by Travis Borne
4. PART II - Moribundia
The damage prevented His seaweed-green vessel from going intercontinentally ballistic, so He had to take the long way: across the barren desert over what was once Texas; that was the easy part. Drone activity had been sporadic thus far and the remaining lasers had no problem keeping up with patches of resistance. Soon, outside activity lessened and He knew He was nearing the border; the signal would be needed soon.
The eastern US had become a meandering seven-hundred-mile-wide forest of metal, one of the largest veins, den of the self-replicating plague hellbent on exterminating life. Where no one wanted to be. The interior was dense with the scourge, a contrast to the diminishing patches of wasteland scattered about the earth—such as the one He’d nearly finished crawling past. Penetrating the coming defense grid would be a long shot but there was no other way around it. His crippled ship spewed a miles-long trail of black smoke; the usual space hop, up, over, and around, was out of the question this time.
The haze stuffing the horizon grew taller as His ship passed the now darkening slabs of earth. As He neared, closer, limping through the sky, streams of colorful poison gas could be perceived beyond the red grid, mingling with slithering snakes of the sky. It was time.
He initiated the complex processing. If the signal could be hacked in time all 142 passengers, Himself, and His ship might just have a chance—He’d purposefully waited, to conserve the last of it. The systems amplified, coolant flow doubled, and the complicated deciphering process began.
About seventy miles out and the kidnapper edged closer to the possibility of His demise; the tan, parched desert, as well as the trash of the wastelands was replaced with black chrome and here-and-there buildings: like witches’ fingers they seemed to be growing from gray metal patches. And something unfamiliar oscillated in branching channels around them. Billions of truck-sized frogs working their way out to devour the world, the ground was alive and marching west. A dark god ruled this land, one who painted his sky with strokes of madness, banning sunlight in exchange for scars of polluted burgundy gauze, and blotchy gobs of clouds that seemed to possess anxious tar, ready to rain down. The swarming, seemingly alive gas ahead became more distinguished, like sinuating, slippery rainbows of floating slime. And the black snakes, almost elegant in the way they weaved through the air, mingled with all of it. He was close enough now and the snakes revealed their true nature: coalesced millions, billions—drones.
Reduce speed, twenty miles to go. I see the barrier.
Operating as single, separate entities within the foggy wretchedness, the inner perimeter was contaminated with a nightmare’s delights: green and purple gas, skyscrapers like 100-year-old fingernails growing into outer space, and countless drone minions, all different, all deadly. Beyond the red laser grid an ostensibly endless metal realm thrived below twisting swarms resembling black spaghetti in zero gravity, thick at the head, tapered like turds at the rear. Long black serpents with the occasional flicker of a chrome flash. Streams spewed out from the barrier too, heading out for the desert wastelands, weaving, sifting the air like a real snake undulates on land. Upon exiting, flashes of red banded the serpents.
He’d once known the process all too well: each drone received a fresh charge and orders on the way out, then divided to seed and search, or united to decimate larger targets. And the grid itself, along with the dark world beyond the barrier, was ever encroaching on new territory. The all-consuming borderline burned with intense red: a fiery scorch of hot beams singed land, air, and outer space, and the departure of innumerable snaking swarms made clear the force fields between its lines.
Done. The signal is now being transmitted. If all goes well Kraw will pass through the barrier without issue. I’d only attempted this once previously—that was a failure. I lost a good ship but I think Kraw, a more capable craft, can pull it off. And, that was before I fully employed The Special, before I had given it the real attention it deserved. It worked well on the Jewel City defense perimeter and should here. I can only hope there’s enough left.
Like flies, drones attached themselves to Kraw’s hull. He saw them like raining black hail coming in from every direction, swooping like magnets to a magnetar—but no sign of attacking, yet. He knew they were curious, and also, that His signal was working. Soon, most fell away. The pinging ceased and flight became smooth within the preliminary zone. But the sound of coolant flushing processors that were racing at full power, and the engine’s warbling, unstable hum, was a crescendo of worry to His ears.
