wired, part v
(We made it! This is the last installment of my post-apocalyptic Rapunzel retelling. Not graphic, but meant for a mature audience.)
Wired, Part V
(Part I, Part II, Part III & Part IV)
She turned on me, Gothel the Mother, the Wizard, now the Hag, and her face was terrible to see, full of implacable self-righteous fury.
“I gave you chances. I gave you choices. And you betrayed me. You’re weak, even with all your modifications. Weak, like the rest of the meat.” She spat on the floor.
“Now.” She clomped into the light, crossed all my barriers, all the circles, all the thin wires running through the floor. “There are no more choices. There is just me, and my will.”
Her code. I had almost wriggled out of it; it was strong but crude and fell in strings around me. But there was more on the way. It came for me, packed into arrows, aimed straight for my heart. Ready to take me over, to serve her forevermore.
No!
I ripped free from the code, and fell. Down into darkness—would there be something to catch me?—and splash! into the sea. I wasn’t connected right, so much of my power was either taken up by my plan or taken over by Gothel. I entered the data stream all wrong—it washed over me like acid, sandpapered my skin and ran spike-fingered down my nerves.
I only had a moment, but it was enough. Had to be enough.
Gothel’s arrows fell behind me, sharked through the water. I dove deeper into the data stream. I was almost a mermaid here. I reached my own hidden place, a cavern of code. Its defenses, all suckers and teeth, pulled back as it recognized me. I reached in and slammed in the final command of my operation.
Key turned in lock. Initiation sequence.
“Stop fighting me. You can’t win. I own you.” Mother Gothel’s coat fell open, revealing that control panel at her throat and chest. Her blunt fingers skipped over the buttons, but…
… she couldn’t control me, if there was nothing to control. I surged, grabbed at my prince’s coat where it had been abandoned in his passion. My fingers found knife-hilt, my other fist clenched around my hair.
A sweep, a flash, and the high-grade electra-knife seared through all my hair at the nape of my neck. The computers shuddered, the control panel blinked, and Mother Gothel jumped from the static buzz.
Her attacking code vanished. So did the data stream. For the first time in years, I was wholly in the real world, powered by internal backups.
I staggered to my feet, threw the electra-knife straight at her. My head felt light, my neck bare. Mother Gothel ducked, but not fast enough. The knife connected and her torc exploded.
I saw her fall, then stumbled as the building juddered. The powerful engines I had built in the floors above had started.
Alarms went off. Their shrieks pulsed in one ear, buzzed in the other. I could only see with one eye, and when I touched my cheek I felt my iron bones.
Concrete cracked and the floor gave. The building had not been built to withstand such raw power. Fire bloomed, smoke spread.
I wasn’t supposed to be down here. I had to move, get out of the collapsing building and into my capsule.
I stumbled over to the dark stairwell—the lift would not work and I couldn’t trust it. Hurry, Hurry. I gasped and wheezed at the unwonted exercise but at least I was relieved of the burden of all that hair.
My hair. Cables, wires, connectors. Gone.
Steps crumbling in the dark. Air: hot heavy close. Dizzy, lightheaded. Ah, door.
I had to wrestle it open, that thick steel hatch. Vibrations ran through the metal, not of collapse, but of powering up. I’d had machines to help me, but they lay useless, no longer connected.
I fell into the ship, my ship, and managed to shut the door. Head throbbing, vision almost gone, I plugged in code manually, from memory. It took too long—something that had taken mere seconds with hair now took precious minutes.
Rockets roared to life. I scrabbled for my seatbelt, got myself strapped in. Pressure on my chest flattened me to my chair.
I blacked out.
***
When I woke up, I was in orbit. My stomach felt sick and woozy, and blood and unnamed fluids were congealed around my face. A weighty feeling pressed on me, but it seemed to shift—the gravity generator rotating, my orientation following it in little circles.
When I made it to the small porthole—I hadn’t left big windows, expecting to see everything through the external sensors–there was the curve of the earth, blue with swirl of cloud and fold of land. Not much to see of the ruin it now was.
My home no longer.
No, I had another world to go to, one that might some day be the earth-that-once-was. One that we’d tried to change, before everything imploded and the Dark fell. One that had been abandoned in the wake of the waste of our own world.
***
I touched down on the surface nine months later, bundled up in all the protection I could find. But I didn’t need it. The air was still thin and cold, compared to home, still poor in oxygen, but I was a new breed of human. I could live with it.
I walked the ruins of base camp, the empty shells of bunkers and labs. Machinery still ran, though weakly and wheezily. For all these years, it had faithfully pumped greenhouse gases into the air, had faithfully grown organisms in nutri-tubs and sent them out into the wild. Green life clung to the reddish soil, grew by the streams and rivers and lakes of meltwater.
I’d make a garden here, in the wilderness. On the red-planet-that-was-no-more, the earth-that-was-to-come.
And someday, with the organic material in my pack, the life-strands of my prince and more, I’d be mother to a new race.
© Rabia Gale, 2012. All rights reserved.
I hope you enjoyed this short story. If you like the way I break fairy tales, check out my short story collection Shattered, now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. If you’re an interested reviewer, please contact me at rabia [at] rabiagale [dot] com for a copy. Thanks!
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