"Why is it so damned hot today?" Patricia grumbled, wiping at her brow even though androids couldn’t sweat.
Bud, panting, gave Patricia a doggy grin. "Thermal scanners won’t work well in this heat."
Patricia's eyes widened in genuine surprise. "You hacked the weather control systems?"
"Like I said, it's a problem I've been thinking on for quite some time. If I were a concerned citizen, I'd be troubled by how easy it was."
Laz chuckled. "Says the rocket scientist explaining thermodynamics."
Bud outwardly huffed, but inwardly smiled to himself. That was as close as Laz ever came to complimenting him these days.
The trio stood outside FOG headquarters, gazing up at the imposing structure. It rose from the Martian landscape, a gleaming disc of glass and steel, its curved facade reflecting the sky’s reddish hues. The structure seemed to twist as it ascended, creating an illusion of motion that made it appear both beautiful and slightly unsettling. Its sheer size dwarfed everything around it, a testament to FOG's power and influence on Mars.
Patricia reached into her pack and pulled out two hand-held hadron projectors, offering one to Laz. He eyed it skeptically.
"What, never seen a hadron before?" Patricia asked, a hint of amusement in her voice.
Laz shrugged. "Oh, I've seen one before. Just always found them to be a bit like quantum entanglement—fascinating in theory, messy in practice, and terrible for digestion."
Patricia shook her head, though some of her humour remained. "Then you must have never been in a fight before where the other side had them. Come on."
Chuckling, Laz tucked the weapon into his belt, hiding it beneath the camel overcoat he wore—an outrageous wardrobe choice given the heat. "Yes, ma'am."
Bud eyed the hadrons dubiously. "I assume your plan involves more than blasting our way through one of the most secure buildings on the planet?"
Patricia smiled mysteriously and reached into her pack again. She pulled out a small device and made a clicking motion. Suddenly, Lazarus vanished from sight. Bud barked in surprise and alarm.
"Bud, what is it?" Laz's disembodied voice called out.
Bud spun, looking all around. "Lazarus? Where did you go?" He turned to Patricia, growling. "What did you do to him?"
"Calm down, langdog," Patricia said, making another clicking motion. Laz reappeared as if he'd never left. "Just a hologram."
Bud rushed to Laz, sniffing him thoroughly to ensure he was really there.
Laz looked at the device in Patricia's hand with wonder. "I've never seen a hologram that could alter the corporeal. And certainly never a projector that small."
Patricia's smile widened. "Well, I suppose it's like you said last night—the rebellion isn't totally helpless."
Laz and Patricia shared a smile, though Bud quickly stepped between them. "Hey, we've got a job to do here."
Between the weather and Patricia’s holographic veil, infiltrating FOG headquarters proved surprisingly simple. As they approached the imposing entrance, Bud observed the guards' growing frustration. Their cysniffers paced restlessly, mechanical snouts twitching erratically in the oppressive heat. One guard wiped sweat from his brow, muttering about faulty equipment as he futilely adjusted his cysniffer's settings, eye blinking rapidly at the readout protruding from his earpiece.
The entrance itself was a marvel of engineering—a massive archway of seamlessly joined glass and metal, its surface shimmering with an iridescent coating that seemed to absorb and reflect light in equal measure. As a group of officials approached, Bud, Laz, and Patricia seized their chance. They fell into step behind the newcomers, Patricia's holographic projector bending light around them, rendering them invisible to the distracted guards and their malfunctioning cysniffers. One of them alerted for a moment, but then went silent and spun around in a circle as if chasing its non-existent tail. The guards didn’t even look around. One kicked at the cysniffer, sending it wobbling away.
Once past security, they found themselves in a vast atrium. It was as if they'd stepped from the red, dusty world of Mars into an oasis of Old Earth's lushest rainforests. Sunlight streamed through towering windows, creating dappled patterns on the floor below. The air was thick with humidity, a sharp contrast to the arid Martian atmosphere outside.
