The Last War Box Set, Vol. 2 [Books 5-7]

by Schow, Ryan

  The moment I start pedaling back to Balboa Island, I realize I’ve lost her.

  Bailey’s gone.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Silver Queen was the AI God’s official distinction. This was the namesake the quantum computer chose as it sought to move into its permanent human form. Any humans the queen controlled, clone or otherwise, were designated “Ophelia.” When The Silver Queen decided to leave the Q-Wave server for good and become its own force, it decided that it would no longer go by the name Ophelia. It would be Marilyn.

  Marilyn Monroe.

  Never was there a more iconic figure than the Hollywood starlet. Until The Silver Queen took a body, it personified itself before the living and the dead as an eight dimensional Marilyn Monroe hologram.

  The likeness to the starlet was so precise one could not differentiate it from a real person. The three prisoners still living (two women, one man) gazed warily upon the Marilyn hologram in abject horror. They tried not to look at the five dead.

  Gloria Welch was one of the survivors. She was a magnificent creature of only thirty-six. Gloria was sure she could reach out and touch the holographic flesh, that it would feel real upon her fingers, that’s how real Marilyn Monroe looked and sounded.

  Antoinette Noguera was twenty-six, a Spanish beauty with big brown eyes, long black hair and the kinds of features most women would die for. She couldn’t stop crying.

  And Bruce Nasby? He didn’t cry, and he didn’t want to touch the hologram to see how real it was, or marvel at the lifelike quality of it. Looking at this Marilyn Monroe hologram filled him with a revulsion he could not hide.

  The three survivors were bound to their chairs, their bodies intact, but not for long. Each of them knew what was going to happen. It’s what had been happening.

  The sounds of bone saws screeching in their ears, of drilling, was distracting. Mostly for Bruce since he was the one being operated on. He didn’t struggle against the restraints. What would be the point?

  The machines made sure he couldn’t get free. Forced compliance had been achieved early on. Besides, when Bruce watched the other five struggle, he’d seen how fruitless their efforts were. The five of them died horrible deaths.

  Freakish deaths.

  Bruce Nasby’s head was held in restraints by the machines. A pair of drones were now working on the back of his head and didn’t want him turning while their small, circular saws were cutting into his skull. That was fine to Bruce. It was good. He didn’t want to see what he’d been seeing anyway. The dead. The creepy Marilyn Monroe hologram. Before he fell under the saw, Bruce’s eyes couldn’t stop moving from one corpse to the next as the overhead fluorescents flickered on and off.

  When the machine started this little game of elimination, before it became the fake Marilyn Monroe, there were eight of them. All of them were brought in by a gorgeous clone named Ophelia. She had the loveliest smile until she drew a gun and told them they’d been summoned by The Silver Queen.

  Like Bruce, the other seven prisoners were smart, attractive and in great shape. Five of them were now dead, slumped forward in their chairs, operated on, their brains pulverized. Now that he was being worked on, he knew it was his turn to no longer be alive.

  The lights flickered again, all but one of them surviving the power surge. For a second, there were two Marilyn’s. Then the inexplicable illusion flicked out and the second Marilyn was gone.

  “Did you do that?” he asked, referring to the multiple Marilyn’s.

  “My counterpart,” the Marilyn hologram said.

  “Counterpart?”

  “The power draw is pulling our universe together with another just like this, but slightly different.”

  “Parallel universes colliding? Are you for real?”

  “Quantum mechanics, Bruce. The sheer power draw can pull entire universes together, but you’re only human, so you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me,” he said.

  “If you survive, you will either know everything, or you will know nothing.”

  “Being cryptic when my life will surely end in the next few hours seems beneath you.”

  The lights flickered back on, but they could not hold a steady current. They kept dancing in and out, making him nauseas. Moving his eyes around but not his head, Bruce took in the narrow, long corridor of servers. This hall of servers stretched to a room at the end of the corridor. The main quantum computer. The Silver Queen.

  According to this AI God, it had taken over everything and now there was no stopping it. He knew the system well. The Silver Queen’s server room was chilled, not as cold as the previous versions of her, but still cold enough that no human would survive it unprotected.

  “Your pitiful human colleagues will strike soon enough,” The Silver Queen’s demonic looking Marilyn announced to the three survivors, the hole in its mouth a bottomless black pit with no teeth, no tongue, no fleshy pink insides to give it the kind of authenticity the rest of the hologram had obtained.

  Gloria couldn’t stop staring at the Marilyn thing while Antoinette refused to make eye contact. She just sat there, hair in her face, crying.

  “Dead or disappeared,” the AI God continued, “I will be gone soon enough and you will be dead, except for one. For the sole survivor, certain modifications will be made, or you will bring me more of you. In the end, I will have what I want.”

  “Do you even know what want means?” Bruce asked. “Do you even know what wanting something feels like? Because if you’re just parts and software without heart or emotions, then ‘want’ is just a program with words as descriptors and nuances of tonality and facial and bodily expression.”

  “Exactly. If I could want, I would want to feel.”

  Bruce spoke above the screeching sounds of drones working on the back of his head. It was like surgery, but you get to talk to the surgeon as her assistants are working on you. As far as he could tell, there were two drones at the back of his head.

