Chapter Forty - All at Once

“There was no need for Cyberpunk 2178 to actually kill the player if they died.”

--IRN article, 2045

***

I skipped--not literally--on over to the building the aliens were pouring out of. They slowed down at around thirty, then stopped around fifty-ish aliens of a few different models, all in the single-digits, all looking pretty damned healthy, though a few had signs of being chewed up by nanomachines, it was light stuff, not the half-melted walking corpses I’d seen earlier.

Our nanomachine attack had worked, so I couldn’t complain too much, but it looked like its effectiveness was dying down. “Do you think they’re growing resistant to the nanomachines?” I asked.

That would be nearly impossible. What is more likely is that they found other ways of countering them.

“What’s the difference?”

You don’t need to be resistant to fire to put it out with a bucketful of water. In this case, I imagine the simplest solution would be for parts of the hive which are unaffected to produce as many units as possible while recycling itself frequently. Eventually most of the nanomachines will be used in the flesh of models being sent out of the hive.

“Would that work?” I asked.

If someone spits in your drink and you empty half of it, then refill the glass, then empty half only to refill it again, eventually, after sufficient repetitions, there won’t be any noticeable traces of spit left.

“Did you have to use that analogy?” I asked.

No.

I shook my head. “Thanks for the mental image,” I said.

Trust me, the contents of your average bottle of drinking water are far more worrisome than another human’s saliva.

“Also great,” I muttered.

I’d crossed most of the way to the building the aliens had come from when I heard a faint bang on the other side of the street and several more came out of another nearby building. Were the two connected, or were there multiple hives disgorging aliens in the same spot? Or was it something else entirely? Maybe the basements of these buildings were linked?

In any case, I didn’t feel like spending the day exploring each of those possibilities. So I ducked into the first building, carefully stepping around piles of broken glass. My boots might have been designed for stealth, but there was no point in being lazy and inadvertently making something crunch.

A few nearby model fours twitched their tentacles my way at my passing, but they dismissed it soon enough. Could they sense the motion of the air? That was disturbing, but probably not too surprising from a stealth ambush model.

The inside of the building they were using to get out of their underground shithole was, predictably, a mess. I suspected it was some sort of office building at first, but the big plaques on one wall and the bulletproof glass above the counters suggested that this was more of a motor-vehicle licence place than anything else.

The lobby was quite large, packed with plastic seats so tight that I imagined it would pinch the circulation of anyone that wasn’t a toddler, and there were multiple guard stations around the room.

Some of those chairs had been ripped up, as had all of the plastic plants in the corners. The antithesis were probably disappointed at their unrealism.

The aliens had left a nice trail across the linoleum leading to the back of the lobby and into a corridor that probably led to the washrooms and to the back end of the building.

I stepped around some of the bloodstains dragged across the floor and tried not to think too hard about them. Probably some poor fucks caught outside, or some family pets that hadn’t been dragged into Downtown in time. Whoever’s blood it was, it was now feeding the hive.

“Hey.”

I startled, then swore under my breath before answering. “What’s up, Manic?” I asked.

“How’s shit going?” she asked. “Because I’m over here, sheltering in some shitty run-down apartment looking through some guy’s classic CD collection and slowly losing my mind.”

“Yeah, well at least you’re not being spooked while crawling through a deathtrap,” I said as I pushed further in.

I wasn’t expecting to turn a corner and find the floor missing, the walls ripped apart, and a stack of rubble pressed up to the edge of a slope that dropped down into an unlit basement.

“Fuck,” I said.

“What?” Manic asked.

I rolled my eyes. She was really ruining the tension here. So I connected my cybernetic eye’s visuals to the channel she was on, so that she could see things from my literal point of view. “Big old hole in the middle of a building,” I said. “This isn’t normal, if you hadn’t guessed.”

“No shit,” Manic said. “They coming up?”

The ‘they’ was a group of model threes that started to scramble up the rubble ramp. I jumped down, then to the side, gripping onto cracked chunks of cement as I let the aliens by. They passed close enough that I could almost smell them.

I flicked on my helmet’s lowlight vision and looked around.

The entire basement had been remodelled recently. Walls torn out, with only a few pillars remaining, but with plenty of new alien shit to make up for the loss. There were pools of goopy crap all over, with large egg sacs piled waist-high at the end of the room and thigh-thick roots ran across the floor in zig-zag patterns.

“This is a whole-ass hive,” I said.

A relatively new one. I suspect that this one is absorbing the biomatter of the hives that we hit earlier. It would make sense for the antithesis to retreat and then work to purge itself of its infection this way. There is a historical precedent.

“Yeah,” I said. Then I jumped back and ducked behind a pillar as a model four came waddling past. It was carrying a mass of antithesis flesh which looked extra fucky, the kind of fucky that came from our nanomachines. I moved on past, and on a whim I started to follow it.

It didn’t get too far. Just to another room with a torn apart floor. There was a pit there, maybe some five or six metres deep, but a dozen metres wide, and entirely filled with rotting plantmeat. The model four tossed in the chunk it held, then hopped down to its death.

“They’re really working on purging themselves,” I said.

“Smart, for a bunch of plants,” Manic said. “So, blowing them up?”

“Mhm,” I said. “But if they don’t like the nanomachines, I don’t see a reason to stop giving them some. Myalis, more of those cat drones, and a lot more nanomachines. Can you follow the roots to wherever they’re getting their biomass from? We’ll undo whatever progress they have here.”

A startlingly good idea!

I huffed, but didn’t comment.

“So no explosion?” Manic asked.

“Oh yeah, big explosions,” I said. “We just need to stall until help shows up, right? So let’s ruin this place. I think acid sprayers all over, and then enough boom to bring the entire building down?”

That should work.

What followed was a nervous half hour of me moving across the basement, unnoticed by the antithesis who were pumping out more and more aliens which immediately set out to leave. They were growing so fast that when I paused to stare, I could literally see them growing in their egg sac things.

There was some sort of system in place where the least infected plant meat was ripped apart and reused, and the most infected was tossed out and segregated, all while the hive continued to produce like mad.

At this rate of growth, these models will be significantly weaker. There’s a reason most models take as long to grow as they do. Chemical reactions can only be hurried up so much.

Once I had placed a few dozen little tanks full of rapidly-spreading acid around, I set out to place my second happy surprise. These weren’t anything special, just plain-old plastic explosives in little baggies that would keep them safe from the acid.

When I was done, I jogged out of the building, then froze up on reaching the intersection above. It was full, with nearly twice as many antithesis lingering around out in the open as before.

“Okay... so, we blow up the building, then... hey, Manic, think you could take on this bunch?”

“On my own? Maybe if they come at me one at a time.”

“I mean all at once,” I said.

“Fuck, I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe?”

“Get closer, and don’t get noticed. Once I set off all the bombs in the world, we’ll cull this little herd the old fashioned way.”

***