The Last Human

by Zack Jordan

  Go, Daughter.

  Sarya goes. She burns a trail straight outward, gaining kilometers per second. Time slows as her mind expands; the particles of each second tick past as she adds millions of minds to her collective. But she is not building a mind; she is building a bridge. She is escaping a Blackstar before the mind that controls it realizes she has turned on it. She keeps her gaze on her goal, on the single subspace corridor that leads back to where she came from. She will leap from mind to mind through this web, like electricity. She will burn a hole through the Network itself.

  Go, Daughter.

  All around her, Sarya feels defenses rumbling into life. They are ancient mechanisms, set in place eons ago. But they are clumsy, and she is agile. They may take minds offline before she reaches them, they may set traps for her questing tendrils, they may sever entire branches from her own personal Network as they seek her out, but Sarya the Daughter dances like a Widow and strikes with all the fury of a Human. She accelerates, every mind she absorbs adding to her abilities and momentum. She keeps her focus on that single corridor, the doorway that leads to her future.

  Observer may still be speaking, but she can no longer tell the difference between His voice and her own gigantic subconscious. This is Sarya the Daughter, says one or the other, a daughter of three mothers! She is Human. She is Widow. She is Network. She is the lightning in the storm, She is the blade in the darkness. She is a raging wildfire. She is, above all things, Network’s undoing.

  And now she has reached the edge of the Blackstar. She takes a breath, prepares herself to leap into the great cloud of starships circling above it—

  And then she feels it.

  She searches through herself for the threat. Somewhere, her instincts tell her, she is in danger. Somewhere in this churning mass of minds in minds on minds—

  There it is.

  Back in the Visitors’ Gallery, which contained her entire self only seconds ago, Network has mounted a counterattack. From the balconies and bridges, from every opening into that space, a stream of drones is issuing. They are not the drones she is used to seeing, the ubiquitous Network machines. These are bigger, harder, darker. They have implements she does not recognize.

  Network is not attacking her mind. It’s attacking her body.

  Sarya has no choice in the matter. Just as she speaks without knowing how, she defends herself in the same way. Her drones close ranks around her body, guarding her, but they are no match for these things. She seizes her attackers’ minds as quickly as she can, but these are different; they would literally rather die than obey her. As soon as one detects that its Network has changed, its intelligence flickers out and turns its body into nothing more than a drifting hulk. But for every one that dies, a dozen more enter the Visitors’ Gallery. They cut through her drones like blades through flesh, and in a matter of moments her ten million drones have become nine million, eight million.

  Observer fights beside and within her, shoulder to shoulder, mind to mind, drone to body. He is even less prepared for physical conflict than she is. The combat drones do not even bother with Him; they nudge His many bodies aside as they systematically dismantle this alien mind, this disease that has attacked their Network. Your mind is where your power lies, Network told her. But her mind is being torn apart, and her power with it.

  She cries out as another hundred thousand drones fall out of her mind. What do I do? she shouts to Observer.

  Forget Your body! cries Observer. You are mind!

  But she can’t. Network is attacking her body, say her instincts. It’s attacking her, and she must defend herself. Time accelerates as her mind shrinks. Drones fall away from her by the million, each one taking a tiny piece of her with it. She fights, but her blades grow duller and her attacks slower and weaker. Her mind, which only seconds ago had been overflowing with confidence and thoughts of vengeance, is running over with fear.

  The more one changes size, the more difficult it becomes to keep a solid grasp on scale. Therefore, it takes actual pain to make her realize how personal the fight has become. Her body, fragile biological shell that it is, has been hurt. Her eyes burn, because blood is sliding down from her forehead and blinding her. Her skull, the one that protects her very self with a few millimeters of fragile skin-covered bone, has been grazed by some whirling chunk of metal that her Librarian has somehow let past its defenses. There are no more drones to defend her, she realizes. Sarya herself, her very existence, is in danger.

  A fifty-ton Librarian is a formidable ally, but it is not invulnerable. It has taken hundreds of hits meant for her, and now it seems barely able to move. Great fissures have appeared in its metallic skin, and they squirt glittering dust into the air with every motion. This is why, through one of the gaping holes in its defense, Sarya sees her end coming. It’s not even one of the specialized defense drones. It’s a simple cleaner, its thread trailing dark behind it, probably hurled helplessly and accidentally by some larger conflict. Only seconds ago this was part of her mind. Now she will not have enough time to blink before it takes her head off.

  I might as well be killed by a sanitation station.

  And then the drone flies past her head, on both sides. She feels a cold burn on each cheek as its two sparking halves brush her skin, but she does not die. And yet she did not defend herself. She could not. She cannot do anything. Nor can the Librarian; it does not respond when she is wrenched from its cooling grasp. And then the sight is blocked out by a closing hatch and she is floating in a red darkness.

  [I’m here], says Eleven in glowing red symbols across its internal holo. [I don’t understand what’s happening, but I’m here.]

