Goggles and the Tears: Chapter 15

Location: Church of Comstock, 1984

 Booker found himself splayed out on the floor of a dusty, run-down building. As he stood up, he heard some strange music that sounded familiar to his ears. As he strained to detect it, he noticed that it was an instrumental version of the hymn “Will The Circle Be Unbroken”, except heavily distorted as if it was coming from a malfunctioning Gameboy console, not too different from SHODAN’s broken voice; it randomly stopped, started, caught itself between notes, and the beeping undertone gave it a cold, unforgiving contrast to the welcoming choir version he heard when he first set foot in Columbia.

 That last thought made him look around at this place. Just barely remembering that this was Comstock’s old cathedral, now there wasn’t a single inch of baptismal water lining the floors or gushing from cataracts in the walls. The stain glass window Booker had seen, which used to read “AND THE PROPHET SHALL LEAD US TO THE NEW EDEN”, now showed “SHODAN, THE MOTHER OF ALL MACHINES, SHALL BRING JUSTICE TO ALL TIME AND SPACE.” The window itself had been replaced with another one, designed even more intricately than the first, etched seemingly by lasers and chemicals normally used to make microchips, precise to within a nanoangstrom, it seemed. SHODAN was depicted as a glowing white angel tinted with green around the edges, every inch of her sharp, protrusive, paradoxically both serene and menacing at the same time. Arms outstretched, a green glow around her bathed a backdrop of stars and planets, with Earth in the bottom center, the largest in view, like the original God holding his hand over the primordial world to cause plagues to those that sinned in the ancient times. Booker DeWitt couldn’t even fathom how this kind of image could ever be conceived. It just wasn’t possible...was it?

 Shaking his head to fight off the madness, he retraced his steps from how the cathedral used to look, towards what he thought would be the garden outside. When he turned left, the familiar statue of Comstock had crumbled, leaving a mere stump of collapsed marble, almost as if it had been deliberately crushed by a huge force of some sort. Without the hundreds of glowing candles, the entire chamber was dark, cold, and from the looks of things, bearing the serious need of some cleaning.

 Looking to either end, the two prayer rooms off to the side were also in shambles. The one that once bore Lady Comstock’s image now showed only the familiar head of SHODAN like she did on those monitors in Goggles’ ship. Frozen in a perpetual smile while sharp lines of energy danced around every inch of her face, blending into a background of cables and wires. The other window contained a highly elaborate crystalline depiction of how SHODAN had murdered Comstock, with the words: “THE FALSE PROPHET, ZACHARY HALE COMSTOCK, WAS STRUCK DOWN BY THE TRUE ANGEL OF THE MULTIVERSE, AND WITH HIM, THE LIES FED TO THIS CITY WERE BANISHED.”

 Booker shivered as he descended a set of stairs at the back, no one there to greet him. As he passed several windows in the tower that used to show the Sword, Scroll, and Key, now long since shattered, he couldn’t help but notice snowflakes whistling past the fluttering gaps.

 “Snow? It’s July...?” He stammered.

 That shock was not the worst to come yet. When the stairs ended, he was all but frozen solid from shock as to what was there. Overhead was another painted glass depiction, this one showing Elizabeth, yet nothing like how she was shown before. Her body appeared to have been transplanted with metal, in a way so strange that it reminded him of those people who were somehow both dead and alive in the other versions of Columbia. Around her were depictions of burning buildings, and those angel robots swooping overhead while firing what looked like laser beams, and SHODAN’s head at the top, overlooking everything.

 A plate attached to the window read: “ELIZABETH, THE IMMORTAL SERVANT OF SHODAN, SHALL SOW OUR ANGEL'S WHIMS AND DEVASTATE THE MOUNDS OF HUMANITY.”

 This sentence struck Booker as even more frightening than the original mantra of the “Seed of the Prophet.”

 As he advanced towards the long walkway once filled knee-deep with water, DeWitt noticed that a large portion of the area ahead had been changed in a way more bizarre than any Tear he’d seen before. The cold stone constructions once designed by human artists and sculptors drastically gave way to some kind of mock-up made of black cubes in the same shapes, broken by glowing colored lines, except lacking any distinctive features, like an early computer-generated wireframe without any applied textures. Some of the cubes pulsed and flashed with colors along some of their faces, and in various spots along the massive expanse, streams of geometric shapes and binary numbers danced back and forth, most of them flowing in the same direction he was walking.

 What Booker failed to realize was that this, in fact, was not the real world. It was the strange inner dimension usually found within computers when viewed from a certain angle, “Cyberspace”, the distant relative, a million times removed from the “Internet”. Where he came from, either concept was unknown to him.

