Girl In The Needle Read online

  Dugan continued. “Keti's number one slave, sticking her fucking nose in the air at the few of us her master didn't kill. It sounds like Keti can't be bothered with the small stuff, huh?”

  The anger in his eyes subsided. She was just a girl. Looking at her, he couldn't hold onto the hatred he thought he felt for her. Keti had taken her as a child and locked her in that damn Needle.

  The Empress parted her lips to speak, thought better of it and said nothing.

  Dugan covered his CR ring, ending the call. When he withdrew his hand, the Empress appeared again.

  A hint of a smile crossed her lips. “She won't let you ignore her.”

  Dugan stared blankly. “Tell me what you want,” he said.

  “Keti foresees one of the outlanders setting off a homemade bomb in the City next week; she estimates 739 casualties.”

  “Tell her to kill him.”

  “She refuses to do it. She enjoys observing.”

  “So one of your enemies is gonna kill some Citizens, and you think I'll risk my life to stop him?”

  “She announced another Assembly for people to ask her questions at. You've been invited.” She paused. “And you'll be one of the casualties if you don't stop him.”

  Dugan grinned. “I'm gonna have to politely decline that invitation.”

  “You have a lot to learn. When the Assembly is about to begin, you'll find yourself there. In appropriate clothing. The Assembly will be twelve days from now.”

  Taking Dugan by complete surprise, the Empress shyly ended the call with a shy “Bye.”

  He sat in thought until the temperature dropped enough to make him notice the long shadows in front of him.

  “Well damn,” he muttered as he stood up and stretched.

  Chapter Four

  Lorenz sat in silence, staring at the speaker in front of him. A portable heater kicked in, rousing him from his contemplation.

  “It would appear that the situation is more complicated than we believed,” he said.

  David, one of his “employees,” had brought him an audio recording of a local mercenary being contacted (allegedly, he reminded himself) by the goddess herself. He had stopped it there to question David.

  Lorenz was the closest the outlanders had to a leader. It was essential that he maintain their respect (and his authority among them), which was easily done by stating obvious things in a confident voice.

  Most of the outlanders were easily provoked, and reacted to new ideas with hatred. This was why a man like Lorenz, whose guiding principle was survival at all costs, was cautious not to upset them.

  The outlanders (even those who'd never witnessed his cruelty), were, in turn, hesitant to cross him. The difference was that Lorenz knew of the outlanders' fear. The outlanders firmly believed that Lorenz feared nothing.

  He was famous among them for having killed an ambitious man named Cris Sullivan.

  Cris Sullivan had been determined to become the outlanders' spokesperson, official or otherwise. Despite the fact that the City had never shown hostility toward the outlanders, Sullivan had roamed the outlands sowing fear into people’s minds.

  He had been solely responsible for the outlanders' near-complete rejection of the technology in the City, one which Lorenz was slowly luring them away from. Sullivan's impassioned speeches had centered around the claim that Keti was an artificial intelligence that could only reach them through electronics.

  “But what if he's right?” his believers had asked anyone who pointed out the idea's flaws. “I'm not risking it.”

  At the time, the outlanders had only rejected the technology which hadn't been pioneered by humans. A widespread complaint among outlanders that year had been their poor cell phone reception due to all the cell phone towers being in the City.

  Sullivan had spent months slowly convincing them that they should be not only afraid of technology, but ashamed of using it. He had outlined a clear archetype: the outlander as a rugged, heroic class of person; someone who survived without technological crutches.

  It had rapidly become politically incorrect to use a cell phone.

  Popular opinion had settled on a compromise between the two extremes; the outlands had chained themselves to the technological limitations of about 1985. They would use basic technology and treat everything else as frivolous.

  Despite this, they derisively followed the City's entertainment news in the newspaper. With the majority of the world's trees gone, necessity had inspired the outlanders to revolutionize the recycling industry; the paper used for newspapers was returned and reused.

  Lorenz had seen the reaction of those who were persuaded by Sullivan; it was an unstable and unfocused mania. He had envisioned the unpredictability of life in these conditions and had known that he had to control the people around him or else be subject to their whims.

  Cris Sullivan had had to die. Lorenz couldn't risk having that strong of a rival. But the man was easier to kill than to befriend. He distrusted everyone.

  Lorenz had ambushed Sullivan in his tent after one of his speeches, had wrapped a length of barbed wire around Sullivan's throat, and had left his head barely attached to his neck.

  Walking calmly out of Sullivan's tent in nothing more than his boxers (to show that Keti hadn't influenced him through electronics), his hands and forearms wet with blood, he had addressed the assembled crowd.

  “Cris Sullivan tried to divide us, to confuse us. What we need is to stand together! To be proud of that which unites us: we choose freedom over comfort, and that is what brings honor to every outlander.”

  Since that day, he had been viewed as a hero for outlanders to look up to.

  “I fuckin' told you Dugan was one of them,” his employee David replied with a burst of enthusiasm.

