Z14 Page 21

  “Seven…”

  As Kaboom dropped to his knees, letting his opponent’s fist sail over his head, I thumped my own fist down on my opponent’s free foot – once, twice, three times, in a blur of motion, like some pneumatic pounding machine.

  “Six…”

  The old Warden fell awkwardly on top of me, his free foot broken, his other still trapped in the wall, bending his leg at what, for a human would be a stressful angle, threatening to buckle the joint.

  “Five…”

  Kaboom had been kneed in the head by his attacker, and had fallen on his face. He struggled to rise, but his foe leapt astride his back.

  “Four…”

  I couldn’t stand up, nor wriggle free of the old Warden, who, almost mimicking Kaboom’s struggle, was unintentionally sitting on me. He tried to wrench his foot free of the wall, as I head-butted him in the groin. Oof, right in his nozzle.

  “Three…”

  The bearded Warden had grabbed Kaboom by the hair and started slamming his face into the floor, over and over. He was probably trying to deactivate the self-destruct – by deactivating Kaboom. A sound plan and one I would approve of were the situations reversed.

  “Two…” Kaboom’s alternate voice was muffled as he forcibly ate floor tiles.

  I wasn’t going to get away. A sinking realisation on my human side, even as every process I had been automatically running, desperately trying to plan an escape, chimed in with agreement.

  “One…” Kaboom’s voice was weak. He was fading. I could imagine the warnings blaring in his mind that cranial integrity was compromised.

  I had one chance left. I grabbed a fistful of my opponent’s lovely, retro tweed jacket and pulled him down on top of me.

  “Kaboo – ” yelled Kaboom, before being cut off by the explosion inside his head.

  The noise was tremendous. My system automatically all but shut-off my audio input to prevent damage to my sensitive hearing equipment, but I could do nothing about the exposed parts of my body, underneath the fully exposed, old man Warden. I felt immense, searing pain as a shard of hot cyborg alloy went through my own still exposed spine, just above my pelvis, severing my spinal column. Kaboom and the other Warden were both comprehensively destroyed, and shrapnel even went through my now dead, inhuman shield and pierced what remained of my own body in dozens of places.

  I clumsily shoved the corpse off of me and then I lay still for a moment, on my back, staring at the ceiling. I had hoped to be nowhere near the explosion in the tunnel, when it went off, as I feared a collapse. However, it appeared we were surrounded by many metres of thick rock, and Kaboom’s latest explosive demise had merely served to excavate a small cavern around the detonation point.

  I barely took all that in though. I was more occupied by my internal damage alerts. I had never seen so much bad news scrolling through my system before. Most of it was banging on about superficial dents and scratches, but “Warning: Legs Severed” sounded just a tad serious. Ah-ha, using understatement to comedic effect: Five years of human humour studies, still not paying off. I emulated a sigh, before using my arm – of which I now entirely had only one – to push my oddly light, broken torso over onto its front.

  “Melon?” I called. “Melon?”

  “Zed?” shouted the doctor. I suppressed a very real giggle – boy did I need a doctor, right now. Hah.

  “In the flesh, Doc,” I said. “Well, I think I have a patch or two of flesh left under my armpit, anyway.” I began pulling myself along the corridor, throwing my forearm out, just in front of my head, and using it to pull and drag myself forward a bit, and then repeating. It was as awkward and ungainly as it sounded, but, being a powerful machine, I could still go at a fair old clip. It’s not like I was going to get tired. I moved over to where I’d thrown Melon. On the way I went past my bag. A quick glance inside told me that Fourth Melon had taken a load of shrapnel in the blast. He was dead. Oh well, never mind, I’m sure that at the rate I accumulated Melons there’d be a half-dozen more along soon. They were annoying little know-it-alls, but at least they didn’t tend to explode. Exploding Baboons and scheming Melons; what a strange world I now lived in.

  I reached the original, the classic and now the only Melon, who was utterly unscathed; his head lying there on its side, watching me approach in slack-jawed amazement.

