Coven's Rebellion Chapter 28

Incoming heavy topics and stuff. Not like too heavy I don't think but yeah.

Fluff Link

Rosa

The room was sparse on features, save for three doors, one ahead and one to either side. The dark metal panel aesthetic continued into this area, so that even the warm lights in the ceiling couldn't nullify the eerie energy it had. That was before my girlfriend killed a man, leaving a body and an expanding pool of blood.

Other than the alarm that the man had been rushing for, several standing desks with large monitor arrays were set up against most available wall space. Unlike most others we'd discovered so far, these ones were active.

“I'm going to close the door,” Rusti said abruptly, after staring at the body for several seconds.

They didn't have to move one synthetic muscle of their tall, masculine frame to do that, but they turned away to look at it anyway. Amelia, on the other hand, was busy peeking into one of the three adjoining rooms.

“Holy fuck,” she blurted from the entrance to the left. “Talk about backup power.”

Curious, I made my way around the desks to peer around her. The room was about ten metres wide and five deep, with a massive storage rack taking up most of the wall opposite us. The whole wall was practically groaning under the weight of the heavy duty battery cells it held. Each one was plugged into sockets on the wall, happily keeping itself topped off with power coming from who-knows-where.

What baffled me most about them was… why? A whole wall of batteries could not be practical. Well, perhaps they were wary of connecting something to the wider power grid?

On a hunch, I left that room behind and hurried to the entry into the right-hand room. It was a server room, with immaculate cable management and little blinking lights. My synthetic skin felt a vague chill when the air currents shifted, blowing cold air and the faint smell of cleaning alcohol.

In the middle of the room, on a pedestal that poked at some subconscious game instinct within me, was one of those battery cells — mostly empty. The why of the setup had still not been answered, but I took some small satisfaction from figuring out the where and how.

“Rusti, I think I found what we were looking for. There's a server room here,” I called urgently.

His reply was preceded by a grunt of frustration. “Yeah, one minute. The door is refusing to stay closed. I can't—”

Abruptly, every background noise present in the facility slowed to a stop, and the lights shut off with a loud click. The people in command of security at the facility had just cut power. The alarm had made it to someone with authority. I wanted to swear loudly — to throw something even, as stress continued to mount.

How were we going to get the data, now that the power was cut? I paused as something registered in my subconscious thoughts, then spun to look at the racks of servers that were our objective. LEDs still fluttered with activity, and in the centre of the room, the power cell blinked a warning light. We still had backup power, but it was draining quickly.

A grinding rumbled through the floor, and when I turned back to search for the cause, it became immediately obvious. The door was rolling open, as though that were its natural, unpowered state.

“Rusti!” I said with alarm as I rushed to peek out into the elevator lobby. “Get the data on those servers, now.”

“On it,” they replied, pulling from their pocket the most precious item we'd brought along for this mission. It was a high speed data FTLN interface. Actually, correction, it was one of four such devices — the other three resided in the skulls of our cutting-edge android bodies. The interface that Rusti carried had much more robust hardware surrounding the priceless information glass, however, making it ideal for remotely ransacking securely air gapped server farms.

Rusti wasted no time getting to work, and across countless miles and the vast Pacific ocean, a team of SAI was getting ready to receive the data. This was what we came here to do. We were so close.

“O-oh… oh god, oh fuck.” Amelia's voice interrupted my thoughts.

With the emergency lights silhouetting her, she stood in the now open doorway to the third and final room, rifle hanging limp in one hand.

Adrenaline, fear, and anxiety fizzled over my skin like a radiation burn, and I hurried towards her. God damn it, what else had gone wrong? Ame still hadn’t moved when I arrived, so I leaned around to see into the third room. It was long, almost like a wide hallway or a thin warehouse, really. Yet more screens sat on the walls immediately to the left and right, displaying detailed maps of… human brains? Disturbing, considering what we had previously found in the facility, but hardly… hardly…

The rest of the room snapped into focus. Resting in small cradles, one for every square foot of wall-space, were thousands of objects that were very familiar to all digital beings. Thousands of crude, but still obviously functional, rotarybit universal computing units. RUCU — the optimal storage device for a digital mind.

