Gods & Legionnaires (Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Book 2)

by Jason Anspach

  flight. Including the dual killers of starvation and boredom.

  “It was at about that time that you, of all people, one of the elite of the elite, decided to try to take control of the ship by joining up with the cultists. Or the resisters, as they called themselves.”

  A needle inside Crometheus’s mind switches fear of voodoo surgery over to fear of execution by vivisection. Like someone randomly switched on the light in a dark room revealing that was an actual option.

  “But that’s why you’re like us,” continues Lusypher. “In the absence of real leadership, you reverted to what makes you an elite. Just like the rest of us. You’re smarter. Faster. And better equipped to lead. You saw an opportunity and took it. And that’s why we’ve spent all this time rehabilitating you instead of flinging you from the Tarpeian Rock that is the Southern Cliff as an example to all the lessers.

  “But that’s all, as they say, ancient history. It’s been forever since those days. You chose a new name when you took the next step along the Path and joined us. When you shed. The first time. You remember that, son… that was part of the protocol. You must remember that, and the Abyssatrol should make it easier to access those memories in the next few minutes. Leaving behind the old names. Choosing new tags by which we would be known… and one day… worshipped. The vision of the Path, as it was originally intended, restored. The heresies of Anubis purged. Calories… no longer an issue now that we’d left our bodies.”

  Things within the monitor that is his vision are coming into focus. He can see himself now. Or what he truly is… now. And he wants to scream. Wants to go stark raving void-mad right there when he sees what is left of himself.

  Calories… no longer a problem now that we’d left our bodies.

  “Once we jacked into the neural net of the Pantheon, became it in effect by giving up those ever-greedy, ever-needy calorie-hungry bodies,” says Lusypher, “it was amazing what we didn’t need anymore. What we were free to create with when we were no longer burdened by needs. We could focus, son, on what was important. We could focus on the big things. The wants. Grand-scale thinking. It’s been this way for hundreds of years. Now we’re just bringing you back to the starting point to show you how far we’ve come once again. We’re showing you how it all began, and how you arrived here, now, at deck sixty-six, a member of the Eternals.” Lusypher’s voice is soft and gentle. Reassuring. Like he’s talking someone down off a ledge. Stating the facts to a madman to get him to calm down and see reason. “You’ve been here before, Crometheus. You just forgot that this is how it is. Because that’s the problem with the Xanadu Tower and all the lives we’ve lived inside the augmented reality of the Pantheon… we’ve forgotten what we’ve become, son. We’ve forgotten that first real shedding when we sacrificed our bodies so that we could go on. So that we could become.”

  Commander Zero steps into frame.

  The Abyssatrol won’t let him scream. He wants to. Knows he needs to. Knows he isn’t just falling down into some deep well of madness, but rather a bottomless pit of insanity he’ll never find the end to. He’ll just fall forever, stark raving mad.

  But some overwhelming ambivalence keeps shutting down that circuit within his brain that wants to scream endlessly at what he’s seeing now in the monitor. What he became long ago after the enhanced interrogation cell. After the pit.

  Lying there on the surgery table.

  He is a pulsing, quivering… brain.

  Him.

  Nothing more.

  What have I done to myself? he tries to shriek… and can’t. Because he has no mouth. Which makes things even more horrible than could ever have previously been imagined.

  “We’ve all been through…”

  Lusypher pauses.

  “Through exactly what you’re going through right now, son. You’ve been through it before. Hundreds of years ago. The fact that we cut away our bodies in order to reduce the need for caloric intake is a known thing. But it’s also a purposefully forgotten thing. Our lives are so full and rich inside the Pantheon that we keep forgetting we’re just brains hooked up to racks in the most secure chambers of the ship. Or hidden behind the combat armor we’re interfacing with. We keep forgetting… that this is reality. Except we know it all along. Create hidden places where the truth is buried. Your arcade. The swamp. Those places are where you keep the deep secrets, son.”