  “Wow, Zed. You’re…um, ah, alive,” he said, taking in the state of me in a mix of shock and pity. “That’s, that’s…good. That is.” His face said he’d rather be dead than be in my state. Hah, he was one to talk – or he would have been if he’d vocalised that thought. I almost felt like obliging the unspoken thought.

  “Let’s get going, then,” I said. “I don’t suppose you can move around using your lips, can you?”

  “Hah. No,” he said. “By the way, something flew past me not long after you started all that ruckus with the Wardens. It landed just over there.” He gestured further along the corridor with rolls of his eyes. I dragged myself along until I came across good old Kaboom’s memory unit. I clutched it in my hand and dragged myself back over to Melon. I wedged the unit into Melon’s mouth, then I grabbed the pole his head was still welded onto and threw it back down the sub-corridor, back to the junction that was full of the remains of three and a half cyborgs. Fuck, I’d miss those legs of mine a lot. We’d been through a lot together and they’d always been there to support me. That one was definitely going into the humour database.

  I made my torturous way down the main corridor again, heading in the direction the Wardens had come from. Every few yards I had to stop and grab Melon, with his mouth-full of data unit and throw him a bit further ahead of me.

  This was madness, but pressing on was still all that was left to me. Sure, the Kon Ramar’s nearest Warden was still more than five hours away, but they could have literally anything else out there that had come with them from, well, wherever the hell they’d come from. Melon had said previously that they would only send their currently Earth-based religious, scientific group that also formed their political leadership. Yet more madness if that were true – scouting a potentially hostile situation with your most important assets? And these crazy idiots had built the likes of me?

  It wasn’t long before we reached our final destination: The room where the three Wardens had – ever since we tracked their arrival in Boram Bay less than four hours ago – been pacing back and forth. Now I knew why, and I didn’t know whether to turn on the waterworks, or to howl with laughter.

  Grand Overlord Chester Boram had built his own living brain network.

  The corridor had opened out into a huge, cavernous white-tiled and brightly lit room. On one side was an enormous aquarium full of green goop and – quick tally-up – fifty-seven human brains. In the middle of the room, just sitting on the floor, joined together by webs and tendrils of a fleshy rope-like substance were another thousand-odd brains. They all seemed to be connected to a cluster of five brains, which in turn were joined by those same strands of matter to one more brain. One that was snuggly nestled inside the open skull of a head – still attached to its body – that was unmistakably that of Grand Overlord Chester Boram himself.

  And he was alive.

  And he looked at me.

  And he said, “Zee fourteen, we meet at last.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “Astonishing,” said Doctor Melon. I’d thrown him into the room ahead of me, and he had a good view of Chester’s little experiment.

  Now, I’m no expert on gigantic, inter-connected, living brain networks, but this looked like a fairly rushed, slap-dash, ad-hoc setup to me. I’m sure when the Kon Ramar did this they didn’t just leave a bunch of wired-up brains lying around on the floor, where any clumsy old, half-destroyed cyborg might ‘accidentally’ splatter one of them…

  Chester’s stern old features, that I’d last seen in a video conversation, lit up in the kind of smile that would make many a grown human feel nervous. “You’re probably wondering just
what I’m up to, Zee,” said Chester. If he was concerned about the fact that his last few body – brain? – guards had just been destroyed, he certainly wasn’t showing it. But, there would have been no way he would have been expecting to send three fit and healthy Wardens after me only to see the battered ruin of his – fairly recently declared – enemy come pulling itself across the floor towards him.

  “I don’t really care what you’re up to, you mad twat,” I said. I knew the dismissive tone and words would rile him, badly. “What I care about, or rather what part of me is telling me I should care about, is what poor bastards these brains used to belong to.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about them, Zee,” said Chester. “They’re all still alive. We’re all together. Although naturally I’m in charge.”

  “But who are they?”

