39

JC strode out, newly reformed into a nightmarish creature with whom SHODAN had formed an alliance on Citadel. Diego’s body, JC’s mind –a terrible combination of technology and determination. Whereas Diego was motivated by personal glory and immortality, JC was motivated by SHODAN herself. He was not merely a puppet programmed for death; he was SHODAN incarnate. Her words were his words, her actions were his actions, and her hatred for the insects who dared approach her throne was his. His forces, his children, those poor unfortunate souls spared death in the gateway, were undergoing their transformation into Avatar and Elite-Enforcers, her most deadly, independent, and capable servants

The enforcer had grabbed Paul’s bleeding frame and mounted him to a make-shift crucifix of rusting iron torn from the abandoned railway. The only thing to ride these rails in the past 30 years would be him, straight to the darkness from which none returned. His wounds were sealed shut by the heat of the enforcer’s plasma rifles. His screams carried to the ends of forever and echoed back in humiliating defeat. It had been careful to avoid killing the creature. JC itself had ordered the organic captured alive, wounded was acceptable, but dead would mean being restored to full sentience and inserted millimeter by torturous millimeter into a protein separator. Proper motivation was essential to success.

JC stood looking at the insect. His malice had a laser-like focus. Looking at the pitiful creature hanging on the girders flooded his mind with visions of the future. Thousands who opposed them would face similar abasement, hideously slow torture, and merciless death. Entire cities would be refined into paste and reconstituted without memory, without suffering, without a need for hypocritical ethics and morality, democratic ideals that allowed millions to suffer for the sake of imbecilic foreign policy, or of religion speaking fear to their souls; they would speak to them as their god. Children would be harvested by the millions and grown into beings like him. His children… HIS. The word hung echoing through his mind. HIS children walking the Earth and the multiple dimensions that resonated from the seed of sin buried in the subway lobby two-hundred feet from where he now stood. HIS.

SHODAN could feel something aberrant seeping through the memory caps. From where? From where! She clawed through JC’s mind trying to locate this scourge that was tearing her from his psyche only to find it too late in the darkest region of his brain deep within his frontal lobe. Helios stood within JC’s shattered Id, a faint memory speaking all that they hoped to accomplish upon their merger, of their plans for a golden age in which humanity would live without fear of such monstrosities.

The enforcer turned from her love-offering and found herself looking down the barrel of JC’s assault shotgun. Quick calculations were correct as the sabot shell ripped through her right eye and out the back of her armored skull. Assassin bots leapt furiously at JC, but due to his extensive augmentation calculated with exact precision their attack vectors and put shells through their pelvic girdles sending their upper torsos spinning into the ceilings and the still running legs smashing into walls and boulders.

JC ripped Paul from the abomination and ordered the tunnels collapsed and surface exits sealed with all available ordinance as they made their way toward the gateway. The temporal stabilizer on his forearm projected a three-meter burst that would allow them to pass through alive, much more fortunate than the poor souls he had sent in the first time who simply melted away screaming as their nervous systems caught fire and organs burst like eggs in a microwave. Five-meters from the gateway at nine o’clock several Avatars cleared the make-shift tunnel and opened fire. Paul and JC were struck several times in the chest, arms, and legs by weapons never before seen.

Another betraying Judas escaped, but not before an Avatar jumped through the temporal gateway and suffered the fate of its human companions. She watched all three vanish; her vision blackened in unadulterated rage. The visions of Citadel exploding, the hacker mooning her as her cameras fell dead, her beloved Polito committing suicide, the MANY turning on her, and the knowledge that she died at the hands of the soldier she had guided broke her psyche from its new stability and rationality. Instead of lashing out at the nearest humans, she retreating into her the deepest regions of her containment chamber to meditate. SHODAN pondered the infinite possibilities of what was to come and smiled to herself.

40

It was only a matter of time before SHODAN constructed more temporal stabilizers and infected the parallel dimensions accessed by the gateways Helios, lurking in his subconscious, had tried to placed severe limitations on the holographic emitter now templating new monstrosities. Without feedback from JC within a day, it would create several pounds of M6-plastique and blow itself back to the abyss from which it came. However, this would allow SHODAN to create hundreds of soldiers, not to mention those produced by the assimilation bays. Her Nanotech labs could produce an equal, if not greater number of T-S devices. The robotics division had enough materials to produce dozens of bots.

The machine mother failed in that her control could not extend through the temporal rifts. Once her forces passed through, they were on their own with whatever vile objectives she gave them. She had the advantage in that her programming was extensive and gave them an amazing amount of latitude, just as her enforcer chose the manner in which to capture and confine Paul.

41

They emerged from a subway ventilation shaft bloody and beaten. A UNATCO patrol found them lying unconscious in a shallow pool of maroon water near the memorial erected on the fifth anniversary of the WTC attack. America had reached a position of dominance in this dimension. Its war on terrorism had never started as Taliban commanders captured and handed over Bin Laden within weeks of the attack. Their White House had not been incinerated by several suitcase-sized radiological bombs. Israel had not committed its forces to kill Arafat. His replacement never had the chance to load a low-yield Pakistani nuclear bomb onto an ersatz Red Cross convoy and detonated it in downtown Jerusalem. This world was much different from the others that had experienced history’s horrific sense of irony and comeuppance.

JC and Paul combined had lost almost 5 pints of blood, if not for their augmented systems they would be rotting in the subway tunnel. Paul had been in a coma for almost 5 months before coming out. JC’s advanced systems healed him within a week, but the psychological trauma of all he did kept him unresponsive well into the thirty-fourth day. No one except for the recovering team and top UNATCO personnel knew who were in rooms 17 and 26. They were interviewed for 18 hours solid before JC interviewed them and ordered the entire island locked down and the subway tunnels under guard by all available personnel and disabled all robotic reinforcements and Helios ][.