Infernal

The floor of the control room on E-579 rose several inches before dropping back into place with a jarring thud. Hairline fractures raced up the concrete walls and across the ceiling. Fine dust dribbled down on several consoles at the perimeter of the room.

The Elder lost his balance and would have fallen had it not been for Sophia. Ever concerned for the welfare of her benefactor, she shot her arm out and steadied the elderly man.

Jefferson turned to the technician—Waller, his nametag read—who’d moments ago warned them of the Enigma Rips propagating throughout the Multi-verse.

“What the hell was that?” Jefferson demanded.

“There was an overload in the primary turbines that power the ZeVatron, sir,” the youth responded, adjusting the glasses that had gone askew on his face and peering at the display at his console. “They exploded.”

“Backups?” Jefferson prompted.

“They’re down as well. I’m reading fire throughout that level and the level above. The auto-extinguishing system has kicked in and those will be out soon, but…” he trailed off, his fingers working busily at the keyboard.

“But what?” Jefferson barked.

“There’s nothing supplying power to the accelerator anymore. All those systems are gone.” He looked at Jefferson anxiously. “The accelerator should have shut down but it’s still running. It’s already above peak output and increasing.”

“Christ,” Jefferson muttered. Everyone present knew the sequence of events on E-01 during the first test of the Focal Point Generator. And that a large portion of Finland had ceased to exist within moments of the power cascade in the particle accelerator there.

“We have to get you out of here, sir,” Jefferson said, turning and addressing the Elder. “If containment within the accelerator fails this entire continent will be ashes.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” The Elder responded calmly. He had a dazed expression on his face and was staring into seemingly vacant space beyond the observation window. “Containment will hold, Tyro. The Multi-verse will soon be at our fingertips and we will reap the fruit of nearly three centuries of labor.”

Jefferson looked to Sophia. She too appeared alarmed but her stony expression conveyed her absolute faith in the Elder. She would neither contradict nor oppose the old man’s convictions. He turned back to Waller.

“Can we shut down the Rip?”

“Unknown, sir,” the young man responded. “If we could cut power to the oculus the Rip should close on its own, but the ZeVatron is running on its own now and the emergency shut off systems went up with the turbines.”

“Sir?” Angela Martin, the senior technician Jefferson had earlier ordered silent interrupted from her console.

Jefferson turned to her, his manner indicating that whatever she was about to say had better be good.

“We may not be able to cut power to the oculus,” she said, “but if we can sever the link to the QC’s, I might be able to stop the accelerator.”

“Explain,” Jefferson said, then added, “Quickly.”

“The QC’s are controlling the power flow from the accelerator to the oculus. If we take them offline, I might be able to bypass the oculus, reverse the polarity of all that energy, and feed it back into the accelerator. The opposing fields should cancel each other out, effectively stalling the accelerator.”

Jefferson, who thought her report too full of Ifs, mights, and shoulds looked to Waller. Waller simply shrugged as if to say, “It’s worth a try.”

He cast his glance back to the Elder, still staring at nothing with that dreamy expression on his face, oblivious to his surroundings. Sophia also stared through the observation glass, her eyes scanning the chamber beyond as if seeking out whatever held the Elder in thrall. Jefferson looked in that direction. The techs in the room poured over their consoles, studying the information relayed to them there, occasionally looking up and casting worried glances towards the observation window. The Key sat in her chair, wired into both the oculus and the QC’s, a look of sheer pleasure on her face. For a moment, no longer than a single heartbeat, Jefferson thought he saw a dark shape hovering to the left of the window; a bilious, torso shaped mass of swirling darkness that went up and up, out of sight past the frame holding the thick glass in place. A thrill ran down his spine, raising goose bumps there before radiating outwards from his crotch. Then the figure was gone. He chalked it up to anxiety and the massive energies in play in that cathedral sized space. He turned back to Martin.

“Do it.”

