They spoke in unison. “I begged you to kill me! Now you create us!”
I didn’t slow down. My stolen hand–howitzer spoke twice and they flew back with craters the size of dinner plates in their chests. One of them hit the floor so hard his head broke off. There was no way a pistol — not even one as humongous as the hoss I was holding — should have been able to make holes that big, but maybe I was getting the hang of this whole “nothing is real” thing. The guns shot bullets that big because I thought they should. It wasn’t gun against gun, it was mind against mind, and from the easy way Finster’s creations were toppling, his mind seemed to be getting weaker while mine was getting stronger.
I reached the barrier at the end of the room. It didn’t open. I pushed on it. It didn’t budge. So much for my mighty mind.
The decapitated robot head at my feet spoke up. “April fifteenth, nineteen twelve. I killed a ship. What am I?”
“What?”
“April fifteenth, nineteen twelve. I killed a ship. What am I?”
“Wait. Is that the question that gets me through this door?”
“April fifteenth, nineteen twelve. I killed a ship. What am I?”
“Are you fucking kidding me? You’re asking me about something that happened ninety years before the apocalypse? How the hell am I supposed to know that?”
“April fifteenth, nineteen twelve. I killed a ship. What am I?”
I picked up the head and shook it. “Would you—”
A cold wind hit me as I shook the bell rope, sounding the alarm. Something huge and white glinted in the dark night ahead of the ship. I grabbed the receiver of the telephone.
“—pick up you bastards!”
There was no answer. “Goddamn it, is there anyone there?”
Finally, the wheelhouse picked up. “Yes? What do you see?”
“Iceberg! Right ahead!”
The barrier dissolved and I was back shaking the robot head. Another vision of Finster’s past? No. He couldn’t be that old. Another fantasy, then? Who would fantasize about being on a sinking boat? Every time I thought I was getting a handle on what was happening in this place, it threw me another curve.
I looked at the head, utterly baffled. “What the hell was that? Did you just tell me the answer? Why would you do that? I thought you were trying to kill me.”
The head said nothing. I dropped it and stepped through into the next space. Immediately a voice popped into my head.
“I am impressed, ranger. You have come further than anyone before you, including my creator. You are a noble foe. However, you are only human. I offer a choice. Your life for those of your comrades. Right for you, left to kill them.”
This was not Finster’s voice. It was colder. Cooler. Where did it come from? Was Finster sharing his brain with somebody else? Besides me, I mean? And was the voice serious about killing my friends?
I looked around the new space. There were indeed two doors in front of me. I glared at them.
“Is this a trick? How would you kill my friends? They’re not hooked up to this machine.”
The voice didn’t speak again. I was tempted to go through the left door, just to show the voice I didn’t believe its crazy threats, but what if it was true? What if it could make Finster’s head blow up or something? I couldn’t risk the life of my friends. My life, on the other hand…
“You obviously haven’t been reading my mind lately,” I said, and strode through the right door.
Pain dropped me to my knees. I clutched my chest as my heart lurched and thudded with all the rhythm of a drunk toddler banging pots and pans. I turned and crawled back toward the door, fully prepared to go back and take the left hand door and kill all my friends if only the pain would stop.
There was no door. Anywhere. I was in a tiny empty space with no exit, and I was going to die here. I lay down, unable to do anything else, while hissing voices whispered nonsense all around me.
“Know thyself.”
“Each step from birth is toward death.”
“Cogito ergo sum.”
“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
“What is the difference between a duck?”
I groaned. “You’re killing me, and now you’re feeding me this pseudo–intellectual bullshit? Please, just get it over with.”
Then I started hearing other voices behind the whispers.
“Shit! He’s flatlining!”
“The machine is killing him!”
“Unhook him! He’s dying!”
“No! The shock might finish him off.” This was Athalia. “Come on, Ghost. Pull out of it! Fight it! Remember, everything in there is just an illusion!”
How did she know that? I wondered. But it was good advice. Everything that was happening to me was just a constructed reality that Finster was showing me and I was going along with. It was a hard illusion to break, but I’d done it before, hadn’t I? I’d closed my eyes in order to walk across the room that had jerked me all over the place, right?
I closed my eyes again. I wasn’t in this room with no doors. I was in the room I’d seen through the right hand door.
“He’s coming back,” said Athalia. “His pulse is strengthening.”
“Come on, Ghost!” That was Angie.
Thinking about Angie I almost slipped back, but I pulled it together and kept building the other room with my mind, block by crazy–colored block.
“Yes! He’s stabilizing. Stay strong, ranger!”
I could see the other room around me now, so I stepped forward and opened my eyes — and I was in it. I let out a relieved breath, and heard cheering outside my head.
The voice that wasn’t Finster wasn’t too happy about it though. “Pah! I tire of you. Be gone!”
Then, on my very next step, Finster’s voice was back, panicked and screaming. “No! You cannot be here still. Stay back, get out, leave! Or I’ll sear the flesh from your bones!”
Was he talking to me or the other voice? I couldn’t tell. Did he have multiple personalities? What was going on?
The floor around me erupted into flames. Shit! I dived out of the circle of fire and ran, afraid the rest of the place was going to catch on fire. There was a click from above me and a storm of knives shot out of the ceiling. I zigged left and only a few caught me, opening up the sleeve of my leather jacket and the flesh underneath.
“You’re crazy!” I shouted.
Finster’s laughter followed me down the hall and around the corner. “Do you hear me, ranger? This is the end. I will finish you. I will crush you. You, too, will die!”
I skidded to a stop as I saw what lay before me. It was Finster again, but this time it was mega–Finster — a twisted metal monstrosity twice as tall and twice as wide as I was. I groaned. First he tells me to leave, then he says he’s going to kill me, then he blocks the exit. What the hell?
Well, at least I knew how this worked now. I closed my eyes and charged forward, seeing myself wielding an even bigger gun than before, knowing that I was wearing armor that could stop whatever the Finster–Leviathan could throw at me. And as I saw it and knew it, I was.
I blazed away at the big bastard with a gun the size of a rocket launcher and shrugged off his return fire in the armor I had seen behind the glass walls at Sleeper One. Nothing could hurt me, and I was bringing the hurt in a major way. It didn’t take more than six or seven shots before the giant was a smoking ruin on the floor.
I stepped to it and stuck my uber–gun in its metal face. “Are we done? Can I have the sec pass now?”
It raised its shattered head and smiled through broken lips. “You killed it.”