Raine VS The End of the World (57 page)

Looks like I got the last laugh. I’m sorry, Daddy. I hope I made you proud.

The
Freyja
impacted against the
Charon
, and then exploded, ending Macleod’s assault. Both airships careened into the Shield Control Complex, crumbling the third wall, sending a shockwave through the upper levels, and downing the bulk of
Neo Eden’s
shimmering forcefield.

▒

“Uwgah!”

Jon leapt up in a sudden spasm. That pesky redhead was standing over him, cleaning a syringe.

“What happened back there? What’s going on?” Jon demanded. Gerrit held the man’s shoulders to keep him from cramping up.

“Adrenaline. Relax,” Holdfast laughed, reprogramming a few stunned androids. “You were out. We needed you moving.”

Jon gasped for breath as his veins throbbed; he slammed his back into the corridor wall.

“Keep it down, will you?” Gerrit pleaded.

He ignored the kid. “Wait… is this…”

“Bet your arse it is. Central Asset Control,” said Henry. “We’re shutting the Overseer down.”

“B-but why?” Wrathman retaliated after a length of silence. “It’s the last tether we have left to the hivemind. There’s no telling what will happen if you do any damage to that room, you hear? It could be weeks before we get the herd back online!”

Gerrit shot Henry a quizzical look.

“Care to remind me why he’s tagging along, again?”

Steeling his resolve to face the worst, Henry led the trio down the wide hallway, which finally ended in double-blast doors reading ‘Chamber 50B: Central Asset Control Failsafe’: a misleading label to protect the Queen’s most valuable program.

“Based on Miss Guggell’s data, two
Nexus
personnel ranked Class A or higher are needed to open this door right here, and seeing as how the rest of my team is inconveniently frozen or missing, you, Captain, must hold open the lock.”

He deliberately left out Dr. Karuishi, whose job it was to report ground movements and patterns to Joaquin at this stage of the operation now that Frankie was out of the picture. She wasn’t in danger, as far as he knew, and there was no sense giving her away to any eavesdroppers.

“Jon, give me your access key.”

With every armed droid in the
Spire
sent to the front lines to minimize human casualties, the trio met with no resistance, but Henry sent his repurposed sentry bots to guard the hall.
Something’s amiss. She would never let it be this easy.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Jon intoned.

“Why did you have to say those words in that particular order?” complained Henry. “You politicians are nothing but a walking pile of clichés.”

“My impeccably utilized clichés net me two million credits a day, son. Have a little respect.”

“I hold no esteem for dictators.”

Jon laughed. “I’ll be sure to tell your twenty-year-old Napoleon that.”

Gerrit watched as Henry and Jon simultaneously did retinal, fingerprint, and voice scans on either side of the blast doors. He was instructed to hold open the heavy central lock as they did so, a task usually relegated to powerful androids. The doors opened to a chilly, dark chamber nestled into the very heart of the pyramid.

Henry placed a hand on Jon’s shoulder, beyond relieved that against all odds, things were going as planned.

"Hey Jon, your part’s over. You can still get out of this. I'll see to it my people spare your life."

“Give me a minute to consider that.”

The hexagonal grid must have been five hundred yards in each direction, and packed with thick cables, control panels, mega-servers, and a circuitous network of icy tubes that worked in tandem with giant ceiling fans to circulate the heat past the artificial climate system.

They made it to the raised central console platform. Henry pulled out his tablet and established a physical uplink to the Network. He began typing away furiously.

“I’ll pass on the parting,” Jon answered. “The captain must go down with the ship, right? Plus, you guys have the plan.”

“Man, you must really hate your job,” Gerrit observed.

“You don't know the half of it. She made me marry an artificial intelligence, all in the name of PR and efficiency.”

Gerrit was grossed out. “She
what
? And you went along with it?”

“Hey, don't judge me, kiddo. Up here in the
Spire
, it's life or death by her law.”

“Maybe so,” Henry said. “But getting your Jones on with a robot? That's just downright weird, even for a politician.”

Jon threw his arms up in the air like he just didn’t care.

“To be honest, I’ll be surprised if your tinkering even works,” he griped. “You are aware there’s no precedent for shutting down the Overseer’s global system. It hasn’t been done, not even once, and certainly not in the middle of an intensive operation like this--”

“Well, we’re about to do it, old man. And if you know what’s good for you--”

“He doesn’t know what’s good for him,” a snarky outburst erupted from the PA system. It was a voice all three knew very well, and feared.

It belonged to Queen Lorelei.

“And if any of you want to live past the next few minutes, I suggest you listen to me and surrender.”

“Not gonna happen!” Gerrit exclaimed before Jon could open his mouth to comply with the Queen’s wishes.

“Very well,” she replied.

Doors opened from all six corners of the room.

A regiment of close to a thousand
M-Geared
men, women and children, armed with automatic weapons, marched in and formed a perimeter around the trio. They were completely surrounded.

Henry’s eyes never left his computer. At last, he exhaled deeply as he hit the Return button.

For a future of human, not machine singularity,
Holdfast thought; recalling the warm faces of his large family back home, the smiles of freedom and wonder he’d likely never see, he basked in the fulfillment of his childhood dreams.
I hope I’ve done right by you, kid.

The override program was running. It just needed a few minutes to execute.

“Shit!” Jon cried. “Your Majesty, please stop this! I’m sorry!”

