by Hugo Huesca
The doctor could’ve explained them to the other Cole himself. This method had been Crestienne’s idea. She figured, since Cole’s mind and mine worked the same, there would be less risk of misinterpretation in the long term.
Still, I opened a window to the real world and watched Sommer nod in my direction as I explained the rest of the process.
“OK,” said the other Cole after I was done. “It’s your time. You ready?”
“Yeah.”
Beard made sure to stand as close to us as possible without getting anyone’s attention. My friend had been trying to hitch a ride into the Signal’s framework since we’d begun the experiments, without success.
“Alright,” I told Foreman in the real world. “Punch it, Chewie.”
Foreman shot me a strained smile and keyed in the commands over the control panel that turned on the Device.
The Algernon disappeared around me and the other Cole.
We were atop a black spire, thick enough for both of us to stand comfortably, but no more. We were surrounded by black infinity thick with distant, green stars. Our own could be seen in the distance, the Signal’s Core, creating and dissolving black data-packages at infinite speeds. Green swaths of energy broke the horizon like thunder.
The other Cole took a deep breath as we both looked around, taking the scenery in. Even after all this time, all these Translations, it was a breathtaking sight. “Ever wonder what this place smells like?”
“No? I assumed it had no smell. No one to program it, right?” I told him.
“That’s what I figured myself. I didn’t notice until the fifth time or so we were here, it’s very faint. It smells of a steak.”
“Are you fucking with me?”
He shrugged. “I swear it. A goddamn steak, perhaps fried a bit. You can miss it if you’re not paying attention. But makes my mouth water all the same.”
I bit my lips in the real world. I suspected what the other Cole was thinking. There were flavors in Rune Universe, but those were programmed in by software engineers. They were a faint shade of the real thing, even with the almost-mystical interference of the Signal adding uncanny realism to the game.
“Perhaps it’s a bug?” I offered. I couldn’t smell anything, myself.
“Eh,” he dismissed me with a gesture. “It’s just something weird I found. I’ll be back in a bit, alright?”
Without waiting for my answer, he summoned the bridge that would get him to a strange land that I was forbidden to see. I caught a glimpse of a bright tunnel of solid plasma that extended far beyond what my sight could reach. Then he was gone.
The rest was routine. Fuck around for a bit, wait for him to come back. Time didn’t work straight in the Signal. A minute could pass in the real world and I could be standing around for an hour here. It was fuzzy. Opening a window was dizzying, like seeing your own body move in slow-motion.
The green Cores that were the stars made for a much better sight.
I wonder if I’ll ever get to see them.
One of the blasts of thunder by our own Core was a deep orange.
I’d never seen something like that before. “What the hell?”
The Core, at this vague distance, was as big and bright as watching the Sun in the real world. So, when the sphere of crystal-like energy flickered for less than a second, my surprise felt more or less like seeing the Sun itself turn on and off like a defective lightbulb.
“What the hell?” I repeated. Was it my imagination or the Core was a bit less bright?
“Did you know,” said a voice that sounded like someone dragging a knife through an auto-tuner, “your shiny little Device is hooked up to the Puente del Diablo Fort’s main network?”
I turned around with my heart pounding in my virtual chest. There was something on that barely comprehensible voice that reminded me of…
“Oh, fuck.”
Savin Keles. Standing right in front of me, with a smile that extended way too long in his face.
It didn’t take a detective to know something was wrong with Savin Keles. His body was stiff, almost as if built out of polygons. A disturbing mixture of a dead body and a rendered man’s texture from a 2000’s videogame.
And he was a puppet. I could see the orange strings of energy floating out of his joints and lifting him, moving him in the way a robot would believe a man does. The strings of energy reached a spot above Keles’ head and disappeared into a cloud of dark miasma, where cords of mismatched data floated and collapsed like a miniature storm.
“Fuck,” I repeated again. There wasn’t much else to say. I was petrified in place by a mixture of surprise and sheer horror.
