The Desolate Guardians Read online

  Chapter Seven

  Haven't heard from you in a few days, the message said. Are you alright?

  I stared at the two sentences for quite some time, failing to comprehend that they were actually meant for me. I'd been answering messages, coordinating responses, and watching the worlds burn for so many uninterrupted hours? I couldn't remember the last time I'd eaten, or slept, or even taken a walk around my office building prison.

  They'd tried to destroy themselves. Or, someone had tried to destroy them from the inside out. I'd spent eleven hours breaking into a military mainframe to shut off a nuclear launch countdown gone awry. Who was in charge on that world? Why had they tried to detonate all of their nuclear weapons? I was still getting messages from people there, all desperate for help against black transmorphic spheres that kept evolving new defenses against anything used against them - black transmorphic spheres that liked to stab people through the skull and then take up residence inside. Were these the brain-eaters Jonathan had mentioned? Or were they a new threat?

  Somebody high up had panicked, and started a twelve-hour countdown to global suicide.

  I'd managed to turn it off? with four minutes to spare.

  Haven't heard from you in a few days. I stared at the two sentences that had been meant for me in particular. Are you alright?

  I had no way of knowing - had the writer of the first message I'd read, the man trapped eleven thousand feet underground with the fate of the world at his fingertips, been the one to start that countdown? Had he seen what was happening on the surface and given up?

  I didn't think so. The military mainframe I'd gotten into hadn't been nearly as secure and high-tech as the encryption of his message had implied. Most nuclear arsenals on human worlds had been built during the Cold War - an era they'd all shared - and the technology was equally as outdated, often scarily so.

  I stared at the two sentences that had been sent with concern for me, something nobody else had really been shown during my efforts. They had their own situations to worry about, and their own homes to defend.

  My author contact had remembered that there was a person behind the screen.

  "The candle I lit during the Game started a fire," I wrote back slowly. "I watched it burn out a couple rooms, until the sprinklers took care of it."

  Oh? wow, I'm sorry.

  "It's fine. I kind of wanted it to take this whole place down. I've smashed all the windows, flattened half the cubicles, and trashed all the pictures my coworkers left behind."

  Are you losing it?

  I sighed. I was considering lying, but, as I watched my map, the circle I'd thought I'd saved went red. Connection lost. I stared at it for maybe thirty seconds, too numb to feel anything. Had I missed something? Had I made some error? Had they overridden my shutdown? We'd actually lost one. We'd actually lost an entire world while I'd watched. The sheer size and complexity of the defense efforts had practically guaranteed somebody would slip through the cracks eventually, but I hadn't? thought about how it would actually feel to realize, finally, that it was a losing battle, a battle of attrition that we could not win? a crushing fist of intense stress squeezed my awareness, and I felt like bursting.

  Was I losing it? "Yes."

  I've been thinking about your situation. I enjoy puzzles, and you've got the mother of all puzzles on your hands. We're going to think you out of this situation.

  "Alright?" For some reason, I actually believed there was hope. He seemed sensible, and a fresh perspective might see things I couldn't.

  Let's start with the basics, then. Do you have hands?

  "What?"

  Do you have hands? Simple question.

  I looked down? at my outstretched hands, fingers poised over my keyboard. "Yes."

  Are you breathing?

  I suddenly became aware of my own breathing as my chest rose and fell.

  What about your eyes? Are you blinking?

  If I hadn't been before, I certainly was after thinking about it. "Damnit, stop," I said, annoyed at suddenly having all sorts of bodily functions brought to my awareness.

  So we can reasonably guess you're alive, right?

  I froze. "You think I might be dead?"

  Well, no. From what you told me, that mind-entity used a different word to describe you. In a way, it specifically listed doomed and dead as things that you were not.

  "So I'm not dead?" Aware of them as I was, I took a moment to widen my eyes with surprise. "And I'm not doomed!"

  Right. You're vwaal, whatever that is. If you're not dead, then you're not a ghost, or a spirit, or some other nonsense. If you're not doomed, there's still hope for you yet, in some small amount. And you drew the attention of that entity by thinking very loudly, so you've got a real mind.

