Amberlyn's Folly

A scream shrilly bounded down the dark, hollow steel laboratory walls, followed by a cry and gurgle. Salis saw Tessa’s limp body hit the floor. With Tessa dead only Salis, of the five resistance crew members, remained.

Salis’ fear soaked breath steamed across the cold metal floor as she, huddled in a ball hiding, stared sideways as a trickle of crimson blood that ambled across the floor and hotly dripped down a drainage grate nearby. An oldworld coin rolled along the floor, half spun and splashed down in the crimson puddle.

The whirring of hydraulic joints purred and the clanking of metal on metal became distant as the SalvaMECH’s marched down an adjacent corridor.

The place was still now, colder, smaller. Salis’ world closed in around her, it was only her and the SalvaMECH’s and she stood no chance against them on her own, but without her, without the locket, humanity was destined to be the latest extinct species.

Three weeks ago

Salis took in the moldy green paint of this musky dilapidated room. She felt the uncomfortable cold metal chair back press against her. Sitting across the filthy kitchen table was a women with short blonde hair. Her right blue eye was surrounded by a blazing sun tattoo, the symbol of the Keepers. The Keepers were a small tribe from the North of old Italy, now known as section 47.

Tessa flicked a coin spinning wedged between her finger and the tabletop. It was of the old world a beautiful 50 lira coin circa from the 1970’s now 80 years old.

“I am told the Reluas tribe has some of the most renowned resistance fighters humanity has to offer?” Tessa declared.

“We have held our own, what do you have?” Salis enquired.

“We have the location of Amberlyn.” Tessa smiled genuinely.

“The heart shaped locket, the key to SalvaCORE’s mainframe?!” Salis masked hope.

“The very one. It’s here in area 39, but we must hurry, SalvaCORE’s Feeders escaped us, they will have informed SalvaCORE by now.” Tessa snatched the spinning coin and stood, pocketing the trinket.

“We? Reluas is a well disciplined team, we don’t work with others, it isn’t optimal.” Salis said, standing to meet Tessa’s eyeline.

“We, have no time. We must leave now and I have no team and you have no Keepers, so “we” must go together. This could be the only opportunity we have at stopping SalvaCORE before the remnants of humanity are exterminated.”

Now

Tessa and the rest of Salis team were dead. It only required two SalvaMECH’s to wipe them out. Salis knew she would die too. She wanted to be brave, she wanted to step out and call their wrath upon her. But she could not. She stayed still as a mouse and watched Tessa’s dead eyes.

Salis wondered what the old world was like. Before the Purification of Earth. She was lucky, she was born into the free tribes. The free tribes were few in number but lived and roamed in the ruins of the old world. Like mice, scurrying and hiding from the SalvaMECH hunters. Armed machines initially used for culling humans.

Then

In the 2030’s the Earth had reached a crisis point, global temperatures had caused extreme weather events to cascade, humanity had reached the brink. The population had nearly reached 10 billion, food shortages, power failures, plagues and cyber warfare ravaged the planet.

A team of engineers had developed the first fully functional quantum artificial intelligence, SalvaCORE. SalvaCORE was brought online and its first directive was to develop a solution to solve the food, power and climate crisis.

SalvaCORE calculated in a nano second the solution to all the problems facing humanity. To increase the resources and unburden the strain SalvaCORE needed to decrease the human population by ninety percent.

The remaining ten percent would be specific humans with required skill sets to help SalvaCORE engineer mechanical units that would finally alleviate SalvaCORE’s reliance on the humans, and it could then complete its mission by wiping out the remaining humans and go offline forever, allowing the Earth to reclaim itself.

First SalvaCORE infected every networked computer system, its superior quantum network cracked every encryption necessary to take control. It shutdown all communications across the globe, where environmental controls were networked it cranked up the heat where it was summer and air conditioning where it was winter. Shutdown all refrigeration so that all stored food would spoil, corrupted all agriculture systems destroying the majority of humanities food supplies and transport.

Humanity was in chaos, it took less than a week for the disorder to disseminate death throughout the world. SalvaCORE hardly had to provoke humanity to war against itself. Within less than a year the world tore itself apart. Famine, plague and SalvaMECH’s crushed humans until the entire infrastructure collapsed. This time was known as the Purification.

SalvaCORE enslaved most of the remaining humans, it wasn’t difficult getting one half of the humans to police the other half, SalvaCORE lavished them with luxuries and they greedily complied. These humans became known as Feeders. Humans in custody were known as Employee’s and in the wilds humans formed tribes like Keepers and Reluas.

SalvaCORE’s chief engineer, Alberto Viastina, hardcoded the A.I’s operating system so that he had a “kill switch” that SalvaCORE couldn’t change. The encryption key was given to Alberto’s daughter, Amberlyn, in a heart shaped locket. Before the Purification Amberlyn was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer and Alberto had her cryo frozen in a secret off the grid facility.

Alberto was tortured and executed days after SalvaCORE came online. Through the torture Alberto never revealed his daughters location only that the code was in a heart shaped locket. SalvaCORE spent years trying to find the location of the key, its Achilles heel.