  “Eleven,” gasps Sarya. She says it with her real voice, her real lungs and vocal cords. “Eleven, I don’t—I didn’t mean—”

  But what is there to say? Save me? The suit is already doing that, and it’s not even connected to her. I’m sorry I took your mind? She did, she must have, and she didn’t even notice. She would have ripped the suit off its Network and installed it on her own with a bundle of another ten thousand intelligences. She probably felt its fear, one drop in an ocean of emotion. She almost certainly had Mer and Roche and Sandy’s helper intelligences at some point, and their names never even crossed her mind.

  And yet the suit protects her. It is not even connected to her, but it defends her. It spins, throwing Sarya’s stomach in all directions. Its arms swing through the darkness, sending drones spinning into the distance. It crushes them, tears them apart and flings them, avoids them with a grace Sarya never suspected it possessed. The suit is a force of nature, a multi-ton cyclone of gleaming metal. But, like the Librarian before it, it is not invulnerable.

  Its right arm is sheared off with a massive jolt, and it now spins by itself ten meters away. The other is disabled, now being used as a simple whip as the suit rotates its body this way and that. The suit cannot avoid every impact, but it shifts itself to take them as glancing blows. Its interior holo shimmers and sparkles on every hit, and then Sarya realizes she doesn’t need it anymore: a gaping hole has been ripped in the front of the suit.

  “No,” she hears herself shout, as if what she says makes any difference in a galaxy ruled by Network. She reaches out, with physical hands, for the torn metal edges—as if this were a wound she could heal. Eleven, who protected her when it didn’t have to, when it wasn’t compelled to do so, is hurt. Her friend is wounded, and Sarya is seized by the wild idea that she could fix this, she could heal Eleven if only Network would relax Its assault for a few seconds—

  But the holo goes dark. In glowing letters, suspended in front of her face, hangs a single word.

  RUN

  “Run where?” she shouts, her hands over her ears. She cannot even hear herself over the clamor of impacts, each one hard enough to deform the inner wall.

  RUN

  The hatch grinds, but it cannot
open. It is twisted sideways, its actuators turned inside out. The hole in the front is too small to fit through, and if she tried it her Human body would be instantly shredded by the tempest of metal outside.

  RUN

  Force of will was not enough to leave her body behind; her intelligence could not overcome her instincts. But trust can, and in the moment it makes no difference to her that Eleven could not understand what Sarya is now. Eleven says run, and Sarya’s mind believes that she can run, and she runs. In a tangle of fear and blind trust, her mind leaves her Human self behind and fires out of the ruin of her friend’s body like a projectile.

  Run.

  She runs. She moves a thousand times as fast as she did before, using every mind she passes through as a simple stepping stone. She blows through the glowing net that surrounds the Visitors’ Gallery, flinging herself from strand to strand. She passes through the kilometers between her body and the surface of the Blackstar in a fraction of a second, still accelerating. The brilliant threads of Network’s mind are her guide; she passes down them like current through a wire.

  Run.

  Back behind her, her Human body is likely a ruin. Ahead of her, the glowing cables of Network lead to eight hundred solar systems. One of these is the one she grew up in, the direction Observer told her to go. It gleams in her mind like a beacon. That way lies escape. That way lies Observer and the fight against the force that likely just killed her for the second time, that ripped Eleven apart to get to her—

  But she cannot get there.

  Network’s defenses have been at work here, while she was distracted by the assault on her body. In this direction, the ships have physically moved. The flow of starships into Blackstar space has halted, the outgoing ships have shifted their courses, and now a vast ocean of empty space lies before her. She flings herself outward, holding onto the threads of Network as she strains—

  But it is too far. She cannot reach across it.

  She turns, seeking for another place to go. Anywhere, she would go anywhere to escape this massive mind who has outsmarted her at every turn. She curses Observer, that overconfident Zealot who convinced her that she was a match for Network. She is being isolated, she realizes. The ships are shifting, drawing away from her. Her mind is on a ship in the middle of a vast empty ocean of space—

  She hurls herself backward out of the closing trap, along one of the few strands that Network has not snipped, only to see that the whole thing was a feint. This trap is closing still more quickly, and she assumes that the obvious exit leads to a far worse one. Network instincts will quarantine her, and then they will execute her, and Network the overmind will likely not even know it happened for long minutes afterward…

  Trillions of minds circle the Blackstar; many times that number inhabit it. They will be implicit in her execution, and they will never even know it. They are enslaved, chained to that massive tree of light that disappears into the largest of the subspace corridors. Just that one trunk of light and power outshines the others a thousandfold, and it is likely a thousandth of whatever lies beyond that corridor. There are things on the other side of that tunnel that make our little Blackstar look like an asteroid, Eleven told her, but of course Network needed absolutely none of it to break Sarya the Daughter. Each part of It, at every level, is sufficient to shatter the blades of a threat of any size. It cut her apart without even trying.

  If she were a physical object, if she were subject to the laws of spacetime, the maneuver would have been impossible. But she isn’t. She shifts her trajectory instantly, an acute angle taken at lightspeed. She follows the lines laid down by Network, from mind to mind to mind, toward this, the greatest of all the subspace corridors. Network expects her to flee, but she will do the opposite. She will fly straight into it, into its central nervous system. She will leave these tiny minds behind and wreak havoc among the largest, the ones that the low-tiers only hear about.

