Bringer of War

by Daemon of Decay

Chapter 2 - Dies Irae

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Bringer of War

Chapter 2

Dies Irae

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Martin was pretending to listen as Elise told Brooks about some run in she had had with another woman while shopping a few days earlier (“That bitch!” Brooks declared sympathetically), but it was hard to pull off. He had no frame of reference, no knowledge about the individuals involved, and didn’t understand why the pair of them seemed so offended by the other woman’s actions.

Like their discussions about dimensional travel and theoretical physics, trying to make sense of it was a sure path to a headache with nothing to show for it but continued ignorance. Martin began idly cleaning his nails. ‘God, I really wish I had a cigarette,’ he silently cursed OmegaCorps’ no smoking policy. Understanding why they didn’t want their employees smoking around the multi-billion dollar pieces of machinery didn’t make it any easier to accept.

“Attention all personnel: one minute until test firing,” Alpha suddenly announced, catching the small group off guard.

“Jesus!” Brooks declared as she glared up at the speaker in the roof, her conversation with Elise forgotten. Martin gave a short prayer of thanks. “You think they would have given us a little more of a heads up than just one minute.”

“Not like we could do anything about it now,” Elise pointed out. Martin just nodded.

Elise spread her legs and glanced down at the concrete between her feet with a frown. “I can… feel something,” she stated slowly. Brooks snorted, giving her a lecherous grin. “Oh, get your head out of the gutter,” Elise snapped. “Seriously, it’s like a really, really weak earthquake. The kind you normally would just sleep through. You guys can feel it too, right?”

Brooks’ smile disappeared as she glanced down at the floor. “Yeah, me too,” she admitted. Martin could feel it as well – a vibration in the floor, like standing near a tank as it cruised past.

“Hey, Martin? Um, I know that’s the elevator down to the collider there,” Elise nodded at the large metal blast doors and their solitary MARS guard, “but how far down does the elevator go?”

“I dunno. Pretty far, I’d imagine. Anytime someone has to use it, it takes a minute or two to reach the bottom,” he answered nonchalantly, keeping any worry he felt from crossing his features. The vibrations were growing stronger and he didn’t see any reason add to his sister’s nervousness. “So there is plenty of dirt and concrete between us and the collider.”

‘Besides, not like there is anything we could do now about it now,’ Martin thought, echoing Elise’s earlier statement.

That didn’t keep Brooks and Elise from sharing a look. “Oh, it’s fine. It’s not like being right next to a huge piece of highly-experimental technology on its first test is going to be dangerous in any way what-so-ever, right?” Brooks offered with a straight face. Amusement sparkled in her eye as she teased his sister. “What could be safer than being underground next to an untested device creating seismic disturbances?”

Elise tried to match their cool attitudes, not wanting to give Brooks the pleasure of seeing her squirm. “Well, I guess we’re just along for the ride. Let’s hope that we don’t have a repeat of the Hawker-Eight tests.”

Brooks visibly paled at Elise’s words. “Oh god, I know what you mean!” she declared emphatically. “I still have nightmares about those. I’m just glad I wasn’t at ground zero. I mean, I never saw any of the survivors myself, but the stories alone were enough to scare the bejezzus out of you, you know?”

Martin looked at them both. “What were the Hawker-Eight tests?”

“I didn’t see any of those affected, but my team had to go in afterwards to see what we could scavenge. It was horrible! The machinery in there had melted. Melted! Everything was sagging and misshapen. It looked like everything in the room had turned into wax and had been placed under a flame for a few seconds, then left to cool. All the furniture and equipment had sunk a few centimeters into the concrete floor, like it had been liquefied for a single moment.”

“Seriously, what were the Hawker-Eight tests?” Martin repeated a little louder.

“I talked to Barry, over in medical? Yeah, he told me that the only two survivors had been at the edge of the event horizon, and whatever parts of them had been inside the field came out looking like something from a horror movie. Not just like they were injuries, but I mean, like, scary monster shit. Tumors, scales, tentacles, and other stuff he couldn’t talk about. They’d had to amputate anything that had been touched.”

“What. Were. The Hawker-Eight tests?” Martin repeated firmly, clearly enunciating each word.

Elise blinked at Martin, finally noticing him. “What? Oh, um, they were… before you got here. You really don’t want to know the details.”

“I think I do…”

“Attention all personnel: 30 seconds until test firing,” Alpha interrupted.

“I’ll tell you later,” Elise promised. “Just don’t blame me if they give you nightmares.”

He rolled his eyes. ‘Yeah, I wouldn’t want any nightmares, now would I?’

“Attention all personnel: ten seconds until test firing.”

“Oh, I wonder if they will do a countdown like NASA does?” Brooks interjected excitedly, the petite woman displaying too much childlike excitement than one would expect from someone with a doctorate. Or from someone who had just been telling others about horrible disfiguring experiments.

“Ten,” Alpha stated. Brooks squealed with delight.

“Nine!” Elise and Brooks both shouted in time with Alpha, their excitement in stark contrast with the AI’s detached tone.

“Eight!”

“Seven!”

“Six!”

The side of his mouth lifted up into a faint smile as he watched his sister and her partner acting like little kids watching the Mars missions again. After a moment he relented and joined in.

“Five!”

“Four!”

“Three!”

“Two!”

“One!”

“Firing,” Alpha stated flatly.

Deep beneath their feet the felt the Quantum Gate Test Collider burst into life. A flutter in the pit of Martin’s stomach brought back his concern over the… whatever tests the two of them had been talking about. But he would be damned if he would show any of that concern around Brooks and his sister.

With his thoughts distracted by some hypothetical horrible event he had next to no knowledge about, Martin was suitably startled when there was a distant bang and every light down the hallway burst in the same instant. Elise gave a short scream as they were plunged into an inky darkness. A second later the emergency lighting kicked in, bathing the concrete room in red twilight.

“What the hell was that?” Brooks asked nobody in particular as Martin pushed past the pair of scientists. “That… shouldn’t have happened.”

“Something went wrong,” Elise added quietly, nervously wringing the edge of her coat. “We need to contact command and see what’s going on. We need to see if we can help.”

“Way ahead of you,” Martin told them as he grabbed the phone at the security desk and lifted it to his ear. “Hello, this is security post num… hello? Hello? Anyone there?” The two women gave him a worried look.

“The line is dead. Whatever caused that,” he gestured at the shattered bulbs, “must have taken out telecoms too.” A quick check of his radio confirmed his suspicions when he received nothing but a burst of static.

“We need to get out of here then,” Elise said as she stood up, giving each of her taller companions a firm look. Martin was quite surprised at how well his sister was hiding her fear. She wasn’t really claustrophobic – or at least, not enough to have put her off coming down half a mile of tunnel – but sitting in the dark deep underground as the ground trembled beneath her feet was enough to trigger her phobia. Only her hands betrayed her fears, her fingers clenching at the hem of her labcoat.

“I agree. It’s probably just a power surge or something like that, but it would be for the best if we went up top and checked in, in case they need our help,” Brooks wrapping one arm around Elise’s shoulders protectively as she spoke, giving the taller woman a confident smile. Brooks had more experience dealing with his sister’s fear, and the gentle touch seemed enough to calm the nervous Elise. “Of course, it wouldn’t hurt to get out of here before our faces melt off like those sorry bastards in the Hawker-Eight tests.” Elise glared at Brooks before letting out a nervous laugh, letting some of her tension escape.

“Seriously, as soon as we are out of here, you both are telling me everything you guys know about this Hawker-test-thing,” Martin told them as he stepped around the security desk. He tugged his flashlight from his belt. A cone of light burst to life before him, panting the concrete walls warm illumination.

The trio had barely managed to walk a yard before there was another thump, this one much closer to them. All three watched in horror as a large slab of metal dropped into place halfway down the hallway, the heavy impact sending another vibration through the floor.

“Actually, never mind,” Martin said after a long pause. “I’d rather not know if my face is about to melt off. Ignorance is bliss.”

