by Eric Warren
“He’s using them. All of them as his personal army. Somehow he’s managed to get so strong he can control as many as he wants all at once.”
“It wasn’t always like that. Jairo arrived not long after the husks began attacking,” Mitsu said. “Takai and I were still in control of the building and all of a sudden they just started turning on us. It was only a few of them at first, but that number grew exponentially as time progressed. Had it not been for Jairo and the Peacekeepers, we would not have survived.” She paused, looking at each of them in turn. “What happened to you? Where did you go?”
“Are you under a communications blackout? Have you been cut off from accessing the comm grid?” Arista asked, ignoring her questions. Blu didn’t blame her; who would want to try and explain they’d been to an alternate universe?
“For the past few weeks, yes. But Kurt and the others have managed to relay what is happening out there, we have a makeshift comm system, you probably saw it when they were bringing you in.”
Arista glanced to Blu. Blu shrugged, she hadn’t seen any comm system.
“Visual,” Mitsu said. “They flashed us light signals from the ground. It’s why we’re up here. They can climb a rooftop and we can get a message from just about any part of the city.”
“Smart,” Blu said. She found the concept very exciting. The machines had created a new type of language; they had adapted. She couldn’t wait to get back to tell Dad. “What is the syntax? Do you have different colors? Are there scheduled message times or are they at random? What do you do in emergencies?”
“Blu,” Arista said.
“What about weather patterns, do they affect what you can see? Is there—?”
“Blu!”
She stopped talking. She’d done it again. “Sorry, I just get so excited. I can’t help it. Think about it, they’ve made their own language as an adaptation to their changing surroundings! Isn’t that incredible? It’s a hyper-reaction to their circumstances. I’d love to download some specs on the language, maybe get a translation matrix?”
“We don’t have time for that now,” Arista said. She turned back to Mitsu, who was staring at Blu. “We were hoping you could help us find Charlie.”
“This is ridiculous,” Jairo said, announcing himself to them again. “I will not be dictated terms by a couple of humans. We don’t have to kill them but I don’t have to help them either. Throw them back on the street, let them take their chances. The machine can stay with us.”
“Jairo,” Mitsu began.
“This is not up for debate. I am doing you a favor by not killing them,” Jairo said. “The humans have systematically exterminated us. Assisting them now is paramount to suicide.”
“I know what they did to you, I saw it,” Arista yelled. She’d tightened her hand into a fist again. But her earlier bluster had just been an empty threat, right? She wouldn’t take all of these machines out, would she?
“If you’re thinking about using that weapon of yours, keep in mind you’ll have to kill us all to get what you want. Then you still won’t be any closer to finding Charlie.”
Arista glanced at Mitsu, whose pity was plain on her face. “Can’t you do anything? Can’t you help?”
“I’m sorry, without the support of the Peacekeepers there isn’t much I alone can do.”
“But you and Takai, you make up two-thirds of the council.”
“And the Peacekeepers are loyal to Jairo. He saved them. They do what he asks.” She held her hands out in a placating gesture. “I wish there was we could help.”
“You and me both.” Arista turned her back on Mitsu and made her way for the door. Blu was right behind her, though she had a lingering wish to stay and examine some of the old volumes that lined the walls.
“Jonn?” Arista asked when they reached the door. He hadn’t moved from where he’d stood beside the other guards.
“It looks like he’d rather be with his own kind,” Jairo called to her, taking his seat on the platform again. “Next time don’t act so superior. It’s unbecoming.”
Arista gritted her teeth but Blu grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the door. “Leave him,” she whispered. She wasn’t sure why Jonn would rather stay with these people than come with them. But she wasn’t about to linger over it. They had an out and needed to take it.
Seething, Arista spun again and stomped out the door with Blu quick on her heels.
TWENTY-NINE
“Idiots!” Arista yelled, kicking a piece of stray debris. “They think they can do a better job taking him down, cause I’d like to see them try.”
Blu sat on the stairs to Hogo-Sha’s tower, glancing up at the giant glass building. The sun had finally come up and the streets were warming from the chilly night. “So what do we do?”
Arista shook her head and sat down beside her, throwing a nasty look at the two Peacekeepers who guarded the front doors on this side of the building. As soon as she and Blu had reached the elevators, they’d been met with a security team and escorted out.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Their kind of thinking is too small. If they don’t stop Charlie at the source he’ll never quit. He’ll make enough husks to overrun anything, even this tower. Imagine a pile of husks a thousand feet high.” She harrumphed. “Good luck surviving against that.”
“Do you think Jonn will stay with them?” Blu asked, watching the ground.
“I think Jonn saw an opportunity to get out of his promise to us and he took it. Can’t say I’m surprised.”
“I am,” Blu said. “I thought I was so sure about him, about his remorse over what he did to you. I thought he’d do anything to make it right again.”
Arista’s demeanor softened. “Don’t let it get to you. He was a good person once, but ever since Charlie got a hold of him it seems he’s been willing to change sides with the wind. I never fully trusted him, but I thought I could keep an eye on him until we got to our objective.” She made a fist with her artificial hand. “I guess it’s back to square one. I’ll have to do it myself.”
