by E A Carter
'Goodbye Capitaine,' de Pommier says, soft, from behind me, a relic of an already dead world. Her avatar collapses, a heavy, dense thud. I keep moving and don't look back. I don't even care. There's only Blue, now.
And the next thousand years to kill.
Seven minutes left. I am almost at the slaughterhouse, the safe tucked tight under my arm. The entire city glows with a dull orange tint, the colour of hell. Of hopelessness. Of finality. There are no shadows. The whole sky is burning now, the heat already unbearable. The oppressive silence of the doomed city weighs down on me, claustrophobic. I feel like I'm the last thing left aware and alive on Earth. A gunshot splits the air, and corrects my error. I reach the slaughterhouse elevator, its doors slide open and welcome me into its sanctuary.
Five minutes. It's going to be tight. I bolt to the main elevator, and plunge the final two kilometres to the safety of G-II.
The doors open. One minute and twenty-four seconds to spare. I'm already running, determined to be there with her when it happens, when the world as we know it ends. To watch over her. And wait.
Halfway down the corridor, a resonance surrounds me, goes right through me, the agony of a planet in its death throes. A heartbeat later, a ripple of seismic activity slides along the length of the corridor, a harbinger of more to come. Another tremor follows, hard in its wake. The lights die. Absolute darkness surrounds me.
I keep running, blind. Echolocation kicks in, an enhancement I never even knew I had. Ultra high pitch frequencies reveal a world in low res. It's enough. At the blast doors, I punch the emergency switch to close them. A faint click answers me, then nothing.
Fourteen seconds. Fuck it. Blue is all who matters now. I reach her with six seconds to spare. The safe still in my grip, I kneel and scan her pod for power. Her readout blinks at me, innocent of the hell unfolding around it. Relief slams into me. Whatever shut down G-II's power didn't hit the pods.
Two seconds. It comes then, the roar of the earth's mantle tearing itself apart. The floor heaves with the force of a detonation, slams me into a wall. The safe skitters away into the darkness. Damage reports flood my sensors. I'm injured, can feel myself repairing. I need to get back to Blue. I need to get the safe. I stagger back to my feet, I don't feel pain, but I know I should—if I had bones, most of them would be broken.
Another roar of stone against stone shoots through the cavern and I am thrown again, this time against a pod unmoored from its place. I claw my way through the mêlée, but everything is moving, a heaving sea, a storm of pods rising and falling. I search for Blue's pod, lost in the chaos. Another pod loses its footing, slides across the floor at me. I lunge out of its way straight into another incoming pod. A glitch of blue in my vision, then nothing. Darkness. Silence.
PART II
THIS IS HOW IT BEGINS
ONE | RYAN MADDOX
* * *
A flickering behind my eyes drags me back from the darkness, in its wake, a hum resonates through me, awakening my senses, but it's jagged and unpleasant as it slides through me, growing stronger here, fading, then igniting there—like something else is alive inside me, something that isn't me.
I scan my memories. Nothing but emptiness confronts me. There's nothing else to do but wait, and let my mind organise itself. A heartbeat later it hits me, where I am. Lubochnia. The ambush. My men dying all around me. The incoming strike hurtling towards us, its scream of promised death.
A slice of panic carves its way through me, stark and ugly. No. Please. I can't be dead.
Blue.
The hum dies. A surge of power slams into me and with it, my memories. The lab. My return to life in the body of another. London. Blue. A gunshot in a stairwell. Alpha VII. Mars. de Pommier. A major upgrade. Screens bleeding red. The safe. The key to a vault. A sky on fire. Our descent into the depths of G-II. The end of all things.
Blue.
I can't move, but there's no pain, at least. Darkness impales my vision. A moment later the echolocation snaps on.
I'm pinned in between two pods. I shove the one before me away, its weight more than a tonne, but for me, it's nearly nothing. Beneath, my legs are crushed. I wait, aching with impatience as I rebuild from the inside out.
Chaos surrounds me. Against the outer walls, hundreds of pods lay piled up against each other in heaps. A wreckage of them, sideways, upside down, others standing on end. Deep undulations carve the floor where the Earth purged itself of its agony and tore the metallic surface into two, as though shorn by giant scissors.
