Anisim bowed his head, enduring the pain from his impaled skull, he felt he deserved the punishment.
“Jules, unlike you, I’m human. My wife was assimilated, as were four other companions of mine. Anisim, here, tells me you have the clearance to take me to the replicator and to activate their android bodies. Is that true?”
Jules didn’t speak with her lips, her nervous system having been entirely compromised. “Yes,” she replied through her mental connection to Old-timer.
Old-timer took a deep breath. He could feel her terror, and it took him a moment to recalibrate so that he could find the strength to shut himself off from his overwhelming sense of pity.
“Please don’t hurt her,” Anisim said quietly. “She’s just a tech. She’s never taken part in a rescue, never hurt anyone you know. She doesn’t deserve—”
Before he could say another word, Old-timer’s tendril broke through Anisim’s face, silencing him. It pulled out, encircled Anisim’s neck, and severed his head from his body.
Old-timer could feel Jules’s disgust and fright as she watched Anisim’s mutilated head roll to a stop near the wall in the perfectly simulated sunlight of the android city.
“Why? Why did you do that?” she demanded of him in horror through their connection.
“We can’t bring him with us,” Old-timer replied, “and I couldn’t have him warning the collective about my presence.”
“You-you’re a monster,” Jules replied, tears forming in the corners of her eyes, “you’re a monster.”
5
“So what the hell do we do now?” Thel asked with frustration as they emerged from the stairway from the rooftop and into the warm, but dark interior of the Cloud 9 revolving restaurant. The restaurant was no longer revolving, and they had to keep the lights off to avoid detection, but it was warm and dry and provided an excellent place for the quintet to lie low. “If Aldous is to blame—”
“Something we’ve no proof of,” the A.I. pointed out, making an addendum to Thel’s statement before she’d even finished making it while he guided the Kali avatar, still pacing slowly and mindlessly like a sleepwalker to a table, where he helped her take a seat—an eerie sight, something like a mannequin sitting down for dinner.
Thel soldiered on, “then we’re going to be trapped in here indefinitely.”
“Not if we can help it,” the A.I. replied. “There are alternatives.”
“Like what?”
“If we’re in a hard drive,” James offered, “then really what we’re in is a mini-mainframe. Aldous said he’d constructed it so he could download the sim into it and remove us from the A.I.’s mainframe, so we’re likely on his person as we speak.”
“And that means that we do, indeed, have a means,” the A.I. added.
“Means of what?” Thel responded with a shrug. “We’re ghosts trapped in a little box.”
“Aldous communicated with us,” James observed, “which means that the sim is capable of receiving signals. And a sim this big is going to be a huge power hog, so to keep it running, he’d have to have equipped it with an MTF generator.”
“He was also able to provide us with armor and weaponry,” the A.I. added, holding up his de-patternizer. “These are quite complex patterns that he was able to upload for us.”
“So?” Thel asked. “The weapons and armor were meant to help us survive the purge—to buy time. How do they help us get out?”
“They don’t directly,” James replied, “but the fact he was able to send them to us means the hard drive is capable of sending and receiving powerful data transmissions. Aldous said he couldn’t enter the sim because our core matrix programs had been trapped by a trapdoor code that would allow for our patterns to enter the sim, but wouldn’t let them leave. That’s entirely possible, and why we can’t be sure he’s the one who trapped us here.”
“But,” the A.I. continued, as though he and James were of one mind, “if he is the one who trapped us here, then our task will be to break the trapdoor code from within the sim. If we do, we’ll be able to send a signal for help.”
“But Aldous said he couldn’t do it,” Thel countered, “and he had the power of the mainframe to help him.”
“That’s true,” the A.I. replied, “but what if he was lying?”
“What if he was telling the truth?” Thel returned. “You said so yourself, he’s a suspect, but we’ve no proof. If he was telling the truth, then we don’t have a chance in Hell of breaking a code that he couldn’t break with the help of the mainframe at his disposal.”