Ivan sat up, blinking, head craning this way and that. He read Leon like a pamphlet, dressing him down in a fraction of a second and moving on to Clovis.
He climbed out of the bed with what would have been surprising grace and decorum had it not been for his genitals yo-yoing between his thighs. No man, Leon thought, even one chiseled from the mountains of Olympus, could cast elegance upon a room while shriveled and naked. And Ivan was no Greek god.
He stood like a birch, tall and narrow, pale and pallid with body hair so white it looked like he was freshly shaven, topped with a mound of straw-colored hair that would sit well on no fifty-year-old-man’s body, much less one as limp and sagging as his.
“Leon,” breathed Ivan, collapsing into him. He threw his hands around Leon’s back, embracing him in the uncomfortable and awkward way achieved only by a nude man.
Leon went to pat his shoulder, unsure where else to put his hands, but Ivan shoved him back and ripped the rifle from his shoulder.
He spun around and held down the trigger, pumping magnetic bullets down the row of consoles and systems.
“What the hell are you doing?” Leon hollered, punching Ivan in the kidney and stealing back his weapon.
Ivan clutched at his flank, turning with a serpent’s grin. He stared down the barrel of a magnetic pulse rifle. “And what a good day to you, Mister Imus!” He winced as he straightened, that impish smile never leaving his face. He pointed to the busted consoles. “If you think I’m ever returning to that torture chamber, ha! Fuck you is what I say.”
Leon side-eyed Clovis. “This is what not what I expected.”
Ivan gestured to the drone. “Nice little fiddly-dink Machine you’ve got there. Looks strikingly similar to the one that bastard Varugus had pissing about. If I still had that rifle, I might blast it to bits.”
“You hurt my friend here, and I’ll make sure the only food you’ll eat in this life is soup.”
Ivan cackled like a pimple-faced witch. “Okay, hotshot, let’s hear it. It’s been four hundred and ninety-five years since we saw one another. How’d you escape the torture, and how’d you get yourself a fancy gun and faithful robot?”
“It’s a long story.”
Another cackle. “I spent five hundred years locked away with only my thoughts. I can spare a few hours.”
“No, you can’t. There are two hundred Machines scouring this place, trying to find a way into this room.”
“Is that so. Do you feeling like dying today, Mister Imus?”
Maybe coming here was a mistake, Leon concluded.
Ivan held out his hand. “Flashlight.”
“Why?”
“Oh, question me more, Mister Imus. By all means! You and I have plenty of time it would seem.”
Frowning, Leon slapped his flashlight into Ivan’s hand. The unceremoniously brash and audacious man strode to the far end of the room, beam of white light guiding his way.
Standing at the corner, he inclined his head and recited a riddle.
Bricks to twenty and one
Start there and you’ll have your fun.
Leon looked at Clovis, who shuttered his lens and looked away. That seemed as good a response to Ivan’s ramblings as any.
“What are you doing?” Leon asked.
“Right now,” said Ivan, counting up from the bottommost brick, “I’m finding my starting point.”
Leon glanced over his shoulder. How long would the Machines wait before blowing a hole in the wall? Or were they taking precious care to keep their grotesque consciousness servers alive and well?
“Nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one.” Ivan clapped his hands. “Per-fect! Now, let’s see.”
One, two, twenty and three
One day I will be free
Ivan hummed a tune as he counted from left to right. Upon arriving at the twenty-third brick, he tapped it happily and reached for Leon with an open hand.
“A knife, if you will, Mister Imus. My fingernail would work, eventually, but time is of the essence.” He spun around, eyes wide. “Isn’t that right?”
This fucking guy, thought Leon as he unsheathed a skinning knife from his belt. At least he’d come here instead of Orissa. She may well have shanked Ivan already. Foolishness was something Orissa Servoni refused to abide by, and there seemed no more foolish of a man than Ivan Kravst, the supposed CEO of the largest, most profitable, most renown technology company in the world, prior to the Rise.
