System Overclocked 3 -ch 13-

Chapter 13

Taking in a breath Wrench held it, let it out, than pushed his systems into an extreme state.

Right up to the point that he had reached just earlier.

Let’s hope there’s another vending machine over there… because damn did it run me down. I still feel kinda empty.

With that thought, Wrench pushed ahead through the portal, his gun coming up at the same time. He had the sight in front of his face as he went through the magical oval.

As he crossed the threshold he watched in awe as he was pulled apart.

His fingers and hands dissolved, broke into tiny fragments, and vanished into nothing at all.

Nothing was left behind.

Not even the feeling of his hand, in fact.

It was as if it simply didn’t exist.

When his mind crossed through the portal he realized that his hand wasn’t anywhere at all.

Nor was his body.

The space between where the entered the portal, and it’s exit, was somewhere else entirely. As if he had entered an intersection rather than a hallway.

As that thought took hold, Wrench came to a stop.

Completely and utter to a stand-still with a lack of direction, orientation, and the feeling of where he physically was.

His spatial awareness ceased to exist as a whole as if he himself did not exist.

He couldn’t see his arm pushed out in front of himself or the gun for that matter.

There was no doubting the fact that he existed, or that he was somewhere, but wherever this was, his physical body was and wasn’t there at the same time. Existing in the space between the portal entry and the portal exit.

Unfortunately, now that he’d halted his progress, Wrench didn’t have an idea of which way to go. Or if there even were directions to go.

What had felt like an intersection only a moment ago now felt like an endless sea.

An ocean of endless waters expanding out in every direction without any real form to it.

I’ve become a Hume in a Hab lost out in the middle of space.

Shit.

Wrench slowly came to the conclusion that there wasn’t even a feeling of being lost since he had no idea how to move here since he didn’t have a body. That he was quite literally, adrift.

A push against his sense of self moved him.

Or at least, he thought he was moving.

He genuinely had no way to tell.

Rather than let the feeling go though, he struggled to maintain it. To keep himself moving along in the same way he’d been bumped.

Whatever it was that had given him a nudge had provided him with a means to “move”. Or at least what he perceived as moving.

He continued traveling along as he did.

For a period of time that he had no way of measuring and genuinely couldn’t reflect on.

It was as if time truly had meaning at all.

Then suddenly, Wrench exited the portal.

He came out with his rifle up and found himself at a disadvantage.

His concentration so deeply set into moving forward through the nothing that when he popped out he wasn’t ready for it.

Stumbling, Wrench felt his mind wildly flail at his body. Trying to move in the not-space even though he was now able to physically move.

Flicking the rifle toward the nearest target Wrench pulled the trigger.

Six rounds slammed into a tree before Wrench could discern that he was standing in the middle of a strange area. One that made no sense to him given what he was expecting.

It was roughly the size of a medium Hab as far as Wrench could tell, but he wasn’t quite sure.

The grass that was rolling along gave the ground an odd shape as did the trees that were dotted here and there. Bushes and foliage also obscured the area.

At the center of it was a rather large house, surprisingly enough.

Wrench had discovered them recently with his work for Edmund. They seemed odd to him but he vaguely understood them to be familial Habs.

Beyond that though, there was nothing.

There was a sky, but no clouds.

Light, but no sun.

A fresh feeling, but no breeze.

At the edge of the area, the grass fell away to nothing, vanishing into the inifinite down into nothing below. Almost as if he were staring up into the sky, but down below the ground instead.

It’s a floating island?

“Where am I,” he muttered to himself. He hadn’t expected to be wherever this was, to be honest.

“I call it the pause,” came the response from beside him.

Edmund was standing there.

Surprisingly, the helmet wasn’t on his head.

Wrench found a young man in his twenties staring at him.

His hair was a light brown in color and he had blue eyes.

There was a tiredness to him.

Absolute bone weariness.

The kind that left you wondering if the person was alright and if they needed to immediately go see the Mender.

Before they tried to stick their head in a vent fan.

“The pause?” Wrench asked, staring at the young man.

“That… weird spot, between exhaling and inhaling,” Edmund continued, looking at the tree Wrench had shot. “It’s not an exhale anymore and it isn’t an inhale. It’s the pause between.

“It fits here, because I genuinely can’t tell if it’s the start of the universe here, or the end. I’ve seen both here. It as the last piece of the universe and the first.

“I can’t tell. It’s just that place in between. The pause.

“It’s not Limbo. We’re not dead, after all. This isn’t a hall of judgment or anything like that. It’s just… here… it exists. That’s… that’s it.”

“The moment before you flip the switch?” Wrench suggested. “It’s repaired, it’s ready, but it isn’t on. You don’t know if it’s ready or not, and you won’t, till you activate it.”

“Liminal space. Sorry, best I can manage as an explanation.

