Chapter 58: Chapter fifty-seven

Present day

 

“When we get in there,” Oblivion said. “I’m going to draw a lot of attention and take out the cameras as I go. You come in behind me, stay quiet, and find wherever they are keeping the AI systems. Then, you destroy it and get out. I’m going after Smythe, so all eyes should be focused on me, but be careful anyway.”

He had already showed her how to plant explosives and he was confident in her ability to do so, but it was still a lot of danger to put a civilian in, and a part of him wished she was somewhere far away and safe. But, as always, that part of him was small and quiet, and so easy to ignore.

She nodded and he entered the facility proper.

 

 

While Oblivion passed through the base like a tornado, leaving security systems, and security personnel, broken in his wake, Liz dashed through the aftermath, moving as quickly as she dared through the winding hallways. The inside of the facility was utilitarian and sparse. Thin carpeting covered the metal floor, but that was where the Program’s concessions to comfort had ended. The walls were uncovered steel and the ceiling above transitioned from concrete where it overlapped with the bottom of the building above, to more steel. The bare metal was only broken by the occasional fan spinning lazily just overhead, low enough to make a tall person nervous, in some attempt to help with the base’s ventilation.

Liz kept one hand on the pocket of her flak jacket, holding onto the two explosive charges Oblivion had given her. He had said they were perfectly stable and there was no risk of them going off accidentally, but that didn’t make her any more comfortable with carrying around a pair of bombs in her pocket.

She found the first staircase and hurried down it, wincing as the metal stairs magnified every footstep. She wore heavy boots and, though they had been good for traversing the terrain outside, she now wished the heroes had given her something more suited to sneaking about.

On the next floor down, Liz found a directory of sorts. It looked like there were seven floors in total and the bottom was labelled ‘Servers’. That was where she needed to get to. But the stairs ended without going any further down. That was probably a security measure. She would have to criss-cross the length of the facility each time she descended.

Liz could hear the sounds of screaming and intermittent gunfire from up ahead that meant Oblivion was passing through. She took a deep breath and followed after him as fast as she could.

 

 

Oblivion burst into a room six storeys down that looked and smelled like a private hospital recovery room. There was only one bed and it was recently used, not even having been made up since its last occupant had left. For someone not to have corrected that already meant the patient must have left it either just before Dusk and Oblivion had attacked and the facility had gone on alert, or just after.

He was getting close. Smythe was nearby.

He turned around to leave the way he had come in, just in time to see a strange figure blocking the door. The figure looked to be wearing armour, but on closer inspection it was clear that he wore nothing at all, and it was his body that was metallic. Every inch of him was covered in matte silver and black metal, from the tips of his claw-like toes to the top of his hairless, skull-like head.

For a moment Oblivion’s mind refused to believe the thing was real, insisting it must be a trick as it wasn’t something that belonged in the world. But the pieces came together and he realized what he was looking at. This was the result of Liz’s prosthetics technology pushed to its absolute extreme. Not a prosthetic limb or even a prosthetic organ, but a whole prosthetic body, keeping whatever remained of the person alive somewhere inside a metal shell.

Oblivion had been wrong. Smythe wasn’t nearby, he was here.

“Hello boy,” Smythe said, his metallic face not moving when he spoke. “I see you’ve come to kill me. How quaint.”

Oblivion said nothing. Smythe already knew everything he had to say.

“Come on then,” Smythe said, making a ‘come and get it’ motion with his hand that looked as natural and fluid as if he weren’t made of metal. “I can’t wait to see what this new body can do.”

Oblivion moved, dashing at the Smythe and firing a stolen weapon as he did so. Each shot hit home, but didn’t even scratch the surface of Smythe’s metal body.

Probably lined with some kind of titanium alloy and reinforced with carbon nanotubes, Oblivion thought as the bullets pinged uselessly off of Smythe’s chest and head.

He got in close and went for Smythe’s arm, planning on using leverage and torque where pure force had failed.

He missed the grab.

Oblivion had, as always, been perfect in his technique, but Smythe had slipped away from the grab at a speed Oblivion could barely track. Then, his other arm came up and hit Oblivion in the chest so hard it cracked his suit and sent him flying backwards. He hit the room’s television and landed in a head on top of it.

Smythe advanced on him slowly, looking down at his hands admiringly.

Oblivion got to his feet and ran.

 

 

When Liz was on the sixth floor down, the sounds of heavy footsteps came towards her and she ducked into a room to hide. The rooms were marked with numbers, rather than names, so it could have been anything. But she got lucky, it was only a storage closet, and no one was waiting for her inside.

