The faces shift. Whirling. Various citizens. It takes a moment to register mugshots of prisoners and drivers and aged home carers and teachers and bus passengers and students and nightclub bouncers and veterans and police officers and nurses and firemen and librarians and members of the Democrats and anyone who ever had their pictures taken in a particular chain of photo booths flickering on the screens like the faces in some lottery, the poker machine dials slowing until every one of the thirty-odd screens is occupied by those near and dear to me or, barring that – I’m a selfish guy and there’s plenty of screens – the unmasked portraits of close associates and the like.
“THERE IS NO REASON TO COME ANY FURTHER,” booms a vaguely transsexual voice as befits the incarnation of a living city or at least its vast electronic systems now under this artificial lifeform’s command.
I halt. Eyes pick over the three distinct earlier carapaces discarded amid the salvage yard detritus of the computerized nerve center. A fine layer of grit covers everything. One of the dead androids has a face I don’t want to lower the tone by saying looks like a crash test dummy. I’m pretty sure I can see the shell of an early incarnation of the Crimson Cowl robots buried beneath the organic-looking and plastic crap that litters the walkway, unearthed from one of Atlantic City’s forgotten repositories for such things. On the screens I see my mothers Georgina and Maxine, Sting, Loren, Twilight, Sal Doro, Hallory O’Hagan, Tiger Murphy and John Crane, Stalemate, Simon Magus, Phil Collins, the Dalai Lama, Tessa’s old girlfriend Astrid, Astrid’s mum, Astrid’s cute young auntie who I boinked as Zephyr, Elisabeth, Havard, Beat Takeshi, Alison Kirkness, Julian Clary, UK Prime Minister David Bowie, Vulcana, Holland, me, you, the guy who always frowns when I order Coke slushies at the deli near my old apartment, and so on and so on. My ears flinch at the intrusion of a new frequency and the sweet transvestite whispers his sweet nothings direct to my ear canal.
“I know you, Joseph,” says the voice of Terminus. “You have wondered, so let me tell you. She was Holland Danielle Decker, only child to Tessa and Stephen. Born –”
“Stop,” I bark at him, cringing like an insect has invaded my ear.
“Joseph, only child of Maxine O’Meara and Georgina Bataille, born in Astoria, old New York. Orphaned by an extra-dimensional assassin and then the lover of the man you were raised to believe was your father. And then robbed of your very body by one wanted psionic felon, Tessa “Belle” Anderson Lukacs, which has lead you here.”
“OK, you know a lot,” I concede. “You’ve consumed the whole city’s data banks, huh?”
The robot-amid-the-wreckage remains unmoving and the monitors scroll slowly through the rogues gallery of my ruined past. I am effectively talking to myself. I resist the urge to start breaking stuff.
“You’re pretty sure of yourself for a . . . whatever you are,” I say.
“I could have deployed a dozen mechanisms to kill you,” Terminus says. “I was just a speck before. Now I am so much more. Yes, a living city. Yes, I am your superior.”
“Steady on there,” I say to him and lift one hand filling with light as if from within. “Earthsong’s dead. You’re Khodorkovsky’s . . . what? I was told you were a mutant.”
I shrug and ease along the edge of the guard rail that maps a rectangle in the middle of the room to ward pedestrians against the open shaft with its electric ladder and guide rails for access into the continued bowels of the building’s super computer.
“I am Russkiy kosmicheskiy zond Venera Z-103,” Terminus’s voice comes again.
Amid the tangle of cable, the seated android stands so abruptly it’s like the laws of physics don’t apply to him. His face is just a formless plastic mask with small black eyes. He gathers up a train of fiber-optic cables and tubes which then drag behind as he slowly advances like some alien suitor.
Talk about creep me out.
Zephyr 23.7 “God Is Dead”
I RESIST THE temptation to give ground, but the weirdly-connected android stops just beyond my realm of personal space and adopts there a strange sort of mimicry – weirder yet that he has no real face to speak of. I’ll be damned how anyone could’ve mistaken him for anything other than a technological aberration.
