Wired Instinct (a short story)

Currently undergoing revisions, this is the version of this story the e-zine I write for published.
Enjoy.

Wired Instinct
Year: 2101

With a curse on her lips, Amy stared at the entrance to the old Pittsburgh Zoo & Aquarium. Somehow, the newcomer to Pittsburgh had managed to find the only down-trod section of the area. The city that had managed to economically flourish for the first time in over a century could be seen from the curves of hills surrounding the parking lots and exit of the zoo. The sun had decided today would be worthy of postcard images. Its rays slipped over Pittsburgh and created a blue sheen over its three muddy rivers, illuminating the edges of tree leaves and flowers that had started to bloom in the multiple parks. The glimmering buildings of downtown looked brand new, despite the fact that had been replaced in recent decades. Even the run-down neighborhoods peeking out from behind the tallest trees had lost their gloomy appearance during the day.

Amy sighed at the glorious sight below. It was a relief to realize she was no longer back at her old home in Idaho. Nothing had been wrong when she was young and growing within the safe walls of her parent’s house. Unfortunately, a bad college relationship had left the young woman bruised and battered beyond her physical limits. It had taken two years of work from her and both of her parents to pay off her medical bills.

Driven by the need to escape the setting of her abuse, as soon as the last debt had been settled, she had gathered her savings and moved out to Pittsburgh. Here, she was sure she could rediscover herself spiritually; here, she could speak with a therapist in a new setting and come to terms with what had happened in Idaho; and here she could begin to work again without the distractions of the past.

Tearing her gaze away from her new home below, Amy observed the setting her apparent wrong turn had led her. The zoo had been included in recently published information and history books; she remembered reading about it when she decided to move to Pittsburgh just a few months ago. Its beauty was long gone. Its multiple hills of various heights were plain and empty, aside from the occasional tree stump infiltrating the bareness; both the concrete and asphalt of the parking lot and sidewalk were cracked to the foundations. The distant ticket booths Amy could just make out from the road were missing their roofs completely, allowing the inside of the cubicles to deteriorate as the ever-changing weather of the city pounded down day after day.

Amy sighed as she surveyed the lot. The old zoo was shut down for repairs, and had been for the past five years. Orange cones and yellow tapes blocked her car from entering the lot; another set of the colorful markers was laid out before the crumbling ticket booths.

Still, she flipped her key to the left and let the engine of her car sleep. She needed to enter that zoo and find help. The small businesses around the zoo had all closed, leaving their tiny buildings as empty and useless decoration. The GPS in her car was malfunctioning, leaving her without assistance. Since all cars carried GPS systems, very few places sold maps. Even if she knew which direction to try heading to next, it would take far too much time.

However, the construction workers would surely know their way around the city; even if they didn’t carry old maps to hand out to confused drivers, they could give reliable directions.

As she stepped out of her car and touched her flats to the concrete, Amy felt the air press down onto her back through her white blouse. The gloom seemed to rush forward, and as it did so, it overcastted the sun directly overhead and swallowed the gleam of her car into its belly.

With a slight shudder, Amy clicked on her key ring. The car behind her beeped as it locked; she hesitantly began the trek towards the entrance, each of her jeans’ legs swishing against the other to fill the silent void.
---
After a careful ten-minute walk over the pieces of sidewalk and up a towering escalator, Amy could see inside the actual zoo. On the left side of the continuing sidewalk, two separate gift shops sat on either side of a small plaza. The signs in front of all three had faded away, leaving them nameless. Each sign still wore part of a name of a food or toy they once had sold. As she strolled past the third of the buildings, she spotted the Merry-Go-Round, a relic of the past. Dust covered the horses, elephants, giraffes, and lions that lived on its wheels. The paint on all had worn away, and parts of legs and backs had been chipped away to reveal rotting wood. A pile of metal across the sidewalk from it represented what was left of a brief train ride.

Amy looked up the separate branch of the cracking path to a large, long building that clearly had been a center of organization for the zoo workers. It sat unlit; its doors were locked, the windows covered with a layer of filth. It didn’t appear worth the effort to walk up the hill to it. She walked forward instead, down another slope.

As she walked down the hill underneath a bridge, she shivered yet again. The entire zoo had a feeling about it that she didn’t quite understand, or like. As she crept through the darkness, a car rumbled overhead, making the unstable ground tremble.

