At The Hands Of Madness

by Kevin Holton

  Wheelchair Kid sat by our one remaining radio, listening, but had turned the volume up enough that we could all hear it when no one was talking. Thousands already dead, city hall in ruins! People are charging the city limits, but some kind of force field has prevented them from leaving. It… It seems like Medraka has trapped us, and wants to kill us slowly this time around.

  A cohost cut in. That’s a lot of speculation, buddy.

  Well excuse me, I didn’t know you were The Almighty Fact Lord. Please regale us with all the spot-on factual information you know about the headless monster about to kill us all. Seriously. Tell us everything you know, Britannica.

  “I’m sorry,” Akila said. “We weren’t prepared to override the coding when it was here before, but now, we can activate the convergence protocol. If we combine it with Medraka’s blood, we should be able to fight it and, at the very least, drive it off.”

  “Hardly your fault.” Lisa’s eyes drooped shut but she refused to let herself pass out again. Thankfully, she hadn’t lost enough to merit a transfusion. “Medraka… is.” She looked out at the kaiju, which was steadily, methodically, completely destroying the city we’d sworn to protect, just to get revenge on us.

  I couldn’t imagine the pain she was going through. Not having her arm ripped out—painful though that had to be—but the fact that, between shock and a lack of weaponry, she couldn’t assist. Lisa had been there the first time Medraka showed up, and now, if this was the day it died, she’d live it the same way: clutching a bloody stump, watching helplessly as her squad mates fought to their last breaths. It wasn’t the ending she deserved, but none of our recruits deserved what happened to them, either.

  “While I can’t say much for psychic abilities, merging together should allow us to match, or at least come close to, its size, leveling the field here. Doubly so if we bypass its shielding,” Akila said, her angular features harder than usual, metal face set with steely resolve.

  Allessandra and I shared a look. That was a lot of ‘ifs.’ She cocked her head, looking off toward the Scrapyard, eyes drifting out of focus, a smile playing on her lips.

  “Look, guys,” Steve sighed, drawing our focus as he looked around. “I’ll just say it: are we sure we should do this shit? I mean, Heartbreaker blew out both hearts, did his job damn well, but it keeps fuckin’ us over. Lisa’s down, Damien’s dead, we almost lost Grover, most of our other recruits are dead, the rest are shittin’ themselves… What if we just, I dunno, got our asses out of here? There have to be places nearby to run to that won’t involve fighting this fuckin’ bastard.”

  Running away was a sacrilege against our mission, but we didn’t have a lot of other options. “I heard the same program Grover went through experimentally spliced together people and spiders to overcome degenerative muscular issues. Worked out pretty well. The Homo Araneae are supposedly doing quite well.”

  “Oh god, spiders,” Grover shuddered.

  “No, no, not like that. I mean, yeah, they’re supposedly pretty different from us, but from what I understand, they’ve really revitalized the economy in Detroit.”

  “Oh god, Detroit,” Grover said, hugging himself.

  “No.” Allessandra stepped forward, unsteadily, like her limbs were only connected to her body by a few thin sinews, and she had to fight to keep herself together. “We all serve the unconscious. The collective. If Hyperion gives up, humanity gives up. We’re the only ones who can fight it. The only ones who’ve managed to hurt it. It dies today, or we all die tomorrow.”

  Our radio blared, Medraka has been making its way down Main Street, and I don’t know what’s worse: when it raises its arm and makes a building implode, or when it just crushes our fellow man beneath its oversized feet.

  Fellow man? It’s not a tragedy when women die? the cohost snapped.

  Fuck off, this isn’t the time for your god damn fucking bullshit!

  Waving at the radio, she continued, “See? This wrath, we brought it down on Great Bend. We collectively fought it, we collectively angered it, and now we, collectively, are dying.” Turning to Akila, she said, “If you’re willing to do this for all of us, then we will, all of us, as one, honor your sacrifice. We’ll carry you on in our hearts and minds, your ghosts walking with us side by side in a new world, safe from the horrors of the kaiju. If nothing else, we will remember you, and ensure our children do as well.”

