Chapter 18
The First
...
In the smoking armory, the surviving members of the cult of the god-painters scrambled to their feet and ran off after the sounds of battle leaving them behind. Their messiah was newly armed in shining armor and now chased after the devil herself. Even the prospect of looting a Chozo armory could not overcome that religious draw. They fled, leaving their fallen behind, strewn across the floor.
A moment later one of the fallen Pirates opened an eye. He looked around for a second, scanning the abandoned room, before opening his other three eyes. Then he sat up and reached out to tap the corpse beside him.
"Hey, Kiber-2272. They're gone."
At the first touch, that fallen pirate flailed in panic before realizing that tap was not a hostile action. Then he opened his eyes and looked around, crouching down to stay as hidden behind his companion as he could. "1161, you are empirically the most defective Zegar I have ever met."
"I told you it would work. When a squad meets the Hunter, command just assumes everyone is going to die so no one asks questions. She doesn't bother shooting anyone once you fall down."
Kiber-2272 slowly stood up, still much more hesitant than Zegar-1161. He shook his head in disbelief. "We've encountered the Hunter three times and we're still alive. This statistical anomaly is outrageous. I've honestly considered the theory that I'm an AI in an immersive training environment. It would at least explain why you are such a poor imitation of a person."
"Come on, don't believe that."
"All right, that may have been unsupported criticism against you but-"
"No, I mean don't believe in AIs. I bet all those supposed programs are just the living brains of some unfortunate grubs the science clans scooped out to shove in so-called computers."
2272 slowly turned to stare at him. "You don't believe in computers? Are your seriously-"
Then 1161 held up his claw. "Shh! I heard something."
They both ran together, pressed back to back, and raised their weapons out at the still somewhat smoking chamber.
"What did you hear? Was it the Hunter coming back? Was it the Chozo? Was it both?"
"No, she usually sounds more like gunfire and explosions. This sounded like blinking."
2272 lowered his weapon as he turned in renewed exasperation. "I know your augmentation specs, you cannot hear blinking. What would that even sound like, you-"
A new voice spoke up. "Um, hello?"
2272 spun around in panic and fired a blaster shot in a purely random direction. It was decidedly more luck than skill that it managed to streak right over the face of another Pirate soldier who had hurriedly thrown himself back down on the ground.
1161 managed to aim his own weapon claw at the newly revealed third survivor before he recognized it and relaxed. He said, "Wow, that was close." There was a brief pause. "Shoot him again."
2272 quickly lowered his claw and clicked his mandibles in what he hoped was a sincere and reassuring way, mindful that they were back under the ears of the cult. Ever since they accidentally got swept up in the Chozo's personal guard and missed the following purge order by virtue of being together in rearguard, he had been very hard to keel a low profile. "Uh 1161, your neural implant is, uh, acting up again. You meant to say help him. That explosion must have shaken something lose in you. Can do weird things, explosions, like even make people incorrectly hear us regret the presence of the angelic Chozo majesty."
"Ok, I'll shoot him."
2272 managed to reach over and shove 1161's weapon out of the way before anything more regrettable happened. This decision was aided by the fact that this other survivor seemed more intent on cowering than defending the cult dogma. The third Pirate said, "No, don't do that! We don't report to the god-painters either!"
2272 exhaled in relief. "At least there's one more non-defective...Wait. We?"
A low voice hissed from among the corpses. "Shut up, Voctum."
1161 straightened up. "Cybernetic zombie slave programs. I knew command was implanting those. Well, start incinerating heads."
By now 2272 felt like 1161's paranoia was somehow infecting the reality around them. He waved his weapon indiscriminately at all the bodies scattered around them. "Everyone! You will be shot unless you get up right now!"
2272 could hear the trembling in his own voice but despite it, two more 'dead' Pirates complied and climbed up to their feet. They were both Shakshi clan and skittered over to join the Voctum clan individual who had first blown their cover.
