End Program

by James Axler

  “You’re stronger than them, Ryan,” Krysty said.

  “No, I just have friends,” he told her. “It’s time we finished this.”

  The companions made their way down the corridors of the building, which were largely unpopulated. Whenever they saw anyone, Ryan would simply say “Machine” and the machine would be chilled. They were bureaucrats, functionaries—they offered no resistance. A trail of a half dozen bodies had been left in their wake by the time the companions exited the building.

  Outside, Ryan stopped, looking at the council tower where it stood framed by the night sky. “We need to chill them,” Ryan said, “or shut them down. Whatever it is you do to machines.”

  “Ryan?” The astonished voice came from close by, at the exit to the single-story building that housed the grand underground complex of the old redoubt.

  Ryan turned and saw J.B. and Doc approaching, surprise etched on their features.

  “My dear Ryan, you are alive!” Doc exclaimed, then corrected himself with embarrassment. “That is to say, you were already alive. I just did not expect—”

  “It’s good to see you too, Doc,” Ryan said, cutting the man off.

  Then Ryan turned to J.B. and a look passed between the old friends.

  “Ryan,” was all the Armorer said, but that was all that needed to be said.

  “Ryan says we need to destroy these people,” Mildred explained.

  “Yeah.” J.B. nodded. “We were thinking the same thing. But we’re outnumbered—real outnumbered. You have a plan?”

  Ryan nodded slowly. “Chill the council. Once they lose their leaders the rest should lose direction.”

  “That’s a mighty big ‘should,’” J.B. said warily.

  * * *

  IN THE WAREHOUSE, the war drones had turned on one another and were carving up slices of the room while Ricky and Jak avoided the lancing heat beams. The sec crew was cut down in a matter of seconds, as the red beams zapped through the air.

  Jak and Ricky remained low, crouching as they ran toward the far exit, smoke billowing all around them. Jak slammed against the door as another burst of heat burned the wall just two feet to his left. Ricky fired another round from his Webley at an approaching war machine.

  Jak shoved at the door, forcing it open on its treads. As the door gave, the chill of the night air struck Jak and Ricky—so different from the stifling warmth of the room where the heat beams were zipping left and right.

  They stepped out together, jamming the door closed behind them and running from the storage building. As they sprinted up the moonlit street, Jak spotted the rest of his companions talking in the shadows of the surgical center. He headed toward them, instructing Ricky to follow.

  “Ryan, that you?” Jak asked as he sprinted across the empty street.

  Ryan looked up, the red splash marring the left side of his face. “Jak. Ricky. I was starting to wonder where you two had gotten to.”

  “Is he...himself again?” Ricky asked, directing the question to Mildred.

  “Large as life and twice as ugly,” Mildred assured him.

  Before Ryan could explain, Ricky had his arms folded around him in a hug. “I knew it,” was all he said.

  Across the street where Jak and Ricky had emerged, the door to the warehouse was glowing red as war drones sent heat blasts against it. A moment later, the door gave in a burst of red-hot shrapnel and the first of the towering war drones stepped out into the night air, torso swiveling as it sought the escaped intruders.

  “I see you brought company,” J.B. said. “Friend or foe?”

  “Foe!” Jak and Ricky replied in unison.

  “Then I guess it is time we made our exit,” Doc announced with a flourish of his sword stick.

  “Follow me,” Ryan snarled, his lone eye fixing on the towering structure where the council waited. “I still have some unfinished business with these people.”

  With that, Ryan began striding across the street while the war drones struggled through the small door to the warehouse. J.B. eyed the war drones and pulled an explosive and detonator out of his satchel, which he tossed across the street, directly into the path of the towering machines. The companions turned as the explosive went off, ripping through three of the emerging machines and sending a shock wave through the warehouse.

  “Well, they sure as hell know we’re coming now,” J.B. said.

