by Phil Wrede
CHAPTER 9
EARTH-3243 THE PRESENT Cyber-Knife followed the escaping Lady Cyber-Knife through the doorway, and emerged behind her less than an instant later. They fell from Cyber-Knife's cell into a world outside; a world, as far as they could tell, of tundra, snow, and howling wind. A blue sun - a star on its last legs - cast its fading light onto this Earth, shrouding everything in a pale cerulean. It looked almost as though they'd wound up under water, but not in a deep blue sea, or a fresh mountain lake, but more like a snow globe, the sort to which drops of colored dye had been added to the water. As they crashed into banks of snow while they struggled, clumps of that snow bounced into the air, dissolving instantly as the wind tore them apart. Cyber-Knife kicked at Lady Cyber-Knife's sword hand with the heel of his foot, targeting the weak part of her grip exactly, his combat systems promising him that he could regain Excalibur, if only he could connect with her hand. Lady Cyber-Knife knew exactly what he intended to do, of course, and kept her hand just out of reach, twisting just far enough around him to ensure his strikes missed. With every failed kick, Cyber-Knife felt his irritation building, until he'd finally had enough.
Cyber-Knife used his plasma blaster like a flare, releasing such a bright flash of green light into Lady Cyber-Knife's eyes that she staggered back. He spun into her chest and hit her just below her neck with his clasped hands; when she lost her grip on Excalibur, he snatched the sword out of the air. Cyber-Knife held his jaw in place with his cybernetic hand, keeping the bone and tissue in place as his body worked doggedly to repair the grievous injury. He wound up a punch with his other hand, holding Excalibur tightly in his fist, and kicked off the ground. As he came back down, he punched Lady Cyber-Knife across the face. He tore the skin on his knuckles across the metal surface of her cheek, and sent her spinning backwards. She stayed on her feet, at least until he jumped forward and drove his front foot into her chest.
Lady Cyber-Knife flew back, striking her right shoulder back against the frame of the transdimensional doorway. Cyber-Knife ran at her, even though they were both off-balance, and they continued to strike at one another even as the door closed on one side, and opened on the other. He felt the hinge of his jaw knit itself back together, to the rest of his face, and held his lips tight as he smiled. He no longer had to fight with one hand tied behind his back, or across his face, or whatever.
EARTH-47
The snow kept falling dutifully, oblivious to the fury of their battle. Cyber-Knife spun Excalibur around his body, still thrilled at his reunion with his weapon after all this time. Lady Cyber-Knife pushed herself off the door's frame, and wiped Cyber-Knife's blood from her face. She answered Cyber-Knife's display with one of her own, twisting her cybernetic arms and legs about her body impossibly fast, and with a timing that no human could ever have matched. She looked like four pinwheels underneath the falling snow, sucking the flakes in and spitting them right back out with the vortexes her limbs created. Her motors whirred with a lethal focus, as a buzzsaw does before it rips through wood, and she leapt in the air, slamming her legs down and creating a snow shower to rival the one naturally coming down around them.
Rather than run at her, as she had prepared herself to expect, Cyber-Knife took off running in the other direction, his feet making muffled thumping sounds against the ground, and scattering the snow in his wake. It was all Lady Cyber-Knife could do to keep herself from screaming as she followed. She had to follow his lead as they ducked into a forest of dead trees, weaving around one cold, dry trunk after another. She slashed away branches with her talons, never letting him out of her sight.
They stepped into a clearing and Cyber-Knife's stride didn't waver for an instant as he dove through another, seemingly randomly placed dimensional doorway. Lady Cyber-Knife followed, her feet driving her forward faster and faster, the snow melting in her wake, and stormed into a narrow, high-ceiling laboratory, its walls lined with flexible screens and holograms, and tables everywhere, stacked with all kinds of glassware. She crashed into Cyber-Knife, who had only just barely stopped himself from toppling a heavy table, and they barreled ahead like bowling balls, smashing everything in their way.
