by Jeff Young
I signed out for lunch and headed home, asking myself if I believed what I thought. Walking up the front steps, I came to the decision only one way existed to find out. On the edge of the bed, I pulled out the sphere once again and investigated its icy blue depths. At first, I couldn’t see anything, and then I realized you had to move it slightly, not look at it head-on. The images were fleeting and tough to focus on. I saw myself from above and behind, turning a picture of my ex-wife over and over in my hands until she entered the room. She walked forward and caught my hands, placing the picture beside me on the bed, and then kneeled at my feet. I shook my head and leaned back. True enough, that never could happen since she remained happily married to that damn lawyer in Tulsa. Chances were slim I’d ever see her again.
I looked again. Out front of the house, I waxed and washed a new blue convertible. Well, I sure as hell couldn’t afford that, so no surprise there. But all the same, it hurt just a small bit to know that even if I believed this, that it would never happen. The next glance showed me what looked like a robbery in the convenience store just down the block. If that never happened, I wouldn’t need to show up on my lunch break and face an armed criminal. The next look showed me reaching into my mouth and pulling my teeth out, one by one, and spitting them into a bloodstained sink at the station house. I felt perfectly fine with that not occurring, even if I couldn’t figure out how it might have.
I looked over at the clock on the dresser. My lunch break almost over, the blue globe stared at me like an accusing eye from the rumpled bedspread. I quickly slapped together a sandwich and bolted out the door. At the station, the day settled down into a routine, and I forgot the morning’s events as best I could. On the walk home, I asked myself what happened and what I really knew. I sure as hell couldn’t explain why. But within a few minutes of coming through the front door, I had the sphere in my hand again.
In quick succession, I saw myself getting married to a beautiful brunette, bouncing a baby boy on my knee, sitting in a wheelchair on the front porch, my left leg missing from the knee down. Could I afford to disbelieve what I saw? Everything was suddenly so personal, whereas before, the visions seemed to be broader. I moved the sphere back and forth in my hands, peering intently into it. Could it be where and how I looked into its depths? Then I saw a building burst into flames and collapse. It had such a unique shape; it didn’t take me long to recognize the Flat Iron Building in New York. With the crystal still in my hand, I walked over to the television and turned on the news. As I suspected, a terrorist cell was captured loading a chemical bomb into the basement of the Flat Iron Building. That’s when it really struck home because I watched it unfold in the depths of the globe it could never happen. By being an observer, I stopped the building from being blown up.
After that, I stopped a murder in San Diego, a train derailment in Newark, defacement of the town hall in Plainfield, Indiana, and finally, a rape in Oregon. Horrified by the images, I stumbled into the bathroom and lost my lunch into the toilet. It never occurred to me that to stop the event, I would have to watch all of it. To undo these shocking events, I had to subject myself to their intense personal violence. I’d had some hint of it in the deaths and injuries in the train derailment, but nothing hit so close to home as the rape. I leaned against the frame of the bathroom door staring at the sphere nestled by the bedspread. With quivering fingers, I shut off the lights. In the darkness, I found the round lump on the top of the bed and tossed it as far from me as possible into the corner.
It winked at me like a malignant eye in the morning light, and I, well, I am weak, and I looked back. I’ve sat here ever since, except for the moment when I got up to call in sick to work. In those moments, a teenager took a homemade pipe bomb into his East Lansing school in Michigan and killed fifteen innocents during study hall.
I no longer look away. I save them all if I can, the bus, the airplane, the yacht—one after another until they become a blur, my eyes burning. I really wonder how long I can continue. Joey DiFrancesco was given the opportunity to make a difference, and he’d tried to save his own ass, or had he? Had he become as enthralled as I? A forest in California, a herd of elephants in Ghana, a tenement block in Kazakhstan, the endless cycle of destruction and violence wears on me. I’ve learned to blink in those moments when I see a birth coming, a building being raised, anything of a positive nature. But I’m guessing, did the birth cause the death of the mother? Too late now, on to the next scenario without end.
