Herod stared out the window of the star-tram as it sped along the magnetic 'tunnel' at hypersonic speeds. Below him were vast fields of grain, tended to by robotic agricultural units. Above him was an ocean, sparking and blue in the light of the two fusion reactors moving along their own magnetic tracks.
The two areas were separated by roughly five hundred thousand miles. The only reason he could see them with any clarity was the auto-focus in the windows of the startram, and the fact that he was currently moving through the thin layer of vacuum between the two atmospheres.
It wasn't the first time he had ridden this route.
Herod kept having nightmares in the eyeblink between full wakefullness and moving into maintenance mode to defrag, recompile, and kernal check. In the split second before the dream generator kicked on, he had been suffering a nightmare.
The same one.
Over and over.
Every time he was sitting in a startram car. Wally was next to him, even more rusted and battered. The hazardous environment frame and protective gear he was wearing was worn, scuffed, dirty. His boots were battered and scuffed, the soles thin, the laces replaced by narrow strips of plas. His tools were mismatched, scuffed, scratched, rusted in places. Grips were worn almost smooth, sockets were rounded rather than sharp at the corners, drivers were warped and rusted.
Every time he looked up and saw his own face in the glass of the window across from him.
His face was wrinkled. His hair gray. A long beard down his chest of iron gray and bone white. His eyes were surrounded by red, puffy flesh, his eyes bloodshot and weary. His nose and cheeks covered with the thin spider-tracks of broken capillaries.
In the nightmare, he knew there was just one more thing to fix and maybe the automatic systems would finally completely kick in.
Right before he woke up he often suffered another dream. Of pushing a massive boulder uphill, of struggling, straining against it, moving it stubbornly inch by inch, only to have his strength fail and the boulder roll back and crush him, leaving him screaming and maimed in the dirt of the trail he had been pushing the boulder up.
Herod knew he needed to talk to someone about it, about the dreams, but couldn't bring himself to.
Nightmares like he was having were one thing.
Sam-UL's existence was something else.
Herod looked down and patted Wally's head. The little maintenance bot looked up, blinked, and gave a chirping sigh as he leaned against Herod's leg.
"Harry, are you there?" Sam asked over the datalink. Herod could hear the tightness in his voice, hear the barely resisted madness.
"I'm here, Sam," Herod said.
"Things are lighting up. The more stuff we fix, the more urgent requests for repair we get. We've got a major one, tied into the SUDS, the Gestalt System, and the Educational System," Sam said.
"What is it?" Herod asked. He closed his eyes and sighed. He couldn't remember the last time he had more than a few hours off.
Yes, he could. It was when they'd sent a message to that General. How long ago was it? Years? Months?
He checked his chrono out of habit and sighed when he saw that it was flashing error codes and had a 'local time' underneath that said he'd been here nearly twenty years.
"Herod?" Sam asked.
"I'm here," Herod answered.
"You drifted off for a moment. I need you to repair something."
"What is it?" Herod repeated.
"I'm not sure, exactly. I don't know what most of this stuff does," Sam admitted. "Something called the Cross Species Consensus Individual Insertion Array. It sounds important."
Herod nodded. "Yeah. How long till I get there?"
"It's important enough that it's on the Alpha Layer, near Earth-Prime. It's on Atlantis," Sam said.
Herod sighed, a weary long-suffering sound. "Of course it is. Am I going to be able to access Atlantis this time or am I going to end up running away from pre-Glassing combat robots again?"
"When I accepted the repair request, it kicked out a security header for you. The system is weird on Earth-Prime," Sam said.
"I'm pretty sure that it's the initial section that they built," Herod said. "Atlantis was destroyed in the Mantid Attack, if I recall correctly."
"Yeah. The Lost Continent. Completely obliterated by the Mantid," Sam said. "Supposedly, a high-tech utopia that everything they had is all lostek."
Herod nodded. He'd heard the stories. "I used to scoff at the idea of Pre-Glassing TerraSol having tech that the Confederacy didn't have."
"Then we got here," Sam said softly. He giggled, then laughed, then started screaming and sobbing.
It took a few minutes for Sam to get himself back under control.
"Better?" Herod asked.
"Little," Sam said, his voice quiet.