Zegar-1161 was shaking his head. "No, no, I don't like it. How did they know the plan to fake our deaths? They must have hacked into our neural implants and live-monitored our conscious nervous systems. Only the Chozo could manage that on the fly, so they have to be working for it. We need to shoot them now or they'll betray us to the cult and hack us to pieces for heresy. I hope you're listening to my thoughts now, cultists, because I have a few choice-"
"No! We heard you whispering together!"
1161 paused in mid rant. "Oh. That fits the data too. We did get a bit loud at one point."
"And I was blinking. I'm impressed you heard that."
1161 turned back to Kiber-2272. "Their story checks out."
The Voctum abased himself, exposing his neck as he bowed. "Thank you. Please, Kiber, listen to the Zegar."
"I say we shoot them anyway."
"Don't listen to the Zegar!"
Kiber-2272's shell felt too tight around his head. Nothing made sense today. Right now he just yearned for a damp hive, a high perch, and clear scientific orders from a logical commander. But he did not have that.
"Let me extrapolated. You were swept up in the Chozo guard detachment as well?"
"Yes. When the order came through to purge all individuals loyal to Commander Ridley we three happened to be standing next to each other. We could hear gunfire out in the hallways and by the time the next god-painter came by we just saluted and said we'd executed the heretics. That line always works, no matter who's in charge."
"I like this guy's logic."
Kiber-2272's shell felt even tighter. "Shut up, 1161."
The three other Pirates huddled together. "We...thought you two had a plan. Oh no, we committed treason against the god-painters at the expectation of new leadership. But you two are idiots. Aww, they're going to peel us out of our skeletons."
"Hey! We have...a plan."
"We do? I was still intending to incinerate their heads."
"Shut up!"
One of the Shakshi clan turned to her comrade. "Maybe Commander Ridley will win instead. He'll probably just decapitate us."
"Oh, yes. I would much prefer that."
Kiber-2272 felt like rattling his abdomen plates in a primal shriek. However, in the middle of the swirling storm of fear, confusion, and certain death, a new unfamiliar emotion began to faintly warm his ventricles. Someone had looked to him as a leader. It had only lasted until he opened his mandibles to speak but it was still a very pleasant sensation. Distantly, he was aware of nearly vestigial ambition glands that now quivered into life, secreting a few measly molecules of command hormones into his brain.
He clacked his pincers together and the other four pirates jerked in surprise. "Right. Your lives now depend on the whim of antagonistic superiors who would prefer you ground into nutrient paste. What, exactly, has changed from your prior existence? No matter what result is most probable, crouching down to torpor here until you die will not improve anything. Look around us, we are in a genuine Class 1 forage site! Think of what technology we might find in this facility! If once we are apprehended we have a horde of plunder in our arms we actually stand a decent chance of buying our lives, no matter which side finds us first."
"Except the metroids."
"Shut up, 1161."
"Or the Hunter."
"Shut up, 1161!"
The Voctum clan member exchanged a look with the two Shakshi and they actually seemed appeased. He turned back. "That was genuinely a logical speech." He held out one hand with three sharp bright green claws, palm up in traditional subservience contract position. "Right, we pledge to serve you with our lives, right up until the moment a more powerful force wishes for us to betray you or offers us a greater probability of advancement."
Kiber-2272 felt his primary eyes mist up with emotion. Truly, it was a scene out of the legendary technical manuals.
...
Dust filled the dark air, occasionally crackling with electricity from the power of the weapons being fired through the abandoned temple halls. Samus slammed back against a wall, friction modulators allowing her to grip on polished stone and fling herself to the side just as The Last's plasma beam splashed into the slabs with a blaze of blinding fire. Samus raised her weapon and fired off three missiles in an arcing path, curving them around and to distract her opponent for a second. Keep him off balance, use his lack of combat instincts against him, that was the key. She could not allow him a spare moment to think, to use his technical knowledge. The Last was terrifyingly intelligent, and at the moment Samus felt rather lacking in that department.
