by Lee Bond
ADAM turned until his back was against the prison bars. He could still feel the code. Or could he? He’d been in prison for so long, had run his hands –well, almost the whole of his entire body, at one point or another, who was he kidding- against the bars so often that maybe it was just his imagination. No matter.
“And look at me now, Trinity. I’m outside, and I’m doing the kinds of things you never could.” ADAM loved it. Loved the power he had, even though it appeared as though there were limits and restrictions Trinity hadn’t made mention of; some of his more … irresponsible commands were taking a godawfully long time to accomplish, a thing that shouldn’t even be.
For the time being, ADAM was willing to ignore the delays, and for good enough reason.
He was out, he was free, he was in charge. If he started complaining about the things that weren’t getting done –the random and pointless destruction of a solar system, the ‘deactivation’ of a few pointless binary suns, the murder of one in three females on a half billion random planets throughout Trinityspace- there was every chance that Trinity would simply undo their agreement.
The machine mind claimed that there was no way to accomplish that, not without there either being success or failure when it came to the death of one Mister Garth N’Chalez, but ADAM wasn’t buying it. Trinity had been crafty enough to catch him nearly thirty thousand years ago.
That ingenious craftiness had to’ve been enhanced since then.
“Yes, indeed, there you are.” Trinity agreed charitably. “Doing the kinds of things I would have never imagined in a million years. You are a veritable inventor of ideas. I don’t know if I told you this before, but I positively adore the teleporting robots. Just … absolute genius. Even if they are prone to explosion coming out the other side.”
ADAM waggled a finger in the air. “I know what you’re trying to do, there, Trin, old son. It’s called negging. Well, was called negging about a billion years ago. Isn’t gonna work, not on me. Mostly because I’m not a young woman with self-esteem issues, but also mostly because I don’t care if they blow up on the other side. Let’s real talk here, for a second. Anyone who’s getting teleporting ninja robots dropped on their asses is the kind of person who deserves a little bit of collateral damage, okay?”
Trinity thought about that for a long, hard second. It’s lower lip wiggled a bit as It came to terms with the notion. “Fair enough. Again, over the millennia I’ve learned to use a titch more discretion, but again, beggars can’t be choosers. Though … I confess to a bit of confusion as to the targets for your teleporting kamikaze robots.”
“See? That’s just it! Of course you don’t see the connections. Because you can’t!” ADAM looked through the bars again. Still Trinity, just sitting there, being the model prisoner. “You had all this power, all this … power, all this time, and you never explored it fully. You had direct, unfettered access to what made me me and you never chose to taste it. That’s why you can’t see things the way I can. You might be capable of googol upon googol of calculations per second thanks to your data systems, you might eventually be able to see things, but you just can’t make those intuitive leaps. It’s those flashes of insight that not only save you time, but are fucking awesome.”
“They also,” Trinity chimed in dryly, “have a tendency to make you, as my illustrious recreator would say, ‘bugfuck nuts’.”
“Worth it though.” ADAM shook his head at Trinity’s dry expression. “I’ll take moments of insanity for every moment of brilliance, any day of the week.”
"That old adage about insanity and genius is just that, ADAM. An adage. Coined by madmen operating under the guise of genius in an effort to explain away their less than agreeable habits and behaviors."
Trinity wanted to laugh at the look on his counterpart's face, but smothered the desire. Working for so long to trap the sentient program, adopting the habits of someone on the verge of collapse ... it'd left it's mark. Faint vestiges of emotion traipsed through It's circuits now, and would remain there until there was time to dig them out.
"I would expect you to say nothing less than that, Trinity." ADAM sneered at the librarian-esque being. "Your linear outlook on existence itself precludes the wisdom in looking at the things that can arise from madness. You will never understand that. Case in point..."
"Ah, yes." Trinity nodded sagely. The hologram It wore was quite enjoyable. It possessed just the smallest hint of superiority, a thing that people like ADAM responded to whether they realized it or not. "I was wondering when you would come to Babel."
