Just a little bit more, today. Very short! :)
29: Reboot
Mars, just above a now very alien former colony-
The X-90's hull plates flew off like cards from a scattered deck; rivets popping, wires shredding, metal and plastic tearing like paper. She didn't so much crash as disintegrate, bathed in that eerie green flame.
The men fell, tumbling onto the roof of a dome which immediately angled itself to send them hurtling ground-ward, on opposite sides of the building. Paul scrambled desperately for a hold on the dome's slick surface, but he might as well have been trying to climb up a mountain of ice. Metal bent away from him. Glassy stuff somehow bulged without cracking, forming a cliff too steep and slippery to hang onto. Small lights like St. Elmo's fire crackled all over him, sparking at every hair-end and buttonhole as he slid to the heaving, cracked ground.
Tore up his palms and the knees of his uniform, but lunged to his feet in time to avoid a fanged mouth-pit. Didn't stop to wonder how he was breathing… how the fall hadn't killed him… how the hell he was supposed to find Lefkon… Just pulled out his sidearm and ran.
Bits of the X-90 had fallen nearby. To Paul's horror, the broken remains of his ship were being stitched onto the city by cables, silvery data traces and glassine archways; grafted like body parts on a writhing Frankenstein's monster. A few yards away, the med-bot scuttled in ever-tightening circles, as though trying to escape capture. Paul fired several rounds at the cobra-like cables chasing the fleeing auto-doc, attracting so much attention that he was forced to dive for shelter in what was left of the base garage. Mistake.
The door pinched itself shut behind him, sealing Metcalfe into a shadowy, semi-sentient concrete prison with five or six murderous vehicles. They came at him from many sides, growing appendages and blades, and belching fumes like something ripped from a fevered nightmare.
Like an ant, he scrambled this way and that. Like a man, he thought, fired his weapon at critical joints and camera masts, and swore aloud/ gabbled bits of prayer/ shouted for Lefkon. Whirring blades hissed barely past him, screeching shrill-metallic as they struck ground and split concrete. Giant tractors rumbled in Paul's direction, clanking and clashing, just missing the frantically dodging man. Broken bits of metal and pavement… his own spent bullets, even… simply formed themselves into spherical missiles, attacking like the fireballs had, from every side at once.
They weren't what got him, though. The ground, itself, managed that chore, opening like a set of massive, rebar-fanged jaws laced with a hundred tongues of lashing cable. He lost balance and fell within, flailing and shouting. Then, those jaws smashed thunderously together and…*
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Else and every and nowhere-
The quantum entity, Five, was quite aware of her construct's attempts to alter local reality. The construct had unwisely been programmed with memory and applications enabling such activity. Further, it had retained the ability to access and absorb immense amounts of power, redirecting same.
In retrospect, an error; from she who permitted no error. The willful construct had used its memory and power-access to hyperlink areas of spacetime vastly separated by circumstance and causality, bringing these points into contact and allowing probability to twist and shift. It had revealed itself to the extra-dimensional beings now invading the locus. It had rendered even Five vulnerable to attack.
Action was required to forestall these threats, and to block the invaders' access to what had long been her private locus. Thus, the quantum entity, Five, constructed a decision tree, seeking through its branches for the simplest possible response. One act which would bring everything that followed back into rapid alignment.
-And/ Or/ Not/ Controlled-Not/ List_ Matrix_ Variable Object_ Array_ Library_ Choice/ Decision-
There was but one. A reversal. A re-exchange of her construct for its beloved original, currently locked into restless off-line sleep status. John Tracy would have to be returned. A John Tracy strengthened, armed with sub-textual data… and placed once again in harm's way.
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He* folded space and jumped. Someone else landed. Someone with no more than foggy, hung-over memories of Mr. Perfect's dumb-ass behavior, and the difficult plight of four stranded others. John's initial response to finding himself in a large, brilliantly-lit cavern, instead of the airlock…
"What the hell?"
…was cut off almost at once by the added sensory shock of unexplained animals and plants. Nor were these organisms the only things very much out of place. Appliances, too, were scattered about the roughly drilled chamber; machine parts and vehicles shining like they'd just rolled off the showroom floor, surrounded by waist high stands of wheat, corn, rice and soybeans (he was enough of a Kansas farm boy and Wyoming rancher, still, to recognize his basic damn cash crops). Be awhile before they were ready to harvest, though. Especially the rice, which probably needed more water.
And… yeah. There were flocks of clucking young chickens pecking around his booted feet, eagerly snapping up all the crushed plants and bugs that his sudden arrival had provided. Snorting piglets were there, too. And calves… there were calves, looking as mild, patient and stupid here, as they'd ever done back on Earth. Not the young bulls, though. These had a certain speculative, daring gleam in their large eyes, which is why they usually wound up as steers; clipped, snipped and rendered docile (a job he'd never liked). Needless to say, there was something of a yeasty, barnyard smell to the place. And plenty of noise.
Confused clean through, John did a full 360, gradually coming to the realization that he stood below ground, in the base garbage dump, surrounded by highly recycled trash. Chicken nuggets, hamburger patties, pork chops, bread, soy protein, batteries… even parts of goddam pump 4… anything they'd ever thrown away was back. As in, back from the dead.
"Umm…" John ventured aloud, his grip tightening convulsively on a keyboard and bomb that he was vaguely conscious of holding, "Hello…? Anybody else here? Dr. Bennett?"
'Baa-ahhh!'
Something bleated enthusiastically in response. Startled, John looked down to see a wooly black lamb frisking about and swishing its long tail. Had to smile at that, obscurely glad that no one had ringed the tail yet, and it wasn't going to wither away and drop off.
"Hey, lamb-chop," he murmured, stooping to pet the friendly small animal. "We meet again, in a better place. Sort of."
Then,
"John…?" A hesitant, worried voice called to him, from the shadowed mouth of an eastward access tunnel, "AO', buddy… that you?"