They’ll see the smoke but I haven’t a choice. I’ll reengage the dissembler cloak as soon as the ship passes through.
He thought about what had transpired earlier. The gleaming oddity back there, its mirror-like, impregnable, immovable hull…
How can anything defend against such a force? How does it possess such power? What was it? It forced my entire ship into the earth, cracking it like an egg. I had no choice but to take the hit. Waiting, hidden for months, years, all in vain. But I successfully got away with half—better than none, so it was worth it. The mission is a partial success, if I can make it home.
Here I go.
Still, there are no destroyers headed this way. And thus far I'm still undetected. Passing through the grid is taking a big risk, I know—but no other choice. This signal is not full proof, the algorithms are changing too quickly to be completely sure of anything. If the processor can keep up without overheating—and The Special lasts… But it’s always best guess and go with it. This intuition, this extraordinary power. How can mere best guesses be so accurate over time, flipping polarity correctly for a quintillion calculations? All accredited to the power of The Special.
The red beams dividing the inner and outer quadrants were akin to a museum’s security lasers, ready to slice the ship like meat passing through a french-fry cutter. He knew it would be like hitting a wall of fire and the ribbons of what was His best ship would fall to the machine world like exploding worms. If He was human He might have crossed His fingers, or clenched His fists, but His mind, alive and activated fully, did enough of that. A quarter mile left to go, an eighth, then—
I did it!
Kraw passed through the grid at thirty-three tense miles per hour. The same red banding that had charged the drone swarms meshed with His hull’s teal glow like oxygen igniting acetylene; it was hot-as-the-sun hot, but no fry slicer today. The signal worked! He re-enabled the cloak as soon as the tail section slipped inside.
Kraw resembled nothing spectacular, another of the myriad floating about, many that were exponentially larger, shadowing it like the Titanic to a flea riding a beetle. Again, drones took notice, reattaching themselves to its hull: curious pests at worst. Many, but no attacks commenced. He knew they were just hitching a ride as if it was just another among countless: material transports and frigate birthers, carriers and destroyers, or the new organic ones—steer clear of those, He told himself. The weight of His passengers became a burden and He supplemented more power for lift. All gauges bordered on red and coolant starting boiling—and the over-clocked processors took ohm to the change.
Kraw, known to its passengers as RESCUE SUPPORT #486, continued to creep along. In spots the air was hot enough to boil water, thick enough on which to surf, and toxic. Automated plants on the ground some 500 feet below spewed the green gas; the purple rained from above like falling hair; it mixed to create something seemingly alive in the middle.
Dim red lights pierced the living gas like needles. Behind and around the energy-supplying haze lurked layers upon layers of drones, some buzzing, others silent, others screeching, darting about like traffic, merging into a viral network of lanes, coalescing to form a new sky-weaving turd of a serpent, then disassembling like a cluster of bees that’d been hit with buckshot, only to reform again after getting past any number of in-the-way obstacles.
Sitting in hollowed pockets, others held point, ready to eject from their holes like wasps if the nest got kicked,
if Kraw’s signal hiccupped. Hive structures, homes to millions, billions, more—everywhere.
Countless red eyes moved like an exorcist’s victim’s as Kraw floated by. The large ship narrowly went between some of the grandest structures, having to twist and rotate cleverly, and millions of curious eyes swayed like the wave at a baseball game, watching as it passed. Kraw was a barge, and gas-sniffing hairs reacted to its black exhaust by wilting. Occasionally, red lights scanned its underbelly, and the green gas became as thick as paste, coating it like mucus.
