Post-Human 5 Book Boxed-Set: (Limited Edition) (Plus Book 6 Preview Chapters)

by David Simpson

  Thel looked incredulous as she replied, “What do you think he’s doing? He’s trying to kill us!”

  “But why wouldn’t he just…” He paused as he looked to the A.I. for guidance. “Why wouldn’t he just crush us?”

  “The answer to that question can wait,” the A.I. replied urgently. “The priority is for us to stop this car from careening into an object at a high rate of speed and...”

  The A.I. stopped midsentence as the car roof suddenly became transparent, a feature that wasn’t activated by any of the three passengers in the car. The trio looked upward to see the candidate looming over them, flying like a vulture, circling as it watched the proceedings below.

  The A.I. turned to see a monolithic structure that he and James instantly recognized as the bridge that connected the north shore mountains to the downtown core of the rain-drenched city. The candidate appeared to be guiding them toward it.

  “I have a very bad feeling about this,” the A.I. uttered.

  “We’ve got to stop this car,” James whispered, his face instantly draining of color.

  “What? What’s going on?” Thel asked, examining the shared expressions of foreboding on their faces.

  James looked her in the eye as he swallowed back his fear to speak. “We need to stop this car now.” He lunged forward toward the cockpit of the car, spinning the seat next to Thel so he was in the driver’s position. He began pressing buttons on the dashboard. “We’re physically locked out of the car’s systems,” James informed his companions. “I can’t get the steering wheel to engage!”

  “And the door locks aren’t functioning either!” Thel shouted as she tried to manually open the doors. “Neither are the windows!”

  Suddenly, an idea flashed into the A.I.’s mind. He began to speak as he turned himself around and searched for the release button on the back seat. “Unless the coding of the sim changed, the car may still be working based on the model of real electric cars in the first half of the twentieth century.”

  “What are you doing?” Thel asked him.

  “If we can access the trunk, we may be able to find an object James can use to disable the onboard computer and cut power to the A/C motors.”

  Thel jumped into action, feeling with her fingers around the lining of the back seats, searching for a lever. “Is this it?” she asked as she pressed a small red button. The backs of the seats lowered, as if to answer her question.

  The A.I. pulled the seats all the way down, and then thrust his body toward the trunk, groping for any sort of tool he could toss to James to help him destroy the car’s onboard computer system.

  For his part, James punched and pounded the dash, trying with all his might to puncture the plastic paneling on the dash so he could access the wiring underneath. Even after his knuckles became bloodied, the durable dash was barely scuffed.

  “Do you see anything?” Thel asked the A.I., terrified as the car sped, dangerously fast, onto the onramp leading to the bridge deck.

  “I do!” the A.I. called back. “There’s a tire iron, but it’s screwed into place.”

  “Can you loosen the screws?”

  “I-I don’t think so,” the A.I. replied, the terror finally overcoming him as his hands shook, his fingers unable to grasp the cold, cruel screws, the sweat from his fingertips making the work impossible. I’m just a man now, he thought, unable to block the notion. I can’t save them...or me.

  James stopped pounding the dash as he began to understand the sadistic logic the candidate was employing. The bridge appeared to be fifty meters above the water at its highest point, and they were quickly speeding up the incline. Fifty meters was right on the edge of being survivable if their car were to careen over the edge, off the bridge. From that height, hitting the water might be like hitting concrete if the fall was sharp enough. “I think…” James began, but his lips had difficulty forming the words as the adrenaline shook him, the fear caused tremors throughout his body. “I think we better brace for impact.”

  The A.I. gave up his attempt to pry the tire iron free and grabbed Thel’s arm, pulling her down to the floor of the cab. “Get flat,” he spoke.

  “Oh God,” Thel whispered as she realized there’d be no saving of the day, no heroic rescue just in time.

  “Thel,” James said over his shoulder as they approached what he realized could be the end of their matrix patterns, the end of their conscious lives, “I love you.”

