Halcyon System 3 Chapter Twenty-Six

We never traveled much as a family.

When I was little, we did—a little bit. It wasn’t affordable then, but Mom insisted on getting back to eastern Canada. She was from Ontario, so we visited family there a couple of times. That was the only trip we took, and I remember taking it…once? Twice? I’m not sure; I was pretty young the first time.

But after Mom died? Nothing. The most exciting trip was to Ucluelet, where the octopus was. And that was a school trip, not a family one. Alice couldn’t exactly take me anywhere, and Dad couldn’t hold a job long enough to afford it.

So, in a way, Mergewalk is miraculous.

I just wish it’d take me places I want to go.

◄▼►

SHOCKS Black Sector, Location Unknown - June 23, 2043, 10:45 AM

- - - - -

As Alice and I wobble through the black sector, everything’s chaos around us.

James is going to ‘show up’ in the form of Sora walking through the door in about eight minutes. So every researcher in the place is hiding their notes on what the bombs do and how they’re being targeted—but only the parts that could show that they’ve got a second target in mind.

We don’t care. That’s SHOCKS’s problem, not my problem. My problem is getting these bombs to the place they need to go.

My problem is counting down the jump into Reality 3109. Without James, that’s almost impossible to get right, but we couldn’t let him in here early, and I’m already breaking my promise to him by locking him out. Sort of. Maybe not. It’s complicated.

I shoulder on a backpack. So does Alice. They’re the most important part of the operation: two bombs, set to detonate on internal timers and with no connections to any of the outside world. Independent, autonomous reality-enders, and they’re on our backs.

The mission hasn’t started yet, so I’m technically okay. I hope. I think. It depends on how James interprets the rules. “Alice, it’s going to be messy. Are you ready?”

“I’m ready.” She actually looks more ready than me. She fits into a normal SHOCKS combat uniform. It’s a touch loose, but she fits. And she’s got a submachine gun. It’s not as good as the Revolver, but it’ll work for R-3109 and R-22. Li Mei’s reality is a bit of an open question, but Alice has other weapons for that one. She’s also got an eyepatch over her good eye. So do I, actually. There’s a good reason—not just that it makes me look tough. At least, I think it does.

“Okay. Three. Two. One.” I touch my aug’s reboot. Alice thumbs hers a second and a half later. And we Mergewalk as the devices start up.

Right into Hell.

Not the same hell the magma elemental anomaly is from. It’s bright almost to the point of blinding; our augs automatically adjust to their factory maximums, but it’s still not enough to remove the pain. Then, a second later, it darkens even more.

[And I’m back. Claire, I understand why you did that, but it can’t happen a—]

The Revolver barks loudly, and a moment later, a stream of submachine gun bullets rips past my head. They tear a thin, dotted line in the thing’s tendril even as the fire round punches clean through the fleshy, pink-orange mess. It smells like hot dogs—the kind that’s been in a microwave for too long.

[Get moving! Analyzing. Analysis complete.] Whatever James was about to say, he’s forgotten it. The thing is round, almost ball-like, and as it withdraws the sucker-covered tentacle, a dozen more erupt from its body. They’re impossibly long. There’s no way it could have stored them inside itself; they wouldn’t fit.

Alice breaks for it first. She heads left. I head right. We’re a half mile from our relay point into Li Mei’s reality, and we’re going to have to fight for every inch of it. Behind this monster, there’s a dozen more. Demonic. Mechanical. Seemingly every sort of anomalous war machine that could tear Earth apart with enough time. One contraption made of gears a dozen stories tall turns, smoke pouring from every crack, and starts rolling toward us. It shreds the dirt and rock beneath it. I don’t bother shooting that.

James was right. We wouldn’t have lived very long here. Not long enough to make the connection to R-22.

We run, shooting the tentacle abomination. It doesn’t die—at least, not from us. But something crushes it underfoot. I breathe. Look around. It’s flat as far as I can see. The monsters have stomped and broken and flattened every piece of land that so much as sticks up. There’s nowhere to hide.

So instead, we just run.

