Almost as soon as he went in, the man showed up again, this time carrying two clear drinks and set them on the table, winking at Leah. Leah took a sip.
Max felt the next question coming before she even said it. The clanging and pinging of silverware as people around them enjoyed their meals and made quiet conversations was almost distracting as he waited for her inquiry.
“Tell me, Proxy, will I ever be privileged to your true name?”
He wondered how anyone could ever deny such a request when coming from someone so pleasant. “In my time I have learned that names, although they may not seem like it at first, aren’t just names,” he said. “They hold power over those who know them, but I admit, that sounds a bit pretentious.”
“Not at all, I understand, you are somewhat of a famous man, as famous as the Admin himself, I believe. But most people don’t know either of your names, or faces. I suppose–”
“It’s Max,” he blurted before she could finish. “Max Byron.”
“Sounds official,” she smiled. “So, tell me, Max, what kind of work do you do for the Admin exactly? Everyone knows you, yet no one truly does. Also, have you ever wondered why it’s impossible to take your picture? Why is your face always blurred?”
“I do what I must.”
“Cryptic are we?”
“Not at all, at least, not intentionally. Look at me now for instance – I’m acquiring information about your work so I can decide what to do about it.”
She gave him a puzzled look, and Max wondered if she picked up on his subtle lie. He had no idea why he said it. Clearly, he was never given a choice in anything or given the freedom to decide about any of the things he had been forced to put an end to, or stir in a different direction. He had always, always, received an instruction which he carried out to the letter. It had been what had made him so reliable and well known. The Proxy never failed in his tasks. Because of this, he never truly wondered what would happen if he were to go against the Admin’s wishes. Over time, however, he had become curious. It had been years now, and Max’s patience had run out. The man owed him a family.
In that moment, and perhaps for the very reason that he began to hate the Admin’s bullshit, he decided he would not shut down Leah’s project, but aid it. He didn’t realize it at the time, and probably never would, but in that moment, the fate of humanity turned and the compass of progress began its unrelenting spin backwards.
By chance, or by some foreign thought which nudged itself into his mind with elegant ease, he looked at the Moon. Its surface wasn’t visible to anyone else – he alone could see its ethereal lines behind the surface of the station. A single flash erupted from the surface of Luna and traveled in an arc, leaving behind a tail of incandescence like a comet. Its center pulsed and twisted as if molten. The expelled contents whipped towards the station. No one but him seemed to even notice it, at least not until it punched through the shield, momentarily disturbing it in cauls of static. The square shattered with the impact of it landing. The tiles peeled off. Heat punched him in the face. Blackened and charred material spat out and upward at the epicenter of the impact in geyser–like fashion. The world turned to smoke around him, particles danced a dance of death as bodies of those standing upon the square and around it turned the air pink and embraced every surface, caking it with ash and organic residue. Those standing near the square as the blaze hit were gone, their flesh coating the streets. Max didn’t register a single sound over the angry squeal of his ears. It had been too much, too fast. Microscopic debris had imbedded itself in his tight and torso muscles. He realized he had been knocked down from his chair. A hand grabbed his wrist and pulled. Max staggered to his feet. Little could be seen of the restaurant’s insides, they were in shambles. He allowed himself to be guided through and to the back exit. His eyes stung, clouding his vision beyond what the pungent mist had already accomplished. His mouth begged, and when it didn’t get the liquid it desired, it kept begging. Max wondered how the hand that guided him could see anything in this dust. Sounds slowly returned to him over the shrill whistling, none of which were pleasant or comforting. People screeched and screamed in the confusion, the abrupt endings put to their vocal abilities suggesting something was hunting them, killing them, ending them in the dust. With no desire to be silenced like the voices around him, he rubbed the back of his palm against his eyes like a confused child, hoping to see better. He already found it difficult to handle the stinging sensations inside his lids and his dust–covered hand only managed to make it worse. His eyes bleed tears, their wetness slowly returning a semblance of sight to him. A semblance which perhaps a blind man would relish. He instead tried to focus his mind, eased his thoughts in an exercise of breathing–control which brought him as close to a meditative state as he could hope for at a time like this. He began to see through the mist of confusion and searched to find clarity. He saw the outline of the one guiding him. It was enough.