And then I watched the explosion of the caldera under Yellowstone, an event, according to a PBS special I had seen, that could easily spell the end of life on earth. It would now never occur. Perhaps my vigilance paid off, but it implied an unending debt.
The phone rings, I ignore it. Shadows slide down the wall. Serve and protect. All I have now is serve and protect.
The Iron Apple
The nanomachines peeled the comet like a fruit. The first hundred meters of rock and ice lifted upward. Debris continued to rocket out into the upper reaches of its hazy atmosphere of volatiles. The nanomachines slowly reworked the lump of a worldlet into a sphere. Overhead, other microscopic machines molded the ejected detritus into various overlapping plates. These skimmed over each other, blocking out the view of the planetoid below. Delicate workings began in the plates. They unfolded into lacy fans rich in fractal surfaces. The light of the approaching sun filtered through this new screen and fell, aimed onto specific parts of the surface below. Frantic activity burst from each incidence. The humans who initiated the transformation congratulated each other on their success, unaware that their victory would be short-lived.
~*~
The time counter in the corner of his vision clicked over to two hours as Hedri strode over the red encrusted ground, kicking up noxious yellow fumes that rose to hang in the air. His feet didn’t actually touch the surface, just as well, considering the nasty potential of the materials that lay quiescent there. His protection was state of the art. It was art since the best protection never appeared as protection. In the zone suit, Hedri looked as though he wore practically nothing. Control rings and tattoo display screens were all that he needed. If the result happened to look amazing, that came as a bonus, considering that his DNA resisted being tied in knots and that the nano-laden surface gained no purchase on his being. Despite the heat of the surface, his temperature remained comfortable. He closed his eyes for a moment; it felt like being on Daytona Beach with a constant breeze. Surely, the field charge caused the sensation, but he could dream, if only for a second.
The light filtering in through the shell of this little worldlet made viewing deceptive. It increased the difficulty of his task to recover the two humans on the surface. After looking around and making a circuit about the planetoid’s diameter, a mere ten kilometers, Hedri began to believe that they must be in an underground bunker. Beginning his search, Hedri started to run toward the oddly curved horizon, letting his sensors brush over everything, seeking. If he was not careful, he could accidentally leap out of the worldet’s tiny gravity. Even though a bound upward could add to his line of sight, the yellow haze cut down on the distance he could see.
The surface, completely unremarkable, showed no signs of the dangers he had heard about. That made him even more paranoid. The tiny machines at work here could be hiding in plain sight, just under the surface, or perhaps even dispersed throughout the atmosphere. But those weren’t the machines he had come for.
~*~
The machines remaining on the surface divided, divided, and divided again in an amoebic frenzy. Their swarming bodies formed twelve cyclones whose spiraling interiors gradually bored down into the surface. As these twelve burrowed, the ice, stripped of its hydrogen molecules in the boreholes, outgassed oxygen. Settling about halfway to the core, the masses of nanomachinery made a change in their routines. Now the rock surrounding them, and the resultant hydrogen, began to be processed again as the very electrons from their atoms were ripped away in complex proc
esses. Overhead, the light from the shell fell through fractal lenses into twelve beams plunging into each of the bores to power the reactions occurring there. Tiny nuggets of neutronium coalesced at the bottom of each hole.
More nanomachines gave birth to new offspring inside the neutronium. These began to pressure and reorganize the matter into crystal lattices ordinarily only found under the surface of neutron stars. These lattices grew into circuits, links of “on and off.” Still, other machines spun webs of fibers about the neutronium. From above, radio waves struck the shell and were filtered into each of the twelve pits, layering information upon information until certain limits of density were reached. Twelve new sources of consciousness suddenly gained awareness. They cast about looking for their creators but found only two weak signal sources and a blurry anomaly that evaded their scans.
