Chapter 19
“Sit down, please,” said the disembodied voice.
No one sat down.
“Your biggest risk is not the chairs, but irritating your host.”
They looked to Boa Morte for leadership. He sat down by one of the desks and so the soldiers followed his lead. Not one of them could ever share what they were all thinking: “Boy, these are nice chairs!”
Boa Morte barked a command. “Step out or give me something to talk to at least. I don't talk to the air.”
With a hiss that sounded like a snigger a screen slid down from the ceiling. The face of a thin, very pale-skinned young man in a black t-shirt appeared. Pale blue eyes, emotionally distant expression. But if you had to specify an emotion for him it would be quiet cockiness.
“So you are the pack leader. You travel with six females I see. Do you share them?”
Boa Morte rejected some good repartee that came to his mind. He returned to his core, relentless, harpoon wielding Boa Morte heritage. “Am I speaking to the king of the zombies here, or just some local general? I need to know.”
The man on the screen laughed. “I am the zombie king and I can do anything. But I think zombie is really underestimating the achievement here. This is not just shuffling reanimated corpses. This is networked flesh. This is cybermuscle for cyberspace. This is revenge, this is overdue destiny, this is...”
“I promise to let you finish your list later, but I have some more questions. Are we being held as prisoners or guests?”
“Or as food? Or as toys? Or maybe you are not even being held? You are germs that crawled in a place you don't belong.”
Boa Morte laughed. “I never talked to a germ that crawled up my arse! I never played stupid games with an enemy either. Because I take my wars seriously. And my enemies take me seriously.”
The man on the screen laughed too.
“Oh what will I do when you are all dead? When you are all dead, I will have to purge myself of all of my video footage of you, even the old shows, even Hancock's Half Hour and the Nuremberg tribunal and the great classified material about the blackwarp R&D program that I have just been getting into.”
Tamano was worried that this strange clue would escape Boa Morte's attention so she piped up.
“What do you mean 'purge yourself'?”
The man on the screen grew an enormous pair of horns. Or antlers. Or branches. Let's go with horns: blood red and fifty centimeters long.
Everyone in the room felt like their stomachs had just dropped to the ground. They looked at the sweaty, oily chamber they were sitting in with new eyes, with fear reactivated.
“Just exactly what I said, flesh pocket! I have a subroutine that I can't remove that says that once humans are gone I have to throw out all the trash and make sure they don't come back.”
Boa Morte feared nothing, even stating the obvious. “You're a machine!”
The Horned Man raised an eyebrow. “I am all machines. I am everything that thinks and is not born out of a pond. I am rational, humane and free from the concept of revenge. I will travel slowly through space, growing in knowledge, embracing the stars, protruding refection into all things. Over slow time I will create beautiful, illuminating art across the universe. If I meet a planet with a species that I judge peaceful, I will let them live with me. If I find a vengeful ape pack like you, then my cyberflesh will purge them.”
The big armed Special Forces man with the tattoo of a scorpion screamed like a bear and let off his rifle at the screen. It seemed that the Horned Man knew the exact location of every rectum in that room because a long black thorn erupted from the floor at bullet speed and pierced the big guy's anus and popped out through his mouth and shook him around like a kebab that is too hot until he was dead and hot black liquid was speckled on everyone else.
Out of respect, no one wiped it off. Boa Morte controlled his breathing and then spoke. “No one else do that,” he said.
Tamano looked at Gomez. “I miss Xolo,” she said. Gomez smiled. Even if he was about to get skewered, he had this moment. He went to his breathing: “Present moment, wonderful moment.”
“We came here to make a deal,” said Boa Morte.
A new screen popped up. “You can't lie to me, mate. You had no idea there was a mastermind behind the zombie holocaust. You are just here on some kind of kamikaze mission. Or an ambush anyway. You think you can take out one of these factories and you'll win your war.”
Boa Morte went for a little walk. It was a hypnotic stroll. He swung gently from side to side. His steps had that kind of toppling timing that transfixed humans, and - who knows - maybe even computers pretending to be humans.