Moments after she got the door closed, Liz heard heavy footsteps pound by outside the door. Whoever they were, they must have been going incredibly fast, as the sound of their steps faded away almost before she could process hearing them. There had been something else too. When the footsteps passed by, Liz had heard a second set of footsteps coming just before them, as though someone was running away from a giant.

What the hell am I doing here? She wondered, and not for the first time that day. She wasn’t cut out for this. She was a scientist, not a secret agent or a superhero. Her reasons had seemed like good ones at the time, but it was one thing to agree to something in the abstract, and another to live it.

But it was too late for second thoughts now, so she gritted her teeth, opened the closet door, and kept moving forward.

As she neared the end of that floor, she heard high-pitched, almost panicked, voices coming from inside one of the rooms. Oblivion hadn’t been here yet which, combined with the footsteps had heard earlier, didn’t paint a very positive picture about how his part of the plan was going.

Liz pressed on anyway, heading for the last set of stairs down to the servers below. She reached it, but there was a security camera above the door. A very unbroken, definitely working, security camera.

“Shit,” Liz swore, dashing through the doors and taking the stairs as fast as she could.

She was about halfway down when she heard shouting from above her.

“Shit, shit, shit.”

She ran faster, taking the stairs three at a time heedless of the risk of tumbling down them. She liked her chances with a fall down the stairs a lot better than her chances with a bullet.

She reached the bottom and burst into the last floor of the facility. She was in a long, straight hallway with doors coming off both sides. She opened the first one she saw, hoping to find somewhere to hide, and noticed two things.

First, there was a camera just inside the door, so hiding would be impossible. And second, the room was absolutely filled with computer servers.

For a moment, she thought she had found what she was looking for, and her hand went to the explosives in her vest. Then a sick feeling settled in her stomach and she dashed down the hall to the next door. It was the same. Another basketball-court-sized room filled with servers and, based on the amount of space between them, separated by walls of two-foot steel.

Liz poked her head back into the hallway and looked down at door after door. If they were all the same, then her two explosive charges would barely make a dent. She needed a new plan.

Before she could think of one, three men with guns burst through the door, saw her, and opened fire.

 

 

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Oblivion ran for all he was worth, and Smythe stayed just behind him with no apparent effort.

“I never really saw the appeal of physical strength before,” Smythe said, seemingly musing to himself as he easily kept pace with Oblivion. “But, I must admit, now that I have the power to, the idea of beating you to death with my own hands holds more appeal that I would have expected.”

Oblivion pushed himself, sprinting through the corridors he had passed through before. Smythe could catch him easily, but he didn’t seem concerned with doing so which was just fine with him. He needed him out of the base.

As they reached the last level of the underground complex, right before they got to the small building that served as an entrance, Smythe appeared in front of Oblivion.

Oblivion stopped as fast as humanly possible, turning on one foot to go back the other way.

But Smythe was too quick and he grabbed Oblivion. Metal arms moved and Oblivion was launched through the air, up through the bullet-ridden ceiling and back into the building he had entered through.

He lay in a heap on the ground. His suit was designed to protect him from a lot, but there was no armour in the world that was made to be thrown through a concrete floor. It was cracked and he could feel himself bleeding within it.

He pushed himself to his feet anyway just as Smythe leapt through the hole in the floor and landed before him

Oblivion feinted that he would attack, then ran out the hole he had blown in the wall.

Smythe followed at a leisurely pace.

“I want you to know that I know what you’re doing,” he said. “I’d hate for you to think that your little distraction technique is working.”

Oblivion came to a stop.

“The thing is,” Smythe said. “Even if you destroy my computer systems, this isn’t the only facility where they are being built. I’ll grant you it’s the furthest along, and you might delay my plans by a month or two, but now that I have this new body, I have all the time in the world. A small delay is a price worth paying to ensure that you and those working with you are dead.”

“You act like you’ve had everything planned out from the start,” Oblivion said. “But your plan to discover who I was working with failed.”

Smythe shrugged metal shoulders. “One of my plans didn’t completely succeed. But it kept you busy long enough for me to remove my vulnerabilities. And from the security footage and your current actions, you seem to have brought your co-conspirators with you, so I have the opportunity to end all of you at once now.”

It wasn’t like Smythe to talk this much. He was normally one to act, not to explain himself. Oblivion had a flash of insight.

“You consider me a peer.”

