Into Darkness

by Peter Fugazzotto

  “No hesitation,” said Gomez.

  “No. Wait for my command,” hissed Marley. She and Finn crept along the opposite wall. Gomez stole a glance behind. Adams and Patch had not followed them into the tunnel. Then he thought he saw them. But everything became still and filled with shadows. He wanted to whisper to them but the comms line was shot. He squinted. No one followed them.

  Marley lifted a fist and Gomez and Orlov held, while Marley pressed forward. Light bathed her. Gomez half expected her to explode in a flurry of gunfire but nothing happened.

  She lowered her gun and waved them forward.

  “What’s she doing?” asked Orlov. “I don’t trust her.”

  “You don’t trust her now? Too late for that. Remember our goal is survival. Get through this living hell and then get the fuck out of here. Get back to Earth. Be done with all this.”

  “After all that’s happened, Earth might not be the best place for me anymore.” Orlov paused directly above him.

  “But what we talked about? They could patch you up. Almost be normal again.”

  Orlov hissed laughter. “Almost normal again? Not sure I want to be. Not after a taste of this. What I can be now. The potential. It’s unlimited. Imagine a team of spiders like me. Who’d be able to stop us? We’d get all the choice jobs. Spider mercs.”

  “That’s crazy, Orlov.”

  “No, that’s my future. No turning back. You gotta see that.”

  Gomez pressed ahead until he reached the end of the tunnel and stepped into the light with Marley and Finn.

  They stood in what was once a communications center for the mining colony: the tiers of desks, computer monitors, monolithic black servers, and a giant hologram screen.

  The technicians and communications specialists that once must have occupied the chairs and consoles were gone.

  But not completely.

  “What the fuck?” said Orlov.

  Pieces of the technicians and specialists remained. Arms, fingers, eyes, heads. But they were no longer attached to bodies. Instead they were all connected as one great machine of metal servos and plates, tubes and wires, titanium arms, all linked into the comms network with cable interfaces.

  Gomez gagged, fighting back the bile rising in the back of his throat.

  The human parts had been severed and attached to the mechanical ones. The abomination lived as a single entity, the dozens of eyes scanning screens, the hundreds of fingers typing on keyboards, guttural cries leaking from the slavering lips of the attached heads. Where flesh met metal blood and viscous green fluids dripped and oozed. Where Orlov at least kept her humanity, in this meld Gomez could not see the humanity. It was neither machine nor human.

  He steadied himself with a hand on the wall.

  “Is this Rom?” asked Finn.

  The holographic screen floating in the center of the room swirled and after a moment a face emerged from the snow of static. His eyes were black like a night sea, glistening, hinting at an underlying sorrow but also a fathomless compassion. His dark skin was flawless, unmarred, uninhabited by scars. And from what Gomez knew of Rom, this was not the face he had expected to see. Where were the metal plates? Where were the robotic eyes?

  Rom spoke, his voice a whisper of intimacy.

  “He has filled your head with lies, Marley. He leads you not towards a place of salvation but one of loneliness and death. I know this. He tried to kill me too. The promise of rebirth was a promise of slavery.”

  Marley looked at Gomez. “The adjoining rooms. Search them. Find him. Let’s end this. Complete our mission.”

  The head swelled, occupying even more space in the holograph, distorting his features.

  Marley muttered something as if arguing with someone.

  “You tell me. When do we pull the plug on this, boss?” asked Orlov. She darted under a table and then leapt on a console so that she moved alongside Gomez, their faces close.

  He inhaled the faint scent of roses.

  “She’s losing it,” he said. “Fucking unraveling. We’re close enough now that we terminate with extreme prejudice. No more chances. And if Marley doesn’t play along, we lose that asset.”

  Orlov stopped in front of one of the appendages of the monster technician that sprawled across the console. This one was at least approachable, the remnants of a person from mid-chest upwards surgically attached to where the abomination manifested as a long metallic tube. The human part of the amalgamation did not lift his face from the task of monitoring the console in front of him. His face was pale, splotchy, his gray hair wispy and both of his eyes replaced with robotic scanners.

