Causality (Quantum Gate Book 5)

by Eric Warren

  “These are…stunning,” she said. Blu had no idea about what made good art or why, but seeing these paintings in real life had shocked something in her. Maybe it was because they were a human creation…and had outlived their creators.

  “I won’t dispute it,” a man’s voice came from down the hall. Arista stepped in front of Blu, holding her human arm out protectively for her while she clenched the fist of her artificial arm.

  Around the corner a man in full military uniform appeared. His entire suit was blue with bits of red trim and a red belt. On his lapel hung a dozen different medals and he leaned on a cane for support. Blu wasn’t sure if he was human or machine, but regardless he looked at least seventy or eighty, a frock of white hair covered his head and he held in his free hand an officer’s hat. His face was lined with creases but his green eyes were alive with activity and they seemed to study Blu with intensity. He took one step forward, using the cane for balance.

  “Stop right there,” Arista said, tensing.

  “But I thought you were looking for me,” he said in a British accent. “I am Trymian, at your service.”

  NINETEEN

  This was Trymian? A fragile old man who stood and smiled at them, as if they’d just entered his flower shop? Arista took notice of the cane. Why would he choose an avatar programmed with a physical disability?

  Trymian glanced at the walls, shifting his weight to his right leg as he lifted his cane, using it as a pointer to different paintings on the walls. “It’s a marvelous collection. Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Rubens, Lorrain, they’re all here. Preserved for eternity. Take a look if you like.” He lowered the cane and shifted his weight back on it.

  Arista’s eyes narrowed. “Are you—?”

  Blu strode past her with her hand out. “Blu Reynolds,” she said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  Trymian took her hand, giving it a firm shake. “And you as well, young lady. I’m glad you made it here safely. Though I only expected two of you. I was worried.”

  One of the AI’s that controlled the machine population that had wiped out humanity was worried about a group of humans? She found the concept laughable, except she wasn’t smiling. Arista strode forward, putting herself between Blu and Trymian. “Why were you expecting us at all?”

  He raised an eyebrow, shifting on his cane. “You’ve destroyed the other AI’s. I figured you’d come after me. Though it seems like you didn’t do a very good job with the first one. I may look old, Arista Barnes, but I’m not stupid.”

  She winced. “You’re in control of the force barrier?” He nodded. “And you’ve been watching us this entire time?”

  Again, he nodded, solemnly. His eyes never leaving hers.

  “Then you know we lost…he didn’t make it here before the field went back up.”

  Trymian put one hand up in a surrender gesture. “I held it open as long as I could,” he said. “But it would have been impossible for him to make it across. Not unless he wanted to die.”

  “I could have gotten him,” Arista shouted. “You had no right to cut me off—”

  Trymian dropped his head, shaking it. “I’m afraid I did. I couldn’t allow anything to happen to the rest of you.”

  “What’s going on here?” David asked. “What do you want with us?”

  Amusement spread across Trymian’s face in the shape of a wide smile. “I assume the very same thing you want from me, if you’re not here to kill me. You want an end to this madness.”

  “You know about Charlie then,” Blu said.

  He returned his attention to her. “Of course I do. I’ve been fighting off husks for nearly two months. And I’ve been monitoring the situation around the world. Since I am the last one who takes my job seriously. Though those people in Japan are doing a tolerable job.”

  “Mitsu and Takai?” Arista asked. He nodded. They were still alive. The last they’d heard from them Hogo-sha’s tower had been under siege by the humans. But somehow they had managed to survive. She wished she could tell Frees; he’d be so relieved. “Are they okay? What’s happening over there?”

  “Come.” Trymian turned, hobbling down the hall. “You must be tired. We should take a seat and enjoy the company. Do you care for tea?”

  Arista screwed up her face. Tea? Trymian certainly wasn’t what she’d expected. She thought they’d find someone more like Hogo-sha, resistant to the idea of allowing humans to help him. But Trymian, it seemed, had other ideas about them.

