The robot towered over Julie, smelling of ozone, grease, and blood. Behind it, Ms. Jance was trying to get back up on her feet, one hand braced against the wall. Her knees were bent inward against each other, her ankles leaning out.
“N–Julie,” she said. “It’s time for us to go.”
“I’m not going,” Julie said.
“We have to.”
“Why?” She gripped her wheels.
“Because it’s not safe.”
“I am going to listen to what the robot has to say. The thing that’s pretending to be my son has to be stopped. Not to mention that girl.”
“That robot killed Al. And Richard.”
Julie shrugged. “I don’t know them. Maybe they attacked it, and it had to kill them because they wouldn’t listen.”
Ms. Jance gaped at Julie for a moment and then started limping down the hallway toward a set of emergency stairs. Ms. Jance’s ankles wobbled like a sick dog’s. After a few steps, she kicked off her heels and walked barefoot to the exit door. She leaned on the bar on the exit door.
It was locked.
“Let her go,” Julie murmured. “She’ll just be a distraction.”
“When a human is dead, it is less of a distraction,” said the robot. “She will contact other humans, and we will have more humans than are necessary.”
“You’re right,” Julie said, “but alerting the other humans may be exactly what we want. If we’re going to fight these… astral beings, we may need as many distractions as we can get.”
“I will notify the humans later, when appropriate.”
“Ms. Jance,” Julie called. “Sit down and don’t be distracting, or the robot will kill you.”
Ms. Jance turned her back on the door and slid down it until her legs stuck out. One of her bare feet tore through her stocking, which bunched up around her ankle and slowly crept up her calf. Her chest shook, but no noise came out of her mouth.
Julie looked back up at the cameras under the cage that was the robot’s head. She was abruptly aware of her very human need to make eye contact. “What do you want from me? My experience is with medicine, not that woo-woo stuff Pax was messing around with.”
“I am working on developing an energy weapon that will be able to disrupt astral material and energy,” the robot said, still using that near-monotone female voice. “I am using documentation on the astral plane Pax left on his computer.”
“That’s fine,” Julie said. “But it still doesn’t answer my question. What do you want from me?”
“The astral beings recorded and placed a copy of your son’s spirit into some inert astral material. The astral material subsequently achieved self-awareness, using the copy of your son’s spirit as a template.”
“It thinks it’s Pax. I get that. Go on.”
“Your notes show you are researching how to prevent illnesses like your son’s. You did not discover this. Instead, you discovered how to manipulate spiritual energy, using certain applications of magnetic waves, for destructive purposes.”
She said nothing.
“This is very close to what you called ‘that astral crap’ earlier, Dr. Black, whether you know it or not. You will identify the parts of the astral material that have been patterned after your son and create a magnetic resonance wave to destroy them. The rest of the material you will leave for me to manipulate.”
Ms. Jance was watching, open-mouthed. She had clearly heard every word.
Julie decided to worry about that later. “Assuming it can be done… how will I know which is which?”
“We will go to the body of your son and practice.”
The moon was all the way up. A haze of smoke still lingered; the moonlight had turned it into a pale, transparent mist. The air reeked of ozone. The loudest sound was the Caribbean crashing against the shore.
There was a kind of purity to it.
Moonlight on radiation, how romantic, Pax thought as he rolled back to the island. If only I had a girlfriend who wasn’t insane or stabbing humanity in the back, I’d hold her hand and walk across the half-melted, burning rock.
He climbed the Hill where Scarlett had been. The pool was empty.
Scarlett?
Heading toward the volcano.
In the distance, another aircraft was coming in. Pax landed on a boulder and listened. He wanted to hear what they were saying.
A thought made it possible, and Pax found himself able to hear and understand the radio waves.
A strained, piping woman’s voice was saying, “…if you do not return to U.S. airspace for landing, you will be shot down.”
Pax searched the rest of the airwaves quickly. The public radio frequencies were only broadcasting emergency instructions and warnings. Shortwave and cellular communications appeared to be filled with people who were losing their minds in several different languages.
He heard no other hint that the jets were acting against orders.
The fighter jet shot overhead. It had United States insignias on the bottom of the wings.
“Repeat. If you do not return to U.S. airspace, sir, you will be causing an international incident. Captain Robinson, what the fuck are you doing?”
The airplane turned to the right in a large circle. It was coming around for a second look. He’d been spotted.
“Captain Robinson? Sir? Sir?” And then the voice added, in a fainter tone, “I don’t think he’s conscious, sir. I think—the plane’s being remote controlled. Like at the base.”
Pax stretched his senses and searched the aircraft for evidence of life. Other than microbes, he found none—just a corpse slumped over in the seat. Something else was piloting via remote control.
He started rolling his hamster ball, fast. Whatever was piloting that plane might be searching for him, in which case he intended to lead it toward the monsters in the extinct volcano to the south.
