by Jack Heath
No movement within earshot. After ten seconds, Six lay down on the ground and wriggled through the frame.
Once he was inside, he reached back out and pulled the broken glass through after him. Then he jammed the grille back into place. From the outside, the window would look undisturbed from a distance of at least 3 metres. No guards were likely to patrol any closer. Good enough, Six thought.
The room was unlit, and Six couldn’t risk turning on the lights. He fumbled through the blackness until he found a door, then opened it and crept through.
The corridor was one he’d been in before – or would be in, about a year and eleven months from now. But it looked different in the dark. Six’s eyes strained at every shadow, waiting for a guard to lunge out at him. Noone did.
He rounded a corner. The green glow of an exit sign served only to make the rest of the gloom more impenetrable by contrast.
The door he wanted was on his left. He turned the handle.
Unlocked. His luck seemed to be holding.
That only made him more nervous. Once you start to believe in luck, you start to worry about it running out.
He slipped inside.
He saw what he needed right away – it was the only thing in the room. A coffin-shaped steel case. Six reached forwards and opened the lid …
… the case was empty.
‘Who are you?’
Six whirled around, and found himself staring into a plastic mask. He had no time to speak before a mechanical hand whipped up and closed around his throat.
‘Identify yourself,’ Harry said. His voice box crackled.
‘Agent Six of Hearts,’ Six hissed. ‘A friend.’
The bot said nothing for a moment.
‘Harry,’ Six said. ‘I’m your friend. Let me go.’
‘We have never met,’ Harry said.
‘No,’ Six said. ‘But we will.’
The bot’s grip loosened. But not much.
‘Explain,’ it said.
Here goes, Six thought. ‘Two years from now, Earle Shuji will give me joint ownership of you,’ he said. ‘You will come to live in my house. You’ll learn more about me than most of the humans I know. And then you will die, saving my life and that of my brother.’ He paused. ‘I, uh … I’m from the future.’
The words sounded so ridiculous coming out of his mouth – but Harry was the only “person” Six knew who might actually take him seriously.
Harry let go of him. It lowered its arm slowly. Then it said, ‘Are you here to prevent this?’
Six shook his head. ‘The past can’t be changed,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Then why have you come?’
‘So you can help me save a lot of other people,’ Six said. ‘Maybe millions.’
Six could actually hear Harry’s processor clicking rapidly inside his metal skull.
‘Explain,’ the robot said again.
‘I’ll tell you on the way,’ Six replied.
Minutes later they had climbed through the window and were standing outside. In the glow of the streetlight, Six could see Harry better – and was shocked to notice there were faded bloodstains on its hands and feet.
Earle Shuji had perfected the combat-training software in her bots by kidnapping soldiers and forcing them to fight her prototype. Almost a hundred men and women had died at Harry’s hands.
Six had long since forgiven Harry for that – the bot didn’t know how to disobey orders; it was a tool. Harry was no more responsible for those deaths then Six’s bent screwdriver was responsible for him breaking in. The dead soldiers were on Shuji’s conscience.
But that reasoning was harder to accept here in the past, where the killing was only half done. Harry had murdered someone today, and would probably do so again tomorrow. And there was nothing Six could do to stop it.
No time to moralise. Time to move.
The building Sammers was about to invade was roughly 30 kliks from here. Six had already run dozens of kilometres today – well, his subjective “today” – and he wanted to get to the building as quickly as possible.
‘We have to steal a car,’ he said.
‘No,’ Harry said.
Six paused. Usually Harry’s argumentativeness was just literalism in disguise. ‘We don’t have to steal a car?’ he asked.
‘Correct. There is a jump-jet on the roof.’
Six grimaced. Shuji’s building was twenty storeys tall – and the lifts would be disabled at night.
‘We don’t have time for that many stairs,’ he said. ‘A car is much –’
Then Harry gripped Six’s arm by the wrist and flung him upwards, a hundred metres into the sky. Then it switched its jetpack on and blasted up after him.
Six failed helplessly in the air as the windows of Shuji’s building whirled down past him, the air rushing against his face and his heart shuddering against his ribs.
‘Harry!’ he screamed.
He spun in the air so he was facing down, and saw Harry rocketing up to meet him. But he could also see how far down it was. The street was so far away it looked two-dimensional – like the parked cars and streetlights had been painted onto it.
Shuji’s roof swept past. Harry wrapped its arms around Six and fired its jetpack sideways so they drifted over the roof. Then they fell.
Six landed on all fours like a dropped cat. Harry hit the roof feet first with a clang.
Six took a deep, shaky breath. Then he said, ‘Harry?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t ever do that again. Not without warning me first.’
‘Understood.’
The fighter plane was parked a few metres away, dark and menacing. ‘Can you fly that thing?’ Six asked.
‘Yes,’ Harry said.
‘Good. Because I think I’m going to be sick.’
The jet swept through the night sky. Inside the cockpit, Six watched strands of clouds flit across the windshield. He couldn’t see anything outside – hopefully Harry’s enhanced vision could penetrate the fog.
The robot looked too big behind the controls, like an adult on a children’s rollercoaster.
‘How will I die?’ it asked suddenly.
