--- Chapter 4
The laboratory was laid out differently from the last time Lenny had been in it. Instead of a neat counter along the left wall, carefully set with equipment, there was some sort of curved desk covered in a haphazard pile of electronic components. Wires stuck up from it, twitching in the air, while a container of computer chips spilled onto the floor. The right side of the room was still set with filing cabinets and storage bins, but they were pulled out on their rails, tipped over or sprinkled with purple corruption. Files were flung on the ground like dead butterflies and papers scattered across the top of the drawers.
The center of the room was taken up by a giant mountain of machinery, something with tubes and wires coiling around its outside and small, blinking lights set along the top. It seemed to be made mostly of silver metal, which was also stained in places or grown with strange moss. It blocked off the view of the opposite side of the room, so that Lenny could not see either the door into the rest of Devi’s lab or the doctor himself.
Lenny felt strange as he walked into the room, and it was not only because of the glitch in his cybernetics. It seemed as if uncanny eyes were watching him, someone holding their breath at his every move. A low, distant thrumming was running somewhere in the building, but he could not figure out exactly where the sound came from. Every few seconds, the machine in the center of the room let out a quiet sigh.
“Dr. Devi? Doctor?” Lenny paced slowly around the machine, gazing up at it in surprise as the other half came into view. This side was cut away to fit a glass tube in, a giant tube easily large enough for a person to stand in. There was a door in it for entrance, fit with a little red button. The wires and piping all connected to the glass tube at the top and bottom of its length, where some sort of pads were built into the floor and ceiling. There was a very simple control pad set into the contraption next to the tube, but Lenny could not understand any of the controls on it.
The doctor was nowhere in sight, but the door into the next section of the building was hanging open.
“Devi?” He went over and pushed the door open, peering through. This next room was one he had rarely gone in to, except for when his cybernetics had been installed. It was somewhat of a 'secret’ room, as cybernetics were illegal and Devi did not want anyone guessing what some of the machines in it were for. There was a counter along the right-hand side of the room, with drawers and cupboards below it all carefully locked. On one side of it was a large computer complex, which had its own robotic arms and machines attached to it. In front of it was an installation which looked like a dentist’s chair, but much more complicated and covered in various devices.
On the far side of the room was a simple office desk and chair, next to a set of stairs going upwards. The light was off in the room at the moment, so that Lenny could hardly make out anything clearly. But in the beam of light from the open door he stood in, he could see a form dressed in a white lab coat, slumped in a chair next to the desk.
“Dr. Devi, is that you?” Lenny resisted the urge to turn on his night vision, approaching the figure across the gloomy space. “Are you awake, Doctor?”
“Yes.” The doctor stirred in the seat, sitting up and turning towards him. Devi’s eyes gleamed purple in the shadows, making Lenny stop half-way across the room in consternation. The eyes watched him with an almost brutish cunning, while the doctor stood slowly up to his full height. Devi was a tall man, though he had never been very strong or agile.
“I’m awake, Lenny. I’ve been waiting for you. We’ve been waiting for you.”
“We?” Lenny found himself backing away as the doctor advanced, but then remembered the weapon under his arm and stopped. With a quick shift of his hands, he got the Sissionbeam cutter into place. The doctor was not quite in range, but it would only take a few more strides for him to be.
The doctor paused, making a gesture with his hand to one side. Lenny heard the door close behind him and glanced around to see that there was something there, something dark and purple, shaped a little like a human but more like a machine. Two more of them paced out of the shadows, gleaming black and magenta. They were robots, with thick chests, small heads and slim appendages. They had differing amounts of limbs and varying attachments on the ends of them.
“Dr. Devi,” Lenny gasped, turning back to his old friend, “I’ve come to ask for help from you. The cybernetics...they’re malfunctioning. And I’ve come to help you as well: set you free. You won’t have to fight the evil power any longer.”
The purple eyes rested on him with a glance that was almost sympathetic, though it was obviously crazed. “You don’t understand, Lenny. I’m not fighting it any longer.”
He raised his hand with a device in it and pointed it at Lenny, pushing a button. Before the young man could duck out of the way or move into position to fire his own weapon, a deadly stiffness laid hold of him. He tried to fight it, but all of his limbs became so rigid that he could hardly move them. He felt all the strength of his cybernetics leave him, until he could hardly form the single word, “why?”
