Myth Gods Tech - Omnibus Edition: Science Fiction Meets Greek Mythology In The God Complex Universe (44 page)

Deinomache did call me a brute after all.

I
shredded three more pretty thighs and let the factory drones sweep
the floor with them. One did actually do some sweeping, bloodying
the place all over.

The
blonde Amazon, now the Alpha girl of the group, commanded, “Retreat
now!” They followed, fencing off the drone attacks and backed up to
the exit. They laid cover fire from the exit and I had to duck. I
picked up one of the pistols laying around and fired
back.

The kid
had ordered two big factory drones to stay infront of him like
metal bodyguards, and managed to get down close to me.

I looked
back at the 3D printer. The thing looked like a sleek robot,
completed up to its waist. Thin aerodynamic legs and a pleasing
aluminum finish gave it the impression that it was meant to fly. Or
perhaps it was the wings on its ankles that gave that
impression.

“
Where is my brother?” I asked the kid.

“
He is holding off two Amazons in the floor above. I left him
a couple of drones to assist,” he said as I was pulling the
unconscious Alkinoe behind cover.

I threw
him a medkit and said, “Patch her up while you talk. Did you crack
the safe?” I kept firing back at the Amazons, they had fully
retreated in the corridor. Our drones stayed in the room with
us.

The kid
grabbed the medkit and obviously didn’t know what to do. Then he
shook his head, typed a search, first-aid instructions popped up on
his overlay and he began stitching Alkinoe’s back. The script he
was running even dotted the points on the woman’s back that he
should pierce with the needle and showed him how to make the
finishing knot. “Yes, Mr. Thomas got the parts, I have them right
here,” he said and pointed at three roughly oval shapes in the
color of dark olive. “He said we should insert the parts to the
robot. He said the plan had gone to skata and we needed that thing
to walk on its own if we are to make it out of here.”

“
Good. That’s good. Let’s do that,” I said, and began to lose
consciousness. The adrenaline wore off. The chemboosts wore off.
Silly ringing. Silly alarms. God I’m so sleepy. Never mind me, I’ll
just take a quick nap over here…

Chapter
9

I closed my
eyes for three seconds. When I opened them, the smell of burned
flesh filled my nose. I looked around, Thomas was behind the
finished robot, arcs of electricity flowing from it to him. He
jerked around spasmodically and fell on the floor. His face was
burnt and his contorted limbs stopped moving. Big electric arcs
blinded me and I covered my eyes.

When my
corneas managed to overcome the blinding flash I saw the kid on his
knees, trying to cover. Alkinoe was awake, pistol in hand, her jaw
purple and swollen. Deinomache wasn’t where I had left
her.

The
robot was still.

My
brother was still.

I
screamed from the bottom of my lungs, stood up and broke off the
machete in my chest in half. I charged the robot with my halfblade.
As I was closing in, his eyes came to life.

The
first thing he saw, was me trying to kill him.

I
brought the broken blade down on him with all the strength I had
left. All I managed to do was scratch his eyebrow.

He
grabbed me by the neck and lifted me up with his hand. Then he
threw me across the room like a ragdoll. I toppled some equipment
on my path and broke my way into the far wall.

I closed
my eyes for three more seconds. When I managed to get them open
again the building was coming down on us. The 3D printer was
trashed on one side and kneeling, smoke and fire was coming out of
everywhere. A big hole with singed edges was diagonal on the
ceiling above, letting us see the stars. Another big hole was
making a new entrance to the corridor where the Amazons had
retreated to. If someone had stayed there hidden, they weren’t
alive anymore. The kid brought a drone to carry me on its freight
surface. Alkinoe was limping on one leg but keeping up.

I saw a
flash on the patch of starry night and then what could only be a
plasma discharge. It was aimed at the metasteel forge below and I
could tell because in moments the whole place was up in flames and
the heat was unbearable. Tons of molten metal brought down girders
and supports, bending the very floor we were on. We rushed to the
exit.

“
Not the elevator,” I said, “I rigged it.”

“
Yeah, it’s already blown anyway,” said the kid. The robot we
had 3D printed moments ago had used the freight elevator, got it
blown to his face and then came back and blasted the ceiling to
escape by flight. The corridor that the Amazons had retreated to
had only two corpses, so the rest must have escaped.

We
followed a path out but there was molten metal running down the
corridor. We doubled back and managed to find another exit. I was
being carried on the back of a lifting drone and feeling useless.
It was all on the kid now, he would get us out. I saw him
manipulating a schematic and looking for a way out. A floor
collapsed behind us and filled the air with dust.

“
Did you check on Thomas?” I said to Alkinoe, coughing, my
eyes fixed on the ceiling.

“
Yes, I checked… I triple checked. He is gone. I am sorry
Deimos,” she told me and she meant it.

“
I am sorry too,” I said, but I was referring to her
happiness.

We went
for the van. It was bullet ridden but would get us out of here.
Some chemical tank must have kissed the flames because a plume of
fire came out of the factory. An entire corner was demolished, as
if a titan’s boot had stepped on it.

Then I
saw the 3D printer room cave in. The room my brother had died in,
now being buried in the rubble.

A group
of bikes went the opposite way into the night. I half-expected to
hear the roar of the engines, but they were eerily
silent.

They
loaded me into the back, Alkinoe threw her bloodied body next to me
with a relief. She found some painkillers and downed half the
bottle. She passed me the rest and I emptied it. The kid drove, and
we left the factory behind.

“
What do we do now, Miss Alkinoe?” the kid asked a few
kilometers away.

