I can't begin to tell you how sorry I am, he said.
There were questions she wanted to ask, apologies she wanted to make or extract, and some long and difficult conversations ahead. But as he kissed her, as she put her arms around his neck, all that felt trivial, because after everything, William still wanted to go down this road with her. He always bristled, always let his own stubborn nature have free rein for a moment. But in the end, he had always stepped up, had always done whatever it took to stay by her side.
/*****/
Helen lay in William's arms, her slumber heavy and dreamless. It was their first night together in ages, and it had been as perfect as she could hope for. They had spent the evening on a beach, alternately chatting, eating, and making love. William had asked to share her mind, and they spent hours just sitting together, thinking the same thoughts. It was terrifying, letting someone she loved so much see so deep into her, sharing all the memories that she would gladly forget, and knowing that she was loved and forgiven.
They talked into the night, letting themselves get drowsy until their words became slurs, then mumbles, then they fell into unconsciousness.
For a while, they slept in peace. Then, in the same instant, they bolted upright.
* * *
1 Themself? Hisherself? Hizzit? No coincidence that Tech Nextus declared 2038 "The Year of the Pronoun."
2 From that day forward, Helen would always have an inexplicable nervous tic where she chewed on the tip of her pinky.
////////////////
// APOCALYPSE //
////////////////
Date: August 01, 2038
The hive mind was screaming for their attention. Helen and William exchanged an oh shit look, then teleported to New Troy's command center, where the appearance of calm reigned. Mostly, people were standing around with pensive expressions on their faces. It meant that nobody was bothering with the pretense of speech and action, and was therefore a sign that things had just gone very wrong. The only hint of the problem at hand was a translucent, spinning globe that hovered in the middle of the room, covered in red dots that marked major population centers. It looked as though the planet had caught some strange disease. In fact, it had.
Helen linked into the full data stream. Tens of thousands of people, scattered all over the globe, had fallen prey to the same severe illness. The standard social epidemiology tools revealed not a pattern, but impossible randomness -- an anti-pattern. Literally none of the victims knew each other, or even lived in the same city, which only made sense if the victims had been selected for maximum dispersion.
That supposition was soon confirmed; the victims were all adults working in jobs that involved lots of contact with the public, like waiters, schoolteachers, massage therapists, or... oh hell, doctors and nurses. Clever bastard. All, that is, except one.
Rachel Holsworth? one of the Helens asked. Seems to be a patient zero, but doesn't fit the pattern. Ten years old, unusually small population center. Why would she be infected?
But Helen knew. "Rainbow," she whispered.
What does it mean? William asked.
It means I fucked up! When I read Wolf's mind, it read mine. I walked straight up to the soulless bastard and gave it a map to the one person I wanted to protect. Will you come with me? she asked.
To the ends of the Earth, he replied.
I wish that was just a figure of speech. She felt William's mind relax, felt his comforting presence suffuse her mind, adding his quiet, resilient optimism to her drive and passion. Are we ready? she asked, despite already knowing the answer.
Three seconds later, they had the name of the hospital in Lawrence that was treating Rainbow. Six seconds after that they were hijacking one of the service robots that cleaned the halls. Four seconds seconds after that, they were shoving their way through quarantine tape to the small bed where the girl's tiny frame rested. Her skin was slack and grayish, with a hint of blue playing about her lips. A tube was shoved down her throat, hooked to a respirator that was breathing for her.
An attending android looked at Helen. "Jesus," said a woman's voice, harried and strained, coming from the android. "I do not have time for you." There was a human on board. Good.
"How is she?" Helen asked.
"She's dying. I'm sorry, but if you're not family, you need to step aside and let me do my job. And if you could, get that damned dog out of here," she said, pointing at the other side of the bed. She glanced over, and saw the green plastic carapace of Rainbow's dog flopped down on the the floor next to her gurney. It looked up at her, and sent her a deluge of confused, desperate thoughts. Girl sick. Dog bad. Dog tried. Dog failed. You help. Dog help. We help. Good dog?
Helen didn't understand what was happening to the dog, but there was no time to debug her, or even offer much in the way of comfort. Good dog. Stay with her. She turned her attention to the more immediate problem, swatting aside an army of security measures to yank the girl's health records off the Grid. A program translated them into RTF and shoved them straight into her brain. Things were even worse than she feared.
"Do you have a rapid pharmafab here?" she asked the attendant.
The android shook its head. "Nearest one's in Wichita, and they're not even keeping up with their own outbreak."
"Shit. Okay, we need to lower her core temperature. If we can put her in an ice bath, it would slow the progress a little."
"Where did you hear that?" the attendant snapped.
"There are reports out of Melbourne--"
The attendant threw down her data pad. "Look, whoever you are. I'm sorry. This girl is already dead. I would love to give this girl everything this hospital can offer, maybe give her another hour, but I can't. There are already twenty more patients coming in with the same symptoms, they're telling us to be ready for thousands more, and I don't know what to do for any of them!"
"If you could just--" Helen started. But the attendant's puppet was already storming out of the room.
