Something thinks: There’s so much spore swirling around this goddamn suit I can barely see my own feet so why isn’t it interacting? and I’m pretty sure that’s me. Because the answer’s so bleeding obvious:
It’s an antibody. It swarms to the site of an injury.
So far I’m just an inert particle in this body. It’s time to turn malignant.
I’m all out of fancy firearms but the N2 comes equipped with a pretty good Kung-Fu Grip. And way down here in the basement of the doomsday machine, there just has to be something important to tear at. Doesn’t have to be vital. You don’t have to attack the heart or the brain to get the white blood cells to take notice. Any old chunk of tissue will do.
This outcropping I’m hunkered down against right here, for instance . . .
I raise my fist, bring it down. Nothing.
Again: a dent. Maybe. Maybe just spots in front of my eyes.
I find something that looks like a seam, hook my fingers underneath, pull. It gives a little. I pull again, putting my back into it.
The panel peels back like the zip-top lid on a can of cat food. Blue light sparkles within.
I go to town.
Blue light recedes. Orange is in ascension. Every time I bring down my fist, copper lightning forks and crackles from the breach. It takes thirty seconds for me to bring this whole segment of passageway alive with electricity.
It takes less time than that for the antibodies to pay attention.
They boil out from the main flow as though someone’s punched holes in an invisible pipe: black angry thunderclouds in search of a parade to rain on. The wind doesn’t seem to bother them; they cut across that howling flow as if the air were dead still. They’re more than smoke, more than particles; they’re a collective, a billion microscopic agents acting in unison. I can see them talk among themselves: I look into that seething darkness and I see a million faint sparks winking back and forth as the nanites trade notes and make plans. Structural damage in sublevel whatsit. Power failure in thingamajig twenty-three.
Invader.
Infection.
There.
They swallow me whole, billow around me like some monster amoeba. The suit catches fire. That’s what it looks like, anyway: that orbital time-lapse of burning rain forests where half of SouthAm is sheathed in orange sparkles. Only the smoke isn’t rising from the tiny fires burning across my body; the smoke is falling into them, it’s precipitating, it’s condensing down into the light. It’s Brazil, run backward. The suit drinks in the spore; the embers fade along my arms and legs. Nothing else happens for a moment or two.
My fingertips start to tingle. My fingertips start to glow.
I begin to brighten from the outside in.
All those black specks, resurrected. All that ash turned back into flame. The particles rise like a blizzard of stars: from my arms, from my chest, from my legs and feet. So much mass, escaping; it seems impossible that any might be left behind. Perhaps my very molecules are flying apart, perhaps my whole body’s ablating into luminous mist.
Suddenly I’m as incandescent as a goddamn angel.
The rest, as they say, is history.
The spire vented, of course. That was the whole plan. It went off exactly when it was supposed to, but not before we’d raped its hanging fly ass; and when all that jizz spread out across Manhattan, it was carrying our sperm, not the Ceph’s. The Tunguska Iteration blew those fuckers apart like maggots in a microwave.
They say it was even closer than we thought. All those other spires popping up across the city, those were just beta releases. Tweaks, test runs, short-lived and self-terminating. That Central Park fucker, though: That was the mass-production model. It would’ve been shooting replicators. And then you’re not just talking about Manhattan, or New York, or even the whole tristate area. You’re kissing the whole damn planet good-bye. That’s what they say, anyhow. Of course, they don’t really know anything.
Actually, Roger, I don’t think they even know that much. I don’t think we have won. In fact, this is just the beginning. I’m pretty sure your bosses know that, too.
Because Gould had access to Hargreave’s feed. Gould knows what I saw, Gould knows stuff I haven’t told you here today. And if Gould knows, your bosses do, too.
Personally, I think of it as kind of a group home, a mansion with many rooms. And one of the residents wakes up in the middle of the night—hears a noise upstairs, maybe—and goes to investigate. He doesn’t bother waking the others. It’s probably just squirrels, or the cat knocked over a lamp or something. No point disturbing anyone else.
But it’s not squirrels, and it’s not a cat—or if it is, it’s a cat that’s figured out how to use the shotgun on the mantel, and now a gunshot’s gone off in the attic. Maybe there was a scream when the bullet hit, maybe someone shouted out a warning. And all the other gardening tools in all the other rooms, they’re waking up now. They want to know what happened. They want to know where their friend is. Maybe they’re even putting in a call to their owners to come have a look-see.
Hargreave would probably have some really valuable insights right about now, don’t you think?
Well, yes. As far as we know. But come on, Roger; you can’t have forgotten that Hargreave was never in it alone. It’s right there in the name of his company, for chrissake.
So tell me. What do you know about a dude called Karl Rasch?
Blackbody
Pre-Testimony Interview, Partial Transcript, 27/08/2023
Subject: Nathan Gould
Excerpt begins:
You remember those constellations I told you about, the ones that kept showing up in the static: clusters of blue stars, little sapphire pinpricks connected by a network of dim glowing filaments, rotating slowly in midair. Ceph starglobe, remember?
I bet your guys are going over it right now. The suit kept playing it so it’s gotta be important, right? Some kind of star map. Interstellar trade routes or invasion plans. Maybe the location of the Ceph homeworld. You’ve been poring over that shit ever since you tossed my place; nine, ten hours now? Trying to line up those sparkles with our own star maps, trying to figure out where a planet would have to be in the Milky Way to have that particular constellation hanging in its sky. How many possible matches you got so far? Few thousand, maybe?
I’ll give you a hint. You’re looking in the wrong direction.
One of those stars is under New York. Central Park, if you really want to narrow it down. There’s another under Ling Shan. And you know there’s a shitload more. Dozens more. If you’d waited another ten minutes before kicking in my door—hell, if you’d just asked nicely instead of waving those fucking guns in my face—I could’ve given you a list.
No big deal, though.
I’ve got a feeling everyone’s gonna know exactly where the rest of those stars are, real soon now.
Excerpt ends.