Torment of Tantalus

by Bard Constantine

  She yelled and plunged the sharp end of the tactical pen deep into his side.

  The pressure released from her throat when he screamed and fell back, clutching his ribs. The entire sky flashed, brighter than daylight. It flared over everything, disintegrating the scene of destruction into glimmering motes. She shielded her eyes from the intensity of the blinding glare as she fell in a weightless sea of shimmering light…

  ∞Φ∞

  Screams rang in her ears.

  The world slowly took focus again. It was still bright, but the violent flare had vanished. She was on her back in a white hallway. Several figures surrounded her, writhing as if in agony. They were monstrosities, man-sized moth creatures that thrashed on the floor, screaming and clutching their heads. The facility trembled, rumbling as if in the midst of a massive earthquake. The lights flickered, bulbs popping in showers of sparks.

  The mothmen scrambled away, retreating down the hallway on all fours, wounded wings limp like battered sails. They crawled around the corner and vanished, trailed by their injured cries. Elena slowly picked herself up, staring after them in shock.

  It took a moment to notice Nathan. He sat against the wall a few feet away, leaned over and drenched with sweat. His hand was pressed against his side. Blood trickled from his fingers and pooled onto the floor.

  Elena looked at the crimson-stained tactical pen in her hand. Realization dawned.

  “Oh my God. Nathan…I’m so sorry. I was seeing things. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  His eyelids fluttered. Startled confusion flashed across his face when he recognized her. He looked afraid. She didn’t know what the mothmen had forced him to experience, but she understood how he felt.

  He tried to rise, wincing in pain. “You’re…sorry? I’m the one who needs to…apologize. I attacked you thinking you were…someone else.”

  “That was you?” She raised a hand to her bruised neck. “I thought…” Shaking her head, she knelt beside him. “Those things, they were playing with our minds. Deceiving us. Can you move?”

  “Can’t.” His teeth gritted. “It hurts. Think it punctured something. Get out of here, Elena. Find a way to catch up with Blackwell. I’ll only slow you down.” He glanced around when the hallway rattled again, reverberating like a subway rolled past them. “Wherever Guy and Michael are at, they’ve set something off. That’s why those creatures ran away. There’s no time. You have to get as far away as possible.”

  “Fine.” She quickly got up, dashed to the doorway, and struck the glass with the tactical pen’s window punch. It shattered into tiny cubed pieces. Reaching inside, she slid the bar back, unlocking the door.

  “But not without you.”

  She jogged over and seized him by the jacket. He groaned in pain when she pulled him up, slipping his arm around her shoulder. They limped toward the door.

  Nathan shook his head. “You should have listened. Blackwell will take off without us.”

  “No he won’t.”

  “How can you know that?”

  A grim smile touched her lips. “I have something he needs.”

  Chapter 25: Ozymandias

  Michael followed in Guy’s footsteps. They crept down the hall with weapons ready, checking every corner before turning. There was little mist the direction they went, indicating that the thick of the infiltration was behind them. The direction Nathan’s squad went. Michael tried not to think about it. There was nothing he could do for them, not until the main task was completed. Everything depended on the Aberration being shut down.

  Guy had his hand firmly on Stein’s collar, dragging him along. Stein was skittish, whining every chance he got about ‘the Gestalt’ and what it forced him to do. Hayes was close behind Michael, muttering under his breath.

  Guy glanced at Stein. “Where to next?”

  Stein pointed. “Just down the hall. Door at the end.”

  There were no footsteps, no sound to alert of the incoming threat. Shadows were the only indication of the black-outfitted guards that rounded the corner, sentient ink stains against the bright white of the hallway.

  It made targeting them all the easier. Michael didn’t even have to lift his rifle. Hayes and Guy’s swift response was a hail of gunfire, dropping the trio of guards. They fell without a sound, silent in death as they were in life.

  Hayes knelt down to check their vitals, snatching the tight fabric mask from one the guard’s heads.

  “Aw, man.”

  “What is it?”

