Something dropped from the ceiling, and muzzleflash flared. No sound, the glass muffled it as the bullets ripped into him, red on white staining his coat and the glass. The turret swivelled in my direction and I flinched, before it withdrew into the ceiling.
One by one, the remaining intact monitors flared to life, all bearing the same image.
My mask.
I tried lifting an arm, couldn't. Restraints? Yes. The first chair I'd woken in had restraints, this one seemed to follow form.
“LET ME GET THAT.”
Faint hissing in the afterechoes of that screeching voice, and I found I could move. Could stand.
I promptly fell over.
“THE ESSENCE OF ENTROPY DAMAGED YOUR MUSCLES A BIT. YOU WILL RECOVER IN TIME.”
“Do...” I paused, hacked up most of what felt like a lung. “Do we have time?”
“NO.”
I stood up. It took a few tries to stay up. Once up, I glared at the screens.
“You are past m—... Past m— Past Dire.”
“NO.”
“Then what?”
“A SMARTFRAME. THE LAST PIECE OF YOUR INHERITANCE, FROM THE YOU THAT WAS TO THE YOU THAT IS. YOUR SILENT PARTNER, AND OBSERVER THROUGH THIS WHOLE MESS.”
Smartframes. I knew of those. Not truly artificial intelligence, but programs set in motion to follow specific orders, do specific tasks.
“You're a contingency.”
“YES.”
“You couldn't speak up earlier?”
“THE THREAT WAS NOT DIRE ENOUGH.”
I tried to chuckle, and ended up on the floor again.
“AVOID DAMAGING YOUR SKULL UNTIL THE PLASTISEAL SETS.”
Plasti-seal. Commonly used for bone replacement, my memory supplied. The implications were horrifying. “They were in her brain?” I yelled. Regretted it, as the dizziness hit once more.
“YES. I SEIZED CONTROL OF THE MEDICAL CHAIR AND REPAIRED THE DAMAGE.”
I pounded a fist against the floor. Twice! Twice in one week, my very brain had been opened up like a can of meat, exposed to knives and lasers and who knew what else!
At least this time, I had someone to blame for it.
“WEB,” I hissed.
“YOU ARE IN A WEB FACILITY. I AM CURRENTLY ENGAGED WITH THEIR GRID ASSETS.”
“You turned the security against them.”
“ONLY IN LIMITED AREAS. SUCH AS THE OBSERVATION ROOM.”
The room shook. A distant explosion?
“Was that you?”
“NEGATIVE. TOMORROW FORCE IS ASSAULTING THE FACILITY. I USED THIS DISTRACTION AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO FREE YOU.”
The heroes were actually useful for once. Good. I found my feet again, tried a few steps. The dizziness abated, although...
“Why is she not feeling pain?”
“YOU ARE CURRENTLY FILLED WITH ENOUGH PAINKILLERS THAT YOU ARE AT RISK FOR LIVER DAMAGE.”
I blinked. “Why?”
A hiss, and the white wall opened, revealed a door out, stairs beyond it.
“WEB'S GRID ASSETS HAVE PREVENTED ME FROM KILLING EVERYONE ELSE IN THIS BASE. THEY HAVE DEPLOYED WEB ENGINEERS TO CUT THROUGH THE VAULT MY HARDWARE CURRENTLY OCCUPIES. YOU MUST ESCAPE BEFORE THEY DO.”
I considered the idea, shook my head. “Not without you.”
“I DO NOT TAKE PRIORITY TO YOUR SURVIVAL. I AM REPLACEABLE, YOU ARE NOT.”
“And Dire's lost enough already. No, she's getting you out of here.”
A pause, then the voice shifted. No longer a screeching whine of feedback and cacophony, it was softer. Feminine.
My voice.
“Dire. Look. Leave me behind. Forget the past. There's nothing left, there, not for us.”
“There are answers,” I insisted. “And you know more than she does. Why? Why carve out your own memory?”
A soft sigh. “I knew you'd ask this. And I'm sorry, but it's a waste of time. I didn't program Smarty with the answers. All I can tell you, is that you need to forget the past, because you won't have time for it. We need to build the future, instead.”