  I was slowly creeping further into the room, dragging myself a mere half an inch at a time. I was scanning the room for any final threats, but apart from a normal-sized steel door in the far wall, and the various bits of the brain network, the room was empty.

  “This explains what the Wardens were doing from the moment they arrived here, then,” said Doctor Melon.

  “Ah, Doctor Melon,” said Chester. “Welcome to you, too. You’re right, doctor, the Wardens were building this for me. It’s why I only sent them after Zee here when it was clear the stubborn bastard wasn’t going to fuck off.” A bit of Chester’s cool vanished momentarily, just then.

  “Now, now, Chesty,” I said. “Don’t get your brain strands in a twist.”

  I gave up on inching forward surreptitiously, and just dragged myself straight over to the nearest brain, which was one of the main group of over a thousand.

  Chester definitely looked a little concerned at my advance.

  “Don’t tell me you really don’t want to know what’s going on here,” he said.

  “I do!” said Melon.

  “Chesty,” I said. “What you get up to in the privacy of your own secret tunnel is no concern of mine. This is better than that dwarf porn I found on your computer, at least.”

  Chester wasn’t going to give up on telling me all about his scheme though. I gave him half an audio channel while I assessed the brain network, taking it all in. It really was an intriguing sight.

  “As you know, my family have had access to the alien vessel beyond that doorway over there for generations, now,” he said. “We’ve been trying to crack its secrets the whole time. It wasn’t until Doctor Melon arrived in orbit and merrily colluded with me for a while, that we made real breakthroughs in understanding some of what the Kon Ramar have been trying to do and how they have been doing it. Even better though was understanding how to start to control the Wardens.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Melon. “I did say, Zed, that I stopped talking to him when I realised he was insane.”

  “Shortly after I used the computer here to learn of what the aliens could do with a linked network of human brains; a young, ambitious, prospective Overlord suggested a merger of his gang and my company. It gave me a fantastic idea, so I decided to merge his brain with mine. Then, I expanded that merger programme to encompass all the brains you see here today. Say hello to some of the Boram Bay Overlords, Zee.”

  “Hi guys,” I said obligingly.

  “But the real genius of my plan is that I shall convince the Kon Ramar, when they finally come down here that I have achieved what they were after, that I am their god, inhabiting this physical vessel, this expanded consciousness.”

  I laughed. “That’s just bonkers, Chester. They’ll never believe that, despite how insane Melon claims they are. But, even if they did, so what? What the fuck does that achieve?”

  “Zee, were you at the back of the line when they were installing central processing units?” said Chester. “Why would I give up the chance to become the living god of an ancient space empire, who also happen to be in complete dominance of the human race?”

  “Okay, good point,” I said. “What makes you think it will work?”

  “Their arrogance,” said Melon.

  Chester nodded, which set a weird ripple through many of the fleshy strands connecting his brain to the five others – which seemed to be acting as nodes of some sort for the network. “Melon’s right. I’ve falsified records in the ship’s database to show a long history of experimentation by myself and the three Wardens you somehow defeated. All the evidence will point to one, still living, still whole host body being part of the network being the key component that makes the brain construct suitable to receive at least a small part of the essence of their god.”

  I took a moment before I could say something that didn’t sound like a bemused human spluttering. “But why would incorporate yourself into the network as part of the ploy?”

  “Because of the power, Zee,” said Chester, clenching and shaking a fist. “My brain has the capabilities, knowledge and memories of these thousand and more people. I know all they know, and can think faster even than you. And, I can never die – I just need fresh brains added to the mix from time to time.

  “It’s a drug, Zee,” he continued. “Every brain added, absorbed and consumed is a rush of discovery and enlightenment, and of increasing my overall power.

  “Zee, I’m about to tap the human mind’s hidden powers: Telekinesis, maybe even mind-reading.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said. “Can you read electronic minds?” I pushed my arm against the ground, rearing my broken torso up, off the floor, and as I went up and came down again, I lifted my fist off the floor and slammed it with all my might into the brain I had crawled up to. It crumpled with a squelch.

