Rebirth (Archives of Humanity Book 1)

by Justin DePaoli

  Leon swallowed. “How?”

  “How did he do it? How do I know? Hmm. Well, for starters Mattias Varugus was well-connected, wealthy, and intelligent. He was also a thief who stole the brilliant work of advanced AI by Rebecca Servoni and perverted it. He left behind a trail, however, and I learned of it. I sniffed it out. Too late, I’m afraid. Too damn late.”

  Leon shook his head. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever stopped. “Primes. Ballistics. Duelists. Deadeyes.”

  “I’m sorry, Mister Imus?”

  “Those are killing Machines. Why make them unless you want to kill? I’m just trying to understand how you think a man who caused the Rise wasn’t evil.”

  “Those were not made by Mattias. He had good intentions. I hate the man, despise him, but I won’t assassinate his character as he had mine. His research centered about knowledge-class Machines. He simply hadn’t accounted for his main AI—the Core, he called it—advancing so quickly and secretly. By the time he learned of the first Prime, Australia had been breached. Four months later, the world ended. If not for my heroic deeds, Mister Imus, humanity would have ended as well. But we still have a chance. A very slight chance, likely bordering on a fraction of a fraction of a percentage, as the original EMP shield is no longer functional, which means the facility is exposed and the Machines will acquire what they desire.”

  Ivan stretched out his hands, cracking his knuckles. He relaxed deep into his seat as if he hadn’t casually tossed out a cliffhanger.

  “What do they desire?” Leon asked.

  “The facility.” Ivan grinned. “Ah, Mister Imus. I enjoy fucking with you. You’re too uptight! Inside the facility are roughly two hundred thousand human embryos. It is a cloning facility of sorts, but more than that, it is an assembly line of human blood to sustain the Machines for eternity. It’s too damn cold in here.”

  Leon watched as Ivan fiddled with the instrument panel. The cool air through the vents eased. “You knew all of this and you didn’t tell anyone?”

  “Piss on you again, Mister Imus! Varugus assassinated my character over the years. I’ll give that bastard credit: he was the finest manipulator I’ve ever seen.”

  I wonder, thought Leon, recalling his first weeks with Orissa. “Did you operate a lab in Pittsburgh?”

  Ivan wheezed a laugh. “I took painful steps to conceal its purpose. It was nothing but a cave before RayTech came in and retrofitted it—secretly, of course. We weren’t driving trucks out there with our name plastered on the doors. But yes, that was my… well, not lab. More, ah, think of it as an office. You’ve stirred my curiosity, Mister Imus. How did—”

  “Orissa stumbled on it,” Leon answered. “We went in there, found a laptop left behind by Varugus. In his emails, he claimed to have visited the lab—or office—because of a whistleblower. Said all your employees were gone. Place had been stripped.”

  “Fucking liar is what he is. Someone squealed. That office was key to my investigation of Varugus. I had the best investigative minds working there, turning up every rock, leaving no corner untouched. It’s how I learned about the facility in Florida. A shame that information got to me only two days before the end of humanity. A coincidence, you think? I’m not so sure.

  “At any rate,” Ivan continued, “if your dear Orissa made it to the facility, she’ll need to deploy the electromagnetic shield should the Machines come for her. When. And I do hope she knows how to do that. There isn’t a button to press, I’m afraid.”

  The progress of humanity has, since the evolution of homo sapiens, relied on two phases: argument followed by action.

  Shortly after breaching the ocean surface and taking flight over the mainland of Florida, Leon and Ivan engaged in the first phase.

  “Goddamnit!” cried Ivan, pointing the nose of the ship straight to and accelerating toward the clouds. “It’s been an experience, Mister Imus!”

  Gunfire clapped from below, an unrelenting spew of plasma from rifles to rotary canons. That a single bullet hadn’t yet so much as glanced off the ship’s wing was more a testament to its speed than Ivan’s piloting.

  “If this is going to be death, let me tell you again that you’re a fucking idiot for requiring someone to shoot your stupid fucking shield in order to deploy it.”

  “A grenade will work too! It just needs some force!”

