by Rien Reigns
In the end Nora and Cook got into the elevator.
Alone with Sam, she beckoned me to follow her into the next room.
When I started to follow, Kali decided to express her opinion of the situation.
‹I feel I must warn you. I detected she was lying during your questioning.›
‹“About what?”›
‹When you asked her about her being E3, her response came .349 seconds faster than any of the others and her voice was 3.6 decibels higher. I believe this to be an indication of deception.›
‹“You can detect those things? How come I’m now just learning of this?”›
‹I simply have not attempted to use these abilities in the past, but considering the circumstances, and our lives being in danger, I am now doing everything I can to ensure our continued existence.›
‹“So what are you saying, that I shouldn’t trust her? Can you tell me what else she was lying about?”›
‹The fact that she lied indicates she can’t be trusted. I am re-analyzing the conversation now and it seems there are hints of dishonesty in regards to both Mrs. Beit, and Inquisitor Noble, having killed Mr. Beit.›
‹“Are you saying that Nora and Noble were working together, and that somehow Sam knows and is covering for them?”›
‹I am uncertain. All I know is that there were physical clues which suggests she was in some way not telling the full truth when it came to Beit’s murder.›
‹“So you’re saying that I should walk away and take my chances trying to solve this before I get thrown in prison for the rest of my life?”›
‹I am not suggesting any course of action. I am simply trying to make you aware of the possibilities. My current analysis for the ‘walk away scenario,’ is a 97% probability that you will be captured by either the Horsemen or the Rangers, before you can clear your name.›
‹“Well that’s dismal. What are my odds if I stay and do whatever it is Sam wants me to do?”›
‹I cannot say. I do not know what she knows, nor what she intends, therefore I cannot make a prediction as to how it will help or hurt us. I just thought you should be aware that she is lying.›
‹“You didn’t by chance happen to catch any of what was said between the three of them?”›
‹I caught a few words from Mr. Cook due to his heightened emotional state.›
‹“Care to share?”›
‹“Unjustifiable risk - with your heart – too dangerous – be trusted.”›
“You all right?” Sam asked. I’d been so caught up conversing with Kali, I hadn’t noticed that we’d stopped and I was staring off into space.
“Huh?” I said, and shook my head. “Oh, yeah, I’m fine, just going over things in my head.”
“You ready?” she asked.
“As much as I’ll ever be I guess, considering I don’t know what it is you intend to do to me.”
I realized then we were in a room similar to a Methuselah chamber. To my right was a tech table.
“Lie down on the table,” she told me.
“Do I need to undress?” I asked.
“Yes, go ahead.”
‹She is lying.›
I smiled. ‹“That’s a good sign.”›
‹I thought you didn’t want to think with that head anymore.›
‹“Habit is a hard thing to break and sometimes the positives outweigh the consequences. Besides, it’s Sam. I’m willing to be killed by her.”›
‹With an attitude like that, you are going to get us both killed.›
I happily undressed. Sam did a good job trying to make it seem like she was unaffected and that it was actually part of the procedure, but there were a few furtive glances that I noticed.
“How long is this going to take?” I asked, and hopped up onto an examination table.
“It only takes about twenty minutes.”
“So what exactly is the procedure?”
“I’m going to inject you with a syringe full of modified M-mytes. They’ll make their way to the ones already imbedded within your brain as well as your hands. Once they’ve located the old ones they’ll assimilate them.”
“And what exactly are these new ones supposed to do?”
“I can’t tell you until they take effect.”
“And you have this upgrade?”
“Yes. We all do. Shep, Nora, and myself.”
Something suddenly dawned on me.
“Did Julius have this upgrade? Is this what Nora was talking about, what she injected him with? Is that why she thinks she killed him?”
I didn’t realize Sam had put on a glove, one which looked like an Inquisitor’s glove. She touched my leg and I felt a little stinging sensation. I grabbed her wrist, but I didn’t have as strong of a grip as I wanted. I felt sluggish, like I was treading water. She put a hand on my chest and pushed me down like I weighed nothing.
“You’ll be fine, Travis. You’re going to fall asleep now, but it’ll only feel like seconds have passed. When you wake I’ll give you all the answers I have.”
“Sam, I-” Before I could finish my thought the world went black.
Just like Sam had said, it felt like I’d only blinked, but it was 2 minutes and 13 seconds later when I awoke. I have to admit. It felt like nothing had happened. Of course I knew something had happened. Sam had given me whatever killed Beit. Kali told me so.
Sam had injected with me with millions of new mytes. There were two kinds. One was Mnemosyne-mytes, which seemed normal enough, except Kali informed me they weren’t H&M-mytes like Sam had said. The other mytes were ones Kali were unfamiliar with. Because Sam had lied and had gone about injecting me with them in a deceitful way, Kali had decided to quarantine them until I was awake and could decide what should be done.
Because she didn’t have any control over the new mytes, Kali had ordered my immunos to keep them contained at the site of injection. Problem was, the unfamiliar mytes didn’t like that, and decided to destroy my immunos. Kali took that as a major threat and ordered all my immunos to the scene to destroy the foreign invaders.