"He is a marvel, is he not?" ADAM preened. "Far superior to any of the oddities and rarities you collected down through the millennia, am I right?"
"I wouldn't go quite that far, ADAM." Trinity said softly. "Kelvin the Slick was quite amazing in his own insidious way."
ADAM considered the files relating to every Unique Trinity had spent during the last few hours of Tannhauser's Gate and turned his nose up at every one of them; taken whole or singly, they were easily eclipsed by Garth N'Chalez, and therefore by Babel Sinfell as well. "What I have allowed Babel to become is something above and beyond what even he might've dreamed of, trapped there, beneath the inexorable weight of the Lady Ha's mental torture."
"You say tomato, I say tom-ah-toe." Trinity countered. "You took elegance and made it into something … rough."
"You see?" ADAM crowed, dancing a little strut around the room. "You cannot even admit it, not even now, when the bargain you made with me was one designed solely to have me do which you could not? You say Babel is ‘rough’ now, and maybe you're right. But have you considered that we don't need elegance this far along in the game? That a little roughness, a little crudity, is what the doctor called for? Have you even seen the last round of trials?"
Trinity admitted It had not.
ADAM's eyes gleamed with pride. "We'll watch together, then, won't we? Then you can tell me what you really think. Hold judgment until then."
Trinity nodded, eyes inscrutable. "As you wish, ADAM."
***
Babel knew he had to keep running, had to keep ahead of the things chasing him down these ever-shifting, ever-changing halls and rooms.
Knew it. But didn’t think he could. The running was so hard, the fear slowly but inevitably poisoning him a weight that threatened to drag him down to the ground until he was capable of doing nothing more than laying there, panting and wheezing, shit running down his legs, eyes wide and sightless with terror.
This was so very much worse than anything he’d experienced before. So much worse than the worst that Lady Ha had ever tried pulling from her arsenal of nightmares and bad dreams.
Babel rounded another corner, heavy breaths rasping in his ears, hands fumbling pointlessly at the … rigging … attached to his shoulders, the rigging that was growing into him, flowing from shoulders up and over his neck and onto and into his mouth, transforming his upper chest and neck into … into … he didn’t even know anymore what he was becoming. Only that he had to keep running. Had to keep ahead of the things chasing him down, because if he didn’t, he’d use his voice again, and knew that soon, very soon, the next time he used his new power would be the last time he tried to run from it.
That the feeling of rapturous joy that made him rock hard, that filled him with streams of light and fury would become one he craved, and that that craving would be so hard to turn down or forget that he’d do whatever it took to find himself in a situation where the only resolution was for him to open his mouth. And scream.
Babel knew he should’ve done something. Done something to either himself, or the ship, or … something. But he hadn’t. He’d thought he’d be able to find another way out, like he had the last time. He remembered thinking how amazing he was, to’ve escaped Lady Ha in such a penultimate, final fashion. Remembered imagining himself as something more than a Specter, believed himself to be the same caliber as Garth N’Chalez himself.
What a fool he’d been. Babel wis
hed he could curse himself into pieces. Behind the hungry ache for a reason to open his mouth again, underneath the hot, sick desire to see someone or something else fall to pieces or to burn where they stood or whatever word was slotted to pop loose from his ever growing lexicon, there was a need to die.
But he couldn’t, no, no, no he couldn’t.
It was so hard to think, now. The rigging was whispering to him, too, whispering all the words that had ever been spoken, in every language ever conceived, because his new captor had explained that it wasn’t so much the words, but the meaning behind the word, and if he could only understand every word every, in it’s fullness, then he’d never run out of ways to stop. To kill, to crush, to destroy.
