The Perfect Run

Where could Mechron be hiding?

Smashing through blast doors and steel walls, Leonard Hargraves felt something wrong in the atmosphere. Space itself bending and twisting. Something created powerful magnetic fields inside the base, tearing apart the very fabric of reality.

As he had thought, Mechron’s fortress also counted as a particle accelerator. Did the Genius activate it? For what purpose? How could it help repel the army at his door?

“Pythia, where do I go?” Leonard asked, but he only ‘heard’ psychic static. Whatever happened inside the fortress interfered with the telepathic contact.

He was on his own.

Leonard eventually made his way into the fortress’ collider, a closed circuit of steel inside which particles moved at an astonishing speed. A stream of unknown, blue energy raced through the superstructure, the Red Genome entering it like a fish swimming inside a river. He didn’t identify the particles inside the collider; perhaps they were undiscovered by modern science, or not native to Earth’s reality.

Much to his surprise, Leo started to see things inside the stream. Bluish phantoms of strange, inhuman figures composed of raw data, blinking in and out of existence. These mirages never settled in one shape, constantly changing.

What was going on?

The living sun could tell the ambient energy focused in one place at the facility’s center; the point where the two loops making up the infinity symbol joined. He followed the blue stream towards its endpoint, eventually crashing through more steel walls. The blue stream leaked out behind him, dispersing into fine particles.

Leo’s crash course ended at the very core of the fortress, a command center straight out of H. R. Giger’s nightmares. The entire room looked like a gothic cathedral of steel, whose walls were alive; veins of metal coursed through them, pumping the building with thick black oil. The structure seemed capable of breathing, while coiled tin spines formed the pillars keeping the roof. Eye-like screens projected images of the battle outside, while loudspeakers screamed warnings.

Six giant, biomechanical brains the size of elephants formed a circle around a tiny blue spot floating in the midst of an energy pillar; the focal point of the entire superstructure. Each of the brains were protected from the outside world by reinforced glass tanks, and connected by thick wires. Leo guessed they were biomechanical supercomputers, housing the AIs piloting their master’s entire war effort.

Mechron was there, standing on a platform below the blue spot. The wizened old man wore nothing but simple white clothes and needed a black cane to walk. He was the only creature of flesh in this ghastly iron heart, giving orders to his AI servants in Bosnian.

“Transfer all data to the back-up base.” Mechron’s voice sounded so calm, so small. So human. “Activate all remaining units outside, and open the gate.”

“Data transfer initiated.” A robotic voice answered through loudspeakers. “Warning: dimensional coordinates incomplete. High-degree of instability expec—”

“Don’t care if we destroy Sarajevo! Open the gate!”

Mechron suddenly noticed Leonard, who had his palm raised at the man.

Now that he could take a good look at the Genius’ face, the living sun realized that the battle had taken its toll on him too. Already past his seventies, Mechron seemed like he hadn’t slept in days. His eyes were blackened by fatigue, his hands shaking with stress.

He looked so… so normal. He didn’t wear a costume, nor was he a larger-than-life, charismatic dark lord. Mechron was a mere man, straight out of a retirement home; one who had killed millions, perhaps billions.

And yet... he looked so very tired of it all. Broken by a decade of endless warfare.

The living sun’s hand wavered.

“Make your shot count,” Mechron said, glaring bitterly at Leonard. “You won’t get another.”

Instead of blasting him, Leonard Hargraves stared at the hateful dictator straight in the eyes. “Are you happy, Mechron?” he asked in Bosnian.

The question took the Genius aback.

“Are you happy living like this?” Leonard asked. While he didn’t unleash any plasma blast, he kept his hand raised. Pythia would flay him alive if she knew. “Alone in a bunker, surrounded by machines, killing people left and right? Was that your wish? Are you happy living like this?”

The fortress shook, while the Genius mulled the question over. He looked away, before focusing back on Leonard.

“No,” Mechron admitted, sounding exhausted. “No, I’m not.”

“Then why won’t you stop?”

“Why do you care?” the Genius snapped back.

“Because… because I want to believe human life should be cherished. Even yours. I will kill you if I must, but call me naive… if there is the slightest chance of ending this by the book, I want to try it.” Leonard paused, trying to find his words. “I don’t know what made you what you are, but you must realize deep down that hurting other people won’t help.”

He did. Leonard could see it painted all over his face.

“Please surrender peacefully,” the living sun asked. “Tell your machines to stand down, and we will give you a fair hearing. Nobody else has to die; not even you. You started this, and you can end it.”

Mechron’s expression suddenly morphed from sadness to wrath.

“I didn’t start anything,” the man snarled, his voice dripping with venom. Anger bottled up for years roared to the surface. “You did. The Serbians murdered my sons at Srebrenica and you people… you people just watched! If you want this war to end, then stop getting in my way!”

Leonard got his answer in the man’s intense, hateful gaze.

He would never stop. It didn’t matter how many had to die to fuel the fire burning within him; it was an inferno that could never be extinguished. This bitter, hateful man would never stop until he had brought the whole world to its knees.

A demon born of war.

Leonard regretfully opened fire.