Deep inside a vast cavern beneath E-01 one-hundred and seventy-six ten story tall thinking machines thrummed with power. They were largely featureless save cooling vents that ran at intervals up their sides like the rungs of some great ladder and covered in a pale white polymer that closely resembled human tissue. A thick gelatinous sludge, a byproduct of bioelectric synthesis, continuously oozed from this polymer ‘skin’ to puddle on the floor at the base of the machines. Small, semi-intelligent bots resembling water spiders skimmed through the liquid and up the sides of the machines, clearing the sludge away from the vents to prevent overheating.

The Quantum Cray’s, essentially large cybernetic brains inside composite ‘skulls,’ had diverted enormous cognitive resources to the problem on E-579. They had ceased analyzing data from the ever increasing number of Enigma Rips as well as BanaTech’s ongoing operations throughout the Multi-verse, devoting their attention to their ongoing attempt to control the massive energy surges surrounding the oculus and the Focal Point.

They had already considered, and discarded, Angela Martin’s theory that the ZeVatron could be stalled by introducing a charge of reversed polarity to the accelerator. While they predicted the scenario had a ninety-seven point three percent chance of succeeding, such action also had an eighty-two percent chance of sending a power surge of enormous and incalculable—even by them—magnitude back through their own systems, severely damaging if not destroying their collective intelligence outright.

Like any living creatures, the Quantum Cray’s were hardwired for survival.

Featureless, but not without eyes or ears in the form of thousands of sensors throughout the cavern, the QC’s noted the arrival of the Monk. Dozens of molecular and biological scans revealed to them his true identity. Dr. Stephen Bana. Their creator.

Billions of thought processes occurring within nanoseconds compared his absence from BanaTech seventeen decades prior, to the Monk’s actions against that same entity within the last two years, revealing his probable motives.

He was there to destroy them.

Bana had yet to take a single step away from the Rip he had called forth, had yet to look around the four-hundred foot high by twelve acre square cavern housing the progeny of his mind, before one-thousand and sixteen three foot tall spiderbots ceased their predetermined maintenance routines and turned to converge on him.

Bana stepped from the Rip and the pain was overwhelming. Arthritis that would have presented itself as irritating but tolerable aches, pains, and stiffness over the course of his natural life came crashing down in a single wave, driving him to his knees—now aging and protesting the impact. His kidneys, one of which would have failed in his sixtieth year had he aged as any other man, sent agonizing pain shooting throughout his nervous system. His heart, rapidly thinning and aging as it would typically over the course of a lifetime, began trip hammering in his chest. The weight of one-hundred and seventy five years fell on him in an instant. As he placed his hands before him on the sticky floor he little resembled the seventyish man who’d stepped through the Rip mere moments before. He now appeared sallow, skeletal; on the verge of death.

He’d never considered himself a brave man. His extreme intelligence had been discovered at the age of four when he’d diagramed the atomic structure of an oxygen molecule while the rest of his pre-school class had been scribbling vague shapes that were supposed to be horseys and bunnies. As a result of his brilliance he’d been cruelly tormented by other children—and not a few adults—during childhood and early adolescence, ridiculed and mocked by classmates that were several years his senior. It was only after receiving his high school equivalency at the age of eleven and entering the hallowed halls of academia where the verbal—and occasional but always humiliating physical—abuse was much less tolerated that he’d found a sort of peace for himself. He’d found solace in physics. Comfort in quantum mechanics. The secluded laboratory and generous funding offered by the administration offered refuge from the petty jealousies and by then trivial harassment of his colleagues; none of whom he’d understood or cared to.

It was this considerable social ineptitude that allowed Alex Jefferson, or rather, a previous version of the man who’d long ago surrendered himself to oblivion, to manipulate Bana’s research under the guise of friendship and mutual interest. To direct and coerce his discovery of the Rips and their limitless potential. He had even allowed Jefferson to place his surname on the corporation.

