Jeez, I wonder if they knew how right they were . . . but for a completely different reason: Man must believe in something, for not to believe opened us up to spiritual invasion by Little Green Men from another planet. “Goodbye, Arlene Sanders.” I gasped, spitting out the blood that still flowed. “For God’s sake and your own, don’t lose faith. I’ll be with you always—and I got the message about Patrick.” The Res-men made no move to shut me up; I don’t think they cared whether I talked or not.
Arlene groaned, out of sight to my left. “Good—goodbye, Bro’. Semp . . . semper ft, Mac.” The Marine Corps motto: Semper fidelis, always faithful. I smiled. She understood the terrible stakes, amazing for a child who wasn’t raised a Catholic. Luther was right, I thought. Salvation is there for everyone.
A bright white nova of light flared inside my head. It expanded like a “data-bomb” inside my brain, an infinitely expanding pulse of pure white noise; in moments, it overwhelmed every program I was running, and I couldn’t string another coherent thought together, the last being Patrick. Then even the metaprograms were overrun; the last to go was the “I,” the ego that was nothing more than I Exist, and for a timeless interval—I didn’t.
* * *
I awoke in a strange, familiar place I had seen once before, but couldn’t possibly be seeing again. I awoke on Phobos; I awoke in the mouth of the UAC facility; I awoke at the start of my mission, months and centuries ago. And deep ahead of me, I smelled the sour-lemon stench of a zombie, I heard the first distant hiss of a spiney.
It had started, God, all over again. I was alone, standing at the gate of hell with nothing but a freaking pistol in my hand, a standard-issue 10mm, and a grounded land-cart at my feet. Behind me was—how did I put it the first time?—a blank empty desert silhouetted by a barren purple sky. I was back on Phobos, where hell began, and hell had started all over again! Even the inadvertently traitorous Ninepin had deserted me; I had no idea where he had got to, but he was gone.
Okay, so am I going to do this the hard way? What did the Resuscitators want me to do—go all the way down, down eight levels to the heart of the UAC facility, jump into the mouth of Moloch (as dead old Albert Gallatin named it) and find myself on Deimos? Jump back through the hyperspace tunnel and end up orbiting Earth again?
I swallowed hard and started jogging down the long empty corridor, the sour-lemon smell growing stronger with every step. I heard a hiss behind me. Drawing the 10mm and spinning in a single fluid motion, I found myself facing the same leaky pipe that had jerked me around the last time. “Goddamn it!” I snarled, feeling my pulse beat so hard in my head that it felt like hammer blows. I shoved the semi-auto into the holster on my armor and continued my walkabout, slowly and carefully this time.
I vaguely remembered what—who—was next, and he didn’t disappoint me: when the corridor narrowed, and I began to hop lightly over the first green tendrils of toxic goo that slithered across the floor, I heard plodding footsteps ahead. Out of a swirl of smoky mist, the flickering lights casting hideous shadows, shambled the pale corpse of William Gates, still a corporal. . . . I guess hell didn’t believe in promotions. His wide-spaced eyes and scarred cheek were unmistakable; it was dead Bill, the zombie-man: “The Gate is the key . . . the key is the Gate. . . .”
I didn’t bother trying to talk to the man—he was long past any sort of conversation—but as I raised the 10mm, I abruptly remembered Arlene’s silent message. Patrick, what the hell did that mean? Patrick converted the heathens. . . . How could I convert a zombie, for God’s sake? It had no brain left! I gritted my teeth and squeezed off two rounds into his forehead; I could barely fight the compulsion to turn my face away or close my eyes . . . not again, not bloody again!
No more blood. I shot my buddy dead again, and once again his body flopped on the floor like a headless chicken (I butchered a hundred chickens when I was a boy; they really do that, it’s not a goof). But when it was over, I didn’t feel the same revulsion as last time. It was just a simulation—emulation?—and it wasn’t really happening all over again. The Resuscitators were studying my reactions.
Well, Christ, I’d give them something to study. As I stepped right over the body, fighting down my own panic, I casually leaned over and spit on my friend. When in doubt, confuse the hell out of the enemy—a maxim to live by.
