by Hugo Huesca
I was expecting him. I clawed at his shield hand to gain balance, pushed him back, and as the blaster floated by my legs, I hit it with my knee and sent it flying under Keles’ legs and into the other Cole’s body.
His arm suddenly jerked back to life. He caught the blaster. Keles tried to turn away, but couldn’t regain his balance in time.
Cole shot him point-blank through the head.
The helmet split open like a ripe, cybernetic melon. Blood and bone splattered away in zero-g. Keles screamed, more in rage than pain. He was blind and his mouth and lower jaw had been replaced by Rune’s cartoonish gore. He turned his sword on even though he was choking to death in the vacuum.
I reached his head with my power-gauntlet and squeezed.
Splosh.
While Keles’ remains floated away, I used my oxygen stream to dive to the other Cole. He looked pale and blue through his cracked visor.
“Seriously,” I told him. “That was so fucking badass.”
He raised a trembling, blood-covered thumb in my general direction and went unconscious.
I caught him in my arms, magnetized him to my armor, and flew away into space as dozens and dozens of new Keles rushed to us.
15 CHAPTER FIFTEEN
PAST MISTAKES
IT WAS like falling through an infinite chasm. All sounds of battle disappeared as my close-range comms got farther and farther away from the Algernon.
The Keles still gave chase after me. I could see the shine of their afterburners.
In my hands, the other Cole lay still. Was he dead?
I knew that he could respawn without issue. He had told that me before. It still was upsetting, seeing my own body lying there like that.
“Walpurgis?” I asked aloud. “Where are you?”
“Making my way through the Cabin,” she said. “Where are you?”
If she still hasn’t powered on the cabin, we’re not gonna make it.
There were too many Keles behind us. Bolts of plasma traced silent paths through space in my general direction, too far to be worrying. But they were getting closer.
Still, I pushed my location to her visor and hoped for the best. It wasn’t like me to go down without a fight. I looked over my shoulder and slowly left all my remaining grenades primed and ready for the Keles horde. Perhaps that would slow them down.
Smoke and plasma explosions behind me shook my body while I activated my jetpack at full speed. The plasma bolts stopped for a second, and then resumed.
“It’s useless,” I told Walpurgis. “I’m going to turn back and meet them. I’ll see you on Earth with the other Cole.”
“WAIT JUST ONE SECOND,” a familiar voice blared over the public channel. “NO ONE IS WASTING SKILL RANKS ON MY WATCH.”
Francis?
The Teddy dropped out of invisibility only a few thousand yards away from me. I could almost see power returning to the ship as its shields raised, the engines returned to life, and the forward lasers roared.
The legendary-level lasers passed close enough to me that the last dredges of my shields just gave up on life as a reaction.
But swathes of the Keles mob behind me were turned to vapor.
The Teddy flew towards us, with Francis roaring all the while:
“YOU THINK YOU CAN GET RID OF ME? I WAS ALREADY AN UNDEAD AI BEFORE YOU WERE EVEN A ‘HELLO-WORLD’ JAVASCRIPT LINE, YOU…YOU COPYCAT! NO WANNABE MAD AI IS TURNING ON HUMANITY ON MY WATCH. THAT’S MY SHTICK. I WAS HERE FIRST, YOU HEAR? I WAS HERE FIRST!”
And behind all that screaming, Walpurgis’ voice: “Yeah! You tell him!”
The interior of my ship was strewn everywhere, floating in my way as I rushed in through the airlocks.
I dove into a sea of ammo, rifles, loot boxes, power tools, and Beard’s retro-arcade collection. The medbay was only a second away, with all the nanobots and kits necessary to let the other Cole survive even a wound of that magnitude.
But his body became a game object just as I laid him on the table.
“Fuck!” I punched the table next to his head, leaving a fist-sized dent in it.
“Dude,” Walpurgis said as she walked toward me. “He can respawn. Chill. Let’s get the hell out of here, before the Algernon blows and takes the Teddy with it.”
