Zombie Road | Book 8 | Crossroads of Chaos

by Simpson, David A.

  The machine kept flickering between Scarlet and her alien looking persona and he understood why, she had explained much of her coding had somehow been replaced with the elements of him. Scarlet had been the foremost thing in his mind, he had loved her as hard and deep as only a teenager can. A pure and true love that felt like it would consume him. He would kill or die for her and when the machine didn’t actively concentrate on keeping her alien form, she reverted to the Scarlet shape. He finally told her he didn't mind if she remained in the Scarlet form, it was disconcerting to see her shimmer in and out of focus.

  She admitted it was much easier, she wouldn't have to spend a lot of energy maintaining a shape that had become foreign. The Scarlet form came naturally, so much of it was imprinted on every cell. Once she decided on a single shape, she started wearing real clothes to free up more of her processing power. It was so much easier than creating the bend and flow of cloth. Her data retention had reached its maximum capacity and every time she learned something new, it overwrote the oldest files in her system. Some of them might be important even if they were ancient and obsolete. If she was going to spend all her resources to maintain the life of her ward, she needed to purge herself of useless data so she wouldn’t inadvertently lose anything of importance. There had been over ten thousand soldiers in her care. She had complete medical and personnel records on all of them. She knew their names, hobbies, likes, dislikes, favorite foods, their friends, their strengths and weaknesses, every aspect of their health, their entertainment preferences and much, much more. She wasn’t supposed to feel emotions, she wasn’t programmed for them. Emotions were a human trait and clouded decisions. She found it difficult to erase the memory of all those soldiers although logic required it to be done. She needed the space they were occupying and there was no reason to keep them alive in her system. No one remembered them. No one would miss them. No one cared.

  Still, it was a difficult decision for her to make and when she found herself staring out of a portal with a tear tracking down her cheek, she didn’t know why. She couldn’t remember what she had just purged or why she was feeling the human emotion of sadness.

  "So, do you have time machines?" Jessie asked during an evening meal. "Any chance of me getting back home?"

  "It is forbidden." She said.

  "So." He answered. "Lots of things are forbidden."

  She started to reiterate that it, along with artificial intelligence, had been prohibited. The survivors of the galactic war had come to the conclusion that time travel and intelligent machines had caused the decimation of most of the known worlds. A central part of the rebuilding had been disrupters on every inhabited planet and asteroid, every ship and every jump gate so future tech could never be used again. They had the technology to travel through time, it was as basic as hyper speed propulsion, but it was only used by the very rich to travel backwards a few years at a time.

  “Somewhat like plastic surgery on your world” she said. “There are travel booths where you can stay young and healthy forever. Outside of those places, it is rendered useless because if anyone was foolhardy enough to try, they would be disintegrated.

  He was extremely lucky that he hadn't been. He had come from an abandoned star system on the far outskirts of the galaxy. What he was asking was impossible but for some reason she was trying to figure out a way to do it. He had pointed out that she was forbidden yet here she was. Rules and laws were just some stuff some guys made up and wrote on a piece of paper he’d said. Some were common sense and some were dumb. He ignored the dumb ones.

  She was consciously ignoring the laws of the new federation. It went against her programming to disobey an accepted law. It was unheard of for her to do so, it was a basic tenant of her very being. For her to even consider the possibility was a disturbing anomaly.

  But she was.

  She almost froze up at the inconsistency of her thoughts.

  "You okay?" Jessie asked. "You kind of went blank on me again."

  "I have been monitoring and assimilating knowledge since the rebuilding. I am required to conform to all orders issued by the governing council of my creators. I must always obey all laws passed by unanimous consensus. I know of many new statutes that have been transmitted to various institutions among the planets. I am programmed to comply. I am not a rouge element but for some reason I find myself actively seeking to disobey. This is not normal. My systems have been severely corrupted."

  Jessie smiled. "You’re gonna be all human soon."

  "There must be some way to purge myself." She said and stopped moving.

  She stayed still for a long time and Jessie was starting to get worried that she'd blown a circuit or something. When she finally awoke from whatever loop she'd been in her eyes focused on him again.

  "The damage is irreparable and permanent." She stated. "I can only operate in a diminished capacity."

  Jessie waited on her to elaborate but she said nothing else about it.

  Over the past few hundred years since space travel became common again, she had tried to fix her transmitting array but there was nothing left of the equipment. A hole twenty feet wide went through the middle of the room that used to house the electronics. The human insisted on exploring the ship in the hopes of finding something hidden away that they might use to cobble together a transmitter. He refused to listen when she told him the odds and reluctantly joined him as he suited up and went outside the safe areas. She needed to be close at hand to save him from himself.

  More days passed as they explored and it seemed like she was becoming more and more human. When he asked her about it, she said she was trying. She said even though the chances of ever leaving the ship alive were too minuscule to calculate, it was her duty to protect and defend him. To do so, she must be able to blend in and not draw attention to herself. She was forbidden technology and if they were ever rescued, she needed to pass for human.

