Circle of Fate and Pain
by Elliot Bowers
Chapter 16—Death to Light and Hope
1.
The source of light was a familiar place: Mr. Okotonz's shop. The place was bright and welcoming while the rest of the cityscape was steeped in the glow of the dying daylight. Somehow, by some cosmic miracle, this storefront place had bright and hopeful incandescent light shining out from the front of his perfectly intact. It made the rest of the decaying, darkening street look even worse. Yet so much of the happy and welcoming light glowed outward onto the sidewalk that just standing here made Sieben feel a lot better.
It's... It's too good to be true, thought Sieben. It's true, is it? Sieben could just stand here in the presence of this light of hope, holding Jack Bent and with his left arm draped across her neck and shoulders. Finally, something good was happening. There was maybe a way out of all of what was becoming darkness and madness.
"Ach-hem! What are you waiting on... The end of the world again?" said Jack Bent. "Let's go boogie on in. Let us just open up yonder doorway... Ach-hem!" He began to take little steps in that direction... Then fell down.
For a moment, Sieben thought that Jack Bent had been struck by one of those little men again, making him fall. But there were no such beings around. "What's wrong!" she exclaimed. Her voice was all full of worry, her eyes wide open and looking at Jack Bent lying on the sidewalk. Then she knelt by his side. "Like, can you walk? Please...! Please tell me you're okay!"
"Ach-chem!" he coughed, shaking his head. "Ach-hem...! It's not that. Hrr-hmmp!" He nodded towards the familiar place. "You see that brightness and cheeriness over there? Something in there... I can't go in there. It's... Ach! That light's making my...stomach hurt...! "
"I don't understand," said Sieben. Still kneeling, the replicate-girl pivoted halfway around on hands and knees to look at the bright and cheerful city shop. The light pouring out from it made her feel good, even a little happy. Whatever was keeping away the darkness and decay ought to make Jack Bent feel good too—especially in his condition. "Like, this light feels good."
"Not to me it doesn't, bitch! Freakin' light's feels like it's eating up my flesh!" shouted Jack Bent. Sieben shrank back, blinking against the sudden outburst. But then Jack Bent's voice softened. "You go on inside," insisted Jack Bent.
What...? The sudden outburst was enough to make a person go into open-mouthed shock. Sieben could not believe what she just heard. "Like... Did you just...? What's wrong? Are you feeling okay? I d-d-didn't…" The shock of the words made for her taking on a stutter.
"God-damned right I said it!" snarled Jack Bent. "If I could stand up right now, I'd kick you down and make you lick my footwear for not hearing me the first time. Now, just because you're hard of hearing, I'll say it again. Get the Hell away from me, bitch, and go talk to your happy-go-lucky buddy."
A quick tear sprang from Sieben's right eye. What did she do to him--to anybody--to make him suddenly act this way? All she wanted to do was help him. Even if it seemed as if everyone else was dead, the least she could do was try and save at least one person--the best she could do. Or maybe it wasn't enough effort?
No... It was the sickness talking. The radiation was obviously affecting his brain, along with the runaway series of cancers that made his body lumpy with deformities. Yet there was no getting around how he was suddenly such a hateful person—when there was no one else for her to rely upon here. Eyes downcast in sadness, Sieben stood up and quickly turned to go towards the shiny and bright doorway of the shop.
Her eyes were still downcast as she listened to Jack Bent's hateful and painful tirade of insults and pain. "Sieben-bitch, she can't make sense of light or anything..." He was mumbling incoherently as he went away, making his slow and painful way along the sidewalk by using weak hands and weaker legs. "Ach! You're making me feel really rotten... Make that literally and figuratively. Darned cinnamon... It's always worth getting somebody darkened. You can't change the color once you're contaminated...! Oh no you can't. Dumb chip-brained bitch can't understand..."
Even with the light of hope and happiness shining on her, Sieben still felt especially terrible. The dark and terrible things that the man said hurt her inside. She wasn't a real person, but her feelings certainly were real. Please stop it, thought the replicate-girl in turning to face that doorway that goes into the shop. Just as she opened it, her ears picked up Jack Bent saying one more thing. "Elkric to everybody, bitch..."
Sieben stepped in to see the wonderfully familiar scene. First entering the shop brought her to the place at the left where customers can stand: a flat clean floor with smooth ceramic tiles. A small table The chubby bodied and metal-armed Mr. Okotonz was sitting behind the counter, sitting atop a sturdy metal stool, a book in his metal hands.
