Behind me I heard more noise. With a skill I had developed over a long time I turned and expertly fired. Three rounds tore into one guy’s chest, and the next two were into the other’s head. Taking the two of them out required little thought or effort.
Turning back to the farther squad, I realized Mitreah was already halfway to them. The loud explosions of their guns reached me long after I saw a few sparks of light fly off her body, the rounds hitting metallic substrates. She stabbed her blade-arm straight through one of them, twisting and slashing the second one in half before stabbing her way through the final one and was already running back towards us before I could even realize we had to keep moving.
“Hey, are you okay?” I nodded to the holes in her chest and arms that were leaking a dark blood. It had not hit her deeper substrates yet.
“I can take way more before I am compromised.”
At this point I had never made it this far, so no longer ‘knew’ what to do. All I had was my skills, which were substantial. I saw movement below us and with a single shot killed the guy sighting us with his rifle. My skills were far past what it took to be an expert marksman.
We hurried along the walkway, an occasional shot from below us hitting the walkway or the ceiling. The walkway was a ‘T’ shape and we took the left instead of the straight path where the dead guards lay. Below us the huge machines hummed ominously; the bright blue energy from the glass cylinder did not look very good at all.
The walkway ended at a door Mitreah front kicked off its rolling ridge, quite an impressive feat. Inside were three scientists and a computer mainframe. We entered quickly and soon the three of them were holding their hands up, begging to not be killed.
“Where is the center of the particle creator?!” I yelled to them. One of them pointed behind him where beyond the computer was a railing overlooking something radiating light. I was walking towards it, unhooking my satchel, programming the time charge on the bomb.
“Don’t do it! Do you know how much research has been put into this?” someone behind me cried.
In a moment I realized it partly might have been a distraction. From two sides we were attacked. Mitreah was engaged with one group on the other side of the room.
“Tre!” Proud yelled my name. I glanced to my left seeing her form between me and a squad that had come into the door. The next instant her form was bending over as the rounds from their rifles were entering her body. Her body moved a bit, dancing slowly from their energy hitting her. I had once found out she truly could take rounds in our physical dimension if she ‘lowered’ herself enough to the base level but was bound by certain rules regarding the consequence.
“Proud!” I yelled to her slumping form as I lifted my unlimited Liner pistol and unloaded round after electro-magnetically propelled round into the group, leaving them holed and dead. I had taken out four skilled men with a commercially available pistol. That is how far I had come.
“Proud!” I yelled again, running to her.
She was kneeling, and turned her head towards me, tears in her eyes. “It hurts. What a terrible sensation! In future resets do not stand there so I will not have to feel this.” She managed a grim smile and went back to looking downwards. From her body there was not blood leaking out, but rather a light blue energy that was barely visible from her bullet holes before disappearing in the air. Her eyes were closed, and despite how bad her body was massacred, I would almost swear the wounds were disappearing, but why were her eyes closed!?
“Proud!” I yelled again, and then my eyes went wide as a fire ripped through my shoulder. The momentum from the bullet entered my shoulder and threw me to the ground, stumbling forward over Proud. I hit the ground, and panic from the pain threatened to completely take over my mind. Only the simple thought of noticing Proud trying to get back up kept me sane.
I lifted my head to see a heavily armed squad from the other door that was firing at Mitreah. A huge round entered her body, exploding out from her backside along with a grim mix of organic tissue and metallic substrates. She staggered for a moment and continued onwards into the fire. Another round hit her in her other arm, a piece of it flying off from the energy. I could visibly see how much momentum there was pushing against her in bullets as she staggered forward.
She stabbed the first one though the chest as another round from the man next to him ripped through her body. I saw her pause for a moment, gathering strength perhaps for her slash out of that body into the next one. It cut the next man in half while the final man backed up professionally, firing coldly at the target in front of him.
“Mitreah!” I yelled, coughing from the pain. I thought she was going to go down right there with her slumping form. She was slowly going down, then I saw a poise take over her body as she launched at her final target, stabbing her arm into him, pulling downwards as the two of them fell into each other, dead or dying.
Another person came from the other door. I used much of my focus I had gained with Mitreah while in extreme pain to line my pistol up and shoot the two of them dead before they could do anything to our wounded party.
‘No…It doesn’t end like this.’ I tried standing up, and when it failed I contented myself with crawling over to the railing. Below me was a spherical core of blue and white energy that hung suspended between two huge rotating metal braces, a white light softly radiating outwards. Though the light was white, I knew its true evil nature. I had been its victim enough times.
I activated the bomb, and lay there as a thought hit me. Should I just abort and try again? But…a deep fear came to the surface that maybe indeed this was ‘real’, that I had no second chance, and that all my lives were really just an illusion; that thought seemed easier to dismiss but the idea that something critical had changed and I would not reset seemed likely. At the very least what if something had changed by me being so far in here? I could not take the chance. The sacrifices to get here been too great to risk it ending in failure.
