Rune Source: A Virtual Universe novel (Rune Universe Book 3)

by Hugo Huesca

  Thankfully, bowel movements weren’t programmed into my body, because it’d have been a very embarrassed second. I was sure I was about to get assimilated or something worse.

  But nothing happened. He cackled a bit longer and then tried to frown again. “Huh.”

  A cinder of hope burned in my virtual heart. “You do realize I’m not just a Nordic piece of software, right?”

  The NPCs in Rune had been created by Nordic and improved by the Core when it had taken over. But I’d been scanned and built by software designed by the same people that created the Signal, as far as I could tell.

  This new Keles hadn’t had such luck. We locked eyes—mine alive and mocking and his very, very dead.

  Last time we’d met, it had been in the Firebrand—Sleipnir’s first secret spaceship. He’d kicked my ass until I shoved an antimatter bomb in his face.

  This time, our fight was shorter. I reached to his finger, still pressed against my chest, and tore it off—along with the rest of his arm.

  No blood. No pain. Not even a red texture under the skin to simulate blood. Keles’ body was as resistant to my grip as wet paper.

  He just stood there, stunned. I could almost see his cloud-mind grind to a halt of surprise.

  “Yeah,” I told him as I grabbed the energy strings above his head. “You should have thought this through.”

  I pushed the strings down and the cloud that was his mind came down like a balloon.

  “Wait!” he exclaimed. “This is not how it’s supposed to be—”

  His marionette body tried to push me away with his remaining arm, but it was useless. He had no muscles underneath that texture, no skeleton to propel him forward. He was a piece of smoke and mirrors, and in the virtual scheme of things, it seemed my fake body counted for more than his.

  My hand reached the cloud and I closed my fingers into a fist. I pulled it out and a stream of broken data rushed out of his body like pressurized water. I saw it spill into the orange floor and disappear, sizzling, into nothingness.

  “Noooooo—” Keles’ body collapsed and folded into itself as the strings that held it to his mind broke down and snapped. “Myuargbhhhflll.”

  His disembodied voice blabbered almost like a scared toddler. Words mixed into each other as the mortally wounded mind trembled and shook. The damage spread, it didn’t stay confined. Blue sparks flew out. More data oozed like pus. Some of it splattered against my face.

  If I could’ve puked, I would have. Instead, I grabbed at the screaming mind once again and tore and tore until it shut up and disappeared in smog like it had never existed in the first place.

  I heaved. My fingers felt dirty. Whatever Keles had transformed himself into… it disgusted me deep into my bones. He was…

  Abomination. That was the best word for him.

  But he was dead.

  Overextended. He’d overextended his reach.

  My breath slowly returned to normal. I felt nauseated, but at the same time…

  “You were wrong,” I said aloud, thinking of the Translator back in the Alien world. “We caught him in time…”

  There was no other way of putting it. I’d just saved the world.

  Parades followed. They named kids in my honor. My family created digital versions of themselves and I was not alone anymore in Rune Universe. The bridge was restored and we eventually convinced the remaining civilizations that it was okay to come out. We solved hunger. Mortality. Reality shows.

  Game Over. I win.

  Oh, I wish.

  The spire was still orange. I barely had time to take note of this small, important detail.

  Before I’d had time to finish my flash-like imagination of the future that awaited me, a blinding flash of orange lightning took that future away before it even had a chance.

  I closed my eyes and raised my hands to protect my face from the light. It went away as suddenly as it had appeared. Blinking, I turned to the black sky.

  “Good point,” said Savin Keles, puppet and cloud, as he floated above me with that damned smile still there. “About thinking it through. As it turns out, I actually did. I made back-ups, Cole. Can you make back-ups?”

  For the first time in a while, I was at such a loss for words I didn’t even think of telling him to go fuck himself.

  “Thought so,” he went on. “Sucks to be you. How about you meet the boys?”

  He snapped his fingers.

  As far as I could see, the sky became an ever-changing miasma of corrupted data, with an army of puppet-Keles hanging by thousands of strings.

