“This is heaven.”
The word meant nothing to her.
“Heaven. Dig?”
She shrugged her shoulders, and Michael wondered exactly how a species could have no concept of heaven but could still exhibit the same mannerism denoting confusion as his once had.
“We’ve been watching you for a long time, Maire. Coffee?”
She looked down at the steaming cup he held between mocha fingers, the nails bitten in true Delany fashion to the quick. Her new fingers were tipped by the same translucent (chitin? protein?) shields, each with a setting moon crescent at its base. “No. Thanks.”
He sipped. “Took us a while to make contact. We’ve been waiting out there, dabbling here and there. You’re an interesting species.”
Cup to tabletop. She was trying not to breathe too much, breathe too quickly. Her chest hitched under her blouse as she attempted to spread her gills plate, but it was no longer there.
“I myself only arrived in-system about forty-thousand solar cycles ago. I wanted to check to see what my kids had made. I must say, you’re among the most interesting pattern variants yet.”
“You’re a god?”
Michael smiled. “Not quite.” His smile opened to a grin. “I know what you’ve done to your gods before, and I wouldn’t want that to happen to me. Just consider me a neighbor. A cousin, sort of.”
“What are you? What is this place?”
Hands folded on the table. “You have no concept of virtual worlds; I’ve done my homework. Guess I’d better start by telling you of a
sky blackened by war and disease and centuries of gaiacide. The only lights studded the rim of the launch tunnel, and even they were murky in the dead air of the dying world.
“Almost time, Michael.”
“Yes.”
“There’s still time to change your mind, you know.”
He shook his head across his pause. “I can’t go.”
The earth shuddered beneath them almost imperceptibly. Men in clean suits ran to the vehicles and sped away from the edge of the launch tunnel, forty miles away. Michael took the binoculars from his eyes and wiped away the stale sweat that had collected on his eyebrows and in the hollows of his eyes.
“Starting final countdown sequence. Any more to board?”
Expectant eyes regarded him with almost pity. He shook his head.
“Shut down the upload link. Irrigate the lines and initiate primary engine test sequence.”
The earth began to resonate with the power of the massive engines that lay hundreds of miles beneath the surface. There could be no turning back now.
“Test shows positive across the board. Waiting for coordinate lock.”
The binoculars went back to his eyes. The edge of the launch tunnel looked deceptively calm, bereft of the hundreds of clean-suited workers that had toiled over every inch of its interior for decades.
“Coordinate lock achieved. Planetary position is a go. Launch window open. Launch on your order, sir.”
Michael nodded his understanding. All hope for the continuation of the human species lay in the precious golden machine bundled safely within the launch vehicle. Millions of emulated humans living emulated lives in emulated worlds where the emulated sun still shined and the emulated water was still pure. Someday they would come home. They were the ark. When the planet had finally healed, they could come home and live again.
“Engage Gauss cycle in launch tower.”
“Gauss engaged.”
“Engage primary thrusters.”
“Primary thrusters engaged.”
With this machine, all hope lay.
“Launch.”
“Launching vehicle.”
The binoculars revealed a tunnel entrance that flickered with the Gauss cycle. Michael held on to the bunker wall with one hand to steady himself; the ground beneath them shook noticeably and fiercely. Never before had a vessel of such size or power been launched from the planet surface.
Where is it?
“Gauss cycle at max. Vehicle launched.”
Michael took the binoculars from his eyes and replaced them with blackened blast goggles. The vehicle emerged from the launch tunnel with a stark white ferocity that painfully illuminated the bunker interior and flash-reddened Michael’s face immediately. The sound and heat and light were unbearable even from forty miles out, but then it was gone, and the vehicle was out of the atmosphere.
“Launch successful. Vehicle has broken orbit.”
Goodbye, my child. Goodbye, my children.
“All right. Good.” Michael regarded his launch crew. “Start the disassembly process. Everything has to be taken apart before we abandon the city. There’s sure to be a resistance attack now that they know we’ve
launched, and that’s where the story really begins.”
He regarded his empty cup, motioned for the server. She smiled, one bullet-hole dimple, and went behind the counter for another pot.
“We’re here to bring you home.”
“Where’s ‘home?’”
His fingers tapped one through four on the plastic tabletop. “I wasn’t even supposed to be on the probe. I guess one of my over-eager or over-compassionate technicians must have ghosted my pattern while I wasn’t watching. They always had far more respect for me than I had for myself. Difficult to believe in yourself when you’re nothing more than a fourth-gen clone.”
The dimpled server returned with coffee. On her way back to the counter, her hand went to her partner’s back, lingered as she whispered something to him. Maire saw: the scar on her fingertip, the prominent bridge of her nose, the way her lips brushed his ear, brushing and whispering, perhaps the scent of smoke, perhaps the taste of him.
Maire absently rubbed the place where her hearts should have been.
“I know of your ambitions, Maire.”
She frowned.
“I built a machine that would save a world. And this is what it made, a thousand variants of my species scattered about our universe, a million variants spread across a million timelines, forevers expanding and contracting, and here, only here, have I found anything remotely resembling me. You know how hard it is to talk to crystals? To bioneural sludge? To control that evolution, to hope beyond hope that somewhere, somehow, things have lined up to create a semblance of familiarity? I’ll tell you the greatest secret of life: we’re all alone out here. No little green men, no hives or alien queens, no beings of pure energy. All we have is us.”
She didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything at all.
“Those silver machines that you hate so much? I made them.”
Eyes drew to slits.
“Something happened after the heat death. Maybe it was that dark matter, the holes in the universe we’d not been able to explain. My machine bred, its children bred, and somewhere along the line, something went tragically wrong. They don’t yet know we’re here,” his hand extended to indicate the air, the interior of the coffee shop, its patrons, “and I intend to keep it that way. They have to be stopped before they reclaim it all.”
Laughter from the counter. Michael turned in time to see a playful bite on the cheek, man to woman, tip to tip of nose, bite from woman to man: he had known love once, albeit unreflected. He closed his eyes and saw Richter’s spectrums of gray there.
“Why am I here?”
He looked at and through her question as it hung in the acrid air between them. “I need you to do something for me.”
“What?”
“I need you to kill a god.”
and she slammed to the floor from her stance, the lifeless body of the neuter falling beside her in a heap of unclothed flesh, a sickly crack as its fragile skull gave to the floor, the slap of meat on metal as legs bounced once and fell still.