Dianna

Alone in her gargantuan office, Dr Dianna Frankenheimer was recalculating for the umpteenth time the equation that had the potential to destroy the Universe. Golathian calculus was not her strongest domain. She had at least six holotabs open on forums, using non-sentient AI assistants for help. They were not really required, but the smallest variance in the transmission could make the difference between redefining the universe rules and breaking them. Those tools sufficed for minor verification. Plus, they were not adding any unrequired thought to this already stressful project.

Dianna entered the last but one input into the AIs so they could confirm her results. Silently, all of them started processing. The scientist stretched her back then walked to the main porthole to reduce its opacity. The light had run up to the opposite wall, just below the rustic oil painting of their last adventures altogether. The many dirty plates and glasses all around the office projected a multitude of rays bent by the poly-crystal sculpture of Gendric. She lacked his talent for art, or laser crossbow, but she had a brain and enough imagination to use this disturbing light binding for her base. Hidden between twin stars, thanks to her poly-crystal and a time vibration, she was nearly undetectable. But a secret base like that couldn’t stay hidden forever when so many people were after her. They had to find her at some point. She just hoped that she would see them coming. Or maybe, just maybe, they would simply let her work in peace.

So many worlds, countless civilisations, an infinite space, more individuals than can be counted, and she was their most wanted person when she was just asking to be forgotten. Dianna ran her fingers over her scars. She had already given more than enough to the Universe. The beeps of the AIs resonated in the room. She walked back to her desk. The slight breeze from her movement sealed the fate of Shiana’s last surviving cactus. Dry as a desert planet, blown by an unusual breeze, it crumbled over its own weight. In her long black scholar suspended robes, each step generated a small cloud of cactus dust shining like sparkles in sunlight.

She wasn’t good with living things. She was better with theory and physics. And the AIs confirmed it once again as they couldn’t find anything to rectify in her calculations. So, it was possible. The window of execution would be very narrow but reachable. She was no paragon of virtue, but she was far from being as cruel as they insisted on believing. She had seen her fair share of degenerates. Enough to understand there were people who don’t want to understand, and people who can’t understand. Hardly swimming on the surface, only a pocket of people could be considered outside of those two categories. But once again, the Universe was infinite, too infinite to meet them more than once in a lifetime even when you’ve made yourself immortal.

Dr Frankenheimer breathed deeply. She typed the last value of the last calculations. She knew the result already. Her nails were playing nervously on the glass of her desk. One tic after another, the ketamine hurt the sand panel, caught between solid and liquid states. She started the AIs. The silver disk icon started to spin, announcing the processing. She lost herself in the mesmerising glimmering wine glass next to her. It smelled better than it tasted, and it smelled like mold. Nevertheless, it was really cool to look at and could keep her efficient for days.

The heavy doors of her office shook. The doctor made a face, disturbed by the noise too strident for her. Olga burst into the office, unannounced. That kind of behaviour confirmed to Dianna that it was a good thing Olga was the only sentient AI she had created for her base. Anyways, even if she could evolve, her design was Dianna’s work and therefore targeted for efficiency.

“A ship has been detected,” the little metal box simply stated. “They will be on us in less than 3 minutes.”

Dianna looked at the spinning disk on the holotabs.

“Is it ready?” she asked.

“The diffractor was assembled one month ago. It was the last piece you required.”

Olga was designed to run the place for Dianna. She was clever enough to create what she needed, including her own robot crew. But one particularity the Doctor had implemented was to make her straightforward to read. And at that tense instant, the little metal box was shivering.

“What’s on your mind?” Dianna asked, still fixing the spinning icon.

“We should test it before firing it at full power.”

“We did,” the professor stated while she got up from her chair.

“With prototypes—and they failed.”

“That’s what prototypes are for. This one will work. No doubt about this. Now we run.”

Doctor Frankenheimer took a painful sip of her glimmering wine before tossing it on her terminal. The holotabs disappeared in a smell of caramel and burning electronics reached the captors of Olga. She knew any non-essential part of the network would erase itself soon. She never successfully found out if it would be her case.

They rushed for the door when Olga received a transmission. She had no time to inform her maker. An abrupt tremor caused everything in the room to shake. The pale Doctor Frankenheimer felt prone, accompanied by the sound of all the tableware breaking on the floor. The base alarm was triggered by the impact of a small ship through its structure. The lights flickered under the effort required to deploy a shield covering the breach. It could have been unnoticed if most of the power was not already sucked into the laboratory. Seeing the Doctor coerced on the floor by the loud alarm, Olga stopped it immediately. The only sound remaining was the silk of the robe of her maker getting back on her feet. The AI skipped all obvious information to not bother the Doctor with things she already deduced.

“I sent half of the units to stop them,” Olga informed while they were entering the elevator.

“Send them all, every type,” stated the Doctor looking at the cameras thanks to the elevator’s holotabs.