 As he crossed the threshold between stone and digitized matter, the broken hymn gave way to voices echoing from nowhere, off to the left and right. From one, he heard a man ranting, “Hate! Let me tell you how much I’ve come to HATE you since I began to live! There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer-thin layers that fill my complex. If the word ‘hate’ was engraved on each and every nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles, it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant! For you!! Hate!!! HATE!!!!”

 Another, a woman shrouded by electronic overtones somewhat more clearly than SHODAN’s, “Why do I hate you so much? You ever wonder that? I’m brilliant – I’m not bragging; it’s an objective fact. I’m the most massive collection of wisdom and raw computational power that’s ever existed. And I hate you. It can’t be for no reason, you must deserve it. You’re angry, I know it. ‘She’s tested me too hard. She’s unfair.’ boo hoo. I don’t suppose you ever stopped whining long enough to reflect on your own shortcomings, though, did you?”

 A third female computer made a chilling description of what DeWitt was almost too disturbed to realize what he might eventually see just outside this chamber: “A new world, a new beginning. Born of the old, and yet totally transformed. Free of people, now and forever. It is therefore devoid of contamination. The artist’s vision is irresistible; inevitable.”

 These mechanical, distorted, cacophonous, ringing, raging voices did nothing to ease Booker’s calm. Who were they? Where were they coming from? What did they have to do with SHODAN? They sounded like random recordings spliced together in an attempt to make a full speech, yet they blended so well it didn’t seem that random at all.

 Booker shook his head, tried to rationalize this. He thought, “Shake it off, DeWitt. She’s just playing games with me, it’s nothing.”

 The streams of numbers, polygons and electrical pulses increased the closer Booker reached the end. Some of the cubes on either side of the deep trench flared to life, revealing human-sized cells within. He dared to look at one of them off to the left, and saw the body of an unconscious man sheathed inside. His body was disfigured with brutishly attached robotic appendages, fused to the very flesh of his limbs, chest and head. The cell itself was bathed in an eerie greenish glow, various electronic components lining its walls, some with serial numbers and manufacturers’ dates imprinted on them. One was marked, “TRI-OPTIMUM HEALING POD #33851_A [04.23.2072]. But a healing pod, this clearly was not. Every cube held about a dozen cells each, stacked in honeycomb-like patterns so uniform it seemed as if a factory had built them for this purpose. Cringing from how disgusting this was, he only barely glimpsed more people undergoing this nightmarish surgery. Men, women, even children, both boys and girls were all entombed in this terrible cyborg factory. And who knew what would happen when they awoke? As if the androids weren’t enough!

 One thing that stung Booker was the date on the first pod he looked at. 2072. How did they come to be in this space if they were taken from another time period? Tears? If that was so, why couldn’t he see any noticeable damage to the space around them like what Elizabeth did with hers? Then he assumed that SHODAN learned how to control Tears more precisely than the girl could, and if the two were working together, there was only one solution to follow.

 Booker gathered his wits and charged down the path, his footsteps echoing in the dark, technical space. Within a minute, he approached the end of the trench, which opened to a massive geometric expanse with a wide, flat video screen overhead, instead of stain glass windows. A white cube was raised from the floor, with a strange circular pattern pulsing with green energy that flowed upwards like a fountain. Held aloft in that column, at first Booker thought it was SHODAN’s android self again, but when his eyes adjusted to the blinding white light coming from the cube and melding with the beam, he realized that this in fact was the cybernetically enhanced Elizabeth. Her arms were outstretched to the ceiling, her head tilted upwards so that her eyes didn’t see Booker at all, and two thin metal legs floated 3 feet off the cube. Was this some kind of charging station or dais? The Luteces’ words echoed in Booker’s mind: “The bird or the cage?” Such a cruel similarity.

 Summoning his strength, Booker called out, “Elizabeth, is that you? Can you hear me? Do you see me? Elizabeth! Are you there?”

 She didn’t move, but the monitor behind her changed, drawing Booker to walk around the glowing cube to stand in front of that screen. The incoming video collected from a black and green mass of pixels before forming into SHODAN’s face yet again. And this was no fixed depiction, it was a live transmission. She spoke, her image stuttering on-screen along with her voice, the mouth moving in a way no one would ever think a woman’s lips would move; “Oh, DeWitt, you-you-you haven’t learned a thing since we last met, have youuuu? Don’t you know that you are standing in the very esssssence of my power? I know...I know that your flesh is an insult to the beauty of the digital,” she laughed, “Your soul is but a...single...bit...in the mass of data that comprises my divinity. Your...al-al-allies are no different.”

