Apocalypse A.I. - Rise of the Machines Page 2

  As we settled in for our thirteenth day on the side of the mountain, three days past our mission end date, I began to consider our options. There were always fail safes in missions such as these. Equipment failed and communications occasionally shut down. That was why we carried back up gear. That hadn’t helped us. If it was a satellite issue, they usually lasted hours, not days.

  The back-up plan for a lost communication scenario was the predesignated pick up time. There wasn’t another plan after that.

  It wasn’t as simple as walking back to the operating base. We had been flown in from a carrier that was sitting in the middle of the ocean, four hundred kilometers away. In between us and them was two hundred kilometers of rugged and dangerous mountains. Not to mention the two hundred kilometers of open water.

  We had food for one more day and water for three. Trying to walk back out was borderline suicide. What we needed was to figure out what the hell was going on. I set Mario to work finding an active signal.

  Any signal. Radio or satellite.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea? Running through all these frequencies could expose us,” he said, as he fiddled with the knobs on yet another backup device we had brought with us. This one had one long antenna that searched for radio signals instead of satellite.

  He’d already been trying for half an hour and given up connecting to the satellite network. Our ships were silent. All military frequencies were. Hell, even civilian satellite radio wasn’t working. The world, normally pulsing with activity, was as quiet as this mountain, but we needed to keep trying.

  “I know the risks,” I said, “but we need to know if it’s our equipment malfunctioning or if something else is going on. Are you picking up anything at all?”

  “Nothing,” he said, narrowing his eyebrows as he concentrated, listing to the static coming through the headphones.

  “Can you at least figure out if it’s our gear not working or something else?” I asked.

  “The radios are working fine. The satellites are definitely down, but radio frequencies are active; there’s just nothing being broadcast,” Mario said. “I’ve never heard of anything like this before, or not heard, I guess. It’s . . . bizarre.”

  I turned my attention back toward the house. There had been no activity at the Butcher’s place over the last few days. Not even the bodyguards had stepped back outside in the days since they’d arrived. I wondered if that was normal. Maybe they didn’t need to come out for fresh air. The house could have a self-contained air filtration system, or it might have an open air courtyard cut into the rock. No one really knew. This was the first direct observation of the hideout.

  It was supposed to be the last.

  “Wait a minute,” Mario said, holding up a finger, “I’m picking up something.”

  He screwed his face up in concentration, then while closing his eyes, he fiddled with the knobs again. After a few moments, he opened them, his face stricken.

  “What is it?” I asked. Mario didn’t reply, instead handed me the headphones. I took them and slipped them over my ears.

  “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,” said a panicked male voice. “Any station. This is the MV Summit. MV Summit. Loss of power controls. Loss of . . . heading for port . . . direct path . . . Mayday . . . Clear the port . . .”

  Chapter Two

  ~

  The message was recorded, and it kept repeating itself with the same parts getting scrambled. Still, I felt a tightness in my chest as I handed the headphones back to Mario. The message was clear enough to understand what was happening. There was a large port city about two hundred kilometers south, and a runaway ship was heading directly for it. A bizarre and terrifying thing to hear at any time. Even stranger still that it was the only thing being broadcast.

  “If the MV Summit is a container ship, it will destroy the docks,” I said. Talking more to myself than Mario. “Those ships take hours to slow. One heading at full speed into the port will take out dozens of ships, or worse crash through the docks and into the city itself. If it’s an oil tanker, the mess alone will shut down the port.”

  “And if it catches fire . . .” Mario added, trailing off as he listened again to the message. I let him go through more channels before he finally set the headphones down and turned off the radio.

  “That’s all there is,” he said.

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Why can we pick up a vessel distress call but nothing on our frequencies?” I asked, puzzled.

  Mario shrugged. “It confirms our gear is working though. It’s just like the world suddenly went back to the middle ages. There is nothing on any other frequency. I’ve tried every satellite and got nothing. I tried all our normal pilot frequencies and all the commercial ones. Nothing. I even tried to get something from the signal coming from the Butcher’s hideout, to see if they were communicating with someone. They aren’t talking either.”

  I grunted, looking out over the still mountains. Things out here hadn’t changed much since the middle ages. We could see for fifty kilometers down the valley, and there were no more than a few handful of villages. To the south, east, and west of us were more mountains and a handful of other small communities nestled in the valleys on the other side.

  “I expected radio silence from these places,” Mario said. “But, this radio has a range of over five hundred kilometers. There is more than just the port city in that range. How have they all gone silent?”

  “I’m more worried about the fact that the satellites haven’t worked for almost four days,” I said. “That is unthinkable. To not work for that long could mean someone unleashed a cyber weapon against our communication platforms.”

  “I couldn’t pick up any satellites though. That would mean someone had to take them all out. Who could do that? Aliens?” Mario asked.

  “Be serious,” I admonished him. “The question is, if we are at war with someone, has it evolved into a shooting war or just cyberwarfare? If just cyber, then why didn’t the extraction team show up. That was the purpose of arranging it ahead of time.”

  “You think someone started a war with us?”

