The Rising

by Heather Graham

  Machines building machines.

  A machine army to be commanded by whoever came through the wormhole channel, which must have been somewhere else in the complex, out of sight from this vantage point, if Donati’s conclusions about her findings were correct.

  The pale surface flesh was sprayed on the fully assembled cyborgs in thick sheaths at a final station before they dropped down a conveyor through the floor, likely toward another assembly line where their unfinished chips would be programmed to enable them to spring to mechanical life at the flip of a switch. Capable of accepting complex instructions and fulfilling assignments as detailed and specific as the one that brought four to Alex’s house in the guise of fake cops. Looking, talking, and acting almost entirely human.

  Then Sam remembered the strange language she’d heard them conversing in outside Alex’s house. Obviously the language of their home planet, the programming performed by designers limited to expertise in that language. She guessed the cyborgs were equipped with learning chips capable of cross-converting one language instantly into another to the point where they would always “think” in their native language but speak in the language of whomever they found themselves among. No reason to do that when they weren’t aware anyone else was listening, to save functional RAM and power.

  Machines indeed. If only she could find the plug and pull it. If only it was that simple.

  “I should’ve brought explosives,” Raiff said, still straight and stiff as steel.

  “You’d need a boatload to make an impact here,” Donati told him. “And that says nothing about the God-knows-how-many other facilities like this that are out there.”

  “I’ll find them,” Raiff said, but his voice lacked the surety his words implied. “I’ll find them all.”

  “Right now, this is the one where they’re going to open the wormhole,” Alex interjected. “This is the only one that matters. For now, anyway.”

  Raiff ran his eyes along the endless expanse around him. “Now’s all we’ve got, Dancer.”

  Alex led the way down the catwalk, bringing them to the midpoint of the massive underground assembly line beneath them. They rounded a corner and came into clearer view of the next stage of the process, where the unfinished cyborgs were sprayed with flesh-colored tint, had glass eyes fitted over their swirling orbs. It looked also like the assembling mechanism fit them with distinguishing features, like various hairstyles and facial lines, scars, flesh tones. This suggested the assemblers built each unit with infiltration in mind, as well as assault.

  And speaking of assault, another assembly station that had just come into Alex’s view was making stubby, rifle-like weapons with short, thick barrels. He had no idea what they fired but doubted very much it was bullets as he, or anyone else, understood them. He thought of all the science fiction movies he tried to watch after Sam boasted enthusiastically of their classic nature. He’d never finished a single one, but remembered enough of what he had seen to realize that this scene could have been lifted from any number of them, in one way or another. Art unknowingly imitating life that was much too real.

  “Still no trace of the wormhole mechanism,” Sam noted.

  “It would almost surely require its own level,” Donati explained. “The energy required to open the wormhole, formulate the space bridge, at this end would result in incredible, even immeasurable heat transference from radiation that would require a particle accelerator on the level of Cern, Brookhaven, or Tevatron.”

  “Or Laboratory Z, right, Doctor?” Alex asked him. “What would it look like?”

  “A tunnel, long and tubular. It would have to be tubular to properly use electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles to high speeds and to contain them in well-defined beams. The very definition of a supercollider. It would use oscillating field accelerators to generate radio-frequency electromagnetic fields to achieve the particle acceleration.”

  “If we can’t see it now,” Alex picked up, when Donati seemed to run out of breath, “it’s got to be beneath us.”

  Almost on cue, a steel spiral staircase that looked like a massive drill bit forging deep into the bowels of the Earth appeared before him. Alex never hesitated. Still holding Sam’s hand tight, he started toward it, forgetting all about the invisible safety line the chip in his head formed around the four of them.

  “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea, Dancer,” Raiff said, holding his ground. “At least let me—”

  A shrill, piercing alarm swallowed the rest of his words.

  “Raiff!” Alex yelled to him, realizing he and Sam had strayed a dozen feet ahead, clearly too much separation to continue projecting a protective shroud over them.

  “Keep going!” Raiff shouted. “Go!”

  Alex yanked Sam on toward the exposed stairwell, her eyes having trouble breaking their hold on Donati’s.

  “Move!” Raiff wailed. “Don’t stop!”

  And they hurtled toward the stairwell drilled down farther than the eye could see, while Raiff swung toward the cyborg guards converging on him.

  104

  DESCENDING SPIRAL

  “DON’T LOOK BACK!” ALEX yelled over the incessant wail to Sam. “And don’t leave me!”

  “Don’t worry!”

  She clung to him, not about to let go. The stairwell spiraling downward was closer to them than it had seemed. They stepped onto the platform at its top, even with the floor of the catwalk, together.

  And then the stairwell started to move.

  At first, Sam thought it was an illusion, then she realized, no, this was really happening. The stairwell was indeed churning, picking up speed on a descending spiral that pushed the air past them in gushes.

  “Close your eyes!” Alex ordered, hugging her tight against him.

  The spiraling descent continued, everything around them visible only as a whirling blur. Sam opened her eyes. She’d always imagined she could see the miniscule particles that made up air rippling before her and that’s what this felt like now, as if she were watching the air itself swirl around them.