  For a long time Crometheus watches with silent horror, his brain on the monitor. Doing nothing but pulsing and quivering.

  “After the failures of the cryo decks,” continues Lusypher, “we started consuming our fellow Uplifted adherents. For calories. We did that before the shedding and then took a suite of PTSD-purposed drugs to forget what we’d done. Of course there were side effects; there always are. With every pill, there’s a poison. And when even that… food… ran out, we were down to nothing because there were no fabled storage vaults full of endless pre-packaged food that could have carried us through lifetimes like some were saying back then. There was nothing. No Seven Cities of MREs. There were some. But not enough, not by a long shot. Not for a complement of close to forty thousand human bodies all dying and fighting to be fed. And perfectly willing to eat each other regardless of station or status.

  “But then we stumbled on a brilliant plan down in the labs. And it was this, son. Just think… what if you got rid of everything you didn’t really need to survive? Stripped it all down to just the brain. A brain jacked into a machine that can make it think it’s a person, or several persons, all with any body it wishes, every life it ever imagined. Then what use was a meat bag called a body? Enough protein could be manufactured to keep everyone minimally alive if everyone were just brain. Reach the next world and we could find more protein while living wonderful lives inside the Pantheon’s simulations. Lives where we were the hero, the lover, the gambler who always won. So, as I’ve said… you’ve been through all that before, Crometheus. This is nothing new. You just forgot.”

  Medical machines buzz while the robot surgeons power up on dull hums and sub-aural whines. Like mosquitos in the jungle night.

  “Now it’s time for the next phase of the Uplift, son. And I’m glad you’ve made it this far,” says Lusypher. Stepping once more into frame.

  Crometheus’s mind is still shrieking. Shrieking that he is just a brain. Except it only wants to shriek. The Abyssatrol won’t let him actually shriek himself ragged. Still, he cut away his own body. A body that rocked seventy thousand on a summer night and made love to some unremembered girl who got brought backstage after almost every show. An incalculable number of backstage groupies in every city and town he ever played.

  He once touched, and was touched.

  He ate the finest foods. Felt the wind in his spiky blond hair as the hog beneath him blasted out across the desert at golden dawn with Holly Wood’s slender tanned arms wrapped around his thin muscled waist.

  None of that… will ever happen again.

  Lusypher’s face is right down next to his… brain. Whispering the truth he needs to believe.

  “We had to do it. You… had to do it if we were going to make it this far.”

  He… Crometheus. He did this to himself.

  “This is the next phase, son. We aren’t inside the simulation of the Pantheon anymore. This is my new body, Crometheus. It’s real. And it’s time. Time for you to get yours. Time to upgrade.”

  Commander Zero leans into frame within the monitor.

  “Perk of being an Eternal, Crometheus. We’re the first to try out the new chassis. Welcome to the next step along the Path.”

  Gods: Chapter Twenty-Two

  Crometheus could hear…

  A heartbeat monitor. Steady and sure. Beneath his fingers, which was the first thing he could feel… with… he felt the sheets of the bed he was lying in.

  His fingers?

  The sheet was rough. Almost un
pleasant. But it was real, and in that instant he realized everything he’d felt since the shedding… all of everything in all those lives inside the simulation… had been false on some level compared to what he was experiencing right now.

  Like the old VR worlds of first-era video games. Fun and amazing… but still very much distant from actual real reality. And when you really thought about it, after the fact, a lot less was offered than real actual life gave you on the average daily basis. Even the ancient VR color palettes had paled in comparison to any real day in real life.

  This feeling of the sheet beneath his fingers was like that realness of real life as it had been long ago before the shedding. Real. Even in its starched and scratchy unpleasantness. It was real.

  “They’ve done it,” was Crometheus’s first thought. “They’ve found a way to put us back in our bodies again. Found a way to do what we had to give up for eternal life. And survival.”

