Sorry for the wait, yo. Life, it seems, has begun catching up with me. I'll update as often as I can, but future chapters may be a bit more sporadic than usual.
That said- let's get this show on the road. (Now slightly modified, for your convenience- and also because I failed to notice a GLARING FACTUAL ERROR.
You may commence the throwing of stones.)
Wall-E is © Pixar
Lenne Vescuya and Vox are © Metro.
--
Ex Machina
Chapter 10
--
It took just under two weeks for the first of the ships to arrive, during which time the people in the depths of the Absconditus's hold remained immobile and frozen in cryogenic stasis, in part due to the fact that the computer was still badly damaged and its Captain didn't know what would happen if she tried forcing a thaw command, and partly because -according to the Major- her instructions were to wait for the order to wake them up, not just go along with 'Hey! We're on Earth, everybody out of the pool'. Besides, she really had no idea how those people, most of whom were used to a lifestyle far more... comfortable... than the world as it was at present could provide, would react if she tried it.
She didn't envy the person whose job it would be to explain to them exactly what life would be like for them from now on.
There was still very little in the way of basic amenities throughout a great deal of the city at large, although the people of the Axiom (more specifically, the non-organic ones) had managed to cobble together an electrical network. The lights flickered now and again, and sometimes an entire section of the grid would fail and have to be repaired, but as the Axiom itself served as a temporary generator (what energy the ship could spare, at least), it was far more impressive an endeavor than what might have been if there had been no starliner present.
In fact, the main problem had not been electricity and warmth, but water. The reservoirs contained a sizeable amount of the liquid, but roughly ninety percent of what had been discovered was tainted in some way: either with pollution, or rust, or debris of some kind. The pipelines had fallen into such long disuse that even with purification equipment in place, actually getting liquid to come out of a tap could be a dodgy thing at best.
The dust storms were, as always, both a hassle (as the sand and grit that each storm left in its wake could clog or damage delicate equipment) and a real danger, considering the threat of suffocation to anyone caught out in one. Most of the pre-existing buildings were so old and decrepit that they didn't provide much protection from the wind, and had to be constantly maintained.
"Still," Lenne commented as she surveilled what the colonists had been doing with a critical eye, "it could be a lot worse." It could have been radioactive, was the silent conclusion to that thought, though she didn't voice it aloud. And since there weren't any imminent crises -cities rising from the sea, and the like- she opined that it was well on its way to being quite the thriving community. Which was flattering, admittedly, but there was still the matter of only one ship's worth of people being present on the face of the world.
In spite of yet another singular addition to the colony, and the revelation that many more would soon be forthcoming, life had more or less returned to something resembling normalcy in the days to come. People tried to repair the damage to city buildings and equipment, tended the spreading community garden, and WALL-E and EVE went about business as usual, compacting and stacking boxes of garbage on the city limits. It was still a sparse and not very aesthetically pleasing place, but it was much better than it had been when the Axiom had first arrived.
So Captain McCrea was not expecting to be startled out of bed in the wee hours of the morning one day, by a feeling of distinct deja vu as AUTO popped down into his quarters to inform him that his presence was needed up on the ship's bridge.
"What is it, AUTO?" he inquired, groggily, as he stepped out into the room. It had better, he thought, have been something fairly important to warrant waking him up before the first light of dawn had yet touched the eastern horizon. The AI, who instead of waiting for the Captain's arrival, was hovering intently over the control panel, glanced over at him at once, although there was a noticeable pause before the Autopilot actually answered. Just long enough of a hesitation, in fact, to cause McCrea to become far more alert. Something was up; something distinctly out of the ordinary routine.
"Sir," AUTO replied, reaching out one spoke-claw to press a blinking panel to one side in lieu of explanation.
A holographic screen popped up in response to the action, solid white except for the BnL logo in the background- and the words 'Incoming Transmission' printed across the front on bold black lettering.
"Greetings, Axiom," a voice crackled from the transmission screen. It expanded slightly, and then hissed into temporary static before reasserting itself into the picture of a ship's interior, nearly identical to that of the Axiom itself. The speaker was an olive-skinned man in his late forties, his head haloed in a mass of tight black curls. Behind him (predictably) hung the black-and-white bulk of the ship's own Autopilot. "This is Captain Madrilejos of the starship Hyperion. Requesting clearance for landing in your vicinity."