“I’m sure there’s a better explanation that I could probably get but I doubt I’d understand it.

“It’d be like trying to explain to a two-dimensional character that there was really a third dimension that they just couldn’t perceive,” Edmund answered instead. “Anyways… seems like this is it. You’re where you needed to be. I’ve done what I needed to do. It’s time for us to move to our final positions, I guess. Well, if you’re willing, that is. I can only ask this of you, can’t force it.”

A two dimensional person that there’s a third dimension.

Hm.

I somehow suddenly relate to this hypothetical two-dimensional person.

“What is it you’re exactly asking me to do?” Wrench asked.

“I need you to move and save someone. To move so fast that it’ll probably damage you, honestly. At a speed you’ve never gone before,” Edmund whispered with a shake of his head. “It only needs to last for a fraction of a second but… it’ll be everything.

“Overclocking your system to the point that I can’t even… I don’t know what’ll happen to you. I know that you’ll end up back in your Hab afterward though. I know you’ll be back home. Just not what happens after that.”

“Why’s that?” Wrench asked. “You’ve seemed to know everything up to now. Pretty sure you were cheating there a few times with some of those coincidences I ran into.”

“Hm… because I’ve never done the part we’re about to do,” Edmund admitted. “I don’t get to cheat, see ahead, the past, nothing. I can only see now, do now, and never again.

“Pretty sure I won’t be coming back either. One way trip for me.

“Or, if you prefer, a single use tool. I don’t get to be used again.”

Wrench frowned.

He understood perfectly what Edmund was getting at.

To be fair, he felt like he owed this young man a great deal.

The life he had been living was granted to him for this moment. To be the tool for Edmund to use here and now.

“More than that, there’s the distinct possibility some things might change when you get back to your Hab,” Edmund added with a sigh. “Nothing huge but… small things. You might notice someone has a different hair color. Maybe they have a different name. Things that won’t really change the outcome of anything, but just that they have some minor differences.

“It’s part of my power and what I do.

“You can just file it away as ‘fixed with an alternate part’ as to the why. Nothing large will change just… smaller things.”

To Wrench that sounded curious, but it didn’t change his thoughts.

“How much will this fix if I do it?” Wrench asked, curious. He had already made up his mind, but he wanted to know.

Edmund blinked, tilted his head sideway, then snorted.

“Imagine you’re replacing a single wire that leads to a power source that connects to a great many components on a machine that has existed for eons.

“A power source that has generated a multitude of extensions and additions to the machine that have increased it’s complexity beyond it’s original design.

“Except this power source is about to go dark. It’s going to go dark and everything it was powering falls off. It goes dark sooner than expected and can’t complete the given functions of the additions it powers,” Edmund said in a strange and almost broken voice. “That without that source to provide power to everything else, those machines that go dark cause a great many things to fall out of alignment.

“Safety measures will break, specifications go wildly outside of parameters, teeth off gears are literally shorn off. Everything begins an inexorable descent into absolute chaos and a resulting mechanical explosion that will happen far down the road.

“Except to you, you’d never even know you fixed anything at all really. Your part of the machine wouldn’t show any of this wear and tear for a very long time. To the point that you as a part of the machine would’ve been replaced many times over.”

Edmund said all this in a way that sounded beyond frustrated. He reached up with one hand and grabbed at his own hair as if he might pull it out.

“I just need… I need one wire replaced,” he spat out in a deathly whisper. “One wire. Even if it’s only temporary. Just a few minutes of this power source would change so much. So many of those additions, those extensions, would be able to complete a cycle. They would be able to become their own power source because of that single wire.”

Wrench raised his eyebrows at that.

He now really wanted to fix this machine and become that single wire.

It sounded like a grand idea to be the most needed tool in the box, while also being the most simple one.

A jumper.

Jumping a circuit from point A to point B.

“And that’s me. I’m that wire?” Wrench asked.

“I can do many things. I can change many things. I have searched endlessly across multiple universes and galaxies for tools, abilities, anything that could get this job done,” Edmund said, meeting Wrench’s gaze. “The world is vast and you’re but a single wire on a machine the size of the universe.

“Yet you’re the only wire in all of existence I’ve found that fits the power source and can give me just… just a few minutes.”

“Then it sounds like I need to fix something,” Wrench said with a grin. “How do we do this?”

“Well… I’m going to do a thing… and you’re going to appear somewhere else. Chances are you might be missing a lot of what you have on you, but you might have some of it,” Edmund explained, looking confused even as he said it. “You’ll be staring at the man you’re meant to save. Dark hair, kinda wild looking, he’s got two women next to him. In front of him is a giant static monster.

“He’s going to hit him with a giant… laser beam, I guess. That beam is going to kill the person we’re saving outright. You need to knock him aside. Bring him down. Something.

“Just get him out of the way.”

“That’s it?” Wrench clarified.

