SHOCKS Headquarters, Victoria, British Columbia - May 31, 2043, 10:13 AM
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Sergeant Arnold Strauss’s truck pulled up in the SHOCKS Headquarters garage, springs squeaking. He’d had a long time to think since his release from Aberdeen Hospital. For one thing, he shouldn’t have been out yet, but circumstances had required it. His hurt arm was in a sling and covered in bandages, his good one ached from gripping the wheel, and his head pounded against his skull.
When he woke up that morning in a hospital bed and without his gear, he’d thought for sure that the storyline anomaly had ensnared him. He’d started to panic; it had shifted to medical horror, and if he was trapped in a hospital room, his role might be lethal. But instead, a doctor—a real one—had checked him out, pronounced him healthy, and kicked him out. “Aberdeen’s about to start seeing patients from the Sooke Quarantine, so we’re discharging everyone who doesn’t have to be here,” she’d said.
Before he left, though, he’d checked the Universal Reality Anchor. It was on, humming away like it was supposed to. Would it be enough? He wasn’t sure. But he’d completed his mission, and Claire—Subject - 573-V-1/1O-Alpha—was nowhere to be found. His best move was to return to SHOCKS Headquarters and debrief with Lieutenant Rodriquez and Acting Director Ramirez.
So now, here he was.
He safed his broken rifle and pistol, holstered the sidearm, and pulled his go-bag over his good shoulder. Then, shutting the truck door, he marched into SHOCKS’s last stronghold within the Victoria/Vancouver Island Control Zone.
The facility felt less like it had when they’d arrived two nights ago and more like it had two weeks back, before this whole mess. Agents, Troopers, and Researchers moved through its sterile halls like bees in a hive, everyone busy. It almost felt normal—like everyone was happy to be doing their jobs again instead of preparing to abandon ship.
Almost.
But when he looked closer, he could see signs that the building was preparing for something worse. And he knew what; the massive potential merge had been looming over northeast Victoria since he left Aberdeen Hospital, and he hadn’t been able to keep himself from staring at it.
It was partly why he needed to debrief with Rodriguez and Ramirez.
He hurried to the Director’s office, where they’d both set up. Ramirez had made it clear that while his experience as a top-tier Researcher gave him a skill set that could manage the Control Zone during normal operations, he needed someone to handle the armed response side of SHOCKS VVI. So, after some work, they’d set up a desk and workspace for Lieutenant Rodriguez on one side of the office. Together, they served as Headquarters’ brain.
“Lieutenant, the primary mission was a failure.”
Strauss’s words hit Rodriguez almost like a slap. He almost regretted saying them, but they had to be said.
“Understood,” Rodriguez said. She composed herself visibly, and Strauss relaxed. She was still in control. “Report to Researcher Barnes for the debriefing interview.”
“Ma’am, I need to say something before the interview. You both need to hear this.”
“Make it fast,” Rodriguez said.
“I briefly had 1O-Alpha in my custody but was put in a position where I couldn’t maintain control over her without jeopardizing my secondary mission. As that mission coincided with her stated goal in the hospital, I agreed to work with her to complete it, as ordered.
“Together, we navigated a merged section of Aberdeen Hospital and Reality Ninety-Three. I was badly injured, and she saved my life, helped me reactivate the hospital’s URA, and brought me to the doctors, who patched me up. I’m running on stimulants here, but I have a recommendation.”
“Go ahead, Sergeant,” Ramirez said from behind the Director’s desk.
“We should extend an olive branch to 1O-Alpha.” Strauss swallowed. His opinion wouldn’t be popular—especially since she’d obviously wrecked a bunch of the Headquarters on her way out, ripped the JAMES system from its walls, and destroyed a likely-irreplaceable anomaly.
But he had to try because she hadn’t had to save his life. She’d gone out of her way, several times, to keep him alive—even though he wanted to put her back in containment. Her anomalous powers were worth studying, yes. But right now, they were even more worth using, because the potential merge over southern Vancouver wasn’t getting any smaller, and when it broke, SHOCKS would need allies if it wanted to survive. Not test subjects. Allies.
She could be one.
Strauss hoped it wasn’t too late for that.
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Location Unknown, Date Unknown, Time Unknown
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I push myself off the ground, the devoured pouring through the window like the time the first floor in basic living flooded. I’m up, even though my lungs scream, and I can’t protest when James says, “[Analyzing. Overlaying Simulation.]”