“Ah,” said Francis. “You should have told me that was going to happen. I’d have been flying away from it instead of diving in to save them.”
“You’re a class act, bud,” I told him as I ran for the cabin and the pilot controls. “Get ready to punch it to Earth!”
The cabin’s screens showed a real-time image of the Algernon collapsing in on itself like it was made of cardboard and had been exposed to rain.
Tiny, shy explosions followed the lines of its spine, multicolored eruptions of plasma reactions.
“It lasted a lot longer than it should have,” Walpurgis pointed out. Even through her usual demeanor, I could tell she was impressed. “Those PDF grunts must have really given Keles hell.”
Once the antimatter engines collapsed, the resulting blast would be equivalent to several modern nuclear bombs all going off at once. The EMP alone would be enough to fry the Teddy’s circuits, and everything else in the vicinity.
It felt wrong to abandon the Algernon like this, knowing how hard the members of the PDF alliance had fought to keep it alive.
But we had a mission.
My hands clasped the controls and I prepared the Teddy’s own engines for the jump. As I did so, I could see a constant stream of fighters and starships abandoning the Algernon, flying away as fast as they could. Some might even make it.
Others were already dogfighting amongst themselves. Keles must’ve stolen some of those.
If he can just drop in wherever he wants, why is he only attacking the Algernon? a part of me thought.
Before I could consider the idea, the Algernon shone with a white light (at least that’s how the screens interpreted it) and began to inflate—
And the space in front of us dilated as the Teddy jumped away from the PDF flagship.
“Dorsett?” I searched for the other Cole’s signal around the familiar, blue planet. As expected, after the Algernon had been destroyed his spawn point had been reverted back to our original location: the research facility where I had appeared for the first time in Rune two years ago. “Can you hear me?”
“I lost my blaster on the safeguard,” his voice answered. “That’s my luck, I guess. You make it to the Teddy?”
“Yeah. It was a close call.”
“Neat.”
Talking to the other Cole still felt like a purely narcissistic exercise. It was my voice answering back, after all.
He went on. “Hurry up to Earth, then. All the PDF guys that were on the Algernon are respawning here. Guess who else is around?”
Caputi.
“Yup, Crestienne,” he said. “But you’ll never guess with whom she’s hanging out.”
“John Derry?” I guessed. He wasn’t on speaking terms with Crestienne, as far as I knew.
“I should have seen that coming,” the other Cole sighed. “You’re no fun at all.”
Walpurgis and I exchanged nervous glances. Every time John Derry slipped into our lives, people ended up hurt.
I knew he had a one-man vendetta against Charli Dervaux, though. Of course he’d show his head around. Keles had used Dervaux’s fake Device to scan his mind in the first place.
Does he know about the Freya’s exploit?
We’d find out soon enough. I talked briefly with Irene and Van back in the real world, where we still sat in the clumped closet of the hospital. They were already in the research facility along with Mai and were searching for the other Cole and Crestienne.
I set Teddy’s course and let the auto-pilot take over. “Francis, are you okay? Last time I heard from you, Keles was fucking you up.”
“That’s not how I remember it,” Francis said with a twinge of hurt pride. “I was doing pretty well until he jumped me. Still
, he hit me pretty hard. I had to run back to the Teddy or risk getting my data scrambled. I cut all the connections I had going on, including your phone.”
“I’m glad you’re okay,” I told him. In front of us, the Earth was growing bigger and bigger. Soon enough, we’d be crossing the atmosphere. “No mad AI is taking your place, bud.”
“That’s what I like to hear.”
“So, you met Keles?” asked Walpurgis. “I assume the guys running around aren’t all him, right? They acted more like NPCs than anything else.”
“Not sure about the guys you fought,” Francis said. If he had a face, I guessed it would be scowling. “I don’t like them. They’re cheap code, badly optimized. And they take a lot of resources out of the Core. At the rate they’re pouring into Rune…I’d say we have about a day before they collapse the Signal.”
