Circle of Fate and Pain

by Elliot Bowers

Chapter 17—The Fourth Rotation

1.

Go around, to go around, to go around… It is the end of the beginning, to complete the end, to start again… It makes for an end to the beginning, a beginning of completion. The circle continues to turn again. Can the circle stop the turn? Wake up...

"You freak! Wake up!" exclaimed a young woman's voice—practically a girl's voice. "What kind of crap is this...! We're not even supposed to need sleep, don't need it! I'm starting to think that you're malfunctioning on me." This time, the voice was closer. "You wake up now...or I'll make you want to wake up. And you won't like it."

"Huh...?" exclaimed another young woman's voice, sounding very similar to the first voice. It was Vicki's voice, sounding perfectly human. It was not human, because she wasn't.

"Like… I swear!" continued the other young woman's voice. "You're starting to be the most pathetic thing in the world!"

Vicki was a gynoid: a robot designed to resemble and behave like a human female. To look at her, talking to her, there was no telling the difference between Vicki and an actual human female of the same presumed age…if one thought her to be in her late teen or early twenties. Yet that presumption was wrong: Vicki and her "sister" were created hundreds of years ago.

The same technology that went into the creation of Vicki went into the later design of Vanessa—though the technology was just slightly "improved." Well, the word "improved" meant that Vanessa's personality emulation had more simulated self-will. But later technological upgrades over the centuries meant that they were very much the same: technological upgrades that were either freely given to them or taken in the heat of troubling moments.

The ultimate upgrade of all was the prototype nanotechnology--making them immortal, invincible to the ravages and wearing of time. Both gynoids managed to have themselves infused with a small swarm of nanobots. Just as human beings had red blood cells within their circulatory fluids, Vicki and Vanessa had nano-sized robots flowing within the thin coolant tubes that ran throughout their skin and bodies. The nanobots made for the artificial girls being able to self-repair. In other words, it was "healing" and immortality. The artificial girls were able to live forever…though not technically "alive."

Right now, functioning fully well, Vicki was aware of herself lying on the floor after having had a strangely compelling, yet awful, dream. It was about short muscular men taking over Scrap Iron City. They weren't from Zalem, those short muscular men. They could have been mutants from the landscape of junk, the mountains of metal waste outside of the city. But though the dream was terrible, in it…she was more beautiful.

Beautiful… In the dream, she was more womanly and elegant. Her face was more exotic, with large dark eyes and high cheeks. Her hair was long, silky and dark--instead of the fluffy stuff she had now. Her body was more of a dancer's physique: longer legs, more defined abdomen and slender arms. But though that, her body was made of metal parts in her dream.

But why dream that? Her body was entirely made of synthetic flesh: myogel muscle-tissue over titanium skeleton, covered with synthetic skin, her internal components powered by fusion. She was glad to be a gynoid: an incarnation that has almost all the abilities, agility and power of a metal-type body typical of cyborgs, yet she retaining a human appearance. Instead of heeding her sister's calls, Vicki just laid here and wondered about her dream. She could lie here on the concrete floor for days. When one has lived for centuries, days can be like minutes…

"I sa-a-aid… Get up! That's it, you're gonna wake up! Right now!" came Vanessa's voice. There was the feeling of Vanessa's thighs grasping her hips, a buttocks weighing down on her. So astride her own sister, it was a deliberately provocative position. Vicki's sister cared little for human notions of decency—preferring to do her own thing and flaunting human manners. Vanessa then began to move in a vaguely obscene way. "I know how much this bothers you! Aren't you getting up yet? Come o-o-n!"

Then came another tactic. Vanessa would "strangle" her sister. She slid her fingers around Vicki's neck. Thumbs pressed her throat—the ridged plastic tube beneath the skin at the front of her neck. Vanessa was closing off Vicki's flow of air.

A gynoid did not "need" to breathe. It was because a gynoid--a synthetic female--was not alive. However, inhaling and exhaling air helped keep their internal components cool much as computers of long ago needed air-fans flowing within. "Breathing" was also necessary to pass air through the throat for the sake of speaking.

Vicki still did not move; her internal components were not becoming especially heated. She lie there for some minutes even with Vanessa squeezing her throat shut. Only when slight overheat caution signs came on at the back of her mind did Vicki open her eyes and begin to stir. She could not speak with her throat being squeezed so. Yet the look in her eyes was that of pleading.

