by Platt, Sean
“Piper, this is Melanie.”
Feeling absurd, Piper shook the woman’s hand. She had no idea how they’d come to this place. Had she been transported while unconscious? The last thing she remembered was the ship, and the Ark.
Meyer made the remaining introductions. Clara eyed the woman. Almost suspicious.
“Melanie, is it?” Clara said.
The woman made a little face. Clara didn’t shake her hand. Their introduction ended on a note of neutrality.
“Where are we?” Piper asked. “Is this … Are we on the ship?”
“I think they sent you away. They knew that what they did to the Ark might harm you. Or at least …”
“At least what?” Piper prompted when Meyer trailed off.
“Or at least make us forget,” Clara said.
All heads turned to Clara.
Clara looked at the blonde, at her grandfather, and then at Piper. The room was graveyard silent until Clara said, “It’s what you think, Piper. Kindred and Stranger and Grandpa started it all over, and they sent us here so we wouldn’t be affected.”
Piper looked around the circle of faces. All were looking right at her, as if she were this thing’s center of attention, and everything hinged on Piper reaching the proper conclusions.
“The Forgetting,” Piper said. “It’s happened, hasn’t it?”
Meyer shook his head.
“Not the Forgetting.” His eyes ticked to the woman. “What we started, all over again, was Judgment.”
Chapter Seventy
Divinity waited, sitting in her chair. She had her knees together and her elbows on the chair’s arms, her hands loosely open on their ends, palms up. She’d repeatedly seen the posture in human dramas. It was the way you put a body when you were readying it for inspiration from a higher power. The way yogis sat while harnessing their chi.
It bothered Divinity that she was thinking about inspiration from a higher power and yogis and chi while waiting for Canned Heat to cleanse her (human constructs, even if appropriately themed), but until she was reintegrated, she had this body, and its sense of brain and mind. Soon she’d no longer need the body — ironically, the same as yogis thought they’d no longer need theirs one day — and she’d return to her true form. Would it feel like being sucked out from behind, leaving her old body as a limp and lifeless shell? Perhaps. And as she meditated and waited, that thought made her sad. But all things (so said the yogis) were for a time.
But nothing came.
Divinity could no longer feel the collective — all she had were the thoughts inside this limited body’s tiny brain. Canned Heat had to sever the connection to cleanse it, the same way a filter had to be removed from a device before being blown clean. Now she had to wait for the connection to return, and be content with what little she had in the meantime.
But eventually being zen became boring, so Divinity opened her eyes. And saw a bunch of idiot-faced Titans staring at her in a circle.
“Jesus Christ! You scared me!”
The Titans traded glances. Whether they were wondering about her fear or the exclamation to a human deity, Divinity didn’t know. And it was annoying not to. What were the Titans thinking? Because they were thinking and would be for a while longer, same as she was.
She shooed them away. They parted like an adoring throng as Divinity sat, then walked to the console. She tapped at it, taking a long moment to make sense of what she was seeing. She’d grown used to the surrogate’s senses, but not to monitoring ship’s statuses through a visual readout. That information had always been inside her, accessible with a thought. But for a bit, she’d need to check things with her eyes, the same as how video and audio had been the only way to speak to Eternity from inside Meyer’s cell.
“Where is the virus?” she asked the Titans.
They pointed at a display.
Annoyed, Divinity walked forward to look where it was pointing. Obviously Titans didn’t speak. Hell, normally, neither did Divinity and Eternity. But she still found it vexing that when she asked a question without her connection to the collective, she couldn’t get a straight answer.
Divinity looked at the display and saw something confounding. She kept scanning, exhaling, trying to be patient, waiting for her limited brain to figure it all out.
Then Divinity realized that she already had.
This didn’t fail to make sense because her brain hadn’t cottoned onto it; this didn’t make sense because it just plain didn’t make sense.
“What’s wrong with this panel?” Divinity demanded. “Is it offline because the collective is still offline?”
The Titans looked at one another, mute.
“Is this time index right? Because it can’t be. Where is the stream flow report? Because this sure as hell isn’t it.”
One of the Titans, proving supreme adaptability to humanity’s quirks, shrugged and made a quizzical face.
Divinity’s jaw clenched.
According to the readout, the cycle had finished, and there was no Canned Heat left in the system at all.
Chapter Seventy-One
Melanie held her mental grip, waiting.
She could see the collective’s restart (thanks to her surrogate brain’s penchant for visualizations) as a giant red button she’d need only to push. She could sense the archive at the back of that quiescent and cleansed collective, now empty. To her visual mind, it looked like a mesh of cool blue lines dotted with nodes waiting to be relit. And vaguely, in the distance (more through Clara than the emptied archive, she imagined) Melanie could sense the human network — dormant now, as if asleep.
She waited, watching the door. And then right on time, it happened.
The door opened. The room filled with Titans and Reptars. It wasn’t a large room, but it hadn’t been meant as a prison cell and hence had comfortable space for twenty or thirty. She didn’t count the troops swarming in (from the outside or from inside her mind), but there were that many at least. Perhaps a dozen muscular, powder-white beings with weapons raised and another dozen unarmed black beings viciously purring.