“You like my new avatar, Cole?” he asked with that wrong voice of his. “Made it myself.”
It was too slow, his voice. Like he was writing the speech in real time and having a program read it aloud.
“You’re dead. I saw your body.”
Sleipnir’s Device, I thought. Did it work? But we scoured Sleipnir’s network, there were no traces of him…
“A small price to pay in the name of progress,” he announced. The puppet that was his body shook with fake modesty. Or psychopathic laughter. It was hard to tell. “It took me a while to patch my pieces back together, but now I feel better than ever. Well worth the investment.”
“You need fucking help. There’s obviously something wrong with you!” I told him in a dry whisper. At the same time, I opened a window to the real world. Slowly. Like moving in a dream. I meant to warn them, but trying to move my real body with the time distortion was dizzying… I was falling out of my chair…
Back in the game, I stumbled over my own feet and fell to the hard surface of the spire. Keles laughed.
“Nice try, but I can’t have you bumbling around yet. I still need about five more seconds…” My window disappeared.
What? I asked flatly. I tried to summon my log-out window, but nothing came of it.
Mind you, I could still feel my slow-falling real body. I just couldn’t see shit. I reached for my mindjack as I fell. Slow. Too slow…
Around Keles, I saw orange coils slip out of his feet and into the spire, orange veins over its black surface. The veins grew, extended around me, then past me. I looked over my shoulder and saw them go down and down.
I didn’t need to know what the hell was going on to figure out something bad was happening. I ran towards Keles and punched him with the full strength of my power-armored fist.
I hit nothing. The momentum carried me past the puppet and I almost fell out of the spire. Keles laughter grew louder and maddened. It sounded exactly like a kid typing “Hahahahahaha” into a text-to-speech program.
He turned to face me. “Don’t bother. I’m already in. Business is done. Now follows pleasure.”
“Listen, Keles, whatever you tried to do to yourself, it didn’t work,” I told him. I pointed at the miasma of glitched data above his head. “Your mind is not working right. Just look at it! Whatever you’re thinking, stop it! You need help—”
The puppet crawled towards me in a blur of speed and joints. “Working right? My mind is better than ever. I am better than ever. Don’t you see it? I won, Cole. Just by refusing to die, I proved you irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.”
Okay, I thought as I fought down panic. He’s rambling now. Just distract him for a bit more and perhaps his mind will just crash on itself.
“Keles. You didn’t shed your mortal coil or whatever the fuck you think you did,” I told him. His face was inches away from mine, and that damned smile… “You died. You’re fucking dead. You’re just a copy, and a very damaged one at that. Surrender and let the PDF try to fix you. We have the resources…”
“ ’That is not dead which can eternal lie…’ My mind has continuity. My purpose has continuity. My purpose is my soul. And now my purpose is eternal. Goodbye, Cole. You’re not even relevant to me as a test anymore. You made yourself irrelevant when you agreed to step into your Device and stay merge
d with the useless meat of your body. Now the only one who matters to me is your better self—”
“You’re quoting Lovecraft? Are you comparing yourself to an eldritch abomination like it’s a good thing? You’ve completely lost it!” It was like speaking to a wall. And the spire was now completely orange.
“Die, or not. It doesn’t matter anymore. But…if you somehow survive the next hour, here’s something you should chew on. The drones? They weren’t my idea, I just improved on it.”
“Stop!” I tried to use my jetpack and launch myself against the miasma above his head. Perhaps I could physically damage his mind enough to put him out of commission. But the jetpack didn’t work inside the Signal’s framework, and Keles didn’t even bother to react.
A window prompt appeared in front of me. It was the power-off screen from the mindjack. Keles reached with his stiff finger and pressed it for me.
And the darkness was total.
6 CHAPTER SIX
BASE DEFENSE
I CAME TO, awakened by the blaring of the base’s alarms and a flat pain in my ass and knees. My brain felt almost as scrambled as my stomach and the nausea was overpowering. I fought it down as I tried not to retch.