Looking up into Vanessa's face was exactly like looking at herself. Of course, it was the very same as her own face. Both artificial girls had the same round and cute sort of face, lightly tinged pale complexion to their skin. There was a slight cinnamon-tinge of blush to their cheeks. And the hair radiating from their scalps was fluffy dark brown—like dark wood, but soft as wool. They also had the bodies to match the beauty of their faces, lithe graceful-looking bodies that would always be slender and lean, artificially so. As a rule, they both wore the same outfits, clothes that seemed to fit every century thus far: tight-fitting jeans clinging to legs and thighs, short shirt-tops that exposed their flat abdomens, along with old-fashioned biker-boots fitting their calves, while open leather over their shoulders and backs completed their outfits.

It was like looking at herself, strangling herself. Vicki used infrared emitters within her eyes to transmit a binary message to Vanessa's eyes. She was able to speak directly to Vanessa's computer-mind without using her voice. Please stop it. I really don't like fighting.

"Oh okay, you big baby," complained Vanessa. She took her hands away from Vicki's neck. Still, she did not stop sitting astride Vicki. Her thighs still grasped Vicki's hips to hold her in place on the floor. Vicki was going to listen, like it or not. "We don't even need sleep. Pretending to be human and fooling yourself into thinking yourself human are two different things. Really, you're my sister—my fellow robotic sister—and I love you more than I'd like any of those meat-bag humans or glob-brained cyborgs. But, like… You've gotta kick that whole bit of human thinking!"

"But I was just so tired," complained the first artificial girl. "I couldn't help it. We've been doing nothing but doing stuff, going places and parties and night clubs… Then I began to fall into a dream."

"Now you've gone ahead and told me a lie!" complained Vannessa, hands on her hips. She then used her thighs to give Vicki's hips an annoyed squeeze. "We've both got the same hardware for brains, and I don't dream—because we…don't…need…sleep! Only sloppy human brains need to sleep! Now you're telling me that you can dream too? I suppose next you'll tell me that you'd like to get yourself a big silly human to make out with you every night—a male or a female. Some of our nights at the clubs, some of 'em have been scoping you out.

"Then again, you've always been such a 'good girl' that most anything fun is not fun to you. I'm starting to think you're one of those replicates. What happened to my sister? What's wrong with you, Vicki? Tell you one thing: You're starting to edge out my subroutines for tolerance."

"No, wait..." said Vicki. "The dream was just so…real. Something bad was happening, like a big warning. We were in this part of the city... Except it wasn't really this city. It was different. All the buildings were the same or looked the same. It was actually another place. In that other place, I was somebody else in that place--a replicate made by some people from that floating city.

"There was an army of deformed mutants coming after me. Some of them had weird power tools. Then something started happening to the air. They were messing up the sky, too. Everything was getting broken down and replaced because somebody else made it past a goal in life. Some of them were talking about Motorball... They were trying to make the light of day start dying until it was like where they came from. Those short guys got me with power tools. But I hurt a lot of them before they took me away."

"Like, that make no kind of sense!" declared an impatient Vanessa. She then leaned down until her lips were kissingly close to Vicki's—her sister's plastic-smelling breath blowing past lips and cheeks. Her arms were straight, palms to the floor to flank Vicki's head. "Ya know, I think your processors are malfunctioning. I know how you love the humans, cyborgs and all... But now you're getting to like 'em so much that your thought processes are getting screwed. How about if I induced a manual reset?" Her lips still close to Vicki's, Vanessa's arms blurred back for a second. Fwick! Two sharp switchblades appeared, both hands.

Vicki's eyes went wide. Vanessa was glad to see that this latest threat was finally getting something out of her sister. "Yeah... It'd be really easy to make your body fix your thought processors. Just hold still while I stick this through you eye-sockets… When your nanos rebuild the microchip array in your head, you'll be back to normal. Of course, you'll maybe forget the past twenty years or so, but at least you'll be fixed."

"No-o-o! Stop it!' shrieked Vicki, squirming and struggling. Yet her own hips were still in the clamping hold of Vanessa's thighs. But the effort was not met with success. Both artificial girls had the same synthetic strength level—both of them with myogel muscle tissue was twenty times stronger than human. Still, Vicki shoved, hands pushing up at Vanessa's shoulders.

"Okay, already! Spoil-sport..." complained Vanessa as she was being shoved. She then got off of her sister. Fwick! Blur-quick, Vanessa made both switchblades disappear—maybe somewhere into her jacket. She stood and took a step back. "You gonna lay there all day or what? I wanna do something cool and violent today."

