Future Winds (15 page)

“They were assaulting a civilian, sexually, verbally, and physically,” he mustered in a low, raspy voice.

“And so, you decided, then and there, that they should die? Be slaughtered like pigs?” she said, her back still facing him.

“She was just a little girl,” he said looking at the floor as he replayed the image in his head of their deaths at his hand. “Maybe they did deserve to die,” he continued coldly. “Maybe they deserved to be put down like the rabid dogs they were.”

Realizing that what he had just said could be taken as an admission of guilt, he fired a wide eyed look up to Fox to see her response.

With her back still facing him, she did not bother to turn. She simply nodded her head and without saying a word, she left the room.

***

Fox and Aisha left the jail room and walked halfway down the thin corridor back towards the front of the carrier. Aisha couldn’t believe it. On the walk down to see Tyler she had watched the video feed with the vice admiral on a tablet and was perplexed in just how exactly Tyler was capable of performing such an act of horror. In his jail cell he looked disgusted in himself, but in the video it almost looked as though he had enjoyed killing the soldiers.

“You know something, if I were in that boy’s shoes, I don’t know if I would have acted any different in all honesty. But there is a chain of command, respect, and rules that we must adhere too if we are to carry on our way of life. If we fail to do that we will be no better than primitive animals and the legacy of our species as a whole will be a red stain in the pages of history.”

“So, what are you going to do with him?” Aisha asked.

“I don’t know,” she sighed as she pressed her temples in with her fingers and closed her eyes. “You let this sort of thing slide and you see repercussions, not only from my peers, but the civilian population. I mean how does it look when the workforce population sees military personnel killing each other?” She paused for a moment and then continued with the answer. “We will give ‘em a day, a final meal and such, then put ‘em down with a bit of dignity in tact via lethal injection.”

Aisha had no comment though it seemed the vice admiral wanted her opinion. She did want to save her friend, however; did not want to say something out of place. She was after all only a personal bodyguard, and while she thought of Tyler as a friend, maybe she really didn’t know him as well as she thought that she had. They met in their training a few years ago and most of the time between then and now was spent in cryosleep.

The visual of him smiling as he gunned down those soldiers was a vision that would reside with her for the rest of her life. It was as true as ever a display of character: portraying sheer ruthlessness, cruelty, and insanity. She didn’t question his reasoning, but the act depicted him a true infidel at heart.

Tyler's robot, Aries, drifted down the hallway towards them and silently passed by as she headed into the jail room to visit her imprisoned friend.

***

Tyler slumped back on the metal cot and slammed the back of his head down. The dry, coagulated blood from the wound given to him by Kaito re-opened. Warm blood ran down the back of his neck and smeared onto the cot. The hydraulic door opened again and without moving his head, his eyes crept over to see Aries come into the room.

“Hey, Tyler,” she called out to him in her usual tone.

“Hey, Aries,” he responded flatly.

She looked him over from outside the cell. “You are bleeding,” she exclaimed.

“Yea. It’s fine,” he eased.

A few minutes of silence passed while she hovered up and down, continuously watching him as if waiting for something. “Are you afraid of death, Tyler?” she asked.

He thought about it for a minute. He knew he was going to die, but it wasn’t until then that the emotion of it all really seemed to sink in. “Yes.”

“Do you know what death is?”

“I have a pretty good idea.”

“Do you think that you will meet God?”

“I’m not so sure God exists.”

“Well, the universe as we know it is endless. Realities and dimensions exceed that which your mind, or my processor, can even begin to imagine. Cats, dogs, robots, and man alike, we all live within our own reality that exists on the same plane of laws and physics we are programed to perceive. Given that intelligent life outside of our own native galaxy is now known to exist, one can draw the mathematical conclusion that a being transcending in power well beyond that which we could ever truly comprehend not only exists, but could also very well know of our existence in great detail.”

“Wow,” Tyler frowned, “That was quite the answer.”

A few minutes of silence passed as Tyler thought about what she had said.

Most all of humanity disregarded religion when life was proven to exist elsewhere in the galaxy, but her theory is one backed by math. If life exists in endless space, there is no reasoning for the intelligence of that life to range from a single celled organism to a form of life so far progressed into its existence that it transcended multiple dimensions and realities. Perhaps a being even existed with the ability to craft, shape, and manipulate elements--the very pillars of all creation as we know it.
The notion scared Tyler beyond belief.

“That girl you saved, you did not know her?”

Tyler paused in answering as he tried to shift his thinking away from endless space and back into the room he resided within. “No, I did not,” he said with a sigh.

“Then why did you save her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.”

Tyler could not believe it. Since meeting Aries he had grown highly affectionate of the bot, though it was artificial, something about its level of intelligence and morality had led him towards holding her in high regard. Until now, that is, she had seemed cold and heartless. Perhaps that was because she indeed did not have a heart to feel anything at all.

He remained silent, not knowing what exactly she wanted of him. A few minutes passed and with time a tear quietly began to drip down his cheek.

“I should never have overstepped my bounds, Tyler. I was not instructed to interfere with your situation, but I did anyway.” Her LED lights increased in the speed in which they blinked, suggesting her processor was under tremendous stress.

Tyler slowly repositioned himself to sit upright to face and pay attention to her.

“You are my friend, Tyler. You expressed an emotional desire and I fed into your aspirations.”