“
Let me think. We patch up first, obviously, or we won’t get
very far,” she said lying face down, trying not to wound her back
any further. “We won’t get paid now, that’s for sure, so let’s see
what other options we have.”

The kid
said, “Our fake id’s that I made still hold up, they are ready. We
could stick to the plan. If we sell the one we have for Mr. Thomas
we could have enough cash for a few days.”

Alkinoe
looked at my face and bit her lip. I said, “It’s ok, he would want
us to do that, to survive. It’s a wasted identity anyway and we
don’t have many assets.”

“
I’m sorry Mr. Deimos. I admired Mr. Thomas. He… he was a good
man,” the kid told me.

“
I know you did kid. Allright then, you can sell my fake id
too. That way you will have more money to get away. I can’t leave,
I have a job to do,” I said.

Alkinoe
looked away, and said, “But they will kill you. Or that robot will.
Or the other people who are involved in this. Deinomache might be
talking large but she is never lying. That being we made is unique,
a lot of powerful people want it. Please come with us.”

“
Nah, I have to find that robot. He killed my brother and
punched me. I have to kill him back and punch him, in that order,”
I said loudly and a terrible sense of hybris fell upon
me.

Will Deimos
get his revenge? Will the team manage to escape? What was the being
that they 3D printed anyway? This is the end of Deimos’ story for
now, leave a review of the book and tell us if you are dying to
know the rest of it. This taste of the God Complex Universe will be
expanded in the future, join the Mythographers to learn about
it.

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The Impossible Quest Of Hailing

A Taxi On Christmas Eve

George Saoulidis

A modern retelling of

“
A Christmas Carol”

By Charles Dickens

Stave
One

“
Marley was
dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that,” he
read out loud from the first page and then shut the book closed. He
exhaled, a puff of frozen breath forming in front of his mouth and
said, “And this is supposed to be a fairytale? How
morbid.”

He held
the book in his hands, a real, physical print of “A Christmas
Carol” by Charles Dickens. It was only a mass-produced cheap copy
but it was vintage enough in this time and age. His late partner
had left it on his desk, with a handwritten dedication for him.
Scrooge never figured out why.

His name
wasn’t really Scrooge of course. He was John.

People
just called him like that, and the nickname stuck. It was just that
every Christmas Eve since his business partner’s death on the exact
same day, he was reminded of the man. Scrooge didn’t have any
pictures or anything, just the worn old book in his drawer. He
never got to read the thing, it was too dour. He just held it in
his hands, feeling the paper, thinking. There’s something about the
texture of books that appeals to people. The shiny, glossy surfaces
of the reading devices nowadays just don’t evoke anything
similar.

Across
the freezing office was his assistant, Clara. She was a single
mother of one, in her late thirties and needed a new dye of blonde
hair. She could have been attractive, if she had managed to get
some sleep, enough money to pay her bills and a miracle to lift the
worry off her shoulders. She was an accountant, the only employee
to Scrooge, and she ended up juggling every single job, manning the
phones, doing the accounts, fixing technical issues with the techs,
keeping the office livable with a couple of plants.

She was
currently rolled up in a blanket like a gyro wrap, shaking and
sniffing her nose. The frigid office was dark, illuminated only by
the lights outside, some colourful ones from the Christmas
decorations, others simply street signs and lamp-posts, and also by
the computer monitors on their desks. She was wearing knit
colourful gloves and was tapping away on her phone, constantly
stopping to check out something on her monitor by pressing a
button, sighing, and then turning back to her phone. It was doing
gling sounds all the time, filled with incoming and outgoing
Christmas wishes to old friends and faraway family. The glove tips
wouldn’t normally work on the touchscreen, but she had those
popular touchscreen gloves with capacitive elements sewn in the
fingers. It was a small comfort in the cold office.

“
Mr. Tsifoutis, it’s still not working,” she nagged to no one
in particular.

“
The server works half the time, so it’s good enough. How many
hours do you need to input a few accounts woman?” Scrooge grunted,
his eyes not lifting towards her.

“
But I’m waiting for over an hour to finish this up and go
home. The IT isn’t responding, they must have left the office for
Christmas Eve.” She sniffed her nose. In the beginning, she was
trying to do it quietly, discreet like a lady should, but after
years and years of enduring a winter office she had just given up
and pretty much blew her nose like a loud trumpet.

“
Bah! Customer service they call it! It’s the same thing every
Christmas, you just can’t get any work done anywhere,” Scrooge spat
out, his face turning sour.

“
People just want to go home to their families Mr. Tsifoutis,”
she explained softly.

He got
the hint. “Days off with pay… In my day, you could work 14 hours a
day 7 days a week and not get paid till four months later,” he said
shaking his finger.

She
waited calmly for him to finish his rant, pulling up the blanket in
a futile quest to make herself warm.

“
Christmas! Bah! Nothing but a marketing ploy, I tell you.
Selling Christmas ornaments and Christmas gifts two full months
before the holiday itself. And the waste of it all! The city
lights, paid with my taxes. Stupid snow frosting on buildings,
requiring money to put on and then money to clean off! A waste.
They slap a Christmas packaging on products and mark-up the price
by 30%!”

“
Thirty percent,” she nodded patiently.

He still
had more coming but he suddenly felt tired, so he sagged back into
his chair. The back was worn and some screws were poking out of the
lower back, making it really uncomfortable. He didn’t spare any
cash to get new office chairs of course. They were fine and sturdy,
they still had at least 10 years of good use. “Anyway, go home.
I’ll finish up here and upload it in a while. You’re gonna drain my
account anyway, you can have the day off tomorrow.”