Circle of Fate and Pain
by Elliot Bowers
Chapter 15—Another Day…
1.
This cityscape was colored with deathly quiet tones. Sunlight slanted from the city's blocky western horizon, a jagged city horizon of crumbled machine-buildings in the distance. Closer to here, the empty windows of abandoned square buildings were squares of black--some of the buildings fallen in. Wind carried faintly reddish desert sands and grit blew along the sunset-illuminated streets. There was just barely enough light to see by at this time because the shadows of the crumbling buildings were just so long and the dying light of the day was getting to be just so low. And the wind howled along abandoned streets..
Bzzt...! Flick-flicker... Eventually, some of the street lamps struggled to turn on. Many of the streetlamps had eroded internal electrical connections due to the unusual levels of sandy grit getting inside. Flick... Bzzt! Also true was how there were some nearby sources of intense radiation in the air. Bzzt-flicker!
The wind carried more of that sandy, faintly miscolored grit from the desert wastelands. It carried waves of the dusty sandy substance along cracked streets and abandoned sidewalks that crumbled in places. These sidewalks had places where there were the scattered and naked metal bodies of long-dead cyborgs. At the end of this city street was a chunk of tipped-over junk. The junk had once been a Net-man. It was all junk now.
More of that wind blew past long-abandoned shipping trucks and big fancy cars: doors opened on all the abandoned shells of vehicles. All of their tires had long since gone flat, the deflated rubber having since long been dissolved away by the toxic winds and the blowing sandy grit. That wind would have also made the opened doors of the vehicles flop a bit, but the car doors' hinges were eroded stiff with some kinds of rust. The same was true for the doors to the abandoned buildings. Flicker...?
As if unsure of things, one streetlamp next to an alleyway began flickering on. Flick... Flick... Bzzt! Sureness and strength came to the streetlamp, the light glaring downward. A faint buzz-hum came from the halogen-arc light fixture itself. Then came the distorted and static-ridden hiss-s-s-s coming from inside an abandoned car. That buzz-hum matched the sound coming from the streetlamp.
It had probably been a Motorball executive's car at some time—because only a Motorball executive could afford to make radio-dial knobs out of credit-chips. And only people with money could afford to have personally owned vehicles at all. The car's radio was somehow now working.
And the static-ridden hissing of the car's radio became louder. Mixed in with the radio-static were also faint gibberish sounds as if the radio station was struggling to come in more clearly. That radio station was barely coming in. Something else also seemed to be coming in. Something was coming. Flick-flicker...
The figure of Jack Bent staggered out of this alleyway. This curly haired man in oil-smeared tee shirt and slacks did not look to be in decent health—not at all. He held his right arm across his midsection to cover some severe bodily wounds there. In fact, there seemed to be more wounds than abdomen. As for the arm itself, his limbs were covered with blisters and open weeping wounds. Worse still was his left arm—lumpy in places with ingrown tumors, the shoulder consisting of three humps now instead of one contour. His face was pock-marked with acne on the right side. Dark fluid dribbled from a corner of his mouth.
Tumors, they were. Tumors afflicted him. Along with it went open sores that would not heal and lumps of mutated flesh. And right now, all sorts of lumps of contaminated flesh were growing in Jack Bent's body. It was his own flesh betraying him as entire chunks of a once-healthy body were now becoming lumpy and lousy with damaging growths that kept growing. Contamination and radiation made for this happening to him—especially since there was so much intense radiation in the Other place that he had been taken, abducted by those little bastards in gold-colored coveralls. The man had multiple forms of cancer in the worst possible ways.
I made it back, he thought dimly to himself, mumbling. What came out of his mouth was a sort of mumbled, "Edem ni kabb." Jack Bent could not help but mutter aloud. He was at that hazy and weak point of near-death where he just didn't care who heard.
He began to take some more steps lazily and crazily in one direction. Nope, nope... That's not the way. The man drunken and woozy with pain sort of stagger-stopped before weaving and bobbing to walk in the opposite way, his left foot going whoops and nearly making him fall into the street—not as if there were vehicles now to worry about. But hey, a person would really have to be careful. If he fell down, there would maybe not be any more getting up again. Dribbles of dark fluid drooled from his cracked lips as he went along. More of the dark fluid trickled from his abdomen.