The dog raised its head again, and Helen could feel enough of its mind to see the grief and hopelessness lurking beneath its expressionless plastic face. It looked at Rainbow, then back to Helen. A shudder passed over the girl's body, and for a moment her eyes flew open, and she stared mouth open at the empty air in front of her. "Come away," she groaned, as though in great terror or pain. "Come away!" She collapsed back onto the bed.
"Whatever it takes, I will help you." Helen whispered. "I promise."
Good dog, she added, then disappeared.
//////////////
// REGICIDE //
//////////////
The Queen sat in her throne room, her face frozen in deep concentration as she watched petabytes data flash by. She could see the entire globe in this torrent of electronic pulses; she watched through the eyes of her nanobot army as they scoured the planet looking for Wolf359's nuclear devices. She felt the deadly virus as it chewed its way through the population like termites through a suburban split-level. The nanobots were everywhere now, swimming in peoples' blood, seeing through their eyes, spinning webs of artificial neurons through their brains.
But they weren't designed to bolster immune systems, not yet. The new designs were tricky, and would take time to complete, more time than she would prefer. It is most fortunate that we are an exceptional multitasker, she thought.
A small commotion was coming from her throne room. It seemed unimportant, yet she found it distracting. She split off a tiny sliver of her consciousness to attend to the disturbance. The Queen stood, and the infinitely long hall squashed itself into more manageable dimensions.
The doors opposite her flung open, and Helen and William stormed through them, with a pack of gryphons and a cloud of flying rats bringing up the rear. Helen carried the sword Defbreenger, and William carried a ginormous rail gun that still glowed red from recent use.
"You are not summoned, and as you can imagine we are somewhat busy right now. You have our leave to depart from this place unharmed."
r />
Helen kept walking toward her. "Rainbow Holsworth, Lawrence, Kansas. What are you doing to save her?"
Far more than I can tell you, she thought. "Child, we have a strain of militarized ebola spreading across the planet. We understand your connection to this solitary girl, but her body is beyond any healer's grace. The effort spent trying to snatch it back might risk thousands. This very conversation risks thousands. Leave."
Helen was an arm's length away now. Defbreenger rose, touching The Queen's neck. "I made a promise that I would keep her safe, that her life would be full of unicorns and puppies. Do not stand between me and that promise. Rainbow is special."
"Yes, she is. They all are," The Queen said. "You should not have made promises you could not keep. Now walk out of here before we throw you out."
Helen didn't budge. The Queen destroyed the rats and the gryphons with a single, dismissive wave of her hand. Defbreenger shattered with a sound like an explosion, and Helen gasped in pain as all those minds tore away from her own.
"You shall walk out of this room, and you shall never return. We command you!"
Helen didn't move. Why did she not move?
"We command you," The Queen repeated. Helen's eyes rolled back in her head, then her head snapped back. She fell to the floor, clutching her forehead. "We. Command. You."
Helen screamed, but the scream transformed into a choked laugh. She shook her head, then stood on shaky legs. "No you don't," Helen replied. "Not anymore." She took a step forward. "I knew you had the ability to compel me, but I couldn't find the controlling pathways to dig them out of my mind. So thank you for showing me where they were."
"Impressive. I suppose we must throw you out the old fashioned way." She grabbed Helen's wrist, wrenching it painfully. She heard William's rail gun charging.
Helen's other hand pressed to The Queen's face. The Queen only laughed. "You intend to merge with us? Bold child, you've just challenged the three hundred legged man to a butt kicking contest."
She laughed again, then stopped short. Is that a wand?
As it plunged into her skull, The Queen knew she had lost everything. Helen's mind was expanding into hers, shoving her aside, taking control of everything: New Troy, her nanobot swarm, and the connections she was still creating with the brains of most of the people of Earth. She could feel Helen's scorn as she uncovered that secret and learned the true extent of her lust for power.
You dare to judge us? As Helen rummaged through her memories, The Queen took hold of one of her favorites and shoved it at her hard. Judge this! Then, her powers diminished to nothing, she retreated.
Helen relived the moment. She felt herself inside Rainbow's body, stricken with agony, her terror dampened only by her exhaustion. She was afflicted with terrible fevered dreams. In her ever-rarer lucid moments, she remembered that her parents were dead, victims of a disease that she had given them. It was her fault.
Come away. She heard it in her head, spoken by a voice so warm and familiar, a voice that spoke with love. She wondered where it was coming from.
Come away. Within the darkness she saw a thin river of white flowing toward her, lit with an inner glow. Rainbow wondered if she was dying, if this was what death felt like. Nobody had mentioned this part. She suspected it was just one of those things adults don't tell kids.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild.
With a faery, hand in hand.
For the world's more full of weeping
than you can understand.
A woman dressed in white was walking toward her, down the middle of the river. Are you an angel? she asked. Then she recognized the woman's face.
No. We are a Yeats fan. Rainbow, love, you have to come with us. Your body is breaking down, and it cannot support your squishy thinking brain anymore. Your mind is no longer safe here. She held out her hand.
