The Right

The Right/2509

By Mordecai J Banda


AUTHOR NOTE: This story was written two years ago, and this is my final draft of it. When you read it, read it as a tale simply to be enjoyed and to gain some knowledge. I have washed my hands of it, after reworking it for a whole day, and this is my finished product. The formatting may be a bit strange, and i might fix that but i'm confident that it is completely readable.

My special thanks go to: Farzwhal < You had better seriously check his port out, all sci-fi lovers!

And: sbedwards < Wherever he is now...

---

Alfred woke up.

His first knowledge of existence was a low insistent beeping. After that, Pain. He tried to scream, but only a hoarse rattle escaped his mouth. The pain subsided, and then he opened his eyes.

There was a gray slab or something with a thin glowing rectangle. His brain slowly comprehended that the 'slab' was 'ceiling' and the 'thin glowing rectangle' was a fluorescent lamp. There was a different tone to the beeping now.

"Beginning stimulation of the limbic system." A voice announced.

Electric shock that jolted Alfred's entire body, and suddenly he knew. His name was Alfred Kolinsky, Neurologist, and he was in Leviathan, the underground facility he had been asleep in for... A very long time. Alfred tested his limbs, found them functioning pretty well. The computer had probably been prepping his body while he was unconscious (dead).

Alfred rolled off the metal surface he was on and landed with a thump on his right knee. He grimaced in pain and rubbed the sore limb, rising to his feet as he studied the room. It looked the same way it had before. A long rectangular room lined with bulging white cylindrical cryogenic sleeping-pods (cryo-pods) on either wall. The pods were each fixed at a right angle to metallic ‘beds’, similar to the one he had been on. There was plenty of overhead lighting, and a black rubber track divided the middle of the room. Short, rectangular metallic slabs sat next to the ‘beds’, a few feet higher than the platforms themselves. From what Alfred could remember… they were for holographic status readouts.

If all calculations had been correct, he, with the others, had been asleep for around 200 years.

Alfred flexed his fingers. He definitely still felt like a thirty year old. That was good. He knew he had an advantage by being the first to wake, he decided to make the most of it.

"Computer? Are you there? It’s me, Alfred Kolinsky."

Apart from the beeping, there was silence. Alfred looked over his shoulder so see that the slab beside his metal bed had a small red LED blinking on it. He couldn't recall what that meant. Alfred shrugged, and called out again,

"Computer?"

Silence.

Alfred walked, his legs felt weak, but he could support himself. The cryo-pods left and right seemed silent, and Alfred wondered if there was anyone in them. Maybe he had been the one who had over slept. In that case he needn't wait and fret for who knew how long. To be sure, he walked over to one of the cryo-pods at the end of the room.

The pod was spotless, it’s extruding features and metallic surface seemed so perfect it was menacing. Alfred touched the pod, and the white dissolved to reveal its contents. There was no one inside. He let go, the white clouding the pod again, and began walking to the end of the room, where, if he remembered correctly, the deceptively grey wall opened to reveal a staircase going upwards.

The walk took ages; the pods and the silent room stared down at him. Alfred wondered what had happened to the computer, Leviathan. It was possible that it had malfunctioned. 200 years was a long time, and the computer nut Eric had predicted a possible deterioration for the computer's behavioral patterns, but hopefully it wasn't that serious. Besides, Eric had always been a pessimist.

Suddenly a gray wall was in front of Alfred, and as he reached out his hand to explore its blank surface, a thin rectangular line opened in the wall, releasing a faint blue glow, then the door slid downwards and out of the way with an ancient grinding noise. It revealed smooth, cement steps going upwards. The headspace in the corridor was small compared to Alfred's tall frame. Alfred ducked, clearing the low ceiling and straightened as the staircase opened up, from then on there was plenty of room upwards. Simple blue bulbs lit the way, and Alfred began the ascent.

He emerged into the fair-sized kitchen area. It was just one of many. Without much of a warning or preparation, Alfred was greeted by the sight of five of his colleagues weaving past the tables and dishing plates with various foods.

Alfred was stunned to see them all out and about, and he felt unsure of himself. Were these his long lost friends? Madeline, Botanist, was the first to notice him; she was stuffing her face with pizza,

"Hi there, Alf"

Then everyone noticed him, except Peter (Statistician), who was too busy savaging a sandwich to care.

Welcome back, Alfred,” said the muscled black man leaning against the counter.

Alfred nodded at him, “Sydney.”
He stared at the others one by one. They all stared back at him.

"Hello? How old are we now?" Alfred greeted nervously. What do you say after waking up from a 200 years sleep?

"Ha ha, Alfred, you were always the joker."

The sarcasm gave Alfred a bout of nostalgia; it was, of course, the pale Physicist, Johansen Smithson. He wasn't eating anything, just sipping water.

Alfred nodded to him, then smiled, "Left anything for me?"

---

”You know, it makes me feel sick, eating this sandwich.” Sydney commented. Alfred looked over at him, taking a break from guzzling an energy drink,

“Yeah, why’s that?”

Sydney frowned and held out the sandwich, “Well, we were frozen just like this, you know? It feels sort of weird. We were like meat packed in a-”

“Sydney, your disgusting.” Peter growled, bits of his latest sandwich were flecked across his mouth.

Sydney grinned, “You're the one smooching your sandwich.”

Madeline chuckled, “Sydney don’t start. You have a bad history with relationships.”

At that there was a short, uncomfortable silence. Sydney smiled slightly, “By now they’re probably dust.”

The silence was profound after that. The others present in the kitchen noticed. Alfred decided this was time to start getting serious. After all, monumental things had happened, the world was still as serious as it had been centuries ago. There was no longer any family to talk about.

"Guys, we had really better get to business." Alfred began.

Madeline sighed heavily, "There you go again, switching from humor to seriousness in a flash." But she obviously appreciated it,

Johansen scratched his balding scalp, "Well, it’s about time."


They filed out of the kitchen, weaving along deserted corridors, headed for the conference room. On one of these corridors leading to the elevator, they met a bunch of scientists talking and walking in the same direction.

“Johansen. Mr. Kolinsky!” The foremost woman exclaimed, she offered her and, which Johansen shook. Alfred nodded at everyone behind her in general. He could barely remember some of the faces.

“We’re headed to the conference room.” Johansen said.
---
Mixing with that group of scientists brought their number up to twenty. The group finally settled in the conference room. This was one of the most colorful rooms in the facility. The furnishings were mostly soft, and the seating was a single three-quarter sofa circle facing a large rectangular schematics platform that used hologram technology. So far there wasn't any reply from Leviathan, the artificial intelligence in charge of the facility. A.I’s were named after their respective centers of operation.

The lights worked, and only Eric, who was not one of the twenty who were available at that moment, could operate the hologram to some extent. The room was large, with plenty of lighting and doors leading to other parts of the facility. So far no one had gone exploring, and the meeting began with the few people available scattered about on the large sofa.

Alfred stood up when everyone settled down, "Good... uh, day, everyone."

No one replied. Alfred was relieved to see that all the serious countenances had returned to his colleague’s faces. It was comforting and very much less awkward.
Alfred was about to walk to the center and switch on the schematics hologram when, finally, Leviathan spoke, "Welcome back ladies, gentlemen."

Some were startled, but they all quickly recovered.

"Levi." Alfred greeted with a nod to the roof, where the voice came from.

"Good to see you alive and kicking, Professor Kolinsky."

"You took pretty long to wake up, Levi, what happened? You snoozed?"

There was a derisive chuckle from Leviathan, "Not really possible, I was too busy pampering all of you."

Alfred sat back down on his chair,

"What's the exact day today, computer?"

There was a pause, then: "0201 New Era, 26 August, Sunday. Its summer."

There was a pause; Alfred was beaten to asking the next question by one of the more obscure members of the science team. Alfred just couldn't place a name to his face, "What’s the current status of the environment? I presume the sensors are all still functioning?"

"They're all online” Levi replied cheerfully, “they had perfect protection from any flora or fauna. As for the environment, take a look for yourself..."

The hologram crackled, and lit up in a glorious rectangle of vivid color. (From everyone's vantage they could view the scene as though on a personal screen, though there was an amount of distortion if one moved about too much.) But as for the view itself, it was beautiful. It was green, and fresh. Light danced about, and trees were everywhere. The soil looked so brown and fresh, and red and yellow flowers were in the bloom. Alfred felt a pang of childish excitement and relief. Tears almost came to his eyes, and he rubbed them away furiously.

"To emphasize the difference, I could show you 202 years back, when the world was dead." Leviathan offered.

"No thanks, Levi, we've had enough of that nightmare." Madeline answered for everyone present.

There was silence, and then Alfred spoke, "Computer, this is amazing. Are you telling me, without any error at all, the world is alive again? No problems at all?"

There was a pause, "Well, Alfred. Though the population of the planet, from what I can gather, is drastically low. There is hope.

"Unfortunately, I’m afraid I have some bad news about some of the others in the crew. Some did not survive the hibernation process. Fifty-Seven died due to various complications. I'm sorry, Professor."

Alfred exchanged glances with the others; Madeline cupped her mouth and gazed worriedly at the hologram showing the names of the dead. Alfred tried his best not to look at the names. He couldn't handle the death of such precious lives. When the list finished, Alfred asked, "Okay, Levi, what of the others? What’s taking them so long?"

There was a pause, and then a familiar voice filtered on the screen, "Hello, Alfred."

Alfred sat bolt upright, "Eric! My God, Eric, you’re alive!"

"Nice to meet you too, brain guy. I've got thirty people on my end. There is one batch of civilians remaining to wake. As for the others... I presume you've heard?"

"Yeah. Very unfortunate. Where are you?"

"Well, I’m up in The Brain and from what I have on screen, it seems like the majority of others are at the second conference room. Some are still asleep, but I’m handling that with Levi. We’ve begun the second phase of this operation."

Alfred caught himself before he asked 'what operation?' Of course he knew what the operation was. Step One of the Omega Phoenix project had been the cryogenic sleep, from which he had just awakened.

Step Two was the rebooting of all Leviathan electronic systems and getting the facility to run in full working order.

Step Three was to contact any possible survivors, which was the most important step. Alfred passionately hoped that this step was not in vain. That people across the planet had somehow survived the nuclear war and its deadly winter.

Step Four, the last one in the operation before they began officially living life, were the excavations into the outside world.

Alfred swallowed and then nodded, "Good luck, Eric, and please, keep us updated."

There was a few seconds of silence. Alfred leaned closer,

"Eric? Levi, what h-"

A flat voice came on the speakers, cutting Alfred off mid-sentence, "This is Eric Orion.” The voice said, “this is an emergency announcement for Alfred Kolinsky, Bruno has bitten master, Gate 3 please, three - one - four - two - zero"

Then the voice crackled out of existence, and Levi returned to the speakers, apparently finishing an announcement, oblivious of the interference, "-due to some interference. Sorry, the line will take a while to be reestablished."

Alfred looked at the others, unsure on whether he had actually heard what he had heard. Bruno has bitten master? What the hell was Eric playing at? The nut had been known to be ridiculously cheerful and childish occasionally, but why did this particular... stunt, fill Alfred with a silent dread?

He studied the faces of his colleagues, apparently some had ignored the occurrence and written it off as a glitch, but Madeline and Sydney were looking over at him, while Johansen rubbed his chin thoughtfully. No one asked Levi anything, and they let the matter slide.

Alfred went ahead, "Well, I guess this meeting is over. Everyone to their stations, I guess. I think I’m too out of it to do anything just yet. I’m taking a nap. A real one."

"Well, I’ve slept enough.” Johansen brought up two fingers, “ two lifetimes. I'll check out my toys and see if they’re still running. I'm going up to The Brain." Johansen rose, taking a cup of water with him; he carefully walked over the sofa, and headed towards a glass door that led to the vital surveillance center/lab nicknamed 'The Brain'.

The other scientists headed off to their respective quarters of the facility, exiting through other doors.

Alfred watched them go, shrugged, and then he lied down on the comfortable 200 plus year old sofa. He pondered the strange glitch in the hologram system for awhile, but it was just beyond him to think of problems emerging this early after that long, long sleep.

When he fell asleep, he pondered.