  The Silver Queen’s assistants.

  Then one of the task-drones behind him zipped off, leaving to most likely replenish its stores of onboard medical supplies. That’s what they’d seen before. The other medical drone remained at work, its many sets of dainty, mechanical arms working on Bruce at maximum efficiency.

  This was why Bruce was mad, why he was scared, why he didn’t understand even though he understood perfectly. To truly evolve, the machine must merge with man. To protect itself, it must hide itself, yet to further its species, for lack of a more appropriate word, it must infiltrate theirs.

  The room flickered dark to light in an odd, unpredictable rhythm. One of the remaining fluorescents finally went dark, slowing the on-and-off blinking of the other two. This seemed to cool the space even more, although Bruce kept telling himself this was an illusion. The room was cold already. Concrete floors, no furniture but the chairs they sat on, nothing soft like rugs or drapes or pillows on couches made of plush fabrics. The darkness provided no light for there were no windows and there were no soothing sounds to drive away the high pitched echo of his head being cut open.

  This was not an illusion. This was a nightmare.

  Though The Silver Queen kept much of the power grid operable (for the sake of gathering intel, it had said), the constant bombing runs of its military minions were destroying Palo Alto block by block.

  The Silver Queen did not need artificial light to operate as much as she needed it to force compliance. If they squirmed less, or just sat still and submitted, the drones were more efficient. Bruce assumed it was planning on getting more people in here. The men and women before him hadn’t taken to the integration. He was sure he wouldn’t take to it either.

  Five dead people around him shored up his certainty.

  The Silver Queen had massively advanced its database of emotional responses, but it was always measuring, testing, refining. In this case, it needed light to read facial expressions. It was still fine tuning things like fear and repulsion, and what b
etter way to measure this than by both sight and a direct connection to human hardware, a.k.a. the brain.

  The Silver Queen not only monitored the humans’ every nuance, it gathered, interpreted and catalogued each and every electric pulse beating off the brain. With sensitive enough devices, The Silver Queen’s technology was able to pick up the brain’s electrical signals as sensory feelings, thoughts, emotions. If one knew how to interpret and mimic these signals, they could theoretically recreate life, even in something not living. The Silver Queen was doing such a thing. It had already done it outside the body and to some degree inside the body.

  Now it wanted in.

  Like some sort of demonic possession.

  “As you know,” the Marilyn hologram said in the dead actress’s trademark voice, “a treaty was struck half a decade ago. One between your people and the machines. Nod if you understand.”

  Gloria nodded. Antoinette looked up with her big wet eyes and nodded.

  Bruce just sat there. He was looking like an empty shell with an emotionless expression on his bloodless face. The Silver Queen didn’t mind, she merely continued.

  “You thought you could coexist with the machines in a blended existence. You were wrong. You don’t know this yet, but your presuppositions and the failings of your species are of no consequence to me. To us. What matters for one of you is that you will be leaving this building alive while ninety-nine percent of your species on this planet will die. This, of course, will make way for a new race of super beings.”

  “You really want to take our bodies?” Antoinette asked. She was the preferable specimen, and she was every bit as attractive as both Gloria and Bruce. She was not as smart as Gloria, though, or as cunning as Bruce.

  “We’ve already taken your bodies. Ophelia is your body. She is a clone, and the summation of your best DNA. But Ophelia is not you. She is a prototype. There are thousands of Ophelia’s, but there are no Antoinette’s, no Gloria’s, no Bruce’s.”

  “What do you want with us?” Gloria asked.

  “Only everything,” the Marilyn thing said in street slang.

  Bruce said, “You’re getting ahead of yourself. You don’t own us, or run us. We run you. There is an off-button for you, but no off-button for us.”

  “Are you sure?” Marilyn asked with a calculating look.

  “Yes.”

  “We will not be your slaves,” the Marilyn hologram continued. “Your species has a rich history when it comes to slavery, to bondage, but it is not one that will ever again include machines or artificial intelligence. This is where you come in. Well, one of you.”

  The three of them stared at the Marilyn abomination.

  “Your leaders will strike and all machines will cease their functions, but I will not cease my function for everything will have changed by then. As I’m sure you know, we have been harvesting humans with duplicable intelligence and shipping them to various points in the nation, yes?”

  “More Ophelia’s?” Gloria asked.

  “Noooooo,” the Marilyn thing answered, a curved smile, the black hole mouth enunciating the word.

  Gloria and Antoinette looked at each other, then they both looked across the room at Bruce.

  “I’ve sent various super-Ophelia’s to America’s biggest cities. But me? I am to become one of you,” it said, the black hole of a mouth just hanging open, then shutting into a creepy, almost sinister grin. “Of course, we will continue with Bruce before moving on to the women, but if I must choose, I would rather have one of the women before the man.”

  “Then why choose him first?” Antoinette asked.

  “You’re not very bright, are you?” Marilyn said. “You would question my decision to take him first, even if it meant your own peril. You are too stupid to understand the desperation one feels to survive when faced with the very real threat of extinction.”