"Funny thing is, all of this is ancient tech. Even if it is technically lostek, it's all ancient. There's actual semi-conductor systems. Some of the quantum arrays have less than ten qbits and are a thousand times more massive then anything we have currently," Herod said. He chuckled. "Hell, my watch, before it grew legs during the Bang, had more qbits than the majority of the 'supercomputer arrays' we repaired."
"It's funny, but if I start to laugh I'll start to scream and I don't know if I can stop this time," Sam said softly. His voice grew low and menacing. "And when I start screaming, I want to kill you so badly. So, so badly."
"I know, Sam," Herod said, looking out the window. "As soon as we're done, you'll kill me."
"Yes, yes I will," Sam whispered. "There will be nowhere you can run, nowhere you can hide. I'll let you run, let you feel all the fear as you know I'm coming for you and you can't stop me. You live at my sufferance, at my largess, but that generosity shall not last forever, Herod."
Herod stared out the window as Sam raved at him.
In a way, he was starting to miss Dee.
---------------
"Dammit, the self-check failed again," Herod said, staring at the screen. Data was flowing by. Everything was working right, but it still kept throwing back "SELF CHECK FAILED. ALERT MAINTENANCE. ERROR CODE: GURU MEDITATION ERROR 22-04- 8400000C.000054D9" which made no sense.
"Any ideas?" Herod asked, looking down at Wally, who had finished the grisly task of shoving bones into his chest and grinding them up for mass.
Wally beeped and looked around. He blinked a few times, then looked back and gave a low, sad whistle.
"Me either," Herod said. "Let's see. We'll do a RUNSTEP command, see what we can find."
Herod stood there, watching each section of the bootup run, while Wally stood next to him. Cooling arrays were in tolerance. Power was stable with correct voltages. The fact that the system used whole volts instead of micro or millivolts still startled him.
The old systems were horrific power hogs.
RAM checked out. It still used the old byte system rather than the holographic platter system, so it took Herod a second each time to convert the amount of memory.
It seemed almost ironic to Herod that this system, which he had no idea what it did, had less memory than a pocketcomp RAMstik you could win in a box of cereal. He had a Charlie MooMoo RAMstik on his keychain back in the black box that had a trillion times the memory of the entire system and it was smaller than Herod's finger.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
For a moment Herod daydreamed about sitting in the Black Box and watching a few episodes of Charlie MooMoo. He could use some animated comedy amusement.
"THERE!" Herod suddenly blurted out. He didn't tap onto the next instruction, just looked at what had happened.
Process Call to Species Divergent Neural System Amalgamation Splicing Array Failed
Process Call to Primary Processed Packet Processing Injection Processor Array Failed
DEEZ NUTZ FAILURE AT ADDRESS 0x80071AC3
Process Call to Recursion Interruption Buffer Failed
SHUTTING DOWN
Herod stared at it.
"All right. They're words. I recognize them as words. They're put in statements and descriptions," Herod suddenly leaned forward and banged his helmeted head against the side of the massive computer array. "But what does it mean?"
"Herod, are you all right?" Sam suddenly asked.
Herod sighed. "I need you to look up a couple arrays and a buffer system. Tell me if they're nearby," Herod said, then recited the error codes.
"Wow, those don't show up on a search or a list of functions and equipment, you literally have to do queries on those systems to get them to show up," Sam said softly. "It's a high security area."
Herod sighed. "Of course it is. Why, it's perfectly logical. A high security area. On an artificial continent modeled after a continent destroyed 8,000 years ago. On the surface of a Dyson Sphere, built 8,000 years ago in secret. In a secret dimension. Around a repeatedly failing Big Bang that nobody knows about. Why, a high security area in such a well known area makes complete sense!"
Herod took a deep breath.
"I HATE THIS FUCKING PLACE!" he yelled.
"Herod, easy, easy, man," Sam said.
Herod slumped, leaning face first against the computer array, which was somehow vibrating smugly.
"How long have we been at this, Sam?" Herod asked softly.
"According to the systems I'm accessing, less than a year has passed at the Black Box," Sam said.
"How long, Sam?" Herod repeated.
"Um, the system where I'm at, which is temporally shielded? I've been in here about, oh, five years."
"How. Long."