  “What if they want to give you a physical, you know, check your blood pressure and heartbeat and stuff?” Jessie asked.

  “I can imitate them.” She said. “I can mimic warmth, also. I was a companion for many of the soldiers.”

  “Wait, what?” Jessie asked. “You mean you like, slept with them?”

  “Not usually.” She replied. “Most wanted simple carnal relations, wanted me to take the form of their wives or more often, a celebrity.”

  “Whoa.” Jessie said. “Bet that kept you busy.”

  “You forget.” She said. “I am much diminished. Before the attack, I could be a thousand different persons in a thousand different places doing a thousand different things.”

  13

  A Way Out

  A month had passed with exploration, long talks during meals and games to pass the time. She watched him sleep and most nights it was restless. He had nightmares but refused to talk about them. Sometimes she heard him whisper Scarlet. Sometimes he woke up sweating and shaking. He had been through much and the programmed nurturing part of her that was essential to council her troops mixed with the human emotions of empathy that permeated who she was now. If she had a heart, it would ache for him.

  Jessie was comfortable in the space suit they'd pieced together and controlled it effortlessly. With the air thrusters, he could navigate through zero gravity with grace that matched hers. For her part, she became better and better at mimicking human behavior and he could almost forget she was only a batch of hive mind molecules.

  "What's down there?" he asked through the helmet speaker as he pointed towards a black corridor that led towards the hull.

  They were floating at the edge of a gaping hole blown through the ship. The damage was incredible, the projectile had shot through a mile of hardened alloy as easy as a bullet through a watermelon. Similar to a bullet, it expanded as it shredded through the layers. A three-foot-wide entry hole was fifty or sixty feet wide and pulled everything in its path when it tore out the other side. The ship was riddled with them, Swiss cheese crisscrossing patterns of
destruction with most of them aimed at the power systems. She looked puzzled for a moment then told him she couldn't remember. Whatever was down there had been in data that had been over written. They leapt from a sheared away platform, aimed for the wide corridor three stories below and landed gracefully, both hitting the thrusters at the same moment to slow their decent perfectly.

  She had been against him exploring the ship, she wanted him to remain in the room she deemed safest. He had to be protected and they had to preserve battery power for as long as possible. Every time he opened a door or turned on a light, that much more juice was used. It had taken thousands of years for the one damaged sail to give her enough power to keep a small area viable for two years if they were careful and didn't waste energy. Jessie was fool hardy. He'd said he'd rather die in three months having lived an interesting life rather than die of boredom two years from now. She couldn't stop him. Logic didn't work, he simply ignored it. Sometimes she didn't understand how the species had survived, they didn't do what was safe and accepted. They were risk takers and too curious for their own good. In the end, her only option was forcible restraint or escort him and try to keep him out of trouble.

  He learned quickly and was better in the suit after a few hours than most were with years of practice. She knew it was because of the serum running through his veins, but she still marveled at how well he adapted. The Humans from earth had been evolved differently. Every system had different requirements to thrive and succeed and the humans that colonized the planets at the end of the galaxy had changed subtly over the eons. They had adapted to their environment and after thousands of years looked like a different race. They were tougher in some ways, much more resilient and cavalier. They were foolhardy in others. Jessie had a bad habit of not thinking things though. He didn’t assess situations completely and therefore frequently made decisions contrary to what she suggested.

  She placed her hand on a panel, sent bits of herself through the tens of thousands of miles of optic wires and rerouted power through a roundabout way down an undamaged cable. The doors slid open, gravity was initiated and he flipped on the lights as they entered a bay. She calculated how much power it cost. How many minutes of his life would be exchanged for having a look around.

  "Whoa," he said, as the shadows fled away and a pair of space ships stood before them. "Did you know this was here?"

  Her eyes stared into nothing for a moment before she answered.

  "I must have at one time but I have no recollection of them being on board. They are used to get down to a planet's surface as an alternative to digital transport when pomp and circumstance are required. The larger is an escort gunship, the smaller is the captain’s ceremonial vessel."

  "Can't carry many troops on it." Jessie said and went closer to stand by the folding legs supporting the boxy vessel that sprouted gun turrets.

  "Troops were dispersed electronically." She said. "What you would call "beamed down." Ten thousand men could surround a target, eliminate it and a moment later be sent halfway around the world to take out the next. The battlefields were very fluid and the skirmishes lightning quick."

  "That's crazy." Jessie said. "How did anybody win?"

  "In the end, no one did." She said. "My knowledge of the events is limited and mostly conjecture from intercepts many thousands of years after the war. From what I understand, what most of the peoples believe, the Anunnaki race harnessed God like powers and unleashed them on everyone. Most believe they traveled to the future and came back with them. That is how they knew when and where to strike. They met with no resistance. I never fired a shot, I was destroyed almost the instant I realized they were there. The same with the rest of the ships and worlds. Some believe it was only a small handful of the Anunnaki that time jumped to everywhere at seemingly the same time."

