For Every Action - The Quantum Mechanic Series Book I

Date:

March 6, 2054

Time:

8:48AM EST

Officiator Note

After Agent Vox returned yesterday, we spent the afternoon assembling secondary and third level references corroborating Captain Bowlin’s narration. To the best of our abilities we could not find any information that contradicted any component of her story. In fact, there is evidence that Captain Bowlin may have understated the level of traumatic stress that was inflicted on the soldiers at Forward Operating Base Corsica in Sinai.

Between 2028 and 2040 all of the surviving 107 soldiers had been discharged from service under a variety of conditions. By 2043 a total of 49 of those soldiers had committed suicide, died from drug overdoses, been killed driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or lost their lives under a variety of other suspicious circumstances. The vast majority of the remaining soldiers are still under some form of psychiatric care from the Veteran’s Administration or private organizations.

Among those who were lost to suicide was SPC Specialist Gene Ogden. According to Army records, he was the soldier responsible for sniping the MGSU operators at Sinai when they were pulled from their tanks. He apparently escaped being killed by the RPG barrage sent into his emplacement by leaping out before impact. His left leg was broken, and he was knocked unconscious when he landed on the ground twenty-two feet below. He survived because an unknown soldier dragging him underneath of a nearby equipment shed, where he was discovered the following day.

SPC Ogden suffered from severe depression that was never successfully treated, despite extraordinary efforts by both V.A. and private sector doctors. Six years after he was medically discharged, he took his own life with the very rifle he used to spare his friends from a death we cannot imagine. According to another survivor we interviewed, one of those he shot was his own brother, SPC Roger Ogden. Although the exact nature of Roger’s death cannot be confirmed, it has been determined that he was killed at Corsica while serving as an MGSU Armament Specialist.

All told, of the 116 men and women who survived the first known encounter with Yaoguai class Cybernetically Blended Assault Units, only 60 remain alive just 15 years later; and almost all of them are still suffering from severe physical or psychological problems.

It is a testament to Captain Bowlin’s character that she not only survived the attack on Corsica, but volunteered to assist efforts to better understand the threat. A source who wished to remain unknown, stated that Captain Bowlin communicated with several high ranking Army personnel, and one former US Senator (who had all been patients of hers) in the first two days after her arrival at Rammstein. She apparently called in every favor she had to guarantee her assignment to the 75th.

Captain Bowlin also never married and has no children.

Transcription resumed by officiator

CAPTAIN BOWLIN: OK, where were we?

MARCUS: You were talking about the code, and how it affected the techs.

CAPTAIN BOWLIN: Oh yes, Eddie. I was going to tell you about Eddie.

Another poor boy these things took. Somehow those monsters kept right on killing us even after they were dead.

I lost touch with almost everyone after they decommissioned all of the facilities, and then we went through that three month debrief at Ft Knox. I think everyone just wanted to get the GAA investigations as far behind us as we could. So we avoided being around people we knew. It just shoved the whole thing back in our faces.

But I saw Jenny Mathers at the GAA Trials. She had been married to Eddie, our head tech while we were at RAMBUS. He was a cute kid, maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven years old when he came to us straight out of MIT and DARPA. He had a bunch of PhD’s and cruised out at the top of his class like it was summer camp. I heard his IQ was so high they really couldn’t measure it, and Jenny was just about the prettiest little thing you ever saw. I liked both of them. But when I saw her at the trials she looked like an old woman. Her eyes had that hollow, haunted, thousand-yard stare like shell-shocked vets get. Worse than that though, was her voice. It was flat, quiet, dead and it went right through you like a cold knife. It was the voice of someone who couldn’t find a reason to live anymore, but couldn’t figure out how to die either.

I caught her in the hallway after she came out from testifying and asked her where Eddie was. She just looked at me with this flat, lifeless stare; and right away I knew he was dead. So I hugged her and asked if we could get some dinner, and she accepted. It took her almost three hours to tell me the whole story, but I’ll sum it up for you.

Turns out Eddie never let go of that code, even though he knew he could go to prison for it. He kept a copy on his slate and wore himself down to a nub trying to understand how it could have been created. He poured over it every night for years until he was barely sleeping. When he did sleep, he’d twitch and mumble, sweating like he was in an oven. Jenny said he’d sit bolt upright in bed at least twice a week, screaming like he’d seen the angel of death. It took everything she had to calm him back down when that happened. Within a year he’d lost so much weight that he looked like a ghost. His hair turned grey, and then it went white.

She tried everything to help him. She took him back home to his family in Texas, quit her job, and drove him back and forth to Doctors and the V.A. but nothing helped. The counselors said he never talked to them. Just sat there until his time was up and shuffled back out. Doctors said he was more stressed than anything they’d ever seen, and the drugs they prescribed weren’t working.

A few months later she woke up early and realized Eddie wasn’t in bed. She looked all over for him, calling his name and turning on all the lights. She finally looked outside and there he was in the backyard, just standing there in sweatpants, bare feet, and nothing else. He was staring at this little sliver the sun was making as it came up. He had that slate in his hand, but it just hung by his side with that cold, elegant code on it.

So she went out to him. Took his hand and said his name real quiet. She asked him to look at her. She said he turned his head to her slowly, shaking, and there were tears running down his face. His mouth was hanging open and it went up and down like he was trying to say something. So she reached up and took his face in her hands, saying his name again and he finally looked down at her. Now he was a tall kid, maybe six four and a bit, and she was just a little thing. So she had to look straight up to see his face like that. Tears dripped off him and onto her face so fast she said it was like rain. She asked him what was wrong over and over, and after a few minutes he blinked and finally spoke.

