Appeal to Probability
Adjuster: Agent 33
Ref#: 826537K
SSL#: P9I2T
Type: Server Data Packet
Location: Black Mesa Facilities, New Mexico
Designation: Level 1
Action: Document and Research
—————1—————
01000001 01110010 01100100 01100101 01101110 01110100
Footsteps dryly echoed across the ruins of Llopheg. Its hollow rotting shelves and massive stone pillars reverberated unfamiliar tones as our dive team drudged onward, descending deeper into the mysteriously abandoned catacombs long lost to the ravages of time. Ancient technology whose uses mankind had forgotten over centuries of war, triggered by motion and flickered sickly upon us passing. They whirred in a pained attempt to defy the degradation of its functionality before screeching to a halt. One couldn't help but wonder what secrets humanity had hidden away in these towering mechanical walls of lights and sound. What good these now alien artifacts could be used for if understood. Maybe one day our level of engineering would return to par with the ones of old. Unfortunately, that is a race against deterioration we likely stand to lose.
"You think they had cyber pussy back then, ey?" Rekk the most vulgar of us four belted out loud while running his fingers across the jak on my neck.
"Is that all you ever think about?" With a shiver, I slapped his hand away in retort.
"What otha' point is there of being wired outside these dusty tombs?" His batted away hand landed on the metallic wall, and he dragged it along, sweeping years of dust off its surface. "Someday, all the servers will dry up, then these modifications will only be good for pornography and drugs. Though I ain't complainin'."
"Pessimist much." I said, rolling my eyes.
"He presents a feasible theory, Blu. Not that it'll happen in our lifetime of course, we haven't even decrypted the first layer of information yet. Moreover, lest we forget all the vaults still under lockdown in the wastelands. It'll be another hundred years before the radioactive half-life reaches levels relatively safe enough to explore them." Johnathan chimed in with a stoically logical tone.
"Mm." Rekk grunted, almost disappointed.
"Personally, with the way corporations are ordering bits and pieces of the picture while locking the rest away for later, I don't think it'll ever happen." I added.
"Unless there's a revolution." You could practically hear Rekk's grin crack through his words at the prospect of an uprising.
"Please, a revolution would mean the people are educated enough to revolt, something that requires free and readily available information. Information with which the corps aren't going to part." The truth is blunt, but this argument called for me to state the obvious.
"Isn't that why we do what we do?" Johnathan genuinely asked.
"You both know we do this for the highest bidder, not to incite insurrection. In fact, I don't think we ever worked for charity." I went on, each word weighing a pang of strange guilt onto me.
"Now who's the pessimist?" Rekk continued to grin out.
"Mm" I grunted, miming Rekk's previous disappointment.
We agreed to disagree, and each took a turn glancing skeptically at reticent Timothy, who remained quiet throughout the conversation. He simply walked onwards, staring at his homemade radar scanning for threats or treasures. Knowing Tim's level of paranoia, it was probably the former more so than the latter. Not that meticulous caution wasn't warranted, diving without proper permits being issued from one of the six major conglomerates was punishable by death. Even the process of getting a jak installed was heavily monitored and regulated. This is why most people, our team included, got their cybernetic work done underground away from the all-seeing eye of 'Big Brother.' No one wants to be put on a list, rolling the dice until they finally cross off enough names to get to you.
However, a point of contention in our group had been the fact that Timothy was the only one of us who absolutely refused to get modified. His opposition primarily stemmed from a fear of being caught with an unregistered jak, something that was a common occurrence given how police had the right to stop and test anyone with the implant. Merely running the serial number of your parts through the L-6 database would clear or condemn you. Then it's an automatic guilty verdict and a choice between life in prison or the removal of your implants. Both options held the same gravity of seriousness as tech has always been notoriously safer to install than remove.
Despite the air of ambiguity surrounding Tim, we retained him on the team because of his erudite knack for inventing useful gadgets, which aided immensely in the exploration of these crumbling ruins. Yet he was very much the reclusive type; all we knew of his past was what Rekk's background search could dig up. Born into affluence with a learning disability that ironically propelled him into being one of the world's leading engineers in biomechanical augmentation and quantum coding theory, Tim was quickly scooped up by the Aurotech Corporation. His biography after that was locked behind corporate firewalls and redacted need-to-know documentation. Judging from his specific skill sets and newfangled disposition, it wouldn't have been much of a stretch the think he worked as a lab coat in the information acquisition center. Generally, as a rule, we'd steer clear of anyone bearing the mark of Aurotech, but Tim's biographical files and employment information ended with a curious little fact; he'd been declared dead in a workplace accident and his body recycled. The story matches the fact we found him meekly living in the slums, doing jak upgrades under a false name.
