Tartaruchus
04-06-2003, 12:06 PM
first chapter of a fan fic 4-parter
THE MATRIX
Wrath of the Grigori
1.
The Enoch ripped through the gray-green steam of the old sewage tunnels at an incredible speed leaving streaks of white-blue energy from its hover wheels in its wake. Its head beams barely cut through the thick mist soup fifty feet in front of it.
Pegasus, the ship’s captain, knows she can’t slow down. She knows that this mission requires speed and accuracy. She knows that it’s worth her life and the lives of her five crewmembers. That’s why she braves the sharp turns and sudden drops of the ancient sewage systems at breakneck speed. That’s why she can’t stop and shut down her engines just to fire the E.M.P. to stop the three spider sentinels she knows are somewhere behind her and were still on her tail. She’d have to out maneuver them down here. She really wanted to believe the human mind was capable of so much more than the machines, though you couldn’t tell by the devastated planet and the majority of the human population still dumbly sleeping through captivity.
The search for the One continued still, to no avail. Morpheus and his superstitious followers believe in some foretold Christ asleep somewhere in the Matrix waiting to be awakened. God didn’t help us after we created an intelligence whose only logical conclusion was the end of the human race. Now, after we’ve destroyed the planet, scorched the sky, and wiped out almost every natural life form on earth, God is probably thinking twice about sending the human race a savior. But, hey, if they wanna find hope in blind faith, by all means do so. You’ve gotta find hope somewhere.
Pegasus stood five-foot-one, with a small thin frame, jet-black hair, and shimmering blue eyes. Her silky smooth skin fooled the ignorant eye into thinking she was only twenty or, at most, twenty-five. But the crow’s feet that accented her deep, knowledgeable eyes showed her thirty-three years and then some. She was ten when Morpheus freed her. She’d learned a few tricks from the Oracle, but nothing compared to what the One was said to be able to do. Despite her petite stature, Peg could command a room just by walking in. Job once said that if willpower were a weapon Peg could end the war today. That was before she’d watched a sentinel cut him in half. Her will to destroy the machines only doubled. She and her crew had brought down more sentinels than any other in the entire fleet. Now she was faced with the difficult task of saving the machines.
Alarms sound and Peg is immediately on her feet behind Chime, the thin blond flat-chested tomboy who was the best fighter on the ship – in the Matrix that is.
“We got a bug! In front two kilometers!” Chime screamed a little too loud for Peg to be right by her head, but that thought didn’t come now.
“How the hell? Why didn’t sensors pick it up sooner?”
“Don’t know, but we’re coming up on it fast! And those three are still behind us five kilos and comin’ strong.”
“Shit.” Peg’s human brain kicks into computer mode as she assesses her situation. Memorized tunnel maps, speed, trajectory, complex calculations computed in milliseconds. The supercomputer would have felt inadequate.
“All stop,” Peg speaks calmly and firmly. Chime learned years ago not to questions Peg’s orders and brings the Enoch to a stop.
“Those three are closing fast. They’ll be on us in five seconds.”
“Full speed on my mark… MARK!”
No hesitation. They were of one mind. One body. Peg the brain. Chime the hand. And the Enoch explodes forward.
“We’re closing on the squidy ahead of us.”
“Up ahead there’s a fork in the tunnel at one hundred thirty degrees.”
“Don’t see it.”
“You don’t have to. Go now!”
Again, one. The Enoch shifts to the right heading down a thin corridor. The sides of the ship scrape and grind against the close tunnel walls. Sparks fly lighting only a thicker mist. Behind them, somewhere in the gloom, Chime and Peg hear the thunderous explosion of four sentinels colliding, their titanium-alloy tentacles wrapping around one another in a cold embrace of death, were they but alive in the first place.
Chime slows the Enoch to a crawl and wipes the sweat from her brow. “Can’t go back that way.”
“I know.” Peg collapses into her chair with a puff. Close calls never excited her. One look at Chime navigating with a new wide smile, and she knows that it definitely excited her though.
“What the hell was that?” Tobias and Quan burst onto the bridge. They both had the familiar pseudo-vomit appearance of their amino-synthesis breakfast on their shirts. Tobias was a hulk of Latino who stood about six-five and would put any of the ancient professional wrestlers to shame. He’s definitely the muscle of the ship. Peg could never understand how anyone coming out of the Matrix with a muscular system seemingly beyond repair, as Tobias had, could, in six short years and in a cramped living space, put on so much muscle mass.
Quan was the exact opposite. At nineteen, he stood a mere five seven and couldn’t have been larger than a toothpick. His light brown hair capped his pasty white body. Though not much of a fighter, he was a great strategist and knew computer programming better than anyone Peg knew.
“Sentinel orgy,” Chime replied with her yet to fade smile.
“Yeah? Well a little warning would be nice.”
“As soon as Quan and Uriel get off their asses and fix the intercom, I’ll be able to let you all know what I’m doing.”
“We’re getting to that today, Peg.”
Tobias walks over to Chime and leans over the back of her chair. “Where are we now?”
With a slight shrug of Chime’s shoulder, Peg speaks up. “Secondary solid waste chute.”
“And we’re going this slow because…”
“Because I don’t know this tunnel and I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want me to plow us into a wall.” Chime didn’t like back seat drivers.
Tobias turns to Peg. “Will we make the Atlantic field on time this way?”
Peg’s emotionless face said it all. She seriously doubted it. Ironic. They were racing to save one of the machines’ human fields and it was because of the machines that a hundred million people were going to die. An entire northern crop lost. A quick mental flash has Peg wondering if the machines ever developed some sort of currency, and if so, how much a battery would cost after nearly a fifth of their overall crop is wiped out.