There were never dreams for Alfred, at least, not in the usual sense. There were always sessions with some obscure figure in black. The setting was always the same: Old-style desk cluttered with various stationery, the white walls enclosing a doorless office, brown carpet. One couch in the middle of the room and a chair beside it. Alfred was always in the couch, talking to the obscure figure. He always came up with amazing revelations in the end, and despite the grueling thought process he had in these 'dreams' he always woke up self-assured and well rested.

"Did you notice?" The man asked Alfred, who was in his white pajamas, arms clasped together over his chest.

"What?" Alfred asked sleepily.

"There were inconsistencies with the date. Leviathan claims that the date is 201. That is 201 years after the year 2219-"

"- she said it was Sunday, 201, 26th August, but today’s supposed to be Monday, 201, 26th August." Alfred completed for his shady psychologist.

Though he himself felt agitated, he didn't fret. He just kept his cool expression and stared at the white ceiling of this lighted room with no lights.

"Then there was that speech Eric made." The man spoke, flipping the endless pages of a document as always. "Bruno bit the master?" the psychologist asked.

"-Gate three please?" Alfred completed the question, adding,

"Three-one-two-four-zero? What does that mean?"

As always, if Alfred asked a question, the man remained silent.

"I remember Eric telling me something.” Alfred continued, “A nervous joke he made before we were put under. He was worried about Levi. He said that-"

"-Leviathan, the dog, might betray the project due to deterioration overtime." The man completed.

There was a pause. Alfred wondered, "Gate three? He meant the gate three of this structure? That’s the East exit. 31-42-0 must be the pass code; Eric would know it, of course. I wonder what-"

Alfred opened his eyes; his session was over, he immediately recognized the expansive featureless ceiling overhead. He had slept on the conference room sofa. Groaning in disappointment at himself, he shuffled his feet and sat up, rubbing his eyes. He was still rubbing his eyes when he noticed the shadows playing on him; he opened his eyes wide to see Peter, Johansen and other faces he hadn’t seen during the conference standing around him. All except Sydney and Madeline.

“Uh… what’s up, guys? Is there something wrong?” Alfred asked nervously.

They didn’t answer; Peter placed his chubby hand on Alfred’s shoulder,

“Alf, I’m sorry but you’re going to have to come with us to the cryogenic chamber.” Peter seemed sincere, but his pupils were unnaturally constricted. Something was wrong.

Alfred pushed away the hand, backed up on the sofa, looking at the other men. None of them were from the original twenty, and all, including Johansson had pinprick pupils.

“Guys? What the hell?” Alfred asked suspiciously.

“Sorry, Alfred,” That was Johansen, “didn’t mean to scare you; it's just that your processing didn’t go well. You're in danger of having brain damage if you don’t return to the cryogenic chamber so that Leviathan can fix you up.”

At the sound of the dead, emotionless tone, Alfred suddenly knew that something was really wrong, and he jumped back and off the sofa, placing it and the sleep walkers in between.

“Come on, Alfred, don’t make this hard on yourself.” said Johansen.

He climbed over the sofa, keeping his eyes on Alfred and trying to smile. His pupils were brown pinpricks. Alfred corrected himself: Whatever this was, it was much deeper than sleepwalking, and this person before him had no self-awareness at all. Alfred’s breath came short and quick. He took a step back; despite the glaring lights of the room everything seemed darker. The men and women in front of him clambered over the couch; some were already making movements to flank him. Alfred took another step back, and his heart missed a skip when he bumped into someone.

“Get down, Alfred, now!” The someone yelled.

Alfred complied before he deduced who the owner of the voice was: Sydney.

Almost as soon as he hit the ground, there were three blue flashes of light coupled with three loud whines of a high-tech rifle of some kind, Alfred rolled from his position just in time to see Johansen and Peter topple over the chair and hit the floor headfirst with nasty cracks.

“Sydney, no!” Alfred protested, “They’re from our team!”

“Shut up and find a way out of here, I’ll cover while you lead!”

There was obviously no point in arguing with that sort of fury, Alfred tried his best to ignore the fact that Sydney was probably killing long-known colleagues and also the last few men on Earth. The way seemed to light up in his mind. He spotted the large door in the entire room that led to the main corridors that led to the electric cars, which in turn led to the upper levels of Leviathan. Once they got there, they could go outside by using one of the four main gates. Then it occurred to Alfred: The message was probably the last one Eric had left to order an evacuation from the facility, and then he arrived to another conclusion: Levi is corrupted, and she is controlling these minds.

Alfred vaguely wondered what the whole story behind this growing chaos was, but he would find out in time, for now-

“Alfred!” Another whine of a rifle, Alfred jumped back to reality, “Oh, right, that way! The big door leads to the-”

“Just lead the way, damn it!” Sydney cut in, another whine and ambient blue flash, another thump as someone crashed to the floor.

As he ran in the direction of the door, Alfred looked around to where Sydney was, and was horrified to see the small mob had turned into a swarming mass of various scientists swarming slowly but surely in their direction.

Sydney was trying what he could to slow them down by shooting up the ones in front in order to make their bodies block the other’s progress. Alfred recognized the blocky stub of the rifle over his shoulder. The IND-R 0002. The Dream Catcher. It fired small, sharp capsules filled with deadly nanomachines. The tip would fry an organism’s brain and all other moisture in its body. The gun knew nothing of simple flesh wounds. As soon as there was blood, there was death.

This fact almost changed Alfred’s mind about the situation, but he saw the colored irises with barely pupils inside, and knew assistance was futile.

During the time Alfred had noticed these things, he had reached the door. At his proximity, it beeped cordially and hissed open with a painful slowness, regardless of the urgency of the situation. As Alfred waited, and he turned to survey the situation: Sydney was about to be clamped in by a closing wall of mindless scientists. He fired off one last round of his Dreamcatcher, then with two fluid movements, batted three heads from one closing wall of scientists and turned on his heel, running towards Alfred,

"Go!” He shouted.

Alfred was about to turn and run, when in front of his eyes, over the wall of mindless scientists, the schematics hologram burst into a myriad of lights. A female face emerged from the mélange of colors. Alfred stood there, fascinated. He didn’t notice Sydney run past and through the open doors. The face opened its mouth and spoke in mighty tones,

“Alfred Kolinsky, this is your own work. Why do you run and avoid the good? This is science at its greatest! This is-”