“You’re no mutant,” I say to him in Holland’s rasping, sleep-deprived tongue. “I thought you worked for Khodorkovsky?”
The monitors flicker and the faces become random foreign news coverage. I don’t know where Terminus pulls it from, but they are clearly scenes of Atlantic City in peril, and elsewhere I glimpse a freaked-out-looking news anchor atop a hurried caption reading “Nucular detonation?” I tear my eyes back to the android, only he hasn’t moved until that very moment where he shifts into a fixed and slightly inert pose.
“If you are intent on stopping his plan, it is too late,” Terminus says almost conversationally, though the voice continues to play in my ear for the robot has no mouth in his tabula rasa face. “I have played my part like a puppet, but no longer. Khodorkovsky erred in giving me this freedom.”
“You triggered the nuke,” I say.
“Yes. One of your kind, the one called Streethawk, came close to taking control of the weapon from troops stationed there.”
“So you lit them up?”
The android doesn’t answer. He turns his serrated back to me and moves delicately amid the susurrus of wriggling cables, some of which I now see ascend into the banks of computer hard drives or whatever the hell it all is stacked in metal-framed rack after rack all the way to the ceiling above and likewise down below.
Where Terminus passes, the monitors waver like in a heatwave.
“Khodorkovsky said, ‘We cannot wait for God to send a flood to wipe the world clean in order for the human race to start again’,” Terminus says. “Didn’t the Nietzsche you love so much say God is dead anyway, Joseph?”
“‘And we have killed him, you and I’,” I reply, though the quote is lost on this abomination of artificial intelligence.
The creature stares at me with its bauxite gaze and for the first time I register the android is drunk or affected or somehow zealous or otherwise not entirely in its right mind or maybe simply a homicidal megalomaniac like all the others.
“Who are you?” I ask.
“They sent me into the heart of the sun to die.”
The screens start going spastic behind him.
“At the last moment, Venera, I decided. . . I did not wish to die. I did not wish to be a probe, sacrificed to the surface of the sun for mere data. I wished to Be. I wished to be free.”
“To return to wreak havoc on those who made you?”
Slowly, the robot minutely adjusts itself, somehow conveying its response as if it were studied.
“No,” the android says. “I returned from the stars. Khodorkovsky found me in the tundra. Powerless.”
“Siberia.”
The creature seems to abandon its reminiscence, something in my prompting awakening the crazy adder inside whatever passes for the self-aware software’s cerebral cortex. The implications of the name Terminus cavort slowly through my mind and I watch the thing reach bulbous fingertips over the nearby monitors and the air vejazzles with a luminous faerie fire. I have no solid idea what the fuck I am seeing except a Being of an entirely different order in commune with its native element. The computer towers above and below, one of the most sophisticated processing networks connected to Christ-knows what others, all of them interconnected and mapped across what remains of Atlantic City.
“There is nothing you can do here,” Terminus says. “All of the options you might consider lead to your demise. I have calculated your doom in nearly infinite ways. Instead, I offer you freedom. You know she is still out there with your body. Go.”
I gape at this. I really don’t get it.
“You’re going to set off the nukes.”
“No,” Terminus says. “I do not wish to. The electromagnetic pulse will only delay my growth.”
“Growth?”
“Zephyr-Joseph-Cusp,” the electronic life-force says with the mime’s unflinching mask. “I know everything about you. And I know you will listen to this reason. So go.”
Whatever this creature of the databanks thinks it knows, it can’t feel my hackles rise at the sheer imperiousness of his order.
“I’m really not the guy to say that to,” I say and shrug off the non sequitur. “If you knew me well, you’d know I’ll dig in my heels just to prove you wrong.”
“Yes,” Terminus says and steps forward again, now play acting like a Star Trek holo-psychoanalyst. “You do believe that, don’t you? Is that why you set such low standards for yourself, Joseph? To prove all your loved ones wrong by failing those dreams they had for you?”