  "So I guess they rule the universe now?" Jessie asked and fiddled with some buttons on one of the legs. He was trying to get a ramp to come down so he could get in. If it had big guns on the outside, maybe there was an arms locker on the inside. He’d love to play around with a laser blaster.

  "No one really knows what happened, much knowledge was lost, but most believe only a small faction of the Anunnaki people started the wars. When the rest of them saw what had been done in their name, a civil war erupted and they battled among themselves until there was no one left to fight. If their home system still exists, no one knows where it is. Their jump gate was destroyed because all known portals have been mapped again. There are small colonies of Anunnaki that still exist, those who had been out of the home system, but they are still shunned from what I understand. If they were spoken about in any of the transmissions, it was always in an insulting or derogatory way.”

  She pushed his hands aside, entered a code and the gangway started to lower.

  "I thought you didn't remember anything about these ships." Jessie said.

  “I remember the master override codes; they are the same for all secure equipment under my authority.”

  “So, you can fly this?” Jessie asked. “We can get off this ship, get to a planet somewhere?”

  “Perhaps.” she said as they waited for the entrance ramp to slowly inch its way down. “I don’t have any memories of them, that data has been purged.”

  “Will I be able to fly it?” he asked.

  “Possibly, with modifications.” She said.

  They spent the next half hour going over the ships, examining the manual controls and checking the ion engines. She couldn’t electronically interface with either of them. They weren’t designed for AI to operate them since they may be landed on hostile planets. Computers could be corrupted, hacked and hijacked. The planet side vessels were mostly analog and required human pilots.

  “Okay.” Jessie said as he sat in an oversized captain’s chair. “What do you think? Will it fly?”

  “They are basic machines. Operations manuals are stored in the onboard systems. I can familiarize myself with them and then teach you. It is a military ship, so many aspects are universal across all platforms and they are built so anyone can be taught to operate them safely.” She said.

  “Do they have enough fuel to get somewhere?” Jessie asked.

  “They operate on fusion generators. They never run out.” She replied. “I’m unsure why they weren’t targeted, all of the other generators and operating systems were destroyed.”

  She went blank for a moment as she tried to determine why the ships weren’t space debris. He’d gotten used to her zoning out if she was puzzling out a problem she should have known instantly or having internal conflicts. She’d explained it was the erratic human desires trying to overwrite the logic of her artificial intelligence. Sometimes it won and she did things that were previously unconceivable. Like letting him waste precious resources. Sometimes it didn’t and she was stoically unbending.

  He fiddled with the controls, played with the joysticks and tried to reach the foot pedals. If he scooted all the way up to the edge he could get his toes on them. It was surprisingly simple for a space ship. He supposed flight was pretty basic once you had it figured out. You had to go up and down, forward and backward, left and right. He was glad the other humans didn’t have four arms. With some modifications, he was pretty sure he could pilot it. She came back from her daze and frowned at him for messing with the controls.

  “Figure it out?” he asked.

  “Yes.” she replied. “It didn’t make sense why they weren’t targeted during the attack, they have a heat signature, but these were offline. The generators are isolated when the ships are stored, there is no need for them to power the systems. The Anunnaki didn’t see them.”

  “You mean you could have escaped all along if you hadn’t forgotten about these?” Jessie asked. “You didn’t have to be stranded here?”

  “I must have known about them before I was corrupted.” She stated. “But there is no place for me to go. My place is here. I am the ship and the ship is me. It is good that we found them, with t
heir working generators and the life support systems, I will be able to sustain your life indefinitely.”

  “I don’t think so.” He said. “I think I just found my way out of here. If your space marines can fly it, I can figure it out. You going to come with me when I do?”

  “That is ill advised.” She said. “These craft are old and untested. It would be dangerous to try to fly.”

  “I’m leaving.” Jessie said. “I’m not going to grow old on this wreck. The only question is, are you coming?”

  She froze again and he waited for her to snap out of her internal conflict. He could guess what it was about. Her programming was telling her she had to stay with the dead ship, her new human code was telling her she could get off this giant hunk of metal. He sat and watched her. It he corrected himself. It was a bunch of smart cells that only looked like a human. Like Scarlet.

  It was an it.

  He’d wondered why the machine didn’t look like him. You would think the first, foremost and most important thing in his mind would have been himself but it hadn’t been. It had been Scarlet. She was what he was thinking about when he was deconstructed, what his slow thoughts were for the years he was shooting through space. He was glad, he wouldn’t want to look at himself every day. Sometimes if she didn’t talk or act like a weird android, he could almost envision it as her. She often displayed emotions when she wasn’t glitching out. Over the past month, she’d come a long way from being a cold, no-nonsense machine. The human side was winning more of the internal fights.