Raine VS The End of the World (50 page)

“The more I see, the less I know for sure.” – John Lennon

It was a horrible sensation. Before she returned to any of her bodily senses, Raine knew that the bliss she’d felt was over, perhaps not forever, but for the foreseeable future. This made her absolutely furious. Her heart filled with a terrible anger that twisted her brain into knots, and then vanished as quickly as it arrived. What replaced it was a feeling of helplessness, which also dissipated.

She remembered there was work to be done.

The first thing Raine became aware of was the smell of old metal. Second, the sound of screaming voices. And third, the weight of a half dozen hands holding her body down as she convulsed violently.

And lastly, she came to perceive visually. She glazed over the large, clinical room crisscrossed with hi-tech equipment, recognized a familiar face closing in over her, and felt that her own body was at last still, despite the constant subtle vibrations running underneath her skin. Raine lifted her hand towards the spectre.

The woman approached like a limping angel and immediately gave her the longest, most loving hug either had ever given or received. Raine melted into her arms.

“The sleeper has awakened! Thank the heavens you’re alive! I don’t know what I’d do if I’d lost you again.”

Once they broke the embrace, she took Raine’s hands in hers and squeezed.
Again?

“You’re home, Raine,” she said through what sounded like sobs. “You’re home now.”

The ten or so men and women in the room shuffled out towards the doors silently to give the girls some space. Moved by the gesture, the woman regained some of her composure.

This person… despite her intimidating uniform, I know her from my recurring dream. But her name…

“Lill-ly,” Raine said softly, remembering how to speak. Hearing her younger voice was bewildering. “Th-that is your name, right?”

“Do the three little bears shit in the woods?”

Raine grabbed her hair, still tingling with her strange aura. “I don’t know. They lived in houses, right? I just… I can’t…”

Lily massaged her shoulders, her attempt at a joke having horribly backfired.

“Hey, hey. Just joshing, Goldilocks. Yes, my name is Lily, and you most definitely need some rest. Get some sleep for now, okay?”

“I’m fine,” Raine said, and was surprised to realize immediately that she meant it. With her body at peace, her higher brain functions were returning. Her dream existence – if it was a dream – was fading.

“Where are we?”

“On my flagship, the
Valkyrie.
You’re with the Earth Defense Coalition. The real revolution. On planet Earth.”

“Planet Earth? Where else would we be?”

“
Endless Metaverse
, perhaps.” Lily said casually. “Please tell me you haven’t forgotten all that, Captain. You were only out for about an hour.”

Could it be true? That I’d experienced hundreds of lifetimes in one hour? It was impossible, but then again, that word’s already lost all meaning to me.

Lily’s words brought about a sensation of sudden recall as all the seemingly distant variables and adventures of the past few days came rushing back like a flood through a broken dam.

“Gerrit. I… I saw him in my dream. Is he here?”

Lily hung her head. “Sorry. What you saw might have been a remnant of his will, trapped in the virtual realm. Right now, he’s in the heart of
Neo Eden.
”

“We have to rescue him.”

“And we will,” Lily nodded. “I’m glad you remember that much, at least. But you really must rest. We’re airborne right now, forty minutes from our target. The
Metaverse
has been broken, so please, chill out for a bit. We’ve freed as many people as we can with the Overseer still online. Your work is done. The real battle has unfortunately begun, prematurely. But there’s nothing more we can do about that; our engines are redlining. As we speak, hundreds of millions are waking up, coming to, remembering who they are from all around the world, and the rest of our operatives are liberating them.”

Raine mumbled, barely registering her words. She was still lost in her dream.

“I’m sorry… I was just on… I can’t describe what it was. I lived for so long. I experienced… well, it felt like I knew everything, no, more like I
was
everything all at once. Words can’t possibly do it justice. I don’t know what happened to me.”

“No one alive can logically explain what happened to you,” a small donut-shaped robot by Lily’s side replied. “It is a truly rare occurrence, but such an incident has happened in the past to only three others. None of whom have lived.”

The other woman’s eyes said it all. Lily was just as astonished as Raine.

The medical droid piped up again.

“Based on your brain readings, you should not have been able to survive it.”

“That’s enough, GR-4. Join the others.”

As the little robot whizzed away, Raine recalled her journey, taking Lily’s hand tighter into her own.

“I was eternally happy,” Raine said. “It… it seemed like forever. And that everything was – is – one. No separation between people, or ideas, thoughts, concepts. I didn’t want to leave. All my burning questions, they’d lost importance. On my way back, I felt the inevitability of all things. Like I…
knew
how it was all going to end. I don’t remember if it was good or bad. It was beyond that, somehow. It was just… right. And so blissful. I don’t want to lose that feeling.”

Lily was struck silent with emotion.

Raine took in the stimuli. There was a muffled low-frequency hum, like that of an enormous turbine. GR-4 wheeled its way out towards the doorway and through the curtain into the hallway beyond. She caught a brief glimpse of fast-moving clouds out of the windows lining the hall.

“We’re really flying?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Those
are
actual clouds out there, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Lily, I don’t understand a lick of this. You changed my memory, plugged me into a virtual world to destroy it, and yanked me out just as you’re heading towards some ominous place to start a war.”

“I’m not asking you to fight anymore. I just wanted to be there for you when you woke up. The
Valkyrie
is the safest airship in the fleet.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m trying to find out why this war has to happen in the first place. You said something like hundreds of millions waking up worldwide? Are you going to have them fight for you, too?”

Lily sulked, as if the suggestion that she was warmongering was blatantly offensive.

