by John Hook
“What is it doing to them?” Blaise was more wondering out loud than addressing anyone.
“Based on their eyes, something very bad. What, I don’t know.”
Saripha pulled inside herself and her face went blank for a few moments. Then her eyes flew wide open and she screamed. The look on her face gave me chills. She almost fell over but Izzy and Rox caught her. Her face calmed down, but terror still lurked in her eyes.
“Saripha?” Izzy probed.
“I tried to open myself up psychically, to see what I could sense. It was overwhelming.” She breathed deeply and made an effort to center herself. “From what I can tell, they are being kept alive while pain throughout their entire nervous system is being maximized.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, although pure sadism isn’t out of the question, I suppose.” Saripha visibly shuddered.
“I don’t think so,” Izzy commented. “First, there is this technology here. They don’t need technology for sadism, although maybe it is needed for this kind of scale. However, there is also that pipe we followed. Something is being produced here. I’m not a neuroscientist, but I know pain and stress produce chemical changes and production in living brains. Who knows what these glamour bodies might produce under these conditions.”
I looked for Roland, planning on demanding an explanation. He was still frozen in place. For the moment he couldn’t process. He just stared.
“Izzy, we have to free them.”
Izzy stepped up to a small upright cabinet, the only one like it. It was about 12 feet high. Cables and tubing came out of it, angled up, and then traveled over to the outer wall. Izzy opened it and both Izzy and Blaise looked in. I came over. Inside the cabinet was a three-dimensional network of brightly lit threads of such visual complexity that it made me think of the William Blake expression “fearful symmetry.”
“Izzy?”
“I think this is the brain of this operation, whatever it is.”
“So kill it.”
“I don’t think that is a good idea,” Blaise said grimly.
“Blaise is right.” Izzy looked at me, knowing this wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “We don’t know what this does. It may even be life support for everyone. We need to find a way to disconnect them, not just blow it up.”
As usual, I was losing my patience. “You and Blaise work on that, but I’m going to start freeing them, if I have to do the whole tower one person at a time.”
I ran out one of the radial arms. I noticed Kyo start to join me.
“Kyo, wait. Let me see if I can figure out how to release them. For now I need you with Saripha and Rox, in case we come under attack.”
I ran up to the person at the end of the radial walkway. I realized to my horror that all were screaming under their gags, although it came out as little more than a low keening, an almost electronic sounding high-pitched tone.
I looked closely at the rigging that held them. I could see the person in the rig becoming more frantic, probably anxious to be released. There were straps that held them in, but the important part of the rigging was a series of clips attached all around their bodies. They were the same clips we had discovered in the tunnels, with biological material coming out of them. The tubes had apparently tunneled into the bodies and part of the skin had grafted onto the clip.
I tried breaking the tubing off one of the clips but whatever the tubing was made out of was too strong to break. I pulled my short sword, but it wouldn’t cut either. The person in the rig was becoming more agitated.
I looked in their eyes.
“I’m sorry. I only see one way to free you and it is only going to add to your pain.”
I reached over and yanked the clip out of their shoulder, tearing away the grafted skin. The biological tubes had become root-like and seemed to thread off in all directions. I yanked to disconnect them. They broke.
Suddenly I jumped back as the man I had pulled the clip from went into convulsions. He seemed to writhe faster and faster, making as much movement as the rigging allowed.
Something was wrong. The momentary pain of pulling it out should be over. I started to call Rox over to see if she could lower his nerve activity level. Then his eyes met mine with a look that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. It was the look of horror of knowing, for sure, that something awful, beyond any scale, was about to happen and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
At first I thought he was turning into a proto. His eyes bled and then his body seemed to tear itself apart, splitting from the center out. However, instead of seeming to turn inside out and then pink fleshy substance ballooning and reforming, it was like he was being eaten alive by microorganisms. He turned bloody. Flesh fell away in glops and fell out of the harness. I stepped back to the edge of the walkway as skin and even bone seemed to sizzle and then just melt away. It was too awful to watch. He was being molecularly dissolved before my eyes.
“Quentin?” Saripha called.
When I looked back, he was gone. Just gone. A vat of acid would not have done as thorough a job. I turned to the others, my eyes wet, but my belly full of rage.
“There was no proto. He just dissolved.”
“Quentin, it wasn’t your fault.”
“I know that, damn it.” I flushed, and apologized to Saripha for snapping.
“If we’re going to be able to free them, the only chance is getting these machines to release them. If there is actually a way to release them once they are in that rig.”
I looked one more time at the rig where the man had been. The emptiness was haunting. The increased pleading and fear in the eyes of the people in the rigs on either side were even worse. I again looked away, this time looking down a bit from the walkway.
That’s when I saw him. In the row immediately below the walkway, next to the ladder, was Philip, also in a rig.
His eyes met mine, bulging with fear.
22.
I continued to hold Philip’s eyes with mine.
