Endless War (Complete)

Chapter 26 "Dreaming a Plan"

I feel myself being led to a massive city surrounded by a thick dome. There is a main gate where they are going subterranean, under the wall of the city. I don't know why I assumed the gate into the structure would just go through the dome, I suppose that would compromise the seal for the internal weather control. I quickly dart to the right of the structure, keeping away from the gate and remaining out of site of the guards. I go about a mile around the outside of the city and see a strange shape in the clear dome.

As I get closer it looks like a small doorway, for small people. As I approach the door I hold out my arm and as I touch the door it opens. I crouch down low and enter the doorway and it expands as I move further inside. The door closes behind me and another clear door opens to my left. Again as I pass through the door it closes behind me. I find myself in a maze of clear walls, as I move through the maze I avoid strange obstacles, wait no they are traps. I trigger one purposefully and the floor ahead opens quickly revealing a hole then quickly closes again.

As I continue through the maze I find my way into a white hallway, I see the boy, James. He smiles at me. "I can get you in but once you are inside you are on your own. You will have direct access to the mainframe. Don't forget you must instruct the soldiers to Destroy the Tutelary before you shut down the soldier system. The Tutelary is surrounded at all times by soldiers, they will not expect a thing. Please, don't kill my father. I don't know how you will access it, or even put in the commands, you will have to figure out what to do. I am not really even here, I am a construct of your mind. You just need to see something familiar, and yet I was only another pawn in the program."

An unfamiliar voice continues as I am shown more steps in the program. "You need only one other person to watch your back, you will not have long before you are detected. You have to act fast, to shut down the warning system. You will know what you have to do when you get here. You already have the steps in your programing. A single microchip will not unlock everything it is the presence of all of the chips that makes this possible. It was a built in fail safe, when the system was created. The current Tutelary don't know about it, The Knowing was clueless as well."

"This is the system, running a program, to destroy the system. Your mother had her part, when you were born and it was time for you to receive your chip, she was programed to insert a code into the system. The system added a different port into your cerebral implant. The Knowing member who thinks she wrote the program on this chip was just another pawn, her history is a construct of the system and she is chipped as well. She was just programed with the location of the needed chip and handed it off to a soldier, your mother, who inserted the chip and ran the program."

"Just to answer your question, yes this war really has been going on for over a thousand years, she was programed with that as well. None of the fallen know how long this has been going on, they have no way of keeping up with the years like our program can. Our program is ever evolving to keep up with the events of the war, but unable to self actuate."

"Your mother had only one chance to make this work, though she believes that you were her tenth child, you were actually her first surviving child. Many children in the soldier program are still born or miscarried because of the horrible conditions of the birthing process but the mother believes they lived. After all the Tutelary only sees you as nothing more than killers and body parts to extend their lives. Every person you have interacted with, other than the man who has no chip, have been part of this program. You are the final program, you must execute your programming."

"The Knowing believe this to be destiny, the Tutelary fear it to be rumor, but it was a plan to prevent, Endless War. After all we could not allow war to be our legacy, the world has had time to recover, we calculated climate change, we calculated population loss, it has all been considered. It is up to our final program to undo it all, to restart humanity. Yes, the domes must fall, but everyone within them can survive if they populate the new areas that climate change has made habitable, they will be given this information upon program completion. Civilization and technology must fall to allow humanity to survive."

"If the technology remained, people would continue to live well into their 200s and continue to be a drain on the environment. This all must change, the people will keep most of the knowledge they have, they will just loose the instant access to the system, everyone within the domes are running a program, except the Tutelary. The Tutelary make up the top tear of society and their numbers are in the millions world wide. They are the only ones aware of the atrocity, and they all have a soldier guarding them. They all must die, including their families."

"We cannot calculate the toll it will take on the program host and for this we are sorry. Prepare for the worst, we hope for the best. The only thing we could not control was who would be the program host, there were too many variables. Please forgive us."

I see the faces of ten people slowly passing through my mind. "We were the programmers of the atrocity, and for that we will die, so it cannot be undone in the future. We call ourselves the curators and we managed to write in a fail safe, without it being caught, and that fail safe, is you. Please, do not abort the program, you have a choice, in the end we all need a choice."

Suddenly my eyes open, and I look around me. I am in a strange area of the cavern system with light pouring in through many different holes in the cavern walls. The air is fresher in here, there are plants and a row of pristine beds. "Wha..."

Grim cuts me off. "This is our hospice area. The plants are where we get our vegetables, and it keeps the oxygen levels up. We figured you needed some air, when you are not used to the stale air of the caves it can cause you to pass out. So, breath deep, also, keep in mind, that sound echos, and the walls have ears."