by J M Guillen
“The Spire.” I rubbed my hand through my scruff.
I had never heard of it.
An odd title, completely unlike any other Facility location. When combined with the aberrant gore on the walls and floor and the bizarre numerics—
Fivvve… Three-ee-ee… Sssyst-em Del-ta onnnline… Ff-hor…
—well, now we’d stepped past odd and straight into eerie.
Remembering the schemata on the wall and the slender tower at the center of them, I shook my head and tried another tack.
“What is the location and purpose of The Spire?”
The blue lights on the platform below the orb darkened.
INFORMATION CLASSIFIED. DESIGNATE CLEARANCE REQUIRED.
“I’m pretty sure the Designates know I’m here.” I sighed and considered switching off my comm. Perhaps just a moment free from the droning numbers would help me think.
I turned to another of the screens, reaching out to use the tactical interface. When I felt the gentle buzzing sensation beneath my fingertips, I slid the image to the left, as if turning a page.
This brought up new data that also made little sense. A diagram of that same tower pulsed a light green as it hovered in front of my eyes. As I studied it, I realized that the image lacked several key bits, almost as if parts of the tower itself weren’t on telemetry.
“That’s odd.” I peered closer, skewing my mouth in thought. “Why would—?”
A razor-sharp spike tore through my fancy quasi-steel jacket and into the meat of my left shoulder with a blaze of scarlet agony.
“Fuck!” I screamed, staggering backward. Animal panic and adrenaline burned in my veins. With gaping incredulity, I glowered up at the silhouette standing at the edge of the door, raw fury in my eyes.
A silhouette stood against the red light, a ragged shadow with a massive piece of equipment on his back.
An Artisan Asset?
I could only assume that I hadn’t heard the trademark WHUF of the Tangler because I had been inundated with a merry circus of meaningless numbers in my mind.
“What the hell, man?” I reached for the spike, which had torn into the upper part of my shoulder.
Before I had moved my hand an centimeter, the spike had begun to heat up.
Oh, fuck that. More than once, I had seen Wyatt crank up his spikes to hundreds of degrees in a matter of seconds. I didn’t know why this Artisan had seen fit to attack me, but I wasn’t playing that game.
I had gear of my own.
Shutting down my comm, I engaged the Spectre. A cold, electric tingle capered in my Crown.
In an instant, I was completely intangible.
I knew that the Artisan could still see me, but I had faded to a blurred version of myself. The spike clattered to the ground, and I stepped away from it. I couldn’t know how the heat would affect me in a non-corporeal form, but I didn’t want to find out.
The Artisan gazed at the spot where his spike had fallen, his movements slow and stupefied. I leapt across the room toward him, wondering how best to time my attack. I didn’t understand many things about the Spectre, such as how it knew what qualified as my gear or the floor—
WHUF. The Artisan fired again as he fully entered the room.
I must admit that I grimaced as the spike pierced my incorporeal body, creating an odd, shivering sensation as it passed through. Then the spike embedded itself into one of the schemata behind me.
As the first spike began to incandesce to a dull yellow, I hurled myself toward the Artisan, drawing back my fist. I disengaged the Spectre just as I got close, aiming my fist directly toward the man’s chin.
No matter what he’d just done, I didn’t want to use my katana, not until—
Then I got a good look at him in the lurid light.
The Asset’s eyes, already a ghostly white, had glazed over as if in death. His chin up to his right cheekbone had been nearly obscured by crimson, chitin-like scales. The cherry-colored material also coated his throat.
I stared.
His haunted eyes tracked me as I materialized, and he aimed the Tangler as I gaped. More of the alien, organic substance along his left arm glinted in the garish light as if wet.
“Nope.” I reengaged the Spectre, dropped my fist, and dodged past the shambling figure as he fired another spike right where my head had been.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the spike embedded in the wall shine a brilliant white and begin to melt everything around it. Already, the one that had embedded in my shoulder had created a molten pool of flooring.
As Wyatt would say, this guy didn’t play fuck-around.
