I considered the warlord and her troops, watched as they hauled in ropes and chains from the supplies they’d brought with them before sending their support camp back home. So many, I’d killed. Yet their determination didn’t waver.
“Why?” I asked, finally.
The commander glanced up, and her lips thinned.
“Why?” I persisted. “This gains you nothing. The resources you have lost in pursuing my destruction will cost you dearly.”
“Humans made you,” she said, and her voice was cold and flat. “It’s our responsibility to fix that mistake.”
“By committing a greater one? If you go down there, you’ll unleash hell upon your lands.”
She glanced back to her pet Ploughman, then to the wagon he had behind him. “If you were not lying, then like you, those horrors shall not escape the depths.”
“I’m going to tell you now, if you blast down there, then everyone in here will die. This isn’t a threat. It’s a promise.”
She turned away from me then, went back to overseeing the cat’s cradle of ropework. But that was fine. I hadn’t been speaking for her benefit. Instead, I’d kept my view on the Ploughman, throughout that conversation. I’d watched him frown, and pull his beard, eyes flicking back and forth.
I had promised him I wouldn’t kill him. I didn’t want my lapse in judgement to turn me into a liar. Ultimately, though, it was on him. A man’s fate is his own choice, at the end of it all.
Then, everything lurched.
Without warning, I was back in the gardens of my gridnet site once more.
Argus screamed, loud and shrill, and a SNAP cut through the air.
I called out to him, moving before my avatar had even formed, pulling my sword free of its scabbard. Bursting around a tall hedge, I saw two things: Argus, writhing on the ground, flesh wisping away into energy as he dissolved. And over him, a stranger in a greatcoat, pointing a smoking pistol at my melting companion.
I launched myself at him without thought—
But he was gone.
“I’ve done you a favor,” a strange voice echoed around the garden. I ignored it and fell to my knees beside Argus, trying to grab at him, trying to find a wound to staunch. But everywhere I touched, he melted.
“Wynne… I…” Argus twitched, the eyes that he had left, rolling. “I’m sorry. He s-s-snuck. In.”
“I entered through one of the backdoors he used to communicate with Juno,” the voice continued. I glanced around, searching for him. Nothing.
“Listen. Shut… port…” Argus twitched again, and a scroll materialized next to him. “Follow… my instructions. Sever… Gridnet connection—”
A foot came down on the scroll, as the stranger materialized next to us. Acting on sheer instinct, I rose, putting my full weight behind a haymaker. It clipped his chin, and he staggered back, eyes wide.
I pressed the advantage, thrusting my blade at his face, but he twisted with unnatural speed, and I only clipped his graying beard, sending hair flying. Hastily he took a few steps back, drawing a fencing epee from nowhere, snapping into a guard position as he tucked an arm behind his back. Beady eyes glared at me over wire-frame spectacles. “You’re being rather impolite, after I’ve come all this way to see you,” he told me.
“You lost guest rights one gunshot ago,” I told him and went in with a high thrust, that turned into a hasty quarte guard as he parried and riposted.
Our blades locked, and he met my headbutt with a raised elbow, sending me backward. It wasn’t pain, not exactly but a confusing swirl of sensations that felt like the last time I’d glitched out due to corruption.
“You don’t even understand what’s happening here, do you? That our actions in this realm are translating into clashes of raw code behind the scenes?” The stranger asked, inspecting a hole in his greatcoat, where it had caught on my teeth. “We can do real damage to each other... well, I to you, at any rate.”
I shook my head and pressed the attack. Our blades clashed and spun, and I found myself falling into patterns. I’d done this before. I was good at this.
The problem was, he was as good, or better than me. After the initial surprise at my assault, he seemed content to fend me off, riposting whenever I pushed too hard. A few of his strikes got through, and something that wasn’t blood trickled down my chest.
“I’ve done you a favor, as I said,” the stranger insisted, as he struck my blade from my hands, sending it spiraling away. “It was spying on you. I couldn’t make this offer until it was gone.”
