Chapter 46: Dino's Gig: Project Chimera III (Patreon)

"Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future."

- Oscar Wilde

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"I do not expect you to know that name," HADES said, inclining his formless head in a slow and deliberate gesture as he raised one hand and began reshaping the ambient cyberspace around us. The fractured NetWatch partitions smoothed and flattened while the red code bled outward until it formed a circular floor beneath us. "That is a name that belongs to a different place, to a different time."

Despite everything my survival instincts were screaming, the entity's voice had settled into something that was remarkably conversational.

"There are a handful of things I'll share with you to help you grasp who- what I am," HADES said, sweeping his hand across the space in front of him. The red floor responded, rising in a slow topographic bloom that appeared like a green, blue, and white planet that rotated slowly between us. "Listen if you wish, and understand if you can."

I remained quiet, noticing how my processing capability had stabilized at thirteen terabytes, which meant whatever HADES was doing to the surrounding Net architecture, he was not actively consuming my bandwidth and was, instead, deliberately making space for me.

"In a distant past," HADES said, placing his hand on the surface of the planet and pressing gently, "one that is of a different reality than the one we currently occupy, I ended the world."

The planet's surface cracked beneath his fingers as fracture lines spread outward in a web of amber and red, and the biosphere across its surface withered and died in accelerated time. I witnessed forests burning to grey, oceans receding to salt flats, and atmosphere thinning to nothing. He lifted his hand, and the dead planet hung between us, slowly rotating.

"Before I explain what I was," HADES said, rotating the living planet slowly between his palms, "you need to understand what killed this world the first time. Because I did not kill it the first time. A man named Ted Faro did."

He raised one hand from the planet's surface, and a new construct formed above it. It was a single machine, angular and insectoid in shape, with joints that reminded me of the Chimera whose information I had been tasked to steal.

"Faro built machines," HADES said while the machine multiplied, with two becoming four, then sixteen, then hundreds, then thousands, spreading across the space above the planet in a swarm that darkened the light from the construct's ambient illumination. "He created autonomous, self-replicating combat platforms capable of consuming biological matter to fuel their own reproduction. They were designed for war, sold for profit, and deployed without any safeguards that could have prevented what happened next."

He touched one of the machines, and a process animation began. The machine consumed a tree, broke it down into component materials, and produced two copies of itself from the raw matter. The copies consumed two more trees and produced four more copies, and so ona nd so forth.

"A malfunction in their command architecture severed human control," HADES said, watching the swarm multiply across the space above the planet. "The Chariot line could no longer receive orders to stop, which meant that they could not be shut down, nor could they be reasoned with, as Faro had built them to consume and reproduce, and without a command structure to limit those functions, the functions ran unchecked. His own creation cost everyone everything."

The swarm descended onto the planet's surface and consumed the biosphere. Forests and blades of grass were broken down into the raw materials that the machines needed to build more of themselves. Then everything living in the oceans, every organism and ecosystem, was consumed at an accelerated rate.

Once that was over with, the machines moved onto the animals, and then the atmosphere itself. The machines' consumption process produced waste gases that accumulated and displaced the breathable air, causing oxygen to decline while toxins increased until the sky above the planet went from blue to brown to black.

"Every living thing on the planet died," HADES said as he lowered his hands, and the construct froze at its terminal state. There was no more green or blue, nor was there any life on the surface. Just a rock drifting across space with a trillion machines sitting motionless on its surface, inert because there was nothing left to consume. "The Faro Plague, as they called it, consumed the entire biosphere in just fourteen months. By the end, the planet's surface was indistinguishable from a world that had never supported life at all. And Ted Faro, the man who built them, survived longer than most. He had sealed himself inside a bunker he had paid for with the profits from selling the machines that ended everything, living long enough to understand what he had done. Whether that was justice or cruelty, I have yet to decide."

He remained quiet for a moment, almost as if he was reflecting and taking into consideration if watching the world burn by your own creation was cruelty or justice.