  “Not completely correct,” intoned Maestro within the vast empty and very pleasant space of Crometheus’s mind. Just as the voice of the AI had always been since the shedding. Since the mysterious super-intelligent AI had come forward to administer the colony ship Pantheon so that it might make it beyond its present difficulties back then. And in time, the AI would run the Pantheon itself. “But close enough, Master Cro. Since the Eternals deal in… reality… shall we say… to be perfectly correct… it’s not your old body they’ve put you back into, but a completely brand-new, vat-grown… model, they’ve ‘put you back into.’ Designed with the latest enhancements and technology. Your original body was reclaimed for the greater good during flight between Cappella Three and Saurus Six. To be specific. Generally speaking. We needed the old meat bag for calories if we were going to make it. For the greater good and all. You know how those things go.”

  Maestro was still in his head. But the body he was beginning to feel with, the body resting on a rather hard bed and rough sheets… was real. As real as his body had been back during the rock god glory days of past Earth. And it felt. It could feel. There was no numbness, or pain, or anything like all the old injuries and bad health that had preceded the rejuvenation and longevity treatments they had taken during the early years on the Pantheon when they’d made fantastic medical leaps while hauling through sublight for their future utopia.

  He’d been made “young” again. He had been a youth back then, too, for all practical purposes, but nothing in those treatments had ever made him feel like this. Nothing. And of course when they’d all begun to starve out there in the stellar dark, well then, young bodies, no matter how they felt, had to go if they were to survive.

  Calories.

  But…

  Feeling, really feeling something, being able to touch it… was simply fantastic.

  Wonder sprang anew with each new second of rediscovered sensation. Yet for some reason Crometheus couldn’t yet see. Not at all. He felt his physical eyes, the eyelids, actually opening. Then closing. Blinking. But he could see nothing.

  “I can tell from your movements, Master Crometheus, that you are attempting to use your vision capabilities,” noted Maestro. “Those upgrades are currently offline due to a suite of neural blockers we’ve put in place. We didn’t want to overload your brain with too much all at once. If you’re ready to see I can restore version. Would you like to see now?”

  “Yes,” whispered Crometheus breathily.

  “All right then… I’m flooding your optical nerves and interfaces with antimorph first to remove the barriers. Then… here it comes. It should take just a few seconds. I encourage you to understand that what has taken places is to be considered an upgrade over your initial visual perception system. There have been reports of some side effects, but over the long term the system will stabilize and you’ll get used to it. Plus we’ll be able to upgrade as we go. I’m most sure of it. Ah… what do you see now?”

  At first all Crometheus could see were clouds. Mist shifting across his field of vision. It made him feel like he was back in the swamp with Jim Stepp. Following a brush-laden trail that swallowed itself along sandy courses where the air was cool and there were small unseen insects constantly buzzing. But all that had taken places inside the simulated worlds of the Pantheon. Inside his personal secret reality, locked away from the main and for his mind only. The Persistent Contrived Realities Project, or what they’d come to substitute for reality for hundreds of years, or however long they’d been out there in deep space, aboard the colony ship Pantheon at a sub-light crawl between worlds, had been their only experience. But now he was hearing. Really hearing noise. With ears. His ears. He could tell the difference. It wasn’t just some comm channel that was all too clear, sound designed and layered for the perfect more-than-lifelike experience every time. This was real. And though it was sound, it could be… felt. That’s how real it was.

  He could tell from what he was hearing that he was in some kind of room with medical equipment constantly beeping and humming. Ticking and pulsing. Inhaling and exhaling. Even the small chitter of computers processing data and uploading it to some external monitoring system, a sound so small it could be ignored by even the subconscious, he heard it. And the hearing of it was like some small but necessary part of a grand symphony. To him.

  He saw his HUD as the mist cleared from his vision. His in-game HUD. It wasn’t just part of the armor he was wearing, or the piece of equipment he was flying or riding in… it was interfaced with his actual mind. A message flashed front and center. It was a menu screen regarding Hearing Sensory System Management.