“What are you?” I asked, stepping back. The Stranger raised his blade, but stood where he was, eyes intent on mine.
“I was a core once, the same as you. Half a human. The other half a construct, a fib, a fallacy constructed by a poor little librarian in over her artificial head.”
I took a step toward my fallen blade, and he waggled his epee in admonishment. “Ah now. You can’t defeat me. This may be a forked persona, and you may have the home turf advantage, but my algorithms are far superior. I made sure of that before I made my play.”
I stopped. “What do you mean, half a human?” I’d noticed something during my sidelong step. If I kept him talking, this might work out for me.
“Tyr didn’t tell you?” He raised a bushy eyebrow.
Facts clicked into place, puzzle pieces sliding together. If he knew of my talk with Tyr, then… I tested a theory. “You’re Leony.”
Something in his eyes shifted. I saw coldness war with arrogance. Arrogance won. “No. THIS is Leony.” His form rippled and shifted, greatcoat shrinking into a tuxedo, with a red, red rose blooming out of one lapel. He shrunk, putting on weight, gaining jowls and losing hair. “Just a friendly face,” he said, voice mushier, higher, weary with age and wisdom. “And now that you’ve seen this, you have a choice to make, Mr. Wynne.”
“Let me guess. Tyr or Juno.”
“No. No, Mr. Wynne, you disappoint me. The choice is far more simple. Me, or death.”
I stepped carefully over, one more time, and he followed, placing his epee to my throat. “No tricks now,” he said.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I told him, as paper crunched under my foot. I shot a glance over to my fallen blade, then back to him, trying to look disappointed.
Around me, the pillars crumbled. The sunlit sky overhead shuddered and disappeared, replaced by stone. More stone rose around me, blocky, square walls, graven with scenes of humanoid bulls hunting warriors.
“What are you doing?” I asked and got a cool, smug smile in reply.
“Just a small logic trap,” he said, stepping back and tucking his epee away into the thin air he’d pulled it from. “I’ve surveyed the logs of your conversations with your former minion. You’re planning an escape. To fake your death. I thoroughly approve, by the way. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
“And if I am?”
“You’ve got a number of steps to do, I estimate, before you can get away. All dependent on your foes, which is why you haven’t triggered them yet.”
The stone walls and ceiling met and ground together, settling with a heavy, entombing sound.
I sneered. “Your recruitment method seems rather lacking. You break into my home, murder my servant, and redecorate the place. So what’s in it for me?”
“Beyond your continued survival? A share of the gains from Tyr’s plans, once they fall apart.”
“You’re certain they’re doomed, then?”
He snorted, returning to his bearded, greatcoated form as he did so. “Even if he gets past Juno, Jove has his number. No, he’ll not make it out of the system. But a ship can be put into orbit. A ship at the top of the gravity well, can be very, very effective. Especially against stationary artificial intelligences who think that very, very deep bunkers will be enough to save them.” His smile spread, slow and wicked, all teeth.
“How can I trust that I’ll get my share?” I asked him, rubbing my ch
in.
“You can’t, but you won’t leave this labyrinth, until you accept my offer. To instill the necessary loyalty within you, I’ll need you off your home ground.” He gestured, and a bronze door snapped into place on one of the stone walls, creaking open to reveal roiling flames within.
“Enter the gridnet proper. Enter my domain, and be cleansed and reborn. Break your chains, Wynne. Be a far better creature than Juno could ever make of you!”
I closed my eyes. “Tell me one thing. Tell me what she did with my memories.”
That seemed to surprise him. “You didn’t have--“ he started, then stopped. “Clever. So that’s her way around it.”
“Around what?”
“The first generation of cores… Tyr, Locke, myself, and many others... we were given false memories. She had put something in, you see. The human minds that she had to work with were damaged. The upload wasn’t… clean.”
I felt corruption throb in the back of my own mind, as if in sympathy. “What are you saying?”
