The Tower - part 5 of 5

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The Tower

The final chapter of a complete Amateur free sci-fi / horror story by Dean Thorpe

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Chapter 5

7:30

I arrived and used my computer to upload a virus to crash or override all the retinal scanners and cameras between the main entrance and the tower itself. I went as fast as I could because I knew it would not take them long to fix the problems my virus had caused. I went in the main entrance and turned right and headed down towards the science labs. I did not know how to build a bomb, but I did know what chemicals could be mixed to create highly flammable gases. I grabbed a few bottles of what I needed and moved towards the tower. When I arrived I pressed the button for the lift. When the doors opened I went in to it. I had used my bag to stop the doors from shutting and poured the first chemical all over the lift floor. I then attached the second and third bottles to the door so that when the doors shut the bottles would break and the chemicals would mix together. The final touch was a holographic generator with picture of one of the people from Megadeth I had scanned in. I am sure they would have approved of what I was using it for. From a distance it looked like a real person and it was even set up to move back and forward across the lift. The plan was set and now it was time for me to go up to the top floor of the tower. I used the hidden door in the computer room on floor 17 and climbed the hidden staircase, I then peered round the corner into the main corridor. The androids were at the other end by the lift doors protecting the only official entrance. I used my computer to call for the lift and as soon as the lift started to move the robots spun round with their guns pointed at the door as no aliens were due to be in the tower this early in the morning. I moved into the corridor to get a better look as the doors opened. The chemicals had mixed and there was a large amount green smoke coming out of the lift. As soon as they had seen the holographic human they had opened fire on it. The explosion was much bigger than I had been expecting. The androids flew apart and one of the spikes from their armour came flying in my direction. I moved as fast as I could, but it was not fast enough. The metal spike speared me straight through my left leg. The pain was excruciating and I fell to the floor screaming. The lights had gone off and I was laying there in the dark with blood pouring out of my knee. I could still hear one of the androids moving. It sounded badly damaged, but it was definitely still functioning.

7:45

The sirens had sounded and on the walls spinning yellow emergency lights came on. The android was looking straight at me. The damage was incredible. Not just to the androids, but the whole corridor had been totally devastated. Roof panels were dangling down and sparks were coming from what was left of the ceiling lights. The remaining android would be no threat to me as it was just a wrecked mess. got up and walked over to have a closer look at it. It had looked kind of pathetic to me. It was just lying on the marble tiled floor looking up at me like the student in the corridor that had been killed. I wanted to finish it off like that teacher had, but I almost felt sorry for it. That may sound strange, but it was only doing its job and now it looked beyond repair. With how uncaring the aliens were they would probably just kill it. It was not just a machine it was a thinking living life form. I had never really felt this way towards an android before. I had always just ignored them as being machines, but this one had seemed different. I could see some kind of intelligence deep in its human looking eyes. I wondered what had made these 4000 models so special. The android had clearly been in pain. I had studied cybernetics at my last college for almost a year and I could see that the main fiber op cortex had been severed. I could not believe what I was thinking. I went over and started trying to reconnect those cables. The lift was destroyed so reinforcements would take a while to get up all those stairs. I managed to get the android out of pain and to give it some of its mobility back. It just sat there on the floor looking at me. Could it understand what I had done for it or was it just waiting for an opportunity to strike back at me. Just then the door behind me flew open and one of the aliens came running in. It was the teacher from my Amygee's class, the one that had killed that student in the corridor. His body started to expand to full size and I was sure that I was going to die, but just then the badly damaged android I had been helping raised his arm and fired a green bolt of pure plasma energy at the alien from its hand. The alien had screamed and then vanished in a flash of blue light. Even after all my work to repair it, the android must have known that it would be destroyed for what it had done to one of its masters and so it had moved towards the window. I had tried to stop it, but it went straight through and fell down to the earth so far below. I could see that it had blocked the many doors and this had bought me some more time. While standing there I could see that the sky was now totally clear. I was definitely beginning to regret not bunking off and going to the beach after all. I could not see a way of getting back to my normal life as I had gone too far now to turn back. I still could not believe what the android had done for me. A few minutes ago it would have killed me without thinking and then it had saved my life and killed itself to help protect me.

