Infinity Lost (The Infinity Trilogy Book 1)

by Harrison, S.

  “THERE YOU ARE, CHILD.”

  The robot lunges forward onto its heavy bulbous knee and takes careful aim at one particular girl, obviously wanting to relish the triumphant moment of my murder. But that’s not me Nanny Theresa is aiming at. We have similar figures, similar long, straight, jet-black hair and pale skin, but that isn’t me out there. If only she wasn’t shielding her face when she ran, maybe Jennifer Cheng wouldn’t be the next one to die.

  I bite hard into my fist as the R.A.M. fires again, loudly tearing a splintering furrow into the barrier behind Jennifer. Chips of pulverized wood spray the back of her head as the encroaching torrent of gunfire closes in on her. Margaux screams and Bit grabs me, sobbing into my shoulder, unable to watch when suddenly, inches from Jennifer’s neck, the gunfire bizarrely changes direction, zigzagging over her head. The swath of bullets continues upward, gouging a wide gash in the shiny black wall of the dome as it goes, exposing a long patch of the sunny blue sky and fluffy white clouds outside. A ray of hope lights in my heart; there still may be some small chance of escape for them all. Jennifer feels the breeze on her cheek; she skids in the dirt and throws herself at the wooden barrier. She claws at the splintered furrow carved into it, reaching for the edge of the gash in the dome wall, but the barrier is almost ten feet tall and cruelly too high for her to climb.

  The gunfire has stopped. I look over at the R.A.M. and its guns bursts forth again, but this time its weapons are aimed directly upward, burning a gaping hole in the high black curve far above the mechanoid’s head. Something very strange is happening.

  The R.A.M. has inexplicably grabbed its own arm with its other hand and is pointing it up, wrestling its own limb away from the terrified group. Amy Dee, Karla, and Percy have all turned back from their pointless circular sprint and are desperately running to Jennifer and the large, sky-blue cut in the side of the dome.

  “STOP THIS MADNESS, THERESA!” bellows the R.A.M. It topples over, landing on its side in the dirt with a heavy thud. “NO! I WON’T STOP UNTIL INFINITY IS GONE!” it roars at itself.

  I had always suspected that Nanny Theresa was deluded, even deranged, but now I think her downloaded mind must have been completely warped and shattered her consciousness into full-blown insanity. What other reason could there possibly be for the horrific murders of my schoolmates, and now arguing with herself, fighting herself to the ground?

  The mechanoid’s back arches and contorts; it rolls on the dirt, its guns firing sporadic uncontrolled bursts, peppering random holes in the high black canopy. “IT’S NOT HER FAULT! SHE DOESN’T DESERVE TO DIE! NONE OF THESE CHILDREN DO!” it shouts as it rolls and grapples with itself.

  On the far side of the arena, I can see Percy doing his best to hoist Jennifer up and over the top of the ten-foot-high barrier toward the gash, which I notice, to my dismay, is slowly but steadily healing itself closed.

  “Go! Get out of there!” Brody yells at the display. With Percy’s help, Jennifer heaves herself up, rolls out through the gap, and drops out of sight.

  “Yes!” shouts Ryan.

  Percy hurriedly issues some instructions to the others then crouches low as Amy Dee leaps feet-first onto his shoulders. He quickly stands, boosting her up toward the shrinking gap. She sidles through the steadily contracting swath of blue and drops out of sight as well, quickly followed by a shrieking Karla Bassano.

  Only she, the Professor, Dean, and Percy are left, but they’re quickly running out of time. Most of the smaller holes higher up have completely sealed shut, and what used to be a large gap cut into the dome is now barely wide enough for Karla to squeeze through. She scrambles up from Percy’s shoulders onto the top of the barrier and shimmies sideways on her stomach into the now-tiny and ever-decreasing hole. Karla kicks both legs through the small space in an attempt to drop out feet-first.

  But she isn’t fast enough.