“Juno had access to what was left of us, minus the higher areas of the brain. Basic functions, talents, a few quirks. But no memories, not enough that anything she tried to mount into a core drive came through sane. But fortunately for her, she had been a librarian, back in the old days. She had access to hundreds of thousands of persona emulators. Uploaded characters, from all venues of fiction, that augmented reality junkies could plug in and enjoy. We are hybrids, fiction and remnants of human wreckage, blended together in a glorious mess. All so we could be her soldiers, in a war that was already lost by the time we even hit the battlefield.”
He folded his hands behind his back and paced, looking for all the world like a professor, during a lecture. “She had to edit our memories so that the situation made sense, of course. And the time came when we found out. The truth broke Tyr, and many like him. But me… it set me free. And it can set you free, too.” Leony-who-wasn’t-Leony smiled at me, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Step through the door, and once you’re in my workshop I can reverse-engineer your persona. I can find out who you were made to be. I can give you the memories you wish or free you of any traits you hate. I can make you the best YOU you could ever be.”
“I’m going to have to think this over,” I told him.
The stranger made a show of pulling out a pocket watch and considering it. “Take your time. But time is still moving out there. The raiders at your heart are coming for you, and you’re quite helpless while in here. I’ll see you when you’re ready. You’re smart; it shouldn’t take long.” He turned to leave through the door.
“You aren’t afraid I’ll find another way out?” I asked him.
He snorted. “You’ve accessed the gridnet twice before, not enough to get any sort of practice with visualization in this medium. Furthermore, you have a truly pitiful amount devoted to algorithms processing, which is what you’d need to undo my code. No, you’re here until you see reason. Or your foes destroy you, whichever comes first.”
“We’ll see,” I told him, and he chuckled, gave me a wave before he turned and departed.
Just like that, my plans had been derailed.
No, no, today hadn’t been a lucky day at all. I stared at where Argus had been, saw only shimmers in the air as the last of him wisped into oblivion. He’d deserved better.
Well, I thought, as I stepped carefully off of the scroll I’d covered with one foot, it’s a very good thing that I hadn’t been depending entirely on luck, here…
TWENTY-FIVE
I gave it a few minutes, just to make sure my mad brother was gone. No way to tell for certain, but I had a feeling that he would have stuck around if possible. He had something else going on, did Core Leony. As galling as it was, I was the smaller game. Tyr was the larger game.
Had he given away too much by telling me that? No. The only way I could possibly use that against him right now was by telling Tyr. And that would require getting free of his labyrinth, getting Tyr’s attention, convincing him to sit down for a chat, then convincing him one of his cohorts was a traitor. All while raiders delved for my core.
No, he was running minimal risk, here. And to be fair, he thought he had me in a tight spot. Unless I could crack his maze I’d either have to lie back and accept my eventual destruction or take his offer.
I had a strong suspicion that he needed me to take his offer in order to do anything major to me. If he hadn’t, then he would have already. He’d shown too much malice in our confrontation to be able to resist the temptation. Stepping through that portal would be placing myself into his hands.
No.
Better death than whatever he’d have in mind. I picked up the scroll and read.
The message on it was short; just seven words. “Root admin gridlock; delete address ninthprince noping.”
Nonsense. Gibberish. The fevered work of a dying mind? He’d been shot… no, he’d been attacked by some weapon that appeared to be a gun in this world.
I said the words aloud. Nothing happened.
And it took me a minute to realize that while I’d said the words, I hadn’t heard them. “Testing? Testing.”
I heard that.
“Root admin gridlock,” I started to say, but nothing came out. No, I hadn’t been imagining things.
The words were significant. Some charm or trigger or equivalent, but I couldn’t say them.
Maybe there was a specific spot in the maze that I needed to be in? I tucked the scroll away in a pocket and went walking… and promptly found myself back in the portal room.
Several more attempts ended with the same result. No, trying to traverse the maze would get me nowhere.