I stumbled back into the hallway, still incorporeal, as my mind scrambled. In all my time as an Asset, I’d never seriously had to tangle with another Facility operative, much less someone wielding the—
WHUF. WHUF. The Artisan fired two more spikes as I ran down the shadowed hallway, both of them tearing through me with that chill, shivery sensation.
Already, I felt the tingling in my Crown that indicated the Spectre’s warning. I couldn’t keep using the packet without consequences. Not for long.
Halfway down the hall, I drew my Stilettos, aiming as I spun.
“AHHH!” Screaming in combat would often throw off an opponent. Supposedly.
The Artisan didn’t seem to notice, turning slowly toward me as the Tangler whined.
I fired four times, each shot guided by the mecha in my system.
Each one struck the sallow Artisan, the force knocking him backward and off balance.
I uttered a low curse—if I had narrowed the field of my shot and calibrated my weapons beforehand, this would already be over. As things stood, however, I had essentially hit him with couch cushions moving at the speed of a racecar; annoying but not lethal.
Irritated with myself, I sprinted toward the man. As he brought the Tangler up, I reengaged the Spectre.
He fired, his shot tearing through my intangible chest and flying wildly down the hallway.
Before he had a moment to recalibrate, I switched off the Spectre, thumbed the field of my right Stiletto as tight as it would go, and shot squarely at his head.
The Artisan’s blood sprayed wide as a thousand kilos of kinetic force, narrow as a pencil, hammered into the center of his forehead and out the back of his skull. He stumbled backward, reeling for the fall.
“Yes!” I exclaimed. “I dunno what Irrational bullshit you got into, friend, but—”
The Artisan Asset gathered his feet beneath him. His head lolled up and back. The bleeding hole in his forehead revealed I had hit him square.
“What?” I stared.
With empty, haunted eyes, he leveled the Tangler at me.
“Fuck!” I scarcely had time to engage the Spectre before he fired again, twice.
His spikes went high and wide, and I ran, sheathing my Stilettos before the second one passed by.
I switched on my comm.
Anya! I linked just as the march of monotonous numbers began in my mind. I believe you can hear me. I am engaging an Artisan Asset, one who seems under some kind of Irrational control. If you can assist in any way, please apprise.
F-hive… Sixxx… One-ne… FosxtrrOT prOtOclls in-it-e-aeded… EIGHT…
Nothing from Anya.
“Fine,” I mumbled as I halted the comm and drew my katana, one for each hand. “I guess I’m on my own.”
I tried to ignore the throbbing pain in my left shoulder as I held the katana. Less than an hour into this mess, I had already been compromised.
That did not bode well.
The Artisan fired squarely at me again, and I danced closer as the spike whizzed through my incorporeity. A tell-tale tingling began to drone in my Crown, and I knew I could only hold the Spectre for a few more moments before the packet would begin to create feedback.
I spun toward him, drawing my katana back one instant, disengaging the Spectre the next. Swinging low, I sliced through the back of the Artisan’s leg, right at th
e heel. The white eyed man didn’t even cry out as I cleanly sliced through his Achilles tendon, but he did fall backward to the floor.
I reengaged the Spectre, expecting him to fire even as he fell.
This time, however, he seemed to have a difficult time taking his aim, seemingly thrown off by suddenly being tossed on his ass.
I dodged to the left, swung my katana, and switched the Spectre off again as I brought the blade down upon his throat.
It bit deeply, only stopping at his spine. The man gurgled, trying to bring his Tangler forward but failing to move quickly enough. He trembled violently as blood spurted, splashing his face a brighter scarlet than the chitin alone.
Just to be certain of things, I thrust my second blade into his chest.
The man gave one final lurch and collapsed into stillness.
“Finished,” I hissed through clenched teeth. I drew the blade from the dead man’s neck, my eyes narrowed.
Then the scarlet, wet patch on his arm rippled, as if slithering across the man’s skin. For the first time, I connected it to the gory growths I had seen on the walls and recoiled in terror.
“Ugh!” My eyes grew wide as I watched the organic slime ripple across his body again, pulling the hardened layers of chitin into itself. Now that I looked, I saw the truth: an organism, a single parasitic creature, had attached itself to the surface of his flesh.