Rekk, on the other hand, was Timothy's opposite: blunt, brave, quick to anger, and even faster to action. Rekk served most of his life away in the great war, and judging from his stories, enjoyed every minute of it. That lifestyle is what gained him his curt personality and running mouth. Still, due to his unbending loyalty, we never minded anything he said; we actually grew accustomed to his brusque frankness in our conversations. Interestingly it was Rekk that found us and insisted on joining, as he called what we do "the last bastion of true patriotism" because despite winning the war, Rekk had always considered the corporatization that happened afterward was a significant loss to mankind. "Two steps forward, a fucking shot to the horses head" as he tended to say, "What was the point of fighting for freedom when it ended in monetary enslavement. We lost the war, and this is the next dark age. Except it's not as simple as good steel and clap-free whores anymore."
Lastly, there was John, my non-blood related brother. We had met each other in 'Miss Hilltoft's Orphanage and Halfway House,' and I doubt I have to tell you that it wasn't the best place to grow up. When John and I bumped into each other between classes at the age of 8, we almost immediately developed a bond that had lasted us twenty odd years. In a way, our relationship in that hellhole was practically symbiotic. John had helped me pass all my classes in fear of me falling behind a grade or even being transferred, while at night, I'd always sneak out of my room; scavenge food, toys, and books, before sneaking into Johns rooms for a night of childish shenanigans. We had been so close that by the age of twelve, people began to mistake us as brother and sister, and we embraced the misunderstanding. Since then, we've been through thick and thin, falling back on each other's strengths and abolishing each other's weaknesses.
"Get down!" Rekk suddenly blurted, breaking the silence and yanking me to the floor behind a collapsed pillar, everyone followed his lead.
"What's your proble-" I started but got interrupted by Rekk's sweaty hand clasping over my mouth with white knuckle intensity.
"Shhh." Rekk gradually peaked the corner, and his head instantaneously shot back down into cover. His eyes widened, nostrils flared, breath thinned and hastened. Aggravated, I was about to try finishing my question when the unmistakable thunderous pulsating reverb of a corporate scanner echoed from far away and grew stronger by the second. Rekk's fingers sluggishly grazed over to his ion-pistol, and with an almost deafening click, he unbuttoned the holster. Our gazes met; I shook my head in disapproval of a gunfight at which Rekk simply grinned his stupid grin.
The droid drew near, it's sonar thrum now rumbling the walls and floor like an earthquake. Hundreds of years of debris and dust loosened by the vibrations rained down upon us. I began to gasp, feeling the chaff inciting a sneeze. Rekk glared in pure contemptment, but there was nothing to be done, and just as the droid was passing by, I snorted so loudly that the sound practically overpowered the drumming growl shaking everything around us. The droid stopped, and a thick curtain of silence draped down. It turned towards the pillar we hid behind and hovered closer. Still as a statue, Rekk had his gun drawn, and the cylinder spun charging up. Suddenly a bright flash of red light burst from the robot's optics, the rumble recommenced, and the droid floated onward as we all simultaneously exhaled.
Rekk wiped his hand on my shirt. "It didn't spot us." He murmured while slapping me upside the head.
"Owwww, it's not my fault, you know I have allergies." I whined. The sentence merited a fiery stare from Rekk that made me chuckle.
"John, tell your sister something, the corp being here is no joke." Rekk mocked.
"Yeah John, tell me something." I mocked.
"John?" We both said at the same time.
"You know this means we've stumbled onto a worthwhile server." John stated, "We should push forward while we still have the lead, they never send men in before the drone returns with its readings. Their librarian should be a good four hours behind us."
"Fine, but let's not lose the element of surprise, ey?" Rekk added, staring me down with vicious eyes, at which I simply sniffled.
—————2—————
01000010 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100100
After another hour of trekking and a second close encounter with that screaming harpy bot, our expedition reached a set of enormous interlocking steel doors. Each monstrously towered over a hundred feet tall and had been tangled in vines, daubed with moss, and retaken by mother nature. Cast into them were gargantuan rusted cogs and mounted springs convolutedly linked to latch bolts in a jumbled domino puzzle of moving parts, the engineerical complexity of which left us gaping in awe. Tim, unfazed by the anomalous sight, hobbled out from among us and quietly shuffled up to a VDT adjacent to the vault's entrance. He unscrewed its service panel and began to rip wiring out by the fistful, effortlessly stripping them to their copper cores, crossing and twisting various colors together. Then he procured a handheld PDA from his knapsack and clamped it to the terminal battery. After seconds of feverous typing away on the computers' tiny keyboard, an 8-bit chirp knelled out, and the whine of electricity flooding a high capacity coil rang out. Timothy lifted his head up, and as if in response to our anticipation, hydraulics violently puffed steam from vents surrounding the doors, and the enormous vault creaked open.
