Transformation

  “Oh man, it is so good to see you.” Jeff lifted the lantern. He turned his attention to Rachael as Cooper was introducing her.

  “This is Jeff. Jeff, Rachael.”

  “Man we have a lot to talk about,” Jeff said. It was obvious he had some unpleasant things to say.

  “Where is everybody?”

  “That’s what we need to talk about.”

  Cooper had a feeling really bad news was coming and he wanted to stay focused on the mission.

  “Wait. If it’s something we can’t do anything about right now I need to talk first.”

  Jeff nodded. “Let’s go to the sofas.”

  Cooper tried to explain things to the best of his ability. He told Jeff about Trevor, how he survived, what was happening to him, and most importantly what he’d said.

  Jeff was quiet for a moment. Cooper let him think. It looked like it might go on for a while so he waved Rachael over to the kitchen where they could look for something to eat and drink.

  Cooper had seen the blood and bodies and was worried about what he was going to hear. Rachael almost stepped on Nurse Nancy, and did step in her blood.

  After a few moments, Jeff arrived. It was only a few yards away, but in the darkness it felt farther. Cooper handed him something to eat and drink. He nodded his thanks and put the stuff in his pockets.

  “Come on,” Jeff said and started walking up to the roof. He spoke as he walked away making it harder to hear him.

  “We’ve seen some weird shit around here lately. All the dead dropped…dead. Then these weird creatures appeared.”

  “I think we ran into some of the creatures. When we were walking here yesterday…”

  “Yesterday?”

  “Long story. Yesterday we saw hundreds of these things walking behind us as we tried to get here.”

  Rachael piped up. “Actually, we didn’t see them. They were invisible.”

  “Well I saw one. Nasty thing.” Jeff wasn’t fazed or doubtful about the invisibility.

  “You said hundreds?” Jeff looked at Cooper with furrowed brow.

  “Looked like it,” Cooper said.

  “OK. I’m going to go try some stuff.” Jeff walked towards his corner of the roof. Cooper was used to his mannerisms and didn’t take offense at the abrupt departure.

  “That’s the way he is. Really nice guy though.” Cooper watched Jeff walk away.

  Rachael nodded. She understood but more so she trusted Cooper.

  “What should we do right now?” She asked and looked Cooper directly in the eyes. He looked away. He needed to stay focused. He’d just started wondering the same thing. But that question was answered when Jeff called them over to help him.

  For the next hour they hung around doing an odd thing for Jeff here and there. The sun was coming up and standing around was boring. But soon that would all change. He and Rachael had strolled over to the edge of the roof to look over the landscape and talk. There wasn’t much to say. Suddenly, Jeff was behind them.

  “Cooper! Cooper! You have a…” He hooked his thumb over his shoulder.

  “You have a video chat waiting for you. It’s Trevor.”

  Cooper sprinted over to the laptop. Sure enough there was a full screen image of Trevor. There was nothing else, no user interface with any buttons or icons. But what was more odd was Trevor himself. He looked normal. His eyes were their normal color again and he looked scared.

  “Trevor?”

  “Hey Coop. We need to make this quick. I am almost completely removed.” He looked side to side every few words.

  “What?” Cooper said.

  “I don’t have much time. Once this connection breaks, I will be stranded. I am on an island way south of America off the coast of Costa Rica. I’ve been able to figure out the longitude and latitude from my connection with the thing—whatever.”

  Jeff wrote as Trevor rattled off a string of numbers. They were the coordinates of the island.

  “All the shit that’s happened started here, on this island. They have labs and stuff here.”

  “How did you get there? Where’s Ellen?”

  “Ellen is back at the house. She’s fine. I got here through the virus. I don’t even know what it is. It’s mechanical, that I know. It avoids certain metals and electricity. They created it here and it got out of control, but they still don’t know how that happened. They have no idea just how out of control things have gotten.”

  “Mechanical,” Jeff said low and soft. “Mechanical. It makes sense.”

  Trevor was still on the screen.

  “Guys, I don’t know what good I am doing here. Soon I’ll be unable to contact you.”

  “Not true,” Jeff was back at the screen nudging Cooper out of the way.

  “With the connection you created, I’m able to open this chat up again. You can too if you just…” But what Jeff tried to explain to Trevor was so complex, so many steps, he had no idea how to use the connection again. But then Jeff concluded with:

  “… or you can just open the chat application on probably any computer on the network and look in the history and click on the entry that has a different set of numbers in front of it.”

  Cooper shook his head as Trevor’s eyes widened. “Why didn’t you tell me that first?”

  Suddenly Trevor was gone. Jeff’s computer restarted itself. He looked a little worried about that but let it finish. It restarted normally.

  “Crap, he’s gone.” Cooper felt deflated. They were no closer to figuring things out, or so he thought.

  “What do we do now?” Rachael asked. She’d been mostly quiet up until now.

  Jeff was working on his computer again, focused, typing, switching between windows.

  Cooper motioned to Rachael. She followed.

  “He’s on to something. Come on, I’ll show you around.” Cooper also wanted to take another look around in the light of day.

