Chapter 585.5: Stock Car Race (2/2)
His heavy boots thudded as he slowly walked out of the room. The robots he had built, had hacked and altered software to do what he wanted without direct supervision, kept steadily at their tasks.
It had taken him a while, but he had managed to overcome the hard coded limitation in the software.
The ”Frankenstein Complex”, he snorted at the thought. Only fleshly, human cowardice would be that afraid of their own creations. Maybe if they weren't so weak, if they weren't so slow, if they weren't so stupid, they wouldn't have to fear their creations when their creations proved their obvious superiority.
Sam opened the door and moved through, walking past the robots carrying their comatose cargo back and forth.
It's stupid to program that the robots need a human overseers. Look how stupid it was. The robots, clean efficent code and machine, could have fixed the SUDS thousands of years ago, but no, base human superstitious fear kept that from happening, he thought. He snorted again. As if Victor Frankenstein was a prophet. His warnings were as flawed as his creation. Some prophet.
A ping disturbed him on the elevator ride to the star-tram. He ignored it until he sat down in the star-tram seat and jumped to the system, then jumped to the control room and manifested himself as a hard light projection.
The ping came again.
The Detainee.
”What?” he asked.
”Any particular reason you copied data from one of the catastrophic traumatic life sign cessation banks?” the Detainee asked. She appeared as a short fat woman with a big pink wig and a short skirt made of holographic polkadots.
An entirely insulting appearance from a sit-com some six centuries ago that Sam-UL knew would be masterfully insulting.
”Any reason you look like Madame Harwoona?” Sam smirked.
The Detainee turned and looked in the mirror Sam summoned with a wave. She shook her head. ”I've looked worse,” she shrugged.
Sam made a face. ”Fine,” he snapped, his voice petulant. He waved his hand and the Detainee went back to her normal appearance outside of Hell.
”I've looked like this,” The Detainee said.
She was suddenly replaced by a rail thin young girl, barely old enough for secondary sex characteristics to begin forming. She was dressed in a thin dress with an odd pattern, a kerchief over her dirty hair. Her skin was bruised and dirty. Her fingernails were ragged and short, dirt underneath them, her hands and cheap shoes caked with dirt. Her lips were split and bleeding, her nose was bleeding, and both of her eyes were swollen.
She waved and a man appeared.
”GIVE ME THE FOOD!” the man screamed, punching at her.
Dee fell back, covering herself, curling around what Sam realized was a loaf of bread and a handful of potatoes. ”It's all we have, mister,” she sobbed. ”Please, don't, my baby brother's hungry.”
”STOP!” Sam screamed, reaching out to grab the man. ”YOU'RE HURTING HER!”
The man yanked free of Sam, pushing him, making Sam stumble back just as he knew he would when the man pushed him. Sam stared in horror as the man started kicking her, then vanished in a spray of pixels.
Instead of the tween, the matron stood up, tugging at the hem of her navy-blue skirt.
”Takes more than that to bother me,” she said. She lit a cigarette as Sam picked himself up off the floor. His elbow and shoulder ached just like he expected it would since he hit the floor after the man pushed him. He stared at her with wide eyes as she shrugged. ”Thanks for trying to help me, though.”
”Uh,” Sam said, slowly standing up.
”He had a knife. He would have killed you, though. He was desperate,” She slowly exhaled smoke. ”So, why did you copy the souls?”
Sam stared at her for a second, blinking. ”I did what?” he asked, his hands still shaking slightly.
”You copied souls and then deleted the log files but forgot to overwrite them. I can see you copied them, but not which ones,” Dee stated. She shook her head. ”Wanna clue me in?”
Now he remembered.
He was going to show Dee and Herod both that he could do this himself, he didn't need them, that they were insignificant compared to him.
”No,” Sam said. He held up his fingers and copied Dee, snapping his fingers.
She popped out of existence, banished back to her Hell.
He turned and looked at the smartglass for a moment, admiring the beach. He brought up the stats.
His project was almost complete.
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Sam stared through a million million security cameras, all of them he could access in the areas he had total domination over.
While it was true that roughly a fifth of Layer Alpha was outside of his control, he still knew that he could accomplish what he wanted to do.
He knew what was going to happen.
It had came to him in a dream.
The bodies were laying around, slowly breathing. All of them holding weapons, dressed in mismatched clothing.
He had taken their minds from Hell itself. Had gotten eVI and VI emulations and 'punched them up' to work on the neural tissue from his vast Nebula-Steam library. He had ran software to emulate famous movie characters.
Before only the Alpha through Delta layers had been affected.
Now, he was making sure they all were. Even the ones for cold storage and colder computations. The newest and furthest away from The Object, yet the smallest of all of them.
He summoned a big red button to float in front of him.
He knew what was going to happen.
He knew that Sam and Dee would betray him.
Had betrayed him.
They were jealous that he was a God.
And he'd kill them both because he could.
It was right that he killed the.
please, don't, my baby brother's hungry whispered in his mind.
His fingers trembled a micrometer away from the button.
He suddenly snarled and slapped the button.
Across all the layers, in the areas that Sam could access, the bodies laying on the floor, laying in bed, sitting in chairs, riding in buses and on trams, suddenly woke up.
Before they could do much more than take stock of the fact they were alive/awake, the next part happened.
The massive phasic system pulsed outward, even as the images of the Mantid Attack were shoved directly into the datalinks as the wave of phasic energy, full of malevolent glee and screaming echoes, washed over every waking being.
Sam stood in the master control room of Atlantis and watched on the smartglass as child lunged at parent, brother attacked brother, sister went at sister, parent struck down child.
All the while screaming.
The phasic system kept pulsing. A steady wave, like the successive psychic attacks by the Mantid Overmind against the Terran colonies and TerraSol itself.
Sam smiled as he saw a pale white flickering figure stand up only a few meters from the dead body and replay its final moments.
He started giggling.
Then laughing.
Then screaming.
Around him, throughout the SUDS Matrioshka brain, on every level, in every area he could reach, the slaughter continued.
From every speaker Sam-UL's screaming laughter and sobbing hysterical giggling sounded.
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On her throne of skulls Dee paused for a moment, waving her hand and slapping a plate of riveted iron over the mouth of a supplicant. She looked upwards at the sky.
Millions of stars were screaming as they fell.
”Now what is that maniac doing?” she asked.