Cyberdrome (38 page)

He was about to
look away when he noticed that behind her reflected image, he could see the
place across the street where the Soldiers had been standing. It was now empty.

“Shit,” he
cursed as he pivoted around. He looked up and down the street, but there was no
sign of the creatures.

Maya opened her
eyes and looked too. “Where are they?”

He looked back
at the section of concrete wall where he knew the Watchport opening to be.
“Maybe they went back up to the Core,” he said.

“That’s great,”
she said.

“Not
necessarily,” he said as he turned back to the locked door and doubled his
efforts to open it. “They might’ve gone to get reinforcements.”

Just then, a
shudder rocked the steps. “Earthquake?” she asked. “Or did something just blow
up?”

“I don’t know,”
he said. He glanced up and down the street. “I don’t see anything.”

The ground shook
again, this time it was much stronger.

“Oh my God,” she
whispered.

He started to
ask what was wrong, but the look of terror on her face made him freeze. He pivoted
around, expecting to see one of the Soldiers right behind him. Instead, he saw
a huge wall of water rushing down the street towards them.

o     o     o

Inside
the Watchport, Javid saw Alek and Maya disappear in the transport beam. One of
the Soldiers ran over and grabbed Mathew Grey around the waist, pulling him
away from the controls.

“You
surprise me, Mathew,” Ceejer said. “Do you really think you can hide your son
from me?”

Javid saw
movement in the shadows. When he focused on the location, he saw a female covered
by a material that allowed her to blend in with the background. Only a
Sentinel’s eyes would have detected her. She had assisted in Alek’s escape, he
deduced. Everyone, it seemed, was working to help Alek.
Everyone, that is,
except for me.

On a
command from Ceejer, two Soldiers ran toward the beam and disappeared. Without
hesitation, Javid sprinted over to the nearest arch control and entered a
series of commands. The Watchport beam suddenly winked out just as Javid turned
to face Ceejer.

“What is
the meaning of this?” Ceejer bellowed.

“No one
else goes through,” Javid said calmly. “I scrambled the lock—only I can open it
now.”

“Then you’ve
trapped them both in there,” Mathew Grey said.

“I blocked
transmission only,” he explained. “This port will still receive input from the
simulation.”

“I’m sure that I
can open it,” Ceejer said as he took a step toward the arch.

“You will fail,”
Javid said as he calmly walked past Ceejer and out the door.

A moment later,
Ceejer turned and followed the Sentinel out to the open space. “Give me the
combination, Sentinel Rho. That is a direct order.”

Javid suddenly
remembered a catchphrase from his pre-Sentinel life, and turned to face Ceejer.
“You can have the combination when you pry it from my cold, dead brain,” he
said with a half smile.

“Clever,” Ceejer
said dryly. “You will, of course, pay for your actions with the deletion of
your source code.”

Javid stood tall
as he faced his former supervisor. “I am a Sentinel. I have always been willing
to sacrifice my code for the good of the system.”

“I am the system
supervisor,” Ceejer said, a rapidly building anger in his voice. “Only I can
know what is good for the system.”

“Alek has
reminded me that I am capable of thinking outside my basic programming and I
can now see that while he made many errors in judgment, his purpose was never
corrupt. You, on the contrary, are indeed corrupt, and are no longer a benefit
to this system. Therefore, logically, you must be removed.”

Ceejer stood
there silently for several long seconds. “I see now that I underestimated the
interaction of the individual forces within your group,” he said. “Biologics
valuing the lives of digitals, Mathew’s Transgenics deciding their own fates,
and now Sentinels going against their basic programming.” He turned to Mathew
who stood motionless next to one of the Soldiers. “What is the name you
biologics have for this phenomenon?”

Mathew was
staring at the ground near his feet, seemingly oblivious to his surroundings.
Perhaps he was concerned for his son, Javid thought.

“Dr. Grey,”
Ceejer repeated.

“You’re talking
about chaotic interactions between components of an otherwise organized system,
resulting in unpredictable behavior,” Grey said without taking his eyes off the
ground. “We call it an emergent behavior.”

“Ah, yes,”
Ceejer said. “An emergent behavior that ends now.”

With a nod of
his head, the Soldiers backed up and formed a wide circle around Javid. Then,
one of the Soldiers stepped into the ring and approached him. The crouching posture
of the creature made it appear only slightly larger than he was, but with
two-meter long arms and legs, a solid blow from either appendage could cause
him serious damage.

“Sentinel,” a
familiar voice called out. Javid glanced to the side and saw Jas Kaido
unstrapping his club from his leg. Before the nearest Soldier could react, he
tossed it toward Javid. It struck the ground less than a meter away and slid
next to his foot.

“Feel free to
pick it up,” Ceejer said. “I wouldn’t want anyone to accuse me of denying you a
fair fight.”

Javid picked up
the club and examined it. It appeared to be a hydraulic piston from one of the
leg sections of a Spider. Not exactly a fair fight, Javid thought as he
extended the piston to its full length and turned to face his foe.

The Soldier
attacked immediately, lunging onto its two arms and kicking at him with its
legs. Javid easily rolled between them and struck the body sections as hard as
he could. The recoil from his metal club bouncing off the solid metal sections
almost knocked the weapon out of his hands. He scampered off to the side as the
Soldier turned around to face him again.

As the Soldier
charged, Javid feinted left, and then rolled to his right. The maneuver fooled
the Soldier for a moment, but then it grabbed one of the sections of its right
arm with its left and lashed out with a new three-meter arm span, striking
Javid squarely in the chest. He saw sparks as he flew backward and crashed hard
into the side of the Watchport, then fell to his hands and knees on the hard
ground.