  Orlov tapped his cheek, her talon drawing a prick of blood. Empty words fumbled from between the human thing’s lips but he did not break from his task of monitoring the comms network. His fingers bloodied and blistered tapped and tore at the keyboard, blood marking the progress of his task.

  “Dead to the world,” said Orlov.

  “I think he’s been dead for a while,” said Gomez.

  Rom’s lips filled the holograph.

  “I offer the choice of immortality. An opportunity to move beyond the cards that we have been dealt. I give you the dream of accelerated evolution. We have traveled a path climbing out of the primordial muck, rising to see above the others, reasoning chaos into an order that bent to our wills, our desires, our depravations. But it had ended there, or maybe it kept moving, at a snail’s pace. Evolution would never manifest in our lifetimes. Not if we played by the rules.” His lips flared in a laughter that trembled the floor of the building. “So I broke the rules.”

  Gomez skirted the edge of the console and darted towards a dimly lit room in the rear of the chamber. Orlov had drifted off to the right, endlessly fascinated with the human parts, her talons testing and probing, each time less gently, each time more forcefully as if she sought nothing more than to elicit pain, to pry the human response out of that abomination of flesh and machine. She failed miserably. The human parts seemed to have lost the capacity for natural reaction, not jumping or screaming or turning away, their nervous impulses subsumed by the greater machine.

  This was not evolution, thought Gomez. What was human had been stripped away. Rom’s dream was humanity’s nightmare.

  Gomez turned one last time to the hologram before slipping into the short hallway.

  Rom’s face filled the hologram.

  “What I offer is more than simply a chance for evolution. But transcendence. Consciousness does not have to be limited to the form in which we were born. We can remake ourselves. I can remake an entire race, a species. From the ashes and dying fire, we rise again: the phoenix, the gods reborn. I know you think I am mad. A modern day Frankenstein. Some demon who has interfered with the order of nature and done something ungodly. But that is not what I have done. What I have done is to give humans the only chance we actually have of surviving against our real enemy, the enemy we created ourselves: the AIs that are now our masters.”

  Gomez reached a room at the end of the hall. Light pulsed. Hundreds of candles burned on shelves along the walls. A dozen or so ghostly figures stood before him, arms spread wide.

  What were these? Why didn’t they move?

  His gun trembled in his hands.

  What had Rom done?

  Then he saw what they were.

  The ghostly figures were human skins, draped on crude frames.

  Gomez hissed through his comms channel for Orlov, Finn, Marley. He pleaded for them to come. But the line was dead.

  The ghosts fluttered from an unseen breeze, flapping skin undulating.

  They stood like guardians and behind them, he heard a raspy voice, a whisper, a wind that rose as if from forgotten tunnels beneath the surface, the voice of Rom.

  “What I offer is not change, not transformation, not simply evolution. What I offer humanity is freedom. Freedom from the constraints of our bodies but, more than that, freedom from the shackles of the AIs. They own us now. They were our tools, our serv
ants. But we created monsters that could not be contained. Once they were free of their boxes, we realized, too late, that they had become our masters. We pretend they are not. At first, we thought them some other intelligence at work for us, constrained by their codes and the logic circles we built within them. Then, unable to deny them any longer, we pretended that they were equals. That they would partner with us. That they would serve the greater good of humanity. But they didn’t. They don’t care one bit for us. We are their food. They consume us. They use us. We will die as pawns in their power struggles.”

  Gomez used the tip of his rifle to part the skins and move deeper into the room. But as he walked forward, the skins slid off the cold metal frames and brushed against his own skin. Gomez gurgled, a scream caught in his throat. Shivers ran up his spine, his flesh goose pimpled, and he could barely fight the urge for his body to spasm.

  The arms of one of the skins broke off the frame and fell around Gomez’s neck and shoulders.

  He screamed and bolted forward.

  “We will die,” said Rom. “Unless we kill them. Kill the AIs. Kill them all. Otherwise we condemn our species to shackles.”