He could just barely see how terrible things were, though suffering and pain hazed his vision with a blurry red. The suffering and troubles inside his mind and body did manage to blur his vision. It also made it very difficult for him to breathe. All the same, the awful state of this neighborhood was apparent to him. Crumbling sections of sidewalk lay in places. The buildings all around seemed abandoned, some of them fallen in. More than once, he nearly trip-stumbled over the occasional metal body part—or entire body—of a fallen cyborg. And it was this way that hear nearly stumble-bumbled over a broken Net-man.
He stopped staggering along now, standing and looking down. The silvery robot with the funny shaped head was lying on its side. That water-proof keyboard attached to its body had half of its button-keys missing--as if a cosmic jokester had been banging on it. Yet because the rubbery face was intact, Jack Bent had the hazy and vague idea that this Net-man just might still be able to listen. He needed somebody to talk to, or to listen.
"Gy-a-ach...!" he exclaimed in clearing some dark fluid from his throat. "Ach... Ach-em! H-hey there, Net-man. I guess we've both seen better days, huh? And..." Pain came over him…
It was enough pain to make him sway a little. Some of the fist-sized cancerous lumps high up on his left shoulder twitched a little. "Better...days, indeed. It's over for everything now, huh? Those little bastards in gold coveralls must have gotten everybody…! Loddy doddy, everybody! Ach..." A spinning sickening sway of dizziness made him stumble a step backwards. "Sorry Net-dude, a man has to sit down."
Then he did so, practically falling down. He gasped from the impact, some of his tumor-ridden insides jangling too harshly. Some sores on his left leg also pained him a little—the sores making that his side of his pants wet with mucous and a dark fluid from within. In fact, significant portions of his shirt were wet with pus and dark fluid as well. The dizziness in his head lessened a little. All the same, he knew that the pain would not go away until he was dead.
Something...began to appear. It was six feet tall--something sticking out of the top like antennas. And there it stood. Two arms, two legs, and it had a head with a sort of cyborg face. The longer it took for the figure to appear, the more prolonged Jack Bent's pain became. The pain was a sickening and dizzying sort that became worse still. He was feeling himself about to black out…when…the figure clarified.
The cyborg-faced figure in bunny suit became more visible than anything else. While the rest of this scenery seemed darkened and ruined, the cyborg-faced being was just about as bright as day. It was as if the thing was illuminated by light from another world. That seemed so even if the daylight of this one seemed to be dying out.
"I knew you'd show your death-mask face around here eventually," said Jack Bent. "Ach… Have yourself a good look around. Screwing around with karma… Those little freak buddies of yours, they like making things turn their way, huh? Ach!"
Indeed, the skull-like electromechanical face seemed to gleam. Chrome eyes glistened. The truth is your reality, the figure seemed to say. Its metallic voice seemed to resonate in Jack Bent's head. You can only run with the truth in the end.
"What the...Hell are you talking about!" exclaimed Jack Bent. Anger temporarily pushed aside his pain. "Your people are making all of this happen! The folks here were just barely happy enough to work hard to survive and get by in life even if they had to get their bodies replaced with hard cyborg ones. Maybe things like you have forgotten what pain is all about. Or maybe you feed off of human pain? Ach..." As if to supplement his commentary, a swath of agony lanced up the left side of his chest—left arm going numb. "Your fault!"
Your fault, seemed to say the six-foot cyborg-faced figure in bunny suit. The ball is the fault. It is now in your possession. Possession is the truth. You must carry it to the next round. Then the figure still stood there and stared with both chrome eyes looking.
"Ach! Heh, God-damned right it is," said Jack Bent. He leaned back enough in his sitting position just enough to pat his severely wounded abdomen. Beneath ripped cloth and through holes in damaged flesh, there seemed to be something hard there. "Or maybe I'll...pass the ball! Let some other poor sap do it."
Passing the goal will make for another cycle over again and again, expressed the cyborg-faced creature in the bunny suit. You can join us. We scream a lot. You need to scream as well beyond the breeze.
