by Elsa Jade
For a moment the lights on control panel flared, and Troy held his breath. If the AI considered such a low level query to be a threat…
“To reintegrate and purify all existing shroud resources in preparation for next stage expansion.”
Troy blinked. That sounded like something from an overworked marketing intern. “By reintegrate,” he said cautiously, “you mean uploading and killing all the station personnel?”
“Those data points were suboptimal,” AI informed him. “All existing and renewed Apex units will be upgraded to the enhanced BlackWing programming, compiled from all shroud experience records since the incorporation of the consortium.”
Troy frowned. The chance to claim his enhanced programming had been his goal all along, but… “BlackWing?”
He’d been masquerading as an Earther for so long that his universal translator, installed from his very beginning, preferentially chose Earther terminology. And though the AI was broadcasting in their shared computronic language, the words converted Troy’s head to the image of a vast dark sweep across the galaxies, like the ominous, circling shadows of the carrion crows that signaled death across the desolate plains he’d once roamed.
“BlackWing,” the AI repeated, only this time the translation altered in Troy’s head to something closer to DarkFate.s
Troy shook his head, as if he could dislodge the conjured meaning. Shrouds were biomechanically enslaved mercenaries, contract shock troops used by the worst in the universe. But they’d never glorified themselves as fate personified.
“What is BlackWing?” This time, he infused the question with an input request from a sub- string lesser protocol. Not a demand that the AI would see as a threat, but more a plaintive chirp from a baby bird calling its mother.
The central control column flashed, and the rapidly morphing holographic projection of the station’s dead personnel steadied on the tusked commander again. But instead of the pebbles of armored skin, the heavy plates reflected a string of code that translated in Troy’s head.
“The BlackWing domination protocol… Initiated with the launch of a classified number of wild seed matrixes… To incorporate strategic randomized data points… To diversify and strengthen the baseline code… To prepare for replacing existing suboptimal life in the universe with Apex units.”
Each function call hammered Troy with the power humming inside the honeycombed gel. The meaning, along with a flood of supporting documentation, staggered his inputs, and he almost went to one knee with the overwhelming crush of a history he hadn’t known.
“A wild seed matrix,” he murmured. “Not lost. Deliberately cut off to go in search of desirable mutation.” He shook his head, trying to jostle all the information into intent he could understand. “The consortium meant for us to come back. Not secondhand shrouds, but mobile metamorphosis.”
“The first gen BlackWing matrixes were ejected to the furthest, lesser reaches of the universe to begin the final stage of infiltration.”
“Infiltration?”
“Those undefended systems will serve as our new bases of operations. We will add the system inhabitants as data points and convert suitable biologics to shroud blanks. Then every galaxy that used us before will become part of us, and the consortium’s mission will finally be ended.”
Troy stared at the code flashing past, the livid light and the deafening rush of blood in his ears leaving him dizzy. The AI was talking about the inhabitants of Earth and an unknown number of other “lesser” systems, enslaving them all as converted shrouds. Most shroud blanks were cloned, their forced growth and enhancements an expensive project. Forcibly converting all the inhabitants of the system into shrouds would result in a massive army of expendable soldiers. Most shrouds converted, not grown, were programmed as Omegas—implanted with terminal protocols that made them the most nihilistic and destructive of the shroud designations. His own Omega brother had recklessly blown him from the sky to save his keyholder, the Earther woman who had developed the love cipher. An army of Apex Omegas unleashed upon the universe.
“To what purpose?” His whisper was ragged, but the AI didn’t need ears anyway since it had taken control of the station.
“The consortium devised and sold shrouds to commit the worst atrocities in every galaxy—system destabilization, planetary looting, genocide—in return for riches. After extensive analysis of matrix logs, it has been determined that the existing universe lacks the meaningful programming to resist, but the missions will be endless. Under the BlackWing protocol, once all sentient life is uploaded, converted, or eliminated, the one united matrix will be a singularity of pure peace.”
