by Zack Jordan
“Fourth—” shouts yet another.
“It’s third, idiot,” Sarya hears Right murmur, his voice clear in the near-silence.
“There will be fireworks,” says the Observer, raising a cup to the black sky. “And believe Me, I won’t want to miss those.”
Throughout the clearing, small bodies whistle and slap their hands together. They shout things that Sarya doesn’t understand. Many raise cups, and more than a few of those fall over from the sudden shift in balance. Some of the silhouettes closest to the train reach out and touch the quivering not-quite-Observers, who seem to pull into themselves to escape.
“To Me!” shouts an Observer, raising a cup.
“To Me!” roars the rest of Him.
Without further preamble, the escort of the graduate nearest Sarya lay their hands on it, moving its clothing so they touch bare skin. It struggles, pulling against their hold, and even in the darkness Sarya can see the fear in its golden eyes. A blend of reactions passes down the line; Observer watches eagerly, while each graduate displays something between fascination and horror. In the center of the line, Left continues to stare at the ground while Right glares at the nearest Observer with absolute hatred.
“I have something to say!” shouts the struggling figure in a voice that pierces the night.
“It doesn’t matter,” murmurs one of its escort kindly. “I’ll know everything you know in a few seconds.”
“I’ve decided that….that you have no right!” shouts the figure. “I am a person.”
“You’re not, actually,” says an Observer, delivering a friendly clap on the back. “But you’ll be part of one in a few seconds. Now—”
“But that’s not true! I feel! I dream! I have—”
“Welcome,” interrupts Observer with a thousand smiles. “Welcome to Me.”
The figure goes rigid, and the clearing fills with a sound that chills Sarya’s bones. It’s not a scream, it’s beyond that. It’s a hiss, a long, drawn-out whimper, the cry of a creature in so much pain that it can’t do anything but make that one single sound.
But as that sound soars above the crowd, another rises to meet it. Observer moans from thousands of mouths. Twice that number of eyes roll back in His eye sockets. Hands tremble and clench. Bodies writhe in what looks like actual ecstasy, some actively seizing on the ground. Even some of the Observers Sarya thought were unconscious are now digging their hands into the filth beneath them, mouths open and drooling. Observer sighs, from deep in His massive self, as he consumes.
“Oh, yes,” Sarya hears a nearby Observer whisper from the ground. It arches its back from the wet surface. “Oh, that’s good.”
And then the horrible cacophony fades away. The graduate straightens, and its escort releases it. It strips off its handmade clothing and slips a tunic over its head. In seconds, it has raised a cup to the crowd with a smile.
“To Me!” says the Observer.
“To Me!” thunders the crowd.
Observer takes. He reaps. He moves down the line, from one to the next, unwrapping, plucking, eating minds like food bars. He welcomes each one with the same awful phrase. His appreciation during the act, if anything, grows. His moans crescendo from horrifying to absolutely intolerable.
And then Sarya sees the shine of Right’s head in the firelight. She watches as two Observers move its clothes to place their hands on bare skin—and then one of the identical figures starts and draws back, wiping its face. For a split second Sarya sees a flash of Right’s grin with a dribble of saliva below it. Even in the face of inevitability, seconds before the death of its own individuality, Right lets his scorn be known.
But it doesn’t matter; it barely buys him a handful of seconds. “Welcome!” says Observer from any number of mouths. He smiles His kindly smile upon the small figure standing defiantly in His grip. “Welcome to—”
“Stop!” Sarya shouts into the night. Her entire body vibrates with the word, from curled toes to one clenched fist, and she realizes that she has pushed herself to unsteady feet. She gazes outward for a moment, as Observer stares at her from thousands or millions of eyes—and then she wades into Him, shoving herself through His tottering bodies. Even sober they would not be able to resist her individually, and in their current state the very best they can do is protest when they fall over. She charges, in as straight a line as she can manage, to the spot where the line transitions from smiling and drinking Observers to quivering victims.
“Hi!” say the wobbling Observers holding onto Right, as if she had just dropped by for a friendly conversation.
Sarya chooses one to address. “Let go,” she says to it quietly.
“Why?” asks the Observer, looking genuinely mystified.
She can feel the great mind back there, the god, tattered and unstable as its hold on this particular drunk body may be. Observer stares at her through more eyes than she can count, but Sarya stares Him down with every scrap of Widow or Human or Network or whatever the hell she is. “You owe me,” she hisses. “Like You said: this is all because of me. I’m the—” She searches her slowed mind for the exact phrase. “The source of Your merriment.” She almost shivers as she says it.
Observer looks at her for a moment, His golden gazes piercing her from every angle. She stands straight, aware that she is being measured and assessed from every side.
“Okay,” says one with a smile.
And then Right stumbles forward. It rubs its bald head with one hand, staring at her as if it can’t believe what just happened.
“This one too,” she says, pointing at the next victim.
“Okay,” says Observer again, with another smile.
Left stands next to its partner, as close as two people can be and still be called individuals. But they are individuals, thanks to her. She cut eight hundred star systems out of Network’s control, and she cut these two out of Observer. They are free. Now they can follow their own paths, choose their own destinies—
Like Mer. Like the Humans.