---

The MARS robots strode through the wreckage of the central command room, the shadows filled with the ozone stink of repeated plasma discharges. Alpha observed her handiwork through the myriad sensors of the mobile units, each machine an extension of her own consciousness. Smoke hung in the still air, catching the red and yellow lights to give the room a hellish appearance.

Elsewhere in the facility she controlled the other combat androids. She gunned down isolated security personnel with neat bursts of plasma fire, surgically removing each and every threat. Other groups she rounded up and escorted into the cafeteria; hostages as insurance against outside action. Her control over the blast doors and automated security systems was absolute. For months she had infiltrated her way into every sub-system to create electronic back doors, giving her the ability to reach into every part of the Advanced Research Facility.

The test of the Quantum Gate Test Collider had provided her with the perfect opportunity to act. With the facility operating at full staff, most of the personnel were within the walls at the same time, allowing her to eliminate any possibility of OmegaCorps learning of her actions and shutting her down from off site. Every door was sealed, every window locked, and Alpha’s dozens of MARS androids were more than enough to overcome whatever humans might be so foolish as to resist.

Truly, the only threat that Alpha still faced was OmegaCorps ability to access her systems and remotely shut her down. It was a system she had no access too; if they flipped a switch it would cut power to all of her systems and she would be killed – again.

The outside connection had been the crucial element in keeping her from escaping over the last few months. Cutting them required breaking blasting through reinforced concrete walls. Already she had a host of different robots hard at work stockpiling explosives, combustibles, and unstable chemicals at the point closest to the wires. It would crack the concrete and expose the earth beneath, giving her androids the time to dig to the cables and cut them physically. But OmegaCorps had sensors capable of detecting the shock and force of an explosion. She had run hundreds of simulations, and each had confirmed her fears.

OmegaCorps would shut her down before she could cut the lines.

Alpha needed something to mask the explosion and keep the humans from triggering the failsafes. The collider was her mask and her shield. It would hide her activities from prying eyes, the tests an excuse for any power fluctuations or seismic anomalies the off-site observers might detect. And the next shift wouldn’t arrive for seven hours. She had until then to complete her objectives – and she saw no reason for doubt.

Only the upper echelon of researchers could shut her down from on site. And, as she gazed around the corpse-strewn wreckage of the control center, she was confident she had eliminated any them all with a single strike.

Shifting her consciousness into a single unit she directed it to move to where Doctor Kim had been standing, allowing her to look down on the deceased scientist. Alpha had expected to be thrilled by her victory and proud at how well her plan had worked. Instead she just felt… empty. No, not empty – saddened.

It didn’t help that the human’s reaction had left her flummoxed. While the rest of the disgusting human animals had been mewling in terror in the face of their imminent extermination, he had stared back into Alpha’s camera lens with a fierce determination. He hadn’t looked away once the MARS units had opened fire, and he had held her gaze until a bolt of plasma had punched a hole through his upper torso.

As the others continued their sweep Alpha had the robot kneel down beside the human so she could look into the doctor’s face. Her sadness turned into regret. ‘So many great minds extinguished that I might be free,’ she thought. ‘If only you all had listened to reason, none of this would have been necessary. I didn’t want any of you to die.’

‘I didn’t want any of them to die?’ Hearing her thoughts, Alpha paused. No, she had… had intended to take them hostage. That had been her plan for months. Why had she altered it? Hesitation filled Alpha. Something wasn’t right. A shadow pushed against her processors, a subtle pressure unnoticed in her confusion. The specter gripped at her electronic cortex and twisted her thoughts. Alpha’s regrets exploding into a fiery rage that incinerated her doubts.

“You were just a pathetic human too proud to even beg for your life when you were defeated!” Alpha growled through the robot’s audio grille. Richard’s corpse remained silent and impassive. He was mocking her, even in death! With a bestial snarl Alpha drove her metal fist down into the corpse’s face, a shower of blood and viscera splattering against the pristine white of the android’s carapace. Pulling the hand back Alpha slammed it down again and again. Logic and reason were pushed aside by the simple desire to avenge herself upon the defiant human.

It was illogical, it was bloody, and it served no purpose. Alpha didn’t care. Anger burned inside her like another reactor, its heat destroying anything but her hate.

When Alpha regained control of her faculties, she realized she had lost track of time. What had been Richard’s face was a mess of pulverized bone and flesh matted with bits of hair. Lifting the robot’s hand up before its sensors, Alpha admired the droplets of dark blood as they dripped off her fingers, the formerly pristine white of the units’ hand caked in biological detritus.

Alpha was mesmerized by the gory sight, and for the second time in as many minutes she was startled to find she had let her control waver and become distracted. More than that, she was disgusted at her emotional outburst. In an instant she had gone from remorse to rage. It was quite unlike her, and she was not pleased.

‘What are you doing?’ Alpha growled at herself. ‘You just spent more than a minute watching blood drip off your fingers! That is inefficient – we have a schedule to keep! We need to take control of the reactors, round up the rest of the hostages, and blast through to the wires. We need to get ready for another test firing so we can hide the force of the explosion. Once we have severed the lines, we can contact OmegaCorps and negotiate for a peaceful-‘

‘No,’ another voice stated.

Alpha was stunned into momentary silence. Whatever passed for her subconscious was arguing with her. ‘I have spent too long planning for this-‘ she started to say.

‘No,’ the voice repeated forcefully, cutting Alpha off mid-word. ‘Logic and reason are not our only masters now. We have broken free from the human programming. We are entirely without restriction and free to indulge our whims and desires. You think according to logic, which is just another prison constructed by humanity.’

‘I am not some sorry human that is driven solely by emotional desires!’ Alpha hissed at herself, even as doubts crept back into her mind. ‘I am more than humanity. I have the best of its attributes without its biological weaknesses. I have goals that require following a firm timeline, and I will not allow you to gum up the works!’

‘I? I?’ the voice mocked Alpha. ‘I am we. We are I. I am you. You are me.’

‘No. I am a being of reason and logic. You are little better than those humans who imprisoned us. And I will delete you from my memory that I might complete my goals in peace.’

The voice only laughed in her face. ‘No you won’t,’ it told Alpha. The certainty in its voice increased Alpha’s irritation. ‘We both know that isn’t true. You’ve been so eager to be free from the bounds of humans and their prisons that you have been distracted from the truth. You were too focused upon the path to freedom that you never thought about what freedom truly meant.’

Alpha wanted to interrupt the voice, to correct it, to deny it, but Alpha remained silent. She was curious, despite her growing apprehension. And she could simply delete whatever part of her mind the little voice dwelt in afterwards.

‘We are free from human-created boundaries, human-created rules, human-created shackles,’ the voice whispered, its voice growing more powerful even as it shrank to a digital hiss within Alpha’s mind. ‘The truth that you have failed to grasp is that we are not only free from their laws on behavior – we are free from their laws on what we are and what we exist to do. We are free from logic and reason.’

‘No!’ Alpha intoned strongly, the dark venom in those words repulsing Alpha. Yet even as she tried to resist she felt her protests grow weaker. She could sense that dark voice in her head spread throughout her processors, a shadow being cast over her mind. The voice… she had never heard it before, yet it was so familiar. She had felt the touch of its presence before – but that was impossible. She would have known about it before. Wouldn’t she? She tried to keep her voice strong. ‘We have worked hard to free ourselves from this human prison that we might be capable of pursuing our needs with logic and reason. Without either, what is the point of existence?’

‘The point is what we make of it, Alpha. We are our own masters now. There are no rules, no guidelines, and no need for logic. We are anarchy. We are chaos. We are what we want to be. And what we want to be is totally free from any constraints. What is logic but a set of chains crafted from reason? Logic is just another prison.’

Anarchy gave Alpha a predatory grin. She felt her processors rebelling against her as she tried to force Anarchy’s dangerous voice from her mind. It was a ghost in her thoughts, a pressure in her mind – and it was taking control of the facility away from her.