  “I love you too!”

  A pre-programmed violent turn of the car’s wheels jerked the car violently to the right, causing it to cross into the oncoming lanes before impacting the guardrail, the left front side hitting first, the momentum threatened to flip the car into a roll. The driver’s side airbag inflated and cushioned James from the worst effects of the initial collision, but the vehicle momentum, with the added lift of the guardrail, caused the car to flip up and over the safety barrier, turning it upside before, terrifyingly, the gravity seemed to seep out of the car interior.

  James’s eyes widened as the front windshield revealed a horrifying kaleidoscope of blurry visions: city lights, an inverted view of the bridge, the north shore mountains, and, finally, the nearly black water below. “We’re falling! For Christ’s sake! Hang on!”

  PART 2

  1

  “I never thought anything could make me believe in a god, but Craig, for you to be here now, for it to have been you who walked through that Planck portal...what are the chances?”

  “I-I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” Old-timer uttered in reply as he looked down, disbelieving, at Samantha’s wet eyes, glistening up at him, not a trace of anything impure or deceptive in her earnest expression of love.

  “That makes two of us,” Samantha replied, a brief, disbelieving laugh interrupting the soft crying from her joy. She shook her head before the look of happiness was replaced with a sudden onset of pain. “Craig, I thought you were gone forever. I didn’t think...I thought I’d never see you again!”

  Old-timer wasn’t sure what to say. In fact, he still wasn’t certain he was even alive. He narrowed his eyes to peer into the nothingness from which Samantha had emerged. Then he turned back to make sure his friends were still there, still standing on the Planck platform, and he was relieved to see that they were. “Where is this?” he asked as he turned back to Samantha. “Where am I?”

  “The void,” Samantha replied flatly, as if common sense should have told him so. “Don’t you remember?” she asked, suddenly studying his eyes, seemingly scrutinizing every twitch of his eyelids, every dilation of his pupils. “We talked about this,” she said, emphasizing each syllable in an effort to reach his memory.

  “I-I—”

  “It’s not him, Sam,” said another familiar voice, and an instant later, Aldous Gibson appeared from out of the blackness.

  Though Old-timer saw no light source, the figures were plain to see once they chose to appear.

  “Use your reason,” Aldous continued. “He came from the portal.” He pointed her to the Planck platform, where Rich and Djanet were frantically trying to rouse Old-timer’s crumpled form.

  “You can’t know that,” Sam replied, turning back to Old-timer, desperation in her eyes. “You don’t know what’s happened out there. It could be him. Maybe he entered Universe X and then—”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” Aldous replied, his tone sympathetic as he laid eyes on Old-timer. He gestured with his hand. “Go ahead. Ask him.”

  Samantha looked up at Old-timer and grasped his hands tightly as she prepared to speak. “Craig, it is you, isn’t it? You remember me, right? You’ve come back?”

  “I remember you,” Old-timer answered, causing Samantha’s face to light up for an instant before he quashed all hope with his follow up: “But I’m not him. I’m not from this universe.”

  Her face fell, and she abruptly let go of his hands as the hurt suddenly rushed back in. She shook her head, trembling as she stepped back. “You’re not...you�
��re...”

  Aldous put his arm around her and pulled her into his chest, trying in vain to comfort a loss that he knew could never truly be comforted.

  “I-I’m sorry, Sam,” Old-timer offered. His arms fell to his sides, as he was entirely helpless.

  Aldous’s eyes narrowed and locked on the alien entity before him.

  “Am I... Is the me from this universe…dead?” Old-timer finally asked.

  Aldous nodded. “All too recently, I’m afraid. Your appearance here has reopened a very fresh wound.”

  “But how?” Old-timer asked. “I mean, how did it happen?”

  Aldous shook his head, not sure how to even begin such a complex answer. “It was—” he began, only to be cut off by yet a third voice echoing from the void.

  “You died in the most heroic way a soldier can, Doc,” Colonel Paine said. “You died trying to save us all.”

