Girl In The Needle Read online

  Girl In The Needle

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Epilogue

  Girl In The Needle

  By Joshua Renneke

  Distributed by Smashwords

  Copyright 2017 Joshua Renneke

  Act One

  Chapter One

  “Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. The Empress requests your silence as she enters. Please do not applaud or cheer.”

  The Great Hall fell silent; as the lights began to dim, not a whisper escaped the crowd's lips. A fearful reverence permeated the room as the assembled men and women waited in total darkness.

  How would she appear? Would she simply walk on stage? Materialize from thin air?

  From speakers far above them, a male voice slowly intoned, “Twenty years ago...”

  Suddenly the enormous stage was filled by a hologram of a busy downtown street. The clothing styles and vehicles were laughably archaic, underscoring the changes the world had experienced in only a few decades.

  A few people laughed tentatively, afraid to not react. What if the Empress expected a reaction, an acknowledgement of the transformation which Keti had brought with her?

  They waited. Onstage, the holographic display continued. People walked along cracked sidewalks, voicing whatever simplistic thoughts they'd had back then. Cars and trucks crept slowly past.

  The audience's eyes followed the vehicles' trails of exhaust toward the ceiling. To think that this was once impressive to humanity! Again fearing that a response was necessary, a few of them muttered praise to Keti.

  “The goddess Keti appears,” the voice continued. Gradually the stage became engulfed in light, until the Hall shone brightly enough to force the audience to shield their eyes.

  It dissipated in a matter of seconds, leaving darkness behind.

  “Keti. The goddess awakens. Among all people on Earth, she chooses a home, wiping out all other human life. An intermediary is chosen between Keti and her chosen people: the Empress.”

  In the middle of the vast stage, a hologram of the Empress rose from the floor. She was seated on an elaborate throne which was inlaid with rows of marble. Her image loomed above her on the Grand Hall's rear wall.

  Her black hair was pulled to one side of her head, falling just below her shoulders.

  "Rise," she commanded.

  The audience murmured nervously, unsure if this was part of the presentation or an actual order.

  The hologram of the Empress arched its face toward the heavens and opened its mouth, as if to call out. A pearl rolled from her tongue onto the floor with a sharp crack that echoed through the auditorium.

  To their astonishment, a very real pearl rolled off the stage.

  “Rise,” she repeated. Her seductive tone was a natural effect of the awe she'd inspired through most of her life.

  The audience, numbering in the thousands, shot to their feet in unison. They bowed their heads before her.

  “You stand before me today,” she began almost mournfully, “as witnesses to the goddess Keti's unknowable power.”

  “As she wills,” they chanted.

  “You are the fortunate among humanity, for you are Keti's chosen people.”

  “Her grandeur endures for eternity.”

  “Her will...”

  “Above any mortal's understanding.”

  “...shall be made known to all. Return to your seats.” She gestured dismissively.

  The audience was eager to obey. Each of them had been personally summoned in the most extraordinary way: the Empress had materialized (via hologram) in their homes, telling them a date and time to arrive at the Grand Hall. No further details had been given.

  The Empress joined her hands, as if in prayer, and pressed the tips of her fingers against her lips.

  “No further response is required of you,” she said after a moment's silence. “Keti is unmoved by you repeating scripted lines anyway.”

  The front row pursed their lips nervously. Ignoring their discomfort, she separated her hands and extended an open palm to her rapt audience.

  “The goddess came to me recently as I sat in my rooms. She asked me, ‘Why do the people of every era insist on rituals to worship their gods? Are these rituals not as repetitive and meaningless to them as they are to me?’ I told her I didn't know. It was the way we had learned to worship.”

  She folded her hands in her lap and paused. The Empress was viewed with a mixture of awe and foreboding, as if she were a black cloud formed above the City. Keti had chosen her, and no one knew if she'd been blessed with powers unknown to them. Yet today she seemed relaxed, an icon who'd grown up to still be very much a human.

  “I'll get to the point. Keti and I spoke, and agreed that you worship her so impersonally because she never told us what she wanted. You've been invited here to ask me anything you wish. I will share as much as I know.

  “The goddess,” she began with what sounded to them like distaste, “can simply be referred to as Keti. No 'goddess' or 'Her Divinity' needed... she realizes that you're aware of her divine nature. Keti instructed me to answer to the best of my abilities, but as I said, I can only tell you things I know."

  The lights in the Grand Hall rose slightly and a voice announced, “Please grab the pads from under your seats and type your questions. Your questions will be sent at random to the Empress.”

  The Empress lifted her hands, revealing a thin square like a page from a book. It illuminated her face with a soft glow.

  “Raise the lights,” she commanded. “These people look intimidated.” Scanning the room with her eyes, she added, “As well they should,” in an undeniably teasing tone which, nonetheless, was met with silence.

  Hundreds of hands slowly dropped the pads to their laps.

