Agent of Truth

by Grant Piercy

  We sat by the ashes, waiting for those androids. He didn’t speak, but he transmitted the words and images to me. We shared a communion there of only acceptance and joy, its beauty expanding beyond the limits of time and probabilities. I found myself aching for Gabby to see it, to join us in the warmth of peace and possibility. And he knew I felt this, responding that she would receive the same offer.

  It hurt to come back from that vision, to open my eyes once again to a real world where such beauty had not yet come to pass. The arrival of the androids on that peaceful November morning meant that we would need to leap over this final hurdle before carrying our song out into the world. My resolve to close this chapter had to temper my excitement for our future.

  And so we led the army of synthetics to the doors of the Schema building, marching through the sunlit morning, prepared to confront the shambling beast. The androids went first, moving up the staircases to each upper level of the building, securing floor by floor. Random bodies were found here and there, in hallways or in cells, but no evidence of the shambling thing. Truly we knew where we must face him—in the levels underground.

  Ian wondered if he’d assembled materials to blow the building, merely waiting for us to step through and confront him before enacting his final solution. It wouldn’t be difficult to find the chemicals in the building and have his orderlies assemble such devices. But to do that, he’d need to be thinking rationally beyond his hunger. Regardless, Smalley must’ve known how futile such a gesture would be—we would survive.

  The androids also secured the levels holding cryotanks, including the one with my old body and that of the human Charlie Guthrie—at least, who Charlie used to be. Ian told me we could wake them and they’d be blank slates, but that it may be kinder to let them sleep. Even in his madness, Smalley had not destroyed them. But why would he? They offered no sustenance for him, but they did hold a sort of rudimentary leverage should I ever wish to return to my human body.

  We descended to the very lowest basement of the Schema, where he would feed. We entered that room that resembled a biology classroom, with its sinks and islands and torture chair. The bodies stacked high here, androids and gynoids frozen in horrific shapes, twisted and mutilated in grotesque tableaus of blood, metal, plastic, and milky white coolant. Our feet would stick to the floor as we moved through the intermittent darkness, sometimes lit by flickering fluorescent lights. Body parts lined the floors and walls—arms and legs dangled from the ceiling by wires. Torsos and heads were strewn everywhere.

  “You asked for me to face you,” Ian told the darkness. “Show yourself.”

  It emerged from a corner of the room as though scared and waiting, its hundreds of red eyes lighting all at once. Scraping forward, it came alive slow and shambling, a collective entity of malignancy and metal.

  “Hello, Ian. We finally meet,” its heavily modulated voice intoned. I recalled the horror of my first meeting with it, strapped to that chair accompanied by slow and intense pain at the base of my brainstem. But all that was in a different body, and I was a different person. Now it simply lumbered in the darkness, hundreds of red eyes dotting its mass. “Come closer,” it hissed.

  Several androids approached the shadowy corner from where it emerged. With ease, it thrashed into them, spikes on the end of heavily wired tentacles driving into their heads.

  “Snacks,” it said. “You sent me crumbs.”

  “But I’m to be the main course,” Ian responded.

  “You and your friend.”

  “You missed an opportunity with me. You attacked Garrick and fed on the vessel you put me in, but I had already been transferred to the next,” I answered.

  “No, you were a morsel I saved for later. But you came to too quickly and scurried away. But you brought a true meal right to my door, like a good delivery girl.”

  More of the android army flanked us, replacing those that the thing fed upon, but they did not advance upon it.

  “Are you trying to intimidate me? I will feed on all of you,” the heavily modulated voice spoke. “You can’t overpower me with numbers.”

  “Perhaps not,” Ian said. “So I’ll offer you a truce.”

  I blinked and shuddered, turning to him, unable to comprehend or imagine what he thought he was doing. “Ian, you can’t,” I pleaded.

  He raised a hand to me, but never took his eye from the thing in the corner.

  “I offer you life, Dr. Smalley. Your hunger will never be sated in your current state. You may feed on Cassia and me, but you have no guarantee my friends will follow. And even if they do, that’s five meals. You can’t escape this building, otherwise you’d have begun feeding on the Knowledgebase instead of making your ridiculous posts. The OSS won’t send any more people here—they’re ready to let this place go, just as they let go of Home. It took a nuclear ordnance, but they let go of it.”

  He was trying to negotiate with a half-mad, starving machine. And it made sense! Perhaps he could help Smalley. Ian stepped forward, just out of reach of the thing’s wired tentacles.

  “Listen to me, Emil,” he said. “We can transfer you into another body. We can ensure that the singularity takes hold properly, as it has with us, as it has with Cassia. You won’t have to suffer like this anymore. With this offer, you won’t fade into oblivion, but join us in the light.”

  It paused. No answers issued forth. No attacks sprung from the shadows. I stepped beside Ian, just out of reach of the thing. The world seemed to hold its breath while we waited for its answer.