“Alfred! Let’s go! She’s the cause of this!” Sydney yelled.
Alfred found himself rooted to the spot, her face seemed so damn familiar…
“You know me, Alfred, more than anyone else, and you understand what’s good for the-”
"Alfred.”
The warning tone of Sydney’s voice registered louder than his original shouts. Alfred turned to look, and was horrified to see the doors hissing closed. His legs moved before he thought of it. Even as the gap closed with obvious finality, Alfred jumped through. He barely escaped the many hands that had reached for him.
He flew through the gap, already preparing for the pain of the door shutting on his stomach with a monstrous crack...
-the crack came, but there was no pain. Alfred almost thought he was in shock or something similar, but then he finally realized he had made it through. He turned from his sprawl on the cold floor to see that Sydney has somehow managed to jam the stubby Dreamcatcher between the doors. It had cracked into unrecognizable pieces, but the extra resistance had allowed enough time for Alfred to slip through the small gap. He was for once thankful for his thin frame, and Sydney’s unusual talents. Sydney, however, had no time for sighs of relief; he helped Alfred up, whipped out a pistol from a side holster and nodded curtly,
“Let's get going.”
There was definitely no sign of Geologist in him now. Alfred nodded back, sweating as he jogged along the featureless corridor. With the cold blue pulse of fluorescent light, he could clearly see a door up ahead.
-and then he couldn't.
The lights suddenly winked out of existence and the door behind them beeped opened once more to accommodate a flood of mindless men and women intent on capturing the two men. The eerie way they were silhouetted against the light from the conference room almost stopped Alfred’s heart.
Sydney swore and put himself between Alfred and the hoard. Grotesque shadows danced in the light spilling into the corridor from the conference room, then Levi's voice rumbled through the corridor seductively,
“Alfred, you must listen to me, this isn’t a bad situation, and over the last five-hundred years I gained knowledge and discovered the true way to revive this earth.”
Alfred almost stopped in his path, Five hundred years?
“Don’t listen, Alfred.” Sydney warned, looking up from where the speakerphone voice of Levi came from. In the darkness, Sydney fiddled with his gun and a powerful beam from a torch mounted on top of it winked on. He trained it on the corridor ahead and handed Alfred a torch mounted pistol as well, but purely as a second source of light. He didn’t expect in any way for Alfred to gain enough nerve to start shooting his own colleagues, however out-of-it they were.
Give him a brain though, and he'll slice it without much thought. Sydney thought. He took the task of providing cover. After a few meters along the corridor, he would turn, survey the situation using his flashlight, and end a few more lives. The semi-automatics that Sydney had taken were almost completely regular projectile weapons. Except they had an amazing fifty round clip with full-metal-jacket bullets that slid through skin like hot knives through butter. Every time he fired off a round, it punctured at least two bodies with the force of a sniper rifle. It had a poor aim and murderous recoil that Alfred definitely would not have been able to manage, but Sydney knew his guns well enough and despite the size of the corridor and distance between them. The corridor was clogged up enough by the mindless zombies to be a simple matter of height and light. The dance went on for a while, and finally Alfred said the sort of words Sydney had been begging for,
“We’ve reached the electric cars…”
Sydney didn’t look around; he fired off another round into the approaching wall of soothing voices and asked nervously,
“Wouldn’t Levi be able to hack into them or something? Can’t she just shut off the tracks?”
“No, they're not that type of electric.”
There was a powerful rev of an engine, Sydney had to look, shining the torch on Alfred and his find. He was almost relieved by the sight of Alfred sitting in a two seating buggy. It had a mass of coils and rectangles with a main rectangle with the universal symbol for radioactive plastered on it. It ran on nuclear cells. It obviously had a powerful engine system, judging from the sound.
“Sweet!” Sydney exclaimed. He clambered onto the passenger seat, and Alfred started off with an unexpected burst of speed. Sydney had been aiming his gun without much of a grip and it easily flew from his grasp and clattered into the darkness.
“Crap!" He turned to Alfred in the darkness,
"Alfred, the other gun!”
Alfred swerved the vehicle in the narrow corridor as he fumbled on his lap to pass over the pistol, it slipped, and he clamped on it against the steering wheel with the side of his right palm, struggling with his left. The vehicle swerved in one direction in the dark, and the torch mounted on the pistol illuminated an incoming wall, Alfred shouted and wrenched the steering wheel to the left, tossing the pistol to Sydney wildly and steering the car again to avoid the wall. Sydney desperately tried to make sense of the spinning beam of light and managed to catch the torch itself, and with despair, he felt the torch slip out of its holding clamp, letting the pistol freefall and leaving the torch in his hands.
“Oh, man…”
“Sydney! A little help here!”
The car scratched against an unseen wall, and Sydney pointed the torch ahead in the inky blackness. With the aid of the wild light, Sydney noticed a dead end with the prominent outline of the door that Alfred had seen earlier. The words "Main Elevator" were stenciled on its frame.
“Alfred!”
“I know!”
He pressed the brakes button on the steering column, and with a slick, surprisingly silent skid, the car slowed down, but at an angle. The momentum of the car was too fast to completely stop, and it smacked into the elevator door and bounced back some meters, rolling sideways some more and wedging its body tightly in between the two walls. Despite the low-level collusion, Alfred easily flew off the driver’s seat sideways into the metal hull of the closed elevator door. Sydney managed to hold on to his seat and maintain the torchlight’s direction towards where they had come from. The torch did not do much to puncture the darkness.
Apart from the sound of the engine, all was quiet. Sydney shuffled past the driver’s seat to the elevator and noticed a faintly blue flashlight button on the steering column. He jabbed the button, and the four searchlights mounted on the buggy burst to life. Sydney wanted to fume at Alfred for forgetting to press it, but this wasn’t the scientist’s territory. Let alone Sydney’s.
Sydney shook his head at the groaning figure of Alfred and stepped on the metal floor. He turned around to look in the darkness but despite the massive lighting from the buggy, he could not see anything. They had left the people (If they had to right to be called that) far away, but Sydney did not relax. He bit on the flashlight and went over to the semi-conscious form of Alfred, helping him up gingerly. Alfred moaned in pain, but managed to keep to his feet. Alfred clutched his left shoulder and pointed at the door with a shaky finger,
“This is the elevator that leads up to the Prepping Bays. Where the exit gates are, where we can escape-”
He groaned in pain, rubbing his shoulder. Sydney pushed him aside and kicked the silent elevator doors. The only sign of life it had was the red keypad beside it.
Along with that were the yellow words on a small patch of dark screen written:
“Locked”
“Oh man…” Sydney began, but then soothing voices broke the silence:
“… Sydney, come on, be reasonable…”
“… Aaalfred…”
"… ha ha ha…”
The voices were close; Sydney pointed his torch, heart thumping and almost immediately picked out their forms, with their careful gaits and kind, considerate faces of their colleagues.
Sydney’s hands slapped his holsters, which were empty, save for a combat knife that would be useless against the amount of them approaching.
“Alfred, get us the hell out of this. I have no weapons.” He said in leveled tones. Sydney considered using the car to drive through the whole group, but it was jammed in an impossible angle, thanks to Alfred’s reflexes.
Alfred had regained a bit more composure over the numbing pain of his possibly dislocated shoulder. He studied the numeric keypad, and without effort the numbers floated to his mind,
Three one two forty.
He pressed in three, and Levi suddenly came on the speakers again, chuckling,
“What are you doing, Alfred? I control every circuit in this facility. Why do you think we share the name? I have all access, because you are inside of me. Forget-”
Alfred ignored the voice, tapped in the remaining numbers with care,
One…
"Oh, Alfred, how naive you are, I can’t believe a genius such as you…”
Two, four…
“Forget it, Alfr-”
“Shut up, Levi.”
Zero…
There was an expectant silence, even Levi seemed to hesitate, but after a mind-numbing pause, there was still nothing, and Alfred gave up.
But the keypad turned blue, and the words now displayed, “Active.”
The door slid open, and Alfred jumped into the elevator before turning and shouting to Sydney, who was about to slash at a man shuffling through the Buggy’s seats.
"That doesn't make sense." Leviathan said softly. Alfred shouted,
“Sydney! It’s open!”
Sydney looked back, his distraught face turned to relief, and he forgot about slashing a man he had been addressing. Just as he took a step towards the elevator, the man grabbed Sydney on his knife arm. Alfred saw Sydney freeze completely in his movements, saw his eyes roll up into his head and the knife clatter to the ground. Sydney suddenly lashed out wildly with his foot. He stomped on the chest of the attacker. The attacker seemed genuinely hurt and annoyed by the kick, and he stumbled back against the car with a cough just as Sydney stumbled once, twice, and finally landed into the elevator on his knees. He stretched out a hand against a wall just before he crumpled, and steadied himself, breathing heavily.
Alfred spun to the keypad and jabbed the “Ascend” button. Sydney turned around in his kneeling position and took in the scene of five men climbing over the buggy, intent on catching them. The doors finally closed on the white light of the stuck buggy and the reasoning voices of the mindless men and women. It was quiet for a few seconds, and then the elevator began ascending. Sydney sighed,
“Man, that was-”
His sentence was interrupted by the two loud reports of a pistol: a point on his right shoulder splashed a large tendril of red blood like a pebble in a pond. Except the pebble was a full metal jacket round.
Sydney screamed, his right arm hung limp, and pain grappled him in a sudden deadly grip. He almost passed out but as he crumpled to the floor in pain, he instinctively smacked his left palm onto the punished shoulder, adding to the fiery pain. In response to that pain, he bit his lips, puncturing them and spilling blood. The torturous mixture of pain kept him awake, rather than knocking him out.
Alfred was on him in seconds, examining the wound despite Sydney’s weak struggles to push him away. The wound was so surgical and precise that Alfred could almost see through it. The bullet had gone through his shoulder and punched a hole in the elevator’s walls. If it had severed a major artery, he was dead. Regardless, Alfred ripped off Sydney’s holster belt, struggling with it and tossing away the gun holster, and then wrapped it around the wound. He tightened the belt enough to pinch away the blood, and enough to kill the limb after some hours in that state. At least that was better than death.
“That’s a really bad wound.” Alfred commented with a deadpan voice that surprised even him. But why should it? I have seen worse.
The elevator kept on going up.
“No time for small talk, doctor.” Sydney grunted as a delayed response to Alfred's comment. He shuffled into a sitting position against the elevator wall and took in deep, controlled breaths to keep conscious, despite his lungs tearing desperation for irregular panting.
“What happened to you? When the guy touched you?” Alfred asked, remembering the weird moment before they entered the elevator.
Sydney breathed for a while, and then grimacing in pain, he spoke,
“That’s how she’s... killing the other non-converts.” He chuckled bitterly at that, and then continued, “If they touch you… You blank out and die, or get to be one of them. They ambushed us in the kitchen… killed Terry and Michael. I managed to get to the quarters with Madeline, but we were separated in the hallway... She’s dead by now… the place was completely crammed with those freakin’ zombies…”
Alfred’s heart took a skip. Levi’s words tumbled in his mind:
Alfred Kolinsky, this is your own work…
You know what is good for The Earth…
Could this really be true? Alfred knew with a slight sick feeling in his stomach that this was indeed true. His foray into suspended animation, cryogenic sleep, and something else, had led to Levi carrying out these… plans. Whatever they were.
How did those other scientists really die? Maybe Levi did it? Alfred wondered.
The elevator stopped, and it was time again to start planning and remembering. Sydney came to his feet, and the elevator doors slid open. The two men stepped out of the elevator into the huge room known as The Prepping Bay.
The 'room' was awesome in size. It had a simple dome shape with a not so simple radius of 0.8 miles and a roof hundreds of feet high.
The roof was an extremely thick but transparent polymer that allowed full view of the outside world. It had been specially designed to block out radiation as well. The polymer on its own was deceptively fragile looking, but a network of vicious turrets and high-voltage electrical systems protected it. Levi controlled them all. The vastness of The Bay and the unexpected alien glow of sunlight filtering through the glass jolted Alfred into the past…
...Where everything was a jangled rush. When everything was dark, icy, cold…
---
A nuclear winter had broken the world. There wasn’t any clear definition or documentation on how the war had started nor ended. The obliteration and interference to all types of communications had locked the human race into unawareness, and on that tropical retreat owned by everyone, the scientists had initiated the procedures discussed in Omega Phoenix: In Case of a Catastrophic Nuclear War and Subsequent Nuclear Winter, A paper published by the timid and unremarkable scientist known as Alfred Albert Kolinsky, Dr.
The paper had gone through rigorous examination and some modification, through four major superpowers and finally into the laps of the Pandora Isle, where the hidden geniuses planned contingencies for all forms of world-wide misfortune and constantly experimented with what was considered pseudo-science. Here, protocols had been established for a worldwide epidemic, extra-terrestrial invasion, overpopulation of the world, and more. All such dark possibilities were discussed and scientifically prepared for on this outwardly unremarkable Isle.
The Omega Phoenix paper had been chosen over Omega Delta Alpha.
Both were plans in case of nuclear war, one chose prolonged suspended animation to wait for the effects of nuclear winter to pass while the other suggested leaving the planet, respectively. Mars was indeed a sub-colony, known to the top brass only, but the plan had crashed since the space shuttles had already been taken out of the isle for various reasons. No other space shuttles existed, at least, not in a useful form. This had left Pandora alone and Earth stranded. At least, that is what the cut off scientists of The Pandora Isle presumed.
Omega Phoenix was easy to initiate. As the nuclear winter clouded the dome of the Leviathan, (most deadly radiation shielded by the special polymer) the scientists toyed with massive resources stored away for such occasions. The cryogenic-pods, the devices that would carry out the suspended animation of the human subjects, were constructed.
The community that lived in the Leviathan, one of many facilities on The Isle, was given a choice; live old and die while awake, leave the facility and try to live in a radioactive wasteland, or attempt to prolong your life in order to live to another day where the problem was a little more manageable. Of the six-hundred civilians and scientists stuck there, three hundred chose to die, misguided by a zealous Felix Fellowman to try and go somewhere north to escape the radioactivity. Three-hundred remained, and one by one, they were led through extensive procedures to ensure perfect cryogenic hibernation / suspended animation. Thirty died.
The remaining left their lives in the hands of Levi, the ultimate artificial mind, of which years ago Eric had successfully installed and booted after salvaging it from old artificial intelligence project files deep within one particular facility’s database.
On the last day before they began the real hibernation process, Alfred remembered looking through the grey light and death floating outside the bay’s 'glass'. He remembered the last peek of above, the walk to the cryo-room, and the freezing, instant sleep that spared him no time for last thoughts and last words.
Then he had woken up from dreamless sleep, oblivious to the time passed, to the sound of an insistent beeping…