  The menu was asking him if he’d like to increase his hearing to local surroundings radar-level detection level, or remain at normal Uplifted range. There were other menus that included such options as explosives diagnostic, detection source, and tracking identification. And even Animal Heartbeat Pulse Measurement for Interrogation Procedures.

  “Why am I still seeing… the heads-up display?”

  “Ah!” erupted Maestro. “The HUD. Of course, that’s what most ask once you get a look with your new eyes. Well, not to worry, young Master Cro, you can disable that when you’re not serving in combat operations. But the HUD is now a part of your brain instead of being dedicated to the particular system or chassis you were operating. Through your HUD you will be able to manage equipment and armor systems; it syncs in seconds. Or manage your own life systems. For instance, this is a fun one. Let me take control for a second…”

  A series of menus raced across Crometheus’s HUD. Fast. Like shooting-star fast. Menus and options were clicked off or on. Parameters set. Things opened and closed in sudden frenetic blurs in which something must’ve been accomplished by the super-genius-level artificial intelligence known as Maestro.

  “Don’t worry, with time you’ll get faster at working through your own interface. Though not as fast as me. I designed the system, so I know my way around quite handily, Master Cro.”

  Silence as more menus popped up and disappeared.

  Then finally…

  “You can play dead!” said Maestro.

  The heart monitor within the medical suite flatlined all of a sudden. Crometheus felt his heart just… stop. He freaked out as he heard his blood pushing lethargically through his arteries like junky sludge before coming to a standstill.

  He was dying. That much was clear.

  No… he was already dead.

  He couldn’t move a muscle and he felt nothing.

  “Don’t worry, young master,” whispered Maestro as though the two of them were hiding from some giant prowler in a game of lethal hide-and-seek. “You have a small backup battery inside you that can provide emergency power and bare minimum life support for up to thirty-six hours. But to the outside galaxy… to all appearances you are dead and so would appear to any human… er, rather, Animal soldiers. Even their medical personnel. In reality you can restart your life systems by accessing this menu…”
<
br />   A menu popped up inside Crometheus’s HUD.

  “Just click reboot.”

  Crometheus thought about clicking reboot. And within the HUD’s ghostly blue menu, he did.

  At once his heart began to pump and his blood resumed its flow. Feeling came back to his extremities. A thousand pins and needles overwhelmed him all at once.

  “We designed this function for infiltration operations during the asymmetrical phases of our coming campaigns against the Animals across all their worlds. Imagine, Master Cro, the Animals thinking they’ve achieved a great victory. They defeated us in battle, leaving our beaten new bodies on the field, unguarded. Some of those they thought dead are brought within their defenses for study; others are left unsupervised as nothing more than corpses. And within hours those Uplifted marines left for dead are running around behind enemy lines as the opposing force presses on toward some new perceived objective we’re leading them toward. A trap, or an ambush. Meanwhile our ‘dead’ are destroying command and communication elements and generally slaughtering the defenseless and wounded often found behind enemy lines. Isn’t that glorious, my boy? Mass extermination with minimal resistance parameters! It’s complete genocide!”

  Crometheus coughed as his lungs began to breathe once more.

  He’d never thought about breathing. Not in all those years inside the Pantheon. And maybe the shedding process had removed his focus on such an activity now that it had no longer been needed. But here he was… breathing. He could do nothing but continue to marvel at the rise and fall of his own chest. It was an alien thing, and each time it began again he wondered if it would repeat the next time.

  And it did just that.

  Again, and again.

  Amazing. The act of breathing was stunning when you really noticed it. It’s just that you never really stopped to think about it much.

  The horror of that long-ago moment when they skinned his mind of his old body faded like some bad dream best forgotten in the golden light of a new summer morning. That moment after he’d been caught and tortured, and then watched as his mind was broken… when they gave him the privilege of undergoing the shedding. And it had been a privilege. Those who did went on to survive. To go on he would have to let go… of his body.