An End

She looked all-too-pleased with herself, and grinned widely. [you wouldn’t want to go where i’m sending you like that, hank. you wouldn’t last long as a flesh construct.]

Hank was wordless. He grabbed his projector and placed it in his pocket. “You could’ve fucking warned me. Uploaded me and didn’t fucking warn me.” He looked uneasily over at his own dead body.

[oh, hush now, hank. you’ll like this even more than being a cowboy.]

Fleur’s eyes flashed with realization. “No humans…Just me. You killed him so that—”

[and her eyes were opened.]

“But we’ve cleaned everything already. There were no more systems to infect.” She began to shake her head back and forth, unconsciously denying that which she knew she could never refuse.

[let’s just say this is something special.]

“I can’t! I won’t do it. I—”

[you will.]

[natural immunity. that’s an asset, son. right now, your only asset.]

Zero was held motionless, floating in the center of the spherical chamber to which they had transported him. It was dark, but three revolving spotlights, perhaps force generators, were fixed upon his limp body, holding him in stark contrast to the rest of the expanse of shadow. They surrounded him, these men who spoke with lips and tongues that projected nonsense and minds that projected perfect silverthought, violent in its intensity. He was struggling against the mental onslaught of hundreds of prying minds, the last of his mental defense mechanisms slowly cracking and falling.

[we’ve interrogated your machine. you’ve come a long way, Zero.]

how can he know that?

The man before him smiled, his lips curling to enunciate those grinding words that were quickly surpassed in volume by the direct mind-to-mind communication that was much more effective, even if it was highly disconcerting.

[your machine…it gave us everything we need to know about you.]

The man walked closer. Black-clad hand reached out, gently touched Zero’s cheek.

[so long…it’s been so long since we’ve seen you. eons.]

Zero frowned, beyond confused. That touch, almost imperceptible as (leather?) fingertips traced his cheekbone. The man’s eyes were a piercing blue, so faded as to suggest white. Impossible blue, the blue of a life spent in the darkness of space. Zero had the most unsettling feeling that he knew this man from somewhere, sometime…

[we sent her to populate your galaxy many, many years ago. after she stopped responding to our communications, we just assumed that the colony had been lost. but it would appear that the dear creature you call “Mother” has been busy, busy, busy.]

The man grasped Zero’s chin firmly, locked his gaze into Zero’s eyes, and his world became a burning city, a woman screaming, looking up, reaching up, pointing into the sky, where a vessel hung, lights flickering from within, a radiant sphere of white expanding out from the interior as phase drives amplified the Fleur virus, disseminating it throughout the atmosphere, where it rained down, tiny flecks of silver, a confetti of glitter that dusted the faces of the assembled masses and spawned, spawned on and in their flesh, screaming flesh as the roar from above, the many engines of an Extinction Fleet descending from above, a tumult that was indescribably beautiful and horrifying and—

Zero closed his eyes, snapped his head back and forth, those alien hands now grasping both sides of his face, those alien eyes now drilling into his mind with pure white fire.

[she sent you to kill us, you know. or maybe the beauty of it is that none of you knew. you thought it was a jihad. you thought it was civil war.]

Zero opened his eyes and looked desperately up at the stranger, whose face was white and held a sheen of sickness and exhaustion. The stranger shook his head, cleared his throat, and the suffocating mental embrace was released.

“It wasn’t a civil war, Zero.” He assembled his sentence very carefully, spoke the words with a childish fascination at the sound, the taste, the touch of the new language. “It was a genocide.”

“I’m so sorry.” Zero felt all of his energy, all of his vitality pour from his body at the man’s touch. The Stranger’s touch, for that is what that silken mental embrace felt like. He was a stranger, but so remarkably familiar…“I never knew—”

The Stranger smiled the sad smile of ancient resignation. “Of course you never knew, Zero.” He leaned in close to the incapacitated Zero, gently, tenderly kissed his forehead, tousled his hair. The gesture was so kind, so loving. Who was this man?

With a wave of his hand, the beams of light holding Zero suspended in the air slowly faded, lowered him to floor level, where he stood, weakly rubbing his hands over the cold gooseflesh of his forearms. The Stranger’s head tilted in concern and then understanding, and he removed his black overcoat and wrapped it around Zero’s shoulders.

“Come on, son. There’s much to talk about, and so little time.”

[it would seem that we were a little too efficient.]

Fleur glared at Mother, whose eyes betrayed the obvious relish with which she was stringing them along. The little girl sat in her tiny chair, her hand placed lovingly on top of Hank’s new emulated hands, uneasily clasped on the table before him, on which was printed a circular pattern of dancing barnyard animals, all linked hand-to-hand, or hoof-to-feather, rather. Mother patted Hank and gravely rested her chin on her fist, shrugging with feigned indecision.

[too efficient. that’s the only way to explain it.]

“Just tell us what you want to say. Stop these games.”

Satisfied that she had stirred enough emotion in Fleur for now, Mother smiled widely, crossed her arms on her pre-pre-pre-pubescent chest.

[you ran when you found out what you were doing to those worlds, little flower. you hid on a prison galleon bound for the outer and hoped that we’d never be able to find you. if it weren’t for whistler and seven and eight and nine, you’d have escaped with the rest of the vermin.]

Whistler and Nine sat side-by-side, each flickering in perfect projected unease. Neither could look up and face the gaze of Fleur.

“They brought me back unharmed.” Fleur instinctively flexed her “new” left hand, constructed from an emulated parts clone, raped from another Fleur to fit the only Fleur that truly mattered. “So you must have found another planet. Another rogue world.”

[something like that.]

“Just fucking tell me!”

A motion too fluid and too fast for Fleur to comprehend and they were alone in the room, Whistler and Nine and Hank vanished, the only hint of their existence the tiny silver spherical emulation projectors that dropped into the children’s chairs in which they had been sitting. The balls rolled around the concave (convex?) depressions meant for human posterior regions, then fell through as the chairs, the neon green carpet, the room itself faded, dissolved. Fleur and Mother were left alone in the true Center Earth, which appeared from the fog of illusion that Mother had created for her guests.

They hung in the center of an expanse that dwarfed the Vegas tunnel, its walls lined with machines of limited sentience that skittered about insectlike, gigantic machines the size of mountains roaring along on Mother’s orders of processing the interior of the planet. Fleur’s throat closed in as she saw what the majority of the machines were working on. Mother remained in her child form, and playfully swam over to where the silver balls that were Whistler, Nine, and Hank floated. She grabbed all three and placed them in the pocket of her overalls.

[like my ship?]

Ship was an understatement. A vessel the size of a continent was being constructed out of the carcass of planet Earth in its very interior. Hundreds, thousands of Mother’s machines swarmed over its surface, which sparkled with countless welding blasts, shrieks of metal, the reverberating clang of miles-long segments of the vessel slamming into place as the machines hurriedly constructed it.

Fleur was wordless. She had seen the vessels of the Extinction Fleet, but never anything like this. She had only heard of one larger vessel—