blinkinglights

There is an island in the middle of the sea. In one of its bays there stands a sandswept ruined fort. It has been there for a very long time. It is inhabited by the remnants of a possibly extinct noble family's House staff. A galleonful of fancy-coated British-style navy men has come and camped there, with the purpose of retaking the place. Only a small percentage of the sunbleached rooms are habitable; most of the sprawling complex is blocked off. What can be accessed is filled with drifting sand and strange ruined pieces of technology, beyond the level of these modern, musket-toting men.

I am there but neither important nor in charge of anything. I think a skeleton crew of housepeople have been living in the keep, keeping up appearances; I'm speaking to a young man who's spent his life here. he's somewhat disaffected because all his friends had hereditary claim to more interesting positions but he was stuck as a butler, a job he feels is pretty useless considering the state of the place, but he's doing his best attending to the officers of the exploration team, etc. He's practicing treating me with grace, but from behind him a dry voice corrects him in his use of honorifics, recommending some better and more fluid ones. It's a small, palm-sized black robotic spider. The young man seems to respect its contribution and I think he tells me a little about it.

George is the mad old ruin of the House's main computer, the original butler or chamberlain. I think this guy had to learn the ropes from him, even, but the spider-machine is so crazed and dangerous now that it's never turned on all the way and has to be watched in case it attempts to plug any of its disconnected cords into any still-functioning outlets. Fascinated, I think I talk to him a little. He can respond but it's clear he's mad.

The main expeditionary force swiftly occupies every accessible corner of the keep, keeping the House's ancestral staff busy tending to their needs. I walk through the place observing. We seem to be planning to break in to several of the sealed galleries, and are setting up digging teams. I don't feel one way or the other about this, though the staff seem nervous--yet reassured at the same time, possibly at the obvious might of the Royal Navy. I return to George, who I believe is unresponsive. I pick him up--he's the size of a small dog now--and carry him through a long, broad, pillared hallway to a meeting room where the generals are planning their incursion. At intervals, as we pass by particularly shadowed or watermarked areas, George arches and writhes weakly like he's trying to escape. I just hold him tighter, uncomprehending.

Once we reach the meeting room, I sit down in a corner, out of the way but watchful. George is important so I want to be somewhere official where I can get high-level approval of whatever I might decide to do. I want to ask George why he was acting out as I carried him through the hall considering how lucid he was just moments before during our conversation about honorifics. As the men at the table speak and plan, I remark that George's batteries are so old they definitely shouldn't have been able to retain that much charge. Despite the hazard he poses as a security system the denizens of this place still take care of him, I'm glad to see. I ask him if he has a text-only mode, since he doesn't have enough power left to speak--possibly it's rare for people to be able to read in this era, which is why he hadn't tried it already; or he's just crazy--and he does. A little screen flips up and words and sentences flow across it far too fast for me to catch most of them. They're all exasperated, desperate warnings about the places we'd passed in the hall.

There are markings and drawings scattered all around the House in a smoky brown pigment, symbols scratched into the walls and floor; each thing we passed was a clue as to what lurks beneath the place, clues George finds painfully obvious, having lived through their dire and unstoppable propogation, but to which I was clearly oblivious, though in retrospect if I'd only been paying attention I'd have at least gotten a hint. The lurking danger represented by the mysterious graffiti is legions of horrible zombie-like monsters nesting beneath the place, making the sealed galleries unsafe; these were their clanmarks or something. I think we'd already had a few troubles with them at this point. George's grip on reality soon slips and his last messages across the cyan screen warn me about himself, rather than the danger beneath the House. He shuts down.

The leaders take George's input, relayed by me, into full account, especially the part where he'd revealed some of the easiest routes to access the sealed galleries by. We blow out a wall in some kind of dining room with a demolition team and send in a large group of armed men. Nekkerlike enemies come pouring out of black doorways in the forbidden area. Frantic, I see that we're having a hard time of it; the Royal Navy are supposed to steamroll enemies, not get into pitched battles with them. I run back for George. In his text-only mode, I beg him to help us. I entreat and cajole the last sane part of the tiny machine; surely he'll be able to resist harming us if I point him at some real enemies, real threats to the House? Grudgingly he decides to try it. I plug him in, first, I think, for a short test run, setting up his cable so it's tangled and short and he'd rip it out of the wall if he lunged for us (I think some of the keepers of the house are with me now). After the power surges through him, with great lurching rips he explodes into gargantuan metallic size. He stands there briefly calibrating and lunges for us eventually, ripping the cord out of the wall and collapsing into his tiny form again.

We argue about what to do. Since I have fourth-wall-breaking knowledge about computers--was this why I was brought along?--I try to figure out what each cable does, since there are several, reasoning that if we can, say, blind or otherwise cripple him temporarily we can lead him to the fray and then set him loose, bargaining the reattachment of whatever withheld sense for our safety. I don't think this pans out; pretty sure everyone else abandons the project. I believe I speak with George myself again, and I eventually decide to try something more dangerous. He has a pilot's seat, or, no, just a place to carry people, up front using appendages similar to a spider's fangs; possibly for carrying captured trespassers. Somehow we reach the decision, me pushing, him reluctant, that if he's focused on carrying me, that should hobble some of his more violent out-of-control guarding tendencies, since he'll have already "caught someone" and should therefore be in a mode more conducive to returning a prisoner alive.

He's a little bigger now, since I plugged in an auxilary cable to speak with him after his collapse from ripping his main cable set out of the wall. Armchair-size. I sit down carefully, my back to him, and strange machine arms carefully grab me from behind. Kind of like sitting in a car, except being held by a giant spider. At some point I've plugged him into the wall, probably not from this position. And he takes on his enormous true mecha spider form again, and thunders forward through the halls to where the Royal Navy soldiers are being slowly but surely beaten back by a wave of the enemy.

George wades in there with his eight massive bladed legs and starts stomping the shit out of the bad guys, with me whirling along for the ride. He has to be careful of his cable, stretched out taught behind him after being dragged through several convoluted sets of rooms, but his machine mind is more than up to placing each leg perfectly for the task. Eventually, the gallery is cleared. George whirrs to a halt, nominally under control. On a text readout display, he confesses that he feels better and more clearheaded than ever as the Royal Navy soldiers gather in formation to both salute George and rally for their next push forward into the forbidden galleries. I worry about them stepping on George's cable, and his ability to maneuver without catching his cable on a person with them all standing around and over it like that, but he says let them; I get the feeling he's swept up in the thrill of the battle too. After all, it is his house they're fighting to take back. He's languished so long in the throes of madness as the monsters slowly crept into and overran this place, sealing galleries to protect the ever-shrinking ranks of the keepers of house, that of course he would want to continue the fight. Having an army at his back is a nice change from when it was only he, alone, faced with the choice of protecting the keepers of house or attacking the invaders, who would surely pour through the secret passages in the walls and destroy his precious family while he was distracted. Poor loyal spider! No wonder he went crazy.

And that was where I woke up, hanging suspended in the arms of a giant ancient killer robot spider above ranks of rallying Royal men, preparing to push our advantage.