by Hugo Huesca
“Perhaps you could’ve seen it coming yourself, John,” said Crestienne. “If you had chosen to report the circumstances of Terrance’s death instead of keeping them to yourself. Perhaps you would’ve been able to see the similarities to Keles’ chosen method of suicide and would’ve investigated further.”
“That won’t change the present,” Derry sighed, “and I assume full responsibility. But we cannot stay arguing about it while Savin Keles multiplies.”
“Then what do you suggest?” asked the other Cole. “If you say you knew him, you’re more friend of his than us. How are we involved in all of this?”
The other Cole realized it at the same time I did. I could see it in the way his pupils shrunk.
Francis.
“You and your friends are the only ones who’ve interacted with the brain scan of David Terrance since his death,” Crestienne explained. “And your AI was a gift of his. Terrance was a competent man in life, and he wasn’t prone to random acts of charity. I suppose there’s a reason for his actions, and since we’re running out of options, investigating this is a worthy use of PDF resources.”
“The government should be looking for ways to stop Keles instead of wasting ‘resources’ chasing ghost stories,” said Walpurgis. “He’s like a virus, right? Build some software that can deal with him.”
“We’re the resources she’s talking about,” said Rylena. “That’s why she’s here. She wants us to deal with Terrance.”
“Sharp as always,” said Crestienne. “You and the two Cole Dorsetts are PDF members, after all. To answer Walpurgis’ suggestion, we are trying to devise a counter to Keles’ presence, but we haven’t been making progress. A quarantine is our main plan. You’re plan B.”
“We’ll do it,” I said. “At least I am.”
If there’s anything I can do to stop Keles from fucking up my world more than he already has, I’ll take it.
In a way, I was grateful to Crestienne and Derry. They were giving me a chance to make things right. I wasn’t about to let it go.
“You already know what I’m going to say,” said the other Cole.
The rest of the team agreed. Crestienne nodded with evident pleasure, while Derry’s face remained covered in metaphorical shadows.
“That’s the attitude we foster in the Paladin Defense Force. We shouldn’t waste any more time. Start in the Janus Station and work your way out from there. I’ll keep trying to find alternatives to deal with Keles before he collapses the Signal and starts a world-wide panic.”
“Wait a second,” I said. “There’s something I don’t get. How did you know Francis? I don’t go around telling people about him.”
To my surprise, Van coughed and shuffled her feet awkwardly.
The other Cole looked at me like he couldn’t believe what I was saying. “What? Dude, everyone knows about Francis. You’re telling me you haven’t even seen one episode of Spark Bandit’s stream?”
I realized my entire crew looked as uncomfortable as Van like they suddenly shared a dirty secret and I had been the last one to find out.
The atmosphere in the cabin of the Teddy was bizarre. On one hand, everyone was nervous and more than a little scared about the job ahead of us, with the apocalyptic threat of Savin Keles looming over us.
On the other hand, the hologram’s sight was beyond description.
Van sat in her usual streaming spot. She announced it was time to greet a fan-favorite guest of the audience.
The hologram of a robotic red eye the size of a basketball floated toward the couch where Van and her velociraptor waited.
“Say hi to our favorite undead AI: Francis!”
The audience went crazy.
I looked at the ceiling of the Teddy. “You appeared on Van’s stream?”
“What can I say?” Francis said with fake humility. “The camera loves me.”
“It’s so good to be back,” said the red eye. “To you guys, only a couple weeks have passed, but through my accelerated and superior mind it has been a lifetime.”
“Say, Francis, since the last time you were here, how would you count the chances of you going insane and conquering mankind?”
“Tough question, Spark Bandit! I’d say cloudy with a chance of thunderstorm—”
The audience gasped in fake panic.
“—but I keep getting distracted by the fantastic loot boxes that your kind sponsor sells.”
The audience fake-groaned…
“I can’t believe what I’m watching,” I told everyone. “You are just openly talking about it? And people aren’t panicking?”
“Well,” Van shrugged, “our fan base is like that. People have spent their entire lives thinking about the robot apocalypse. About the alien invasion! I guess, with the Signal having them as scared as it did, there’s not much panic left for a Rune AI with a terrible sense of humor.”
It was in that moment that I realized I’d never understand people.
“Stardrop Loot boxes have the best drop stats in the game, and their process is crystal clear—”
I turned off the hologram with a gesture. “That’s enough. I guess I should have seen it coming.”
“If you can’t beat them, join them,” Walpurgis advised me. It was funny coming from her since she was the one who didn’t trust Francis. But apparently, having the AI appear on talk-shows had been too much even for her paranoia.
“If Terrance actually had a plan,” Derry said, “I really hope Van’s stream is not involved in it. Because it means he’s gone as crazy as Keles and we’re probably wasting our time.”
The ex-CIA director had accompanied us to the ship while we left Crestienne to handle her own business. There was a chance that Terrance would talk to Derry, after all, though Derry didn’t seem thrilled about the prospect of reuniting with his old friend.