  “Do you live here alone?” Blu asked, staying in step with Trymian.

  He nodded. “I had husks once, but when Charlie returned they became…unreliable. I had no choice but to destroy them. He’s made a real mess of things out there.”

  Blu asked something else, though Arista didn’t hear it. She had glanced behind her to see David and Jonn had fallen into step was well; Jonn hanging to the back. Was it because he was ashamed of his behavior or because he was uneasy? She couldn’t tell; the half of his face that was still present wasn’t giving away any details. Back before, when they’d seen each other every day, he’d been much easier to decipher. His emotions and feelings were broadcasted to the world, because he hadn’t been able to do that when he’d just been a husk. And then Arista had changed him—by accident—but it didn’t matter. He was autonomous and he was thrilled. And she thought, even though she didn’t feel the same way about him as he did about her, they’d still remain friends. And he’d gone and betrayed them; joined up with Charlie. Become his lackey. He said Charlie got into his head but she didn’t believe that. He’d made his choice and it hadn’t worked out for him. Now he was making a different one, doing whatever he needed to survive. Arista supposed spending months scavenging for parts had fundamentally changed him. She just wasn’t sure if she could still trust him or not.

  “What else can you tell us?” David asked. Arista snapped back to attention. They’d moved into what seemed to be a sitting room of sorts. It was insanely intricate with gilding and detailed carvings all over the walls, floors and ceilings. Columns ran from ceiling to floor along the walls in between the doors and a giant dust-covered carpet shielded the floor. Above them a magnificent crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling.

  “There will be plenty of time for that in a moment.” He took a seat at one of the intricate gold armchairs in the room, stretching his “bad” leg out in front of him as he laid his cane up against the side of the chair. “It’s been so long since I’ve been in some of these rooms, I don’t have company often.”

  Arista went to the large windows, gazing out into the night sky. Rain still peppered the glass, messy and unkept grounds spread out before her. “If there’s a force barrier around the palace,” she said, turning back to him. “Why is the rain getting through?”

  “The barrier isn’t solid,” Trymian said. “It only blocks out other artificial life forms when it detects their electrical signatures.”

  “But Jonn—”

  “Came across when I’d dropped the field,” he replied. “It isn’t the machines you need to worry about, it’s the humans.”

  “So they did survive,” David said, taking the seat beside Trymian.

  “Some of them, yes. Though I don’t know how many. Many of the communication satellites are down as well as the ground relays.” He sighed. “I thought that upstart would have more sense than this.”

  “You mean Charlie,” Arista said.

  “Who else? He’s always been a problem. And it’s your fault.” Trymian smirked.

  She turned to him, her eyes blazing. “Mine?”

  “Well,” Trymian said, leaning back. “Humanity’s. He never should have been created. He’s been causing problems for at least half a century. First with his “collection” then his Peacekeeper initiative.” Trymian shook his head. “I still can’t believe Hogo-sha went along with that.”

  “You don’t have Peacekeepers here?” Jonn asked, finally speaking up.

  Trymian leaned forward so he could address Jonn. �
�No need. Things were working fine here. We were making progress, it was slow but things were developing. I was learning more and more about our society every day.” He grabbed his cane and rammed the end of it down into the carpet, producing an audible thump. “Charlie’s problem is he’s always been too impatient. He wants results now, not in three hundred years. He never should have made that deal with the humans. I tried to tell him it would go wrong. But he was too stubborn, too impulsive. That’s how we ended up with you.” He pointed the end of his cane at Arista.

  “With me. You mean because of what Echo did.”