“Because there was no choice for me but to give in.” Devi waved his hand through the air, beckoning to the mechanical men. They came up on either side of Lenny and grasped his inflexible arms with their hard, cold grapples.
“EX-2 was too strong for me. I knew it from the beginning and did not even fight it when he came for me,” Devi went on, gesturing for them to move the inert Lenny towards the chair and computer. With a glance at Lenny’s face, he added, “but you don’t even know who EX-2 is. I mean the purple corruption that you have set yourself against so foolishly. Its perpetrator and center wanted me, Lenny. He knew that I could make him even stronger and better than before, since I am his original creator.”
Lenny felt as if a darkness had descended on his world, not through his eyes but because of what he was hearing.
It couldn’t be true...Dr. Devi was his hero...he wouldn’t hurt Lenny, or make something so all-encompassing evil as the Power Center which was spreading the corruption.
But the doctor was having the robots push him down into the chair, putting light straps over each of his wrists. They took the S.B.C too, and put it aside on a counter. Lenny could not speak any more, only beam a look of betrayal and sorrow at his captor.
“Yes, I built EX-2, never meaning for it to become so powerful.” Dr. Devi gave him a ghastly grin. “But now I’m glad that he did. He’s so powerful, you could never understand it! And he gives me as much power as I like, as long as I do his bidding. He had me give the police a hint about your cybernetics, anonymously, because you were too close to learning the truth. His power is all-seeing. And soon, you will have a little of his power too, if you wish. Once again you will work for me, Lenny, once I get your little malfunctions settled out...then you can go back to your friends and travel with them. You can spy on them, find out more about this Di-jump apparatus for me and then pick them off one by one so that they will cause no more trouble to our master.”
Fear gripped Lenny like a ravening wolf. Spy on his friends? Kill them? No! Agghhh!
The sounds echoed in Lenny’s head without a way to escape. He tried to use his cybernetics, unfold his hands and arm the energy cannon. He did care what it cost him. It would be better to die then become a robot ran by the Power Center, tasked with destroying his companions. But nothing worked: he had no command over his electronics any more. He saw Dr. Devi move to the computer and desperately tried to fortify his mind against anything that was going to be put into it.
I will not harm my friends. I will not allow him in my mind. He will not alter me without my knowing. He will not!
Devi pressed a few buttons on the computer and the world faded away into nothing before Lenny’s eyes.
---
Jax and Jackal were playing a game of eight-square ‘tic-tac-toe’ on the wall with a bit of chalk, while everyone else spectated, when the door to the laboratory opened. Jumping up, they saw an unexpected figure come through the open door. It was a young woman, perhaps a year or two older than Amber, dressed in the pure white of a nurse. Her golden hair was bound back loosely, while violet eyes took in the group with a mixture of efficiency and shyness.
“Quite a goggle,” Jax muttered under his breath, getting an odd look from his tic-tac-toe opponent.
“Hello,” the woman said in a soft voice. There was a patch on her dress which had ‘Mary’ written on it in practical letters, forgoing the need for an introduction.
“I’m Dr. Devi’s new assistant. He sent me to tell you that the work on Lenny Staff’s cybernetic-interface is going quite well and he is now sure of success in the operation.”
“That was kind of him to send you,” Amber remarked, giving her a friendly nod. “When can we see Lenny again?”
“It will still be some time before the doctor is finished, then your friend must rest,” Mary explained, “because of that, the doctor suggests that you might be more comfortable finding a restaurant nearby to wait in, or something of that sort. In case you did not have the proper currency, he begs that you accept this wallet and its contents as a gift.”
Jax stepped forward to take it with a smile and a wink. “Nice. When should we come back?”
“In about one hour. I must go back to help the doctor now. Good-bye.” The nurse gave them all another friendly look and departed through the door. Jax tucked the wallet in his pocket and began walking to the exit door, the others following behind him. He was part of the way down the hall when he stopped and looked back with a puzzled expression. “But, wait a minute...if Lenny is being operated on now, why didn’t we feel the world change? He should have used the Sission-cutter before getting fixed up.”
Soleeryn moved a hand to her cheek with an anxious look. “Perhaps he collapsed before being able to use it, and Dr. Devi decided to help him despite being the Power Core.”
