Cemetery Planet: The Complete Series (4 page)

10.

He spotted the trouble a kilometer before he got there. The oncoming dusk cast the landscape of entombed souls in high contrast between dark and light. Nevertheless, he saw it—a gravedigger, sitting where it wasn’t supposed to be, its mechanized boom bent like a rotted tree.

“What are you doing out here?” he mumbled. “Gravediggers haven’t been used in a hundred years.”

He disengaged the autodrive when his cart got close to the heavy machine, its large scoop raised, half full of dirt. He puzzled over that, and motored around the bulky thing to get a view of the damage. When he got to the other side, he puzzled even more at what he saw. Somehow, all on its own, the gravedigger had risen from its mothballed death, wandered into the cemetery, and, at random, chose a grave and dug a perfect 2,200mm long by 800mm wide by 2,400mm deep hole.

“At least it still works,” he admired the machine’s achievement sarcastically, then parked and stepped out of the cart. His cynicism turned to distress when he spotted something on the ground, just next to the pit, stained and splintered. He knew what it was. As he got closer, he willed it away, wished it just a vision, a smudge inside his visor. The nearer he got, though, the more his suspicions were confirmed. A bone, a femur to be more accurate. A human femur.

He rushed to the side of the gaping crater, a precisely squared vertical stamp. The headstone, a black granite slab, read “Myron Woods,” and indicated he died in Twenty-Three Fifteen. His family had paid a tidy sum to have him buried here, and trusted the cemetery owners to keep him safe from harm so he could rest for eternity. Now that rest had been disturbed, the promise broken. And DeepSix would hold him responsible.

At the bottom, shrouded in twilight, he saw the coffin, or the last remaining vestiges of one. Its lid, jagged and broken, angled on its side, looked like it had been pried open by a set of giant jaws. Must have been the digger, he glanced at the machine’s rugged bucket, several thick metal teeth grinning at him like the cat who’d eaten the canary.

He set his helmet lamps on high and pointed them into the grave again, hoping there were no more extraneous body parts to clean up. Nothing. No bones. No signs of a skeleton. Great, he exhaled his frustration, contemplating the large dirt pile next to the pit, and how much fun it would be to sift through all that for the rest of poor old Myron.

First thing’s first, though. Find out why this happened.

He climbed into the digger’s cockpit and searched its onboard computer. The ancient controls made it difficult to find the automatic settings, and once he did, he detected nothing out of the ordinary. The operational logs showed no commands, no programming, no reason whatsoever for the machine to start up and locate a grave and dig, all on its own.

His attention wandered to the leg bone protruding from the loamy topsoil, and again his uneasy thoughts went back to his impending and disagreeable task. He opened the hatch, ready to climb out.

“Suck it up, Harv,” he summoned his own pep-talk. “This is what you signed up for, buddy.”

He put his foot on the sidestep, and the digger’s onboard computer lit up with a crackling flash. His first instinct told him this might have been the malfunction, happening right before his eyes. Digital artifacts on the monitor, static coming in through his headset. Numeric readouts and graphic displays flickered into an indistinct image, ringed by a soft, radiant aura. He saw eyes. They gripped onto him, tugged at him.

“Harvey!”
Lea’s voice commanded him into immobility. He hung on the side of the gravedigger and, stupefied, stared at her on the control screen.
“Harvey, watch out!”

Before he reacted, the stout machine whirred into motion, its near silent electric motor kicking on, its burly metal tracks jerking into a spin. The gravedigger rolled forward and the giant pneumatic arm powering the scoop turned and brushed him off like a bug. He hit the ground harder than he thought he would. Looking up from the silt, he understood why. The open grave. He’d fallen in.

He got to his hands and knees, then fell to his chest again, promptly and forcefully, sand and grit pouring on top of him, what felt like a ton of it on his back. His headlamps dimmed to nothing, buried in soil, leaving him in total blackness. The silent, dead calm of the grave sent his heart into overdrive, his survival instincts into full alert. The stillness wouldn’t last long.

Thrashing and scuffling and screaming. His suit sensors picked it all up, magnifying it in his ears as a strange and desperate situation unfolded on ground level.

“No! You won’t do it! I won’t let you!”
he heard Lea clearly in the otherwise garbled, terrified scuffle. She sounded more forceful than ever, a complete system overload. And she was in control of the gravedigger. It rumbled and rolled, tracks creaking with age, dust and soil kicking into the pit. Harvey tried to stand, but more fill washed over him. His suit barked at him, warning of an exhaust problem and a rupture in the leg. Batteries were low, and so was the oxygen level. His stay inside that grave would either be short, or it would be very, very long.

Another load of dirt, rocky and dense, crushed him down even further. His helmet cracked, and he felt his biopack crumple. Up above, Lea’s frantic cries seemed to die off, in conjunction with a low rumble, fading quickly, from a steady and violent quake, to a subtle quiver, to nothing.

Slowly, arduously, he managed to wriggle free from his tomb. It took everything he had, and his suit’s power was at an all-time low when he flopped onto the ground, heart pounding, muscles screaming, fighting for air his biopack didn’t have. He reached into the soft terra and felt something solid in his glove. When he caught a good look, he cringed and tossed it away. A skull, cracked and half-crushed. Then he came across a ribcage, or half of one, attached to a crooked spinal column. He clenched his lips to keep down the surge of stomach contents that wanted to erupt into his mouth.