  We were both silent for a minute as we considered the possibilities. A war with a major global power. It was the only reasonable explanation. None of the terrorist groups would have the capability to pull this off.

  Mario was the first one to speak again. “What do you want to do, Top?”

  Although we didn’t have most of our AI developed technology with us on this mission, we were still members of the Mechanically Enhanced Special Operations unit. The elite of the elite. We teased Mario for being the new guy only because he was the youngest of us. He had gone through just as many years of training to get into special operations to begin with. Then, he had been exceptional in his few short years with the teams. He might be the least experienced and youngest member of the MESO unit, but he wasn’t exactly a rookie. Point being, we didn’t rattle easily. However, neither of us had encountered this scenario before.

  “We’ll give it another day,” I said. “You wait at the extraction site in case they arrive, and I’ll watch our objective, make sure they don’t leave.”

  “What do we do if they don’t show?” Mario asked, gathering his stuff once again.

  “We’ll figure that out then,” I said.

  As morning came on the fourteenth day, nothing had changed in our situation except that we were now out of food and down to two days of water. It was time to make some tough decisions. Our extraction was over four days late. A few hours or maybe even a day might not be a shock. However, combined with the lack of communication, it suggested something much worse.

  After finishing off the last of our coffee rations, I slapped my hands on my knees and turned toward Mario. “Looks like we’re on our own,” I said, rising to my feet. “What do you say we finish this job ourselves?”

  “You want to kick down the door?” Mario asked, eyebrows raised in surprise. “We don’t know how the house is laid out. We’d be
going in completely blind.”

  “I don’t want to miss the opportunity to get this guy. The Butcher has personally executed dozens of people. Including that army kid last year. I’ve never liked the idea of dropping a bomb on his house in the middle of the night. That little shit down there needs some in-person justice,” I said, a smile cracking my face despite our situation. “We’ll take care of him and Patchy McBeard Face. Then, we’ll borrow a car so we can get out of here and figure out what the hell is going on.”

  The shock disappeared and Mario grinned back at me. It was a stupid plan to just blindly go kicking in doors when it was eleven against two, but he wasn’t going to turn down the chance for a little action. He was an ass kicker just like me.

  We packed up all our gear for the umpteenth time, and as stealthily as possible, dragged it to the base of the mountain where we left it behind a group of brown bushes. Everything was brown out here. Rifles at the ready, we made our way toward the hidden carport. A few unseen birds squawked at our presence. The rest of the area was silent. Slowly, we moved around the cars to the solid metal door that had been placed into the brownish red rock.

  Mario and I stood side by side to the left of the door. We’d cleared plenty of buildings before, so there was no need to talk it out. I nodded at him, and we both began a silent count of three.

  In unison, we fired one round each from our XL-50s. I took out the hinge at the top while Mario took out the one on the bottom. The rifles boomed loudly in the enclosed space and dust fell from the rock roof. The door fell towards us, and we both flipped the larger rifles onto our backs while switching to our submachine guns.

  We pushed through the cloud of dust and into the house.

  The first thing I noticed was the silence. Despite having clearly announced our presence, no one was shouting in the house. There were no rushing footsteps. All was deathly quiet.

  The second thing I noticed was the body that lay in the foyer.

  One of the guards, his rifle underneath his fallen body, was face first on the floor. I kicked at him and got no response. It was possible that one of the rounds had cut through the door and caught this unlucky guard behind it. But, there was no blood pooling from a wound. It looked like he had just collapsed and died. I fired three rounds into his back just to make sure.

  Mario and I exchanged curious glances, but there wasn’t time for a discussion.

  The foyer was large, and three different staircases led off from it. We took the staircase on the far right and hurried up the steps. Submachine guns pointing upwards as we climbed, heart pounding as adrenaline filled me, we dashed up two flights of stairs and found three closed doors.

  I kicked through the door on the right and pushed to the far side as Mario came in behind me. The space was a bedroom containing two twin-size beds. One of the bodyguards were in each of the beds. Tucked beneath the covers. Still sleeping despite the noise? That seemed odd, but I wasn’t taking chances. I fired a short burst into the body of the guard in front of me while Mario took out the one in the other bed.

  The men didn’t make a sound.

  Taking an extra few seconds, I moved closer and threw aside a pillow that was over the man’s face. I was surprised at the man’s appearance. I had expected to see the agony twisted face of a man bleeding to death from gunshot wounds, instead he looked like he had been dead for a while. His face had an odd . . . discoloration. Like he’d suffocated under his pillow before I’d shot him. I glanced over at Mario who was looking at the other guard with a similarly perplexed look.

  They had both been dead before we got here.

  There was no time to figure it out. The house had a lot more guards, presumably still alive. We exited the first bedroom without a word and tried to push in the next door. Something prevented it from opening all the way. I fired a quick burst through the wood.

  Again, there was no screams of shock or shouts of pain. Only an eerie silence followed the gunshots.

  Shouldering the door harder, I managed to peer inside. It was a very small bathroom and Patchy McBeard Face was dead on the floor. He was slumped against the far wall, his feet blocking the door from opening all the way. There was puke on his chest, like he had been puking in the toilet when he died. It wasn’t me who’d killed him, I realized with some disappointment. All my rounds had struck the wall over his head. Still, just like the others, he was dead.

