Mechanical Heart

 

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Chapter 1

The empty stage hung eerily silent, red curtains unmoving in the still air and air heavy with silence. No a living thing stirred in the room though the sunlight filtering through the motes of dust that floated lazily through the afternoon air held an animated quality as they drifted lit aflame by the rays that came down from the window mounted high in the wall just out of the reach of vision.

Well, vision was what one might call it. The only witness to the scene being a disorganized pile of debris with something resembling a human head perched precariously on top of it. The stack consisted of randomly scattered body parts, wires sticking out at odd angles here and there, servos and gears visible in the few places that weren’t hidden in shadow. The head had sat here quietly observing for untold years, seen the myriad of faces and voices come and go across this stage in all that span of time, seen the still and silent times like this when not even a stray mouse disturbed the stillness.

The moving parts of the android had ceased moving so long ago that no one now alive in the ballet company that was housed in the theater could remember when he was fully functional or even what he was called, even though Android Defense and Artillery Module was stamped inside his chest. Adam, the acronym that he had always been addressed by, was scribbled under it in crude block letters written in permanent marker on top of some of the technical specifications etched onto the metal plaque just inside the access panel on his chest. His positronic brain held the knowledge of its location with acute clarity along with the precise memory of the man who had scribbled it there. He could even tell you down to the second the moment at which the marker came into contact with the metal on his chest.

Well, he could have told you if his voice actuators hadn’t gone out of service long before the pieces of him were ever dismantled and rummaged around inside of for spare parts to repair the moving parts of the scenery and background for countless performance. He had, for quite some time been a literal part of the workings of the ballet company.

How he’d come to be here was a long story. Part of the vast army of android soldiers created to fight in the war so long ago that no one alive even remembered the day that the circuits in him were fired to life for the first time. Two thousand and twenty seemed so long ago now, though in Adam’s memory banks the recorded memories of his activation and purpose replayed as freshly as if they had happened yesterday.  

 The alien hoards that had poured off the ships onto the Earth had seemed peaceful enough in the beginning, friendly even, though it was with a quick, sickening realization that they were far less benevolent than they first appeared became evident.

The first human to become sick hadn’t raised much suspicion. Humans grew sick and died every day, fragile things that they were, and one person with a mysterious illness that doctors couldn’t determine a cause for raised only a few red flags. However, when the next two fell ill, then four, the numbers doubling like some sort of wildfire, it only took them a few tries to trace it back to its source. The first to get sick were the scientists and soldiers that interacted directly with the new arrivals, but it spread quickly enough as airborne viruses are wont to do, leaving destruction behind in its wake.

The first response was to quarantine the visitors who responded to the suggestion with violence, taking out entire battalions of the soldiers who were sent to enforce the orders of their governments, and it was then that their intentions towards Earth became clear all along. These extraterrestrial beings were sick, their planet behind them dying in an epidemic of apocalyptic proportions. The few who managed to make it onto these ships were the survivors, carriers of the plague that wiped out their home civilizations and searching for a home among the stars where they would be welcomed by the ignorant and technologically backwards inhabitants who had no way of knowing that in most of the universe these beings were as unwelcome as cockroaches and just as much of a nuisance. They’d spent much of the last two decades rebounding from one planet or moon to the next only to be rejected before even landing most places.

To them the Earth must have looked like some sort of primitive Eden, unspoiled and filled with barely formed apes that would be easy enough to wipe out. The fact that their own virus spread so rampantly amongst the population would have been a bonus, doing more than half of their work for them. However, they had underestimated the tenacity of the human race to overcome the odds against them. In the end, it came down to sheer numbers that left the invasion broken and overpowered. Their limited numbers, weakened by the virus already, hadn’t been a match for the android army deployed by the human race as their first shield.

Adam had been one of the first generation of those androids sent to defend the human race when they could barely defend themselves. Only a few thousand had made it out in the first wave, then hundreds of thousands more until, in the years after the war when the plague still ravaged through the population, there had been more androids on the streets of the planet than living humans.

That was the one thing that perhaps the creatures did succeed in. The disease swept through the human race, no matter how exhaustive their attempts to quarantine themselves in walled cities, enacting travel restrictions and blood testing for those few allowed to move about from one city to another. Those who were infected were dead men from the first symptom as no cure was ever found, and those brave enough to work with the sick and dying were signing their own death warrants in the process.

