Post-Human Trilogy (33 page)

10

WAKING UP had become almost impossible. James blinked his eyes, and the darkness flashed away for the briefest glimpse of his surroundin
gs. He saw a black and orange blur sliding and swirling like the image of a kaleidoscope. The light was coming from overhead. He blinked a handful of times, but his heavy eyes shut and sealed, his eyelids sore like the legs of a marathon runner in the last quarter-mile.

Someone’s cool hand touched the back of his head, and he awakened again. A woman’s chilled fingers were on the back of his neck. She was putting something behind his head. Was it a pillow? Of course—he’s in a hospital. Thel had found the Purists. He tried to speak to the woman, but his voice failed him. His throat felt like the barrel of a flamethrower.

“Don’t try to speak,” the woman whispered. “You had a tube down your throat. Rest.”

A tube down his throat? Surgery. He has required surgery. James held his head up and tried to communicate, but again, every move caused exhaustion. One move of his neck felt like the thousandth time he had made the motion. The woman put her cool hand against his burning forehead and lightly pressed him back against the welcoming pillow, seemingly willing him back to sleep.

He couldn’t sleep—there was too much at stake. But he couldn’t fight her. She was too strong. He closed his eyes to wait for her to leave, but the blackness came again before the cool hand left his skin.

Light again.

Someone was moving across the room, an elderly man holding a contraption with a bag of clear liquid attached to it, slowly making his way out of the room. He had made some sort of noise and given James the toehold he needed to escape the blackness.

Awake again, James could not let himself sleep. How much time had he already lost? Where was he? Suddenly, he remembered: a hospital. He needed to reason his way through his predicament. It was clear that he was being prevented from waking up. He looked down and saw the bandages across his torso. The punctured lung. He must have required some sort of surgery. That meant his body had undergone massive trauma. Without his nans, his body would have to heal from the trauma on its own. That would require an enormous amount of rest. The Purists must have administered painkillers and a sedative to keep him unconscious. How were they getting it into his system? A pained move of his neck from side to side revealed the answer. Like the man who had woken him, James had one of the poles with a bag filled with clear liquid attached to him. A wire went from the bag down to his arm, and a needle was puncturing his skin. He assumed this was how they administered the drugs and nutrients. He would have to disconnect it in order to stay awake. He took as deep a breath as he could. His throat was still coated with liquid flame. He swung his left arm across his body and grasped the needle that was sticking into his right forearm. This movement sent a terrible stab of pain through the right side of his body, where his incision was located. The painkillers were not strong enough. James did not want to imagine what it would have felt like had he no painkillers to dull the full brunt of it. He wrapped his fingers around the needle but then suddenly stopped.

Thel
.

James’s eyes were adjusting to the dim light, and the blur was clearing as he kept them open. Thel was lying on a cot against the wall only a few feet to his right. He tried to call out to her for help, but only a hoarse and cruelly painful whisper left his lips. She was sound asleep.
Death’s Counterfeit
, he thought.
Of course
.

He broke from this train of thought and focused on the task at hand—he would have to do this himself. He began to pull with what little strength he had. Again, even with the painkillers running through his system, slowly pulling the needle out of his skin caused exceptional discomfort. He grimaced as he tried to work the metal object out of his arm. Since it had to have entered a vein, he knew it was deep. James wished for more strength, but he had none. He focused on the pain, hoping it would keep him awake long enough to work the needle out. It was an agonizing five-minute process, but finally, he worked the needle free. His arm began to bleed, but there was nothing he could do about that now. He needed to rest for a moment.

Without the painkillers or the sedatives going into his system, he knew he only needed a few minutes to go by before things would become easier. The pain would quickly increase, making him more alert. He concentrated on generating saliva and swallowing so he could tame the searing dragon in his throat. He looked at Thel and tried to call out to her again. His whisper was louder, but it still wasn’t enough to wake her out of her sleep. He knew she must have been exhausted. He looked at her dark hair and the exposed nape of her white neck. Everyone else had lost everything, but James still had Thel. She was alive, and he had to keep it that way.

When a few minutes had passed, James began to attempt the impossible. He rolled to his left. The pain was almost unbearable. He remembered trying to get to his feet after falling, following the mishap with the Zeus. That had only been the beginning. He squeezed his eyes tight and swore in his whispery voice. He remained on his left side for a few minutes more, before he attempted to move his left leg out from under him. He searched for the edge of the bed and let the leg guide him toward the cold floor.

When both his feet reached the ground, he held on to the side of the bed with both hands for a few minutes before trying to put all his weight on his legs; he could not afford to fall. To fall would undo everything and cost him and the rest of the survivors their future. It all depended on his first few steps. He very cautiously stepped forward and, with great trepidation, let go of his stranglehold on the bedsheets. He slowly took the dozen or so steps to the door of the room and exited.

