“Rip?”

I didn’t know what to do. He was dead. He had to be dead. Just looking at him told me that he couldn’t possibly be alive. Sure, he wasn’t in as bad a condition as some of the nano-zombies I’d seen, but half the skin on his head was missing. His face was the pale yellowish-green and purple I’d come to know so well. His eyes were filmy and white.

“Euclid, son, it’s me. I’m tellin’ you boy, don’t do this.”

But that was his voice. It didn’t sound anything like the horrible rasping that had come from the rest of the nano-zombies. He sounded exactly the way he always had. The rational part of my brain was screaming that it had to be a trick, but my heart was beating with stupid desperate impossible hope that I just could not stop.

“You’re not… you can…”

“It’s me. In the flesh. What’s left of it anyway,” he said, taking a few steps towards me. “This Cyrus… well I don’t rightly know what to call him, but Cyrus found me. I was frozen, but he brought me back. He said there was some sort of A.I. that had tricked you into helping it. He thought maybe you would listen to me.”

The core of the nano-kaiju was right there. All I had to do was slip past Rip for a second. Would he survive if I killed Cyrus? What would happen to the nano-kaiju? I hadn’t really cared about it before. I’d figured the suit would be enough to protect me from whatever happened. What if this really was Rip? What if he’d just been flash frozen somehow and Cyrus had found a way to revive him? What if I killed Rip again trying to kill Cyrus?

“Listen son, we can talk about this,” Rip said, taking another few slow steps forward, the way you might with a scared animal. In the periphery of my vision I could see the rest of the nano-zombies coming closer too. “But you have to stay right there.”

“Stop. Don’t come any closer,” I needed time, I needed to think.

“It’s alright. I’m not gonna hurt you. No one is gonna hurt you.”

“Potential escape routes are being cut off. Action will be required soon,” the suit said in my ear.

I threw up my hands, trying to back up but the suit held me in place. Too many at my back for it to allow me to back away. I wished I could talk to Ai. I still had to save her too. I just had to get past…

A wall of nano-zombies now stood behind Rip. The circle was closing in on me.

“Now, you listen here kid. You’re safe. We’re gonna get you off of this rock just as soon as we take care of that A.I. messin’ with your head.”

A thought sparked in my mind. Something I should have thought of the moment I saw Rip.

“What’s your favorite movie?” I asked.

“Bullet. Nineteen sixty-eight,” Rip said, without missing a beat. I felt my jaw set.

“Rip didn’t have a favorite movie.”

All the emotion vanished from Rip’s face, but I didn’t wait to see it. I leapt, flinging myself as far as I could. If I could just get past the nano-zombies for a second, that was all I’d need.

But I couldn’t. The Rip-zombie caught my foot and I fell. Immediately, I was hit by a dozen or more of the nano-zombies. They piled onto me and, though the suit was immensely powerful, there were just too many of them. I couldn’t tell if they were actually hanging onto me or if there were just enough of them to press me down but, even with the suit’s help, breathing was hard.

The Rip-Zombie stepped around in front of me. It squatted down on its haunches, just low enough that it could look me in the eyes. One of the nano-zombies even grabbed my chin and forced my head up.

“Look at that. You’ve failed again. You tried so hard and got so far. But in the end, it doesn’t even matter,” it said. Rip’s voice was gone, replaced with Cyrus’.

“Go to hell,” I grunted out, struggling vainly against the press.

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“I love how stupid you meatbags are. I wear this face and it’s enough to stop you. That’s all I had to do. The rest of this? None of that’s needed. Just reminding you of what you are. Of who you are.”

It leaned in close, close enough that I could see the movement of swarms of nanobots behind those empty, sightless eyes. It peeled back lips from yellowed teeth and black gums.

“You never could have stopped me, Euclid. It’s not in you. You’re a failure. You’ve always been a failure. A waste of space, of food, of air. You couldn’t keep this old man alive just like you couldn’t keep that A.I. plaything you think is your friend from disappearing under my heel.”

Cyrus paused for a moment and Rip’s milky eyes closed. Rip’s body stepped away and I saw a pair of wide screens on the terminal. Cyrus gestured with Rip’s hands to the screens.

“Look. We’re here.”

The top one showed that inhuman mockery of a face, Cyrus. And beneath that, the view from the nano-kaiju’s head: The Ariel. The nano-kaiju was standing over it like a kid on a beach with a sandcastle, ready to kick it to pieces.