As the heavy glass shards rained down, Cyber-Knife ran towards the doorway at the other end of the lab. Lady Cyber-Knife grabbed a heavy desk bolted into the floor. She launched herself over the top of it, smashing every test tube and bottle sitting on its surface, shooting forward, a singleminded, cybernetic arrow. The portal closed around the two of them just as she was about to close her hands around his throat. EARTH-1851 They next appeared on a drilling rig, suspended atop an ocean of black water. Red lightning flashed in the sky around them, accompanied by shrieks of thunder that made the platform reverberate with every distressing sound. Workers fled out of the way as the cyborgs careened through their workplace, smashing through metal staircases, pipes, and fencing. Those who understood what they were looking at dove into the water, desperate to get as far away from the duel as they could. Cyber-Knife repeatedly battered Lady Cyber-Knife's hands away with the flat part of Excalibur's blade as she struck at his neck again and again. The sound of the sword colliding with Lady Cyber-Knife was completely lost among the clamor aboard the extraction facility. Lady Cyber-Knife ducked under one of Cyber-Knife's swings and tore a piece of metal grate up from under their feet. She used it like a small shield to knock Excalibur away; with every strike of the sword, her shield got smaller and smaller, until she had only a handful of it left in her grasp. Her gamble had paid off, though, and she'd gotten inside of Cyber-Knife's reach, close enough that he could no longer easily threaten her with the sword. She hit him once in the shoulder with her weighted fist, and once more in the face, and he shouted angrily. His rage rippled outward and bent all the nearby surfaces, as if an extremely powerful magnet had raced across the sky. Cyber-Knife lifted Excalibur and spun it around above his head, ready to drive the sword down point-first, but Lady Cyber-Knife grabbed him by the collar and threw the both of them over the rig's edge, into the water. It was cold, a chill that threatened to suck every bit of heat out of her body, organic parts and artificial alike. A countdown timer immediately clicked into the bottom of Lady Cyber-Knife's vision; her advanced survival systems would allow her to spend eight minutes fighting in the water before she'd need to actually surface for air. As she stared through the deathly black water at Cyber-Knife, she hoped those eight minutes would be sufficient time for her to get Excalibur back and entice him to follow her someplace more conducive to conversation. If she'd had the same onboard sensor suite as he, Lady Cyber-Knife would've realized that Cyber-Knife could extract oxygen from the very water around them. He could afford to wait her out, if he'd been inclined to fight that sort of fight. Lady Cyber-Knife brought her legs together, and her feet spun around, propelling her forward with an almost reckless speed. She didn't shoot directly for Cyber-Knife this time, but brought herself around him in circles, a cautious electron orbiting a hostile nucleus, leaving furious trails of bubbles in her wake. Circling in tighter and tighter curves around Cyber-Knife, Lady Cyber-Knife watched even his hints of movement with every gram of focus she possessed. Any twitch that might become a strike, any twist that could wind up to a slash, a gleam of light that would become a blast of plasma - Lady Cyber-Knife was ready to dodge, or lunge through the ink around them in an instant. They locked eyes in the darkness, and understood one another. Just as she was about to level out and charge at him, Lady Cyber-Knife felt a thick, muscular shape wrap itself about her legs, forcing her propeller feet to grind to a halt, and a mighty force yank her down. She couldn't resist, for she had nothing onto which to grab, so without as much as a moment's consideration, she bent down at her waist and attacked the tentacle - it couldn't be anything but a tentacle, she thought - with her arms, extending her claws and repeatedly driving them, as piston-like as she was able, into the impenetrable flesh surrounding her. She wasn't able to break through it, but it did withdraw after agonizing seconds during which she was pulled e
ver deeper. When she finally broke free, she could barely make out the crescent moon through all the water above. She knew she'd never make it to the surface, so she dove after Cyber-Knife, reaching him just as he opened yet another doorway. EARTH-3911
Instead of depositing them gently on a flat, horizontal plane, Cyber-Knife and Lady Cyber-Knife were dropped into the open air. They found themselves falling through the sky above an uneven landscape, pocked with great white stone cliffs looming above expansive canyons. Water from the dark ocean fell around them. As they spun around one another, they zoomed their vision close into the ground, and quickly learned that what they had initially thought was stone was actually bone. Their electronic eyes took bursts of photos every time they twisted around to face the ground, and their HUDs carefully zoomed in on them at the edge of their vision. At the same time, both Cyber-Knife and Lady Cyber-Knife saw the mountains of skulls, stacked carefully, with the shadows cast inside their empty eye sockets drawing dark, narrow lines across the artificial mountains. The swings that they'd both drawn back, they held in place, and they hit the planet's surface like twin meteors, blasting fragments of human remains out in all directions.
Their impact triggered an avalanche; the precisely stacked bones clattered down upon each other. At first, they made hollow sounds that built upon one another almost musically, until there were too many falling at once to distinguish their sounds. It grew from a loud raining noise to a roar, and Cyber-Knife and Lady Cyber-Knife dug through the material underneath them in an attempt to get closer to the ground and avoid getting swept away in the uncontrollable rush. They drilled down faster, and faster, away from the moonlight, until they had made for themselves a tiny cave amidst the waste, from which the sounds of the collapsing world around them were little more than a rumble. Cyber-Knife couldn't lift Excalibur to his shoulders, so low and tight was the ceiling, so he dropped the sword, settling to raise his fists, instead.
