The Boring Cyborg
“Marie? Marie?!”
Astor couldn’t hear anything back over the radio. That was bad. The rumbling had subsided, but one team hadn’t checked in yet.
They were constructing the new intercity lines when the tremors began. Nobody had expected that, and he was sure the engineers were checking their figures again. But what to do about Marie?
“We need to get out Molly. She’s temperamental, but she’ll get the job done,” his boss stated.
“Do we have to? Didn’t she kill someone last time?”
“Nearly, but the guy survived. People don’t need all ten fingers.”
“Cybernetic fingers are not the same as flesh and bone.”
“She’ll be calmer this time Astor. Break the glass.”
Astor took a deep breath, knowing that he didn’t have any choice. He wrapped his hand inside his shirt and thrust it into the glass window in the corner of the command center. Immediately he was hit by an intense whiff of cheese.
He picked up the wheel of cheese with a long stick and held it carefully away from his nose.
“Go bring that to Molly now. At least get it out of this room. It’s stinking up the whole place.”
Astor nodded and took the elevator down to the sub-basement. When it opened, he could only see dirt lining the walls and darkness. They didn’t store things down here, but it was the only place they could keep her.
He tapped his glasses and a faint beam of light hit the ground. It wasn’t much, but allowed him to move forward without tripping on loose stones.
His hands brushed against the walls until they found the switch. He flipped it quickly and then took several seconds for his eyes to adjust to the bright lights in front of him.
A creature stirred in the cage. A huge mole, perhaps thirty feet tall, smelled the cheese right away. It thrashed its head between two bars. Astor tried his best to stay still, but couldn’t help but shake nervously.
“Astor, are you down there? Is Molly awake?” the voice asked through his glasses.
“Yeah, she’s awake. I’m surprised you can’t hear her gnashing.”
“I’m going to open the gate. Get the bait in place.”
Astor took another deep breath and checked the map overlay displayed on his lens. It showed that Marie’s team had last been spotted northwest of their location. He walked over there, trying not to freeze up.
From behind him he suddenly heard the gate being lifted. He gulped and then did his duty.
He lifted the cheese as high as he could. The mole lunged for it and smashed its head into the side of the stone wall. It didn’t appear to suffer it all because then it lifted its claws, which were wrapped in metal, and began tunneling.
“Sir, it appears to be working.”
“I was confident that it would. Molly had attacked before as she perceived us as threats. Although we are able to genetically modify moles to be large enough to build tunnels for us, they are still mentally small rodents.”
“What did you do?”
“We’ve started spraying our field teams with the scents of baby moles. That triggers an instinctive need to find and protect.”
“As… Astor…” a woman’s voice spoke up.
“Maria? Maria! You’re okay!”
“Well, not quite. We got hit by a landslide and a few of us got caught up in it. We’ll need an evacuation.”
“Help is on the way.”
I had a fun idea a few months ago that we could make tunneling a lot faster and cheaper if we had giant moles doing it instead of machines. Tunneling animals have a good gut check on how to make tunnels safely, and genetically engineering cybernetic moles sounds very cool.