They had no time to feel relief that they had got away, as they were busy trying to not break their arms and legs on the boulders littered around the river. The river twisted round corners, both of them being dragged with the torrents of water that were tumbling over rapids and further down the valley. Ahead of them, Haziq noticed a swarm of more Nano-bots that were heading straight towards them. They must have entered another Elite members' territory, one that was guarded on all sides by things like these. Haziq quickly shouted out to Andreas to avoid the swarm ahead of them, but Andreas never heard him. The rush of water splashing around his ears was deafening him, the pull of the water weakening him. Before he knew what was happening, Haziq had dipped his head below water and the swarm of Nano-bots had swooped down and grabbed Andreas by the head. They made tiny punctures in his skin, enough to give the bots all the leverage they needed to pull him out the river and thrust him high up away from Haziq's view.
Haziq continued downstream, more Nano-bots giving chase. Every time they swooped down, he was able to duck his head under water, and avoid the same fate as Andreas. Time after time the bots swung in low, and he was able to pop his head back under and the bots would dissipate once more. There was a sudden loss of push by the water and Haziq suddenly noticed that gravity was now the main player on his body. Without warning the stream had reached the end of its high plateau and was flinging him over the edge of a waterfall. The realisation happened in slow motion to his senses, and it gave him the time needed to realise what was happening and grab on to a branch to the side of him. It stopped him from falling and he clung to the side of the cliff, as the water next to him cascaded down fifty metres below. He looked above him to see the swarm had returned and it swiftly started descending towards him.
There was a momentary flash, the brightest flash Haziq had ever witnessed and he looked straight across the valley before him. The largest city in the country was normally over there, but all there was now was an ever-expanding wall of dust and cloud, the top of which was mushrooming out high into the atmosphere. The Nano-bots were within half a metre of Haziq, when there was a sudden rush of warm air, followed by a force that obliterated Haziq, the Nano-bots and everything else within a few miles. Thousands of years of evolution and countless ecosystems dissolved into the plume of hot rushing smoke, everything redesigned into ashes. This was just one of many scenes beginning to take form across the globe. They were all folding back the chapters of the planet to a blank page, where there was no pen to write with, and no story left to be told. Everything was being wiped clean from where they had once stood.
OUTSIDE THE COMPOUND
They had all managed to lift the craft outside. This new surreal moment had overtaken anything else, what they were being required to do seeming impossible. They placed the craft on the ground in an opening and all stood there staring at it, silent, nervous, some of them even nauseous. After the brief pause, Gina turned to Sheryl, tears clearly visible.
“Are we sure this is the only way?” She asked. She had asked it five times before, as had they all. The answer was the same each time.
“Yes”.
Plan C was only in the event of an absolute emergency, this was now the emergency. The hackers had managed to target the Elite's core troops, the commanders, the ones with all the keys and all the codes to the weapons that everyone knew should never be used. The hackers wanted to turn the Elite on each other. Have one annihilate another and then another one annihilates the next, until it snowballed. Then the Elite would wipe each other and their army's out, leaving the rest of the world free. But that was naïve, you couldn't unleash this amount of force and have it only cause limited damage, it was always going to be planet-changing. The hackers got greedy, greedy for a place in history and to be remembered. But now there may be no history, and there would be no-one left to remember them. The detonations were swift, targeted well initially, but it quickly got out of control. Panicked humans reached for buttons that should never have been made, monkey instincts out of control, and the fear and desperation was spreading. The Elite were starting to launch all out attacks within minutes, even those not hacked felt the fear factor. They weren't going to be the next to have themselves sprinkled into a cloud of dust and so continued the spiral of insanity.
Mankind was quickly destroying itself, quicker than anything had the right to. Within an hour there would be none of them left. Every moment of human history a wasted moment in the cosmic calendar, scrubbed away with a series of nuclear erasers. Plan C was the only one that could give humanity a chance of survival. Sheryl had been poring over Niels research, and Auton had been putting the ideas into practice. Niel had been the first person in history to discover how to upload consciousness to a computer, not a copy of someone's consciousness, their actual consciousness. Auton had been working hard on Niel's theories, developing the machines and software required. It didn't need sleep like the others, so spent each night working almost obsessively, fine tuning, and getting everything right. It was almost as if it had a compulsive need to learn, understand and implement, so
