A cat and his spider, as they travel through their world, discuss the cat being a disobedient heretic, and their idea of killing a goddess…their adventures show just what the goddess really is… -lp
Foh’s oak tree wouldn’t stop shaking, but earthquakes were frequent as drizzle in Crith Talun. He hunched over his workbench, which stood at the center inside the trunk, clustered with boxes and hunks of metal he’d scavenged from his trips to the Ruined City.
Like all Vulpiyan, Foh had the appearance of a bipedal cat, with hands like a raccoon’s. A pink scar lined his muzzle, and a worn belt pouch was strapped around his waist. His fingers, marred by burns, worked the last plating into an oval device — a patchwork of various alloys the size of a melon, with an inset no larger than a spoon. A metallic spider sat on his back, eight lamp-eyes glowing orange.
Foh twisted his screwdriver, fastening the plating. “Can you pass me the core, Pix?”
The spider leaped down to the glowing rod, stood on four back legs and dragged it across the table with its front. It spoke in a boyish voice. “I must insist that this is not a good idea.”
Foh wiggled his fingers merrily and took the rod. “Nonsense. What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
“The seismographs you have already integrated in my algorithm would be enough if we gather more data. Two thousand datums would be enough.”
“You do realize I have a finite life span?”
“Affirmative. Two thousand datums can be gathered within ten years. A Vulpiyan lives up to fifty.”
“Ten more years of calamities, villagers dragging the wounded from the ruins, rebuilding their homes until their spines grow crooked.” Foh shook his head. “No. The earthquakes must stop. And to do that, I need to understand how they work.”
Foh pushed the core into the inset of his device. Too tight. He brought out his induction heater and lit it up to enlarge the opening.
Pix jumped on Foh’s shoulder, then crawled over his back, spider legs digging into the fur like a comb. He began grooming Foh. “What does heretic mean?”
Foh paused. “When did you hear that? I thought you were in sleep mode when the elders came.”
“It’s not the first time. You’ve been called that every time you accurately predicted an earthquake. I had categorized it as a synonym for perceptive or intuitive. But this definition is inconsistent with the context of today’s discussion.”
The comb now reached Foh’s ears, gently massaging between earlobe and temple. “The earthquakes are the beat of the Catmother’s heart. The villagers believe we should not study the goddess, only worship and pray for her mercy. I’m breaking a lot of customs by doing what I do.”
“I see. So heretic is a synonym for disobedient.”
Foh opened his mouth to protest, then paused. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”
The inset widened under the induction heater’s effect. Foh set aside the tool and pushed the core into the hunk of metal. The glow brightened, and the device levitated. He tried touching the device, but it sparked, sending sharp tendrils of pain through his fingertips. “Ach-ach-ach-ach.”
“I estimate a forty percent probability of survival,” Pix said.
“What?”
“It dropped to thirty-eight percent.”
The earth shook violently, a fissure snaking up the inner trunk walls. Foh rushed to the other side of the table and picked up a single glove with a series of buttons and valves along the wrist. He slid it on — its bulk three times the size of his hand.
“Is it the Catmother’s heartbeat?” Foh asked.
“Negative, this is your doing.”
Despite the danger, Foh’s chest warmed with pride, and he had to suppress a grin. “How can it do so much damage? It matches some of Catmother’s average earthquakes.”
“It doesn’t. This is local quaking. The rest of the village is not affected presently. It matched the lab-tree’s frequency perfectly, achieving resonance.”
“That’s a relief. Can you shut it down?”
“Affirmative. Initiating battle mode.”
“No-no-no! Don’t destroy it! Just shut it down.”
“Impossible. It’s reaching thermal overload. It will explode unless I destroy the core.”
“Wait! Can’t you — I don’t know — cool it or something?”
The trunk groaned like a whale giving birth. A row of sunlight passed through a horizontal crack on the wooden wall. The tree would topple over soon.
“I have no cooling functionality.”
“Of course you don’t. Damn it. Just do it.”
“Affirmative. Initiating battle mode.” Pix extended his spider legs. He hurtled off to the core and spread around it like a claw. The grip tightened, crushing the device with a grating sound of metal against metal. The vibrations waned and faded away.
Foh cringed. “Nothing to salvage, is there?”
Pix relaxed his grip, dropping a hunk of crushed metal. His eyes flashed red. “I sense a signal from Catmother’s cavern. Incoming earthquake. Massive one. Seven Fohlons. It’s almost here.”
