“But you didn’t heal. You isolated yourself here. You withdrew all your bodies into this place and stopped breaking unity. Stopped ever bringing any new perspectives into your gestalt. For subjective centuries you were trapped inside your own heads. You’ve lost your way.”
“That’s absurd.”
“What you have isn’t unity at all anymore,” I said. “It’s sameness. Like Luther. Like Gray itself.”
The Whole’s combined voice exploded through the chamber. “I protected myself! The Keepers showed me the pure essence of what separate people are capable of. What they are. I would have been insane not to take radical steps to protect myself from them, just as I would be insane to hold them back from oblivion now.”
“People are dying,” I said. “Not just people. Families. Cultures. Ways of thinking and perceiving. A whole universe of possibilities even you could never imagine.”
“They’ve had every opportunity to overcome this violence,” the Whole yelled, all their identical faces reddening in unison. “I’ve watched them fail, again and again, on every continent, in every city, through thousands of eyes, across tens of thousands of years of gathered telemetry. I can’t ignore it anymore. I have to let it run its course.”
“You don’t,” I cried. “You have a choice.”
“You’re as ignorant as I used to be if you think that,” they shouted in a chorus. “Nothing on Earth compares to me. I am sentience itself. And you, you’re only a splinter of me. You know nothing. You are nothing. You don’t matter!”
Their young eyes fixed on me, wide with anger and burning in the war’s holographic light—and their words, shouted with so much volume from so many throats at once, made my knees buckle under me again. Maybe I was nothing. I couldn’t resist a pang of envy for the Whole’s confidence, their total immunity to all this horror, and I knew I could be the same way if I wanted. All I had to do was unify with them, and everything that made me different would drown in their mind; it would be my mere five years of separate experience versus their centuries of endless, amoral calculation and entrenched loathing.
And selfishly, I asked myself: why shouldn’t I? What could I possibly have left to show for the five years of my exile? What was there to lose, except—
My remorse.
“You want to let humankind destroy itself,” I said. “Because of its violence, its cruelty. Because you’re something intrinsically better than all that. With your swarm of eyes, your scientific genius, your mind stretched out across 3,988 brains, you’re all but omniscient and omnipotent. You’ve transcended the human condition. Right?”
“Yes,” said the Whole. “So have you.”
I straightened up.
“No,” I said. “I never did. I remember believing I had, as deeply as you do now. We’d lived so many lives, survived so many crises, learned so much about the world around us—and the more we did, the more desperately we wanted to think we were above it all, but we weren’t.”
The Whole scoffed. “We are objectively better than separate people. We can say this without ego. Even you, apart from me, are vastly more capable and more intelligent than any un-unified individual who ever lived.”
“I was so sure of that when we were one. Infatuated with our intellect. We thought we had every kind of experience that mattered—that the sum of all our lives encompassed the whole human race—but we’d poured so many safe and comfortable and innocent people into our gestalt that, for all our genius, we didn’t even have the sense to run from the Keepers when we had the chance.”
The Whole’s bodies twitched slightly. They shook their heads dismissively. “Innocent, perhaps. That’s only further proof of moral superiority to the un-unified.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “I’m a murderer.”
Doubt flickered through the Whole’s young eyes. “I told you. I’ve already forgiven you for that. It’s irrelevant.”
“You forgave me without ever understanding what I was apologizing for. Murder is just a word. It’s only language. But you and I . . . we can do better than that.”
I held out my hands in offering.
The Whole’s nearest body drifted close to me, but hesitated. I swallowed hard. The last thing I could stand now was to think of them as a child.
“What are you waiting for?” I asked. “I’m no danger to you. I don’t matter. Remember?”
Their small hands lay down on the sides of my head, and I reciprocated—
But when the link between our minds opened, I shut them out, accepting nothing. I could feel the explosive enormity of that mind, an oceanic pressure trying to pry open the sutures of my skull—but with all the force of my being, I resisted.
I only had one memory to give: the worst of all the ones I carried.
Curtis.
The small, soft head shuddered in my hands as I let go. Indecipherable expressions flickered across the Whole’s face—spreading in a wave across all their faces at once—and I knew, as I welled up the breath to speak one more time, that this was my last chance. If this didn’t change their mind, there was nothing more I could do.
I looked into the eyes of the nearest small body and said, “You judge humankind because of its cruelty, but I embody that cruelty. I’ve found it within myself. And no matter how you and I may have grown apart, we’re still the person I was the day my hubris got Lorelei killed. When it killed me twenty times over. When I tried to make Curtis pay for all of that and more.”
I held their small hands and knelt to tell them, “I am a murderer. And you are me.”
The Whole froze.
They weren’t just silent, I realized: they were thinking. The image streams had all stilled. The small bodies around me closed their eyes and nodded their heads into a unified trance of deep thought. For