Nothing remains as it was. I have no idea which pod is Blue's. Impatience seethes through me as I endure my temporary futility. I seek the code for her pod but a thick film of dust coats everything. All I can do is wait.
It's hell.
Another tremor rises from the depths below our prison. Several pods at the top of the nearest heap loosen their tenuous hold. They tumble to the ground, sending great clouds of dust that take forever to settle. I wonder how long I was unaware. I check my legs. Halfway. At seventy percent it will be enough for me to move. Another tremor comes, heavier and angrier than the first. I count the passage of time between them. One hundred twenty three seconds pass when the third tremor makes its appearance. Sixty five percent and I haven't even begun to consider how we will get out of here. The elevator will have been lost, but there must be a second access way to this place, to have only one would be madness. I scan my memories of the layout of the city, searching for an opening that leads nowhere. Another tremor rocks the ground beneath my feet. I conserve my energy for my repairs. One problem at a time. First. Find Blue. Because if she's gone, nothing else matters anyway. This place can be my grave.
Seventy percent. I'm already moving, clambering over the wreckage, pushing the pods aside, my hands thick with dust as I seek the only thing that can identify her to me: G-II-0493.
One empty pod after another greets me. A vicious rumbling rises from the depths, ominous, hot with the promise of fuck knows what next. I move with extreme precision and speed, all my power focussed on this solitary objective, sensing I have just one small window of opportunity to get this right or I will lose her forever.
Silence follows in the wake of the rumbling, laden with warning. It's coming, whatever it is. I shove the nearest pod aside and expose the one underneath. A faint bleat of light sears the opacity of my echolocation. Raw with hope, I swipe the dust aside and there it is. G-II-0493. Blue. Her pod is still intact, and after a rapid scan—operational. There isn't even time to feel relief, because the next upheaval comes with the force of a thousand tsunamis, a world enraged, determined to tear itself apart.
Beneath, the floor buckles and falls, angry waves of the Earth's inner storm. Above, a jagged scar rips apart the ceiling, and separates with a spine-grinding tear of geological agony. Hell rains down in great sheets of gneiss, smashing everything in their path. Another rent opens in the floor, and I see it, what is to come. We are going to be in for the ride of our lives. The pods at the opposite end of the hall tumble into the abyss opening beside them, man's highest achievement roiling into the Earth's depths, a pointless mass of scrap. Beneath Blue's pod, a thrust, brutal as a rocket launch shoves us straight up towards the rent, its maw opening wider by the second. I throw myself over Blue's pod and don't let go.
Another flickering. Another hum. I gain awareness on my back facing a leaden sky thick with dust particles. There is light, which means it must not be winter anymore. I have lost several months at least. The damage I sustained on the way up must have been critical. Yes. It was. It was brutal. But I held on to her pod for longer than I expected.
Blue. I try not to think about it. I lost her somewhere on the way up, right before a shear of bedrock struck me.
I'm so fucked I can't even turn my head. I can only stare at the opaque lid of a dull sky, and wait for the nanobots to rebuild me again. It takes a long time. An entire day and night passes before I have the power to begin my search for Blue—the one I now realise has
defined all the shit I've endured, who gave me a reason to go on, despite what I've become, despite the pointlessness of it all.
In the grey light of a shitty, dead dawn, I sit up.
To nothing.
I turn full circle, expecting to find the rift that freed me from the depths with Blue's pod close by. Instead, an undulating wasteland of scoured bedrock confronts me. In the distance, lumpen mounds that I suspect are all that's left of the might of Alpha VII's dome. The view greets me, silent, calm, yet condemning, devoid of both fissures and pods. I blink, unwilling to take in the enormity of it. Of where I am—and Blue isn't. I shove back the image of her pod still beneath the surface, buried alive. My fingers curl into fists. I still have a thousand years to kill, if I have to dig her out with my bare hands, I will.
I turn, because I don't know what else to do, and absorb the bleak vista. I have no idea where I am. The soldier in me tells me I need to get my bearings. Mark this place to at least give myself a starting point in my search for Blue.
