“That’s what the A.I. meant about it being a paradox?” she asked.
“Indeed it is, my dear,” the A.I. answered “However, even a computer this magnificent has its limitations. The informational capacity required to reverse the solar system will only let us turn time back twenty-two hours and thirty-one minutes.”
Katherine and Jim marveled as they watched the past come back like a slingshot, their reality playing out in front of them as though someone were reversing a filmstrip. The sun crossed the sky in a matter of minutes, rising in the west and setting in the east, whilst the horrors of people being pulled up from the surface reversed themselves. The cloud of androids abandoned the planet while the dead post-humans returned to life, calmly moving about their business—albeit in reverse.
“It’s working,” Katherine said softly. Tears welled into her eyes.
“The firewall held,” Jim commented. “It looks like we’re going to be okay!”
“We are not, as the saying goes, out of the woods just yet,” the A.I. quickly cautioned. “We have given ourselves a second chance, but what we do with that chance is yet to be written.”
At that very moment, James Keats hovered just above the waterfall he’d been considering naming after his dead wife. A voice whispered in his ear.
“Welcome back, my son.”
24
“Welcome back?” James responded with a confused grin painted across his lips. He turned to Old-timer. “What do you mean?”
Old-timer was at a loss. He hovered only two meters away from his young friend, the mist making him appear almost like a dream. “Say what?”
“You said, ‘welcome back,’ didn’t you?”
Old-timer knitted his brow. He shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”
James’s embarrassed grin melted into a look of concern. He was sure he’d heard a voice.
“It is me, James,” the A.I. spoke.
James’s heart jumped at the sound of the kindly, elderly voice. He heard it, but he couldn’t believe it. “No.”
“Stand by for upload,” said the A.I. “You may need to brace yourself. This will feel strange.”
A sudden jolt of energy flowed through James’s connection to the mainframe as the A.I. uploaded James’s memories from before he had been sucked into the black hole, back into his reestablished pattern. In a matter of seconds, with his eyes fluttering wildly, the events of the past twenty-two hours flooded his synapses, forming new memories and bringing him instantly up to speed. When the upload was complete, he doubled over, propping himself up by placing his hands on his knees as he gasped in the fresh, cool air over the falls.
“What the hell just happened, James?” Old-timer asked as he braced the young man, placing his hands on his shoulders. “Are you okay?”
James looked down at the water churning below, frothing against the rocks. Trans-Human had been completely successful. “What about the nan consciousness?”
“What?” Old-timer asked. James put his hand up, signaling for him to hold on.
“You removed it from the equation when you sent it outside the blast radius,” the A.I. informed James. “It is no longer part of this time period, and you are free.”
He sighed with relief. “It worked.” He turned to Old-timer, who was now joined by Rich. “The Governing Council is about to summon us to headquarters. We have to grab Thel and head out right away.”
“What the heck’s going on, Jimbo?” Old-timer asked.
“I’ll explain it all on the way, but first, you might want to brace yourselves.” He tapped back into communication with the A.I. “Are their uploads ready?”
“Yes, James.”
He turned back to his friends. “Okay. This is going to feel pretty weird.”
25
When they reached the front entrance of the Council headquarters, Djanet was there to greet them. Her face appeared stricken by worry, and she began walking with them in step as James hurried into the building. “The situation appears very bad, Commander. No one has any idea what’s going on. The anomaly doesn’t appear to make any sense. And the chief is furious with you for taking so long to get here,” she informed James, her eyes on his flight suit. It would be very difficult for James to explain himself.
James placed his hand on her shoulder reassuringly. “Everything is going to be okay.”
They marched toward the door of the emergency strategy room. As soon as they entered, the eyes of all of the Council members who were present, as well as the dozens of assistants and advisors, fell on James.
“Keats, just where in the hell were you?” Gibson thundered as he saw James’s flight suit. His eyes narrowed. “You better have one hell of an explanation, son.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” James replied, regarding Chief Gibson with much more empathy and respect than in the past. Gibson had dealt with Luddites too, many years earlier—James realized now that he and Gibson were not so different—they were fighting on the same side. “A lot has happened, and I need to get you all up to speed.”
Gibson was momentarily stunned by James’s respectful tone. He still wasn’t sure whether he should suspect that it was sarcasm or part of some sort of trick to make him look like a fool. He decided to play it safe. “Well, we’re listening. This had better be good.”
“Listening won’t be enough,” James replied. “I’m going to have to show you. You might want to hold on to something.”
Instantly, the experiences and memories of the twenty-two hours previous to the reversal of the solar system were jacked into everyone present. Djanet, just as Thel, Old-timer, and Rich had earlier, had her saved pattern overlaid with her own. The councillors who were present experienced a program put together by the A.I. that made up, essentially a highlight reel of some of the most intense and poignant memories experienced by James and his companions. In only a few seconds, the experiences were relived as viscerally as they had been originally. When it was over, the room was electric with the terror that they had all just seen and felt and it was as if they all, collectively, had awoken from the same nightmare.
“It’s over,” Djanet finally said, breaking the silence that hung in the room.
“What about the nans?” Gibson asked. “They’re still in us!”
“We’re safe,” James assured the room. “The nan consciousness has been destroyed.”
“But what about the android armada? They’re still out there,” Gibson observed. “They’ve already proven themselves too powerful to be stopped!”
“That is where you are incorrect,” announced the A.I., suddenly appearing in holographic form in the room.
“Oh my God,” whispered Thel.
“Hello, Aldous,” said the A.I., greeting the chief warmly. “I have missed you.”
“We’ve all missed you,” replied Gibson, smiling in return. “And we need you.”
The A.I. shook his head. “What you really need is yourselves.”
Gibson’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“He means we already have the power, Chief Gibson,” came James’s voice just before a small foglet of nans appeared next to the A.I. When the foglet dispersed, Katherine and Jim stood next to James; concurrently, James had been transformed back into his new, gleaming body, right before their eyes.