  I wanted to stop her, to plead that, no, they didn’t all have to sacrifice themselves, but what did I know? I’d fought it with conventional weaponry, more or less, and all I’d done was make the situation worse. My efforts resulted in a shockwave that destroyed our camp and splattered our troops worse than a kitten struck point-blank by a cannonball, not to mention the razing of Great Bend.

  Plus, she’d always had this. Hope. I couldn’t tell if it was her nature, or something about the disconnect between her mind and the rest of reality, but she wasn’t afraid of Medraka. Or of dying, for that matter. Hell, maybe it was because of her mind, of fighting for control over her interpretation of the world. She knew what it was like to walk unarmed into a battle she might not be able to win, and charge the front anyway. So far, she’d come out on top, more or less.

  If there was anyone who knew the merits of reckless, irrational hope, it was her, and if she could inspire even a little bit of a chance of our survival, I’d take it.

  “Humanity has always had its monsters,” Allessandra said, echoing our conversation from the previous night. “We have always had insurmountable evil to overcome, even if we created an enemy, just to prove we had someone to fight. This monster,” she pointed, “is just that: another monster. Except, instead of destructive power spread out over an army, it’s condensed into one creature. This is our final test. We’ve spent eons serving the que—the collective unconscious, the pool from which all our strengths and weaknesses, all our ideas, hopes, and fears are drawn. Medraka is our darkness made manifest, so now…”

  She looked over at Grover, who stared back in confusion for a second. Then his eyes widened. He grinned, holding up twin fireballs in his blackened hands. “Time to light it up.”

  “Well, shit, I always loved Suicide Squad,” Steve said.

  Akila nodded. “We’ll prepare the convergence, then?”

  My core group turned to me, so I turned to her and said, “If you’re absolutely sure, then yes. We’ll do everything we can to support you. Remember to aim for the hands. I think they’re the source of its psychic power.”

  “Why would that…?” Akila said, fading off.

  “Speculation here, but it seems like it’s using psychic abilities to push the blood through its veins, and move its limbs, even though it should be dead. There are some aspects it doesn’t seem able to control anymore, like the Phranna—once it lost both hearts, they stopped coming—but as long as it can use its powers, it’ll keep going.”

  “A headless beast, using the power of its absent mind to control a dead body,” Akila said, looking away. Then she barely more than whispered, “What did we deserve to merit such an atrocity?”

  None of us had an answer. She left to prepare their final weapon, and we had preparations to make as well, with almost no time to make them. But after several millennia of war, religious inquisitions, genocide, honor killings, and other massive conflicts, I was feeling pretty confident. If there’s one thing our species had always been good at, it was killing.

  Medraka had waged war on us, and today, one way or another, that war would end.

  Chapter 13

  Allessandra was a far better leader than I’d have thought. Ignoring the occasional trailing off as she listened to some distant whisper from the back of her mind, or her odd tangents and segues, she managed to get everyone organized with relative ease. She relegated our remaining grunts into guarding what little supplies we had left, not to mention Lisa, who, by her own admission, would’ve been a hindrance at this point.

  After pillaging the Scrapyard, I found one exoskeleton
still intact, built for Damien’s larger frame. Steve was a bit tall for it, but managed to squeeze in, so he and Grover were set to clear out rubble, clearing a path for people to flee to safety. Mari had already been sent off to Great Bend, still under Allessandra’s control, as she’d been unable to shake Medraka’s influence. It wasn’t ideal, but if she wasn’t going to have free will anyway, she might as well have been rescuing humans instead of killing them.

  The Nanites were to do anything and everything they could to kill Medraka.

  Me? My duty was simple. “Heartbreaker,” she said to me, after the others dispersed to prepare. “You just… stay out of the way.”

  “What?” I asked, surprised and, frankly, offended.

  “You’ve done more than anyone. You killed… most of it. Now, you focus on not getting yourself killed instead. By your own admission, you see no weak points through that scope of yours, and a sniper with no target is a seed with no soil.”