I cast around looking for something to mark the spot, but the Greenland I am standing in is nothing like it was before. Though its glaciers were already long gone, there had been a dense furze of pale orange and copper lichen that had gorged on the long-buried nutrients of the ancient bedrock. Without its blanket, the dull grey of the exposed rock peers back at me, naked and vulnerable bearing scorch marks where the densest clumps of lichen burned their imprint into the land. It's depressing so I look away, at the sky which sulks over me heavy with fine debris carried on the jet stream from god only knows where.
So this is it. One thousand years of nothing, and no Blue. I think of the safe, and of my wild race to get it so she would have a little companion to comfort her in this strange new world. But it was a waste of energy. Fake Miro is gone, too. Forever lost. Everything is fucked. Everything. I kick the air and then feel stupid, like I'm a kid taking a tantrum and someone is watching me, judging me. But of course, there is no one. I am the only one left standing. And I'm not even human. The irony is deafening.
Pissed off, I continue to ruminate on the loss of Miro's safe when the memory of seeing de Pommier for the last time pops up. A wrecking ball of hope ploughs into my pissed-off-ness.
I pat my breast pocket, frantic, certain it will be destroyed, shattered into dust, but it's not. I don't waste time thinking about how miraculous it is as I examine the general's last gift to the human race. It's totally intact. For a fleeting moment I wonder if the nanobots repaired it. I cut off the thought. It doesn't matter. It's whole. I have something from before and a location. With the toe of my boot I drag a thick line into the dust coating the bedrock. A white scuff emerges, like an open wound in its monotonous grey skin. It's not going to be enough. One downpour and it will be gone. I need something permanent. A primordial primitiveness surrounds me and I realise even with all my enhancements even the most basic task is going to be an enormous challenge.
It takes me a long time to gather up enough rocks to build a substantial mound over my imprint. Most of them I have to prise free from the bedrock, cracked and loosened by the upheavals, but still embedded in the bedrock's face. There's almost nothing lying loose on the ground which I find strange, but don't dwell on it. It feels like my existence now is to deal with a lot of unknowns and I don't like it. I fucking hate it.
Hauling each rock free is a tedious, boring task, and it makes me angry. By the time I am done, I'm claustrophobic with my failure to protect Blue and the possibility I might never find her again, even with a thousand years to burn. For all I know she's been dragged back down into the depths and ended up with all the other pods that fell into the abyss. For all I know, her pod's power source failed and she's already dead from suffocation and everything from this point on is a waste of energy.
I search my memories for something, anything, to explain how I am above ground minus a rift. Maybe I came to and walked here on autopilot, nothing more than a machine with zero awareness. Maybe I got caught in another quake and that's how I ended up on my back needing a full day to rebuild. I search the neat corridors of my memories with care and precision but find nothing except utter darkness, presumably the catalogue of my shutdown—of my near non-existence.
It troubles me, the possibility I could function without my consciousness at the helm, that I am not my own master. The more I resist the thought the more it boomerangs back to torment me. I need to do something. I decide to find the fucking rift.
The silent remains of the city's melted dome calls to me, beacons that pierce the flat bleakness of the landscape. Every hundred metres I check over my shoulder for the mound. Even after half a click I can still see it. A surge of pride goes through me. One point for me. I have no idea why it matters, this small triumph, this mark left by the sole survivor in an empty, desolate world, but it does. Another click passes under my boots before I reach the edge of a massive crater at least a half a click deep. Beneath my toes, the wall of the crater slopes away at a forty-five degree angle. Turns out the low mounds of the dome are not so low after all. They still reach to at least half their height. All I had seen were the tops of them.
'Well,' I say to no one, 'I found you, you motherfucker.'
The rift stares back at me, baleful and jagged with its teeth of gneiss, half the city swallowed into its maw. The rest of its structures tangle away into the distance twisted, melted things, barely recognisable. It's going to be a hell of a hunt, but I know I will find her. She's there. I can feel it in my titanium bones. I search for a landmark, anything that looks familiar. There's nothing. The rift is at least three kilometres long and fuck knows how deep, but it looks deep as hell. A problem for later.
