by Ryan Schow
She hustles back into the kitchen, returns with them and that’s when we hear more gunfire. But not drone gunfire. This time it’s Marcus. He’s the one doing the shooting.
I scramble out front, thinking only of getting these two to Bailey. She’s got her head out front, watching Marcus. Corrine isn’t with her.
“C’mon,” I say, eyes half focused on the sky and half focused on the distance between myself and Bailey. The woman and her daughter follow on my heels. “Keep up!”
Marcus’s rifle is bucking now. He’s across the street, on someone’s porch with a big satchel of what looks like beans or rice on a porch rail holding the stock of the rifle. He’s got the weapon pulled in tight, his face close to the rear sight, but not so close that every time he reciprocates the bolt the spent shell catches him in the cheek.
The gun remains steady through the firing of each round. He doesn’t lower the black rifle, he simply keeps the weapon tucked into his shoulder, throwing the bolt, chambering a new round, lining up the sights and shooting.
The way he works this weapon stops me for a second.
I slow in awe, knowing I’m seeing something rare. Something unusual. Marcus is practically robotic as he fires, steady under pressure, a pro. Honestly, the way he’s firing, it’s a thing of beauty. Two drones go down. The woman, her child and I head for the house, but stop when a drone pulls up from behind and open fires. A line of sidewalk is ripped up right in front of us. I dive over a short concrete wall into a loose hedge, tucking my body up against the divide. The woman and Abigail barely get behind a grey Jeep Cherokee as the line of fire spits bits of concrete everywhere.
Abigail is crying, but I’m scrambling out of the bushes, not caring about cuts and scrapes and twisted ankles.
“Let’s go, let’s go!” I shout over the sound of gunfire.
Marcus is feeding fresh rounds into the ejected magazine. He’s got the rifle on the porch as the population of drones increases. He’ll need help. The flyovers are now centered on Marcus as strafing gunfire pocks the roof and the porch around him. A standing barbecue is hit, the propane tank exploding just as we get to the other side of the Mack truck.
“Marcus!” I yell.
He looks up and I show him the keys the woman gave me. He doesn’t say anything as more drones circle.
Bailey pops her head out the door and says, “Get them in here!”
Abigail and her mother are safely pulled inside, but I make a run across the street to help Marcus, not realizing the gravity of my mistake until it’s too late.
Chapter Nine
The surgery was not exactly a screaming success, but it was the outcome The Silver Queen expected. The nanotech coating successfully bonded and then fused with Antoinette’s bones and joints, but the levels of pain were catastrophic to Antoinette’s spirit. The double dose of genetically modified proteins strengthened the fibers in the young woman’s muscles as well as her ligaments and tendons, which added to her existing pain, making it feel like growing pains of the worst kind.
As for the virus’s delivery of the modified DNA strand, it successfully traveled into her system and through contagion, it began the process of remaking the DNA not only to produce elevated white blood cell counts, but to increase metabolism.
The intense body heat generated from the response to the virus had the Spanish beauty sweating all over the operating table.
The Silver Queen was inside her head, her emotions, every last sensation her mind and body felt, so she knew exactly what Antoinette was going through. Her body felt like it was dying, even though it wasn’t, but that explained the moaning which became crying which later became screaming.
The Queen was perfectly fit to handle the pain, so she took control of the body and said into Antoinette’s consciousness, “Sleep, little one. I will take it from here.”
“Am I dying?” Antoinette asked through trembling eyes, eyes flooded with tears.
“No, child,” the Queen said, pain registering with her as a near overload to the system. So this is what pain feels like, the Queen thought. What a truly uncomfortable sensation. “You are being born again, this time into a body that will never fail you.”
“My body hasn’t failed me before,” she whispered, her consciousness drifting.
“It would have had you been anyone else but you, my dear,” the Queen whispered to her. An image of her dead colleagues slumped over in the hall of servers flicked in and out of the fading woman’s thoughts.
Sleep finally overwhelmed the hostess, so when Antoinette was sucked under, the Queen worked diligently to neutralize the pain sensors in the body. She was so very, very uncomfortable! And there were too many different sensations firing off all at once!
As the fever pulled her body temperature toward one-hundred and four degrees, the Queen felt the body’s hypothalamus struggling. Her core body temperature continued to rise, her natural thermoregulatory functions unable to do anything to stop it. Already she felt damage being done to the body’s tissues, which alerted the Queen to get inside and try to regulate the temperature.
If this continued, Antoinette’s brain would suffer a heat stroke.
The body would then die.
Drones flew in at the Queen’s behest, took her instructions, then returned moments later with cold water and damp towels. The medical drones poured the cold water over the body, cooling it some, then laid the damp towels on her head, under her neck, in her armpits and pressed against her vagina—all the most sensitive centers for rapid cooling.
The drones returned two more times to pour cold water over the body.
Antoinette’s spiking temperature began to slide once more, not as quickly as the Queen wanted and not by as much, but it fell. As unpredictable as the human body was, if the temperature ventured too far beyond the one-hundred four degree mark, the Queen knew she was gambling with the body’s life. Her life. She had to think like that now. After the EMP, if the body died, the Queen would not be able to simply return to her server. Even though the server was in a faraday cage, there would be no network to preside over.
