The Apocalypse Contract

CHAPTER 39 - PETER

"Sydney," Peter implored, "What is going on? What happened to you? Why do you look like that? But most of all... why are you carrying a Halo Type 25 Plasma Rifle?"

"Heh. You like it? It's actually a Denial of Service exploit. OK, hold on to your britches, here comes that weird bit I was warning you about."

She raised her hand, and the chamber they were in burst apart. A chaos of light and sound briefly swirled around them, then coalesced into a new reality.

They stood in a dimly lit tunnel, a cylindrical tube so large you could park a cruise ship in it. The walls looked more like pale flesh than something constructed. Peter imagined they were in the digestive tract of some unfathomably huge creature. "What is this place," he finally whispered.

"Maintenance tunnel. We're not really here. I loaded us into the processing core of that mobile service node up ahead." She waved toward a semi-spherical shape the size of a Volkswagen beetle sitting in the middle of the tunnel. "We're seeing all this through its sensors. And stop calling me Sydney. My name is Adra."

Adra snapped her fingers, and the car sized spheroid lifted itself off the ground. It towered over them on a dozen insectile legs.

Peter grabbed Samantha's arm. "It's attacking! Run!" He turned and sprinted down the tunnel, dragging Samantha behind.

Or at least, that was what he tried to do. His feet were moving. He felt like he was running. But he stayed exactly where he was.

"I don't think it's attacking," Samantha was staring at the monster with an incredulous expression.

Peter realized how ridiculous he must look and stopped running.

"Of course it's not attacking," Adra assured them, "it's my perfect puppet... my loyal pet. Wanna see it roll over and do tricks?" She saluted the strange creature. It raised one jointed, insect leg and approximated a return salute.

"Can it do that trick where it runs away and doesn't come back?" Peter's voice was a breathy squeak.

"Sorry, no can do. We need Fido here to save our bacon. He's our ride out of here." Adra snapped her fingers again, and they were instantly transported to the top of the creature. It began scurrying down the tunnel, its many legs a blur of motion below them while they remained inexplicably glued to its top surface.

Samantha watched the walls fly past. "I think I should be terrified right now, but this is all too bizarre. None of it seems real."

"That's probably shock," Adra explained. "That, and the sensorium link to this processor drone is a crappy lash-up job. I was working under pressure."

"It doesn't feel like we're moving," Peter observed, "no sense of acceleration, no wind in the face."

"Yeah, I only had time to link in visual sensors. It's kind of ironic, really. What we are seeing is the real world, but it looks more fake than a simulation."

"Sure, totally fake," Samantha agreed, "like those things crawling all over the walls. I would be totally freaking out right now if I thought those were real."

Adra and Peter both turned toward where she was looking. A shiver went up Peter's spine when he saw it. They crawled along the floor and walls, some solitary, others in groups. His memory flashed back to an incident shortly after moving into his current apartment. He had gone into the basement to reset a breaker only to be confronted with a colony of earwigs when he opened the circuit panel. This was like that, only worse. These squirming insect things must be huge. As big as a person? Bigger? The massive scale of the tunnel made it hard to be sure.