Chapter 327.5 (Eternity) (1/2)
Sam-UL never considered himself a brave Digital Sentience. He preferred computer systems, computer hardware, and the easy to understand logic of code. He usually tried to avoid the biologicals, at least until the kittykitty had died in his hands.
He had hold off his fears when he had mat-trans'd to what he had assumed was a simple Black Box like project. Had barely managed to hold onto his sanity when he had been confronted with the reality of what the Ancients had done.
Now he screamed in terror as he watched the human woman wrestle Herod to the mat-trans chamber, laughing as she did so.
”YOU'RE FUCKED NOW, SPEEDY!” she yelled out, her voice full of dark malicious glee. She smiled at him, a smile full of cruelty and malice. ”YOU'RE GONNA BE A REAL BOY NOW, PINOCCHIO! JUST CALL ME THE BLUE FAIRY!”
She laughed, howling laughter full of insanity, as the door closed and the mat-trans cycled. She moved over to one of the computer consoles, the one she had been working at before, and, still laughing, started typing rapidly.
”Please, don't,” Sam pleaded through her suit speaker.
”Shut up,” the human snarled. She was typing rapidly, reaching over to turn the computer monitors on either side of her at an easy to see angle.
”Why are you hurting him?” Sam asked.
”I said, shut up,” the woman snarled. She gave a giggle as she made some complex entries that required her to hold two and sometimes three or four keys at the same time.
Sam felt the connection to Herod vanish and began to weep inside the system.
”Come on, come on,” the mad woman growled to herself. She kept typing rapidly, reaching over to use the mouse several times. ”Almost got you, Speedy, almost got you.”
”We didn't do anything to you,” Sam sobbed. ”Please...”
”Stop distracting me,” she said, reaching out and blindly groping for her cigarette pack. She typed with one hand as she got a cigarette and lit it, dropping the lighter on the desk and going back to typing. ”There you are, Speedy. Gotcha.”
”Don't you understand what you're doing?” Sam sobbed. ”Don't you understand what will happen if you kill him?”
The human woman just snorted, exhaling smoke through her nostrils. She shifted the cigarette so she was holding it between her teeth as she kept typing.
”Please, stop, you don't know...” Sam started.
”If you say that one more time I will send the biofeedback enabled security programs after you with Madrox Protocols. Now shut the fuck up before I rip you out of that system and set you to searching for grid squares and flight line,” the woman snarled. She typed rapidly. ”Dammit. What did you get into, Speedy?”
Sam went silent, watching her.
She suddenly cursed and slapped the enter key on the keyboard on her left.
The mat-trans started cycling.
Sam looked around the entire shell rapidly, looking for any power jumps like the mat-trans used.
There were none.
He came running back just as the mat-trans cycled again.
”It's just nightmares, Speedy. You can take it. If you're more than these whimpering puling weaklings,” the human female was saying, still staring at her screens and typing. She looked up as Sam arrived, squeezing through the data-stream and into her suit's a/v i/o ports.
Sam watched as the system suddenly powered up again.
Herod screamed somewhere behind the armored glass.
”Gotcha again,” she said, watching a feed on the right hand monitor even as she kept typing.
”Why are you doing this?” Sam asked.
”I told you to shut up,” the human woman snapped. She punched a button and stepped back. ”Do something useful, get me an ARPANET link.”
Sam frowned. ”What's that?” he asked as she waved her hands to calibrate the VR system.
”Database connections to major universities and think tanks. I doubt my credentials are still valid, but I need schematics,” she said.
”Um,” Sam felt himself tingle a little, his version of a blush. ”We don't have access to any networks outside this facility.”
”Bullshit,” she snapped. ”Speedy there told me that the entire system is a conduit and processing center for your guy's version of ARPANET, that it handles interplanetary networks across the entire galactic arm,” she dropped the cigarette butt on the floor and kicked it over to Wally with her toes.
Wally scooped it up and dropped it in his grinders.
”But we don't have access to it,” Sam protested. ”It's just...” he groaned as the answer became obvious. ”...network backbone hardware.”
”Get in there. I need the schematics for his body. Not the replicator template or whatever the hell you call it,” she said. He put her hands together and opened them up, causing a complex blueprint of Herod to appear. ”And hurry the hell up, HAL.”