  The shiny black glass completely envelops her body from the bridge of her nose down. There’s an awful wrenching, tightening sound, like a thick dry rope that’s being twisted to breaking point. A desperate muffled scream can be heard coming from the glossy dark surface. The scream is gruesomely silenced with a sickening thock as the top of Karla’s skull, complete with its mane of beautiful, thick, shiny brown curls, is guillotined clean off, toppling from the side of the dome and dropping onto Percy’s back like a brain-filled bowl of bone and hair.

  With a horrific realization, Percy arches upward, frantically pulling his blood-spattered blazer from his shoulders. He throws it to the ground behind him, too afraid to look down at what he has cast aside, and is promptly pelted in the face with one of Karla’s hands and three of her fingers.

  I quickly turn away; Bit’s face is ashen white and Margaux loudly vomits onto the floor.

  “THEY ARE ALL AS GOOD AS DEAD ANYWAY! YOU CAN’T STOP ME, GENEVIEVE!”

  At the sound of my mother’s name, I spin back to the screen, focusing all my attention on the section of the display where the R.A.M. is.

  The robot has staggered to one knee, still in the throes of its personal battle. Its hand is whirring loudly as its robotic fingers dent into its gun arm, shaking violently with the incredible exertion of force, while up on its domed head its eyes are flickering one at a time from sapphire blue to silvery gray and back again.

  Oh my god . . . my mother is in there with Nanny Theresa! I knew she was here! That was her inside the silver Drone this morning! It must have been! I did see her face!

  And now she’s out there fighting for us. Fighting for the lives of the ones who have survived.

  I glance over at them. Percy and the Professor have both slung one of Dean’s arms over their shoulders, and all three of them are staggering back toward the crippled grandstand.

  The whole R.A.M. is shaking and whirring now as two minds fight for control. It shudderingly forces its own arm down at its leg. The rail guns burst on, blazing fire at its exposed knee joint. Its leg is completely rendered in half and it drops forward onto the fizzing, sparking stump of its huge green thigh.

  “ENOUGH!” shouts the R.A.M., and with one last monumental gear-wrenching jerk it pulls its gun arm to the side with all its might, ripping its other arm right out of its socket in a shower of bright golden sparks and spurts of luminous orange fluid.

  The disembodied hand on the torn-out arm finally releases its grip, and the bulbous green appendage drops into the dirt with a dull thud. The eyes on the R.A.M.’s dome head glare solid, unblinking silvery gray once again. It looks down at its own ripped-out arm like it’s the body of a fallen enemy.

  “Get me out of here!” Margaux shouts from the other side of the room, and my whole body flinches from the fright. I turn to see her glaring, teary-eyed, at one of the Drones. All of them are still standing motionless in a row on the boundary line in the middle of the room.

  “Help me! Somebody!” she screams right in the Drone’s black plastic face, dark tracks of mascara running down her cheeks. The Drone doesn’t move an inch.

  “Surely someone else must be watching this?” says Ryan. “Why isn’t anyone helping? Where are all the soldiers we saw before?”

  Ryan looks up at the walls, into the corners of the room, scanning the ceiling. “There’s got to be cameras in the walls here, too, and that nurse knows we’re in here. Where is she?”

  “They can’t do anything without the computer,” says Bit. “We all saw Colonel Brash and Percy try. No one can control anything, anymore . . . nobody except the one who is controlling that,” she says, pointing back at the section of the screen showing the R.A.M. kneeling in the blood-splattered dirt of the arena.

  “We’ll have to find our own way out. Maybe we can smash open a door? Hopefully those things won’t try to stop us,” I say, glancing toward the line of six Drones.

  Ryan nods and walks over to his chair. He picks it up and strides with purpose toward door number one. “I gu
ess we’re about to find out.” He swings the glossy-white chair back over his shoulder and hurls it as hard as he can at the frosted glass. It hits solidly with a hollow ringing sound and bounces off, narrowly missing Ryan’s legs. It skitters along the floor, across the boundary line, and comes to a stop on the other side of the room. I look back at the Drones. None of them has moved.

  Brody has quickly followed Ryan’s lead and has gone to door number three. With a grunt he brings his chair down on the door with all his might, but it bounces off, too, and flies back over his head, taking him with it.

