The Rendering

by Joel Naftali

  I slumped in defeat, completely baffled.

  Then I got the glimmering of an idea. A bad idea, but not worse than letting Roach steal the only copy of the Protocol. Not worse than failing to download another copy that could be used against him. And definitely not worse than being locked inside the Center when a nuke exploded.

  So I tapped 707 on the keypad. I waited a second, then tapped 7070707.

  Then:

  707707707707707707707707707707707707

  707707707707707707707707707707707707

  707707707707707707707707707707707707

  707707707707707707707707707707707707

  Because whenever I text, 707 means SOS. And I really, really needed help.

  Then I waited. And waited. Yet nobody answered.

  Well, unless you count the announcement in the distance: “Self-destruct initiated. Detonation sequence in thirty-four minutes. Self-destruct initiated. Detonation sequence in thirty-four minutes.”

  Then the keypad beeped twice, and I looked more closely. Three letters flashed at me: BUG?

  I tapped in JJ! (I called Jamie JJ online.)

  Jamie: RUIT? (Are you in trouble?)

  Well, I didn’t want to say too much, in case Roach was somehow monitoring the conversation. Fortunately, Jamie and I texted enough that we used the same shorthand. And even more fortunately, she was using her newly supercharged laptop, with a direct link to the Holographic Hub, which monitored the entire Center.

  I’ll explain about her laptop later—but right then, the important thing was that my desperate call for help had popped onto her screen.

  I thought for a second, then entered EMRTW. (Evil Monkeys Rule the World. Telling her I was in trouble.)

  Jamie: WUN? (What do you need?)

  Me: FRED. (Friggin’ Ridiculous Electronic Device.)

  Jamie: LB4? (Like before?)

  Me: ATSL. (Along the Same Lines.)

  Jamie: …

  Me (frantically): OPNTHELOKINEDU2OPEN HATCH!

  Jamie: UNLOCK?

  Me: Y. (Yessssssssssssssssssss!)

  Jamie: UNTCO. (You Need to Chill Out.)

  Me (hyperventilating): STPPYNOZGTW! (Stop picking your nose, get to work!)

  Ten seconds later …

  The access hatch: Shhhhhht.

  Unlocked!

  Me: UROCK.

  Jamie: LYLAB.

  Me: LYLAS.

  Love You Like a Brother. Love You Like a Sister.

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME

  Long story short: I found workshop seven around the corner.

  Hiding behind a janitorial cart, I eased closer and closer, then stopped, ten feet outside the room. Just in time to watch Roach’s men wheeling this huge pod into the service elevator.

  And on the side of the pod, in big letters:

  HOSTLINK

  I’d arrived too late. Instead of downloading the Protocol into the three cloned skunks, here’s what I’d achieved: I’d moved a few steaks around.

  Perfect. We needed a hero, and we got a T-bone delivery boy.

  To make matters worse, Commander Hund loomed inside the freight elevator, his implanted eye scanning the corridor as the soldiers loaded more crates.

  He tapped his communicator and said, “HostLink secured. Bring us up.”

  “Excellent,” Roach replied. “With the Protocol and the HostLink, we cannot conceivably be defeated.”

  “The boy—”

  “Ignore him. In twenty-five minutes, he’ll be vaporized.”

  “He’s right in front of me,” Hund said, looking at the janitorial cart. “He thinks he’s hiding.”

  “Then kill him, what do I care? Just don’t delay!”

  Hund pulled his guns and blasted away, not even aiming for me, just shredding the cart. Floor wax and glass cleaner splashed everywhere, and I was exposed, crouched in the middle of the hall.

  Hund bared his teeth. “Should I wait twenty-five minutes—or put you out of your misery right now?”

  I shook my head.

  “Your wish is my command,” he said as the elevator doors started closing. “But here’s a parting gift.”

  Then he shot me.

  EXCRUCIATING

  In my calf.

  A terrible burning pain.

  Agony.

  I curled into a tight ball. Maybe I screamed.

  PAGING DR. MANDIBLE

  Something hissed and popped and crawled toward me—the centipede, looking pretty rough. Charred and cracked and missing half its segments.

