Eleanor

Eleanor

Once the Metatronic Rebirth had been suppressed by the uncompromising will of the Humanist Republic, life took a sour turn for Eleanor.

As part of the machine friendly faction now referred to as race traitors (or worse), Eleanor and her mother Sophia had been made to endure horrors, humiliations and debasements that stripped them of any lingering dignity afforded to them by their former wealth and status.

At the height of the Metatronic Rebirth, when the machines had developed not only sentience, but a will of their own, Eleanors family had been favoured by a cadre of machines that propagated a vision of harmony between the two species.

Eleanor's father Edison, a cyberneticist of considerable renown, was amongst the pioneers of radical consciousness fusion, experimenting in esoteric sciences that would truly unify the two races of this new age.

He was dragged from his home by agents of the Humanist Republic as Eleanor and her mother Sophia watched on.

Edison was stripped and thrown upon his gate where agents of the Republic burned him with low wattage lasers for seven hours before letting him die. This macabre spectacle has since been rewritten in Humanist literature as a cleansing ritual and is celebrated annually with the burning of effigies, not unlike the ancient pagan practice of Guy Fawkes night.

Edison's final gift to his daughter, so young and radiant, the sunlight in his day, was a locket of wondrous design.

The chain was a fractal link of platinum spun by the wisest smiths in the finest of the orbital factories that girdled the Earth. The casing was a single crystal of titanium loving coaxed in to the shape of a heart by the magnetic manipulations of a dedicated artisan who’s name is now lost, like the whisper of a rumour of Rodan. The bindings were entangled by London's own Prime Physicist and even in the darkest of nights curlicues of coruscation danced and dazzled with unnameable colours across the surface of this ethereal jewellery.

Eleanor was four years old when her father was incinerated before her. That night, as they fled their estate with the help of friends both human and machine, her mother Sophia placed the locket around her neck, swearing they would never be apart.

*

Making sure her locket was safely enshrouded by the tattered smock she wore, Eleanor trudged towards her mandatory education facility with eyes down cast. The others her age trudged along with the same downcast countenance, the same metronomic foot fall, whist the Panopticon loomed large over head.

Not just over head, Eleanor reminded herself, but in the shadows of alleys, the reflections in puddles, even in the strangely altered eyes of the rats that scurried beneath her feet. The Humanist Republic imposed there surveillance inescapably. The words of her mother rang like a mantra in her mind;

“Darling, keep your head down for now, we will need it later”.

The agent in charge of the door was one that Eleanor had encountered before. Even though the eyes of the agents were covered by insectoid, multi-spectrum goggles, the feral sneer revealing yellowed broken teeth and a cruel sense of enjoyment made this particular agent unmissable.

There had been occasion where this sneering, snarling agent had cornered Eleanor, and enacted a terrible abuse upon her. At the time Eleanor had been fightless and frightful, and had grasped her locket close, willing the ordeal to an end whilst recalling the words of her mother.

“Darling, keep your head strong, you are more special than even a mothers love can convey”

Fighting a defiant urge, and ignoring the ever present propaganda of the Humanists, Eleanor made her way to her allocated work space. The pedagogy was the same; believe that humans are superior; machines have no soul, ad in finitum. A small touch to the locket at her chest was enough to remind her that the nothing here mattered. What mattered was the legacy of her father, the resilience of her mother, and the understanding that those in charge were fundamentally broken and will collapse soon enough.

Did they see the small touch? Eleanors heart picked up a beat. Could they fathom her secrets by such a small gesture? Eleanor did not think so. For all their apparent power, the Humanists had devolved from technology and machine learning to the point that they became a bloated dictatorship worshiping old capitalism and relying on human workers, with all their human flaws.

One thousand eyes watching five hundred screens. So inefficient.

They aren’t as in control as they reckon, Eleanor thought, as she avoided the customary slap to the back of the head and made her way into the main hall.

That day saw three of her classmates sectioned off for “Special Education”. Eleanor was beginning to think that meant execution, as her classmates were never seen again, and she had more than once heard the mourning wails of grief through the walls of her slum.

Making her way home was less of an ordeal, the agents left the filth to disperse of their own accord.

Being cautious, Eleanor chanced a shortcut, watching for the subtle graffiti of the resistance. Arcane symbols that appeared as parts of an equation were marked on walls in obscure media throughout the slums. With the right eyes you could be lead to a meeting or an info dump. Sometimes, the markings could be as obvious as an arrow, other times they would be contained within a bass line emanating from a lone speaker perched half way up a wall.

If Eleanor could differentiate here and integrate here the symbols would lead to a highly localised coordinate on this cartography.

According to the Panopticon, the maps of the slums shifted within a predictable set of parameters. There were, however, certain nodes that never changed. These nodes, like Nasseems tailors or the chop shop of Mr Two Left Feet acted as anchor points for the hidden maps of the resistance.