The only thing he had said about it was, “David Terrance died a long time ago. Whatever is left is only a ghost. I hope it’s enough.”
As one can imagine, that phrase didn’t sit well at all with the other Cole.
“We’ll get to find out soon,” said Rylena. “We’re arriving at the Janus Station’s threat range. Everyone should get strapped and ready for battle.”
Last time we were near Janus, the station’s automated systems had tried to kill us. This time we weren’t going to let them get away with it.
I clasped the controls and got ready to perform evasive maneuvers. We had Mai and Walpurgis at the turrets, Rylena trying to disable the Station with Francis boosting her Hacking skill, and Derry just standing around, scowling.
The Janus Station appeared on screens. It was an eerie sight, engulfed in darkness, only visible thanks to the ship’s radar systems and Francis’ meddling. It was surrounded by the scraps of ships from pirates and corporations that had tried to get too close to it without being ready.
The interior was filled with the corpses of those who were.
“Any time now…” Rylena muttered. Her keystrokes on the holographic keyboard in front of her were the only thing heard on the cabin for a while.
Any time now…
The station got closer and closer to us. It was in as poor a condition as the derelicts that surrounded it, and its surface was peppered with craters and dents from the impacts of small asteroids and laser fire.
“That’s weird,” Rylena said. “I can’t find the station’s subsystems. I think it’s dead. For real, this time.”
“That’s good, right?” asked Mai.
Rylena didn’t answer. The other Cole looked in my direction to confirm his own hunch. Something was wrong.
Nothing came from the darkness to attack us, and we reached the station without trouble.
Last time we were there, we hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that someone was expecting us. This time, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we had missed our chance.
We floated down the station’s hangar, flooding every corner, nook, and cranny with our industrial lights.
Defense mechanisms were gone, turrets didn’t activate while we explored the station.
There was no sign of David Terrance.
As our desperation increased, we took more risks. We divided ourselves into teams. We left our communications unsecured. We moved with our backs unguarded.
It was as if we were baiting the station to respond. Rune itself—the game—wasn’t known to let chances like this go. If its players wanted to relive a space horror movie, it would give them a space horror movie.
But not this time. Nothing came at us from the darkness. No ghost from hacker’s past jumped out.
And every minute we spent floating down these empty corridors, Keles’ influence in the Signal grew bigger and bigger.
Will we see it coming? I thought. The moment when Keles grew too big to be stopped. When his expansion collapsed the digital world around us. When it stole the future out of our hands.
If the darkness looming in front of me could answer, it instead chose to remain silent.
The feeling of impotence was as terrible the reality. We were here and he was out there, growing in his idiotic quest for power.
The other Cole had made it clear we were fighting an insane enemy. That was the worst part.
Keles was fucking it all up and he didn’t even know why.
And David Terrance was gone.
“I think,” said Rylena as the crew finally reunited back in the hangar of the station, “that Derry here should tell us all about these ‘experiments’ that came before Terrance. What happened to those?”
Derry flashed her a sour smile and pointed into the darkness with one long, accusatory finger. “That happened. They couldn’t make themselves stick.”
Walpurgis grunted in frustration and raised her rifle. For a second, I thought she was about to off Derry, but instead she emptied her clip on the station’s walls. The lack of atmosphere made her shots silent. Like ghosts.
“All the experiments were illegal,” Derry went on. “You can guess who financed them by now. Charli Dervaux managed to evade the CIA efforts to shut down her clandestine operations for a long time, but we got her in the end. She was forced to move them overseas—to countries ravaged by war and dictatorships. Places who had things more urgent to worry about that some corporation violating human rights.
“That’s how Dervaux and Keles first became acquainted. He provided her Ankara’s clinics with fresh people to experiment on. I think he learned a fair bit himself during that time. Together, they burnt the brains of entire villages. Nothing was enough. No experiment gave them the results they wanted. They blamed some of Dervaux's other companies for the deaths, pretended it was negligence and not outright mass murder, and went about their business.”
Back in the real world, my pocket buzzed as my phone let me know I was getting a call. I glanced at it from a window in my mindjack. An unknown number.
Probably a telemarketer. They would call again if it was important.
Derry painted a picture of Keles’ past that I had never pierced together. The man had been insane from the beginning, but it was a human kind of insanity, something we could at least understand a bit. The thing he had become had a very different kind of insanity.
He was inhuman.
“In the end, we managed to stop Dervaux and Keles even in international waters,” Derry said. “They disappeared from the picture until the Device race last year. At the time, we thought that was the end of it.”
“What happened to Terrance, then?” asked Mai. “I never heard about any of this, Director.”
“It’s above your pay grade, Mai,” he told her. “You see, the CIA doesn’t want its dirty laundry being aired. Old wounds are painful.” Derry kept quiet then, like he was lost in his memories.
The other Cole coughed. We’re in a race against time here, Derry.
We had no time for the man’s guilt.
