Jeffery’s incredibly broad chest heaved and dripped with sweat but a look of glee covered his face. He had to know that he was going to die soon, but it was clear that this was the most fun that he had had in his entire life. Maria marveled at how calm he was, and even though he had lost, he still managing to exude an aura of control. He took in all the bots, who made no indication that they intended to attack. This was further emphasized when they stepped back widening the circle around him. Chen looked in the direction of the transport and shouted, “Show yourself Patty!”
The troop transport that had brought the drones landed on the deck of the hangar. Her father was already walking down the ramp when the ship settled. Her heart ached at the sight of him and the flood of emotions, both loss and anger, crashed over her. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to run up and strike him or wrap her arms around him, She even contemplated just turning away and using her knowledge of the internal workings of a Spire to hide.
Striding down the ramp slightly behind her father was another drone, but this was one was different. It was of the most recent and advanced combat design that her father had crafted, and it walked in an unusual manner. A slight bounce in its step set it apart from the drones that currently filled the space, that and the way its head swept the room constantly, even though its sensors were able to perform 360 detection without the movement.
“Toby,” she whispered and immediately stepped out of her hiding place and darted behind a stack of crates. Her father must have rebuilt him using one of his most recent backups. She needed to see Tobor up close to be certain.
As she crept closer, she could begin to make out what Jeffery was bellowing at her father, “… Christ Patty, you couldn’t even let me think I had beaten you for twenty-four hours? I haven’t even had a chance to take a shit since you left."
Her father sat on a crate with Tobor on his right, his shoulders slumped forward slightly, and his skin was pale. He only looked this bad once in her entire memory of him, and it was after her mother had given him food poisoning when trying to cook menudo. “I’ve always respected you enough to not waste your time,” he said, a small smirk emerging.
“Funny,” Chen said, the tip of his sword denting the deck plating of the hangar as he rested his considerable weight on the hilt. “So how did you do it?”
“Magicians don’t share their secrets”
Jeffery started to laugh, “It was the fucking locket, wasn’t it? How?”
“Jeff, you’re the only walking cliché here. I’m not some evil super genius who spouts all of his secrets when he has his enemy cornered.”
“No, you’re just the type of asshole who wants to reshape humanity in his ideal image. Bet you have to read Nietzsche to get in the mood to fuck Eva.”
Her father shook his head slowly, placing his hand on his temples as he did. He looked up at Jeffery slowly. “I don’t know why I ever thought that you might one day understand what it is I’m trying to do. I don’t want humanity to be like me, and I sure as hell don’t want it to be like you. But, in order to do that, we have start over; otherwise, men like us will manipulate and poison the species for our gain.”
“And you’re just the man to bring about this new utopian dream that will somehow avoid the taint of men like us?” Chen spit on the ground. “Yeah, I’m done listening to your horse crap. Can we get this over with?” he said, jerking his head toward the ring of combat drones.
Her father nodded and said, “We were good friends at one point Jeff…”
Chen interrupted him, “So make sure this fight is fucking glorious!”
Her father nodded his head, laughing a little to himself. Doors on the bottom of the transport swung open and a large object fell out. The doors quickly folded back in and the object rolled out from under the craft, extending itself upward on two massive legs. Maria’s eyes went wide at the sight of the Land Dominance Unit as it lumbered from beneath the craft. It strode toward Chen, removing a shield the size of a large dining room table from its back. It placed itself on her father’s other side, and Jeffery hollered, “Fuck yeah, saw one of those things rip an armored car in half! Glad I won’t have to embellish this part of my legend when I write it!”
“Well, I’m glad you’re happy. I’m looking forward to seeing the limit of what your genetic modification research has achieved.” Her father said.
The moment the last syllable was uttered the LDU rushed Chen, closing the distance between them in two massive lunges. Its shield swung with incredible force toward Jeffery, only to pass through empty space. The head of the Chen dynasty was twisting through midair, landing upon the bot and burying his sword between its neck and right shoulder, where the armor was thinnest. The blade slid deep into the center of its chest. The LDU jerked as the weapon pierced its central processing unit causing a catastrophic failure. It shambled forward a step and collapsed to the ground with Jeffery Chen riding it as if he were an expert surfer on a simple wave. He wasted no time, however, wrenching the blade from the bot and using the energy generated from that action to assist him as he twisted and threw the blade with blinding speed directly at her father.
It happened so quickly that she barely kept track of it all. The sword advanced on her father and Toby as if it were a bullet. Chen himself ran and launched himself into the and air at super human speed toward her father. Tobor moved with swiftness and grace, like water flowing through a curved channel. It slipped in front of the path of the weapon, the sword barreling straight toward its chest. Its hands deftly landed upon and guided the kinetic energy of the enormous blade around in a three hundred and sixty degree circle and rotated the sword on it’s axis. Tobor’s hands released it at the perfect moment and angle to send it soaring into the air in the direction it had come.