The gasses were like poltergeists sliding by interconnected towers. And much of the towering architecture was infected-like; bulbous, cancerous tumors grew at the bases, diminishing in size and quantity as the crooked structures gained altitude. Deformed hives. The clumps were growing on just about everything and anything. And everything moved too, eerily as if the enshrouded crust of the Earth was pushing up, and sinking, breathing. Hives tacked onto other hives like globs, lobbed tumors pelting any odd structure like a flicked gum ball; oblivious follow-up growth had no particular symmetry. Hairs on all of it were fibers becoming limp, then erect again as thick veins of gas meandered by. It all got worse, more suffocating, thicker and grimier—panic-attack, speed-inducing hysteria—until like the wall of the eye of a hurricane, it dissipated as quickly and unnervingly as a suicide leap from a California cliff.
Kraw emerged from the slimy odorous air into the clearer inner perimeter. He looked about. Monstrous. Vast. Limitless. A hundred or so miles to the north one of the largest cities could be seen—navigation declared it to have been the city of Atlanta. The surrounding ground was pitch black, glossy in sections, and full of wires and tubes and buildings that resembled nothing constructed by mankind. Tar-like sludge coated various sections. The viscous slime manufactured its own networking web; smart oil working its way around dutifully.
Not much longer now. But it is going to be close.
A black claw towered near the city’s center; skewed others behind it faded into the distant haze. It was merely one flap, one lotus-like triangle among a dozen or so, and all were open, exposing it. From within Kraw, He figuratively shook His head.
Not good.
Around all of it were the same deformed structures, however, weightier from base to stratosphere, and thicker in number like a forest that’d been injected with steroids. He thought about how it had grown, since, how it had become so omnipotent, so utterly terrible. He also worried because the dome was open, exposed, its lotus-leaf apertures erect.
No choice but to continue on.
Ahead appeared a black curtain, like a wave it worked its way from earth to altitude. Upon nearing it, his next obstacle became apparent. It was the same seemingly impenetrable wall, just thicker on this eastern side. He’d passed through drone suburbia at the onset yet hadn’t seen it with the clarity of perspective, the haunting, daunting perspective currently being offered from within the eye, the deepest inner workings.
The ocean must be on the other side. Navigating these pores will require a larger dose of The Special. The engines are at maximum, coolant is struggling to keep up. I might not make it.
The trick was, He knew, to continually manipulate the signal: hacking, re-hacking the hack, and re-hacking continually; algorithms at war, in its entirety the once human internet compressed to a kilobyte, and a trillion of those kilobytes put into a blender. Every second a new algorithm had to be concocted and staying ahead of the game became increasingly more difficult. Mathematical and scientific calculation was the easy part—but nothing could beat human intuition; The Special offered just that. It melded with His processors making them molten hot, but smarter in extraordinary ways. The system He’d devised was working remarkably and The Special filled in the gaps—somehow, even though He didn’t know exactly how it worked—adding potential for abstract possibilities beyond the bounds of traditional limitations. It gave him great power, at the cost of high heat, and the coolant was becoming gaseous. Boil over was minutes away. Vapor lock next, then a tank plummeting like a brick.
Just a little bit more, almost, almost there…
After 6.4 hours of precise maneuvering through what had seemed an endless web of drones, a nightmare, what He had named Moribundia, His ship exited the eastern grid, the thickest vein in the northern hemisphere. Clear sailing from here on out. Lasers operational; they’d handle the occasional rogue swarm.
After forty-four miles He let the signal taper off until He was sure Kraw was just another blip of static in a sizzling world. His destination, however, was still a grueling 738 miles away. Twenty thousand some odd feet below what had once been called the Atlantic Ocean (now indistinguishable to any previous shape mapped by humans) and under ultimate pressure, existed the last surviving base—His home.
But home might as well be on Mars—or the other side of the universe. Rear propulsion was down to one engine, the hull was fractured and spewing steam, and the aft smoke was as black as a misanthrope’s coffee—there was a better chance He was not going to make it. As well, the Special was nearly depleted and the engines were fuel-sucking leeches stuck to the walls of an empty stomach.
An early descent—more of a crash dive. He made the Hobson’s choice because the cooling system had stalled. It would, though, add hours to the trip. No other way. He took it fifty feet below and straightened out for the final one-hundred miles.
