by Isaac Hooke
“What is it?” Jason went to her.
“It worked,” Xin said. “That was fast.”
“Actually, I cheated,” Lori said gleefully. “I dialed my time sense to max so you were all frozen, and then I got to work!”
“Nice,” Xin said. She was still on her knees. “I think I’m going to have to dial down my emotions for now, however. I feel so conflicted… I lost my friends, and yet all of you are alive again. From your backups. It’s the strangest feeling. I also feel… remorse. For what I once was. And what I’ve become. I’m not human. I can’t be.”
“You are,” Jason said. “Your emotions make you human.”
“Yes,” Xin said, standing. “But I’ve dialed them down for now, as I told you I would. I’ll deal with them later, on my own time.”
“What year is it?” Jason asked.
“2260,” Xin said.
“Ah, so only ten years have passed since I got scanned,” Jason said. “That’s a relief.”
“I’ll say,” Lori said. “Imagine if it was a thousand!”
“That means our original human selves are probably still alive,” Aria said.
“So much for all of us being unique…” Tara said.
“Yes, but at least there’s no chance we’ll ever meet our original selves,” Xin said. “If we’d revived those mechs and installed our backups, we’d have to face them every day.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Lori said.
Xin didn’t answer.
“So, a Blaze mech…” Jason said.
“Yes,” Xin said. “I can superheat my hull, turning my body into a weapon, burning anything that touches me. Also, I can glow extremely bright, blinding enemies. It’s especially useful at night. I also fire superheated plasma from just underneath my eye cameras, in long streams.”
“Doesn’t that interfere with your vision?” Tara asked.
“Nope,” Xin replied.
“She’s sweet, yet deadly,” Aria said. “Just like the rest of us.”
The group passed three estates and came to a small village. The Explorer confirmed that it was clear of hostiles.
“This should be good enough for our purposes,” Jason said. “All right then. It’s time to practice combining.”
Red abruptly filled his vision and Jason was sent hurtling backwards. He switched to Bullet Time, and realized missiles were coming in all around them. As he was thrown clear of the fireball that had struck him, he glanced west, toward the source, and saw the largest mech he had ever seen, towering over the landscape. It was bigger even than the wreckage of the other mech he had seen a few kilometers north. It was a quadruped, vaguely horse-shaped, coated in a smooth, silvery skin, with several weapon mounts attached to either flank. One of those mounts was vomiting missiles as he watched in Bullet Time: they appeared as slow-moving rockets.
Damn it. He could have used a working Battle Cloak to draw some of those missiles away at the moment…
Another mount was unleashing a stream of railgun fire at his girls. The slugs appeared as thin streaks of light that cut through the air. Sophie was bearing the brunt of that attack, but her energy shield was deflecting the slugs, for now.
The Rex Wolves were thankfully cowering behind the nearby tanks, next to the farmhouse. Safe, for the moment. Jason and the girls consumed the giant mech’s attention.
Jason landed, and dialed his time sense closer to normal. He started dashing forward to avoid the next round of missiles, and aimed his energy weapon up at the underbelly. He fired, creating a black gash underneath the throat.
Tara materialized behind the neck of the horse, and stabbed down with her sword, cutting off one of the missile mounts. The hull abruptly electrified, and Tara was sent flying backward into the air.
Sophie was airborne by then and used her jumpjets to catch Tara while redirecting her micro machines toward the giant mech, forming a blade that cut off another turret.
Plasma bolts launched toward the mech from an invisible source—where Lori’s Stalker resided.
Aria had ducked behind her ballistic shield, and she held her ZR-22 over the top rim and unleashed a bolt of lightning at the big unit.
Xin had turned into a blinding figure of molten white light, and she dashed toward the big robot. She leaped into the air and began revolving her body as she did so, so that she was like a fast moving drill. She struck the inner side of a foot, and her superheated form drilled a nice gaping hole. It wasn’t enough to unbalance the huge mech, unfortunately.
More turrets unfolded further down the flank, revealing more weapons.
Jason targeted some of the existing turrets and fired his energy weapon; he struck one, but instantly several turrets focused on him.
“Oh shit.” He was forced to run, switching to Bullet Time to dodge behind a nearby silo on the farm.
“We have to combine!” Xin said. “It’s the only chance we have at beating it!”
“How are we supposed to combine now, in the middle of battle?” Jason said. “Considering we’ve never done it before!”
“We have to try!” Xin said. “Switch to the slowest timebase, and initiate the sync. Our bodies will take care of the rest! You have to initiate the sync, Jason!”
Jason increased his timebase to the maximum so that reality slowed to a complete and utter halt. Everything froze around him. Well, except for the very slow moving cloud of vapor that was expanding nearby, where one of the missiles had just struck.
“All right, sync up, huh?” Jason said. He pulled up his HUD menu and reread the appropriate section in his manual.
“Uh, great time to pause,” Tara said. She was translucent, her body in the process of teleporting to avoid a plasma bolt fired by the huge robot.
“All right, our time bases match,” Jason said. “That’s the first step. The next step is to log into my VR. It can be any environment, so we’ll go with the mountain lake.”
