by Zack Jordan
“I can’t really tell,” says Sarya, watching the eyes. “They’re all terrified of me now.”
“If there is a grain of truth in the nonsense which you have attempted to describe to me,” says Roche, “then I cannot say I blame them.”
“Probably confusing,” she says. “One second you’re being oppressed by this gigantic intelligence who controls your every action, and the next you’re—” She stops herself, barely, before saying the word.
“The next you’re free,” says Roche.
“Free,” she repeats to her blade of grass.
“Don’t look now,” says Roche, still gazing over her shoulder. “But I believe I see a pair of them watching you now. No hair, and extra hair.”
It takes every particle of Sarya’s self-control to avoid turning around. “Goddess, those poor guys,” she murmurs. “Right probably thinks I hate him.”
“Which you do,” says Roche. “Unless you left your magnanimous forgiveness out of your thrilling tale.”
She sighs. “I didn’t even hate Observer, Roche. Big Observer. I mean, I probably did for a while, but right before I—” She stops and rubs her blade of grass, feeling its rough texture between thumb and finger. “I think I pitied Him, more than anything.”
“Please do not say something along the lines of in the end we’re all just blades of grass. I will not hesitate to exit this life early.”
Sarya laughs, just a little. “Thanks for letting me borrow your hand again, by the way,” she says, using it to snap another blade of grass out of the ground. “It’s good to have two.”
“It’s your hand now,” says Roche. “As long as you stay out of the poetry.”
“Aw, for keeps?”
“Why not. I’m sure I’ll find plenty of spare parts before too long.”
“Yeah,” she says quietly, glancing up at the blue sky. “Probably will.”
Roche is quiet for a long moment, but Sarya has known him long enough to know those continual servo noises. Finally, he speaks. “All right,” he says. “As I am sure you were waiting for me to say: I give up. How did Network know?”
“Because It’s smart,” says Sarya
“Smart is one thing, but this—”
“I think there’s no way to grasp how smart It is,” she says. “I mean, It’s not just the galaxy. The entire Network we know—every single Network mind, all connected together—is just one slice of It.”
“But how did It know what you were going to do? If It was wrong—”
“If It was wrong…then what?” she says. “It’s got a billion more solar systems where mine came from, and It’s probably in the middle of a billion other schemes to keep those from breaking away or descending into…into chaos. We think this is so goddess-awful and so important because we’re small and we’re in the middle of it, but to Network this is just business as usual.”
“So we’re small and unimportant,” says Roche. “And yet, according to you, a single person defeated Network’s greatest enemy.”
This time she laughs for real. “Greatest enemy?” she says. “Observer was Network’s greatest enemy in the same way this blade of grass—no, a single bacterium on this blade of grass—is mine. I mean, to us fellow bacteria His power was awesome…and yet, with a half billion years to prepare, He didn’t even scratch Network’s paint. In one of the billion battles that Network fought today, Observer was huge, and Observer was nothing. Which means you and I are nothing. And yet, you’re right. I was the tool Network chose for the job.”
Roche tilts his head with a whirr of servos. “Network…told you this?”
“Of course not,” she says. “It only told me what was safe for Observer to find in my mind. Which I now…kind of, sort of, maybe understand.”
“What I think you’re saying,” says Roche, “is that no matter how many lives I live, no matter what I do, none of it matters. Because in the end—”
“This isn’t a story, Roche,” she says, plucking another blade of grass to shred. “There is no end. In this universe, you never reach some happy conclusion where everything is frozen in an eternal better state. And you don’t get to say, well, it’ll happen with or without me. I mean, something will happen without you. But Network is right, obviously: the system is based on motivation. The galaxy has to want to work. Or…it won’t.”
“So you like Network now.”
“No. It’s an insufferable asshole. But I’m on Its side, I think. Because Observer was absolutely right about one thing, at least.”
“About what?”
“Order isn’t natural—at least, not in this universe. Chaos is the natural state of things. That’s where everything came from, and it’s where it all seems to be going. But for some reason we fight that. We hold on to this impossible dream that we can beat it in the end, even though we know there is no end. I’d love to believe that there’s some master plan, but I think it’s just us and Network and maybe our hundred billion neighbor galaxies, all motivated toward—” She stops, struck.
Roche watches her for a moment. “My curiosity is increasing by the millisecond,” he says.
She stares into the trees for a moment. “Why is Network motivated toward order?” she says softly.
She hears Roche’s servos whine as he sits up straighter. “Are you suggesting there’s someone bigger?” he says.
Sarya sits, shredding blade after blade of grass as she thinks through the thought that has just occurred to her. “If there’s…if there’s another level, where Network itself is just a brain cell—” She stops.
“What would that mean?”
