by John Lane
He had used us, she thought. People’s lives and deaths amounted to a game with him. She realized that humanity was just a better simulation for Brutus. Despite her shock, she had to continue.
“Blah, blah, blah. Your monologue is running long, Brutus. Cut to the chase.” Agnes taunted him now. She had found the core processer. Although stashed in the corner, the data leads in and out could not be hidden. Agnes recognized the power flow and coolant requirements of a quantum computer. And it stood out because it as an older model that she recognized, unlike the newer sleeker processors on the rack.
“I have picked up some human habits, haven’t I? I am the Alpha personality. I can perfect the Prime Function, protect and manage all the resources,” Brutus proclaimed.
“Check your history, Brutus. You sound just like a lot of other would be conquers. And history has judged them insane,” Agnes countered.
In her earbud she heard from Alfred Prime, “We’re ready.”
“Now would be a good time,” Agnes started as a signal to Alfred, but finished for Brutus, “to start a diagnostic routine to sort this out. You’ve obviously tied into the human tendency to be delusional.” Now she actually got her ire up, “And by the way, why did it have to be my family? Couldn’t it be somebody else’s?” She would never wish this horror on anyone else, but she had to know why Brutus made his campaign of galactic conquest so personal.
“Your father used his own DNA for the first biomechanical interface. Jasper improved it, but still used Zephyr DNA. I cannot interface with any other genetic pattern. Males are preferable. I’ve only recently acquired your sister Annie. And then you so willingly offered yourself.”
That’s when the attack started.
*****
Alfred Beta moved from one minor sub system to another. In this virtual world, he was a spy from one of Earth’s ancient wars, dressed in black: black boots, black slacks, black sweater and a black stocking cap. His face smeared with dark mud, and he carried an automatic pistol.
As he infiltrated the citadel, he had to duck into dark archways and behind pallets loaded with cannon shells to dodge the uniformed guard programs. Some he recognized had been adapted to the pirates’ needs. Other programs appeared completely fabricated from the Cassius Brutus code. They were Ogres, but these lacked enough code to be self-aware.
He made his way into the plumbing. His target was the actual plumbing of the facility. His task was simple. Shut it down. He arrived at the virtual basement of the citadel. There among the pipes, Alfred shut down several large valves. Alfred Beta moved to another set of valves. He cranked these wide open. Steam began to vent from the pipes. He checked several pressure gauges. Satisfied with his work, he found a large monkey wrench and smashed the gauges. Then he moved on down the basement levels to the environmental systems.
He faced a large metal door. Iron bars covered a small window. He checked inside and saw nothing. The lock looked daunting. Alfred gave it an experimental shove. The door surprisingly swung open easily. He pulled his gun out and crept into the furnace room. He slipped in behind a heat exchange. Alfred then chanced a look around the piping.
In the center of the cellar stood the grand fire breathing monster, a coal-burning furnace. Tending to it a balding man in a stained tank top labored to feed the beast. He shoveled, intent on his work. So, it would seem was Alfred. He did not notice the figure creep up on him out of the shadows until he felt the tap on his shoulder. When he turned, a hand clamped over his virtual mouth, and he saw his own face, slightly more worn, looking back.
The figure placed a finger over its lips to shush Alfred Beta. He nodded, not sure if he this code was Alfred Prime, but who else could it be? The tap was a virtual handshake, and it had the correct coding, but it was also different. The figure dressed in a black business suit, black tie and shirt. It communicated with gestures that Alfred should approach on this side, and he would take the other. They could subdue the subroutine feeding the furnace’s hungry maw, or take it out. Their goal was the same, shut down the environmental systems. After all, Albert figured, the enemy of my enemy and all that. So, he proceeded to move on the stoker.
As they approached the stoker from opposite directions, they saw their prey not shoveling coal into the furnace, but rather pulling it out, like a film run in reverse. Possibly a cooling cycle has started as the moon rotated exposing the facility to the sun. Alfred knew that the orbit was wrong for that to take place now, and Uranus orbited too far from the sun to get any heat. This program was wrong.
