Jack Chalker - The Messiah Choice

“You think I’m stupid?” he snapped. “Do you take me for a dunce? I figured that out long ago! That’s why the erasure program is still there. Oh, I deactivated it all right, but I left in a code I could give to have it be carried out anyway. They know it’s there—I told them, truthfully, that we’d have to shut down half of its core memory to get it out—but they don’t know that it’s not dead.” He looked smug. “Now what do you think of that ?”

“Well, Reggie, I’m impressed—but can’t SAINT hear and see in this room, too? Didn’t you just tell him how he could die? And didn’t you just say that the only man who knew that code was you?” MacDonald pressed, sensing an opening he never expected and pushing it for all it was worth with the one weapon left to him. “Any chance you had of surviving before just went out the window.”

Sir Reginald suddenly got up and looked around nervously. All was quiet in the eerie emergency lighting, although there were dead bodies all over. MacDonald could see it in his face, though, and in the way he looked around, that the computer genius was suddenly more terrified than tired.

“I’m afraid he’s right, Sir Reginald,” said the smooth, unhurried voice of the computer from a wall speaker. “The truth is, up to now no decision had been made on you. Call me—sentimental, if you will. Now, though, I fear Mr. MacDonald has done you in, although in so doing he has done me an inadvertent service.”

Sir Reginald picked up the pistol with its two strange clips. “SAINT! I created you!” he shouted, his voice echoing against the walls. “No one else could have done so! I—I did more than create you! I loved you!”

“You did indeed create the machine,” SAINT admitted, “but it was only a shell itself, a receptacle for what was to come. Still, in an odd way, I did love you, too. Just wait there. In a moment it will all be over, and you will be with me forever.”

“Reggie! You don’t have to stand there and die like a dog!” MacDonald shouted, cursing his inability to move. There was the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs from above. “Damn it, man! Think logically! If there’s hell and a return from the grave, then there’s God in heaven, too! You still have a chance, Reggie! Give the damned code!”

Two red-clad men appeared, bearing rifles. Sir Reginald shot both of them with the pistol, which gave a sound like a short burp, and they went down for good. He turned and looked frantically around. “I—I can’t! I need a terminal! It can block the rest by simply preventing the code from reaching its banks through the audible sensors!”

He looked around as the sound of more footsteps approached, and made for the door down to SAINT itself. The terminals both upstairs and on this level were totally under SAINT’s own electronic controls, but downstairs there was a direct input terminal, one which SAINT couldn’t foul up or shut down without shutting down part of itself.

SAINT tried to slide shut the door, but it hung up on the body of the technician who’d been with the Dark Man and didn’t have the living corpse’s immunity to bullets. Neither did Reggie, though, and bullets flew and pinged off the walls as he slipped through and ran down the stairs to the next level two at a time.

“Reggie loved Daddy!” Sir Reginald screamed as he ran. “Daddy hates Geoff!” They were simple words, key words, but he’d been right. The computer shut down its speaker inputs at the first words. The only hope he had now was the direct input terminal in the small glass-enclosed booth just outside of SAINT itself. But in shutting down its sensors, the computer had also shut itself off from direct help in its own survival. It had to rely on human help.

There! He was within sight of it, breathing hard. The glass booth with the one unstoppable entry into SAINT. He reached it! He reached the door, an old-fashioned door with a simple knob latch, and started to open it.

Bullets from men and women in red uniforms both on his level and from below cut through him, splattering the glass exterior with blood, although they did not penetrate the special protective glass of the walls. He took so many shots in his body that before he hit the ground he almost looked as bad as his brother.

MacDonald just sat there, unable to do anything, hearing the muffled sound of the shots below. Suddenly four big men came up from the fourth level and over to him.

“He didn’t make it,” one said casually. “Come on. They’ve decided you’re part of the show. The boss wants you down there.”

“I can’t resist, but I can’t move, either,” he pointed out, cursing under his breath. So close! Each damned time it’s so close and no cigar!

One big man took him under his arms, the other by the feet, and together they carried him through the door and down not one but two more flights, to the fifty level, where SAINT’s refrigeration and small fusion plant were located. The place was quiet and antiseptic, but as they carried him down to the far end of the huge chamber he saw a small crew working on patching a gaping hole through which outside air was rushing in and he grinned. “A little more air conditioning than you want, eh?”

“Shut up or I’ll cut your tongue out,” snapped the big man forward of him. He shut up.

MacDonald was surprised to find one of the small electric carts at the end of the room, and he quickly saw why it might be there. One whole section of wall seemed to have swung outwards and away, revealing an enormous tunnel. The tunnel was lighted with four bright strips going its entire length, and also down it ran thick cables that apparently had been hidden by the wall, coming down as they did through holes drilled in the rock. So Frawley had been right about one thing.

They dumped him unceremoniously in the back of the cart and the big man started down the tunnel. To MacDonald’s surprise, it opened into a fairly large chamber that might have covered the entire base of the meadow. In the center was the huge mass of obsidian that was below ground, going from ceiling to floor and possibly beyond. It was not the cold glassy black it should have been, though; all the cables terminated, it seemed, directly into it, and the whole rock or whatever it was hummed and glowed with an eerie light that filled the entire rock structure. It seemed almost like something alive.

Men and women in brown saffron robes took him from the cart and stripped him naked. He could see that on their foreheads was a symbol that seemed to pulse like strange protruding veins. The six inside the six inside the six. Somebody stuck a gag in his mouth and then they began to rub his whole body with some sort of oil. He couldn’t feel a thing except on his face, where it felt like vaseline. Innterestingly, the one thing they left on him was the chain from which hung the Bishop’s cross.

They took him back to the center rock formation now, lifted him up to his feet, and pressed his entire body hard against it. He felt a tingling, then some vertigo, and then a sudden blackness for just a moment. Then he was outside, in the open air, and he knew just where he was if not how he got there. His head rested on the top of the high point of the altar stone, and he looked both out and down.

The small cup-shaped depression at the low end was filled with red liquid, almost certainly blood. The whole “stone” or whatever it was seemed drenched in it. In back of the stone and running its entire length they had erected a narrow wooden stage-like platform, and there were people on it as well as several enormous idols, each a stylized demonic creature with gaping mouth and goat-like horns and vaguely saurian appearance. Each had some sort of incense or another sweet smelling material burning in their laps, but it gave off far more odor than smoke. Fires lit inside made the eyes and mouths burn and glow.