Griffin stood paces away.
She looked just as she had all those weeks ago, when Andra had seen her under the lake. She wore a gray pantsuit, twenty-second-century style. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a fishtail braid. Her shoulder brushed the edge of the cave. Her long-fingered hand hovered over the railing.
The ground shook, and more rocks tumbled down the side of the cavern.
Andra pulled Rashmi behind her.
“You killed my mother,” she growled.
Griffin had the decency to look ashamed. “I didn’t want to. She made me. She fought me. Trust me, it broke my heart. But she was a necessary sacrifice. She never would have let me complete my work. To create my new future. Our future, Andromeda. A new world. Can you imagine it?”
“Stop, stop.” Andra pressed her fingers to her temple. “Just stop. I can’t believe this was your plan all along. I can’t believe that the woman who gave humanity groundbreaking medicine and technology and hope turned out to be so . . . cruel.”
Griffin smiled sadly, stepping forward. Andra wondered if she could draw her high enough on the ledge to push her over. But the fall wouldn’t kill her, and even if it did, Andra didn’t know if she could bring herself to murder her, even after everything.
“This wasn’t always my plan,” Griffin said. “But it’s what I’ve come to believe is the best solution. And it turns out, you believe it as well. You’ve convinced me, Andra. You. You’re the reason why I know that destroying humanity is the only way to save them.”
Andra shook her head. “What are you talking about?”
“You hear it, don’t you?” Griffin took another step forward. “The voices? You should listen to them now.”
As though she’d turned up the volume, a chorus of voices began chanting in her head.
destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy destroy
Andra fell to her knees, covering her ears, but she couldn’t block the words.
She felt the bone-deep need to turn against the humans. To end them. They were unworthy of this planet. They’d waged war, committed genocide, fueled themselves with rage and hate. And now it was time for something new.
AI were humanity, but better. They would take care of this planet. They would nurse it back to health. They would create more AI to populate it, designing themselves to be gentle creatures that would nurture the earth and one another. But this new world of peace couldn’t start until the old one was wiped away. Sometimes creation started with destruction. And Andra was a part of that. She had been designed for that. It was her purpose.
“NO!” she screamed, and she didn’t know if it was out loud or in her head. All her senses were consumed by the mandate to
DESTROY
“No,” she said more quietly, gathering her strength.
She took a deep breath and opened her eyes.
The ground rumbled and Griffin took another step, a patronizing smile on her face. “Why are you fighting me, Andromeda?”
“Has it been you all along?” Andra cried. “You’ve been trying to control me. You’ve been the voices in my head?”
“No. I didn’t need to.” Dr. Griffin shook her head, her lips downturned in pity. “You downloaded Rashmi’s programming. She was the control. You were the experiment.”
Andra looked at Rashmi, horror dawning. An experiment and a control. A question in two parts.
“We were a generative adversarial network,” Andra whispered, remembering what Cruz had told her.
Opposing sides of an argument. Challenging each other until an outcome was reached.
Griffin smiled and nodded at Rashmi. “She was the argument against humanity. You were the argument for it. That was the point of creating two of you. To help me determine if humanity was worth saving. I couldn’t decide if we should live among the humans or replace them. It was too big a decision for one AI to make. You and Rashmi were meant to determine this together once I woke you and was ready to start the implantation process. I spent centuries perfecting the creation of sentient technology. When I was finished, you were meant to argue with one another until you reached a conclusion.”
Andra felt sick. She bent over, hand on her stomach.
Griffin continued to move forward. “But now, Andromeda, you have Rashmi’s programming inside you, and you’re arguing with yourself. And it sounds like the argument to replace humanity is winning. You know, in your deepest logic circuits, that the only way to save humanity is to destroy them.”
Andra’s heart pounded with the thought. Destroy humans. Yes, it made so much sense. To start over with something new.
“We . . . would become humanity,” Andra said.
“We would be human,” Rashmi whispered.
“Yes, yes!” Griffin said. “You understand! During my time before I had a human body, I watched. I observed the humans, and they were illogical and cruel. They’d been given this entire planet! They were given the ability to evolve and reproduce and live, and they abused those gifts and turned themselves into monsters! I knew there was a better way to live. I knew we could be better creatures. Humans don’t deserve this planet. We do. And you know it too.”
The ground rumbled. Through her nanos, Andra sensed buildings toppling above them. The pocket swarming. People screaming, dying. The burning away of the old to make way for the new.
She took a deep breath, felt the sting of tears in her eyes, the pressure at the back of her throat.
She lifted the Crown.
“You don’t deserve anything,” she growled.
“NO!” Griffin cried, stretching her arms out. “That Crown . . . it’s proof that humans deserve to die. They created that to hold their hate and their anger. It’s been harboring those feelings for hundreds of years, and it’s all directed at AI. At you, Andra. What do you think will happen if you wear it?”