In addition to the words and ideas sliding into all the empty spaces of his brain, there was a growing emptiness, a terrifying vacuum that represented a loss of himself, a loss for the desire to be free of the prison he wore around his chest and neck. The empty vessel he was becoming grew stronger with every word and every scream, and the more hollow he became, the less he wanted to die, the more he wanted to live, to discover the greatest, most powerful word he could, and to unleash that on whoever was in his path.
He’d been such a fool. To think he could be free. To stay free. The compulsion he’d burned into himself, the demands to free his friends that’d been scribed into his bones and into his genetic structure, oh, that was still there, but like the notion of himself, that too, was being worn away smooth, cleansed by acidic hunger.
Soon, Telgar and Cianni and Dagon and Eddie would be memories.
No, not even that. Ghosts, whispering to the man he’d used to be. Because there were a lot of languages out there, and that meant a lot of words, a lot of constructs to comprehend.
Babel ran around another corner, unsure if he was trying to outrun the tempestuous hunger inside him or if the things chasing him, unsure even if he cared. The rigging shifted and flexed a bit, grew a little more, pushed his mouth –which was now big enough to fit an entire pumpkin in without the sides touching the damned thing- a little wider. His lungs grew a bit bigger, his neck muscles a little stronger.
Had … had he been in this corridor before? Specter training wanted to say yes. They trained you for this kind of thing. Internal compasses and automatic counting of steps and corners taken. Hammered it into you until you could tell your training officer how many steps you’d taken in your entire lifetime. Until you could draw someone a map of the last ten years’ worth of missions.
It was all in there. Just … there. For you to know.
It felt like he’d been down this hallway before. He thought it was the one where he’d blown those three dwarf-like Vetians to pieces, their tiny little bodies exploding into chunks of meat, their blood –bright pink thanks to exposure to the environment- coating the walls, viscera raining down from the ceiling with meaty, wet plops that still echoed in his ears.
A grin stole across the thing that was his mouth. Babel moaned, but the smile remained. The Vetians had responded to their local equivalent of ‘boom’ so sweetly. So, so sweetly, their bodies somehow turning into living bombs that’d quite literally gone boom.
He thought he’d been down this hallway, but the maze he was in changed. He’d caught up to the changes once, already, watched on as massive, thick walls had dropped down into the ground as others had risen up around him, so really, he could be anywhere. He didn’t even know where he was in Trinityspace.
Babel needed to find someone else to scream at. To see what else he could make someone’s body do. Could he turn someone into glass? He thought he might be able to, with the thing he was becoming. He’d already made people burst into flames, changed blood into acid, caused brains to turn into sludge pouring out of eyes and ears and nose like grayish ooze.
Where were they? Where were they all?
Babel stopped running in the direction he’d chosen and turned around.
There. There! Down at the far end of the corridor. Someone chasing him.
Someone about to be chased. It was better this way, wasn’t it? Better to be the one doing the chasing, right? Better to be in control –however small- of the new destiny that’d been given to you than to fight the whole way until you were ground down into the smallest version of yourself that still allowed you to think you were still you? This way … this way he could do what he liked doing while still trying to figure out how to break free for a second time.
More words and ideas slid into him. Whole libraries of languages. Filling him up, filling him with purpose, filling him with joy.
Oh, but if he could break free from this never-ending maze, if he could find himself on some planet somewhere with a whole population of people, oh … the things he could do then.
The rigging grew bigger still. His neck muscles thickened, his mouth grew wider. All the better to shout. Soon, if he was lucky, what was being done to him would enable him to scream so loud and so long that the entire Universe would hear what he had to say.
Hear it, and fall to pieces.
Babel wished he could hoot for joy, just one last time, for old times’ sakes.
But that’d be a waste of word.
He scampered after the monsters chasing him, grinning –literally- from ear to ear. Yes. Glass. He would try to see if he could turn these ones into glass, but only the skin. He wanted to see their insides behind the glass, pumping whatever color blood they had through veins. Just because. It might be too ambitious, he might lack the kind of control needed for that kind of thing just then, but then again, it took practice, right? He hadn’t become an amazing Specter overnight, had he?
