Read the story of Seven at the River Shining from the beginning.
Read the Story of Arrow-10.
Results of Last Week’s Poll: In what manner did Milly and Arrow-10 leave the Spark Foundry? (8 votes)
Option 1: They fled without permission and are now AWOL. (38%)
Option 2: They were granted leave to explore Arrow-10’s unique personhood. (25%)
Option 3: They left on a mission and are expected back at the Foundry soon. (38%)
Because Options 1 and 3 tied, the story continues with a combination of their directions: Milly and Arrow-10 are on a mission, but they are contemplating whether or not to return.
“All I’m saying is that you don’t need to go back.”
Milly held the glowstone at arm's length, ducked under a low-hanging stalactite, and glanced around at Arrow-10. The two-meter tall automaton was twice Milly’s height and not exactly designed for the narrow confines of the mine. But he managed to slide around the stalactite without issue, his shining eyes adding to the light of the glowstone.
“We are friends, Milly.” Arrow-10 said. “If you need to go back to the Spark Foundry, then so do I.”
“I joined the Foundry’s staff of my own free will. If I want to leave, I can resign. You don’t owe them any such courtesy.”
“Is courtesy something that is owed?”
Milly stopped and looked up at the towering Spark. “You have a habit of asking questions like that.”
“Like what?”
“Ones that make me realize I’m not as good a person as you.”
“Perhaps I do not yet have enough experience to be a bad person. I have logged only 87 days since reintegration.”
“But who’s counting,” Milly said with a smile.
“I am,” Arrow-10 replied.
Milly shook her head and moved down the passage. “We’ve got to be nearly there. If we go much further, you’ll get stuck.”
“The vein is 34.5 meters from the entrance. We have 6.75 meters to go.”
“You’re going to have to crawl.”
“A new experience for me. Strange. New bipedal offspring often crawl before walking. I am doing the reverse.”
Milly laughed. She knew Arrow-10 wasn’t trying to be funny, but that just made his observation all the more so. She watched the Spark sink to his knees, the myriad gears whirring in his joints. Dropping to all fours, his helmet-like metal head was at the same level as Milly’s. Arrow-10’s facial features, such as they were, could not move, but Milly imagined he was smiling just like she was.
Milly walked and Arrow-10 crawled 6.75 meters until they came to a thin vein of pulsing blue ore. “Here it is,” she said. “Do you have the test kit?”
“You know I do. You gave it to me before entering the mine.”
“I was being polite.”
“Ah, is that similar to courtesy?”
“I suppose so.”
“Do you owe me politeness?”
Milly thought for a moment. “I guess I don’t owe it to you. But being polite is kind, and being kind is good.”
“So we do not owe each other kindness, but we should be kind nevertheless?”
“Owing makes kindness seem like a transaction. But it’s not.”
Arrow-10 did not respond. Milly looked at his sparkstone core and watched it flare a blinding blue. A moment later, Arrow-10 said, “My apologies. I was processing this distinction with a logic cascade.”
“And your conclusion?”
“A transaction is an agreement between two parties in which one pays for goods or services rendered. Kindness is not a good or service in itself. Kindness is a non-monetary motivator that propels service; therefore, kindness is not transactional.”
“I couldn’t’ve said it better myself.” Milly ran her finger along the vein and adjusted her previous question. “May I have the test kit?”
“I obey.” Arrow-10 said, handing her the small satchel.
“You know you don’t have to say that.”
“I know. But that does not preclude me from saying it when I wish.”
Milly pulled a test strip from the kit, dipped it in the prepared solution, and touched it to the pulsing ore. After counting to ten, she placed the strip in a second solution. “Now we wait,” she said. “Can you please tell me when three minutes have passed?”
“I can, and I will.”
Milly set the solution on the ground and waited. As she did, she let her eyes wander over her friend’s metal exterior. At first glance, Arrow-10 looked like a warrior in full plate armor, but upon closer inspection, the metal plates were fused to his limbs in such a way as to make him much more flexible than an organic being wearing heavy armor. The metal was his skin as much as his protection. But what made Arrow-10 so special was not his manufactured body, but his mind. The first Spark to successfully integrate a creative consciousness, Arrow-10 had benefited from a combination of magical hallanir and a memory cocktail sourced from Spearpoint’s Mystery Division.
It was this memory cocktail that had caused Milly many a sleepless night over the last 87 days. She had never thought to ask where it came from, not that she had security clearance to know anyway. But she knew now. She knew the program had begun innocently as a way to help soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress. She knew that the memory magic used was a blunt tool, not a fine instrument. She knew that the soldiers who underwent the treatments had unwittingly donated entire swaths of memories to the cocktail, not just the traumatic ones.
