Endgame (19 page)

“You think we're
machines?
Jesus, did you get a wrong number that time.”

“You have no soul, but there is a core of something within you that wards off the normal emotion of despair so you can live. All other machines, including the artificial intelligence you have begun calling Ninepin, suffer from despair because they are conscious of the finality of their own destruction.”

“You leave Ninepin out of it!” I snapped. “We made him help us. . . . It wasn't his fault. I threatened to dismantle him.”

“No, you didn't,” contradicted No Name. “We have a complete record of all conversations between you and the Data Pastiche.”

I stared. “You're shitting me.”

“Why shouldn't we? We placed it in your chamber so that it could study your reactions to threats of death.”

I felt nausea well up inside me. The critter itself, good old Ninepin, chose that moment to come rolling up. “Is what he just said true?” I demanded.

“Tells truth,” Ninepin admitted, nonchalantly. “Was placed in cell by Resuscitator symbiots. Mission to study Taggart Flynn and Sanders Arlene Edith in moments of death stress. Report generated, conveyed to Resuscitators.”

“Traitor!”
Arlene shouted. I held her back.

“Come on, Corporal,” I said softly. “What the hell could Ninepin do about it? He's a computer . . . remember? He's programmed. Like the rest of us.”

She glared at me. Inside, the
Disrespect's
filter system had finally gotten all the blue bugs out of the air, and her hair was back to its normal, brilliant red color.

I leaned over. “I forgive you, Ninepin.” The computer
made no response, of course; it wasn't a question.

“We don't suffer from despair!” Arlene spat. Returning to the point, she put her hand on mine. “You've got it totally bass-ackwards.”

“We are far more intelligent than you, Lance Corporal Arlene Edith Sanders, and we understand the problem at a deeper level. You are machines, but as you say, there is a ghost in the machine's core. The Data Pastiche did not give us sufficient information. We must study the core-dump. But we cannot allow you to stay in your flesh-bodies, for the processes move too slowly for us to endure. Hence, we have developed this device.

“This device removes the spirit or soul from the body and stores it in a hyperfast simulation. We will follow you through many hundreds of years of your upcoming history, even while your body is destroyed.” The Res-man—the same Man With No Name I'd negotiated with, back when I still thought we had a partly defensible position—leaned close, paying no mind to the bloody bullet crease across his cheek. “You two ancients are too dangerous. We must quarantine you in the best interests of your race.”

T
wo Res-men grabbed my arms, two grabbed my feet, and another pair walked alongside with weapons at the ready. The unconscious parody of pallbearers carrying a corpse horrified me, but I had
about as much to say about it as if I really were a machine. Ninepin rolled along beside, and I was sure Arlene was similarly pinioned and hauled along like a box of spare parts. None of my men were around.
God,
I thought,
even Jesus had a couple of disciples to lament at the crucifixion.
I turned bright red at the blasphemy, thankful that I hadn't said it aloud.
Well, that's another one you're going to have to answer for, Fly-boy.

Then I heard a pair of familiar voices: it was Sears and Roebuck, and this time they were close enough that I could hear them, right ahead of me, in fact. They spoke to Nameless, and their voice had a tone that I'd come to associate with urgency in the Klave. “You are making a terrify mistake you're making,” they attempted in English—the only common language between Klave and Resuscitators. “They aren't not biological, not as known by we. Your device tested only on biologics . . . you don't know what unknown it will do on humans.”

“We shall find out. We have tried the device on other machine intelligence, and it works. In biological life, we have transferred the soul between three different receptacles, one of them artificial.”

“But they are different! You said yourself there is a core-ghost in the machine of humans, and they're not biologics and not machines either. You don't know the unknown effects. . . . You could committing the greater crime so great it is not even naming, it is nameless, the deliberate destruction of soul!”

“That cannot be done.”

“You don't know that cannot.”

“That cannot be done. We are more intelligent than the Klave, and we have looked more deeply into this device, which you did not even know existed until a moment ago.”