Jason switched to his VR and stood before the lake. The gray-green mountains sprawled behind it, covered in green pines. He didn’t feel the usual sense of peace, not this time. No, there was only urgency.
The others materialized one by one around him as they logged in.
“All right,” Jason said. “We’re supposed to hold hands, and form a circle.”
He held out his hands. Tara and Lori grabbed the hands on either side of him, while they linked with the other girls, forming a circle.
“Xin, you might as well take over,” Jason said, looking up from the digital manual. “Since the rest of the procedure is all you guys. For the most part.”
“We must link our AI cores,” Xin said. “This is done remotely, via our comm signal, so that our minds act as one single unit, forming a collective consciousness. In your sync menu, set your AI cores to sync all motion to Jason’s mech. That is the first step.”
One by one, the girls announced they had done it.
“Next, you must concentrate on your hands,” Xin said. “Imagine that your consciousness is flowing down from your core, and into both arms, spreading out into the person immediately beside you. Jason, you must do the opposite. You imagine yourself taking in the flow of consciousness. When you feel the pressure, you must accept it… you will receive all of our memories and experiences. You will know our deepest and darkest secrets. Our desires. And these in turn will be shared with all of us. If one of us holds back, even the tiniest memory, it will prevent the syncing from occurring. You must give everything.”
Jason could see visible signs of the consciousness transference… along the arms of the women, small blue pulses of light traveled just underneath the skin, and down toward the fingers, into the person on either side. He felt the pressure as those blue pulses from Tara and Lori touched his skin, and he accepted the flow.
Those blue pulses appeared underneath his own skin now, and slowly crawled up his arms, heading toward his torso, and neck.
“Be warned, it can be overwhelming,” Xin said. “If you can’t control it, it
will destroy you. It might be a good idea to turn off your emotions.”
He was about to do just that when the pulses reached his brain.
The VR environment winked out.
He was bombarded by memories from all of the women. Some happy, some terrible, and his emotions swung all over the place, as he relived the feelings that came with the different thoughts. Because he was experiencing everything from the viewpoint of the person involved, it was very difficult to tell what memory belonged to whom. He’d catch a familiar name now and again as a friend referred to one of the girls by her moniker, but that was the extent of it.
Soon the sounds and images and emotions became a blur, and he felt himself beginning to become overwhelmed. It was too much data for his mind to handle all at once, too much for the small capacity of his human brain to handle. He was going to explode.
And then he realized he wasn’t human. He could merely expand his brain, to take up the confines of his AI core. And he did just that, reaching out into the unused areas of his neural network, and filling them up with the contents of the flow.
But then that ran out, and once more the memories began to pound against the inner shell of his mind.
But there were other neural networks out there, just beyond the shell that contained him. Minds that were waiting. He reached toward one of them, and joined with it. He doubled his capacity, and the memories instantly flowed into the new brain. It too filled up, and he joined with another external brain. He continued doing so until he had connected with all five external neural nets, completing his link with the girls. The memories flowed freely between all of them, forming the collective consciousness that Xin had promised.
There were five different voices in that consciousness, and he could hear the echoes of the different thoughts the women were having.
“Where am I?” Tara said.
“What’s going on?” Sophie said.
“This is so weird,” Aria said.
“You’re in my mind,” Jason said. Those words reverberated throughout the six joined consciousnesses, louder than all the rest. It was obvious that his mind had usurped the other five, and that his thoughts took precedence over theirs.
“I don’t like this,” Sophie said. “I feel… dominated.”
“It is, what it is,” Xin said. “Surrender to Jason. That’s all you can do at the moment.”
In that moment he sensed the adoration, even love, that some of the women felt for him. Lori, certainly. And perhaps Tara. Xin was devoted. Sophie, lustful. Aria, torn between the love for a husband, and her growing feelings for the only eligible man on the current continent: Jason.
Information was flowing freely between them. They were synced. He clasped down on those brains, and issued the command to combine.
It didn’t take.
“It’s not working!” Jason said. “I thought you said we were compatible?”
“We are!” Xin said. “Our minds aren’t fully in sync.”
“Then how do we sync them?” Jason said.
“You have to do it...” Xin said.
Not very helpful.
I heard that, Xin commented. That was a drawback of joining one’s consciousness to everyone else’s—no private thoughts.
Jason searched the different brains that formed the collective consciousness. There had to be a snag somewhere.
Someone hadn’t fully shared themselves.
He reached deeper out into the minds around him, penetrating, seeking.
There.
He found a small globe of darkness inside one of the neural networks. He focused on that globe, and soon found himself inside it.
Lori was there, in the dark. On her knees. Weeping. She had no tail.
“Lori, what is it?” Jason said.
“Let me out,” Lori said. “I can’t get out.”
“Where are you?” Jason said. “Hold my hand.”
“I can’t,” Lori said.
“Hold my hand,” Jason said more forcefully.
She looked up, teary eyed, and held his hand.
Jason squeezed. “Do you feel that?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I’m never going to let go of you,” Jason said.
“Thank you,” Lori said.
“Now tell me where we are,” Jason said.