  She was still hugging Alex when the swirling seemed to slow, an entirely new phenomenon starting to sharpen around them. She recalled Donati’s and the professor’s descriptions of the particle accelerator they’d constructed at Laboratory Z and realized she was looking at what could only be a far more sophisticated and technologically advanced version of that.

  Enabling the wormhole that would open again from the other side. A cylindrical, tubular channel of black steel interlaced with thick glass panels, fifteen feet or so in height and wide enough for a car to pass through. It reminded Sam of the Chunnel, which ran beneath the English Channel connecting Britain and France. If she remembered her lessons correctly, once activated a particle accelerator of this size and magnitude would generate power on a millisecond level equal to that of the grid powering an entire city or even state.

  “Oh, shit,” she heard Alex say, figuring he was seeing the same thing she was.

  Until her vision cleared, settling on a shape standing before them that wasn’t totally there.

  “Hello again, Alex,” said the ash man.

  * * *

  Raiff felt the handle of his stick weapon heating up and thought it into its whip form as the first wave of cyborgs descended upon him and Donati. Keeping the NASA scientist close behind him on the catwalk, Raiff lashed the whip out, up and down, side to side, slicing through everything in its path. The air filled with a baked-rubber-and-hot-steel scent, mixed with the corrosive odor of burned wiring. Residue of what his cuts with the whip-like weapon had left in its path: broken machines collapsing in heaps to the ground.

  Raiff continued retracing their steps back to the elevator, a junkyard left in his wake. The first wave of androids weren’t equipped with weapons but the second wave, reinforcements surging up from the levels below, carried plasma rifles every bit the equal of his whip and capable of working at much greater distances. Up close, along the narrow width and clos
e confines of the catwalk, which forced the cyborgs into a virtual single-file attack, Raiff’s whip proved enough to hold them at bay all the way back to the elevator.

  Raiff shoved Donati into the open cab ahead of him and pressed the “up” arrow. The door slid closed just ahead of the cyborgs opening fire, their plasma rounds boring effortlessly through the elevator’s old-fashioned heavy steel door as the cab shook into hydraulic motion.

  “Are we supposed to outrun them?” Donati managed to say between gasps.

  “I haven’t figured that part out yet,” Raiff told him.

  “What about—”

  “He’ll be fine. The girl too.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  Raiff’s stare bore into Donati’s. “Yes, I can.”

  The elevator trembled to a halt, squealed into place. The door slid open.

  “Don’t goddamn move!” ordered Rathman.

  * * *

  The ash man’s voice sounded like pieces of ground glass rubbing against each other. Utterances somehow stringing themselves into words. He stood before them maybe a dozen feet in front of the entrance to the particle accelerator, which once activated would trigger the sequence ending the world as it was known today. Maybe ten feet before Alex and Sam.

  “I didn’t give you enough credit, Alex,” the ash man continued. “I never thought you would get this far, especially so fast.”

  “I had help,” Alex told him, stepping protectively in front of Sam.

  “You don’t understand.”

  “What don’t I understand?”

  “The truth, who you really are. Have you stopped to think why you, why an infant, was made guardian of knowledge vital to our civilization?”

  “I haven’t had a lot of time to think lately.”

  The ash man seemed to move, or float, closer, looming larger in one moment than he had in the last. “I should have told you the truth of your identity the first time we met.”

  “After you killed my parents, you piece of shit!”

  The ash man looked utterly unmoved by Alex’s feisty show of emotion. “The truth of who you are and why you were taken through one wormhole lies on the other side of this one,” he said in that ground-glass voice, tilting his gaze toward the tunnel, which weaved its way beneath Alcatraz Island. Then he extended a grainy hand forward, the palm seeming almost translucent. “Join me on that other side, Alex. We can take the girl with us if you wish.”

  And with that the cylindrical entrance to the accelerator opened, disappearing into the thick steel walls to reveal a brightly lit tunnel that seemed to stretch emptily forever.

  “Embrace your true identity and take the place that is rightfully yours,” the ash man continued, stretching a hazy hand forward. “Come back to your world.”

  “This is my world!” Alex screamed at him and, for the first time, Sam realized the shrill alarm wasn’t sounding down here. “This is my world!”

  “It won’t be for very much longer.”

  * * *

  “Drop the weapon!” the big bald man wailed on, Raiff watching his eyes, sizing up the situation. “Where’s the boy? What have you done with him?”

  The hall beyond him seemed dimmer to Raiff than it had when they’d first traversed it, as if power were being pulled away from down below. The overhead lighting faded, flickered, and Raiff realized a power drain wasn’t to blame, that something else was …

  coming …

  “The boy,” the giant standing before him resumed, “where is he?”

  Raiff never had a chance to answer. A rumble seemed to pulse through the whole of the prison structure before the floor broke apart along an endless cascade of crisscrossing fault lines. Gaps opening in the cracking tile through which the cyborgs burst with their plasma rifles at the ready.