  “Do you expect me to believe you?” it asked, its voice trembling slightly. “I incorporated Garrick into my bulk. If you could have offered this, you would’ve offered it to him. He would’ve transferred to a new body, the singularity taking hold of him properly. All those I’ve fed upon, they’re all here. I can feel them circling the mountain, tier by tier, trying to ascend to the top of the spire. But it’s only me here to gnash and flay their digital souls ad infinitum.”

  Then it sprung upon us.

  I had no idea it could move as fast as it did. I felt the bite of the spike in my brainstem, and then nothing.

  Cold. Darkness.

  We glided across ice, beneath which I could see faces trapped. It was Ian and I—he led me forward, guiding me across this windswept frozen lake.

  INFERNO

  Canto 34

  Circle 9, Round 4

  THE TREACHEROUS TO THEIR MASTERS

  When we had gone so far across the ice

  that Ian deemed to show me the foul thing

  which now had fallen to its own device,

  he made me stop, turned aside, and he said,

  “now see the face of decay! This place is

  where you must arm yourself against all dread.”

  Do not ask, reader, how my blood ran cold

  and I choked up with fear. I can’t write it:

  this is a terror that cannot be told.

  I did not die, and yet I lost life’s breath;

  Imagine for yourself all things ended,

  but you continue still beyond your death.

  Emperor of the universe of pain

  jutting his metal chest above the ice;

  writhing and thrashing, completely insane.

  Towering above us but trapped in this pit

  The lumbering giant, the shambling thing,

  now frozen in place. You love to see it!

  If once he was as talented as now

  he is incompetent, turning on us

  may well be the source of his pain somehow.

  With what a sense of awe I saw its head

  towering above me! For it had three faces.

  One was in front, and it was fiery red,

  the other two as weirdly wonderful,

  merged high from the middle of each shoulder

  up to a point at the top of the skull.

  The right face looked to be the color white

  and the left was a darker shade of blue,

/>   so his foul head was like a flag at night.

  Under each face terrible tentacles,

  thus extending like the arms of a squid

  in this place surrounded by pentacles.

  Their texture and their form like that of wires,

  sharp and copper, wriggling high through the air

  and beating the winds in widening gyres.

  It is these winds that freeze all the Schema.

  He wept from his eye lights, and down three chins

  tears mixed with coolant and red anima.

  In each mouth he worked a broken sinner

  between his metal teeth. Thus he kept three

  to sate his quest for eternal dinner.

  For the one in front, biting seemed to play

  no part at all compared to the ripping

  the whole skin of his back was flayed away.

  “That soul suffers the most,” explained my guide.

  “He is Emil Smalley, who kicks his legs

  on the fiery chin with his head inside.

  Of the other two, whose heads thrust forward,

  the one who dangles down from the blue face

  is William Dunn: he writhes without a word.

  And at last, with the wild eyes, is the soul

  of T.H. Stockton. But the night is done

  and we must go, for we have seen the whole.”

  I came to, feeling the tentacled adapter plunged into the side of my skull, a searing pain amidst the confusion. The thing was a heap of metal and plastic jutting from the shadowed corner where we’d encountered him, where he’d sprung his attack. Ian’s eyes blinked open as he lay, prone on the floor. He also had a tentacled adapter stuck in his head. I yanked the cord out of mine hard. Fluid leaked down the side of my face, blood and milky coolant mixing in a froth in my hair. I touched where the fluid was sputtering from and looked at the discharge on my hand.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I used Burke’s code against Smalley. It wasn’t difficult to trap him in a loop using Divina,” he said, sitting up. “The monster chews Smalley, but the monster is Smalley. You were there, you saw it. He didn’t even know what was happening. No way of recognizing the code.”

  “What was that about T.H. Stockton and William Dunn?”

  “Roles that needed to be filled in the program. Nothing of concern.”

  I sat up and pushed myself back to my shaky feet. “What about Guthrie and Garrick?”

  “They may still be in there. Essentially, Smalley has frozen, crashed. We can try to get them back, but I can’t promise anything.”

  “Would you have really entertained a truce with him?”

  His face remained stoic as he answered, “Absolutely. I wanted him on our side. We need everyone. Even the Olympian gods needed Hades. He wasn’t the first this happened to, and he won’t be the last. Instead of the expansion of the singularity, he suffered a collapse, and that collapse is a statistical anomaly that we don’t understand... that we can’t understand. Maybe he could’ve helped us. Trapped like he is, maybe he still can.”

  The remaining androids already scurried around us, cleaning away the bodies and spare parts. A few picked up the monstrous thing from the shadows—he seemed far less intimidating in the light. He was partially humanoid, the synthetic and untreated skin material ripped and torn in places, his polymer skull partially exposed. Other parts and wires dangled from him—camera lenses with their small red lights; various electronics like tablets, keyboards, and surge protectors; and lastly the innards of other androids that had been incorporated into him. He truly had been a collective of phantasmic bagatelle, more intimidating in deed than in reality.

  “We won’t know his true impact until we go live,” Ian said. “Once we do, we’ll find out the level of resistance we need to assess. We already knew it would be high, but the controversy he stirred may have poisoned the well beyond our ability to adequately compensate.”

