Divergence

Constantine could see what was forming in there. But it was not at all what he had expected…

The siren’s note changed and horror lanced through him. No! He had to stop it. This was not what anyone had expected. He began to run across the plain. It was too far…

…and a magnetic pulse washed across the night. The howl of the sirens rattled and died. Motors stopped. Constantine only just got his own shields up in time to save his mind. But the rest of his body caught the full force of the pulse…

The rest of the crew were too busy gazing at Constantine to notice the way the venumbs were moving about.

“What happened?” pressed Saskia.

“Should they be doing that?” Constantine asked, pointing to the white body of one of the great wooden dinosaurs. It was twisting around on itself, almost overbalancing.

“They’re fine,” Maurice said, not bothering to look. “Answer her.”

Constantine shrugged. “Okay. We killed it. The Watcher killed it. Once it had proof of its theory, it killed that being.”

“But why?”

“I told you, it didn’t want competition. Look at the Enemy Domain. That was a result of the rise of another AI. The Watcher didn’t want a repeat of that conflict. It doesn’t trust other powerful AIs.”

“That’s a good excuse,” Maurice muttered sarcastically.

“What happened to you ?” Saskia asked, ignoring the interruption.

“The colonists found me three days later. I was half buried in mud, my body completely shut down, most of the circuits tripped by the magnetic pulse. The colonists argued for a whole day about whether they should jump-start me. They were angry about what had happened to them, feeling as if they had been tricked, and indeed they had been. The Watcher’s scheming had left them marooned on a planet where nothing now worked. All their machinery was ruined.”

Constantine had worked long and hard himself to build that colony. The memory of a Geep, half submerged in the mud, its motor beyond repair, rose up in his mind.

“But they obviously got you started in the end,” Maurice was saying.

“Yes, they started me in the end.”

“So what are you doing here?”

There was an edge to Judy’s voice that none of them had heard from her before. She had folded her arms across her chest, and there was a haunted look in her eyes.

“Are you okay, Judy?” Edward asked hesitantly.

She didn’t appear to hear him.

“Why are you here, Constantine?” Judy shouted. “What happened to you? What did you see inside that ziggurat?”

Constantine patted her arm. Then Maurice and the rest of the crew looked on in astonishment as the robot placed a plastic hand behind her head and drew her close in a gentle embrace. “You knew, Judy, didn’t you? You knew about the ziggurat.”

“What did she know about the ziggurat?” shouted Maurice.

Constantine went on. “I had to get to Earth,” he said. “I was trapped on a forgotten planet with possibly the key to life itself in my grasp. The Watcher, it had been wrong all of this time. Nobody had guessed, let alone the Watcher itself. And now I had to get to Earth. But how?”

“‘Key to life itself’?”

“What had the Watcher been wrong about?”

“About everything. About what it was and where it came from. About its place in the universe. I saw it all there in that moment before the ziggurat was destroyed.”