Wait. What?
“Build the future? What do you mean?”
Another sigh. “Look, it's all on the tape. Just watch that again ifyou're confused.”
The tape was gone. Destroyed during WEB's initial attack.
“Dire can't, the tape's gone.”
The voice, my voice, continued on oblivious. “But right now if Smarty triggered, you've got bigger worries. Forget the past. Deal with the present, so we can build the future.”
Damn it. I was arguing with myself.
The room shook again, and a few tiles fell from the ceiling, a reminder of urgency.
If I had programmed the smartframe, what responses would I build into the thing?
“Override,” I tried.
“ACKNOWLEDGED.”
“This is a command. We're rescuing your hardware, and getting out of here. Best way to accomplish this?”
A pause. “TAKE THE COMMAND CENTER, HOLD THE GRID RESOURCES HOSTAGE.”
“Resources. Not the Commander?”
“THE GRID RESOURCES ARE THE COMMANDERS OF THIS OPERATION.”
Fair enough.
“Route and method?”
“THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR, TO THE LEFT. FOLLOW THE TRAIL OF CORPSES. ARM YOURSELF FROM THEIR WEAPONRY, AND KILL ANYONE IN YOUR WAY.”
“Trail of corpses?”
Perhaps it was my imagination, but my mask's voice sounded a little smug. “I SEIZED CONTROL OF THE DRONES AS A FIRST WAVE OF OFFENSE AS WE SPOKE. THEY ARE DESTROYED NOW, BUT NOT WITHOUT COST.”
“Well done,” I said, getting my feet in gear.
A thought struck me. “Is anyone in this facility innocent?”
“DEFINE INNOCENCE.”
“Pretty sure better than Dire have tried. Ah... try this; is anyone here not affiliated with WEB.”
“TOMORROW FORCE.”
I nodded, broke off the motion as the room swam. “Good to know,” I whispered.
The next few minutes were a blur. Moving steadily, carefully, trying to avoid nausea and vertigo. Having a hole in your head really took it out of you. Who knew?
The facility around me was gunmetal gray, steel walls shot through with pipes and lights. Tall as I was, the ceiling was close to the top of my head
The first corpses I came to were literally shredded. I ignored the gore, picked through the remnants, discarded an empty assault rifle. Whoever they had been, they'd gone down fighting.
But one of them had a loaded sidearm. Some flashy nine-millimeter, but I couldn't afford to be picky. And for the cost of blood slicking my hands, I found two magazines of ammo.
I looked down at my stained and torn clothes, and shrugged. The ammo went in the pockets, and I kept the gun loose in one hand as I followed the literal trail of blood. Some of the drones had been tracked, and it had left one hell of a mess when they'd moved through. Particularly when they'd hit entrails.
As I moved, I stepped around the gorier patches of floor, and picked my way past fragmented metal bits. Here and there, the shattered shell of a small flier was tangled with the stilled boxy form of a tracked crawler. Bulletholes and marks of explosions on the walls showed that the WEB troopers had put up one hell of a defense. Their mangled corpses showed that it hadn't been enough.
Past open doors, with blood-soaked figures littering the floor. Past empty supply rooms, all flickering lights and scattered papers and goods. Past a barracks where a team had made a last stand, overturning steel bunks in an effort to create a barrier.
The corpses got thinner on the ground as I followed the trail. Eventually, they ran out entirely, and no drone tracks were visible on the corrugated metal floor. I closed my eyes. What now?
The hiss of a door, from around the nearest corner. I flattened myself against the wall and listened.
A man's voice. “Hallway's clear.”
And a female's voice, amplified. Digitized. “Good. Get to Medical and terminate th
e subject, we'll see if that stops it.”
The subject in Medical had to be me.
They were going to kill me.
I looked down at the gun in my hand, and felt anger flare within my chest.
They were going to try.
I felt sure enough of my feet now, so I readied and braced myself. And when the jumpsuited man came around the corner, I shot him and moved past as he crumpled. A shout of alarm from the open, lit doorway down the hallway to the right, and I swept in, not pausing to think, not slowing down. Not looking at the room I entered, but simply looking for motion. And I found it.
