The Omega Project (27 page)

Memories of my hasty escape came rushing back. Entering the lower level, I listened for the bees, and instead heard a deep gurgling sound originating from beneath my feet.

ABE, identify that sound.

THE SOUND IS COMING FROM THE TWO AUXILIARY BACKUP GENERATORS.

What about the nuclear reactor?

PLUTONIUM RODS HAVE EXPIRED, THE NUCLEAR REACTOR IS OFF-LINE. BACKUP BATTERIES HAVE BEEN CHARGED USING SOLAR PANELS LOCATED ALONG THE AERO GEL EXTERIOR. VEGETATION GROWTH IS IMPEDING THE PROCESS. LIFE SUPPORT IS LIMITED TO SEVEN HOURS, TWENTY-SIX MINUTES. LIGHTS ARE NOT FUNCTIONING IN 37 PERCENT OF THE SHIP. ALL GALLEY APPLIANCES ARE OFF-LINE. POWER TO THE ARBORETUM–

Never mind that. What about the cryogenic chamber?

THE CRYOGENIC CHAMBER HAS ITS OWN BACKUP POWER SUPPLY.

How can I access the chamber?

GOLEM CONTROLS ALL ACCESS.

Is GOLEM online?

NO.

Is there a manual override?

YES.

*   *   *

Oscar followed me up the steel ladder. The air was stagnant and at least fifty degrees warmer than when
Oceanus
had been submerged. The smell that greeted us on the midlevel was rancid, rendered ripe by the cessation of cold.

The damage
Oceanus
had endured from its death roll and plunge into the sea trench was everywhere in evidence, from the pipes that had burst through the ceiling to the recessed stateroom doors, the open panels having unleashed the suites’ wares into the corridor. Arriving at Stateroom Two, I sifted through my fiancée’s belongings and was excited to find my duffel bag nestled within the pile of refuse.

Like a boy on Christmas morning, I opened the canvas bag, extracting a fresh pair of boxers, my black nylon running suit, matching athletic shoes and socks. Slipping out of the tattered orange jumpsuit, I dressed in my familiar civvies and felt like a new man.

Curious, Oscar groped my new “skin” with four of his suckers.

“It’s for warmth, pal. Sort of like your hair, only with a fashion statement.”

We continued down the corridor, arriving at the cryogenic chamber, the only suite whose doors remained sealed. The override switch was located inside a master control panel on an adjacent wall. Suctioning the locked security cover, Oscar tore it from its hinges, allowing me to access the override.

With a squeal of rubber the seal parted, Oscar wrenching open the double doors.

Unlike the rest of
Oceanus,
the interior was well ventilated and chilled. I advanced slowly through the darkened chamber, my eyes unable to pick a trail through the unrecognizable shadows.

ABE, guide me to the emergency lights.

Feeling my way to an interior panel, I flipped a series of circuit breakers, igniting sparks. Above my head, two crimson emergency lights flickered to life from a row of ten—revealing a dramatically altered interior.

“GOLEM … what have you done?”

To describe the chamber and adjoining surgical suite as having been “transformed” would be an understatement, for the surroundings I stood in now had been rendered unrecognizable by its creator, who was nowhere in sight.

The ceiling that had separated the mid-deck from the upper level had been torn out and gutted in order to fabricate a new appendage—a monstrous multi-metal and graphite five-fingered extremity, each four-jointed digit in excess of fifteen feet long. The artificial hand hung inverted and limp from the upper deck’s steel support beams, its tendons composed of pistons, its blood vessels aero gel flex tubing filled with hydraulic fluid and sintered tungsten carbide balls. As fluid pushed the weighted balls through different sections of the arm’s tubing, the redistribution of weight and pressure allowed GOLEM to open and close the massive claw.

Judging from the cobwebs and layers of dust, it had been eons since the appendage had been operational. The source of the hydraulic fluid had been GOLEM’s vertical shaft, and the shaft now stood before me, drained of its fluid. Perhaps a leak had sprouted from one of the claw’s major arteries, bleeding its master to death; perhaps GOLEM had simply suffered a major systems failure. Either way, some time after completing the abomination of technology before me, my creation had been condemned to its final resting place at the bottom of the shaft.

Curious, I pressed my face to the tube and looked down, but it was far too dark and there was no angle to see anything.