“What good does this do you?” Excalibur shouted, finally able to get a word in. The sword's voice, already shrill in its worry, was amplified by the echoes as it bounced off the cave's bone walls. “What do you get if you win, the opportunity to continue on alone, without the only other person in all the universes who understands what it's like to be you? What a big win that would be, to you!” “You were there, too!” Cyber-Knife growled back. “She started it, you know that as well as either of us.” “Excuse me?” Lady Cyber-Knife asked. “I am not the one who played childish fucking games, and decided I would have more fun just being contrary. Perhaps I should have listened to MOM, and submitted to the Complex's will, after all.” “MOM isn't real!” Cyber-Knife shouted, pounding his fist against the wall with such passion that the bones rippled outward from the impact, like a pond once a stone had been cast into it. “Of course she is!” Lady Cyber-Knife replied. “I've seen her! I've talked to her! She raised me! She's been inside me!” She jabbed the the point of one of her talons into Cyber-Knife's chest with each of her last four words for effect. Pinpricks of blood pooled up after each poke, and cleanly vanished. Cyber-Knife grabbed her wrists, and was surprised to feel how warm the metal was to his touch. He felt a little jealousy, for his cybernetic hand only stopped being cold when he routed energy to his plasma blaster. “That's not her,” he tried to explain, “not the way you think of her. She's a creation of the Complex, just like us. They made her to keep us in line, as a kind of fail-safe if we start pushing back. They gave every secret location those ridiculous acronyms so that we focus on her, and never peek too far behind the curtain. The idea that she runs the show, that everything that's done there is done according to some great, grand design of hers? It's all false! She serves them, just like we do.” “Except that we do not!” Lady Cyber-Knife said, pushing him away. “We discovered what they did, and each decided to fight back against it. Alone, we both lost, but I thought that, together -” “I have more of her inside of me than I want to imagine,” Cyber-Knife said, turning away. “I've spent all the time I've been locked away here trying to purge her influence from me, but it's not been easy. Every time I think I've wound my way clear, there she is again, whispering in my ear, so quiet that only I can hear her.” “He's saying he can't do this by himself,” Excalibur added from the side. Lady Cyber-Knife took his hands in hers, now. “And, you do not have to. I have been trying to tell you this.” “So have I,” Cyber-Knife said, raising their hands to his face, “at least, when I was capable of speech.” “I am sorry for that,” Lady Cyber-Knife replied, feeling along his jaw. “I so rarely get to enjoy my full strength. I thought, perhaps, if I could remind you how it felt to want something, to feel desperation, it would fire the same rage within you that burns inside me. Had I not lit it, I would have gladly left you behind. I very much prefer you this way.” “I can tell. You have more in common with the woman who showed me how to unlock my mind than you know.” “Just answer me this," Lady Cyber-Knife asked, “if you were so content to stay under their thumb and leave them to their own disgusting devices -” “We'll need to have a conversation about that later,” Excalibur interjected. Lady Cyber-Knife gave the enchanted sword a wry look. “If you cared not for the worlds the Complex looted and plundered, why did you let the enemy carry out attacks in your name?” “How about I answer your question with one of my own,” Cyber-Knife said, drawing away. “How can you even imagine I'd do that? Ask yourself, who benefits from aligning me with the alien robot ninjas? Let me give you a hint: whenever you ask the question,'Who benefits?' you always get the same answer.” “The Complex,” Lady Cyber-Knife completed his thought. “An easy answer, for either one of us. Easier for me. I know everything.” Cyber-Knife tapped the side of his head. “The whole span of all accumulated human knowledge, history, and culture resides in here. Once I was taught how to synthesize that knowledge, That's when I became more useful as an enemy than a tool.” “A different kind of tool,” Excalibur added. “To think, earlier today I missed you,” Cyber-Knife said. Everyone chuckled at this; they didn't know how desperately they all needed some levity until they'd given themselves over to their laughter for a few long seconds. Once they had all quieted down, Lady Cyber-Knife said, “Synthesis has never been my failing, but the Complex severed my link to the Cloud. If I had access to the information that you hold, we could be twice as dangerous.” She pointed to her head, just as Cyber-Knife had. “The Complex is arrogant,” Cyber-Knife added, “but I'm not sure they're so arrogant as to put everything they have and know up on remotely-accessible servers. It's got to be easier to store everything in your mind and set up a local fail-safe to terminate you. That's the kind of remote access they could get behind.” “Oh, there was a kill switch,” she said, “but it got destroyed in my escape. MOM sent so much electricity coursing through my body that it fried the mechanism. I felt it happen. No switch, no kill.” “If they did that,” Cyber-Knife said, “then all we really have to