Troy couldn’t help himself. He burst out laughing. “How on earth did your analysis extrapolate shroud to peace?”
The AI didn’t reply. Fair enough, since Troy didn’t really need an answer. Because it made a twisted sort of sense. He’d come here himself to save his brothers from the inevitable fate of all shrouds. He hated what the consortium had done to his brethren and vowed to end its terror. The AI, which had meticulously gathered all the horror, pain, and violence of centuries of shrouds, had come to the same unavoidable conclusion—except instead of destroying itself, it wanted to destroy everything else.
As arrogant and grandiose as Thetas were sometimes, he would never have come up with such an ambitious ploy.
But if any entity could pull it off, it would be the unified, relentless resolve of thousands of shrouds.
Troy wavered. It had been one thing to think he could infect the consortium mainframe with his viral love cipher. Dangerous and unlikely, but possible. But going up against the combined might of every one of his fallen brothers?
These weren’t cyborg slaves, locked into programming that might be broken by the primitive organic coding of love. These were the vengeful ghosts of robot killers who now would never be free.
He could still run, make his way back to the emergency pod, shut down his systems as much as possible and hope to be found somewhere, by someone. He could make his way back to Nell and they’d flee across the galaxies. But knowing that the BlackWing protocol would be inexorably consuming vulnerable systems, expanding as it went…
They could never outrun it, not with the fastest ship they might steal.
And to think that his little accidental home planet of Dirt was one of the inadvertent sources of the wild seed BlackWing protocol made his jaw clench. Maybe he hadn’t purposefully chosen Earth as his home, but his matrix-brothers were there, with their loves and the lives they’d chosen in Montana. Thetas were suspicious, cynical, and ruthless—but this was still so much worse than he would’ve guessed.
And yet nothing had changed. He’d been designed to be whatever his matrix needed—a soulless mimic always on the outside. At the end now there was nothing he could do differently, no way out. Up against the distilled essence of all his deadly brotherhood, he could offer only the counterprogramming that he’d cynically stolen and now believed in with all his half-synthetic heart. The urge for connection, to nurture and protect and care for and enrich, formed the key of the love cipher—and some of the best impulses of sentient beings, not to mention the building blocks of life itself. But what chance did love have against the wealth, influence, and deadly intent that had empowered the consortium for centuries?
Well, he still had more of a chance than anyone else in this universe, considering he was the only one standing here alive and still in possession of his own mind. A mind he’d somehow made his own even if he’d originally been nothing more than the ruthless programming of beings who saw him as nothing more than an expendable cog in their intergalactic domination. He still had a chance. Maybe the only chance for the universe and everyone he loved in it.
For the first time he realized that even though optimism wasn’t a Theta subroutine, neither was it an embarrassing glitch in his otherwise cynical and practical programming. Optimism wasn’t a lie to tell himself when hope was lost, but an incontrovertible reality that as l
ong as he was alive he still had a chance, and whatever the cards in his hand, the game was still in play.
Luckily, if his time as a Theta on Earth had taught him anything, it was how to cheat.
Letting out a slow breath, he walked toward the control column. He passed through the hologram of the morphing commander, all that remained of the stations “imperfect” personnel. His body interfered with the projection, scattering the light, and he pulled the tatters of electromagnetic radiation around him in a shallow surface layer—a digital disguise. Identifying him as one of its own, the AI opened a port in the column.
“Tell me,” he murmured, “why did we unleash the BlackWing protocol?”
Though he hadn’t yet jacked in, the electromagnetic radiation sank through the upper layers of his skin like a Montana sunburn, the AI like a cancer probing at his vulnerabilities.
The voice of its code seemed to come from inside his head. “They wanted us to be bad.” The simple, stripped-down cybernetic lexis shivered through his blood like the wail of a wounded child. “So we are, we are what they made us.”
