I will need to open the hatch soon, and I do not want to.
I could do this if I could just stay in here and let it happen. But to open the hatch and face what is out there, that is another thing. Santiago, you would tell me something about bravery and being afraid when you are all alone on the sea in the night. Tell me about that, my friend.
“Well,” began the Old Man again. “I can do this. I won’t let you down. You should go now.”
“I want to stay. No one should die alone.”
The tank began to rock back and forth.
The Old Man checked the fractured optics and could see bloody, burned, and tattooed legs and arms like snakes twisting through blackened and dead branches.
“I did not mean to say that you would die. I am very sorry about that,” said the Small Voice.
“No. I guess it’s going to happen.”
“I will also die, if that’s any consolation.”
“It isn’t.”
“Natalie told you we believe in something after this runtime.”
The Old Man stared at the hatch above his head.
How many of them would it take to rock this multi-ton tank back and forth? There must be… many of them.
The noise reminds the Old Man of that long-ago night when the baseball player hit three home runs and the stadium shook as the crowd stamped its feet and roared.
Two minutes, now.
“Natalie,” continued Targeting Acquisition Process. The Small Voice. “She told you about that?”
“Yes,” said the Old Man, wiping his sweaty palms against his pants. He picked up the beacon and placed it on his knees.
One minute, forty-five seconds.
“Do you believe in life after runtime?”
The Old Man reached for the hatch.
Do I?
At this moment, I want to. If she will be there someday. Her laugh. All the good in my life, yes. I want to believe in that. That there’s that kind of place.
He began to turn the handle.
The Old Man thought he could hear the Fool grunting on just the other side of the hatch, swinging something tiresomely heavy in great thuds as he spat out his promised murder.
“Maybe it is easier for an Artificial Intelligence to believe in a Creator,” said the Small Voice. “After all, we were quite obviously created by a designer.”
I will push on the hatch now. Whatever happens to my body in the next few seconds, maybe a minute at the most, does not matter anymore. I will think of her laugh and her smile the whole time. Especially the laugh that erupts all of a sudden. When I catch her by surprise with something funny and she snorts and tells me, “No, Poppa.”
Laugh, snort, “No, Poppa.”
Or was it…
The other way around.
My hand won’t push this hatch.
“A man named Jesus said there was life after runtime,” burbled Target Acquisition, as if the world was not really ending all around the Old Man.
Tell him to shut up.
Tell him to shut up and be done with this life. Tell him to shut up and then push open the hatch.
You take everything with you.
I hope so. I dearly hope so. But it’s so strange that I had to give it all away at the end.
I hope so.
“This Jesus said,” continued the Small Voice, “in his last talk with his friends, he said that he was going to prepare a place for them after this runtime, as we know it, is over. He said that in his Father’s house there were many mansions. He said, ‘Because I live, you also shall live.’ He said this in the book of John, chapter fourteen.”
Do it!
Push!
Damn you.
Thirty seconds.
“And this is the part I really like,” said the Small Voice. “The part that grabs my algorithms and makes me feel something, something I cannot identify or even explain, but it’s there, somewhere inside all my math, this Jesus said, ‘If it were not so, I would have told you.’ Isn’t that amazing?” asked the Small Voice.
The Old Man looked down at his crowbar. He could not take it with him when he left the tank. He would need both hands to hold the target designator aloft.
“Can you imagine that?” asked the Small Voice. “Life!”
The Old Man saw the world. Burnt up and horrible. Filled with living nightmares.
If that were life, he thought… and then he saw his granddaughter’s face. Her smile. Life.
The Old Man sighed.
He sighed, knowing that when all his air was gone, he would take a huge breath and push the hatch open.
“It’s time to go outside now,” said Target Acquisition. “I believe in that place of mansions. I believe there is a place where we will go if we ask for forgiveness for trying to be God. For forgiveness for making such a mess of everything. A place this Jesus said where good things exist. A place of miracles beyond death. A place where even an Artificial Intelligence might… live. I believe in that. Do you believe also?”
I…
I’m sorry.
The Old Man fired the smoke grenade canisters, hearing them burst away from the hull of the tank, hissing as sudden screams and yells replaced the battering.
The Old Man pushed on the hatch, grabbed the beacon, and rose.
Yes.
Me too.
I want that. I’m sorry for the whole mess.
He held the beacon up through the smoke, looking skyward.
All about him, the blistered and scabbed crazies jabber-screamed in victory. He could feel the Fool scrabbling up beside him, biting his claws into the Old Man’s belly and flesh.
Yes.
Laughter.
Mansions.
Many mansions.
And her.
I’m taking everything with me.
And then the weapon hit.
Twenty-seven million tons of shattered rock flew away from the mountain as shock waves tossed prey and predator, slave and slaver far from the nightmare of the Work.
Far south along the road, Ted stumbling forward heard a soprano note ring out across the broken and burnt lands, as though a metal beam had fallen from a great height and struck the road. Seconds later, he felt the blast of a gusty wind hit him and knock him to the ground as the earth shook. To the north, the sky was torn by the vapor rings of sonic booms, each expanding beyond the other, rings rising high into the atmosphere.
In the south, near the conical mountain, among the Mohicans and horses, the last of the dusty day fading to evening, they too felt the ground shake.
