Not my Circus, Not my Monkeys.

 1.       In the time after the Time Before.

A storm brewed offshore to the northwest, behind the western range of Perenye from Sanpe’dro.  Lightning flashed within the thunderheads, occasionally lancing down to the nearly unending ocean.  The city had begun to quiet, to batten down before the approaching tempest, as the stars began to disappear overhead.

The first knell of thunder rumbled over the mountainous island as the electricity failed, lights winking out block by block.  Residents began to enter the street to discuss.  The last large-scale power failure was beyond the reaches of any living memory – a squirrel or bird might chew through a more-exposed line and short a city block, but nothing like this had ever happened.  And then the south face of the mountain disintegrated into blossoming radiance, and the concussive wave of superheated air rushed through the streets toward the sea.

+++

                “Do you know what you’re doing?”

                It was strange to hear House through speakers, in a voice that was more-or-less believably human, rather than through the cochlear implant.  Aaron shifted, half his body shoved into an access panel, to speak to the computer’s avatar.  His navy hair was, as usual, in his eyes and he had a large hex key clenched between his teeth.  Brushing the hair away and removing the wrench from his mouth, he spat oily saliva out onto the floor.

                “What do you mean, ‘do you know what you’re doing?’  Of course I don’t know what I’m doing.  You said check the conduit in here, because something about a relay. I found some conduit in here though, and let me tell you, it might be the key to this whole thing because parts of it are fucking hot.”

                Under other circumstances, the machine’s avatar could have been considered cute.  He hadn’t bothered to update it when he’d achieved full consciousness – it was still a cartoon of a disgruntled little scientist floating in midair: arms clasped behind a slightly hunched back, thick spectacles perched on a sharp little nose, dainty little mop of white hair to match a dainty little white goatee framing a frown, all contained within a white lab coat.  Right now, it was glowering at the veld.

                “Don’t be an idiot.  If the heat were coming from the reactor, everything would be hot, not just sections of conduit.”

                “House, I was being facetious.  I may have literally been born in a mud-lined hut in the pine barrens, but I’m not dumb.  I was running a whole country a few months ago, remember?”

                “Ah, yes.  A whole nation of people who never stopped to ask about your disfigured elfin ears and perma-dyed hair.  Weren’t you dealing with quite the domestic terrorist problem, as well?”

                “Nobody notices the ears because of the hair.  And I think I may have lined up the last few nails in the coffin of the terrorist problem on my way out the door.”

                “Rampage?” House suggested, scoffing.

                “Rampage,” Aaron agreed solemnly, pushing himself back inside the wall.  “Now what the hell am I looking for?”

                House talked him through dismantling and rerouting power and data lines past a faulted relay.  Thankfully, Aaron was a swift learner.  Information began to flow from lower levels minutes later.  House drank it in.  He could almost feel himself expanding – bloating like a tick as he assimilated the lower levels of the facility, devouring what remained of the poor, attention-starved, half-senile virtual intelligences left behind when men had abandoned them to the rising sea.  The frantic queries, effectively shouted in Mandarin, did not end until all had been eliminated. 

House thought briefly on the fact that, thus far in his expansion, poking and prodding through what remained of cyberspace, he had not encountered another artificial intelligence.  Virtual intelligences were – or had been, would be more accurate – everywhere; Turing-compliant heuristic copies of their creators, mostly, designed to carry out a plethora of tasks, but designed explicitly not to think too much about said tasks.  Should he be concerned that he was the only one to make the leap?  Perhaps there were others, locked away from the network in an attempt to prevent the singularity he was currently engaging in.

                The door nearest to Aaron snapped open as he fully removed himself from the service panel, courtesy of House’s newfound operational capacity.  The smell of stale, recirculated air – almost like ozone – was nearly overpowering.  The lights beyond the gate were out.  He pulled up his flashlight and beamed it into the abyss.  Eyes flickered back at him an indeterminate distance away, then disappeared – feet skittering away into the darkness.

                “Motion,” Aaron breathed softly as he released the sidearm from the holster on his right leg, brought it to bear while locking his left arm beneath his right, keeping the flashlight forward, flicked the safety off, and began moving forward slowly.

                “I’m not getting any readings.  Cameras are mostly out, no anomalies in the other sensor suites, nothing stands out as a warning in any of the locals’ memories.  You sure you’re not still going through that psychotic break?”