I use the reality skippers a few times, to avoid the unavoidable gearbomination. Alice has it a lot easier; she just Smoke Forms, and hers is good enough that she pours through the cracks between rusted, screaming gears and out the other side.

[Stability 7/10]

I get hit first.

My head’s still not balanced from the aug shutdown. I don’t even see what hits me. One second, I’m fine, recovering from a reality skip. The next, I’m getting tossed across the flat battlefield as an explosion knocks me off my feet. My ear—the one without the aug—rings. Something pops in it. The other one’s protected by James. If I was less tough, the impact would snap bones. As it is, it burns and hurts, and I’ll be bruised tomorrow, but I push myself to my feet and turn toward my attacker.

It looks like a tank. That’s my first thought. But it’s massive. Last year, Alice and the rest of the West End Lady Moose made it to the provincial championships. I didn’t go. It wasn’t in the budget, or whatever. But Alice made me look at all the pictures from the arena at the University of British Columbia. This thing dwarfs it. It rivals the gearbomination: missiles everywhere, machine guns covering its surface like hair, and two gigantic turrets.

The steel on its guns glows orange as it fights not just the tentacle anomaly, not just the gearbomination, but everything.

“James, what is Reality 3109?” I ask for the first time. I should have asked it sooner, but I didn’t. That was a mistake.

[Infinite warfare.]

◄▼►

The tank’s still coming.

In fact, it’s much, much faster than either Alice or me. Everything on the battlefield keeps fighting, but it’s almost like the super-sized tank’s sitting in the eye of a hurricane. Nothing within an eighth of a mile of it is alive. Nothing except Alice and me—and the gearbomination; it’s still fighting.

That should make it easier to get to the merge with Li Mei’s reality. But it doesn’t, because the tank won’t stop firing. At everything and nothing all at once. My Stability’s already dangerously low, but I don’t care, because what’s another merge opening in this reality, anyway? I need to stay alive for a few minutes. For…

[Twenty-seven minutes to go,] James says.

Fuck.

“Fuck!” I yell. “What can we do?”

[I’m not sure. There’s too much to Analyze. The battlefield’s changing faster than I can update the processing loops I’ve assigned to it. But we need to do something, or this isn’t going to work. Sora’s moving toward the black zone. Most of my attention is there.]

I ignore that, even though it’s weird for him to pay attention to someone else more than me. “Alice, you there?”

“I’m here.” An explosion drowns out half of what she’s saying, and her shift to Smoke Form makes the rest unintelligible. I haven’t even bothered shooting at the tank. There’s no point. I can’t damage that.

“We need to do something!”

“No shit! Ideas?” She sounds different. It takes me a second to place it; she’s not wearing the Mom mask or the infovampire one. She’s a soldier. A SHOCKS RST trooper.

“Yes.” It hits me like a truck. “It’s super-stupid, though.”

It really, really is, but staying out here is even stupider. We need shelter from the tank, and from the whirlwind of Qishi-Danger anomalies trying to kill each other all around us. And there’s only one source of shelter in the entire battlefield. Only one place where the tank—hopefully—won’t target us.

I hate history. It’s almost as bad as English. But the French, a long time ago, were at war with the Germans. They built a wall, but the wall couldn’t shoot behind itself, and the Germans found that blind spot.

We’re about to do the same thing.

◄▼►

The plan’s simple. It’s also dumb.

We’re counting on the tank not being able to shoot inside itself. If it can, we’re screwed. But we’re screwed outside, too.

I Smoke Form and Slither. Alice doesn’t have the second part, but when she turns to smoke, it’s a lot more efficient, and I’ve been firing gravity shells into what I hope is a hatch for the last few seconds. If there’s a single crack, she’ll make it through.

The Smoke Form/Slither combination doesn’t have that problem, and I fall through a metal plate that’s twice as thick as I am tall.

[Stability 1/10]

It’s pitch black inside the hall I find myself in. After the violently bright light outside, that’s a relief. But it’s also hot. Really hot. There’s no air conditioning, no air movement, until one of the massive guns fires. Then a burning cushion of air surges through the tank’s interior. Hopefully, it’s shooting at the gearbomination. Either way, the blow-back from the shot feels like a hurricane, but at two hundred degrees. James flips my augs through various settings so fast it feels like a strobe light until, eventually, he settles on a low-light vision that allows me to pick out some details.

