Inferno (The Glitch Book 2), page 6
“Ah, don’t beat yourself up doctor,” said Holland. “They were just tinnies.”
“Tinnie?” said Mike.
Reed frowned. “It’s what he calls those that are affected by the AI.”
It’s as good a name as any other, thought Mike.
“So what’s the plan?” Mike posed the question to both of them, but they avoided his gaze.
“From the radio reports we have been getting,” said Reed. “I calculated an infection rate, and it’s not good… As you have confirmed, the mode of transmission is a mere touch. Imagine a self aware flu virus, that could completely take over the hosts cognitive abilities to help spread itself… and from what you have told us, to grow stronger by joining with others of its type. If a person gets infected by the flu the body creates antibodies, that will fight off that virus in the future, but the body has no defense against what this is.”
“But it’s still a machine. There must be ways to stop it?” said Mike.
“That’s what I like, fighting talk!” said Holland, who spilled some of his drink in raising it.
Mike ignored the colonel keeping his eyes on Reed.
“We’re dealing with a technology… a weapon that is completely new. It works at the nano scale Mike. Yes, it’s a machine, but one that could be impossible to completely flush from the world. It would be like trying to rid the planet of all the insect life…”
He briefly looked away. Not the news he was wanting to hear. “If we can’t completely destroy it, then we need to find ways to at least survive it. What about electricity, would that short it out or something?”
She nodded. “I have been thinking about EMP pulses, but the nuclear explosion would have created a massive pulse, and that obviously didn’t kill it…”
Mike smiled. “You’re telling me that you and Daryl havn’t already been thinking of something to fight back with?”
“Well… yes, but that’s if we have time, and we don’t have what we need here. Perhaps elsewhere in the town…” Her eyes flicked to the man behind the desk.
“And there’s the rub,” said Holland. “If the Tinnies touch us, our brain gets fried and we become one of them. Kind of makes it hard to go shopping. So until then, we wait it out. This station has plenty weapons, ammo—” He pulled a brand new bottle from the drawer. “— And sustenance to last months.”
*****
“This is some crazy jacked up shit,” said Elias. The western horizon was multiple shades of pink and mauves, heralding the coming night.
Travis was in the same position near the outside door, but was now seated, with his back up against the small wall below where there used to be a glass window.
“So you’re like a hologram, that only I can see…”
“Exactly.”
“But your… brain… what makes you, you… is also inside me somewhere…”
“Yup.”
“And I can’t get you out of me, unless you want to leave.”
“Yes. And I will leave once we make it to my father.”
“And if I don’t take you to your father, then you won’t leave…”
“You’re missing the bigger picture—”
“Oh I’m sorry, Mr. artificial intelligence, who didn’t ask permission to be swilling around my body, and is holding me hostage, what’s this picture I’m missing?”
“I told you the reason for all of this. The AI needs to bring as much of itself back together as it can. Every second we sit here, out there, somewhere a microscopic sized piece of the machine the AI created is linking up with another piece, and gaining more computing power, to outsmart us… I mean humans. Once it hits thirty-four percent of its former mass, it will grow exponentially… and it’s game over.”
They both sat in silence, the shadows growing longer. “And if I take you to your father, then you can stop it?”
Travis sighed. “Yes…”
“You know where he is?”
“With an eighty-five point five percent certainty yes.”
“That sounds to me like you don’t know where he is.”
Travis sighed again.
“Try and see it from my point of view. You want me to get in my truck, with you, my invisible friend, and travel to who knows where, in the dark. To someone else watching this situation, they might just see a crazy old fool getting lost.”
“You’re no fool Elias. I’ve seen y—” Travis realized he had made a mistake by the expression on Elias’s face.
“You better keep your filthy computer bits out of my past. If I’m going to help you, and I’m not saying I will, but if I do, then we gotta have an agreement, that you don’t go meddling with my memories. That shit belongs to me. We got a compact?” Elias held out his hand, then frowned and pulled it back, but Travis crawled forward and held his arm out, extending his fingers. “What’s the point of that, if you ain’t real?”
“Just try it and see…”
Elias stretched his hand out again… and felt the fingertips of the computer ghost kid. He jumped back in his chair. “Woah! Just when I thought this shit couldn’t get any weirder. How can I feel you?”