I snagged the Sig-Cow he was carrying—ooh-rah, the 10mm, M211 Semi-automatic Gas-Operated Infantry Combat Weapon that was standard issue with Marine Corps riflemen. I never liked it much, preferred a semi-auto shotgun or the M-14 BAR I’d been using recently; but it was distinctly better than a 10mm pistol, and I knew what was coming: up ahead waited three zombie-men and a zombie-chick, ready to open fire on me.
Knowing what was coming emboldened me; I don’t know what the Newbies thought they could learn from such a stupid emulation. . . . It wasn’t the same at all—last time, I didn’t have a clue what was happening, and I was particularly freaked by the obviously demonic nature of the monsters that attacked me. But now I knew what they were, mechanical constructs of the Freds. And I knew I really wasn’t there at all; I was inside a vast computer with a blindingly fast clock rate. An hour for me was actually, what, a minute of real time? A second? Fast enough that the real enemy, the Resuscitators, could watch without their short attention spans inducing terminal boredom.
But it was hard not to be fooled by the perfect looming walls, the slippery floor, the hissing, bubbling toxic slime that dripped from barrels and spilled across the floor. I deliberately bent and dipped my little finger in the goo and was rewarded with agonizing pain, like putting out a cigarette on bare flesh. The pain was real; pain was all in the head anyway, a neurosignal in the brain’s pain receptors! I should have guessed that a simulated brain would have simulated pain before sacrificing my finger to the slime god.
Pushing the pain to the back of my mind, I squirmed forward between standpipes and fungus-grown walls, ducking under low overheads and hopping over an obstacle course of metal gratings and hoses. I remembered just what the terrain looked like when I was nearly ambushed; this time, I was the one who fired first, as soon as the four shuffled into view.
I plinked them from cover, taking down three before they crossed even half the room, killing the girl last. I flipped the bodies onto their backs, stripped them of everything useful, and continued: something told me that I had to reach the first spiney, the brown demons with spines growing everywhere. If I could duck underneath the flaming balls of snot he loved to hurl, I could at least talk to him. . . . Hell, I already did—once.
I came to the room with the sabotaged radio and the incinerated map. No matter—the floor plan of the facility was burned into my brain, either by the sheer horror of the memory or else by the Resuscitators when they resurrected me here. Didn’t need the map, in any event, and the radios were useless inside the RAM of an alien computer. I felt like I’d been drafted into a computer game, jerked by electronic strings like a meat puppet.
Killed three more zombies, just like the last time; I was ready for them, they didn’t know exactly when I would be among them. It was a slaughter, like shooting drunks in a barrel. I didn’t get sick, since I knew what they were—not just zombies, but electronic simulations of zombies. But I was getting as bored as hell, and distracted . . . and that was a bad thing; I was starting to worry at Arlene’s code. What did she mean by “Patrick”? Did she really mean I was supposed to convert the demons inside the Newbie machine?
Convert them to what? Good Catholics?
I wanted to catch up with the spiney who lurked in the room with the huge spill of toxic waste; at least that bastard could say something other than variations on “The Gate is the key.” I scurried on through the twisty maze, almost seeing a ghostly overhead view superimposed over the black-dark, dripping-dank corridors, wide shadowy rooms, and sagging ceilings. An awful sickening odor overpowered the sour-lemon smell of the zombies, and I knew I was close.
Then I saw it: the room I’d b
een hunting for, the vast sea of toxic spillage that looked like bubbling lava on Saint Patrick’s day—huh, mere coincidence? I stayed well back, out of the room itself, and scanned for the particular piece of equipment from which the spiney charged me last time. It was tough, since I hadn’t seen it coming, but I found the only console in the place large enough for one of those gigantic, two-hundred-kilogram beasts to lurk.
Pointing my Sig-Cow, I spoke in a loud command tone. “All right, you spineless spiney, I know where you’re hiding. . . .” To prove my point, I pounded a couple of shots into either end of the console. “Come out now, before I have to put a round into each of your kneecaps.”
Nothing happened. I fired six more rounds into the console, right about where I judged the thing must lurk, and it hissed in pain—one of the shots must have passed right through the electronics and winged the mofo.
