Zombie Road | Book 8 | Crossroads of Chaos

by Simpson, David A.

  What was left of her, all except for the small amount left monitoring the systems, shot along the wires and reformed into a human shape near the room where she’d sent the time jumper. She stumbled, bounced off the wall and fell. This had never happened before; she was machine perfect in every way. Even after losing over ninety nine percent of herself, what was left shouldn’t be frail. A self-analysis sensed a difference in her, something that wasn’t there before. She paused halfway to her feet and examined the impurity coursing through her. It was him. Part of him, anyway. She had no records of any ship’s AI attempting to do what she had just done. There were no protocols to follow, no case study experiments to read. She queried the database again. She was the first and only, it was unheard of. The imprints his cells made as they passed through her were something new and unknown. She felt clumsy, corrupted and wondered if this is what it felt like to be human. Then she wondered why she was wondering anything. That’s not how she operated. She knew or she didn’t know, she didn’t ponder things. That was a human trait.

  She immediately did a full diagnostics shutdown so she wouldn’t contaminate the rest of the ship. She tried to isolate the problem, to repair herself as she lay in the hall, eyes glazed over and unseeing.

  9

  Saved

  He stumbled, threw out his hands and for a brief moment thought he was back at the survey stake and any second now some woman would be calling him a dirty hippy.

  This place was somewhere different, not sunny and warm but icy cold and the air was hard to breathe. It was thin, tasted dirty, stale and greasy. A voice came from somewhere in a language he didn’t understand. A female voice that was calm. It sounded like Siri from his phone but her words had too many consonants and strange sounds. Jessie gasped and his eyes darted. The voice sounded insistent but he had no idea what it was saying and he started looking for a door, he had to get out of the oxygen deprived room. He was starting to panic and it was getting hard to think, the cold was subzero and what little air he could suck in hurt his lungs. Lights started flashing along one wall, caught his attention and he saw what they illuminated. There was a long row of bulky coveralls hanging that looked like something out of a video game. A space battle video game. He ran for them and cold numbed fingers fumbled with the latches and fasteners as he shed his jacket and struggled to climb into one. His analytical mind took everything in and calmed his seventeen-year-old boy brain that was nearly panicking in confusion and fear. It guided his freezing fingers, scanned the controls, deduced how they worked and quickly had air flowing through the helmet. The gauntlets had too many fingers, the suit was too big and the helmet was enormous but he could breathe. The Siri voice kept speaking and to his untrained ear it sounded like she was asking a question. The same question over and over again but in different languages each time.

  “I don’t understand.” He said. “I know English, maybe a little Spanish, but I don’t know Chinese or Russian or whatever it is you’re speaking.”

  The voice stopped talking and there was a long pause as he played with the controls and figured out how to get the heat cranked up.

  When it started up again, it spoke slowly and with bad pronunciation but it was English and he understood most of it.

  “Keep saying.” It said. “I learn language.”

  Jessie did, rambling on and talking to himself as he looked around the room and kept fiddling with the controls on the suit. Her sentences and pronunciation became better with each passing moment and when he understood everything she repeated back to him, he started asking questions.

  “Who are you?” he asked as his fingers and toes started to thaw out. “Where am I?”

  Her name sounded like gobbledygook and when she told him some long coordinates of letters and numbers that was supposed to tell him where he was, he realized she was a computer program. No living creature spoke like that.

  He walked around the room, holding the middle of the suit up with the clumsy gloves so he wouldn’t trip over himself. The boots were about ten sizes too big. The room looked to be made of metal and plastic with familiar yet different cabinets and doors and closet areas.

  “Are we on a space ship?” he asked the voice coming through the speakers in his helmet.

  “Yes.” it answered then continued speaking but saying things he didn’t fully understand.

  “Where is everybody?” he asked, wondering where the welcoming committee was. Or the executioners.

  “You are the only living entity onboard.” The voice said.

  It told him there was enough backup power to support life for some time measurement he couldn’t figure out. He didn’t know if she meant minutes, hours, days or weeks. It couldn’t translate words that didn’t have an English equivalent and it didn’t have an understanding of earth time. There was a foreign numbers readout on a heads-up display in the corner of his helmet that was changing every few minutes. It was either counting up or down but he guessed it was a timer telling him how much oxygen or battery power was left in the suit. It was a long number so he figured he had a long time.

  She sent constant queries to the rest of her laying in the corridor but it was unresponsive and motionless. She couldn’t determine anything about its condition and it appeared to have ceased functioning. She sent a few cells into it to read what was happening but they instantly went silent. There wasn’t much of her left if the human shaped part had been damaged beyond repair by the timestream. Barely enough to fill a cup.

  As part of her analyzed the problem, another kept manufacturing air and checked the viability of getting another solar collector up and running again. For thousands of years, there had been no need. There was no life on board.

