The Myth of the Maker Read online

  She found the control computer sat right out in the open, at the end of the third row of servers.

  Total dicks, then. Good to know.

  Kate sat. Her reflection – red hair and pale skin – frowned back at her until she called up the command line. She began acquainting herself with the workstation’s login procedure.

  The lights in the room flickered. She looked up, brows gathering. Then the fans cut out, and her hands fell from the keyboard. The lights dimmed further, and the fans stayed off. All the lights that’d been dancing on each server bank were gone. It was probably a coincidence, but…

  Time to call it a night. If a brown-out had disabled BDR’s primary power, systems engineers would be crawling over the place in ten minutes to make certain the back-up power sources came online.

  All the overhead fluorescents failed completely, leaving her blind in absolute darkness.

  Kate waited a few seconds, but nope. Whatever had killed the lights had taken the “uninterruptible” backup batteries with them. And… what the hell? The red glow that should’ve illuminated the EXIT letters over the door was gone. Either she was facing the wrong way, or… Or she didn’t know what. Exit signs that lost power were bad news however you sliced it.

  Clattering erupted somewhere behind her. She jerked round. Brilliant light flashed on-off/on-off from around the farthest bank of servers.

  Was it a server shorting out?

  No, the power outage meant there wasn’t enough juice for that kind of mayhem. Maybe she’d missed an engineer on night duty. If so, what were they doing over there, welding? Didn’t seem likely.

  Kate considered bolting. But, really? Any PI worth her gun would investigate. Fuck!

  Speaking of which… Good. A quick pat reassured her that her Beretta 9mm remained in the holster strap beneath her coveralls. It wasn’t illegal for her to carry a hidden handgun in Washington, so long as she carried her Concealed Pistol License, too. She’d got the gun used, but God she wished the owner hadn’t felt compelled to tell her the gun’s name was Malcolm. Who names a gun? That guy, apparently.

  Raul didn’t like that she carried it. He said it was more likely to get her shot; statistics proved it. Maybe. But Raul had passed on that gem long after she’d gotten used to wearing the thing. C’est la vie.

  Kate padded closer to the sound and light. Though she was tempted to draw it, she left Malcolm… Damn it, now she was calling it by name! She left the gun in its holster.

  An odor like burnt rubber curled her lip. She rounded a server and saw the light’s source. Her mouth dropped open.

  A twisting pillar was growing up from the floor. No, that wasn’t it. The shape wasn’t growing so much as it was being built, like something a 3D printer might produce, one layer at a time. These days she couldn’t go a week without seeing at least one breathless tech story about how 3D printers were poised to change the economy, could print entire houses, and might one day be used to construct a moon base.

  But printers were bulky, boxy, slow devices able to extrude something the size of a toy plushy after a couple of hours. Whatever was growing before her eyes was already four feet tall, and adding inches every second. And… where was the 3D printer itself? Nowhere.

  As the final layers of the object slapped into place, she saw that the “something” was a “someone.” A man with no clothing.

  The flickering light died before she could see anything else. The burning tire smell was worse than ever, but without the strobing light, the room was pitch black again.

  “Who are you?” Kate shouted into the black.

  No answer.

  Realizing that she was on the verge of hyperventilating, Kate concentrated on drawing deeper, calming breaths. No easy task. She had never liked the dark. She had a flashlight app on her phones, but she didn’t really want to confirm whether or not a man had been assembled out of nothing, right before her eyes, in mere seconds.

  Had she just suffered a stroke? Or was someone playing a trick to dupe the private investigator who didn’t realize her cover was blown?

  A groan emerged from the dark.

  “Oh, shit,” she said, flinching backward. Whether she was having an aneurism, was the target of an elaborate anti-industrial espionage sting, or especially if a mute mandroid had beamed down to flash Earth women, it was time to go. Which meant she needed to see.

  Her phone’s LED blazed. A clear view of the way out beckoned… except she couldn’t help herself. She swung the beam back.

