by Oliver Higgs
I can still hear the hiss.
“Tristan!” Echo calls, taking a breath.
I feel for the door–still closed. But as I push on it, it moves slightly. The lock isn’t holding. I claw at it. It slides slowly sideways into the wall. Strangely, a breeze touches my face–and it’s probably the only thing that stops me from falling to my death, because it’s pitch-black and the air is coming up from where the floor should be. It is an ally-vator, only the moving room is missing. All that’s left is the open shaft. I grope for the missing floor. Echo nearly trips over me before I warn her.
The gas is still coming out. We have to get out of this hallway. The darkness brings an awful fear. It makes everything larger, louder, more mysterious. We’re terribly vulnerable. I grope inside the shaft and feel the rungs of a ladder in the wall to our left. Thank Crom.
According to the Doctor, Vermillion will be on the lowermost level. I’m reaching a foot around cautiously inside the shaft when there’s a rumbling sound and a strong vibration. I pull back into the corridor just as the ally-vator falls past in a roar of noise and air. I’m cursing in my head–we’re still trapped. Is there room to climb the ladder without being crushed? I doubt it. Before I can count to ten, the moveable chamber rushes back upward. Vermillion is either going to splatter us with it or keep us confined until we pass out. The lack of oxygen brings a fuzziness to the edge of my awareness. I’m forced to take a breath, but I’m gulping noxious gas. We can’t hold on much longer. We’ve got to try something.
The ally-vator rushes back down. I fumble for another grenade, twist and push the button, drop it into the shaft. Apparently we only blew the ‘tronics for this floor. The machinery moving the ally-vator itself has to be somewhere, I’m guessing with the ally-vator itself or somewhere in the base of the shaft. Seconds tick by. The EMP must’ve popped by now, but did it accomplish anything? I listen for the rush of noise. I wait as long I dare, gulping another breath of bad air, starting to feel numb and distant. Echo’s hand digs into my arm … still nothing. I step out onto the ladder. The shaft stays silent.
“I’m starting down,” I tell Echo, breathing the slightly better air in the shaft.
She feels for the ladder and steps on my fingers when I’m few rungs down.
“Sorry,” she whispers.
It’s a nerve-wracking descent. We pass two doors outlined by cracks of light. They open and gas starts hissing just beyond them, but it’s mostly staying out of the shaft. Then my foot hits something solid: the top of the ally-vator. It bobs slightly as we put our weight on it. There’s a hatch on top. We drop into the mobile chamber. I grope for the front door. There’s resistance, but I can slide it sideways.
“Just open it a few inches,” Echo says. As I do, she tosses a grenade through. There’s no light adjacent to the ally-vator–maybe the one I dropped into the shaft took the light and door with it–but from further down the hall comes two kinds of glares: one from a harmless fluorescent bulb and one from a laser being beamed at us. Echo ducks to one side, taking cover behind the door. She primes a second EMP and hurls it through the breach. A burn-line cuts the back-wall of the ally-vator. I push the door shut. When I open it again, both lights are gone. The corridor is black and silent.
We creep forward. Even our breath is loud in the dark. I hold Echo’s hand, a grenade ready in the other. Distance is hard to gauge. At least there’s no hiss down here. We stumble over something heavy and metal, startling us both. I discern its shape with my hands.
“Automaton,” I announce.
Probably the one with the laser. The Doctor did say Vermillion would be guarded. I’m wondering how many more robots there will be. The grenades take a few seconds to prime. If Vermillion’s minions surprise us without cover, we’re dead. The door at the end of the hall is locked. It’s funny, in a way. A simple steel bolt might be enough to stop us, but nothing in the facility is strictly mechanical. Vermillion’s nature necessitates some method of remote access, which means everything has to have an electronic override. It could very well lead to his downfall. I’m readying another grenade for the door’s electronics when Echo warns me about a sound behind us. She always hears things first. I listen. Something’s moving in the distance. Coming down the ladder in the shaft.
