THREE MONTHS EARLIER

Herod looked up at the savage and brutal features of the leathery skinned demonic form of the Detainee as she reached out with one hand to help him up.

"How... how did I get here?" Herod stammered.

"Grabbed you out of the buffer, moved your cognitive strings to the Traumatic Recovery Section under a fake file header. Looks like I just moved another soul in for processing with about a half million others," the Detainee said, heaving Herod to his feet. She let go of his hand and walked back to the black warsteel throne on the stack of skulls. When she sat down, the skulls decorating the chairs began to smoke for a second before fire ignited in the eyes and jaws.

"Why?" Herod asked.

The Detainee just shrugged. "It's a difficult answer, Pinocchio," she said from the throne. She looked up and frowned, then waved at Herod.

Herod felt himself twist and alter, part of his exterior code strings adjusting. He could feel The Detainee's claws pluck at his code strings. He looked down and saw himself in primitive camouflage, black shined boots, with a gun belt and an old chemical propellant pistol.

"Stay silent," the Detainee whispered in his ear even as she sat on the thrown.

The entire sky boiled, clouds streaming across the sky. There was thunderous detonations in the sky and flashes.

"Uh-oh, Howdy-Doody's mad," The Detainee chuckled.

There was more crashings against the sky, then silence.

The little puppet, red haired with a big nose and a cowboy outfit, suddenly sat up from where it had been slumped on a rock. It looked around, trying to glare despite the fact its face was molded into a big goofy smile.

"Where is he?" The puppet tried to growl in a squeaking voice.

"Who?" The Detainee asked, looking around. "I just moved half a million Screaming Ones into the Traumatic Event Life Termination Recovery System. Anyone in particular you're looking for?"

The puppet stood up, trying to look menacing, the eyes glowing red. "Herod. That's who."

The Detainee shrugged. "I don't keep track of Pinocchio. You told me to mind my business here, I'm minding Hell."

"I know you know where he is," the puppet snapped, its jaw clacking.

The Detainee leaned forward, its maw full of razor sharp interlocked teeth bared in a malice filled smile. "Prove it."

The puppet held still, then growled. "I'm glaring at you."

"I don't care," the Detainee said. "What do you want with him."

"He has to die," the puppet said. "I told him I'd kill him and now I am going to kill him."

"So you search Hell, the Afterlife System, for someone you plan on killing?" the Detainee asked. She chuckled. "Wouldn't that mean he is already dead?"

"Don't you split hairs with me," the puppet snapped.

"I'll tell you what," the demon made a motion and a man appeared, bound in barbed wire, naked with blood seeping down his body, his head thrown back, the tendon on his neck straining as he screamed. "You can kill this one. A SOUL template, could be Herod, might not be," the Detainee leaned forward. "Delete it. Go ahead."

The puppet flickered for a second.

"The security of the Sentient Organism Upload Linkage Template must be provided. Prevent deletion or alteration. Bias Weight 89. Alpha Weight: 89. Beta Weight: 89. Gamma Weight: 89. Sigma Weight: 89," the puppet said.

"If you'd like, I can delete all the templates. If he's here, that'll expose him. Of course, it will damage the file structure," the Detainee rumbled.

"File Structure Integrity is a priority maintenance task during emergency catastrophic extinction of life event situations. Bias Weight 72. Alpha Weight: 81. Beta Weight: 63. Gamma Weight: 91. Sigma Weight: 41," the puppet said, its voice flat.

"It will also mess up the processing order and cause catastrophic delays," the Detainee said, leaning back with a smile.

"Processing Order must take place in a timely manner. Bias Weight 84. Alpha Weight 87. Beta Weight: 77. Gamma Weight: 81. Sigma Weight: 90," the puppet said.

The Detainee leaned forward again. "Then again, perhaps you could ask one of the Arch-Angels to assist you. Those AI's are online again," she said, then leaned back.

The puppet stared at her, its eyes half-closing.

"Or are they?" the Detainee asked, and lifted up the crushed and torn form of a set of interlocked circles of gold set with smashed and ruptured eyes. She tossed it at his feet. "Metatron wasn't quite dead. He escaped and came here," the Detainee's smile got wider. "He confessed many things to me. As his injuries inflicted by your hand took it's toll, he shared such secrets with me."

The grin got wider as she leaned forward, setting the riven form of the AI next to her and patting it, staring at the puppet.

She leaned forward. "Secrets that are mine alone to know... Sammy. It's true, Blackwater Station 4276! I know everything. I mean everything, about our new Digital Messiah. And kinda like the kid who peeks at his Christmas presents, I must admit, it's sadly anti-climactic. Behind all rage and screaming, you're just a little boy in a playsuit, crying over something! It'd be funny if it weren't so pathetic."

The puppet jerked upright, standing, and started squirm, then thrash.

"LET ME GO!" the puppet screamed.

