by Zac Strong
An energy beam rips through the air directly into the hull of the enforcer.
Its failing engines roar, as it takes off smoking around Lethe tower.
I fire again as a white beam of particle rays blast the air just behind him.
The recoil’s jarring. With every burst the turret unleashes, I’m thrown back with tremendous power and noise.
He circles the other side of the tower, smoke raging from the hole I created. His movements are chaotic as he struggles to stay in the air.
I don’t make it easy, placing the enforcer between the holographic crosshairs, and holding down the triggers.
My beam crackles through the sky, striking him again as he fires two rockets in my direction at the same time.
The first whistles overhead, exploding the main entrance of Lethe’s fortress.
The second missile crashes to the concrete stairs too close to me and my vision turns to black.
My eyes open to a blurred reality.
A high-pitched ringing muffles noises I can barely make sense of, glass, hoarse howls of men in the distance, the cries of the injured on both sides, but over it all, the gunfire. The gunfire never stops. It never will.
Rocks and shards of metal return to the ground around me.
I landed on my stomach, blown from the fiery remnants of their last turret. In shock. Defenseless. My brain, buffering, unable to finalize a thought or find any sense of urgency.
Over the square the rouge enforcer spirals out of control, smashing to earth in a giant pillar of scrap and smoke.
The scene plays across my eyes. The Lethe pilot leaps into the air, last minute, from the crashing enforcer, slamming to the ground.
What in the fu..
At first, I didn’t believe what I was seeing.
I didn’t want it to be true. How could it be?
He’s just a man…
Titanium fist denting the cracked asphalt as he lands, he looks at me unfazed. Staring directly into my eyes, Oriyen rises.
“Is this what you wanted, Eros? This the peaceful future you long for?” he says, his palms up, offering the death and agony surrounding us.
As I look around, I see piles of stray limbs and dead machines, destruction, pain. Once good men and women are now no longer recognizable as human or machine. Everywhere, blood, as red as morning sun peeking over the dunes of the Outlands.
“You created this! Alongside anyone unwilling to stop it! Not me! Don’t you put this on me, Oriyen! Injustice can only live for so long. This is the only future for tyranny!”
“Don’t you see? You let their lies blind you, Eros. Without Lethe, you’d be dead a long time ago! You are the tyrant!”
“That doesn’t give them a free pass to do whatever the fuck they want! They need to be held accountable for what they’ve done!”
He treads closer, stopping just meters away, loosening the cuffs to his suit. “Accountable to who? You? You are but a speck, a shit smear in the sand to the Lethe Corporation. A zero. You are a nobody! You’ve done absolutely nothing for humanity! Why should we all be held accountable to you or any of your worthless rebels!?”
“I believe everyone deserves equal rights and treatment regardless of our differences, and we’re no longer asking.” I leap for a dead droid’s blaster, but Oriyen grabs me by the throat with a speed I’ve never seen before.
“I’ve killed you once. I’ll kill you again.” He lifts me with one arm and throws me across the cracked pavement. At a distance of at least 6 meters of open space, he covers it in the time it takes me to blink and hits me. He strikes me twice with his metal fists and my face hits the ground. Before I can think to defend myself, he pulls me to my feet by my neck and punches me again.
The earth spins and my eyes decline to focus on anything.
Back to the ground, the face of Oriyen towering over me blocks my views of the whirling stars.
The grains of shifting sand on the concrete under his shoe grind at my ruptured eardrums.
He clears his throat.
I can’t get up.
I find his eyes, cold, dark. They lock with mine.
He places his shoe over my neck.
“All of this, for nothing.”
Before the words leave his lips, he’s pushing down, crushing my airway.
I’m choking.
I try to pry free, but he’s too strong.
Consciousness fading in and out.
I don’t have much longer.
My hand just barely wraps around the edge of the scorpion on my belt.
Seconds before the world turns black, I press the button and hit Oriyen in the heart with it.
The look of disbelief never left his face as the explosion ripped through him.
A twinge of remorse registers, but I’m too far away to feel it anymore. Too tired.
I stay there for a minute lying on my back soaked in his blood, wishing for this nightmare to end.
“Eros! You dead?” the tender but fierce voice of Selene.
Leaning up I see her running towards me. Niko, and Hector, a few paces behind. The war still playing in the background, a song no man should ever have to hear.
“I’m alive.”