While the primary section of GOLEM’s new appendage had been intended to handle the computer’s heavy lifting, the claw’s secondary limbs were designed for far more delicate procedures. Sprouting from the knuckles, rooted in the main skeleton were smaller telescopic graspers—six-foot-long fingers, the tips of which branched out again, this time into delicate surgical instruments. There were scalpels and forceps, suction hoses and syringes and IVs connected to God only knows what kind of elixirs and solutions. There were also tools designed for sampling tissue, and that knowledge made me shudder.

What the hell had GOLEM been up to?

I stood back to take in the entire monstrosity, which hung like an inverted mechanical tree, and that’s when I recognized the design pattern in play. The thought must have subconsciously triggered a memory of my phone conversation with Monique DeFriend because suddenly ABE was playing it back to me like a lecturing parent.

“… ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS USING BIOCHEMICAL ALGORITHMS POSSESSING COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO INTERNALLY OVERANALYZE THEIR OWN PRIME DIRECTIVES, CREATING CLOSED-CIRCUIT LOOPS OF SEGREGATED DNA STRANDS. THIS ACTIVITY CAN CORRUPT THE SYSTEM IN THAT THESE FAVORED SOLUTION PATTERNS ARE FILED AWAY AS ‘PERFECTION’ AND THEREFORE ARE NO LONGER SUBJECTED TO RIGOROUS REEVALUATION. THE AI VALIDATES THIS NEW PROTOCOL IN A VACUUM—A COGNITIVE STATE THAT MOST PSYCHIATRISTS WOULD DEFINE AS PSYCHOPATHIC EGO.”

GOLEM, a supercomputer programmed with a matrix patterned after redwood DNA, had constructed a mechanical claw based on its own biological biases. In doing so, the computer had subconsciously created its own closed-circuit loop—and I had been the one to give it shape and form.

The question now—what had my computer’s psychopathic ego been up to?

The twelve cryogenic pods were still in place. I moved to the first machine of four set in the front row and peered inside the container.

It was empty.

So were the next two. And the last.

“Freed themselves and left me behind … Bastards.”

I moved to the second row, yanking open the unsealed lids of four more vacant pods—

—the pan flute–like extortions summoning my attention from above. Oscar had climbed the robotic claw and was demanding I join him.

Standing atop one of the pods in the last row, I climbed up onto the steel appendage, managing to establish a handhold on one of the claw’s lower digits—and nearly slicing my right ankle on one of the surgical blades. Gripping the flex hose, I attempted to pull my way up the alien-looking structure, my rubber-soled shoes slipping on hydraulic fluid drippings.

Growing impatient, the cephaloped reached down with one of its powerful tentacles and hoisted me up to its perch.

The crawl space between the midlevel and upper deck was twelve feet high, a vast expanse filled with ventilation ducts, pipes, and electrical conduits, sectioned between steel support struts. Standing on a rusted steel beam, I stared at the dark alcove until my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting.

And then I saw what Oscar had discovered—the sight making my skin crawl.

Hanging from metal hooks from the ceiling were the skeletal remains of the six male members of the Omega crew, their vacant eye sockets staring back at me, their bones still bearing tatters of dried flesh. The men were identifiable by the size of their frames and the patches of hair still adhering to their scalps. Kevin Read was front and center, Jason Sloan behind him and to the right, Yoni to the left—one of the Israeli’s femurs hanging disjointed from the hip. The other three males filled out the next row so that the men’s remains dangled from the ceiling like bowling pins.

Sensing my distress, Oscar lowered me to the ground, then dropped by my side.

“No … this makes no sense. ABE, analyze the contents of this lab. Determine its purpose!”

PURPOSE UNKNOWN.

ALERT! ONE OF THE CRYOGENIC PODS REMAINS OPERATIONAL.

I pushed past Oscar to inspect the last row of cryogenic pods.

Empty.

Empty.

Sealed!

I tried to raise the lid, only the machine was indeed operational, its unidentifiable occupant vacuum-packed in a frozen pool of tetrodotoxin gel.

Turning my attention to the control panel, I attempted to engage the thawing process, but nothing appeared to be working.

ABE, why isn’t this working?

ALL PRIMARY AND BACKUP CONTROLS WERE INTENTIONALLY LINKED TO GOLEM. TO INITIATE AN EMERGENCY THAW, EXPOSE THE TETRODOTOXIN GEL TO OXYGEN.

“Right, that’s how I woke up!” I searched the lab for something hard to shatter the thick viewport of Plexiglas. Finding nothing, I opened the sliding aluminum door of the walk-in freezer in search of a tool.

“Mother of God…”

They had been hung from the ceiling like lanterns, but when the computer had run out of perches it had begun piling them anywhere it could—on shelves and racks, eventually it had stacked them in piles on the floor.

