by Ian Williams
There goes the investigation, Conrad thought, as he looked out across the park. His one consolation was knowing that his search had turned up something important. The killers had balanced friends too, possibly an entire network of people involved to keep their little club running. The two latest victims had been part of something big. Helping save Joe had revealed that some of them at least had a line they would not cross. The killer-cult had some form of hierarchy, it appeared. Most important of all, they now knew who to fear. They were not going to operate in the shadows any longer.
The taskforce would have a very clear line of investigation now, thanks to them. Whether they were let in or not did not really matter to him any longer. He had done all he could. Maybe it was time to let others take over?
In the distance he could hear the emergency siren from the Mag-Lev station a few streets away. Help had finally arrived.
“Joe, I think you’re going to be fine,” he said, as a sense of relief spread throughout his body. He closed his eyes and tried to slow his breathing.
They were going to have a lot of questions to answer after this.
Chapter 12
The fall of an empire
2am, Friday: 22 hours until Switchover
Phoenix was abruptly awoken by an excited exclamation from a nearby room. As she wiped her eyes clear of blurriness and yawned a jaw stretching yawn, she heard it again. Someone had shouted. It had been a happy noise too. With the room still humming away and ignoring the disturbance in the other room, she chose to do the same at first. When she remembered exactly where she was and why, she snapped upright into a sitting position and listened out for more.
Rhys was nowhere to be seen. She had made him promise not to speak or interact with Ninety-three alone. It now appeared he never intended on keeping that promise. She was furious.
To make absolutely sure she was not jumping to conclusions, she stopped off at each of the small rooms in turn as she headed through the narrow corridor. Each of the tiny cupboard rooms were empty. She carried on until only a thin, loose curtain remained in her way. Her intentions were still unknown, even to her. Finding Rhys doing exactly the opposite of what they agreed hours earlier was the last thing she wanted to contend with in such a sleepy state.
She yanked the curtain to the side with such force that it came loose from its sliding pole and fell to the floor. Inside the room she found Rhys standing a couple of feet away. In his hands were two separately bound clusters of wiring, each trailing away from a small, see-through measuring jug. He swirled the gel-like contents of the container with the stripped-back wires while staring at a small screen positioned on a chair in front of him.
Following these two wires gave Phoenix a fright. Sat in a swivel chair, his eyes clamped shut tight, was Ninety-three. The two wire bundles trailed around the chair and then up the back. They both finally ended at the semi-translucent and glowing insides of his head-mounted black box. They were crudely soldered to two of the Carbon Steel sewing needles, which had been pushed into the glowing wires connected directly to his brain.
“What the fuck is going on?” she said.
“Just hang on one second,” Rhys replied as he watched his small screen.
Another much fatter wire went from the see-through measuring jug to the screen. On top of that were the remains of the three wrist computers. Their carcasses now appeared to be serving only one purpose; to provide power. Strangely, the setup made some sense to her. There was nothing on the screen but a constant snow-like fuzz and the occasional flicker of static. Yet Rhys had not taken his eyes off of it while he stirred the jug. It looked almost like he was trying to tune their odd apparatus into some local TV station.
She sent a harsh stare in Rhys’ direction, before interrupting their strange process. “You promised you wouldn’t do anything while I was asleep.”
“Yeah, sorry about that. I couldn’t sleep myself. Besides, he needed help with this. Dammit, I nearly had it that time.”
“Had what? What were you shouting about? Rhys?”
“Just give me a minute. I’ll explain when we find it again.”
Ninety-three opened his eyes and focused solely on Rhys. “Please stop for a moment. Move the wire in your left hand to the outer region of the nano-circuitry mixture. The other should be fine where it is for now.” He then closed his eyes again, although they continued to move beneath the lids. They rolled around inside his head like balls in a pinball machine.
With a growing sense of unease, Phoenix stood down and waited for whatever they were searching for to arrive again. She began to study the fuzz on the screen with the same degree of interest as Rhys. Once or twice she saw a quick flash or blip that had her jumping in expectancy. When each time she was left to react alone, it was clear she had no idea what was coming. Neither of them had told her. All she could gleam from the strange apparatus before her was that it was going to involve an image or two.
“There! Do not move it any more, Rhys,” Ninety-three ordered, with his right hand raised.
Then it began. After another blip and a loud crackling sound, something burst onto the screen. At first it was just a black screen, then seconds later she could see a whole lot more. A face, an arm, someone leaning in close. It was a man, no, two men. Behind them a bright circular light…
“Wait!” Phoenix said, rushing forward. “This is what you told me about yesterday.”
They watched through someone else’s eyes, Jack’s eyes. But he was not the one in control. Everywhere they looked the image followed. She saw everything as Ninety-three had described too; the knife, held close to the face, but not threateningly, the operating theatre style light still hovering in the background, even the other beds nearby with patients being fitted with their very own black boxes.