“This should bring us out only five hundred kilometers south of the Atlantic field. Once we’re out, Chime, take us to full speed. We still have to try.” Peg stands and walks to the door. “You have the ship. I’ll be in my room.” The heavy metal door creeks closed behind her.
“Man, what’s her problem? She’s been moody ever since we got this mission from Zion.”
“Don’t know. Maybe we should ask Red,” Tobias replied. Red was a little woman about twenty-six who’d studied for a few years with the Oracle. Rumor has it that she’s the next in line for the job.
“Yeah, well whatever you two hens decide to do, do it somewhere else. I’m working here.” With that, Tobias and Quan leave Chime to her navigation.
* * *
Peg’s room door closes behind her with a bang and she quickly spins the wheel locking it. Her stomach twisted with a spasm of guilt. She really didn’t care if they made it in time. In fact, she almost hoped they didn’t. That small piece of yourself that you keep hidden in the back of your mind like a deformed child, that piece that seems to speak up as an immediate reaction to something only to have your “common decency” silence it quickly, that piece of Peg wasn’t easily silenced this time; no matter how hard she tried to conquer it.
Those people hanging like peaches waiting to be picked and consumed were never truly alive to her. They were never more than a crop. That part of the machine mentality had quickly become commonplace for her. The destruction of the battery fields, and then of all the batteries plugged into the Matrix, seemed a very viable option in winning the war against the machines. Take out their power source; take them out. Only problem with that was the Zion elders felt that those batteries were living people. So what if they’re damned to a miserable life of slavery and torture, as long as they’re alive to enjoy it.
Peg sits on the thin mattress spread across the metal plank hanging from the wall that had been her bed for the past five years. The mattress was so worn that when she would lie down, it was almost like sliding a gun into its holster. It was a snug fit. Just next to her body indentation on the mattress was a slight other. She slides her hand across it softly. For two years, she hadn’t slept on top of that indentation. It was just there, next to her every night: her companion. Job.
They had been making repairs to the hull of the Enoch that day. They were somewhere in the tunnels below what had once been Moscow according to the maps and were far below the machines radar scans. Or so they thought. To be out in the present day atmosphere, they had to wear these gaudy bio-suits made out of recycled rubber, plastics, and pretty much any metal they could come upon. Mankind had advanced itself so far before the war, and now it was reduced to fishing for scrap to make the most basic of things. Hell, you were lucky to find any sort of silverware around. She remembered using an old shoehorn before she found a good burnt spoon. So, she and Job pretty much looked like the Goodyear-man on crack. But she could still see his eyes through the goggles. She couldn’t count how many times that day she got lost in those beautiful blue eyes. It didn’t matter about the war raging all around them, they had found the one safe haven left in the world: the arms of another.
A battle with a sentinel had left deep gashes in the Enoch’s hull and she and Job were patching the cuts with random sheets of metal. Chime was at the helm and the rest of the crew were doing minor internal repairs. Those minor repairs just happened to include the EMP, which had short-circuited in the last battle. The warning came soon after Peg and Job had finished the final patch. Sensors picked up an incoming sentinel. It must’ve been doing mandatory sweeps of the area because it was alone, but it picked up the Enoch as soon as the Enoch picked it up.
“Go, go, go, go!” She could still hear Job behind her over the roar of the Enoch’s engine and the loud clanks of the magnetic boots against the ship’s metal hull. The hatch was all the way on the other side of the ship, and Chime was fulfilling her primary duty: run. She was in charge of keeping the ship safe, not the two people caught outside.
They rounded the side of the ship making their way toward the hull topside. As they did, Peg lost her breath as the Sentinel erupted from a tunnel above them and flailed it’s mechanical tentacles as it pounced on its prey. She was about twenty feet from the hull when the sentinel locked its grip onto the Enoch. Job was another thirty behind her.
“Run for the hatch!” he cried.
She knew before she asked what he had in mind. “What about you?” Behind her, she heard the welding torch Job had strapped to his back explode to life. She turned in time to see him run full speed for the sentinel with the blue flame of the cutter out like a light saber in front of him. “No!”
“Go!”
The sentinel shifted putting it’s underbelly lined with the tiny crab-claw cutters up to fend Job off. Peg had gotten to the hatch just as Job leapt into the cutters with the torch blasting into the sentinel’s underbelly. The thick rubber and metal of the bio-suit gave him a little protection. Layers and layers of Job’s protective suit were shredded away by the tiny claws. He was safe as he cut a hole into the sentinel’s CPU. He was going to win. And Peg stood and watched. The tension made it impossible for her to move. Her mind was blank. She can’t remember even breathing for what seemed like eternity, yet was probably more like milliseconds.
The blue flame cut into the exposed circuits of the central processor and the red light that was the sensor laser on the sentinel’s face flickered then went out. But its mechanical brain wasn’t finished the action processing and one of those massive tentacles flinched loosing itself from the hull and whipped into the air. It played out in slow motion as the titanium tentacle came down and swiped through Job like a Ginsu through a tomato. His upper half landed five feet from Peg. The bottom was still magnetized to the ship’s hull. She saw his eyes, wide with shock, as his body was slung from the Enoch and off into infinity. He was followed shortly by the dead sentinel. Peg could only stand and stare at his legs still standing upright. When the sentinel’s tentacle cut through, it breached the gasses in the welding pack and ignited Job’s suit. Over the stench of the ancient tunnels, she could smell the rubber, plastic and flesh burning, and was sick. It took the crew over an hour, after she got inside, to pull her from her suit and clean the mess off her. She couldn’t move. And she didn’t for two months. The Zionists said she was in shock. No shit.