“We have to get to the tower! Open a portal and get the hell out!” Leah shouted. HE realized she had been shouting before, but he couldn’t hear. This time, Max was pretty sure she wasn’t smiling.
CHAPTER 15
Eliminate
Efficiency. It had become the sole thing which still mattered to it. The only thing it still hungered for. It used to think about other things. It used to dream. Dream of becoming more than what it had been born as, more than a human. Transhuman. It used be a she. She even had a name once. Taryn. And when it was still a she, she would have loved to have seen the Administrator. Nothing would have brought her greater joy than to shake the hand of a man who made it all possible. To feel the warmness of a hand that had made her able to withstand the elements – to walk the surface of the sun. She missed those walks. Which was about the only thing she truly missed anymore, the only thing she remembered with clarity.
She never got the chance to meet Him. Instead, she chose to become a living weapon for Him, the man she inexplicably loved. Now, she couldn’t begin to understand such a decision, even if she still had the capacity to think about it. The concept of most things had been stripped from her mind, each abstract emotion plucked like a hair from her scalp. She had lain dormant, as all Wardens do, until called upon. She had laid still for 6years 9months 3days 11minutes and 31seconds. The lesser numbers didn’t matter. And even though she felt every nanosecond of her sleep, they still didn’t matter, much like the six years didn’t really matter. It felt good to sleep. She never dreamed, never even wondered if she even cloud. But oh the joy when He awoke her! In that nanosecond, in that insignificant fraction inside time and existence, she saw what she had always wanted to see – His face. The expressionless gaze wanted only one thing of her, of it – to eliminate.
Compliance came easy.
She stepped out of her pod and into a black corridor, a tunnel, she didn’t even look around. At the pathway’s end, light spat out illumination and freedom. She raced towards it, hungering for it. Every stride took her closer to the light. As she stepped in the fire beyond, she saw a globe, but that wasn’t her target. Something else, something wading in the reaches above it had drawn her gaze. Her metal body heated and compressed as she escaped the Moon’s pull and flailed into space. She felt nothing she could describe as pain. With her arms close to her body, a heat began to assail her, waves of it radiated outwards and trailed behind her in a scythe like iridescent blood. She cut through the fabric of reality with ease, rupturing space–time with murderous intent.
In a flash, the station expanded from a small speck and became a presence all around her. The shield she struck protested for a fraction of a second as she hit it, then gave out in a fizzling gripe. It reestablished before she even hit the ground. The floor warped underneath her, her enhanced senses seeing it bend like a wave before it peeled away in layers of dust and grime. Like deadly, horizontal hail, the fragments cut through those unfortunate enough to stand near, then advanced forward in a form of specks and reddened mist.
She immediately saw her tar
get, and even though through the powdery air he couldn’t see her, she could tell he was aware of her. And if not of her directly, then at least of what she represented, of what the dust and grime represented. He would recognize the song it sung and run from it, as would all. The order she carried lay fresh upon her memory coils. Eliminate. Before she even landed, she had already calculated the most efficient course of action, one that would bring her to the ultimate goal and erase the station and everyone on it forever. None would escape.
***
The tremors began to feel like the station had transformed into an erupting landmass underneath his feet.
With some difficulty, and with guidance from Leah, Max managed to stay upright. It had taken a few moments for him to realize the tremors were in fact not real, but the accumulation of his anxiety and fears – all of them, conceptualized by his mind into visual and sensual perceptions. All to a point where everything appeared as if moving even more than usual. For the first time, he spat over the fact that he could see every object – down to the very molecular level – move, yet in the same breath knew it would certainly not be the last time he would do so.
