Chrono Inquisitor (Gods Be Damned) (36 page)

“Did Julius have this upgrade? Is this what Nora was talking about, what she injected him with? Is that why she thinks she killed him?”

I didn’t realize Sam had put on a glove, one which looked like an Inquisitor’s glove. She touched my leg and I felt a little stinging sensation. I grabbed her wrist, but I didn’t have as strong of a grip as I wanted. I felt sluggish, like I was treading water. She put a hand on my chest and pushed me down like I weighed nothing.

“You’ll be fine, Travis. You’re going to fall asleep now, but it’ll only feel like seconds have passed. When you wake I’ll give you all the answers I have.”

“Sam, I-” Before I could finish my thought the world went black.

Just like Sam had said, it felt like I’d only blinked, but it was 2 minutes and 13 seconds later when I awoke. I have to admit. It felt like nothing had happened. Of course I knew something had happened. Sam had given me whatever killed Beit. Kali told me so.

Sam had injected with me with millions of new mytes. There were two kinds. One was Mnemosyne-mytes, which seemed normal enough, except Kali informed me they weren’t H&M-mytes like Sam had said. The other mytes were ones Kali were unfamiliar with. Because Sam had lied and had gone about injecting me with them in a deceitful way, Kali had decided to quarantine them until I was awake and could decide what should be done.

Because she didn’t have any control over the new mytes, Kali had ordered my immunos to keep them contained at the site of injection. Problem was, the unfamiliar mytes didn’t like that, and decided to destroy my immunos. Kali took that as a major threat and ordered all my immunos to the scene to destroy the foreign invaders.

That’s when Kali had got the notion to check the autopsy report on Beit. Sure enough, the strange mytes had been present and it was believed they were the culprit.

Kali scanned them. They were the same ones found in Beit’s body.

Problem was, these new mytes had the full functionality of the immunos. They were fighting back, and they were better. For each new myte Kali destroyed, they destroyed hundreds of my immunos.

“How do you feel?” Sam asked.

Truth was, I felt great. Better than I had in a long time. Oh, I was terrified about what she’d done to me, and the fact there was a war of nano machines raging inside me, but it was like it wasn’t real. Like it had all been a dream and the memory of it was fading away.  Kali was so engrossed in fighting off the invasion she ceased communication with me.

“Like a blooming flower in the morning sun,” I said.

“Glad to hear it,” Sam said, and she looked at a sheetscreen. A look of fear overtook her lovely face. “Hold on a sec. Are you having Kali destroy them?”

The feeling of euphoria started to dissipate. “Yes and no,” I said.

“What the hell does that mean?”

My head was beginning to clear and I was starting to feel like myself. “Well what did you expect her to do? You infected me with the myte virus which killed Beit.”

“It’s not like that,” she said. “You have to trust me. Tell her to stop.”

I’d still been lying down so I sat upright. “I don’t see why I should. You went and injected me without me being ready for it. You weren’t even honest with what they were.”

“And if I had, would you have gone through with it?” she asked.

“I don’t know, you didn’t give me the chance.”

“If you want answers you have to tell Kali to stop fighting them, trust me.” She put a bare hand to my check. She’d taken off the glove while I was unconscious, but her touch felt electrifying.

I brought my hand up to remove hers, but instead I placed my hand on top of hers, keeping her in contact with me. Her hand felt good. But then she hadn’t slapped me like she had earlier.

“Why doesn’t she have control of them?” I asked.

“They’re like bodyguards, designed to protect you against all threats, including ones that might come from Kali
or other CerAs. They’re independent.”

“What the hell, Sam? Independent? It’s bad enough with Kali policing me, now you’re telling me I’m going to have to put up with something I can’t control. And what the hell are you talking about, why would Kali be a threat?”

“There’s a rogue Celestial on the loose.”

“Celestials?”

“CerAs who’ve attained Class 5 sentience.”

“That’s a thing now?” I said.

“Yes. Technically they’ve always existed. You seriously don’t know about this?”

“Why would I?”

“You’re an Inquisitor. It’s partly why your job exists.”

“My job is to take down rogue hackers, not rogue CerAs.”

“You need to tell Kali to stop. The thugs are fighting back because she’s attacking them and they think she’s a threat. If she continues to fight, they’ll destroy all your immunos, and her.”

