Post-Human Trilogy Part 9

"Okay, okay," he sputtered to himself, spitting out frigid salt water as he blinked away the stinging droplets so he could read his screen. The first one asked him to calibrate his vertical ascent by thinking Up. "G.o.dd.a.m.n this Jedi c.r.a.p." He shut his eyes tight and tried to will himself upward, out of the water. To his utter shock and astonishment, that was exactly what occurred. First his shoulders, then his arms and hands, and eventually even his legs escaped the icy vice of the water. He opened his eyes, astonished, but as soon as he broke his concentration, his ascent stopped. "Ha!" he shouted to himself in amazed triumph. "I did it!"

The text: "Are you satisfied with your vertical ascent? Yes/No," appeared on the next screen before his eyes.

"h.e.l.l yes!" he shouted as he clicked the YES b.u.t.ton with his mind.

Immediately, the next screen asked him to calibrate his vertical descent. The gleeful smile of triumph was quickly replaced with a countenance of horror as he looked down at the frigid water undulating only inches below the soles of his boots.

"Aw h.e.l.l," he cursed. "There's gotta be a way around this." He tried to flip the screen, but each time he tried, he received an error message. "No. Come on!" After a long minute pa.s.sed, an implacable conclusion was reached: He would have to dunk himself back into the water. His flight systems were going to force him below the surface of the waves, and he would have to finish the rest of the calibration fully submerged. He fleetingly remembered the respirocytes, causing a brief stab of longing in his chest. Would the new nan.o.bots the A.I. said were throughout his body be able to breathe for him?

The face of the doctor with the beautiful smile suddenly flashed into his memory. "The Freitas test," he whispered to himself. Without inhaling beforehand, he held his breath, hoping the nan.o.bots would kick in and begin breathing for him. Seconds ticked by as his body shook from the extreme cold. Within just a few moments, his chest began to feel tight as his throat started to close and his head began to pound. He exhaled. "d.a.m.n. d.a.m.n it!" The nan.o.bots didn't take over the breathing for him.

He looked back down at the frozen, suffocating abyss. There was only one thing left to do. He began to inhale deeply, taking as much air into his lungs as possible, trying to expand them as much as he could before his descent. "This sucks," he whispered to himself as he kept his eyes locked on the unconquerable foe below. "I don't want to die...not again."

His mind's eye's instruction to think down remained. Every moment that he waited to begin, his body shook more violently, sapping more of his energy, and limiting his ability to hold his breath. If he waited much longer, there would be no chance that he could make it back up. "Okay," he whispered to himself once again. "Okay."

He thought, Down.

His flight system seemed to take control of his body and push him downward, quickly sinking him into the flesh-flaying fangs of the water. He inhaled until the last possible moment. A second later, his head was below the surface.

"Are you satisfied with your vertical descent? Yes/No."

Craig clicked YES.

The next screen asked him to calibrate flight to his left.

Craig thought, Left.

The flight systems dragged him through the deadly cold water for a few meters before stopping. Valuable seconds ticked by.

"Are you satisfied with your horizontal left? Yes/No."

Craig clicked YES.Yes, G.o.dd.a.m.n it!

The screen asking to calibrate for horizontal right appeared next.

Craig thought, Right.

The movement to the right nearly sucked the rest of the air out of his lungs. He was on the edge of panic.

"Are you satisfied..."

Yes, G.o.dd.a.m.n it! Yes!

The forward horizontal calibration screen appeared.

Craig thought, Forward, and the flight systems brought him mere centimeters from the wall of the iceberg.

"Are you satisfied..."

Craig clicked YES.

Backward was next.

Craig thought, Backward, then clicked YES.

"Initial calibration complete," read the next screen.

Craig had run out of time.

He thought, Up, and prayed that the flight system would answer.

11.

Hundreds of post-humans suddenly spilled out of the side of Mount Andromeda, seemingly emerging out of the snowscape itself, their green magnetic coc.o.o.ns glowing brightly in the darkness. En ma.s.se, they looked like a volcanic eruption, except instead of lava, the mountain was emitting fireflies. Aldous, Samantha, and an impromptu smorgasbord of twenty post-humans lingered behind, blasting powerful bursts of magnetic energy toward the transport harriers in an attempt to cover the escape of their fleeing brethren.

The gun turrets of the harriers quickly locked on to an overwhelming plethora of targets and began firing, but it wasn't bullets that burst from the barrels of their guns; rather, their ammunition was bright white blasts of energy, tinged with yellow auras, designed to disrupt the magnetic coc.o.o.ns of the post-humans. They were frighteningly effective, knocking person after person out of the air, most of them falling dozens-if not hundreds-of meters to their deaths.