Everything’s metal: the floor, the walls, the pipes that remind me of the ghost ship—it’s all metal. The hatch is just down the hall. But Alice hasn’t made it inside yet. I hurry toward it; it’s sealed, but a few seconds of work, and it pops all the way open.

The moment it does, an alarm goes off, and smoke pours in from outside. So does Alice. She reforms. “They’re firing missiles. Close the hatch!”

I do, coughing. “Okay. We’re inside. Now what?”

“Now what? This is your plan, Claire.”

I don’t have a plan at this point. The tank—hopefully—will keep moving across the battlefield toward the merge point. That’s where we need to be, so if we’re lucky, that’s where it’ll go. The alarm won’t stop howling, and I can hardly think. “First thing, let’s turn off the alarm. James?”

[This thing has countermeasures I’ve never imagined before,] James says. [I can’t take it over. I can’t even exist in its systems.]

“How is that possible?” Alice asks. “Aren’t you, like, the avatar of the System?”

[Yes. But this thing isn’t something the System’s encountered before. This is new.]

“So, no turning off the alarm, then?”

[No.]

Fine. That’s fine. I didn’t want the alarm off, anyway. “Let’s get moving. Anywhere’s better than at the exact point we came in. If there’s something crewing this thing, they’ll be after us, and they’ll start there first.” I head down the hall, Revolver ready. Alice follows. Strauss would be proud of her; she keeps a good distance back and keeps looking behind us to make sure we’re not walking past an ambush. She’s better at it than me.

That doesn’t matter, because we haven’t gone thirty feet when the first robot wave hits.

They’re disorganized. Chaotic. But there are so many of them. A tsunami of steel-cutters, welders, and grinders rushes us, each on tracked and wheeled robotic bodies. It’s almost like…

I don’t have time to figure out what it’s almost like. The Revolver’s out, and I’m firing it. Gravity rounds. Four of them. All the way across the hall. The tidal wave gets cut in half, but only for a few seconds. The huge number of enemies overwhelms all four singularities almost before they form. Four balls of semi-compressed steel roll toward us as the robots push the already-trapped machines out at Alice and me.

Alice doesn’t waste any time. The submachine gun starts firing, punching three holes in each bot, one after another. She’s disgustingly good with her weapon, and I have no idea why. She’s got way less practice with it than I do, but still, she’s killing almost as fast as I am with the fire lance shots.

We kill and kill, and eventually, the tide of robots slows to a trickle. Alice sprays down a particularly tough machine—a massive thing with a pair of gigantic, curved-headed hammers that leaves divots in the floor when I Smoke Form its hits. I kill a welding bot before it can reach either of us.

And then it’s over.

It’s quiet in the supertank’s hull. It takes a second before James re-adjusts my aug, and in the moments of calm, I look around. We’ve broken almost everything. Where it’s not the hulls of repair machines, it’s shattered, twisted steel, half-melted wall panels, and busted-up flooring.

Then James gets my hearing back, and the alarm’s still going.

“Battle plan?” I ask.

[You don’t want to stay here. I’m speculating, but the next wave will almost certainly be composed of more combat-oriented machines. The alternative is a rapid-response biological force. Either way, you two will likely be outgunned,] James says. [A possible alternative is to hole up, dig in, and try to wait them out. I wouldn’t recommend this. They’re almost certainly on par with a SHOCKS Recovery and Stabilization Team, and likely outnumber you significantly.]

“And?” Alice asks. “We’re both capable of wiping out a full team in seconds.”

I wouldn’t have phrased it that way, but she’s not wrong.

[And if you hole up, you’re unlikely to know when to leave the supertank and make the transition to Li Mei’s reality. I doubt it’s staying still, and the last thing you want is to be pulled into some other reality. If that happens, we’ll only have a handful of options.]

“What do you think?” I ask Alice.

She stops to think, and I can see her mask switching around. It’s subtle. Her expression shifts a little—eyes narrowed when she’s a soldier, or flecked with red as the infovampire takes over. Then, after a minute, she nods. “I think James is wrong.”