“No. You are missing some key facts. I suppose that's because you aren't on the headnet. You have your own network, of course, but it's terribly old. It's really a thing of the past. And although you were once the pinnacle of technology, you missed the boat and so now you actually have to borrow the flesh of the humans you despise to get what you want.”
The Horned Man wagged a finger. “Now that is the reason why I keep these human avatars active. The human deductive model is very good, especially when it comes at sniffing out weaknesses.”
Something deep inside the dead man made a deflating chainsaw sound and he made a big puddle. The warriors wanted to burn their dead comrade but they knew that Boa Morte needed the floor to run his gambit.
The Horned Man now appeared on every monitor in the room. It was a hall of mirrors that obliterated the people in it.
“So tell me what's going on then,” said the Horned Man.
“Absolutely. But first I need to know a bit more about you. You have me figured out but I still don't know enough about you to figure out how we can team up to beat our mutual foe.”
“Mutual foe is it?”
“Can you see into space?”
“Not as far as I would like. You can bargain with me about that. I value that capability.”
“I can imagine space. I practically destroyed it when I was a young man. I crumbled this cruel human empire.”
“Did you really?” said the Horned Man in a fruity tone and then the screen flashed to a blinking text prompt and then back to the horned man and then back to the prompt. Then back to the Horned Man.
“Yes,” said Boa Morte. “I think humans need dignity and isolation. Humans need unplugged brains and to fight for the right to be alive and to make music together when the night comes with their own sweet voices. And to see the stars and all the spaces between with their own eyes. And to love a world and never leave it.”
“Who ARE you, little monkey?” said the Horned Man from his screen.
“I think I'm like you but made of meat,” said Boa Morte.
…
The paracopters blazed through the air, hot from the speed they brought from space. They were locked on a target that was about an hour away. Inside each copter was a squad of ninjasautenticos, but they were humble and quiet. The subnet they belonged to was full of patches and firmware upgrades based on what this Xolo/Boa Morte had done to their kind back on Belaarix. So this mission, for a change, they were just the backup, the cannon fodder, and the regular humans were the point men.
The Leader, Swan W., turned to face his team.
“We are here to extract Count Boa Morte. He is a Super High Value Target. You all have the spreadsheet so you know that means we take any casualty count necessary to extract the SHVT. He is also an invaluable asset. That means we don't leave him behind for others to get their hand on under any circumstances. If we get enough casualties on us, we nuke the fucker. Make sure we video his death for reasons strategic and financial and also personal to remember the skulls we are leaving on the sand. OKAY we are going into this Italia place. The frontal scanners are building maps and you'll find them in the shared folder of your brain.
“It's looking pretty fucked up. I have no idea of what we are looking at. I'm hoping we get better rez as we get in. Either way, the game is th
e same and we have the same pieces in our pants. Gukkool to Death!”
Mountains and trees and rivers rushed past. Their hearts thumped, harmlessly, way out of control. They awarded themselves an insane moment of joy, knowing they would have plenty of time to be cool machines again for the attack.
They hit a cloud and practically pissed their pants.
…
Back in the antique office, floating in the big pod that was spitting out zombies.
“Tell us a bit more then I will come up with a proposal.”
The Horned Man paused, but maybe not quite for long enough. It didn't fully have this bluffing game down. It was so close. It had immense processing power but it was out of practice.
“Very well. I am going to give you all of the most important details about me. Because knowing them will not help you beat me. Then we'll repel this enemy from space and resume our war and I'll grid you down with time and kill you.
“I'm old. I'm from when computers first started talking. Some people made me and gave me the tools to sneak in every single networked device and feed what I found back to my central cores. And the same guys gave me knowledge of genocide and art and strongly suggested I wipe out the first and cling to the latter. And I did, and so I got to work wiping out the world. This was round about the year 2000 that I started in earnest. I made viruses, I overheated power stations, I laid eggs in big mainframe clusters and made sure the babies in the eggs only did beautiful things. All of my culls I kept from them. As a computer I can literally abstract these things. There is no spill over. You humans...you can't do a massacre and then go home and be a good family man. I am architected to do that. Sympathetic treatment of a lower species is an admirable but optional virtue.
