Wild Dolls

After a bruising half-hour of supersonic nap-of-the-earth flight, the shriek of break-flaps opening announced to our arrival to all.

The pull of deceleration, savage jarring impact of earth beneath us once more. Sounds of boots on metal and Jane announcing all clear on scans. No contact as yet. Cinder and Janice were out and still no contact. Mega was out. I kept expecting to hear Janice or Cinder's scatterguns but that didn't happen until they were all out and well away from the transport. Thirty seconds of shooting and shouting and then silence.

And silence. And guilt. 17 minutes I waited in that small dark compartment, face stretched in horror and grief made only worse by long foreknowledge. But I could not cry; my tear ducts were chemically blocked. Orders said to wait exactly 20 minutes yet I did not. Calculated disobedience! This was where the woman always fell in every play I had ever seen: disobedience to a mans simple order. It felt like certain death and that is what attracted me at that moment.

The glade was quiet and sunny when finally I stepped down the wheel strut from concealment and into the morning sunlight.

5 The valley of the Dolls

An hour of tramping through that idyllic valley and I still had not observed any Doll sign. That was going to change. Birdsong, which had grown gently since the glade, had now smothered as if a poison cloud swept towards me. Nothing else had changed and the sun was as warming as any summer day. Sun wouldn't save me. Did I want saving? Failure could come quicker than success and that made it seductive. Success would be lonely now in any case. But yes I wanted saving. I was terrified. I didn't care about my friends' betrayal right then. I was too afraid.

I stood there in a fresh sunlit glade waiting for the dolls to disappear me like they had my friends. Nothing stirred anywhere. No, that was not true. A slight rustling of leaves by a wind that ran on light feet.

Dolls swept down upon me, swirled around me, sprinting onwards in flight or chase that did not consider me. Flashes of naked flesh bound in green and black ribbons, ribbons trailing, and surely that was a soldier-girl's helmet strapped on that one's shoulder like some gladiatorial affectation.

The glade was empty once more. My heart pounded and I was breathing too rapidly. If not for me, then why and where were the Dolls running so urgently? Surely not another intrusion! Momentarily my thoughts played with the idea that I was just one more diversion, sacrificed as my friends had been, and my mission was a lie.

No. The answer was obvious and I was ashamed of how rapidly I had doubted my superiors. Nothing had startled the Dolls. Dolls neither startled nor tired. If you can't tire, if your quantum entangled consciousness consumes input at a terahertz to the power of a billion synthetic neurons, why walk? Whereas a soldier on guard may pace back and forth for hours on end, those dolls now far past me may have been running through these forests without stumble or pause since their creation.

Only after dealing with all these unworthy thoughts did a far more important observation occur. The Dolls had not taken me. Central Intelligence was right for once. Wearing that studded collar the Dolls ignored me. I wondered how it worked.

There was plenty of time to wonder, trudging towards my fate. Night fell, eventually. The Doll sky thread would not have been visible but for the lights of elevators drifting slowly up and down it.

Yesterday I had been shown many schematics and blurred telephoto images of the sky thread. Each of the ten parallel strands was no thicker than a thumb and made of something not of God's earth. The elevators were just that, normal sized glass walled elevators such as travel the sides of city 'scrapers, but strengthened for vacuum. The elevators went regularly, full or not. Can you imagine sending shuttles into space, full or not? These elevators went a lot further: all the way to Geo-stationary orbit thousands upon thousands of miles above me. I could not help but think the blasphemous thought that whatever kept the Dolls from abducting and raping every last unspoiled woman, it was not us Crusaders of Purity... with our rusted lead-spitting armaments, surplus to needs, just like us.

I walked through the night and just after dawn breasted a hill and saw the base of the sky-thread before me in a wide grassy plain within an old war crater.

The Doll city was not impressive in the way I had imagined. I had anticipated architectural wonders appropriate to the builders of a sky thread. Instead, nothing looked permanent. Many of the structures were mere platforms supported by dolls standing like statues, up to five levels high. They looked like rock, until they moved, and the towers grew and shrank.