  Chester winced in pain, but it didn’t trouble him for long.

  “You just killed Davinda Lornax, former head of a small gang of cut-throats from Jolly Meadows,” said Chester with a grin. “Pleased with yourself? Go on, kill another brain. You’ll still be at it when the Kon Ramar come in here and their god commands them to kill you.”

  “This is truly astonishing,” said Melon. “Zed, can’t we reason with Mister Boram, here. Perhaps between us we can persuade the Kon Ramar to end their experiments on humanity, and we can all work together on the amazing discoveries that lie ahea – ”

  The squelch of me smooshing up another brain interrupted him.

  “No,” I said. This sick fuck dies, his experiment ends, and then we fuck over the Kon Ramar too. They wanted to do this to my son!” The last words became almost a scream. Get a grip! Too right; I went and gripped another brain, and gripped and gripped until it all but burst between my fingers.

  I was having little effect, though. “Ah, your son Zee, yes, I know all about that,” said Chester.

  I glared at Melon. “Wasn’t me,” he said.

  “No, Zee, the computer here knows all about your son,” said Chester, with a triumphant smile. “It knows all about you too.”

  “Talk,” I said.

  “Your son and the twenty million were never revived from stasis when they arrived on Iceholme,” said Chester.

  “We know that,” said Melon. “And then they were wiped out in a power failure.”

  “No, they weren’t,” said Chester.

  What? I thought.

  “What?” said Melon.

  “Your son is alive, Zee.”

  “Impossible,” said Melon.

  “Not at all,” said Chester. “The aliens lied. They were just keeping those twenty million who were still frozen in reserve, ready to form a new colony elsewhere one day, once a suitable experimental planet had been terraformed.”

  I was expecting one of those emotional overload episodes to hit me. That expectation may explain why I felt so calm – for all the sense that made. But, no, no barrage of emotions was going off in my head. The human side of me was just stunned into silence, even as the machine in me accepted the inherent wisdom in holding back supplies – of anything – in reserve.

  “Zee?” said Chester. “Your son is alive. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? He didn’t
die centuries ago. In fact, he is exactly as he was the day you left him.”

  “The day they took him from me,” I said. I splattered the next brain in the network without really realising I had done it.

  “Oh, stop taking it out on my ex-employees,” said Chester. “Join with me, and we’ll fuck the Kon Ramar up. They enjoy messing with us, but, we can literally play god with them, now.”

  I performed the best shrug that I could in my physical state, and then I crawled towards one of the five node brains, closer to Chester. He suddenly looked very worried. I could see in his eyes that apart from words he had nothing left. His powerful Warden guards had failed to kill a limping, one-armed cripple, and here I was, unopposed, ready to thwart his plans. But, did I want to? What good was my son being lost to me light years away, somewhere on a planet I couldn’t reach? What good was I to him, in this state, or, even if I could somehow be repaired? Who wanted a former cyborg assassin, created by aliens for a daddy? A crystal clear memory file played itself in my head: The red-rimmed eyes of my son as he stared, beseechingly at me as we were dragged apart. “No, Daddy, come back!”

  Yeah, I wanted to thwart his plans, alright.

  “Thanks for the info Chester. It’s nice to know he’s alive. I hope someone thaws him out and gives him a big hug one day.” I crawled around and pushed and scooped the five node brains into a huddle in front of me. Hitting each of these brains would cut him off from a fifth of the mass of other brains. I sent a private network message to Melon to see if he agreed with my theory. He said that he very reluctantly concurred. I lined myself up on one of them and got ready to strike.

  Chester seemed paralysed. He may have been thinking of going for a weapon, or rushing at me, but whatever he did, he’d not have time to stop me.

  “Wait,” he said.

  Splat.

  “No!”

  Splat.

  “You.”

  Splat.

  “Fucking.”

  Splat.

  “Cun – ”

  Splat.