by Barry Lyga
“MentorPlexes II and III,” he pointed out, “will be at capacity on the day they open. And still an estimated six hundred thousand Titans will live in constrained quarters. We literally cannot build fast enough to house everyone, and even if we could, we would run out of necessary materials and food before we finished.
“Everything we do to stave off the threat only contributes to the weakening of our environment and increases the chances that the variables will line up sooner rather than later. We are shoveling dirt out of a hole, not aware that every shovelful rains back down on us and threatens to bury us. We live in a graveyard. We just haven’t interred ourselves yet.
“I don’t want this to be true. I don’t want any of it to be true, but I am a slave to fact and truth and science.
“The conclusion is inescapable, my friends. We face darkness and apocalyptic disaster if we do nothing. However, there is a way out.
“My proposition is simple, so I will be brief: I submit that in order to stave off this inevitable catastrophe, we voluntarily euthanize roughly fifty percent of our current population. This population reset will ensure that our species has the time and motivation to adjust our way of life—it is too late to prevent this catastrophe without drastic measures, but it will not be too late to prevent the next one.
“In the interests of objective fairness, I have developed a perfectly random selection algorithm that will choose our proud martyrs without bias as to class, age, deportment, or creed.
“Furthermore, in a show of absolute faith in the rightness of my conclusions, I have hard-coded a single Titan into the algorithm, one who will be auto-selected to be put to death. That person is, of course, me. I am happy to die for the greater good, for the sanctity and salvation of our future generations. If nothing else does, let this be proof of my urgency and sincerity.
“I have devised an exceedingly humane method of painless euthanasia,” he went on. “No one need suffer. We are not monsters.
“According to my math, this solution will guarantee a safe and prosperous Titan for a thousand more generations. Consider the lives that will come into being, secure in the knowledge that the sacrifice of their ancestors—us—has guaranteed them safety, stability, and well-being into the foreseeable future.”
The hologram paused here, long enough for the message to sink in.
“A small price to pay,” Thanos said to his world. “A small, sensible price to pay to warrant our future.”
CHAPTER VIII
ODDLY, GWINTH DID NOT RESPOND WHEN HE TRIED TO CALL her. According to her personal beacon, she was online and available, but she did not answer his hail. She was the first person he thought to contact after his message was delivered.
(It was technically still being delivered—he’d set the hologram to repeat itself every half hour for four hours, just to be sure the message sank in.)
Sitting in his room, controlling the broadcast from his interface desk, Thanos had no idea of the reception to his announcement in the Eternal City. When he called Sintaa, his friend only said, anguished, “What have you done? What have you done?” and then signed off, leaving Thanos with the echo of Sintaa’s terror and the afterimage of the haunted expression on his face.
Thanos emerged from the MentorPlex into a quieter world than he’d ever known. The usually crowded streets were now empty of passersby. Had everyone retreated to their houses to discuss his plan? That would make sense.
Overhead, his hologram recited its dirge. He was pleased and slightly unnerved to find that his photon-refraction technique had worked—the hologram seemed to be addressing him directly. His own visage, several stories tall, stared at him. So strange.
He proceeded to Gwinth’s home. He rang and rang, and eventually she opened the door. Tears streamed down her face, blurring the pristine, painstakingly placed green-dotted pattern makeup she wore.
“How could you?” she whispered before he could say anything.
“How could I?” he asked. “What do you mean?”
Her eyes widened. “Thanos! Thanos, have you lost your mind?”
He gave the matter a moment’s consideration. “Not at all. I’m fine.” He took her hands in his. They were limp and lifeless. “Is something wrong?”
Jerking her hands out of his grasp, she took a step back. “Is something wrong? Is something wrong? You have lost your mind! How could you do that?” She flung a hand out behind her, where he could see—through a window in the apartment—his hologram.
“I…” He paused, licked his lips, thought carefully. “I’m doing exactly what you told me to do, Gwinth.”
With a glare, she raked her fingers through her close-cropped hair. “What I told you to do?”
“ ‘We’re talking about the survival of our entire species,’” he quoted her, “ ‘our way of life. You have to do it. You have to do whatever it takes, Thanos. Save Titan.’”
Horrified, she took another step back. “Not this. Not this!”
“Whatever it takes,” he told her. “It’s the only way. Don’t you think I considered all possibilities? Don’t you think I would have exhausted every possible methodology before suggesting something so radical? We can’t leave the planet—the effort required to construct the necessary fleet would exhaust resources even more quickly and just hasten the—”
“Listen to you!” she shouted. “This is all just science to you! But it’s people’s lives!”
He blinked rapidly. Hadn’t she been listening to him? “Yes. Lives I’m going to save. Well, half of them.”
She covered her mouth with her hands, tears flowing afresh, and stepped fully inside, letting the door slide shut between them.
No matter how much he thumbed the entry button, and even when he mimicked Sintaa and banged at the door with his fists, she did not answer.
He tried Sintaa next.
“You have to take it back,” his best friend said in a slow, careful tone. “You have to recant. Immediately.”