He looked up from it, put a bookmark in it. "So you came after all. Everybody else is gone already. Hmmph, I was beginning to think you'd had it, too... Hey, what's wrong?"
"It's... It's this guy I met," she said. "A guy named Jack Bent. Like, he's feeling really, really bad. And he's dying, I think. There's nothing I can do about it. And, like, he's saying all this crazy and mean stuff...!"
"Don't blame yourself," said Mr. Okotonz. "I knew that there was something radioactiveout there. Really radioactive, downright contaminated. You saw what happened to the city. Most parts of town have spots so hot with the stuff that they'd kill a fleshie in hours. Just being out there and anywhere would eventually change anything flesh or anything with a human brain! Most of my body is still flesh instead of metal. I can't go out there... No way.
"But about your friend. He's a different story, a bad story. If he's sick in the sort of way I'm thinking, then you're lucky he hasn't shouted curses at you in three extinct languages before trying to take off your head or something." Sieben's eyes went wide, putting her hands to her own neck. Memories of being destroyed still lingered. "But he's probably in the dying phase of the disease. Man, I didn't think a single person could be that contamination with radiation and still be alive—let alone walking around."
She turned to look outside. It was still everything covered with that sunset-colored glow of the dying daylight, the dying city. The view through the shop's goods display-window showed a sad view indeed. Jack Bent was lying sideways on the sidewalk and just outside view. Beyond the diseased and dying man lying on the sidewalk was the street, a street going left and right with a backdrop of crumpled and rotting buildings.
Mr. Okotonz spoke up. "Yeah, they're out there. I've been doing some thinking and think I've figured it out. You can't see them most of the time, until the levels of radiation get really high. Then you have to look out. They'll show up and try to take you away. Now that the city is that way, it's their territory. It makes you wonder if the place they come from looks like that, too."
"Like, it's still awful," said Sieben. "I still don't know what I can do about it! If things are so messed up and stuff, what can one person do about it? Like, geez! Sometimes I think to myself that I really am just a copy." She now turned from that awful view outside of abandoned and crumbled buildings bathed in sunset light. "Did you know that I'm not even supposed to exist? Some people in Zalem made me to kill my original and obey them. But then somebody changed something in my chip-brain as so I wouldn't have to be Zalem's slave, not anybody's slave Still, I'm not real. My brain is just some kinda computer chip, my body is totally robotic. I'm not even a real person. So it's like, there's nothing some thing like me can do about that stuff out there." The replicate-girl waved to the window.
Mr. Okotonz nodded. He broke eye contact with Sieben and looked straight ahead, sitting atop the steel stool and stared at the opposite wall. "I can't ask you to do anything about that. Nobody ought to be asked to try and change the world. The world is over. That's it."
That's it, thought Sieben as well. An awful feeling began to sink in, going deeper than before. "That's the end. So like, we're all dead... No great big group of heroes and cyborgs is going to come running in to save us all. The replicate-girl looked down at the floor. Then we're all gonna be taken away. Those short guys in gold-colored coveralls are gonna get us all."
"You know..." added Mr. Okotonz, looking off into the distance, "it's just a little disappointing to know that the world is going to end in my lifetime. Heh... I'm wondering if anybody ever saw this coming. Thousands of years of human civilization on this planet. Now it's a done deal. We had a pretty good run, you've gotta admit. We got around to putting some people up on other planets, made cyborgs, put those cities up in the sky.
"In the meanwhile, I'm guessing that Zalem will probably be the last holdout before radioactive hot-spots start showing up there for no reason, then those short guys will start using their machines to start changing things there too. It's like the world is being deliberately broken down, little by little. Hmmph... Yeah, maybe that's their job. Maybe those guys are like cosmic janitors or something, taking away all the broken and rotten parts of reality. They're doing a pretty good job so far. Almost nobody's left.
"There's you. And there's me too. That guy outside who was just at the window... I don't know how he's still around. But they'll probably get him, ought to be soon when they do. It looks like something got to him already." Suddenly, Mr. Okotonz's tone of voice shifted, so did his facial expression. He was staring out the window. "Wait a second. Wait...a...second! That sick guy you were with..."
"What's wrong?" asked the replicate girl. She looked in the direction that Mr. Okotonz was staring, then looked around. Hearing that tone of voice, she almost expected to see some odd things outside the window. There was nothing out there worth looking at—other than the ghetto-rotten city outside, rotten dying light from a sunset the color of pus and watery blood. Actually, it looked worse.