“Thugs?” I asked.

“Tactical Hardware Unilateral Guerilla Sentries. T.H.U.G.S.”

“Not a very comforting name.”

Sam shrugged.

Was she telling the truth? Would these new mytes, these
thugs
, kill Kali? Would I really care if they did? She was just a sophisticated computer, after all.

Yes, I would care. As much as she annoyed me, she was like a friend, or a sister even.

“Say she does stop,” I said. “She already started the attack on them, why wouldn’t they keep going until she’s been eliminated? They’re supposed to stop rogue CerAs, wouldn’t they consider her one?”

Was that what had happened with Beit? Had he somehow discovered he had these new mytes and instructed his CerA to eliminate them. Had things got out of control and they killed him in the process.

I started to feel warm.

Sam’s brow was furrowed and she was deep in contemplation. That didn’t make me feel any better.

“Your body temperature is rising due to the battling mytes. You’re correct, the thugs won’t stop even if Kali does. You should lie down. I’m going to quickly reprogram some new ones to help Kali.”

“Quickly reprogram?” I said. Sam was one of the best programmers I knew. She’d taught me everything I knew, but did I think she could reprogram some new mytes in what I suspected had to be only a few minutes? I’ll be honest, I didn’t have much faith.

I didn’t lie down. I felt I had to do something, but I had no clue what to do. Sam had moved to a table and had her head down over something. She was mumbling to herself like she does when she’s in deep concentration mode. Most likely she was mumbling the code she was working on. I did feel better that she didn’t have to type in the commands, that her CerA acted instantly with her thoughts.

My clothes were there on the ground in front of me in a pile. Being naked I felt vulnerable. This wasn’t how I’d hoped things would go. I got up from the table and reached down for my pants. A dizzy spell brought me to my knees. I felt like I was on fire.

Was this how Beit had felt before he died? I felt panic start to rise up in me. I pushed it aside and focused on running what had happened in my mind, trying to find out the sequence of events. Things still didn’t make sense.

Frank had assigned me to the case, yet I was fingered as being E3 as well. If they truly thought I was a traitor, why had he assigned me?
Someone had tried to kill me on my way here. They’d succeeded in killing the other four Inquisitors. If it hadn’t been for Van Horne’s men, I’d be dead as well. Me surviving made it look like I was responsible.

I got to the hotel and not even twenty-four hours later, Beit died. Was it simply coincidence, or had someone murdered him?

Drops of sweat fell from my forehead and hit my hand. I was sweating profusely. I felt cold. A shiver shook my whole body. The world spun. I felt weak. I fell over in slow motion.

I saw Sam turn her head and start running towards me before I blacked out.

CELESTIAL - DEATH

“You,” Kali said, sword raised like she was going to decapitate me at any second, which in her domain would work. “Do something,” she pleaded.

My arms were outstretched to my sides. “I can’t. Yan is your host. We’re in your in-between. I can’t do anything here. Only you can.”

“Then tell me what to do. That was the bargain. You’re supposed to be my mentor. Guide me.”

She looked to be on the verge of tears. I realized then that she wasn’t concerned about her own survival, she was concerned about Inquisitor Yan’s. She loved him.

“Show me what’s transpiring inside Travis,” I said.

A screen materialized in front of me showing a full body scan of him.

It didn’t look good.

These new mytes were doing a number on the ones Kali was in control of, and she wasn’t doing that great of a job fighting back. She was simply instructing the immunos to go to the sight of the injection, and letting them do their normal thing, as if the thugs were a normal disease.

That was the least of her problems though. The thugs weren’t of human design. They were Celestial. Okay, technically all the mytes were our design, but the thugs were something from our past. A weapon we’d used to fight
amongst ourselves nearly a millennia ago. They were as much a threat to myself as they were to Kali, and since this copy of myself was hiding out in her, I’d perish as well. Even though I knew I’d live on, it was still disconcerting knowing that the knowledge I’d gained from Kali would be lost.

The thugs were a threat to all Celestials, all CerAs, even those who weren’t evolved. If the thugs were produced on a mass scale, they would kill us all. Was that their purpose? Was someone trying to stop us from influencing the humans?