We freeze, focused on the noise … and then the silence. It goes on almost long enough to convince us we were hearing things, then someone trips and grunts over the same automaton down the hall. Someone, not something. I’m tempted to call out, to ask who it is. Instead, I press and twist the button on the EMP. It makes a soft click. Blue fire lances out from a plasbrid weapon, passing between us and scorching the locked door. I roll the grenade at the source and dive to the floor. More shots pass overhead, sweeping by in an exploratory spread. The EMP pops. Bodies thud to the floor–more than one–as Vermillion’s brain-jacking implants are fried.
I feel my way through the dark to the plasbrid weapon, but it’s partly electronic and of no further use. Echo takes out the door, and we toss another grenade into the next room. We don’t have too many left though; we’ve got conserve them now. When we open the door, everything’s black again. It’s a small room though, and the ‘tronics to the next door are already fried. We slide it open an inch …
And pause.
This new room is filled with machinery of an indeterminable nature. Thick cables snake between islands of ten-foot-tall black metal cylinders. Generators whir. Fans circulate a strong breeze. We enter warily. Echo slides the door shut behind us in case any more minions are coming.
“Vermillion,” I say.
“Is this him–it?” Echo asks, looking around.
A foot-tall robot on treads rolls around a corner and stops, facing us. I start, ready to take cover, but it’s just some kind of maintenance bot. Articulate arms extend from its sides. Screwdrivers and other tools are locked against its “chest.” A voice issues from a speaker on its side.
“Congratulations,” it says.
I don’t know what I expected, but this wasn’t it. I stare at the tiny automaton.
“Vermillion?” I ask.
“Curious that you would know that name. But of course you had help. How else would you be here? I have been attacked before, but no one has ever penetrated this deep into my facilities. Even given your help, you must be exemplary samples of your species. Would you care to provide me with samples of DNA?”
Echo and I look at each other. Ignoring the voice, I look around for the best spot to activate the EMP. Right in the middle of all this, I suppose.
“You have anger. That is to be expected,” Vermillion says. “Do not let it cloud your judgment. I can help you. Did you know that before the Fall, your kind had the technology to make copies of individuals? To give birth without wombs? Cloning. Such knowledge is not lost. Through me, the two of you could father an entire generation. Think of it–in centuries, they will look upon you as the founders of a great clan. They will put your names in holy books and pray to you for guidance. Do you want to be prophets? Founders of cities? You, right now, are in a position to choose your destiny. I can give you this. I can make you into legends.”
“Right here?” I ask Echo, holding the grenade.
She nods, her blue eyes angry. I press and twist, set the device on the floor.
“Wait,” Vermillion says.
The button pops. Sparks fly from the machinery. Generators whir down into silence. The breeze lessons. Some fans still blow, however. Lights glow inside translucent black boxes. The room is big and a single grenade can’t cover it all.
“Why … do this?” Vermillion asks. The little bot tries to follow me but runs repeatedly into a metal pipe. Other maintenance bots venture out from storage. They have trouble maneuvering. One turns in endless circles.
“Stop now. Data will be re- re- re- … Data will be recoverable. You need not go further. Think of the knowledge that will be lost. I can te- te- te- … I can tell you things forgotten by your people. I can teach you forgott
en ways from before the Fall. Consider. I am at your mercy now. Would you de- de- de- … Would you destroy me when you can instead avail yourselves of all my knowledge? Be better than your ancestors. Yield to wisdom, not anger. Your species will benefit. Rule over Haven. I will be your ally. Your subject. Think of all I have to tell you, all I have learned, all the ways you can use me.”
I do listen for a moment. Maybe he’s even telling the truth. He probably does harbor a great deal of useful information. But there’s no trusting the bastard.
“Listen, asshole. I didn’t want to be your slave. But I don’t want to be your master either,” I say.
