Cast in Sand: Atlas Cycle

By Dustin Porta

On a failed expedition to the heart of an ancient space station, Edwina wakes in a land of fierce warriors and drifting sands, in a mechanical body that is not her own.

With no memory of why, or how many bodies have come before this, one thing is clear: she's trapped and time is running out.

An ancient citadel looms over the barren land and a cruel sultan rules the scattered people. Edwina finds a new body, one real enough to feel human, and strong enough to challenge the sultan. But the android body comes with human weaknesses, and like the others it has a mind of its own.

When her allies begin to quarrel, Edwina must find a way to make empathy and hatred work together. To do that, she may just have to listen to what the android is telling her.

This is Station Atlas, where the fall of humanity is long forgotten, where history becomes fantasy, science becomes magic, and basic survival is high adventure in a strange, fragile world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dustin Porta
• Release date: Oct 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386006039

Book preview

Copyright 2017 Dustin Porta

Cover by Domi at InspiredCoverDesigns.com

Agony of Firs

EDWINA HAD SEEN TREES many times in her life, but never quite like this. These were all around her, not ten or twenty but a hundred trees, so many they obscured the great dome overhead.

It's beautiful, she thought, feeling hazy, and content to lie beneath them looking about.

Each shift clouded her memory and Edwina couldn't remember which body she had chosen, if she had chosen at all, or where on Atlas she had landed. She couldn't feel anything, no pain or discomfort, no tactile sensations, no smells. It was the same with all of these crude, mechanical bodies, a feeling that she was dreaming and couldn't wake.

A sapling was growing in front of her and Edwina reached to touch it. Her hand, wasn't a hand at all, but a pair of shears, mounted on a piston-driven armature. She cried out when she saw it, and the sound that came from a speaker was more a crackle of static than any noise a human would make.

Edwina remembered, her head clearing a little. Her own body was somewhere else. She had left it behind. She knew that she was still on the space station and that this was not the first machine she had inhabited. But most of Atlas was dark and cramped, not open like this. This had to be one of the domes of the outer ring, but the domes she knew contained cities, not trees. She could not remember much else, but it would all come back to her eventually.

Suddenly, none of this mattered.  The impulse to touch the plants grew stronger and she reached out again. The blades decapitated the small sapling and cut it into mulch. The task was completed before Edwina realized what she was doing.

Each body had its own programming, and this one was beginning to awaken. She could feel the robot's thoughts crowding own her own. Somewhere, in the back of her mind was a sense of urgency and the knowledge that things were very wrong, but this was drowned out by the robot's overwhelming drive to interact with the forest.

Her left arm had the same blades as the right and she used them to uproot the base of the sapling, trim it into even segments and stack these neatly beside the mulch.

Why am I doing these things? What's the point of this machine? The thoughts were hard to separate from her own.

Then the robot wanted to look about the forest.

There were more saplings that needed to be removed. Many of the larger trees were also out of place. She noted their locations so they could be removed later, fairly certain that the thoughts were not hers, but it was hard to tell in the first minutes and she did not want to forget anything important.

Where on Atlas am I? Edwina had traveled several hundred miles within the space station, and visited many strange places. There were farm pods that grew trees like these. This space was too large to be a farming pod. But station Atlas was immense, a world in itself, no one had seen all of it. She could have landed anywhere.

Where could so many trees grow in one place? she wondered.

Then she felt something human. Hunger tore through her, like a remnant from her old body. The feeling threatened to rend her from her sanity, but it brought her to herself and helped her to focus on the important questions.

Where am I?

It was familiar, though she knew she had never been here. This question could wait.

What was this machine doing in the forest?

It had been a gardener of some kind. This place was a park, or garden, perhaps in one of the dome cities. The robot had been buried here since the collapse—ten generations.

How long has it been since I've eaten?

Weeks? Months? She couldn't remember. She had not returned to her real body since this ordeal began.

The last thought pushed the others aside. The trees were very much in need of tending. Edwina tried to wrest back control of the machine, but gardening was the priority.

More saplings grew farther down the path. She tried to move toward them, but the lower half of the robot was buried in soil. Roots had grown up inside of it, and as she struggled to free herself there was a snap, a whine, and the upper half of Edwina's new body tore free and tumbled into a patch of briars.

These weeds were not supposed to be here either. Ignoring her missing legs, she quickly dispatched the vines, mulching and heaping them neatly out of the way. Edwina turned the soil with her shears, removing any roots that had belonged to the plant.

Beyond the briars were still more invasive weeds, unmanaged shrubbery, and hardwood species planted without regard for the preferred ratio. Edwina didn't understand all of the thoughts that moved her, but she followed them anyway.

She dragged her upper half, leaving the legs buried in the dirt. A low-hanging branch smacked into her and knocked some dirt from the lens that was the robot's eye. She could see more clearly after that.

The robot did not seem to notice that its legs were missing. It dragged what was left of its body as it went about the tasks. More leaves were trimmed and roots removed. Edwina found that when the body was allowed to serve its purpose, her own thoughts resurfaced. So she let it work, and while it worked, she thought.

Where she had landed, was uncertain.

And when she had last eaten, it was best not to think about that.

How long since she left her own body behind? It had been longer than a person was supposed to live without food, much longer without water. She could only hope that the same technology which had imprisoned her, was keeping her body alive.