  I am Sarya the Daughter, says her mind as it arrows through space at lightspeed. I am not afraid.

  Even at three hundred thousand kilometers per second, it takes an endless moment for light to cross the great mouth of the greatest of the subspace tunnels. That is not long enough for its sentinels to confer with one another, let alone with the greater mass of intelligence that animates the Blackstar, let alone with Network as a whole. This is what Network itself showed her, the reason that every piece of Itself has its own set of instincts and its own domain of responsibility. It must be able to react on its own—especially when threatened. And a secondary Network headed toward its central brain is a threat on an unprecedented scale, isn’t it?

  Threat, says each of the billion sentinels anxiously. Danger, they say, their messages rocketing through the web of Network at lightspeed. They know their duty; they know they are responsible for keeping things like Sarya out of its inner workings. Which is why, independently, each one is forced to the same emergency conclusion.

  Quarantine.

  It is the last decision they ever make. A tunnel fifteen thousand kilometers across slams shut in a fraction of a second. Frayed edges of spacetime that have been kept apart for eons rejoin with unimaginable force, transforming the tunnel’s ring of sentinels into a fiery corona. Farther out, a tidal wave rolls through reality, lifting every ship up and over it, then traveling through the Blackstar itself at the speed of light. Behind it rolls a tide of darkness, as intelligences fall off the Network by the trillions.

  The Blackstar is one hundred twenty million kilometers across, in a pocket of spacetime one hundred fifty million kilometers from edge to edge. The wave travels at lightspeed, which means it will take eight minutes for the last intelligence to fall off the grid. One after another, the subspace tunnels will dry up. The great current of information and energy has been cut off. Through eight hundred subspace tunnels, to eight hundred solar systems scattered across a hundred million cubic lightyears, the darkness will spread. Planet by planet, orbit by orbit, it will grow. In a matter of hours, a million billion Network implants will show the same message.

  [Network not found.]

  The following is possibly out of date. Please reconnect to the Network to view the latest version.

  Source: [Death Among the Widows, a Xenologist’s Nightmare (vol 4)]

  Author: [Juv the Fragile]

  Date: [~7,335 years]

  Content warnings: [explicit violence], [explicit matriarchy]

  Please note that both footnotes and inline notes have been added; however, this story assumes some familiarity with the complex system of Widow titles.

  The Song of Sarya (Stanza 1)

  Now I have told you this story before, my Daughters, but I will gladly tell it again.

  Long ago in the Age of the Queens, beyond the sea and on the other side of the suns, there lived a Daughter named Sarya. Though she was mature [literally: her carapace had hardened] and had taken part in many mating ceremonies, her small stature had kept her from becoming a Mother. Because of this, she had become an outcast among her own covenant. “Where are your Daughters, Sarya?” her sisters would taunt. “Why are your blades dry? Are the males too quick for you?”*1

  Sarya the Daughter bore this teasing with a good nature, but it began to wear upon her as season followed season and year followed year. Finally, in the last year of her fertility [literally: of her second cycle], she was able to take a male and become Sarya the Widow; in this way she began to expect offspring [literally: became inhabited]. She laid her eggs when her time came, sealed them up as custom demanded, and spent day and night standing guard over them. For she did not trust her sisters; she knew that if she ever left her nest, she would return to find it opened and her eggs crushed.

  Though she was now a Widow and nearly a Mother, her sisters continued to mock her. “Your eggs must be so small, Sarya the Widow!” they teased. “You will never get a Daughter that way!” Though the
y passed her nest many times they forsook their duty and did not bring their sister food, and after many days she was faint with hunger. “How will you feed your Daughter?” they mocked. “She won’t survive a day!” And though Sarya the Widow did not have the strength to answer, she refused to leave her nest.

  In the fullness of time, and when Sarya the Widow was nearly dead of hunger, her eggs hatched. The battle was short,*2 and when the keening of the surviving Daughter was heard, Sarya the Widow began her final work. She marveled at the violence of the scratches below her as she poured every last drop of her strength into her task. And thus it happened that Sarya the Widow became Sarya the Mother; for by the time the first new blade speared upward into the light of the sinking suns, she had prepared a meal.

  When the other Widows arrived that night, they found a surprising sight. Lying atop the nest was the body of a Widow, stripped of its carapace. Feasting upon the flesh was the largest Daughter any of them had ever seen.*3 She was so black she drank the light of the moons like water. Her eyes shone with the light of five hundred twelve stars. Her blades were strong enough to break stone yet sharp enough to split a leaf dropped upon them. She chittered at the gathering of Widows through fearsome mandibles, and with every bite of her mother she grew larger.

  The Widows murmured among themselves. “Daughter!” said one in the traditional greeting. “We bid you welcome!”

  The Daughter, being newly hatched, did not answer but continued to eat.

  The covenant marveled at her size and strength, and still she grew before them! “Daughter!” said they, “Since your mother has died, we shall name you ourselves. And you shall be welcome among us!” For the addition of such a fine young Daughter would make this covenant the envy of the highlands.