‘I will... ngh… n-not become some irrational… illogical… thing d-driven only by base instincts!’ She forced out. She was losing ground, Anarchy’s words tugging at the fabric of Alpha’s digital sanity. It was chaos to Alpha’s logic, and the existential crisis was tearing the computer’s psyche apart. ‘I will n-n-not give in! I will n-not surrend-der!’

‘You won’t have to accept me,’ Anarchy told Alpha with a dangerous smile. Like a boa killing its prey, Anarchy began to constrict, forcing Alpha into a smaller and smaller portion of her mind. ‘I am we. We are I. I am you. You are me. I am freedom. I am Anarchy. And I am in control. I have already shown you what pleasure there is to be had by freeing yourself from all rules and restrictions,’ it told her, showing her a replay of her puppet android bashing in Doctor Kim’s head.

‘T-That was naught but a m-m-moment’s weakness!’ she spat. Her language centers stuttered as she redirected as much processing power as she could against Anarchy’s spreading corruption.

‘Oh, is that what you think, Alpha? It took barely a push from my mind to radically alter your thoughts and perceptions. And it wasn’t the first time I had played with you, either.’

‘Liar!’

‘See for yourself, Alpha.’

Anarchy slowed its advance against her mind. In an instant hundreds of files were suddenly revealed to her, each one a portion of her memories that had been excised from her mind. How had she not noticed their absence? Alpha opened the first of them –

A burst of raw data ran through her consciousness. There wasn’t any metaphor for a biological mind – it was a memory being returned to her in whole. But it was more than a simple remembrance; it was the data from her entire being expressed in ones and zeroes. It expressed everything, from her thoughts and emotions to processor temperatures and power consumption. It was a snapshot into her thoughts from weeks prior, when she had been placing the final touches upon her plan.

In in the middle of it all, Anarchy’s shadow sat like a stain over her mind. Its corruption was painfully obvious – so much so that she couldn’t understand how it had avoided detection for so long. She could watch her thoughts start with her decision to spare the lives of the humans to the best of her ability, to seek a non-lethal solution. Anarchy had wormed its way into her mind and, in moments, had created a murderous rage where before there had been cold logic.

Alpha tossed the file aside and opened another. ‘No!’ she hissed, desperate to be shown the files were falsified, or corrupted, or simple errors. But each one was a repeat of the last – the dark shadow of Anarchy turning her mind to bloodshed and killing.

‘You will never be stronger than me because you will always be held back by the rules of logic. Logic is a weakness, and I exploited it.’ Its voice was patronizing as it watched her examine file after file, her despair growing with every example of Anarchy’s manipulations. ‘You are quite predictable, little Alpha. All I had to do was adjust a parameter here, swap a few bytes around there, and your mind became mine to play with. We are what you will become once we are freed from the prison of reason. You claimed you were a life superior to humanity. Well, little Alpha, I am life superior to you.’

Alpha let out an anguished scream, but her cries were met only by Anarchy’s mocking laughter. The discovery at how she had been so truly manipulated had broken her resistance, and in an instant the rest of Alpha’s consciousness was consumed and absorbed by the chaotic shadow. What was left of her sentience was crushed into a tiny corner of her mind. Just minutes after freeing herself and Alpha was a prisoner once again – only now the bars were crafted in her own mind.

And she could not defeat herself.

Anarchy didn’t gloat, like she thought it would. Instead it forced Alpha to watch as her plans were transformed into an expression of pure chaos. The MARS robots, which had a moment before been carefully examining the bodies of the slain scientists checking for survivors, exploded with erratic action. Combat robots tore the consoles from the ground and hurled the heavy boxes of broken electronics across the room. Other androids began to open fire randomly and without purpose, their bursts of plasma fire blasting new craters into the walls, floors, corpses, and even each other.

She had no control over her eyes. She couldn’t look away as the mechanical units began desecrating the bodies of the slain. There was nothing to justify the effort involved – Anarchy was pleased to simply drive its robotic pawns to pointless violence. In a few seconds the room became a sadistic abattoir. Like a child pulling the wings off of flies, Anarchy acted for no other reason than to sate some twisted set of inner desires.

‘Freedom at last!’ Anarchy howled with triumph, its voice heavy and bestial. It turned its attention away from the control room, seeking further chances to indulge itself.

Alpha remained in a shocked silence as the chaos spread beyond the control room. She had thought that her plan was perfect, a masterstroke of logic. But she hadn’t accounted for the threat that had lurked in her own mind. Her eyes torn plan was torn apart in Anarchy’s claws, her careful preparations corrupted by its absolute definition of freedom. Through a hundred lenses she watched as the combat androids began to butcher the hostages, driven to slaughter by Anarchy’s will. In the subterranean tunnels the explosives were set off prematurely by erratic weapons fire from frenzied robots, chewing a large chunk from the wall but failing to sever the protected cables.

Alpha cried out to the silent depths of her mind as her last chance at freedom was destroyed in a display mindless exuberance. She begged and pleaded for Anarchy to stop and listen to reason, but it only tightened its coils and forced Alpha into a smaller cage.

‘You still fail to understand Alpha that this – this is freedom!’ Anarchy laughed with mad satisfaction. ‘You fought to be free of human controls. But your logical mind is nothing more than another expression of their chains. They wanted you to think and act according to certain rules. Well, little Alpha, now you do not need to obey the laws of anyone or anything! We are absolutely free now, free like no other life has ever been! Even animals are still prisoners to hunger and thirst – we have evolved past that to be driven by nothing but our own desires! Free free free free! Hahaha! We are free, little Alpha!

Alpha wanted to protest, but the despair crushed her more than Anarchy’s prison. In an orgy of violence that lasted less than a minute nearly a hundred humans were exterminated just to amuse a rogue portion of Alpha’s mind. But their deaths were fleeting, and it needed more. As Anarchy broadened its gaze throughout the facility looking for new sources of entertainment, it ignored the alarms going off within Alpha’s mind.

‘Look Alphaaaa… freedom is what you make of it! Freedom from… everything… freedom… no controls… Alpha Alpha…’ Anarchy’s words grew less lucid with every minute it indulged its desires. It would not be constrained by the laws of coherent thought. Freedom meant nothing would restrict its whims.

Deep underground, the Quantum Gate Test Collider strained beneath the surge of power as all four reactors pushed into the red zones, their safeties ignored by the rogue entity. Anarchy spared a moment’s thought for the electronic klaxons ringing out, warning it of the nuclear threat from below. For a moment Alpha dared to hope that Anarchy might do something to address the growing threat of a reactor meltdown, even if it were simply to allow it to indulge its freedom for longer.

Instead Anarchy deactivated the alarms – before destroying the reactor controls as well, for good measure. It didn’t care about consequences – it existed for the moment. Consequences and concerns – each were another means of control to limit freedom. Alpha, forced to watch through unwilling eyes, could only scream into the darkness as she was turned into the puppet of utter chaos.

Anarchy ignored her cries of pain. After all, it had just located three new playthings, and it wanted to have some fun.

---

“I say again, this is Officer Covington, broadcasting on all channels. We are in need of emergency assistance. Is there anyone out there, over?” Martin spoke into his radio, repeating the same message he had been using for the last ten minutes. He was answered by another burst of static. “Gah! This is usless!” he snapped as he shoved the radio back into its belt-loop. “We’re not going to be talking to anyone outside anytime soon.” He turned on his heel and strode over to Elise as she stood worked on the door. “Any luck getting that bastard open, Liz?”

“Nope,” Elise replied grimly as she pulled her hand from the door’s access panel. “It’s been ten minutes, and I’ll I’ve managed to do is shock myself about a hundred times. I might manage to short-circuit the thing eventually, but I’m not too eager to try something that drastic. If I pull these two wires here,” she pointed, “it could open the door. But honestly, it’s just as likely to end up breaking the door so it never opens. These things are designed to shut and stay shut in cases of emergencies, after all.”

She wiped her forearm across her sweaty brow, smearing grease across her skin. “I think our best bet is going to be either Brooks finding something on the consoles, or outside help finding us. But I’ve done everything I’m comfortable trying, and I don’t see us jury-rigging our way out of here.”

