Seven, 9 December

Lumpyface

Dec 09, 2024

Dronikus, a novel set on a burning planet called Earth.

Rators, rebels and glo-slime

Deafening sirens, explosions, shots, screams, and loudspeakers filled the air. A dramatic clash as two street armies clashed hand-to-hand across the square. Thick smoke, tear gas, and rising steam refracted the light in brilliant splashes of blue, red, and yellow beams on the pavers, the trees, and the buildings.

A rator grabbed a woman by the throat and lifted her off the ground. It ripped her purple and yellow mask from her face, threw it aside, and followed with a swinging arm to her head. She went down hard. As the rator was about to put its boot in, two rebel combatants set upon it and wrestled it to the ground. The woman fled as other rators came to assist their mate, forcing the rescuers into submission with taser-sticks and clubs. They pasted them with glo-slime and corralled them with others, all glo-slimed, into a makeshift holding pen on the fringe of the clashes.

Burning vehicles and rubble, discarded shields, batons, dismembered rators, and concrete and timber barricades were strewn across the piazza. In one corner a building was ablaze, as were a number of vehicles upturned before it. Battles raged across the square between groups of protestors and the rators. They attacked each other at pace, back and forth, in sorties of fire, missiles, gunshots, and explosions.

The rebel protestors followed a rhythmic stomping beat coming from speakers they wore mounted on their headgear. They beat their weapons and chanted war cries, building momentum, pulling together in a tight phalanx, readying for attack.

The military rators, too, had their formations. They moved in lines, hammering their shields with their batons. The two sides sized each other up until – somewhere – a spark fired and unleashed a brutal clash of weaponry, shields, and bodies. Gas sprayed across the lines of the protestors was answered with flaming missiles and heavy poles rammed into the rator formations.

The rators, while of mainly human form, were moulded from a deep grey flesh-like material wrapped around a functional bionic structure and wore no clothes. They were in every way physically superior to their human opponents – bigger, stronger, faster. And the ratordogs were fearsomely effective, their huge jaws and four-legged speed and agility adding an element of terror to their attacking powers.

The rebels, being human, were able to use their brains to generally match and sometimes outsmart the rators. But the most important difference in the rules of engagement was that, unlike the rebels, the rators were, by law, barred from killing or maiming humans. They were programmed to subdue and arrest only. The rebels carried weapons lethal to the rators: chainsaws, heavy-duty machetes, axes, angle-grinders, and sharp metal stakes. When a rator fell it was quickly dismembered in a frenzy of hacking and chopping and cutting, leaving the rator as a pile of un-recyclable junk.

As the battle raged, a figure wearing a sun hat strapped down low over his eyes crept from the shadows near where the woman had been attacked by the rator. He snatched the discarded mask and withdrew back to the shadows. He removed the hat and put on the mask which hid both his head and face. The purple and yellow fabric was covered with reflective sequins and glitter over and around thick black lines. These, Zola realised, were intended to distort the face and eye sockets for the surveillance cameras.

He wore Jonas’s clothes, sneakers, and a tight bomber jacket. He stuck to the shadows as he made his way away from the battlefield; he was not going to hang about. He had only chanced upon the riot by accident, the piazza being on the route to where he was headed.

He stopped at the end of a line of buildings to get his bearings. A group of rators mopping up fleeing street fighters rounded the corner. Zola ran. He only made it a few metres before he had his legs taken from under him by a ratordog. A heavy boot thudded into the side of his head and he was dragged to the holding pen where he was sprayed with glo-slime and shoved up against other glo-slimed combatants in various states of injury and disarray.

A long lasso-like cord was wound round the group and snapped closed with a lock. Zola was pressed up against the others, which produced a stabbing pain in his healing back. Those around him were a wild assortment of warriors clad in makeshift armour and adorned with dramatic jewellery and symbols and tattoos. Oddly, he was one of only a few to be wearing a mask. He craned his neck to look closer at his fellow captives. He noticed that there was something peculiar about them, as if their faces were constantly, subtly, changing. He focussed as best he could on the face of a woman who was pushed up tightly against him. He saw that her facial features were covered with a semi-transparent substance that was in continuous movement, transforming the shape and dimensions of her face.