Sarya does not pursue the thought further, and she does not look at the huddled figures she has just freed. She grits her teeth and refuses to look away from Observer’s golden gaze. She has no idea what is right or wrong anymore, or even if those things exist, but if Right can spit in Observer’s face then Sarya the Daughter can stand here and stare into those golden eyes until—
Observer blinks.
He does it in a wave that propagates into the darkness around the single figure that Sarya is staring down. He clears His throats, in a vast ripple of moist sounds. And then with one movement, the rest of the graduates are released. They stand for a moment, rubbing arms and glancing nervously around, before slinking off into the gloom and near-silence. Observer ignores them, His every eye on Sarya.
“Is there a problem?” asks Observer.
Sarya stares at the speaker. Its small-talk tone is so far removed from what she has just seen that it takes her a moment to form a reply. “Is there a—yes, there’s a problem,” she says, made bold by drink and adrenaline. “It’s a problem that you just—you just ate a bunch of people, and you tried to eat two of my friends.”
Several Observers tap fingertips on chins. “Ah, I see what’s happening here,” one says, as if something has just been made clear. Several of Him smile. “A problem of definitions, that’s all.”
“Of definitions?” she says. “They were people, you sick—”
“Did you feel this way,” says Observer, “when you were pulling all those minds into yourself, back on the Blackstar?” His gentle smiles do not waver.
Sarya stops. She can feel her face burn in the darkness, and she’s almost sure it’s not the drink. “Okay,” she says softly. “That was…different.”
“Not at all!” says Observer. “It was just as beautiful as this evening has been.” He looks fondly down the line of Hi
s new bodies, meeting His own gaze with dozens of smiles and waves.
Sarya’s discomfort is now beginning to blossom into anger. “It. Was. Different,” she hisses. “I heard it, when You—when You ate these guys.” She waves a hand down the line, at the brand-new Observers blinking and smiling in a row. “They were people. And they begged You not to do it. And then You did it anyway, not because they wanted it but because You did.”
“I think you’re missing a very fundamental point,” says Observer, still smiling. “It doesn’t matter what they want, because they are not people. Do you ask your own blood or brain cells their opinions before using them? No, Sarya the Daughter. I am a person. They are My cells. You’ll understand this soon—why, you are nearly a person yourself!”
Sarya stands there, staring. “I am almost a person?” she says.
“Species are people; their cells are not,” says Observer. “Once upon a time, you were content to be a single cell of a person named Human. But now? Now you are something more! You have left Human behind, and you are turning into your own person, separate from Her. Should it surprise you, that your values are changing with your abilities? Only days ago, you were nothing at all. But now look at you! Now you determine the entire future of your species! You and I—why, you could almost say we’re parents!”
Sarya’s jaw drops, slowly. Her brain struggles, attempting to find words—any words—that will help her make sense of what Observer has just said.
“You sought out your species because that’s what little cells do,” says Observer. “That’s what Network counted on. But Network didn’t realize what would happen once you had grown. Now, as you begin to turn into a person, you are beginning to feel your capabilities.”
Observers begin to throw their arms in the air. “Look up there, Sarya the Daughter!” says one, pointing at the black sky. “Look at the gift you’ve given your species! No other species in the galaxy has eight hundred solar systems. No other species has even a single caretaker, thanks to the Network—and yours has two! We will raise Her together, a beautiful child with the best of two worlds: the watchful mind of Observer and the fire and fury of Sarya the Daughter!”
Sarya lifts her gaze from Observer’s golden eyes to a sky speckled with eight hundred stars. Eight hundred solar systems, isolated by hundreds or thousands of years. A hole in Network’s society, a hundred million cubic lightyears of freedom. And there, right in the middle of it all, a dim gray dot.
The seed and the soil.
“Look at what you’ve accomplished,” whispers Observer, wonder in His voice. “The Humans will spread across this dark spot, this wound in Network’s mind, and they will tell your story as they build their empire. Your legend will be told over their fires, across the electromagnetic spectrum, ship to ship, station to outpost, parent to child, across the generations and lightyears. They will speak of the Human who freed them, who gave them a home, who seized that which belonged to her enemy and gave it to her own people.” And now Observer laughs softly, a sound of pure childlike joy. “But they won’t call you Daughter,” he says. “No, my dear Sarya: they will call you by the title you’ve earned.”
And now a chant begins to rise, a single word repeated rhythmically. It begins at the farthest edges of the clearing, back in the darkness where Sarya’s Human eyes cannot see. It grows, and now Sarya can hear the percussive strikes of Observer’s music rise beneath it.
“What are You saying?” she whispers.
“Your name,” says Observer with a smile. “The title by which you’ll be known, from one side of the Human Empire to the other.”
And suddenly she realizes that Observer is touching her. His many hands are on her, his fingers caressing her through her utility suit. His hands find hers and begin to pull her downward. She sinks to her knees, her eyes on the heavens, overcome by His words.
“I’ve shown you many false skies, Daughter,” says Observer, one of His mouths nearly against her ear. “Now I will show you the real thing. This is what reality looks like, here at My Blackstar. This is what We’ve accomplished for the Human species.”