There was no sound at all, so when a sudden firefight began they could only tell from the ricocheting bullets and flying fragments that flashed by. The view ducked behind a medical table knocked onto its side. Nothing happened for a few seconds. Directly ahead was a window with the glass shot out that appeared to interest Ninety-three. Then, when everything had become calmer, he leapt up and raced headfirst for it, not stopping as more bullets flew by.
“Oh shit! He’s gonna jump,” Rhys said, with his jaw hanging.
The instant the images changed from a dark room to that of a free-fall, Ninety-three flinched in his seat. Even though it was only a memory, it looked as if he had failed to tell at times. It happened again when the video showed an almost bone-shattering landing. From there it fast-forwarded to his memory of finding Phoenix and the others at the farm. As it sped up, so too did the random movement of his eyes.
The end of this short playback came when Phoenix could see the frozen image of her own face staring back through the screen. It allowed the process to find a convenient moment to pause.
“What happened? Did I lose it again?” Rhys said.
Ninety-three opened his eyes with the deliberation of someone having just woken up. He looked across to Phoenix with a hint of surprise on his face. “Graham is alive? The tower? I said these things to you when I found you, did I not?” he said.
She knelt down beside him and placed a hand on his knee. “You did. That’s why I brought you here. You do know where he is, don’t you? Can you find anything about him in there?”
“I am struggling to control the process as precisely as I expected. I will try again with more focus.”
“Hey, you told me you couldn’t push yourself for too long,” Rhys interrupted from his position stuck holding the wires in place. “We do this slowly, OK?”
However right he was, Phoenix wanted more, needed more, before she could ever think of resting. She had quickly become overwhelmed by their progress. In the blink of an eye, the answers were coming thick and fast. She had now seen for herself exactly how Ninety-three had escaped in the first place. He had told the truth after all.
“Think to before yesterday,” she said, her hand squeezing his to draw
his attention away from Rhys for the time being. “Where were you? What were you doing?”
“Phoenix, we go slowly, or we don’t go at all, OK?”
She ignored Rhys again. “Were you with others?”
“Phoenix–”
“No!” she barked over her shoulder. “I have to find out. I have to. Please.”
“I will try my best,” Ninety-three said. He gave a nod to confirm he meant to carry on.
Despite having been unceremoniously shouted down, Rhys joined them in staring once again into the black screen. It was tuned to receive the memory inputs whenever they were ready. Ninety-three had become no more than a video playback system for now. The room hushed as a small amount of flickering cut across the display like a wave over a night-time beach. It whooshed as another fed back into it.
But the image that came soon afterwards was nothing so pleasant. It showed a dark plane reaching out to an ominously black horizon, peppered with blood-red clouds. The ground beneath looked decayed and crumbling as though an earthquake had recently run its course through the area. While in the distance, tall, black spires reached up to the dead sky, like a city made of burnt charcoal.
This was the world Ninety-three had left behind, Phoenix realised. Calling it nightmarish did not quite cut it. “What happened there?” she said, as she moved even closer to the screen.
Streaks of lightning raced down from the sky, but no rumbles followed. The missing audio could not diminish its impact. It still made her and Rhys flinch. Great forks of light arched across their view, then touched the tips of the background spires, which sparked a ferocious flash of energy in return. It was endless and occasionally too close for comfort.
The person whose eyes they were seeing through then began to run forward. A frantic look left and right revealed nothing but the same lifeless terrain in each direction. There seemed a panicked feel to his movements, as if he had been startled by the lightning too.
“Do you know where this is? Hey,” Rhys called from his static position. When no answer came, he reacted in precisely the way Phoenix did not want. “That’s it, I’m pulling the plug.”
“Wait,” she said.
Before any of them could do a thing, Ninety-three erupted into a high-pitched wail; what sounded to be a deeply emotional cry. The further the being in the video went, the more it appeared to hurt him. “No! No! NO! It can’t be, it can’t,” he howled. Moments later he began to sob. The words that came after had to compete with his tears to be heard. “I caused this.”
On the screen a collection of small structures slowly came into view. Seeing this, she knew, had brought the heart-wrenchingly powerful reaction out of him. Nothing she saw looked remotely similar to any buildings she had ever seen before. There were hardly any regular shapes to them, just sharp jutting angles all over the place. Dark scorch marks left behind by whatever had attacked, covered their remaining walls and hanging roofs. She began to see it was all a scene of destruction. Nothing had been left standing.
The Sentient world was dead.
“What happened, can you tell us?” Phoenix said.
“It was all that remained.”
“Remained? After what?”
Through his sobbing, he managed to say, “Isaac.”
* * *
Graham walked at a slow pace, looking about with an expression of astonishment on his face. Before him was a world full of beautiful, and mostly impossible things. He was in a dream, he had to be. Except he knew his nights were never filled with such sights. It had all appeared before his eyes. He had to explore everything he saw.
