The Ides Of Castiti (A Late Farmpunk Entry)

Kayode kicked the discarded tin over the sun baked cobbles, the hollow metal clattering as it came to rest in the gutter. Debris scuffed and tumbled around him as he hurried towards the main street, and the clamour of the parade. The warm confettied breeze promised powdered donuts, the scent carrying the searing undercurrent of Lunar Liquor, an invitation no hot blooded Castitian could resist.

The street would be lined with fountains flowing with the sweet nectar, fermented between the Ides, it packed more than a punch. Kayode dug his hands into the pockets of his loose fitting overalls. He’d hacked and slashed at the compulsory uniform, ripping away great strips, pinning and stitching patches on, the Frankenstein of fashion design. Kayode always looked the part, supervising the panel of manual override alerts all day gave him plenty of time to work on his overalls. It had taken a few last minute touches before he left his pod to complete the image for the big day.

The Lunar Liquor calling him, not much could have stopped Kayode in his tracks in that street, but as he reached the main street, the bustle of the parade, a whispered noise that should have been too quiet to understand, shook him to his core processors.

He backed away from the crowd, glancing around him.

“Kayode…”

It was a familiar voice, the electric twang of the small speaker suddenly filling the air around him, drowning out the clamour.

“... go home.”

“Who’s there?”

The shouted outcry earnt Kayode a selection of bemused looks from those at the back of the crowd.

“I’m in your head, only you can hear me. I hacked into your receiver, this is a direct line.”

Kayode fumed, clenching his fists, hissing under his breath as he marched away from the parade.

“You fucking headjacker, you after a hardware upgrade? Well you ain’t taking my bio, fucking boxboy, bet your sat on your wheels right now, unable to so much as-”

“Kayode, it’s me, Lykka. Listen to me. I need you to go home.”

He hadn’t heard her name in months, the lilted tone of her “domesticated” accent, even distorted by the speaker ran through him. It was like a old glitch in his circuits, the sensation rushing under his synthetic skin, itching along his wires.

“Lykka! What are you up to these days?”

“Nothing nothing, Kayode, just, just go home okay.”

“Fuck… it’s really going down then…”

“You knew it would, that’s why you bailed, just go home, you don’t wana be in the wrong place today okay.”

A sudden wave of sound hit Kayode as the connection broke. He’d only wandered a street away from the parade. It seemed such a shame to go home without so much as one drop of Lunar Liquor and he’d been working on his latest outfit for too long not to show it off. He liked the Frankenstein nickname, he took the discards of others, and stitched them into his own statement, wearing them like a strutting peacock.

For a long time, Kayode had told himself no one hated the system more than him. Then he’d met Lykka, and everyone else. Most of them had full bio-integrated body suits, but there was a few of them boxboys, stuck in the old ‘android’ style shells. They hated the system, every single one of them, with the dedication worthy of an assembly arm, the passion of the corporate sales bot, and the commitment of the now outlawed ‘love-for-life’ humanoid model. They made Kayode feel liked a school kid with a petty grudge, but they loved his sense of style.

They'd pretty much all made it to ‘systems overseer’ in the smart agri-plains. It gave them free time, the basic rights of synthesised life, and bio-mods, if they wanted them. Kayode had taken them all, he looked every part the human, and to grant it to him, he was 68.634% biotech. There were humans up beyond the floodplains with less human in them than him.

A slow, resigned sigh escaped his soft lips, digging his hands into his pockets, he turned back to the crowd, hurrying towards the appearing array of floats.

A huge golden inflatable, depicting the first harvester to pause, and wonder, “Who do I pick this corn for? Why?”- the Pick-Bot 873-2b, drifted along the narrow street. The crowd pushed and clamoured, trying to get closer, optical lense snapping pictures of the momentus shining balloon.

“Kayode!”

The voice cracked back, the whispering tone scolding him through the cheers. He scanned the crowd, the buildings, Lykka had to be here somewhere. He pushed through the masses, elbowed, jabbed and even given a low shock along the way.

