by Adam Thielen
The will and ethereal presence of the vampire mages had been stabilizing the construct. When they died or were cut off by polonium, the network began to lose its cohesion. The singular dream of the old west began to break apart, allowing other minds to create completely separate realities within the web.
Drew had disconnected both Kate and Taq at the same time, but only Taq woke up. The transformation had taken too large a toll on her brain. Sensing that time was of the essence, the AI reconnected to her. He knew somewhere in her mind he could manually wake her up, he just needed to find the ‘on’ switch. His ethical subroutines told him he owed her, and somewhere in his consciousness he felt a sense of guilt.
When he found her, Kate was sitting on a bench at large park. Large snowflakes drifted along hidden currents of air, slowly sinking toward a collective of snow and slush covering the ground. She appeared to Drew as a young girl dressed in multiple layers of clothing. On her ears were late twentieth century headphones worn over a pink beanie. The park was filled with tourists and townies walking about and admiring a giant evergreen adorned with lights. In the distance, several people were gliding along a large patch of ice.
Drew found himself wearing boots and a heavy brown coat. He walked up to Kate’s younger self, stopping a couple meters out. “Hello, Kate.” Drew gazed curiously at the vapor created by his words.
“Kept me waiting long enough,” she replied, smiling.
“Kept you waiting?” he questioned, now distracted by her vapor.
Kate bobbed her head in response. Drew could just barely hear music leaking from the head phones. He was surprised she could hear him.
“You look different,” he observed. “How do you feel, Kate?”
“I feel human,” she started. “More human than I normally do, even though I’m not actually human at all right now, am I?”
“I don’t think I’m qualified to judge,” replied the AI.
“What a cop out,” she remarked.
“I am curious, what are you doing?” he asked, noting the headgear and sound.
“Oh, this? It’s music. I heard a song in someone else’s dream, and I had to hear more. I almost have it memorized. Archaic, but so alive and emotional,” she effused. “The dreamer must be real old.”
“I tried waking you, but could not,” started Drew. “A part of your brain has gone dark. I suspect as a result of the ghoul attack.”
Young Kate looked down and lifted her knees up toward her chest, resting her heels on the edge of the bench. She pulled the headphones off her ears and let them rest around the back of her neck. “So I’m damaged. Brain-damaged by one of those things. And before that, I was tortured,” she said, her voice cracking. “Then I poisoned myself with cyanide. And finally, a fiend tried to pull my mind apart in the dream world.”
“I… am sorry… that I placed you in danger, but you seem to be fairly functional,” encouraged Drew.
“I’m running on other people’s synapses,” she reasoned. “I may come out a vegetable, or maybe I just won’t be capable of emotion, or maybe I won’t remember anything. I don’t want to forget, I can’t forget him.”
“You mean Taq.”
“I think he loves me, Drew. What if I can’t return that love?”
“What does love mean to you?” Drew asked her.
“That’s hard to answer, I don’t know. Does it mean anything to you?”
“I have given this some thought,” admitted Drew. “It seems as though there are levels of affection, with love considered the ultimate. Starting from a base level and moving upwards, what changes seems to be what one would be willing to do for the other. Theoretically, at the ultimate level, no actions can be ruled out.”
“Doing whatever they want?” she asked.
“When there’s agreement about the benefit and sometimes when there is not. Perhaps more like ‘whatever it takes’,” Drew extrapolated.
Kate nodded, if in agreement or just to the music, Drew wasn’t sure.
“Right now, Taq and Matthias are aboard a giant flying fortress,” reported Drew. “Taq used dangerous magic to get them there. Matthias is on the roof of the vessel, fighting for his life while news cameras watch.”
“What can I do?”
“I do not know, but you are talented. I… believe in you.”
“I never became what I wanted,” she confessed. “When I was real young, I used to watch this aug-real show called Cosmic Pryde. Do you know what that is?”
Drew’s eyes moved down then back onto Kate. “I am having problems communicating on the network. I know of augmented reality programming, but not that one in particular.”
“It’s real old, back when the tech was flakey,” she explained. “It was cheesy and I loved it. The titular character could shoot out rainbows and had various magical abilities. I always wanted to be able to do that; to use magic.”
“Like Taq,” he supposed.
“I thought maybe he could teach me, or I could learn by neural interface.”
“I’m not sure it works like that,” the AI stated.
“I know it isn’t, but I still wanted to try,” she said.
They sat quiet for a moment, the sound of waves washing over the sand and people talking in the distance the only sounds.
“Maybe if you wake, we can help him somehow,” said Drew.
“But I can’t.”
“I have an idea. Your neuro processors are capable of emulating synaptic patterns. Perhaps I can test and compensate expected brain function with your implants?” suggested Drew.
“Let you play around in my brain?” she questioned, looking forward while speaking. “What if you damage me more? Even my processors will be too slow to be functional,” she protested.
“I will be careful,” he asserted. “Much of my time has been spent researching all facets of human neurology. I have even made a few moderately interesting discoveries that man has not,” Drew smiled, seeming almost proud. The expression lasted only a fleeting moment. “It may feel strange at first,” he continued. “But I must access your hardware and test responses to emulated signals. It will be slower than your synapses, yes, but it is better than nothing.”
