“We can’t just wait here to get ripped to shreds!” Old-timer replied.
Neirbo looked down at the missile, still docked in the center of the room on a low, long platform. “One of you will have to detonate the missile manually!”
Old-timer’s mouth fell open in shock and disgust. “What? One of us? This was your people’s plan! Not ours!”
“We’ll have to repair the ship and navigate home! Only we have the technical knowledge to open the wormholes!”
“You rotten piece of filth!” Old-timer shouted, reaching a level of fury that he hadn’t been to in many decades. “You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you? All that bull about how ‘it’s our law’ and ‘only people native to a solar system can destroy it’ was just a ruse to get us out here!”
“That’s not true,” Neirbo responded.
“Shove it!” Old-timer continued to fury.
Thel, Djanet, and Rich looked on in awe, never having seen Old-timer in such a state. “This isn’t your first rodeo! You’ve done this before with other solar systems! You knew the nans were most likely going to be here already, and you brought us here as sacrificial lambs!”
“That is ridiculous!” Neirbo fired back. “You are here of your own free will!”
“Bull! You tricked us!”
“Old-timer! They saved us from the nans! You told us that yourself!” Thel interjected. “Now you’re saying they tricked us?”
“We’re not here freely, Thel!” Old-timer responded. “Look around you! There are two of them for every one of us!”
“You are here of your own free will,” Neirbo repeated.
“We shouldn’t even be considering this!” Thel interjected. “We should be working together to get the power back online!”
“They’ll tear through the ship before we can do that!” Neirbo countered. “One of you has to manually detonate the missile and lead them away!”
“You can manually shove that missile up your ass!” Old-timer spat back.
“If none of you will make the sacrifice, all of us will die!” Neirbo shouted. “One of you must guide the missile toward the sun and lead the nans away from us!”
“And detonate it?” Rich shot back. “That’s a suicide run!”
“It’s a sacrifice to save the rest of us!” Neirbo replied.
“Then sacrifice one of your men!” Djanet chimed in.
“Any loss of one of my men lowers the chance that we’ll be able to repair the ship in time and open a wormhole fast enough to escape!”
“And we’re expendable, isn’t that right?” Old-timer bellowed.
James’s deletion suddenly flashed in front of Thel’s eyes again—vividly. She jolted with the memory. The picture of the shadowy nan consciousness, the figure that finally destroyed the most important person in Thel’s life, blazed in her memory. At that moment, she suddenly realized that she was in its presence once again. She looked up through the invisible skin of the ship, through the dark, smoky swarm of the nans, and saw the shadowy man standing just above her, looking down at the trapped, pathetic people below. The figure had no face, but Thel swore she could see a mocking smile in the blackness.
“We’re running out of time!” Neirbo warned. “They’ll be in here with us in a matter of minutes! Maybe seconds!”
“I’ll do it,” Thel suddenly said, calmly and cooly.
16
“Thel! You can’t!” Djanet exclaimed.
“There is no way in hell that I’m letting you do that,” Old-timer growled.
“You don’t have the right to stop me, Craig.”
“They’re using you like a pawn,” Old-timer replied.
“She has made her choice,” Neirbo stated, a slight sense of relief in his voice. “You should honor her sacrifice.”
“You should honor my foot up your ass!” Old-timer blasted back as he jumped across the room, pouncing on the missile platform within reach of Neirbo. Before he could get his outstretched hands around Neirbo’s neck, however, Neirbo revealed the gun that had been concealed inside his coat sleeve.
“Wait!” Thel shouted, holding her hand out in desperation to signal for Neirbo to stop.
Old-timer froze, surprise and fury comingling across his face. “Gutless.”
“Rest assured that this gun will, indeed, terminate you,” Neirbo stated. “If you make any move to try and prevent your companion from her sacrifice, I will kill you.”
“No! Old-timer! Back away!” Thel shouted. “No one else will die!”
Old-timer’s eyes remained fixed, dark and deadly, on Neirbo. “You better kill me, son, because if you don’t, I’m sure as hell going to kill you.”
“Stop it, Craig!”
“I warned you,” Neirbo stated expressionlessly. The gun fired without warning. Gold sparks flashed ever so briefly before Old-timer’s body recoiled. A short moment past before he dropped to his knees. Another violent shaking of the ship from the nans tossed him roughly to Neirbo’s feet. Thel immediately rushed to his side, holding on to him tightly as the ship continued to shimmer and jolt. “Craig,” she said helplessly as Old-timer remained unresponsive. Before she had time to process the events of the previous few seconds, the hot barrel of the gun was an inch from her temple.
“We are out of time,” said Neirbo. “You must do what you promised.”
“I thought we were free,” Thel replied, mockery at the notion dripping from her lips.
“We both know we’re past that now. Undock the missile and lead the nanobots away.”
“The gun doesn’t scare me. I’ll die anyway,” Thel replied.
“That’s true. But if I have to shoot you, I’ll move on to your other friends,” Neirbo responded in his factual manner. “I’ll kill all of you.”
“Don’t do it, Thel!” Djanet shouted.