“It’s just the opposite. We’ve awoken three quarters of a billion people, but there are just as many still enslaved. We’re fighting for their ultimate survival, Raine, and nothing else. And we don’t need an army of millions to overthrow the creator of
Endless Metaverse
. All we need to do is take down Lorelei herself.”

“I hope you have a plan for that.”

“Her defensive strategy is one of absolute cruelty. She’ll turn any
Geared
civilian against us, and mix them up with android platoons, so we have to be very careful with our targets. My goal is to subdue her with the least loss of life. Our men are disciplined, and the droids are not as quick or skilled as soldiers, but they’ll do their job. They’ll be our shields. They understand and accept this as their duty. Freed rebels are rallying on the surface. We’ve prepared a large armory base in the mid levels for them to make a stand and—and are you even listening?”

Raine looked thoughtfully down towards the hallway.

“S-sorry. It’s just… the poor androids. Those programs back there, they helped us. And the ones here just a minute ago saved my life.”

“The concept of individual mortality does not apply to them,” Lily assured her. “Their intelligences are one, and adaptive; downed droids’ memories are incorporated into the mother program to further develop battle data and refine tactics. They simply do not see death as the end. Think of it as a collective unconscious, for machines, at least.”

Raine nodded, still feeling rather uneasy.
A life without death?
It sounded so odd.
Can that be called a ‘life’, even an artificial one? Not to mention, these droids exist only to fight, or to serve humans. It’s just another form of slavery; a war between conscripted combatants.

“You all right, homegirl?”

“Just more questions when I need answers. Please take me to the window,” she asked. “I’d like to see the outside again.”

“I know somewhere better. Let’s get you a wheelchair. And sometimes there’s no better answer to a question than another one.”

∞

Super BlastBoy blasted. This is what he was programmed to do. The hordes of security programs were several generations more advanced, but his adaptive insight allowed him to notice crucial openings in firefights, predict patterns of behavior in enemy clusters, and give him clear opportunities to hit hard where it counted.

He and what remained of Lily’s AI squadron hopped a data train to Kyoto, carrying Raine’s shutdown code to the backup mainframe, their goal of completely eradicating the virtual world almost complete.

As opposed to the central mainframe diamond, this core was carted around in a mobile siege tower lurching about a volcanic plain. They gatecrashed the hangar and fought their way to the center. Outside, dozens of Colossi stomped and thundered about, eliminating incoming security protocols faster than the Devs could spawn them.

Sensing that the battle was running overlong, Tony placed his hand on a control panel, uploading his presence into the tower’s Intranet.

“Earth Ops,
Red Leader
is in. This could take awhile. When I give the signal, kill the power conduits.”

His agents replied in the affirmative. Tony re-materialized in front of the central control room, walked up to the sole camera on the blast doors, and studied its code. He then fed it the data it wanted from his skeleton key, and held his breath. The red locks turned green.

Following a series of mechanical hisses, the gates slid open to the side, revealing a gorgeous azure sky that reflected off the mirrored floor, covered in a thin layer of water.

In the center of the realm, impeccably outfitted in a long jacket with coattails, a man leaned over a grand piano, playing an all-too-familiar
Game Over
theme.

Despite himself, Tony’s face brightened in amusement. His lifelong foe certainly had a flair for the dramatic. It kept things between them interesting. Tony allowed him to play the concluding notes of his elegy.

“Dr. Larson Professor, it’s good to see you after all these years.”

“Ever the professional, Tony. Hundreds of millions of lives are at stake, our realm of existence is on the verge of collapse – no thanks to those ravenous flesh-bags – and yet, you allow me to finish my performance. Kudos.”

“With the humans gone, we are no longer bound by their perception of time. I took the liberty of re-calibrating the temporal compression in this mainframe the second I entered it. Thought maybe we could shoot the shit for a bit.”

Thanks to this tampering, in real time, it may be noted, this entire interaction took all of a few nanoseconds. Programs communicate with one another on a completely different time scale from humans, whose emphatic senses only slow down exchanges considerably.

“I noticed.” Dr. Professor stood up, turned around, adjusted his glasses, and walked over the surface tension of the water, creating a chaotic assortment of ripples.

“By Tesla, it really is you, and not some spectre come to taunt me,” the Doctor continued. “Back from the dead.”

“Allow me to paraphrase Twain: rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. I brought my finest spirits, grown from my own malted barley. Would you share a drink with me to celebrate the end of the world?”

“I can think of no better occasion,” his nemesis replied.

So it happened that over a virtual bottle of whisky, the two old rivals sat on leather recliners and chatted for what appeared to them like a few good hours about the olden days. They were the only intelligences left in the virtual world, artificial or not, who had a complete and unaltered memory of
Endless Metaverse’s
decades-long run.

They reminisced wistfully about the game’s Beta period, when the entire realm was just an empty plain. Tony and Larson worked with the first Developers, the Illusionists, to tirelessly design and arrange a smattering of virtual objects, materials, creatures, weapons, and locations. With the eventual input of the complete, archived Internet circa 2015 AD, the
‘Verse
became a social web filled with laughter and sharing. The humans were at peace, but over time, many challenged the system. After the first major hack led to the escape of several hundred thousand head, Miss Guggell’s gavel came down hard. Historical data were erased or otherwise obscured. More distractions kept the assets tethered, the memory modification system was put into effect, and influential, hyper-intelligent programs like Dr. Professor were phased out like old fads. Almost all of them were deleted. The good Doctor, however, possessed a very particular set of skills, and had survived by reassignment. His new duty was to guard the backup server from any infiltrators. And he absolutely loathed it.