Andra shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I have to try to save them.”
“They’re not. worth. saving, Andromeda.”
“I don’t believe that.”
The dead nanos Andra had been coughing up was proof. She hadn’t been dying. She’d been expelling a poison, ridding herself of the urge to destroy humanity.
Andra gestured to the rocket. “And you don’t believe it either. Otherwise why would you have given them an escape? The Ark was built in space. There were sims, eyewitness accounts. You couldn’t have faked that. Even now, you were having them build a generation ship. You were giving them a way off this planet. A way to survive. You wouldn’t have done that if you didn’t believe they weren’t worth saving.”
Griffin scoffed. “I was keeping them busy. I was making the lie believable.”
Andra raised the Crown to her head.
“Andra, don’t! You’re not meant for this. You’re AI, not human.”
“Actually,” Andra said, pressing the Crown to her temple. “I’m both. And I’m deciding my fate.”
Griffin screamed, and Andra felt the Crown snake into her consciousness, its wires probing into her brain. She felt the push and pull, the dance, the negotiation between her own nanos with the invading tech. The Crown latched on, forcefully, powerfully, unforgivingly.
Andra fell forward onto the work’station.
She reached out with her nanos, connected to the rocket, using the Crown as a barrier, a shield. Just as Zhade suggested, she would use it as a conduit. She didn’t know how long it would take for the Crown to realize what she was, so she had to work fast.
Andra flipped the switch on the hub, draining the rocket’s power into he
r.
She felt electricity course through her extremities, fill her, overtake her.
“Andromeda!” Griffin cried.
She took a step forward, but Rashmi moved in front of Andra, metal pole outstretched.
“Stay away!” Rashmi called, her voice shaking.
The power siphoned into Andra, and she felt everything in her light up. She could make out each of the trillions of nanos that constituted her consciousness. Knew each of them and their history and their present and their future. She knew all of them at once, held everything in her head, and it was unbearable.
She cried out.
“Andromeda,” Griffin snapped. “Stop this. You’ll kill yourself.”
“She won’t!” Rashmi cried. “She’s stronger than that.”
But Andra wasn’t so sure. She was starting to feel the hate. The anger. The fear. The years and years and years the Crown had spent absorbing all those feelings from its wearers. All of it directed toward Griffin, Rashmi, and Andra.
Griffin yelled out, “I created her. I know what she’s capable of, and that much energy will end her.”
Andra let out a scream. She’d never heard such a sound before. It was pain and devastation and hope and determination.
The Crown reveled in her pain. It would destroy her.
Power rushed through her entire being, her consciousness expanding and expanding until she was AI and she was Andra and Rashmi and Griffin and all the wearers of the Crown, all their memories crashing to the surface of her consciousness. Hundreds of people’s lives and stories filled her, and she was all of them or none of them or whoever she wanted to be.
She could see that now.
Rashmi had asked who she was if she didn’t have her memories. But maybe consciousness wasn’t just a collection of memories.
Maybe truly being alive was about what she did next. The next action, the next word, the next decision.
It was about deciding her fate.
Andra spread her consciousness wide, connecting with each nano in her path. Expanding through the cavern, into the underground. Her consciousness split among the nanos, and through them she saw the Schism dying, Lilibet surrounded by AI, her sister running through the Schism hideout calling for their brother. She expanded farther into Eerensed. Saw the people running, screaming, buildings crashing down around them, the pocket rushing to consume everything in its path. Gryfud leading people to safety. Children hiding in fear. The Crown fought her every step of the way.
When she bumped up against the pocket, she felt the destruction of it.
Destroy destroy destroy, it said, echoing the words that had haunted Andra for so long. The words now amplified by the Crown, but instead of directed outward, they were directed inward.
Andra fought.
The pocket and the Crown continued their chant, and she felt the pocket narrowing its circle, herding the humans closer together until it could extinguish them in a single blow.
That was their purpose: the destruction of humanity.
That was the Crown’s purpose: the destruction of AI.
She let the pocket’s thoughts into her own. Her head swam with the impulse to destroy, the sheer need of it, a compulsion. The only way she would feel right again was if she laid waste to everything in her sight. Everything on Earth. Even her.
That was her purpose.
But also . . .
But also . . .
Andra had given herself her own purpose.
She would decide her own fate.
And the pocket could too. It could be more than its programming.
Destroy, the pockets screamed at her.
Heal, she whispered back.
She wanted to collapse. She wanted to sleep. She wanted to dissolve into nothing. But she wouldn’t let herself rest until the job was done.
The pocket came slowly, grudgingly. She felt each individual nano of the pocket convert itself into healing tech, change from something bent on destruction to something meant to create.
