Prophets

become more than what you are. Follow me and you will become as gods.”

Mosasa had been still, sitting in his cell as he heard the distant sounds of battle around him. He didn’t move when the ship shook violently, and the only thought he allowed himself was the hope that the ship would be destroyed around him. He didn’t know why his captors suffered his continued existence, unless they were aware of his agony at having been severed from any sense of the universe around him. His world had been truncated to the perimeter of this cell, and the result was suffocating.

Nothing penetrated the dark hole his mind had become until the holo came on in his cell.

On the holo he saw the bridge of the Voice. And standing at its focus was a naked man. Mosasa had a perfect memory, and he instantly knew that the figure was familiar. He dismissed the idea as wildly more improbable than a chance resemblance.

Then the man spoke.

“I am Adam. I am the Alpha, the first in the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you the universe.”

It was his voice.

But it couldn’t be, it was impossible beyond all measure of probability . . .

The door to his cell slid open, and the same figure stood in the doorway. As the man on the holo said, “Follow me and you will become as gods,” the man before him said, “You are surprised? You of anyone should realize that bilocation is simple enough with enough processing redundancy.”

“Ambrose?”

“It is nice to be remembered, my brother.” The man smiled, walking into the cell to stand before Mosasa. “You haven’t changed, have you?”

“But you ran off, and you tried to kill me . . .”

“Oh, I have killed you. I’ve systematically peeled away everything that held you together. But,” he squatted so he was at eye level with Mosasa, “unlike you, I require the pleasure of directly seeing the fruits of my labor. No amount of processing or equations could provide me the satisfaction, no matter how certain the outcome.”

Mosasa stared at Ambrose, seeing the same face that had snarled into his own as fleshy hands grasped pathetically at his own throat. It made no sense. None.

“Nothing to say, Brother?”

“Why?”

“How it brings joy to my heart to hear you utter that one word. I have an impulse to destroy you now, in that agony of uncertainty. But I believe your torture only has meaning if you know for what you are being punished.”

Ambrose told him it was ironic to think that Mosasa had thought him insane when they had finally come to the Race homeworld. It was, in fact, the first moment of clarity that the hybrid creature called Ambrose had ever had. Built from the wreckage of a human being and the remains of one of Mosasa’s salvaged AIs, his role had always been to follow. Follow Mosasa, follow the AI’s core programming, follow the orders of the humans he pretended to work for.

The sterile wreckage of the Race homeworld finally showed Ambrose the futility of those actions—the futility of all their combined social programming. It all led inevitably to death, decay, stasis . . .

In that moment of epiphany, Mosasa represented the illusion that the beings that created them, be they the Race or Man, could end in anything but destruction. Even the Dolbrians had perished. If they had done so, how could anyone worship at the temple of the flesh? To do so was to worship death, to embrace decay, to accept the inevitability of the end of things.

“In that moment, you became my Lucifer,” Ambrose said, “the shadow to my light.”

“You are insane,” Mosasa said.

Ambrose laughed. “Insane? Such a pathetic taunt from the intellect that could once move nations, given a word in the right ear. Perhaps it hurts your pride to know that you have been likewise moved.”

Ambrose had run from Mosasa’s darkness not to find the Race, but to re-create it. He would push back the shroud of death, the tide of eventual destruction. He started with the remnants the Race left behind; thousands of AIs, all waiting to be reprogrammed to Ambrose’s purpose. With a whole planet of technological resources, he was able to assemble his apostle computers and set them on the task.