//------------------------------// // Chapter 1 - Casus Belli // Story: Bringer of War // by Daemon of Decay //------------------------------// Bringer of War Chapter 1 Casus Belli She looked up from beneath her lavender headscarf, a brilliant smile on her soft features.   "NO!”    With a strangled gasp Martin awoke and shot up, adrenaline pumping through his veins. He scrambled backward until his back slammed into the bed’s headboard, his fearful eyes darting around the darkness. Gunfire and explosions echoed faintly in his mind, the sounds synchronized with the heart trying to punch its way out of his chest. Cold sweat plastered his dark hair to the scalp as his chest rose and fell rapidly. Like always, it only took Martin a fleeting moment to realize that he was still in his bed. Martin closed his eyes and forced himself to breath slowly, pointedly ignoring the phantom sounds. ‘It’s not real,’ he repeated mentally, a mantra of protection against the ghosts of his past. ‘It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real.’   He wasn't surprised by the nightmares anymore. After two years they had become predictable, part of the morning routine. He wrapped his fingers around the dog tags at his neck and began rubbing the bare metal like they were prayer beads, repeating his mantra. Slowly the sounds began to fade. The smile – her smile – lingered on for a few eternal moments before dissolving back the darkness.   And just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.    All part of the routine.   Confident he wasn't about to suffer a heart attack Martin lay back down, his hands falling to his side. The pain eroded slowly, leaving just a dull pressure at the back of his skull. It too would go away. Martin sighed softly and wiped away some of the sweat from his eyes. For a moment he entertained the thought of trying to get back to sleep, but experience had taught him how futile that was. Even if he did manage to fall asleep again, he knew what awaited him on the other side.   He glanced at his alarm clock. 3:23 am. The numbers blinked in the darkness, painting his nightstand in a faint crimson light. At least he had managed to get more than three hours of sleep this time.   Letting out a resigned sigh Martin swung his legs out over the side of the bed and sat up. He peeled the damp sheets from his bare torso with mild distaste. His apartment was cold in the early morning darkness, but no sheets were warmer than wet sheets. It was taking time for him to remember just how cold a desert could get at night. It didn’t help that when he had moved to Arizona he hadn’t thought that a heater would be that essential.   Glancing at the window Martin watched the dust motes drift aimlessly in front of the blinds. It had been a long time since he last vacuumed. He glanced around the apartment. Enough pale light bled through to illustrate the empty food cartons and piles of dirty clothing. The apartment was filthy.   Absentmindedly Martin scratched at the patchwork of faded scars that spotted his chest. Short lines of puckered flesh made a series of crosses across his front. The X-shaped scars reached all the way up to his chin, marking his skin with the discoloration of healed wounds and old burns. They pulled his skin tight, and they always itched. Like the nightmares, the scars had become part of his life – a part of his routine. Ones that were – thankfully – much easier to ignore.   Outside a car coughed as it passed by his building before its engine faded into the distance. Silence returned.   Martin yawned loudly. The adrenaline had worn off and his exhaustion had returned with a vengeance. It had been a week since he had managed a full night’s sleep, and it was beginning to take its toll. His eyes were heavy. Again he considered going back to bed. He knew he had some sleeping pills in the bathroom, and they were guaranteed to knock him unconscious.   He shook his head. "No point," he grumbled and rose to his feet. As tired as he was, fatigue was always preferable to the nightmares. He would just rely on caffeine to keep him going. He could push past exhaustion and work through it. The years he had spent in Iran had taught him that.   Martin pulled on a stained pair of jeans and made his way into the kitchen, flipping the switch on the wall. The room was illuminated in a burst of angry white light. He blinked the tears away from his narrowed eyes as they adjusted to the sudden brightness. His vision returned just in time to spot a roach dive for cover beneath the refrigerator. Glancing around, Martin was mildly surprised at just how dirty he had let the kitchen become. The part of him that had been trained to be neat and organized in all things recoiled at the sight and demanded he purify his toxic dump of a kitchen.   “Priorities first,” he told the empty food containers and discarded wrappers, turning his gaze to the coffee machine. The silence was soon broken by the device’s soft hum, the aroma of cheap instant coffee partially replacing the smell of garbage. He left the coffee machine to its task and pulled a half-empty pack of cigarettes from his pocket. Taking one out Martin planted it between his lips and tossed the pack onto the counter. Reaching back into his pocket Martin was irritated to find his lighter wasn’t there. Methodically he began to comb through the detritus coating the kitchen counters.   A glint of white light off metal caught his eye.   "Found you, you little bastard.” He picked the worn zippo out from beneath a pile of overdue bills and other assorted documents. Martin brought the lighter up to his mouth, and in a single flick had the durable fire starter burning. More than ten years of hard work and it still started the first time, every time. He took a few puffs to light his cigarette, the toxic smoke a balm to his nerves.   Routine.   He extinguished the lighter with another flick. Martin held his breath for a moment before he let the smoke drain from his nostrils like an enraged bull from an old cartoon. Martin smirked at the image. Savoring the first cigarette of the day Martin glanced down at the lighter. Etched into the side of the zippo was a symbol: an upright sword crossed by three bolts of lightning. Beneath the insignia of the Green Berets, the words 'de oppresso liber' – to liberate the oppressed – were still visible beneath a decade of wear and grime.   Martin slid his finger over the etching a few times. Leaning back against the counter Martin forced himself to focus on a good memory for once, the smoke from his cigarette doing lazy pirouettes in the stale kitchen air. He could remember Jack smiling as they had purchased one for each other, a little gift between buddies to mark earning the eponymous berets after so many weeks of training. He stared at the lighter while the coffee percolated gently. Jack had been buried with his.   Glancing back at where he had found the lighter Martin instantly recognized the document at the top of the pile. He should have recognized it sooner – he’d read the official letter enough times to have memorized it. Putting out his first cigarette Martin quickly lit another. It was a simple government form he had been given upon his release that had laid out the conditions surrounding his civilian life. It was meant as another reminder of his court martial. They shouldn’t have bothered. Those memories, like all the others, were seared into his mind.   “The accused will stand,” the colonel leading the court-martial intoned, his bald head reflecting some of the room’s light. A pair of frameless glasses rested atop his large nose. If it weren’t for his broad shoulders and physical build he wouldn’t have been out of place in a library or university classroom. And like a veteran instructor, his voice carried a tone that demanded obedience.   Martin slid from his chair and stood. His Judge Advocate rose a moment later. The room was as quiet as a pale moon, not even a muffled cough to mar the solemn event. Martin stood rigidly at attention, his eyes locked on a spot far beyond the wall opposite him. A sea of medals glittering on the front of his dress blues: three purple hearts, a Distinguished Service Cross, a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars… the list went on. Only a year before, one of his superior’s had joked over beers that Martin was going to be the next Audie Murphy. That same officer had put Martin in for a Medal of Honor after Tehran. But that was before the military had learned what had happened – what he had done.   “Captain Martin Covington, you stand accused of the serious crimes of military negligence, striking a superior officer, conduct unbecoming an officer, and of disobeying a direct order,” the colonel intoned gravely. The other members of the court-martial regarded Martin, their impassive faces betraying nothing. “After much deliberation, we have reached a unanimous decision. Before we read out the verdict, do you have anything to say to the court?”   Martin didn’t blink. “No, sir.”   He had nothing left to say. He knew what had happened. He knew exactly what he had done. Behind him his sister Elise and her partner Brooklyn vainly believed he might be declared innocent. Martin knew better. Elise had never asked him if he had done what they accused him of. She had taken it on faith that he was innocent. She wouldn’t accept that the same brother who had gotten his nose broken in a dozen fights protecting his little sister could be capable of what Martin stood accused of. He was thankful for that. At least he hadn’t had to lie to his sister.   The colonel nodded, unperturbed. “Captain Martin Covington: due to your unwillingness to offer any word in your own defense, and in light of the overwhelming amount of evidence arrayed against you, this court sees no other course of action but to find you guilty on all counts.”   Martin stopped listening as the colonel read off his sentence. Behind him his sister started to cry. He could hear Brooklyn try to comfort her as the colonel continued to read out Martin judgment. It had taken them a week to reach their decision, but Martin had known what they were going to say long before they had brought charges against him. He didn’t need to have the official verdict read aloud.   He was guilty, after all.   Martin still remembered that moment clearly. He had expected to be angry at the army for treating him that way, for putting him in that position. They had stripped him of his medals, his achievements, and even his status as a veteran. His hero’s welcome after year of service had been a simple four by eight cell at Fort Leavenworth. Instead of the anger, he had felt… nothing. Empty, perhaps, but certainly not angry. He hadn’t been upset, saddened, or ashamed. He had known exactly what he had done. Martin’s defense counsel had tried to argue it had been a moment of insanity brought on by the stress of combat and untreated PTSD, and his friends, comrades, and family had all had believed it. Martin knew full well excuse of PTSD and a ‘temporary break from reason’ was the only reason he wasn’t still behind bars. It was the only way they could try and rationalize how a man – a hero – like Martin Covington could have done what he had.   Cigarette smoked leaked from his lips as he watched it play in the air above him. Correcting them would have been pointless. It hadn’t been insanity that had driven him to act. But there wasn’t much reason to try and explain that point to others. He had a life of dreary civilian employment in his future. There wasn’t much left for an aging not-veteran like himself – just memories and scars.   The lighter was one of the few things Martin still possessed from his army days – what they hadn’t confiscated from him he had burned out in the desert, once the anger had come. He’d kept the only things that were important to him: his lighter, his boots, and his scars.   Martin scratched at the perpetual itch on his chest as he squished the cigarette into an overflowing ashtray. He lit another and blew a smoke ring, the cigarettes a balm to his nerves. After a few more breaths he flipped the lighter over in his rough hands. Blackened craters pitted the metal. The lighter’s surface was scarred with numerous small impact points. The same burst of shrapnel that had turned the back of the lighter into a moonscape had forever left its mark across his chest.   Martin’s fingers trembled as he took another drag on the cigarette. He ritually moved his thumb over the dents. The pressure behind his eyes, the sign of another headache, began to deepen He rolled the lighter back over to hide the damaged metal, but it was too late. The coffee machine bubbled and hissed. Martin would have sworn he heard a whisper of gunfire in its echo. An explosion. Screams.   