The Mechromancer

It was lonely out here, friendship in space was hard, let alone romance. His eyes stared at the line, "She was..." Zed sighed. "Come on, she was...what? What was she? You can picture her, just-" He leaned back. A drone clinked across the floor of his room on its spidery, metal legs. The safety-orange painted thing leaped into the air to hover over a wadded-up ball of paper, it grasped it like a claw before returning the abandoned idea to the waste bin where it belonged. "Her hair was orange," Zed wrote down. "Good start," he told himself. He dropped his pencil and pushed his notebook away to the far corner of the desk.

"Maybe a log will help," Zed said to the drone as it floated back and landed. The small machine's green slit eyes stared back, aglow with ignorance. Zed exhaled and closed his eyes, he breathed slowly and focused on a plane of existence above him. His metallic fingers curled and bunched the fabric of his uniform.

Finally, it gave way, "Welcome to Aeon P. Industries Collective Consciousness." The neon dream welcomed him. "All activity, thoughts, expressions, and sensation within the company noosphere are monitored, and may be subject to penalty or classified as company property."

"Yeah yeah," Zed whispered. "Log, Zed Holtfield, WP-7 waste disposal planet, Dantioch 9. Begin log." His vestigial verbal command anchored his thoughts on his task. "One barge today, high velocity 'landing' in sector A-27. Searched through it and found mostly chemical waste, most tanks ruptured but the three I did find intact have been marked for drone retrieval and cataloged-" Zed's concentration wavered as he stifled a cough. He reached out with his eyes slightly opened to grab the bottle near him.

There was a momentary stab of pain in his head and his hand jerked out, knocking the open bottle onto the desk. The dark liquid seeped into his notepad, turning the old paper black. "Shit!" he swore. "Uh, end log," he rotated the now mostly empty bottle back into place. Zed looked at the statuesque drone, "Hopefully the connection was cut before that..." The drone stood as still and silent as always. "Come on, don't just stand there, get me another drink."

A woman with orange hair greeted him. "Hey, happy birthday!" He felt his face pull into a grin as she handed him the cake. Thirty candles burned atop it, it meant something to both of them. She placed the cake on a table, a wooden table. He looked up at the woman, past her toward the dim reflection in the glass window. His face was gone, but his smile was still there, an immovable grinning skull of chrome. The reflection's eyes burned red, two more candles in the dark. No, none of this is real, he thought and pulled away. The dream faded, he was back where he was supposed to be. Back where it was supposed to be. Cracks of gunfire sounded from somewhere far off. Buildings stood like islands in a sea of smoke, occasionally deep glows of red pierced the haze, more eyes. It looked down at its hand, the metal fingers covered with stains of red. The cold steel quickly sapped the living warmth from ichor.

Zed woke up and gasped. He looked around and down at his hands. They were metal, but there was no blood. "What kind of noosphere dream was that?" he asked no one. He grabbed his shoulder where his cybernetics met his flesh. He rubbed the joint, groaning with every motion. A drone floated into view, ready and waiting for an order. Zed laid back to remember his dream, it was so...vivid, but not. "Was that...a real dream?" he laughed. Rolling over, he grabbed his notebook from under his head and began to write everything he could remember.

"...Her hair was orange, and she was from Earth That Was. Imagine that," Zed gestured his pen to the drone. "Old Earth, 10,000 light years from here...10,145 actually." He looked up from the page, "I don't know how I know that either." Zed stopped writing and looked at the drone, "I'm talking to myself now." He rubbed his joints again. "I'm going to do a diagnostic on my implants..." Zed stopped when he realized he was talking to himself again.