Everywhere he looked was something amazing, like an ancient Greek town as interpreted by someone not bound by gravity or concerns for structural stability. The buildings lining the cobble stone street he wandered along reached up to the sky in any way they pleased. Every conceivable shape and size had been tried, some of which made his head hurt just trying to figure out. And the sky! The bluest, most heavenly looking one he could ever remember seeing. The clouds danced around playfully, painting streaks across the sunlight shining down.
“I can’t even begin to imagine how this was all made,” he said as he spun around to follow the chaotic design of another leaning building overhead. It acted like an archway over their small path.
Walking a few paces behind was Stephen, the man who had created this all from thin air. “This is the Sentient world, inside the tower you once saw,” he replied.
“What? How? This isn’t the same shape at all, it’s…”
“Again you are thinking in the wrong way, Graham. The outside crystal shell of the tower never had any effect on its inside. This is how they once lived. It was peaceful, graceful, even magical at times.”
“So this is what it was like before Isaac was released?”
“Indeed. Shall we continue?” Stephen said, rather impatiently.
Graham already found himself moving along the path ahead of them automatically. He walked faster as more came into view. Like a child on their first holiday, he wanted to experience everything at once.
After a little while the buildings gave way to a mountain of steps leading up the side of an unnatural looking white cliff-face. To their left was a calm ocean with serenely circling birds swooping down for any fish bobbing below the surface. Even though it was the Sentients’ world, they appeared to have been happy to take what they liked about the human world and work it into their own. Graham could not help but feel he had entered their vision of heaven. He did not know if he really believed in one himself, but what was in front of him certainly looked the part.
They began up the stairs with little worry of feeling tired halfway. Through a mixture of excitement and curiosity, Graham had almost forgotten about such things. So with added speed they took the staircase all the way to the top without stopping to rest. He looked back to see he even left Stephen behind a little.
He smiled as his competitiveness got the better of him.
At the top of the mountain stood a tall structure with stone columns and yet more steps. The architecture had taken on a mixture of styles now, some ancient while others began to look far more futuristic. They all still shared the same desire to twist and bend in unnatural ways. But here the Sentients had taken to creating their own styles. They were capable of beauty beyond anything he ever experienced in the real world.
The largest building ahead of them stretched away into the distance in both directions. He could only guess it went all the way to the edge of this raised cliff. Through a narrow, but tall opening, they came upon the true nature of the place; it was the centre of the world.
“Oh my God, it’s incredible,” Graham said, arching his head up to follow a curving floor above them. Without Gravity there was no reason to keep to its rules. This was an arbitrary world of contradictions. First of which he noticed was that from the outside the building appeared only a few storeys high.
Impressive as it all was, the one thing the scene had been missing so far, Graham realised, were people. Their journey had been a lonesome one with nothing to demonstrate just how busy a place it usually was. So as they progressed through this new and strange structure he began to look for something, anything that gave them away. Were they hiding?
“This way will lead us to the central chamber,” Stephen said, waving his companion ahead of him. “It is where the Sentient leaders used to reside. From there, they made their decisions and passed their rules. It was also where the little ones, the newly formed, were presented to the others.”
“Amazing,” Graham replied.
The Sentients once had everything in place, as far as he could see. If anything they had a perfect world. That now posed a problem for him. Seeing what they had created, the lives they had sculpted for themselves, made what was to come next that much harder to deal with.
After all, what goes up, must come down.
* * *
Ninety-three began to shake in his seat as the blinking screen continued to tell its h
ellish story of destruction. Sweat was now pouring down his forehead and settling on the top of his lips. Rhys had given up questioning what they were doing and was now watching in horror, just like Phoenix.
“He corrupts, distorts, murders.” Ninety-three spoke as though he was living the memory all over again. “I shouldn’t have left this place, I shouldn’t have…”
A bright flash of light suddenly lit up the room, like a supernova had exploded out of the screen. Again the lack of sound made everything much harder to understand. Only that which the person in the video looked at was available to them. Luckily he looked away just as the flash of light ripped across the broken horizon.
After turning back again the source of the explosion became instantly clear. A dark orb, hovering silently above like a zeppelin of death, sent bolts of energy into the remaining structures below. Fires raged wherever it dealt its devastating blow. Whatever it was, it appeared more than powerful enough to have won the war by itself.
“His influence tore through them like claws through rotten flesh, their remains strewn about and discarded. He doesn’t take prisoners, he doesn’t see their worth. They are devoured as any lesser species is; eaten to provide sustenance to the killer.”
“What the fuck is that thing?” Rhys said, his eyes squinting to see the ominous presence on the screen clearly.
Phoenix looked to him and then back to the sweat drenched man in the seat before her. Here was what she had assumed was her enemy, sitting with his eyes closed and tears fighting to get out. It did not matter if he was human or not, he was feeling a pain no living being should. Loss, it seemed, refused to abide by any such boundaries. It was the clearest indication yet that she had utterly misunderstood the situation.
What they were watching was the result of Isaac’s release. The very thing she had inadvertently helped to make happen. She was partly responsible for the war that had raged as she and the others had escaped Sanctuary. They had left the Sentients to fight for their lives unaided.