“Philip, Anita sent me to find you. I’m going to find a way to get you out of here. I promise!” And then I looked around at all the others. “I’m going to get you all out of here!” I shouted.
Of course, I had no idea whether I would be able to deliver on my promise. But I wouldn’t leave until I had succeeded.
I ran back to the others. Izzy and Blaise were both studying the complex 3D network intensely.
Izzy sighed, frustrated. “I’m beginning to get a feel for how the network functions. I know that there are certain pathways that handle certain parts of the holding arrays, and I have an idea of how one would go about shutting them down. I can’t determine the logic of the network and without that we will not get it right.”
“Unfortunately, I can’t help,” Blaise added. “I might be able to understand the logic if I had a pattern I could grasp, but I can’t find a pattern to latch onto. Functions are not unique to pathways. Like a brain, pathways have millions of connection points and there is no doubt a pattern in how network messages move within those connections, but there is nothing that lets us see that.”
“So is this technology or magic?”
Izzy shrugged. “It’s advanced enough that, as Arthur Clarke suggested, we can’t tell the difference.”
“Alien technology.”
Izzy laughed, but without humor. “Or not. We don’t really understand where we are. It may be that we are the aliens.”
Roland finally moved away from the edge. Color came back to his face and a steely anger filled his eyes.
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Not unless you know something about this technology.”
“I had no idea what was in this tower. You have to believe I never knew this was happening to the Zaccorans.”
“Nice to know you have limits.”
I turned to Saripha.
“Is there some way my blue power, whatever the blazes that is, could help if I was able to bring it out?”
“Quentin, we really still don’t know what your power does or doesn’t do. It may be completely irrelevant in this situation. We don’t have time to find out. I may be able to help in another way, though.”
Saripha walked over to the upright cabinet with the glowing network. Both Izzy and Blaise stood aside and let her stand in front of it.
“You think it can be influenced by magic?” I asked.
“Everything in nature can be influenced by magic. That is, ultimately, what magic is. Tuning yourself to the nature around you and allowing it to flow through you. You don’t wield it. You sense it and guide it.”
I started to say more, but Kyo gave a throat slice with her fingers and I realized she was right. Saripha needed to concentrate. Blaise stepped next to Kyo and put his arm around her. It was easy and natural. They seemed to fit together. She squeezed his hands but didn’t take her eyes off Saripha.
Saripha closed her eyes and breathed deeply. In all this pain and chaos around us, it was as if a bubble of peace and stillness formed around her. Her face visibly relaxed and at the same time became more alive. She opened her eyes slowly and fixed her concentration on the network. The intensity of that concentration was palpable, but it had an odd easiness to it. She stood there, fixed, unmoving, only breathing. It was as if she were paralyzed, except her body was relaxed, firmly planted over its center of gravity.
It was hard for me to watch because there seemed to be no urgency in anything Saripha was doing and I felt like time was of the essence. However, I trusted Saripha completely and knew that she was doing what had to be done, or, at least, what could be done.
After standing there for what might have been merely seconds but felt like much longer, Saripha slowly raised her hands, palms up, and made graceful gestures in the air. Finally she brought her hands together in front of her mouth as if she were praying. Her palms were still slightly parted. She blew air through the space between her palms in the direction of the network. Glints of light sparkled around the network, light that was different from the natural radiance of its own threads. The network was an icy bluish-white, almost silver. These glints were golden, like sparks. Then they started changing to other colors and sprinkled themselves on the network. Suddenly colored pathways appeared in the network. The threads weren’t just colored. Rather multiple colored streams appeared within each thread and different connections drew together different colors and then still different colors traveled outward from them. It was even more visually complex than the original network, all one color, had appeared.
I heard Blaise make a subtle sound. I wasn’t sure what it was exactly, but it was like a sound you might make walking into a wondrous example of architecture, like an old church.
Saripha backed away and made room for Izzy and Blaze. They stepped in.
“It’s beautiful,” Izzy almost whispered.
Blaise’s eyes shone with excitement. “It’s a pattern. An incredibly complex pattern, but a very clear one.”
He turned to Izzy. “You know how to start shutting down connections?”
“Yes. I know how the network operates architecturally. I just don’t know which connections to shut down.”
“I know which connections. I’ll point them out to you, you shut them down.”
I watched as Izzy and Blaise began working with the precision and patience of a clock maker. Blaise would concentrate and he would point. Izzy would begin to work a strand not where Blaise pointed but one which made connections to where Blaise was pointing. It was like watching great chess players in a master tournament.
It was also, for me who could do nothing, agony. It felt like it was taking forever. I knew at any moment we could be found. I crossed over to the edge of the platform and tried to give Philip assurance that we had something working. I was guessing that as long as he was trapped by that rig, nothing would be comforting. I came back just in time to see the entire network suddenly glow brighter and then disassemble almost like a flower closing in on itself. The light dimmed and then went out. There were sounds from everywhere and we realized the rigs had shut off and the people in them were released. They were released from the biological tubes that withdrew. They were released from the clips that somehow dissolved the skin graft. They were released by the straps. The gags fell away. Most of the humans collapsed, but they all started to get back up. Some were crying. Many reached out to help others. I scrambled down the ladder to grab Philip. He looked at me with panic and then recognition slowly sank in and he let himself fall against my chest.
