Old World: Chapter Three
Chapter two
Chapter three
“That should be the end of it,” Pi states, unhooking the recently-hatched computer from his work station. “See if it fits.”
I slide it on my arm, and find it just a touch too big. I say nothing, hoping he won’t notice, not that I can speak. It crushes the soft down, letting a stripe on the outer edge of my right arm stand, where the primaries will grow after I molt for the first time.
The chromataphores bleed across the carapace like on a cephalopod, forming words.
“Welcome to life, User 00000000.”
I click my teeth. That is not a valid serial number.
“Make sure it works,” Pi beams, pleased with his work. “Try something simple, like the time.”
I press the enter beneath the greeting, and find a selection of applications, one of which is a calendar wheel. Pressing it tells me it is hour fourteen, sixth lunar month of year zero. I test a few other features, news feeds, and the contact profiles of both Pi and Atrissa, pre-programed by the technician.
“Perfect,” Pi smiles again, flicking his tongue. “Without knowing your profession, the Nest won’t give you a stipend, but Brute says you can go wherever they need an extra set of hands or feet until we know what you’re for. Tell the computer when you start working and stop, and do not let Brute catch you filing for pay on leisure hours.”
I click my teeth in understanding, looking at Atrissa’s photograph in my computer. She has idea hunter coloration, layers of white and brown, and piercing golden eyes.
“She’s nice, isn’t she?” Pi asks, prompting me to close the application and cover the screen with my palm, down fluffing. “She requested your service for a few hours. You get your own rations and a stipend, she gets to make sure you’re not going to fall apart on us.”
I crest the hill, holding cloth over my mouth. It looks like snow but tastes like ash, and it blisters if it rubs the skin. It’s deep enough that I can nearly swim through it, but after watching my siblings hack black out of their lungs until it ran red, I’m in no hurry to get it close to mouth or nose. I’d follow the trees, but the ones left standing are burned and brittle.
Still, as long as there is air in the lungs, there is hope. Over this hill will be the capital city of the Empire. The Imperial Council will have an idea, a plan, recovery efforts, emergency rations. As soon as I get over this hill, I can go back for my siblings and tell them it’s over, that we’re safe. We can get Velkar medical attention for his cough. He’ll be fine. I can save him.
On the other side of the hill, the ruins still smolder. The grand redwood trees that were once the bones of the Empire lean and twist, covered in blackened soot. The massive central tree that served as the seat of the Imperial Council lies on its side, the shelters broken like cracked eggshells.
“No, no, no,” I whimper, running down the hill, sliding in the ash.
The smell of it burns my nose, burning wood and flesh. Instinctively, the smell triggers my hunger, but I know in my heart this isn’t the roasting body of a leptoceratops at my great-grandmother’s hearth.
They are frozen where they stood, blackened pillars like statues, turning in fear, crawling along the ground, reaching for salvation. Males, females, nestlings, fused to the ground or the sides of trees or hidden under rubble.
I am in the graveyard of civilization, and there are only ghosts here now.
“I’ll take you back to the medical center,” Pi says, “if you’re ready. Are you tired or sore?”
Stifling a yawn and hiding the pained shake of my legs, I toss my head in the negative and hop down from my perch.
“Good,” he replies approvingly. “Atrissa would use me for spare parts if I overworked you. Are you sure you’re feeling alright?”
I bob my head enthusiastically. I smell burning flesh and feel like I haven’t eaten in weeks, but I’m fine.
Pi doesn’t look convinced.
I like his office. It’s a little dark in here, lit mostly by the yellow-green, pulsating glow of the neural circuitry connecting the terminals to the Nest’s brain. Stools sit before each terminal, where Pi’s clanmates would ordinarily be working, and readouts on screens showing the data on the Nest and her various systems.
