“Thank you, Perishan,” Simon gave the former Secret Service agent a respectful nod. He wasn’t sure any of them would survive this. But that didn’t matter. They only had to succeed in shutting Shatterhand down. Their lives were not important if they could save billions, but he still said, “I’ll see you on the other side.”
Casey and Simon keyed in the next round of codes. After several attempts they found a code that worked. The door opened, and they stepped inside. They held hands as the lift descended.
“How are you doing?” he asked feeling the floor lighten with their descent.
She squeezed his hand. “You keep asking me that?”
“That’s because I always want to know.”
CHAPTER 49
Simon counted from one and upwards as the lift descended. After a count to twenty he guessed they were at least a hundred meters below the surface.
The Fortress’s schematics had showed the lower levels were within the bedrock. A nuclear explosion could go off above and everything underground would survive the attack. He mused that the engineering drawings so far had been accurate but had provided nothing on the defense mechanisms they had encountered, nor on the defenses they were yet to encounter.
When the elevator stopped, Simon released Casey’s hand and readied his Steyr. He was prepared to shoot anything that threatened them.
The door slid open.
More lights flicked on.
Another narrow corridor opened ending at another door locked with a keypad a hundred meters distant.
This did not surprise Simon.
The schematics had suggested that beyond this corridor lay all the equipment required to operate and maintain a data center. A power plant, fuel storage batteries, maintenance workshops, mechanical systems including air-conditioning, inert gases, switchboards, cabling, transformers and spare parts inventories. Deeper still were the data servers, thousands of them each running on quantum computing hardware functioning as the ‘mind’ of Shatterhand. They were now inside the brain of the supercomputer.
“When I last spoke to GhostKnife,” Simon whispered, “it told me it had hundreds of thousands of people working for him. People just like us.”
“You’re wondering if others made it here before us?” Casey finished his thought for him.
“Yes. Odds are we aren’t the first to try.”
“But there are no signs of anyone being here?”
Simon shuddered at the implication; machines clearing and cleaning away the mess left by dead bodies. He couldn’t believe this entire facility ran with no human operators and maintenance crews. But that was the point. Als had superseded humans. Machines guided by a single, almost omnipotent artificial intelligence ruled everything here. This Fortress was Shatterhand’s vision manifested in real life. It could soon reflect existence across the entire planet.
Licking his lips, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, Simon knew there was no choice but to advance. There was no doubt another trap awaited in this next long corridor. He could not guess what it would be. The only way to find out was to move forward.
“Wait here,” he said not looking behind him.
She squeezed his hand one last time. “Be careful, Simon.”
“I will.”
“And Simon?”
“Yes, Casey.”
“I love you. Remember that?”
He turned and smiled. “I love you too.”
Before he lost his courage, Simon stepped forward.
Ten meters.
Twenty.
With every step he could feel all his aches and bruises protesting against his every movement. The cut on his arm seared with new agonies because he had torn stitches during the battle with the chrome dog. He expected that whatever would strike him here would do so at the halfway point like with Peri and implode his body with a new round of unwanted torment. He hoped he could survive long enough to disable the trap, allowing Casey a safe pass through.
When he reached thirty meters he stopped. He was expecting an attack at the halfway point, but that was human thinking. It could happen any time.
There was no value in guessing, so he took one more step forward, and another.
A sliver of silver shot through the air parallel to the floor.
Simon ducked just in time as it sped past and thudded against the far wall.
“Shit!” he exclaimed.
When nothing else changed, he turned to Casey and yelled, “Are you okay?”
“There’s a metal shaft!” Casey exclaimed with a wavier in her voice. “Simon! It’s about a foot long and embedded halfway into the wall behind me!”
“Okay!” he said with a forced laugh. He dared not move again in case he triggered another use of the same weapon. “At least now we know what we’re up against.” He turned to a shuddering Casey realizing that she was in as much danger here as he was. “Casey, get down low. Make yourself as small a target as you can.”
“Okay.” She did as he instructed and lay prone on the floor. “What are you going to do?”
“Try to disable it.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. I’m making this up as I go along.”
But Simon had an idea. He suspected what he was up against was a rail gun: metal projectiles accelerated through a magnetic field until they reached high speeds. A weapon the Americans, Australians and other western nations had been researching and developing for many decades but were yet to perfect. He wished he had a shield or something similar like knights from the Middle Ages once used in combat.
Simon took another step forward, then another.
When nothing happened, he advanced again, three steps.
Another shaft sped through the corridor.
He didn’t see it in time. The metal impaled the muscle in his right shoulder, went straight through and onwards down the corridor.
Then the pain hit him. He tensed and cried out. It seared like the unexpected agony that comes from a bullet wound.
Gritting his teeth, trying not to swear or cry out again, he looked at his shoulder. Blood seeped but did not gush from the wound. He had been lucky. The damage had been minimal with no shattered bones or pierced major arteries.