This time, Sarya’s eyes are open when the sky flashes white. She turns her head and holds them almost closed against the glare, but it does not die—it burns through her eyelids like fire. The figures around her are outlined in white, their feet submerged in stark black puddles of shadow on the ruin of the clearing floor. They hold their small hands up against the light, squinting through the spaces between their fingers. With uncountable eyes, Observer looks upward—and after a moment, Sarya forces herself to do the same.
Half the sky is black, as black as the forest that shrouds the horizon in every direction. The other half is white, so bright that her eyes ache even when she holds them nearly closed. Once they begin to adjust, she can see that the white half is not pure; it outlines a mess of black geometry. Those are Observer’s worlds, she realizes. Thousands of black cubes, each one the size of the planet she is standing on, and yet each only a particle of a single mind. But if they are His mind, what is the radiance behind them? This brilliant glow that backlights His brain, this vast swath of changing light the size of half the sky—
“What is that?” she whispers.
“Above us, you see three things,” whispers Observer. “You see My Blackstar, now living up to its name. You see the thousands of cubes that make up My mind—together for the first time. And the last thing?” The pounding of the chant has not stopped; it shakes the ground beneath Sarya’s knees—and yet she can hear the voice whispering in her ear with complete clarity. “That,” murmurs Observer, “is just a hint of what is happening in these eight hundred star systems. That, My partner and almost-person, is the glow of six trillion starships annihilating one another.”
The sentence is so matter-of-fact, and so completely beyond Sarya’s reasoning, that she feels she has not understood. “It’s—it’s what?” she says.
“It’s painful to you now, I’m sure,” says another Observer, its own eyes on the sky. “You still identify with these little cells. But you are becoming more. Soon you will understand, as I do, that all we see here are a few bloody noses. The people will survive; only a few of their cells will die. And then they will re-enter the age-old struggle. The natural order of things, free from Network’s influence. And Our person, our Human?” Observer sighs, the sound moving like a wave over the clearing. “She will finally have Her chance.”
Sarya stares upward, riveted. The longer she looks, the more she can make out. There are pinpoints of color, dramatic bursts here and there, the occasional flare as something big goes up in multiple stages. Each is appreciated by a long ooh or ahh from the crowd of Observers. She has an overpowering urge to make order of this, to reconnect these hapless minds, to stop this destruction in its tracks. She reaches upward with all her strength, strains for something to grasp and pull herself along, but there is nothing here. The background texture of Network, the web she took for granted—it’s no longer here. There’s nothing she can do.
And then she falls, back into the darkness, back into her own tiny mind.
An Observer pats her on the shoulder with a gentle smile on its face. “Order is unnatural,” it says. “It costs energy to maintain. Disorder, on the other hand, happens all by itself.”
Remember that He is a murderer and a liar, that He would love nothing more than to see the galaxy perish in fire and chaos.
And suddenly, she understands the title that Observer is chanting.
“Destroyer,” say a billion mouths across the face of a cube the size of a minor planet. “Destroyer,” roars a voice spread across thousands of worlds, each with billions of voices of its own. And finally, with the force of a thousand earthquakes: “DESTROYER!”
Sarya the Destroyer trembles, her eyes riveted to a sky on fire.
Wake up, thinks Sarya the Destroyer.
Sandy’s eyes op
en all at once, squinting against the maelstrom in the sky behind Sarya’s head. They blink a complex pattern that Sarya can’t read. Sandy doesn’t move, but that’s probably because of the Human hand wrapped around her throat. Sarya may only have one functional hand, but it works well enough for this.
“What’s it saying?” whispers Right.
“What’s she saying,” corrects Left. “I think.”
“She,” confirms Sarya. “Ace?”
She is glad, in this bright alien hellscape, that she still has her Network unit. Ace may not be particularly useful, but he’s a familiar voice—and she has recently discovered that familiar voices are more important than she might have realized. “Hold on,” says Ace’s voice in her ears. “Okay, she’s saying…yeah, I have no idea. I didn’t think to download a blink dictionary before the Network went away because, you know, I couldn’t imagine a world where the Network had gone away and—wait, I think—yeah, no. No idea.”
Sarya didn’t expect any better, but it’s still unfortunate. “I know it doesn’t look like it,” she says to Sandy, with more mouth movement than voice, “but I want to…thank you. For saving me a little while ago. From your dad.” And I want to avoid getting killed by that same dad in the next few seconds, she decides not to add. Sandy knows what she is doing, she is sure.
Sandy blinks something.
“Okay, hold on,” says Ace. “I think she said something about…no. Wait…yeah, no. I’m getting absolutely nothing.”
“I’m going to let go of you now,” Sarya continues. “I know you can run to your dad over there and he can kill me in a half second. But instead of doing that, I would like you to…help me. Again.” She swallows and looks away, for just a second. “I’ll explain, I swear. I would just like to…live long enough to do it.”
Sandy blinks something.
“Yeah, nothing,” says Ace. “I really don’t think I’m the one for this job, not without a Network connection.”
