by DJ Molles
A tidal wave of dust. The flare of Confluence from Batu. Perry brought up one hand, slamming that ball of energy out of the way, and unleashing a flow of his own to answer.
The beam lanced straight at Batu—and connected.
Perry registered movement out of the corner of his eyes. Two of the others, rocketing into the air, and then down towards him in a sharp arc.
Batu shuddered as Perry’s energy crackled over his gray, reticulated skin. Unaffected. Energy absorbed just as easily as it had been unleashed.
Perry moved backwards, feet leaving the ground, energy carrying him as the earth slipped by beneath him and he thrust both arms out, a shimmering barricade of air turned as hard as rock expanding out from him like the shockwave of an explosion, and catching the two others in midair, sending their massive bodies careening in separate directions.
Another one, moving fast to Perry’s right. Batu, looming large to his left.
He gasped, drew his hands back, each palm facing one of his attackers. They unleashed on him at the same time, a flurry of bolts so large they could have evaporated entire city blocks.
Perry managed to deflect one, than two, but he couldn’t keep up. The ground shook around him as the richocheting bolts slammed into the ground, darkening the air with clouds of dust and molten rock.
And then the next ones connected.
Perry could do nothing but draw in on himself. His breath seared in his lungs, the air super-heated. Confluence blazed from in him, but like two opposed winds meeting each other, it created a swirl inside of him that he did not understand.
Reality became a hazy thing. His physical body seemed detached from him. He felt its inputs only distantly. He was consumed with Confluence in that moment—but not the kind that he had grown to know from the river that flowed through him. This was a different brand altogether.
Hunched and taut, like a fighter taking massive body shots to the ribs, Perry felt his feet grinding across the ground as the force of each impact pushed him backwards. And yet the life was not draining from him. If anything, he was getting stronger. He was absorbing this energy, just as Batu had. But the whirlwind that it created in him was nothing like he’d felt before. This life was not the life he’d known. This was an energy that came from someplace else.
It was an energy borne of madness.
The flow in Perry’s mind seemed to surge, to swirl, to jump its banks so that it threatened to flood him. The river of red changed. Red and green together, in sickly swaths, the currents fighting with each other.
He felt it crawling over his skin—a sharp, disruptive tingle, like arcs of electricity—but it wasn’t injuring him.
He was, in an instant, not what he knew himself to be.
Every good thing curdled. Soured. Rotted. Corruption spread from the center of him, as though his very mind was streaked with a gangrenous infection. The flow was not a flow anymore—it was a raging tide, and his mind was drowning in it.
Insanity and chaos threatened to crush him, and all he could do to survive was to crush back. The hot air in his throat scraped it dry and raw, and he realized he was screaming, overfilled, overflowing, rage reaching a point of mass inside of him that could not be contained anymore.
There was no conscious thought. Only an explosion of energy. It was both agony and release.
When he opened his eyes, the world was green. Glowing, sickly green, in a great, expanding ball. All consuming. All destroying. He could see nothing else—not the earth around him, not the Nine, not even himself. He wondered if he was actually seeing anything at all, or if, like opening your eyes under silty water, all he was seeing was the dark version of Confluence that had infiltrated him.
He seethed. He ripped air in and out of his lungs. Every function of his body now a raging battle. His hands clenched and unclenched. Terrible heat poured over him, but couldn’t touch him. The pain was excrutiating, and transcendant.
The ground around him was charred, glowing stone.
Every ache and pain from the last days of fighting was gone. His limbs surged with a new power that was beyond physical pain. Life and death had clashed inside of him, and torn his reality to shreds. Nothing made sense. And it made him furious in a way that was entirely different than simple anger. The fury wasn’t an emotion itself. It was an energy. It was a possession.
The air cleared around him. He saw the figures of the Nine, right at the edge of a ring of blown-out earth. He’d pushed them away with the force of the explosion.
He felt exultant. And utterly terrified.
He was not himself, he knew. But there was just enough of Perry left in him to see it, and to tremble at the reality of it. He could not die. They could pump all the energy they wanted into him, but it would never be enough to kill him. His body was invincible.
But his mind was not.
Spit flecked his lips with the force of his breathing. Fear and rage, in equal measures. One on top of the other. One propogating the other. He wanted violence. He wanted destruction. He wanted immolation. He wanted to crush, to batter, to rip, to shred, and it didn’t matter the target, only the release.
Madness.
His body might not die, but there was something worse than that happening.
He was losing his mind.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHOICES
They could hear the battle from the temple square of Karapalida. They could feel it in the rumble of the stones beneath their feet. The throbbing of massive explosions.
But to Whimsby, it was so much more.
He kept heightening his auditory receptors, and then bringing them back down to nominal, human levels. Heightened, he could hear screams and cries that he knew were Perry, though something was off about them in a way that Whimsby’s processors could not pinpoint. Heightened, the burble of worried humanity all around him threatened to overwhelm his auditory capacity, and so he would lower them again.
In all of his years of existence, Whimsby could not recall feeling conflicted.
But he felt it now.
The immediate chaos around him: A four-way argument.