A few rators were moving around the captives, shoving and beating them at will. One reached across to Zola’s head to snatch his mask, but just as its arm was in mid-air it froze – along with everything else in the mayhem across the piazza – with the exception of the humans.

Those in the pen cheered and raised their fists as the lasso that bound them clicked open and fell to the ground. The woman next to Zola screamed with joy and pointed her thumbs up to the sky. She turned to Zola and mimed fingers tapping on a keyboard. He did not understand what was meant by this but raised his fists to show that he too was happy.

Across the square the rators had frozen in mid-act like grotesque statues, some holding aloft their shields and weapons, others about to strike combatants on the ground, yet others fallen over, having been caught mid-stride and toppling off balance. The combatants, who had been momentarily shocked by their sudden good fortune, picked up their chanting again and began attacking afresh, with renewed vigour.

Without the lights the square was enveloped in an eerie gloom except for those who had been sprayed with glo-slime who glowed, phosphorescent. The mob, enclosed with Zola, sprang from the pen like spidery green monsters and headed back into the fray.

The woman grabbed Zola by the shoulders and, lifting his mask, looked into his face. Shocked by her action, he smiled at her, a large and open smile, taking both her and himself by surprise.

She responded, also smiling: ‘Hello.’ He looked at her trying to get a sense of her, but her face was so mobile this proved impossible. She was enjoying his confusion. Then she indicated his mask, ‘that won’t protect you. Get one of these,’ pointing to her face covering.

‘What is it?’ Zola asked.

‘Lumpyface.’

‘Huh?’

‘You absolutely need it.’

‘Oh?’

She pulled a marker pen from her jacket and wrote an address on his arm. ‘Come see me,’ she said. ‘Make sure you come carefully, your face covered.’ She raised her hand to him and jogged off towards the conflict zone.

The rators’ gas guns were no longer firing and the sirens and loudspeakers had fallen silent. The inactive rators, their equipment, and the buildings they were defending were easy targets. Windows were smashed, vehicles overturned, and flaming projectiles thrown into buildings. Many rators were hacked to pieces where they stood or had fallen.

Zola moved in the opposite direction, back towards the darkness of trees at the edge of the piazza. He discarded the glo-slime smeared jacket; although he was unfamiliar with the glo-slime he was sure he did not want it on him or seen on him. He grabbed a large piece of cloth at random from amongst the junk on the street and wrapped it around himself to cover whatever glo-slime was on his skin.

New sounds made him pause and look back. Dronikus. A few protestors, taking advantage of the hiatus, were clambering down a rope from a bridge connecting two buildings. A number of dronikus came zooming in at speed and attacked the protestors on the ropes with gas jets. Screaming and coughing, they fell to the ground. Above, Zola now noticed many dronikus flying in a ‘patrol zone’. They moved in to take control in the absence of the immobilised rators. They flew strafing raids, sprayed gas, and poured glo-slime down on the combatants. They defended the fallen rators and pushed the rebels back from strategic positions.

Then, coming from the opposite direction, Zola saw other craft fly into the battle zone and begin striking at the dronikus. These new craft were squat and ungainly; they moved like the dronikus but were slower and less agile.

A haphazard and frenzied aerial battle between the dronikus and the others ensued, like a dog fight scene from an old war film. In the chaos, and at the speed of a video game, the dronikus and opposing drones clashed. Some fell to the ground in a burst of flame and smoke, while others spun off into the sky, only to flip back and return to the fray.

The lights, sirens, and loudspeakers suddenly snapped back on across the piazza. Zola tore himself away and began moving again. The cloth that he had commandeered to cover himself proved to be a banner. He turned it inside out and wrapped it around to hide most of his body, like a monk’s habit. He moved fast but unobtrusively down a side street, away from the square.

Hey, what's that sound?

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