She could feel her thoughts getting slower with each hour she ran across this planet. Aurora's experimental life energy injection system might have healed the injuries from the orbital drop, but Samus' body still remembered. Stress hormones were building up in her nerve cells and she was burning through neurotransmitter molecules faster than her blood and implants could supply them. Samus had been fighting continuously for over forty-eight hours at this point, since the Diomedes first dropped out of jump, and an eleven hour medically induced coma at the edge of death did not count as rest.
Samus beam weapon charged and shot, blue tinged energy lancing out through the debris. The Last avoided it, his automated suit systems handling the dodge so the beam only hit the floor, but then his foot came down on the slick surface that ice beam shot had really intended to make. The Last slid, falling, and Samus seized her chance to hold her ground, charging a super missile in her weapon for every possible deci-second. In his panic, the The Last fired wildly as he fell but Samus did not twitch, knowing it would miss. However, the crack of breaking rock above her showed it had not missed the carved stone support beam in the ceiling. The very heavy stone beam was directly above her.
There was not time for a decision, yet nevertheless she made it. She held her ground and fired her fully charged shot, hitting The Last directly in the armored chest. The Chozo shouted as his shields took the brunt of the hit yet still allowed some of the roaring impact through. However, the floor beneath him had no shields. Paving slabs splintered and collapsed as The Last fell with them.
Then the falling stone beam hit Samus and she caught it across her shoulders. The impact shook the room and bent her knees but her augmented muscles strained along with the suit to lift the pillar, even as her boots crunched deep into the paving slabs beneath her. Samus even had time to start a breath before the floor gave way entirely.
Samus fell down through the darkness as this upper level of the temple crumbled around her. Fifty feet below, The Last landed heavily on the next floor and whipped his head up as inside his helmet the suit screamed proximity alarms. Suit jets ignited to fling him out of the way, but Samus spun in air and shot out a grapple beam to grab the falling stone support beam. She flung it his way and with the thunderous impact a floor gave way once more.
Samus and the Last fell together through the rubble as they plunged out of the dark into a soft orange light. Even at free-fall the fight continued, energy blasts and missiles ringing out across a cavernous void. However, in the midst of combat and plummeting chaos Samus still had time to recognize the flexing mechanical arms of the great central spindle in a huge spherical room. They had just broken down into the Library of the Winnowers. At this point Samus just hoped the swarm of hunting metroids were not still around here.
She spun in air as she fell and aimed her head to plummet face down, accelerating towards the ground with both suit jets and missile recoil. At the very last second she flipped and fired her jets to mitigate the smashing impact. Her boots hit the ground and the shock sent micro-fractures propagated up her limbs in a wave, racing through the percentage of her skeleton that was still calcium based, but that did not matter compared to having half a second to prepare her next attack. Then a new set of jets flared and The Last landed beside her, a meteor of gleaming metal.
Suit scan analyzed the state of his armor, but Samus did not need to read those results to confirm what intuition told her. In this war of attrition, The Last was still winning. He had a full suite of systems in perfect repair, superior weapons, and more shields. Samus launched into close range combat again, but this time The Last accepted this change in the fight. He joined her grapple, and instead of attempting to escape, his gauntlet gripped her wrist. Samus twisted to see the blinding sphere of spinning light emerging from his weapon barrel. A power bomb.
The Last knew he had more shields too.
The explosion hit them both. Samus flew back through fire and for a moment vanished from the world of memory. Continuity of biological consciousness had an acceleration cut-off point. A second later her cortex recovered but her cerebral implants could only supply a limited history of the interim, tactical data of position, velocity, and gyroscopic orientation. Samus blinked. It seemed she had flown through a wall. And then the wall had followed her. And then they had both tumbled down approximately one thousand and seventy three stairs deep into the lightless bowels of the Temple.
As she sat up in the rubble and dust, the suit switched vision modes and revealed a new dark vaulted chamber. Nearby, The Last was already rising to his knees. That power bomb attack had blown apart a section of the Library's lower bowl, caving it into an adjacent stairwell of seemingly endless length. The Last was now on his feet, and Samus was too late to dodge. However, the Chozo's weapon never pointed her way. Instead he turned and ran, footsteps echoing through the maze of black hallways as the sound mingled with the rattle of rubble still rolling down the endless stair.
