Immortal

by Nick M Lloyd

  ‘The plan is to inject the heads bound for RL3. As many as possible. Hopefully, the Ankor are so intent on assimilating the brain matter that they’ll overlook it. It certainly wouldn’t come up on any tests we could do on Earth.’ Whaller paused. ‘Once the virus reaches body temperature, it will start to multiply exponentially.’

  ‘Will it infect Ankor tissue?’ Tim asked.

  ‘MacKenzie said the Ankor confirmed human brains could be assimilated. So, our viruses may be able to thrive too. But even if the viruses only reach maximum infection density inside the human skulls, Phase 2 should still work.’

  ‘Phase 2?’

  ‘The virus has two modes. Replication first, and then chemical synthesis. The virus will enter a suicide state where it generates a nerve agent. Even if the virus hasn’t spread widely, the nerve agent will.’

  ‘What about reprisals?’ asked Tim. It was crunch time. If they succeeded in stopping the Ankor, okay. But if they failed, then at a minimum the remaining forty thousand hostages would die – the prime minister wouldn’t risk ordering a new invasion of the Hot Zone now the Ankor had nuked both China and Birmingham. How far would the Ankor punish the UK for a failed attempt at stopping them? Would more cities be obliterated by nuclear blasts to deter further insurgency?

  Whaller acknowledged Tim’s question. ‘We haven’t taken this decision lightly. We suspect only a small proportion of the A-Grav units are viable bombs. Each of the ones that have blown up has had a particular pattern of radioactive emissions since installation … low tick neutrons. Across the globe about five percent are showing that pattern.’

  That’s still five hundred nuclear bombs …

  Tim let it go unsaid. He simply nodded and reached for the first syringe.

  Whaller held out his hand in warning. ‘Don’t accidentally get any on yourself.’

  ‘How does it work?’ Tim asked, pointing to a syringe.

  ‘Each syringe has ten doses; the plunger will click to let you know when you’ve delivered a full dose.’ Whaller pointed at one of the packing cases. ‘Take a head. Push the needle through the eyeball and inject one dose. Inject as many heads as you can in ten minutes, and then move onto the next packing case. I’ll start at the other end.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Tim, nervously looking around. MacKenzie’s obsession with security meant if there was a camera, which there appeared not to be, then it would probably only be accessible from the mezzanine. With a bit of luck, it would also be linked to one of the wires that Charlie had cut.

  The packing cases did not look easy to access. They were too tall for Tim to see over them, plus they were already on the trolleys.

  Tim looked for a way to climb up the side of the one nearest the exit hatch.

  ‘Ladder,’ whispered Whaller, pointing to a stepladder in the corner of the room.

  Good news and bad news.

  The good news was that Tim now had a means by which to climb up. The bad news was that someone might have put the stepladder there for a final set of checks that some heavily armed Leafers were on their way to perform.

  Whaller had thought the same thing. He took a small package out of his rucksack and fixed it onto the door that the Leafers would likely come through.

  Whether it was a bomb or an alarm, Tim didn’t know. He took the stepladder and, putting it up carefully next to one of the cylinders, climbed to the top. He laid the syringe case on the top step and inspected the lid.

  It had been bolted shut. Whaller had foreseen this and the rucksack also held tools. Tim took a spanner and unscrewed the first bolt of five that secured the lid.

  Then the next.

  Along the line, Whaller was doing the same, having found a crate to stand on.

  Once Tim had undone all the bolts, he levered open the lid. Inside, the space was much smaller than he’d expected from the outside. The cylinder seemed to have extensive insulation.

  Tim peered inside. As explained by MacKenzie, the heads were suspended in a freezing gel. Tim poked it with the spanner. It was highly viscous but hadn’t set hard. There was no way of knowing if it would. However, given it was at least forty degrees below freezing, he had to avoid putting his bare hands inside.

  Searching back inside the rucksack whilst balancing on the top step of the ladder, it appeared that Captain Whaller had prepared well. There was a pair of thick leather gloves in a top compartment. Whether they were intended to protect from the cold or the killer pathogen, Tim wasn’t sure.