Outside, a soldier was standing guard. His mouth fell open when he saw James. “Oh dear Lord!” he exclaimed.

“I need to see your commanding officer,” James began in a faint, sandpapery whisper. “Our survival depends on it.”

11

When Thel opened her eyes and remembered the nightmare she inhabited, she immediately turned her head to check on James. The bed was empty. Her heart jumped and
seemed to stop momentarily, and her breath was ripped from her as she leapt to her feet in terror. “What!?” She began to race out of the room.

“Whoa! Hold on!” Rich exclaimed, his hands waving in the air as he stood to his feet from his position next to the wall at the side of the room. “I fell asleep. I was supposed to be watching you.”

“Watching me?”

“Yeah, but I just got in from three hours of recon duty with that psycho, Gernot. I’m a little drained after that. Imagine flying around for three hours with a guy who eats flesh because he likes it more than he likes you. Not a safe feeling.”

“What happened? Where is he?” Thel demanded impatiently.

“He’s okay,” Rich answered, waving his hands in front of himself instinctively for protection in case Thel tried to throttle him. “They told me to stay here and watch you to make sure you didn’t go running through the complex shocking people unconscious again!”

“Where is he? Where did they take him?” Thel repeated earnestly.

“They didn’t take him anywhere. He took himself.”

“What? How is that possible?”

“He’s awake. He’s already met with General Wong, and he’s set up in a lab on the other side of the complex.”

Thel blinked as she tried to digest this information. “They said he would be incapacitated for days.”

“Yeah, well, he gave himself a different prognosis.”

“Take me to him.”

“You bet.”

Rich walked briskly across the complex, Thel pushing them to move with a purpose. Rich noted the looks of the people in the complex who saw them as they walked by. They were back in their black uniforms now, and everyone knew who they were. The people were afraid, and Rich couldn’t understand why. Those people were the ones who ate flesh.

Thel was oblivious, almost not seeing where they were going, just worriedly staring into her imagination.
What could have caused James to get up after suffering from such a terrible trauma?
“Why is he in a lab?” she asked.

“I honestly don’t know, Thel. Things have been moving really quickly. I’m not in the loop, but something is going down.”

They reached the door to the lab, and two guards moved aside to let them enter. Thel stopped for a moment when she saw James, back in his uniform, leaning over a countertop strewn with mechanical equipment and ancient computers. Old-timer and Djanet were working on nearby equipment. General Wong himself was there, his arms folded and a look of intense concern painted across his well-lined face.

James didn’t notice her come in at first and instead remained fixed above some sort of contraption, peering into a cylindrical protrusion.

“James!” Thel shouted.

James looked up then and smiled. “Thel,” he replied weakly.

Thel rushed toward him, but he held his arm up with a grimace to keep her at bay. “Slow! Go slow.”

Thel slowed her approach and embraced him gently. “You must be in agony.”

“It hurts,” he affirmed before kissing her.

The general looked across the room to Rich, as though Rich could explain the scene to him. Rich just shrugged and looked down at his feet for a moment while the kiss continued.

Thel broke from James’s lips and asked, “What’s going on?”

James took a deep breath before answering. “I’m going to kill the A.I.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“I want to show you something,” James said to Thel and Rich. He took Thel by the hand and guided her over to one of the strange contraptions on the counter. “This is a microscope. If you look into the eyepiece, you’ll see a magnified view of one of my nans. I brought it back online, and look what happened.”

Thel looked into the eyepiece and watched the nan spin wildly, its sharp instruments thrashing violently. “Oh my God. This is how they died?”

James nodded in reply. “They were ripped apart from the inside.”

“That monster,” Rich whispered. A painful moment passed. Old-timer and Djanet had turned away from their work and held their heads down as an impromptu moment of silence was observed.

“I’ll get him,” James promised.

“How? You can barely move!” Thel protested.

“I’ll have that remedied in a few moments, though it doesn’t really matter. I won’t need my body for this.”

“Well, it’s official. I’m lost,” Rich admitted.

“We’ve been working on the nans. We’re going to reactivate them. We’ve figured out how to neutralize the virus.”

“Speaking of which, Commander,” Djanet interjected, “we’re ready to do that now.”

“Then do it,” James replied.

Djanet turned to a computer console and hit a single button. “Done,” she informed the group.

“That’s it? I don’t feel anything,” Rich observed.

James groaned from the other side of the room. When he suddenly doubled over, Thel reached for him immediately. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong—they’re just busy. I need to lie down.”

Thel and Rich helped to guide James over to a makeshift bed near Old-timer and Djanet.

