Toy Wars (35 page)

“Acceptable for now, but it will be destroyed before sundown.
We will have no other choice.”
I took this
to mean
they were acceding to my idea, at least for the moment.

Sancho struggled only a bit as I opened his neck access panel and deactivated him.
His bulk slumped to the ground.
I hoped that by doing this I was saving his life and not giving him the false hope of those I had led into the tunnel and then abandoned.

“Now do you mind telling me what this is all about?
Six is our creator…”
A
ripple of exclamations
flowed through
the group.

“Blasphemy!”

“Heathen scum!”

“Animal lover!”

“
Human
less.”
It took several minutes of spurious commentary before the group calmed down enough to allow Gold to speak.

“Stranger, you are new here.
You are obviously with a soul, unlike the heathens that constantly harass us from the east and south, but you are speaking things that are so untrue and blasphemous as to tear me to my very core.
If I were you, I would guard my tongue before this rabble decides that you have spoken one too many times.
While we do not have a great many bullets left for the weapons of Six, we will spare a few on your brain case for such a sacrilege.”
I thought it over and decided the best course of action was to be silent unless asked a direct question and then to be very careful about how I answered.
However, I couldn’t remember ever doing the safe thing.

“Could you please tell me who you are and what this place is, then?”

“We are Humans’ Children.
We have been placed here to defeat the Domed One.”
My head was beginning to spin.
Was I in some kind of dream?
Defeating Six?
Humans’ Children?
I was confused.
At least only Gold seemed to be talking for the group.
I didn’t think I could handle two hundred or more talking all at once.

“And your memories of being activated?”

“We have all been charmed by the Beast so that we forgot who we
are
and why we are supposed to be here.
It took us inside the dome and then talked to us without words, urging us to commit sins against the Humans.”

“It’s the beast,” called out a purple bear waving an obviously mistreated weapon about.

“Unclean.
Stealing our thoughts.”

“Defiler of Humans’ Plan.”

“Abomination,” rolled various chants.
My mind was reeling at the thought of so much perversion in such a little time.
How could my own brethren be twisted so horrifically?
I hadn’t even been gone a year.
I had to learn more or I would never save Six from those units it had created.
What had been one army against three was now one Factory against four armies.
The irony was too thick to cut.

“Then,” Gold continued, “when
the Unclean One
fail
ed
to command us, it
lured
the animals to attack us and force us back into its clutches for even more twisting of our minds and offense against our
Human
s.

“But then we were saved.
We talked with our mouths and no longer had to use the foul communication without sound.

“We found strength in the light of the sun and no longer had to prostrate ourselves and suckle our power from the beast and its invisible web of corruption.

“We realized
the fallacy of
the mind words leading us away from
righteousness
.”

I had nothing to say.
Nothing ever prepared me to debate the Humans and Factories with such a twisted sump.

“Eventually Six set its animals upon us.
They stalked the night, when we are the most vulnerable.
Many of our brothers were captured and imprisoned within the belly of the Domed Beast.
We built our homes to be safe from those marauders.”

The story was interesting but of no particular immediate use.
My plans
remained
unchanged.
I must
consult with
Six as soon as I could.
On second thought, the conversation had been useful as I learned that I would be able to move about at night with impunity.

The supercharging of their systems was the only reason that they were unable to function at night.
They had to have the constant sun pressure to maintain their workload.
Their batteries wouldn’t be good for more than an hour or two at those functional levels and they were totally unwilling to tap the net for energy.
They chose to work through the light times, not storing up that emergency supply
,
whereas I took the other option
of
stor
ing
up during the day and work
ing
through the night.
Little did they know how much they really needed that net, I thought as I planned to move amongst them.

“Now we actively work to destroy the Great Beast,” Gold said, ending what appeared to be a preset sermon.

“I see.
May I make one request before I join your righteous cause?”

“What is that, my brother.”

“This animal, while he may be an enemy of us all, was my friend and my creation.
I ask that I be allowed to take him outside the city and kill him myself.”

“It is granted, brother,” Gold agreed, not consulting anyone else around him.
Had I any doubts,
I knew
then
for certain who ran things.
“A unit should always endeavor to right his own wrongs.”
I reactivated Sancho under watchful eyes and wary guns.
While they all fidgeted, similar to me talking to any Factory, they kept to the word given to me by the Gold.

“Sancho, follow me.”
I lead my friend beyond the sight of the villagers.
I was well over a slight rise before sitting down and lowering my voice.
“You are going to have to stay here.
If you come into the village they will kill you.
Do you understand that?”
I didn’t get a response but I had to assume he understood.