I scan through my memories of the city's design, find the slaughterhouse and measure its distance to the dome's perimeter. A little triangulation targets my destination. It's half in the rift, half out. I bellow a string of obscenities that echo across the basin of the city's ruins. Its emptiness hauls at me, tragic and pointless. I might be a machine but beneath all the nanobots, titanium and whatever the hell else I'm made of, I'm still me. What's left of me reels at the legacy of hundreds of thousands of years of the human species. The pinnacle of our evolution hunkers before me, an ugly scab. Nothing. It all came to nothing.
I bark a laugh at the madness of it all. All our religions, wars, greed, destruction, compassion, science, advancement, and hope stares back at me—compressed into a single heartbeat of annihilation. I look down at myself. I'm all that's left. And Blue, something inside me whispers. I nod in answer. Yes, and Blue.
So here we are, two castaways no one would have ever expected to be here after all the well laid plans of the rich and powerful. Just Blue, a human with the ability to alter reality and me, a machine existing with the consciousness of a dead soldier. And it will only ever be us. And when she dies . . . Fuck. It's too intense. I have to stop thinking about it.
I glare at the chaos below me, stamping out the stray thoughts from that thread that bubble to the surface. It doesn't help to think about it. It is what it is. I'll deal with it when I have to. Later. I let out a heavy breath, taking in the work I have in front of me, the years, decades, maybe even centuries of fruitless searching I have ahead. Then again, it's not like I have anything better to do. I think of Blue, of the last moments she was aware before I closed her away for a thousand years, of her last words:
See you on the other side.
This side sucks, there isn't a single living thing except maybe those microscopic organisms that can live in the bottom of the ocean in the thermal vents—extremophiles my enhanced self tells me—and those tiny bear-like things they used to shoot at Europa and Enceladus at extreme speeds to see if they could survive, poor fuckers. What were they called again? Tardigrades overlays my vision in binary code I can read. Jesus. It keeps going: Also nicknamed water bears. Water bears. I like that. They were cute. Poor guys. At least we can't torment them anymore.
So it's just me and the water bears for now. Be
tter than nothing. I think about them, all around me, invisible, but there. It helps. I have a feeling I'll probably start talking to them sooner or later.
My attention gravitates back to the spot I'm aiming for. It's a brutal gash, and unstable looking as fuck. I have no idea how I am going to manage to sift through all that on my own. Then again, I tossed those pods aside in my search for Blue, like they were made of foam. I'm strong, and I can repair.
I'll find her. No matter what. No matter how many times I have to break myself and rebuild again. I'll find her. Because I fucking love her and can't imagine going on without her. And that's the end of it. I activate a timer in me so I can keep track of the passage of time.
See you on the other side.
You're goddamned right you will, Blue.
Under the lead lid of a sunless sky I jump off the crater's edge and slide straight into hell.
TWO | RYAN MADDOX
* * *
Today I feel more gratitude than I have ever felt in my existence. According to my inner timer, almost five years have passed under a sullen, dense dome of slab-coloured grey, that possesses all the comfort of concrete. I learned to stop looking up. Although, six months of total darkness in winter helped. I couldn't see it, at least, could imagine it wasn't there.
Every spring I would wait for the light to return, raw with hope there would be a break in the oppressive weight pressing down on me. And every year, the same depressing, claustrophobic barrier overhead, the light murky and thin even in high summer when the unseen sun didn't set, ever. I existed in a bleak world of pale grey, all the time.
And it never rained. Ever. Neither did it snow. But it got cold. Fast. Within two weeks it hit minus seventy Celsius. Over the second winter, it went to minus ninety-four. I took myself to the deepest part of the city out of reach of the blistering winds and hibernated for four months. It was still fucking freezing when I woke back up, but at least the winds had died down and the temperature was a tolerable minus forty-two. The summers weren't much better, a balmy minus thirty-one on the good days. And through all this: no sign of Blue's pod. Or any other pods for that matter. But I've got time. I know she's here and I'll find her before it's too late. I just have to be patient, systematic, and disciplined. This at least, I have in spades.