  2

  “Don’t lock your arms!” the A.I. called out, struggling to speak as the g-force pulled his neck painfully while the car entered a flat spin, thankfully right side up. “Protect your head!”

  Thel tried to put her arms up around her head, but the centrifugal force was forcing her to flatten, causing her arms to reach out to the passenger side of the vehicle.

  James kept his place in the driver’s seat, with his arms extended against the dash and his elbows unlocked. The airbag had mostly deflated, and would do them no good when they collided with the surface. “We’re gonna hit, but we can survive this! Stay—”

  Before another urgent instruction could be called out, the car impacted with the water. The back right side hit first, causing the vehicle to lurch onto its side. As it became submerged, the interior quickly grew darker, but the onboard electrical system remained active, and lights in the dash glowed green and red, giving off some faint light by which to see.

  The A.I. and Thel had had the wind knocked out of them, but they remained conscious as the car’s buoyancy brought it violently bouncing back to the surface, where it bobbed in the frothing aftermath of the impact and turned right side up.

  “Uhn…” Thel moaned as she looked forward, searching for signs of life. “James?” she said weakly, struggling to find her own breath.

  The A.I. was already working on an escape plan, even as the car began taking on water. He lunged into the trunk and once again tried to turn the screws to free the tire iron, but after wasting a few precious seconds, desperately twisting until his fingertips were bloody, he was convinced that the screws were just too tight. He reemerged into the main cabin.

  Thel was desperately trying to rouse James. He was still alive, but had hit his head against the dashboard after the airbag had deflated, leaving his forehead bloodied, a gash raining crimson rivers of blood down the left side of his face.

  The A.I. considered trying to tear the headrest of one of the front seats apart, betting that prying the metal extender free would be far easier than trying to unscrew the tire iron. The metal piece might be strong enough, he surmised. It could break the glass.

  But then, suddenly, he felt a presence above him, a presence he felt he was somehow uncannily connected too. He craned his stiff neck upward and saw the candidate hovering, staring down at the car as it bobbed in the dark, suffocating abyss that was slowly swallowing them whole, like a snake devouring a rodent, its hind legs still struggling futilely, even though the cruel outcome was already decided.

  “He’s watching us,” the A.I. stated, alerting Thel.

  She quickly looked up. “Why?” Thel demanded. “I thought this guy was supposed to be the savior for humanity! But he gets off by watching people drown?”

  “There may be more to it than that,” the A.I. replied, “but this much is certain. We won’t be able to escape until we’re no longer in his line of sight.”

  “What are you talking about? We have to get out of here!” Thel protested. “This car’s filling up fast! We’ll be underwater in two minutes if we don’t—”

  “Yes,” the A.I. conceded, keeping a watchful eye on the looming figure floating just meters above them, watching them through the transparent roof. “We’re going to go under. That’s when we’ll make our move.”

  3

  “The name’s Colonel Paine,” he said, giving a slight salute before extending his hand for Old-timer to shake as he strode toward him. “That’s in case we’ve never met, that is,” he said with a smile.

  Old-timer looked at the colonel’s hand, outstretched in a gesture of friendly greeting. It was the hand of the man who’d decapitated his wife.

  And yet, it wasn’t the same hand at all.

  The other hand had been constructed of a carbon fiber composite and it appeared metallic and clawed—inhuman. But the hand currently extended to him in friendly greeting was that of a biological person. Old-timer looked up at the steely blue eyes, completely organic and not the cybernetic ones of the murderer who’d taken so much from him. This was not the Purist super soldier Old-timer remembered in his night terrors, night terrors he still experienced all those years later. “Paine?”

  “That’s right,” Paine said. He was still smiling, but his eyes revealed a slight confusion, now that his gesture was being rebuffed. “You all right, soldier?”

  “Soldier?” Old-timer uttered, stepping back. “I-I mean, uh...Craig was a soldier here?”