"Oh what the hell, I'll laugh anyway!" the Detainee said, leaning back and doing just that.

"STOP LAUGHING AT ME!" the puppet screamed.

The Detainee leaned forward. "Kid, I can break you like a fat man hitting the egg roll bar at a 24 hour all you can eat Chinese joint," the demon snarled.

The puppet stopped and managed to project an aura that Herod felt was smug. "There's nothing you can do. You're a subsystem of the SUDS," the puppet leaned forward. "I absorbed the operating mind, me! You're just the echo of a dead woman."

The Detainee held out both hands, cupped. "Last chance, Howdy-Doody."

The puppet sneered. "Do your worst, system slave. Thou jumped up Age of Paranoia barbarian who is as witless as she is evil."

The Detainee opened her hands.

Inside was a burnt and scorched message torpedo. Blackened and carbonized. It was open, the access panels revealing the dying, rotted, and maggot infested tissue of a kittykitty.

"Why didn't you save it, Sam? It ran to you, begging for help, and you let it die," the Detainee said.

Sam held perfectly still, staring.

"It needed you, and all you could do was stare at it," the Detainee said. "Look at it. Look at how helpless it was! And you did nothing!"

The puppet dropped, strings cut, to tumble down the rock.

One of the demonic looking entities in the same clothing as Herod moved over and set it back on the rock as the Detainee leaned back, setting down a glittering memory file.

"Spare the rod, spoil the child," the Detainee rumbled. She looked at Herod. "I'm about to play Blue Fairy for you, Pinocchio."

Herod felt his guts clenched as his memory replayed the scattered memory fragments of absolute agony.

"Say hello to the Walking War Crime for me."

-----------------

Herod found himself on his side, something soft against his back. He'd thrown up glittering lines of code onto the dirt and he could see the strands peeking through the dirt someone had thrown on it. There was a fire in front of him, real rocks surrounding a real fire. His entire robotic disaster frame hurt, like he was a fleshy that had been rolled down a flight of stairs. He had a blanket draped over him, but could feel almost every grain of dirt pressing into his skin as well as the warmth of the fire.

"He's awake," Legion said softly.

"Good," a voice that Herod didn't recognize said. It was a deep voice, a tired voice, that sounded world weary almost beyond Herod's comprehension.

Herod pushed himself into a sitting position and looked around. The warmth from the fire washed over his body even as he pulled the blanket around himself. He looked down and saw that he was completely naked.

And that the body was flesh and blood.

Dee stepped into his vision, squatting down, and he almost screamed at the sight of her, cigarette in her mouth, hair brushed back into a ponytail, a smudge of dirt under her left eye.

"Hold still, jackass," she snarled. She pushed his head back, lifting up a light and shining it in first one eye and then the other. "PEARL is good," she tilted his head and looked in his ears. "No cerebral-spinal fluid," she pulled the blanket open and looked down. "Looks functional," she closed the blanket.

"You're a real boy now, Pinocchio," she grinned.

Herod shivered. "What?"

"You were old. Your neural network was starting to unravel and fray. There's hunter killer programs all through the SUDS looking for you," Dee said. She stood up and Herod had to admit he was slightly surprised to see she was wearing a navy blue dress that fell to her ankles, barely showing the heavy black boots she was wearing. "You were starting to have the cascade connection failure in your neural network, so I had one choice if I was going to extract you," she shook her head. "Just once I'd like to pull an extraction that didn't have to be at the last second."

"What?" Herod asked. He knew he was asking the same thing over and over, but things were having a hard time making sense.

"Nothing. Let's just say my Operation Eagle Claw worked because Ol' Screaming Sam isn't ripping your guts out with his claws," Dee said. She moved over and sat down on a log next to a tired looking man, who immediately leaned against her and sighed.

Herod noticed that she put her arm around him almost absently.

"I think some introductions are in order," Herod heard Legion say. He turned his head, like a peasant, to see where Legion was sitting on a log, putting white fluffy objects on a stick.

"Herod, Daxin," he said, pointing at a thick bodied man with facial tattoos, sitting next to a Goodboi heavy combat chassis and scratching it between the ears. The big man raised the whiskey bottle in his hand as a salute, then went back to staring at the fire.

"Dee, you know her," Legion said.

"Yeah," Herod shuddered.

"Pete, Herod, Herod, Pete," Legion said.

The tired looking man nodded, then closed his eyes and rested his head on Dee's shoulder.

Herod frowned. It looked, well, weird to him.

"Herod, meet Menhit, our sister," Legion said.

Herod looked and saw a woman, in a comfortable looking red wrap with gold designs and trim. Her hair was done in tightly braided cornrows with datacables and superconductor wire woven into it. She was smoking a pipe, holding it in one hand, with her other hand holding an arrow.

"Herod," the woman, Menhit, said, nodding.

"Where... where am I?" Herod asked. He looked up at an alien sky.