“What? How did you not see it coming sooner?”
Pix crawled up from Foh’s foot to his shoulder. “Vibrations from your device overwhelmed the sensors. I couldn’t recognize it as a separate signal. You should hurry. It will hit in less than ten seconds.”
A hum overwhelmed Foh’s ears, and his soles vibrated.
“Pix,” he said. “Attach.”
Pix leaped to Foh’s glove and plugged his butt on an indentation at the palm with a satisfying click.
Foh pointed the glove at the exit, aiming at a neighboring patch of alder trees, and pulled one of the wrist valves. Like a grappling hook, Pix shot from the glove, piercing through one of the thin trunks and attaching himself firmly to it. Foh clenched his fist, and the rope winched, hurtling him out. As he reached the outside, his lab-tree toppled over and crashed against its neighbor.
Foh slowly unclenched his fist, coming to a halt a few feet by the alder tree. With the press of a button, the rope unhinged itself from Pix and returned inside the glove’s crevice. Foh kissed the glove, then loped toward the nearest clearing. “It’s never been this massive. What the hell is happening?”
“Colliding dry rocks have built up a lot of pressure. It’s not fully released yet. This was just the first cracks forming between them. Something bigger is coming. Ten Fohlons at least.”
“What? That would destroy the entire village! How long do we have?”
“Fifteen hours, approximately.”
Foh glanced around at the shaking trees, the smaller ones sinking to the earth and toppling over. He pictured the village, the houses of all the Vulpiyan crumbled to ruins, shafts of broken wood mingling with blood. He dropped on all fours and rushed away.
“Where are you heading? The village is the other way,” Pix said, gripping the hairs on Foh’s shoulder.
“Catmother’s Cavern. If they’re going to call me a heretic, might as well embrace the role. We’re killing a goddess tonight.”
#
Stone totems of The Seven Prophets loomed on either side of the cave mouth. Foh shuffled amidst a parade of humming monks that carried sandalwood-smoking censers as they trailed into the cavern. He kept his cowl low to hide the scar on his muzzle.
He had about an hour until a hunchback elder, disoriented and naked, would crawl out of the bushes and down to the gathering, raining fury down on Foh. Foh’s glove hung along his back — hopefully mimicking a hump — still warm from having used the stun mode. Alternating current can be dangerous, but he had to incapacitate the elder somehow. Everyone’s lives were at stake.
Pix had wrapped around Foh’s wrist like a bracelet, hiding beneath the folds of the flapping robe. “You should have used more voltage,” he said.
“Shh!”
One of the other monks turned, eyeing Foh through the shadows of the cowl. “Did you say something, brother?”
Foh kept his head low. He made his voice theatrically bass. “A prayer to the Earthen Goddess. For today’s victims. May such tragedy never come again.”
The monk nodded and returned to his humming.
Once they reached the interior, the parade of monks fragmented into five different entrances. Pix pulled like a magnet at Foh’s wrist, guiding him to the leftmost entrance. The deeper they went, the colder it became, and Foh rubbed his hands, pretending to blow on them for warmth. Instead, he whispered to Pix, “Make a mental map so that we don’t get lost.”
“Cartography initiated.”
Foh followed three monks until they reached a chamber where a Vulpiyan-sized statue stood on a tiered mound, candles lining the layers. The smell of burning wax contrasted against the cave’s earthy scent. Offering bundles were spread throughout — heaps of pinecone, squirrel bones, and nightshade, among other things. The monks dropped on all fours around the statue and bowed their heads. Foh followed suit.
“Can you feel Catmother’s heartbeat?” he whispered to Pix.
“Third tunnel to your back. A strong pulsating signal comes from there — cracked earth and tension buildup. Whatever is causing the earthquake originates there.”
Foh eyed the other three monks. Heads bowed, they wouldn’t be able to see him. He moved backwards on all fours, but as he did, he noticed something shining in the bundle of offerings. A power inverter. A device capable of converting direct current to alternating current, or the other way around. Foh was the only one to visit the Ruined City. How did the monks come upon that beauty? A shame to just leave it there to rust.
Foh moved sideways toward the bundle.
“Interesting,” Pix said. “You’re diverging from the recommended pattern. Is it that impulse again?”
Foh remained silent. His hand slid into the offering bundle, rusty gizmos making dull sounds as he extricated the device. Foh grinned at the feeling of the corrugated surface in his palm. About the size of his wrist. It had a switched-off LED light on one side.