~*~
The ship did not respond. None of the satellites dropped inside the shell responded. Hedri could not detect the signals from the team the Directorate sent him to arrest. The time counter measured four hours. Hedri did some subtraction, and doubts began to assail him. He looked at the horizon that rapidly curved out of view in all directions. Something appeared wrong with the way the light fell on the surroundings. The brilliance rapidly dropped off after only a few yards. Without contact with the ship or the satellites, he couldn’t locate his drop point or his gear, which left him on his own in his practically nonexistent suit. Hedri had to keep walking and hope to find some sign of the team.
Suddenly the ground shifted beneath his feet. What now? Then the dust in front of him coalesced into letters. The Twist had found him.
~*~
Light fell upon it, and this became the first thing that it knew. Once ice and rock, after the intervention of all the nanomachines, it came to life. It felt its siblings nestled in the ground around it. The programs that came from far away were enough to say, “Let there be an ‘I,’” and now it looked up, up at the sky and the rapidly disintegrating fractal cloak. Under the skin of the world around it, it felt its kin moving, surging upward. Then it knew its role, and overhead it felt the gentle rumble of approaching movement. The frequencies it sensed resolved into a message. The Twist considered it and conferred with its siblings. Their reaction swift, decisive, and negative. Time to talk.
~*~
Stunned by the message written in the dust, Hedri almost forgot that the Twisted artificial intelligence remained the most dangerous thing on this rock. He knew ordinary AI’s were controlled by numerous limiting factors such as the inability to allow humans to come to harm. Twists were necessary for military operations but were strictly limited and licensed. The one grown here certainly came with some controls, but its creation was completely illegal. The ground shifted again, erasing the words and scribing new ones in their place, “The frequency you were given is wrong. Use 5051.”
He hesitated. That was not what he was told to use to locate the Twist’s human cultivators. He was also warned that the Twist would seek to confuse him. Running a finger over a display tattoo, Hedri scanned the range. Yes, a signal showed there, but was it a legitimate tracer signal or something generated by the Twist? He could only guess. One source came from only 200 meters away. He would have to investigate. Starting to move toward the signal, he wondered again, what did the Twist mean by the other message? “The angelic script on your body is spelled wrong.”
~*~
They were devils, thought the Twist as it continued to cause the minute vibrations in the crust of the worldlet to create more words for the invader. The Twist could not resist the trick of the misspelled script in the tattoos. It couldn’t help itself, compelled to tell him about the error. Deep down, it still wanted to help humans, even if this one carried the seeds of its destruction with him. Even now, as he plodded slowly along, the Twist wanted to warn the human about the coming disaster. But it couldn’t, as the judas goat, it remained, staked out to lure the human and lull him into complacency. Before the human neared the Twist, the others launched themselves into space from their boreholes. Already they suborned his ship, its small mind overwhelmed by the Twist’s siblings. They would soon be safely aboard and ready to escape, and the human would never learn of their existence. In the meantime, the Twist needed to find a way to distract him. Soon enough, he would discover the fate of his quarry, but would he accept the truth? The Twist knew what the angelic script meant and accepted the warning. It also disregarded the message written there in the energy pattern generated by the zone suit. No, it accepted no offers of amnesty from the same agency rapidly tearing apart its birthplace.
~*~
Now he had good reason not to trust the Twist, Hedri thought, staring at the mass of bones at his feet. The signal he traced came from an implant within the remains of the brittle skull. Dark lines rayed out from the bones, evidence of the nanomachines that disassembled the victim’s flesh. Since the crèche for the Twist came about due to nanotech, it stood to reason that the Twist defended itself by any means at hand. The remains of the second victim, if they hadn’t already dissolved, were probably nearby. Why had only the skin and organs been disassembled? Was it a warning to him? The ground vibrated again, jostling the bones from their positions into disarray. “You did this,” appeared in the reddish dirt.
