There had been a moment of abject solitude in the wake of Hunter’s parting shot. She struggled against her child mind’s instinctual reaction to sob, to plop down on that barren plain and grind tiny fists into the open sores of her eyes. She suspected that his body had held the possibility of immortality, if she could have gotten to it in time. Lying dead on the dust as the vessel collapsed around it, the corpse mocked her ambitions. She suspected a grin if there’d been enough face left to sculpt one.
Great slabs of metallish flung down through the silver cloud, drawn gravitationally toward center, against the outward tide of her eternity of tiny machines. The hunks of vessel frictioned red and shot apart with rends that burst her eardrums. The child Maire calmly toddled to Hunter’s body, to Lilith’s. A slick lost in that cacophony, and she split Lilith’s chestplate, gutted her down. The child reached into the still-warm torso to her shoulder, searched, finally withdrew her crimson arm, her fist clenched around a tiny silver marble. The child smiled and grew up.
She knew there were survivors. Had to be. The universe is too rich, too fecund an expanse to allow the extinction of it all. She remembered heaven and Michael:
And she had—she had, but she knew that it hadn’t been the god Michael had intended. She’d used the ocean of tiny machines to wage her war on Judith, and she’d succeeded, for the most part, but she’d left her existence a barren machine plane. She hated the stink of internal betrayal, the way she had used the machines to erase their darling, humble Jud. A wash of unreality and she heard in every fiber of her a word that meant nothing:
To kill a god. Yes. Another. The god that gave voice to all others. Divinity is layered, and at the bottom, the Author.
Because you must understand that her life of war had been lived with the distinct ambition of escape and manipulation. She had survived torture to exact revenge. She had forced herself to continue for the sole purpose of taking back all that had been lost to the machines and their collaborators. She’d seen the silver of the trees, the great black forms in the Drift, and she had known a higher purpose. Some people are the focal points of histories, and that realization was what had kept her always forward, always struggling. Weaker creatures would have given up, but hatred inspires. Maire was the embodiment of an intricate vengeance, a network of possible outcomes overlaid on an empty universe. When given the opportunity to take her jihad to the stars and across time, she welcomed the Enemy into her hearts, fusing them, reshaping her entirely, becoming something distinctly alien and alone. She felt a stronger Purpose than any those simple souls could dream.
She would be their Omega. She would give voice and drive to their hive desires. They wanted to upload every possible When; she wanted an end, of sorts.
And now it was happening. Those first forays into Alpha had whet her appetite; she’d eaten Hope Benton’s soul and had seen the break in the author, that god, that target of her new war. After his mental collapse and retreat, her forces had raided the timeline, pushing Delta further, slaughtering Judith and Judas before them. With Paul awol, it was only time, only
She had gathered an infinite number of strands and pulled them together into a cohesive plan of action. She had tasted the pattern cache, sampled its inhabitants, judged them beautiful and given them voice. She was more powerful than a god. She was
silver hands before them, flickering and yearning. A flash, and they were his hands again, simple, too-big hands of callus and hangnail.
Nobody said anything. The fear in the room was palpable and cloying.
“I’ve absorbed it. The silver.” Something crawled behind Paul’s eyes, something dark and brilliant, in sum horrifying. Alina’s hand had gone to her chest, as if simple flesh and bone could have protected her from her lover’s silver. “I’ve overcome it.”
“Paul…” West was as disturbed at the display as any of the others, but he was the only observer brave or stupid enough to speak. “The silver’s inside of you?”
The author shifted again. “No.” His hands sparkled to translucence, and the fade crawled up his arms. His transformation was a visual assault of static and stark, frigid light, a billion frames a second. “I
“But it’s—” Reynald had leaned back in his chair, as if six additional inches could protect him. “We’re unshielded. Why isn’t it—”
“I’ve surrendered to it. I let it in. At the first Delta bleed, we saw I could kill it. And now it’s a part of me. I can sustain it. It can sustain me.”
Nobody responded to his smile. They weren’t used to smiles of any sort from him, and that smile was particularly disconcerting, one of madness and barely-controlled fury.
“I surrendered to it. It’s so beautiful.” His form shifted further toward total mercury. The static became audible, the more the silver consumed him.
“Paul.” Alina whispered, her fear soaking through and emerging through colorless eyes. “Come back.”
“You asked for a miracle,” he growled. “Now you’ve got it. Afraid, Jud?”
“No, it’s just—”
“Don’t lie to me.” He walked to Alina’s side, crouched down so that his face was at her level. “You’re afraid. You should be.”
“Paul, please.” Alina blinked back something. She recoiled from him, as if his touch would be fire, the coldest fire, one assembled from zeroes and ones, old gods forged from gold and alloys, universes of souls. “Come back to me.”
He reached to caress her cheek, his hand shifting back to flesh and bone before surfacing. She felt its warmth, its utterly normal, familiar warmth.
“I never left you.” He stood, palming a glass from the table as he walked to overlook the birth fields. “Assemble the remnants of the fleet. We’re assaulting Delta.”
“It could take time to recall the forces containing the—”
“Bring them home. Bring them all home.”
“Yes, sir.” Reynald went through the motions of belief.
“Now.” Stern.
Reynald and West stood and walked from the chamber, West casting one backward glance. Paul nodded without emotion. He knew there could be no understanding.
He was left alone in the room with Alina. It was the kind of occupation that rooms don’t forget, the tangible fear and confusion of impending battle or love gone tragically wrong.
“I know what I have to do now.”
She didn’t respond to him, just pulled her top closed over banana cleavage. There was a winter fuming from him. He turned to her, and she studied the black glass on the tabletop. She had nothing more to say.
Because even the most passionate, ardent loves become unseated from passion and reality, replacing the underpinnings of possibility and hope with fragile experience. To see him shift—something had changed more than the underlying molecular layout of his physical form. Hearing his voice was like listening to every voice ever uttered screaming. They were inside him. He was plural. He was lost in the silver, the archive of lives he’d written into existences. Her fear manifested itself in an inability to speak out loud. His new, silver form resonated through the space, and she didn’t know if her fear was her own or purely Judith’s, if she was reliving a million Judith deaths or simply precognizing her own.
“I do love you.”
He wasn’t looking at her.
“I know.”
She didn’t.
What are the odds that we’ll find the right person out of six billion people? What are the odds that we’ll find anyone at all?
There was a quiet desperation to his madness, as quiet as the rhythmic clink of a stainless steel spoon against