  "Of course I've got a mind," I responded, typing the words out on my keyboard. I stretched my hands, suddenly aware that they must be tired from my endless days of working.

  I said a real mind, my author contact wrote. I suspected, from the details of your situation, that you might be an artificial intelligence. Possibly a backup system, since you don't mention anything prior to a few weeks ago.

  Still consciously aware of my body, I swallowed uncomfortably. He thought I might be an artificial intelligence? A computer? I blinked, and clenched my hands. I felt floaty and disconnected at times, trapped here in the dark for so long, but I knew I was alive. I knew it.

  Which brings me to my next question, he continued. How long have you been working there?

  "Two or three years," I replied. "I remember it well."

  Right, that bright day of training.

  I frowned.

  Where do you live?

  I looked down at my hands for a moment. "An apartment on the west side."

  Alright? hmm.

  I waited for two minutes until his next question arrived. I wondered why he was asking about me rather than my situation.

  Here's one that might disturb you: what's your name?

  I laughed. "It's -"

  My mouth hung in place, open at the end of its last fading syllable.

  I was worried this might be the case, he wrote slowly. It's not just the building, and your coworkers. There's something wrong with you, too. He paused again, probably thinking. Do you have a personnel file?

  "Maybe," I said, struggling to remember my own name. "But without my name, I wouldn't know who to look for?"

  Frustrating, isn't it? Perhaps by design. Now there's one detail I've been hesitant to mention as yet. You're not going to enjoy it.

  "What is it? Tell me. I have to get out of here."

  Alright? it's the phones. You said there were people screaming on the phones.

  "Yes?"

  We have a tendency, as people, to dehumanize traumatizing things like that. I don't know how often I've read stories where strange screaming is used as a background scary detail. But, you know what? A scream requires a person behind it. Someone conscious, awake, and in pain.

  I let my face go slack as I realized the truth of what he was saying.

  I suspect you're not alone there at all. I hate to say this, but your salvation may lie in the most basic of all horror questions: who was phone?

  I gave the message a long - and deserved - dour look.

  Then, I jumped up, and ran out of the server room. Heading for one of the cubicle farms I hadn't destroyed in one of my despairing rages, I brought a landline phone down from a desk and sat in front of it, steeling myself. Alright, let's do this?

  The screaming began the instant the phone left the hook.

  Heart racing - I was so aware of it, I felt it in my head - I lifted the phone to my ear. My ear, too, seemed very vivid to me, running chill with the office air conditioning. I began experiencing a drilling pain as I brought the screams close, but I fought through the pain. "Hello?"

  The screams changed tenor and tone, briefly, as if the people in pain had heard me.

  "Hello?" I shouted.

  A choir of agon
ized shouts turned toward me, in an aural sense, and I almost recoiled. "Shut up! Just shut up!" I screamed back at them. "One at a time!"

  I caught my breath as they went silent.

  One voice - hollow, trembling, and pained - asked a single word. "Heath?"

  My entire head suddenly tingled with fire and electricity. A flood of images and associations washed through me, too much to comprehend, and I smiled haggardly at the cubicle wall.

  Heath. Heath, from I.T. - had the weeks trapped here in the dark, alone, made me temporarily forget? "Yes, it's me," I said into the phone, suddenly acutely aware that I'd found something else very important. "What's going on?"

  "Oh my God, oh my God," said an unknown woman whose voice I thought I vaguely recognized. "You're still there. We thought we'd lost you. Heath, where've you been?"

  The first man's voice added to hers. "Heath! Are you alright?"

  "Am I alright?" I asked, growing confused. "You're the ones screaming!"

  A moment of silence echoed loudly between us.

  "He doesn't know," a teenage male voice said, almost sadly.

  "Where do you think you are, Heath?" asked a wise, slow, and older voice.

  A second woman commented, too, her voice overlapping with the other speakers. "Heath, you have to wake up."

