Wheatley was lost.
He'd stopped running fairly quickly, as it had dawned on him that he didn't actually have any destination in mind, other than simply away. Unfortunately, by that time he'd already been out of sight of anything which might have given him a clue about where he was. There was a tallish sort of brambly hedge to his right, and the road at his feet seemed to be leading directly out of town and into the fields beyond. It was small, and rutted, and if the neat white-painted sign nailed to the side of the barn to his left was to be believed, someone with lots of optimism to spare had come along at some point and named it Hope Street.
The barn looked slightly familiar. It was tall and red-timbered, a little like the one near the Eaden sign, except he didn't remember the goods elevator running nearly the height of the structure, trailed with creepers, or the cavernous set of doors in its long red-timbered side. It took him a while to realise that it was in fact the same barn- he was simply looking at it from the other side.
He wandered a little way into the field behind the barn, kicking gloomily at things- it wasn't bad, kicking things, once you got the hang of it, he could sort of see why humans liked doing it so much.
"Brilliant, that was. Absolutely brilliant. Why don't you try opening your stupid great big gob a bit wider next time? Might be able to fit the other foot in it. Because obviously, there's nothing she wants to hear more than me comparing her to the mad cow that tried to kill her a bunch of times, that is obviously going to go down like a weighted storage cube, that is, really going to make her feel better about having me hanging around. Rrrgh."
He snarled, smacked himself on the forehead, and flopped miserably against the big, contoured lump of metal at his back.
"I don't even know why I got so worked up. It's her not saying anything, that's what it is. Just standing there, in silence- yeah, maybe saying the odd word, throwing the occasional couple of syllables out there, but for the most part letting me do all the shouting so she can stay all calm and hang on to her precious... being all perfectly justified and having the moral high ground. Silently. Manipulative, is the word for that. Practically Machiavellian, and I do not use that word lightly."
Wheatley sagged. "Oh, God... that's all bollocks, isn't it? It's not her fault at all. Wish it was, though. I'd feel a lot better, for a start."
He looked down at the thing he was leaning against- a chunk of half-rounded, riveted metal, dark and discoloured, like the shell of some giant prehistoric snail. From its highest point, a thick length of steel rebar climbed upwards, strung with wires.
Absently, Wheatley glanced up- and did a double-take, starting backwards, mouth hanging open.
"Oh, what? What's one of those?"
Above him, rooted there like some strange species of extraterrestrial tree, a three-legged structure towered into the sky. It was taller than the barn- taller than the town hall, or anything else in the town, come to that- a looming, elongated pyramid of criss-crossing metal girders at least thirty feet high.
The whole structure was festooned with cables and wires of all colours, strapped to the metal beams in drooping bunches of rainbow spaghetti. In addition, each welded strut was dotted from top to bottom with dozens of things which looked like nothing so much as pale plate-shaped mushrooms, but on closer inspection turned out to be satellite dishes. All shapes and sizes, white, pale grey, paint-streaked, stencilled- they stuck out from the structure at every possible angle, clustered in random configurations as if they'd just happened to sprout there.
The three places where the structure met the ground were encased in three strange seashell-like blocks of verdigrised, contoured metal, giving them the appearance of massive hooves. Wheatley craned his neck on one side, trying to read the letters which, spray-painted and very slightly askew, ran up the side of the hoof he'd been leaning on.
