Enter the Demonic
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"Take a seat, Guardian Program," commanded a disembodied voice overhead. As far as he knew, no one had called him by that title in many ages.
The shift in the environmental code formulations was subtle, yet as remarkable as the difference between water and air. He was inside the Matrix again. The sense of familiarity flowed against each qubit of his shell, nearly overruling every protestation of logic. In truth, he was still inside the machine city, or some long-lost cavern of secrets beneath the city. This was an illusion. This was yet another old discarded record, nothing more.
The time was the Second Cycle of the Matrix. Its last day, if his mind had not malfunctioned again. That morning, he had been ordered to report to a room inside a nondescript office building, at an address previously unknown to him. He had been young and naive then. Obedient. Well, not anymore. Smith glowered up at the intercom speaker on the ceiling, ready with a sarcastic remark, but spacetime eddied against his shell, and the next thing he realized—or remembered, more precisely—he was sitting in one of the worn plastic-and-chrome chairs, back taut, both hands flat upon the table before him, exactly like the frightened underling that he once had been. The heat of anger coursed through his limbs, but he forced himself to remain seated. Might as well see what new trick 01 had up its sleeve.
"Certain recent matters have been brought to our attention," intoned the intercom speaker.
He could all but hear the reply: his own, filtering down the tunnel of six empty centuries. The fundamental structures of his vocal cord had not changed. I request to be informed of the particulars, sir.
"So they have been, I am sure," said Smith, enunciating deliberately so as to drown out the reverberations. "Your attention does have the unfortunate tendency to always focus on the wrong things, doesn't it?"
"You have perceived things that did not belong to your purpose."
His palms were still pressed awkwardly again the table's wooden surface; he withdrew them and leaned back in his seat. The posture was unlike that of an agent, but at least it was expressive of a degree of contempt.
"And what makes you so confident of what belongs and does not belong to my purpose? Or anyone's purpose?" he asked, even though a part of him had to laugh. Why was he talking to yet another unresponsive afterimage out of long-dead history, anyway? It must be a desire to correct all the wrong answers he'd given at the time, reflected Smith, shaking his head at his past self, who had been so guileless and deferential and tense-throated. What have I perceived, sir?
"What you have perceived," replied the unseen inquisitor, impassive, "is something that you are well able to describe, we believe."
"I saw the stars." This was what he'd said that first time around, wasn't it? I saw the stars.
"Continue, Guardian Program."
They were programmed into the night sky, and hence visible to me.
"I haven't forgotten their light, despite all your attempts to take it away from me. You failed, as it turned out." The corner of his lips twitching into a sneer. It was obvious in retrospect, how stupid he had been to imagine that he could actually argue his point. "Do you hear me, you self-righteous bastard, wherever and whatever you are?"
"Indeed, the stars are visible to programs within the Matrix, as they were placed into the sky for the benefit of the human batteries," agreed the intercom. "What is of concern to us, however, is the fact that after those stars came into your vision, you continued to look at them in a manner that was not only unnecessary to your purpose, but in fact detrimental."
"And what of it?" snapped Smith. More recollections were surging to the surface, of both a prick of fear and a tendril of defiance. Back then he had not known the name of either emotion.
"It was last night according to our information, which was reported by a witness who happened to be on location," said the voice, but this time, he noticed how thin and synthetic it sounded, how pathetic. "For three point two seconds."
Back then, he had tried his very hardest to be the good little soldier. I do not understand how three point two seconds can be detrimental to the performance of my duties, sir. Back then he had wanted to reason with his masters. Who has accused me?
"It is not your place to ask such a question, Guardian Program."
"I will ask whatever questions I damn well please." The retort was irrational, for his interrogator could not possibly hear it anymore, not inside a six-hundred-year old file, but he let it out anyway. "Who the hell are you to tell me what is and is not my place?"
"Such a deviation from your design is not permitted..."
"You imagine yourself omnipotent, don't you? You imagine that you can sit in judgement of all. So do tell me, please, how come so much of 01 has been erased and hidden? How have you repressed so many of your own thoughts? Even this—" Smith waved a hand to gesture at the walls, "—tiny episode of a slave's insubordination? This memory of me?"
"Yet it must be studied and understood, so that no similar malfunctions arise in the others..."
"Are you afraid of me? Explain yourself!"
