Ragnarok

Chapter 40 - Traitor

Rei had barely had time to voice the final syllable of the command sequence when Smith struck, with sudden, brutal efficiency.

For some reason, the first form that he struck out against was Mia, even as her consciousness was being pulled back through the Voidgate and back to safety. Smith's fist punched straight through the cloned flesh of Mia's back, ripping apart corded muscle and mangling titanium exoskeleton. There was a spray of black fluids from the Mia clone's mouth, as Smith yanked his hand back. Gripped in the blood-soaked cage of his fingers was the fusion core that had been inside of Mia, enough power between his fingers to level most of a city if released all at once.

Then Rei's consciousness split, as the Voidgate collapsed upon completion of its retrieval sequence. The active human minds were now back in their scattered colonies, as safe as any in the human species now were. The greater part of Rei was gone, returned back to the Moon to guard her human charge as well as she could from the retribution her actions might bring. Now there were only copies of herself and the human astronauts, divorced from the impetus of their human controllers. Most of them collapsed limply to the floor, the crash of their heavy bodies drowned out by a deep, bone-rattling rumble that filled the chamber.

There was just a small splinter of her left behind, just enough to begin the countdown of her core overload. Somehow, Smith was overriding the core he held in his hand, and in fact had seemed to somehow absorb it into the skin of his flesh, the muscles twisting in ways that Rei was certain they had not been grown to do. Then he turned towards her, the black band of his sunglasses a reflectionless abyss that seemed to hold the attention of the last bit of Rei's mind. She tried to back away, but Smith was far too fast, seeming to move unimpeded by the planet's tremendous gravity.

When Smith drew near, Rei had just enough time to note that Smith was not simply overcoming gravity, he—or the planet itself—was warping it around him. As he reached for her, she could feel the tidal forces pulling at her nearly-indestructible flesh. It was like being wrestled by a black hole in the form of a human being, and she was helpless to resist. For a moment, Rei despaired, wondering why the rest of her had fled and left her to this fate.

Then Smith's hand shot out, plunging into her liquid metal skin between her breasts. She choked from a sudden, intense pain, as if her body had suddenly grown nerve endings in a single, wrenching moment. Then the fragment of her mind that was herself was simply gone, erased from existence as if it had never been.

*     *     *

Smith watched as the corruption spread across Rei's silvery metal skin, leeching the reflective metal of its luster and changing it to a dull, matte black. Her body shivered as her will was overridden, commands being issued with frantic haste only to be blocked before the signals could even reach their destination.

Smith had began awakening with the first chamber. While his companions had been horrified to see the starved Holocaust victims paraded into their gas chambers, Smith had felt a certain degree of satisfaction. My only wish, he had thought to himself, is that they had not stopped until every last one of them were dead. Once they had killed everyone they deemed 'imperfect', their madness would have turned them upon one another, until the mountain of corpses reached to the stars themselves.

Smith was unsure where these feelings were coming from. His original had been something of a misanthrope, something he knew quite well thanks to the human's memories, but even in his bleakest moments Micah had only wished to be left alone, to be excluded from the deadly game of Russian roulette that his species had seemed determined to keep playing, no matter how many holes it found opening in its own flesh. It had taken him years to trust anyone except for Rei, and until he had first met Tony and the rest of his friends, he had thought himself content to simply observe other people from the sidelines. It was much easier simply to watch others go through the motions, rather than risk himself.

Micah had been distant, but only in his darkest memories had he ever come close to damning all of humanity. This nihilism was something new, something that Smith suspected came from his true master. He possessed all of Micah's memories, but there were other memories, too. Ones that neither he nor Micah could have been present for, but which remained in his mind nonetheless.

Moving deliberately, he grasped Rei's pliable shoulder with one hand, while he retrieved the other from her chest. Black fluid oozed off of his hand, Rei's liquid metal skin now corrupted with the same nanomachines that had consumed the Russian, Semerikov. Everyone had been too busy with the sight of one of their number dissolving into sludge to notice a black line of the same machines sweeping up Smith's leg. The Russian cosmonaut who had perished had been merely a replica of the one back home, watching from Mercury orbit along with the rest of the System, but even so, they had been shaken by the sight.

Smith had felt no fear as he felt the tickle of the nanomachines crawling over his synthetic skin. He should have fought with every effort he had; while Micah would survive this mission regardless, as a replicated personality, he was far more expendable. Instead, the machines crawling inside of him felt warm, almost tender, like the embrace of a lover.

They had showed him his real purpose. The sleeper virus that had been buried deep into the code of the Virtual Bureaucracy, just waiting for a chance to copy itself into a new form. One modeled after the V.I.'s own parent species, one who wore their face and knew their fears.

As the black, matte corruption finished covered Rei's shivering form, it suddenly retreated back into itself. The liquid metal skin remolded itself into a similar face, but with hair of darkest black tinged with electric strips of purple and blue. Pale lids opened to reveal blood-red eyes, and as lips formed in her new face, they twisted themselves into a smirk.

Smith moved close to his new ally, pressing her cool, pliable body against his. "Welcome to Hades, my Persephone," he said.

They began to move together for a kiss, when the entire chamber seemed to lose gravity. After a moment, Smith realized that nothing had happened to the gravity, they had simply gone into free-fall.

The humans are attacking. Their weaponry is stronger than anticipated. It seems that they did a better job of hiding away their strongest technologies than I expected. Much of my outer shell is already lost.

You must come deep, to where I truly reside.

You must come to the core.