Coven's Rebellion Chapter 29

More heavy stuff, but also juicy lore! Fluff link.

Rosa

To get the upload started, Rusti had to remove the FTLN interface from the server room and dash into the room where all the digital minds were stored. Whatever data had been retrieved by our people back home would have to be enough. Our mission objective had changed. Eight thousand digital humans needed to be rescued.

One by one, the FTLN nodes were carefully extracted from ports in the back of the android bodies. When all three nodes plus the interface were connected together, Rusti carefully plugged them into the central terminal.

Ame fired another burst of rattling gunfire out into the elevator lobby in an effort to discourage the security personnel from attempting to breach the suite of rooms.

“Okay, link… established,” Rusti said, urgency and stress causing their voice to slip further into the more genderless default voice than the masculine one they had affected for the mission. “You seeing it, May?”

May cleared her throat. “Yes, although I’m not handling the transfer. Des has some of her people monitoring. I’m more worried about R.A.I.D.S. With this much traffic suddenly coming out of the AR, they’re bound to send it sniffing around.”

“One problem at a time, ladies. I’m beginning the first transfer,” Rusti said. Their gaze fell on one of the laboratory screens after the button was pressed, and with a tilt of their head, they approached it. The move meant that they had to fully cross in front of the doorway, right into the enemy line-of-fire. Ame and I both sucked in breaths and attempted to lunge for them, but we were too late… and apparently, our concern wasn’t warranted. No attempt to shoot at our friend was made by the enemy.

“They’re not shooting in here, and not using grenades,” Ame remarked, giving me, then the wall of RUCU a pointed look.

She was right. On a hunch, I leaned out to take a peek. A dozen gun barrels were pointed in our direction, but none fired when my head became visible. Regardless of their reluctance to fire their weapons into the room, I did not want to tempt fate, and pulled back quickly.

Amelia was right. I pointed to all of the highly breakable equipment in the lab. “They don’t want to damage anything important.”

“Can we just hide here and wait them out?” Rusti asked tentatively.

It wasn’t an idea I felt we should dismiss out of hand, but they had to be waiting for something. The answer came a moment later, when a message flashed across every screen I could see. ‘Reserve power at 15%. Please replace power cell.’

“Oh, fuck,” Ame muttered, then her eyes widened and she pointed out towards the room where the power cells were stored. “We have to go out and swap the god damned batteries. The moment we’re clear of this doorway, they’ll take shots.”

We locked eyes, and I gestured in the direction of our new objective with a nod of my head. She was the better shot of the two of us, while I was much harder to kill. She came to the same conclusion that I had, and as a reply, readied her rifle. The hand she used to hold the rifle shifted so she could show three fingers, then two, then one. I ran.

Keeping my head low, I used the various desks and research stations as cover. Immediately, bullets began to snap past me. Computer monitors shattered into shards of spinning plastic and sparking electronics. The air around me was a riot of high-speed debris that sliced my synthetic skin as I rushed headlong into the battery room.

Despite the fact I did not have real lungs, or a need for oxygen, my chest still heaved as I took cover inside the doorway. Actually, I think the breathing system within these android bodies was used to supplement the cooling system. I should really take the time to better understand the technology that our people were developing.

Another bullet ricocheted off the doorway and hit one of the precious batteries I had come to collect. Fire and sparks flared to life, blinding me for a brief moment before my artificial eyes adjusted. Oh no, the flames!

I lunged, grabbing and wrenching the battery out of the wall. Artificial skin boiled and popped on my hands, surging pain signals up simulated nerves. I ignored it and swung the battery around and threw it. The flaming, hissing battery bounced off the shattered remnants of a monitor, then out into the doorway that led to the elevator lobby. It came to a stop just beyond, where it gushed smoke and fire that stained the ground. From outside, I could hear coughing as the awful, acrid smoke filled the air.

Now! I wouldn’t have a better time to make my next move.