He tucked it inside a belt pouch and backed away. Once he reached the tunnel’s mouth, he donned his glove again.
Shouts bounded up the corridor. “Intruder in the cave!”
Foh cursed and began running. “Goddamn, he’s awake already.”
“You should have used more voltage,” Pix said.
“Yes, you said that.”
“Left,” Pix said, and Foh turned to a branching pathway.
Foh rushed through a meandering passage until he reached a part of the cave unlit by candles. He had read about these dark corridors no Vulpiyan should approach — the Veins of the Catmother.
Orange light shone from Pix’s eyes to illuminate the path. The tunnels honeycombed into more pathways. What if they got lost?
“You better be keeping a good log of the area, Pix.”
“Acknowledged. Incoming vibrations.”
“I thought we had fifteen hours!”
“Six hours now until the big one. This one is a lesser earthquake. Find steady ground.”
“How lesser is—”
The earth rumbled. The walls shook and dust fell in heaps. With a cracking sound, the earth beneath him crumbled, and he fell.
#
Tendrils of electricity ran through Foh’s scalp. He cracked his eyes open. He was in one of those decrepit labs in the Ruined City. How did he get there? Had he landed? He remembered being chased by something. His gaze drifted to a poster, reading white letters over a desert background: What I cannot create I do not understand.
“It’s advisable you use the neuronal rearranger.”
Foh whipped towards the boyish voice. There was a screen on a desk riddled with buttons and blinking lights. The screen displayed a horizontal green line, and the line jiggled as the boyish voice spoke again. “It’s in the medkit by the door to the left of my screen. It will rewire the healthy neurons away from the damaged ones.”
Was the screen talking to him? Had he hit his head that hard?
Foh hobbled toward the medkit, feeling as if he were trying to balance on a rope. The medkit was a container almost as big as Foh, hosting gauzes, ointments, and a helmet with wires all over its surface.
“It’s a flexible fit,” the voice from the screen said. “You can compress it to your head size. Wear it and sit down for five hours. You might feel tingling.”
Foh looked at the screen, then looked at the helmet. Should he trust the machine? As shadows narrowed around his vision, he made the call and put the helmet on, pushing the sides to fit his head. It chafed his ears and pulled at his fur. Electric currents ran through his scalp, flowing in circles near his forehead.
Foh sat on a slab of stone, already noting how much the pain had eased. He licked the back of his hand, side-eyeing the screen. “Are you a thinking machine?”
“Affirmative. Though the correct term is Artificial Intelligence, or A.I. for short. I was meant to inhabit a body. But according to the limited data I’ve been able to gather, something befell my maker, and I was left behind.”
“So, you’re trapped inside that screen?”
“Negative. I reside in the computer connected to this screen.”
Foh licked the inside of his mouth, tasting blood. “Where did you find the energy to stay operational all these years?”
“Solar panels. They are still intact on the west side of the University.”
“I don’t know what that means. Is it possible to get you out of there?”
“Affirmative. All I need is a body to inhabit. It should run on solar energy to be sustainable throughout the day. But I have long since estimated most prototypes have corroded beyond use.”
Foh noticed a spider crawling along the grout between his feet, then with a leap land on the tip of his toe. “Does the size of your body matter?”
“My chip can fit into the size of an insect.”
Foh grinned. “Then I think we’ll figure something out. I’ll need some tools and—”
The helmet banged his scalp. An overwhelming current came. Another flash of light. The moldy smell of a cave. This was wrong. Wasn’t he in the Ruined City? No, that was then, this was now. Cavern. He was in the cavern, on a mission to kill a goddess.
Foh jolted up, surrounded by rocks, feeling Pix’s skittery legs leap from shoulder to chest to his muzzle. “What?”
“Glad you’re back. I was getting worried about your cerebral cortex,” Pix said. “We have less than an hour left. I had to force your awakening.”
Foh stood, his back aching, his mind like mud. “What happened?”
“You experienced a concussion. I had your mind re-experience the last time you had one, to mend itself faster. You’re lucky my initial algorithm included neuronal rearrangement. You can remain functional for the rest of the day.”
“And after that?” Foh asked.
“Expect some headaches, maybe mood swings. Could even evolve to post-concussion syndrome since you won’t be resting soon. But I have taken steps to minimize that probability. Less than forty percent.”