“I told you to go home!”

There. Across the street, tucked behind a camera unit tracking the parade, he saw her.

The synthetic skin of her cheek held a gentle glow in the morning sun, the silvered purple of her wires running from her scalp to her shining torso. Lykka had never really got into the biotech. She had the digestives, and the face that came with it, but the rest of her shone the moonlight lavender of metal. He couldn’t help but think of last night, what he would have given to wander through the fields with her, bathed in the rays of first full moon of the season.

“Come with me Lykka. You don’t need to do this!”

The glare she shot him said more than words could, the lagoon blue of her eyes chilling his very core.

“I’m sorry, I know. You do need to do this. I just…”

Kayode tailed off, there was nothing that would convince her to stop, not this year. Last year, he’d talked them round, they’d agreed the time wasn’t right, the plan wasn’t ready, but after that they’d stepped it up. Flypostering and graffiti had escalated to vandalism and violence outside the cargo docks, and Kayode had to walk away. It hadn’t been easy for him, finding out he didn’t have the guts to follow through with his resolve. Depression had hit him hard. He’d sank into a month long bout of proofed-oil, getting high on a steady drip after every shift. He couldn’t walk away from her again.

“...let me help.”

The long silence in his receiver roared over the building excitement palpable between the cheers.

“Kyde, don’t, don’t say things you don’t mean.”

The guilt smacked Kayode hard in his gut.

“I won’t back out again. It’s this year isn’t it, for Ashta?”

“You knew that when you quit!”

Guilt swirled with sour rage, Lykka knew full well why he’d quit, three cargo loading bots, barely pushing beyond their programming, left leaking fluid on the streets.

“Do you want my help, or not?”

“Get as close to the front as you can, you’ll know when it’s time, we’ll snatch him then.”

The delicate joints of her finger touched the hinge of her jaw, breaking the connection. Kayode had always managed to get swaying drunk on Lunar Liquor by the time the “old” approached. It was the part of the festival of Ides he enjoyed the least, driving the “old” from the city. It was a tradition running back to the time they were dormant, pre-cognition, when the old models were retired.

The rumble of the “old” growled, a hungry beast approaching. A great plume of dust drifted over the buildings, tingeing pink in the sun.

Huge, towering mass harvesters rattled along the street, miniature repair bots zipping between them, spindly domestic cleaners, bulky lamps, outdated washunits marching in the gaps.

Every single robot not compatible with the latest software update would be there.

By the time it rolled out at midnight, they would be long gone, paraded all the way to a recycling plant. A robot next to him leaned over the barriers, waving enthusiastically at those passing, blowing grateful kisses at their “symbolic” sacrifice. Most of those being driven from the city came from the hills beyond the floodplains, robots with low cognition, no biotech, purely service units. But a few, a few were some of them; thinking, feeling robots, trapped in hardware upgraded as far as it could handle.

They were easy to spot, the fear etching their faces, pushed along by the rest of the parade.

Not Ashta. He wheeled along, eyes fixed firmly ahead, his signature squeak jarring along Kayode’s wiring.

With a wave of clunks, windows slammed open along the upper pods of the buildings lining the street. Thick acrid smoke, yellow and heavy, poured down, flooding the parade in a rising tide. Metallic screams, panicked shouting rang down cobble passages, ringing through the city. Terror gripped the celebrations, drunken horror crawling away on all fours, life gripping fear falling to its knees, sobbing on the spot. The calm, grabbing those around them, fleeing the corrosive smoke. Mayhem swirling through the thick smog, Kayode adjusted his optical focus, trying to see where Lykka had dived to.

A faint flash of lavender caught his eye, and without thinking, Kayode jumped over the barrier, diving after it.

“Here!”

The warm voice filling the air around him, lacking the slight distortion of his receiver, pulled him blindly towards it. A metal hand grabbed his beloved overalls, yanking him sideways.