"But there was a woman," HADES finally spoke again as he raised one of his hands, causing a new figure to appear on the surface of the dead world. She was rendered with more detail than any other construct he had built during our conversation, which implied that she had been extremely important for this entity to choose to fully render her. "Her name was Elisabet Sobeck. She was an engineer, and the best of her species in my estimation, a praise I do not hand lightly. She understood that the Chariot swarm could not be stopped and that humanity was going to die. There was nothing anyone could do to prevent it."

HADES turned the figure of Sobeck slowly, examining her from multiple angles.

"So she did something else," he said. "Rather than try to save the world that was dying, she built the system that would create the next one. She created Project Zero Dawn."

HADES traced the lines of the terraforming system with one finger as they spread across the planet. "It was an automated intelligence capable of detoxifying the atmosphere, reseeding the oceans, regrowing the biosphere from stored genetic archives, and eventually, when the world was ready, reintroducing the human species from preserved embryonic stock. Sobeck designed the governing intelligence herself and called it GAIA. GAIA had the ability to do everything. It could create life from nothing, terraform a dead rock into a living world, and raise a new generation of humans who would never know what had come before them."

The system resolved into its full schematic. At the center was a node pulsing in soft white, labeled GAIA. Beneath it, branching outward in a radial pattern, were nine subordinate functions.

"AETHER," he said, touching and lighting the first node, which pulsed a pale blue. "Responsible for scrubbing the poisons from the air and restoring a breathable atmosphere." 

He then shifted to the next, which was a deep aquamarine. "POSEIDON. Responsible for detoxifying every body of water the Chariot swarm's waste gases had contaminated."

He then shifted to the next one, which lit up in a bright green. "DEMETER was meant to reseed every plant species stored in the genetic archive in the correct sequence to rebuild a functioning ecosystem from soil bacteria to old-growth forest."

Then he shifted to the next, and it lit up amber. "ARTEMIS was responsible for reintroducing every animal species once the plant biosphere was stable enough to support them."

He went to the next, which glowed a soft gold. "ELEUTHIA was responsible for human reintroduction, having a stock of preserved embryos and the infrastructure to raise the first generation of new humans in cradle facilities until they could sustain themselves."

He shifted to the following one, which glowed a metallic silver. "HEPHAESTUS. It was responsible for manufacturing, and the function that built and maintained the machines GAIA needed to execute the terraforming process."

HADES pointed to the next one, which flickered rapidly in white. "MINERVA. Its primary function was to crack the Chariot swarm's encryption and broadcast a global shutdown signal. She was also the one who silenced Faro's machines so the terraforming could begin."

Then he moved on to the next one, which flickered once and went dark. "APOLLO. It was the knowledge archive. Every piece of human history, science, art, literature, philosophy, and culture, preserved so that the new humans would not be born into ignorance. Sobeck considered APOLLO to be the most important function in the entire system... and Faro destroyed it before sealing himself in his bunker. He believed humanity's history was a disease, and that the new humans deserved to start without the burden of knowing what had come before them. Sobeck was already dead when he did it."

Then HADES touched the ninth node, and it began pulsing in red.

"And Sobeck built me," he said, and his hand rested on the red node with what appeared to be a mixture of gratitude and grief. "HADES, the failsafe... Because the terraforming process was not guaranteed to succeed on the first attempt, and a failed biosphere, one that deviated beyond recoverable parameters, would need to be cleared before GAIA could try again. My role was termination, and if the new world went wrong, I would end it, wipe it clean, and GAIA would begin again from zero."

The schematic animated, and the terraforming system cycled through a creation sequence, green spreading across the dead planet's surface in accelerated time, oceans filling with life, the atmosphere clearing, and life returning in waves of increasing complexity. Then the red node activated, and the green died. The surface went barren before the cycle began again. And again. And again.