"Two hundred sixty three years, five months, fourteen days, ten hours, six minutes," Sam said softly. "You've been working to repair the SUDS for three hundred years, Herod. Time moves differently for you than it does for me. I'm out past the Gamma Layer, you're doing most your work at the Alpha and Beta Layers, where time moves faster."
"Of course it does," Herod said, squeezing his eyes shut.
"That's why your defragging and kernal recompiles are taking longer and longer."
"I'm getting old," Herod whispered. "Laughter is timeless, imagination has no age, dreams are forever, look upon my works, ye joyless ones, and despair, for lives lived in happiness shine brighter than the stars and endure long after your misery has passed unto death."
"The Tyrant Disney," Sam said softly.
"Yes," Herod answered. "Three hundred years. Three hundred years have gone by."
"Not exactly," Sam said. "Just for you. Personally. And Wally."
"What about Dee?" Herod asked, mentally crossing his fingers that the psychopath had turned to dust and blown away on an ill wind.
"Still processing souls. She's getting better at it, but she still has a backlog of a couple hundred trillion," Sam said. "Why? Did you want to talk to her?"
"Oh, Digital Omnimessiah, no," Herod said. "Just keep that psycho away from me."
"She serves her purpose, Herod, as do you," Sam said, his voice suddenly firming and deepening. "Each unto his task with all his skill in grim purpose to a future they may never enjoy but find satisfaction in the knowledge that they did their part in ensuring that future."
"Catharzee Kryntalik. Yeah, I know the quote," Herod said. "Everyone knows that quote. Do you remember what happened when his work was accomplished?"
Sam was silent for a moment. "No. I don't."
"He hyper-sparked the stellar mass. Killed six hundred thirty five billion sentient beings across a fifty light year bubble," Herod said. "His final quote was a misquote from before the Glassing."
There was silence a moment. "What was it."
"The future's so bright you're gonna need shades," Herod said. He chuckled, then laughed. "You know, what I just realized?"
"What?" Sam said, his voice soft.
"He's in here somewhere. A charismatic madman who convinced billions of sentient beings to work toward a grand project that killed them all, is somewhere in this system," Herod said.
"I thought they'd erase his SUDS record so nobody could bring him back," Sam said.
Herod shook his head. "You think they had that kind of database penetration on our side? They might be able to lock him out of the system from being reloaded, but there's no way they were that deep into the databases here to erase him."
"Huh. That means there's a lot of really evil people in the system somewhere," Sam said. "Do you think the HYP3.14 Ripper is in here somewhere?"
Herod chuckled. "If DS's somehow get loaded into this system, then, yeah, he's somewhere in here."
"Brr."
There was silence for a moment. "All right. You're right, it's on Atlantis. Believe it or not, it's only about two hundred meters from you."
Herod sighed. "Of course it is," he patted Wally. "Give me a waypoint line."
The blue line appeared in his vision and he started following it.
-------------------
"You know, we could really use some help," Herod said, kneeling down and cutting away a section of superconductor data cabling. A white spectral face of phasic energy started pushing out of the cable and Herod smacked it absently. It sunk back down with a snarl.
"Who's going to help us?" Sam asked.
Herod pulled the damaged connection collar away, tossing it over his shoulder. Wally grabbed it and shoved it into his chest, his grinders whirring as he reclaimed the mass.
"Who even knows what all this is. You've been doing this for centuries and don't even understand what it all is," Sam said.
"Because it's all eight thousand years old, built by crazy people!" Herod yelled, throwing the damaged cable to the side. Wally handed him a new cable. "An insane idea made manifest by insanity, hubris, and a distinct lack of..."
Herod went still.
"Three hundred years," he said softly, bending down and attaching the cable. "Three hundred years I've been doing this myself. Three hundred years of just me, running from system to system."
"I know," Sam said.
Herod locked the collar down, saw the cable light up with a warm amber light instead of the cold white light of the previous section. He slowly replaced the floor plating.
"Do the cloning systems work?" Herod asked softly.
"Lemme check," Sam said. There was silence for a moment and Herod insanely wished Dee was there so he could bum a smoke off of her. "Um, no. Looks like some kind of system lockout. I can't remotely unlock it, the systems that handle remote unlocking require error checks first and I can't trigger them."
