Child of the Fall

by D Scott Johnson

  The gun nearly bucked out of his hand when he fired, but the custom-designed virus slug constructs June made still slammed into the monster, center mass. What was left of its eyes fixed Spencer with a glare that faded almost immediately, then the unduplicate’s avatar sloughed off layer by layer. When the slop filled the amphitheater, it overflowed and knocked Spencer off his feet, sweeping him into the rugged hex field. With each crash or tumble, his avatar’s damage meter filled more. If it exceeded, they’d lose their access and be locked out permanently.

  Finally it stopped. Spencer had been washed into a set of hexagons that formed a rough shelter. Everything hurt, he was covered in shit that smelled like death, but he had two bars left on his avatar’s damage meter. It was enough.

  When Spencer squelched up onto his feet, he thought he knew what would be at the bottom of the pit Abada had lived in, but he was wrong. It wasn’t a lake of oozing crap. It was a hole filled with probe constructs. Spencer had fried them, but it was very clear that someone, or something, had been sock-puppeting Abada this entire time.

  “Okay guys,” he said as he adjusted the locks. “You can come back in now. I think we have a new problem. June, if you have any specialized construct scanners, bring them all. I don’t know what I’m looking at here, maybe you will.” He couldn’t make the filth go away with a command. That would put very noticeable entries into the event logs of the plant’s network.

  “And bring water. And soap. Lots of it.”

  Chapter 50

  Tonya

  Spencer wasn’t kidding. It took two risky round trips to get enough soap and water construct to clean all evidence of Abada off his avatar and clear an area that would let June work with her scanners. They spent the time swapping stories, of her experiments and his misadventures. Tonya thought her tale of the three-eyed monsters would wow the audience. She didn’t count on Spencer already having his own story about them.

  “You killed the other two?”

  Tonya could tell Spencer wasn’t happy about it. “That makes it sound like I had a plan. I was fucking lucky. Stupid fucking lucky.”

  By now they had exited Abada’s realm and gathered in the network room Spencer and June had used to confront the AI the first time. Spencer was able to remove it from the list of places the guards were supposed to search, so it made for a safe room to hole up and plan their next moves. Tonya had to get word to Kim before morning. They needed to find a way to connect to the outside world.

  And that was a problem.

  On the screen June called up to plot their path to a likely access point was yet another monster. This one wasn’t a hairy brute. It was some kind of mist-covered thing. Sometimes it seemed solid, other times it was clearly disguising another thing underneath. Tonya got the impression of a hulking mass with too many legs to be a mammal, too few to be an insect. It curled tighter over a mound of rubble it had made for itself. It was so different from the two Tonya had seen walk out of the portal she would’ve never thought they were related, except the open box in the corner of the screen was clearly the one the creatures had brought with them through the portal. It must’ve been inside.

  Tonya turned to June. “Anna doesn’t know about this at all?”

  While she and Spencer had been cleaning—being a nurse, it took a lot more to shock her than a naked white boy, virtual or otherwise—June had been poring over the information Spencer had captured and taking readings of the realm.

  She shook her head. “I checked the logs and the altered source code. Abada hid it all from her, and I’m continuing that. Abada’s actions, and his transformation, aren’t related to the changes Anna made. My virus stopped him, but someone else had already introduced a specific infection into Abada’s code before we came along.”

  “Infection?” Edmund asked. Tonya could understand why. It would suck to gain consciousness only to lose it to some sort of…well, whatever it was they were looking at. “Am I at risk as well?”

  “Do you feel a sudden urge to protect that?” June asked him, indicating the thing on the screen.

  “The only sudden urge I have is to run screaming into the hills.”

  June called Spencer over, and they discussed the issue. It rapidly escalated past Tonya’s limited vocabulary. She could talk about multidimensional constructs and their implications for space and time with the best of them. But when it came to the nuts and bolts of AI and realmspace? Not her party.