do is override the blocks they've installed in your systems. The opposite of a kill switch.” Lady Cyber-Knife looked at him as though he'd just said something so stupid that he couldn't even conceive the enormity of its stupidity. “Thank you for summing things up so poetically. Now, if you please, tell me how we go about doing that.” “I enter your mindscape virtually,” Cyber-Knife said, stating a perfectly pedestrian process. “Together, we can overturn the barricades they placed inside of you, and release your mind, finally and totally, from their control.” “And if you're wrong?” Lady Cyber-Knife asked with some trepidation. “If they did not lie to me, and all I will ever know is what I know right now?” “Then, we will at least have gotten some practice fighting with one another, rather than fighting against one another,” Cyber-Knife said, sighing ever so softly. “But, as they've lied to you about everything, as they lied to me, can you believe that they would've told you the truth now?” “I have great concerns about wasting time,” she continued. “Every minute we spend here is another that the Complex could use to close its fingers around our throats. You already lost so much time here, and
nothing has changed. I despair that I will emerge from my own mind after a year or more, now able to recall thousand year-old artwork, but without any measurable progress made against our true foe.” “Then, let me put your mind at ease,” Cyber-Knife said, clapping his hands against his knees. “Time expands in the digital realm. Days there are only minutes here. We will not get lost inside our own minds and forget about the worlds beyond this one. I will not make that mistake again.” “Why do you need to take this step?” Excalibur asked. “It's one thing to learn about the mysteries of creation when you're a child, or when you're destined to rule over all you survey, but when you know what you need to do to achieve your goals, and you're capable of doing it? Philosopher kings get lost pondering mysteries, and never act to solve them. I've seen it happen.” “It's not enough to want to fight,” Cyber-Knife said, “or even enough to know why you should fight. You need to understand what you're fighting for. That's what Hnid taught me, what I didn't have time to tell you. She gave me an understanding of life, of our grandeur, and our potential. We haven't lived up to it in a long time; we've been content to stagnate, rather than build something new atop it. Even I'm just a variation on a theme.” He gestured at Lady Cyber-Knife. “You came first.” Lady Cyber-Knife understood where he was going in his thinking “We need to strive for a world that wants to do better than us,” she said. “The only way we know what that is is by knowing the world the Complex tries to lock away.” “Exactly,” he replied, nodding. She took a long, deep breath, looking at the debris surrounding them. For a second, she considered not ever leaving. Perversely, it was peaceful here; she could hear herself think. Her thoughts encouraged her to do as he entreated. After one more deep breath, she assented. “All right. Tell me how we do... whatever it is you need to do.” “You should have an access port directly behind your right earlobe,” Cyber-Knife said. Lady Cyber-Knife fiddled with the narrow strip of smooth, taut skin below her hairline, until the tips of her mechanical fingers caught a tab where her muscles curved above her jaw. A fine tug pulled away a disc of synthetic skin, and she felt a small metal port. “You insert something, I assume?” she asked. “Don't sound excited,” Cyber-Knife said. “It's neither very big, nor very thick.” A small probe slid out of the wrist of his cybernetic arm, wider around than a pencil, but no longer than his little finger. “On the plus side,” he went on, brushing her hair back over her ear awkwardly, “once we've made the hard connection once, it should override any restrictions on our wireless connectivity, so we can hear one another remotely, if we ever need to.” “You speak like a practiced man,” Lady Cyber-Knife observed sarcastically. “How fortunate for me that I'm here to benefit from your wealth of knowledge.” “It's not like that,” Cyber-Knife said, his cheeks unexpectedly flushing ever so slightly. “You learn a lot of things when you're on the run, alone.” He held his arm in the air, well clear of her head. “So,” she said, “you cannot even keep track of where you have inserted it. The confidence is rolling over me in waves now.” “You're very funny,” Cyber-Knife observed. He gestured at Excalibur. “Almost as funny as our friend.” “And he wouldn't compare people to me lightly,” the sword piped up. “Not after everything that we've been through.” “I get it,” Lady Cyber-Knife said, her eyes lighting up ever so slightly. "Your wingman. What a good one he must make.” “Most never see it coming,” Cyber-Knife said. “It sounds like the overblown praise comes from a place of real honesty, if he's spent the last day verbally assaulting me.” “Chalk up another victory for the cyborg and his sword,” Lady Cyber-Knife said, almost smiling. “You may proceed.” Cyber-Knife pressed his probe against Lady Cyber-Knife's port, and they both felt a surge of energy as their software packages negotiated a connection between their different generations of hardware. The sound of an ancient, dial-up modem filled their ears as the world around them slipped away...