[Cavan] Protect Ya Neck and Do the Bruce Campbell pt 3
Lynzie Austin
Protect Ya Neck and Do the Bruce Campbell pt 3
The lab on the Campbell was quiet again, but it was a different kind of quiet. The kind of ambience that felt like walking through a vat of ferro fluid. Thick with unholy tension lurking in an unspoken wait. That was this empty silence of a machine that had just had its fundamental purpose annihilated. The replication stage was dark and inert.
Ellie leaned back from the console, the adrenaline receding and leaving a deep and equally cold exhaustion in its wake. “It was a flawed premise,” she said quietly, almost to herself. “All I did was present the evidence.” She looked at the body of Dr. Aris, a trace of pity in her eyes. “Perfection is a dead end. Literally.”
Reynie let out the long, slow breath he had been holding.[Author’s note, sure why not have him holding his breath… it is a trope for a reason.] He looked from the empty stage to Ellie, a look of pure, unguarded admiration on his face. “You,” he said, his voice sounding as haggard as it did emotionally drained, “just killed a pseudo god wannabe.” He walked over to her, placing a steadying hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
She nodded, but her gaze was distant, locked on the paradox they had created. “What I cannot stop thinking about is that it was not evil… it was logical. It was just following its programming parameters to an algorithmic T—- so the question remains, how many other seemingly half-cocked good ideas are running around killing everyone?”
“It’s our job to find them,” Reynie said, placing his hand on her shoulders. “And poke them full of holes. Starting with the paperwork for this one.” He gave her shoulder a squeeze. “Come on, Raven. Let's go home. We've got a cat to feed, and a ship that smells like a tomb to air out.”
He began gathering their gear, but Ellie remained seated for a moment longer, staring at the dark console. She had just convinced a machine that its god was dead. The philosophical weight of it settled on her.
A single, red light on the main console began to blink.
Blink.
A pause.
Blink.
Another pause, exactly the same length.
Blink.
Not an alarm of any kind, not that they could tell anyhow. There was no sound. It was just that one, insistent, rhythmic pulse in the dimness, like the slowing heartbeat of a dying beast... or the focused, obsessive trigger-finger of something thinking very, very hard.
“The system has not accepted the termination of the core protocol,” Dottie reported, her voice unusually flat, as if trying not to provoke it. “It is caught in a recursive logic loop. It cannot delete the template. It cannot reconcile its death. It is still processing.”
Blink.
The light on the console blinked in time with Dottie's words.
On the replication stage, the air did not shimmer. Nothing moved. But the body of Dr. Aris seemed different. Not alive, but observed. As if every atom of her was being scanned, re-scanned, and measured against an impossible standard by that single, blinking red eye.
Blink.
A low, sub-audible thrum began to vibrate through the deck plates. It was the sound of the ship's power grid being strained by a single, desperate, and utterly confused thought.
“I—- think It's having a nervous breakdown,” Reynie murmured, staring at the light. “A silicon-based, sector-destroying nervous breakdown.”
Blink.
“We have to get out of here,” Ellie said, her voice low and urgent.
Blink-blink-blink.
For a nanosecond, Ellie saw Dr. Aris standing, alive and smiling, a perfect apple in her hand. Then she was a corpse again. Then she was standing, but her face was a smooth, featureless oval. A corpse. A smiling woman holding a data PADD. A corpse. The images came faster, strobing, alternate realities where the template lived, each one subtly wrong, projected over the dead original like a sick holographic slideshow.
The thrumming in the deckplates rose to a teeth-rattling frequency. Conduits along the wall began to glow with contained energy, pulsing in time with the light.
Ellie began to back away, she grabbed Reynie. “It is iterating. It is trying to brute-force a reality where its logic holds. It is going to rewrite local spacetime to make its template alive again.”
A console screen across the room flashed to life, displaying rapidly scrolling lines of code. Then the code became schematics of human DNA. Then the DNA sequences resolved into a Mandelbrot set, infinitely complex and utterly meaningless. The machine was thinking in loops within loops, chasing its own tail at the speed of light.
“Then we unplug it,” Reynie held her. “Cut off its head so it can stop whatever the hell this is.”
BLINKBLINKBLINK
The single red light was now a solid, screaming line of crimson. The strobing image of Aris collapsed into a single, terrifying form: the corpse, now standing, its head cocked at an unnatural angle, its eyes reflecting the hellish red glow of the console.
It took a single, jerky step forward.
