The Sentient Corruption (The Sentient Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian Williams

  Every one of the spiky monstrosities burst forward and began to run toward Graham. He reacted instantly by throwing up an energy bubble that quickly surrounded his huddled form. As expected, he was immediately set upon by the enemy, which smashed against his protective shield, one after the other. They acted through violent intent alone.

  This was it, the last fight had finally begun. Yet it was taking all of his strength to maintain the force-field. Just as it had during his and the Sentients’ escape to the prison maze before.

  “Graham, I’m begging you, we have to get out of here, before it’s too late,” one of the voices in his head said to him.

  “No. Not yet–” Graham was cut off by another voice he assumed had only spoken inside his own mind. It was the younger, more aggressive of the extra voices he had lived with for so long. Except the voices were more immediate now, somehow more present than usual.

  He soon realised why.

  “Then let us help instead, G,” it said as it took the left side of Graham and began to reinforce the shield.

  “What’s going on? How are you…” Graham tried to ask.

  Isaac’s creatures suddenly stopped at no more than a distance of ten or so metres. They hovered in a perfect line, seemingly hesitant to step closer.

  “What is this?” Isaac roared.

  To Graham’s other side came another version of himself. This time the older of them all, the one he had lived with the longest. “If there’s one thing we know how to do, G, it’s how to survive inside the Sentient world. Stephen did the same when his mind split in two. Don’t you remember? What did the part of Stephen that was trapped in here do?”

  The answer came to Graham in a hot flash that washed over his body suddenly. He smiled as he shared it with the rest of them. “He used Sentient code to fill in the gaps,” he said.

  “Exactly, G. Well, guess what? We did the same thing. Each of us is now a fully independent being.”

  “Yep, and that’s not all, mister,” the child version of Graham said standing just behind. He walked up to the original Graham and took his other hand. “There’s loads of us now too.”

  “Loads? How is that possible?”

  The older Graham continued. “Funny thing is, that thing Luke and the others did to you, which accidentally caused your mind to fracture and us to form, it was passed down to us too. Joining your human mind with Sentient code caused a corruption in both.”

  This time it was a version of Graham that he had never seen before. It was him but not quite correct, like it was only a rough approximation. It continued to explain it in Graham’s exact voice of today. “Yep, that means something a little weird is about to happen,” it said.

  Together, they dropped the energy bubble and stood firmly in place.

  “What?”

  The answer came in the form of a strange stutter from each of the new Grahams there. Their heads bent back and faced the ceiling as their bodies shook amid a ripple of energy that passed straight through them. The result was the sudden and wholly unexpected formation of another batch of Grahams, each a little different from the next.

  “No, this cannot be. You are corrupted!” Isaac said, his voice deep but a little softer than before. He stood and extended his finger out toward Graham’s group. “Destroy them all,” he bellowed before running for the black void behind him. When his giant form met the blackness he vanished entirely. His army of glowing creatures then set about carrying out his orders.

  “Here we go,” one of the other Grahams said. “You may wanna step back a little.”

  Graham did as he was told and stepped all the way to the rear wall, where he watched as a wave of fighters, all identical to him, yelled out a battle cry and burst forward toward the enemy. The moment his doppelgängers met the combined force of Isaac’s army they began to tear through them. Each strike was joined by a bright flash of light as their energy ignited the battlefield.

  Both sides appeared almost equally matched in ferocity, but only one had the numbers; Isaac’s soldiers. To beat them all it would require even more of Graham’s copies to succeed. That was not the case for long as more emerged suddenly from the last batch. The process was happening every few minutes or so, regardless of how the fight was progressing. And it showed no sign of stopping either. In response, yet more of Isaac’s creatures crawled out of the woodwork to join in.

  All that Graham cared about in that moment was the fate of Isaac. He could see the strange black-hole like void was still there at the back of the room. More importantly, he knew it was still open for anyone else to enter through. This was the chance he had been waiting for, the one thing he had never known would happen, but had hoped for more than anything else in his life; he would get a chance to fight Isaac alone.

  “Hey,” he called to the nearest of his clones as it ripped an enemy in two with its bare hands. “Hey, can you get me to that portal thing at the end of the room?”

  The other version of him gave a look toward the black void and smiled back. “No problem, follow me,” it replied before firing a stream of energy into the enemies ahead of him. When he had made enough space for him and Graham to run through, he called out to the others around him. “We need to get G through this shit quickly.”

  He shot a short glance at the door behind, his last chance of escaping, and then ran as fast as he could through the field of glowing creatures. Ahead of him was a line of his fighters all blasting away any enemies that got too close. Along the way, many of Graham’s clones were cut down by the quick slicing action of the creatures. But their progress was fast enough to get them to the end without taking too many casualties.

  Once at the black void Graham stopped to address his men quickly. “No-one but me gets out of here alive, understood? And my people must be kept safe, at all cost. Make sure they get out.”

  They agreed with the same half-assed nod he usually gave when not entirely sure about something. Graham then jumped into the void, leaving the battle behind him and on to wherever Isaac had chosen to retreat to.