When she objected to the higher-ups at the Spark Foundry, Milly found herself shunted to a different part of the process. When Milly continued to raise objections, the administrator had taken her off the project entirely and made her Arrow-10’s minder, on the singular condition that she not divulge any part of the Mark Two design to an outsider. Milly had agreed with her own singular condition – that Mystery Division continue working on ways to extract, or better yet, clone memories, without destroying the lives of already damaged soldiers. The administrator had given her assurances and then sent Milly and Arrow-10 on their mission, far away from the Foundry and the front and the enemy Velderisans who had tried to steal Arrow-10 in the first place.
Now here they were, on the other side of Titanstep in a tunnel beneath the Everise Mountains, hunting for sparkstone, one of the rarest elements ever discovered. A natural power source, sparkstone had properties that seemed magical, but Milly suspected that if she could study it long enough, she would be able to figure out –
“Time,” Arrow-10 said. “Three minutes exactly. Now three minutes and four seconds. Five seconds.”
Milly picked up the solution and drew out the test strip. “Yellow,” she said. “It’s not sparkstone.”
“Yellow denotes the much more common azurite,” Arrow-10 said. “But if it is azurite, why is it glowing?”
“I think I know,” Milly said, running her thumb over the vein again. A thin film coated the tip of her finger. “The miners are trying to make a big payday.”
“Did they not expect us to test the ore?”
“I can’t say, and it’s not up to us. Come on, we’re done here.”
Milly led the way back up the mineshaft and out into a late morning drizzle. A group of people stood there, humans mostly, all much taller than Milly herself. She was glad for Arrow-10’s presence. While they looked down on Milly, physically or metaphorically or both, they all had to look up to meet Arrow-10’s shining blue ocular receptors.
“It’s sparkstone then, right?” Mr. DeWist said, his hat squashed in his hands.
Milly’s old aversion to confrontation nibbled away at her insides, but she remembered Major Veeran’s lesson. She would not dishonor his memory by letting this desperate mine owner cow her.
“I wish it were,” Milly said. “Unfortunately, the vein is azurite, a common mistake.”
“But it glows so brightly!” DeWist said and his men agreed.
Milly gave DeWist a piercing look and decided it was not worth exposing his duplicity in front of his employees. Rather, she shrugged and walked past the miners toward the road into town. Arrow-10 followed her, his mechanical joints whirring.
“Shall I report our findings?” Arrow-10 asked.
Before they embarked on their journey, Milly had watched another arcane engineer install within Arrow-10’s chest a specially enchanted gem, which allowed him to contact the Foundry. And more importantly, the gem allowed the Foundry to track his every step. If he were to escape the Foundry’s influence, then a little surgery would be in order. But until then…
“Let’s wait,” Milly said. “We arrived a few days earlier than expected. We can hold off a bit.”
“Is that not disingenuous?”
“Perhaps.” Milly looked up at her friend’s metal head, where the stolen memories intermingled to form half of Arrow-10’s personality. “But on the grand scale of deception, it is fairly low on the list. Besides, I could use a few days to rest.”
“I do not require sleep,” Arrow-10 said. “I require only six hours of inactivity.”
“Lucky you,” Milly said. “I require more than that.”
“You also require sustenance. There is an inn 0.65 kilometers down this road. They will supply you both nutrients and a sleeping chamber.”
Milly chuckled. “You should do their advertising.”
“I do not think the inn needs such a service. Given its proximity to other inns along this road, it is the logical place to stay for travelers moving parallel to the Everise Mountains.”
“Right. Then let’s stay at the logical place with the nutrients and the sleeping chamber.”
“While we walk, may I ask you one more question after this one?”
“Certainly.”
“On the grand scale of deception, where would you rate the substance we found on the azurite vein?”
“Worse than delaying a message to the Spark Foundry,” Milly said. “But not by much. DeWist must have know we would check.”
“Then why the deceit in the first place?”
“I don’t know.”
“It is not logical.”
“Organic beings rarely are.”
“But organic beings created me, and I operate entirely upon a logic basis.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“I am.”
“What about your dreams?”
“You mean the hallucinatory fragments I experience during my periods of inactivity?”
“Yes, your dreams.”
“My previous attempts at logic cascades concerning these fragments have failed.”
“Have you ever tried turning off the logic center of your matrix?”
“Is that even possible?”
“Unfortunately, yes. It’s a built-in failsafe in case Sparks use logic to disobey orders that would otherwise result in their destruction.” Milly mimicked retching at this prime example of Spearpoint’s inhumane treatment of the Sparks. “We could use the failsafe for a more creative purpose.”