"Monsters!" Samantha furiously shouted as she continued blasting toward the harriers. As her eyes locked on one harrier in particular that had shot several people out of the air, she broke her promise to Aldous. She took a moment to let the charge build in her fingertips before releasing an enormous blast of electromagnetic energy that severely damaged the systems on the craft. It fell out of formation and began dropping, spinning as it plummeted, its one remaining functional engine beginning to smoke as it took on the overwhelming burden of the aircraft's entire weight.

Aldous turned, his expression aghast at what his wife had done. "Sam!"

Samantha didn't reply. Her expression was conflicted, but she didn't regret what she'd done to the Purist harrier or the Purists inside who were about to die. What she did regret was hurting her husband.

A dark realization suddenly took over Aldous's eyes. Either he would have to allow the Purists in the transport to die and cross an ethical line that he'd sworn never to cross, or he would have to fly out and risk his life to save them. For Aldous, it wasn't even a choice. He turned and began to sprint toward the ledge of the loading bay, lifting off into the air and engaging his coc.o.o.n, shooting toward the stricken harrier.

"Aldous!" Samantha finally shouted. She immediately established a connection through her mind's eye. "Don't do it!"

"I have to," Aldous replied as he reached the belly of the aircraft and began to support it, awkwardly bringing the ship down toward an impending hard landing in the snow.

"Aldous," Samantha uttered with a resigned sigh. She'd never met a more stubborn man. Even in the face of his exterminator, Aldous wouldn't sacrifice his ethics. She wondered if there were anything that could ever make him.

She lifted off of the edge of the loading bay, determined to at least help him carry his burden, even if she disagreed with it. She'd flown only a few meters before, from her left, a Purist super soldier flying at nearly 200 kilometers an hour collided with her, driving her body into the wall of the rock face, instantly shattering every bone in her body. The soldier used his prosthetic hand to dig into the rock of the wall, holding himself in place as he watched Samantha drop into the snow some two dozen meters below, her blood staining the previously perfect whiteness.

Aldous watched the horrific scene of his wife's demise both from his vantage point under the crippled harrier and in his mind's eye. As the harrier touched down safely into the cushion of snow, his wife fell like a limp ragdoll, tumbling head over heels several times before landing hard. "Sam! Sam!" he shouted. He knew he wouldn't hear a response. There was simply no way. "Sam!"

He released the smoking harrier, now safely on the ground, and began to fly toward his wife, but the moment he lifted into the air, a disruptor blast from another super soldier stripped him of his powers. He slammed back down, no longer protected by his coc.o.o.n, and slid, face first, into the snow. His eyes never left the dark, crumpled form of his wife in the snow, illuminated by the firefight and the blinding spotlights of the Purists' transports. The red ring of blood around her body was quickly expanding.

"Sam! No!"

12.

Craig angled his body awkwardly as he worked desperately to overcome his violent shivering and steer himself through the air onto the Planck platform. When he finally touched down, he collapsed onto his knees, huddling his torso against his legs as his training had taught him to do, making himself as small as possible as the frigid air cut through his soaked black jacket and pants. He crossed his arms over his chest and curled his hands into fists, his fingers so numb that he could barely move them.

After enough time pa.s.sed for him to recognize that curling up wasn't going to generate the body heat he needed to stave off hypothermia, he began flipping through screens in his mind's eye to find instructions for how to generate the magnetic coc.o.o.ns that the A.I. had described to him. Once he found the right screen, he had to follow through with more calibrations. The screens showed him how to generate pulses of green magnetic energy on his fingertips and how to release them like little thunderbolts in whichever direction he chose. They also showed him how to generate much larger b.a.l.l.s of energy, a phenomenon that looked like ball lightning, and to send it wherever he wished with the ease of a thought. Finally, he learned to generate the lifesaving coc.o.o.n for which he had been searching. In an instant, his entire body was encapsulated in a green aura that looked to Craig like pictures he'd seen of the aurora borealis, the beautiful green pulsating, bands of energy wisping in ghost-like fashion around him.

The shelter the coc.o.o.n provided him was an immense relief, but he was still soaking wet, and he doubted that the warmth of his breath and what little body heat still remained would be enough to turn the tide against the damage that had already been done to his body temperature. He rocked slightly to and fro, attempting to generate heat from movement as his eyes darted around, looking for something he could use to turn up the heat. The Planck was obviously extraordinarily advanced technology, but he hadn't the foggiest idea how to use any of it to his advantage. The only other object in sight was the enormous mountain of ice on which the Planck was firmly set. There was nothing combustible. His survival training would do him little good in that place, in the black night, right in the middle of the ocean. Jesus, he thought. I've got a G.o.dd.a.m.n nuclear generator in my spine, and I'm going to freeze to death.

