Date Point ??? AV
Classified Facility, Earth.
At some point during Six’s final failure, Carl had moved his chair around the desk, and was just sitting there, rubbing a hand up and down Six’s spine. It was contact, real contact, a genuine gesture of comfort and compassion from one of the men who had broken him.
There was a long silence after the last secret spilled from him.
“Hey… Six? I’m sorry man.”
Six looked up, and the sight of tears in Carl’s own eyes shook him deeply. He’d known that he had built something of a relationship—even a warped friendship—with his interrogators over his long incarceration. But he had always persuaded himself that it was a distant one, with a thick professional barrier in place.
<They hurt themselves to break me> He thought. But he wouldn’t have been Six if he hadn’t tried to fight back, to claim something here and now, in Carl’s moment of weakness. To hurt him, on an emotional level.
“Fuck you. You’ve beaten me. I’ve betrayed everything I ever lived or cared for. I’ve DESTROYED the Hierarchy. And now you’re fucking sorry?!” he exclaimed.
“More than you can know, man. I’ve been through this, it’s how I learned to do it.”
Carl looked down and wiped his eye, before looking back up, and now there was a determined set to his face.
“You and I are a lot alike, Six. We’ll do anything for our people. Me… I’ll bleed for them. I’ll hurt myself in all kinds of ways for all the lucky fucks out there -” he waved an arm at the wall, indicating the whole world beyond “- who don’t know the first goddamn thing about what kind of pain gets put into keeping their lives happy and safe. So yeah, I get it. And I’m so very, very sorry that I did this to you. I mean that. And Stephen would say it too, if he was here.”
Six just looked away. “It doesn’t matter if you’re sorry or not. You’ve won. I’ve lost. And if your people wage war like they get information out of people, then my kind are doomed.”
There was a long silence. Then Carl stood, returned to his side of the desk, and grabbed a folder from under his laptop.
”…Do you remember one of the first things you were told when you arrived here, Six?” he asked.
Six just stared at him blank. But, too tired and defeated to put up a fight, he reviewed his memory archives of the very first session. One of the—he had now learned, few—advantages of being a machine intellect was perfect recall of details like that.
“I was told… That Stephen was assigned to my case.” he said, reciting the memory in order. “That your goal was to learn as much as possible about my associates and me. That my first meal here consisted of mashed potato, biscuits and gravy, and peas and carrots. That you don’t do ‘that kind of thing’, meaning the torture I had alluded to moments earlier. That I was perfectly safe. That your first and most important priorities were information and…”
He paused. “And…”
”…And a peaceful resolution.” Carl finished for him.
“I’ve just told you that the Hierarchy’s objective is your extinction, and you’re saying that you still want a peaceful resolution?”
Carl rested his elbows on the desktop. “My nation has fought bloody and difficult wars in opposition to genocide all across our planet. And from what you’ve told me, your species and the Hierarchy are about the same thing to each other as this organisation is to the American public. Which means that your people are… more or less—blameless of plotting to destroy us.”
He shrugged. “For me, the idea of wiping out your civilization of trillions to save our civilization of billions sticks in the craw. Never mind that doing so would mean having to slaughter every other living thing in the galaxy.”
“Which you could.” Six said.
“Easily.” Carl agreed. “If we wanted to. We don’t.”
Six snorted. “You aren’t authorized to speak for your whole species.”
“Nope.” Carl agreed again. “But still: we don’t. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we’ll just sit back and invite you to wipe us out. If it comes to it, if the only way to survive is to wipe out every living thing in the Milky Way? We would, if we have to.”
He locked eyes with Six. “Do we have to?”
“What’s the alternative?”
“The alternative is, you and I come up with a way to save both our peoples.”
Date Point: 4y 2m 1w AV.
San Diego, California, USA, Earth.
Seventy-Two was panicking, and now was a terrible time to be doing that.
He had planned to switch safe-houses immediately upon the fiasco at Skateworld, but that was a complicated and risky process which demanded biodrones for maximum security. Things were just too sensitive to rely on local resources—these things weren’t Vzk’tk, Robalin or Allebenellin. They weren’t stupid or mercenary enough to fail to notice something amiss.
So, against his better judgement and good protocol, he had been forced to remain where he was for months, hoping that finally some appropriate human subject would blunder into his stasis trap for conversion into a biodrone.
That hadn’t happened. Instead, months had passed without development. Six had been declared killed, and restored from his last backup. The replacement Six had not returned to Earth, but had remained offworld to ponder the implications of the almost prescient response to their planned hive-poking. 72 was, for the time being, on his own again while the Hierarchy decided what to do.
For now, he needed to rebuild his assets and await orders.
Then the assault started.
It came from nowhere. Cars converged on the building in whose basement he lurked, peeling out of the ordinary city traffic all at once, parking synchronized in the alleyways and streets around him, while vans hauled into place and heavily armed, heavily armoured soldiers deployed barricades, holding back the city public.
There were three layers of door and wall between 72’s inner sanctum and street level. The outermost layer was breached almost before he had become alert to the attack, physically smashed off their hinges by men with steel tools.
The second layer of doors were thicker and sturdier. They bought him time to consider his options.
There were almost none. While every Hierarchy safehouse had contingencies in place to destroy it and leave no evidence of its having been there, all bar one of them relied on the sanctuary not being under attack at the time.
Well. That settled it then: all bar one meant there was only one option. He began his backup as the second doors were opened by means of explosive charges.
It finished just as those same charges were being rigged on the third and final doors.
They blew inwards just as Seventy-Two sent the command.
Kilolightyears away, undetectable in interstellar space, an ancient repository received a signal it had not been sent in nearly four million years. In response to that signal, it sent one of its stored packages directly to Earth via wormhole displacement.
Light bent and reality warped in the middle of the room as the first soldiers barged in. The event horizon collapsed, leaving behind a sphere of perfect blackness, like a black hole hanging in the middle of the room.
Without its power source, the stasis field collapsed within a microsecond.
Very, very briefly, five kilograms of pure antimatter were let loose in the heart of downtown San Diego.
They forever changed the face of the Earth.