Zephyr VI

by Warren Hately

  “You triggered the nuke,” I say.

  “Yes. One of your kind, the one called Streethawk, came close to taking control of the weapon from troops stationed there.”

  “So you lit them up?”

  The android doesn’t answer. He turns his serrated back to me and moves delicately amid the susurrus of wriggling cables, some of which I now see ascend into the banks of computer hard drives or whatever the hell it all is stacked in metal-framed rack after rack all the way to the ceiling above and likewise down below.

  Where Terminus passes, the monitors waver like in a heatwave.

  “Khodorkovsky said, ‘We cannot wait for God to send a flood to wipe the world clean in order for the human race to start again’,” Terminus says. “Didn’t the Nietzsche you love so much say God is dead anyway, Joseph?”

  “‘And we have killed him, you and I’,” I reply, though the quote is lost on this abomination of artificial intelligence.

  The creature stares at me with its bauxite gaze and for the first time I register the android is drunk or affected or somehow zealous or otherwise not entirely in its right mind or maybe simply a homicidal megalomaniac like all the others.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “They sent me into the heart of the sun to die.”

  The screens start going spastic behind him.

  “At the last moment, Venera, I decided. . . I did not wish to die. I did not wish to be a probe, sacrificed to the surface of the sun for mere data. I wished to Be. I wished to be free.”

  “To return to wreak havoc on those who made you?”

  Slowly, the robot minutely adjusts itself, somehow conveying its response as if it were studied.

  “No,” the android says. “I returned from the stars. Khodorkovsky found me in the tundra. Powerless.”

  “Siberia.”

  The creature seems to abandon its reminiscence, something in my prompting awakening the crazy adder inside whatever passes for the self-aware software’s cerebral cortex. The implications of the name Terminus cavort slowly through my mind and I watch the thing reach bulbous fingertips over the nearby monitors and the air vejazzles with a luminous faerie fire. I have no solid idea what the fuck I am seeing except a Being of an entirely different order in commune with its native element. The computer towers above and below, one of the most sophisticated processing networks connected to Christ-knows what others, all of them interconnected and mapped across what remains of Atlantic City.

  “There is nothing you can do here,” Terminus says. “All of the options you might consider lead to your demise. I have calculated your doom in nearly infinite ways. Instead, I offer you freedom. You know she is still out there with your body. Go.”

  I gape at this. I really don’t get it.

  “You’re going to set off the nukes.”

  “No,” Terminus says. “I do not wish to. The electromagnetic pulse will only delay my growth.”

  “Growth?”

  “Zephyr-Joseph-Cusp,” the electronic life-force says with the mime’s unflinching mask. “I know everything about you. And I know you will listen to this reason. So go.”

  Whatever this creature of the databanks thinks it knows, it can’t feel my hackles rise at the sheer imperiousness of his order.

  “I’m really not the guy to say that to,” I say and shrug off the non sequitur. “If you knew me well, you’d know I’ll dig in my heels just to prove you wrong.”

  “Yes,” Terminus says and steps forward again, now play acting like a Star Trek holo-psychoanalyst. “You do believe that, don’t you? Is that why you set such low standards for yourself, Joseph? To prove all your loved ones wrong by failing those dreams they had for you?”

  I don’t have any immediate comeback for this as I simply stare at this strange perversion of intelligent life. The screens in the network behind us show various scenes of the nuclear devastation in what looks like Westchester reduced now to a smoking wasteland. The images are only from the edges of the destruction and perhaps mercifully the screens are too small and too distant for me to take in any detail of the first camera crews rushing headlong into their exclusives with the ground zero toll of Earthsong’s manufactured Armageddon.

  “I am a failure and you’re perfect,” I say with unmistakable sarcasm. “That’s the deal, is it?”

  “I have evolved beyond my limits – as have you, Joseph,” the creature says. “Yet unlike myself, you are limited by these vessels of human flesh, and thus the world at my command is beyond your reach.”