They sat in the antechamber of Sintaa’s house, the small receiving room just adjacent to the living quarters. Out of deference to Sintaa’s family, they kept their voices low, though even the soft volume of his friend’s voice could not belie the urgency of his words.
“Recant? I said nothing false. Everything I said is empirically true.”
Sintaa groaned and leaned back, hands on knees. “Thanos, no one cares about your empirical truth. Have you seen the reports? After your broadcast, there were riots in the Eternal City! Panic-driven. People fled to their homes. Accident rates quadrupled. There are reports of suicides. Suicides. Do you know the last time there was one suicide in the Eternal City, to say nothing of multiples?”
Thanos actually did know, and he opened his mouth to tell Sintaa, but his friend cut him off with a gesture. “You have to recant. Say it was a really bad practical joke. Or say you’ve rechecked your math and you were wrong.”
“I will do no such thing. I will not lie.”
Sintaa shook his head. “Then at least rescind this euthanasia plan of yours. Tell people you’ll come up with a better way.”
“There is no better way. I’ve expended considerable time and thought on this, and my plan is the only one guaranteed to work.”
“Then do something that’s not damned guaranteed!” Sintaa exploded, rising up, the cords of his neck rippling as he screamed. “You can’t just say you’re going to kill half the planet!”
Thanos considered this. “But I did.”
Sintaa swallowed with difficulty, as though his throat had to choke down words. “I think you should leave, Thanos.”
“But—”
“There’s nothing else for me to say to you.”
“I thought we were friends.”
Nodding slowly, Sintaa pursed his lips. He looked down at his feet and took a great deal of time before he finally spoke:
“Would you kill me if your algorithm dictated?”
Thanos tilted his head to one side. It was an odd, almost childis
h question. He turned it over in his mind for a moment, in case he had missed some sort of subtle nuance. But there was none.
“Of course,” he told his friend. “I’m going to kill myself, too, Sintaa.”
Sintaa nodded again, this time with his jaw clenched. He looked up at Thanos, his eyes glimmering and burning at the same time. “Go home, Thanos. There’s nothing more to say.”
On the way home, news spikes came through his personal receiver. Twelve hundred had died in the riots and five times that number were injured in the wake of Thanos’s broadcast. At home, he sat in darkness for a full six hours, thinking.
He had lived with the knowledge of Titan’s impending destruction for many days. He had steeped himself in the data. As a result, he was somewhat immune to its impact. He hadn’t calculated the possibility that the mere knowledge of the catastrophe to come would have repercussions of its own.
“Twelve hundred dead.” A’Lars had appeared in Thanos’s doorway and was not bothering to conceal his abject fury. Thanos had never seen his father struggle so with emotion. A’Lars almost always was able to control himself, to keep his feelings bottled up, letting slip only the disgust and annoyance engendered by his son. Now, though, his full rage was on display, his complexion mottled, his face twisted into a rictus of ferocity.
“Twelve hundred! You claim to love this world, Thanos, and you just killed twelve hundred of your fellows! What do you have to say to that?”
Thanos thought for a moment. He thought about the future generations that would never draw breath, of the children yet unconceived who would never be born, of the end of Titan.
It was all too easy to imagine. He could see it in his mind’s eye, hear the cries of the dying, the mourning of those left behind just long enough to feel regret.
“Twelve hundred,” he said. “Twelve hundred souls. Statistically insignificant. Not nearly enough to have the ripple effect of my plan to save Titan. We’ll still need to eliminate half the population.”
A’Lars uttered a wordless cry.
“I have larger concerns than a mere twelve hundred lives,” Thanos said equably. “I am trying to save millions and, going forward, billions. I cannot be held responsible for what happened. I explained myself in simple terms. No one listening should have panicked.”
“Listening?” A’Lars fumed. “Listening? You intruded on people’s lives. You projected a… They saw a great monster bestride the City, promising to murder half of them. What result did you expect?”
“I suppose I expected them to react with reason and compassion, not base animal instinct.”
His father took a step back, the anger on his face rewritten into a sort of quiet horror.
“We thought your mother was the Mad Titan,” A’Lars said in a voice barely above a whisper. “But I see now that this was false. You are, Thanos. Your mind is as warped as your appearance. Your thoughts are as deviant as your flesh.”
Thanos cleared his throat and stood, pulling himself to his full height. He clasped his hands behind his back and leaned in, towering over A’Lars.
“And what, Father, do you plan to do about it?”
To his credit, A’Lars did not flinch when he answered.
CHAPTER IX
CRIME ON TITAN WAS NEARLY NONEXISTENT. THERE WAS NO such thing as capital punishment and no facility that could hold someone of Thanos’s strength and intelligence.
So the people of Titan decided on the most direct solution: exile.
Not exile from the Eternal City. No.
Exile from the planet.
And so at the age at which Titans usually ventured out into their great society to discover themselves and their individual destinies, Thanos was cast not into the world but rather from it.
CHAPTER X
THE SHIP WAS NAMED EXILE I BY THOSE WHO’D PUT HIM in it.