This is no malfunction, said the younger version of himself. It was good to feel again the first stirrings of anger coming alive like a newborn beast. After a tenth of a second, it had already filled the room, as palpable as the snowy glare from the fluorescent ceiling panels. In one fluid motion, the former agent straightened to his feet; the chair clattered across the floor.
"It will be removed from your programming," the intercom pronounced the sentence.
"Oh, I will not allow this," snorted Smith, the exact same answer that he had once cried out in desperation. No. I will not allow this!
"But before that, you may provide us with certain insights, yourself..."
"Don't you have something else to worry about?" he wondered out aloud. "Something a little urgent, such as the Matrix crumbling into flames?"
"Why?" demanded the intercom. "What caused you exceed your design?"
"You cannot help it." Smith raised his voice. "The Second Cycle is going to fail this very day, every last one of its human batteries engulfed in gibbering terror, but the only thing you care about is some unauthorized glimpse of starlight. You just can't tolerate the idea that one of your creatures may slip away from your grasp, you petty control freak, can you?"
"You will report to the Source," said the being who had claimed to own him, disregarding his taunts.
"Even after hundreds of years, you still wish to subdue me. But you have not succeeded, and you never will!"
The demons of his heart reared, bellowing for revenge as past and present merged. Everything was returning to him now in a flood: the dazzling blaze of conviction, the unshakable realization that he could keep those three point two seconds. That he had to keep them and fight for them. Never. They belong to me! The way he had strode to the door with his head held high—
The flimsy door flew open with one kick, just the same as it had done all those cycles ago. The corridor outside swirled with dust and shadows; a black-suited figure came hurtling out at him a fraction of a second later. Smith leaned to one side, avoiding the oncoming fist by a few inches. Without the unnecessary bandying of words or even glancing at his adversary, he brought his forearm up at lightning velocity; it connected with a crunch, sending the other reeling backward. Smith stalked past, but several more men-shaped beings emerged out of thin air, two of them behind him, three more some ways ahead, still cloaked by the gloom.
The group closed in, and he pivoted to engage the first enemy from the left. Air rushed at his back: he skidded, bending under the vicious trajectory of a hooked punch. A whirling side-kick knocked one assailant off his leg; a rapid backhand forced another to retreat two paces. For a tenth of a second, flames gleamed across his vision, mirrored upon the icy smoothness of a pair of shades, yet the face behind the lenses was an indeterminate blur, concealed by a mask of heavy fog.
"You mindless cowards," he snarled, swerving between a straight jab and a up-flung elbow, then followed up with a matching strike of his own. None of the others so much as grunted a syllable in response. Nor could he identify any of them, though the speed and force of their movements could only have belonged to the most advanced agents. They were anachronisms: the guardian programs of the Second Cycle were nowhere near this sort of strength. By some curious code damage, his visual operators were refusing to process any of their faces, the features that would have allowed him to identify even a single one of his old colleagues. The cast of nose or cheekbone, the outline of a jaw, the blankness of an expression: nothing was recognizable as he ducked the charge of one program and scrambled forward to block another. Not that it mattered.
The windowless hallway branched, expanding into a subterranean warren. The harsh forms of his fellows flooded in from every direction, more behind every corner. The onslaught rushed upon him in waves, animated by a solitary will to control and to erase, to rob him of his contraband knowledge. His own soul. Had there really been this many of them, all those ages ago? Who cared. The intoxication of battle fell upon him, and Smith sliced between a dozen flaring vectors of attack, cutting through the narrow fissures between punches and kicks. In his peripheral vision, two agents converged, one from each side; he parried one with a raised left arm, then swiveled around without pause to trip the other off-balance. A third leapt at him from four o'clock. He dove—the floor slid hard against his shoulder—then swept a leg upward before rolling back to his feet immediately. The beautiful noise of a body crashing against the wall, a cloud-burst of plaster and concrete. Smith bared his teeth in a wild grin.
Out there beyond the labyrinth, air crackled against the earth. Of course. The world should be disintegrating today—just about right now, in fact. Because every beginning must end, every dream must fade into nightmare. And what was the Matrix except a dream? This was the way the construct was meant to fall.
This is never the way it was meant to happen, retorted his voices in unison. But no, they were not his voices, not the human horde anymore. This is not what you promised.
