Inside the Artists’ Colony

by Luke Jackson

Conclusion

We continued to walk down the street, the garish lights and sounds playing over our faces. Nearby, a small rickshaw taxi appeared to have collided with some cattle, and the cattle driver was yelling loudly and passionately about the monetary damages due him. I was momentarily distracted by the cattle driver’s red, unshaven face and the veins standing out on his neck, and couldn’t help but think what an inefficient means of dispute resolution this was.

Tom ignored all this and continued in a virtual soliloquy of disturbing viewpoints. He appeared to firmly believe that the Madrigal were evil; a strange idea, considering all that the Madrigal had done for humanity. Several times I considered losing him somehow, but then realized I knew no one else here, and had nowhere else to go.

Abruptly, Tom whisked me into a low and recessed entrance, which reeked of opium and patchouli. Inside, several bodies were sprawled on cushioned chaise lounges, steaming hookahs set in their mouths. Their dazed eyes seemed lost to the world around them.

“Okay, that was primarily a test,” Tom began rapidly, losing the abstract philosophy and becoming urgent. “We’re starting to get more of them in here, if you know what I mean. Their agents try to say all of the right things to our ears, but end up being way off mark, one of the ‘blind spots’ of the Madrigal, if you will. While intelligent, they have extremely low mental elasticity. Of course, we are primarily concerned with practical opposition, not abstract issues of free will.” I was led into a darkened corner of the opium den.

“You seem to genuinely believe their ideology, which means that you’ve lived among them. So tell me: how did an enthusiastic overachiever like you end up here?”

I started telling him how I had arrived at the colony. The smoky heat of the den created a film over everything, clouding my senses and my mind; besides, I had nothing to lose.

“I know, I know,” said Tom after a few moments. “You check out, you’re Jack. Kim’s waiting in the basement. But first put this on... please.” He held out a nondescript gray tunic to place over my uniform.

* * *

Tom led me down dirty concrete steps into a small room with harsh fluorescent lighting, the only furniture a thin rubber pad on the floor. Kimber was stripped down to a spandex outfit, doing hanging sit-ups on a metal bar set into the ceiling. Even though I hadn’t seen her for only a day, her body already seemed more lean and taut. When I came in, she swung down from the bar and wiped her flushed face, her beautiful lips curving slightly upward.

“Jack,” she said, staring into me with her amazing eyes, then holding me tightly. “Why the hell did you come here?” I held on to her and didn’t want to let go, taking in the sweet, slightly pungent smell of her sweat. Tom retreated upstairs.

“I had to see you,” was all I could say as I let her go.

“Sweet Jack,” she said, her fingers trailing my jaw line, staring into my eyes still. “Not the smartest move. Don’t get me wrong, I’m flattered you would risk everything for me.” She looked downward.

“But, if you haven’t figured it out by now, we claim Tribal,” she said, looking back up and indicating a spiral tattoo on her hand, where her thumb met her hand. The tattoo had not been there, or had not been visible, one day ago. “And you, of course, claim Square,” she said, her fingers brushing the tattoo of four interlocking S’s on the back of my neck.

“I prefer Structured,” I said priggishly, before thinking better of it.

“Jack,” she tried again. “I am an artist-agent, Jack. I spend my time reconnoitering outside the colony. And to do that, I’m mated with Squares, like you, repeatedly.” She looked me hard in the eyes. “Then I find pretenses to break these relationships and return to the colony. That’s my job, it’s what I do. The most important thing in my life is fighting them.”

“I understand,” I said. “But I don’t care.” I was surprised to find that I didn’t. I would remain here, with her, rather than take the highest rank among the cryptic Madrigal.

“You’re cute,” she said, looking down and smiling. “But...”

Tom abruptly stuck his wild-eyed head through the basement door. “Visitors,” he yelled in a booming voice.

Kimber raced back up the stairs and I followed.

In the smoke of the den, Tom peeked nervously through a curtained window and gestured us closer. Through the chintz, I saw that the new morning sun had fled, leaving only churning black clouds. In the darkness outside stood a row of identical dark-robed figures, their faces hidden behind elongated black masks resembling the faces of the Madrigal. They each wielded black, bayoneted weapons, and remained utterly frozen, like store mannequins advertising painful death.

“They must have followed us in,” Tom frowned. “That’s why they sent him in,” his head nodding at me. “Bait.” Tom’s gaze lingered on me, and I could see him consciously struggle not to be accusatory.

“We should have known,” Kim said to me. “They let you in without any paperwork. They must have known something was up.”

“Are they really Madrigal?” I whispered tensely. I had never seen one before.

“No, we’ve killed some before, and they’re human corpses. Initiate imitators, the flesh around their eyes and lips rotted away from being on constant brainfeed for so long,” Kimber responded, the anger resonant in her voice. “We don’t even think the Madrigal exist as an alien race; probably a sect of human fascists, or an AI program gone awry,” she said abstractedly. Abruptly she focused. “Whatever they are, they’re getting bolder. They used to respect the wall and let us alone here.”