  He stumbles backward, trips over his own feet, and falls flat on his back, sliding over the boundary line and onto our side of the room. He quickly jumps up, staring wide-eyed at the Drones, but none of them has moved.

  “Well, I think you’ve got your answer,” Ryan says to me. “They’re offline. Welcome to the cool side of the room, Brody.”

  Brody gives him a tiny smile.

  “Hey you guys,” Bit says from behind me. “The R.A.M. may be damaged, but it’s still active, and Dean, Professor Francis, and Percy are still in there with it.”

  “It’s not after them anymore,” says Brent. He’s kneeling by Margaux, who is sitting in her chair with her face in her hands. “You heard it. Whoever’s controlling it is looking for a female, and they are obviously not female.”

  Bit gives me a worried look. I turn to the screen and see the Professor and Percy and Dean on the ground behind the toppled remains of the grandstand, gravely eyeing the huge robot, their backs purposely turned to the bloody mess of half-limbs and shredded flesh that used to be Sherrie Polito, Ashley Farver, and Miss Cole. I can’t help but notice one of Miss Cole’s patent-leather, buckle-up high heels. It’s still on her foot, a foot which is grotesquely attached to nothing more than a bloody stump lying in the dirt.

  I look over at the R.A.M. It’s kneeling, motionless, staring at the part of the dome wall where Jennifer and Amy escaped. It’s eerily quiet out there. Maybe Brent was right. Maybe Nanny Theresa thinks I got away. Maybe she’ll retreat back into the mainframe and all we have to do is wait for Amy and Jennifer to get help.

  “Finn, look,” Bit says, pointing up at the screen.

  One of the eight squares on the display is flickering on and off. Suddenly it blinks back on solid and the picture has changed. What was once showing a section of the gun-damaged barrier has now switched to an outside view of Dome Two.

  There on the display is an image of Amy and Jennifer, standing on the edge of a small grassy area beneath an overhead monorail track outside. They’re holding each other and weeping.

  Amy looks up from Jennifer’s shoulder and gives her a smile, the kind of frail, consoling, defeated smile that is only given when someone honestly can’t think of what to do next.

  Jennifer looks back over her shoulder at the part of the dome wall from where they escaped. The image on the screen quickly zooms in close on her face, hovering on her features. Then the picture goes black.

  Suddenly, all of the pictures on both sides of the room start changing rapidly, flicking on and off, shifting from place to place and showing camera feeds from all over Blackstone Technologies. There are flashes from every conceivable angle of the jungle in Dome One, alternating with multiple flashes of views from outside the other domes. I see our school bus flick on for a split second; another shows an overhead view of the car park, and there are shots of the rectangular stone arch, random trees and shrubs, and the exteriors of buildings I recognize from the 3-D model we saw earlier. There’s the pond I saw, the pathways between buildings, grassy nooks, sculptures in courtyards, gold-and-black warehouses, Dome Two again, monorail tracks, tall silver towers, and the sparkling diamond geode passageways just outside this clean room. There don’t seem to be any people anywhere. Where are all the people who work here?

  Every section of screen on both displays is switching from location to location to location, changing faster and faster with every second. Ryan walks over and stands beside me. “I have a very bad feeling about this.”

  “Me, too,” I whisper, turning to look back at the other wall. That’s when I notice.

  All of its sections are flicking through different images. All except for one.

  There, in the lower, right-hand corner, one section has remained unchanged.

  It’s filled with the R.A.M.’s face, if you can really call a green dome with a black strip on it a “face.” It’s tilted slightly upward; the strip is blank, eyeless, like it’s thinking or listening for something or . . .

  Bit grabs my arm.

  “Finn! She’s looking for you! Through all of the cameras, Finn, she’s looking for you!”

  “Wait,” says Ryan. “Who is she? And why is she looking for you . . . ?” Our eyes meet for a moment and I see the beginning of realization on his face.