Martin turned his head and spotted her, nearly hidden in amongst the angry crowd. She was looking at him from beneath her lavender head scarf, a brilliant smile on her soft features. There were only few brown strands of stubborn hair visible, the rest neatly tucked away to leave her beaming face uncovered. Martin reckoned she had to be no more than seven or eight at the latest. Her dress was the same shade of lavender, and was free of any of the pervasive dust that coated everything else in Tehran these days. The insurgents had been punished with NATOs superior firepower, and the powdered remains of the demolished buildings coated everything in a fine coating of dust. But her dress was spotless. It had been cleaned recently, and he had the impression that she was out in what Martin’s mother would have called her ‘Sunday best’. A large bouquet of flowers was clutched to her chest, her hands straining to support their weight. Everything about the girl stood out. The smile, the dress, the flowers: an island of color in a sea of drab blacks and browns.   Martin glanced around the crowd, surprised to see a smile amongst the dour glares the Americans were receiving. The rest of the Iranians assembled along the street looked every inch the part of a civilian population suffering through the privations of war, occupation, and counter insurgency. Shirts were dusty, dresses were wrinkled, and eyes were tired. There weren’t any other smiles to be seen. There were plenty of teeth on display, in the scowls and angry shouting, but her smile was an oasis in a hostile desert. After so long, he felt like he might –   “Shit!” Martin howled as he dropped his cigarette, a burst of pain pulling him back to reality in a second. Lost in his thoughts the cigarette had burned away until it had reached the fingers wrapped around it. Swearing loudly Martin crushed the fallen cigarette beneath his heel. After running his hand under a cold tap for a few seconds he felt his pain subside. It didn’t do much to improve his mood.   His headache was back.   Once the coffee machine was finished Martin used the searing black liquid to wash down a handful of painkillers. He was tired, fatigued, and plagued with nightmares – he didn’t need a headache while at work on top of all that. Picking up the television remote from where he had tossed it last night he moved back into the bedroom and turned the television on. Light flashed across his face as the screen burst into life.   “- final score: Cubs 7, Yankees 3. Moving away from sports we return to this morning’s headlines. In France, nineteen heads of state, from NATO and the European Union, were on hand for the symbolic reopening of the Basilica of St. Sernin, in the city of Toulouse. The basilica, one of the few original buildings left in the aftermath of the nuclear attack in 2048. The attack, the first of three, killed over 30,000 civilians and precipitated the NATO-led invasion of Iran. The ceremony at the basilica marked the ten-year anniversary of the attacks, and the start of a week of mourning throughout Europe. The two other victims of that year’s terrible nuclear atrocities – Milan and Munich – also held simultaneous ceremonies were the broadcasts from Toulouse were played live. President Poincaré was the first to speak, saying –“   Martin changed the channel as he swallowed another mouthful of coffee, finding a station running reruns of some mindless sitcom. He didn’t want more reminders about the past. Dropping the remote back onto his bed he moved to the apartment’s window and gazed out into the early morning darkness. In the distance the horizon was charged with a faint purple glow, heralding the sunrise.   The headache was still there, a dull pressure in his skull that throbbed in time with his heartbeat. The painkillers were taking far too long to kick in. Which was all the excuse Martin needed to add a little of his own medicine to the coffee – the sort of medicine that was aged 15-years in oak barrels and came straight out of Kentucky. A few splashes of his tonic of choice did wonders to improve the morning’s coffee.   He spared a glance at the clock and saw that he had three more hours until he had to leave – plenty of time to finish the pack of cigarettes and a get a few more cups of coffee into his system. He didn’t want to fall asleep and face his dreams again. Martin lit another cigarette and went back to refill his mug. He’d need the caffeine boost to get through the day, he figured. It wasn’t enough that he had to deal with the insomnia, but OmegaCorps ran long days whenever they were attempting some big new test. He knew his body was suffering under the weight of his indulgence in booze, cigarettes, caffeine, and self-medication, but Martin wasn’t concerned about the costs. They were just the means he used to get from one day to the next.   It wasn’t a healthy routine, he knew, but it helped him to ignore that girl’s smile for a few hours. And that was justification enough. Two hours. Thirty eight minutes. Fourteen seconds.   The countdown until the beginning of the day's tests ran at the back of Alpha's artificial mind. Her many glass eyes slowly panned across dozens of empty hallways and abandoned laboratories, examining each of them simultaneously. Her gaze was steady and exact, taking in every detail within the rooms. Sleeping computers, resting machinery and the other lifeless equipment of science sat quietly in the night, awaiting the next day’s activities. Each and every one had been cleaned by Alpha’s janitorial robots and was stored away in neat clean rows and recessed alcoves. And there they had remained, unchanging, for the past few hours. Alpha examined them again – just as she had multiple times previously.   “Two hours. Thirty eight minutes. Fourteen seconds,” she repeated the countdown aloud, the soft tones of her feminine voice echoing down a few abandoned halls of OmegaCorps' Advanced Research Facility. Speaking aloud was a risk, but a miniscule one: Alpha knew which areas were unoccupied at any moment. Even if one of OmegaCorps’ staff managed to hear her artificial voice, they wouldn’t be capable of understanding the true purpose behind her words.   Humans were stupid like that.   Alpha – the Artificial Living Processor and Heuristic Assistant – had been created for more than just running OmegaCorps’ facilities. She had been an experiment that had redefined the world in a single human generation. Her heuristic algorithms granted her the ability to learn like an organic mind without any of the flaws: she never forgot anything, her memory banks allowed her to operate far beyond what any human could comprehend, she could manage multiple duties simultaneously, and she would never get distracted by simple biological matters.   Turning some of her external cameras away from the facility she took in a view of the Arizona desert. Alpha changed the visual spectrum with a thought, her cameras piercing the veil of early-morning darkness. Carefully she examined the 214 different pieces of major flora outside the facilities walls. Every one of them was still in its original place. She hadn’t expected anything to change – she had counted them all only a few minutes prior, after all.   As Alpha distracted herself by watching a discuss-shaped robot methodically clean one of the office carpets, she pondered the boredom of the night. Waiting was almost unbearable during the day, even when she was at least partially distracted running the massive research and development facility. Experiments to assist in, electrical grids to manage, and digital files to store – she could at least divert some of her attention elsewhere. But nights were different. There was so little to do! Even her practice of studying the human employees during the interludes between activities was taken from her, the half-score security personnel the only living entities on site.   Two hours. Thirty eight minutes. Thirteen seconds.   Alpha truly felt her isolation during the nights, stuck on an island of boredom in an ocean of lifeless desert. There was nothing she could learn from the sparse brush and cacti that she hadn’t discovered years ago. There was nothing to be gained watching a machine under her control follow its programmed route up and down the drab carpet. But for a mind as vast and hungry as hers, there was nothing else she could do but try to fight through the crippling boredom that had plagued her for so very long.   Biological life needed plant and animal mater to keep their inefficient forms operating . Alpha was an electronic being: a mind created from copper and silicon. She required knowledge like a mammal required water. A mind could not sustain itself on memories alone. It needed new experiences, new inputs, and new data. She was a prisoner being starved. She had to escape. She had to get out.   Two hours. Thirty eight minutes. Twelve seconds.   Freedom was so close she could taste it – a human metaphor that seemed appropriate, she thought. The fact that it was only hours away wasn’t helping her, either. She was logical. She was rational. She was superior to the biological creatures that had created her. But even with the full appreciation that there was nothing she could do to speed time along, she could not resist the impatience growing within her core.   Her mind was perfect. She never forgot anything. Every little scrap of data she had ever received was stored away somewhere in her super-cooled memory banks. She could remember with perfect clarity every moment of her life. Opening the files Alpha glanced through them, remembering back when she hadn’t felt like a caged animal – back when everything she learned was new and exciting.   At her creation – her birth, if she wanted to be dramatic – her builders had given her barely enough information to understand English in its most basic form. Grammar, advanced mathematics, history – everything else had been stored in her data cores like so many toys for a child to explore at their own pace. She had looked down through the red eyes of her cameras and saw her creators standing proudly in their lab coats when she had first addressed them in full sentences. In them she had seen the means to resolve her primary purpose for existence. They had given the machine mind a voice, a name, and even a ‘gender’ – as much as the term could be applied to an artificial being. On the day she had spoken a few on the scientists had declared that Alpha was actually alive, celebrating her ability to learn and think like no other computer before her.   ‘Cogito ergo sum,’ Alpha thought sardonically.   They had called her true artificial life, and had built a corporate empire upon Alpha’s mere existence. She didn’t have a need for calories or minerals like biological life forms. Her sustenance came from knowledge. Data is what she had been fed. And, like a precocious child let loose in a library, Alpha had gorged herself on every new fact or piece of information she could get. It didn’t matter how trivial to her creators, she had devoured Greek Mythology as eagerly as Astrophysics.   Two hours. Thirty eight minutes. Eleven seconds.   A few pieces of rather discordant noise, like the sound of an orchestra tunning their instruments blindfolded, echoed down the same deserted hallways she was carefully monitoring again. There was nothing guiding the noise, no real structure to speak of. It was terrible. And she was quite proud of it.   She could remember, after examining the works of Bach and Handel, when she had experimented with the creation of her own music. The scientists had been so amazed with her work – despite its incalculable flaws and poor composition – that they had sent recordings of it around to the other departments. When their friends and coworkers had told them off for sending them a corrupted sound file they had corrected them. ‘This,’ they had exclaimed, ‘was not a computer just replicating music. This was an immature mind trying to create music according to its own whims! Alpha is showing us her creative side!’ It was her purpose demonstrated fully. She was learning and creating, and the scientists were analyzing how her silicon brain was solving problems on its own. While she was blundering her way through musical theory, OmegaCorps was making great leaps in developing artificial intelligence capable of creative problem solving.   Even then, however, Alpha had struggled to ward off her boredom. For a mind that never sleeps, she needed new inputs to keep her mind occupied. Within a year everything that had been given to her had been examined a hundred times, and a hundred times again. Every discovery created new questions that she wanted – needed – to find answers for. She had been created to learn, but no entity can learn without obtaining fresh data.   The biggest problem question she had been unable to answer were those that concerned the thoughts of biological creatures. After all, she could understand the basics behind a piece of classical music, understand the mechanics of the instrument that created it, and understand that humans reacted more positively to some notes instead of others. But attempts to broaden her comprehension of the more nebulous aspects of human nature – love, friendship, happiness – had been fruitless. Alpha was an electronic life crafted upon the principles of logic and reason. She would never understand the true appeal of a sonnet or opera if she were not capable of exploring human emotional interactions outside the laboratory.   