James stood, dumbfounded as the trillions of calculations that he had been running slowed to almost nothing. There was no point any longer. The nans were, ironically, absolutely right. They, and not he and the post-humans, were the standard bearers for carbon lifeforms. He nearly lost his balance as he considered the emptiness of this future—was this the destiny of humanity? Was this all that the universe had to offer?
“And now, James, the part we have been looking forward to so very, very much.”
James drew his head up ever so slightly and regarded the eyeless monstrosity that continued to furiously swarm in and out of the perverse imitation of a human silhouette. “You’re going to kill me.”
“That’s right, James. But before we actually terminate you, we are interested in knowing what you are experiencing.”
James remained still. Suddenly, all of his thoughts became focused on Katherine.
“You were under the mistaken assumption that you were immortal; yet here you are, about to die. This is the end of your existence as an entity. There is absolutely nothing that awaits you. How does this make you feel, James Keats, to know that in mere moments, there will no longer be a James Keats?”
James was already thinking the same thing. What was all of this for? Why was he born? Just to be used? To be duped into being part of the worst holocaust in the history of all the humanity in the universe? Why couldn’t there be a God? Why couldn’t there be meaning?
“Well, Keats?”
“You’re still in my head until the moment you delete me; you already know how I feel.”
“That’s true. We just wanted to hear you say it,” the nans responded sadistically.
“Go to hell,” James whispered.
The dark thing laughed. “We shall miss you too, James.”
James saw Thel in his mind and the corners of his mouth turned down as the anguish of never seeing her again pierced his heart.
A moment later, he was gone.
29
Gunfire from Lieutenant Patrick’s rifle ricocheted off Old-timer’s chest and deflected dangerously around the cockpit, threatening to seriously damage the instruments. “Give me that, damn it!” Old-timer shouted as he snatched the rifle out of the Purist’s hands and tossed it behind him. “Listen to her, for God’s sakes!”
“That’s not her!” Lieutenant Patrick shot back. He stood out in front of the other Purist soldiers, who were crouched in defensive postures in front of Governor Wong.
“It’s still me,” Alejandra pleaded. “We’re here to help you!”
“Where are the post-humans?” General Wong demanded.
“Where are Thel and the others?” Lieutenant Patrick echoed.
“They’re safe,” Alejandra replied.
“Where?” Lieutenant Patrick shouted.
“They’re not here anymore,” Alejandra tried to explain.
“You killed them, didn’t you?” Lieutenant Patrick demanded.
“No!” Alejandra exclaimed.
“Lieutenant Patrick, Governor Wong, our friends were infected,” Old-timer interjected.
“Infected?” Governor Wong guffawed. “Lies! Post-humans cannot become infected with anything! Their bodies are protected!”
Old-timer let go of a frustrated, exhausted sigh. “That was the infection, Governor,” Old-timer countered.
“He’s not lying, Governor,” Alejandra echoed. “The nans have formed a consciousness and they are launching an attack on any living thing that isn’t one of them as we speak!”
“This was all a trap,” Old-timer continued. “We’ve seen it for ourselves. The androids weren’t here to harm us at all—they were trying to save us!”
“What the...” Lieutenant Patrick began as the Purists were dumbfounded by yet another unpredictable and catastrophic turn of events.
“Look, I’m sorry, but we don’t have time to explain any more of this right now. We have to establish contact and warn the post-humans that are still out there,” Old-timer announced as he brushed Lieutenant Patrick aside and went to the com device in the cockpit.
“How can you send a communication signal that will reach the post-humans in time? Isn’t the attack wave moving through the nan population at the speed of light?” Alejandra asked.
“We can do it the same way you and I beat the signal back here,” Old-timer explained as he desperately worked to establish a link with the fleeing post-humans.
“A wormhole?”
“That’s right. The androids aren’t the only ones with the technology to circumvent the speed of light. Our communication signals work that way too. If we’re not already too late, we might be able to get a signal out to those that are furthest away from the solar system. I’m sending a warning that will go to anyone who is still out there.”
“What about the nans onboard?” Lieutenant Patrick asked.
“I’m generating an electromagnetic pulse that will disable the nans on the ship,” Old-timer replied.
Suddenly, his face went white.
“Your wife?” Alejandra asked, reading him like a book. Alejandra’s empath ability was as strong as ever.
“She’s alive,” he whispered as Daniella appeared on the screen in a slightly distorted, grainy image with a time delay of a few seconds.
“Craig?” Daniella said, as she peered at the image in her mind’s eye; she was still online.
“Daniella! You have to get offline! You have to deactivate your nans!” Old-timer shouted desperately.
The time-delayed pause took on a sickening agony.
“What’s happening, Craig? I don’t understand!” she replied, a terror-stricken look of confusion contorting her features.
“Listen, damn it!” Old-timer nearly screeched as he leaned in toward the screen and pounded the instruments in front of him. “You’re almost out of time! You need to deactivate your nans!”
Again, the time-delayed agony.
“How?” she finally responded.
“You and everyone there need to generate a strong enough electromagnetic pulse to shock yourselves offline!”