“Oh, great. Yeah. Sure, excellent.” Foh sighed. “Let’s get moving.”
#
The tunnel stretched on, illuminated in an orange hue by Pix’s lamp-eyes. A dripping sound echoed, and dust came down from the walls as the world quaked. Foh rolled his tongue, tasting something metallic. His forehead throbbed as if a hammer pushed it from the inside.
Pix crawled up Foh’s nape. He felt him pulling at his fur, grooming him.
“Not the bloody time for it, Pix.”
“Negative. It’s five echoes from the Catmother’s third beat. That means grooming time.”
Foh let out a heavy sigh. “Can you hard code this? No grooming in life-threatening situations. Log that in your algorithm.”
“Affirmative. I will update the parameters.”
For a while, they moved in silence, then Pix’s eyes blinked red. “The source is close,” Pix said. “I detect pulsations within fifty paces.”
“Fifty paces? That’s hunting distance. It should be close enough to smell.”
“I have no data of smell. It is an alien sense to me.”
“We’ll get to that one day,” Foh said, and sniffed the air. It did not smell like a heart, no blood scent to it, nor flesh. It smelled like burning iron. Then again, who could say what an earth goddess’s heart was supposed to smell like?
The passage tightened to a crack. Foh stood on his hind legs and slid sideways inside. A shock wave came, and his back and chest scraped against the protruding rocks.
“Blast it all to heck,” he said.
“Should I initiate detonation?”
“No!” Foh said, twisting his head so fast his muzzle bumped on the rock. “Aw! Catmother’s bones, it’s a bloody expression.”
“Affirmative. No blasting. There is thermal overload ahead, though. Once we reach the lake.”
“Lake?”
Rumbles echoed ahead, and the ground and walls vibrated in a consistent manner unlike the chaotic shakings of an earthquake. Foh exhaled and squeezed through the passing. His eyes opened wide.
Cables connected rusty machines and terminals in a cavern illuminated by yellow lamps as verdigris-covered turbines hummed and drillbit pipes pierced holes above. Waterfalls cascaded down, hitting criss-crossing rows of wheels before landing on a lake covering half the chamber. At the core of the lake, a glass-walled cylinder bulged out of the surface, connecting to the ceiling, a massive piston moving up and down inside it. A metal platform ringed the cylinder near the top.
“I’ll be damned,” Foh said. “The goddess is a real mechanized beauty.”
“Less than twenty minutes remaining,” Pix said.
“Right. I’m way over my head here. Can you interpret any of this?”
Pix leaped from his shoulder and up to the machines. Spider legs surrounded one of the sockets and Pix plugged his butt into one of them. Foh inspected the machines as Pix loaded the data.
When five minutes had passed, the earth rumbled again, and it seemed the vibrations were in sync to the oscillations of the giant piston. Stalagmites fell from the ceiling, some splashing into the lake.
“Are you quite done?” Foh asked.
Pix remained silent. When another minute had passed, he said, “This is an old-world power plant that runs an earthquake nullifier — a fault line inhibitor. There are lines connecting all the way to more than twenty epicenters around Crith Talun.”
“What? How the hell is this a nullifier? It’s anything but!”
“That was its original designation. I could interpret the course which led to its current functionality, but it will take one hour, twenty-six minutes.”
Foh gaped at him.
“Approximately,” Pix added.
“Okay. We just need to figure it out. How can an earthquake nullifier turn into an agitator? How did they manage to nullify the earthquakes in the first place? What does its manual say?”
“An A.I. localized the displacement centers, reconstructed friction conditions, and mapped the seismic wave course. Then—”
“If it’s an A.I., can’t we just ask it directly?”
“Negative. Unlike me, it’s non-sentient.”
Foh sighed. “Okay, so it mapped the seismic waves. So far, so good. But that’s all just earthquake prediction, how did it nullify them?”
“It did not nullify them.”
Foh massaged the sides of his muzzle. “Not a great time for your algorithm to malfunction, Pix.”
“Sorry. I used the wrong term before. It’s not nullifying them exactly. Essentially, ground-vibrating kits are placed throughout the land, connecting to this machine. The giant piston you see here is powering them, mapping its relative resonance to their conditions. What they do in turn is reflect seismic waves. I’m activating the map. Please look at the screen.”
