by Sean Platt
Divinity heard Meyer’s words, knowing the effect he meant for them to have. But if there was rationale in this body and brain, Divinity had yet to find it. Raw anger reigned. Fear for what might come next — a dark step into a terrifying unknown.
“It’s not the best.”
Meyer subtly shook his head. “Hurting them changes nothing.”
“I disagree. I will have to try to find out, but I think it might make me feel better.”
“Nobody can save you from making the wrong choice. But how you choose now?” Meyer turned toward Eternity, and some unknown knowledge — the same infuriating secret that Divinity knew full well they’d exchanged behind her back earlier but refused to share — flashed between them. “It will define the way your species sees itself forever.”
Divinity considered Meyer’s words. She could feel the twin forces within her: the collective’s intelligence urging one option in the name of logic, versus her own state urging the other choice in the name of passion.
The weapon had sagged again, so she raised it, this time to her eye. She retrained it on Clara’s chest. Her finger moved to the trigger. She didn’t need to sight down the thing’s length, but did so anyway, squinting down to one eye the way humans did in their movies.
If I’m to be like a human, she thought, I will be like a human.
One eye open, Divinity zeroed in on Clara, petrified like a statue. She could sense more than feel the twin figures at her sides: Meyer on one side, calculating his odds at diving for the weapon, and Eternity at the other, probing at her from inside the collective.
Something moved between the weapon’s sight and Clara. White like a cloud, as if the room had suddenly grown foggy.
Divinity raised her head. She opened her other eye.
The thing between her weapon and Clara was a Titan’s broad chest, its eyes watching hers.
If I die, I die, it thought.
“Get out of the way.”
But before Divinity could move to improve her shot, a second Titan edged forward to stand shoulder to shoulder with the first. A third blocked them in from the other side.
She lowered the weapon, shocked.
A fourth Titan moved in front of the humans. Then a Reptar, its head cocked toward Divinity, purring slightly. Then a second Reptar. A fifth Titan.
If I die, I die.
And then, a micro collective forming within the larger one:
If we die, we die.
Divinity’s grip slackened. Her legs shook. She felt her anger surrender to something new, and darker. Within the collective’s mind, she caught glimpses of things that all had seen and that only one of them had seen, now sharing memories like trading cards, each presenting what it had for the others to evaluate as individuals. Through Clara, human thoughts joined them. Meyer’s thoughts. Piper’s thoughts. All at once.
Meyer’s words.
A vision of Trevor saving Piper.
Of Heather saving Cameron.
Of Christopher saving the caravan outside Ember Flats.
Of Cameron entering the Ark.
Of Stranger and Kindred, combined into one, entering the Ark.
Of Carl saving Eternity. Saving Melanie.
Meyer’s words.
And Melanie’s words.
If we die, we die.
Someone plucked the weapon from Divinity’s hand.
She did not protest.
Instead, for reasons unknown, she fell to her knees and leaked fluid from her surrogate’s eyes, lungs hitching in great sobs, as a pit of darkness claimed her.
EPILOGUE
DAY ONE
Two weeks later, after the Astrals had done the necessary work of cleaning up after themselves (most notably removing the Reptar bodies still on the surface and incinerating notes from the past, such as Stranger’s store of forbidden items he’d stashed in a desert cave), Meyer left the village on horseback and rode north. Two hours out — and knowing he wouldn’t be the one to decide the day’s timetable — he stopped to give the horse some water. He didn’t know it was time until he heard the hum. But by the time he’d looked up, the shuttle had already arrived.
Meyer watched it settle. They were entirely too far from the village to be seen by the occupants, who by now had no idea what Astrals were. In addition, the mothership would have swept the area for stragglers before deciding Meyer was far enough out for neither ship nor rendezvous to be seen.
The ship opened, and a tall blonde emerged alone.
“You have no idea how strange it is,” Meyer said, looking the silver sphere over from top to rounded bottom, “to see one of these without being abducted.”
“You never boarded voluntarily?” Melanie said.
“Not unless you count the time Kindred sprang me from your space brig. But that was more a ‘flight in terror’ than a ‘cordial embarkation.’”
She stepped aside, gesturing toward the opening like a game show host. She looked the part, too. She’d worn mostly flat sandals that the mothership’s machines had fabricated to look like something from a moderate-range women’s shop on the Old Earth in deference to the sandy terrain, but everything else about her spoke of elegance. She was immaculately groomed, her hair like anything from one of Meyer’s forever-ago films. She wore a slinky blue dress that ended a modest few inches below her knees, but Meyer was sure that the woman knew damn well how good she must look. The Astrals had mastered vanity. Good for them.
“Would you like to try it?” she said, indicating the entrance.
“I think my space-flying days are over.” He laughed, and she smiled. So they’d learned a bit of levity, too.
“We’ve completed the work that remained to be done,” she said.
