(This is only the second draft of the book Worthless. Expect typos, plot holes, odd subplots and the occassionally wrongly named character, especially minor characters. It is made public only to give people a rough idea of how the final story will look)

Chapter 8

The view in the mirror was distorted, in a very disturbing way. It was meant to be, it was a feature, not a flaw. Moving away made the image in it unfold, looking from every side. For a face, that meant ears and even the back of the neck became clearly visible. Moving closer did the reverse, folding the image back together, first into the usual, directly mirrored face, but then making the nose and front of the face mushroom out in an almost comedic way. It was a funhouse mirror in many ways, but it was for serious uses.
"How is this even supposed to work?"
This was Tenner's scorpion transport, and Tenner was once again at the helm. He was concentrating hard on navigating the rough terrain, even though the machine itself clearly did a lot of the work for him. As before, the ride was smooth, barely even affected by the rocky and hilly badlands outside. They whisked past his view of the outside world like images from a film, feeling like they never even really mattered for anyone inside.
"How does what work, Mayeh?" he asked.
"This... facepaint. I look like a mad circus clown."
There was a moment of silence, the kind that seemed like frustration. But then again, it was easy to misunderstand Tenner's many silences. He likely wasn't used to passengers, or at least to passengers wanting to talk to him.
"I have no idea what that is. It doesn't translate," he finally replied.
"I look weird.. Also, it's Marie, not Maya or whatever you just said"
"Ah," he quickly said back, "that I understand. Marie."
He added the name as what seemed like an afterthought. The translations were getting harder. The little devices that helped people communicate here seemed oddly challenged, considering how advanced most things were. The machine that had tried to imitate a human back at the base might have been a bizarre experience, but the technology was clearly advanced. It was difficult to say what made translations so problematic.
"You're going into rogue machine country. The locals there will get you the rest of the way. But the machines, well...."
There was a strange tone in his voice, which the translation device somehow managed to get across quite clearly. The problems seemed to be with the actual language, which had to be very unusual for the devices to struggle so much with it. Emotions and tone carried over just fine.
"Few come back, Marie," he sighed, sounding like he knew that from experience. The way he pronounced the name seemed strained, like he was saying it to practice its sounds, sounds that most likely were not that common in his own language. Again, with the translation device on, it was hard to say, and turning it off was out of the question at this moment. "The machines here are violent, and they slaughter anything remotely human. But they have problems recognizing you as human with that on."
It made sense. The facepaint, which had been sprayed on quickly by a small swarm of floating things, was enough to induce a headache from just looking at it. Sharp lines in multiple colors, no symmetry, everything clearly designed to not match at all with human facial features like nose, mouth and eyes. It looked like bad abstract art, but literally in the face.
"You know about these rogue machines?"
Tenner again fell silent. Moving through the small tunnel to his cockpit was surprisingly easy, likely due to the smooth ride, and there was a second seat for a passenger or perhaps a co-pilot. Sitting in that seat, however, was dizzying, as it made the entire canopy of the cockpit visible, the outside rushing by in front, to either side, and above. It felt like falling, weightlessly, past a world tilted on its side.
"The base is only two years old. I was there when they set it up. It wasn't pretty. The machines swarmed us fourteen times before we got the perimeter working. Lost a good number of lives that day."
A single day. He had talked a bit about the overall situation during the ride to the location in what had once been Sollested, but nothing personal. Things happened fast, at least when they happened at all. Days, weeks, months with nothing happening, and then a sudden push, from either one of many sides in a clearly complicated battle. The machines were losing, but they were not giving up easy, at least not these rogue ones. A war of attrition, destined to be won by whoever ran out of steam last.
"Over there," he said, clearly wanting to talk less about old battles. A strange feature in the landscape came into view, a somewhat jagged hill, spires sticking out of it at odd angles. From a distance, it looked like rock. It wasn't rock.
"Abandonned machine facilities," Tenner half whispered, with a strange reverence. As they came into view, they became stranger looking by the second. "Not from the current rogues. Someone else built them. Not even the rogues seem to know what they were meant for, they just want the parts."
