The Mechanical Ogre

By Giulia Gubellini

In Bologna, the future heart of railway communications on the Eurasian continent, a city continually changing, submerged in toxic fumes and light pollution, Amanda becomes involved in a series of brutal murders. Thanks to her gift for navigating the net, she is called upon by iRobots to solve the case. But why would the largest robot company in the world be interested in catching a murderer?

Giulia Gubellini is twenty-five years old and lives in Bologna (Italy). The Mechanical Ogre is the translation of L’Orco Meccanico, published in 2013. L’Orco Meccanico came to the attention of the Italian publishing house Rizzoli, which in 2014 published the author’s first novel, Under, a dystopia set in Italy in the year 2025.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Giulia Gubellini
• Release date: Feb 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311859327

Giulia Gubellini

Giulia Gubellini is twenty-five years old and lives in Bologna (Italy). The Mechanical Ogre is the translation of L’Orco Meccanico, published in 2013. L’Orco Meccanico came to the attention of the Italian publishing house Rizzoli, which in 2014 published the author’s first novel, Under, a dystopia set in Italy in the year 2025.

Book preview

THE MECHANICAL OGRE

Giulia Gubellini

For further information about the author, and for an eventual continuation of the story, see:

http://www.giuliagube.it/

Facebook: http://goo.gl/UliR0y

Twitter: @GiuliaGube

First Italian edition: February, 2013

Revised Italian edition: December, 2014

English edition: February 2015

The Mechanical Ogre

by Giulia Gubellini

Copyright © 2013 Giulia Gubellini

Translated by Carmel Ace

INDICE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CHAPTER I

Amanda raised her head from the sticky counter of the Japanese bar, her eyes blurry with drunken stupor, and vaguely remembered having beans for breakfast. She could not recall anything else that had happened that day except for the beans and an orange juice laced with vodka she had washed them down with. She sat up attempting to stretch her aching muscles.

The Japanese bar had filled up while she was asleep. Hazy blue light shone down through the smoky air, drunken voices drowned out the music. In a pulsating knob she caught sight of the silhouette of a man with six arms. The hologram of a model wearing a dinner jacket approached, looking like a blue shell filled with vapour, and his invitation to smoke heaven-knows-what-make of cigarettes was lost in all the racket. Amanda waved him away, and the electronic salesman disappeared.

Although she did not know what had woken her up, she would have bet on the baritone laugh of the man sitting next to her - a German with skin-grafts on his face, still wearing the orange overalls of workers at the station.

As if Bologna needed more drunken workers, or new trains, coming here, she thought.

After road transport had been abolished, goods from all over the world docked in Naples, were then packed into containers and brought up there, to the most important railway terminal in Europe, the core of that tree of rails. The trains ran at over five hundred kilometres an hour on a magnetic band, travelling from Bologna to London in three hours and to Moscow in less than five. And they had already started digging the Transcontinental, a line that was supposed to reach the torrid heat of Hong Kong, putting an end to expensive transportation by sea.

Amanda had herself poured a drink. The barman was a stocky Japanese, with a bionic eye that monitored the place on its own, not bothered by the thick fog and lack of light in the place. On the other side of the German, a cluster of angry women had gathered around a troublemaker, and the bionic eye stopped there, staring at them. Something was about to happen soon, and Amanda had no intention of staying to watch.

She placed her hand on the radio-frequency controlled credit panel set in the side of the bar. The transponder installed in her arm responded, little green and red lights lit up in the skin of her forearm, and the credit passed, as they said, from her blood to the barman's. Pushing her way through the crowd, at the door she put on the gas-mask she was wearing round her neck and went out into the bitterly cold winter evening.

She walked quickly along the deserted streets lined with ancient buildings and came out in Via Rizzoli, in the modern part of town. The evening traffic was moving slowly, and the cars, suspended in mid-air like hornets, proceeded in fits and starts. Groups of people out on the town, in furs and gas-masks, made their way through the traffic jam towards the most exclusive clubs.

All that remained of the old centre, once seen in two-dimensional photos, were the two towers, the Garisenda and the Asinelli, flags of a lost world, now encircled by a crown of skyscrapers reaching up into the orange fabric of the sky. Brick monsters, on tiny foundations. A man's voice croaked in the transmitter mechanisms built into the gas-mask.

Are you interested in a party at Gringo's? They're selling tickets half-price, and if...

No, I'm not interested.

She let the crowd carry her away, while a veil of unconsciousness fell over the world. She felt vaguely sick and had a faint headache, but what worried her most was the slight pain in her joints that she was beginning to feel all over her feeble body - the first symptom of withdrawal.

Her blood had been cleansed of Kettenax, and of the even stronger Pevaner, for almost three months now. It had taken nearly a year for her to decide to stop taking acids. She had tried to give up several times throughout the whole period but never managed to get through the first few days of acute pain. Then, three months before, she had made a drastic decision: she had rented a room for two weeks, filled the bath with healthy food and tonic drinks and locked herself in. To make sure she would hold out, she had handcuffed herself to the radiator by the bathroom and changed the opening code number without looking. She had spent the first week lying on the floor in