“Because to your brain I am real, so you can feel me.” He nodded towards his hand which was still waiting. Elias crept his own forward and this time held the hand of the strange young man.
Travis smiled. “We have a compact.”
CHAPTER NINE
Elias placed a twelve gauge and an M4 assault rifle into one of three backpacks he had ready packed. The rifle was a weapon he got comfortable with during his time in the service and managed to procure on the black market after he returned home. He always figured that if shit ever went sideways on a global scale he would need one again, and now was just one of those times. The rest of the pack was already filled with ammo for them and his 911 and Glock. For some reason he kept thinking the young man was going to scold him for taking so much, but instead Travis just stood at the window in the living room looking out into the night and the few sparkling lights of other farms, miles in the distance.
“So am I looking out of the window or are you?” said Elias, momentarily being confused by the possibilities.
“I’m not looking out of this window. I’m thinking, and your mind knows that and creates this image of me doing what you think—”
Elias raised his hand. “Okay, from now on we need to have an agreement—”
“Another compact?”
“Don’t have to be that, but whatever you want. All I’m saying is, if I ask you something, you have to use that advanced computer brain of yours to give me the simplest answer?”
“Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler…”
“Err… yeah, that.”
“I paraphrased Einstein.” The young man continued looking into the darkness.
Elias looked at the other two packs, each containing various supplies for being on the road. Food, water, even some MRE’s although he thought the chances of having to require their use was slim. The worlds not going to run out of food for a long time yet, no matter how bad things get. He looked at Travis. “You ready?”
“Yes. We should leave.”
After packing the bags into the five seater truck, and placing extra fuel and a few other things in the bed at the back, Elias got in the driver’s seat and fired up the engine, then looked in the rear of the cabin to make sure Brillo was laying down. He then looked across to his virtual friend in the passenger seat and frowned. Putting the truck in drive they pulled out of his yard and onto the small track, which was sodden from light rain. It wasn’t long before they were on a tarmacked two lane road heading into the nearby town. The surrounding countryside felt darker than usual thought Elias, but he put that down to his imagination. He knew from experience the mind can play tricks on you, and his was currently kidnaped by… something, so who knows what was real and what wasn’t. He sighed in relief on seeing the lights of his destination keeping the night at bay, and pulled onto the puddle soaked forecourt of Mel’s gas station and convenience store.
He stopped alongside two pumps that belonged in a different era. “Mel’s always been into computers I’m sure he’ll have what you want.”
Travis looked at the ice dispensers and beer commercials that were plastered across the glass door entrance. “It doesn’t look open.”
“He closed an hour ago, but he lives around back. Just go…” Elias scoffed. “Ha, yeah, you can’t do that, can you.”
“No.”
“So much for us being a team when I’m doing all the legwork.”
Travis continued looking towards the store. “When you were in Afghanistan, you relied upon a command structure that would relay information to you. Think of me in the same way.”
“Right…” Elias pushed open the driver’s door and stepped out, avoiding the large puddle directly beneath him. The night felt warm, which was wrong for the time of year. He walked around the side of the building, the single story home of his long time friend Mel coming into view. Light was seeping through Mel’s living room window as was usual for the time of night. He did love his early evening game shows.
Elias walked onto the deck, which surrounded the front and side of the building and up to the screen door, pulling it back and knocking on the other. “Mel, It’s Elias.” Silence came back at him from the other side, which was odd. He would usually hear the jingles and canned laughter from the TV by now.
“Something’s—”
Elias’s heart skipped a few beats on realizing Travis was standing a few inches to his right. “Jesus, son! You can’t be doing that!”
Travis looked guilty. “Oh, sorry… but something’s wrong here.”
Elias looked slowly back to the inner door, not really understanding how the computerized kid would know that. “Err… yeah I was thinking the same.” He knocked harder. “Mel, you in the crapper?” He looked back to Travis and went to talk, but there was only empty space there.
“We… we should leave,” said Travis, now being ten or so feet behind Elias, standing on the mud and grass pathway.
Elias frowned. “Why should we leave? Mel’s never left this place in the twenty or so years—” A noise came from within the wooden building. “Ah, come on Mel, I got places I need to be!”
“I really think we should—”
A crash of glass emanated from in Mel’s home, and Elias unholstered his 911 and had it pointing at the door in about a second. Thoughts of home intrusion flashed through his mind. The end of the world can make some folks crazy.
