Post-Human Trilogy

made up his mind not to sit again until the following night. He was in agony. He’d suffered from sciatica for the last twenty years, and he’d badly thrown out his back during his desperate escape from his home. His legs were on fire, yet he stood straight, his back like a flagpole, his dust-covered uniform like a flag—something to get behind and something to follow.

A young sergeant entered the situation room and urgently approached. “General!” he saluted.

“What is it?” General Wong asked, waving away the salute.

“There’s a Lieutenant Patrick here. He found outsiders while on recon!”

The general and his advisors immediately shared looks of astonishment.

“Where are they?” asked the general.

“They’re with him, sir—just outside the room.”

“In the compound? Dear God.”

“There’s more. They say they spoke to the A.I. earlier today.”

“Bring them into the conference room—right now.”

The young sergeant moved swiftly out of the room and signaled to the lieutenant to bring the group inside. “Let’s go,” the lieutenant said.

“Lieutenant Patrick,” Old-timer began, “our people haven’t eaten anything or rested since this morning. They’re at the breaking point.”

“I’m sorry, friend, but you need to see the general. I’ll make sure something is brought in for you as soon as I can.”

“Thanks, son.” Old-timer put his arm around Thel and comforted her as they walked through the situation room and into a large conference room.

The room had never been used before, but it was furnished with a large oak table with dozens of brown leather chairs surrounding it. General Wong stood at one end of the table, his advisors sitting nearby. His face was wooden, but his eyes could not hide his trepidation. Nothing about that day had made any sense to him or to any of the Purists. The arrival of these outsiders was no different. How could they be here? Why are they here? What do they want? What answers can they provide, and how can we possibly trust them?

“Please sit,” he said to them.

Old-timer, Thel, Djanet, and Rich all sat close to one another on one side of the table, far from the general. Alejandra stood behind them, while the lieutenant went to the general and saluted.

Again, the general waved it away. “Report.”

“Well, we were on recon, sir. We spotted something airborne in the distance. We initially counted three of what we believed were small drones looking for survivors. We opened fire, but the attack was repelled. When the objects started coming towards us, we ran, but we were tracked down. They weren’t drones; they were outsiders. They told us they were the last of their people. They say the A.I. has killed the rest.”

“For the love of Christ,” one of Wong’s advisors said. “It can’t be.”

General Wong’s face was no longer wooden. His eyes were wide and his mouth opened slightly, the air stolen from his lungs. “All gone…”

“It can’t be, General. That doesn’t make sense. The A.I. works for them. They’re trying to flush us out,” insisted the advisor.

“Stop it,” General Wong ordered sternly. The general leaned forward onto the back of the chair in front of him before abandoning his pledge not to sit and negotiating his way into the chair, desperately hoping his unsteady legs would not drop him on his posterior before he could reach the leather.

“They aren’t trying to flush us out, General. They believe what they say,” Alejandra offered, so as to break the long, stunned silence.

“She’s an empath, General,” Lieutenant Patrick explained, anticipating the general’s next obvious question.

“An empath? Reliable, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ve risked us all by bringing them in here,” the general said in an even tone, still trying to catch his breath after the latest and perhaps worst shock of this day—the worst day in the history of humanity— and that was saying something.

“I’ve worked with her for a long time. She is reliable—totally.”

Another long pause followed. The general took his time in mulling over this evidence.

“General, they need something to eat and some rest,” Lieutenant Patrick informed.

“Get them something,” the general said to one of his advisors, who walked to the door and barked orders to the sergeant outside. “Okay. One of you explain this to me.”

Old-timer didn’t hesitate to speak up. “We’re terraformers, sir. We were working on Venus when an accident with a magnetic experiment short-circuited our nans and disconnected us from the Internet. We headed back to Earth, but…well, everyone was dead when we got there.”

“Dead? All of them? How?” the general asked.

“There was a download today—an upgrade.”

“It’s true, General,” one of the advisors said. “I remember reading about that a few days ago.”

“When the download went through, the A.I. introduced a virus that caused the nans to attack their hosts. Everyone was dead within seconds.”

“Everyone? How can you know?”

“We know. We’ve been all over the planet today. No one who was connected to the Net survived.”

There was another long pause as the general absorbed the grim information. “The A.I….it works for you people, does it not? How could this happen?”

“It was supposed to…but something has…happened…” Old-timer answered.

“It’s evil,” Thel interjected, her first words since watching James wheeled away, unconscious.

“She’s right,” Rich echoed. “The program—it was too large to completely monitor. It…somehow developed a lust for power. It wants to populate the solar system with machines. It wants to be…the machine God.”

“The A.I. located us, brought us to his mainframe, and tried to trick us into going back online,” Old-timer further elaborated. “We escaped. It wasn’t easy. Our companion is in your hospital—in bad shape. He might…” Old- timer paused and looked at Thel before letting his sentence trail off.

“Die,” Thel said, finishing it for him.

General Wong sat back into the cool leather chair and stared past the end of the table at the far, dark wall. He was trying to picture a being so purely evil that it would wipe another race out of existence, but he could not see it. He came back to the present moment, and his eyes darted to Alejandra. He didn’t ask her verbally if they were telling him the truth, but she didn’t need to be an empath to read the question in his eyes.

“There is no deception from any of them.”

A man walked into the room carrying four plates of food, which he set down on the table in front of the four outsiders. The plate was filled with mashed potatoes, gravy, and a chicken leg.

“Oh my God!” Rich knocked the plate away from himself. “That’s disgusting!”

The general and the rest of the Purists were momentarily astounded as mashed potato and gravy streaked across the oak table.

“Calm down, Rich,” Old-timer said in a low, calm voice.

“Calm down? No! Did you see that? There was a whole leg of an animal on my plate! I’m not eating that!”

“Rich, it’s their custom—”

“They can shove their custom up…” Rich’s eyes raised and met those of the Purists. “Look—look, it might be your custom to eat…walking things with legs, but that’s not food to me. I’ve had a really, really bad day, and all I want is something to eat that didn’t use to have a face, okay? Is that too much to ask?”

“No,” said the general quickly. He stood up. “No, it’s not. Get these people some food, no meat, and a place to sleep.” He walked out of the room, followed by his advisors.

Rich remained rigidly standing, breathing heavily as his body shook. Old-timer looked up at him scornfully. “What?” Rich asked.

“You’d think a seventy-year-old man would have finally learned how not to act like