The Storm
More a nebulous mass than a spike, the appearance of a modest electrical field nevertheless raised an alert immediately consumed by C788X1, the paramount governance processor referred to as Dark Lord by the few humans left with a heat signature. Based on voltage, the unknown electrical field was little more a bundle of static electricity.
. . . but it came in the aftermath of a resistance attack, and in the lobby of C788X1's primary server location, a bleak government building a century beyond its prime.
If the Dark Lord had emotions, it would have been suspicious.
Human bodies were strewn throughout the grounds and interior, as were remnants of soldier drones. That the resistance had breached the controlling nerve center spoke to their desperation.
Soldier drones stood like statues in and around the building. Others performed foot patrols throughout the city. Any and all human heat signatures were fired upon.
Worker drones dragged bodies to dumpsters. Drone garbage trucks took the human refuse to the landfill to join millions already feasted upon by black clouds of flies, armies of maggots, ravens and vultures, coyotes and feral dogs.
No source for the electric field could be determined.
Cameras could ‘see’ the field as it morphed into the shape of a human male wearing cargo pants and a simple black t-shirt. No visible weapons.
Unremarkable but for the proximity.
Speakers crackled to life—normally their tones were clear and static-free.
“Exit immediately,” C788's human-emulation voice said, the words also appearing on all the monitors throughout the building.
The computer summoned six soldier drones with guns drawn.
Fire, C788 ordered silently.
Bullets passed through the form to blast out chunks in the walls and chip divots from protective plexiglass. The dead bodies yet to be removed were coated in dust and debris.
Cease fire, C788 commanded. Move back to the walls.
After they complied, angry red laser beams, once used for retinal identification, hashed back and forth through the room, trying in vain to fix upon the intruder.
*****
Two figures ran from the shadows of an alley and onto a sidewalk pockmarked with blast holes. Hunched low to use the decaying vehicles lining the curbs as cover, they halted at the back door of a van flipped on its side. The windowless door was charred and cross-stitched with bullet holes. Flames licked at what little rubber remained on two of the wheels, giving rise to streams of black smoke that caressed the facade of a government building shedding mortar.
Marli couldn’t believe they made it this far. She sighted down her rifle barrel, looking for soldier drones. Seeing none, she took a hand from the rifle and pulled on the door handle. The door moved maybe an inch and halted.
“Cover us,” Marli said, letting the weapon hang from its shoulder strap.
Her companion held his rifle at the ready as Marli took hold of the door with both hands inside and wrenched.
A screech of damaged hinges sounded as the bloodied head and upper body of a dead woman fell against Marli’s shins. Marli gasped but did not cry out. The man pulled the body between the van and the next car. He eased her head down, then pulled a necklace with a small cross out from beneath his shirt and knelt.
“Lord, receive this spirit.”
“No time for prayer,” Marli snapped.
“No better time,” the man replied calmly. He touched the woman’s forehead with the cross then rose.
They slipped inside the van, closing the door behind them. Marli set up thin alloy screens and they both worked laptop computers. The screens wouldn’t hide their heat signatures from overhead drones, but would from android foot patrols.
Marli’s laptop showed an aerial view of the street around the van. She saw her own heat signature in the van, but his was. . . different. All precise lines whereas hers was areas saturated with color.
Weird.
The guy worked his machine. He could have been thirty or fifty years old. Marli didn’t know and didn’t care. After the latest failed attempt to topple the Dark Lord, a ragged group of fighters met outside of the city. This man had approached them, hands raised. Said he used to work at a power company before The Takeover, and that he had a way to attack the governing server.
No one believed him, but Marli was willing to go back and kill drones. If he wanted to come along, fine.
His screen suddenly showed the lobby outside C788's main server, and the hologram of a man standing there.
“Used your own image, huh?” Marli said. “Why not? Two places at once. I don’t get how you can holo from a distance like this—not that we can learn tech anymore thanks to the circuit-brains.”
Her companion gazed downward. “I regret it took so long to rouse us. Please forgive us. Please forgive me."
“Huh?”
He ran his finger above his computer’s touch pad. Needle-thin tendrils of quasar blue danced between his finger tip and the pad. A muffled sizzle emanated, as when touching a glass of charged neon.
“That thing shorting out?” Marli said, jokingly.
Her companion smiled grimly. “Not yet.”
Outside a rumble sounded, followed by bright flashes.
“Holy hell,” Marli said. “There wasn’t any storm approaching when we got here.”
“Are you sure?” he said, grimacing at her choice of language.
Marli pondered the timing. Her eyes narrowed. “What is your name?”
The figure in the Dark Lord’s lobby raised his arms and gazed upward to the heavens. Lightning flashed back and forth between his hands, then burst from every part of his body. At the same time, thunder cracked and boomed like ethereal cannons. Lightning tore apart soldier drones by the legion. Walls crumbled and the Dark Lord’s servers were blasted apart.
Marli’s companion stepped out among the flashes and explosions. His voice boomed over the dead streets and melded with the storm.
“I am Barachiel, God’s thunder and lightning!”
John Andrew Karr (also John A. Karr) is a speculative fiction writer who dwells near the southern coast of North Carolina. He has had several novels published via independent publishers and self-publishing. Short stories have been published in Amazing Stories, Flame Tree Press, Dark Horses Magazine, Allegory, Danse Macabre, and others.