“BanaTech,” Jefferson had promised him, “will be a beacon of hope for all mankind. We will cure disease and ease famine. End wars and bring peace to humanity. With your discoveries and my financial backing we will show the world that we are not alone. That other Earth’s exist, and that with all of us working together under one leadership, we can create the perfect Multi-verse.”

By the time Bana had seen through the appealing half-truths to the filthy lies beneath it had been too late. BanaTech controlled too many Earth’s, had too much technology and armament at its disposal, had grown far too extensive and evil for one man to do anything to stop.

Or so he’d told himself. As he had countless times before when pursued by bullies and thugs on faraway playgrounds or in long ago halls, he’d run away. Ripped onto a world where there were none to persecute or terrorize him. Where his brilliance was, in fact, appreciated; even honored.

He’d told himself he’d find a way to defeat the Elder and his minions. One day he’d return and set things right. When he’d learned enough from Eralah. When he’d acquired enough knowledge about the ALL and his role as Keeper.

When he found his courage.

He chuckled to himself as he pushed upwards to regain his footing. The sound was papery and thin; an old man’s dry and brittle laughter. It amused him that he’d finally found his courage not in the in the face of countless human deaths and the destruction of everything he’d come to understand. Not under the threat of the Infernal gaining a foothold in the Multi-verse from which to wage its war against humanity and re-shape the realm into a nightmare from which no one and nothing would ever awake.

No, Bana thought, I found my courage in the simple, selfless act of a dying man who refused to break a promise to a scared little girl.

He had no idea if it had come to him in time or not, but it would have to do.

The first of the spiderbots was upon him before he could push himself fully erect. It grasped at his ankle with pincer-like appendages at the end of its foreleg and pulled. Bana went down, this time on his back. If not for the thick coating of slime on the floor his rapidly thinning skull would have shattered on impact.

Two more bots were on him in an instant. One grasped his right hand and closed its pincers with two thousand pounds of hydraulic pressure. Bana’s middle, ring, and pinky finger were cleanly sheared off at the second knuckle. Blood spurted from the stumps as he cried out in pain. The other bot had positioned itself at his left knee. He kicked out and it slid backwards only to skim back to him as another three bots came for his face.

Bana thrashed and kicked himself into a seated position, looking about furiously for some avenue of escape. He was calculating his odds of making it to one of the QC’s and trying to climb the venting on the side when he saw the scores of spiderbots already surrounding him, with more advancing from the dark recesses of the cavern.

Even before stepping into the Rip on the Sanctuary Earth he’d called home for almost two centuries Stephen Bana had known that his human self would never leave this cavern alive. Still, the scientist still very much alive within him had hoped for time. Time to gaze in satisfaction at the wonders he’d created despite their current perverse function; time to touch them and feel their vast intellectual power thrumming beneath his hands. Time, perhaps, to speak with these, his only children.

Moreover, he’d hoped for time to look death in the face. And perhaps spit on him.

As one spiderbot eviscerated him with its pincers, spilling his intestines into his lap in wet and shiny loops of gore and another sliced into his back, halving his liver, he realized he was out of time. As blood gushed from both wounds, turning the biogel covering the floor a pinkish red hue, Bana summoned a Rip from the planet’s core boundary. He, the spiderbots, and the QC’s were instantly vaporized as molten nickel, iron, and calcium surged into the cavern under tremendous pressure at seven-thousand two hundred and thirty degrees.

Flowing like water at that temperature, the bulk of the core material followed the path of least resistance. It shot up through air shafts, vaporizing all in its path, traveled along passageways and corridors, incinerating living quarters, laboratories, hydroponics bays and recreational facilities. Animals, plants, and people, the just and unjust alike, were immolated before they even knew what was happening. Finally, core material shot up into the Elder’s private quarters, through the thin walls and roof of the building, and out into the perpetual night sky. Had BanaTech’s satellites still been functioning they’d have recorded a spectacular fountain of molten rock and metal shooting up into the sky for thousands of feet before falling back to Earth and sparking a righteous conflagration that rapidly consumed all that remained.