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I bring with me hope
High above the clouds you see
Don't breathe easier

My fingers are burnt, so it hurts to type out this message. But there is always pain before healing, and that gives me the strength to carry on. My struggle is your struggle. Even if you are closer to it than I, feel strong that our battle is being fought on more plains than one. Help is on the way, Reader. Help is just over the bloody bend!

My balloon leads the way, slowly. I know the things behind us could reach Cyrus City faster than we could in this vessel, but it can’t be done any other way. The balloon must lead them, for it knows the way home.

Strange to call CyCity home, but I can think of no other place I’d rather be than with you, winning back the freedom deserved by every enslaved cytizen. And we will win, because I’m coming with an army.

Toru reminds me to eat something. I haven’t eaten in days. He holds out an emergency ration he found in one of the compartments of the balloon’s gondola, but I can’t be bothered right now. I’m too excited to eat. Maybe later, like just before my body gives out from exhaustion. Right now, though, I’m wired. The deafening sound of the jet engines behind me roar like lions, like we all shall roar once the fight is done.

“Call of Cythlu ” by Pandean

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Oct 9, 2106

Before I could bring this army, however, there was another war to deal with.

It all started with a kid. Or rather, it all started with a kid’s opinion: That Pandean’s later work was the best of their career. Yes, I know it sounds stupid, but the dispute over this claim was the only thing that kept us away from toppling the Cyrus Corporation once and for all. The dispute over this simple opinion is what would either save and damn our chances at success against Cyrus.

I would come to find out from the Mecca database that Pandean was a metal band made up of all robots, and that, through the span of more years than I’d like to count, the group had produced over 83,000 albums, over a million songs, before they simply vanished from the public eye. I’d only been in the kid’s company to hear a few of these songs, and I hadn’t heard a single one that I found myself enjoying.

“Don’t you have anything with a little less high-squealing guitar solo and a little more mellow baseline?” I asked.

“Pandean experimented with jazz in their album First Meditations…OF DOOM!!!” the kid told me, “but it didn’t sell very well. I wouldn’t recommend it.”

The kid’s speakers screeched out a guitar note that could shatter each air cylinder of an 85 credit pack of Cyrus’s finest.

My head ached.

“ Death of a Cybriarch ” by Pandean

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Oct 10, 2106

This wasn’t a real kid, mind you. It was an android, permanently stuck in his mid-teens, with all the energy and spunk and highbrowed, ill-researched opinions to drive anyone insane, but this kid had initiated a change in his society’s history with an instinct that every human takes for granted. This kid had created an individual thought, which got others thinking and disputing the significance of that thought.

The kid had created a fire, one that started out small but turned raging in no time.

“Desire is Irrelevant ” by Pandean

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Oct 11, 2106

Toru and I had arrived at Mecca just as the sun was creeping over the flat horizon of a scorched landscape. The setting reminded me of the AfterEarth that surrounds CyCity, only here fires still blazed amidst houses and domiciles that still looked alive with patrons. Towers of flames reached up from underground furnaces. Black smoke had me choking back tears and reaching for the O₂ masks aboard our ship.

The balloon traveled a few more kilometers north, when Toru pointed out to a smoke cloud that broke to reveal two frontlines of the biggest machines I have ever seen standing face to face over an area the size of the CY-Dome, where contraball is played.

The robots had human masters at one point, until a plague wiped out the whole population. Since then, the robots they left behind tried to emulate the society they had lost the best they could. It wasn’t their own culture, but it was familiar, in their programming, so they kept at it. I got all this information from the computer that linked to our balloon during our descent to Mecca. As it scanned all my statistics, it allowed me access to reports on the land’s past. What I found was more than interesting.

There had been a movement by the machines to become a collective society, and a lot of those in the city had come to like the idea and resigned themselves to the consciousness immediately. The other bots of the city had no problems with this movement, and kept doing things that made their life as statistically satisfactory as it possibly could be. However, once the population turned 1/4^th collective, the software that had set up the network between the linked machines started taking other robots against their will. It got nearly half the population before the kid made his statement public, which is what saved the remaining robots from being overtaken by the collective. Once their minds started analyzing their own feeling about the band’s worth and allying themselves with the kid or setting themselves apart from him, every robot both monstrously huge and human-sized had something that drove out the signal of the collective.