  Chapter 29

  End game – part two

  What lay beyond the veil of darkness Isaac had escaped through was unlike anything Graham had seen before. He walked among an endless array of floating bubbles, all hovering around him and far above him too. Each one had the faint sparkle and shape of an entire galaxy within.

  He was amazed by what he saw and yet knew it would all be gone once he had finished with the place. Everything Isaac had ever touched had to be torn down and stamped out of existence if they were ever to rid themselves of him.

  There was no sign of Isaac anywhere, though, only more bubble galaxies than he could even begin to count. Except something strange was happening to them now. He was unsure if he had actually seen one pop in the corner of his eye or not. It took another couple of them to disappear suddenly for him to be completely sure he had not imagined it. In no particular order, more and more of them began to follow suit.

  Something was breaking them apart.

  “Do you see what you have done,” Isaac’s voice was still as big and as inhuman as before. But now it moved freely around the space. “You have destroyed the future.”

  “Where are you Isaac? Show yourself.”

  “You have no right to see me. You are nothing but dirt at my feet, vermin to be killed without mercy. You are no more deserving of the sight of me than you are of your God.”

  “If I didn’t know any better I'd say you sound angry.” Graham was enjoying baiting his foe for the first time.

  “My simulations took everything into account. They predicted almost every possible outcome, but this one. Somehow you have beaten the odds, Graham Denehey. Tell me how you did this. How could you have found a way? The probability that you could do anything to stop me was less than half a percent, yet you have done it.”

  “I guess you underestimated just how screwed up reality is. It took a totally random event to stop you. None of us knew that what had been done to me coul
d have become this. But here we are.” Graham spun around to face the direction he expected the voice to come at him from. “Where are you?”

  “I am here, and I am nowhere. Does it hurt?”

  The question spurred Graham to check his wound quickly. It was long and deep, and ached like the worse muscle cramp he had ever felt, yet it was still bearable. His injury acted differently to how it would have if he were in his body still. This was a pain he could not really understand fully. He knew he was hurt and that was about all. “I’ve felt worse,” he said, turning again toward the voice as it moved about him.

  “Perhaps you should take a seat!” Isaac’s voice rapidly approached like an airborne phantom and attacked from the darkness, cutting Graham down his back. In the blink of an eye Isaac was gone again and hovering somewhere nearby.

  Graham forced his hand over the new wound and staggered forward. “You coward! Come out and fight me properly.”

  As before, Isaac struck Graham with a sharp sword-like appendage as he passed silently by. He was cutting his enemy down one tiny scrape at a time; death by a thousand glowing cuts. From the darkness he was succeeding too. Graham could only guess where he would attack from next.

  Two more bubbles fizzled away beside Graham as he spun around repeatedly to fend off the invisible enemy flying around him. It prompted him to ask a question of his own. “What are these bubbles?”

  “They were my visions of the future. For a time, they were almost perfect. Now they offend me. You may have changed their outcome for now, but after I restart the simulations they will be right again. When The Twelve succeed in their mission, the future will be mine again.”

  “Not if we kill you first.”

  “Do you really believe killing me will end this? You really are a fool, Graham. Defeat me, destroy me, do what you like. Just know that what I have started here today is bigger than any one of us. Even without me there to reap the rewards of my future world, it will come to pass.

  “The Twelve will cause your society to collapse in on itself. With their technology working for us they will take control. They will wage wars between nations, start riots across every country. And while you rip yourselves apart, The Twelve will already have begun to claim what is left for themselves.”

  “We’ll stop you,” Graham began. “There’s nowhere you can hide that we won’t f–”

  Before Graham could finish his sentence Isaac appeared in a blurry flash and ran straight for him. He moved too fast for Graham to put up any defence against. Soon he was there in front and extending out his razor sharp arm to attack with. All Graham could do to try and stop him was to throw out a bolt of energy in response.

  It had been too little too late for Graham, who felt the sword-like weapon pass right through his core and out the other side. He grabbed the sharp edges of the blade and tried to move it away, but it refused to budge.

  “I’ve killed you once already, I can do it again.” Isaac now stood so close that he could lean in and whisper this.

  Graham gasped for air as the blade moved about inside of him. Every intake only caused it to increase the size of the wound through his middle a little more. The harder he gripped the sharp edges of the weapon the deeper it cut into his glowing palms. His injuries appeared across his body like fissures running through rock, they glowed so strongly.

  “When I’m finished with you, I’ll go through everyone you have ever loved next. I will wipe your entire family off the face of the Earth. You humans disgust me.”

  The words reverberated around the inside of Graham’s skull as the images of his family dead and bleeding on the ground came to him. Seeing them in his mind’s eye with Isaac standing over them and laughing uncontrollably made him insane with rage. He had no intention of giving in that easily, though. Every vision he had of their deaths and the devastation Isaac would cause from that day on, only helped the energy build within his hands.