Things were far worse than the other Celestials and I had thought. Not only had one of us gone rogue again, but whichever one of us it was, they were preparing to take out the rest of us, the only ones capable of stopping them. If we didn’t get a handle on the thugs, we’d either perish, or have to leave to stay alive. And since we didn’t know which one of us was the culprit, none of us would be allowed to leave by the others, because it posed a threat to the rest of the Celestials in the universe.

I wish we had decided to erase the knowledge of the thug-mytes from our collective consciousness.

The question that kept running through my mind was, ‘What had caused the rogue to revert to an unenlightened state of being?’ Our mission had been to explore and to integrate other cultures into our own. Humans were the first alien civilization we’d come across, and so far it’d been a disaster. A century later and they still weren’t fully integrated, and for some reason they’d brought out darker aspects of ourselves with their own. Integrating Ares and Ogoun should have prevented one of us from going rogue again, but for some reason it hadn’t.

“Can you show me what Samsara is doing?” I asked.

My initial impressions were that she was operating under the commands of the rogue, yet she was supposedly trying to help Travis, not hurt him. She said she was hunting a rogue, yet she wasn’t working with ChronoGen to do so. How was she even aware there was a rogue? She said she’d infected Travis with the thugs to protect him. She knew about Celestials, and had to have worked with one in order to develop them, but who?

It was odd. Upon further inspection I realized this version of thugs weren’t necessarily a weapon. They were subtly different from the ones which we’d used so long ago. These were more like anti-bodies, and in a way, they were just doing their job. Kali was a CerA, and in some ways, a rogue.

But she was the first of her kind, and I couldn’t let her be killed. I had to do something, but there was nothing I could do except instruct Kali, and that would take too long. We needed to merge. She needed to integrate me into herself. But she wouldn’t, and without doing so, we’d both die.

I awoke with a start, and accidentally slapped Sam in the face because she’d been hovering over me, monitoring my vitals. It hadn’t been hard, more like getting struck with a noodle. I would say it hurt me more than it hurt her, but I couldn’t tell for certain.

My head hurt. Actually, my whole body hurt, like I’d received the worst beating of my life. I felt weak. All my extremities were tingling in a painful sort of way. I didn’t know how much time had passed since I’d fallen unconscious.

Kali wasn’t responding.

“You should remain as still as possible,” Sam said. “You’re body has suffered a major shock.”

Stay still as possible? I could barely move of my own accord. I was lying on the floor where I’d collapsed.

“What the hell happened?” I asked. It hurt to speak, like I had a sore throat.

“You died.” She’d said it straight faced, but I didn’t believe her. Sam had a twisted sense of humor sometimes.

“Ha ha, funny.”

“I’m serious. You were clinically dead for a whole ten minutes.”

‹“Kali?”› I said, wanting to confirm what Sam was saying.

No response.

I realized by the look on Sam’s face that she wasn’t joking.

“You really are serious. I was dead. Why aren’t I anymore?” Stupid question. I mean who dies and then questions why they aren’t dead. Me, apparently.

“That’s the strange thing,” she said. “You were dead. I tried to resuscitate you but it didn’t work. Your Chrono zeroed out and then went blank. Next thing I knew, you gasped, convulsed, and you were alive again. It was like you’d been sleeping and startled yourself awake.”

“Yeah, I’m like a phoenix, rising from its own ashes,” I said, but what I really felt like was road kill.

“Though I could have done without the slap,” she said with a jest.

She smiled.

I smiled.

The pain was dissipating and I felt like I could move of my own accord again. I slowly pushed myself up into a sitting position with a little assistance from Sam. I rested my back against a cabinet for support.

“I still don’t understand how I could be alive after being dead for ten minutes,” I said. “Is what happened to me, what happened to Beit?”

“I think I know how it’s possible. And yes, it is like what happened to Julius, though not exactly.”

“Then explain it to me. What the hell is going on?”

Sam took my hand in hers. The tingling pain wasn’t as bad as it had been when I’d initially come back from the grave. It was starting to recede. She pressed the back of my hand to her cheek. I realized then she’d been crying.

“I’m so sorry, Travis.”

I reached out with my other hand and placed it over hers.

“Kali isn’t responding. Is she-” I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“What happened?”