  “So you’re saying I’m useless?”

  She pursed her lips, looking away. “I’m saying, I believe we can kill it, and I’d rather see you alive at the end of this.”

  What the hell was I going to say to that? No, fuck you. Yolo, baby. So, I conceded that she had a point. Besides, as the unofficial historian, I had another job: make sure I remembered and wrote down all I could, so that we could tell these stories later.

  The Nanites were generally okay with the pending convergence, but more than half their ranks had become the ghosts Akila had mentioned, their soft, blurred bodies awaiting the next command, meandering about and speaking in circles. They reminded me of my brother, who’d died years before Medraka showed up. Months of being dragged under the waters of a pharmaceutical cocktail meant to stem the symptoms of his schizophrenia left him with no ability to communicate with others. He wound up locked in his head with his demons, and used a shotgun to blow that jail cell open.

  Time was short, and growing shorter, but Akila stopped us. “We have… a gift, of sorts.” She handed over a metal briefcase, which I opened. Inside were five syringes of a viscous gray substance. “Nanobots, pre-programmed to obey the consciousness of whatever person they’re injected into. Become an Autonomous, regrow a limb, repair brain damage, whatever your intention. There’s one for each of you. Our way of expressing gratitude for the efforts you’ve gone through.”

  “I hope you’ll understand if we wait until after you smash yourselves together,” I said, not wanting to add, Or if we throw these away.

  Akila laughed, ending with a faint sigh. “My daughter… she won’t be part of this. She’s away, on other business. It’ll only affect the Nanites here, not those in other parts of the world, so if you do see others of us, or her, in particular, could you pass on a message?”

  I nodded.

  She added, “Server 78, signing off.”

  Our core exchanged confused looks. “That’s all?”

  “We rarely die, given… what we are. But this will surely be the end for many. It means something, to say goodbye.”

  “Change doesn’t have to mean death,” Allessandra said, “even if death is just another change. Leave one form to take on another. Leave the single to rejoin the collective.”

  “It’s been great knowing you though,” Steve said.

  “A real pleasure,” Grover added.

  “They’re not dying,” Allessandra said.

  “The trouble is, we have no idea what will happen, really. Only that our identities will merge into one. The erasure of the self. That’s all death is to us. The body is irrelevant, but the identity, the soul, will be gone. Even if the collective thrives, we’ll all be gone.”

  “By your estimations,” I clarified.

  She glared, clearly getting annoyed with our biological lines of thinking. “Yes, Hennessy. We’ve never done this, so it’s all estimations. Either way, we’re running out of time.”

  We looked over to Medraka, stomping through the city. The radio blared, Oh, god, it’s getting closer, it’s—and then nothing. No crash, no static, just silence.

  Thunderous stomping made us all jump, but Steve bounded into view, crammed into an exoskeleton that, ideally, would magnify his already prodigious strength. Metal encased his frame, except it had a flat top with two huge arms, with Steve sitting in the ‘torso.’ At twelve-feet-tall and headless, it reminded me too much of a metal Medraka.

  “Autobots, roll out!” he boomed.

  “Damn it, NAFTA!” I scowled, hand clutching my chest.

  “They prefer ‘Autonomous,’” Grover said.

  “No, it’s a Transformers reference,” Steve countered.

  “I know, but guess what? Fuck you. Now let’s go kill a god.” He looked over at Allessandra and rolled his eyes. “Fine. We’ll help the survivors, but if that thing takes one step in my direction, I’m either sending it to Hell, or bringing Hell to it.”

  He climbed up the exoskeleton, standing atop the exoskeleton’s shoulders as they charged off to Great Bend. Allessandra looked over at Akila, who surveyed us, our ravaged camp, and scant few survivors. “You’ve given up so much. It’s time my people did the same.”

  Turning back to the main group of Nanites waiting behind her, she nodded. They held up a small laptop that had been modified with a signal transmitter. “Execute the convergence,” she said, voice shaking.