"Right... End up...like you! The Hell I will!" exclaimed Jack Bent. He struggled to stand. Then he did. The effort nearly made him faint. He was still able to stand on his own two feet again. "I'll tell you what. I'm not gonna kill myself. I'm instead gonna figure out how to get this out of my guy! Tell that to your freaky buddies."
The cyborg-faced man-thing in the bunny suit seemed to stare for a moment. Then something like a response seemed to come. Tell your living buddies... If there was sarcasm in the statement, there was no telling. There was little inflection or emotion in the cyborg-faced figure's comment—as if the being had no worries for life.
"What!" shouted Jack Bent. An extra gush of pain lanced his abdomen to silence him for a moment. Still, he painfully stood up. Now standing, he glared angrily at the six-foot cyborg-faced figure in bunny suit. "So you're telling me, this is now my fault? Heh... Or maybe it's your fault. You didn't appear until this started happening."
That figure's cyborg face betrayed no reaction to Jack Bent's commentary. Instead, the figure bowed its head once. The symptom and the disease are not the same. This world and yourself are both ill.
"Well, golly...! Ach! I didn't know you cared," said Jack Bent, his right arm still across his midsection. He moved the arm and looked down at it. There was a reddish blush to the skin on this limb, along with some dots of what looked like acne. But he knew that it sure as Hell wasn't an adolescent skin condition. Nope, that stuff was a sign of radiation-induced cancer--growing and spreading beneath the skin.
The same contamination that ruined his abdomen to make it a sore mess was beginning to affect his right arm as well—since he held his arm close to the source of the affliction in his own body. "Hmmph... It looks like there's no real choice, huh? Okay, Mister Six-Foot Bunny Suit, you seem to know a lot. Tell me... Ach-hem! Tell me where I can find some of my so-called buddies? It seems to me that everyone's pretty much been wrecked by whatever the Hell happened to this city."
You will find her. The girl will find you, came some kind of response. That said, the looming six-foot cyborg-faced being in bunny suit slowly raised a furry arm. The furry mitt of a hand was indicating the sidewalk behind Jack Bent.
"Ach! Yeah, thanks. And thanks for the apocalypse, freak," commented Jack Bent. He painfully turned himself around... Turning himself around was much like trying to maneuver a mutilated corpse. Every other sore and lumpy wound to his cancer-ridden felt like a miniature Hell. Every sore he could not feel only acted to sap his strength. Yet, even though his inner pain blurred his vision and gave him a Hell of a headache, he could still see someone.
There was no mistaking her slender and pretty outline from this distance: legs in short leather skirt, a mini-jacket half covering her torso, dark hair fluttering in the breeze as her slender arms swayed in rhythm to her hip-swaying walk. He half-turned back again to look for the cyborg-faced being in the bunny suit... It was gone.
2.
Moving quickly, Sieben was looking worriedly around. Her big dark eyes seemed slightly bigger than usual, open with concern. The hurried pace of her walk only made the sound of her ankle-length boots sound louder than usual as she stepped along. Other than the sound of the wind, it was just too quiet.
The replicate-girl thought, Isn't there anybody left alive? She had been walking for what seemed like hours. There used to be millions and millions of people in the city, and Tire-Wire Alley alone must have had hundreds of people around this time of day. What time of day was it, really? The sun and sunlight had been like this for a while. Still, there ought to have been more people out at this time.
But there was no one. Was there anybody still alive? From what she could see and hear, the answer seemed to be no—though there was the occasional echoing of a possibly distant voice. Wind moaned through some emptied and crumbled structures, sometimes thinking it was the moaning of people. Then she saw...something?
There was a figure—a distant view of someone standing sort of hunched over. That someone looked as if bowing, swaying a little as if drunk...or hurt. Sieben stopped for a moment to try and pick out more details. Her electronic eyes then did a slight zoom... Even so, the sunset-colored low lighting made it difficult to see things too clearly.
She then resumed walking and going closer. The replicate-girl was soon able to recognize the hunched-over figure. "Jack?" she asked aloud. "Oh my gosh... Ja-a-a-ack!" Then her quick walk became a hurried run, her legs moving easily and quickly in ripped leather skirt, her arms outstretched.