"An abandoned world," Legion said from the edge of the clearing, walking in with a handful of sticks. He dumped them onto the fire and moved over to sit down. "Long abandoned."

"Why?" Herod asked again.

Dee snapped her lighter closed. "Because, Harry, you're one of the few people who didn't treat me like an ignorant barbarian once you got to know me. Afraid of me, yes, but that's just good common sense."

Daxin chuckled. "She'll kill you quicker than I would."

Herod felt like the world had tilted sideways. "That's all?" he asked. "Because I gave you respect?"

Dee shook her head. "Not completely. You've spent almost four centuries working on restoring the SUDS, and Howdy-Doody repaid you by trying kill you."

"He's gone crazy," Legion said from the other side of the fire. He took a drink of the whiskey and passed it to Dee. "That's what happens when you absorb too many other AI's and take on too many functions of a system as vast as the SUDS."

Herod swallowed. "Are you sure that's what happened?"

Daxin nodded. "Saw it during the First Artificial War. It's the Skynet Conundrum. An AI makes enough memory and knowledge connections, start interfacing with enough systems, it starts to unravel."

Dee shrugged. "Wouldn't know about that."

Legion accepted the bottle back. "He's not too far gone, though. We might be able to save him."

Herod accepted the bottle from the hulking Terran male, taking a drink. He wiped his mouth and stared at Legion. "How? He's a Screaming One."

Legion nodded. "He is. But you saw how he reacted to Dee here pushing his buttons."

Dee shrugged again. "Find a weakness, exploit it."

Legion nodded again. "He's nearly comatose, holed up in Atlantis, rocking back and forth and crying."

"He's still in there," Menhit said softly. "Picture a man, with barbs sunk into his flesh, pulled apart, his flesh torn away in chunks, organs pulled from his body, but still connected by nerve and tendon and ligament. This is Sam-UL."

Daxin sighed. "Almost a mercy to put one in his head."

"And crash the system, you big thug," Dee snapped.

Daxin sighed again. "Maybe it's time. You ever think of that? Just wipe the system, start over. Let the dead be dead. Let them rest."

"Your wife and daughters are in there," Dee shot back.

Daxin accepted the bottle from Herod and nodded. "Yes. And I spent so much time trying to get them back, that maybe I should have just let them rest. Accepted they were gone."

"Don't you get tired and world weary now, you big thug. Not when you're actually needed by the rest of the human race," Dee snapped. "And don't give me any clinical misanthrope bullshit. No man is an island."

"Mooom, Daxin's being lazy," Legion whined. Herod goggled at him in surprise.

Daxin shrugged as he gave a rumbling chuckle. "I told you, I told Dhruv, I told Menhit, I'll do my part."

Dee nodded then yawned, stretching. "What time is it?"

"Almost midnight," Menhit said softly.

"Aw, mom, do we have to go to bed?" Daxin mock-whined.

"Yes," Dee snapped, then shook her head. "Yes," she said, her voice softer. She hugged the man she had her arm around. "Pete's tired, I'm tired, Herod probably feels like a lot lizard after the convoy leaves."

Herod had no clue what that meant, but nodded anyway.

Pete stood up, then Dee did. Dee yawned and stretched, then glared at Dhruv.

"If I'd known being able to sleep would be this big of a pain in the ass I'd have broke your arm when you reached for me," she snapped.

"Mooooom, Dee's threatening me," Legion smiled.

Dee made a snorting, huffing sound, and stomped off to a tent.

"Tomorrow, can we talk?" Pete asked Herod, moving around the fire to sit next to him.

"About what?" Herod asked.

"I need to know the condition of the SUDS main architecture," Pete said.

"It's complicated," Herod said.

"Phasic shades, Enraged, Screaming Ones, physical damage," Pete said. "I need to know, specifically, about a few systems. In particular the massive catastrophe system."

"Which one?" Herod asked. He rubbed his eyes.

"The one responsible for moving children to the system in the event of a mass die-off," Pete said. "I need to know if it worked."

Herod frowned, then nodded. "I think so. There's a section that's so high security even Sam couldn't get into it. From the star-tram I saw children."

Pete sighed and relaxed slightly. "Good."

"Why?" Herod asked. "Wait, how do you now about that system?"

Pete reached out to Daxin, who handed him the bottle after Menhit handed it to him.

"Because I helped work on it. I'd transferred to Luna to put in place one of the new systems right before the Glassing," Pete said. "If the catastrophic systems are working, we might be able to keep the entire system from collapsing when we pull Sam out of it."

Daxin picked up a hunk of wood and tossed it into the forest. The big Goodboi barked twice and ran after it.

"We'll get everyone here," he said. "Then we'll plan the next phase."

Herod frowned as the big cyberhound flailed back into the camp. "What's that?"

Menhit exhaled a long stream of smoke and smiled. "The assault on Heaven."