“I… don’t think it’s an intruder…”
Elias frowned again at the young man poaching his thoughts, then turned to his right, to where the deck continued. He crept forward, keeping to the ends of the boards to make sure he kept creaking to a minimum, and looked in a window which gave him a view of the first bedroom. A simple room with a double bed, a closet for clothes and a drawer unit with pictures of Mel’s deceased wife on, was dark, only being lit from the light from the hallway, and that in turn from the light from the living room. He strained his eyes to see into the shadows which were flickering within a pale blue light.
“Elias… come on, we can get it somewhere else.” Travis’s voice was just behind him, not that distance meant anything.
Brillo started barking in the distance.
“If something’s happened to Mel, I need to know… There… there he is!,” he replied. A hunched over figure moved amongst the gloom in the hallway, moving past the bedroom door. Elias knocked on the glass. “Mel!” He then looked back to Travis who was still behind him. “See. He just didn’t hear me.” Travis’s eyes grew wide, causing Elias to swing his view back to the window. “What… the…”
A balding man, with clothes which hung from his couch potato physique was looking back at Elias from the doorway, but what shocked him was the blue fire which was alive in the center of his old friend’s eyes.
Mel slumbered forward into the room, his head lowered so much his chin was almost on his sunken chest, but somehow his eyes remained fixed on the man on the other side of the window. Equally Elias couldn’t remove his own gaze from the thing walking through the bedroom towards him. Tomorrow night was poker night. Due to winning for the past two months, he even thought he would let Mel win a few hands for once.
Eyes which were a sea of cobalt molten fire looked into Elias’s own, just half an inch of glass between them. He started to feel light-headed, his thoughts becoming jumbled and confused, and staggered back, almost falling as he stepped from the deck, back onto the mud. Mel kept watching from the window.
“I… I don’t feel so good,” said Elias.
“He’s scanning your mind… I’m doing what I can to stop him, but I can’t keep him out for much… longer… we have to leave!” Travis spoke to Elias without appearing, the words cutting through Elias’s chaotic thoughts. Elias turned and pushed his legs towards the truck, when the sound of glass breaking echoed out into the night. He flicked his head back towards the bedroom window, but it was whole still. Mel or whatever he had become wasn’t there either but he didn’t care, he just needed his brain to function correctly again. He staggered forward past the side of the store, then stopped on seeing the fragments of glass lying around the entrance, which was open.
“We have to go!” shouted Travis, who was standing near the truck’s door, with Brillo up at the window growling and barking.
The sound of packets and boxes tumbling and hitting the floor came from the inside the store.
Elias looked back to Travis. “There’s someone in there!” Travis rolled his eyes in frustration. “Can you tell if it’s one of those things?”
“I… I… don’t think so, but it doesn’t matter!”
Elias raised his handgun at the store’s entrance which was pushed open, and walked forward, taking glances at Mel’s home forty feet away. He crunched some of the glass and the sound inside stopped. “Hey, whoever you are in there, I got a gun, and I can use it pretty well, even in the dark. I don’t care what you’re doing, but it’s not safe here!”
“You the owner?” said a female voice.
“No, I’m not the owner, but the real owner… there’s something wrong with him, and—” A creaking rang out which he instantly recognized. Mel’s front door had just opened, and the screen on the outside clattered. “We gotta go! Grab what you want, but if you stay here—”
“He’s coming Elias!” shouted Travis.
He could hear the thud of footsteps around the back of the building, but he kept his eyes on the shadows inside the store. From the gloom came a slight figure, no more than five feet five, with tied back dark hair and a backpack on her back. Another pack was in her hands, which was bursting with items from the store.
The thud of footsteps got louder.
“Look kid—”
“Becky.”
“Becky. If we don’t leave now, we may never be able too.”
The concern in his eyes told the young girl this was a life or death situation. She ran forward with him and got in the passenger’s side of the truck, while he jumped in the driver’s. He fired the engine up and slammed down on the gas, splashing through puddles and bumping over potholes until they were back on the city’s main road. He looked in the rear mirror. The light that lit the forecourt spluttered and gave out plunging the entire area into a rich blackness, apart from two pin pricks of blue light near the pumps.
The thing that was once Mel Harrington watched them leave.
