The First Protectors: A Novel

by Godinez Victor

  “No time for pocket pool, man.”

  “No, I’m serious.”

  Ben looked at him a moment, then reached in his pocket and pulled out a metal necklace, a pendant. On the pendant, a winged angel was thrusting a spear at a demon he was holding down with one foot.

  Ben raised an eyebrow at his friend.

  “Saint Michael the Archangel, patron saint of soldiers. SEALs too, I guess. That’s Satan he’s curb-stomping. Mike hasn’t let me down yet.”

  Ben put the pendant in his friend’s hand and Dworsky gripped it tightly.

  He took a deep breath. “Okay, I’m ready. See you on the other side.”

  A sleek metal door slid open, and Ben and the technician walked out. The door hissed shut.

  A handful of techs, VIPs, and Dr. Ying were huddled around three big monitors. One showed a video feed of Dworsky strapped down, another showed his vital signs, and a third was a touchscreen control panel for the EMP generator and injection device. The nanomachines they’d withdrawn from Ben would be deactivated only for a few seconds, so the generator was actually located in the ceiling of the injection room. To protect any electronics outside the room from being fried in the process, the walls and ceiling were coated in a thick layer of lead. The lead even dulled Ben’s heightened senses. It felt like a black hole in the otherwise frenetic galaxy swirling around him.

  Dr. Ying tapped a few keys and leaned toward a microphone.

  “Are you ready, Master Chief?”

  Dworsky nodded. Then he smiled and laughed.

  “I’m ready, Cortana.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t have an Xbox, Dr. Ying? You know, Master Chief? Savior of mankind against the Covenant alien invasion, side-by-side with Cortana, his AI companion? When I made chief, it was pretty much the highlight of my life. Well, until all this mess.”

  “We don’t have time for video games, Master Chief.”

  Dworsky chuckled again.

  “Yeah, I’m not expecting to get a lot of R&R anytime soon. Okay, let’s do this.”

  Dr. Ying nodded to one of her assistants (the team was a nearly even mix of American and Chinese scientists) and he typed out the final sequence.

  A low hum filled the room, although it was more of a roar to Ben’s delicate ears. He could also feel a surge of energy gathering, despite the thick blanket of lead. A pulse of electricity swelled and rushed out. Immediately, a robotic arm unfolded out of the ceiling, like a scorpion’s tail with a metal stinger. On Dworsky’s chest, a red laser cross appeared. The arms of the cross shrank as the syringe approached, converging down to a dot just as the syringe reached his skin. Ben noted that Dworsky’s heart rate was holding nearly perfectly steady. He wasn’t surprised, although the techs were. SEALs were trained to control their emotions in stressful situations. What’s more, the kind of men who became SEALs were naturally able to control their emotions in stressful situations. Even so, Ben could see that Dworsky was tensed, alert. It was as close to nervous as a SEAL would get.

  The mechanical arm inserted the syringe into Dworsky’s chest without hesitation, and Ben could see through a clear window on the side of the syringe as the thick green fluid disappeared down the barrel of the device.

  Dworsky’s body arched upward off the table, like a bow pulled back to launch an arrow. He didn’t scream, but every muscle and tendon clenched. Ben felt odd as well. He was accustomed now to the constant stream of data that flowed across his vision, the rivulets of wireless signals he could literally see over every cellphone, computer, and other piece of technology. But something else was happening now. He felt, almost saw, a flicker of something probing at his mind, a tentative tendril of awareness reaching out. Ben knew immediately it was Dworsky being plugged in and connected as the nanobots meshed their technology with his biology.

  “It’s working,” Ben said to the technicians in the room.

  Most looked confused or didn’t respond at all, but Dr. Ying stood up straight and turned away from the monitors. She stepped directly in front of Ben and looked into his eyes.

  “You can feel him, can’t you? His brain is establishing a connection with yours, yes?”

  “You knew this would happen?”

  “I suspected. Based on your reports, the true value of this technology is in the connections it creates between its users. An instant and constant link. An entire army or city or race wired together, able to move as one when needed, to share their knowledge immediately. Can you talk to him?”

