A minute later Declan was back in the Launch Bay slipping the .45 he had taken from Crowe into the rear of his trousers. He tested his Headnet connection, finger set to his temple he thought, Mother, send me to Earth 1232r323. He felt an odd vibration and then he was on the world of the Krome. Now that he knew what fast travel was it amazed him. It seemed to be instantaneous in most cases but interference could disrupt it enough that more than picoseconds were involved going through space. He resolved to study this more when he had time, he currently had far more pressing matters at hand.

The air not only smelled of emissions and exhaust; it tasted of it too. He chuckled to himself as he realized that it was always the smell that struck him first. The odd flavor of the air covered his tongue in a white coat that he could not rid himself of via spitting, although that didn’t stop him from trying for several minutes. The odor of stale motor oil and the smelting of steel burrowed up his nostrils as a dark haze that was an odd chemical cocktail hung thickly in the air like a black fog. He wouldn’t have said that it was choking him, but having just come from a planet on which he had changed the atmosphere into an acidic cloud had earned this world a few points on the breathability scale, but just barely.

The first thing he did, after getting used to the smell was check his connectivity to Mother. He did not need a repeat of her vanishing in a crackle of static leaving him stranded once more. Their next conversation, when he wasn’t worrying about completing Armageddon, as going to be about creating a tether that would be able to maintain communication or pull him back to the base when he got in trouble. That happened a lot more than he was comfortable with.

“Mother, are you there?”

Her voice purred in his ear in a way that was simultaneously disconcerting and reassuring, “Yes, I assume this is a check to see that communication channels are clear?”

He nodded, knowing full well that she could sense his every action. She had a cybernetic connection in his brain as well as a body filled with nanites that made her aware of the status of every cell in his body. “Start infiltrating this world’s communication network. Download every scrap of information that you can. I can see that these people were more advanced than mine. Their tech and know-how will be a huge boon to the cause.”

He felt a mental nod, “Understood.”

The first thing that he noticed after the overwhelming industrial smell was that there were people everywhere. He had been to Japan once, and the crowds there were like a never-ending wave of people. This situation was more like a biblical flood than a wave. Bodies took up every inch of the walkways, and the ground and air were bloated with vehicles.

Technically they weren’t people; they were a hybrid of man and machine. A flawless blend of biological and mechanical that blended so well that the changes were almost imperceptible to the human eye in some cases. Each Kromian was radically different from the next. This went against Declan’s logic. In his mind, everyone would be uniform in appearance like a cookie cutter appliance that was assembled on a line. He had failed to consider the human equation, everybody had their own style; their own flair. That applied to cyborgs as well. He noted that some of them had completely human heads whereas other’s pates were entirely robotic in form and functionality. Some of their faces were a combination of flesh and metal. One man had a steel jaw, but otherwise normal remaining portion of his head and a businesswoman had what appeared to be a speaker where her mouth was supposed to be and a pair of red reticles in place of her eyes. Everyone was more machine than not for the most part, and he very clearly stood out from the masses. Oddly, none of them even noticed him. They did not speak to one another or fiddle about with a phone in their hands. They all seemed to be on a very serious mission, and they did not care to deviate from it in the slightest. His non-cybernetic appearance he did not give them pause. He considered that they might all be on a feed similar to Hnet and that they had no need to actually vocalize anything, as they could communicate in a sort of party chat system or even play Krumbly Kandy Krunch while the went on their way.

“Mother,” he said softly, “How long will it take you to absorb this world’s data?”

Her voice chimed in his head, roughly twenty minutes to download everything of importance, maybe a little longer to get it in its entirety. He nodded, “OK, I’m just going to give myself that much time to find this world’s version of Sarah and skedaddle.” He looked around, and for the first time noticed that there was no actual sky.

This world was encased within something similar to a Dyson’s sphere. He pulled up the schematics and looked them over. It was pretty ingenious. The world had twice the surface area of his Earth. From what he could see not one inch of it had been wasted; every section of ground was utilized to its fullest capacity. The planet was connected by a neural web, as he’d suspected. The web tied every individual to all other individuals but left them space for privacy and individuality. It existed only to expedite communication and was not a means of control.

