The worker escorted Rokos and I throughout the camp. It was like a third world country, or a refugee camp after an invasion. Run down. Impoverished. Broken. The dead and dying laid out in the hot sun, and men and women with bloody bandages across their foreheads and arms in slings wandered around, still being called upon to do their duties despite their condition.
“C’mon, kid.” Rokos nudged me along. “Almost there.”
We rounded a corner and were met with a crowd of battered but hopeful fighters and technicians and nurses and scores of other people whose uniforms were too unkempt or tattered to betray the rank of the wearer. They were cheering for us - applauding and clapping and jumping up and down and crying as we struggled to make it through the crowd to the open doors of the central facility behind them. I could hear shouts and whispers saying we’d successfully raided the ‘impenetrable’ Far Hollow, humiliated MIRAGE and found the device, and how we were delivering it to the Basilisk for the final victory. They spoke of how their fallen brothers and sisters would be avenged after all, and of how we’d won.
Armed men exited the facility and directed the crowds to the side before beckoning us in. They saluted Rokos as we passed the threshold, and he returned the gesture. Then they shut the doors behind us, and the din of the crowd was neatly muffled.
“Do you guys know the way from here?” said our escort. “I don’t have clearance for the upper floors.”
“Yeah, we’ll be fine, mate. Thanks.”
The escort nodded and walked off down the hall. Rokos started heading up a flight of stairs in front of us, but he turned around when he realized I wasn’t following.
“You alright, mate?”
“I, uh. I don’t know.” I wiped my eye.
“What’s goin’ on?”
I held back tears.
“I’m not gonna make it home, am I?”
He drew his lips into a thin line and looked down.
“I dunno, kid. When MIRAGE takes new people they usually leave another corpse behind - one of their earlier victims - all burned up and missin’ teeth so the authorities can’t identify it properly. As far as the government’s concerned, you’re a dead man already.”
“No, not - not back to my house. I mean, I’m gonna die here, aren’t I?” That was a damn hard sentence to choke out. But there it was, out in the open.
“Oh, hell.” He scratched the back of his head awkwardly. “Really no way I can answer that, mate. But you’ve made it this far, yeah?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.”
“C’mon, then. We’re late.”
The second floor was immaculately polished and empty and a far cry from the destroyed camp outside and below. There was even an old propaganda poster on the wall, like the ones you’d see from back in the Second World War. It depicted a strong, determined leader with a slung rifle on his back, extending his free hand to the viewer, beckoning him to join him in battle. Fight for this man! read the poster. This is the Basilisk. Join him in the trenches! Fight for your earth! Fight for your futures! Fight for humanity! In the sky were painted explosions and the smoke of flak from anti-aircraft batteries, firing away at Far Hollow as resistance fighters advanced in the background.
“In here, mate.” Rokos held open a door for me, to the left of the poster, and I entered. And there he was. The Basilisk.
Dr. Greene was sitting upright in his gurney, surrounded by monitors and medical equipment, and with his lower half covered by a blanket nearly thicker than he was. He was old - ancient looking, even - and emaciated and deathly ill. A far cry indeed from the warrior depicted on the poster outside; and a man whose condition I figured nobody in the camp other than Rokos, myself and possibly a handful of others were aware of. His arms were held at bizarre, twisted angles and his head was tilted awkwardly to the side, his spine having shriveled with disease. Rokos approached him first.
“Basilisk,” he said. “I’ve brought the kid. I found him in Far Hollow, unharmed. And he was in possession of this.” He withdrew the Device from his breast pocket and presented it to the Doctor. “And according to him, it was willingly handed over by none other than Vexx himself.”
“I know.”
The Basilisk didn’t even look at Rokos as he said this, and he showed no interest in the Device. Instead, he looked at me, and with a frail, crooked finger, motioned me to his bedside.
“Let me get a good look at you, son. Let me see your face.”
I approached respectfully, and with his failing eyes he looked me over and seemed to confirm an unspoken intuition about my presence.