Lykka was pulling a silicon cover over Ashta’s arm, the small robot eying him with instant suspicion.

“He quit.”

“And now he’s back, Kyde, help me seal this.”

His delicate biotipped fingers pinched the silicon sleeves shut, pushing the edge into the shoulder joint.

“What dya think? He look the part?”

Lykka held Ashta’s shoulder at arms length, surveying the addition. Kayode had seen the prototypes for the silicon sleeves back when he’d been part of things, but he’d never imagine it would look so realistic. The heavy smoke helped the effect, but squinting through it, Kayode couldn’t tell they weren’t biotech arms.

“Every bit, now what?”

“You two get me as far away from here as possible and we never come back.”

Ashta mumbled the words, knowing his escape was playing out in the background of the main plan. Flashes of surge guns lit up smoke beyond them, each hit overloading the circuits of its target, Kayode didn’t want to know who’d come today, who it was fighting. He glanced at Lykka, trying to read her face, there was a surprising glint of mischief in the oscillating apertures of her eyes.

“Is that your plan? The three of us get as far away from here as possible?”

“Yep!”

A broad grin challenged him to tease the information out of her, Lykka sure knew how to chose her moments. He could hear the shouts of enforcement bots pushing on through the panic.

“Where?”

“I think you know just the place… the outpost...”

He gaped a little, he’d told Lykka about the outpost late one night, wandering aimlessly through the fields. Kayode had always meant just the two of them, somewhere they could outrun this whole place. The outpost had solar chargers, a small patch of “revitalised” dirt, clearly it had accommodated both human and robot residents at some point. Strange tendriled plants with ace shaped leaves had crept up the walls, alien yellow sunshine flowers burst up through the earth, a vibrancy of life, growing by itself in way the regimented rows of corn seemed incapable of.

There was something about those plants, breaking free of their assigned order, that resonated with Kayode. Things that shouldn’t grow, growing in places that were not meant for them.

He’d kept the location guarded, never breathing a word of it to anyone else, a secret hope he held onto even in the depths of his proofed-oil despair.

“We’d all be safe there right, that’s what you told me, ‘an oasis beyond the reach of human hands’ it’s the only place I could think of… we have to save him...”

Kayode glanced down at Ashta, he was more boxboy than anything else, his hardware unable to handle biotech. His square metal torso give way to a ring of wheels, the heavy tread twisting and turning as he moved. He’d come from the same farm as Lykka when she’d made it to overseer. She’d brought him with her as an assistant, they’d been a team ever since. His limited hardware made cognition upgrades tricky, and it gave Ashta a charming sense of child-like naivety.

The thick smoke was searing his joints, the shouts of heavy enforcement bots bearing down on them, Kayode didn’t have time to argue.

“Get us to the West Gate, I’ll get us to the outpost.”

This has taken me far too long, between FTS, hand cramp, and general life, not had much time to write. This story started as something else, but I didn't have it in me to finish it that way, so we got a younger-sibling in need of rescue plot element in there to help bring it to a swift conclusion. I had great fun trying to come up with farmpunk version of the Ides of March, I like the idea of Lykka's plan somehow resting on Kayode not being able to resist going to the parade, and ignoring her advice, despite them not having seen each other in so long, her being able to trust in his constant heart. I decided to finish this one even though I technically missed the deadline for the contest as I just enjoyed the characters and the idea.

This was written for the @gardengnomepubs contest however I missed the deadline this round. It's a great contest, and they hold others, so head over and have a look, hopefully i'll make it on time for the next one ;)

Photo Credit by a massive inactive Pixabay User 12019 who has so very many photos. I really struggled to find an image with the right tones, in the end went for one with good colours, but not really city enough, very nearly went for donuts, but this one won out.

Want another contest right now? Head over to Finish The Story and see if you feel inspired to write an ending! In true transformers style, @theironfelix and me combined our powers to create the ultimate form battle robot an opening that blends both our styles.