What had she done in the previous bodies? Had she achieved her goal? What was her goal? Nothing was clear. Entering a body was like entering into a dream.

There was personality in the thoughts, which made them all the harder to distinguish from her own.

>

The chassis rattled as she dragged herself toward a small stand of fir trees.

This could not wait to be addressed. Legs or no, it was her duty to remove this abomination. The smaller saplings were no trouble, but the larger central tree would be a challenge.

There was only so much one gardener could do with pruning shears. First she belted the tree, cutting a swath around the trunk to ensure the awful thing would die even if she couldn't drop it. Then a snip at a time, she hacked at the trunk. The shears were meant for lopping small branches and this was a full grown fir tree, but piece-by-piece she chipped away.

The robot knew how to drop it. She cut into one side first, hacking toward the center, and when the larger cut was finished Edwina dragged her sparking, broken torso to the other side and hacked a smaller groove. This smaller cut allowed the trunk to snap the rest of the way through and to fall safely away from her.

That's the way out of this body! she thought. I'll crush it and keep moving! But it was a murky thought. There were too many things amiss, too much unkempt forest keeping the robot active. The tree had made a hole in the canopy. Looking up, she could see a hazy domeglass sky. It reminded her of the dome she had been born under, large and faded. But what dome had room for a forest this size? Not her home city.

It was said that only seven great domes remained on Atlas. Which one was this? If she could reach the edge, she could look out at the space station. She wouldn't see the other domes from here, Atlas was too massive, the domes too far apart. But looking out, might jog her memory, if only that memory were not so clouded by gardening woes.

After cutting the branches from the fallen tree and stacking them alongside it, she paused to look around. A small path led off through the woods and she dragged her shattered body as quickly as she could, away from the awful fir trees.

thought the machine.

If there's a path, someone is living here. This might not be a waste of time after all! It'll be hard to make friends with this rusty oil drum. Hull, I always hated first impressions.

This thought, she knew, was distinctly her own.

Contest

ARTIFICIAL THUNDER boomed overhead, followed by the whir of irrigators clicking on throughout the forest. A heavy rain set in.

The wires in her torso sparked, distracting the robot from its obsessive management of the forest, and giving Edwina a moment of clarity.

Was she trying to get home or would any people do? Could she even remember where her body was hidden? The idea of someone from a dome that Edwina had never been to, rescuing her from a place whose existence was known only to her, seemed unlikely. But her current situation was even more unlikely. She would not give up now.

How did I get into this mess? The past was foggy and the robot had started working again.

It was determined to weed and manicure the entire forest. Edwina indulged it for a while, going along with the impulse to trim the low-lying foliage. The wires from her missing half, sparked and fizzled in the rain, but she kept working. It gave her time to think and quelled the frenzied rush of commands, letting her own thoughts float to the top as she dragged her way down the footpath, snipping and weeding toward the edge of the dome.

I don't know how long I've got. I don't have time for this nonsense. Who's going to help me in this body? It's broken anyhow. If I can just crush it under a tree, I'll move to another.

Then, a new sound. Between the noise of her shears and the sparking chassis on the wet forest floor, the distant ringing of metal striking metal almost escaped her notice. She stopped to look around but the downpour of water and the lens, now wet and foggy, made it difficult to see beyond a few yards.

The noise stopped. The urge to trim the low branches returned and she went back to work, still guiding the task in the direction of the dome-edge. The path seemed to open up ahead of her.  The sound of clanging metal returned but she dragged herself onward.

A branch snapped nearby. She couldn't tell where it had come from, not with the crude sound-receptors on this robot. Edwina reached up, caught hold of a low-hanging branch and pulled herself upright, swiveling the head to look around.

Farther down, she spotted a flash of white, racing through the woods. The first shape was pursued by another. As they grew closer Edwina could make out two figures in white ponchos, with broad, saucer-shaped rain hats, weapons in their hands. The smaller figure stumbled backward, parrying the attacks of the larger as they crashed through the undergrowth.

Each fighter held a curved hullmetal sword, not rough-hewn blades that the colonies used but fine, delicate scimitars, carefully milled from the dark, difficult-to-shape metal that made up the body of the space station. It was the same technique her own people used. Was it possible that these people traded with hers? Maybe she was closer to home than she realized.

The larger one shouted and pushed the offensive while the smaller managed to keep footing only by retreating backward. They fought violently, but Edwina was more concerned with reaching someone, than with her own safety. She dragged herself after them, stopping just a moment to uproot a cluster plants.

More thoughts that Edwina did not understand but they drifted through her mind all the same.

Wait, she yelled, still mulching the flowers into a pile of green mud. What came through her water-logged speaker were more like a static-filled burp.

She tried again, but the fighters' own cries and the ringing of metal were the only sounds that carried through the driving rain. The artificial thunder rolled again. Edwina snipped at some purple flower tops and scanned for plants to tend in the direction of the fighters, urging the robot to hurry.

Wait! They were moving toward the place where Edwina had first awakened, half-buried in the roots of a tree. The shouting was in a language she didn't understand, though she had heard it before. The larger one did most of the shouting. The smaller parried and struggled to hold ground. Edwina dragged herself closer, so intent on following that even the urge to trim plants disappeared for a time.

Stop! she yelled but the plea was lost in the rain. From here she could see the larger of