It occurs to me that whether we succeed or not, the human race is over. Something new and quite different is about to grow from these sterile halls.
We wait. There’s no “on” button. Either Troy’s nervous system will take to the suit, or it won’t.
I find myself nauseous. This is drastic and insane. Unkind. Troy’s gills open.
Soundlessly, his articulations freshly oiled, he stands. “Troy? Can you hear me?”
Troy’s camera-lens eyes look down. He stands straight, but his shoulders hunch just slightly. The left half of his face seems slower and slumped. It doesn’t react as quickly to stimuli. But if he could sneer his sneer, he would. It’s him.
“Are you connected? Can you hear me?”
The cyborg’s mouth opens. He makes this gagged sound: “Mmmmmm!” I think he’s trying to scream.
“How bad is it?” I ask. I touch his cold, left hand. His parietal’s not connected, and he can’t possibly feel my heat through his metal. Still, he grips back. It’s an oddly human connection, and one I’ve been missing for a long time.
“Troy,” I say. “I’m with you. You’re not alone.”
The lights flash and go bright—he’s online. “Mmmmmm!” he screams. The lights flicker. Troy collapses. His gills go still.
Failure.
It’s minutes before impact. I’m between the steps and the missile again. Calling Jay. It doesn’t go through. Then I’m looking at pictures of them, my family. Scrolling, scrolling.
I look out through the flashing solar lights and there they are: my family. Jay’s carrying both kids. With the Aporias’ scrambled gravity, they must be light as feathers. I’m running toward them. We’re hugging. I’m crying. I’m smelling them, tasting them. Even Jay, his sweaty musk, his calmness in the face of calamity that I’ve always found infuriating until now.
Behind them are a line of others from the Bluebird: Jim’s family; Marc’s ex, who’s shockingly gorgeous and apparently still in love with him; security officers; Air Force cadets; Troy’s sixty-eight year-old father, for whom I have so many questions.
We hurry back inside to the settlement. There’s room. There’s even food for another year. Maybe, if we crack into the dirt and learn to eat worms and extract water, that will be enough.
We don’t feel Aporia Minor for about two minutes after she strikes. Strangers and friends, we’re cramped tight and terrified on the cafeteria floor.
Everything shakes.
We wait an hour, then two, for the hot rain. It doesn’t seep through, but something goes wrong, because the vents cut out. Electricity winds down. Everything goes dark.
No one but the children make noise—chatter and cries and occasional giggles. I imagine the surprised birds up above, the char of their wings. It’s not the asteroid, but the impact plume that springs into space and comes back down again, spreading globally, that will get them.
Someone has the idea of passing out buttered bread and water, and then everyone’s sharing what they have. Hands touching, saying words of gratitude, we eat in the dark.
Ten minutes later, cell phone lights start working again. I stand and everyone is quiet. “I’d invite you to conserve your energy until we figure out how to get the power back on.”
“We need someone to reboot the Network,” Jim whispers. “We’ll run out of air.”
But then, suddenly, the lights do return. The vents hum.
I’m holding my kids, standing with my husband, and everyone’s clapping, like we’re the First Family. They’re smiling with hysterical gratitude. I look to Marc, full of smiles, his girl in his arms, the happiest man in the post-apocalypse, then to Jim, who knows better.
We’re up, headed to surgical. Jay and the kids won’t let me go alone, so they come along. There’s Troy, standing in the doorway.
He’s made himself taller. About seven feet.
“You know what’s strange?” he asks. His deeper-than-usual voice booms through the Network intercoms. They can hear him in the shelter. “I’m not sad anymore. I don’t feel anything. I can see now, why you never liked me. It all makes sense.”
It occurs to me that having no “off” button was a really bad idea.
“You’ll be relieved to know that I’ve cut off life support in the upper levels, for those refugees who’ve tried to sneak inside and steal your supplies,” he says. “I feel that’s what you’d have wanted, Nicole.”
“Can you turn it back on?” I ask.
He cocks his robot head. His left side is completely limp. The eye has gone dead. “Done,” he says. “But it’s a waste. They’ve suffocated.”
“Oh.”
“I had to rework some of my inner plumbing. That’s what took me some time. All that chatter—I couldn’t tolerate it. So I made one lobe go quiet.”
“Can you wake it up? The point was sentient chatter, remember?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Oh. Troy? Do you have moral capacity?” I ask. “Can you distinguish right from wrong?”
“Of course,” he says. “I shall go up in approximately two weeks, when the temperature is acceptable, and build a better habitat. I’m going to please you, Nicole. You know how important that’s always been to me. I’ll need volunteers. Perhaps ten more like me, under my command. If necessary, I trust you’ll enforce a military conscription.”
It occurs to me that the perfect incision around Macun’s scalp was from a skull retractor. Shelter Nine was in the middle of a losing war against the cyborgs it had created when Macun bombed it. Even the Dorothys had a method to their madness: cyanide dries up the brain.
“Troy? Do you remember your mother?” I ask.
He cocks his head. “Sorry? Say it in the other ear?”
I walk around to Troy’s left side, which is an inch shorter.
“Do you remember your mother?”
“Yes!” a voice hisses. “I’ll save you, I’ll help you. Run!”
“Pay no attention to him. We’ve cut him out,” the robot-man cries. “You never liked him anyway!”
Jay and I are standing in front of our kids. I feel the weight of this mistake.
“Volunteers?” the cyborg asks.
Just then, there’s another Earth-rocking shudder, as the impact of Aporia’s dark twin arrives.
Sarah Langan is the author of the novels The Keeper, This Missing, and Audrey’s Door. Her work has garnered three Bram Stoker Awards, a New York Times Editor’s Pick, an ALA selection, and a Publishers Weekly favorite Book of the Year selection. Her short fiction has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Brave New Worlds, Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and elsewhere. She’s at work on her fourth novel, The Clinic, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters. She thinks Ray Kurzweil is kind of a nut, and that, in fact, the singularity is very far away.
ANGELS OF THE APOCALYPSE
Nancy Kress
Me and Ian, along with the rest of the world, were watching the news when my cell rang. My link went through satellite and so the latest vandalism on local cell towers didn’t affect it. I glanced at the number, picked up, and said, “No.”
“Sophie! You have to—”
“I told you last time, Mom, no more. I’m not going out to the settlement again.”