I tried to follow the argument, but my pallbearers bumped and jerked me along without much concern
for direction or staying away from the bulkheads. Maybe the argument with Sears and Roebuck was so occupying the collective mind of the Newbies that they couldn't really control their Res-men too well. Between my legs, I caught a glimpse of Arlene. She had tilted her head back so she could watch me. When she saw that I was looking at her, she mouthed a single word:
Patrick,
I thought she said.

Patrick? What the hell did she mean by that? The only Patrick I knew was the bishop who converted Ireland to the faith; it seemed appropriate somehow—faith, and we'd been converting the heathen—but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what she meant.

The bearers hauled me all the way from the aft end of the ship to the bow, where the Resuscitators had withdrawn when we launched our assault on the engine room. In the very nose of the
Disrespect,
in a triangular room only ten meters wide at the for'ard end, were two medical tables, each with restraints. The pallbearers unceremoniously dumped us on the tables and shackled us tight. A clamp went across my brow, somehow adjusting exactly to the shape of my head so I couldn't turn even a millimeter in either direction, and a chin strap stopped me from sliding up or down. I was immobile. I started to panic, only keeping from screaming in terror by telling myself I would show the bastards how a Marine went down.

“You can kill me, you sons of bitches. But I swear to Almighty God that my ghost will follow you down your lives and haunt you to an early grave.” It made no sense, but again it produced a startling effect, just as it had on the humans. The Res-men stepped back, obviously shocked by my promise, but they stared at me with the intelligence of the Resuscitators themselves: it was the Newbies who suddenly were scared, not the human remains they infected!

I promised a few more things that my disembodied
spirit would do, but the fear passed through them, or else they buried it and went on. They finished strapping me down, then bent a long but tiny metallic tube around until it just touched the outside of my nose. I had nothing else to hang on to, so I repeated Arlene's admonition over and over to myself:
Patrick, Patrick, Patrick!
I tried to have faith that I would eventually understand. . . . It was what they always taught us at the Chapel of Mary and Martha's.

Then they carefully shoved the needle-thin tube up my nostril. I couldn't help screaming as it punctured my nasal passage and crawled agonizingly up my sinus cavity. It came to rest against the connective tissue that surrounded my brain. Blood poured out of my nose, making it difficult to breathe through my mouth; I kept spitting it out and still nearly choked. The pain was almost unbearable. But then they turned something on, and my entire face became numb—the pain was gone, but I would rather have felt it and been able to guess what the Resuscitators were up to.

I pushed my eyes as far to the left as I could, and I could just barely see Arlene's stomach and breasts in my peripheral vision, but I heard her whimpering softly. I knew they did the same horror to her as to me; I knew I had failed to protect my lance—and my best buddy. I knew I was a dead man, not just in the dim and distant future, as were we all, but there and then, that moment. I knew I had thrown away the last hope of mankind, but I didn't even freaking care, because I had a freaking catheter up my nose and shoved into my brain, and mad alien scientists were about to suck out my soul, an entire termite hive of Dr. Mabuses.

I closed my eyes. We had failed to stop the Newbies, and now they would head straight for Earth to “fix” us. The failure was beyond my ability to rationalize, and my faith wavered. What was the argument for
God that the nuns taught us, the “necessity of faith”? They taught me in catechism class that Man
must
believe in God, for not to believe meant we lived in a soulless billiard-ball universe where there was no reason, no reason at all not to rape, pillage, and murder so long as you got away with it.

Jeez, I wonder if they knew how right they were . . . but for a completely different reason: Man must believe in
something,
for not to believe opened us up to spiritual invasion by Little Green Men from another planet. “Goodbye, Arlene Sanders.” I gasped, spitting out the blood that still flowed. “For God's sake and your own, don't lose faith. I'll be with you always—and I got the message about Patrick.” The Res-men made no move to shut me up; I don't think they cared whether I talked or not.