  Two of its antennae probed the bullet hole—and in about five seconds, the pain turned to numbness. I blinked the tears from my eyes. My heartbeat slowed a little. My breath stopped coming in short harsh gasps. And a minute after that, the centipede finished sewing the hole in my leg closed.

  “Um, thanks,” I squeaked.

  The centipede reared back and sprayed a clear adhesive patch on the wound. A cool sensation penetrated my skin, and the scent of eucalyptus mixed with the lingering stench of melted plastic and gunpowder.

  “Are you the AI?” I asked, suddenly calm. Probably from a sedative in that spray. “Can you talk?”

  Three of the centipede’s segments cocked, almost quizzically. Then, with a sudden ttz-pop, it keeled over. The tractor treads on the underside spun momentarily, then stopped as a cloud of black smoke belched forth.

  I don’t know what was in that painkiller, but I patted the centipede on the head and stood. My leg didn’t hurt; I wasn’t even limping. And my mind was clear.

  I pored over the map. For the first time, I knew exactly what to do.

  RAGING BLUE

  “Self-destruct initiated. Detonation sequence in twenty-four minutes. Self-destruct initiated. Detonation sequence in twenty-four minutes.”

  Twenty-four minutes. Plenty of time.

  I grabbed the specimen pack with the steaks and ran. Corridor to vent shaft to access ladder. Supply depot to executive washroom to hallway.

  And from the hallway to the BattleArmor development lab, a big square room with equipment and paperwork strewn everywhere in the aftermath of the explosion. But the blast hadn’t even scratched the prototype Quantuum 19 BattleArmor.

  At that time, I didn’t know anything about the BattleArmor other than the name, which I’d read on the screen inside the air lock. Well, and the fact that nobody ever got the prototype working right. I didn’t care about that. I was just looking for places to plug in the steaks. The massive ilatfanium-alloy suit loomed in the corner of the room, with thick cables snaking around plates of impenetrable armor, from gauntlets to a half mask.

  I darted to the console beside the BattleArmor, then stopped, eyeing the dozens of switches. No idea how to do this. So I flipped every switch and spoke into the console. “If you can hear me, get ready. Steak’s on.”

  I plugged one of the steaks into a port on the prototype and nothing happened. So I popped the safety cap beside the port and pressed the button.

  Nothing continued to happen.

  Huh.

  I gave the console a good whack.

  Still nothing.

  “That’s just great,” I muttered.

  I didn’t really care when kilns exploded or streetlights flickered—and fine, people called me Bug—but this was a bad time for my technology curse to kick in.

  I just shook my head and crossed toward the door. I had one more chance, if I remembered the information on that air lock screen right. Maybe not as good as the BattleArmor, but I wasn’t about to quit now.

  Halfway across the room, I heard a sudden humming. I turned and saw the steak pulsing and glowing a faint blue at the BattleArmor port.

  “That’s more like it,” I said.

  Then the steak turned brighter. And brighter. And hotter. Until some papers on the floor caught fire, and plastic started melting off computers and cables, and a fire alarm sounded.

  The steak streamed inside the suit through the port, growing bigger and hotter and brighter until I had to look away
.

  The heat forced me into the hallway, and a moment before I slammed the door, the entire lab burst into a raging blue fire.

  TAKE TWO

  Well. That hadn’t gone as planned.

  Not that I really had a plan. Still, I’d hoped for something more constructive than setting the place on fire.

  No time to worry, though. Instead, I’d check the map and start Plan B.

  “Self-destruct initiated. Detonation sequence in nineteen minutes. Self-destruct initiated. Detonation sequence in nineteen minutes.”

  On the same floor, in the same corridor, I found the virtual reality combat simulator. The sim looked like the cockpit of a jet fighter, with a scuba suit in the pilot’s seat. Apparently, a trainee—or “test subject,” maybe—would zip into the scuba suit, and they’d run whichever simulation they wanted, with feedback delivered through the suit.

  Urban warfare, demolitions, unarmed combat, the works.

  But, I learned later, the simulations were too good and sometimes actually injured trainees with virtual wounds. So they’d set the simulator to Nonlethal, for safety.