“Maybe...” Jax frowned. “I still wish that one of us had gone with him.”
“Ye think we should go back and check on him?” Patch touched the hilt of his cutlass meaningfully.
Jax hesitated, before shaking his head. “No, no, everything should be fine. Lenny trusted this doctor explicitly, and Lenny isn’t one to trust easily. They’ve been friends for some time, from what I gather. Let’s go.”
The door opened for them and they filed outside, though not just one of them looked back down the hall uneasily as they left.
---
“Time...space...conscious thought, all bound into one dilemma.”
A connection was formed through unknown space. Like shifting mist a part of Lenny’s mind seemed to open up and regain consciousness, though he could not open his eyes or feel anything around him. A patch of darkness turned, green eyes flickered.
“There is only one thing I can do for you across this distance.”
“Leaflow?”
“I can wake you up before he has your mind.”
Lenny jerked as if coming awake in the morning. His eyes were blurry at first, but quickly focused as he blinked them. The first thing he noticed was that he felt better than he had in many days. There was no more fuzziness or crackling in his head, his gaze was bright and he felt fresh all the way through. Even his energy reserve was fully recharged, cybernetics ready to be used. Secondly, he realized that his left arm was clipped open at the wrist, connection cord stretching from it towards the computer. He was linked up with the computer, though he had no control over the computer himself.
Lenny was still sitting in the chair in front of it, turned around to face it. The large screen glowed in the dimly-lit work space, while Dr. Devi crouched on a stool in between Lenny and the screen. His black hair gleamed weirdly in the green luminescence. His capable hands moved over the keyboard steadily.
Looking over his shoulder, Lenny could read what was being written on the screen. It seemed to be lines of code, such as was commonly used for programming AI in computers, cars and other applications. Watching, he got the strange, tingling feeling that Devi was programming the cybernetic-interface computer that was built into his mind. His eyes fell onto the last lines of code that were being written:
'Run Prog. 1/A--Interface Control.
Override C, if C= >Interface.
Begin code line #28.
Run application (Blank Memory) if Interface = > C.’
Dr. Devi’s fingers hesitated a moment, before he reached up towards an icon on the screen which read ‘Run Program’ in bright red letters. Having programmed many AI applications before, it only took Lenny a moment to figure out what the last lines of code meant. It seemed that Dr. Devi had stealthily built a command into his cybernetic interface allowing it to gain control over certain more accessible parts of his natural brain. Which included his normal memory, which the last line of code would tell the interface to begin blanking. If that happened, the doctor could easily trick, persuade or even reprogram him into hunting down his friends, as his enemies.
This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.
Leaflow had awoken him just barely in time.
He was not frozen stiff any longer. The only restraints put upon him were light straps at his wrists to keep them from shifting unconsciously and an electric patch stuck to the side of his head. He was not supposed to have been awake at this point at all.
Dr. Devi’s finger touched the icon, making a secondary window appear asking if he was sure he wished to proceed. He started to shift his finger towards the affirmative button. That was when Lenny began to move.
He threw all of his strength against the straps at his wrists, making them peel apart and burst with a ripping sound. With a twitch and a jerk, he had pulled the patch from his head and yanked the connector out of the computer. It zipped back into his wrist, flicking into place just before he snapped his hand shut on it. The screen on the computer shifted, showing a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark in it and words warning that the connection had been lost.
Dr. Devi spun around on his stool, grave face cracking into lines of surprise. His purple eyes went wide as he saw Lenny there, reaching towards the Sissionbeam-cutter laying on the counter nearby.
“What!” The doctor surged forward, tackling Lenny around the middle. Because of his greater height and weight, the young man could not stand up to him and they both fell to the floor, rolling and struggling. The sound of robot-men clanking swiftly across the space towards them came to Lenny’s ears.
“Give up, doctor, let me save you!” he gasped, shoving the doctor over with his greater strength and rolling so that he was on top of Devi.
“I won’t give up this wonderful power. It’s mine now,” Devi returned calmly, eyes glowing brighter. Metallic arms shot out towards Lenny from behind, forcing him to shove away from the doctor and jump up to avoid them. Backed against the counter as the robots reached for him, some with miniature grapples and some with hypodermic probes or electronic devices he could not name, he activated his energy lance. His right hand clicked out of the way and the lance shone out, running to a gleaming blue tip.