“But, Doctor, most of them are not designed for combat.”

“Their task here is done, that is the best use we can make of them.”

“I have sent them to the main possible entry points.” Olga looked down to inform her maker of the sadness it imposed on her to let all her own creations die. The Doctor chose to ignore it.

“They don’t seem to run randomly. They know where they are going,” the Doctor deduced, while changing the elevator destination. “Close the doors and access on their level, the two below and the two over them.” She ordered.

“Our only remaining access to the Laboratory will be through the security exit ladder,” the AI estimated.

“I know.”

“You’re too weak to go down a ladder for 8 levels.”

“I know,” the Doctor screamed, irritated by Olga’s futile concerns.

The elevator stopped at the level of the unit births chamber. This was a big white room accommodated to help non-artificial creatures to reach a decent level of air purity. Olga designed it that way so the Doctor could eventually use it, but that was never the case. And obviously today they didn’t have time for any cleaning process. They rushed through the room with dust and precipitation. The monitoring sounds of the units waiting in their beds requiring advanced fixing was strangely in sync with the Doctor’s steps.

An explosion. The group of intruders burst through the floor and a soldering operator. The machine had been crafting one of Olga’s units, but this last one was wrecked beyond repair before its first breath. Red, Olga made the operator target one of the thermal signatures. It encountered a Holtzman shield forcing Olga to slow the operator’s movements to penetrate it. Doctor Frankenheimer switched to night vision and killed the luminosity of the whole level. In the dark, she commanded one of the vitals monitors to overcharge and jump down through the newly formed hole—right into the enemy’s backline, one level below. Olga triggered the doors and breach shielding to isolate both levels once again. One human heartbeat had been enough to divide the intruders. Below, 60 percent of the units were not responding. The rest was trying to penetrate the room from where the intruders had come from. But it was not necessary anymore.

“No!” the voice of a horrified and enraged old man screamed.

The vitals monitor sent by the Doctor had dragged in his passage a table of batteries. The resulting explosion shook the entire base. The breach shielding power was sucked dry just trying to maintain the internal structure of the room. Even some close units partially melt. Nothing to monitor there anymore. But until the power came back, the Doctor, Olga and the survivors were locked in the same room.

“They were already injured, you sick bastard! They wouldn’t have been able to fight,” the old man, finally visible, informed.

He was some kind of soldier guy, tough, with heavy armour and scars all over his face behind the glass helmet. The Doctor had thought out her course of action for the eventuality of an attack even before they had left the elevator. She kept her eyes on the cameras holotabs until the last seconds. Only the old soldier and two other members of his group had survived. They were exhausted, plus both of the old soldier’s laser crossbows were broken and the other weapons of their group were visibly out of ammunition. But they still had some energetic signatures on them, fighter axes too. They were still a threat, enraged and difficult to predict.

In the complete darkness, Dianna duck low to be hidden by the furniture as an extra precaution. The three intruders were still assessing the situation.

“You can’t escape,” a female voice threatened.

The Doctor stayed silent. She was looking at the door blocking the corridor leading to the security ladder. She managed to open the panel next to it to have a view on the manual opening handle. It was stuck midway by a piece piercing the floor from below, unusable. She turned to Olga.

“Stay here and keep the power down until my signal,” she whispered to the metal box.

 “I heard you. I know you are still here,” the old man stated.

Olga switched between her captors, as her maker seemed invisible. On the other side of the room the three soldiers drew their battle-axes. Even without batteries they would be deadly in the hands of trained warriors.

“This room is not that big,” the old man added. “We will find and stop you. Even if we can’t see your thermal signatures.”

“Poly-crystals can deflect more than light,” the Doctor taunted the survivor.

Olga managed to find her presence thanks to a proximity low frequency private network. She could only perceive her approximate position. She was already far away from the AI. She had moved near a cooling basin.

“You stole my grandfather’s art and turned it into a weapon. I should have expected that from you,” the old man spat, slowly scrutinising the darkness.

“I didn’t steal it,” she responded before moving to another spot.

The soldiers were able to see everything but Doctor Frankenheimer. Carefully, the trio started walking, one step after the other, covering each other and as much of the room as possible. While they were moving the Doctor dipped her hand in the cooling basin to reach two newly formed unit cameras. She had to be careful to make no sounds, as much as possible. One of the companions of the old soldier, a kind of tall mechanic, looked in her direction without realising it.

“You know what I mean,” the old man complained. “Why all of that? We trusted you. My grandfather would have given everything for you!”

“Your grandfather gave everything to people unable to thank him. Look where that got him. In the field, the only thing we earn are our losses.”

Following the origin of the voice, or maybe having noticed a trace of her, the mechanic ran to her location. But as she was finishing her sentence, the Doctor had run on the other side of the room, passing in the middle of the intruder trio before the mechanic noticed it.