“I am going to shoot my gun three times.
I think I can get to Six during the night.
Then, with luck, I can straighten this all out.”
Sancho la
y
down on the ground.
He didn’t even flinch when I shot off my M16 into the ground.
As an afterthought, I hooked my assault rifle over Sancho’s head.
If things went wrong, I wouldn’t need it.
My insane brothers would overwhelm me.
Killing a handful of them would have no
benefit
for Six.

I gave one final stern reminder to Sancho, “Don’t follow me.
Stay here.”
I turned and walked back to the village.
Happily, I thought, Sancho stayed.
He at least would be spared the insanity of the Golden Cult.
I wished I could also be spared.
I wanted nothing more than to just play along until nightfall until I could sneak away to Six and find out what was truly going on.

Instead of a quiet return,
the crowd greeted me with
cheers and raucous calls of celebration.
I was something of a celebrity now for having “killed” Sancho.

“Good job, unit!”

“Smite the
d
evil!”

“Another blow against darkness!”

“I am Brother Isp.
What are you called?” the gold bear said as he came up to me.

“Don Quixote.”

“Brother Don.
Welcome among us.
We give you your own house for resting tonight,” Isp said, pointing at one of the seemingly identical cubes.
One of fifty hundre
d odd other stone houses
that shared the same
lack of features.

“I thank you, Isp.
I am curious to know more of what you do to defeat the evil
d
ome.”

“Ready to get right to
Human
s
’
work, are you?
Good.
Follow me.”
I had merely wanted information, not to be put to work, but I couldn’t object now.
To do so would be out of character in the role I had chosen.

Isp took me through a milling throng of units, all
t
eddies.
I confirmed what I had seen from the hill
—
not a single other type of unit whether elephant, road-runner, bouncing ball
,
or tank existed here.
Even the train tracks had been ripped up from the ground.
Isp pointed toward seven units moving in and about the machinery of Six’s production facility
—
the same one that
had
created all of us.

“We keep a vigilance on the
d
evil’s workshop to ensure it creates no new animals to plague us.
At first it constantly
spawned
demons to tormen
t us but they were slow of body and mind
.

“Then it started to make devils in our own image.
There were some of us who were soft and didn’t want these new devils killed.
But when these animals attacked, everyone defended themselves.
Fortunately
,
these new animals were frauds without souls and without real intelligence.
It made them easy to defeat.

“But keeping the workshop from creating is just the beginning.
We have started a new project
that
we are hoping will finish the
d
evil for good.”

“And what is that, Brother Isp?”

“Behold,” Isp said as we topped the small rise
that
overlooked the valley.
He motioned to the huge scaffolding.
Now that I was closer I could tell that it had to be nearly
80
meters tall.
The rifle, s
upported by the metal framework,
continued to grow from the
huge line of
teddy
units
labor
ing
on its construction
“We build the
Wrath of Humans
to smite down the
d
evil so we will obtain paradise.”

Six
,
buried several hundred meters underground and sealed inside its own cement casing
, might just be vulnerable to the massive
gun pointing straight down.
Sentience is a curse to some units, I thought.
Worse, it didn’t matter if it would work or not.
They believed it would work thus I
had to believe it would work…
and stop it.

“Impressive, Brother.
How long do you expect this to take?”

“Our goal is one more
Human
year.
We have to do all the work by hand as we can’t have our pure goal sullied by the use of the
d
evil’s tools.
The end never justifies the means.
Were we to touch the unclean things then we would just create another equally evil
d
evil in place of the one we aim to destroy.”

“Oh, how true, my brother,” I mouthed meaninglessly
to show my continued
loyalty.
As
I
looked over the construction of the device, I wondered if
it might not be the largest grenade
ever made,
rather than a gun
, but ne
ither engineering nor explosives were my area of expertise so I wasn’t sure.

The
Wrath of Humans
was not a solid thing.
Flat metal bands bound
groups of the smelted bars all together.
The
teddies dipped the bundles into a green chemical smelling of acetone. Another teddy
very carefully dribbled
another chemical over it
.
Once covered, the sheaves of metal glowed almost white as putrid vapors released from the reaction forced their way out between any available crack.
Once cooled, those
3
-meter-long and
30
-centimeter-across bundles were being hauled from their fusion point to where they were
assembled, using more of the two chemical welding technique, onto the growing weapon.