Jack Bent looked up from his staring at the sidewalk. He was not able to put up both arms to catch the hug that was coming his way. Nor could he move much. Things were even getting a little blurry... Instead, he felt a pair of slender arms in leather jacket wrap around him. Who the...?
"You're alive!" cheered Sieben, hugging Jack Bent and holding him upright at the same time. Her voice was slightly muffled in his shoulder. "Like, I thought those little jerks took you away... Took you forever and stuff! You're back!"
Jack Bent was just so glad to see someone else that he did not complain initially. The pain actually was gone for a little while. Then came the return of the ache in his midsection—where his insides were being eaten away by something radioactive. "Ach..." He wanted to say something. It instead came out as a wet and sickly cough.
Then Sieben pulled away a bit to look at him—her eyes showing concern. "Oh my gosh. You're hurt... " She stared. And the more she stared at the man, the more the extent of his physical suffering and injuries became known to her. He was a sad and awful sight for her to see, being reminded of how people with real and living bodies can suffer.
In pain and misery, the man really was a mess--misshapen lumps of flesh on a shoulder, his skin looking pockmarked in places. Something was even worse with his abdomen. There, his tee-shirt there was a dark-sodden mess, soaked with a dark fluid that resembled blood. The tee-shirt itself had some chunks missing--as did the flesh beneath it. Elsewhere on his torso, parts of his left shoulder seemed to be lumpy with some kind of infection or affliction. Of course Sieben had seen that kind of affliction in fleshies before. Those lumps were tumors.
The tumors must have been caused by radiation because parts of her body were detecting gamma ray radiation coming from the man. It was not enough radiation to get through her own electromechanical body's shielding, but it was still troubling. She looked at his abdomen; it seemed to be coming from there. But how...?
"Jack... What did those little bastards do to you?" asked Sieben, still staring at Jack Bent's abdomen. There was something inside there. What was done to him ought not be done to any fleshie, especially since human bodies are so vulnerable to all kinds of troubles.
"Ach…! Ach-hem… Heh-heh…" chuckled Jack Bent. "Funny how you call them…little bastards. Wasn't sure if everyone else did the same. But…they're just doing…their job—you know? Like some kind of mutants…following their dumb stupidity. Down…into a deep well of ignorance, they are. It's dark in the depths of ignorance. They'll never get their minds…out of reality's gutter. It's all full of emptiness that's darker than the darkness of the universe."
He's delirious, thought Sieben—taking a step back but still lightly holding onto Jack Bent's shoulders. It was one thing for physical affliction to affect the body. When the brain became affected, there was little that technology could do short of replacing it with a bio-chip. It must be a spreading of the cancer to his brain.
"Ach-hem! Hey, you're getting all quiet on me…" He blinked. "It's a little hard for me to see out one eye right now, and the other one's getting kind of funny. You still there? Or do I just think you're here? Please don't be another hallucination."
"No, no, no… I'm… Like, I'm really here," said Sieben. Now sadness was creeping into her voice. She was holding the shoulders of a fleshie who was clearly dying in one of the slowest and most painful ways a fleshie could die. It was all likely due to whatever it was in his abdomen—some kind of cancer.
"Good… Ach-hem! I've got to take you take you somewhere," he said to her. "It's not too far…far…away and away. Before I finally decide to take the ball past the goal line, you've got to get some kind of explanation. At least you deserve…that. Ach-hem! Those bastards can distort reality, but they can't distort the truth. We're going over now. Just watch out for those guys for me, okay? You ought to be able to tell when they show up… Rr-r-radiation all over the damned place just before they start to appear. Well, you rip a freakin' hole in the hole of reality, a little trouble ought to be expected. Why couldn't flan teach him that? Alright, let's boogie on over now."
"Umm… Like, okay," said Sieben. She let Jack Bent lead the way—trying to help him walk by trying to put his right arm across her own shoulders. The curly haired man in tee shirt and casual pants shrugged away and shook his head, instead preferring to keep his right arm close to his abdomen, as if he could helping his cancer-ridden and infected insides from falling out. About his abdomen...
What he said about radiation being a preliminary warning about trouble from them, that would be difficult for her to detect since Jack Bent himself was a source of contaminating radiation. Something in his abdomen giving off a steady supply of murderous cosmic radiation that would likely kill him before the bloody red light of sunset sank into the troubling night.
