Anything is better than Li Wang.
Anything is better than dying knowing that I failed.
“Maximum smoke output,” I say to the Chimera Cube, my voice almost as strained as the muscles in my legs. This command happens to be one specifically programmed into it according to the hundreds of pages of information I have on it in my backpack. There is some numeric quantity to how much particles of potassium chlorate and lactate are reacted to form the smoke, but I’ve never been much of a numbers guy unless it involves money.
All I know is that it produces a fuck-ton of smoke (yes, this is a scientific term, I promise), and that’s all I need for the job to get done.
My vision is soon clouded by the harmless gas as well as nearly every inch of space in the entire dome of the capitol building. Now it will be nearly impossible for any of the imperial guards to fire at me or the drones above.
I just need to break myself out.
“Impossible knife.” I say the stupid namesake my dad came up for the weapon that has a blade that can cut through any material effortlessly. The synthetic material is multiple times stronger than diamond and hundreds of times lighter.
It is the one thing guaranteed to slash through these chains.
Then I will have to survive the fall to the ground.
I gulp, not hesitating once the Chimera Cube opens up inside the backpack to grab the knife from the air right as it is formed. I double-tap the cube, a green wave of light flooding over it as the knife becomes a permanent object in this world. Then I zip up the backpack, not wanting the cube to tumble out of the bag during my fall.
“Ya!” I scream, the energy exuding from me so powerful that I can’t help but let it come out of all parts of my body. I slash the knife through the chain shackled to my right ankle. The blade cuts through the metal as if it is tissue paper, causing the long metal chain to swing back down into the heavy cloud of smoke that is slowly dissipating as more and more molecules diffuse out into the night sky.
With the intense force of the chain pulling against the right side of my body gone, I feel the greatest sense of relief. The pain of every nerve ending in my legs stretching to the point of snapping fades as each of my muscles that isn’t already ripped to shreds flexes instinctively. My legs feel like two giant sticks of gelatin, and I’d be surprised if I didn’t somehow elongate my bones during that painful process and grow a few inches taller.
But that joyous moment of the unbearable pain fleeting turns into a much different sensation. Now I feel my body falling to the ground, and the fall doesn’t last long. The second after my stomach drops from my body, the other chain shackling my right leg tugs me in its direction with the same force by which both chains resisted each other.
With nothing to combat its powerful force, I find myself flying in a haphazard motion as the force of gravity pulls me downward and the force of the chain endlessly tugs me to the side. I have no idea where I am headed, but in a few seconds I will find out, likely with my feet being torn off by the large metal blades of a terrifying machine.
I decide I don’t want to find out what that fate might be.
That decision requires me using all the strength left in my strained, underdeveloped abdominal muscles to jerk my arm holding the knife upward and slice the chain off.
My desperate move works.
And with nothing to hold me up against the pull of gravity, my body falls both to the side and downward as the momentum of my body carries me on a collision course with the granite below.
Landing feet first with my speed would be a jarring collision, but the only part of my body that is close to hitting the ground is my head. And when the force of gravity finally has nowhere else to pull me, that’s exactly what happens.
Every curse word in the dictionary crosses my mind along with a new wave of blistering pain. The ringing in my ears from the shattered glass feels tame in comparison to the violent buzzing sensation in my head. All the blood in my body seems to swathe my brain at once as my brain bumps against my skull from the force of my fall.
I managed to hold on to the Chimera Cube even during that terrible fall through the smoky coliseum, but the impossible knife is far out of my reach. Even if I could slice someone in front of me in half with it, it wouldn’t matter.
My body is glued to the floor as a wave of blackness overcomes me. I force open my eyes, my heart racing as I do everything I can to maintain my consciousness. I fight through the pain and the overwhelming urge to succumb to the blackness and use the determination to save the lives of my friends to keep me going.
But my body is in shock.
No matter what I do, I can’t move.
My legs are practically dead by this point and my brain is totally shot. The only thing I feel is the strange buzzing sensation in my head and the world spinning around me, all the smoke in the air coming together into one massive spiral.
I want to scream, but my body has stopped listening to my mind. It is in a world of its own. It’s dead.
I need to get Jake out of those chains, I need to save Ai.
I feel another wave of blackness overcome me; the feeling is similar to that of a massive tidal wave crashing over my mind that has the ability to drown me in a second. Resisting the pressure is the hardest thing I have ever done, but knowing that Jake is going through an even worse pain keeps me pushing.
I win over the darkness.
I turn my head to the side, and I see a casket covered in feces with glass littering the gray and black speckled floor. The shards of glass blend in perfectly with the white crystals intermixed into the floor.
Seeing that sight seems to finally snap my body into action. I push myself off the ground, clutching the backpack in my hand, preparing to deliver a command to it that will save everything.
But the pounding in my head is worse than a jackhammer drilling into my skull. The pain is so intense that I can’t breathe, my lungs having to gasp for air every few moments.
I fully regain my balance and stand up straight. I feel a massive rush of blood to my head. This time I know I won’t be able to fight it off. This time I know when I hit the floor, I will be knocked out.