  Lorenz stared off into space. “There is no them, David. If Keti spoke to an outlander, that man is not part of any group we know of.”

  Chapter Five

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the Empress will have silence as she enters. Your applause is implied and unnecessary.”

  A man seated in the rear of the auditorium scoffed, began to slide his CR ring around to covertly post a sarcastic comment for his friends, but thought better of it and hid his hands.

  A globe appeared, floating above the stage, as the lights in the room went dark. A wave of prismatic color swept around it.

  “Keti arrives on our planet, designating her chosen people,” announced the emotionless voice. “In the wake of her return, a time of prosperity.”

  The globe dissolved into a swirl of particles, joining together again to form the head of a man in clear eyeglasses. The crowd murmured in recognition of Simon Antonov, an engineer who, on the day of Keti's arrival, had been inundated with a fully-formed vision of the technology that their society was now based on.

  Antonov's holographic head exploded into a flow of images and patterns which lit up the faces in the front rows: the processor configuration that had ushered in unprecedented levels of computing power, mathematical equations for producing a regenerating power source, lines of code for making artificial intelligences which could learn complex ideas.

  They curved outwards like tendrils, floating above the crowd's heads as people gazed upward, transfixed.

  The words and images vibrated and distorted, becoming too blurry to comprehend. They remained in place, slowly swaying, as the stage filled with a scene of life in the City. As Citizens cheerfully rode through the streets, buildings went transparent to reveal bots performing tasks as varied as toilet cleaning and vehicle design.

  “Still,” the voice intoned, “the Citizens do not understand the will of the one who gave them so much.”

  Buildings, bots, vehicles all crumbled to the stage, leaving only the holograms of men and women with smiles on their faces. They looked skyward in unison; a wind seemed to gust up, whipping their hair roughly into their faces.

  Their hair, in fact their entire heads, began to dissolve toward the ceiling in a vague blur
of matter. As the swirl of particles grew above them, they gradually blew away.

  The form above the stage flowed out to cover the ceiling in a rolling wave of light. The audience craned their necks to watch it refract light around the auditorium.

  “Their minds are opened to the existence of one among them who is destined to be Keti's representative on Earth: the Empress.”

  With that, the Empress' face formed in the wave of holographic energy above them. Her eyes blinked, and were fully black when they opened.

  Instead of dissolving, the undulating face of the Empress dropped without warning. The crowd gasped as her face rushed toward them soundlessly.

  The hologram dissipated as it fell, and was gone before it reached the ground.

  Their gazes gradually fell to the stage again, where the Empress stared back passively. She sat on a black throne as she had before, inlaid with marble, but this one rose up to leave her sitting five feet above the stage.

  The stage itself was obscured by what appeared to be fog, though it was hard to discern whether it was real or holographic.

  The Empress closed her eyes. No sound escaped from the crowd as they waited for almost a minute. When she opened her eyes, nothing was visible in them but an emptiness which seemed to absorb light.

  Following the first Assembly, there had been ceaseless discussion. One of the few things the Citizens had agreed on was that when the Empress' eyes had suddenly gone black, it signified that Keti had taken possession of her body.

  Was the Empress really human? Had she ever been? Or was she an avatar for Keti? There were many who swore that they'd known the girl who had become the Empress. They said she had been a normal girl, but shy.

  They thought she had been about four at the time she had been taken. The Return (or Rise, as some preferred to call it) of Keti had occurred in such a dreamlike way that those who had experienced it struggled to describe it clearly.

  None of them remembered the night before it. They had all regained consciousness simultaneously, as far as anyone could tell; even those who worked overnight, and should have been at work, were unclear what they had done.

  Upon awakening, those remaining on Earth had had a numbed understanding of the new world they lived in. Most of them recalled it feeling like their memory extended partly forward and partly backward.

  Turning on their TV's, checking their phones, the limited news of Earth's near-total devastation had seemed natural, like they'd known it would happen but had momentarily forgotten.

  They found that they knew the name, knew that a goddess named Keti was responsible, but knew nothing about her.

  Newspapers' focus was on learning about Keti; they never questioned why billions of humans had died.

  What mattered was that they were her chosen people.

  When they thought of Keti, the image of a little girl began to accompany it in their minds. The girl was young, with dark hair and suspicious eyes. As the story goes, people who recognized her went to her family's apartment. Her parents had dressed her in her finest clothes and sat her outside to wait to be taken.

  No pictures existed of her before the Needle was built to house her and honor Keti; though awed by her existence, not one of them had thought to take her picture. It was one of the curious mental lapses which demonstrated Keti's influence over events.

  The Empress's birth name was now lost to history.

  Ominously, people had simply known their roles in the building of this new world and had begun performing them.

  Workers had arrived at the site where the Needle would be erected, and had begun its construction. When the Empress was whisked away from outside her family home, attendants in matching white robes had been kneeling, heads bowed, in a circle around the spot where she would be delivered to.

  The only ones who felt they had not been manipulated by Keti during this transition phase were the scientists and engineers who had developed and implemented new technologies. They reported that they had skeptically reviewed the engineer Simon Antonov's blueprints and the science behind them.

