John Brosnan - The Sky Lords

“I don’t like being a prisoner. If only I was allowed out for a few minutes of fresh air every day I probably wouldn’t mind it so much down here.”

“Jan, you know if it was up to me you could come and go as you like, but Carl’s in charge and he doesn’t trust you.”

“I know that.” Jan had tried speaking to Carl directly on several occasions. It was an unnerving experience, talking to a disembodied voice that sounded human but was frustratingly unhuman in its responses.

“Anyway, why do you want to risk going topside again? That crazy cyberoid is probably still looking for you.”

“You told me Carl hadn’t seen any sign of him for over a week.”

“Not in the vicinity of the villa, but there’s a limit to Carl’s sensor range. The cyberoid could still be lurking nearby in the woods.”

“I suppose so,” said Jan, worriedly. She had nightmares still about Ezekiel. She would be running through an endless stone maze with the cyberoid close behind her yelling its crazy words about death and vengeance while leaving bloody footprints behind it. The blood was Milo’s. …

“What about Sky Lords? Any more sightings?”

“I’ll ask Carl,” said Ashley. “Yep. One of them passed almost directly overhead a couple of hours ago.”

“ Damn .” Carl had made sightings of either the Lord Pangloth or the Perfumed Breeze almost every day since she had arrived. The warlord was not giving up. She shivered at the thought of what he would do to her if she fell into his hands again.

“See?” said Ashley, as if reading her mind. “You’re much better off staying down here. With me. Now come on, stop looking so glum and tell me more about your adventures.”

Ashley had demonstrated an inexhaustible curiosity about Jan’s life and Jan had obliged by spending hours telling her about Minerva and the events following the bombing and her capture. “Adventures? I haven’t had any adventures. I’ve been through an ordeal.” Which is still going on , she added under her breath.

“Well, they sound like adventures to me” Ashley told her. “Go on, tell me again about Prince Caspar. He sounds dreamy.”

Jan sighed. “What more can I say about him?”

“Tell me what happened when you were in bed together.”

Jan couldn’t help feeling mildly shocked. “Why do you want to know that?”

Ashley smiled mischievously. “Why do you think?”

“I don’t want to be impolite,” said Jan slowly, “But I don’t understand how you can be interested in sex when you don’t have, er, a body.”

“But I told you before—I still have feelings. Well, like I said, they’re more the memory of feelings than the real thing. …”

“Feelings, yes,” said Jan with a frown. “That I understand, I think, but sex is, well, an appetite .”

“Oh yes, I have appetites. I mean, they’re just the same as feelings, aren’t they?”

“I suppose so,” said Jan doubtfully.

“My appetites got recorded along with the rest of me,” Ashley told her. “They didn’t think of that when they made me what I am. It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d been transcribed into a cloned body, but being what I am it’s impossible, of course, for me to satisfy any of my appetites. At first it was really awful; I was hungry all the time. But then a technician made some adjustments and kind of dulled my appetite for food. The scientists said they couldn’t just remove all my appetites without the possibility of eradicating parts of my personality completely.”

Jan was trying to imagine what it would be like to be a mind without a body. She tried to imagine being hungry for over 400 years while knowing you would never have the chance to eat again. “You poor thing,” she said.

“Oh, I’m used to it now,” said Ashley cheerfully. “Besides, like all my other ‘feelings’ my appetites are slowly fading away and one day I won’t have any at all.”

“But now you still have, er, sexual urges?”

“Yeah. Kind of. It was a bit of a problem when Vic was here. I told you he was really pretty, didn’t I?” She glanced wistfully at the bones by the wall. “It was a bit of a problem for him too. Not being able to touch me made him go crazy at times.”

Jan felt a twinge of sympathy for the dead Vic. “Did you ever have a lover? When you were alive, I mean?”

“Oh sure. I had two. One was my gliding instructor. He was over thirty but he was dreamy. We did it once in his training glider, fifteen thousand feet up. Marvellous!” She shook her head in wonder at the memory. “So come on, tell me all about what you got up to with your Prince Caspar. I want to hear everything !”

Another three days dragged by. Jan felt increasingly oppressed by the shelter, which consisted of five separate rooms. Apart from the main one, the living room, there were two bedrooms—one of which contained the bones of Ashley’s parents—a kitchen and a bathroom. That, at least, was the accessible area of the place, but Jan knew there were hidden areas containing various machines, including the projectors that created Ashley’s holographic image, which could appear in any part of the shelter. The power source for all the machinery, Carl had informed Jan, came from heat deep within the earth.

In the hope of persuading Carl to let her out Jan spent more and more time talking to ‘him’, much to Ashley’s annoyance. He persistently refused to discuss the reason for her containment but was willing to provide any other kind of information she required. More to alleviate her boredom than anything else she asked about the old world before the Gene Wars, curious to see if Milo had been telling the truth or merely spinning more tall tales. In response, Carl dimmed the lights and a glowing screen appeared suspended in the air. Carl then announced he would replay a series of news transmissions from the periods concerned, which prompted a groan from Ashley. “Oh God, it’s like being back at school. …”

For two days Jan watched fascinated as she watched the images and listened to the different voices from the past. At first it was hard to follow what was going on—many of the words were meaningless to her—but eventually she began to comprehend the overall picture. It seemed to fit with what Milo had told her, and the little she had learned from Ceri.

Long before the Gene Wars the world had been faced with two serious threats; the first had come from nuclear weapons, which had originally been controlled by the two big empires of the latter half of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union and the United States of America. When, at the end of that century, these weapons had spread to many other countries these two empires got very nervous. Then came the ‘Little Armageddon’ war in the Middle East, where nuclear weapons were used for the first time since the Second World War. This settled the minds of the rulers of the two empires and led to the formation of the Soviet-American Alliance at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The Alliance’s first act was to declare all nuclear weapons banned. There was much opposition to this ultimatum, not only from countries who’d possessed their own nuclear arsenals for a long time, such as a country called France, but also from the Federation of Islamic States who had been the victors in the ‘Little Armageddon’ war.

The Alliance reacted ruthlessly to this opposition. Using a few of their own nuclear weapons with what the commentator called ‘surgical precision’, in harness with their ‘orbiting beam weapons’, they ‘cauterized the problem areas’. When the dust cleared the Islamic Federation was once again a collection of individual countries and France had been reduced to a purely agricultural economy. The other nations saw the point of the Alliance’s argument and handed over their nuclear weapons. When the Alliance was satisfied that no other such weapons existed, nor the means to manufacture them in future, it destroyed its own nuclear arsenal and remaining nuclear reactors. The nuclear age was over.