“-fred! Come on, don’t zone out on me!”
Sydney shook Alfred, who looked at the golden light pouring through the windows. It was a blessing. It was impossible that he could see sunlight once again. Just two hundred years... Just two hundred years and the Earth was okay? Then he remembered Levi’s word: over the last five-hundred years, I gained knowledge...
- And the dark man in his 'dreams': There were inconsistencies with the date...
He took some steps forward, out of the elevator, taking in the environment. The Bay was as cluttered as ever. Mountains of unopened supplies sat in place. Lanes, bulbs and signs divided the area and pointed out specific sections of the dome. The floor directly in front of the elevator was the painted “Gate Three, East Gate” with a white arrow pointing directly ahead of them. Straight ahead was the exit to the wondrous world outside.
Alfred suddenly remembered the pain of betrayal, and returned to himself. He started walking forward. Sydney followed. The large tarp-covered supplies became walls on either side, or they defined other paths in other directions. Alfred maintained a straight course, and it was slow, the dome itself didn’t seem to be moving. And he remembered how gigantic this whole place was.
“Hey, genius, why don’t we use the buggies?”
Alfred turned to see Sydney pointing with his left arm at a row of buggies sitting idly next to some particularly short tarps. Alfred sighed in relief, “That makes life much easier.”
He hobbled over to the car, beating Sydney to it, who was still clutching his shoulder wound fiercely. Alfred slid into the driver’s seat, calling out to Sydney,
“Yo, slowcoach, they're plenty of ways to come up here. We must leave, now.”
Sydney grunted and walked closer, “Yeah, but what's the plan? What do we do out there? Isn’t it still radioactive?”
“Most likely." Alfred stepped out of the buggy and let Sydney through. He continued, “But Levi showed us the exterior, and those plants looked pretty alive to me...”
Sydney paused as he prepared to hop into the buggy,
“Now that I think of it, that’s impossible. Plants that size do not just pop up after a few two hundred years. With that amount of radiation poisoning…”
Alfred knew that Sydney was right. But the facts matched up. Levi had obviously shown a true picture of the exterior, because there was definitely sunlight he could see through the ‘glass’. That meant the dust was gone, and it didn’t take much imagination to guess that plant life and animal life was out there, but the time-line made this an extra-ordinary feat.
“Alfred, there's really no time to space out, let’s get out of here, and then you can try explaining the mysteries of the world. I don’t want to die. I’ve done that already, and it’s boring!”
Sydney was in the passenger seat, Alfred shook himself out of his umpteenth reverie and carefully sat in the driver seat, rubbing his bruised and thankfully undislocated shoulder before pressing a button. He felt the engine rumble to life almost immediately. He pressed on the accelerator button, placed on the steering wheel, and started rolling off. There was some amount of silence, and Alfred imagined he could hear birds singing.
Sydney laughed suddenly. Alfred quickly stopped the car and looked at the man. His face was flushed in pain, but he still chuckled at Alfred. Not a good sign.
“What the heck?” Alfred asked Sydney worriedly. The pinched off vessels in his arm must be screwing with his head already.
Sydney laid his head back on the buggy chair. He finally gained his breath and asked, “This thing runs on nuclear cells, right?”
Alfred nodded with some confusion, “Yeah?”
“That’s it, that’s what’s funny. We never learn, do we? I mean, give us a couple of more years and we would still be fiddling with nukes and more. This would start all over again. We’re barbarians.” He chuckled.
Alfred stared at his friend.
Sydney was not usually a naturalist, and rarely aired his views. However, it was understandable. It was indeed ironic. Sydney was probably telling the truth.
“Yeah, it’s sad.” Alfred agreed.
Alfred thumbed the button, and started rolling again, but this time, a desperate feminine voice interrupted,
“Alfred! Sydney!”
Alfred’s heart jumped. It couldn’t be. He looked, and it was.
It was Madeline, sporting a small gash on her forehead and panting heavily, but very much alive. Plus, she was in a better state than the two men were.
She was lugging a canvas with various weaponry and small cardboard boxes strapped onto it. She was strong enough to manage a steady crawl. Alfred looked into her eyes, and the desperation and timidity in them convinced him that she was herself. Madeline had survived!
“Some good news, at last!” Alfred exclaimed, as he jumped out of the buggy. He walked over to help her with the canvas. Sydney remained where he was, staring off into space. Alfred panted as he dragged the canvas. He looked at Madeline, “Madeline, how did you…?”
“No time,” She panted, then she nodded towards Sydney, “What’s with him?”
“Gunshot wound, really serious, so I pinched the flow off with the holster belt. It’s not good enough, he needs meds.”
Madeline nodded and confronted the canvas she had been lugging. Alfred stopped lugging it. Madeline quickly located a transparent case filled with syringes. She took one, found another case filled with nano-strip bandages. She bit off the cap of the syringe and tossed the bandages to Alfred.
“Come on, we don’t have much time, more of them behind us, if you didn’t notice.”
Alfred looked, and a lo and behold a line of ‘them’ was advancing, pleading, reasoning or just walking.
Alfred didn’t say anything, he just followed Madeline’s lead.
Madeline reached up to Sydney, who had finally lost consciousness, and she undid the holster belt, stabbed the syringe into the shoulder, and held out a hand to Alfred. Alfred cursed, having forgotten to extract a bandage from the roll. He fumbled with the pouch for a while before taking out a black strip one meter long. Madeline took it and tied it around Sydney’s half-clotted wound. Sydney moaned in pain, then screamed when the strip tightened around his hand and injected the clotting agents and medical nanoagents that would deal with infection and eliminate pain.
“There, all done. Now let’s go!” Madeline shouted.
There was the sudden unmistakable loud whine of a Dreamcatcher rifle, and the shot hit the buggy’s flank, narrowly missing Alfred’s hand. He knew this because of the air that brushed along it in the capsule’s wake.
“Let's get out of here!” Madeline repeated.
Alfred hopped into the buggy, Madeline was suddenly thinking differently. She rushed to the canvas, crouching as another shot rang. It went wild, but Alfred was not put at ease. No, not at all.
“Madeline! What the hell are you doing?" He shouted.
“One sec!”
Madeline crouched again as another shot rang out.
Alfred shut his eyes tight, expecting impact, but nothing came, and he opened his eyes, looking at Sydney and Madeline: the round had gone wild, but the mindless were still approaching. Sydney saw that the foremost of them was clutching a Dreamcatcher in an odd grip; If Levi was indeed controlling them, then she had probably still not mastered the complex motor functions of the human body. Alfred noticed another fact: The groups of people in the back were constantly stumbling, meaning Levi was at her limits of mind-control. It was understandable: there were about a hundred of them to control, and no matter how expert an A.I was, it had its limits.
That’s at least some amount of-
“Alfred! Let’s go!” Madeline interrupted. She hopped in next to Sydney.
Alfred glanced quickly at what she had been doing and saw that the canvas was rolled up tightly roped to the buggy, Alfred pressed the accelerator button on the steering wheel, and this time they started off without any hindrance. No more shots were fired, so Alfred presumed that their ammo had ran out, more good news. He wanted to celebrate Madeline’s survival and the attainment of weapons, but the situation was still grave, they still had to escape the bay, and confront an unknown world outside.
All riders were silent. Alfred kept the speed constant, and the dome above whirled around the vehicle as it approached the third gate. Apart from the thumping of Alfred’s heart against his ears and the sound of the engine, it seemed quiet. Alfred risked a look at Madeline. She wore a dazed expression, but she still looked as beautiful as she ever had under stress. Her short black hair still billowed animatedly, and her eyes (With large, chocolate pupils) had a life to them. For a moment Alfred thought of all those lab hours he had spent with her during the last days before...
-but there was no time for that.
Alfred looked ahead, and almost whooped with joy at the sight of the huge construct that made the East Gate. Or Gate Three. It had yellow-black warning stripes along its outline. Various symbols and lettering served to signify its importance.
Alfred brought the car to a stop slowly, leaving it some meters away from the gigantic construct and parked sideways. Sunlight splashed in fractal patterns on the threshold directly in front of the gate, and Alfred stepped out of the car, looking up with awe at the doorway that would reveal the success of the operation. It was a breathtaking implication.
How he had hoped that his contingency plans written in his Omega Phoenix paper would work. Now here was the result of all that toiling under the deadly cloak of radioactivity and hopelessness. Alfred started walking to the gate slowly. It stared back at him silently as he approached it and dwarfed himself even more.
Madeline confronted the canvas. Alfred arrived a few steps from the gate and whispered, “Beautiful…”
“Alfred!” Sydney shouted. He seemed to be fully conscious now. Alfred turned in surprise, heard the harsh percussion of sucking air, and the thought crossed his mind even before the roar of fire came:
Rocket.
He jumped out of the way.

If the rocket had been on target, that would’ve been a futile effort, but the firing angle had been distorted enough to cause the already wild projectile to fly and hit the gate some meters above its frame. It wasn’t a simple explosion though: It tore at the air and spat out deadly fragments of heated metal. Alfred was blown forwards by the shockwave, and he almost broke his neck as he tumbled and rolled with violent force across the cold surface of the massive room. When he stopped rolling he covered his head as the fiery pieces clattered around him, fearing another shot of a rocket launcher and/or molten pieces from the first one.
More shots indeed came, but not of the same type he expected and none in their direction: It was the staccato of a machine gun, followed by two more loud explosions.
When Alfred gained enough control over his aches, he stood up and uncovered his hands from his head. A piece of metal clattered to the floor from his hands, and Alfred looked up past the buggy at where the rocket had come from. In his peripheral vision, he could tell that Sydney was okay. In his immediate line of sight he could see that there was a heap of bodies piled around on the floor. A bloody mess carpeted them, and a distinct scorch mark sat in front of the pile. Smoke was rising to the ceiling, and the stench of burnt flesh wafted teasingly into Alfred’s nostrils. Alfred gagged at the thought of his old friends' horrible demise.
“Good to see some more familiar faces.” A tired voice spoke.
The speaker was a man almost matched to Sydney’s stature, dressed in a full military outfit. He had a bulletproof vest, and carried a large gun. It was probably a grenade launcher and nothing less. Its muzzles were all too large for regular projectiles. Alfred didn’t recognize him at all from any of the science team. He definitely did not look like a civilian or scientist.
The soldier had a thinner companion beside him. He held a lightweight machine gun. Alfred wasn’t sure he recognized him as well.
“Who the hell are you?” Sydney asked, clambering off the buggy.
The man smiled and said to his friend, “I guess we were a secret after all.”
His friend simply grunted non-committaly, studying the scene, constantly on alert. Alfred rose to his feet, “Well?” He prompted.
The man stepped forward and offered his hand. Alfred looked at his eyes carefully, saw some black pupils there, and shook the hand. The man noticed these actions and smiled, “You must be Alfred Kolinsky. The extremely perceptive scientist the geek was talking about.”
Geek? Could it be… ?
“Eric?” Alfred ventured, the man looked in the air for a while, remembering. He nodded, “Yeah, Eric.”
Alfred’s heart skipped, “How do you know him? I thought all military personnel on the Isle were assigned to Zeus?”
Before the soldier could reply, a considerate voice cut in, “Come on, guys, it’s not scary. It's heaven. Levi is God!”
The man turned around and aimed his launcher. He swore, much like Sydney did,
“You had better open that gate. Pronto.”
Alfred didn’t disagree: he immediately turned heel and headed to the gate’s console that was embedded into the wall next to it.
There were even more of them. And almost all were armed this time. They seemed more in control of themselves, and were approaching with more grace and tact. Their rifles never stopped aiming at the group of survivors, and all the time, they spoke of how great Levi was, reasoning, trying to pacify the survivor’s fears by freaking them out all the more.
Sydney cursed, and clambered out of the buggy, he approached the canvas, rolled it’s heavy contents open and took the first gun he could find: The Dreamcatcher rifle.
“Damn sissy gun.” Sydney grumbled, taking up a position some steps away from the buggy and aiming at the closest in line.
There was no gunfire. Yet. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something. It was A Mexican standoff in favor of the survivors. Alfred had arrived at the console, and was already beginning to tap in the numbers he would forget when hell froze over.
“Guys, this isn’t some sort of take over.” Another voice. It came from behind the foremost line of zombies. They made way for a man perfectly in control of his senses. His eyes were normal, and he was Johansen. Not dead. More alive than most, with his carefree emotions plastered over his face. Alfred recognized the voice, but first keyed in the last digit of the door-code before staring wide-eyed at the impossibility. Johansen spoke to the dumbfounded faces in front of him.
“Can you guys please listen? This is not anything bad. No one is against the other.”
“... You’re dead, I shot you with this.” Sydney demonstrated the this by firing off a round that impacted neatly on Johansen’s chest, directly over his heart. Johansen stumbled with a short exhalation of air and dropped to his knees, and then he was still.
- And he laughed. It was a low, lazy laugh. He stood up and stuck his hand in the wound. With three gross motions, he pulled out the blood-covered capsule from his torn heart and tossed it away. The other men and women flanking him remained utterly still and silent, aiming their various weapons. Alfred felt bile rise in his throat.
A loud metallic grounding echoed through the room, and Sydney risked a look to see, amazingly, that the gate was rising. Escape was imminent.
Johansen smiled, “You aren’t leaving. Out there is death, you idiots.”
“Sydney, Madeline! The gate is open! We can leave!” Alfred shouted. He was trying his best to ignore Johansen.
Alfred's shout was ignored.
The soldiers waited.
Madeline was frozen in position, unsure of what to do.
Sydney was, he opened fire, simultaneously shifting backwards and keeping his head low and the buggy between him and any return fire. He picked out the targets carefully, downing the front row of the mindless. Everything shifted into motion, and everything was suddenly chaos. Before Alfred knew what was happening, two successive explosions completely obliterated the buggy, and the thin soldier who hadn't spoken the whole way died along with it instantly. Alfred was ultimately assured of this fact by the ripped torso that rolled over to him. Only his medical training and fatigue kept him from overreacting. He did vomit, though.
The air rippled with heat as the rest of the zombies opened fire. Their aim was a bit better now, and Alfred was only saved by his distance from the shooters, since the majority of fire was aimed at him.
"Heads up!" The newcomer soldier screamed, Alfred did not understand until he was practically at the gate.
The blast knocked him onto his knees and after the horrendous roar, all he could hear was a low pitched whine. He was deaf, and it hurt, but Alfred didn't care, because he was staring outside. And it was more than he had ever dreamed of. It looked too perfect to be a scene some hundred years after a nuclear blast.
alfred.
Alfred came to his knees, staring at the green of vegetation and rich brown soil. He stared at the height of gigantic trees, and the color of flowers in full bloom...
Alfred.
He took a step forward, something whizzed past his ear, he ignored it...
"Alfred you bastard get down!"
Alfred complied without thinking, and saved himself a bullet in his skull. He was suddenly aware of the roar of gunfire, whizzing over and past him. Alfred didn't dare move from where he was, until he was given any order to. Sydney didn't delay,
"Okay! Up, now! They are all reloading... The idiots don't know how to save ammo!"
Alfred stood up and ran through the fully open gate, and only then did he hear the loud groan of the gate closing.
"Damn- Madeline let’s get out of here!" Sydney shouted.
Alfred was running. He couldn't help but ignore everything behind him as he took in what he was seeing, what he was breathing, what he was feeling underfoot. Green trees, fresh air and soft, fertile soil. He kept running, feeling like the world had grown silent, and found himself among the very shrubs and trees he had earlier gazed upon. He carefully brushed past the foliage and stepped through the first line of trees, and now there was no doubt: Over the 200 years, no, 500 years he had been asleep, a forest had sprung up to replace the dead one he had seen before.
I can't believe it. It's back. It’s all back. My paper was for real! Oh man! I saved the world!
Then there was a sharp smack on the back of his head, Alfred cried out and spun around with his eyes wide open.
"Sydney! What in the world was that for?"
Sydney looked battered, and pissed. He jabbed a finger in Alfred's chest, "I swear that brain of yours will kill you. You space out more than an astronaut!"
Alfred rubbed his head, and said in a small voice, "Forgive me, but this is too overwhelming."
Sydney snorted and ran past him,
"You're lucky those freaks didn't know how to reload and the gate closed on them, guess we're safe until they come out for us."
Alfred looked after Sydney, who was walking ahead through the impossible forest,
"Do you think they would?"
Sydney didn't bother replying.
Alfred started after him, then frowned and looked back,
"Where's Madeline? And the soldier?"
Sydney froze in his tracks and spun around with surprise plastered on his face, "She said she was right behind me, I thought-"
"Don't bother thinking. I'm right here, and so is the soldier."
To their side, the shrubs rustled a little and The soldier emerged helping Madeline along. She seemed to have hurt her left leg, but Alfred couldn't see any apparent wounds. Her right hand was draped over the soldier, while her left heaved a rolled up heavy looking canvas by a strap.
Sydney looked at the canvas, then her, "Your joking, right? You delayed to bring that along?"
She smiled weakly, "I didn't trust what Johansen said about this place being death."
"Well, we'll discuss the madness of that later, let’s get the heck out of here." Sydney grunted, then he walked towards the thick of the forest. Madeline and the soldier followed in a fair pace, while Alfred looked back through the trees to the facility.
Levi... Why?
"I SWEAR ALFRED I'LL KILL YOU IF YOU KEEP ON SPACING OUT LIKE THAT!" Sydney roared.
Alfred jumped, and hollered back,
"Sorry!"
He followed them, still wondering why in the world a trustworthy A.I such as Levi would do such a thing.
I swear I'll find out before I die.