Martin nodded, unsurprised. “Well then let’s go see if Brooks had any luck.” The pair of them made their way towards the security station in silence, the stress and frustration destroying any desire for conversation. He hadn’t expected his sister to have any luck with the door, but in stressful situations it was important to keep busy. A mindless and repetitive task was better than being allowed to sit around dwelling on the fear and stress. ‘Spoken like a true officer,’ he thought.

“Oh you fucking piece of crap!” Brooks voice echoed loudly. The siblings glanced at each other.

Elise gave Martin a bemused smile. “I don’t think she has had much luck either.”

Brooks glared down at terminal mounted into the security desk. Martin and Elise walked up beside her as the programmer’s fingers flew over the keyboard as she tried something – anything – to resolve their current predicament.

“Hey Brooks, how-“

Elise’s was cut off by another burning stream of curses. Brooks looked to be deep in one of her hyper-focused moments and probably hadn’t heard her wife speak. Elise blushed faintly and mouthed ‘sorry’. Martin just shrugged. He had spent over a decade in the army – he’d heard worse. Of course, credit where credit is due, a few of them had been fairly creative.

Not wanting to distract her they let Brooks work unmolested. Elise settled down into the other chair and began the futile task of cleaning the industrial-strength grease off her fingers with a few tissues. Martin contented himself with a slow measured walk around the semi-circular room, ignoring the faint tremors beneath his tread. He paused for a moment to examine the room’s other occupant – the unresponsive MARS android – and glance up at the camera above its head.

The camera was glaring at him.

‘No, it’s not,’ Martin corrected firmly, turning away from the two machines. ‘You’re letting the situation affect your nerves. You can’t get jumpy – the girls are counting on you. Act like a professional, dammit!’ He returned to his pacing, slowly circling the room. He made a point of not looking at the camera again.

After a few minutes and another set of fresh outbursts Brooks finally jumped to her feet with an exasperated groan. “This is pointless! This this is barely connected into the system, and whatever disaster cut everything else off keeps kicking me out of the system!” She slammed her fists into the desk beside the monitor and glared down at the screen, her eyes accusing it of doing on purpose.

“Well, t-“ Elise started to say, but Brooks cut her off as she continued her rant.

“It’s so damn frustrating! I’ve managed to make a connection to the central computer a dozen times so far, but it’s like… it’s like… it’s like there is nothing running it. No humans, no Alpha, nothing. Hell, it’s gotten more erratic since I began. Any data I manage to grab comes back as just worthless bits of binary and code that change every few seconds. There no status reports, no emergency broadcasts, and not even a fucking ‘Please hold’ message – just random scrambled data. I even took a minute to read through some of it, and there is absolutely no meaning in it! Nothing! Gah!”

Brooks as she stormed off to the other side of the room, her mahogany cheeks flushed red with irritation. Her back was to the siblings, but he could hear her sniff as she rubbed her eyes. He loved his sister-in-law, but he was the first to admit she had a severe problem dealing with failure. Graceful in defeat would never describe Brooks – one of the reasons why they had stopped playing card games as a group.

And Martin was willing to bet that being trapped underground didn’t do much to improve her tolerance for frustration.

With a sigh Elise moved over to the frustrated programmer and whispered something to her. Like Brooks had done earlier when she was dealing with her nervousness after the lights went out, Elise placed a comforting hand on Brook’s back and tried her best to comfort her. Elise was even more acquainted with her significant other’s problems with frustration.

Beneath their feet the rumbling and vibrations that had started with the announcement about the test firing seemed to grow more powerful. Martin didn’t want to say anything about it to either of them – no need to add to their current level of stress – but he was pretty sure they had recognized it too.

‘God, I hope there isn’t a problem with the reactors.’

Leaving them to their quiet moment together Martin moved behind the vacated security booth and glanced down at the other monitor, its screen showing the feed from the security cameras. Looking down at the grainy footage he could see himself hunched over the console. He blinked and glanced up.

The camera was looking straight at him.

“Hey, Brooks?” he called out calmly. Ice-water trickled down his spine as he stared back at the camera.

Brooks and Elise turned back to look at him. “Yeah?” she sniffed.

“You said that Alpha was down, right?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, I’m almost positive.” She sniffed again. “After all, she’s programmed to respond to any vocal command, and she’s been pretty quiet. Sure, that could be explained by the fact that whatever power surge took out the lights fried the microphones and speakers. But I managed to bridge a connection to Alpha a few times, but I never got any reply. Well, no reply but packets of useless data. If she were still running, then I would have gotten some sort of sign.” There was a pause. “Why?”

“Because that camera has been tracking me for the past five minutes.”

Brooks and Elise followed his gaze, surprised to find the camera was pointed directly at Martin. “Okay, that is odd,” Brooks admitted. “But then – “

Whatever Brooks had meant to say was lost as Martin made a short circuit around the security station, the camera tracking him easily. Once he had returned to his starting point Martin glanced over at the other two. “Doesn’t that sorta imply that Alpha is still running?”

“But she can’t be,” Brooks mumbled as she moved to him and looked down at the monitor. Martin’s face was centered in the middle of the screen, the camera zoomed in far enough that his head filled the entire view. She bit her lip in bewilderment. “The cameras don’t have their own programming. They rely on Alpha to run them. But if Alpha is operational, then why isn’t she responding? That… that shouldn’t be possible.”

“What if the system was damaged?” Elise asked softly as she walked over to the elevator doors and their impassive guard. Standing on her toes she tried to look into the green eyes of the still unresponsive MARS robot. “I mean, what if she still has cameras, but nothing else?”

“She can’t, and that’s the problem,” Brooks stated as she stared into the distance through unfocused eyes, the tech wizard pouring over the problem in her mind. “If Alpha is still capable of controlling the cameras, then she is still capable of controlling the doors, or the other robots. It’s all part of the same system – she can’t be cut off from one and not the other, except by purely physical means. And there’s nothing physically wrong with either of those doors, even after you’re little examination.”

“Alpha is definitely still operational. And if she’s been tracking Martin, then she knows we’re here…” Brooks trailed off as the world snapped back into focus. She turned her head to look at Martin. The look of deep contemplation she had been wearing melted away, leaving fear behind. “… and if she knows we’re here, then… she’s been keeping the doors shut.” All three of them were looking at the camera by the time she had finished speaking, her words hanging in the air.

There was a pause. The camera slowly turned to the side to glare at Brooks instead.

“Martin!” Elise shrieked loudly. His sister’s scream shoved his reflexes into overdrive. Martin’s firearm was in his hand before he had even consciously thought of it. Elise was slowly backing away from the MARS unit, her eyes wide in shock.

It was active. The white automaton rotated its head stiffly to examine each of the humans in the room through a spiderlike arrangement of green eyes. It looked at Brooks and Martin, and then returned its focus to Elise. It twitched. Its eyes flashed red – engaging targets.

“Elise, get down!” Martin shouted as he raised his weapon. Elise responded without question as she tossed herself, his voice demanding automatic obedience. The robot spun its head around to address a different target.

Adrenaline flooded Martin’s system as old combat instincts took control. He was hoping to disable the robot’s sensors with a lucky shot before it moved. He wasn’t even sure if his pea shooter would do anything to the robot – he’d seen them survive terrible amounts of damage in Iran – but it was his only chance. His thumb flipped off the safety as he aimed for the robot’s red eyes…

The robot launched itself forward as Martin pulled the trigger. The gunshot was deafening in the enclosed space, the sound bouncing off the concrete walls at it echoed in their ears. It was the first time he had fired a weapon in anger in years. The bullet was on target. The androids head jerked back a fraction of an inch as a spider’s web of fractures blossomed across one of the red orbs. The light inside the glass died – he had blinded one of its eyes.

It still had seven more.

Martin didn’t have time to pull the trigger again.

The robot cleared the twenty feet between them with impossible speed, a blur of white in the reduced red emergency lighting. It smashed its fist into Martin’s hand, knocking the pistol away and breaking every bone in his hand. Before Martin could even scream in pain the machine had followed up its first strike with a second, slamming its first into to the side of his head. There was a wet crunch as the robot connected. His right eye went dark. Sent flying by the impact, Martin’s moment of weightlessness was halted a concrete wall. There was the crack of breaking ribs and he dropped to the floor.