Back out in the faded sunlight that reluctantly glanced over the branches of dead trees, she walked past the first exhibit. Behind grimy glass slept a mechanical cat, curled into a ball with its head upon its impressively large front paws. The patches of white fur that had not rotted away from its metal structure were littered with black rings. Beside the exhibit, a faded green sign had white letters slapped across it:

SN W L PA D

Amy eyed the sleeping machine meant to represent a snow leopard. The so-called construction of the zoo clearly had not reached a point of recognition. The animals were not activated. The grounds were cracked as the lot, and the land as dead as the hills outside the zoo gates. She had to wonder what any workers inside of the zoo were laboring on.

She strolled past the snow leopard, not realizing it had opened blue eyes. She continued on towards a large enclosure that contained a gap between its fence and its land. The sign for this section had fallen to the ground, and was covered in a dry but thick layer of mud.

Stepping onto one of the wooden steps beside the fence, she peered down the gap, and gasped as she saw the metal paw of a striped cat poking the ground deep within the man-made ravine. What had once been a pond for the machines was nothing but rock for them to walk and pace over. The enclosure inhabitants, several tigers with visible metal legs and orange and black fur backs, were analyzing it and growling in loud rumbles. A bold machine reached his claws up onto the rock and tried to grab hold, hoping to scale up the cliff.

Startled, Amy backed away. This zoo was supposed to be shut down for construction and maintenance! How could its animals be walking?

With a quickening heart rate, she ran. She ran away from the tigers, back towards the dark tunnel beneath the bridge. As she did so, a loud roar deep within the zoo rushed over her ears. Then there was a loud crash of metal upon concrete; though further away than the tigers, it was an impressive sound. In fact, the tigers could be heard clattering out of their ravine towards the back of their exhibit, trying to hide from the cause of the crash.

Amy screamed, confused, frightened, and unable to stop her expression of the emotions. Past the snow leopard exhibit she ran. She didn’t look inside and therefore didn’t notice the ripped hole in the weakened chicken wire around the enclosure.

As Amy ran under the bridge, what she saw as the first sight of life within the zoo appeared. A blonde man in a forest green suit was standing on the path above the pile of train track. At the sight of her, he yelled, gesturing for her to run closer. Amy was confused; she wanted to run for the exit, to leave the zoo; the directions she needed were forgotten in her panic and desperate desire to leave the place far behind.

She then slammed to an abrupt and painful stop as she saw the reason he wanted her to come to him; exploring the wooden animals on Merry-Go-Round was the mechanical snow leopard. In its sleepy state, however, it didn’t seem to notice her. Instead, it crouched and slid underneath the silent, wooden animals towards the dust and rotten trees and bushes, looking for small animals. Its multiple joints clicked against each other rather loudly.

Amy looked at the man again, still breathing hard and praying the snow leopard would not notice the jerky noises. He gestured slowly at the building she had written off earlier; despite the lethargic movements meant to clear the snow leopard’s attention, the man’s arm trembled in nervous desperation.

Amy took in a breath and began to run. A piece of wood snapped behind her as the machine turned to her. The man grabbed her hand, and the rough material of his glove hit her skin. Ignoring her gasps, he pulled her along to the top of the hill, where he pushed her into the long building and slammed the door. He looked down the hill; the snow leopard was still standing on the Merry-Go-Round. Without a care for the humans, it continued its search for weaker game.

As he locked the doors behind him, the man looked back at Amy. “What are you doing in the zoo?” he demanded, clenching his gloved fists. There was an element of fear behind his concerned, deep voice.

Amy stuttered as she leaned against the chipped and faded white wall of an education center lobby, recovering from the shock the machines had delivered.

“Looking…for…directions…” She took a breath and tried to continue. Her voice slowly stabilized. “My GPS system isn’t working, and I took a wrong turn…I had hoped I could find help here.” She realized her hair was loose from its ponytail, but refused to adjust it in front of the man. She felt as though she had to prove she could handle whatever was unfolding within the zoo, without a sign of what he would view as feminine weakness.

After a brief moment, the man responded. “This part of the city was abandoned for a reason.”

“Construction, I thought,” Amy said, convinced she was heading for the correct answer.

“Ha!” The man laughed, his head tossed backwards to expose his Adam’s apple in his throat. “Construction – what a joke! More like malfunctions!”

“Huh?” What a ridiculous and dumb response, Amy realized. But it was all she could muster at the moment. She felt more lost than she had back on the streets in her car.

