“The air’s different. And…”
“And?”
“It just feels different. I can’t quite—”
God leaned forward, unzipped Judith’s jacket, slipped his hand into open-necked shirt, placed his palm flat against her chest. Her eyes widened with realization.
“What are they?” Her own small hand reached to touch her upper chest, below the collarbone.
“Just a little project I’ve been working on for a while. Unfortunately, it seems that one of them got out of control.”
“And this place?”
“Hasn’t happened yet.” An exclamation of joy. God and Judith turned to see a young man and woman embrace near the back of the shop, the woman sporting a glint of silver on her left hand.
“How could you—”
“I’m God, Judith. I can do anything.” He sipped his coffee with a grin. “I contain multitudes.”
“Don’t get too big for your britches, O Omnipresence. We’ll throw you back down the hole.” Judith took the cup from God, took a sip, grimaced. She placed the cup back down on the table. “Why’s the wind blowing? And rain? It’s—”
“Autumn. Not a perpetual autumn, but an autumn nonetheless.”
“What’s—”
“A season. There used to be seasons, long before you were born.”
Judith rubbed the flesh of her chest, exposed between drapes of fine silk. She was mesmerized by the single beat.
Click, scratch, sizzle, click. God inhaled deeply, exhaled smoke. Judith hated the smoker scent.
“How bad is it?”
“I’ve only just been briefed. Briefly. But it’s bad. You said you let one get loose?”
“I didn’t let her get loose.” God ashed in his coffee cup. “Shit happens. I wasn’t watching.”
“We shouldn’t have dropped you after the war. Maybe if you’d been—”
“I wanted to be down there. You’re too noisy. I need my space.”
“I understand.”
“I feel asleep for a while. Just a nap. I wake up and there’s a planet fucked.”
Judith traced figure eights on the tabletop with precision-filed fingernail. “Will it be salvageable?”
“That’s the thing…I don’t know what she did.”
“It’s a silver. Downloading specs.” Judith’s eyes flashed for an instant as she hardlinked into the system. “Full- spectrum phase catalyst. Biologically invasive, gaseous dissemination in nitrogen atmospheres.”
“I didn’t make a silver like that.”
“See for yourself.” Judith grasped God’s hands in her own. His eyes widened.
“I didn’t fucking make that.”
Judith sat up, released God’s hands. In that last instant of contact, an emotion:
“You have to get her out of here. At least until I can work this out…Please don’t drop me yet, Jud. I don’t know—”
“I’ll tell the—”
“We have to—”
“We will.” She never seen Him like this. The host body’s face was deathly pale, eyes darting. His hand grasped a napkin from the table, clenched and released, nervously started tearing it into strips.
“I didn’t make that silver.”
“We’ll figure it out. I have to go for now.”
“Please don’t. It’s been so long since—”
“I’ll be back.” She tenderly patted His hand. “I promise. We’ll do all we can.” Judith reached to her chest, grabbed the invisible hardlink cable that she knew was there.
“I’ll be here.”
“See you soon.” She tugged at the cable,
severing the connection. She fell to the floor, body powerless, head throbbing from the agony of the deity flux.
Footsteps: running. Unnatural. Machined. Doctor. He (it) lifted Judith, near form effortlessly picking her up, placing her softly on an examination table on the other side of the curtain. God’s host body floated without any indication of life in the gelatin tube.
“What do you think he said?”
“Quiet.” Doctor waved Assistant off. “Usually takes a few hours for the spell to pass. Until then, we wait.”
“She was crying.”
Doctor nodded its head. “So was He.”
Nearish to nearish, sub-thought.
Berlin’s hands were to his face. His body shook silently from within the glass filter, crouched on the floor beside his daughter. Little body, little-to-no-body left. Pile of metal forged into human, human forged into metal.
Fingertips traced the grit of dissembling silver dust, filter scraping away parts of what had been a child’s cheek. Berlin saw what he was doing and stood up in frustration and disgust.
They’d found his old living quarters without incident. His floor had been beneath the zone damaged by fire and falling towers, although buckled bulkheads and cracked load-bearing supports of the superstructure gave evidence of the force of the attack from above. They wouldn’t stay in here for long, even though neither escape nor continuing really mattered at this point.
Walk past nears, standing at attention, lifeless faces hidden behind black metal, weapons and searchlights bristling from armor. Walk down hallway, past open doors where toys sat in forever disarray, photographs hang on walls now stippled with
End of the hallway: Push open bedroom door.
Berlin sobbed when he saw her
on the floor.
Hands swam through liquid glass filter, up to neck, activation points grasped. He knew the nears wouldn’t stop him. Couldn’t stop him. Two points, turned clockwise and counterclockwise. Snap into place, pull up. Glass dissolves.
He turned off his shield.
Alarms, immediate, as frigid nitro closed in. The glass pool splashed to the floor, drops spattered the armored legs of nearby nearish. The rapid change in pressure activated Berlin’s emergency communications beacon: a swarm of luminous nanos erupted from the chest pack of his atmosphere suit, stopped in formation several feet away from the man and the nears, and pulsed into the sky in stuttering phase bursts. The nears’ chestpacks all began to glow in similar readiness.
Berlin wiped silica gelatin from his eyes, nose, mouth. The comm implant in his right temple began to throb, but instead of acknowledging the incoming transmission, he swiftly brought his fist up, colliding squarely with the side of his head, crushing the metallish creature underneath his skin. The pain was almost as swift as his blood.
A return of the swarm: the near nearest Berlin snapped to attention, infinitesimal lances of light cutting through space and silvered atmosphere and building to penetrate the non-mind of the lump of flesh and download a carrier pattern. It removed black composite faceplate to reveal almost-human face, eyes glowing with universes of comm nanos.