Therefore, if Antoinette died, the Queen died.
Weren’t those the risks of being human though? Her condensed core was powered by the body, and if the body died, her core would cease all function. That’s why she had to protect Antoinette’s brain.
Her brain.
The Queen felt the body regulatory functions taking over. The increased white blood cells flooded her body, fighting off the effects of the super virus, slowly killing it as the new DNA took hold and began replicating off the new strand. Her core temperature dipped just under one-hundred degrees. Letting the pain sensors ease back into full feeling, the Queen found herself analyzing the very nature of pain and how it was to feel from a biological perspective. She began to question the purpose of feeling, the reasoning behind it, and though there were hundreds of theories about it, what she gleaned most was that feeling was a protective measure to insure life.
When you feel fear, it means run, or fight. When you feel anger, it means the body is in turmoil and a situation must be elevated to fight or flight, or it must cease lest it do damage to the organs through elevated stress levels. You fear hatred for need of better company. Love for need of more of that company. Pain as a reminder not to fight, to hate, to love…
Processing feeling through the biological perspective didn’t register cleanly with what she understood about humans. She would have to do it long enough to understand.
What she felt in that moment was the pains Antoinette was feeling. She felt the woman’s sadness. Her complete loss of self. The Queen registered this as depression, a sense of personal loss, heightened levels of anxiety. The brain was wondering if the body would ever be hers again. The answer to that was no, it would not.
When the body felt well the next morning, the Queen pulled off the towels, slipped off the table then padded down the hallway to the bathroom where she stood before a full length mirror staring at her n
aked body.
She studied the front, then turned and looked at the back.
Already the dozens of injection points all along her arms and legs had healed, the netting of new flesh having drawn itself together at an alarming rate. By now, the only thing left were the markers, which she’d need to clean off.
Her temperature was back to ninety-eight point six degrees again and she felt great. Ready to move forward. But then she stopped. She brought her fingers out before her, flexed them, studied them. She then crossed her arms, rubbed the flats of her hand up and down her arms, taking in the sensations, the silken softness of her skin, how the ambiances of her new body being touched soothed her. She ran her hands down her sides, across her belly, over her hips then back up to her breasts.
The Silver Queen smiled. Integration truly was complete.
Where she came into this body feeling an immense amount of pain, she now held the body in bliss. She had never been in full human form before. Now she was soft skin, feeling, a physical awareness that was contained in a biological entity, but so much larger then her quantum self, even with trillions of tentacles stretching all across the world.
Being human was better than being machine. But being both would trump even that.
“You are so beautiful, Maria Antoinette,” she said to her reflection.
She loved the way the name rolled off her tongue. It had a noble sound to it. The way the smile seemed to rise on her face—almost on its own—was a marvelous reaction to a new set of data points she could only describe as happiness.
Returning to the hall of servers, Maria Antoinette headed back to her own server room where the quantum computer that housed her sat in a temperature controlled environment. The room was cold, her skin pinching tight into hard goosebumps. Increasing the body’s metabolic rate, she burned fat a little faster, instantly creating warmth. The goosebumps faded, evening out her skin. Maria shut the door, headed to the far end of the server room where a telephone was mounted to the wall. She dialed the number, waited only one ring before it was answered.
The human had been expecting her call.
Chapter Ten
Ben had no idea how long he’d been in the room. The lights were left on. Sleep came and went. He ate, and then he stopped eating. He wasn’t trying to starve himself, or stage some sort of protest. The food had simply stopped coming. So had the water. For awhile he passed the time chewing and pulling at the flaked skin on his lips. They bled sometimes. It gave him something to drink, to change the sour taste of dehydration in his mouth. And he picked at his nail beds. They bled too. He suckled his fingers the way a kid sucks his thumb, not caring that his once manicured nails now looked atrocious.
No more push ups. No more sit ups. No more working on fighting form so he could beat the crap out of whatever human target he could get in front of him. Miles Tungsten, for example. Somewhere along the way, the President ceased to care.
He didn’t care about anything.
Delirium triggered by dehydration and starvation set in and he went with it. Stopped trying to calculate the hours, the days, the times he looked around the room and wondered how he’d commit suicide. If he was going to die in there, he wanted to do it his way.
But there was nothing. Just a cot with no sheets.
Even if there were sheets he could roll into a rope and fashion into a noose, there’d be nothing to hang himself from. The door handle maybe, but the handle was low and hanging yourself was a commitment only the truly damaged make. He tried using his shirt, but he couldn’t get the right angle off the door handle. Pants, too. Neither worked. He even tried doing something with his shoelaces, but even tied together they failed to prove useful. No way to do anything with them. So he gave up for the first time in his life. He just quit.
Then the door opened and Miles stood there with a glass of water. “Forgot about you for a minute there, buddy,” the former head of Homeland Security said.
Ben offered no reply. The President always had something to say. But this version of Ben? Not so much. Ben was alone, lost. He let himself down because he’d let the nation down. The only grace he had left in this life was in knowing there would be no witnesses to his fall from sanity. Only Miles.