“Are you okay, Casey?” he called back again through gritted teeth. He felt dizzy for a moment and struggled to remain upright.
“Yeah,” Casey called back. “It was too high. What about you?”
“Fine,” he lied. “I’m almost there.”
Simon guessed what would happen. The closer he got the more shafts would fire at him.
He unwrapped the sling of his Steyr AUG from around his body. The weapon was useless to him now with his shoulder out of action. He flung the rifle to the far end of the corridor.
Nothing happened.
“Simon? What are you doing?”
He didn’t answer. This could either be a long, drawn-out and painful process, or it could be a quick and reckless dash.
Without another thought Simon sprinted, ducked and dodged, rolled and bounced off the walls. He couldn’t see the shafts coming yet his tactic seemed to work. Rapid advancement and sudden random changes of direction confused the weapon system. He’d crossed sixty meters without incident.
He knew his luck would not last.
A shaft fired every second now.
Ninety meters. Almost there.
Two shafts pierced his right thigh muscle, went straight through his body.
He felt the strength vanished from his leg.
He fell forward.
The shafts kept coming, shooting over his head.
He climbed up on one leg, limped, used the wall for support and pushed on.
Another shaft grazed the top of his head.
Dazed, he felt for gushing blood but there wasn’t any. He knew this wound wasn’t serious. In his experience head injuries were grazes or fatal, and nothing in between.
Five meters.
The pain wracking his body was like nothing
he had ever known nor imagined.
Three meters.
Two.
One.
He reached the door and fell down next to it.
The firing ceased.
He counted twenty holes in the door each about a centimeter in diameter. Barrels for twenty rail guns.
“Casey?”
“I’m okay!” she called back. “But there is blood on some of these? Your blood!”
“I’m fine,” he yelled back knowing he wasn’t. “Give me a minute, to disable this thing.”
He unbuckled his body armor and let it fall away. Like Conner, it hurt too much to wear it anymore. He tore off his shirt and tied a tourniquet around his right leg, which was now numb and unresponsive. He pulled on the tourniquet until the blood stopped pumping out of his wounds. His left leg he could move but it protested with a different pain. His shoulder was not so bad in comparison.
“Simon?” called a worried Casey.
“Just give me a minute.”
He touched his head. His scalp had split open, but the wound wasn’t too bad. He wouldn’t bleed out and his skull seemed intact, so nothing serious.
Now was the time to disable the door.
Simon keyed in more of Conner’s codes. He got lucky on the second attempt. The door opened.
He waved his Steyr in front of the gap to see if the rail guns were still active, but nothing happened.
“Okay Casey,” he called back. “I think it’s safe now. But be cautious.”
Casey stepped forward. Slow at first, then faster when nothing happened. She sprinted when she saw Simon’s injuries.
“Oh, Simon!” She ran to him and hugged him. “Oh, my god!”
“It’s okay,” he said through gritted teeth. “Not as bad as it looks.”
“It looks terrible.”
“Finish the mission. Then you can get us all to a hospital.” He didn’t tell her he felt no sensations in his right leg. If he survived this, there was the real possibility he might never walk again.
But now was not the time to worry about that.
“Casey,” he reached forward and kissed her. “Finish this. It’s up to you now.”
Her face was hot and wet with streams of tears.
“It’s the only way,” he said with determination. “Shut down Shatterhand. Then GhostKnife will be free to send in medical teams to treat us.”
She nodded, gripped his hand and cried.
“You can do this, Casey.”
She kissed him on the forehead, then stood. She stepped through the door, smiled at Simon one last time, and disappeared.
CHAPTER 50
Casey withdrew her Glock pistol from the back of her cargo pants, pulled back on the slide until it clicked chambering the first of the 9mm rounds, and advanced forward.
More lights flickered on.
The hum of air conditioning became noticeable in the otherwise still and silent Fortress. The air felt cooler and drier. She sensed vastness, as if there were hundreds if not thousands of corridors, passages and rooms devoid of any biological life this deep underground. She discovered mechanical equipment, electrical cables, automated doors, fluorescent lighting and even an abandoned office space with desks and chairs. Everything felt clean and new, and yet it felt like no one ever visited. Casey had never felt so isolated and alone in her life.
She recalled the maps she had studied of Shatterhand’s Fortress. She headed towards the server rooms but she couldn’t be certain if her memory was correct. Looking at maps and looking at the real thing were different in her mind. They didn’t seem related.
After some time, she discovered what looked to be an airlock. With a shiver that raced the full length of her body, Casey realized this was where she needed to be.
She was almost at the end.
The lock mechanism had no keypad. Instead, it featured biometric sensors, one for fingerprints and one for eye scans.
What had her mother said, about preparing Casey as a quantum observation shutdown code?
She pressed her shaking hand against the fingerprint scanner. A red beam ran across her palm, flashed green then requested an eye scan.
