“You really slowed us down, insisting on AI. I’d have solved the singularity by now if it wasn’t for you,” Troy says. The entire right side of his face is twitching.
“Okay. How’s your progress?” I ask.
“I think it makes sense to eliminate the parietal. It’s worse feeling the loss. They might develop phantom limb syndrome. The Network interface should provide plenty of sensory feedback.”
“You sure?” I ask. “I’m worried it’ll shock them too much, psychologically.”
Troy looks up at the cement ceiling, then around the operating room. “You’re worried about psychology?”
“Do what works for you, Troy.”
Jim and Marc show me some intercepted transmissions they’ve hacked from Shelter Nine’s network, which we’ve imported into this installation and plan to use for automation. It’s scary stuff. Before Macun’s nukes brought the whole thing down, the Dorothy cult convinced some thousand people to down cyanide pills. The National Security Council and Joint Chiefs were murdered by Shelter Nine scientists, led by the cybernetics department.
“Jesus,” I say. “What a clusterfuck. Our families? Are they gone, too?”
“The itinerary’s complete and our people weren’t listed. Looks like they made the Bluebird, but that’s all I can figure out.”
I send another enlisted out to look for them, then head back to surgical. “Volunteers?” I ask again.
Nobody answers. As their leader, it should be me. But I’m not a martyr. I want to see my family. “You’d get to live forever,” I say.
Marc lifts his hot-dog greasy fingers from the keypad. “You can’t spare me. I have the best hands.”
“No, I do,” Jim says. “I have a doctorate in medicine! I’ve actually performed brain surgery!”
“Should we ask a soldier?” Marc asks.
“No. We’ll lose their trust if it goes wrong,” I say.
We all get quiet. I smell the ammonia and metal grease. The surgical lamps are bright and I picture what’s to come. I remember reading about leeching in the 18th century, and doctors who didn’t wash their hands between surgeries. Lobotomies. Botched tracheotomies. My knees lose their lock and I’m propping myself over a surgical table.
“This is crazy. I don’t want to go out like a butcher,” I say.
There are tears in my eyes. It might be the first time I’ve cried this week. I can’t remember. It occurs to me that my family might be dead, or lost, and instead of looking for them, I’m in a mile-deep basement, parsing dendrites.
“Let’s kill ourselves,” Jim says.
Marc punches the wall.
“It’ll be easy. We’ll do it together,” Jim says.
“I want to see Jenny,” Marc says. “I was wrong when we broke up. I never told her I love her.”
I’m still crying. “This is too hard,” I say. “I can’t take it.”
Troy stands up. He pats my back, awkwardly. I don’t know what possesses me, but I hug him. “It’s okay,” I say. “We did our best. You, especially. It’s okay. I’m proud of all of you.”
“I’ll do it,” Troy says. “I volunteer.”
“No,” I say. “I won’t let you.”
“I’ve decided.”
“It’s 99.9% likely to fail,” I say.
Troy sneers. He’s terrified. “Let me do this. It’s all I’ve got.”
• • • •
We do it. We insert Troy’s brain into an articulated steel husk with oxygen gills and tiny needle holes through which he can inject his own calorie serums. We connect his spine and central nerves within rubberized sheaths. When we’re done, his body’s an empty husk on the table.
I run my hand along the steel casing. We’ve pulled its articulations so that it’s exactly Troy’s height: 6’2”. Its face is carved like a human face, with camera-lens eyes that in monkeys have provided successful peripheral and central vision. Small flaps under its sharp chin open and close to intake air. The air is drawn into its chest, where it’s filtered and if necessary, converted to oxygen, then returned to the head, where it circulates through its organic brain.
I’m thinking about Troy’s mom, for some reason. Did he dream of her, watching him from the very chair in which she died, for the rest of his life? What dreams will come now?
Jim injects the calorie solution. Marc inserts the battery within the robot’s chest, then screws it closed. We’ve got plenty more suits. Plenty of parts. I can hear the crowd outside surgical. The settlement is excited. It’s something to take their mind off the Aporias.
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, sudden
ly, 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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.”
“But they’re under attack! A big gang this time! Carrie said—”
“Forget it!” On the TV, the fifteenth talking head in a row was saying the same thing the first fourteen had said: We don’t yet know anything definitive.
My mother, her voice quavery from more than the MS that felled her at fifty-one, said, “You have to go! Carrie told me—”
“That’s all Carrie will do: tell you things. Tell me things. Let them solve their own problems for once. I told you, I’m done!”
“She’s your sister!”
