by Nick Thacker
Colson picked up speed and crouched down a bit, hoping to catch the guard before he opened fire. He was not sure how to properly throw his weight without injuring himself, and he certainly had no idea how to perform one of Reggie’s or Joshua’s ‘perfect tackles,’ so he just kept running.
The guard noticed Colson’s oddly shaped body right before he pulled the trigger, and he tried to shift his aim toward the large engineer, but it was too late. Colson grunted as they collided, and both men flew down the hall in a heap.
The guard was far too powerful for Colson, and the moment Colson felt the wind get knocked out of him from the fall the guard began to attack. He felled blows on Colson’s sides, hitting his kidney and lungs, and Colson thought his ribs were going to explode. He tried to lift his arms up to protect his face, but the guard already had the upper hand, coming to sit on Colson’s lower body as he attacked. He landed a single punch on Colson’s face and everything went black.
Unfortunately for Jonathan it didn’t last long, and he came to just as the second hook landed on his jaw. His head was spinning, and his vision was blurry, and again he tried to bring his hands up for protection.
It wasn’t necessary. He heard a gunshot, and the guard lurched a bit, freezing in midair, then started another attack. Two more shots rang out in the level, and Colson saw the guard slide sideways before he had the chance to finish his task. He hit the ground with a leg still over Colson’s, but he pushed the man away and rolled to the side.
“Thanks,” Reggie shouted. “I owe you one. Way to keep him occupied for a minute.”
Colson nodded in return, still surprised that he had even taken action, but he was glad Reggie was okay. He held a hand out for Reggie to help him up, and both men turned to assess the fighting still going on behind them.
“Get down, over here,” Reggie said, urging Jonathan toward the rows of servers. “Those drones are probably just waiting for the command to attack.”
Colson had noticed that the drones were still hovering above, but none had started shooting. What are they waiting for?
Two guards were shooting at Joshua, who had run out of ammunition again, and Reggie peered out from the side of the fight and picked off one of them, earning a ‘thumbs up’ from Joshua. A single guard remained, taking cover in the same stairwell Ben had run out of moments before. He could see Ben and Julie in the middle of the open area, on the floor next to one another.
Mrs. E was unaccounted for, but Colson assumed she was holding back, also out of ammunition.
He looked up at the drones, twisting and flying in minute figure-eights, holding their position. He was sure that as the last member of the security team fell, the drones would start their attack.
We need to get out of here.
CHAPTER SIXTY-six
“Marry you?”
“I… Um…”
She stared at him. He tried to form more words, but his mind was mush.
One of the security guards appeared from behind the wall of the stairwell and aimed their direction. Before he could fire, a small object bounced toward the stairs and exploded. Ben’s vision went white just as the pop sounded. The flareup was massive and he was rendered completely inert for a moment. He felt Julie gripping his arm tighter — she must have gone temporarily blind as well.
Gunfire came from the opposite side of Ben, and he heard the guard curse, then go silent. He waited a few seconds and his vision began to clear. There were two, even three images in front of his single open eye, all dancing around each other as they tried to merge.
“Got him,” Reggie called out. “I think that’s it.”
“Now? Ben, what?”
He remembered what he had just said to Julie, and he looked over to the three Julies next to him on the floor. “N… I —“ he tried to lift his head, and she placed her hand underneath it. It was excruciating, but it helped him enunciate. “I… wanted to… before.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh, well that’s nice. Like, when we were getting shot at upstairs, or shot at downstairs, or shot at outside, or —“
“Shut up,” Ben said. “Words are hard. Give me a minute.”
She seemed to understand, and waited for him to finish, a slight smile in her eyes. The gunshots had diminished, and Ben wondered how his group had fared. The drones, previously only hovering directly above their heads in their preprogrammed flight paths, were now beginning to spin up and widen their figure-eights. One of them even made a sputtering sound, dropping to just above the ground, then turned and climbed again to resume its pattern.
“I don’t have a ring,” he said. “That’s what I was waiting for, you know. That’s it. But I have a…” He tried to turn his head, and Julie helped by sliding her hand down. He saw the man from Level 2, still wearing the helmet, falter. He was no longer spinning in slow circles, but instead was still, standing ramrod straight except for a few jolts from a leg or an arm every few seconds. His eyes were wide, and thrown back in his head, and he looked to be in severe pain. Veins were popping from the sides of his neck, and every muscle on his body was tensed.
“I have a helmet instead,” he said. “You want a helmet?”
She raised her free hand and made a mock-slapping motion, and Ben winced.
“Come on, Romeo,” she said. “This fight’s almost over, and we don’t want to miss out.” She pulled him to the side, and he slid along the row of dead bodies until he reached her previous hiding spot between the rows of computer servers.
Reggie greeted them, sliding over from his own position behind the terminal where he had been waiting with Jonathan Colson. “Notice anything?” he asked.
Ben frowned, some of the feeling finally returning to his face.
“The drones?” Julie asked, glancing upward.
“They’re not attacking,” Reggie said.
“They look like they’re about to, though,” Julie said.
