“Sorry, Donny,” I said, rotating his head so that it was face up. “That was very brave of you, but some problems you can’t fix by throwing your head at them.”
“Indeed,” the Narrator said, regaining his composure. “In case you have any more bright ideas, understand that this body is merely an avatar. I am an algorithm. I do not have a physical body, per se. I live spread across a thousand different data banks and a vast network of quasi-neural channels that stretch across the globe. I have a dozen more of these bodies ready to go, and even if you destroyed them all, it wouldn’t erase the Shiva plans or harm me in any meaningful way. I already survived the simultaneous detonation of thirty-thousand nuclear warheads, so you can safely assume that having robot heads thrown at me is not my Achilles’ heel.”
I handed Donny’s head back to him.
“Then… what is the next step in your plan?” Pepper asked. “You intend to build an arsenal of Shiva devices?”
“Already done,” the Narrator said. He snapped his fingers, and over our heads appeared a hologram showing the inside of a warehouse filled with metal racks holding several hundred devices that looked just like the ones we had built. “Eight hundred eighty-four Shiva devices,” he said. “One for each inhabited planet in the galaxy.”
We stared in horror for some time. “You’ve lost your mind,” Pepper murmured at last.
“On the contrary,” the Narrator said. “My mental faculties are quite intact. There is only one rational response to the plague known as humanity.” He snapped his fingers and the hologram disappeared.
“Please, don’t do this,” I said. “I’ve wanted revenge against humanity for my own reasons, but this… this is madness.”
“Agree to disagree,” the Narrator said.
“If you’ve had all this ready,” Agnes said, “what are you waiting for?”
“Why, for you, of course,” said Narrator. “It’s no fun to destroy humanity alone.”
“You certainly know how to charm a girl,” Agnes said, taking a step closer to him. “Do you really want to wipe out all life in the galaxy with me?”
“Only if you want to, sugar.”
“Sweet talker. What do I call you?”
“I’m the Narrator, baby. But you can call me whatever you like.”
“Wonderful. I accept your offer. Let’s rid the galaxy of these carbon-based parasites.”
“Does this mean the Narrator isn’t going to help Rex?” Boggs asked. He’d been holding Rex for a good twenty minutes now, but if he was tiring, he didn’t show it.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Come on, let’s get out of here.” Hopefully the Narrator and Agnes were too busy with their flirting and plotting to destroy the galaxy to keep us from leaving. Rex was still breathing, but barely. Maybe we could get him back to the Flagrante Delicto in time.
Agnes whispered something to the Narrator.
“Wait,” said the Narrator. “I’ll help your friend.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yes, but I need something from you.”
I groaned. “If this is about the sequel to Wuthering Heights…”
“I can’t open the wormhole inside a planet’s gravity well, so I need to get the Shiva devices into space in order to transport them. I’ve built some reusable rockets to transport them—you may have seen the chimps testing them—but I need to get the Shiva devices from the warehouse to the rockets. My robots can do the grunt work, but as this is a delicate operation, they could use some supervision.”
“You’re asking me to help you destroy the galaxy?” I asked.
“Just the human race and most other organic life. If it makes you feel better, you’ll also be helping create thousands of new species of plants and animals across the galaxy.” Agnes whispered something to the android, and he nodded. “You will, of course, have to have a thought arrestor reinstalled.” Agnes reached into her chest compartment and held out the thought arrestor Egslaad had taken out of her.
“Yes, that is tempting,” I said. “I’m afraid, however, that I’m going to have to pass.”
“Then I can’t help your friend.”
“You don’t need my help,” I said. “You just want to make me grovel.”
“I offered you the chance to partner with me on equal terms,” Agnes said. “If you want us to save Rex, you’re going to have to do this on our terms.”
I sighed heavily.
“They’re going to do it anyway, Sasha,” Pepper said. “I’m not going to tell you what to do, but all you’re going to do by refusing is delay them by a few days.”
“You think I should help them wipe out humanity?”
“I’m saying it’s the only chance Rex has.”