“Why, Wrathman? After all we’ve done together… and all the riches I’ve shared with you… your many privileges…”

“You threatened to kill me!”

“I’ve threatened to kill everyone! Why do you take it so personally? Am I some kind of monster to you?”

It was a strange thing to hear. The Queen was being weirdly emotional.

One of the humans shot Jon in the kneecap. He fell to the floor screaming.

Gerrit and Henry watched in horror, too terrified to move.

“And Henry, you back-stabbing traitor,” she began. “Here’s a question for a self-made supergenius. Do you really think a lowly human has the capability to shut down a worldwide defense network created by a cyborg with an IQ of over two hundred?

Jon glanced sideways at the progress bar on the hacking program. Thirty percent.

“I’m confident in my abilities,” Henry smiled like a Zen Master. “And someone’s got to take a stand.”

There was something very off about the Queen’s voice. Gerrit wondered why they hadn’t been killed on sight.

Ω

Alone in the dark recesses of the
Nexus
’ mainframe and without the aid of her cyborg implements or virtual double, Queen Lorelei looked down at the haptic gloves she’d put on for the Network to read her hand gestures, along with the old-school keyboard she was now forced to use to issue advanced commands on the herd. Her fingers were shaking, still covered in blood.

Not five minutes ago, her nano-bots’ emergency protocols forced the Queen’s body awake from the anesthetic. She’d terminated the power-hungry Dr. Marco and his assistants before they could remove her cybernetic plug-ins, but her souped-up brain implants were malfunctioning, sending various organs into overdrive and leaving her nervous system a twitching wreck.

It had been a long time since she’d personally executed a human, let alone five, and constant electric spasms made her walk downstairs a painful trip.

“All th-three of you had the world at your fingertips,” the Queen said softly. “I gave you everything.”

Jon’s screaming slowed. She had him shot in the other kneecap.

Gerrit and Henry jumped in shock. Queen Lorelei stole a glance at Holdfast’s tablet. Forty percent. And there was no way it was going to work.

It would be so easy to kill them and stop the shutdown sequence. But that would only prolong the suffering. Hundreds of millions of her loyal subjects would die: men, women, and children who were just as helpless and afraid as she had been a few minutes ago, at the hands of her most trusted people, no less. And there was no guarantee that anything she might be doing would put a stop to Lillian’s advance.

Without a doubt, the Sky Admiral was coming up to challenge her personally.

All along,
Lorelei thought,
I’d only ever needed to take one life.
I don’t think I can bear any more blood on my hands.

“How could you…” she mouthed to herself, hands off the mic. “How could you live with yourself if you killed potentially hundreds of millions, and prevented the births of over seven billion, only to discover that you only needed to kill one to prevent genocide on a universal scale?”

No. Now is not the time for regrets. Even then, I should always assume the worst-case scenario.

‘But then, to what purpose is all this bloodshed for?’
the other voice cried.
Will this truly be the last of all world lines?

“Queen Lorelei, please stop this!” Gerrit begged. “These people are innocent! I know you don’t believe in suffering without purpose. Prove it to me, and to yourself, that there’s more to you than ruthlessness.”

Oh, but there is more. So much more. Not that you’d understand.

First, to take care of these three… they were fighting for Lily. And they deserved death.

“Know with your parting breath that I gave you a chance, Gerrit. N-n-now, die,” she continued, a tear running down her cheek.

What’s wrong with me? This should have been easy.

She closed her eyes as she gave the order.

Three of her favorite men were brutally mowed down on the control floor, silencing her conscience.

The tablet counted down the seconds.

This was it. The moment of truth.

The voice in her head took hold of her finger over the kill command.

What are you waiting for? Do you have a death wish?

Perhaps she did. Nevertheless, Lorelei had a dozen of her
Geared
soldiers train their rifles on the tiny CPU. It would be so easy. And yet, she couldn’t will herself to pull the trigger.

Lacie was dead.
Destroy it!
Beech had kicked the bucket.
Pull it now!
Guggell was gone.

Ninety percent.

She held in a breath.

I may have a death wish. But I’m not bloody stupid
.

Queen Lorelei shot the tablet into little pieces.

It was a done deal.

Only, it wasn’t. An alarm sounded; something went very wrong. She stuck a source plug into one of the input sockets behind her ear. Going by the ballistics, a bullet had ricocheted directly into the heart of the mainframe coolant system, puncturing a supposedly reinforced glass tube. The entire room would soon flood with near-freezing fluid.

The odds against such a thing happening were astronomical.

Maybe I should have thrown my chips in with fate.

She hit the commands to open the doors, but it was too late. The glass had cracked, the hole had burst, and icy coolant flooded the entire compartment, drenching the small army of people and short-circuiting the Overseer servers that controlled their minds, effectively destroying the last link in their shackles. Now fully awake, they struggled to stay afloat, and then screamed at the giant fans that were sure to be their death.

Queen Lorelei quickly halted the blades. Robotic arms carried the people to the climate control chamber above the upper ventilation shafts. The act brought her some relief.

“Men, women, and children of
Neo Eden
, be free,” she said, in disbelief of her own words. “Follow the maintenance lights to the exit and take refuge in the nobles’ dining room.”

The Queen leaned back in her chair and grabbed the varnished cedar hard, digging in her nails.

The Defense Protocols were kaput. The people would demand her death.

I refuse to feel sorry for myself.

No, this isn’t the end. Not by a long shot. As long as I take breath and the
Raven
has fuel, there’s still a chance.