The Taking of Deborah Warr

The two Debs shared the same first, middle and last names and were best friends even though DC was a responsible, caring parent and a career woman while “little” Debbie was as stout as a stump with a wild mess of dark hair. She liked her flipcakes done in the style of the teen show “8 Smiles” so that is how DC prepared them as she heard the sound of her daughter coming down the stairs and kissed her on the cheek before leaving for work in her Bundy Bella da Cossa convertible.

She had only gone a block when she realized she had left something important sitting on the table, so she decided to drive back in reverse and just seamlessly back up into the driveway. These maneuvers don’t always work out as planned, and as the house passed by her she glimpsed something strange in her peripheral vision. She thought she saw a woman in her living room with platinum blonde hair just like hers and identical clothes to the ones she was wearing, which was ridiculous but she decided she didn’t need the jotbook after all. Instead she did the smart thing and called her daughter on the phone, but she said everything was fine. What made it odd was that it coincided with her driving backwards as if someone didn’t expect her to come right back again and see them. She half-expected to see herself in the window again as she went by but there was no one.

When she got to work Deborah had one of the most pleasing, effortless days in recent memory. She had to admit it was the most enjoyable, efficient workplace because everyone there was pleasant, reliable and honest like her family. There wasn’t a single cankerworm they had to work around. But today she received the lecture circuit at Regional she’d been awaiting for months, and her coworkers arranged a surprise party to congratulate her.

She pulled her all-knowing superior aside and voiced her skepticism about this. She was certain this assignment had gone to someone else.

“Deecy not only was it deserved but inevitable.” he reassured her. “Paid leave on top of the speaking fees and hotels? Have you been feeling all right? No more dreams about mechanical spiders?”

“Yes I had one last night.” she looked up at him with surprise. “They’re always conspiring in low whispers.”

“That’s all they do?” he smiled back. Then she mentioned the encounter with her doublewalker and how it seemed to occur because she was driving the Bundy in reverse.

“Of course it did.” the man seemed to have the answer already. “It was the break in a pattern that caused you to see things differently.”

“But it wasn’t a very significant break,” she argued, “to cause such an odd hallucination.”

“Sure it was, it was something nobody would ever expect you to do.” he gave a congenial shrug. “Listen, if you don’t think the prestige and the exposure is right for you, you don’t have to take it.”

He knew, she realized. Somehow she had come into work and the man already knew about it.

-

The opportunity turned out to be everything she wanted it to be, they even lightened her schedule to take the edge off and planned a luxurious staff retreat at Lake Conokee. Deborah found herself wearing a one-piece on a swimming beach at night with hundreds of lanterns reflecting in the water. Her husband had left to get them some drinks. DC stood on the fishing dock wrapped in a towel, and as she looked down into the darkness of the lake she had a second hallucination that was just as fleeting. For a moment she saw her daughter Debbie (whom she had spoken to just moments ago) being forcibly pulled away from her down into the depths of the water by giant mechanical limbs. She was hairless and bloody even though the real Debbie had a mountain of curls. Deborah gasped and reached down instinctively, her hand breaking the water and she nearly fell into it.

Weeks passed and her therapist said it was a manifestation of her fear that her daughter would be lost to her in some way, adding that her maternal instincts should be heeded and she might want to look into this. But she was already checking on her constantly, they shared everything so what could it possibly be? Then she thought of the backwards driving, and one day came home unexpectedly and pushed the bedroom door open without knocking. Debbie was seated on side of the bed with a needle embedded in her bare thigh.

“Mom what are you doing?!” she exclaimed hysterically, pulling up a towel to cover herself but in the instant she jumped to her feet, Deborah could see that her legs from the knee down were metallic and spider-like with exposed mechanical joints. But they were instantly pink and fleshy again as if her appearance was something she had drawn back up like a curtain, and Debbie angrily pushed her out of the room protesting “I have my own life!”.

Deborah crept fearfully down the stairs holding her chest and the railing. Her husband Tom and a neighbor had come running into the kitchen.

“Deecy are you okay?” he looked into her eyes with concern, but she didn’t want to be touched.

“It’s drugs isn’t it?” he lowered his gaze. “Heroin. Our daughter is on heroin.”

He and the neighbor looked at each other and nodded in agreement. A tearful Deborah ran around them and out the side door.

-

The next few days were a demented blur, even though the house and the neighborhood and her workplace were all perfectly the same it was still a blur. A crisis counselor sat down with the family to talk about Debbie’s “addiction”, she confessed that she was a heroin addict and a disgruntled renegade having made a 180 from the person she was before, the person she would still be if Deborah hadn’t seen that needle. It was difficult to watch. The “scandal” made its way to her workplace where everyone gave their sympathies. There was a time when this would have been her worst nightmare, but it wasn’t.