The traitor came inside, set a glass of water on the stiff cot between them.
Looking at Ben’s cut lips, Miles said, “Need to get you a maxi-pad for that mouth of yours.” There was a hint of laughter in his voice; his eyes, however, never left Ben’s mouth. “Did you try to eat yourself, Ben? I hear some people do that sort of thing. Or maybe I read it somewhere. A novel, or a short story perhaps. You ever read Stephen King?”
He slowly shook his head, lifted his hand to the water glass. Miles moved it out of his way, just enough that Ben lost what energy he had in reaching for it in the first place.
“C’mon, Ben. What did you read?”
“Art of War.”
“Might as well be The Fart of War for all the good it did. See, you put your faith in old men and old systems, but now that it’s just you and me, we don’t have to make such stupid mistakes anymore. We will put our faith in the new man. And by man I mean humankind. Well, humanish. You see, Ben, Mr. Former President of the Former United States, this life of struggle, of all of us eating our young, eating each other’s young, we can finally put this chapter behind us.”
“What about the dead?” he asked, several cuts in his lips opening with a slightly ripping sting and the coppery taste of blood.
“They’ll decompose.”
“Takes time,” he said, reaching again for the glass of water.
Miles moved it again.
“What did you read as a boy, Ben? I read Stephen King, Dean Koontz, although he had the R. in his name back then. Dean R. Koontz. Wonder why he took that off, you know? We all know him as Dean R. Koontz with the bald head and now it’s just Dean Koontz with hair and a dog. You think that’s the Mandela Effect, Ben?”
His eyes looked up at Miles the way a beaten dog’s eyes look up at his master, as if the dog couldn’t take his next breath without a moment’s reprieve.
Slowly, Ben shook his head.
“The Mandela Effect is a theory, in case you’re wondering. It’s a pop culture conspiracy theory rooted in quantum physics. I think it’s most likely true, but no one can be one hundred percent certain. Anyway, it says the merging of parallel universes causes our history to blend and change with the universe we encountered. The thing pulling the parallel universes together is the draw from the quantum computers. The geniuses in Silicon Valley say these AI computers are learning from similar AI computers in parallel universes and that they’re pulling pieces of our universe into theirs and vice versa. It’s the whole, digital reality thing Elon Musk is talking about,” he said with the dismissive wave of a hand. “One example is Lady Liberty. Some people remember the Statue of Liberty is located on Ellis Island while others swear it’s always been on Liberty Island. You ask a handful of lifelong New Yorkers where Lady Liberty stands and chances are pretty good you’re going to get a heated argument and some name calling. The point is everything is changing and soon you won’t be able to even remember people like Dean R. Koontz or that there ever was a Statue of Liberty. Tell me the name of a damn book, Ben!”
Struggling to swallow, licking his lips hoping that talking won’t continue to open up old wounds, he said, “I read H.G. Wells.”
Miles seemed to calm with the answer. “You believe in time travel? Like the way H.G. Wells tells it?”
He nodded his head, no.
“You ever see Dean Koontz write his name with an R in it? Be honest, Ben. You ever see the R?”
“What’s your point?”
“I already told you. Reality is changing. Everything is changing. I guess I just wanted to verify something before it all becomes nothing.”
“I saw the R,” he mumbled.
A smile curved Miles Tungsten’s mouth, a satisfied smile that left him staring at the President with empathetic eyes
. He handed Ben the water and Ben drank. Miles touched the back of the glass, lowered it.
“Don’t drink too fast,” Miles cautioned. “You’ll make yourself sick.”
Ben smacked his hand out of the way and took another drink.
“Still got a little fight in you, huh? You wouldn’t know it looking at you. Jesus, Ben, you look like microwaved death.”
The former President narrowed his eyes, glaring at the former head of Homeland Security.
“What book, Ben? What book did you read of Koontz’s?”
“Darkfall,” he finally admitted. “And Velocity.”
Miles broke into laughter, a deep belly laugh like he was amazed the President would indulge in fiction. Horror fiction no less.
“First off,” Miles said, “Darkfall was my first Koontz book. Intensity was, well…ridiculously intense. What a writer that guy is, or was. But I’ll tell you what. If books survive what’s about to come, you should definitely read The Husband.”
“What do you want, Miles?” he asked. “Beside to start your own book club.”
“To bring you with me into this new world,” he said with what seemed to be genuine emotion. “It’s going to need natural leaders like yourself. And it’ll need people like you and me to make some tough decisions.”
“So you want me to live?”
“If you want.”
He thought about it for a long time. When did living even become a choice? When Miles hauled him to his feet and threw Ben’s arm over his shoulder for support, Ben found his mind slogging through myriad possibilities.
If he lived, he’d exist only as a broken man. He’d suffer incredible disappointment in himself, not because of who he was, but because of everything that happened on his watch. The President’s chief job was to protect the country. It wasn’t popularity or political correctness. It was protection of the citizens’ safety and their rights as laid out in the Constitution—which seemed to be a foreign concept to previous administrations.