“What’s going on?” someone was screaming. Voices came muffled under the screech of the alarms. Ghost-like. “Are we being attacked?”
I stood up, trembling, from the cold floor. Over my head, the holographic screens were behind in the timeline. They were still showing my avatar standing alone on the black spire.
“Dorsett?” asked Foreman as he rushed by my side. “What just happened?”
“Keles,” I told him. “Sleipnir’s Device worked, more or less. He scanned his mind, but he’s fucked up. Managed to infiltrate the Fort. We need to get everyone out of here. Quick!”
“Infiltrate the Fort?” Foreman whispered. “What’s he pretending to do? We’re filled to the brim with soldiers and security.”
I may not have understood half the crazed rambling of Keles, but I sure as hell paid attention. “He’s going to use the drones! At least, he claimed he was going to.”
“No way in hell.” Foreman helped me get up as I took deep breaths to focus my brain away from the dizzying effects of jerking a mindjack off without logging out first. “You can’t just hijack a military drone.”
The alarms now showered the hall in intermittent red light.
“Perhaps,” I told him. “But what would Caputi tell you if she were here? Do you really think ‘No way in hell’ is an acceptable answer for her if turns out Keles isn’t bluffing?”
Kudos to him, he didn’t need to be told twice. He instantly withdrew his gun and turned to the confused scientists around us. “Everyone out of here! Stay away from the drones, all of them! Get behind human soldiers and get to extraction point!”
“Extraction point?” asked Doctor Li as a sea of white lab coats and business suits rushed away from here and into the emergency exits, going to alert the nearest guards.
“Follow me,” said Doctor Sommer as he grabbed her hand and pushed her towards the exit. “It was in last month’s simulation, the field near the civilian’s housing.”
As they disappeared from view, the soldiers by the entrance rushed to Foreman’s side. “What’s going on? The alarms have gone off everywhere in the base.”
When they saw Foreman’s sidearm, they drew and readied their own rifles, searching the corners and entrances for any enemy.
“We’ve reason to believe the base drones are about to go ape-shit,” he told them. While he talked, I grabbed my mindjack and tugged out the cable that connected it to the Device.
My mindjack had a small modification that allowed it to sync with any open network nearby. Normally, people used it to play Rune minigames or watch replays, but I knew a mad AI who was fairly good at hijacking drones himself.
While I frantically synced my mindjack with Puente del Diablo’s WiFi, the shooting started.
The five of us jumped as one. It came from afar, the constant sputtering from an automatic rifle. Then silence.
More shooting followed, some closer than others. Then higher calibers were added to the mix, like instruments in the opening moves of a concert.
Then explosions.
“Fuck me sideways,” exclaimed one of the guards. He turned to Foreman. “Sir, it’s the drones?”
The man’s face was flush with panic. I knew what he was thinking. A tank-drone could do a lot of damage to a well-prepared infantry squad. By surprise…
The loss would be terrible.
“We’ve to get the civilians out of here,” Foreman said. He took out a radio, which was exploding with panicked communication:
“They’re killing us!”
“We request back-up at—”
“Pinned-down—I repeat—”
“The drones—”
“—Extraction—”
He started barking orders as he frantically tried to establish a chain of command. There were protocols in case of a base attack, even if they’d never been used before. They’d take minutes to go into effect, and during those minutes people would get killed.
We had more pressing problems. Something inhuman screamed. The entrance to the hall exploded in a shower of glass, plastic, and metal. Wolf-like silhouettes stepped through the debris as Foreman and the guards raised their weapons.
I knew those. Security drones. Nasty, nasty things. Their bite could break through bone before you had time to soil your pants. And they were armored. I wondered if the guards’ rifles were high-enough caliber to pierce their metal skin. Foreman’s gun sure as hell wasn’t—
My mindjack’s status LED turned green when it connected. I held my phone in my hand and prayed that Keles hadn’t fried the hardware or something similar.