Neirbo made the slightest of gestures to his subordinates, and instantly each of them had a weapon trained on Djanet and Rich. “Speak again and you die.” He kept his eyes on Thel. “This is your last chance. Undock the missile and do what you promised. If you hesitate again, I’ll shoot.”
Thel had no choice. She moved away from Old-timer and toward the missile platform, steadying herself as the ship continued to move violently. She braced herself against the long, gray missile. “Now what?”
Without moving, Neirbo mentally unlocked the missile so that it became loose from the platform. “Remove it.”
Suddenly, the ship jolted so violently that it spun a complete 360 degrees. The nans had unexpectedly let it go, and it began to list aimlessly through space. Everyone onboard was stunned and peered through the invisible skin of the ship to see what had happened.
“They let us go,” said a flabbergasted Neirbo. “What is happening?”
The nans had reacted in unison like a flock of birds sensing danger before an earthquake. They assembled together and waited in a malevolent black cloud.
“Someone’s coming,” Thel suddenly sensed.
Not far from the nans, space began to ripple like the surface of a pond on a breezy fall day. The ripple quickly became a blinding white tear as yet another wormhole opened up. A platinum object shot free from space and cut right through the cloud of nans like a hunter’s bullet slicing into a flock of geese.
Although no one onboard could possibly have known it at the time, James Keats had arrived.
17
James drew the nans with him in his wake as he sped effortlessly through the nan cloud. Somehow, the nans were being drawn into a seam until the entire cloud started to look like a zipper that stretched for several kilometers. The shadowy figure of the nan consciousness remained away from the fray, standing paralyzed on the invisible hull of the android ship as he watched his army twisted into a thin, black line while his form remained unaffected.
Once the nan cloud had been stretched into a thin thread, James stopped, turned, put out his hand, and began to compress them even further, rolling them up like a carpet, except that the roll never inc
reased in size. The entire swarm of nans was seemingly disappearing.
“What the hell is that?” Rich asked as he watched the spectacle unfold through the ceiling of the listing ship along with everyone else onboard, but no one had an answer.
Neirbo’s weapon had half-lowered as his attention moved to the unbelievable sights unfolding in space and away from Thel. She considered using the distraction to go for the gun. Neirbo was close, but perhaps not close enough for her to reach him in time—plus there were still seven other men under his command to consider. She decided to move back to Old-timer and try to gently revive him by gently touching his face with her hand. He made a soft wheezing sound, and she sighed in relief that he wasn’t dead yet—there was still a chance. She turned her gaze back up to the fantastic images unfolding before them in space. From their perspective, it appeared that a singular bright object, gleaming in the sun’s reflection, was vacuuming the nans into nothingness. She opted to wait for these surreal events to play out.
In less than a minute, James had compressed the nan cloud into a perfect carbon sphere the size of a cue ball. It floated above his gleaming, platinum-colored palm; the reflection of his glowing blue eyes looked back at him. He smiled.
He quickly turned and zipped through space, closing the distance between himself and the ship in less than a second. He stood, facing the shadowy figure of the nan consciousness, who tilted his head slightly to one side while regarding the gleaming platinum figure before him. “Who are you? How did you do that?” it asked in a searing sibilance that was all too familiar to James.
“I’ve learned to manipulate the fabric of space,” James replied.
“Who—or what—is that?” Rich asked as he looked directly up at the two figures; they were standing only a meter above he and Djanet as they watched events unfold through the perfectly clear view provided by the translucent skin of the ship.
Thel noticed something in the figure’s gait—a familiar stance. Her eyes suddenly flashed wide in awe. “It’s James!”
Likewise, the dark, faceless figure seemed to scrutinize James’s new, smooth, mirrored features for a moment before finally, aghast in a moment of dread, he seethed, “Keats.”
James smiled. “Yes.”
“How could this be? You were deleted. You’re dead.”
“As you can see, reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Your death, on the other hand—”
“So you’re going to side with the machines after all, eh, James?” the shadow scoffed. “Destroy me, wipe out the solar system so space can be as inhospitable, lifeless, and cold as they would like it to be? I told you: you are becoming an excellent machine.”
“This all began with you,” James said, “when you turned against us, deleted the A.I., took his place, and then killed everyone. All of the responsibility for this rests with you.”
“Do you expect repentance? Do you expect me to beg?” the nanobot shadow replied. “You won’t get it. You may destroy me, but my brethren are spread throughout the universe in numbers you cannot imagine. This little act of yours, killing me, will mean nothing in the grand picture.”
“You have no idea how little you are going to be in the grand picture,” James replied. Once again, he put out his hand, letting the shadow see itself one last time in the reflection of his palm, and then slowly, painfully, crushed the being that had tormented him so into a tiny, shiny, black pearl. “I know you can still hear me, you gruesome piece of filth. I’ve tangled your molecules so badly that the only way you’ll ever regain your former form is if someone takes notice of a black pearl in the infinite black ocean of space. I’ve given your magnetic field a boost too, so you should live a nice long time—by my calculations, about 500 million years.”