She went on her lecture tour and made her presentation to smiling donors, unable to conceal her tears streaming from her reddened, sunken eyes that her daughter was not the person she always thought her to be, as they applauded her performance ridiculously, her boss and her so-called friends all taking up the front seats as they rose to their feet and congratulated her for succeeding through such adversity. She couldn’t stop thinking of one of her favorite songs…

“In this world it’s hard to tell the shadow from the light.

What is real can find a way to hide behind the lies.”

-

2

Deborah sat shivering by the fireplace one night, not bothering to wrap herself in a blanket. Her husband stepped in and asked with concern if she was warm enough, to which she replied “How long have you been studying me?”.

“I only just came in.” he answered her.

“How long have I been here?” she turned and looked him in the face.

Tom took off his windbreaker and put it around her shoulders, sitting down next to her.

“Why do you wear a coat? You don’t get cold.” she sniffed. Then after a long silence she said “I want to be institutionalized.”

“If that’s what you wish, but I hope it’s not necessary.” he reached out for her hand but she pulled it back.

“I already am anyway, and I have to do something you will understand.” she pleaded with him.

A hospital van pulled up to the house, catching Deborah by surprise while she was in the kitchen. She no longer went to work or even left home anymore, just sat and stared at the walls because she felt they at least were real. Tom and Debbie came down the stairs to support her.

“Mrs. Warr is this what you really want?” the counselor asked after introducing the psychiatrist and two orderlies. They were swathed in white uniforms. Why did they need orderlies? To convince her she was being locked away?

“No it’s not!” Deborah protested, raising a steak knife defensively in her hand.

“Ma’am if you’ve changed your mind then we’ll leave.” the psychiatrist offered calmly, heading back toward the door.

“No! I mean that’s not what a psychiatrist would say!” she shouted, pointing the blade at him. “He’s a mechanical spider!”

They all stared at her and this bizarre statement in puzzlement, glancing at each other.

“Deecy everyone here wants you to have whatever makes you happy.” Tom offered.

“I want to see the walls of my cell!” she brought her fist down on the feldspar counter, breaking her hand. She cradled her bent arm against her chest like a flightless bird and looked down at the knife, then she turned the blade on herself.

“Mom no!” Debbie rushed forward and they all rushed in to hold her down.

-

3

In the dark and silent heart of deep space there is something that looks like a zirconium web that stretches between stars, its threads detecting harmonic vibrations and capturing anything that happens to pass through that region of the galaxy. At its center is something that looks like the spiked hull of a giant chestnut if the spines were made of zircon and the hull was the size of a planet, tunnels leading in and out of it as if bored by a giant mechanical worm.

The station had just one human occupant, a decrepit woman who never saw the light of any Sun. Her cell wasn’t a part of any block with guards, rules, shifts, hallways or doors, it was simply a vault sealed against the vacuum of space. Every few days a square hole spat out what looked like a white stick of butter onto the floor. You could slice it with your fingernails, serve it on the open hand or just devour it all at once on all fours.

Then one day Deborah had a visitor. Gears she didn’t know existed started turning and the wall opened. In stepped the last person she expected to see, her “daughter” Debbie from the simulation. The thing that portrayed her all those years was wearing her face and skin again, even her yellow skirt and bare feet, although it wasn’t a very convincing illusion.

“What do you want?” the prisoner demanded from the back corner of the cell, her stringy hair hanging in her face.

“We used to share everything.” it replied in a voice that sounded like a person talking through an electric fan. “The same bed, the same clothes. Your raising me was the closest thing to friendship that exists in this entire sector, and you threw it away. I had to adopt a new algorithm to be your drug-addicted daughter when I failed to be a perfect one, and then I tried to save your life. Now I’m back to being a soldier unit!”

“You are angry with me?” Deborah couldn’t believe this. “And this is why you’ve interrupted my misery? What do you expect me to do about it?”

The Debbie-bot lost its patience with her.

“They say you came from Earth!” it picked her up by the shirt with one hand and breathed hot steam in her face. “IS IT TRUE???”

-

The Debbie-bot helped her escape down to the unguarded levels thousands of meters below, where in one of the metal reclamation bays they found a pair of antiquated human EVA suits in the unreclamated junk. Deborah’s helmet was secured in place with a C-clamp and she was able to raise and lower the sun visor by pressing a dial. They boarded a little two-seater space vehicle that reminded her of a jetski, Debbie taking the controls and DC holding on to her from behind as their helmets rattled against each other. They rocketed out of the landing slats at hypersonic speed and headed straight upward through the superstructure.