Cadavers. Hundreds of them. Some had been infants when they died, others centenarians, along with every age in between. Dark-haired, light-haired, bald. Two arms, no arms, and others bearing nightmarish deformities that would be turned away from a circus.

It appeared that every corpse was female.

I slammed the door shut, then stared at the closed walk-in refrigerator a full minute before opening door number two.

“Geez.”

They were in beakers and glasses and specimen jars. At some point, the computer had run out of sealable containers, resorting to bottled water containers—hundreds of them, transported from the galley storeroom.

In each container was an embryo.

There were human, and yet some seemed inhuman … more accurately—unhuman, the obvious result of genetic tinkering. Besides the extra arms, there were freakishly large skulls possessing extra eyes, chest cavities loaded with duplicate vital organs, three-fingered hands and webbed feet and bat-shaped ears that looked almost satanic. It was as if the computer had gotten bored and, in a slow psychopathic burn, had unleashed its inner Mengele, tinkering with its crews’ genetic code.

Mengele …

ABE latched on to the obscure reference, replaying the memory of my last conversation with Dharma:
“IN YOUR LAST LIFE, I SAW YOU HELD CAPTIVE AS A YOUNG BOY IN A NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP. I FELT YOUR WRATH AT THE CREATOR AS YOU WITNESSED YOUR MOTHER SENT TO THE OVENS; I EXPERIENCED YOUR DESPERATION AND FEAR WHEN YOU WERE DELIVERED INTO THE HANDS OF JOSEF MENGELE, A PSYCHOPATH WHO PERFORMED GENETIC EXPERIMENTS ON JEWISH CHILDREN.”

“Stop!” My head hurt, and at that moment I wished I could—

WHY DO YOU WISH TO TERMINATE EISENBRAUN?

I turned to Oscar, the cephaloped resting a sucker paw on my wrist.

No, no … not Eisenbraun, Oscar. I was referring to ABE. It’s a computer chip … never mind. Oscar, we need to vent … we need to open this pod—this one over here. Can you tear this aluminum door from its frame and use it to smash open the pod?

Reading thought waves translated through my bio-chip, the nine-foot-tall squid slid four of its tentacles around and between the refrigerator door and tore it loose from the frame. Wielding the seventy-pound object over its head, it smashed it with a sudden burst of blunt force against the top of Dharma’s cryogenic pod.

The impact shattered the outer casing, expelling a stream of cold misty exhaust from the interior of the damaged sleep chamber.

With the internal pressure relieved, I was able to lift the lid.

Lying in a draining pool of tetrodotoxin gel was Dharma Yuan, her nude form held in an internal harness, her face concealed behind a plastic mask. As I watched, a sixteen-inch bang stick rigged to the body harness forcibly expelled the business end of a hypodermic into the Chinese woman’s breastplate, the six-inch needle injecting a syringe filled with adrenaline into her heart.

Seconds later, Dharma’s mask began pumping pressurized air into her esophagus, inflating her lungs. As her stomach bloated, the harness constricted, squeezing out the forced breath, clearing the way for the next blast of oxygen even as the vest portion of the bodysuit initiated alternating cardiac compressions.

Neon-orange vital signs appeared over the plastic mask covering her forehead.

It took twenty-three minutes and two more injections before Dharma began breathing on her own.

Reaching into the pod, I removed the bodysuit, then lifted her out of the container. Her flesh was as cold as it had been the day I rescued her from the Antarctic ice sheet. Carrying her over to the surgical suite. I laid her down on the operating table—and the giant claw above our heads immediately animated! Surgical lights ignited, scalpels became rigid, the digits of the telescopic robotic hand opened—before everything powered off and went limp.

ABE, what just happened?

A POWER SURGE.

What about Dharma?

DHARMA YUAN IS IN A VEGETATIVE STATE.

No shit. Will she recover?

NOT WITHOUT MEDICAL ASSISTANCE.

Instruct me.

THE CRYOGENIC CHAMBER IS NOT EQUIPPED FOR SUCH A PROCEDURE. HOWEVER, OSCAR’S ECHOLOCATION CAN SUITABLY REPAIR THE NEUROLOGICAL DAMAGE TO DHARMA YUAN’S BRAIN AND CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM.

My arm … I forgot. Oscar fixed it.

OSCAR ALSO REPAIRED THE DAMAGE TO ROBERT EISENBRAUN’S BRAIN.
How do you know that?