by Isaac Hooke
One didn't seem too concerned that Hoodwink was gone. Without a word, the A.I. moved among the newcomers. Men exploded in blood wherever it went, just like Cap. Gone was the gloating. Gone were the extravagant deaths. One had decided to just kill these men and be done with it.
It was Tanner's fault. He had summoned these men and condemned them to death. He'd warned all of them before this began that this was a suicide mission. Yet they all volunteered. That didn't stop Tanner from dying a little inside with each man who fell.
Two men exploded at once. Three. Four men at once. Ten.
One had circled the area, and it paused now beside Tanner and Ari.
The A.I. looked down at her sprawled form. Tanner had thought himself emotionally numb at this point, but now that her turn had come, he knew he couldn't watch her die again. He would descend into madness.
One raised it's palm—
I'm so sorry Ari.
Apparently One had decided to prolong her death, because Ari's unconscious body floated into the air.
Tanner wanted to plead for her life, but his lips were frozen. He knew the A.I. wouldn't listen to him anyway.
He floated up from the sand now too, and he drifted forward until he hovered beside Ari.
He had to do something to distract One and somehow buy Ari time. If he could get One to kill him first...
Like his lungs, his eyes could still move, and he focused on the damaged barrier behind One. He was at just the right angle that he could see the subtle reflection of the desert on the transparent surface. He himself possessed no reflection, but he didn't need one. Not for what he intended.
Tanner focused on the reflected dunes and cleared his mind, beginning the process of disbelieving reality.
One followed Tanner's gaze and saw the subtly mirrored landscape. The A.I. swiveled its head back toward him. "Fighting to the very end, Tanner? I propose a race. Let us see if you can disbelieve this reality before I tear out your heart. When Hoodwink's daughter reawakens, I will take hers too so that your hearts may be joined together to the end."
One squeezed its hand.
Tanner felt a pressure building inside his chest, right where the wound in his heart was. His body began to shake.
Of course he wouldn't be able to disbelieve reality, not now, but he took a small comfort in the fact that he'd distracted One long enough to give Ari a few more moments. It was his turn to die for her, after all. And maybe, just maybe, the children would pull her out in time when they realized his vitals had flatlined alongside Hoodwink's.
It was the last hope he had, the only hope.
It felt like his chest was about to burst.
At least he knew the answer to the question he'd asked himself at the start of all this. Would he have the courage to die for her?
Absolutely.
Goodbye, Ari.
Without warning, the pressure in his chest ceded.
One glanced up sharply. "No."
The invisible binds lifted, and Tanner and Ari dropped to the sand.
One flickered. In its place stood a drunken Jeremy, dressed in a black robe with thread-of-gold tentacles running up one sleeve. Jeremy's eyes rolled up in his head and he toppled, lifeless, to the dune.
Tanner sat upright, hardly able to comprehend what had just happened. It was done then.
They had won.
He lifted Ari weakly in his arms. The wound in his chest throbbed painfully. He wasn't able to block the pain anymore.
Ari opened her eyes.
"Did we do it?" Ari said groggily. Her cheek was swollen purple where One had struck her.
Tanner forced a smile. "We did." His voice was just as groggy as hers, if not more so. He ran a gentle finger across her forehead. Vision was beginning to fail him, and it was all he could do to keep himself upright.
Ari pushed herself up and stared at the fresh blood stains all around her that blackened the dunes. She paused when she saw Jeremy's robed body, his face clearly visible. "Where's Hoodwink?"
"He—" Tanner's voice caught. Hoodwink threw himself past the system boundaries. Went back to that Topside of his, and somehow saved us all.
Ari grabbed him by the shoulders. "Tanner, where's Hoodwink?" Her lips were trembling.
Tanner shook his head. He felt faint, so very faint. He really needed to lie down. Darkness was encroaching on his vision. "He said... he said to tell you he was sorry."
"What are you talking about?" Ari released him, and clambered to her feet. "Hoodwink?"
Tanner remained upright for a few seconds longer, but finally his punctured body ceased to obey him and he collapsed.
"No!" Ari's voice seemed distant. She raised him in her arms, but his head flopped back, and she had to cradle his neck with her hand.
The darkness almost consumed his vision now. "Cap got me in the heart with his sword. I stanched... the wound... forced the muscle to pump. It's finally giving out on me. It didn't help that One almost pulled my heart out just now. Should've..." But he lost his train of thought. He felt so cold, and he was shivering though his forehead gleamed with sweat. Blood had started to flow again from the stump of his hand. Just as it had started to gush from the wound in his chest.
Ari tore a handmirror from her cloak. "Stay with me, Tanner. I'll get you out of here."
He smiled weakly. "One last kiss?"
She kissed him without hesitation. He felt tears splash onto his cheeks. His, or hers?
"We've a lobster date to go on," she said, her voice trembling.
"Sounds nice." Tanner closed his eyes.
"Stay with me." She sounded so far away. "Don't you dare close your eyes."
Tanner looked at her groggily. "My turn... to die this time."
"No! Don't you die! Not now. Not after everything!"
But the darkness came, and Tanner was gone.
130
Drenched in sweat, Ari focused on the handmirror.