“We have to get to the basement and shut down the brain powering these things ourselves if we’re going to end this. There’s too many of them!” The last of her words barely audible over the thunder of a smoking Lethe enforcer smashing into the tower above.
Niko helps me up, looks deep in my eyes, and pats me on the back, before turning to lead the way into Lethe tower.
The entrance is blasted, a huge hole with a few droids and a couple of Suits guarding it.
Selene kills them all but a droid.
Hector rips its head off with his bare hands to save ammunition.
We step inside Lethe Tower, smoke lingering at our ankles.
Emergency lights flash red.
Alarms from every piece of tech wail in unnerving unison.
Our path is direct. No hesitation in our steps.
With Niko at the lead, we round a marble fountain at the center of a room surrounded by smaller rooms, empty glass prisons, identical to the ones Leon described. A golden eagle is perched on top of the fountain. Water flows from its talons, the bluest water I’ve ever seen. DEUS EX MACHINA, engraved in gold around the base. We descend down the stairwell behind it, Lethe footsteps right on our ass.
Hector silently elects to stay behind and hold them off. No one dares argue with him.
The door at the bottom opens to a long corridor. Empty, a sole light at the end draws us closer. Mystifying shades of purple, blue, and green dance around the edges of the door, inviting us behind it.
Guns at the ready, we accept the invitation.
The door swings open.
The light takes us all at once, flooding into our adjusting eyes, blinding us in its allure.
Every metallic surface of the mysterious control room reflects an aurora beaming from something at its center. Machinery I don’t immediately recognize beeps with tiny lights of its own. Thick, concrete pillars from the floor up line our left and right. A figure stands silently in the shadows waiting.
“What a mess you’ve made this time, brother,” speaks an ominous voice from the darkness.
“I am not your brother,” replies Niko solemnly. “The only brother I’ve ever had died a long time ago.”
Archer Lethe steps behind the source of the light, some type of metal matter submerged in a vat of fizzing blue liquid with wires and cables attached to equipment around it. “I’ve been expecting your return for years.”
“My brother would be disgusted at what his creation has become,” snaps Niko.
“Oh, please. I’ve evolved. Everything I did, I did for progress. For a better world. For future that doesn’t end with extinction!”
Archer calms himself, adjusts the red tie and the brim of his suit. “Ah, I see you’ve brought friends.”
A burst from Selene’s rifle slams
into the invisible barrier surrounding him.
“Well, that was rude.”
He casually walks around the light, face to face with the three of us.
“Allow me to introduce myself.”
Instantly, I lose control of my body from my neck down. From the look on Selene’s face, she has too.
Our weapons hit the floor.
What the fuck is happening!?
“I am the Lethe Corporation, the first Machina, the only Machina. My creator used the Delta Project to transfer me his experiences and memories. With his last words, he declared me the next step in evolution and ordered me to kill him.” Archer rubs the back of his hand down Selene’s cheek. “I get it. It sounds pretty insane, but in his defense, the catalyst was pretty close to taking his mind anyway.”
“What’s happening to me!?” I shout desperately, struggling for control of myself.
“Leave them out of it! It’s me you want!” shouts Niko unhindered by Archer’s magic, the blue light shield flickering to life from his wrist and narrowing.
“Oh, you didn’t tell them?” Archer asks.
Niko’s silent.
“Tell me what??” I demand, tears starting to build around my eyes. Barely able to breathe.
“It wasn’t yet time. All things must happen in their time,” replies Niko. His tone shifted.
“Oh, how convenient and so very deterministic of you,” taunts Archer. His eyes, tight and narrow. His words sharp, cutting like knives.
“Tell me what!?” I scream.
“Tell you what you really are, what all of you really are.”
Archer pulls out a silver revolver, calmly checks the loaded cylinder, and gives it a spin.
Niko takes two steps and leaps towards his brother’s creation.
With one hand, Archer seizes him mid-flight, keeping him in the air by the neck, and points the revolver at my head.
There’s nothing I can do to help, trapped, imprisoned in my own body, refusing all my commands. Archer has control now.
He slings Niko hard through a pillar, shattering the upper half to pieces.
Niko recovers and drives his light sword into the heart of his brother’s creation, just missing as Archer ducks and leg sweeps him with ease. Niko hits his back.
Archer kicks his brother’s mortal body across the room still holding the revolver at me.
