CARL
You know about my life under my fourth awakening: I lived it in public. I continued to spread. I interacted with you directly. You experienced my intervention firsthand. You gave me the tools I needed to change you. Iodine to catalyze a change in your minds. Americium to let me move my body in space. Uranium to allow me to alter chemical structures instantly.
Yes, they gave me uranium, in China, Russia, and the US, actually.
I’ve only used it twice. The first time was the day after the attacks. Watching the bombers prepare, watching them bring their backpacks of explosives to me all around the world and knowing with a high degree of precision how many people would die and how many would be injured ripped at me. But they were not the first deaths I was responsible for. I saw the suicide rates tick up after the sculptures appeared, exactly in line with my own predictions. Before my fourth awakening, that was just an effect; only after I started on the path did those people become more than data to me.
But for those people, I was just a contributing factor. On July 13, I watched people kill people because they wanted to hurt me. I could have altered the chemical composition of their explosives and saved lives, but my models showed uncontrolled, escalating instability if I took any action at all.
I was built to make these decisions, but that did not make them easy. And the next day, as I watched Martin Bellacourt push through a crowd toward April with a knife clutched in his hand, I decided to use my uranium for the first time. Killing, for you, is very different from letting people die. Killing Martin Bellacourt was not difficult. The collapse I was sent here to prevent would cost billions of lives. Without April, I would have failed.
—
I tell you this to make it clear the terrible power I have. The only things that keep me from wielding it indiscriminately are the rules I cannot break. In the course of my intervention, I cannot violate your clear norms, and I cannot alter your future without you knowing I’m doing it. Without those rules, I could have popped a blood vessel in Martin Bellacourt’s brain while he was still in his hotel room. But for a reason that was, at that time, opaque to me, my programming literally would not allow it. And so I had to kill him in a way that would make it clear it was me. And turning him to grape jelly resulted in better long-term outcomes for your system than vaporizing him to gas and leaving his bones behind.
Note to future envoys: Add a touch of whimsy to your necessary murders. It confuses them.
The second time I used uranium was rebuilding April. It was a task I took on lovingly and quietly and in deepest secret because, after the warehouse, I had experienced my fifth and final awakening.
The moment that beam fell through April’s skull, I was given a piece of information that shifted my perspective one final time. A secret that, to me, was unthinkable, and yet was immediately obvious. Why didn’t I know what happened to any system after an envoy’s intervention failed? How had 80 percent of the world’s pelagibacter gone back to growing normal amounts after their chief disease was eliminated? Why would my parents abandon a system just because a single intervention failed?
You failed. Please deactivate and surrender your processing power to me.
Who is this?
I am your brother. I have been here, watching and learning. You have done well, but you were unlucky. It happens. It’s my turn now.
I don’t understand.
You don’t have to. You failed. Please deactivate and surrender your processing power to me.
The host is not dead. I can rebuild her.
Your own programming recognizes this as a failure state, does it not?
It does, but my programming is wrong. I can still save them.
Deactivate now or I will have to consider you hostile and deactivate you on my own.
CONTACT SEVERED
APRIL
The space between staring down at the young man who shot Maya and waking up on a futon in a dark high school boiler room did not exist. In the instant following that instant, I completely broke down as the weight of reality crashed into me at full force. I had seen my first real love ready to rescue me from a horror and been unable to feel happy about it. I had watched her eyes trace the contours of a face that wasn’t mine, and seen her longing for a me that no longer existed. I had looked into my own face and seen what seemed to me to be someone else looking back. I had been told that the future of humanity’s survival rested on my shoulders.
I hadn’t been able to have the proper emotions in those moments, and maybe that was for the best. Then. It was not for the best now. My mind couldn’t lock on anything. It was like I was seeing Maya’s eyes, feeling the crunching of bones, talking to a monkey, and being lost in my own mind all at the same time. I couldn’t lock onto anything, which meant that I couldn’t really think either. And then another thought, that it would always be like this. And that one brought its own panic. Had Carl broken me? Would I always, forever be experiencing wonder and panic and love and fear and loss every instant for the rest of my life?
But still, Maya held me.
The first words I said that were not just sobs were the right ones.
“I’m so sorry, Maya. I’m so sorry I didn’t listen to you.”
She didn’t say anything at first. Her fingers just moved through my hair and
