My footsteps echo on the pavement as I face this gauntlet.
Beyond all of the metallic confusion of flesh is the research building. The major walls still stand, but the ceiling has collapsed. Shards of the structure have migrated to the edges, heaped up in the crude imitation of a nest. Familiar bits peek out of the confusion—part of a ventilation hood, an office chair, a hallway water fountain, some cubicle walls. The rest is harder to describe, hard even to look at: quivering limbs of metal; ridged tiles of pure gemstone; gnarled vines sprouting human hair.
A slanting doorway leans before me. A black mouth open wide, choking on its own broken teeth of shattered glass. This is the X on the chalkboard. This is the spot where I saw the world in ruins.
This is the end.
My mind starts scrabbling away from the moment. I’m alone now and the others are dead and I remember this one thing. It slid its barbs into me and never let go. Unable to stop, I fall back into the memory—to a place where the pain is something familiar and it wounds me in a reassuring way.
I put out my arms that morning in the cleanroom. But I could not catch her. My wife was holding her hands over her stomach and she fell to her knees, still watching me. Her teeth and nostrils and eyes were already stained with bright pinpricks of blood. Mucous membranes first. Then skin pores. A gruesome sheen over soft flesh. Billions of crimson dots expanding through sterilized white cotton. She was coughing, wheezing with the raw choking gasps of a dead body still striving to live—not quite up to date with the inevitable.
I managed to hit the emergency stop button. Felt the sudden chill as the industrial-grade exhaust system started swallowing tainted air. Through fogged goggles I saw my wife’s face when she finally fell, and if I’m being honest, it looked like she’d been skinned alive. Every inch of her face was seeping blood.
She was too far away for me to catch.
This is my crystalline moment—the one that plays through my mind, fast or slow, depending on how long I close my eyes. Air roaring in my ears. A small blond woman is lying facedown and the machines inside her are still doing their grisly work. Her blood is surging away from under her body in a spreading pool. Swift and plum-dark across impossibly white tile.
I watched, dazed and curious, as the polished tile floor somehow canted and rushed up to meet my face. I smacked into the ground and a high-pitched note began to sing in the meat between my ears. From behind cracked goggles, I watched that tidal flow pulse toward me. Watched my wife’s body stop moving, stop breathing.
Together, she and I were going to make something. Create our own order out of the chaos. In the three-dimensional ultrasound, my son’s eyes were closed and I swear he had a half smile on his lips. His only job was to grow. Our baby boy was inside her and when she fell her hands were over her stomach to protect him and yet I lived.
My heart staggers again.
I take another step into the leaning doorway. There is only death on the other side. The knowledge is in every atom of my body.
Don’t you feel that you owe some kind of a debt?
The memories are razored feathers that slice through my mind. Only by magnifying the details can I save myself from the whole lacerating knowledge of it. So I think of the microscopic particles of flexing metal spreading into the rivers of her bloodstream, out across the pale heaving ocean of her lungs. The nanomachines, they’re only small things, but they spread so far and so fast. They are two hundred thousand years of technological evolution written in the pattern of a handful of atoms. The living blueprints of humankind’s most magnificent achievement, our past and our future—hungry, spearing into the deep tissue of her body.
What my wife said was wrong. Nanotech does have a smell. It’s a metal bucket filling with rain in a thunderstorm. Ozone and sweat. A coppery slick pooling in the back of your throat. The cretes want to make something out of the chaos. In the face of this unstoppable miracle, your body weeps a trillion droplets of blood.
Tomorrow eats today.
A sound like the plucking of brittle guitar strings cascades over me from a hundred yards up. The dome is completing itself over my head. It reminds me of a cathedral ceiling, except the diamond is almost transparent through rays of falling sunlight. Above the dome, dark clouds have collapsed into bruised smears. Blackness above, and blackness before me.
I step through the doorway.
