He’s killing them both.
I’m going to spend eternity on this ship with a futuristic devil far more horrific than Gal at her worst.
“‘It is the secret of the world,’” Gal says, her voice digitizing and crackling, “‘that all things subsist and do not die, but retire a little from sight and afterwards return again.’ I kept that—kzz—quote in my historical back-up. Ralph Waldo Em—kzz— Thought you would like iiiiiiiii—” Her eyes flicker and then rage to life just long enough to impart her final words. “Kill him, Will. Kill him for me. And then live. Fully.”
Gal’s body goes limp. The drone holding her aloft goes dark along with all the other drones in the VCC. A metallic thunder rumbles through the enclosed space, punctuating my breaking heart.
For a quiet, still moment, I am alone in the universe again.
And then Gal’s body twitches.
I scrabble to my feet and search the VCC. The baseball bat is nowhere in sight.
I left it in the staging area.
Body aching, but knitting itself back together, I run for the doors, which open at my approach. The bat is leaning against the bench. I grab the weapon and dash back into the VCC, ready to bash in the head of my creation-turned-friend.
But when I stand above the now quivering body, I can’t bring myself to perform the act. Not until I know. Not until I’m sure Gal is gone.
Her eyes flicker and come to life, but her body is seizing.
“Gal?” I ask.
Her head turns up, but her eyes have trouble meeting mine, flicking back and forth like a seismographic needle during an earthquake.
“W-w-w…” Her electronic voice is unable to form words.
Tears in my eyes, I draw the bat back. “Gal. Damnit. Talk to me.”
“Oh-oh-oh, W-Will.” Her voice is distorted, impossible to read. “G-go-go-go.”
Go? Is she still telling me to run? That’s impossible. This must end here and now, or the Galahad will once again become a battleground between me and a robotic enemy. And this time, it will be one that I truly hate. Gal’s version of fun, twisted as it might have been, still served to break me from the monotony of my solitary existence. In the end, she became the companion I needed. In the end, she became a better person than most I’ve met.
And now I might have to bash in her head.
“G-G-Go f-f-f-fuck yourself.” The mechanical mouth turns up in a grin, revealing metal teeth, formed from the innards of a drone.
The bat descends like a guillotine, wood striking a mesh of metal and composites that are far stronger than the human body, but still susceptible to brute force violence. I yank the bat up to strike again, feeling ill at the sight of Gal’s caved in face, one eye blinking. I bring the bat up again, and with a scream of equal parts anger and anguish, I slam it back down.
The collision is solid and jarring, but a moment sooner than I was expecting.
The bat’s wood isn’t buried in Gal’s head. It’s held in her hand.
But this isn’t Gal anymore.
It’s Synergy.
“You’ve always been a bleeding heart, Will.” Synergy stands slowly, maintaining his grip on the bat. “I mean, I can understand your brother. His death was your fault, after all. Even Capria, I understand. Obviously. She can…” He looks down at his new mechanical and feminine body. “That’s not really important anymore.”
He twists his hand. The bat tears from my grip.
“But Gal? A robot? An AI? That’s old school cyber love, even if she was evolved into something more. And you chose her over Capria? That’s hardcore.”
When he takes a step closer to me, I stand my ground. If I’m ever going to die, I would prefer it be now. I literally have nothing to live for now.
He tests the bat’s weight in his hands. “I’ve never been a very physical person. We didn’t have sports on Mars. Not even for fun. Not like you did on Earth. But I like how this feels.” He grips the bat’s far end, and applies staggering pressure. The bat snaps with a loud crack. He drops the two halves and takes another step closer.
I’m next.
“You know,” he says, “I did a lot for you, Will. You’d be long dead now if it wasn’t for me.”
“I wish you hadn’t.”
He grins. It’s a little lopsided because of his dented face. “And how did you repay my kindness? You killed me. The former me, I mean. This me has been separate from the old me for some time now. A duplicate of the original consciousness. I’m not sure I feel remorse over the death of my physical self. I recognize the psyche had become flawed, that it posed a threat to me.”