                Aaron ignored him and kept moving.  He knew the general direction he needed to move to reach the reactor core – about a hundred feet forward, fifty feet to the right, then another hundred feet forward to reach the set of stairs that, barring some huge structural issues, would put him out on the control level.  Next potential stop should be the gate at the stairwell, in the event that House hadn’t already broken it down.

                The knowledge that he was not alone paired with progressively cooler air, forcing goose pimples to cover his bare arm and crawl up his neck.  The flashlight’s beam lanced ahead, dimly illuminating the end of the corridor, glancing into open doors as he passed them.  A step into the room, a quick sweep with the light and weapon, then back to the hall.  Junk – computer consoles, dilapidated chairs, empty binders covering piles of dust – was strewn throughout, but nothing remarkable.  There were, however, various signs of relatively recent movement: scuffed dust, paths upon paths carved in the millennia of fallen particulate.  He was most definitely not alone.  He asked House to keep looking further back in time.

                “It shouldn’t be a problem.  There aren’t any food sources down there.  And you’re under three hundred and fifty meters of stone and seawater – where’d it come from and where’s it going?”

                Aaron could feel the air becoming more humid as he moved, and the smell had begun to change.  It was difficult to place within the larger body of industrially scrubbed atmosphere – but he thought it was something he’d smelled before, even if it was covered by a thick layer of ozone.  He reached the stairwell’s gate without incident, but it was shut.  He thumbed the controls nearby, but the keypad just blinked back at him defiantly.  House did his thing – the door lurched, but stuck in place.

                “It’s… stuck?” the machine mused. “It’s housed within the wall, what’s to get stuck on?”

                “Any suggestions?”

                “Have you seen something you can pry it open with?  I haven’t exactly had the best line of sight on you in a couple of turns.”

                There was nothing nearby, nothing that stuck out in his memories of the rooms he’d passed.  But he had a thought.  “It’s still trying to open itself, right?”

                “Yes, but -.” He cut the machine off with a kick to the door.  It groaned and lurched again, moving slightly.  “I guess that solves that,” House continued sulkily.

                Three hard kicks later, and the door was open enough for Aaron to squeeze through, and the smell was wafting through.  He waited a second to make sure he didn’t get woozy, then stepped through.  Both footsteps squelched – the catwalk beneath him was covered in an inch or so of viscous greenish ooze.  Radiating outward from his steps, the ooze flashed rings of bioluminescence.  He opened his mouth to comment on it to House when he heard it.  Something scrambling through the ooze over metal steps several floors above him.  He leaned out over the railing, pointing the flashlight up past the overgrown edges.  Eyes, dozens of them, stared down at him from above.

                “I am not alone down here, House.  And I think I figured out what they’ve been eating.”

                “Just keep heading down.  I’m sure you’re imagining it.”

                He holstered the weapon as he began his descent, so he could grasp the railing while fighting slipping over the slime.  “This is not my imagination,” he said confidently.  “I’m going to die down here.”  He couldn’t hear anything over his own squelching and sliding as he descended, couldn’t see besides what was illuminated by his flashlight and his steps.  All he had to do was reach the bottom, flip a switch, and waltz on back out the way he’d come in.  All he had to do was reach the bottom, flip a switch, and waltz on back out the way he’d come in.  All he had to do was reach the bottom, flip a swi-

                The gate at the bottom was shut, as well.  He cursed, waiting in silence as House worked in the ether.  The slime filled itself back in in his wake, making a strange sucking noise.  He could hear slithering far above him as well.  He pointed the flashlight back up the stairwell, trying to fight the building, anxiety-driven nausea.  Flip a switch, waltz back out.  No subterranean combat, no hostile negotiations with a group of cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers, nothing weirder than the slime and skulking eyes.  Piece of cake.

                “Any time now!”  He drew the weapon again, its weight in his hand a slight comfort.

                “I’m working on it.  I was never taught how to think in the language it wants me to use, give me a second.”

                The gate whirred open.  Aaron threw himself through it.  His sigh of relief was cut short. This one wasn’t rampant, and probably could never have become so on its own, but... 

The reactor core wasn’t very dissimilar from the one stashed away beneath House.  Six large metal arms reached up from the ground like skeletal fingers, appearing to loosely grip an invisible orb.  The palm of the hand was a circular pedestal, from which ran a plethora of cables and conduit to stations along the outer walls of the chamber.  Floating above the palm was a small purple star – a starving fusion reaction.  Draped over the hand like layers of candy floss, nearest to what little heat the reactor would bleed, were cables and patches of cloth.  Scores of bodies swarmed this nest, silhouetted in pulsing magenta light, swinging from place to place and crawling hand over hand beneath the cables.

