Mike Stackpole - Ghost Book One - The Earth Transformed

Finster spasmed and kicked and tried raise the gun again as his blue eyes began to darken, but I stepped on the barrel and gave him a smile.

He looked up at me. “You were easier to… kill last… time.”

“I was alone last time.”

Angie dropped beside him. “Never mind that shit! Where is the sec pass?”

Finster chuckled. It sounded like a broken fan blade spinning down. “You will… never find it.”

Angie shook him. “Come on, you bastard! Give!”

“It is… in… my memory.”

His blue eyes went black.

“So,” asked Angie. “When do you think he went around the bend?”

“Who, me? Oh, you mean Finster.” I scratched my chin. “Coulda been a long time ago. I mean, it woulda had to be frustrating for a guy who’s trying to discover ways to survive the apocalypse to have his research interrupted by the apocalypse. And maybe this killer robot business made things worse. Like he felt he had to speed up evolution before Cochise’s machines steamrolled his operation.”

“I got another question,” said Vargas. “When did he become an android? Before the apocalypse? After? Was he always like that? And if he wasn’t, why did he do it? Just to prolong his life? Or was there some other reason?”

“How about, how did he become an android?” I added.

“Maybe we’ll find out when we get in his head,” said Ace.

“ If we get in his head,” said Hell Razor, glaring at Athalia. “Seems like some unlikely–ass shit to me. How do you know how to do this stuff anyway?”

Athalia looked up from trying to hook Finster’s head up to the computer we’d found in a little room off his office. “The Church of the Mushroom Cloud teaches its children well — especially those trained to fight androids and robots.”

Angie waved a hand. “Ignore him. Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

Athalia nodded and bent her head to her work again as we all watched. This was our last chance. We’d searched the whole damn facility from top to bottom for that sec pass and come up with nothing. It had been an easy — but frustrating — search, since there was nothing on any of the shelves or in any of the closets. The place was so clean and neat that there was nowhere to hide anything.

It had been when Hell Razor had suggested we start kicking in the walls and seeing what was behind them that I had a brilliant inspiration.

“Wait!” I’d said. “Finster’s memory! What if he was talking about the pictures of back when he founded this place?”

Well, it was brilliant, but wrong. We’d run down to the lab again and broke open the frames of all those old photos. There was nothing inside. Still, it wasn’t a completely wasted effort, because it in turn inspired Athalia.

“Hang on,” she’d said as we’d stared at the empty picture frames. “Finster was an android. He had a computer for a brain. What if the answer is in his memory ? His RAM ?”

Fortunately, she knew about this kind of stuff, because the rest of us didn’t, and we followed her back up to Finster’s office, detached his head, and then got to work trying to hook it up to the weird computer console in the closet.

Hell Razor growled and spit on the spotless floor. “Can’t we just hook him up to a battery, wake his ass up, then slap him around until he tells us?”

Vargas shook his head. “Sounds like fun, but what’s to stop him from lying? This way we get at the actual info… if we can get in.”

Athalia put down a pair of needle nose pliers and looked up. “It’s ready. I hope.”

Everybody turned around.

“Okay,” said Angie. “So how does it work?”

Athalia held up a weird headset that looked like a cross between a pair of headphones and a salad strainer. “Wearing this hooks you into Finster’s brain, and you should be able to walk around inside the file structures like it was a library. At least I hope that’s what it’s like. He got banged around a lot in that last fight. Things might be a little jumbled up in there.” She cleared her throat. “Which is why I’d like to volunteer to be the one to go in. I’ve got a lot of experience with computers and artificial intelligence. I know what to expect.”

Vargas and Angie frowned and exchanged a look, then Vargas shook his head.

“Mighty nice of you, sister,” he said, “and what you say makes a lot of sense, but… well, we don’t really know you from Adam. I mean, you’ve been real helpful and all, and you’ve certainly held up your end in combat, but I can’t say I actually know why you’re along for this ride, and that makes me a little nervous about what you might do with the info you find in there. So, if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather have a ranger put that rig on.”

Athalia pursed her lips, disappointed, but then shrugged. “If that’s the way you want to do it, fine. I’ll just say that it might be dangerous for someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. There could be built in biofeedback mechanisms that could send a shock down the wire and leave you brain–dead.”

“Gotcha. Thanks,” said Vargas, then looked around at the rest of us. “So, any volunteers?”

I sighed and raised my hand. “It’s fine. Let the clone do it.”

Angie managed to look relieved and guilty at the same time. “Ghost, are you sure?”

I spread my hands. “Hey, I oughta be used to weird, disorienting experiences by now. I’m the only one here who’s woken up in a cloning chamber with somebody else’s memories in his head, right?”

The other rangers looked around at each other, then shrugged.

“Okay,” said Vargas. “You’re our man.”

“The Ghost in the machine,” said Angie.

I laughed at that, though my stomach was busy tying itself in knots. Athalia put a hand on my shoulder and motioned me to a chair.

“Have a seat,” she said. “I’ll get you hooked up.”

I swallowed. “Can’t wait.”

I cringed as my eyes were burned with a searing yellow light.

Wait, were my eyes even open? It was hard to tell. The colors around me kind of looked like the fireworks that happen if you close your eyes and press your knuckles into your eyelids for too long — yellow, green, red, blue.

I stumbled forward, hands out. Was I walking? Floating? That was hard to tell too. I stubbed my fingers against a vibrating wall. It looked exactly like the floor.

“How do I even move around in here?”

And where was here, anyway? I was sitting in a chair in front of a computer, wasn’t I?

I couldn’t see anything but the crazy colors, couldn’t feel anything but the pulsing walls and floors around me. Was I in my head? No. This was Finster’s head. It didn’t look like I’d imagined it. Like a library or the inside of a computer. It was just this weird yellow brightness.

I started feeling my way around the space and noticed that weird thoughts and random phrases were popping into my head with each touch. It was like I was overhearing snippets of conversations.

“Research and education will be Project Darwin’s highest priority. I assure you, Commander.”

“No! No area of research can be considered off limits! Not when the future of humanity is at stake!”

“We will prepare our citizens in case the worst happens. They will be modified to survive under any conditions.”

“Dammit! We are not playing god just for the sake of it! We produce only useful life!”

“I swear, John. You’ll get the Nobel Prize for this.”

This snippet came with visuals. A dark–haired woman — I remembered her from the faded photos in the lab downstairs — wrapped in my arms, looking lovingly into my eyes. I answered her.