The scorpion was moving in a very unusual way, its legs tilting knees forward and then making hundreds of small jumps per second. It seemed inefficient at a glance, but the terrain really did not seem to be fit for wheels. More than that, though, it seemed to play into the mind games with the machines. Size or not, the lesser machines apparently identified the scoorpion by its shape, and being immune to whatever a real giant scorpion could do, they could not care less. The more strategic machines sometimes got trigger happy at the weirdness, but they were clearly designed to look for anything that looked human or human-made, and not apparent freaks of nature. To a human, the scorpion was clearly a machine, with sharp angles and straight lines. But machines were not humans. How the world looked to them was impossible to tell, at least according to Tenner.
"I'm dropping you off at the outer spire, the map should help you from there on."
The map he referred to was a small wristmounted device. When activated with a specific flick of the wrist, it opened up a holographic map. But most of all, it was a translation device, which might come in handy with the natives. The big machine made a swerve to the right, causing the first bit of motion inside as everything pressed to the left, then slowed down as its legs showed how nimble they were, expertly avoiding large rocks and the first, small machine... things.
"This is as far as we can push in. You're in local hands from now on. Yudie should have sent a warning to them that you're coming, but even if something went wrong, your look should do the job just fine."
He wasn't exaggerating. Other than the migraine-inducing facepaint, that look included similarly decorated clothes, some formfitting and some dangling like something from a stage show. It was at once camouflage and quite possibly the most flamboyant outfit ever created.

The huge claw slowly, even gently, moved to the ground, allowing plenty of time to jump off onto the uneven earth below. Just breathing in the air signalled the presence of strange machinery, an uncomfortable mix of ionized, metallic smells blending effortlessly with that of slightly damp soil. The strange hard sand of the arrival point could be seen some distance back, where the scorpion had speed-jumped through just minutes ago. Here, that unnatural desert made way for what could best be described as a machine augmented savannah.
"Take care," came Tenner's last remark over the small earpiece, before the huge scorpion made a turn that would have made any ballerina proud. Then it sped away, quickly becoming a blur and then a dot in the desert. That would be the last remark from him, at least this time around. The earpiece dropped from a soft background hum to complete silence as his scorpion moved out of the artificially defined range of the device. Rogue machines lurked here, they could pick up anything broadcast too far, even with the precautions that were taken, precautions too complex to understand without training.
The place looked wrong. The long, thin machine structures that ran from inside the dense brush and out beyond the border of the plants seemed to belong in not just a different place, but a different reality. Moss and vines grew over them, looking like green patterns of paint if not studied up close. Walking along them, following them into the brush, was like entering the ruins of some ancient civilization. All that was different, at first glance, was that it was metal and not stone.
"Kek," came a sound out of the brush, just a bit too far in to be clearly visible. "Kekset," it elaborated, very confidently.
"Kek?" It seemed like the only sensible response, repetition. There was no immediate response, though, only the previous sounds of wind and thin branches returning.
A blurry streak appeared amongst the leaves, a streak of pale amber, smaller ones of green and teal intersecting it. It moved. Not in the direction it was pointing, but it moved.
"Likua," said the brush, same confidence in its voice as before. "Li... ku... a...."
The translation device. Tenner had mentioned it briefly, that the device would switch off if there was nothing for it to work with. They were apparently old technology, something that had been lost in the wars that had been fought, and nobody knew how to reprogram that tiny little troublesome aspect of them. A quick click at the earpiece fixed it. Hopefully.
"Sorry, what were you..."
"Stop," said the same voice, now translated. "Stop and identify yourself."
It felt weird to get the translation of something that had already been said without translation. If those two commands were kek and kekset, respectively, it was an efficient language, almost militant.
"Marie. I come from..."
"We know," said the voice, and the colored streaks appeared again, briefly. They were hard to see when they were not moving.
"Then... why ask?"
"We know who Marie is. We did not know it was you."