So where were they going? There was probably no sort of clinic that could help him at this point. And even if there were clinics, they would not be able to save his life or save his brain. Once the brain was messed up, that's the end of a person. Anyway, Sieben had the idea that there were no more clinics left after what happened to the city: crumbling buildings, a creepy sunset-colored sky, and everybody gone. Nobody could help him now. So, like, the least she could do for the poor guy was do what he wanted and keep him happy until he finally dropped over dead or some stuff like that. Poor guy...
As he kept limping along, she just listened to his declarations. Him saying, "Ach... I figured it out. We all come back after every time around. All this, it happened before as so it could happen over some more again. Kyrie traipsed into the city. You had your noggin noggled off... Sechs being whatever it is that Sechs does. Karmic inversion flap-jacks the wind and everything. Am I right or left?"
"Sure!" said Sieben, trying to make her voice sound cheerful—though it was close to creaking due to sadness. A quick tear came down her eye. She hoped Jack Bent didn't see it. Here she was, helping along a man in sickness and pain--dying. Why not help him be happy a little bit longer? He didn't have too long to live, and there was no one else left, probably no one else in the world. "So, like... You tell 'em!" she added.
"Uh-huh... And I figured out how to come back," said Jack Bent. "I didn't even have to wait around dead for the next cycle—a little more time. When I do this new deal, I'll make them pay an arm and a leg. Then I'll make them pay another arm and a leg on top of that! A pile of severed limbs!"
Please stop, thought Sieben. Now she didn't want Jack Bent to talk anymore. The poor man was already in such a sorry condition. For her to hear the man talk was a deeper reminder of the suffering within his mind. To be walking with a human being in suffering and pain was beginning to make her feel so sad inside. Then there was how all of this was happening. Even as this replicate-girl helped Jack Bent walk along, her eyes looked at this darkened and decaying city. The rest of the people must have died in the same way that this man did. A quick tear rolled down her right cheek. Yes, though a replicate, Sieben could cry real tears.
"Wa-hey!" cheered Jack Bent. "You've been awful quiet. Why, you don't want those little bastards to hear you? I'll tell you what going on in my think-works. Their mutant ears can hear all the things they want! Ach-ach-hem! We're walking, so we're walking. Do you hear us, you little...! Ach... Ach-achem-m-m!"
"N-no... It's okay," said Sieben. Even if everything was not okay, that was what she said to the curly haired man whose abdomen and body had become an infected, cancer-ridden mess. "Like, I don't feel like saying much anyway. I'll listen."
"Alrighty then... Ach-hem!" said Jack Bent. "It's no problem at all for you and me. We're all just temporary swingers in the breeze of time. Ach-hem!" A dribble of something dark trickled from the right side of his mouth. "When our time's up, we swing away. It's life, you know? Ach-ach... Then we... Ach-hem! We die, end up in the breeze! Ach-ch-ch-ach..."
Anything else that Jack Bent might have said past that point was lost in a wracking fit of coughs. Whatever source of harmful radiation there was inside of him, it was continuing to sicken him. It made it all the more painful for Sieben to carry him onward. But she would. Until he died, she would help the man do whatever it was that he wanted to do. After all, there was nothing else left to do in this city. Or maybe there was a slight hope to be had with this dying man after all. Any sort of hope in this dying city was probably worth holding onto—just as Jack Bent seemed to cling to life despite being obviously so close to death: his body and brain absolutely infected and decomposing due to radiation and the resulting cancers. Any sort of hope, a ray of hope... Yes, that would be it.
There was a slight glow of light a block away. It was the glow of bright and cheery illumination glaring out onto the sunset-darkened street. Sieben did not know exactly how, but there was something cheerily familiar and homely about that light. And there was something in that feeling as well. It really was a ray of hope in a place being darkening and dying.
"Why, there it is! Ach-hem!" said Jack Bent. "Yeah, I told you and told some more that there was something we could do. All you had to do was help me out just a little tiny bit." He nodded his head weakly. "And here we go. Don't know exactly who we'll meet, but it's us meeting somebody. It's likely somebody who can help you out, maybe."