Troublingly, she’s weak. There are errors from every facet of her biology, from atmospheric processing to water filtration. Some of the neural circuits aren’t functioning correctly either, almost like…
Pi yawns. He’s delaying a sleep cycle because of me, which is why we have the sequester to ourselves. “Let’s get you back to Medical before Atrissa comes looking for you,” he says through the yawn, motioning to the oculus.
Pi took me through the deep paths to get here, avoiding the more open commons of the sector, stopping at intervals to plug in his computer and check for things at various levels. He must be taking time from his working hours as well as his sleep cycle to help me.
I look down at the ground. I’m small, defective, and without purpose, and now I’m taking away from others.
I follow him up the spiraled ramp into the hollow trees of the Blue Sector’s commons. The exposed nerve clusters and neural circuitry give way to smooth bark, some with healing marks where the technicians skinned them for access. The sounds of the livestock echo within the tree, trumpeting and bellowing and deep, resonate singing.
Right now, they’re probably exclusively domestic breeds, mostly food, ceratopsians of all sizes, ornithomimids for chasing, and hadrosaurs. There may be a few working breeds and companions, like fleet-footed, herding dromeosaurs or shoulder-riding scansoriopteryns for flushing out smaller prey.
For all our comforts and advancements, we are still much like our little gliding cousins. We still enjoy the chase, the taste of a fresh kill on the tongue. I remember fondly leisure hours spent with the house at the hunting fields and arenas, warm sun on the feathers and the smell of blood and adrenaline on the air.
Pain runs along my right leg, eliciting a strangled grunt, and all the muscles knot up at once, sending me toppling to the ground and landing hard on my right side.
“What was that?” Pi asks, turning on his toes, tail whipping.
It’s nothing, I want to say. I’m fine.
I grab for the smooth bark of the walls and get my left leg beneath me, but my right leg in painfully tight, locked in place and rigid, toes curled into a fist. My blood runs cold when I realize I can’t open it, and I’m helpless on the floor.
The thunder of feet is all around, kicking up dust that makes it hard to breathe. A massive foot almost lands on my head, but I roll from under it just in time. The panicked herd flees in one direction, like the flow of water, heedless of anything in their way. Trees are falling, people are being trampled, and above, the heralds of doom light up the sky.
“There we go,” Pi says kindly, pulling me up against the wall, my right leg stuck out at a strange angle. His computer is linked to mine, sharing data.
“I think it’s a muscle spasm,” he elucidates. “Atrissa is on her way to be sure.”
I look away, pretending to preen. I don’t want her to see me like this, or anyone for that matter. Bad enough that Pi has to take time away from his sleeping hours and working hours to tend to me.
“Does it hurt?” he asks, disconnecting the neural cables from his computer.
I toss my head and click my tongue in the negative, hoping he won’t notice the subtle changes in heart rate, or the way my hands wrap around the thigh to ease the muscle. A soft growl of pain, unbidden, escapes my throat, which is starting to twinge slightly.
Pi slides beside me, tail over his lap, the length of his bare feet along the floor. The spotting at his ankles is bright green with some yellow, like the primaries at his calves.
“It was a power surge,” he explains.
I look up at him quizzically, grabbing for my knee when a stab of pain passes through it.
“A power surge turned on your incubator and triggered its programming,” he continues. “There were some who voted to flush it, but Brute insisted on otherwise. He had me monitoring it to keep the immune system from taking whether to keep your or not from being removed from the ballot. Atrissa kept the incubator’s lifesigns and nutrient supply in balance.”
I click my tongue and look down at my rigid, bone-striped leg. A power surge, a cosmic mistake. A million, billion, trillion things that can happen in any particular point in time, and all it takes is one applied bit of pressure to change the paradigm completely.
Atrissa emerges around the curve of the ramp, hissing, feathers raised in territorial display.
“What did you do?” she demands of Pi, voice as cold as a glacier.
“Nothing!” he replies, hands in front of his chest, palms-out, a signal once used to show submission was honest and true, without hidden weapons. “I did what you said, walked him straight down here and we were on our way back. I even took a shortcut!”
