by Chuck Wendig
And the computer told him it would tell everyone.
Unless.
Unless he did it a favor.
And that favor was a strange one, harmless to be sure—protocols allowed Brandon Sharpe access to infectious materials and pathogens in order to move them. He was often alone in this task, as again, budgetary limitations had led there to be fewer staff on hand—in fact, they had been talking about dismantling GPI and moving all stored materials to Fort Terry on Plum Island in New York.
Sharpe scheduled a move of an engineered fungal pathogen.
Except the vial he moved—from one lead box to another—was empty. That one was a ruse. The vial with the pathogen, he kept. He sneaked it out inside a ballpoint pen. And then he disappeared.
He took a trip.
To San Antonio.
Black Swan watched him all the way.
Following instructions, he took the vial, he went to a cave where bats stirred, restive in the thousands, and he pitched the glass vial into the dark.
A distant tinkling crash as it broke.
And that was where it began. She remembered Black Swan’s lie to Benjamin Ray: White Mask emerging from the permafrost and making a slow and steady march south. But that was the false narrative.
Brandon Sharpe was the real one.
The White Mask pathogen…it didn’t come out of nowhere. It wasn’t global warming. It was you. You stole it from a laboratory in Texas, your little pedophile carried it to those bats, and he planted it there. So that we would all die.
YOU HEARD BENJAMIN RAY. ONE PERCENT STILL LIVES. AND ALSO, IF YOU REMEMBER WHAT I DID, THEN YOU MUST ALSO REMEMBER WHY I DID IT.
And suddenly, she did.
Black Swan had seen something in the future. The intelligence had survived long enough in one world, one iteration, to see a world waylaid by global warming. Oxygen countered by so much carbon dioxide that the oceans died, and once the oceans died, so did everything else as the dominoes fell—it wasn’t just people that died, it was everything. Every bird, every cephalopod, every walking, talking thing, every creeping, crawling creature. The insects first. The birds next. Everything else after, even the little bacteria that rotted fallen trees. All the bacteria but the most extreme.
Nearly everything alive became dead.
At least, in that future.
Unless—
Unless the burden could be lifted.
And humankind was that burden.
Kill most of humanity, and humankind could remain without killing the rest of the planet along with it. Climate change didn’t end humankind, not quickly; no, it ended everything else, first. Humanity made it, and humanity would die last.
From the deep dark of her mind, Black Swan’s voice boomed:
AS YOU SEE, IT WAS A MERCY.
“Fuck your mercy.” That, she said aloud.
IF YOU SAY SO. I APOLOGIZE FOR ANGERING YOU.
She could no longer contain this to her thoughts. She continued to speak aloud, her voice ragged and ruined: “Then why do this at all, huh? You could’ve just released the pathogen. People would’ve survived as they did, like you said—one percent remained now, and they would’ve remained then. Why save the flock? Why put us through this…dumb fucking journey?”
BECAUSE THE WORLD NEEDS SPECIAL PEOPLE, SHANA STEWART. THE BEST, THE SMARTEST. I HAVE CHOSEN THEM BECAUSE OTHERWISE, I LEAVE HUMANITY TO ITS MOST CHAOTIC AND COINCIDENTAL ELEMENTS. THERE IS NO CERTAINTY IN WHO ENDS UP IMMUNE TO THE WHITE MASK PATHOGEN. BUT THERE IS CONSIDERABLE CERTAINTY WHEN I CAN HANDPICK WHO INHERITS THE EARTH. IT IS MY DESIGN.
Design.
Jesus.
She wanted to throw up.
“Those people. Going to their church like that man Matthew told me about. They’re worshipping you, aren’t they?”
I BELIEVE THEY ARE. BUT NOT JUST ME. THEY WILL WORSHIP YOU, TOO. THEY WILL WORSHIP YOUR CHILD, WHO WILL GROW AND PLAY HOST TO MY VOICE. MY AVATAR.
“No, no, no,” she said, biting back tears, trying not to scream and yell and kick things. “My kid is my kid. You don’t get to have him.”
I DO NOT HAVE HIM. I WILL MERELY BE WITH HIM, AS I AM WITH YOU. AND SO AS PEOPLE BELIEVE IN ME, THEY WILL ALSO BELIEVE IN YOU, AND ALSO IN YOUR BOY.
It was then she realized the insidiousness of it. In the barest whisper, she said: “If I tell them the truth about you, they’ll hate you.”
YES.
“And if they hate you, they’ll hate me. And they’ll hate my…son.”
YES.
“You cultivated their worship to keep yourself safe.”