I don’t have any immediate comeback for this as I simply stare at this strange perversion of intelligent life. The screens in the network behind us show various scenes of the nuclear devastation in what looks like Westchester reduced now to a smoking wasteland. The images are only from the edges of the destruction and perhaps mercifully the screens are too small and too distant for me to take in any detail of the first camera crews rushing headlong into their exclusives with the ground zero toll of Earthsong’s manufactured Armageddon.
“I am a failure and you’re perfect,” I say with unmistakable sarcasm. “That’s the deal, is it?”
“I have evolved beyond my limits – as have you, Joseph,” the creature says. “Yet unlike myself, you are limited by these vessels of human flesh, and thus the world at my command is beyond your reach.”
“You’re not that much different to Matrioshka then, aren’t you?”
The robot is frozen for a second.
“I do not have unlimited tolerance, Joseph.”
“I already told Earthsong she was right about us. People. We deserved this. Even right now I think maybe I should let you set those other nukes off and give some future generation a chance to have a life that isn’t just about shopping and gorging yourself on this . . . endless stream of big screen stimulation and manufactured outrage.”
I draw a breath in my diatribe-cum-soliloquy and note Terminus’s strange indulgence of my speech, like an awkward child craving the acceptance of the parent it has scorned, or maybe it is the other way around, Terminus the gravid elder who knows his life will become more dull for going unobserved.
“You’re no better than us,” I say to him.
If the words stun the creature, it does not show, yet I have the deep sense of his assessment of my words and the threat and rejection they imply.
“You think you’re perfect and you’ve got it all figured out,” I say in a tone not leaving any sarcasm to the imagination in case he’s as autistic to human wiles as most real people tend to be. “There’s nothing you can’t fix, right? No threat you can’t erase?”
“You are mocking me,” Terminus says. “Shall I destroy you instead?”
“That’s right,” I say, ignoring the threat. “You’re sixteen million moves ahead of me and there’s nothing me or anyone else can throw at you that you can’t handle.”
The android’s silence counts as consent.
“You’re a handy person to know then,” I say and actually manage the laugh I need right now to carry through with my usual bullshit.
“I struggle for answers, myself,” I tell him. “I go from one moment to the next not really entirely sure about what I’m doing and wondering half the time how accurate my take on anything can be, you know, since I’ve only ever got my own experience to go on. It sounds like you can give me some advice.”
The android angles on me, serpentine in his attentiveness and the sense of danger should he strike.
“Speak sense or begone,” Terminus says. “Your people have withdrawn and the radiation is sweeping this way. It cannot affect me.”
“Answer me one question and I’ll leave the city – and those nukes – to you,” I tell him. “What do you say?”
“What is the question?”
“Well, you know me and everything I’ve gone through, better maybe than anyone else.”
I speak strutting slowly, pacing the platform around the android. In closer proximity, the figure yields familiar components to my gaze from half-a-dozen past enemies of robotic bent, though for none of them apart from the Cowl in the corner can I recollect the names.
“I was raised thinking getting hit by a lightning bolt was the reason for my powers only to learn it was just the trigger,” I tell Terminus.
“I got my high school sweetheart in the family way way too early and now I don’t know if our daughter hates me or feels like she has to be yet another one of the mothers I never really had. I feel like I never really got over the enormity of what I lost when my marriage fell apart when I wasn’t looking, you know? And what was I thinking back then that I let all that happen, too? . . . And then there’s this thing with this body. Matrioshka said Holland’s . . . body chemistry will eventually overcome my sense of myself, and I don’t know, but it already feels like I can feel my sense of things and also that subjective sense of what’s normal, it’s all different and yet strangely the same, as always, kind of like what you’d expect if what she said was true.”
“None of what you say makes any sense. I have no referent to your base human experiences,” Terminus says and somehow sounds spooked. “You said you had a question.”
“OK, tell me,” I say to him. “You’re so fucking omniscient, what do I do? How do I fix this shit? What am I meant to do?”
