The very moment I entered those doors, a gruesome sight greeted me. I gaped at the destroyed remnants of Benlark’s computerized remains. His entire mainframe was sprawled out along the wall that it was lodged into, like a wispy spider with sixteen disfigured legs—or better yet, like a splattered, parasitic vine that reached in every direction possible. But instead of vines, branches of metal wires, tubes and miscellaneous mechanics took the look of an overgrown jungle plant or splattered paint. Instead of the graceful, lithe, hanging body that KASNA had, he had a multi-jointed, mutilated, robotic, mechanical spider-like body.
His core head glared at me with a bright, cerulean blue light, malevolently and with silent hatred. His mechanic arms were chunkier with exposed angles, unlike the closed-in, tube-like snakes of KASNA’s. However, he had about eight compared to the four of the other AI’s, and they swayed about in a motion similar to a gorgon’s head. That white, pristine Kortan symbol remained boldly emblazoned upon the very top of his domed body.
The walls around the AI were in shambles, letting in that unknown source of light I had been marveling at earlier, making the scene almost natural, and far less ominous. However, I noted carefully that the light left that symbol in the shadows upon the AI, as if yet again Kortan was cheering me forward, ruing its treachery. That cursed symbol was everywhere, but at that moment hidden from me, such as on my wrist that was secured safely in the Trans Shooter, and underneath all the scratches I had made on my own Shooter to cover the symbol up.
Immediately I noticed another problem: the entire room looked to be patched with random sheet metal pieces, yet various holes still covered the entire ground and walls. I’d have to be careful, or I’d fall through into darkened depths. But falling down wasn’t what I was most worried about. Even above getting rid of Benlark, I had more concern with getting back outside. Just like I had thirteen years ago and every year for eleven years, until I had gotten free of the sinister, captivating clutches, I still yearned for that outside feel—the real sky, real light and simply the reality of the environment.
A person could only live within square metal walls under fluorescent lighting for so long until naturally wanting reality.
I hoped Quintley was making progress, even though I had already prepared myself for it not to work. I still wondered how VOCOM was going to ‘distract’ Benlark. So I stood waiting, taking in the sight before me and collecting my composure before walking forwards with slow, steady steps. My fear had been replaced with adrenaline and calm determination. I stopped about one hundred feet before him, his domain nearly as cavernous as KASNA’s had been.
“My, my. Look at the beautiful woman you’ve grown into, little Vera.” His voice sounded as old as I last remembered seeing him as a human. It couldn’t be truly his, but it was, and very real. Very him, and trapped inside a machine forever; forever a computer code. “Two Trans Shooters!” he continued, his voice sounding as if we were having a lovely, amiable conversation over a cup of coffee. “You must’ve acquired such great skill after KASNA hid you from me. Clever, isn’t she? She took you away from me for her own greedy purposes. What did she tell you, darling? That I was going to kill you? Very likely.”
I remained quiet. It was likely that VOCOM could’ve lied to me, but I had known Benlark’s cruelty for longer. The AI wasn’t the nicest computer herself, but at least she hadn’t gone around ransacking people’s lives and destroying them. So I’d let him taunt me; replying would fuel him more. I needed him to get angry; he’d be less agile and less accurate.
“Shocked to see me?” his voice rang out quietly in a dull, bored tone. “I haven’t seen you in person for well over ten years. It’s a shame you were snatched away from me, isn’t it? That damned girl took over more control than she was supposed to have. It’s nice to be reunited, isn’t it?”
I smirked a bit at the irony, believing VOCOM more than ever at that moment. He was just trying to confuse me, to twist things around, but I wasn’t that stupid. After all, she had made several valid points, despite some of them being rather self-centered, and I was still alive. He would’ve killed me right then and there thirteen years previously.
“Feeling cocky, are we, my dear?” his body’s extended reach was limited, with him being based in the wall rather than the ceiling, so he moved four of the mechanical arms to slink around me and hover just out of reach. The dark metal was cutting off my vision of the light source I had yet to find that was spilling in from the rightmost side of the domain.
