Cypulchre

by Joseph Travers MacKinnon

  “Well, if you’ve a mind to take a hostile stance, I don’t see why I shouldn’t take the same precaution.”

  Winchester snaps his fingers, and two gigantic buke bots de-cloak on either side of him. Dressed and armored like Samurai of legend, the bots lurch forward, their cannons and melded-on electric swords entering the cross-light.

  Should have known.

  “You’re welcome to keep your gun drawn, but know: Dr. Katajima designed these specifically to protect me. They’re cutting edge.” Winchester laughs at his pun, reaching out to flick the closer-bot’s crackling sword with a gnarled finger. A drop of rusty-red blood rolls away from the cauterized skin, and down his sleeve.

  “For the love of God, stand down!” Paul yells, desperately.

  “Oh please, Paul. I don’t control them with grunts like a filthy Neanderthal.” He points to his head. “My will, coded, be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

  Paul groans.

  “I know why you’re here, Dr. Sheffield.”

  “Really? Have you been consulting your crystal ball?”

  “Not quite. Our dear friend, Dr. Katajima, has kept me in the loop. His loyalty is really quite remarkable, granted your recent encounter. I don’t see how I can remunerate him for his time, given his present lack of pockets or need for them.”

  “If you’re referring to his murder, it wasn’t by my hand…”

  “No need for fictions now, my dear boy. He told me all about your plan to destroy what you created; to rock my empire and kill all those people—my children, as it were. All of his messages are public record, should you wish to see them. It might paint this meeting in a different light, if it is,” he points at Paul with both hands, “another one of your infamous episodes.”

  “Series finale, actually.”

  “My lord!” Winchester chuckles. “Pettiness has evidently taken root with all those grey hairs…”

  “Those messages are all counterfeits. Your source has been compromised. The Anomaly…”

  “A nice trick. I knew it was you all along. Who else would create a problem so destructive, that the only solution would be an alternate form of lesser destruction in-line with your original agenda?”

  “There’s no time to explain. The man—the thing—you’ve been talking to…that’s not Shouta. There’s something in the CLOUD right now that can and will kill everything in there just for kicks, and then hardline out. It’s going to destroy the world as we know it.”

  “Do you take me for a simpleton, Dr. Sheffield?”

  “Check your data-streams!” Paul bellows.

  With eyes glowing bright red, the buke bots motion forward, picking up on Paul’s belligerent tone, but Winchester subdues them with a trembling hand. He opens his desk, takes out a holo-deck, and centres it before him. A hologram visualizing the CLOUD’s data-streams coagulates. Save for an out-of-place nodule, everything appears as it should be.

  “No, that’s not right. It’s lying to you!” Doubt swirls about Paul’s mind, fogging his memory and contaminating his certainty.

  “Please, Doctor, you’re exhausting the both of us. I recall, now years back, an idealistic, young man who sought to destroy what I’d built. And now that same man—calloused and weathered by failure and rejection—is back, standing before me, prophesizing cataclysm and professing to be humanity’s last hope. What a moth-eaten yarn!”

  Paul eyes the pair of buke bots, and then the ocean through the window, partially eclipsed by the frail and stubborn technocrat sitting in his imperial throne. “What are the chances you’ll depopulate the CLOUD as a safety measure? I’ll submit to whatever punishment fits my crime, whatever that crime might be.”

  Winchester laughs.

  “What if I asked nicely?” says Paul, frustrated.

  “Well, you’d need my full cooperation. The Baal Deck needs to scan my biometrics in order to function.”

  Paul brandishes his canines.

  Appreciative of Paul’s exasperation, Winchester continues. “And the likelihood of having my cooperation in destroying everything I’ve worked to achieve? As probable as your walking out of here in one piece.”

  Paul’s Monocle crackles alive with Oni’s voice. “Paul! Paul, do you copy?”

  “Yeah,” Paul replies, eyes locked with Winchester’s.

  Winchester cocks his head sideways. “Tell Dr. Matsui I say hello.”

  “In Winchester’s office—”

  “I know,” interrupts Paul. “Buke mechs.”

  “Shit! But no, that’s not all. There’s been a data surge, just like the one that Gibson logged in advance of Katajima’s murder.”

  “Here?” yells Paul, alarmed, scrutinizing Winchester. “Thanks Oni.”

  “What’s that little minx on about?” asks Winchester.