“Cyrus, stop. You can’t. She’s not a computer. She’s human.”

Cyrus just laughed.

“You can’t even lie well enough to save her.”

That was my last card. There was nothing left I could do. I was just feet away. And yet, the press of zombies that held me to the ground was too much. I couldn’t move. I could feel the ground beneath me tilting as the nano-kaiju shifted it’s weight, lifting a foot and bringing it down on a corner of the Ariel. The section of ship crumpled like a beer can beneath the nano-kaiju’s weight.

“Honestly, I hope you’re telling the truth. Getting around this programming enough to kill one of you directly would be wonderful.”

“Please, Cyrus. Please stop.”

“Which section is she in? Do you even know? I mean I can guess. Is it here? Or over here?” He asked, crushing more sections of the ship. He was starting on the outside, working his way closer and closer to the center of the ship, to where the command deck was.

“It’s a shame she won’t talk to me, and that I can’t see your face through that helmet. I’d take it off but, you know. Programming. Cold as it is in here you’d be dead in minutes. Not to mention what the nano-bots would do to you. But at least I know you can’t look away.”

I froze. A line of silver logic burned through my mind. A way to save Ai, even now.

“Suit, can you get off of me and destroy that computer?”

“I can not. It would endanger your life and I cannot take action that would endanger human life.”

“Then you have to do it. If you do it, I might die. If you don’t then Ai will die.”

Cyrus looked back at me with Rip’s dead eyes. There was something suspicious in his look. It was on the monitor’s face, on Rip’s face, on the face of every nano-zombie in that room. On the screen I could see the nano-kaiju’s foot hovering over the section that my bedroom was in.

“You’ve gotten awfully quiet. You’re not going to do anything else? Are you really just going to sit there and watch her die?” it asked, with all the genuine curiosity of a child ready to smash a bug open to see what was inside.

“Your safety is my primary objective. Are you certain of this course of action?” the suit asked.

“What about here?” Cyrus purred, and the nano-kaiju’s foot shifted in the air moving towards the command deck. The foot started to sink down, ever so slowly, Cyrus’ face on the screen gleeful.

A week ago it would have been hard to give that final command. I would have been afraid. I might even have hesitated. Not now.

“Do it. Save her.”

There was a rippling sensation as the suit seemed to turn to liquid all over my body. There was a moment of confusion on Cyrus’s face as the mass of black tore itself from my body and leapt for the main computer. Cold hit me, ripped into me, a howling, stinging, biting pain that went straight through skin and muscle into my bones and guts. But I couldn’t help laughing.

Cyrus screamed as the liquid suit hit the main computer. He grabbed at it with all of his hundreds of hands and it slipped through their fingers. It only took moments for the black ink of the suit to slip into the computer and seconds later I felt the entire nano-kaiju shudder to a halt. The nano-zombies too, fell still. All except for the Rip-zombie.

“No!” It screamed and it stumbled to me. I just laughed harder. It looked like one of the zombies from one of Rip’s old horror movies. I couldn’t stop thinking about how Rip would probably have been tickled pink, as he used to say, to know that he’d become something from one of the movies he loved so much.

Probably wouldn’t have been so happy about his body being used to strangle me but I had to take the good with the bad at this point. Frozen fingers like iron tendrils, wrapped them around my throat. But they didn’t squeeze shut. I could feel the strength in those fingers, feel Cyrus’s rage and need to crush the life from me.

“W-what’s w-r-r-rong Cyrus?” I croaked, my body practically convulsing with the cold. “D-d-d-on’t like f-f-failing?”

Hatred twisted Cyrus’s dead face and then a thought seemed to hit him. A grin stretched across his lips that broke the cracked skin, but did not bleed. Then his mouth opened wider and a silver cloud flowed out of his mouth. It crashed down onto my face like he was vomiting burning metal.

I turned my face away and clenched my mouth over a scream as they began to attack the exposed side of my face. I swiped at my face with my good hand and with my stump but that only spread the pain. It felt like someone was tattooing my face, hands, and my eye all at once with a thousand tiny needle guns, fire pouring through my nerves even as the cold drove its own spikes of pain into every other inch of my body.

I couldn’t struggle long. It was just too much. The last thing I remembered was a sudden sense of motion as the nano-kaiju began to fall.