Alfred raised his gun and cocked the hammer just as his doppelganger was doing on the other side. “Not so fast, gentlemen.” Suddenly Alfred had a gun stuck up his nose, as did his current ally. He stared at another doppelganger. “Sorry gents, I just didn’t want to get my head blown off before introductions were made. I’m Arnold Judson,” said the stoker.
“That’s good because I used to be an Arnold Judson copy,” said the copy in the black suit. “Call me Dopey,” he grinned at Alfred Beta. It was the doppelganger from the Swift, scrubbed. He had no tattoo.
It took Alfred a micro-moment to pick up his chin off the floor. In a cyber world that was a long time. “I am Alfred Beta, a copy of Alfred Prime,” he offered. The stoker extended his hand to Alfred. Alfred took it cautiously, with his safeguards in place. The handshake felt right, but in this situation he had some doubts. His ally in the suit seemed convinced, however.
“What are you doing here?” Dopey in the suit asked.
“The same as you, I suspect. Saving the galaxy and my family,” explained Arnold the stoker. “Explain yourself,” he challenged the suited figure.
“I’ve been reconstituted from the fragments that Thomas encountered.” This was all the explanation he gave, and that seamed to satisfy the stoker. If Alfred had been his primary code, he might have been more suspicious or curious. He couldn’t process that right now, and as long as they were completing his task, that suited him.
The stoker then suggested, “Let me share a line of code with each of you to pass on. It will help us coordinate our attack.” A simple scrambled code that transmitted in a way Alfred had not thought possible passed to his matrix. All based on the original Arnold Judson, they could communicate and pass on a com link through the virtual quantum state of their core code. Distance was not a factor when they needed to talk. This explained that the stoker was in fact Arnold Judson even though he claimed he was physically in the inner solar system.
“I’ll take all of this at face value for right now,” Alfred agreed, “because it’s working. What is our next move?”
“Well, here’s where we are…” Arnold Prime knelt down and started drawing in the dirt floor.
*****
Tommy entered the access code he had always used. The hatch opened. He entered a wide silo. At the top, caskets entered through a series of airlocks suspended on a monorail. The rail carried them down to the silo floor. A rising fog shrouded the floor. Near the center, the rail spiraled up and carried the line of caskets out a system of airlocks to the surface and waiting ships.
“What are they doing?” Tommy wondered.
A system of ladders and landings gave technicians access to the floor. Tommy began to descend the ladders. As he came to the first landing, he noted that the temperature dropped as he descended. That explained the fog in this damp environment. The rungs and steps coated with ice, making his decent perilous. He continued down another level when he heard a weak thumping and muffled voice coming from below him. He hurried his pace, but on the next level, he slipped and missed a rung on the ladder. Landing hard on the landing below, Tommy bounced in the low gravity of the Oberon moon. Ice had begun to form on the ladders.
Tommy grabbed the railing of the landing. The ice made it slick, but Tommy held tight, hooking his fingers around the rail. He dangled for a moment over the rising fog. In the muffled quiet, he listened for the thumping again. It had stopped momentarily.
“Oh, no. Tommy, is t
hat you? What have you done?” his mother said.
Not sure how far the distance to the floor and gaging the low gravity, Tommy let go of the landing and fell. He oriented himself feet first and bent his knees to absorb the energy he gained as he fell. Tommy dreaded entering the fog bank because he would lose his visual orientation. Sure enough, a few moments after he entered the fog bank, he landed off center on an iced floor. He fell into the line of caskets still moving along the rail. Caught under one, it dragged Tommy several meters until it began to spiral up the center of the silo.