I pressed on both out of a fear that maybe this really was my only life, and another feeling of if I really had lived a million lives that I just wanted this to end. I rolled to my side, grasping the bomb with the opposite, non-shot hand, and laughing once as I pitched it off the edge to the core a few stories under me. So this is how it ends…
I turned back around, maybe ready to die when I saw those three scientists still there. “Like I’m letting you out of here. We are all dying here.” I lifted my pistol and shot the three of them who tried to run, before I felt fire enter my stomach from a different angle and I blacked out.
***
“Uhh…pain…” I woke up half expecting the softness of my pillow I had seen so many times. But this time I was already standing, my body was trying to fall down held up by what seemed to be chains on my wrists.
“So the terrorist is finally awake huh?” There was a voice in front of me. Something painful hit me in the stomach, and I coughed hard as my head swung back and forth. I felt some saliva leaking out of my mouth, but I could barely bring myself to swallow it. What was going on?
“Why did you do it, Trego? Why’d you sell out your whole race?” the voice asked. I couldn’t see anything. Was I blind? Fear flooded me at the thought of never seeing again. “Is ‘Trego’ even your real name? Who are you an agent for!?”
No strikes to my body from the voice, and no further prompts for a while let me think about what was just said. Something critical had changed in my reality. I definitely was not where I usually was when I ‘died’ or the cycle ended. Was the loop I was in over? The voice said selling out my race and being an agent. I remember once a long time ago I had indeed thought that maybe I was part of an experiment to see how long I would go before I’d break. Was this what it was about?
I thought not though, because I had lasted impossibly long. I had resorted to killing myself before going through with this; what more would a military or whatever want with me? How could I have passed the test any more so when I resisted for so long?<
br />
“What race?” I asked the darkness. Maybe I was not even Solarian, just a butterfly dreaming he was…
Damn, was I really an agent? No way…but why did I decide to blow up a reactor?
“The Solarians, you idiot! Though with what you were doing, one would wonder if you weren’t serving something else. We were near a new technology that could finally give us a decisive edge over the Daijin Stars, and you did this?! We are fighting for our fucking lives, and you blow up a weapons research base…all to help the fucking Daijins!?”
I felt a hand over my face grip something, and a cloth or bag was ripped from my face. In front of me was a hand holding an info screen cycling news, but in bold was ‘ReCorp Building Bombed by Ex-scientist.’ The picture under it showed the internal part of the building cratered in, smoke rising from the ash. ‘Ex-Scientist and Combat Android Rampage Building. Deaths Estimated at Over 100, Research Set Back “Insurmountable” says ReCorp Employee.’ A picture of me frowning was off on the side, with a story about how great I used to be and how no one could have seen this coming.
“So I did it.” It was more of a relief than any question of if the fact was true.
The man in front of me slapped my face hard. It knocked my face to the side, and I was able to see a scabbed hole in my shoulder. I evidently indeed was shot; seeing something carry over for once was a really weird experience for me now. It gave a reality to injuries I had lacked for a very long time. But even so, the raw repetition had yet to give away, and I still only looked at the pain bemusedly. It would only be one reset away.
“Why did you do it?” he asked sternly.
“It had to be done.”
“Heh, you types are all the same. It’s always the crazy people that have delusion of grandeur, or think they are alone in realizing some big conspiracy all around them, that they alone know the secret to saving the universe. Pitiful. Next thing you’ll be telling me is God or the voices told you to, right?”
I managed a grim smile back at him. “Would you believe me if I said a Goddess indeed did?”
He slapped me again. I wanted to cough and spit out the blood, but my mouth was very dry. All I could spit out was a slow retort, swallowing once midway. “She was hotter… than you could ever imagine.”
“You are unbelievable. I can’t wait to smoke you. I am tempted to just bash your face in right now. Others still want to get some info out of you, how you pulled this off and who else was working with you. Do you really feel no remorse for what you did? ”
I looked back at him coldly. “None. You have no idea the alternative. Tell me my Rank and since I’m obviously captured tell me when my trial is.”
I was wondering what level Rank I would get as all criminals receive them; the higher the number, the more serious it is. Hmm, bombing a building, that’d probably net me about 40-50 out of a possible 64, depending on how corrupt the person listing the charge was. A particularly desperate Hunter could kill anyone out on the streets if you did not turn yourself in, even with a single point of Rank on your name.
He laughed darkly at my question. “Haha! You have no clue about your position here, do you? This was a top secret base, and though what was going on here will be covered up, do you think you will have any chance at all of getting out of this?”
“So that’s how it is going to be, huh? I’ll be erased from the world and no one will ever think about me again.”
“Yes.” He uppercut me in the stomach and I felt myself losing consciousness. “It is.” Did anyone ever think about me anyway?
***
I woke back up, eventually, and was still in chains. Okay, so this was definitely ‘reality’ as much as I had flirted with different states of that word. My mind went through a few scenarios on what exactly this meant. There appeared to be no doubt I did indeed bomb the ReCorp building. Sounds like I am probably slated to be executed here, maybe after I’m tortured awhile to see what I can produce as far as my contacts or whom I was working for. It was all for a girl, man, all for some crazy girl.
Proud. Hmm, did she really exist? Evidently Mitreah did, as the info screen referenced her. Yet, I could have sworn that Proud absorbed some bullets that would have laid me out.