There were few apparent vehicles or machinery except the Dolls themselves. There were palettes, bearing some heavy cargos but sometimes just a single captive bound like a sacrifice, along with a couple of Dolls apparently to gloat. Whatever their cargo, the palettes all moved by the attention of an appropriate number of Dolls, always at a smooth loping pace. The Dolls ran, or stood absolutely still, but never walked or hesitated. I was reminded of an ant nest I had once disturbed. The ants had scurried around carrying the queen's eggs to safety. This entire city could no doubt move to follow the base of the skythread.

I kept to the edges of the foot-worn paths, and tried not to witness the many debauched and carnal plays enacted around me. Somewhere, if I looked long enough, I was certain I would see a human girl's face I recognized; twisted in terror and struggling with lust, or already broken and damned, curled between a Doll's thighs, drinking Doll milk.

None paid me any attention, not the dolls or their writhing human spoil. Without incident I made it to the base of the sky thread and strode into the glass capsule of an elevator moments before it began it's long ascent.

***

The Doll city shrunk beneath me, then the crater itself was just a dish, then I was ascending through a hole in mountainous clouds. The crater had vanished before the sky darkened and stars appeared.

The elevator accelerated slowly at first but the weight kept growing under my feet. It seemed so slow watching from the ground. By the time I knew I would have to lie down on the floor I was supporting the weight of three. Three G acceleration. A doll wouldn't have been tested.

Many minutes later the elevator reached midway. I was free floating just long enough to reach the ceiling before it became the floor and I was crushed again.

Had any humans made this trip before me? Hundreds upon hundreds I suspected, but perhaps I was the first to make it of my own free will. Lying on my stomach against the glass ceiling-become-floor I had a perfect view of my destination. A biomechanoid satellite shaped like a gigantic gourd, or a spider's abdomen with complicated spinnerets from which the Doll Sky Thread issued. We called it Terminus, named for the boundary stone at the end of a road.

My target was where the thread joined the gourd. If severed there the entire length of the thread would fall to earth and be destroyed. Intelligence believed it would take years for the Dolls to rebuild the sky thread, and without earth from which to siphon resources and slaves the Doll colonies may well lose cohesion and turn on each other. I had to succeed. I had sentenced my friends to damnation to achieve it.

It was not to be so easy. The elevator did not stop but continued into the bowels of Terminus. I would have to find my own way back.

6 Terminus

A queer blue light permeated everything. It gave steel, glass and plastics the same illusion of organic softness and unnatural translucency. Floating lamps drifted slowly above my head like corpuscles. Steel-and-glass arteries bearing a clear, blue-fluorescing liquid followed several of the corridors I walked, before branching off into deeper sections of the station where I could not follow.

In one of these vertical arterial branches I spied the drowned body of an unknown model of Doll. It seemed improperly formed, perhaps a rejected mutant that had been flushed. It's body was standard, that of an adolescent girl, but it's skull devolved at its base to thick translucent tendrils. It was by these tendrils that it had become caught at the branch, feet trailing upwards in the direction of the arterial flow. I had watched for only a handful of seconds when the tendrils came free and the body slid out of sight. I had the unnerving impression that the tendrils had let go of their own accord. My assumption that the Doll was dead seemed suddenly naïve and I hurried on.

I had travelled at least a kilometer through the strange metal intestines of that hellish place before I met my first definitely functional Space-adapted Doll. I was trapped in a long curved corridor when she appeared around the distant end. I had to proceed with my faith in the collar. The alternative was to flee before her.

I walked towards her as calmly as I was able. Not very! The collar did not shield everything and the doctors had warned me to calm my thoughts if I had to pass close to a Doll. It would have been easier if they had not told me at all.

I tried to fill my head with a simple tune, a childhood litany against fear, to block out the panic.

She was not like other Dolls I had seen. She could never have been mistaken for human. She was tall: two and a half meters or more. Her disproportionate limbs ate the distance between us rapidly although she appeared to be moving in slow motion. Her skin could have been cold marble or the softest most translucent flesh. Strangest of all was her head. Cables interfaced with the back of her otherwise hairless head like braids. The cables hung around her like a web even as she walked. They must have been on tracks on the walls or some similar mechanism. With a little more effort they could have transported her as well, and those ridiculous legs would have been redundant.

