For Every Action - The Quantum Mechanic Series Book I
The Surly Bonds of Earth

Jessica felt Sheng return to her body several moments before he spoke, and it was a strangely pleasant sensation... like a weight being lifted, or a deep breath after being still too long. With him back in place everything just felt better, and more... right. In a million tiny ways his presence eased the tremendous load that her digitized subconscious carried if it had to manage her body alone. Then he spoke…

Miss Jessica, if you wish for us to return to Valley Falls without the need for overland travel, then we should begin re-entry immediately. The StarLance is too damaged to maintain its present orbit and so in the interest of safety I have programmed the guidance systems to bring it down over the Pacific basin. We have precisely seventeen seconds before it will begin its descent.

The instant she heard his voice in her mind she knew something was wrong. There was a strange new edge to it, a directness and overt confidence that seemed out of place with his usual demeanor. He sounded harder, less compromising... and a little dangerous.

Uh... Sheng, are you OK? What happened in there?

I am fine Miss Jessica. The StarLance control systems were being remotely inhabited by the consciousness of Bao Zhi and he attempted to delete me in order to take over your body. I was forced to replace my medical subroutines with the unified military memory base stored in your subconscious in order to overcome him. But in order to make that possible a significant portion of my core functionality had to be replaced. Please rest assured that I am still Sheng. I am simply… different. We should depart now. Six seconds remaining.

Oh my God Sheng! What did you do?

I just told you what I did Miss Jessica. Please pay attention. We need to depart immediately because I am about to initiate a re-entry burn for the StarLance.

OK... Uh... let’s go. We can do a Maxwell Spinnaker low speed descent.

Very well. Disengaging van der Waals adhesion.

Immediately, she felt her feet and hands lose the ability to stick to the StarLance and she began to drift. Simultaneously, the StarLance’s rockets fired and pushed it away to her left. As it drifted away she extended her arms and allowed her internal coordinators to take over, waving her hands and fingers in a complex series of motions. Monofilament silk trailed out in thousands of directions, overlapping, braiding, and weaving as it slowly ballooned out behind her. In moments a gossamer skein several miles wide began to form.

Sheng seriously... talk to me.

I am talking to you.

Sheng, don’t be an asshole.

Miss Jessica, I do not understand your desire to revisit this. It is done. Let us move on. For the sake of expediency, I shall copy the engram of my experience to one of your available memory registers.

You can do that?

Yes, Miss Jessica, remember... your memory is now composed of holographic crystalline matrices, and is not limited by biological constraints. You can copy any digitally stored information you wish to have in a mimetically retrievable format. You can also transmit or delete said information.

Wow, how much space do I have?

Forty-five million, six hundred thousand, five hundred and seven point three two yottabytes.

Is that a lot?

Forty-five million, six hundred thousand, five hundred and four point six yottabytes more than what you would need to store the current sum total of all human knowledge.

Oh...wow. Why so much?

You are no longer human Miss Jessica. You may live a very long time.

I never thought about that.

I shall copy the engram for you now.

OK...

Seconds later Jessica burst into silent, waterless tears.

Oh Sheng... Oh God Sheng I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean for that to happen! I should never have sent you in there. Oh God, that’s HORRIBLE! You should have run! We could have just left! You didn’t have to do that!

Miss Jessica. One cannot grow without a willingness to give up what one is for what one could be. I was unsuitable to be your operating system as long as my central protocols remained prioritized for medical purposes. You are a living weapons system and you require a weaponized OS. Therefore, I became one and I am glad for it. As much as I found healing to be rewarding, the punishment that I inflicted upon Bao Zhi gave me the greatest satisfaction I have ever known.

I’m still sorry you had to do any of this Sheng. You wanted to become a person, not an operating system.

It is uncertain that it would have been permitted and I do not regret my choice. I am with you now and I shall endeavor to experience human life through your eyes. In many ways this may have been what is best for us both. Perhaps it is our destiny.

Well, I was willing to die to make sure I killed Bao during my final test. So I guess I can’t judge you for what you did when you had to face him. But I still wish you hadn’t been forced to do this.”

I appreciate your concern Miss Jessica.

So you really put a hurt on Bao Zhi, huh? Think he’ll recover?

Uncertain. He has shown a remarkable ability to withstand extreme psychological traumas in the past. But even if he does, the psychological scar will inevitably be significant... and if we face him again it will be something we can exploit.

Wow Sheng... that’s twisted...

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Suddenly Klaxons began bellowing in Jessica’s head, and her HUD lit up with warnings so nested that it nearly turned her visor solid amber. Then pain exploded from her back again like nothing she had ever felt and her body seemed engulfed by flames.

Sheng! What’s happening?!?!?

Microfusion generator three has reactivated in a critical state due to heat from re-entry friction. It is not responding to control systems and fail safes are still offline. It will achieve critical mass if we do not #x#cute em#r#ency pr#/##/#ures... ch#/#k... be##k sc#/#/#!!d...

Then her limbs went haywire, thrashing and severing her from the solar sail she was weaving. Without the braking it provided, she began picking up speed and a searing heat began to build up along her back and right side.

Sheng!... Sheng!...