He crouched
there for a moment, trying to force the pain down. He did a quick inventory of
his body and found three broken ribs and a damaged right lung. He mentally
ordered his internal organs to begin repairing themselves. He could feel the
ground pulsating below his hands and knees, supplying him with raw energy.
Within a few seconds, he began to feel slightly better.

Although he
needed to remain motionless for a few more minutes to give his body time to repair
the damage, he knew that he couldn’t afford to let Ceejer, or his opponent,
know that he was injured. He took one last deep breath, and then jumped to his
feet.

By now, the
Soldier had reattached the extra section to its original position on its right
arm. Javid was impressed by the speed with which the creature could separate
and reattach sections, essentially recreating its size and shape as needed. It
was obvious that conventional tactics would be useless against such a being.
However, experience taught him that knowing an opponent’s strengths often shed
light on its weaknesses.

As the Soldier
began circling him, Javid hit upon the one flaw in the creature’s otherwise masterful
design. The end of each section contained a sort of hand joint, which it used
to grasp and hold onto other sections. In order for the joints of the hands to
operate, they could not be heavily armored and were therefore the Soldier’s weakest
parts. When the creature lunged at him a moment later, he was ready.

This time, the
Soldier grabbed its entire right arm with the left one, slapping it down hard like
a steel whip. Javid barely managed to roll out of the way as the last section
hit; tearing a hole in the ground less than a meter from Javid’s foot. It stuck
there momentarily.

Javid used the
split-second opening to dive toward the Soldier’s torso. This time, instead of
striking at the armored sections, he swung his club as hard as he could at the
joint between the extended arm and the main body. As he had anticipated, the
joint separated in a shower of sparks.

The now armless
soldier stumbled awkwardly backward, apparently unable to come up with a new
configuration using its remaining six sections. At the same time, the
disembodied four-section arm unit managed to remove itself from the ground, but
it faced a similar predicament.

Javid knew that
if either group could reach the other, he would not have a second chance. He attacked
the joints of the main body with his makeshift club, and even though it was
able to kick at him with some success, he quickly bashed it into six useless
sections. Then he went after the snake-like arm sections but they were not able
to put up much of a fight. In a matter of minutes, the Soldier lay in ten
pieces across the empty circle.

Javid turned
back to face Ceejer. “Is that the best you can do?” he asked.

Ceejer smiled as
the damaged sections were dragged off by the surrounding Soldiers. “Look around
you and the answer will become obvious,” Ceejer said.

Javid looked at
the wall of Soldiers surrounding him, and then back at the opening of the
Watchport. “I will hold them until you return, Alek,” he whispered, then turned
to face his next opponent.

o     o     o

In one swift
motion, Alek turned and entered the final code to unlock the building’s door,
then pushed it open and pulled Maya in. “Run,” he yelled. When he saw her
turning toward the elevator across the lobby, he yelled again. “No, use the
stairs.”

Behind them, he
heard the rush of water blast through the front door. As they sprinted up the
steps toward the second floor, he yelled, “Top floor, or at least as high as we
can get.”

They ran up the
stairs as fast as they could. By the fourth floor, he was starting to breathe
hard. At least inside the Core, he could recharge his energy from contact with
the floor. Here inside an Earth Simulation, he was just another out-of-shape
guy.

When they
reached the sixth floor, Maya stopped abruptly and pointed to a sign on the
stairwell door.

“Keep going,”
Alek yelled, nearly out of breath. “We’re only halfway to the top.”

“Watertight
doors,” she said as she opened the door. “The sign says that these doors will
close if there is a water leak. We need to get out of this stairwell.”

He looked up the
stairs, and then heard the sound of water below them. Time to make a decision,
he realized, and bolted through the door. As the door closed behind them, they
heard the sound of the seals engaging. He tried the door, but it was locked
tight.

“Glad you saw
that sign,” he said as he bent over to catch his breath.

She patted him
on the back and pointed to the desk near them. A flat panel computer screen
glowed softly in the darkened office.

He walked over
and picked up the computer. “Old fashioned keyboard interface, and a simple
multi-core processor,” he said. “Primitive, but it should do.”

She ran over to
the nearest window and looked out. “Oh my God,” she said.

He rushed over
to the window and looked out. The street below was gone—covered over by a bubbling
flow of blue-green water. As they stood there watching, the water level rose up
to the bottom of their window.

“Do you think it
will hold,” he asked, backing away from the glass.

She knocked
twice on the window before answering. “Feels solid enough,” she said, and then
looked at him. “I would still try to hurry, though.”

“Right,” he said
as he ran back to the desk and sat down. It took him a few minutes of fiddling
with the computer to find and open a text editor. Then he placed his hands over
the keys and began typing.

A few minutes
later, she left the window and came over to stand beside him. “How much
longer?” she asked.

“This isn’t like
writing a letter,” he said.

“I thought you
said you could write programs in your sleep.”

He pushed the
computer away from him, then grabbed it and resumed typing. “I was talking
about a Swarm program,” he said. “That, I can write in my sleep. This is different.”
He pointed to the screen in his lap. “A deletion gun resembles a deletion bomb,
but the blast is focused into a narrow beam.” He wiped a bead of sweat from his
brow. “It will require about a thousand lines of code, which on my home
computer would take me less than a half hour. Here I have to write every line
of code from scratch.” He shook his head. “This is going to take me several
hours, at least.”

She placed her
hand on his shoulder. “We may not have that long.”

He looked up.
The window showed only green water, which meant that the building was now completely
submerged.

“How long do you
think we have?” he asked, looking back down at the glowing lines of machine
code on the computer screen.

Maya stumbled
backward, tripped over a chair, and fell on her butt. When he jumped up to help
her, he saw what had startled her. A Soldier was floating in the water, just
outside the window.