Raine VS The End of the World (39 page)

Although she didn’t stand a chance, Lillian fought with even more ferocity. Finally, Lorelei used the Captain’s momentum to flip her over and slam her back down on the floor. She quickly immobilized Lily by twisting the shuriken in her calf, eliciting cries of terrible pain.

Lacie couldn’t bear to watch anymore. She turned away, and just as she did, Lucille appeared behind her, brandishing an automatic crossbow. Before Lacie could yell out in alarm, her sister knocked her out with a high-powered stun gun.

“Stand down, Lorelei,” Lucille yelled, taking aim at her maniacal sister.

Now that Lily was struggling on the floor, Lorelei slowly spun around.

“Ah, Lucy. I expected this.”

“Leave her be!” Lucille yelled. “You need help, Lorrie. You’re no messenger of peace. I don’t know what it is you really want, but from what I’ve just witnessed, my clinical analysis is that you are absolutely insane. If you want to investigate the universe, then we should do it as a team!”

Lorelei laughed, kicking Lily in the stomach again.

“Look at this pathetic girl,” she said. “You and I, and Lacie… now, that is the perfect team. But Lily, here… she’s ethically weak. She created us because she knew she couldn’t complete her own mission. Our very existence is conditional, sister. We were born into conscription. We live in a time machine in outer space, but our futures have been planned out with care. Ever consider her plans for us, once the task is done? Will she keep us here? Or will we be disposed of, left on Earth to rot and die like those clueless peasants? Surely you remember her failure to act in
Jerusalem.
”

Lucille shook her head.

“Lily wouldn’t abandon us. All life on Earth is at stake here.”

“Which is why she is doomed to failure. What a noble goal, to save the human race at the expense of the rest of the universe.”

“I’d n-n-never abandon you. You’re my only friends. The rest of the universe is fine, dammit!” Lily cried softly. “Time isn’t a one-way line you can splinter off like a web. It’s more like waves on an ocean…”

Lorelei kicked her again.

“I’ve heard enough of your parents’ theories! Give me proof or give me death!”

Lucille cleared her throat as she notched her finger into the trigger.

“I’ll be more than happy to do that.”

“Kill me, then,” Lorelei taunted. “Draw the first blood. I dare you. In fact, I double dog dare you.”

Lucille did. She fired right into Lorelei’s chest. But the bolt never connected; Lorelei had dodged it at preternatural speed, and danced across the floor in an irregular pattern towards her sister, who kept firing – and kept missing.

“Impossible!” Lucy cried as Lorelei charged straight into her, knocking her to the ground and holding Lily’s EM knife up to her neck.

Lorelei then stood Lucy up and held her hostage. She kissed her on the cheek to mask her nano-machines’ power strain. Her faux-innocent facade sent a shiver down Raine’s spine.

“Nothing’s impossible with my cybernetic implants, darlings,” she said, panting. “My reaction time is no longer limited by human evolution. Lily, you had no idea I could optimize these bad boys to override my nervous system, did you?”

“Stop!” Lily called out with a raspy voice, sitting herself up with Lorelei’s pulsing polar pistol. Raine imagined that her ribs must be cracked; she was having trouble breathing, let alone holding a firearm with shaky hands.

“Don’t you dare,” Lorelei barked through clenched teeth, cutting softly into Lucille’s neck. “Drop the weapon.”

“J-just shoot, Lily,” Lucy urged. “They have the p-power con--”

“Shut up!” Lorelei yelled, giving her sister a thick gash along her arm and making her yelp. “Drop it now!”

Lily obeyed. She was forced to watch helplessly as Lorelei kicked Lacie awake.

As if awoken from a pleasant dream, Lacie started to her feet, stunned to see Lorelei holding their ally by knifepoint.

“Is… is everything okay?”

“Get over here and restrain the good Captain. We’re running out of time. Let’s head to the docking bay, shall we? I’m terrible at goodbyes.”

Raine held Super BlastBoy’s hand tightly. It was difficult to watch Lorelei and Lacie drag their injured hostages down the hallway at such a brisk pace. Lucy and the barely conscious Lily exchanged worried glances.

They were dropped, hands bound, on the cold metal floor.

“We have two minutes,” Lacie exclaimed in a bit of a panic.

“I’m aware, sister. I’m not finished with her yet.”

Lorelei snapped a packet of smelling salts before Lily, shocking her awake.

“Never did I ask to be born,” Lorelei explained as they finally reached the
Raven
. “I want no further part in this twisted dynasty. My new mission is to show you the true cost of human lives, so I figured we’d play a little game. You’re being sent two hundred years into the future. When you reach your destination, visit me. I’ll be in the highest room of the tallest tower in the richest country in the world.”