She said it came out in this hollow, hoarse whisper, and all he said was “It’s not code...” like it was the most precious secret in the world. Then he went down on his knees and fell over dead.

The doctors said it was a massive series of strokes, all over his head, like bullet holes. It had destroyed more than half of his brain before he hit the ground. His heart gave out too and popped like a worn out balloon. After the autopsy they told her that a hundred of the best doctors in the world couldn’t have saved him a year before that, much less that morning. His body had eaten itself alive. Whatever was in that code, it was cancer. It devoured that poor kid like slow acid, cut away at him piece by piece every time he understood more of it.

You see... it wasn’t like Eddie had to stretch like the others. He knew he was up to the task; but it was going to take him a while… like eating an elephant one bite at a time. He was like a lot of math-smart kids his age, obsessed with puzzles, and this was the greatest puzzle he’d ever seen. He could almost see the answer all the time, but it kept dancing back out of reach whenever he thought he was close.

So he bit and chewed, bit and chewed, and he saw how a little more of how the code worked each time. Jenny said he kept telling her it would get better once he got past the toughest parts of it. But every little slice he took in was just a little more of that horrible beauty, a little more elegant death. Eventually though, it looks like he learned every instrument and every note that composed that awful code. I think in the end that’s what killed him - he finally understood it. He saw how the symphony was played from the conductor’s viewpoint, and it was just too much for anybody to live with... at least anybody with a soul.

You see Mr. Lillian, everything about those things was as black and evil as Satan’s heart, and once you’re touched by that... Well, every day after is a fight to not let the stain devour you.

I was never much for religion when I was young. But once you see absolute evil you have to deal with a few things. One is the fact that if the one extreme exists, so must the other. You can’t have demons without angels. There’s no Satan without God. I had to come to terms with that because that’s what those creatures were, one end of that spectrum… a terrifying, and utterly perfect evil. They had to be, because some unfathomable mind had torn apart little babies and used the pieces to grow their own demonic army of integrated machine-organisms.

They weren’t people augmented with technology, and they weren’t just machines with human parts. They weren’t separate. The stress of the integration should have killed them thousands of times over; but it didn’t, and we don’t know why. Maybe it was in that hell spawned code. They were crafted to kill and die and their existences had to be short, full of agony, and driven by nothing but fear and rage. The only mercy that was given to them, as far as I could tell, was that they weren’t self-aware. At least not like you and I are. The brain construction they had retained was only the ancient parts we inherited from reptiles; coupled with the worst things we kept from the days when we killed each other over the carcasses of dead animals.

That amputation of their minds meant they had no emotions other than rage and hunger. Everything else, including their soul, had been carved out of them and died on the floor of some horrible operating theatre. At least that’s what I pray happened when I can’t sleep at night. If I’m wrong, then it means the souls of innocent children were trapped in those machines, tormented until they went insane, and then made to fight until they became monsters.

But I believe that at the very least they’d had their sense of self ripped away, and that’s why they had no fear of death... as long as they went down killing. I saw them do the most suicidal things at Sinai. They’d charge tanks or wade right into a whole battalion of heavily armed Marines. I saw them run right through military grade defenses while we were shelling them with RPGs and pouring firepower at them like the wrath of God. The first ones just died, and the ones behind them used their bodies as shields to get closer. These things were made for one thing, and one thing only - to kill, and they were unbelievably good at it.

I told you how it took a lot to bring one down. I don’t think they really felt pain, at least not like we do. You combine that with the kind of armor they were wrapped in and you’ve got the most effective extermination force the world has ever seen. I saw a grenade go off right under one while it was charging us. The explosion blew it thirty or forty feet up with pieces flying off of it and the damn thing just rolled in midair and hit the ground at a full sprint. It didn’t even break stride.

We only survived because the Marines started making huge Molotov Cocktails out of empty plastic shipping barrels, and firebombing the horrible things to burn out their biological components. When that stopped working because they got wise to it, the Marines rigged up a makeshift flamethrower from a diesel delivery truck and burned out most of the rest. They all died in the process though. Sergeant McCallum took out the last one himself, by doing a suicide run into it with half a blivit of fuel strapped onto a forklift.

The weird thing was, all of those monsters ran right into their own deaths like you or I would run trying to catch a plane. They had no ability to think, other than rudimentary decision making. Even that was just based on stimulation delivered from these little neural, solid-state supercomputers inside of them. Those were made entirely from superconducting graphene, and we found them at the center of each organism. They were protected by a hardened, state of the art shell and we destroyed a lot of them just trying to get them open. When we did, we found brick sized CPUs and memory cores with redundant radio, ultrasonic, infrared, and even micro laser based networking systems. Some of the damn things were still running when we got to them, trying to connect to the others. So, although they each had a degree of autonomy, they were all tied back to some kind of central control to coordinate their attacks. I guess you could think of them a little bit like those fire ants from the Amazon. Each one was doing its own thing, while at the same time they all served the will of the whole. We were desperate to figure out where the central control was or how it communicated with them over long distances. We never found evidence that pointed to a control node though, and Eddie theorized that there really wasn’t one. He believed that some sort of “over-mind” arose organically in the interlinking of the swarm. From what he could tell, as long as more than five of them stood, they could work together as one organism. They shared computing cycles across the network, and strategic level organization was delivered back through some sort of cascading logic.

That was the code that messed up the techs heads when they tried to understand it.

That was the code that killed Eddie.