Jeffery tried to twist to avoid his weapon; however, his incredible size made any chance of evading his fate impossible. The blade plunged through his torso with such a force that his entire forward momentum through the air came to an abrupt halt, and he fell to the ground in a heap, the sword protruding from both his front and back and making an sharp clang that reverberated through the hangar as it impacted the floor. Maria watched breathless as he lay there motionless for a moment and then slowly began to move himself into a seated position.
“No… fucking… way,” she whispered in absolute disbelief. The amount of kinetic energy behind that sword would have ripped another man in two, and here he was sitting up under his own power. His hands clumsily fumbled with the hilt, grasping it and weakly trying to remove it. She looked at her father and his head was hung, slowly shaking from side to side. Jeffery coughed a mist of red into the air and gave up on trying remove the weapon; instead, he summoned the strength to pull a knee beneath him and begin to force himself into a standing position from there. Blood flowed profusely down his chest and back, creating a macabre web down his legs until it began to pool by his feet. He glared at her father, his eyes never leaving him as he lurched forward one agonizingly slow step at a time. A strangled scream burst from his mouth as he forced himself forward. Maria was absolutely certain that he knew he was about to die. Even with his genetic artistry, there was only so much the human body could take, and she was pretty sure that having a large steel blade run through one’s heart was guaranteed to stop any person no matter how strong he was. Chen took three shaky steps and collapsed to his knees; his eyes fixed upon her father.
Tobor raised its right arm and a device emerged from its forearm. Jeffery closed his eyes and she thought for a moment that a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. A puff of smoke and a flash of flame appeared on his left temple and his body fell to the ground as if he were a puppet whose strings were finally cut.
A woman screamed, and it took Maria a moment to connect the voice to Nathan’s mother. The widow stood on the lowered ramp of their family transport, her entire world and all of her machinations lying dead on the hangar floor. Several drones departed the circle and made their way after her. She shrieked and r
an into the transport where Jeffery Chen’s harem and legitimate children awaited. The transport began to power up its engines only to have the craft that her father arrived in direct its nose cannon onto the cockpit, turning it into a cloud of sparks, debris, and smoke as thousands of high-velocity depleted uranium rounds eradicated the pilots. The drone units quickly made their way up the ramp, and Maria realized she was about to be a witness to the death of an entire family.
She wasn’t sure how, but she found herself moving at a full run toward her father, screaming for him to stop, begging him to show at least the children mercy. He looked up, confusion and then horror flashing over his face. He jumped to his feet and ran toward her, catching her in mid run, wrapping his arms around her waist, her forward momentum forcing them both to the ground.
“Please, don’t do it Daddy,” she begged as tears streamed down her face.
He began lifting her onto her feet and then toward their aircraft, repeatedly telling her how sorry he was. She watched as the ramp to the Chen family transport raised, and she didn’t see the bots leave. She screamed, she fought, but he still managed to force her away from the doomed family.
“You’re an evil bastard,” she raged, spittle flecking his face. A powerful arm wrapped around her waistline, and she was gently pulled upward and away from her father. She twisted to see Tobor restraining her with no effort and taking her into their family craft.
She watched as her father surveyed the hangar, a bot taking a sample of DNA from Jeffery Chen’s hip. The ramp to his family aircraft lowered and the units from earlier descended with their white and grey exteriors splashed with lines of crimson.
Maria went slack at the sight. The fight was gone from her. Everything she thought she knew was forever changed, and she could no longer deny what everyone had been telling her. Father was a monster and the butcher of the entire human race. The gentle man she had been raised by, who she had seen love on the children of her home, was capable of coldly murdering the children of others. He was a man without a soul.
Tobor placed her gently on a travel seat along the wall of the transport and secured her harness. She sat there nearly catatonic. The drones jogged into the transport, arriving at the end of the cabin and turning back toward the ramp should they be needed. Her father sat across from her, shoulders sagging as far forward as was physically possible, and he laid his face in his hands. The ramp hissed closed and the craft lifted off with stomach-dropping speed. The hangar rapidly flew by on the viewscreens, and they plunged into the darkness of night. It took several minutes of silence but eventually he looked at her. His face was streaked with tears.
“I am so sorry that you saw that.”
“You’re,” her voiced cracked and she took a moment to compose herself. Through gritted teeth she started again, “You’re sorry I saw that and not for murdering over a dozen helpless women and children."
She leaned into her harness. “Why aren’t you sorry for being the man I defended when the other families whispered about you killing the Sao Paolo family or when they accused you of orchestrating the death of billions?” she hissed through clenched teeth.
“I idolized you. I wanted nothing more than to be like you.”
He sat there, his head hung and slightly bobbing. “Why did you do it Dad?”
He slowly lifted his eyes, dark bags beneath with weariness permeating them. “When you were born… when I first held you in my arms, I realized I couldn’t let them destroy the world you lived in."
A bright flash of light filled the cabin generated by the virtual windows. A moment later the aircraft was buffeted from side to side. She turned her head to look out the virtual window and watched as a mushroom cloud grew oppressively over Hong Kong.
