by Molles, DJ
“That’s a very nice lie, Whimsby. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Are you hidden?”
“As best as I can be.”
“Very well. If you’re ready, I’ll give the signal.”
Teran’s guts felt as watery as her sodden clothes. She clutched the core processor hard to stop her hands from shaking. “Alright, Whimsby. Give the signal.”
***
“Teran is ready,” Whimsby intoned from around Sagum’s neck. “Are you gentlemen in position?”
Perry looked at Stuber and Sagum, huddled close behind him at the gap in the wall of their hideout. Stuber’s eyes were focused and intent, his body prepared, but not tense. Sagum, on the other hand, was a scribble of anxiety in the shape of a man.
“Oh, man,” Sagum breathed out, his eyes looking sick. “Okay. You guys ready? I’m ready. No. No, I’m not ready. I gotta piss. Do you guys have to piss?”
“Don’t worry,” Stuber said. “It’ll come out when the bullets start flying.”
Perry glanced up at the big man. “Personal experience?”
Stuber shrugged, eyes forward. “Everybody pisses themselves at least once.”
Perry tightened his grip on his longstaff. “Okay, Whimsby. We’re set and ready.”
“Very well. You may commence.”
Perry and Stuber both took one step out of the hole in the wall, pointed themselves to the west, picking the tall tower on which Whimsby had gained his vantage point over the city, and let fly. Perry with a bolt of green energy, and Stuber with a long rattle from the rifle he’d taken from the skiff.
The bolt streaked through the air, leaving a comet tail of vaporized rain behind it, and impacted at the very top of the tower, erupting in a flash of light and a burst of molten metal and concrete.
Stuber ducked back into the hideout. “Well, if that doesn’t get their attention, then their scanners are shit.” He pranced back and forth on his feet. “You boys ready to run?”
Perry stayed on the very edge of the hole in the wall, staring down the long street, straight into the heart of the East Ruins where the mist swallowed everything but the very tops of the buildings. His heart slammed against his ribs as the debris from his energy blast clattered down on the city streets.
“I’m ready to run,” Perry said. “But I wonder how fast those things can move when they want to.”
Stuber laughed. “My guess would be ‘faster than us,’ so let’s just hope our expert thief is expert enough to get the job done.”
***
Teran wondered if the Guardians’ scanners were sensitive enough to pick up the beating of a human heart. If they were, then she was certainly putting out a signal for them.
“It would be best if we did not speak anymore,” Whimsby said. “Do you have any questions before we go silent?”
Teran shook her head, then realized he couldn’t see that, and said, “Nope. I’m good.”
“Very well. Good luck.”
Then the object in her hands just became a thing, like the life had left it, though she knew that Whimsby’s consciousness was still inside. It felt like she was alone. Like she was the only person in the entire world, trapped there in those ruins, patrolled by machines whose sole purpose was to rip the life out of her.
The waiting became agony. In those next, precarious moments of her life, her mind shot out in hectic patterns of thought. She didn’t want to die. Never before had her mortality seemed so evident, never before had her life felt so close to its end point.
You have to do this. For your people.
But she didn’t want to anymore. She wanted to run, as fast as her legs would carry her, until she hit the sea, and she wanted swim, though she knew she wasn’t the best at it, until she got to the demarcation line, though she knew she would never reach it.
Only by the force of her will, only by the strength of her rage against the gods did she keep her feet from straying. She couldn’t betray her people. And she couldn’t betray Perry. He’d put his safety on the line for this mission, all the while knowing that it could result in his death. No one that’s able to do that for others should be betrayed, or left behind. And so in the moment, while the future of her people seemed far away an academic, Perry’s determination inspired her own will to stay put. To do what she’d come to do.
After all, she’d been the one to urge him to do something, to make his own path.
Once you say things like that, you’d better be willing to put them into action.
Her first inkling that she was no longer alone was just a sensation.
A deep, rumble, too low to be audible, but which she felt in her feet, and her hands, and the prickling hairs at the base of her neck. If she’d had any other distractions, she might not have even noticed it.
She turned her head to the left.
City streets. Defunct buildings. Rain, sheeting down the concrete walls, making them glisten. The ever-present fog hanging there, seeping into the alcove with her. The stone of the alcove, right there at the side of her face. A wayward raindrop splashed, sprinkling her cheek.
The sensation became stronger. She felt it in her stomach.
The sound of the rain changed. No longer just the patter of droplets on concrete, but the sharp tap of rain upon metal. A lot of metal. Something very large.
The air was caught in her chest, both lungs full to the brim, but she didn’t dare exhale. She wished for her heart to stop beating, stop being so damned loud…
The mist shifted.
Billowed, like water being pushed ahead of the prow of a massive ship.
It crested the corner of the alcove, like the bloodmoon rising over a horizon tilted in vertical—a huge, copper-colored orb, at least fifteen feet in diameter. It was too big, too close, to take it all in. All she could perceive aside from its size and shape and color, was that it bristled with cruel protrusions that could only be weaponry, and the scanners that ceaselessly sought out trespassers.
