by Phoenix Ward
He couldn’t help but sigh a heavy breathe of relief once he was free of the beacon. Now all he had to do was make his escape. With a grin, he turned from the facility and started to make his way back to the maintenance tunnel.
Before he was even a stone’s throw from the beacon, the ground around him started to shake. He froze; his heart grew cold in his chest. This wasn’t an explosion, he realized, but the footfalls of some enormous creature. He turned around just in time to see the grotesque monster emerge from the building on its eight robotic legs.
Ethan’s eyes grew wide as the horrible hulk uttered an animal-like roar. Reverend Nidus appeared from behind the creature.
The human tried to duck out of sight once he could motivate his muscles to respond, but it was too late. The monster’s dead eyes locked onto Ethan before he could hide. A terrible smile stretched across the behemoth’s face as it started to sprint after him.
Blood pounded to the rhythm of the hulk’s footsteps as Ethan ran as fast as he could. He could see the hatch to the maintenance tunnel, still open wide and waiting for him. He was only a short dash from salvation. All he had to do was outrun the monster.
You’re going to make it, he chanted to himself. You’re almost there!
He coiled up to leap into the opening when the hulk closed in on him. He was no match for the creature’s mechanical legs, even if there weren’t eight of them. Just before he jumped, Ethan saw the monster swing its huge sword-arm at him. He turned to the tunnel, locking onto it like a torpedo.
The wind was snatched from his lungs. He was swatted down as if he were a fly. There was a hot pinch that rushed through his left arm as he fell to the ground. Instinctively, he raised the appendage and clutched onto it, only to notice a bloody stump where his hand had been. It wasn’t a perfect cut; his hand hung by a thin strip of flesh as blood squirted from his open veins.
Ethan tried to scream, but his throat was incapable of sound. He just lay on the metal floor clutching onto his mutilated arm as blood poured all over him. He felt the monster move away from him, roaring as it rushed to join the rest of the battle. He looked around himself helplessly as his body grew numb, hoping to see anyone he might know. His mind was filled with a sudden desire to be back in the simulation, safe and sound with his digital friends.
He saw Shedder cultists running past him, pouring out from the facility he just marked. They ignored him as they followed the hulk into the fight. He looked down at his feet and saw the distant form of Reverend Nidus standing by the storage bunker. Then everything went dark.
59
Tides
Tera stopped fighting for a moment and frowned as she gazed to the north. Through the thick line of white bodyshells and the rebel soldiers who clashed with them, the I.I. woman could see the familiar form of the Shedder hulk scuttling towards the battle. With it, a dense line of cultists followed.
Her heart sunk for a moment. Was Ethan successful? she found herself wondering. Is he even still alive?
Her confusion only managed to increase when she saw the cultists stop just on the northern side of the battle. They didn’t seem frightened or perturbed, but the Shedders all halted just outside the fight and watched. If any of the rebels pushed too far north, they would cut them down with precision and haste, but they made no effort to join the melee. To Tera, they looked like police officers observing a riot. It was too messy to jump into the fray, but they had to be there to contain the violence. Any attempt to move closer to the storage facility was met with swift and terrible force.
She only managed to watch the Shedders for a moment before she had to duck under another barrage of blaster fire. The beams of light zipped over her mechanical head, crashing into some of the Pavilion buildings behind her.
The holographic projection of Councilman Harring watched the battle with a sour look on his digital face. Reverend Nidus stood just beside him, watching the combat with unblinking eyes.
“What are you doing, Nidus?” Harring asked. His tone was indignant. “Why aren’t your people joining the fight?”
“Because we need to hold the storage facility,” Nidus replied. “That is our top priority.”
“Then get out there and kill those sons-of-bitches!” Harring barked. If he were real, a bit of phlegm might have flown from his frantic lips. “You could help us crush them in a moment.”
“That makes us vulnerable, councilman,” the cult leader replied.
“I don’t care, dammit!” the hologram shouted. “Attack! Now!”
“No.”
Councilman Harring was taken aback. “No?” he echoed. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“I mean exactly what I say,” Nidus said. “Now shut up, will you?”
Even though he was a digital projection, Harring’s face grew red with anger. If he could free himself from the building’s premises, he would fly over the Shedders and demand they push into the fight. He realized, however, that they’d never obey him. They were Nidus’s people, not his.
All he could do was close his mouth and watch the battle, hoping that Nidus was right.
Ethan felt movement. He couldn’t quite make out the shapes or any of the voices around him, but he felt himself being lifted up. The pressure in his mutilated arm was mounting to the point where he thought he was going to burst. He tried to open his eyes, but the darkness still filled them. Then he saw it.
The bodyshell reached down and pulled something from its bag. When it turned its robotic head towards Ethan, he could see it was Gauge. For a moment, he thought he was dead and his friend was simply a hallucination. He tried to reach up and touch Gauge’s chassis, but he didn’t have the strength.
“Hey, you’re gonna be alright, buddy,” Gauge said. His words ebbed in and out of understanding. “You did good, kid. Now lemme help you.”
