DOM#67A
LOSTON, COLORADO
AD 1999
10:47 AM TUESDAY
***ALERT MODE***
Adam reached the elevator a moment before the shooting. It was empty, and one of the Controllers - a woman named Del - reached out her hand to open the gate. Sudden shots pounded up from somewhere down below, causing the lift to twitch back and forth like an enraged animal on an electrified floor.
The edge of the lift caught Del’s shin, knocking her over into the center of the cage. She lay in a fetal position, arms shielding her head, as bullets shot through the floor all around her. Miraculously, none hit her, though the floor of the lift looked like a cheese grater when the firing stopped.
Adam thought for a moment that God might actually be doing a miracle of some kind, impossibly saving the woman’s life, before a snap ripped through the turbulent air and the elevator plunged out of sight.
A few seconds later, something else fell past them.
Adam couldn’t really make it out. But it had glistened like a diamond.
A long diamond, in the shape of a spear.
***
Elijah was still trying to figure out the best way to proceed, how to get himself up the cable and onto solid ground again before he either fell or Malachi killed him and the three other Controllers hanging out in space below the elevator. He needed time, he needed peace and quiet for thinking and some time to decide how to proceed. But peace and quiet were not to be found in this place, it seemed, and time was the one thing he couldn’t have, for in that instant he felt the cable slacken in his hands and knew that he was falling.
It was over.
The thoughts in his head tumbled over themselves in an almost childishly silly patter of twists and convolutions, making no sense and all sense at once, marking his end not with the peaceful understanding that he had hoped for as he entered the eternities, but rather with confusion, with disorientation, with despair. His thoughts were jumbled even as he was, plummeting in fast loops and barrel rolls as he fell through the silence of the mine shaft. He could not see where he was going, or where the other three Controllers who had been on the cable with him were. But he could feel the wind rip through his clothing and pierce his skin as he fell, picking up speed as he dropped like a stone down a deep and empty well.
He fell forever, it seemed, and at one point felt himself collide with the wall of the shaft, which sheared off his right hand cleanly. He was already screaming by then, and the pain registered hardly at all.
Thousands of feet. Forever. Eternity wasn’t Heaven or Hell, it was a fall through a dark tunnel to the pit of the world, clutching a sonic pistol in one hand and nothing in the hand that fell disembodied beside you.
Then he hit the ground, finally, and all sounds, including his own, were silent.
But not gone. He wasn’t gone. He was alive, with all that meant, and he felt himself - now a prisoner in his body and not the owner at all - push up on hands that were shattered that were attached to arms that were broken that in turn hung off a torso whose innards were mush.
Elijah could feel it, though. He could feel the bones re-knit themselves within him, and he knew what it meant.
I’m a machine, he thought, and darkness rose within him.
He looked over and saw one of the other Controllers - he couldn’t even tell who it was, so mangled was the body - also twitching. Slower that Elijah, though. More internal damage. The other two Controllers were nowhere to be seen, and the analytical part of Elijah – that part of him that was quickly disappearing beneath a soft, dark blanket of madness that he could feel settling down in his mind like black snow – reasoned that they must have been utterly pulverized in the fall, colliding with the wall of the elevator shaft so many times and with such force that they had simply disintegrated under the pummeling.
Then he noticed the cable. It was still dropping around them from above, wrapping around the floor of the shaft like an obscenely long snake that would twist in on itself and then begin to eat the whole earth from the inside out. Elijah knew the elevator must be dropping, and he began to shuffle to the side of the shaft, hands and knees working slowly as they mended themselves and tried to carry him out of the danger zone at the same time.
He made it.
He turned as the elevator hit, seeing it slam into the other living - or unliving, as it were - Controller, smashing he/she/it into the earth, allowing no more life, crushing the last bits of animation out of the machine. Blood splashed and dust rose in a great cloud as the earth shivered with the force of the impact.
Elijah lay there in the dark, feeling his body mend.
I’m a machine, he thought again. His whole life, the memories he had, the loves he felt, the friends he knew, all turned away from him as he realized that his existence was a lie. His memories were constructed, and his birth had been from in a bio-lab, not a womb.
He began screaming again, his lungs now able once more to process oxygen (Not breathe! screamed the rapidly diminishing portion of his mind that still remembered being a man. Process oxygen.) and then stopped as he heard a new sound.
It was a terrible, silent sound. The sound of Moses parting the Red Sea, that awful stillness before cataclysm.
Elijah, or rather the thing that had once been Elijah, looked up. Darkness greeted him, but then something sparkled above.
He saw the icicle that had cracked off its base thousands of feet above him a mere fraction of a second before crashed down. The needle sharp shaft pierced him, slamming through him like a pin through an entomologist’s favorite specimen. It exploded through his face in a bright flash of white, and Elijah felt it enter the tiny part of his thalamus that was all that was keeping him alive in spite of his body’s anxious desire to embrace death.
Elijah, the man and the machine, died.
And was not unhappy.