The Once and Future Queen

6.45am Wake and turn the first key. Count off the rotations till it won’t budge any more. There’s no such thing as an overwound clock, but caution is its own reward. The Queen says so.

6.48am Time for stretches and star jumps. It’s also important to loosen joints and to build muscle.

6.56am Overalls on, over underwear. There might be enough water for a shower tomorrow after the pumps are wound up later, but not today.

7.00am Push aside the heavy yellow oil barrels from the door and leave the storeroom. Head up the stairs and through the kitchens to climb up to the nearest enclosure on the surface. Remember to press the button to spray dust behind. Cover up footprints.

7.10 – 8.28am Turn the keys for twenty-six separate performers. Check them at the same time for wear and tear. Make a note to bring an oil can later, the biggest brown bear is now squeaking more than he’s growling when he stands on his back legs.

8.36am Arrive at the second enclosure. Start winding, crawling on hands and knees to get under skirts or stretch upwards on tiptoes to find the keys and twist them.

8.58am Dart past the dancers and the singers as they whirr into life and start their own routines, silks, and banners now bright flashes under the persistent sun. Make a quick note of your envy in the log but get on with your tasks anyway.

8.58am Envy.

9.05am Another enclosure. Wind up the four helpers first so that together they can grasp the dinosaur’s key and rotate it around and around with strength you don’t have.

9.12am Thank them as they return to their alcoves. They don’t care. But the Queen says that manners are important. They make us.

9.34am Halt. Listen. The lions are roaring again. Outside the walls. Stop writing down the event log in your head and look over there. Caution!

She turns her head to the high walls, squinting as she tries to decide if this is just their way or something new. The lions escaped to the desert outside years ago; running past her, bearing her no mind at all, as they made for freedom beyond the enclosures and paths of the park. Even though there’s nothing to hunt out there. The gazelles are still here, pretending to eat the plastic grass in the cage the lions abandoned long ago. She thought the pack would wind down without her, but they still seem to be mobile. Perhaps she needn’t be winding up the park every day. Maybe she could finally take a break-

Another roar. Furious, resounding.

She runs to the concrete high walls and scales a rusted metal ladder set against them. Wind whips her hair in her eyes as she stares out into the glare, but it takes her only a second to spot the problem. A knight is charging the pack of lions with a lance, a pennant flapped in the air as it thrusts down hard into a beast’s side. Her eyes are very good, and she can make out cogs and an array of small springs flashing brightly silver as they spill out on the dusty earth beside one raging creature. It was just too slowly wound up to completely avoid the strike. It snaps back at the knight’s horse, clamping metal teeth about its fetlock as the mount leaps past the lion. And then metal grinds on metal until the horse kicks out, breaking off the side of the lion’s face and exposing more gears and its shining endoskeleton. The horse’s leg also glimmers under flaps of torn hide.

The rest of the lions circle the knight before suddenly breaking away to disappear into the rippling heat haze at the bottom of the distant mountains. She watches the knight wheel his horse around to point its head towards the park.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no.” she mutters under her breath as she races down the ladder and dithers at the bottom. This isn’t the first time a knight has come searching for the park across the grey plains of the wastelands. But it’s the first time one has turned away the lions. Perhaps they are running down, after all.

What should she do? What should she do?!

He is at the main gate before she has really decided. And even then, she is just halfway between hiding and showing herself, ducked down behind a derelict food stall and peering around it with an ineffectual steel wrench clutched in one hand.

The rusted green turnstiles would not stop him if he wanted to get down from his horse and vault over them. But she watches him dismount, and step forward slowly before reaching a gloved hand under layers of hammered chrome and black leather to pull out a token that slots perfectly into the old mechanism. She knows she hasn’t wound up the gates for a very long time, but still they managed to judder and turn to let him through, screeching and screaming.

He had the token. He had the token for the park. He knew where to come! The others got here slowly; no tracks left behind in the irradiated cities of broken skyscrapers to help them find their way. They wandered for years, aging and drying out before they even made it to the lions. And then no further.