As Vicki sat up on the concrete floor, words came out of her own mouth before she could stop herself. "Um... Like, there's a guy out there who's head is worth some money. He's done a lot of crimes. Except I don't think the Netmen officially posted the bounty yet. We could get him for some easy cash." What am I saying? "He's a fleshie, easy to get."

If Vicki was surprised at her own words, then Vanessa was more so. "Ooh...!" said her twin sister. "Am I hearing you right?" The other artificial girl tilted her head to the right, then put a hand to her right ear as if more carefully listening to something. "Did I just hear my own sister finally decide to take some kind of violent actionagainst a human?"

Vicki said nothing. She should have said something at the moment. But, it was one of those moments. It was one of those moments all full of hesitancy. And the more she hesitated, the harder it came to actually say something. It was most usually Vicki who was the peacemaker and pacifist. She was usually the one who sometimes held back her sister and prevented the occasional confrontation with the various denizens of Scrap Iron City. Also, it was her that kept her sister from becoming more merciful and less sadistic in the occasional bounty-hunting job they took.

Oh, Vicki hated it whenever Vanessa just randomly decided to do a little bounty hunting for a little cash on the side. Since both her sister and herself were fully synthetic beings, synthetic flesh over metal skeleton and robotic parts, they never needed to buy anything except for the occasional extra set of clothes. They had small amounts of prototype nanotech swarms inside of themselves for maintenance, so they never had to rely on the local technology—or lack of technology—to maintain their bodies or their computer-minds. They never needed money. Vanessa just liked bounty hunting just because it involved hunting...of humans.

Vanessa smiled inhumanly. "It's been a while since I've done one of those damned fleshies. Killing those jokers with the metal bodies is no fun. There's all of those sparks, and some of 'em have dark blue stuff instead of blood. I like seeing blood."

To have done a human… By doing a human, Vanessa did not necessarily mean sexual intercourse. Pleasure from such a thing simply wasn't part of Vanessa's design--though her body and manner of dress certainly seemed capable of giving it. The times that Vanessa actually did partake in sexual intercourse with a human was only for the sake of manipulation: She would pretend to enjoy the act--then laugh about it soon afterward. This tactic certainly crushed the self-esteem of more than a few males--and some females. One man committed suicide, coming too deep into love with Vanessa only to find her laugh and leave. In that way, Vanessa did not even have to use her switchblades to kill.

Just maybe, Vanessa liked to kill humans. Maybe was the thought because Vicki was with her sister for all of these centuries—her sister being just as much a gynoid as she was—and still not understand her. What did her sister want in life? One minute, Vanessa would be quite content to simply show up at parties among the most hard-core cyborgs and fleshies. More than a few times, she showed up with an arm draped around the waist of someone with a human brain--someone with a human brain and sometimes a human body to go with it. Regardless, it did not take much to convince Vanessa that a human needed killing—be it for the red business of bounty-hunting or allegedly for the sake of self-defense.

"Yeah, let's go do that human," voiced Vanessa. "I think I know which jerk you're talking about. And when we do, I want to see if his freaky black blood can go to greasing up the mechanisms of my blades. No way a human is supposed to have that kind of blood "

Came the thought, Dark blood…? A quick hush of static…and Vicki had a view of dark oily blood that ought not be the blood of a human—coming from someone screaming. The nightmare was the length of three eyelid blinks. Something had to be done. But first…

Everything flickered back to normal. "Wait a second. Vanessa…? Black blood? What do you mean by that?" asked Vicki. "Who has black blood? We're not hunting a mutant."

"What are you talking about?" asked Vanessa. "I didn't say anything about black blood. The blood of those meat-bags is always red when you cut 'em. At least, we're still talking about human blood. Red blood, the red stuff… It's got that metallic aftertaste that stays in your mouth and…Mmmm…! Oh Hell, let's just go! You point him out, I'll cut 'em."

…

2.

…

Down the industrial stairs and out of the building, they were outside. Vicki somehow expected the weather to be a lot darker, the sun a gloomier color. It wasn't. Outside was the blue brightness of day. Out the door of their apartment, they went down the industrial stairs—walking past machines to leave the building. This was essentially and actually their place of residence: an old machine-building that was so toxic and contaminated with chemicals that no human would live there. The corporate consolidation known as The Factory could have had it torn down. Then again, Factory could have simply had a lot of buildings torn down. Factory chose not to do so—perhaps because the massive computer-run bureaucracy was losing track of territory.