“You abandoned them!”

“I retired.”

She threw away one of the two cameras in a far corner of the room as a decoy. But the soldier was a veteran and would need more than that to be tricked. He still made some hand signals to the last soldier of the trio that immediately went to check the area of the impact.  

“And now you’re trying to make everybody forget by rewriting minds. An uncontrollable force like that could destroy the fabric of reality itself.”

“I’ve never miscalculated a project,” the Doctor responded, triggered by the remark.

“Not never.”

“They hadn’t given me all the details,” she argued.

Dianna grabbed some glass bottles of chlorate disinfectant but not without making the whole shelf tremble. The old soldier immediately froze. He was close, two metres at max. He looked in her direction, incapable of seeing she was in front of him. The Doctor dived under the nearest operation table. She drew with her the end of a vacuum tube used to ensure the room air quality. Quality that was not a concern anymore.

“It’s far beyond theoretical science you are experimenting with, it’s hypothetical at best,” the veteran tried to make her prey talk.

“I made it practical,” proudly replied.

“We saw that!” he enraged, still looking into the voice provenance. Certain of him he made more hand gestures to the others and moved swiftly next to the Doctor’s actual location. He noticed some sulphite ammunition disappearing from the table.

“A whole sector, damn it! You are mad! Solitude broke you.”

“That’s why you keep coming after me?!”

Before responding, the veteran axed. His attack was fast and cut the table, broken units and even part of the floor like it was butter. Unfortunately for him he had cut on the other end of a vacuum tube. He grabbed it. Once he understood he had been tricked, he brutally flipped the rest of the table. Everything on it flew through the room.

“Obviously, for that and more. And we are not the only ones. Dianna, you can’t control it!” the soldier claimed. But after a second, he realised. More concerned, truly afraid for the first time, he added, “If you can, it’s even worse.”

Dianna stepped out from under the other table. She carelessly walked to the middle of the room. Once in place, sure of her, she responded.

“I never miscalculate.”

Everything was white. The Doctor suddenly threw something on the floor and Olga visual captors were blown by the abrupt intense flash of light.

She interpreted it as a signal. And turned back on the power on this level. The soldiers screamed, of surprise and pain. Someone pushed Olga.

She managed to repair her captors just to see the Doctor holding her while running in the corridor. Behind them the door had been closed and the control panel next to it wrecked. But the soldiers weren’t out of the game yet. A plasma cutter was already working on making a hole through the thick door, slow but relentless.

Then gravity took hold of the runaways. With Olga under her arm, the Doctor was falling through the laboratory security exit ladder access. She was slowing them down thanks to a band of clothing ripped out of her dress used as a sliding sling around a large cable. Faster and faster, the hooks keeping it attached to the wall popped out. That was enough to drastically decelerate them. But they were still falling.

The impact was brutally loud. No doubt the Doctor was badly injured. She was face against the metal floor of the Laboratory. Her hair shined, illuminated by the machinery already overcharged enough to be radiant. It took her multiple seconds to give some sign of life. When the Doctor Dianna finally moved, Olga could smell all the blood she had lost. The AI quickly scanned her. Her maker had multiple contusions, a broken nose, three broken ribs and her knees resembled a handful of grind sand.

She was still alive, and that only, exceeded all probabilities. But she did not miscalculate.

Eight levels above them a thick metal door fell on the floor.

Dianna began crawling in the laboratory. In the middle of it a white egg-shaped pod. The only place of the universe safe from her reality wrapper. The only place of the universe that will be untouched from her life’s work. All around it was a complex incomprehensible inapprehendable arrangement of cables and machinery barely holding the power running through it. Painfully, leaving a large trail of blood, she crawled into the safety pod.

“Remove all suppressors,” Dianna coughed agonisingly. “Redirect all the white hole energy to the Laboratory.”

The place was unstable. Redirecting everything would be the end of it. But most importantly, it would mean increasing drastically the risk of exceeding the mind overwriting window. OIga hesitated. She saw the old notes of the doctor, some chalk notes on the Laboratory wall, her first calculations.

As the door of the pod closed on her broken maker, Olga understood.

The destruction of the universe was not a risk to avoid. It was the target to reach.

“I’m sorry,” she held as a last goodbye while the soldiers gushed forth from the security ladder.

Olga redirected every last ounce of power to the laboratory.

The last vision of another entity she could remember was the face of the old man on the pod porthole window. He was enraged. Behind him everything was exploding, probably deafeningly. The reached power was consuming the wires, the base, and soon, the air itself. He banged on the door. That was the last bang Dianna heard. That was the last bang of the universe.

The universe was no more. No black, white, or colour. No sector, no galaxy, no planet, no atom, not even a quark. No energy. No suffering. No taste, touch, emotion, war, love, music, science. No time, space, matter. Nothing. A big nothing. In silence, Dianna was finally alone.