  * * *

  THE LOBBY TO the council building was populated by Roma and the six sec men who had escorted the companions there when they arrived. Roma was working a self-repair program on her ruined torso while the sec men were working similar repairs, welding new pieces in place of their ruined chunks of body where the companions had attacked them. It was clear now that they were all robots or semi-robotic. Whatever humanity was left in their makeup was just so much flesh being carried by a machine.

  Roma looked up as Ryan entered, balked as he thrust his SIG Sauer in her face.

  “Ryan Cawdor, I didn’t expe—”

  Roma’s face was obliterated by a 9 mm slug as Ryan pulled the trigger without a hint of emotion.

  The sec men responded immediately, standing up and approaching the companions striding across the lobby.

  Ryan glanced back to J.B. “Deal with them,” he said before continuing toward the elevator. Krysty followed Ryan while J.B. and the others laid down covering fire, using the sparse furniture for cover and holding the sec men at bay. The lobby lit up with explosions and the flash of propellant.

  * * *

  THE COUNCIL CHAMBER was as dark as Ryan remembered, only this time he had no artificial night-vision to compensate. Hidden fans whirred and the air smelled recycled, as if it had circulated the room a thousand times before.

  The council materialized as Ryan and Krysty stepped from the elevator, their dark, hooded shapes looming over the railing like specters.

  “Ryan Cawdor,” Emil said. “The prodigal son returns.”

  “I’m here to shut you down,” Ryan told them, “and then we’re leaving.”

  “Impossible,” Emil replied calmly. “There’s no escape from the ville unless we want you to escape. You and your friends are merely running yourselves ragged with no idea that we are watching your every move.”

  “You’ve lost people and equipment already,” Krysty pointed out.

  “Tools,” Emil stated. “Those things can be replaced. Even now the next phase is beginning, when full production of the surgical team will begin in earnest.”

  Ryan frowned. “What surgical team?” he asked.

  “You have already met the drones,” the being Ryan knew as Una replied from her position on the shadowy council. “They are the surgeon’s knife, there to cut out the infection of humankind.”

  Ryan reached for his panga. “Seems appropriate,” he muttered.

  “You would be better advised to surrender your will now,” Emil told them both. “The alternative is more painful but will only achieve the same result.”

  “I don’t surrender,” Ryan said. “You must have missed that when you put your hunk of shit in my face.” Knife in hand, Ryan ran at the tall wall of circuitry, pulling himself up.

  * * *

  IN THE LOWER LEVEL, J.B., Doc, Mildred, Jak and Ricky were containing the last of the sec men. They were cyborgs, just like the bikers the companions had fought with in Heartsville. Built things, made to fight. But, by tag-teaming, the companions managed to overwhelm the sec men and capture them the same way that the bikers had finally been stopped, using climbing ropes and other equipment that they carried to ensnare their enemies. It was more effective than trying to chill them, they knew—because an unliving thing was hard to chill.

  Outside in the street, the hulking war drones were emerging from another door in the warehouse area, striding past th
e council chamber.

  “Now, where do you think they’re going?” J.B. wondered.

  * * *

  RYAN WAS ON TOP of the raised section of the room in a flash, leaping to the balcony and grabbing for the encompassing robe of Emil. Ryan drew the panga back in his free hand as the other members of the council started to react.

  “You owe me an eye,” Ryan snarled as Emil’s hood fell back from his head.

  When the hood fell back, Ryan saw that the man’s head was not really a head at all. The face was stretched over a frame of metal piping, a headband of metal holding it in place. Behind the web frame was a blocky mechanism, with diodes flashing and a line of connected circuits running upright in parallel lines, one next to another. With the hood removed, the head didn’t really look like a head at all—just a box of circuits with a human face stretched over its facade.

  Ryan blanched as he saw that, spun to face the other councillors as they rounded on him. Each one was like Emil, he saw now—each of them disguising their inhumanity by the loose hoods and robes they wore. They did not even walk like humans, instead they trundled like machines, bumping over the tiled floor like shopping carts.

