They stood in the winds that cried of warfare to the east and looked out upon the blank black of the dry ocean expanse. The resistance in the streets beneath the city had been killed by the company defense force, but there would be more. There were always more.
“Is this planet really worth saving?” Michael regarded the burning expanse below him with unabashed disdain.
Richter stood at his side, now clothed, now solid and calm and human. He looked at Michael with his silver eyes and that was all the answer Michael needed.
“Maybe not this world. This world’s been dead for centuries. But the Enemy can’t be allowed to travel back through time unchecked. We can’t allow them to upload all that’s physical into Omega. We can’t allow them to kill and ravage all of history for sacrifice to a machine god. They’re your creation, but you’re nothing to them but a useless mass of protein, good only to power the machines that create worlds of phase space in the void between the stars. They must be stopped.”
“They will be stopped.”
A chaos of sound as the battle on the surface raged anew. The city shook from an atomic attack at its base.
“Are we worth saving?”
Richter did not answer him. His gaze was riveted to the sky, which had taken on a shimmering silver tone. Michael stood transfixed. He had never before seen color in the sky. The sky was black; it was scientific fact.
“They’re coming.”
“The machines?”
“They’ve been coming home for billions of years, and now they’re almost here. We have to prepare for their arrival. We have to prepare for the war.”
The fighting below the city had stopped as the hundreds of thousands of members of the forsaken resistance and the defense force saw the silver shade of the sky. The night began to shimmer with a metal fire.
“They’ll be here within the year. Probably sooner than we expect. We have to get out of here.”
“Many won’t understand.”
“Then they’ll be left to die. Their patterns will be uploaded into Omega. We can’t be concerned about those who don’t believe. We have to run, and we have to strike to kill. There can be no halfway in this war.”
“I’ll make the necessary preparations.”
The distinct sound of screaming and chaos as thousands of people saw silver in the sky where for countless billions of years before there had only been the black of night.
Soon.
“With Richter, I was able to convince my superiors that the threat was imminent and the threat would destroy everything in its path. The silver in the sky was reason enough to prepare for planetary departure. The long-range sensors revealed our worst fears: the silver in the sky was consuming everything in its path. The stars were fading, the out-system planets disappearing. The Enemy’s appetite was ravenous.
“We’d been equipping ex-terra vehicles with phase drives for centuries for in-system travel, and with the research of the last decade focusing solely on the uploading of human patterns, it was only a small technological hurdle to combine the pattern cache with a phase drive to create a Shadow. We had a fleet of phase-ready vehicles and more volunteers to pattern themselves than we could safely transport.”
“You were uploading people, just like the Enemy.”
“We were uploading people, but their patterns became part of the Judas program, not a part of Omega. The virtual universe that we created was a viral code in the vast network of phase space pockets that the Enemy had been creating for aeons.”
“You were giving up your physical selves so that others wouldn’t have to.”
“We became Judas to prevent the Enemy from uploading the past and erasing the history of our physical existence.”
“It was quite a sacrifice. There’s no turning back.”
“There’s no turning back until the Enemy has been defeated and the Purpose has been prevented.”
“This vessel, all of this… It’s all just lines of code in the Judas program?”
Zero-Four gently touched the matte black surface of the vessel wall. “Lines of code, yes, but so much more.”
“They’re in the system periphery. Our forces are ready to engage.”
“Good, good.” The display revealed an ocean of mercury in the sky. “Engage at will. This is where it begins.”
“Understood. Engage at will.”
With a hideous snap, the display cut to black. “Adjust our long-range sensors.”
“Sensors not responding. Communication with fleet has been cut off.”
Michael turned from the display, face a canvas of rage and fear. “Our forces will hold them off as long as they can. Even if… Well, at their present rate of advance, we still have two or three days.”
Richter was silent. The room was silent.
“Richter?”
He looked up, eyes flickering in the light of the static-filled displays. “The chamber… I have to get back to the pattern chamber.”
“What? Why do you—?”
“Someone… Just take me to the chamber.”
They went.
“I don’t believe it.”
“There’s two patterns in the buffer. We need to rescue them.”
Michael looked at Richter with a mixture of trust and suspicion. Who was this man from the past? He turned to a technician. “Download the patterns. Print them.”
“Yes, sir.”
Michael touched Richter’s shoulder, and they moved from the assemblage of technicians. “Do you know what this is all about? Do you know who they are?”
“I think so.”
“Can we trust them?”
Richter nodded slowly and sadly. “They’re more important to preventing the Purpose than either of us.”
“Who are they? How could they have—”
“Quiet. He’s coming around.”
“Their patterns aren’t in the registry. They could be one of the—”
“They aren’t machine code. I know them.”
“How could you possibly—”
Richter motioned for Michael’s silence. There were two people in the download chamber, a man and a woman. Both appeared to be sleeping. The woman’s lower body had been badly wounded, her midsection torn apart. She was bleeding profusely. Richter bent to pick up a black shard of metal from the chamber interior next to the woman. It was Enemy armor.
The man was coming around slowly. His eyes lazily opened, tried to focus, failed. He weakly attempted to get up, but fell back into the chamber. Richter reached out, gently touched the man’s forehead and cheek.
“Solid enough for now, but there was a lot of signal degradation in the transfer.”
“But how could you know them?”
Richter turned, gazed icily at Michael with silver eyes.
“I told them they’d get here eventually. I never expected them to arrive so soon. This wasn’t a part of the plan.”
The man in the chamber sluggishly tried to get up again, collapsed from exhaustion. He tried to speak, failed. The woman remained ominously silent.
“I know them because they came from the same world I escaped from. They’re monsters, just like me.”
The man in the chamber frowned, but he was too weak to summon the strength to say anything. Richter leaned down, whispered into his ear.
“Welcome to heaven, Simon Hayes.”