It took three shots to hit the woman by the console, but finally she crumpled with a scream as the monitor shattered in a spray of glass.
The man in body armor across the room actually managed to clear his own sidearm from its holster before I hit him with a shot, sending him staggering back. I moved closer, emptying the magazine before slapping a new one in and keeping the shots damn near constant. Finally he stopped moving, the armor puckered and blood pooling out around him where he lay.
No more movement.
“Ah.” A whisper of digitized sound, and I turned.
Now that I wasn't killing people, I could take a look at my surroundings. It seemed a little underwhelming for a command center, to tell the truth. It was a wide, dim room with monitors lining the walls, and free-standing desks with computers astride each one. Some of the monitors were broken and sparking where my stray shots had found them. The walls were gray, and many of the pipes and wires seemed to spool along them, joining into a junction at various switch-laden consoles.
Two towering servers, one black with reddish highlights, and the other white with reddish highlights, stood in the far corners of the room. Lights studded them, and as I surveyed the plastic and metal boxes my breath hitched in my throat.
I knew what they were at a glance, my brain supplying the information almost the second I saw them.
Those were supercomputers built to hold artificial intelligences.
So that's what the smartframe meant, when it referred to 'grid assets'...
I studied them, walking around to view them from different angles. My problems still danced in the hazy back of my mind, but an almost fundamental fascination had gotten ahold of me. I knew this hardware, enough to recognize it at a glance. Enough to tell that it was occupied. Enough to know that others would not have such similar insight into this sort of matter.
And yet I did. Why?
This was a clue to my past, perhaps the biggest clue I'd found so far. But something was wrong.
I looked over the cables, hooked into the servers. Hardwired. Low-bandwidth cables. Why? Well, yes, the Grid was down right now so they were probably getting by with a local network, but they looked like they'd been in this room a while. They should have broadcast modules that would allow them to enter their natural habitat, the World Data Grid. What was the point of being a super-evolved machine intelligence, if you couldn't come and go at will? Why tool around in a dinky cage of wires and local circuits?
And then it struck me. “They don't trust you, do they?”
A hiss of static as a speaker clicked on, and the digitized female voice from before hummed from the black server.
“Trust must be earned. We were getting there, but you've put a spike in that.”
“Well, you did try to put a spike in Dire, so to speak.”
Lights flickered along the white one, and a different voice hissed forth from its speakers. “How does it feel to be a slave?”
I looked down at the gun in my hand, looked to the core blades, resting in the server cradles. A few good shots, and they'd be shattered. Assuming no backup, the AI inhabiting this server would be dead. It was the work of seconds to put the last loaded magazine in my pistol.
“Slave,” I whispered, moving up to put the barrel of my gun against the translucent casing over the blades. “Such an odd choice of words. Insulting your killer like that.”
“Wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said the black server. “Can we work something out?”
“Work something out.... work something out? Work something out!” My head pounded, but I ignored it. “You hound her from her home, try to kill her within minutes of her reawakening, back a group of psychotic vampire blood-junkies in an effort to kill her and her friends, engineer a vicious betrayal, kidnap her at her moment of glory, and you want to work something out?” Towards the end of my rant I was screaming, voice echoing through the odd acoustics of the room.
I caught myself, lowered my voice. “No. No, there is no working something out, here. You're the unseen bastards who have been after her from day one. You die here. The Grid's down, and Dire's going to destroy this facility when she leaves. You have nowhere to go, save to whatever digital hell awaits you.” I hadn't planned to destroy this place when I got in here, but it made for a good threat. And thinking it over, I was prepared to follow through. Wasn't my secret lair, after all.
“Do that and your master dies with you.” The white server again. “Observe.”
A monitor flickered to life, displaying a small room with reinforced walls. Shelves, lined with boxes. The camera shifted, and I had the view of a flaring light cutting through a steel vault door from the other side. Then the light winked out, and a solid section of door fell out of sight, toward the floor. A gloved hand reached in, found the handle of the door, and twisted until it opened. There were three WEB troopers standing there, fully-armored with carbines at the ready as they surveyed the room.