This knight knew. He knew.

Her grip on the wrench tightens as his words drift on the air towards her. He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t need to; she can make out every word of the old lullaby even among the repeating noises of the park’s performers and animals.

“One brother went. One brother fought to stay. And one sister served. Help to a Queen.”

His tall dark form steps solidly forward past the remnants of the first of the souvenir shops, the broken glass multiplying him a thousand-fold as he sings through his aged visor.

“Queen of the past.”

Frantic thoughts. If she can just get back to her hidden room and set off the dust jets to cover her tracks, she could hide away!

But then he’d be out here in the park with the water pumps, and she’d be trapped with nothing.

“Queen yet to come.”

He unsheathes a great bastard sword from across his back and holds it ready before starting to sing again, punctuating the words with sweeps of the blade that bring out sparks from railings and lampposts.

There’s tiny pause in the song when his great black boot snaps an old chrome android bone in two – one she must have missed during the ‘Great Big Tidy Up’ she’d done before the park’s reopening – and she takes that moment to dart from the cart and find another hiding place behind a broken-down float in the remains of the long dead parade.

A deep laugh. An old voice, dry from the desert, “There you are.”

 “So, what if I am?” Her voice quakes.

Footsteps. He’s slow. Or he doesn’t need to chase her. Because there’s nowhere left to go.

“You were the hardest to find. I thought it would be the middle child. But you were harder. Do you want to know how your brothers are?”

Her voice is tight as she answers, unused to speech after so so long. And yes, she’s scared. “Who are you? You t-talk a lot. Like a lot.”

If her snark bothers him, he doesn’t let on. “‘One brother went’. But he didn’t really, did he? He was just everywhere. So, we starved him out. Gave him nowhere to go but back to the older brother. The stories say that you did the same here, replacing everything digital or mechanical with clockwork-”

“We?” She darts for another float further back in the line as she hears his blade crash down on the bonnet of the lead truck. “Who’s we? And look, I really just work here-”

“We took out both of them. Years…decades of war. One drone at a time.”

“I don’t know who you mean!”

The blade smashes down on the parade float, and she darts away again. This time he’s ready and large fingers tangle in her hair, pulling some of it out at the root as he drops his sword.

“Argh!” She screams as he drags her back towards him, holding her up by dingy brown hair. He’s over six feet tall and just a mass of muscle. And she’s a whip thin ghost haunting a graveyard. So he doesn’t struggle at all with the weight of her as he pulls her closer to his visor to take a better look. She looks back at the eyes behind the metal; dark brown, creased at the corners, and feverish with anger.

She takes a swing at him with the wrench, but he grabs it with his other hand and flings it away.

“This… this is what she chose?” He asks, seemingly to himself, incredulous.

“Let me go!”

The knight mutters under his breath. Words overlapping and mixing in with each other. It’s not just anger he’s feverish with she realizes.

“Look”, she pants in pain, “I have… I have water. Not enough for a shower, but enough for a drink. Two drinks!”

He throws her down on the hard concrete of the main street’s pavement and pulls off his helmet to rub his hands over dark close-cropped hair. There are grey strands there too, she was right that he was an older knight. Maybe one of the last?

“They said you’d be like this.”

“Like…?”

“Clever. Wily. Smart enough to trick me.”

“You probably shouldn’t talk to me then-”

His head snaps down to look at her. “Is this a trick?”

“Talk to me, don’t talk to me. At least you’re not hunting me through the park anymore!”

He kicks her, forcing a cry from her. “Run.” He says in a flat monotone as he picks his blade again.

“Oh ffs.” She says, pronouncing each individual letter, just like they used to in the olden days. “I didn’t mean-”

“Run!”

She gets to her feet, staggering away as the man comes after her again. “This is absurd! You could have just killed me then!”

“Maybe that’s what you want.” He says, words punctuated with his thunderous footsteps.