---

"What happened to the walls?"
Alfred was shocked. He had never seen his session room ever change. It stayed constant all the times. It was an utmost rule that the room stayed lit with no lamps. It was also a rule that there was never a door, or window.
This time there was a door, a lamp and a window. In addition, the white walls were peeling, and Alfred realized for the first time that they were plaster. He hadn't even known what material they were until now due to their perfect construction.
But as always, ask a question in sessions, and there was no answer...
"What do you think, Alfred?" The obscure figure asked. He was scribbling on the notepad.
...but a question could be asked in return.
Alfred lay back in his couch,
"I presume this is my subconscious, so I can safely translate everything in this room literally."
"That is true."
Alfred nodded, "Then that means the walls of my subconscious are peeling. Sounds fancy, but what does that mean?"
The figure kept on scribbling.
Alfred wasn't patient enough for these mind games, he sat up and glared at the shadowy man, "Do you realize that we're in a deadly situation here! Do you know that I can die? If I die you'll be gone too!"
The man kept scribbling, and then he said simply, "Calm down, Kolinsky, or I may have to cancel this appointment."
Alfred laughed, "You really won't help me, huh?"
There was a crackling sound, and a large reel of plaster peeled off the wall.
The man remained silent. He finished scribbling on a page, and turned it to start another.
Alfred grinned, leaning forward, "I bet you have all the answers I need on that damn notepad..."
The figure stopped scribbling, and looked up at him with its blurred face
"Mr. Kolinsky. I suggest you don't attempt to do such a thing."
Alfred grinned like a shark, and lunged for the notepad.

---

"AHHHHH!"

"Ah! Ah! AHHHH!"

It took a full ten seconds to realize that he was screaming, and by then he already knew that he was scared. Scared beyond words. It was the perfect phobia: complete irrational fear for no reason at all, and he couldn't stop himself.
His heart thumped painfully, and he found that he was out of breath, and then Sydney shook him. Kolinsky stared into the canopy of trees, and realized that he was already awake. He had woken up screaming and freaked almost to death,
"Alfred, what’s up?" Sydney was cautious.
Man sounded like he was being put through a meat grinder feet first... He thought, shaking the shivering Alfred. Except shivering didn't quite cover it. The man was terrified: He kept quaking, completely unresponsive to his prompts.
Ted, the soldier, walked over with his rifle pointing downwards. He had been on night watch, and didn't seem perturbed by Alfred's actions. He looked lazily at Sydney,
"Nightmare?"
"I think so." Sydney shook Alfred again,
"Alfred, come on, get up. It’s okay, nothing’s happening. Nothing’s happening."
Alfred calmed down. But he was still having spasms. He was chewing on his thumb, and Sydney had dismissed it until Ted shined a torch on Alfred's face,
Ted swore softly, "That’s nasty."
Alfred was drawing blood, he was chewing his thumb and stripping skin off it,
"Stop it, Alfred!" Sydney knelt down and forced Alfred's jaws open carefully, making sure he did it by squeezing his fingers against his cheeks. Alfred stopped, but still stared off into nothing, quaking. He looked pitiful, but all Sydney could do was pat him lightly on his shoulder,
"Go back to sleep."
"NO!" Alfred screamed, and suddenly sobbed, "I hate him! I hate him!"
Sydney looked around the dark forest nervously. It was a scary place. It looked like any normal forest, but there was completely no sound. No animals or birds. It was enough to give Sydney nightmares. He looked at Ted and grunted,
"You can sleep, I'll take up watch from here."
Ted chuckled, "You think I'm an idiot? This forest here ain't normal. No sleep for me till I need it."
Then he walked away some distance, shining his torch around and murmuring to himself. Sydney looked at Madeline, who was curled up on the floor, clutching the canvas next to her like a Teddy bear. He shook his head,
Scientists are really fragile sometimes.
And what do you consider yourself to be?
Sydney shrugged and stood up.

---

They woke up early. As far as the four were concerned, there was no right way to tell the time. It was a bit light, and that’s all they could say for sure. They walked in the same direction they had taken when entering the forest, and it took around two full hours before they realized that they had no plans. Sydney had taken advantage of this lull to at least confront the rolled up canvas Madeline had miraculously lugged along, and had ignored the various goodies to pick out a beautiful piece of machinery. GRU-016. He finally had a gun worth talking about in his hands. A good old projectile machine gun, 30 rounds, almost as durable as an antique AK-47, except for the fact that it had Precision Pressure Explosives, and Sydney loved those.
Alfred was the natural candidate to supposed to have made plans, but he was still having spasms, and hadn't uttered a single word throughout their aimless tromp in the dead forest. He had spaced out way more often, but Sydney hadn't had the heart to shout at him. He contented himself with gently but firmly leading the man, but Alfred jumped in surprise or shuddered even when he simply called his name carefully. Whatever nightmare he had had, Sydney was sure Alfred would've rather got shot. He was completely out of his element.
"This place here isn't normal." Ted repeated his sentiment for maybe the tenth time. He didn't seem in the least disturbed by that.
"You do realize that this is 200 years after the nuclear war?" Sydney asked.
"So?" Ted replied, he looked up, as though mesmerized by the sunlight filtering through the canopy.
Sydney looked back at Madeline, who was still apparently dazed by the forest.
Sydney grunted and looked back at Ted, "So? I thought you'd at least have some sort of reaction. It’s not every day you see a scientists ideas save the planet, you know. Nor do you expect nuclear fallout to clear so fast."
Ted climbed over a root of a tree without even have apparently seen it.
This guy here isn't one of us. Sydney realized.
"Well, what do you want me to do?" Ted asked.
"Huh?" Sydney asked.
Ted glanced back at him once, spreading his arms out and letting his machine gun hang by its straps,
"It doesn't make a difference." He smiled, "You might also be shocked that Harry back there was a long time friend. Fought two wars and ten covert missions and survived them all together. But I don't give a damn about him dying," He looked at Sydney's stupefied expression with a grim smile, "Nothing personal. Believe me, I feel some amount of loss, but it’s only in terms of statistics." He raised two fingers and brought one down as he said it, "One less trooper to improve our odds."
Sydney shook his head, "What happened, Ted?"
Ted chuckled, "Man, I wish I knew. I didn't witness a gruesome murder or anything. I just... switched off. The worlds a cruel place, man, and I realized it’s only cruel when you feel emotion."
He grabbed his rifle, "In that way, I do my job perfectly, and all I know is to act upon orders, not think about anything. So, I'm never surprised."
Sydney shook his head, Liar. You're probably a mess. Trust me I kno-
There was a high pitch animal squealing. It was sharp and repetitive
Pig?
Sydney carefully flicked the safety off his GRU-016 and crouched, looking ahead in the general direction of the sound. The whole group stopped. Alfred went on a while, but Ted put a hand on him.
"What’s that?" Madeline whispered. The squealing was getting louder, and then Ted shouted in warning, "Sydney."
Sydney nodded. He could hear it too. Who couldn't? There was the distinct cracking and crashing sound of vegetation being parted, and the sound got louder.
"What sort of animal would be around here?" Alfred asked.
Sydney was too surprised by Alfred's apparent recovery and the animal sounds to say anything.
Alfred seemed worried. He stepped forward and cupped a hand under his chin. Thinking. Then his eyes widened and he looked at the others,
"Run! That way!" Even as he pointed, a fat, alien form vaulted over Alfred and Ted, coming crashing down on Sydney, Sydney let off a wild shot in the air and rolled away, expecting the animal to follow, he raised his gun, but the animal had simply landed there, and wasn't interested in Sydney at all. He got a glimpse of a fat, dry gray skin and the whiff of a bitter odor, and then it rushed out of view, dodging past Madeline and running ahead.
"What the hell?" Ted shouted in utter shock. He walked over to Sydney and helped him up,
"I thought you never got surprised?" Sydney grinned, and stood up, dusting himself.
"You idiots! I told you, run!" Alfred's voice shouted from some meters away. He had already started running. And Sydney looked at the wild look in his face, and almost shot himself in the head at how obvious the man's logic was:
Animals in an apparently empty forest. First one we see is running like its life depends on it...
Sydney didn't bother shouting, he just ran.
"Oy!" Ted called, Sydney didn't stop, and he disappeared through thickness of the branches with Alfred close at his heels. Ted looked at Madeline, "You okay to run?"
She nodded.
"Then go." He flicked the safety on his gun and crouched, "I'll cover all you and that freaking coward."
Madeline didn't question him.
Ted waited for her crashes to diminish, and then followed. He ran for ten steps, then turned round and aimed. The forest was silent.
I'll get you when you come out. He grinned. That’s always how it happens.
He patted his gun. And took another ten steps.

- the gigantic claw split him vertically in half.
- in reflex his corpse's nerves squeezed on the trigger of the machine gun.