  “We’re both in big trouble.”

  “Oh?” says Winchester mockingly. “The both of us?” He coughs, and stands up slowly.

  “What killed Katajima—it is in here with us right now.”

  “I dare say I’m looking at it, Paul. Dr. Katajima was a good man. Too good a friend for the likes of you, evidently.” Winchester walks around his desk, one hand anchored on the corner, acting as a pivot point and support. “You never really understood what we were doing here.” He lifts his hands up as far as he can, and wobbles, slightly. “Creating mankind anew.”

  “Save me the spiel. You’re after power, pure and simple.”

  Winchester shakes his head, and smirks wistfully at the buke bot on his left. “This could have gone differently for you, Paul.” He coughs. “I never blamed you for Allen’s death—for coercing Dr. Katajima to break protocol and move forward with his experiment ahead of schedule. In private, I celebrated your ambition. I also prayed for your silence, so that the two of us could continue to…collaborate. It is unfortunate that we cannot turn back the hour hand on your folly, because it would scoop a handful of numbers I doubt you’d balk at.”

  The eyes on the buke to the right of Winchester turn from red to a bright yellow, like hollow furnaces on fire. Its slight realignment catches Paul’s attention.

  “Your dog has a mind of its own,” Paul says, lifting the B.F.G.

  Responding to Paul’s aggressive stance, the other buke, still red-eyed, targets him with several laser points.

  “How now?” Winchester turns to the yellow-eyed buke. “He’s simply tiring of your sad performance. I can’t say I blame him.”

  The yellow-eyed buke steps forward, and grabs Winchester by the back of his neck. It lifts him up like a ragdoll, shaking one of his shoes free.

  “What…are…you…doing?” rasps Winchester, writhing in the bot’s hold, kicking backwards at its chassis and scraping futilely at its mammoth hand.

  The red-eyed Buke lunges forward, fully weaponized, and knocks the yellow-eyed bot back with an iron punch, releasing its hold on Winchester. Winchester slaps the ground like a damp newspaper, and tries to pull himself away from the scrum. The aggressor kicks the loyal bot back, and opens fire, scraping off its opponent’s oriental mask.

  Paul fires two rounds: one directly at the red-eyed bot, and a miss, past the yellow-eyed bot. The first rounds clink on-target, but fail to explode.

  “Blast!” barks Paul.

  Undaunted by the titanic clash and metal-on-metal screeches, Paul checks the feed on the B.F.G. A red grenade is buried after a sequence of green ones. He takes a knee, and pulls out the ammo-belt.

  There’s a crash. Paul looks up. The first delayed grenade blew a crater into the torso of the red-eyed bot, sending it careening back—just missing the Baal Deck. With sparks and lubricant oozing out, it nevertheless finds its footing and aligns itself for one last go at the yellow-eyed bot.

  Both bukes close in, leaving just enough room for swordplay. Their electric swords snap and spark, glinting in the cross-light.

  Gurgling blood, Winchester crawls around the Resolute desk. He throws out a trembling distress sign for Paul.

  Too late, a
sshole.

  Paul rifles through a handful of grenades, pocketing the erroneous green-striped ammo. There’s only one incendiary round left, which Paul single-feeds into the B.F.G. after a delayed grenade. He aims it at the tornado of metal and circuitry, and fires both rounds in rapid succession.

  The delayed grenade clangs against something metallic. The yellow-eyed bot pulls its twin into the second, incendiary round. Wiring and metal-plating decal the desk and jet into the surrounding sandstone. In an inferno of smoke and flame, two yellow eyes stand out. The mutinous buke’s gun thunders.

  RED. PAIN. DARKNESS.

  PAUL CAN FEEL his heartbeat in his eyes. Sprawled out on a pile of his own gore, with one foot dipped in a mirror pool, he looks up to see the surviving yellow-eyed Buke smash through the desk and pull Winchester up by his shoulder. Its raises its electric sword, twisted in the fight, and cleaves Winchester in two. The technocrat’s imperial garb sloughs off and all the biomachinery keeping him alive spill out.

  “No,” murmurs Paul. Shock must have kicked in earlier than usual. He can’t feel his legs. The exo-suit armour Gibson insisted he wear has splintered. Some of the shards have made their way under his skin.