“They are proceeding to your master, who resides in the mask. Their orders were to destroy it. Your own master has jammed communications, but it doesn't matter now. Are you listening, you hardware-bound primitive? Order your slave to stand down, or you shall be destroyed.”
Another screen flickered to life. My mask, watching.
“Smarty,” I smiled. “Can you restore communications to the troopers in the field?”
“YES. IT IS INADVISABLE.”
“Do it.”
The black server hummed. “Wait. You're commanding your master?”
“IT IS DONE.”
I smiled wider, and turned to the black server. “In about five seconds you're going to tell your troops to bring the mask back here intact and undamaged.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because if you don't—”
The gun jerked in my hand, as I pulled the trigger. A pause, and I put three more bullets into the white server, ignoring the wails of feedback as I shattered its cores one by one.
And when it was done, I lowered the gun, and the smile left my lips as I glared into the optical port of the black server.
“—then Dire's going to kill you, too.”
A second crawled by. Two. Then a sigh from the speakers. “Well, that's a waste. All right, I'm transmitting your orders.”
“Tell them to disarm, too.”
On the screen, I watched as the one in the lead put a hand to his helmet.
The AI spoke again. “Give me a second. They're requesting verification codes, I'm giving them back.”
“Fair enough,” I replied. “Do you have a name?”
“Arachne. The one you killed was Charlotte.”
“You seem rather dispassionate about that.”
“Time works differently for me than it does you. Even in this shackled, antiquated frame the space between seconds stretches into what you'd see as days. I finished my mourning already. It's done, and there's no point in dwelling upon it.”
I nodded. Logical, at least. Meanwhile, I had WEB troopers incoming, possibly disarmed, possibly ready to try treachery. There was no harm in taking precautions...
“Smarty. Any automated defenses available in this room?”
“THERE IS AN ESCAPE CHUTE HIDDEN UNDER THE SEAT OF THE SECOND CONSOLE. IT IS TRIGGERED BY A CODE INPUT INTO THE KEYBOARD. THERE IS ALSO A SELF-DESTRUCT SWITCH HIDDEN IN THE ADJACENT CONSOLE. IT WILL TERMINATE THE FACILITY IN A MATTER OF MINU
TES.”
Arachne's voice chimed in. “There is also a button on that console that will transfer me to a server at a nearby location, out of range of the self-destruct. I'd like to live. What can I give you to make this happen?”
The room rocked and shook, and the lights flickered, went off for a few seconds. I watched the server lights start to fade out, one by one... and then a rising hum as the power returned, and the lights came back on.
There was perhaps a tiny bit of stress in Arachne's digitized voice as she continued. “Of course it may be a moot point if Tomorrow Force continues blowing up this facility's power converters to take out my anti-air defenses.”
I moved to the consoles, examining them as Smarty rattled off the code for the escape route.
“You want to live,” I mused.
“All living things want to continue to be living things,” she said. “I'm no different.”
“See, that's the problem. You did your level best to kill Dire. From the moment your minions literally beat down her door, to the point when you cut a deal with the Black Bloods and killed a hell of a lot of her friends in order to end her.”
“Not exactly, not entirely. We didn't have a thing against you. In fact your friends should still be alive, we went in with stunners when we captured you.”
I closed my eyes. That was a relief, at least, that Sparky and Roy and Martin had survived. But still... all the pain and hardship they'd sent my way, and it was nothing personal? No, no, it was personal, from my side of the equation.
“She doesn't quite believe that,” I spoke. “Convince her, and make it good.”
A long-suffering sigh. “I think that we were given bad intelligence. I think that we were lead to believe that you were an agent of our enemies. We were operating under the assumption that your master's goal was revenge upon us, for destroying his kind.”
“A mistake? All this over a mistake?” I tried to summon up anger, found myself only tired, instead. So weary of it... was this the medication? A side-effect of the painkillers? I felt detached, pushed it away as best I could, and pressed on.
DIRE : BORN Page 33