Several more minutes pa.s.sed by. Craig's rocking slowed as his mind drifted to the events of what, for him, had made up the past twenty-four hours. Could this be h.e.l.l? he wondered. It seemed plausible. After all, no one denied that he had, indeed, died. Could this all be part of some death dream? Everything seemed too absurd to be real. Fourteen years? I was gone for fourteen years and Sam married that...Sam really married Aldous Gibson? A young Aldous at that. The government won the war but turned on its own people in an attempt to prevent A.I.? And I'm a...what did they call me? A post-human? My G.o.d.

If all that weren't enough, he'd now been sent through some sort of wormhole into a parallel universe and had apparently arrived on an ice flow in the middle of an ocean, only G.o.d knew where. Am I even on Earth? he asked himself. More importantly, can technology like this even really exist? What the h.e.l.l did Sam mean about boiling s.p.a.ce?

He nodded to himself. Yes. This is h.e.l.l.

Without warning, an image appeared in his mind's eye that nearly sent him backward off the Planck platform again. The image was an extreme close-up of an eye, but it flickered on and off before vanishing completely.

"What the h.e.l.l?"

A few more seconds ticked by before another image flashed before him; this time it was the visage of the A.I., much smaller and upside down. He was speaking and appeared to be trying vehemently to communicate something important. Craig tried to read his lips, but after a few minutes, he realized it was a useless endeavor, the upside-down mouth making incomprehensible shapes and giving him a headache. Almost as soon as he gave up, the A.I.'s image vanished.

Craig waited several more seconds for the image to return, but when it became apparent that the wait might be a long one, he decided to get to his feet. He knew if he stayed there any longer, he was going to freeze.

He flew straight up, still protected in his beautiful green coc.o.o.n, and floated high above the iceberg below. He scanned the area slowly as his alt.i.tude increased, taking in the full 360 degrees, looking for any sign of land. The horizon was completely black in all directions. The night was moonless, but as he looked up, he recognized the Big Dipper. Finally, something familiar.

Suddenly, a flicker caught his eye. Far in the distance, a faint yellow light slipped into existence over the edge of the world. It was so faint that Craig was afraid he might lose it as he began to fly toward it, fearful that it might be moving away from him. As he flew faster and faster, the light quickly began to grow in intensity. After a few minutes of excited and desperate pursuit, it became clear that the object was a ship, and it was moving toward him. He flew toward it as quickly as he could, only slowing once the ship was almost within reach. It was a gigantic pa.s.senger ship, and its lights burned brightly. Warmth. Salvation.

Just as Craig dared a smile, his eyes caught the bright white lettering on the hull: T-I-T-A-N-I-C.

"Uh-oh."

13.

"You men all right?" the super soldier hollered at the flight crew of the downed harrier transport.

Three men finished exiting the aircraft; though smoking, it was mostly intact. They were regular humans, in sharp contrast to the super soldier who had addressed them. "Yeah," one of them hollered back. "We're all accounted for, sir!"

"Good," the super soldier replied. Aldous was barely able to crane his neck to see the silhouetted figure standing only a few meters in front of him and two paces to his right.

He wore a black, collapsible woven carbon nanotube wing on his back, standard issue for all Purist super soldiers. Four small stealth jet engines fitted with plasma actuators to increase efficiency and drastically reduce noise were mounted on the wing; the engines were idle now as the super soldier conversed with the downed airmen. "I got you a present," the super soldier commented, indicating with one of his cybernetic arm prostheses toward Aldous as he lay, nearly motionless in the snow. The prosthesis was black but shiny, and it caught a glint of light near the wrist as the sharp claw of the index finger pointed to Aldous. "Enjoy." He turned to leave but suddenly stopped, turning back. "Don't dawdle. Their generators only stay down for a couple minutes. Once he powers back up, you'll be no match for him." And with that, he completed his turn and crouched down, coiling his powerful cybernetic leg prostheses, and then leapt several meters in the air, his stealth engines firing up to give him the lift he needed to swoop quickly toward the holographic slope. The post-humans who were behind it would be his prey.

Aldous squirmed in the snow, taking his eyes off the fallen and crumpled form of his wife and rolling onto his back, determined to meet his death in the face. If he had to die, he wanted the men making that decision to have to live with the memory of his eyes.

