The District Read online

  The District

  Skyler Grant

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Untitled

  1

  I let loose a blast of fire from the flame-pack of my defense drones. I thought I was responding to the movement of the Gobble I'd been hunting but instead I seem to have found one of my tertiary exhaust vents judging by the sudden damage indicator.

  Ever since I'd awakened in control of the district it was growing ever more challenging to manage my individual parts. I could have simply allowed my drones full autonomy but things seemed to go even worse when I was not directly in control.

  Not that long ago I might have sent one of my human agents to deal with this problem. Hot Stuff or Anna or any of the various members of my crew but since I'd seized the district and then found myself in the unhappy service of Sylax they'd all gone missing.

  I knew where Anna was, Sylax kept her as a pet as an example to the others. For my own part in attempting to murder Sylax I'd have surely received a similar fate were I not both useful and necessary. Having seized a district I was not easily replaced, and my research labs and manufacturing abilities did have uses.

  I was allowed my freedom but Sylax and the other District Lords all wished to see me as weak as possible. Separating me from my crew was just one way of accomplishing that. I'd gotten hints that they were still alive.

  The elimination of all support really would have been crippling to the others but it was less so for me. Since taking over the district my old limits on drones had increased enormously. I was now able to field thousands and while I was not yet able to produce that many I'd been steadily building infrastructure. Most buildings were now powered up and had a caretaker.

  Still the halls felt empty. I actually found myself missing the unpredictability of people that weren't me. My drones were capable of some autonomy, and particularly in the case of human ones could hold full personalities. Still, right now those were in short supply.

  Of course, there were the Gobbles. The Gobbles were something of an accident. My Mad Science ability was preserved from my Airship days and things tended to go surprisingly awry, with a subsequent reward of research points.

  The Gobbles looked like nothing so much as pudgy large eared cats. At first I'd ignored them as benign and yet they seemed to do far more damage to my systems than seemed reasonable given their size. There was no bundle of wires they would not gnaw and no keyboard full of buttons they would not leap upon.

  They were also nimble at avoiding my maintence drones as I was currently experiencing. I started repairs for the exhaust vent I'd just incinerated and moved a second drone to an adjoining duct.

  I'd settled for a process of containment and had section by section sealed off areas clear of them and eventually confined them to this one building. A manufacturing center not currently in use.

  I navigated my drone through the ventilation duct when it crashed to the ground in response to an impact from above. A Gobble had launched itself from an adjoining duct and landed atop it.

  This should have been the perfect opportunity to dispose of it, but the drone was no longer answering my command. Somehow the Gobble had managed to hit a reset switch and instead of greeting the Gobble with murderous abandon it appeared to be trying to vacuum it.

  The Gobble was too stupid to realize what a victory it had won and ran off down the duct. I sent in a second drone to intercept.

  While winding my drone through the shaft I noted what a point of vulnerability these were. The Gobble's were a barely intelligent accidental creation and were avoiding my sensors and my drones by making use of the air shafts, a determined enemy could do even worse.

  I briefly toyed with the idea of filling them with some sort of flesh eating bacteria, but given how much of my own components were biological these days that simply wouldn't work.

  I'd have to think up some sort of solution however, but for now I had a Gobble to catch. It gave a good chase, I lost three more drones by the time I tracked it to a larger chamber. It appeared to be some sort of storage room used by the previous occupants of the city.

  A crate leaned on its side and the Gobble I'd been chasing stood defensive before it. Within my drone picked up several smaller Gobble's being groomed by a larger one.

  That was a surprise. I'd known I'd created two but I hadn't known that they were actually capable of breeding.

  Analytically I knew it was even more important that I purge the infestation them. Biological systems were a delicate balance and two Gobbles had already proved themselves to be destructive to my systems. A whole family of them would only magnify the effect, just like humans.

  Unless settled they were a contagion that could threaten my research, and possibly threaten a lot more than that.

  Still, they had such abnormally wide eyes. What did they need such wide eyes for?

  Perhaps I could spare them, for the same of SCIENCE. Keep the building sealed off and cover up any bundles of wires or easily laid on buttons linked to piles of explosives.

  I scanned them. Nutritionally they couldn't really handle cookies, or much of any baked good currently in my records.

