Jacob Burns and the Order of the Algorithm #Wattys2017

Chapter 15: When the World Comes Crashing Down

As the creature fell to the ground, I grabbed Ilya off the floor and we ran.

Back in the main lobby, more synthetic faces were appearing out of the dark, coming at us from all sides. Almost as if from thin air, their skeletal hands grasped for us at every turn, their yellow eyes gleaming with malice even as they left their weapons at their sides. Lucky for me, they seemed too afraid of hitting the girl or the device to shoot, but as we ducked down the grand staircase and back towards the main entrance, we were met with about a dozen more crawling out of the annex we'd entered so long ago. I thought we were cornered for sure, when Ilya suddenly grabbed hold of my hand.

"This way!" she cried out, and with that we ran madly down the hall, passing through another exhibition room and dashing through a small door hidden off to the side. As soon as the metal door shut behind us, Ilya latched the deadbolt before winding a set of heavy chains around the handle for good measure.

As I looked around, I could see we were standing in a dark stairwell, one that led into an abandoned underground subway. Ilya wasted no time with explanations, leading me straight down the steps and over a set of rusty turnstiles before the tunnel opened up into old Copley Station. Even after all this time, suitcases and newspapers were still strewn about the room, the lonely remnants of long forgotten travelers destined never to return home. The train itself sat cold and dead on the tracks, a large blast door blocking the only way out. As I searched the surrounding area, I had hoped for another entrance that opened out to the street, but every path was blocked, every exit caved-in. As I turned to Ilya, I could hear the synths banging on the door above, their lasers sure to make quick work of the aging metal.

"What now?" I asked, but Ilya just ignored me as she raced across the platform and towards an old maintenance hatch. There, just beyond the window glass, was the control room and our ticket out of here. Without another word, I watched as Ilya began to hack into the security terminal and within a matter of seconds, she had the door open. She raced towards the console and began to boot up the system, but as soon as the screen flickered on, I watched as her face fell.

"Oh," she said, suddenly looking very lost.

"What are you waiting for?" I said frantically, "Hurry up and get these gates open, we ain't got all day!"

"No, you don't understand..." Ilya replied, a terrified look upon her face, "It's this system... I've never seen anything like it. I mean, don't get me wrong, I can hack my way into just about anything, but this? This doesn't even run on the standard UOS or use any of the basic coding I'm familiar with. You might as well be asking me to read Chinese! Just look at this company... Have you ever heard of it before? Because I know I haven't," she added as she pointed towards the screen where large blocky letters flashed in a bright fluorescent green: "JANUS SYSTEMS".

"Well, that just sounds like some kind of Poseidon Energy offshoot, doesn't it? Those corporate bastards had always thought themselves gods, after all. Why else would they name every product and subsidiary they ownws after them? What is it, a Greek god of war or something?" But Ilya just shook her head.

"This is Roman, Jacob, not Greek... But honestly the name's origins hardly matter at this point, because all it really means is that we're stuck here!"

"Well, you've got to try!" I yelled at the girl, the commotion above getting louder and louder with every passing second, "Unless, of course, dying at the bottom of a hole is an option for you, then by all means, let's just sit this one out," I added snarkily, but Ilya only glared. Without another word, she turned back to the screen, typing furiously into the console.

I left the girl to her work as I raced back out into the subway, the noise now rising to new heights as they neared breaking through the door. I spotted a gate near the bottom of the steps and pushed it into place, but found only a rusty broken padlock that refused to close shut. Even so, it would buy us some time at the very least. I rushed back to the office where I found Ilya cursing at the screen, but before I could even ask, I watched as things took a turn for the worse.

"What!?" She suddenly cried out, "Oh no... No, it didn't... Oh God, it did! It locked me out! The security protocol defaulted the controls back to its parent server, there's absolutely nothing I can do! Oh I knew it, I knew I didn't know what I was doing... and now, we really are stuck here with no way out!" She cried as she looked up at me with her bright blue eyes, and I could suddenly hear my last words to her coming back to haunt me. I looked at my gun, my last energy cell over half depleted, and I knew.

We weren't going to last two minutes.

As that horrible reality began to sink in, I could feel myself go numb. This was it. We were done for. There was simply nothing I could do. Hell, even if I secured the control room right now, how long would it actually hold? Ten... maybe fifteen minutes? And how long after that before we were overrun? One synth had almost been enough to do me in, so what hope did I really have against a dozen more? I swallowed the lump in my throat as I took out a flask from my pocket and unscrewed the cap. After a long hard pull, I put it away, stared at my gun, and cocked it.

Well, If a last stand it was going to be, then I sure as hell wasn't gonna go out without a fight.

But before I could finish that thought, something miraculous happened. An automated tone chimed throughout the station, echoing off the walls as the prerecorded voice of a woman began reading off the train schedule. The screen before us suddenly flickered on, a mad string of code flying across its face as it enacted some kind of boot-up sequence, and before we knew it, the entire subway had come to life once more.

Our excitement, however, was short lived. Not long after, we quickly realized the controls were still in lockdown and our commands useless. The gate before us remained firmly shut and as a dull static began to fill the underground, a hollow pit began to form in my stomach. As I looked at Ilya, it was clear neither of us knew what to make of it all, and so, we sat there and just braced ourselves for whatever was to come next.

Suddenly, a voice spoke. One I had never heard before in my life.