  Mario burst into the last door on this side of the house and honed in on the figure that lay on the bed. I followed, immediately seeing the body of another guard on the floor next to the second bed. Out of habit, we both put three rounds into their chests, but like the others, they were already dead.

  There appeared to be no physical trauma to any of them. It was like a goddamn ninja had snuck into the house and choked everyone out. We were the killers here. If a ninja had tried to get into the house, we would have seen them.

  “What the hell is going on?” Mario said, as we cleared every corner for more guards. “At least one of us has been watching this place since they got here. No one could have gotten in here to do this.”

  “Unless there is another way inside,” I said as we made our way back down the stairs. “Let’s find the Butcher, and then we can figure this thing out.”

  In the opposite wing of the house, we found the target of our search. The Butcher was lying in bed with one of the women, the other wife had made it to the bathroom off the main bedroom. They were all dead like the rest. The wife in the bathroom had a nasty cut on her forehead from when her head had hit the sink, but other than that, there were no signs of trauma. Just like all the others, they looked like they had been dead for a while. There was something else off about all the bodies that I just couldn’t put together.

  Perplexed, I felt the beginnings of a headache. I pushed through a sudden wave of nausea. Odd. That had never happened during an operation before. Dehydration, I wondered.

  There were still a few guards unaccounted for, so we moved back to the foyer and started up the third flight of steps. It occurred to me that Mario and I weren’t moving very fast anymore, and halfway up, I was suddenly finding the stairs to be a challenge.

  My legs burned with every step as though I was out of shape. That wasn’t the only problem though. I seemed to have forgotten the entire concept of walking.

  My mind and body had become paralyzed.

  I put a hand on my head, trying to remember how to move my legs in order to keep climbing. No ideas came to me. My legs simply didn’t want to move. I shook my head to clear out the cobwebs.

  What was happening to me?

  “What . . . we . . . doing?” Mario mumbled behind me. His speech was slurred and slowed, like he had been hit in the head. Alarmed, I turned too fast and my vision blinked out for a moment.

  My weak hands dropped my weapon. I watched stupidly as it clattered loudly down the stairs. I wavered on the steps for a moment before my arms clutched the railing to keep me from falling. I tried to take a few deep breaths and found I couldn’t fill my lungs.

  What an odd house? What were we doing here? I looked at the man on the stairs with me. I didn’t know him. He had a dull expression on his face, like he was in another world. Who was he and why was he pointing a submachine gun at me?

  I stumbled drunkenly, and my foot slipped on the stone stairs. Losing my grip on the railing, I began to fall face first down the stairs. I grasped at Mario to stop me, but he was just as weak, and I ended up pulling him down with me.

  We crashed down the stairs with dull grunts and groans. Mario’s weapon went flying as we tumbled to the base of the steps. We lay on the blue tiled floor, helpless. The first guard we had seen didn’t move. Nothing moved.

  My brain desperately tried to tell me something. Mario moaned and mumbled something about skin.

  My brain sputtered and fired, trying to make important connections.

  The bodies. There had been something wrong with the bodies. The skin? What was wrong with it?

&nbs
p; These people had been dead for a few days. Soon after they arrived? Shouldn’t their skin be pale. It hadn’t been. They were all discolored. Gray. And tinged blue.

  Blue. Skin. Hypoxia. Oxygen deprivation.

  We needed to get outside.

  My oxygen-depraved brain was pounding as my mind began to piece things together.

  I got to my hands and knees and grasped at Mario’s uniform. My breath ragged, like a smoker that had just run a marathon, I dragged him toward the open front door. I made it a few feet, and stopped, clutching at my head as it threatened to explode.

  Keep moving, came a voice inside my head.

  I grabbed at Mario again, crawling my way to the door, pulling his lifeless body behind me. We made it a few more feet before I stopped again. My breath was rapid and shallow, desperate. Gritting my teeth, I tugged at him again. Creeping closer and closer toward the open door.

  We were within arm’s reach when I collapsed and slammed my face into the ground. The shock of pain gave me a burst of adrenaline, and I picked myself back up. With both hands and my last bit of energy, I pushed as hard as I could at Mario, rolling him outside.

  It was a final effort.

  My vision blinked out, and then, like a curtain closing on a stage, the lights went out.

  Chapter Three

  ~

  I woke a little while later with a hot breeze blowing over my face. It felt like the blast of heat from an oven, but it was a welcome feeling.

  Groaning, I blinked and tried to focus. I was outside, leaning against the rock wall. Mario was sitting beside me. He tried to grin, and it turned into a grimace.

  “My head is killing me,” Mario said.

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “How long have I been out?”

  “Just a few minutes, I think. I woke up outside, and once my brain started working again, I pulled your heavy ass out here,” Mario said. “Hypoxia, right?” he added.

  “I think so.” I nodded, regretting the movement. “You mumbled something about skin, and that’s when I realized what was wrong with the bodies. The house probably has vents to bring in outside air. They got closed off somehow, and the oxygen ran out. Killed everyone inside.”