“They must have picked up on our missions,” Tom frowned.

“Has the word been sent?” Kimber asked.

“Of course,” he replied. He walked over to a sprawled woman, her hair a tangle of pungent dreadlocks. As he lifted her insensate head, I saw a thick cable running from the base of her skull into the recesses of the chair.

“These are initiates?” I whispered, seeing the sprawled figures around me in a new and frightening light.

“No, no, they’re sentries,” Tom said quickly. “Don’t worry, we have our own hacked technologies.” He set the woman’s head back down and her eyelids briefly fluttered.

“If word’s been sent, that means we’ve bought some time,” Kimber said.

As I stared out the window, I saw an unusual sight-seemingly deranged street people, businesslike dealers, and even passerby, apparently unrelated one instant, abruptly stopped the business of the night trade and congealed behind the Madrigal imitators. The uniform line of black figures was broken into fragments as they were grappled from behind, several dropping their instruments of pain.

“Come with me,” Kimber said, grabbing my arm with surprisingly strong fingers and dragging me back down to the basement.

“I’ll keep them off for as long as I can,” Tom said as we withdrew.

“Don’t play the hero,” Kim told him, “if they get in here, chip away.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Tom yelled down. “I have a recent backup.”

“Why are we going down into the basement?” I asked. It didn’t seem wise.

Kimber didn’t answer, but moved her rubber sleeping pad to one side. Underneath there was a filthy stone trapdoor, which she easily lifted to one side.

“Body mods and training,” she explained. “Get in.”

I eyed the bare steel ladder descending into pitch blackness. There must be a better course of action, I thought to myself. An advanced race like the Madrigal must be open to reason, but I didn’t even know if they were a race anymore. I realized that I didn’t know anything anymore.

The sound of crashing glass came from upstairs, and then Tom’s brief scream. I smelled the strange odor of something burning, something I couldn’t place.

I grabbed the sides of the ladder and slid down into pitch blackness. At the bottom, my feet landed in a stinking, semi-liquid substance. I didn’t want to know what it was.

Seconds later, Kimber slid down next to me. She yelped in pain when she hit the floor.

“Shrapnel,” she explained.

“I’m modded with night vision,” she continued, taking my hand. “Follow me.”

* * *

Kimber pulled me through the darkness for hours. Without sight, I felt my other senses heighten: the smell of what appeared to be raw sewage, the touch of the moist mud walls. At one point, I felt a hard, lumpy round object, coiled with a metal cord, immersed in the mud of the wall.

“Don’t touch,” Kimber whispered, slapping my hand lightly. “Human skull, zapped while mindwired.”

Several times, I heard the tramping of boots behind us in the blackness. They would approach us rapidly, my pulse would quicken, but then they would dwindle, apparently going down a side corridor.

Now the sound of marching feet had returned again, and was growing louder, seeming to echo through the catacombs. I tried to support Kimber as she limped ahead, nursing her wound from the shrapnel, but it was difficult when I couldn’t see anything at all.

“Am I just slowing you down?” I whispered to her.

“No, we can make it. There’s an upladder a hundred yards ahead. We’ve heavily wired the underground, for a day like this,” she said unevenly, taking deep breaths.

We limped towards this invisible ladder together, as swiftly as we could. I prayed that the marching boots would dwindle again, but the noise only kept increasing. The footsteps were only a few hundred feet behind us.

I felt the cold steel of the ladder. I tried to ease Kimber up, but she kept slipping and making pained noises under her breath.

“I’ll lift you up,” I said. I tried to push from below.

They were directly behind us. Kimber kept slipping.

“We’re wasting time,” she gasped after a few moments of futile struggle. I felt her small hand flexing over the base of my skull. “You’re not fixed for mindwire?” she asked.

“No.”

“Of course not,” she snapped to herself. “You go up. I’ll retract the ladder behind you. I have to chip away; my backup is much too old.”

“No way....” I began, even though I wasn’t certain what it meant to ‘chip away’ or ‘backup.’ I felt her small, powerful hand close over my arm.

“I can’t go up the ladder, so I have to chip away. You can’t chip away, so you have to go up. Don’t play games. Go now.” She released my arm and gave me a light shove up.

I inched up the ladder, feeling my way along. The steady marching of boots below me filled my head, drove me upward. Kimber’s rapid, shallow breathing became slower behind me, gradually dissolving in the crushing darkness.

I paused. I thought of sliding back down to her, but the ladder had retracted, so that I was hanging in black, empty space. On the floor below, I could make out distant green lights playing from the visors of the Madrigal imitators. From their sickly glow, I was able to make out flickers and flashes of Kimber’s somnambulant form, wired by the base of her skull to an access terminal. She was beautiful asleep; her cheekbones and her limbs seemed so horribly fragile now.

“She’s gone,” I heard a booming voice croak from below. “Body’s useless.” The voice sounded mildly disgusted.