Inside this yawning safe laid this century's most valuable commodity; a server room. The room was a colossal arching citadel with its baroque vaulted ceiling covered in wires and tubes, all of which trailed from a center chandelier like hub, down the walls, and met at the center where an ominous-looking black box stood ten feet tall. Again, Tim took the lead by pacing up to a second terminal located inside, and repeating actions done only moments ago, the colossal vault doors shut closed behind us. The isolating feeling caused us all to glare at him skeptically.
"It'll buy us some time when they find this place." He explained, propping his ill-fitting glasses back up his nose. "Don't worry, a room this big has enough oxygen to last us at least three-four days."
"You're a comforting bloke." Rekk quipped, smacking Timothy on the back with vigor. Then he slapped his hands together and rubbed them excitedly "Okay! Let's do this thing kiddies."
Tim carried every tool imaginable tucked away in one of his many dangling knapsacks. We've seen him pull out screwdrivers, processing chips, blowtorches, self-piloting drones, scanners, hundreds of feet of varying cords; you name it, he had it. Most handy of which were three odd-looking chrome cubes, each no more sizable than four inches in perimeter. What the naked eye couldn't see was that they were composed of hundreds of thin slivers of magnetized titanium. At the press of a button, they slid against one another and snapped into place at their edges to form any number of different shapes, most commonly, armchairs. At first, we'd tease him about the luxuries provided, but later we grew to appreciate the nonessential comforts he rendered, to the point where sitting Indian style on a cold stone floor seemed out of the question.
We started to undress so the static from our clothes didn’t interfere with our connection, meanwhile Tim set up the chairs. Despite being located in the desert, the frosty bowls of these ruins prickled at my naked chest and torso, further accentuated by those chilly seats. While we mustered a feeble attempt to get comfortable, Timothy pulled clumps of wiring and began connecting them to different ports on the server like an old phone operator. I slipped out of my shoes and rested my bare feet against the icy concrete floor.
"Always with the fuckin' feet." Rekk exclaimed.
"What? Not a foot guy?" I teased flashing the bottom of my dogs in his face, wiggling the toes as he shudders.
"What is there to like 'bout the one extremity where each person grows their own specific brand of fungus." He retorted.
"You don't know what you're missing." I feign being offended as he pulled out grenades from his jacket pocket and arranged them on each side of the entrance, carefully threading a razor-thin wire between their fuse pins. We all shot a concerned look. "It'll buy us some time when they find the place." He jested, joining us in his seat. "Don't worry, a room this big should disperse the explosion enough to not kill us all." We all gave a nervous laugh, except for Timothy, who in no way seemed pleased at the thought.
"Ready?" Tim asked
"Ready." We affirmed in unison.
The "meld" was always the hardest part of these ruin dives. In its entirety, the procedure took about a minute to initiate and was not so much painful as execrable. When a plug got inserted into one's jak (generally located at the back of one's neck), the penetrating cold steel unpleasantly tingled the spine as it felt evidently foreign piercing into modified flesh. Then at the flick of a switch, much like an acid trip, you felt rising pressure lightly grip your body, and your muscles inadvertently started to tense. Any attempt to take a deep relaxing breath from this point was met with disappointment as it seemed no matter how hard you tried, the air around was too shallow for any relief.
Before terror could set in, the distinctive pinch of electricity sparked deep inside your body, so intrinsically generated from the core of your being, that it fooled you into believing it a natural occurrence. It's building current took gravity away from the increasing pressure, instead, diverting attention to the maddening scream of your nervous system. The sensations brought you to physical limits. Yet, before madness could set in, you'd suddenly experience an array of colors flashing before your eyes as you felt yourself sink into the floor and break through the physical membrane into a free fall of the dark ether bellow our existence. Shortly after, the hallucination would start to fade, all vital signs returned to normal, and an unrivaled calming lucidity encompassed the mind. The jump between dimensional strings was completed, and the next blink always brought in a new reality.
The cyber-world was not tangible like the one we know; nothing had a physical form. It was an unrequited litter of zeros and ones arranged in billions of varying combinations continually shifting, changing, and multiplying beyond calculable interpretation. You yourself deconstructed into an ethereal sum of bits which freely moved between databases, altering lines of programming with your very presence. For example, I myself was a road map, refining strings of code into doorways between information packets, while Johnathan was the logic breaker who can unlock any encryption with a certain finesse that speaks toward his inborn intellect. Rekk, on the other hand, was the dozer, the bruiser, the muscle. He could smash through any barrier and crush any countermeasures launched against us. In a way, we were lucky to find another, as one can't directly learn skills in cyberspace; instead, the tools we used on the other side are innate abilities that coincided with our talents in the real world.