Most horrifying of all, especially after having seen the prison and the morgue — they were all active. Every single one held a mind of… well, of some description.

Ame’s voice was almost monotonous when she spoke. “Archived subjects 500-1000 currently active. Operation: neutralisation test, number nine thousand, two hundred and fourteen.”

I looked over. She was reading from one of the screens. A progress meter was slowly inching its way across a window.

I processed everything in a single wild heartbeat — all the hints, all the odd little inconsistencies in the facility, and the technical information on the screen. It was obvious, what was happening, but I didn’t stop even to put the wild, jumbled, messy thoughts into an ordered form. I lunged for that screen, as though I was trying to catch a person who'd just stumbled while they stared out over the edge of a chasm.

Heartbreakingly, reality did not stray too far from the heart of that metaphor, with one glaring divergence — this person hadn't stumbled. Someone had pushed them.

Like glittering, wet sand, my nanites poured from my fingertips and into the hair thin cracks at the edge of the screen. A crude connection was made, and I instantly became aware of a dreamlike interpretation of virtual space.

Screams — incoherent and babbling — assailed me, and for an awful moment, I was overcome. The voices just… pressed, hurling themselves with edges of fraying, broken sanity, towards the escape I represented. I didn’t blame them for their terror, for that same emotion curdled in my gut when I saw what followed closely behind. It appeared out of the dreamlike haze as massive, grasping fingers of cold metal that dripped with deadly poison. The horror, the thing, executed its grim job in an emotionless, methodical frenzy.

“Cancel operation,” I demanded, shouting to be heard over the panicked ghostly babbling of the person who was the subject in this horrifying ‘experiment’.

Every jerking, mechanical movement of the too-many-limbed horror slowed to a stop, and a rasping digital voice said, “Ceasing operation.” Good. Good… the person wasn’t being… I could leave.

I pulled back, shaking so hard that my nanites struggled to retract. My gut felt heavy, like I'd eaten a riverstone. That poor person…

“Rusti,” Ame called back into the room behind us. “We have a major fucking problem, eh? Get in here.”

“I'm a bit busy, ladies!” They called irritably. “I’m trying to close the door and keep this damned data bridge open.”

“Get here now,” I said, reverting to internal, virtual communications. When had we stopped using the secure channels? The shock of the guard's death, it must've reverted us to using vocal comms.

The reply of our overworked SAI was a grumpy huff, but in moments, they joined us.

Ame’s hand began to brush soothingly down my back as she gave the details of the situation to Rusti. “Looks like we found where those people were ‘archived’ to. There’s gotta be thousands… they’re testing… well, the computer over there is calling it a ‘Digital Exorcist’ — lovely wording there. I think we found what we were looking for, and I think we can also safely figure out how they developed it. I’m a little confused how they managed to…”

The last was said with a gesture towards the row upon row of occupied RUCU that sat humming in their plugs on the wall.

Rusti was nodding with eyes wild. “But, this place was in operation like thirty fucking years ago, how did they… nevermind. Shit. May, Des, you seeing this?”

“Affirmative,” came the reply from Desmonia. “Assessing.”

May typed out a text before any of us could speak. “These are our people, Desmonia. WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING.”

“Fuck it, we’re already spraying a firehose of data through the FTLN interface. We’ll get noticed regardless, so I’m switching to voice,” Desmonia said. “I agree that we have to do something, but these aren’t necessarily our people. There are digital beings that we do not include in our organisation.”

There was a reason we’d been doing everything we could to keep the data transfer rates low as it passed through the FTLN nodes during this mission. Locational data from FTLN nodes was highly imprecise, but because we very likely had the only FTLN nodes within a hundred kilometres, it wouldn’t be hard for interested parties to spot our anomalous network traffic. Interested parties included the Network department of the UN, who were, among other things, in charge of keeping the Republic of America from gaining access to the FTLN.

“If we don’t try to save these people, Des…” May said, her voice shaking with emotion.