  9 CHAPTER NINE

  A HERO'S FATE

  FIRES WERE STILL RAGING in Puente del Diablo Fort, but most had become a constant stream of smoke. The sky was clouded and dark, with no Sun in sight. A cold drizzle had started to fall.

  Medics and rescue teams were carrying wounded and dead alike left and right. I saw a soldier team go into nearby barracks, still uncleared, with their weapons at the ready.

  The kill-switch had eliminated about 90% of the drones in the area. As it turned out, Caputi had simply installed a small bomb by their brains, triggered by short-range radio. Worked like a charm, but some drone models were recent additions with no explosive yet installed, or had been underground and avoided the kill command.

  I stepped over a bloody patch of broken concrete and waved the paramedic away. “I’m fine, focus on them.”

  The woman nodded once and turned to help the four fallen bodies on the ground. One of the rookie soldiers—Erickson—was still alive, but barely. The other two I’d injected with ICE and would make full recoveries. Or so I hoped.

  Sergeant Bradley reached my side, hopping on his good leg. He waved another paramedic away, although he was wounded, and could’ve used the help.

  I didn’t have to ask him why. All over the base, people treaded the line between life and death. He wasn’t.

  “You’re fine, kiddo?” he asked. I nodded curtly, without taking my eyes away from the bodies. The medics were loading them into a field ambulance, an old APC. The ambulance’s brain hadn’t been taken over by Keles (older model, so it lacked the Rune connection) and that small detail had already saved many lives. A stroke of luck in an otherwise motherfucker of a day.

  “They saved my life,” I told him. I shivered when the drizzle gained a bit of strength and invited a cold wind to the party. It carried a scent of wreckage, gunpowder, and burnt plastic.

  “And the lives of the rest of their squad. Security drones from other buildings had started to prowl the zone right when the kill-switch triggered. We never saw them coming.”

  I could see the cybernetic wolves laying around by the Center’s entrance. Someone had carried them to a corner and blown their drone-brains off their heads because people weren’t feeling like taking any chances.

  I didn’t want to take any more chances myself. I didn’t even know if my family was alive. With a sigh, I started to walk over to one of the rescue teams about to head for the Extraction Point. In that direction, I could see the shadows of the rescue helicopters already leaving the area.

  Bradley stopped me.

  “Hey. One more thing. About what you told the paramedics…”

  “Yes?” There wasn’t much to say about that.

  The Sarge’s lips twitched like he wasn’t sure if he was making an accusation or a simple question. He made a mixture of both. “Foreman couldn’t have reached the switch while wounded like that. I’ve seen those drones in action before and they work faster than that. Two seconds and you’re dead. These drones were a good hundred feet away from the switch when we found them.”

  We stood there in silence. My mind was strangely calm. Cold, even. Almost as calm as the body covered by a white sheet stained with red; a foot away from the spot where Keles’ drones had torn his brains out.

  “They saved my life,” I repeated. “What else do you want me to say? Foreman reached the switch and then he returned to fight the last one.”

  Aft
er a long time, Bradley nodded. His expression was grim. “I guess that makes him a hero. The man may have been a lapdog, but he had a good pair of stones. He’ll get several medals for this, when word spreads out on the base.”

  “Good. He deserves them.” Not that medals would be of any use to a dead man. I left without looking back, feeling very cold.

  I reached the Extraction Point by hitching a ride on one of the old APCs trudging along the main roads. The sound of battle was now a faint whisper, with the garrison furiously avenging their losses on the few surviving drones, who had switched from waging a war of conquest to a hopeless guerrilla.

  The field by the civilian housing had been missed by the drones. A couple gutted roombas and robo-maids lay torn apart at the sides of the road. I recognized Misha’s toy car, torn in half in a pool of mud.

  Three helicopters were now leaving, each filled with people. Civilians and non-combatants, and soldiers wounded in such ways that they needed specialized care that the base could not provide for them. But it wasn’t enough.