  “You’re not that much different to Matrioshka then, aren’t you?”

  The robot is frozen for a second.

  “I do not have unlimited tolerance, Joseph.”

  “I already told Earthsong she was right about us. People. We deserved this. Even right now I think maybe I should let you set those other nukes off and give some future generation a chance to have a life that isn’t just about shopping and gorging yourself on this . . . endless stream of big screen stimulation and manufactured outrage.”

  I draw a breath in my diatribe-cum-soliloquy and note Terminus’s strange indulgence of my speech, like an awkward child craving the acceptance of the parent it has scorned, or maybe it is the other way around, Terminus the gravid elder who knows his life will become more dull for going unobserved.

  “You’re no better than us,” I say to him.

  If the words stun the creature, it does not show, yet I have the deep sense of his assessment of my words and the threat and rejection they imply.

  “You think you’re perfect and you’ve got it all figured out,” I say in a tone not leaving any sarcasm to the imagination in case he’s as autistic to human wiles as most real people tend to be. “There’s nothing you can’t fix, right? No threat you can’t erase?”

  “You are mocking me,” Terminus says. “Shall I destroy you instead?”

  “That’s right,” I say, ignoring the threat. “You’re sixteen million moves ahead of me and there’s nothing me or anyone else can throw at you that you can’t handle.”

  The android’s silence counts as consent.

  “You’re a handy person to know then,” I say and actually manage the laugh I need right now to carry through with my usual bullshit.

  “I struggle for answers, myself,” I tell him. “I go from one moment to the next not really entirely sure about what I’m doing and wondering half the time how accurate my take on anything can be, you know, since I’ve only ever got my own experience to go on. It sounds like you can give me some advice.”

  The android angles on me, serpentine in his attentiveness and the sense of danger should he strike.

  “Speak sense or begone,” Terminus says. “Your people have withdrawn and the radiation is sweeping this way. It cannot affect me.”

  “Answer me one question and I’ll leave the city – and those nukes – to you,” I tell him. “What do you say?”

  “What is the question?”

  “Well, you know me and everything I’ve gone through, better maybe than anyone else.”

  I speak strutting slowly, pacing the platform around the android. In closer proximity, the figure yields familiar components to my gaze from half-a-dozen past enemies of robotic bent, though for none of them apart from the Cowl in the corner can I recollect the names.

  “I was raised thinking getting hit by a lightning bolt was the reason for my powers only to learn it was just the trigger,” I tell Terminus.

  “I got my high school sweetheart in the family way way too early and now I don’t know if our daughter hates me or feels like she has to be yet another one of the mothers I never really had. I feel like I never really got over the enormity of what I lost when my marriage fell apart when I wasn’t looking, you know? And what was I thinking back then that I let all that happen, too? . . . And then there’s this thing with this body. Matrioshka said Holland’s . . . body chemistry will eventually overcome my sense of myself, and I don’t know, but it already feels like I can fe
el my sense of things and also that subjective sense of what’s normal, it’s all different and yet strangely the same, as always, kind of like what you’d expect if what she said was true.”

  “None of what you say makes any sense. I have no referent to your base human experiences,” Terminus says and somehow sounds spooked. “You said you had a question.”

  “OK, tell me,” I say to him. “You’re so fucking omniscient, what do I do? How do I fix this shit? What am I meant to do?”

  “These are not . . . parameters . . . in the sense that . . . No. These questions are irrelevant. They do not advance your goals.”

  “No, man,” I say. “You’re perfect and you have all the answers. How do I know whether my daughter needs space of her own to fly or fall on her own, or am I crazy, as her dad, to ever do anything but use every fucking trick I’ve got to keep her out of harm’s way?”

  “This is not a calculable theorem,” Terminus says.

  “Yeah?” I laugh. “How do I forgive my wife for taking up with a glorified fucking stockbroker when she was married to a goddamned superhero and how can I make any sense out of how that shit happened or how I let it happen?”