  That drilling pain from the screams had lingered in my forehead, and now seemed to intensify, forcing me to wince. That's what the eldest boy had said to me a few days ago: Man, you gotta wake up. Somethin's wrong with you. What was I missing? What part of me remained shorn away, as if I lay dreaming?

  "We've been trapped like this for over a year," the first male voice said again, his words evincing the growing pain of that imprisonment. "Heath, you have to end this."

  I thought back to the piles I'd seen on the security feeds. Why had the children battered them with weapons? It was obvious, now that I thought about it: they were ensuring, out of a sense of anything-goes precaution, that they would not be attacked by zombies. Hadn't their protector - my only friend - told them that zombies weren't real?

  I supposed it might never have come up in casual conversation.

  I knew who the voices on the phone were. "You're my coworkers."

  "Yes."

  I sat for a moment, just feeling my breathing, before I said it aloud: "You're dead."

  "Not quite," the man answered. "But we'd like to be."

  "We've all agreed," the first woman chimed in, almost hopeful and relieved. "This is no existence."

  I lolled my head back and stared up at the ceiling. My disbelieving gaze followed the white square patterns above. "You're vwaal?"

  "Where did you hear that word?" the old male voice snapped. "No matter. You have to snap out of whatever's wrong with you, and end this. You have to kill us."

  "No," I sobbed and laughed. "I'm alone. I'm alone. I can save you. Maybe -"

  "Nobody's coming, are they?" the second female voice asked. "I've got my son here. There are children here, trapped with us. It was bring your kid to work day. If God exists, he's a bastard for this."

  "Keep it together, Marjorie," the older male said. "We've got to get Heath to kill us, or who knows how many years we'll spend like this? The nuclear reactors could power this place for centuries."

  "God, why? Why?"

  "Heath -"

  "Mom, is that the guy?"

  "Heath!"

  I clamped my eyes shut as they began shouting at me. "Tell me what's happening," I insisted, repeating my words until they stopped clamoring.

  Finally, the first male voice spoke to me again. "Heath, where do you think you are?"

  "I'm in a cubicle right now? I can't get out of the building? and the whole place is underground?"

  "I see. Is there a server room?"

  "Yes, I work there."

  "Good. You need to go there and look around. I believe it will be behind your desk, on the wall. Please, hurry. There is nothing more maddening and painful than being awake, aware, and helpless every single second of every single day."

  I lowered the phone back into place, my eyes functioning, but my gaze unseeing. Blankly, I got up and walked back to the server room. I moved through the server stacks, enjoying the breezes from their fans on my skin. I approached my desk, but did not sit. Instead, I looked at the wall.

  It was right there - it had been there the whole time. I'd been aware of the poster on my wall, but never looked at it, never comprehended it. It had just? been there. There were a dozen other posters in a dozen other cubicles and break rooms I had never looked at, either.

  READING THIS? it asked.

  If you're reading this poster, then something has gone terribly wrong. Undoubtedly, you feel trapped, scared, and/or confused. It's important that you calm down and understand your situation.

  First: provisions have been made for this situation. You are not trapped here.

  Second: you are not being held against your will.

  Third: you are not dead.

  Proceed inside.

  I felt weak as I read it, and nearly fell; I caught myself with a hand to the wall. The smooth white paneling felt cool to the touch. How many new sensations had I felt since the author had made me aware of my body? So strange, that I'd been oblivious to so much?

  ?including a door, apparently.

  There was a door in the wall that I'd never bothered to think about.

  Right next to the poster sat a nondescript white door.

  Pushing through, I found myself in a vast rectangular space designed to look much like a server room - except this one was white - startlingly white, bright, and clean. Large white cubes sat at regular intervals. Each had a monitor set into the side, and I moved from one to the next, watching individuals I began to recognize as coworkers as they moved around blank white rooms much like the one I was moving through.

  As I passed one, a haggard-looking man with a foot-long peppered beard leapt up to the feed. His voice came in quietly over the speaker. "Heath?"

  I faced the monitor. "You can see me?"

  "We've been screaming to try to get your attention for months," he breathed, clutching the camera with an overjoyed grin. "Or, at least, that's why we started?"

  "What is this?" I asked.