Six hesitated. He and Kyntak had been trapped inside an upside-down tank in Vanish’s underground hideout, and Harry had rescued them. It had flown in from outside, lifted the tank, and carried it to safety – but the robot had been shot to bits in the process.
Six had not told Harry to save him and Kyntak. In fact, he had specifically told it to wait outside. The rescue had been the first time Harry had disobeyed a direct order, and Six had never understood why.
Harry could probably handle knowing its own fate – unlike a human being, it was incapable of psychological trauma. But if Six told it how it would die, then it no longer had a choice. It would sacrifice itself to come to his rescue because it had been told that it would.
Six didn’t want to take that heroic act away from Harry by making it predetermined. So he said, ‘I can’t tell you. But you’ll be very brave.’
Harry said nothing.
‘Are you capable of creating external system backups?’ Six asked suddenly.
‘Yes.’ Harry tapped the side of its head, and a chrome panel slid aside, revealing a row of USB ports.
‘Two years, three months and thirty days from now,’ Six said, ‘I want you to make a complete backup of your system. Memory, personality, hardware design, everything. Then put it on an external hard drive and hide it somewhere in my house. Understood?’
‘Yes,’ Harry said.
Six smiled. When he got back to the future, Harry could be rebuilt. It would be a copy – but then again, so was Six. We might be friends again someday, he thought.
Soon CVHQ was looming up out of the fog ahead of them. Six told Harry to fly above it, and the jet started to rise as Harry pulled back on the throttle. It didn’t look like enough – the building was rushing closer and closer, the windows at the top growing larger and larger, and then su
ddenly they were over the top of it. Harry had judged the distance with a level of precision that would have been impossible for a human pilot.
The jet hovered over the roof, thrusters blasting.
‘When you get back to Shuji’s office,’ Six said, ‘make sure there’s no sign you ever left. Fix the window, refuel the jet, everything. Oh, and don’t mention any of this to me later. Got it?’
‘Understood, Agent Six of Hearts.’
‘Good.’ Six touched a button, and the hatch buzzed open above his head. His ears were suddenly filled with the whine of the engines. ‘See you in a couple of years.’
The bot said nothing. Six clambered out of the hatch. His hand hovered over the close button.
‘Thanks for saving my life,’ he shouted. ‘All those times. Thanks for being my friend, and thanks for trusting me and getting me here. Thanks for everything.’
‘You are welcome,’ Harry said. It reached forwards and touched a button, and the hatch slid shut.
Six walked across the wing of the jet and jumped down onto the roof. He watched the plane sweep away into the darkness. Then he turned to survey the desert of concrete and dust.
He was here. And in two hours, Straje Sammers would be too.
ARMAGEDDON
There was a squat air-circulation unit built into the roof; a fat metal block with fans whirring behind rusty gridded panels on each side. Six slipped on some fingerless high-friction gloves, and then pried off one of the panels with his fingers. It came loose with a soft squeak, exposing the fan beneath.
Six scanned the roof for rocks to jam the fan with. Nothing. He checked his pockets. He still had his Owl, but a collision with the fan could jar the barrel so it wouldn’t fire straight anymore. The only other equipment he had was a couple of smoke grenades and a leftover lump of Semtex. He sure wasn’t going to stick those near the whirling blades.
There was nothing else for it. Six lay on his back and kicked the centre of the fan twice, three times, four, until the mechanism cracked and the blades ground to a halt. The sound had probably echoed through the whole building, carried by the air vents – but Sammers wasn’t here yet, so with any luck the sound had gone unheard.
Six plucked out the blades of the fan like petals off a stiff flower, and then he wriggled through the gap into the gloom of the vent.
Warm air blew against his face, sucked up out of the facility by the remaining three fans. He pressed his hands against the walls, hard – they were slippery with old grease.
Six pulled his legs inside the vent, and slipped down into the darkness. He didn’t have to go far – he knew that Sammers was going to take the nuke to a server farm on the top floor.
ChaoVision was a growing online library of videos, both user-uploaded and internal – and it was how more than 91 per cent of citizens got their news, education and entertainment. The remaining 9 per cent of the population weren’t watching, but only because they were homeless and had no computers.
The website had many dedicated server farms across the City. In fact it was responsible for over three billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year – not that anyone paid much attention to that, now that the polar icecaps had melted and most of the world was underwater. But the server farm in ChaoVision Headquarters not only held the most data, but also the oldest. It had long since filled up its hard drives, and now new videos were only added to it when old ones stored here were erased by moderators or by the users who uploaded them. Much of the footage stored in the CVHQ databanks was filmed in pre-Takeover days, long before Six was created.
When ChaoSonic bombs wiped this place out in a few hours’ time, not only would two thousand lives be lost, but an entire culture would be destroyed. Humanity would lose more words and thoughts and facts than had survived from the empires of Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece combined.
Sad. But unchangeable. Six listened at a grate in the vent, and heard nothing. So he pushed the heels of his palms against the metal and shoved it out of its frame.
It clanked to the ground inside the server lab. Six jumped down after it.