  “Really, now,” the Empress admonished with a barely-perceptible eye roll. “She's not going to kill you for asking a question.”

  Even in the added glow of the overhead lights, she looked, to them, unreal; her presence was less surreal than hyper real. Most of the audience gazed a little too long before remembering the pads in their hands.

  As she waited for citizens to send her questions, the Empress distracted herself by twirling a finger in front of her face; yellow, glassy tendrils trailed behind the finger and spread outward into intricate patterns.

  “Ah. Our first question: ‘How did Keti choose you to be her representative?’ I asked her the same thing once. She told me that I could never fully understand. A piece of information I should add, to help explain: she sees us as clouds of energy, not as the vessels of flesh in clothing which we see each other as. She says she chose me because my energy was pleasing and unique to her.”

  Veiled dismay showed on the faces of a noticeable portion of the crowd upon being described as vessels of clothed flesh.

  The Empress leaned back and extended her legs. As she did, her throne elongated itself into a sort of regal couch to reflect her posture.

  “I suggest you get comfortable too,” she said demurely, to hesitant laughter.

  The screen behind her had gone dark, making her the sole focus of the Hall.

  The Empress' face had once been anonymously described as “a porcelain mask, the facade beh
ind which any terror might lie.” When Keti had informed her of this, she had revealed the faintest smile.

  There were those among the thousands assembled who superstitiously refused to meet her gaze, unimposing though she was on such a grand stage. This was their sole intermediary to the goddess Keti.

  Her black hair was cut to such a specific style that human hands had never been trusted with it. Her bangs angled sharply down across her forehead in a way that was calculated to the point of being mathematical. Its exactness gave rise to the view of her face as masklike, certainly inscrutable.

  The soft curve of her face contrasted strikingly with this iconic hair. Her eyes, ringed in lurid pink eyeshadow, brimmed with a disdain that dared one to trust their minute flashes of vulnerability.

  Was she a girl who had been bred for regal iciness, or a soulless puppet of the very goddess who had not flinched at murdering billions of people? None but Keti knew.

  To analyze the separate parts of her appearance failed to convey the shifting beauty of her, though; the crowd's reaction to her presence was as if a cobra had risen from the darkness to sway before them. They all recognized the danger implicit in having her attention.

  “Ah,” she sighed, “I expected to deal with this: why did Keti choose to spare us, when she had the whole Earth to choose from? This I do know. She once ruled over a people many years ago on this land. Keti tells me they served her with sincerity and love. So, the answer is nostalgia.”

  “Oh. Someone... wants to know if I'm still human or if Keti has made me something else. What a polite way of asking, and I'm sure you would like to know.”

  Her eyes scanned the audience slowly, assessing them or possibly seeking out the one who had asked the question. Not a whisper broke the silence.

  “I don't know,” she said. “I don't know what it is to be human in the way you are. I sit alone in the upper levels of the Needle and only interact with two other people. Neither of whom I enjoy the company of, because they are forbidden from speaking to me. I suspect that they're not even human.

  “And Keti, of course.”

  She spoke the words without sorrow or bitterness. The answer to the question was something she clearly had accepted long ago.

  “Next. You ask me where Keti was before she appeared twenty years ago, and why she came back. In all honesty, she hasn't said much about it. She ruled over a portion of the planet until becoming bored. As far as I can tell, she slept. Maybe she went on a vacation through the universe.

  “I suppose that it's hard to continue caring about a world you've watched for so long. Now that I think about it, she once commented on how painfully dull we were before discovering language. She implied that we were given language when she found herself tempted to wipe us out if we didn't become more... interesting.

  “But... she didn't. And here we are.” The Empress extended an upswept hand to the crowd.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Lower the lights again so I can concentrate. I'm currently in the Needle. Let us say that I'm half here and half there.”

  The lights dimmed until all she could see were glowing faces, lit by pads. She looked down and frowned.

  “Our next question: why does Keti let the outlanders live, and should we fear them? Well... I don't think Keti cares at all. She gave us the technology that enabled the lives we lead now, but some people are offended by the idea of depending on technology. Or Keti.

  “They're no threat to her, or to any of you. They built their own towns rather than live among us and stir up rebellion. Let's be thankful for that, and thank Keti for being more accepting than many of us would be.

  “I believe Keti is merely intrigued by them knowing she exists, yet being too stubborn to bow before her. She watches us all, but that doesn't mean she's concerned with what we do.”

  “I'm here today,” she added, “for that very reason. We're nothing more to Keti than things to observe. She grew bored of being worshipped long before any of us were alive. It would seem that she wants us to recognize her power without fawning over her.”

  Hundreds of faces turned suddenly downward to their pads. Before their questions could be sent, the Empress dismissed them with a wave of her hand.

  “Yes, even me. None of us has anything to offer Keti that she hasn't seen countless times. Maybe more than we realize.

  “What else do you wonder about? You asked... now this one is interesting. If Keti gave this level of technology to us, why haven't we found evidence of previous civilizations having it? Very good,” she said, furrowing her brow.

