Rhodes woke up and instantly recognized Dr. Neiland’s lab at Coleridge Station. He collapsed back on the mattress in his capsule. He couldn’t decide if he was happy about being back here.
He groaned when he remembered everything that happened on the Ero. Sweet Jesus! Could he and his subordinates look forward to more of this….well, forever?
What if the doctors and technicians never worked out all the bugs in the Battalion 1 project? What if Rhodes and his people kept suffering from these malfunctions for as long as they survived this disaster?
Why would it be any different? Implanting these devices into living tissue couldn’t end well. It would always cause problems, either physically or mentally.
The human body and mind weren’t designed for this. The battalion members’ bodies and minds would continue to reject the new reality.
Then there were the SAMs. Just how much of this had to do with them?
How much control did they really have over each battalion member’s behavior and thought process? Did it even matter anymore which of them malfunctioned or why?
The SAMs weren’t alive. They might be self-aware, but they weren’t human. Whatever else they might be, their thought processes were incompatible with human nature.
They couldn’t possibly be anything else. They were machines—computer programs. The two systems would always conflict.
Rhodes didn’t understand much about the Battalion 1 project, but he understood one thing. Whoever designed this whole lunatic scheme didn’t plan for the SAMs to have to deal with strong, raw human emotions.
Whatever genius came up with this must have thought the battalion members would have no emotional reaction to anything that happened to them.
Whoever designed this must have believed that the battalion members would have no emotional reaction to getting these implants, much less losing their families and their basic humanity.
That on its own was incredibly short-sighted of the project designers. They really showed their incompetence by not taking into account that the battalion would end up going into combat.
Going into combat always brought up powerful emotions—both during the combat itself as well as before and after. The project designers never thought of that.
Fisher reappeared immediately this time as soon as Rhodes opened his eyes.
“Captain,” Fisher murmured. “I am so sorry about what happened before. I feel awful about attacking you the way I did.”
“It wasn’t your fault, pal,” Rhodes husked. “I know you didn’t mean to.”
“How can you ever trust me again? How can you trust that I won’t do it again?”
“I don’t have any problem trusting you, pal. You look fine now. You’re back to normal.”
Fisher looked away. “You’re much more generous than I would be.”
“How can you even say that? I attacked you, too. I would have killed you. I wanted to.”
“I know you did,” Fisher murmured. “I felt that when it happened.”
Rhodes tried to look somewhere else, but he would always have to look at Fisher. Fisher would always be right there in front of Rhodes’s face. “I’m sorry about that.”
“You malfunctioned,” Fisher pointed out. “You can’t blame yourself for that.”
“You malfunctioned, too. What did you think—that you were somehow immune to malfunctions even though all the other SAMs have been suffering malfunctions all this time? You know you aren’t immune. You said so yourself. You were the one who told me it was only a matter of time before you malfunctioned and it affected me.”
Fisher hesitated for a second. “I’m afraid I did think that. I told you that, but I never really believed it. I somehow convinced myself that I wouldn’t malfunction simply because I am your SAM and you’re the battalion’s commanding officer. I somehow convinced myself that I was too important to malfunction—and that you were too important. I didn’t let myself think it was possible that I could let you down like this.”
“You didn’t let me down, pal. Shit happens. It happens to the best of us.” Rhodes dragged himself out of bed. “What are the others doing?”
“I’m not sure, Captain. I can’t interface with them.”
Rhodes’s head shot up. “You can’t? Why not?”
“I’m not sure, Captain. The interface simply isn’t working.”
“Where are they?” Rhodes immediately realized his mistake. Fisher wouldn’t be able to find that out without the interface.
Rhodes dropped into The Grid, but it didn’t tell him anything, either. It read Coleridge Station all around him, but The Grid only showed the normal station personnel. The Grid didn’t indicate the location of any Battalion 1 people, not even Rhodes himself.
He was just about to stand up and go looking for his people when Dr. Irvine, Dr. Montague, Dr. Osborne, and Dr. Trudeau walked into the lab.
Rhodes cast a suspicious glance around, but he didn’t see Dr. Neiland. Irvine and Montague were just as bad, but Rhodes had developed a special vendetta against her.
“How are you feeling, Captain?” Dr. Osborne asked.
Rhodes stifled the urge to snort. “I’m about as good as you would expect. Did you cut me off from the interface?”
