Architect (Last Resistance Book 3), page 31
“Good,” I say. Maybe in its last moments it will feel a small fraction of the fear it’s put us all through. I hope so.
The door opens, admitting Samuel. He looks harried, a little wild-eyed. Not at all himself.
“Sam—” I start to say when he pulls an EMP-G from behind his back and levels it at Glasgow.
Twenty-Two
I shove into Samuel’s arm, throwing off his aim. Instead the EMP-G shot kills a localized spot of screens that are part of the console. “Samuel! What are you doing?”
What he’s doing is attempting to wrestle past me to fire at Glasgow again. The machine, if it’s aware of the danger to itself, doesn’t bother to do anything, not turning its physical analog to deal with the threat.
“Get him out of here,” Jo says in a darkly serious voice.
I’m still fighting with Samuel when Camus comes up behind us and overpowers my confused friend, tying his arms behind him.
“You don’t understand,” Samuel says desperately, still flailing, “If the higher echelon is gone, Ximena will die. All those people you saw in Portland will die. The bunker they’re in is deep underground and hermetically sealed. They won’t last without the higher echelon cycling clean water and air to them.”
“Glasgow can open it,” I say, glancing back at the machine. “Right?”
“A concern for another time,” Jo grounds out through clenched teeth. I’ve never seen her so tense. Until now, I wasn’t sure she ever broke from her well-mannered persona.
“You don’t know what security precautions the higher echelon has taken,” Samuel insists. “You don’t know for sure destroying the higher echelon won’t initiate a kill switch of some kind.”
“Did you see this bunker?” I ask him.
He opens his mouth then shuts it. I’ll take that as a no.
“It could be a lie,” I say. “The higher echelon lies. Remember everything it told Prim to get her to turn on the resistance? To say nothing of the woman who attacked McKinley directly, who attacked me. I know you care about Ximena, and I promise, I will do everything to help you find her after this is over, but right now you aren’t helping anyone.”
His resistance lasts only a few seconds more before he lets his head hang, his body slackening in Camus’s grip as his shoulders begin to shake with weak sobs. “I’m so confused, Rhon.”
I don’t hesitate before throwing my arms around him, clutching him to me tightly. Camus hesitantly releases him to me and steps back, letting us have a moment of privacy. “What really happened in Portland?” I touch Samuel’s cheek gently, turning his face to mine. “What did the higher echelon do to you?”
“Rhona,” Jo says insistently.
Sanjay also pipes over our private comm at the same time, “We’ve got company! They’re coming your—” and cuts off.
Samuel says, “I woke up in a capsule, like the one I cloned you in. I thought maybe I was… but I’m not, Rhon. I swear I’m still me.” He sounds scared.
“I believe you,” I say.
“But I keep having these intrusive thoughts. Because would I even know if I wasn’t me anymore? Or what if the higher echelon had me cloned? What kind of damage could I be made to do?”
“There’s one way we could test your theory.” I snatch the EMP-G from him and lay it against his head. This worked for me, and it won’t do him any harm, one way or another. “If you are a clone or were implanted with a device capable of transferring your memories to a cloned body, this should make those intrusive thoughts quiet. Okay?”
He hesitates, but ultimately nods. “Okay,” he says in small voice.
I pull the trigger.
But it’s clear from his unchanged expression that the EMP-G has no effect on him. There’s no device in Samuel’s head. He’s not a clone, not being controlled remotely by the higher echelon, nor is it likely that he’s been cloned. But everything that’s happened has changed him as much as it has me. The only difference is that I had a short reprieve through the loss of some of my memories. And I have Camus. Samuel’s had to live through it all. Bear it all. Alone.
Samuel inhales shakily. “I guess that solves that mystery. I wish I’d thought to try that sooner.”
“Sit down,” I tell him, easing him into a nearby office chair at one of the consoles. “Take a breath. Reset.” To Camus and the others in the room, I say, “Go help Sanjay and Benji. Buy us time if you can.”