  Dropping Winchester’s remains, the yellow-eyed buke registers Paul’s continued presence, and turns to deal with him. There’s a beep. The delayed grenade. The buke’s yellow eyes widen like carbuncles set to break, and then disappear in a cloud of debris and fire.

  “Monocle,” rasps Paul. “Status.”

  The medical brief flits over Paul’s iris. “Critical condition. Exsanguination expected to shut down mental faculties in one minute; heart will fail in two. Medical attention summoned by unknown witness.”

  Sliming over his own entrails, Paul pulls himself across Winchester’s office floor. Anything for them.

  Trailing his last supper, Paul circumnavigates the splintered Resolute desk, and finds Winchester…twice. He grabs the shouldered head of his former boss as one would a bocce ball, and heaves it over to the storm machine. It bobbles along, stopping, finally, at the Baal Deck’s stilted base.

  Paul yanks two wires out of the sparking, smoking belly of the closest buke, and trawls them behind him, over to the storm machine. Gushing blood every-which-way, he closes his charred shirt around his chest wound, and, wheezing, plots Winchester’s face into the scanner.

  The Baal storm machine rejects Winchester’s empty stare. Thought so. Paul stabs one of the buke’s hissing wires into the base of Winchester’s skull. He shoves the wrinkled visage into the mould, and keys a second wire into the dead man’s mouth. A zap announces the completion of a circuit. Glad that worked.

  Paul spatters blood, and keels into the machine. Quickly losing consciousness and motor function, he panics, believing he’s hallucinated the storm machine’s validation-beep. Disregarding the agonizing ache branching throughout his chest, he pulls himself up the machine’s stilts. With his exo-skeleton shattered, he creaks on two sets of broken legs, grasping either side of the view screen.

  The Baal Deck prompts Paul with several options, but there’s only the one action-tree he cares about: “SEVER LOOP, QUARANTINE NETWORK, AND DESYNCHRONIZE ALL SUBSCRIBERS, EXCEPT FOR MEMEX NUMBER…”

  His Monocle is on the fritz, having taken some of the beating. He comms Oni, and waits on fuzz for a reply.

  The words are faint and distorted. “Paul? Update!”

  “What’s my memex number?” Paul rasps, gurgling blood between words.

  Static.

  “Oni?”

  “031087…Paul?”

  “Thanks. See that my girls make it out o-k.”

  He enters his memex number and finishes the command.

  He intuits-off his Monocle, and clicks through the Baal machine’s suggestive pop-ups and warnings. He watches the loading bar realize his goal. It beeps again, offering particular options he hasn’t the blood left to comprehend.

  He falls back. Twisting in a septic puddle of the yellow-eyed buke’s making, Paul sees the early-evening light stab the massacre. He crawls across the debris, tattered fabric, and guts, into the warming rays. He flops back into a lean against the Resolute desk’s ruins. Overlooking the ocean, he yanks a green orb out of his pocket, clicks it, and intuits-on his implant.

  Chapter 34: KOYAANISQATSI

  SOMETHING’S OFF.

  Winchester’s motionless parts are still unevenly plotted across the floor. The yellow-eyed buke, too, is half-buried in the splintered Resolute desk beside Paul, sparking.

  Paul looks down to the source of his phantom pain, but the wound, like the pain, disappears. “This isn’t real,” he declares for his own benefit.

  He remembers how, back in the day, his team at Outland was developing a program codenamed “Charon.” Its function was to emulate an individual’s surroundings during synchronization to ease their translation into the CLOUD. By mimicking reality, the virtual preamble to the noosphere would give the individual’s mind a chance to prepare.

  Paul gets up slowly. He turns to see his mangled body resting behind him. Its shirt is blown back, exposing a porridge of mangled organs and bones wrapped in spidersilk. That can’t be good, Paul surmises. His doppelganger disappears in a flurry of glitches, and his vision begins to shudder.

  The water in Winchester’s mirror pools drips skywards, and the hall Paul had entered transforms into a kaleidoscopic tunnel of light. The walls begin to melt into pixel ponds. The barbs of daylight stabbing the floor through the shattered cross-window solidify, taking on the appearance of iron girders. Trembling some more, the room begins to shrink around Paul. Light turns to sound, and the ground gives way to deafening darkness.

  Instinctively, Paul tries to grab onto something, feeling the noise suck at his feet. He throws his arms around one of the iron girders, but both his arms and the girder dematerialize.