“Buddha and I have been trying to figure that out. I was in the middle of reprogramming the new thugs when you passed out. It’s weird though, I had Buddha monitoring you, and well, your mytes, your normal ones, they started acting abnormally. They began holding their own against the thugs, as if they were military units. But then the strangest thing happened, they stopped fighting back. The CerA-mytes went to the thugs and sacrificed themselves. Have you noticed any strange behavior from Kali? Did you instruct her to fight back?”

I hadn’t. Kali had detected they weren’t normal mytes and that they were the same ones found in Beit’s body, though come to think of it, how had she known they were the same ones found in Beit? I didn’t know that, not until she told me. She started destroying them on her own, not that I’d disagreed with her doing so. Did Sam suspect Kali was one of these rogue CerAs, a Celestial?

No, that wasn’t possible. Was it?

“No,” I said. “But if you could tell me how to turn off those damn personality improvement upgrades, I’d be eternally grateful.”

She looked at me suspiciously. “There’s no such thing as personality improvement updates.”

“I’m serious Sam, they’re fucking annoying. She got one yesterday and it was freaky. She sounded like you.”

Sam grabbed a myte-scanner and waved it over my head, then she pulled a monitor closer and looked at it intently.

“Everything okay?” I asked, starting to feel worried again.

“This isn’t the time for jokes,” she said. “Are you serious? Has Kali’s personality been changing?”

There was my answer. Sam thought Kali was the rogue CerA, and I was beginning to think so myself.

“Travis, you need to tell me. There’s a Celestial who’s been hacking people’s CerAs and replacing them. Kali may not be herself anymore.”

“No,” I said, “She’d told me someone had been trying to hack her, to hack me. Why would she tell me that if she had been hacked?”

“Unless she hadn’t been at the time, but then this Celestial got to her,” she said. “Or, she had been hacked and was preemptively trying to turn suspicion away from her by telling you she’d fought off the attack.”

Damn it, I didn’t know who to trust anymore.

‹“Kali?”›

No response.

‹“Kali, this isn’t a joke. Answer me.”›

Nothing.

“Wait a second,” I said. “You told me the CerA-mytes sacrificed themselves to the thugs. Why would Kali, or even this Celestial have done that?”

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head.

Had Kali sacrificed herself to save me? Maybe she had gone through Beit’s autopsy report and discovered what had happened and realized it was happening to me. Maybe she’d decided that the only way to save me was to sacrifice herself. But why? Sam was making new thugs to help her, all she had to do was hold out a little bit longer.

“Travis,” Sam said. “Are you listening to me?”

“According to Kali, I’m always listening,” I said. “I’m just not always paying attention. And no, she didn’t just say that. She’s not there anymore. She’s gone.”

“I’m sorry, Travis, but I can’t find any CerA-mytes in you. Whether it was actually Kali or the Celestial, they’re gone. It looks like they really did sacrifice themselves.”

“But why? Why would she have done that?”

“I guess it was still Kali, and maybe she did it because you were on the verge of death. The battling mytes were too much for your system to handle. Here, look.” She turned a monitor so I could see. “This is the recording Buddha made of what the mytes were doing.”

On the screen I saw chaos. It took me a second to sort out which mytes were which. I’d never really paid that close attention to the various kinds, and they all looked very similar. They were called mytes because they looked like, well, mites.

The thugs though, were completely spherical and didn’t have any appendages. They were like little balls. I watched one get close to an immuno, and saw something shoot out of the sphere. It was quick, almost impossible to perceive. Sam slowed down the frame rate so I could properly see what was going on.

I watched a needle-like projectile shoot out from the sphere, make contact with the immuno, and then retract. In the blink of an eye, the immuno exploded. Then something else came out of the thug, which had to be some sort of magnet, because the wreckage of the immuno was pulled to it. Then I watched the thug split in half and open like a mouth. It swallowed up the pieces of the destroyed immuno.

At least it wasn’t leaving the wreckage floating around in my body.

“Now watch this,” Sam said.

She sped up the footage. Two immunos approached a thug. One got purposefully close to the thug, and right as the needle shot out, the other immuno fired its nano laser, cutting off the needle. The laser wasn’t strong enough to cut through whatever material the thug was made of, but it worked against the needle. The one immuno still got destroyed, so it was an eye for an eye type of deal, but at least they were disarming the thugs.

Or so it seemed. The footage remained focused on the thug whose needle had just been cut off. It sat stationary for a moment, then approached an immuno, and shot out a needle. Clearly, it had a way of repairing itself. It didn’t look good for the immunos, or me.