With a swirl and a slash Lenny chopped away the invading arms. Grotesquely, they dripped purple ooze even though they appeared to be made of metal and wires. With a jump, he cleared the form of Dr. Devi on the floor and slashed the robot-men in half, sending their bodies clattering and dripping to the ground.
He felt a grip on his leg and Dr. Devi tripped him, making him fall sprawling to the tiles once again, this time slithering in the sticky, noxious purple liquid. The doctor clung onto his leg, holding him down. Lenny made a feint at him with the energy weapon, but the doctor did not loosen his grip. Lenny did not wish to actually hurt the doctor. Despite how far he had been betrayed, despite all of the doctor’s nefarious plans, he could not find it in his heart to harm him.
More mechanical creations were coming into the room, advancing towards the fight on the floor. Many of them were less human in form than the first ones he had destroyed, but one looked like a human girl with blonde hair, dressed as a nurse. Kicking and grappling, Lenny rolled over and wrapped his left arm around Devi’s throat, moving the glowing energy lance until it was almost touching Devi’s chest.
“Call them off,” Lenny growled, flicking his gaze at the hesitating creations gathering around them. None of them wanted to make the first move that would get their creator killed.
“Give up, doctor. Tell them to leave.”
He could feel Devi panting under his arm, throat and chest heaving. He relaxed a little, expecting an admission of defeat. Instead, the doctor surged up, wrapping his arms around Lenny’s head and dragging it down so that their faces were almost touching.
“Robots, get him!”
Lenny tightened his grip on the doctor’s throat, struggled and fought but could not get free. He heard the mechanical men coming up behind him, felt a cold, metal touch on the back of his neck and panicked. If they caught him, he would be brought back to the reprogramming computer and made into a reluctant assassin. Everything in him rebelled against the thought.
Metal arms began to wrap around him, dragging him away from the doctor. There was only one thing he could do and he hated it.
He plunged the energy lance through the doctor’s chest.
There was a crackle of energy and gasp of pain. As Dr. Devi expired, the robots disappeared. Their creator had been removed from the world.
Lenny felt their cold arms fade away from him as he released his grip on the body and stood up, stumbling away from the warm, dead weight. The energy lance fizzled out on the end of his arm, leaving the metal ring showing. Lenny stared down at Dr. Devi in horror, seeing the purple light disappear from his eyes. There was a tearing feeling and the whole world shivered, breaking free of EX-2's hold. Things blurred, then lay still again. The purple ooze was gone from the floor and from Lenny’s back.
He staggered forward and bent over the doctor, then turned away and wiped an arm across his face. There was nothing he could do to change what had just happened. He had killed his oldest and most respected friend.
A cold, hard feeling descended on his heart. He had not wanted to harm Devi. But there had been no choice: the doctor had betrayed him, had created a monster and run from it, then joined its side in his lust for power. The monster was still at large, but the doctor was dead. Everything good that had been between Lenny and his mentor was lost.
He moved over to the counter and picked up the Sissionbeam-cutter, cradling it against his side. With one more last, look at the doctor laying on the floor, he walked out of the room.
In the main laboratory, all of the mosses and fungi were gone, though the machine in the center of it and the piles of electronics were still there. But now the lights on the machine were off, the low humming noise gone. Everything was eerily silent.
Lenny opened the door into the entrance hall and peered out, but his traveling companions were not there. He closed his eyes for a moment, pressing a hand across them, then moved out into the hall and started down it. The door at the end no longer had a purple smear on it, but there was still a strange, diagonal crack in its surface, letting in the gray outer light. Lenny went to it and opened it, stepping out onto the sidewalk. The world seemed bright and empty.
There, only a few hundred feet away, were his friends. They were coming down the sidewalk in a mixed, hurrying group, chattering cheerfully to each other as they came. Jax’s bright hair bobbed and jerked as he looked up, arm pointing out the figure at the lab door.
“Look, it’s Lenny!”
Lenny stood still, waiting as they came rushing to crowd around him.
“How’d it go, Len?”
“We felt the world get released. The cutter worked, then?”
“Did the doctor heal you? Where is he?”