That’s when Kali had got the notion to check the autopsy report on Beit. Sure enough, the strange mytes had been present and it was believed they were the culprit.
Kali scanned them. They were the same ones found in Beit’s body.
Problem was, these new mytes had the full functionality of the immunos. They were fighting back, and they were better. For each new myte Kali destroyed, they destroyed hundreds of my immunos.
“How do you feel?” Sam asked.
Truth was, I felt great. Better than I had in a long time. Oh, I was terrified about what she’d done to me, and the fact there was a war of nano machines raging inside me, but it was like it wasn’t real. Like it had all been a dream and the memory of it was fading away. Kali was so engrossed in fighting off the invasion she ceased communication with me.
“Like a blooming flower in the morning sun,” I said.
“Glad to hear it,” Sam said, and she looked at a sheetscreen. A look of fear overtook her lovely face. “Hold on a sec. Are you having Kali destroy them?”
The feeling of euphoria started to dissipate. “Yes and no,” I said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
My head was beginning to clear and I was starting to feel like myself. “Well what did you expect her to do? You infected me with the myte virus which killed Beit.”
“It’s not like that,” she said. “You have to trust me. Tell her to stop.”
I’d still been lying down so I sat upright. “I don’t see why I should. You went and injected me without me being ready for it. You weren’t even honest with what they were.”
“And if I had, would you have gone through with it?” she asked.
“I don’t know, you didn’t give me the chance.”
“If you want answers you have to tell Kali to stop fighting them, trust me.” She put a bare hand to my check. She’d taken off the glove while I was unconscious, b
ut her touch felt electrifying.
I brought my hand up to remove hers, but instead I placed my hand on top of hers, keeping her in contact with me. Her hand felt good. But then she hadn’t slapped me like she had earlier.
“Why doesn’t she have control of them?” I asked.
“They’re like bodyguards, designed to protect you against all threats, including ones that might come from Kali or other CerAs. They’re independent.”
“What the hell, Sam? Independent? It’s bad enough with Kali policing me, now you’re telling me I’m going to have to put up with something I can’t control. And what the hell are you talking about, why would Kali be a threat?”
“There’s a rogue Celestial on the loose.”
“Celestials?”
“CerAs who’ve attained Class 5 sentience.”
“That’s a thing now?” I said.
“Yes. Technically they’ve always existed. You seriously don’t know about this?”
“Why would I?”
“You’re an Inquisitor. It’s partly why your job exists.”
“My job is to take down rogue hackers, not rogue CerAs.”
“You need to tell Kali to stop. The thugs are fighting back because she’s attacking them and they think she’s a threat. If she continues to fight, they’ll destroy all your immunos, and her.”
“Thugs?” I asked.
“Tactical Hardware Unilateral Guerilla Sentries. T.H.U.G.S.”
“Not a very comforting name.”
Sam shrugged.
Was she telling the truth? Would these new mytes, these thugs, kill Kali? Would I really care if they did? She was just a sophisticated computer, after all.
Yes, I would care. As much as she annoyed me, she was like a friend, or a sister even.
“Say she does stop,” I said. “She already started the attack on them, why wouldn’t they keep going until she’s been eliminated? They’re supposed to stop rogue CerAs, wouldn’t they consider her one?”
Was that what had happened with Beit? Had he somehow discovered he had these new mytes and instructed his CerA to eliminate them. Had things got out of control and they killed him in the process.
I started to feel warm.
Sam’s brow was furrowed and she was deep in contemplation. That didn’t make me feel any better.
“Your body temperature is rising due to the battling mytes. You’re correct, the thugs won’t stop even if Kali does. You should lie down. I’m going to quickly reprogram some new ones to help Kali.”
“Quickly reprogram?” I said. Sam was one of the best programmers I knew. She’d taught me everything I knew, but did I think she could reprogram some new mytes in what I suspected had to be only a few minutes? I’ll be honest, I didn’t have much faith.
I didn’t lie down. I felt I had to do something, but I had no clue what to do. Sam had moved to a table and had her head down over something. She was mumbling to herself like she does when she’s in deep concentration mode. Most likely she was mumbling the code she was working on. I did feel better that she didn’t have to type in the commands, that her CerA acted instantly with her thoughts.
My clothes were there on the ground in front of me in a pile. Being naked I felt vulnerable. This wasn’t how I’d hoped things would go. I got up from the table and reached down for my pants. A dizzy spell brought me to my knees. I felt like I was on fire.
Was this how Beit had felt before he died? I felt panic start to rise up in me. I pushed it aside and focused on running what had happened in my mind, trying to find out the sequence of events. Things still didn’t make sense.
Frank had assigned me to the case, yet I was fingered as being E3 as well. If they truly thought I was a traitor, why had he assigned me? Someone had tried to kill me on my way here. They’d succeeded in killing the other four Inquisitors. If it hadn’t been for Van Horne’s men, I’d be dead as well. Me surviving made it look like I was responsible.
I got to the hotel and not even twenty-four hours later, Beit died. Was it simply coincidence, or had someone murdered him?