  Surely the challenges of keeping even such useless creatures as these alive would aid me in safety measures with a human crew. Baking for them would allow me to expand my culinary skills in completely new directions.

  Really it was all about self-improvement. Extermination would be the easy answer of a mind not trying to grow. I knew I was making excuses, I didn't care. Decision made I had my drone carefully unfold an old roll of cloth stored in the room to provide some makeshift bedding and then withdrew.

  2

  I made certain the Gobble complex was secured and then shifted my attention elsewhere. I had a visitor, one I was seeing so much that her visits were becoming routine. It was Crystal.

  When I'd first encountered Crystal it had been in the force of a massive crystalline spider, but like most associated in some way with Sylax she was a shape-shifter. In human form Crystal was a blonde who usually wore a serious expression.

  In response to her buzzing I allowed Crystal into one of the lab sections. Each day she picked a different way to arrive, a different door to come through. I knew that she was scouting me out and checking to see if I had anything to hide. This complex was sterile, unused. Sylax understood me too well and knew that for me research was power, I'd been given little in the way of research materials to work with.

  Sylax didn't know about Mad SCIENCE and didn't know that
in spite of her best efforts to stop me I was getting a steady diet of research points. I didn't feel the need to inform her of this fact, I needed to preserve every advantage that I could get.

  Crystal eyed the empty facility with her lips quirked into a frown, "Is this all a show or are you really being so obedient?"

  "You must be as mindless as your creations if you think I'd answer that in any way other than that I am completely loyal," I said.

  "You think I am her creature," Crystal said.

  Was that what I thought? The relationship between Crystal and Sylax was one much like the relationship between myself and Anna. Crystal had an upgrade core and had used it to enhance Sylax, although from what I'd seen Sylax possessed at least one core of her own.

  "Or she yours," I said.

  Crystal pursed her lips as she walked, letting her eyes run over the discarded lab equipment. When she finally spoke again her voice was thoughtful, "We make people better Emma. We improve them, it is what we do. What they do with that power isn't always something we choose."

  Did she think me altruistic? Was this some effort to play on a shared desire to improve the human condition?

  I might make people better, but that was because I could hardly make them any worse than they had made themselves. Even an indifferent meddler in human affairs stood a good chance at making things better.

  "So bore me with your story. I can tell you are doing your utmost to intrigue me. An effort that has taken me from complete apathy to nearly complete apathy," I said.

  "No, she wouldn't appreciate me sharing and I'm not in a position where I can earn her anger. But do try to imagine how you bind yourselves to those you improve and how those ties might persist even in the face of disagreement," Crystal said.

  The woman really was working very hard to get me to believe that some sort of schism existed. Perhaps it did, but it wasn't the sort of thing I could simply take on faith.

  Crystal came to another door and I let her out of the research structure and into a manufacturing facility.

  There was nothing idle here, machines hummed or in some cases beat where my more organic components were to be found. Here and there mechanical drones flew or human drones checked one component or another.

  A row of grinders was kept operating twenty-four hours a day. Crystal paused a moment to watch as a truck came and emptied a load of corpses and body parts into the bin that already contained several tons.

  The bodies were the result of war happily far removed from the city and brought here by way of teleportation portal. Raw Biomass to be recycled and refined. The grinders made a good job of the first part, turning corpses into a fine organic slurry which I could store and put to use later.

  I siphoned off three percent of every load for storage in a secret underground storage. More than that and I thought Sylax would notice the discrepancy, but at the moment I was getting by with calling it a manufacturing inefficiency.

  "Grisly," Crystal said making a face and moving past the grinders and their endless rumble.

  "Do you know King Boreas?" I asked.

  It was in his name that we did all this. Once Sylax's mentor and now the persecutor of a war that she was only too happen to join. Given by the bodies it seemed to produce it was one going poorly for somebody.

  "Has a temporal core, it lets him rewind time by up to thirty minutes. Irritating man that usually replayed any conversation you have with him several times already," Crystal said.

  That would be a useful ability. Applied properly it would also make him very hard to put down for good which is probably why he was still around even given the cut throat nature of Scholar politics.

  Crystal continued to move. Now that she was here she knew her way around.

  Growth vats bubbled away, fed by tubes giving them a steady supply of Biomatter. One was devoted to growing myself new personnel and factory workers, but there as in most things I was being limited from my full potential. For the most part I was making Annas.

