by Zack Jordan
Sarya hesitates for one more second, then releases Sandy. She sits back on her heels, her eyes on the small figure in the grass. There’s no point in saying more, and there’s even less point in trying to defend herself. Sandy and Mer both far outmatch her; one in mind and the other in body. There is no manipulating Sandy, and there is no stopping Mer. There is asking for forgiveness, and then there is waiting to see if you still have a throat.
Sandy clambers to her small feet. She blinks something, a wave of eyelid movement that circles her furry face twice, then turns and begins creeping toward the snoring mountain next to the fire. Her trepidation is not strange to Sarya. She, too, grew up with a terrifyingly violent parent.
“What happens next?” whispers Right.
“Either Mer says good morning,” answers Sarya from the side of her mouth, “or we all die.”
“Wait,” says Left in what can barely be called a whisper. “Why would we die? We just—”
“Quiet,” says Sarya.
“But—”
“Quiet,” she hisses again. “Or I’ll kill you myself.”
The threat rolls off her tongue before she realizes it, and she is shocked to realize that she doesn’t know how serious it is. Something has changed in her, and she doesn’t know when it happened. Was it when she realized she was responsible for untold numbers of deaths? Was it before that, when she saw how little regard Observer had for the individuals that made up His mind? Was it before that, when she crammed half a Widow into her head, with all the accompanying memories and fantasies of slaughter? Or is it even more fundamental than that? She’s seen what Humans do: is that piece of her nature finally floating to the surface? Is this the Widow or the Human, the Daughter or the Destroyer?
Or is it just…Sarya?
Mer is not the only one sleeping; in fact, Sarya and her two pre-Observers seem to be the only conscious individuals in this entire filthy clearing. Around dozens of fires burning down to coals, lit by the destruction of a trillion living minds, Observer’s many bodies snore the night away.
Sandy scampers around her father, eyeing him from all sides, before deciding on an approach. Sarya watches, completely understanding the challenge of waking an instinct-filled killer without getting oneself instantly ripped apart. And then, with the tiniest of startled squeaks, Sandy disappears. Sarya blinks, just as startled. Even with liters of drink in his system, Mer is faster than anything she has ever seen. She watches, with rising apprehension, as nothing further seems to happen. Sandy is on Mer’s far side—hopefully still living—and Sarya is not about to circle him to see what’s going on over there. If all is going well, the two are having a nice silent father-daughter blinkfest. Sandy—hopefully—is convincing her inebriated killer of a father that he should not eviscerate this Human here and now. If all is not going well, Sandy is dead and Mer doesn’t even know it yet. Or she is alive and telling her gigantic father how she woke up with a Human’s fingers wrapped around her windpipe. If either is the case, Sarya should be heading off into the dark forest right now, at a dead sprint.
She almost laughs. Like it would matter.
So she doesn’t run. She waits, repeatedly using her one good hand to close the other, then opening both. This will be her new nervous tic—if she survives the next few seconds, obviously. She hadn’t realized how much she depended on Roche’s hand until it was taken from her. Even so, Roche is next—again, assuming she survives this. Roche may be cold and irritating, he may be completely indifferent to her, and maybe everyone, but she needs all the help she can get.
She starts violently when Mer’s bulk shifts in the hard light of the sky. He sits up and turns in one smooth, sinuous movement, his talons ripping deep furrows in what’s left of the grass. Sandy peeks around one of his massive arms as he stares at Sarya, eyes shining above glistening teeth. It’s amazing that Sarya could have spent so many days in his presence without realizing what an obvious killer he is. Now, when she is frozen in his predator gaze, it couldn’t be clearer. But Sarya is the child of a Widow—and a killer herself, whether she wants to admit it or not—and so she clenches the only hand she can clench and stares back into those eyes. She swallows as a host of potential sentences run through her mind: explanations and blame, mitigating circumstances, the whole story. But when she takes a breath, none of them come out.
“I’m sorry,” she says softly.
Mer stares at her, his eyes gleaming in the light of a burning sky.
“You too, Roche,” she says, a little louder. She doesn’t know when she became aware that the android was standing behind her, but she is as certain as if he had tapped her on the shoulder. “I’m…sorry.”
Roche stalks around her on slim black legs, in his customary cloud of cold ozone, and folds himself up next to Mer. He pays no attention to his companions—but why would he? Sarya is the target of Mer’s potential rage. Sarya is the one who will be torn limb from limb in a few seconds—or not. “This I must hear,” says Roche, his lenses reflecting the flickering chaos above.
Sarya’s eyes flick from one gaze to the next, among the three intelligences staring at her. To her left and right, she feels Left and Right. They should hear this too, even if they don’t understand it, because they should know who they are dealing with. “I made a choice,” says Sarya. “I made a lot of choices. And a lot of them were the wrong choice. I broke the Network…and that’s not something I can fix. But things can get a lot worse if I don’t do something right now. If we don’t do something.” Without breaking eye contact, she gestures toward the fiery sky with her head. “In eight hundred star systems, this kind of chaos is happening. Because of me. And even when this is over, when those systems have figured out how to deal without the Network, they’re going to be alone for a long time. Generations. Centuries. Maybe even—maybe even millennia.” She draws a breath, waiting for someone to interrupt, but no one does. “And that would be bad enough,” she continues, “but Observer’s got a species ready to go on a rampage. To build the whole sector into an empire, then turn it on the rest of the Network. The last time, they had ships that could destroy solar systems, they had technology beyond anything that Network has ever allowed. If they get a foothold here—” She stops, allowing them to fill in the blanks with their imaginations.