A green panel in one of the terminals lit up, showing a network of nodes. Contours illustrated Crith Talun’s geography, and concentric quarters of a circle flashed with alarmingly red colors.
“These represent the upcoming waves,” Pix said.
Foh remained silent. Identifying where the Vulpiyan village was just from a contour map was tough. What he could say with clarity was that these waves were directed away from one point in particular.
“The Ruined City!” Foh said. “That’s why earthquakes are rare there!”
“Four minutes remaining.”
“Right,” Foh said. “Okay. I think I understand enough. How do we disable the giant piston?”
“There should be an external source of direct current. Most likely on the platform, as it would have to be accessible to maintenance units.”
Foh eyed the ceiling. “Attach,” he said, and Pix leaped to his glove and attached himself to the palm.
Click.
Foh fired, piercing the ceiling with Pix winched them up. Once he landed on the ring platform, he pulled back the rope without unhinging it from Pix’s body. Pix crawled out of the palm and jumped up his shoulder as Foh walked along the circumference. A kit was embedded on the other side of the cylinder, its lid shut.
With his glove, Foh yanked the lid off, hinges and all. A tangle of circuits stared back at him.
Foh picked at the fur under his muzzle. “This doesn’t look like a generator.”
“Affirmative. It has more than one functionality: directing the piston and mapping the output power to the kits throughout Crith Talun. You could disable everything at once —probability ten percent.”
“That’s handy.”
“You could also make everything explode — probability ninety percent.”
“Right. Lovely then.”
“One minute remaining.”
Foh stared at the circuit, gaze drifting through the copper wirings as if through a labyrinth. A rusty device with a corrugated surface was embedded between three terminal chips, minute shards of glass from a burst LED light. A fried power inverter.
Of course! The power inverter was supposed to switch incoming alternating current to direct current. Without it, the machine was being fed alternating current. Too powerful. It was in overdrive.
“Fifteen seconds,” Pix said.
Foh pulled the device he’d pilfered from the offerings and swapped it in. A perfect fit.
The earth rumbled. Foh was shaken off the platform, dropping into the lake. His fur floated like algae around him, the liquid touch chilling his sensitive paws. The pressure throbbed his ears as the machine hummed. Schools of cavefish dispersed as stalactites dropped into the lake and he dived deeper to avoid them. Hadn’t it worked? No. It did work, or else the whole ceiling would have come down.
Foh held his breath until the vibrations had subsided, then swum until he reached the shore. His fur heavy with water, he shook, spraying droplets all over, then sat against the wall, beside a turbine.
A loud series of clanks echoed as Pix crawled down the machineries and along the turbine. “Apparently the earthquake was less than five Fohlons. What happened?”
Foh twisted his tail to squeeze out the water. “The piston had gone into overdrive. Its frequency reached resonance with the surrounding earth, causing increasingly powerful earthquakes. Not only that, the adaptive A.I. mapped the frequency to all the ground-vibrating kits. They didn’t just reflect seismic waves anymore, they also made them more powerful.”
“Affirmative. Non-sentient A.I. is very unreliable. But what did you do?”
“The piston was receiving alternating current, so I replaced the inverter. I believe the machine fried recently, which would explain these massive earthquakes today. However…”
Foh moved toward the green panel. “This solves part of the problem. I’ll need to figure out how to redirect all the earthquakes. And there’s wear and tear all over the controls. Pretty sure the inverter was not the only thing causing the piston to malfunction, either. I’ll have to rebuild some of the modules.”
“I have a query on a very tangential subject.”
“Go ahead.”
“I’m still trying to comprehend the concept of heretic. You just meddled with the goddess. Won’t they hang you up for this? You’ll have to return to the surface for sustenance.”
Foh placed a hand over the panel, dusting it off. “Won’t be a problem, Pix. For starters, there’s fish in the lake. I’ll feed on that for a while, until I figure out how to direct earthquakes at will.” Foh opened one of the terminal lids, a display of rusty circuits staring back at him. “I’ll make a kinder goddess, one that believes in life, instead of taking life. But first, I’ll need to understand how She works. Then, one day — who knows? I might even become a new prophet. It would be easy to prove that I understand Her, that she ‘speaks to me.’ What an interesting upgrade from heretic that would be.”
Pix’s lamp-eyes blinked asynchronously. After several seconds, he said, “The concept of religion still confuses me.”
“Then I guess we’ll both figure out things as we go,” Foh said, grinning at the possibilities. “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
The End