“An evacuation is unnecessary and a logistical nightmare!” Mordicus was saying.
“Perry told us we needed to get out of here, and for once, I agree with him!” Teran was yelling.
“We need to prioritize the wounded,” Petra put in from beside Stuber, who didn’t have much to say on it—seemed as conflicted as Whimsby was, with half his attention on trying to support his wife, and the other half evident in the way his eyes kept wandering out to the west, where the explosions were coming from.
“Me and Lux can help Perry!” Mala asserted. “It’s the best use of our abilities!”
“You won’t do any good against the Nine,” Teran shot back. “And we need you to guard the evacuation!”
“You can’t get all these people out of here!” Mordicus roared. “They’re safer if they stay!”
“We have a skiff,” Teran replied hotly. “We can ferry people back and forth to the caves!”
“For how long?” Mordicus demanded. “How much of a charge do you still have on that thing?”
Whimsby guessed it wasn’t much, by the way that Teran looked away, guilt-ridden.
“We’ll go until we can’t go anymore,” she said. “And staying here? What the hell do you think your legionnaires are going to do against the Nine?”
“The Nine already said they don’t want to exterminate us!”
“No, they only want to enslave us!”
“And running for the hills is only going to enrage them! Gods, woman, how can you not see that you’re asking to get wiped out?”
Mala cracked her longstaff against the stones. “We need to go help!”
“You’re only going to die!” Teran screamed, on her tip-toes to try to get as close to Mala’s face as possible.
The only one besides Stuber that seemed to have nothing to add to the argument was Sagum. He stood next to Whimsby, and kept wa
tching him, fear and curiosity mingling in his expressions.
Whimsby turned up his audio receptors again, looking westward as though he could see through all the buildings and the distance between him and the battle out in the wastelands. The rumble of voices, deep and harrowing—that could only have been one of the Nine. More explosions.
Closer in, distracting, the sound of the people in Karapalida that Whimsby could not see, all their voices creating a rush of noise that his processors fought to delineate from one another.
“This is safe,” a man said. “We’ll stay here and pray.”
“Get the children!” a woman cried.
“What’s happening out there?” Another woman.
“Why do we have to go again?” A child.
“Take his boots, Maddie! He don’t need them anymore!”
“You fucking come near me I’ll cut you open!”
“You don’t understand—we need to run! I heard them say it!”
“Pray to who? No one’s fucking listening!”
“I can’t find my son! Has anyone seen my son?”
“Someone is coming that wants to kill us all.”
“He’s got gold—should I take that too?”
“Aaah! Aaah!”
“Don’t! Please!”
“Go! Run and don’t look back!”
Whimsby lowered his receptors again. If he had an epidermis, it would be covered in chills. If he had a heart, it would be pounding. If he had a stomach, it would be sick and hollow.
He had none of those things, and yet he still felt a great, aching sadness coming from someplace that made no sense to him. It could not have come from his core processor—it had no tactile receptors, and this was a very physical feeling. And yet it seemed to come from the center of him, right around where his core processor sat.
If he had a subconscious, it’s what would have animated his hand to reach up and touch that glowing orb in the center of him that Bren had sacrificed. But he had no subconscious. So why had his limbs moved seemingly of their own volition?
“Whimsby?” Sagum said, his voice quiet compared to the arguments still frothing all around them.
Whimsby looked at him. Felt his own face contort into an expression that he had not decided to make. Expressions were for the ease of communication—mechanical men had to make them to put humans at ease, and they were employed strategically. Except for now. This was not an expression that Whimsby had chosen to make. And it certainly did not seem to put Sagum at ease.
It was an expression that seemed to come all on its own. As though Whimsby could not control it.
“Yes?” He said, his voice modulator displaying calm, despite the fact that Whimsby did not feel calm at all. At least it seemed he could control that, though it still troubled him that he was feeling things at all. He had never not been calm and self-assured. This was a first for him.
“Is Perry still alive?” Sagum asked.
For some reason, though he didn’t say it loudly, the others fell into a hush. Sagum’s question had speared through their petty disagreements and forced their attention over to Whimsby.
Whimsby nodded. “Yes. I believe he is. Though…something is wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
Whimsby looked west again. Turned up his auditory receptors again. Just in time to perceive a massive blast, far greater than the others, and in it, a wail, a venomous screech, that matched Perry’s unique vocal characteristics, but was so, so wrong at the same time.
It was the sound of a man gripped with terror. And the sound of a man wild with bloodlust. And the sound of a man who has lost everything and stands completely alone. And the sound of a man who wants to murder.
“I don’t know,” Whimsby admitted. “He’s definitely alive. But…he is not himself.”
“I don’t understand,” Sagum said, taking a step forward.
“I don’t understand either,” Whimsby said. “He’s…”
Alone.
A thought. Unbidden. Uncalculated.
How strange. Is this what it was like to be human? To exist with a muddle of conflicted thoughts, so very little actually making sense? No wonder humans were such unpredictable creatures. Their minds were beset with both pressures and vacuums, constantly pushing and pulling them in random directions.