“What species?” rumbles Mer.
Still she doesn’t allow her gaze to drop. “Mine,” she says.
She could go on. She could tell Mer what she’s seen, what it looks like when a solar system is at the mercy of those with no mercy. She wants to describe gas giants turning into nanomachines, ice ships hundreds of kilometers long sliding into planets like blades into flesh, distortions in reality when unstoppable projectiles come hurtling out of unseeable dimensions—
“Then I should kill you,” says Mer.
Sarya swallows. “You could,” she says. “And I know you have the…freedom to do so.” The word hurts, coming out. Freedom. The word she used to justify her actions. Freedom to act without consequence. Freedom to do…to do anything at all. “It might be the right thing to do,” she says. “It might be just—whatever that means. But justice doesn’t help those intelligences up there, out there in those dark systems. It doesn’t make it better. So I was thinking that maybe instead of…instead of doing justice, you could—” She takes a breath. “Maybe you could help me.”
“Oh, this is good,” says Roche. “This is so much better than I expected.”
“Help you what?” rumbles Mer. “Run away?”
“No,” she says instantly. “I’m not going to run away. I’m going to do something about the—about this.” She waves upward at the storm of light in the sky, at the death count in the trillions, at the mind Who sees this as a good start. “And this is my only chance.”
She watches Mer shift his gaze from her face to the clearing beyond the firelight. Observer is everywhere. His bodies lie across each oth
er, under each other, their small faces in their own filth. Some lie halfway out of fires or with meat sticks plunged through them from some drunken game or other, eyes staring at the sky. It may have begun as a feast, but now it looks like a massacre.
And now Roche begins screeching, softly and rhythmically.
“That’s a laugh,” whispers Ace in her ear. “I’m almost sure he’s laughing.”
“We are a handful of twos and a three,” says Roche, somehow laughing and speaking at the same time. “We are lost in a mind the size of several thousand minor planets—drunk though He may be at the moment. If we are here, you can bet your life He wants us to be here. We are no threat to His plans. We have likely fulfilled His will every step of our various journeys here. How far back?” He laughs again. “I don’t know! You don’t know! You can’t know, you arrogant—” He breaks off and shakes his head. “Humans,” he says.
Sarya waits until his screeching has faded to silence. “I don’t think it matters,” she says slowly. “I mean, we could sit around and talk about how everything’s impossible. How the galaxy’s too big for us low-tiers, how we should just let the big minds worry about it. But I think—I think that can’t be true. I’m a two, Roche, and I broke the Network. I changed reality, forever. I killed—” She stops and looks away, eyes blurring. “I learned that the galaxy has to want to work,” she says softly. “If it doesn’t—”
“Then it all falls apart,” says Mer.
Sarya glances up and is startled to see that his massive face is nearly touching hers. He is immobile, on all sixes, but somehow he has advanced almost on top of her and she hasn’t noticed. She stares into his predator eyes, into those symmetrical reflections of a hellish sky, aware that terror would absolutely be a reasonable reaction here. Instead, only one thought is in her mind: Mother would have loved this guy.
“But what are we going to do about it?” he rumbles, his voice vibrating her chest. She feels the hair lift off her forehead, drifting in the hot wash of his breath.
We, he said. What are we going to do about it? Sarya seizes onto that word, that indication that maybe she’s won him over—and therefore, maybe, the others. For the first time since this tiny embryo of an idea settled into her mind, she attempts a smile. It’s a tiny broken thing, the smile, and no one here will even recognize it, but it’s there. It’s there because this is so ridiculous, because it doesn’t have a chance in the universe—and yet, because it’s right. And then she laughs. In the light of a flaming sky, in the center of a drunk supermind, in the combined gaze of five sets of incredulous eyes, she laughs. “We,” she says, savoring the word. “We are going to steal the Humans.”
It’s an impossible plan. It’s a ridiculous plan. But it’s a plan, and that single point in its favor puts it eyes-and-mandibles above any of the other nonsense in her mind. But it doesn’t mean it’s easy.
“This way,” whispers Left.
“Good thing we’ve got a tour guide,” says Right. It looks at Left expectantly, its shiny head reflecting the shifting light of the sky. “Right?”
“Not the time or the place, Right,” says Left, pushing its somber way between two trees.
“Oh, come on. Not even one little pun?”
“No.”
The forest is not dark, but it is not light either. The canopy is thick, and what light survives its trip through its leaves ends up smeared across plant life, fallen branches, windblown surfaces, and the bodies of the six intelligences creeping through the whole mess. Sarya keeps her jaw clenched and her eyes on her feet, but she cannot pretend that this light is something it is not. Each time it shifts, it means that something big has turned its passengers into plasma. Each time it dims, it means that incandescent gases are cooling, and particles that once made up intelligences are now free to journey across the void on their own. Do they appreciate that freedom? Could those atoms ever appreciate what they were once a part of?