“Thats it. It’s just… it’ll happen in the time it takes to blink. It’s going to be fast. Almost too fast,” Edmund stated. “Before you ask, you’re at the peak of your ability right now. It’s as if you’ve eaten your fill of calories and then some.

“You never get hungry here. Or thirsty.

“You don’t age either.

“It’s… it’s just… it’s a pause. Everything is paused.”

“Okay,” Wrench said. He did have a momentary regret that he wouldn’t get to fix anything more here. He had a lot of fun going through endless things and putting them back together while learning about them. “I’ll just max out my speed and go from there. Everything to speed and agility. Dash to this powersource and throw him aside. There’s nothing I can do, right?”

“Not really,” Edmund admitted. “The hardest part is making the choice and doing it. There’s risk. That and getting to this point.”

“Speaking of, I set up a bomb. I honestly can barely understand ended up where I ended up,” Wrench said, wanting to discuss a thought he’d had. “To the point that it all just felt weird.”

“I kinda poked here and there to make things happen in certain ways,” Edmund confirmed. “Even having you repair things before hand had put you in a mid to fix things. To fix everything. You wanted to keep fixing.

“Even now, you probably had a thought that you regretted the fact that you won’t get to keep fixing all those weird and unique inventions.”

Pausing in his thoughts, Wrench blankly stared off into the abyss off to the side.

“Oh,” he said finally, seeing it exactly as Edmund had said. “That makes sense. Mm. Well. Sometimes you have to warm up a tool. You can’t just go straight into it’s use sometimes.”

Edmund snorted and patted Wrench on the back.

“Thank you, Wrench. If I could, I’d drop in on you after this just to see how things are. You and the others,” Edmund muttered then sighed. “Are you ready? You’ll be dropped into it immediately. I’ve already set everything up otherwise. It really is just doing it and that’s it. You either succeed or fail and… it’ll be over in a flash.”

“I’m ready,” Wrench said and nodded his head. “Just give me a three count and go on ‘go’ so I can ramp it all up.”

“Alright, I understand,” Edmund confirmed. “Then… three, two, one, go.”

Wrench floored his body into a place he had never tried.

It went to the furthest extreme that it could. Just a series of nine’s without end and little else.

Every system in his body was at a point that he wasn’t sure it wouldn’t just blow apart as soon as he twitched.

But this was to fix the greatest machine Wrench had ever fixed.

He was going to quite literally fix the universe it sounded like.

One little wire.

Wrench flashed into being in a strange place.

Ahead of him was a man just as Edmund had described.

Before him was the monster, exactly as it had been stated.

None of this mattered to Wrench.

Truthfully, this small action on his part was nearly nothing to Wrench himself.

A single action to him that would be just another in a long line of events. One that wouldn’t even likely show any appreciable difference to him, just as Edmund had stated.

Wrench flashed forward in the microcosm that his brain registered he wasn’t in The Pause.

Blurring between the points of where he began and where the man was in a way that made Wrench feel as if the very molecules of his body had become alight.

That his skin was burning and peeling away from his very bones.

The attack Edmund had mentioned was already incoming though.

Wrench could see it closing in on him out of the corner of his eye. His brain wasn’t able to keep up with this and his body was already acting out what it had been asked to do.

There was no time to change anything at all.

This man was going to be hit just as he had been destined to do and Wrench would fail. He had no options in his mind or what he could do to move faster to get this man out of the way.

Except to maybe go limp.

Rather than push him out of the way, Wrench entertained the idea of just knocking him down.

In that moment, Wrench gave up on controlling himself.

His body went limp, his systems unwound themselves, and Wrench shot through the remaining distance in a flash.

Bowling the man over and sending him crashing to the ground.

An intense heat washed over Wrench’s back and he felt his back go strangely tight.

Whatever the attack had been, it’d clearly brushed Wrench or maybe even struck him directly.

Before he could consider what that meant, what’d happened, or even if he’d accomplished his goal, Wrench was elsewhere.

Again.

Except wherever he was didn’t matter.

All that matters was his body was now very upset with what’d been done to it and was quite angry with him.

Enraged, even.

Or so Wrench guessed from every system suddenly flashing into his view, turning a deep ugly red, and him starting to pass out. His grasp on reality slipping away despite him desperately trying to cling to it.

He needed to get to Squeak and get squared away.

It wasn’t going to work out the way he wanted though it seemed. Even as he struggled to remain conscious, he could feel his mind growing weak.

Regardless of his abilities, of his extreme peak of Hume genetics, whatever had struck him was beyond his ability to handle it and it’s repercussions, when paired with what he had put his body through.

“You did it,” whispered Edmund as the world flickered in and out on Wrench. “You fixed it.”

Wrench heard the words and realized there was nothing more he could do at the moment. That he’d just have to set his regeneration to a high level and hope someone drug him over to Squeak.

Then he let go.