Some ways behind him, Max heard a kind of pounding, a strange sound he couldn’t quite put his finger on. That is, until he and Leah took a wrong turn. In the confusion, they had stumbled into what looked like a dead end, an alley walled up by a thick layer of white smoke. It was obvious the air circulation systems left much to be desired or had gone faulty. A person came running up to them, breaking through the thick smog, the microscopic particles of debris trailing of his limbs in whips and dying his black hair white. The man tried to blink away the dust as he stammered free of the mist. A flash, a sound spat out from the debris behind the man, an almost subsonic, electric burst of crackling discharge. Max froze as his eyes locked with the man’s. The person’s blank eyes bulged as if utterly surprised and shocked in the same instant. The body, now no more than a husk, got thrust forward as if kicked from behind, presenting Max with the source of the strange sound he had been hearing. It was the noise of a human body exploding. A wet crunch of instantly boiled liquid thrown into the windless air. Whatever had hit the man from the rear quickly forced what had just moments before drawn breath to hug the walls in a thick paste. Bits of the man plastered against Max’s face. In the moment of shock, the world stopped its spin above them. Unexpected clarity flashed through him. Like a sword, the thought sliced through with redeeming sharpness and transformed the moment which came next into one that flipped all of Max’s fear, turning it into focus unlike he had ever known. He felt the man’s last moment of utter terror as it if were carried on every dead particle now worn upon his face. In Max’s mindscape, things calmed.
A shape encroached out of the mist as though cough in slow–motion.
Seeing a conceptual image of a Warden whose every alloy had been designed to crush and destroy was one thing, but to see one as it approached you, its gaping mouth open beyond what looked natural, flaring white, its eyes blazing as its maw–cannon charged for another hurl of lethal energy, was quite another. The metallic body held within its caged beauty lethality evident in every stride that cracked the tiled floor. Over two and a half meters in height, the female version of a Warden looked as though a human had been stripped of its skin and its exposed muscle tissue replaced by bundles of overpowered nano–tubing, silver metal and fiber–cabling capable of emulating and expanding upon every nuance of strength a human being might muster. She didn’t’ need to wear armor, she was armor. She didn’t need to run, because there was nowhere to hide. And if for some reason the lady luck herself decided in that moment to smile upon you – an unlikely spectacle to begin with – the approach of the living form of metal might just give you enough time to shit yourself before she transformed you into ash.
Seeing the monster, however, and despite what he thought he would feel, the sight gave him only clarity. A conviction that he would not die here. Not yet. Not today.
Leading the escape this time, he pulled Leah back around the corner as a ray of what looked like solid light painted the previously white edge of the building they ran behind black. Crumbs of its surface tore away and pattered over the ground.
“Hold on!” Leah shouted. “We need to get to the tower, the basements have the only portal platform to get outta here!”
“That’s where we’re going,” Max yelled back as they ran, “we can’t take a direct path, the thing won’t let us!”
“Christopher,” Leah suddenly whined.
“What?” he asked as they turned another corner and rested a bit with their backs pressed against a wall. Not the best idea, he knew, but they needed some air.
“The cook, we need to find him,” she said, turning to look behind the corner and saw the beast approaching.
“You’re worried about that guy? The thing just splattered someone in front of you!”
“He’s my uncle!” she snapped.
There’s always something, he thought. He wanted to say it didn’t matter. Related or not, he would have to take care of himself. Yet to try and convince her of this by means of speech Max had neither the will nor the desire. He was sure he was pretty low on time as well. He hated himself for even thinking it, but he was going to have to do it. The air twirled around her face as Max turned to look upon her. Her eyes burrowed into his as spatial dimensions danced a foreign tune about her and threw themselves askew in hues of kaleidoscopic madness. I truly am losing my mind.
>He will be fine,< he willed. A wave of reassuring calmness passed into her through him, propelling her to follow, and they began to run ahead through the narrow streets.