There was a sudden clamping sensation on Ethan’s left arm, right where the hand had been cut free. The pain sent a jolt of energy through Ethan’s veins and forced him to sit up and scream. Gauge tried shushing him, but quickly realized the only way to make Ethan silent was to physically cover his mouth. The human’s cries were muffled under his metallic hand.
“Shh, you gotta be quiet, Ethan,” Gauge said. He tinkered with the emergency tourniquet device he had slapped onto Ethan’s wound and the rising pressure made the teenager writhe. “It’s gonna be okay, man. You did awesome. Let’s get you out of here.”
Ethan felt himself being heaved up and over the bodyshell’s shoulder as if he were a sack of potatoes. He didn’t have the strength to adjust himself, let alone break free if he wanted to. He simply leaned back and listened to the sounds of gunfire and explosions as consciousness slipped away from him once more.
“We have to push forward!” Tera could hear one of the soldiers near her yell. “We need to take the storage facility now!”
Just as the words left his lips, a huge barrage of shells whistled through the air and collided right into the bunker Ethan had marked with the radio beacon. Dust was kicked up from the concrete and metal structure and Tera felt her heart lift up a little.
Did it work? she wondered. Did they bust the facility open?
Once the cloud of debris blew away from the impact, she could see only dark smudges where the shells had fallen.
Reinforced, she realized, her hopes crushed beneath the realization. It’s going to take more than that if we want to win.
The Council soldiers were starting to fall back. One of the gunships lay in a crumpled pile on the Pavilion floor, smoke rising from the flames that licked the aircraft’s fallen form. The rebel troops continued pushing forward until they met the line of Shedders, who acted as a sort of fence around the battle. The hulking monster slashed and bashed anyone who came within arm’s reach, roaring at the rebels as they approached it.
“The other cities know!” she heard the soldier in charge shout again. “We have to take the facility now before they send reinforcements!”
Tera’s expression became d
ismal as she watched the fight continue in the north. They pushed the Council troops back, but the Shedders held their line. They couldn’t purchase any distance, no matter how hard they fought. The cultists fought to make sure no one got one step closer to the storage bunker like their lives depended on it.
She looked behind her, toward the part of the city wall where King Hum and the others were stationed. She wished with all her heart that they could just dump all the ordinance they had onto the Pavilion.
Time is running out, she thought.
Before another whistling set of shells could make flight for the battle, a deafening tone rang out over the Pavilion. It was so loud that everyone, Council soldier and rebel alike, covered their ears in pain. The battle stopped for a split second as everyone looked around themselves, trying to understand where the tone had come from. A thousand confused expressions darted around the scene, the commotion dying to a near silence.
Tera’s eyes opened wide as she watched the firm line of cultists burst into action. Before anyone knew what was happening, the Shedders cut down almost half of the Council soldiers that remained. None of the troops knew what to do as their allies started turning on them — as they started slaughtering them. The rebels stood in stunned bewilderment as they watched the Shedders destroy the Council bodyshells with extreme precision. They danced around the rebels, ignoring them for the most part as white bodyshell after white bodyshell dropped. The soldiers couldn’t react before their numbers shrunk down to a mere handful.
“What the fuck are you doing, Nidus?” Councilman Harring asked. He was practically foaming at the mouth. “Why are they killing my men?”
“Because the final phase of my plan has begun, councilman,” the cult leader replied. He didn’t meet the furious hologram’s eyes.
“What are you talking about?”
“My plan, Harring,” Nidus replied, “to destroy the Council. Once and for all.”
Harring’s face fell. His mouth contorted with confused horror as he tried to find the words.
“I don’t understand,” the councilman said, stammering.
“That’s fine,” Nidus replied. With a swift motion, he pulled a remote control-like device from his robes. He glanced at the councilman’s hologram for a moment before pressing a button.
“What have you done?” Harring asked. His voice started to break apart as he spoke, the words popping like static on a television screen. Before he could say anything else, the hologram flickered and disappeared.
Tera’s jaw dropped as she watched the remaining Council soldiers fall to the ground, lifeless. It was like someone flicked a big power switch off, deactivating all Council life on the Pavilion. In the matter of a few seconds, the rebels and the Shedders stood alone, ceasing the battle to watch Nidus’s plan in action.
Before Tera could even cry out, the Council was defeated. Nidus had won.
60
Deleted
Reverend Nidus strode down from his position by the storage facility and up to the huge crowd of confused combatants. A few of the rebels raised their weapons to take aim at the cult leader, but the Shedders around them disarmed them without much struggle. No one else could fire a shot.
Tera pushed her way through the rebels, moving to the northern line so she could see better. She saw Gauge in the corner of her vision, who looked just as confused as she did. When she was within earshot of the cult leader, she stopped.
Nidus waved at his hulk monster, which hoisted him up onto its shoulders. Even the people in the back of the mob could see the I.I. cult leader.
“You must be confused,” he said, his voice booming out over the masses. “I can see it in your faces. If you understand one thing, let it be this: I am not your enemy.”
There was a round of murmuring as the crowd reacted to the comment. Nidus lifted a hand to gesture for silence. Once they obliged, he continued.