  In the moment that it took for Ryan to absorb what he saw, he stopped, holding the panga ready to cut Emil’s eye from his face. “Are you—?” Ryan began. “Were you ever—?”

  “Human?” Emil asked, finishing the question. His voice lacked that strange emotionless quality it had had. Instead, he sounded strained and something else—scared. “Yes. But they took us, took our thoughts and made them their thoughts. They—you wait too long, plague thing.”

  Ryan spun, realizing he had been tricked. The other councillors were on him, descending like hyenas on a wounded antelope, grasping for him with inhuman metal hooks in place of hands.

  “Foolish flesh man,” Emil hissed. “Chill me and I will simply regenerate, take a new body, continue my good works in cleansing this once-safe nation of its enemies.”

  Ryan ignored him, striking backward with the panga, slicing the closest of the approaching figures across the chest. “Stay back!” Ryan shouted.

  Had Emil tricked him or was it something else? Had he truly wanted to share the last of his humanity with Ryan in that single moment before the program took over once more? Ryan would never know. He was too busy fighting for his life. The councillors swarmed toward him, six inhuman grotesques, faces stretched over pipes and dials and circuitry.

  But as the councillors overwhelmed Ryan, a revolver blasted in the darkness. Krysty had found an alternative way up and she balanced on the balcony, working the trigger of her Smith & Wesson and blasting the hooded figures as they grabbed for Ryan. They went down like dominoes, one after another. The machines had been designed for thinking, not for fighting—that was the role of the war drones and the robots that had been fashioned as sec men. Without their protection, the council had little chance against blasters and knives.

  Una spoke as Krysty peppered her with bullets. “Destroy us, but you will never escape. The ville is in lockdown. You will be my next body, Red. I’ll take your flesh and wear it like a dress.”

  Krysty drilled the last of her bullets into Una’s brain box, sending her current thought programme to oblivion.

  “Una is correct, Ryan Cawdor,” Emil bragged as he watched the scene play out. “Destroy us here but all you do is destroy these shells. Our thoughts shall move on to the next vessel, whenever we choose. We have superseded the old flesh that humans wore, made it redundant and irrelevant. You cannot escape the ville, and tomorrow when we meet again we shall all be wearing new faces and you will bow down to the End Program, the solution to the mess that humankind made.”

  “No,” Ryan said, thrusting his knife into Emil’s fleshy face and driving it in all the way to the hilt. Emil’s face sparked with electricity and his body vibrated as though having a fit as it shut down. “We’ll reprogram.”

  * * *

  OUTSIDE, THE VARIOUS Progress creations had amassed, grouping at the edges of the ville and across the far side of the dam to block escape. When Ryan and Krysty returned to street level in the elevator, J.B. explained the problem.

  “We can’t get out, Ryan,” the Armorer said. “They’ve covered every exit.”

  “We still have the mat-trans,” Doc reminded them.

  “No, they’ve got that covered,” Ricky said from his lookout post at the doors.

  “And they’d follow us if we made a break for it,” J.B. added.

  “We’re not going to run,” Ryan told them all. “Not yet. We still have work to do.”

  Ryan stepped out into the street, his lone eye scanning the crowd of mechanical things that waited at the edge of the ville.

  “Where are we going?” Ricky asked.

  “They think we’ll try to walk out of here but we won’t,” Ryan told him. “You don’t leave a pesthole like this intact, Ricky. That just creates more problems for you another day.”

  “Then what?”

  Ryan stopped before the towering steps leading up to the dam that powered the ville. “They’ll go on forever unless we stop them.”

  J.B. nodded. “I see what you mean,” he said, a cunning smile crossing his lips.

  In a couple of minutes, the companions were standing at one end of the high dam wall that stretched across the Klamath River and drew power from the current. The dam fed everything in Progress. Across the wall, they saw an army of mechanical beasts amassing, like the war drones that Jak and Ricky had faced but numbering more than a thousand. Impossible odds.