11
I emerge into vegetation, my sight swimming from the muted shafts of light that filter in through the gossamer dome. The building has swallowed itself. A short, broken hallway has abruptly ended in a green expanse of vines and leaves. There is no more roof.
This is a circular amphitheater. Lush but featureless, save for a tumble of stones growing out of the grass at the dead center of the room. Now that the dome has sealed itself, the air in here is stagnant. No movement; the only sound is a soft whoosh from high above.
I almost don’t notice Caldecot.
Sitting on the rocks, the man is frighteningly gaunt and long-limbed, even from a distance. Chin in his hand, he seems lost in reverie. The pile of broken rock is formed into a throne, carved by some kind of crete to fit perfectly with Caldecot’s slumping, pale body.
I step closer, fingers closed over the vial in my front pocket.
High on his throne, Caldecot seems to be melting, his face falling away in shadowed rivulets. But moving closer, I see that the light and dark playing on his face are coming from above. Sunlight twists and courses through streams of water coursing over the outside surface of the dome.
It is raining out there, in the world.
I clench the vial in my palm and approach the throne. Caldecot still does not respond to me. I can’t even tell whether his eyes are open. The skin on his face is slack. His body is eaten by darkness, half-swallowed by the slabs of rock around him. I can make out coils of thin wires wrapped around his body.
“Dr. Caldecot?”
He doesn’t stir. Doesn’t even seem to be breathing; his chest is still.
I pause at the foot of the throne and stare up. One of his hands hangs over the promontory of rock, pallid and relaxed. His fingers are long and sensitive, the back of his hand laced through with dark veins. I move my gaze up his forearm, to where his elbow rests in a mess of wires that spill over the side of the throne. Continuing up past the bicep, I see a broad chest, whitish collarbones sunken into pools of shadow. On his long neck, tendons pull the skin in taut marbled folds, supporting a massive head that lists to the side. His jowls undulate with rolls of waxy flesh up to his cheekbones—to a pair of open black eyes open, watching me darkly.
I startle, take a step back.
“Dr. Caldecot? Are you all right?”
Laboriously, Caldecot straightens his back. Those fathomless eyes lock onto me hard, the way a crow might watch a lizard. His breathing is shallow, but I can see his chest moving now. He speaks to me in slow precise syllables, his voice growing, its power rumbling out from hidden depths.
“Oh,” he says. “It’s you. They finally sent you.”
I take another careful step toward the throne. The pocketed flesh-eater vial is still cradled in my sweating fingers. Caldecot regards me calmly. I notice a glinting braid of wires and cables and hoses hooking over the top of his throne and splaying out into the foliage behind it. The toe of my boot hits something hard, and I see that similar cables meander through the grass as well, across the entire clearing.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
Caldecot winces, the expression spreading its way over his exaggerated features. “Of course. My apologies for the travails you must have suffered to reach this place. It could not have been easy, and I fear that I may have played a part in the difficulties.”
His voice is deep and sonorous and it expands to somehow fill the cavernous amphitheater. Maybe the entire dome.
“You’ve got to stop this thing, Caldecot,” I say. “You’ve got to come back with me so we can fix this.”
His lips move, peristal
tically, until he appears amused.
“How is it? Out there?”
“People are dying,” I say, climbing the bottom step of the dais. “There’s no sense to any of it.”
“Change,” he says, “is often mistaken for tragedy.”
The empty clearing sighs with the falling of rain outside the dome. Now I can see that some of the wires go inside him. His arms and legs and torso are riddled with ports.
“It’s madness,” I say.
“Madness?” he asks. “Hardly. Your own research was the leaping-off point. You made all this possible. We are creators, my friend. We do not fear change. We wield it.”
“Will you come willingly?” I ask.
He continues speaking in a low monotone, as if he hasn’t heard me.
“We’d had purification cretes before. Nothing more than chemical tricks. Not mechanical. Not true molecular reassembly. The chain always failed after a few hundred generations. Mutations crept in, followed by self-immolation. But I found the solution in an old patent. Yours. I watched how you made the creticide scan its enemies for flaws. Then I reverse-engineered it.”