The most interesting feature was that instead of the local star hanging in the non-sky he noted that there was a white orb that was encased in a silicon-aluminum compound that provided power for the entire world. The energy appeared to be comprised of electromagnetism and electronegativity. He had no idea of what they had done to make those forces interact, but somehow they had managed to make it work. Bolts of energy arced inside of orb with an output that was one million ties more than the energy place into it. This took the place of needing a sun. The imitation star was not connected to some enormous wires or tubes that kept suspended it in the air but instead hovered there on its own. Declan could tell it was generating untold gigawatts of energy with each passing second. He could hear the electric hum overhead. It reminded him of a bug zapper as it crackled and popped. He assumed that its current configuration represented daytime, and when the diurnal shifted to the nocturnal the orb would dim and lessen its luminous output accordingly. It was a wonder of engineering.

He had Mother try to generate a holographic map for him so he could get his bearings. Request made, he headed to where the coffee shop was normally found on most worlds, not that he’d been to a lot of them but Mother had assured him that large deviations of spatial localities did not change until you completely changed Phyla. After that, there was little resemblance to the worlds. He shuddered thinking about there being a humanoid ant named Sarah. That just seemed wrong. Mother had assured him that those sorts of things did not translate either and that there was no fully arachnid version of Declan Mason in the Planeiverse. She had differentiated the Multiverse from the Planeiverse in simple terms. The multiverse was a collection of reflections of a prime world made long ago. Each was a copy with perhaps only one single deviation to a quadrillion differences in just one piece of land over centuries of time. There were realms that were totally technological and realms that were utterly magical. Anything was possible in the multiverse. The multiverse’s only distinction was that humans or mostly human humanoids were the dominant species on each earth. The Planeiverse was where each animal Phyla was represented in a way similar to the humans. Each one contained Polyverses, which were both similar and dissimilar to the multiverse. It had been a lot to take in, and to be honest, it wasn’t something he’d understood very well. He had chalked it up to being something he would “look into later”.

Bringing his focus back to the present he noted that there were no street signs to guide him, and even if there had been everything was written in binary. He was completely lost. All he could hope for was to step into various stores and pray that he stumbled into Sarah’s coffee shop. That was if they even had coffee on this world, or if she was even a barista on every world. That was a depressing thought. Was she slated to serve coffee in every iteration of her multiple existences? Was he always a data analyst? How far did individuals vary in an infinitely multiple universes?

Then a lightbulb clicked on and he realized that he could have Mother translate the binary code for him; he wasn’t using his head effectively lately. He really needed to stay focused and on point. Even if she couldn’t provide a map instantly she sure as hell could break down simple binary codes. He had to get in the game, and right now he wasn’t even near the stadium. Hell, he had to get in the zone if had any chance of completing these missions. He sent a mental nudge to Mother and suddenly he could make out what everything that was printed. He breathed a long sigh of relief as soon as he saw the words Bucky Starrs hidden in a series of ones and zeroes.

He sauntered into the café trying to look as normal as possible. Again, the people in line didn’t even react to his presence. He may as well have been invisible. Each of them stood patiently; facing forward, and moving only when the person ahead of them finished their order and moved to the side. As soon as the woman in the front finished she stepped to her left and a man took her place. The girl at the counter wore a plastic smile that would have put a fashion model to shame, but it was still plastic.

He watched as a man stepped up and said, “My order is a venti salted caramel mocha frappucino with five pumps of frap roast, four pumps of caramel sauce, four pumps of caramel syrup, three pumps of mocha, three pumps of toffee nut syrup, double blended with extra whipped cream. I should like it heated to 190 degrees Fahrenheit.” Having finished he placed his finger on the counter, a light appeared beneath it, and he deftly stepped to his left. It was the most perfectly given order he’d ever seen. It even sounded delicious. The clockwork precision of the people and the store also amazed him. No one was impatient, no one complained, and everyone knew what they wanted when they got to the counter. No one had to make up their mind, had to ask questions or give long detailed instructions about how a specific extra was to be added or blended into their beverage. He had dreamt of such a place but never thought it to be a reality.