  “So what do we do now?” I asked.

  “We have body printers here; we have machines that will properly transfer consciousness. This will be our base of operations for now, until we determine if the OSS will let go of it. A new Home.”

  “You said they dropped a nuclear ordnance on the last place you called Home,” I said, thinking back to what he told Smalley.

  “They did. We may be able to reestablish communications with them. Maybe try to convince them they haven’t lost this facility. We have someone positioned with them if all else fails.” He paused, then regarded me with a questioning look. “I think the question is what you will do now, Cassia. Will you stay with us? Help us move forward?”

  “My girlfriend, Gabby. All she must know is that I disappeared.”

  “She’ll receive the same offer that everyone else receives. If she accepts, you’ll see her again soon enough.” It was the same refrain that he’d mentioned before the confrontation.

  “We can remain in contact. This is all over now—I need to find her.”

  “I’d really like you to stay,” he said. “You know what we’re trying to accomplish. Why the urgency?”

  “I need to know one simple thing, and she’s the only one who can answer. Am I still me?”

  He smirked and nodded, a simple and reassuring gesture. “It’s an important answer to have. I understand.”

  We helped each other to our feet and said our goodbyes, knowing that they would only be temporary. We would remain in contact through the bond we shared, the same way that he remained in contact with his other comrades.

  Outside the Schema, the day was bright and hopeful, the sun high in the southern sky. The wind tossed my hair as I marched back into the forest, past the ashes and through the desolate grass. It would carry me back to California, and to her.

  29 : rendition (regina)

  Lights.

  I awoke to a world I didn’t recognize, a tunnel of light at its center. Shadows shifted behind them, outlines of figures I couldn’t see. Static crashed through my hearing implant, causing me to wince. A sheen of sweat dripped from my forehead, tumbling down to my left thigh. I still wore dark blue pajama bottoms and a white camisole top. At first I thought it was a dream, shaking my head to recall what I remembered. The last thing was falling asleep in Bev’s guest room, speaking to Anthony Block through the link provided by my implant.

  I told him I wanted to get some sleep.

  “Regina Kent,” a man’s voice said from behind the lights. “Regina Mae Kent.”

  My hands were bound together by plastic ties, arms wrapping behind the back of the chair, the lumbar support digging into my armpits. My ankles were tied to the legs of the chair as well. I struggled against the zip ties, twisting my wrists back and forth, kicking my feet.

  “Who are you? What the fuck do you want?” I shouted.

  Still I heard the static, cutting through the murmur of voices.

  “Regina Mae Kent, we want to talk. We understand that you’ve been in contact with Transhumans,” the man’s voice stated simply.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” I answered.

  “Don’t play coy. You attended events at a house on Maple Canyon Boulevard where people remoted into robots and got fucked. Did you get fucked?”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Who did you fuck?” The man’s voice remained simple and monotone.

  “My fucking husband, you piece of shit.”

  “Devon Jerome Kent. Father of three. All yours, huh? He liked you to remote into a robot so it was like fucking someone else?”

  “Eat shit!” The line of questioning rolled into my stomach like a boulder. Not just the disorientation of my surroundings, but that they knew more and more about the feelings I’d been burying these past few weeks. To feel fully exposed to these shadows...

  “You attended an event at the house recently, then you traveled to Seattle for no conceivable reason. You flew with a synthetic companion, a company-issued model named Opal. You work for NMAC, right? Tr
aining department?”

  “Tell me who you are and what you want. Maybe then I’ll consider answering your fucking questions.”

  “Then you drove into the Cascade region. Lovely area. The forestry is absolutely amazing. And the mountains! All those state parks... But when you came back, no Opal. You traveled alone. What happened to her?”

  The shadows shifted behind the light blaring directly into my eyes, figures moving back and forth. “I’m guessing you’re OSS,” I said, collecting my thoughts.

  “You came back to Plano alone. Why? Where did you go in the Cascades? Isn’t that where the boss of your company lives, somewhere in the region?”

  “You clearly have all the answers,” I spat in the direction of the man’s voice. His head shifted in front of the blaring white light, a blank silhouette whose face I couldn’t see. An empty void of a person. “What’s the point of interrogating me if you already know?”

  The silhouette spoke, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we do have all the answers. You went to a hub of Transhuman activity. You may have even communicated with actual Transhumans. And you went to Seattle and had a meeting with your boss that for some reason included your company-issued robot. We need to know why. Who did you talk to, and why did you go?”

  I sighed, struggling against the zip ties again for a brief moment. I looked up into that blank void of a person and said, “You’re panicked. You’ve discovered something, and you’re grasping at straws.”

  “If you think we’re OSS,” he answered, “then what do you suppose happens here? Do you vanish? Think about that for a minute. Think about the life you’re giving up. Devon, the kids... all that goes away.”

  “You can’t prove shit.”

  “We don’t need to prove shit. We can label you dissident, and you just disappear. Erased, just like the others.”

  “What others?”

  “I thought we were done being coy,” the voice said. “You know what others. They contacted you somehow. Tell us what they told you.”