“Quentin, I was such a fool.”
“Anyone who hopes in this place is a fool. Let’s stay fools. Can you walk?”
“Yes.”
I shouted out, looking around. “Everyone, we are still in danger. Get out of here as fast as you can and head for the mountain and into the trees. Go!”
Everyone did. Philip and I almost got trampled, but I helped him up the ladder and pushed him to follow the others. I told him how to climb the mountain in order to find Taka. As I have said, it was impossible to calculate how many levels there were below where we were and it took a long while for everyone to climb out.
When everyone had run out we all had one momentary group hug of triumph. Roland had left at the beginning so his men would not try to stand in the way of the fleeing people.
“There’s one more thing,” Izzy said. “Taka will take down the building, but I want to make sure this network device can never be used again. We only shut it off.”
Izzy took the last bomb from his bag and placed it on the surface that the network had collapsed into. He backed up while stringing an arrow. He let it fly. The cabinet exploded and shattered across the deck we were on. The control panels close to it also sustained major damage. Izzy grinned. We turned and ran back outside.
We emerged out of the tower. Some of the people had done as I said and were running for the mountain, but others were milling about in shock. I knew Taka would never take his shots while people were in the danger zone if he could avoid it.
“Go! Get out of here! If you don’t want that to happen again, get as far away from the tower as you can. Get to the trees and into the mountains.”
Izzy, Blaise and I picked people off the ground and shoved them in the right direction. They started running, scared that something bad was happening, and others joined them.
“CASE!” The voice boomed in my head as well as in my ears. Coils of sharp razor wire wrapped around me and I was painfully jerked up in the sky. The razor wire cut deeply into my skin right through my clothes. I found myself hanging in the air that way with Baron Steel’s face inches from mine. He was angry, which made me pretty happy even with the pain. He had his powdery metallic skin on, which made me less happy.
“Howdy, Baron. You miss me?”
“You don’t know what you have done.”
“Sure I do. I helped a bunch of people escape your pain-o-tron.” I noticed Izzy, Rox, Blaise, Kyo and Saripha still standing near the tower, unsure what to do. Izzy had strung an arrow and Kyo was moving carefully in a semicircle assessing the situation.
“Get out of here! Leave me!” I wanted Taka to be able to take his shot. They understood and started running.
Then I heard a commotion and shot my eyes in the other direction. Pouring out of the tunnel in the mountain and from another larger cavern we hadn’t noticed were our troops chasing the last of the demons. The troops stopped before they crossed much of the plain and archers set up in front. They knew not to let the troops get too close to the tower. I was gratified to see the redheaded woman we had helped in the tunnels in the lead. She was covered in a mixture of demon blood and her own blood and smiling. Roland and his men ran over and joined the troops.
Baron Steel yanked my head around.
“Your only chance! Give me your power now and your friends will live.”
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I saw the Manitor appear near the tower. He was taking no part in what was going on. He was simply watching. That seemed to be part of what Manitors did, but I was uneasy not knowing what might change that. They had a lot of power.
“Baron, as Janovic found out, I’m not making deals. I’ll admit I’m not even sure how to make the deal, but I would never trust any of you to do anything you promised.”
Frustration and rage rippled over his metallic features, but then they were replaced by a smile of realization.
“Oh, I will make you a promise you can be sure I’ll keep.”
I didn’t like that expression, but I didn’t get long to think about it. Unexpectedly, I found myself flung, arcing through the sky and finally hitting the ground. There was just enough grass to pad my fall and I was able to roll off the shoulder rather than hit my head. I kept rolling, choking on dust, and pulled myself up. The cuts were still angry on my flesh and now my shoulder hurt.
Saripha, Rox, Izzy, Blaise and Kyo all rushed over to me. Izzy and Kyo watched the Baron with weapons raised.
“Are you okay?” Rox asked.
“I’ve been better. Keep moving. He’s up to something.”
Unfortunately, we found out what in the next heartbeat. Razor wire shot at us and wrapped about Saripha. She cried out, more in surprise than pain, although I knew the pain was considerable. I watched in horror as Baron Steel flung Saripha against the tower, high off the ground. I then found myself screaming as he pinned her there with metal spikes through her upper arms and thighs. Strangely enough, she didn’t cry out. She had already pulled deeply inside herself. Even from here I could see her eyes blaze. There was power behind those eyes, but it didn’t change the situation.
I don’t think there was a single one of the humans on the ground that weren’t paralyzed by what they saw. To make it more insulting, the remaining demons that had fled the troops were gathered near the tower and now started to feel bravado again. They started laughing. Rage rose up in me like a red tide. For those of us who knew Saripha was actually mortal in this world, this was mind-numbing to see.