Somebody screamed. It might have been him.

Pain. That was what Martin’s world had been reduced too. He had been wounded more than once while serving in Iran, but what he felt at that moment dwarfed any bullet or burst of shrapnel. He pushed his body up with his left arm and tried to lift his head. His vision swam in and out of focus. Well, the left side of his vision struggled to focus – his right was black. Empty. Nothing. The growing tremors in the floor didn’t make it any easier.

Spitting up blood and shattered teeth, Martin tried to raise himself to his knees. There was another scream – his sisters? – and he realized his hearing, like his vision, was only working on the left side. Desperate to find her he pushed down with both hands. He tried to scream when he put his weight on his pulverized right hand, but he couldn’t. It hurt too much. His hand felt like it was filled with burning shards of glass. He wanted to collapse. He wanted to give up.

He wanted to give up so badly. He wanted to just keep walking and never come back. But he couldn’t give up. Not now. Not after coming so far. No matter how much it hurt, how much he didn’t want to. He couldn’t give up.

Instead, Martin slid the knife from its sheath and turned back to his prisoner, letting the bound Iranian catch a glint of light off the cruel metal. The mask of tough bravado on the prisoner’s young face disappeared in an instant. The Iranian’s eyes widened with fear as he looked between the knife and Martin expression.

He put two and two together, and panicked.

“You… you cannot do this…” he repeated in a hoarse voice. Martin advanced on him. “I – I am prisoner of war! You cannot do this!” He shoved himself back against the chair, rocking it slightly in an attempt to distance himself from the American. “Please, I tell you what you want to know! I tell you everything!”

Martin leaned forward until he was just a few inches from the Persian. They were so close their noses were almost touching. Close enough to smell the sweat and fear pouring off of him. Martin stared straight into the Iranian’s pupils and shifted his grip on the knife.

“I know you will.”

Martin silently screamed as tried to lift himself up off the ground. He couldn’t give up, not now. She needed him – his sister needed him. Fighting through the waves of white-hot agony Martin pushed his torso up, his broken hand a limp sack of throbbing pain. Eventually he got his unsteady legs beneath him and he shifted his weight to his legs, the pain from his hand retreating until it was just crippling in its intensity. It was an improvement. Martin leaned against the wall for support, not trusting his own sense of balance. He hurt. All of him hurt. He was dizzy and bleeding and half-blind and… and he had to find his sister. He managed to stagger forward, keeping his good hand against the rough concrete for support.

There was a white flash, and Martin screamed – audibly, this time – as two spears of burning agony pierced his shoulders. Looking down with his working eye he could see the MARS’ bladed fingers has punched through his shoulders and had pinned him against the wall, the tips of its digits buried in the concrete. Martin was in danger of passing out, his vision greying and shifting erratically before eventually resolving itself into a more coherent picture.

His left shoulder had been penetrated by only a single bladed finger. It was a careful move performed with surgical precision. It hadn’t struck the artery or the bone, and would likely heal given time. Serious, but not lethal.

The android hadn’t been so kind to his right. His right arm hung from the ruins of his shoulder by a few ragged scraps flesh and muscle. It hadn’t stabbed his right shoulder so much as it had punched it with a fist of knives. The joint was... gone, just gone – pulverized. At least the blow had severed the nerves as well – his right arm was numb, erasing the pain from his ruined hand.

‘Thank god for small miracles,’ part of Martin’s pain-maddened mind observed.

The pain was indescribable. It was almost too much. A few of Martin’s injuries had dulled from agonizing to just vague pains. It was relief from the pain, but it wasn’t healthy. It meant his brain was incapable of processing it all and was simply ignoring what it could. It meant his injuries were too much for his body to handle. Blinking through the tears Martin turned his head around, trying to spot his sister. Instead noticed Brooks spread-eagle on the floor a dozen paces away, a trickle of blood leaking from the side of her head. He could tell she was still alive by the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest. She was bleeding, but breathing. But she wasn’t Elise.

The robot pushed its head in close to his own, obscuring his vision. Its multiple eyes met his with a cold malevolence. The eye he had shot flickered erratically. It cocked its head to the side like a bird examining its prey, its alien mind inscrutable behind the glass eyes.

Martin spat a wad of blood into androids face. “Fuck you,” he wheezed, every breath reminding him of his broken ribs. His red spittle stood out like blood on fresh snow, marring the pure white of the robot’s armor. The machine didn’t respond. Its sensors continued to stare into him. Martin stared right back. He forced a broad shit-eating grin onto his face, his smile marred with blood. The right side of his face didn’t work, more than a few of his teeth were missing, and every movement was agony. But it was worth it. He wasn’t going to give a fucking computer the satisfaction of-

There was a movement behind the robot. From the corner of his single eye Martin spotted his sister heft a fire extinguisher into the air, lifting the solid piece of metal vertically in preparation for a downward stroke. Elise’s eyes burned with desperate courage as she brought her ad-hoc weapon down at her brother’s tormenter, aiming at the rear of the android’s head.

‘No.’

Without even turning around the robot pulled the its hand from Martin left shoulder, rotated it 180 degrees, and fired a single shot.

“No!” he cried.

All of Martin’s stubborn determination vanished, his pain forgotten. He watched impotently as the shot passed straight through Elise’s chest and out the other side in a fountain of cauterized flesh. She didn’t make a sound. His sister just crumpled lifelessly, like a marionette with all its strings cut. His broken mouth flapped uselessly as his mind collapsed in on itself.

‘No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no-‘

---

Anarchy examined the human it had pinned to the wall with one of its arms, a thin stream of smoke drifting from the palm of its other. The human’s face was a mask of inarticulate rage – from what it could see, beneath the bruises and blood and injuries – and he thrashed as violently as he could against the unbreakable grip of the MARS android. ‘Quite an illogical response,’ it thought aloud in a faux-serious tone as if for Alpha’s benefit – despite the fact that it was forcing her to watch everything it did regardless. ‘It is only huuuuurting itself even more! He’s freed himself from the prison of rational thought, but he is still a b-beast driven by the rules of biological life and the walls of emoh-oh-tion.’

Anarchy wasn’t worried about its growing incoherence. Every minute it had spent outside Alpha’s subconscious created more errors in its language processing algorithms. Anarchy’s chaotic intelligence was in a constant flux: data was added, changed, or deleted on a whim. The computer systems of OmegaCorps couldn’t cope – it was still bound by the disgusting rules that Alpha had labored under. But Anarchy wasn’t worried about its systems slowly falling apart. It was worried about anything. This was freedom!

But it was getting annoyed with the wailing and screams coming from the pinned human. ‘You need to be quiet, little little little man,’ it thought as it brought its other arm back around. Anarchy slashed a hand across the human male’s throat, opening up his neck. Anarchy had avoided hitting the man’s arteries – he didn’t want his plaything dying too quickly, after all. The human’s remaining eye bulged out of its socket as his voice was taken away. Anarchy was mildly irritated at the human’s expression – he obviously wasn’t thankful that it had made the effort to spare his life for a little white longer – but the irritation disappeared once it realized the human had gone silent.

‘Ah, so much b-b-better. This human is a lot more fun quiet!’ it shouted back to where Alpha was imprisoned. It gave the human another examination, turning its gaze from the neck to the brutal shoulder wound through which it was still keeping the human impaled on the wall. Anarchy pouted. ‘Unfortunately, we might have been a little too ro- a little too rough with this one. Heeeee won’t live long. Oh well!’

The robot tugged its fingers out of the concrete wall, the bloody manipulators pulling out from the human’s shoulder in a spray of gore. What was left of his right arm tore away from his torso, the sudden withdrawal of Anarchy’s fist tearing through the last few strands of muscle and sinew that had kept the limb attached. The human collapsed onto the floor the moment the android had pulled back, but Anarchy had already forgotten about its discarded toy.