She had to get out. Now.
Hoodwink was gone, probably dead. Tanner, the last person she cared about in this world, the last person she had left, was dying. It was up to her to save him. Up to her to return to the Outside and pull him out.
Her face throbbed in pain where One had hit her. Her battered body ached from the intense melee. But she ignored her physical woes, as gols sometimes could, and stared into the reflected world of the handmirror. She had a reflection, these special mirrors made sure of that, and she looked upon her bruised face, remembering what Hoodwink had told her so long ago.
Know, deep inside, that none of this is real. That your heart beats in a far-off place. That your thinking comes and goes in a mind that lives on the Outside. You are the illusion. The person in the mirror is real.
That was true in this reality, and the next. After where she had been, what she had seen, she recognized all of this for the fallacy that it was.
Urgency filled her and, sitting there among the dead, in the sand dunes beyond civilization, she did something that she had never done before. Something no one else had ever done.
She disbelieved reality in under thirty seconds.
She blinked her eyes in the real world and immediately sat up.
Her helmet and gloves lay on the table in front of her. She saw Hoodwink slumped, unconscious, against the terminal beside her. She turned around. Tanner hadn't revived yet either. The other children, intent on their own terminals, hadn't seemed to notice that she was awake.
She spun back to her own terminal and initiated the retrieval procedure Tanner had taught her.
Neither Tanner nor Hoodwink awoke.
She tried again. "Come on. Come on!"
"Ari!" Caylin came rushing to her side.
"Wake Tanner up," Ari said. "Someone wake him up! And Hoodwink!"
"I'm trying!" Stanson said from across the room. His face was grim. "I initiated the pullback for both of them. They should be awake by now..."
Ari untethered herself and pushed away from the terminal. She touched Hoodwink's b
are wrist. Like her, he'd left the gloves of his suit on the terminal. He had no pulse.
She went to Tanner. No pulse either.
"They're dying!" she said. They're dead. "What do we do?"
"Neither of them have brain readings," Andes said. The bald child stared into his terminal. He sounded shocked. "We could hook them up to the ECMO heart-lung and keep them alive, but... but they're vegetables."
Ari set herself down beside Tanner, and sagged against the desk.
Neither of them have brain readings.
So this was how it would end.
The two people she loved more than anything in the world, both gone.
Ari's head tilted to the side, and her eyes lost focus.
She knew that death was nothing to fear. That Tanner and Hoodwink were in a good place, a better place, where they would know unlimited love, as she had when she was gone. Yet she couldn't help but feel a sense of regret for the life they could've had together.
"Wait a minute," she heard Andes say.
"Hey Teach."
Her head shot up. Tanner was awake beside her.
She buried her lips in his, almost falling off balance, not caring who was watching.
She pulled away. "I thought you were dead. You had no pulse. No brain readings."
"Maybe you checked wrong."
She touched his wrist with her index and middle fingers, just below the sleeve of his skin-tight blue uniform. This time there was a pulse. "No. I checked right."
Tanner shrugged. "Well, I couldn't die. Had to hold you to our lobster date."
She kissed him one more time, a quick peck, and then went to Hoodwink. She rechecked her father's pulse, hoping for a miracle.
Not this time.
"So you've left me again, dad," she said sadly. "So soon after coming back. Just like you always do."
Tanner was alive at least. Life was often bittersweet, wasn't it?
A brief, brilliant flash came from the window on the far side of the room. The children hurried over to it.
"Guys," Stanson said. "Take a look at this."
Ari and Tanner approached the window together.
When Ari got close, Caylin held her hand.
She stared out the long window into the starfields of the Ganymede sky.
Ari saw the purple ribbons of the aurora borealis. The dancing lights that were one of the greatest spectacles of the universe, the lights that Hoodwink promised she would see one day.
And above those ribbons she saw a spreading cloud of glitter, in a pattern reminiscent of fireworks. She realized it was debris from the ship that had been in orbit. There were no plumes of smoke, no fireballs, just pieces of metal expanding from a central point in the sky, the tiny metallic edges catching the light of the distant sun.
"Hoodwink," she said. "So he's really gone." Her voice cracked. "He's crossed the final Forever Gate. For us." For me.
Tanner rested a comforting hand on her shoulder. "When beggars die, there are no comets seen; but the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes."
Ari smiled sadly. "He never got to build the utopia he wanted."
"We'll do it for him." Tanner lowered his hand and clasped hers in his.
"He's not dead," Ari said. "Not really. None of us ever dies." She glanced at Tanner. "Did you see it, when you were gone? Just now?"
"See what?" Tanner seemed genuinely puzzled.
"Forever." Ari stared at the twinkling debris. "When I fell from the wall, Brute slammed the disk into my head. I found myself back here, in the Outside, except I was looking down at myself from a corner of the room. There was a wispy cord that connected me to my body. As I watched, that ethereal cord slid over to the terminal beside my body.
"There was a being next to me. I couldn't see him, but he told me not to worry about the cord, or how delicate it looked. There was a tunnel behind me, and I went inside. There were beings of light in the tunnel. I saw relatives. I saw Cora. But Hoodwink wasn't there.
