I want to stop that from becoming the case.
There will always be new technologies, there will always be powerful things that can either save or destroy the world depending on how they are used.
And it’s my responsibility to kill every last person who wants to use the cube for their personal gain. I have to destroy the Syndicate and every last person affiliated with them—including Jake—and I need to get Ai back and save every other good person in this world that has failed to succumb to the perpetual cycle of power.
And the way I’m going to do it is by screaming at the top of my lungs with my legs wide open for the Syndicate to come to me.
Well, figuratively, of course.
In reality, I am standing at the top of a cliff, surrounded in a force field, waiting for the Syndicate to try and capture me again. This time they know they can’t catch me off guard like they did before. And if they brought two dozen operatives all with assault rifles the first time, there is no telling what they will bring this time.
But I am ready.
I’m not just seated at the edge of the cliff, staring out at the mountaintops, waiting for them to approach me. I have set up a system of traps. What I’m about to say will sound super impressive, but with the power of the Chimera Cube, it makes flying around on a hoverboard and constructing thousands of weapons and defense capabilities a relatively easy task. With that, I have been able to plant over ten thousand defense robots in the surrounding terrain, just in case they decide to throw a land attack at me. In the air, there are over one thousand drones flying around, programmed to auto-detect any enemies and begin firing the mini-missiles they contain. There are also a couple dozen turrets hidden in the underbrush of the forest, all prepared to lock onto any oncoming targets and fire away.
And all of that doesn’t even count the fact that in my hands I still have the Chimera Cube, the most powerful weapon of them all, and no matter what they do, they won’t be able to hurt me from behind the fifty-foot force field that I am encased in.
I got this.
I give myself a lonely pat on the back as I hold the cube out in my two hands for any onlookers to see. There is no doubt that I look insane right now. My eyes are bloodshot with heavy bags underneath them, my skin is covered in dry blood, and the cloth I am wearing barely covers my body and what little of it remains is all torn up and stained brown from my body fluids.
I have managed to get some food into my system, but I know if I eat a full meal, I will just vomit it back up onto the grass. But even despite my hungry state I feel powerful.
I feel unstoppable.
And I’m not sure if that’s the Chimera Cube or the cocaine talking, but either way I am happy to believe it.
It’s time for me to destroy the Syndicate. It’s time for me to do what should have been done over a hundred years ago when this organization was started at Harvard. But after hours of waiting, I’m not sure if my tactic was smart.
The sun is dipping beneath the horizon, the wind taking on a bit more of a harshness as the welcoming beauty of the landscape slowly transforms into utter darkness. They may just leave me here. They may just want me to stay out in the wilderness until I have lost every bit of my sanity so that they can just rip the cube right from my hands.
But before I can throw in the towel and let the dark feelings overcome me with the newfound darkness to the sky, I see something on the horizon. At first, I only notice a few dark spots in the rays of sunlight beaming over the mountaintops. Within seconds, those dark spots turn into the rough silhouettes of what I already recognize to be military aircraft.
As the jets continue to fly over the mountaintops, they seem to multiply. What I once thought was four turns into twelve, and what I once thought was twelve turns into fifty aircraft, all propelling through the sky towards me.
I hope Ai is in one of them. I hope the entire council of the Syndicate is inside.
But as the aircrafts approach within a few miles of my position, I immediately recognize exactly who they belong to.
It’s not the Syndicate. It’s the United States government. And they are coming for me. They are coming to regain control of the final result of the Protocol 00 experiment and exterminate someone who has been branded as a homegrown terrorist that supported the killing of millions of Americans.
It’s time for war.
Chapter 11
I don’t think anyone has ever been happy to have the government show up out of nowhere. I am no exception.
In many ways, I asked for this.
Besides the fact that the world has a habit of giving me exactly the opposite of what I want, this is exactly what the Syndicate of Truth does. They don’t take the time to go and kill their enemies. Instead, they plant trackers inside their blood streams and share their location with the largest killing machine in the world—the United States military.
In the end, these aircrafts are all just operatives of the Syndicate. They are already well on their way to taking over the United States government as a result of their grand plan in The Last Migration, and with this cube in the hands of the military, it will mean the same thing to the Syndicate in the end.
More money and more power.
But for now, it’s in my hands, and they will have to rip this thing from my cold, bloody, half-naked body if they want it. From the looks of it, they won’t quit until that happens.
I’m so fucking ignorant.
Apparently after barely surviving a few skirmishes with various military forces, I think I am some sort of tactical genius at war. Ten seconds ago, no one could have convinced me that my trap wouldn’t work perfectly. In my mind, I envisioned dozens of explosions taking place above the lake, all the aircrafts empty of missiles and on fire by the time they reach the exterior of the force field.
My vision was about as far from reality as is gets.
The United States military doesn’t fuck around.
I am thrown backward with the force of a round of airstrikes that land on the cliff around the force field. They must have some sort of tool that can detect the electrical waves that the force field produces. That’s why every bomb explodes right around the exterior of the force field in a ring of fiery hell.