That was enough. The beast slowly emerged, hideous and stomach-turning, with a stench that would drop a carrion-crow at a hundred meters. The spiney was unmistakable: brown, leathery, alligator hide, ivory-white horns out of every body part, inhumanly huge head with mad red slits for eyes. It stared at me, advancing slowly, then it stopped and hocked a loogie into its hand. The snotball burst into flame when the air struck it, and the spiney raised its arm to pitch a high hard one right across the plate.
I leveled my rifle. “If one drop of that fiery snot leaves your hand, you will be dead before it hits that back wall!”
The spiney stared resentfully, then slowly let the fireball fall to the ground, where it sizzled out in the toxic waste, in which the creature stood up to its ankles. Thank God that green goo wasn’t inflammable!
“My friend,” I said, thinking of Saint Patrick, of the Emerald Isle, “you may think I’m here to blow your fool head off, and I might just do it yet, but that really isn’t why I came . . . and you’re not here to kill me, no matter what you might think.
“I’ve got a little something to tell you, and you’re not going to like it one bit, but if you just take a deep breath and a stress pill, I think you’re going to be a whole hell of a lot angrier at someone else than you are right now at me.”
It stared at me for a full, long, solid minute, during which both of us maintained cacophonous silence. Then, strike me down if I’m lying, the spiney spoke to me! “Ssssssspeak,” it hissed, “we sssshall lisssssten . . . The eye slits narrowed, but blazed brighter, if anything. “We will lissssten . . . once.”
The spiney waited, flexing its huge claws, for me to come up with something terribly clever.
15
The Newbies are being blasted by their own petard, I realized. In the real world, the genetically engineered spiney never would have paused in its attack to hold a philosophical discussion with me, but we were in a computer emulation, taken from my memory—and human memory is amazingly creative. We remember things not as they really happened, but the way they should have happened, the way that actually makes sense. The brain is a gifted storyteller. “We are all greater artists than we realize,” or whatever the hell that guy said, whoever the hell he was.
Just then I distinctly remembered the spineys being much more rational and logical than they probably were in reality; yes, sir, I made damn sure that was how I remembered them. So that’s what I got; it was like a so-called lucid dream, where you know you’re dreaming . . . except, I was never able to do that. But this time I was wide awake—and so long as I made sure I remembered things the way they ought to have worked out, I had an edge the Resuscitators couldn’t take away from me.
“I know what you are,” I said to the spiney, “and I know who created you. And I know who destroyed your creator. You want to join forces and kick some ass?”
It hissed in rage, yellow mucus dribbling down its chin. As each drop cleared the skin, the air ignited it; a chain of fiery islands dotted the ground around the spiney’s splayed feet.
“Don’t give me that crap,” I warned. “You’re a product of genetic engineering, created by a race of creatures we call the Freds, who have heads like an artichoke, if you know what that is—covered with colored leaves—and grow taller and smaller as part of their mating cycle. You’ve seen them, right? Is my description right on, or what?”
“Sssssspeak!” demanded the spiney, but it closed its mouth, swallowing the rest of its spittle.
I took that as a good sign. “You know they’re members of a grand galaxy-wide conspiracy of philosophical-literary criticism that is reasonably well-translated into English as the Deconstructionists. They’re fighting the other school, called the Hyperrealists. You were sent here to prepare us for invasion and conquest by the Freds, and they told you that we would roll over and beg for mercy if you came looking like our ancient demons, right?”
The spiney hunched lower and lower as I talked, its eyes glowing deeper red, but the stench that accompanied the beast grew stronger, not weaker. Watch it, I warned myself. It’s not submitting . . . it’s getting angrier and more devious.
“Sssssssssssso? What plansssssss do you have?”
“But your masters screwed up, spiney. They didn’t tell you we would have guns and space travel and a well-organized resistance. Did they? And now you’re bloody terrified, because the situation is totally out of control.”
The last part was a total wild speculation. For all I knew, the Freds never even engineered the emotion of fear into their puppets. But it was a good chance. After all, they sure as hell demonstrated anger and senseless rage, the way they would turn on each other at the slightest provocation, and in the racial enmity between, say, pumpkins and the minotaurlike hell princes. If I had to guess, I’d say the Freds started with alien stock that already kind of looked like what they wanted and already had emotions.