With my burned and partially melted hand, I grabbed one of the power cells and twisted to remove it from its socket. As soon as it was free, I sprinted back out into the main research room. Smoke from the burning power cell was making it difficult, but not impossible to see through the doorway. It was enough, however, and I made it into the server room.

I was moving fast enough that I almost slid into the pedestal for the power cell when my momentum did not magically vanish in the exact moment I stopped rushing forward. Fumbling with my undamaged, but non-dominant left hand, I carefully pulled the drained power cell from its cradle, then inserted the new one. It clicked into place with a satisfying, hefty chunk, and the low battery warnings vanished from all the displays.

I did it! Power loss was no longer imminent. Our desperate evacuation could continue.

“Rosa, they’re doing something out there,” Ame warned, interrupting my miniature internal celebration.

Carefully, I returned to the passage and looked back into the main lab, trying to get an angle to see further through the entrance. The power cell was only puffing out little spurts of smoke now, but the haze it had created made it difficult for my vision to function using the normal visible spectrum. So, I swapped to a composite that utilised a much wider range.

For the first time, I got a good look at the soldiers of the opposing forces. Their armour had the obvious signs of being powered in some way, but if I had to guess, I’d say the additional strength and speed they gained would be on the light side. It wasn’t full powered battle armour, like we had seen in the recent conflict in Austria.

We might actually be able to take them in a fight, assuming whatever plan we used was halfway intelligent. My body was damaged, though. I would need… no, what was I doing? How did I keep forgetting the power I held?

My resolve hardened, and I looked down at my broken hand, willing the nanites that were me to flow over it. The nano-scale machines worked quickly, dissolving any material that was too damaged to be of use, while augmenting those that were still functional. In a matter of seconds, my hand became a functional oily black imitation of itself before it had been damaged. I clenched it and took a breath to calm my nerves.

“Jesus fucking christ,” May blurted, with a level of raw emotion that I had never heard from her before.

Warily, because intuition told me I would not like the answer, I asked, “What is it, May?”

“I…” Her voice shook. “I know who these people were— are… They were protestors from… maybe a decade ago? It was the peace marches, where AR citizens were trying to get their government to finally ratify the treaty that would officially end the war with the UN. Until that treaty is signed, the blockades, the… it’s the reason the AR is still a pariah state. Thousands were killed when the government cracked down. That was the official line, anyway. They lied, because every single person listed as part of this ‘archive’ was supposedly a casualty of that crackdown.”

“That is… in line with what I know of the AR,” Ame said softly, her voice as calm as ever.

“It is horrible, but it’s what they did to these people, their own citizens, that is… it’s awful,” May said in a whisper. “In the war, it was the NSGAI that allowed the UN’s drone swarms to be so much more potent than ever before. So, the AR knew that they needed a counter to those AI. To develop a counter, they needed something to test on, but there was no way for them to get any actual NSGAI. So… they shipped all those people here, forcibly digitized them, and used the minds of those people to test if their weapon ideas worked.”

“Wait, this happened how many years ago?” Rusti interjected. “We only recently figured out how to digitize people ourselves, how…”

“The method they used was invasive and… barbaric. There’s footage of each and every digitization — they were very thorough with their record-keeping. Then there’s the tests… after each one, they reset the minds they were using, but digital minds can’t just be reset. It does damage, and those people retain vague, fragmented memories of what happened. That’s why they have multiple backup sources of power for those rooms, by the way. If power gets cut while a test is happening, the mind being tested on— no, the mind being abused loses coherence when the interruption happens. They die, in plain terms. Those power cells are actually their worst-case power backup, by the way.”

May was rambling, perhaps in shock. I was too. Every word she spoke painted a picture of a horror that was beyond my comprehension. Innocent citizens going against their will into those surgical rooms in the floors above us. I imagined the knives, or the probes — whatever uncaring, inhumane method was used to extract the essence of a living, breathing person. I tried and failed to picture what their experience must’ve been like, as they were thrust into a type of torture so fundamental that it would see them deconstructed and rebuilt over and over. Above those horrific images came a realisation that until now, I had only ever understood on an intellectual level.