The humans, save Meyer, retreated into corners. All eyes turned to Melanie, while hers turned to the dark-haired woman entering at the rear.
“What did you do?” Divinity demanded.
She was stalking toward Melanie, but Meyer responded.
“I smothered the fire.”
Divinity threw Meyer a look like he was something found on her heel.
“What is he talking about?” she said to Melanie.
But again Melanie said nothing, and Meyer walked toward the pair. Reptars purred and Titans pointed their weapons, but none stopped him as he closed the distance to stand directly in front of Divinity.
“Your virus needed fuel to spread,” Meyer told her. “It needed thoughts and memories to tear through so it could leap from one mind to the next. I took the fuel. It did its job then shut down when it ran out of memories to burn — just like it did when the first copy of me loosed the same virus on the Internet in Heaven’s Veil.”
“How did you …?”
Meyer didn’t have to cut Divinity off. She simply stopped talking.
“I emptied the Ark.”
“You—?”
“Once I understood how to do it, the need was obvious. I can see pieces of your history, stretching back through your previous visits. Each time, you’ve used the Ark to judge us. But you don’t understand it. You can’t look into it before it’s opened or touch it once closed. When the Mullah hid it from you last time, you needed humans to seek it out. You needed human hands to move it from Sinai to Ember Flats. There’s always been a human key bearer who opens it because you can’t. Don’t you remember? You gave Piper that ability yourself. Both of you.”
Piper was looking from Meyer to the Astral women, her eyes flicking intermittently to Melanie. She knew now. If there was ever a chance of concealing Melanie’s identity, her cover was blown. Piper’s eyes found Melanie’s. They’d met on
ce before, when Piper’s mind wasn’t quite coherent, a long time ago.
“You corrupted your own collective so you could corrupt ours. But even when it all shut down and I could no longer reach my family, I could still reach the Nexus. And I could still reach the Ark.”
Melanie straightened as Divinity, now understanding, looked away from Meyer and came toward her.
“You told him. You showed him the way.”
Melanie kept her face neutral. In truth, she’d told Meyer a lot more than that — but the Founders’ message she’d uncovered during the blackout was for Eternity and the hybrid to hear, not for Divinity and the lower classes.
“You told him how it worked. You told him that judgment emptied an opened Ark.” She sneered. “You burned the bridge between our collective and theirs, so the virus couldn’t cross it.”
“And with your collective offline …” Meyer added, shrugging. “I guess you were in no position to hear the Ark’s contents as they escaped. Or to judge us accordingly.”
Divinity’s small brown eyes flicked toward Meyer, then back to Melanie. Her jaw hardened.
“You’ll pay for this.”
“It’s over,” Melanie said. “Let it go.”
This was the wrong thing to say. Divinity snapped like a twig, fury descending in a wave.
“Let it go? Do you have any idea what you’ve done? You’ve interrupted the cycle before it could finish! The virus only affected us! And now the collective is gone. The soldiers have nothing to command them. We’ve lost everything that makes us, us! And this is your answer? It’s over?”
An inarticulate snarl of rage escaped her, Divinity’s face twisting into something gnarled and ugly. She jabbed a finger at a Reptar to one side. Then, betraying the depth of the collective’s wound, she addressed it as an individual rather than part of a hive — a thing with its own mind and will.
“You! Take her!”
The Reptar didn’t hesitate. It swiveled its big black head from Divinity to Melanie, then prowled forward with its jaws agape, a spark churning deep in its gut. Unmoving, Melanie didn’t see compulsion in the Reptar. Instead she saw anger: a solo being obeying a command because it wanted to, because it was afraid and happy for an excuse to punish someone.
Melanie was still holding her mental grip, waiting. But as the Reptar’s breath touched her skin, she let that grip go. Her mind’s eye saw a hand press the big red button. The cool blue grid she’d seen inside her head began to flicker as she did. Nodes began to reignite, one by one.
The Reptar stopped, one clawed foot forward and slightly off the ground. A light seemed to brighten behind its eyes — a subtle shift that wasn’t precisely visible, but that changed it nonetheless. And when that happened, Melanie thought she saw fear draining from the beast. Anger followed. And then the Reptar was again just another soldier in the hive.
Its outstretched limb lowered to the floor, claws clacking on the hard surface. Then the Reptar lay down at Melanie’s feet like a dog.
Divinity’s eyes weren’t on the Reptar. She was frozen, feeling the renewed power just as the beast had — same as the Titans and other Reptars throughout the room. She blinked open-mouthed at Melanie, her expression that of someone receiving a much needed drug. Shocked but not unpleased, as if she’d been mollified against her will. Melanie could still see the woman desperate for fury. But within Divinity, rage was losing a battle to relief.
She waited. She watched the change happen.
And as she watched and waited, Melanie felt the collective energy fill her as well. It was like standing alone and afraid in a dark room, then seeing friends pull cords above their heads, showing themselves to have been there all along. But even as she watched the hive mind come back online, she held part of herself back. She didn’t want to give herself fully. The collective was part of her and always would be. But it would only be part — rather than whole — from here on out.
