Behold: Humanity!: Screams of the Past by Ralts Bloodthorne

Author:Ralts Bloodthorne [Bloodthorne, Ralts]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2022-12-19T16:00:00+00:00

Damaged Infinity & Dogs

The landscape below was ravaged. Parks riven and cold, destroyed buildings covered with a rime of frost from where the atmosphere had frozen to the surfaces when the dome had been breached, vehicles strewn around. There was still the flicker of neon and holograms.

And the white flicker of shades.

"Where are we?" Herod asked as the domed city slowly passed beneath him, as if he wasn't moving at nearly two thousand miles an hour.

"Over the Layer Sigma Worker Housing Area Niner Epsilon Three Area," Sam-UL answered.

"How many people worked in here when it was active?" Herod asked, watching as the shattered edge of the dome slid by.

"Two hundred fifty three thousand four hundred nineteen 'Pure Strain Humans', eighty-three Digital Sentiences, eighty three thousand two hundred nineteen 'gene-jacks', one-hundred sixteen thousand two hundred forty two Cybernetic Collective Citizens, fifteen thousand Treana'ad exactly, and nineteen million eight hundred fifteen thousand six hundred seventy six Born Whole maintenance clones," Sam answered.

Herod closed his eyes, no longer the robotic looking eyes his physical interaction frame had started with, and pushed his palms against the eye sockets.

"They all killed each other," Sam choked.

"Steady, Sam," Herod said. The other DS had been alternating between raving and weeping for a few hours prior.

"There's just so many of them. So many of them," Sam's voice trailed off into a whisper.

"Steady, Sam," Herod said. He looked down at Wally, the little robot that had been accompanying him.

Wally could get to the mass storage areas much faster and easier than Herod could.

And, unlike Sam and Herod, Wally didn't see the Shades.

Another destroyed dome went by, frozen trees and fields of gain in the darkness. The only light was the pale white flicker of shades moving about, the psychic residue of the last moments of beings driven insane.

"How much further," Herod asked.

"Half an hour," Sam-UL said.

"What do I need to repair?" Herod asked.

Below a complex railyard passed, with the rails moving up into the air.

Behold mine works I doth craft in mine madness and despair, ye who art still burdened with thy sanity, Herod quoted to himself as the mag-lev passenger car passed a train frozen still on the tracks and covered in a layer of frost.

"Main power switching system. Not the computers, but the physical links," Sam said. He coughed, the wet bubbling cough of a man with a punctured lung. "It used old Stappenbury Superconductors."

Herod nodded. That type was room temperature and above, but quickly increased impedance the colder it got; a direct reversal of most conductors.

It also excreted fluorine gas as it got colder, and hydrogen gas as it got hotter.

One of the earliest strange matter applications.

"I'll manufacture the Stappenbury when I see what I have to replace. Do you have a visual on it?" Herod asked, opening up his virtual keyboard and setting to work.

"No. I've got the blueprint, but like we saw in the matter shipment switchback, what is on the blueprint and what is reality are two different things," Sam said. He paused for a moment.

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