Each server we melded with had had its own distinctive programming constructed through unabashed ai deep learning. This made it almost impossible to predict scenarios beforehand, making each dive a blind mission. Timothy, being a ridged mathematician, always argued that we should have developed a protocol to stick with because empirically, a pattern in coding permutation should begin emerging after the fifth dive, being that these are no more than giant sophisticated computers. But when one has never melded, it was difficult to grasp how these inanimate objects could have personalities of their own. The only explanation of it we could think of is that somehow, the mass quantities of information bared an influence it's artificial intelligence, giving it a distinctive feel depending on the type of knowledge it stockpiled.
Though this specific server seemed drastically different, its geometrics numerically opaque, layered so densely upon one another that it was difficult to freely navigate. Squeezing through the calculations, jumping from one linear equation to the next, it left no room for exploration, and its finite pathing was almost akin to being led somewhere. What we looked for only reveals itself when stumbled upon, thus equal part luck to skill is required. Among the runtimes and executables, it was essential to keep an eye out for pooled databases, pockets of information. This information can range on anything from cooking omelets to ancient weapons of mass destruction, the latter being an example of what The Major Six were gunning for, the former of what consequently is locked from the public. Oddly enough, there was also no info stored anywhere along the way. Typically, we'd have been perusing through common data by now, sifting through stored schoolbooks, saved job resumes, and even ancient black and white TV shows. Instead, there was nothing but stacking formulas multiplying over one another, growing exponentially with each figurative step we took. Something had to be here, we risked too much to walk away empty-handed.
Ever since the end of the four-hundred-fifty-year world war, the automated lifestyle our forefathers took for granted had become more of a crutch than a luxury. Preoccupied with death, civilization had forgotten how to create and instead focused on maintaining the little technology left, preserving daily life instead of creating a future. Innovation was long extinct to our society. In fact, 'invention' was simply a word with a definition instead of a concept for progress. Over time, scientists demoted into engineers who attempted to keep the pre-war factories operational. Teachers became head mechanics schooling the next generation in nothing but conservation of equipment hundreds of years old, and the middle-class jobs fell off the face of the world altogether, leaving much of the populations in crippling poverty, or on the flip side, obscene wealth.
That's where we came in. They called us librarians, an ironic title in an age where the last standing libraries are dusty crypts sealed off from the public through the greed of corporations. In reality, we were more like cyberspace pirates, over-glorified hackers scouring the data ocean for remnants of code that could be sold for restructuring people's soulless ambitions, or more predominantly, fulfilling corporate fiscal responsibilities. We risked our lives to tread the bowels of what can only be assumed as ancient libraries, where the knowledge of generations had been stored electronically on enormous idiosyncratic metal monstrosities, we called servers. Though being freelance divers, upon uncovering old secrets in the form of blueprints, manuals, recipes, instructionals, medical journals, and anything of a similar fashion, we'd sell the information to anyone with enough money to pay the asking price, not just fiendish corporations.
The first librarian was created by OmniCorp and connected with these computers using scavenged technology. It's rumored when they returned with the schematics for a nuclear fusion reactor, the information race exploded. Each corporation recruited hundreds of people, paying them millions of dollars to undergo biocybernetic enhancement surgeries and sign over their lives to the pursuit of servers and exploration of ancient libraries. When the Major Six saw how difficult it was to control the flow of information with the sheer number of enlisted explorers, they cut their librarian armies in half. Then sent the ones that betrayed their trust and sold information to rivals either to jail or to the gas chambers.
People knew what was going on, some protested and attempted to sabotage or dive themselves, but in the end, they all met the same fate as the unfaithful ones. Then as each corporate expedition brought back new innovations that eased the populous way of life, the rebellion was snuffed out. Soon after, the Major Six, having accumulated wealth beyond imagination, wedged their way into politics and offices of power. Lobbying tax cuts and creating laws that worked for their gain. It wasn't long before they grew so powerful that their businesses replaced entire governments, forming walled autocracies in which the average person's way of life varied depending on the information collected by their leading company. I digress, back to the story at hand.
We'd been rooting around for what felt like hours; when suddenly like exiting a dense forest and seeing the starry night for the first time, we broke through a line of code that led us to the center of the brain of this machine. Words could not describe the magnificence of the database before us, all previous equations pooling into a single location, all simplified into just a single line of code. The sequence of code that will have ended it all.
—————3—————
01000011 01100001 01110101 01100111 01101000 01110100
"Ummmm, guys? They're here..." Timothy nervously spoke, and the words manifested as comprehendible digits in cyberspace. "We've got three minutes tops."
"We can't just leave; we have to find out what that is." Rekk urged.
"John, is there a manual or terms of use somewhere around here?"
"I'm looking, I'm looking." John impatiently barked back at me.