Peg pulls her thin pillow to her chest and hugs it as she lies down in the indentation for her body. She imagines wrapping the arms of the indentation next to her around her shoulders and imagines it holding her tight. And she is supposed to save the machine’s power source?
* * *
“You do it.”
“Naw, man, this was your idea. You knock.”
Quan shuffled back to hide just behind Tobias’ shoulder, but his gaze was focused on the hatch in front of them.
“Wuss.” Tobias leaned forward and seemed to almost hesitate before tapping on the steel hatch.
From inside, they hear Uriel’s voice. “Yeah.”
“What the hell’s he doin’ in there?” Tobias twisted the wheel on the hatch and swung it open to see Red leaning back in her custom entry chair and Uriel at the control center in Red’s large room.
It was the biggest room on the ship, next to the control room and the “boot deck” which was what Quan called the room with the hardware used to enter the Matrix. It was also the only room, hell the only place around, with any sort of color. Red read all sorts of books in the Matrix about weaving tapestries and ancient methods for making dies out of certain minerals Zion now mined out of the earth’s core. She had oriental-style rugs on the floor, Indian and Native American-like tapestries and wall scrolls covering the bland steel of her walls, orange and red sheets on her bunk and hanging lanterns of red and green spotting her ceiling. Even her entry chair (she had three in the room), strictly used for ship training programs, had a custom woven brown, red, orange and green covers. She offered to make things for the rest of the ship, but Peg thought it’d be a waste of time and energy.
Red was loaded into a training program and Uriel was at the control. Unlike the Boot Deck’s control which was attached to a swiveling chair and multi screens, Red’s was made out of the remnants of a lap-top, so Uriel was plopped comfortably, or as comfortably as possible, on Red’s bunk with the com in his lap.
Now, Red had gotten her name for obvious reasons. Everything she made and wore had red in it, and her hair was the brilliant red of a thousand suns. Or at least that’s how Uriel had once described it. It was pretty obvious he had a thing for her, but Red settled happily into her self-appointed position as the chaste priestess. So, no touchy-feely for Uriel. Next to her fiery hair, her porcelain skin seemed to shimmer.
Uriel was a mid-sized thirty-something man with dark hair and eyes and the deep dark skin of his Pakistani ancestry. He was very much the passionate poet and slightly hedonistic, so it was a lot of fun to watch his hopeless advances on Red.
“What’s she doing?”
“Same thing she always does, Tobias. She’s meditating.”
“Where this time?”
“Mount Everest. Whaddaya want?”
Quan chimes in, “Well, Peg wants us to fix the intercom ASAP.”
“We’ll get to it.”
“That’s what I told her, but…”
“We wanna talk to her.”
Uriel lets out an unhappy puff. “Yeah, she said you’d probably be in today.” Uriel stands and lies the com on the bunk. “Have a seat. I’ll boot ya in.” Uriel remembers the jack in the back of his neck and scratches the itch that arises. “****in’ hate these things.”
Tobias is the first one jacked in. When Quan gets in, the blizzard on top of Everest blinds him. In the distance, he sees the dark figure of Tobias standing over a smaller blur seated in the lotus position upon a rock. “It’s COLD!” With that, a heavy coat is digitized onto his DSI (digital self-image). “Thanks!” He follows with “ass” under his breath as he fights the three-foot deep snow and wind to make his way over to Tobias and Red.
When he finally makes his way over to the two figures that had, just moments ago, been almost shapeless in the blizzard, he catches his breath (if there is such a thing here). Red was sitting about six inches above the snow and rock hovering in the center of what appeared to be a pillar of snowflakes falling up like dogwood petals in a slight breeze despite gravity and the sixty miles-per-hour wind gusts all around them. Her eyes were closed as she finished talking.
“…mission weighs heavily upon her, Tobias. Hello, Quan. Nice of you to join us.”
“Yeah, thanks to Uriel, I had a little hike to get to you guys. Why the hell are you here anyway? It’s cold as a witch’s… well, you know.”
“If the snow bothers you…” Quan feels a slight pulse of energy pass through him unsettling his stomach as if he’d just gone over the first huge drop on a roller coaster. It takes him a couple seconds to regain his equilibrium. When he does, he realizes the blizzard is silent. The wind and snow just disappeared.
“What the…”
Red’s emerald eyes are open and looking softly at the confused Quan. “There are certain things that I can do in the jump programs. I’m trying to figure out how to control the Matrix the same way. Now, back to your little quandary.” Red stands from her mid-air seat and allows her feet to settle down into the snow. She starts walking letting her the long train of her red priestess silk drag on the snow behind her like a flame trail. Tobias and Quan follow.
“What is it about our mission that’s so damned bothersome?” Tobias continues. “I mean, it’s not really a bad thing to save all those people in the Atlantic field, right?”
“That’s but the tip of our iceberg.”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“Well, Quan, our mission isn’t finished with the Atlantic field. In fact, that field is almost insignificant next to the true threat. Do you remember the stories of the Grigori?”
“An old spook tale of men that went crazy when the machines attacked. Didn’t they steal a bunch of hydrogen bombs and go on suicide missions trying to knock out the big CPU?”
“Hydrogen bombs? Yes. Suicide? No. Actually, the Grigori was a huge religious group of men, women and children led by a man calling himself Magus who thought all technology was evil and that mankind’s drive to make life easier through it was the beginning of the apocalypse.”
“Well, he wasn’t too far off, was he?”
“No. And that’s why his followers bought into everything he said. Man’s technologies had almost eradicated the environment long before AI was ever established. When the first human was cloned, the Grigori were the people responsible for killing it.”
“Oh, I remember. My mother told me about this one. Didn’t they like drag her out of a bar near her college campus or something?”