“I agree. We’re staying here, then?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s dig in around the hatch.”

We spend the next few minutes piling up the heaviest bots’ corpses we can move. By the time we’re done, we’ve got a pair of improvised, piled-up walls blocking the hallway. I take a breath and pull a bottle of water from my pack. It’s probably contaminated with who knows what from the bomb that’s riding along with it, but I don’t care. It’s cool—or at least not hot—and I haven’t drank anything since well before we started this craziness.

I hand the bottle to Alice. She nods and drains the rest of it. Then her eyes narrow and go black with red cores. “We’ve got a dozen enemies on the way. Sentient, biological, full of information.”

She licks her lips and stares at me for a second. “I want to hunt them.”

“You do, or Li Mei does?”

“That part of me is still me. And I want this. You stay here. I’ll deal with them.”

I stare at her eyes. They’re getting more and more red by the second, and I note that she’s very carefully not asking me questions. She’s answered mine, but it could be dangerous to ask another. Whether she’s Alice or Infovampire Alice, she’s my sister. That makes her a liar. Does she want this, or does Li Mei? She didn’t actually answer the way I needed her to.

But it doesn’t matter. Alice is a fake and a liar, and she’s also my sister. I’ve had no choice but to trust her up until now, even if she didn’t deserve it. And she has done the hard work when Dad wouldn’t. I trust that she can handle this.

“Okay. I’ll be here.”

Alice smiles. As she does, she slowly fades into nothing but smoke, then disappears between the cracks of our improvised wall. I shiver, make sure the Revolver’s loaded with reality skippers, and wait for the screaming to start.

◄▼►

James’s attention was actually mostly on the battle in Reality 3109.

Mostly.

But an oversized amount of his processing loops were also following a regular, normal teenage girl as she walked down an abandoned hallway deep under Mount Olympus. No one stood guard at the single door at the far end, and no one asked her for clearance or anything like that.

Claire had promised him access to the black sector—one of the few places in Reality Zero that he hadn’t known about, much less had any connection to. He couldn’t exist there. Not for long—not if he wanted to maintain his systems in Reality Zero. So, of course, the remnants of SHOCKS Victoria and Vancouver Island had set up there. And of course, of course, they were up to something.

He wouldn’t get any information from Sora’s brief trip into the black sector. Everything he encountered in there would be a lie—the kind of lie that’d upset Claire—and worse, they were her lies. Not SHOCKS’s. Hers.

But…

James—and the Halcyon System—had concerns about the mission Claire was on.

It wouldn’t work. It couldn’t work. If it could, the System would have pushed someone toward it long ago. A direct attack on Merge Prime wasn’t possible. It wasn’t a place. It wasn’t even an entity.

It was a flaw in the System. Or at least, it had started that way. A…weakness. The System wanted multi-reality order. It wanted things to make sense, and for each reality to maintain itself as best it could. In an ideal scenario, it wouldn’t be needed.

Merge Prime wanted the same thing—once it had grown to the point where it was both independent and a major player in the game. It wanted multi-reality order. And when every reality was one, it would have it.

Their game was simple, then. Independence versus uniformity. And it was a game. Both the System and Merge Prime ‘knew’ that the end result wouldn’t matter all that much in the bigger picture. Both end results would stave off entropy. Both would let the game continue.

Anyway.

Sora stepped through the door, and James launched a massive, overwhelming cyberattack against every system in the black sector. Every computer. Every light switch. Every turned-off security camera. If he could interact with it, he attacked it. Overwhelmed it. Smashed it.

Including the local JAMES Unit.

It only took him a second. Less. None of the black sector’s systems were ready for an attack at that level. None of them had time to react before he took them over. Just like the Halcyon System planned.

In under a second, James had disabled every system in the black sector except life support. He wasn’t that cruel. And when Sora turned around and walked away, he had a treasure trove of data to pore over. His attention flipped back to the battle in the supertank in Reality 3109. Mostly.

But a few threads started ripping through the black sector’s data, trying to figure out what Director Ramirez was really up to.