King in the Mountain

"King in the Mountain — GHOST STORY"
Nevada, United States of America, 2044​

. . .

Wailing...

The senior agent sighed again as the elevator platform came to a stop. Even without the audio feed, the specter of tormented souls bellowed like the metallic screech-grown, then a deafening, killer silence.

The ancient, elevator gates opened to reveal a new antechamber before a rusted bank vault style door ten meters across with an automated spin dial, and giant gravity lock that would take several dozen men to turn if made manual.

An Army gate guard stepped out before Agent Smith despite being the only arrival with the additional presence of six other Military Police officers standing at the corners of the expansive, and musky atrium. They carried FN P90-USG personal defense weapons on retention bands, laid over soft body plate carriers, over reinforced full body cyborg frames—colored gray like dead skin. Affixed to their hips were FN 5.7-USG handguns, chambered in 5.7×28mm NATO cartridge, the same bullets as the P90s. Armor piercing and fast, for chewing up cyborgs.

"Senior Agent John Smith, welcome back to the Dungeon."

"Thank you, Sergeant. The challenge scenario?" Smith asked, stopping two paces of the guard-in-charge.

"Stay where you are. Please don't move."

"Of course."

"Reaction time is a factor—"

"Yes, yes. Go ahead." Smith impatiently nodded but with a respectful half-smile.

"You walk through a desert and come across a tortoise. It crawls towards you and you reach down, flipping it. The tortoise now lays on its back, baking in the hot sun and unable to turn itself over. Not without your help, but you're not helping. What are you thinking in the moment?"

Smith relaxed his facial muscles, and made very small rolls of his shoulders to relax. "Of course. Sometimes these things happen."

The sergeant waited a couple moments, looking between his handheld tablet and Smith. Finally, the Army guard spoke up, waving the government employee through. "Confirmation: it’s you. New phrase every time, still consistent as ever."

Agent Smith made a soft smirk. "I can't be anyone but me."

"Uh huh," the guard agreed without clarification. The bunker door spun and groaned, hissed and whined as ancient steel and brass worked to unveil the entryway beyond. A dark, cavernous space lit by old vacuum tube computer screens within. Smith marched forward and the bunker door sealed behind him with the same metallic fanfare.

Sounds outside vanished into solid rock, perishing against thick concentrations of limestone and concrete. Rusted pipes along the bunker ceiling and walls revealed their age, colored maroon with time and bacteria. Cycling fans whirred and glowed inside large server boxes lined against the chamber walls. Wires ran to-and-fro, jumbled along the floor in a manner easily described as recent and haphazard.

At the center of the chamber, a transparent habitation cube with reinforced glass contained an out of place, hospital suite. External observers in Army uniforms and DARPA work-suits kept their eyes on their terminals and the container's occupants like a dissection scene from an alien movie. There was no privacy for the wounded half-corpse strewn out on a raised hospital gurney. His right arm appeared cleaved off at the elbow and his left leg was a mere stump. Fresh bandages rested on the man's missing limbs; however, it was not the most gruesome sight.

The only wound left to the open air appeared pink and dark as gray skin decayed around the gaping crown of the man's skull. An exposed, half-cyberized brain seem to squelch and shift like worms in a water bowl. Wires extended from the open head, analyzing numerous health variables and data streams from the computerized portion of the damaged cyborg.

Smith walked by the special unit computer analysts, offering a pat on the back to a couple without word. He received nods in kind, and greetings. "Welcome back, sir. Good flight?"

The senior agent made it up several stair-steps to the clean chamber door, stopping by his similar-sunglasses' deputy, Agent Jones.

"How's the mental assessments been since my last visit?"

Jones nodded, "We've kept to low consequence mental exercises for now. Per your request, we avoided risk and provided no new headline scenarios. We've continued to monitor him for spikes on the gray matter and neural components but results are still inconclusive on the attempts to manipulate his time perception."

"Any blips, or data stream activity? I remember we concluded during the last series of scenarios he was attempting to communicate somehow with the PET brain scanner."