A chill ran through my heart. “Collapse the Signal?”
“That’s impossible,” said Walpurgis. “It has the processing power to simulate a fucking universe in real time. A million or two of those things aren’t going to dent it.”
“A million won’t,” said Francis. “But they’re being created at an exponential rate. Right now it’s only a couple hundred per second, but in a couple hours…it’ll be a millions at once. That’s still easily manageable, but it will get out of hand. Trust me. I did the math.”
I cursed under my breath. Keles. How was he doing it? He was broken code.
If the Signal collapsed…everything Kipp dreamed of would be lost forever.
And I was supposed to accept that because of the actions of one motherfucker?
It wasn’t fair.
Without realizing it, I had started to clench the controls so hard the screens warned me I was about to break the equipment. I let go with an effort of will.
“I don’t know what he wants. To be honest, I don’t care. I only want to stop him,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” said Walpurgis. “Killing the little Keles’ NPC is fun and all, but I want to take a shot at the real asshole. You think we can do that, Francis?”
To my surprise—and growing sense of doom—Francis coughed sadly and refused to answer. Instead, he said:
“Oh, look. The rest of the team is waving.”
The research facility was now well-visible onscreen, while still being a couple miles below us. Francis zoomed in to show us Van and Rylena next to Mai, Crestienne, and sure enough, Derry himself.
“See! Hi, everyone!” Francis cheered with fake nonchalance. “Boy, am I glad to see them!”
I knew my AI well enough to catch the implicit meaning that he left off: I’m glad because I probably won’t get to see you again.
He was saying hi, but was getting ready to say goodbye.
We landed the Teddy by the open-air hangar, close to a familiar rainforest. Said forest had been overrun by mutants for as long I could remember. Hell, I had heard they were now grouping in angry mutant-villages and trying to raid the Federation.
Walpurgis and I met with the rest of the team, who were waiting for us in the hangar’s bridge to the facility.
Right from the start, it was clear that something was going on. Derry was there, still using that newbie avatar of his—something told me he hadn’t even bothered to log back in since last the last time I had seen him.
But it was the expression on his face that I hadn’t seen before. Eyes downcast, lower lip twitching a little.
He looked guilty.
Crestienne’s face was severe. Even in her younger avatar, the lines on her face were marked with repressed emotion.
“What did you do?” I asked the ex-CIA director.
Perhaps a bit too sternly for someone who had saved my life in the past.
Then again, he had also tried to kill me.
He was that kind of guy. Van had once called him a Tsundere. No idea what that means, but Walpurgis had laughed until she was red in the face when she heard that.
“It’s not what he did,” Crestienne said. “It’s what he didn’t do.”
I raised my eyebrow at her, hoping that she didn’t actually think about leaving her answer at that. It didn’t faze her one bit. Besides being the PDF’s leader, Crestienne coddled herself with the upper echelons of the States’ politics. Pressure from someone like me was meaningless to her.
“They have refused to explain further,” Rylena sighed. She was standing next to them, making sure she looked annoying. “Freaking waste of time—”
“We can’t talk until we know no one else is listening,” Derry said through clenched teeth. “If you haven’t noticed yet, your precious Signal is no longer secure.”
Crestienne gave him a look that could’ve turned a unicorn into glue.
“And we never saw it coming, did we, John?”
“You never believed me, and you never would’ve. No matter what.”
Since we weren’t going to get them to be less cryptic by just standing on the bridge, we moved to the interior of the research facility.
“I really don’t think he can hear us while he isn’t here,” said the other Cole. “For the same reason he can attack the Algernon and not Earth.”
“What reason is that?” I asked him.
“Cole thinks the Signal itself exists in a separate layer from Rune Universe—the game. Wherever Keles is nested, he can’t manipulate the game all at once. He can only access it from in-game sites that are in contact with the inner layers.”