“I heard about that,” she growls dryly, dropping to her knees beside me. “Thank you for the data, though.”
She grabs my right leg at the thigh, prompting a fluff of feathers and a weak squawk, and begins feeling the knotting all the way to my toes.
“Muscle spasm,” she murmurs. “Overtired? A relaxant should help. This might make you sleepy.”
She reaches into her medical bag and pulls out an opaque box of vegetable plastic, pulls open a slot on the side where tongs are hidden, and reaches inside. She uses the tongues to grab a large, wingless wasp, sluggish and dozy, with clear venom dripping from its tail.
My eyes widen in fear. It’s just a shot, a single sting and then the little creature’s job is done, and it is recycled into the fertilizer for the botanists. Still, nobody likes to be stung by a wasp, even a medically-bred one.
“Hey, look, a calliodromeus escaped from Veterinary,” Pi shouts suddenly, causing me to turn in his direction, his much larger, if skinny, frame pouncing on my wrists and holding me down.
A second later, he lets me go, clicking his tongue in laughter. Atrissa is removing the little insect, its stinger still embedded in my hip, beneath my blue jumpsuit, where my body with metabolize it for maximum effect. She places the wasp in a separate container, marked with the broken ribs denoting biohazard, and turns to Pi.
“Did Bleed teach you that?” she asks as I sniff the air for a wayward dromeosaur.
“Sort of,” he replies, clicking his teeth in amusement.
“He did the same thing when I twisted my ankle in the Food Riots.”
Atrissa clicks her teeth and tongue, putting her supplies away. “I saw so many in those times, I don’t rightly remember them all.”
Atrissa then drops to her knees in the position adults use to carry children and tells me to climb on. I balk silently, even as Pi help me to my feet—er, foot. I feel warm again, hiding my nose behind my arm, leaning on Pi. The last thing I want to be seen doing is being carried back into Medical like an errant child.
“Her venom’s mild,” Pi states, seizing me under the arms and placing me on her back.
Before I know what’s happening, I have my feet anchored to her hips and my hands to her shoulders. Since I’m bigger than a fledgling, she loops her tail under mine and holds either end in her hands. The bands on her fingers match the ones on her tail.
Mortified, I squirm and flail, but that just makes her hold on tighter, my leg sticking out at an awkward angle.
“Be still,” she chides. “You need to keep weight off that leg so the muscle relaxant will work.”
The two of them quietly discuss matters that effect both clans, and common interests from their similar fields. I keep quiet and listen, picturing in my head the things they are talking about.
The Nest is sick. When the others emerged from their tanks, they found very little worked. Prepared food was scarce, leading to the slaughter of livestock, which caused a spiraling shortage in animal husbandry, which led to further shortages. Pi’s clan has been working full days and nights to fix the errors, cobbling together a half-functional sector.
That’s troubling. The Nest was designed to be self-sustaining. With only a single new generation hatched, less than a year old, it shouldn’t be falling apart like this.
They emerge onto one of the round, woody patios, just below the central pillar of the medical center, at the heart of the sector, where the most vulnerable are kept. The bellow of livestock raises from the abyss below, and above the massive node of bioluminescent fungus is set to late evening.
A few faces stare as Atrissa carries me up the path and into the medical center, some whispering.
“That’s him, the one triggered by the power surge.”
“I’ve never seen eyes like that.”
“Eyes? Look at his markings. What’s he going to look like after he molts?”
I cast my gaze down to my stiff leg and Pi’s yellow feet as they move into the medical center, looking up as the oculus opens to the upper reaches. A tall figure is standing against the railing, arms crossed, leaning over the side, and watching.
His bright plumage is unmistakable, as red as blood and dark as shadow. He studies me as we enter the oculus, and I can feel the disappointment radiating from here. This is not a good time for the Nest to have stragglers.
