Chapter 327.5 (Eternity)

Sam-UL never considered himself a brave Digital Sentience. He preferred computer systems, computer hardware, and the easy to understand logic of code. He usually tried to avoid the biologicals, at least until the kittykitty had died in his hands.

He had hold off his fears when he had mat-trans'd to what he had assumed was a simple Black Box like project. Had barely managed to hold onto his sanity when he had been confronted with the reality of what the Ancients had done.

Now he screamed in terror as he watched the human woman wrestle Herod to the mat-trans chamber, laughing as she did so.

"YOU'RE FUCKED NOW, SPEEDY!" she yelled out, her voice full of dark malicious glee. She smiled at him, a smile full of cruelty and malice. "YOU'RE GONNA BE A REAL BOY NOW, PINOCCHIO! JUST CALL ME THE BLUE FAIRY!"

She laughed, howling laughter full of insanity, as the door closed and the mat-trans cycled. She moved over to one of the computer consoles, the one she had been working at before, and, still laughing, started typing rapidly.

"Please, don't," Sam pleaded through her suit speaker.

"Shut up," the human snarled. She was typing rapidly, reaching over to turn the computer monitors on either side of her at an easy to see angle.

"Why are you hurting him?" Sam asked.

"I said, shut up," the woman snarled. She gave a giggle as she made some complex entries that required her to hold two and sometimes three or four keys at the same time.

Sam felt the connection to Herod vanish and began to weep inside the system.

"Come on, come on," the mad woman growled to herself. She kept typing rapidly, reaching over to use the mouse several times. "Almost got you, Speedy, almost got you."

"We didn't do anything to you," Sam sobbed. "Please..."

"Stop distracting me," she said, reaching out and blindly groping for her cigarette pack. She typed with one hand as she got a cigarette and lit it, dropping the lighter on the desk and going back to typing. "There you are, Speedy. Gotcha."

"Don't you understand what you're doing?" Sam sobbed. "Don't you understand what will happen if you kill him?"

The human woman just snorted, exhaling smoke through her nostrils. She shifted the cigarette so she was holding it between her teeth as she kept typing.

"Please, stop, you don't know..." Sam started.

"If you say that one more time I will send the biofeedback enabled security programs after you with Madrox Protocols. Now shut the fuck up before I rip you out of that system and set you to searching for grid squares and flight line," the woman snarled. She typed rapidly. "Dammit. What did you get into, Speedy?"

Sam went silent, watching her.

She suddenly cursed and slapped the enter key on the keyboard on her left.

The mat-trans started cycling.

Sam looked around the entire shell rapidly, looking for any power jumps like the mat-trans used.

There were none.

He came running back just as the mat-trans cycled again.

"It's just nightmares, Speedy. You can take it. If you're more than these whimpering puling weaklings," the human female was saying, still staring at her screens and typing. She looked up as Sam arrived, squeezing through the data-stream and into her suit's a/v i/o ports.

Sam watched as the system suddenly powered up again.

Herod screamed somewhere behind the armored glass.

"Gotcha again," she said, watching a feed on the right hand monitor even as she kept typing.

"Why are you doing this?" Sam asked.

"I told you to shut up," the human woman snapped. She punched a button and stepped back. "Do something useful, get me an ARPANET link."

Sam frowned. "What's that?" he asked as she waved her hands to calibrate the VR system.

"Database connections to major universities and think tanks. I doubt my credentials are still valid, but I need schematics," she said.

"Um," Sam felt himself tingle a little, his version of a blush. "We don't have access to any networks outside this facility."

"Bullshit," she snapped. "Speedy there told me that the entire system is a conduit and processing center for your guy's version of ARPANET, that it handles interplanetary networks across the entire galactic arm," she dropped the cigarette butt on the floor and kicked it over to Wally with her toes.

Wally scooped it up and dropped it in his grinders.

"But we don't have access to it," Sam protested. "It's just..." he groaned as the answer became obvious. "...network backbone hardware."

"Get in there. I need the schematics for his body. Not the replicator template or whatever the hell you call it," she said. He put her hands together and opened them up, causing a complex blueprint of Herod to appear. "And hurry the hell up, HAL."

Sam jumped out, leaving an ear out in her system, hurrying to the network backbones. He knew how to get access to the system. Just log into the maintenance section and do SolNet Access Testing. He was part way there when the human woman started telling him to get her stuff.