A crimson force field activated around the rogue Genius, deflecting a stream of plasma. Metal and electrical devices around Mechron melted, but the warlord remained completely unharmed. Similar fields protected the giant brains, protecting them from danger. Leonard flew towards the Genius, intending to smash through the forcefield and end Mechron’s life.

A roar echoed at his left, a wormhole opening. The biomechanical dragon from last time emerged from it, claws raised at the living sun.

A powerful gravitational force pushed Leonard against a steel wall, sending him crashing against mechanical panels. The dragon kept the gravitational force active, attempting to break the Red Genome’s heart-core apart.

“It could have been beautiful! A new Eden!” Mechron’s face twitched in anger. “I could have eradicated diseases, solved world hunger, brought peace! Increased life expectancy, everything automated! Everything would have been perfect!”

cane at Leonard,

with his cane, his hands

replied angrily, trying to break free of the battle-beast’s gravitational field. “You

Genius visibly flinched, his fingers clenching around his cane. By now, he was so furious he couldn't make coherent sentences. “If politicians had

maniac and blasted the biomechanical dragon with plasma. The creature’s scales and flesh melted away, leaving only mechanical implants and seared bones. Yet astonishingly, it kept moving and

spatial anomaly leading into a place of bright blue light. When Leonard looked at this reality tear, he felt something brush against his mind. He thought it was Pythia for a second, before realizing the

formed inside the living sun’s mind, like in the blue stream. Vivid pictures of his childhood in Hackney, surrounded by criminality; of his first day in the London Fire Department, helping a family evacuate from a burning building; of finding

sent him. Even the burned dragon stopped

Records…” Mechron muttered, his eyes widening in triumph. “The universal compendium. All data, all information, all knowledge, all intent, and emotions,

the portal, his fury replaced with

here!” He turned his back on the Red Genome, chuckling to himself. “Even you must

showing pictures of Leo’s own life, they shifted to stranger sights. Of alien

can begin again!” Mechron boasted. “Fix everything! Once I get there,

looked at the blue with divine fascination, until

screens in the facility turned red, and the loudspeakers changed their tune. “Warning: anomaly detected. Warning: anomaly

spots slowly grew from within the blue portal, tainting it entirely. The room seemed to freeze over, the temperature dropping at an alarming

happening. “It’s… it’s not the blue world… it’s somewhere else…

which no light could escape. It wasn’t a door to a

black,” Mechron muttered,

And then...

The abyss gazed back.

the

overwhelmed by darkness too. An alien

looking at them

Skin, flesh, bones, and then working its ways

same fate. Even now he felt the outer layers of his solar body disintegrating, its molecules annihilated into nothingness. The sustained gaze of this thing would tear him apart in minutes, destroying his heart-core as

vaguely reminding Leo of an eye, surrounded by a cloud of dark, empty space; a sentient hole in reality, a living darkness

it was trying to get

slowly widened, the radius of the baleful gaze increasing. The entity behind the gate kept looking, unaware, or perhaps uncaring, of the damage it caused. If the

will somehow kill everyone in

of plasma

quickly stopped to

extinguished. They disappeared, leaving neither heat nor smoke behind. The dark force on

to this entity, the living sun looked like an ant trying

would erase him from existing within minutes, and then do the same with the fortress.

The particle accelerator’s destruction…

sufficiently damage the fortress, he could collapse the portal before it could grow larger. But the explosion needed… it

in this bleak, devastated world. Friends like Pythia, with families at home; soldiers trying

Leonard didn’t hesitate.

whatever power fueled his heart-core, and caused his heart-core to implode on itself. His body turned white, his

say…” he muttered, staring defiantly at the darkness beyond. “Better

thought towards his comrades outside, the Living

explosion, and the darkness returned

Darkness.

nothingness. He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t smell,

He felt cold.

He felt numb.

anything,

afterlife? Or maybe it

truly believed in any god or afterlife. He thought he would just vanish, cease to exist. Compared to an eternity

as he could remember. He might have looked like the sun, but he never felt warm when alone. So he had filled the void with his fellow human beings, their

was alone with his thoughts. Alone with

would never have a wife, never have children. He hadn’t written that urban fantasy book he always said he would. He would never return to London and see the people he left behind. He would never get to make up with certain friends, whom he had parted with on bad terms; he would never avenge the Costas or bring Augustus to justice.

many things

But…

was okay

He had tried.

done

long tunnel, though he couldn’t see what was beyond the exit. Was it Heaven? Was it the last door? Were the Christians right, or the Muslims? The

whatever awaited him beyond…

He entered the light.

Leonard opened his eyes.

of facing angels, he could only see a

had returned to his frail human form, though with some changes. His black skin was somehow hairless now, and all his muscles

on her friend. “You come back from Hell

plague doctor outfit, to the point Leonard had never seen how he looked underneath. “You

to see. He seemed to be in some kind of hospital, laying

death hadn’t claimed him

kilometers from Sarajevo. We evacuated

happiness. “We

struggled to form words. His throat felt

“Three days,” Stitch answered.

“And Mechron’s fortress…”

glass.” Ace smiled at him, happy to see her friend alive. “You