The thought whether his one decision to help instead of crushing Leah’s research had caused all of this to happen didn’t leave him alone. It certainly looked that way. The last thing he wanted was to die for his decision, and upon realizing this, he knew he didn’t want her to die either. Above all others on the station, she was the only one who struck him as the person worth saving. Helping others felt like something he should do, yet if he had the chance to escape and save but one, she would be it.
He turned around to see had fallen behind. He willed her to run faster.
They began to near the slope leading upward through the station’s residential sprawl and up to the spire. As expected, there were more than a few with the same idea as him. People who had decided not to take the most obvious route they could to the tower – the one place where they still hoped to be able to establish a portal and leave. He hoped some had already done so. A hope soon twisted and thrown into doubt, for behind the screams and yells, the now familiar sounds of people exploding began to spread with alarming rapidness. Voices shred the air as people began to near the gate of the tower only to realize too many had come for all of them to fit inside fast enough. The huntress was already on their heels. In their rush, all the people had managed to do was line themselves up for easy annihilation. It didn’t take long before the sounds of gore splattering under the extinguishing might of an electric smite replaced their screams with silence. Silence, and even more shouts by those who yet lived. Obscured by the surrounding slum–shaped buildings, the sight of the carnage lay hidden to all but him. While the slope ahead of them rose without heed of anyone’s tired legs.
The dust in the central impact site began to settle and the bellows of the dying rattled the air as Max suddenly realized the folly of his plan. If the Warden was already there, near the entrance, and the only thing stopping it from entering the building were people, then he would need to find a way to circumvent them all. He could use his will, but in his limited knowledge of the tower itself, he assumed all the entrances must have already been blocked, if there even were any others, so even if willed, Max knew the people could not move aside. For that, there needed to be room for them to move.
Fuck.
Others with the same idea as Max – to flee on a less direct path towards the spire – were now joining the two in their flight.
Men and women, all with the same look of terror and the determination to survive packed in every stride. They joined them from the streets and alleys the two had passed. He could almost taste their desire to live, it was an infectious thing, not that he didn’t possess enough of it himself.
“There’s no way we’ll make it past all of those people!” a woman next to him said, mirroring his own thoughts.
“You can do something about whatever’s on the loose, can’t you, Proxy?” a boy to his left pleaded, a boy he could only guess was the son of the woman who had just spoken – the two had the same hazel eyes.
A momentary disgust passed through him. Does this person truly think his life is worth more than those already dying? Max said nothing and instead kept running, realizing it had been what he himself thought about his own life, and that of Leah, all along. These people were no different. When the time came to escape certain death, everyone, everywhere, probably feels their own lives and those of their children are worth more than those of others, even if they don’t express it. They are all right, of course, because they are worth more… to them.
“The entrances to the lower–docks have been sealed off,” a man pointed out. “There must be another way of the station!”
“I’ll get you to safety,” Max said, panting and almost despite himself, “you have my word.”
What none of them realized – what not even he realized – was that he will break that word and scatter its remnants into space before the day’s end.
CHAPTER 16
The Bowels Of Madness
One of the fleeing group’s members was an engineer. An older man by the name of Leonel, his face worn out by age which he for some reason didn’t care to augment. Time had made him gaunt of cheek, yet gifted him with bright eyes.
“I know a way to the lower levels of the spire,” he croaked, barely able to keep up behind the rest of the group, now numbering in more than two dozen. His voice was barely heard, a dry yet somehow dignified whine of an old man whose every syllable sounded laced with wisdom, even if wisdom was not what the words conjured. His daughter ran beside him, who, realizing no one had heard her father, repeated his words, louder. Everyone stopped. “I was one of the engineers who helped design and build this cesspool,” Leonel rasped. “We need to go there.” He pointed his skinny finger to their left, to a normal–looking passage that led between the buildings and around the slope.