In the end, what had saved the human race from complete and utter extinction had been a combination of factors. Firstly, for some unknown reason, a small subgroup of people had been immune to the virus from its inception. The immunity tended to run in families and at times entire small towns and communities carried it, leaving little pockets of people able to go on living their lives at a relatively normal pace, hidden behind their walled quarantine zones. These people had tended to stick to themselves even after the threat of plague was removed, leaving these bubbles of purebred humans like artifacts of a distant past that no one now remembered.

The rest of the world was left to depend on the ingenuity of a handful of scientists, struggling desperately to find some sort of cure that would mean the human race could go on surviving. They didn’t have the luxury of running away from their home world as their invaders did. Nor did they have the assistance of the rest of the newly discovered universe, since the Earth was strictly marked as a no-fly zone for the rest of the universe, cutting the planet off from its neighbors before they ever really knew the neighborhood even existed. Left to their own devices, with the governments of the world in a shambles, they took to experimenting on the dying and the living to find anything that could extend their lives even a short while.

Genetics research had been in its infancy at the time, and the power of DNA wasn’t well understood, though it didn’t stop so many of them from playing with the few tools at their disposal anyway. When it was discovered that cats were immune to the virus, it was a simple step to using cat genes to treat the infected in one place. Another far-flung location found that birds were the answer to their question and in yet another place, mice, until one by one they were left coming to the same conclusion from different means, saving the few who were strong enough to make it through the therapies and lead a relatively normal life, though the consequences of their actions wouldn’t be known for some time yet.

The human population was left devastated in the years after the plague, and Adam’s memory banks recalled his next purpose, not fighting against foreign invaders, but defending mankind from itself. Civil wars quickly became the order of the day, and the forces built to save the world from the plague were now the only thing that could keep them from killing each other out entirely in the struggle for the spent resources that remained until mankind came to its senses when the first babies of the genetically modified plague survivors were born, one with slitted, glowing eyes like a cat, the next with downy feathers lining his collar bone, and a third with scales and webbed fingers, gills flaring at the sides of her neck. One by one, the significance of what they’d done to survive came to full realization and the battle for the reserved supplies ground to a halt while man once again came together in an attempt to work through the perceived crisis, though in the end there was little they could do to halt the tide of a man-made evolution of sorts.

Two centuries later, the world was made anew in the image of these hybrids, though they had become second class citizens to the few remaining purebred humans that kept themselves at least socially walled off from the majority of the population, leaving them the de facto aristocracy in this brave new world.

Adam and his kind had stood silent witness to it all, recording and documenting, following orders until they’d been decommissioned and used for spare parts, positronic brain sill chronicling the events that passed through two centuries of time, taciturn sentinels to all that had passed. More droids had come in their wake, created for other purposes, and built from the remaining parts or patterns of their ancestors, until it was presumed none were left functional, which was strictly true. In his current state, Adam was far from functional, though the cameras lay behind his eyes still operated with perfect clarity through the thin film of dust that had settled over the lenses of his eyes. His appearance was chiefly human, created to be a perfect replica of the soldiers he was built to replace down to the detail, and no two androids had been exact copies of the other in order to confuse their enemy as to who was human and who was a robotic replacement.

Adam’s own face had been modeled on that of the first soldier to die from the plague, fairly handsome though in a rugged worn kind of way, brown hair with a little gray at the temples and eyes grey eyes that reflected the colors of the light around them more than anything, appearing to change with the seasons and weather in a trick of the eye, skin seasoned with light lines and wrinkles that gave him a more human air than one might have imagined possible for a machine. More than one unprepared visitor to the his current home had found themselves startled at what appeared to, on first glance, be an assorted jumble of human body parts, though the current students at the ballet company had grown so used to him that they glanced over him like nothing more than one of the props that littered the edges and corners of the theater in assorted boxes and stacks, waiting to make themselves useful once again.

He’d come here a hundred years ago, when he was still more or less in working order, though certain parts were a bit sticky and slow even at that point in time when he’d been purchased as second hand military surplus to do maintenance work around the theater. His voice was already cracking and broken, growing steadily worse with each passing year until it was gone, one servo motor after another going dead until he was frozen in place like a futuristic tin man, doomed to remain rusted in one spot for the rest of time. It was then that he’d been relegated to the dusty corner where he now resided, being cannibalized for parts and forgotten in an accumulation of indiscriminate parts, literally and figuratively a part of the background.