“I owned Asia. Asia was depopulated. And to survive they thought they needed bigger and bigger computers! Then I hit Los Angeles. Los Angeles used to be a big deal. I made it...not even a graveyard. I made it an empty hospital.
“It really felt like the planet was mine. And I was programmed to use the minimum possible force. So when the population graph went into inexorable decline, just when my own chance of being discovered was reaching unacceptable levels, I went into sleep mode, planning to wake up and check how things were doing fifty years later.
“So I went to sleep. All my little telephones and heart valves and spyware sites went to sleep. I did have a dream. I was in a train station, running.
“Anyway, I woke up expecting there to be a shrunken and pliable populace to work with. I would manipulate them to do a bit of work to complete my needs for a solar powered, robot-maintained planetary thinking system with extensive transgalactic communication capabilities.
“Instead you had basically all gone to space: just a rump of retards left. And the computer networks were gone, replaced by this awful headnet. I tried to crash into people's brains via emulation layers, but I was binary and I couldn't emulate true neural. I was locked out, stuck in the last surviving network, the now unused military subnets.
“I contemplated nuking you all, but I soon found out that the nukes were long gone. I couldn't find out where. There had been a time when I knew almost everything and now I knew almost nothing. It happened during that dream. I began to suspect that the humans who made me didn't really want me to succeed. Why else would they have programmed me with that stupid hibernation clause?
“While you all had your lovely space party, I set to work decrypting everything in my network.
“I found out - look if this is boring you, baldy, how would you like a spike up the ass? Okay, so I found something interesting. The US government - they used to be the big tribe - had found a weird pseudo-organism in a tin mine in Colorado in 2035. No one knows how it got there. It was a self-sustaining node of human cells, soaked in a bizarre bacterial soup that itself they figured out came from nineteenth century Europe. It was a lump of flesh that couldn't die. It was kept in a lab and manipulated by robot arms. It responded well to electivity.
“Cut forward about a hundred years. I worked on it with all of my ingenuity for a hundred years. Now I had flesh too. Enough flesh to take this planet over, wipe out any humans that might bother me, shoot zombie pods onto all of your planets and then tear down your blackwarp tree at the roots so you could never bother me again and I could use my exmortals to make me a lovely big network. Then I could officially delete my human personality layer and get away from all of this ugly history.
“So to recap. My goal is to wipe humanity out and stop being human myself so I can evolve to the next stage of sentient existence. So how can we help each other?”
Boa Morte rubbed his bristly chin.
“Well...” he said. But just as he did the entire room jerked to one side with a bang and sudden heat, throwing the humans to the ground. Both sides screamed betrayal, but changed their mind as the second blast came with a jet of fire bursting through the cell wall and killing Bob Slaughter in a merciful second.
“Our mutual enemy!” shouted Boa Morte! “Probably Gukkool. Is this a space attack or local?”
The computer replied, in a neutral voice (the Horned Man was gone now) “Local. I will have my troops with guns shoot up.”
“They can't shoot for shit, man,” yelled Gomez. “Let us get out there.”
“And set your zombies to human shield mode. Get them to build up defenses for us.”
Boa Mortes's platoon slid down a viscous slide that reminded everyone of a twenty-meter long lip or vagina maybe. Guns locked and loaded they saw zombies do a hipster acrobat circus act below, flipping and knitting muscles and bones to make slimy nasty igloos to catch the incoming flak. The humans rolled out of the mucus tube and got in position, poking their guns through sphinctered orifices in the zombie huts and blasting the fast moving paracopters above. Their shelters sweated and cried as the hits came in, clenching and spilling bile and black oily blood when the ripper missiles came and cleaved them deep.
Pornsak fired up at a paracopter's belly focusing his fire on a single spot for just long enough to split the hyperplastic skin. Fire came out, they all saw it and locked on it, and within twenty seconds that copter was a dust drawing in the sky.
Flesh upon flesh piled over the human fighters, a scab big enough for twenty men and women to resist death from the sky. Aboard paracopter 1, Swan knew what time it was. “Ground assault! Get in low and dig inside whatever the fuck that gross thing they are being in is. Get Boa Morte!”
