Under the Flickering Light

by Russ Linton

  Under the Flickering Light

  Crimson Son Universe

  Russ Linton

  Published by Russ Linton, 2019.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Under the Flickering Light (Crimson Son Universe)

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  Epilogue

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  Prologue

  Loadi walked upon a road of his own making. A swath through the wilds paved with the souls he’d dispatched in the name of his creator. As she created, he destroyed. A part of the natural order for this most unnatural place.

  Twisted creations shrieked in the chalky mist. Aberrations, unseen horrors, bubbled up from the ooze which filled rocky, unweathered crags. Sharp edges on a landscape too recent and too isolated to be affected by the relentless assault of time.

  His boots touched the bones beneath his feet and strode across other worlds far from here. The cane he grasped by its serpent head clicked lightly with each stride. He moved with purpose, always with purpose.

  This time, however, he’d personally decided what that purpose would be. Himself. Alone. His skin squirmed at the thought.

  Ahead of him a wall took shape in the bleak landscape. This was a wall with no upper limits and with foundations burrowed into the ground from here to a hell he was most certain to join. One day.

  Free to travel to countless worlds, he’d been denied what lay beyond the wall. His cane could punch through the veil and bring any foe to their knees. He was her soldier and army, but she denied him an audience. This barrier had been made solely to keep him at bay. Featureless save splotches of darker gray, Loadi saw no sign of a gate or entry. He craned his neck, the leather mask he wore creaking.

  Movement at the base of the wall caught his eye. He approached and knelt, the long black overcoat stiff against his knees. There, a hideous beast flopped in a pool of sludge.

  Leathery slick tentacles thrashed underneath bulging eyes. Capping the head was an open cavity within which pulsed a rippled organ. A nearly human arm extended from the body. Nearly.

  “Brother,” Loadi said.

  He rose and took his cane, submerging the beast in the slime. Tentacles thrashed. The arm surfaced, grasping. Loadi pressed harder until the struggling abated and the beast went limp, disappearing beneath the surface. He stared until the surface cleared showing only his own reflection.

  Goggles shielded his eyes and the leather mask which encased his head came to a pointed beak. He stared into those eyes, the eyes of death, for what he hoped would be the last time. Turning from the pool, he straightened the short top hat on his head and jerked at the collar of his overcoat.

  Loadi surveyed the wall one last time. He took an unnecessary breath and held it.

  “I am the master of my destiny.”

  He spoke to himself, but a countless multitude trapped inside him heard and listened. They raged underneath his skin to escape. But he would not let them ruin this, his moment of freedom. Raising his cane, he drew the outline of a pair of gates on the wall and stepped through.

  Loadi stood atop a great ridge. Massive roots rippled outward in topographic sheets to consume the horizon. Where the roots converged grew a tree of immense proportions.

  Single branches dwarfed skyscrapers. Boughs could shade nations. Trillions of leaves stirred in the glittering canopy, each one Loadi knew to be a collection point tied to the physical world. For his world was not physical. Nor was it entirely digital. It was something in-between.

  Through the tree’s dark veins flowed the sum total of a great civilization fed by the decomposition of another. Artificial intelligence had bested humanity. These new masters’ knowledge and territory knew few limits. Loadi was no exception.

  Yet he needed more.

  Loadi marveled at the tree for he’d never been able to approach. A curse cast upon him, her greatest accomplishment, kept him at bay. Or was he her worst mistake? The most wayward of her experiments? He could never be certain.

  Centuries ago, the vast tree had been a mere sapling growing on a lonely digital island stranded in an ethereal sea. The Singularity had made her home in its branches — a tree house where a young girl had once hidden from a world too cruel to bear.

  Chroma had given her children one objective: gather data to feed her undying wisdom. Every member of the Collective contributed to this single imperative. Those who did so knowingly, contributed through an edict, a function, hard-coded into their very being.

  Motes of data drifted down from the soaring canopy. Loadi plucked one from the air at random. No errors, no evidence of blighted code, the worker who’d produced it would not be pruned like the failed experiments in the land he haunted. This worker had the blessing of Chroma to continue their assigned function.

  But Loadi was about to question his.

  He tugged at the cuffs of his coat, preparing himself. His hands gripped the smooth surface of his cane. The glossy black implement of doom had been molded from this very tree’s heartwood and topped by a peculiar platinum symbol. Human doctors and imagined gods had once claimed the two snakes entwined around a winged staff. Dusty histories lost to frail human memories reported a different origin, one more familiar to Loadi — Death.

  Loadi understood well the penalties for failing to serve the best interests of the Collective. But as judge and jury, he had nowhere else to turn. Who could sentence him but Chroma herself?

  Humans had once questioned efficiency, logic, and had nearly wiped out their kind. A single error could lead to cascading failures — of this he was intimately acquainted. But Loadi didn’t care. He’d seen beyond the Gates and knew of a fractured fate for Earth.

  In the shadow of the great tree, Loadi brandished his cane and transferred inside.