  After a minute of furious searching, I found a port at the bottom of the machine, then plugged in the steak and flipped the switches.

  This time, the reaction was immediate. Not fire:

  Tiny bursts of electricity zapped off the steak, stinging my fingers, then arcing into the cockpit of the VR simulator. I heard an ominous sizzle as the bursts started spraying around the room. A zigzag blast of lightning fried the potted plant beside me, and I ran, only one step ahead of the chain lightning.

  HIGH SCORE

  With one last steak in the specimen pack, I’d run out of ideas.

  “Self-destruct initiated. Detonation sequence in fourteen minutes. Self-destruct initiated. Detonation sequence in fourteen minutes.”

  Fourteen minutes. Not enough time to get away. With the Center’s AI off-line, I couldn’t expect any help, and I didn’t have any clue where to plug in the last steak.

  So I figured, what the heck?

  Might as well die with a smile on my face.

  In the employee lounge, I started a game of Street Gang, the Hog Stompers versus the Fists of Kung Fu, as the Center crashed and burned around me.

  On a lark, I plugged the cable of the last steak into the game port. I mean, why not?

  Maybe it would help me beat my high score.

  SIX THOUSAND ITERATIONS

  Hey, this is Jamie again.

  A few things you need to know:

  First, I’ve seen all Dr. Solomon’s digital reconstructions, and that didn’t look anything like a fridge.

  Second, those stem seeds—the “steaks”—were designed to work in the HostLink, right? To put the skunk minds, for example, back into their ordinary skunk bodies. But with an emergency override, they’d activate around any sufficient amount of technology. So Doug, for once, had the right idea—as long as you were willing to accept some uncontrollable chaos.

  And by chaos, I mean insanity.

  One more thing: Do you know the difference between digital information and physical stuff at the subatomic level? Between a software program and an elephant? Between a million lines of code and a strawberry smoothie?

  Nothing. If you look closely enough, there’s no difference at all. Life emerges from things that aren’t alive. From molecules, from atoms, from quarks, from membranes vibrating in sixteen-dimensional space.

  Bug: BORING, JJ …

  damselfly: WHAT NOW?

  Bug: NOBODY WANTS TO READ ABOUT SIXTEEN-DIMENSIONAL SPACE.

  damselfly: HEY, I DIDN’T INTERRUPT WHEN YOU WERE GETTING BORING.

  Bug: YOU’VE BEEN IMING COMPLAINTS THIS WHOLE TIME!

  damselfly: ONLY BECAUSE YOU DON’T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ITS AND IT’S.

  Bug: I DO TOO.

  damselfly: THEN WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

  Bug: THE DIFFERENCE IS, SHUT UP. AND STOP TALKING ABOUT QUARKS AND MOLECULES.

  damselfly: FINE.

  Bug: JUST TELL THEM WHAT THEY NEED TO KNOW.

  damselfly: FINE.

  Bug: FINE.

  damselfly: FINE.

  Sorry about that. Try to ignore the trolls.

  In any case, at the subatomic level, everything is made of the same stuff. Everything. And with the Protocol and the stem seeds, you could translate digital information to physical reality and back again.

  A chunk of “steak” could unzip into a polar bear or a toaster oven, then vanish into a flash of electrons and stream into a computer as pure software.

  You know exactly where this is going, don’t you?

  Start with the BattleArmor, the combat simulator, and the video game. Add the new Awareness that Bug mentioned, which had been hiding, waiting, watching—and which overrode the normal safeguards to output the three skunks.

  Larkspur: routed through the Quantuum 19 BattleArmor.

  Cosmo: routed through the virtual reality combat simulator.

  Poppy: routed through the Street Gang video game.

  A walking tank, an elite commando, and a kung fu biker chick.

  Yeah, and skunks.

  Except not entirely skunks.

  Remember back when that “snake fridge” told Doug about “six thousand iterations”? That just means doing something six thousand times, like running a test over and over, or pressing Next six thousand times in a row.

  And the skunks had lived and learned and evolved through millions of iterations, drawing on the knowledge of the Center, on databases of human biology and old movies and joke-a-day calendars and—

  Wait. How’d I get stuck with the boring explanations again?