"When you were with him," began Mr. Okotonz, "did you notice anything in particular wrong? Was there something funny looking or wrong about his guts, looking like they were leaking something dark?" asked Mr. Okotonz. "I know he seems pretty messed up from cancer and exposure to the wrong kind of radiation. But something ought to be different about his belly... Like it was burnt and with black holes in it"
Sieben thought back… Then she nodded, standing with feet together and her arms crossed--as if fending off a sudden chill. "Yeah… That's right. Like, his stomach look really messed up."
Suddenly, Mr. Okotonz shouted, "That guy! He's the key! Hmmph..." Wink-flicker! The cyborg-man shook his head when the lights flickered--as if to shake loose a headache. "Hmmph! That felt...funny..." Then he shook his head again. Ultra-brief flashes of awful places and even more awful inhuman things played out in his mind. It was like glimpses into places beyond cracks in reality. Then he managed to clear his head long enough to look at a Geiger counter somewhere behind that counter of his. Sieben could hear the rapid ticking of the radiation-reading device. Mr. Okotonz screamed.
2.
"A-a-augh...!" came his voice, making the terrible sound until his lungs were emptied of air. Inhaling, he pointed one of his metal fingers towards the glass windows of this place, pointing even while he was collapsing out of the stool. The pot-bellied cyborg-man then lowered his arm, lowered his pointing finger, and only started screaming again... It filled this once-calm and peaceful place with noise and fear.
As Mr. Okotonz collapsed out of sight behind the shop counter, Sieben had an awful feeling of dread as to who—or what--she would see. Also true was how that circular radiation warning signal came on inside a corner of Sieben's own mind. Bzzt... Wink-flicker! The lights even flickered in response to the intense and dangerous levels of radiation now began to fill this place. Mr. Okotonz was being killed right now.
Some of the things she had seen were accompanied by radiation. What awful, sinister mutant would appear to bring misery and dark madness this time? The replicate-girl turned to look. Of course, she thought.
All sorts of problems and questions zipped through Sieben's head at the time. Some of those kinds of questions were of the sort, Oh my gosh...! What am I supposed to do? Close relatives and offspring of those questions were even more arbitrary—questions like, Why is this happening to me? How can I help Mr. Okotonz?
It was a silly question because Mr. Okotonz was likely now exposed to more than enough radiation to kill him. A brief exposure to some kinds of radiation was almost guaranteed to make for cancers of multiple varieties. And if Sieben's built-in radiationdetection systems were any good, Mr. Okotonz was exposed to enough radiation to make for the still-human parts of him being killed, death to come in. Sieben wanted to save Mr. Okotonz. Except, parts of Sieben's confusion-addled mind witnessed the appearance of something else...
It was that six-foot creature—the tall figure in the bunny suit that had a cyborg face--resembling a big furry mutant changeling of sorts. . Its articulate metal jaw was roboticized and looked capable of biting into skulls—be those skulls human, cyborg or otherwise. Sieben had that sort of impression of the six-foot creature as she stared at it. That kind of creature ate up all the birds, came a thoughtThey were all kinds of reasons and paths. It resembled a nightmare that seemed to leak out of a person's worst nightmare, or from visions of a ruined future. Whoever or what-ever it is, it was most certainly a dark thing.
Still staring at the thing in the bunny suit, Sieben thought, Who the Hell would make such a creature? Rather, or who would it benefit from its existence? She had the idea that the bunny suit actually concealed something so grotesque that a mere view of the truth beneath the furry cotton could lead to madness. The replicate-girl could actually imagine a scene in which the man-creature thing somehow fed off of madness.
Mr. Okotonz stopped screaming some time ago. Sieben didn't hear him breathing—or moving, either. And she just maybe thought of going behind the counter to get his dead body and leave this radiation-flooded place. Going with it was the thought that at least, for someone, this all was over.
It can be over for you as well. It can be all over again, came a comment from somewhere. From where, Sieben did not know. It felt as if it was echoing from somewhere, or from inside of her own head. The way that the cyborg-faced creature in bunny suit was standing, it could be coming from there. The end of the road, the end of the circuit, it is only part of the beginning. The living beginning shall return as parts of the ending when it becomes the beginning.
All the while, murderous levels of radiation continued to flood this place. Sieben rushed for the doorknob of this place. A quick dash, a quick turn, and the door was open with her rushing out of the shop. Without Mr. Okotonz, it would not be anything but just another place. And Mr. Okotonz was dead—just like so many thousands of other people. This entire city may as well be dying or dead.