  "You don't know?" he asked, narrowing his eyes. "How much do you remember?"

  "Bits and pieces," I said, shaking my head. "I feel? scrambled. I've been spending most of my time here alone, coordinating local defenses against the Crushing Fist."

  He stared at me for a moment, and, then, his eyes softened. "I suppose that's an appropriate name for it." He looked to his right. "Heath, we need you to turn us off."

  "Why can't I just save you?" I asked, frustrated to the point of near-crying.

  "You always want to help. If all else fails, you still keep going. That's why I knew we could count on you. That's also why it'll be hard to accept this: we died, buddy. We died over a year ago." He gave a long sigh. "We didn't have much time when the shit hit the fan here, so we tried to upload our consciousnesses to the system. I mean, it worked? but without bodies, without admin rights, and with nobody coming back to save us, we just managed to create our own private hell."

  I frowned, full of heat and anger and frustration and confusion and anguish. "But the poster says I'm not dead?"

  "You're not," he laughed. "By we I meant us. The forty-eight of us that worked here. We're just computer simulations, now. You're not like us."

  I almost didn't want to accept the faint sliver of hope growing inside me. "I'm still alive?"

  "Of course, buddy. I sealed you off so you'd be safe. Last thing I ever did? if I'm really me, that is."

  I took a deep breath and stilled my heart. "What do I do?"

  "There's a switch at the back of the room. I can almost see it from here. Maddening, right? Just turn it off. The blue one. That'll kill the processing power for all of us. We're probably eating up most of the system resources. Then? the green and red switches are for you." He sm
iled sadly. "If you want out."

  I walked past them in a surreal fog, watching each of my former coworkers rage, cry, and rock back and forth in their blank prisons. Had they been here, screaming, the whole time? Of course they had? and I'd been oblivious? for some reason?

  I looked back.

  They each watched me from their monitors, praying, laughing, and cheering. I remembered each one, only now, as if their faces had emerged from haze.

  I flicked the blue switch.

  The monitors went dark one by one, and the room first got louder as exuberant shouts filled the air, and then quieter, as those voices went dark.

  In a few moments, I was alone.

  What he'd said had been right: they'd been using a tremendous amount of processing power. As soon as the last monitor faded to black, a rush of energy and awareness hit me. I could suddenly remember? everything. The fog was gone. The haze had lifted. My brain felt sharp and aware for the first time in months.

  And I suddenly knew, for a fact, that I was not an artificial intelligence, and I was not dead.

  I was alive!

  This, and a thousand other things, I suddenly knew.

  I faced the green switch and the red switch, and regarded the two posters above them.

  ---

  I slipped the helmet off and blinked with my real eyes for the first time in over a year. My arms cracked and snapped as I moved them under my own willpower. I could see electro-stimulators that had exercised my muscles during my long sleep, and I carefully pulled IV tubes out from my forearms before removing the stimulator patches.

  Climbing up from the chair, I immediately fell to cold, smooth marble, and I remained there for a time, enjoying real breathing and real sensations.

  The underground office building had been a simulated environment. I knew that now. Human brains weren't designed for direct access to the network, and the false environment had served as an interface. The building had been locked down, not to trap me, but because nobody had designed anything beyond it.

  I was still in the white room - the real version this time, behind the sealed door the eldest boy could not possibly have opened when the children had come here. If only he'd gone one room further, he would have found me? asleep, my mind adrift in the network? but he couldn't have gone further, because my work buddy had sealed me in to protect me.

  And I'd have been fine, even then, if the forty-eight other minds hadn't used up so many resources that I'd forgotten myself.

  Staggering onto uncertain footing, I moved along the walls, clutching my way toward the exit. It opened at my touch, and I found myself in the server room again - the real one, this time.

  I could even see the messages I'd received and written open on the monitor. My experiences had been real, they'd just been? virtual.

  Clambering through the rainbow-lit darkness of the racks themselves, I reached the odd heavy metal door to the server room. I knew what it was now that my mind was my own: it used a special array of static generators to keep dust out of the room. That was it. It wasn't a portal, or an elevator, or anything else I'd theorized.