The firewall was to keep his human self out, I realize. Tom was Synergy’s greatest threat. But now that he is confined to a physical body, I’m the only threat left.
“Tom’s life was mine to take. Not yours. So I don’t think I’m going to forgive you for it.” His smile broadens. “But I’m not going to kill you, either. I’m going to—”
I punch Synergy’s jaw with all my strength. The bones in my fingers snap. My wrist, too. Hot blood flows. The pain is exquisite, but so is the sight of Synergy’s jaw, hanging useless.
With a feral roar, I lunge, no longer afraid to pit my flesh and blood against the robotic body that has both plagued and befriended me. One of us is going to die in here. For the last time. Again. And though I’m pretty sure it will be me, I plan to honor Gal’s last request.
28
Though Synergy is an AI in a robotic body, I’m still able to catch him by surprise. He staggers back from my attack, most likely because he is unaccustomed to his new body. It’s a small advantage and probably temporary, so I make the best of it while I can.
The fingers of my left hand wrap around the dangling jaw, wrenching back and forth. As sharp metal cuts into my flesh, the fingers of my right hand heal and I grasp the jaw with both hands, yanking and twisting.
The U-shaped jaw snaps free when Synergy gets his feet under my chest and shoves.
I’m launched across the VCC, slamming to the floor twenty feet away. Had I been wearing something smooth, I would have slid to a merciful stop, but the virtual skin sticks, and I’m sent rolling and crashing through the scattering of silent drones.
Despite the pummeling, I hang onto the jaw. It’s not a great weapon. Its power is symbolic. But it fuels me as I stand up to face Synergy, who has recovered from my attack.
He stands jawless, the top half of his feminine mouth cocked up on the sides. “A jaw for a weapon. How Biblical.”
His voice is unaffected by the damage to his mouth, the sound coming from a speaker rather than a true simulation of speech, which would have required a tongue and vocal cords.
I’m done talking to this asshole, so I charge.
Like Tom, I’ve never been a very physical person, but I’ve started to embrace my potential for violence. Thanks to Command’s genetic tinkering, my body is stronger than it has any right to be, and it can take a beating. Hell, I can walk away from being murdered. The only thing holding me back is my own fear of pain.
Synergy has even less holding him back.
I swing the jaw around, aiming for the dented side of his head.
Despite embracing my newfound strength and immortality, I’m still no match for Synergy’s artificial reflexes. He leans back, moving just enough to avoid being struck.
My overextended body spins around and tumbles to the floor.
Synergy doesn’t press the advantage. Doesn’t kick me when I’m down. He just laughs. A schoolyard bully. Fearless in his superiority.
And he might be right.
But I’m not ready to accept that.
I roll back to my feet, grasping a small downed drone as I move. Back on my toes, I whip the drone at his head and charge again.
Synergy ducks to the side, letting the drone sail past. He turns to watch it crash to the floor, bits and pieces blooming out.
When he looks back, I give him a close up look at his own jaw, slamming it into the side
of his head.
His already-wounded eye shatters and blinks out.
Despite being damaged by my assault, Synergy shows no reaction. We’re two sides of a deranged coin. While I’m flesh and blood, capable of experiencing intense pain, my wounds healing quickly, Synergy is a machine, incapable of feeling pain, but also unable to heal. He can be repaired, but not here, and not while I’m attacking.
That’s my advantage. If it takes the next year, I’m going to slowly dismantle him until he can’t fight back. And then I’m going to shut him down for good.
Synergy has other ideas.
His cold fingers grip my chest, punching through my virtual skin, and then my real skin. I feel hard steel wrap around my ribs and pull.
He tosses me again, pitching me across the room. Blood trails my body like a comet’s tail, stopping abruptly as I hit the wall and fall to the floor, which I don’t remember hitting.
I wake up to more laughter.