“The monolith? The freighter in the sand?”
“Reduced to component elements. But you understand, the Ark could not be destroyed.”
Meyer nodded. It was also true that the Astrals couldn’t move it. Without their systems in place for a coming epoch, it was only a hunk of metal, but for some reason it still dogged them.
“I know. I will send Logan and Kamal out to bury it.”
“So they still have their memories?”
“For now.”
“But they will forget, same as the others?”
“We all will.”
“Clara?”
“All of us,” Meyer said. “These aren’t memories I want, if I’m to live out the little of my life that remains here in the wasteland. Best not to know there was ever anything else.”
“You will forget?” She seemed surprised.
Meyer nodded. “I haven’t exactly gotten the hang of talking to this thing you put inside my head, but it must agree. I can’t make myself forget something. So …” He made a vague hand gesture. “I don’t know, some juju my thingie and Clara have going on. She describes it like taking a photo on a timer. You set it consciously, then the rest happens automatically. A way of distancing herself — and myself, I guess — from the process.”
“How long until you forget?” Until all knowledge of us leaves humanity forever, she seemed to add.
“Five days. Long enough to clean up the last loose ends. Long enough to think of anything we might have forgotten. And it’ll probably only be me and Clara who make it that long. Kamal has already started to forget.
Melanie nodded.
“And you? How is it on the ship?”
“Order is still pending. But we are getting on.”
“And Divinity?”
“She has elected to return to her natural state.”
Meyer suppressed a flinch. To him, it sounded like suicide. And it had probably looked a lot like suicide, too. The only way for any instance of Divinity who’d taken residence in a surrogate to return to its natural state would be to kill the surrogate.
“What about you?”
“Time will tell,” she said.
Meyer nodded. It was as good an answer as any.
“Then I guess this is goodbye.”
The sentence was strangely sentimental for someone who’d killed seven billion people. But Meyer let it go. The baggage between races was a lot of water to force under a bridge, but he was willing to try. In five days, he wouldn’t remember anyway.
“Do you promise?” Meyer asked.
DAY TWO
Kamal woke from his nap refreshed. He put his feet on the ground, pacing around his hut. Something was pestering him. Something he’d forgotten? It wasn’t clear. He’d had strange dreams — of another place and another time, another group of people he’d swear he’d once known but had somehow left behind.
But the arrival of a small child in the room distracted his thoughts. The last image to go was that of an enormous round object in the sky, black as night.
“Daddy!” the little girl said. “The sun is up! It’s time to plant!”
“Past time, I’d imagine,” Kamal said. Soon it would be hot. And planting in the heat, while necessary at times, was never any fun.
The child ran for the door, but a curious feeling tugged at Kamal — a sense that the girl wasn’t his. That she’d been a loose end that had somehow attached itself to him.
“Mara,” he called.
The girl turned. She smiled. She smiled at her daddy.
“Never mind,” he said.
DAY THREE
“Meyer,” Piper said. “Did you have a Cousin Tim?”
Meyer laughed. But instead of answering, he said, “You don’t remember?”
“I’d swear you told me about him before.”
“Okay.” Meyer sat, looking at Piper across the small village well. He didn’t use the well often. Meyer usually took a horse to gather water from an oasis. One far off but which boasted spectacular water. Although come to think of it, he hadn’t brought any water home from that oasis when he’d gone two days ago, had he? “What’s the context? Why do you want to know?”
Piper thought. It had seemed important. Now it really didn’t.
She shrugged. “Never mind.”
Meyer rose as if to leave but then seemed to change his mind. He turned around and this time sat right next to her. He took her hand, and in that moment Piper felt as young as the day she’d married him.
“I did have a brother, though. Two brothers, actually.”
“Really?” Piper said.
He nodded. “One was named Kindred. The other was named Stranger.”
“Those are funny names,” Piper said.
“We were very close. But they had to leave. There was something very important they had to do. And there was a woman, too. Kindred’s wife. She’s also gone now. Her name was Heather.”
“Where did she go?”
But Meyer didn’t answer. Instead, he bit his lip and looked into the distance. If Piper didn’t know better, she’d think he was holding back a wave of emotion.
“She was called away. But she also had two amazing children. The most amazing children I’ve ever known. Their names were Lila and Trevor.”
Piper looked up at Meyer’s profile. He was staring off into the distance, but she could see his eyes were wet.
“Meyer? What is it?”
“I just wanted to tell you about them, while I still can.”
She held his hand tighter. She reached for his face, but he pulled away.
“What’s happening, Meyer?”
“I just want you to remember those names, Piper. Kindred. Stranger. Heather. Lila. And Trevor.”
“Okay. I’ll remember them.” And so Piper repeated them in her mind twice, concentrating because it seemed to matter so much to Meyer all of a sudden.
“Tell me their names again,” he said.