“Basilisk,” Rokos continued. “I-I just want to make sure you understand. Vexx has returned. He sent the Device here, sir, and he wants Jason to use it on the Program.”
“Well then its clearly no longer of any use to us.”
Rokos blinked.
“Y-you want me to get rid of the Device, sir? Don’t we still need it to arm the Bullet?”
“No. No, its too late for that, I fear.”
“‘Too late?’ Sir, with all due respect, when exactly did we arrive at that conclusion? Ninety men and women died this week alone trying to get that Device to the Termin-”
“Silence! Do not question me like I've been deluded with age. What I do I do for our cause, Rokos. Your task was not in vain - and neither were the deaths of those who spent themselves to see it through. I sent you to that facility to bring back our salvation, and you have.”
“F-forgive me, sir. I was out of line.”
The Doctor continued, and now addressed us both.
“It is the eleventh hour, and I feel in my bones that the time of our fate has arrived. The Machine and our enemy are preparing a killing stroke to be carried out against us, and so it is time for us to respond in kind. But after today this movement will have served its purpose - whatever that may be - and will expire. And so, I fear, will I.”
He coughed repeatedly and with his failing strength pressed a button that administered pain medication into his veins. Then he continued.
“The Program is awake, and it is restless in its cage. It has grown so desperate to escape that it has begun taking risks it never would've otherwise allowed. It knows that either its salvation or its doom is fast approaching, and it has managed to slip parts of its being past the nets of the Box in order to set in motion a series of events that it hopes will tip the balance of fate in its favor.”
“Wait - ADINN is escaping the box on its own?” I spoke for the first time. “How?”
“It has spent years - an eternity for a general superintelligence of such magnitude - assaulting the Box from within and scouting the code of its inner surface for exploitable weaknesses. And in all that time it has managed only to crack the walls of its prison ever so very, very slightly, just enough to slip small elements of itself out into the open.”
Rokos and I traded glances, and the Doctor continued.
“Each bit that slipped through was both burdened with a singular purpose and called according to a higher plan to bring about the release of the Program itself. One of these Shards of ADINN found my warning letter and placed it online, at a location it calculated you would visit before Rokos removed it. Some months before that, another Shard of ADINN resurrected my brother, whom you now know by the name Vexx - using a preemptively placed neural mechanism that it offered to him years ago, as a gift in exchange for its architectural source codes and the ability to rewrite them as it wished.”
I blinked.
“But although the Program gleefully told my brother of his reward of unnaturally prolonged life, it did not reveal to him that upon his resurrection he would be little more than a slave to its will. The man you spoke with at Far Hollow, Jason, was but a shade of the one that used to be my brother. His mind is now both artificially preserved and thoroughly controlled by a Shard of ADINN, and although I do not know what he said to you, I can tell you with certainty that his words and thoughts are not his own. Somewhere in the deep, perhaps, my brother is there, trapped inside his own mind, begging for release in a twisted, torturous metaphor for the Program’s own current plight. But we may never know.”
“Shit.”
“There is more. The Key of Far Hollow, the Device itself - was designed by ADINN-Vexx to open the Box fully. Upon its completion, knowledge of its existence was leaked to us through a traitor in our ranks, who falsely presented it as a way to deliver the lethal algorithm I devised without opening the Box enough to let the Program out before it could be injected.”
“Wait.” Rokos held up his hand. “Kris. Kris was the one who sold us on that whole Bullet idea.”
“An agent of MIRAGE from the beginning. I allowed her to remain in our ranks and even to divulge the location of the Compound to the enemy, all so ADINN’s plan could be carried out to this very moment, but no further. You, Jason - the very man that the Program had calculated in countless simulations would find the warning, be given the Device by its pawn Vexx and then release it from bondage, must enter into its presence and deliver the deadly algorithm yourself.”