  Ben ignored her now. The sensation was more forceful, tinged with panic, as Eddie struggled to absorb the flood of information pouring into his brain. He was looking for something to steady himself. Ben instinctively responded, providing the anchor his friend needed.

  I’ve got you, buddy. Just hang on. You’ll stabilize in a few moments.

  With a flick of his finger, Ben opened the locked door separating the observation room from the injection room. Eddie was sitting up now, the restraints in tatters, breathing hard, the muscles settling but his gaze unfocused. Ben knew exactly what he was going through. Not just because he had gone through it himself once before, but because he could literally feel it happening to his friend. It was a shared sensation that Ben would not have been able to fully explain. There was no human precedent for this moment. Ben could see through his own eyes, his own senses, but at the same moment he could also see himself through Eddie’s eyes, could feel the already subsiding fear as it was replaced with curiosity and wonder, and could grasp the swirl of data and thought that was coalescing into new knowledge and insight. It was a new awareness of the world and all the secrets it contained, now laying itself bare to his augmented abilities. At the same time, Ben could feel Eddie swimming through his own mind, reading Ben’s calm, seeing that indeed the flow of data was manageable. He could see and feel Ben’s memories of his previous battles with the mrill and their drones, and all the battles he’d fought before then. Eddie felt Ben’s horror at ordering his friends into battle, and truly appreciated for the first time the deep reluctance Ben had felt and still felt at leading this new war.

  All that happened in an instant.

  Now Ben watched as Eddie’s skin turned gray, a silver sheen. The techs filed into the room, huddling and whispering. Dr. Ying, though, strode right up to Eddie and looked him over. She waved a device over his body—radiation detector, Ben and Eddie thought simultaneously—and set it down on the table, apparently satisfied.

  “How do you feel, Master Chief?” she said.

  “Weird. Great. I feel like him,” Eddie said, nodding at Ben.

  She flicked a glance between the two men, and nodded, apparently pleased with his response.

  “Good. Master Chief, please accompany the researchers for full testing. We need to keep going. Time is short. Lieutenant, please bring in Chief Petty Officer Parson and then Petty Officer Marquez.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Parson’s experience was identical to Eddie’s. Ben felt the energy surge, watched the injection arm unfold from the ceiling, and felt Nick’s mind fumble for a handhold. This time, though, both Eddie and Ben reached out to steady Nick, like a pair of tugboats bringing a ship into port. Nick followed the techs out for his testing.

  Marquez settled into the table.

  “So, no sweat, huh?” he said.

  Ben bumped fists with Marquez.

  “Not a drop,” Ben said. “In two minutes, you’ll be a new man. Gonna feel like your brain turned inside out, but I’ll be here and so will the rest of the team. It’s hard to explain, but you’ll know we’re here.”

  “Cool. I always wanted to be a superhero.”

  Ben smiled. “Dude, you’ve already kicked more kinds of ass in your career than Batman ever did. Just relax. After this, the hard work starts.”

  “Will I still be . . . me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Marquez looked up and down Ben’s gray body.

  “Yeah, that. Look, it’s hard to d
escribe what happens inside. But it’s still me. I can see a lot more and, I dunno, sense a lot more. There’s a . . . connection with the world.”

  Ben held out his arms, turning them over.

  “Tell you the truth, the one part of me that’s gone that I really miss are the scars.”

  “Yeah, chicks dig those.”

  “Well, yes. Doesn’t get them to stick around long, though, does it? But what I really mean is that before all this, my body was a mess. But it was a reminder, you know? Where I’d been, what I’d done, what I . . . what I sacrificed. I can remember every scar, could draw them right now with my eyes closed. Sometimes I think I can still feel them. But they’re gone.”

  Marquez looked at him quizzically.

  “Look, you’ll be fine,” Ben said, snapping out of his reverie. “You think the ladies couldn’t get enough of you, wait ’til they see the all-new you.”

  Marquez laughed.

  “That’s what I’m talking about. Let’s roll.”

  The techs keyed in the commands and Ben felt the now-familiar surge of energy, like a mental vacuum sucking him in and then blasting him out as the electromagnetic pulse exploded invisibly through the nano material. He absently ran his hands over his forearms, his fingers gliding over the perfectly smooth, perfectly healed segments that had once been twisted chunks of scar tissue. He drifted inside his own memories as he waited for Marquez’s mental link to open up.