“Kill you!” screamed the spiney. “Kill you all! Death to hu-manssssss!”
“Spiney, your masters were wiped out. All of them, the entire race. They’re gone! Would you like to know who did it?”
It stared at me in confusion. Clearly, I wasn’t acting the way it thought I would, or the way the Freds told it to expect. The damned thing was utterly nonplussed, totally at sea—and most of us react to that sort of confusion with fear and rage. I guess, in its own way, the spiney was just another jarhead dumped behind enemy lines, where it turns out the brass-holes got everything butt-wrong, as usual.
“How . . . would you know thissss?” it asked. Thank God I was remembering a logical rational spiney! It stood up slowly from its crouch, muscles relaxing, but still a mask of suspicion covered its face. Its lip still curled back, baring huge tusks, and it alternately clenched and loosened its fists.
“Look, this is the hard part to accept—but none of this is real. You’re probably real; at least, I think I am, and you might be, too. The scum that killed your masters, the Resuscitators, are Newbies who aren’t even part of the Great Game: they’re neither Deconstructionists nor Hyperrealists, and they don’t give a damn about any of your literary theories of the universe.
“They created this computer simulation to study something about me and . . . and my race, and you just got swept up with the study. Capice?”
It hissed at me, long and loud. So much for sweet reason! It changed its mind and decided to charge; I must have stupidly let my mind drift back into a different sort of memory of spineys as remorseless killers. But before the spiney could pounce, it had to crouch. I had a bead on it already, and I squeezed off two shots—both into the creature’s hip.
The spiney went down hard, clutching its hip and screaming in agony. The hip was destroyed, the rifle rounds tearing the flesh apart and pulverizing the bone. The creature wasn’t going anywhere for a long time, not without surgery.
I stayed where I was, just crouching with the rifle and waiting until the spiney thrashed itself out and lay exhausted on the ground, spent and paralyzed by pain and fear. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” I cooed, like I was talking to a six-year-old who insisted on stealing cookies and getting walloped.
“The simulation is based on my memory; I can remember things a little differently.” I looked at the creature’s ruined hip and visualized a different outcome.
One trick I learned at the Chapel of Mary and Martha’s was “How to Lie Successfully,” a course taught inadvertently by Sister Lucrezia. The secret—I’ll give it away for free just this once—is you actually have to convince yourself that the lie is really the way it really happened. Got it? If you broke a vase by playing football in the lobby, you just have to visualize the alternate scenario (you tripped over an extension cord and knocked over the lamp) so intensely that your memory of the fantasy is stronger than your memory of the reality. Understand, now? That way, even if the penguin whips a galvanic skin-response lie-detector machine out from under her habit, you’ll still pass . . . because by now, you’ve totally convinced yourself that the electric-cord tripping is really and truly the way it happened. Honest injun.
“Yeah,” I said aloud. “I knew I only creased you with that shot. Lucky thing, too.” The spiney slowly sat up, rubbing its hip in pain—easy pain, the pain of an annoying bruise. It bled copiously, but the wound was a light scratch—nothing like the terrible, hip-shattering shot it could have been in a hypothetical, alternate universe.
“Starting to sink in yet?” I asked.
The grotesque spiney then did the most horrific thing, sinking to its hands and knees and crawling slowly toward me. When it got within two meters, the spiney fell to its belly and slithered forward like a lizard, arms splayed but legs pressed tightly together, like Jesus on the Cross but facedown in the glowing acid. It squirmed close enough, then it pressed out its long yellow tongue, gently flicking at my boots the way a lizard tastes the wind for scent—predator or prey?—and everywhere the tongue touched was left a thin sizzling streak of glowing embers. My boots were crisscrossed by fiery marks of obeisance. The spiney stretched its arms wide, feet long to the south, face down in the grime of the floorplates: it offered itself to me, drooling fire and sweating oil from the glands along its back. The oil probably protected it from its own flaming mucus, but nobody was there to protect me from my new servant. Not even Arlene.
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