  “Have I ever thought to ask?...” She paused a moment, bowed her head and closed her eyes. Her posture stiffened slightly. Following a violent flutter, her eyelids opened to reveal black nothingness.

  She blinked. Her eyes were normal again, but took a moment to orient.

  “Keti gave us a level of technology we could handle, just as she has done each time she has returned. We don't need to know where from.”

  She blinked twice, giving the front rows unsettling glimpses of darkness. The crowd tensed nervously. Slowly, her eyelids closed. A low, modulated voice emanated from her open mouth: “Your final question.”

  To the shock of all, a man instantly jumped to his feet and shouted, “How will the world end?”

  Her eyes flared open, wider than seemed possible, onto a deep emptiness which seemed to pull the flesh around it inward.

  “You will kill each other for food,” the voice of Keti intoned. “The last of your kind shall starve, too late for the planet to fix the damage you have done. Its atmosphere will deteriorate. I will leave, to begin my experiment again, with new knowledge acquired through observing your failure.”

  All of the Grand Hall’s lights came on in unison. The stage was now empty other than a light dusting of purple soot.

  A voice announced, “The First Assembly has concluded.”

  Most of the crowd's eyes stayed on the stage as they filed out. Outside, groups of them typed anxiously on keypads projected from the CR rings on their index fingers. Across the enormous city, people waited in anticipation for the first reports to come back from the Assembly. In answer, CR rings pinged soothingly in every home.

  Chapter Two

  As the form of the Empress broke apart in the Grand Hall, her eyes opened onto a broad landscape. Though she could see the majority of Keti's kingdom from so far up in the Needle, she had never physically left it since the day Keti had claimed her. 150 stories up, on an entire level with floor-to-ceiling windows, she looked down on humanity with great distance, a distance she felt as vividly as she saw it.

  From here, she could only see life happening on a grand scale: traffic moving like a dotted snake through the streets, orderly squads of bots performing the duties once relegated to humans, cloud systems rolling in and out slowly.

  But from this height, she never saw two people holding hands. She never saw the smiles of friends drunkenly weaving to autopiloted hovs, bellowing their affection to one another.

  Just tiny dots that moved and stopped at random. Her fellow humans (if they even thought of her as one of them) were never anything but dots scattering around far, far below.

  Life in all its variety, seen through a microscope.

  It had been exhilarating to be in a room with other people. She had felt giddy, and had had to strain not to show it. But it had ended so quickly. If only she had touched one of their shoulders! Or shook a hand!

  But, obviously, she had been here the whole time. It still wouldn't have been real.

  An unabashed sob broke from her lips and descended into a choppy series of lesser sobs. There was no one to console her; it was silly to bother crying, but there was no reason to hold back either.

  “I do not need to read your mind to know what is in it.” The Empress saw Keti reflected behind her in the glass but she made no move to turn to her.

  The goddess' voice was a minimal attempt at sounding human and female. It sounded like a computer text-to-speech program being
run underwater.

  The Empress sniffed softly and rubbed tears away with the back of her hand. There was no use turning to face Keti, who chose to present herself as a mirror image of the Empress when she came to her. The only difference was the black eyes of the goddess.

  “I'm still human,” the Empress said lowly.

  “You are.”

  “If you're here to tell me how foolish this is, please don't.”

  Keti was silent. She had no concept of time, and didn't notice if their conversation went months between replies.

  “I'm one of them, no matter what you've done to make me be like you. You can't understand why I cry... don't judge me for it.”

  The Empress stared out at the world beyond the Needle. Her tear-streaked face was reflected as a ghostly image hovering just outside the window.

  Keti's reflection, by contrast, mocked her: the Empress' own face, void of any emotion. The black eyes had never blinked in twenty years. Like two masks, the faces hung over the lights of the city.

  The Empress looked down uncomfortably.

  Keti spoke. “You have no peers. You are alone, isolated, while comparable organic lifeforms are all around you.”

  “If you knew how this felt, you would cry too.”

  “I ask you to consider: which of us is more alone, Empress?”

  The Empress rubbed her eyes. “Yes, your divinity.”

  “You were crying just now.”

  “Yes,” she replied. “You have seen me cry before.”

  “Never like this. It makes your energy blur in a way that would amaze you if you could see it.”

  “Does it amaze you?”

  “No.”

  It was unprecedented; Keti's face, rather the Empress' face, softened perceptibly. “I once,” she began, “saw hundreds of thousands of your kind blur in the same way, all at once. For over six years. If you would, imagine it like a fireworks display.”

  “You enjoyed it.” It was an accusation.

  “It was abhorrent to me. I slept, to forget the sight of it. It is not right for a goddess to be affected by such insignificant things. After that moment, their energy shone more pleasingly. I look on it now as a great accomplishment for your kind, yet I could not remain unfazed as it occurred.”