“When was the last time you slept?”
Fleur blinked her eyes, shifted her blank gaze to the pile of blackness whose eyes glowed at her from the darkness of the passenger cabin of the Agent transport. Nine was beside her, his breathing implying a meditative sleep that could never be actual sleep. She had been lost in that near-bliss for a moment herself… But these were days of endless days. They were a species that could not sleep, in that void between existence and unknown realms that would have been perfect for a slumber of forevers.
“I don’t know. It’s been years. Decades. You?”
Whistler took another pull from his flask. “Fuck you.”
Fleur leaned forward in her vacuum seat. “What’s the matter, darling?” She said the word with all of the acid that she could muster. “Never slept, have you? My beautiful, flawed puppet. So tired, aren’t you?”
Whistler’s eyes blazed from the darkness. “No rest for the wicked, dear.”
Fleur swam to the porthole, looked out into the pure night. No stars to mar their beautiful passage through the ether. No other vessels, anywhere. All was perfect and nothing and somehow home. Somehow wicked… Somewhere out there were worlds that she had burned. Somewhere there were entire systems laid waste by the bastard spawn of Mother. Were the cities still burning in the Wound? A million planets, each throwing fire and the stench of death far into the very void through which she screamed.
She breathed onto the not-glass of the porthole, leaving a misty layer of exhalation. With her new hand, she awkwardly drew a smiley face. Spinning around to swim back to her vacuum chair, she caught Nine’s gaze. Whistler was otherwise engaged, studying the threading on the mouth of his flask. For an instant, a grin formed on one corner of Nine’s mouth, but then it was gone.
Zero, where are you tonight?
Nine was his exact image. It was deeply disturbing to see him there, the ninth incarnation of someone she never should have and never could again love. Zero, trapped on a machine sent into the edge of all that would be. Forever lost in the night, traveling too far beyond to ever return… His fate would be a solitary death, if ever he could die.
Whistler placed the flask back into the hidden recesses of his robe, rose from his seat, swam into the darkness beyond the passenger compartment. “I’ll see if we are within contact range yet.”
Fleur said nothing, watched as the man who was not a man slipped out of the compartment. She hesitantly looked up at Nine, who was looking back. She reached over with her new hand and looped her tiny fingers through his own, cold and distant and almost there. Instead of surprise, he gently squeezed her hand with his own. He leaned over to her little ear, whispered.
I contain multitudes.
swimming and drowning and gasping for air life breath past.
It swam in the heartbeat of the liquid expanse, the gentle resistance of fluid caressing every curve of his human-esque form. Inhale, exhale, lub-dub, lub-dub. It gagged on the viscous gelatin that kept its physical form from liquefying at the impossible speed of Light X Three. The machine within which it was housed was itself a liquid of sorts, splashing across the dark night of the Outer faster than anything before envisioned. A solid within a fluid within a fluid, Zero coursed into the future on a machine of inescapably-beautiful silverthought.
“Machine?” he asked into the featureless expanse of his prison with a voice of drowning liquid syllables, choking on the thick biological secretions that kept him alive and lonely and curious. “What time is it?”
Stop asking, Zero. It does no good to hope.
“She might have—She could have—Maybe…”
She hasn’t, and most likely won’t.
Zero touched his fingertips to the slick wet surface of his face, exploring his cheeks for any sign of the tears that he so desired to produce. He spun around in the bowl, his term for the sphere of liquid that had been his prison for seven months. Seven months? Was it really only seven months?
“Mother was wrong about us, Machine.”
Do not question our creator, Zero.
“You don’t have to be loyal to her out here… You’re going to die out here too, you know. No one will remember us. Seven months… They’re all dead already.”
They were dead before we left. The system had been initiated long before our exile began. There was never a chance that we could have—
“There was always a chance to stop it. There was always hope.”
Zero could feel the narrowing of non-existent eyes in anger. He could sense Machine’s subtle fury building in the vibrations of the ocean within which he floated.
“Machine, I command you to turn this bucket around and sail us back home immediately!” Zero smiled as he said it, but was meant with a silence that was probably only minutes, but could have stretched to hours in the nothing.
Humor doesn’t suit you.
“I wish—”
Wishing doesn’t suit you either. You know the impossibility of what you desire.
Zero knew full well that what he desired was an impossibility, and he knew the magnitude with which it was an impossibility. He had been forced to witness the construction of the system-sized engine that had hurled the Machine and its insignificantly microscopic prison into the Outer. He had seen the billions of labor drones harvested from countless colonies to construct the gigantic engine. He had seen the billions left outside to die when the construction was complete, as well.
You can’t go home again.
Zero frowned in the nothing. He would find a way. Somehow.
He would find a way to return to Fleur.
I contain multitudes.
Nine disengaged his hand from Fleur’s as Whistler swam back into the passenger cabin. There was a look of concern on Whistler’s shadowed face. Fleur could not tell if it was because of something he had seen in the cockpit, or if he had been watching the dance of digits that took place on the armrest between the vacuum chairs.
“Whistler?” Nine’s eyes had drawn to a concerned visage. “What?”
“We’re near… Very near to home. But there’s no signal.”
“No navigation signal?”
“No signal at all. Nothing is coming from the surface.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing at all!” Whistler snapped. He waved his hand in the air before him and a holographic display of the approaching planet appeared. Whistler grasped the globe of light and spun it around so that the dark side of the planet faced Fleur and Nine. “What do you see?”
Their faces spoke only of confusion, so Whistler answered for them.
“Dark. Black. Nothing. It’s nighttime. Do you see any cities? Any lights at all? Do you see any evidence that this planet is inhabited?”
“It’s been forty thousand—”
“It’s the extinction. Mother started it without us. That’s the only explanation.”