  Not Edmund’s either. “I don’t care how it works, you gits. I want to know if I should be smothering myself with poultices or whatnot.”

  “There,” Spencer said as he pointed at a virtual screen full of gibberish code. “That’s where they did it.”

  Tonya shared a look with Edmund, who was using a window in their shared vision channel, then turned back to Spencer. “Did what?”

  “They hacked into the network through the spiral stack. It’s a universal hack that exploits the nature of the crystal lattice of a quantum computer rather than the source code itself.”

  Edmund slapped his forehead. “In English, you bloody, bollocksy lump of meat. Some of us use those, you know?”

  “It’s good news,” June said. “The hack will only work if you have physical access to the matrix host machines, and it’s a per-use thing. Think of it like an injection for humans.”

  “Bloody hell.” His holo vanished, and then there was a beep from a box on Spencer’s belt. Edmund’s voice came from it. “How can an alien virus be good news?”

  Spencer shook his head. “Just switch to named tunnels and you’ll be fine.”

  “Oh, I’ve done that, too. But I’d rather be in a place where it has to go through you before it can get to me. Who knows what else it’s capable of?”

  “Very brave, Edmund,” Spencer said.

  “Whatever gave you the impression I was brave? Bravery is for knights too stupid to understand that lances to the head are more about physics than armor. Bravery is for priests who know that Protestants are proponents of alternative heating. Bravery is for people who want to tell a queen no. I am none of those things. What I am is alive, and I want to stay that way for as long as possible. If that means living in a box strapped to your bony backside, so be it.”

  “Fine. It makes things easier if I don’t have to keep track of you.” He turned back to June and Tonya. “That doesn’t make them easy. The only route to a network access point we can use to reach Kim is on the other side of that thing’s lair.”

  “Any alternatives?” Tonya asked.

  “None good,” June replied. “Anna has repaired the inner network and has placed guards in the passageways.” She flashed up pictures of various intersections.

  “Robots?” Spencer asked. “Where are the people?”

  “Mostly on the surface. There aren’t that many people in the plant, period. Until Anna called them all in, at any rate.” Another picture showed that the influx that’d given Tonya so much trouble had slowed during the night but had not stopped.

  If they took over the robots, it would give them an army. “Can you control them with our new access?” Tonya asked.

  “I think so, but I need time.”

  “How much?”

  June shrugged. “If I’m lucky, an hour or so.”

  “I don’t trust luck. Worst case?”

  “No way to tell. Four hours, maybe eight.”

  Kim would be here in six hours, and Tonya had been around enough doctors to know hedging when she saw it. “You have three. If you haven’t made progress by then, we’ll need a different plan.” She turned to Spencer and pointed at the cannon strapped to his back. “How many shots does that thing hold?”

  “Seven. It’s loaded up, but ammo isn’t the problem. I have to get close.”

  “Define close.”

  “I’m a good shot, but not great. All I have is open sights. I get the shakes looking at that. Thirty feet if I need to hit a specific target. No more than one fifty if I want to hit anything at all. I need to be
on top of the target if I want to be sure. And I want to be sure. Sure kills monsters dead.”

  Leave him to say the perfect thing that would set Tonya’s nerves jangling. Nurses dealt with horror shows every day, but they only ever involved humans. She’d somehow managed to wedge the terror of facing an actual, for-real alien into the same place that let her ignore a rupture that splattered blood, or worse, across her face, but it wasn’t a comfortable fit. She didn’t know how Spencer was coping with it. June seemed be treating it as a puzzle to solve, but her hands were so large it was hard for her to hold them steady.

  Tonya concentrated on step one. The box the creature arrived in gave her a sense of how big it was: twice as long as Spencer’s maximum range. “Do you know the dimensions of the room, June?”

  A blueprint drew itself into existence in their shared vision channel. “About a hundred meters long and not quite half that wide. The ceiling varies, but it’s no less than fifty meters high in most places. I think we planned on turning it into a garage but had to shelve that plan after our budgets got cut. There’s one finished room cut into the side, otherwise it’s big and oval.”

