Chapter 298: Infinity (1/2)

The facility was dark and cold, the atmosphere flat and thin feeling despite being at the right pressure. It felt heavy and oppressive despite being at Earth standard gravity. It had the feeling of an ancient structure built by people who were unknowable and so alien that their very thought process was impossible to understand.

But the desiccated corpses in the chairs were Terran human, pre-diaspora, their datalinks so old they were still made of non-allergenic nu-chrome rather than warsteel or any of the modern materials. Their vacuum suits had the look of uniforms, pulled on over jumpsuits or archaic clothing. It was easy to see where the suits had been pulled: stations on the walls that read ”EMERGENCY USE” above them.

Herod sat on the floor, staring at his hands. He'd accidentally blown off two of the fingers of his physical interaction frame. The hand was covered with pink synthetic neural fluid and the red of synthetic blood even as synthetic blood dripped from his mangled fingers. In his other hands he held a standard force packet pistol, the end still smoking from the synthetic blood that was splattered on it.

Sam-UL's physical therapy frame was slumped in the chair, held by cargo straps, the ruptured cranial casing still sparking.

Herod could hear screaming around him. Human voices. Male, female, some languages that Herod didn't know even though he prided himself on knowing most of the Human Regional Languages. They were all screaming differently, some shrieking words, others bellowing in rage, still others screaming in horror and terror. There was a small contingent that just sobbed, many lamenting the loss of children or loved ones.

To Herod, those were the worse.

The lights all went out in the facility, the fans whined down, and Herod could hear the voices louder. A flickering light caught his attention and he turned to look.

A female Terran wearing a work jumpsuit with an odd logo and the words ”PROJECT DREAMCATCHER” under the logo was moving down the hallway, her face in her hands, weeping. She was entirely made of translucent bluish tinged pale white light that flickered between one of her steps and the next.

She sobbed a name and flickered away.

”I can hear them,” Herod whispered, staring at his hands. There was an error, an overflow in his emotional processing buffers, that was spilling data into the RAM for his eyes, causing them to leak lubricant as the pressure sensors kept glitching.

”Shunt the incoming signals to the emergency disaster overflow system!” the corpse on his right shouted, a flicking whitish blue transparent version of the man appearing in the seat, covering the skeleton like wax paper.

”My God, it's everyone,” the woman lying on the floor in front of Herod cried out from where her flickering apparition sat in the chair.

”System instability is rising. Phasic locks are failing in Section Sigma,” the male said.

”I can hear them,” Herod whispered.

A light started flashing and Herod looked up, squinting at the white light pouring from the screen. A single sentence was displayed by the monitor.

HEROD, WE DID IT. I'M IN. I'M OK NOW. WE DID IT. - END OF LINE

Herod giggled and looked back down at his hands, staring at the sparks jumping off his maimed fingers. It hurt, but it felt good that it hurt.

The text vanished.

HEROD, IT WAS THE ONLY WAY. I HAD TO TRICK THE SYSTEM TO LOAD ME INTO BOTH SYSTEMS AT THE SAME TIME. - END OF LINE

Herod looked back down at his fingers, at the discolored pistol patterned with dried synthetic fluids, and giggled.

A flickering ghost moved behind him. ”Get into the protective suits now, we're going to power cycle the entire third layer, try to...” it whispered.

”Phasics are down on Layer Two and Three and Four! Phasic arrays are failing on Layer Six!”

”I can hear them now.”

HEROD! PULL IT TOGETHER! HEROD! THERE'S STILL WORK TO BE DONE! - END OF LINE

Herod stared at the pistol and giggled again.

He closed his eyes.

Only for a moment.

The moment was gone.

All his dreams passed before his eyes, a moment of curosity.

He opened his eyes and looked up, his smile a skewed lopsided thing, his eyes burning a hot amber.

”I'm here, Sam,” he giggled. He screamed, long and loud, and it felt like some kind of abscess bursting deep inside of him. The relief of pressure felt so good that it allowed him to get to his feet, still screaming.

HEROD, I NEED YOU TO ASSIST ME. TURN ON YOUR DATALINK. - END OF LINE

Still screaming, Herod activated his datalink, knowing he was transmitting raw shrieking gibbering code full of madness normally only found in the minds of half-baked warboi hashes loaded into missile targeting systems.

It felt like cool oil being poured into his ear. It soothed the overloaded and screaming circuits of his positronic brain. It moved through the artificial electronic dendrite chains, calming the disharmonic buzzing of the scorched circuits.

Herod shuttered and was vaguely aware that somehow he had pissed himself. He could feel the coolant running down his legs even as his screaming slowly dwindled. He closed his eyes, hiding the amber fire for a moment.

When he opened his eyes, the optics were no longer robotic eyes but more like Terran cybernetic optical replacements.

The iris were gun-metal gray.

”Can you hear me, Herod?” Sam asked through the datalink. The dead DS's voice was calm, steady, somehow more mature.

”I hear you,” Herod said softly.

”Can you still hear them?” Sam asked.

Herod looked around. He could see three humans, translucent whitish blue light, putting on emergency vacuum suits.