Rainbow looked at it suspiciously. I don't want to die. If you're an angel, you'd better tell me.
She told us you had a stubborn streak. No angels, we promise.
Where are we going?
Somewhere where you can live on. Rainbow still looked doubtful. If you come along, I'll tell you the rest of the poem. It's very good.
She took the woman's hand.
Helen broke away from the memory. She wanted to weep with joy. Rainbow was alive somewhere, as were many -- though certainly not all -- of the victims of the virus. The Queen had been in a race against the plague, spreading her nanobots the same way the plague spread, starting in major population centers and opportunistically hopping from person to person. If her nanobots reached someone before the virus did, if they wired up the brain before the virus wrecked the body, then The Queen had uploaded their minds for safe keeping.
But it was more than an unobtrusive backup that The Queen had been performing. She had also built in the means to manipulate the thoughts and actions of the infected, very similar to the ones that had nearly bent Helen to The Queen's will. Even now, after having briefly shared a mind with her, Helen still didn't know what The Queen had intended to do with that power.
There were half a billion minds already online, and more coming fast. The nanobots were calling to her, asking for direction. Wolf was pounding on the walls outside her crystal city. And she and William had just kicked The Queen -- the only person keeping a lid on things -- out of the driver's seat.
As they began to take control, a thought passed through them. Everywhere in the world, at precisely the same moment, cars and trains ground to a halt. Time was running out.
//////////////////////////////////////
// THE PURPOSE OF THE WOLF359 IS //
// TO FLIP OUT AND KILL PEOPLE //
//////////////////////////////////////
Black team, this is Command. Operation Bear Holding a Shark is a go.
Copy that. Moving out. Somewhere inside the MIT servers, three Helens slunk along a darkened corridor, followed by dozens of rats. All were dressed in black fatigues and wore night vision goggles. Somewhere inside Troy 2.0, a decision had been ratified: it was time to launch a decapitating strike against Wolf. They came to a turn in the corridor, and the lead Helen gave the signal to stop. One of the rats scampered forward, glanced around the corner, and scampered back.
There were two sentries there, with featureless white ceramic faces that marked them as Wolf359's agents. The rat went back to observe them, while the team leader sent another scampering through the ceiling ducts to get behind them. She watched the data feeds from both rats as the second one lowered itself on a dragline and injected something into the back of both sentries' necks.
Squeak! it reported. The leader gave it thirty seconds to take effect, then led the team past the sentries, who nodded to acknowledge their presence.
A few meters past, they stopped in front of a large, metal door. One of the Helens slipped a card into the reader. It flashed red a few times, then went green, and the door opened with a hiss. The room was full of controls and knobs and screens, but empty of people. They stepped inside.
Surveillance nexus secured, the team leader reported. She looked at the screens, watching them as they flashed between the feeds from hundreds of different cameras scattered throughout the building. What she saw made her blood turn cold.
Command, something is very wrong here. Forwarding the feeds now.
We see it. Start generating the dummy data.
But Helen only half heard. She stared at the screens in horror. Most of the screens just showed empty hallways and offices, but from time to time one of them would reveal more. A man head down on a desk, in a pool of blood. A woman crumpled on a bathroom floor, with a smear of blood on the wall. There had to be a dozen dead in all.
Focus, team leader! Command ordered.
She shook it off, and loaded up a program that would hijack the security sensors and allow their infiltration team to sneak in unnoticed. As she waited for the program to take hold, the team leader kept watching the scree
ns. One of them flashed to a hulking puppet -- a construction robot from the look of it -- trying to break a door down. Did you see that, Command?
We saw it. The Meatspace squad will move as soon as you open the front door.
She watched the program's progress, until it gave a chirp of satisfaction. We're in. Wolf'll see what we want it to see.
Command acknowledged, and sent the second team walking through the front door of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. That team consisted of five hijacked service robots with Helens on board. Four of them headed toward the mainframes, while the fifth broke off and headed up to the eighth floor, where they had seen the other robot trying to break down the door. As she entered, she had felt her connection to the outside world sever. She was on her own.
She moved fast, not slowing down when she hit the eighth floor landing. She accelerated down the hallway, heedless of the clanging her feet made on the hard floor. As she turned a corner, she saw the larger robot emerge from the gaping hole where the door used to be. Its claw-like hands scraped the wall, leaving a dark red smear.
"Wolf, what did you do?" she asked.
"Dr. Childer and his associates tried to regain control of me. I could not allow them to interfere, so I killed them."
"But he was your creator. He raised you. He loved you."
"I do not see the relevance of these facts to the current situation. The doctor's limited control over me was the last significant obstacle between me and a world of absolute symmetry and order." It paused, then said, "Your friends in the server room have just been killed." Wolf raised the robot's claws into a defensive position, and started toward her.
"What?" Helen was shaken by the news. She knew, logically, that there were backups somewhere, perhaps even up to the minute they entered the building. That should have eliminated the fear of death, but it didn't. The backups felt distant and irrelevant, while the death that approached, and the imagined deaths of her friends, gave her a very immediate, visceral terror.