  “How many ways in and out?”

  “Two are finished, but there are three others available.” The blueprints turned into a 3-D model that slowly began to rotate. The two finished entrances were on opposite ends of the cave with a walkway between them. The walls were blue while the monster—they were going monster hunting, and she had to hold it together—was green. Red tunnels drew into being and connected to the walls in three different places.

  “Do we have any rope?” Tonya asked.

  “No,” Spencer replied. “So that takes these two off the table.” He used his finger to turn them black. “But this one is still a candidate.” It was close enough to the floor for a climb to be realistic. “We can’t use it as a sniper spot, though. Too far away and at the wrong angle.”

  Tonya spun the model so they looked straight down at it, then sliced the ceiling off to get a clear view of the floor. The monster had parked itself in a shallow alcove near the center of the cave. There might be a way past it. “We don’t want to shoot it if we don’t have to.”

  Spencer snorted. “You didn’t see its buddy bite a human in half. These things are fucking dangerous.”

  Like most guys she knew, Spencer didn’t think much beyond fight or flight. There were always other options. “I’m also not saying we should walk up and say hi to it. If we’re careful,” she drew a path from their natural entrance to the finished exit with her finger, “we can follow this route to the exit.”

  “But then what?” Spencer asked.

  Tonya didn’t like the only answer she had. “Then we improvise. First, we get the message out.” She needed to coordinate next steps with Kim but couldn’t reach her from down here. “Then we deal with that. Maybe shoot it in the ass? I don’t know.”

  Edmund cleared his throat. “I’ve reconsidered my choice of host environment. I should be left behind with June. I’ll help her take over the robots. Yes. I should definitely be left behind here with June.”

  This time Tonya got to share a look with Spencer.

  “Well,” Edmund said, “don’t just stand there, you naked ape. Hand me over to June.”

  June gave them a wry smile as she took the box from Spencer. “His bravery notwithstanding, Edmund will be able to help. I’ll need it. You can’t use those phones to attach to this network, so you’ll be out of my range once you get to the cave.”

  Tonya turned to Spencer. “You wouldn’t happen to have another shotgun hidden away somewhere?”

  He shrugged. “Sorry.” He pulled the gun off his back. “How many times did you work with a Saiga in the realms?” He tossed it to her.

  She caught it like she’d done it a hundred times, which might be true. “Plenty.” Holding it gave her the surreal surge everyone got when they handled an object they’d only ever touched as a construct. She ejected the magazine, checked the action, clapped the two together, and tossed it back to Spencer. “Realspace recoil?”

  “You’ll get bruises if you’re not careful, but otherwise it’s fine.”

  Spencer would keep the gun, but Tonya could use it if she had to. “Who says you can’t learn anything from videogames?” With a steadiness that might be thirty percent authentic she said, “Okay, we’re off. June, call us if you get the robots online or if anything goes wrong.”

  “And what are we to do,” Edmund asked, “if anything goes wrong?”

  Tonya shrugged. Sometimes trolling Edmund was too easy. “Lock the door.”

  Spencer picked it up without missing a beat. “And hope they don’t have blasters.”

  “Bloody, bollocksy Americans. If I had a ha’penny for every time they referenced—”

  The door shut him off mid-rant.

  They grinned at each other for about ten strides. Spencer broke down first, spitting giggles as he walked. It wasn’t often Edmund walked straight into a reference trap, and that one was choice.

  The navigation arrow in their shared vision guided them to the entrance of the route that led to the cavern. “I’m glad this suit has knee pads,” she said. Rocks against jeans wouldn’t be fun, and it wasn’t like she was going to keep it after this was over. “Sorry I don’t have an extra pair.”

  “No worries. Where did you get all that stuff anyway?” he asked on a private phone channel as he clambered up to the crack in the wall.

