It was time to walk. They had a long road ahead of them, and neither knew how much time they had left. The planet was dying.
They began.
broken by a silent question
WHAT IS IT((?))
THE UPLOAD OF THE POPULACE IS COMPLETE. WE HAVE DONE ALL THAT WE CAN WITH THE PLANET. WE HAVE SALVAGED ALL OF THE PATTERN THAT WE CAN.
THE STAR((?))
WE HAVE FOCUSED ALL ENERGIES ON THE COLLAPSE. WE CAN DO NOTHING BUT WAIT NOW. THIS WHEN HAS BEEN DRAINED OF OMEGA’S LIFEBLOOD.
THEN LEAVE ME. SALVATION AWAITS US IN THE PURPOSE. WE WILL AWAIT THE COMPLETION IN THE SILENCE AND THE STILLNESS.
YES. THE STILLNESS.
the black sleeps. the black parts.
How many days?
They returned to the alien vessel beneath the mountain at least once each day, whether to reassure themselves that the orb was still there or to hope that it had disappeared, neither knew. It floated at the center of the spherical chamber still, day by day growing a little brighter. Satisfied or perhaps disappointed, they always returned to the surface.
They had completed their survey of Diablo. They found food, but neither was truly hungry. The days and nights blended together into a sinuous progression of time. The sky remained hazy and gray. Did time still progress? No wind, no sunlight, no movement. Just cold. Static. Dead.
July? Maybe.
What were they waiting for? Was this to be the end of the world, a calm, cold, freezing cessation of movement and breathing and life? Was this all that there was to death? Sometimes West wondered if they were dead already… He did not want to discuss that with Patra.
Is this heaven? Hell? What dream suffocates us?
He could sense something… Somewhere out there, the almost imperceptible touch of the thoughts of others. They were coming as fast as they could. He would wait here with Patra as long as they could. He would—
“West?”
He looked up at her glimmering face, which was canted diagonally beside him at a seemingly impossible angle. They sat on a swing set in a laughable excuse for a playground in a laughable excuse for a park in the middle of Diablo. If the miners and soldiers had possessed no need for a case of Pepsi, then surely these playground toys had not seen any attention since at least the turn of the century. Had there ever even really been children in Diablo? They sat on fragile, cracked black rubber straps hung from rusty antique chains which themselves were suspended from a creaking, somehow dangerous-feeling metal frame. Patra swung noisily, leisurely back and forth, her legs kicking out, body swinging low and then high and repeating. She had been swinging for hours, it seemed. West sat on the swing beside her, motionless, arms wrapped around the chains and hands sitting lazily on his bent knees. He had been studying the dusty scratch of dirt before him with quite some interest when Patra interrupted his visual geological survey.
“What?” He looked over, his gaze following her swinging, childlike movement.
“Do you have a first name?”
She had a silly grin on her face. He smiled, laughed, shook his head. “How long have we been together, walking around this ghost town? A week, two weeks?”
“I don’t know. A month, maybe? I can’t tell anymore.” Swing back, swing forth.
“Neither can I.”
They sat in silence for a while, West remaining stationary, Patra traveling in an ever-decreasing arc beside him. Eventually, she stopped swinging and came to a rest beside him, kicking up a small cloud of dust that settled back to the ground a little too fast for her comfort. The air was dead, oppressive, freezing. West was quietly thankful for the cessation of the rusty creaking sound that had been grating through his head at Patra’s every motion. Now at rest, the sound stopped, much like the landscape stretched before them, a world at rest, silent.
Is this heaven? Hell? Drowning in this…
He felt her looking at him, and he turned to face her in his swing. She still had that silly grin on her face. He had long ago gotten over the initial shock of being near a metal human, and he found her smile quite intriguing.
“You never answered my question.”
“What?”
“What’s your first name?”
“Oh… I don’t have one anymore.”
She frowned. “What did it used to be, then?”
He saw that she was not going to give up. “Don’t laugh.”
“I promise I won’t laugh. How bad can it be?”
“Adam.”
She blinked once, then her smile widened, and she began to snicker. “Adam West? Wasn’t that the guy who played—”
“Shut up, Cleopatra.” He said it playfully, but before he knew it she had stood up and pushed him out of his swing onto the cold dusty ground. She stood over him with her smiling face an image of silver fire. “Batman my ass.”
With that, West kicked her legs out from under her and she fell not gently to the ground, landing mostly on top of him. “Egyptian queen my ass.”
They laid in a pile on the ground, laughing loudly, appreciating the echoes their laughter made down the mountainside. Neither questioned the moment. They laid on the ground, looking up at the gray shell that was suffocating the planet, laughing about dead African queens and dead American television actors because their reality was too terrifying to laugh about. Patra was on top of West’s arm, so he pulled her over and they hugged each other in an only slightly-more-than-friendly embrace. West felt like a child, invigorated, refreshed. The swing floated back and forth above them; his right leg was still ensnared in the metal and rubber device. Patra’s attack had caught him off-guard indeed.
The sky moved above them. They knew not what it was that strangled the earth, and neither wanted to discuss the suspicion that eventually the atmosphere would be consumed by the silver web and they would suffocate. Day by day, the silver web seemed to inch closer to the surface. For now, they were content to lay on the dusty earth at look at the sky like children.
Lying on our backsides, just waiting to convert, the sky’s an open wound when the clouds resemble our ex-lovers.
The thought struck West suddenly, unexpectedly. He thought for a brief moment he heard whistling, or whistling of a sort, but then it was gone. James Richter used to whistle like that. All the time.
He felt Patra’s gaze again, and when he turned to face her, she looked down guiltily. “What is it, Cleo?”
She quietly smiled, face not exactly as lithe as once it had been. She quickly turned to him, leaned over, gave him a quick kiss on the lips. She searched his eyes for approval, and found it tenfold.
She stood, took his hand, helped him up. They brushed the sand and dust off of themselves. West was about to wrap his arms around her when she grabbed his hand and began pulling him back up the mountainside, toward the mine entrance.
“It’s time to check on the orb, Batman. We can play some more after dinner.”
He was not sure if she was alluding to sitting on the swing or something infinitely more playful, but he knew that it would be an adventure nonetheless.
Mountains, or the precipitous lack thereof.
“What do you think happened?”
Simon looked across the expanse and shook his head.
Where once the Rocky Mountains had thrust into the American sky, now an impossible stretch of flattened earth lay, littered with shards of the Enemy web that had fallen to earth. The landscape was devastated as far as they could see. One rather disturbing addition to the scorched earth that they had not encountered before was the presence of hundred, perhaps thousands, of dead Enemy vessels that had been knocked out of the sky by the web breach. They most likely had been mining the mountains in one large infestation when the end of the upload generator came, and the writhing bodies of the vessels had fallen lifelessly to the great gouge in the earth they had created when the spire had erupted, spilling their precious uploaded lifeblood into the atmosphere.