The first devoured doubles back and shrieks, then lunges in your direction. You dodge/smoke form/shoot back.
I use Smoke Form and disappear into a dark cloud just as the hard-light devoured swings its arms to grab me. They pass through me, and I swirl to form on the far side.
Then the same thing happens a split second later but with the real, flesh-and-blood devoured. The monster misses, and in the moment it’s confused, I fire the last gravity round right into its torso. My eye’s burning, and the simulation drops away.
There’s a pause. A heartbeat—I can hear them in my ears.
The next devoured pushes its friend aside. It slams into the ground—the gravity shot’s ripped it apart. Then the next one rushes me. I dodge this time. Long arms grasp for me. My hands are busy tearing the Revolver apart, and my feet backpedal. The smell is unbelievable; I want to lose my breakfast. I slot the fire cylinder onto the Revolver. The barrel’s practically in the monster’s stomach, and I pull the trigger. It punches clean through it, but there’s another right behind that one.
And another. And another. They keep coming; there have to be fifty. Sixty. A dozen? I can’t count them, but I shoot the Revolver dry. Four more drop. The head’s good, and the upper chest. Lower than that, their wounds fix themselves. As I backpedal toward the next house, I get a full view of that process. Its already thin waist sucks even thinner like an old-timey corset’s tightening around it, and its lower chest rebuilds itself. There’s blood. A lot of blood.
But it blocks up the others. I start switching cylinders again.
I don’t have time to finish, though.
“[Analyzing. Overlaying Simulation.]”
The devoured press you back, away from the house. One reaches out to grab you, and you slither/dodge/fight.
I’m tired of running, so I lash out even as my optic aug heats up. The fake devoured takes the pistol whip like a champ, and its arms blanket around—
“[Resetting simulation. Don’t pick that one,]” James says.
“Thanks!” This time, I Slither back a few paces, turn, and run. The whole time I do, my fingers reload the Revolver, switching it back to gravity. I’m not sure if my choice worked; the simulation stops almost as soon as I turn. But the devoured doesn’t grab me. Its shrieks echo off the tower wall. And I crash into—through—a screen door.
The devoured are red, the house is blue. The whole village must have been turned. I fire the gravity shots with one second between each shot. The first three monsters get hit, and the last one shreds the door frame. I’m already doing the reloading trick as my feet move toward the back door.
[Skill Learned: Revolver Mastery 12]
My feet keep pounding the floorboards. They keep pushing, shrieking. I’m screaming, too. The Revolver’s not screaming; it’s barking out shots. I shove my way through the door and into the backyard. A devoured dies next to an empty kiddie pool. Another slumps over the slide. They have smoking holes in their chests, but I don’t have time to check them.
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[Analyzing. Overlaying Simulation.]
A single monster crashes through the fence, screaming as its arms wrap around you. You smoke form/slither/fire.
I Smoke Form and Slither together, disappearing through the monster and running through the new gap in the wooden slate fence. My pistol clicks empty again, but I’m still running—this time toward the ominous, stained-glass-and-concrete tower in the town’s square. My lungs burn, then suddenly burn less.
[Stability 5/10]
[Skill Learned: Endurance 5]
I pause at the entryway, turn, and look at the horde.
There are ten left. Twelve. Fifteen? Too many.
The Revolver’s shells start glowing again, and I empty them into the swarm of devoured. Some hit. Some don’t. I’m past caring. The truth is that I can’t win the fight, only extend it for a while. I backpedal again, this time past desiccated skeletons and up concrete stairs. Then I stop.
They’re not following me.
[Why’d they do that?] James asks. [If I’d known they wouldn’t follow us in here, I’d have said something, and that whole fight could’ve been avoided. See, this is why we need the SHOCKS database—the whole thing, not just what I could grab off Strauss. My simulation was woefully inaccurate.]
His British accent’s calming, and I can feel my heart rate dropping. Not much, but enough. I watch the nearest devoured back away from the door. It keeps glancing up at the shattered stained glass like it’s trying to watch something, but it can’t see, can it? “How did it know where we were?” I ask. My throat’s dry, and I’m not sure if it’s from screaming or the absolutely moistureless air.
[No idea. I’m trying to resimulate, but we need more data.]