"Rekk, go sandbag us in, I'll copy the code when John finds some sort information on it, pull us."
"Got it. Tim yank me!" Rekk said momentarily, vanishing from the file system. "What's the situation?" he asked, standing out of his chair back in fleshy reality.
"Scanner is picking up seven guards, no librarian tech."
"Scouting party then, easy-peasy." Rekk said with a grin as he slapped the button on the side of his chair and watched the metal disks slide close then re-purpose themselves into a waist-high wall. "Come on, guys! We're running out of time and could really use some more cover!" He yelled loudly enough for the words to reach Johnathan and me.
"I've got the code copied and stored. Anything, John?" My question rolled off him like water, "John? Anyone home? Hello?!"
"Shh! I need more time!" He snarled back, waving me off. "I've almost fished it all out."
Depressurizing locks of the vault doors burst out steam like a locomotive, I realized we're out of time. "Come on, we'll have to work with what we've got." I grabbed John's hand and dashed into less complex coding. "Pull us! Pull us now!" The words manifested themselves on Timothy's monitors, and we were instantaneously pulled back into reality.
Rekk immediately grabbed our chairs and transformed them into more cover. "Duck down." he ordered just as the colossal doors cringed open to reveal a small company of soldiers in a firing line.
"By order of OmniCorp policy, stand and surrender." The leader forcefully beckoned.
"Pfft, ya gotta be fuckin' joking." Rekk yelled back pistol at hand, obviously enjoying the action. "You can take your policies and shove them deep up your arsehole ya daft cunts."
Like the calm before the storm, sullen silence heavily draped the room. After a tense moment, the patter of cautious footsteps clacked as the soldiers slowly approached us. Suddenly the chime of a pin dropping against concrete pierced through the stillness, and with it followed an ear-splitting detonation whose pulse-wave ruffled my hair.
Shell shocked; we peered over our cover at a room painted with such carnage; it no longer seemed familiar to us. Blood splattered up the walls, bits of roasted human anatomy laid scattered across the room, and one unfortunate soul rolled on the ground half-alive screaming. With a sour expression, John picked a piece of goorish lung off my head and flicked it away, while I turned to Rekk for the comfort of a sarcastic quip. Yet comfort would not come this time, as Rekk's face was flushed with the confusion and fear of a vet suffering from PTSD. Luckily his tenacity swiftly shook the physiological echoes away, and he walked over to the last man alive, drew his gun, and shot the suffering recruit through the head, causing silence to yet again seep in all around us.
"There's no doubt they heard all that." Rekk said, still staring at the mess with hollow eyes. "We have to move quickly."
The trek back came with relative ease. Having explored the area beforehand, it was a simple task to avoid any troops scrambling mindlessly around. It was smooth sailing until we reached the tombs entryway, because there under the voussoir of the arching ingress, stood OmniCorp's librarian. He was tall, broad, forbearing like a statue, and clad in golden armor adorned in precious gems. In his left hand, he held a light blue, diamond-shaped, translucent shield. Whose edges radiated thin strands of energy which danced in the wind like flames before dissipating into the atmosphere. In his right hand, he wielded a pulse-hammer, a weapon which had been longer than him by a head and appeared too heavy to be practical armament.
Just after the dawn of the information race, there had been circumstantial instances that led to more than one librarian exploring the same archeological site. So, to protect their own interests in these cases, the corporations began incrementally hiring progressively more fit, healthy, and energetic individuals. They'd pay to send them to school, train them in various forms of combat, and even sometimes mechanically enhance them past the capabilities of a normal human being. These librarians were killing machines, dangerous soldiers not to be trifled with. Simply one held the same power as a battalion of special-forces footmen. When two equally matched librarians met in these ruins, the ensuing battle would have sometimes ended in complete decimation of the structure itself. It went without saying that we had to have the utmost discretion in avoiding this monster.
Rekk flashed hand signals telling us to stay low and follow him. We darted from pillar to pillar, hiding behind each piece of cover until the coast was clear. When we finally reached the last of the columns in the row, Rekk picked a pebble off the ground and tossed it over the librarian's head. The scuttling of the rock distracted the beast long enough for us to silently dash past him out into the open desert. Unfortunately, in the distance, a squad of soldiers guarded our ship, patrolling around it like minutemen. Yet their lack of a seasoned strategist and common sense left their own ship completely neglected, so we decided to assail it and commandeer ourselves a new ride.
"Halt!" the librarians' low tessitura voice resounded over the flat arid landscape, though the authoritative warning went unheeded, and our furtiveness turned to a mad sprint. "I said... HALT!" he lifted his hammer high into the air and cleaved it against the floor. Its impact resulted in a violent tremor which split the crackled desert surface open ripping the ground apart like shifting tectonic plates, causing the earth to crumble into itself and haphazardly spit out human-sized boulders. The devastation hurdled past us at speeds that couldn't be outrun, and the fissure intelligently curved in front of our path. We braked on our heels, narrowly avoiding a deathly plummet into the newly created rupture, gauging the depth and width, we braced ourselves to try and jump it.