Chapter three
“That should be the end of it,” Pi states, unhooking the recently-hatched computer from his work station. “See if it fits.”
I slide it on my arm, and find it just a touch too big. I say nothing, hoping he won’t notice, not that I can speak. It crushes the soft down, letting a stripe on the outer edge of my right arm stand, where the primaries will grow after I molt for the first time.
The chromataphores bleed across the carapace like on a cephalopod, forming words.
“Welcome to life, User 00000000.”
I click my teeth. That is not a valid serial number.
“Make sure it works,” Pi beams, pleased with his work. “Try something simple, like the time.”
I press the enter beneath the greeting, and find a selection of applications, one of which is a calendar wheel. Pressing it tells me it is hour fourteen, sixth lunar month of year zero. I test a few other features, news feeds, and the contact profiles of both Pi and Atrissa, pre-programed by the technician.
“Perfect,” Pi smiles again, flicking his tongue. “Without knowing your profession, the Nest won’t give you a stipend, but Brute says you can go wherever they need an extra set of hands or feet until we know what you’re for. Tell the computer when you start working and stop, and do not let Brute catch you filing for pay on leisure hours.”
I click my teeth in understanding, looking at Atrissa’s photograph in my computer. She has idea hunter coloration, layers of white and brown, and piercing golden eyes.
“She’s nice, isn’t she?” Pi asks, prompting me to close the application and cover the screen with my palm, down fluffing. “She requested your service for a few hours. You get your own rations and a stipend, she gets to make sure you’re not going to fall apart on us.”
I crest the hill, holding cloth over my mouth. It looks like snow but tastes like ash, and it blisters if it rubs the skin. It’s deep enough that I can nearly swim through it, but after watching my siblings hack black out of their lungs until it ran red, I’m in no hurry to get it close to mouth or nose. I’d follow the trees, but the ones left standing are burned and brittle.
Still, as long as there is air in the lungs, there is hope. Over this hill will be the capital city of the Empire. The Imperial Council will have an idea, a plan, recovery efforts, emergency rations. As soon as I get over this hill, I can go back for my siblings and tell them it’s over, that we’re safe. We can get Velkar medical attention for his cough. He’ll be fine. I can save him.
On the other side of the hill, the ruins still smolder. The grand redwood trees that were once the bones of the Empire lean and twist, covered in blackened soot. The massive central tree that served as the seat of the Imperial Council lies on its side, the shelters broken like cracked eggshells.
“No, no, no,” I whimper, running down the hill, sliding in the ash.
The smell of it burns my nose, burning wood and flesh. Instinctively, the smell triggers my hunger, but I know in my heart this isn’t the roasting body of a leptoceratops at my great-grandmother’s hearth.
They are frozen where they stood, blackened pillars like statues, turning in fear, crawling along the ground, reaching for salvation. Males, females, nestlings, fused to the ground or the sides of trees or hidden under rubble.
I am in the graveyard of civilization, and there are only ghosts here now.
“I’ll take you back to the medical center,” Pi says, “if you’re ready. Are you tired or sore?”
Stifling a yawn and hiding the pained shake of my legs, I toss my head in the negative and hop down from my perch.
“Good,” he replies approvingly. “Atrissa would use me for spare parts if I overworked you. Are you sure you’re feeling alright?”
I bob my head enthusiastically. I smell burning flesh and feel like I haven’t eaten in weeks, but I’m fine.
Pi doesn’t look convinced.
I like his office. It’s a little dark in here, lit mostly by the yellow-green, pulsating glow of the neural circuitry connecting the terminals to the Nest’s brain. Stools sit before each terminal, where Pi’s clanmates would ordinarily be working, and readouts on screens showing the data on the Nest and her various systems.