Thanos rechristened it Sanctuary.
CHAPTER XI
HE ALLOWED HIMSELF A SINGLE LOOK BACK ON HIS HOMEWORLD as the ship breached the outer atmosphere and exploded into the star-pocked black of space. Titan’s atmosphere, a thick, unyielding organonitrogen fog, appeared orange from space. The Eternal City, swallowed by the haze, was invisible to the naked orbiting eye. Thanos told himself that everything he knew lurked beneath that haze, and then he told himself that it didn’t matter.
The ship’s autopilot had been set to send him into the inner solar system, to worlds considered habitable places for one such as he. That was the safe course, the reliable choice. But he had no desire to be safe or reliable.
They could banish him from Titan, but beyond that they could not claim his destiny. For the first time in his life, Thanos was free. Trapped in a tiny spaceship with few resources, yes, but free of second-guessing, free of hatred, free of fear and disgust.
Free of love. Of the need for it.
There was no one to love in Sanctuary except himself, and Thanos had better things to do with his time.
The ship was tiny, essentially an oversize coffin grafted onto a sublight engine. Aimed into the inner orbits of the solar system, it had just enough speed and power to get him to one of the allegedly habitable worlds closer to the local star.
He hacked the autopilot immediately.
Every last atom in his being yearned to turn the ship around and head back to Titan, but that would only delay his exile, not end it. They would just fire him off into space again.
If he headed inward, he would land somewhere within the solar system, somewhere primitive and raw and lacking the technology needed to eventually return and save Titan. He would be stuck.
But if he headed out of the solar system, away from the sun, there was an entire universe of possibilities. A panoply of worlds. A menagerie of races and species. Somewhere out there, he would find the help he needed. He would find a way to return to Titan and save his people despite themselves.
Sanctuary was not designed for interstellar travel. Built to carry him a few light-minutes away, it had limited fuel and only enough food and water for a month.
He told the autopilot to plot a course to the Kree homeworld, Hala, the closest civilization he could identify. Proud, militaristic, the Kree possessed the technology and the know-how he needed. Titans were brilliant, but isolated. Conflict accelerated science, and the Kree had years of experience at war. They had armies and fleets of ships. Everything Titan lacked. He would return to Titan with an army at his back, if necessary. Whatever it took to convince his people to listen.
When the time came, he would figure out how to persuade the Kree to help him. For now, it would suffice to get there.
There was not enough power in the engines to make it to Hala, so he rerouted power from all other systems, including life support. The temperature in Sanctuary quickly dropped to below freezing. Thanos fought off the urge to shiver, and instead he closed his eyes and meditated himself into a trance state.
Dimly, as though from a far-off distance (although it was from a speaker ten centis from him), he heard the synthetic voice of the autopilot counting down to the maximum fuel burn he’d programmed. The course was plotted. The ship would do the rest.
By the time the engines flared and Sanctuary lurched to life, blasting its way out of the solar system, Thanos had already meditated himself into a coma. He never saw the beauty of the stars blurring by as Sanctuary ferried him out of the solar system and into the galaxy beyond.
And he dreamed.
He dreamed of her. She came to him. She touched him. She told him what to do.
Remember when you wake, she told him. Remember what I have told you.
I will, he promised, but even in the dream, he knew that he would not. He knew that he would awaken and forget, that he would fail at so rudimentary a chore.
And yet he promised anyway. In the dream, he imagined the memory was a physical thing, and he clung to it, holding it tight, swearing never to let it go.
CHAPTER XII
“’E’S A BIG ’UN, HE IS!”
A voi
ce swam into the darkness and the silence. Thanos tried to turn his head toward it but couldn’t move.
“Truth, not lie!” said another voice. “Not lie! Truth!”
“Aye, an’ sure!” said the first.
Hands on him. At his neck. Something solid and heavy clicked into place there. Thanos struggled up, kicking against the tide of his self-induced coma. He tried to open his eyes, but they wouldn’t cooperate.
“Big an’ alive,” said the first voice.
“Alive and big!” agreed the second.
Thanos lost his fight against the dark. It swallowed him whole.
When he at last opened his eyes, he thought first of his dream. He remembered her, remembered her whisper in his ear, her admonition to remember. And he recalled with perfect clarity his own certainty that he would not remember, that his memory would fail him.
It had. He could not remember what she had told him.
This all occurred to him in the instants between opening his eyes and his vision clearing from the blur of his long sleep. He lay on a bed, an old-fashioned affair that actually rested on a floor. Blankets—blankets!—swaddled him, rather than the comfort of a heat field.
This was not the Kree homeworld, he realized immediately. The Kree possessed far better technology and comfort than this.
Sitting up, a wave of nausea and vertigo overcame him, sending his head spinning and then crashing back down onto the pillow.
Remember, she had told him. Remember.
But he couldn’t. He remembered setting the autopilot, inducing his own coma so he could survive on limited life support. He remembered the dream in exquisite detail except for that one damned part!
He clenched a fist. In his weakened state, it drained him but felt good nonetheless.