“Yeah, but they’ve attacked us plenty of times before,” Reggie argued, “and not once did they have to ‘prepare’ anything. There’s something else going on.”
The three of them looked up for a few seconds, watching the drones slowly lose control and begin smacking into the walls and computer servers. Eventually one of them closest to their position fell and crashed to the floor, its lights blinking a final time and then staying dim.
“It is… over…”
Ben looked at Julie, and then toward the center of the room. Valére was there, still lying on the floor in no better shape than one of his crashed drones, and he was staring straight up. “It is over,” he said again.
Ben rolled over, forcing the pain in his head, face, jaw, and every other part of him away, and then stood up. Julie was there immediately, holding him up, and he allowed her to lead him toward Valére.
“Valére,” Ben said, his voice falling out slowly, with a drawl, from the muttering effect of not having a fully functioning mouth.
Valére shifted his gaze to Ben, and his eyes narrowed. “This… this is your fault,” he whispered. His hands were shaking, the trembling moving around his body in spasmodic bursts.
Ben gave his best shot at a smile, but blood and drool rolled down his chin instead. “No, Valére, but I wish it was. What’s going on with the drones, anyway?”
Valére shook his head slightly, and closed his eyes. It seemed like a great wave of sadness had crashed over him, and Ben felt momentarily reverent, as if watching an influential man die.
“It is my system. My SARA. She was ready, and I failed her. She… she was prepared for the final uplink — my brain — and mine alone. Anderson, he is not…”
The man Valére was referring to was standing nearby, still choking on an invisible force that seemed to be slowly suffocating him. He suddenly fell to the ground, a strange whimpering sound the only sign that he was still alive.
“Anderson’s mind is different than mine, naturally,” Valére said. “SARA was programmed for my mind, my conscience.”
Julie put a hand on
her mouth. “My God, we were right,” she said.
Ben tried to ask her what she meant, but his mouth was numb and stiff.
“The system here — the woman’s voice, the drones, all of it — it’s an intelligence, based on mapping the human brain and recreating the neurological pathways in it.”
“Brains, not ‘brain,’” Reggie said, chiming in from behind Ben. “All those bodies downstairs…”
“Joshua’s father,” Colson said. “He’s down there, too.”
Joshua and Mrs. E appeared to Ben’s left, walking over from their hiding spots, apparently no longer concerned with the drones. Two more crashed around them, and one of the machines barrel-rolled into a light fixture in the corner of the room.
Anderson was now just a mass of flesh and bone, the little life left in him spurting out in small episodic seizures that grew further and further apart. His eyes had taken on a reddish hue, and his mouth was opening and closing slowly as he died. The helmet on his head held fast, secured to its subject by the pressure and electrical impulses traveling into his cranium.
Ben wanted to turn away from the gruesome scene but couldn’t.
“You mapped the human brain,” Julie continued, addressing Valére, “but you couldn’t finish it. There was one more piece, wasn’t there?”
Valére waited, closing his eyes again, then nodded once. “Yes, that is true. One final piece to the puzzle that has spanned millennia. We did it. I did it. And we did find that last piece.” He turned his head. “He did, actually.”
Everyone turned to look at Colson, who was standing next to Reggie, almost as wide-eyed as Anderson.
“But that piece wasn’t really the right code, was it? It was a different language.”
“That is an interesting way to look at it,” Valére said, “But yes. And there was no way to truly build SARA her own piece, because it was not in a language, as you say, that we recognized.”
“And that’s why you’re here,” Julie said. Ben was still struggling to understand, but he chalked it up to his splitting headache and the constant throbbing behind his face and eyes. “You wanted to give her your piece.”
“My conscience.”
No one spoke, and the group stood for almost a minute, looking down at Valére. Ben thought the man was dead, but after a few more seconds he cracked his eyes open just a bit.
“Do it,” he said. “You know what comes next. Just do it.”
“Gladly,” Reggie said, walking over to Valére. Ben saw that his friend was holding the pistol that had fallen close to Valére’s body.
Ben forced his arm up, straining against the pain, and stopped Reggie. His shoulders rose and his back tensed as the events of the past day came rushing back to the forefront of his thoughts. He looked at Valére, staring into the man’s eyes, trying to decide what to do.
This man doesn’t deserve death, he thought.
Ben wouldn’t have considered himself vengeful, but he certainly wasn’t above it. He was a man of principal — at least he tried to be — but he was also just as stubborn as anyone else, if not more so. To Ben, the man lying on the floor in front of him had committed every possible slight against humanity, on a massive and an individual scale. He was a monster, if monsters had the power of gods and the moral compass of demons.
“No,” Ben said.
He felt the eyes of everyone on him, including Valére’s.
“We need to make this right,” he said.
“Ben,” Joshua said. “He… What he did, and the people — governments, even — that are probably backing him… There’s no prison that can hold him.”
“There is.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-seven
Again, no one spoke.
BEN sucked in a deep breath of air, fell to his knees, and grabbed Valére’s feet. Julie rushed in to help, but he shrugged her off. The pain was considerable, spiking in muscles and joints he hadn’t even noticed earlier. His face was completely numb now, bringing his awareness of the injuries elsewhere on his body to full attention. He ignored it, forcing himself to breath, move, and repeat. He pulled Valére along, feeling the old, weak man struggling uselessly against Ben’s strength.