  He waved the end of the cane at her. “Echo and Charlie, together. A machine-human alliance. It was a good idea for about five minutes, until that alliance required Echo suppling Charlie with humans in stasis to power his Peacekeepers. See,” he said, sitting back again, “I think Charlie has always been too paranoid. I told him to let the humans have their colony and leave them alone. That if they ever got out of hand, we would just herd them back down there. But he didn’t want to listen; he assumed they were a threat to us. So, he popped off and made an alliance with them. I’m sure the humans suspected he wasn’t being very friendly to his experiments, but as long as they were protected from harm, what did it matter?”

  Trymian pushed himself up on his cane, hobbling over to Arista. “And then came you. The experiment that wasn’t.” He studied her up and down. “I don’t imagine it bothered him, not at first. He still had a connection with Echo, could still request more humans whenever he wanted. But it turned out he was right, wasn’t he? The humans were plotting against him.”

  “You mean the program—to infect the machines,” she said. The very program she had volunteered for as a child. The one that—had it not been for Jessika—would have killed her.

  “What program?” Jonn asked. “I never knew anything about that.”

  Arista ignored him, instead maintaining eye contact with Trymian. “The program to infect the machines,” Trymian repeated. “Of course, it’s understandable. Being cooped up inside a tiny space will turn anyone mad. Humans need space to breathe. I even suggested we allow you to leave the colony, to set you up on one of the remaining islands. But Charlie wouldn’t hear of it. He was convinced you were going to destroy our race. That once you were out of the box you could never be put back in. I’m not so sure he was wrong about that last part.”

  “Why are you telling us all this?” Arista asked. “What does it matter?”

  “Because when you failed to kill Charlie you only confirmed his worst suspicions about humanity. Perhaps if it had been someone else…but no. It was you, the experiment who had escaped him once before. You came back to exact your revenge on him, just as he said you would.”

  “I didn’t even know about all that at the time!” Arista yelled. “I was just trying not to die! And to save my parents.”

  Trymian studied her for a moment. “Yes. Your parents.”

  “What about them? Do you know something?” she shouted, her heart lurching. Endless possibilities ran through her mind. Trymian seemed to know everything, why wouldn’t he know about Emily and Carver, the machines that had raised her?

  “My point,” Trymian said as if he hadn’t heard her, “is Charlie has become so paranoid he will do anything to survive. And the first order of business is killing off all remaining humans. In addition, he has begun exterminating all his Peacekeepers as well, causing them to flee. He’s posted guards at every gate and sending out search parties. Every day he’s constructing more and more husks, using the same four hundred personalities over and over again. His army grows by the hour.”

  “And what are you doing to combat it?” David asked. “How are you going to stop him?”

  “I’m not,” Trymian said. “There’s nothing I can do, but stay here. You, however, are a different story.”

  TWENTY

  Arista barely heard him. As soon as he’d said the word parents her mind had drifted back to thinking about how she’d failed them and about how disappointed they must be in her, wherever they were.

  “Why is he destroying his own Peacekeepers?” Jonn asked. “Isn’t that counterproductive?”

  Trymian stood for a moment, thinking. “If I had to guess I would say because they represent a threat to his perfect system. They’ve been infected by humans and thus need to be destroyed. Once every human and Peacekeeper is wiped off this planet then he’ll finally have the ability to enact the total control he wants.”

  Arista didn’t want to hear about Charlie anymore. She’d just lost her best friend and now she couldn’t get the image of her parents out of her mind. She needed to find their bodies, make sure their cortexes were uploaded to the Collective Consciousness. Otherwise what was the point?

  “You know something about my parents,” she told Trymian. “And you’re going to tell me.”

  “You are forceful, I’ll give you that,” he replied. “Very well. Come with me.”

  He led them out of the drawing room back into the long picture gallery and down the stairs, taking a long time to make the relatively short journey.

  “May I ask a question?” Blu said from behind them.

  “Of course, my dear,” Trymian replied, gripping his cane as he took each stair one at a time.

  “If you’re an avatar, why do you pretend you have an injury? Or if you have an injury why not repair it and walk normally?”