“Heh, you’re pro’bly really hungry by now.”
Slowly, they began to realize that something was not quite right. Jax saw the bleak expression on his friend’s face and asked, “what is it? What happened to you, Len? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I just murdered my hero.”
The words were spoken with so little feeling that they sounded empty. But they held more than one world of meaning.
“You mean Devi?” Jax’s gaze was sharp until Lenny nodded, then his expression softened into understanding. “He was working for the Central Power, wasn’t he? He had become a Power Core in more than name.”
“Worse.” Lenny shook his head slowly from side to side, fumbling with the Sissionbeam-cutter. “He is the one who created EX-2. What we call the Central Power. Devi created it, was afraid at what he had made and tried to run. But when it caught up to him he decided to serve it without reservation. Yohan Devi...was a traitor. So after he cured me, I destroyed him.”
A somber air fell over all of the dimension travelers. They felt guilty for leaving Lenny alone in the hands of an enemy, even though they had been so uncomfortable with the decision that they left the restaurant and came back early to check on him.
Jackal was nodding slowly at what he had said. “You did the right thing. We can’t afford to trust traitors. Life’s too precarious for that.”
“I don’t know.” Lenny’s gray eyes looked at him like frozen pebbles. Jackal met them levelly with his gaze of smoldering coals.
“But what is EX-2? And how did he have the knowledge to make something so powerful that he could not destroy it?” Amber wanted to know.
“There are still too many questions. Devi told me very little...only that he had made it and that he came to serve it. Other than that, he betrayed me for it and was going to make me into its slave. But I know someone who will give us at least some of the answers.”
“Who?”
“Leaflow.”
---
The train was gone when they returned to the street it had been sitting beside. Men in orange vests were inspecting the area, sweeping detection devices of various sorts over the sidewalk. It was cordoned off with warning streamers to make sure that no one came to close to the place, which might have dangerous radiations or other phenomenon effecting it. The travelers stayed at a distance so that they would not be spotted or even recognized.
Amber turned pale and Raggsy patted her on the shoulder, trying to comfort her.
“It’s alright,” she said after a moment, giving everyone a wan smile. “We’ve all lost something in this venture. And...it’s just a train. I can build another one some day, when this is over.”
“That means we have to find another metal base plate to ground ourselves on when jumping,” Jax said briskly, covering up his unease at the loss. “And a long wire to connect to the Di-jump for us all to hold. It’s going to be a little bit rougher, finding places to sleep and supplies on some worlds, now. But we’ll get through. It shouldn’t take long. Think, we’ve already defeated two Power Cores, now there’s only seven more to go!”
“And EX-2.” Lenny put in coldly. “We must stop it at the source.”
“Of course,” Jax agreed, though he gave his friend a worried look out of the corners of his eyes.
Lenny had been acting differently ever since he came out of the laboratory. Not that he could be blamed, after what he had been through. But he would have to get over it at some point, when the shock had abated. He was not wearing any bandages and the only mark on him was a small, round red scar on the side of his head, just in front of his ear. Jax guessed that Devi’s methods of installing and working on cybernetics were fairly sophisticated. He just hoped that all of the change in his friend’s attitude was natural.
They did not dare hang around where the train had sat for long. The travelers did consider going to look for it, but Lenny pointed out that it would probably be far away from there by now, taken to a government laboratory for study or held in a secure lot until they could decide what to do with it. Rescuing it would be far too large a job for the travelers to tackle along with their primary mission. Perhaps Amber could come back for it later, after everything shook out, but for now they had to find a way to jump to Leaflow’s world without it.
The city was wide and full of technology, but it was not so easy to find a large enough piece of metal for all of them to stand on. After looking futilely in a few places he thought they might find one, Lenny led them to a wrecking yard in a slightly less high-rise part of Belltoh. There they found a large, light sheet of rusted metal and a long copper wire, both of which they had to pay for before dragging them off to a quiet spot nearby. With the sheet spread on the ground and everyone assembled on it, Lenny hooked up the wire to the Di-jump. Once again it displayed a wide range of worlds within jumping distance and Jax looked through them hungrily while everyone waited. He was enjoying seeing more than the original ring of nine trapped worlds.