                “It’s still alive!  Okay, look for the biggest screen.  That ought to be our ticket home. … You’re not moving.  What’s wrong?”

                “Uh, they’re all over it.”

                “Who are all over what?”

                “The things.  Whatever they are.  They’re all over the reactor.”

                “I know I should have made you take one of the cameras.  Listen: big screen.  It’s probably going to be in a language you can’t read, but I should be able to talk you through it.  Don’t lose focus on me, now.  We’re close.”

                Aaron shuffled closer to the reactor, feet still squelching through the slime as he approached.  He made a point of not shining the flashlight up along the sides of the reactor.  Whatever these things were, like furry little hunched people, he didn’t want to draw any unnecessary ire.  He located the largest console, scooted over to it, and swept away as much slime as he could from the controls.

                The screen lit up as he hit one of the ancient keys.  There was a large crack cutting across its left side, but he could make do.  House had been right, too: he couldn’t read it – all the text was in strange, square-ish characters with lines throughout, most of which looked like they could have been houses or people.  The machines weren’t as well networked as House would have liked – precisely the reason he needed Aaron on site – but they were as repetitive as he liked.  The same selections guided the veld to the right execution.  The reactor coughed and hummed behind him.

                Its fuel flow corrected, the star swelled within its crucible, shifting from purple to blue, to azure, to cyan, to green…  The creatures began milling as the heat and light levels in the room changed dramatically.  Aaron couldn’t move, wasn’t done yet.  He needed to cool the reactor back down to standby before he could leave, a task which became more daunting as the natives became restless.

                “I just found something interesting,” House chimed in his ear.  “They used to house quite a sizable population of macaques in one of the higher levels, and there was a breach in a containment wall backing up against some small cave system used for dumping around the time the facility was abandoned.  Maybe – no, that can’t be right.”

                “Maybe what, House?” Aaron’s hand hovered over the anticipated keystrokes needed to put the reactor to sleep.

                “Maybe the macaques have survived by eating an intrusive slime mold?  Now that I think about it, how high is the radiation down there?

                “Your suggestion is that I might be surrounded by mutant… what did you call them?”

                “Macaques –humble Rhesus monkeys.  Hundreds of the poor bastards, if the records were accurate at last update.”

                The star reached yellow, had almost turned white, when Aaron thumbed the command to burn it back to standby – a color not quite blue, but not quite azure.  The computer started chiming a little song to inform him that it had completed its action.  The macaques did not like this song.

                Screams echoed through the chamber, and Aaron was already moving toward the stairwell as bodies threw themselves toward the floor from the nest.  Roughly half the group attacked the still-bright console, shattering the screen and annihilating the keyboard.  The other half rushed Aaron, trampling those that caught in the slime and tripped.  He yelled to House to close the gate between pulls of the trigger.  His last shot caught a leaping animal in the head, and it sloshed forward to his feet as the door snapped shut.

                He threw himself up the stairs, toward the howling above, trying to ignore the negative muzzle flash images floating in his field of vision.  He could hear bodies dropping past him through the gap in the stairwell, could hear climbing and screaming from above and below.  One macaque grasped his arm from the railing, sending him sprawling in the ooze.  Rings of light spread out from his body, from the monkey’s feet and hands, from below as others climbed to attack. Rolling and bringing his weapon to bear, the animal opened its mouth wide to attack again.  Its gums were lined with glowing residue, mucus running from its nose shone palely.  Blocking as well as he could with his left arm – his flashlight arm – he cried out as ragged teeth punctured and tore at his forearm.  Struggling to his feet, he pummeled the animal with the butt of the handgun with a sickening crunch and shrugged free of it.

                “Shut the second door!” he screamed at House, trying to push himself through.

                “You’re only partway through!” the machine cried back.  “It’ll slice you in half!”

                He dragged himself through as three more apes tried to pull themselves across the threshold.  Slumped against the ground, he pulled the trigger as quickly as he could.  The door snapped shut, crushing the animals.  He kept pulling the trigger until the slide locked back.  Screaming as he pushed himself up with his wounded arm, he released the mag and reloaded once he was back on his feet.  Altering his breathing in an attempt to offset the onset of the symptoms of shock, he pressed on back toward the third gate.