He watched as the barista behind the counter began to flawlessly reproduce his order without bothering to look at a ticket or a screen. She simply smiled and pumped away oblivious to anything else about her. That was when he realized that the barista was Sarah. Her face had no mechanical replacement parts and he could see her eyes sparkling like diamonds from across the room. She was, he noted with a tinge of disappointment, almost one hundred percent robot, though. Her face was human, but the rest of her head looked like a space-aged biker helmet. Her breasts were visible partially, being covered from the underside over to where her areolas would have been. He could see perky points where they were covered. Her body’s metal was gold in color, and he could see glowing lines and wires around her joints. He could see that parts of her forearms were also exposed skin, as well as her upper thighs. There was very little left of what he would have considered to be his Sarah. He shook that thought out of his head, he was here to save her and as many like her as he could. He stepped up to the counter and called out, “Sarah. Sarah, can we talk?”

She continued working, and only after finishing the order she’d been working on did she notice him. Her eyes scanned him up and down and a look of utter confusion came over her. “DM4532, where have you been. I have not seen you in weeks, and suddenly you appear without any notice and look as if you have removed all of your cybernetic implants. How did you manage to regrow your biological aspects?” Her face was the perfect image that was burned into his mind, but it was disconcerting to see Sarah ensconced in a metal body. “Who,” he asked when she referred to him, “Sarah, I need to talk to you. Right now. Can you take a break? Please?”

The beautiful cyborg looked at him quizzically. “DM4352, my name is SC7456. You used to call me Essea for short. Is your memory malfunctioning due to the loss of your biomesh equipment? Why would you remove your Organomechwear? You look very,” she actually paused having to search for the proper word to describe his appearance, “Silly, without it.” She turned and began preparing another coffee order. “In fact,” she said without taking her eyes off of the order she was making, one that she had not heard ordered but knew anyway, “You look naked.” He realized they must have had something similar to Headnet here as well.

“What?” Her mention of his nudity threw him off, “No, please we need to talk and I do not have time to dance with you around here.” He put his hands on the counter and vaulted over to land in front of her. “Uh, Essea,” he pleaded, “Please listen to me, you are in danger. I can help, but you have to come with me, right now, if you want to live.” He added the last part for dramatic flair. He had seen it in a movie once. The only other possible line he had to go with was “GET TO THE CHOPPA!” He didn’t think it would have been appropriate to the situation.

“Dee-em,” she said with a mechanical lilt, “If this is some kind of game. . .”

He shook his head vigorously, “No, no game. I’m deadly serious. We need to go right now.” Essea cocked her head sideways, then nodded. “I trust you Dee-em, even if you have gone crazy and removed all of your biotech.” He grabbed her hand and prepared to tell Mother to open a gateway for her when all the power went out.

“Aw, crap,” he said. He knew deep in his gut that this was not a good sign. He hadn’t even implemented his apocalypse protocol yet. Reflexively, his finger went to his temple, “Mother, what is happening?”

“Declan, I forced a power shut down in your immediate area. There was a corrupted feed in what you would consider to be the local WIFI. It is creating havoc wherever it has been received. I cannot sustain the shut down for long. The Krome are very efficient and will find and resolve the issue that I caused within less than five minutes. Set your apocalypse and get out of there.”

Her mention of corrupted feed worried him. What if the thing that had caused Vegan Sarah’s world or Crowe’s had just been some sort of core rot that ate away at whatever it touched? Vegan Sarah had been locked in her apartment for a long time and hadn’t had contact with the outside world for almost two weeks. Crowe’s world had taken longer, but the corruption may not have had as solid a footing as it did on Vegan’s world. He suspected that wherever that tainted signal had touched bad things would be happening.

He didn’t flinch. “Give me one minute,” he said to Essea. He turned away from her and didn’t notice her going to the store window. “Worldfeed is down,” she said softly. Everyone around her said in unison, “It’s too quiet.”

He looked to the woman known as Essea, “This is what I was talking about. This is just the start. In minutes things are going to spiral out of control.” Mentally he sent, Mother, disconnect Essea, otherwise designated as SC7456, from the Worldfeed. In fact, do it for everyone here. I’m going to try to save as many of these people as I can.

Declan opened his HUD. Its red glow calmed him, as he finally felt like he was gaining some control over the situation. He looked to the Apocalypse page and was about to open it when he heard a man in the back of the line that was still maintained in perfect formation, say, “It is the time for the Master. I give myself to him fully. My artificial heart beats for him and my biological eye cries for him. I can feel Shuggthorichx. He has blessed my soul.”