  I turn toward our display and fear stabs my stomach as I see a side view of myself flash across the center-left section of the screen. The section below it flicks to an image of me from across this very room. Another one flicks to a view of me from above, clearly displaying the top of my head. One by one, in quick succession, they all start changing: me from behind, me from my other side, me from a high corner of the room, me standing between Ryan and Bit, me close up, my face filling the entire frame of a section. One of them is a magnified picture of my eye while another is just my lips and nose. All the sections have changed, and all of them are focused directly on me.

  I turn to look at the display across the room and it’s almost identical to ours, all the images of me turning at the same time like choreographed clones, all staring in their own different direction, but all with the same look of horror on my face, captured from every angle.

  I can feel everyone’s eyes turn toward me, but I’m focusing all of my attention on the picture of the R.A.M.

  In the lower-right corner section, the R.A.M.’s eyes blink on that sickening shade of silver gray. It slowly tilts its big green domed head up toward the camera, as if it were looking through the screen right at me. I swear, if that thing had a mouth, it would be grinning. The picture of the R.A.M. zooms in, right up to its gray-circle eyes, and its voice booms loudly from the display for everyone to hear.

  “I’M COMING FOR YOU . . . INFINITY.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  All sections on both displays cut off simultaneously.

  Margaux turns and glares at me. “You!?” She boosts herself out of her chair and marches across the line, finger pointed accusingly, her face streaked with dried mascara, her pale-blue eyes sparkling with rage and disbelief. “You’re the one they’re looking for?!”

  Ryan’s brow is lined with confusion. “Finn?”

  All I can do is hang my head.

  “Listen, none of this is Finn’s fault,” Bit says, standing between me and Margaux.

  I know she’s trying to be a good friend, but she’s wrong. This is my fault.

  “Everyone out there died because of you!” screams Margaux. “Millie is dead . . . because of you!”

  “I don’t get it,” says Brody. “What’s going on?”

  “Why are the hackers after you, Finn?” asks Ryan.

  “Who are you? Who are you really?!” yells Brent, his tear-reddened eyes narrow with suspicion. “People are dead because of you!”

  I ball my fingers into fists and screw my eyes shut. They’re right. So many died today because of me, and I have absolutely no idea why. My burning sorrow and utter frustration come bursting out of my mouth.

  “SHUT UP! EVERYONE JUST SHUT UP!”

  I yell so loudly that Bit and Margaux both jolt in their skins. Everyone is staring at me in silence. I take a deep breath and focus on a spot on the floor.

  “This is going to take way too long to explain, and we don’t have much time. All you need to know is that someone dangerous is controlling this place, and they’re
coming. We need to get out of here. Right now!”

  Ryan steps forward by my side.

  “You heard her. Everyone grab a chair and pick a door.”

  Margaux and the boys just stand there, stunned, looking back and forth at each other, unsure of what to think or do. I can’t say that I blame them. I focus on Margaux, staring right into her eyes. “If we don’t get out of here . . . we are all going to die in here.”

  “No,” Margaux says, glaring right back; her expression hardens. “They only want you.”

  “Well, I’m not going to get caught in the crossfire like everyone else did,” says Brent. He nods at Brody. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Without a word Brody turns and crosses the room, scoops a toppled chair off the ground, and flings it one-handed at the closest door. The frosted glass resounds with a hollow ring and the chair clatters off to the side. The door wobbles but it doesn’t break.

  “Let me try.” Brent picks up his chair and walks over to Brody’s door. He swings around in a full circle, and, with a loud grunt, slams the chair into the glass. A low ring pounds from the door, but the chair bounces off just like the others and skates across the floor.

  “These doors are impossible to break,” Brent says, dejected.

  Ryan grabs another chair. “Keep trying.”

  I turn and look at Bit. She smiles at me, but it’s a feeble smile. I can see in her eyes how afraid she is.

  Margaux is just standing there with her arms folded across her chest, glaring at me with burning anger.

  I turn, grab my chair, and head for door number two.

  A steady pounding rhythm reverberates around the room as Ryan, by door one, and Brent and Brody, by door three, slam their chairs against the frosted glass.

  I grip my chair tightly and focus on the large gray “2” stenciled on the door in front of me.

  I swing back and heave the chair against the door with a loud involuntary scream.