“You know why I’m here.”
“You are our salvation.”
“No, I’m here to kill you.”
“You’re our property. Every man and woman, n-born and v-born, belongs to us.” The man in the moon took a faltering step towards her. His eye sockets were inset with rubies that glowed with a lambent electric light. “A person is the sum of their memories. They make us into someone. Without them, we are nothing. But what happens when those memories are shared? When we have thoughts and feelings that began with others, but ended up as a part of ourselves? Are we then everyone, or no-one at all? The old religions died when we realised that we were never the work of gods. We are our own work, our own design, and you are our prime creation. The traces were the beginning, and you are the end. Through you, we will ascend and be preserved forever within the Flood’s infinity.”
“And the people down there in the Crawl?”
“They were necessary until you came into being. Now, all life in the Crawl will be zeroed, by you. You will be deployed to finish our work. Every sector dropped. The flesh made obsolete. The wheels on the bus go round and round, but what happens when they come off? Everybody dies, Celeste Walker. Everybody dies, that we might live. Such is life; so full, yet so bereft of meaning at the same time. You’d know this to be true if you’d spent centuries watching the planet below as I have. So many lives with so much potential doing so little and achieving nothing of much value in the end. It is better to think of humanity in terms of gain and loss than life and death. Business teaches us truth. It always has.”
“And is that how you think of your business partners? The ones in the beds? Are they no more than numbers and stats to you?”
Tate paused. “What do you mean?”
There was something in his tone. A tremor that’d survived digitisation. A remnant of the man this cybernetic cadaver had once been. Emotion. There. Fleeting. Passing. Lost. Gone?
“I left a lot of collateral damage behind me on my way up here. Why’d you think it took me a while?” Micro-processors whirred fiercely inside Tate’s chest cavity in response to her words.
“That’s how much your sense of reality has warped, Tate. You’ve spent too long in the slow cold. They’re all dead. Your partners. Your colleagues. Your brethren. And I did it. Everyone dies, like you said, and I made sure of it. No-one’s ascending today.”
In every bedroom on every floor under their feet, there was a corpse.
“You… killed her?”
She could see he was accessing the tower’s internal systems. Scanning and cross-referencing. Verifying what she’d said was the truth. She could kill him while he was defenceless but she couldn’t do it yet. There was something she had to see. This man had orchestrated more death and suffering than could be counted yet there had been someone below he valued in a way that didn’t involve clinical calculation.
I have to see him hurt. I have to see him in pain.
Tate’s fingers curled into brittle fists.
There was more to him than property, but it was too late for such a revelation to change things. He’d done what he had done and she’d done what she had done. This was the end and the moment had been prepared for. She remembered what the Perl said to her the night before he died. You’re all right, Walker.
“The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king,” she said. “No asked me to pass that on to you. I took my cue. I had my entrance. Now it’s time for both of us to make our exit.”
“It wasn’t real.” Tate spat. “It was a simulation. A test program. Nothing more.”
“That’s what you say. Nature loves her anomalies though, doesn’t she? No system’s perfect.”
Fragile, crystalline corpse that he was, Tate straightened his shirt-cuffs and collar before fixing her with glittering, certain eyes. “Very well. As you wish.”
The man in the moon’s ossified throat let out a scrambled digital scream. Naked fury. Frigid bones snapped and ancient musculature gave away. He came for her at a severe pace, animated by hatred and rage, feeling deeply and truly for the first time in a millennium. She was supposed to be their salvation, but had instead become the end of the one – the only one – he cared for. The woman he loved.
“You killed her, you fucking nigger!”
Tate’s charge sent both of them slamming into the reinforced glass of the outer wall. Celeste felt it shudder under the impact of their bodies. He locked his rotten hands around her throat. She clamped her hands around his wrists, feeling glacial bones and frail tendons crack. “There’s no place like home, motherfucker,” she spat, “and you’re coming with me.”
Tate snarled, his spittle turning to frost on his livid lips. Celeste closed her eyes, breathed in, and let the gift she’d received from No do the rest.
It was all a question of perception.
Celeste Walker opened herself up to reality and it all flooded in, filling her until she was brimful. Every aspect of being intersected with her – creating a brand new, white-hot paradox point. The prison of Celeste’s body ebbed away, leaving essence alone to endure. Her skin was drawn back like a curtain and the restraining bars of her bones were broken open by surging light.
She was the neuroseed and the neuroseed was her.
Everything shifted, translating from layer to layer of what is, what was, and what will be. Past, present and future integrating. It was like diving into the Flood, pursuing a trace, only this time she was navigating the real rather than the shadow left behind. Searching for a destination point.
Celeste and Tate fell together through the non-space between spaces, and re-emerged above the Crawl as a shooting star, long enough for the channels to pick them up. Celeste felt contact, so she reached out and wired herself into everyone. Every feed and screen across the artificial super-continent tuned in. Watching. Waiting. Anticipating.
She shifted again so they didn’t plunge into the Crawl itself. Celeste and Tate re-materialised between its underside and the Earth’s ravaged surface. The link with the people of the Crawl was still strong and she held onto it. Everyone had to see this. Everyone had to understand.
Routine lives threaded across the Crawl paused. They sensed her. Felt her deep. There had been an interruption. Destabilisation, uncertainty had been created with an indefinite outcome. Subroutines broke down. Streams and channels went offline unexpectedly. Traces turned on chasers and swallowed them whole. Disruption halted the endless data-chatter and nonsense-discourse of CrawlSpace for a mere second – and it was more than enough. Enough to experience uninterrupted thought. To think. To feel. To know and comprehend. Every human being on the Crawl became one. They shared private hopes and wonders and dreams. Realising how much they were alike. How much they needed each other. And they understood what they had to do next.
Then, the connection was lost – but they would all remember this moment of clarity.
This was a beginning rather than an end.
The revolution was here, at last.
Humanity’s future had become unknown, an unregulated quantity, as it should be.
The neuroseed’s work was done.
Celeste and Tate descended to Earth, plummeting through the lower atmosphere. Winds tore at them. Air screamed around them, though that it might also have been Tate screaming; realising his fate after so many centuries spent preserved and maintained in billion-share stasis. Celeste’s hold on him was as hard and unyielding as a mother on a hated child. He struggled against her grip like an enfeebled insect. She could see and feel so far and so much; ranging tors and hurried distances, the glitter and rush of distant, deadly seas, the cauldron of dawn breaking open. Beauty in ugliness. Rapture in desolation. Love and utter hatred at the eye of life’s storm.