereby bringing him
into the ship. He was dazed or something, but Rektor had no time to coddle this
organotron - "Wake up you fool!"....
- Chapter 47 -
The gate to the
outpost.
 
- Chapter 48 -
....The saucer had come to rest like a drain
stopper plugging the entrance to an enormous cavern. Vic lay nearly insensible
at the bottom of the cabin, his head bleeding from the force of the impact. How
long he had been out he couldn't say, but the blood had dried his hair to the
floor. He felt a chill draft waft in over the open portal in the ship, and
gurgling sounds suffused through the interior of the small cabin - his first
thought was they were sinking. On the control deck, the absorber lights were
showing red one after another. Vic couldn't imagine where they were picking up
energy from. The plasma in the lake was too impure, and the collector too small
to be effective. There it was. More power than they could ever use, at least in
his lifetime. He wondered what would happen when the dials all were red.
Vic rose, and got his legs under him,
steadying himself on the console. He knew the ship was in bad shape if the
artigrab was off, He forced his way into the lower deck, to see if Rektor was
there - he was not. He picked up the spare pistol from the wall, now the floor,
and touched the bottom of the ship He felt the cold burn into his hand. He
peered at the bottom of the hull, and listened. There were a few creaks and
groans, as the plasma forced itself around the hull, the cold chilling the
great saucer, causing the seams to contract and become more brittle.
 Radiating from the hole were giant ribs, and in the near darkness
the outline of a giant crystal engine was pointed directly at the entrance.
Scorch marks radiated away from the hole, and the crystal behemoth, immense,
warped, sat looking at Vic with malice aforethought. The catwalk stretched away
deep into the black cold void. Vic looked walked over to the edge. The sea of
plasma that they rode to this final resting place was leaking around the edge
of the ship, squirting into the air in high luminescent arcs and cascading down
into the abyss. There was no sound from the bottom of the blackness, which he
thought was odd.
Rektor continued on his way down the long arched pathway, full of
the bad feeling he had been here before. Maybe it was just echoes of dim
memories, staining the pathways and angles of his complex structure. He made a
note, like so many others he had made, to reach home and download the past few
thousand years into his storage reservoir. The thought of the huge white memory
cubes taking up ever more space clouded his thought process - it must end
someday. But when? When the universe and he had grown so old together neither
could remember the beginning? Maybe he belonged in another universe altogether
Maybe he'd scan the cordex and see if there was any direct reference to this
origin-forsaken world. - Such were the thoughts between the thoughts of a
billionth of a second between footsteps.
 Rektor no longer mused about
the disparity between his mental ability and the physical limitation of the
physics of motion. There were simply some things one could do nothing about. He
made another note to switch to classical thought mechanics - there simply was
not enough new information here to justify quantum calculations, and he hated
doing things over and over. Routine was not his strength - too impatient. Vic
on the other hand wanted less and less of this strange cavity. He shouted into
the dark, but no noise came back It was deathly quiet. The vibrations from his
yells simply went their own way. Rektor heard Vic's yells, and paid him no
heed. He did note the absence of echoes, which gave hum further pause- The
energy had to be going somewhere. This too was disturbing. What could be so
energy hungry it would use the minuscule vibrations of the air? A small relay
clicked beneath him, and he stopped, stepping to the edge of the walkway and
looking down. Rektor's flare swept the reaches of the black abyss, and he froze
on the site below him. There were the massed carcasses of tens of thousands of
units like himself, black and gray in color.
Rektor waited for a long
minute, half expecting some deathly surge of energy to break from the masses
below and find his weak spot, ending his long solitude, his lonely life.
Vic now looked to
the bottom of the abyss and the thousands of robotic carcasses, splayed in a
heap in their last quest for energy, scouring energy from gravity itself. Now
all was still. The blackness flowed around the inert forms, sucking in the
light from Vic's flare. How far down the hulks went he couldn't see, and by
what mechanism they transferred and transformed the energy of his flare was
unknown and forever unknowable to him.. It could be a mile or ten miles to the
bottom, the number of these dead yet foreboding machines uncountable. Vic felt
the chill go through him again. An unnerving, morbid sense of emptiness ate
away at his soul. "REKTOR!!!!" he shouted, but no sound came back. He thought
he heard a footstep, and wheeled around. Nothing. He was definitely getting the
creeps. He looked over the edge again. A sudden flash startled him, making him
think he saw something move. "Damn!". He waited, but nothing moved. He played
his light slowly, then quickly, and saw the flash again, light coursing off a
perfect reflector, coupled to a perfect conductor. Vic couldn't know it,
couldn't see it, wouldn't accept it if he did, but something was happening.
Inside each of the
topmost hulks, light rays entered and found receptors, harboring the energy,
adding it to the stores. Uncounted millennia passed, without a single photon
free - now the famine was over. It was not enough to power anything yet, but
food was on hand, and something knew it.
Back
at the doorway, the ship had had enough. Suddenly the power plant collapsed
under the strain of the excess energy. With an anguished roar, the power cells
let loose the accumulated plasma, exploding with the light of a small sun. The
brittle hulk of the ship was fragmented, and the pieces of the ship's cabin and
control were flung the length of the cavern, raining down on Vic and Rektor -
but the noise was muffled.
The once dormant energy nets, designed to sense any change in the
surroundings and evaluate it for food, captured the violence of the explosion
and repurposed it effortlessly. With the ship gone, nothing was left to hold
back the torrent of plasma that had pinned Rektor's ship against the portal.
Millions of gallons of high-test poured into the abyss every second - enough to
power every dead thing here for a thousand thousand years.
At the
moment of the explosion, Vic and Rektor had climbed to another level. The light
from the ship's death laid bare a stark scene before them. Arrayed in perfect
formation were thousands - no millions -of Rektors in black and gray, a
thousand or two wide and tens of thousands deep. Their armor was complete, and
they were a little taller than Rektor.
Receding into the distance above
them was an even stranger site. Five cylindrical rows of saucers stood on end,
countless ships, new, with razor sharp edges and sleek, fat, black hulls. A
giant arm had stopped midway in the task of replacing one of the ships, looking
all the world like a record changer in a jukebox - a record changer 100 stories
tall. Vic estimated there were 50 thousand of these saucers on the first
carousel alone, and the carousels disappeared into the black above them.
As the light from the vaporized ship
faded, a warmish glow began to fill the space - an orange-yellow glow snaking
its way along the bottom of the cavern. The plasma was no longer blue.
Rektor turned to
Vic and spoke to him for the first time since they arrived in this man-forsaken
outpost. "We have about thirty of your minutes".
That was all he said, as he turned
and walked toward the closest saucer. Vic watched the plasma wend its way along
the channels for a long second, the glow and shadows playing on his features,
then ran after Rektor.
Rektor called Vic over
to the edge of the ship. It was exactly the same model as Rektor's old ship,
but it was pristine, totally new. "I need to show you this." Rektor took one of
the stainless obdinum ribs lying on the floor and touched it to the knife edge
of the ship. It cut it like butter...
|
|
 Ted is developing 3-D storyboards from his original
screenplay for "Orphan Train", a sci-fi epic set in a future where machines
have overrun humans, and a small girl goes into deep space to battle robots,
armies and aliens to retrieve her only posession.
"Orphan Train" is written as live action, with animated support
to tell the visual story in a completely realistic setting.
Like
"The Matrix", or "Lord Of The Rings", this film is to be seamless between
reality and imagination.
The machine at
the refueling depot. |
|
The saucer
overheatst.
Chapter 47. The Machine at
the outpost gate. |