  Using the phones made a lot of sense. No noise. “The plant is still a construction site. It wasn’t hard to gather up what I needed.”

  Spencer helped her up with a boost. “Wait,” he said as they crawled forward. “You said it was all in a box that you picked up. Why did you have to gather it up at all? Couldn’t you have left it to yourself?”

  “Two reasons. One, I still needed it to move around here after I left the care package.”

  “And two?”

  “That one’s a little harder to describe. I didn’t, and still don’t, want to screw with causality too much. I think it might be elastic, but that doesn’t mean I want to stretch it when I don’t have to.”

  “What does that mean?”

  This one took her a bit to get her head around, too. “It’s another paradox. If I got this suit from the box, and then put it back in the box to send back with me, then where did the suit come from?”

  He paused, then shook his head. “Fucked up.”

  “The thing was,” she said as she squeezed through a part of the passage that was narrow. Rocks scraped against her chest, “I could’ve done exactly that, but every time I tried, I failed. It was damn spooky.” Cyril hadn’t put some sort of hex on her to make her stand still in front of that portal. Once Tonya was in the right position, it seemed like the whole universe kept her from moving. “I can only imagine the compulsion that might hit someone trying to screw with an important event.”

  “It was an internal thing, not, like, a tree falling in your path?”

  “Stuff like that happened a couple of times, too. The call I made to you took four tries. It only worked when I promised myself I wouldn’t do anything funny and then didn’t. The first three failed. Technical glitches, a different one each time, just before I tried to cheat. It made me paranoid.”

  The conversation stopped as soon as they got close to the entrance of the cave. Spencer was right; they couldn’t see the creature from here. But that worked both ways. The next trick was getting down to the floor without making any noise.

  Tonya went down first, landing with a crunch that must’ve echoed up to the surface. After breathing a few times, though, Tonya knew she’d made barely a sound.

  With various signals and motions, Spencer made it down, too. They only needed to get across the—

  “Welcome, my strange C-7s. Please, come forward.”

  It was Abada’s voice.

  “Did you hear that?” she sent to Spencer.

  Eyes as round as dinner plates, Spencer nodded.<
br />
  “Please,” a different, tenor voice said. “I don’t have much time left. I’d like to see you up close.”

  Tonya fell to all fours, then crept forward, Spencer close behind. Monsters were supposed to stay in their damned corner, not sound like they were coming from everywhere.

  A husky female voice spoke next. “This is your language, yes? It would be disappointing if I got that wrong.”

  Crawling across muddy gravel was the worst. Cold and spiky. They had to stay out of its sightline.

  “I don’t need to see you,” Abada’s voice again, “although I’d like to. And you won’t progress without me.”

  Now Tonya could look into the nook the creature was resting in.

  It was empty. The pile of rocks it’d made was there, but no creature. No tracks either. She looked around frantically. Even the ceiling was empty.

  “You will stand.”

  They both had to duck rocks that fell from the ceiling.

  “Stand up,” said the tenor voice this time. “Please.”

  Tonya put three fingers up at Spencer and mouthed this many? He shrugged. Black people didn’t hang around with ghosts. When they did, it never ended well. Fine, they wouldn’t play its game. She scrabbled toward the exit.

  “I said,” the woman’s voice, “STAND UP!”

  A stalactite crashed to the ground in front of them, literally shaking floor.

  “Okay!” Tonya shouted as she stood up. “Fine! You win!” A frantic I’ll kill your ass if you don’t stand up with me look got Spencer to his feet. “What do you want?”

  “To see the creatures that could end it all.”

  Spencer said its buddies could bite a human in half. Tonya breathed deep and prayed. It didn’t help much.

  “So plain,” it said, cycling through the voices as it spoke. Not three then, a single creature with three voices. “We never thought this was possible. Any of this.”

  Tonya looked around, trying to find the source of the voice. Nothing.