Troublingly, she’s weak. There are errors from every facet of her biology, from atmospheric processing to water filtration. Some of the neural circuits aren’t functioning correctly either, almost like…
Pi yawns. He’s delaying a sleep cycle because of me, which is why we have the sequester to ourselves. “Let’s get you back to Medical before Atrissa comes looking for you,” he says through the yawn, motioning to the oculus.
Pi took me through the deep paths to get here, avoiding the more open commons of the sector, stopping at intervals to plug in his computer and check for things at various levels. He must be taking time from his working hours as well as his sleep cycle to help me.
I look down at the ground. I’m small, defective, and without purpose, and now I’m taking away from others.
I follow him up the spiraled ramp into the hollow trees of the Blue Sector’s commons. The exposed nerve clusters and neural circuitry give way to smooth bark, some with healing marks where the technicians skinned them for access. The sounds of the livestock echo within the tree, trumpeting and bellowing and deep, resonate singing.
Right now, they’re probably exclusively domestic breeds, mostly food, ceratopsians of all sizes, ornithomimids for chasing, and hadrosaurs. There may be a few working breeds and companions, like fleet-footed, herding dromeosaurs or shoulder-riding scansoriopteryns for flushing out smaller prey.
For all our comforts and advancements, we are still much like our little gliding cousins. We still enjoy the chase, the taste of a fresh kill on the tongue. I remember fondly leisure hours spent with the house at the hunting fields and arenas, warm sun on the feathers and the smell of blood and adrenaline on the air.
Pain runs along my right leg, eliciting a strangled grunt, and all the muscles knot up at once, sending me toppling to the ground and landing hard on my right side.
“What was that?” Pi asks, turning on his toes, tail whipping.
It’s nothing, I want to say. I’m fine.
I grab for the smooth bark of the walls and get my left leg beneath me, but my right leg in painfully tight, locked in place and rigid, toes curled into a fist. My blood runs cold when I realize I can’t open it, and I’m helpless on the floor.
The thunder of feet is all around, kicking up dust that makes it hard to breathe. A massive foot almost lands on my head, but I roll from under it just in time. The panicked herd flees in one direction, like the flow of water, heedless of anything in their way. Trees are falling, people are being trampled, and above, the heralds of doom light up the sky.
“There we go,” Pi says kindly, pulling me up against the wall, my right leg stuck out at a strange angle. His computer is linked to mine, sharing data.
“I think it’s a muscle spasm,” he elucidates. “Atrissa is on her way to be sure.”
I look away, pretending to preen. I don’t want her to see me like this, or anyone for that matter. Bad enough that Pi has to take time away from his sleeping hours and working hours to tend to me.
“Does it hurt?” he asks, disconnecting the neural cables from his computer.
I toss my head and click my tongue in the negative, hoping he won’t notice the subtle changes in heart rate, or the way my hands wrap around the thigh to ease the muscle. A soft growl of pain, unbidden, escapes my throat, which is starting to twinge slightly.
Pi slides beside me, tail over his lap, the length of his bare feet along the floor. The spotting at his ankles is bright green with some yellow, like the primaries at his calves.
“It was a power surge,” he explains.
I look up at him quizzically, grabbing for my knee when a stab of pain passes through it.
“A power surge turned on your incubator and triggered its programming,” he continues. “There were some who voted to flush it, but Brute insisted on otherwise. He had me monitoring it to keep the immune system from taking whether to keep your or not from being removed from the ballot. Atrissa kept the incubator’s lifesigns and nutrient supply in balance.”
I click my tongue and look down at my rigid, bone-striped leg. A power surge, a cosmic mistake. A million, billion, trillion things that can happen in any particular point in time, and all it takes is one applied bit of pressure to change the paradigm completely.
Atrissa emerges around the curve of the ramp, hissing, feathers raised in territorial display.
“What did you do?” she demands of Pi, voice as cold as a glacier.
“Nothing!” he replies, hands in front of his chest, palms-out, a signal once used to show submission was honest and true, without hidden weapons. “I did what you said, walked him straight down here and we were on our way back. I even took a shortcut!”