“Are you sure you’ll be all right here?” Camus asks me privately, sliding his gaze toward Samuel.
“At the risk of jinxing this whole thing, what more could go wrong?” I give him a weak smile.
“I’ll be back as soon as I’m sure the perimeter’s holding,” he promises, and then he’s gone.
I join Jo at the console. “Okay. Damage report? How’s the fight going?”
She looks over at me with a look so desolate I feel it like a punch in the gut.
“What is it?”
“Glasgow’s gone,” she whispers, and I want to throw up. If Glasgow’s gone— “But so is the higher echelon,” she adds. “They wiped each other out. Glasgow must have understood he couldn’t overtake the higher echelon; this was his solution.”
“That’s it?” My head is spinning. The higher echelon is just— gone? It happened so fast. I wasn’t even watching. All the times I imagined our victory, I envisioned some huge explosive battle as humanity fought back against annihilation. But reality isn’t like a Hollywood picture. Sometimes the biggest moments end up being the quietest. “Then we’ve won?”
“No,” Jo says. “The machines are still fulfilling their last commands. Only now there is nothing to control or pull them back.”
“But this console,” I begin.
“—was meant for artificial life, not a human operator. Machines are spread across the face of the earth. They’re like deadly little mines. Even as we try to rebuild we’ll be running up against them. To say nothing of the technology they could have helped us restore. It was all for nothing. The fighting. The death. We haven’t won. We’ve only reset the game board.” She drags a hand through her ragged blond hair. “None of it mattered.”
“I don’t accept that. There has to be something we can do.” I test my comm, but the signal is gone. She’s right. The machines no longer have a master. But they are still coming.
Jo leans her back against the console. “Maybe your friend here was right. Maybe we should have just accepted elimination and let the higher echelon help us evolve. Maybe…”
“Stop,” I bark. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. That’s not helping.”
But she’s not listening. She’s gone over to Glasgow’s physical analog now, its large form frozen in a stoic posture. She pats the equivalent of his arm in a gesture that is all love and appreciation as if to say, thank you for trying.
My mind races, even as my ears pick up the sound of more trouble outside. The console is still active. We no longer have a machine operator, and a human operator can’t deal with a system so complex. But what about something in between? Someone who isn’t entirely human and isn’t entirely machine either.
“What about me?” I blurt. “My implant allowed me to sync to the machines out there via a signal. A direct port here could be less stressful.”
“How would we even do that?” Jo asks. “Your device is internal.”
Good point. Surgery isn’t exactly in the cards right now. “I don’t know,” I admit, and then turn to the one person I’ve always relied on for hope. “Samuel? Thoughts?”
“There might be a way to use those neural links,” he says after a moment’s thought. The links in question look like metal crowns jutting from the wall. I assumed they were used to connect to ported machines wirelessly. “But it’s difficult to know what it will do to you. Your device wasn’t—”
Ulrich bursts back inside the room. “The machines are gaining. We are falling back,” he says, before taking in the sight of me and Jo. “What is happening?”
“Glasgow succeeded in destroying the higher echelon but was in turn destroyed. Now the machines are rudderless. Samuel,” I turn back, prompting my friend to finish his thought.
“I’m not sure your device could withstand,” he says, “in its current iteration.”
In other words, Samuel thinks the connection will kill me.
But if I do nothing, we’ll all die here anyway. Maybe what remains of the human race will be able to fight back unaided, but how many people will lose their lives battling the machines? If I can save even a few lives, I have to try. Not because it’s what I should do, but because it’s what I want to do. I want to help.
I drag a stool over and station myself beneath the neural link.
“Wait!” Samuel blurts as my hands come up to pull it down. “You might not be able to come out without losing control over the machines. And that’s if the initial connection itself doesn’t kill you outright.” He’s standing now, pacing. Trying to work out a solution to this impossible puzzle.
