My heart was beating faster. I chuckled at myself, perversely, eliciting a curious look from Luther. What did my own life matter anymore? What did I have left but to die, and why should I care how it happened? But when he spoke those words, unfinished business, it was suddenly, brutally clear to me: I couldn’t think of any way I less wanted to die than this, stitched into the monster Luther had become.
So I did the only think I could think to do: I reached up put my palm softly to his forehead—the way I’d once touched his original head, on his original deathbed, in a room that hadn’t been far from here seven decades ago. After a confused moment he twisted out of my reach, but it was done. The nanobots were in his system now—waiting for my command.
“I won’t allow you to do this,” I said.
He aligned the second probe. Snap. He ignored me.
“I have the power to stop you,” I said, louder. “Please don’t make me use it.”
His hands paused amid the tangle of wires he was plugging into the crown on his own head. He squinted at me doubtfully and said, “How?”
“I can engage the first stage of the link at the same moment you do, with my own unifier. The shock will kill one or both of us before the first engram transcription can complete.”
I wasn’t bluffing, although there was something I knew better than to mention: the timing would have to be extraordinarily precise. If I engaged my side of the link a fraction of a second early or late, it would be for nothing.
“But you have no unifier.”
“It’s part of me,” I said. “Self-replicating nanoscale cybernetics.”
He stared. “Where are the probes? How do you connect?”
I shuddered guiltily. “I introduced the nanobots into your cerebrum. All I need is a few seconds of skin contact. After that the link is wireless.”
He shook his head and fitted the last two probes into place on my scalp. Snap. “Implausible. You’re trying to deceive me again.”
“It’s true,” I pleaded. “I’ve spent hundreds of aggregate years refining the technology. Finding ways to make it maximally noninvasive.”
He ignored me. “I’m begging you not to let it end this way, Luther. Whatever you’ve done, whatever you’ve become, I don’t want to hurt you. If any part of you is still . . .” snap “. . . human. If you’re still the young man I once loved, you won’t make me do this.”
The prototype unifier was in his lap, running through its startup routines, scanning both of us. I could see his thumb hovering over the activation switch. There was a look coming over him as he hunched over it, breathing heavily. His fingers shook in vicious ecstasy. I thought I could see his mouth watering.
“It’s too late,” he said, and grinned as the lights turned green to signal their readiness. “I’m not him anymore.”
I looked into his eyes in the moment before he pressed the switch, and in that last fleeting millisecond before the link engaged, the rising electrical fray in my cortex presented me with a hallucination:
His eyes had ceased to be human eyes. They became narrow slits cut into dark red irises, and his face around them became a fever dream of gaping pores and black spines. The prototype was part of him, woven into his monstrous body, and the wire stalk from each of the four probes had become like a mosquito’s proboscis on his face: each one quivering and outstretched toward me, retracting its sheath to expose the toothed syringe within. In that last instant, I could feel him seeing himself as I saw him—seeing himself through my own sensorium—and he noticed that, for the first time in many years, he was not shocked or repulsed by his own image, but rather thought that it was right.
ALEXEI
The silhouette of a skeletal town finally cohered in the hazy distance, and I shivered in eerie recognition: it was like seeing in waking life what I knew I had already seen in dreams. I didn’t even know the name of this place, but I’d known instinctively that it was where we’d find them, and there they were: Danae and the young stranger, slumped in folding chairs, facing each other.
I yelled her name. I jumped down from the rover and started for them, but Kat stopped me with a firm hand on my chest. She kept her wave pistol raised and primed as we crept closer, and I saw the tangles of cable drawn between their heads, swinging in the darkening sandy wind. Nothing else moved.
“What the hell is that?” Kat whispered anxiously.
I pushed past her to examine the scene.
I checked both their pulses. “He’s dead. You can relax.”
Kat gave me a look. She kept her waver primed.
I knelt at Danae’s side. Her breath and heartbeat were both slow and regular, but her eyes stayed closed. I looked more closely at the metal ring attached to her head. One by one, I pressed the four small release levers and felt them snap free of the bone beneath them, and as I pulled them away, I could see and feel the translucent threads, fine as spider silk, trailing from the small puncture wounds.
Kat grimaced and retched.
“Help me get her shackles off,” I said.
“Lex, do not do that.” Her fingers only tightened around her gun’s grip. “If what you told me is true—”
“What?”
“Then we don’t know who’s inside that body now! If she wakes up, we don’t know who’s waking up, do we?”
The cranial probes lay in a tangle in the weathered concrete under my knees. Tiny beads of blood and cerebrospinal fluid glistened in the sinking sun, gathering dust from the wind. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the rusted folding chair.
“We can’t just leave her,” I managed to say.
I heard Kat draw a