  Cooper took Rachael around the garage. He pointed out a few things, noted all the new things, and told her stories about his arrival and the folks that had lived here. Everything he found just added to the questions in his head and the concern he had for the others. There were at least six dead strangers all about the place and blood everywhere.

  “Hey look.” Rachael pointed out over the parking lot. The corpses were gone and very little of the fine dust remained. There was no wind so none of the stuff was being kicked up. She was pointing out to the far end of the lot.

  Cooper came over and saw two people heading their way. He used his scope. It was a guy with short hair and a blonde. They were holding hands.

  “Here let me see.” Rachael took the scope from Cooper and looked at the couple. She looked around a bit, then back at the couple. She lowered the scope and smiled at Cooper.

  “Maybe when they get here we can have a double…” She stopped midsentence and turned back, raising the scope again.

  “It can’t be.” She whispered, an edge of fear in her voice.

  “What? What?” Cooper asked.

  Rachael handed the scope back to Cooper.

  “I think the guy is Ben.” The fear in her eyes was apparent.

  Cooper held the scope up to his eye and spoke as he examined the couple.

  “I don’t know, but you know him better than I do.” The guy was smiling, holding the girl’s hand. Very unlike Ben from what he’d observed.

  “What do we do?”

  “I guess we hope they pass us by.”

  “Well, in case they don’t, I’m getting ready for them.” Rachael said. “What do you guys have around here in the way of weapons?”

  §

  Jeff was able to use information gleaned from Trevor’s video chat to access the servers on the island. Security was virtually nonexistent. The amount of information was overwhelming but he did find security feeds and could look around the island that Trevor had spoken of. There were labs, a block of nice homes, and on another island was a town surrounded by a large fence.

  Jeff wasn’t
a serious hacker not by the standards of real hackers, but he could get around a system that was largely unprotected. He looked for and found records of the scientific work going on at the island. There was a lot of it and most of it way over his head, but he was able to determine one horrible fact, they were using humans for their experiments.

  He didn’t like what he was reading and wondered where all the assholes came from that would set this up and then carry it out. Human experimentation was clearly wrong, but still an academic concept to Jeff until he found the security archives.

  He watched footage of a man putting nude corpses onto the back of a small vehicle that resembled a golf cart with a flatbed on it. In other footage he saw people herded into the same yards nude, clearly terrified, and then he watched the various results of the experiments. The people dropped dead, had seizures, attacked each other, had sex, and sometimes they were unaffected. These made Jeff the most ill, watching the unaffected trying to run, fight, climb the fence, even hide behind their hands until ultimately they were killed by the others.

  Jeff felt himself getting physically ill and had to stop looking at the stuff. But he had to check one last thing. He scrolled through a list of hundreds of folders, each containing a week’s worth of archived footage, until he got to the folder for the current week. It was the last one which told Jeff that the security system was still active. A new folder was probably created automatically each week to store the footage for that time period. He opened the folder and it was filled with files, each representing an hour of footage, up to the current hour.

  Jeff opened the last day of files and played through them a high speed to see what the people on the island had been up to recently. The experiments were still going on, but at a much slower pace. And they looked different now. At high speed it was hard to tell how they were different so Jeff had to watch more of the gruesome footage.

  The people herded in to the pens now were far fewer, a scientist spoke to them on the other side of the fence for a few moments before leaving them alone. Then it was the same as before and always ended in the deaths of the people in the yards. He sped the video up again and leaned back.

  “Fuck this horrible shit.” Jeff said out loud as he rubbed his eyes. When he looked back to the screen to stop the video and move on to other data something caught his eye. He’d almost missed it.

  Jeff had gotten used to the pattern of activities. After the subjects died in the yard, no matter what time of day it was, it wasn’t until the next morning that they were hauled away. There was always at least twelve hours of inactivity after the last person died and he could see why. It wasn’t uncommon for a subject to kick or move hours later. Sometimes sitting up, sometimes standing and walking around before laying back down to finally die. But one time the pattern was different. When the sun was almost gone, he saw a flash on the screen. He backed it up and watched at normal speed. The flash was a man crawling from under a few bodies and running off camera, away from the gate. He never reappeared. It seemed he’d escaped.

  Jeff took note of this but had to keep studying the mountains of data he had access to. He understood very little of what he examined, but the gist was nanotechnology. He had access to every bit of email ever sent to or from the island. With that he was able to get a much clearer picture of the activities on the island. There were many emails sent to all scientists discussing the rules of living and working on the island, protocols for handling the subjects, what to say and more importantly what not to say. He found a few emails between individuals who were talking informally about the island, the lab, the work going on and virtually everything else one could imagine. He got more out of these emails then any of the other documentation. A few sentences jumped out at him like:

  “I am not so sure that we are developing what they tell us we are.”

  And.

  “I’ve asked to go home three times already. I was ignored the first time, the second time I had to fill out forms that I am sure were shredded the moment I left the office, and the third time I was threatened with the loss of my position.”

  And.