  Inside the mechanical arm in the transfusion chamber sat a small fragment of metal, a shaving left over from the frantic machining process. The fabricators in Boston had missed it during their harried inspection process before shipping the arm to Colorado. It was nestled in a safe spot, but each movement of the arm nudged the fleck of titanium toward the gears. This time, as the arm extended, the shaving tumbled into the gears and was swallowed by their teeth. Deep inside the small, intricate cogs, the shaving, a whisper of an ounce, congealed between two of the gears. For a moment, maybe a second, the arm froze, and then the mechanism ripped through the metal shaving and continued its plunge. Dr. Ying, examining a readout of Eddie’s initial testing, didn’t notice the pause. Ben was distracted, mentally communicating with his other teammates, each testing their new abilities and moving through a battery of tests. The technician in charge of the arm frowned, opened his mouth, closed it, and then opened it again and spoke just as the syringe pierced Marquez’s skin. “Dr. Ying . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I think there might have been a . . .”

  Everyone froze at the sound of Marquez’s scream.

  On the video monitor they could see him thrashing in his restraints, every limb lunging in a different direction, the metal bands cutting into his skin. He was still screaming. Now his skin began to undulate, ridges and seams appearing and disappearing while the color of his skin cycled, chameleon-like, though gray, brown, and various shades of green.

  While the screams pouring from his throat could be heard by everyone in the room, only Ben could hear the loudest cries, a mental shriek pouring out of Diego’s mind into his own. Machine-gun blasts of raw pain, alternately broadcasting at full volume and then complete silence. Each shriek that made it through was like a fishhook in Ben’s mind that pierced and yanked. He felt like his skull would explode with Diego’s misery. Alarms were now sounding in the observation room, sirens and strobe lights accentuating the throbbing terror and agony pounding in Ben’s mind. Ben clutched his head and slumped against a wall, incapacitated and overwhelmed.

  Dr. Ying elbowed one of the techs out of the way and cycled through the procedural log with a flick on the touchscreen, her fingers dancing as everyone else froze. The malfunction was immediately apparent. She swore in Mandarin and turned to an American technician standing, dumbfounded and terrified, by another console in the corner.

  “Activate the incinerator,” she ordered.

  “Wha, what?” he replied.

  “You heard me. Now.”

  Ben heard enough of this exchange to open his eyes and face Dr. Ying. “What are you doing?”

  “Some kind of malfunction in the arm. It delayed the injection by a second or two and some of the nanoparticles reactivated and reverted to their original programmed state. Others did not. Now the two batches are at war with each other inside Petty Officer Marquez’s body. He will not survive.”

  She didn’t look up as she entered the command codes to activate the incineration process.

  The screaming in Ben’s head was louder now. He tried to reach out to Diego to steady him, offer something, anything. But like a drowning man consumed with panic will thrash and strike even his rescuers, Diego’s mind was overwhelmed and terrified. It lashed out like a bullwhip, and Ben could not reach him.

  “Maybe he’ll fight this off?”

  “No. His body is being consumed by the battle. It is destroying him. We must activate the incinerators, for his protection and ours.”

  On the screen, everyone could see that Diego’s body appeared to be melting. His skin was torn open and peeled back, and rivers of green and gray fluid oozed and spattered out. Some of the fissures closed, as one group of nanobots tried to repair his body, but new wounds appeared faster than the previous ones could be sewn shut. Larger canyons now opened in his torso; thick red blood, almost black, bubbled out. A silver metallic tentacle snaked through the gore, trying to vacuum it up and return it to his body, but a larger green worm rolled over the silver thread and devoured it.

  Ben tried to speak, but the assault on his senses was overpowering. He sank to his knees.

  “Activate the incinerator!” Dr. Ying yelled, her composure slipping. The technician, who had to enter his code before the process could activate, glanced at Ben, who wanted to protest, but could only groan in mental anguish. “Now!”