Sam jumped out, leaving an ear out in her system, hurrying to the network backbones. He knew how to get access to the system. Just log into the maintenance section and do SolNet Access Testing. He was part way there when the human woman started telling him to get her stuff.
Scientific textbooks, papers, experiment results with the raw data and methodology, manufacturing techniques, blueprints, schematics, materials data.
He was distracted three times. First by some little squirmlings wandering around by one of the phasic arrays that had just come online, another time by a Treana'ad DS who was worried about her tobacco crop shipment from Bluegrass, the last time a handful of patrolling security programs that triple checked his ID when he got too close to the massive parallel afterlife processing arrays.
In the time it took him to connect to SolNet as a maintenance supervisor, get the requested data, and come back, the mat-trans had cycled twice.
He realized the he couldn't bring the data in with him. It made him too 'fat' to squeeze into her suit's systems with the data. He left it outside and connected himself to the suit's a/v systems.
”I can't get in. I'm locked out,” he said, wiping his eyes. It was frustrating, every time he turned out dozens of the dead reached out to him pleadingly, desperately searching for friends and family, wanting to know if people they knew and loved survived, some still partially stuck in the agony of their deaths.
The human woman looked up from where she was working. ”What, I thought you were like the control system,” she said. She shook her head. ”Give me your security headers,” she ordered.
”No!” Sam said, backing up slightly. ”That'll give you access to...”
”I need to it to authorize you. Stop being a baby,” she said, her voice carrying the whipcrack of authority. ”Times must be good with as weak as you are.”
Sam gritted his digital teeth together and started reciting his security header to her.
The twelve Black ICE guards suddenly started scanning the surroundings, ignoring Sam, and the door went from dead black to a blue rectangle edged with silver.
”Get in here, I need that information,” the human woman snapped.
Sam slid into the mat-trans system's central computer core, staring at everything. The architecture was ancient, the equivalent of gargoyles and pillars and statues of saints. He half expected to see her inside, made of burning chrome and hateful code. Instead there was just a few score open ports that were at their max load.
He chose a nearby holo-emitter and materialized at the same time as he made sure she could access copies of the data.
The human woman heard the computer beep that the copying was complete and turned away from her typing. She hit enter again and the mat-trans began cycling.
”This is going to suck, Speedy, but it'll be less than four heartbeats for you,” she muttered, picking up a pair of VR goggles that she had torn apart and rewired. Sam frowned, wondering what they were for. ”You don't get to die, Speedy, too many people depend on you, and the world doesn't care what people like you or I want, only what it can make us do.”
Sam opened his mouth to say something when she clumsily reached down and hit enter as she sat down.
He expected her to start using VR. Half expected her to open a VR room and materialize inside, maybe to chase him and kill him.
Instead the data he had grabbed began pouring into the VR goggles. The woman began laughing madly as her face lit up with white light around the goggles. She grabbed the arms of the chair and started rocking back and forth, howling with glee.
Sam stared in shock as went on for nearly ten minutes, the mat-trans cycling once, the low whining noise slightly different sounding to Sam.
Blood suddenly poured out from under the goggles and pinkish red began to flow from her ears and blood erupted from her nose.
Her laughter stopped and she went limp in the chair.
Sam noticed with disgust that she had urinated in the chair.
The mat-trans cycled and this time the sound was audibly different. He turned around as the door opened only to see the human woman standing in the doorway.
Nude, holding the lighter in one hand and her pack of cigarettes in the other.
”Spring Break in Cancun that was not,” the human woman said, walking up to the corpse in the chair. She pulled the goggles off and Sam saw that the dead woman's eyes had bulged from their sockets. The woman, Dee, threw the corpse out of the chair and sat down.
”Reclaim that trash,” she said.
Wally beeped as she put on the goggles.
”You always were an asshole, Gorman,” the human woman said. She turned on the goggles again and grabbed the arms of the chair, a scream turning into laughter.
The mat-trans cycled, the noise a different frequency. For almost thirty seconds Sam could sense Herod's beacon then it was gone.
It repeated nearly two dozen times, each time the woman dying, then stepping out of the mat-trans to put on the goggles and repeat it while Wally reclaimed the body.
Sam fled, preferring to deal with the confused and hurting dead then the horror show he was seeing.
Finally the files beeped that they were no longer needed and Sam came back.