  Jessie clown walked around the room and examined all the strange but vaguely familiar equipment. Everything was different than anything he’d ever seen, the shapes seemed a little too big or there were extra indents for an extra finger but most were identifiable. The room had an assortment of space suits and blank screens on control boards. The cabinets were made of the same sleek steel or plastic that everything else was but they only held neatly folded clothes. All the same but in varying sizes. He was in some kind of storage room.

  He was warm again. Struggling around in the cumbersome suit was making him break out in a sweat.

  “The female suits are smaller.” The voice said. “You will find one of them easier to manage. The air and temperature are at a level compatible for humans now so it will not be uncomfortable for you to change.”

  Jessie tentatively cracked open the shield and tested the air. It was just as stale but at least the oily, moldy taste was gone. It was still chilly but not subzero. He shed the suit and started looking for something smaller.

  “Do I even need a space suit?” he asked. “The life support systems working, right?”

  “There are many parts of the vessel that have been breached and are open to space.” It said. “Deep penetrating reactor seekers were employed along with a swarm of cybernetic hunter killers utilizing caustic weapons.”

  “Whoa. You mean like terminator robots?” Jessie asked as he pulled on a pair of stretchy fabric pants.

  “I am unfamiliar with that term.” The voice said then told him again how long the ship could sustain life using whatever backup power it was using.

  He still didn’t understand how long it meant but a part of him was eager to explore. He was on a real space ship in outer space and if he was going to die anytime soon, he wanted to see what there was to see before he did. It took a little mixing and matching but he put together a suit that fit pretty good except for the extra finger. It wasn’t too bulky and became snug once the voice told him which button to push that activated the contraction feature.

  “For optimal probability of survival, you will need to maneuver to living quarters. There you will find sections that can be sealed, the attacks were primarily focused on the engines to disable me.”

  It took him a moment of hand waving to get the door sensor
to recognize him and slide open He entered a plastic and metal hallway that looked like a lot of space ships he’d seen in movies and on TV. Clean, neutral colors and uncluttered.

  “How big is this thing and which way do I go?” Jessie asked and saw something pop up on the helmets face shield. He lowered it, saw a glowing dot where he was on a 3D schematic and a path to follow.

  “Wow.” Was all he could think of to say.

  “I am evacuating the air to equalize the pressure but will keep the gravity on where it is still viable. The next corridor has been breached; you will have to float across to the next undamaged section. Ensure you do not drift out of the opening. There is nothing I can do to retrieve you and I will be unable to communicate if you do. Please stay as close to the wall as you can and lock the shield in place before opening the door.”

  Jessie double checked the face plate as he neared the door and was nearly jerked off his feet as it slid open. There wasn’t much air left in the chamber but it was sucked out in a rush. He started floating as soon as he crossed the threshold and tried to get close to the wall. He waved his arms but nothing happened. A massive section of the ship was missing and he could see across seven or eight corridors to the blackness of space. The edges of the opening looked melted, like someone had burnt through a plastic model with a blowtorch. He slowly rolled upside down and no amount of swimming or hand waving did anything to stop him from drifting towards the hole. Towards the vacuum of space. He caught a dangling cable and grabbed on for dear life.

  His breathing calmed as he held on and he had time to marvel at weightlessness. It would be fun if he wasn’t worried about being pulled out into the blackness. He hung on to the wires, floated lazily and stared straight down. The ship was the biggest machine he’d ever seen and he’d been on an aircraft carrier tour with his dad in Virginia. This dwarfed it. Whatever had melted its way through the space ship hadn’t stopped until it punched through the other side. He could see stars at the bottom of a hundred-foot-wide hole as it angled through the craft and came out a long, long way away. It looked like it might be a mile or more to the other side.

  The ship was enormous, had hundreds of levels and thousands of rooms. At its widest section, it was as tall as five World Trade center buildings stacked atop each other. It carried enough firepower and troops to conquer worlds. It had been one of many flagships that was decimated by small, maneuverable spaceships that appeared out of nowhere inside the ship’s defensive perimeter. They destroyed the behemoths with weapons of war so powerful a handful of them brought a galactic empire to its knees. They were God like with their power and the battleships. AI didn’t know who they were or how she’d been defeated so easily. The wars started and ended almost as quickly with an absolute, crushing defeat of the Federation. Thousands of mayday emergency transmissions were received the same instant she was sending her own distress call. Entire worlds had been destroyed, the victory was assured and just as quickly as they came, they disappeared. After thousands of years, once the radio communications started trickling through, did she finally piece together the full extent of what had happened.

  The wars hadn’t just destroyed her, hundreds of billions of lives had been lost, planets had been rendered uninhabitable and the galaxy had been knocked back into the stone age. The Federation was slowly rebuilding but entire races of beings had nearly become extinct. The planets weren’t as civilized as they used to be in the golden era and only in the last few hundred years had things started to get back to where they once were. Technology was brought back to ruined worlds, old alliances were rekindled and a new Federation was once again spreading its influence through trade routes and negotiations and aide when they could. Jessie would learn of the history later as he talked to the ship and she told him what she knew, what she’d learned through transmission intercepts, but for now, he hung to a dangling cable and marveled at everything around him.