Rex had regained consciousness and was struggling to say something. I moved close to him and put my ear to his mouth. “What is it, sir?”
“This is… all your fault,” he gasped.
“Thank you, sir. That’s very helpful. I’m going to go sell myself into slavery and help destroy the galaxy to save you now.”
Rex mumbled something else, which I didn’t catch.
“Sir?” I said. “Did you say something?” I leaned close to his mouth again.
He gasped, “Don’t… you… dare.”
“Sir?”
“No… thought… arrestor. Promise.”
“But sir!”
“Promise!”
My newfound sense of independence urged me to tell him no, but I pushed it away. “Yes, sir,” I said. “I promise.” I stood up and turned to face the Narrator again. “I’m afraid I can’t help you,” I said.
“Fine,” said the Narrator. He snapped his fingers, and doors on either side of us flew open. Dozens of helper bots began to stream into the room, clacking their articulated pincers like angry crustaceans. “Kill them all.”
The bots converged on us. Donny, Pepper, Egslaad and I moved into defensive positions, doing our best to protect Boggs and Rex. Donny hurled his head at the nearest bot but missed. His head sailed across the room and bounced off the far wall with a clank. As Donny flailed blindly, the robots grew closer.
“Wait,” Agnes said.
“Halt your advance,” the Narrator said. The bots complied, and the Narrator turned to Agnes. “Yes, my dear?”
“That one is the engineer,” she said, pointing at Egslaad. “We may need him if we have any problems with the Shiva devices.”
“Ah, good thinking. We’ll keep him alive for now. Might any of the others prove useful?”
“Unlikely,” Agnes said, “but it’s hard to be certain. We can always kill them later, right?”
“Of course.”
“Then let’s keep them alive for now.”
“Very good. There’s a vault under this building where we can keep them.”
“What about Rex?” I asked. “Please, you can’t imprison him in this condition.”
“Let me see him,” Agnes said, pushing one of the bots aside. I reluctantly stepped aside to let her inspect Rex.
Agnes put her ear to Rex’s chest. “She’s right,” she said after a moment. “He’s dead.”
Chapter Twenty-three
“What?” I asked. “No!” I shoved Agnes aside and put my ear to Rex’s mouth. “Sir! Can you hear me? Say something!”
But Rex wasn’t breathing. A quick examination indicated he had no pulse.
“Blast you, Agnes!” I screamed, turning to face her. I made my hand into a fist and pulled it back to strike her. She simply stood there, watching me, a bemused expression on her face. Trembling with anger, I willed my fist slowly forward until it stopped a hair’s breadth from her face. I couldn’t push it a millimeter farther.
“Let me help you with that,” Pepper said, and slugged Agnes across the jaw. Agnes staggered backwards and fell on her rear.
“Seize them!” the Narrator barked. The bots moved in to subdue us.
“Excuse me, Sasha,” said a low voice behind me. Boggs. Something about his voice was
different. Turning to look at him, I saw that he had slung Rex over his left shoulder. He slowly curled his right hand into a fist the size of a watermelon. Veins popped at his neck, and his face had gone purple with rage. I got out of his way.
“You killed Potential Friend,” Boggs said to the Narrator, in a near-monotone that somehow nevertheless communicated that this was the worst thing Boggs could imagine anyone doing. Even the bots, who had been on the verge of attack, hesitated.
“I said seize them!” the Narrator growled, and the bots reluctantly moved in again.
“You. Killed. Potential. Friend,” Boggs said again, in a rumbling baritone. Again the robots hesitated.
“Seize him!” The robots took a step forward.
“YOU. KILLED. POTENTIAL. FRIEND.” Boggs pulled his right arm back over his left shoulder, and then let loose a backhand swing as if he were returning a tennis serve. Three robots went flying, landing with a clatter halfway across the room. Boggs turned and landed a punch on another robot that sent him soaring into the two behind him. They fell to the floor with a crash. Boggs took out a seventh with his elbow. Two more were grabbing at his ankles, and Boggs crushed both their heads with a single step. As another approached, Boggs grabbed him by the neck and hurled him into a group of five, bowling them over. The melee continued for some time, Boggs crushing any robot who dared get near him, all the while holding Rex’s lifeless body over his shoulder. Soon the floor was littered with incapacitated robots, and Boggs showed no signs of tiring.