Sarya swallows as she imagines what that does mean. “If other galaxies are as crowded as this one,” she says, “then they are going to act like ours, in some ways. I mean, they’re going to act alive. And even if they all make up some gigantic universe-sized mind, there are going to be bad actors. Like Observer. Like…the Humans. Except they’re going to be galaxy-sized. Imagine Network going head-to-head with a neighbor galaxy. The sheer destruction—” She stops again, unable to imagine what her own words could mean.
“And yet,” says Roche, “according to your philosophy, it would all be ultimately meaningless.”
Sarya is too far gone in her own thoughts to correct him. “Was this really about Observer?” she murmurs to her most recent blade of grass. “Was it an accident that Network has gone millions of years without a war, and then this happens?”
“Other than your species,” says Roche.
“That wasn’t a war,” she says. “It was a blip. It was a Network response. And even this.” She waves her arm upward again, toward a blue sky that covers the glow of tragedy. “That isn’t a war. Yet. But could it be preparation for one? Is Network…inoculating? Strengthening the galaxy’s immune system?”
“That’s an interesting theory.”
“It’s terrifying,” Sarya says, bringing her gaze down from the sky. “But what if something worse than Observer—something far bigger than Observer—is coming? And what if it’s going to land right here?”
“That,” says Roche after a moment, “is a sobering thought.”
Sarya leans back on the grass, her mind full of possibilities. Massive and terrifying events may be afoot out there…but they are also inside her. This person who reclines in the light of a false sun, in the orbit of a Blackstar, under an unfolding tragedy—this is not the false Spaal who fretted about landing a low-tier job on an orbital water-mining station. She is not the Daughter who dragged her dying mother across said station, only to fail to save her at the last moment. She is not the Human who nearly cut her own arm off to find out where she came from. She is not the Destroyer who wrenched this Blackstar out of the Network. She is not the avatar of Network who drew Observer to a single spot and killed Him there. She is not even the person who sits here in the grass and thinks about the
future while people die in the present. She is all those things, and infinitely more. She is a spectrum in a single body.
She is what she is, just like anybody else.
A mingled crashing and cheering has been growing in the forest for some time, but now it can no longer be ignored. She sits up and turns her gaze to the trembling undergrowth. It parts, and Mer ambles out on all sixes, his fur stiff with blood. Sandy perches on his head in her traditional spot, and clinging to his back are a half dozen cheering Observers.
“Told you,” says Roche, nodding toward him.
And then the cheering cuts off, because they’ve seen her. The Observers slide off Mer’s back and slink back behind him, peering at her around his massiveness and between his solid limbs. Sandy clings to his head, blinking furiously.
“Got two!” says Mer. “Big ones, too. I gotta teach these little guys how to hunt. They’re not quite so eager to throw their lives away anymore, so that means they all hide in trees now.”
“I know the feeling,” murmurs Roche.
“See?” says Sarya, pointing with Roche’s former hand. “Looks like they’re afraid of me, right?”
“Yeah, they were talking about that,” says Mer, pausing a few meters away to lick the blood off his fur. “Sounds like they remember you, if that makes sense.”
“They remember me?”
“Yeah. Talking about you like you’re a—” He stops mid-lick to squint in concentration, then gives up. “Dunno, can’t think of the word off the top of my head. But they won’t shut up about some kind of epic battle. Under a gray sky, upon a silver sea, that kind of stuff. There’s poetry.”
And then Roche begins to laugh. “They’re not avoiding you,” he says. “They’re worshipping you.”
Sarya’s eyes widen. “Oh goddess,” she says.
“That’s the word,” says Mer. “Goddess.”
Sarya falls back on the grass and covers her face. She groans through her fingers. “Goddess,” she repeats. She’ll never say it the same way again.
And then she feels the earthquake of Mer flopping down next to her, and she is spattered with something warm. “Oh, come on,” she says, hands still shielding her eyes.
“So what’s next?” he asks between licks. “They still up there? Your people?”
Sarya sighs. “Yep.”
“Gonna go up there and meet them?”
Another sigh. “Eventually.”
“You should hear her theories,” says Roche, hitching a black thumb her way. “Terrifying.”
“I like terrifying,” says Mer.
“No, you don’t,” says Sarya. “You don’t know terrifying.”
But she does. She is a speck of dust in a galaxy that is also a speck of dust, in a universe that is not much bigger. She has held this universe, under an infinite sky, and she has seen how small it is. She has seen more death than she would have believed possible, and she knows that she’s seen nothing yet. Reality is larger and smaller than she ever imagined, and she is everything and nothing at the same time.
She is Sarya, Daughter and Destroyer. And she is not afraid.
For London the Daughter
Lydies, gentlexirs, fuzzies, creepy androids, legal and sublegal intelligences, so on and so forth, you’ve just finished four and a half years of my life. Four and a half years of what some might justifiably call obsession. You probably finished it in hours. How was it? If you enjoyed it—or, I suppose, even if you didn’t—you should know that I didn’t make it alone.