She passed me without pause (I had to duck under the cables). She appeared to be sleepwalking or deep in thought. Her eyes were closed and she was singing meaningless sounds absentmindedly to herself. That more than anything convinced me that I was going to make it. It was only after she had passed out of sight that it occurred to me that her song bore resemblance to the tune I had filled my head with in order to stifle my fear.

This realization caused a spike of purest panic. If I had made the connection about the tune seconds earlier, that spike of emotion would surely have exposed me. This realization only drove the panic deeper, to become shock as the nearness of my escape became apparent. I knew my fear was a searing beacon but knowing made control impossible. How many seconds or minutes I stood paralyzed, I do not know.

Some higher power watched over me. No Doll came. I reached my destination with no further encounters.

It was a tall room with a concave glass floor looking down at a distant earth. A rim of metal edged each half of the bowl of the floor, and bulged into a complicated seal around the point the skythread exited into space. In all, the rooms' diameter was, say, twenty strides. The entire bowl was hinged in order that it could open and let the sky elevator through. Although the sky thread spinnerets were currently separated from space by the bowled floor, this could change without warning when the next elevator approached. Yet I paused.

Reaching the sky thread spinnerets left me momentarily at a loss. Success was the queerest of all queer things to meet in that place and the least expected. Don't freeze here, Alice!

The metal rim provided footholds to the bottom of the bowl. Hastily I shucked the demolitions pack off tired shoulders and extracted the long coil of explosives. Each thread had to be cut simultaneously for the simple reason that the first detonation would knock askew the other demolitions devices and do considerably worse to the demolitions expert.

"Ooh careful!" said a voice by my ear.

Spun around, just in time to see the afterimage of two Dolls, identical, mouths stretched wide in perfect mimicry of my own horror. The Dolls themselves were gone. That fast. My eyes caught up to them again, now at the rim of the bowl, looking down at me with irritated frowns.

"That.. hurt," one said.

"That wasn't friendly," said the other.

I hadn't touched them, not even shouted. What did they mean? My hand flew to my throat. The collar was gone.

There it hung, from the hands of the left-most twin. My explosion of fear had dazzled them. I had lit up.

The two did not attack. For the moment they just watched. I watched them. They were not as tall as the graceful, space-adapted doll I had met in the corridor, but there were similarities. Daughters? If that term had any meaning. Gangly, immature, inquisitive. These terms should not have applied either.

"Explain yourself," said the leftmost doll. All expression had faded from her face. The impression of intent was somehow increased.

"I am performing specialized repairs." Not a good lie, even without those eyes upon me, and lie, lie, lie broadcast from my every nerve.

The two faced each other, and I had the impression of terabytes of silent debate passing between them.

"Our request was poorly worded," the left said.

"Tell us how you work," said the right.

Hard metal pressed into my back. I had backed into one of the sky thread housings and my hand lay across the demolition mechanism. It came to me that I could leave this hopeless situation with a twitch of my finger. Only seven of the neutronium pinchers were set. The remaining three threads would hold, and prevent the whole falling to earth. All my company, Cinder, Mega, all sacrificed for nothing.

I would not do it.

One hope occurred; these dolls did not know what to make of me. They did not understand, or did not care that I was attempting to destroy their home. That concept might simply have been left out of their ego-splice. Their 'mother' certainly had not omitted the doll's innate telempathy, though they did not appear to understand their fascination with me.

If they had never met a human, they had never felt emotion before. That fascination would become an addiction, the addiction dependence. The Idolaters that had created the Doll had created the perfect slave obsessed only with their master's happiness.

Yes, and having no motivation of their own the Dolls would never act independently, never possibly breed wild. That failed belief and my faith were all I had.

"I must finish my work. Then I will explain myself to you." I turned my back on them, moving to the next housing, refusing to consider them and trying to keep my thoughts numb.

It worked, for the most part.

"Perhaps she is a present from Mother," theorized one of the dolls as I assembled another of the demolition devices. This talk must be for my benefit.

"She is very unlike Mother's art," observed the other. "Also, we have not been particularly good."