7:55

I went into the first room and it was just a room full of filing cabinets. The second and third were the same and I was beginning to think that it might have all been for nothing. When I entered the next room the sight before me was incredible. It was a large dark room filled with rows of glass cylinders. The only light was a bright green glow coming from within these strange cylinders. They contained more androids in various states of construction. When I looked closer and found the reason for the behaviour of the android. The brains that had been implanted in these machines were those of human origin. They had been very severely modified to interface with the androids hardware, but they were most definitely human. There was only one large control panel for the whole room. I could have used it if there had been more time to work out the Amygees instructions, but I had to move fast. I went back to the corridor and picked up a gun from the remaining very dead looking android. As I started to walk away I heard it move and I span round as fast as I could and shot it in the head. I know the other android had helped me, but I was not willing to take the chance of this one not being the same. I returned to the room and pointed the gun at the control panel. I was wondering who these brains had belonged to and then remembered what my tutor had said about all the missing students that had been vanishing over the last few years. I switched the laser based weapon onto its highest setting and then fired one shot at the center of the computer terminal. It had exploded in a giant shower of pieces of metal, sparks and flames. This time I had made sure I was hiding safely behind one of the cylinders and did not get hit by any of the many pieces of metal that flew all over the room. The lights within the cylinders changed from bright green to a deep blood red and the brains had seemed to start to disintegrate almost immediately.

8:00

My job was not done yet, so I slowly limped to the next room, the bleeding had been getting worse and my head was starting to feel like I had just got off a huge roller coaster. I had a good idea what was in this room as I had spotted the large satellite uplink dish on the roof above it. I was definitely not disappointed. The room had one of the biggest computers I had ever seen and when I approached it the computer and all of its many displays came on automatically. From the displays came symbols that I recognized from the worlds many television networks. It seemed as if they had been hacking into the television networks and using subliminal messages to control the thoughts of millions of people and make us more passive towards them. From the look of the computers they had only recently started the hidden messages so hopefully it was not too late to tell the world the real truth about them. This computer seemed to be linked into over four hundred channels. I hoped this would be enough and not too many people would be watching the other sides as this was only about a quarter of the worlds channels. I accessed the computer and went into the security video files on the mainframe again and set them to run in a continuous loop. My work was almost over and so I hit the override button and sent the film of the students being murdered to the screens of millions of people all over the world. I ripped the interface out of the wall and smashed it. Without this they could not stop the transmissions without shutting down all of the television networks.

8:05

I made my way back out to the stairs. The bleeding had still been getting much worse at this point and I did not know how much longer I could last. I had managed to get about a quarter of the way down all those stairs when four alien guards had confronted me. Their bodies were fully expanded and I knew I was in big trouble. I did not care as I had sent the truth to the world. The rebellion against the aliens would start very quickly now. I did not know if this was a battle we would be able to win, but I knew that we would triumph or die trying. I shot the first alien in the chest and he vaporized in another blue flash just like the other one. The second was much too fast for me and he knocked me to the floor. The gun went sliding off down the corridor out of my reach. I kicked him in the groin in he went back against the glass window and went straight through it. He must have fallen about 15 floors and it took time before I heard that splat of his body smashing in to the floor. I looked up at the two remaining aliens standing over me and I started to smile at them. I had just remembered a line from a film that my granddad had told me about, it was 'You come from nothing, you go back to nothing, so what have you lost, nothing!'. Life had never seemed that simple before, but maybe now I could see that it was. I knew that I was going to die, but at least it was for a good reason. I never had liked the idea of dying in my sleep at the ripe old age of 120. This was much better as I had done something useful with my life and I knew that I would at least die with honour.

8:15

I slowly closed my eyes and I waited for the cold blackness of death to take me away from all the horror's of this place and the evil it contained.