"I neared the end of the tunnel, and my life played back. My actions weren't judged by anyone except myself. I could see myself, reliving the important events from the point of view of the people I cared about. And I could feel how my mistakes hurt them, because I was them. I felt the hurt I caused Hoodwink and Cora. I felt the hurt I caused you. I—"
Tanner interrupted. "You've never hurt me."
"I have. But in that moment, I swore if I ever returned that I'd be a better person. That I'd help others, even gols, and try to be more mindful of how my actions affected them. I emerged from the tunnel into a land of brightness. I felt peace, well-being, love. There was a bridge of white light, spanning a sparkling river. A gold gate, towering to infinity, was set across the middle of the bridge. It was the final Forever Gate that all creatures in the universe must one day pass.
"I looked back, and saw that I still had that thin umbilical connecting me to the world of the living, though it was slighter than ever. I knew if I crossed over that final threshold, if I crossed that final Forever Gate, the cord would break entirely and I could never return. So though I felt peace, forgiveness, and love, I didn't cross. Instead, I waited."
Tanner was silent a moment. "Why? If that place was so good, why would you want to come back to this?"
"Because Hoodwink wasn't there." Ari squeezed his palm, and looked into his eyes. "And because you weren't there."
Epilogue
A million bits of crumpled metal and ice drifted through space. Ranging in size from specks smaller than dust to fragments larger than mansions, the edges of each individual piece sparkled like icicles under the faraway sun. Some of them rotated. Others broke apart and disintegrated. Many of the metallic fragments were in fact coated in ice, or were chunks of ice themselves. Large swaths of mist—microscopic pellets of frozen water—gradually dissipated in the gaps between fragments, proof of what happens when an exploding ocean flash-cools in space.
A small pod floated amid the glittering wreckage. It carried one roomful of water, one compact energy source, and one bittersweet Satori.
Graol had the pod all to himself. Through the portal, he saw other pods dispersed among the glittering fragments. The nav controls of those escape pods were all preprogrammed to return to the nearest colony, in this case the third planet of the system, Earth. The Vargos was gone, but its passengers survived.
Still, he felt little satisfaction over what he had done.
The Vargos had possessed some of the same security layers as the human starship. Sub-A.I.s could veto commands from the main A.I., The Shell. However there was a flaw in the security design—no sub-A.I.s protected the power system. That area of the ship was just a dumb interface under the direct control of The Shell, like the satoroids. Thus the tailored virus Graol had created allowed him to bypass the security measures of the power system and overload the core.
When he initiated the overload, the automated escape procedure kicked into gear. The fleshy umbilicals and placentas slid along the support tracks to the evac chambers, bringing the respective Satori along with them. Eight Satori at a time were packed into the escape pods of the lower-class oceans, while the pods of the upper class held only one. The slave classes were left behind, as none of those races had consciousness anyway. Once the occupants were loaded into the escape pods, the hatches were sealed and the pods jettisoned.
There was enough time before the core exploded for every Satori aboard to be stowed in a pod and ejected. At least that's what Graol hoped. He hadn't wanted to kill any Satori by doing this. That wasn't what this was about.
No. It was about Javiol, and his surrogate Jeremy.
The thirty-eight remaining surrogates would have awakened the instant they were transferred to the escape pods. Forcibly emptying the Satori consciousnesses from the human surrogates was essentially the same as killing those surrogates. When Javiol awoke, the human that was Jeremy died, ending his link with One.
Destroying an entire ship was a harsh price to pay when Graol onl
y needed to disconnect one surrogate, but Ari and Tanner didn't have the luxury to wait around while he tracked Javiol down.
So he'd destroyed the Vargos.
Javiol was floating somewhere out there in the debris field at this very moment, lying awake in a pod. He was upper class, so he would be alone like Graol. Without The Shell to guide his awakening and initiate Return therapy, he'd have no knowledge of who he was, nor of the technology available to him within the escape pod. He would still be Jeremy in his mind. Graol imagined him frantically slamming his tentacles into the metal walls, flailing about like a caged prisoner, trapped not only in a cell of metal and water, but in a body of tentacles and cilia.
It would be a long journey for that one.
Graol tethered himself to the local A.I. of the pod and prepared to enter hibernation. His only regret was that he hadn't had time to permanently transfer his consciousness to a human body before he destroyed the Vargos. That would just have to wait another day.
Goodbye Ari.
Before he went under, he reached out, searching for Javiol.
There. A quadmind whose thoughts were a confused bundle of madness and terror. A quadmind that still thought it was human. A quadmind that once believed it could do anything to anyone, no matter how cruel or sadistic, without repercussions.
Graol transmitted a single message.
Welcome to the real world, Jeremy.
He thought he heard Javiol scream.
This is the end. Or is it?
Get the Next Book
Volume Two
The story continues…
Part I
Rebirth
1
Sword in hand, Ari cautiously made her way forward through the ruins of the market square. The signs of the recent attack were obvious—shredded tents, apples spilled from carts, small blast craters in the cobblestone, the bodies of four guards. Unfortunately there were no witnesses, as everyone had fled. The shutters on the surrounding buildings were sealed tight.