Smith took a paper clipboard with some jotted notes from Jones. A quick glance over and Smith handed it back.

Jones continued, "Two data bursts, almost an hour apart. We responded with two days of set isolation to see if he would continue to repeat. Or, if it was an attempt to induce stimuli in the technicians. Nothing else for two whole weeks after. And we continue to change up the nurse schedule to not be predictable."

Smith thought it over, pressing his sunglasses to the ridge of his nose. "And the data bursts were when?"

"Two weeks—so, that second Thursday of..."

"Alright, good to know it was a quiet time away. I have a new test in mind. Monitor but don't intervene, I'm going to give him a culture shock and see if adding a current event will produce any new behavior. A 2044 event might excite him after an appetite of sanitized headlines from 1960s Chicago and 1970s Capetown."

Jones frowned, "What do you have in mind?"

"Operation: LATE WARGAME."

"Are-are you serious? That might be jumping the gun a little bit, sir. Why not wait a couple days, or run it by the Director first?"

"My investigation, my head call. If she has a problem with it, she'll let me know and you'll have my job."

Jones shook his head. "Well, you're the boss. I suppose you know best."

The deputy wandered down the steps back to the terminals leaving Smith to watch as two Army nurses exited the habitation cube. "Welcome back, Agent Smith. Welcome back, sir."

"Thank you, ladies."

Once all other personnel were nine paces or more away, Agent Smith stepped through the clean room door and sealed it behind him with a dull thud of the deadbolt. He slipped on a white-decontamination "bunny suit" over his dress suit, and stepped into main chamber where the crippled cyborg subject waited for him. He added a face mask for good measure.

"Mister Gary Harts! Good afternoon!" A false-joyous tone left Smith's lips as he raised his arms to greet his catatonic subject.

The half-corpse didn't respond, staring up into the one-way glass ceiling. Smith pulled up a plastic foldout chair and ignored the eight, wire-only observation cameras in the room' corners, and the two last-century microphones affixed to a nearby desk. All sorts of unhackable things for a modern cyborg. A couple medical servers and readout machines also filled the space but they were air gapped to the best of NSA cybersecurity standards and isolated to the chamber itself.

Smith continued, "I hear you have been a very good patient to my adjutant for the three days I have been gone. How have you been? Anything we can speak about?"

No answer came. The patient remained catatonic, as he usually did. The half-corpse, once Master Sergeant Gary Harts, responded with micro twitches of his exposed fingers and toes over the course of two, random minutes. Everything to say he was alive, nothing to say if he was aware. A slumbering, deathless knight. A man whose behavior shared more with the eccentricity of ghost stories than reality. The military oversight staff dubbed him "King under the Mountain," with the Nevada bunker suite his throne room and tomb.

"That is a shame. I heard you called to speak to someone not long ago but it seems no one was able to respond in time. You know how people are. Sometimes they can be... Inconsistent."

A sick sneer crept onto Agent Smith's smile, now wrinkled in dark shadows. He embraced his indulgence with the Guest, deploying his new test scenario.

"I do have something for you. Some news which might interest you."

Gary Harts blinked but his dull gray eyes remained pointed at the ceiling.

"I am authorized to inform you today that combined intelligence and military resources of the United States Armed Forces neutralized a terrorist nuclear bunker confederation in the Rocky Mountains region. You see, they presented a renewed clear and present danger to the stable international order. They got your message and tried to follow your example. You remember that? The consequences then are as expected."

Smith stood up to lean over Gary Harts, meeting sunglass-eyes to dull eyes, living to the dead.

"It is all thanks to you. And no thanks to you. Happily, no Americans were hurt. We managed to prevent a nuclear launch and contained the threat. Drone bomber fleet, bunker buster bombs. Smart gas dispersal. You would be familiar with such tactics in your previous life. You handled some of those kind of raids to my recollection?"

The senior agent waited for a response, not blinking behind his obscuring sunglasses and deep personal shadow. Harts' dim eyes revealed nothing, and Smith retreated back to his chair.