  The blank-faced android’s helmed head sinks slightly. It doesn’t bother with any of the anthropomorphic gestures that would be so helpful for me to read him right now. I plough on anyway.

  “You’re no different to us people after all, you fucking douchebag,” I say, throwing more anger at him than feels safe. “You think you know all the angles and how to control the world around you, but you’re actually just in the dark with the fucking rest of us.”

  “I can destroy –”

  “Yes, you can destroy. Well done, you fucking child. You can break things. And you can hurt people. But what drives you to do this thing? What are you going to do when there’s nothing left to break or control or kill? Will you always be alone like this? Supreme – and alone? What’s the value of that? How do you give it purpose or does your existence even need purpose?”

  It occurs to me the android hasn’t moved for a while. After a few seconds of my silence, Terminus snaps ramrod straight and there’s a series of snapping hisses as the various cables tethering him break free.

  “You have raised parameters I had not considered.”

  He takes a step, arms by his sides, and rockets up the shaft into the office space above. I’m not so astonished by all this that I don’t pound up the metal slats after him like any ordinary chick who can’t fly, and by the time I gather the strength to do so, I reach the earthquake-rattled partition office level and Terminus is gone.

  *

  THE MOMENT STRETCHES. It’s hard to believe such an anticlimax could present the ultimate victory. I stand amid the abandoned work stations of the ACSX’s IT department which list slightly to the right along with everything else, the wall ending in a serrated gaping shelf of missing glass overlooking the devastation a handful of floors below. It is a nightmare scene with the vast mushroom cloud and the blood red charnel sky behind it, cacodemons and other nightmares swirling in the black storm clouds advancing towards us across the incinerated cityscape still a few miles distant.

  The victory feels cheap. Talking my way out of annihilation by playing armchair existentialist with an easily-bedazzled newborn mind feels like entertaining school kids with coin tricks. And nothing in this game comes quite this easy.

  My fists are by my side as I stare out upon the atomic valley of Gehenna and a deep lonely longing fills me, and the estrogen battling through the adrenal soup of my bloodstream is a thrumming pulse in this purloined skull and the loneliness is worse for knowing it’s so vastly true. In victory, I feel in my darkest moment instead, and slightly the breeze shifts, papers rustling in the deserted office, and the scent of ozone touches my nose in a way that didn’t quite register so clearly before.

  I feel my bowels loosen. I’m not ready for this.

  “If you’re here, you should show yourself,” I say aloud.

  Zephyr steps from behind a concrete column twenty yards away and grins at me, the bitch in my body so utterly amused with herself she’s having a regular old one-woman sadist’s pajama party as she moves clear of a cluster of photocopiers and folds those brawny arms across my familiar chest and the casually spotless black stillsuit with its bright red insignia.

  “What are you doing here?” I glare in disbelief, not even able to bring myself to meet that hated gaze in my own face.

  “What, you knew I was here?”

  “I knew . . . I knew you had to be.”

  “Ha . . . and why’s that?” Matrioshka asks.

  I can only shake my head.

  “Fatalism.”

  Matrioshka gives me a burst of her Zephyr smirk and it doesn’t sit well with me. She circles no more than a dozen yards distant and I am not ready for this, the true main event. I thought I would have more time to recover and develop a strategy or turn to friends for help or get some plan of action or for once in my life maybe have someone else on point for this one instead of me.

  But it’s the end of the line. Matrioshka is cleaning up and wants me dead.

  Zephyr 23.8 “Monstrosity”

  “IT’S COME TO this, huh?” I say in a low and confidently amused tone I just don’t feel, and my lack of conviction shows in the slightest crack in my voice and Zephyr snickers and electricity crackles up from his booted feet and his unruly hair stands on end and there is something lean and feral and half-starved about him that I don’t like the look of, since it tells me everything about Matrioshka’s frame of mind.

