Sarah Zettel - Fool's War

Burying her so deep that no other packet would be able to find her. She hoped. If she was wrong, she was already dead, trapped in here until she lost what was left of her mind. With great difficulty, she flexed herself a little. Just enough to drag one of the packets out of the puzzle-work shell they’d made over her. Another one oozed into its place. Her imagination supplied a low “slurp.”

Dobbs dragged the packet down until it was almost touching her private mind. It disintegrated, but the fragments had nowhere to go except inside her. She set to work on it with tiny, cramped movements. It responds to us, Terrence had said, but not to stuff we create. Well, she had plenty of raw material to create with. It was pressing against her like cotton wadding. She knew nothing beyond her little world. She grabbed another packet. Seconds creaked past. Cohen might be dead. She didn’t know. She didn’t know anything. She clenched herself tight around her handiwork. She dissected one more packet for its search code and joined it to the others. Anything might have happened by now. The war might be over by now. They might have won or lost. She might be permanently alone under an endless weight. She might be buried alive.

Dobbs pushed her new-made searcher into motion. The shell around her parted briefly, because this new thing was not Evelyn Dobbs. Dobbs, straining to keep herself from blind panic, waited two seconds. Then, she stabbed downward. The shell splintered and, almost instantly, sealed shut. But that fragment of time was enough to tell her her idea was working. She was moving.

The deafening packets were not spontaneously generated out of the nowhere. They had no self-replicating code inside them. They had to be coming from some command sequence somewhere. Her searcher was trying to find out where that was. It was dragging the mound that held her with it.

She could stand this. She knew she could. It wasn’t any different from when Cohen had carried her. Stab. Still moving. Well, not much different. But, she hadn’t known what was happening then, either. Stab. Still moving. She couldn’t touch, couldn’t hear, couldn’t know then either. She had not gone crazy then. She had not died then. She wouldn’t now. She wouldn’t now.

Stab. Stillness.

Dobbs gathered all her energy and bust free of her shell. The packets flew apart like shrapnel and she clamped herself onto the processors in front of her. The swarm descended, fastening onto her back. She shivered reflexively, but not enough to falter in the work in front of her. The processors flickered and shifted under her touch. No time for finesse. She reached deep into the middle of them and with one hard twist, she froze all the microscopic gates shut.

She turned her attention to the packets. They still clung to her, but now when she swatted them aside, they were not replaced. She kicked herself free of the last of them and streaked up the path back toward Cohen.

He was tearing apart the last whole packet as she reached him.

“Cohen!”

He swung his attention towards her. There was something wild and swollen in his motion that made her back off. “It’s all right, Cohen. I’ve turned it off. We’re out of it.”

Slowly, Cohen shrank back to his normal shape. “Thank you.”

He turned to the transmitter a little too deliberately and sent the all clear.

Stay with me, Cohen , thought Dobbs in the deepest part of her private mind. I can’t do this without you.

The black air around Al Shei was full of objects, all of them rushing straight up. She had her hand up in time to stop her head from colliding with the ceiling. The guard hollered wordlessly as he hit. Bracing herself with her spares kit, Al Al Shei switched on the band lamp on her forehead. The beam fell across Curran’s security guard. He no longer looked pleased with himself. She brought her tool kit down to chest level and shoved it away from her. It rocketed across the room, knocking lighter miscellany aside and catching the guard square in the chest. All the air left him as he slammed against the far wall. Al Shei kicked off the wall and snatched the shot gun out of the gloom as she flew past it. The guard had time to stare open-mouthed at her before she swung the gun like a bat against his skull. The impact smashed him back against the wall and left a trail of scarlet droplets hanging in the air behind him. Al Shei bounced backwards against the wall and felt the impact against her spine. She ignored it, tucked the gun under one arm and kicked off again, launching herself down the corridor.

Up and down were without definition. Her body told her she was falling, in all directions at once. The walls rotated around her, scattering missiles and meteorites through the air. They clanked, chinged and rattled off the walls, and each other, and Al Shei. Nothing was heavy enough to slow her down.

Someone with chestnut skin and a green coverall fell into her lamp light. They snatched at her and missed. As she drifted past, Al Shei twisted around and aimed the gun between her own feet and fired. The recoil shot her past the stranger and into the wall, slamming into her stomach and knocking all the air out of her lungs. There was more scarlet in the air behind her and her stomach lurched senselessly. She had hit something with that trick.

She fell toward a major hatchway. The stranger, a man, she saw now, launched himself at her. His shoulder was leaking red bubbles. Al Shei yanked on the hatch with one hand and pressed the shot gun against her ribs and fired again. Again, the recoil knocked her backwards, through the hatchway this time.

She didn’t slow down to see if she’d hit him. The spin was slowing and the alarms were silencing one by one. The AIs were regaining control. They’d have the lights back on soon. She flew through a broad corridor, ricochetting off the curved walls. She coughed painfully and tasted blood. The gun’s recoil had broken something inside.

The lights came on, flooding the corridor and making Al Shei blink hard. Something grabbed her left arm ruthlessly and hauled her toward the wall. Al Shei gasped and twisted. A waldo gripped her forearm, and a second reached out toward her. She stuffed the gun’s stock into its pincers. They closed down and the stock splintered, sending slivers of plastic flying in every direction. Al Shei ripped the wire cutters off her tool belt. She wrapped their jaws around the waldo’s smallest pincer, and wrenched it back. The pincer casing bent and snapped, exposing a series of multi colored wires. In the corner of her eye, Al Shei saw a cart-sized drone racing toward her down a grooved track in what was now a wall. She was close enough to the corridor’s side to brace her feet against it. She hooked the cutters around the waldo’s newly exposed wires, arched her back and yanked. The mechanical hand spasmed, and her abrupt motion pushed Al Shei into open air again. She bounced off the wall/ceiling, sending a whole wave of pain through her. That was when she really saw the cameras. They were directing the waldos. These AIs had hands and eyes and they had spotted her.

She pushed herself toward the cart. The wall waldos hadn’t oriented on her yet and she dropped past them. She hit the grooved track and bounced. As she rose, she hooked her hand under the cart’s belly, holding herself against the wall/floor. A waldo swooped toward her and she swung her wire cutters up to block it. It wrenched them out of her hand and tossed them away. As it did, Al Shei braced her feet against the nearest wall and shoved backwards. The force of her movement jarred one pair of the cart’s casters out of the groove. Its right side rose at a drunken angle and its waldos flailed to reach the track again, catching some of the wall’s arms in their grip.

Another waldo stretched out from the wall to catch hold of her. Al Shei’s body rose to meet it. She grabbed its forearm with both hands and used it to lever herself up into the relatively clear air, snatching her wire cutters as she passed. The cart arms and the wall arms were still grappling with each other, trying to sort themselves out. Al Shei pried open a panel in the ceiling/wall over them. She caught up a clipper full of wires just as a waldo closed on her ankle. She clamped both hands around the wire cutter’s handles as the waldo dragged her backwards. The wires broke and a shower of sparks exploded out against Al Shei’s face. The lights went dead, leaving only the narrow beam of her lamp to cut the darkness. The waldo holding her relaxed and Al Shei was able to launch herself around the curve of the hallway.