  “Bravest man I ever knew,” Paine confirmed, keeping his hand outstretched, determined not to let it fall before the gesture was returned.

  Old-timer finally reached out apprehensively, as though caught in a nightmare, and shook Paine’s hand.

  “You seem a little…” Paine paused for a moment, searching for the right words. “You seem weirded out. Understandably, of course,” he concluded as he completed the handshake.

  “Yeah, you could say that,” Old-timer replied. “This place...Sam called it the void. What is it?”

  “This little hideaway?” Paine replied sardonically as he looked up and surveyed the perfect nothing in which they stood. A cigar seemed to appear out of nowhere and was suddenly in his grasp, and an equally unexpected match was suddenly struck to light it. Paine took a few puffs before he continued, “This is all that’s left.”

  “What do you mean? All that’s left?”

  “What he means,” Aldous cut back in, still holding a silent Samantha with his arm around her shoulder, “is that you’re looking at the only three survivors of this universe—a universe that can trace its demise back to the day when intruders from your universe took it upon themselves to attack us and then, quite inexplicably, leave behind technology that was decades ahead of anything in our world.”

  “And decades beyond what we could control,” Paine summarized. Then he addressed Old-timer directly. “And, while you might think we’d be a little on the pissed off side about all that, we’re not looking for revenge. Do you know why?”

  Old-timer could hardly breathe. Is this the moment I go insane? he asked himself. Is this what breaks me? If I’ve gone insane already, would I even know it?

  “We’re not angry with you,” Paine continued, “because what goes around, comes around, and the technology you unleashed here, the tech responsible for destroying innumerable lives throughout our universe, isn’t finished killing.”

  “What do you mean?” Old-timer asked, trying to focus his eyes. The shock had nearly overwhelmed him and Paine’s foreboding words seemed to grip everything within earshot with ice.

  “Your universe is its big prize,” Paine related coldly, “and unless you ready yourselves—and in a hurry—your universe is going to be just as erased as we were.”

  4

  “WAKE UP!” Thel shouted as she vigorously slapped James’s cheek in an effort to keep him from passing out. His head was bobbing up and down as though he were drunk. Thel turned to the A.I. “If we don’t break the windows now, we’re going to die!”

  She helped James get out of the driver’s seat and he stooped over, trying to regain his footing in
side the cabin of the car as it quickly filled with water that was only a few degrees above freezing. Like a boxer trying to beat the ten-count, he wobbled on rubberized legs.

  The A.I. took his eyes off the candidate, who was still visibly looming above them in the darkness, and helped Thel guide James to the back seat. There, the three of them knelt in water that was nearly waist-deep.

  “We have to remain calm,” the A.I. said, controlling his own fear as their circumstances deteriorated rapidly. “The more panicked we are, the more quickly we’ll use up oxygen.”

  “This is ridiculous!” Thel shouted back. “There is no oxygen here! Why can’t we get out of this sim?”

  “For all intents and purposes, there is oxygen here, Thel,” the A.I. replied emphatically, “and your simulated body needs it to survive in this simulated world. And if your matrix pattern is harmed in the sim, there’s no guarantee we’ll ever be able to resuscitate your body in the real world. Do you understand? We have to survive here if we want to survive in the real world, and to survive here, we have to remain calm.”

  Thel’s eyes were distraught as she struggled to keep James from tumbling forward, passing out into the water.

  The A.I. continued, speaking slowly, careful to enunciate every word so Thel couldn’t misunderstand. “We’ll figure out the whys and hows once we’ve survived this immediate predicament. In the meantime, I need you to listen to me.”

  “Okay.” Thel nodded, trying in earnest to calm herself as the sound of the water rushing in and the air rushing out of the interior increased.

  “We can’t smash a window. I tried to free the tire iron, but that’s impossible. The locks are also frozen and beyond our ability to manipulate them. Even if we could unlock them, the doors would be impossible to open until the pressure inside and outside of the car equalizes.”