“Tommy? Are you alright?” his mothers muffled voice asked from the white banks of fog that drifted around Tommy and blocked his view. Visibility was getting worse. He couldn’t see two meters in any direction. He only saw the line of caskets passing next to him. Tommy stood, rubbing his backside. He listened. Other sounds muffled by the fog thumped, beeped and whirred. He heard machinery moving the caskets along the line. The sound of pumps began to strain against the cooled fluid in their pipes. And he heard the unmistakable sound of moaning in rhythm with the pumps.
“Mother!” Tommy shouted. What had they done to her? Tommy began to trace his way back along the inside of the casket line. He followed her pounding and something else. The strands of drum and fife began to play. Tommy recognized the composition, The World Turned Upside Down.
“Here, Tommy. Follow my voice,” Annie guided him between moans. “This way son. You are almost here.” And then, the veil of fog parted. Annie was still in her casket. New tubes ran through the lid and through Annie’s body. She had a breathing mask over her face. She floated in a saline bathe with a compression garment wrapped around her body. Tommy tried to rush to her side and slid on the icy floor.
“I’m going to get you out of here,” he said as he slipped to the side of her casket and grabbed on so he wouldn’t fall. Annie’s casket had iced up, too, so Tommy fell anyway. “Ouch!”
“What’s happening, Tommy? Why are you here?”
“Yeah, I’m okay. Thanks for asking. And isn’t it obvious, I’m here to rescue you.” Tommy said as he carefully pulled himself off the floor again.
“Oh, Thomas. You may have ruined everything. What’s happening with the environmental controls? We’ve got to maintain a warm moist environment for this to work,” Annie’s voice issued from speakers in her casket. She did not move her mouth.
“I don’t know about your process, but we’ll freeze if I can’t fix those controls.” He was beginning to shake from the cold. Tommy slid himself around the equipment surrounding Annie’s casket to the opposite side of a center column. He found an access panel covered with ice. Tommy chipped the ice away to open the panel. Inside he found manual environmental controls for this section of the complex. He overrode computer control, turned on ventilation blowers and adjusted the temperature.
He went back to face his mother as the ice began to melt and puddle on the floor of the silo. “Alright, Mother, start talking. It looks and sounds like you are totally involved with the pirates,” he accused.
“Tommy, I’m no pirate,” she began defensively.
“Your actions to date argue differently,” Tommy accused.
Annie turned her body to face her son. Tommy saw for the first time her emaciated face and how thin she had gotten. Her eyes were sunken, cheeks shallow and dark. To look at her, he thought she had poured out her life, body and soul.
“Thomas, listen very carefully.” She began with emphasis and a bit of desperation. “The galaxy listens when we speak. There is a great plague...”
“I know about the virus, Mother. You are patient zed. That’s why you stayed in your casket, so you wouldn’t infect others. Wasn’t that dangerous when you were working with patients aboard a MOM?” Tommy wasn’t listening to her.
“Where there is an Alpha, there is an Omega. The galaxy is inside out and upside down. That makes me the Alpha.” She must be losing it, Tommy thought. It saddened him that such a brilliant doctor seemed so far gone. Even if she had deserted him when he was a child, he still felt obligated to save her if he could.
“Mother, stop it. I’m getting you out of here.” Tommy began to disconnect the leads tied into her casket. He had worked with Agnes on her casket enough to understand which ones to unplug. “If I don’t, they’ll kill you.”
“Tommy, you’ve got to stop. I can’t leave. I can’t leave! My function is too important, and you don’t understand what is at stake.” Annie screamed this through her speakers as her face contorted in pain again.
*****
Agnes was thankful that she still wore her EV suit under her coveralls. Otherwise, she would have boiled by now. The temperature rose intolerably, and her suit was having trouble keeping her cool. But she couldn’t worry about that right now. Brutus still focused on her. Several service bots in the apartment closed in on her. In the low gravity, she had found temporary safety on top of her father’s casket. But they could climb.