Captain McCrea had the presence of mind to not let his mouth drop open, a reaction as a result of both realizing that there was an actual person on the other end of that transmission, and that what everyone had been waiting for was finally -finally!- happening. He turned to look at AUTO, who paused the relay with a claw. "There are five other starliners currently within orbit," he informed McCrea. "Each is awaiting your permission to enter Earth's atmosphere."
Captain McCrea swallowed, his eyes huge. "My permission?" he repeated, thunderstruck.
"Affirmative." As the current leader of Earth's populace, it was up to McCrea to act as a makeshift Ground Control. While there wasn't any danger of the ships colliding with one another, and technically they could very easily have affected reentry without permission, perhaps they thought that 'requesting clearance' would be a more polite way of making their presences known. The Autopilot did not know whether these ships were the result of the transmission the Axiom had put out or whether they contained more cryogenically-frozen humans; all he knew was that there was a certain protocol to be followed in this situation.
Captain McCrea cleared his throat, then reached up and tugged his hat further down on his forehead, determination creeping onto his face. "All right, AUTO," he said, the words riding on the end of a deep, steadying breath. "I'm ready. Patch me through."
"Aye-aye, sir."
--
Captain McCrea wasn't the only one up with the dawn. At the moment, Lenne was sitting in the middle of her ship's bridge, attempting to repair the damage that had been done to Vox's original body. It was an aggravating piece of work, since she had no instruction manual and lacked most of the proper parts for the job. At least the framework wasn't half-detached from the ceiling anymore, and she'd managed to get rid of most of the scorch marks.
Her face twisted into an expression of consternation as she examined the crack in the center of it, however. That was going to be a problem: where on Earth (pardon the pun) was she going to find a proper replacement? Unlike WALL-E's method of solving technological problems, she couldn't very well salvage parts out of another ship... there wasn't one; at least one that wasn't currently in use. And while the Major did have an extensive working knowledge of robotics, she hadn't a clue how to build a lens of that caliber from scratch.
Not that it would have mattered, considering the ship was well and truly totaled in the long run, but at least it gave her something to do. Vox himself was sitting slumped in the corner, cables snaking from the back of his neck and head into the far wall. Recharging, of course, although from a human perspective he appeared to be asleep- or (to a darker mind) dead, considering the android's chest didn't move.
He didn't need to breathe; why should it?
She let out a low sigh, raised her hands to rub the sleep out of her eyes- then remembered that her hands were, yet again, covered with grease, and stopped before they actually reached her face.
Great. She would have to clean them off before...
...before...
"Captain!"
"Gaaah!" There was a resounding crash as Lenne, who had evidently nodded off, sat bolt upright at the shout. She almost immediately fell over, into a tangle of wires and equipment, nearly upsetting a container of lubricant in the process. There was something digging into the small of her back; by the feel, it was a socket wrench. "Chyort-!"
She lifted her head up to glare at Vox, who to judge from his position had been on the verge of actually shaking her awake. He seemed unperturbed by the glare she was leveling in his direction, instead shifting out of his slight crouch and pointing at the bank of flickering lights at the front of the deck. Roughly half of them were still dark, but the other half functioned perfectly well. And one very ostentatious button positioned smack in the center was blinking insistently on and off, demanding that she pay attention to it.
Lenne hauled herself to her feet with a groan- and then the realization of what the flashing signal meant hit her like a sledgehammer to the face.
Two giant strides had her standing in front of the control screens, angling her head so that she could look out through the shattered windshields up at the lightening sky. One corner of the Major's mouth curved up into a crooked half-smile that did not -quite- reach her eyes.
"Showtime."
--
'Showtime' was, in fact, a fairly apt way of putting it. The entire colony, human and non, turned out en force when the ships began descending, one after the other, from the sky. Three cruise ships like the Axiom, one carrier ship presumably containing supplies, and one that was smaller than either of the other two and which stayed in orbit the longest of all. As it happened, the cruise ships had only just arrived: the carrier ship and its smaller cousin had been in orbit for nearly three days, maintaining radio silence for some unspecified reason until Captain Madrilejos -who, as it turned out, was the pilot of the carrier- had hailed the Axiom.
It was a bizarre situation: waiting so long (so it felt) for even one ship to turn up, and then discovering, out of the blue, that there were five practically parked on the colony's doorstep. Most of the colonists didn't know what to think- should they be happy, or bewildered, or apprehensive? All three at once?