Sometimes, victory in battle was just convincing your opponent you would not stay down. The Last still had the advantage but he was not used to pain. Even to those they punished, the Chozo were kind, at least as they saw it. In her decades Samus had been hurt more by her friends than this person had been hurt by any enemy. Something as small as a near fatal point blank explosion would not cause her to flee.
The Last broke and Samus ran after him. At this point she was beyond thought, the decision to chase was no longer a conscious decision. He simply fled and so she hunted. It was who she was. The confusion and pain of her body were not relevant. However, that gap in strategic planning did open up mental resources to analyzing her surroundings.
They were far beneath the main body of the temple now. These endless tight corridors did not just feel abandoned, they felt like they had never been lived in. In each chamber, the sharp and angular walls were unadorned and the dimensions were cramped. The dark passages between them wound and undulated through the solid rock in an almost natural way, as though this planet was gnawed in the deep by wormlike things. This was somewhere the old temple builders had not liked to think about.
However, The Last seemed to know where he was going even as the scent of panic oozed into his decisions. Through it all, he was always just out of sight, as they raced past endless chambers holding strange and glowing things, bits of machinery and other Chozo technology. From time to time, Samus spared a moment to smash into one of the devices and allow her suit to drink hungrily from their power supplies. As the crack of splitting metal rang out, The Last's voice cracked through the suit coms, words thick with hatred and disgust and fear.
"Thief. Destroyer. You...carnivore. Despicable thing, you only live off the death of others!"
But the sounds of his fight had stopped and now mixed with the clunking of something mechanical and heavy. Then Samus rounded a corner and was confronted by a large and heavy door, now left ajar. It looked like a vault. The Last was inside.
Samus stepped into the vault, lit only by the glowing fire charging within her weapon barrel. This space was not small like the other chambers she had passed, but was instead a large vaulted rectangle. Scan showed powerful energy signatures within the walls but all that seemed more like supporting systems then the focus of this room. Indeed the focal point seemed to be emptiness, only the space these walls enclosed.
The Last stood near the center of the room, facing the door. "My people-"
Samus fired. The beam streaked towards him but at the last moment it deflected strangely, twisting in area between. The flash briefly illuminated the room and in that moment Samus noticed the faint indications of folded space. In the center of this chamber, something was hidden behind the air, something big. The Chozo liked to hide things but this was the most powerful interaction warp field Samus had ever encountered. The strength of these projectors could have fueled an intersystem battleship.
The Last tried to sound condescending, but by now that tone came through ragged and broken. "Have you not grown tired of that by now? What did my people become, that they created you? Twisted a primitive alien into this crude instrument of destruction. You fight without thought, you kill without meaning. The two looter species out there, that crazed cult, at least they have something they hope to gain in this battle. They aim towards a victory for their race. But you...you are just an automaton, following the last stupid instructions of a long departed creator."
He was talking again, and since he didn't seem to be doing anything at the moment Samus decided to encourage that. A few minutes of pause would let her medical nanites finish draining the blood that explosion had left pooling in her brain.
She said, "Your route through these lower tunnels grew less direct at the end. You knew what you were searching for would be in this sector, but not which chamber. It is something installed after your conviction, yet you know it still exists. It is something of yours."
The Last tilted his helmet as he watched Samus. It was a gesture unnervingly like one Grey Voice had used. "It was in that room above us, where I first laid eyes on you, that I knew it was still here. I had began to doubt but I should not have lost faith. My people could never bare to destroy what they could hide away. Ever curious, ever tempted."
A few pieces clicked into place in Samus' head. This was an evidence vault. What ever The Last had done to be imprisoned in a stasis box for a millennium, a monument to it was in here. The faint ripple in the center of the dark air refused to give up any information beyond the roughest dimensions of its bulk, and The Last's position guarded the control system. However, now that Samus had successfully gotten him monologuing again, she slowly started to edge to the side, imperceptibly angling towards a clear firing line.