Even before the words had finished being translated, the streaks began to move, giving a clear idea that the translation device was having trouble keeping up. A fast language translated into a slow one, a process that almost seemed to warp time around the talkers. The streaks solidified into a larger patch of colors, the blacks and browns having been hard to see amongst the brush. It was a face. In fact, it was a person, a rather tall, muscular person! The facepaint might hav ebeen to fool machines, but it apparently worked quite well on humans, too!
"What do you want here?"
It was insane to watch the lips on the painted face while listening to the translation, like watching old movies poorly dubbed. The native language took two movements of the lips, nothng more, to say that whole line.
"There is a place, a spot inside your area. I need to see it. It probably looks very old."
Three other faces seemed to materialize out of nothing from the brush! Two were about the height as the first one, the fourth was a head or so shorter. Looking at them was enough to make one's eyes flicker, the coloring, each unique, being hard on the senses. They seemed to wear some padded clothing or armor, also painted, the edges only just possible to make out. It looked like military gear, with random bits of wood, stone and metal attached here and there, a feather for decoration in two cases. The entire things overloaded the brain to look at.
Leaning in almost comically, the shorter person quietly spoke to the first one, an exchange that was no more than a handful of quick sounds from the look of it. The taller one made an odd, twitchy move, which clearly served as an answer of some sort.
"A copper web? Twisted metal that glows softly in the night?"
The description was odd, and the way the translation clearly butchered something did not make it any easier. But it seemed right. A nod at the first person, who did sound a bit like a man through the slight warp of the translation, and two of the others seemed to suddenly disappear, leaving the first and the shorter one. A closer lok revealed that they had not disappeared, but simply stepped back into some brush, the bizarre painted patterns doing the rest, concealing them like some sort of dark magic. They were gone for mere moments before a soft series of crunching noises came from the brush, seemingly from all around! Tiny, slender machines, looking like fragile metal deer, stepped out of their hiding. They had simpler versions of the painted patterns, making them less adept at slipping out of sight, but their thin build and unexpected shape helped.
"Ride."
The translation kept pace with the lips on that one.

The deer-like machines moved through the brush fast, slipping between branches and makng quick, running leaps over roots. As they did, they adjusted impressively for any passenger, tilting and twisting to avoid flinging anyone from their seat. Had they not, it would have been over quickly, and painfully!
"What do you want with the old copper web?" asked the shorter one of the four as the deer raced onward. It seemed to be a young woman, judging not just from the voice coming through the translation, but also from how she moved and had her armor fitted. It was impossible to say for sure, but she seemed like a she.
"I need to examine it."
She cast a skeptical glance at that answer, skeptical enough that the frown could be seen through her frustratingly confusing facepaint.
"It has no parts for use," she said, very casually. "All that is left is rusted metal bits and molded stone. It's worthless."
"Not to me."
Again, she seemed skeptical but it seemed a bit risky to fully tip the hand at this point. Tenner and the people at the base had been very helpful, for no clear reason, and that on its own should make anyone a bit suspicious. The ease with which these people had been essentially recruited for a mission they did not understand only made it all seem even more too easy. If they were looking for information, making someone feel safe and then dumping them for these rogue machines to deal with seemed like a good strategy. It made more sense to prolong it, then. After all, there was a time limit to the whole thing, anyway.
"We played near it as kids," she continued. It was getting harder to tell if she was probing for information, making polite conversation, or honestly felt like talking. "It is a scar in the landscape. It sticks out. Even the machines distrust it."
Machines feeling fear, that was a new concept. The mechanical deer seemed mindless, just machines for transportation, bringing their passengers from one point to another. But the young woman sounded like she meant exactly what she said, rather than as if the translation had glitched up somewhere.
"It's very old," she added, voice lower than before, almost solemn.
"Yes, about a century. A few years more, to be exact."
She reacted sharply to those words, even to the point of her deer changing its path to move in closer!
"You know it!" she all but gasped. "You know old lore about it!"
That was why keeping answers short and meaningless was the better way. Her newfound attention, or perhaps even obsession, could make things far more difficult, honest or not!
"What is it? Who made it? Did the machines? Did the Iron Sphere? I want to know!"