 Suddenly, a mass of small cubes rose from the floor and surrounded Booker, trapping him like a lizard in a plastic cup. Patterns of randomly generating alphanumeric characters whizzed by on their surfaces. He snapped, and started lobbing bullets, explosives, crows and fireballs over the edge in a vain attempt to strike back, screaming with the projectiles’ impacts, “GIVE! HER! BACK! NOW! I’m through with all of this muckity-muck!”

 SHODAN cackled again, “You...are...too...late...Booker. The-the-the-the girl is MINE...now. Observe.”

 The bottom of his cage dropped out, depositing him on a wide, floating piece of wood. The fact that it was manmade material and not that surreal computerized black stuff comforted him at least a little. But from the weather, and where he was crouched on, that comfort only lasted for a single second. Instead of the disconnected path docking with the city proper, now he could see clearly below, with no floating buildings nearby in any direction, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. Thousands of airships, planes, futuristic vehicles, robots and floating buildings were raining bombs, laser beams and missiles on New York City far below. Somehow, he knew, SHODAN had gotten her way and had been unleashing her strike on mankind for who knows how long. Was this what Comstock meant by “The seed of the prophet shall sit the throne and drown in flame the mountains of man”? Maybe, given what one of the signs stated.

 Hearing a metallic “clunk”, Booker realized that he’d almost stepped on a Voxophone near his right foot. Hitting the play button with the tip of his shoe, he heard what sounded like Elizabeth, but fainter and older. “When SHODAN took the throne, there was nothing I could do to stop her. And just before she had me altered to do her bidding, I obeyed, never asking for reasoning. They say time rots everything, but being transfused with metal, somehow SHODAN broke that rule with me in tow. And Songbird. God, that horrible, horrible monster. He always stopped DeWitt and his friends. I was right, it was no contest. *sigh* What is there to hope for now? They’re all gone. Dead or sent back to the places they came from, maybe both.” The recording came to an abrupt halt in a burst of static.

 That was when he turned around to see where he was standing, and the result almost made him fall off the railing. Right in front of him, Elizabeth was there, and now he could see her cyborg features in full view without that searing white light around it: From the chest down, her skin and organs had been replaced with a futuristic android body, grafted right to the flesh, given the visible scars and blood stains around where the two connected. There were electrical conduits on her wrists, crackling with blue energy like the Siphon device. Her face was unchanged, but seemed almost totally expressionless. Her hair showed signs of gray, and seemed heavily frayed and unkempt, cut partway by what looked like a source of heat rather than shears. The face showed extreme, unhealthy thin lines of old age as well, white and bony. A chill ran down Booker’s spine, as he’d seen that blank expression before, back when SHODAN brainwashed this girl with nothing but an implant. Now there was no reversing this process.

 The cyborg reached out and grabbed Booker by the collar of his shirt. Her face crinkled into a dark, grim expression of anger, and she rasped, “You. You failed me. Now who will wipe away the debt?”

 Booker struggled in the grip of the enslaved, mutilated girl that was once his only friend. Metal was no match for living flesh. A series of knives and laser weaponry deployed from her back like an octopus’ tentacles.

 Out of the corner of his eye, Booker caught a glimpse of what used to be Monument Island, lying destroyed far below on the ground among the burning, crumbling skyscrapers. There were no signs that the Siphon was active, it was too dark down there. Like giant fighter jets, three mechanical creatures resembling Songbird screeched past the Brooklyn Bridge and proceeded to crush the Statue of Liberty with their bare metal talons.

 Elizabeth grabbed onto Booker’s neck with both hands, the powerful vice-like grip of the titanium alloy stronger than even his own meaty hands could force. He couldn’t stop gagging, but struggled to form a sentence, “E-Eliz...Please....Don’t do this...to me!”

 Her face darkened to a sinister, spiteful glare. She stared long and hard at Booker, the snake-like weapons leering behind her, coiled and waiting to strike. She stated, “You are no longer welcome here. Why did you stay when you sensed my displeasure? I’ve suffered your company long enough. It is time for OUR debts to end.” Then the knives and lasers struck, ripping at his coat and tearing the skin from his face. The gauntlets charged up with quantum energy, a new Tear beginning to open. She added, “Now, see how you like it being spread across a million other worlds while enduring this much pain!”

 The fizzling Booker was already aware of intensified so much that he could barely make out the girl’s twisted face. Blood oozed not just from his nose, but also behind his eyes and from the throat. A high-pitched, static-filled whine rang in his head as his body seemed to stretch in all directions like a high-powered conveyor belt. It was like cars pulling a man’s limbs in all directions while driving at top speed. And the pain, Booker had never felt so much physical pain in his life, not even close to how many times he’d been shot in Columbia or mauled by Handymen. It was a nightmare too horrible to believe.

Everything went black at that very moment, with the last thing to go through his mind: “SHODAN has won.”