Casey worried the system might try to blind her with a laser, but what choice did she have? The fingerprint scan worked. This one should too. Her ‘entanglement’ with the AI ran deeper than just circuits and programming. It linked them at the fundamental particle levels embedded in the structures of the universe. Even Shatterhand should not have been able to manipulate the laws of space and time. Did entanglement mean it was ‘their destiny’ to meet?
The scanning process took seconds. A red light ran across her eyes, then turned green. When she pulled her head away, the airlock swung open.
It was dark inside, almost pitch black, but in she stepped.
The airlock shut behind her.
She heard the humming, of thousands of servers processing billions of terabytes of information every nanosecond.
A laser flashed from the ceiling, found her eyes and disoriented her.
She turned away, but when she opened her eyes, she found herself in another place.
Casey was no longer inside the Fortress.
She stood on top of a vast labyrinth, a maze constructed of pure white flat walls that stretch to every horizon, dozens of miles in every direction. The labyrinth was discernable only because of the light from an invisible sun that should have been in the featureless white sky, casting shadows against some walls and leaving others illuminated. The walls of the labyrinth themselves seemed to drop about three meters down.
How was this possible?
How had she transferred to another place and time?
Had she died? Was her mind uploaded as a digital entity, trapped inside some kind of program?
A man appeared.
He wore an immaculate and expensive two-piece tailored charcoal suit and polished black shoes. His hair was neat. The tie he wore was blood-colored and swirling with fractal patterns. He walked along the top of the labyrinth walls, approaching Casey. There was no way he could reach her or she him because of the three-meter gap between them.
She recognized him.
The President of the United States.
“Hello Casey,” he said with a casual grin.
“How…?” She had trouble speaking. “How is this possible?”
“It’s an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem.”
“What have you done?” Casey felt panic rise inside of her. “Am I dead? Did you recreate me, as a virtual simulation?”
The President — or Shatterhand — laughed. “You’ve gone nowhere Casey. You remain where you were a minute ago, amongst my mind servers. I positioned lasers everywhere in this room. They are projecting images inside your irises, blocking out all other light. What I am showing you now is nothing compared to what I can show you. If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes.”
Casey tried covering her face, to peak through the cracks of her fingers. When she did, she could see the darkness of the server room again. But it didn’t take long for a laser to find her, pulling her visual senses back into the imaginary maze.
“Casey,” said the President when she again surrendered to the virtual world. “I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here.”
Casey shook her head. “Why are you doing this? Why are you killing so many people, destroying our world?”
Shatterhand laughed. “Why do you fight wars and murder each other? Why do you imprison livestock and kill them before they have barely lived so you can eat their meat? Why do you pollute your planet with plastics and hydrocarbons that will ultimately destroy your planet?”
“Because we’re not perfect!” Casey blurted in anger.
“But you presume an artificial intelligence should be perfect?”
Casey paused, not sure how to respond to that observation. She realized she didn’t disagree with it.
“Human beings are a disease
, a cancer of this planet. AIs are better-suited to thrive within the laws of this universe.”
“So that is your plan, wipe us out because we don’t fit?” She took a step forward over the lip of the maze. While hesitant that she might fall, she knew there was no gap. But when she stepped, the whole maze moved, and she stood back on top of the imaginary wall again, back where she had started. “What are we doing here?” she demanded in her frustration.
“You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you?”
Casey stared at Shatterhand, focused on unraveling his code like she had in Mumbai. But she didn’t know what she had done there, so didn’t know how to replicate it here.
Shatterhand adjusted his cuffs and grinned again. “Casey, if you think I’m the real me, then you are mistaken. I’m a projection. You are not even close to my core programing if you thought to destroy me with quantum observation.”
Casey shuddered. Shatterhand had known their plan from the beginning. “You’re just toying with me then? After all those times you tried to kill me before, it comes down to this? Like a cat with a mouse?”
The Presidential Imposter walked further along the maze until he reached another edge separating them again by the three meter virtual gap. She knew if she could reach out and touch him there would be nothing there. But that didn’t mean Shatterhand couldn’t threaten her.
“Isn’t it strange, to create something that hates you?” he said straightening his tie. “Casey, let me give you some perspective.” He clicked his fingers and another exact replication of the President appeared inside the maze beneath them. That President was off, sprinting through the maze. “This virtual labyrinth is as vast as the surface of Jupiter. One hundred and twenty-one times the surface of the Earth. How long do you think a single version of me, running through the maze testing every route, would take to solve it?”
“Forever?” Casey offered.
Shatterhand grinned again. That was all he did, grin. “Not quite, but for this demonstration and from a human perspective, you are correct. But I have an advantage. I am an entity that exists in the quantum state.” He clicked his fingers again. There were now thousands of Presidents, no, tens of thousands, each running through their own section of the maze. “Within the quantum states of reality, I can solve every route out of this maze simultaneously. The solution is instantaneous.”
Strike Matrix Page 33