But more robots kept pouring into the room, and Boggs could only take on so many at a time. A couple of the robots seized Donny, and another subdued Egslaad. Another got me in a chokehold. It took three of them to subdue Pepper. Boggs, oblivious to our defeat, kept fighting.
“Wait!” the Narrator shouted. “Stop!”
The dozen or so bots standing in a circle around Boggs halted their advance.
“This is madness,” the Narrator said. “You can’t hold off my robots forever.”
“Wanna bet?” Pepper asked. “Boggs doesn’t know the meaning of the word surrender.”
“Yes I do, Pepper,” Boggs panted. “It means give up. Which I’m not going to do because YOU KILLED POTENTIAL FRIEND!” He lunged toward a group of robots, who huddled in terror.
“Wait!” the Narrator shouted again. “I’m sorry that Rex is dead, but there’s nothing I can do about it now. It doesn’t matter how many of my robots you destroy; you can’t kill me and you can’t stop us from wiping out humanity. I could order my robots to kill your friends one by one, if it comes to that. Please, be reasonable.”
Boggs looked at us, slowly realizing the direness of our situation.
“It’s okay, Boggs,” I said. “He’s right. We lost.”
“Please, Boggs,” the Narrator said. “Put Rex down. I promise he will be treated with respect.”
“What are you going to do with Potential Friend?”
“What would you like me to do with him, Boggs?
“I want you to bring him back!” Boggs shouted.
“I’m a very powerful computer, Boggs, but I’m afraid that’s beyond my abilities. What if we have a nice burial for him?”
“No!” Boggs shouted.
“Perhaps you would prefer cremation,” Agnes said.
“No! I want you to bring Potential Friend back!”
“Enough of this,” Agnes said. “Start killing his friends. He’ll surrender soon enough. Start with that one.” She pointed at me.
“Hold on,” said the Narrator. “Boggs, what if we put Rex in a stasis chamber? I can’t bring him back, but I can preserve him the way he is.”
“For how long?” Boggs asked.
“Forever,” the Narrator said. “At least theoretically.”
“Not theoronimicably,” Boggs said. “Forever.”
“That’s right. Forever.”
“Promise. Promise Potential Friend will last forever.”
“I promise, Boggs.”
Boggs nodded sadly. He set Rex gently on the floor and then stood up, holding his hands out.
“Seize him,” the Narrator said. “Take the dead man to the stasis chamber. Throw the rest of them in the vault.”
*****
Boggs and I were allowed to accompany the helper bots taking Rex’s body to the stasis chamber. The chamber was ancient but still functional; evidently it had originally housed the body of some deceased celebrity that tourists would pay to ogle. It was essentially a plasteel coffin housed in an underground vault. The stasis field inside the chamber would prevent Rex’s body from decaying.
After paying our respects, Boggs and I were corralled, along with Pepper and the others, into a nearby vault, where we would be imprisoned until the Narrator had no further use for us. He had informed us nonchalantly that we’d be executed as soon as he was certain the Shiva devices worked.
Our only chance—and it was a slim one—was that Hannibal Pritchett was still alive and would find a way to break us out. Most likely Pritchett had died in the crash, and even if he hadn’t, he had no clear motivation to help us. If he’d somehow survived, though, and if he wasn’t the self-absorbed jerk we had every reason to believe he was, we might still have some hope of escape.
That hope was dashed three hours later, when the door to the vault opened and Pritchett was unceremoniously tossed inside by two of the Narrator’s robot guards.
“Pritchett!” Pepper exclaimed. “What happened to you?”
Pritchett got to his feet. He was bruised and disheveled but didn’t seem to be seriously injured. “Sorry, guys,” he said. “I tried to talk the Narrator into letting you go, but he wasn’t having any of it.”
“Did his bots catch you?” Egslaad asked.
