many things.” She stepped towards Old-timer and touched his cheek with her fingers. “You became something else. Your people took control of evolution and you became…post-human.”
Old-timer was left at a temporary loss for words. Her point of view, amazingly, seemed almost logical. He began to shake his head again, as though he were trying to shake out her voice and the seeming reasonability of her ideas. “And what about the end? You live your lives naturally, and then you let yourself die? You see seventy- five years of experiences, of love, of life, and then you let it all go? You must realize there is no god. The concept is absurd.”
“There are things we can’t explain.”
“Absurd.”
“Why? I can feel your emotions. Can you explain that?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be explained.”
“Perhaps one day it will. And perhaps when I die, I will learn a great many things.”
“Alejandra, you won’t learn a damn thing. Tell me something. Can you remember what it was like before you were born?”
“No, Craig.”
“So you concede it is possible to simply not exist?” Alejandra remained silent. “If there is a soul, if there is an afterlife, science can find it. Why not stick around long enough to find the answers instead of just taking a leap of blind faith?”
For a moment, she was silenced. She stepped away from him and looked back at the bloody sun and the Earth’s corpse. “It was your way of doing things that led to this, Craig, not ours.”
Old-timer sighed and nodded his head regretfully. “I can’t deny that, but as you said, we’re from the same world now. We have to make that world. There has to be a happy medium.”
10
WAKING UP had become almost impossible. James blinked his eyes, and the darkness flashed away for the briefest glimpse of his surroundings. He saw a black and orange blur sliding and swirling like the image of a kaleidoscope. The light was coming from overhead. He blinked a handful of times, but his heavy eyes shut and sealed, his eyelids sore like the legs of a marathon runner in the last quarter-mile.
Someone’s cool hand touched the back of his head, and he awakened again. A woman’s chilled fingers were on the back of his neck. She was putting something behind his head. Was it a pillow? Of course—he’s in a hospital. Thel had found the Purists. He tried to speak to the woman, but his voice failed him. His throat felt like the barrel of a flamethrower.
“Don’t try to speak,” the woman whispered. “You had a tube down your throat. Rest.”
A tube down his throat? Surgery. He has required surgery. James held his head up and tried to communicate, but again, every move caused exhaustion. One move of his neck felt like the thousandth time he had made the motion. The woman put her cool hand against his burning forehead and lightly pressed him back against the welcoming pillow, seemingly willing him back to sleep.
He couldn’t sleep—there was too much at stake. But he couldn’t fight her. She was too strong. He closed his eyes to wait for her to leave, but the blackness came again before the cool hand left his skin.
Someone was moving across the room, an elderly man holding a contraption with a bag of clear liquid attached to it, slowly making his way out of the room. He had made some sort of noise and given James the toehold he needed to escape the blackness.
Awake again, James could not let himself sleep. How much time had he already lost? Where was he? Suddenly, he remembered: a hospital. He needed to reason his way through his predicament. It was clear that he was being prevented from waking up. He looked down and saw the bandages across his torso. The punctured lung. He must have required some sort of surgery. That meant his body had undergone massive trauma. Without his nans, his body would have to heal from the trauma on its own. That would require an enormous amount of rest. The Purists must have administered painkillers and a sedative to keep him unconscious. How were they getting it into his system? A pained move of his neck from side to side revealed the answer. Like the man who had woken him, James had one of the poles with a bag filled with clear liquid attached to him. A wire went from the bag down to his arm, and a needle was puncturing his skin. He assumed this was how they administered the drugs and nutrients. He would have to disconnect it in order to stay awake. He took as deep a breath as he could. His throat was still coated with liquid flame. He swung his left arm across his body and grasped the needle that was sticking into his right forearm. This movement sent a terrible stab of pain through the right side of his body, where his incision was located. The painkillers were not strong enough. James did not want to imagine what it would have felt like had he no painkillers to dull the full brunt of it. He wrapped his fingers around the needle but then suddenly stopped.
James’s eyes were adjusting to the dim light, and the blur was clearing as he kept them open. Thel was lying on a cot against the wall only a few feet to his right. He tried to call out to her for help, but only a hoarse and cruelly painful whisper left his lips. She was sound asleep.
He broke from this train of thought and focused on the task at hand—he would have to do this himself. He began to pull with what little strength he had. Again, even with the painkillers running through his system, slowly pulling the needle out of his skin caused exceptional discomfort. He grimaced as he tried to work the metal object out of his arm. Since it had to have entered a vein, he knew it was deep. James wished for more strength, but he had none. He focused on the pain, hoping it would keep him awake long enough to work the needle out. It was an agonizing five-minute process, but finally, he worked the needle free. His arm began to bleed, but there was nothing he could do about that now. He needed to rest for a moment.
Without the painkillers or the sedatives going into his system, he knew he only needed a few minutes to go by before things would become easier. The pain would quickly increase, making him more alert. He concentrated on generating saliva and swallowing so he could tame the searing dragon in his throat. He looked at Thel and tried to call out to her again. His whisper was louder, but it still wasn’t enough to wake her out of her sleep. He knew she must have been exhausted. He looked at her dark hair and the exposed nape of her white neck. Everyone else had lost everything, but James still had Thel. She was alive, and he had to keep it that way.
When a few minutes had passed, James began to attempt the impossible. He rolled to his left. The pain was almost unbearable. He remembered trying to get to his feet after falling, following the mishap with the Zeus. That had only been the beginning. He squeezed his eyes tight and swore in his whispery voice. He remained on his left side for a few minutes more, before he attempted to move his left leg out from under him. He searched for the edge of the bed and let the leg guide him toward the cold floor.
When both his feet reached the ground, he held on to the side of the bed with both hands for a few minutes before trying to put all his weight on his legs; he could not afford to fall. To fall would undo everything and cost him and the rest of the survivors their future. It all depended on his first few steps. He very cautiously stepped forward and, with great trepidation, let go of his stranglehold on the bedsheets. He slowly took the dozen or so steps to the door of the room and exited.
Outside, a soldier was standing guard. His mouth fell open when he saw James. “Oh dear Lord!” he exclaimed.
“I need to see your commanding officer,” James began in a faint, sandpapery whisper. “Our survival depends on it.”
11
When Thel opened her eyes and remembered the nightmare she inhabited, she immediately turned her head