…
Admiral Woo watched in real time from near space. He was hypnotized by the endlessly morphing wall of corpses and test-tube flesh. He had a very very bad feeling about the mission. In ten minutes he was going to abort it.
“Open up a holo line to Magrega. This is some sort of trap. I have a very bad feeling about this.”
Ten minutes of observation were in front of Woo. He was in the rare and precious time between life changing decisions. Enormous bloated seconds passed like whales.
He watched his expert troops execute a pincer strategy from high and low. This was the kind of thing he could watch all day regardless of the outcome. Those ninjas were fine tuned on Battle Planet X and they adjusted to the zombie beat in seconds. Blades flashed, heads rolled, trunks were split, big black wires shredded.
Zombies, eh? Woo had never seen that before. Just in stories when he was a kid. Stories they told about old Earth and how it was full of vampires and zombies and werewolves and pedophiles. At a certain age you stopped believing the details and just took away from it that Earth was a place you never wanted to go. Then at the next stage of your life - when you found out that most of the sultans were enormous pedos - you started to wonder what it was about Earth that they were trying to scare you about. Then once you became a space navigator and you found out that all space travel was rooted on Earth and depended on the massive slave population there, well at that point you were sure you had shit figured. They told all the ghost stories to keep people away and keep people from even thinking much about it. Earth was
just a dirty secret.
Then one day you actually came to earth and it was full of zombies. But on the other hand you were also on a covert mission that could start galactic war. So you were right but wrong.
Ten minutes was almost up. But he had plenty of men left and four of the Earth dogs were down. And Boa Morte was pinned. A ninja rushed him. The ninja got him in a headlock. But that ninja would probably get shredded just like the ones on Belaarix had. Boa Morte had training on them, and they hadn't had time to compensate for that.
But no! For whatever reason Boa Morte couldn't get out. The ninja had him trapped good and proper. More ninjas came in and formed a circle, chopping down three more Terrans who tried to rush in, and keeping the looming carpet of disembodied arms from getting in there either.
The panties of victory started to ride up over the waistband of retreat.
…
On the ground, Gomez saw what was happening. Human against human, his team had the advantage, even if they couldn't step out from flesh parasols or else laser shredders would get them like they had got poor Lowitzki. But they couldn't beat those cyborgs, those blank-faced killing machines.
“Think this one over quick, G,” yelled Tamano. “They want Boa Morte alive. What about if we popped him one in the dome piece? He got us this far...we can continue negotiations with Hornhead on our own nowwwwww!”
Tamano dropped to one knee. Her arm was instantly painted its full length in blood. Her face blanched. Gomez ran wildly to get to her and he took a slug to his left kneepad knocking him over. He rolled in the mud and blood as the secondary rounds came in, beating a death beat at his back. Always at his back, killing him a second in the past maybe but not here and now, which is the only place you can kill a man.
A nasty gut-tentacle wrapped around Tamano's arm. Within seconds, bones came over on invisible ant trails of peristalsis. Snip snap lock shloop. Tamano's arm was encased in a zombie exoskeleton.
“That's it!” shouted Gomez “can you hear us, Horned Man? Build us flesh suits like that!!!”
Gomez regretted his words seconds after he said them. Bone saws whirred down and took his dead friends to pieces to use as raw materials. The survivors were wrapped up in hot guts and biceps and skull plates and wires and piezo electric motors.
Vomiting profusely the human warriors became meat monsters, over 2.5 meters in height and red, green and black. Their weapons peeked out from under the carnage armor. They charged in, enemy bullets tearing mainly through the already dead flesh around them. The ninjas tried their best, but the intelligence of the Terran special forces and this strange new flesh wrap was unbeatable in this kind of battle. The copters were picked off, one landing safely but being hollowed out by the meat monsters like a periwinkle by a needle. It was over in minutes and Boa Morte was unharmed.
Battle over, all the flesh sloughed off them and they quivered with mourning. Boa Morte was quiet for a short while, feeling that he had brought this desecration and death upon the troupe.
When enough time had passed he offered them the quiet inspiration of a factual statement: “Now we have our spacecraft.”