She slowly turned to him. At a complete loss for words for a moment, she looked down at the floor of the cabin, not able to control herself enough to look at him. “You mean to tell me that my birth turned you into fucking monster? There were millions of innocents on that island.”
“You Maria are why I still have a soul, and I don’t want you thinking for a moment that the things I did are your fault.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“You have every right to be livid with me and want to push me away. The fact that you are proves your mother and I raised you correctly, and that I have been right about you for years."
“You’re insane. Can you even hear yourself? Everything leaving your mouth is about you.”
He shook his head and reached for her hands which shot away from his. “Don’t,” she said.
He took a breath and asked, “Have I been a good father to you?”
“Up until you used me as a pawn in your game of political chess, and… oh yeah, murdered millions of people in front of me. Yeah, sure, you were dad of the god damn century."
“I don’t want you to agree with what I have done… with what I’m doing. It would destroy me if you did, but please allow me to explain why I took this path.”
She stared at him, every fiber of her being infuriated and disgusted with her father but also herself for being so blind. But, no matter how much she hated him now, there was still a little girl deep within that desperately wanted her daddy to vindicate himself and repair her badly damaged faith in him, so she remained silent.
He smiled, clearly relieved. “Your mother and I and thousands of other change leaders spent decades trying to guide the world down a better path, yet no matter what we did, we constantly were undone by fear, paranoia, ignorance, and the apathy of the average man.”
“We ended world hunger, drought concerns, and massive amounts of greenhouse gas emissions by developing high volume hydroponic and meat production factories… and yet some states and countries created laws that prevented their implementation to protect handfuls of farmers who couldn’t get their heads out of the past.”
“We created commercial fusion power plants, limitless clean energy with a near universal fuel source, and yet again were blocked by local governments because we were putting oil, gas, and solar employees out of work, and their aging utility companies paid high priced lobbyists and marketing firms to sway the residents and officials.”
“Your mother and I had secretly hired lobbyist groups of our own to encourage law makers to vote on the 70/30 law, where seventy percent of every company’s productivity had to directly connect to human labor, and what happened, companies ran propaganda campaigns and convinced the average American to oppose it. People honestly believed that it would hurt their ability to get a job because corporations told them that they would shutter their factories! We risked everything had we been exposed trying to limit our own company and for nothing.”
“I personally risked my seat on the board to force MNR to produce the Longevity vaccine cheaply and sell it at cost to give everyone around the world access to it, and what happens? Religious conservatives used their mega churches to fight against its use, claiming that only god should live forever. While those same religious leaders forbade their congregations from taking it, they themselves used it in secret while they plotted to conquer the world through their military arm, the Guardians of Christianity."
Maria shook her head and asked, “But Daddy why kill everyone? Why not just focus on the leaders who were responsible for all this? The average person did nothing."
“Exactly baby girl, they did nothing. They sat back and consumed sports and social media with no real thought given to the world around them except when it bit them in the ass. For so much of human history so few controlled so many, and then, in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, brave men died to give their descendants the ability to decide the fate of entire nations, the human race. The generation that I ended wasted all that their ancestors fought and died to secure for them, and when many of them did participate in the political process, they did so as mindless surrogates of those with clear agendas easily disproven by anyone who bothered to learn even one iota of their free public education. But math, science, the writ
ten word… tools that were mastered by men thousands of years ago, when the most advanced instrument for calculations was papyrus and the abacus, were too hard for them to bother utilizing even though each and every one of them was given access to an education that would have put to shame that of kings and queens a thousand years ago.”
He looked up at the ceiling. “They had far more important things to focus on, like dating apps and reality shows on their favorite streaming services.”
He paused, taking a measured breath to calm himself, his hands slowly shaking, a clear sign at his outrage at the potential that so many had willingly wasted. “There were some, both wealthy and poor, who worked to better themselves, to build upon the work of their forbearers, who didn’t make excuses for their failings and tried to improve the lives of all. They constantly restored my faith in the potential of humanity. Unfortunately, they were a minority. Their impact was carried away in a wave of mediocrity, tribalism, and short sightedness. They were trapped in an endless cycle of corrupt culture and the ineffective upbringing of those around them."
He reached for her hands and this time she didn’t retract in revulsion. “When I held you in my hands for the first time, I was forty-nine, your mother fifty-two, and in that moment, I knew that everything I had done my entire life was for you. I could not, absolutely would not, let the worst of our species poison your world."
He let go of her hands and looked out the virtual window to the shrinking cloud in the distance. It had already begun to flatten out at the edge of the upper atmosphere, the trade winds beginning to stretch it. “That was when I realized that to protect your future and to save humanity from itself I had to be willing to take all sin upon myself and reset the world."
She shook her head, more distraught than angry. “But Dad don’t you understand? You’re a product of that world. You can’t hope to rebuild it into some perfect utopia if it’s based on a flawed foundation.”
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