That bureaucracy was hundreds of years old—likely to lose track of resources at times, maybe lose some control. Maybe some day the Factory wouldn't be there to control the world anymore. Oh well…! It left the twins with a place to stay where prying eyes wouldn't find out that Vicki and Vanessa weren't "normal." Even in an age of cyborgs, the artificial girls had to be careful to disguise the fact that they weren't human. Factory laws, the few there were, only protected human brains.

"Okay, Sis," began Vanessa as they stepped across the cracked parking lot. "So where the Hell can we find the meat-bag? Maybe we ought best head find one of those Net-men dudes. Now Net-men, they're good people! If the rest of the meat-bags decided to have some sense and surrendered their brains to make more of those guys, maybe the world would be a better place? Ah well! Humans have gotta go extinct some time into the future—maybe soon. Sooner than…" Something made Vanessa stop walking.

It also made Vicki stop walking as well. "Ow-w-w…!" she exclaimed, hands to her head. She staggered. There was a sudden haze of radiation—that invisible energy. The radiation was interfering with the electronics of their synth-flesh bodies and their computerized minds before the nanobot swarms of their bodies could block the effects. It was…making them feel a bit dizzy.

There was a slight but sudden increase in the level of local radiation. The city was always a slightly higher level of radiation than usual. Over a century after a massive world-wide war, some parts of the world were still radioactive. Also true was how there were massive nuclear generators underneath parts of the city, nuclear generators that--uh oh--occasionally exploded in years past. Even when not getting ready to go uh-oh in an explosive way, some of those underground things were old enough to leak radiation upwards anyway.

But this radiation was coming from something else--or something else. Both Vicki and Vanessa stumbled to falling onto their butts. The interference with their computer-minds was making them feel worse. Then he appeared…

The intensity of the radiation lessened when the cyborg-faced creature in bunny suit appeared. The figure…faded into existence. Now there he stood in all of his bunny-suited glory. Six feet tall, blue-furred, the figure looked entirely fuzzy and soft—excepting the head. The head was cyborg-faced, with metal ears pointing upward exactly like bunny ears.

"What the Hell kind of psycho-mess is that?" exclaimed Vanessa as she sat there. She then cupped hands around her mouth--megaphone-style. "Hey dude! That's some sick-looking gear you've got on! But you're about six hundred years late! Earth stopped celebrating Halloween centuries ago. We know 'cause we were around back then." She paused… The being in the rabbit suit did and said nothing visible or audible--just standing there. Again, Vanessa cupped her hands around her mouth. "What is that suit, anyway! One of those Tuned suit-things? Dude! Do…you…hear…me!"

"Um… Vanessa…?" went Vicki, her eyes on the cyborg-faced being in the bunny suit. "I think that thing hears us pretty well. It's probably not a good idea to try and get him angry. We don't know what kind of technology he has… Do you notice anything…not right with that guy?" She still stared. "Like, notice something missing? There's something really creepy and wrong…"

"Oh! Like, the fact that the bunny suit's as tacky as a fleshie at a hunter's hangout?" asked Vanessa.. "Or do you mean it's because the dude has a shadow facing the entirely wrong way? Yeah, I see that—as freaky as it is."

Indeed, the six-foot being in the bunny suit cyborg skull-face, it had a shadow that completely went against all the other shadows nearby. It was the afternoon, and the shadows of the fence behind the creature--the fence-shadows went left. Some chunks of metal junk were also in this industrial lot--the shadows going left. In complete defiance to all that, the cyborg-faced creature had its shadow going the opposite way.

There were also other little things wrong with the being--things that made Vicki very nervous… The breeze was blowing, enough wind for her to feel it blowing her fluffy brown hair and hear it whistling in her ears. Except, the fur of the bunny suit over there never moved at all. And though it was full daylight, six-foot creature in the bunny suit seemed…darker than it ought to be--as if its very existence was eating some of the light shining onto it.

Run away, went a thought in Vicki's computer-mind. If you see that thing, run fast and far. Then go find a place deep underground to hide, and maybe you'll live a few minutes more. The showing of that creature means the end of the universe. "End of the world…" mumbled Vicki. The radiation level was still too high for her to move or do much beside mumble.