“A cave,” Lori said. “I fell. I was on the golf course behind my house. Exploring in the dark. I had a flashlight. But I fell. And the light broke. Now I can’t get out.”
“This is just a childhood memory,” Jason said. “A traumatic one, yes, but a memory nonetheless. You’ve trapped yourself here.”
“I have?” Lori said.
“Yes,” Jason said. “I’m not sure how you’ve done it, but you’re stuck inside some kind of infinite loop. You’re holding up the transformation.”
“I’m sorry,” Lori said.
“Share it with us,” Jason said. “Share it with all of us.”
“I can’t,” Lori said. “I’m so ashamed.”
“We’re all ashamed of some of the memories we have,” Jason said. “But by holding it back, you’ll only draw attention to it.”
“There was a little boy with me,” Lori said. “He was my friend. My friend. I pulled him to me as we fell. I used him to cushion my fall. He saved me. But I didn’t give him a choice.”
He saw the broken body on the cave floor beside her.
“You didn’t have time,” Jason said. “You had to act to save your own life. You did what you had to do.”
“But I killed him,” Lori said. “My friend.”
“We all have skeletons in our closet,” Jason said. “Let it go.” He squeezed her hand tighter. “Let it go.”
She squeezed back, and he pulled her to her feet. “That’s right. You already lived through this guilt. You already put it behind you. Leave it again.”
Lori nodded, then gave him a hug. It was the tightest hug anyone had ever given him. She wept on his shoulder.
And then, just like that, the blockage cleared. He was back inside the complex environment of floating neural networks, and their interconnections.
He gave the order to combine once more.
The VR shut down, and he was back in the real world.
“You did it,” Xin said. Her voice had a strange echo to it, as if she were speaking both directly inside his head, and over the comm. “You can increase your time sense to something a little faster. The mechs will handle the transformation process from here.”
He did as she asked, and time sped up. The other mechs were dashing toward him. Tara arrived first, thanks to her teleportation ability, followed by Aria. Jason immediately climbed onto the back of the latter, bulkier mech. Slots opened in the back of Aria’s Dominator mech, and his arms and legs slid inside of their own accord, and locking clamps wrapped around them, so that his head formed the head region of the final mech.
Tara’s mech straightened, and attached to the right side of Aria’s body—she formed an arm, with her hips becoming the elbow; her feet extended, and formed pincers. Tara’s sword slid down on a track to the legs, and the grappling hook enlarged, forming a protruding mound above the wrist region.
Sophie arrived next, landing with her jumpjets, and she shoved the torso of her spider body into the opposite side of Aria, so that her head and shoulder region formed a shoulder joint, while her torso was the bicep, her carapace the forearm. Her legs slid downward on a track, toward the bottom of the carapace, forming an eight-fingered hand. Her micro machines broke free, and swarmed about the mech bodies, causing even more transformations. Those machines formed joins between different parts of the surrounding metal, or created entirely new objects, for example the huge, sparking sword that was emerging from Tara’s body around her existing blade.
It was too bad the scientists had programmed those micro machines to smelt only unprocessed ore; and that there was a limit to how many units Sophie could create, otherwise they could have directed those machines to completel
y digest their current attacker. He might have to get Lori to look into hacking those units at some point. Then again, messing with alien tech in the field was probably a dangerous idea.
The ballistic shield shifted from Aria’s Dominator to Sophie’s Highlander, and was augmented by the micro machines as Jason watched. Aria’s ZR-22 also moved along a track, until it too had attached to a small mound that had formed on the Highlander, just underneath the shield, effectively shifting the weapon to what had become the left arm of the combined mech.
The big robot continued to shoot at them. Jason’s Vulture took a direct missile impact, but Sophie’s micro machines flowed over the dent that formed in his armor, filling it in. Jason instinctively lifted his left arm to shield himself from the next attack; Sophie’s body moved upward in response, along with the silver shield that was still forming, and he used it to protect himself and the others from the missiles.
Lori arrived. She slid underneath Aria so that her tail was facing backwards, and underneath the Dominator, and then latched into place. Her legs moved on a track along her torso, reinforcing the torso so that it became a thigh, while her arms solidified to form a calf region, with her hands enlarging to become the foot.
Xin attached to the opposite side, her mech also forming a leg. Her heat generator unit slid on a track until it was underneath Aria, forming the crotch area of the mech.
Jason’s energy weapon also moved on a track so that it joined up with another turret that had emerged in Aria’s shoulder, forming a large energy weapon mounted there. His railgun did the same on his other side.
The bottom portion of Sophie’s carapace shifted upward, until it connected behind the Dominator’s back, and attached to different vents that had emerged, forming a large jumpjet unit. There would be fuel only for limited jumps, given the combined mech’s new size.
He no longer thought of himself as six separate units, but one single, big mech.
Cataphract. That’s what I’ve become. A soldier in full armor.
At the moment it was like Jason was lounging on his back, with his legs spread on the ground in front of him, and his body propped up on his elbows.
He curled in his legs, released a quick burst from his jumpjets, so that he was standing upright, facing the enemy robot.