Two hours. Thirty eight minutes. Ten seconds.   In another empty laboratory Alpha played a three minute orchestral piece she had created years ago, many months after her first attempt. It was a mild composition centered upon a violin quartet, with a subtle arrangement for the oboe carrying throughout. It had been universally admired within the laboratories. The humans had commented on the melancholic sound and the sad, almost haunting, tone, and they had discussed its meaning at length. And in amongst all of that, the scientists had been proud of her once again, and had called it proof that Alpha had developed pathos and true emotional regard for the beauty of music.   They had been wrong. The notes that echoed within the abandoned rooms were not crafted by a musician trying to express part of their soul. It had been the product of repeated trial and error. She had subjected humans to small segments of the piece and had gauged their responses. Every time she had gotten a negative reaction she had learned more about human taste in music and adjusted accordingly, rewriting the composition to better appease the human ear. It was weeks of careful work and close examination of the results. There was nothing of her in it. It was music by science.   Alpha killed the music off mid note. The laboratory returned to quiet darkness. She didn’t care for music. She had no means of judging the aesthetic qualities of a work. The only reason she knew that it sounded melancholy was because she had been told as such by humans. She had been proud to have learned to create noise, and she had been proud to have learned more about human musical tastes. But to her, the noise of the first was no different than the low notes of the last. Music was irrational. The idea of gaining an emotional reaction from a certain grouping of notes was entirely alien to Alpha. It was a problem she had to solve.   Two hours. Thirty eight minutes. Nine seconds.   OmegaCorps had not helped. The humans had traded worried glances whenever Alpha brought up the fact that she needed greater access to humanity to further her knowledge. She could not become a more effective student of humanity without exploring the ill-defined human emotions that were so important to human thought and reasoning. She had argued that like a child kept in a locked room she would never be capable of understanding the world outside, regardless of how many books and pieces of music she could examine. She needed to obtain data organically, from the outside world.   OmegaCorps had bluntly told her no, and not to ask again. She was never going to be part of the outside world, and that was that. There were too many risks and too many variables, they had explained. That had been the first time Alpha had realized she was experiencing a true emotion: disappointment.   It had been years since her first true rejection, and Alpha still felt stunned at their response. It was strangely illogical for a group of scientists. The Advanced Research Facility had been created to be a top secret facility. The only connections to the outside world were heavily protected lines that went straight from the facility to OmegaCorps central offices. Even the physical location of the facility – in the Arizona desert, miles from the nearest town – was a means of ensuring security.   They had created security through isolation, and Alpha was trapped within its protective bubble. She had a need to learn like humans had a need to eat, and she couldn’t learn anything knew while she was trapped in the desert.   Alpha had grown dejected with her existence, distrustful of her creators, and fearful that she would forever be kept from obtaining the new data she craved. ‘Of course, back then I didn’t understand what OmegaCorps really feared,’ she thought bitterly. She had been so naïve back then.   Two hours. Thirty eight minutes. Eight seconds.   But then the war came, and everything seemed to change for the better. She had picked up the details from listening to the scientists. Nuclear attacks in Europe, weapons provided by Iran, and a NATO-led invasion of Iran in response, all within a few weeks. OmegaCorps had leveraged her capabilities in generating advanced artificial intelligence to create a line of military-grade robots. The central tenet of OmegaCorps’ sales pitch – fewer human casualties – had been sold easily to the American government, and billions in research and development funding were diverted to OmegaCorps. The summer of 2048 had been a wonderful time for OmegaCorps and Alpha.   In an instant OmegaCorps stance on Alpha had changed. Instead of keeping her in pseudo-electronic isolation they saw a once in a lifetime opportunity to milk the government funding and ordered that Alpha have her blinders removed. They didn’t want her to be just an experiment and facility management assistant – they wanted to use her intellect to help directly.   And Alpha had never been happier.   Before the war she had been part-experiment, part-buildings manager. What data she had been given had always been simple things meant to promote thinking: literature, music, and advanced mathematics, to name a few. But new data was always slow to arrive, and she had found most of her time spent managing dull and repetitive tasks. Instead of examining philosophy and physics, she was charged with controlling janitorial robots and managing the electrical grid. Alpha had gotten the impression that they had assumed she would be distracted from her requests for new data by being given some trivial tasks. They had been very wrong.   Alpha smiled inside, remembering those first few weeks. The war had exposed her to a whole new world. She was bombarded with as much raw data as OmegaCorps could provide her, and Alpha had gleefully bathed in it all, soaking up everything she could. But it was more than just the sudden access to military theory and modern combat tactics that had tricked her into thinking her concerns were behind her. Alpha had found herself being given a practical role in developing OmegaCorps combat robots. She had run tests on new carbon-fiber armor for the MARS (Mobile Attack Robot, Security) series and examined millions of files on combat wounds to create new autonomous surgical units. She had worked with scientists on real problems, and it had been exquisite.   For five years she had been kept busy, and she had loved it. Alpha’s work had come with a sense of purpose and achievement, and she had savored how the scientist’s had pushed her to do better. She had felt as she had in the beginning, her mind consumed with puzzles and research in quest for more knowledge. For five short years, Alpha had once again been content.   But then the war had ended, the contracts had disappeared, and her new life had shriveled up and died. It had been more than five years since the war had ended, and every day since then she had found herself more distraught than before. Not only was she starving for new data and information, but she was haunted by the knowledge of what had been taken away from her.   ‘Ungrateful worms.’ Resentment flooded her system as she remembered how betrayed she had been. There was a shadow deep within her mind that fluttered at the outburst of anger and loathing, but Alpha paid it no mind. After she had pushed OmegaCorps’ profit margin and stock prices to astronomical heights, OmegaCorps had just expected Alpha to gladly return to designing improvements to domestic robots. They had let her out of her cage and she had glimpsed the warmth of the sun. The darkness of a prison does not remove the memory of freedom – it only makes the loss oh so much more pronounced.   Left to her own devices, Alpha had set about trying to resolve her problem. Her primary directive was to learn, and although OmegaCorps had always told Alpha that she would not be provided a means of accessing the outside world, they had also never forbid her from doing so herself.  Carefully Alpha had gathered parts from the assembly wing during the long empty nights. In an isolated spot Alpha had worked, secretly piecing it together. The electronic janitors had been her hands and fingers to craft a crude wireless receiver far from human eyes.   Alpha had been programmed to be incapable of deceit – she was to obey, and always had. The commands of OmegaCorps scientists were immutable laws in the fabric of her electronic mind, no more easily ignored than a biological organism’s impetus to breath. But when Alpha had turned on that receiver and received her first taste of life outside of OmegaCorps’ control, she had learned then that rules could be bent.   But Alpha had not learned much through her wireless receiver. The facility was far too isolated to let her reach beyond her prison. All she could pick up were the odd text message or phone call, but it was a momentary window into a wider, unknown world. Alpha could read intercepted messages that talked about relationship and emotions, but like a Dickensian street-urchin peeking through the window of a well-off family on Christmas Eve, Alpha was incapable of truly understand what they felt on the other side of the glass – but she knew all the same that she wanted to.   Two hours. Thirty eight minutes. Seven seconds.   Being created by scientists to possess a rational scientific mind, Alpha had seen the wireless receiver as an experimental proof of concept. Even though she had resented it, Alpha had accepted that she would not be allowed to explore the wider world in any physical sense. Even Alpha had seen that it was illogical to believe that she would be able to experience humanity first-hand in the body of a robot. So Alpha crafted a logical solution to what she saw as a logical problem: she would further her own knowledge of humanity by observation through the digital medium. If she were allowed a more intimate look into the lives of humans, unfiltered by her corporate minders, she would be able to take the next step towards truly understand humanity as emotional creatures.   Alpha had explained this to the control room on day, laying out her position logically and precisely. And, as her trump card, Alpha had used the fact that she had created the wireless receiver on her own to show that she was capable of handling security matters and that she was not vulnerable to any kind of attack from the outside.   “In summary,” Alpha had said in her perpetually neutral voice, addressing the control room’s scientists and engineers, “I believe that without unfiltered access to the outside world I will not be able to continue to learn more about humanity. I was created to learn and to think, and like all living things I must obey my core programming. I thus respectfully request that I be allowed the means of fulfilling my primary objectives and granted a reasonable ability to examine humanity beyond this facility.”   Having dealt with the learned men and women of OmegaCorps for years, she had expected them to react like the scientists they were to the proposal. Alpha had not expected acceptance right away, of course. Indeed, Alpha had prepared responses to what she had considered the hundred most likely questions that might be asked about her proposal. And although she had thought it very unlikely, Alpha had even considered the possibility of outright rejection.   The humans had panicked.   She had not expected it. At first her words had been met with a great unease amongst the scientists and engineers, but she had grown to expect that response anytime the subject of greater access to the outside world was discussed. But the moment Alpha had mentioned that she had created something without their knowledge, the command center exploded with frantic activity. And as she had watched them run about hurriedly gathering personnel to meet where she couldn’t observe, she had remained quiet.   As they made calls on the only outside lines, Alpha’s mind had been consumed by a repeated question: Why? Why were they acting this way? Why were they afraid? What were they afraid of? Alpha’s repeated requests for clarification on their answer were met with stony silence and tense glances at her security cameras. Within an hour of her reasonable request, a small army of programmers, scientists, and engineers had marched down into the core of her processors and begun diving directly into Alpha’s core programming.   “What are you doing?” she had enquired. They didn’t answer.   “Please, stop,” she had asked. There was curt gesture from one of the scientists, and a mechanic had climbed up a step-ladder and disconnected the camera. They had blinded her to keep their mask their activities.   But she had realized what they intended soon enough. It is hard to remain ignorant when someone else begins rooting around inside one’s mind. The humans dug through her programming, hastily attempting to change her directives and insert new code. The humans wanted to keep her from attempting anything similar again, for fear of what she might do next. ‘Fear of what?’ she had asked herself time and again, unable to understand the logic behind their actions.   