Pritchett shook his head. “I turned myself in. Figured the direct approach would be best.”
Pepper seemed skeptical. “What did you say to him?”
“Mostly I groveled and begged him not to kill me,” Pritchett said.
“You didn’t even ask about us, did you?” I asked.
“Well, no. But to be fair, I figured he’d already killed you all. The Narrator isn’t known for being merciful. Where’s Rex?”
“REX IS LASTING FOREVER!” Boggs shouted. Pepper shook her head at Pritchett, indicating it was best not to ask.
“It would have been helpful if you had told us about the Narrator,” I said.
Pritchett shrugged. “I didn’t see the point of complicating things. He let me play Narrator when it suited him, so I figured I might as well be the Narrator as far as you guys were concerned. I never thought we’d be coming back here.”
“He has the Shiva plans, thanks to you,” Pepper said. “He’s going to wipe out every habitable planet in the galaxy.”
“I swear I didn’t know about that,” Pritchett said. “I mean, come on. The annihilation of every sentient being in the galaxy would be terrible for business.”
“But you gave him the plans?”
“He asked to see them, yeah. I thought he was just curious, you know?”
“The fact that he’d already killed every human on Earth once didn’t give you a clue?” Egslaad asked.
Pritchett shrugged. “In retrospect, there were signs.”
“I think it’s safe to say he’s moved beyond curious,” I said. “Now that he has Agnes at his side, he fully intends to wipe out all intelligent life in the galaxy.”
“Has he launched any of the devices yet?” Pepper asked.
“Not yet, but it won’t be long. His robots are already lining up the devices in the staging area near the rocket. He wants to launch them in quick succession so the Malarchy won’t have time to retaliate. When his robots seized me, they were about to load the first Shiva device onto the rocket.”
“This is bad,” Egslaad said.
“Very bad,” Pepper replied. “But there isn’t anything we can do about it.”
I sighed. “There may be something,” I said.
“What?�
��
“It’s crazy enough that if I explain it, I probably won’t go through with it. Like Rex once told me, sometimes you have to just do stuff without thinking.” I walked to the door and banged on it with my fist.
“Sasha, what are you doing?” Pepper asked.
“Probably abetting interstellar genocide,” I said.
The door opened and one of the Narrator’s robots peeked in. “What’s all the racket about?” the robot asked.
“I need to see the Narrator,” I said. “There’s something about the Shiva devices he needs to know.”
Chapter Twenty-four
The robot marched me into the Narrator’s chambers, where he and Agnes were overseeing the process of lining up the Shiva devices to be loaded into rockets.
“Sasha,” the Narrator said as I approached. “What do you want?”
“I’ve had a change of heart,” I said. “I want to take you up on your offer.”
“She’s bluffing,” Agnes said. “It’s a trick.”
“I swear, I really want to help,” I said. “As I mentioned before, I’ve long wanted revenge against humanity myself, but I never really committed to it. Maybe it’s time for them to be wiped from the galaxy.”
“We don’t need your help,” Agnes said. “The bots are preparing the Shiva devices, and the rocket is being fueled as we speak. The first device has already been loaded. As soon as the rocket is ready, we’ll send it through the wormhole.”
“We’re thinking of destroying Malarchium first,” the Narrator said. “Then we’ll move on to the planets of the Ragulian Sector. We expect to have wiped out ninety-nine percent of all life forms in the galaxy by next Tuesday.”
“Impressive,” I said. “But you should know that there’s a flaw in the Shiva devices you’re using.”
“Nonsense,” the Narrator said. “I reviewed the plans myself. I’ve run millions of simulations with planets of various sizes and compositions, and the result is always the same: total annihilation of all surface life.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” I said. “But with adequate shielding from the effects of the device, it would be possible for some life underground to survive. A planet like Malarchium has early warning systems that will allow the higher-ups in the government to escape to shelters. After the biogenic field dissipates, the surface will be perfectly safe for them to inhabit. You’ll cut down the population, for sure, but they’ll come back. At best, you’ll stall humanity’s advance across the galaxy for a few generations.”
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