Kate sat pondering. She turned to him and gazed into his eyes, wondering if anything was really behind them. “Okay, do it” she nodded, putting her headphones back onto her ears and wrapping her arms around her knees.
They both closed their eyes. Kate hummed a few notes from the song she was listening to, then began to sing along quietly:
Tomorrow the present is the past.
Moments with you go by much, much too fast.
I can only hope these memories will last
After a couple minutes, Drew opened his eyes. “I believe I have rerouted the functions. There’s only one way to know for sure.”
“Thank you, Drew.”
“Shall we go?”
“I’m scared.”
“You asked me a question earlier,” began Drew. “If you can’t love him, you will have to make a choice.”
“To leave him, or what?”
“To pretend or not,” he answered.
“To love him? How can someone live like that?” asked Kate
“I have been in the minds of many, and it is not at all uncommon,” Drew asserted. “It is clear that care for him and are afraid to hurt him. However, your concern may be unwarranted. His pain would be short-lived, and he would likely get over you. Perhaps that is what you really fear.”
“Maybe,” she conceded. “Maybe not.”
“I feel vulnerable this far out, may we attempt to return to our own hardware now?” asked Drew.
“I may forget this song when I wake. Even worse I may not like it once I return to my senses,” she sighed. “It’s like I’m me, but I’m not. Let me enjoy it one last time.”
She hummed the notes to the chorus and bridge, standing up. Drew noticed there were suddenly no other people in the dream.
Facing Drew, her hands flew o
ut to her sides and rose upwards. Beams of multiple colors shot out from her fingertips and laced around each other, expanding in size the further they traveled. Her body grew taller as she time-lapse aged into her facade self.
“Activating entanglement cores.”
“Plural?” Drew asked in surprise.
The beams stopped their upward travel and split horizontally as if hitting a ceiling. They changed into flat ribbons and began branching and reconnecting at various places, forming what looked like complex circuitry and slowly meshing into a dome flowing downward around the two of them.
Drew realized he could no longer move. The mesh snaked to the snowy grass, then along it toward his feet. “Kate, what are you doing?”
“I’m doing whatever it takes. I need you. All of you,” she declared.
“You tricked me into coming here, entering your mind. I have been helping you,” he argued.
“In your own way,” she said. “Now we do things my way.”
Flat ribbons wrapped around Drew’s feet, then legs.
“Let’s get to work,” rallied Kate as the rest of Drew’s body was consumed by ribbon-like tendrils.
* * *
Matthias rushed behind the bunker adjacent to one of the rotors, turrets tracking and firing as he moved. The door inside wouldn’t open, and only a few feet away was a short guardrail and a long drop. Only a few feet away from the rotor shaft, Matthias unloaded with the assault rifle. He held the trigger on fully automatic, emptying the entire clip. To his dismay, he could see no damage to the shaft or blades that whirred around inside of it. He dropped the gun and pulled out the grenade. “Just need to time it perfectly,” he thought.
“Hold on!” he heard someone shout to him. “You wait one goddamn minute.”
Matthias looked to the hatch. A man was climbing onto the stairway canopy with a sniper rifle. A woman walked toward Matthias slowly. “Makida, the woman from the news,” he realized. She had a thick strip of metal fitted from each side of her neck to the top of her head, and Matthias recognized the fabric of her pants suit as anti-ballistic. She appeared unarmed.
The sniper got onto his belly and started fidgeting with his weapon, replacing a long range scope with a shorter ranged one. Matthias pulled the pin on the grenade, waited a second, then lobbed it into the air. Makida watched as it went over her head and toward the gunman. Williams looked up in time to see it hurtling toward him, instinctively burying his head into his forearms. Makida dove to the ground. The grenade bounced right next to Williams then detonated, sending him flying off the shelter.
Matthias came out from behind the bunker to face Makida, who rose and dusted herself off.
“That wasn’t very-,” she cut herself off. “You…”
“Me,” he replied.
“The great Matthias,” she said, smirking. “I had no idea. The name is the same, but I didn’t connect it.”
“What are you going on about?”
“You wouldn’t remember, hon.”
“Try me,” he said flatly.
“You and I had a bit of a fling. I guess you wouldn’t recognize me like this,” Scarlett said.
Matthias blinked and where Makida had been standing, there was now a different woman, younger looking, human. The woman from the fairgrounds. His vision went blurry for a moment, and he felt a rage begin to bubble up from underneath the anger.
“How about now? No?” she asked.
“Fuck off,” Matthias said through gritted teeth.
“Ah, so you do remember me.”
“You’re not her,” he challenged.
“It’s alright dear, I had all but forgotten about you too,” she gestured toward him. “Look at what you’ve become. I am so proud.” Makida’s youthful illusion dissipated.
“This mind game isn’t working,” dismissed Matthias.
“Is it so hard to believe? I called myself Serafine at the time.”
Matthias recalled the name. He stood staring at Makida, eventually determining that her knowledge was simply too extensive to be a deception. “You ruined my life,” he accused.