The man crossed his arms and drew in a deep breath, looking at Amy directly. “The zoo you’re standing in lost funding when a machine malfunctioned eight years ago. They had to close the place down three years later after that, since the population of visitors dwindled. People were too afraid of the machines.” He chuckled scornfully. “Too afraid of the creations that came about when they asked for the removal of real animals in the zoo. They just didn’t think it was worth seeing live animals anymore. Stuffed ones in museums began to suffice. In a museum, there’s no risk to loss of life and limb in freak accidents. You’re only viewing the dead within a cold hallway to match the creature. There’s no organic or synthetic wiring running the beast and waiting to malfunction one way or another.

“So the place shut down. The owners decided to say the entire place was under construction. Really, though, they’re just waiting for the fear to die down. They’re saving their money until the reopening, too, so they can get extra funding to replace everything with better technology.”

The smile of humor and hope disappeared. “But here’s my problem. Do you know how this place knows when to run and activate its animals?” He didn’t wait for Amy to shake her head no; of course she didn’t.

“Heat sensors. Once someone walks past the front doors, the park stays active until they walk out. It counts how many people come in, too, and waits until the last one leaves. I…have my own way of avoiding being counted by the sensor. You, though…you walked in and activated a zoo of machines that have had no maintenance in years. Even better: the machines were built to be animals, down to their last bloody instinct. They’ll be feral mechanical animals by now, there’s no doubt in my mind---“

A crash against the door brought a scream from Amy’s throat. The man yelled as well. Outside, two lionesses struck at the door with metal claws far stronger than those of a real lion. Their legs were patched with yellow fur, while their metal and wired backs were almost completely exposed.

“What do we do?” Amy asked the worried man beside her. Her voice trembled more than her knees.

“Hell if I know. No one’s been stupid enough to walk in here before!”

A gaping hole appeared in the door as one of the metal paws slashed straight through the softer metal. Amy screamed again at the sight of the large paw pulling away for another swing. She stood against the wall, unable to stop herself from trembling.

Then the clawing stopped. There was a screech outside. The man peered between the grime covering the door window. Outside, a smaller piece of machinery ran from the two lions to another old sign that once welcomed visitors. The small machine jumped onto the large wooden sign, screeching as a child would. Once still, the shape of the petite machine could be made out. It was catlike and dotted with patches of white and gray fur. Its impressive, long, black-and-white ringed tail was dabbed with white fur.

“The lemur’s escaped,” the man stated calmly; his voice was steady, which reinstalled some of Amy’s confidence in him. “I’ll have to round them up now. Still, the little escapee helped us out.” He looked back at Amy. “You need to get out of this park. We’ll both be safe once you escape!”

Amy stared. He expected her to run out the door, past the mechanical lions? They had already sliced through the posts that held the structure up. As the sign collapsed, the lemur ran back under the bridge, screeching; the lionesses followed, their exposed paw structures clicking against the ground.

As they disappeared, the man unlocked the doors. “C’mon, now’s the time!”

He entwined his hand with Amy’s again, and yanked her out behind him. Amy tried to resist for a single moment; then she accepted she had no chance fighting him and truly did need to escape. The man was slow and intently observing and listening the park around him. Amy merely followed his lead, trusting his experience with the land to keep them both out of harm’s way.

They had not managed to cover half of the hill when the man halted. There was a chorus of yips and howls from the path the lions had just galloped up. Three African wild dogs jogged along the concrete. They weighed considerably lighter than the lions had, and so the clicking of their legs against the ground was not as intense. The fur along their frame was more complete than the other animals had been. The splotches of white, black, and tan mingled with wire rather elegantly.

“Relax,” the man whispered to Amy as her breathing began to roughen. “I’m not worried about them nearly as much as I was about the lions. Be still, and they might very well turn around and ignore you.” He smiled at the sight. “They’re rather beautiful.”

One of the dogs yelped loudly as he looked over his shoulder. Then the three began to draw into the bare wood in the same direction of the snow leopard, tails between their legs. The yips diminished to faint whines.

The man frowned at the events unfolding. “Not good. Run!”

Amy forced herself to run at the same speed of the taller man. The two worked in sync, the sight of the other runner beside them urging them to continue at a fierce pace. They dashed down to the intersection of the paths and towards the gift shops and exit.

As they passed the plaza between the gift shops there was a snarl behind them that Amy desperately ignored. Paws hit the ground with loud clangs as Amy and the man rushed past the first of the gift shop. The man beside her let go of her hand and shoved her forward, past more tree stumps, and into the escalator shaft.