“Kindred, Stranger, Heather, Lila, and Trevor.”
Meyer nodded. “Good. Don’t forget. And don’t let me forget.”
And Piper didn’t, through to the end.
DAY FOUR
Logan looked up at his wife. “Did you say something?”
Clara looked back. She had a secretive smile — the one she used when he did something stupid and failed to realize it.
“No,” she said.
“I could’ve sworn you said something.”
“Well, I didn’t.” Then she gave another smirk just as he turned his head.
“What, Clara? I feel like I’m missing something here.”
“Hmm. Like there’s something you’ve misplaced? Something that you might have forgotten.”
Suspiciously, Logan said, “Maybe.”
“Something you once knew, then forgot all about, huh?”
“I don’t know.”
“Something you didn’t really need in your head, that you really don’t want to remember at all, and that’s really most relevant right now because I can torture you with it because you have this sneaking suspicion that I know something you don’t? Almost as if you used to have this power, but now forgot the trick of using it?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Clara smiled larger. Then she said, “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”
DAY FIVE
But of course they didn’t talk about it tomorrow. The first reason was because Logan never asked. The idea — and probably the whole teasing conversation — seemed to have slipped his mind. Just like so many things seemed to do these days.
But the second reason was that Clara no longer precisely remembered what she’d delighted in teasing her husband with.
There was no matter. It was a beautiful day.
She left the hut and looked up.
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
Or anything else.
DAY FOUR HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN
Meyer Dempsey was seventy years old when he died, if that was possible to believe. Seven full decades. Seven times ten full cycles of seasons, when the oldest most people could ever hope to reach was half that, maybe a bit more.
Most people simply accepted Meyer’s incredible age. But on the day of his funeral, when the village gathered the pyre to send him on to his next life, Sarah Carpenter (daughter of Samuel and Mary, sister of Luke) found herself pondering it.
She herself was twenty — over half the lifespan she might otherwise have expected. Recently she’d been feeling long in the tooth, but Meyer’s funeral inspired rather than frightened her. She’d been single until recently, childless even to half her expiration date. But perhaps now, she thought, running a hand across her still-small belly, she’d have a chance to see more of her unborn child’s life than a lone generation. If she could live to be seventy? Well, that would be something.
It wasn’t going to happen, but as they set Meyer’s body on the pyre, her thoughts drifted to immortality — what seventy long years felt like to Sarah.
As the pyre burned, Sarah’s mind drifted from inspiration to melancholy. Meyer had been center of this village forever. He was larger than life. And whatever he’d done to bargain with the devil, it seemed contagious. His wife was well past forty — maybe even fifty, or possibly sixty. They were doing something right. And Sarah — possibly now that she had a second life inside her — found herself more intrigued than most.
She was on the village’s edge when she saw the ghost.
A flash of light. Nothing. If anyone else had been with her, they would have laughed at the way she started. But Sarah knew the flash was worth paying attention to in the same way she knew Meyer’s advanced age was worth considering as more than coincidence. Without thinking — and surely against her parents’ and new husband’s wishes — she set off in the direction it seemed to have gone.
She walked.
And she walked.
Hours later Sarah seemed to wake as if from a dream. She’d been ambulatory but not quite conscious, moving on as if in a fugue. Once she realized how far out she’d come, she gave a little cry. Sarah knew the general direction of home, but no more than that. How could she possibly find her village again? She didn’t even know where she was!
Her worry died when she saw a small half moon
of darkness ahead, visible in a crag of rock.
She approached the thing and dug, stirred by a strange compulsion and the way the sand, when she’d approached, seemed to have been freshly disturbed. Someone had been here. Recently.
Someone had gone into that hole.
Without thinking — again in a fugue as complete as the one that had caused her to follow the ridiculous ghost — Sarah continued to dig.
The sand wasn’t packed, and came away easily. She found herself looking down, realizing she’d had to hike up, as if the cave was at the top of a rock structure that had once risen above the desert floor. Something had covered it. But what? And why?
Sarah slipped into the tunnel. There was no light inside, but she found herself able to easily see. As if something was over her shoulder, lighting the way. As if something wanted her presence.
She went down one tunnel after another, terrified but moving despite her best intentions to turn around. She saw skeletons, wearing robes. Markings on the walls in strange languages, and a repeated word that seemed to be “Mullah.” She found room after room — a virtual warren within the rock.
Sarah desperately wanted to leave. But something compelled her.
Eventually she came to a room with a stone door at its head that had been partially rolled away, or perhaps knocked askew. She entered and found the room black. Two things happened.
First, she saw a second flash of light, much like she’d seen leaving the site where Meyer’s body burned. It approached Sarah, then stabbed hard into her abdomen. She expected pain, but there was none. Instead, Sarah felt a stirring where her infant slept inside her. She was deeply aware of it, but then the feeling was gone.