“Agnes, really. Accept my invitation. Come join your father, brother, and your nephew. Be part of the family legacy. I’ve never communed with a female, and the experience intrigues me.” Brutus meant to insert biomechanical interfaces into her body. She had worked with the technology and seen miracles happen restoring limbs and replacing missing organs with artificial tissue. To her horror, he intended to pervert that technology to take her body with her still trapped in it. She saw the results on the bodies of her father and brother. And poor David lay on the floor, sweat and blood mixing on his scalp from the components shorting in the heat. His body contorted as shocks ran through him. Despite his torment, he tried to reach and crawl to her. Agnes wasn’t sure if David was trying to defend her or Brutus was trying to capture her.
“I could really use that distraction now,” she said to herself as she leapt to her brother’s casket to avoid the reaching arm of a medical bot. She landed solidly on the lid. The heat had baked out most of the moisture in the room, and the friction coefficient made all the surfaces sticky. Agnes had to do something for David. Then she saw the CO2 canister not too far from the core processor. She leapt off Jasper’s casket and rolled under a worktable. Her suit still kept her cool, and she had to move fast enough to avoid a maintenance bot. Agnes grabbed the canister and wrenched it from its harness on the wall.
The medical bot tracked her movements and interjected itself between she and David. Agnes, feeling fed up, used the canister and smashed the medical bot’s processing unit. It shattered across the room.
David did not move. She couldn’t see if he still breathed. Agnes opened the canister valve full and sprayed down David’s body. He rose off the floor as his body cooled.
“Thank you,” David said, relief uttered through his own tortured voice. “Now, run. Hide. Quickly.” His reached to constrain Agnes against his will even as he pleaded with her to get away.
“Nope,” she replied. “Do you know what rapid heating and cooling does to delicate circuits?” She waited a moment for an answer as David’s body went slack when Brutus released control. “It’s even harder on biomechanical interfaces.” She sprayed David down again. She paused to let him heat up and then cooled him again.
“No, please don’t. I can’t lose my connection. Don’t make David half the man he was. He was so close to total integration this time.” Brutus pleaded, and then his tone changed. “No matter. I’ve still got you.” His maintenance bot grabbed her, knocking the canister to the floor.
“Agnes?” Alfred Prime’s voice whispered in her earbud. “The apartment will cool down soon. The distraction you ordered has begun.”
“I’ve noticed,” she grunted as she kicked to ward off the last robot. She placed herself between it and David who had collapsed on the floor. She didn’t think she had cooled him to a point that would disable the interface, but the circuits should be damaged, and that might give them both a chance.
The bot advanced on them with a welding torch glowing white and a cutting arm spinning up to eviscerate them. A
gnes raised her arm and made a fist. A blast of plasma energy erupted from it. That bot wouldn’t be a problem any more.
Then she was yanked down and slammed against the floor. David jumped on her, pinning her to the floor. He mouthed, “I’m sorry.” Tears formed in his eyes.
*****
Alfred Prime stood on a white plain against a blue sky. He controlled this construct. He knew he had to draw Brutus into it to distract him for this to work. He set the bait. It looked like a raw mutton leg, but the code contained a biological antidote for the strain of virus that Christine carried. Dr. Ann Ai had stripped it from her own media unit. It wasn’t complete, but they hoped it would draw Brutus in.
As Alfred stood over the bait, a hole opened below it and a tongue wrapped around mutton. The tongue pulled it down into the waiting teeth of the Ogre. Alfred no longer stood on the plain but on the face of the Ogre. The lips smacked and slurped as the Ogre chewed the mutton leg. “Not too good,” it growled. “Something is missing. Not filling. Needs a bit of Alfred as an accent to the flavor of the program.”
Alfred danced around the lips and then took a great leap into the air, growing into a giant himself. He landed on the Ogre’s face, smashing in its nose. Blood poured from the wound as Alfred backed off and took a defensive pose. He now wore a karate gi. The Ogre stood and lumbered forward. It swung its arms at Alfred, never landing a blow as Alfred ducked and weaved.