Did I really live all those cycles over? Of course. I had to have, because how else could I have gotten that bomb, or found Mitreah’s secret phrase, or figure out the perfect paths for everything? Or…what if I always had that bomb and Mitreah was given to me from a shadowy contact? Was I an agent programmed to forget what exactly I was doing, and come up with some massively delusional story to hide the simple truth that I was just a terrorist against the Solarian Federation?
Damn, was that the truth? It was true I could not remember even two cycles ago. Ha, holy shit, I literally could not remember what had happened two cycles ago.
Had my secret neural trigger activated and blanked everything out? “Uhh…” I tried moving my arms, and groaned from the pain of the wrist locks and my arms not being able to move.
“Proud…were you just a lie? Was everything just a lie?” Was I just an agent with his combat android sent to eliminate whatever advantage the Federation was developing here?
Though another thought came to me. What if indeed the cycle reset over and over, and that was simply Proud’s goal from the beginning: not so much saving the universe, but simply preventing the time fracture after which I no longer mattered? I prevented it, so her goal was accomplished. Why would she care about one stupid little Solarian locked up for his crimes? This was especially true if it was for the whole universe’s sake. As long as I did my duty, I was completely expendable. Wow…that was fucked up. I got played hard. Maybe I would have cried, but the emotion felt foreign to me. Distant.
***
Sometime later – ha what an ironic word, ‘sometime’ – I had thought I had lost my arms. I could no longer feel them, and it had been at least a few cycles as my hunger had disappeared, replaced by the slow consumption of myself. In the pain and dark despair I eventually decided that I probably did indeed experience a time fracture, and Proud was real, but I had done what she wanted all along and there was no reason to ‘save’ me or ever even say anything to me again. Hell, I fucked her and shot her to make it even worse.
Do we cry over a white blood cell that kills itself in our service? Hardly. All we do is expect them to make that decision again and again. And I was probably worth infinitely less.
I was just a single white blood cell. It was the metaphor I had settled on. I did my part to help pull the universe out of the problem it was in. Proud was some director, and I did my sacrifice, everything else moved on. Wow…I hadn’t felt so abandoned in a while. Yet I sympathized in a way. I did not care about the individual blood cells dying to save me. Why would the universe?
“You would forsake me so fast?” It was her voice. I wondered how long before I would start hallucinating about her.
“Fuck you, go away,” I said to the darkness. Damn, I hated just being used. I kind of wanted to shoot her if the circumstances were such that way again.
Her…the cause of everything. Guess it was not too long. It was in the shadows of despair within my mind and the actual darkness in this cell that I definitely started to hate her. I felt used beyond redemption. White blood celled.
The bag was pulled off of my head, and her bright blue eyes were almost touching mine. She smiled was wide as she brought her face back. “Hi Tre! My, what have they done to you?”
“Unfortunately…” my voice came haggard. I had not spoken in a long time, and being deprived of water left my throat dry. “My race has… our less than… glorious… moments towards each other. Are you… real? Or just here to…to torment me before I die?”
I honestly expected her to disappear, or maybe appear as the guy who was probably going to torture me. But she stepped forward, putting her hands on my arms, and something happened as I was falling towards her. I landed in her chest as she held me gently. My arms hung limply at my side a
nd I definitely could not feel them.
“Proud…you are real…” I mumbled, feeling her actually hugging me and feeling overwhelmed by that fact as I whimpered softly.
“Of course. Why would I not be? I had promised I would protect you, did I not?”
“Did…you? Can’t… remember. I can’t move…hunger…pain. My arms…”
“I know. I know.” She held me there, and something warm was flowing from her into me. I felt a strange awareness come over me, an awareness I once possessed slowly come back to me.
“Healing,” I stated and she nodded. I could at least walk, even if I felt weak and out of it. “But how can we get out of here? I thought you cannot influence reality that much?”
“I have gotten stronger. I am still limited, but enough to get you out of here. I had to wait until everyone in your near reality counted on you dying. To that reality it makes no difference if you actually die, or are simply gone. The jail guard was killed in an accident today, he was the only one who knew you weren’t actually dead yet.”
“Complicated rules.”
Her eyes widened a bit at the simple truth of my statement. “Indeed. It is time we go.”
“Uh, are we going to teleport or something? I don’t think we can just walk out.”
She disappeared, and I certainly did not make the trip with her. “Uh, Proud?”
The door to my cell opened, and she was the one that had done it. “Come on.”
“And if we are caught?”
“I will protect you. It will not happen though. Stay close.” She offered her hand and I reached for it, but my hand did not move. She bent down, grabbing it, and I noticed my emaciated arm that she had taken. I had been in this delusional state in this dark cell for longer than I likely knew.
At the very end of the hallway, I tried tugging her back as I saw the shadow of a guard coming. She shook her head and sure enough the form on the wall had turned around and started walking away without ever turning the corner. We walked through some sort of facility, and it was uncanny that at every turn someone would be walking through the opposite door, or turned engaged in something. We continued in the strange ballad of perfect timing until we came out to a ship pad.
Proud Infinity (VayneLine) Page 9