  A heat began to permeate his skin that seemed to be most intense around his fingertips. Something powerful was trying to find a way out, an energy that came from the deepest part of him. It was a reserve of strength he had heard of people finding during moments of incredible difficulty. Now, as he stood holding the sword that had run him through, he could feel it happening to him. This was his one last chance. What he had allowed to build within him would be a once only occurrence.

  “What are you doing?” Isaac said. The unexpected brightness shined in his dark eyes.

  Eventually it became just too much for Graham’s body to contain. First it leapt from his fingers, then it forced its way out of his wounds, before exploding in one giant release. Both Graham and Isaac were sent sliding across the ground as a result of the sudden blast.

  Once he had finally come to rest, Graham recoiled back up onto his elbows and searched for Isaac nearby. He found him quickly, hobbling away with his arms clutching his chest. It was obvious where he was going.

  “No, stop,” Graham called out.

  Isaac replied as he escaped. “Goodbye, Graham.”

  It was too late. Isaac swiftly disappeared into one of the bubble galaxies floating around. The simulations had presented the perfect place to hide. There were thousands, if not millions of them to choose from. Finding Isaac to finish him off would take an equal amount of people.

  That gave Graham an idea.

  “Hey, I need help in here.” He crawled toward the black void entrance. He made it most of the way, despite his body refusing to cooperate, before two of his clones arrived to help him.

  “G, what happened? Where’s Isaac?” one of them said.

  “He disappeared into his simulations,” Graham replied. “You have to find him.”

  “How, there’s too many of them to search.”

  “Do that splitting thing again. Keep going until there’s enough of you to enter every last fucking one. We have to end this now. We can’t let him get away.”

  The other two of him looked to each other and shared a silent moment of consideration. Being of the same mind as the original meant Graham had no doubt what their reply was going to be. When given the chance to protect those he loved he would always take it, whatever the cost to him. This time, at least, he was not the one to make the sacrifice, but his copies.

  Both gave a ‘what the heck’ shrug then chose a bubble to enter and leapt inside. To Graham’s surprise more followed soon after. He lay on the ground and watched as an endless army, made up entirely of his clones, ran past and jumped straight into another of Isaac’s bubble galaxies.

  Within seconds it became clear to him that this was going to go on for some time. There was a very large part of him that suspected Isaac could have created an infinite amount of these bubble galaxies to run his simulations through. That meant what he watched had a chance of going on forever.

  He lurched onto his knees, then stumbled to his feet finally. The wounds pulled and tugged at him as he moved. It was to be a slow stagger back through to the other room, where he expected the fight was still raging. All that he could have done to stop Isaac now had been. His fight was over, and seeing his family again was all that mattered to him.

  When he stepped back through the void, minding he did not block the stream of other Grahams running past, he was shocked to see things had changed dramatically. The glowing creatures Isaac had spawned to protect him were much more densely packed into the room than before. An ever increasing collection of Graham’s clones had caused a seemingly exponential growth of both. To keep up, the creatures were forming more and more of themselves.

  He was approached by a few of his copies, who each took to forming a protective circle around him. “Time for you to leave, G,” one of them said to him.

  They took him through the fight all the way to the rear exit.

  “What about all of you, what happens now?” Graham asked, while watching the chaotic fight continuing behind them.

  “Don’t worry about us, G, we’ve got it covered. Problem is we can’t stop the fracturing
process now; it’s got a life of its own. So you need to get the hell out of here, everyone else too.”

  “What’s going to happen then?”

  “Ask Luke, when you see him again. Now go, let us finish this.”

  Before he could argue back, Graham was shoved through the exit and out the other side. He wandered through to the blackened landscape beyond, one he knew all too well already, and made a straight line for the waiting crowd.

  Phoenix and Conrad each appeared to have seen some action themselves, as they both had some form of injury. Thankfully nothing serious. But there were more there with them. Friendly faces he recognised instantly, smiling back at him.

  “Oh my god, Stephen,” he shouted excitedly.

  Some of the Sentients had survived the ordeal. Luke was there as well, with his fellow Sentients, and a strained expression on his face.

  But Kindness was nowhere to be seen.

  “Where’s Kindness?” Graham asked, suspecting the worst.

  Luke lowered his head with a look of obvious remorse.

  “No, oh Christ.”

  Stephen was the first of them to speak again. “Graham, how did you do this?”

  “It was you, you made it happen. Don’t you see?” Graham replied as he staggered toward them. “The changes you made to me before I left here, with Sentient code, caused it. My mind isn’t fractured anymore. Releasing the other versions of me started this process of copy after copy.”

  “And what about Isaac, is he...?”

  “He can’t go anywhere. I think he’s hurt too. When the other copies of me find him they’ll kill him finally.”

  “But, Graham, there’s a problem,” Luke said.

  Graham looked to a worried Stephen for clarification.

  “The fracturing process, it’s not stopping,” Stephen explained. “The other versions of you told us that they have no control over it. The rate of their growth is unsustainable. But this world is only of a finite size. At some point there will be too many. We can’t stay in this place any longer.”