By a group consensus, it was decided that the three that had done the most for the colony (EVE, WALL-E and Captain McCrea, of course) should be the ones to greet the newcomers.
It was something of a relief, at least for the Axiom's passengers, to discover that the people on each of the cruise ships looked precisely like they did- in fact, they were more like how the colonists had been before WALL-E and EVE had upset the Axiom's daily routine. Most of them were confined to hover chairs, even the Captains... although the latter two, admittedly, did stand up for the purposes of traveling down to meet their established welcome committee.
Captain Madrilejos was somewhere in between the usual physical build of those exposed to micro-gravity and someone of Lenne's stature, though he leaned toward the former end of the equation. Unlike the Absconditus, his ship was manned by humans far more than machines, and contained mostly medical and/or scientific apparatuses.
Eventually, when all the introductions had been made, the fifth and last ship descended from the sky.
Unlike its counterparts, this ship's engines were almost silent. Its chrome exterior caught the midmorning sunlight and flung it back into the faces of its observers, forcing a great deal of them to squint or shade their eyes in order to keep watching. As previously stated, it was far more compact and understated than any of the other starcraft currently in place around the city limits; there was room inside for what could not have been more than two hundred people and assorted machines. It bore no visible title other than the numbers '01' painted on either side, and unlike the other transmissions he had presided over, Captain McCrea had not spoken to its pilot face to face: only the voice of Captain Ellison had been available to him.
It set down not far from the Axiom, as silent in landing as it had been in flight. For some moments there was no further action from the ray-shaped vessel, until -as the breathless waiting continued to drag on- there was a slight hiss from its base and the bottom opened up, allowing a ramp to descend from the aperture to the ground.
Down the ramp came a quartet of people, clearly of the same type stored in the hold of the Absconditus from their slight physiques and the fact that, rather than the simple red or blue attire worn by nearly every other human present, they instead wore loose-fitting, dark-toned clothing.
They peeled off to either side of the ship, standing in pairs, in almost militant poses of attention. None fo the four said anything, even when Captain McCrea stepped forward to offer his greetings with WALL-E and EVE. Which would have given him pause, if the silence had lasted long enough... but apparently the odd quartet were only waiting for the next passengers to make an appearance, moments later. The first was clearly the Captain of the ship: a watery-eyed man of indeterminate age, with short, spiky hair the color of straw. Those that followed after him, flanking the Captain on either side, appeared to be technicians of some sort, all of them much more relaxed and unassuming than the guards to either side of the ship.
The Captain paused a few feet in front of the delegated welcoming trio, rocked back on his heels, and took a breath, probably with the intention of saying something reassuring. He never got the chance.
Instead, there was a slight commotion from inside the ship, and a mold jostling of bodies that suggested another passenger making his way forward, elbowing aside colleagues as he went.
"Come on, come on," a distinctly masculine-sounding voice commented from within the small crowd of newly-awakened immigrants, "move over. Where's the Captain? I want to meet this guy. I want to shake his hand." He slurred his words together slightly, in a manner that suggested some type of regional dialect... though such cadences had more or less faded from humankind after years of all living on the same ship. The last few passengers on the ramp glanced back at the sound of the voice, then hastily stepped back -almost falling off said ramp in the process- to make room for the newcomer.
'There, now. That's more like it," the speaker remarked to no one in particular, brushing back his hair with one hand as he made the last few steps from starship to the ground. There was a moment of silence as the stranger blinked, owlishly, in the sudden light of the Earth morning, and then his mouth parted in a wide and friendly grin. He extended a hand toward Captain McCrea, who did not move or speak in response, apparently stunned. Indeed, the entire crowd had gone silent- those that were close enough to the last ship to actually see the passengers, at least.
"Good to meet you, Captain McCrea," the smiling, uncannily familiar man said, his smile never faltering even during speech. He grasped McCrea's limp hand and shook it vigorously, oblivious to the fact that the man he was addressing could probably have been knocked over with a feather at that moment.
"I'm Shelby Forthright."
--
AN: 'Chyort'- Russian swear word. No, I'm not translating what it means. X3
Anyway... Oh snap. XD
(Also, if you caught the obscure reference to a certain... author... in this chapter, I will love you until the end of time.)