CHAPTER TEN
Mike sat on the floor with his back up against the station’s lobby counter. Most of the children had fallen asleep in the main room behind him, and he was surrounded by silence, including a distinct lack of noise from beyond the entrance double doors, just a few yards from him. They had been bolstered by large filing cabinets, although he wasn’t sure what good they would do if the ‘Tinnies’ wanted in. An hour before with the others, he had come up with a plan for a small group to leave the station at daybreak and try and find the items Reed and Daryl needed for their experimental weapons. It was a good plan, but one that he suspected would come with a cost.
Gary’s face came into his mind out of the shadows of the room. Just another victim, no doubt one of probably hundreds of thousands across the globe, of a human built machine.
We sure do find inventive ways to fuck ourselves.
The enormity of what had happened was still too much for his mind to comprehend, so he didn’t bother trying. He had good practice with just such a mindset. Taking each day as it comes was what got him through after Clara died, well that and the bottles in the brown paper bags.
He slid to the ground and placed the one small pillow he could find under his head, and his eyes grew heavy…
He looked out on a broken city. The skyscrapers which filled the sky were missing pieces, and their remaining windows were mostly gone or jagged examples of their past selves. The sun was setting in whatever fictitious dreamscape his mind had conjured bathing the concrete streets and blackened vehicles which laid scattered like toys in purples and pinks.
Is this the future?
“Yes…”
He spun around to face his son, who was wearing Jeans and a brown sweater. They both stood inside one of the upper levels of a parking garage, it too a ruin of what it used to be. Chunks of masonry with iron and steel poles sat at award angles around them, under which the remains of cars sat.
“Travis?”
Travis smiled and nodded.
Mike threw his hands to his head and turned away. “I don’t want to dream this. It’s just going to make it harder to keep going, like with Clara. She’s… I mean, he’s dead.”
“I’m not.”
Mike lowered his arms. Travis was now standing just a few yards away.
“I survived what the virus did to the AI.”
“There’s no… way…”
Travis smirked. “And you know how the mind of a super AI works do you?”
“I don’t, but… I saw you get…”
“The AI had long before that point destroyed my organic self. What you saw was a construct be… deconstructed, but who I am, my consciousness survived what happened, and I’m making my way to you…”
“Tinnie?” said Mike.
Reed frowned. “It’s what he calls those that are affected by the AI.”
It’s as good a name as any other, thought Mike.
“So what’s the plan?” Mike posed the question to both of them, but they avoided his gaze.
“From the radio reports we have been getting,” said Reed. “I calculated an infection rate, and it’s not good… As you have confirmed, the mode of transmission is a mere touch. Imagine a self aware flu virus, that could completely take over the hosts cognitive abilities to help spread itself… and from what you have told us, to grow stronger by joining with others of its type. If a person gets infected by the flu the body creates antibodies, that will fight off that virus in the future, but the body has no defense against what this is.”
“But it’s still a machine. There must be ways to stop it?” said Mike.
“That’s what I like, fighting talk!” said Holland, who spilled some of his drink in raising it.
Mike ignored the colonel keeping his eyes on Reed.
“We’re dealing with a technology… a weapon that is completely new. It works at the nano scale Mike. Yes, it’s a machine, but one that could be impossible to completely flush from the world. It would be like trying to rid the planet of all the insect life…”
He briefly looked away. Not the news he was wanting to hear. “If we can’t completely destroy it, then we need to find ways to at least survive it. What about electricity, would that short it out or something?”
She nodded. “I have been thinking about EMP pulses, but the nuclear explosion would have created a massive pulse, and that obviously didn’t kill it…”
Mike smiled. “You’re telling me that you and Daryl havn’t already been thinking of something to fight back with?”
“Well… yes, but that’s if we have time, and we don’t have what we need here. Perhaps elsewhere in the town…” Her eyes flicked to the man behind the desk.
“And there’s the rub,” said Holland. “If the Tinnies touch us, our brain gets fried and we become one of them. Kind of makes it hard to go shopping. So until then, we wait it out. This station has plenty weapons, ammo—” He pulled a brand new bottle from the drawer. “— And sustenance to last months.”
*****
“This is some crazy jacked up shit,” said Elias. The western horizon was multiple shades of pink and mauves, heralding the coming night.