Of course, the Guest offered no reply. They trapped the Master Sergeant here, in a ceramic box deep underground missing two limbs and a good portion of his brain's frontal lobe. He was stuck on life support, nowhere to go. Nothing to connect to. Stuck and at home, like an abandoned house pet.

What remained of Gary Harts could say nothing, would say nothing. He lost the ability to speak, to think with words. Or much of anything else… All the evidence pointed to this objective fact in Smith's knowledge, understanding, and confidence. But Gary Harts was not dead, something inside was still awake. And the eyes in the abyss sometimes stared back.

Smith allowed himself to look away from the Guest for a moment. He shouldn't have. The senior agent heard a pillow rustle and looked up. Gary's head remained bedridden. But it began to turn, turning towards Smith at the pace of a snail crawl, like a zombie. Their eyes met again.

Smith's sneer faded, his lips twitched twice in confusion and curiosity. "What is it?"

The Master Sergeant opened his mouth, revealing pale, old spider-webbing blood vessels along his sunken cheeks and his unused jawline. His lips formed a wide O-shape. No sound emerged. Slow breathing heaved from the comatose man's nostrils and throat.

Suddenly, Gary's lips popped and his teeth clicked together, animating as if alive for the first time in months.

"Wow, Master Sergeant. That's quite the improvement! Good job." Smith chuckled, both impressed and concerned.

Gary's dry mouth parted open and his tongue and lips started to curve and twist, forming vowels and consonants with his breathy, voiceless speech. At first, Smith did not know what was happening and watched on in apt, intrigued focus. But soon, he did begin to understand, putting together the silent English tones into a brand-new jigsaw puzzle.

Real, tangible words. The dead king's first delivery in months. Not a voice, only the ghost of warning.

END-NOT-END. FOR-THEM. FUTURE-STILL-COME. WORLD-END. DAY-SOON. DAWN-PEACE-PROSPER. FOR-ALL.YOUR-TIME-COME. SOON-AND-SOON-AND-SOON. AND-SOON.

Smith squinted in confusion, his sunglasses slipping down the rim of his nose and exposing his confounded blue eyes to the Master Sergeant.

At first, the senior agent thought he heard cheering. He looked around, but there was no one in the habitation cube and he couldn't see his subordinates through the crystalline fog of a window to his right. No, the cheering was much too loud to fill the tiny hospital space containing him and the posthuman subject.

The noise was coming from elsewhere. A place far away: Colorado. Mountains on fire, forests vaporized. Houses blackened with smoke. Not cheering, not a sporting event. Screaming—drowning—burning. His imagination was back at Cheyenne, along the hillsides where forest hills cleared for terrace farming and homes built by the survivors of the irradiated, obliterated Colorado Springs. The ones who made new economic alliances and friendships with the Strategic Air Command staff-survivors inside their bunkers. The ones who watched as America collapsed into nuclear Armageddon. And they just watched… A hundred bunkers remained silent as their country burned and died: the Bunker Union.

Smith's imagination ran wild as the screaming and drowning voices pulled him deep into the Cheyenne bunker passed the movie-famous tube entryway and the bank vault door at the end of the reinforced, exterior cavern. Inside, bunker buster shells cracked open, exposing an invisible menace to the open air. Micromachines armed with thermite powder and cell-targeting, nanite smart gas ran free through the bedrock. Through the water supply and the concrete office structures loaded on nuclear weapon-grade compression springs. These fixtures were a marvel of last-century Cold War engineering, a testament to America's will to outlive the fire and fury of nuclear warfare. It did nothing for the inhabitants of this century as their bodies destroyed themselves from the inside and melted on the outside.

This was not cheering; it was death incarnate. The screams of damnation. Hell brought up from under the earth into the mortal coil. Hellfire upon body and soul. It was indiscriminate against natural humans and cyborgs alike. All burned and drowned, women and children received no quarter.

Gary's silent words repeated through the imaginative cacophony of noise and suffering, branding into Smith's mind. The words, in the agent's voice, burned white-hot and devoured everything else. The mantra called to him again.