  The man wasn’t a hallucination. But he was no longer standing. Instead, he slumped against the servers, head in one hand. When she held the beam on him, a hint of bones and organs showed through translucent skin. Shocked, she played the beam across him again. Yep, she could see his ribs, his lungs, his heart… and an enormous ring on one hand that wasn’t the least bit transparent. Holy shit.

  Kate wondered why she wasn’t running away, maybe trailing a scream for effect. Really, was that such a bad idea?

  But, she thought, what would the fictional heroines she admire most do in this situation? No, they wouldn’t run. Dana Scully would do something stupid, of course. She would investigate.

  The man lifted his head and fixed her with watery brown eyes. “Help,” he said. His voice was strained, but human.

  She realized the intruder wasn’t a mandroid. He was just some poor slob who needed a hand, never mind what she’d thought she’d seen. A perfectly reasonable explanation, once she heard it, would clear everything up.

  Relief and concern made her giddy as she went to him.

  The same relief she felt was mirrored on his face, but… yuck. She could see the bones of his skull. “What the hell happened to you? What’s your name?” He was obviously incredibly sick, though with what she couldn’t guess.

  “I’m a messenger,” he said, his voice weak. “Call me Jason. But something’s wrong!” His free hand caught hers. “Please help me?”

  His skin was damp and soft. His grip was weak as a baby’s. Kate didn’t pull free. The stranger needed a good Samaritan. She said, “Don’t worry, Jason. I’m calling 911. The hospital is a couple of blocks from here. An ambulance will be here in five minutes. You’re going to be fine.” Saying it didn’t make it so, but it sounded reassuring.

  “No, I can’t go,” Jason said, his voice weaker than before. “I have to talk to Liza. Her anchor isn’t stable. Look at what happened to me. I’m to give her the Ring of Desire. But now that I’m here, I don’t really want to die…”

  “Die? Listen. You’re sick, but you’ll be all right,” she said, though the more she played her light on him, the less she believed it. “You need medical help, right away.”

  “Won’t do any good. Thanks for trying to help. I didn’t expect kindness. It almost makes me wish–”

  The man’s words slurred into a coughing fit.

  “Jason?”

  “I’m sorry for my part in this. I didn’t realize I had a choice, until I came here. The ring–” A fiercer coughing fit overcame him.

  “What about it?”

  Back to silence and darkness. Kate abandoned the call to 911 mid-dial. In the LED’s light, she saw that he’d stopped moving.

  “Jason!” she said. His hand somehow slipped out of hers. Kate reached to retrieve it, then froze.

  The man liquefied all at once. Arms, torso, legs, and all the rest of Jason slumped like a wax candle in a frying pan, forming a circle of cloudy pink goo.

  “I’m losing my fucking mind,” she whispered. She was in an episode of the X-Files after all.

  When the widening circle of liquid threatened to lap over the soles of her sneakers, Kate retreated a step. All that remained was the oversized ring she’d first seen Jason wearing. It hadn’t melted.

  Mind numb, she retrieved it with her free hand. Tiny inscribed designs, maybe words in a language she didn’t know, spiraled around the band set with a massive transparent green stone so large that it had to be costume jewelry.

&nb
sp; A small section under the ring was loose. When she wiggled it, the whole piece came away, revealing itself as a sleeve for a slender metallic square. The silver square was perfectly sized for insertion into nearly any computer she could name.

  The ring and a USB flash drive nestled in her palm.

  4: Duplication

  Jason Cole

  The Lord of Megeddon had many names. To some, he was War. To others, Legion. To most, he was simply the Betrayer. But among himselves, he was Jason.

  Homunculi peered at Jason from their stations on either side of the exit. Each was a copy, but their bright scarlet coloration denoted their status as inferior clones of the original.

  Of him.

  Jason said, “Open.”

  A mechanism chattered. The gate slabs parted. Jason and his lieutenant swept into a passage lit by violet flames, and up two further flights of charcoal-toned stairs.

  The sound of slapping feet on the stairs behind made Jason look round.

  A clone scampered up from the warrens they’d just quit, gabbling excitedly. Its green skin marked its low grade. Three reds charged after it, cursing, their carapace-like armor clacking.