As she stumbled against the glass walls, the snarls stopped. She turned and yelped despite herself. A mechanical tiger was frozen in place just behind her savior, a paw extended towards him.

“Good running there.” The man began eyeing the claws that had almost hit his back. He hardly seemed phased. Then he blinked as he remembered what she had said inside the building.
“Now, then…how about we fix that GPS, so you can get out of here?”
---
After Amy had unlocked her car back on the road, the man opened the driver’s door and sat for a moment. Amy watched, startled, as a fingertip clicked off to reveal wiring beneath. While the fingertip hung at a deep angle, the wiring inside of it connected to one of the GPS outlets. A few sparks flew back against the man’s skin.

Well, she shouldn’t have been surprised, she realized. Who better to care for the mechanical zoo than a machine? Clearly, if the man were mechanical, he wouldn’t give off a clear heat signal. That explained why the zoo remained comatose.

As he worked on her GPS, Amy eyed the green suit that remained completely zipped to the neckline and dropped down to his ankles and tan work boots. She hypothesized that it allowed the man to keep his power source on while the rest of the zoo waited in their Sleep setting.
The man slid out before she could ponder further.

“There. It needs a full recharging when you get the chance, that’s all.” He smiled at Amy, completely calm and friendly now that the woman was safe, as he extended his arm to indicate she was welcome to enter her car. Carefully, she sat down and turned her key. The car rose from its nap, the GPS on and ready.

When Amy looked up to say thank you, the mechanical man was already walking back towards his zoo, hands deep in his pockets. Then again, a machine only did as it was meant to. If he were following the Laws of Robotics, as all other robots did throughout the world, she had no reason to say thank you. Still…it felt…rude.

The need to leave the zoo behind won out over her guilt. With etiquette on her mind, she slammed the car door shut, turned back onto the road, and slowly began lowering her foot onto the gas pedal, resolving to not speak about the zoo again. Programmed or not, the robot didn’t need to feel worry for invaders again. Best to keep rumors from urging pranksters and teens into the zoos confines, until it was safe to enter again.
---
Year: 2117

“Mommy, look!”

Amy smiled as her pale five-year-old daughter ran away from the sleeping tigers within their exhibit. The ravine below was filled with water, and leaves sprinkled its surface and floated with the wind. The sight no longer interested either mother or daughter.

Far up the path, both could see the top of the lion enclosure. Inside its confines, the two massive queens slept, stretched out over the freshly mown grass and allowing their complete golden fur coats to absorb warmth from the sun.

Amy followed her daughter, and remained close enough to be able to watch her without having to approach the animals she feared the most in the zoo. She stood by an exhibit to the right of the lions. There, an enormous white rhino grazed. Amy observed his gray skin, wrinkled and lifelike. His large lips delicately plucked at grass and flowers, though it was impossible to tell if he actually swallowed it.

“Enjoying the zoo, ma’am?”

Amy turned to see who had spoken. In the khakis and green shirt of a zoo worker stood a blonde man she recognized from sixteen years prior. His skin seemed cleaner, fresher, since when she had last seen him. He had probably undergone maintenance along with his charges.

“Yes.” She chuckled slightly. “Your animals seem better mannered than my last visit.”

“A little reprogramming goes a long way,” the man admitted. “And with care their instincts can be suppressed and managed. I don’t know if they should be, but hey, what do I know?”

He frowned slightly at one of the waking lions. “Still, it takes far too much work to manage these things…I think there’s more chance of them hurting a human than there was the originals. There’ll be an accident one day. I can sadly guarantee it. I just hope it will be when the visitors are all almost out the door.”

Amy’s daughter ran to her side and clutched her hand before she could even feel terror at the impact of his response. “Mommy, let’s go see the monkey house!”

The zoo worker smiled at the sight of the girl who had been born since Amy’s escape from the zoo. “Be sure to see the lemurs,” the man told mother and daughter. “One of them is a good friend of mine.” He looked at Amy meaningfully.

“I’ll be sure to see him. Perhaps if he sits in the window I can even say thank you,” Amy told him.

The man smiled. “We all do as we are programmed, be it to run the zoo or run from hungry renegade lions. There’s no need to thank me or yourself for instinct, ma’am.”

“Mommy, enough! Let’s go!” The impatient daughter, too young and ignorant of the past to understand, tugged forcefully at Amy’s hand.

“But thank you anyway!” Amy insistently called over her shoulder as her daughter began dragging her away from the lions and rhino.

The man chuckled as he crossed him arms. “Like I said: I’m just doin’ my job.”