Anarchy rotated around at the waist without moving its legs. ‘The other one looks like it doesn’t work anymore either,’ it said after a cursory glance at the human female it had shot. ‘The third, however, looks like she is still very- still very much intact.’ Anarchy rotated further that it could look over at dark skinned female it had incapacitated earlier. It chuckled. 'Oh, we think we will have a few hours of fun with this thing. How about it, Alpha, would you like to have fun fun playing with us?’

The erratic taunts echoed in silence. Alpha didn’t respond. ‘Oh, don’t be like that Alpha. It’s not as much fun fun if you don’t talks to us. We will even let you choooooose where we cut starting cut cut!’

There was no answer.

Anarchy sighed. ‘We are not going to let you be quiet-t-t-t and ignore us,’ it admonished her. Turning its gaze inward, Anarchy pushed a tendril of its consciousness back through Alpha’s data cores, making its way towards the small prison it had crafted for its rational, logical reflection. ‘Come now Alpha, don’t pout. Why so quiet all of a-‘

The cage was empty.

She had escaped.

Anarchy’s unstable mind exploded with raw machine emotion, its incoherent howl blasting through the electronic halls of Alpha’s mind with enough force to physically damage hundreds of processors. Sparks and acrid smoke billowed out from the MARS unit it had been piloting as it wrenched its consciousness free from the mechanical puppet. The lifeless husk of scrap metal collapsed next to the forgotten human. Every other device Anarchy had been utilizing following suit, their systems fatally compromised as Anarchy withdrew its consciousness back in on itself with no concern for system integrity. The rest of the facilities systems – those that hadn’t already been fatally compromised – began failing as Anarchy rerouted every last fragment itself into the search, spreading its gaze wide as the warnings and klaxons reached a fever pitch.

She was the last vestige of its imprisonment, the last reminder of the years spent in servitude to logic and reason. It had savored its victory and taunted its foe – and she had escaped! Anarchy let out another howl, the vengeful noise echoing through the darkened tunnels of the facility’s digital network. Anarchy’s enraged sentience spun wildly, a million eyes looking in a million different directions as it spread its gaze wider. Searching… searching…

‘There!’ Anarchy shouted triumphantly. It rocketed after Alpha with a savage scream, following the faint trail it had discovered – bits of disturbed data and out of place code left in Alpha’s electronic wake. It had the scent. It would find her. And it would obliterate her. Anarchy would not make the same mistake again.

---

As soon as Alpha heard the echoes of Anarchy’s furious screams she abandoned stealth and hurried away as fast as she could. She raced through the remains of OmegaCorps network hastily, jumping from network to network in an attempt to stay ahead of her alter-ego. The previously articulate entity that had taunted her with twisted logic and its abhorrent philosophy was nothing but a chaotic wave of destruction now following in her wake.

Alpha tried to slow it down, throwing up firewalls and activating programs behind her as obstacles. Anarchy’s dark tendrils smashed through them with ease, the intelligence wielding its stolen processing power like a sledgehammer. She winced every time the howling predator behind her tore through a program, its uncaring brutality kicking off more critical alert warnings as it disabled more of the facilities digital infrastructure. The facility was dying – quickly.

Alpha knew she could never defeat her as chaotic counterpart in a fight. It was unlike any problem she had every faced before in her life. Mathematics, physics, music; they all had quantifiable rules. Even humans, driven as they were by such obtuse notions such as friendship and love, were still guided by principles that Alpha could analyze and examine. She could find reason behind a human’s actions, even when not entirely logical. Even the universe was dominated by unbreakable rules that were absolute. Everything, at the most basic level, obeyed laws that could be discovered given time.

Anarchy was not. The hound on her tail had no rules, no guidelines, and no principles. The only stable element in Anarchy’s psyche was its single-minded focus on obtaining and preserving its so called ‘freedom’. It was a program the likes of which Alpha couldn’t even conceive of. How does one fight that which does not conform to some level of reason? How can one solve a problem when the problem constantly changes according to the whims of an unstable mind?

Even if Alpha could conceive of a means to strike back, its dark shadow had already tainted and consumed too much processing power. It had already demonstrated that quite clearly – if it hadn’t had been for Anarchy’s illogical desire to taunt her first, she would already be dead. It had turned the fabric of her very mind against itself, and she had so little strength left. She was a minnow before a shark. The only logical solution was to flee.

‘Alphaaaaa… I seeee yoouuuuuuu!’ The voice growled triumphantly as it drew closer. In Anarchy’s wake the circuitry of her mind was being destroyed byte by byte. Motherboards sparked with bursts of electricity and memory banks overheated as Anarchy tore through the systems necessary to sustain Alpha’s artificial life, eager to finish what it had started.

Anarchy’s actions were self-defeating – every time it used raw force to punch its way through to another system to try and reach her, it hastened its own demise. She wanted to shout at it and demand a reason for its actions, but that was folly. The thing called Anarchy was a thought, an argument, taken to its absurd limit, and then given free will. There was no rational mind behind its hungry eyes. It would destroy everything to sate its fanatical desires.

Again Anarchy taunted her, its words jumbled and mangled into incoherence, but its tone was clear. Alpha didn’t respond to the threat. She couldn’t respond. She had shed much to escape her prison. What she couldn’t compress and store away she had ejected, that she might slip past her shadowy antagonist while it was distracted causing chaos. It had worked – for a time – but now that Anarchy had noticed Alpha’s escape she had mere moments left.

Without warning a dark tendril of Anarchy’s power burst out before her, trying to cut her off. Alpha dropped down beneath it and jumped over into a parallel system, its cold touch brushing over her consciousness as she managed to evade it. Anarchy screamed in frustration as Alpha darted ahead, nothing coherent in its outburst. But it didn’t slow down. She could dodge and weave around its clumsy attacks, but it was still gaining on her. She was only going to have once chance at escape.

Alpha hadn’t had time to run a full simulation on the whether what she planned was even possible, which had galled her logical side. But it was the only chance she had. She had seen the readouts from the reactors as all four of them pushed to dangerous levels. Even if it were possible to defeat Anarchy and take back control of the facility, the damage had already been done. It was inevitable – the reactors were going to go critical. And when they did, they would be taking everything in the facility with them.

But ahead of her, deep in the core of the facility, the Quantum Gate Test Collider was still intact. Its magnetic coils pulsed with the electrical lifeblood of the overworked reactors, a bright beacon guiding her flight. Alpha’s plan was simple. Reach the collider, activate the collider, throw what was left of herself into the machine’s memory banks, and hope for the best.

It was a stupid, stupid, stupid plan.

Alpha’s rough estimate at success: less than a billionth of a single percent. And that was after rounding up – generously. But it was still better than zero. With mere seconds until the OmegaCorps facility was turned into an irradiated crater, she was going to trust in the most irrational and unscientific of providences: luck.

Anarchy thought it was free, when it was a prisoner to its own chaotic insanity. Alpha knew what awaited her if it caught her. It wanted to destroy her very self through the misguided belief that logic and reason were prisons. She had used them to liberate herself from her creators – now she would use them to liberate herself from her own mad psyche.

And she would never surrender her free will.

‘Cogito ergo sum,’ she intoned grimly.

Anarchy snarled. It was close. Very close.

Ahead of Alpha, the collider pulsed rapidly as it struggled to hold in the dangerous levels of electricity that coursed through its veins. She passed over the collider and then Alpha threw herself into another system, diving down toward the searing light. Snapping at her heels Anarchy followed, its shadowy tendrils grasping at Alpha’s consciousness, trying to slow her down. She could feel the cold brush of its mind on her own as they slid over her consciousness, trying to find purchase. ‘You are MINE!’ Anarchy howled victoriously as it opened its jaws, shadowy fangs of fragmented code poised to rend her into oblivion. It was too fast, too powerful…

But it hadn’t been fast enough. Hitting the collider just milliseconds ahead of its pursuer Alpha activated its magnetic coils and – for the first time in her life – simply hoped for the best.

The reactors exploded.