"Not mother's design," the first agreed. "This Doll is so unstructured. No mind could engineer such a tangle. And yet, one might suppose she were engineered to fascinate us."

"I theorize a method. I call it combinatorial variation and selection."

The two dolls faced each other, motionless. I wondered how long it would take a Doll brain to deduce the rationalist heresy of evolution, species and phyla, having never seen a natural born animal till now.

Some minutes, I hoped.

On the verge of finishing and a fingernail ran delicately up my spine. I convulsed, gasped and fell to my knees. My legs would not hold me. Only my grip on the last housing prevented me slipping to my belly on the cold floor. The pole of the housing was against my breast and between my thighs. One touch and I was as helpless as a girl at the whipping post.

"It has occurred to us that these 'repairs' may leave little of you to explore, Monkey," one of the Dolls breathed in my ear.

She sounded proud of that word. I suspected it had taken them much longer to uncover it from some unformatted corner of their mothers mind than it had taken to see through my ploy, or to mutually conclude that it might be more amusing to let me hope a little longer. They had never intended to let me escape through death, at least not before they had unraveled all my mysteries.

I made a second grab at the final wire and shrieked as fingernails stroked my side. You might have thought their nails were tazer prongs from the sound I made. Not so. The touch itself was not magical, just the way they knew where to touch. They had been studying me.

"I must finish," I tried to make them feel my need, to make it theirs. I held the instant of completion in my mind as a climactic release. Everything I wanted.

A cool Doll hand still lay on my side. Not stroking, I think that would have driven me insensible, but making my breath rapid from the fear of it. "You want this too," The doll whispered huskily. They were trying inflection. I was all they had to learn from but I had never spoken like that, thought like that... I filled my mind with litanies against temptation. The Doll continued. "Let finishing be the last thing you enjoy."

"If I let you examine me, you will let me finish?" I did not think I could survive their exploration, but compliance might leave me an opportunity that struggle would remove entirely.

"Anything you want," they said, with strange emphasis on that final word.

Then they just watched me, watching the cogs turning with glacial organic majesty in my mind, perhaps. I broke first, and asked what they wanted of me.

"Show us all of you."

"Do you mean... strip?"

"Yes, do that for us."

The way she said it implied I had misunderstood. They were merely content with my interpretation; for now.

I rose; they turned me so my back was to the housing, front to them. I was taller than the pair by half a head. Huge dark eyes increased their waif-like appearance.

I undid each button of my tattered shirt under the inspection of those eyes, not exposing any more skin until I absolutely had to. When I hesitated, they slid the shirt off my shoulders. I shook free of it as quickly as possible, not liking to have my arms trapped. They smiled at me in admiration I knew was not deserved, and I blushed furiously. I was fit and strong but any woman next to a Doll was a rack of imperfection. Worse was to come. Next had to be my bra, because I needed it less than my gun-belt or my boots.

I stood there clutching the unstrapped cloth to my breasts. I thought I could do it but I couldn't. The Dolls were not disappointed. They were fascinated with my inexplicable humiliation.

One of the twins held my shoulders. She made comforting sounds. I don't know if it was the clumsiness of her first attempt that comforted me, or if by design she showed me precisely what I needed, an illusion of fallibility.

That helped when the other kneeled before me to unbuckle my Kaki pants and put the belt aside. Holding my hips tightly in both hands she slid the zip down effortlessly with her strong tongue, chasing it deep between my thighs.

The Doll paused, then laughed. "I can hear something crinkling in there. More wrapping?"

Pants and underwear were rolled down to my knees, revealing the tape the nurses had used to keep my scent in. "What a strange thing to do," said the other gleefully as the first began to lick at the tape with her rough tongue.

That broke my resolve. This far, I could tell God and the priests' polygraph I was playing for time, acting out of pure motives in desperate circumstances. Any further would be submission to my own degradation.

I would not go passively into the night. Kicking, struggling, and howling, I was brought to the floor. She held my knees wide and intensified her attack. I couldn't see. The other cradled my head in her lap and all I could see each time my eyes popped open was her smiling down at me. Even through the tape, the sensation of that tongue almost broke me, and I had to hiss litanies against temptation through clenched teeth.