Pax had thought volcanoes were supposed to look roughly conical, with wide, spread-out slopes, like Mount Fuji or the ones on Hawaii. These were steep and narrow. Their sides weren’t so much slopes as they were a series of cliffs.
Pax was running up them when the peak of the closer volcano collapsed.
A black cloud burst out of the top and hung in the air. Ooof. Scarlett was becoming less and less human. That almost fucking hurt.
Pax looked over his shoulder. The aircraft had circled back and was coming in again, lower this time. Scarlett. More nukes incoming. Get out of the way.
All yours, said Scarlett, and the darkness disappeared into the shadows between the rocks.
The monster began pulling itself out of the volcano. Pax wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting to see—a huge mountain of garbage, a furry carpet of ferns, maybe.
But definitely not a 20-meter long metallic claw made of I-beams and engine parts.
It grabbed onto the side of the volcano, biting deep into the rock. Chunks of the cliff bounced down the side of the volcano with loud cracks that echoed like gunshots. The earth seemed to groan, and another claw joined the first, digging in and pulling the body of the creature after it.
It rose out of the crater, the size of a hill and covered with a forest of garbage and ferny tentacles, some as thick as the cables on the Queensboro bridge.
Pax rolled up the side of the dead volcano, landed on top of the monster’s head, and dropped his shield.
The tentacles rose up to meet him, grabbing him before he could orient himself. They slapped on his skin and wound tightly around his limbs. The air around him reeked of burnt plastic and rotting fish.
The jet screamed overhead, dropping another bomb.
The tentacles underneath him retracted suddenly and he fell like a fucking rock. The remnants of his human instincts made him throw up his hands to t
ry to grab onto something. The tentacles folded into a smooth, dark throat, and he slid downward, clawing the tentacles, but unable to stop himself.
In the split second before he stopped acting like a stupid human, the monster batted the bomb away with one claw. Pax threw a shield around the bomb as he landed in a thicket of tentacles. They grabbed him again, trying to rip his arms and legs off. Pax ignored them and threw a second shield around the bomb as it bounced down the side of the volcano.
The bomb blew, and the inner shield dissolved almost immediately.
But almost was long enough for Pax to absorb the energy from the nuke and feed it back into the second shield. A nuclear explosion is driven by a chain reaction, a subatomic feedback loop. His shield was now a feedback loop of its own.
The more radiation the bomb threw out, the stronger his shield got. The stronger his shield got, the smaller he made it, compressing the explosion and radiation further, until he was able to compress his shield around the bomb so tightly that he stopped the bomb’s radioactive decay.
He dropped the shield.
The shrapnel from the bomb had been vaporized into black powder. It puffed into the breeze and sank into the holes in the rock.
The energy from the shield flooded back to him.
He formed the energy into a tight cone around his fist. If the monster wanted him to go downward, who was he to argue?
I am so done with this shit.
He punched downward into the mass of tentacles. The cut tentacles oozed green slime and puffed up with pink spores bursting out of their centers.
Pax! You’re releasing more spores!
You clean them up. I’m going to try to kill this thing.
He thought he heard Scarlett calling him an asshole but wasn’t really paying attention. He drilled into the monster with another punch. With his other hand he pulled loose tentacles out of the way. He punched again and again, digging downward. The sides of the monster closed up around him like a tomb.
Pax! It’s coming out of the volcano!
Scarlett sent him an image.
What was emerging from the top of the volcano was more like a headless centipede with two large claws at the end than anything else. Huge slabs of rock crashed down the edges of the volcano as the monster widened the mouth of the crater.
The top and sides of the monster were covered with metal plates. The top plate was spiked with heaps of junk—bikes, power lines, plastic siding, roof tiles, refrigerators. It reminded him of one of the barges that carried garbage across the Hudson.
The monster’s front claws had been made out of cranes and were attached to the armor plates via jointed struts. The bottom of the monster featured a layer of smoothed-out metal plates streaked with scratch marks from the monster’s belly dragging against the volcano.
Another set of claws emerged from the crater. It was like watching a mountain shit out a living skyscraper. With armor and claws.
Pax! Do something!
Unless you have a plan, shut up and let me think.
The monster crawled down the side of the volcano, zigzagging to keep from sliding. Another set of claws emerged as the monster turned again.
Pax shook off the vision and focused on the tentacles surrounding him. Rational. Reasonable. Calm.
I can do this.
He didn’t have time to explore the monster one punch at a time. He shrank his shield to a pinpoint of burning blue light and made it whirl around him, like an electron around a nucleus.
The shield tore through tentacles like the blades of a blender.
He was quickly surrounded by a pink mist as the pulverized tentacles erupted in a cloud of spores.
Pax divided his shield into three and set them all spinning. Now three bands of blue light were around him: one around his waist and two at an angle, passing over opposite shoulders and under opposite feet. He really felt like an atom now. He grinned.
He began to drop, sliding through the front end of the monster and down into its guts.
Above him, the empty space where he had been was already filling up with tentacles.