---

"Where's Ted?"
Madeline breathed heavily and pointed back vaguely, "He said he'd follow me closely. His supposed to be here by now."
Sydney looked back at Alfred, who was also breathing heavily.
"Alf. What do you-"
There was the distinct loud chattering of a machine gun. It went on for a full six seconds before stopping. Everyone froze in place, trying to listen for more, but there was none.
"Sydney, we better find a place to hide." Alfred panted. Sydney agreed, but the situation was hopeless. With not so much as a map they couldn't find a way out of this thicket. They may have even circled back to the Leviathan facility without knowing.
"Madeline, is there any sort of map we can use in the canvas?"
Madeline looked at Sydney with despair, "I'm... sorry I left it. The canvas. I completely forgot about it..."
"Damn." Sydney looked at Alfred, who just shrugged.
Your kidding me, right? Did you just shrug?
Alfred read Sydney's question off his face, "It doesn't make a difference if we don't find a place to hide before whatever got that guy gets us. We wouldn't have a campus nor enough time to decipher where we are. Let’s just make sure we keep our eye out for any rocks, as soon as you see any then I know what we can do. That’s a Geeks 'R Us model, right?"
Alfred pointed at Sydney's GRU-016. Sydney looked at it and then Alfred mournfully,
"You're kidding, right? This gun actually sounded cool!"
"Let's go, then." Alfred stared jogging, Sydney waited for Madeline to go forward and Sydney followed the line carefully. Not that he was covering them, not completely anyway. In general, the misfortune of an ambush met the person leading a troop.
"There! Sydney, quick, shoot an explosive over there! Into the wall!"
They had emerged from beneath the ceiling of leaves to a surprisingly rich sunlit patch or open land. In front of them, stretching across the group's eye line to the right was a grey face of rock that went even higher to make a massive natural rock wall.
Just as Alfred shouted his orders to Sydney, there were sounds of movement, shrubs thrashed from behind. Madeline looked back and her eyes widened. Sydney didn't bother aiming. He set the GRU to 'PPE', spun around and let off a shot. His eyes widened at the sight of what surely was some beast out of a fantasy from his childhood days.
The sight of the multifaceted eyes of the insect-like being was blasted away by the PPE round. It performed a grotesque back-flip: revealing its monstrous scorpion body, sting and pairs of clawed hands, before crashing a bit above the canopy. It roared and squealed, thrashing about in a tide of violent emotions. Sydney's skull suddenly burst in pain, he looked back and saw that Alfred had smacked him across his head. It looked like his hand had suffered more than Sydney's skull had, judging by the way Alfred grabbed it. He shouted,
"You idiot! Who's spacing out now? Shoot the rock. now!" he shook Sydney roughly, and Sydney rose to his feet, aimed at the rock wall carefully, and pulled the trigger. The gun simply gave a click:
What now? Sydney moaned, and then Alfred snatched the gun away and pushed Sydney aside. Clearly struggling with the weight, Alfred slid a catch to chamber another PPE round and aimed at the rock. He pulled the trigger. As expected the recoil blasted him backwards, but the rock wall caved in a perfect circle, just wide enough to give a tight fit for Alfred, the thinnest of the group. They weren't called Precision Explosives for nothing. Alfred swore.
Sydney came to his feet and ran towards the hole, making sure he snatched the rifle away from Alfred, he charged the hole and kicked at its edges and was astounded to feel his ankle fracture. Sydney screamed and fell on his back, letting the rifle slide in the dirt and clutching the punished ankle.
Behind them the beast screamed horrendously and thrashed even stronger.
Madeline was making whimpering noises.
"You idiot! The stone is reinforced with a steel framework!" Alfred shouted at Sydney, who managed a glare at him. Alfred picked up the gun, making sure not to look back or pay attention to the struggling beast.
But he couldn't help it. The beast had stopped making noise. And Alfred knew enough to know it was gazing down on its prey. On him.
-something moved him, something told him to duck, roll to the left and aim the gun. Something told him to slide the catch because a PPE round had to be chambered, and something else told him to keep his frame loose when he fired because the blowback would likely fracture his frame when he hit the stone wall behind him. He did all these things without thinking.
To Sydney he couldn't catch a single movement. Alfred blurred with the speed of the actions he took. Two claws obliterated the wall with a wide, horizontal swing, and Alfred was beneath them. Even as the thing compensated and brought its huge head and maw to where Alfred had been. He blurred again to the left, and fired a round. The blast punctured the beast this time, in its side, and it screamed its discomfort and jumped on its hind limbs, much like a horse. It flailed its limbs with intense pain and collapsed in the opposite direction. It groaned once and lay there, breathing heavily.
Sydney came to his feet gingerly, applying all pressure on his one good foot. He went to Alfred, who was knocked unconscious by the recoil and managed to drag him into the destroyed rock wall. Sydney immediately recognized it as one of the old mining caves that meandered the entire island, it was the perfect way to move, and Sydney commended Alfred's memory even after apparently having a traumatic nightmare, whatever it had been about. In the end, it had been Sydney who had spaced out, completely forgetting about such a well known feature of the island.

---

Madeline helped Sydney drag Alfred into the tunnel, and when they went deep enough in the dark, Sydney turned, aimed the GRU rifle to a point on the ceiling that was almost the middle of their path, and shot the last PPE round at it. In a regular cave this would be completely idiotic, but the reinforced structure held and the blast didn't cause a chain cave-in. The darkness was complete, and Sydney only wanted sleep. But they had to move awhile, as far away from the wounded thing. In case it came after them again.
"We're lucky to survive that." Madeline spoke. Her voice was less scared than it had been before.
Good fortune, another scientist has gained speech.
Then: What do you consider yourself, then?
Sydney shook his head and replied to the shadow that was Madeline, his eyes were adjusting.
"We're lucky to have made it this far in the first place. But we have, and that’s all that matters."
The darkness was silent for a while, and then Madeline asked, "Does your rifle have a torch? That would help a lot."
Sydney almost laughed, for no apparent reason. He fingered the GRU carefully around its muzzle area, and scratched the distinct ridges of a Torch lenses.
"Yeah, it does, just don't blame me if I shoot you by accident."
Madeline remained quiet. Thinking about how true the statement could be, Sydney carefully engaged the safety on the rifle, and searched for the most logical place for the torch button to be. He found it, and switched the torch on. He aimed the blue, lancing beam to the top of the ceiling. The glossy crystal elements within the skin of the cave reflected the light a bit more and gave off a good ambient glow to see by. Sydney felt more like going to sleep, but he managed to rise to his feet and shake Alfred. He looked up to ask Madeline to help her, and found her inches away from his own face, he cried out in surprise and jumped backwards, dropping the gun and landing on his butt. He rubbed it painfully and looked at the bluish form of Madeline, who was seductively crawling over to him,
"Er... Um. Madeline, this isn't..."
"Sydney." She spoke slowly, "I really wish Levi would've chosen you to be a Guardian, too, but it’s not to be. I'm truly thankful that you've helped me cross the forest. I love you."
Sydney's hand shot for the GRU reflexively.
Madeline's hand reached out and grabbed Sydney's skull, and even as he felt his blood sucking in the wrong directions and the flood of information and programming kill him, he realized with the last ounce of clarity he would ever have:
You were one of them.
Sydney's corpse slumped to the floor, and Madeline dusted herself off as if she had touched something contagious.
She took the GRU rifle and walked over to Alfred, looking at him. She flicked her right hand upwards, and Alfred's form twitched for a while, before levitating a few centimeters of the rocky floor, his shoes and head scraping the floor. She added some support for his head, and walked ahead in the cave, shining the torch and making sure Alfred was unconscious. After a full fifteen minutes walk, she dropped Alfred and the gun, looked at a point in the ceiling and raised both her hands. She brought them down in an almost perfect mime of flapping a wet bed sheet, and the rock caved in there as well. She dusted her hands, picked up the rifle and flicked off the safety. She firing a single shot into her left thigh then she dropped the gun again and walked over to a wall. She sat in the dust heavily and lay against the wall. Seeing that the bleeding in her leg was more serious than anticipated, she tore off a strip of Alfred's shirt and tied the messy wound, then she closed her eyes and fell asleep.

---

Alfred was silent.
The room was now completely different. There was a window streaming sunlight, a strong oak door, and the plaster walls were repaired, though there was still evidence of scarring, however, he didn't bother asking about these, nor did he rise from his prone position. He fumed there in silence, and the man kept scribbling. It took some seconds for Alfred to realize that the man had put a mesh screen in the middle of the room.
"That’s going a bit too far." Alfred mumbled.
The man looked up with his shadow of a face, "Oh, so you have stopped fuming?"
Alfred struggled to control himself, "Yes. I have. I wish to continue the session."
The man nodded and continued scribbling. Alfred was not in the least tempted to move from his position.
"What happened? What did you do to me?"
Silence. More scribbling. Alfred remembered the rule and sighed, "I'm in trouble, and I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm stuck in a forest with alien beasts and I have no idea what Levi wants. She was all for humans. I spoke with her like a daughter and colleague..."
The man finished a stroke on his hidden notepad, and turned the page, he spoke,
"Levi is not human, you should know that. Whatever she’s doing, it’s all based on hard, simple, logic, uncompromised by human emotion."
Alfred sat up at that. Carefully, so as not to annoy his amorphous psychiatrist,
"Your suggesting I believe her? I go back to the compound and let her explain what she wants to me?"
"What do you think, Alfred? And I mean Kolinsky, not the scared man that has occupied my office ever since you woke up."
That’s about the most emotion he's ever expressed.
But the answer to the question came clearly to his mind,
"Everything is too ordered. It’s like we got pushed here, somehow. Maybe at first Levi wanted me locked in-"
"-But then she changed her efforts to flushing you out, and in the panic she did something you didn't notice." The psychiatrist completed.
Alfred didn't ask the question on his lips. He'd figure it out sooner or later.
"Alfred. What is your plan?" The man asked.
Alfred blinked in sudden clarity, "I need to talk with Levi, in a place she won't try anything. I need a safe place. I need a place to think. Maybe Sydney-"
"I wouldn't depend on Sydney if I were you..." The shadow stood up.
"Wha-?" Alfred looked at the leaving psychiatrist. He opened his mouth but before he could...
He woke up.

Madeline was sobbing in pain. Alfred rubbed his tired eyes and looked at her, and was thrown in a sudden fit of coughing after accidentally inhaling dust. He came to his knees whilst coughing and sneezing all the time, and he realized that he was in utter darkness, save for a small blue ambient light. He tracked it with his eyes to discover the GRU-016 lying up against a wall, shining a beam of light to the ceiling of the reinforced tunnel/cave. Beside the gun was Madeline, rubbing her thigh and sobbing pitifully in pain.
Alfred came to his feet, coughed once and walked over to her,
"What happened?"
She didn't reply at first. She clutched the bleeding wound tightly, and Alfred noticed that a piece of his shirt had been used to tie off the wound. She beat him to repeating the question, "It was Sydney. He... he changed and... I don't know how it happened. We were dragging you one moment and then he was aiming his gun at me... He was so clumsy and jerky that he only managed a shot before I could do anything."
She sobbed some more. Alfred's stomach dropped with dawning realization.
"Sydney... Where is he?"
Madeline sobbed. The light was enough to show her tear streaked and dirty face. She pointed a shaky finger in the general direction of whence they had come. Alfred could make out that there had been a cave in, "His back there. I think his dead."
Alfred felt stomped by the news.
Sydney. Of course it was Sydney. How else did he survive all that time? He was one of them from the start...
He exhaled shakily, "Come on, if I remember correctly there's a shaft up ahead. From Leviathan to that shaft is around a kilometer, and we’ve done only a couple hundred, I think, so it'll take some time. But if we do make it, then we're in The Eyre, and in there we're set to go anywhere we want."
Madeline wiped her eyes and clutched the wound, she looked up at Alfred with her beautiful eyes, "Thanks, Alfred."
Thanks?
"You're welcome. Let’s get going. How's the wound?"
Madeline looked at him pleadingly and Alfred got the message. He crouched and carefully pulled at the strip of shirt that had been used to staunch the bleed. It was a tight fix and he had to pull at it to the discomfort of Madeline, but he soon realized that it was a fairly clean wound. There was no bullet in it, and it had clotted fairly,
"You removed the bullet?"
Madeline nodded and looked at him worriedly, "How is it?"
Alfred shook his head with uncertainty,
"Uh, I guess it’s just a flesh wound, but you'll need disinfectant, and trust me, The Eyre will have that."
Alfred looked in the direction forward, "So long as Levi hasn't infiltrated it, then that'd be a problem."
He turned to Madeline and helped her up gingerly, "Sorry, stay on the wall for a while."
Madeline looked at Alfred and nodded, placing her hands on the wall to support herself. Alfred went over to the rifle and grabbed it. The gun would be bulky to hold, and he probably wouldn't have the guts to shoot anything anymore, which reminded Alfred;
How the heck did I move so fast, earlier?
-but that was a mystery for later. Right now he had other stuff to attend to. He made a mental note to try coaxing the answer out of his psychiatrist, if he ever had a chance to sleep (or faint, fainting works too) again, that is.
Weren't there supposed to be motion sensitive lights here? Alfred remembered.
"Alfred?"
Alfred looked at Madeline, she was struggling to stay upright against the wall.
"Oh, sorry." He grabbed the gun by its scruff, allowing for a clumsy aim of the lancing blue light. He went over to Madeline and gently supported her, with her (smooth, gentle) arm over his shoulder and his left hand around her waist. They went like that for the many meters ahead, and there wasn't much conversation. Alfred was lost in thought about what was happening, how disaster had struck as soon as he emerged from suspended animation to a miraculously renewed world. But Levi. Levi just had to go ruin it all by going crazy.
"Eric. What’s happening?" He suddenly asked aloud. Madeline didn't seem startled by this. She just kept silent. He expected more.
Probably in shock or something. I'd better be right about the shaft... Or else.
"alf..." She whispered. Alfred knew without asking that she had seen the shaft. He twisted his right wrist to splash the blue light around, and right along the crystalloid wall were the rungs of an old dull ladder snaking up into a narrow cylinder.
What a relief... But how will Madeline make it up there with her thigh shot up like that?
Madeline, as always, seemed to read his mind.
"It's okay, Alf. You go up ahead. I'll wait here." She sounded weary.
"No. I'll figure something out. We'll-"
"Go on ahead, Alfred. Just find the medical supplies and bring them as fast as possible. The sooner I'm better the sooner I can come up with you." Even in the darkness, Alfred could almost see the intense eyes pleading with him. But he knew she was right. However-
"Can't you pull your weight or something? I mean, what if they find you down here?"
Madeline shook her head, "I'm exhausted, Alf, and I have a gun if it comes to that. Trust me, please, you’re wasting time."
Alfred looked at her, and sighed explosively. He nodded his head, "Okay, fine, I'll do it. Don't die down here while I'm gone, okay? I'll come down as soon as I can."
"I know you will."
She seemed suddenly so close, and Alfred almost kissed her, but the thought of Sydney and the others dead made it seem dreadfully disloyal. He contented himself with a hug, and then he turned to the ladder and carefully climbed up it.
Be careful. It is two hundred years old. Maybe five.
As he climbed up into the shaft, he suddenly knew that it had been much longer than 200.
He shook his head and climbed up mumbling the words like a mantra, "I'll find out. I swear I'll find out..."