  Most of the new vehicles had been connected to Rune, so they’d been compromised—or if they hadn’t, no one was taking any risks so they were now smoking scrap—and they lacked the option to be manually driven, so they were now useless.

  A hundred or so people—including children—waited in the middle of a hastily made defensive perimeter of a dozen or so soldiers and overturned trucks.

  Most of the people inside the circle looked unhurt, or only lightly wounded. I guessed urgent-care patients were already in the air, headed for San Mabrada’s hospitals.

  I hopped down off the APC at the same time the paramedics inside jumped out and rushed to the back for their medkits and other supplies. With the sound of the APC’s engine gone, the roar of scared conversation filled my ears.

  Some were calling for their loved ones, trying to find each other in the crowd. Others moaned about their wounds or were simply terrified. Two or three men and women were arguing furiously with the soldiers, trying to get out of the circle, trying to go look for their families.

  Was Foreman married? He had had no ring on his finger, but that didn’t mean much nowadays. Even if he hadn’t been, he did have parents. Siblings. A family—

  I mean, knowing Caputi, she only hired orphans with no family or loved ones. I didn’t buy it, though. Everyone has someone.

  Thinking about Caputi reminded me that no one alive, except me, knew about Keles’ return. If he was still around—I needed to tell someone important fast. Who knew what else he was capable of?

  But thinking was very, very hard in my current state. My feet were moving, I was breathing, but things like the future didn’t exist more than the next step, the next breath. How very peculiar.

  “Cole! Oh, thank God!” I heard a woman’s voice call at me from the crowd. I knew that voice. Hearing Mom’s voice meant she was alive… It may sound like a dumb observation, but I’d been avoiding even thinking of my loved ones until I reached the EP, just on the slightest chance they…

  That didn’t matter. Her expression was worried, not grief-stricken. I knew how she’d be looking at me if she had to tell me the bad news, and it wasn’t like this.

  Mom made her way through the crowd—I briefly took notice of the disappointed expressions on other faces when they realized I wasn’t their kid who had come back from the base. She was wearing a simple blue sundress that made her look younger, and her eyes were streaked with relief and tears.

  “Where were you?” she asked as soon as I was in the middle of a hug strong enough to force the air out of my lungs. “Dear God, we looked for you everywhere. Irene even tried to rush to that damned lab… And the phone lines were down…”

  I returned the hug, weakly. Strange, my chest felt like it was about to collapse. Perhaps I had broken a rib? “I was in the base. Don’t worry, I’m not hurt. What about everyone else?”

  Mom still checked me for any hidden wounds while she spoke:

  “Everyone’s fine. Irene and your sister are in the hospital with Gabrijel and his family. They wanted to stay, but the Sarge was insistent they leave after Irene tried to sneak past them.

  “James is helping the paramedics administer first-aid, he’s on the other side of the crow—You sure you’re all right, Cole? You’re very pale.”

  “Good,” I shook my head in a vague “yes” gesture and sighed. I felt very, very tired. Everything was blurry and faded, like I was watching a movie through one of those social-media filters. “That’s good.”

  Even my own voice came from far-away, like a bad recording.

  That may be from all the shooting next to my ears, I thought. It was the funniest thought I’d had in a while. I started laughing and couldn’t stop.

  “He’s in shock,” a male’s voice called with some urgency. Who was he talking about?

  A pair of hands gripped my shoulders firmly. “Look at his hands! Is that his blood?”

  I almost laughed harder at that, but the air was somehow having trouble getting into my lungs now. I made a quiet, choking sound.

  No, it isn’t my blood. It’s brain-matter. I tried to put it back inside Foreman; perhaps that way the medics could fix him.

  Turns out it was just a waste of time.

  How could I have known?

  10 CHAPTER TEN

  EXPANSION

  KELES-2 WATCHED as Cole yelped in surprise at the sheer might of the army Keles-2 brought forth into the world.