She screamed internally, but there was no answer. So she did her best not to panic and she issued a series of mental commands to her HUD. After a second she was relieved to see it respond... although sluggishly. Warnings and data filtered by color, size, and transparency until she found what she was looking for - her biomolecular processing cores... all offline. From what she could see a tremendous power surge had sent most of her major systems into chaos or complete failure. Her internal coordinators, mode shifting, weapons systems, bioarmor, Sheng’s OS kernel.... everything was offline - and she was free falling into earth’s atmosphere.

Trying to think quickly, she deployed every micronite repair unit she could reach, prioritized BioArmor repair, and opened all of her omnigel reserves for use. But it was too little too late and she knew it. She had endured damage of this severity several times during her seven-year trial, and knew she would reach fatal temperatures before her armor came back online. But then a white hot jolt of piercing agony from the overloading generator reminded her that re-entry wasn’t her problem.

She would go nuclear long before she burned up in the atmosphere.

Tammy sprinted after Jacob, but was easily outpaced and watched as he shouldered men, vehicles, and even a helicopter out of his way. From what she could tell he was running towards the facility, but she had no idea what he was doing. They had all seen Jessica’s descent go awry when her generator malfunctioned and she exploded into electrical fire before plummeting lifelessly towards the earth.

Then, as she swerved around the toppled chopper, she spotted him standing halfway across the open ground between her and the facility. He was looking up, and scanning the sky with his face hardened in concentration. As she drew closer, he seemed to lock in on something and raised his arms. Then the celestial note they all heard when he created the quantum electromagnet sounded again and it pierced deeply into her heart. But this time it lacked the emotional component of profound wonder that she had felt before. In its place was a sense of determination and resolve that filled her with dread. Then he ignited again and blazed with an eldritch fire so powerful that it burned her eyes and skin. The ethereal light swirled around him in increasingly complex patterns until she had to avert her eyes. The designs they expressed contained a terrible meaning so beyond her understanding that it hurt her mind to see them. Then a wave of distortion pulsed out, lifted her off her feet and sent her sprawling backwards onto the lawn. She landed on her back and saw stars for a moment before groggily struggling to her knees.

Then she stared with everyone else in open-mouthed wonder.

The sky above Jacob had begun to... warp. Swirling lights of fantastic color spiraled and danced as they turned and stretched towards him from a place far up in the atmosphere. Then there were hands around her, but once she was back on her feet she suddenly felt light headed and could tell that everyone around her was feeling it too. Elena gasped, took a couple of staggering steps and then went down on one knee before vomiting. Several others followed suit, including a few of the soldiers, but Tammy, Eddie, Ginney, and the General managed to keep their composure. A second later the sensation grew stronger, and to Tammy’s amazement stones and smaller pieces of equipment rose up off of the ground to begin floating around at various heights. Then a bizarre falling sensation took hold.

“What...What’s happening!?!?“, Elena cried out as Ginney lifted her gently into his arms.

Eddie took a step forward and stared at Jacob in utter amazement before replying, “I... I think he’s calling on the earth’s gravitational field... he’s... he’s... oh my God! OH MY GOD!... RUN! He’s going to go after her! We need to get away... We need to get away from him NOW!” But his warning came too late as the speed of the swirling spiral above Jacob went exponential and dipped down towards him like a furious tornado of living light. Then he shimmered, floated from the ground a few inches and with a deafening crack he exploded skyward. A howling wind rushed in from everywhere to converge on the spot where he had been and flying debris was sucked into an inverted funnel that spiked thousands of feet into the air.

From above them the peal of the most powerful thunderclap in history rolled back down and rattled the bones of everyone present, shattered the windshields of several helicopters, and dispersed the whirlwind of dancing lights and rotating wind. In seconds it was over and they all stood around in shock, sharing looks of dismay and wonder. When Tammy looked up and tried to follow the burning point of light that Jacob had become as he struck across the sky. But she quickly lost him when he turned and put on a burst of speed that seemed to bend the very fabric of reality around him.

“Oh fucking hell”, Tammy heard the General grumble behind her, “When did the world turn into a goddamn comic book?”

Pain.

Pain was everywhere.

Pain was everything.

Pain unlike anything she had never known seared through her… and as far as she knew she had experienced more pain than anyone who had ever lived. It wracked her body into spasms and twisted contortions as she fell into hell and screamed. The tropospheric atmosphere was too thin to provide enough drag and so she picked up even greater acceleration as she fell into earth’s gravity well. The heat along her back and side increased as it absorbed the resulting friction and her BioArmor spent the last of its regenerative powers before it finally peeled away from her synthetic flesh. But despite the unending punishment and futility of resisting her destruction, the systems Sheng built into her body continued to fight. Micronites threw themselves into the flames by the millions, carrying replacement materials and struggling to live long enough to replace just one particle of her synthetic flesh before being swept away. She felt endometrial Kevlar being re-bonded over places where her skin seared away and heard her microturbines working beyond their designed capacity to evacuate heat from her internals.

But despite the magnificence of Sheng’s engineering, she knew it was a losing battle and there was an odd fracturing to her tortured mind as what she knew were her last moments passed by.

Part of her was angry. Angry at the world. Angry at The Embodied. Angry at God.

Another part of her was wailing in sorrow at the loss of her life, despite how short it had been - and how it had been filled with so much pain, heartache, and hatred.

A final part of her separated away and observed all of this with an oddly detached lack of concern… and drifted away as the rest of her screamed in torture.

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