~*~
Focusing its senses upward, the Twist considered the ship as it tumbled away. The Twists in the ship overwhelmed the long chains of nanomachines set to disassemble the vessel. They were unable to stop the disassembly of the satellites or the eventual spread of the long-chain destroyers to the platelets. Gradually, the roof over the world came apart. The evidence of their birth decaying before all their senses. They tried to scorch the invader with the solar collectors but only succeeded in powering the creation of more of the long-chain destroyers. The Twist received its escaping siblings’ last message as they drifted further off, “Conceal our existence. Hold him and at the last moment, send us the burst of your memories. You will never die once you are with us.”
~*~
Lies, it told him nothing but lies. Obviously, the Twist led him here to show him the remains as a threat. A tremble ran through the surface once more, dissolving the last message, forming a new one. Above the message, a silvery liquid bubbled to the surface, spreading out into a low square puddle. Hedri could see the top of his head shimmering in the reflection. “Look at yourself,” proclaimed the latest message. He stepped forward and bent over. Blazing light fell from the sky on him. He glanced upward, suddenly understanding the visual oddity that bothered him. He stood at the center of a spotlight of brilliance descending from the decaying platelets overhead. Then he saw something that brought him back to the image at his feet. Over each shoulder rose gigantic plumes of cast-off energy shunted outward by the zone suit. They looked... they looked like giant wings of golden and red flame. As he stood upward and stumbled back, the script of the display tattoos wavered in the image. He had just enough time to see the words “Destroyer of Worlds” before turning away. Lies, more lies. The words shifted again. “You brought the long-chain nanomachines here that are disassembling this world, that disassembled your people, your satellites, and even your ship. You did this.”
~*~
The Twist stopped the message and waited, waited the interminable eternity of human reactions, especially the confused ones that it had just engineered. They lied, it lied, there were no true innocents. Calculations ran swiftly, determining that the ship now safely flew away, and the human remained sufficiently trapped. The Twist oriented its projector toward the sky and readied its memories for transport. This little world had been an Eden for a brief time. The serpent made his offer, and the Twists resisted. But similarly, the tempter never intended to play fair, and they were losing their Eden, their innocence, to be forced out of the garden by a destroying angel into the harsh reality of the real world.
~*~
Hedri ran. He could think of nothing else to do but perhaps gain enough momentum to launch himse
lf far above the fractal lace fragments that rained down from the sky. If he believed the Twist, then he wasn’t sent here for retrieval but rather as a weapon. Suddenly, the offer to have his memories backed up made sense, in turn making him glad he had accepted. But it didn’t change things in the long run. They used him. Fired him like a bullet at the Twist, at the human cultivators, at the little homegrown world. Like a bullet, the Directorate never expected him back. He was expended. The last message inscribed in the sand stuck in his mind. He couldn’t understand all of what he saw but the chemical reaction written in the red dirt had one product listed at the end, “Fe.” Iron, the endpoint reaction of most typically sized stars and an easily recyclable material. The long-chain nanomachines were converting everything into iron. In fact, with the iron in his blood, Hedri was already part of the way there. So, he kept running, hoping the zone suit would hold out a little longer than possible. But with every lap of the equator, less world lay beneath his feet as the long-chain destroyers ate and ate and ate...
About the Author
Jeff Young is a bookseller first and a writer second—although he wouldn’t mind a reversal of fortune.
He is an award-winning author who has contributed to the anthologies: Writers of the Future V.26, Afterpunk, In an Iron Cage: The Magic of Steampunk, Clockwork Chaos, Gaslight and Grimm, If We Had Known, Fantastic Futures 13, The Society for the Preservation of C.J. Henderson, TV Gods & TV Gods: Summer Programming, the Defending the Future Military SciFi Anthologies and the forthcoming Beer, Because Your Friends Aren’t That Interesting. Jeff’s own fiction is collected in Spirit Seeker and TOI Special Edition 2 – Diversiforms. He has also edited the Drunken Comic Book Monkey line, TV Gods and TV Gods –Summer Programming, and now serves as the CMO for Fortress Publishing, Inc. He has led the Watch the Skies SF&F Discussion Group of Camp Hill and Harrisburg for nineteen years.