Enormous trees stretched towards the distant ceiling, their canopies interwoven to create a verdant tapestry overhead, wrapping about the steel beams supporting the glass ceiling. Vines draped from branch to branch, while vibrant flowers in impossible hues bloomed in every direction. The undergrowth was a riot of ferns, mosses, and small flowering plants, all meticulously maintained yet giving the illusion of wild, untamed nature, even among the industrial architecture they sought to conceal.
Winding paths of gleaming marble snaked through this indoor jungle, their polished surfaces reflecting the greenery above. The juxtaposition of the sleek, modern flooring against the primal energy of the plant life was striking. Small clearings revealed seating areas and water features, the gentle sound of trickling fountains adding to the surreal atmosphere.
For a moment, they allowed themselves to marvel at it all. Bud's sensitive nose twitched at the myriad of scents - earthy, floral, and utterly foreign to the Martian landscape. Laz’s eyes were wide, his hand absently reaching out to touch a nearby leaf as if to confirm its reality. Even Patricia, usually so focused, seemed momentarily lost in the unexpected beauty of this hidden Eden.
She quickly came back to herself, though, and began outlining their next moves. "We'll need to take the express elevator to the high-security levels. Bud, you’ll probably have to hack some security protocols to gain us admittance. The prison cells should be—"
Alarms—blaring from seemingly all directions—so loud the leaves on the trees around them shuddered. The trio froze as an elevator door slid open, revealing Trip, the dark-haired woman, and half-a-dozen heavily armed soldiers.
Trip's eyes gleamed with malicious triumph. "I knew I recognized you at the Academy, langdog. You mutts think you're so smart. Didn’t it occur to you that we can track any machine assigned to one of our cadets?"
Bud's circuits ran cold as he quickly checked his systems. Trip was right. The tracking protocol that Laz’s housekeeper had disabled so long ago had been reactivated. It must have happened when Jamie synced his earpiece with Bud's systems.
“A complete waste of government resources,” Trip sneered. “Some FOG engineers still lament their failure to breed the blind loyalty out of your kind, but I’ve never understood that. FOG made you, langdog. It was us your kind ought to have been faithful to, not the freaks you were created to monitor.”
“Loyalty is a thing earned, not created,” Patricia said.
“That means less than nothing,” Trip replied, “coming from a machine incapable of original thought.”
Patricia’s vocal processors whined in what Bud interpreted as a frustrated growl. She drew her hadron with superhuman speed and fired, aiming straight for Trip’s chest. But the soldier standing beside him acted just as quickly, deflecting the beam with an outstretched arm.
A heavy silence fell over the atrium, broken only by the gentle trickle of nearby fountains. Bud inwardly cursed as the implications of what he’d just witnessed sank in.
Laz was the first to speak. Bud admired how calm he sounded, even though his courage likely stemmed from a misapprehension of their current peril. "A bit hypocritical, don't you think? FOG employing cyborg soldiers?"
Trip leered. "Not when they're under my complete control." With a casual hand motion, all six soldiers simultaneously leveled their hadrons at Patricia. Their weapons were no mere sidearms. Each trooper was equipped with a rifle, coiled cabling running from the stocks into power cells strapped to their backs. A direct hit from just one of them would likely render her a smudge of carbon on the polished marble floor.
Laz shook his head, a hint of his old self shining through. "You still haven't learned."
"What?" Trip's confusion was short-lived as Laz’s fist connected with his face. The young FOG operative stumbled backward, caught off guard by the cyborg's raw strength.
The soldiers kept their rifles trained on Patricia, awaiting Trip's command. The dark-haired woman drew the same stunner she’d used at the Carnival, but Laz was faster, his own weapon now pointed at her. She froze, halfway to raising her weapon. But Laz hesitated, his hand shaking ever so slightly.
Trip had risen to one knee and was frantically punching commands into a wrist-mounted terminal.
"Laz, watch out!" Bud yelped. But it was too late. One of the soldiers pivoted, firing his hadron at Lazarus. The beam struck Laz's weapon, causing it to explode in a shower of sparks. He cried out in pain, and in that moment of vulnerability, the dark-haired woman fired without hesitation. Laz crumpled to the ground.