“This better be a good plan you’re hatching,” said Leon.
“Of course it’s a good plan. It’s my plan.” Ivan settled the tip of the knife into the mortar of the brick and pounded on the pommel. After the fourth whack the mortar crumbled. He looked back with a gaped-mouth smile. “How do you fancy that, Mister Imus? It’s not real mortar, mind. And for good reason! Now, watch as the magic continues to unfold.”
He etched out the remaining mortar around the brick and inserted his fingers into the newly made gaps, effortlessly pulling the brick out.
“Look.” He waved Leon forth exuberantly. “Look!”
Leon leaned in cautiously, not trusting Ivan not to take him by the back of his head and bash him into the wall.
In the gap was a metal panel with a winch bolted into it.
“What is this, a trapdoor?”
Ivan snickered. “There you go, use that brain, Mister Imus! Do you think I’d carved out a mountain, knowing I might be stuck here for the rest of my days, without plotting an escape?”
“You constructed Illythia?”
“Well, not me. But a separate arm of RayTech. Tell me, what do you remember, Leon?” Ivan asked, an insult masquerading as a question. He cranked the winch and the middle of the wall opened outward, revealing a staircase that descended into blackness.
Ivan jogged down them. “Hurry now. We’ve got ships to fly.”
Leon kept close, Clovis beside him. The drone’s lens lit up like a sun, pouring light down the confined staircase. “You built a hangar in the middle of a mountain?”
“I wouldn’t call it a hangar. A stowaway barely large enough to fit two of RayTech’s proprietary fighter jets. Now, drone, are you a useless ball of metal, or can you interface remotely with a relatively unsecured system?”
“There are few systems I cannot interface with, Mister Kravst.”
Leon shot Clovis a look. “Don’t address him as mister,” he whispered.
“Ah, ah,” said Ivan. “I heard that. You ought to respect your elders, Mister Imus.”
Down they went, Ivan clicking his tongue and humming and singing. When they reached a landing, he rubbed his hands and hissed. “Here we are.”
Two massive fighter jets loomed before Leon. Paradoxically they looked both alien and familiar, as if he’d glanced at one screaming through the sky but never zeroed in on it to get a close look at its finer details.
Ivan opened the rear fighter and slid a hand between its slightly ajar cockpit doors. He climbed inside.
“Hold this, will you?” he said, handing the flashlight to Leon, who clambered inside with Clovis close behind.
Ivan blew on the console, heaving dust throughout the cockpit. He put a finger to a metal switch. “Mylosynicide’s instability, my friends, is slow, but existent. Every five hundred years of inactivity adds about a ten percent chance of explosive, catastrophic failure when ignited. So, say a prayer if you believe in God.”
“Wait—”
“Too late,” said Ivan. The cabin lights turned on and the console controls flared to life with a dazzling array of reds and greens. The engines purred, a low thrumming that Leon felt in the floor. “Okay, you ball of metal, now’s your turn to shine. Get that jet ahead up and running.”
Within seconds, vapors radiated from the twin engines of the front fighter.
“Now, wiggle those engines, drone. Got to make sure the thrust vector control is A-OK. Go on, wiggle ‘em like the ass of a young woman, or a man! I don’t mind, no sir. I enjoy both genders. Is that too much in
formation for you, Mister Imus? Travel too deeply into the depths of my brain? Ah, poor bastard.”
“That consciousness server did something to you, didn’t it?”
Ivan grinned. “Torture though it was… no. People of RayTech were convinced I’d snorted coke every morning before coming in. Ah, but I did not! My drug of choice was meth.” He grinned, slapping Leon on the shoulder. “I swore off drugs after firing up a bong when I was fourteen. Damn thing had sat in my brother’s closet for three years, and that’s the story of how I nearly died of pneumonia before my fifteenth birthday. Inhaling mold is not good for your lungs. That near-death experience did, however, start me off on my journey into science enlightenment and put me on the path to where I am now.”