“In a worst-case scenario, wouldn’t we be able to shut the system off and pull her out?” Jo asks.
Samuel shakes his head. “I don’t think it’ll work that way. From what you’ve told me, brief encounters with the higher echelon’s signal caused you to go blind, losing other senses. Even if you can hold onto your mind, you’ll be trapped in there with the machines.”
“Do you see another alternative?” I ask him, and my heart sinks as he shakes his head.
“You and your friends have done enough,” Jo cuts in. “You could still find a way out of this mess.”
“I think we both know that window’s closed.”
She leans back against the console, hands positioned as if for prayer in front of her lips. “Yes,” she murmurs. “I suppose it has.”
I place my hands on both sides of the neural link, feeling the shape of my fear growing. “Camus. I need to say goodbye to Camus.”
“I’ll get him,” Ulrich says.
“He may not be as understanding,” Jo points out.
“I know.”
By the time Camus returns, the machines are essentially at our front door. We’re losing, and the forces outside have been completely overwhelmed. He tells me this in a rush before catching sight of the setup next to the neural link.
“What’s going on?” he asks. “I assume Glasgow was unsuccessful.”
I quickly catch him up on what’s happened and our new plan of attack. When he wants to know the risks, I’m honest with him. He deserves that much. He didn’t get it last time.
“So you see, the device used to install my memories is similar to the tech the higher echelon was created with. That’s why Samuel and I think this will work. If anything, I’m a form of artificial intelligence too, created in a lab.”
Camus looks horrified. “You’re also my wife,” he says forcefully. “And to be perfectly honest, I don’t want you to do this. I know that’s selfish, but…”
“It’s not selfish to want to protect those you love,” I tell him, trying to hold onto this memory of him holding me now. What his arms feel like, the warmth of his chest. His eyes staring down at me, dark in the grim light. I feel like I’m dying all over again. “But this is the right thing to do.”
“No one will ever know you even did it,” Camus says. He looks at Jo for confirmation. “If she’s successful at shutting down the machines, who will know?”
“I won’t just be shutting them down,” I cut in. “I’ll be controlling them. We can use them to rebuild, Camus. It will save us years and a lot of lives.”
“Years,” he murmurs. “I already lost you once—twice, I thought. Is that what you want?”
“I don’t want to leave you,” I say, my voice blocked almost entirely by tears. “I’ve never wanted that. And I don’t need this to make sense of my life. I’m not doing it because it’s my purpose. I’m doing it because I’m the only one who can right now. I’m not special. I’ve never been special. I’m the right person in the right place at the right time. That’s all.”
“You’re wrong about one thing,” Camus says. “You’ve always been special to me.”
Jo pulls a comm away from her ear. Whatever she just heard, it’s bad. “If we’re doing this, it should happen now.”
“This has to stay secret,” I tell Camus. “No one can know about this facility or about what I’m doing. They’ll try to use it for their own purposes. I’m a stopgap, nothing more. I’ll help us transition, and then…”
“Then you’ll come back to me,” Camus says, tracing my wet cheek.
“Yes. Always.” It’s not a lie. If I can come back from this, return to him, I will.
I take a seat, but just as I’m about to go under, Samuel steps forward.
“Wait.” I fear he’s going to demolish the last of my resolve by raising more concerns. It was hard enough saying goodbye to Camus; I don’t know if I can push Samuel away too. “I think there might be one more way I can help you.”
“How?”
“I didn’t understand why the higher echelon was so afraid before, but now I get it. This is why it never wanted you dead, why it keeps cloning you. You and it are the same in many ways. But different in one key fact: your compassion and your resilience.”
Samuel does something to the neural link, makes some adjustment. “There,” he says after a moment.
“What did you do?”
“There may be a chance now—however small—that you’ll stay you in there. And your implant won’t, you know, implode.”
“How’d you manage that?”
“Respectfully, Rhon,” he says with a weak smile, “You barely passed high school physics and cheated off me throughout chemistry. I don’t think I could explain it to you.”