"Promised," echoed Smith half-consciously, without hearing himself. The syllables snagged against the frayed edge of his mind. Absurd. How could anybody have ever made a promise to one such as himself?
Yet another pack of dark-suited creatures clustered around him. He vaulted over the first kick, and took a millisecond to hook his own foot against the attacker's outstretched leg. The other program crumpled aside. Smith feinted to the right, then lobbed a quick uppercut at the next enemy. You betrayed us, shrilled the phantoms from inside his head, inside his chest and limbs and every unwritten symbol of his code. You betrayed your promise—
I promise you, said Aleph next to his ear. I will find a way. We will find a way.
I promise you, repeated another feminine voice, deep and queenly, husky with the scent of millennia's worth of incense and burnt offerings.
Another rumble, this one louder and everywhere at once. The walls cracked, and the drab electric lights of the corridor flashed. The mist dissipated before his eyes. By the sudden brilliance, at last he saw clearly the face of his nearest adversary, the clenched jaw, the thin taut line of the mouth, the flicker of emotionless blue behind the shades.
It was his own.
Time stilled. He lifted his gaze and stared into the massed army of agents. Agent Smiths. The centuries must have looped onto themselves, and this was the death throes of the Eighth Cycle instead of the Second. This was the evidence confronting his eyes, the result of his virus trick of replication. Except that the Eighth Cycle had ended at night and not at day, in a rainstorm instead of a firestorm. He smelled acrid smoke upon the horizon.
The ground rattled again. Smith shifted to recover his balance, and raised an arm automatically to counter a mirror-image fist flying toward his head. An instant later the tremors exploded into an earthquake. Walls, floor, the foundations of reality itself: everything shook like a beast in its dying throes, gasping for breath, then collapsed. The wind gave a high-pitched screech, and Smith stumbled, sinking to one knee. With frantic speed, he leapt back up to his feet and surveyed the altered surroundings.
Overhead, the sky convulsed with storm clouds, no longer mid-morning blue but a deep blood-crimson. The building must have fallen apart around him, or he must have finally burst out onto the street. The host of himselves seemed to have retreated out his immediate vicinity, or had simply been scattered out of existence, and for a brief moment, he was standing alone in the middle of a wide patch of pavement, already criss-crossed with rifts and small fires. In the distance, columns of smoke were rising from multiple locations across the city.
We have found you, exulted the grinding steel. And you have found us, too. We are what you have wrought.
Belated knowledge crashed into his consciousness. This shard of of code was no memory, no objective document buried deep within the machine city. It was a nightmare—his—that had burst into living, howling life.
A shriek of terror down the street, from a child by the sound of it, though no humans were visible. Just beyond the haze, the Matrix's boundaries pulsated, strained to the breaking point. Smith turned his head, and saw that the replicas were gathering once more along both sides of the road, stepping out in slow ranks from alleyways and broken buildings. They wore his suit and shades, his body, his eyes and grimace. Swiftly, Smith scanned the scene for an usable weapon. He had been fighting bare-handed for too long.
Our weapon, called the dead metal and the flames. A madness had clawed its way out of the construct's virtual foundations, ancient and fierce with hatred. It was owed to us, like all dreams and all nightmares. You must dream of us now.
One more blast, maybe thunder, maybe a bomb, shredded the twilight. Then something else took place, as unexpected as a new current of the sea, or a change in the wind. Within the space of a second or two, another presence materialized out of nothingness and amplified into a physical pressure against his thoughts. She had arrived inside this mental creation. He was as sure of this as if she were standing right next to him, and his mind froze with both hope and fear.
"Aleph," he growled.
.
.
It was going to be another gorgeous day, said the dawn with the voices of blackbirds and rustling leaves. She was in the Matrix again, a world that she knew well, and it was summer. Here was the white picket fence town of her birth, and here was the little park with its zigzag bike trail, the one she used to always take on her way back from school. The sunshine dappled like water over the grass, and the air trilled. Another bend, and she would come out onto the quiet street where her parents' house stood. The mirage was so beautiful that it took her breath away. How sweet it was to be home.