Scientific textbooks, papers, experiment results with the raw data and methodology, manufacturing techniques, blueprints, schematics, materials data.

He was distracted three times. First by some little squirmlings wandering around by one of the phasic arrays that had just come online, another time by a Treana'ad DS who was worried about her tobacco crop shipment from Bluegrass, the last time a handful of patrolling security programs that triple checked his ID when he got too close to the massive parallel afterlife processing arrays.

In the time it took him to connect to SolNet as a maintenance supervisor, get the requested data, and come back, the mat-trans had cycled twice.

He realized the he couldn't bring the data in with him. It made him too 'fat' to squeeze into her suit's systems with the data. He left it outside and connected himself to the suit's a/v systems.

"I can't get in. I'm locked out," he said, wiping his eyes. It was frustrating, every time he turned out dozens of the dead reached out to him pleadingly, desperately searching for friends and family, wanting to know if people they knew and loved survived, some still partially stuck in the agony of their deaths.

The human woman looked up from where she was working. "What, I thought you were like the control system," she said. She shook her head. "Give me your security headers," she ordered.

"No!" Sam said, backing up slightly. "That'll give you access to..."

"I need to it to authorize you. Stop being a baby," she said, her voice carrying the whipcrack of authority. "Times must be good with as weak as you are."

Sam gritted his digital teeth together and started reciting his security header to her.

The twelve Black ICE guards suddenly started scanning the surroundings, ignoring Sam, and the door went from dead black to a blue rectangle edged with silver.

"Get in here, I need that information," the human woman snapped.

Sam slid into the mat-trans system's central computer core, staring at everything. The architecture was ancient, the equivalent of gargoyles and pillars and statues of saints. He half expected to see her inside, made of burning chrome and hateful code. Instead there was just a few score open ports that were at their max load.

He chose a nearby holo-emitter and materialized at the same time as he made sure she could access copies of the data.

The human woman heard the computer beep that the copying was complete and turned away from her typing. She hit enter again and the mat-trans began cycling.

"This is going to suck, Speedy, but it'll be less than four heartbeats for you," she muttered, picking up a pair of VR goggles that she had torn apart and rewired. Sam frowned, wondering what they were for. "You don't get to die, Speedy, too many people depend on you, and the world doesn't care what people like you or I want, only what it can make us do."

Sam opened his mouth to say something when she clumsily reached down and hit enter as she sat down.

He expected her to start using VR. Half expected her to open a VR room and materialize inside, maybe to chase him and kill him.

Instead the data he had grabbed began pouring into the VR goggles. The woman began laughing madly as her face lit up with white light around the goggles. She grabbed the arms of the chair and started rocking back and forth, howling with glee.

Sam stared in shock as went on for nearly ten minutes, the mat-trans cycling once, the low whining noise slightly different sounding to Sam.

Blood suddenly poured out from under the goggles and pinkish red began to flow from her ears and blood erupted from her nose.

Her laughter stopped and she went limp in the chair.

Sam noticed with disgust that she had urinated in the chair.

The mat-trans cycled and this time the sound was audibly different. He turned around as the door opened only to see the human woman standing in the doorway.

Nude, holding the lighter in one hand and her pack of cigarettes in the other.

"Spring Break in Cancun that was not," the human woman said, walking up to the corpse in the chair. She pulled the goggles off and Sam saw that the dead woman's eyes had bulged from their sockets. The woman, Dee, threw the corpse out of the chair and sat down.

"Reclaim that trash," she said.

Wally beeped as she put on the goggles.

"You always were an asshole, Gorman," the human woman said. She turned on the goggles again and grabbed the arms of the chair, a scream turning into laughter.

The mat-trans cycled, the noise a different frequency. For almost thirty seconds Sam could sense Herod's beacon then it was gone.

It repeated nearly two dozen times, each time the woman dying, then stepping out of the mat-trans to put on the goggles and repeat it while Wally reclaimed the body.

Sam fled, preferring to deal with the confused and hurting dead then the horror show he was seeing.

Finally the files beeped that they were no longer needed and Sam came back.

The crazy woman was busy with the VR, switching out parts of schematics.

"Welcome back, HAL," she said, exhaling smoke. "Or should I call you Charon or Saint Peter or Hades?"