“I do not follow,” he said, squinting his eyes and lowering his brows.

“Maybe I am as much to blame for killing those soldiers as you are, but you wanted to do it. Your mind begged for the courage,” she defended.

He stood to his feet, walked over to the bars that separated him from the bot, and spoke very carefully. “Aries, what are you talking about?”

“You wanted to kill that man and his peers but your conscience acts as a safety switch. I merely flipped it off and allowed your instincts loose.”

Tyler's heart sunk into his knees. He couldn’t believe it. How did the thought not cross his mind that the robot, synched into his nervous system, could have played a role in his outburst of character? “What right did you have?” he said softly in disbelief.

“I’m sorry Tyler, I-”

Tyler placed his hands on the cold steel bars that entrapped him and cut off her attempted apology with a fit of animosity, “Who gave you permission to alter my psyche?”

Aries said nothing.

“Who said you could fuck with
my
mind?” he continued as he submitted himself into a full blown tantrum: shaking himself into a fit of rage against the steel bars that did not move or care for his agitation. Ceasing his outburst, he slid down to the ground and began to sob. “I am going to die in here because of you.”

“I will never let you die, Tyler Flynn.”

“You sentenced me to death,” he huffed as his eyes filled with water.

“I helped you save one of your own and now I will ask you do the same for me.”

He shook his head like a child combating inconvenient truths. He did not want to believe that the series of events that had landed him in this cell had ever even truly occurred. He wanted to confess to Fox that it wasn’t him. It was really Aries but, in all reality, that would be a lie. Killing those soldiers was his desire and he was the one who murdered each and every one of them.

“Scorpio is alive. I want to save him,” she said.

Tyler said nothing as he ignored her. Instead he reflected on his own fate. He was going to die. The fear of nothingness in death was one that knotted his gut and wrenched his soul.

“So, will you help me in recovering him?”

“Who?” he questioned, coming late into her new conversation.

“Scorpio.”

Leon's drone,
Tyler thought,
so what about a stupid, worthless robot?

“I will get you out of here and we can go save him together, okay?”

“He is software. Can’t you just redownload his spark into another vessel?” Tyler spat.

“I can not do that without him being present and alive to transfer his essence into another. Not to mention, his current hardware is far greater than most artificial beings in existence today. We need him if we are to survive on this hostile planet. The last time he had a full systems cloud backup was almost a decade ago. Re-downloading his consciousness would be like reincarnating him as a child. And cloning AI is not like copying and pasting software. There are unique keys that bind to each drone that, if replicated, would lose the data packs that make them supreme in thought. Without our encrypted spark keys, we would just be choice computer powerhouses, but we would not be artificial intelligence.”

On his knees, Tyler glanced up to her. She hovered on the outside of the cell, watching him with the steady pace of her LED lights blinking, awaiting his response.

He sniffled back a set of tears.
How could she be asking me for help right now after she allowed me to commit the heinous acts I was never hard wired to commit?

“Tyler?” she pressed for an answer.

“And what if I don’t go?” he said as he looked again to the floor.

The levees broke and the water contained by the floodgates began to flow freely from his eyes. Tears streamed down his face at an indiscriminate pace. They weaved and turned about through the hairs of his unshaven face, and dripped to the cold, hard floor.

“Then they will kill you, Tyler Flynn.”

***

“Looks like an armadillo tank with a couple special ops guys are going to be helping us out,” Lanfen called out over the radio to Jason.

“Toss them the coordinates to where we are heading. I am sure if we head in the direction the monolith was venturing to from the location we last saw it, won’t take us long to spot it once more,” he commanded.

“They are already in route. I guess they are packing enough explosives to vaporize a small country too.”

“Sweet, a private late night light show,” he said with a chuckle.

The two pilots flew mid speed for about fifteen minutes, scanning the eerie night sky which was lit up due to the size and proximity of the planets’ colossal moon. Lanfen mostly throttled back and forth while Jason made a spectacle of unnecessarily dips and dives through the canyons and between mountains.

“Is that him?” Lanfen called out, breaking the silence.

The details of the faint silhouette were filled in clearly as they approached. Sure enough there it was, the largest living creature known to man. And here they were, about to get rid of it like some rabid infected animal. The flowers on its back had turned white under the moon lit sky, and tiny illuminated orbs drifted out from them. Glow in the dark pollens trailed out into the desert landscape, spreading life in a lifeless wasteland of hardship.

“Yea, that’s him. What channel is that armadillo on?”

“Delta Sixer Charlie,” she answered.

“Alright, switch over to that with me,” he said, punching the three-digit code into his comm system.

“Hey, ground grunts, we found the target. So on me double time.”

***

“Looks like we are about ten minutes out,” Leon said into the radio.

Kaito was stuck in the back glued to the controls of the vehicle’s weapons system, encased in what felt like a sea of explosives while they navigated through a jagged, rocky terrain.

“There is a canyon approximately two miles ahead,” the vehicles AI bot, Amy called out, “Going around it will add nine minutes to our eta. Shall I reroute?”

“Can we jump it?” Leon asked with a spark of madness in his eye.

“If we disengage gravity stabilizers and punch vertical thrusters to their limit for twenty seconds, we should be able to float right over,” she informed.

“You sure about that?” Leon asked, scratching his beard with one hand while he controlled the vehicle with his other.