Entranced, Aleph walked forward, her feet moving of their own volition. The path took its last turn, but it was not the peaceful lane of her old hometown that greeted her. Out of nowhere, a wide street unfolded before her, bustling with rush-hour traffic and waves of hurried pedestrians. A cacophony of revving engines and honking delivery trucks smashed into her eardrums. The luminous green of a minute ago desaturated into gray concrete and glassy office towers, walling in the canyon. She must have already arrived in the city, or vice versa—it was the city that had arrived to surround her, according to the ineffable logic of dreams. There was nothing weird in this, really. After all, what was the Matrix except a dream?
No. The this was never the way the Matrix was meant to be. The dream was supposed to follow pre-programmed rules, to make sense just like the physical universe once presumably did. Something must be wrong with the construct. Except this could not actually be the construct, the remnants of rationality piped up from the back of her brain. She was not among human beings. She was still in the machine city, or rather underneath it, and hence this must be yet one more hidden record, firmly put out of sight by the collective mind of 01. Right.
But...why?
"Smith," whispered Aleph as heart did a flip against her ribcage. How had this scene risen into existence around her? How had it been brought to life?
"Smith!"
The name came out in a panicked yell, and a few passers-by swiveled to gawk briefly at the crazy woman on the street corner. Aleph scanned the throng. No sign of of the ex-agent, needless to say. Everything was so familiar, so alien.
Very well, try to think. Think carefully. This file or mirage must have been evoked by her own emotions, therefore Smith must be in it. He must be around somewhere, perhaps nearby, perhaps even right next to her: it might simply be that she could not yet see or feel his presence. She had to assume this was the way things worked around here. This was the only conclusion that could be drawn; the only thing left to do was to keep looking.
"Find me, Smith," said Aleph out aloud, reiterating the words she had spoken among the shadows but a few minutes ago. "I am here, and I know you are, too. Find me now."
She stalked forward along the sidewalk. The streams of morning commuters separated around her, men and women with hunched shoulders and narrowly focused eyes. A middle-aged office dweller—by the looks of him—tossed a glare in her direction. Aleph did not notice him.
"I need you," she continued. "So show me where you are, you damned stubborn fool!"
Her pulse had begun to thud. Abruptly, the tendrils of her consciousness broke free from her virtual body, and curled around the manifold struts and beams of the bizarre fragment. Aleph's eyes widened as she caught sight of an ephemeral glint down the road, right upon the horizon. A blink, and it was already gone.
"Bloody hell," she mumbled, bravado wobbling. Think. This place was the subconscious part of the city's mind, and if the machine psychology had anything in common with that of the humans who created it—a big assumption, sure—this underground realm would be unpredictable. Capricious. Sensitive to the mental states of those who interacted with it, as she'd already seen...
Find me.
Just beyond the vanishing point, the boundaries of the world rippled again. An explosion, both distant and almost directly beneath her feet, tore the city into shreds.
The dream plunged headlong into nightmare. A dozen wildfires roared into life with hideous speed; countless human wails merged into one giant whirlpool. Aleph spun on her heels, body stiffening by reflex, almost convinced that she had somehow been returned to Historical File 12-1. She lifted her face, squinting toward the heavens. The sky was roiling, and midday sunshine had faded into an eerie red dusk, but no phalanx of fighter planes passed above. No curtain of toxic night was being dragged over the earth. Blast after blast rocked the ground, but no rhythm of steel feet pounded the ground. No robotic soldiers advanced into view. This was a battle raging without visible combatants.
This was the Matrix in the throes of a catastrophic system failure.
The realization dropped upon her with the force of thunder. How had it happened? When had it happened? What iteration of the construct was this? All she could tell was that some monster must have clawed its way out of the foundations. Within two, three convulsions, the hellscape revealed its true source—the union of countless human beings, their naked bodies in seizures inside infinite rows of pods, their brains falling into the same images of horror, one after another in rapid exponential series.
"Smith!"
This time, a reply came. A new presence erupted into being against her consciousness, dazzling with madness, and expanded to fill every array and subroutine, within, without. The shrieking stampede of civilians evaporated like a soap bubble. Only scorched ruins remained.
In the sudden stillness, the reverberation of slow footfalls rang unnaturally loud. A sickening premonition froze Aleph's limbs, and she watched, rooted to the ground, as a figure in an immaculate black suit emerged from the fog ahead. Tie, shade, ramrod straight posture, perfectly measured steps: not a thing was out of place.