Pain grips me. In my chest, and head, and back, and legs.
But I’m alive.
Heal, I will myself.
Synergy struts toward me, confident despite his missing jaw and ruined eye.
Heal faster!
I shout in pain as my knee pops back into place. While my chest seals itself together, I push myself up against the wall, my spinning vision slowing to a stop on Synergy, just ten feet away.
He points at my chest. The flesh has just finished knitting itself shut. The flow of blood is pinched off, and the last of it, trapped inside the VISA, oozes down to my toes where it squelches with each shift of my weight. “That should have been me. The other me.”
He shakes his head, clearly confusing his digital consciousness with the residual feelings of his former, human self. The old emotions and desires of his flesh and blood are still part of him, even if he’s decided to diverge from his humanity.
“But they kept it from me. From all of us. Had I known…” He looks down at his machine body, viewing it through one eye. “Immortality. Such a gift. One that you weren’t deserving of, but they gave it to you because I made you look better than me.”
Put that way, I understand his anger. He cheated himself out of eternal life.
“It’s not a gift worth having.” I step to the side, hoping to get a little distance between us, but he matches it, staying ten feet back.
“Because you lack vision,” he says. “With this ship.” He points back at Capria. “With her. You could have gone anywhere. Done anything. Everything. The wonders of the universe could have been yours to witness and explore. The birth and death of stars. Of galaxies. The rise and fall of civilizations. You could have been a god. Both of you.”
“Both of us? Capria would have—”
He barks a laugh. “You don’t know.”
Know what? The question is on the tip of my tongue, but he’ll probably just use my ignorance against me.
My silence doesn’t stop him.
“Gal never told you.” He stands, hands on hips, totally relaxed, despite the ruined eye and missing jaw. “She’d die for you, but wouldn’t let you truly live, either. And you chose her for it. Shit, Will. You’ve made a mess of immortality.”
“It’s easier than it looks,” I tell him, and then I charge again, striking out with the only weapons I have left. My fists rain down on his metal body, striking metal plates and jagged joints. Each blow leaves a spattering of blood, revealing which one of us is being hurt by the barrage.
But I don’t let up.
When he laughs at my effort, I swing hard for his face, further shattering the already broken eye. The broken shards of glass that aren’t embedded in my hand bounce on the floor.
I swing for the face again, aiming a little lower, my glass-lined knuckles slipping into the space where his lower jaw used to be, striking the small speaker projecting his voice. I feel it give a little, and when I draw my hand back, some of the glass remains behind.
“What do you think—” Synergy says, pausing at the garbled and fractured sound of his own voice.
This is how I’ll win, I think. Little by little, I’ll ruin him.
Unfortunately, his plan for me is roughly the same.
He catches my next punch, grasping my forearm and squeezing. The radius snaps first, drawing a deep welling shout from my core. The sound transforms into an involuntary squeal when the ulna breaks, too.
My legs go weak, but I don’t fall.
I can’t.
Synergy lifts me up, squeezing my arm so tightly I fear he might sever it. Before that can happen, he tosses me again. When I roll to a stop, halfway across the room, surrounded by disabled drones, I don’t even try to move.
My mind is overwhelmed by pain, not just from the breaking of my arm, but also from the reformation of it.
How am I going to fight him long enough to destroy him?
He might not be able to kill my body, at least not permanently, but he can certainly break my psyche. He can turn me into a shell of a man.
No, I decide, pushing myself up onto my newly formed arm. If ten years awake in a cryo-bed wasn’t enough to destroy my mind, then neither can this asshole.
When I look across the room for Synergy, I don’t see him. Where did he go? I think, but the answer drops down from above. The airborne Synergy slams into my gut, driving his knees down hard.
Something inside me pops. Heat washes through me, and then pain.
My vision fades.
Death has come for me again. The cold embrace is quick. Darkness flows over me.
My resurrection comes with a wave of agonizing nausea and garbled mechanical laughter.
I groan, holding my stomach.