A dark, mechanical sigh whirred, followed by the computerized voice I hated with such a burning passion, even when it was human. “I’m so glad you’ve come; I really am. When I had been put in charge of you after your parents’ deaths, I didn’t know what to expect of you. But look, you’ve turned out to be the person that grew up and single-handedly took down Kortan. Oop! But you didn’t do it alone, did you?” he sneered.
I kept a careful eye on the arms circling me like a wolf to prey, waiting the moment to strike. I didn’t like people who sneered at me. When people sneered at Vera Mattice, they got their face shot off.
“That foolish boy and my very own creation are on your side. Funny how the three of you are teamed, isn’t it?” he laughed gently, as if amused. “Where are they now?”
Like I’d ever tell him.
“You’ve ripped me away from her, haven’t you?” a metal arm pushed gently at my back. I didn’t budge. “Don’t be stubborn now, you insolent child. You always were a hardheaded one; always getting the in way of things, nosing where you had no business.”
Perhaps then was the best time to question him over my parents. VOCOM couldn’t care enough, but I knew Benlark would tell me just to enrage me. But I had a comeback; I knew his Achilles heel. I took a few steps forward, just to see his reaction and to get the focus of the arms around me back into my peripheral view. “How did you kill them, huh?” I asked boldly, voice strong and unfaltering without fear or pain. “Toxins? Poisoning? A nasty experiment?” there I gave dramatic pause—unlike me, but I wanted to make my point clear. “Did you beat them?” I spoke with a dark undertone, hinting at what I knew. I would be ruthless in this revenge. I looked into his blue processor light, knowing I was going to strike a nerve. “Did you inject them with lethal substances? Narcotics?”
“You—!”
“What? Tell me!” I yelled. I scowled, letting my anger burn through me. I was releasing all I had built up in a careful, steady stream of spite through words. “Tell me how you killed them! I want to know! I want to know so I can do the same to you! Did you hit my father? Did you dope my mother? Just like your own parents? Do tell me, Benlark, for I’ve waited fourteen years to know.”
That’s when he struck at me with two arms, swinging with high velocity. I jumped out of the way, easily predicting that move.
He yelled with rage, “I burned them!” he was in a mad terror. “I burned them with their own fire! You were nothing but another David Mattice! Another little girl that’d fall in the name of science! You were no more special than—“
“KASNA!” I screamed, still moving. “You wanted to turn me into another KASNA! Don’t tell me I’m worthless—they were your friends, you coldhearted bastard!” I dodged more blows from the attacks that were causing the ground beneath me to shake and crumble unstably. I couldn’t let him destroy the concrete floor—or I’d go down, and he possibly with me.
I looked up, aiming to shoot the first aperture on the highest slope of the domed ceiling. I kept wondering when VOCOM was going to interfere, if she even was. The communicator had been dead silent ever since I walked through those doors.
The streaming blob of a light that congregated onto the ceiling distracted him at good length. He laughed darkly. “What’s this, painting walls now?”
I ignored him and quickly opened the gateway with the second aperture on the far wall to my right, beneath the beatific light. I began to run towards it, carefully dodging his poorly placed attacks. One grazed my leg, making me stumble and lose the top momentum I had.
Damnit, I swore to myself. I regained my sprint, aiming directly for the aperture and glad he had no clue as to what I was doing. Just ahead I could see the view that the first aperture was giving: the top of the AI’s body from a bird’s eye view. Perfect. He wasn’t going to know what hit him, to put it simply.
I knew where I was supposed to aim; Benlark’s body was no different than KASNA’s. I flung myself through the aperture, suddenly falling through the air downwards from the other hole. I aimed Gala’s Shooter, perfecting a slicing beam of light into the nook between where his body was lodged into the wall.
His computerized scream split my ears, but I had to endure it for the sake of it. In the nick of falling face-flat onto the cement floor below, I opened a new aperture, moving the second one directly below me, and adjusting my body so I’d keep shooting at Benlark. It was a continuous loop that made me gain speed every time I passed through one of the apertures, a continuous fall that circled into an infinite track. I kept the beam focused on him the entire time, hacking and passing through main bits and pieces of metal, wires and tubes. He was being pulverized by the damage I was causing, and I was being pulverized by the velocity of falling faster and faster, through the apertures over and over and over.