Leon raised a brow. “Trying to escape a crumbling mountain after spending five hundred years with your consciousness locked away in a server?”
Ivan chuckled. “I like you now, Mister Imus. You’re less of a stickler than you were five hundred years ago.”
“How are we getting out of here? Do you have another trap door you’re going to open?”
“Drone, fire the Gallant Torpedoes.”
“Wait,” said Leon. “You need to know where you’re taking us.”
“Away from here, I assume. Maybe I’ll land high on the cliffs of Mount Fucking Everest. Can’t be many Machines there.”
“We’re going to Florida and meeting up with Orissa.”
The inane expressions and ramblings Ivan had risen from the preservation chamber with finally faded. “Orissa Servoni?” he said, voice a pitch deeper.
“That’s correct.”
Ivan sniffed. “You have a lot to explain, Mister Imus.”
“So do you,” Leon retorted. “Orissa and I dug up quite a bit of information about you. About RayTech. If there’s anything you want to tell me, now’s the time.”
He smiled. “There’s a lot I wish to tell you. And you won’t believe half of it. Drone, fire those torpedoes.”
The Atlas Mountains trembled with a thunderous eruption, and from the smoke and a newly made hole in the promontory raced a jet.
It ascended westward, attracting a storm of Valedalls and Friggs. The fighter took a missile into its belly, exploding and strewing its carapace over the Atlas Mountains.
A second jet escaped during the commotion, undetected.
It plunged into the sea like a failed rocket launch.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The sickening crunch of a skull underfoot was followed by another. It seemed no matter where Orissa stepped, human remains awaited her.
“Droll, I need light.”
A cool white glow emanated from the drone’s lens, and a haunting chill scuttled down Orissa’s spine. Bones were strewn out before her like a welcoming mat woven with corpses, a hardened white carpet lying atop a concrete floor.
The needling pricks of fear pinched at Orissa’s throat. She tried to tiptoe between the bodies, but the brittle bones were impossible to avoid. The sound of them cracking and breaking with her every step made her stomach vault into her mouth.
Fortunately, the remains were amassed in a relatively small area that she eagerly hurried over. It was as if the people had gathered here at the foot of the ladder, the door above sealed shut and refusing to open. Refusing to allow them out.
Orissa shivered at the thought. What was this place? Its purpose?
“It’s massive,” she said aloud, in awe at the sheer size of this underground labyrinth. She appeared to be standing in a vestibule, a yawning chamber that might have been welcoming at one time but had long since devolved into a dark crypt. Droll intensified his light, revealing posters on walls and pillars, colorful announcements with large font and vintage drawings.
They looked like propaganda from the 1950s.
Orissa ripped a flyer down. It had a finger pointing at her.
YOU are making a difference
She shook her head, crumpled it up, and tossed it behind her shoulder. “Any Machines in here?”
“No,” answered Droll.
At least she had that going for her. She tightened the strap of her backpack and waded deeper into the mysterious facility. Its breadth appeared to be infinite, an open expanse of numerous floors, each connected by stairways. The bottom floor had no halls or corridors; it was one sweeping chamber divided into distinct purposes—districts, perhaps— separated by wide swaths of space.
There were workspaces complete with desks and computers and white boards, and further along Orissa came to treadmills and tumbling mats and fitness machines. One direction led to a fully serviced kitchen. She ran her hand along a counter and looked through partitioned glass, at steam tables with empty pans and hotplates without food. The dining room was a ramshackle mess, chairs and tables overturned.
In silent observation, Orissa climbed a staircase and navigated her way into a corridor with doors on either side, spaced a few feet apart like a hotel hallway. She tried a door at random, the hinges squealing as it opened.
Droll hovered beside her, his beacon of light radiating into a stuffy room sparsely furnished. There was a small twin bed, neatly made with the pillows fluffed and comforter folded. A little fridge stood under a counter with a coffeemaker and mirror.