  He had struggled to explain concepts too new to have technical names. They would have ignored his claims if not for the strange, uncertain world they found themselves adjusting to: following a cataclysmic global event, the majority of the survivors on Earth had fallen into a trance and, with no apparent impetus, begun building a metropolis which was incompatible with current technology.

  Antonov had searched out anyone who might understand, raving about a dream he had had about a majestic City they could build. It was so obvious, he said.

  Initially they had assumed that he had lost hold of his sanity.

  He had demonstrated an understanding, though, of too broad a range of fields of study for them to explain. He had lectured them on the flaws in everything from virtual reality coding to city planning.

  As they tentatively explored his vision, they'd begun to notice that construction crews had already been building an infrastructure around the technology they were researching.

  The factories being built weren't made for humans. Road crews had begun laying out roads that required superb skill to drive on, but were ideal for a vehicle that drove itself; exactly the vehicles Antonov had described to them.

  For seven months, the Empress's attendants had guarded the Empress during the building of the Needle. Following the hours spent on her clothes and hair daily, she had been put on display in a park during the afternoon so Keti's worshippers could lay flowers at her feet and bow before her. At night they had ushered her into an imposing stone courthouse to be alone.

  When pressed, she had divulged that yes, Keti came to her on most nights.

  “But what does she say?” they had asked.

  “Just... stuff. I dont know.” She had been too young to handle the entire world's population hanging on her every word.

  It was said that during this time, she had mostly acted like a normal, but quiet, four- or five-year-old girl. She was shy around strangers, even-tempered, and sensitive.

  A popular website of the time had posted accounts of people who had somehow caused the Empress's dissatisfaction during her days in the park, sometimes by doing nothing more than asking a question on a day when she had wanted them to let her be by herself.

  To their shock, one day a boy her age had asked her if she wanted to play with him.

  “Play what?” she had asked.

  “I dunno... tag?”

  “I'm not very good at tag,” she had replied in embarrassment.

  “Okay,” the boy had said, unsure how to respond. He had retreated to his horrified parents. If he had been responsible for the Empress getting hurt in any way, the family could conceivably be cursed for all time.

  To the Empress's quiet dismay, children were then forbidden from approaching her without an adult's presence.

  On the day the Needle was officially dedicated to Keti, there had been a parade for the Empress. Citizens had lined the parade route holding up signs of adoration and encouragement.

  An imposing black onyx pyramid had been built for her to sit atop in the procession. There was no need to protect her from a population which revered her.

  And so, en route to being locked in the Needle, she had portentously been given a vantage point which separated her both physically and symbolically from the rest of humanity. The pyramid they had made for her was so tall that she was visible from both ends of the parade route.

  There she rode, on a throne built into the peak of the pyramid. The Empress hadn't looked down at the crowd once.

  In an iconic picture taken of her that day (the poster of which had become more ubiquitous than a flag), her chin pointed toward the heavens. Or, perhaps, toward the Needle. Her dark hair was pulled too tight to one side of her head.

  The expression on her face was most often described as austere. She would later reveal to an attendant that Keti had appeared before her in that moment, telling her to force all emotion from her mind. Emotion, Keti had ex
plained, was reserved for inferior beings.

  In the temples to Keti, people would openly weep before the poster, prostrating themselves before the image of a young Empress staring skyward, hearing the voice of a goddess who spoke only to her.

  Other than a row of attendants which led the parade, the entire parade procession had consisted of bots.

  Once Simon Antonov's ideas had begun being implemented, computer programs had calculated the optimal designs for safe, intelligent bots. These bots had been built, and immediately become more efficient than humans at building the foundations of the new world Antonov had envisioned.

  The bots' operating system was based on code which Antonov had envisioned, then woven into the open-source code of a semi-popular online game for children. Using the game's code as foundation, he had added in the lines from his vision.

  He had posted links to it on a few social media sites (on which he had very few friends). Within days, the game had incorporated his changes and begun sending invites to people itself.

  The game, originally about a dog learning grammar, had a name which was too inane for people to be comfortable identifying with Keti, so they had chosen to forget it.

  Within a week of Antonov’s upload, the game was deleted. Asked for comment, the dev had posted a status saying The changes we made were the result of a vision from the one we know as Keti. The process has begun to incorporate the many things she's shown us into our world, as we rebuild it.

  It had come as no surprise to anyone. Of course Keti had established how the city they'd been building would function. They had rushed out the first bots, so that those bots could more quickly design their own successors.

  Bots had finished the City, cleaned it, built the pyramid on which she rode, manufactured the driverless cars the roads were designed for, and organized the parade.

  And so, when the Empress had walked cautiously down from her perch high above the parade, she had found herself waving mostly to bots. The frenzied crowd had kept a distance; they chanted the words “Keti, Protect The Empress Forever” as she had marched slowly, all alone, to the base of the Needle. She had simply walked into the darkness of it.