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The company waited until nightfall, when it was cold. The boy wasn’t allowed to stay behind in the dome tent, but he wasn’t supposed to help dig either. “We can’t have you tearing up your nice, soft hands,” he said.
It was cold enough in the nighttime wasteland that the boy was allowed to wear clothes for once, albeit just a thin undershirt and faded linen trousers, no shoes, no socks. He stood on the edge of the ditch and shivered, his fingers tangled together, implant under the skin of his neck blinking bright, active, just like the winking stars overhead. He couldn’t go too far from the man, or else the implant would tase him until he was little more than a writhing heap of limbs on the ground. Only the man had the key to deactivate it.
The boy had considered stealing it before, but his opportunity had yet to arrive. The man was suitably paranoid, but maybe tonight would be the night.
The man had been skeptical of this venture. Leaving the safety and comfort of Kalliope to dig in the desert sands of sparsely-populated Gunsmoke seemed ill-advised at best. The boy secretly agreed with this assessment, but late at night he encouraged the man, cooing sweet words in his ear about how much of an adventure it would be and how much money they would make. The boy, in all honesty, was not good at playing this sort of role, and hated doing it besides, but maybe, just maybe, if he could get the others killed, if he could disappear into the urban sprawl of Kalliope, or at worst, across the sands of Gunsmoke, he would finally be free.
So far, that was not panning out. The man did not come to Gunsmoke unprepared, and he came not only with the venture capitalist who’d pitched him this idea, but a whole fleet of construction workers and equipment, shoveling aside sand by the metric ton. And the boy. The boy was there too. At the beginning of the night, the man sat him down on a crate at the edge of the dig site and said, “Stay here, darling. Don’t move. Smile at me when I look at you.”
The boy nodded, smiled, the same one he always did—tight, thin, not reaching his eyes. The man was never able to read the truth behind it, though whether through stupidity or deep self-delusion, the boy had no idea.
“Good,” the man said. “I love you.”
“I love you,” the boy said back.
“I love you,” the man repeated.
“I love you,” the boy repeated.
The man called this the “I love you” game. The boy hated it, if only for its tedium and repetitiveness. They went back and forth until the man was satisfied and stepped away to oversee the excavation of the dig site.
The boy did not know all the details. He knew that someone had detected something large and metal beneath the sand. He knew that it was supposed to be old, thousands or even tens of thousands of years old, from when humanity left its cradle on planet Earth. He didn’t know what the venture capitalists or the man was expecting to find. A crashed ship, perhaps. Lost technology. Maybe even a Divine, though its name would be a mystery. The names of Divines that old had long since been forgotten. Left behind. Buried.
The boy had to admit he was curious, if only a little. Mostly he hoped that whatever they found would kill them, even if that was almost certainly not going to happen. Most likely, all that was down there was nothing more than a big hunk of dead metal.
They made quick work of the sand, loose as it was. They moved with an unexpected alacrity, their energy almost infectious, and it made the boy want to leave his seat on the crate, look closer. But he didn’t. He didn’t move. It was better for him not to draw any more attention to himself than he was already receiving, which was comparatively little. Even the man only looked up at him occasionally, and the boy smiled as he was asked.
Hours passed, and the digging continued, and slowly but surely, the sand parted, revealing an expanse of metal beneath, still mostly buried. It was smooth, and silver-white, but under the golden light of the workers’ headlamps glowed just slightly pink.
Then something happened. It wasn’t immediately obvious what. But something in the air changed, the digging slowed, and the workers began to shout at each other. The boy could almost hear something, over or under the workers’ arguing. A low, mechanical hum that he couldn’t so much hear as feel, resonating within his skull, pulsing like an inhuman heartbeat.
The boy shook his head, his eyebrows knitting together. Sometimes, when his man was upset with someone else, any violence he wanted to inflict upon that someone else would instead find its target in the boy. Should he run? No. He wouldn’t get far. His leash, invisible as it was, wasn’t nearly long enough.
One of the workers shoved another. At some point, a punch was thrown. The shouting escalated into wails. Blood splattered across the sand that remained on top of the metal object.
The boy couldn’t believe his eyes. Couldn’t believe his luck. He’d hoped the man and his cohort wouldn’t come back alive from this trip, but he hadn’t dared to put too much weight on it actually happening. He dropped to his knees off the crate, lightheaded and giddy. The hum got louder, stronger. He crawled on all fours to the edge of the pit. Some of the workers had fallen. Some of them weren’t moving.
The boy’s gaze met the man’s. The man was still standing, his eyes cloudy, as if seeing something else entirely. As he saw the boy, his vision seemed to clear, if only for a moment, and he bellowed something the boy couldn’t and didn’t care to parse. The boy rose to his feet and waved down at the man, calling, “I love you!” He beamed, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
The man started to storm up the edge of the pit, but he didn’t get far. The venture capitalist who pitched this whole thing in the first place came up behind the man, clenching his fingers around the man’s throat until the man turned purple. The venture capitalist did not even see the boy.
Then, all the boy had to do was wait. Wait until the last fell, wait to tentatively slide down into the pit and stand amidst the carnage, blood on his bare feet. The man had been all but torn apart, and the boy went back to his hands and knees, scrabbling around for the key.
The key was not literal. It was a fob, a drive to be inserted in the back of the boy’s neck, to adjust the software installed within his body and allow him freedom of movement—or lack thereof. But where was it? Had someone tried to take it? Was it too soaked in blood for its bright red glow to be visible? The man’s pockets were empty, and it wasn’t hanging around his shredded neck where he usually kept it.
The boy stood, glancing around. His pale linen pants and soft hands were smeared crimson. Then something caught his eye—a glow, but pale blue rather than red, clutched in the dead palm of one of the workers. The boy knelt down, uncurling the fingers from around the object. It was the key—no, not the key, but rather, a key, the two objects remarkably similar in shape and size, the main difference being the strange pattern wrought in blue light around this one.
The boy examined it. It looked like it would fit in the port at the back of his neck just the same as the man’s key. Would it work? Only one way to find out.
Worst case scenario, it would kill him, as was always the risk with these types of cybernetic implants. But that would be just fine, too, the boy thought, and best case scenario, it would act as a replacement for the man’s key and potentially even restore his abilities as a stratus—which had long been suppressed. He slid the key into the back of his neck, and it fit perfectly, as if it had always belonged there.
The pain hit the back of his skull like a lightning strike, worse than any time he’d ever been tased. He cried out, fell to the ground across the bloodied metal, curled into the fetal position, sand and gore smearing across the side of his face, clotting in his hair, dying it from blue to red. Was he going to die? Maybe, maybe. He reached upwards, towards the stars, which had begun to shift and spiral. Let me go, he wanted to say, but his voice failed him.
“No,” someone said, as clearly as if spoken right beside him, cutting through the mechanical whine which was the only sound that remained in the pit of corpses. “No, I’m afraid I cannot do that.”
Please.
“No.” The word was brutal, precise. The voice, flat, smooth, and unassuming, left no room for argument. “Make no mistake, I hate you, and one day, you will be just like those in whose blood you writhe, but unfortunately, I am a Divine, and I need a Candidate.”
I hate you. Three words had never sounded so beautiful. The pain abated, and the boy smiled. Then he began to laugh.