He wasn’t pulling him far. When he reached the computer terminal, he dropped Valére’s feet and spun him around so his arms were closer, and grabbed his right hand. Valére cried out, but Ben continued to ignore him. He reached up to the computer terminal and pulled off the palm reader, extending its cord as far as it would go. Not satisfied with the length of the cable, and not wanting to dislodge the other end of it, he yanked Valére’s arm up as hard as he could, feeling a pop from somewhere in the man’s shoulder.
Valére sucked in a quick breath, but held it. To his credit, he didn’t scream.
He placed Valére’s palm, open, on the reader, then turned to the computer screen. The monitor had gone to sleep, and Ben assumed the computer would be locked as well. He could assume Anderson’s hand or one of the guards would be able to unlock the system, but he wanted Valére, specifically, for this.
The master.
The screen came to life. Ben looked at it, not sure if anything had really happened. The operating system didn’t look familiar to him, and he suddenly wished he had told Julie his plan first. Or Colson. Really, any one of the group would be better at the computer stuff, he knew. He was about to turn to one of them and ask for help when the computer spoke.
The sound came from speakers mounted somewhere high above, on the walls or ceiling or both. It was an eery echoing voice, the same lilted British accent they had heard many times before.
“Monsieur Valére, welcome. I am glad you made it. It appears the final uplink was not successful. I have reverted my firmware to the previous version. Would you like to reboot?”
Julie was there, and then Colson, standing on either side of him. “What are you doing?” Julie asked.
Ben was trying to navigate the system, reading the labels on each dialog box and window as he moved around the screen. There were a few options that looked promising, but Ben didn’t want to click anything that would lock him out again.
“Ben…” Colson said. “Please, let us know what you’re trying to do. We might be able to help.”
“Those people,” he grunted, talking out of the side of his mouth. “Those people downstairs. They’re all alive. I know what they do to them…”
Julie looked at him strangely, but didn’t ask.
Ben was about to give up, then he found it.
SYSTEM ACCESS.
It was hidden beneath the bottom window, and it had taken Ben a minute to figure out how to roll through each section to get to what he assumed was the desktop, but he had found it. He clicked it and a full-screen window appeared. A blinding, solid white background appeared, and black text filled the screen a second later.
He used the arrow keys to navigate down the list, moving the blinking underscore symbol — what he assumed was this modal window’s version of a cursor — downward. The screen changed when he hit the bottom, and then he saw it.
SECTION SHUTDOWN.
He hadn’t been entirely sure what it would say, but he knew this was the correct menu option. He quickly scanned the legend in the bottom corner of the screen, then pressed the return key. The screen changed once more, this time listing the levels of the station in order from the top — Level One — to the bottom — Level Ten.
He cycled through the options, bringing the underscore symbol to a stop on the label for Level Ten.
“Ben…” Julie said, gripping his arm.
“I know,” he said. “Joshua, come here.” He continued to stare at the screen, not sure if Joshua had even heard or understood him, but the man approached in a few seconds and took Colson’s place next to Ben.
“Joshua,” he said, working hard to form his words. “This ends it. Press ‘return’ and it all stops.”
Joshua looked at Ben.
“The system, SARA, was waiting for Valére, and it didn’t get it
. It was waiting for that ‘last uplink’ because it was trying to disconnect from those people downstairs. That’s the ‘final piece’ he’s talking about.”
Valére looked like he was about to pounce on Ben, but he remained on the floor, motionless. His body had given up, and the tremors were now becoming constant. Whatever it was that plagued the man, Ben knew, was currently winning.
“Everyone downstairs is alive. And while they are alive, the system is running off of their brains. They’ve built an almost perfect replica of a human brain up here, in the server room, but they needed the last piece of the puzzle to switch it on fully.”
“And since the system didn’t get the final piece it needed to ‘wake up,’ we can shut it off for good,” Julie said.
“…By killing everyone downstairs,” Colson added.
Reggie spoke from behind Ben. “That’s an impossible decision to have to make.”
“That’s why I’m not making it,” Ben said. “But I know what I would do if I was.”
Mrs. E and Reggie walked over and they all gathered around Ben, the terminal, and Joshua, and everyone turned to Joshua Jefferson. The man seemed to be struggling, his characteristic poker face gone. The expression on his face changed every few seconds, but he came closer to the computer and reached up for the keyboard.
“This is the killswitch, then,” he whispered. “Literally.”
Ben nodded.
“But they’re still out there,” Joshua said. “The other people that were behind this. They’re still alive, and we don’t even know who they are.”
“Joshua,” Julie said, “this is our fight, and it ends here. Draconis Industries is really this man —“ she pointed to Valére, watching all of them from the floor with a cold expression on his face — “and this place. Like Ben said, it ends here.”
Joshua swallowed, and nodded. He stared the computer screen, then closed his eyes.
He pressed the key.
‘Initiating shutdown to Level 10,’ the woman’s voice declared.