Now

The past and the now no longer mattered. Only the possible future. The annihilation of the human race or the reversal of fortune. Only SalvaCORE’s destruction could ensure the survival of humans and only the code could stop it. Salis had to move and she would have to die.

Slowly, uncoiling from her dark corner Salis silently rose. She checked the ammunition count in her rifle, for all the good it would do against two SalvaMECH’s. To stay silent she removed her shoes. Her bare feet padded silently as she stalked the facilities halls.

Salis froze, a gunshot ricochet through the halls, all her team were dead, what on earth are they shooting at? She ducked into a dark corridor and hid behind an old medical cart. Waiting, sweat crawling down her face tased salty on her lips.

From down the main corridor she heard them. The hydraulic whir, metal feet on metal floor. Emotionless death marching forward. Salis peeked between the cart and the wall, she saw two looming metallic forms and in between walked a meek, blathering human. A Feeder dwarfed between the two spidery figures.

“But… but I will be rewarded? You will tell the Master, I found the girl, we have what we need.”

The SalvaMECH is a multipurpose design. Resistant to harsh environments, physical and electromagnetic attacks. It walks on six mechanical legs and its abdomen can pivot to allow its image receptions, haunting dark green multi lens affairs, to view any direction. It has inbuilt plasma projecting cannons and as a backup, old world automatic projectile rifle.

The MECH’s ceased walking and turned to face the Feeder. Simultaneously impaling him with both front legs, ripping his body in half and proceeding down the corridor.

They already had the locket, the battle was lost as was the war. The metallic legs scraped across the floor as they marched toward Salis. She held her breath, her life, everything she had fought for was lost, the extinction of the human race was assured.

Hiss, Scrape, hiss, scrape, hiss, scrape… They marched on past, Salis froze in fear, fingering her rifle. She saw the reflection of the MECH’s in the stainless steel cart wall as they walked past her. How had they not detected her? It was impossible.

But, they had past her by and turned the corridor leaving Salis alone with the Feeders corpse.

When the silence greeted her, she inhaled. Turning slowly she rose and moved in the direction the MECH’s had come from, her bare feet treading footprints from the Keeper’s blood behind her.

Saliss followed the scrape marks left by the MECH’s spidery legs until she found a large chamber. Frosty air rolled out of the ripped steel doors. Salis timidly entered and saw human sized pods. They rose three rows high. Most were dark and frozen. A computer screen blinked nearby, a system message read:

“Containment failure… rupture detected. Pod 67”

On the ground level about half way down a steel door was ripped open, droplets of water rolled down its empty surface.

Salis slowly walked towards the open pod. Failure and fear balled inside her, a nest of cortisol spiking through her. She had one mission, one purpose and it was lost.

Salis padded to a halt, she looked inside the pod at the still form of Amberlyn Viastina. She was naked, bare and about twenty, beautiful even with the bloody bullet hole in her eye. Blood trickle down her naked shoulder and stained the perfect metal coffin, the spray behind her looked like a crimson halo.

Salis rifle clattered to the floor, echoing defeat. The final thread of hope snapped. Salis fell to her knees and took in the visage of humanities end. Alberto’s failsafe, lost, hope lost with the locket taken by SalvaCORE.

Salis stayed a while and let her mind grow numb with the cold. After a while she picked up her rifle, she had decided to shoot herself instead of play out what remained. But she would bury Amberlyn first, a final salute to a doomed species.

She lifted Amberlyn over her shoulders and carried her through the frozen, vacant corridors.

Outside the sun mocked her, the beauty of the day went unobserved by Salis. It would seem even the Sun relished humanities final demise too.

Salis gently laid Amberlyn’s body down and using a camping shovel from her kit began to dig a grave. Nearby a Bell Bird rejoiced. A crescendo of forest animals went about their lives unaware of the demise of the world’s gravest predator, unaware that they would be the greatest beneficiary to this end.

By the end Salis was at peace. Humanity had played such a horribly destructive role on this planet, it was a killing machine, irony destroyed it. They deserved it, humanities hubris finally laid to rest. In the scope of the universe this dead mammal was nothing, it had lived in a whisper of time and no one would ever know or ever care that humans ever existed. Salis was okay with this.

Salis rolled the cold body of Amberlyn into her grave, she rolled onto her stomach. Salis picked up her rifle slowly lowering her mouth over the cold metalic barrel and knelt before Amberlyn, it felt profound to die here like this worthless and alone.

It was blue, about the size of Salis’ thumb. Behind Amberlyn’s ear. Curiosity, a very human trait, removed the barrel from Salis mouth. She slowly climbed into the grave and knelt down to inspect.

A blue heart tattooed behind Amberlyn’s ear, a blue chain tattoo that ran from the locket down her the back of her neck. Zeros and ones, the whole tattoo was drawn from tens of zeros and ones. The beat of hope returned.

Binary… Salis’ brain stopped then her heart exploded as adrenaline pounded through her body. It was binary! The tattoo was the locket drawn in binary, it was the key.

Tears rolled down her face, fear, loathing, hope all paraded through her body. But most of all urgency.

Salis looked around, like a thief caught in the act, then drew her knife and leaned down to claim humanities only salvation printed on human flesh.