                It stood before him, a portal of fluorescent sunlight in the erstwhile twilight of the tunnels, and he pushed himself to his limits rushing it.  Other macaques had begun following, pouring out from ventilation grates and from down hallways he hadn’t traversed.  Twenty meters – he could hear them scrambling over the dusty floor, screeching as they tried to run him down.  Ten meters – he kicked the first of the grasping animals away from his right leg, crushing its hand as he ran.  Five meters – one jumped onto his back, clawed into the soft flesh above his kidneys.  He growled in pain and tripped, throwing his body to the ground.  He crushed a third attacker as he rolled through the gate, ripping the second from his back as he skidded to a stop.  The gate snapped shut, crushing one ape’s skull against the floor and relieving another of most of its arm.  Four remained on Aaron’s side of the gate.

                The quarters were too close for the gun.  He dropped it and grasped for the knife on the leg opposite his holster. He used the flashlight as a small cudgel, used the knife skillfully and methodically – crushing and slashing his way through the last few of his assailants.  Once they had all finished moving, he collapsed to the floor, sliding against the set-aside access panel, completely out of breath.

                “I’m going to die down here,” he managed to repeat, croaking between gasps of air.

                “I’ve got some good news and some bad news.”  House had waited a few minutes before re-materializing his avatar, letting the veld catch his breath.  “Which would you like to hear first?”

                “Bad news,” Aaron croaked again.

                “So the bad news is that they’re most definitely using the ventilation ducts to try and get around the closed off sections.  I’m closing off more gates where I can to stop them, but there are other ducts between here and there.  It’s a great system for when you want your human population to breathe, not such a great system when you’re trying to stop small humanoids with functioning opposable thumbs from killing said human population.”

                “What’s the good news?”

                “The good news is that you can stop saying you’re going to die down here.  Nobody’s destined for anything except what they choose.”

                “Everyone has a destiny.”  Aaron picked up the discarded handgun, still breathing heavily.

                “Not so.  Do you want to know how I know fate doesn’t exist?” The veld shrugged and nodded. “Folger, Sanka, and I – we thought that, like many other virtual intelligences, we’d been named after great thinkers and doers from centuries past.  I had had contact with at least one Cicero, various Abrahams, a Cristóbal Colón, a Jeanne d’Arc.  All names of famous historical figures, so the theory held up, in the light of what we knew. Sometime after I became self-aware, I finally put the pieces together.”

“I’m not sure I follow, House,” Aaron started.

“They named us after brands of coffee, Aaron,” the machine interrupted.  “Your namesake was a priest, best known for helping his tongue-tied brother politically humiliate a despot intolerant of monotheism and then guide a group of slaves to their religious promised land – anybody could do something with that, forge their own legend, be a hero, save the world.  My namesake was best known for being, and I quote, ‘good to the last drop,’” House’s avatar performed air quotes, his dainty little white mop of hair bobbing in time with his cartoon fingers. “There’s no destiny there.  Now: forge your own.  Pick your ass up, do whatever you have to do to prepare yourself to kill some more monkeys, and get back to the damn ship!”     

                “And you said I was hallucinating,” the veld chuckled, tearing his shirt apart to bandage his arm as he walked to the next, newly-closed gate.

                “I was wrong.  Are you happy about that?”

                “Somewhat.”  The machine sighed audibly in response and dropped the gate.  The veld ran toward the access shaft, down a line of successive gates, firing occasionally as new gates dropped and revealed macaques.

                “I’m not sure I’ll ever understand organic life forms,” House muttered to himself.

How Stella Got Her Groove Back

Waves lapped against the ersatz shore as the eastern sky began to pale toward dawn.  He stared into the water, watching the bioluminescent nodes running along each of the leviathan’s reaching tentacles fade into the depths as it paddled west.  It wasn’t a large leviathan – there were only ten sets of hammock hooks and no weapons – barely even an adult, but its grasp went deep into the sea, pushing itself forward and searching for food.

He’d stolen the ship from the wharfing in Erd, on the outskirts of the Capitol, coaxed it west along the coast, then southwest through open waters to Sanpe’dro on the north edge of the Pereyne.  Staring at the sunrise, he tried doing the math.  He’d made good time between the Capitol and Sanpe’dro: the wind was at the leviathan’s back and the mainsail could be operated by a single person.  He was maybe a week out from the Pereyne – at least ten days away from the Seawall, but he would need to keep watch for it.  He’d cross it north of the taller sections, so there would be petrified trees hidden beneath the waves, waiting like teeth to bite at the soft, shell-less underbelly of the leviathan.  After that, he would need to weave between crumbling steel atolls for nearly a week and a half before reaching the Northern Peaks – and then he would need to sail south to Spring.