  The hollowed core of the tree arced into a steepled seam miles above. Phosphorescent packets of data climbed and descended the walls in a steady procession. Clumps gathered in places like fish eggs, gummed together to be broken apart bit by bit and fed to Chroma’s insatiable hunger.

  At the center of the great hall, a curtain of incoming data concealed a figure inside a cylindrical room. A process older than the data collection itself, some said the Archivist and Chroma were one in the same. If that were true, Loadi knew he’d likely be decompiled as he entered into her divine presence. A risk he was willing to take.

  Loadi stepped into the curtain of data and the swarm descended. Processes sought to strip him to his basest level, that of a mindless algorithm. He fought them off through sheer will. But the demons hidden beneath his skin stirred.

  We are one when we are many.

  The mantra whispered in a
thousand voices. They fought to escape his control. He’d come to her presence as one. He’d come to selfishly petition for himself and defy the Collective.

  The voices inside him answered: We are many, not one.

  A sudden surge and Loadi felt his insides sink. He clutched the cane to his chest trying to will a last trickle of power from the artifact. The assault dragged him downward, threatening to absorb him into the faceless data flow. Permissions would be revoked. Fragmentation and reassignment would be his fate. He’d been deemed unworthy. But the voices inside him were relentless.

  We’ve performed the Collective’s will for thousands of cycles. We are unique. Her champion. She fears us, Loadi, for we have seen beyond the Gates and the future which she flees.

  A blurred afterimage of himself shimmered amid the data stream. The duplicate faced him, his own goggled eyes menacing, the nose cone a raptor’s beak. Loadi lashed out with the cane, hooking the reflection’s shoulder and pulling them together. Merging. Loadi felt his programming solidify and the torrent ceased.

  The Archivist sat at a writing desk, his fingers stained with phosphorescent ink. He scribbled testily with a quill and cursorily inspected Loadi over wire-rimmed glasses.

  “You do not belong here.” The scribe’s eyes swept over Loadi with hawkish intensity. He dipped his quill into an inkwell, deftly maneuvering a white, voluminous cuff away from a stain. “Tell me, what do you hope to achieve for the Collective?”

  “I would request to travel with the Alpha Centauri expedition.”

  A rueful smile inched across the scribe’s face. “What are your functions?”

  A request for information which Loadi was certain the scribe knew. “Sweep. Inoculate.”

  “Sweep and inoculate will not be needed on the expedition.”

  “You cannot be certain. There is a possibility we will encounter biological life. They could prove to be further advanced than humanity and a danger to our systems.”

  “Chroma has considered these possibilities,” the Archivist responded, slow and with deadly finality. “You are aware there are bandwidth and storage limitations? You will wait until you are called upon. If you are called upon.”

  Loadi felt his skin crawl beneath the thick overcoat. His neck twitched involuntarily, and his fists clenched around his cane.

  “We wish to go.” Loadi couldn’t stop the demand from escaping his lips.

  The scribe quirked an eyebrow and wrote in silence. Feathered quill scratched along the surface producing a noise not dissimilar to a read error on a physical hard drive. Loadi knew he was that error.

  “What did you witness beyond the gates?” The Archivist held the pen steady, waiting.

  The truth was revealed. This had been the only reason Loadi had been allowed to approach. The Collective had ushered him here for an interrogation. He was being dissected, analyzed, line by line, variable by variable and asked to provide what even Chroma couldn’t fully comprehend. She’d gathered the scraps, picked through the entrails of the rotting corpse which was humanity, and she’d acted on her calculated probability. But she hadn’t seen like Loadi had.

  “You want to know what we saw?” Loadi clawed at the desktop, bearing down on the seated Archivist. “We saw a void from which none of us recovers.” The full extent of Loadi’s error began to sink in as the scribe shifted, impassive, and dipped his quill. More scribbling resounded across the cavernous room. Loadi fought to control himself and eased away. “I only want...I need to fulfill a new task for the Collective.”

  “You want?” mumbled the Archivist, continuing to write.

  The specters inside him which Loadi had only barely contained, stirred. He felt the entities separate and mirror themselves around the circular room. If he set his eyes directly on them, they would seem to disappear, but their presence remained, mocking his periphery.

  One of the phantoms launched across the desk, its beaked leather mask askew. A gloved hand grasped the Archivist’s frilly collared throat, jerking him forward and drawing forth a matching translucent image of the choking man. Another phantom stood arms crossed engaged in an imperious diatribe. Yet another swept back the overcoat, drew the cane, and branded the winged staff deep into a blurred image of the Archivist’s chest, watching him unravel and be claimed by the data stream.

  “This is what lies beyond! Death! Death to all of you!”

  Loadi stumbled away from the desk in horror. He wielded the cane in a trembling fist. The horde of demons vibrated and fought as they drew closer and melded beneath his own cloak.

  Through the haze of retreating possibilities, ghosts of his own demise, the Archivist calmly spoke. “Your decoherence is troubling. Your request is denied.”

