The Desolate Guardians (13 page)

In a few moments, I was alone.

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

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

I was alive!

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are you talking about?
he
asked.

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

Heath, I don't understand.

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

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

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

…because I'd wanted to help out…

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

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

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

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

Yep, got you good.

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

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

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

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

You can follow more releases, or give
comments at:

Website: MattDymerski.com

Twitter: @MattDymerski

Email:
[email protected]

I'm always interested in hearing from my
readers!

Psychosis

Explore the true anatomy of horror through
these thirteen tales of despair and terror, each written by the
author of the original short story "Psychosis."

Psychosis

The Bonewalker

The Fire of the Soul

"Come Closer"

Scribblings

The Lodge

Correspondence

Strangers in a Graveyard

The Lonely Grave

The Basement

Erosion

Strange Things

The Seven Horsemen of the Apocalypse

The Asylum

What is the nature of insanity? Follow one
doctor's hunt for dark Truth through a series of patient accounts,
each further from the light than the last...

Contains all six of the popular Asylum series
of horror stories.

Creepy Tales

Five longer tales designed to creep and
disturb.

It Watched Us Play

A Series of Strange Occurrences

The Hole

The Heat

The Misdial

Aberrations

Thirteen creepy short stories designed to
disturb even the most jaded horror fan.

A Strange Kind of Journal

Still Life

Staring Contest

Final Exam

The Everest Corpses

Something’s Wrong

An Overheard Conversation

Smoke and Mirrors

An Unhappy Awakening

The Unseen Hands

The Hungry Lights

The Television

An Impossible Window

World of Glass

In a total surveillance society where every
moment of every life is publicly recorded, three newly graduated
Scientists make a youthful pact to change things for the better.
Their naïve promise will shape the future in ways subtle and vast,
perhaps offering a sliver of hope against the coming darkness, for
this world of glass has reached a breaking point. Under the most
powerful tool of oppression ever built, work is life, and speaking
out means unemployment and starvation - but someone has found a way
to communicate in secret, and the implications will be explosive
beyond measure.

Read this tale of survival and awakening in
an industrial dystopian surveillance society disturbingly not too
far from our own - World of Glass, Book One of the Final Cycle:

Humanity has blazed a legacy of destruction
and rebirth across an endless history of violence, but Time and
Earth have finally run out. There is nowhere left to begin again. A
hopeful promise between three friends; the meeting of two very
different civilizations; one last struggle to master the human
spirit - whether harmony or extinction triumphs, there will be no
more chances. This is the Final Cycle.

Preview:

The Moon Aflame

I know this might be an odd question to ask
on a mental health forum, but - does anybody else see that the Moon
is on fire?

I'm not joking. I'll run through this for a
second. I know I'm not the most reliable person, but I don't think
I could imagine something like
this.

Hell, I remember the entire lead-up to what
happened. People were
freaking out.
It was the end of the
world, by all anybody knew. What did they call it? An 'unidentified
object at near-luminous speed…' That's what the media said, over
and over, for like the day and a half we had until it hit. I guess
that meant it was going really fast… fast enough to destroy all
life on the planet, anyway. That was the part nobody
misunderstood.

They said somebody had to have created this
object and aimed it at us. It was unlike anything natural they'd
ever seen. They said somebody had probably shot this thing at us
billions of years ago, probably aiming to wipe out the competition
before it evolved… aiming to wipe
us
out before we were
anything more than barely living goo.

But, apparently, it'd been sent out - hold
on, let me check my scribblings about what they said - between 4.54
and 4.527 billion years ago… because whoever had shot it at us
hadn't taken the Moon into account. They couldn't have, because it
didn't exist then.

Miraculously, the timing was just right, and
it hit the Moon instead.

I remember the noise and the flash. How could
I forget? Absolutely everyone was outside watching and listening,
thinking the world was about to end… but it was daytime here, and
the Moon was on the other side of the planet.

We only saw the edges of the blast spraying
up past the horizon. A sprawling cloud of flame and glowing dust
erupted across the sky as I stood on the street among dozens of
neighbors I didn't know. Well, I knew Crazy Donald, a homeless guy
who I sat with sometimes outside Wendy's - he was there, muttering
to himself and holding a plastic bag filled with plastic bags, but
I don't think he knew anything was going on. He was just going
around asking people for change, even before we knew that we were
going to live for another day.

I like him, because he and I get along, in a
quiet and lonely sort of way.

I followed him around and made sure he was
safe as the crowd grew confused, excited, and loud, scaring
him.

The radios came alive and said we should
probably stay inside for the next few days. We didn't need to be
told twice. I urged Donald to move along to somewhere safe, and
then I hid in my apartment.

The parties were absolutely insane - from
what I could hear through the walls. I imagined that people were
amazed at being alive, and, since they had nowhere to go until the
all-clear, it was party time.

Me? I keep to myself, mostly.

See, that's why I'm asking. I remember all
this very vividly. I could have
sworn
it was real. Thing is,
even despite the pills, I have a tough time with reality. I can
feel the rippling waters of dreaming while I'm awake. Often, I
can't distinguish between the cold hard lines of the real world and
half-formed concepts of waking imagination. I don't want to have my
dosage upped again, because the pills make my brain feel like
cement, so I… pretend.