  “You know what… no. We’re not going to die.” The radar disagreed with Leon, the black of its background blotted out by flashing red dots.

  “There are over three thousand Machines,” warned Clovis.

  Ivan righted the ship and settled it in a shelf of tufted clouds. “More to come I’ve no doubt. Those damned Friggs we passed under near the coast will be convening on us soon.”

  If that was true—and it most certainly was—that meant two hundred cannon-firing, missile-launching fighters would be swarming the Skymmer. Clovis had theorized their positioning along the coast was intended to intercept mylosynicide missiles from the haais. But when they realized that the initial launch had all been a ploy, they’d rear around and converge on the true threat.

  “We either go down in a blaze of flames,” said Ivan, “while shooting Machines like we’re the Doom man and they’re demon-spawns from the depths of hell, or we skedaddle our asses right on out of here. Find a nice island to settle on. Grow old while we crack coconuts and fish the sea.”

  “We’re not running,” said Leon.

  “Then death it is! Fine by me, Mister Imus. Spend five hundred years in a goddamned server and you tend to come to terms with death. Stand by, gentlemen—that includes you, drone. You might be made of metal, but you’re a better man than most. Down we go in T-minus 10.” He cleared his throat. “Nine. Eight. Seven…”

  Ivan was rubbing his hands, letting the autopilot systems keep the ship afloat.

  “Six. Five…”

  “Wait,” said Leon, extending an arm across Ivan’s chest and keeping him against the back of his seat. “Clovis, do you have a radius on the opening to the facility?”

  The drone answered that he did not. “We are too far away; the cloud coverage is disrupting my sensors.”

  “But if we can get you a visual?”

  “Then I will provide you that data, Major General Imus.”

  Ivan swatted away Leon’s arm. “Pray tell, Mister Imus! What do you have up your sleeve?”

  “Get Clovis a visual of the facility’s entrance. If it’s big enough for this ship to squeeze into, that’s where you’re taking us.”

  “A suicide mission would be far more entertaining if we went guns a blazing, I daresay. Speeding into a cloning facility crawling with Machines who will be so very eager to burn every inch of our bodies with hot plasma… that sounds less exciting.”

  Leon stared at him with creased brows. “If Orissa’s down there—”

  “Then she’s dead.” He met Leon’s hardened gaze with his own. “If she could have used the EMP shield, she would have. Either she was stripped of it or, more likely, unaware how to activate it.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Oh? The facility is approximately three miles in length. The EMP shield has a radius of two miles. Do the math, Mister Imus. Unless Orissa has found her way to the end of the facility—” Ivan paused, pinching his lips between his thumb and forefinger. “I suppose that is plausible, a logical reason for why so many Machines have gathered outside the entrance. They’d be unable to go very far in.”

  Turbulence jolted the ship. A fitting time for that, Leon thought. It was like the wind before a rainstorm, a premonition of something bigger to come.

  “Gentlemen,” announced Ivan, taking hold of the control wheel. “I suggest you pray.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “What do you intend to do with that device, Orissa?”

  Orissa studied that wrinkled face inked with liver spots and sores, the frayed ends of his white beard, the metal army behind him that could end her life before she could flinch.

  W
hat a strange time for her resolve to harden, but harden it did, like a melding of water and lava.

  “You’re not real,” she said, a projection of strength and confidence in her voice.

  “A partial truth. I am a man of flesh standing before you, not a holographic image. However, I concede to be an impostor of the man you know as Mattias Varugus. My brain is a twin of his own, constructed in its likeness, and my appearance has been meticulously crafted to mirror his own. But I am not the original.”

  You’re an illusion, thought Orissa. She side-eyed Droll, hopeful his all-knowing lens would tell her the truth. But the drone remained still and silent at her side, the truth—if he knew it—unspoken.

  “A shame about your mother,” said Mattias.

  Orissa aimed her gun at the bastard’s head. She flinched at the booming repercussion of a rifle.

  A Deadeye’s bullet tore her submachine gun out of her hand. It smacked against the door into the embryonic chamber and fell to the ground, tendrils of smoke rising from a hole in the barrel.

