wired, part ii

(This is a post-apocalyptic retelling of Rapunzel. While I am never graphic, I intended this for a mature audience.)

Wired, Part II

(Part I is here)

They came for me one night, while I sat in Mother Gothel’s lab—now my lab—with my hair spread out in tentacles across the room. Vaguely I knew that things had changed in the outside world, that Mother Gothel was High Wizard now, that she was more often out of the lab than in it, that my gathering and manipulation of data had ripple effects far outside myself.

I cared for none of it. Knowledge called me, siren-like. I had drowned in it more than once, and kept going back for more. The things I had learned about the time before the Dark! About food and flowers, music and machines. About how the ancients had reached for the stars, made machines that broke away from the earth’s hold and went to prepare other worlds for men. Other machines had lain dormant in orbit for over two hundred years, and as I called to them, they woke up and told me things.

These were the secrets that Mother Gothel hungered for the most—the movement of caravans across the ravaged land, clandestine meetings in caves, buried deposits of gold. She was content with those, but I… I wanted more. And so I probed a giant hulk of a telescope that looked out towards the stars, begging it for more information.

The lights flickered. The connection I’d so painstakingly built with the telescope snapped.

The sea vanished. So did the electric currents in my hair. I had no internal batteries, no internal backups. More machine then human now, I could not move, could not even get up.

Doors crashed open far away, footsteps vibrated through sensors in the floors. The cameras showed figures, blurry and small, clad in black, carrying an array of weaponry, nonetheless deadly from being cobbled together—energy guns, grenades, even the antiquated bullet-loading rifles. My mind scrolled through its vast database of knowledge, presented me with manufacturers and model numbers, things I did not need, while I sat there, useless and afraid.

They were coming for me.

They hit the door to the lab—it did not give way to them. They shot at the locks, which only fused together stubbornly. One of them took off a power pack, hooked up a plasma torch to it. The rest pulled face-guards over their heads.

Sparks flew, metal yielded with a groan and a yawn. Then the men were inside.

Alarms shrilled, loud and useless, like hysterical women. I struggled with my prone body and succeeded in freeing one finger loose. An organic finger, my pinky, not yet a network of wires wrapped in synthetic skin. My wrist twitched, rotated just a bit—the finger stretched for a button on the keypad…

… and Mother Gothel was there, dropping from the top of the lab in a mechanized lift. Her hair whipped crazily around her face, her eyes burned. Her fingers flew along the torc at her neck, a crude metal thing of buttons and lights.

A control I had never seen. A control for things I had no knowledge of.

Robotic arms swung at the attackers, wrenching away guns, catching grenades in midair. Metal discs shot along the floor. The men tripped on them and yelled as the metal edges bit deep into their ankles.

Metal screeched as tiles slid apart on the ceiling. Small holes, angry pinched mouths, spat acid on the men below. The potent stuff ate away at their suits, their weapons, their hard poly masks. The men stumbled from the deadly shower, yanking off their dissolving masks, stripping off their gloves. Making their way towards me.

They’d be sorry they did that.

My fingertip pushed down on the key—hard.

My weapons came online, in aerosol sprays. A fine mist covered the men and lay cool on my cheeks.

Mother Gothel’s lift groaned as it rocketed up to the ceiling, hard, fast.

The biochemical agent didn’t take long to act. The men clutched their stomachs. Doubled over. Voided themselves.

The power kicked in again, releasing me from my immobility. My hair, electrified, crackled. I rose. A whiff of the agent came to my nose, irritated my lips, but it could do little damage.

I was not fully organic. Not meat, like those wretches writhing on the floor.

***

Mother Gothel took me away from the lab, bundling me and my hair into a hot damp night that smelled of burning tires. The wind blew fine ash around us as we walked into the ruined city. I had never been in so deep before, surrounded by the skeletal remains of buildings so tall they poked holes in the low-lying clouds.

I made my home on the twenty-fourth floor of a cracked concrete-and-steel shell, the broken glass from its empty windows long ground into dust.

And from that beginning grew Mother Gothel’s empire.

© Rabia Gale, 2012. All rights reserved.

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