Travis was in the same position near the outside door, but was now seated, with his back up against the small wall below where there used to be a glass window.
“So you’re like a hologram, that only I can see…”
“Exactly.”
“But your… brain… what makes you, you… is also inside me somewhere…”
“Yup.”
“And I can’t get you out of me, unless you want to leave.”
“Yes. And I will leave once we make it to my father.”
“And if I don’t take you to your father, then you won’t leave…”
“You’re missing the bigger picture—”
“Oh I’m sorry, Mr. artificial intelligence, who didn’t ask permission to be swilling around my body, and is holding me hostage, what’s this picture I’m missing?”
“I told you the reason for all of this. The AI needs to bring as much of itself back together as it can. Every second we sit here, out there, somewhere a microscopic sized piece of the machine the AI created is linking up with another piece, and gaining more computing power, to outsmart us… I mean humans. Once it hits thirty-four percent of its former mass, it will grow exponentially… and it’s game over.”
They both sat in silence, the shadows growing longer. “And if I take you to your father, then you can stop it?”
Travis sighed. “Yes…”
“You know where he is?”
“With an eighty-five point five percent certainty yes.”
“That sounds to me like you don’t know where he is.”
Travis sighed again.
“Try and see it from my point of view. You want me to get in my truck, with you, my invisible friend, and travel to who knows where, in the dark. To someone else watching this situation, they might just see a crazy old fool getting lost.”
“You’re no fool Elias. I’ve seen y—” Travis realized he had made a mistake by the expression on Elias’s face.
“You better keep your filthy computer bits out of my past. If I’m going to help you, and I’m not saying I will, but if I do, then we gotta have an agreement, that you don’t go meddling with my memories. That shit belongs to me. We got a compact?” Elias held out his hand, then frowned and pulled it back, but Travis crawled forward and held his arm out, extending his fingers. “What’s the point of that, if you ain’t real?”
“Just try it and see…”
Elias stretched his hand out again… and felt the fingertips of the computer ghost kid. He jumped back in his chair. “Woah! Just when I thought this shit couldn’t get any weirder. How can I feel you?”
“Because to your brain I am real, so you can feel me.” He nodded towards his hand which was still waiting. Elias crept his own forward and this time held the hand of the strange young man.
Travis smiled. “We have a compact.”
CHAPTER NINE
Elias placed a twelve gauge and an M4 assault rifle into one of three backpacks he had ready packed. The rifle was a weapon he got comfortable with during his time in the service and managed to procure on the black market after he returned home. He always figured that if shit ever went sideways on a global scale he would need one again, and now was just one of those times. The rest of the pack was already filled with ammo for them and his 911 and Glock. For some reason he kept thinking the young man was going to scold him for taking so much, but instead Travis just stood at the window in the living room looking out into the night and the few sparkling lights of other farms, miles in the distance.
“So am I looking out of the window or are you?” said Elias, momentarily being confused by the possibilities.
“I’m not looking out of this window. I’m thinking, and your mind knows that and creates this image of me doing what you think—”
Elias raised his hand. “Okay, from now on we need to have an agreement—”
“Another compact?”
“Don’t have to be that, but whatever you want. All I’m saying is, if I ask you something, you have to use that advanced computer brain of yours to give me the simplest answer?”
“Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler…”
“Err… yeah, that.”
“I paraphrased Einstein.” The young man continued looking into the darkness.
Elias looked at the other two packs, each containing various supplies for being on the road. Food, water, even some MRE’s although he thought the chances of having to require their use was slim. The worlds not going to run out of food for a long time yet, no matter how bad things get. He looked at Travis. “You ready?”
“Yes. We should leave.”
After packing the bags into the five seater truck, and placing extra fuel and a few other things in the bed at the back, Elias got in the driver’s seat and fired up the engine, then looked in the rear of the cabin to make sure Brillo was laying down. He then looked across to his virtual friend in the passenger seat and frowned. Putting the truck in drive they pulled out of his yard and onto the small track, which was sodden from light rain. It wasn’t long before they were on a tarmacked two lane road heading into the nearby town. The surrounding countryside felt darker than usual thought Elias, but he put that down to his imagination. He knew from experience the mind can play tricks on you, and his was currently kidnaped by… something, so who knows what was real and what wasn’t. He sighed in relief on seeing the lights of his destination keeping the night at bay, and pulled onto the puddle soaked forecourt of Mel’s gas station and convenience store.