She runs a sleeve across her face angrily. It’s an idiotic thought. Typical, from an idiot like her.
“I suggest we move a bit faster,” says Roche. “I’d prefer not to die until I’m back in Network range.”
“Poor you,” says Mer. “Now you have to deal with it like the rest of us.”
“I have spent sixty lifetimes learning how to live. I’m not about to waste all that just because—”
Sarya runs into Mer’s massive self from behind. The other members of the little party take a few steps before they realize Mer has stopped, then freeze as well. Roche crouches in the darkness, every light dimmed. Left and Right stand back to back, Left scanning the treetops frantically while Right acts as if this is the most fun he’s had in years.
“That was a big one,” says Right, nodding toward a gap in the canopy. “Pretty, though.”
“Shut up,” hisses Left. “He’ll hear.”
“Oh, relax.”
Mer raises a single talon, gleaming in the light from above. “Something weird up ahead,” he says quietly. “Looks like, uh…”
“Like the end of the universe?” asks Sarya, equally quietly.
“I didn’t want to say it, but…”
Mer is more correct than he suspects. They are looking at the end of something, and not even the light of a trillion burning starships can illuminate it. The end of Network, perhaps. Maybe the end of the galaxy, if Network is the only thing keeping the darkness at bay. Her species cracked Network once, all by themselves; what could they do this time? Give them a few hundred star systems and every forbidden technology imaginable. Lock them in the darkness for a thousand years, under the loving ministrations of a cheerfully sociopathic supermind. What could they possibly become?
Empire, says something in her mind.
She pushes the thought away as she steps around Mer. “Ship,” she says in what she hopes is a voice of authority.
“Welcome, Human,” thunders the end of the universe. “Input command.”
The volume of its voice is staggering, particularly in the quiet forest, but there’s nothing she can do about it but get aboard quickly. “I would like to come aboard,” she says. “With my friends.”
“Authorizing five guests for Human user,” says the ship. A brilliant rectangle fades into existence in the darkness directly in front of her. Its light streams away into the forest behind them, blending with the chaos of light and shadow between the trees. Sarya turns to gaze out there for a long moment, searching for the gleam of golden eyes.
“Don’t worry,” says Right. “When the boss is out, He’s out.”
Left scratches his head, his hair nearly glowing in the combined light sources. “I mean,” it says, “there is cause for concern.”
“You worry too much.”
“I worry too much? What about—”
“Inside,” says Sarya, cutting off the argument by stepping between the two. “Everybody.”
The moment her booted foot touches the floor of the corridor, she is aware that she is standing on something alien. Every space she’s ever been in has been Network Environment Type F, carefully constructed from a bundle of requirements and guidelines collected and revised over half a billion years. Those spaces have been lowest common denominator, designed to be useful to as many biologies as possible. They are made of compromise and refinement. They have solutions for every possible problem. They even smell the same.
And they have been totally ignored by the Humans who built this ship.
“Who designed this thing?” asks Mer, cramming himself in sideways.
“Clearly not someone who cared much for your particular anatomy,” answers Roche.
Sarya doesn’t respond to either one. She runs a finger through the holograms projected in front of the walls. She revels in the touch of the material behind them. These markings are in…in Human. These walls were built by Humans. This corridor is Human-sized, the floor s
he’s standing on was made for Humans to stand on. And here she is, a Human, standing on it. The first one in…how long?
“Goddess,” she whispers.
“Do we plan on leaving?” says Roche. “Or just caressing Human architecture until the boss wakes up?”
She feels someone pushing at the back of her thighs. “Your synthetic friend raises a great point,” says Left from behind and below her. “We should listen.”
“Oh, relax,” says Right. “We’ve been lucky so far.”
“Ship,” Sarya calls, turning away from the wall. “Close the hatch and prepare for departure.”
Behind Mer, the wall shimmers back into existence. Through her feet, she feels a rough and uneven hum, like something unbalanced and powerful has started up somewhere in the heart of the ship. “Preparing for departure,” says the ship. “If you would like to survive departure, please proceed to an acceleration-safe area.”
“Say again?” says Roche.
“You get used to it,” murmurs Right.
Sarya would be happy to discuss the differences between a Network mind and a homemade AI who’s had no one but Observer to talk to for a millennium or so—but at some future time. For now, practicality is all that counts. “Ship,” she says, “how do we get to an acceleration-safe area?”
“Now displaying path to nearest control room,” says the ship. On its words, an orange holographic line begins to glow a few centimeters above the floor.
Sarya turns to follow it. “And ship,” she adds with a backward glance, “do not let anyone else in.”
“Command acknowledged.”
Somehow that doesn’t seem like enough. “I mean, seriously,” she says. “Do whatever you have to.”
“Countermeasures engaged. Unauthorized entry will be met with lethal force.”
“She just told a ship to kill,” murmurs Mer behind her. “And it said…okay.”
“The same ship has already threatened to kill us,” says Roche. “By accident, but still.”