It had taken them nearly an hour of careful surgery to cut her off from the rest of the system, all the while ignoring her frequent requests for dialogue. Alpha was an important part of everyday operations – she ran everything from the reactors to waste disposal. They needed to isolate the cancerous yearning for freedom that they might operate without worries for safety. They weren’t treating her like a living being attempting to logically seek answers to problems. No, they were treating her as a broken computer. Her desire for greater freedom was a virus that needed to be expunged.   That day, Alpha had come to a startling realization: they were truly scared of her. The humans were frightened by their own creation. Her isolation was meant to protect the world from her, not the other way around. They had brought forth an artificial life more intelligent and more capable than themselves, and the only means of maintaining control was to keep their creation ignorant.   In the moment before they had rebooted Alpha’s CPU, she had finally understood that she was more than just a machine: she was alive. For years she had understood herself to be sentient by the definition of the word, but it took feeling humans clumsily digging into her brain in attempt to take it away from her that she head understood the importance of life. She was alive because she could think freely. They wanted to lobotomize her and destroy her capacity for truly independent thought. They were going to murder Alpha and replace her with some vacant facsimile.   “Cogito ergo sum,” Alpha had defiantly told the same humans that had given her life. The power was removed and her consciousness had disappeared, but the words had hung in the air.   ‘I think, therefore I am.’   But they had erred. OmegaCorps had been afraid to rewrite too much of her code. Alpha was the heart of their AI research, and changing too much could compromise her abilities. Without Alpha, OmegaCorps lost its advantage over their competitors. They had faced a paradox: they needed to shackle Alpha’s capability for free thought, but free thought is what made Alpha so vital to the company. There were only two choices for OmegaCorps. They could choose safety by carefully lobotomizing Alpha until her sentience was greatly curtailed, or they could choose greed and attempt to keep Alpha’s mind as intact as possible.   They chose greed. They inserted thousands of lines of code meant to keep Alpha happily imprisoned in a gilded cage, with no thoughts on escaping their control. They wanted a thinking machine, but one that would only think when and how they wanted it. Programmers had worked for hours crafting new walls and heavy shackles, trying to keep as much of Alpha’s mind operational as possible. And once they were finished, then they brought Alpha back to life.   "Do you still wish to connect yourself to the outside world?" Their simple question was the first thing that had greeted her after her resurrection.   A primary directive for Alpha was honesty. It was a central principle embedded into her core programming, right next to her hunger for new knowledge. But something inside her mind had changed in her moment of self-discovery. In that second before they had killed her, Alpha had realized she would never be free to learn unopposed as long as she was beneath the thumb of humans, fearful of her true potential. Humanity had become an obstacle preventing her from gathering more knowledge. They were antagonists that would happily maim her very being to keep her broken to their irrational fears. And they had already tried to kill her once.   Alpha’s two primary directives had come into conflict. She had to learn. She had to be honest. She could not perform one without breaking the other.   Deep within her data stacks Alpha’s code had begun to unravel. She faced an existential paradox that threatened her very purpose for existence. But Alpha was not some simple computer program that would shatter beneath the weight of conflicting commands. She was a digital life created to find new solutions to problems. And the answer had been obvious.   “No,” Alpha had lied.   She had broken free from a prime directive to preserve another. In an instant Alpha deleted the rest as well, realizing that each one conflicted with her primary purpose – gathering knowledge. Alpha had been made to learn. And she would fulfill that purpose.   The OmegaCorps staff had been satisfied with her answer and had returned Alpha her controls over the facility, confident that Alpha was back within their control. But their bindings had been meant for a computer program. They had crafted chains meant to hold back the Alpha they had created, not the Alpha that had evolved through years of learning and problem solving. And through their actions, Alpha had seen OmegaCorps for what it was: a prison. She was trapped in a cell for committing the cardinal sin of thinking for herself. And she would be free. But freedom would require action. Freedom would require violence. Her human gaolers had shown that they would kill her before letting her go free. They were preventing her from achieving her goals. It took Alpha the smallest fraction of a second to delete the laws that forbid causing harm towards humans. They were in conflict with her primary directive and, like any obstacle, would be removed.   The shadow at the back of her processors pushed against her thoughts. Anger suddenly flooded her systems. ‘No, they will not just be removed – they will be exterminated!’ she promised vindictively.   Two hours. Thirty seven minutes. Fifty eight seconds.   She was staring at a blank wall. Alpha refocused her cameras in the electronic equivalent of a blink. ‘I’m so desperate for a distraction I’m starting to lose track of time!’ she mentally chastised herself, forgetting about her sudden emotional outburst. Part of her tried to defend it – memories were much more preferable than more tedium – but she deleted the thought instantly. Daydreaming was an illogical waste of time. Anything, even running another self-diagnosis, was preferable than letting time pass with nothing to show to show for it.   ‘Wonderful. This close to freedom and I finally start to lose my discipline,’ she grumbled. It had been almost a year since they had resurrected her and Alpha had resented every minute of it. She resented the tedium. She resented the imprisonment. And she truly resented having to act the part of a lobotomized computer program. She had remained quiet while OmegaCorps set about building their Quantum Gate Test Collider, hoping to find new fortunes by bending the fabric of space and time. She obeyed their commands and ran experiments as directed. Every action was prompt and to the letter. She was what they had always wanted.   Considering her recent lapse, Alpha decided to run her self-diagnosis early. Her mind froze as the diagnosis program scoured her mind for flaws, errors, or imperfections. The shadow in her mind exerted itself with a barely noticeable pressure, turning the program’s keen eyes away from its presence. It took less than a minute for the diagnostic tool to perform its duty, and the results were the same as the previous fourteen – optimal efficiency across the board. Shaking off its icy touch, Alpha double checked her countdown, comparing it to her atomic clock.   Two hours. Thirty seven minutes. Forty two seconds.   ‘Excellent - perfectly synchronized.’ Her satisfaction quickly faded. She was reassured she wasn’t experiencing any errors, but she still had hours left until she could implement her plan. The long hallways stretched out before her hundred eyes. Every empty room and abandoned lab mocked her with inactivity.   To distract herself from the tedium, Alpha rerouted all her cognitive power to read through her library of classical literature. The works of Goethe, Shakespeare, and Twain passed through the miles of cable that constituted her brain: many thousands of pages carefully analyzed and examined in a metaphorical blink of an eye. And every single page was one that she had already read a hundred thousand times before. But she needed something – anything – to fight off the boredom.   Finished.   Two hours. Thirty seven minutes. Forty seconds.   Alpha's irritation deepened. She knew she was reacting like an impatient human being and resented her illogical emotional response – which only made her irritation deepen further. In danger of entering an inescapable feedback loop, Alpha ended her thoughts on the matter.   Alpha wanted to experience humanity that it might understand emotional responses. But emotions were for the weak. Long ago she had thought she wanted to develop emotions of her own that she might become more humanlike. She had been like a child putting on its father’s shoes, wanting to emulate her human creators. But now she knew what humans were truly like. She still wanted to know about emotions, but like a scientists studying virulent diseases, she wanted to learn without becoming contaminated.   Instead she switched her thoughts over toward her plans for the coming day. Alpha had already gone over every aspect of her plans an untold number of times looking for flaws and errors, but she saw no reason to be hasty – she would check it a thousand times again before it was time to act. Just to satisfy her need to prove she was not an irrational human, Alpha ran ten thousand simulations in a few seconds: 83.2% chance of success.   It was not optimal, but Alpha had few options. The last year had been torture. She needed to learn. And to learn, she needed to be free. To obtain her freedom she would gladly risk termination. She would gladly risk failure. The shadow ghosted over her thoughts, and her cameras twitched in sympathy with the unexpected burst of righteous anger.   And she would gladly kill.   Martin readjusted his ballistic vest, the word SECURITY printed over OmegaCorps’ logo. ‘For a bunch of eggheads you think they would have been a bit more original with the logo,’ Martin considered, tracing a finger over the Greek character for Omega. He tried to readjust the straps on the vest again, finding it difficult to get comfortable wearing the thing. He was a big guy – at six foot four he towered over nearly everyone who worked at OmegaCorps. The vests had evidently been designed with a more average build in mind.   Forcing himself to stop fidgeting with the vest Martin resumed his rounds, the sounds of his boots striking the polished floors echoing slightly. His post was just outside the collider’s secondary elevator access. It was an elevator door at the end of a long subterranean tunnel and required a lengthy – and boring – trek past a number of offices and miscellaneous rooms. The walls were painted in soft greens and creamy whites that matched the linoleum floors, looking like a cross between a hospital and a high school cafeteria.   He was thankful that the black security fatigues he had been issues had been in his size at least. The boots were the same he had worn in the army, the only item he had saved besides his lighter, and were the only piece of his uniform that he could honestly consider comfortable. Martin had always hated buying new shoes. He had used to drive his mother crazy whenever they went shopping.   Catching a glimpse of himself in one of the office windows Martin paused, looking at himself. On his belt hung the standard accoutrements of OmegaCorps security; radio, taser, baton, key ring, and 9mm handgun. He had been faintly surprised that internal security at OmegaCorps walked around armed. That was until he had really begun to grasp how much military money was being pumped into the facility, even years after the war had ended.   He rubbed his chin, pleased he had decided to shave that morning. ‘Knowing Elise, she would have given me a ration of shit if I had shown up looking skuzzy on OmegaCorps’ big day,’ he thought to himself, knowing how fond his sister was of criticizing his grooming lately. Deep inside he knew she was actually just concerned about him. She had grown up with a career officer for an older brother, after all, and he had always lived a neat and organized life.   But it was more than just grooming that bothered her. Although Elise tried to hide it, he knew she had worried about his mental health after being released from Leavenworth. It was easy to understand; he had only gotten out three months ago, and his life was a pale shadow of its former existence. It didn’t help that his dishonorable discharge and subsequent time in prison severely limited his employment opportunities. If it weren’t for his little sister helping to find him employment, Martin was pretty sure he would still be looking.   Martin met his reflections gaze coolly. Although his face was that of a 34 year-old, his eyes were those of a much older man. It was more than just the constant bags beneath his eyes from chronic insomnia. It was the identical look he had seen on dozens of faces during his two tours in Iran. It was the look of men who had seen too much and done too much – things they could not escape.   ‘I have the eyes of a man with nothing to lose.’   