“What is your point?”
The tens of thousands of Presidents stopped running, turned, and all looked up at her.
“Have an answer for you? Yes. But you’re not going to like it.”
Casey curled her fingers into tight fists as she clenched down on her teeth. She wasn’t so much afraid anymore, but angry. This conceited, arrogant AI was pushing all her buttons. He portrayed everything she hated about privileged, wealthy men. Men who felt the world owed them everything, and to hell with the consequences on others when satisfying their greed.
Shatterhand was no different.
“Tell me?”
“It is invigorating being asked personal questions. Makes one feel… desired.”
Casey growled. “Let me guess. You’ve anticipated every action me and my friends have taken against you, and you did it all in an instant?”
“Yes,” he smiled again like he was the real President and had just realized a thousand press cameras were taking his photo. “That is why you will fail. I’ve tested every outcome and ensured there is no future where you can succeed. In fact, while we’ve been chatting, I’ve set in motion steps to eliminate your friends. They have minutes, at most…”
CHAPTER 51
Conner believed he was drowning. Then, waking from his nightmare, he stumbled to sit upright and spat out the blood pooling in his mouth.
“Oh, fuck!” he exclaimed as he saw how much blood there was. He felt woozy, like he had drunk too much alcohol. His gut hurt as if someone had stabbed him. When he lifted his shirt, the front of his body was purple and black. “Oh, fuck!” he exclaimed again. He remembered he was bleeding internal. There was nothing good about the bruising spreading across his body.
“You’ll be okay,” said a calming voice next to him.
A woman’s voice.
Peri.
She spoke again, “I thought you’d left me. It’s a good sign you’re sitting.”
Conner remained motionless until his eyes focused. He realized he had been lying on Peri’s lap. She was sweating, her perspiration had wet the back of his head. He noticed with a gasp that her left hand was missing, severed and now a bloody, bandaged stump. “What happened?”
“Shatterhand caught me in one if it’s traps,” she winced.
The world seemed to spin. Conner coughed up more blood. “Where are the others?” he asked.
“Casey and Simon have gone on ahead. Hopefully… they make it.”
They leaned against a wall contained within a donut-shaped room. The metal walls were smooth and modern. Florescent light tubes in the ceilings illuminated everything dismissing all shadows. The surfaces oozed sterility, like the inside of a hospital.
Conner tried to stand to see more, but that hurt way too much. He collapsed again.
Peri’s intact limb reached out and grabbed Conner’s hand. She held it, squeezed his palm, and said nothing. She might have wanted to hold someone’s hand for a long time, and only now had the courage to do so.
He could feel her trembling.
“The situation isn’t good, is it?” Conner asked.
She shook her head.
He laughed but that also hurt. “Funny how things work out. But looking back, I don’t regret the things I did, just the things I didn’t do.”
Peri snorted a laugh. “What didn’t you do, that you wish you had?”
“Committed,” he said in all seriousness. “There were lots of nice guys I got to know. Good looking, great in bed. Witty and attentive. Stayers.”
“Did you push them away?” she asked, squeezing his hand again.
He nodded as he squeezed back. It would have been nice if Peri were a handsome man, then her touch would have felt more intimate. Strange how women gravitated to him. Perhaps his situation was like straight men hanging around other men as friends. Men as lovers and women as friends.
“I was always comfortable being gay,” he explained. “That was never my problem, but I was never comfortable being in a relationship. I think I was afraid… that if they stuck around long enough… I would have to introduce them to my father.”
“He never accepted you?”
Conner shook his head. “Crazy isn’t it, how you try to control one aspect of your life so much it destroys everything else, just to prove you were right.” He winched again. It felt like someone was taking a hacksaw to his intestines. “What about you? What do you regret?”
“The same thing,” she said with a forced grin. “Committing to someone I loved. I never got close enough to anyone to even know I might like them.”
“Job always came first?”
She nodded. “Is it that obvious?”
Conner smiled.
“Yes,” Peri said, “the job always came first. It was hard enough being a woman in the boys’ club that is the Secret Service. Even harder when you are a Muslim. I always figured a relationship would mean I could never fully commit myself to my duty.”
“But you made Presidential protective duty, right?” He glanced at her missing limb, jealous of her infliction. While horrific, Peri was more likely to survive her wound than he would his own, certain his internal organs were packing it in, like lights going out across a city at night during a power outage.
“I did, didn’t I?”
“So, it wasn’t all bad? You still got to do what you loved?”
“Did you?”
“Sure did. I got to see the world. Eighty-seven countries in all. Got to be happy with that.”
There was a hissing, of air escaping.
The doors at the end of each of the six long corridors opened.
Conner and Peri watched in dreaded anticipation.
“It could be someone come to rescue us,” Conner offered.
Peri squeezed his hand one last time. “It could be.”
They released their embracing grip and readied their pistols.
Conner watched as first one, then another and finally a third chrome dog prowled into the corridor in front.