“And sisterhood already cost me two fingers.” My left hand curled around the place my fingers had been before the shrapnel sheared them off. If Ian and I got around to believing in marriage, I would not have a ring finger for a diamond solitaire. If anyone gave diamond solitaires anymore. If—
“Sophie,” my mother said desperately, “I’m trying to tell you that—”
“I know what you’re trying to tell me.” The Sweet settlement was under attack by yet another band of thugs who knew easy pickings when they saw them, and everybody there would now be frozen in passivity while the fuckers looted whatever they wanted. What Mom wanted was for Ian and me to go out there again and rescue my poor little sister.
Ian’s hand took mine, although his eyes never left the TV. The sixteenth talking head gave his version of We don’t yet know anything definitive. The aliens are not communicating with—
My mother said, “Listen, girl! I’m trying to tell you that Carrie is pregnant.”
• • • •
Most non-military scientists are not gun people. Ian’s colleagues at Amber Park Biological Research Institute could almost be mistaken for Sweets themselves. But Ian grew up in rural Kentucky, he owns a small arsenal, and he taught me to use it. He drove while I studied his profile and tried to figure out what he was thinking. It was never easy. The firm jaw and gray eyes gave nothing away. Ian hated his good looks because he thought they made people take him less seriously. He was wrong. There was no other way to take Ian.
We covered the fifteen miles from suburban Buffalo—there wasn’t any habitable urban Buffalo any more—to Carrie’s settlement at ninety miles an hour. The old Hummer belonged to APBRI and although Ian had discretion in its use, the Institute would not be happy about this trip. We passed almost no other vehicles. Cars needed gas or biofuels, which need a functioning economy: factories, distribution systems, enough workers to staff both. Sweets didn’t usually work in such industries: “not environmentally friendly.” Those that tried didn’t last long.
“Ian,” I said, “I appreciate—”
“Don’t,” he said, scowling, and I shut up.
The settlement sat on farmland. Dairy cows, apple orchards, a lot of corn. Barns and silos and wells and windmills, all hand-built. From a distance, you could mistake a Sweet settlement for Amish. Up close, you saw the bright and sometimes skimpy clothing, the computers and cells and radios. Some settlements of Sweets—not this one—were buying electronics companies. They didn’t object to machinery if they could figure out how to make, use, and repair it with minimal environmental damage.
As I climbed out of the Hummer on the “village green”—these stupidly archaic terms nauseated me, suggesting that any minute now we’d have a Maypole dance—I could hear the attackers. They were in the community hall, the first structure any group of Sweets built, happily wrecking things. People shouting, glass shattering, wood smashing. No gunfire, but that didn’t mean they weren’t armed. No cops, because even if someone at the settlement called them, they didn’t always respond. The police chief said the department was short-handed (true); the ACLU said that cops discriminate against Sweets (also true). Like God, the boys in blue mostly helped those who helped themselves.
“I’ll check it out,” I told Ian, who got behind the Hummer to cover me. As I approached the window, a bench came hurtling through it.
Inside were only four of them, three men and a woman, all of course late thirties or older. At
least fifteen Sweets huddled at the far end of the room, including four children. The adults could’ve jumped the attackers while the fuckers were picking up furniture to smash, their sidearms holstered, but the Sweets didn’t move. They stood frozen, only their eyes darting around the room.
Cowards.
Extreme Involuntary Fear Bradycardia.
Both terms came to mind, and I pushed them aside. “Hey!” I yelled, and fired a shot into the air. The attackers pivoted to face me.
They were a scruffy lot, dirty and maybe drunk. Only one drew his weapon—were the other guns even loaded?—and I snapped, “Don’t try it.” Ian appeared behind me with his AK-47, which was laughable overkill. I said to one of the Sweets, “Was anybody hurt?” and, with great effort, he shook his head.
“Get out of here,” I told the scumbags. “And if anybody in this settlement has been hurt today, or if any of you ever come back here, I swear I’ll hunt you down, each and every one of you. Captain Zap there has your pictures on his cell and we can find out where you live. Do I make myself clear? Do I?”
One by one, they nodded. The only guy with a drawn weapon tried to scowl at me, but I locked my eyes onto his and he lowered both his gaze and his gun. A minute later, they’d all gone.
Slowly the Sweets began to unfreeze, and the adults knelt to comfort their children. Carrie wasn’t there, but I hadn’t expected her to be: If she had been able to call our mother, she hadn’t been confronted directly by an attacker.
Ian, ever the researcher, asked permission to take blood samples. Everyone said yes. Blood tests were the price they paid for people like Ian and me doing for them what they would not do for themselves. Sweets understood that. They were cowardly, but not stupid.
I went to find my sister.
• • • •
It started with the volcano. When that mountain blew up in Indonesia, the ash contained a weird compound that affected developing fetuses (and still does). The stuff was as eternal as the dormant genes it activated. Twenty-five years later, researchers like Ian were still trying to catalogue all the effects those few genes have on the half-million miles of nerve fibers in the human brain, not to mention the rest of the body. The short list:
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