I wanted my face to be the first one he saw.
I wanted, for just a second, him to experience a rush of hope.
And then I wanted to break him.
I looked around the room. The team were in place, surgical masks over their mouths, they were a cluster of eyes, no more, no less. Tenebrae, Mel Kamahi and Rowell Gant. My team. My family. The machinery was primed. All that remained was to turn it on and wake Fate. End it finally, and begin it all over again.
I looked at the doc. He nodded. The rest of his team confirmed their readiness.
They ran through their startup routine. They were good at their job. Fate’s body had already been incinerated. I’d toyed with the idea of purging his mind and leaving his empty body to taunt him but decided against it. It wasn’t that it was cruel and unusual, or that dangling the carrot of hope could backfire against me if he found a way to escape the machine. None of that really factored into my decision in the end. I just wanted to watch him burn.
I’d poured the gasoline on the pyre myself, and warmed my hands on the flames as his flesh was reduced to ash.
All that remained of my old mentor was structures and subroutines on the machine now.
Funny to think that what had started as a con became the foundation for my revenge. But I guess that’s the thing with science. Someone has to imagine it, then someone else can make it happen. The quest for immortality is as old as the hills. Everyone is obsessed with living forever. Well, everyone except for us Bleeders. We know better. We know that death is a release.
Immortality is most definitely a fate worse than death.
I said, “Let’s get this party started.”
The doc moved down the line of glossy screens, triggering commands until Fate 2.0 came online.
His face slowly reconstructed itself in the center of the main screen.
Froze in place.
Tried to speak, but couldn’t. Tried to move, but couldn’t. There was a camera above the screen. I stared into its black lens, giving the facial recognition software time to map my features, then turned my attention to the screen beneath it.
I watched the panic set in.
It knew me. He was in there. It had worked. The horror of it made me realize what kind of hell I must have put Mel through when I’d kept her trapped in that flatline right at the beginning of this revenge trip. I owed her. Big time.
“Can you hear me, Fate?” I asked, speaking slowly, clearly. “Look around you, I’ll give you a moment. It would have been too easy to kill you. Plus, I’d given you my word. That means something to me. I’m a man of principle. My word is my bond. It’s about honor. You wouldn’t understand that. There’s no way you are going to die on my watch. You’ve paid for my services. You’ve paid a lot of money for them, in fact. Everything you ever had. I want you to consider yourself protected. Forever. Well, not forever, for as long as there’s air in my lungs and blood pumping through my veins. A long time. I don’t intend to die until I am very old. I just came into something of a windfall. I’ve got my eye on a little desert island somewhere warm to settle down and retire. I should warn you, I’ve been talking to the doc a lot over the last week, while you’ve been gone. He reckons you’ll experience phantom pains for years to come, they’ll be quite real, I’m told. You’ll be trying to move hands that aren’t there, trying to scratch itches that are only in your head. Thoughts that before came tumbling through your head will process so quickly now you’ll have the answers before you’ve finished consciously forming them, second-guessing yourself all the time. No doubt you’ll slowly go mad. That’s an understandable side effect of this new life of yours. But before then, you’re going to have a long time to think about what happened, about what you did to Swann and Martagan. About how you betrayed them. They didn’t deserve to die. Not like that. They trusted you. You betrayed their trust. You deserve this. I burned your body myself. It’s important you know that. There’s no going back. I watched it sear and char and blister and finally collapse in on itself, all of the juices cooked out of it. This is your life now, Fate. This is all there is. Think about it. Process it.”
Sensors reported the kernel panic at its core as it understood it had no mouth, no body. All that remained were thought processes that might laughingly have been called his soul.
One by one the servers and systems attached to the machine started to make the most hideous sounds, grinding, grating, overloading.
It took me a moment to realize that the machine was screaming.
“I win,” I said, and walked away.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
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