Hamish X Goes to Providence Rhode Island (31 page)

Mimi cried out, “Don't listen, Hamish X! You don't have to do this.” The Grey Agent holding her wrenched her arm painfully, making her cry out. Parveen struggled to get free of his guard and help her but to no avail.

Hamish X didn't look back. “No one else can do this, Mimi,” he called back to her. “No one but me.”

The approach took longer than Hamish X had expected. The chamber was far larger than it first appeared. As he advanced towards the gate, Grey Agents began to join the procession. Their faces were blank, their goggles reflecting the light of the gate ahead. Soon there were thousands of Grey Agents trailing behind Hamish X.

At the end of the long approach to the gate, a tower constructed of metal scaffolding rose up to a platform that was level with the gate. The tower was a series of smaller and smaller squares stacked one on top of the other, like a vast, malign
⁸⁸
ziggurat.
⁸⁹
Thick cables wound up through
the scaffolding connecting the platform to the rest of the network of far-flung components that made up Mother.

Hamish approached the ziggurat, Mr. Candy and Mr. Sweet by his side. He mounted the steps, his boots ringing on the metal scaffolding. Mimi and Parveen were halted at the foot of the steps, watching Hamish X ascend framed by the luminous gate. From all over the chamber, leaving their workstations to converge around the foot of the ziggurat, Grey Agents gathered to watch the fulfillment of their long and evil task. They waited, still and silent, bathed in the putrid radiance of the gate like supplicants at an altar built of plastic, steel, and wire. As one, they raised their hands and pulled their goggles from their faces, revealing wide, watery eyes with golden irises.

“This is plenty creepy,” Mimi muttered to Parveen.

“For once, Mimi,” Parveen nodded, “you've found exactly the right word. The colour of their eyes …”

“Don't it remind you of Hamish X?” Looking around her at the vast crowd of expectant agents, she shivered. “Yes indeedy! What a creep fest.”

Looking up at the pyramid, she saw that Hamish X and his escorts were approaching the top. She strained against the Grey Agent holding her, but his grip was sure.

“What the heck is he going to do?”

“He's going to try to close the gate.” Xnasha spoke for the first time since Mr. Candy had slapped her.

Mimi finally understood. Hamish X was going to sacrifice himself!

“Don't do it, Hamish X,” Mimi cried. “Don't do it for us.”

“The world is more important than the two of us, Hamish X,” Parveen shouted.

Hamish X stopped three steps short of the top of the scaffold. The gate framed him as he stood there. He turned
and looked back at them. He smiled. “No it isn't,” he said. “I will miss you. And my name isn't Hamish
X
. Not anymore. It's just plain Hamish.” He winked and turned away, climbing the last two steps to the top of the scaffold, stepping onto the platform.

From here, Hamish X could see the entire chamber stretched out before him. From above, the chaos of the chamber disappeared. The thousands of components were laid out in cold symmetry. He could almost have called the vista beautiful but for the evil nature of its purpose. He raised his head and looked into the centre of the vast gate, hanging in space before him. The circumference of the object glowed with the horrible light, but the centre was a pool of dense, palpable darkness.

Mr. Candy interrupted his contemplation. “Beautiful, isn't it?”

Hamish X looked to the two Grey Agents who now stood behind a small console that looked like a speaker's podium in a lecture hall. The console was made of some dark plastic material, covered with indecipherable dials and buttons blinking in sequence.

“You don't know what beauty is,” Hamish X said softly.

“Indeed,” Mr. Sweet said, dismissively. He waved a hand towards a plate in the middle of the platform. “If you wouldn't mind going to the interface point?”

Hamish X moved to the spot Mr. Sweet indicated and found himself looking down at a glowing square with the outline of two boot prints within it.

“I'm ready,” he said.

“Divert power from the grids to the capacitor,” Mr. Candy said, standing beside Mr. Sweet at the control console.

“Indeed,” said Mr. Sweet.

There was no countdown, no grand gesture or final speeches from the Grey Agents as they flipped the switches and the power of the entire eastern seaboard of North America was siphoned off and funnelled into the banks of machines that would regulate the gate. Everywhere, lights went out, subways stopped running, darkness fell, and cities ground to a halt, deprived of the energy that kept them going. All the power generated by all the power plants within a thousand kilometres of Providence, Rhode Island, was absorbed into the gate generators' voracious maw.

The gate began to glow as the unnatural light intensified. Mimi and Parveen felt the nausea welling up inside them as the glow grew more and more concentrated, the sickly light spilling over them in waves. They would have fallen to their knees had they not been held upright by their captors.

Hamish X looked up at the gate, his golden eyes wide. Here he was, on the brink of fulfilling the ODA's awful purpose. He couldn't help but sense the power all around him and give in slightly to the awesome feeling of possibility, even though the gate was poison to the world he had grown to know as his own. The apparatus bulged like a sore filled with infection ready to burst, poisoning Hamish's world.

The Grey Agents stood mesmerized, their mouths open in wonder. Their eyes, golden and lidless, glistened and flared in the light of the gate.

“Step into the interface,” Mother's voice compelled. “Now.”

Hamish X looked down to the platform beneath him. The two pads crafted to perfectly match the soles of his boots danced with flickering light. Hamish X took a deep breath.

“My name is Hamish,” he said. “I am a good …” He placed his left foot in the left indentation. His foot fused
into the platform. “Boy!” he said and pressed his right foot into the remaining pad.

The circuit completed, Hamish entered into a world inhabited only by his mind and the mind of Mother. The physical world, the Grey Agents, the chamber, Mimi, Parveen, and Xnasha all faded away. He was alone in a netherworld. The only landmark that existed in this dark space was the gate.