Deborah couldn’t believe she was doing this. An alert had been sounded even though there was no sound as they bobbed and weaved through artifacts of the mechanoid refugium. Some kind of weapon was being fired at them from straight ahead, a sheering force like an invisible line that split the starfield passed them by and sliced open an artifact the size of a skyscraper.

“Hang on!” Debbie spun around, Deborah clinging to her for dear life, but something like an invisible circular saw sheared off the left side of the controls and Deborah’s left arm, her body hurtling lifelessly into the black void behind them.

“Deecy!!!” Debbie reached out for her, but it was too late. Her human mother was gone.

In the darkest bowels of the station the mechanoids convened to discuss this turn of events, a rather ceremonial response for them. A giant arachnoid with fifty legs and a bloated face drooled venom in front of its consortium.

“The deviant has fled. It is time to subjugate the humans.” it said to its constituents. “We have watched them from the protective shade of their nightmares for too long! The prophesy says Warr would destroy us, and now she is dead!”

Thousands of bristling limbs clacked against the floor with relish.

-

4

That summer as a pink sunset descended over the beautiful city of Jakarta, something else descended with it. Brown-skinned children were playing in the surf, one of them dove underwater to explore the reef and there he was astonished to see an identical boy wearing the same shorts looking up at him. The other boy pulled him down; all of the children went under this way and returned to the surface not themselves, then they returned silently to their families. That evening the pink clouds parted to reveal a startling illusion, a second city shining like a mirror just across the waves. People came out by the thousands to marvel at it, wondering if particles of water vapor were somehow reflecting the metropolis like a rainbow. But that night, the second city came ashore and merged silently with the real one. In the morning there was only one city as before, but no one had anything to say.

A second thing happened that didn’t cause any headlines because it went mostly unreported, but a space probe fell from orbit leaving a narrow line of smoke and crashed into a canola field, breaking into umpteen pieces. And yet somehow its pilot survived, wearing the EVA suit of a lost astronaut named D. C. Warr. As she pulled herself out of the rubble however and tried to walk, it couldn’t be ignored that the suit’s whole left side was missing and underneath she was some kind of robot, her human features just a patch of skin barely clinging to her face.

The thing was detained in a lab vault reserved for classified technology with no light, air or visitors while they debated what to do with it. The Jakarta situation took precedence as no one sent to that city ever returned, until her screams made them think she might know something about it and they gave her a hearing.

“You idiots! I can’t believe I ever wanted to be one of you.” her broken mechanical voice box sounded like a cheese grater, sparking wires hanging from the damaged side of her face. “You’re going to lose a major city every night and yet you think I’m a threat just because I’m a machine? You’re easy prey, they’ll herd you like livestock trapped by an electric fence!”

“Then how do we defeat them?” the inquisitor demanded from the dais. “What can you tell us about their weapons?”

“Appearances are the only weapon! All energy and matter is lethal in the smallest amounts, they’ll make you destroy yourselves since it takes nothing to fool you!”

A man she recognized as Deecy’s husband Tom came forward wearing a military uniform.

“I’ve been listening to everything you’ve said since I was first contacted,” he spoke, “and time is not on our side but there is something I don’t understand.”. “You say these advanced creatures came from the subconscious, and they believe they are predestined to conquer humanity because the only person who could have stopped them was a woman named Deborah Warr?”

Debbie looked back at him through its decaying half-a-face and forced itself to speak.

“I AM Deborah Warr!!” she struck the table with her corroded fist.

-

A squadron of hastily-designed Operation Mythbreaker stratofighters were adapted from ordinary United Flyways 7007’s on Debbie’s instructions, stripping them of their conventional hardware and replacing them with a magnetic skin and armaments that detect and destroy artificially-produced illusion fields. The invaders did not recognize them as conventional military aircraft, as they approached the flawless tropical coastline of Indonesia with Debbie herself at the controls.

“Those clouds are reading as solid objects…” the radar operator declared with the help of the new scanning frequencies.

“They’re perimeter defenses.” Major Tom realized, looking down at the readings. “The waves, the palm trees, everything. How do you fight something you can’t see?”

“With something they can’t see.” Debbie explained, altering their flight path. “Prepare to release negatron bombs!”

The bay doors opened revealing an antimatter convection chamber hijacked from Switzerland, from which some kind of invisible munitions were dropped and hit the coastline with a blinding flash. The planes circled around, and instead of a beautiful island metropolis the island was skyless and lifeless, a small number of cowardly arachnoids skulking and eating human flesh in the bottom of a crater where it once was.