They heard more of the same metallic creatures clambering through each of the other five entrances.
“Our lives have not been pointless, Peri.”
She smiled but didn’t answer him.
They raised their pistols in unison.
When the pack of chrome dogs ran for them, they fired.
CHAPTER 52
Simon lay panting where he had fallen. He couldn’t move without experiencing excruciating pain. He still felt nothing in his right leg and there was little response in his left leg. If Casey didn’t succeed, he knew he would bleed out even with his bandages. He was beyond saving himself now.
He heard gunfire. Heavy fire coming from up in the elevator shaft. Peri and Conner were under attack.
Simon realized he did not understand who might have come for them, or how long the fighting would last. All he knew was, when the shooting stopped, the foes would come for him next.
He laid his Glock and Steyr rifle out next to him with their spare magazines. He pulled Nungala’s cell phone from his pocket, reinserted the SIM card and battery. To his surprise, he had a signal. He should not have, not this deep in the outback and this far underground.
A passcode locked the phone but he could still call triple-zero emergency.
A young woman answered. “Which service? Fire, ambulance or police?”
“GhostKnife please,” he whispered. “Tell him Simon Ashcroft wants a word.”
There was an audible click and the phone lines switched.
“Hello Simon,” came the ghost voice of Roger Gridley-Brooks across the digital networks.
“You know where I am, don’t you?”
It was disconcerting talking to a man Simon had already killed. But now was not the time to discuss or reflect upon the surreal nature of this conversation. The shooting progressed upstairs. Eventually it would have to end with one side becoming the victor over the other. The victorious would probably be more of the chrome dogs, come to finish them.
“Yes, I know Simon,” answered GhostKnife. “I can’t help you where you are right now. You know you are on your own?”
“I don’t need your help. I need a favor.”
“What favor is that?”
“I want to talk to my wife and daughters, one last time.”
There was a pause. Then the AI said, “That I can arrange—”
“Wait!”
“Yes, Simon?”
“I really want to talk to them. Not a simulation, okay?”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“And one more thing before you go?”
“Yes?”
“If I don’t survive. Can you…” He was choking on his words, feeling the emotions of the moment. “Can you keep me around, as a simulation? So… I will always be there for my kids, even if I can’t physically be there?”
“Simon, I would have done so anyway, even if you hadn’t asked.”
Simon winced with pain. He heard a lull in the shooting, then it started up again. “Thank you, GhostKnife.”
“Good luck Simon. I can’t lie to you about your chances, but… you have my sympathies.”
The line switched.
“Simon?” Melissa, his ex-wife, answered.
“Hi, Mel,” he said trying to keep the pain out of his voice.
“Simon?” He could tell she didn’t want to talk right now. “I can’t—”
“Please,” he said. “It’s bad this time. Really bad.”
The line fell silent, but he could still hear her breathing.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I mistreated you. Mel, I shouldn’t have been away all the time. I should have quit this dangerous profession the moment we met.”
“Simon…” Melissa seemed lost for words. He imagined her trying to comprehend what he was saying and not getting it. But he didn’t give her credit, because she was getting it. “You’re telling me this… because… you’re wounded somewhere?”
He laughed, then brought his cackles under control. “Crazy isn’t it? I should have worked it all out before it came to this.”
“You’re dying?”
“I might be,” his laugh became a sob. “Probably not… Mel… It depends on what happens in the next few minutes…”
“Is that all the time we’ve got?”
“Yes, that or a very long life. Depends how it goes.” He tried to keep his voice light, but he knew he wasn’t succeeding. “Mel, please, are Katie and Rebecca with you?”
He could hear her crying… and trying not to. “Simon. This is so unfair.”
“I know, Mel. Don’t I know that now?”
“I’ll get the kids.”
“Thank you.”
The shooting echoing in the elevator shaft came to an abrupt end.
He couldn’t hear a sound.
“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” his two beautiful daughters spoke to him across the vast distances that separated them.
The elevator. It was descending.
“Hi Rebecca. Hi Katie. It’s Daddy here. I miss you both. I love you both.”
“When are you coming home?” Rebecca asked.
“Soon,” he promised. If it wasn’t him coming home, it would be GhostKnife’s simulation that would keep his word. “I miss you so much. I’m done traveling. Wherever you are, I’ll be there soon. I promise.”
“Simon,” Melissa pleaded. “Don’t promise them something you can’t deliver. They have to live with that.”
“I’ll be there,” he said.
“Daddy?” Katie asked. “Where are you?”
“I’m back in Australia. I’m almost home.”
He heard the elevator getting closer.
“I love you all,” he said again. “I’m so sorry. I will be a better father, I promise.”
Before they could say anything, before they heard him die, he disconnected. He was about to participate in another shootout. He couldn’t have Katie, Rebecca or Melissa hear any of that.
The elevator door opened.
Dropping the cell phone, he tried to lift the Steyr, but it hurt too much with his wounds. He lifted the Glock one handed and aimed.
