Enemy tst-1

by Paul Evan Hughes

  “Even if it means killing someone you love?”

  “Even if it means killing someone you love. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again.”

  Patra regarded Zero-Four calmly. “I understand. But I don’t think you’ll have to kill me.”

  Zero-Four nodded.

  There was a marked moment of awkward silence, and then West spoke. “If you designed the machines in the first place, how did you get involved in this whole war against them? Wasn’t your world about to die?”

  “It was, but time is a fluid, much like the machines. They swept back through time almost as easily as they’d conquered the universe in the countless aeons before the heat death. Machines persevere, and they have no fear of time. Machines are eternal. We, however, are not.”

  “What is it?”

  “Sorry to wake you, Michael. You should come take a look at this.”

  He went over to the display at the center of the room. “This equipment was supposed to be dismantled yesterday. We have a schedule to keep.”

  “That’s just it… We were about to take it apart when we noticed that something was wrong with the readings. Just look at it.”

  Michael relented and activated the holodisplay. The building shook with the force of an explosion from the outside, and the display flickered for an instant. “Damn the resistance. They’ll never give up until the city falls.” His eyebrows furrowed as the display returned to normal. “What the hell’s in the buffer?”

  “We have no idea.” The technician came closer. “We were about to take it apart, and this is what we saw.”

  “But there’s a pattern in the buffer! How could we have missed a full pattern in the transfer?”

  “It was clean. We all made sure it was clean before they cut the upload link to the machine. But when we came back to disassemble it, this is what we saw.”

  Michael studied the display closely. It clearly showed the green outline of a trapped pattern in the buffer. Another explosion, and the readout faded to black. Emergency generators kicked in almost immediately, and the readout returned to normal.

  “When are they gonna give up?”

  “They won’t. Not until we’re all dead.” Michael’s gaze was riveted to the display. “Well, there’s only one thing we can do. Download whoever our trapped passenger is and give him his money back. Prepare the synthesis chamber for pattern download and printing.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The technician left the chamber to prepare the necessary biologics. Michael crossed his arms, shook his head. Just what they needed right now… With the abandonment of the city only days away, this unexpected development could cause some serious trouble for the machine engineers.

  “Impossible. We couldn’t have missed this.”

  “How’s he cooking?”

  “Download at ninety percent. Adult male. Sequencing shows cellular degradation consistent with forty-plus years of age.” The technician scrutinized the display. “Hmm…”

  “What is it?”

  “Filters say that this pattern isn’t pure. Hasn’t been screened. Twenty-percent cancer risk, thirty percent—“

  “Cancer? How is that possible?”

  “Let’s ask him. We should have an identity lock right… now.”

  “Who is he?”

  The technician was dumbfounded. “Identity not found in current registry.”

  “Identity not found? Everyone’s in the registry. Could the pattern have been disrupted in the transfer?”

  “Doubtful. Usually they aren’t as well formed when there’s a transfer disruption, just a bloody mess when they come out. As you can see,” the technician adjusted the display, “he looks fine to me.”

  On the screen before him, Michael saw a healthy-looking older man, skin chocolate brown, hair just beginning to gray at the temples. Muscular build. He appeared to be sleeping peacefully.

  “Well, we’ll find out who he is soon enough. Activate him.”

  “Are you sure that it’s safe?”

  “Activate him.”

  “Yes, sir. Breath of life in three… two… one. Engaged.”

  The body seized as electrical current was forced back into the brain, activating the body once again after the lifetimes it had spent in the void of the pattern. The man’s body arched up, and he fell back to the bottom of the chamber, screaming. He spun around in the confined space.

  The man in the chamber stood as best he could. He saw Michael and the technician in the room beyond. His arms shimmered with a silver fire as he shifted and cut through the chamber cover.

  “What the… Secure the room!”

  “Chamber sealed off! What the fuck was that?”

  The man’s arms solidified, and he stood before them, eyes blazing with an impossible silver fire. Michael was speechless.

  Where am I? What time is this?

  Words without substance. The man was speaking without using his mouth.

  Where am I? His eyes burned at Michael, who could say nothing. He felt a sudden gentle tugging behind his eyes, and the man’s silver gaze brightened for an instant.

  Good. Then I’m not too late.

  “He was reading your mind.”

  “Yes.”

  “It was Richter.”

  “Yes.”

  West’s face could not contain its amazement. “He made it. I thought for sure that he’d be killed if he jumped into that light, but he made it.”

  “He said he knew what he had to do, where he had to go.” Patra’s eyes were distant. “He touched the mind-essence in the desert. He saw the thoughts of the Enemy. He knew where he had to go because his own voice told him.” Patra turned to Michael. “They captured him, didn’t they? His pattern was uploaded into Omega. It’s the voice of the Enemy.”

  Zero-Four sadly looked at the floor. “He was captured, but not before he gave us the hope to retake the future from the Enemy. Not before he reclaimed billions of patterns from the damned. It’s because of Richter that the Judas exist at all. If not for him, there’d be no hope of saving the physical universe from upload by Omega.”