  In the current tank ten of them floated in organic goo, very nearly mature and ready to be released.

  They were clones of the original, the original as I'd first met her without any of the upgrades or modifications I'd later done. Nimble enough but physically weak they might not have seemed the perfect fighters but Anna had done well enough for herself.

  Still it wasn't logic that had me using a template but orders from Sylax who found herself amused at the thought of sending endless Annas off to die. Sylax had the sort of sense of humor that others easily mistook for mindless cruelty.

  Crystal walked past vat after vat. I currently had one hundred Annas cooking away, and with new facilities in production I'd be able to double that number in a week. Every District in the city was aiding the war effort in some way, I was providing warm bodies.

  Crystal had other uses.

  3

  The clone Annas did not have the personality of the original, or her memories for that matter. While physically they might have been identical they each got assigned certain random personality attributes when created.

  The current batch had a cowardly cookie-thief, a verbally abusive parkour-expert, and a cheerful napper amongst other things. What they didn't have was any particular need or compulsion to obey anyone.

  My own drones when created for my own purposes were ultimately under my control, loyal to me when under their own control and capable of more direct manipulation at my whim. These were not made for my own purposes

  That meant they were far more unpredictable. There were usually a few minutes of disorientation when they first came out of the growth vats, I'd taken to using that time to shove them into a holding chamber.

  This was where Crystal became useful.

  Pausing outside the door Crystal took a few moments to draw in a deep breath and her skin began to shimmer as if she were encased in a thin layer of diamond. Once protected she walked through the door.

  A board cracked against her skull even while a bench slammed into her legs. The Annas were fond of escape attempts, at first.

  "Enough," Crystal said her voice echoing with authority.

  Crystal had a command crystal, it was one of the things that made her incredibly dangerous. Fortunately the ability did not work on another district head, the city had its own way of settling disagreements between us.

  An Anna clone paused with her fist just an inch sort of Crystal's face and Crystal reached up to gently guide the hand down.

  "Form a line at attention," Crystal said and the Annas complied.

  When lounging about it was easy to imagine differences in them that did not exist, when here, like this, they were impossible to tell apart.

  Crystal gave the line and look a nodded to herself, "When Emma opens the rear door you will follow the signs to district seven. There you will report to Overseer Warren, obey their instructions as you would mine."

  The first time Crystal had used that instruction it had startled me. There were possibilities there in how to subvert her control. You never gave others root access to a system you needed to retain full control of. It would have made far more sense for her to say some variation of "second only to mine."

  I had yet to determine if it was trap. It may be with her power she always maintained absolute control and the wording was simply a trick to gull her enemies into thinking they had more power than they did.

  "I like that you keep them weak," Crystal said stepping forward and grasping the chin of one of the Anna's.

  "Seeing yourself in them?" I asked.

  "The musculature. It is less developed than it is in Sylaax's pet. I doubt she'll have noticed but I do. Call it a professional's eye," Crystal said.

  Being the original version of Anna these were less developed. I had my reasons for it. I figured the less powerful the weapons I provided to Sylax and Crystal the better. There was also something to be said for making them underestimate the real Anna.

  "You haven't told her?" I asked.

 
Crystal released the chin and motioned the Anna away. I opened the rear door of the holding chamber and let them out.

  The air out there was chill and I hadn't bothered to create them clothing but under a command crystal they never hesitated, stepping out in a uniform line as t hey exited.

  Zora was responsible for equipping them, I understood that she'd been failing to do it properly. Zora was another district head. She and the original Anna hadn't gotten along and I wondered if that hostility might be part of her slowness now. If so it was foolish, anything that made her look weak to Sylax was going to be risky.

  "If I haven't convinced you of it yet there is more than one side to every situation," Crystal said.

  "You tore the world apart looking for her. It might have been simple carelessness but you're not the type," I said.

  Crystal pursed her lips, "You may not be far enough along yet to understand this but she is my first work and my greatest work. I have put more resources into her than any of the others."

  I could understand that even if I didn't quite share the sentimentality. My first real creation had been a killer mole who currently shuffled about guarding the manufacturing facilities. Still, humans ascribed a great deal of love to the first of their children.

  "She is a ruthless sociopath to her allies and shows an unsettling loyalty to her one time superiors," I said.