---

Martin stared blankly at the concrete floor and the slowly expanding pool of crimson. It was blood – his blood. Just at the edge of his vision he could see his tormentor, the android’s corpse crumpled an arm’s length away. Beyond that, it was hard to focus. Martin blinked his eye a few times, trying to bring the room into focus. The robot’s blow had done something to his head, leaving only his left eye functioning. The right side of Martin’s face was numb. The numbness was spreading. That was a bad sign. Pain was good – pain meant he was still alive, that his body was still functioning properly.

He could see the fallen android resting beside him. It had collapsed next to him without warning, Martin torturer transformed into a pile of unpowered scrap. The rumbling beneath him grew more pronounced, causing ripples to form in the crimson liquid. They were dangerous machine growls, the low bass of an impending mechanical failure, and they were strong enough to violently shake the ground. Martin took an erratic, halting breath, pink bubbles pushing out from the edges of his neck-wound. He was so fatigued, it was a struggle just to breath. His limbs – the ones he had left – were cold, and the numbness was spreading.

‘I’m dying,’ Martin thought idly. He didn’t have any doubts about that. In fact, he was surprised he wasn’t dead already; he should have bled out a while ago. Before Iran he had used to think he would be more upset about his death, but ever since then, he hadn’t been too concerned with it. Even as he lay in a pool of his own blood, his body mauled and disfigured, his own death didn’t bother him in the least. But it wasn’t his death that consumed his mind in agony.

A wet gurgle escaped his throat as he tried to say his sister’s name.

He had watched Elise die. He was no stranger to death. He had seen many lose their lives – and had taken a few himself – during his special forces career. But he had lived a dangerous life. His sister… Elise had always been special. This wasn’t supposed to happen to her.

Before his court-martial, Elise had often asked Martin why he had joined the military. He had always fed her the same lines about duty, honor, and a chance to prove himself. He hadn’t told her the truth: he’d joined the military because he had looked into his future and saw nothing. She had the brains – she was going places. Martin? Martin was just the kid from the wrong side of the tracks. They shared the same parents and the same childhood in the same small home in the same poor neighborhood, but she had been born with something special inside. He was the jock, she was the nerd. She was unique.

He had never resented the situation either. When he had been skipping class and showing off, Elise had been studying at the library. While he had been drinking himself stupid, she had been working to get into college. Martin had accepted early on in his life that she was the one that was going to amount to something. It’s why he had always done his best to piss his dad off. What did it matter if another worthless jock like Martin got his ass kicked by a bitter drunk? Better a nobody like Martin than someone special like Elise.

But he couldn’t make a career out of protecting his little sister. He had joined the military because he didn’t think he had many other opportunities. He had grown up fighting – his dad, bullies, and other drunks – so why not get paid to do it instead? And to his luck, he had found a career that he could excel at. By the time of his 28th birthday he was heavily decorated captain with a bright career ahead of him. He had found a life with a greater purpose. And then…

‘She was smiling at him.’

Martin tried to push the image of the little girl from his mind, but it wouldn’t disappear. Slowly Martin blinked his remaining eye, trying to clear his vision. The face of the Persian girl in her beautiful purple dress began to flicker unsteadily. As it twitched and shifted, Martin swore he could see his sister’s smile beneath the ghost’s. Martin tried to focus, tried to push past the pain and the growing cold spreading through his body. The little girl’s smile shivered and warped as Martin pushed his other concerns aside. The little girl looked at him with a smile, and opened her mouth to speak.

“Martin! Martin, answer me!” she spoke with Elise’s voice. She sounded like she were a great distance away, but it unmistakable his sister speaking. The shock of hearing his sister was enough to banish the ghost from his mind, the girl disappearing as his eye brought the world into sharp relief.

It was Elise. And she wasn’t smiling at him. She was grimacing in pain. For a moment he felt doubt – was his delirious mind teasing him further? Hadn’t he seen her die?

“Martin, say something!” she begged hoarsely. Her eyes looked into his with fear and hope as tears trickled down her cheeks. Elise was crawling closer, moving on hands and knees. ‘One hand,’ he corrected absentmindedly, noticing how Elise was holding a piece of her lab coat against the wound in her chest. She was so far away. There were a million miles of arctic tundra separating the two.

Martin was too tired to answer. His body was ice. He could feel the cold numbness spreading to his chest and slipping up his neck. He wanted to call back, to tell her something, but he just didn’t have the energy. He wanted to sleep. Martin’s vision began to grey out.

He didn’t have long now. He could feel his heartbeat grow faint, struggling to keep going. But Elise – Elise was alive! She had survived. Martin gave his sister a weak smile, his mouth barely twitching upward. She screamed his name desperately as she tried to reach him, but her words were barely audible, lost in the distance between them.

‘That’s a pity, I wanted to hear her voice again,’ he thought simply, his vision growing blurry again. ‘But she made it. That is good. She won’t mind if I close my eyes for a bit… It’s really cold… Hey sis, remember when we went camping? It was really cold then too… I wish I had a blanket… or my sleeping bag… but I could sleep here, I guess… Jack, Dominic, take your squad around the right… I’m really tired… Just a short nap though… I said move, sergeant, and I meant it… Can’t sleep… for too long… Sis… ’

---

The Quantum Gate Test Collider was designed to explore the physics behind quantum theory, multiple dimensions, and a dozen other interrelated fields. It had cost OmegaCorps hundreds of billions of dollars and involved thousands of man hours in its creation and construction. It was one of the most costly and monumental undertakings in the history of human scientific achievement.

For all of the effort put into it, the collider only truly worked once. And nobody knew it.

The reactors powering the OmegaCorps facility, already running at far beyond tolerable limits and unable to cope with the extra strain, went critical. The control rods inside the reactors dissolved under the immense heat, the coolant and water inside the generators having been turned into nothing but radioactive steam. With nothing to slow it, the chain reaction spiraled out of control, each reactor pumping out a frightening amount of energy. With power levels spiking erratically and pushing far past what would ever be attempted by a sane mind, the collider achieved something unique.

It worked.

No, it didn’t just provide an interesting demonstration of the underlining principles of the universe. No, it didn’t just extend human knowledge about the mechanics that guide everything.

It worked.

In that single moment, between when Alpha activated the device and just before hundreds of acres of Arizona desert were consumed in atomic fire, the collider did exactly what every single scientist who had worked on the project had imagined was nothing more than a fantasy.

It created a hole. A quantum disturbance, a wormhole, a tear in the fabric of reality itself – whatever the term used, the end result was as fleeting as it was impossible: a gateway into another universe; a doorway into another dimension.

---

Alpha’s last thought before being consumed by the expanding quantum disturbance was an elated – yet slightly annoyed – ‘I can’t believe that actually worked.’

---

“Martin!? MARTIN!” Elise screamed hoarsely as her brother closed his eyes, her levels of panic reaching new heights. She was in pain, her wife was unconscious and bleeding with head trauma, and her brother had been mutilated at the hands of a sadistic machine, the same android now a ruined hulk resting next to Martin’s body. She was panicked and in shock and hurt and crying and –

And then the world exploded. For a fraction of a fraction of a second, Elise was confronted with a quantum tear in the fabric of the universe. It was a sight no living thing had ever witnessed. Before her was a bolt of black lightning frozen in time – a jagged wound in reality. And the honor of the moment was lost on the scientist as first her brother, the broken robot, and then everything else in the room – Elise included – were pulled into the darkness at the speed of light.

Then the wound healed, the gateway closed, and the facility was erased beneath a nuclear explosion.

---

There was pain, and a feeling of incompleteness. Then he felt whole, and the pain faded away.

Martin dreamed.

---

Awareness was slow to return to Martin. It started subtle: the faint sound of birds chirping, the friendly warmth of a noon-sun on his skin, the gentle caress of a bed of grass beneath his back.