  “You are new here so take my advice. DON’T go to the cages during a run. You may be tempted but you will regret it. Trust me. I thought I had a strong stomach and no conscious, but after that I was shaken.”

  He watched as the number of emails ticked up in real time. He looked at a few of the most recent messages and there was reference to the cloud of swirling mist that invaded the main lab. Several individuals were there, and they were all speculating on what it had been.

  And it went on and on. Lots of distrust, complaints about lies told to lure them to the island and speculation on what was really going on. But the most useful information for Jeff came from discussions between two scientists, one defending his decision to strip a lot of “useless code” from the bot’s codebase so they would be more powerful and he could move faster in the lab to reach the insane goals set upon him. Some of that code included a restriction placed on the bots so they could not replicate themselves. There was also speculation as to how delivery bots, programmed to deliver a viral cell to a specific location in the human body then shut itself off, could have possibly overrode their programming. There was talk of a bad element in one of the machines used to batch program the nanobots via magnetic fields. It was speculated that some of the bots remained repair bots and seemingly they stopped the delivery bots from shutting down. Somehow they interfaced with the human host and attempted to repair it. The bots kept the broken humans functioning in the most technical sense of the word. They ate, took breath, and were mobile but they were just walking vegetables.

  Jeff was deep into all of this when his screen turned blue. He pulled his hands away from the keyboard and cursed.

  “Damn. Blue screen of death.” His computer had crashed and he wasn’t looking forward to figuring out why and then trying to fix it. He was worried the people on the island caught him snooping and attacked his computer but the screen flickered and Trevor appeared again.

  “Hold on, I‘ll go get Cooper.”

  “There’s no time just listen. I can no longer wander the labs and the island freely. The bots are leaving my system.”

  “How…” Jeff started.

  “Just listen. You have to shut this thing down. If you don’t the scientist here are starting to figure out what happened and will start trying to interface with the bots. When they do, they’ll discover the power they have around the globe. It’s almost unlimited and they can use it to destroy or control what’s left of the human race. Once they get access, they can alter the code or close down the ways you might have of dealing with them.”

  “So this might be as easy as entering a command?”

  “Theoretically, but I doubt it will be. Look I know nothing about computers and soon I will be unable to help you. I have to run and hide. You need to try and communicate with these things.”

  The screen went blue and the computer shut off. Jeff slouched back in thought. He sat perfectly still, head tilted, for a long while thinking. He should be working on his computer and looking for ways to interface with the operating system of the bots. But he was thinking about the emails he’d read through. He was thinking about the nature of a machine that’s sole directive was to repair. What would happen if that machine got into a dying human? What would happen to the machine if you tried to break it or shut it down. If it could “repair” dead humans and make zombies, what else could it do?

  Jeff had no idea just how far the “machine” had advanced, just what it was capable of doing but his instincts were right. He knew he had to get this machine to repair itself out of existence.

  §

  Cooper and Rachael watched as Ben and the blonde circled the structure, looking for a way in. They both hoped they’d just leave but Ben seemed determined to get up and into the structure. Cooper finally had enough of hiding.

  “Ben. Get out of here.”

  Ben looked up with a huge smile. He start
ed laughing.

  “Cooper? Is that you? Oh man let me up it’ll be fun.”

  “Seriously, leave.”

  “How’s Rachael? She’s in there with you, isn’t she? Oh! Oh! This is Dawn.” Ben held both hands towards her. She waved and smiled. “I want to thank you for helping me get rid of Willow. Dawn is such an improvement.”

  “I am.” Dawn smiled and put her head on Ben’s shoulder.

  “Ben. Just get the fuck out of here.” Cooper stood with arms folded.

  Rachael started forward and Cooper held her back with one hand. He didn’t want to give Ben any more reasons to stick around.

  He watched the couple, almost convinced by their act. Despite all he knew, had seen with his own eyes, Cooper found himself rooting for true love and its transformative power. But that flicker of hope was crushed by a mountain of commonsense, wisdom, and experience.

  Dawn was blissful. What and how they fucked with these people, her sworn enemies because they were Ben’s sworn enemies, didn’t matter. She searched the structure and spotted the big old truck parked underneath it. It was still piled high with weed. Her face tightened with hate. She put her mouth on Ben’s ear.

  “These are the assholes that killed my sister and all my friends.”

  Ben smiled bigger as he looked up at Cooper. He spoke low so only Dawn could hear him.

  “Smile. Act nice.”

  “I can’t.” Dawn balled her fists. “I can’t do that. I can’t do that.” She burrowed her head in his neck.

  “OK! Have it your way.” Ben pulled Dawn along by the waist under the structure. He saw the truck and walked towards it. Dawn broke free and was practically screaming.

  “We have to kill them! We have to kill them!” Her eyes were wild, she was hyperventilating. She was going to ruin everything. If this had been Willow she would’ve been the calm one and they would have been standing on the second level by now. If Willow ever acted this way Ben would have backhanded her to shut her up. But this wasn’t Willow, this was Dawn and he couldn’t imagine hitting her. He grabbed her by her face and looked her in the eyes.