Children of the Stainless Steel God

By George Rivers Bridger

When you’re a slave, death may not be the worst thing that can happen to you...

Created to be the assassins, spies, soldiers and general playthings of the upper echelons of a society with little or no consideration for life, a group of genetically enhanced psychic (or Esper) teenagers plan to escape the clutches of their amoral creators and carve a fate for themselves of their own choosing.

But when you’re hidden away on a planet far from the moral scrutiny of anyone likely to care, and you’re trapped within a fortified compound surrounded by bloodthirsty mercenaries with your powers limited by electronic fields and experimental drugs, escaping may well be just the beginning of your problems...

This is the First in a series of at least Three stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: George Rivers Bridger
• Release date: Nov 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465855596

George Rivers Bridger

George Rivers Bridger was born in Camperdown, Australia in 1968, a time of Black and White TV, typewriters, AM radio and where things such as VCR's, home computers, digital cameras, eBooks and mobile phones were all the products of Science Fiction but are now as commonplace as paperclips...He is currently waiting for such Sci-Fi staples as Moonbases, Friendly Space People, Flying Cars, Robot Valets and Personal Jetpacks to follow suit...

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Children of the Stainless Steel God.

By

George Rivers Bridger.

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Copyright 2020 George Rivers Bridger.

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***

Children of the Stainless Steel God.

The pale light of the rising full moon peeped over the concrete windowsill and filtered through the tiny, barred dormitory window to illuminate the stark interior of the room within, painting the minimalistic tableau with a series of alternating bars of faint light and deep shadow.

With a start, Z awoke from her all-too-restless slumber, but it was neither the whitish-blue sheen of the moonlight nor the quiet buzzing of the psi-suppression field constantly reverberating in the back of her mind that had made her restive this night.

She lifted the thin (some would say insubstantial) sheet from her near-decrepit tube-steel bed and emerged fully clothed and ready, brushing an errant lock of her milk-white hair from her large cherubic eyes of deepest midnight blue and making her way in the faint moonlight across to where a thin (though relatively warm) faded blue-denim jacket was slung over the back of a much used aluminium chair which, apart from the bed, was the only other furniture in her otherwise extremely barren room.

Z quickly pulled on the jacket and turned the chair upside down; she then pulled a small wad of rags from one of the chairs hollow legs and carefully tipped the chair upright. With a quiet metallic tinkle, two tiny tubes fell onto the floor from their hiding place; Z quickly gathered them up and shoved them into the deepest pocket of her jacket, quietly hoping that she wouldn’t need to use them.

She turned to gaze out of the window; through it the moon was still visible, now high in the sky and rapidly rising. She guessed with an accuracy that was unique to those of her enhanced abilities that it was five minutes to midnight, and she found herself tensing involuntarily, for finally - after much waiting - it was almost time to begin...

***

Alpha gradually worked his way along a hallway within the Guard Block, mopping the floor slowly and precisely, not a corner, not a patch of the faded linoleum was missed in his careful progress. But it was not so much a matter of professional pride on his part than it was an issue requiring exact timing, for today - more than most days - he had a very specific schedule.

Like all of the other experimental males Alpha wore a one-piece blue denim overall (the females wore a one-piece dress) and his garb was now much faded and worn from many years of use, except for the patches which were emblazoned upon each shoulder and on his back, they were the brilliantly reflective white T symbols that identified him as a Trustee-Inmate, and thus allowed him a limited amount of freedom within several of the eight interconnected buildings (commonly known to its occupants as The Complex) so as to perform a series of randomly allotted menial tasks, which in the case of Alpha was to mop the floors and clean the toilets for the entire six levels of the Guardian (or more commonly just Guard) Block, which if the observer had been looking north and the complex had been laid out like an analogue clock face would have stood at the twelve o’clock position. It was here that the Guardians lived, trained, deployed and monitored the rest of the Complex for any suspicious behaviour, just like the good little pseudo-fascists that they (inadvertently or otherwise) were.

Next to the Guard Block, at the two o’clock position was the Esper Dormitory Block (Esper being a term referring to ESP or extra sensory perception, a description that was at best an inaccurate label for the experimental subjects of the Complex, whose powers went far beyond the limits of simple mind reading and suchlike) and below that at four o’clock was the Esper Training Block. They were the only other buildings Alpha was familiar with in any detail and the only two separated from the others by their own encircling wall (for their own protection they were told. though no one was so gullible to believe such an obvious lie); but from the other trustees he knew that the building at the due south, or six o’clock position was the living quarters of the Administration and Scientific staff, and the Infants Creche (where all Espers spent their first years of life, though Alpha own recollections of the place were hazy at best) lay next to that at the seven o’clock position.

At the west, or nine o’clock, position lay the Experimental (or Laboratory) Block. But amongst the Espers, the Lab Block was better known as the Mother and Father House for it was here that lay the large stainless steel and glass artificial wombs from which they had all been born of the questionable biological experiments euphemistically (and rather unimaginatively) referred to as The Project by its progenitors: the grey-faced, unfeeling intellectuals who called themselves Bioalchemists and who worked almost non-stop in their laboratories with an indifferent (at best) disposition towards their young subjects.

Above the Lab Block, at the eleven o’clock position lay the mysterious Normals Block, for although Alpha, at twenty-two years of age (and as his name implied) was the first and oldest of the Espers he was not the first person to have been born here. In fact there had been many children born long before Alpha, and they had all of them been conceived, gestated and ultimately delivered by the same artificial means as he had. But whilst Alpha had developed Esper powers as a product of Bioalchemists tinkering with his genes and was the first to be given a code-name, many others had failed to develop any sort of Esper abilities at all and for all intents and purposes were normal human beings (and thus were known by the designation Normals from then on, although the more common term between the Bioalchemists was usually Failures), and - once classified as such (usually if the children that hadn’t developed any Esper abilities by the time they were due to leave the Infants Creche) - they had been taken away from