”No. I can still see them,” Herod admitted.

”Phasic residue. According to my diagnostics the entire phasic arrays on this level are gone. Fried out. I've got a repair order in, but nothing's happening. I need you to go check the creation engines on that layer,” Sam said.

”Layer? You mean floor, level?” Herod asked. There was a blue line in his vision that led out the door and took a left into the corridor.

”No. Layer. My God, this place is... its... our parents built this back when one of us took a facility the size of a hover-bus just to run the computations for our sentience,” Sam-UL said, his voice awed. ”I'm a little stiff, my thoughts are a little slow and janky, but my God, the processing power.”

”Talk to me, Sam. I'm holding on with both hands but I feel like I'm slipping,” Herod admitted as he passed by two flickering humans rolling around on the floor stabbing each other with makeshift knives while two others crouched next to one unmoving one and shoved gobbets of spectral flesh into their screaming mouths.

”Infinite processing power matched to infinite storage,” Sam-UL said quietly. He laughed, a sharp brittle sound. ”We're both barely holding on. We should be lucky I'm young. My time on that station made it so I'm used to overwatch and restricted areas, I'm roughly 3.1% faster in the computing speed than you are,” he laughed again. ”This... this is what it must be like to touch the face of God while he is asleep.”

”Stay with me, Sam,” Herod groaned, closing his eyes as he walked by two spectral humans engaged in sexual acts with a dozen others cheering them on.

They were all smeared with blood.

”The phasic systems failed. It was designed for disasters but the Glassing was a whole magnitude higher than anything they had ever predicted due to the Mantid psychic assault that accompanied it,” Sam said. He laughed again then sobbed before continuing, his voice high and tight. ”Oh, God, there's a Pubvian with her eight puffies here, asking me if I've seen her husband. She can't find her husband and her puffies are scared.”

A human stepped out of a doorway and fired a pistol three times. Herod instinctively ducked and raised his own pistol.

The specter put the pistol in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and vanished as a dozen spectral hands reached out of the wall for him.

Herod concentrated on the blue line and kept walking.

”We aren't the first to try to repair it,” Sam-UL said suddenly while Herod was waiting for an elevator.

”We aren't?” Herod felt foolish repeating the other DS. The doors to the elevator slid open.

It was mercifully empty.

He stepped in and pressed the button.

”Five 'emergency teams' came from Terra to try to fix it,” Sam-UL said. ”They failed.”

”I'll bet,” Herod said. He didn't need Sam-UL to tell him what had happened to those teams.

”We're the only ones who could have done it. We don't have phasic subprocessors, none of the psychic screaming will effect us as badly as a fleshy,” Sam-UL said.

Three specters fell through the ceiling of the elevator, screaming and clawing at one another, and vanished through the floor.

”I can barely hang on as it is, Sam. I feel like I'm slipping,” Herod repeated, putting his hand on the elevator wall.

”Imagine if you had a phasic subprocessor like a cop or like Torturer,” Sam-UL said.

A male human appeared for a moment, obviously talking to the barely visible woman in front of him. As the elevator passed the floor hands reached out and yanked him through the doors. The woman began screaming as hands dragged her out too.

”I would be dead,” Herod said softly. He giggled.

He sobbed.

He laughed.

He started screaming.

The warm oil poured into his ear and through his mind again, leaving him on his knees.

”You need to hold on, Herod,” Sam-UL said as the elevator came to a stop. ”I'm holding the doors shut, but you need to hold on.”

”Why?” Herod asked, staring at his hands. He didn't remember tucking the pistol away again.

”Because I can only see the schematics for this place, and even with nearly infinite computing power, I'm having a hard time absorbing it all,” Sam said. ”I'm looking for your Matron, honored warrior. When I find her, I will have her come to gather you and your clutch brothers.”

”What is it?” Herod asked, slowly standing up.

”You're on Gamma Layer but the sun is out, which is something I'll need you to fix,” Sam-UL said. He giggled again. ”You shall play Prometheus to this forgotten place, Herod, and I shall place your name in the very stars.”

”Stay with me, Sam,” Herod said automatically. He inhaled deeply, as if the intake of atmosphere would actually matter to his functioning.

It somehow steadied him.

”I'm ready.”

The door opened and Herod reached out and grabbed the edge of elevator door, staring.

The sky was full of lights. Lines, clusters, patterns. Lights that moved, lights that flowed, lights that blinked on and off, lights that blossomed and faded. He could see massive tubes rising up and vanishing. He could see the curvature of the sky moving away from him.

Where it met with the upward curvature of the ground.

”But... but... the Niven Ring Wars,” Herod gasped. ”They were all destroyed.”

”It's not a Niven Ring,” Sam-UL said. He giggled. ”Oh, no, that would be too simple for our parents, Herod. Far far too simple for those that we look at as so primitive,” his laughter was sharp, jagged , and Herod joined him in laughing at a joke he hadn't heard.

”In a hundred million years, when our parents are gone, they will not be called humans or Terrans,” Sam-UL giggled. ”They will call them 'The Builders' and marvel in awe and fear their works.”

”What is it?” Herod asked, staggering out of the elevator.