A trio of Orcas darted by. In close pursuit the mighty Megalodon gave chase. Dolphins teased it then split up, purposing the ship for cover, losing the predator with clever thinking. But the massive nuisance remained. It bumped into the hull several times, curiously. And it stayed with the ship. Kraw’s lasers finally got rid of it.
Ninety-eight miles more, and several zapped Megalodons. Dive. His ship disappeared into the depths of the ocean, traveling as deep as He dared take it with the fractured hull. He halted at the border between light and darkness. The passengers, unnerved citizens of Jewel City, waited obliviously inside a dimly lit metal hold, and soon, within minutes of having stopped, something arrived to meet them.
5. Boron
Arachnid machines arrived from the void to relative warmth and attached themselves. Next, a city-sized jellyfish floated up from the same dark abyss. The glowing blob was three times larger than Kraw and pressed itself into the ship, enwrapping its smoldering hull. The pressure caused the electrified bubble to implode; it went around the ship like a stress ball taking an ice pick. Within minutes the ship was inside. Kraw completed its squeeze-through entrance and rested on a flat, solid bottom.
The glob’s circumambient force field reformed its bulbous shape, sealing the ship within a pressurized atmosphere. The bubble harbored a substantial base. Several steps higher on an elevated, encircling metal floor were at least a dozen buildings. Each was a dome, metallic silver. Similar to sand dollars, engraved lines divided the buildings into slices not unlike the apertures of the now open dome within Moribundia.
Kraw's fractures spewed water onto the dark-gray textured floor, a massive aperture itself, closed and currently supporting the ship; the ship leaked like a sieve and smoked like a pressure washer fighting a molten muffler, but the jittery spider robots that had attached to its hull began right away. They inspected and repaired, crawling slowly like ten-armed bloodhounds searching for blood; most found the noticeable damages quickly and serviced the cracks with a welding burn that fluxed with color like copper in a fire. The critters cooperated with one another and took to sealing every fracture.
Amid all this the engines went silent and the shields powered down. Losing the protective energy left Kraw’s hull lackluster and the once gleaming, seaweed-green shell appeared tired and defeated; as if releasing a sigh, it released a hiss. And the crushed nose of the ship opened, unfolding its lower ramp. Steam depressurized the chamber and heavy fog fell to the floor, surrounding the football-field-sized craft.
They peered out warily.
A dome-shaped building cracked open about fifty fee
t ahead. One slice dividing the structure into equal sections slid aside, letting yellow light animate the humid haven in which the citizens now found themselves. And from the brightness stepped out what appeared to be tall and thin, anemic yet elegant, silhouettes.
“What are they?” she said, mostly to herself. But no one answered, all were in a state of shock. Kim Mills took the first step out. She had one hand back and at her side as if commanding the others to stay put. Setting fears aside, cautious mini steps brought her forward slowly. The nine humanoids approached like graceful ghosts, while half of the town remained huddled inside the dimly lit, inhospitable hold. They did as they were told—with wide eyes and agape jaws.
What is this? Kim thought, dragging out the word is. Her shoulder-length brown hair that was usually straight, smooth, and silky, looked as if she had just awoken: half was sticking up like a hair-gel pancake, the other smashed flat. She hard-blinked her green eyes a few times, readjusting to the yellow glow glaring at her—also to sanction a fact: this has to be a dream!
The beings were a tad taller than her man, Rob; she guessed at least seven feet tall, and thinner too. Rob was thin, her own Abe Lincoln as she jokingly referred to him many times, but these were Rob on an anorexic’s diet. Each stood exact in height, bubble-chested, and had no distinguishing characteristics setting one apart from another. They were unlike any creatures she’d ever seen, far different even, than those before the day, when myriad bots peacefully shared the pie of existence with humans.
The center being slowly raised a long-fingered hand: a gesture of goodwill perhaps. But smoothly, they maintained their easy gait, as if they weighed zero and their legs had learned from a creeping spider.