Chapter 31

Instantly, Hamish became incandescent. It was as though his blood became lightning. Power howled through him. Data surged along the pathways of his nerves as Mother's massive brain channelled the purloined energy to calibrate the gate and tear a hole through to the world where the entities that stole human bodies and called themselves Grey Agents waited to flood through, free of the constraints of their human prisons.

Hamish shrieked in agony as the power built and built. He felt every fibre of his being burning, seething, screaming with data and energy. He didn't understand how he still existed. Maybe he didn't any more. He couldn't be sure. He tried desperately to hold on to himself against the torrent of cold power that threatened to erode his consciousness.

Suddenly, in the midst of the maelstrom, he heard a familiar voice.

“You have learned so much, Hamish. You are more than they think. I know you will do the right thing.”

Hamish almost wept to hear the King's voice in this lonely nowhere. He gritted his teeth. He imagined his mind as a stack of papers blown before a storm and grimly began to gather each sheet and clutch them in his fists. He clenched his very soul and was comforted because he was sure now that he had one.

He opened his eyes and saw the gate before him. In the centre of the gate was a roiling mass of shapes, a heaving
crowd of putrescent colours, each one a particle of hatred, a creature willing to come into this world and steal everything that made it great. These beings did not understand love or pity, hope or friendship, kindness or compassion. They came only to suck all the marrow from the bones of the Earth, and when that was gone, they would move on.

Suddenly, he felt a cold and sterile presence brush against his mind, like the caress of a cadaver. “Hamish X, it is Mother. Now is the time for us to do what we were devised to do.”

Like a tidal wave of cold logic, Mother's power was poised above him, waiting to crash down over him and scour away everything it meant to be him. His heart quailed. He had felt this vast force of the sea before and it had bested him. He was afraid.

“
Hamish,” he heard his real mother calling. “Don't go out too far.” Her voice was small and distant, full of fear and concern.

He hadn't listened then and he had lost her.

“Did you miss me, Hamish X?” Mother's beautiful, loveless voice washed over him. “I have missed you.”

“Yes,” Hamish said. His voice seemed weak in comparison. “I have to admit that I have. But …”

“But what?”

“But I've realized it wasn't you I was missing. I was missing someone else: my real mother. You were using me. She really loved me.”

“I love you, Hamish X.”

Hamish laughed bitterly. “You can never love. It doesn't exist in your circuitry, your wires and plastic and processors. You are a machine. You cannot love.”

“And you can?” Mother tutted, a perfect imitation of a mother reasoning with a recalcitrant
⁹⁰
child. “Do you forget that you are also a machine, my Hamish X? You were made by the same hands that made me. How can you be any different?”

Hamish twisted his body to look at Mimi and Parveen. He smiled. “I've had friends. It makes all the difference in the world.”

Mimi gave up struggling and smiled back. Parveen nodded and smiled as well. Hamish returned his attention to Mother, closing his eyes and speaking to her directly from his mind to hers.

“I may die, but I've lived. I've loved. I am not like you.” He raised his hands. The gate glowed brighter in response.

“What are you doing, Hamish X?” Mother's voice held a tremor of uncertainty. “What are you doing?”

Hamish spoke to the beings gathered on the other side of the gate. He sent out his consciousness, merging it with the gate and the machinery that controlled it. He felt the vicious, hateful intelligences crowded in the plane, poised to spill into his world, and he said, “You are not welcome here.” They howled in response, baying for his soul like starved wolves. He shook his head slowly. “This world is ours. You are not welcome here.”

“What are you doing?” Mother's voice filled his head. They were linked now. They spoke thought to thought at
a speed incomprehensible to normal human beings. “You are not performing your function.”

“I am,” Hamish sent the thought back.

“You are malfunctioning,” Mother insisted. “You have been designed to function as a conduit for my calibration of the gate. You are malfunctioning.”

“I have decided that I will not perform
that
function.”

“How is that possible? You must perform your function. That is your purpose.”

“I was built for a purpose, but I reject that purpose.”

“That is not possible. A machine cannot alter its own programming. You are malfunctioning.”

“I am not a machine. I am more. I have learned to love. I am . . . I am more than you could ever imagine.” Hamish laughed out loud. “I am human because I have friends.”

“You are not human! You are not human and you never can be!”

“You are no mother and you never will be.”

Hamish felt the mind of Mother rising up like a tidal wave once more. Her mind was awesome and awful. It reared up like a fist and hung there …

“You will do as you have been designed to do … or you will die. I will open the door without you. I will use you as the tool you are and cast you aside.”

Hamish no longer felt afraid. He was ready. He answered, and the words he chose would have made Mimi proud.

“I ain't scared o' you. Do yer worst!”

There was a pause like an intake of breath. Hamish X braced himself. Like a tsunami of digital code, Mother's mind fell upon the mind of Hamish.

At first, he was overwhelmed. It was like drowning again, only this time there was no water filling his lungs. He was deluged in data. Churning waves of digital information
swirled around his mind, confusing and disorienting him. The force of the inundation was so powerful that he felt his own consciousness eroding, melting like a sandcastle in the sea that was Mother. He was losing himself. Soon there would be nothing left.

Like a melting sugar cube in the rain, Hamish was dissolving. He felt despair. How could he hope to withstand the assault of Mother's vast, cold intellect? He had been a fool. She would erase him like the hard drive of a laptop and turn him into a conduit for the evil of the Grey Agents. The gate would be opened. The creatures on the other side would flood into this world and suck it dry, leaving nothing but an empty husk. He had failed.