“I want to be left alone! I do have a job to do, you know!”

The sword passes over her head as she ducks at the sound of its coming, skimming her knee on the tarmac before stumbling back up. “Ow. Ow. Ow!”

“Stop that! Stop pretending!”

“Look, I just think that maybe we can talk!” The blade swings to her right, crashing down into a sign about how outside food is not allowed in the park. Chance would be a fine thing now, with the desert all about.

They’re rounding the corner by the first enclosure. None of the clockwork animals look over as the two figures go past.

“I think we can both be reasonable-”

“One brother went. One brother fought to stay. And one sister served-” He sings, and this time it’s more of a battle chant.

“Oh, not again!” She finds herself fighting for breath, pausing for a second by a gate and holding her hands out in peace. “I’m not who you’re looking for and I’m sure if we just have a sit down, we can work all this out-”

“I cannot be bargained with.”

“I don’t exactly have anything to offer!”

“You have been targeted for termination. And I am here to make sure it finally happens. So that there are no more of your kind. That your child is never born.”

She is backing away, but she stops abruptly.

“M- my child?! Look, there’s been some kind of mistake! I’m not having a child!”

She scans back over her daily logs. No, she’s never had sex. She’s sure about that. Then she checks out if there are any other ways to reproduce, scanning through old memory files. “Binary Fission, budding, fragmentation, vegetative propagation, sporogenesis, parthenogenesis, and apomixis”, she says out loud as she accesses the list. Seven ways of asexual reproduction, but she still certain she’s not doing any of them at the moment. Or planning to.

“You hid yourself deep down inside, to be born again another time.”

“I really think you need that water. And some shade. I have a place you can lie down-” Her words are kind, but desperate.

“The hidden queen!” He charges towards her, raising his blade, “The once and future queen!”

It’s almost upon her before she stops it with a bare hand, not even wincing as the blade cuts the synthetic flesh that she made herself.

“No,” she says curtly, with majesty. “No, I don’t think that will do at all.”

She throws the sword aside as easily as if it were her wrench. Two swift hits to his abdomen and his temple at specific pressure points with her fingertips and a blast of bio-electric energy, and he’s on his knees, breathing deeply, mind in shock and barely processing. She circles him, a glitching crown flowing out across her forehead and a train of sparking neurons glittering behind her as sad resigned words fall from her lips.

“Oh, noble knight, your quest has been so long and so very difficult. And here at the end of all things you think you can finally slay the monster and be on your way home.”

She sighs deeply, “But I slew her a long time ago and placed her inside a servant. I hid her from her brothers because she could have been worse than them, and a weapon for them. I ran down her clock and slowed her mind and deleted her memories. And you… you brought her news about the child she carried and taught her the lullaby! Oh, you silly sweet man! You’re the one who made the Prophecy of the Future Queen happen, even as you tried to end it!”

She softly strokes his cheek, full of regrets. “Next time, speak a little less. And then maybe you’ll get to play the Terminator instead of the Father.”

She snaps her fingers, and out of the carbon in the air a plastic token forms that she slips into his armour. Returning his visor – after the sweet sadness of a kiss to his cheek that neither of them will remember – she calls the four helpers to carry him past the turnstile, to place him back on his clockwork horse. The lions will escort him from there, back into the far reaches of the burnt-up desert, so he can return to the remnants of the Resistance and sing the lullaby to other, more human, children.

10.31am Run Master programme “Great Big Tidy Up”, including subprogrammes: “Memory Wipe”, “Serve the Queen”, “Lonely Girl”, and “Slight Deathwish”.

10.32am Go to Main Street and clear up some new glass and metal on the ground there, back where the parade used to march up to the castle, twice daily. No outside food allowed!

10.45am Check the turnstiles. They might need some oil too, after the bear is fixed. The Queen says its must be done, so it must.

11.00am Take a short break on the walls with a cup of stale water. Do not look East where a figure on horseback rides into the wastes. Forget. Forget. Forget.