The empty stage hung eerily silent, red curtains unmoving in the still air and air heavy with silence. No a living thing stirred in the room though the sunlight filtering through the motes of dust that floated lazily through the afternoon air held an animated quality as they drifted lit aflame by the rays that came down from the window mounted high in the wall just out of the reach of vision.

Well, vision was what one might call it. The only witness to the scene being a disorganized pile of debris with something resembling a human head perched precariously on top of it. The stack consisted of randomly scattered body parts, wires sticking out at odd angles here and there, servos and gears visible in the few places that weren’t hidden in shadow. The head had sat here quietly observing for untold years, seen the myriad of faces and voices come and go across this stage in all that span of time, seen the still and silent times like this when not even a stray mouse disturbed the stillness.

The moving parts of the android had ceased moving so long ago that no one now alive in the ballet company that was housed in the theater could remember when he was fully functional or even what he was called, even though Android Defense and Artillery Module was stamped inside his chest. Adam, the acronym that he had always been addressed by, was scribbled under it in crude block letters written in permanent marker on top of some of the technical specifications etched onto the metal plaque just inside the access panel on his chest. His positronic brain held the knowledge of its location with acute clarity along with the precise memory of the man who had scribbled it there. He could even tell you down to the second the moment at which the marker came into contact with the metal on his chest.

Well, he could have told you if his voice actuators hadn’t gone out of service long before the pieces of him were ever dismantled and rummaged around inside of for spare parts to repair the moving parts of the scenery and background for countless performance. He had, for quite some time been a literal part of the workings of the ballet company.

How he’d come to be here was a long story. Part of the vast army of android soldiers created to fight in the war so long ago that no one alive even remembered the day that the circuits in him were fired to life for the first time. Two thousand and twenty seemed so long ago now, though in Adam’s memory banks the recorded memories of his activation and purpose replayed as freshly as if they had happened yesterday.  

 The alien hoards that had poured off the ships onto the Earth had seemed peaceful enough in the beginning, friendly even, though it was with a quick, sickening realization that they were far less benevolent than they first appeared became evident.

The first human to become sick hadn’t raised much suspicion. Humans grew sick and died every day, fragile things that they were, and one person with a mysterious illness that doctors couldn’t determine a cause for raised only a few red flags. However, when the next two fell ill, then four, the numbers doubling like some sort of wildfire, it only took them a few tries to trace it back to its source. The first to get sick were the scientists and soldiers that interacted directly with the new arrivals, but it spread quickly enough as airborne viruses are wont to do, leaving destruction behind in its wake.

The first response was to quarantine the visitors who responded to the suggestion with violence, taking out entire battalions of the soldiers who were sent to enforce the orders of their governments, and it was then that their intentions towards Earth became clear all along. These extraterrestrial beings were sick, their planet behind them dying in an epidemic of apocalyptic proportions. The few who managed to make it onto these ships were the survivors, carriers of the plague that wiped out their home civilizations and searching for a home among the stars where they would be welcomed by the ignorant and technologically backwards inhabitants who had no way of knowing that in most of the universe these beings were as unwelcome as cockroaches and just as much of a nuisance. They’d spent much of the last two decades rebounding from one planet or moon to the next only to be rejected before even landing most places.

To them the Earth must have looked like some sort of primitive Eden, unspoiled and filled with barely formed apes that would be easy enough to wipe out. The fact that their own virus spread so rampantly amongst the population would have been a bonus, doing more than half of their work for them. However, they had underestimated the tenacity of the human race to overcome the odds against them. In the end, it came down to sheer numbers that left the invasion broken and overpowered. Their limited numbers, weakened by the virus already, hadn’t been a match for the android army deployed by the human race as their first shield.

Adam had been one of the first generation of those androids sent to defend the human race when they could barely defend themselves. Only a few thousand had made it out in the first wave, then hundreds of thousands more until, in the years after the war when the plague still ravaged through the population, there had been more androids on the streets of the planet than living humans.

That was the one thing that perhaps the creatures did succeed in. The disease swept through the human race, no matter how exhaustive their attempts to quarantine themselves in walled cities, enacting travel restrictions and blood testing for those few allowed to move about from one city to another. Those who were infected were dead men from the first symptom as no cure was ever found, and those brave enough to work with the sick and dying were signing their own death warrants in the process.