“Fair.” I finally get a chance to look around at the octagonal room. The stairs work their way around the wall toward a bunch of rooms on the tower’s sides. None of the doors up there look locked, though here and there, bones litter the floor or sprawl across the stairs. Inside, the daffodil smell isn’t as strong, and neither is the devoured stink. I can breathe normally. But where’s the truth here? There’s not a book to be seen, or a newspaper; there’s nothing but shattered stained glass.
It’s a lot like the older churches the bus passed in Victoria, but the shape is wrong. None of them are tall. Well, they are, but they’re wide and long, too. This is just a tower. It’s got to be a couple hundred feet tall. I fill in a new variable. James thinks it was a cult, and maybe that’s how SHOCKS refers to them, but this feels more like a religion. “There’s no police or post office, so maybe they’re a religious government?”
[That makes sense. Let’s go up and see what we can learn.]
I nod slowly. The truth is up there somewhere. My feet hit the first stair, and I start climbing.
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I’ve got goals.
First, figure out what went wrong in this reality, because something definitely went wrong. And it wasn’t a plague. The devoured are bad, but I can’t believe they killed every other living thing—grass, trees, and every plant included. Something would have lived; biology doesn’t just stop. Plus, I want to solve this Inquiry, learn a new Truth, and deal with the devoured I left behind.
That brings me to my second goal. Find a way through to the other side of the thinning. I have a theory that the bubble contains part of this reality, not the whole thing. If I’m right, then I should be able to find the other side before it pops. If I can, I can offer to bring the Landsdowne people through. If not, maybe I can figure out how to separate the two or turn the thinning off from this side like I said I would.
And third—and most importantly—I need something to drink, because it’s dry here. I go for the water bottle in my backpack, but it’s mostly empty. “Have I been drinking that much?”
[Yes. You’ve drank over five hundred milliliters of water since we started climbing. You’re also rubbing your eyes more the higher we go. And you’ve started sweating a lot more.]
“Thanks,” I roll my eyes. “We’re not that high up. Should we try a door?”
[I think so.]
I take a deep breath, sip at the water to wet my lips, and climb one more flight of stairs. Then, gun up, I slowly open the door and quickly rush into the room. There’s no one, obviously, but there is a…thing. It leans against the wall, half-off the table, a steel tube with a glass side. It looks like the air tube things at the drive-through banks. But bigger, and I can’t see a way to open it.
Below it, there’s a keyboard, but this one’s not in English. At all.
Okay. Anomalous Computing. I’ve got skills at this, so this should be solvable. “James, got anything here?”
[Working on it, but there’s no lexicon for this language. Nothing in my databases, nothing in the Halcyon System. I’m trying to generate likely meanings for the symbols but coming up with very little.]
“Okay.” I push a couple of buttons experimentally.
The moment I do, the whole tower shakes for five seconds. It’s not earthquake shakes; after they stop, there’s no aftershock, so whatever I did caused them. I push one more button.
This time, the tube starts glowing. A face appears in it, or at least the keyboard version of a face. Its eyes are zeros or Os, either lower or upper case, and it’s got a straight underscore line for a mouth. The mouth opens, and a babble of noise comes out.
“I can’t understand you,” I say.
At the same time, James says, [Working on it. It’s not English or anything else I recognize. It’s probably the same language as the one on the keyboard. Keep it talking.]
I ask it questions, but no matter what I say, the artificial face just looks at me quizzically. It takes James almost five minutes of babble and a bunch of button presses before we get anywhere, but eventually, I push a key in the lower left corner, then one up high and to the right, then both together. The face changes. Eyebrows—sideways parentheses—raise over its eyes, and it spits out something that’s obviously a list.
[Skill Learned: Anomalous Computing Systems 3]
[Got it. The list helped. We’re looking at an instruction manual for a true artificial intelligence system, but it doesn’t run on a traditional binary system. It looks like it’s powered less by science and more by faith. If enough people believe it’s real, it’s real. That’s not something that’d work in our reality. An ontological AI. But it definitely does work.]
“So, what do I do?”
[Believe it’ll give us what we need? I’m not sure, but the first step is probably to query it for a few different things to build up the lexicon a little more. Right now, I have rough, kindergarten-level translations. It wants a demonstration of faith or something similar.]