“Oh please,” she dismissed. “You couldn’t stand that life. You wanted out, I just helped you realize it. You begged me to rip the memories out of you. Now that took a lot of work and apparently wasn’t completely successful. I will take the blame for that.
“Mm, right,” responded Matthias. “That’s why I don’t remember you either.”
“You became awfully boring after a while,” she shrugged.
“I don’t remember how it went down,” Matthias scowled. “But I have a better theory.”
“That I stole your memories from you?” she questioned. “Assaulted your mind, left you broken and lost? Out of spite perhaps, or maybe jealousy? You can believe whatever you want.”
“I would have been scared,” Matthias yelled. “I would have been vulnerable. No one who’s turning is in their right mind. You can’t excuse it.”
“I don’t need to. In this world, what you take is rightfully yours,” proclaimed Makida.
“Why me?”
“You struck my fancy, dear,” she looked upward, recalling. “At that time I myself had lost a lot. I had no direction. Found myself in your town.” Makida gazed at Matthias, smiling. “In a way, you inspired me. I got off my ass and did something. I even named it after the place we shared together.”
Matthias paced left to right, shaking his head. “You manipulated me. You are one of the old ones, I see that now. Must have manipulated Frank, too.” He continued to pace, but locked his gaze on her while he moved. “Where is he?”
“Frank?” she asked. “I guess you haven’t heard. He’s the new CEO of Noxcorp,” she smiled smugly.
“You idiot,” he mocked. “Everyone at Noxcorp is dead. Everyone.”
“Now who’s lying?”
“If he was there, he’s dead,” stated Matthias. “You used him, got him killed, and have nothing to show for it.”
Makida frowned. “If that’s true it’s unfortunate. But he did his part for the cause.”
“Spare me,” scoffed Matthias. “This is why you relics were put out to pasture.”
“And you lesser ones have gone too long without answering to an elder. Our kind was strong once, bound by blood. Now you grovel at the table of men,” she said with disdain.
Matthias readied his sword. “I’m going to rip your heart out and show it to you.”
“They say you overpowered a fiend, an old lady like me should be no sweat,” she said, beckoning with one hand.
* * *
Matthias snapped his gun toward her, firing the several shots in quick succession. Makida slid to the side almost instantly, then ducked her head and spun, allowing her suit to absorb the impacts. As she moved, flat metal bars slid out from the metallic strap over her head. The bars curved around her head and face, covering it completely, save for small holes in front of her nose and an ocularium slit across her eyes. The bars locked into place forming a semi-reflective helmet.
Matthias holstered his gun and charged her with his sword. Makida stood and waited. Matthias stopped at sword range and swung. She moved out of the way with unnatural ease. He continued his assault, coming in at different angles, all in a fluid motion. Makida continued to move slightly backward with each attempt.
She unsheathed two plain looking daggers, a foot in length, from the back of her waistband. They were slender, perfectly reflective, with no hilt and a subtle grip only slightly thicker than the blades themselves. Matthias stepped forward with a lunge. Makida parried. Matthias stepped backward then spun, but Makida interrupted, stepping with him and stabbing him in the side before he could complete the movement. Vapor oozed from the blade as it exited his body, now coated with his blood. Matthias winced, choking back a groan.
He released the grip on his sword from right hand, simultaneously backhanding her with that fist. His knuckles hit the hard metal shell protecting her, but still sent her reeling backward. Matthias caught
his sword with his left hand, transitioning into an upward slash, but Makida leaned back, evading contact. He clutched in pain at his stab wound.
“My, my, my, you are strong,” she remarked, her voice muffled. “A little slow, though.”
Matthias swapped his sword back to his right hand and drew his gun with his left. He charged at Scarlett again. This time he swung defensive, short swings, matching her movements and keeping his distance.
After a minute of patience, her form started to become sloppy. After parrying a dagger, Matthias kicked the outside of her thigh. Makida’s knee fell to the ground. She recovered and leaned toward him swinging downward, but Matthias was now ready. He dodged and brought his pistol up to meet her face where the eye slit was. He fired twice, immediately hearing the sound of metal on metal; she had moved just slightly, and he had failed to penetrate the helmet’s eye slit. Even so, the force of bullets hitting the helmet knocked Makida back.
Matthias followed up with another flurry, but she was once again ahead of him. He swung directly for her head, expecting her to move. Instead, she let it land while she lunged forward, stabbing Matthias in the chest, barely missing his heart. His blade merely bounced off of her helmet. Matthias pushed her away and stumbled backward, falling on his ass. He heard a muffled laugh emanate from the helmet.
* * *
“Do you really have multiple entanglement cores in your neural implants?” asked Drew.
“Yes, but I never use them.”
“Because of the law.”
“It’s dangerous for several reasons, but yes,” Kate confirmed.
“Where do they connect?” he asked.
“One siphons a network hub located in the Atlantic,” she answered. “The other is connected to a supercomputer that I built.”
“What are we doing?”
“We must compromise that ship’s systems,” she explained.
“That is likely impossible. The firewall—” started Drew.