Just as Lacie finished her pre-flight checklist, Lucy struggled to press the comms button on her wristwatch. Seeing what she was trying to do, Lily sidled up beside her and pressed it herself.

“Now, Rutger!” Lucy boomed.

Suddenly, XF-22 wheeled into the docking bay. The robot anchored itself against a crane and clamped onto the shuttle, preventing it from leaving.

“You’re not going anywhere!” declared Lucille.

Raine watched, horrified, as the turret atop the
Raven
peppered XF-22 with bullets. Lorelei’s laughter echoed from the PA system. She mowed off the robot’s arms, freeing the shuttle. Both Lily and Lucille were hit hard with flak. Lily hid her head, screaming. Lucy instinctively sprang forward and pulled the Captain to the ground, taking a number of bullets in the process.

“Space Time-Warp Initiation in one minute.”

The shuttle’s jets fired up in a flash. The burst knocked XF-22 off the platform and sent him flying; the robot collided with the back wall of the hangar and landed in a messy heap of scrap.

Lily looked up at the ship for the last time as it shot through the airlock. She watched desperately as the gates closed shut.

The external bay doors opened and the
Raven
disappeared into the blackness of space, a cosmic speck of dirt dropping from the
Belladonna
to Terra. There was no stopping Lorelei now.

“I’m… so sorry, Miss Lily…” Lucille uttered, gripping Lily’s hands.

Lily held her dying clone in her arms. Tears fell onto her cracked glasses. She was bleeding profusely from a number of bullet wounds. Both knew she had mere minutes.

“Don’t you dare apologize, Lucy, you saved me. It’s… it’s my fault. I should never have given her those nano-bots.”

“Listen. S-she took all but one of the
Belladonna
’s fuel cells, and s-s-severed the p-p-power converter.”

“No! I can’t replace that…”

“But I… snatched a c-c-couple. The f-fuel cells, I mean. Check the freezer in the rec room. The E-Exo Knight plans… p-p-particle cannon files… ballistics tests are inc-c-complete, but… it should be the only copy…”

Lily nodded, still holding back tears.

“Lucy, I’ll bring you back. Just say the word.”

She shook her head. “If it’s all the same to you, Captain, I would like to tender in my resignation. I don’t think I’m cut out for this line of work,” she snickered. “Maybe it’s time you put your trust in someone… other than yourself…”

The wisdom of this statement was abundantly clear to Lily. As the Warp commenced, she cradled Lucille, and crooned the opening bars of a soothing lullaby to help ease her passage to the other side.

“There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.”

– Charles Dickens

Even though she told herself she wouldn’t do it, Raine was in tears again. Super BlastBoy turned the video off. He gave her some time to think by boiling more cocoa and making grilled ham and cheese sandwiches, along with a side of clam chowder in a bread bowl.

“As you can see, Lorelei and Lacie splintered off from Lily and jacked one of her time machines. Droids from secret factories were working on Lily’s Ark. Lorelei repurposed them for warfare. Leading with the
Raven’s
advanced weaponry, Lorelei and Lacie joined the global war as an independent defense contractor in 1914, and pretended to form alliances with every major player, all the while breaking them, assassinating heads of state, and turning their subordinates against one another. By 1916, London, Washington, D.C., the Vatican, and New York were all wiped off the map in one bloody coup. Beijing, Moscow, Berlin, Kyoto, and Rome were soon annexed. The global elite toppled within the span of three years. Ruling families that’d been in power for centuries were hunted to the last or forced into servitude. Besides assassinations, Lorelei utilized controlled chaos, false flag attacks, mind control, and scare tactics to split apart nations, communities, and families, and to instill great fear and dread into the populace. It was a horrible war that lasted for decades. Meanwhile, the sisters also worked behind the scenes to create their own empire, funding puppet politicians spewing empty promises. Their descendants, the Seven Lords, rule the two hundred ‘Sectors’ of planet Earth. Through careful back-dealings, there was a sort of hard-won peace.”

“Wait, the ship they stole was also a time machine?”

“One of three, though the
Belladonna
remains the only device in existence that can traverse interstellar distances or more than a hundred years at a time. After losing her parents, Lillian installed limited Temporal Drives into her gunships. Lily pilots the
Phoenix
;
her clones helm the
Raven
.”

“So with Lily’s fuel cells, Lorelei and Lacie hopped across time with the
Raven
.”