Mother chimed in Declan’s head. I didn’t shut it down fast enough. That man received about a quarter second’s worth of feed. You can see how much he’s been affected. It is worse in the areas of Krome that the feed was unchallenged. People are killing one another and destroying property while chanting. This is not something that you want to allow to spread any further.

The former Data Analyst nodded and watched in fascination as the man in the back of the line began to shudder. The sound of metal rending and bone snapping issued from his body, and he began to scream.

In a panic, Declan searched the room for a weapon. He did not think that Crowe’s gun was going to do much against a foe who was mostly made of metal and was more than likely carrying nanites in his system.

He quickly pulled up his Personal Data Sheet. He scanned it quickly.

PDS: Declan Alaric Mason

ATTRIBUTES

Strength: Average

Agility: Average

Intellect: Above Average

Acumen: Average

Vitality: Superior

Charisma: Average

Perception: Above Average

Occupation: Revelator, former Data Analyst

Skills Abilities Expy Equipment Personal Data

He stopped at the skills, he didn’t need to see those at the moment. Right now he wanted to focus on his attributes. He’d never really looked at himself this way, but Mother had run the numbers for him to get a better grasp on who he was now. He looked at the Attribute scale. It went: weak, below average, average, above average, conditioned, superior, superhuman. He didn’t need to see what each of those correlated to in terms of each attribute. He already knew he wanted to get to superhuman.

Mother, he thought, can I expend Expy to increase my attributes?

Her voice was calm in spite of the fact that all hell was about to break loose any second from now. You may use Expy to modify any attribute, skill, ability, etc. What would you like to do?

“What would it cost me to go from average strength to superhuman?” He didn’t realize he’d switched from thinking to her to speaking. Essea must have thought he looked like a mad man.

With your current amount of Expy the upgrade would leave you thirty thousand available Expy when completed.

“Can you hold off Worldfeed, but restore power?”

It will not be easy, and I will not be able to do so for long. With power restored the Worldfeed will not be easy to squelch. Would you like me to restore power and initiate your upgrade now?

It was a lot of Expy, and he had only just become Expy rich! Easy come easy go, eh? He had no real choice. He needed strength and he needed power to stop his opponent. He grit his teeth together and said through pursed lips, “Do it.”

It was now his turn to scream as his muscles ripped apart and regrew over and over again. He suspected that this was something that was supposed to be done incrementally, step by step, with pauses and breaks to allow your body to adjust to the changes. He lacked the luxury of time, an so had to undergo the entire process instantaneously. He imagined that he screamed. He had to be screaming as his body literally exploded, imploded, and rebuilt itself from the atom up, but when it was over his throat wasn’t sore, and his voice wasn’t hoarse when he said, “Everyone, get behind me, now.”

The Kromians did as he bade without question. They might all have been individuals with complete freedom of thought and expression, but they were also a people of discipline and order. Organization was their bailiwick, and they obeyed him as if he had been the ultimate figure of authority in their culture.

That left the tainted man who, like Declan, had just gone up a few shirt sizes. Declan could already see that the man was transforming into something new. He was still a combination of man and machine but there was something alien that had been added as well. His metallic parts were shifting to form a protective shell, not unlike that of a crab and his hands were already razor-sharp pincers. Declan knew that he did not want to go toe to toe with the unfortunate stranger. That was not what he had used up so much Expy to do. No, he had something else in mind.

He allowed his HUD to cover his vision with its red screen. He had eliminated all text but commanded it to seek out power lines and conduits of power hidden in the walls or floor. Energy had to be thrumming through a place like Krome, and he was right. He could see a line of energy running the length of the floor below him. He didn’t hesitate, he drew back his arm and drove it down into the floor. Two things happened. First, he was shocked that he had punched through the floor so easily. Second, he realized that having gobs of strength did not make your body indestructible. His hand hadn’t broken from the impact, but it came close to doing so. He could barely close it.

He knew his nanites would repair his hand, but it was going to take some time. Clearly, he was going to need to increase his Vitality to superhuman levels as well just to avoid events like this repeating. He reached down with his left hand and wretched the line from the floor. He was disappointed that the line hadn’t torn in half when he lifted it from the ground. That would have made his life that much simpler.

He looked up in time to see the Crab clawed man charge him.