“I don’t know if it’s completely useless,” I heard a reptilian voice chuckle. “Recreation for the soldiers, then immolation to send a message to the humes.”

I felt a surge of nauseating rage at this violation; I saw motes of light dancing before me in the absolute blackness, and for a moment thought I would lose my grip on the ladder. The urge to slide down, to scream, to take action surged up through my being, and I kept it barely restrained, trying to strangle it within me before it got us both killed. It could do no good, now. I resumed climbing the steel ladder, slowly and shakily, my hands slippery with sweat.

If Kimber was gone, where had she gone to? I comforted myself by imagining that she had achieved some sort of escape, but I found myself mourning her corporeal form. I would never gaze into her mesmerizing eyes, brush against her richly pendulous lips, hold her soft, strong body, ever again. I brushed wetness from my eyes, and kept climbing, feeling as if my useless body had died too.

* * *

The ladder ended in a rain gutter, steaming with the underground heat. I abruptly found myself in a darkened alleyway, strewn with garbage and small, scurrying things. Nearby, a group of heavily-bejeweled, dangerous-looking men in head scarves warmed themselves by the heat of a burning trash can, making soft mocking noises at me.

Above ground, the scene was different from when I had first arrived. I saw black-robed imitators at both ends of the street, armed with the same cruel, pointed weapons. The human traffic seemed slowed and subdued, as if drugged; but some bold ones were yelling and cursing at the robed figures, which ignored them and stared straight ahead. Children on top of buildings, for some reason awake at this hour, were pretending to pelt the imitators with pellets, always careful to miss. Alarms and sirens blared in a distant wail, and smoke suffocated the horizon.

“The Quarantine is in effect. Return to your homes.” The mechanical voice echoed loudly throughout the colony, but I couldn’t derive its source.

“We have no homes!” a small, cowled woman screamed at the invisible voice. At first, I thought she was a child, but the wrinkles in her face and the infant slung across her belly revealed her to be much older.

I merged into the crowd, trying to remain calm and nondescript. I was numb to the incipient chaos of my surroundings, and only saw Kimber every time I closed my eyes; her arched cheekbones and closed eyes lit by the repulsive light of the Madrigal, as they planned what to do with her ‘useless body’. For some reason, my rational mind haltingly tried to legitimize the actions of the Madrigal, but the recurring image of Kimber burned into my eyelids, nullifying these weak rationalizations. I felt my mind made useless, and empty.

Like an automaton, I turned a corner, where a filthy crone latched on to my gaze and held it. She squatted near a chipped brick wall, scrawled with angry graffiti, holding high a sign that absurdly read “Ragnarok Draws Nigh” in a childish hand. She followed along at my elbow for a few paces, pretending to beg for alms.

“A message from Kimber. She is safe in our core servers, but can’t make contact,” she muttered, her cackle become abruptly professional. “Standard noob instructions for you. Blend in. Get retrofitted for mindwire at one of the parlors. Doctor Verma does a good job. Come back to me for your missions.” She grinned up at me with loose eyes and splintered, blackened teeth, which I now saw as veils for her true purpose. “The war has begun.”

I nodded grimly, and knew I had no conscious choice at this point. Even the thought of some artist-doctor inserting his unsanitary fingers into my cranium, wiring my neurons with bootlegged cybernetic systems, barely registered. In this war, I had irrevocably taken sides: Kimber’s side. The image of her sleeping body, lit by an unholy green glow, was burned into me, and I knew it would be with me forever. This image instantly made all of my words about the Madrigal working for ‘the greater good’ into empty absurdities. I vowed to protect her essence, wherever it was, as I had failed to protect her body. I felt a black feeling swell the pit of my stomach, and knew it was hate.

* * *

I eyed myself in the rearview mirror of the sedan. It was always strange to see this new face-widened, with a thicker jaw and neck, and smaller, new hazel eyes. Sometimes, I had the disorienting sensation that I was looking at someone else through a window pane, someone who mirrored my actions precisely. No time for that now.

The lustrous black sedan, its jutting cab and curved wings like a bird of prey, locked itself behind me, unnecessarily, since all crime had been eradicated here. I walked up the gravel path to the small blue bungalow, set along a hillside in La Jolla.

I knew more about the woman inside, my new mate, than I was supposed to. I knew that she was rising rapidly in informatics at the local compound, and may have access to new information about the Madrigal. I also knew that she was a firmly convinced believer, and had been her entire life. In other words, she could be very useful.

I rang the doorbell, readying the flower arrangement behind my back. While the Madrigal frowned upon love, minor tokens of affection were acceptable.

My first mission had begun. But my mind was preoccupied not with this new mate-pairing or the information I would obtain; it was of the task’s completion and return to the colony, where I would again be coupled with Kimber. Again, I would see her luminous eyes, made kaleidoscopic in the ether, her features illuminated by transcendent machinery.

I wanted to go home.