Then Li can do whatever he wants with me.
A large box enters from the cloud of smoke that is almost gone. I still can’t hear anything above the ringing in my ears, but I can now see the dozens of imperial soldiers that are lying dead on the ground.
The large wooden box is being held in by the claws of a large drone that hovers in the air just above it. The way its blue light blinks when it recognizes my face almost seems to say hello.
I have no idea what this drone is here for.
I have no idea why this box is here.
But I can’t stop myself from stepping forward. I pull open the wooden door on the box. The light blinks again on the large, purple-colored machine. It likes what I’m doing.
I take another step forward inside it, finally getting the idea about what this is here for.
The box is about six feet high and has air holes in it at the top. The box is built to transport a human. The box is built to transport me.
I look back up at the gold in the dome dozens of feet in the air. Jake and Ai are nowhere to be found. Even the clone of President Li is dead, his body hanging off the crane with the layers of smoke floating around him.
This is my only chance at living.
Thousands of soldiers will be on the way in seconds. The Chinese military will already be in the sky searching for me.
I let my entire body enter the small confines of the box, and as soon as I am inside, I shut the door behind me.
The second the lock clicks into place, the drone uses its claws to pull the box upward. The ringing in my ears blocks any noise coming from the chaos outside. All I can feel is the box pulling me upward.
I have no clue if what I did will kill me or save my life. I have no idea where I am headed. This might be the dumbest decision of my life.
I might be hovering through the
air to my grave.
Chapter 4
This is more traumatic than the chains.
A Chinese military aircraft can shoot me down at any moment. With every breath I take, I’m not sure if I will find myself becoming an explosive fireball in the sky or if I will continue to use the lease on life this drone gave me. Outside the box, I can hear the echo of multiple bullets being shot through the night along with missiles exploding. I’m just happy I don’t have to see any of the destruction. With the suffocating blackness of the box making it difficult to see even a few inches in front of me, at least I have comfort in being completely ignorant as to whether an alien attack is taking place right now or the United States government is making a siege on the Chinese capitol building.
Both are unlikely.
But then again things have progressed way past the point of conventional wisdom. The only thought that keeps crossing my mind is that this is all one elaborate trap. President Li doesn’t want to just kill me in one grand show of power. He wants to drag this out, make me feel like a mouse being chased by a tiger until finally I collapse from exhaustion.
That point is coming soon.
I collapse to the floor, my legs unable to take any more pressure as I gasp for air. The pounding sensation in my head has not let up since the moment I fell headfirst onto the ground, and it distorts each sound and sensation I process from the outside world. I feel like I’m about to burst into tears. Actually, that’s a lie—this is really embarrassing, but at the moment I am crying.
It’s not tears of sorry or misery.
It’s a terror so intense that my body has no idea how to express it except let it effuse out of my eyes and pump to the rest of my body through my arteries. I have no idea where I’m headed. I have no idea if Jake and Ai are alive being carried by drones identical to mine or whether they are already dead. The only thing that I know for sure is that with every passing second the drone only pulls this box higher and faster through the night sky.
But I know it’s not taking me on this stomach-turning roller coaster ride to the clouds for fun. This thing has an agenda.
“Please, let it be aliens.” I cough. The pain from the minute shards of glass still digging into my flesh is becoming unbearable. Blood is dripping down my face, coating my eyelids, and forming another stream of tears that land on my lips.
The heavy, metallic taste to the blood is somehow satisfying, but the agony shooting up from my legs and lower back quickly makes any satisfaction I get from tasting my blood negligible.
My head is about to explode.
I am thrown to one end of the box, the tiny shard of glass that falls off my cheek and onto my hand only adding insult to the brutal sensation that occurs when my legs are slammed against the firm wall of the box. I’m lucky I’m not dead. I’m lucky I haven’t blacked out from the pain.
If it were me thinking about my own self, I would be gone.
My will to live isn’t this strong. I would have let the chains rip my legs apart and tear apart my life for good. I would have succumbed to the pain, the torture too great to continue.
But one thought keeps echoing incessantly in my mind. They are the words of President Li Wang, and with each one of his words that echoes in my head, a blinding pain courses through my spine and travels to every part of my brain. He has a plan that will kill hundreds of millions in this country. He has a research station in the East China Sea that will cause a massive earthquake to rock the eastern seaboard of China.
And I don’t care what it takes—I have to stop him.
I have to use the power of the Chimera Cube to destroy him, so that he can’t ever use this divine technology to cause more pain than any other human being in history.
My life is about more than just me.
I suppose it always was. Heck, all our lives are about more than just us. But now I finally realize how crucial my position in this world is. Now I realize that if I fail, the future of humanity will.
And that’s the only thing that keeps me going. Sometimes it’s the things in life that are bigger than just me, bigger than anything that I can imagine, that allow me to grow into a man I never thought I could be.
I now know who that man needs to be.
I need to rule the world.
But that reality feels farther out of reach than it ever has been. That reality feels like it will never come true because this pain won’t ever leave. Even thinking about it brings so much pain to my mind, whose internal system feels like it’s on fire, each of my neurons firing in a wild manner.