“Yes. Magus had so many people believing that that poor girl was an abomination and inhuman. He said she had no soul. That she was nothing more than a dog; a pet for real people. They snatched her when she was out for her birthday. A week later, a few of Magus’ followers strolled into a police station and told them where they could find her raped and battered body. She was a toy for them. Eight men and women played with her until she broke, then they went proudly to the authorities and told everyone what they’d done. Magus said they had done the human race a favor.
“The Grigori were responsible for the deaths of over a hundred clones over the course of five years. And Magus got away scott free every time.
“That was about the time AI was born. All of a sudden, there was a new soulless enemy. Unfortunately for Magus, this one was important to the international government, so it was given special protection. When the first shots were fired, everything Magus had been saying was cemented as truth to his followers. The apocalypse had arrived.”
Quan steps awkwardly on a rock and slips tumbling into the deep snowdrift. “Jeez. Can we go somewhere, oh, I don’t know, tropical?” Red doesn’t even hesitate. As she raises her arms from her sides, the three are lifted out of the snow and into the air. “Oh may friggin’ god,” Quan says as the world below him whips by like a video on super fast forward. They land in what appears to be the Florida Keys. “Now this is what I’m talkin’ about.”
“So this Magus is a super bad guy, right?” Tobias is eager to get back to the story.
“Well, yes, and no. He just believes blindly. He believes he’s right. That he’s doing good. And that makes him very dangerous.
“He was also very powerful. He had a lot of friends high on the political totem pole, so he knew a lot of things the everyday man didn’t.”
“Like the location of certain hydrogen bombs.”
“While the InterNational Peacekeepers’ attention was focused on the war with the Machines, Magus’ Grigori were able to steal a few hydrogen warheads and plan their own war. The I.N.P. weren’t doing very well against the Machine army, but Magus believed he knew how to win the war. It didn’t matter what was lost by the blast. He believed it was the end of time. That humanity’s time on earth was over. When he ignited the warheads, he set off a chain reaction of explosions. The bombs fed off all the hydrogen in the atmosphere. The skies were dark within a matter of weeks. The soulless machines were defeated. Or so Magus believed.”
“Hey, Red,” Quan was looking out into the blue water of the Keys with awe. “I thought you said they didn’t commit suicide.”
“They didn’t. Magus was willing to wipe out what was left of the earth and mankind, as it was once known, but he was too much of a coward to go down with the ship, so to speak. He had already established a fall back point deep within the earth years before the machines came to life. He figured, when the apocalypse did come, his holy followers would be the only ones left to greet the returning god.
“Well, you know the rest of the story. The Machines easily adapted to the lack of their solar energy by growing and harvesting human brain energy. Magus had definitely turned the tide. Unfortunately, it was against the humans.”
Tobias was beginning to grow impatient. He didn’t like the digital world. After he got used to the way the real world looked, the digital only hurt his eyes. “Nice bedtime story, Red, but how does this pertain to Peg’s above normal stand-off-ish-ness?”
“The Grigori settlement still exists, and Zion intelligence has told us Magus’ plan to take out the machine’s power supply is still their highest priority.”
“Holy shit,” Quan’s attention turns away from the water. “That means they’re out to…”
“But Magus is long gone, right? I mean, can’t Zion just go in there and set these people straight?”
“Their zealots. They believe. And nothing we heretics say or do can convince them otherwise.”
“Yeah, but… I mean, they’re gonna wipe out the human race.”
“As far as they’re concerned, the humans the machines grow are nothing more than soulless clones. They are of no value to the human race in their eyes.”
“I’m no soulless ****ing clone!”
“Tobias, welcome to the world of the true believer. They’ve stolen the technology to enter the Matrix. They’ve got the plan. The Matrix functions on the same basic rules of nature that the twentieth century earth really functioned on. All it would take is a hand full of ten megaton nuclear warheads within the Matrix, and all life in the system would be wiped out.”
* * *
Chime pushes the Enoch as hard as she can go through the tight unmapped tunnel. She knows the ship better than it knows itself. She knows what the slightest touch on the control pad will do on instinct. And she’s happy to be doing it alone. It’s not that she doesn’t like the captain on deck with her. For god’s sake, any company is welcome in the loneliness of the real world, especially in the world of war in which she’s forced to live. But she needs time to herself, doing what she does best. And this is her time.
Up ahead, she can see the tunnel swirling with the red and purple lights of the new day’s sky. Had the earth ever been green and the skies blue? She’d never really know. The Matrix told her it was, but she knows she’ll never see a real blue sky or a real warm day. As she brings the ship racing close to the end of the tunnel, there seems to be a different orange glow mixed in the dismal skylights. She slows so as not to explode from the safety of the tunnel into a full Machine battalion, but deep in her gut, she knows that’s not what she’ll find waiting on the surface.
And oh, man, is she right. She parks the ship in hover just beyond the border of the tunnel and taps the control panel opening the direct com to the captain’s room. This is the only intercom working on the ship.
“Hey, Peg.”
The crackle of Peg’s unhappy voice answers a couple seconds later. “What is it?”
“You’d better come out here and see for yourself.”
Peg enters about a minute later followed by Tobias, Uriel, Quan, and Red. They all look past Chime’s control panel at the carnage laid out before them.
As far as the eye can see burns a sea of fire. The Fetus Stalks lie cracked and broken spilling the pink recycled gel that was once human bodies into the rolling waves of the fire-ocean. The fetus-harvesters float in the burning goo as broken ships and fragmented pieces set adrift. The entire Atlantic field, a hundred million humans bred as batteries, and five hundred fetus-harvesters, completely destroyed. And all the crew of the Enoch can do now is stand dumbfounded and slack-jawed.