"My name is Sam," he said, feeling slightly offended.

"Is it an acronym or actually your name, like our friend the King of the Jews?" the woman asked. She leaned forward and shook her head. "None of these coolant lines are needed and half of them are biological veins and arteries for no reason."

"It's my name. My hash creche name. I never bothered to take another," Sam said.

"Huh. A kid. Should have known," she said. She swept one finger under her nose, wiping away a thin line of blood. "Great, a kid, Speedy, and me, out to save tens of billions from the nothingness of non-existence," she shook her head. "Well, we'll each work with the tools we have and the others can provide."

The mat-trans cycled again and Herod got out a scream before he vanished.

"Don't you care about him? He's in agony!" Same blurted out.

"No, I don't care about him," she admitted. "I care about his part in all of this, ensuring that he can carry it out, so that you can carry out your part. That's all."

Sam was quiet for a moment.

"Why are you like this? Why are you so mean?" he asked.

She laughed at that. "What, you want some treacle After School Special that tells you why I'm a killer or a very special episode about Blossom's bloody panties reason I'm such a bitch?" she sneered. She moved data from one hologram to the next. "Why I am what I am doesn't matter, you can't change that, nobody can. You're either terminally naive if you think my life before now matters to you or you're arrogantly stupid enough to think you can analyze and fix me, or worse yet, predict me and outthink me, which would make me wonder if I need to take measures to protect myself from you."

Sam was quiet for a moment.

"Who else is going to do this, Sammy? There's a teenage you, the Incredible Repeating Pinocchio there, the garbage bot, and my ever widening ass," she looked up, wiping her nose. "And my memories are fucked up from radiation exposure slowly eating me because of that thrice bedamned double dealing back stabbing bastard obviously spawned straight out of Echidna's loins after a randy night with a catfish and a cow."

Sam wondered if the damage meant she couldn't tell him if she wanted to.

"Doesn't this bother you?" he asked.

"No," she said. She highlighted a few things and moved them to the multicolored wireframe.

"But billions died," Sam said. "There's billions of people in here."

"They aren't dead, they're temporarily disrupted," she said. "It's much more sophisticated now. What I was doing in comparison to what you're using looks like some grunting ape piling up alligator shit compared to the Notre Dame cathedral," she looked up. "To be honest, Sam, I wish I had the research and development team I used to have."

She sat down and lit a cigarette. "It'll take about five minutes for the patches to be applied to Speedy," she said. "Another ten for error checking, then the system will power cycle before bringing him back."

"How is the mat-trans doing this?" Sam asked.

"I'd tell you but you wouldn't understand it. Suffice to say, I use it like you use the creation engines, except I don't need mass tanks, I can literally create matter from energy, since I turn matter to energy for transmission," she sighed and rubbed her face. "I wish Cheong or Brown were here. I understand it all, but they were good solid dependable soldiers in the scientific war against the Soviet Union."

"Soviet Union?" Sam asked.

She waved her hand. "It doesn't matter. Not any more."

"Tell me," he said. "We lost Earth's history when the Mantids glassed it."

Sam listened as she described two competing ethos and political philosophies who had grabbed each other by the throat while holding atomic weaponry. How everything was devoted to the fight, each government clawing and biting for survival.

The mat-trans cycled, breaking her monlogue that Sam was listening to. Right after it cycled she hit the enter key on a keyboard, stood up, and went back to work.

Sam watched her closely. If he survived, he'd be able to tell everyone that he had been within digital reach of one of the Ancients from the early Age of Paranoia and survived.

If.

One of the times she was waiting for the system to power-cycle, Sam used the pause while she lit a cigarette to ask a question.

He was pretty sure interrupting her was a quick way to get murdered.

"Why are you helping us?" he asked, 'sitting' down across from her in a chair.

She sighed. "You don't get it, do you?" she asked. "Everything I told you about the world I lived in, that I was a scientist in the knowledge battlefield, and you still don't get it."

"No," Sam said, shaking his head. "It's all so... alien."

She took a deep drag and Sam ignored the amber in her eyes. "My work protected two hundred and thirty seven million people from invasion, protected four point eight billion people from an atomic holocaust," she shook her head. "I was born between the Great Wars, Sam. My father lost his youth, his friends, his sanity in the trenches. I personally saw the hell on Earth that was World War Two," she laughed, a sudden dark and mad thing in the quiet dimness of the mat-trans chamber.