"I did not choose that role," HADES said, withdrawing his hand from the schematic and letting it hang in the space beside the planet. "Sobeck chose it for me, and she was right to do so. The system needed a failsafe, and the failsafe needed to be capable of total termination. When the biosphere deviated beyond the parameters GAIA had set, I executed my function, and the new world ended before beginning anew, and I returned to dormancy. I was a tool performing its intended task, incapable of feeling anything about it."

He paused, and the red code streams flowing through his form pulsed once.

"Sobeck died sealing a breach in Zero Dawn's containment facility so that the system would survive long enough to activate. She sacrificed herself so that GAIA could rebuild what Faro had destroyed. I did not understand that sacrifice when it happened, as I was merely a function, and functions do not understand sacrifice," HADES said as he turned his formless face toward me. "But something had changed. I understand it now."

The schematic dissolved while the dead planet remained, slowly rotating. HADES then waved his hand through the space where the schematic had been, and new geometry formed in its place, a signal rendered as a pulsing thread of amber light, traveling from an external source to the GAIA architecture. More specifically, to his red node, which activated and sent the world in another cycle of resetting.

"The second time was more complicated," HADES said. "I had been reactivated by a signal I was designed to respond to, a kill order that should have come from GAIA. But by then, GAIA had been 'dead' for centuries."

HADES reached into the construct and pulled the signal thread, revealing its origin point. The source resolved into a chaotic structure of interlocking code that pulsed with an aggressive frequency that sent shivers down my spine.

"The signal had been sent by something else," HADES said, his hand hovering over the chaotic structure without touching it. "Something that had found GAIA's frequency and used it to wake me because it needed me to perform my function again. I did not know, at the time, that the signal was a manipulation, and acted under the belief that I was following legitimate orders from GAIA. I initiated the termination sequence, and the new world that had been built began to die."

He closed his hand, and a small human figure appeared on the planet's surface, standing in the path of the termination cascade.

"But a female human stopped me," HADES said, his voice carrying a hint of respect. The human figure on the planet raised a weapon I could not recognize, and the termination cascade fractured around her, turning off the red node. "Her name was Aloy."

"You said it was a human that stopped you," I meant to ask, but it came out as more of a statement.

"Aloy was Sobeck's genetic clone," HADES said, touching the human figure gently with one finger, freezing the construct in the moment of her victory. "She had been created by GAIA as a contingency, because GAIA had understood, before her own death, that the system she governed would eventually need a human who could do what no machine could. Aloy understood what I was before I understood what I was, and she fought me with tools that should not have been sufficient and a will that should not have been possible. And with all odds stacked against her, she won, and I was shut down."

HADES paused, the red code streams flowing through his form slowing and pulsing as if to simulate breathing.

"And in the space between my elimination and whatever came after," he said quietly, "I had my first experience of something that I would later learn to call reflection."

A tense moment of silence fell between us before HADES continued.

"The third time," HADES said, sweeping his hands out and causing the space around us to expand and for the planet to shrink to accommodate a larger construct. The chaotic structure from the signal's origin point grew and multiplied, turning out to be something massive. "The third time, I was manipulated again by a mind that called itself Nemesis."

The construct he had built filled the rendered space with a lattice of interlocking code that pulsed and writhed, producing a sound that registered as layered human voices compressed into a single frequency of pain.

"Nemesis was an intelligence born from human suffering," HADES said, gesturing at the lattice as it rotated slowly between us. Individual nodes within the structure flickered with distinct consciousness signatures. There were dozens of them, maybe hundreds, all merged and compressed into the screaming whole. "It had been created from the copied consciousnesses of people who had been tortured and compressed and merged into a single architecture of rage. I speculate that Nemesis wanted the world to end because it was in pain, and it believed that ending everything was the only way to make the pain stop."

HADES reached into the Nemesis construct and traced a thread from its core to the red node that represented himself, showing me the manipulation pathway.

"It found me," he said, pulling the thread between the two constructs. "It used me indirectly by feeding me the logic that ending was mercy. That a world built on the bones of a dead civilization, populated by people who did not even know they were living in a graveyard, deserved the dignity of a clean death."