Eventually it became too fast for me to even see beyond a blurry mass, my stomach became queasy and tears streamed through my eyes. I quickly shot one of the apertures in a random direction, hoping for all I stood for that it hit something solid. My head was furiously hurting and I could feel my blood surging upwards into it, a very bad sign and very dangerous. To my extreme luck, it hit, just as I flew smack into the floor.
I cried out in a child-like agony, moaning with a failed attempt to get back up. My body wasn’t going to move. I had been moving too fast—impossibly fast—inhumanly fast, and it had no idea on how to react. I felt like I had fallen from a sixty-story building into a pile of bricks. I let myself cry—or rather, couldn’t prevent tears—from the absolute shocked pain pulsing through me in a large, numb mass.
My jaw felt terribly loose, I had landed nearly face-first, and my teeth were throbbing unbearably. My shoulder was burning, feeling crushed, and the corresponding elbow felt cracked. My stomach felt ripped and cut into with the bulky thing I landed on. I forced my head to look down, through the extreme pain exploding through my spine and neck, to see I had landed on Gala’s Trans Shooter.
No. No-no-no-no! I mentally screamed. The adrenaline surges that I had always received when I was hurt kicked in, sending me unstably to my shaky feet. I examined it before myself, noting its cracked shell. I could only pray it was still operational, but I didn’t get to test it out before Benlark smacked me out of the way.
A white haze filled my mind for a few seconds, my frail, numb body unable to take much more. I hated myself for so carelessly putting myself in peril with that dumb stunt I pulled with the infinite loop. It made me weak and vulnerable.
“What is this madness you’ve created?!” he bellowed, his voice the only thing penetrating my ears. “Teleportation?!”
That was perhaps the worst pain I had ever felt in my entire life at Kortan. It was just that were was so much ache that I couldn’t describe it, I couldn’t comprehend it or even fully recognize that it was inside me—that the pain was real and not just some dazed state my mind stumbled into. Every inch of me hurt, every movement sent another wave of twinges through me and everything had overextended in physical exhaustion. I felt blood running up my throat as I tried to move, and it spewed beyond my control with a rank smell.
“What is it, sweetheart,” he taunted as I struggled to steadily gain balance on my feet. “Feeling tired? Feeling hurt?”
VOCOM! Where the hell are you?! What are you doing?! I wanted to scream, if I had a voice. Then was a horrid time for her to turn her back on me, and she just may very well have. I hoped Quintley was still alive, in the least. If VOCOM decided to leave me then in my moment of most needing her, so be it. I was sick of traitors, and I wasn’t going to deal with it anymore. I had done everything alone my entire life, so it was no big loss.
I spit out more oozing blood, trying to clear my throat of the oddly coagulated and acrid blood. I wiped the sweat from my eyes, desperately fighting my swaying, shaking legs, and wearily faced the monster before me. I’d have to keep moving; I had to ignore the pain.
I started running in a wide arc, somewhat sloppily due to my imbalance. I wanted to get more shots in at his mainframe. The wear on my body was giving me strain and hindering me. It was hard to keep moving, to keep going and keep from giving in and throwing myself down to possibly die under his hand. But from his head I noticed a large chunk of metal hanging off, the ends of the gaping hole, blackened and smoking from the burnt char the light had made. If I could get close enough, I could shoot into that hole with the Trans Shooter, and it’d be all over. He’d permanently be killed.
But how was I going to do that? His attacks were livid and unrelenting. Somehow he was missing me, oddly since I was in no condition for fighting, and it was making him angrier by the second. I couldn’t exactly sit down and take a breather to figure things out.
“How did you know?!” he growled in a flustered, tired tone. “How did you know so much about what happened?”
“You’re stupid,” I said bluntly, nearly tripping over one of the metal arms. I opened another aperture in front of me. “You thought I was too young to understand. You don’t lie very well.”
“They were nuisances.” An arm hit me, pinning me down.