Orissa made her way into several other rooms that were all the same, save a few which had cribs and rocking chairs.
At the end of the hall she came to a rectangular room with glass walls. Inside, a soft rubber floor on which stood rocking horses and climbable blocks and equipment for children to play on.
“Orissa,” said Droll, “look.”
The drone aimed his light at a poster. It showed a picture of a man in pain, holding his head and gritting his teeth. Beside him, on a table, lay a book and pen.
JOURNALING: it could save your mind.
“We should look for one of these journals,” Droll suggested. “It might tell us more about the purpose of this facility.”
Its purpose seemed perfectly clear to Orissa: it was a vault meant to protect the last humans from extinction.
And it failed.
She hadn’t really believed humans—besides the to-be Rogue Hunters—were still alive on this planet like Leon. Yet, the sting of defeat and dejection was impossible to ignore. There was a difference between not believing in something and finding evidence to support that non-belief.
It was the difference between faith and knowledge. Faith allows room for the possibility to be right and wrong. Knowledge is definite and undeniable.
Still, if work on the Governor had advanced, evidence of it would be in the Atlas Mountains or this facility. So Orissa and Droll ransacked room after room, looking for diaries, breadcrumbs to lead them to the Governor.
Her search turned up a leather journal in a room with candles and empty vases. Only a few pages had been inked. Orissa read them twice over, and then for a third time.
Journaling could save your mind. Funny. Tell that to everyone whose only method of writing exists on laptops and tablets. Call me old fashioned, and maybe I am, but it’s a good thing. If not for this paper and pen, I’d probably go insane.
It’s been a month since that man came and ruined our lives. He said the device would protect us from the Machines. Don’t know why we needed a device like that. Doctor Varugus told us this vault would protect us. It has so far.
The man called himself Dexter. Who knows if that was his real name. Commander Ohring had him put to death yesterday. Not good enough, if you ask me. He’s doomed us all. The council keeps saying they’re working on getting the systems up and operational again, but word is it’ll never happen. The thing—an electromagnetic pulse shield I believe Dexter called it—fried every piece of electrical equipment for good, including the controls to the door.
There’s no coming back from that.
From those few paragraphs, there was a wealth of information to unpack. None of it welcoming. The author of this journal spoke as if Varugus was in charge of the facility. Sur
ely if this place had been conceived as humanity’s last refuge, someone higher on the totem pole than Varugus headed the effort. Someone like the president, for instance.
And this Dexter—there was no one by that name on the president’s council. At least they weren’t present during the last meeting in D.C. Could be that the owner of this journal was right in his suspicions, and that Dexter was an alias. But why would someone on the council need an alias to enter this facility?
Further, why was there only one member of the council who came here?
Damn you, Leon, thought Orissa. I could use you here. I told you the Atlas Mountains didn’t have anything. You went on a wild goose chase. You’d better be okay.
She scoured the remaining rooms and found little more than personal belongings and knickknacks. Arms thrown over a banister and overlooking the vastness below, Orissa brooded.
“Computers are fried. Vaunton cubes likely are too. I don’t know how we’ll get any information about the Governor now.”
“I urge you to explore further,” said Droll. “The propaganda we’ve seen suggests the inhabitants of this facility were working on something of great importance, possibly the error-induction software component of the Governor. The Injector.”
“Software that’s almost certainly stored on Vaunton cubes,” Orissa noted.
“It is possible that data on those cubes can be salvaged.”
Orissa pushed herself away from the banister and gestured to a cubicle farm below. “There’s no less than fifty computers right there. We’ve passed three of these workstations already. It’s going to take a lot of time to search that data.”
“Time we have,” said Droll.
She gnawed at her bottom lip. “Not until I know Leon is safe we don’t.”
Rebirth (Archives of Humanity Book 1) Page 23