THE MATRIX
Wrath of the Grigori
1.
The Enoch ripped through the gray-green steam of the old sewage tunnels at an incredible speed leaving streaks of white-blue energy from its hover wheels in its wake. Its head beams barely cut through the thick mist soup fifty feet in front of it.
Pegasus, the ship’s captain, knows she can’t slow down. She knows that this mission requires speed and accuracy. She knows that it’s worth her life and the lives of her five crewmembers. That’s why she braves the sharp turns and sudden drops of the ancient sewage systems at breakneck speed. That’s why she can’t stop and shut down her engines just to fire the E.M.P. to stop the three spider sentinels she knows are somewhere behind her and were still on her tail. She’d have to out maneuver them down here. She really wanted to believe the human mind was capable of so much more than the machines, though you couldn’t tell by the devastated planet and the majority of the human population still dumbly sleeping through captivity.
The search for the One continued still, to no avail. Morpheus and his superstitious followers believe in some foretold Christ asleep somewhere in the Matrix waiting to be awakened. God didn’t help us after we created an intelligence whose only logical conclusion was the end of the human race. Now, after we’ve destroyed the planet, scorched the sky, and wiped out almost every natural life form on earth, God is probably thinking twice about sending the human race a savior. But, hey, if they wanna find hope in blind faith, by all means do so. You’ve gotta find hope somewhere.
Pegasus stood five-foot-one, with a small thin frame, jet-black hair, and shimmering blue eyes. Her silky smooth skin fooled the ignorant eye into thinking she was only twenty or, at most, twenty-five. But the crow’s feet that accented her deep, knowledgeable eyes showed her thirty-three years and then some. She was ten when Morpheus freed her. She’d learned a few tricks from the Oracle, but nothing compared to what the One was said to be able to do. Despite her petite stature, Peg could command a room just by walking in. Job once said that if willpower were a weapon Peg could end the war today. That was before she’d watched a sentinel cut him in half. Her will to destroy the machines only doubled. She and her crew had brought down more sentinels than any other in the entire fleet. Now she was faced with the difficult task of saving the machines.
Alarms sound and Peg is immediately on her feet behind Chime, the thin blond flat-chested tomboy who was the best fighter on the ship – in the Matrix that is.
“We got a bug! In front two kilometers!” Chime screamed a little too loud for Peg to be right by her head, but that thought didn’t come now.
“How the hell? Why didn’t sensors pick it up sooner?”
“Don’t know, but we’re coming up on it fast! And those three are still behind us five kilos and comin’ strong.”
“Shit.” Peg’s human brain kicks into computer mode as she assesses her situation. Memorized tunnel maps, speed, trajectory, complex calculations computed in milliseconds. The supercomputer would have felt inadequate.
“All stop,” Peg speaks calmly and firmly. Chime learned years ago not to questions Peg’s orders and brings the Enoch to a stop.
“Those three are closing fast. They’ll be on us in five seconds.”
“Full speed on my mark… MARK!”
No hesitation. They were of one mind. One body. Peg the brain. Chime the hand. And the Enoch explodes forward.
“We’re closing on the squidy ahead of us.”
“Up ahead there’s a fork in the tunnel at one hundred thirty degrees.”
“Don’t see it.”
“You don’t have to. Go now!”
Again, one. The Enoch shifts to the right heading down a thin corridor. The sides of the ship scrape and grind against the close tunnel walls. Sparks fly lighting only a thicker mist. Behind them, somewhere in the gloom, Chime and Peg hear the thunderous explosion of four sentinels colliding, their titanium-alloy tentacles wrapping around one another in a cold embrace of death, were they but alive in the first place.
Chime slows the Enoch to a crawl and wipes the sweat from her brow. “Can’t go back that way.”
“I know.” Peg collapses into her chair with a puff. Close calls never excited her. One look at Chime navigating with a new wide smile, and she knows that it definitely excited her though.
“What the hell was that?” Tobias and Quan burst onto the bridge. They both had the familiar pseudo-vomit appearance of their amino-synthesis breakfast on their shirts. Tobias was a hulk of Latino who stood about six-five and would put any of the ancient professional wrestlers to shame. He’s definitely the muscle of the ship. Peg could never understand how anyone coming out of the Matrix with a muscular system seemingly beyond repair, as Tobias had, could, in six short years and in a cramped living space, put on so much muscle mass.
Quan was the exact opposite. At nineteen, he stood a mere five seven and couldn’t have been larger than a toothpick. His light brown hair capped his pasty white body. Though not much of a fighter, he was a great strategist and knew computer programming better than anyone Peg knew.
“Sentinel orgy,” Chime replied with her yet to fade smile.
“Yeah? Well a little warning would be nice.”
“As soon as Quan and Uriel get off their asses and fix the intercom, I’ll be able to let you all know what I’m doing.”
“We’re getting to that today, Peg.”
Tobias walks over to Chime and leans over the back of her chair. “Where are we now?”
With a slight shrug of Chime’s shoulder, Peg speaks up. “Secondary solid waste chute.”
“And we’re going this slow because…”
“Because I don’t know this tunnel and I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want me to plow us into a wall.” Chime didn’t like back seat drivers.
Tobias turns to Peg. “Will we make the Atlantic field on time this way?”
Peg’s emotionless face said it all. She seriously doubted it. Ironic. They were racing to save one of the machines’ human fields and it was because of the machines that a hundred million people were going to die. An entire northern crop lost. A quick mental flash has Peg wondering if the machines ever developed some sort of currency, and if so, how much a battery would cost after nearly a fifth of their overall crop is wiped out.