  One by one, the other Nanites moved toward each other, eyes going a blank white. Upon contact, their ‘flesh’ and even, I now noticed, their nanobot-generated clothing, all blended into one another, becoming a miasmatic mass of ever-shifting gray. Akila thanked us for fighting by her husband’s side, then joined her fellows in the collective, sharp features melting into an endless blob as it grew to roughly the size of a moderate ranch house, nanobots becoming a single, replicating swarm.

  A ripple coursed through it. I was no tech expert, but the heave in my gut told me something was wrong. They weren’t becoming a single entity, or weapon, or whatever, the collective shook, then began to outright writhe. One hand, then two, then ten extended from its surface, clawing at the ground and at itself, gouging itself open. Rivulets of silvery blood oozed down to the ground, the bots quickly reabsorbed, only to be bled out again. Eyes blinked themselves open, squeezing themselves into the outstretched hands, each bloodshot. Some of them were promptly crushed. Others were smashed back into its surface, recoded to become ears, or hands, or other unnecessary organs I hoped I wouldn’t soon see.

  With another tsunami of its oceanic flesh, a dozen mouths tore themselves open along the faceless surface, every last cell of its huge body beginning to scream.

  Chapter 14

  Our recruits fled the area, not sure what was happening, with one of the larger men looping Lisa’s arm over his neck to help her. She’d stabilized, but wasn’t in the best condition. Still far better than the Collective though.

  Covering my ears, I looked to Allessandra, whose mouth opened and shut, trying to form words, but not knowing what to say. Neither of us had significant technical experience, let alone the faintest grasp of nanotechnology. What were we supposed to do if the Nanites themselves had gotten the process so horribly wrong?

  They’d intended to become a unified force, a weapon against a dead god, but they’d instead become a writhing mass of body parts. Voices overlapped, calling out nonsense and echoes of things the Nanites said just prior to the Convergence.

  Allessandra sprinted off, hands still over her ears as errant hands clawed at the blood-soaked earth. I followed her, if only to pretend to be helpful, and found her rummaging through what remained of Damien’s gear.

  “What are you doing?” My voice didn’t carry much over the Collective’s screaming.

  She ignored my question, soon finding her target: the neural-interface helmet he’d been using to pilot the mech when Medraka first arrived. The mech that Medraka used to kill him. She plugged a nearby wire in, connecting the helmet to his computer, smashing the power button with her thumb.

 
I hadn’t the slightest idea what she intended to do, but it didn’t take her long to show me. Pulling up a control menu, she began sorting through the helmet’s settings. This went right along with recently used radio frequencies, which she filtered to only recently used, but unregistered, sources.

  “The Nanites use their own frequency to communicate long-distance. A personal intranet.” Her fingers hammered, heavy and uncertain, across the keys, ripping out her Bluetooth in the process, apparently figuring she wouldn’t need it. That she wouldn’t need us.

  That scared me as much as Medraka.

  “This is what no one understands about them,” she said. “About them and about people like me. Sometimes, you’re too much for one brain. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and you know what’s awful, Hennessy? I never had a diagnosis. Not one. People didn’t like that I’d space out sometimes, or had weird thoughts, so I got bounced around until a court decided I needed medication for my own protection. The Nanites are the same way. So many thoughts, one person couldn’t hold them all, but they get filtered through a central server and channeled back, all that information in every single nanobot. If even one cell of one Nanite remains, you can rebuild an empire. Regular people don’t understand how amazing, how inspiring it is, that they can hold so much in one person. I’m just like them, you know. I’m too much, but there’s no filter. It’s like you said: I have a rawer, more honest way of understanding the world.”

  “I don’t… Allessandra, what are you talking about?”

  She laughed. She let out a true, open, honest laugh, the likes of which I hadn’t heard in over a year. “That’s my point! You don’t get it—you can’t get it—that’s why I’m the one who has to do this. I’m the only one who can steer the Collective, because I alone understand what it’s like to feel like one with everything, and everything at once, at the same time.”