The jets that drop the bombs fly by so fast that I only see they are coming until after they have already passed. Right before the deafening ring of the explosion hits my ears, the high-pitched whizzing and harsh wind from the air particles being forced in my direction hits me.
If this was all that happened, I’d be fine. After all, with the force field protecting me from any shards of metal or rock from the ensuing blast, I am all but invincible to their attempts to kill me.
That is until I realize their plan. They know I have a force field around me, that’s why they want to knock out the ground from underneath me.
They are remarkably successful at it.
With the harsh sound waves pounding against me and explosion of light knocking me to the grassy edge of the cliff, I start to feel the foundation beneath me crumble. The rock face of the cliff is unable to handle the force of all the bombs. There is nothing I can command the Chimera Cube to do that will stop this. My fall is inevitable.
The cliff doesn’t just collapse in one fell swoop like the oil rig did. The rock face was likely carved by glaciers, this structure formed from the movement of tectonic plates over millions of years. To say it is stubborn is an understatement.
But when it falls, it isn’t shy about it. At first the dirt on the outer layer of the rock formation is blown into thousands of chunks that are catapulted in all directions. The force field is hit with a torrential downpour of the chunky pieces of dirt and grass, causing a mess of sparks to hit the exterior of the electric bubble.
The shockwaves from the explosion reverberate to the ground underneath me. Normally, the force field is programmed to stretch fifty feet in all directions, including underneath the earth, and will in occasion bend around objects that are immobile and impassable. T
he ground often doesn’t meet that criteria. After all, the force field is designed to protect against things like mines and practically anything else that would want to kill someone.
But the military has found a loophole.
The large swath of dirt and rock within the force field underneath me are unable to be deflected by the electric fields when they fly haphazardly through the air. In one large wave of pain and chaos, the earth flies out from my feet and attacks me, the force exerted by the dozens of bombs dropped outside the force field enough to break down the structure of this entire cliff.
I fumble with the Chimera Cube, the thing nearly dropping out of my hands as I wrap both my arms around it and close my eyes. I prepare for the next phase of the disaster. After the top level of dirt and rock is stripped from the cliff, the real kicker comes next. At this point I am lying down with a thick layer of dirt on top of me as thousands of tiny pebbles and granules of dirt pelt my body.
I am unable to get up with the sheer force at which they hit me and unable to open my eyes in fear that once my eyelids are exposed to the particles of dirt, I will never be able to see again. This horrible chain reaction takes place in a span of no more than three seconds, and by the end of it, the force field is being pelted in all directions by bits of earth, resulting in thousands of sparks to dance throughout the newly formed cloud of dirt and smoke.
My entire body is in pain. My arms shake as I struggle to hold myself together. I never pictured this happening. I thought the drones would destroy these aircraft, and I thought that the turrets and thousands of robot soldiers would take them down before they could kill me.
But the military is many steps ahead of me. And not only do they have dozens of attack helicopters bombing the living daylights out of my metal army, they also have their own fleet of drones in combat with my fleet. Except the artificial intelligence software downloaded onto the military drones has much more data to operate off, and as a result they tear apart my flying brigade with ease.
My trap has instead turned into a death wish for me and an utter shit show. Every second, dozens of explosions and hundreds of bullets are fired, the once serene beauty to the landscape now erupting into a scene of fire and destruction.
This is war.
But I can’t fight a war as a one-man army.
I try and stand up, surprised that the cliff has not fallen yet. Somehow the several-hundred-foot-tall wall of rock has remained strong amid the explosions, the top half of the cliff the only part destroyed. I put my hand on the Chimera Cube, readying to spit out the command that will heal me from the dozens of cuts and bruises that line my body after being pelted in the storm of dirt and rock.
Before any words leave my mouth, the second prong to their attack comes down to finish me off.
Now this cliff is going to fall, and I’m about to go right with it. With the madness taking over the landscape, it is impossible to tell exactly where the blasts come from, but the result is the same in the end. An array of at least half a dozen missiles connect with the base of the rock formation directly beneath me. From this high up, the explosions are felt as nothing more than a dull wave of force.
But it doesn’t take long for it to turn deadly.
The missiles wiped out the entirety of the bottom portion of the cliff. That only means one thing: the top is about to go down with it. That’s why the second my mouth opens, the ground caves in underneath me. I’m not fast enough to react in time.
This cliff is crashing to the earth, and nothing is stopping me from falling right with it. My first reaction, instead of even saving myself, like any mother’s first instinct, is to save my baby in the Chimera Cube. I shift the backpack around my shoulders to hang off the front of my body and shove the cube inside. I try and zip it up as much as I can, leaving a tiny sliver of room for my hand to squeeze through, so that no matter what the cube won’t leave my bag.
Before I can command it to do something that will actually save me, all hell breaks loose.
