Inhuman(122)
“But-but I destroyed you…” James replied, disbelieving his eyes.
“The molecules you tangled and sent into the abyss of deep space are just molecules. You will never destroy my pattern, James. Yours, however, will be destroyed. I will destroy it.”
James floated back, creating distance between himself and the nan consciousness.
The shadow in the blackness of space laughed, its open mockery of a mouth glowing a purplish light that matched the glow of its eyes. “You’re trying to communicate with your A.I., but by now you must know V-SINN has it locked in a stalemate. We’re on our own here, James.” It’s tone reached levels that were colder than the frigid space they inhabited. “You’ll have to fight me for yourself.”
“Stay back,” James warned. “Or this time, I’ll make sure you don’t come back.”
The nan consciousness scoffed. “And now a bluff. We both know you can’t control your body’s powers with your limited, human brain architecture, James. You can’t compress my molecules. You can barely control the gravitational field well enough to fly. You’re completely and utterly at my mercy.”
“I’m never helpless,” James warned, his tone threatening.
“Please, bluffing demeans you in my eyes, and I already think so, so very little of you. Would you like to know how the final minutes of your life are going to play out?”
James continued to back toward the Planck platform, already opening up his link to the controls in his mind’s eye.
“First, you’ll gamble that I won’t block your link to your Planck platform,” the nan consciousness announced, causing James’s expression to freeze. “Then, before you can attempt to escape, you’ll realize it’s already too late.”
A second later, a snake-like spear of nans formed from the furious wisps that surrounded the nan consciousness and shot toward James, encircling him before he had time to protest. At first, the serpentine nightmare just flowed around him harmlessly, like a boa constrictor taunting its prey, a dance before the kill.
“Because on a nanoscale, I’ll be unraveling that impressive armored skin you designed, undoing the intricate, almost unbreakable nano-scaffolding that you believed would protect you from almost anything—as long as you had your connection to the mainframe that is. For a brief moment, you’ll believe that your so-called ingenuity will come to your rescue and that you’ll solve this death trap, but then you’ll realize the conceit involved in believing that you could outwit a mind that is built on the premise of infinite power, and that this is a game that you’re going to lose.”
“What’s the fun of a game if there’s no element of chance?” James shot back, terror gripping him as the nans continued to swirl menacingly around him, nothing stopping them from commencing their destruction of his skin.
“Oh there is no chance for you, James, but I assure you, it’s still fun…for me. However, you’re quite right. It can’t just be an execution. Your inferiority has to be demonstrated plainly. The best way to achieve that is by making you a pawn in a much larger game and, believe me, calling you a pawn is generous on my part. Here’s the game: you have only two choices, something you already realize. You can refuse to play, in which case you die here, at the midway point between Neptune and Uranus, your skin and then your insides ripped apart in a gruesome and slow end. Eventually, the nans will make it through to your brain and nervous system and activate them so that the pain you experience will be unimaginable. Truly, nothing you could have experienced in your real body—nothing—could be as horrible. Or…”
The first nans began tearing at James’s skin, a realization that was met with near panic on the human’s part. Although he could dial down the pain, he realized this was the beginning of the process that would kill him if he didn’t take drastic action.
The nan consciousness continued, “…you’ll work out that there is one force in the solar system strong enough to break through the magnetic fields that protect my nanobots: the sun itself. But what you don’t know, what will be a game of chance, to borrow your term, will be whether or not your powers will allow you to escape the very same force that kills me. Will I have shredded too much of your protection by the time you can reach the sun’s surface? Will your severely limited ability to manipulate gravitational waves allow you to break free from the sun’s gravity? You don’t know, so you’ll have to gamble, and we both already know which path you’re going to choose. It’s a certainty.”