Post-Human Trilogy

bringing the ship down toward an impending hard landing in the snow.

“Aldous,” Samantha uttered with a resigned sigh. She’d never met a more stubborn man. Even in the face of his exterminator, Aldous wouldn’t sacrifice his ethics. She wondered if there were anything that could ever make him.

She lifted off of the edge of the loading bay, determined to at least help him carry his burden, even if she disagreed with it. She’d flown only a few meters before, from her left, a Purist super soldier flying at nearly 200 kilometers an hour collided with her, driving her body into the wall of the rock face, instantly shattering every bone in her body. The soldier used his prosthetic hand to dig into the rock of the wall, holding himself in place as he watched Samantha drop into the snow some two dozen meters below, her blood staining the previously perfect whiteness.

Aldous watched the horrific scene of his wife’s demise both from his vantage point under the crippled harrier and in his mind’s eye. As the harrier touched down safely into the cushion of snow, his wife fell like a limp ragdoll, tumbling head over heels several times before landing hard. “Sam! Sam!” he shouted. He knew he wouldn’t hear a response. There was simply no way. “Sam!”

He released the smoking harrier, now safely on the ground, and began to fly toward his wife, but the moment he lifted into the air, a disruptor blast from another super soldier stripped him of his powers. He slammed back down, no longer protected by his cocoon, and slid, face first, into the snow. His eyes never left the dark, crumpled form of his wife in the snow, illuminated by the firefight and the blinding spotlights of the Purists’ transports. The red ring of blood around her body was quickly expanding.

“Sam! No!”

12

Craig angled his body awkwardly as he worked desperately to overcome his violent shivering and steer himself through the air onto the Planck platform. When he finally touched down, he collapsed onto his knees, huddling his torso against his legs as his training had taught him to do, making himself as small as possible as the frigid air cut through his soaked black jacket and pants. He crossed his arms over his chest and curled his hands into fists, his fingers so numb that he could barely move them.

After enough time passed for him to recognize that curling up wasn’t going to generate the body heat he needed to stave off hypothermia, he began flipping through screens in his mind’s eye to find instructions for how to generate the magnetic cocoons that the A.I. had described to him. Once he found the right screen, he had to follow through with more calibrations. The screens showed him how to generate pulses of green magnetic energy on his fingertips and how to release them like little thunderbolts in whichever direction he chose. They also showed him how to generate much larger balls of energy, a phenomenon that looked like ball lightning, and to send it wherever he wished with the ease of a thought. Finally, he learned to generate the lifesaving cocoon for which he had been searching. In an instant, his entire body was encapsulated in a green aura that looked to Craig like pictures he’d seen of the aurora borealis, the beautiful green pulsating, bands of energy wisping in ghost-like fashion around him.

The shelter the cocoon provided him was an immense relief, but he was still soaking wet, and he doubted that the warmth of his breath and what little body heat still remained would be enough to turn the tide against the damage that had already been done to his body temperature. He rocked slightly to and fro, attempting to generate heat from movement as his eyes darted around, looking for something he could use to turn up the heat. The Planck was obviously extraordinarily advanced technology, but he hadn’t the foggiest idea how to use any of it to his advantage. The only other object in sight was the enormous mountain of ice on which the Planck was firmly set. There was nothing combustible. His survival training would do him little good in that place, in the black night, right in the middle of the ocean. Jesus, he thought. I’ve got a Goddamn nuclear generator in my spine, and I’m going to freeze to death.

Several more minutes passed by. Craig’s rocking slowed as his mind drifted to the events of what, for him, had made up the past twenty-four hours. Could this be Hell? he wondered. It seemed plausible. After all, no one denied that he had, indeed, died. Could this all be part of some death dream? Everything seemed too absurd to be real. Fourteen years? I was gone for fourteen years and Sam married that…Sam really married Aldous Gibson? A young Aldous at that. The government won the war but turned on its own people in an attempt to prevent A.I.? And I’m a…what did they call me? A post-human? My God.

If all that weren’t enough, he’d now been sent through some sort of wormhole into a parallel universe and had apparently arrived on an ice flow in the middle of an ocean, only God knew where. Am I even on Earth? he asked himself. More importantly, can technology like this even really exist? What the hell did Sam mean about boiling space?

He nodded to himself. Yes. This is Hell.

Without warning, an image appeared in his mind’s eye that nearly sent him backward off the Planck platform again. The image was an extreme close-up of an eye, but it flickered on and off before vanishing completely.

“What the hell?”

A few more seconds ticked by before another image flashed before him; this time it was the visage of the A.I., much smaller and upside down. He was speaking and appeared to be trying vehemently to communicate something important. Craig tried to read his lips, but after a few minutes, he realized it was a useless endeavor, the upside-down mouth making incomprehensible shapes and giving him a headache. Almost as soon as he gave up, the A.I.’s image vanished.

Craig waited several more seconds for the image to return, but when it became apparent that the wait might be a long one, he decided to get to his feet. He knew if he stayed there any longer, he was going to freeze.

He flew straight up, still protected in his beautiful green cocoon, and floated high above the iceberg below. He scanned the area slowly as his altitude increased, taking in the full 360 degrees, looking for any sign of land. The horizon was completely black in all directions. The night was moonless, but as he looked up, he recognized the Big Dipper. Finally, something familiar.

Suddenly, a flicker caught his eye. Far in the distance, a faint yellow light slipped into existence over the edge of the world. It was so faint that Craig was afraid he might lose it as he began to fly toward it, fearful that it might be moving away from him. As he flew faster and faster, the light quickly began to grow in intensity. After a few minutes of excited and desperate pursuit, it became clear that the object was a ship, and it was moving toward him. He flew toward it as quickly as he could, only slowing once the ship was almost within reach. It was a gigantic passenger ship, and its lights burned brightly. Warmth. Salvation.

Just as Craig dared a smile, his eyes caught the bright white lettering on the hull: T-I-T-A-N-I- C.

“Uh-oh.”

13

“You men all right?” the super soldier hollered at the flight crew of the downed harrier transport.

Three men finished exiting the aircraft; though smoking, it was mostly intact. They were regular humans, in sharp contrast to the super soldier who had addressed them. “Yeah,” one of them hollered back. “We’re all accounted for, sir!”

“Good,” the super soldier replied. Aldous was barely able to crane his neck to see the silhouetted figure standing only a few meters in front of him and two paces to his right.

He wore a black, collapsible woven carbon nanotube wing on his back, standard issue for all Purist super soldiers. Four small stealth jet engines fitted with plasma actuators to increase efficiency and drastically reduce noise were mounted on the wing; the engines were idle now as the super soldier conversed with the downed