“This should bring us out only five hundred kilometers south of the Atlantic field. Once we’re out, Chime, take us to full speed. We still have to try.” Peg stands and walks to the door. “You have the ship. I’ll be in my room.” The heavy metal door creeks closed behind her.
“Man, what’s her problem? She’s been moody ever since we got this mission from Zion.”
“Don’t know. Maybe we should ask Red,” Tobias replied. Red was a little woman about twenty-six who’d studied for a few years with the Oracle. Rumor has it that she’s the next in line for the job.
“Yeah, well whatever you two hens decide to do, do it somewhere else. I’m working here.” With that, Tobias and Quan leave Chime to her navigation.
* * *
Peg’s room door closes behind her with a bang and she quickly spins the wheel locking it. Her stomach twisted with a spasm of guilt. She really didn’t care if they made it in time. In fact, she almost hoped they didn’t. That small piece of yourself that you keep hidden in the back of your mind like a deformed child, that piece that seems to speak up as an immediate reaction to something only to have your “common decency” silence it quickly, that piece of Peg wasn’t easily silenced this time; no matter how hard she tried to conquer it.
Those people hanging like peaches waiting to be picked and consumed were never truly alive to her. They were never more than a crop. That part of the machine mentality had quickly become commonplace for her. The destruction of the battery fields, and then of all the batteries plugged into the Matrix, seemed a very viable option in winning the war against the machines. Take out their power source; take them out. Only problem with that was the Zion elders felt that those batteries were living people. So what if they’re damned to a miserable life of slavery and torture, as long as they’re alive to enjoy it.
Peg sits on the thin mattress spread across the metal plank hanging from the wall that had been her bed for the past five years. The mattress was so worn that when she would lie down, it was almost like sliding a gun into its holster. It was a snug fit. Just next to her body indentation on the mattress was a slight other. She slides her hand across it softly. For two years, she hadn’t slept on top of that indentation. It was just there, next to her every night: her companion. Job.
They had been making repairs to the hull of the Enoch that day. They were somewhere in the tunnels below what had once been Moscow according to the maps and were far below the machines radar scans. Or so they thought. To be out in the present day atmosphere, they had to wear these gaudy bio-suits made out of recycled rubber, plastics, and pretty much any metal they could come upon. Mankind had advanced itself so far before the war, and now it was reduced to fishing for scrap to make the most basic of things. Hell, you were lucky to find any sort of silverware around. She remembered using an old shoehorn before she found a good burnt spoon. So, she and Job pretty much looked like the Goodyear-man on crack. But she could still see his eyes through the goggles. She couldn’t count how many times that day she got lost in those beautiful blue eyes. It didn’t matter about the war raging all around them, they had found the one safe haven left in the world: the arms of another.
A battle with a sentinel had left deep gashes in the Enoch’s hull and she and Job were patching the cuts with random sheets of metal. Chime was at the helm and the rest of the crew were doing minor internal repairs. Those minor repairs just happened to include the EMP, which had short-circuited in the last battle. The warning came soon after Peg and Job had finished the final patch. Sensors picked up an incoming sentinel. It must’ve been doing mandatory sweeps of the area because it was alone, but it picked up the Enoch as soon as the Enoch picked it up.
“Go, go, go, go!” She could still hear Job behind her over the roar of the Enoch’s engine and the loud clanks of the magnetic boots against the ship’s metal hull. The hatch was all the way on the other side of the ship, and Chime was fulfilling her primary duty: run. She was in charge of keeping the ship safe, not the two people caught outside.
They rounded the side of the ship making their way toward the hull topside. As they did, Peg lost her breath as the Sentinel erupted from a tunnel above them and flailed it’s mechanical tentacles as it pounced on its prey. She was about twenty feet from the hull when the sentinel locked its grip onto the Enoch. Job was another thirty behind her.
“Run for the hatch!” he cried.
She knew before she asked what he had in mind. “What about you?” Behind her, she heard the welding torch Job had strapped to his back explode to life. She turned in time to see him run full speed for the sentinel with the blue flame of the cutter out like a light saber in front of him. “No!”
“Go!”
The sentinel shifted putting it’s underbelly lined with the tiny crab-claw cutters up to fend Job off. Peg had gotten to the hatch just as Job leapt into the cutters with the torch blasting into the sentinel’s underbelly. The thick rubber and metal of the bio-suit gave him a little protection. Layers and layers of Job’s protective suit were shredded away by the tiny claws. He was safe as he cut a hole into the sentinel’s CPU. He was going to win. And Peg stood and watched. The tension made it impossible for her to move. Her mind was blank. She can’t remember even breathing for what seemed like eternity, yet was probably more like milliseconds.
The blue flame cut into the exposed circuits of the central processor and the red light that was the sensor laser on the sentinel’s face flickered then went out. But its mechanical brain wasn’t finished the action processing and one of those massive tentacles flinched loosing itself from the hull and whipped into the air. It played out in slow motion as the titanium tentacle came down and swiped through Job like a Ginsu through a tomato. His upper half landed five feet from Peg. The bottom was still magnetized to the ship’s hull. She saw his eyes, wide with shock, as his body was slung from the Enoch and off into infinity. He was followed shortly by the dead sentinel. Peg could only stand and stare at his legs still standing upright. When the sentinel’s tentacle cut through, it breached the gasses in the welding pack and ignited Job’s suit. Over the stench of the ancient tunnels, she could smell the rubber, plastic and flesh burning, and was sick. It took the crew over an hour, after she got inside, to pull her from her suit and clean the mess off her. She couldn’t move. And she didn’t for two months. The Zionists said she was in shock. No shit.