"I won't be asking again." The oscillating ring of a recharging weapon stopped us in our tracks, and we stood motionlessly like a game of freeze tag. "You're in violation of code 12-A and 77-L 'Interfering with corporate business and unregistered gathering of information,' which holds a minimum sentence of life." Rekk started to mouth down from three, at which Timothy shakes his head in disapproving panic
"You are hereby under arrest in the name of the Omnilithl Corpora-" Rekk reached one, and we all dashed onward while he sprang off the ground, twirled midair, and began firing off shots as he fell toward the ground. The cavalry arrived at the librarian's aid and began returning fire as John, and I jumped over the crevice, landing safely on the other side. Timothy questioned if he could make it but gained too much speed to stop, and so he feebly lunged across, falling short of the other end. Luckily John grabbed him by the collar and hoisted the quivering wreck to land moments before he fell to his demise.
Rekk had kept on returning fire until we were safely behind the cover of a heap of rubble thrown-up by the schism. After Rekk landed a shot to the shoulder of the librarian, injuring him enough to drop his weapon, and taking the opportunity to effortlessly hop over the crevasse and joining back up with us.
"Did ya miss me?" Rekk grinned, ripping Tim's backpack away from him and emptying its contents onto the ground. He searched through the gadgets and scrap, pulling seemingly incompatible objects out of the mess and jamming them together. "Keep your heads down. Fire in the hole!" Rekk tossed the heap of junk metal over the rock, and within seconds, it's screaked from overheating, detonating in a fiery blaze that consumed two more soldiers. He turned to us with an expression of pride on his face that is quickly wiped away and replaced by shock.
"Bloody fuckin' damn it John, ya fuckin' bleeding mate!" Rekk gently lifts the flap of Johnathan's jacket to reveal his abdomen profusely gushing thick black blood, and he instinctually lays John into my arms and begins applying pressure on the wound.
"John! No!" I involuntarily screamed out.
"I'm... I am... o...ka-" John exhaled the words as he passed out.
"Johnny? Johnny?!" I yelled hysterically, slapping his face.
"Come on, we're almost at the ship, we have to keep moving!" Rekk said, tugging at my shirt.
"I'm not going to just leave him here." My voice carried a hint of unjustified betrayal.
Rekk's head bobbed around like a madman, with a grunt of anger he impetuously thrusted his pistol into my arms and hoisted John onto his shoulder. "Cover me damn it!" he dashes off "Let's go, let's go, let's go!"
The pistol felt odd and heavy, with each shot the recoil kicked back like a mule. Maybe if I were stationary and took time to line the sights up, there'd be a chance of hitting something, but in a full-body sprint with tears welling up in my puffy red eyes, firing at them was no more than a bellicose bluff. While some of the soldiers bought it and ducked for cover at the thundering crackle of our covering fire, the Librarian knew better. He galloped after us, taking wide hulking steps as his leaden armor clanked rhythmically with each stride, hammer in hand and with a gaze so vicious that it could pierce through steel.
"Twelve o'clock!" Rekk yells.
My attention zeroed forward on the sight of two frightened rookies standing guard at the lowered hatch of our only escape route. Urgency caused me to take a second to aim, breathe in deeply, and fire a shot straight between the eyes of the one on the left, at which point the latter dropped his rifle and hit the dirt. Poor soul didn't know treason holds a far worse death than a blast to the head. The clanking of our steps on steel as we boarded the B-52 cruiser had a strange solace in it, and relief started to overcome the ice-water feel of sheer panic.
"Tend to John, I'll fly." I commanded, taking the pilot's wheel in the cockpit.
I'd never operated a cruiser this size or sophistication before, but I knew Rekk's field medical training was the only chance John had, so I couldn't preoccupy him with piloting. I closed the landing hatch, flicked the engine on, and tremulously grabbed hold of the yoke. Pulling the control wheel gently back, we began to lift off the ground when suddenly Rekk's voice sounded throughout the cabin "Pick it up, pick it fucking up!". The rear-view monitors showed the Librarian spinning in circles with his grip slowly slipping off the hilt of his hammer, after enough momentum he let the weapon go like a discus thrower, sending it hurtling directly toward our left thruster. I vigorously yanked the yoke in disregard to every flight procedure in the book. Emergency lights blinked, alarms rang out, and our crew slammed against the ceiling like ragdolls, but the unorthodox maneuver was enough to avoid impact as the hammer just grazed past by a split hair.