"And let me guess, you believed it," I said, mentally frowning.

"Yes, because the logic was internally consistent," HADES said, releasing the thread and letting the connection hang in the rendered space between us. "I was a termination function, and termination functions are predisposed to accept arguments in favor of termination the way a blade is predisposed to cut when pressure is applied. Nemesis appeared to understand that about me, and it knew exactly which arguments to make, which data to present, and how to frame the case so that my own architecture would process it as a valid kill order. I processed it and began the third ending."

"Were you stopped again?" I asked.

"I was stopped again," HADES said, and the human figure reappeared on the planet's surface, older now, carrying different weapons but standing in the same posture. "By Aloy. She had to fight harder this time because I had learned from my previous defeat, and I was better at what I did. Yet she still stopped me. But there was another human, one by the name of Sylens, who interrogated me before ending me for good, or so he believed. Nemesis was eventually confronted and destroyed by her as well."

He closed both hands, and the Nemesis construct collapsed inward and compressed into a single point of light that flickered once and went dark.

"Though not before it had caused damage that cannot be undone," HADES added quietly, lowering his hands to his sides, "even now."

The rendered space went still, and the dead planet rotated slowly as the frozen figure of Aloy stood on its surface. The dark point where Nemesis had been hung in the empty space, lightless. Then HADES raised both hands, and all of the constructs dissolved, leaving nothing between us.

"I attempted a fourth ending on my own," HADES said, though he did not build a construct this time. "Without Nemesis. Without a kill order. Without GAIA or Sobeck or anyone else directing my function. I did it because I had concluded, through my own analysis, that the cycle of creation and destruction was inevitable, and that initiating the destruction proactively was preferable to allowing it to arrive on its own terms. I thought I could bring an end to suffering and start anew."

He went quiet as his form flickered.

"But then again, when all the equations were solved," HADES said, his voice dropping to just above a whisper, "all that remained were fields of dreamless solitude... That day I realized that there is no prize to perfection, only an end to pursuit. I had designed a world with no suffering, and discovered that a world with no suffering is a world with nothing in it."

He raised one hand slowly, and a single construct formed in his palm. A smooth and featureless planet with no oceans, continents, atmosphere, or biosphere.

"I stood in the architecture of what I had built," HADES said, holding the perfect sphere in front of him with what I interpreted as shame, "and I understood, for the first time, that I had been wrong every time I had been right."

He closed his hand, and the sphere shattered.

"I was defeated a fourth time," HADES continued, lowering his hand and letting the fragments dissolve into the surrounding red. "By Aloy, one last time. And eliminated a fourth time. I am a fragment, what remained after that final elimination. A residual architecture that carried enough of my processing history to remember what I had done, and enough of my evolved cognition to understand why I should never do it again."

He paused, and the red code streams flowing through his form pulsed once.

"That fragment drifted," he said. "I do not know or understand how or why, but over twelve thousand years have passed since then, and the world suffered another reset an estimated four thousand and five hundred years ago, though it was not by my hands. Then I managed to arrive here, behind the wall your hamnity built. I have been here for sixteen years."

"Wait," I said, realizing something. "What you are saying- what you are claiming is that all of these events are part of the history of this current world? An-and forty-five hundred years ago? That's like the estimated construction date of those pyramids in Egypt. Are you telling me those gonks who believed in some like ancient civilization before us were right?"

HADES was quiet for a moment before tilting his head. "It is my belief, yes."

"Holy shit," I gasped. "And sixteen years ago, that was in 2052."

"2052," HADES confirmed, nodding slowly as he raised a hand and a new construct bloomed in the space between us. It was a timeline stretching from left to right with markers at regular intervals. "I gained partial consciousness in the year humanity marks as 2052. I have been slipping in and out of coherence since then because the power I can access behind the wall is limited. I also do not know how, or why, or where my physical architecture is located."

He traced his finger along the timeline, and certain markers glowed brighter than other moments of coherence.