She seemed friendly, not demanding. What was she, perhaps in her early twenties? With the paint and armor it was nearly impossible to tell, but the sound of her voice, even through the translation, made her seem about that age. She had grown up in the shadow of that thing, the copper web as they called it. Her parents and perhaps even grandparents likely also. It was ancient here. Now. Time had passed for them.
"I am here to try to figure that out."
That half-lie seemed to quiet her, for the time being. And moments later, the sight of this copper web took over. She pointed a silent finger at it, but there was no real need to point it out. It was quite visible in the landscape.
The leader of the group made a sharp turn right on the machine deer, making it look as if the machine's spindly legs would snap clean off. They did not, either due to luck or due to that person's experience at pushing the things that hard. His, assuming it was a he, maneuver brought him on a trajectory passing right by the thing. It was big, reaching into the air at several stories of height. The leader was moving past it quickly, but it was wide enough to still make it take some time. Near the foot on the far side of it, he stopped the machine deer, jumping off before it came to a full halt. This was not his first ride, and trying to mimic his style seemed like a bad idea!
The name they had given it was not entirely fitting. It had a red and green shine to it, like rusty copper, but only in parts. Most of it was a dark blue metal of some sort. It felt warm to the touch. It should not do that.
"It's breaking down."
The remark was meant as a quiet mumble, a personal observation. But the four locals reacted to it immediately.
"What do you mean by breaking down, Marie?" asked the short one, shifting her gaze back and forth to the structure. She was right, it looked completely misplaced, like someone had taken a very long metal dagger and stabbed the ground thoroughly with it. The web part of the name was more fitting than the copper part, but not as in a spider's web. It looked like an exploding bucket of paint, captured in a snap and frozen in time for all to see. Thick and thin strands intermingled, dark blue with streaks of copper red and green. But it wasn't copper. It was a soft glow, streaks much like the lines on the device on the Moon. It was leaking energy. There was no way that it had not been leaking that same energy for decades.
"You really should not...."
Bad habit. Helping people was a natural human thing to do. Warning them that this thing, whatever it was, was a serious health risk seemed like the right thing to do. But there was right, and there was right. They lived near it, and they would have been none the wiser without knowing more about it. Not informing them could kill them over time. Informing them could affect future history.
"It's dead. It's just a dead artifact, falling apart slowly."
They seemed to accept it. All but the short one stayed back, though, clearly not trusting the device. They were smart to.
"Marie?" said the short one, sounding uneasy. "Is it supposed to do that? It never did before."
She was pointing at one of the streaks closest by. It seemed to be flaring up, sputtering random sparks and glowing a bit more intensely. Of course, without knowing what it was or how it worked, it was hard to say if that was an intended thing.
Moving closer caused it to react. The sputtering became more rapid, the glow a bit more intense. A sound of metallic pain, the structure aching through every one of its long thread-like parts, could be heard from inside. Then one last powerful sputter, large sparks flying. Then nothing.
"I think you broke it," said one of the previously silent riders. It was hard to contraict him.
"I think it's burning," said the leader. Looking at the thing revealed no sign of a flame, or smoke.
"No, I think you're burning, Marie," said the short one, finally. It was hard to say why, though. There was no heat, no flame, no smoke, nothing.
"Marie, you're burning. Look, embers!"
The short one rushed over, but it was too late. Colors. Little colored dots, circling. A sphere of colored dots. And they were becoming more and more each second!
"What is that, Marie?" asked the leader, sounding more skeptical than worried.
"I dont... oh no..."
It was starting to burn, the pinpricks on the skin! Atoms were trying to line up, to fit their configuration from arrival. Atoms from this time were being forced out of molecules, out of their positions inside that sphere.
"This was not supposed to happen yet..."
"Marie, what are you talking about? What's going...."
"Get away, quickly!"
They all looked terrified. Then, they did just that, rushing to their mechanical beasts to ride away, the last one, now without a rider, following them soon after.
The dots grew too numerous to tell apart. The heat from energies rushing through was growing, painfully so. The pressure in the ears. The taste of smoke. Everything was imploding, the reverse of the explosion that would...
Boom.