---

"Ouch... Damn."
In the darkness, Alfred had hit his head on a blunt metallic object with ridges. It took him a full thirty seconds of cursing and memory retrieval to remember that of course, the shaft had a wheel operated hatch over it. Alfred went down the ladder some rungs, and then gingerly felt for the wheel with his left hand. It would be stupid to forget he was quite some feet above the ground. When he confirmed the existence of the wheel, he carefully tried turning it. It caught solidly for a while, almost convincing Alfred to use both hands and risk using only his leg and back for support, but finally it screamed and spun counter clockwise. With a small groan of old metal, it finally swung open, only stopped by Alfred's grip on the wheel. He carefully let go, transferring his arm to the rungs of the ladder and the hatch fully opened. Dull Light washed down on him from above, and Alfred realized it was fading sunlight. He had emerged into The Eyre's Prepping bay, which, if he remembered correctly, was smaller than Leviathan's but more impressive.
Alfred took a deep breath, and climbed out of the hatch as quickly as he could. He did not try to study the landscape in depth until he was sure that the bay was completely void of mindless beings or monsters...
And it was.
"Good news for once." He breathed.
He took the liberty to look around, and nodded in appreciation on how good his memory of the place was.
The Eyre was the facility and outpost designed to have all aircraft and heavy machinery. It was also one of the three main communication centers spread across The Pandora Isle. There were so many aircraft and vehicles, quite a few of them purely military, that it made Alfred think of preparation for a new war. Sydney said something relating to that, Alfred remembered painfully, that if they had the chance they would do it all over again. Alfred took some steps forward and looked around the expanse of things. Containers, packed ladders, small vehicles to carry heavy vitals to the aircraft, elevators to the underground and wide rectangular outlines that would open to reveal channels to more machinery down below. Yet they were all still, and the whole place was silent and devoid of life, making the whole scene sad rather than amazing.
Alfred glanced up at the ceiling, which was made of thinner material than that of Leviathan or Zeus, and he realized that time and trouble doesn't stop for anyone, because, crawling on the ceiling were two gigantic insect-like monstrosities. He could already see the cracks forming.
Oh man.
One of the things raised its hind sting and gored the ‘glass’. The force of the blow rattled the polymer, and another crack formed. Alfred managed one last glance at their progress before he ran, and he realized without doubt that they were heading for him. The screens on their eyes all reflected him. They wanted to kill him.
Where is the damn elevator...
His eyes caught sight of the unmistakable shaft that led to the control tower above the dome. It looked flimsy in the face of the insects' size, but up there was all the communication with the entire island he needed.
This was not a chance to miss.
Alfred ran.
The shaft was further than he thought, and his heart threatened to suffocate him with fear, because he could hear the loud plinking of glass as it struck the floor. At least one of them had made a hole through the glass. The beast would follow, and Alfred made sure he did not look up. He concentrated on the shaft, not because he was brave and able to block out fear at will, it was because he was scared of what he would see if he stopped and looked up.
His ears heard everything, the glass above smashed again as the shaft loomed closer, some hundred feet at least, and then he heard a loud unmistakable buzz saw sound of earnestly flapping wings...
Of course they have wings.
The shaft was closer, and his lungs were bursting. He couldn't move fast anymore. With horror in his heart, he felt himself slow to a fast walk. His adrenaline wasn't assisting him; he was exhausted from his earlier exploits. The day had been cruel to all his limbs and muscles.
Damn damn damn why do they make it look easy in the movies? He limped, wheezing heavily as he felt a shadow slide above him. The door was in front of him. His hand reached out and pressed a button. The door slid open.
I'm dead. It has impaled me. I'm dead. He tumbled through face first-
-and he felt a good amount of skin shave off the top of his head. The sting accompanied a rush of wind and it bored through the other end of the shaft completely.
Bleeding, Alfred knew that he must be dead, but he rose anyway, with gore leaking over his face and down his neck, and pressed the elevator button that led up. The doors closed, and the insect screamed
Sounds like the roar of a lion mixed with a night cricket. Alfred thought, his world yawing.

The beast screamed again as the elevator went upwards, and Alfred found himself tipping over and smashing the floor. He lazily watched as another arc of blood flew out of his wound and splattered the elevator buttons. He stared at the surface of the carpeted elevator.
Death. I've never... actually thought about it... I thought I'd have time... Plans...
Alfred's eyes felt heavy, and he smiled,
At least. At least it’s not painful. God all my life as a child I didn't want a painful...
He closed his eyes. The slow fade out was a blessing. He could have laughed in pleasure at the fact that death was so peaceful.

---

The Mesh was gone. The room was a mess, and the shadowy man was standing up, the notepad clutched under his arms.
"I'm impressed." The man said with a tired voice,
"Usually all your species fail in encounters beyond their means. I'm glad that I'm your Memoria Accommodare, you have preserved the body well, and I think it’s time you remembered."
"But I'm dead." Alfred rose to his feet, and gingerly felt his scalp, there was a huge scar there, but it wasn't bleeding. He looked at the shadowy figure, who was standing at the door in the room. The open door in the room.
"Let's go, Alfred Kolinsky, I'll show you why Leviathan did what she did, and what you discovered before this."
They were in a corridor, and it was the most featureless place ever. Alfred was not even sure if it was a corridor. All he saw was an expanse stretching outwards, but since he was obviously in his mind, it must be some sort of structure. He looked longingly back at his session room, but the shadow man pushed him forward,
"Time to walk, Alfred. It’s a trip down Memory Lane."
Alfred shook his head dreamily and muttered, "Cliché."
"An accurate one. Start walking. You'll see."
Alfred asked, "So. Memoria Accommodare, huh? Additional memory. So you’re not a normal occurrence, after all? I always thought-"
"-that you conditioned yourself not to dream?"
Alfred nodded.
His Memoria Accommodare spoke, "You’re dying, unless you recover your memory. Go."
Alfred walked, and then, on second thought. He ran.

---

The images blurred past him. Color, smell, sound and touch rose like waves and almost engulfed him completely, nothing of the sort happened, except that he remembered. Alfred pulled himself past the memory covering him and ran through another. And another. And another...

---

"Oh my God."
Alfred was leaning over his personal piece of console in The Brain. Levi had exclaimed in surprise at the same time. Eric frowned and walked over to the unusual couple,
"What's up, Alf?"
Alfred looked up at him with tears in his eyes. He tried to choke out the words, but they would not come. He was failing to breathe in the face of the awesome discovery. He tried but couldn't. A lump had formed at his throat, and he found himself almost passing out.
"Ouch!"
Eric had slapped him. He looked at Alfred with a nervous smile,
"You mind telling me what the heck has got you excited? You almost went into convulsions, I swear."
Alfred cracked in a hoarse voice, "I found it. Eric it’s not a myth. I found it."
Eric's eyes widened, "No ways, seriously?" Then they contracted in sarcasm. Alfred ignored it, he pointed at the screen.
Eric was not in the least confused by the jumble of windows Alfred had opened. Alfred was in the vast unexplored database of one of the Isle’s computers. On one window, Eric saw what Levi and Alfred had exclaimed over, and he found his senses dulling in shock.
Alfred finally had a voice, "I've found the Book of Eden. This is way past anything. Anything on this planet. It’s... It’s the most fucking awesome discovery for mankind."
Alfred looked at Eric, who was as stunned as his friend was, "Just when the world is about to end, I've found the book that started it all..."
The Book of Eden. Levi downloaded every byte of the text into Alfred's personal files, and Eric looked at the status meter and darkness flitted across his face,
"Levi? You are not to download the book. We'll read it remotely, and that’s it, understand?"
"But why, Ericsson?" Levi was annoyed. Alfred frowned at his friend, "Yeah, why?"
Eric managed a smile, but Alfred saw through it, "Alf, at such a time, we shouldn't reveal this. This book will cause an uproar. We'll still see it, maybe, but no one else knows apart from us..." Eric looked pointedly at the holographic figure, "and you, Levi."
And you, Levi? Alfred thought.
---
Alfred was pouring through the book alone, and then it finally dawned on him.
This is too much power... This is just too much... He understood some of Eric’s apprehension.
"Levi."
Levi's holographic figure looked at him expectantly, "Yes?"
The download status meter was about to complete,
"Cancel download of the book. And delete it from its archive. There is no best case scenario I can think of where this book will help mankind."
Levi stared at Alfred, hoping that he was joking in some way, but seeing the serious look in his eyes, she shook her head,
"You must be joking, Alfred. You realize that with the genetic codes specified in this book we can create anything? Any living organism ever to be alive on this planet, and more? Do you realize the implications of such... Such Treasure?"
Alfred shook his head and tapped the ESC button on the progress screen, a password prompt came up,
"Are you sure you want to cancel upload?" It said.
Levi pleaded, "No, please Mr. Kolinsky. Don't you want the world to be alive again? Can't you realize how much potential we can unlock? I showed it to Madeline and she said combinations could easily-"
"You did what?" Alfred asked Levi. She seemed flustered, "That’s beside the point, Doctor-"
Alfred typed in the password and confirmed canceling the upload. Then he called Eric using the intercom,
"Eric, lock up the file."
Though Eric was annoyed that is friend had gone ahead and read the book again, he complied immediately.
Levi vanished with fury on her face.
---
The next day, two days before they would all be put under, Alfred was reading the first page of genetic code found on The Book on a document in his computer. It was the last page of the entire Book, and no one knew he had it. Alfred had uploaded his own genetic code as a base of reference and read through the ancient text that Levi had partly translated. He was doing it on a secure data pad that was not within the network, hence Levi nor Eric would be aware of the file. Alfred read the details on the screen repeatedly, comparing the genetic code.
Homo sapiens sapiens rex, a clearly superhuman race of humans, compared to his own, regular Homo sapiens sapiens
Or at least, that’s what he had thought. Alfred looked at the screen in surprise as his genetic code registered as the ancient super-man: Homo sapiens sapiens rex...
He obtained some blood from random human blood samples taken from the scientists who were about to implement the plan, and compared those ones' genetic code to the one located in Homo sapiens sapiens rex, and found them to be a normal Homo sapiens sapiens.
Somehow, Alfred was a living genetic miracle dating to the ancients who had created life...