  He put them on and picked up the first syringe.

  Usually, on commencing an unpleasant or gory task – such as unblocking a shower drain – Tim would flinch, and possibly shut his eyes. With a needle full of killer virus and a tank full of severed heads, he kept his hands steady and his eyes wide open.

  The gel was sticky. Tim reached in and pulled out the first head by its hair. He turned it and rested it on the edge of the packaging case. It was a middle-aged man.

  Not Charlie …

  Gulping, Tim pushed the needle into the right eyeball. It slid in without resistance. Tim pushed the plunger down one unit, click, delivering the Chimera virus deep into the brain.

  Shit!

  Tim hadn’t thought this through. He had nowhere to put the head. If he put it back, he might mix it up and reinject it. The efficacy of the plan depended on as wide a distribution of brain material across the Ankor craft as possible. The hope was that, of the four thousand brains being sent, on average each pod would get twelve of them. In this way, the chemicals would get a chance to attack all of them. In any case, double injection into one brain was a waste.

  At the same time as this thought hit his brain, the cold hit Tim’s hand. The gloves had not been as effective as he’d have liked. One slip and Tim would get serious burns from the gel, probably rendering further injections impossible.

  Fuck!

  It hurt.

  ‘Double speed,’ hissed Whaller from the next cylinder. ‘The gel is setting. We’ve no more than ten minutes.’

  ‘Come on,’ Tim whispered to himself.

  On the next injection, Tim noticed that Whaller was correct: the gel was getting more viscous. If it set fully, then he would not be able to get the heads back in. Tim pushed the head back into the gel, angling towards his left-hand side. He took another head near the surface and injected again.

  The process continued.

  Each time, Tim took a few seconds to try to memorise the facial features of the head, to mitigate against double injections, and he continued to push injected heads down on the left and pull them up from the right.

  After twenty injections and two empty syringes, Tim began to lose feeling in his left hand. He tried to switch hands and scoop with his right and inject with his left. That failed.

  Rubbing life back into his hands, Tim looked towards Whaller.

  Whaller was hard at work, but also scanning the room every five seconds or so.

  Will they come?

  Judging that he was unlikely to get uninjected heads due to his inability to reach more deeply into the current packing case, Tim moved on.

  After securing the bolts back on the cylinder, he climbed down.

  The injections continued.

  Eight minutes later, and with half of the final syringe still full, sirens started.

  Tim looked over to Whaller again.

  He had finished and was packing up.

  Tim quickly grabbed for another head.

  As he pulled it out, a sound from the end of the room indicated the exit hatch was opening.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Whaller, now standing under Tim.

  Pushing the head back into the near-set gel, Tim secured the packing case, and then carefully put everything back into the rucksack.

  Quietly opening the door, Tim and Whaller slipped back into the secret corridor.

  After the relatively well-lit transport room, the corridor seemed even more dim, and Tim could not see more than a few metres ahead.

  Rich
ardson was not where they’d left him.

  They reached the first anteroom to find him slumped against a wall; he was still alive but his breathing was laboured. His hand still pressed a blood-soaked cloth to his shoulder.

  ‘Can we move you?’ asked Whaller.

  ‘Just drag me into the corridor, and leave me there,’ said Richardson, ‘there’s more chance of discovery here.’

  ‘I have an idea,’ said Tim. He reached up to the observation slit and looked into the decapitation room.

  In the half-light, he scanned the room.

  Empty.

  ‘One moment,’ he said.

  Whaller raised an eyebrow, but Tim had earned a modicum of trust by now and was allowed to carry on.

  He cracked open the door and crept through.

  There, in the corner: Sam’s wheelchair.

  Whaller and Tim gently lifted Richardson into it, and then set off back up the corridor.

  On the journey, now using sign language and lipreading, they’d decided they didn’t want MacKenzie to see Richardson hurt. Not only would it give him satisfaction, but also he would have known where Juan had been stationed. They’d prefer for MacKenzie to think they were still planning a Hot Zone assault.

  At the top of the corridor, Tim left Whaller and Richardson in the MIDAS server room, before heading back to the Faraday room.