He couldn’t have. He doesn’t know about Francis.
“Francis! Are you there?” I yelled at the phone. The drones took a single glance across the room, searching for any hidden ambush, their stalking-protocols at full power. We walked back, slowly, trying to put as much distance between them and us as we could. Around me, the men took aim…
“Master Cole?” said my AI buddy. I exhaled in relief at the sound of his voice. “There’s another AI around here, what—”
“No time,” I told him. “You see these drones? Shut them down, fast! They’re about to attack us!”
“Holy fucking shit,” said the unfathomably complex, undead AI.
The drones stalking-pattern shifted into full-blown hunt. They blazed into us so fast they were halfway through before anyone had time to react. I knew what was going to happen next. I let my phone fall to the ground as I covered my ears with my hands, and at the same time, people opened fire around me. The muscles of my legs tensed as I frantically tried to make them run for cover, but biology wasn’t fast enough when dealing with the mechanical joints.
A blink. One wolf-drone stumbled to the ground at high-speed, pierced by a lucky barrage of bullets. The other two reached the guard’s formation, a dozen feet away from me.
I saw a metallic maw close around a human neck, his screams drowned by the rattle of the weapon in his hand. Another blink. Two guards were down, blood was everywhere, I was running for cover. Not fast enough.
Something huge and heavy smashed against my back and took the air out of my lungs. I fell to the ground hard, with a muted scream. The weight was crushing and overpowering… I knew I wouldn’t even have time to feel the bite.
Then the drone fell to the ground next to me with a heavy thud.
Stunned, I fought to get air back into my chest and tried to stand. The firefight around us was over. My ears rang with a constant, piercing pain, and I could barely hear my ragged panting.
“Dorsett!” Foreman caught me by the arm and pushed me up. He was screaming, but I had to focus to hear his words. “You wounded?”
“N—no.”
The two drones were down, the third one was destroyed. The security captain laid dead in a poo
l of his own blood. His body was shaking as the electrical impulses of his brain slowly shut down. Another guard was bleeding a lot from his arm, which was barely connected to his shoulder by a meaty thread.
I turned away and heaved.
Denial would be useful right the hell now, said the part of my brain that had seen combat before. A part traumatized enough that it was emotionally barren. Let’s pretend you’re seeing Rune gore. And keep your food in, we can’t waste time puking.
“They shut down. I heard you tell someone to do it,” said Foreman. “Can they make that happen?”
“I sincerely hope so,” I said. Foreman nodded and I ran for the phone, which lay on the ground next to an expanding puddle of blood.
Meanwhile, Foreman and the surviving soldiers knelt next to a third guard as they tried to stop the hemorrhage from his mangled arm. The man—although he couldn’t have been much older than me—was pale and trembling and his lips shook with blabbering as he tried to speak but failed.
“Listen up,” Foreman told him as Foreman pressed a torn cloth over the wound. “You’re going to bleed to death. Understand? It’s going to happen in about three minutes. Nothing we can do about that. Relax now. We will revive you when we get you to the medics. You have a significant other?”
The man shook his head.
“A mother, soldier?”
He nodded.
“Think of her.”
I reached the phone and cleaned the blood over it to reveal a cracked screen. My voice quivered over the speaker:
“Francis?”
“Finally! I was beginning to think I wasn’t fast enough, Master Cole. Those drones aren’t malfunctioning, someone on my end of the Signal is controlling them directly—”
“I know. It’s Keles. He’s back in a fucked-up version of the other Cole.”
“But the other Cole can’t hijack a base’s worth of security…”
And that was the problem. I remembered the orange veins beneath Keles’ puppet as they infected the spire. What the hell had that been? The other Cole behaved like a normal human would in a normal world. I mean, I couldn’t just go and hack a dog just because we shared the same reality—