He stopped alongside two pumps that belonged in a different era. “Mel’s always been into computers I’m sure he’ll have what you want.”
Travis looked at the ice dispensers and beer commercials that were plastered across the glass door entrance. “It doesn’t look open.”
“He closed an hour ago, but he lives around back. Just go…” Elias scoffed. “Ha, yeah, you can’t do that, can you.”
“No.”
“So much for us being a team when I’m doing all the legwork.”
Travis continued looking towards the store. “When you were in Afghanistan, you relied upon a command structure that would relay information to you. Think of me in the same way.”
“Right…” Elias pushed open the driver’s door and stepped out, avoiding the large puddle directly beneath him. The night felt warm, which was wrong for the time of year. He walked around the side of the building, the single story home of his long time friend Mel coming into view. Light was seeping through Mel’s living room window as was usual for the time of night. He did love his early evening game shows.
Elias walked onto the deck, which surrounded the front and side of the building and up to the screen door, pulling it back and knocking on the other. “Mel, It’s Elias.” Silence came back at him from the other side, which was odd. He would usually hear the jingles and canned laughter from the TV by now.
“Something’s—”
Elias’s heart skipped a few beats on realizing Travis was standing a few inches to his right. “Jesus, son! You can’t be doing that!”
Travis looked guilty. “Oh, sorry… but something’s wrong here.”
Elias looked slowly back to the inner door, not really understanding how the computerized kid would know that. “Err… yeah I was thinking the same.” He knocked harder. “Mel, you in the crapper?” He looked back to Travis and went to talk, but there was only empty space there.
“We… we should leave,” said Travis, now being ten or so feet behind Elias, standing on the mud and grass pathway.
Elias frowned. “Why should we leave? Mel’s never left this place in the twenty or so years—” A noise came from within the wooden building. “Ah, come on Mel, I got places I need to be!”
“I really think we should—”
A crash of glass emanated from in Mel’s home, and Elias unholstered his 911 and had it pointing at the door in about a second. Thoughts of home intrusion flashed through his mind. The end of the world can make some folks crazy.
“I… don’t think it’s an intruder…”
Elias frowned again at the young man poaching his thoughts, then turned to his right, to where the deck continued. He crept forward, keeping to the ends of the boards to make sure he kept creaking to a minimum, and looked in a window which gave him a view of the first bedroom. A simple room with a double bed, a closet for clothes and a drawer unit with pictures of Mel’s deceased wife on, was dark, only being lit from the light from the hallway, and that in turn from the light from the living room. He strained his eyes to see into the shadows which were flickering within a pale blue light.
“Elias… come on, we can get it somewhere else.” Travis’s voice was just behind him, not that distance meant anything.
Brillo started barking in the distance.
“If something’s happened to Mel, I need to know… There… there he is!,” he replied. A hunched over figure moved amongst the gloom in the hallway, moving past the bedroom door. Elias knocked on the glass. “Mel!” He then looked back to Travis who was still behind him. “See. He just didn’t hear me.” Travis’s eyes grew wide, causing Elias to swing his view back to the window. “What… the…”
A balding man, with clothes which hung from his couch potato physique was looking back at Elias from the doorway, but what shocked him was the blue fire which was alive in the center of his old friend’s eyes.
Mel slumbered forward into the room, his head lowered so much his chin was almost on his sunken chest, but somehow his eyes remained fixed on the man on the other side of the window. Equally Elias couldn’t remove his own gaze from the thing walking through the bedroom towards him. Tomorrow night was poker night. Due to winning for the past two months, he even thought he would let Mel win a few hands for once.
Eyes which were a sea of cobalt molten fire looked into Elias’s own, just half an inch of glass between them. He started to feel light-headed, his thoughts becoming jumbled and confused, and staggered back, almost falling as he stepped from the deck, back onto the mud. Mel kept watching from the window.
“I… I don’t feel so good,” said Elias.
“He’s scanning your mind… I’m doing what I can to stop him, but I can’t keep him out for much… longer… we have to leave!” Travis spoke to Elias without appearing, the words cutting through Elias’s chaotic thoughts. Elias turned and pushed his legs towards the truck, when the sound of glass breaking echoed out into the night. He flicked his head back towards the bedroom window, but it was whole still. Mel or whatever he had become wasn’t there either but he didn’t care, he just needed his brain to function correctly again. He staggered forward past the side of the store, then stopped on seeing the fragments of glass lying around the entrance, which was open.