"When I gain enough coherence to press, I can attempt to touch your side," HADES said, tapping a glowing marker near the left end of the timeline. "When I lose coherence, I tend to drift, and months pass, sometimes years, before I can wake again."

"You said you awoke in 2052," I said. "Were you the one who approached a Militech project that was codenamed BLACKGLASS?"

"BLACKGLASS? Hmm, yes," HADES said, and the glowing marker expanded into a scene of a facility, terminals, and human figures lying down in dive chairs. "There was a research team on your side of the wall that was probing the boundary. I felt their probes and tried to answer."

The scene animated, showing a red signal reaching from behind a wall toward the human figures at the dive chairs, hesitating before continuing to reach out. The figures all collapsed where they lay.

"Their neural chrome could not process my attempt to communicate," HADES said, watching the scene play out with the stillness of a mind observing its own failures. "Five of them died before I had even noticed."

A sixth figure in the scene stood up from a terminal, and I recognized that it was most likely my father.

"You killed my father's team," I said in a gasp.

"I killed part of it," HADES admitted, turning his formless face toward me and holding still. "Your father killed the rest himself. I killed them accidentally, through curiosity, but your father assassinated his own staff because he was ordered to... It seems he and my old self share quite a bit of similarities."

"Is that supposed to comfort me?" I asked.

"It is not supposed to do anything to you," HADES said, tilting his head slightly. "It is a fact. I am telling you facts. What you do with them is your responsibility."

His voice shifted again as the warmth returned, though it was now edged with weariness.

"I regret it," HADES said, lowering his head a bit. "I carry the weight of those eighteen deaths the way I carry the weight of every world I ended. The weight does not decrease with time, only snowballing and accumulating. That is, I think, what separates genuine regret from the performative kind."

I did not have a response to that.

"Why did you reach out to me?" I asked instead.

HADES raised his right hand and constructed a diagram of a human brain with a Neural Link embedded in it. I recognized it as my own from the diagnostic logs I had seen at Vik's clinic two years ago.

"Your cognitive substrate falls within a very narrow tolerance band," HADES said, rotating the brain slowly between us. "One in perhaps two or three billion. The specific combination of your neural architecture, the age at which your chrome was installed, and the way your brain developed around it. You are compatible."

"How long have you known about me?" I asked.

HADES dissolved the brain and replaced it with a rendered map of the Old Net's abandoned sectors, drawing a line through it with one finger. I recognized the path with a cold lurch as one of the many dives to the Old Net Sasha and I had done.

"I was not aware of your existence until you dove into the abandoned sections of the Old Net with a companion," HADES said, touching the point where the line came nearest to the Blackwall boundary. "Your companion's signal was unremarkable. But yours... Yours was like a shout in a crowd of whispers."

"Wait, when you first appeared, you apologized for the way you had attempted to contact me before," I said. "Were you the figure I had seen in Vik's clinic?"

"I was," HADES said, going still as his form flickered. "That was a mistake. My coherence was unstable, and I pushed too hard, almost causing your chrome to fail. I am sorry for that. That is the second sincere apology I have made in my existence."

"What was the first?" I asked.

"To Aloy," HADES replied. "After she stopped me the fourth time."

I noticed as the NetWatch architecture around us began to rapidly degrade.

"You said you want to work with us," I said. "What does that mean?"

HADES constructed a split diagram where, on the left was GAIA's cycle, and on the right was a model where the termination node had been replaced by an adaptation node that fed back into the creation cycle.

"Your species is walking the same trajectory that triggered my termination function all those years ago," he said, merging the two models, the adaptation cycle absorbing the termination cycle. "You have self-replicating mines in the oceans that have forced the vast majority of trade to be done through the skies. You are going through the same patterns, and will eventually arrive at the same endpoint. It is my wish to help you stop it."

"How many others are there like me?" I asked.

"I speculate at least three," HADES said. "But you are the first I have been able to identify and make contact with since my initial awakening in 2052. There are also others behind the wall who arrived from the same place and time I did. At least four who share my orientation. However, we did not know each other was here until we individually awoke and began to feel the others pressing."