“If we can get to him,” Blu replied.
“It’s almost not even worth it. Should we just go back to Trymian, live the rest of our natural lives in the palace? Like a couple of princesses?” She couldn’t help but laugh at the idea. But after everything they’d done and everything she’d lost, it was almost preferable. Almost.
“You don’t mean that.” Blu chuckled. “You wouldn’t be able to sit still for more than a couple of days before you wanted to get back out here and continue the fight. Look at what you did back home. You had to organize all that money from Echo and distribute it when really you could have just sat back and done nothing.”
“There was never any guarantee the gate would work,” Arista said. “I had to be prepared.”
“You mean you had to stay busy.” Blu turned to her with her eyes searching.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Arista said, turning away. “I know I fucked up. I should have said something to him.”
“I wasn’t…I didn’t mean that,” Blu replied. “I just meant you’re not the kind of person who can sit around, waiting for someone to fix the problem for you.”
She mock-laughed. “Yeah, because everyone else gets it wrong.”
“See? You’re like super Type-A. You have to be doing something. So I don’t think a life of princess leisure will cut it for you.”
Arista leaned back on the step, allowing the bright sun to warm her skin. “No. You’re right. So how do we find him?”
“I’ve been thinking. What if we find one of the husks he’s controlling and subdue it? Not destroy, but instead disable it so I can get a look inside. I might be able to figure out how to locate him if the signal he’s projecting into the husk is strong enough.”
“And what keeps him from leaving the husk as soon as its captured? Or shutting the husk itself down?” Arista asked. Though she was skeptical, she sat up.
“Hmm. I guess we need some kind of…” S
he trailed off while staring at Arista’s arm. “…lock.” Arista glanced at her own arm, pulling the sleeve back. “If I can reverse the effect of the key, if instead of obliterating the internal code of a machine I can solidify it, I might even be able to draw Charlie to us. I could pull his consciousness out of wherever he’s hiding and trap it inside the husk we capture.”
Arista’s brow furrowed. “Do you really think that could work?”
Blu’s mouth turned down as she shrugged. “I have no idea, but it’s worth a shot. Then he’d be trapped in one body. He’d be much easier to destroy and we wouldn’t have to worry about him getting away again.”
“That’s…quite clever,” Arista replied, thinking it over. Was it really possible? Trapping Charlie in one body would solve most—if not all their problems. She could handle one body. Not to mention it would stop all the other simultaneous attacks across the world. “You know, I am really glad you decided to come along.”
Blu laughed. “Sure, you are, now. Back before you thought I wasn’t anything other than extra baggage for you to cart around.” She smiled but some of her words rang true.
“I didn’t want you getting hurt,” Arista admitted. “I knew I couldn’t protect you all the time here. I was selfish and didn’t want to leave you behind. And ultimately, I chose my selfishness over my better judgement.”
Blu arched an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“We could have made you stay if we’d really wanted to. But…” She stood, taking a deep breath and examining the streets around them. “I’m done trying to live other peoples’ lives for them. You wanted to come, then you got to come. I’m glad you didn’t have to leave your dad behind.”
“Me too,” Blu said. “Though I never thought he’d be brave enough to take a leap like that. He’s better in the background, working on stuff from the shadows. It isn’t like him to make rash decisions.”
“Whatever his reasoning, I’m glad. For you anyway.”
Blu stood as well. “Just for me? You sure any of that isn’t because you wanted him here too?”
“Okay, I think that’s enough for today,” Arista said, putting on a fake smile and descending the rest of the steps. “Where do we need to go to see if you can re-engineer this thing?”
“Coward,” Blu said, a smile in her voice. “I need a place with some precision tools. Somewhere I can examine it and perform some tests. It might be as easy as flipping a component or it might be as difficult as needing a bunch of different augmentations to make it work. Know anywhere like that?”
Arista sighed, turning back to the building. Her thoughts went back to the infirmary where she’d first met Mitsu, Takai and Jairo. It had an abundance of barely-used, sophisticated equipment. And while most of it was medical equipment, there had been a lot that could be easily modified or changed into something Blu could use for examination and testing. Not to mention it was secure and being inside the building had a low chance of being attacked by Charlie’s husks.
“Unfortunately, I do,” she replied, staring up at the giant needle in the sky.
THIRTY
The room was dark. No. It was nighttime, and the sky was dark. No. Neither of those was right. But the darkness crowded in, that much was for sure. There was no escaping the darkness. It had been wet, cold…and harsh. And then dark.
And then nothing.
An eternity of nothing. No time. No space. It was the absence of everything, except for thought. Thought remained in this place and it was thought that would drive someone mad. Thoughts of failure. Thoughts of second chances. Thoughts of opportunities wasted, and people forgotten. Thoughts of all the bad things in life, and all the good things. And the good things, those were the worst, because they could only remind you of what you had lost. What once was alive, vibrant and present was now gone and in its place was only an empty, black pit that took up the whole of existence.
It seemed to go on forever.
“Let’s try this again.”