The Last must have been an instructor at one point in addition to a scientist, because he effortlessly fell into lecture. "One created, knowledge cannot be destroyed. It is indelible. That was the crime I committed, that I opened a door and my fellows could see this new path stretched before them. I gave them infinity and they sentenced me to oblivion."
Samus continued to distract him. "But they left the door open."
The Last snapped his helmet around to face Samus with a burning intensity that crested past hatred into desperation. "No! You do not get to say those words. I found the slabs. I read the message. It was written to me! The door was left open for me! They were talking to me! The planet's prophecy speaks to me, not...you." The fervent need was painful in The Last's voice. "It has to be about me. If it's not, it means my people never forgave me."
Samus could see the trembling tension under that armor, the sagging shoulders of a being pushed to the very edge. This kind of delicate communication was not Samus' speciality, but she might still be able to draw him back. The Last had very nearly reached his lowest point, and so was open to the greatest change.
She said, "The others honor you. They sent your body away, but your equation is the heart of the people, their science, and their culture. For all the time you slept, you lived in every breath they took. Energy is matter, matter is life, life is thought, and thought is energy."
The Last looked away from her. His helmet tipped down to loom down at the long-fingered gauntlet covering his left hand as it slowly flexed in an almost meditative way. "You may mimic our speech but you understand nothing, twisted mutant thing. You do not know why they trapped me in that box. It was not just because I discovered the truth. It was because I created a demonstration."
One of those long fingers flicked out, operating a virtual control board and then the energy hum of the room began to change. The ripple behind the air began to waver. Samus could feel the path towards resolution slipping away, but she still had to try and grab it.
"The Empire expelled you, but the empire left with you. What it became was better. To raise up all they met, to let all life touch the path, that was the existence you created for our people. Because of that, the Chozo still walk in the minds of a hundred species across the galactic arm, the humans and so many others. Those species are still following those footsteps, and in the future they are one hundred more species of chozo; all children of your genius."
Her words felt awkward and rusty, unused tools at the best of times. Now all Samus could do is hope and wish she had learned as much from Grey Voice as she had from Old Bird. The Last froze, unreadable under the armor. In between them, the air rippled and a huge dark shape began to enter into the room, motionlessly sliding out from the cube's ninth corner.
"Children," The Last said and for a single instant Samus felt an uncharacteristic trill of hope. Then The Last continued, "No. Other females might bare eggs, raise children, but not me. This work, this work is my child."
The center of the room thudded with displaced air as a massive cylinder materialized into the conventional dimensions, but Samus was momentarily preoccupied by an incongruous brush of embarrassment. It was true she had only ever met two living Chozo, both male. It was also true that the Chozo artistic representation which had constituted the rest of her education was deliberately androgynous by stylistic choice. However, Samus still felt that inward wince as she realized she had assumed The Last was male based on exactly no information. She should have known better, enough people had made the same assumption about her.
Then Samus was brought back to the moment quite firmly by the thunderous thump of something hitting the inside of the huge cylinder. Samus tilted her helmet towards it, trying to keep the Last still in her sights as she did so. The cylinder was filled with something, something black and shifting. The motion inside was increasing, as though something powering up. Or waking up. A second thump rang the vault and this time Samus saw a massive, constantly shifting appendage pressed against the cylinder wall, capped with a bloom of claws or teeth. Then the limb was reabsorbed, but as it vanished, the oily black surface momentarily parted to show an interior of suspended red clusters on wiry threads, brain-like globules held in a large transparent core.
The Last turned back towards Samus. The Chozo straightened her back, rising up to her full eight feet of height. "Tradsiak M'etroid, we named this facility. At the time it referred to the ultimate hunters for truth. I suppose after they betrayed me, the others found a more appropriate interpretation. Poor copies they made, but I suppose all forgeries must be. Allow me then to introduce you to my masterwork, the thesis of the Life Energy Equivalence project. Behold, you stand before the first Metroid."
...