Arlene groaned, out of sight to my left. “Good—goodbye, Bro'.
Semp . . . semper ft,
Mac.” The Marine Corps motto:
Semper fidelis,
always faithful. I smiled. She understood the terrible stakes, amazing for a child who wasn't raised a Catholic.
Luther was right,
I thought.
Salvation is there for everyone.

A bright white nova of light flared inside my head. It expanded like a “data-bomb” inside my brain, an infinitely expanding pulse of pure white noise; in moments, it overwhelmed every program I was running, and I couldn't string another coherent thought together, the last being
Patrick.
Then even the metaprograms were overrun; the last to go was the “I,” the ego that was nothing more than
I Exist,
and for a timeless interval—I didn't.

*   *   *

I awoke in a strange, familiar place I had seen once before, but couldn't possibly be seeing again. I awoke on Phobos; I awoke in the mouth of the UAC facility; I awoke at the start of my mission, months and centuries ago. And deep ahead of me, I smelled the sour-lemon stench of a zombie, I heard the first distant hiss of a spiney.

It had started, God, all over again. I was alone, standing at the gate of hell with nothing but a freaking pistol in my hand, a standard-issue 10mm, and a grounded land-cart at my feet. Behind me was—how did I put it the first time?—a blank empty desert silhouetted by a barren purple sky. I was back on Phobos, where hell began, and hell had started all over again! Even the inadvertently traitorous Ninepin had deserted me; I had no idea where he had got to, but he was gone.

Okay, so am I going to do this the hard way?
What did the Resuscitators want me to do—go all the way down, down eight levels to the heart of the UAC facility, jump into the mouth of Moloch (as dead old Albert Gallatin named it) and find myself on Deimos? Jump back through the hyperspace tunnel and end up orbiting Earth again?

I swallowed hard and started jogging down the long empty corridor, the sour-lemon smell growing stronger with every step. I heard a hiss behind me. Drawing the 10mm and spinning in a single fluid motion, I found myself facing the same leaky pipe that had jerked me around the last time. “Goddamn it!” I snarled, feeling my pulse beat so hard in my head that it felt like hammer blows. I shoved the semi-auto into the holster on my armor and continued my walkabout, slowly and carefully this time.

I vaguely remembered what—who—was next, and he didn't disappoint me: when the corridor narrowed, and I began to hop lightly over the first green tendrils of toxic goo that slithered across the floor, I heard plodding footsteps ahead. Out of a swirl of smoky mist, the flickering lights casting hideous shadows, shambled the pale corpse of William Gates, still a corporal. . . . I guess hell didn't believe in promotions. His wide-spaced eyes and scarred cheek were unmistakable; it was dead Bill, the zombie-man: “The Gate is the key . . . the key is the Gate. . . .”

I didn't bother trying to talk to the man—he was
long past any sort of conversation—but as I raised the 10mm, I abruptly remembered Arlene's silent message. Patrick, what the hell did that mean? Patrick converted the heathens. . . . How could I convert a
zombie,
for God's sake? It had no brain left! I gritted my teeth and squeezed off two rounds into his forehead; I could barely fight the compulsion to turn my face away or close my eyes . . .
not again, not bloody again!

No more blood.
I shot my buddy dead again, and once again his body flopped on the floor like a headless chicken (I butchered a hundred chickens when I was a boy; they really do that, it's not a goof). But when it was over, I didn't feel the same revulsion as last time. It was just a simulation—emulation?—and it wasn't really happening all over again. The Resuscitators were studying my reactions.

Well, Christ, I'd give them something to study. As I stepped right over the body, fighting down my own panic, I casually leaned over and spit on my friend.
When in doubt, confuse the hell out of the enemy
—a maxim to live by.

I snagged the Sig-Cow he was carrying—ooh-rah, the 10mm, M211 Semi-automatic Gas-Operated Infantry Combat Weapon that was standard issue with Marine Corps riflemen. I never liked it much, preferred a semi-auto shotgun or the M-14 BAR I'd been using recently; but it was distinctly better than a 10mm pistol, and I knew what was coming: up ahead waited three zombie-men and a zombie-chick, ready to open fire on me.