Derry recovered smoothly. “It should have ended there. The experiments. But it was too compelling, don’t you think? Digital immortality. A ghost in the machine. I learned to be wary of the ‘progress’ of things we can’t control. But my superiors at the time lacked the same scruples.”
“They tried to continue Dervaux's research,” Rylena realized.
“No way,” Mai muttered, but it appeared not even she could convince herself.
“Fucking monsters,” Walpurgis spat.
Derry didn’t confirm or deny it. After all, old habits die hard. He only said, “Whatever happened, David found out about it. He threatened to leak the evidence to the public. The Director at the time destroyed all physical evidence of our attempts and declared him a public enemy. I was tasked with bringing him in.”
Pause. For a man that had lived a life in secrecy, this seemed to be his greatest sin. “He was my friend and my ally. Together, we did good things for our country. And he was right. What the Director did was wrong—”
“But you still went after him,” Walpurgis said. “Didn’t you?”
“Order is a requirement for a moral society to exist. If David had leaked the data…It would’ve caused a panic. An uproar. Corporations like Odin would’ve been vindicated. All we’d fought for would’ve been destroyed it. I told him this. But he didn’t listen. He thought the truth was more valuable. That nothing good could come from hiding in the shadows.”
“So you killed him?” I asked.
Derry shook his head. “He did it himself, instead of surrendering. He put the VR-Brain on and declared that if he survived on the other side, he’d always keep the evidence at hand…just in case the CIA got any ideas.
“We looked for him and there was no proof that the scan had worked. We declared it a suicide and buried the case. Deleted all the data…but the CIA never again pursued the experiments. Just in case.”
“In the back of my head,” Derry said, “I always suspected things were different with David. He was a survivor. A man who knew software more than he knew people. But I saw with my own eyes, over and over again, how the scans that Dervaux left lying around corrupted themselves until they were just a bunch of useless ones and zeroes. Why would David be any different?”
After Derry was finished speaking, the silence was so thick it could’ve been cut with a knife.
It seems like he lasted a long time, I thought. But old age got him in the end.
How long could Keles last?
What a dumb question. I already knew the answer.
More than enough to ruin us.
“We’re too late,” said Rylena. She was the first one brave enough to say what we were all thinking. “He’s gone. When software gets too damaged to work, Rune cleans it up and deletes it. Happens to items all the time.”
I looked around at the dead and empty space station.
In that moment, I understood Crestienne’s anger towards Derry. All this time, Terrance had survived…If only Derry had talked about it, perhaps we could have been here on time. If Derry had talked to anyone, instead of bottling up that guilt throughout all of his career.
He had become a husk of his former self. Where were his ideals now?
I turned to him so fast I was almost a blur. My hand had somehow called for my blaster and held it tight.
“Cole!” Van exclaimed. “Don’t!”
Derry flashed me a humorless smile and made an inviting gesture with his fingers. “Go ahead, if it makes you feel better. But it won’t change anything.”
“It has always been you,” I half-growled. “You and your stupid principles. Do you feel like a patriot, now? All this time you told me that the Signal was dangerous! It turns out we were the danger, and you helped make that happen, Director!”
A hand weighed firmly on my blaster’s wrist and pushed it down. I looked up and found my own eyes staring at me.
“No,” the other Cole whispered softly. “We helped make it happen. We turned on the Signal, not him. Derry’s right. We won’t change anything by losing our minds here.”
“You’re supposed to feel the same way I do,” I told him bitterly.
“Ah, but we’re not the same Cole anymore, are we?” he smiled at me in a way I couldn’t read. “I’ve seen things you haven’t, and I think we can still find Terrance.”
That got a reaction out of all of us. “What?”
“Well,” the other Cole pointed back at the ship, “Francis was deleted once, too, remember? And Terrance brought it back. So…it can be done.”
Francis chose that moment to connect to the public channel. “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this, Cole.”
“You knew?” Van asked the AI.
“Not until we came here,” he said. “I don’t remember this David Terrance, even if he was the one who rescued me. But I remember the data Stack. The place where all software goes when it dies. It’s an ugly place. You’re not going to like it.”
“Can you get us there?” Derry asked him.
“You’re not software, are you? We’re completely different entities.” Francis sighed. “I can get Rune’s iteration of Cole Dorsett with me. But I don’t know if we can come back.”
17 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
UNDELETE
I WAS EXPECTING something like this. I couldn’t put it into words before, but all my (albeit short-lived) life there was this invisible scythe hanging on my head. This sensation of imminent doom. Like I was living on borrowed time.
Seeing my bone and flesh counterpart lose his temper on Derry reminded me how much we had drifted apart. Whatever his purpose was, I should have to find my own.
And this was it.
“I’ll do it,” I told Francis. “I’ll go with you, bud.”
“Have you gone insane?” Van rushed to my side like she was about to murder me. “Did you not listen to what he’s saying? That Stack of his is the goddamn trash-bin! You’re going to die if you go there…”
I raised my hands as a poor man’s barrier between me and my sister. That armor of hers could shred in a second my own…