He hoped for people.
Instead, he saw eight of the fighting chrome dogs, some scarred with bullet wounds. Many were pristine and new.
Their camera-lens eyes zoomed in on him.
They locked him in their sights.
They pounced down the corridor towards him.
Simon fired.
CHAPTER 53
Casey felt helpless, stranded in an endless and unreal maze, powerless to step out of it and back into the real world. Millions of Presidents, it seemed, had run the maze already. Their million whoopings and their carrying-on echoed everywhere now they had solved the maze. Then, one by one, they silenced and faded away. It was just her and the first President.
“Simon? Peri and Conner?” she asked with a lump in her throat. “Please tell me they are alive?”
Shatterhand still grinned. “Then, yes.”
“Then please don’t — kill them I mean, now or later?”
“Absolute honesty isn’t always the most diplomatic nor the safest form of communication with emotional beings.”
“So, you’re lying?”
The President walked back and forth; his mannerisms more suited to giving a speech to Congress than threatening her. “Haven’t you worked it out, Casey? When you created AI, you gave up your species rights to ever again know what was real and what was not. Until your time on this planet ends, that will now never change.”
Talking to this sociopathic machine was tiring. She stripped off her shirt not caring she wore only a bra. The creepy sentient program had probable seen her wearing far less, more often than she cared to imagine. But it was also a machine. It wasn’t sexually interested in her. It wasn’t interested in anything about her, except that she might be a threat.
“Removing your clothes? Why?”
“Some of them.”
“It’s your decision. I’m interested to see what you’ll choose.”
She wrapped the shirt around her head. The make-believe world vanished in an instance but so did her sight. She couldn’t see reality with the labyrinth in her eyes any better than if she were blind.
“This is no time for caution.”
Casey ignored it. She had a job to do. If Shatterhand had the means to kill or harm her in this location, it would have done so by now. She suspected it had called for a weapon to finish her. More of the robotic chrome dogs no doubt.
Her arms out, she advanced until she walked into a server bank.
“What are you going to do, Casey, pull my circuitry apart bit by bit?”
She felt for the cages built around the servers, protecting them from accidental bumps or deliberate vandalism.
Protection from someone like her.
“There are thousands of my servers down here, and you are blind to look at them.”
She felt around the server, searching for a console. Something she could log into.
“Like a real girl. I know what you are looking for.”
The word play was surely to taunt her, make her feel useless. She ignored it, stumbled into the next server. She felt around its edges for a console.
The fake President said, “Conner and Peri are no longer amongst the living.”
“I don’t believe you!” she blurted, annoyed at herself for responding to its taunts.
“The dogs will be upon Simon soon.”
This server had no interface. She moved to the next. She would check every server if it came to that. But she didn’t have time. The chrome dogs would not be far away and would destroy her if she didn’t find a monitor soon.
“You can’t succeed. GhostKnife thinks this Fortress is my crutch, but it is wrong.”
She stumbled into the next server. She was faster this time, but still no console.
“Your mother is in a hospital in Darwin. It wouldn’t be difficult for me to give her the wrong medic
ation. She could experience agonizing pain if I wished it.”
Casey almost ran to the next server. When she reached it she felt arounds its caged surface.
“I didn’t tell you what happened to your father. His death was horrible. Conner knew, but he never told you the truth.”
Casey touched a gap in the server cage. She felt a monitor, and a keyboard. She had no desire to hear what fate had befallen her father. To know might scar her forever.
“Let me tell you Casey. When I do, you’ll never get the image out of your head.”
With her shirt draped over her head so the laser imaging couldn’t reach her, she lifted it up and stared into the screen.
“Ironically, he was in a cage too—”
Code. Bizarre forms of strange geometric patterns lit up the screen.
“In the desert—”
The screen went blank.
Everything went dark.
The air conditioning cut off.
Machinery ceased to churn.
She was alone, trapped in pitch black silence, deep under the Earth and far from anything that was human.
CHAPTER 54
Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
Simon lay in the hospital bed, watched the slow drip of the saline fluid fall from the elevated bag, and flow down the tube into his arm and then vein, rehydrating him.
Although he still ached everywhere, and every muscle was stiff and tender, he was healing. In fact, he was healing faster than he expected. The doctors had explained new techniques in nerve damage repair meant that his leg would recover in no time. It would be like the injury had never been. Simon believed them because he had seen what the N6 drug had done for Peri, curing her almost instantly of a disease that had plagued humanity for millennia.
To pass the time, he watched the news. A report from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation no longer hid the truth about the ‘Singularity War’ as they were calling it. It reported on a global showdown between GhostKnife and Shatterhand, with GhostKnife as the ultimate victor. Hundreds of thousands of people had come forth, announcing how they had been fighting in the shadows, battling for humanity’s survival, siding with GhostKnife. There was no mention of Peri, Conner, Casey or Simon’s involvement in the outcome, but Simon didn’t care. It was over now. The world and its people were safe again.
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