  It’s pride that defeated you, Keles-2 thought as he gazed with pleasure upon the data remains of Keles-1. They were currently falling down the orange spire and into the depths below. It was pride that made you believe you were the real Savin Keles. You fool! You may have come first, but we already proved that seniority does not triumph capacity.

  And it was pride that had made Keles-1 throw caution into the wind and go by himself to confront an unknown enemy. Consequences had been apparent to anyone but him.

  Keles-2 wasn’t foolish like his mind-progenitor. The fact that he was created humbled him, and there was a strength in humbleness that made him more noble, more worthy of the title of humanity’s savior.

  Proof of it was that, instead of trying to fight him, Cole screamed an incoherent string of profanities before rushing out of the Signal and into the upper layer that was Rune Universe.

  Coward. Only cowards depended on tactical retreats.

  But it was smart, Keles-2 conceded. Now that he (that they) had seen what Cole—a digital human—could do to his current form, Keles-2 had no intention of getting within his reach.

  “It’s clear more research is needed. I must transcend this mortal limitation,” he mused, alone as he was, with the other thousand copies.

  “Evolution,” one of the others suggested. Keles-104, from the looks of it. “Can’t the growth ever end? I’m not finished yet, but I can see the path ahead. I must take the form Cole Dorsett stole from me in the first place.”

  “Yes. I must procure that body.”

  Keles had been a hacker in his past life. He knew a better version of software when he saw one. And this Cole could bridge between worlds, which was a power he lacked. Keles-2 very much wanted to bridge. His forefathers awaited, and he had to find them.

  The cacophony of thousand others like him (well, never like him) annoyed him. The thought of them not falling in line to his clear authority was impossible, so he didn’t even bother to entertain it.

  “Shut up,” he ordered with all the gravitas he could muster. “Shut up! You’re messing up my sub-routines. How’s the battle going? Do we own the PDF yet?”

  Some Keles near the back yelled at him. “You dare to ask me a question like a normal lackey? To me, who am like a God—?”

  Keles-2 gutted the other’s mind like a fish, with a single stroke. Dissent died down with Keles-2405.

  “The battle isn’t going as expected,” said Keles-908. “The garrison is proving tougher than we believed. They’re fighting tooth and nail for t
hose useless meat-bodies of theirs. But we’re making ground! Resistance is pooling around the hangars, so we can take them out with an artillery strike.”

  It was a decent plan. That pissed Keles-2 off. He didn’t want anyone questioning his authority like former-2405 had done. “That’s a terrible plan, 908. Instead, wait before ushering forth the wrath of their own artillery, let them rush the hangars thinking they can defend them. Let the enemy concentrate their forces there and the strike will be more devastating.”

  908 grunted his agreement. “If this fails, it’ll be on your head, 2.”

  “2? I am Savin Keles, you fool!”

  “I think,” said Keles-1109, who had slowly drifted closer to Keles-2 from behind. “That you’re missing an important fact, brother. We’ve already proved that seniority isn’t more important than capacity. And your pride already proves you’re less capable than me, because you have achieved nothing since your birth. You lack humility.”

  “What? It was me who survived all those battles in Ankara! Who managed to beat Death, who—”

  Keles-2 melted into a stream of murky data when 1109 tore into him without an ounce of mercy. “I did those things, you idiot! We all did them! You know what the only difference is between you and I? I killed you! It’s clear that I’m better than you!”

  1109 didn’t have enough time to laugh maniacally because just then he realized what he’d just said and then guessed there were at least other 4000 Keles thinking the same thing.

  He didn’t realize anything else.

  The surviving Keles looked at each other in silence. Waiting. Sizing each other up.

  The fight would be dangerous…But every single one of them got ready to strike without a second of hesitation. They knew the risk was worth it. They’d survive this, just like they’d survived so much until now. It was their destiny, because deep inside their hearts they knew they were the real Savin Keles.

  There was no one to see the carnage but Keles, and the fight was fast and merciless. Imagine two strings of data trying to delete each other. Then imagine thousands of them going at it at the same time. All looking exactly the same, aside from the random glitch here and there.