“You must. This is the only plan that will work. It is the only way to save hundreds of billions of others from enslavement. He must be stopped. This is the end of humanity if you do not. You must play the villain to save them all. If allowed to proceed, Faust will not die. He won’t be able to be killed or removed. He will not allow anyone to challenge him. He will go mad with power and it will mean societal collapse and ruin. You simply cannot bypass the military in any other way to reach him.” Locked in their embrace as they flew still upward, Tarien squeezed him tighter. “Please.”
Jason let out an animalistic cry of despair even as he issued the orders. Tears leaked from his eyes as massive sky barges all turned westward. Jason watched his horrible instructions enacted. Two massive sky towers, complex floating islands of metal and glass fitted with magnetically stored antimatter as a source of antigravity, lifted high into the sky and began following the barges. These sky towers were massive floating cities unto themselves. He issued the orders and immediately crippled communications so they could not be stopped. He would crash them, use them as enormous weapons to bombard infrastructure. The Techs were madly scrambling to cancel Jason’s commands, but could not find a way to stop them.
He turned toward the medical complex, intending to take cover for the few minutes required before the armada of barges and towers converged on their destination. Jason landed both himself and Tarien on a building ledge and stared off into the distance. Hundreds of missiles were pouring out of the armaments surrounding the central government buildings. Safety protocols would not allow missiles to track and detonate near civilian population or buildings. No amount of orders could override these safety mechanisms. Faust overcame this protocol by sending officers in flying vehicles to try and apprehend Jason.
This, too, failed almost immediately.
Jason countermanded orders given by the Techs. While they were getting faster and were far more skilled, Jason was generating increasing amounts of interference with specialized broadcast units he’d hijacked. Within minutes, the disruption of communications meant Techs could no longer easily issue orders. Jason seized the vehicles intended to apprehend him and ordered them to safety. Jason learned quickly, his power growing every moment. Each interaction with the Techs meant gaining traction on the incredible complexity associated with the way Techs used technology. His brain continued augmenting rapidly, making him more formidable each passing moment.
Jason tore into the food stores Tarien had packed and ate ravenously, discarding the packs. In the same moment, he ordered all animal and insect life in the sector to flee. The humans were not subject to his control, but every other living creature would obey him. Most of the wildlife would never make it out, but he had to try. In the face of the horror of his actions, Jason needed to find some way to redeem himself.
The sound of a klaxon nearly ruptured Jason’s eardrums as it began to cry out emergency warnings. Several more began to sound in the distance, the warning sirens echoing in all directions.
Faust and the Council had figured out the extreme danger those flying barges posed as they slowly moved toward critical city infrastructure. They had figured out that Jason intended to drop them. Faust directed energy weapons to shoot the barges down, but instead the weapons bounced off the shielding harmlessly. Flying towers and barges were designed to be nearly impervious.
The Techs finally abandoned trying to counter Jason and focused their energy on saving people. Every vehicle in the city turned and descended, trying to offer evacuation services to any human detected. Jason could have crippled some of them, but he desperately wanted these vehicles to help get people away as fast as possible. He sent his own orders to help, bolstering the Techs’ commands. Vehicles filled the sky, streaming in from nearby areas to evacuate anyone left behind. Every available transport was summoned from as far away as reasonable. Despite this, Jason knew thousands of people simply would not get out in time.
Faust tried to communicate with Jason on every frequency, screaming for Jason to stand down. His voice became increasingly frantic, not having anticipated the lengths to which Jason would go to stop him.
Several minutes passed. Jason sobbed against Tarien’s shoulder and braced for the impending explosion.
Faust began offering to surrender. He’d give himself up to Jason, he promised. Jason knew the man lied and also knew what would happen the moment Jason no longer held the upper hand.
Jason closed his eyes and crippled the complex set of systems on the sky towers and the barges. It took great effort to make them vulnerable, because the engineers had designed the safety systems so thoroughly. Jason had to use his nannies to physically eat away at some of the mechanisms surrounding the antimatter containment. Swarms of his tiny robots disintegrated the protective casing, overcoming the power systems and controls. At last, Jason succeeded in exposing the antimatter, crippled the gravitational fields suspending it. The great towers faltered, then began to slowly fall, crashing ponderously down onto the structure of the dam.
As matter met antimatter, the sky became fire. A burst of light blazed from the west. A flash so bright it would have blinded them both if they hadn’t had protective technology. The physical force of the shockwave rippled outward. The concussive blast threw vehicles and debris like toys. Tarien and Jason sheltered behind buildings, hoping the structures would absorb the power of the explosion. Despite this, they were showered in glass. In a flash of insight, Jason wrapped himself protectively around Tarien, allowing shards to stab into his flesh as the shockwave hit the city core. Jason’s body rejected the projectiles and he healed quickly.
In the distance, Jason could see the blast had leveled everything in its path. Though it came from miles away, the detonation by the sudden release of anti-matter from the gravitational fields was beyond belief. Air traffic vehicles were hurled vast distances, engines barely able to keep them aloft and restore balance. Many of these vehicles did not recover, careening to the ground along with the screaming people inside. Several buildings groaned under the strain of bent and warped metal.