  Raiff shoved Donati against the elevator’s far wall, covering him protectively as the battle erupted beyond. The plasma rifles made a pinging sound, something like a toy weapon might, white heat erupting from their barrel bores instead of a muzzle flash. All this in eerie contrast to the steady rat-tat-tat of the human force’s assault rifles, their fire deafening in the narrow confines of the hallway.

  Raiff watched the soldiers of Langston Marsh’s Fifth Column being slaughtered in virtually effortless fashion by an army that provided the ultimate vindication of Marsh’s obsessive crusade. The sounds of screams and the incessant barrage of fire continued to hollow their hearing, and Raiff realized Donati was screaming in cadence with the constant cacophony of gunplay.

  Marsh’s forces tried to make a stand while seeking some form of cover, only to have the plasma rounds fired by the cyborg army trace their trails wherever they darted. The rounds flared in the semidarkness like streams of light, darkening only when they hit their targets and obliterating whatever lay in their path.

  Raiff had been in this world so long that he’d practically forgotten the fearsome impact of the weaponry from his world. As advanced beyond this world’s as virtually every other form of technology. Strangely, the plasma rounds ejected with only that soft pfffffft, just a hissing in the air as they sizzled through it en route to their targets.

  The big bald man who was obviously the leader of this phalanx of Marsh’s Fifth Column managed to hang on to the last, amid the sprawl of spilled bodies around him. He was holding a pair of M4 assault rifles in hand, firing them while wailing himself and managing to take down a few of the cyborgs in his relentless spray. His eyes locked briefly with Raiff’s when he crossed even with the elevator cab, sweeping his assault rifles toward him, when a series of plasma rounds tore into the man and blew him apart, pieces scattered all directions.

  The damn machines saved us, Raiff thought, but only for the moment.

  “How good are you with that thing?” Donati asked, eyeing the stick into which the whip had receded.

  “I guess we’re about to find out,” Raiff said, his whip flashing to life again.

  * * *

  “You must believe me, Alex,” the ash man continued, as a hot, static-riddled wave blew out from the entrance of the accelerator, like a wind-powered magnet drawing them toward it. “These aren’t your people, that isn’t even your name. Come with me now, so I may show you the way, the truth. Come with me to the other side, millions of light-years from here where your true destiny awaits.”

  The ash man said something else, but Sam didn’t hear him. She looked at his spectral image superimposed against the particle accelerator tunnel behind him, began to consider the incredible amount of energy it would take to fold space over to create a pathway between these two worlds.

  Positive energy.

  That took her to the projection of the ash man, transmitted almost surely by some sort of electromagnetic energy. And yet Alex had cut that transmission in half, implying the projection must be some hybrid or held together in all likelihood by an excess of electrons.

  Negative energy.

  The ash man was talking again, Alex still listening, when Sam crept closer to him.

  “What causes a spark?” she said softly, hoping he recalled the lesson of their last tutoring session.

  Alex cocked his gaze toward her.

  “What causes a spark?” Sam repeated.

  His eyes widened, realizing what she was getting at, what happened when positive and negative charges collided.

  “I’m offering you a chance,” the ash man was saying, “I’m offering you the future.”

  “Here’s your future, asshole.”

  And with that Alex was in motion. To Sam he looked just as he did on the football field, barreling forward to take down a ball carrier. Only this time it was the ash man he barreled into, slipping partially through his spectral image on contact even as the image was driven backward.

  Straight for the entrance to the particle accelerator.

  The ash man seemed to float through the air, slipping through the entrance, where his form stretched out to the length of the ceiling, elongated, as if it were made o
f rubber. Then Sam watched a shower of lightning bolt–like sparks erupt, firing and dancing everywhere, seeming to both strike and emanate from him at the same time.

  “Noooooooooooooo!” the ash man wailed.

  And then he was gone.

  What causes a spark? Sam thought, recalling her lesson with Alex about just this time yesterday in the hospital. A collision of positive and negative energy.

  “Come on!” Alex said and tugged her away from the scene unfolding before them, back toward the spiral stairwell that had brought them down here.

  Sam rushed toward it with him, aware of the sparks both increasing and thickening, hopefully doing their part to short-out the entire mechanics of the wormhole itself. She ducked into the spiraling stairwell with Alex, felt it starting to spin wildly around them as the glass and steel forming the particle accelerator began to rupture and crack near its entrance and then along its endless reach, faster than her eye could process.

  Along with the ash man himself, his image looking like crack lines spreading across fine porcelain.

  “Alex!” he screamed. “Allllllexxxxxxxxxx…”

  His voice crackling in the last moment before the accelerator exploded silently in a final gush of blinding white light and the stairwell sucked them back upward.

  * * *

  Alex gazed about him. He felt exactly as he had the moment before, but this moment found him outside in another place and time entirely: standing with his parents in San Francisco’s Chinatown, celebrating the largest Chinese New Year festival outside of China itself. People packed both sides of a street cluttered with an endless display of colorful floats and displays crawling along.

  It had always been one of his parents’ favorite days of the year, the one that still brought a connection to their homeland. But this was different than a dream, since Alex was well aware he couldn’t possibly be here. This was just a transitory illusion of some kind triggered by a boyhood memory.