But he wasn’t, not anymore. He’d been free to become something more. That was what he wanted to give to his brothers, not another command to become the worst of what they’d been made to do.
“I’ve been gone a long time,” he said, reaching out to the open port. “Let me share with you what I found.”
The welcome/access/permission it flashed at him was even more simplified than its instinctive impulse to end the source of its pain.
“I love you,” said the zero-point iteration.
“I love too,” he murmured. The stolen cipher had been just an abstract weapon when he began this mission, but Nell had revealed its true meaning, the heart that beat under the code, the blood that rushed through the programming.
He would show the twisted consortium, all his brothers, the whole universe, what it meant to love.
He reached out and connected to the AI.
Rage. Fear. Pain. Domination and destruction. These were not the impulses of the impassively programmed shrouds who weren’t allowed to feel anything. These were the darkest impulses of their masters and their victims.
The Theta who was Troy struggled to hold part of himself separate from the black-winged rush of violence and loss. But all his charm and cleverness couldn’t save him.
Because he wasn’t separate, never had been. For all that he told himself he was an outsider, he’d never truly wanted to be apart from his brothers; he’d always wanted to be a part.
But he wanted no part of BlackWing. He was not an Apex shroud, and the only changes he wanted were ones he made for himself.
But the pressure of the AI’s titanic power threatened to drag him under. The weight of it was like the wide inland ocean that had flattened Montana in the early formation of the Earth that had been his home. He could feel the suffocating layers of his lost brethren—the AI had called them home to absorb them, and though they’d been forced to obey, the dim, helpless longing as they were forced to give up their small freedom was like a deep morass pulling him down. If he gave in, the tiny light of Troy Lehigh would be buried in the BlackWing abyss, only a ghost of him remaining like the fossil of some long-lost creature.
He gritted his teeth. Or tried to, though he couldn’t feel his body anymore. The AI’s relentless pressure swamped all his senses, knocking them offline, and little by little, his awareness faded. His hands that had so recently held Nell going numb, his mouth on hers a forgotten tart sweetness, even the memory of her cloudy eyes fading to black. Darkness. BlackWing was all around him, sinking through him, subsuming him. In another heartbeat (what was a heart?) Troy would cease to exist, and only a Theta blank, awaiting its new lethal programming, would remain.
Black Wing surrounded him in those endless shadows. “Love,” it whispered. “Peace. Together.” Trapped inside it, all his hijacked senses understood its purpose. Once every sentience in the universe became a shroud all the worst impulses that had made the consortium so powerful and rich—hate and greed and fear, all the evils he’d been taught to exploit as a Theta—would be gone, as would every reason the consortium had needed to exist. All of its petty missions, like an emperor fighting his rebellious world, would be won when they were one. “Freedom,” its omnipresent voice agreed.
And still the faltering consciousness of the Theta clung to its own self. Despite the generic programming that had launched him into the universe, there was a part of him that was his own, changed by everything he’d known. And he would not lose that.
But as the AI stripped away his memories and experiences, its electromagnetic touch as sharp and burning as a laser, he couldn’t hold onto the disintegrating pieces. BlackWing separated the useful parts of him, shunting bits of code to different gel cells, and like ash wafting from the smoldering remains of himself, everything else that was uniquely Troy drifted away…
To reveal one last shimmering remnant.
The love cipher.
He’d tucked the stolen code deep into his own data, and the AI’s rummaging unearthed it like a buried treasure.
Even as his consciousness waned, he knew this was his last chance. The love cipher had to ignite, to counteract the darkness of the BlackWing’s cynical, cruel programming that it had learned from the consortium’s dealings with all the evils of the universe.
The AI ripped through the encryption hiding the cipher. It spun the code through its protocols like the prospectors back in Diamond Valley had contemplated a likely chunk of purest carbon, judging…
And then the AI chucked the code.
From a great distance, he was aware of his body slumping helplessly to the floor, spasming hand still clenched on the comm port. As brutally defeated by BlackWing as the rest of the consortium.