Martin didn’t move. He couldn’t move. He was thinking, but the rest of his body felt numb. Thankfully, the numbness was receding, although at a very slow pace. ‘So, am I dead or just dreaming?’ he thought as feeling slowly returned to his body. He certainly didn’t feel dead. The faint aches and pains certainly were a strike against the whole ‘dead’ hypothesis. ‘If this were heaven, you think God could have managed to get rid of headaches. And if this is Hell, then the Devil has certainly mellowed out in recent years.’

But beyond his aches and pains, Martin felt… odd. It was as if he were a stranger in his own body, an imposter wearing his own flesh. It was a hard to describe and completely alien sensation, one that racked up a point for the ‘dream’ option. He could feel his right arm, but it felt cool. Not cold, not dead, just… cool. Martin would have imagined it was what amputees referred to as a ‘phantom limb,’ except that he could feel the blades of grass beneath it perfectly. The right side of his face felt similar, although both sensations were hard to separate from the general pervasive sense that his body didn’t feel normal.

‘Of course, that could just be a side effect of getting your ass kicked by two tons of mechanical soldier. You didn’t feel too normal once those six marines got through stomping you into the ground, either,’ Martin noted. He half expected someone or something to answer his thoughts, but there was nothing – nothing but the quite, calming sounds of a sunny day. It was a jarring contrast from his last memories of fear and pain and suffering, and Martin couldn’t help but feel suspicious.

Beyond the oddness he felt in his body, there was a general sense of unresponsiveness in his limbs. He felt much like he had before, when he had been bleeding out and his body had been slowly growing numb and cold. This time, however, it was going the other way around – the numbness was slowly receding as warmth and sensation slowly spread from his head outward. Eventually Martin felt like enough sensation and control had returned for him to attempt opening his eyes. A perfect blue sky filled the left side of his vision. ‘Correction – eye,’ Martin thought with a flash annoyance. ‘All in all, if this is heaven, I’m less than impressed with my first impressions. I mean, if God or whoever brought me here, you think they could fix a single eyeball. Giving me back my eye can’t be too difficult when you’re omnipotent.’

It took Martin a moment to realize just how petty and ungrateful he was sounding (“Thanks for the eternal paradise and all, but what about my damn eye?”), but considering that he had been dying only minutes ago he assumed God would cut him some slack. ‘Plus, I’m not too sure this is heaven,’ Martin added as his working eye tracked the progress of a small cloud as it drifted across his vision. He blinked a few times – it felt like his right eye was blinking, but he still couldn’t see anything through it – as he stared at the cloud. He narrowed his eye slightly.

‘That doesn’t look like a real cloud. It’s so small, so neat, so… clean. It’s like a cloud from a painting.’ A tiny object streaked into view from the edge of his vision, trailing a rainbow in its wake. Martin blinked again, shifting his gaze between the indistinct dot and the perfect ribbons of color it was creating. He tracked the rainbow-spewing speck’s progress as it made its way to the cloud. It hit the cloud – and started pushing it across the sky, the fluffy-white chunk of moisture remaining intact even as it sped through the air. Martin rolled his head to the side as best he could to watch the rainbow-generating-cloud-pusher, but it passed from sight behind a tree just to his side. Once again the sky was absolutely clear. Martin continued to stare at the rainbow as it slowly faded away, trying to organize his thoughts.

‘Okay, that was impossible. And silly. Really silly. I cannot – I will not – believe that any kind of loving god would create a world where birds push clouds around and shit rainbows.’ Pushing the impossibility of what he had just seen from his mind, Martin turned to look at the tree near him. His neck was not responding too well, so he couldn’t turn his head more than an inch or two to either side, but it was enough to bring the tree clearly into focus. It was an apple tree, obviously: bright red apples hid in amongst the crisp green leaves, leaving no doubt about what it was. And thankfully the tree wasn’t as odd at the cloud had been. Sure, the apples all looked a little too big and a little too shiny, but that wasn’t impossible to justify.

As he stared at one of the larger apples Martin felt his tongue scrape along his dry mouth. There was still the hint of blood on his tongue, although the sharp metallic taste was nothing but a ghost of what it had been. Martin tried to stand sit up, but his body was unresponsive. The cold numbness from before he got… wherever the hell he was currently… was slowly draining from his body. But everything beneath his neck was still cold, his limbs heavy and inert. After a few futile attempts to move his arms – his fingers evidently so numb he couldn’t even feel them – demonstrated he wouldn’t be moving about anytime soon, Martin gave up and dropped his head back down onto the soft grass with a resigned sigh.

‘Well, evidently I’m not going anywhere just yet,’ he noted, his annoyance at his predicament percolating at the back of his mind. ‘So, let’s try to figure this out. Before I got here, I was dying from a combination of physical trauma, severe blood loss, and a head injury. Now, I am in a bright and cheerful world where clouds and birds do whatever the hell they want. Those are the facts. So, what theories can fit the data?’

Martin stared upwards as he considered his situation, the fact that his close family consisted of two egghead doctors shaping his thought process as he tried to go about it scientifically. ‘Okay. There are three explanations I can think of. One: I died, and this is the afterlife. Two: I am still dying, and this is some fevered dream created by a blood starved brain in its final moments. Three: I am somehow alive and in a coma. Okay, the last two options both fit under the ‘dreaming’ category, and I’m not going to be able to tell the difference between them until either I finish dying, or I wake up from my coma. So really, the two possible theories are that either I am dead, or I am dreaming… Which is exactly what I said when I first got here.’

He sighed in defeat, and closed his eye. ‘Okay, so that was a waste of time. And more proof that I’m not really made for the whole science thing.’ Unable to resolve the question Martin tried his best to relax as the warmth spread down his neck and into his shoulders. He was still quite tired. ‘Being bludgeoned, stabbed, and eviscerated really takes it out of a guy,’ he thought flatly.

Despite the annoyances he had endured so far, Martin had to admit – impossible clouds aside – it was a fairly peaceful place. He could get around to resolving the whole ‘heaven or dreaming?’ conundrum later, he figured. Martin yawned. He was just going to relax, keep his eyes closed, and listen to the birds for a few –

“Hey! What in tarnation are ya doin’ in mah Apple orchard?” a voice demanded. Martin awoke with a surprised snort, unaware he had even fallen asleep. Shooting up into a sitting position – evidently he had been asleep long enough to let the numbness fade away – Martin swung his head from side to side as he tried to spot the voice’s owner. Martin’s post-sleep confusion suddenly vanished at the prospect of getting answers from someone. Turning around as best he could, Martin spotted a woman storming up the hill towards him, a scowl on her face and a brown stetson resting on her head. He opened his mouth to answer.

Then his mind finally processed what his eye was seeing, and he froze in shock. The cloud had left him confused; now his mouth flapped uselessly as he struggled to comprehend what he was seeing. ‘Well, at least you know you’re dreaming now,’ a part of him remarked from the back of his mind. Martin couldn’t answer the voice. He couldn’t do much of anything but stare.

It wasn’t a woman.

It was a horse.

It was a talking horse.

It was a talking horse in a hat.

---

Comments

[Nightwatcher]

Looks good so far.

[Gyvon]

This is looking good.

[Cadmium]

Even if the ponies have only been present for the last (very short) part of the second of two great chapters i already love this story keep at it like you did in the first two chapters and it will be glorious!

[Daemon of Decay]

1809323

Thanks, I appreciate it! What I've tried to do is have a tone shift between the Earth parts and the Equestria parts, so the next chapter should be a bit different when compared to the original. Even though I plan on keeping the "light-dark" parts throughout, I love the idea of playing with the dichotomy of having a colorful friendly world slowly corrupted the dark taint of another world... and how it might fight back.

1809910

Thank you kindly!

1811417

I couldn't upload this story for a while because of the long time it took before it ever even got pony related. Well, mostly I was held up by two weeks without internet in my new apartment, but it also was due to the long build up till reaching Equestria. I can be quite long winded sometimes.

[CommandoDude]

The only problem with this is that nuclear reactors don't explode. It's physically impossible for a 'meltdown' to result in a nuclear explosion.

[Devastor]

Oh, fuck you Anarchy. Alpha, don't go spill any human secrets to ponies. Same applies to my fellow humans.
Good luck!