“To me?” Smythe said. “No. But you were an able student. And with Dusk gone.” Another shrug. “You’re the only one left who might be able to appreciate the elegance of my plans, even if you couldn’t match it personally. Now, would you like to stop running? I’d prefer to kill the world’s last superhero face to face, but not enough to spend all night running and talking. I have more important things to do.”

Oblivion closed his eyes. Smythe had told him everything he needed to know and he knew what he had to do.

He entered his mind palace for what could well be the last time. In his mind, he stood in a white room. The room had no features, no walls, no doors, no floor and no ceiling. It was just an endless white space that stretched on forever centred on a plinth topped with a glass box and, inside the box, a red button.

In his mind, he broke the glass, took a deep breath, and pressed the button.

He opened his eyes as adrenaline flooded his system and his mind broke down the unconscious limiters on the force his muscles could exert.

There was no witty banter, no one-liners. Oblivion turned to face Smythe and, without a word, the two sprang towards each other to fight until one of them was dead.

 

 

Liz ducked back inside the server room and bullets pinged off the metal door. She was caught. She should just give up and hope they took her alive. She couldn’t fight her way past three guards. She didn’t have the precision and technique of Dusk or Oblivion. She didn’t even have a gun.

But she knew she wasn’t giving up. That would mean letting Oblivion down after he saved her life. That would mean allowing the people who had kidnapped her to win. And, if she was being realistic about it, that would mean a bullet to the head for her.

So, she didn’t have a gun or the ability to fight off three armed guards. What did she have?

She had a brain; that still worked fine. So, maybe she could think her way out of this. What else? She had a pair of explosive charges. Not enough to take out all the servers, but maybe enough to deal with her pursuers. She had a room with thick, steel walls. And she had a whole lot of servers, humming away pleasantly.

It might be enough.

She attached the explosive charge to the door, going through the motions that Oblivion had showed her to arm the bomb as fast as she dared. He had told her what to do for maximum destruction: plant the bomb near load-bearing walls or combustible substances with nothing blocking the path of the explosion. So, for a smaller blast, she figured she should do the opposite. With the bomb in place, she ran to the back of the room, putting as many server banks as she could between herself and the explosive.

Moments later, the guards burst into the room.

“Fan out,” one said. “Find her. I’ll guard the door.”

Liz hit the detonator.

There was sound, motion, and pain, and the next thing Liz knew, she was lying slumped against the wall, her cheek resting against the cold steel.

She groaned, but she couldn’t hear it over the ringing in her ears. Still, she didn’t know how much more security might be coming, so she pushed herself slowly to her feet and went to retrieve a weapon from the guards.

That was easier said than done. The guards had been reduced to a bloody mess and their weapons weren’t doing much better. Liz saw something she thought was the remains of a gun, but it could have just as easily been from one of the servers that was nearer the explosion. She staggered back out of the room, climbing through the ruined remains of the door, and into the hallway beyond.

She pushed herself on, one step at a time, looking in each of the rooms as she passed. There was nothing but more server banks, and she worried that there was nothing centralized down there at all. She wasn’t sure how long sabotaging each room’s worth of servers one-by-one would take, but she was sure it was far longer than she had. She needed something central.

Eventually she opened a door to find a small man sitting at a computer. He took one look at her, at the fatigues and the second explosive charge she was holding openly in her hand now, and let out a yelp.

“Please don’t hurt me,” he said, though Liz could barely hear him.

“Go,” she said, pointing at the door. She didn’t know how long she could stay standing, let alone what she was meant to do if this guy tried to stop her.

He didn’t though, he scurried off down the hall and Liz sank into his chair. In his haste he hadn’t logged out of the system—which was an incredible piece of luck as Liz was no kind of hacker—and Liz could see that she had indeed found a central control point for the server banks.

She may not have been a hacker, and she wasn’t going to be uploading any viruses into the servers, but she knew enough about computers to break them, and she set about doing just that. There are a number of important systems that all have to be working just right in order for a machine that complex to function, so it was a fairly easy thing for Liz to tweak those systems enough to shut down the whole thing. She shut down cooling systems, overclocked everything she could, and messed the power allocations enough to cause surges throughout the system.

It probably wouldn’t be enough to take out all of the servers, but it would be enough to ruin any ability to use them as the body of a human-AI hybrid.

Then, when she was done breaking things, she placed her second bomb on the console she had been working at and left. That way, no one could fix any of the damage she had done.

No guards tried to stop her on her way out and Liz detonated the bomb when she was at what she considered a safe distance.

There was a rumble through the walls as the explosive went off but if Liz jumped at it, there was no one around to see.

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