“Okay. Demonstration of faith.” This isn’t my strength. Religion was never Dad’s priority; Mom grew up Catholic, but less the practicing type and more the cultural one. After she died, Dad didn’t even take us to Christmas Mass anymore, and I didn’t miss it much. But now, solving the Inquiry revolves around getting this faith AI to accept my inputs. That changes the equation a little. “Let’s look around more.”
[You’re low on water. The smart thing would be to leave and go back to Landsdowne Middle School.]
“But I need to shut this merge down or get through it.” I keep hiking up, even though my throat’s dry.
[Understood. We’ll keep pushing on, then. Maybe we’ll find an answer here.]
This high up, the stained glass windows aren’t shattered anymore; I have no idea how they’re still intact with how much the building’s been shaking, but they’re together. I start skipping doors; my priority’s on finding something to ‘demonstrate my faith,’ not on exploring every room.
The equation’s pretty simple. I think I have about half an hour before the water issue becomes a problem. James is worried about it right now. So I’ll search for ten minutes and then, if I can’t find anything, I’ll leave, shoot my way through the devoured that are probably still waiting outside, and go back to R0.
Easy enough.
And there’s enough time to get to the top of the tower.
It does take almost seven minutes to climb, at a rate of one step per second or so, with pauses at some of the landings for a breather. It didn’t look that tall from the outside. But eventually, I reach a carved wooden double door and crack it open.
Inside, somehow, is exactly what I’m looking for.
It’s an altar. And behind it is another steel tube with a glass front. As I get closer, it lights up, and the ASCII emoji face reappears. I’m hit by the same babble, but this time, James translates half of it in my augs. [Something about the demonstration being complete. I’m not sure; we’re still missing words, but maybe it just wanted you to climb the tower?]
I nod and start pointing at the keyboard. “Any ideas on how to make it speak English?”
[Yes, but not really. This is a holy language, like Latin was in the Middle Ages.]
“I didn’t pay much attention to social studies,” I hedge.
[Okay, so, it’s a language that’s only used by the clergy, which means there’s almost certainly a translation available from lay language to it. Let’s start experimenting.]
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I don’t have forever. My throat’s dry, and my lips are already pretty chapped, even though I’m trying not to lick them too much. But it doesn’t take long, either. The tower shakes a couple of times, the tube’s light blinks a half-dozen purples, blues, and pinks, and then, suddenly, the incomprehensible babble pops into focus. “You! Heretic! Apostate! The Tower has been unattended for seventy-five days, sixteen hours, and twenty-three minutes! The Tower demands your attention!”
“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.” I nod slowly. “Thoughts, James?”
[Fourth button, second row, then second button, first row.]
I push them, and the ASCII face makes a surprised one. “You want to see the archives? You?! Unbelievable.” But then it fades away, and a handful of names appear. ‘Holy Order for Virus Use,’ ‘Foreign Infiltrators,’ and ‘Final Days of the Tower’s Defenders’ appear. I’ve already got a guess at the first two, so I use what I hope are arrow keys to maneuver into the ‘Final Days of the Tower’s Defenders’ document.
It’s heavily blacked out. In fact, it looks a lot like a SHOCKS database report I’m not cleared for. But James gasps when he sees it. [Okay, working on a security breakthrough for the redactions. They’re ‘permanent,’ but they’ve also left behind a digital footprint a mile wide. I’ll have them broken soon. Just have to translate it out of their digital language and into ours. In the meantime, let’s start recording this so we can leave.]
I won’t leave, though, not with the truth so close. So, as James works on the digital security, I keep asking him for the best button options, skimming document after document for hints of what happened to this world.
It’s on the sixth button push that something else happens.
The ASCII face turns into a carat-enhanced glare, and its mouth’s line thins. “Heretic, you are unworthy of the Tower’s secrets. Your faith has been tested and found weak. The God in the Machine will judge you in the afterlife.” Another ASCII face appears, this one looking like a pair of hands praying in front of closed eyes.
My optic aug’s been clicking black like it does when it takes pictures, but now it starts rapid-firing as the tower begins to shake under my feet. [Give me five seconds, and flip through as much of this as you can!]
I listen, clicking the ‘next’ button as fast as possible and scrolling. My aug heats up, but I keep going. Over and over, faster and faster, until James yells, [Go!] in my ear.
Then I turn and sprint for all I’m worth for the tower’s exit.