Fall of the Archangel

6. Countdown to the Future

Her clock read 11:00 on the 31st of December 2116. This was not at all how she expected to be spending New Year's Eve; in a helicopter flying across the city to stop a madman. Then again the last 24 hours had been full of surprises. If she had known this much things were going to happen she would have never gotten out of bed this morning. The helicopter took her straight to the front entrance of the Michael Building. It landed and she ran inside. Technicians were running around everywhere screaming. She couldn't make head or tail of anything. She screamed to get their attention.

'EVERYONE! CALM DOWN!' taking a deep breath she continued.

'Who's is in charge here?'

'Me,' a rather plump man with messy hair raised his hand. She walked to him, grabbed his arm and proceeded to drag him to the nearest elevator. The man was too shocked to resist.

'Bring me to the Archangel.'

'What are you talking about?' he pretended to play dumb.

You either bring me to the Archangel, or I send you to the real archangel.

The man's face turned pale. Once inside the elevator she saw him enter a password, scan his fingerprint and his retina, and speak a certain pass phrase. Wow, they sure had some killer security here. The elevator started moving only it moved up instead of down. When she looked at the technician in surprise he said,

'It's stored underground.'

'Exactly what is it?'

'You'll see.'

When the lift opened she saw a massive empty hall. Only it only seemed to be a hall at first glance. She saw a huge pit in the middle of the hall. The pit was easily half a mile across. She walked closer to the railing surrounding the pit. She didn't know what to expect actually.

What she saw in the pit took her breath away. The pit was actually an inverted dome. Inside the dome she could see thousands, maybe even millions of massive translucent balls floating in the air. Each was connected to its neighbours by miles and miles of floating optic fibres. That much light travelling around made the entire dome look like a light show. Not just any light show, but the biggest light show on Earth gone crazy on steroids.

'Magnificent, isn't it?' said the technician. 'The Archangel? It was built to resemble the way neurons connect in the human brain. Each one of those translucent balls is a powerful super computer on its own. They are all connected in parallel to each other, increasing their calculating power into hundreds of trillions of terabytes per nanosecond. It can calculate possibilities with stupefying speed. Numbers that could take a human all their lifetime to count up to, it can count to in the blink of an eye.'

Yet even as the technician ranted on, Josephine could see the blue colour of the Archangel slowly change to a dull red glow.

'Why is it glowing?' asked Josephine.

'It's overheating,' as he said this, a look of concern came over the technicians face. 'This whole day has been nothing but a disaster. First the liquid nitrogen coolant didn't arrive. Then we couldn't take in emergency coolant from the river because it froze over. The blackout disabled all our emergency fans. And on top of all that-'

'The contraceptive factory got broken into and their goods tampered with so that today had the highest number of births. The private hospitals were cut off from power to force all the births to be redirected to the general hospital. The backup line was cut so you couldn't redirect all the data to an off-site server for later calculation. The optic cables in the hospital were replaced with the ones stolen from the backup line to bypass any possibility of an emergency shut-off at the hospital. The automated cars were disabled to force the Archangel to update everyone's futures. The stock exchange and other buildings for that reason too,' continued Josephine. Only now did she realise the full extent of the man in the coat's plan. It was simply ingenious; there was no way she could have predicted that all those seemingly unrelated incidents could culminate like this.

'All of these will ensure the Archangel overheats due to too much processing and runs itself into oblivion.'

She turned and suddenly the man in the coat was standing beside her. She immediately pulled out her gun and pointed it at him.

'Stop it,' she ordered him.

He didn't move.

'Stop it or I swear I will-'

'The idea would have meant nothing if I wasn't ready to die for it.'

Bang! The shot rang out through the huge basement. Blood spurted out from his chest. He toppled over the railing and fell into the dome below without making a sound.

Josephine took a deep breath. It still wasn't over she had to stop the Archangel from overheating. She turned to the technician.

'Is there any way to stop it at all?'

'There is one. A manual shutdown switch. It's down in the dome. There's an elevator to get to it' he replied.

'Let's go.'

They stepped back into the elevator and took it further down. When the doors opened she saw a long corridor. They ran down it, and at its end was a huge lever connected to a terminal. Josephine could feel the heat emanating from the Archangel above her.

'Is this it?' she asked the technician.

'Yes this is the one,' he replied.

She pulled the lever. Sparks flew out from the terminal as it short circuited.

'Was it supposed to do that?' she asked.

'No, it should have worked, I don't know why-' he stuttered.

Josephine looked at the terminal closely. There was something like blood on it? She looked up. There was blood dripping from the seams where the terminal opened up to the dome outside. The man's dead body had landed on it. The blood from it dripped into the terminal and had caused it to short circuit. In his final act of defiance, the man had sealed the Archangel's fate.

'There's nothing more we can do. The Archangel's end is now inevitable. We should get out before it explodes,' said the technician.

'No, no, no, no, no,' Josephine started sobbing. She had failed. The Archangel started rumbling as it slowly overheated. She was tempted to just lay here and let it's destruction consume. But the technician had other ideas he grabbed her, lifted her in his arms and carried her to the elevator.

Once they were outside, Josephine could see that the entire inside of the building was glowing a dull red now. She checked her watch. 11:59:47 p.m. a lot of passer-by's stopped and looked at the building.

At exactly 12 o'clock midnight a massive explosion tore through the building. A wave or fire rose through the building until it erupted out of the top into the sky. Josephine could almost hear the combined static sound of all the Archangel apps crashing simultaneously. She took out her phone and looked at it. The system message had been replaced. Apparently the man in the coat had hacked into the transmitters in the building and set a message to be broadcast the moment the Archangel exploded. Nine words were displayed on her screen.

The Archangel  has risen into heaven. Enjoy your freedom.