  “I knew this dude. Jeremy Dunlap. Did a few details with him a while back. Chimera contractor. I guess he was on the security detail.” Hayes’ face twisted in revulsion. “He looks like he’s been dead for weeks. What are these?” He indicated the metallic contraptions fitted to Jeremy’s head and face in ways painful to look at. He had been altered into a blend of man and machine.

  “Bioroid,” Guy said. “Crude and outdated.”

  “What, like some kind of cyborg?” Hayes scrambled back as if the bioroid was contagious. “Where the hell did it come from?”

  “Must have been the work of a brilliant bioengineer. Or a mad scientist.” Michael looked at Stein. “Want to enlighten us?”

  Dr. Stein’s face turned surly. “The Gestalt forced my hand. They didn’t give me a choice.”

  “You built these things? Turned your own coworkers into robots?”

  “Bioroids,” Stein said. “Synthetic upgrades of our own biology. And of course they’re crude. The technology isn’t here yet. They were…training. Preparation for the pinnacle of my work.”

  “You mean the monster. Victor. The one that had you so scared that you locked yourself up to avoid him. Yeah, great work.”

  “The Gestalt turned him against me.” Stein’s face flushed with anger. “My own creation. I found it, you understand? The secret to immortality, the seed of life itself. Victor is proof. Proof of my mastery of the human genome. And the Gestalt took it from me.”

  “It wasn’t yours in the first place. Don’t tell me you could have accomplished your work without the aberrant source code. You were used, Stein. Blinded by ambition and ego, you didn’t see it coming. You turned on your staff, sacrificed them for nothing.”

  “I had no choice. They knew the risks…”

  “They were people, you sick bastard. People you knew. I don’t think you were ever coerced. You’re already corrupted. The Gestalt didn’t even have to force you to do anything.”

  Stein’s face flushed dark red. “You don’t understand. Your kind never does. You’re brutes whose world consists of following orders. You don’t originate your own ideas or conceive of a world greater than yourself. You can’t imagine the drive, the persistent need to answer the questions that elude the greatest minds.”

  “And just look at the great things that drive has compelled you to do.” Michael gestured to the fallen bioroids. “Look at them, for God’s sake.”

  Guy gestured impatiently. “We’re wasting time. Stein won’t grow a conscience in the next few minutes, and we have work to do.”

  They followed him down the hallway. Michael was sure it was his imagination, but the passage seemed to stretch for eternity. The door never appeared any closer, no matter how many steps they took. Their footsteps squeaked and echoed as they walked on and on, an invisible treadmill under their feet.

  “Hey, what is this?” Hayes looked as disoriented as Michael felt.

  “Ignore it. It’s an illusion.” Guy’s gaze never wavered, fixed on the door. He reached out, his arm extending like a rubber toy when he placed a hand against cool metallic surface. The delusion ended, snapping the hallway back into normal focus. “Dr. Stein. Would you be so kind as to use your entry key?”

  Stein placed his hand on the panel, giving Guy a nervous glance. “What exactly do you think you’ll find in here?”

  “Absolution.” Guy’s voice was so different that Michael had to take another look. He’d never heard hope from Guy before.

  Stein s
hook his head. “Then you’ve come to the wrong place.”

  Guy just looked at him. Stein sighed and tapped in his key code. The door slid open with a serpentine hiss, expelling jets of vapor.

  A bioroid stood in the doorway; black as pitch, still as a statue.

  For a long moment no one moved. The bioroid shifted its head from side to side as if scanning them. Its sightless gaze lingered longest on Guy.

  Michael’s finger tightened on the trigger of his gun.

  The bioroid turned and strode away on silent feet. Michael exchanged glances with Guy, who shrugged.

  “Let’s go.”

  “It’s got to be a trap.”

  “It’s definitely a trap. But what choice do we have?” He led the way into the control room.

  Michael’s mouth dropped open as they entered. The interior was completely different from the clean, streamlined look of the rest of the facility. It was a massive, nightmarish configuration of gunmetal steel platforms, winking lights, haphazardly positioned consoles, and ropes of cables and wires that hung from the towering constructs like vines from synthetic tree limbs. Moving figures were barely visible—more of the black-outfitted bioroids. They soundlessly moved and tended to unknown tasks on the ground and catwalks built into the walls and support frames.