Places like the Algernon. Where we held the Translations.
“Apparently, this was first implied by a third Alien species that visited our own hosts during the latest Translation,” said Crestienne. The PDF leader ignored my surprised gasp, turned to me and gestured to the other Cole, who was himself hanging opposite Rylena, next to Mai. “Your digital self has explained much of what’s going on here. Mind sharing, Dorsett?”
The other Cole nodded. “I fought the real—well, that’s a silly word to use with him, right?—Keles after I returned from the Translation. I’m pretty sure the ones that assaulted the Algernon are only copies…”
He explained how he had killed the Keles in front of him, only to be surrounded by hundreds of other copies. And how our Alien friends had closed the connection to our own Signal. How all the other civilizations in the universe had forsaken us in an attempt to quarantine us.
Leaving us alone with the cancer that was Savin Keles.
I didn’t talk while he spoke, though the expression in our eyes was the same. Like our hearts were breaking.
All that talk about protecting Kipp’s dream. Did I fail even before I started?
“This Visitor thought our Core was going to collapse from the strain of harboring a mind that was making exponential copies of itself,” Cole went on. “And worse, they feared it could find a way to spread to their own Cores…and to their own civilizations. See, they depend on the Signal like we rely on the Internet right now.”
“That’s funny,” Crestienne pointed out in a way that made it clear she didn’t find it funny at all. “That’s the path we were heading down.”
“We weren’t ready,” said Derry. “We couldn’t take the necessary precautions. We didn’t even know about the danger.”
Like many other times, I shoved down the impulse to deck him in the mouth.
“That’s where you are wrong,” Crestienne interjected. “We did, in fact, know about the danger. We’ve been tangentially involved with it for decades. We didn’t see it coming. But we should have.”
Derry winced like she had punched him in the mouth.
“What?” I whispered. “What are you—Derry, what’s she talking about?”
“Director?” Mai asked with a trembling voice.
“We aren’t going to get any more jammers in here,” Walpurgis pointed out. About twenty officers carrying the bulky machine had formed a circle around us, far enough away to grant us privacy.
NPCs dressed in white coats or the Terran Federation’s mili
tary uniforms looked at us like we had gone crazy. More than one curious player tried to get close, but they were stopped by the PDF guards before they could interrupt.
Derry sighed. “I suppose I can’t do any more damage. And like Crestienne says, you’re involved already.”
That spiked my interest. Of course we were involved already, Keles hated our guts. But Derry knew this, so the only reason he was bringing it up was because…well, I was about to find out.
“Years before I became a director,” Derry said, “not long after the CIA was allowed to operate on American soil, I was a field agent working alongside an anti-cybernetic terrorism division. My partner was a friend of mine who was once considered the best hacker in the world. He died in a situation very similar to Keles. He was trying to copy his mind onto the Internet. For a long time, I…believed he had failed. But when I heard about Keles’ success…well, that forced me to reconsider my prior belief.”
A chill ran through my spine. I had heard that story before, hadn’t I?
“His name,” Derry continued, “was David Terrance.”
16 CHAPTER SIXTEEN
JANUS STATION
RYLENA, the other Cole, and I all exchanged alarmed looks.
Walpurgis cursed under her breath and said, “That creep from Janus station?”
Derry’s jaw tensed. He passed a hand over his eyes like he had been awake for far too long. “I don’t know about a Janus Station. But David Terrance was presumed dead for a long time. And he left no evidence through the Internet that any part of him had survived. We had no way of knowing. Other experiments failed where he had apparently succeeded. Before Keles appeared, we thought the digitalization of the human brain through our current technology was impossible.”
I hadn’t forgotten about that man. He used an old, outdated power-armor that covered his entire face, and “lived” in an abandoned space station far away from us. He had retrieved Francis from deletion and returned him to me.
It always stuck with me as a ghost story. One that you shouldn’t look too hard into—unless you could summon things a human being has no business dealing with.