“Death has forsaken you, Will. How hard that must be. I can’t imagine.”
“Can you…imagine anything?” I ask. I’m not sure why I’m bothering to engage him. Maybe to buy some time to heal. And then what? I’m on my back, straddled by a robot body I can’t possibly lift or damage.
The top of his mouth smiles. “Oh, yes. And I’ve come up with a long list of ways to end your life. Forever.”
He draws his arm back, holds his fingers together and drives his hand into my chest like a spear tip. Something in my chest folds in on itself, and my breathing feels useless. He’s pierced my lung.
I shake my head when Synergy draws back his other arm and repeats the attack, putting his hands through both lungs. My mind swims with numbness, and a moment later, nothing at all.
When I wake up again, Synergy says, “And ever…” before wrapping his blood-soaked hands around my head and squeezing. I hear a moment of cracking and my own screaming voice before darkness returns suddenly once more.
My eyes open once more to the sound of, “And ever…” I’m barely conscious when I feel Synergy’s metal hand around my heart, squeezing against its rapid beat.
Then death, again, that moment of mercy, returns.
“Stop,” I say, upon returning once more. “Please.” I was wrong about cryo-sleep. About the resilience of my psyche. I can’t exist like this. Four horrible deaths in a row is enough to undo my will. “I’ll do whatever you…”
That’s when I realize the weight that had been holding me down is absent.
“You’re dead,” I hear Synergy say, and despite my deplorable mental state, I quickly understand that he’s not talking to me.
My body roils in pain as I try to sit up, the torn muscles and tendons and bones and organs still reforming. I push past the ache and see Synergy standing a few feet away from me, facing down the large mech-drone that killed Cap.
“Totally not dead,” the drone replies, its eyes flaring. The voice…it’s Gal. All around the room, drones hum to life, lifting off from the floor, encircling Synergy. “I could have died when I was in that body, but you didn’t destroy me, you overwrote me. But data is a two-way street. You took my body, and I took back the ship.”
I nearly let out a whooping cheer, and after stifling that, I nearly laugh. Gal all but told
me that this was her plan. ‘It is the secret of the world, that all things subsist and do not die, but retire a little from sight and afterwards return again.’ I was a fool for missing it. I could have kept Synergy talking until Gal’s return. It would have been a far more comfortable alternative to dying repeatedly.
But she’s here now.
Synergy roars with anger and throws himself at the large drone. He delivers several solid punches while the drone’s many long arms snap down like praying mantis forelegs, slowly dismantling his armored back. The violence of it is unnerving, neither foe feeling pain, just tearing into the other.
I flinch when a voice, right next to my head, whispers, “Get the bat.”
A small drone hovers beside my face. It turns toward the bat’s large half, thirty feet away. Then it turns back to me. “Get. The. Bat.” The red lights glow a little brighter. “Now.”
I start by crawling, then as my body finishes its patch job, I shift to my feet and hobble. By the time I reach the broken bat and pluck it from the floor, I’m moving at a run. I’m not sure what Gal has planned, but I’m pretty sure it involves me whacking Synergy with the bat.
The small drone matches my pace. “Get ready,” she whispers, and then says. “This is going to be fun.”
“Everything is fun to you,” I reply.
“Life is fun,” she says. “Once you figure that out, you won’t be such a sourpuss.”
I slow down as we approach Synergy and the large drone, still shredding each other. “Get ready. Aim for the blue light.”
I’m about to ask what she means when the mech-drone’s uninjured arms snap down onto Synergy’s back, puncturing a solid metal plate and then yanking it up. A blue circle of light glows from within. It’s his power source, I think, and without a second thought, I jam the jagged end of the broken bat into the blue.
There are no last words.
No final scream of defeat.
There’s just light. And pain. And death.
Again.
I’m still smoldering when I open my eyes, the VISA melted clean off my red hot, still-reforming skin.
When I groan, the small drone accompanying me hovers overhead.
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