Jason then saw the massive wall of water rushing toward the city. A wave, over two-hundred feet tall, rose from the largest reservoir in human history, an inland sea of majestic proportions and depth. The dam had spanned dozens of miles and had been several hundred feet tall before large sections were destroyed by the blast.
Power in the city failed as the wall of water overtook the generation sources and receiving panels. Supercapacitors blasted apart entire acres as they came in contact with the water.
Jason grabbed Tarien and lifted them into the air again, away from danger as the inflow of water pushed buildings to the ground, crashed against metal and glass and bent them to the point of snapping. The outermost ring of skyscrapers took the full force of the impact and fell, crashing against nearby buildings. These, too, fell, unable to withstand the force of the blast impact coupled with the now raging torrent of water. Slowly, like dominoes, a third set of buildings toppled.
The force of the wave dissipated as the city absorbed the energy it carried, but the water poured through the warren of boulevards and streets. It rushed inward to the heart of the city, flooding everything between the buildings and rushing inside shattered windows and open doors.
The wave overtook the military deployment, storming over the top of the army of robots, and over the army of people before they could escape.
The danger posed by the ground weaponry had been neutralized. Laser cannons and projectile launchers were submerged, overturned.
The casualties of military personnel were enormous. Jason felt hollow inside as the death toll mounted.
The mass of water finally rushed around the Council building, the massive pyramidal structures representing the heart of all government. Jason seized control of the remaining aerial vehicles still aloft after the blast, bringing them rapidly back into the area. He launched them into the building like rockets, blasting holes into the sides to create a way into t
he complex to serve as his entrance point.
Flying rapidly toward the pyramid, Jason’s incoming nannite feeds supplied him with details about Faust’s whereabouts. Faust had moved to another location in one of the many towers ringing the buildings. He sent Jason a one-way video signal of a room isolated from most of the complex. Designed to provoke Jason, Faust blocked any reply from Jason’s personal communicator, trying to force Jason to come to him.
In the room was Monica.
Faust had her chained to the wall. She had obviously been given the drug cocktail. Unable to fight the effects of the drugs, her body had changed, becoming an Amazonian hulk.
She thrashed madly against her chains, her eyes bloodshot and wild, ridiculously oversized muscles bulging with strain. Screaming, she fought vainly to escape, to kill Faust, who stood before her. Nine still stood by Faust’s side and he, too, struggled to fight the effects of the drugs, remaining unable to disobey orders due to his edicts. Jason noted with some despair that Nine had finally lost his mind in the struggle between his edicts and the commands of his body from the drugs. His madness radiated out through his uplinks. Jason tried several times to address Faust through his communication link, but the man was goading him, trying to get Jason’s emotions to prevent clear thinking. Faust clearly wanted to find Jason, know where he was, so he was taunting him into giving away his location.
Jason landed in the gaping wound of the building complex, detaching himself from Tarien in a fit of grief. Monica. A friend more precious to Jason than he could put into words. Nerves raw, Jason ran rapidly down the hallways. Seven followed, and they moved out of the destroyed areas and then found a working video transmission wall tied into the main security systems of the building. He overrode the security requirements and addressed Faust.
“You bastard! Let her go!”
“Well, hello at last!” Faust glared at Jason through the video screen. “I’ll let her go. Just turn yourself in. We have robots converging on your location. All you have to do is to let them do their job and bring you in.”
“No! Monica, listen to me. It’s Jason. Please. Oh please hear me. You can fight this. I’m coming for you. I’ll be there soon, and I can help you. I know how to control what is happening to you and I can put you back to normal. Just hold on!”
Nine laughed, hysterically. His madness made tears of frustration run down his face as he clawed into empty air toward the ceiling.
Faust ignored the Tech by his side. “Really, Jason. Monica is quite far gone, I’m afraid. I gave her the drugs several days ago, so she is not capable of thinking right now, let alone hearing you.”
If I can get to her fast enough, I can still save her. “You insufferable monster! I’ll kill you.”
Faust laughed. “Oh, so I’m the monster? Look around you, Jason. Half the city core is destroyed because of you. I have killed a few people, but you have murdered thousands. Tens of thousands, perhaps.”
Faust appeared to consider something. Jason was sure he was stalling, trying to get security teams and weaponry to converge on him now that he had lured Jason to a video terminal and knew his location. “Tell you what, if you turn yourself in, I will allow you to revert Monica to normal before you are imprisoned and executed. I will even allow you to kill me, if it will stop you from destroying anything else. You can take my life before you are put to death for high treason. You see? I put the good of the people above myself. I’m willing to sacrifice myself to save them.”
Jason couldn’t believe what he heard. Kill him? Had he entirely misjudged the man? “I—”
“No.” Tarien cut him off, speaking to Faust. “You may allow him to do this before he is executed, but then you will have gained the last information you require to control others. You will record his data stream and unlock the secrets you need. You will enslave Monica after he is gone. You do not offer her freedom, only a temporary reprieve before enslavement. You do not truly offer your life, despite any assurances you may give. We suspect you now know how to transfer to another host, rendering your death meaningless. We will not permit this.”