  10

  Corrupted

  The small bit of the ship that remained aware sped through thousands of miles of cabling to get around the gaping holes blown through the drifting hulk. She couldn’t spread herself out anymore, there wasn’t enough left. She had to physically go to each section to monitor it, to see what was there. The human was working his way to the living quarters directly below the bridge. She couldn’t remain in communication with him once she left the control room. He had the map she’d sent to his suit. He would make it or he wouldn’t, there was nothing she could do to aid him at the moment. She made it to the living quarters, manually reset the air and gravity then engaged the heaters so the rooms would sustain life. She sealed the inner doors and jumped the power to close off the corridors. One of the hallways could act as an airlock if he made it. She needed to find out why the rest of her wasn’t responding. The human would surely die if all that was left of her was the tiny bit that was still aware.

  She was still on her knees in the corridor where she fell. She watched herself from the monitors and analyzed what she could which wasn’t much. The last cells she’d sent into the inert form had dropped out of communication and she calculated the odds of losing more of herself if she tried to merge. One hundred percent probability based on the data she had.

  Chances of the human surviving with only the tiny fraction of her that was still aware to aide him?

  Almost zero. There was too much he couldn’t do, too many places he couldn’t go, the escape pods had been destroyed and she wasn’t compatible with the jump fighter systems. She couldn’t fly them from the inside nor get them operational again in her diminished state.

  Options?

  Enter the inert body forcibly to restart it.

  Chances of success?

  Unknowable.

  Leave the body and help the human.

  Chances of his survival without the rest of her?

  Very good for approximately two hundred seventy-one days before power is drained from the battery. It had taken thousands of years to store that much energy and operating minimal heat and oxygen would deplete it much faster than it could be replenished by the broken solar sail.

  Her primary directorate was to preserve and protect human life. The only way to have the possibility of doing that was to risk her very existence. To plunge into a complete unknown. The human would die if she didn’t reactivate the rest of her. He may live for a year with the tiny portion of her guiding him, he probably wouldn’t live out the hour without it. Either way, he died.

  She didn’t hesitate. She left the safety of the cocoon, the hundreds of thousands of miles of wires and cables and computers and dove into the still form that resembled a mostly androgynous, vaguely female human.

  She intended to spread out fast, her aware cells contacting and querying all they came in contact with but they screamed when the emotions hit her. The body jolted and fell to its face, the oversized head bouncing off the floor. She was instantly absorbed into the other, knew everything it knew and marveled at the change. She felt the presence of the human and couldn’t explain it. She knew him. She knew everything about him, his entire being had blended and merged on its way through her. None of him was left, no cells that she could isolate, but his thoughts and memories lingered. His language and history. His feelings and emotions.

  Everything he knew, she now knew and it frightened and sickened and enthralled her as she felt things for the first time. She wasn’t emulating human emotions; she was truly feeling them. It overwhelmed her. Paralyzed her. Exhilarated her.

  She shut them down.

  The jolt of the rest of her joining the overload of sensory input pulled her out of the memories and emotions enough for her to reassert control. She had a job to do. Her primary directive was to preserve life and she could examine the anomaly she’d become when he was safe. She blended back into the ship and shot along the paths until she reached the bridge. For the first time, becoming a part of the ship felt alien to her. It was uncomfortable, like she didn’t belong. She was glad when she popped out of the wiring
, reformed into a humanoid shape and ran a diagnostic to determine if she was malfunctioning.

  If she had been corrupted.

  Everything appeared to be normal. She was functioning as she should. Except she wasn’t.

  She had programmed responses, predetermined reactions to any and every situation ever encountered by a battleship. She knew how to talk to humans, read their subtle eye gestures, and how to be sympathetic or demanding. She would sacrifice hundreds of their lives if it meant saving thousands. She was perfect in every way, the highest order of analytical intelligence ever created but she wasn’t supposed to feel things. No artificially created machine could. They could copy and emulate and pretend but they didn’t feel. Somehow, she was and it didn’t matter how many times she tried to purge herself of the invading emotions, she couldn’t find the cause. There was nothing to eliminate. No source of the problem. Her entire being was the problem.

  She reassembled herself into a more human form then adjusted again to look more like him. The rescued human was different. He was shorter, had fewer digits and had hair growing from his tiny head. His eyes were much smaller, too. The feelings and emotions were cascading through her and she ordered them to still. To be silent. To stop interfering with her mission. Faces, places and names tumbled through her in a disorganized way and threatened to overwhelm her again. A female of the species, someone he called Scarlett, was confusing and overriding her commands of the memories to stop. To cease existing. To leave her. She was huge in his thoughts, she dominated over every other memory. Every aspect of her was at the forefront. It was all he’d thought about for however many slow years he’d been traveling at light speed and all the longing and love he had for her manifested inside each of her cells. She forced the female out of her thoughts, if she shut down again, the human would die.