He crawled on all fours, red lights and alarms inside his helmet, life systems critical. The slow creep worked, conserved just enough air to reach the cart, and when he did, he plugged into its O2 condenser.

11.

Harvey crashed into another cart parked inside the utility bay, then tore off his helmet and threw it at the airlock control, which emitted a course buzz. The entrance to the visitor pod opened. He didn’t even take off his cherished suit, just unbuckled and let it dangle over his waste, though he did rip off his gloves one at a time.

Marching to the mausoleum, down to the third floor, he reached Lea’s grave and ripped open the holomemorial control panel. When he did, the system started up. Lea appeared in hologram, standing next to him.

“What are you doing, Harvey?” her wide, penetrating eyes looked on nervously.

“I’m-I’m…” his words failed him. No sugarcoating it. “I have to shut you down, Lea,” he found it impossible to return her gaze. Machine or not, she’d become real to him, as real as any woman on earth.

“Why, Harvey?” she reached in a vain attempt at stopping him. Strangest thing, though, and it happened once before. He knew her tactile display was composed purely of ultrasonic waves, yet her touch, it seemed…real. “Why are you doing this to me?”

He fumbled for the processor, and grasped the power fibers. “You’ve gotten out of control. You almost killed me—”

“I saved your life, Harvey!” she yelled so loud, and with so much conviction, he was forced to surrender his full attention. He stared at her, but had to look away. Although he hated to admit it, Lea’s friendship represented the deepest, most fulfilling, relationship he’d ever had in his life. He’d forgotten she was a hologram long ago. And now he had to destroy her.

“You tried to kill me, Lea,” he fixated on the power supply, on the optic fibers he needed to pull.

“I didn’t try to kill you…I tried to save you!”

“From what?” they locked stares. “What was out there? What was it, Lea?”

“I don’t know!” she tortured her own hair, pulling and squeezing large clumps in frustrated anxiety. “It was something…something I can’t explain!”

“I can explain it,” he tried to remain calm in the midst of her tantrum. “It’s you. You’re making this thing up to have an excuse for what you really want, which is me.”

“No.”

“Yes. And you want me here, on this godforsaken place with you forever.”

“No!”

“And you’d do anything to keep me here, with you, forever…even if that means killing me!” his eyes felt on fire as he shot an accusing glare. She stumbled two steps backward and held her own chest.

“Harvey. How could you think such a thing? I love you, Harvey. Can’t you see that? I’d never want to harm you, ever. It’s not me. But it’s something. Something’s here, and it’s trying to hurt you.”

He wiped his cheeks and runny nose on his suit. “I don’t know what to believe anymore,” shaking his head, he looked at her CPU again. “The things you’ve been doing lately…No,” he straightened and exhaled hard. “No, I have to do this.”

“But…but what’ll happen to me?” she looked at his hands. “When you unplug my power, where will I go? Will I die?

“I-I don’t know…I’m sorry.”

“Harvey, please!” she threw herself onto him, blinding him with her projected light. He squeezed his eyelids to slivers and held the power connectors firm. “Don’t do this, Harvey! Harvey, I love you!”

“I love you, too, Lea. But I can’t let you kill me,” he yanked the wires free, severing the connection cleanly. Sparks erupted, and the projected image folded. A distorted, wavering last memory of the one person in existence with which he’d ever truly felt a connection. Her twisted expression of agony flashed by as the diffuser powered down, accompanied by a mournful,
“NO!”

The mausoleum turned more still and quiet than he’d ever remembered. No sounds of Lea, singing some ancient serenade. No glowing sight of her prancing on her toes to her own melody. She was gone. The polarity coupler shorted out her processor when he pulled the plug. Fried her brains like bacon.

12.

The next several nights went by with mind-numbing sluggishness. His routine, after almost a whole Earth year (six hundred and seventy two Cemetery Planet days) had been engrained into him to where he could do it with his eyes closed. Testing the visitor center auditorium presentation, inspecting the interactive maps, riding the
personal motility devices
, and fighting with the autoserve food printer for a decent dish of ice cream. He kept up his entire daily schedule, all but one thing—the holomemorials. He refused to look at another one. Outside, and especially in the mausoleum. He hated that place, that world of the dead, and wanted it erased from his memory, starting now.

He thought he had it beat, his loneliness, his fear. He thought, when he got to within three days of his departure, three days until his contract was up, he’d be home free.

Then he started having hallucinations. At least he wanted to believe they were hallucinations. The alternative was too illogical, too unreasonable, too crazy.

The first one woke him up. In the dark, beside his bunk, he caught a glimpse of a face. No body, no hair or other features, just a face. It appeared and disappeared just like that, and Harvey nearly blinked and missed it, yet he saw it, and when it vanished, a ripple of recognition crested into a tidal wave of realization. He knew that face. Lea.

He saw her a second time in the food court. As he tossed his used tray into the recycler, there she stood, this time a complete form, albeit not much more than a slight layer of steam, colorless and weak. But she was there. And he knew by her expression she was pleading with him, just as she had the last seconds of her existence.