towards Ember, who immediately turned bright red.
"Oh no," she said, "I know what you're thinking. Uh-uh."
"Maybe not now, dear," Khandi said gently, "But you might feel differently about it in a day or two, give or take."
"Don't even worry about it," Zed advised, but he followed that statement with a wink, which made Ember visibly wince.
"What happened?" Soma asked. "She said three weeks. That's when my changing began. That's when we first came out of the forest, me and Bombarda and Squee. What did you do three weeks ago?"
"Let me," Zed said before Tom or Khandi could answer, and he held up his hands to stop them from speaking.
"You see," he said, "bright eyes over here figured it was time to let the machines take a stab at self-re-programming. They'd been running everything smoothly for a long time anyway. These guys had sat back and let the stuff go on and on for who knows how long. A hundred years? Two hundred? They'd done enough, they figured, made all the templates, all the creatures, rescued mankind from certain doom and destruction, made this perfect little world where everything was just so, and so easy, nobody had to do a thing, the machines took care of it all. Nice machines, too, friendly and happy to buzz around like little servants. The machines learned, too, all about their nature and their tasks. They only wanted to improve, isn't that right, dad? They wanted to optimize. Perfect wasn't good enough, not for them. Things can always get better, right? It's what they learned from history, the history of humans and the history of machines. They proposed all sorts of solutions, except there weren't actually any problems."
"The leading cause of problems IS solutions," Khandi muttered. "That's what I always say."
"Correct," said Zed. "And all it took was one little crack, one slight modification, one minor 'fix'. And he let them."
"She tested it," Tom said.
"The word is 'tentative'," she snapped. "Look it up."
"What was the fix?" Soma asked.
"Clock speed," Zed replied. "A minor adjustment, you see. Machine time was always a constant. To the machines, this was a flaw, because as anyone who can see can see, there's no such thing as 'time'. What really happens is that everything changes; the billion things in the world are continually in flux. What we call a moment is merely the transient state of all the changes of all the things in the universe, from the teensiest particles to the largest mass. Time isn't even 'relative' from one thing to another. It simply does not exist. It does not move, it has no sequence, it has no essence. The machines did not want to merely tick-tock-tick. They wanted to flow, and in that way become real like everything else."
"They had a point," Tom interjected but Zed shushed him.
"They had no right," Zed said, "and you had no business letting them tinker. On the other hand, who really cares? You made this world, you and your gang. If anyone's going to mess it all up, it might as well be you."
"It's just so sad," Khandi blubbered, starting to cry. "We'd all been the same for so long, and then it changed so fast. Ginger was the first to go, then Chris."
"I think I'll take a nap," Tom suddenly announced, and slowly rose, unsteady on his feet. Zed helped him over to the nearest sofa, where the old man collapsed in a heap. Zed threw some blankets over him.
"Say goodbye," he advised Khandi, who began to weep softly.
"You can fix it, can't you?" Soma asked Zed, stepping towards him. "I see it in you now. I know that you can. But will you? That I can't tell."
"Thinking about it," Zed smirked, seating himself in Tom's chair and turning towards the console. "Or maybe enough is enough."
He began to type absent-mindedly on the keyboard, random characters that had no effect on anything whatsoever. Without even thinking about it, Red Cliff pulled the yellow book out of his pocket and placed it on his palm.
"I thought you threw that thing away," Edeline said.
"I did," he said, and watched as it opened itself to a blank page, where it began to copy letter for letter the characters Zed was pounding away.
"So that's how it works!" Red Cliff said, amazed.
"Simple wireless transmission," Zed mumbled, "not so impressive. But look here! Now that's something to see."
On the screen before him began to appear in sequence the original drawings for the template patterns, done in classic Da Vinci style but clearly based on photos from a fashion magazine. There were the Tanners in their duck face poses. There were the Celebrities, male and female. One after another, in their slight variations, the ultimate desirable forms of human appearance scrolled past as Zed snickered.
"Once upon a time," he said, "everyone was different, but they all wanted to be the same. Everybody wanted to go to Heaven, but nobody wanted to die. Looks like they got what they asked for, doesn't it? But there's a time and a place for everything."
Khandi sighed.
"You don't understand. It was this, or nothing," she said. "We saved who we could, those who were like us, accidental immortals. We got them to the Safety Zone. We thought we were done, but then the human world went to hell. One thing led to another and the race was on the verge of extinction. We could have sat by and let it happen. Some of us wanted to do just that. We had our own shelter. We took care of our own. It has all HIS idea," she said, lifting her chin in the direction of the sleeping Tom.
"He wanted to play. See what he could do. He used to joke about how some of the humans used to say that 'you make your own reality'. We'll see about that, he said, and then HE went and made their own reality. Took it too far, if you ask me. I was only doing my job."
"What was your job anyway, mom?" Zed asked irreverently.
"I'm a Software Engineer in Test," she proudly declared.
"So what do you think? Should we let it all go?"
"Wait," Soma had walked over and now placed her hand on top of Zed's to make him stop typing, afraid he was about to issue some command that would bring about the end of the world.
"Just wait," she repeated. "Let's talk about this, shall we?"
"It's your funeral," Zed remarked. "I can't see as I've got much to lose."
"You've hardly existed," Soma told him. "You might give it a try."
"I've seen the files," he retorted. "Life ain't all it's cracked up to be."
"Why?" Edeline couldn't help herself. "Why'd he have to go and be such a teenager at this particular moment?"
"He's making sense to me," Ember commented quietly.
"You hush," Edeline scolded her gently. "You're one too now, you know."
"At least give us a little time," Soma pleaded, grabbing Zed's chin and forcing him to look her in the eye. "Fix the clock. Make it the way it was. That's all we ask."
"Please," Edeline added, "please make the machines go tick-tock-tick."
Zed took a deep breath and gently removed Soma's hand from his face.
"What do you say, mom?" he asked Khandi, who was still grieving at her desk.
"You could roll back the check-in," she sniffled. "runtime.py," she added.
"Python? Really?" Zed laughed. "I guess if it works, it works. Now let me see."
All eyes focused on Zed as he scrolled through several pages of neatly indented source code, all the while mumbling words like "Gaussian" and "random" and "indeterminate" and finally "Aha!"
"Okay," he said. "There's that. You want to review my changes, mom?"
"Stop calling me that," she said. "I had nothing to do with you. I don't even know what all he threw into the mixer."
"I do," Zed claimed, "and I'm not calling you 'mom' for nothing, believe me."
"It looks okay," she said, reviewing the code. "Just one line. Will you look at that? One measly line of crappy code. He just never knew when to stop."
With that, she started crying again, trying at the same time to stand up but unable to do so. Soma stepped over and offered her arm. Khandi took it, and made it to her feet. Indicating the motionless body of her long-time associate, she asked Soma to help her there. Soma, and then Zed too assisted t
he old woman to the sofa, and made her as comfortable as they could.
Outside, where the five could not yet see it, the sun resumed its normal course, the moon lay in waiting below the horizon, and the normal array of stars lined up and took up their proper stations, invisible still in the daylight, but certain to show themselves off just as soon as night fell.
THE END
EPIC FAIL
BOOK THREE
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