Julie followed the robot through the clean room, passing what had once been a cleaning robot but was now holding the door for them. Julie felt her skin begin to crawl, but she kept going forward. It might be the only way to get out of this alive.
The big robot whirred and clanked across the tile. Its upper body jerked back and forth as it descended the stairs, its torso thumping against the soundproofed, cloth-textured wall with every other step, leaving smears of purplish grease on the wall.
Julie hobbled after it, hanging onto the railing. Her heart thudded in her chest. I need to take my meds before…
She didn’t get to finish the thought. The robot grabbed the top of the operating theatre’s doorframe in both claws, lifted its arms up, and stepped back, ripping the door panel out of its slot. The rest of the plexiglass shell wobbled but remained upright. The robot’s upper body pivoted to the side and it threw the door on top of the first row of desks.
Logical and direct, thought Julie. Too direct. Doesn’t understand subtlety.
The two bodies still lay under their sheets. The computer screen brightened, showing the last report she’d been scanning before the phone had rung, less than fifteen minutes ago. The robot slowly marched across the floor toward the girl’s body, grasped the sheet, and tried to pull it off her. Its arm wasn’t long enough, and the sheet clung to the girl’s breast and arm. The robot took one clunking step backward and the sheet dangled freely from its claw.
It dropped the sheet on the floor and contemplated the girl’s body, naked and silvery and dead.
“You are familiar with the girl,” the robot said.
“I didn’t like her.” Julie descended the last steps and hobbled inside the plexiglass shell. She held on to the edge of the panel for a moment. The girl’s body still appeared to be freshly dead, if the silvery material leaking from her orifices and beaded up on her skin were ignored. Her hair follicles were dusted with silvery material at the base, making her shimmer at the corners of her lips, her pubis, and along her arms.
“I never liked her.”
The robot paused. “Do you like your son?”
What a question. It was probably trying to calibrate her responses. She circled along the inside of the plexiglass until she reached the row of chairs. She sank down onto one of them, gasping in relief. “I love my son.”
“Do you like your son?”
“More than I like her.” She certainly felt worse about his death. “If you need to cut one of them up, I’d rather it were her.”
The robot moved one claw to a metal plate in its chest, its screen throwing blue light across the girl’s skin. A motor whirred. When it pulled its claw free, it was pinching a syringe. The claw rotated so the needle was facing the girl’s body. Then the claw plunged downward, and the needle entered the girl’s abdomen near her belly button. The robot’s other claw jerked toward the plunger and pinched it. When the robot tried to lift the plunger, it slipped from between the rubber pads at the ends of its claws. It tried several more times but failed each time. The syringe wobbled on the girl’s stomach, held upright by its needle.
The robot turned to Julie. “Get a sample.”
Julie groaned and pushed herself out of her chair, her legs shaking with the effort. She shuffled over to the table.
The robot retracted its claws, leaving the syringe standing straight up in the girl’s belly.
“What kind of tissue sample do you need?”
“Astral material. The girl’s bowels are full of astral material and are not blocked by her bones.”
“The girl’s bowels are full of contaminants.” Trust a robot to try to get a sample in the most impractical, yet logical, manner possible. ??
?If we use that one it’s going to be filled with shit.”
She pulled the syringe out of the girl’s stomach, walked laboriously over to the sharps container, and shoved it in. She searched through the rolling cabinet and came up with several sterile syringes in packaging. She hobbled back to the table, opened one of the syringes, and slid the needle carefully up the girl’s nose. She pulled back on the plunger and sucked astral material out of the nasal cavity. The syringe pulled five ccs and then started sucking air.
She took one of the robot’s claws, pried open the rubber pads at the end, and tucked the syringe between them.
“There. Now what?”
The robot grabbed Julie’s arm with its other claw and pulled on the cloth of her blouse, leaving the skin unbroken but tearing her sleeve.
“What are you doing?” she asked in her best doctor’s voice.
“I am going to inject you with astral material.”
She was careful not to jerk away, and she kept her voice even. “Why? It’ll kill me and create another one of the astral beings. More for you to fight.”
“There is a less than eight percent probability of there being a sufficient amount of the material in this syringe to cause your death.”
“It’s still a risk!” Julie protested. She tried to think logically. “We have enough material here to run tests on non-human subjects. If you’re trying to find out whether you can kill these things, let’s try a few rats first.”
Her terror was mitigated by the complete idiocy of the robot’s logic. Direct and logical—to the point of dipshittery. She’d never really enjoyed working with computers. She decided this monstrous robot was doing nothing to change her opinion.
“If you survive being injected with this material, there is a greater than fifty percent probability of gaining additional insight into abilities of astral beings,” the robot droned. “If you survive being injected with this material, there is a less than thirteen percent probability that you will be overwhelmed by the astral material. In conclusion, you will probably survive, resist the influence of the astral material, and provide valuable insight. I will restrain you until you are able to signal you have overcome any astral influence.”