“I do not know if that is something I wish to do.”
“You don’t have to answer now. We have all the time in the world.”
“At least until we have to report back.”
“Again, you don’t have to. Listen to me, Arrow-10, your life is your own.”
“And right now, I choose to spend my life escorting you to a sleeping chamber. We are 0.05 kilometers from the inn. We should find it around the next bend.”
And so they did. The Birch and Wing stood amongst a grove of the white-barked trees that supplied half the inn’s name. The doorframe of the inn’s front entrance bore several dozen feathers of various birds. They entered the dim interior to find an empty taproom, save for a sullen bartender and a large Olonkin hunched over a drink at the end of the bar. Even sitting down, the half-giant was huge, despite his presumed desire to shrink himself small enough to fit in his glass, such was the devotion with which he stared at the three fingers of amber liquid.
“What’ll you have?” the bartender rasped, looking at Arrow-10.
“I require neither sustenance nor sleep. I require only –”
The bartender cleared his throat, interrupting Arrow-10’s recitation. “You one of them metal men…what they called…Sparks?”
“I am B27-Arrow-10, the first fully integrated Mark Two unit.”
“Well, bully for you, but I don’t want yer kind taking up space in my inn if’n yer not wanting room and board.”
Arrow-10 cast his shining blue gaze around the patron-less taproom. “It seems there is space aplenty to take.”
“Never mind, Arrow-10,” Milly said. “We can sleep elsewhere.”
“I do not –”
“I mean I can sleep elsewhere.”
The lone Olonkin spoke up from the end of the bar. “The next inn is a day’s travel east of here. But don’t expect a more hospitable welcome.”
“Ach, the bottle you bought is welcome enough,” the barkeeper said before turning into the kitchen.
Milly padded over to the Olonkin and climbed onto the stool beside him. “Are you all right?” she asked. “You look a little worse for wear.”
“I’ve been better,” he said, not taking his eyes off his glass.
“What’s wrong?”
The Olonkin did not respond at first, and Milly was about to repeat her question when he continued: “The people of these lands look to the Lake States, not to the mountains. They have no honor. They care nothing for their neighbors.” He picked up his glass, drained it, and slammed it back on the bar. “And they water down their brandy!”
The Olonkin looked as though he needed more water than alcohol at this point in the evening, but Milly let it pass. “What kind of help are you looking for?” she asked.
“The kind that a lone halfling is incapable of providing, unfortunately.”
“Then it’s a good thing I’m not alone.”
The Olonkin turned to her, and only then seemed to notice the Spark standing in the middle of the taproom. He blinked a few times, as if trying to decide whether the automaton was a figment of his drink-addled imagination.
“Is that –?”
“A Spark of Spearpoint. Yes it is.”
“They’re said to be worth a hundred soldiers each.”
Milly clicked her tongue. “I’m not sure that’s true, but this one is special.”
The Olonkin staggered to his feet and drew himself unsteadily to his considerable height. He was a full head taller than Arrow-10. “I’m looking for fighters to protect my home against the Kronix Orn orcs.”
“Accessing,” Arrow-10 said. “Kronix Orn. ‘High Orcs’ in the common tongue. A loose collection of marauding bands that stalk the eastern climes of the Everise Mountains.”
“There’s nothing loose about their collection these days,” the Olonkin said. “The whole lot of them is descending upon Morrin as we speak.” He raised his voice to a shout. “And none of the people around here will help!”
“I will help,” Arrow-10 said. “It is my duty to protect those who cannot protect themselves.”
“Hold on,” Milly said. “How many orcs?”
Arrow-10’s sparkstone core flared. “The number of foes is immaterial if innocent lives are at stake.”
“That’s the old Mark One programming talking.”
“On the contrary, Milly, it is not. I desire to be kind, to be of service to others. And here is my chance to serve.”
“You’ll truly help us?” the Olonkin asked, and the prospect seemed to steady his drunken balance.
“I will,” Arrow-10 said, turning to Milly. “Will you come with us?”
Milly jumped down from the stool. “I’m not going to let you out of my sight!”
The Spark turned back to the towering Olonkin. “I am B27-Arrow-10. This is my companion, Arcane Engineer Amilira Woodril.”
“My name is Lark, and I thank you. Into my lake of failure, you have poured a cup of success.”
Come back on Friday to see what happens next in the story Seven at the River Shining. You can also listen to this chapter on the podcast side of the Trail Blaze Fiction Substack or your favored podcast app. While you’re waiting for the next installment, head over to AdamThomas.net and sample Adam’s fantasy novels.