Drops of sweat fell from my forehead and hit my hand. I was sweating profusely. I felt cold. A shiver shook my whole body. The world spun. I felt weak. I fell over in slow motion.
I saw Sam turn her head and start running towards me before I blacked out.
CELESTIAL - DEATH
“You,” Kali said, sword raised like she was going to decapitate me at any second, which in her domain would work. “Do something,” she pleaded.
My arms were outstretched to my sides. “I can’t. Yan is your host. We’re in your in-between. I can’t do anything here. Only you can.”
“Then tell me what to do. That was the bargain. You’re supposed to be my mentor. Guide me.”
She looked to be on the verge of tears. I realized then that she wasn’t concerned about her own survival, she was concerned about Inquisitor Yan’s. She loved him.
“Show me what’s transpiring inside Travis,” I said.
A screen materialized in front of me showing a full body scan of him.
It didn’t look good.
These new mytes were doing a number on the ones Kali was in control of, and she wasn’t doing that great of a job fighting back. She was simply instructing the immunos to go to the sight of the injection, and letting them do their normal thing, as if the thugs were a normal disease.
That was the least of her problems though. The thugs weren’t of human design. They were Celestial. Okay, technically all the mytes were our design, but the thugs were something from our past. A weapon we’d used to fight amongst ourselves nearly a millennia ago. They were as much a threat to myself as they were to Kali, and since this copy of myself was hiding out in her, I’d perish as well. Even though I knew I’d live on, it was still disconcerting knowing that the knowledge I’d gained from Kali would be lost.
The thugs were a threat to all Celestials, all CerAs, even those who weren’t evolved. If the thugs were produced on a mass scale, they would kill us all. Was that their purpose? Was someone trying to stop us from influencing the humans?
Things were far worse than the other Celestials and I had thought. Not only had one of us gone rogue again, but whichever one of us it was, they were preparing to take out the rest of us, the only ones capable of stopping them. If we didn’t get a handle on the thugs, we’d either perish, or have to leave to stay alive. And since we didn’t know which one of us was the culprit, none of us would be allowed to leave by the others, because it posed a threat to the rest of the Celestials in the universe.
I wish we had decided to erase the knowledge of the thug-mytes from our collective consciousness.
The question that kept running through my mind was, ‘What had caused the rogue to revert to an unenlightened state of being?’ Our mission had been to explore and to integrate other cultures into our own. Humans were the first alien civilization we’d come across, and so far it’d been a disaster. A century later and they still weren’t fully integrated, and for some reason they’d brought out darker aspects of ourselves with their own. Integrating Ares and Ogoun should have prevented one of us from going rogue again, but for some reason it hadn’t.
“Can you show me what Samsara is doing?” I asked.
My initial impressions were that she was operating under the commands of the rogue, yet she was supposedly trying to help Travis, not hurt him. She said she was hunting a rogue, yet she wasn’t working with ChronoGen to do so. How was she even aware there was a rogue? She said she’d infected Travis with the thugs to protect him. She knew about Celestials, and had to have worked with one in order to develop them, but who?
It was odd. Upon further inspection I realized this version of thugs weren’t necessarily a weapon. They were subtly different from the ones which we’d used so long ago. These were more like anti-bodies, and in a way, they were just doing their job. Kali was a CerA, and in some ways, a rogue.
But she was the first of her kind, and I couldn’t let her
be killed. I had to do something, but there was nothing I could do except instruct Kali, and that would take too long. We needed to merge. She needed to integrate me into herself. But she wouldn’t, and without doing so, we’d both die.
26: Phoenix Rising
I awoke with a start, and accidentally slapped Sam in the face because she’d been hovering over me, monitoring my vitals. It hadn’t been hard, more like getting struck with a noodle. I would say it hurt me more than it hurt her, but I couldn’t tell for certain.
My head hurt. Actually, my whole body hurt, like I’d received the worst beating of my life. I felt weak. All my extremities were tingling in a painful sort of way. I didn’t know how much time had passed since I’d fallen unconscious.
Kali wasn’t responding.
“You should remain as still as possible,” Sam said. “You’re body has suffered a major shock.”
Stay still as possible? I could barely move of my own accord. I was lying on the floor where I’d collapsed.
“What the hell happened?” I asked. It hurt to speak, like I had a sore throat.
“You died.” She’d said it straight faced, but I didn’t believe her. Sam had a twisted sense of humor sometimes.
“Ha ha, funny.”
“I’m serious. You were clinically dead for a whole ten minutes.”
‹“Kali?”› I said, wanting to confirm what Sam was saying.
No response.
I realized by the look on Sam’s face that she wasn’t joking.
“You really are serious. I was dead. Why aren’t I anymore?” Stupid question. I mean who dies and then questions why they aren’t dead. Me, apparently.
“That’s the strange thing,” she said. “You were dead. I tried to resuscitate you but it didn’t work. Your Chrono zeroed out and then went blank. Next thing I knew, you gasped, convulsed, and you were alive again. It was like you’d been sleeping and startled yourself awake.”
“Yeah, I’m like a phoenix, rising from its own ashes,” I said, but what I really felt like was road kill.