Peg pulls her thin pillow to her chest and hugs it as she lies down in the indentation for her body. She imagines wrapping the arms of the indentation next to her around her shoulders and imagines it holding her tight. And she is supposed to save the machine’s power source?
* * *
“You do it.”
“Naw, man, this was your idea. You knock.”
Quan shuffled back to hide just behind Tobias’ shoulder, but his gaze was focused on the hatch in front of them.
“Wuss.” Tobias leaned forward and seemed to almost hesitate before tapping on the steel hatch.
From inside, they hear Uriel’s voice. “Yeah.”
“What the hell’s he doin’ in there?” Tobias twisted the wheel on the hatch and swung it open to see Red leaning back in her custom entry chair and Uriel at the control center in Red’s large room.
It was the biggest room on the ship, next to the control room and the “boot deck” which was what Quan called the room with the hardware used to enter the Matrix. It was also the only room, hell the only place around, with any sort of color. Red read all sorts of books in the Matrix about weaving tapestries and ancient methods for making dies out of certain minerals Zion now mined out of the earth’s core. She had oriental-style rugs on the floor, Indian and Native American-like tapestries and wall scrolls covering the bland steel of her walls, orange and red sheets on her bunk and hanging lanterns of red and green spotting her ceiling. Even her entry chair (she had three in the room), strictly used for ship training programs, had a custom woven brown, red, orange and green covers. She offered to make things for the rest of the ship, but Peg thought it’d be a waste of time and energy.
Red was loaded into a training program and Uriel was at the control. Unlike the Boot Deck’s control which was attached to a swiveling chair and multi screens, Red’s was made out of the remnants of a lap-top, so Uriel was plopped comfortably, or as comfortably as possible, on Red’s bunk with the com in his lap.
Now, Red had gotten her name for obvious reasons. Everything she made and wore had red in it, and her hair was the brilliant red of a thousand suns. Or at least that’s how Uriel had once described it. It was pretty obvious he had a thing for her, but Red settled happily into her self-appointed position as the chaste priestess. So, no touchy-feely for Uriel. Next to her fiery hair, her porcelain skin seemed to shimmer.
Uriel was a mid-sized thirty-something man with dark hair and eyes and the deep dark skin of his Pakistani ancestry. He was very much the passionate poet and slightly hedonistic, so it was a lot of fun to watch his hopeless advances on Red.
“What’s she doing?”
“Same thing she always does, Tobias. She’s meditating.”
“Where this time?”
“Mount Everest. Whaddaya want?”
Quan chimes in, “Well, Peg wants us to fix the intercom ASAP.”
“We’ll get to it.”
“That’s what I told her, but…”
“We wanna talk to her.”
Uriel lets out an unhappy puff. “Yeah, she said you’d probably be in today.” Uriel stands and lies the com on the bunk. “Have a seat. I’ll boot ya in.” Uriel remembers the jack in the back of his neck and scratches the itch that arises. “****in’ hate these things.”
Tobias is the first one jacked in. When Quan gets in, the blizzard on top of Everest blinds him. In the distance, he sees the dark figure of Tobias standing over a smaller blur seated in the lotus position upon a rock. “It’s COLD!” With that, a heavy coat is digitized onto his DSI (digital self-image). “Thanks!” He follows with “ass” under his breath as he fights the three-foot deep snow and wind to make his way over to Tobias and Red.
When he finally makes his way over to the two figures that had, just moments ago, been almost shapeless in the blizzard, he catches his breath (if there is such a thing here). Red was sitting about six inches above the snow and rock hovering in the center of what appeared to be a pillar of snowflakes falling up like dogwood petals in a slight breeze despite gravity and the sixty miles-per-hour wind gusts all around them. Her eyes were closed as she finished talking.
“…mission weighs heavily upon her, Tobias. Hello, Quan. Nice of you to join us.”
“Yeah, thanks to Uriel, I had a little hike to get to you guys. Why the hell are you here anyway? It’s cold as a witch’s… well, you know.”
“If the snow bothers you…” Quan feels a slight pulse of energy pass through him unsettling his stomach as if he’d just gone over the first huge drop on a roller coaster. It takes him a couple seconds to regain his equilibrium. When he does, he realizes the blizzard is silent. The wind and snow just disappeared.
“What the…”
Red’s emerald eyes are open and looking softly at the confused Quan. “There are certain things that I can do in the jump programs. I’m trying to figure out how to control the Matrix the same way. Now, back to your little quandary.” Red stands from her mid-air seat and allows her feet to settle down into the snow. She starts walking letting her the long train of her red priestess silk drag on the snow behind her like a flame trail. Tobias and Quan follow.
“What is it about our mission that’s so damned bothersome?” Tobias continues. “I mean, it’s not really a bad thing to save all those people in the Atlantic field, right?”
“That’s but the tip of our iceberg.”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“Well, Quan, our mission isn’t finished with the Atlantic field. In fact, that field is almost insignificant next to the true threat. Do you remember the stories of the Grigori?”
“An old spook tale of men that went crazy when the machines attacked. Didn’t they steal a bunch of hydrogen bombs and go on suicide missions trying to knock out the big CPU?”
“Hydrogen bombs? Yes. Suicide? No. Actually, the Grigori was a huge religious group of men, women and children led by a man calling himself Magus who thought all technology was evil and that mankind’s drive to make life easier through it was the beginning of the apocalypse.”
“Well, he wasn’t too far off, was he?”
“No. And that’s why his followers bought into everything he said. Man’s technologies had almost eradicated the environment long before AI was ever established. When the first human was cloned, the Grigori were the people responsible for killing it.”
“Oh, I remember. My mother told me about this one. Didn’t they like drag her out of a bar near her college campus or something?”