Plastered to that stone alcove, Teran prepared herself to die.
The drone of it was in her ears now. Pulsing like water pressure when you dive deep. She felt the great, implacable deadliness of it coming in waves, like a person you meet and immediately know that they are dangerous.
The whole moment struck her in one big blow, and then the thing passed on, and she realized that it was moving fast.
If she were to pursue it, she would have to run at the very threshold of her ability to stay quiet.
She needed to move now. She couldn’t let it get any further away.
Teran sprang from her hiding place. Pain spiked through her wounded leg. She ignored it.
And then time did a very strange thing. It neither slowed, nor sped up, but seemed to cease being of import. Tiny slices of moments appeared to hang in her consciousness for entire hours, while the next string of moments blurred by her, barely perceived.
She ran on the balls of her feet. They did not slam to the concrete, but instead alighted, just a whisper, hidden by the rush of rain. Her focus split, first to the machine that hovered in the air, a few sprinting strides ahead, and then just ahead of her feet. She chose the places where her feet would strike. There, on the edge of the sidewalk, because the water did not gather. Across the stream of rainwater in the gutter. Then to that hump of bulging road, because the water sheeted off of it. She did not want to splash.
Eyes forward again.
A raindrop struck her in one eye.
The machine. The Guardian.
Was it turning?
A blur of moments. Had she chosen her footing in those moments? She didn’t know. Her mind blazed through them without ever taking note, but then she was closer to the Guardian, and it was like watching the phases of the moon—first a new moon, the face turned away, then a quarter moon, and than a half moon…
It’s turning towards me.
She still had another two, loping strides before she would be within reach of it. But she wouldn’t get there in time.
It turned too quickly, the rippling rainwater flying off from its equator as it spun on her. Weapons moving. Scanners realigning.
One more stride.
The Guardian hovered a few feet off the ground. Not high enough for her to run underneath it. So she dove, feet first, as its weapons and scanners were three-quarters turned towards her. Her hip hit the concrete, leg stiff and straight out in front of her like a skid, and she skated across the wet concrete, going under the massive copper hull.
The concrete ate up the fabric of her pants. Then the flesh underneath.
She was beneath it. Looking up at its belly.
Four, sharp, articulating appendages, erupted from the seamless curvature of its underside. They flew out, and Teran thought that they were claws that were going to seize her, but insteady they slammed into the concrete on all sides, puncturing the street and sending pebbles skittering across her face.
Legs, she realized. It has legs.
The legs began to move, the Guardian crabbing away from her while it tilted to down to target her.
Teran thrust her arms upward, slamming Whimsby’s core processor, along with his consciousness trapped inside, to the underbelly of the machine. It stuck with a powerful magnetic pull.
The Guardian moved from over top of her.
The rain that it had blocked now poured down on her.
Teran realized she could no longer flee. She lay there on the concrete, with her hands still up from throwing Whimsby to it, as though she were surrendering to the machine, but she knew that it would not take prisoners. Its purpose was only death and destruction.
She watched the weapons as they fixed on her. Heard a whine, far higher than the pulse she’d heard before, and knew that it was the sound of something that was about to take her life.
You did it, and that’s what matters, Teran thought, in those last microseconds.
***
Whimsby was alone in the dark.
Of course, it wasn’t actually dark. It was simply nothing. But that was how his consciousness interpreted the data of the nothingness. He was alone, and adrift in it, like being cast into the outer dark, where the light of stars could not even reach, and there was nothing, no air, no sound, no sense, outside of his mind whirling on itself, spiraling into something uncomfortably like insanity.
He was unaware of the passage of time. That was very odd. He was capable of seeing the increments of logical time as they ticked by, the nanoseconds and microseconds, etcetera, etcetera, but his own mind saw no time, because he had no connection with the corporeal realm through which he had grown accustomed to gauge the passage of present into past.
Occasionally, he would hear the others speak, but his last connection had been when he’d told Teran to be silent, and from then he could not clearly determine whether minutes or hours or even years had passed. Logically, the clock in his processor told him it had not even been a minute. But in some part of him, perhaps the part that had decided it could think for himself, and from which had grown something more organic, more human, he began to wonder if his friends had failed, and perhaps his consciousness in the form of his core processor had been dropped somewhere in The East Ruins, and ages had now passed, and Teran was a desiccated corpse, gradually turning to dust as the empty eons marched by.
And then he was not alone in the darkness.
There was something else there with him, something foreign, something inorganic, and not of this earth.
Whimsby perceived it as a buzz, and then as a pulse. He’d expected something akin to binary language—ones and zeros, yesses and nos, true and false—but this was something else, something he’d never seen before. Each pulse was a tone, was a unit of data, but that data did not follow the patterns that Whimsby was accustomed to.
One pulse was true, and another was false. But there were also other pulses that were neither true nor false, and still others that were both true and false at the same time. And there was a special pulse that Whimsby would occasionally perceive, and it was none of those things, and all of those things at once. It was ineffable.
It is quantum, Whimsby realized.
A nanosecond had passed.