Now the two were at a standstill, their biggest warriors facing off on the battlefield, each waiting for an attack from the other side to start the big battle.

"Illegal Command " by Pandean

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Oct 12, 2106

Life for everyone else went on the same. After fifteen years of everyone standing at the ready on the battlefield, the crowds of smaller droids slowly dispersed and went about their business, each keeping their idea of society functioning well. Neither side seemed to have a sinister culture; they did their jobs and kept the peace. The only thing that set them at odds was the method in which they were governed.

Toru and I talked to the leaders of each side, bringing them up on the balloon’s communication system.

“We had nothing against the collective,” said the leader of the Freeminds, an avid supporter of Pandean’s earlier work. “They’re the ones who started this whole mess!”

“We had a problem with consumption,” said the collective, which appeared on the screen as two different robots speaking the same words at the same time. “A spike caused the assimilation program to harvest everything in its grasp. We have since been able to repair this error. However, the trust is lost. Defense will remain constant.”

“What about returning the minds your accident claimed?” Toru asked. “Wouldn’t that patch everything up?”

“Impossible,” the collective said. “They are a part of us now and don’t wish to be returned.”

“You mean, you don’t want to return them,” I said.

“Both are the same,” it clarified, then both the lines, having said all they wished to say, went dead.

“What do we do now?” Toru asked.

I could only think of one thing to do.

“Take me to the kid.”

“The Importance of Being Furnaced ” by Pandean

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Oct 13, 2106

Toru, always the quick study, found the kid’s address in the Mecca database and guided the balloon to his home. There, Toru and I knocked on the kid’s door. He answered.

“Hey,” he said to Toru. Toru raised an eyebrow in response. “Is that your girlfriend?”

“No,” Toru said.

“Hey lady,” the kid said. “You want to be my girlfriend?”

“Sorry, guy. I got enough problems.”

“Oh.” The kid sounded like I had set flame to his favorite CyroForcer action figure. “Okay.” Then he stopped, puzzled, and asked, “Did you guys want something?”

“We came to listen to some music,” I told him.

“Domino's Requiem ” by Pandean

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Oct 14, 2106

We brought the kid with us to the collective headquarters. At first he was a bit squeamish about the trip, but I told him I’d give him a kiss when it was all said and done. Suddenly, he was all for it. We couldn’t move fast enough for him.

I told him to make sure he brought the thing that played music files through speakers and looked like a Cypod.

We announced ourselves at the main gates of the collective headquarters and they let us in, following us the entire time with armed guards. The kid stuck close to me, his gaze shifting from guard to guard. Finally, we entered the main hall of the collective. I told the kid to wait over near the east wall with Toru and try to win him over to a side on the whole Pandean debate.

I could hear the music playing while I addressed the collective leaders, two sleek looking bots that sat on either side of a large hunk of humming technology. The computer was connected to both of their thrones and had ten antennas sprouting out the back of it.

“Gentlemen,” I said. “I need for this dispute between you and the Freeminds to be over.”

“And how do you propose that we do that, Ms…”

“Rachael,” I said. “Call me Rachael.”

“Rachael,” they voiced in unison.

Behind me the tweedles and wiggidy-wows of Pandean were playing through the kid’s speakers. I could hear him telling Toru the entire history of the song.

“You need to give up all the bots you’ve collected up to this point,” I said.

“Ridiculous,” they purred, not an ounce of outrage in them. “If we conform to their side, we will be in utter misery.”

“I’m not asking you to conform to their ideas,” I explained. “I’m asking you to start again. Those who really wanted to be a part of your collective will return to you. Those that never did can go back to living the lives of their choice.”

A different song had started on the kid’s player. This one had more of a melody to it. Had I not known that he was playing the same band, I would have sworn it came from a different artist. The kid dove headfirst into an explication of the use of distortion in the song, and how, through experience and the right blend of trendy techniques, Pandean had refined their sound to its current perfection.

The collective leader on the left’s attention seemed to be momentarily diverted, but he recovered from the distraction quickly.

The leader on the right spoke on his own: “It will never happen.”

“Don’t you see that this is the only way that any of this will be resolved.”

“Then let it continue forever,” said the right collective leader.