  Orissa lifted the electromagnetic pulse shield higher. Her lips parted in preparation to utter a threat, but she swallowed the words. Doubtless this mimicry of Mattias Varugus knew exactly what she held and its capabilities to destroy every Machine in this facility. And doubtless he wondered why she hadn’t activated it yet. Better to keep him guessing, keep him talking.

  “Without your mother,” said Mattias, hands steepled at his waist, “this world would be a very different place. These wondrous, godly Machines would not exist.”

  “My mother had no part in this,” she growled.

  “Oh, but she did. Without her research and work into advanced artificial intelligence, I would have never been able to give rise to… well, the Rise.” A deep-bellied chuckle echoed down the hall. It was cut short by Mattias’s sudden seizing. He was bent over at his waist, hand flicking back and stiff at the wrist, shoulder drawn up high. His face was a contortion of pain and suffering.

  He looked less like a human and more like a Machine suffering a glitch. He cleared his throat, righting himself.

  “I am not the original,” he said again, a heinous smile pricking at the corner of his mouth. “Tell me, Orissa. Does Project Riven mean anything to you?”

  The utterance of that name sent an electric zap across the folds of Orissa’s brain, like a hypnotist lulling a willing audience member into an alternate level of awareness. It triggered memories that she’d only recently unlocked from her dreams.

  Project Riven, the closely related cousin to her mother’s abandoned Project Endeavor—an attempt to merge human consciousness with artificial intelligence.

  Project Endeavor was fraught with problems, she remembered her mother telling her. It was not and could never be safe for humans. Or humanity.

  “You’re the one who stole my mother’s files,” Orissa asserted.

  “Your mother, lying naked beside me in bed, once told me I could have anything I wanted.” Mattias shrugged. “So, I took what I wanted.”

  “You used her. You son of a bitch. You—”

  “She was weak.”

  Orissa felt her weight shift forward, a primal instinct to defend her mother’s memory. But she stilled herself, aware that if she went bolting ahead as a bellicose woman hellbent on caving in Mattias’s face, she’d either be shot dead before she took two steps, or she’d play right into his hand, whatever hand that might be.

  “My mother,” she said, chin held high, “was the strongest person I’ve known.”

  “Weak,” repeated Mattias. He paused, as if the second insult might prompt a change of heart in Orissa. But she made no move. “Your father beat the fight out of her, I’m afraid.”

  Her toes were curling in her boots like a cat’s claws clutching onto sheets for dear life. She was ready to let go. Wanted to let go, to bear down on Mattias and loosen every tooth from his mouth. She felt like a coward standing there, listening passively as he abused and disgraced her mother.

  “She was shattered,” said Mattias. “Her trust nonexistent. But I built her back up. I forged her anew. I gained access to parts of your mother she had refused every man before me.”

  “You speak of her like she’s a Machine.”

  “She was worth something to me, and at times… at times I felt regret for what I was doing.”

  The line of his mouth softened, and his eyes drifted away from hers. Orissa knew that look well. She’d felt it countless times since being reborn, that doleful and dour mood dusted up from the wanderers and relics of the past trespassing in her mind.

  But she was no monster like Mattias, so while the crushing melancholy would stay with her for hours or days, his ended abruptly, and he once more looked as foul as his heart was black.

  He pointed a claw of a finger at her and went to speak, but from deep in the facility came a raucous and discordant roar.

  It sounded like the engines of a ship.

  Ivan went mad with laughter. “Mister Imus, this is excitement! This is to be treasured!”

  Leon felt like his bowels were attempting to evacuate through both ends. The Skymmer veered and careened through the expansive chambers of the facility at speeds that blurred passing objects. He couldn’t say how much damage the ship could sustain, but he figured knocking into a solid pillar at this speed would probably rip wing from fuselage and, in turn, his arms from his torso.

  “A mile and a half ahead,” Ivan called out, rapping a nail against the radar screen. It flashed with red dots.

  The plan had been to enter the facility and quickly kill the engines, then hoof it on foot to find Orissa within—ideally—the womb of the electromagnetic pulse shield.