  “Time’s a cycle. It’s because of the launch of the machine that Richter appeared, right? If the machine hadn’t been launched, Richter never would have appeared in the pattern buffer.”

  “That’s right. The launch of the machine led to the eventual evolution of the machine species into the Enemy and their race to consume the physical universe. If the machine hadn’t been launched, the Enemy would never have attacked your time, and Richter never would have jumped into the future.”

  West’s arm flickered with the shift. “How do you explain this? Where’d the vessel in the earth come from?”

  Zero-Four shook his head. “We might never know. I don’t know how many covert operations Kilbourne sent into the past. I’m certainly not aware of any that were sent back far enough into the planet’s history that the planet surface was still forming. I don’t know how that ship got into the earth.”

  “Time’s a cycle.” West thoughtfully scratched his chin. “Richter convinced you to join him against the Enemy?”

  “There was no convincing needed. He touched my mind, and I saw everything that he’d seen. The fog of age has obscured some of it to me by now, but I still can feel the horror and fascination that his touch brought to me. He knew that I’d created the machine, and he knew that I had to help him to prevent the Enemy from uploading everything into Omega.”

  A starless sky, a city on fire. A rooftop.

  They stood in the winds that cried of warfare to the east and looked out upon the blank black of the dry ocean expanse. The resistance in the streets beneath the city had been killed by the company defense force, but there would be more. There were always more.

  “Is this planet really worth saving?” Michael regarded the burning expanse below him with unabashed disdain.

  Richter stood at his side, now clothed, now solid and calm and human. He looked at Michael with his silver eyes and that was all
the answer Michael needed.

  “Maybe not this world. This world’s been dead for centuries. But the Enemy can’t be allowed to travel back through time unchecked. We can’t allow them to upload all that’s physical into Omega. We can’t allow them to kill and ravage all of history for sacrifice to a machine god. They’re your creation, but you’re nothing to them but a useless mass of protein, good only to power the machines that create worlds of phase space in the void between the stars. They must be stopped.”

  “They will be stopped.”

  A chaos of sound as the battle on the surface raged anew. The city shook from an atomic attack at its base.

  “Are we worth saving?”

  Richter did not answer him. His gaze was riveted to the sky, which had taken on a shimmering silver tone. Michael stood transfixed. He had never before seen color in the sky. The sky was black; it was scientific fact.

  “They’re coming.”

  “The machines?”

  “They’ve been coming home for billions of years, and now they’re almost here. We have to prepare for their arrival. We have to prepare for the war.”

  The fighting below the city had stopped as the hundreds of thousands of members of the forsaken resistance and the defense force saw the silver shade of the sky. The night began to shimmer with a metal fire.

  “They’ll be here within the year. Probably sooner than we expect. We have to get out of here.”

  “Many won’t understand.”

  “Then they’ll be left to die. Their patterns will be uploaded into Omega. We can’t be concerned about those who don’t believe. We have to run, and we have to strike to kill. There can be no halfway in this war.”

  “I’ll make the necessary preparations.”

  The distinct sound of screaming and chaos as thousands of people saw silver in the sky where for countless billions of years before there had only been the black of night.

  Soon.

  “With Richter, I was able to convince my superiors that the threat was imminent and the threat would destroy everything in its path. The silver in the sky was reason enough to prepare for planetary departure. The long-range sensors revealed our worst fears: the silver in the sky was consuming everything in its path. The stars were fading, the out-system planets disappearing. The Enemy’s appetite was ravenous.

  “We’d been equipping ex-terra vehicles with phase drives for centuries for in-system travel, and with the research of the last decade focusing solely on the uploading of human patterns, it was only a small technological hurdle to combine the pattern cache with a phase drive to create a Shadow. We had a fleet of phase-ready vehicles and more volunteers to pattern themselves than we could safely transport.”

  “You were uploading people, just like the Enemy.”

  “We were uploading people, but their patterns became part of the Judas program, not a part of Omega. The virtual universe that we created was a viral code in the vast network of phase space pockets that the Enemy had been creating for aeons.”

  “You were giving up your physical selves so that others wouldn’t have to.”

  “We became Judas to prevent the Enemy from uploading the past and erasing the history of our physical existence.”

  “It was quite a sacrifice. There’s no turning back.”

  “There’s no turning back until the Enemy has been defeated and the Purpose has been prevented.”

  “This vessel, all of this… It’s all just lines of code in the Judas program?”

  Zero-Four gently touched the matte black surface of the vessel wall. “Lines of code, yes, but so much more.”

  “They’re in the system periphery. Our forces are ready to engage.”

  “Good, good.” The display revealed an ocean of mercury in the sky. “Engage at will. This is where it begins.”

  “Understood. Engage at will.”

  With a hideous snap, the display cut to black. “Adjust our long-range sensors.”

  “Sensors not responding. Communication with fleet has been cut off.”

  Michael turned from the display, face a canvas of rage and fear. “Our forces will hold them off as long as they can. Even if… Well, at their present rate of advance, we still have two or three days.”