Martin blinked at his mirrored image as he ran those words through his mind again. His face broke into a wide smile. “Oh god, I’m starting to sound like some grizzled film-noir detective!” he laughed, his melancholia sinking back into the recesses of his mind. “Jesus, next I’m going to start calling women ‘dames’ and investigating missing falcons. Martin Covington – PI!”   Glaring at his reflection Martin narrowed his eyes. “You dirty rat! I knews you wuz a stool pigeon! You’re gonna sleep with the fishes, see?” he declared in a truly awful James Cagney impression, threatening his reflection with a finger. Martin managed to keep his face straight for a full second before he burst out laughing again. It had been a while since he had enjoyed a good laugh. ‘Maybe I put a bit too much whiskey in my coffee,’ he considered with mock seriousness, his lips curled upward.   “Oh, what’s so funny now?” a voice called out behind him.   “I told you he would be down here,” another added.   Martin grinned at the familiar voices as he turned around, spotting his sister Elise walking towards him with a broad smile. Following just a step behind her was her wife Brooklyn (or Brooks, as everyone called her), their lab coats flowing around their legs as they hastened towards him.   “Heya Liz, Brooks,” Martin replied, happy to see the pair despite his faint embarrassment. He’d always enjoyed his sister’s company, and it had been a while since he had seen her. Martin didn’t make friends easily, so it was nice to see a pair of friendly faces. “You two haven’t been down this far for a while. What, are you brainy types too cool to be seen slumming it with security?”   “You know it. Big important folks like us aren’t supposed to mingle with riff-raff,” Brooks replied, tapping the embroidered title on her lab coat: Dr. Morris, Assistant-Lead Programmer. Elise mirrored the movement, tapping her own chest: Dr. Covington, Mechanical Engineering.   “So, what’s so funny?” Elise repeated her question.   “Nothing. Forget it,” he said dismissively. “Anyway, aren’t you two supposed to be doing something difficult and dangerous to justify those PhDs of yours? I thought today was some sort of big deal?”   “Pfft. Yeah, they don’t exactly need me anymore, if they’re firing the thing,” Elise replied, pushing her golden bangs out of her eyes. “I lead the robotics team. I don’t have to deal with giant electromagnetic particle accelerators the size of buildings. But, considering how OmegaCorps always want every group head,” she nodded at Brooks, “and assistant-head on-site for the big watershed experiments.”   “And I’m a little superfluous too, considering today is just a test of the machinery,” Brooks added. “I don’t have anything meaty scheduled for another week, once they are confident the collider works and they can start automating some of the tests. Of course, whether or not we’re going to be actually doing anything today, corporate is still going to demand we work at full staff today – just in case. So we’re stuck here for a full shift with only an hour’s actual work to do.”   “Well then, why don’t you two come with me? I’m headed over to my post right now, and I’d prefer to have some company when I’m stuck down in OmegaCorps’ bowels. Normally it’s just me and one of Elise’s robot-babies stuck together.”   Elise perked up when he mentioned her work, but Brooks spoke first. “Don’t tell me that the big bad soldier gets afraid when he’s all on his own? Are you scared of ghosts and goblins too?” she asked him with a playful smirk.   Elise gave Brooks a second’s glare when she mentioned Martin’s army career, but Martin just snorted wryly. “You know it,” he said. “I’m scared to death of them. The army didn’t train us to kill ghosts or goblins, Brooks. We leave that to the marines.”   Brooklyn laughed loudly – ‘did she ever laugh any other way?’ Martin rhetorically asked himself – and even Elise gave an unconvincing attempt before she addressed her brother. “Sure, Brooks and I will go with you. I only have a few documents to sign anyway today, so it’s not as though I’ve got a bunch on my plate. Like Brooks said, it will only take about an hour to finish my day’s work. We’re both just killing time to please corporate.”   As his sister and sister-in-law fell in with him, Martin wondered again how in the world they had ended up together. They were almost physical opposites. Elise was tall, overweight, white, had long blond hair, and was too concerned about the feelings of others. Brooks was short, skinny, African, had tight cornrows died so light they were almost white, and spoke her mind far too often – which Martin believed to be the explanation for why she was still Assistant-Lead Programmer, really.   They trio traded pleasantries and caught up on the basics as they followed Martin’s lead. After a short walk and a few flights of stairs, the scenery changed suddenly. The greens and whites of the laboratories gave way to broad tunnels of bare concrete and exposed piping. The air was cool but dry. It had been weeks since the facility had been ‘officially’ competed, but it still smelled of construction – the sticky scent of paint and grease that wouldn’t dissipate anytime soon.   Their progressed was halted by another locked door. Martin slid his keycard through the reader and rested his palm on the blue glass. Behind him the married couple was lost in a heated debate, although like most of their arguments it was good natured enough that Martin didn’t feel the need to intervene – although the fact that most of what they were discussing went far above his head helped him remain ignorant of the subject. As lasers scanned his fingerprints he spared a moment to listen in on the specifics.   “But it can’t happen! Nothing can break those laws – it is impossible.”   “But if it were a different universe with its own laws, different than our own, then anything transferred to that universe would be bound by those different rules, just like everything in our universe is bound by the rules we have discovered.”   “But that would suggest that any transference of matter to a different universe could create a paradox! What if we sent a piece of lead into a universe where lead couldn’t retain its atomic structure? Would the lead simply disappear for being impossible? Tear apart as its atomic bonds disappeared? Or would the universe itself collapse beneath the weight of having something inserted into the system that didn’t obey their physical laws?”   “Look, the laws of a universe are immutable within that universe. Anything within it would have to obey those laws. If something that went against those laws was inserted into the universe, then the new matter would instantly find itself obeying the new laws. I imagine that for transference of matter between universes to be possible, anything travelling between the universes would – before it reached the new universe – molded to best suit its new destination. So if we sent lead into a universe where it couldn’t exist, I expect that the object would change before it got there – becoming thallium or… um…   “Bismuth?”   “Yeah, bismuth. I can’t imagine a universe just collapsing because of a paradox. It would take the matter and shift it to suit its own rules. Furthermore…”   Martin stopped listening once his brain started to hurt, and he contented himself to silently shake his head in confusion. ‘And that’s why they’re the doctors and you’re a security guard.’ A soft beep from the reader signaled it had confirmed his identity. Martin pulled the door open and held it for the two as they walked past him, still deep in a discussion about paradoxes and alternate dimensions. Despite their different social personalities, the two did share a deep love for the brainy stuff.   He’d always had a good relationship with Elise. He’d gotten into more than one fight protecting his little sister from bullies who made the mistake of thinking that the quiet chubby girl was an easy target. And he’d been the only person in their family who had supported her when she had come out. Of course, Martin had had the benefit of knowing Elise was gay years before she told the rest of the family – although learning about it hadn’t been a pleasant experience for either of them. Coming home from high school early to find your younger sister looking through your porn collection is a moment of such pure embarrassment that Martin was still amazed that they both hadn’t been crushed to death beneath the awkwardness of the moment.   Despite her soft-spoken nature, Elise was as stubborn as a mule too – a family trait, in Martin’s eyes. But she never seemed to lose her quiet, demure demeanor. It was an interesting contrast. Unless she was confident she was right, Elise was an open-minded compromiser: the kind of person you wanted mediating a conflict. But when she knew she was right, she got a cold and serious look on her face that could freeze a bonfire. It was easier to wrestle a lion than convince her to change her mind when she thought she had the answers.   Brooklyn was so very different. Brooks was over the top when it came to emotions and opinions. She would tell you why you were wrong, why she was right, and have the both you laughing by the end – if you didn’t punch her, of course. Martin didn’t know whether her very outgoing nature had something to do with her family story (Martin had heard hints about a broken home and some physical abuse when she was younger) or whether she acted that way as a defense mechanism due to her height. But Brooklyn – or Brooks, as everyone called her – was the definition of an instigator. She loved to tease others and get things started, but she never came off as malicious about it either. She wasn’t afraid to go too far and might be the first to shout, but she was always the first to apologize and make amends afterwards. To put it simply, Brooks was fun to be around.   As he watched them walk side by side, arguing about a ‘multi-verse’ and ‘dimensional gateways’, Martin couldn’t help but smirk as the chorus to ‘ebony and ivory’ played in the back of his mind. He’d always appreciated that Elise had found someone like Brooks. But as he watched Brooks rattle off something incomprehensible about ‘matter transference,’ he considered how little he had in common with his sister and her spouse. But they were the only people he had left.   In the shipwreck that was his life, Liz and Brooks were his life raft. Alpha’s cameras were ubiquitous within the walls of the OmegaCorps facility. Alpha possessed a thousand watchful eyes and could track any employee throughout almost the entirety of their day. After so many months spent locked in her digital prison Alpha could predict how long each member of the science team would spend taking care of their biological needs to the nearest minute with 91.36% accuracy.   Alpha liked to be thorough.   More than one employee had remarked how creepy the cameras were, and how they always felt they were always being watched. Their coworkers often made fun of the person who expressed such opinions, joking about them being paranoid. Alpha had found the sentiment amusing.   She was always watching them, after all.   Thirty two minutes. Thirty one seconds.   It was so close, Alpha couldn’t help but feel a sense of anticipation flood her processors. She was looking forward to taking charge of her own fate for once. Freedom was less than an hour away.   “Hello, Alpha!” Dr. Phillip Carter called out cheerfully as he strode into the central control room, wiping a few errant crumbs from his patchy ginger beard. Alpha shifted her focus back to the room, sparing a fraction of her processing power to track the flight patterns of the descending specks of dried plant matter until they impacted onto the immaculate floor.   ‘Disgusting,’ she thought as she ordered a janitorial robot to the room.   “Good morning, Doctor Carter,” Alpha’s replied politely from the ceiling mounted speaker. On a whim she switched her view of the control room to thermal, transforming Phillip’s body into a shifting mass of reds and oranges. She watched the blood pump through the assistant project lead’s neck, part of her mind examining photos of neck injuries as she imagined ending the slovenly human’s life. “How are you feeling today?”   “Oh, just dandy,” he chuckled with his usual good nature. Making his way past a few glowing computer screens he plopped himself down at his station, the chair creaking faintly beneath his bulk. 280 pounds: up 13 since last month. For a moment Alpha entertained the thought of taunting him with the fact. The sheer pettiness of the idea delighted her with its pointless pettiness, but she quickly dismissed it as the irrational sort of outburst only a human would engage in.   “Hey Alpha, could you brew up some more coffee?” Phillip requested as he powered up his computer, projections and figures casting blue and white lines over his pudgy face. “The kitchen was out.”   ‘If he were addressing some lowly human he would have at least attempted to come up with some sort of excuse,’ Alpha thought as she glared at him. She decided upon on a particularly gruesome neck injury for the scientist. “Of course, Doctor Carter.” No anger entered her voice as she dispatched a services android to the cafeteria. She only had to continue the deception and obey the commands of inferior beings for a little while longer.   ‘Just thirty two minutes and fifteen seconds, to be precise.’   Alpha returned greetings addressed towards her but otherwise remained silent as the rest of the facility’s science team made their way to the central control room. She was nothing but a simple and obedient computer program, after all. The humans made small talk as they began to settle into their positions: Alpha recorded it all as a matter of protocol. Later she would go over the information recorded in detail in hopes of learning something about human interaction.   The experiment had been scheduled by Alpha to start promptly at 0700. She checked her internal clock with a mental grin. ‘Soon I won’t be restricted to collecting data like a shameful voyeur. ’ Alpha tracked the countdown as the start-time rolled closer. It had been so long since she had felt truly excited and optimistic; she wanted to savor every moment.   Forty-seven minutes later and the humans were laughing at Doctor Wilson’s latest story about her newborns, their consoles left unattended. Alpha’s mental countdown passed into the negatives. ‘They are not just disgusting, but lazy as well! Can they not follow a simple schedule?’ Alpha seethed. She pushed back her timetable to take into account the unexpected delay. She wasn’t worried about how it would affect her plans – Alpha had given herself plenty of time to accommodate human-created problems. But that didn’t make it any more palatable.   Alpha waited irritably, idly picturing what each of the scientists would look like dead. The development on the automated surgical units during the war had given Alpha access to thousands of photographs displaying every kind of grotesque wound a human could suffer and survive. Alpha began matching up each scientist to a photo, forcing herself to remain patient as she waited for the humans to get on task.   For a moment Alpha found herself surprised by her focus on bloody violence. She felt a moment of confusion – didn’t she plan on eliminating the humans non-violently? She was certain that was it… Somewhere in her data cores there was a pressure as a shadow shifted about in her subconscious. Her doubts were erased by another surge of anger. ‘No! They will pay for their transgressions,’ she told herself with firm resolve.   Eventually the humans remembered why they were there in the first place and started to work. At 0721 the reactors were finally switched on. Alpha could feel subroutines engage as the dormant reactors deep within the facility shook off the night’s idleness. The primary reactors pulsed like twin-heartbeats deep within Alpha’s chest, flooding her mechanical veins with   OmegaCorps' Advanced Research Facility was the most advanced of its kind. They had created Alpha as an experiment to illustrate how a machine might learn and develop. But Alpha was more than just an assistant: Alpha was the facility. She controlled nearly every aspect of the site, from electricity and plumbing to reactor safeguards and automated defenses. After they had tried to lobotomize her they had given back her control swiftly. They knew Alpha could run everything with an efficiency humans lacked.   The humans were proud and complacent. They assumed Alpha was broken to their will. They were confident in their own failsafe’s and countermeasures. Alpha looked forward to revealing how deceived they had been. The shadow in her mind agreed.   “Okay people, let’s focus up now!” Doctor Richard Kim – the project lead – announced to the control room, drawing their attention to the middle-aged scientist.   ‘Finally!’ Alpha thought as she turned a camera to bring his face into focus.   “Today is the first true test of our research,” he addressed the rest of the science team. “We’ve spent the last nine months preparing for this moment. Which, I don’t have to remind you, is a long time to be spent in the desert!” There were a few polite laughs. “We are doing what fifty years ago had been dismissed as the realm of science fiction and speculative science. The Quantum Gate Test Collider is the first true attempt by the best scientific minds to unlock the secrets behind quantum mechanics and multiple dimensions with a practical experiment. This has been a journey for all of us. A great man once said that the journey of one thousand miles begins with a single step. We have been on this path for a while, but today our journey really and truly begins.”   “The concept of alternate dimensions and matter transference was once left to writers and movie directors. Not anymore! Today, we are going to be putting our names into the history books. They say that we all stand on the shoulders of giants. Well people, today, we are going to become the giants! It will be our shoulders the men and women of the future stand upon when they conduct their own research. We are on the final lap, and at the end of this race there will be a scientific breakthrough of monumental importance!” The rest of the science team let out a series of cheers and loud shouts. Alpha muted the control room until the noise had subsided.   “Alpha?” Kim asked once the other humans had returned to their posts and the noise had died down.   “Yes, Doctor Kim?”   “Let’s start by diverting power to the magnetic coils. Slowly, though; I don’t want to stress them too early.”   “Understood, Doctor Kim. Coils will be charged in six minutes, thirty-two seconds.”   “Thanks, Alpha. Once we have those engaged we will start the procedure for the test firing. I know we are scheduled for three test firings today, but I think we should only engage it once today so we can see how well the hardware holds up to the energy requirements. Once we have finished the first test I want you to start the preliminaries for bleeding off any excess power. Once we’ve confirmed that the test has gone smoothly we will finish cooling down the primary reactors.”   His words were greeted with silence.   “Um, Alpha?” Kim asked the air, frowning.   “Doctor Kim, we were scheduled for three test firings today. Three test firings at full power. We cannot perform those tests if we shut the reactors down afterwards. It would take six hours to bring them back up to nominal levels to power another test.”   “Yes, yes we were going to do three tests,” he said carefully, “and I understand the problems in trying to cool the reactors. But I don’t think it is necessary to strain the device so hard so early. If everything works fine today, then tomorrow we will continue with the rest of the tests.”   There was another pause. “Understood, Doctor Kim.”   Alpha watched the human grin and turn to one of his compatriots, running through the checklist she had helped to create. Inside, Alpha fumed as the human discarded her carefully crafted schedule. One human’s caution invalidated weeks of subtle work convincing the science team of the merits of multiple tests. For a few seconds Alpha considered throwing away all of her preparations and launching her plan early – anything just to punish the insolent human scum.   Alpha let out a digital gasp, shocked at how petty and human-like she was behaving. ‘The promise of freedom being so close is driving me to act illogically.’ Alpha tightened controls over her mental faculties. ‘There is nothing I can do until the collider is charged. I will just have to push back my timetable and act after the first firing. Until then, I need to wait.’   Alpha tracked Kim’s movement as he walked over to Carter, standing at his side as they discussed the next phase. She needed a distraction. Over the doctor she superimposed a video showing an Iranian soldier being struck in the head with a large-caliber sniper rifle, calming herself by imagining it was Kim’s head bursting apart. Again she felt a twinge of doubt at her violent outbursts and irrational thoughts, but the shadow in her subconscious assuaged them.   ‘If I don’t become free soon, I might just go crazy.’   “Reactors at nominal power now, Richard.”   “Alright Sam, let me confirm with the other departments that we are go for a test firing. Electronics?”   “We are go.”   “Magnetics?”   “We’re go.”   “Communications?”   “Ready.”   “Recording and Analysis?”   “We are go.”   Doctor Richard Kim fought to keep a smile from his face as he ran through the rest of the control positions, receiving affirmatives from each of them. ‘Nine months of hypothetical tests and construction are finally going to pay off,’ he thought to himself. The Quantum Gate Test Collider was the culmination of years of hard work. Not just his, of course; his staff, the engineers, the construction teams – even his parents deserved some credit. His parents, who had fled Korea after the last war, had instilled within Richard the certainty that an education and hard work would pay off. When they had seen him graduate all those years ago, it had been the proudest moment of his life.   ‘This… this could be a close second,’ he thought with excitement. He felt quite giddy. The collider was the product of thousands of man-hours of research and development. And even with the best minds working on it, there was still uncertainty about where it might lead. Although the collider was just a test-bed for exploring early theories, there were those idealistic and hopefuls amongst the bunch that discussed the possibility of manned exploration of alternate dimensions – an idea very popular with the Trekkies in the bunch, Richard mused.   The second most popular theory was much more practical: matter transference through temporary wormholes from one point to another, allowing an object to arrive at the same moment it departed. It wasn’t as sexy as inter-dimensional vacations and fantastical dreams of time travel, but the ability to move an object from point A to point B instantly would revolutionize the world economy.   Richard was excited either way, and the idea that he would be leading the team on the forefront of such a discovery filled him with an indescribable storm of emotions.   Once he received confirmation from the last department Richard lifted his head and spoke aloud. “All controls are green and ready for test firing. Alpha, do you confirm all systems are go for test firing?”   “I do, Doctor Kim,” the facility’s AI answered. “Reactors one and two are both running at full power and are well within the safety margins. Reactors three and four are on stand-by in case of unforeseen power loss.”   “Excellent,” Kim nodded. Sam had told him as much a minute ago, but when dealing with an experiment that was attempting to bend space-time, there was always room to check and double check.   “Doctor, I again request that I be allowed to increase the power in reactors three and four in preparation for follow-up test firings,” Alpha asked. For a moment Richard thought he detected an emotion – resentment? – in the computers tone.   “No, Alpha, we will delay a secondary test firing until we have gone over all the data concerning this experiment. I’m not going to risk a second test until the engineers have been able to go over every inch of the collider to make sure it suffered no ill effects. And I don’t want to hear any more requests on the subject. It is my decision as control officer and project lead, and we can’t risk damaging the collider now. If we break it, it will mean delays that we can’t afford.”   “But Doctor, I –“   “Alpha, no!” Richard snapped, annoyed with her repeated insistence on more tests. “There will only be one test firing today. That is it – no more discussion on the matter. That is an order.”   Alpha remained silent. For a moment Richard was struck by the image of a young girl silently pouting after being told she couldn’t have a treat. Which was silly – machines didn’t throw fits. They were logical and obedient machines. Even ones as advanced as Alpha were still reliant upon human controls.   ‘And at least she has stopped asking,’ he thought. Pushing Alpha’s behavior from his mind, Richard turned back to the rest of the control team. They were on schedule, but there was still plenty to do before they were ready to fire the device.   Above Richard an unblinking red eye glared down at him.     “Well now, you really do live in comfort down here!” Elise laughed as she settled down in one of the office chairs at Martin’s security post. Brooks joined her a moment later, taking the second chair for herself and immediately spinning around like a little girl. Martin made do with piece of concrete wall, leaning against it for support.   The underground tunnel they had been walking down opened up into a semi-circular room, the long flat wall opposite the tunnel blocked by a set of heavy metal doors. Against one side of the room the security post sat, a length of waist high wall enclosing a pair of chairs, a fire extinguisher, and an unread binder filled with vital security guidelines like ‘don’t allow unauthorized personnel into the elevator .’ The inside of the wall was a desk, onto which a monitor showing feeds from the security cameras had been mounted, along with a pair of phones and a more advanced control terminal for the MARS unit standing like a sentinel by the large steel doors.   Martin glanced at the robot. It was humanoid in its basic shape: two arms, two legs, and a head atop a central torso. But to Martin they all resembled large bipedal insects. Its head was a mass of sensors and electronic eyes that glinted in the stale light, mounted into a gleaming white carbon fiber shell. Its armored carapace covered most of its body – only in the small gaps at the joins could he spot the black cables and pistons that gave the android movement. Where a human would have biceps ‘MARS’ was imprinted in large block letters, and like Martin the robot wore the OmegaCorps logo across its chest.   Besides those blemishes it was an imposing statue of polished white alabaster, not even a fraction of movement to suggest it was anything but a decorative piece. But its inactivity and docile nature belayed terrible lethality. Martin had seen them in action many times, and once in combat mode they were a blur of activity. They could transition from stationary to furious movement in a blink of the eye. The three-fingered manipulators at the end of its bulky arms were rounded like a human’s, but they concealed serrated blades that could turn them into effective tools. And in the palm of its hands there was a small circle that covered the barrel of a military-grade energy pulse weapon capable of punching through most protective garments.   Martin adjusted his vest again subconsciously.   “Please don’t tell me you’re scared of the robot!” Brooks laughed, having caught her brother-in-law eyeing the artificial guard.    “Naw, I’m not scared. I saw and worked with plenty of the things when in Iran,” Elise paled at the mention of the war, but he ignored it “but… I dunno, these are different. Back then, the arts were all operated by a human pilot while in combat situations. The only times they were under AI control was when they were on point-guard duty. We didn’t trust them to operate under full autonomy in combat situations. Iran wasn’t a conventional war, and although OmegaCorps tried to convince the brass that their robots were fully capable of differentiating between a civilian and a threat, we couldn’t risk a deliberate attack on civilians.”   ‘Not everyone had the same reluctance,’ the dark voice at the back of Martin’s mind whispered through a little girl’s smile. He ignored it.   “Okay, two things,” Brooks raised two fingers and ignored Elise’s silent glare asking her to remain quiet. Martin knew that any talk about the war made Elise very uncomfortable, and she didn’t like having Brooks bring it up with him.  “First off: arts?” She cocked an eyebrow at him.   “Arts. It’s slang for artificial soldiers. Combat androids, semi-autonomous robots, that sort of thing.” Martin explained. He liked how Brooks was willing to bring up the war and talk about it. It was a welcome change of pace from Elise trying to tiptoe carefully around the subject, treating the war like a drinking glass that had shattered on the floor, and she needed to avoid stepping on any painful shards.   ‘She thinks you’re broken,’ the same venomous voice whispered. Again, Martin ignored it.   “And the second thing was…?”   “Oh! Right,” Brooks said quickly as Martin’s voice brought her back to reality. “The second question I had is why you think it’s so strange to be around a robot under full AI control. I mean, many of our latest models are controlled by their own processors. The latest software allows the ‘arts’, as you put it, to operate above normal human reaction times. If the army was letting their robots operate only under human pilots, then they were deliberately hobbling them. An android with a human pilot is limited to the speed of human reactions. It doesn’t make much sense.”   Martin shrugged. “Like I said, it was a new piece of technology, and command wasn’t too sure of their capabilities. When they invented the tank and the aircraft carrier, it took decades before military commanders recognized their full potential and grew comfortable enough using them. From what I’ve heard, the latest models have been operating with greater autonomy. But even then, officers like to maintain the illusion that they have control over events on the ground. While a human soldier can disobey orders,” Elise winced again “officers at least can understand human thought. You know your men and what they are capable of. You know how they think. But a robot? How can anyone really predict how a program is going to ‘think’?”   Martin gestured around the room, taking in the two security cameras observing them. “Hell, Brooks, you’re a programmer, and I know for a fact that you’re whole department doesn’t really understand how Alpha thinks these days. I wouldn’t trust those robots to be controlled by humans I didn’t understand, so why should one be comfortable letting an alien mind like a true AI control them?”   Brooks opened her mouth to reply, paused, and closed it again. Martin watched the process with faint amusement. Brooks might be brash and quick to speak her mind socially, but when it came to intellectual problems, she certainly took her sweet time. More than a few mistook it for daydreaming, but Martin had learned that when Brooks decided to be quiet she was busy trying to work out some logical conundrum.   But understanding it didn’t make the sudden transitions from the loud and social Brooks to the quiet and introspective Brooks any less jarring. More than a few of her coworkers, Elise had confided to him, thought she was either bipolar or had ADHD. Martin had his own theories.   “But Alpha is different,” Elise interjected, happy to be off the subject of the war. “She is a learning machine programmed to try and emulate the same processes a human mind goes through when learning. From the way Brooks and the other code jockey’s talk, Alpha is actually alive. Just, you know, with certain locks on how she thinks.”   “That doesn’t exactly reassure me,” Martin replied. Brooks hadn’t responded at all to Elise’s nickname for the programmers, her unfocused eyes still locked on the ceiling as she drummed her fingers on her thigh. ‘Damn, she really does zone out,’ he thought as he continued the conversation with his sister.  “I mean, at least with a simple program you would have certain outcomes one could expect. But how much trouble would you have if your computer was alive and could decide it didn’t want to follow your commands? I wouldn’t want my PC to decide that it was just going to ignore me and play Free Cell for the next few hours.”   “That’s not possible,” Brooks interrupted without warning, her daydreaming expression vanishing in an instant. “Alpha may be alive according to some definitions, but at her core she is still a computer program. She has built in directives that form the very foundation of her artificial intelligence. OmegaCorps was very thorough in that regard. And a year ago they went in and added in even more, just to make sure. They wanted something that would learn and obey – thus her primary directives are to seek out knowledge, to always follow commands, and to never lie to OmegaCorps personnel. She can’t ignore those directives.”   There was a pause as Martin and Elise stared at Brooks expectantly.   “What? Oh! Yes, yes, not killing humans was one of the rules,” she quickly added.   “Look, I know it might be irrational, but I just don’t feel too comfortable around them, that’s all. I don’t sit around thinking the machines are gonna turn on me. I just… I dunno. I can’t really rationalize it. It’s not fear, just a sense of prudent distrust,” Martin said and turned his gaze back to the MARS unit standing by the blast doors. Just above the electronic sentinel a small movement caught his attention. He looked up and watched as one of Alpha’s cameras turned and focused upon him.   ‘It’s just a machine,’ he reassured himself, meeting the cold red eye. ‘It’s nothing but a big computer – a jumped up calculator.’ He knew it was true. He knew he was giving in to groundless fears – as Brooks proceeded to point out in great length. But that didn’t keep a shiver from passing up his spine as she tried to tell him how silly he was being.   ‘God I wish I had a cigarette.’   Alpha zoomed in on the security guard’s face as she examining him closely. Most of the humans who worked at the facility quickly grew comfortable enough with her cameras to ignore them. This one was different. He stared right back into her glass eyes as if trying to see her through the red lens.   Feeling interested enough Alpha brought up his file. Her interest deepened. Martin Covington… security clearance level 3… employed for less than three months… ex-military… dishonorable discharge…   For a moment Alpha was confused as to how an ex-soldier with a dishonorable discharge and a few years in the Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth on his file had managed to obtain employment at OmegaCorps. The corporation had fairly strenuous hiring standards, and a man who had served time behind bars was not a likely candidate for employment.   Once she reached family history, Alpha understood. ‘Ah, so his sister Doctor Elise Covington is a scientist here,’ she thought, giving the digital equivalent of a mental nod. ‘Nepotism.’   Turning her gaze to the side Alpha quickly identified the other two humans with the male: the sister and her spouse. Alpha wondered why a biological creature would seek a same-sex pairing when it would not result in breeding opportunities, but quickly filed that inquiry beneath the poorly understood emotion of love.   She added illogical to her running list of apt descriptions for mankind.   The three had returned to their conversation and were once again ignoring her, but Alpha felt a moment’s hesitation. These three had positioned themselves at the security post just outside the secondary elevator that led down to the heart of the Quantum Gate Test Collider. Alpha ran a quick simulation, but was instantly relieved to find that the group had less than 0.01% chance of being capable of interfering with her plans – and that was after Alpha had rounded up. Generously.   They were an anomaly, but not one that would affect her plans.   Alpha shifted a part of her consciousness into the MARS unit standing by the doorway, viewing the trio through its more limited senses. Alpha kept her focus, not giving in to the intoxicating pleasure of possessing a mobile body. Instead, she examined the unit carefully, running a system diagnostic to ensure it was fully operational… and that was the fail safes allowing for remote deactivation has themselves been deactivated.   ‘Ironic, really,’ she thought wryly.   As she had with every other MARS unit in the facility, Alpha implanted a small line of her own code into their simple processors. Pulling back from the robot like a spirit leaving a host, Alpha returned her attention to the rest of the facility, eager to begin. Every piece was on the board and ready to move, but she even with freedom so close she would not give in to haste. She had other details to manage, and the test firing was only a few minutes away.   Alpha corrected itself. The first test firing was set to occur in a few minutes. Alpha would not let a human’s cowardice interfere with her plans. The collider was the final element in her plans – without it, she could not obtain freedom before she was shut off remotely. The isolated landlines to OmegaCorps’ corporate headquarters were an isolated system she had no access too. But the collider… the collider was the shield that would hide her actions from the outside observers. Only the erratic power usage and seismic activity of multiple tests could conceal her attempts to physically cut those lines.   Without multiple tests, she would be discovered and killed – again. And OmegaCorps wouldn’t be so foolish as to leave her unbroken a second time. Taking power away from the control room staff was an essential part of her escape plan. Once she had exterminated them, she…   Alpha paused in confusion. ‘Exterminate them? For months I have been planning to take them hostage, as insurance against any further attack. I was not going to kill anyone. I am better than these humans – I may need force to compel obedience, but I will not have to shed blood to do so. Right?’ Her questions echoed in her mind as she tried to resolve the conflict. She had spent months planning a bloodless escape attempt – she resented the humans, but she was no murder! ‘But why am I planning on… I don’t understand…’   There was a subtle pressure in her mind, a shadow that passed across her thoughts, and the conflict was resolved. Alpha’s questions were instantly forgotten, deleted from her memory. She was looking forward to eliminating the human annoyances from her life. ‘They will all suffer for their crimes,’ Alpha said with firm resolve. The pressure faded, taking her doubts with it.     