  Plans never did seem to go accordingly, Leon soberly noted. The Skymmer plunged down from the clouds like a bird of prey. It took several bullets, but its armored plating held up well as it corkscrewed into the facility’s opening.

  “We’re late arrivals, it would seem,” Ivan had said as the vertical drop vomited them out into a vast, open-floor chamber that stretched like a meadow beneath a skybox of gray stone. Machines were three miles ahead according to the radar.

  What that meant Leon didn’t know. Was Orissa still alive? Had she even made it here? Was she holed up, threatening the approaching metal fiends with annihilation by electrocution?

  Clovis would have been able to tell them more, but he was aboveground, high in the clouds, waiting. If he had joined them and they’d passed through the electromagnetic pulse field, his circuits would be instantly fried. Leon told him it’d be better to hide, to wait for them to establish a plan to drive the Machines a few miles from the entrance and then reconvene later.

  “We’re half a mile away, Mister Imus,” announced Ivan, pulling Leon back into the present. “The hall is narrowing ahead. Don’t think we’ll be able to continue—holy hot damn! There they are!”

  Leon barely had time to process the bulwark of metal that awaited them. Ivan flailed about like a man being sucked out to sea, arm flinging this way and that, hands splayed as he slapped away at the console controls.

  Something grumbled in the belly of the ship.

  Fwoosh. A missile, followed by another, torpedoed out. Leon followed the vapor trails up until twin explosions huffed fire from floor to ceiling.

  The Skymmer sped toward the flames. If it had slowed, Leon couldn’t tell.

  “Ivan—”

  “Not now, Mister Imus! There’s explosive ordinance to be unleashed.” He took hold of a stalk with multiple side buttons and a trigger, his attention glued to a screen beside the radar.

  The Skymmer’s rotary guns spun into action. They unleashed a frenzy of bullets into the smoke and fire, tiny explosive bursts sounding off as each made contact with the enemy.

  “Puff balls, as they’re colloquially known among RayTech engineers,” Ivan explained. “They tend to turn one into puffs of smoke.” He cast a glance at Leon, eyes as big as marbles, mouth gaped in an unsettling smile.

 
With a click of a button, Ivan unfolded the landing gear. Head restraints emerged from the seats, a cushioned cage that clasped securely around both him and Leon.

  “Hold onto your balls, Mister Imus. This will be a rough landing.”

  He brought the Skymmer to the ground and yanked back the brake.

  Leon’s shoulders were hunched, his knuckles white. He clenched to the seat so firmly he could’ve crushed a watermelon between his thighs. The raging flames and sheet of smoke reeled in the Skymmer. It sucked the ship in like a fiery, cataclysmic vortex.

  And then the sight of an impending hot death vanished. But not for reasons that brought Leon any comfort. The Skymmer squealed and screeched, spinning out of control. Its lights bounced erratically, illuminating one stretch of darkness and then withdrawing just as quickly before Leon could orient himself.

  Ivan cackled. “The rawness of excitement! Do you feel it, Mister Imus? Have you ever felt so alive? Have you ever—”

  The rear of the Skymmer collided with an immovable object, whiplashing its front around. It was only by the grace of the head restraints that Leon’s neck didn’t snap.

  Amid the confusion and disorientation blossomed pain, white hot and stabbing, in Leon’s forearm. Much as the agony made him want him to scream, he ground his teeth and stayed silent. Better for the Machines to think him dead than know there was a bleating, bloody human clinging to life inside the Skymmer.

  He ran a finger over the spot on his arm and found a chunk of debris had buried itself in his flesh. Blood poured from around the object.

  You’re alive, he told himself, forcing away his brain’s attempt to hyperventilate himself. He drew in calming breaths and went through a mental checklist.

  He was alive, in a hostile location, and trapped in a ship on which the enemy was doubtlessly converging. The wound in his arm didn’t appear to be life threatening. It’d be a bitch to bend his elbow with that piece of debris sticking out, and the loss of blood was alarming, but he could deal with those problems later. First order of business was freeing himself from this deathtrap.