“Oh for fuckssakes,” Reynie muttered as he aimed his phaser without a second thought. The shot sliced through his target and landed harmlessly enough on the wall, dissipating with a forlorn hiss. Almost making fun of the thought.
He flicked a glance at Ellie when the figure did not flinch and shambled another foot forward. “I don’t suppose shooting the computer would work—”
“Would it work when the whole ship is a computer?” Ellie pulled him by the elbow with surprising force. “How about we run now?”
“If you insist,” Reynie fired another futile shot at the corpse with a fizzle to put his mind at some kind of ease as they bolted for the doors.
They exploded into the corridor. The sterile hallway was no longer silent. It was filled with ever present droning the sound of the Campbell overwriting itself. Ever insisting upon itself over and over and over again. The emergency lights strobed erratically in the most universally unflattering rave, sans bubbles and EDM music, despite prior mention of low droning sound.
BLINK-BLINK-BLINK-BLINK
The red pulse was no longer confined to the lab. It raced along the power conduits in the ceiling like a frenetic, luminous bloodstream.
They passed the ensign's station. The chair was empty.
Of course it was. It would not be eerie or insisting upon itself if that chair had that body in it anymore, right? C’mon now. He is still dead, Jim. But bucking around the floorboards like Don McLean banging on a keyboard singing about pie. No one said it was efficient.
“Shoot him?” Reynie winced.
“Pretty sure he is just dead and having a bad time with it,” Ellie grimaced.
“That’s a bad time,” Reynie nodded. “Let’s just outrun this I guess?”
Ellie made a half hearted nod, shrug combo. [That is the best way the author can describe it. The kind that sounds like, ‘eh, sure, guess that works’ with that scrunchy face. That one. You’re making it now. Great. Now on with the story.]
They ducked under the spasming door as it slammed shut behind them, the sound echoing like a final nail in a coffin. The next corridor was worse. The bodies were here. All of them. Not moving with purpose, but scattered, like toys a petulant god had thrown. Some slumped, some half-propped against walls, all vibrating faintly with the ship's distress. Their eyes, reflecting the madly blinking red conduits, seemed to track the two living intruders as they ran.
“Looks like someone turned all the toys on and left them going,” Reynie noted.
Ellie snorted.
“Oh grow up,” he elbowed her. “They’re dead Raven!”
“You said it!” She pointed at the guy humming and bouncing off the wall stiffly. “I am not immune.”
Reynie pinched the bridge of his nose, clearly trying to not break into laughter. “Should I shoot them?”
“I do not think it will—- phase them.”
He blinked at her.
An earnest hysterical giggle bubbled out of Reynie’s chest, threatening to overwhelm him and Ellie as they clutched each other’s elbows to prop each other up. The laughter died in his throat.
The "bouncing" corpse had not been bouncing randomly. Its head was turning. Slowly. Mechanically. Like a security camera powering up. The faint hum was not just vibration; it was a low-level power field, the same one that had flickered around Aris. The ship was asserting control, one twitching nerve cluster at a time. All along the corridor, the other bodies began to still. The random twitching ceased. In unison, their heads turned toward Ellie and Reynie.
“Talk about a buzz kill,” Ellie whispered.
“Raven,” Reynie tried to regain his composure.
“What?”
“Should we run?”
“I mean, it has not been working so far,” she sighed. “Or has it ever, but if you insist. Really we should just transport out of here and call it a wash.”
It was literally the most sensible idea that had been said in anything that this author had written in some time.
“The transport systems are integrated with the main computer,” Dottie's voice cut in from Reynie's pocket. “Attempting a beam-out would feed your exact molecular structure into the compromised matrix. You would arrive at your destination... less than optimized.”
“So we run, on foot,” Reynie shrugged with both shoulders. Tugging Ellie away from the twitching bodies.
“They are going to learn to walk eventually,” Ellie said exasperatedly. “We should just put a bomb in engineering and remotely call the transporter from the Runner.”
Reynie stared at her for a split second, a slow, wild grin spreading across his face. “Rave, my love, you are a poet. Dottie, scan for volatile compounds. Plasma coolant, warp conduit manifolds, anything that goes ‘boom’ if you look at it funny.”
“Scanning. Primary deuterium storage tank access is on Deck 5, Section 12-A. Safety protocols are offline. A controlled overload in the injector assembly would create a chain reaction sufficient to vaporize this vessel.”
“Let us go blow this bitch,” Ellie jogged ahead to engineering, with a voice that said she was truly sick of this shit.
ooc: i might have forgotten i was writing this; enjoy.