to check on James. The bed was empty. Her heart jumped and seemed to stop momentarily, and her breath was ripped from her as she leapt to her feet in terror. “What!?” She began to race out of the room.
“Whoa! Hold on!” Rich exclaimed, his hands waving in the air as he stood to his feet from his position next to the wall at the side of the room. “I fell asleep. I was supposed to be watching you.”
“Watching me?”
“Yeah, but I just got in from three hours of recon duty with that psycho, Gernot. I’m a little drained after that. Imagine flying around for three hours with a guy who eats flesh because he likes it more than he likes you. Not a safe feeling.”
“What happened? Where is he?” Thel demanded impatiently.
“He’s okay,” Rich answered, waving his hands in front of himself instinctively for protection in case Thel tried to throttle him. “They told me to stay here and watch you to make sure you didn’t go running through the complex shocking people unconscious again!”
“Where is he? Where did they take him?” Thel repeated earnestly.
“They didn’t take him anywhere. He took himself.”
“What? How is that possible?”
“He’s awake. He’s already met with General Wong, and he’s set up in a lab on the other side of the complex.”
Thel blinked as she tried to digest this information. “They said he would be incapacitated for days.”
“Yeah, well, he gave himself a different prognosis.”
“Take me to him.”
“You bet.”
Rich walked briskly across the complex, Thel pushing them to move with a purpose. Rich noted the looks of the people in the complex who saw them as they walked by. They were back in their black uniforms now, and everyone knew who they were. The people were afraid, and Rich couldn’t understand why. Those people were the ones who ate flesh.
Thel was oblivious, almost not seeing where they were going, just worriedly staring into her imagination.
“I honestly don’t know, Thel. Things have been moving really quickly. I’m not in the loop, but something is going down.”
They reached the door to the lab, and two guards moved aside to let them enter. Thel stopped for a moment when she saw James, back in his uniform, leaning over a countertop strewn with mechanical equipment and ancient computers. Old-timer and Djanet were working on nearby equipment. General Wong himself was there, his arms folded and a look of intense concern painted across his well-lined face.
James didn’t notice her come in at first and instead remained fixed above some sort of contraption, peering into a cylindrical protrusion.
“James!” Thel shouted.
James looked up then and smiled. “Thel,” he replied weakly.
Thel rushed toward him, but he held his arm up with a grimace to keep her at bay. “Slow! Go slow.”
Thel slowed her approach and embraced him gently. “You must be in agony.”
“It hurts,” he affirmed before kissing her.
The general looked across the room to Rich, as though Rich could explain the scene to him. Rich just shrugged and looked down at his feet for a moment while the kiss continued.
Thel broke from James’s lips and asked, “What’s going on?”
James took a deep breath before answering. “I’m going to kill the A.I.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“I want to show you something,” James said to Thel and Rich. He took Thel by the hand and guided her over to one of the strange contraptions on the counter. “This is a microscope. If you look into the eyepiece, you’ll see a magnified view of one of my nans. I brought it back online, and look what happened.”
Thel looked into the eyepiece and watched the nan spin wildly, its sharp instruments thrashing violently. “Oh my God. This is how they died?”
James nodded in reply. “They were ripped apart from the inside.”
“That monster,” Rich whispered. A painful moment passed. Old-timer and Djanet had turned away from their work and held their heads down as an impromptu moment of silence was observed.
“I’ll get him,” James promised.
“How? You can barely move!” Thel protested.
“I’ll have that remedied in a few moments, though it doesn’t really matter. I won’t need my body for this.”
“Well, it’s official. I’m lost,” Rich admitted.
“We’ve been working on the nans. We’re going to reactivate them. We’ve figured out how to neutralize the virus.”
“Speaking of which, Commander,” Djanet interjected, “we’re ready to do that now.”
“Then do it,” James replied.
Djanet turned to a computer console and hit a single button. “Done,” she informed the group.
“That’s it? I don’t feel anything,” Rich observed.
James groaned from the other side of the room. When he suddenly doubled over, Thel reached for him immediately. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong—they’re just busy. I need to lie down.”
Thel and Rich helped to guide James over to a makeshift bed near Old-timer and Djanet.
“Rich, help me get my shirt off. You guys are going to want to see this. This is a once-in-a-lifetime event.”
Rich helped James remove his shirt. James lay as still as he could while the group, including General Wong, stood and observed; his massive incision seemingly vanished before their eyes. His stitches were pushed out of the skin and the bruising appeared to evaporate.
“My God,” General Wong uttered.
James watched with hungry fascination as his body was repaired. “Amazing,” he whispered. His color returned. He closed his eyes for a moment once the process seemed to be finished before saying, in his returned, strong voice, “That’s better.” He sat up and got off the bed. “Okay, guys, let’s finish the final preparations.”
“Final preparations for what?” Thel demanded.
“I’m going to enter the mainframe,” James replied.
“What? How is that possible? It’s guarded by millions of those machines. You’d never get close—”
“I’m not physically going to enter it,” James replied.
“Then how?” Thel asked. Again, James took a deep breath before beginning his explanation. “Thel, this is going to sound a little…strange, but you know that in my position, I was privy to top-secret information.”
“Yes,” she answered, beginning to sense that she was not going to like what she was about to hear.
“I was also part of many different projects. One of them was codenamed
“That’s impossible,” Thel replied, only half-believing her own words.
“It’s possible, Thel. I know, because I was their test subject. I’ve been there before.”
Another moment of silence filled the room, but Rich broke it. “You mean you’re actually going to kill that bastard? I love it,” he said, smiling.
“But he might kill you,” Thel protested.
James put his hands on Thel’s shoulder and looked directly into her eyes. “No he won’t, Thel. I’m going to enter his mainframe on a signal the A.I. doesn’t know about. That smug bastard thinks he knows everything, but the Council was smart enough to keep some information away from him. I’ll enter as a signal he won’t be able to detect, and I’ll isolate his mother program. Once I’ve done that, he won’t be able to access any of his defenses, so I’ll be able to delete him.”