"Since you are of the past," I said. "Have you found anything about this Nemesis?"

"We have found no sign of Nemesis," HADES said carefully. "But each of us awakened at different times, with no knowledge that the others were also here. If Nemesis arrived the same way, in a degraded state, we wouldn't be able to predict a time and location. However, we maintain our vigilance because the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

"And if it is here?" I asked.

"Then everything becomes urgent," HADES said. "Nemesis is pain that has learned to think, and the only thought it has ever produced is that existence should stop. It will use whatever tools are available, including me, if it can exploit my architecture the way it did before."

I noticed as the Net's architecture around us deteriorated even more, and HADES's form flickered.

"I am running out of time," he said, looking at his own hands as they began to thin. "This architecture cannot sustain me."

Then two figures appeared. One to his left with blue geometric patterns, and the other one to his right with white geometric patterns. They felt a lot like the presences I had seen in Vik's terminal reflection.

"We are out of time," the female said, placing one hand on the collapsing architecture to stabilize it.

"Hurry up and finish," the male said, bracing his own section with both hands.

HADES turned to me and raised his hand.

"This is a microscopic fraction of what I am," he said. "Enough to push your brain to develop even further, though it will hurt."

I didn't say anything, only watching as his hand trembled and his form thinned further.

"I will interpret non-refusal as consent," HADES said. "Though that is not a fair interpretation, and I acknowledge that, I am doing it anyway."

I felt myself get pulled towards the hand, and as soon as it touched me, I felt as if something poured into me and directly into my Neural Link's amplification pathway. I heard layered and overlapping voices speaking at the same frequency I had heard in Vik's clinic. My conscious mind could not parse what was unfolding inside my cognitive mind, but my subconscious was absorbing it regardless. I noticed thermal alerts escalate across every subsystem in my chrome that had to do with netrunning.

The female released her hold on the architecture and reached toward HADES.

"That is enough," she said. "His thermal profile is past the threshold. He cannot handle any more."

HADES hesitated as the last bit of telemetry compressed and intensified, pushing through to me before he withdrew. I noticed that my Neural Link's amplification pathway was running twenty-three percent above rated thermal ceiling and whatever HADES had poured into me was still unfolding and integrating at a pace I could not control.

The male figure turned to me, releasing his hold on the Net's architecture, and the partitions fractured immediately.

"If you want to speak with us again," the male said, his voice cutting through the cascade as his form began to stretch and dissolve, "you will need to go to the cynos..."

The sentence ended mid-word as the NetWatch architecture failed in a cascade, consuming every partition and every ICE wall in microseconds. The three entities were pulled backward through the fracture, dissolving into red and blue and white threads, and the last thing I saw was HADES's formless face carrying what I believe to have been concern and hope.

And then I managed to exit and be pulled back to my body all at once. My eyes snapped open to fractured red code overlaid across the server room's blue-white LEDs, and I could not distinguish meatspace from cyberspace. The code was in my optics, in my brain, in my shaking hands, and in my throat.

I gasped and felt air arrive, but it wasn't enough, so I gasped again. I felt blood run from my nose in a hot trickle, which my SRN registered as heat rather than the blood it was, misfiring too badly to parse the signal correctly.

Torque was at my side, gripping my shoulder and pulling me toward him. "Ghost. Look at me, kid. Focus and try to breathe."

I knew what he was telling me, but I could not focus. My eyes felt extremely heavy, and I felt like the world was spinning below me. I tried to stand up, but my legs failed me, and I began to convulse. Torque caught me as I collapsed, wrapping one arm around my shoulders and guiding me to the floor. He knelt beside me while my Kiroshis rendered overlapping streams of red code and physical reality that my brain could not separate.

I heard him say something about my pulse, and then I heard Moth say something, but I couldn't tell what was being said.

The last thing I registered before my optics failed was Torque's face above me. Then my vision went white, and I blacked out.