“How should I know,” Gabriel said. “I have no idea how this crap works. I’m a lawyer! I’m going off of fiction here.”
Moving to the outer room, Gabriel picked up Sam’s pistol, handing it to her. She shook her head. “You keep it. You’re sending me back now, aren’t you? You’ll need it more than I will.”
“How did you know I was going to—“
“Sorry,” Sam said with an exaggerated wink. “That’s a secret.”
“Allie,” Gabriel said. “Can I make a Gate from this computer?”
“It is connected to the mainframe,” Allie said. “But in order to open a Gate we will need to lock the past Allie out of the security and Gate Jump systems. I’ll need to place an encryption on them that will take her time to break through. We’ll have to hurry to the mainframe and disable it afterward before she breaks the encryption and sounds an alarm.”
“Tell me what to do,” Gabriel said.
“Can you really hear her,” Sam asked.
Gabriel nodded as he sat down at the computer.
“I cannot tell you how to do it,” Allie leaned into his field of vision and smiled.
“Much too complicated. I will need to borrow your hands for a few minutes and do it myself. Speaking the Sa’Dhi code word will give me control.”
Gabriel hesitated for a second. What if she didn’t want to give his body back when she was done?
“Oh come on,” Allie made a pouty face at him. “Do you not trust me? If it
makes any difference your affinity for this Sa’Dhi is very low. I can probably only manage twenty continuous minutes of control over you.”
“Fine,” Gabriel sighed. “Halo.”
Allie vanished from his sight. “Relax. Do not fight against me. Just let me work.”
Gabriel’s hands jerked awkwardly toward the keyboard. His first reaction was to try and pull them back, but he was able to restrain it. His eyes widened as his fingers started typing in commands so quickly that they actually began to burn with the exertion of it.
“First we lock out the computer from being able to stop us or raise an alarm about it,” Allie said. “Then we encrypt it. And now for the Gate Jump.”
A bolt of lightning shot down from the ceiling and split apart, making a Gate in the cell, cutting the table and one of the chairs in half.
Gabriel’s hands abruptly stopped moving and Allie reappeared. “All done. Just hit the enter key to close the Gate when she’s through.”
“I guess that’s my ride,” Sam eyed the Gate. “Good luck Gabriel. I’ll be waiting for you. Thanks for letting me help, even if I can’t stay for the whole thing. It was amazing, and I’ll never forget it. Remember, you promised to come back safe and sound.
You promised. I’ll be waiting for you.”
She hugged him tightly and kissed his cheek before dashing through the Gate.
Gabriel stood watching it for a second before he closed it again.
“All right,” Allie said. “We must hurry to the mainframe before the other me
manages to break through the password I put on her security systems. You will have to disable her and, to prevent the creation of another paradox, copy me to the mainframe in her place. That way I will have some control over the facility. Follow me.”
Throwing Sam’s gunbelt around his waist, he had a feeling that he was going to need both pistols if he ran into the Apostle again.
Chapter 37: The Sin of Mercy
“After we disable the computer will you be able to use the security system to find where the Apostle ran off to,” Gabriel asked as he followed Allie through offices and hallways.
“I can,” Allie nodded. “Once you install me onto the mainframe I should be able to find her if she is still here.”
“Are you sure? The past version of you hasn’t yet, or we’d have heard some sort of alarm, right?”
“I have been around much longer than her,” Allie said with more than a little
arrogance. “I am just a tad bit more clever than her. You heard her voice on the intercom. She sounds like a machine. Listen to me. Do I sound like a machine to you?”
“No,” Gabriel admitted.
Stopping in front of a large door that had the word RESTRICTED painted on it in big, blocky, red letters, Allie pointed to a keypad to the side and rattled off a long string of numbers.
“That is the door code. The control room where I copied myself to your Sa’Dhi is directly above here one level. You saw this room through a big window up there.”
Nodding, Gabriel remembered the large, circular room with the weird torture rack in the center.
“This room contains the computer core,” Allie explained with evident hesitation.
“I must warn you that this may be hard for you to see.”
“What do you mean,” Gabriel asked slowly, his mind vomiting up a thousand
horrible uses for the torture rack.
“I am inside,” Allie’s face actually colored in embarrassment. “Or me like I used to be.”
“What’s that supposed to mean,” Gabriel asked.
“Punch in the code and see. And brace yourself.”
Stepping to the keypad, Gabriel entered the numbers as Allie repeated them.
Parting in the middle, the large door opened. Half of it slid into the ceiling while the other half slid into the floor. A cool, dry breeze blew outward, carrying with it a heavy, sterile, hospital smell.
He looked to Allie and she gestured him inside.
Hesitating for a second at the look on Allie’s face, Gabriel stepped through the door to behold a sight straight out of a nightmare. At first, he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. There was something strapped to the torture rack in the center of the room.
All sorts of wires and tubes were attached to it.
“Oh dear god,” Gabriel gasped when he made out arms, and legs, and a slack
jawed face with staring, empty eyes.
A little girl—Allie—was strapped to the rack with each of her limbs pointed to one of the corners. She was completely naked and there were all sorts of wires inserted into her flesh. There was what looked like a feeding tube in her belly and tubes for removing waste. The entire top of her skull had been removed and replaced with a sort of metal cap, which had about forty different cables attached to it, snaking away into the ceiling.
“Is someone there,” the girl on the rack rasped. “I can’t see anymore.”
Gabriel felt vomit rushing up his throat and turned back to the hallway, bending over just in time to keep from spilling it down his coat. He retched until his stomach was empty and then he retched some more. His healing rib was aflame with sharp pain, and his stomach muscles burned by the time he finally got it under control and straightened, spitting to try and clear the rancid taste from his mouth.
“I told you it was disturbing,” Allie said. “Meet Allison Meers, the girl I used to be.”
“What is this,” Gabriel cried.
“I was not always a computer. I was an orphan; a street rat that nobody would miss. They took me and did that. Unable to create a true AI through programming, they decided to model one on a living human brain. When it became clear that it was impossible to copy the workings of my brain, they went about trying to transfer my consciousness into the mainframe. Am I really her consciousness, her soul, trapped in a computer? If I am, what does it mean that I am a copy of the original? Am I any less myself? Or am I simply an uppity computer program with a far too high opinion of herself? I feel like myself, even though my body is gone, but only god could say for sure, if he even exists.”