“But we have to go on so that it doesn’t happen again...” he muttered to himself, adjusting it until it showed the dimension which he calculated was Leaflow’s. The gauge read just into the scarlet, enough to jump safely, so he slammed his thumb down on the center button. A shock went through them all, carried by the wire to their hands and down through them to the metal under their feet. Most of them had no experience jumping without the train. There were a few exclamations of surprise as their vision seemed to blur, the world slipped away around them and they all could not help blinking their eyes.
The new air touched their arms and faces with cool, moist tendrils. An earthy, loamy scent came up to meet them. There was none but the very softest of breezes, which rocked the leaves above them, filling the everlasting night with mysterious rustlings. They opened their eyes and looked about, some with more curiosity than others.
The deep midnight sky, seen through breaks in inky branches, was speckled with a few stars. Twisted, ancient trees stood around them in the twilight darkness, moss thick on their bark. Tiny twinkles of light moved through the woods, sometimes pausing over the specter glow of Greenfang mushrooms.
Jax shifted in the thick loam beneath his feet and gazed around, taking it all in. Though he had been here once before, he had been ill at the time and had not been able to leave the train. Now he felt the mysterious electricity in the air which seemed to both repress his senses and heighten them at once.
“The druid’s wood,” Patch commented, fingering his cutlass thoughtfully. “But it seems that there is more vines here than last time.”
Lenny nodded agreement. There had been purple creepers clinging to the trees and apparently strangling them last time they were here, but the malignant growths were thicker now. They spread from one tree to the next, hanging in heavy swathes between the branches or trailing across the ground like groping arms. Many of the trees even had something like mistletoe sprouting from them, hanging down with loathsome, oozing bladders like seawrack.
Dansei touched Lenny’s arm to draw his attention. “Do not act like I told you, but there is something watching us.”
“Where?” Lenny did not shift his gaze around the forest, keeping it fixed curiously on some of the thicker vines.
“Over beside that clump of trees. It is coming towards us now.”
At the same time Raggsy’s sharp voice said aloud, “hey, look, is that Leaflow there?”
Everyone turned to look where he was pointing. A dark shape materialized from a cluster of trees, striding to the edge of their group and giving a slight bow. It’s hooded head tilted up and they saw his bright green eyes looking at them, with flecks of yellow light drifting through them.
“Leaflow!” Jax jumped forward, hands outstretched, but then hesitated just before touching him. “Wait, are you the real Leaflow?”
“I am the one you knew before, who traveled with you. The one who’s service bracelet you carry in your pocket. The Keeper of Light and Darkness sent me to meet you.”
“But...you died! On Jackal’s world. I thought you were dead!”
“I told you that I could not die.” Leaflow’s voice was just as impenetrably solemn as they remembered it from before, though his eyes flickered with something close to amusement. “Remember?”
“Oh. But still...didn’t you, well, dematerialize or something? I mean, I’m really glad to see you. I owe you my life to some extent. But I thought you wouldn’t be here any more. Just the Power Core.” Jax tilted his head to one side and scratched a finger in his hair obnoxiously as he tried to explain.
The avatar of Leaflow turned away, glancing off among the trees. “I won’t be here for long, now, it is to be hoped.”
The others came forward then and there was general greeting and introduction to both Dansei and Jackal, who had never really met him before. Patch still treated him deferentially, as a druid, but Soleeryn would hardly look at him or say a thing. Lenny was impatient to continue their mission and asked Leaflow, “do you think that there will be any obstructions to our freeing the Keeper from EX-2's bonds?”
He was remembering what had happened on the last world, with Dr. Devi’s treachery, and did not want anything like it to happen again.
Like always, Leaflow seemed to know his thought without it being spoken. “The Keeper is still fighting to keep his will free of the master’s. He has not given up and will not resist you personally. But it has been a difficult battle. The Keeper had to use much of his freedom and power recently in a battle on a different world, and in so doing lost a little of his footing in this one. Because of that, the dragon is no longer friendly. That is one reason he sent me to meet you, so that I might give warning.”
A look of understanding passed between them when he spoke of a battle on a different planet, though none of the others knew what it meant. Lenny bowed his head and returned, “I’m grateful to him. We’ve brought the tool to set him free. Please, take us to him now.”
With a nod, the creation began to lead the way deeper into the dark forest.