“Wh—What?”
“Flynn and Hayes. I saw your eyes. You could have pulled them up, but instead, you let go and let them die. Their blood’s on your hands.”
“I…They—”
“They’re humans, aren’t they? They aren’t aliens. The people who destroyed our planet were god damned humans. How are we supposed to trust you? How the hell do we know that you aren’t the Enemy? You and these Judas? I had dreams in the stasis, too. Nightmares. But I’m not sure that they were dreams. Machines… Screaming, raging people…A war. And Richter…You have a lot to tell us. Get started.” West shifted down, backed away from Zero-Four.
“How do you know that the Judas aren’t the Enemy?”
West stood in silence.
“How do you know that I’m not the Enemy?”
Silence.
“This is how.”
Michael Zero-Four raised his forearms, which began to radiate a faint glow. The flickering aura of shifting emerged. Zero-Four looked at them with cold silver eyes.
Patra walked into the light. “He’s a Styx. Jesus, he’s a Styx.”
“I’m a Judas.”
“My time wasn’t like yours.”
He spoke quietly, unassumingly, even though they could all see the pain in his eyes as he told them the history of a future now long dead. The rage of just moments ago was nowhere to be found on his countenance.
Simon was still silent, and the vessel floated adrift in an unknown universe. Within, they sat in the control chamber, the viewscreens black and dead and hopeless. Each sound fell flatly into the strange gravity of the spherical room.
“I don’t know where to even begin.”
“You could tell us your name. And where we are. And how the hell President Jennings got on to your spaceship.” West looked over to where Jennings was sitting on the black floor, his arms draped around his daughter. She did not appear to care how her father had been rescued; she was simply content that he was there.
Zero-Four smiled weakly, nodded.
“My name’s Michael. Michael Zero-Four.”
“What kind of a name is Zero-Four?”
“What kind of a name is Adam West?”
West frowned. “It’s a human name. A real name. What does the Zero-Four mean? And how’d you know my name? I never told you my god-damned name.”
“That’s not all I know about you, Adam.”
“What else do you know about me?”
“Well, I know that you hate something called the ‘Batman.’ I know you cheated on your fifth grade geography test that you had to take a week late because you were in the hospital with a temperature of one-hundred six degrees and they placed you in a bathtub full of ice water and you couldn’t for the life of you remember the capitals of all fifty-seven states. I know you first made love to Abigail on the night of your high school graduation and when you woke up the next morning it was raining and you could hear the raindrops hitting the roof above you and she was there next to you, warm and sleeping and entangled in your arms, and you’ve never felt that content again. And I know that the suspicions David has about you and his daughter are unfounded. You’re a gentleman. I know everything that you were, and everything that you will be, Adam.”
West’s face was an emotional battlefield. His eyes were a subtle mixture of fury and grief. “Who are you?”
He blinked, eyebrows furrowed. “I’m Michael Zero-Four. Program Seven, pattern cache Judas Golgotha Simon, emulation zero-four, Michael.”
“You’re talking like you’re a fucking computer file.”
He laughed, more to himself than to his audience. “Aren’t we all?”
“I don’t—What are you talking about? No, of course I’m not a—”
“No, you wouldn’t know about it. How could I have been so blind? I just assumed since you’re—You don’t know yet because you haven’t lived it yet.”
Jennings stood, arms crossed, hand on chin. “Maybe I can do a better job of explaining it to them, Michael. It was quite a shock when I first heard it, myself.”
“Daddy, what’s going on?” Patra had gravitated to West’s side when her father stood up. “Where are we?”
“Patty, it’s not a question of where we are anymore. It’s a question of when and what we are.”
Patra shook her head, her face beginning to reveal the fear that lurked beneath its surface. “Don’t talk like that. It’s sometime in August, and we’re people. We’re human beings.”
The sadly blank look on her father’s face only intensified the look of confusion and worry on Patra’s. “Stop it. Don’t tell me… Daddy, don’t… It’s August. It has to be August.”
Jennings crouched to Patra’s level, took her silver hands in his. “It’s not that simple anymore, Patty. It’s not that simple at all.”
“It has to be August.” Patra’s eyes had taken on a childlike glaze as she fought against everything that her life had become.
“It’s not August, Patty. It’s… It’s autumn now. It’s more like a perpetual autumn now.”
“Just tell us what this is all about.” West looked in disgust at Zero-Four and the president of a nation from a planet and an existence now dead. “Stop playing these games. Just fucking tell us.”
“I think it’d be better if we just showed you.” Jennings gently smiled, and his form took on a shimmering, static quality.
“Daddy, what…” Patra’s face was awe and confusion masking a denial of the evidence before her. Jennings’ outline faded, and West suddenly found that his thoughts were no longer his own, and his mind was filled with the nightmare of the end of time and the impossible made possible.
Silence.
No heartbeat, no inhalation or exhalation. Silence that was utterly complete. The void negates the presence of sound.
It had been travelling for longer than forever, and when at last it landed on the barren rock, the exhaustion was overbearing. With its last mechanical breath, it created an exact duplicate of itself, which bounded from the rock without a look back at its sole parent. The dead metal shell that remained on the surface of the asteroid melted into a pool of silver.
A universe of silver, stretching in all directions ad infinitum et ad nauseam.
“What are they?”
“They’re our children. They’re who we became when the planet died.”
“Machines?”
“More than machines. Gods.”
Grossly misinterpreted data collected by a race like children who were left on a moody green planet when the old galaxy collapsed led generations of the species to believe that their rock was the center of all that existed. Arrogant, they actually thought that they could live between the stars, travel the night between the galaxies, survive in the eternal cold of the void. Hubris begets punishment.
A planet overpopulated by billions, a society tearing itself apart, a planet struggling to maintain its life. When the atmosphere began to turn black, when the plants would no longer grow, when people warred over water and land and the right to procreate, some began to realize that humanity was exacting a revenge on the planetary organism that would in the end kill it.
The race to abandon the planet began long before the year-long nights and the continental firestorms. Provisions had been made. Technological developments were hoarded so that only the best and brightest would survive the apocalypse. The boundary between man and machine had long since been crossed in the years of Artificials and virtual wars. When the time came to leave the planet to the dying masses, only one machine would be sent, a probe of von Neumann design and Tesla science and Tipler vision, a machine within which would be stored the precious uploaded patterns of as many individuals as it could hold, living out their days in emulated worlds with emulated wives and emulated children and emulated dogs and cats and waitresses and bosses and firemen and rebellious teenage suitors for rebellious teenage daughters. The emulated worlds would replace the abandoned, dying planet, at least until it could heal and be repopulated by the chosen few.