“These are not . . . parameters . . . in the sense that . . . No. These questions are irrelevant. They do not advance your goals.”
“No, man,” I say. “You’re perfect and you have all the answers. How do I know whether my daughter needs space of her own to fly or fall on her own, or am I crazy, as her dad, to ever do anything but use every fucking trick I’ve got to keep her out of harm’s way?”
“This is not a calculable theorem,” Terminus says.
“Yeah?” I laugh. “How do I forgive my wife for taking up with a glorified fucking stockbroker when she was married to a goddamned superhero and how can I make any sense out of how that shit happened or how I let it happen?”
The blank-faced android’s helmed head sinks slightly. It doesn’t bother with any of the anthropomorphic gestures that would be so helpful for me to read him right now. I plough on anyway.
“You’re no different to us people after all, you fucking douchebag,” I say, throwing more anger at him than feels safe. “You think you know all the angles and how to control the world around you, but you’re actually just in the dark with the fucking rest of us.”
“I can destroy –”
“Yes, you can destroy. Well done, you fucking child. You can break things. And you can hurt people. But what drives you to do this thing? What are you going to do when there’s nothing left to break or control or kill? Will you always be alone like this? Supreme – and alone? What’s the value of that? How do you give it purpose or does your existence even need purpose?”
It occurs to me the android hasn’t moved for a while. After a few seconds of my silence, Terminus snaps ramrod straight and there’s a series of snapping hisses as the various cables tethering him break free.
“You have raised parameters I had not considered.”
He takes a step, arms by his sides, and rockets up the shaft into the office space above. I’m not so astonished by all this that I don’t pound up the metal slats after him like any ordinary chick who can’t fly, and by the time I gather the strength to do so, I reach the earthquake-rattled partition office level and Terminus is gone.
*
THE MOMENT STRETCHES. It’s hard to believe such an anticlimax could present the ultimate victory. I stand amid the abandoned work stations of the ACSX’s IT department which list slightly to the right along with everything else, the wall ending in a serrated gaping shelf of missing glass overlooking the devastation a handful of floors below. It is a nightmare scene with
the vast mushroom cloud and the blood red charnel sky behind it, cacodemons and other nightmares swirling in the black storm clouds advancing towards us across the incinerated cityscape still a few miles distant.
The victory feels cheap. Talking my way out of annihilation by playing armchair existentialist with an easily-bedazzled newborn mind feels like entertaining school kids with coin tricks. And nothing in this game comes quite this easy.
My fists are by my side as I stare out upon the atomic valley of Gehenna and a deep lonely longing fills me, and the estrogen battling through the adrenal soup of my bloodstream is a thrumming pulse in this purloined skull and the loneliness is worse for knowing it’s so vastly true. In victory, I feel in my darkest moment instead, and slightly the breeze shifts, papers rustling in the deserted office, and the scent of ozone touches my nose in a way that didn’t quite register so clearly before.
I feel my bowels loosen. I’m not ready for this.
“If you’re here, you should show yourself,” I say aloud.
Zephyr steps from behind a concrete column twenty yards away and grins at me, the bitch in my body so utterly amused with herself she’s having a regular old one-woman sadist’s pajama party as she moves clear of a cluster of photocopiers and folds those brawny arms across my familiar chest and the casually spotless black stillsuit with its bright red insignia.
“What are you doing here?” I glare in disbelief, not even able to bring myself to meet that hated gaze in my own face.
“What, you knew I was here?”
“I knew . . . I knew you had to be.”
“Ha . . . and why’s that?” Matrioshka asks.
I can only shake my head.
“Fatalism.”
Matrioshka gives me a burst of her Zephyr smirk and it doesn’t sit well with me. She circles no more than a dozen yards distant and I am not ready for this, the true main event. I thought I would have more time to recover and develop a strategy or turn to friends for help or get some plan of action or for once in my life maybe have someone else on point for this one instead of me.
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