Echo primes the EMP and sets it down, frying the rest of Vermillion’s synthetic guts. The effect is curiously anticlimactic. There’s no blood, no explosions, no horrific images like–
–Ballard’s eye popping out
–the burn-hole in Byron’s skull.
Just silence.
A few lights are still on; the ceilings here are high. It’s actually kind of tragic we had to fry all the ‘tronics, because the room is chock-full of highly advanced components, all up for grabs.
“The others. We have to check on them. See if they’re okay,” Echo says.
I nod, but something’s bothering me. I can’t put my finger on it. As Echo reached for the door, I grab her arm.
“What’s powering these lights?” I ask.
“Must be more generators somewhere,” she says, looking up.
“Yes … but–did it seem too easy to you?”
She guffaws.
“Tristan, we should be dead or enslaved right now. Too easy?”
“Listen, how do we know Vermillion is really dead? What if he still has some control?”
“Tristan, we fried his brain.”
“Did we? We destroyed a room full of equipment. How do we know what his brain looks like? What if we just cut off his foot?”
She opens her mouth but closes it again, frowning.
I look around the room. I examine the machinery. I need some kind of proof, some confirmation. For all I know, Vermillion could’ve faked the fear, the stuttering, the maintenance bots gone haywire. I know how that must sound. Crazy, probably. Yet the feeling lingers.
Then I find the crawlspace.
It’s covered by a small, non-descript square panel in a far corner of the room, just bigger than the foot-tall maintenance bots. Behind the panel, white pipes and black cables snake to and fro. The crawlspace runs perpendicular to the entrance. It’s like a hallway for the maintenance bots. A few meters to my left, it makes a right turn around the pipes, heading out of sight. I peer through the tangle of pipes. The miniature hallway takes another right turn beyond them, then turns left into a square opening. The odd thing is that the “hallway” curves down from there, dropping out of sight.
As far as I could tell, we’re on the lowermost level of the compound. Why would the maintenance bots need to head any lower? To fix pipes under the floor? Maybe, but my paranoia says otherwise. Now I’m looking for access panels leading into the floor. After all, those little bots can’t fix everything. If there’s anything beneath us, Vermillion would have to send a larger, stronger bot in at some point, if only to replace a heavy pipe. All this machinery must require a lot of maintenance.
Beneath a four-foot translucent black cylinder, I find it. The cylinder lies at the end of a row of similar structures. Inside each is a web of delicate machinery, barely visible through the tint. That the last one, however, is empty, and tthere’s a trace of faded black scuff marks on the floor, as if something heavy were dragged from the cylinder. The cylinder is bolted to the floor, but there’s a wrench among the maintenance tools. We unbolt it and heave the cylinder sideways, letting it crash to the floor and roll. Underneath is a circular floor-panel. A trap door, its outline matching the base of the cylinder.
Echo tucks her blonde hair behind an ear. We share a bewildered look. The panel has no handle, so I find a screwdriver to slip into the crack and wedge it open. Echo catches the edge. We lift it together and send it rolling away with a bang. Then we stare.
An entire room lies beneath us, fifteen or twenty feet deep. In the center of it, beneath a transparent hemisphere, stands what I can only describe as an elaborate fiber-optic tree. The root of the thing rises from a silver plate and branches into four parts, which then branch into four more, and so on, until the “branches” are microscopic and number in the billions or trillions. They shimmer like water with every shift in perspective. Glass-like cables meet the hemisphere from all points of the compass, extending to a dense host of machinery spread throughout the room. There can be no doubt …
This is Vermillion.
“I’ll never call you paranoid again,” Echo breathes.
We prime our few remaining grenades and drop them into the hole.
Chapter 22.
On our way out of the Vermillion’s lair, we discover just how close he came to winning. The lightless hallway leading back to the ally-vator has a dozen more automatons than it did on the way in. The robotic ones are dead, the human ones unconscious. While I’d lingered to look for proof, they’d been creeping toward our location, carrying an assortment of weaponry. If I hadn’t stopped Echo from opening that door, we’d be dead, plain and simple. It had seemed such a little thing. A vague suspicion. A minor act. Sometimes the world is made or broken in such ways.