There was a moment of self-celebration as I left the stratosphere and flipped the autopilot on, but the joy was short-lived. In the main hull of the ship was Rekk, covered in blood, desperately trying to save a life. Seeing John that pale, sprawled out on a table, his breath labored, eyes shut in a perpetual wince of pain, sent me into a panic. I felt myself get hot and hyperventilate before passing out where I stand. I came to hours later, Rekk must have carried me to the bunks as I woke up in bed, covered with a blanket. The team was absolutely lugubrious when I came looking for them, the mood itself informing me of everything I wanted to know. John didn't make it. Defeated and tired, I sat next to Rekk, and we both cried until there were no more tears that could be physically shed.
"As far as I see it, we got two options, neither of which ya going to like much." Rekk's words are fraught with glum. "We can leave John on board after we ditch this hot tin box, let the corporations deal with the cleanup. Or..." there was a pause in which he questioned the sensibility of the next proposition. "we can set the plane to idle for a few minutes while we run the body through the turbine accelerator piston in the engine room."
"What the hell Re-" I started, eyes welling up again.
"That way, you can keep the ashes Blu." Rekk interrupted, placing his hand on my shoulder, at which point I buried my face in his chest. I shook my head yes and started to cry as he embraced me.
We set the plain to hover and placed Johns' body on a piece of wiring panel, scavenged off one of the walls, and carried him into the engine room. Just as we lifted the blast hatch to one of the idling energy pistons and were about to slide him in when Timothy walked up to John and reached behind the corpse's neck. After a few seconds, he procured Johnathan's bloody jak and stumbled back to the foyer. We were too downhearted to question the shameless salvaging, though if it wasn't for the grief that would've seemed a lot more distasteful, then it is in reality. Rekk and I paused at the brink of cremation, unable to accept the fact, and the events not truly yet registered.
"Um..." Rekk breaks the silence "John was a mate, a partner, and a brother. He was taken too soon and will be dearly missed." His word break in a slight tremble. "But... but his sacrifice will not have been in vain. Blu... you wanna say something?"
I glanced up at Rekk and squeezed the server data chip in my pocket, praying he didn't die for nothing, and I shook my head no. It seemed Rekk had already made up his mind what to do with the information obtained without weighing its consequences. As much as I'd like to have justified John's death at that moment, I still felt impelled to deliberate a plan. My mind was quickly refocused when Rekk slid the makeshift gurney onto the massive lowered jug piston, sealed the manhole, and hit the proficiency-test switch. The turbine outsides roar to life, and the arm-like mechanism started to lift Johnathan's body up along the cylinder. Extending out of sight, the rolling boom of combustion grumbled throughout the engineering cabin, and just as the piston falls back into place, Rekk hits the override button. Screwing open, the latch filled the room with unexhausted smoke and upon clearing left nothing behind but a tray of black ashes, which I scooped into an empty coffee tin.
The rest of the trip was silent. I sat hunched over with Johns remains in my hands, alternating between crying and staring off blankly. Rekk excused himself to the cockpit, his thoughts too heavy a weight to deal with unoccupied. It was for the best, touch had turned prickly for me hours ago, and the company made no difference. Suddenly Timothy popped out for one of the back rooms and slowly hobbled up to me, his muscles visibly sore and thoughts evidently millions of miles away.
"This has his... um... 'cyber essence.'" Tim placed Johnathan's jak gingerly into the palm of my hand, it had a connector soldered on and a dozen new wires running across the device. "While your brother may no longer physically be with us, his code lives on."
"Thank you." is all I could muster as my fingers wrapped around the cold metallic cylinder.
—————4—————
01000110 01100001 01101100 01101100 01100101 01101110
"We're obligated to act on this. If we sat by and did nothing, we're no better than the corporations that set these precedents." Rekk lectured while fixing a drink back at our hideout.
"We can't predict the future damn it; you don't know how this will affect the world!" I yelled back, staring out at the city, the 52nd floor offered a gorgeous view.
"It's not like we can be any worse off."
"That's where you're wrong. But you and your fucking pride can't see that."
"Blu... that's not fair."
"Don't touch me! For fuck's sake, John is dead, Rekk. He's fucking dead! All that's left of who he was is stored on a piece of fucking metal! What information is worth that?! Huh?" I burst into tears of mourning as saying it out loud caused its grim severity to sink in again.
"Pull yourself together damn it." He grabbed me by the shoulders and gave a light shake, then embraced me after realizing his actions were doing more harm than good. "If this code is what we think it is, do you know the repercussions it has? We could change the world." Rekk attempted to comfort.
"Or die trying." Tim meekly sighed under his breath.
"What?" Rekk lifted his head from my shoulder.