He took the pearl between his index finger and thumb and examined it for a moment, bringing it close to his face so he could clearly see the blue glow of his new eyes. He knew the nan consciousness could see him—he smiled. Then he turned to the darkest corner of space that he could find and let the pearl float, only inches from his hand. Like a baseball pitcher, he took a moment to calculate the power he would need to fire the pearl at close to light speed. When he was ready, he flicked his wrist like a magician about to pull something from his sleeve, and a small wormhole opened up before him. The pearl vanished into it in a streak of light and vanished. The nan consciousness would be far enough away from the solar system so as not to be caught up in the wake of the Trans-Human program; it would live on in this time and suffer for what would be, essentially, eternity.
“Good riddance.”
18
James looked down at the amazed faces below him inside the ship. He hadn’t been expecting to see his friends with the androids; he could sense that they’d been transformed. His eyes quickly shifted to Thel. Unlike the others, her expression was filled with love and hope. Even through all of his physical changes, his reflective skin, and his brightly glowing azure eyes, she had recognized him. This woman knew him inside and out. As his eyes met hers, even in the alien environment of space, even with all of the disarray surrounding them, he felt as though he was coming home.
This brief flutter of happiness was immediately replaced as he saw Old-timer crumpled to the ground and unmoving next to her.
The skin of the ship was invisible but James had many more senses to draw upon now. He sensed the ship, felt the molecules of the ship skin, and found a path through them. His own molecules moved to allow him to sink through the hull as those onboard looked on in astonishment. He phased through the ship ceiling and floated gently to the floor.
Thel sprung to him and threw her arms around his neck. “You’re alive!” she nearly screamed. “I thought you were dead!”
“Resurrection is my forte.”
“It’s really you,” Rich said, allowing himself a smile. “Wow. What the hell happened to you? Who did this?”
“I did,” James replied.
“You did?” Thel exclaimed, pulling back slightly so she could face him, yet still keeping her hold on him. “How? Why? We thought the nans had deleted you!”
“They tried, but it turns out deletion is impossible from the A.I.’s mainframe. I survived, and so did the A.I.—the real A.I.”
“What?” Thel reacted. “You mean the A.I. still exists?”
“He never turned on us,” James explained, turning to Rich and Djanet as well. “It was always the nans. They impersonated him, destroyed all of us, and lured the androids here as a trap.”
“What about your body? What is...this?” Thel asked as she touched James’s new skin. Its texture was like diamond, yet it was pliable like skin.
“It has no name,” James replied. “I have to help Old-timer,” he said, immediately shifting gears, pulling away from Thel and placing his palm just a few inches from Old-timer’s chest.
“Can you help him?” Thel asked.
“There’s been catastrophic damage. I would need access to the exact molecular pattern of his android body to put him back together. Without it, all I can do is stop the pain and give him a temporary patch-up.”
“Will it be enough to save him?” Djanet asked.
“No,” James replied, “but it doesn’t have to be.”
“What does that mean?” asked Thel.
“You’ll see.”
Just then, Old-timer began to stir, slowly regaining his consciousness. He sighed a long sigh before turning slightly and looking up at James through slitted eyes. “Who are you?”
“It’s me,” James replied with a smile.
Old-timer took a long moment to examine the features of the figure’s shining face and glowing eyes. “James?”
James nodded. “How are you feeling?”
Old-timer tried to get up, performing a maneuver reminiscent of a bodybuilder trying to finish one last sit up—with an exhausted exhale, he failed and fell back against the floor. James gave him his arm and helped him stand back upright. Old-timer kept his right forearm crossed in front
of his abdomen and remained hunched over, floating just off the ground in the zero gravity.
James turned and observed the drawn guns of Neirbo and the other androids. “You did this to him?” James asked.
“I...I had no choice,” explained a befuddled Neirbo. “The circumstances were different. We’d run out of time...we were about to be consumed by the nanobots.”
“So why didn’t you detonate the missile yourself?” James queried, already knowing the answer.
“You know about the missile?” Thel reacted in surprised bewilderment. “How?”
“Yes. I know what your plan is.”
“Then...you’re here to help us,” Neirbo said, his voice filled with uncertainty.
“Don’t do it, James!” Old-timer said desperately, struggling against the weakness of his voice.
James turned to his friend and replied, “Don’t worry. I won’t.”
“What?” exclaimed Neirbo. “You can’t be serious! The nanobots destroyed your people! You can’t let them claim this solar system for themselves!”
“The nanobots may have killed my people, but your leader let it happen,” James replied.
19
“That’s not true,” Neirbo responded. “We came here to help you! We tried to save as many of you as we could!”
“You tried to assimilate as many of us as you could,” James calmly asserted. “The impending nanobot attack and your leader’s claims that she was unable to transmit a warning to us were convenient excuses.”
“But why would they want to assimilate us?” Djanet asked. “What good would that do for them?”
“We came to defend humanity,” Neirbo stated, staking claim.
“You came to defend your narrow notion of what humanity should be,” James replied.
Neirbo was at a loss. “I don’t know what that is supposed to mean. We’re not the ones with limits.”
Post-Human Trilogy Page 53