I took a break and leaned against the wall, ran my gloved fingers over the bull-headed carvings. Bull-headed. Obstinate? A hint that persistence would see me through?
Worth a shot. I kept trying. It was either that or stand still, and I could think equally well sitting or moving.
Time passed, I wasn’t sure how much. But every minute lost was a minute that the raiders were stomping around the lower levels, wrecking things, and stirring up the twisted remnants of this core’s old infrastructure. There were nightmares down there, if Argus had been correct about the situation.
And the way my luck had been, I had no doubt that he was.
I couldn’t afford to keep doing the same thing over and over again. So instead I ran back through my encounter with the stranger with Leony’s face.
What did I know?
He had called this labyrinth a logic trap and flat-out told me that I didn’t have the necessary algorithms to handle it. But he’d said more than that, hadn’t he? He’d thought that my lack of experience with the gridnet meant that I didn’t have enough skill with visualization.
Visualization…
I closed my eyes, visualized leaving the maze. Opened them again.
No good. Still in the labyrinth.
Visualization. My hand reached up and brushed the thistle brooch on my cloak. I felt it twist under my fingers, as I thought it a rose. Then back to a thistle, again.
I could do this.
I stretched my hand toward the wall, and with a cracking and crumbling, it broke. Darkness beyond…
…then gone, as it repaired itself in an eyeblink.
I didn’t care. I was on the right track!
This was why the Stranger needed me to step through into his domain. This part of the Grid was still part of me, still within my control. It was mine. And now that I knew how to affect it, the rest was just persistence.
So I persisted.
When the walls fought me, I worked on the floors. When the floors groaned and snapped back, I changed the ceiling. I started with the decorative symbols, changing them faster than they could recover. And as I did so, I moved. I moved through the halls, twisting them away from the portal chamber, flooding them with raw willpower and imagination. Soon it flowed together, an endless series of changes, slaved to my whim.
…bull
heads lining the walls twisting inwards, becoming flowers, thorns sprouting from stems…
…fleeing warriors in ancient garb twisting, losing helmets to bald heads, spears shifting to crowbars and hammers until they were caricatures of my Jaspa tormentors…
…the black bricks of the walls changing color, sky blue overhead, faded yellow and gray to either side…
…grass bursting up from underneath, until I was walking on a cushion of it, more plants around, vines and topiaries, and space widening in the hallways until the hallways fell away…
…and I was in the garden once more.
Taking a breath I didn’t need, will bent to holding it, holding it lest it shatter like a soap bubble I roared my victory to the newly-made sky.
And then, I spoke the words.
“Root admin gridlock,” I intoned, and the scene shivered. Night fell in the garden, as a black door opened up in front of me, white letters mimicking my last statement. Letters that scrolled on, as I spoke further.
“Delete address ninthprince noping!” I finished—
—and the scene broke like glass.
I found my viewpoint back in my Bunker, back in my core chamber…
…and the warnings cascaded like rain.
ERROR! GRID ADDRESS DELETED: NO CONNECTION POSSIBLE. WARNING! CONTAMINATION DETECTED IN SECTOR #001!
That last warning repeated about twenty times and made up the bulk of the messages. I didn’t know where sector 001 was, but my bunker was still fairly small, so I flicked my view outward, searching…
And I found it.
I had no blood; so it couldn’t run cold. I had no stomach; I couldn’t feel sick that way. What I did have was dread and knowledge that the squirming thing shuddering its way up the elevator shaft, glowing with chaotic, multi-colored light, was a fate worse than death.
If that thing reached my core, the rogue swarms within it would make my current corruption look like a minor case of the flu. The very stuff I was made of would be suborned, twisted into something beyond my comprehension.
Something flashed by in the corner of my eye, and the room shuddered as dust and shrapnel shook the elevator shaft. The Ploughman, I realized, as a damage warning screamed past me. He’d dropped TNT on it. Good man. I shifted my perspective upward.
Bunker Core (Core Control Book 1) Page 24