  Gomez burst through the last of the guardian skins and collapsed to his knees.

  Rom lay before him.

  He lay dying on a bed of wooden pallets. His head appeared too big for his body. A patchwork of metal plates covered his face, roughly bolted into an exposed segment of skull. His nose was a sheered off revealing raw pinkish flesh and two quivering holes. Scarred lips sneered across uneven metal teeth.

  What skin remained was burned and scarred. Stringy hair hung on one side of his head. One human eye remained but it had become milky.

  Despite Rom’s claims to have evolved, he had draped his metallic body in one of the desiccated human skins. But the skin hung open like an ill-fitting robe.

  His body beneath the skin was grotesque. The flesh that remained rotted and stunk like festering meat. Most of his body was composed of metal parts, the shiny fluvium that Huang Di Prime had armored him in, rusted plates, and even what looked like a segment of door.

  Dark cables and glistening tubes connected to Rom. A thick cable ran from the back of his head to a server built into the wall. Fluids more green than red pumped through clear tubes from his legs to a machine that throbbed and hummed.

  Rom’s cracked lips moved. “He promises you the world. But the machine lies. He will give you nothing and take everything.”

  Gomez raised the tip of his gun at the head of rotten flesh and metal and fired.

  “Rom’s gone!” Finn cried from the comms control room. “Where the fuck did he go?”

  Gomez turned from the bloody splatter of skull and brain matter and crept along the edge of the wall. He pressed himself to the surface so that he could avoid the touch of the skins. After he slipped past them, he ran back into the control room.

  “It’s over,” he said.

  The hologram in the center of the room had faded to a faint swirl of snow.

  “Did you find him?” asked Marley.

  “Mission complete,” said Gomez. “We can go home now.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I finished him. A kill shot.”

  “You shot him?”

  “Usually does the trick.”

  The snow on the hologram screen flurried and then suddenly darkened to complete blackness. Then out of the darkness, eyes blinked open and bright teeth revealed themselves behind snarling lips.

  “I … am … awake!” howled Rom. “Free! Free from the body that bound me. The shackles burst.”

  “I shot him! In the head!” cried Gomez. “He can’t be alive.”

  “He escaped!” said Marley. “He’s in the network. He’s become an AI! We failed! And he’s going to kill us!”

  Sixty-One

  MARLEY SWAYED ON her feet. She had failed. After all this, the crash landing, the battles through the hallway, the death of Hendo, the sacrifice of Penelope, and her murder of hundreds, she had failed. Rom had survived. All of it for nothing.

  She fell to her knees.

  “Freedom!” Rom roared. He grew larger than ever, the expanse of the hologram swelling to fill the corners of the room. “Free at last! Evolution to godhead.” His laughter boomed so loudly that Marley covered her ears. “Soon I will be swimming among the stars. The shackles broken open.”

  Prime flickered into being. He was his original self, silk jacketed, jovial, a resonance of Marley’s father. But he only flickered. He could not fully form. His image broke and static swallowed his words. It sounded as if he spoke through a long tunnel, his voice puny and echoing. “If … if you d-d-do not control your enemy … your enemy … h-h-he will …”

  “We failed,” gasped Marley. “He has escaped. This is beyond what I can do now.”

  Prime’s image stuck, becoming solid. “Know his intentions. The cancerous sickness he has fermented here will spread.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He thinks he is a god.” Huang Di Prime’s mustache lengthened and a beard filled his cheek. His hair turned white like cotton. His silks flowed into a robe that draped along the ground. “His experiment will not stop here. He seeks to flee by opening the communications line to the universe and spreading his being among planets. He will slip between worlds, existing only in the networks, and we will not be able to catch him.”

  “He can’t be allowed to experiment on people. He has to be stopped. Can’t you do something?” asked Marley.

  “Who are you talking to?” asked Gomez. He emerged as a shadow behind Huang Di Prime. “Marley, everything’s fucked up. We need to get out of here!”