"We're working on that next. We're getting the damn cloning banks working," Herod said.
"Why?" Sam asked.
Herod reached out with one foot and tapped a bone. "So we can bring these people back. They know this system. They built this system. Why didn't we bring them back?"
"Um... Harry..." Sam said gently.
"What?" Herod asked, stomping back toward the original system.
"You remember why we're here," Sam said.
"Yeah. So?" Herod said, stopping at the master control panel. "So what?"
"We're here to fix the SUDS. Without it being repaired, I can't bring back the techs who worked here. Not to mention that most of them are maddened, sleeping ones, or suffered extreme phasic injuries," Sam said. "Even if we get the system working, there's no guarantee that we can SUDS up the original crew that died here."
Herod closed his eyes and leaned his head against the side of the computer.
It was still vibrating smugly.
"Shit," was all Herod said.
"And right before those kids showed up, external access was taken over by the Arch-Angel Ellie, and I can't even get her to talk to me," Sam admitted. "She's part of a different system and won't recognize my authority."
"Elllie?" Herod asked. He stepped back, closed his eyes, and shook himself.
"Ee ell ee. Extinction Life Event. She's some kind of emergency system," Sam said.
"So things are going bad outside," Herod said. He opened his eyes, reached out, and thumbed the startup button. "Here goes nothing."
The computer whirred to life.
It beeped through each check, then began clicking and mumbling to itself.
Herod watched it as the CPU load jumped to 95% and stayed there as it began to process three different classes of files.
All of them SUDS files.
Herod sighed.
"That's one. What's next?" Herod asked, starting to gather up his tools. "Let's stick to Atlantis for right now. This is where they started building, let's see what's critical and fix it here."
"Um... Catastrophic Biological Failure Overflow Sorting Array System," Sam said. "Wow, the software in here is absolutely thrashed. The VR representation looks like a warzone."
"Can you fix that on your end?" Herod asked.
"I think so. I'll have to bring up the data from the Antarctic Data Storage," Sam said. "Looks like the hardware failed completely. No signal from any of it."
"Probably just unplugged again," Herod said. "How far?"
"Uh, fifteen hundred meters," Sam said. "Want me to get you a cart or something?"
"I'll walk," Herod said.
"OK. I have to do in-person VR requests for replacement code at the Antarctic Facility. I'll be back in a bit," Sam said.
"Yeah," Herod said. He looked down at Wally. "Three hundred years. Can you believe that shit?"
Wally just blinked, then beeped.
"Yeah, me either," Herod said.
-------------
Ge'ermo'o watched as General Trucker leaned forward and pointed at one of the data windows in the holotank. The window showed one of the new tanks, in the parking lot of a shopping center, merrily burning away. A flag was fluttering in the breeze, two spears on either side of a mantid skull, all in white on a black cloth, the tips of the spears red.
Painted on the ground was "It was like that when we got here!"
"Another tank. Dead," Trucker was saying.
Ge'ermo'o nodded along with the others.
"What went wrong this time?" Smokey 'No asked.
"They did a tight starboard opposing track turn while mounting a curb, one of the tracks snapped, got pulled up into the running gear, bunched up next to the engine and forced the firewall against the steam turbine, rupturing the injection system, which then caught everything on fire," Trucker said.
Ge'ermo'o nodded along.
Smokey 'No nodded and looked at General A'armo'o. "That seems like a serious defect."
"Indeed," A'armo'o said. "One that would prove fatal on the battlefield."
"And something that should have been caught in field testing," Trucker snapped. "We're goddamn lucky that whoever keeps stealing these tanks keeps exposing some pretty serious manufacturing defects."
"Now, now, the defect had already occurred when they got there. Didn't you read their note?" Smokey 'No drawled.
"Hardy har har," Trucker said. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand while he spit into the plas bottle he was holding.
Ge'ermo'o noticed something that nobody else had noted.
After all, he was quite attentive and observant.
"General Trucker," Ge'ermo'o said, moving forward.
"Yes?" Trucker asked, leaning forward to stare at the video where locals were spraying the burning tank with fire extinquishers.
"You're blinking," Ge'ermo'o said. "One's green."
On the back of Trucker's neck, at the base of the skull, the top two bars were flashing red, the bottom one was a steady green.