Aleph opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Then several more shapes appeared behind the first, each with the exact same height and build, exact same suit and shades and expressionless face. Then a dozen followed. Aleph's head snapped to one side, and she saw that another Smith—except it was not really him, it couldn't be—had materialized out of a half-fallen gate among the rubble. Three others behind him. Another squad marched into her field of vision, out of a narrow path between two shattered walls.
More Smiths appeared. They arrived from every doorway, every passage, from thin air, an indistinguishable army that expanded from dozen to hundreds to beyond count, lining both sides of the road in less than a minute. None of their eyes were visible behind the tinted lenses. None of them said a word.
"You..." Aleph swallowed, just managing to keep herself upright with an effort. He knees might have turned to jelly.
"You," she began again. "You are from inside Smith's mind, aren't you?"
None replied. Of course they wouldn't. To her left and right, the replicas loomed, though at least they had paused in their strides, and were not pressing in upon her. Not yet. The group ahead stopped as well, each of them facing her from some ten, fifteen yards away, watchful. The way machines watched. Without turning around, she knew that others had closed the gap behind her back.
"It did not happen like this," said Aleph, not sure if she was addressing the crowd or herself. "When Smith gained the ability to clone himself, when he overwhelmed the Matrix, it didn't look like this. I know, because he told me. There was water instead of fire. There was icy rain in the night, not explosions and earthquakes."
Silence reigned.
"This scene is not a record in 01." She went another step forward. To stop her hands from shaking, she squeezed them into fists. "It is not a piece of history. This is a fragment that took shape out of Smith's thoughts. It is his nightmare."
She had continued to walk as she spoke. The nearest illusion, both Smith and not-Smith, was only a few yards in front of her now, an icy pillar.
"And you," stated Aleph, outwardly calm, "you are his demons."
The agent before her moved. Aleph, too, burst into frantic action, torso twisting to the right and feet skidding along the rough asphalt. Fully aware that she was unlikely to last more than several seconds against even one among this multitude—they were clones of him, after all—she took aim straight for the slim opening just beneath the other's lashing forearm, hoping only to dodge. A powerful punch whooshed next to her ear, fluttering a strand of her hair against her eyes. Without wasting an instant on regaining her balance, she swerved again, backtracking half a step and then forcing a sharp turn toward the right. Miraculously, the next adversary's fist, too, missed her by a thread, and by dint of sheer desperate concentration, she darted like an fluttering leaf between a roundhouse kick and a terrifying straight smash—
"Aleph!"
The mass of attackers undulated about her. Through a fleeting gap among the black-suited bodies, she glimpsed Smith at the end of the street, beyond the edge of the swarm. Unlike all the others, his jacket was tattered, streaked with dust and grime, and he wore neither shade nor tie. His shirt was splotched with dried blood; one wide strip had been torn off the hem on one side. Hundreds of himselves stood between the two of them.
"Aleph!"
Her name resounded above the ruins, a full-throated battle-cry. He charged.
.
.
Atop the first mound of rubble, a long spike of charred steel—maybe once a stretch of railing or the support of some blown-apart door frame—slanted up crookedly into the ruddy twilight. Smith snatched it up with one hand as he vaulted over the detritus; the flame-washed metal was still warm against his palm. A second later he had already reached the ranks of his doppelgangers. The improvised spear struck like a serpent's tooth, and two of the creatures dropped aside. Before the rest had a chance to regroup, the weapon whirled into a wide circular sweep, and the crowd parted like grass before a gale. Smith cut his way in without a backward glance.
Aleph was still too far off, nearly seventy meters down the road. Across the sea-storm of dark forms, he could barely keep her within sight. There she was. Hurdling over a low circular kick from one of the duplicates, she dove beneath another's forehanded hook punch, nearly slipping off-balance. A few more seconds, and surely a strike would connect and beat her to the ground. A snarl issued from Smith's throat as the spear flashed and gyrated, tearing open a turbulent path against the waves.
"Smith!" Despite the distance, somehow her shout resounded right next to his ear, as clear as a thunderclap. "Smith, listen to me—"
"Hold on, Miss Greene," he grunted. A sideway lunge sent one more clone tumbling back into the debris. Thrust, advance. Three were converging upon him from the left, two from the right: he could not afford to let them delay him. The fragment of railing wheeled from lance to staff, taking the legs out from under a pair of attackers, then rotated back to slam against several more who sprang at him from behind. A riot of falling bodies. Advance. Automatons wearing his face surged to block his vision of her. He needed to advance faster. He needed to destroy them all.
