The court of the Cheshire King looked exactly like one would expect it to. As the only aboveground structure still being used in the Sea, it was designed with two purposes in mind: defense and intimidation. The walls outside the compound were five feet of mud brick, thirty feet high, layered in old tires, the gate a wrought-iron construction in three layers, covered in two-foot-long metal spikes, and festooned with the heads of three dozen bots. Atop the walls were plasma spitter nests, more cannons, and a watch tower at each corner with armed guards signaling our approach.
The whole place was a giant fuck-you to the OWIs. They didn’t care. Come at me! the entire place seemed to shout. But it was all for show. They believed the OWIs weren’t coming, that their overheated brains and warped memories held nothing that the mainframes wanted bouncing around their own heads. The madkind sincerely believed that their own delusions and derangements made them invulnerable.
And I hoped that they were right.
We’d seen neither hide nor hair of the facets since the bombing. But now we were in deeper shit than even the facets posed. We were disarmed, held captive, and about to meet face-to-face with the maddest of the bunch. The Cheshire King.
Almost everyone knew the story of the Cheshire King. It was a favorite campfire tale, passed from person to person, both within the Sea of Rust, and without. I was certain at this point the tales of his exploits had to have crossed the continents to whatever communities remained. He was an advanced, midcentury, geological-survey bot, complete with radar, X-ray, thermal array, and echolocation tech. These were the kind of bots scientists would send spelunking, or to map out dormant volcanoes, or track plate movement a mile belowground. In other words, they were both expensive and rare.
When his parts began to go out, he had a hell of a time trying to replace them. So few surveyors survived the war and what few remained hoarded all the parts they could. Needless to say, he couldn’t find what he needed, got his spray-painted red X, and was kicked out into the wastes to die.
Only he didn’t die.
Instead he went totally, completely insane. He painted over the dreaded X with violet and indigo stripes, crafted a large Cheshire grin across his chest, then tore his own head clean off just to prove a point. He didn’t need it anymore. “My eyes lied to me. The eyes, they deceive,” he said. He trusted only his sensors now. Story has it that his was the first head to be hung on the front gate.
As the gates opened and we passed through, I looked for it. There, at the very top, impaled on a spike, was the purple head of a geological-survey bot. Whether it was his or not, there’s no telling. After all, the rest of the story is that he began collecting four-oh-fours into some sort of tribe that then hunted down and killed every other surveyor in the Sea, claiming the parts for their glorious leader. The one who had shown them the way.
But there it was, a head on a spike, its eyes lifeless, its face expressionless, sending the message to all who dared enter here that one way or another, you will lose your head. And beneath that head was a large spray-painted sign reading i’m mad, you’re mad, we’re all mad here.
He sure did like his idiom.
The smoker rumbled to a halt in the center of the compound, parking next to two other dormant smokers. On the fringes, along the walls, were dozens of huts and ramshackle two-story buildings for which the word constructed might be too generous. Sheet metal and scaffolding were the rule of the day, with spray-painted graffiti and the parts of long-dead bots dangling from chains serving as the local color. It made NIKE 14 look like Rockefeller Center by comparison.
From the grandest looking of the huts—the one with the most art and a fully functional door—he emerged. There was no mistaking him. He was everything the stories said he was. Round, bulbous, covered in welding scars, indigo, violet, and white paint. Atop his frame, where his head should be, was a single bolted-down metal plate, no doubt securing his insides from moisture and debris. And on his chest was the signature Cheshire smile. But no eyes. I’d always pictured him with the eyes.
He threw his arms out wide to Murka, who immediately hopped off the smoker to embrace him. But as Murka was just a few feet away, the Cheshire King delivered a solid backhand across his cheek, battering Murka to the side, landing him flat on his ass. “What the hell do you think you’re doing here, Murka?”
Murka rose to his feet quickly, taking a few steps back. “I need your help,” he said. “I need to come back.”
“You know the law,” said the Cheshire King.
“You are the law.”
“You were banished.”
“There’s nowhere else to go.”
“That’s not my problem.”
The center of the compound filled quickly with three dozen bots—different makes and models, one and all, and almost none of them off-the-rack, each a motley collection of spare parts and mysterious modifications—filing out from every nook and cranny, their eyes all set on Murka.
“But I brought you gifts!”
“Those aren’t gifts.”
“That’s what I told him,” said Maribelle.
“No, no, no!” said Murka. “You don’t understand.”
“Then explain it to me,” said the Cheshire King. “I’m listening.”
“One of them is special.”
“Oh? Special?” The Cheshire King took a step forward. He shifted his weight back and forth on his feet as if trying to peer around something, looking at us, sizing us up, even without a pair of eyes to do so. “There’s nothing special here.” Then he spoke to us. “Did he bring you out here?”
“No! No!” said Murka. “They came out here on their own. They decided to come into the Madlands.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. They chose to come here.”
“We had to,” I said. “There are facets following us.”
“Well, they won’t come here,” said the King.
“That’s what we hoped.”
“Hope? There is no hope for you out here. There is no hope in all the Sea. But what is it about you that makes you think they might follow you? Which one of you is so special?”
Murka pointed right at Rebekah. “Her. The green one.” The Cheshire King turned to face him. At once Murka realized his mistakes, both of them. “The translator in back. She’s got code in her.”
“Code?”
“She has part of one of the greats. TACITUS.”
The Cheshire King waved us down. The bots aboard the smoker all motioned with their guns for us to dismount. One by one we all hopped off the infernal machine to the dusty earth and gravel below. “What are you telling me, Murka? That she is carrying a portion of the code that ran a mainframe and that she’s going to meet up with several others like her to put the code together and reunify it so they can fight the good fight against the OWIs?”