“Rude,” I say with a mangled laugh. “But probably true.” I kiss him on the cheek, gripping his neck so that our heads remain bent together. “Long and Lewis, together at the end, just like the beginning, huh?”
“Yeah,” he answers weakly. His voice is full of tears. “Hey, Rhon? When you’re in there, could you…”
“I’ll look for the bunker,” I say, already knowing what he’s struggling to ask. For the favor he thinks he doesn’t deserve. “Of course, I will. I’ll find Ximena. I promise.”
Our heads move together with his nod of acknowledgement. “I’m sorry,” he adds. “For making such a mess of everything.”
But before I can offer him my forgiveness in words, I begin to feel a charge inside my head. He’s already turned on the neural link. Bless him, because I don’t know if I could have honestly given the command with him, Camus, and Ulrich all watching me. My friends, my husband.
The last goodbye dies on my lips.
Then, there are only machines.
The network feels like a vast chasm. Nothing has shape, only feeling. I move through it like a ghost possessing a person, taking control of the hundreds of thousands of elements individually and then all at once.
“Rhona?” I hear Camus, as if from a great distance. “Can you hear me?”
“I hear you,” I say, but it’s an effort. “Is it working? It feels like it’s working.”
I can see what I can only describe as the detritus leftover from the higher echelon and the devastation remaining from its drag-out fight with Glasgow, whole swaths of code broken, shattered. Servers shut down. If Glasgow had been successful, we probably could have used him to put the world back in order I think. Jo was right about that. Maybe one day I’ll get to tell her.
“I love you,” comes another whisper from the real world, but already that world feels like the dream. This is the only one that has ever been real.
As my physical body fades from my consciousness, I become the monster I’ve been fighting all my life. I become the machine.
And I begin to make things right.
EPILOGUE
CAMUS
ONE MONTH LATER
She doesn’t speak to him anymore. Occasionally she makes sounds, a quiet sigh as he passes a wet cloth across her face, removing the dirt and sweat. Sometimes it sounds like pleasure and other times fear, like the part of his wife that is still in there knows she is trapped.
Does Rhona regret her decision? There is no way to ask her now. He takes comfort only in the fact that this was her choice, made out of a genuine desire to help the world, even though they may never know the full extent of her sacrifice. In the end, Rhona Long did as she promised she would. She fought for them. Not merely those who loved her, but those who hated her too.
“I’m proud of you,” Camus whispers. He’s not sure she can still hear him, but he wants her to know. Maybe it’s more important for him to speak the words than for her to hear them. “I love you and I’m so proud. But,” he can’t help but adding, “I miss you terribly.”
In his dreams now, she is absent. Sometimes he hears her voice and turns but he cannot look at her directly, like trying to stare at the sun. His eyelids hang closed and trying to open them only wakes him. Instead, he must settle for reaching out into the dark, feeling for her outstretched hand. An arm. Anything.
“Listen,” she says, but he never hears what she wants to say next. There is only the sound of a heart steadily beating, and he doesn’t know if it’s his or hers.
Most days he spends his hours in the facility, splitting his time between caring for Rhona’s physical needs and repairing parts of the crumbling building. She was able to use the machines to drive the New Soviets away and now they haven’t returned, too occupied fighting over the vacancy left by the machines to return.
Jo teased him, claiming he was nesting by making this place cozier, and he didn’t correct her. If he cannot take Rhona from here, then he will make this a home for her. For them both.
He’s in the middle of restoring an antique desk where he can write, so he can begin the long process of putting everything that has happened into words, when a soft alarm begins going off. At first he fears it might be the pressure gauge Samuel surgically installed in Rhona’s brain after she went under to monitor swelling and relieve any pressure that accumulates from the effects of the implant. Rhona kept her word, in the end. She found the bunker where Ximena and the others were being kept, and before Samuel left to rescue them, he instructed Camus in how to read the diagnostic equipment.