"Captain," one of the airmen pointed out as he approached Aldous, the airman's rifle already pointing dangerously in the post-human's direction, "my aug gla.s.ses are giving me a weird message. Are you getting this?"

"No. What is it?" asked the captain.

"I'm getting a do-not-kill order. It says this guy's a VIP target."

"Who is he?" the captain asked.

"That's the thing. It says he's Professor Aldous Gibson."

A short moment pa.s.sed as the trio of airmen tried to compute the information. The captain, cognizant of their time constraints, tried to remain calm, but he knew a decision had to be made quickly. He marched up to Aldous and got a visual on his aug gla.s.ses as well: the same do-not-kill order appearing on his aug gla.s.ses. "I'm getting the same message. It says this is Gibson. We don't have time to call this in, and the disruptors on our bird are shot. If we let him power back up, he'll escape, but if we kill him, we could be killing a VIP."

"There's gotta be something wrong with the facial recognition though, Captain." The airman who stood closest and had his gun trained on Aldous enthusiastically turned back to the captain and the other airmen as he spoke. "Aldous Gibson is seventy-four years old. This guy's thirty at most. There's no way this is our VIP."

"Maybe it's his clone or something," the captain replied. "Who knows with these freaks?"

"Well," the closest airman replied, as he moved one hand up to scratch under his helmet, "we either let him power back up and escape or we take him out. What's your call, Cap?"

The captain nodded as he mulled over their dilemma.

Aldous clenched his fist and gritted his teeth.

"Cap, with all due respect, sir, we need a call on this now."

"If we shoot this guy and he turns out to be a VIP, we're gonna catch h.e.l.l, but we also have one h.e.l.l of an excuse. He doesn't look like Gibson to me. The computer's got to be glitchy. Let's take him out."

"Affirmative," the nearest airman said, turning back to his target and raising his rifle to aim a kill shot squarely at Aldous's temple.

Aldous's mind's eye suddenly flashed salvation into his field of vision. The screen read, "Full Power Reestablished."

As the airman's knuckle twitched on the trigger, Aldous's coc.o.o.n suddenly reignited, blocking the bullet as it left the barrel of the rifle. Half a second later, he sent out a powerful wave of energy that overwhelmed the airmen, overloading their synapses and sending them crumpling to the snow, unconscious.

Aldous blinked twice before drawing himself up to his feet, not sure whether he was even really still alive. He'd been saved by less than a second of indecision by the captain. Had the airman made up his mind just a moment earlier, Aldous would have been dead. He suddenly thought of all of the universes in which this was, indeed the case. He thought of the A.I. and Craig, who had crossed into one of those infinite parallel possibilities.

Suddenly, he realized that the universe was about to split again as he reached yet another fork in the road. Just as he had split the universe when he'd decided to save the crippled harrier, separating himself from his wife and leaving her unprotected in the process, leading to her death, now he had to make another fateful decision. He turned back to his wife and watched her unmoving body in the snow, circled with that ghastly crimson ring of blood, her spilled life. The firefight continued all around him, though the green energy blasts of the post-humans were now few and far between. The Purists were overwhelming them, and their victory was inevitable. He had choices: reenter the fight and fall with his friends and colleagues; or fly to his wife, gather up her body, and hope that her nans-no doubt still functioning-could somehow repair her and bring her back to life. He stepped forward when he thought of that option, but he froze when he calculated the chances. While the nans would be repairing her body, he'd seen how hard she'd been driven into the rock face, vulnerable since she hadn't yet ignited her protective coc.o.o.n. No human could have survived such an impact, but could a post-human? Aldous wanted to believe it was possible, but they'd never tested the nans under such harsh conditions. Not even Craig Emilson, whose body had been riddled with bullets and whose spine had been broken, had endured as much damage as Sam. Could they repair that much damage before her brain is completely lost, if it isn't already? Impossible.

And even if he tried to salvage what was left of her, he knew he'd almost certainly be caught by the Purists in the attempt.

No, I can't. There was only one reasonable course of action. No one had eyes on him. He could escape on foot, and the Purists wouldn't be able to track him. Then he could reestablish contact with the A.I. and Craig when they returned to Universe 1.

Even though it felt wrong-even though he felt like a coward leaving her behind-he knew it was the only logical course of action.

He turned his back on the facility and began to run through the snow, away from the battle, away from the Purists, and away from Samantha. His eyes locked on a dark patch of sky between two mountain peaks in the distance and he ran toward them, not daring to break his forward stare.

14.