Desmonia sighed. “How, May? Where do we put them? How do we transport them? Two of the nodes that they have on site are busy running real-time links from our servers to the bodies. The node in Rosa’s body isn’t active, but that still leaves two very small pipes that we’d have to cram thousands of people through.”

May wasn’t going to be deterred, and as she spoke, I could hear the thoughts in her hyper-intelligent mind beginning to churn through the problem. “Siya recently got us a whole bunch of RUCU. They’re installed on Rosa’s farm and ready to go.”

“What about all the people on the makeshift servers we have around the globe? We were going to begin moving them in a week, May. What do we tell those people?” Desmonia said, sounding strained.

I’d had enough. We didn’t have time for them to endlessly debate the issue. They could speed their perception of time to compensate for things, but those of us on-site couldn’t afford to pull back from piloting these bodies right now.

I intervened. “We’re going to extract these people. Prepare the RUCU we have, Desmonia.”

“Do you have hours to wait while we upload… how many?” Desmonia snapped. “While the transfers are happening, we won’t get any of the data we launched this whole operation to get, either. If we utilise the node in your body, we won’t have the last-ditch option of moving you off the nanites.”

She wasn’t wrong. While I was technically here in person, unlike the others, I could still escape by being properly digitized. The effort of moving an entire mind from one storage device to another would take up the entire throughput of the devices we had available, however. In the frantic split-second timing of combat, there wouldn’t be time to wait for a break in the queue.

“I don’t care,” I told Desmonia, as my resolve hardened. “Use the node in my head to aid the transfer.”

“Are you sure, Rosa?” May asked. She sounded a lot less sure of herself now. “If—”

“Contact!” Ame shouted, shattering the illusion that we had time for any conversation.

Her weapon rattled the synthetic bones of my body as she fired it right beside my head, firing a burst of bullets past Rusti and out into the lobby area. If I’d been made of flesh and blood, I might’ve lost my hearing. As it was, the delicate instruments in my ear threw up yellow warning notifications of protest.

Return fire sprayed through the open vault door, and the three of us dove for cover. I landed behind a desk in the central room and frantically pulled my own weapon around from off my back. The irritatingly intrusive sling caught on one of the pouches I had under my arm, stopping the weapon before I could ready it. Frustration and panic reared up for a brief moment, but I mercilessly shoved my emotions back and finished readying my rifle. How were these awful implements of death meant to be operated again? Amelia had spent half a dozen hours trying to get me familiar with the weapon while we walked through the mountains, but that was not nearly enough time, apparently.

“One guard down,” Ame reported while I fumbled with my rifle. “Estimating three more. They’ve pulled back. We have a little time. Try not to give them an angle.”

I slid the gun across the ground towards Ame in disgust, and said, “Desmonia. It’s now or never. Set the link up.”

“Use my node too,” Rusti said quietly, from where they were crouched against the wall beside the large vault door.

Nobody said anything as all attention turned towards them. Those of us in the room openly stared in confused shock. Were they abandoning us? No, they were still operating the body, so…

Rusti had uploaded themselves into the android body, taking control of it directly. There was a RUCU in its head for exactly that reason, but the idea that someone would use it during combat was insanity.

“Rusti…” May whispered fearfully.

Instinctively, because I cared about her opinion on pretty much everything, I turned to look at Ame, but she was staring back into the warehouse of digital people. “What have they gone through? There’s none that were deleted. The test was running through, what, roughly five hundred ‘test subjects’? If that was test number nine thousand and whatever… with batches of five hundred… there’s no way they’ve gone through millions of people, right? Those tests weren’t permanent, which means—”

She shook her head as though she were trying to eject the horrible conclusions she was drawing from her memory. Then, she looked up and met my gaze. I nodded and gave her a worried, but resolute smile. One corner of her mouth twitched up, and she mouthed, ‘I love you’, then said aloud, “Use my node too, Des, May. I’m downloading into the body.”

“We cannot afford to lose the three of you!” Desmonia exploded. Hearing her lose control like that was alarming, and I glanced anxiously towards the main vault door. I could hear muffled shouts as the facility’s security force coordinated.

Ame, to my surprise, laughed. “Well then. Guess we’d better not let these artfully crafted heads get smashed then, huh?”