  The terrified technician keyed in the instructions, his fingers mistyping, and the incinerator remained cold. The nanobots were now pouring out of Diego’s body, consuming the restraints and table. They were enlisting reinforcements, converting any nearby matter to additional nanomachines, just as their cousins had done at Saint Petersburg. They were eating, rebuilding, and reprogramming the atoms and molecules of the table, restraints, and anything else they could touch—even the air in the room—into more nanobots. The temperature in the chamber soared 20 degrees in 10 seconds, then 20 degrees more, the molecular reactions releasing a torrent of heat, miniature weapons factories cranking at maximum production. The clumsy tech hadn’t recognized his error and was babbling about a clogged fuel line. Dr. Ying shoved him aside and reached under her collar and yanked out a chain with a red metal key. She flipped up a plastic shield covering a key slot on the wall and inserted the key.

  “Stop. Please, stop,” Ben said, struggling to his feet, one hand holding the wall and the other his head. “Please.”

  Without a word, Dr. Ying turned the key, activating a final failsafe. On the video screen, Diego’s physical form was almost unrecognizable, a lumpen, writhing mass that had all but liquefied. The table was disintegrating beneath him, and puddles of steaming material were eating through the floor as thick black clouds of smoke filled the space. The temperature gauge read 153 degrees Fahrenheit and rising. The audible cries had ceased—Diego had no functioning mouth anymore—but the mental siren continued, shrieking at uneven intervals, ricocheting through Ben’s mind like a terrified bullet. Ben pounded on the metal door, his hardened fist denting the thick steel with each strike. The collisions rang through the room like a bell.

  The ceiling in Diego’s room seemed to collapse as seven funnels of what looked like reddish-brown dirt poured into the room. Ben recognized it immediately. Thermate. A military-grade incendiary compound that burned at more than 4,500 degrees, one of the hottest man-made burns short of a nuclear bomb. A combination of iron oxide, aluminum, and other chemicals, it was fierce enough to turn the steel room into molten goo and, presumably, incinerate the raging nanomachines. A white-hot magnesium rod shot into the room, the igni
tion source for the material, which the nanobots were already trying to eat.

  All became one giant flame.

  The material didn’t burn. It rioted. Fire stormed through the room like a caged demon, raw heat obliterating the man-made sensors and cameras, liquefying and then vaporizing everything it touched in incandescent fury. The monitors in the observation room went dark, bereft of data. But Ben’s senses endured. He could feel the fleeting terror, pain, and then agonizing relief that flooded through the remnants of Diego’s mind in the split second before his remaining physical form was turned to ash. With a final scream, both man and machines were extinguished in the furnace. The chemical reaction had to take its course. Even if the room were flooded with water, the substance would burn unimpeded as it generated its own oxygen.

  So the bodies burned.

  And burned.

  And burned.

  The technicians and Dr. Ying had backed to the far side of the observation room, as heat was radiating even through the two-foot-thick walls. Ben didn’t move. The silence was, if anything, even more excruciating. The flames in the injection room were finally settling down, but Ben knew the temperatures had permanently sealed the facility, melting the door into its frame. It was now a sarcophagus, buried in the mountain, sealed more effectively and eternally than any pharaoh. Diego was in there; all the particles that had once been a man now twisted and embedded into the remains of an alien technology that had been designed for Ben. Ben had killed his friend. He had poisoned him with the nanomachines, inflicted on Diego inhuman suffering, and then mutilated his remains. There would be no burial. No final goodbye with family or visitations with the body. There would be only this sealed room, both empty and full, locked and dark and unvisited as long as the world itself existed. Ben had killed his friend. He felt like his body would collapse under the pressure, praying it would.

  He wept openly, the grief too much to bear, and he wished that this room, too, would be filled with fire and finality.

  Then a small sensation coursed through his mind like a soft breeze. Eddie and Nick, no less aware of Diego’s death, reached out to Ben in the dark and gave what comfort they had. There were no words, no persuasion. Just comradery. Knowledge that Ben was not alone. That, whatever else, he did not have to shoulder the burden alone. And the sealed room wasn’t the end of their journey. Diego would have insisted they go on, and would have expected nothing less. Their silent companionship wasn’t much. It was certainly no match for the sealed room, but it was enough . . . for now.