The room was almost exactly as he had seen it as a fourteen-year-old. Rows upon rows upon rows of dark obelisks stretched out before him, each one humming softly. A fat rope of tightly wound power cables ran along the centre aisle above Six’s head, individual strands peeling off to supply each row of servers. The tiles beneath his feet were so white Six had to squint to look at them. The air was cold and still.
It was very exposed in here – there was nowhere for Six to conceal himself when Sammers and his troops broke in. But if he hid anywhere outside the server lab, it would be almost impossible to break in once they were inside – the first thing they would do after sweeping the lab was barricade the doors.
There was a desk against the wall, with a builtin column of drawers and a hollow for the owner’s chair. Six removed each drawer and bashed it against the corner of the desk, smashing the bottom panel to splinters. Then he slid the empty square frames back into their slots and stepped back. The column of drawers looked the same as before. No-one would guess that it was now hollow.
He opened all the drawers, clambered down into the hole he’d created, and crouched on the floor. Then he pushed against the underside of the desktop and rolled all the drawers back in so he was sealed inside the desk.
Sammers wouldn’t find him in here. Six settled in to wait.
Minutes passed.
Then hours.
Six resisted the temptation to shift his posture. His joints would only be sorer later if he did.
Bang. Bang.
He jerked upright, bumping the back of his head on the inside of the desk. He’d been listening so carefully for so long that the distant thumps on the server farm door sent shocks up his spine.
Someone was trying to get in.
Crack!
And now they’d succeeded.
Six sat absolutely still as he heard the footsteps flocking towards him. The thick doors clanked closed again, broken locks crunching. A bunch of bags hit the ground. And then he heard the voice he’d been trying to banish from his mind for the past two years.
‘Get that door shut. Weld it, if you must. From now on, none shall enter this place – and only souls shall leave.’
Sammers was here. Along with what sounded like twenty or thirty others. That’s not right, Six thought. There’s only supposed to be twelve of them!
‘Disciples,’ Sammers continued. ‘Search the floor. Ensure that we are alone with God. If you find anyone, purify them.’
Six’s heart thumped steadily against his ribs. He hoped his hiding place was good enough – he knew what Sammers meant by ‘purify’.
Six thought he could hear whispered sobs. That explained the extra footsteps. Sammers had hostages.
There were no hostages last time, Six thought. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go!
There was a clump sound above his head. Someone had put something down on the desk.
‘All clear,’ a voice called.
‘All clear,’ another echoed.
‘Excellent,’ Sammers said, unnervingly close.
There was a series of electric cracks as the lights were smashed one by one. Now that they thought they were alone, Six guessed, they didn’t want to give any advantage to an invading team of cockroaches.
Beep. Beep.Keys clacked up above. A thin electric whine rose through the air, like a recharging flash on a disposable camera.
Uh-oh, Six thought. What’s that?
‘The device is set,’ Sammers said. ‘Two hours until ascenscion.’
Six’s pulse doubled in an instant. The nuclear warhead was sitting on the desk, centimetres above his head – and it was counting down to doomsday.
‘Set up the webcam,’ Sammers commanded. ‘We are fair, and pure, and honest servants of the Lord. We shall give the sinners fair warning, and a chance to repent before they are purified.’
Six knew that Sammers hadn’t chosen this
location just because of its proximity to the Seawall. He wanted to be at CVHQ so he could use the online broadcasting system to announce his intentions to the public. It was this announcement that had led the Deck to dispatch fourteen-year-old Agent Six.
Only a madman would try to kill everyone on earth, Six thought, but it takes a special kind of crazy to want to warn everyone first.
‘Get these heathens out of my way.’
Six heard the hostages cry out as they were pushed and beaten and kicked aside. There was a mass of shuffling – a migration into the corner of the server farm. Six tried to tell himself that was a good thing. If the hostages are far enough away from the ‘disciples’, he thought, I might be able to get them out.
‘Bring me the digicam.’
Six needed to see what was happening. He prodded the top drawer, and it slid slightly ajar. Then he poked his knife through the gap, using the blade as a mirror.
Eleven of the disciples were standing in a semicircle around Sammers. The twelfth was holding a digicam, attached to one of the databanks by rewire cable. The digi cam featured a spotlight which shone on Sammers’ face.
Six had seen this footage countless times over the years. Being here in the flesh to watch as it was made was nightmarish and surreal.
Sammers himself was looking into the lens of the camera with a disturbingly serene gaze. His platinum blond comb-over and large, square teeth were exactly as Six remembered them. He was holding a giant, jet-black weapon – a smoothbore APFSDS cannon. The muscles in his forearms bulged under its weight.
Armour-Piercing Fin-Stabilising Discarding Sabots were basically giant arrows made of depleted uranium and nickel alloy. Each one weighed so much and was launched so fast that they could punch straight through walls, or through the hulls of ships – in fact, they were originally designed to be fired by tanks at other tanks. In the event that an APFSDS collided with something too dense to smash through, it melted through as its kinetic energy became heat energy.
The massive hand-held version that Sammers carried looked like it had a 90-mm calibre barrel, which meant it would fire APFSDS rounds that were 2-cm thick and 40-cm long. It could easily take down a jet, or skewer an armoured car.