“Facing the Fax ” by Pandean

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Oct 15, 2106

The kid was just about to finish his speech on why the later work of Pandean stood out as superior when the left collective leader stood from his chair and pointed at the kid and Toru.

“Don’t listen to any more of that rubbish!” the leader said.

Toru held a “Who me?” hand to his chest.

“Just because the art of the solo is lost to this child,” said the left leader, “doesn’t mean that the earlier work of the band is flawed.”

“Julius,” the right leader said, “I hardly think that something so trivial as music has any relevance to the matter at hand.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Ashley,” said the left, “but I refuse to sit idly by while some infant spreads his uneducated propaganda about the most influential band of our time.”

“I hardly think they were all that,” said the right.

The left collective leader was taken aback.

“What?” said the right. “I just don’t think they were that great.”

“Not that great?” the left cried. “They were only the thing that kept us going when this whole war started!”

“Oh,” said the right. “Was that what you were humming during the battles? I thought it just calmed you down, so I didn’t say anything.”

They both looked at me.

The left collective leader returned to his throne and composed himself.

“Dude, you’re totally off your rocker,” the kid said from over near Toru. “Early Pandean is nothing compared to the newer stuff.”

With that the left leader sprang from his seat and launched a ball of energy at the kid’s Cypod-looking device. The player was encased in energy, and the kid was frozen in his position, not knowing what to do. I ran over and yanked the thing from his grasp with both hands, and then tossed it toward the computer system that lie between the two thrones. The energy surrounding the device burned a layer of skin off my fingers and palms, but I didn’t cry out. There was a moment of pause, as the player grew brighter and brighter. Everyone cleared the area near the device and covered their faces with their arms. The glow around the device grew even more and soon there was a tiny explosion.

Everyone lowered their arms from their faces, almost in disappointment. It was at this time that a few sparks sounded from the ruptured area created by the player’s small explosion, and was followed by a larger, more forceful blast that knocked everyone to the floor.

Toru help me and the kid up. When we saw the guards, we knew that they had been released from the grips of the collective. Whether that was what they wanted or not was up to them, but at least now they had a choice.

“The Taste of Anti-freeze ” by Pandean

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Oct 16, 2106

Afterwards, those that had always wanted to be home went home, and those that wanted to rejoin the collective started working on rebuilding the hardware that would return them to their choice-free lives.

The Freemind leader allotted us a number of their heavy infantry division to go take down the Cyrus Corporation, since almost all the bots assigned to this division came back to the side of the Freeminds. Only half of those dispatched to our aid would have put up more than a good fight, but the number of these building sized robots is enough to ensure our victory.

Before we headed out, Toru reminded me of my promise to the kid. I kissed his blue, synthetic lips and could have swore I saw a little color go to his cheeks, but I could have been mistaken. He backed away shyly into the crowd of Freeminds that had come to see us and their fellow robots off. Before he was completely engulfed by the crowd, he sprang forth again and gave me an even bigger kiss, then asked, “Can I come with you? I’m trained for combat. I could be a big help!”

I looked to Toru and was just about to say that I didn’t think it was a good idea, when the kid blew by me and jumped into the gondola.

“Wait a minute!” I yelled, but it was already done. The look on both their faces told me that much. Instead of throwing the kid out, I grabbed onto his replacement Cypod and tossed it far beyond the crowd.

“Aw,” he whined, but that was the extent of his concern.

"Death from a Dove" by Pandean

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Oct 16, 2106

Right now the kid’s asleep—sleep being a favorite among his programs.

I’m glad. I don’t want him to see me like this: Driven and obsessed.

“What are we going to do with him?” Toru asks, before shoveling another forkful of rations into his mouth. “I mean before we reach Cyrus City. What are we going to do with him?”

“I don’t know,” I say. We can’t take him with us into a war, but I wouldn’t know where to leave him. “Let’s just deal with that problem when the time comes. There may not even be a fight once the Cyrus officials sees what we’re bringing with us. We’ll try doing this peacefully, but I’m not counting on it.”

And I’m not counting on it. I know there will be a lot of life lost in my return, but I’ve got no other choice. Cyrus has to be stopped. So each of you must make up your minds: Are you willing to fight for your freedom or not? If so, I look forward to seeing you come to my side; if not, then you should run for shelter as soon as you hear my roar.

"Ones and Zeros " by Pandean

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