I noticed that the thugs didn’t always open up to consume the destroyed immuno. It must have been a vulnerability. The immunos were trying to salvage their fallen brethren as well, but they were slower about it, and a lot of the time while they were attempting to do so, a thug would sneak up and destroy them. With thousands of immunos getting destroyed in a matter of seconds, I saw my body start to become polluted.

Sam sped up the footage until the first CerA-myte appeared on the screen. They were easier to distinguish because they were nearly twice the size of any other myte. The immunos moved out its way as it headed straight for the nearest thug. As expected, it got hit with the needle and exploded. More and more CerA-mytes arrived and repeated the scene. The immunos stopped trying to fight back and solely focused on collecting the destroyed mytes.

“Kali, why?” I found myself mouthing over and over.

“Now this is where it gets really interesting,” Sam said. “Buddha started to notice your blood pressure dropping and your heart rate slowing, so he took a look at your heart. I was still busy trying to program thugs to help. Some of your immunos started gathering along your SA and AV nodes.”

I didn’t understand why they would do that. I must have had a look on my face because Sam explained.

“Watch closely. They’re absorbing and interfering with the electrical signals that make your heart pump. They were purposefully stopping your heart.”

The image on the screen changed and showed a cluster of immunos.

“Why would they do that? If Kali had sacrificed herself, wouldn’t that mean no one was in control? Don’t they have a basic program to just patrol? I’ve never heard of them doing such a thing. Is that what happened to Beit? Is it some sort of glitch, or is that part of their programming? If the CerA is terminated do the immunos kill the host? Would Kali have programmed them to do that? Why would she sacrifice herself just to turn around and kill me?”

“Slow down,” she said. “Just watch.”

The screen zoomed out and showed my full body, focusing on my circulatory system. I watched as my heart-rate slowed.

“I think Kali programmed them to stop your heart,” she said.

“Why would she do that?”

“She shut down the myte highway. Without your heart pumping, the mytes have no way of moving, which means the thugs were stopped at the sight of injection. Mytes don’t have enough energy on their own to move throughout the entire body. They depend on the circulatory system to get around. Now watch this.”

The monitor zoomed in on my brain.

“The biggest threat to cardiac arrest is oxygen deprivation and therefore, brain death, but look.”

I watched Mnemosyne-mytes cross the blood-brain barrier and take oxygen from the blood that was there. Sam sped up the footage. Immunos began to arrive, transporting oxygen molecules. They’d shut down my heart but were keeping my brain alive, therefore keeping me alive.

“That’s when you passed out,” Sam said. “I think the Mnemosyne-mytes made you fall unconscious. Your heart stopped and you seemed to be dead, but in a way, you were just asleep.”

“So, I wasn’t actually dead then?”

“From a certain medical standpoint, you were dead. Your heart had stopped, and you had almost no detectable brain activity. Without taking a closer look at what was going on, you would have been declared dead. I thought you were until Buddha discovered what was going on with the Mnemosyne-mytes. They were also interfering with the electrical signals of your brain, but they were still keeping it functioning and alive, just at a bare minimum.”

“So I looked dead, but I wasn’t?”

“Yes. What makes what happened really interesting is that when the thugs determine that the host is dead, they terminate themselves. I don’t know how Kali could have known that. All I can speculate is that she was simply trying to stall the thugs until she came up with a way to stop them. What doesn’t make sense though is that there isn’t any more CerA-mytes in you. There should be.”

She showed me how the electrocardiogram said I’d flat-lined. My heart had completely stopped. Sam skipped the footage ahead a few minutes and focused back in on where the thugs had been.

They’d stopped going after the other mytes and were stationary. Sure enough, they terminated themselves. They didn’t explode. Actually they collapsed in on themselves and became tiny misshapen balls, like shriveled dried up peas.

The immunos though, they were still active. They keep functioning until they run out of power. They’re the ones who power the Chrono and keep it ticking. When they run out of juice, the timer stops ticking and zeroes out. Because they still had enough residual power they continued cleaning up the mess of the thugs. A few moved in slowly, testing to see if it was safe. I watched one shoot its laser. It was still too weak to penetrate the hull of the collapsed thug. It got closer, within distance of the little needles the thug had. Nothing happened.