  Richter was silent. The room was silent.

  “Richter?”

  He looked up, eyes flickering in the light of the static-filled displays. “The chamber… I have to get back to the pattern chamber.”

  “What? Why do you—?”

  “Someone… Just take me to the chamber.”

  They went.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “There’s two patterns in the buffer. We need to rescue them.”

  Michael looked at Richter with a mixture of trust and suspicion. Who was this man from the past? He turned to a technician. “Download the patterns. Print them.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Michael touched Richter’s shoulder, and they moved from the assemblage of technicians. “Do you know what this is all about? Do you know who they are?”

  “I think so.”

  “Can we trust them?”

  Richter nodded slowly and sadly. “They’re more important to preventing the Purpose than either of us.”

  “Who are they? How could they have—”

  “Quiet. He’s coming around.”

  “Their patterns aren’t in the registry. They could be one of the—”

  “They aren’t machine code. I know them.”

  “How could you possibly—”

  Richter motioned for Michael’s silence. There were two people in the download chamber, a man and a woman. Both appeared to be sleeping. The woman’s lower body had been badly wounded, her midsection torn apart. She was bleeding profusely. Richter bent to pick up a black shard of metal from the chamber interior next to the woman. It was Enemy armor.

  The man was coming around slowly. His eyes lazily opened, tried to focus, failed. He weakly attempted to get up, but fell back into the chamber. Richter reached out, gently touched the man’s forehead and cheek.

  “Solid enough for now, but there was a lot of signal degradation in the transfer.”

  “But how could you know them?”

  Richter turned, gazed icily at Michael with silver eyes.

  “I told them they’d get here eventually. I never expected them to arrive so soon. This wasn’t a part of the plan.”

  The man in the chamber sluggishly tried to get up again, collapsed from exhaustion. He tried to speak, failed. The woman remained ominously silent.

  “I know them because they came from the same world I escaped from. They’re monsters, just like me.”

  The man in the chamber frowned, but he was too weak to summon the strength to say anything. Richter leaned down, whispered into his ear.

  “Welcome to heaven, Simon Hayes.”

  Simon fell back into the void.

  “Simon. And the woman was Maggie Flynn. That’s why you let go.”

  Zero-Four looked at and through the floor. “That’s why I let go.”

  West exhaled slowly, shook his head. “Time’s a cycle, and we’re all trapped within it.”

  Patra’s face was a confused canvas of emotion. She touched the matte black surface of the vessel interior. “This is what he became. Simon did this for Maggie.”

  Zero-Four nodded gravely. “We had to upload Maggie to save her, but Simon… He could’ve remained behind. He could’ve lived as a physical, but he chose to join us. It was the only way that he could stay with Maggie. He gave up the rest of his life for her.”

  The chamber descended into a silence of reverence and gravity, the realization of the paradoxes within which they were caught.

  “That’s about the extent of the story. We abandoned the planet, led by Richter. Our fleet was miniscule compared to the ocean of silver that was the machines. They fell upon the system with a fury and hunger that we’d never seen before.

  “We made a pact, a covenant. Richter’s visions
taught us that there could be no turning back in this war. No surrender, no prisoners, no compromise. We’d have to strike where we could, and aim for the kill every time. Our war would be fought in the void between the stars and the space between the synapses. Our Enemy was endless and infinite… Incomprehensible in size and power. Uploaded into the program, we’d chase the Enemy as they tore through time, and we’d attempt to prevent them from uploading the times that they infected.

  “Their god Omega knew of our presence from the very beginning, from the very first viral insertion. The Enemy pledged to hunt us down and destroy our patterns before we could prevent their upload of all that was real. We pledged our heresy; we became the Judas.”

  “And you’ve been chasing them for how long?”

  “Longer than anyone can remember, Patra. We’re eternal here in the shift, in the Judas program. I must have seen thousands of Whens fall to the Black, but still we persevere. Still we strike, and we fight to the death. I’ve been fighting forever. But if I don’t fight, then they have won already. If I don’t fight, my pattern is theirs.”

  “You’re a Judas.”

  “I’m a Judas.”

  The sun was rising, a faded mockery of the sun he had once known. He knew with daylight that this would end. He knew that this was a dream. He knew the woman pressed against him had died two tragic, terrible deaths. He knew that she was not really there. He knew that she was gone.

  She moved against him, the steady pattern of her breath for an instant interrupted by a pause that indicated sleep’s impending departure. She took a deep breath and Simon knew that she was awakening. He held her so tightly, and his eyes flooded with hot tears.

  “Mmmmhh… Simon…”

  He pressed his face against Maggie’s warm, smooth skin. He whispered into her ear, a calm, reassuring voice that she had no reason to fear or suspect.

  “Shh… Go to sleep, Maggie. Everything’s gonna be all right. Go back to sleep.”

  She squeezed him and muttered a sleep-muddled phrase that could only be “I love you” and fell back into her slumber. He choked back the tears but his body wracked with his sorrow.