My mind is out of sync—the only thing it wants is to be absorbed in the same blackness that infests every square inch of this box.
I need to get out of this box.
I take out the Chimera Cube from my backpack. I place my palm on the cube, the gorgeous white exterior lighting up at my touch. I take a deep breath, the command that I have had to utter to save my life numerous times by now stuck on the tip of my tongue.
“Exterior wound repair.” The words finally escape me. My voice is airy, my lungs feeling suffocated by the damp, hot air inside of the box. The dozens of holes poked into the top of the box aren’t the best at ventilation, but having a sufficient amount of oxygen is the least amount of my worries at the moment.
My bigger problem is hoping that the wind swaying this box back and forth doesn’t knock me out from the grip of the drone.
I double-tap the cube after I say the command, even though the medical nanobots that descend upon my body are one of the very few commands in the Chimera Cube automatically programmed to deconstruct. Once they scan a radius of twenty feet from their launch point and heal all exterior tissue in sight, the robots immediately return through tiny pores in the cube to their home inside the nanofabrication system.
The cube lights up green, the color one of the richest I have seen with its full intensity easily seen from inside the dark box. A surge of adrenaline courses through me the moment the wave of heat touches my skin. The box opens up, revealing the system of chips and flashing lights that make up the nanofabrication system inside.
The nanobots then swarm my face. An odd tingling sensation overcomes me as I feel what normally would be a biological process of healing that would span weeks take mere seconds due to the artificial boost from the nanobots. They automatically analyze my DNA strands and pump out the exact match of my existing skin cells at the blink of an eye. The billions of supercomputers that invade every pore in my face work in tandem to easily map out the problem areas on my exposed skin and heal it within seconds.
It’s such an amazing process that it is nothing short of magic. If I showed this to most people, they would denounce this as witchcraft, saying that no machine can ever do what this thing can do so easily. What they don’t realize is that sufficiently advanced technologies are indistinguishable from magic, but every power has a dark side.
Reading the hundreds of pages of patents and notes from the Protocol 00 research showed me the dark side. And just the thoughts of everything that could go wrong are enough to keep me tossing and turning with nightmares for the rest of my life.
I will never let the dark side out. I will destroy this thing before that happens.
Today, I am very thankful for its good side, though. It heals my face, alleviating me from the terrible stinging sensation that plagued me moments ago. No more blood is dripping down my face. Even the glass shards were eliminated from my wounds. The only thing that still adorns my skin is a coat of dry blood that takes no more than a second to wipe off with a wet towel.
The flood of endorphins and dopamine in my brain make me feel weightless for a moment. The high each time I use this technology is always so intense that I enter a power trip that takes me to a new dimension.
I have to remind myself before banging on the side of this box to try and get out that I still have another entire part of my body to heal.
Now, onto my legs and head.
“Interior wound repair.” I tap the c
ube, the blue wave of light that always washes over it after initially delivering a command making me feel like I have the power of the ocean at my fingertips. And that’s because I do.
The Chimera Cube is automatically programmed to process requests that aren’t exact commands programmed into it and use its machine-learning algorithm to decipher what someone wants. However, the only way to get the nanobots to heal internal wounds is to say something about an interior wound.
Delivering the command the way I do triggers the nanofabrication system to produce a syringe with a clear liquid inside it. I snatch the syringe from the air and unzip both my wingsuit and bullet-proof armor so that I can drive the syringe directly into one of my veins.
I’m far from a pro at this, but enough desperation and enough insanity coalesce to give me the courage to hold my left arm still against the wall. Then, I use my dominant hand to drive the syringe into one of the bulging veins in my skinny arm.
At first the blood seeps out of my skin, which even though I’m not a doctor seems like a really bad sign. But I can feel the liquid shooting into my vein. It only takes seconds for the billions of nanobots to circulate through my bloodstream. Not only will they hopefully work to repair the torn muscle fibers and tendons in my legs, but they are also programmed to detect any abrasions of my internal organs, unclog any blocked arteries, and return my body back to performing at its peak. Hopefully that means alleviating the pounding headache I have and lifting the thick fog that has coated my consciousness.
I sigh, lying down on the box as I feel the pain slowly alleviating from within me. I have to rest my head against the wall, my body a bit too tall to fit lying down across the floor of the box. With my chest and arms now naked and exposed to the stuffy air of the night, I feel the sweat air out of my armpits. Every second that passes by I feel a bit better, my eyes focused on the rhythmic movements of the Chimera Cube as it moves up and down with my belly.
Each rush of oxygen I let into my lungs is slow and concentrated as I endure the massive wave of sensation spilling over me.
In less than a minute my gelatin legs are rejuvenated into the strong, powerful machines they have been for most of my life. The motor neurons in my muscles are back to firing in sync and the torn muscle tissue in my calves and hips is repaired. The thumping of my heart in my head stops, the terrible pain from the collision against the marble floor dissipating along with any damage it did to the internal structure of my brain.
The Conspiracy Chronicles Boxset 2 Page 29