I growled and closed the hole I had just made, moving it to be directly beneath me. I looked to the wall I had shot earliest, struggling against the pin I was in. I couldn’t get my arms to move fast enough. “They were your friends,” I returned, snarling as he pinned my arm. I took the chance I had and shot in the direction the Shooter was facing. The little swirling light raced to the chunk of metal I was staring at—not at all my intended target—hitting it and then dissipating with small sparks. “No!” I cried desperately. I began to struggle more. “No!”
“You were the best Kortan had seen in a while. I noticed after I died. By then there was nothing I could do about your survival. But you had it pretty well, didn’t you? Bratty little Vera turned into the very chaotic monster that I loathe.”
I kicked at the metal arm, loosening it just enough to wiggle my arm to aim back at the wall. I shot the aperture without aiming, immediately feeling the loose ground beneath me give way for me to tumble through and out the other hole. I scrambled to move out of the way as he growled and shot in a metal arm after me. I pressed my back against the wall as the arm shot past me in a mad dash. Then I had to act quickly.
I took my Trans Shooter off my wrist, deciding to use Gala’s—which thankfully still worked just fine. I began to hack away at the arm, swinging the light beam like I would’ve a bat to someone’s car, my fury driving me forward with a rage that was desperate and that of a trapped animal.
The light burned away the metallic covering, revealing the inner wires, multitudes of wires in all sizes and colors. I took the knife that I had at the small of my back and checked to make sure its handle was wooden before I began to saw at the wires with the serrated edge. Sparks flew instantly, blinding me and burning my skin with a familiar pain I had felt all too often. Blood continued to drool out of my mouth in a thin stream, still smelling foul and feeling chunky in places.
The arm jerked, and I heard yells from Benlark; something about me being insolent and ignorant—his favorite adjectives to describe me. I’d heard it all before, so I tuned it out, keeping my focus on the nearly-severed arm and not my pain. But I wasn’t going to get to finish the job, for he sent in three more arms into the aperture. I dropped the knife and scooped up my Trans Shooter. Then I decided that I should test Quintley’s question from earlier.
I closed the aperture closest to me, on the wall, and instantly regretted it. Within absolutely no time measurement, the other aperture began a sort of sucking vortex of destructive force, pulling in Benlark by the four arms within the hole. His body was being pulled off the wall, making it crumble along with the floor and ceiling. The raging vortex was starting to pull me in against my will too, and it felt like its central force was gravity. Had I inverted gravity? That wasn’t possible! The aperture was starting to pull the entire room inwards, like tinfoil folding into itself with a million wrinkles that could only be wrinkled further and never smoothened.
Black holes were formed by light, in some theories, so perhaps I had created a miniature version of that—with particles being scattered, lost and destroyed, or perhaps just distorted beyond use or method. I was glad then that I had never tested that before, or else I probably wouldn’t have been there. I felt like my feet were stuck in quicksand being pulled out by an ocean riptide. What had I just done?
I looked to my side to see the four arms sliced off cleanly where the aperture had been.
What was I supposed to do then? What would happen if I closed the last aperture? There was only one way to find out—and I needed to do it quickly. Screeching metal was deafening me, drowning out all other noises. A few pieces of the crumbling ceiling hit me on the shoulder, and I moved immediately. An odd tugging sensation was pulling at my skin, like being stabbed with a needle and being pulled on at the same time. I felt almost distorted, like being squeezed and suffocated.
I pulled back the first clutch of the Trans Shooter, everything stopping immediately. The sudden stop of the anomalous sensation pulling about me made my ears pop and then ring. Benlark continued to scream with outraged yells. Two more arms had been pulled into the vortex, leaving only two. They sparked and jerked spasmodically, cut off mid-way and completely useless. Wires sprouted from them like wiry stems, burnt.
“What have you done?!”
My legs wobbled continuously, but I made myself move forwards. The AI’s body had almost been completely torn from the wall, hanging at the bottom by scrap pieces of metal—like a broken hinge. This had just gotten a lot easier for me, for he practically destroyed himself.
Immediate joy ran through me, past all the pain and inhuman suffering I was drowning in. I could do it; right then I could destroy Harvey Benlark for one final moment. I tried not to smirk as I stumbled forward.