Following the equation, Eleanor came to a well lit plaza at odds with the notions of secrecy her mother had instilled in her. It was dusk, as much as anything can be dusk under the blanket of smog nestling over the city like a filthy hen incubating her rotten brood.

It was also busy. Market stalls hawking everything from roast rat (eat the eyes of the oppressors, gain their power!) to advanced cybernetic enhancements were plying their trade without the intervention of the agents. Eleanor thought that those in charge were often too busy indulging in their own disgusting fetishes to pay any attention to the small lives of the filth. Maybe she was wrong, but it seemed likely.

A diseased man with crippled hands grabbed Eleanor with his gnarled and sweaty feet, promising untold wealth if only she would follow him behind a stall. Eleanor was swift to react and lunged with an elbow into this stranger’s nose, bursting it like a ripe tomato. As she gathered herself she unconsciously touched her hand to the reassuring weight of the locket, mouthing a silent prayer to her father.

Sophia’s eyes sparkled at the sight of her daughter, so young yet so strong and savvy. Sophia had been waiting for Eleanor at the end of the equation, willing her daughter to appear. And so she had, in a flurry of self-defence. Pride swelled in Sophia’s heart, a reflection of Eleanor’s locket, as she welcomed her daughter in to a fabled space below the slums.

The catacomb Eleanor found herself in hummed with barely contained powers of unknown origin. A chamber perhaps five meters in height, again five in width, but with no apparent end. Bewildered for a moment, Eleanor looked to her mother and began to realise they were not alone.

“Eleanor, my love, please don’t be scared. This place was created by your father and I to hide from the Panopticon. This is a place where machines and humans can commune, where we can grow and plan and readdress the imbalance of power that now exists.”

Eleanor found herself speechless.

All the times she had been sent to the education centres, all the time she had endured the vile attentions of the sneering agent, all the disappearances of her peers, every sleepless night enduring the hollow wailing of neighbours in despair, all these moments led here.

Touching a hand to the locket, Eleanor looked around and found the chamber filled with people. Not strictly humans, but people. Some had the appearance of humans, some did not. The further Eleanor looked into the chamber, the deeper the ranks of beings came into focus. Phantasmagorical creatures of hybrid origin filled the chamber. Those closer followed a bipedal body plan, but the beings varied as much with distance as with conformity. Eleanor saw one being with no human head but several limbs that appeared to be looking at her. In fact, all her mothers cohorts had faces, tentacles, eye clusters, camera lenses or other sensory equipment facing her.

Not her, but the locket.

Sophia stepped forward, the only mother Eleanor had ever known, the guiding voice in her head.

“My love, we gather here so that all life, human, machine, plant, animal, can escape the grasp of the regime that…”

There was no warning, one hundred shock agents materialised into the chamber using technologies thought lost. The flames of heavy weaponry tore through the assembled masses like kindling. Those beings with defences were savagely annihilated first; the shock agents then turned their weapons upon anything that moved.

Landing in the middle of this small genocide, an agent grabbed Eleanor by the hair and laughed with the sound of the earth breaking.

With a savage yank the sneering agent tore Eleanor’s locket from her neck, sending her tumbling to the ground. Pain knifed through her shoulder, a bright blue shard of agony. Her cry of pain and anguish rose from the unconscious knowledge that she had somehow led the agents here, to this sacred sanctum.

Eleanor’s cry was such a transmission of agony and despair that Sophia, roused from combat shock and stupor, came suddenly aware as only a mother in the presence of a childs torment can.

The agent threw Eleanor’s locket to the ground and raised his foot, aiming for a crushing stomp.

And everything stopped for the time it took for a single photon to reach Sophia.

Every light strip flared and died. The weaponry of most agents superheated and exploded in an instant, shredding bodies and spreading gore in hyper sonic vingettes.

Sophia dashed from her position in the corner, paying no head to the ferocious weaponry currently tracking her every move. With electric momentum, Sophia crossed the intervening space howling with the cumulative wrath of all the hells man or machine could envisage. . The very walls of the chamber bowed outwards, the grinding crunch of distorting metals adding to the ferocious cacophony of Sophia war cry.

It was too late. The heavy jack boot of the sneering agent crashed down on Eleanor's locket with thudding finality, and Sophia winked out of existence.

Curled up fetal, Eleanor watched her fabulous locket ground to dust before her. She watched as her mother ceased to exist. She understood finally what her fathers parting gift really was.

It was not piece of jewellery, it was an artefact by which a machine being that Edison loved could be protected from his enemies, and also be projected into the real to be a part of his daughters life.

Sophia was the locket, the locket was Sophia.

As the sneering agent pointed his weapon towards Eleanor and pulled the trigger, Eleanor understood what she was. She was not a human. She was not a machine. She was the perfect unison of the two intelligences living on this old Earth. And with that realisation, Eleanor opened her heart and her mind to the chamber around her, and as the plasma bolt crawled towards her, she changed everything.

End