“That’s correct. They were free to use it, yes, but they were also sworn against changing the past and creating what Lorelei believed to be alternate universes.”

“In other words, they had nowhere to go but the present, and the future.”

“That was the plan, anyway. Since Lily’s return seven years ago, Lorelei’s been hunting the
Belladonna
. This reality they’ve created has no future. The prolonged First World War left the Earth a forsaken land populated by only one and a half billion people, corralled by unified powers, robbed of reason and spirit, and awaiting certain death.”

Raine tried to process that scale of destruction. Against her world line, three quarters of the globe’s population had seemingly vanished, their existences never having taken place. She was simply unable to accept Super BlastBoy’s numbers as reality.

“All those people… But… but couldn’t Lily just send a message back to the past, and stop herself from creating the clones?”

“Not without first taking back her stolen power converter and fuel cells. When Lily finally reappeared seven years ago, she tried to reason with Lorelei, now a self-proclaimed Queen. It didn’t do her much good. By using their foreknowledge of Earth’s history and peoples, superior technology, and the
Raven
to travel through time and space, she and Lacie built an ultimate global superpower. Lorelei desired to be the one to bring stability back to the world, and then to be there to see it come to an end. What can I say? Control freakishness must run in the family. To be fair, it appears that the Queen really does believe that each failed parallel universe is an act of cold-blooded mass murder to the people involved, and that humanity will inevitably come to an end either way, prosperous space colonies or not. She’s not wrong there, you know.”

“That’s kind of a bleak way of looking at it,” Raine said. “I’m no physics buff, but from what I understand, her Split Timeline theory might well be true."

“It’s very possible. And the idealistic Lily wasn’t having it. She was betrayed, and badly burned by the thought of her own flesh and blood driving this particular universe into the ground. She wanted awfully to recover her power converter and erase this mess, and they wanted her dead to stop what they called her ‘mass murder spree’. So they came to a truce. The terms were grave.”

Their cups of cocoa with marshmallows were now ready. He returned with them and sat down beside Raine, whose brain was so overloaded, she slurped the stuff down without so much as a thought. After devouring two grilled ham and cheese sandwiches, several carrots and sticks of celery dipped in ranch, and most of her chowder (she was rather hungry), Raine waited for her host to continue.

“Lily’s flaw might be that she has too much of a code of honor. Her clones have it as well. The agreement went like this: if Lily could put a stop to Lorelei and Lacie’s reign without time travel, then she would continue on with her quest. Otherwise, if the two clones saw planet Earth through to its grisly conclusion, also without time travel, then it would mean an end to everything. All life on Earth, in this or any other dimension.”

“What? So this is all just a war game to them?” Raine cried out, incredulous. “Who gave them the right to control the lives of every human being on the planet?”

“That’s just the thing. With power as their birthright, the Queen and the Sky Admiral consider themselves ultimate authorities on the matter. That’s why they’ve both been amassing armies.

“With her defense override now fully integrated, Lorelei boasts a billion-strong global army straight from
Endless Metaverse
, not to mention the dreaded
Eden
Armada, a hefty reserve of android soldiers, and a nuclear arsenal. She rules the Earth’s remaining population from
Neo Eden
, a massive fortress-city-state.

“Lillian, on the other hand, has co-opted the forces of resistance against Lorelei’s rule. She leads the Earth Defense Coalition, a force tens of millions strong, with her aerial wing comprised of half a million volunteers – chiefly engineers, programmers, and militias of common folk and rescued
EM
players who pilot airships and operate mechanized infantry. In keeping with the EDC’s goal to limit human casualties, the Sky Admiral employs over twice as many android warriors. While Lily’s been able to hide the true strength of her numbers and keep information leaks to a minimum, it appears from the outside that she’s fighting a losing battle. At this point it could go either way. If her final moves go off without a hitch, she’s got a fair chance at completely annihilating
Endless Metaverse
.”

“Annihilating it? Why? You still haven’t explained what it is.”

“Well, it’s all been building up to it. Are you ready for this?”

“Yeah,” Raine said with utter determination.

Ω

“Talk to me, Lacie,” Queen Lorelei begged the corpse before her. “I want to know what the afterlife is like.”

Afterwards, the Queen did something she didn’t think herself still capable of. She wept, silently, at the pyre set up outside the modest but heavily guarded mausoleum where past royalty were allegedly buried, built into an outcropping on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, a short walk from the geothermal generators.