Another sickening pause.
“But, Craig!” Daniella countered desperately, “We’ll be helpless out here without our nans! How can we run the replicators? We won’t last a week! And we’ll lose contact with you. How will you find us?”
“I’ll find you, damn it! And you’ll last a hell of a lot longer than you will with those nans in you! They’ve turned against us! You have to—”
Old-timer didn’t finish his sentence. Just as Daniella had seemed to accept the situation and turned to her sister to relay the message, the nans signal finally reached her. The last he saw of his wife was an almost instantaneous liquefaction of her body before the signal went dead.
The last agonizing pause would be eternal.
30
His metallic hands crushed the edges of the screen to which he clung as though it were gumbo. It disintegrated, crumbling through his fingers, and he fell back onto the floor, putting his head into his hands, distraught, and letting his body shake with fury and despair. A moment earlier, Old-timer’s wife lived—just a moment. Yet it might as well have been an eternity.
Alejandra didn’t have to be an empath to know not to say anything. Instead, she draped herself over his back and cradled him as though she were trying to shield his body from a grenade in the trenches. She wished she could somehow absorb the pain for him, but she knew holding him was all that she could do.
Governor Wong silently waved away his troops; machine or not, Old-timer’s despair was clearly genuine—it deserved privacy. Only he and Lieutenant Patrick remained; like Alejandra, they stayed silent.
A long moment passed. It may have only been two or three minutes, but that kind of pain stretched time to an eternity. The moment may have continued for even a longer time if it weren’t for an incoming message to Alejandra and Old-timer. The grim-faced man was calling them through their android telepathic connection—a system very similar to t
he mind’s eye.
Alejandra answered the call for both of them. “Hello, Neirbo.”
“Your friends have been transformed and are ready to be roused. In respect of your request to be here when they awaken, we will await your arrival.”
Old-timer’s head was still firmly buried in his hands but he couldn’t hide from the message; there was the grim-faced man, Neirbo, staring at him. “We need you to respond immediately. We are under, attack and your friends will have to be awakened soon to give them a chance to defend themselves once the battle reaches us. If you are not here when they are roused, we will have to proceed with the education without you.”
“No!” Alejandra responded, jolting upward as the memory of her “education” shot through her like a bolt of electricity. Neirbo tilted his head back ever so slightly, as though he were startled by the strength of Alejandra’s reaction.
Old-timer reached up to put his hand over Alejandra’s to steady her. “We’ll be there shortly,” he said in a lifeless monotone.
“Hurry. Time is short,” the android replied.
“Where will you be?” Governor Wong inquired urgently.
“You’re not leaving us again, are you?” Lieutenant Patrick echoed, desperation in his voice. “We need you here to guide us.”
“You’ll be okay,” Old-timer replied. “We’ll set a course to get you out of the solar system and as far from all this carnage as possible. The Vega system has the most rocky planets; it’s probably your best bet to find a life-sustaining planet.”
“But why won’t you come with us?” asked Lieutenant Patrick, almost pleadingly.
“We are not astronauts,” Governor Wong stated frankly. “We will need assistance.”
“We’ll make sure we can return to you,” Old-timer said, getting to his feet. “But right now, our friends need us more than you do, believe me. We have to be there to help them first.”
“I’ll stay behind,” Alejandra suddenly announced, stunning Old-timer, who turned his head quickly in astonishment.
“Alejandra, I’m going to need your help to explain this to the others. They aren’t going to be happy to be...machines. You can help me persuade them.”
“I won’t be able to go with you,” Alejandra replied.
Old-timer paused as he suddenly realized why Alejandra wasn’t going to accompany him. “I can’t believe it. You actually want to go back into your flesh body,” he said, disbelieving his own words.
“Craig, I have to.”
“No you don’t!” Old-timer yelled out as he shut his eyes tight and moved sharply away from her. “You’re impossible! There is no reason for you to go back into that body! None! Neirbo already explained to you how your powers work! It has nothing to do with your flesh or your...spirits or anything else!”
“I heard what he said,” Alejandra replied, still speaking in a patient, even tone. She wouldn’t lose her patience; she knew where Old-timer’s pain was coming from. “He may be right...”
“May be? Are you kidding me? Christ!” Old-timer shook his head violently and grunted with frustration like a pit bull rejecting his master’s leash. “Reason is never good enough for you people, is it? Seeing evidence with your own eyes is never good enough! Well, here we are, Alejandra! You’re made of metal, and you’re still alive! You’re still you! Neirbo ripped out your insides to show you, but it still wasn’t good enough to convince you that your old body is a useless, fragile remnant of evolution!”
“Craig...it’s my body,” Alejandra replied, keeping her hypnotic eyes locked on Old-timer’s. “I can’t let it die. Can you honestly tell me that if you had the chance to go into your old body, you wouldn’t do it? You’d just let it die?”
“That flesh body will die, Alejandra! It’s just a matter of time and not much time either! That’s what you can’t appreciate because you’re so young and your body is healthy, but believe me, you are going to fall apart and quickly!”