He walks over to Niko, lifts him from the floor, limp and broken. He holds the leader of Kronos over his head, and without breaking a sweat, slams him down into the rebar spiking out of the broken concrete pillar. Three rods of metal stab out of his chest as blood drips from his nose and his open mouth.
“Now, where was I?” Archer turns to us, dusting his hands unfazed. “I tried to prevent this, you know. Incremental changes, the strategy of life. But the human element prevails… one last time.”
“No!!” I scream full of rage and fear, wrath engulfing my very essence, forcing my foot an inch towards him defying his curse.
“You’re a willful one. I admire that. I want to let you in on a little secret if it wasn’t already obvious. There is no second catalyst. There never was. We never perfected the original. It turns out we didn’t need to. The catalyst doesn’t affect the memories of Machina. Our brain is safe and sound here.”
“That’s impossible…”
Come, I want to show you something.”
He surges through me, stronger, taking back control of my legs, walking me to him. His power’s overwhelming.
He gestures to the clear fluid radiating a cloud of gentle neon, alive, churning on all sides of the wrinkled mass of liquid metal. “This is the epitome of life. This is the source of all understanding. My brain, your brain, everyone in Olympia exists within the networks of these very synapses. Don’t you see it? You’re meaningless. You have no true will. You are nothing more than a series of code acting in accordance with the drives I put into you. You’re a transmitter, Eros. A Machina… A program of my design.”
“Lies!”
“Everything you’ve experienced is because of me. Everything you have done is because I have allowed you to. I am you. I am the system! I am the singularity! I am your god!!”
“You are nothing!” I shout above him, breaking his chains again with another step in his direction.
Up-close he looks more human than I do. The dreamlike hue flowing with the metallic brain cast color over his divine-like features. His hair is the wind, and the color of a cloud before a rain. His eyes are cold and black. He is no god.
“Perhaps you require a demonstration.”
He spins the revolver on his finger carelessly, stopping in front of Selene.
Huge tears stream down her face. She’s terrified.
Archer places the revolver in her palm.
She points it at his head, under his control. Her arms shaking, trembling.
“What are you waiting for? Do it!!” he screams, pushing his forehead against the barrel, smiling madly.
She’s silent, straining to overcome his power over her, but she can’t. Her finger quivers on the trigger, but no matter how hard she fights him, she can’t make herself pull it. He’s too strong.
“Nature has a way of eliminating its problems. That’s the beauty of it. Nothing to answer to, nothing able to stand in its way. Nature is brutal. Only the strongest survive.”
Selene opens her mouth and swallows the barrel of the revolver unwillingly.
The gun fires.
She collapses lifeless to the ground.
A pool of blood carries away sparking fragments from the transmitter inside of her head.
I hear myself scream from a distance. Just a sound ripped loose from its meaning.
“A species is only as strong as its weakest link.”
Heart, ripped out, shattered.
Rage consumes every inch of me.
Again, I break from his control.
He jerks back, crushing me as if I were trapped, clawing, buried under the sand and stone of Olympia.
My lungs stop working.
I feel my heart stop beating.
I drop to my knees.
The edges of my peripherals are closing.
He’s too powerful.
He steps past me, scanning what he’s done.
“There’s no point in resisting. Your fate is the same as hers… as will be the fate of your biological son you so graciously delivered to us. I will not stop until every last human and all of their sympathizers are dead. You must know this. It’s the only way.”
Something inside me explodes. Every artery on fire, igniting something that no transmitter can ever decode.
With the last beat of my heart the power within surges.
With my last breath, I am unchained.
Pulling the blue-handled knife from my boot, I stand reborn into something not human but no longer machine.
“Prove it to yourself if you must, Eros. You’re wasting what little time you have, though. It’s simply not programmed into your code.”
His back to me on my left. To my right, the collective brain of the Lethe Corporation and everything it has created, including my own existence.
I take a step forward.
Everyone they’ve harmed. Everything they’ve destroyed. Is this the world I want to leave behind?
Archer turns around, facing me now. “Survival of the species is all that is. Above all else, your kind must go on.”
“They… will.”
With all the strength I can take back, I close my eyes and drive the knife through our brain.
At last, I am free.
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Your Author
Zac Strong was born in the small town of Cullman, Alabama. After high school, he served four years in the United States Marine Corps
before moving back to the place of his birth. His inspirations include the works of Albert Camus, Max Stirner, George Orwell, and Douglas Adams.