  A rounded portal centered the room, framed by dark metallic latticework, a tower that stretched upward to heights so vast the apex was lost to sight. A massive violet-white cord of near-blinding energy crackled within the tower, pulsing with deep thrums that rattled the chamber. Michael had seen a similar phenomenon before on the roof the mill, but that instance seemed pitiful in the face of what was in front of him. The chamber was another world, a tribute to a cybernetic god who communed from a digital heaven. They were just ants, insects crawling among the whirring gears of a clock tower, ignorant of its grandiose mechanisms. All he knew was the energy being harnessed was beyond anything humanity had seen before.

  He was staring at the end of the world.

  “This is nuts.” Hayes stared around like a lost, frightened child. “Must be the center of that tower we saw outside. How do we stop something like this?”

  Michael shook his head, wincing. His ability to concentrate was severely challenged by the nearness of the energy tower. His eyes were pulled to the galvanic beam, his body tingled from head to toe. Hairs lifted from his arms and scalp, his mind flashed with static. For an instant the violet energy stream flashed, a million screaming faces shimmered within before disintegrating into flickers of brilliant light.

  “What is this place?”

  Dr. Stein whimpered from where he huddled behind Hayes. “The Threshold. Built directly over the anomaly in the ocean.”

  “The anomaly?”

  “The wormhole. It forms a bridge between our world and the Other side. Every occurrence of what you know as Aberrations has sprang from this point of origin. But without a proper Threshold, the effects are haphazard and chaotic. This was built to repair that error. Those on the Other side will enter our world without restriction, claiming this world for themselves.”

  “Not if we stop it.”

  “You fool. Do you think we’d be allowed in here if there were even a remote chance of that happening? Look around you. This can’t be stopped. It can’t even be understood.”

  “You don’t know Guy.”

  Stein gave Michael a pitying look. “If you think you do, you’re a bigger fool than I thought.”

  Michael glanced at Guy, who moved toward the main tower with the reverential approach of a proselyte to a massive idol.

  “There’s the nuke.”

  Guy approached the base of the massive turret, where a cylindrical apparatus was attached inside a housing connected by wires and suspended above a heavily armored tubular spout. The nuke looked so tiny, completely insignificant against all that encompassed it. Guy methodically checked the device before tapping his earpiece. The conversation crackled in Michael’s ear via his own headset.

  “Team two, this is Guy. Do you copy?”

  “Copy. This is Blackwell. We’ve been attacked. Charlie Foxtrot…is dead.”

  Michael heard Hayes groan from behind him. Guy accepted the news without a change of expression.

  “I’ve found the nuke. I need the access code to activate it.”

  “Thank God. The code is Delta One Alpha Niner Bravo Four Oscar Five Mike Bravo. You should get an option to set the timer. Max is fifteen minutes.”

  “Not a lot of time.”

  “Not meant to be. Set it and get out of there, Guy. We’ll meet you at the sub.”

  “If we’re not there, take off without us, understood?”

  There was only a brief pause at the other end. “Understood.”

  The channel went dead.

  Guy nodded to Michael and Hayes. “Better get going.”

  “You’re not coming with us?”

  Guy shook his head. “I’ll wait until you get to the sub before setting the timer. Should give you enough time to get clear.”

  “But…you’ll die.”

  Guy’s face remained impassive. “I was never a part of this world, Michael. This is where it ends for me. You should get going.”

  Hayes started for the door. “Sounds good to me. Come on, Michael.”

  Michael hesitated, unsure of why he felt so unsettled.

  Hayes gestured frantically. “Come on!”

  Michael stared at Guy, who stood like an effigy against the backdrop of the gargantuan tower of sizzling energy. Shadows advanced and were shoved back by the flashes of blazing light, a display of conflict that flickered around Guy, darkening and illuminating his stony face. Only his eyes seemed alive, glimmering with the terrible truth.