  --------

  Tim found Sam sitting on a wooden chair outside the Faraday room. After a brief hug, he gave her a thumbs-up to indicate success, then mimed that Richardson was injured.

  Sam knocked quietly on the door.

  It opened, and Martel came out. His eyes widened when he saw Tim. There was blood on his hands. He indicated for them both to come inside.

  MacKenzie was lying half-conscious on the floor, blood oozing from a bandaged hand and from his mouth. His hands were still tied, but now in front of him.

  Once the door was firmly shut behind them, Martel turned to Sam and Tim. ‘Apologies, but there have been developments on the RL3 launch. MacKenzie had not been entirely honest with us. He did have some codes that locked down the launch.’

  ‘Has he told you them?’ asked Sam.

  ‘He told them to me when I first asked,’ said Martel. ‘What you see here is a punishment for his original misdirection.’ He paused. ‘All good?’

  Tim looked towards MacKenzie, wondering what he could hear. He kept it brief. ‘Captain Whaller is in the server room. It’s fine.’

  ‘I’ll go and look in on him,’ said Martel. ‘One of you should get some sleep, and I’d like the other on the mezzanine with me.’

  ‘Who will guard MacKenzie?’ asked Sam.

  ‘I’ll ask Whaller to do it once I’ve spoken to him,’ said Martel, turning for the door.

  Once Martel had closed the door behind him, MacKenzie stirred and manoeuvred himself into a sitting position against the wall.

  ‘So, what’s new with you?’ Tim asked Sam, one eye on MacKenzie who was stifling groans in the corner.

  Sam smiled at him, seemingly finding it easy to ignore MacKenzie. ‘The US have noticed we’ve restarted RL3. Apparently, the prime minister had assured the president it would not happen. They’re angry.’

  ‘They weren’t swayed by what happened in Birmingham?’

  ‘Could not give a shit,’ said Sam.

  ‘Nice to have one more thing to worry about,’ said Tim. The US had the most capable military on Earth and appeared to be spending an inordinate amount of time judgementally eying those countries taking an insufficiently hard line with the Ankor.

  Uncomfortable with MacKenzie’s nudity, Tim took off his jacket and draped it over him.

  MacKenzie said nothing, but Tim saw a flicker of appreciation flit across his face. He was obviously in extreme pain.

  ‘I have an aspirin somewhere, if you’d like?’ said Tim.

  MacKenzie’s eyes registered the gesture. ‘Anything stronger?’

  ‘I’ve got Tramadol,’ said Sam, reaching into her pocket for her medium strength painkillers.

  ‘Thanks,’ said MacKenzie, swallowing the pills that Tim pushed directly into his mouth.

  Realising that he and Sam were now alone with MacKenzie, Tim decided to dig. ‘Did MedOp ever work?’ he asked.

  MacKenzie, clearly addled with pain, took a few moments to process the question. ‘Yes. The technology was child’s play for the Ankor.’

  ‘You’re planning to join them in a live meld.’ said Sam.

  ‘Yes,’ said MacKenzie, gingerly touching his heavily bruised face. ‘Hopefully, they’ll demand my release soon.’

  ‘Do you really think they’ll still ask for you?’ asked Tim. He could have asked it in an aggressive way, but it came out quite softly.

  ‘They need me,’ said MacKenzie.

  ‘Charlie said you supported the Transcender faction,’ said Sam.

  ‘The Transcenders …’ said MacKenzie, grimacing through the pain as he moved his weight. Tramadol could only do so much. ‘They’re the ones humanity needs to worry about. As the Ankor are slowly becoming starved of brain material, more pods are getting desperate and turning to the Transcender methods, if not their end-game.’

  ‘Methods?’ asked Sam.

  ‘It must have been they who demanded the detonation in China. Actual full nuclear explosions were never in the original plans.’ He shifted himself again to find a more comfortable position. ‘Obviously, talk is cheap.’

  ‘What did you do to support the Transcenders?’ asked Sam.

  ‘Nothing much,’ said MacKenzie, looking a little unsure of himself. ‘I listened to them rage for the last fifteen years. And, more recently, I tweaked the contents of RL1 for them.’

