Sequence by Adam Moon Page B

people came to his defense.
    Samda whispered, “I have a feeling most of these guys have been driven slowly insane. We’d better watch our backs.”
    She was right. It was difficult to tell if most of the mechs even had a personality trapped inside. They moved and acted like automatons, except for the few who seemed to have snapped and given in to their frustrations and growing aggression. Only a small handful seemed to have retained their faculties.
    Chris wondered how long they had been trapped in those mechs. From what the captain had said, it had been a hundred thousand years or so.
    Just as he closed in on the captain’s conversation again, they arriv ed at the barracks.

Barracks
     
    The barracks were barren , devoid of any furniture whatsoever. The room was cavernous and empty. The walls were brown, as was the floor. There were no windows and the lighting was poor.
    Chris nearly made the mistake of asking how they were supposed to sit down or sleep until he remembered that those things weren’t necessary when they were in the robotic suits.
    A dirty mech with dents and scuffs on his metal body sidled over to the captain. Chris moved closer to overhear the conversation.
    It said, “Welcome back , sir.”
    “Thank you , Number Eight.”
    “We’ll know soon enough if your mission was a success.”
    “Did she build the processor already?”
    “Yes , but her specs were way different from the ones we used to design her. Before she killed those who helped build it, one of them described it to me. He said that there’s a deep concave indentation she had dug out of the floor in the processor room. It’s off-limits, so I’ve never seen it myself. It’s inlaid with a golden-colored polymer and has several holes at the bottom. He didn’t know what those were for but he said they looked like drainage ports. There’s a crane at the edge of the crater and there are thousands of docks with hydraulic lifts on each. He thinks those are for the stasis pods. They are positioned all around the crater lip. He said there was a huge complex contraption that hangs over the center of the crater. He thought it was some type of laser, but he wasn’t sure. His hypotheses was that the DNA would be extracted from the aliens, positioned somewhere in the crater and then it would be combined by the laser beam. I told him he was an idiot. That was the last thing I said to him, because he was called away right then and never returned. None of the workers did.”
    The captain sighed. “She’s a cruel one , but maybe she knows what she’s doing. We have no choice but to put our faith in her.”
    Number Eight nodded and said, “I wish I could have gone with you. We all went a little crazy here. At least you had a mission , a reason for being. But thank you for coming back. Some of us had lost hope. Some of us thought you’d abandoned us to save yourselves.”
    The captain shook his head defiantly , as if to say that that was ridiculous. “It’ll all be over soon. We’ll see what’s to become of us before long.”
    “I wouldn’t hold out hope that it’ll end well for us. She barely recognizes that we’re even alive. She regards us the same way we would regard a stone. If we’re lucky she’ll consider it a waste of her time to kill us off.”
    “I take it no one ever came up with a way to overthrow her.”
    “Several did. They’re all dead now. She can’t be stopped. She has our DNA inside her. She can anticipate our every move.”
    Chris saw that Samda had also moved closer, to eavesdrop. She gave him a quizzical look. This had become more complicated and far more disastrous than they’d been led to believe. One thing was for sure, if the captain’s life wasn’t even guaranteed, then they stood less of a chance of getting back to Earth.
    Chris interrupted the captain’s conversation. “Was human DNA used to create her?” He already knew the answer, but he wanted to be sure.
    The captain said, “No. Earth is in a