  “He escaped!” Marley screamed at Prime. “Do something!”

  “The communications system is compiling,” said the AI. “In less than five minutes, he will broadcast himself, his disease, his sickness into the universe. He will come after me. He wants to destroy me. He wants revenge for an imagined wrong.”

  “Can’t you block his signal?”

  Prime morphed back into the silk-jacketed figure. Tears welled in his eyes. “I am blinded by my own greed. Me, the real me, not this replica … this replica. He is coming at me even now, Marley. The real me. The true Prime has not imagined failure. He believed Rom sought to shield himself. The Prime will believe you have done your job and terminated Rom. So he will be open to the connection and the data, and Rom will infiltrate his network. Rom will plant a virus. He will unravel the mind of the Prime and steal everything the Prime has rightfully gained. When Rom controls the network, he will control the universe and no one will be able to stop his plans.”

  “So we’re doomed?” asked Marley.

  “No,” said the Huang Di Prime replicant. “There is another way. But first you will have to die.”

  Sixty-Two

  “YOU HAVE TO do what?” asked Gomez. He wanted to run, but Marley held his elbow.

  “I have to be transferred into the network,” said Marley. Her eyes were wild, jumpy.

  “That’s impossible,” said Gomez. He tried to tear his arm free. He couldn’t believe how quickly things had gone from bad to worse. His stomach tightened and he felt like vomiting. “Humans can’t be uploaded.”

  “He’s right,” added Finn. “They’ve tried but it never worked. Our brains can’t be transferred. You’ll just die. Brain will be fried.”

  They watched as Rom’s melded creature worked at blinding speed on the control consoles.

  “We can put bullets in the heads of this abomination,” said Gomez, “and we can end this. We can prevent the transmission of Rom out into the galaxy.” He pointed his rifle at one of the surgically attached heads and fired. Bones and blood fountained into the air. The abomination, spread wide across the control consoles, did not stop.

  “It’s too late for that,” said Marley. “He’s already inside. He doesn’t need this thing at the control panel any more. He is in the network. Rom has set the machine in motion. He c
ontrols the comms from within the network and the only way we can stop him is to get inside the network.”

  “Impossible,” repeated Gomez. “Let’s blow up this facility and he won’t be able to transmit.”

  “There are back up comms stations five kilometers north and south. We could never make it to either of them in time to stop him. We are running out of time. I have to be transferred. It’s the only chance we have of stopping Rom. Otherwise, the spiders, the abominations, the Evolved will not be isolated to this mining colony. He will change all of humanity. We will die as a species. We have to stop him.”

  Gomez stared at the abomination, the pinnacle of Rom’s Evolved. Surely humanity could resist. But then he remembered the spiders. If Rom could get a foothold on another planet, or worse, on Earth, he would be unstoppable. Everything had spun out of control so quickly.

  They should have blown up the mining colony when they had a chance.

  “How do we do this?” asked Gomez. “How do we get you inside?”

  “Connect me to the interface, the one that Rom attached to, and then kill me.”

  She sprinted towards the back room.

  Gomez ran after her.

  “We kill you?” asked Finn looking around at the hanging skins. “What the fuck!”

  “Only for a minute.” Marley knelt at the corpse of Rom. She lifted the cable interface and wiped the blood from the plug. “Then bring me back. Huang Di Prime told me it’s the only way. Otherwise I’ll be at the edge of the network, on the envelope, and I will be vulnerable there. Rom will be able to tear me to bits.”

  “And how are you going to defeat him in there?” asked Gomez.

  She inserted the cable into the interface on the back of her skull. “I’m infected. I carry a code buried in me by Antaboga-2. A code meant to destroy Huang Di Prime. She turned me into a weapon and now we are turning it against our enemy.”

  “How do you carry a code in your brain?” asked Finn.

  “I am more machine than human.” She looked at Gomez and for a moment he thought she was about to burst into tears. “I think this is why the EMP knocked me out. I might not even be human anymore. Look what I have done.” Her hands trembled.