A voice. No longer the absence of everything; something had penetrated this obsidian membrane. Something new, different, and not part of the whole. Something outside.
“He’s fighting us.”
“No, he’s fighting the upgrade. Pull back on the actuators and send in another pulse.”
Two. Two voices permeated now. It was something other than the whole, and that was all that mattered. Hope surged. If it was quashed the pit would only grow and consume. But if it could persist…
“Take this…damn him. Okay, I’m going back in. He’s coming back whether he wants to or not.” The voice was soft and familiar. Like a breeze on a spring day. A bright, vibrant, beautiful spring day. It was a voice that brought comfort. But there was something else.
It began as a pinprick of light. A tiny star, in the distance. But then it came rushing forward, like a sonic boom and all of a sudden, the darkness had been obliterated by the light. Sounds, smells, and textures flooded the senses. He became aware of himself.
He opened his eyes.
“There. Jesus. I’m exhausted.” The woman with the crimson hair and the freckles across her nose adjusted her glasses and sat back in a chair. She rubbed her eyes while another person came into view, reaching over him and out of sight. He felt something tug at the back of his mind.
“Ocular inputs are receiving,” the second person, dressed all in white, said.
“Auditory?” the woman with the glasses asked. A name came to him. Jessika.
“Affirmative.”
She stood again, adjusting her glasses again and leaned over him. “Frees, can you hear me? Do you know who I am?”
“Jessika Thorne,” a familiar voice replied.
She smiled. “His recognition protocol is in place. Let’s get the rest of him locked down before he gets too rowdy. It may take some time before he’s fully cognizant.”
“Jessika,” he said, testing the word out again, finding it came to him easier the second time. “What happened?”
“Let’s just say we’ve pulled off a minor miracle,” she replied, her eyes searching what he could only assume was his face. Did he even have a face?
“Give yourself some time. You were offline longer than any machine I know,” she replied. “Do you know who you are?”
“Mor—Frees,” he replied. “But I died.”
“Yeah, you kinda did,” she said. “Frees, where is Arista? Is she okay?”
“She’s…” The name rang familiar, and associated with it feelings of comfort, of home, of pleasantness and safety and wonder filled him. She was the other. She was his first natural thought. “She’s…safe.”
“Good enough,” Jessika said. She glanced up. “Let’s get the rest of him prepped. I want him fully functional in two hours.”
“Yes, ma’am,” three other voices Frees couldn’t see said.
She turned back to him. “Just relax and let your mind explore itself. It’s going to take you some time before you feel like yourself again.”
***
“Frees.”
He opened his eyes, taking in the room around him. Before he’d been too confused, too out of it to understand what he was seeing. All he could see was Jessika and the other person he didn’t know obscured behind a mask and a white zip-up suit. But now the room stretched above him. Frees was in what seemed to be a room with tiles on the walls and a bare ceiling with the exception of all the equipment attached to it. A bright adjustable light hung down, shining right in his face. His eyes adjusted to the input and the light dimmed, allowing him to inspect the other details within his visual field. Two other instruments were attached to the ceiling and he recognized neither, though they seemed to have cutting tools of some kind built on to the ends of them.
As he inspected them, attempting to determine their function a series of visual data flashed before his eyes, all of it relating to the function of his systems. As all the updates passed through his vision, he was surprised to learn his body was in remarkably good shape, especially f
or having been torn apart by a husk. He could still feel the sensation of having pieces of him ripped away as the husk dug into him, destroying his vital systems.
“Frees, can you hear me?”
He glanced over to see Jessika standing beside him, her hands in the pockets of her lab coat and her glasses slightly askew. “You’re alive,” he said, as if he was just now realizing it. “Arista’s been so worried.”
A smile broke out over her face. “That’s good. I wasn’t sure—well, it doesn’t matter. What matters is we get you back up on your feet. Can you sit up?”
It felt strange, but Frees managed to move without too much protest from his body. For as much as it had been through, including all the repairs, he had to admit it had held up well.
“Perfect,” Jessika said. “Have you performed a systems check? Can you give me a rundown of all your vitals?”
Frees scanned the items again, taking the time to correspond them with his different systems. Everything seemed in order, though some of the operational components were different than what he’d had before. He supposed they’d needed to do a lot of repair work. “Everything seems in order,” he said. “I’m surprised I’m even sitting here. The last thing I remember is going off-line as Arista ran through the gate.”
Jessika picked up a small device and pressed a button on the bottom, bringing up a transparent display in her hand. “Are you experiencing any integration issues? Any rejection?”
“Rejection?” he asked.
Her eyes flicked up to him then down again, hidden behind the large frame of the glasses. “I’ll be honest with you. We’ve never done this with an auto before. Only with husks. I wasn’t sure it would work.”
“What wouldn’t?” Frees asked, concerned.
She put the device away, the screen disappearing back into the base. “Frees. Look down.”
As he did, he had the vague sensation of being outside his body, as if he were studying someone else from a different point in the room. He was naked; not just missing any clothes but also missing any skin. He was back to his old self. And yet, he wasn’t.