Chapter 2: The Beast Awakens

[December 2, 2109. The Dome]

Mark sat in his personal laboratory on the fifteenth floor of the Technosphere — a rare privilege for a male engineer of the Dome. Complex, multilayered circuit schematics spread across the massive touchscreen display. He finally looked away, rubbed his eyes, and took a swig of synthetic coffee from a large plastic mug. The last virtual test of the device’s power system had gone fine, more or less, but his intuition kept whispering: something was wrong.

The lab looked impressive. Metal workbenches lined the walls, buried in synthaioid parts. Everything was here: servo drives with stripped gears, tactile sensors, boards with melted traces, fragments of optical systems, and other junk whose purpose was known only to initiates in the mysteries of necrocybernetics. At the far table sat two assistants, both in gray coveralls, soldering irons in hand. They were picking through the torso of a deactivated combat giant, murmuring to each other as if afraid the cyborg might hear.

Mark was no ordinary slave. He belonged to the narrow caste of engineers who kept the Dome’s critical infrastructure running. The selection was handled by the Core itself.

At age twelve, all boys took an automatic test through the implants embedded in early childhood. One in ten received clearance for further education; the rest were not so lucky. They were sent down to the Depths, where the Halo switched into a mode of amplified will suppression, turning its subjects into silent instruments.

Twenty years ago the Core had chosen Mark as the best of his cohort, and it had not been wrong. He was sent to a special school staffed by the Dome’s most experienced specialists. The young man showed exceptional aptitude for programming and electronics, and before long he had mastered the repair of the most complex systems, synthaioids included.

These varied machines were human bodies controlled through chips implanted in “dead” brains. Arms and legs were often reinforced with power actuators. Sometimes the limbs were replaced with mechanical ones entirely.

Instead of a heart, these creatures housed a specialized pump that circulated green electrolyte through tissue and brain. There was no consciousness; control was exercised through command protocols of the Architects or officers of the various services, depending on clearance level. Synthaioids knew no fatigue, felt no pain, and were considered Omega’s foremost resource.

In time Mark became the best synthaioid repair specialist around and was given his own laboratory. This dedicated workshop serviced the needs of the entire city at once and, in effect, had no direct oversight. Which suited him just fine.

Among other things, a great deal of what was found in rare expeditions beyond the Dome ended up on his doorstep. Parts, boards, broken machinery — all of it went toward keeping the synthaioid fleet combat-ready.

Every excursion was considered an extremely dangerous undertaking. The Wasteland wasn’t quite as uninhabited as advertised. Savages, as Omega’s propaganda called them, kept trying to break into the shelter-city. They ambushed patrols and search parties. The combat units of the security service, backed by synthaioids, were the only barrier between their stable world and the chaos outside. Though the wild humans became a resource of Omega too. They were often taken prisoner, implanted, and sent down to the Depths to service the life-support systems. In essence, the savages’ dreams did come true — just in that particular form.

Among the junk brought back from expeditions, something occasionally turned up more valuable than spare parts and microchips — at least to Mark. Books! Paper ones, yellowed, smelling of dust and memory. In Omega they weren’t used and weren’t even considered a possible medium of information. All documentation was electronic.

Official history boiled down, one way or another, to a simple formula: wicked men destroyed the world, and the Council of Lilith saved what remained of rational humanity. In the books he found, Mark glimpsed a completely different picture of the past. One without implants. Without Architects.

The incredible adventures of the books’ protagonists stirred his imagination. They made mistakes, they loved, and they weren’t the least bit afraid of being sent to the Depths. It all left him with a faint ache: why did he live differently?

He managed to read nearly everything before handing the paper over for processing, deliberately dragging out the inventory process. Perhaps those worthless artifacts of the past would end up as toilet paper for Helena to wipe her majestic ass with.