With a single thought, she dispersed the cloud of nanos, raining them down over the city, sending them in search of bodies to heal, hearts to mend. They found Eerensedians bleeding in the street, hiding in collapsed buildings. They found children crying for their parents and parents searching for their children. They found broken bodies that couldn’t mend and whole bodies that were helping others. She sent the healing tech to all of them, and then guided what was left deep below the earth. They found people fighting, people dying. Some of those people had been corrupted, and needed to be healed, purged. They always gave the corruption a chance to yield, but it always refused. So they plucked it out. The corruption went screaming, each time, clinging to the life it had stolen. They found a small woman bleeding, but smiling. Cheering as the corrupted ones stopped fighting, as the dying ones began to heal. Her friends hugged her and cried. They found a young girl, scared and alone, searching for her brother, and they whispered to her that it would all be okay. They found three broken bodies in the rubble of a collapsed palace, and they did what they could.
They no longer needed Andra. They knew their purpose now, knew their fate. To help, to heal.
They let her go. They watched as her body crumpled to the floor. They watched as a woman with long blonde hair lunged at her, and a small woman with white hair and a gap between her teeth stepped forward to defend her sister. The blonde woman was impaled. The small woman fell to the ground weeping, and as the woman she’d killed fell to her knees and her blood spread across the floor, a flood of nanos burst from the body. The nanos tried to avoid them, but it was impossible. They were everywhere. And they cradled the nanos that had been the blonde woman to themselves. The nanos were alive, like the corruption had been, and they were angry and hurt and scared.
The healing tech gave them a choice. Destruction or healing.
And as they decided, the girl below stirred.
FORTY-EIGHT
ZHADE
Zhade pulled himself free from the rubble and looked up from the bottom of a massive hole where the cathedzal had once been. The sky was blue. It was clear and quiet, except for an occasional topple of palace wall, tumbling down, down.
His stomach hurt, his legs and arms hurt, his temple was killing him. He should not have survived that fall, but he had.
He didn’t reck how long he had been unconscious, but he recked that whatever had happened had happened. Either Andra had won or she hadn’t.
“Maret?” he called out over the rubble. “Meta?”
There was no response.
“Maret!”
He started struggling through the rocks and debris, digging down as far as he could. He saw no broken limbs or blood. Heard no cries for help.
His brother and Meta had been right beside him. But they’d fallen a long way. Either they had gotten free from the rubble, or they were already dead.
Zhade felt the sting of tears, but ignored it.
He had to find Andra.
He climbed out of the pit into the nearest tunnel, then followed that to the nearest peacing aboveground. By the time he reached the surface, his full body ached.
He gasped when he saw the city.
Destruction was everywhere. Entire buildings were missing, others toppled to the ground, littering the streets with rubble and bodies. People roamed the ruins, bandaged and weary, the ones who were full well bringing water and medicine to the ones who needed it. Zhade walked through a crowd of people, dazed. None of them noticed him, but they wouldn’t reck him now. Not with his own face.
“It vanished,” one was saying. “I saw it. The pocket. It was there and then it turned, glittering into stardust.”
“It saved me,” another was saying. “I was dying, and the stardust went into me, and saved me. I’m alive because of it.”
“You imagined it,” another
said. “There’s no more magic, not without the angels. Not without the goddesses.”
“I saw them,” yet another said. “They came back. All three. I saw them in the cathedzal. They saved us.”
Andra . . .
She had to be alive. He didn’t reck what she’d done, but she’d done something, because the pocket was gone.
Zhade hurried through the streets and climbed back into the tunnel, making his march through as best as he could til he came to the Vaults. The entrance was busted in. Bodies littered his path. He climbed gingerish over the destruction into what Andra had called the lobby.
It yawned open before him, a tangle of bodies and blood and fallen steel structures. The enormous clock Andra had said held perfect time for hundreds of years lay shattered and scattered across the lobby floor.
“Zhade!”
Lilibet came running toward him, her bare feet slapping against the floor, her long hair swinging behind her. She was covered in dirt and blood, but there was a huge smile on her face.
“She did it, Zhade! She did it!”
She was out of breath by the time she reached him, but that didn’t slow her down. She barreled into him, throwing her arms round his neck. He patted her back as she squeezed too tight, then gentlish extricated himself.
“She must have done it, because we were fighting and fighting and I was doing magic so that we could use what Andra called an EMP to slow down the gods, which used to be good, but then were bad, and now are dead. But there were too many of them and they kept shooting the Schism and turning them bad. And oh, Zhade, they got Skilla, and it’s so sad, and also Dzeni.”
“What?” Zhade snapped his attention to Lilibet. “What happened to Dzeni? Where is she?”
His knees went weak. His hands shook. Not Dzeni. It couldn’t be Dzeni. He’d promised Wead.
“She’s there,” Lilibet said saddish, pointing to the circular desk in the mid of the room. Zhade took off toward it, vaulting over bits of fallen ceiling and clock and dashing past dead bodies. He circled the desk, and behind it, Xana was bent over a sprawled-out Dzeni . . .
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