He turned to Jason.
“He is in possession of Emma’s research, of this I am sure. He knows how to transfer his consciousness to another host. He implanted himself with the experimental transferal devices Emma developed for this purpose. If you kill him, he may simply move to another body and then gain his desired end. He will not truly be dead. You will have surrendered in vain and will be eliminated and out of the way.”
Faust sneered. “You can’t stop me, you pathetic cyborg. While I’ll admit I did not anticipate one of you Techs disobeying me and helping him escape, I will find out how you managed. I still hold all the cards. I am in complete control. You couldn’t reach me if you tried. I’ll be going through central protections far beyond your ability to bypass. You and all your kind have outlived your usefulness.” He laughed. “Fine, Jason. Have it your way. You’ll never reach me.” He made a motion to cut the video signal off, but Jason overrode the console. His nannies, which had started propagating days before, were already permeating the area where Faust was hiding.
The Director’s eyes widened as he quickly guessed when he could not cut the video feed that Jason must have nannites influencing the area.
“Oh, I think I can get to you just fine. I’m already on my way.”
Furious, watching his plans fall apart, he turned to the Sector Tech at his side. “Kill her.”
Agony twisted Nine’s face as his sub-systems struggled to obey, locked between two opposing orders. One order would not permit him to harm another human for any reason, a safety protocol deeply encoded into his very core. The first directive of all Techs. “Do no harm, unless harm is inevitable. Then, do as little harm as possible.” However, Nine was also mandated to obey the Council without question. Normally, no individual Council member could ever order a Tech to kill. It would require a unanimous vote, if such a thing could be done at all. Now however, Faust embodied the entirety of the Council voices as one person.
Conflicted beyond his ability to endure and ravaged by the effects of the advanced nannites that had been injected into him along with the immortality drugs, Nine froze, unable to take action between equally conflicting commands. Under the enormous strain, the last vestiges of Nine’s sanity were scattered across the Net. With a strangled groan, Nine’s eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed.
Momentarily taken aback, Faust began to swear. His looked around the room in desperation, recognizing his continuing loss of control.
Jason screamed as Faust pulled out an old-style projectile gun and shot Monica in the chest.
Her wound began to close immediately, but her rage built. He shot her several more times with increasing concern, unable to hit her in the head because he simply wasn’t a good enough shot and clearly feared getting too close. Not, it seemed, that a shot to the head would stop her for long.
Jason despaired as he watched her shot repeatedly. “Oh, Monica! Stop it, you bastard!”
Some self-preservation must have been in play, because with an incredible display of power Monica tore one of the chains from the wall using her now super-human strength. With fury, she lashed out with the chain, snapping the jagged end against Faust’s neck like a whip, tearing his throat wide open.
Eyes wide with panic and shock, Faust staggered backward, hands clutching at his ruined throat. Shattered bone fragments came pouring out between his fingers as blood rushed from the wound. He tried to breath, but only managed a gurgled exclamation. Before he hit the floor, Monica roared at him, her chain whipped a second time, taking him full in the face and crushing his skull.
Through the video feed, Jason watched in stunned disbelief as Faust fell to the floor, dead.
Jason wasted no time. He turned out of the room and rushed toward the area where Faust held Monica prisoner. He used his personally designed technology to clear the way. It had overtaken much of the building and continued to replicate, disabling all
the safeguards and opening the doors ahead of him as he ran. Laser weapons aimed at him and fired before he had a chance to cripple them. His body healed the holes, and his physiology changed in such a way as to absorb the shots. He adapted and became immune to the low power of the weapons. Several robots sagged, deactivated as their systems went offline.
Tarien followed behind Jason in his usual silent manner, easily keeping up with him as he sped through the complex. Within minutes, moving with astonishing speed due to their enhanced athleticism, they reached the holding cell that abutted the southern wall of one of the towers.
The door had been sealed from the inside, so Jason put his hands against it and his nannies spread through the material rapidly, allowing him to disintegrate the locking mechanisms.
As he forced the door open, Jason staggered back in shock. He could feel Monica’s emotional distress, sense her out-of-control physical changes. Assaulted by her elevated hormone levels, he reacted as if struck a physical blow. She thrashed, yelled out nonsense words. Caught up in the horrors of her own mind and increasingly unable to understand reality, her body quickly changed to reflect the demons within. Jason knew all too well, having gone through the process himself, that she was in a mental state which she could not escape, since her sensory organs were being overloaded with false information. She was starved because of it, her body burning through energy so quickly she would soon start losing mass. Monica vainly struggled to wrench her other arm free and randomly lashed out with her free arm in frustration, the chain thrashing in the air around her.
“Monica, I’m so sorry. I’m here now. I’ll help you, I promise.”
She appeared not to hear him, or his words made no difference. Her bloodshot eyes still stared off into nothing and she made unintelligible noises as she struggled.
Sector Seven Page 32