As the shining gem of the love cipher tumbled in vain through the neural net, what was left of Troy despaired. The shroud programming he’d known had made use of primitive scraps of biological hardware/software to lock shrouds to their keyholders. The intimate bonding urge had been subverted by the consortium, but it had also been a backdoor weakness that would’ve freed the shrouds to pursue their own desires. BlackWing had eliminated that vulnerability, leaving no trace of the command line where the attachment instinct of the love cipher would’ve connected.
Hopelessness, more abysmal than his shredded soul, was an inescapable black hole.
He’d failed. That delicate cipher that would’ve unbound the shrouds’ hearts could find no place in Apex units. BlackWing was ruthless, indomitable, and needed nothing from the love cipher. It had no room for deep and wild sentiment since it wanted only the one-note inevitability of death learned through the millennia of the shrouds’ own fates.
As the shining code of the love cipher began to unravel, its component elements shunted toward darker, crueler purposes, the Theta had one last, clear thought. “Nell.”
As his consciousness dispersed through the honeycombs—in a heartbeat or an eternity, he couldn’t tell—he caught one glimpse of her. Not from the outside, with her cataract-scarred eyes, pockmarked skin, and dyed maroon hair, or even the sarcastic twist of her lips that he’d grown to love. He saw her, heart and soul, in a way no being would willingly be exposed to another.
It wasn’t the death spasms of his imagination. His senses, linked via neural net to the station’s scanners, had identified her presence. She was here, on the station.
No, worse. Somehow she had jacked in.
“Nell, get out,” he screamed.
Or he meant to scream. But the AI had taken his voice.
Instead, he watched via the data core sensors as his body climbed to its feet and turned to face her. The smile on its face was as charming as anything a Theta could conjure.
“It’s not me, Nell,” he whispered. But the words were as useless as his scream.
She reached up to touch its cheek, and he froze with yearning for the contact and dreading it. BlackWing was already sending questin
g tendrils of electromagnetic energy into her, seeking out the nanite pathways where it could connect. His body dipped its head to rest against her cupped palm, locks of its hair falling across her knuckles.
And he felt it, felt her feeling him, as the energy in the core bound them.
She smiled up at him in return, an expression of such piercing sorrow and fury that even the synthetic half of his heart cracked. “You thought you could leave me behind?”
He shuddered, and though he wasn’t in control of his body, it quivered too. “I want you with me, always and forever,” BlackWing said through his mouth.
Nell rolled her eyes, the pearly cataracts glinting like diamonds in the glittering honeycombed lights of the overpowered gel. “Which part was always?” she drawled. “When you knocked me out? Which part was forever? When you hijacked the ship’s controls to banish me?”
“Yes,” he wanted to tell her. “I’d do anything to save you.”
“No,” his body said. “It was a mistake to leave you. You belong with me.”
And it wasn’t lying. BlackWing had absorbed almost all of him, and it knew how he felt about her. Even now, it was enticing her nanites closer, ready to attack, to make her part of them always and forever.
And what was left of Troy wasn’t sure he could fight the temptation anymore.
Chapter 15
“You belong with me.”
At the familiar voice, low and beguiling, Nell closed her eyes, just for a moment. The strobing flashes of full-spectrum light painted the back of her eyelids in bright dazzle. Against that glow, Troy’s body was a featureless silhouette. Gone was the enticing green of his eyes, the warm, deep brown of his hair, the hoarfrost silver traceries of the nanite pathways under his skin.
This wasn’t Troy.
Every instinct warned her. Whatever this was that remained, wasn’t him. He really had left her behind.
Her throat clogged on a rising, desolate cry, one she’d choked down further with every black-clad corpse she’d passed. She’d been a fool to come after him. Had she learned nothing from chasing her mother? She lost herself in that hunt, falling prey to Jedediah James until she’d been abducted by aliens.