I didn’t give you permission to die on me
, she thought. Her only true ally, her shadow, the one person who knew and accepted her completely, was now gone. She looked up at the night sky, torch in hand. It was empty. Not a single star was visible through the dark smog and light pollution emitted by
Neo Eden’s
many mines and factories, which stretched along the Italian coastline for hundreds of miles. She reasoned that it was probably just as well. A black night. Just how Lacie would have wanted it. She closed her eyes and felt the cold wind threaten to take her away. An opening formed in the clouds above, barely wide enough for the first quarter moon to shine through. It was as if Lacie’s restless twin souls were calling out for their bodies to be set free. Queen Lorelei could wait no longer.

The World Leader lowered the torch onto the pyre and watched the last vestiges of her two sisters depart this world. The unspoken beauty of the vistas she and Lacie had seen, the world they had created, and the afterlife dreamed of together were now secrets for her to bear alone. General Lacie’s service to the Cause would not be forgotten. With Lillian’s death, their legacy would endure.

∞

Super BlastBoy was worried. He wanted to continue at Raine’s behest, but this information was not always welcome, or easily received.

“The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.”

“Please, sir. I need to know.”

Unable to refuse such an honest request, Tony closed his eyes and spoke as if he were channeling.

“
Endless Metaverse
is a tool to distract approximately ninety-three percent of the population of Earth from mindless work done in the service of
Neo Eden
. People immersed in the
Metaverse
wear
M-Gear
helmets, devices that disengage the conscious brain from reality. While in the Network, they are living a daydream. Their day-to-day work, regulated by the Overseer’s centralized AI and the decrees of the Seven Lords, goes on without any interference from their conscious minds. They eat, sleep, toil, and procreate, some in barracks, others in regimented family units, necessary functions operating like clockwork. Their physical bodies know no enjoyment. They are experiencing reality on pause. Many are farmers. Others work in war factories or mines. They are the lowest caste, treated on the televised news as animals by their rulers, all of whom serve Lorelei. Yes, many children are born and grow up in the real world, raised by software in their parents’
M-Gear
helmets, or by free peoples, but by nine years of age eighty percent of them become full-time users of
EM
. Most of the rest sign up in later years, unable to stave off their depression. There are servers for small children to live out fantasy lives while their bodies are enslaved to do Lorelei’s dirty work. The most shocking part of all this is that
Endless Metaverse
is not forced on anyone.”

Raine was absolutely speechless.

“Everyone who has ever entered the
‘Verse
has done so of their own free will. If it sounds unbelievable, that’s because it is. And it’s been going on for decades now. Humanity has been warped almost beyond recognition. Only a truly disturbed mind could possibly conceive of such a world, let alone create it.”

Tony scrolled through photos and videos on the wall; without visual confirmation, she might not have believed him, and indeed the girl took to pacing around the room, trying to get her thoughts straight.

Her host opened the door and they ventured outside to bask in the cool night air. Wrapped up in a quilt, Raine sat on a swing and looked up at the stars; she’d never known there were so many, never mind that they were being created within a computer. Virtual fragments of fragments of reality. It took a half-hour for the truth to really sink in.

It can’t be true. It just can’t. Except that his explanation answers so much. It’s painful to hear, but I can’t stop. Not yet. There’s more to this, I know. The creepy thing is it’s like I’ve always known it.

Across the way, SBB smoothed down a pile of wood chips and raked them into his vegetable garden. After some time, Raine finally nodded that she was ready and followed him back inside.

“Any thoughts, Raine?” asked Tony.

“Just questions. How is it possible for you to know all this?”

“Lily’s journals. She gave me access to them way back when, in preparation for this day. Also, the EDC has moles in
Neo Eden
from which she gleans details enough to fill in the blanks.”

“Who are you, Mr. Anthony? You’re obviously not one of Lorelei’s creations.”

“I am one of the most intelligent AIs in existence, created by the early
Metaverse’s
Illusionists to be a sort of hero figure, if you will. Once I got wind of the truth behind the
‘Verse
, I disappeared, leaving a dummy program in my place. That’s what got deleted. The AIs they wrote to replace me were significantly underpowered. I was a celebrity in the first iteration of
Endless Metaverse
. As a fugitive, I have no place in version 3.0. Sorry if that ruins your perception of the old arcade game. I hear you are rather good at it.”

“No, not at all. This is good stuff. And I’m happy you’re still here. I was afraid I might never find you.”

Tony beamed, evidently touched by these words. “Anyone who seeks the truth will cross paths with it, even if it’s in the least likely of places. You have a pleasant nature, Raine.”

“I’ve heard that slogan before,” she replied, recalling the innkeeper from her first night in the
Metaverse.