“Rich, help me get my shirt off. You guys are going to want to see this. This is a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

Rich helped James remove his shirt. James lay as still as he could while the group, including General Wong, stood and observed; his massive incision seemingly vanished before their eyes. His stitches were pushed out of the skin and the bruising appeared to evaporate.

“My God,” General Wong uttered.

James watched with hungry fascination as his body was repaired. “Amazing,” he whispered. His color returned. He closed his eyes for a moment once the process seemed to be finished before saying, in his returned, strong voice, “That’s better.” He sat up and got off the bed. “Okay, guys, let’s finish the final preparations.”

“Final preparations for what?” Thel demanded.

“I’m going to enter the mainframe,” James replied.

“What? How is that possible? It’s guarded by millions of those machines. You’d never get close—”

“I’m not physically going to enter it,” James replied.

“Then how?” Thel asked. Again, James took a deep breath before beginning his explanation. “Thel, this is going to sound a little...strange, but you know that in my position, I was privy to top-secret information.”

“Yes,” she answered, beginning to sense that she was not going to like what she was about to hear.

“I was also part of many different projects. One of them was codenamed
Death’s Counterfeit
. The goal of the project was to send a person’s consciousness, literally, into cyberspace.”

“That’s impossible,” Thel replied, only half-believing her own words.

“It’s possible, Thel. I know, because I was their test subject. I’ve been there before.”

Another moment of silence filled the room, but Rich broke it. “You mean you’re actually going to kill that bastard? I love it,” he said, smiling.

“But he might kill you,” Thel protested.

James put his hands on Thel’s shoulder and looked directly into her eyes. “No he won’t, Thel. I’m going to enter his mainframe on a signal the A.I. doesn’t know about. That smug bastard thinks he knows everything, but the Council was smart enough to keep some information away from him. I’ll enter as a signal he won’t be able to detect, and I’ll isolate his mother program. Once I’ve done that, he won’t be able to access any of his defenses, so I’ll be able to delete him.”

“When you do it, tell him I said, hello
,
” Rich said, contempt dripping from his lips.

“Don’t do this, James,” Thel pleaded. “I just got you back. I can’t lose you again.”

“You won’t lose me, Thel...and I have to do this.”

“Why? Why can’t we just stay here? Why can’t we start over here?”

“We can’t escape him, Thel. Believe me, right now, the A.I. is breeding. He’s using a process I invented to reproduce exponentially. He can reproduce far faster than any organism in the universe. Robots don’t need to terraform. He can populate the solar system in a matter of days. He won’t need Earth, and then there won’t be anything stopping him from destroying it. He’ll move on from there. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine the terror we’ve unleashed? There is life out there, Thel. We may not have contacted it yet, but it’s a mathematical certainty that it’s out there. It won’t just be us he destroys.”

Thel stepped away from James and sat down on a nearby chair. “I can’t believe it. It’s actually worse than I thought.”

“Do you see why I have to go?”

“But why alone, James? We could come with you!”

“It will take too long to configure a signal that can carry more than one person’s neural pattern. Besides, I need you guys here to watch over my body. I’ll appear to be in a deep sleep, but there won’t be anything you can do to wake me. Only I can bring myself back.”

“Will this nightmare never end?” Thel said.

James bent to one knee in front of Thel and lifted her chin. Her eyes were glossy with tears. “Thel, I promise you, I will destroy him...and I will be back.”

Thel shook her head and shut her eyes tight. “Then go! Go right now! Because I can’t stand this anymore! Kill it, James!”

James kissed her for a long moment on the cheek, then turned to the others. “Are we ready?”

“We’re ready,” Old-timer replied.

“Then let’s do it.” James took his place on the bed once again.

“Are you sure about this, buddy?” Old-timer asked his friend in a whisper quiet enough that Thel couldn’t overhear.

“As sure as I can be.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Old-timer responded grimly. “Take care of yourself. You still owe me that beer.”

James smiled. “I never break a promise,” he replied. “Okay. I’m ready.”

“Wait!” Thel shouted before Djanet could initiate the transfer of consciousness. She sprung out of her chair and grasped James’s hand tightly with her own as she kissed him hard. “You come back to me, you hear me?”

“I’ll be back.”

Thel kept her eyes locked on James, even as tears fell and landed on his neck.

“Do it, Djanet,” James said.

Djanet hit a button, and the life seemed to drain from James’s body as though someone had unplugged the drain. His pupils shrank as his eyes shut, and his head turned slightly to one side. His grasp on Thel slackened to nothing.

“Is he okay?” Thel asked Djanet.

“He’s perfect, Thel,” Djanet replied as she looked at the read-outs on her computer screen.

“He’s in,” said Old-timer.