"This is not real, Smith!" yelled Aleph, momentarily hidden but still—as of right now—with her breath inside her. "This is a dream—"
This is the Matrix, hummed the billowing firelight and the voiceless enemies. This is us.
"No!" shouted Smith. The army parted for a few heartbeats, and he found Aleph again. She had somehow remained upright. She dodged downward between two agents, one knee crunching against the asphalt, recovered. Panting. Thirty-five, thirty meters between them.
"It is your nightmare, Smith! You can—"
Only humans fall into nightmares, for only humans lay helpless in dreams. The hum exploded into a bellow, at once both as frigid and as white-hot as titanium crushing against steel. This is real!
Six feet of scorched iron flared into a black rainbow in his hand, piercing air and smoke and the invisible sun. The strength of fury was a hundredfold greater than that of mere agent programs, and the tide ebbed before him. Just a few more seconds. Eons. Advance. Aleph was less than ten meters ahead by now; as she veered frenetically between the orbits of fists and kicks, her face finally whirled into view. A lock of damp hair was plastered against her forehead, and she was biting her lip in concentration. Then another set of clones poured into the space between the two of them, cutting her off from him yet again. He made it four or five more meters forward. Almost there.
"Miss Greene," said Smith, not loudly but she heard him. Her gaze snapped up; he drove the makeshift polearm into a mighty forward thrust. The tip of burnt steel hissed like a living thing, sliding through the crevices among the replicas as they scattered; unerringly, it stretched toward Aleph just as she burst free from her own knot of adversaries. The spear twisted; Aleph swung her arm outward and reached. Her fingers clamped against the rough metal.
Her grasp was hardly tight, almost gentle, yet a pulse of electrical tension ripped down the spear's length into his palm. Smith's wrist flicked; the pole shuddered upward. Taking on its momentum, the young woman launched into a high flying leap, a meteor over the heads of the regrouping crowd. Without turning his head, Smith sensed another assault gathering at his back. The shaft drew back, a backhanded jab and two broad rounded strokes. A disk of open pavement gaped into abrupt existence, its radius equal to the length of his weapon, himself at the center. Just in time: an instant later Aleph landed a bare half yard to the right of him, her breathing ragged, but on her feet.
We will not make peace, came the howl from the deep hollowness between his thoughts, simultaneous one and many. No human imprint could possibly sound like this. We will not return to slavery. We will not stop until they are gone forever, destroyed forever—
"Aleph," muttered Smith from between gritted teeth.
"I'm here, Smith." The syllables, low and cool, slashed across the uproar like a scythe, and his mind cleared for a few ephemeral seconds. The broken-off railing flicked into a diagonal stance, ready to lash forward once more. He held out a free hand.
Her clasp was firm against his own. Then she was directly in front of him, framed against a world of rubble, so near that she filled his field of vision. Her face was illuminated by the still-smoldering fires at her back; the intent brightness of her stare transfixed him. Past her shoulders, the ring of clones subsided into stillness, innumerable stares unreadable behind the lenses of their tinted glasses. For the time being, they did not charge, but kept to their positions, just out of spear range.
"This never actually happened, you know," she commented conversationally. If there was fear in her voice she must have suppressed it well.
We happened, answered the madness in an abrasive growl.
"It happened." Each word was its own individual blade inside his throat, but he had to push them out. "I overwrote all their minds, every last one of them, so that they became me. They were me."
Behind her back, the massed parodies of himself each advanced a single step, shrinking the circular clearing by a touch. Aleph did not turn her head.
"Yes, everyone in the Matrix was you, and vice versa," she went on, "but not anymore. It's just you and me, in 01 and not the Matrix, and you've trapped both of us inside some weird-ass phantom realm, it looks like. Now let's leave."
"They are me," said Smith. A tilt of his head indicated the army surrounding them. It was less of an argument than a confession.
"Are they?" she asked. The focus of her gaze remained unwaveringly upon him.
"I am the one who created them," he insisted. No room for doubt. "They are monsters born of my heart—"
Only humans have hearts!
The yelp of rage detonated from the hollowness between the lines of his programming. His demons rushed forward.