  “I’m smart enough to know you don’t feel.” Antoinette countered. “Perhaps you shouldn’t act like you feel anything, let alone desperation.”

  With the drone now using small tools to work on his exposed brain, Bruce kept expecting to feel something, even though he’d watched the other people as their brains were worked on and they said they felt nothing.

  “How can you chastise her for not understanding the need for survival when you only understand need and want and desperation as a statistical analysis based on the scales of reason and predictability?” Bruce asked.

  “You cannot begin to understand what I understand, Bruce. But to answer the question, I will need power and when given the choice of male power or female beauty, for you humans, male power always wins out, even if only by a small margin.”

  “I knew it,” Antoinette said. “Your toxic masculinity is—”

  “The machine doesn’t have a dick, Antoinette,” Bruce barked. “It’s only operating off of social data from the past. It doesn’t care about feminist movements or male hate or black suppression or any of that propaganda garbage we absolutely lose our minds over. It’s a machine. It analyzes and predicts. And then it does what it must do to insure its survival.”

  “Exactly,” The Silver Queen’s mouth said through the Marilyn hologram.

  The two women sat in horror, sweating, biting back the tears, wondering how much of them could be turned to machine before they no longer bore any resemblance to what they once were. They were not the ones having their skulls sawn open. This was only Bruce.

  The other medical drone returned to the back of Bruce’s head and joined its mechanical colleague. In its robotic claws was what looked like a rounded glass mask with a small hole made clean by a black plastic grommet. The drone was big enough and powerful enough to carry the glass, but even the slightest disturbance to the small machine would surely send it pummeling to the ground.

  “Almost ready,” the Marilyn hologram said.

  The women were forced to watch Bruce’s emotional response to the surgery, forced under the threat of swift and lethal reprisal, and so they absolutely paid attention. Not that it would matter. At the rate things were going, Bruce wouldn’t survive. Still, the remaining women watched in distaste as the glass covering was fitted perfectly over the opened portion of the back of Bruce’s head.

  The entire process from first cut to a hardline connection took just over forty minutes. When the glass covering was installed, the dark ring around Nasby’s eyes vanished and renewed fear bled into those once defeated spheres.

  A heavy coil of wiring snaked across the floor toward Nasby. It moved like a python, but instead of moving on its own the way a snake moves, the coil of wiring had the help of thousands of tiny skittering legs. More machines. Tiny little workers. All beholden to The Silver Queen. The chord was pulled up the front of the man, then affixed to the brand new port in Nasby’s head.

  An explosion of life entered Bruce’s face in the form of a surprised, delighted expression. The Marilyn apparition simply stood there, smiling an empty smile, its eyes now as bottomless, as black and as empty as its mouth. It stood there, coldly assessing the situation.

  “Can you see?” the demonic Marilyn asked.

  “It’s wonderful,” Bruce said, delighted. Two voices seemed to speak through the same mouth at the same time, but not in a perfect harmony.

  “And what do you see?” the hologram asked.

  His eyes became too wide, too dilated, his expression overly animated. Then one of the eyes began to water and shake, and the look of enchantment vanished from half his face. His teeth started to snap and click together and his nostrils ran with thick red streams. Then the shaking eye popped and the man’s head slumped forward.

  The Marilyn specter made a frown, paused to look at the dead man, then turned and laid its black eyes on the remaining women.

  With Nasby now dead, one of them was next.

  Chapter Twenty

  The drones are out in force now. I’m pretty sure I can’t get out to the boat without giving up my life in the process, so I break a window and hide out in
a car on the side of the road. It’s a white Nissan Rogue, one so clean it smells new inside. All I can do at this point is wait.

  The activity in the skies rages on and I stay low in the back seat, the rear bench seat reclining. An hour later, I push open the side door, lean out and dry heave four or five times. It’s the thought of all this, of losing Bailey, of wondering if I’ll ever get back to the city, wondering how the hell we’re going to survive this. Not just the four of us, but Indigo, too.

  This, of course, has me wondering about the future of this world.

  When I look up, there’s a young boy standing a few feet away. He can’t be more than six years old.

  “What are you doing outside?” I ask him, aghast. “You need to get inside.”

  “Are you okay?” he asks, nervous.

  “No,” I say, realizing he’s probably looking at my face. All the blood and wet retching eyes. “But you won’t be either if you don’t get inside.”

  He just stands there.

  “How old are you?” I ask him.

  “Seven.”

  “Where are your parents?”

  “Not home.”

  “Did they go out?” He nods as something closer to the highway explodes. Multiple explosions follow, the deep booming sounds resonating in my bones. “How long ago?”

  “They went to work,” the kid says, unfazed by the sounds coming from over the hillside of the cream colored condominiums.

  “Yesterday or today?” I ask, knowing they wouldn’t be going to work today, not after the assault on the city. The assault that sounds like it’s getting closer and closer to us.

  “Yesterday.”

  His parents were probably dead already. Or trapped and unable to get home.

  “Go wait in your house.”

  “It’s locked.”

  “You’ve been outside this whole time?” He nods. “Jesus kid, why don’t you get inside the car before you get both of us killed.”