Dr. Irvine spread both hands. “Everyone in Battalion 1 suffered catastrophic systems malfunctions. We thought it best to keep you isolated from each other until we can iron out the wrinkles.”
“And did you? Did you iron out the wrinkles?”
“That remains to be seen, now that you’re out of your conversion cycle.”
“So what did you do? What caused the malfunctions?”
Osborne went over to the central stack of components and started tapping on them. “All your SAMs suffered errors in their base programming during your battle on Sulia. It appears that going into combat affected them in ways no one was able to foresee.”
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Rhodes compressed his lips. Of course no one foresaw those problems. No one in the Battalion 1 project had even been looking for them.
“We’ve corrected the errors in the programming,” Dr. Trudeau added. “You shouldn’t suffer from any further malfunctions.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it,” Rhodes fired back. “I think what you mean is that you corrected the problems that you know about—the ones that caused this particular set of malfunctions. Obviously you couldn’t correct any problems you haven’t foreseen.”
Trudeau lowered his eyes. “Of course, Captain. That is what I meant.”
Dr. Montague looked down at the remote device in his hand. “Is your SAM functioning normally, Captain? Is he exhibiting any unusual changes?”
“No, he seems fine and he’s acting normally, too.”
“He’s reading some emotional distress,” Osborne called over his shoulder from his stack of equipment. “This is unusual. The SAMs aren’t programmed to experience emotional distress.”
“Why not?” Rhodes demanded. “They’re self-aware. It makes sense that they would have a range of emotions and reactions to their circumstances.”
“They’re programmed to help the individual soldier cope with emotional disturbance. The SAMs aren’t programmed to cope with emotional disturbance of their own.” Trudeau looked up. “What’s wrong with him? Why is he disturbed?”
“He says he feels guilty about attacking me earlier when he malfunctioned. He thinks he violated my trust and I won’t be able to trust him again.”
“That’s odd. The SAMs aren’t programmed to feel guilt or shame over their actions at all.”
“Why not?” Rhodes repeated. “They’re self-aware. They should have a full range of emotions.”
“They aren’t programmed to have any emotions at all,” Dr. Montague interrupted.
“Then something must have gone seriously wrong,” Rhodes replied. “The SAMs feel fear, so they must feel everything else, too.”
“If you could just lie down, Captain.” Dr. Irvine moved in. “We need to make some more adjustments.”
Rhodes didn’t want anyone making any adjustments to anything, but he would do just about anything to prevent another catastrophe like the last one—or like all the rest of them.
He started to lean over to lie back down on his mattress when Fisher crumbled before Rhodes’s eyes.
The SAM’s features contorted in a grimace of misery and he broke down sobbing right there.
He spasmed and jerked as the grid lines twisted his face in all the wrong directions—except that they were all the right directions. They formed all the most perfect expressions of someone falling apart in despair.
“Fisher!” Rhodes choked. “What’s wrong?”
Fisher broke out in a few more sobs, and just as fast, he erupted in rage. At least he didn’t change back into a monster full of fangs.
His grid lines burst apart as he expanded. He bared his teeth in a feral snarl and bellowed in fury.
His face rotated from right to left like he was struggling to break out of something holding him back.
Rhodes jolted away as Fisher’s image rushed closer. “Whoa!” Rhodes yelled. “What are you doing to him?! Stop!”
“We aren’t doing anything!” Dr. Osborne yelled back. “We haven’t even started making the adjustments yet!”
“You’re…..” Rhodes began and broke off when Fisher collapsed again. His grid lines all went limp and flopped down to land in a pile. They would have landed on the floor except that there was no floor in The Grid.
The lines slumped into an inert mound of lines right there in front of Rhodes’s horrified sight. “Fisher!” he husked. “No!”
Just when Rhodes feared the worst, the lines bounced up and reformed Fisher’s normal face again. He blinked at Rhodes in that quick, bird-like way of his.
“Fisher?” Rhodes croaked. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Captain. Why do you ask?”
“You….you malfunctioned again.”
“I don’t think so,” Fisher replied. “You must be mistaken. I’m functioning according to my programming. All my systems are operating within normal parameters. I would remember any malfunction.”
Rhodes opened his mouth to reply, but he could already see that Fisher didn’t even remember what just happened.
At that moment, another agonizing wave of crushing grief seized Rhodes by the guts. It nearly made him buckle from the sheer weight of agony.