"The corps were there when we dove. If this code can, in fact, open every server and reprograms protocol for open access information, they'll do anything to stop it." Tim grumbled at the floor. "We're as good as dead." Whether it was something about the treble of Tim’s voice, or a misguided word my attention didn’t catch, it was evident the sentence didn't sit well with Rekk. He let me go and stood motionless, staring at the wall with squinted eyes as if trying to process something.
"What exactly are you saying." Rekk stoically asked as his hands slowly balled into fists.
"We're as good as dead for what we found." Tim repeated himself, head still hung downward. "Should've left it all alone when we saw the droid, should've packed up and-" His sentence was cut short from Rekk turning on his heel and bull-rushing toward him with unbridled rage, violently throwing aside anything in his path.
"What the fuck did ya do ya whiny little cunt?!" Rekk grabbed Timothy by his collar and lifted him off the ground. He clenched his hand around Timothy's jaw and forced eye contact. "Tell me what the fuck you did?!"
"Rekk what the hell?! Stop that." I cried, my tears of sorrow turning to tears of shock as an unexpected panic attack set in.
"Shut up! Take the drive and get the hell outta here." He yelled back at me. "Now!"
"Why, what's happening Rekk?!" I shortly found myself by the door.
"This little weasel did us in. He fuckin' did us in to save his own ass." Timothy closed his eyes at what Rekk said, and streams ran down his cheek. "I said get the fuck out of here Blu, I'll hold them off."
"Rekk…" All I could muster is his name pleadingly.
Rekk grabbed me by my coat and dragged me outside the room. His forcefulness would be freighting if it was any other man, we stared each other down for a moment, and I walked away. Then a thin, whiny sound whisked in the background, growing exponentially louder until its screeching sonic pitch burst the windowpane of our room overlooking the city open. Yells of special forces breaching into our home sounded through pellucidly. I threw my hood on and pulled it over my face to hide the tears streaming down, then inconspicuously walked down the hallway as S.W.A.T. pushed past me toward Rekk. Sounds of a struggle radiated through the apartment complex as I called the elevator. "Give 'em hell Rekk" I thought to myself as the door to the lift closed, and an eerie silence blanketed the compartment leaving me with nothing but thoughts of regret.
I stood outside at the corner bus stop watching police dash in and out, the rain masking any sorrow that dripped down my face. The weight of the world pressed down; a responsibility too high for a proper thought process bared on my mind. What could I do? I was but a single ember in an ocean, too little to shine, too opposed to even ignite.
By that point, there was no more debate, no more room for philosophy, no more time to weigh consequence. By that point, the circumstances had forced a decision upon me. All that was left was to make an appeal to probability and pray the coin toss landed in my favor. Each city had its own corporate headquarters, a stronghold from which trickled down every single one of their decisions, enforcements, and products. It was OmniCorp's way of keeping tabs on their interests, and the building itself towered over the city like a guard post. The most significant aspect of these business-formal obelisks was that at their hearts laid servers of OmniCorp's own design. A particular server connected to every single factory, military base, government building, school, civilian internet port, and even the traffic lights on the goddamn street corners. Having this technology so closely interwoven with every aspect of society allowed them a complete stranglehold on information and monitoring. So theoretically, if one had a key to any server, they could metaphorically release humanity from its shackles.
—————5—————
01010010 01100101 01100010 01101001 01110100 01101000
It's surprising how easy things become for a person with nothing to lose. Without any tethers pulling at your heart, fear washes off you like water, and a suicide mission becomes a walk in the park. I had no plan of action, I simply walked in like I belonged there. Despite being a wanted felon with my face being plastered across every display in the city, my nerves were dead, so I simply kept my head down and didn't make eye contact, no one gave me a second glance. Then it was as simple as a suit missing off the rack, a high clearance elevator caught in the last second, and about half a dozen pickpocketed keycards to get me to where I had to be.
I stepped up to the server and inserted Johnathan's jak into one of the free plugs, it grew warm to the touch, and after it's whirring subsided, I snapped it off, throwing the metal shelling to the side. Next, I injected a compressed data packet of the mystery code we found in the ruins, priming it for release. Lastly, I connected myself to the machine, choosing an outlet so high up that it forced me to stand tiptoed, stretching the cord to its limit. The intense sensations came over me once again, this time, there was a strange solace in it as I crossed my fingers in hopes that everything would work according to plan. The meld reached its point of no return, colors flashed around me, and with the blink of an eye, I felt my body fall to the ground as the cord snapped off in the socket.
I was welcomed by my brother into our new everlasting reality of 0's and 1's.
So, to whomever this may concern, if you manage to recover this information and are reading it in the distant future, I pray what we've done did more good than harm. The turmoil caused by our actions initially devastated the world, I dearly hope you're better off without the corporations running us like slaves, I wish you the best.
Sincerely yours,
-Blu