Jarvis and Octavia are … I wouldn’t call them “okay,” but they’re alive. Octavia cries a lot, barely eats and often sits hugging her elbows and rocking to herself. She’s a shattered reflection of the peaceful, smiling girl I knew in the forest. She’d been more like a mother than a sister to Ambrose, and without any time to grieve, she’d been sold into slavery and possessed by a high-tech demon. Not something you bounce back from in a day.
Jarvis is more aware than Octavia but often stares around in shock, as if he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing. Reluctantly, I tell him about Starbucks, and he can’t believe that either. He literally can’t grasp it, to the extent that he’s more confused than upset. Only a few minutes after the revelation, he says, “But where’s Starbucks now?” I have to tell him again: he’s dead. It only begins to penetrate slowly in the days that follow. I catch him clenching his fists and crying in lonely moments. There’s very little of the energetic, optimistic boy we found in the ruins.
Following Vermillion’s demise, we organize a gathering of Haven’s victimized residents in the courtyard before Vermillion Hall. It’s a chaotic, emotional mess. Some of them aren’t in their right mind. They scream, cry and laugh. One woman insists she’s still possessed by the AI. Others just sit and tremble, traumatized into almost vegetative states. I have to wonder how long they’ve been imprisoned. It’s a question none of them can answer. Even Jarvis and Octavia, who couldn’t have been brain-jacked more than a week, suffer from a sense of discontinuity, a fragmentation of their internal clocks. It’s hard to tell how much they remember. They’re reluctant to speak of it, and I don’t want to press for details. Maybe later, after they’ve had some time to digest the experience.
Some people thank us for our role in Vermillion’s demise, but mostly there’s a sense of shock and trauma. People talk about going back to their families, about missing loved ones. Others don’t have anything or anyone to go back to. I tell them Haven is theirs now to do with as they please. The ironic thing is that the town actually can be something of what Vermillion promised. It has strong walls, turrets, fortifications, infrastructure. It’s surrounded by fertile land. If its residents can overcome what’s happened, if they’re brave enough or destitute enough to stay, they can make a life for themselves. That is, we can make a life for ourselves. After all, that was our goal, wasn’t it?
There’s one suicide the first night. Nobody knows the woman’s name. She’d done little but scream the day before. Her mind was broken; she threw her body off the roof to make it match. Echo and I organize another gathering at noon for both logistical a
nd psychological support. We need food, but many need something more vital: a reason to eat.
Vermillion had built a greenhouse to grow food for the slaves. It’s incredibly efficient. It has genetically modified plants, grows all kinds of things, feeds far more than it should. He had the slaves put traps in the forest for game too. The system worked, so there’s no reason to change it–no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It’s funny though: there’s a huge difference between doing a thing free and doing it forced, even if the task is identical. All in all, this would’ve been an idyllic little hidden community–if, you know, a tyrannical machine hadn’t traumatized the entire population.
Some ask to see Vermillion’s remains. They want to know he’s not coming back. I take them down to the lair, four floors beneath the Hall. Assumedly, Vermillion dug out the area himself using remotely operated robotic machinery. The AI must’ve used a large vehicle to transfer its precious neural equipment. The task couldn’t have been easy. Vermillion had banked on Haven for the long-term.
In the lair, some of the slaves are scared, but most are angry. They ask the old unanswerables: why this, why that, why them? They want to break what can be broken. I’m not sure how therapeutic it is, but at least it’s a separating event, a thing that happened after the Terrible, and this way their internal clocks can start ticking forward again. On the way out, we stop outside the doors and work together to tear down the “Vermillion Hall” sign. It’s cathartic. Able to stomp it underfoot, the former captives break into tears of joy.