  Shit.

  IT FEELS A LOT like drowning, only there are no ear drums around to burst. No lungs, no panicked heart. Just Paul’s stray mind, glowing with pictorial, haptic, and willful potential.

  Paul perceives himself slip deeper into the CLOUD, stuck with the feeling he’s going back to sleep after waking from a horrible nightmare. Some part of him realizes he’s been mortally wounded, but his animal panic and most of his reptilian drive have been displaced. He can’t sense his bubbled skin or his broken body, only cognitive discomfort.

  The CLOUD sweeps-up his lonely partition into a dense star field populated by synesthetic ideas and sensations, loosely laced by information highways and photoluminescent course-lines, glowing, somehow, without electricity or conventional power. Data swirls like aimless snowflakes around the fractallic structures—a seemingly infinite structure constituted by linked Mobius strips morphed by passing information typhoons.

  It worked.

  Paul’s implant has successfully synchronized with his virgin memex and the CLOUD.

  They’re all gone. No one’s home, and the home that’s left is an amalgam of temporary mental projections—the leviathan’s mental fingerprint.

  Paul feels like he’s falling into the pulsating mire, but with no body or horizon to orient with, the CLOUD may just as well be falling around him, assuming his historical person.

  He offers up one last cynical thought (i.e. “No! No!”), and then shrinks away from his unifying code and voice.

  THE THOUGHTS FORMALLY attributed to Dr. Paul Sheffield pool and reunify, defining a singular framework and semblance of self. He’s experienced a fleeting moment of ego-death.

  “That was awfully unpleasant,” Paul thinks, recomposing himself. Without the customary, slow introduction, evaporation to the CLOUD has one hell of a learning curve.

  A singing, yellow line necklaces Paul. He is at once filled with unprecedented knowledge about the CLOUD’s interior rules, logic, and inhabitants. It’s the crash course, he realizes. He didn’t have the time to be eased-into CLOUD space by the tutorial bots, so Oni keyed his PILOT to demand instant access, or rather, immedia
te noospheric capability. It’s overwhelming.

  “Body, shape, extension, movement, and place are all illusions,” thunders a displaced, atonal voice.

  The sentiment cuts through Paul, unfamiliar like a stranger’s declaration in a foreign tongue.

  “So what remains true? Our minds, together. Together, we are shaping tomorrow. Together, we change what it means to be human. Together, we change what it means to be. Welcome to the CLOUD.”

  A rudimentary heads-up-display beads along the soulful line like morning dew. The droplets of information assigned to Paul via the interface differentiate by colour like a genomic printout, suggesting things to do in the CLOUD.

  Yoking the rainbow band, Paul defines his space, effecting a basic avatar around his singular voice and swirling thoughts; nothing more than an anthropomorphic, gridline-encased self. It ripples with the hum of his repressed subconscious, turning the squares begat by the gridlines into vibrating diamonds.

  Paul flicks through the colours on his data-assignment, and intuits his query: “Outland Terminal search: Pythia Sheffield.”

  There’s a lyrical spectacle of light around him, but no satisfactory result.

  “Pythia Irhap,” Paul guesses.

  His daughter’s perfect face appears at the head of a collage of shared memories—both Paul’s and someone else’s—perhaps Rachel’s. Pythia disappears like a happy dream wrecked on the verge of waking.

  Ozymandian pillars whiz by like shooting stars, trailing intense tribal vibrations and lap-string carols. The information on them is illegible, but somehow their signage conveys meaning to Paul, as if by osmosis.

  “EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE…CLOUD TUTORIALS…TAKE A BREAK AT NOSTALGIA BAY…SENSEDEN: YOUR GO-TO FOR MENTALLY SAFE, LUSTFUL, AND CARNAL, DELIGHTS…NARRATIVE IMMERSION: SPECULATIVE FICTION FRIDAYS…FETCHED MEMORY POOL. WHO DO YOU WANT TO BE TODAY?”

  The influencers’ advertisements for intimate connection, interesting experiences, and SIMHAP, fade, leaving behind a wake of remembrance, reiterating their sales-pitch via glyphs. Curious they should immediately translate into understanding without the buffer of my Broca’s area or the discrimination of my temporal lobe, reflects Paul. “They’ve done it!” he realizes. “Projected thought. Disembodied manipulation—telekinetic advertising!”