  ‘So, their end-game?’ asked Tim, wondering if a weakness could be divined from their goals.

  MacKenzie nodded. ‘They want to create a critical mass of computational ability, with an information density limit so great that they break the simulation they consider us all to be part of.’

  ‘Can they do it?’

  ‘They say that what’s black holes are – local informational densities so great they cause a computational node overflow in the Creator universe. They think they can reproduce them with massive computational systems that are impossible to simulate. They think that if they cause enough then all the Creator’s back-ups and recovery systems will crash and the whole system goes down.’

  ‘But a total system crash would mean oblivion,’ said Tim. ‘If a computer fatally crashes then the programs running on it die too. Do they think they can somehow escape into the programming substrate … into its operating system?’

  ‘I’m not sure what they expect,’ said MacKenzie. ‘I think they hope to be taken out of the simulation and join the higher reality. But I suspect they’d be equally happy with oblivion for this reality.’

  ‘They’re not worried about dying?’ asked Sam.

  MacKenzie shook his head. ‘Neither do they spare a thought about all the life created and ended in the fourteen billion years before they were born.’

  ‘So they’re simply psychotic,’ she said.

  ‘It’s the reason Taylor changed his original plans ran for RL3. He couldn’t stand the thought of his brain being allocated to a Transcender-aligned pod,’ said MacKenzie.

  ‘But you’re supporting the Transcenders,’ said Tim. ‘If they win and meet the information density requirements, you’ll die along with all of us.’

  ‘Firstly, I’m not convinced the Creators, if they exist, running this universe would allow that to happen,’ said MacKenzie. ‘Secondly, the current calculations suggest a requirement for trillions of times more processing capability than the Transcenders have access to. By the time they get anywhere near it, I will have unhooked and be living inside a terraformed gas giant, from where I will make it one of my goals to stop them.’

  ‘Unhooked?’ asked Tim, wanting to hear the technicalities.

  ‘By joining with the Ankor, my life will initially be extended b
y a factor of one thousand.’ He paused. ‘I will work towards creating a computer capable of electronically housing my entire consciousness and then I will unhook myself from biology altogether.’

  ‘But you said even the Ankor couldn’t manage that,’ said Tim.

  ‘No, I said they couldn’t create electronic artificial intelligence from scratch,’ said MacKenzie. ‘I don’t know what they’ve achieved in terms of sequential replacement of biology with tech. It may be their belief system is hindering them in some way … a prohibition against idolatry, perhaps.’

  ‘Then what?’ asked Sam.

  ‘After I’ve thwarted the Transcenders and safeguarded the universe,’ said MacKenzie, ‘then I will create my own universe-sized simulation to hook into.’

  Tim felt himself being swept along. ‘But you said—’

  MacKenzie cut him off. ‘What I said was that I didn’t necessarily believe that this reality is hosted on a computer in another dimension. I am very prepared to believe that, building from the Ankor’s base knowledge, I can build a full simulation that my real self can interact with.’ He paused. ‘Once complete, I can jack up the frame rate to maximum – extending my life by another factor of a hundred million.’

  ‘A single person simulation,’ said Tim. ‘With NPCs that think they’re real.’

  ‘As real as you or me,’ said MacKenzie.

  ‘And your immortal soul?’ asked Sam.

  ‘Died at the age of eight clawing at his own throat,’ said MacKenzie.

  ‘It all seems so reasonable,’ said Sam. ‘Except for the fifty thousand people being decapitated.’

  For a moment, MacKenzie looked unsure of himself, then his resolve hardened. ‘I am reconciled with the price.’

  Sam snorted in derision.

  MacKenzie turned and stared at her. ‘Don’t you want to live forever?’

  Tim shuddered. He remembered himself asking Sam the same question at the MedOp launch.

  Whether Sam remembered, Tim didn’t know, she simply shook her head at MacKenzie in disbelief.

  CHAPTER 35

  SpaceOp

  Once Whaller had relieved them, Tim headed back up to the main floor of Mission Control, while Sam returned to the server room to get some sleep.