“Yes. Magus had so many people believing that that poor girl was an abomination and inhuman. He said she had no soul. That she was nothing more than a dog; a pet for real people. They snatched her when she was out for her birthday. A week later, a few of Magus’ followers strolled into a police station and told them where they could find her raped and battered body. She was a toy for them. Eight men and women played with her until she broke, then they went proudly to the authorities and told everyone what they’d done. Magus said they had done the human race a favor.
“The Grigori were responsible for the deaths of over a hundred clones over the course of five years. And Magus got away scott free every time.
“That was about the time AI was born. All of a sudden, there was a new soulless enemy. Unfortunately for Magus, this one was important to the international government, so it was given special protection. When the first shots were fired, everything Magus had been saying was cemented as truth to his followers. The apocalypse had arrived.”
Quan steps awkwardly on a rock and slips tumbling into the deep snowdrift. “Jeez. Can we go somewhere, oh, I don’t know, tropical?” Red doesn’t even hesitate. As she raises her arms from her sides, the three are lifted out of the snow and into the air. “Oh may friggin’ god,” Quan says as the world below him whips by like a video on super fast forward. They land in what appears to be the Florida Keys. “Now this is what I’m talkin’ about.”
“So this Magus is a super bad guy, right?” Tobias is eager to get back to the story.
“Well, yes, and no. He just believes blindly. He believes he’s right. That he’s doing good. And that makes him very dangerous.
“He was also very powerful. He had a lot of friends high on the political totem pole, so he knew a lot of things the everyday man didn’t.”
“Like the location of certain hydrogen bombs.”
“While the InterNational Peacekeepers’ attention was focused on the war with the Machines, Magus’ Grigori were able to steal a few hydrogen warheads and plan their own war. The I.N.P. weren’t doing very well against the Machine army, but Magus believed he knew how to win the war. It didn’t matter what was lost by the blast. He believed it was the end of time. That humanity’s time on earth was over. When he ignited the warheads, he set off a chain reaction of explosions. The bombs fed off all the hydrogen in the atmosphere. The skies were dark within a matter of weeks. The soulless machines were defeated. Or so Magus believed.”
“Hey, Red,” Quan was looking out into the blue water of the Keys with awe. “I thought you said they didn’t commit suicide.”
“They didn’t. Magus was willing to wipe out what was left of the earth and mankind, as it was once known, but he was too much of a coward to go down with the ship, so to speak. He had already established a fall back point deep within the earth years before the machines came to life. He figured, when the apocalypse did come, his holy followers would be the only ones left to greet the returning god.
“Well, you know the rest of the story. The Machines easily adapted to the lack of their solar energy by growing and harvesting human brain energy. Magus had definitely turned the tide. Unfortunately, it was against the humans.”
Tobias was beginning to grow impatient. He didn’t like the digital world. After he got used to the way the real world looked, the digital only hurt his eyes. “Nice bedtime story, Red, but how does this pertain to Peg’s above normal stand-off-ish-ness?”
“The Grigori settlement still exists, and Zion intelligence has told us Magus’ plan to take out the machine’s power supply is still their highest priority.”
“Holy shit,” Quan’s attention turns away from the water. “That means they’re out to…”
“But Magus is long gone, right? I mean, can’t Zion just go in there and set these people straight?”
“Their zealots. They believe. And nothing we heretics say or do can convince them otherwise.”
“Yeah, but… I mean, they’re gonna wipe out the human race.”
“As far as they’re concerned, the humans the machines grow are nothing more than soulless clones. They are of no value to the human race in their eyes.”
“I’m no soulless ****ing clone!”
“Tobias, welcome to the world of the true believer. They’ve stolen the technology to enter the Matrix. They’ve got the plan. The Matrix functions on the same basic rules of nature that the twentieth century earth really functioned on. All it would take is a hand full of ten megaton nuclear warheads within the Matrix, and all life in the system would be wiped out.”
* * *
Chime pushes the Enoch as hard as she can go through the tight unmapped tunnel. She knows the ship better than it knows itself. She knows what the slightest touch on the control pad will do on instinct. And she’s happy to be doing it alone. It’s not that she doesn’t like the captain on deck with her. For god’s sake, any company is welcome in the loneliness of the real world, especially in the world of war in which she’s forced to live. But she needs time to herself, doing what she does best. And this is her time.
Up ahead, she can see the tunnel swirling with the red and purple lights of the new day’s sky. Had the earth ever been green and the skies blue? She’d never really know. The Matrix told her it was, but she knows she’ll never see a real blue sky or a real warm day. As she brings the ship racing close to the end of the tunnel, there seems to be a different orange glow mixed in the dismal skylights. She slows so as not to explode from the safety of the tunnel into a full Machine battalion, but deep in her gut, she knows that’s not what she’ll find waiting on the surface.
And oh, man, is she right. She parks the ship in hover just beyond the border of the tunnel and taps the control panel opening the direct com to the captain’s room. This is the only intercom working on the ship.
“Hey, Peg.”
The crackle of Peg’s unhappy voice answers a couple seconds later. “What is it?”
“You’d better come out here and see for yourself.”
Peg enters about a minute later followed by Tobias, Uriel, Quan, and Red. They all look past Chime’s control panel at the carnage laid out before them.
As far as the eye can see burns a sea of fire. The Fetus Stalks lie cracked and broken spilling the pink recycled gel that was once human bodies into the rolling waves of the fire-ocean. The fetus-harvesters float in the burning goo as broken ships and fragmented pieces set adrift. The entire Atlantic field, a hundred million humans bred as batteries, and five hundred fetus-harvesters, completely destroyed. And all the crew of the Enoch can do now is stand dumbfounded and slack-jawed.