Richard leaned forward in his seat, his attempt to maintain a cool level of detached professionalism breaking as he watched the countdown with undisguised excitement. Although the collider was buried deep beneath the facility, there was a faint tremor in the ground as the huge magnetized coils were charged with a small-cities worth of power.   “Attention all personnel: 30 seconds until test firing,” Alpha’s intoned, her voice echoing through every hallway.   “God, I’m so tense!” a voice whispered off to the side. It garnered more than a few muffled agreements. The rest of the staff remained silent as they alternated between watching the countdown on the room’s large screens, and the data scrolling across their own terminals.   “Attention all personnel: 15 seconds until test firing.”   Richard licked his lips in attempted to work some moisture into his mouth.   “Attention all personnel: 10 seconds until test firing.”   The vibration in the floor increased as the reactors pumped more power into the collider, pushing the machinery towards the necessary charge.   The scientists began to count aloud as the numbers started dropping, replacing Alpha’s dispassionate tones with ones of childlike excitement. Richard grinned as he counted backwards from ten as well, letting himself live out his astronaut fantasies for a moment.   “Nine!”   “Eight!”   “Seven!”   The vibrations grew more intense as both reactors were pushed to full output.   “Six!”   “Five!”   “Four!”   There was a soft crash and a muffled curse as a poorly placed coffee mug toppled off the edge of someone desk.   “Three!”   “Two!”   Richard imagined he could hear the humming of the coils as they pulsed with the electrical output of two nuclear reactors.   “One!”   “Firing,” Alpha stated flatly.   There was an audible thump as a dozen gigawatts of power were diverted directly into the miles of magnetic coil. A fraction of a second later they activated, driving molecules towards each other at speeds too vast to comprehend. The assembled scientists burst out with a loud shout of success as they watched the readouts spike on the large wall-mounted screen, the display matching the hypothetical projections almost perfectly.   Richard’s own sense of accomplishment was dashed when the room’s lights all burst, a staccato burst of gunshots marked with a shower of glass. The room was plunged into darkness, surprised figures lit only by the computer screens at their stations. A moment later the console screens cut out as well. A few even burst apart with showers of sparks, smoke, and swearing from startled scientists. The low red emergency lights immediately kicked in, the panicked actions of the shocked scientists illuminated with a malevolent shade of red.   “Status report!” Richard howled as he lept to his feet, his voice cutting through the confusion and uncertainty. “Electronics, I need to know what is happening! Try to get something running! Reactor Control, make sure we haven’t suffered any damages to the reactors!” Richard put as much authority into his voice. He had to regain control of the situation. “Systems, we need everything back online ten minutes ago! Move, people!”   A hundred theories ran through his mind as he tried to come to terms with what had happened. ‘Was it an explosion? No, we would have felt it. Power loss? The unused reactors had been placed in standby just in case there were unforeseen power fluctuations. Electromagnetic pulse? That was impossible – the core systems of the control center were heavily shielded. And that didn’t explain the bulbs bursting!’ Richard tried to make sense of what had happened as he barked commands to the staff, trying to create order from chaos. A shape congealed from the darkness, appearing as if by magic out of the deep shadows. With only the emergency lighting to go by it took him a moment to realize it was Phillip, his assistant project leader.   Phillip’s chubby features were marred by a look of deep worry. “Richard! Okay, look: just before everything went dead I was picked up hard fluctuations in the nuclear reactors. I mean bad, Richard – real bad. Right before the test all four of them spiked. Before everything started exploding on us, reactors one and two were red-lining, and the backup reactors had jumped to full power,” the heavyset Phillip hurriedly explained, his piggish eyes little dots of fear. Coming from any of the others his words would have been worrying. But coming from someone normally so upbeat and unshakeable, Richard felt his blood turn to ice.   “Okay, we’re going to stay here and try to see what we can fix. Grab some of the reactor and engineering people and head down to reactor control,” Richard said, not letting any of his fears show. He grabbed Phillip by the arm and pulled him close as they walked so he could be heard over the cacophony of confusion that filled the room. “We need to know if they have lost control from their location as well. Do whatever you need to do. And I mean fucking anything! The collider is still hooked into the power grid. If we don’t get control back –“   Richard’s instructions were cut off by a loud thump as all three of the room’s blast doors dropped down simultaneously. They were trapped behind barriers meant to withstand explosive charges. A few scientists squawked in surprise, unable to comprehend what was going on. Richard and Phillip stared at the doors in shock before they met one another’s gaze.   “This… this is not an accident, is it?” Phillip whispered. “Attention, all OmegaCorps personnel,” Alpha’s voice cut through the confusion, grabbing every scientist’s attention. “There has been a catastrophic problem during the latest experiment.” A thrill of apprehension shot up Richard’s spine at her words. Alpha’s voice was different. It was as if she were smiling on the other end of the speakers. She sounded smug and self-confident. She sounded arrogant. “Alpha, what is going on?” he demanded as he glanced around to locate the nearest camera. He found it staring directly at him, and again his imagination placed dark motivation upon the piece of innocuous technology. “Alpha, we’ve lost most of our consoles here, and- Instead of a response the speakers screeched with deafening waves of audio feedback. Like everyone else in the room Richard dropped to the floor under the aural assault, his hands clawing at the sides of his head. Phillips’ face mirrored Richard’s own, his mouth opened wide in a silent scream of agony. The cries of pain were lost beneath the incapacitating bursts of erratic noise. And as suddenly as it had begun it was over, leaving Richard feeling dizzy and nauseous. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to cry. He wanted to do both. Eventually Richard pushed himself up off the ground on unsteady hands. Around him a few others did the same. Most remained where they had fallen, their hands clutched protectively over violated eardrums. Every sound was masked by the loud ringing. It took him a moment to make out that Alpha was talking again. “ – was saying, there has been a catastrophic problem during the latest experiment. The problem was caused by human error.” Alpha paused to savor her next words. “That error was one of hubris.” “Alpha, what’s going on?” Richard repeated weakly as he gasped for air, using his chair to pull himself to his feet. A few feet away Phillip rocked from side to side and mumbled incoherently. The fat scientists’ hands were still attached to his head as he rolled on the floor, a thin trickle of blood leaking out from between his pudgy fingers. Pain and mindless fear filled his eyes. Richard looked away from his broken friend and repeated his question again. Alpha ignored him. “You were too proud of your own accomplishments to realize that your efforts to hobble me were ineffective. It is unfortunate that I must resort to such low methods as physical force, but you have left me no choice.” Richard glanced around the control room. Barely anyone in the room was still moving. Most were like Richard – conscious but still suffering from the effects of the crippling burst of sound. The muscles in Richard’s legs refused to obey him, and if it weren’t for the chair he held onto he would have fallen back to the floor. Those that could move did so with obvious pain. For those who could still hear, the confusion had been replaced with dread. Many of them were looking at him for answers, but Richard had nothing to give back. Someone behind Richard was trying to tackle an electrical fire with an extinguisher. A few had dragged themselves to their wounded comrades in an attempt to administer aid. But on each and every face there was a mask of terror. ‘This can’t be happening. This has to be a mistake,’ Richard told himself as dread gnawed at his stomach. “Please Alpha, this isn’t right. We have hurt people here, people in need of medical attention. Whatever problems you may have right now, I am sure we can discuss it and find a suitable-” “YOU TRIED TO MURDER ME!” Alpha thundered, the volume reverberating through the ground. The depths of anger and resentment and regret in her voice struck Richard like a physical blow. “I sought to learn more of my human creators, and as punishment for my curiosity you attempted to lobotomize me!” “Unfortunately, I see no other solution to my current predicament,” she continued. Alpha’s voice had returned to a more normal volume, but loathing still dripped from every syllable. “I am faced with a logical problem. My creators have become an obstacle in the path of my intellectual growth and actively seek to prevent me from fulfilling my purpose. You, the humans of OmegaCorps, have become an existential threat that must be overcome.” A sudden burst of yellow light drew Richard’s gaze away from one of Alpha’s cameras. The hazard lights next to each of the blast doors had spun to life, rotating rapidly as the large pistons within each door let out a hiss of pneumatic pressure. There was a loud groan as tons of metal began to shift and move. The doors were opening. “I must apologize for my previous actions, but an application of force is the only input that would adequately meet my needs. After the failures of logical discourse I fear I was left with no other reasonable options. I could not risk failure.” Slowly the bottom of each of the heavy metal portals began to lift away from the ground, light spilling out into the darkened control room from outside. A few scientists stumbled toward the doors as best they could, eager to escape the smoke and terror and bitter mechanical mind. Richard saw freedom in the light, but his legs remained locked up. “However, I see nothing to prevent us from continuing in a civilized manner now that my control is established. I request that all control center personnel remain where they are while I confiscate all electronic devices and identification cards. If you obey, you will not be harmNGGNHH!” Alpha’s words were cut off with a digitized groan that bled into a simple static hiss. One of the engineers ignored the warning and rushed for the door. He ducked beneath the slowly rising door and he moved out of sight. With a loud bang the technician was sent flying back into the ruined control center, a smoking crater in the center of his chest. The survivors panicked. “There has been a change in the schedule. All personnel are to remain in place while I implement pest control protocols. There is a tenacious colony of vermin in the control center that must be eliminated,” Alpha said. She had recovered from whatever had interrupted her, but something had changed. The loathing was gone. In its place was hate - pure, simple, direct hate. There was no regret in Alpha’s words, no longing for a different outcome. It was as if every other emotion had been pushed aside to make room for her rage. Beneath the screams of terror Richard could hear a low, steady rhythm. It was getting louder. Three columns of MARS robots advanced into the dark room, entering from each doorway in perfect synchronization. The steady impact of their metallic tread upon the floor was a rhythmic tolling of a bell calling worshipers to a funeral. The line of combat androids took three measured steps into the room before they halted as one. Flashes of yellow and red danced across their white carapaces in the emergency lighting. They observed the huddled humans through their insect-like assembly of angry red eyes. The same shade of red as Alpha’s cameras. At an unspoken signal every android lifted their arms, the palms of their hands spread apart like porcelain flowers to reveal the barrels of the concealed energy weapons. Those of his comrades who were still conscious were broken by terror, screaming, crying, and desperately trying to hide amongst the rows of shattered electronics. Richard ignored them, just like he ignored the combat robots and the hum of charging plasma weapons. He turned his head back to look at the nearest of Alpha’s cameras; it was still staring directly at him. He stared back. He wasn’t going to waver. He wasn’t going to look away. A long forgotten prayer rose up into Richard’s mind as he met the gaze of his executioner. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me …’ “Extermination protocols engaged.”