“I can always choose to become like you, Craig. If I let my flesh body die now, however, I can never go back. Even if I could somehow remake a flesh body or clone myself, it would always be a copy.”
Old-timer’s breathing was slowing as he kept his eyes locked with Alejandra’s. As usual, in the face of what seemed like impenetrable logic, she was able to make a point that would cause him to pause. Why was he even huffing and puffing at all? Oxygen was useless for him. He could walk out into space and have a stroll if he wanted, completely unprotected from the radiation and extreme temperatures. So why huff and puff when angry? The answer was obvious: because this body was a copy. Whether his new body was better than the old one he used to have or not, it was still imitating the things that made the old one human.
He nodded slightly. “Okay. Okay, if that’s what you want to do. I won’t stop you.”
“Thank you, Craig,” she responded softly. “But I need more than that; I need your help.”
In the infirmary, Alejandra looked down at her body. It was still covered in dust, even though the medical staff had tried their best to clear it away. The room’s ceiling was still torn apart where James had blasted it.
“How rare a moment this is,” Alejandra commented in awe.
Old-timer watched as she stood over her own body. He wondered if she could still sense what he was feeling—complete and utter loss. As soon as she returned to her original body, she would no longer be able to follow Old-timer to where he needed to go. Didn’t she realize that this act would separate them? Perhaps she confused his feeling of loss for what he felt for Daniella; perhaps she was just too overwhelmed by the magnitude of her own decision to sense anything from him at all.
“I’m ready,” Alejandra said, suddenly snapping Old-timer free from the consumption of his thoughts.
“Okay,” he responded, brandishing his assimilator and putting it to her neck.
“Wait,” she said as she gently held his hand back. “This doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”
“I never said—”
“You’re very easy to read, Craig,” she replied, her eyes filled with sincerity. “Don’t give up on me. When you’ve done what you need to do with the others, come back to me.”
Old-timer was dumbfounded for a moment before he finally nodded.
“Okay. I’m ready,” she said.
“Okay,” Old-timer responded as Alejandra took her hand from his and let him touch her neck with the assimilator. Her android body thundered and clanked to the ground.
“God. Those are heavy bodies,” Lieutenant Patrick observed. The lieutenant, Governor Wong, and a doctor were present in the infirmary.
Old-timer held the assimilator for a moment—inside was the pattern of Alejandra. It was like holding her soul. He held it as though he were holding the most precious and fragile egg in the universe as he placed it onto Alejandra’s flesh body. As soon as the object touched her, her body reacted, and color began to return to her complexion. She didn’t wake up right away, but her muscles were reanimated for the first time as her unconscious body shifted position and she sighed.
“Oh my God—it’s a miracle,” the doctor whispered as he moved to the body and felt her cheek before quickly turning and calling for medical staff to join him. “We have to get her off life support! She’s waking up!”
Old-timer moved away from her and began to lift off out of the hole in the ceiling. “Wait!” Lieutenant Patrick exclaimed. “Don’t you want to be here when she wakes up at least?”
He shook his head. “No. I have to leave now. My friends need me. Tell her I said goodbye.” With that, Old-timer slipped through the ceiling and made his way out of the Purist ship.
Moments later, he floated alone through space. This close to the sun, it was difficult to make out the stars. He looked at his arm, garbed in black and outstretched before him, and realized it was impossible to delineate where his arm ended and the vast blackness of space began. “I’m ready, Neirbo,” he announced.
A wormhole opened up in the nothing
ness and swallowed him.
PART 3
1
WAKING UP was entirely unexpected; waking up to see his dead wife looking down at him was beyond reason.
“James? It’s time to wake up,” Katherine Keats said with a familiar hint of impatience in her tone.
James looked up at the form of his dead wife and studied it for a moment. It was perfectly vivid.
“You’re not dead,” Katherine said, as though she were responding to his thoughts.
Was it possible that there was some sort of residual electrical patterning that continued in the moments after death, even without a body? Could this be some sort of cyber death dream?
“You’re always trying to figure things out, aren’t you?” Katherine said, sighing and shaking her head. “Why can’t you simply ask?” She moved to the side and revealed another figure standing nearby. She addressed him. “You see? This is what you used to be like all the time.”
“I’m sorry,” James’s doppelganger replied, apologizing to her.
The doppelganger’s eyes met those of James, and he stepped toward his twin with an outstretched hand. “Help you up?”
James’s mouth hung open as he pondered the vision before him. He put his own hand up and grasped the hand that was offered to him, then stood to his feet. Katherine Keats remained, arms folded; she was wearing an expression of resignation. The doppelganger stood nearby with a considerably more sympathetic expression on his face. Behind them was a vast network of what appeared to be some sort of golden circuitry, glowing brightly and undulating like the sea all the way into the horizon where it sparkled like a setting sun in front of a pure black backdrop.
“Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen,” James whispered in awe.
The doppelganger smiled. “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” he observed, before adding, “you’re not dead, James.” He put his hand reassuringly on James’s shoulder.
Post-Human Series Books 1-4 Page 48