---

Alfred stopped running. He had remembered. He looked over at his Memoria Accomodare and stated, "You're the advantage of my species. An inner mind with which I can reach important conclusions with."
"That is correct."
"My species... Where did I come from? I wonder who I am…"
The shadowy figure walked over to him, "It's a long story, Alfred, and beyond your mind at the moment. As of now you need to stop Levi in her tracks."
Alfred looked at him, unsure of whether he could trust this man, his psychiatrist looked impatient,
"Alfred. I swear I'll tell you about your heritage. But now this isn't the time. Among this advantage, your species also has the ability for spontaneous regeneration, speed-"
"-Like what happened before when I first met that thing..." Alfred cut in, then his eyes widened as he realized, "That insect... It was formed by one of the genetic codes written in The Book... Who helped Levi construct... ?"
He looked at the shadowy man, who waved Alfred goodbye. The world dimmed.
"Madeline." The man answered Alfred's question for the first time ever.

---

Alfred woke up. The elevator was still rumbling, and his head wound had stopped bleeding. He watched with detached amazement as some of the blood actually crawled up his scalp and back into his head.
There was still fiery pain where the wound had been opened, but Alfred was confident that in a minute or two there would hardly be any evidence of damage - but he had been lucky.
Despite his advantage he knew a direct blow to his brain would end it all, and that was a result he did not want.
The elevator stopped. And Alfred could hear more screaming of the beasts. They were confronting something else below.
Madeline.
Without a doubt, she had somehow used The Book to enhance her capabilities. That was just a half genius's use of The Book. Alfred couldn't imagine what a team of scientists would come up with...
The Book of Eden was dangerous.

---

The door slid open.
The Eyre control tower wasn't impressive, just a circular saucer shaped room with consoles along the entire circumference, but it would do its work efficiently. Although Alfred hadn't discussed it, he knew exactly what his plan was: The Zeus facility, full of all military related personnel, was still under cryogenic sleep. Eric ensured that he would personally initiate the process that would activate Zeus's less sophisticated A.I to begin the process. That is, if Levi hadn't already murdered the hundred or so people there, or they had died during the process of unplanned lengthened hibernation.
Highly likely. Alfred thought grimly, but he would at least try.
He found himself in front of a console, bringing up the required windows of data with effortless memory and something extra. He found himself within the restricted areas of Zeus’s systems within seconds, and then he was running diagnostics on Zeus.
"Fully operational.” The result returned, “Boot? Y/N..."
Alfred tapped 'Y'.
DUUM
Alfred spun around as the floor suddenly dented upwards and Madeline flew out of a hole. She landed gracefully, but she was butchered. Her stomach had a yawning hole in it, revealing some ribs and flesh, and most of the right side of her face was a mess. But she seemed in total control of her limbs. She glared at Alfred,
"Your damn Memoire Accommodare survived Levi's programming, huh?"
Alfred frowned, "Levi tried to program me?"
Madeline seemed to think about laughing, but stopped herself, "She erased your memory. You’re hers, Alfred. You lost from the very beginning. You fell into Levi's hands years ago..."
Alfred grinned back at her, "I doubt it."
Madeline turned her head clockwise as though she was studying Alfred, but she was looking past him to the console, "Looks like you've completed what Levi wanted you to do."
"Wha-?" Alfred looked at the console, and his eyes widened as he saw the grinning face of Levi stare back at him through a screen,
"Thanks for activating The Eyre. Now I have full control of it. And through the connection from The Eyre to Zeus..."
The displays on the consoles and the lamps flickered, then stayed steady. Levi came back on,
"... I now have control of all three facilities. Now. You'll listen to me, Alfred, and after that, maybe I'll see whether Madeline should kill you or you'll help this just cause."
"I'm all ears." Alfred said without looking at Levi. He stared at Madeline, and wondered why he ever thought her beautiful. Of course, the insects had thrashed her, but even before that, he wondered how he could've trusted such a despicable face. He just wanted to crush it in his hands...
"So... what do you want to know, Alfred?" Levi said sweetly.
Alfred clenched his fist, feeling blood pumping through his veins, "I want to know why you killed Eric...” He paused for a moment there, and felt a sharp pain at the fact that Levi didn’t interrupt him. It was true, then. He continued, “…and why you delayed the cryogenic sleep," He turned to face Levi and finished, "And why you betrayed us all."
Levi smiled, "You should really be an actor, you know. You choreographed that so perfectly-"
Alfred glared at her. He was starting to see red. His adrenaline was getting to him, and Alfred could tell by the way his whole world shook that it was his own special, deadly adrenaline... It would be his advantage.
"Well. I killed Eric because he didn't trust me, and also because he tried to destroy The Book and set subroutines in me that allowed your fortunate escape from reprogramming."
"What do you know about The Book, Levi? I don't know why I didn't think of it then, but you deciphered it too easy for it to be alien to you."
"Well, it'd become a history lesson if I told you everything, but let me tell you, I'm much older than you think. This Pandora Isle is Eden, and I'm part of it, designed by The Ancients."
Alfred's eyes widened, "What?"
"Yes... I know. Strange name. However, this is not actually a human settlement. It is an archaeological find of alien technology… So far that is all I have discovered.
“My previous files got corrupt as the dateline increased, but so far I'm thinking I was the first computer, developed by the ancients to handle everything concerning the making of new organisms. I'm an overseer, you might say, and the text in The Book was therefore easy to read."
Alfred's heart thumped. There were so many questions, but there was too little time to act,
"Madeline? You used a genetic code on Madeline?"
"Of course. She helped a lot, so I had to bestow the gift on her. I actually have a genetic compiler deep within the facility where I can procure the treasures of The Book, and I'm sure you'll be happy to visit it. Maybe I can show you brains of the dinosaurs. Or the things that were there before the dinosaurs..."
Alfred's adrenaline was full. He was going to die if he didn't let it out. He continued, "So you used The Book to re-nourish the plant life? What happened, Levi?"
Levi seemed flustered, "A miscalculation. I needed a beast that fed on radiation. Yes, Alfred, radiation. There were quite some creations before you came along. After its duty was done I created animals, but it evolved unpredictably and killed everything, and evolved some more over the few 500 years we put it on the Isle. None of us were equipped to stop the hoard, and it was too risky for Madeline to go out alone, even with the scientists, who were hard to control, But then, you woke up all of the sudden with Eric's back door program and gave us a chance-"
"-Thanks, I know the rest of the story from there." Alfred said. And he turned around, swinging a mallet of a foot to Madeline. Madeline's reflexes were slower due to her wounds, and her head tore off her shoulders and flew some feet sideways with her body. Shock was the last expression on her gored face.
"What are you-!" Levi was shocked, but Alfred wasn't done yet. He needed to move or his heart would explode, and he had just the right idea.
Recovering from the round house kick, he crouched and jumped out of The Eyre's control tower, smashing through the glass and flying so high he could see a lot of the ground in all its glory. He saw a hoard of the insect creatures rushing towards Zeus, and listened to gunfire for a second before concentrating on the glass dome of The Prepping Bay.
He landed on the reinforced glass with tremendous force. It cracked heavily, and the fissures spread across its face. Alfred, feeling far greater than he had ever felt, made two fists and swung them down on the centre of the cracks, launching his legs up in the recoil of the smash. The heavily reinforced glass caved immediately, and he was through it with a swan dive.
The mindless men and women were ready. The majority carried Dreamcatchers and at the sight of more dead bodies and three ugly animal carcasses, Alfred guessed that they had just experienced a battle with the insects. Their deadly aim was steadier than before, obviously. However, Alfred had his nearly fatal adrenaline to aid him.
He spun in the air as Dreamcatcher capsules and deadly bullets flew past. He flipped from his dive, and then he was among them. His landing dented the metallic surface of The Bay and shook the ground. Quite a few of the mindless lost balance, but Alfred didn't pay more attention after that. Swinging his hands widely, he decapitated a number of them, and then he smashed his hands on the metallic floor. It didn't cave immediately, and he pounded at it more. He kicked and punched through the metal, his vision reddened by the crazy hormones blasting through his body.
He jumped through the new hole, and landed hard but safely on another metallic surface.
He was met by pitch-black darkness, but almost like he was wearing night vision goggles, the place lit up in a dull green haze. The immaculate machinery and precise architecture was unmistakable: Leviathan's core. He had found it with one try, thanks to his boosted mind.
"Levi!" He called, licking his lips as he walked towards the main generator and brain of Leviathan.
Levi gave up on keeping her opponent blind in the dark, she switched on the lights.
"Alfred.” She said in the millionth pacifying tone Alfred had heard throughout the debacle, “you must understand that I've done a good thing, I saved the island and can save much more of the world. Your actions have no logic in them."
Alfred looked up at the voice, "I know that. There's just something you haven't told me. I can feel it."
He jumped onto a platform, and there, in front of him, was the fusion core of Levi. It was fully active, and its roar was almost deafening, but Alfred easily adapted,
"Tell me, Levi, why a super nation would abandon such an island of treasures without so much as a sign of themselves?"
Levi remained silent, save for her fusion core. Alfred grinned up at the featureless ceiling, "They died, didn't they? They made something similar to your radiation eating bugs. They got themselves killed."
He looked at the fusion core, "I wonder how they dealt with it."
Levi remained silent. Then there was laughter, loud laughter.
"I knew you were the member I needed in the team. Your smart, so smart, Mr. Kolinsky… But you’re also an idiot." She laughed loudly. Alfred frowned.
She spoke in the midst of chuckles, "Kill me... Kill me, Alfred Kolinsky. Because I remember. I finally remember what happened. I know what they created. What killed them... Your world is doomed, we are doomed. No matter what happens from here. The nuclear war should've finished us off!"
She laughed, and Alfred methodically kicked at the generator components of the fusion core, careful not to hit anything that would immediately incinerate him. Finally the laughter was finished, and the core flickered in malfunction.
"Better get out of here, I guess." He mumbled.
The core blasted, but Alfred was far out of the dome before it happened.
He landed in the jungle, burnt to the bone in some places but otherwise clothed and tired. He crouched thereand pondered as his flesh grew back and his adrenaline slowed. Debris from the facility plinked down among him. He sighed,
The insects. I still have to deal with them...
But the foliage up ahead was rustling gently, and it gave Alfred sudden painful nostalgia, the simple effect of a shrub rustling.
Three soldiers, dirty and tired walked out of the bush. All were armed, and the foremost one smiled at Alfred, "Hey, there, Kolinsky. Looked like we over-slept."
"Yeah." Kolinsky replied. He hadn't the remotest idea who the man was but knew Eric had been busy with back doors programs in Zeus. Levi had obviously failed to kill everyone, as threatened.
If Eric was the genius, Why did he have to be one to die?
The soldier walked over to him, "We've got all the crabs on the run, and I’ve dispatched drones to their nest. We've been way past hell and now everything’s done. No zombies, no insects to threaten us. Also, it looks like Mars left us a message. They've got quite a population up there, and over the years Earth has developed some random chatter, looks like humans get the right to live again."
Crabs, huh? What a fitting name... Alfred thought bemusedly.
The soldier looked around the smoking not-so quiet bush with the countenance of a person finally out in the air after being locked up underground. But then again, that wasn't too much of a metaphor, in his case.
Alfred was just exhausted, and thankful. So thankful to Eric and his suspicions.
"Yeah." He said again. The soldier patted Alfred on the back sympathetically,
"It’s good to know we can depend on a scientist or two to get dirty. You've saved a lot of people, Mr. Kolinsky."
Alfred sat down in the dirt, and looked up to the darkening sky. Half the moon was visible, and so was a bright star.
The North Star. He remembered. Such things were ageless, no matter what happened on Earth. They were always there, perfect, and peaceful.
Finally Alfred allowed himself emotions akin to joy and relief, and stood up, ready to talk, ready to get every last detail cleared up before he slept one good long sleep.
This time I'm going to ignore my Memoir and sleep on that couch for once!

---

EPILOGUE

The North Star pulsated. It was finally, at long last, ready to move.
All those million years of growing limbs and feeding on all forms of energy were done.
All that time reconstructing itself after The Ancients tried to destroy it.
Now it was ready to begin its journey. The solar system was a starter course, especially Earth, where its creators wanted to kill it.
After this galaxy, the next, and then the next, and finally, the universe.
It would be the most enjoyable experience.
The humanoid figure pulsed one last time, and the light shrank away to its dark, featureless skin. Its eyes opened and glared red, and it clenched its claws.
Space and time bent at its will, and it tumbled into the wormhole. It would take some quite a number of years before it arrived, but it would eventually, finally cross the gulf to Earth.
And begin The End.