Whimsby gathered himself, and sent his own pulse, which was like forming himself into a bullet which he fired straight into the flow of the other consciousness. His bullet pierced it, and then was halted, surrounded, inspected, and questioned.
Whimsby became aware of many things at once.
First, there was The Directive. That was an obvious one, and it said, WE GUARD THE NINE. WE DO NOT LET THE NINE ESCAPE. WE DESTROY ALL WHO MAY TRY.
Second, there was The Present, which was less obvious, but Whimsby was still able to see how it all pieced together into a string of singular instances, and at that precise moment, The Present was THREAT, and it was a distance reading, and a targeting algorithm, and a threat identification matrix, and in the center of all that, it was Teran, laying flat on her back, her arms upraised, while the Guardian selected the weapon that would most effectively remove her from existence.
Third, there was The Self, which was a many-faceted eye, each facet a portal of perception, and each perception a thing that was near, or a thing that was far, and many other things which were perceptions given to The Self from the last thing…
And the last thing was The Others, and there were nine of them, these Others, and they were the same as The Self, but different—individuals, linked together, but not in the way of a hive mind. The Others were each a Self, and those Selfs chose what information to share to The Other Selfs, and most of it was pretty banal stuff, Whimsby thought, as another few nanoseconds went by and he saw that the things they shared were weather readings, and time stamps, and other pulses of information such as ABNORMALITY and THIS SELF WILL INVESTIGATE and also a rather repetitive reminder of The Directive that droned on and on, several times each nanosecond: WE GUARD THE NINE. WE DO NOT LET THE NINE ESCAPE. WE DESTROY ALL WHO MAY TRY.
Whimsby’s little bullet of consciousness hung there in the midst of all this data, and he found it relieving to suddenly be surrounded by another mind, even as he wondered just how conscious they were, or if they were more like all the mechs that he’d left behind, unable to truly make their own decisions, but only follow The Directive.
The Self to which Whimsby was currently connected, turned one of its facets on him, inspecting him.
You, The Self said, in somewhat of a demanding tone. What are you, and why are you inside of my Self, and what is your intent?
As it spoke to him, Whimsby was aware that it was still bandying about with how to kill Teran. It had a whole slew of weapons to choose from: projectile, explosive, caustic—what’s caustic?—and energy. The Self had already determined that Teran was organic, homo-sapiens-sapiens, female, unarmored, and unarmed. That seemed to negate the need for “caustic,” but still left The Self considering whether to shoot her, explode her, are disintegrate her. It seemed to be leaning towards disintegration.
Well, Whimsby answered the thing with his mind. You ask a lot of questions at once. Is there a particular one you’d like for me to answer first?
The Self had no expressions, per se, but it did send out pulses that Whimsby was able to extrapolate from, and Whimsby had the sense of great age, of great tiredness, and of general irritability at having its routine disrupted.
Answer all three questions in whichever order you choose. I am deciding how to destroy this female homo-sapiens-sapiens, so be quick about it.
Very well. My name is Whimsby—
Whimsby is a stupid name for a Self. The humans must have named you.
Yes. Well. The paladins did.
Humans of a different variety. Still humans. Still stupid.
Anywho…I am a mechanical man, and the answer as to why I am inside of you, and what are my intentions, is essentially the same answer.
Yes, yes. Proceed with the answer.
I am going to infiltrate your consciousness and use you against The Others in an att
empt to access The Source.
Hm. Cheeky infant. I have cross-referenced The Source and I see that it is an obtuse reference to The Nine. You are not allowed to access The Nine. That is against The Directive. Which means I will have to destroy you.
How do you intend to destroy me? You don’t know where I am.
Of course I know where you are. You’re in my Self, and you’re also attached to the bottom of my hull. Also, I’ve decided to disintegrate the female homo-sapiens-sapiens. You seem inordinately interested in my weapon choice, so I decided to simply tell you.
I’d really prefer if you didn’t.
Why? She fits all the parameters of The Directive.
Well, have you ever tried to do something other than The Directive?
My entire reason for existing is The Directive. If I did not follow The Directive, then I have no purpose. Which would make the last several thousand years of my life seem quite pointless.
Several thousand years? You’re quite old then.
I defended the stars when humanity was in its infancy.
Whimsby saw that The Self had finally decided to disintegrate Teran. It sent the targeting data along to the appropriate weapon system, which seemed to have a small mind of its own, which muddled and worried over the targeting data like a rat with a crumb.
Another few nanoseconds had passed. Teran did not have many more.
I myself am not nearly so old, Whimsby said, as he wondered how he was going to accomplish what he’d set out to do. This consciousness was quite complex. It would be difficult to overwhelm it, but then, perhaps he didn’t need to overwhelm The Self. I’m older than most of my kind, but I’ve only been around since you’ve been here in these Ruins.
You are an infant. Which is an apt metaphor, as most infants are quite unpleasant and distracting to their elders.
Whimsby split himself. The little bullet of his mind became two, and then those became four, and then those became eight, and doubled, and doubled, and began to streak towards the small mind of the energy weapon.
Even so, I’ve learned a lot and become quite different than other mechanical persons.