“We have to go!” shouted Travis, who was standing near the truck’s door, with Brillo up at the window growling and barking.
The sound of packets and boxes tumbling and hitting the floor came from the inside the store.
Elias looked back to Travis. “There’s someone in there!” Travis rolled his eyes in frustration. “Can you tell if it’s one of those things?”
“I… I… don’t think so, but it doesn’t matter!”
Elias raised his handgun at the store’s entrance which was pushed open, and walked forward, taking glances at Mel’s home forty feet away. He crunched some of the glass and the sound inside stopped. “Hey, whoever you are in there, I got a gun, and I can use it pretty well, even in the dark. I don’t care what you’re doing, but it’s not safe here!”
“You the owner?” said a female voice.
“No, I’m not the owner, but the real owner… there’s something wrong with him, and—” A creaking rang out which he instantly recognized. Mel’s front door had just opened, and the screen on the outside clattered. “We gotta go! Grab what you want, but if you stay here—”
“He’s coming Elias!” shouted Travis.
He could hear the thud of footsteps around the back of the building, but he kept his eyes on the shadows inside the store. From the gloom came a slight figure, no more than five feet five, with tied back dark hair and a backpack on her back. Another pack was in her hands, which was bursting with items from the store.
The thud of footsteps got louder.
“Look kid—”
“Becky.”
“Becky. If we don’t leave now, we may never be able too.”
The concern in his eyes told the young girl this was a life or death situation. She ran forward with him and got in the passenger’s side of the truck, while he jumped in the driver’s. He fired the engine up and slammed down on the gas, splashing through puddles and bumping over potholes until they were back on the city’s main road. He looked in the rear mirror. The light that lit the forecourt spluttered and gave out plunging the entire area into a rich blackness, apart from two pin pricks of blue light near the pumps.
The thing that was once Mel Harrington watched them leave.
CHAPTER TEN
Mike sat on the floor with his back up against the station’s lobby counter. Most of the children had fallen asleep in the main room behind him, and he was surrounded by silence, including a distinct lack of noise from beyond the entrance double doors, just a few yards from him. They had been bolstered by large filing cabinets, although he wasn’t sure what good they would do if the ‘Tinnies’ wanted in. An hour before with the others, he had come up with a plan for a small group to leave the station at daybreak and try and find the items Reed and Daryl needed for their experimental weapons. It was a good plan, but one that he suspected would come with a cost.
Gary’s face came into his mind out of the shadows of the room. Just another victim, no doubt one of probably hundreds of thousands across the globe, of a human built machine.
We sure do find inventive ways to fuck ourselves.
The enormity of what had happened was still too much for his mind to comprehend, so he didn’t bother trying. He had good practice with just such a mindset. Taking each day as it comes was what got him through after Clara died, well that and the bottles in the brown paper bags.
He slid to the ground and placed the one small pillow he could find under his head, and his eyes grew heavy…
He looked out on a broken city. The skyscrapers which filled the sky were missing pieces, and their remaining windows were mostly gone or jagged examples of their past selves. The sun was setting in whatever fictitious dreamscape his mind had conjured bathing the concrete streets and blackened vehicles which laid scattered like toys in purples and pinks.
Is this the future?
“Yes…”
He spun around to face his son, who was wearing Jeans and a brown sweater. They both stood inside one of the upper levels of a parking garage, it too a ruin of what it used to be. Chunks of masonry with iron and steel poles sat at award angles around them, under which the remains of cars sat.
“Travis?”
Travis smiled and nodded.
Mike threw his hands to his head and turned away. “I don’t want to dream this. It’s just going to make it harder to keep going, like with Clara. She’s… I mean, he’s dead.”
“I’m not.”
Mike lowered his arms. Travis was now standing just a few yards away.
“I survived what the virus did to the AI.”
“There’s no… way…”
Travis smirked. “And you know how the mind of a super AI works do you?”
“I don’t, but… I saw you get…”
“The AI had long before that point destroyed my organic self. What you saw was a construct be… deconstructed, but who I am, my consciousness survived what happened, and I’m making my way to you…”