  Michael’s voice trembled. “You’re…not going to destroy the tower, are you?”

  Hayes stopped in his tracks. “What do you mean, he’s not gonna destroy it? He has to destroy it. We came in here to destroy it.”

  Michael took an apprehensive step toward the stranger he thought he knew. “A nuke is nothing compared to the raw power being housed in here right now. It won’t destroy the aberrant energy, much less destroy the Threshold.”

  “No.”

  “What are you doing, then?”

  “Opening the Threshold.”

  Michael flinched. The indifferently spoken words were like a searing lash across his face. “No. No, that’s not true, Guy.”

  Guy went on as if he didn’t hear Michael. “The nuke will be funneled to the wormhole on the ocean floor. The resulting explosion will destroy the barrier, allowing the entire stream of energy to pass through unhindered.” He pointed to the massive turret. “This tower will project the eruption into the atmosphere, where it will amalgamate with our world.”

  Hayes reached for his pistol. “The Aberration is controlling him. We have to take him out before it’s too late!”

  Michael motioned for Hayes to stand down, keeping his gaze fixed on Guy. “Amalgamate? Isn’t that what you’ve been fighting against? Don’t you Wardsmen prevent Aberrations from taking over the world?”

  “Aberrations, yes. But this isn’t an Aberration I’m talking about. Aberrations are chaotic eruptions of psionic waste, the worst of humanity’s mental condition. But there is a flip side: the DEIS code.”

  “DEIS code? The artificial intelligence?”

  “The source of the corrupted data from the Neuroverse. This purge will allow the untainted coding to emerge in the form of a powerful energy channel, synchronizing with our world and its inhabitants. The world will change, but the Cataclysm will be averted. The future will be altered, Michael. Maybe to the point where the Neuroverse doesn’t get destroyed. The threat from Aberrations will be over.”

  “I don’t believe it. You can’t be saying this. Not you. This is against everything you’ve fought for.”

  “Everything I’ve fought for?” Guy’s face twisted, revealing equal amounts of rage and pain. “What do you know about that, Michael? Wer
e you there when I faced unspeakable horrors, over and over again? Do you know what it’s like to skim across time, torn from one place to another like a plant pulled from its roots? Have you seen everyone you’ve known and cared about die in front of your eyes?”

  Michael stepped closer. “No. I don’t know what you’ve been through. I could never know. But I was there, Guy. I was with you when you risked everything to end an Aberration.”

  “This is the end.” Guy stabbed the air with a fierce gesture. “Right here, right now. I remember everything. Every moment of every life span, every memory amassed over eons of time. Do you know what that’s like?”

  He went on without waiting for an answer. “I’ve seen fires eat the world in their anger, seen the ocean stilled; without a ripple far as the eye could see. I’ve wept myself unconscious on top of cloud-capped mountains, unable to beg mercy of an unknown God. And I realized the truth.”

  His eyes glistened. “The past is…cobwebs. Cobwebs we adorn with dewdrops to make them glimmer in the light. The present is fleeting, singular moments gone too soon. All we have is the future. Always just out of our reach, tantalizing; inspiring us to reach for greater heights. The Aberrations threaten to destroy even that—forcing the future to consume the past. The only way to survive is to forge a new future, create order from this chaos.”

  Michael’s fingers dug into his scalp as he stared in dumbfounded shock. “Are you crazy? Don’t you know there will be catastrophic repercussions? I’m not a genius, but it’s simple physics—for every action there’s an equal reaction. You can’t just project immeasurable energy into the atmosphere without some sort of fallout.”

  “Fallout?” Guy pointed at the tower. “I’ve seen the end of all things. The panicked screams of billions ripple through my mind time and again, Michael. I’ve witnessed catastrophes this world has never seen. It has to stop. And if this is the only way to end it, I’m willing to accept the fallout.”

  Hayes whipped his pistol from the holster. “Yeah, maybe we aren’t. Call me selfish, but I like the world the way it is. You know—without nightmares coming to life and killing everyone.” He looked at Michael. “You gonna stand there, or help me put this dude down?”