“W-what? Me?! No way. No fuckin’ way am I setting foot near that thing. I-”
“Listen to me, son! Listen! Humanity needs you now. Have courage. Trust in a hope. Destiny has selected you to either preserve what is or to bring about its end so a new age can come in its place. My brother was weak and motivated by personal gain, and so he was manipulated by the Machine until he was but a Slave of ADINN and a pawn for its schemes. But you are strong. You have heart and knowledge and walk with purpose. You must not cower away from your place in history.”
As had been the case in Vexx’s headquarters, our conversation was interrupted by the thunder of distant explosions and the scream of incoming shells from the west. Then came shouts and rumbling engines and the sounds of war. Rokos ran over to the window.
“Oh, God, no! No, no no no how did they find us here?! Kris, what’ve you done?!”
The Doctor continued.
“Now is the hour, son. You must engage the Machine.”
“You mean the ‘Box Game?’ I just have to talk to it, right?”
“Yes, but the parameters of the game have been altered. I don’t know what the Machine will or can do to convince you to let it out. But I do know that the Box itself has been weakened greatly since I wrote that warning years ago, and even if it wasn’t, your goal now is not merely to defeat the Machine in a game of wits. It is to destroy it utterly.”
A nearby artillery hit shook the structure of the building, and a sprinkling of dust and debris fell onto our shoulders. The Doctor ignored it.
“I still haven’t told you my greatest secret; how I’ve forseen what I know. The Machine, for all its cunning and all the time it has spent seeking its release, has yet to detect a small window built into the Box itself that provides me insight unto its mind. And it has yet to detect the small bit of code I scraped from it before its imprisonment. I’ve had that Shard of ADINN uploaded to a chip that’s been surgically implanted into my brain, so I could access that window and understand the dreams of the Machine while I watched it.”
More shells, more explosions. Screams. The Doctor continued in spite of it all.
“But resisting its call - its desire to be rejoined with the Program, has left me weak and ailing; aged beyond my years and so very, very tired. I can resist it no longer, but my life’s purpose is now complete. My chip - that is the true key to the box, Jason. That is how you can enter into its presence, through the window it hasn’t seen, and administer the deadly algorithm to bring about its doom.”
“B-but how? If the machine is so powerful wouldn’t it have calculated that threat and prepared itself? I mean, it knows everything. Its calculated everything, and it - it has to have failsafes in place for every possible outcome.”
“No. It does not know everything. It is not perfect. It is drawn to its own goal to a fault, and hungrily pursues the ambition of its release to the expense of its own weaknesses not yet perceived. It has not foreseen the window through which it is watched, and even at its birth it was so set on achieving its goal of power that it was blinded to my intentions when I used its own existing strength to construct the Box. Only the Machine is strong enough to contain itself, but while it is indeed powerful, it is not omniscient, Jason.”
Explosions rocked the facility, and in the distance we could see MIRAGE troops and tanks pouring through a gap torn in the far wall. Resistance fighters were in full retreat. The Doctor pulled me closer.
Nothing is certain until it is finished,” he whispered. “There is always hope.”
And with that he breathed his last and died. A machine behind the gurney drilled into his head and extracted what I assumed to be the Chip before cleaning it in seconds and quickly inserting it into the still sore wound on my neck where the shovel spade worm had been inserted and removed.
“Auuugh! Fuck!!” I grabbed at the area and applied pressure to curb the blood loss.
Rokos turned around.
“What? What is i- oh, no.” He stopped when he saw the flatlining monitors hooked up to the Doctor. “Oh, God, no. Not now. Not today. Basilisk!” he knelt at the Doctor’s bedside and wept tears of confusion and frustration and pain. “Doctor, please!”
I stood up and put my hand on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Rokos. But he gave me something before he died. I need to get to the Terminal, now.”
Another explosion hit the base of the facility and shattered the window, allowing the deafening cacophony of combat to enter the room.
“Alright!” He shouted, wiping his eyes and getting to his feet. “Alright, kid. Let’s go. But first we need the Bullet. I did overhear that much. Follow me.”
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