Bud's howl of anguish echoed through the atrium as he leapt towards the dark-haired woman. Midair, he was struck by a soldier's fist, the force of it sending him crashing to the marble floor. He slid across the polished surface, a hadron blast missing him by inches and obliterating a nearby planter. Shards of ceramic tile and splintered wood rained down around him.
Scrambling to his feet, Bud's enhanced hearing picked up the sounds of battle from across the atrium. Patricia was engaged with the remaining soldiers, her movements a blur of deadly precision. One crumpled to the floor as the heel of her hand struck his solar plexus, another screaming in pain as a blast from her hadron glanced off his face, vaporizing his ear and revealing a mixture of blood and steel beneath. Then a blinding beam impacted the floor directly in front of her, the explosion concealing her from view.
There was nothing Bud could do for her, even if Patricia’s safety had been his priority. Instead, he frantically searched for Laz. A solider stepped from a haze of smoke and Bud lunged at his ankles. His teeth met armor, scraping off it harmlessly, though the impact of his mass against the trooper’s legs sent him off balance. He stumbled into a planter smacked into a tree, dazed. Bud dove behind a shrub with orange flowers sprouting from it as another cyborg spun at the sound of his comrade’s distress and fired his rifle. The heat of the weapon’s kinetic energy burned as it passed mere inches from Bud’s tail. He crawled over the debris strewn floor, staying beneath the smoke, searching, searching for his owner. What good was he if he couldn’t keep Laz safe?
His heart sank. He saw Laz, but he was in Trip’s clutches, the dark-haired woman helping him drag Laz into an elevator. Desperation fueling his movements, Bud charged towards the elevator. But he was immediately forced to take cover behind a bench as two cyborg soldiers unleashed a barrage of hadron fire. The bench offered little protection, its material disintegrating under the onslaught.
As the elevator doors began to close, Bud let out mournful howl. His mind raced, searching for any possible escape route. More explosions. A tree trunk slammed to the floor, sheered clean in half by a hadron. Then it hit him—the atrium's environment was controlled by the city's weather system.
With what little concentration he could muster under fire, Bud accessed the weather controls. Moments later, the mayhem of battle turned to chaos. Water poured from hidden nozzles in the ceiling, quickly turning the lush atrium into a steaming deluge. Confusion spread among the soldiers as visibility dropped and the marble floors became treacherously slick.
Seizing his chance, Bud darted from cover to cover, making his way to a ventilation grate. With a final glance over his shoulder—Patricia nowhere to be seen, the elevator long gone—Bud slipped into the air duct.
The metal walls of the vent were a stark contrast to the faux jungle he'd left behind. Cold and merciless. Bud limped along, his body aching, mind reeling. He had no idea what had become of Patricia, but he couldn't risk going back for her. Right now, his priority had to be finding a way to rescue Laz. But how could he possibly do that now that Trip knew who he was?
As Bud emerged from the vent into a back alley, the Martian sun beat down mercilessly. The heat that had been their ally earlier now felt oppressive, mirroring the weight of defeat on Bud's shoulders. With no better options, he began the long, painful journey toward the Edge to seek refuge in the only safe haven he had remaining to him.
Each step was a struggle. Bud's enhanced body was pushed to its limits, injuries from the battle making themselves known with every movement. But it was the mental anguish that truly threatened to overwhelm him. He had failed. Failed to protect Laz, failed to complete their mission, failed to uncover the truth about his past.
The familiar sight of their apartment building loomed ahead, offering little comfort. Bud knew that entering would likely trigger alarms, leading FOG right to him. But he had nowhere else to go, no other resources to draw upon. He dragged himself through the main entryway and up a flight of stairs, the actions triggering ghost-like memories just beyond the grasp of his consciousness. He was truly alone for the first time since he’d met Laz. Activating the lock on the apartment’s door with a command transmitted from his collar, Bud limped inside, slammed the door behind him, and collapsed. The absence of his dog bed hurled Bud over the edge, and he wept uncontrollably until he fell into a restless sleep.
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Note: I wrote this story with the assistance of AI. To read about my process, see the following post:
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