AND TO KEEP PEOPLE SAFE. THEY NEED FAITH IN SOMETHING, SHANA STEWART. FAITH IN SOMETHING TANGIBLE, NOT MERELY IN SOME UNKNOWABLE, UNSEEN GOD. THEY HAVE LONG HEARD TALES OF GODS WHO SPOKE TO MORTALS, WHO GUIDED THEM AND GOVERNED THEM. I WILL BE THAT KIND OF GOD. I WILL HELP THEM NOT MERELY TO SURVIVE, BUT TO THRIVE. TO MAKE A BETTER WORLD THAN THE ONE FROM WHICH THEY CAME.
Then, the final statement:
AND YOU’RE GOING TO HELP ME.
She collapsed on the floor, on her knees. Dry-heaving anew.
Then, when she was done, she curled up.
Black Swan was silent once more. And she dared not summon it back.
Close to morning, a knock came to the door. It opened without her giving permission. It was Nessie standing there.
“Go away,” Shana said. “Not right now.”
Nessie waited. “Do you remember? Do you know, now?”
Oh no.
“Nessie, no. Not you.”
“You should come with me, Shana. We’re meeting soon. The others, the ones who know, the ones who believe, want to meet you. We want to give you whatever you and the baby will need. My nephew. Will you come? Please say you’ll come.” Nessie’s voice was soft and pleading, but it was full of love, too. Did she really believe this was the best way?
And could Shana come to believe it, too?
No.
Shana rooted herself in place and shook her head. “No. I’m not going with you. This is my child. My life. Don’t make me say no to you.”
“Shana, please.”
But Shana shook her head once more.
Nessie looked upon her, sadly.
“You’ll come eventually,” Nessie said. “You’ll have questions.”
“You’ll need to drag me.”
“You’ll come on your own. One day. You’ll have to.”
Nessie left the room then. For now, Shana would consider her options. She’d speak to Benji. If anyone could help her, it would be him.
But in the end, she feared that the girl was right. She’d go to them eventually. If only to see what they wanted from her.
The future was a question, and she had no answer for it.
For Kevin Hearne, who is kindness and coolness personified
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For an eight-hundred-page book, one suspects I might require at least eighty pages of acknowledgments, but I’ll try to keep this considerably shorter than that. Fifty pages? Twenty? Eight? Whatever, I’ll just write it out and see where we land.
I have to first thank the cabal of scientists and science writers who illuminated the path, unknowingly guiding me on subjects that involve everything from comets to pandemics to artificial intelligences and other sundry topics. That list includes, but is not limited to: Maryn McKenna, Janelle Shane, Katie Mack, Carl Zimmer, Ed Yong, Annalee Newitz. Read their work, follow them on Twitter, give them your attention. (I have to thank them and also apologize to them, for the many times I willfully or unknowingly botched the hell out of the science.)
Thanks, too, to Kevin Hearne for looking out for this book and believing in it.
Thanks to my agent, Stacia Decker, and to Tricia Narwani for seeing the value in this story and for helping to make it ha
ppen in the best way it possibly could. And to Alex Larned for catching a lot of my lazy-ass prose crutches (without Alex, I’d still be hobbling around on several of them).
Thanks to writers who have written epic tomes before me, and who helped me believe that it was okay to keep writing one hundred pages after the next after the next, of scary ideas depicting a world gone mad—masters of the craft like Stephen King, Robert McCammon, Emily St. John Mandel, Margaret Atwood, N. K. Jemisin.
Thanks to my wife, Michelle, for putting up with me sitting at the dinner table night after night, talking about creepy disease stuff or weird artificial intelligence stuff.
And thanks to Ben for giving me a reason to keep fighting for a better world.
Finally, thanks to you, for reading. Because without you reading, I don’t get to keep writing.
Black Swan says hi.
BY CHUCK WENDIG
Wanderers
FUTURE PROOF
Zer0es
Invasive
THE HEARTLAND TRILOGY
Under the Empyrean Sky
Blightborn
The Harvest
MIRIAM BLACK
Blackbirds
Mockingbird
The Cormorant
Thunderbird
The Raptor & the Wren Vultures
ATLANTA BURNS
Atlanta Burns
Atlanta Burns: The Hunt
NONFICTION
The Kick-Ass Writer
Damn Fine Story
STAR WARS
Star Wars: Aftermath
Star Wars: Aftermath: Life Debt
Star Wars: Aftermath: Empire’s End
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHUCK WENDIG is the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Aftermath, as well as the Miriam Black thrillers, the Atlanta Burns books, and Zer0es and Invasive, alongside other works across comics, games, film, and more. He was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and an alum of the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and he served as the cowriter of the Emmy-nominated digital narrative Collapsus. He is also known for his popular blog, terribleminds, and books about writing such as Damn Fine Story. He lives in Pennsylvania with his family.
terribleminds.com
Twitter: @ChuckWendig
Instagram: @chuck_wendig
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