Rushing out also told her that two things were also missing. The six-foot cyborg-faced entitiy was nowhere in sight: just a view of the front of the window's storefront. Also not-there was a vas Jack Bent. The man would have been right there on the sidewalk. Of course he wasn't. Foolishly, Sieben looked back the way she came and found nothing.
A sudden increase in radiation made her feel...dizzy and confused. The radiation warning symbol appeared in a corner of her mind again. "Ah-h..." came her gasp. Oh no, not again, she thought. Please, not again so soon. I can't take this... It's starting to hurt.
Something must be causing the increase in radiation, and she had a good idea as to what it was. Something was coming. They were coming. She turned around to face the door of Mr. Okotonz's shop when she heard some sounds coming from beyond it.
Now Mr. Okotonz's shop was as dead-looking as the rest of this cityscape. The once-bright and once-cheery lights were shut off, with the outdoor light fixtures now covered with rust, bulbs smashed. Whamp! A blur of motion, a slap of sound, and the front door of Mr. Okotonz's shop whipped open. Kyrie saw those short bastards in gold-colored coveralls taking Mr. Okotonz's radiation-baked corpse away. She took just one step in that direction...to stop them. The radiation became far too intense for her body's radiation shielding to handle for a little while. It was enough to make her...
Huh? What just happened? For a moment, Sieben blacked out when her body's built-in radiation shielding was temporarily overwhelmed. She was now lying on the sidewalk and looking up at the sickly and pathetic glow of the dying golden sunlight—static lines streaked across her vision. That radiation warning signal was now getting to be more prominent within her mind. Her body also now had a severe loss of power.
Turning over to lie on her abdomen, the replicate-girl used her legs to push herself weakly along the sidewalk, using her arms as well, getting herself away from the source of the radiation. She still had to try. There was no giving up. She was still alive, and her mind was still working. And as long as she was alive, there was hope. When she was feeling better and able to stand up again, the thing for her to do was to find a way to resist the radiation that made her feel so sick and weak. Then maybe she could find out where those little bastards were coming from—and find out about that cyborg-faced creature in the bunny suit.
Near the intersection of this city block, Sieben was able to snap to her feet again—standing up. Her leather skirt was a bit gritty and still had the tear up a side, and her jacket was gritty. Dusting it off, Sieben looked around. The truth is this way, came an invocation in a familiar tone.
Tone was the word because it was not exactly a voice. She heard a keening sort of sound, like some sort of sinister screeching bell-signal. When it passed, that too-familiar figure appeared—the six-foot cyborg-faced creature in bunny suit. Sieben had knowledge of TUNED agents from Zalem wearing such suits. Except, she had the strong idea that the being had its origins in Zalem.
That cyborg-faced figure in the bunny suit stared at Sieben, staring with its chromed eyes. It raised its left furry arm to point at Sieben. The ball is beyond the line now, came the declaration. Not all of the ending resembles the beginning yet.
"You crazy thing! Stop it!" screamed Sieben. She clenched her fists. "Those crazy little friends of yours are doing something really screwed up! I don't know what you are or where you came from, but I'll get you! I'll kill you and..." Another flux in radiation levels made her clutch her aching, dizzy head. "Aa-a-eigh!"
The words of the cyborg-faced creature in bunny suit resonated with metallic echoes. It has been done already, came the declaration. There has been so much done. There is so much to be done now. All that remains is you. The beginning must become here again.
Whamk! Sieben whipped herself around. Three sections of sidewalk flipped open. Out came even more of those short guys in gold-colored coveralls. "Elkric... Elkric... Elkric..." they chanted, or something like that. Armed with jagged metal bars, rusty hammers and strange motorized tools, they were gathering...to approach Sieben.
Pra-a-a, praw-w-w...! That would be the sound of the motorized tools starting up. She never heard that kind of sound before. They sounded especially powerful, those motorized things. They sounded dangerous.
Oh Hell, thought Sieben. There were just so many of the short muscular guys now. Some clusters of the short men in coveralls, they were all over the sidewalk. They were squirming and moving about in trying to stay on the concrete surface. Even more of them were starting to gather in the street, filling the street. There, they were getting ready with all kinds of power tools and bare hands. A look behind herself revealed more of the same. More and even more of those muscular troublemakers were getting ready. Then they began chanting.
"Elkric... Elkric... Elkric..." came the voices. Some of them raised power tools up into the air. "Elkric... Elkric... Elkric..." Most certainly, they were preparing themselves for some kind of massive action. Sieben was becoming both confused and annoyed with the chant in that she could not understand whatever the Hell elkric meant. Whatever it meant, it was followed by them closing in on her.