“It was always my intention to bring down the tyrannical Council, but my methods differed greatly from your own,” he said. “You see, your assault was doomed to fail before it even began. Once you destroyed the storage facility, what then? You would have erased the Council from Shell City, but there would have been backups. Each member of the Council exists wherever they have power, in all the cities across the wastes. All they would need to do is recuperate before they’d march here and destroy each and every one of us. No, if you were to succeed, you would have killed your own resistance. This battle was fought with men and women, but the next one would just be a dusting of nuclear bombs. You’d never see the retaliation coming before you were reduced to ash. If the Council is to be stopped, it had to be done all at once. Recuperation cannot be possible.”
“I don’t understand,” Tera shouted, pushing her way to the front of the crowd. “What did you do to them?”
“Ah, Ms. Alvarez,” Nidus said in almost a hiss. His face lit up when he saw her. “I’m glad to see you’re still with us.”
She said nothing, instead locking into a staring match with the cult leader. Neither blinked.
“I deleted them,” Nidus replied after waiting for a response. “All of them.”
“Deleted?” Tera asked. She sensed Gauge joining her by her side. “How?”
“With the most complex computer virus ever conceived,” the cult leader answered. “I call it a ‘living’ virus. You see, an installed intelligence is by far the most in-depth, information-heavy bit of data ever designed. In the days of the Cold War, it would take a computer the size of Africa to run an I.I. — if it was even possible. Nothing programmed since has come close. Now, if you accumulate a large enough number of I.I.s, you’ve got yourself a mountain of data so large that it can’t possibly be processed. That’s what I did: I accumulated thousands of I.I.s and reworked them into the Council’s reckoning. A virus so powerful, it can worm itself into every computer the Council has and overload them all simultaneously.”
Realization fell across Tera’s artificial features. “That’s why you were recruiting so aggressively. To accumulate more I.I.s,” she said.
Nidus nodded. “That’s right,” he replied. “My recruitment drive is the only reason I was able to create the living virus.”
“Did they even know?” Tera asked, her indignation rising a little. “Did they know your cult was a lie and that you were planning to use them?”
“Some did, yes,” Nidus said. “Not everyone was a religious fanatic. In fact, most of us were dedicated to the cause. To a better Shell City — a better world.”
“Why not tell us your plan?” Gauge asked. His mechanical eyebrows were furrowed in frustration. “Why attack us? Why kill our people?”
“I’d like to believe I could have trusted you,” Nidus started, “but I can’t. Almost all of you might have joined my cause, but if just one of you refused, I was at risk of exposing my plan. It had to be perfect. I had to gain the Council’s trust or it wouldn’t matter how many I.I.s I collected. On top of that, I had to buy time. Creating such a virus is no easy task, and hardly an instant one. Years of processing were required. Your revolution threatened to derail my scheme just before it could be fulfilled. You had to be stopped.”
“So many dead,” Tera said, shaking her head. “All because of you.”
“I know,” Reverend Nidus replied. “I don’t expect I’ll ever see heaven. However, if the virus worked the way it should and the Council is gone, it is worth it. I didn’t enjoy killing anyone, but it was necessary. I don’t want your forgiveness, though — just your understanding.”
“You kidnapped us,” Tera said. “Ethan, Hum, and I. You tried to trick us.”
“All in the name of fooling the Council and buying time,” Nidus said. “I regret that deception more than anything, but just as with the cult, it was necessary. I had to make sure the virus had enough time to process. The moment it was ready to be deployed, I dropped my facade and turned on the Council. That’s what the tone you heard signified.”
“But why?” Tera asked. “Why y
ou? Why the sacrifice?”
Nidus’s jaw tightened a little, as though he was dreading this question in particular. His voice was drenched with emotion as he spoke.
“Because of what they did to me — and my daughter,” Nidus answered. His face was serious as he gazed into Tera’s eyes. He waited for her to prompt him to carry on, but she didn’t. “They stole her away from me and ripped me from my body. I was just a humble man trying to keep my family safe after the Great War came to an end. The ghettos weren’t built yet, but the hatred for humans was still strong. Without warning, without even a debate, they came for her. My little angel. I never saw her again.”
“I’m sorry,” Tera commented. She couldn’t help but feel a pang of pity for the cult leader.
“When I figured out what they had done — that they planned to keep her in that horrible simulation until they could harvest her body — I felt sick. I had to get her back. So I confronted the Council and demanded to see my baby girl, to bring her back home with me. Not only did they refuse; they murdered me. They killed my organic body and then extracted my intelligence. Just as I did to the young king from Opes. They forced me to become an I.I.”
“But why?” Tera asked. “Why not just leave you dead?”
“That’s how they procreate, you see,” Nidus explained. “They need fresh I.I.s if they want to increase their membership. That requires a bit of brainwashing, if you tend to recruit your enemies like the Council did. It takes years, but eventually, an I.I. who goes through their process forgets who they were. In my case, it worked for a few decades. I was only recently able to break my conditioning and see what was done to me.”