He almost broke down in despair, too, but just as fast, his feelings changed to stupid, hysterical, irrational mirth.
He had to bite his lip to stop himself from bursting out laughing right now. This whole ridiculous situation was too stupid to take it seriously a second longer.
He understood at some deeper level that he was malfunctioning again. He turned to lie back down on the mattress before anything else went wrong. He wanted to lock up with his capsule so he wouldn’t be able to react to whatever this feeling changed to next.
He made it to a forty-five-degree angle to his mattress when this unstoppable groundswell of emotion erupted in a volcanic blast of pure murderous rage.
This time wiped out his previous fury and turned him into a raving psychopath in the blink of an eye. He didn’t even have a chance to try to stop himself.
Something beyond himself shot him off the capsule. This other force moved all his limbs without him doing anything, trying anything, or deciding on anything.
Dr. Irvine happened to be standing closest to Rhodes’s capsule. Rhodes swiped his mechanical right arm to one side and sent Irvine flying. He slammed into the wall and flopped unconscious on the floor.
The other doctors got out of Rhodes’s path just in time for him to storm over to the central stack of computer components.
He could have destroyed them instantly by firing his Vipers into them, but he wanted to feel everything—or whatever part of him was doing this wanted to feel everything.
He charged the stack, extended both fists in front of him, and plowed straight through the equipment.
Screens and block processors exploded all around him, but that wasn’t enough. He tore his way through the stack ripping everything apart with his bare hands.
He burst out the other side, swatted wires and conduits out of his face, and looked around for what else he could destroy.
He would never stop destroying. He would destroy the whole station. He wanted to tear the whole world apart.
He wasn’t close enough to anything here, so he bent over, punched both fists into the floor, and roared in fury when he tore the floor plates up with his bare hands.
He hurled them into the walls, smashed more equipment, and sent the technicians running for cover.
He spotted Osborne and Trudeau on the other side of the room. They attacked what controls they could while they tried to shut Rhodes down, but nothing worked.
The small part of his brain that could still form rational thought had to admire them for having the courage to stick around.
Rhodes didn’t see Dr. Montague anywhere. He must have bolted and left these two behind to try to save the situation.
Rhodes couldn’t damage the lab fast enough by walking around pulverizing the equipment with his fists. He needed more—always more. Nothing would ever be enough to satisfy this rage.
He dropped into The Grid. It still worked.
He took off at a blinding run, measured the grid lines covering the walls, and straightened his arm on one side.
He hit the wall still running at his top speed and carved a path of destruction around the lab until he got to the other side.
His rage made him do all this, but he also felt something outside himself turning him, moving his limbs, and even directing his thoughts. Was he even doing any of this?
Osborne and Trudeau had to dive out of his way when he ran past them. They huddled together in the middle of the lab for protection. Flying sparks and shrapnel twirled in the air.
He got back to where he started and went to work tearing the wall components apart one brutal piece at a time.
He could take until doomsday to finish off this place and everything in it. He never wanted to see this lab or Coleridge Station again.
He turned his back on the rest of the lab so he could give the job his undivided attention.
He was in the middle of destroying a pile of processor units when a jet of fusion torched him in the back.
The Grid activated. He didn’t have to turn around to see two dozen Legion soldiers standing across the lab.
They unloaded their Jackhammers on him, but the shots didn’t damage his metal housing.
He unleashed three Vipers back at them and blasted all those soldiers out into the corridor. He turned around, stormed across the lab, and raised both his arms to wipe them all out with his lasers and scourge guns.
He actually hoped in that moment that someone sent more soldiers after him so he could kill them, too.
What was wrong with him? He only ever wanted to protect Legion soldiers. That was his job. He never wanted to harm his own comrades.
None of that meant anything right now. He wanted them dead in the worst, most torturous way possible.
Which weapon should he use to torment them as much as possible before they died? Should he use his thermal cannons to torch them to death? Should he blast their bodies to smithereens with his Vipers?
He made it halfway across the lab before another catastrophic smash hit him from somewhere. The Grid expanded for a fraction of a second—just long enough for him to read a Ravager in orbit over Coleridge Station.
The ship fired down at the station, punched through the ceiling, and a charge of electric voltage hit the walls and floor. The charge shut him down in a split second and he blacked out again.