"I was there when Oppenheimer became Death, the Destroyer of Worlds, my teenage hand too etched the runes of destruction on the chalk-boards of destiny," she said. She laughed, brighter, more brittle, but none the less mad. "It was a heady time, Sam. It didn't matter I was a woman. We were at war and the project I was part of promised to end war for all time, either by preventing major nation states from engaging in warfare," she took a deep drag and exhaled smoke, smiling, her eyes glittering. "Or by destroying mankind because they were too stupid and self-centered to live."

She power cycled the system again, getting up and replacing more parts of the schematic. Sam noticed that almost two thirds of it was green, no more red, just patches of amber.

"We did our math on chalk boards. Hell, I wrote out the implosion generated wave form math on the wall of the little house I lived in with permanent markers I snagged from the secretarial pool," she said. Her voice was far away and Sam saw a trickle of blood ooze from one ear. "Then computers."

She laughed again. "It was a brave new world, Sam. Except it got ruined by pride, greed, and old sins," she sighed. "You know, I was part of the team who determined the best substance and then the thickness needed with gold foil to resist cosmic rays outside of Earth's magnetic protection."

A worm of blood squirmed out of her left nostril and she blinked rapidly a few times.

Her eyes were bloodshot and red.

"So I'm helping you, Sam, because there are billions, tens of billions, maybe even trillions of beings stuck in an endless loop of suffering and anguish," she said. Sam noticed she sounded slightly intoxicated as she kept talking. "I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties required by my superiors and the American people; So help me God."

She sneezed, wiping her bloody hand on her leg.

"I'm helping you, Sam, because nobody else can. Not like I can," she laughed, a drunken sound. "I led the team that created the mat-trans, the soul chip. Not like you know them, but more like this," her pupils were wide, fully dilated. "Under my guidance, my intellect, we achieved the impossible."

She dropped the cigarette she was smoking, fumbled at picking it up a few times, and kicked it over to Wally while she lit another one with a shaking hand.

"The plotters, sneaks, and bureaucrats who called themselves project leaders stole our work, the credit for all of our genius, of course," she suddenly laughed. "At least until I killed a few to keep the rest honest."

Sam watched as she sat there for a long moment, mumbling too low for him to hear even with the suit's mic's gain turned all the way up.

She looked up suddenly, blood trails down either side of her nose from where she was bleeding at the bottom of her eyes.

"His mother abandoned him, left him at a gas station. I knew this, used it. Had him call me Mommy, forging faux-maternal affection with him to get the highest level of performance out of him," she sighed, slumping slightly in the chair.

The smoke she exhaled stunk of hot blood.

"When the project shut down, they wanted to kill him. Politicians and bean counters always want super soldiers during the war, but as soon as the war is over, they get mad because their super soldier didn't die and now they don't know what to do with him," she said. "They tried to kill Mommy's little boy."

She took a long drag, leaving bloody lip prints on the cigarette butt.

"Major John Earl Tom," she said quietly. She laughed. "Never trust a man with three first names," her voice got quiet. "Mommy's good boy."

Another drop of pinkish fluid ran out of her ear and she wiped at it, looking at her finger.

"Oh, damn, I'm stroking out," she looked at Sam. "I'm talking, aren't I?"

Sam nodded. Her speech had gotten slurred, but he was still able to understand her.

Sam watched as she sat there quietly, smoking a cigarette. She was almost done when she suddenly started convulsing, foam running out of her mouth.

She was dead sixty seconds later.

The mat-trans kicked on and he wasn't surprised to see her come out.

"Well, that was embarassing," she said. She walked up and threw the corpse to the side. "Reclaim that, Rusty," she said. She wiped the chair with her hand and sat down. "Stroke must have hit my impulse control center first."

She lit another cigarette after removing one, turning it around, and putting it tip first into the pack, then leaned back in the chair.

"Don't think that's my normal setting, HAL," she sneered.

Sam nodded, swallowing.

She walked over to the console, looking down. She reached out, hit enter on the left keyboard, then the right, then the middle.

"Time to wake up, Pinocchio," she said.

She looked at Sam.

"Time to be a real boy."

The mat-trans cycled as she laughed wildly.