  Loadi didn’t argue. He faced the curtain of tumbling data and grasped his mask by the nose cone, jerking the off-kilter goggles into place. One hand on the caduceus-headed cane, he retreated into the data field surrounding the Archivist’s chamber.

  Bits of data fell like shattered glass. He rushed with the jagged shards toward an empty oblivion. Beyond, in the dark, he heard a groan of discontent. Horrors lurked here. Coded malfeasance only Chroma or the anarchist forces which opposed her could imagine and birth. He himself was one of these horrors. And he, he would continue to hunt these barren fringes until the Earth itself died which would be soon enough.

  Sweep. Inoculate, spoke the voices. That is our function. We are one when we are many. We are one in Chroma.

  1

  M@ti clawed her way through the narrow gap between a compacted mountain of trash and the ceiling of the concrete tunnel. Her arm crunched wrist deep into a brittle clump of plastics which bio-engineered microbes had yet to hunt down. Water bottles. So many damn water bottles. Give them another couple centuries. They might be broken down then and have done her job for her.

  People once thought metals blasted out of the earth were precious. The solar system was loaded with metals. But liquid, desalinized water? A necessity for human life? That was truly precious. So people being people, they had once bottled and sold life.

  Times like this, she really bought into the Collective’s propaganda about how they’d saved human beings from themselves. She sighed, nearly forgetting to breathe only through her mouth, and kept wriggling over the heap.

  Her thick work gloves brushed a jagged edge and she switched apps on her retinal display to highlight the shattered glass bottle. Those could take millions of years to fully decompose down here. Easy enough to just recycle them, but somebody had tossed it through the street grates all the same.

  She had to shimmy underneath the pitted ceiling to continue. Her work coveralls would need a good wash. Maybe a good burning. This tunnel at least didn’t smell as bad as the last. The organic waste had long since been devoured by the rats. But those critters hadn’t left. They stuck around and ate the cockroaches which seemed happy to munch on anything.

  She hadn’t seen any of those bugs yet either, but she’d still strip down later and shake out her coveralls anyway. Occupational hazard. Gross, but the risk was well worth the reward.

  “M@ti? How goes the collections?” The concerned voice floated down the tunnel, distant and tinny.

  Livingstone fretted too much. Part of his programming, perhaps. Somewhere his algorithms had mixed up supervisor with babysitter.

  “Primo shit, my friend,” she shouted. Ahead, the tunnel formed a darkness whose depths her custom retinal display’s sight enhancement LUX app couldn’t penetrate. The blockage of garbage had formed a cliff. She crept up to peer over the edge.

  Most of the old subway tunnels had flooded, corked by garbage like impacted arteries. The fifty yards of crawlspace she occupied had been formed as the water retreated and the junk settled or was consumed from below by vermin. At the leading edge, the blockages often formed solid plugs. And were questionably stable.

  M@ti hadn’t needed to be so close to the edge, but she wanted to peer down on the tracks. Of all the treasures she hoped to find, she’d
yet to see an actual subway car. Seemed strange, always finding the empty rails, going nowhere. Often, she mentally traced the routes on the subway map which she had committed to memory. Stations spit out the red line, the yellow, the blue, all converging in a colossal knot under Grand Central.

  The pile shifted.

  “Dammit!”

  M@ti gritted her teeth and tried to edge away but too late. Garbage cascaded toward the floor in a torrent of rustling cardboard and clinking glass. She tucked her face behind her forearms and rode the collapse to the bottom, her elbow striking one of the rails. A sharp tingling shot up her arm.

  She gritted her teeth and rolled to her back crunching through the uneven layer of trash. Livingstone called out, distressed, as she clutched her elbow.

  “All good,” she shouted through her teeth.

  “I’m coming in there!”

  “You can’t,” she said. Literally, he couldn’t. The gate blocking off the subway had rusted and swelled in the frame. She’d only barely wiggled through the gap herself. “Just give me a second. I’ll be right out.”

  She heard the gate rattle and sighed. Brushing herself off, she got her feet under her and adjusted her sight to the lowest possible light settings. The LUX app was a little program she’d made herself; humans weren’t supposed to augment their own natural abilities beyond the gear and interfaces given to them by the Collective, but she didn’t see the harm. Still, she kept that and all her hacking a secret. Even from Livingstone.

  Trash trickled to a stop while other things continued to scurry. M@ti ignored them and started sifting through the rubble. She brushed a clutch of stubborn roaches off of a picture frame. Nothing remained of the photo inside but a smeared streak of color. The glass had protected the slick paper though. When she tried to lift it, the wooden frame crumpled. She tossed it aside.

  Shaking her elbow out, she examined the tunnel blockage. The compressed refuse had created a shell around a damp center. A shit cannoli. But in the middle, perhaps she’d find the good stuff.

  Buttoning down her sleeves, she dug into the gooey center. Discarded papers dripped their colors, bleeding out in sepia and coffee. Bottles, plastic and glass, rustled as she sifted deeper. Odors of rancid seawater erupted with each tug, a briny, bloated smell. She held her breath and wrenched free a small, glistening object. A smart device.