“How long do we have?” Mordicus asked, his voice harsh. Pragmatic.
Whimsby didn’t know. Found that he didn’t really feel like answering that question. Another oddity. Perhaps by programming, or perhaps by force of habit—was he a victim of habit now too?—he’d always been compelled to answer what he was asked. Now he simply didn’t want to answer, and so chose not to.
Choice.
Whimsby knew what Bren had done for him. Not just the sacrifice of his parts to bring Whimsby back, but how he had organized Whimsby’s memories. He’d created an algorithm that organized them according to the presence of an anomaly. Perhaps Bren hadn’t understood what that anomaly was, only recognized the correlation between its presence and the proper chronology of those memories.
Whimsby saw that anomaly now. Saw its peak. The moment when it had reached its fullness. And that moment was a memory.
Standing in Praesidium, facing down Perry and Stuber.
Now free will? Stuber had said. That’s another thing entirely, isn’t it? Because that’s really the difference between something that lives and thinks for itself…and a machine that does what it’s told.
Then you’ll be one of us, Perry had said. You’ll be a part of something bigger than just programming.
Help us, he’d said. Show us that you’re a man.
And Whimsby had made a choice. He had exercised free will. And everything after that had been an anomaly. Everything after that had been…human.
Choice, Whimsby thought. His core processor more than just a processor now. More than just the sum of its parts. Something else happening in there. Something beyond just the mimickry of the human brain in the artificial circuits that acted as synapses. Because the human brain is also more than just the sum of its parts. It holds something else in it, something that cannot be measured, or quantified, or calculated. And that thing is choice. Free will. That is what thinking is. That is what humanity is. That is the commonality that binds them all together.
And me?
Yes. Me as well.
“I am a man,” Whimsby said, the words coming out of his vocal modulator before he really had time to calculate what affects they might have, what consequences they might draw.
He found himself looking to the others to find that out. Studying their faces to guage its affect.
They seemed confused.
“I am a human,” Whimsby clarified, though, again, he wasn’t really sure of what he was saying. It seemed he was speaking and thinking at the same time. He looked to Sagum. “You’re a human.” And then to Mordicus. “You’re a human. And you, Teran. And you, Stuber. Petra.” Finally, his gaze landing on Mala and Lux. “And even you.”
“Whimsby,” Mordicus said, as though naming the mechanical man was a painful thing for him to do.
“I wasn’t finished,” Whimsby snapped. How odd. “We may not look the same. We may not even be built the same. Some of us have different abilities than others. But what is the one thing that we all have?”
“Free will,” Stuber said, as though he could somehow sense Whimsby’s thoughts.
Whimsby smiled at the big legionnaire. What was this new sensation? A connection. A sharing. An agreement. Two minds thinking alike. What a wonderful feeling that was. It was the antithesis of being alone.
Alone.
“Yes, Stuber,” Whimsby nodded. “Free will. We think. We weigh a thousand options. We try to peer into the future and ascertain what might happen when we make certain choices, but it’s all a muddy mess, because every choice affects everyone else, and all their choices affect yours.” What am I saying? I’m not entirely sure. Best just to keep saying it, perhaps. “We all think we’re s
olitary creatures, but we’re not. We’re all bits and pieces of one big organism called humanity, bound by our choices, and the affect of our choices on one another.”
Was it true? It seemed true. The math added up. In fact, the more that Whimsby said, the more sure he became that he was articulating reality.
“The most terrible thing that a human can experience is to be cut off from that organism. And the greatest sacrifice that a human can make is to freely choose to be cut off, in order to preserve the other members. I have only been human for a short time, but it seems a most powerful thing. Powerful in ways that I cannot really describe. A single, solitary sacrifice carries this weight that I can feel, but cannot measure. But does one have to face it alone? Doesn’t it seem like that is the strength of humanity? To stand as one?”
Mordicus bared his teeth. “You want us to go out and fight and die alongside Perry? For what? To show solidarity?”
“To fight and die? No, that would be pointless, I think. To show solidarity?” Whimsby considered it for a moment, and, just as everything else that he was experiencing now, he couldn’t quite force any logic out of it. It defied logic. And yet it was true anyways. “Yes. To show solidarity.”
He tuned up his receptors again, but now could hear nothing but the rabble of the people in Karapalida. He could not hear Perry. No more screams. No more explosions.
“Perry made a choice. A powerful choice because it was done freely. I do not think that we can save him. But…” How to explain this? If only he’d been human for a little while longer, he might have a better grasp on some of these intangible concepts. “I am afraid for him to lose his humanity. I am afraid for him to be alone when he dies. I feel like that would be…” He grimaced at his own lack of adequate vocabulary. Went with the simplest word. A little crass, but true all the same.
“Shitty.” Whimsby looked about at his friends. “And I’m afraid of being a shitty human.”
***
“A man shouldn’t have to die alone.”
The words came out of Stuber, and he realized he was making a decision along with them. Another one of his big, terrible decisions. But also the right one. Unfortunately, that’s just a fact of life: Sometimes the right decision is the worst.