Caldecot’s words spread over me like anesthetic. As the torrent flows faster and faster, a buzzing numbness settles over my face.
“We think the breakthrough came after midnight over a weekend. A lab assistant named Jacobs was working on a silicone variety. Highly experimental. At some point, it worked—it fed upon the silica of the glass vial. I imagine Jacobs must have laid his tired head down to sleep at his desk. Funny to think it all happened while he was dreaming. But by then, none of us were making it home from the lab very often. The whole facility was on the verge of being mothballed.
“When I found Jacobs, the skin of his face was fused with the surface of the desk. Stretched like brittle glass, yet pliable as a polymer chain. His throat was collapsed in a fan of skin and his vocal cords were sunk into the tabletop like veins. His arms were puddles of flesh; the fingers splayed and melting.
“We could not understand how he was still alive.”
I close my hand into a fist around the vial. Caldecot continues, speaking to me but not looking at me.
“But he was. Young Jacobs was silently crying with the one eye he had left. Crying so softly as that crete ground the silica from his bones and turned it into plastic. A whole week passed before the rest of his face was swallowed. During that time we learned to work around him. A sheet was placed to block the sight of his work station. But it never could block the sound of the grinding.”
Caldecot blinks, seems to notice me again.
“We mourned him. Don’t think we didn’t. But we also celebrated. Jacobs was a miracle at work. And I made sure we were there to witness. To build on this incredible good luck.
“Some of my scientists ran, then. I let the deserters go. Others from the army came and they tried to stop me. But I simply allowed the light of creation to shine. It ate them whole and in pieces. In the stench of cauterized flesh, my cretes found in my enemies so many new forms to take. The light wants to shine into dark places, you know. Who am I to stop it? Who are you to try to stop it?”
His voice drops to a whisper, almost inaudible, and I step forward.
“I tell you … there was a moment, when I put my hand on Jacobs’s shoulder to rouse him on that first morning, when it happened … and I saw the horror of what he had become … It was a split second that spawned universes. Right then … at that moment … I could have stopped all of this. I could have retreated into ignorance, but I chose to keep my eyes open to the terrible face of our destiny.”
Another step. I could throw the vial now. End this.
“Do you see? Do you understand the decisions we must make? Men like us owe it to the world. We are obligated. We can’t stop—we can never stop. Without us, none of it means anything. If we were to stop, why, the sacrifices we’ve made … they wouldn’t mean anything.”
His final words evaporate on the air, but I swear I can still feel the baritone rhythm echoing inside my chest. Men like us.
“Will you come willingly?” I ask again.
A shudder runs through the foliage. Something shifts in the grass behind me. Ten yards away, the earth is vibrating. A pure-white gap is emerging in the thick folds of grass. As it grows, I see it holds a ramp leading down into the research facility.
He has preserved it.
“Your lab is sterilized. Ready for operation. For a new era. I offer you this invitation. The opportunity to shape a new reality by the power of your mind. Together, we will unleash the future and watch lovingly as it feeds upon the flesh of the old world.”
The hazy glow spilling from the ground solidifies into the shine of row upon row of fluorescent lights, test tubes, and cloudy sheets of plastic. I hear the familiar whir of a ventilation hood and I taste my own vomit. I am looking into a cleanroom, its tile floors impossibly white and smooth and unblemished.
The barbed memory is back and this time it is real.
“We can’t do this,” I say. “I won’t do this. It’s wrong.”
Caldecot leans forward, only an inch, but his eyes are two wells of inescapable gravity. I suddenly feel as if I’m standing on a cliff. As he leans, the world seems to lean with him and a sudden vertigo overwhelms me.
“It wasn’t your fault she died,” he says.
Her hands were on her stomach when she fell.
My vision quiets and I stumble. My hand lands on his knee and it is cold and hard as stone. I snatch my hand back. The air feels heavy. Like I’m breathing underwater.