  Jason frowned at hearing his own obscenities in the mouths of reds. It was almost as upsetting as the clones’ failure to shut the gate after he’d left. Because of their lapse, a runner was loose.

  One red pursuer brandished a club. The club wielder and his two sibling clones cornered their quarry on the landing below where Jason and his lieutenant watched. The green homunculus realized it was trapped, but made a break for freedom up the next flight anyway, hands clutching for its progenitor: Jason.

  Jason stepped forward to meet the runner with an elbow. The impact literally smashed its face in, though Jason felt only a satisfying jolt. The homunculus gave a bubbly exhalation rather than a scream as it collapsed. Its left leg twitched a few times before it went still. As usual, he felt no remorse. In a way, his homunculi were even less real than everything else in Ardeyn, and he despised them even more than everyone and everything else because of it.

  The red handlers who’d chased their charge up from the warrens, only to lose it at the last moment, stared at the Lord of Megeddon with wide, panicky eyes.

  “Get out of here!” Jason yelled. “Before I recycle all of you!” Seeing his own reflected, albeit red-hued, features contorted in fear pissed Jason off. Lucky for them he was anticipating good news. Fresh rumors of progress in his Contact Foundry promised an end to Jason’s imprisonment.

  The clones snatched the limp body and hustled away.

  Jason said, “Why is it the greens who always manage to get loose?”

  “Because,” replied his translucent-skinned lieutenant named Gamma, in a voice most people would find indistinguishable from Jason’s own, “they’re determined.”

  “How can they be determined?” Jason said. “They’re hardly smarter than rabbits.”

  “Exactly,” Gamma said. “Greens don’t understand repercussions or grasp consequences. They act in the moment.”

  He knew that, of course. A clone without a trace of soulcode to govern it almost invariably came out of the vats with the wits of a beetle. But the power resident in Jason’s “truename” was already stretched as thin as he dared expand it. Green and yellow grade clones got nothing from Jason except his likeness and a few reflexes. The higher-grades rated a share of the Betrayer’s unique identifier number, his “soulcode.” And they only got a bit. The only clones who received a nearly complete copy were his lieutenants. Which was why Jason manufactured lieutenants who were completely translucent, so no one would ever mistake an ersatz homunculus for the real deal. Ever again, he thought. That time himselves revolted had taught Jason a lot. Starting with how to begin from scratch with an entirely new batch of homunculi. The carapace-armor he still allowed his lieutenants was see-through. He didn’t want them hiding anything from him.

  Back when his Ring still functioned, Jason had been able to substantiate hundreds of instances with a thought, maybe even thousands, if given enough time. Before his Ring was broken and the Maker was betrayed and slain.

  Jason touched the cracked metal circle he wore around his neck on a chain, and brought it to his lips, then gazed through it. Even damaged, the Ring of War contained a trace of its former power. Despite all his searching for alternate ways to tease out multiple simultaneously active instances of himself, the scrap of metal was the only thing that still allowed Jason to share his soulcode at all, even if just partial copies of it to a few hundred homunculi in Megeddon, enough to give a few of them a semblance of competence.

  “You’ve been doing that a lot lately,” said his lieutenant.

  “Doing what?”

  “Looking through your ring like it was a window to a better time. Do you miss your friends after all this time?”

  “Piss off,” said Jason. Of course, Gamma wasn’t wrong. Gamma was partly him, after all. And despite everything, sometimes Jason missed Alice, Mel, Sanders, Bradley, even Carter. He and Carter used to get root beer floats once a month. They’d both joked about how childish their tradition was, but Jason was sure Carter looked forward to it as much as him. That was long before everything went bad. Ancient history.

  For a long time, he’d felt horrible that his move against Carter ruined his friendship with the others. Stripped of their Incarnations like he had been, Mel had slunk off and ended up taking over Hazurrium, vowing to never speak to him again. Everyone else had simply disappeared. He hadn’t had the heart to go looking for them then, and by now, they were probably all dead. He hadn’t kept tabs.