The sound of thousands of tons of rock falling to the earth is one I won’t forget. It’s like that of an earthquake, albeit at a lesser magnitude, but due to the fact that I am only a few hundred feet above the epicenter of where the cracks have formed, the sound is overwhelming in the worst way. It has a deep, sinister character to it, one that sends chills down my spine and leaves me frozen in place. I feel like I am in the middle of a graveyard and hundreds of human spines are being snapped in synchrony.
As the ground gives out beneath me, I wake up to the fact that the only spine on the verge of snapping is mine.
“Hoverboard,” I scream to the cube, hoping that it can hear me above the gunfire, explosions, and sound of the earth shattering. The cube lights up at my command and I double-tap it immediately afterward as the hoverboard is formed in the air.
But my reaction isn’t fast enough.
By the time the hoverboard is produced and floating in the air next to me, I am already falling along with the tons of rock beneath me to the surface of the lake. Sheets of rock and large chunks of dirt collide with my body on the way down. The force of gravity causes the rock face to pick up momentum as it falls to the earth. The first second after the initial waves of the missile blast, everything seemed to move in slow motion. Now, with the increasing velocity downward, the entire world feels like it’s falling apart.
I manage to grab on to the hoverboard just in time before I am caught in that mess for good. My force field couldn’t even protect me from a fall like that, my body would just hit the floor and die, the cube trapped inside the force field and stuck beneath tons of rock and water.
The hoverboard isn’t my magical ticket to safety, though.
I grab on to the side of it with two hands, hoping that I can hold on as the world around me continues to collapse. It’s my only hope of survival, but it’s still a shitty one. With the ground falling to the earth beneath me, and my body magically hovering in the air, a series of events take place that can be described as unfortunate at best and fucking terrible at worst.
The very same mechanism that keeps the hoverboard defying gravity is the same thing that nearly kills me. The hot stream of fire that pumps out the bottom of it burns through the flesh in my arm and singes the skin on the side of my face as I try and turn away from the flames. If that’s not painful enough, with my movement downward abruptly halting, the force field now remains in place.
This causes all the chunks of rock and dirt between the cube and the fifty-foot radius of the force field to collide against the electric barrier the nanobots form. The ensuing explosion of electricity and chunks of rock make a hard job of holding on to a hoverboard that is burning holes into my arms an impossible one.
“Fuck!” I cry out, the agony getting the best of me as at least a dozen baseball-sized rocks smash into my head. For a brief second in time I black out, and when my vision and consciousness finally return, I expect to be falling through the destruction and on my way to swift death.
Look at me. I’m going to die the exact same way my mother did. At the bottom of a cliff with my body torn apart by the jagged rocks.
I push that thought out of my mind and instead tap into the killer instinct inside me. It’s in moments like these when the pain and darkness seem like they are never going to end that tapping into the competitive drive inside me is most effective.
I hook my right arm around the top of the hoverboard, shielding most of my body from the hot flames threatening to burn me alive. The intensity of the rock and dirt smashing into me doesn’t slow down as the seconds pass by.
Almost the entirety of the once magnificent cliff that stood hundreds of feet above the surrounding lake has now crashed into the earth. The sky around the force field is full of particulates of dirt from the implosion and smoke from the missiles and explosives.
The surface of the earth itself seems to shake in the wake of the blasts, and with so much material surrounding the force field, I have my one tiny window to break fre
e from it all. If I continue to hover in the middle of what has effectively become a flying bubble of death, there will soon be a large enough rock that hits in just the right place of my head to knock me out for good. My arms and legs are already dripping with blood from the rocks cutting into me, and my skin is covered in a thick layer of dirt that for once hides my paleness.
“Deconstruct force field.” I utter the command, taking the one risk that will either kill me instantly or give me my one shot at living.
At first, it is impossible to tell whether the Chimera Cube correctly registered my command. With hundreds of chunks of rocks and tens of thousands of specks of dirt above me, I am continuously battered by dozens of pieces of debris.
A particularly large, pointy rock manages to collide straight into my temple. After that, I can officially say that I have lost the brain capacity to interpret what is happening around me. The pain from streams of blood dripping out of dozens of places of my body is nothing more than a papercut in comparison to the sharp ringing sensation that strangles my consciousness.
I scream, the horrid noise emanating from my throat nothing more than the primal instinct within me pouring forth. I have to battle every internal system telling me to shut down and give up and latch on to the will to survive. I know that the moment I give in to the pain and let the red rings lining my vision take hold of me that the world will end.
After a few seconds of barely clutching on to the hoverboard for life as the chunks of earth hitting me reached a new, agonizing intensity, my senses alert me that it has stopped. With the force field gone, gravity effectively takes hold of each of the rocks in the air and brings them down to the earth and out of the electric vortex they were stuck in.
The dirt particulates and smoke are still thick enough to block me from view of the United States military. Well, more accurately, they block me from seeing them and infest my lungs with a heavy soot that overwhelms the mucous membranes in my nostrils, resulting in me having to hold in a coughing fit.
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