In the end, what had saved the human race from complete and utter extinction had been a combination of factors. Firstly, for some unknown reason, a small subgroup of people had been immune to the virus from its inception. The immunity tended to run in families and at times entire small towns and communities carried it, leaving little pockets of people able to go on living their lives at a relatively normal pace, hidden behind their walled quarantine zones. These people had tended to stick to themselves even after the threat of plague was removed, leaving these bubbles of purebred humans like artifacts of a distant past that no one now remembered.

The rest of the world was left to depend on the ingenuity of a handful of scientists, struggling desperately to find some sort of cure that would mean the human race could go on surviving. They didn’t have the luxury of running away from their home world as their invaders did. Nor did they have the assistance of the rest of the newly discovered universe, since the Earth was strictly marked as a no-fly zone for the rest of the universe, cutting the planet off from its neighbors before they ever really knew the neighborhood even existed. Left to their own devices, with the governments of the world in a shambles, they took to experimenting on the dying and the living to find anything that could extend their lives even a short while.

Genetics research had been in its infancy at the time, and the power of DNA wasn’t well understood, though it didn’t stop so many of them from playing with the few tools at their disposal anyway. When it was discovered that cats were immune to the virus, it was a simple step to using cat genes to treat the infected in one place. Another far-flung location found that birds were the answer to their question and in yet another place, mice, until one by one they were left coming to the same conclusion from different means, saving the few who were strong enough to make it through the therapies and lead a relatively normal life, though the consequences of their actions wouldn’t be known for some time yet.

The human population was left devastated in the years after the plague, and Adam’s memory banks recalled his next purpose, not fighting against foreign invaders, but defending mankind from itself. Civil wars quickly became the order of the day, and the forces built to save the world from the plague were now the only thing that could keep them from killing each other out entirely in the struggle for the spent resources that remained until mankind came to its senses when the first babies of the genetically modified plague survivors were born, one with slitted, glowing eyes like a cat, the next with downy feathers lining his collar bone, and a third with scales and webbed fingers, gills flaring at the sides of her neck. One by one, the significance of what they’d done to survive came to full realization and the battle for the reserved supplies ground to a halt while man once again came together in an attempt to work through the perceived crisis, though in the end there was little they could do to halt the tide of a man-made evolution of sorts.

Two centuries later, the world was made anew in the image of these hybrids, though they had become second class citizens to the few remaining purebred humans that kept themselves at least socially walled off from the majority of the population, leaving them the de facto aristocracy in this brave new world.

Adam and his kind had stood silent witness to it all, recording and documenting, following orders until they’d been decommissioned and used for spare parts, positronic brain sill chronicling the events that passed through two centuries of time, taciturn sentinels to all that had passed. More droids had come in their wake, created for other purposes, and built from the remaining parts or patterns of their ancestors, until it was presumed none were left functional, which was strictly true. In his current state, Adam was far from functional, though the cameras lay behind his eyes still operated with perfect clarity through the thin film of dust that had settled over the lenses of his eyes. His appearance was chiefly human, created to be a perfect replica of the soldiers he was built to replace down to the detail, and no two androids had been exact copies of the other in order to confuse their enemy as to who was human and who was a robotic replacement.

Adam’s own face had been modeled on that of the first soldier to die from the plague, fairly handsome though in a rugged worn kind of way, brown hair with a little gray at the temples and eyes grey eyes that reflected the colors of the light around them more than anything, appearing to change with the seasons and weather in a trick of the eye, skin seasoned with light lines and wrinkles that gave him a more human air than one might have imagined possible for a machine. More than one unprepared visitor to the his current home had found themselves startled at what appeared to, on first glance, be an assorted jumble of human body parts, though the current students at the ballet company had grown so used to him that they glanced over him like nothing more than one of the props that littered the edges and corners of the theater in assorted boxes and stacks, waiting to make themselves useful once again.

He’d come here a hundred years ago, when he was still more or less in working order, though certain parts were a bit sticky and slow even at that point in time when he’d been purchased as second hand military surplus to do maintenance work around the theater. His voice was already cracking and broken, growing steadily worse with each passing year until it was gone, one servo motor after another going dead until he was frozen in place like a futuristic tin man, doomed to remain rusted in one spot for the rest of time. It was then that he’d been relegated to the dusty corner where he now resided, being cannibalized for parts and forgotten in an accumulation of indiscriminate parts, literally and figuratively a part of the background.

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