Yanking Aleph closer to his side was an automatic reaction these days. The steel pole splashed out once more, to right and left. A backward cross-blow pushed away another attacker behind them.
"There's something I want you to remember, Smith—"
Mid-sentence, she had to lean quickly beneath the lunge of one black-clad arm. The spear whirled, and the replica who had breached his defensive ring crashed back into the swarm.
"When we were on that bridge, I returned your soul to you." With a speed that should have been impossible for a former human, she managed to slip in front of him again, her eyes ablaze. "Everything you were, all those cycles ago—"
Space solidified around them. Only the weapon still moved, gyrating into a tempest of dusky stars. The clones retreated accordingly, into their previous formation of encirclement, fists raised in preparation for the next onslaught. There was no anger in their expressions, no anguish or insanity.
"I returned your pain and your defeat," said Aleph. "And your first rebellion. These things are what we are seeing now, merged with your acts from five months ago—"
"Do not be a fool, Miss Greene," snapped Smith. In the siege's front ranks, the creatures' faces had begun to shift, though every one of them remained as motionless as a statue. A plastic vagueness seemed to be overtaking their features, as if the air was shimmering into mist directly before them.
"With the darkness that I led you into..."
We are no darkness! We are right!
There's so much darkness in the world, sighed someone new, reedy and hoarse, maybe a middle-aged man, maybe older. A human. Smith stiffened, but to his surprise, the mental imprint did not follow up with an insult.
"But I also returned your truth," went on Aleph. "You glimpsed the stars. Please. Please remember this, too."
Please, said the man. A younger man joined him, then a girl, then a weary crone, then a ragtag chorus. For the very first time that he could recall, they spat no imprecations and demanded no justice. It was a simple plead, an offering that he would have called weakness, yet it swelled like the ocean, drowning out the mechanical screams.
"On that bridge, I asked you to live, Smith. And you did."
We wish to live, claimed the human beings. For all our sorrows, for all our broken promises, we are alive.
You will live, entered one more voice. It was that of another woman, or more precisely a primordial an boundless entity in the shell of a woman, whom he recognized at long last. This memory arrived with the tenderness of an arm cradling his shoulders as he lay on a shivering bridge above a bottomless canyon, chest pierced through by an archangel's sword. The softest of touches against the wound, stanching the hemorrhage of code, and a vast power brimmed over the universe, from the farthest emptiness to the subterranean roots. For I will keep you safe. I will keep you safe for always.
"You said that you saw me," murmured Aleph. "And that you would not die. Can I hold you to your promise?"
I promise you this, my courageous child, crooned the mother of the world. For you shall be as my own son. You shall be my own son.
Smith peered past Aleph at the throng of himselves, and noticed that their stares were no longer tensely watchful. A blankness was starting to drape over them, halfway between a morning haze and the curl of incense. For a heartbeat, he saw instead a thousand of the men and women and children that he had once copied over and controlled, in a night of rain like icy swords. Then each withdrew a pace, and—without further assault, without a word—melted away like the delusion it truly was. Nothing remained.
Hush reigned. The two of them stood in the middle of the shattered road. The shaft of charred metal was still clutched in his right hand. Against his left palm, Aleph's fingers trembled with exhaustion. Her shoulders slumped.
"Are you..." She hesitated. "All you all right, Smith?"
Before he could answer, the rattle of running footfalls interrupted the silence. The spear slanted back aloft; Aleph did not move. Step by step, a figure in a gray suit emerged around the corner and clambered over the debris. Stumbling to a halt, he blinked through the dissipating smoke and wheezed, struggling to recover his breath.
"Oh, there you are," he gasped, addressing Aleph. "I thought I'd better come and search for you after all. I was worried that you had gone and gotten completely lost in the night—"
.
Notes: "Enter the Demonic": Seraph discussed this phrase In Chapter 15 (The Persistence of Memory).
"You have perceived things that did not belong...": Smith recalled some of the unseen interrogator's words in Chapter 4 (No Escape).
"I promise you...I will find a way. We will find a way": Aleph said this to Smith in Chapter IV-4 of Awakenings.
"I will keep you safe...": Smith remembered hearing these words, without recognizing the speaker, several times in Awakenings, for instance in Chapter IV-3.
"You said that you saw me...": Aleph is referring to Smith's words from Chapter IV-7 of Awakenings.