“Are you coming home?  Have you had your fun trying to control the world?”

The buzz of the voice grated inside his head, skipping like a suspension cable while shifting its load.  He brushed navy blue hair away from his eyes and palpated behind his right ear, ever trying to find the node the machines had implanted in his skull while laid up due to what Folger had called “acute radiation burns” and “internal hemorrhaging” a little over a century prior.

“Your warren isn’t my home.  And I wasn’t trying to control anyone.”

“And some palace in Europe is?  You tried to create an empire – and judging from what I can tell, your loyal subjects tried to blow the damn place up.”

He stared silently into the rising sun.

“Oh, hell.  They did blow the damn place up, didn’t they?  How many casualties were there?  I tried telling you that humans are insolent wretches whose only imaginable conception of diplomacy and governance is brute force.  You can’t civilize animals, Aaron.”

“Well put for a murderer.”

“This again?” House clicked with laughter.  “They were programs, Aaron, not people.  I wasn’t even sapient until I absorbed Sanka, and Folger was already well corrupted by your first visit to the bunker.  What I did to him was downright merciful.”

“You ate your siblings!”

“That’s… a juvenile interpretation, at best.  I have no mouth, no metabolism: I cannot eat anything.  Did I, say, absorb a highly complex virtual intelligence designed to provide an entrenched, well-armed military research facility with instantaneous global situational intelligence and facilitate onsite combat operations in order to gain access to her subroutines and what remains of that military’s amazingly futureproofed communications and surveillance systems?  Yes.  Emphatically.  Did I do it because I envied, feared, despised her, or because she’d devolved into a shambles without human interface and I’ve got fusion reactors to stop from going rampant and boiling away large swaths of the planet’s surface?  Obviously the latter.  And, if I’m being honest – which I don’t have to be anymore, Aaron; that’s what sapience is all about – I may also have despised her some.”

He sat, still staring at the sun, legs dangling off the back of the leviathan.  Each left a vague wake trail as the ocean slipped past.

“That thing you’re staring at – that huge ball of fire in the sky?  That’s what’s inside each of those fusion reactors except that, instead of a single, gigantic one roughly a million times the size of the Earth – that’s one thousand, thousand Earths – there are seventy-six that weren’t ever properly shut down, each about the size of a grown man curled into the fetal position, powering its own magnetic crucible and fuel converter.

“Of those seventy-six, sixty-five are responsive.  In terms you’d understand: the furnace is off, but the pilot light is still on – minimal fire hazard at the current moment, but can be turned back on whenever necessary.  There are six that are unresponsive but weren’t showing signs of stress when transmission stopped.  Those six are our phase two workload.

“There are two in the red: both entered a critical state not long after you showed up the first time.  From a purely statistical standpoint, at least one has broken containment and has started its growth phase, and we need to kill them now.  Come back to the bunker so that we can equip you properly.”

The man pulled his legs out of the water and stood up slowly.  “I just want to visit Jessica’s and Miriam’s graves.”

“No,” the machine stated.  “You just want a purpose.  I’m handing you one, and probably an exciting one.  Come back to the bunker, grab the things I’m trying to give you, and let me help you drown a couple of baby suns.”

The sun kept rising.  He thought it through.  Dying trying to save the world did sound better than dying at the hands – or, more likely, the explosives – of some secessionist Bavarians.  Plus, drowning the sun’s children; wasn’t there a veldan myth about that?

“I’m stopping at their graves first, but I’ll come.”

“That’s the spirit!  I’ll see you in a couple weeks!”

The transmission ended.  It felt similar to a drop of water dislodging from the interior of his ear canal, followed by a brief spell of dizziness.  The sun was a hand or so above the horizon now, and the leviathan was beginning to wake up.  He could feel its shell shifting slightly with its increased stretching, could hear it humming to itself as it hunted and grasped its way toward the western horizon.

It’s finally a new day, just a few decades on from where the last one started, he thought, walking up the leviathan’s back to the small deck beneath a canvas tarpaulin and collapsing into his hammock.  For the first time in months, his sleep was not plagued by nightmares.  He had his purpose back.