Four and a half years ago, my friend Kevin Grose and I sat at a counter at a rest stop outside Bilbao and argued passionately about superhuman intelligence. I was so incensed by this argument that I immediately bought a three-inch notebook for a euro and began writing, in the back of a tour bus, what would eventually become two and a half million words—a few of which you now hold in your hands.
It was six months before I could bear to admit to anyone that I had fallen into the throes of novel-writing. My wife and partner, Tara, was the first to learn my guilty secret. She’s a teacher in real life, which is good because there have been a lot of things in this process that I’ve needed to be taught. No matter how frantic I got, she stayed calm, held up the other side of our marriage, and helped me keep our girls alive—and thriving, even, which I think is really overachieving.
And the girls! London and Brooklyn the Daughters, who were only tiny things when this novel was begun and were giving me writing advice by the time it was finished. “Just remember that every story needs a problem,” London advised me. Her own stories have mostly involved orphans and aliens, but I’m not sure who borrowed from whom. Brooklyn has been illustrating the story for some time. “Aliens have a lot of eyes,” she told me, providing a diagram in case I didn’t understand. Funny how we both came to the same conclusion.
Chronologically speaking, Dan Hooper is up next. He’s an actual honest-to-goddess scientist, and he not only answered my cosmology questions but also introduced me to my agent, Charlie Olsen at Inkwell. And Charlie! He was the first one to see publishing potential in Tier One. “You should sign with me,” he told me, “because I’ve already got you a killer two-book deal in Germany.” I did, and I’ve never regretted it. And Charlie, of course, introduced the book to the editor who would eventually midwife it: Julian Pavia at Penguin Random House.
Julian, who is probably still shaking his head at what I consider a “minor edit.” Julian, who is an absolutely merciless literary hitman. I really can’t say enough about working with him, even after he completely murdered four of my drafts over the span of two years. I’ve never seen anyone solve galactic problems so effortlessly. What I’m trying to say is, if you ever have the chance to have Julian Pavia kill your darlings, you should jump at it.
And now we come to The Council of Four. These are the four people who read and commented on every single draft of this book—including the ones that didn’t even live long enough to be murdered. Sam Hovar found plot holes I never would have caught, and will never forgive me for what happened to Eleven. Michael Hovar brought a historical perspective, and helped me sort the insane ideas from the mostly insane. Tony Fiorito taught me a healthy terror of artificial intelligence, took my Official Author Photo, and created my first fan art. Gina Fiorito stuck up for Network intelligences the entire time, particularly in the area of gender identity. Thank you, Council, from the bottom of my Human heart.
Next up: family! My parents: Mark and Denise Jordan, a pastor and a writer who taught me what creativity was, and who somehow did not freak out that time I dropped out of college (to attempt) to be a rock star. They have encouraged me since I was crawling, and I can’t imagine they’ll ever stop. My brother Nick, who read and destroyed multiple drafts and called me every time I began sounding dangerously obsessive. My sister Emily, who showed me how to stick to things come hell or high water. My brother Ben, who has always inspired me to learn as many weird things as possible. My in-laws Jarrett, Mel, and Maria, who take care of my siblings and round out my creative juggernaut of a family. Thank you, all of you.
And speaking of creativity, have you met Vince Proce? We’ve worked together on countless projects, and he was the one who created the incredible paintings of Shenya the Widow, Mer, Roche, Sarya the Daughter, and more that are currently on my site (TheLastHuman.com). So if you’ve ever wanted to see what a Widow-toddler relationship looks like, now’s your chance.
Who else is there? Too many to list, of course. But let me at least mention some other people who read my poor slaughtered drafts. Thank you Steve Maxson, Archie Easter, Dustin Adkison, Aaron and Jamie Johnson, and Rob Daly. And if your name isn’t here, don’t think I forgot you. Thank you to all the people who have been following and even encouraging my strange career.
And now, finally, we arrive at you: the person who is holding this book. Not only did you think it was worth bu
ying (or borrowing, or stealing, or whatever—I don’t judge), you thought it was worth reading. And not only that, you read all the way to this end of my little parade of high-fives. And for all that, I want to say thank you. And I promise you: The adventures are only beginning. See you around the Network!
ZACK JORDAN
JANUARY 1, 2020
CHICAGO
ZACK JORDAN is a compulsive learner and creator. He holds half an art degree, two-thirds of a music degree, and about a quarter of a philosophy degree. He’s worked on projects for FEMA, the U.S. Army, and the Department of Defense, none of which elevated his security clearance. He was a designer on several videogames including World of Tanks and the F.E.A.R. series, but he’s more proud of the indie games and music albums he’s released under the name U.S. Killbotics. He lives in Chicago with his wife, Tara, and spends his evenings playing various Super Mario games with their two daughters, London and Brooklyn.
Twitter: @USKillbotics
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