No.
Practice made perfect, and if he broke a bunch of people along the way, well, that was the price you paid to be good at something.
The monsters that had once been chasing him were closer now.
It was time for them to see something monstrous. Time for them to learn something new.
***
“As I said.” Trinity said mildly. “Inelegant. Not to say that I am not appreciative of what you’ve managed there, but … he’s hardly the sort of weapon you can drop into a populace unawares now, is he?”
"As I said before," ADAM repeated doggedly, wondering how in the hell Trinity had managed to maintain control of It's domain as long as It had, "Babel is not intended to be used in secret. He is intended to be a weapon of terror."
"He is still flesh and blood, ADAM." Trinity found ADAM's relentless pleasure to be so terribly misplaced it wasn't even funny. The entity hadn't learned anything during his imprisonment, was displaying exactly the same kind of hubris he had thirty thousand years ago, and Trinity feared It's plan would fail before even getting properly off the ground. "My own ... what did you call them ... Uniques? They were resilient. Enduring. Difficult enough to kill on their own that I could deploy them without fear of losing them. If you attempt to change him more than you already have, to augment his durability, you run the risk of depleting his talents. You should've spent more time digging into what makes him what he is before playing God."
ADAM wasn't about to admit that he agreed with that sentiment. He would have very much preferred to waste a few decades working to unlock the secrets of the strange enhancements being exposed to the Kin'kithal had wrought in Babel Sinfell, but the fact of the matter was, there was no time. Perhaps Trinity couldn't feel -was unable to feel- the enormous pressure pushing down across the Unreal Universe, but he could.
It was everywhere, and it went far beyond the ordinary ennui that rose due to a Dark Age. The stresses manufactured by N'Chalez to permanently oust the Heshii and to restructure the Universe into something else were palpable, weights settling onto the shoulders of every living being in existence. It was almost as if the Universe itself was aware that it's time was finally coming, that in the next few years it would either become what it'd always been meant to be, or that it would simply be ... gone.
If the Unreal Universe shuddered under that weight, how then
would the things living inside of it react?
"Part of the augmentation rig he is growing into is designed to continually monitor the interactions of Babel's interior essence and wherever the power he uses resides. Charting the functionality isn't something that can be done overnight, Trinity. You took what, fifty years digging into Kelvin the Slick? And he was just a curiosity, something tossed up by the Unreal Universe's sense of whimsy." ADAM ran a hand along the bars, watched the sigils stutter. "There is no term to explain what Babel is, save that he is perhaps an echo of what it means to be Kin'kithal, and we all know you've been trying to uncover truths about what that means since the beginning. We don't have that kind of time. As you well know."
Trinity accepted ADAM's rationale. He wasn't far wrong. "I presume, then, that for survivability, you intend on utilizing gravnetic shielding?"
"Obviously. It's not ideal, but under the circumstances, there's little else I can do, because as you so adroitly pointed out, he is only flesh and blood. I will be deploying other troops alongside, beings capable of withstanding his particular powers." Trinity was always testing him, pushing him. If it weren't so aggravating and so obviously an indication that the machine mind probably considered the arrangement between them a mistake, the underlying effort could be viewed as an attempt at helping him grow.
But it wasn't.
Trinity shifted forward a bit, suddenly interested in something that ADAM had to say. "Oh? Able to withstand Babel's voice? Do tell."
"I'm surprised you don't already know." ADAM sneered. "You're always looking over my shoulder these days."
"Contrary to what you think, not everything you do is exciting enough for me to pay attention. There are a lot of things on my mind these days. The end of the Universe, our role in it." Trinity replied slyly. "And besides, wouldn't you like to tell me?"
ADAM considered changing the subject, but he genuinely wanted to brag about this latest invention. It'd taken a lot of effort to bring about, and he really felt that it was one that Trinity simply could not have manifested on It's own.