“The collective,” Divinity said. “It’s still alive. It wasn’t destroyed after all.”
Melanie nodded, feeling the reboot she’d just allowed. “Authority over the collective must go through Eternity. Something you failed to consider.”
“But …” Divinity trailed off. Melanie — more through an infant sense of intuition than hearing the other woman’s thoughts — imagined what she’d meant to say: But there is no authority in a collective. No one being has authority the others don’t have.
It had once been true. But it wasn’t so anymore.
Divinity looked around the room, not really surveying her surroundings so much as inspecting her renewed internal space. Melanie could almost imagine Divinity within her, investigating the fresh collective the way a human might inspect a new home.
“It’s not the same as it was,” Divinity said, eyes unfocused as she explored. “I still feel like …” She gestured vaguely, mostly at her own body. Like ME, Melanie imagined her finishing.
“I do, too.” I being the operative word, just like Me — both first-person pronouns they’d have to get used to using, whether spoken by the lips of a preferred body or merely whispered within the collective mind.
Divinity’s face changed again. Melanie watched it without any warning. This was something happening within the woman but not the collective. The second edge to their new double-edged sword.
Her eyes darkened. Her lips firmed, her jaw gone rigid. Her brow wrinkled, eyebrows drawing down. A thousand emotions — now an integral part of them all — screamed across the surrogate’s face. But Melanie was still learning her own emotions, so only the largest and most obvious registered.
She saw Divinity’s fear.
She saw anger.
And she saw them shoved aside, acceptance definitely not a part of the mix, as Divinity pushed one of the Titans hard in the chest. Divinity’s surrogate was small so the Titan barely swayed. But a second later Divinity was showing Melanie what she’d managed to grab in the otherwise botched exchange.
The Titan’s weapon, now aimed squarely at Melanie’s chest.
Chapter Seventy-Two
“If the others won’t stop you, I will,” she said.
“There’s nothing to stop. It’s done. The virus finished then leaked away. How things are now is how they will remain.”
“With us half-human.”
“We’re just changed. This is our next step.”
“Bullshit.” She used the crude word the way a human would, practically spitting it from between her lips. It was as if she was trying to make a point, to show how far down the wrong path they’d gone.
Divinity raised the weapon higher.
“You should have let it finish. You should have stayed out and let it happen. The virus would have restored our collective to normal instead of this …” She looked down at her body, her face disgusted. “This in-between. I don’t know what I am now.”
“You’re you.”
“I shouldn’t be me. I should be us.”
“Then leave your surrogate. Shed it, and return to your given body. “
Divinity’s mouth moved. Melanie, though she couldn’t hear the thoughts the other woman kept hidden, could imagine what she must be thinking. They were addicts. No matter how much they desired an alternative, they’d hold tight to the status quo.
“Maybe I should force you to shed yours.” The weapon’s barrel trembled, still centered on Melanie’s chest.
Melanie said nothing. She wanted to say something a brave human might say, such as Go ahead. She wouldn’t die. As long as the collective existed, she couldn’t die. But the body would. And somehow, right now, that mattered.
When Melanie didn’t reply, Divinity went on.
“You’ve ruined the experiment.”
“It was ruined anyway. Destroying their minds would have changed nothing.”
“It would have erased the humanity from our collective. It would have restored us to normal.”
“And it would have sent them into extinction.”
“Wh
y does it matter?”
“Because we need them.”
“How do we need them?”
Melanie wasn’t sure how to answer. She looked at Meyer, remembering what she’d told him. Even if human interference — or at least hybrid interference — had been needed to nudge her species forward, that work was already done. They didn’t need each other anymore, not really. But the solution that would have killed humankind off would also have restored the collective to the way it was when they’d arrived on Earth. Humanity survived in the same fell swoop as the Founders’ plan had come to fruition within Melanie’s race. They were as intertwined as the two collectives had become, even if one thing hadn’t precisely caused the other.
The situation had become what it was, and “how it was” was good. Maybe they didn’t need humanity, but spitting on them after deeds were done felt like a poor way to respect the Founders’ wishes.
And besides. Deep down — in a place that was definitely more Melanie than Eternity, more solo than collective — she couldn’t shake the feeling that the two species weren’t finished with each other yet.
Melanie watched Divinity’s finger tighten on the weapon’s trigger. Her whole hand was shaking. Melanie could feel the other’s anger from the inside but knew that if she left it alone, the feeling would pass. There was a balancing act they’d all need to learn in their new form, and this was only the beginning. You could feel anger without acting. You could disagree without fighting. You could suppress intense moments, deferring to what was best for the future, once you got the hang of the new way of being.
But Divinity was losing that battle, wanting to lash out though it would change nothing. And Melanie, as she watched the weapon’s barrel, could barely keep from a creeping sense that she suspected was panic. She couldn’t truly die, and didn’t want to die all the same. It’s what had made her go along with Meyer and Carl rather than letting Carl snap her neck. Kin to the instinctual sense of preservation that had caused Carl, in the end, to trade his life for hers.