The CRES code

Chapter seventy four - The Fallout

     Emily spent several days travelling across the country, sleeping under bushes and in abandoned barns, hitching rides on haywains and turnip wagons, before she allowed herself to relax and find a new home for herself.

     The place she chose for her base of operations was the Wookey Hole natural cave system in the Mendip Hills, a place she had visited once in her childhood and which she was pretty sure would not be associated with her in any criminal file the machines might have on her. The natural limestone would, she hoped, shield the electromagnetic radiations generated by the equipment she'd had the ship fabricate for her. She would be able to work here for months, years if necessary, and so long as she was careful not to carry any electrical devices out under the open sky, all the sophisticated scanning and detecting devices the machines (or Randall) possessed would be unable to find her. And when she started work in earnest, they would most definitely be looking for her.

     She found a mound of rock the right size and shape to serve as a chair and sat on it, then swung the heavy backpack down off her shoulders. She had discarded the original woven metal one almost immediately. It was far too alien in appearance and would have attracted attention wherever she went. The one she was using now, made of cow leather, was stolen from a hardware store she'd visited the first day after leaving the spaceship. She sat it beside her, undid the buckles and opened the flap. Then she carefully lifted out the bulky, metal object hidden inside.

     It was a mini-fabricator. A smaller version of the device aboard the spaceship that had created it. It could create anything, so long as it had a set of blueprints and a supply of raw materials. It could even create a full size fabricator, so long as it created one small piece at a time and its operator had the technical expertise to put it all together, which Emily had. The full size fabricator could then create even larger ones capable of creating anything she wanted. Even spaceships if she wanted. Everything a global civilisation could supply, the fabricator could supply. Every luxury, every utility...

      Every weapon.

     There was one other object in the backpack. A portable data storage device containing billions of fabricator blueprints. The complete set of instructions for creating every possible object and device from paperclips to medical robots. Even priests and orc chieftains if she wanted. She could create an entire robot army for herself, covered in human flesh and able to enter any city without attracting attention. An army of loyal slaves to do her bidding. Planting bombs, crushing the throats of key people. Maybe even killing Randall if the opportunity presented itself. Randall wanted to give technology back to mankind. Emily wanted to stop him.

     The natural world had to be protected. It had always been her driving ambition, but back in her old life she'd always known that her cause was hopeless. The global industrial complex was too vast and powerful. The few victories she's managed to achieve had been more symbolic than anything else. Attempts to gain publicity for her cause. That had been all she could hope for back then but now, for the first time, she had a real chance to actually achieve something. She could become what she'd only pretended to be in her old life; the guardian of the natural world. She smiled to herself, feeling real peace and contentment for the first time she could remember.

     She touched the contacts on the fabricator and the memory storage device, turning them on and allowing them to communicate with each other and with her head phone. Images appeared in her visual field. A menu of options. She scrolled down it, searching for the first thing she would have the fabricator create. Another fabricator, for redundancy. In case some accident befell the original. Three fabricators, in fact, with the third hidden in another remote location, carefully sealed in a waterproof container in case, by some chance, her hideout was discovered and she was forced to flee. She'd survived until now by taking no chances, by preparing for every eventuality, and that wasn't a habit she intended to break.