I stared in horrified awe at the creature, which slowly glided across the Asset, engulfing him.
“Just… just no!” I stumbled back agape, half-certain that the creature would somehow lunge toward me, infecting me with that same Irrational horror.
“Okay. We’re all okay.” I spoke aloud, backing up another step.
If nothing else, this answered my main question. The Designate had directed me to ‘clear the area’ before Wyatt’s insertion, but I hadn’t found anything beside the thrumming red splatters of viscera.
It seemed as if I had found the source of our troubles.
“More dangerous than you first looked, aren’t you?” I muttered. As I watched the ooze covering the Artisan, drooling into his open mouth and nose, I remembered the Designate linking that several Assets were presumed lost, and shuddered.
I tried not to notice my limbs trembling.
Regardless of my new intel, my task remained the same: Clear the area. Once complete, Guthrie would be inserted. Then, together, we could figure this out.
As I thought, I felt a growing aura of warmth on my back.
The fight had taken me out of the terminal room and into the hallway. Remembering the spikes that had punched through me, I whirled around.
“Oh. Oh no, no, no…” I moaned.
The far end of the hallway had been peppered with spikes, now glowing with white-hot incandescence. The floor and ceiling around the spikes shimmered in the heat, and the structure had begun melting around them.
“The conduit,” I whispered, my heart sinking.
The wilting rectangle of shining metal that remained of the conduit had warped, and bright orange sparks leapt from the left side of the passage as I watched. The spike’s heat had reduced parts of the thing to the consistency of melted cheese.
“Well.” I turned my head, popping my neck. “Wyatt Guthrie isn’t coming through here.” As I watched, the conduit sagged down to the floor, and I realized another horrific truth: it couldn’t be used for my extraction either.
Fuck.
I stood, alone and in the dark. Alone, in the dark, with no way out.
Shaking my head, I held back a rueful chuckle.
“God, I need a cigarette.”
3
It only took me a moment to realize that I couldn’t allow those spikes to go untended.
When Wyatt used the Artisan, he would set the spikes to function for a certain period of time, say ten minutes. But in this instance, I had no idea how long the devices had been set to warp the axioms of reality or how hot they would get.
“Probably melt through the whole damn building.” I reached into one of the side pockets of my tactical vest. “Probably take the whole thing down with me in it.” After fishing out a dampening grenade, I took five steps toward the punishing heat before wincing and deciding I couldn’t get any closer.
Activating the small device, I tossed the dampening grenade toward the conduit. For a moment I worried it might melt, but…
WHUM. The world trembled around me as Rationality cascaded through the darkened hallway. The local axioms snapped and bent as they underwent instantaneous adjustment. The light died instantly as the heat began to fade. I watched for a moment, just to make certain, then turned from the useless conduit and stepped past the corpse of the Artisan.
The two spikes in the chamber with the terminal orb still pulsed with hellish temperatures.
“Let’s stop that right now.” I reached for another dampening grenade, plotting my next move.
As I tossed it, I regarded the orb.
WHUM.
Had the interface been damaged by the heat? It showed no outer signs of harm and still hung in the air, silent and ominous, despite the dampening grenade.
“That’s not weird or anything.” It should have crashed to the floor with the restoration of base Rationality. I switched my comm back on and sent a link to the system.
This is Michael Bishop, Asset 108. My access code is iota-six-three.
The blue lights glimmered again, even as the woman’s clipped voice began reciting numerics in my mind.
I ignored the woman’s strangely accented words as best as I could.
“Screen four.” It brightened as my gaze came to rest upon it. “Please display all system prompts as text.”
UNDERSTOOD, 108. WILL COMPLY.
This time, I had different questions.
“Query: What is the nature of the Irrational threat currently active at The Spire?”
A long pause followed, and screen two filled with a long, flashing series of dataglyphs and alpha-numerics. Then screen four replied:
ALL INFORMATION REGARDING THE SPIRE IS CLASSIFIED, 108.