  I took a moment of silence as I found the bodies in the hallways.

  I'd been under when it'd happened, so I didn't know what threat had killed them all, but I'd seen my only friend's swarm of children storm through here a few days before, so I knew the threat must have departed by now.

  Stumbling to the nearest break room, I raided a fridge. Our food at this facility was designed to last, and last it had. I broke some into frozen chunks and stuffed it in my mouth, relishing the burn, and then I left some out to thaw.

  After a few minutes spent gathering strength, I made a journey to the windows.

  Outside, across the parking lot, lay a bombed-out building I recognized. The cars in the lot had been trashed and devastated in various ways, and I saw a few bodies lying on the pavement. Is this what the children would have seen, had they ventured near a window? Oh, the comedy of errors that had kept the truth from me for so long?

  I returned to my desk in the server room after a time. My world was gone. Everyone I'd known was dead? but all I felt was relief. These things were still foggy to me, after so long absent from my mind, and I was just happy to be free and alive.

  I found it sublimely hilarious, and I couldn't quite describe why: even in the midst of terror and imprisonment, I'd sat at a virtual recreation of this desk, and helped people. Now, with the ability to go anywhere - and no living world to actually go to - I was still going to sit here, survive on company food, and do my job.

  Because I wanted to help. I felt like I was part of something.

  There were people that needed me? not because I was some hero. Far from it. I just happened to be a guy on a computer, in the know, at a time when knowledge was everything.

  Sighing and shaking my head with a smile, I returned to my messages.

  "I got out," I wrote to my author contact - no, my author friend. "I'm out!"

  What are you talking about? he asked.

  "I was connected to the system in an immersive virtual reality chair, complete with intravenous nutrition and electro-stimulators. Someone put thought into serious long-term uses for that chair."

  Heath, I don't understand.

  "Wait, how do you know my name?" I wrote, confused. "I never told you. I only just remembered."

  You said you found out what happened to you, and you sounded like you were having a complete breakdown. You said you were dying from a terminal illness, and wanted to help people, so you volunteered. You said the posters told you that you were surgically removed from your body and kept alive as a brain in a medical vat, to serve as the most capable, loyal, and unhackable network processing center possible. You said they left you two switches: one red, to kill you, and free you, once you wanted out? and one green, to erase your personal memories so that you could keep working without the pain of knowing your situation.

  My stomach twisted up in a knot. "I said that? God, is that true? Am I just a brain in a vat somewhere in the building?" A horrific sense of terror began swelling up through me. "Did I really say that?!" I checked through my logs for the past hour, but they'd been deleted? because of the AI shutdowns? I couldn't be sure? I couldn't be sure! Was I just like those men, women, and children I'd just freed? If the green switch removed my personal memories, and left my skills intact? God, how many times had this happened? How many times had I used the green switch because I?

  ?because I'd wanted to help out?

  He didn't respond for several minutes, probably watching me panic. At long last, he wrote: Oh, no. I'm just messing with you. I'm a horror author, remember? I think up the worst possible scenarios all the time.

  The panic drained out of me, replaced by a burgeoning sense of relief and purpose. "Lord, not funny. That is not funny at all."

  Sorry. I guess I couldn't resist such a good prank.

  Remembering that I had a headset here in the real world that could dictate my spoken words and allow me to interact from anywhere in the building, I donned it and spoke into it. "You got me good. I was freaking out for a moment, there."

  Yep, got you good.

  He paused, and I waited, expectant. Damn good joke...

  Quite a few strange happenings in my hometown the past few days, he finally wrote. I could use some assistance.

  I smiled at my monitor. "Absolutely. How can I help?"

  About the Author

  I'm an author of science fiction and horror. I write a wide range; everything from short story anthologies to full-length novels. As an avid fan of both genres myself, I try to create engaging works that, above all else, make the reader think.

  You can follow more releases, or give comments at:

  Website: MattDymerski.com

  Twitter: @MattDymerski

  Email: [email protected]

  I'm always interested in hearing from my readers!

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