  He dropped the Ring which flopped back onto its chest, its chain clinking. The trinket had once granted him the power of a god in Ardeyn. Back when the Maker had counted him a friend. As Ardeyn’s aspect of War, Jason could become a literal army with a thought. His thoughts raced simultaneously in every instance, and his capacities were magnified to superhuman levels. It’d been mind-blowingly awesome. Probably.

  Actually, it was difficult to recall with real clarity what being War had been truly like. Retaining even a tenth of the thoughts and plans and exultations that’d flashed through a thousand minds at once was impossible in his current limited state. Plus, separating what’d actually happened, and what’d been part of the extrapolated Age of Myth, was no easy task. Carter’s injection of faux history had made everything possible in the Strange, given structure to chaos, and had been the difference between living and dying when they’d all accidentally come here.

  But Jason still hated Carter Morrison. Or, as he’d later come to be called, Carter Strange, the Maker. It should’ve been him, not Carter, who’d become the god of Ardeyn. But as usual, Carter had to steal all the glory for himself. Then strand him here in a place where magic worked, wonders walked, and they had become like gods… except, it was all a lie. It had seemed real enough to fool everyone, even Jason, for a time. But he’d come to realize it was a prison. He couldn’t return to Earth, and killing the Maker had only further limited his options instead of providing an escape route back to reality.

  Though if Jason had it all to do over, even though it meant breaking his Ring again, he’d still kill Carter.

  “We have an appointment,” Gamma said, breaking Jason’s reverie. “Stop obsessing. We’re close. It’s all still possible.”

  “Didn’t I tell you to piss off?” But Jason fell into step beside his clear-skinned clone. There wasn’t enough difference between himself and the seven lieutenants who shared most his soulcode for him to become too angry with any of them. Usually. In this case, the homunculus was right. If his latest scheme panned out, he’d surpass even what he’d been before. He’d claim for himself not only War’s full power, but also the Maker’s mantle and abilities, as it should’ve always been. Then he’d remake Ardeyn, out of spite, as a new recursion. It would be a whole new world, one where Jason called the shots. But returning to Earth was goal one.

  They passed around the monstrous mouth
of the Pit Reactor. Purple light glimmered in its torpid depths. It was supposed to have been a source of unlimited power. But for all its promise, the Pit Reactor remained a disappointment, good for providing extra light but not much else. Siphoning energy directly from the insane, infinite flux of the Strange was tricky. Jason and his homunculi consistently erred on the side of caution, rather than see Megeddon blasted out of existence by a flare of loose chaos. Maybe that was why the Pit consistently failed to deliver.

  His other projects were more or less in the same lackluster state, except for a few standouts.

  One foundry was devoted to scraping soulcode from slaves purchased in Ardeyn, then repurposing the unique identifiers for Jason’s lower-grade homunculi. Despite a few snags, his lieutenant Theta who oversaw the repurposing project claimed that the problems were nearly licked. Theta had been saying that for years. Jason was beginning to have his doubts about Theta.

  In the next chamber, reds labored to understand and utilize a collection of items imbued with magical power gathered from around Ardeyn. Jason had claimed a couple for himself after his Ring failed, including his belt that granted him greatly increased strength for limited periods. The chamber also stored relics washed up from the depths of the Strange on Ardeyn’s border. Those were mostly confined to a vault and rarely experimented with, because those who did the experimenting had a tendency to disintegrate.

  And of course there was the Electronics Foundry. He’d added it only forty years ago. For decades, Jason had labored under the misapprehension that because magic worked in Ardeyn, regular science wouldn’t. Thankfully, he’d been proved wrong. Sure, he hadn’t been able to do anything he couldn’t have accomplished back on Earth, and in most cases given his lack of tools and an industrial base, far less. But he’d had a few successes in the last couple of years. Jason had the unique advantage of being able to cheat using magic. He and his clones started with transistors, and worked their way up from there. It’d been grueling, but he’d achieved his goal: an operating system capable of storing and accessing vast amounts of data. Moreover, one with data pointing the way back to Ardeyn and the Strange, based on Peter Sanders’s seminal research so long ago…