“I heard about that,” she growls dryly, dropping to her knees beside me. “Thank you for the data, though.”
She grabs my right leg at the thigh, prompting a fluff of feathers and a weak squawk, and begins feeling the knotting all the way to my toes.
“Muscle spasm,” she murmurs. “Overtired? A relaxant should help. This might make you sleepy.”
She reaches into her medical bag and pulls out an opaque box of vegetable plastic, pulls open a slot on the side where tongs are hidden, and reaches inside. She uses the tongues to grab a large, wingless wasp, sluggish and dozy, with clear venom dripping from its tail.
My eyes widen in fear. It’s just a shot, a single sting and then the little creature’s job is done, and it is recycled into the fertilizer for the botanists. Still, nobody likes to be stung by a wasp, even a medically-bred one.
“Hey, look, a calliodromeus escaped from Veterinary,” Pi shouts suddenly, causing me to turn in his direction, his much larger, if skinny, frame pouncing on my wrists and holding me down.
A second later, he lets me go, clicking his tongue in laughter. Atrissa is removing the little insect, its stinger still embedded in my hip, beneath my blue jumpsuit, where my body with metabolize it for maximum effect. She places the wasp in a separate container, marked with the broken ribs denoting biohazard, and turns to Pi.
“Did Bleed teach you that?” she asks as I sniff the air for a wayward dromeosaur.
“Sort of,” he replies, clicking his teeth in amusement.
“He did the same thing when I twisted my ankle in the Food Riots.”
Atrissa clicks her teeth and tongue, putting her supplies away. “I saw so many in those times, I don’t rightly remember them all.”
Atrissa then drops to her knees in the position adults use to carry children and tells me to climb on. I balk silently, even as Pi help me to my feet—er, foot. I feel warm again, hiding my nose behind my arm, leaning on Pi. The last thing I want to be seen doing is being carried back into Medical like an errant child.
“Her venom’s mild,” Pi states, seizing me under the arms and placing me on her back.
Before I know what’s happening, I have my feet anchored to her hips and my hands to her shoulders. Since I’m bigger than a fledgling, she loops her tail under mine and holds either end in her hands. The bands on her fingers match the ones on her tail.
Mortified, I squirm and flail, but that just makes her hold on tighter, my leg sticking out at an awkward angle.
“Be still,” she chides. “You need to keep weight off that leg so the muscle relaxant will work.”
The two of them quietly discuss matters that effect both clans, and common interests from their similar fields. I keep quiet and listen, picturing in my head the things they are talking about.
The Nest is sick. When the others emerged from their tanks, they found very little worked. Prepared food was scarce, leading to the slaughter of livestock, which caused a spiraling shortage in animal husbandry, which led to further shortages. Pi’s clan has been working full days and nights to fix the errors, cobbling together a half-functional sector.
That’s troubling. The Nest was designed to be self-sustaining. With only a single new generation hatched, less than a year old, it shouldn’t be falling apart like this.
They emerge onto one of the round, woody patios, just below the central pillar of the medical center, at the heart of the sector, where the most vulnerable are kept. The bellow of livestock raises from the abyss below, and above the massive node of bioluminescent fungus is set to late evening.
A few faces stare as Atrissa carries me up the path and into the medical center, some whispering.
“That’s him, the one triggered by the power surge.”
“I’ve never seen eyes like that.”
“Eyes? Look at his markings. What’s he going to look like after he molts?”
I cast my gaze down to my stiff leg and Pi’s yellow feet as they move into the medical center, looking up as the oculus opens to the upper reaches. A tall figure is standing against the railing, arms crossed, leaning over the side, and watching.
His bright plumage is unmistakable, as red as blood and dark as shadow. He studies me as we enter the oculus, and I can feel the disappointment radiating from here. This is not a good time for the Nest to have stragglers.
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