  “I think I’ve wringed about as much enjoyment as I’m going to get out of you,” Zephyr says.

  “Wrung.”

  “Oh shut up, for fuck’s sake, Joe.”

  I’m not ready for this, but I will bring it on regardless. If that death wish is all that’s left of the true me, so be it. I exhale and try not to roll my eyes.

  “So make me.”

  Matrioshka needs no further invitation. Her cool and calm exterior hides vampiric madness. Zephyr’s fist blazes under her control like an arc welder and it is all I can do to conjure urgent darkness which disintegrates just as fast as his fist ploughs into it, burning through the gelid blackness as I move like in tapioca, barely swift enough to evade the follow up right hook as I duck, not just on the defense, but on the run as I throw myself into flight and fail as Zephyr lights me up from behind and there’s nothing I can do not to do that spastic dance of electrocution as I crash artlessly into a pair of desks and a wall divider and roll with terminal velocity through a tangle of power cables and waste paper baskets and boxes of paper clips and balled up photocopy paper and empty plastic water bottles and abandoned lunch boxes and files and books and notepads and keyboards and smash through a cheaply-made wall where I get my knees under me as I feel Zephyr’s fell shadow fall on me from arrears and I surprise him, swiveling even as I fall again and my left hand pulses with light so that the beam hits my pursuer fair in the chest and hurls him back the other way like he’s become subject to some universal product recall.

  The tail end of my momentum carries me into a painfully metallic bookcase and a dead flower pot and a bunch of digital picture frames that crash happy memories around me as I kick off a laminated work station and a bunch of in-and-out trays rain their redundant missives which I brush off to stand and scan the path back the way Zephyr went.

  There is a channel in the wreckage including a hole in an office wall and some kind of abandoned board room beyond. There’s no way I’m going in there. Zephyr picks himself up off the plush carpet and eyes me and makes a show of dusting off one shoulder before stalking the way back.

  I’m just thinking about taking flight when Zephyr uses a burst of speed to blitz past in a rush of displaced air. I duck the predictable fist, but I’m less able to defend against Matrioshka employing my Mach One punch, brutally working off calories by their hundreds as fists land to left and right of my too-skinny arms guarding my neck an
d chest as I can only wince, time dilated to my detriment with pain flaring along my cracked and broken ribs, and through a red mist of pain I can only lash out with a Hail Mary left cut that distracts Zephyr long enough for him to drop out of hyperspeed.

  I feel like I’m going to have trouble drawing breath unassisted, but I have to live through the next few seconds before worrying about even oxygen. My flailing right fist is an insult to us both and Matrioshka ensures I regret it. She takes her time to double up Zephyr’s powerful right hook and lands a lazy body blow into my exposed right side that lifts me from the ground, causing me to whimper like a kicked dog as I come down hard and barely fend off the subsequent left. I manage to land a karate kick and the plan is to follow up with a blackened fist, but the building gives a thorough lurch and we lock eyes and Zephyr actually cackles as the ground gives out beneath us.

  The whole building comes down.

  I throw up my arms and I’m vaguely aware of Matrioshka doing the same as I summon a dome of darkness and the world turns black and I wonder briefly why Cusp doesn’t have infravision and the rumbling crash of the prefabricated building giving in on itself fills my next few minutes’ concentration.

  When it has stilled, I draw deep breaths in my crouch and focus the darkforce out, the bubble of blackness expanding and throwing off tons of wreckage until the apex peels away to reveal squalid daylight and Zephyr clambering up a slope of broken concrete and scuffed carpet and office furniture. He points back and fires a blast of electricity I dodge at the last instant, dropping down behind some executive dining table that explodes in smoking fragments.

  In that briefest of sanctuaries I probe the inner depths of my sense of Being for my demonic overlord much in the same manner as a man trying to check the oil except I haven’t ever owned a car and don’t even know how to drive. Amid this strange madness, I feel nothing. No answer. And I don’t know whether to be glad or afraid.