I could have chewed glass.
“Query: What are the known specifications and capabilities of the aberration on the floor behind me?”
Nervously, I glanced backward, half expecting the parasite to ooze toward me.
But no. It was busy dissolving its former host, a process that smelled abhorrent.
I took a step further away.
INFECTIOUS BIOHAZARD IS CONFIRMED IN YOUR AREA. PLEASE VACATE TO YOUR NEAREST CLEAN ROOM UNTIL A FACILITY ASSET CAN BE INSERTED.
What?
“Right.” I rubbed at one eye, my shoulder throbbing. “Because I’m not a Facility Asset.” This made no sense. Did the system not recognize me? Even after I had logged in?
Eighttt… Juan… INit-eeeating Delllta…
As I thought, those inevitable variables whispered deep in my mind.
FiffTEeen… T-aaango… Julie-ET…
“God, shut up.” I glanced back at the aberration again as noxious steam rose from the Asset’s flesh, then back to the room.
System interfaces weren’t exactly my specialty. Typically, I had Anya to interface with the Facility tech—
My eyes widened.
Anya, if you can hear me, I could use a hand. Can you patch to the terminal orb I am using? I am using a text only readout because of local interference.
Nothing, save the interminable march of the woman’s broken accent. A frown began to sour my face as I considered my next move.
YOUR REQUEST IS ACKNOWLEDGED, ASSET BISHOP. GREETINGS. Like a lighthouse on a distant shore, the characters appeared on the screen.
“Hot damn.” I almost laughed out loud. “Anya, the situation has changed here, and I need some—”
PRECEPTOR PETROVA DOES NOT HAVE ACCESS TO THIS SYSTEM, ASSET. SHE LINKED YOUR REQUEST, AND I HAVE PATCHED INTO THIS TERMINAL ORB. THIS IS DESIGNATE LING.
“Understood. I’ve been cold-booted, Designate. I a
m intended to clear part of the hot zone so that my Artisan will be free to insert. However, the conduit for insertion has become damaged. As I do not have the full dossier, I require further instruction.”
HOLD, ASSET.
Two of the other screens began to shimmer, and one of them filled with schemata that looked very much like cascading mathematical formulae kung-fu fighting with flashing dataglyphs.
I peered at the other one, reading bits of the text across the top:
Hyper-Rationality is stable…
Current broadcast spectra is at 78%…
Topiatic incursion steady…
“Hyper-Rationality?” I muttered. I understood the idea in principle; it involved a Preceptor’s nodes. Anya could emit Hyper-Rationality to ruin the day of large scale Irrats like Variants or while in the presence of terminal levels of Irrationality.
Designate Ling returned.
YOUR ASSESSMENT REGARDING CONDUIT 2709 IS CORRECT. IT WILL NO LONGER BE SUITABLE FOR THIS DOSSIER. THE NEAREST AVAILABLE CONDUIT IS IN THE TELEMETRY RELAY STATION.
I didn’t even have time to ask before a soft blue marker appeared in my field of vision, rotating slowly. It hung far below me, almost beneath my feet and somewhat to the left.
YOUR CURRENT POSITION WITHIN THE SPIRE IS HERE.
As the Designate’s words spilled forth, the screen showing schemata pulsed more brightly and resolved on an area in the upper fourth of the slender structure.
YOU WILL MAKE YOUR WAY TO TELEMETRY RELAY, AND CLEAR THE ZONE OF THOSE INFECTED BY THE IRRATIONAL SYMBIONT.
I frowned at the word symbiont. That didn’t sound reassuring. Downright alarming felt closer to the mark.
THIS CONDUIT WILL ONLY BE AVAILABLE FOR THE NEXT 87 MINUTES.
As Ling sent the text, a secondary indicator appeared over my vision: a timer set at 87:00.
AFTER THIS TIME CONDITIONS FOR ITS USE WILL EXPIRE.
The moment it appeared, the timer began to count down.
“What happens if I can’t make the conduit in time?” I glanced at the other screen, which cycled through text that seemed to relate to localized breaches of Rationality.