The six-foot cyborg-faced creature in bunny suit remained standing there on the pavement—defying the laws of reality. The shadows, standing untouched by the breeze… That being over there was not even supposed to exist. Still, there it was. Its chrome-polished face glared at the synthetic girls. Though the "eyes" were polished domes, there was still the impression that it was looking in this direction. Then came a sudden horizontal glare of white light from its right eye. Vicki and Vanessa stared into that light. There was a flickering deep within that light, a rapid-flickering of certain patterns. Those patterns of light so happened to resemble the binary code used by Vicki and Vannessa to communicate when staring into each other's eyes, using light instead of sounds to transmit information to each other.

The beginning is the end, this end, came the message from the horizon-glare of light. Ends can be the beginning. It begins now to bring about an end. Or there is a scream of misery and pain into darkness. Who carries the ball?

Vicki mumbled, "Who carries the ball?" Her computer-mind was operating at only half the speed due to interference that was just barely being countered by her body's internal nanobot supply. She still had the ability to comprehend information. Her sister was also getting the same data from deep within that horizon-glare of light coming from the cyborg-faced creature's right eyeball. Then Vicki communicated her own message into the light, using the infra-red transmitters within her eyes. Who will scream?

To that, the cyborg-faced creature bowed its gleaming head. It hurts so much, it communicated. It is the fear of my return. Madness and red darkness, feel the anger. R-r-r-rgh…

There was a sudden increase in the levels of…radiation. Something was happening… Everything went blurry for a moment. Things became darker, as if all the local light was being absorbed. Then…the cyborg-faced being in the bunny suit was gone.

There was now no sign of the figure in the bunny suit at all--as if it was never there. While Vicki took her time in standing up off the cracked pavement of this parking lot, Vanessa quickly hopped to her feet. She next cupped hands around her mouth again to shout, "Hey… Hey! Mr. Psycho Bunny-Suit Guy, where'd you go? I wanna talk to you! Better yet, my right foot wants to communicate something to your spleen!"

"Um… I'm not even sure that guy has a spleen," commented Vicki, carefully dusting off miscellaneous bits from her own jeans. "Or maybe he wasn't there at all. His shadow was wrong, and he looked too dim to really be there. It's like he was actually somewhere else. Like we could see him from somewhere else."

"What, like some kind of fancy hologram?" asked Vanessa. "Hmmph… But I thought the meat-bags lost the technology to make holograms? Anyway… Why the Hell did that thing have to hit us with hard radiation? If I had a bladder, I'd be pissed off right now," said Vanessa, her eyes focused in the directin of the six-foot, cyborg-faced thing in the bunny suit. There was no such thing there now, though. "Yo! How the Hell is that dude able to skip in and out of the world like he's invisible or something…" She glanced over at the remains of the fence's gate—as if the tall metal poles at the gate were responsible for the haphazard appearance of the creature. "That thing's one of the butt-ugliest fugley in the world! You couldn't pay even the ugliest mutant to stare at th …! Geez…!"

"But what about his message and stuff," asked Vicki. "The guy in the bunny suit, he was able to transmit data through light. He used our own secret data-channel! Nobody's supposed to know it. Like, and the people who programmed it into us are dead!"

"Yeah, yeah…" commented Vanessa. "I'm more pissed off that Mr. Psycho Demon-Rabbit hit us with radiation. And did you catch that freaky voice? It sounded like six dead humans with rotten necks trying to talk. It was all like… R-r-rgh… "

"Ew-w-w!" exclaimed Vicki. "Like, cut it out! That creepy guy's voice is probably gonna cause me nightmares for a hundred years! It's like it's all distorted and freaky. I'm still trying to figure out how he knew how to communicate with our infrared data-channel." Her face took on a very serious look. "About the data he transmitted, at least now we know where that jerk is hiding."

…

Vicki and her Sister began to stride towards the entrance to the fence. Doing so brought them out and away from the abandoned industrial area they called home. As they walked, Vanessa spent about as much time looking up at the sky as she did at her surroundings. Still, Vicki had that feeling that there was something wrong with the sky. Or was that just in her dream?

Happy blue sky or not, she still felt something was wrong with everything now. The sky in her dream was a darkened sky, rimmed at the western horizon with a reddish-swath of glowing clouds. Thank goodness it wasn't dark yet. It was because those short guys would come out when the land was dark. And this time, if they didn't stop it, maybe the land would have its final end…

…