WORLD-END. DAY-SOON. YOUR-TIME-COME. SOON-AND-SOON-AND-SOON.

“The world’s end? Day coming soon—Your time will come? And soon?”

Smith blinked, and startled as he found himself standing mere inches away from Gary Hart's wrist where intact connection sockets lay. In Smith's left hand, he held a loose connectivity wire. Where it came from, he did not know. He did not remember bringing it in here, did he?

Had he? Did he connect to the Guest?

He froze, taking into account his distance from the microphones and cameras. Despite the best alignment for observation, Smith's presence created a blind spot. The wire went unseen by those outside, both by cameras and eyes.

Smith let out a long sigh. "You're a scary one, you know that? Master Sergeant Harts? Thank you... For your time."

The senior agent beat a hasty retreat from the habitation cube, pulling off his bunny suit components and dumped it into the laundry cart by the clean room exit. He marched quick to Agent Jones's side and pulled him over to a dark corner, cutting off his new greeting. Smith removed his composed mask, but Jones spoke first.

"We were monitoring from here. That was an interesting development, words but no voice. He's improving—"

"Yes, yes. But Jones, I need you to find out with discretion who left a connection wire in the room. Amend the security protocols from now on, no cyberized personnel in the isolation chamber at all. Not you, not me. Only full organics."

Jones shook his head, processing the stray wire being pushed between his fingers. On closer inspection, it was not a National Security Agency standard wire. Possibly a leftover from a careless DARPA engineer, or one of the Army nurses. At least that was Smith's thought.

"You're sure you didn't bring that in there? Maybe it was in your pocket on the plane?"

"You and I know better than anyone not to be so careless," Smith insisted back.

"Oh, okay then. I'll start an internal security audit. See who broke isolation protocol."

Smith nodded. "And isolate the insider threat, do a full medical and cybernetic workup. No official discipline and no leaving the facility until we know for certain what happened."

"And if they've already left the facility?"

Smith looked away, his eyes darting back to Gary Harts on the gurney inside the habitation cube.

"God have mercy on us all."

"You seem a little shell shocked, sir." Agent Jones remarked, observing how unkempt trails of hair escaped Smith's hairdo and the widening of his blue eyes.

"Jones. Were the words I saw, what he said? I didn't do anything odd in there, right?"

The deputy paused, seeming alarmed for a long moment and thought back. He finally shook his head.

"You just talked to him, got close to him a couple times but I didn't see anything odd. A couple seconds at most. You walked out in a sprint right after he started mouthing at you."

"What did Harts say?"

"End, not end. For them. Future, still come? World end. Day soon. Dawn-peace-prosper? For—"

Smith shook his head as well, rubbing fresh sweat from his brow. "Alright, just wanted to make sure I wasn't crazy about that."

"Take the night off, Boss. You look spooked."

The senior agent pulled back his hair, finally stroking through the dark locks and synthetic grease. Smith sighed.

"Yeah, that sounds like a good idea right now. I'm going to go borrow a topside spare office for right now. I'll find a base apartment in the morning."

"Sounds good. I'll keep things in check here. It's probably all the excitement tonight, and the jet lag."

Smith offered a real, recovering chuckle. "Yes, I suppose so. One of those things cybernetics can't fix."

A thought lingered in Smith's mind as he exited the reinforced bunker, passed the gate guards and the vault door. Did I connect after all? Did I break the containment protocol? He looked back to Harts as the vault sealed and thought the posthuman subject stared back at him. A micro-glance away and back, the dead man's head was glaring back at his mirrored ceiling.

The NSA agent definitely didn't bring in that wire.

But where did it come from, and where had it been? Did someone else connect to Harts? The creeping thought of such things scared Agent John Smith more than undead corpses and nuclear fallout. His optimized blood ran cold, and Smith gave off an involuntary shiver as the reinforced bunker door sealed behind him.

The senior agent would struggle with sleep tonight. And not because of jet lag or because of a makeshift, stiff office bed. Smith had a lot on his mind.

The net noise tonight almost thrummed with a fever pitch.