“What?” I say, forcing the word out.
“Change is hungry. It feasts.”
Some part of me is bleeding inside. I’m breathing in gasps. She didn’t deserve it, none of them did. My baby boy …
Could I make it mean something?
“Are you insane?” I whisper.
I do not know who I am asking the question of.
“Your wife’s death meant something,” says Caldecot. “Fuel for the future. You have only to take the credit, not the blame. You and I—we will make all of it mean something.”
“The credit?” I ask.
My chin dips a few times as confusion coalesces into rage.
“It was my fault,” I say. “I have no excuse. There is no … there can be no excuse. I killed her. I killed him. The blame is mine. I claim it.”
I stop talking, my chest heaving. I can taste my tears.
Caldecot responds, his voice still amused: “Ah, your son. Yes, a shame. But don’t you see? You have made another, far more important child. The creticide.”
My fingers grip the vial.
“Will you come or not?” I shout at this grinning jack-o’-lantern.
Caldecot’s languid smile droops to a snarl and back. “You and I will never leave this place. Of that, I guarantee you,” he says. “We will stand at ground zero as the world is eaten. While the others die, the light of a new dawn will sear our eyelids away. And you and I will stare into creation and finally and from then on we will know the true face of the world.”
His smile returns, blazing and wide.
“The answer is no,” he continues. “No. I will not go with you willingly or in any other capacity. Our destiny is here under this diamond sky, and we will face it together.”
“No, we won’t,” I say, pulling my hand from my pocket.
The vial glints. Murder in a bottle.
I pull back to throw it and something nudges my calf. Instinctively, I step over a cord. They are writhing now, all the cables spread out in the grass. Moving in concert toward some unknown end. A heavy coil loops over my throwing arm, and continues wrapping around my torso, pinning my wrist to my thigh.
As I struggle, a small whimper uncurls from the back of my throat.
More wires are rising up before me. Draping themselves over each other, swaying like vines in the cool air. I get the strange impression that they can see me. They are all around me now. Stalks of grass shiver
with slithering metal.
“What are you?” I ask, stuttering over the words. I don’t even know where to look while I speak. Worse, I don’t know where to run.
“The terrible face of change.”
Something hard and cold circles over my chest and under my armpits. Fear keeps my head pointed forward. With a hydraulic shudder, the coil lifts me off the ground.
Caldecot continues speaking, his voice gaining volume and power. A thump of bass drops into his words as thick cables rise up like cobras and throw themselves against the ground.
“I know that you see death in me,” says Caldecot. “You fear the dread that claws up from your chest and into your throat. The grim specter settles into the darkness between your eyes. When your fear turns to panic, it is your life, calling to you.”
I struggle to breathe. My legs are wrapped up now, ankles to thighs. I’m hanging helpless from hard metal wire. The vial is clenched in my fist and trapped against my own body.
“But life is not rational,” says Caldecot. More hidden snakes surge through the grass. “You will learn that in time. Life is mindless. It only wants to grow. And when you challenge it, life will fight back with everything. That is why I have protected us.”
Disembodied fingers of wire lift, pointing to the sky.
“The diamond?” I ask, craning my neck. My breath comes in pants now. My chest is burning from the friction of tightening cables.
“A layer of diamond, certainly, but much more than that. There is no name for what has never existed. It is impenetrable, self-healing, very nearly alive,” he intones. His voice seems to come from multiple sources, echoing itself, high- and low-pitched. It is everywhere at once and grows still louder, vibrating every molecule of air.
“Let me out of this dome,” I say.
“Not a dome. A sphere,” says Caldecot. “Round like the world.”
The cables squeeze the breath out of my chest. An oily weakness is spreading through my limbs. In a detached way, I suppose this weakness must be the knowledge that I am going to die. I find myself believing that perhaps dying is the best I can hope for. And knowing that it’s exactly what I deserve.