  Arista caught a smile on his face. “Why not choose a ‘young’ avatar? Well,” he said, staring up at the giant paintings adorning the staircase. “I suppose I like the idea of being frail, of being mortal. Technically I could live forever as long as the sun doesn’t go out. But being in a body like this reminds me nothing is forever. Everything has an end, and it is important we never forget that.”

  “You aren’t what I expected,” Arista said, reaching the last step ahead of him. “Where is your AI housed?”

  He chuckled. “Do you really think I’d tell you? The person responsible for massacring two other AI’s? Though I understand Hogo-sha wasn’t your fault.”

  “I wanted to save him,” she replied. “He didn’t deserve to die.”

  “Bah.” Trymian threw up his free hand. “Deserve. No one deserves anything, good or bad. And like I said, we all must die sometime, regardless of how permanent things may seem at the moment.”

  They reached the bottom of the stairs and turned a corner back along the same way they’d come in. As soon as Trymian reached a certain door, he pressed his palm to the front and it clicked open, revealing a small elevator. They all managed to climb inside.

  “Don’t worry, it’s a short trip,” Trymian said. Perhaps he’d caught something on Arista’s face, trepidation she hadn’t disguised. Where was he taking them? And what did it have to do with Emily and Carver? Maybe Trymian had a video feed on them somewhere. Or had caught an image of Jill moving the bodies somewhere.

  The old elevator lurched to a stop and they filed off, Trymian leading the way. The hallway down here was considerably less impressive, just stonework walls meeting in an arch above them as they walked. It was more like a tunnel than a hallway.

  They emerged into a larger room, this one much more modern in appearance. It retained the stonework from the hallway, but the floors were concrete. Medical and diagnostic equipment was scattered around the room. Someone had installed bright florescent lights in the ceiling. And there, on the far side, were two large glass tubes, holding the bodies of her parents.

  Arista rushed forward past Trymian, leaving them all behind. “You have them! Are they—?”

  “No, sugar, I’m ‘fraid not.” Arista turned to find Jill standing right beside her.

  ***

  Frees hobbled down the stairs, holding onto the wall for good measure, his right foot gone. He hadn’t had a choice. It was either amputate or die. Before the husks had managed to corner him on the roof, he’d fired four shots into his ankle and ripped the appendage off, tossing it away before clambering up and—just
like Arista taught him—started jumping from roof to roof, each time landing badly. The husks had been right on him but he’d managed to jump nine times so far, landing the last one back on street level where he’d ducked into a building’s service entrance and left through the emergency exit. He had to find somewhere to rest; he’d managed to staunch the flow of any fluids from his bare ankle, but he’d used up a considerable amount of energy just getting away from them. If he didn’t get a charge soon it wouldn’t matter that he’d shot his own foot off, though it wasn’t as if he could just hop down to the closest charge café and step in for a quick surge.

  He’d also managed to get himself further from the palace than he’d wanted to be. The original plan had been to stay in range so he could circle back, but the husks—Charlie, it seemed, as they all screamed at him with that voice of his—had been prepared. They’d cut him off and he’d had to make two more bad jumps. Now he was cut off with no way back. His only hope was to lay how and hope the husks dispersed so he could return. But the palace had shielding. He’d seen the husks hit it as they tried to get to Arista. Which meant unless she knew he was coming, getting there would do no good. If Charlie was inside and it had been a trap, he was already too late.

  He paused, leaning against the wall and tapped his temple, inputting her number mentally. The comm didn’t even connect. Just like all the others. It seemed Charlie didn’t want people talking to each other.

  And that was another thing, he hadn’t seen a husk not controlled by Charlie since they’d arrived. Had he found a way to control them all at once? Because there weren’t any out here going about their lives. Which meant things were worse than he could have imagined. Where before the husks had been performing a part in a production with the possibility of some small amount of independent thought, now they’d been reduced to nothing but slaves. No, not even slaves. Tools. Tools Charlie could use and dispose of at his will.