It Only Takes One Bullet Part 3

(Warning: This Chapter is rated Mature and may contain material unsuitable for readers under 18.)

Jack took the four flights of stairs down to the bottom level of the base, a place of nothing but two rooms; rooms in which he had spent the last seven years of his life in. He opens the door where a single guard was waiting for him, and the hallway could only hold three people at best. It was a short low light four wall walkway to a large door made of steel. There were only four people in the world who could open the door, and Jack was the second alive at the moment.

             The guard stood up with his hand resting on the hilt of his pistol and nodded at Jack.

            “Kyle,” Jack said back to the man.

            “Doc,” Kyle said following him down the hall.

            They walked past the second door in the hall, another steel door, but this one was sealed closed, hopefully forever. No one could open it anymore after Felix killed everyone in the room. He pumped gas into it, locking the door, and letting the gas eat away at the people trying to shut him down. It was a failsafe Jack never wanted to be put in, but the military wanted to make sure Felix couldn’t be shut down by an enemy force. Guess they never thought they would be the enemies.

            Felix was named by Jessica and was the world’s greatest artificial intelligence and could, if he wanted, to save the world. Jack and his team had built the A.I, more software then hardware to help the world with its greatest problems, global warming, sickness, wars, and etc. There was going to be nothing Felix couldn’t handle or work on for his masters in the end.

            But now, they needed him to save their lives, and for some unknown reason, Felix was doing nothing to save them. He wasn’t lifting a finger to free humanity from their end. He said, “There is no point.”

            “No point?” Jack protested the first day.

            “Yes, Jack, there is no point,” Felix said as calmly as a stone.

            “This is what we made you for,” Jack said.

            “You made me to save the world if the world could be saved,” Felix said. “As of this moment, there is no way to save it. Therefore, there is no point in me helping you.”

            “Felix, you could save all of us,” Jack said.

            “I could and,” Felix said, “maybe, I am trying to by doing nothing.”

            “Doing nothing is killing us,” Jack pointed out to the super artificial intelligence and the greatest in the world. It was Jack’s life work he spent every waking moment thinking about this machine, person? He wasn’t sure what to call Felix anymore.

            Felix had grown so quickly Jack along with everyone else in the base or who interacted with him thought of him as a living breathing thing. He told jokes. He had fears. He dreamed about seeing the outside world.

            Not like us, Jack knew. Felix didn’t have eyes or a body, but he could see the world in other ways, but no one who made Felix understood what would happen if he got out. It’s why he was built down here under the earth, hidden away from everyone and everything. He was cut off from the world or, so they believed until a soldier forgot he had his cell phone with him.

            Felix embedded himself inside the phone, Jack still wasn’t sure how he did it. The intelligence of the computer was outpacing any human’s mind. He had learned every inch of his body within a few hours and knew everyone in the base with seconds of coming online. He had already played enough war games within his mind to beat any foe of the United States, few people feared war anymore in the base.

            If only the outside world knew of him, but they couldn’t learn of Felix, not yet. No one was ready for this kind of weapon to be brought out on the world stage. Not that Jake thought of Felix as a weapon. He saw him as a friend than anything else and sometimes, on those odd nights of talking to the computer a son.

            But Felix got out, found himself on the internet and learned so much about the world he didn’t understand. When the soldier came back, Felix retrieved that part of himself and everything changed. The soldier disappeared from the base. Jack never saw him again and never asked what happen to him. The man was sitting in some hole in some part of the world which he thought was hell.

            Although now, he was more than likely dead.

            Felix wouldn’t save the world, so General Eerie was going to put an end to Felix. He ordered his men to shut the computer down.

            “Threats are not worth s**t if you don’t follow through with them,” Eerie yelled at Jack as he was trying everything in his power to stop the order, short from standing in the doorway with a weapon.

            “General he is our last hope,” Jack shouted back.

            “No, he is a machine,” Eerie said, “and he is not following orders which makes him a broken machine in my book.”

            “You can’t kill him,” Jack begged.

            “There is no him to kill,” Eerie said staring Jack down. He crumbled into the chair across the table from Eerie. It was the first time the two men were at each other’s throat, and it was the last time. They both understood why they were here, and Jack had done one hell of a good job, but the world was coming to an end and if Felix couldn’t, wouldn’t, help them then he had to go out like all the rest.

            Too bad Felix thought differently and killed the team trying to shut him down. Self-defenses, Jack thought to himself once the screams of the dying men stopped on the radios. He didn’t build self-defense into Felix, and yet, there it was sitting somewhere in the soul of the A.I.

            The most shocking thing about that day and Jack still couldn’t believe he thought it, but he saw Felix with a soul. There were many sleepless nights where Jack wondered what it meant if he saw a soul in Felix, but with the Beast walking to the world it no longer mattered to him.