  “You’re surrounded,” an artificial voice called out from the control room of the hydroelectric dam. “Lay down your weapons, surrender the future.” The companions could not tell if the voice came from a person or just the speakers of a comp, but with what they knew now that distinction didn’t really matter here anyway.

  The mechanicals on the far side of the bridgelike structure of the dam began to trundle slowly toward the companions. More of the mechanical figures waited in the darkness of the track leading to the cliff paths and out to freedom, and more still trudged down the main thoroughfare of the ville, accompanied by the humanlike robots that had given Progress the illusion of being a normal ville.

  “Phew. Guess someone’s been really busy with their construction kits,” Mildred said as she eyed all those mechanical figures before them.

  J.B. reached into his satchel for his stash of explosives. “It’s time we deconstructed,” he said, handing everyone a hurriedly preset explosive charge.

  From the far end of the dam and all around the ville, mechanical figures approached the companions, certain that they had them trapped. Ryan drew the Steyr Scout from his back and began to blast the closest of them, rationing his shots to hold them at bay long enough for J.B. and the others to plant the charges. It felt good to use the scope again, just trusting his own eye to locate the targets.

  The cyborgs observed emotionlessly as the companions dawdled at one end of the dam. They seemed unable to process quite what the flesh-men were doing—why did they not run from the ville now they knew they were in the enclave of an army that wanted to chill them?

  “Primed,” J.B. said as the group finished placing charges.

  Ryan fired one last shot from his longblaster before slipping it over his back once more. “Good,” he said. “I was out of ammo anyhow.”

  “Five seconds,” J.B. warned, reaching for the edge of the dam. The churning, moonlit waters of the Klamath River looked less than inviting.

  J.B., Doc, Mildred, Jak and Ricky all dived from the dam.

  Krysty grabbed Ryan’s hand. “When was the last time we went swimming, lover?” she asked.

  “You know, I don’t honestly remember,” Ryan said as the first explosion hit.

  Fiery blossoms ignited all around them, burs
ting to life along the gray line of the dam. Ryan and Krysty jumped over the side as explosions began to rock it, leaping for the water as the stone strip erupted in a violent burst of fire. They leaped hand-in-hand, a gesture enviably human in its simplicity and closeness.

  * * *

  THE EXPLOSIONS PETERED out after five seconds and in their place an eerie silence seemed to usher through the valley. In the water below, Ricky stared at the dam in confusion as it loomed above him, dark smoke emanating from where the explosives had been packed.

  “What’s happening?” Ricky asked. “It’s not...did we fail?”

  “Be patient,” J.B. replied, straining to keep afloat as the water threatened to drag him and his weaponry down.

  Then they heard a mighty crack as the dam began to split, water pressing against the tiny fractures that the explosives had created. It took a few seconds before the splits showed, first one, then another, running up the surface of the dam like streaks of black lightning, wider and wider. Then the whole thing started to break apart as water rushed through those rents, pushing them wider apart and ripping through the dam.

  Chunks of stone fell from the dam, tumbling into the river. The river itself raced onward, driving the rents wider, ripping through with all the unstoppable energy of a force of nature.

  “Time to get to safety,” Mildred shouted over the noise of the violent cascade.

  As water bled over the side of the river and out into the streets of Progress, the companions started to swim.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Everything metal sank. Robots, cyborgs and all the metal housings that they had relied upon disappeared to the bottom of the new lake that formed where the dam had been. The towers of Progress disappeared too, a few roofs peeking from the depths of the water but most were destroyed as the great wave struck them, knocking them down like tenpins.

  Doc and Mildred found a chunk of wood that had been torn from a siding and, using it as a raft, gathered the companions up while the waters continued to whirl. Eventually, the cataclysm subsided and the water began to drop again, like a basin with its plug removed.