Poe was angry. He had sent the man into subspace. Subspace! Yet he had not only he managed to kill his appointed world off within the deadline, but he had also somehow managed to negate any time delays on his overall mission from the diversion. His replacement was crafty and mentally flexible. He seemed to take a disadvantage and turn it around to his own benefit. The Horseman had no idea of how his counterpart had managed to find his way home, or arrive before he’d left, but it was clear to him now that the man was far more capable and dangerous than he’d expected. He would not underestimate him again.

He realized that he was a complete idiot. Declan barely registered his foe rushing him. This turn of events was completely unexpected. He’d planned to be the one running and acting threateningly. Now his plan had gone to hell and he had no idea of what to do. The power line had been supposed to break when he ripped it from the ground. That happened all the time in those old movies and vids. Then he was supposed to thrust its crackling power-filled end into the steel crab’s chest. He’d break out the champagne, and they’d all go home and celebrate Krome’s destruction. Now he had what looked to be a half ton of inhuman bionic crab man bearing down on him like a hawk on a field mouse.

The transmogrified man hit Declan like a runaway train. The impact was intense, but the former Data Analyst held his ground. He used his HUD to increase his perception, allowing his reflexes to react faster than real time, which he could do now that he had superhuman strength. Death Claw, Declan had named his opponent Death Claw so that when he told this story later and expounded on his resounding defeat of the bioengineered being it would sound a lot cooler, drove his razor-like pincer at Declan’s face in slow motion. Enhanced reflexes allowed the Revelator to put the powerline in the claw’s path. The chrome pincer snapped into the power line but could not cut all the way through.

Damn, these people know how to build safe power lines, thought Declan as the energy contained therein now surged into the corrupted man’s body. In mere seconds he was on fire but immobilized as the power continued to enter his body. Declan released the line and stepped back. This was the chance he needed to set his apocalypse.

He set his HUD back to normal and tabbed open his Apocalypse Now Page. He began typing like mad on his invisible screen. He began to fill in the details of how his apocalypse should occur.

He had no idea of what quantum interference was, or would it did, but he figured what the hell. The Apocalypse Generator could do the heavy lifting there. He hit enter and spun around. Essea was gone, the entire café had emptied out. He hadn’t expected that.

He looked outside the shop window and could see the patrons all staring at a rooftop about seven hundred yards away. He could see oddly shaped figures on the top of the building. They were hurling the humanoid figures high into the air and watching them fall to the ground. Sometimes, a humanoid form would suddenly shudder and morph into one of those things. He tried to think of what they reminded him of, and then it struck him. They were mechanical replicas of the Octomonster that he’d fought on the last world. He’d thought that they had been remnants of the failed apocalypse. Leftovers of a prior attempt to destroy the world, but he could now see that he’d been wrong.

These things hadn’t followed him here. They were already here. Were they why this world had to die? Could it be that their presence had some deeper darker meaning? The mission said something about an infestation. He wondered if those creatures could be what it was talking about? Then it hit him; right now, it didn’t matter. He had to get off this world ASAP. He stared into the Tesla ball and could see that it was overloading. Electricity was arcing outside of it and striking random areas around them. The smell of ozone was strong and even he could tell it was going to go any second from now. He realized that the faux sun was miles away and that it had only seemed close. Mother’s map snapped into his head, and he could see that there was not one sun in the sky, but thousands of them all around the planet. Each and every one of them was failing. The quantum interference had done something to each of them at the same time.

He ran to the front of the crowd and grabbed Essea’s hand. “Time to go,” he said and had mother open a portal in front of her. He had her enter first and sent mother a mental note that she was to be treated well, given her own quarters, and given whatever she wanted.

“All right, I’m only going to make this offer once. Anyone that does not want to die here is welcome to go to my world, a place that is safe, and you will be given anything you need to make a fresh start, but the time to go is now.” He gave Mother instructions for the Kromians similar to those for Essea, but made certain that they had a separate complex to stay at, they did not need to be cluttering up his home. That done he told her to leave the portal open for as long as possible, but not to let any of those things into his residence; then he stared at the dying energy globes. They were beautiful.

“Mother, can you send me directly to Earth 987y43?” He felt a slight vibration and he could see an arc of electricity strike where he had just been and he faded into a bright and sunny world.