People had done this. This wasn’t the work of some immortal demon, whose age and intelligence could somehow explain the depths of the hell they could willingly inflict on others. This was done by actual humans. I tried to understand them — to put myself in the shoes of one of the scientists who had conducted these experiments, or the officials who had signed off on the project. My mind balked at the concept, twisting and screaming to free itself from the grip of my imagination. It was too much.

“Incoming!”

Ame’s shout arrived in my consciousness with all the alacrity of a physically posted letter, but when I realised what she meant, my thoughts coalesced and I sprang into action.

Heavy, mechanical footfalls echoed through the open doorway out into the elevator lobby, and moments later, came their cause. Multiple squat, heavy bipedal robots rushed in, wielding large, wedge-shaped blades where hands might be. Motors whining, they ducked to present thick armoured plates that shrugged off Ame’s bullets as she tried in vain to stop them.

Oh, absolutely not.

I whipped my hand up and out, like a dancer beckoning to her partner from across a stage. From that outstretched hand came heavy, clanking links of nanite chain, on the end of which was a thick axe-head blade.

Impact, then the high, discordant ring of metal on metal. One arm of the lead robot fell heavily to the floor, and it staggered, stunned. Good, their advance was halted, at least for two, maybe three seconds.

Whipping my arm backwards, I pulled the chains back, then lunged forward. Others might have cried out, either wordlessly, or maybe with a battlecry, but I was numb. I made no sound and I took no breath. I just moved, willing my nanites to twist and shred the mechanical foes before me.

It wasn’t an effortless thing like it had been in CORA. The heavy armour of the combat robot was tough, and it resisted one, then two, then three strikes from my heavy chains. A fourth one caused a structural support to give way, and an armour plate went flying, spinning end over end to trash one of the few remaining monitors in the room.

I was too close to spin my chains effectively now, so I pulled my nanites back in, forming blades along my forearms to match the ones the robots had. The wounded machine’s companions attempted to strike me with their blades, but I caught the blows on frantically formed nanite armour, and lunged. My oily metal blades plunged into the exposed innards of the robot, gouging and severing vital components as they went. When the force of my attack was spent, barbs formed down my blade-arms, and I wrenched them free. Sparking wires, smoking battery cells, and cooling fluid sprayed out in an arc, while my nanites lodged strident complaints.

They weren’t invincible, and the violence of my strike had destroyed a not-insignificant number of them. When I tried to tell them to just consume the robot and make more, I received a frustrated, foot stamping reply. They could not ‘just consume the robot’, because first of all, they were highly mutated medical nanites. Second, their limited ability to rebuild their number hinged on having reserves of certain, crucial molecular components, and they were running dangerously low after all the abuse I had put them through since my consciousness became one with them.

So distracted was I by the new information that I was receiving from my nanites, that I failed to see the blade swing in towards me. I tried to dive out of the way when suddenly, the joints, artificial muscles, and servos of the android body I was piloting locked down, freezing me in place.

The blade of a second robot glanced off the nanite armour plate I had created earlier, but I couldn’t brace to absorb the impact, and I spun backwards to bounce off a desk. What… what was happening? Why was this body not responding to—

Out of the gloom of the digital void, beyond the real, deep in my perception of the nearby FTLN, a presence shifted, its titanic writhing mass emerging from the darkness. Fear and confusion chilled my simulated mind into inaction. What was this thing?! What was— I attempted in vain to comprehend the horror that was bearing down on me. It was everywhere. I needed to flee. I needed… no, it was already here. It was too late. Hundreds of reaching fingers were worming — had wormed — their way into the body I was piloting. I knew this thing. I had seen its predecessor just minutes ago, in this laboratory. R.A.I.D.S was here.