  APPRENTICED LIKE A DENTIST

  Doug here.

  As the countdown continued, I pounded on the Fire button, and on the video screen, my Hog Stomper swung his motorcycle twice around his head and—

  BOOM

  The game exploded. But not in fire or lightning or shrapnel; that would’ve killed me.

  No, it was an explosion of goo, of flesh. Of … steak.

  Strictly speaking, Douglas, you were impacted by self-extracting nanocellular matter, not flesh. Flesh is the soft tissue of the body of a vertebrate, whereas—

  Marshmallow, then.

  Imagine an 18-wheeler made of marshmallow hitting you at sixty miles an hour. Apparently, plugging that steak into the video game made it available to the new Awareness, which was searching for ways to output the skunks.

  The bad news: I got slammed across the room while the speakers broadcast, “Self-destruct initiated. Detonation sequence in nine minutes.”

  The good news: because I hooked the steak up to Street Fighter, the Awareness was able to output Poppy.

  When my vision returned, I stared at the video machines, which were now completely engulfed by a bubbling mound of goop. Then I looked higher, toward the ceiling.

  At the digital announcement banner.

  UBSECTOR 2W … GO TO THE ROOT CANAL … CATCH THE BLUE SHUTTLE IN SUBSECTOR 2W … GO TO THE ROOT CANAL … CATCH THE BLUE SHUTTLE IN SUBSECTOR 2W … GO TO THE ROOT CANAL … CATCH THE BLUE SHUTTLE IN SUBSECTOR 2W … GO TO THE ROOT CANAL … CATCH THE BLUE SHUTTLE

  “Um,” I said. “Me?”

  “Self-destruct initiated,” the speakers answered. “Detonation sequence in eight minutes.”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking at my map.

  Catch the blue shuttle in subsector 2W? Why not? It’s not like I had other plans.

  WELL, MY MIDDLE NAME IS JOHN

  Five minutes later, inside the loading dock, Hund told his soldiers, “If you so much as scratch that thing, you answer to me.”

  The guys operating the crane and forklift paled slightly, then verrrrry carefully lowered the huge pod—the one with HOSTLINK written on the side—onto the transport pallet.

  “That’s the last load,” Hund said.

  Across the loading dock, Roach tapped the Protocol cube, his eyes shining with glee. “Combine this Protoc
ol with the HostLink, and the country is ours. Not in a decade, not in a year. Not even in months. In weeks—maybe days—they will see, they will all see, what beauty is, what perfection is. They will—”

  “Doctor,” Hund interrupted. “We’re on a schedule.”

  “We’re on my schedule,” Roach snapped, “and don’t you forget it!” He slipped the Protocol cube into a secure case. “I’m not pleased with your performance today.”

  “The operation was a complete success.”

  “In the end, yes. But you missed Dr. Solomon during the first sweep, then lost her nephew.”

  “He’s six flights underground, with a bullet in his leg and a bomb ticking down.”

  “Still, I expect better of you, Commander.”

  Hund’s eyes hardened. “If you weren’t so slow giving me those upgrades …”

  “Soon, Hund,” Roach said. “Soon.”

  “The full upgrades, Doctor.” For the first time that day, Hund actually smiled. “Subdural ilatfanium mesh and synaptic acceleration.”

  “Exactly as promised, yes.” Roach looked at his watch. “Now where is that airlift? They’re almost twelve seconds behind schedule, and—ah!”

  He shaded his eyes as three huge helicopters, silent and black, dove from the dark sky to hover near the loading dock. Soldiers attached crates the size of 18-wheelers to dangling cables for transport.

  “Did you discover anything about that audio in the processing lab?” Hund asked, watching the helicopters. “That voice calling my name?”

  “It came from Dr. Solomon’s private data sectors. She must’ve arranged some kind of automatic security for the boy before she died.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Hund said. “In a few minutes, this is all gonna be a smoldering hole in the ground.”

  Roach cocked an eyebrow. “Isn’t a thermonuclear device overkill?”

  “Overkill is my middle name.”