He looked about him. Row on row of sleeping Seedees were stacked against the sky, awaiting the command to awaken. This was not supposed to be possible. They were all gone forever, he knew that. Somehow, they were all to live again, subjected to some kind of mysterious resurrection process, brought to life again in the complexes of an eternal circuitry. How? He thought about it, his renewed oil, if such itwas, coursing with excitement. Obviously, something new had been added to the dark equations of reality.
Centrum began to speak within him, a thing it had never been able to do before. A curious double entity tracked along its voice, a different being, writ large with it, a new, unconscious dominance in the old being.
You have work to perform, it said, its voice echoic in nature, two thought-tracks merging with his consciousness in a strange, intractable fashion. Centrum seemed angry with itself, almost schizoidal. Mother Ocean has been invaded by a disease. The product of the Grand Design has gone wrong. Things must be rectified. The invaders must be repelled.
Sent away?
No. We must have all that is within them. There is a greater cosmos waiting without and we must have a way of dealing with it. Absorb them all. I will reach out and take what is theirs into myself. I must be supreme once again.
7red wondered at the meaning of it all, but the voice of God said, Go thou! and he went. He sailed away from the massed, sleeping ranks of all the beings that ever lived, the first scout of his renewed kind, to be in the proud vanguard of an unending, everlasting horde. He should have been overjoyed, but a shadow of unhappiness followed him, troubling the smooth flow of his liquid thoughts. What was wrong? He pondered as he flew, marveling at the changes in his world. Something had gone wrong. . . . No, he realized. Something had always been wrong. He merged with a waiting work vacuole and fled into the limpid depths of the blue sky, staring hard through its enhanced senses. Something was happening ahead, and he squinted to see what it was, eager to discover the form of the invaders. The sense of wrongness left him disquieted. He had no reason to live again, but here he was. Something had happened to Centrum. What?
He wondered if Cooloil would live again and wished for her presence. He had always missed her. He could feel the circuits all about him, and suddenly realized he could remember bits and pieces of that great dark time when he had beenpart of the unified mind. I am not real! he thought. His own oil had long ago dissipated. The body he inhabited now wasjust an image, held in the cold imagination of Centrum. It recreates me as a mere subroutine! He wondered at the source of this new terminology. I am dead, still, never to liveagain. But he felt real within himself, even knowing thatconsciousness was an illusion. Maybe it had alwaysbeen. . . . He felt a flood of horror course through him, but the battlewas before him now, already joined.
Harmon Prynne was lying on his bed in the darkness alone, hands laced behind his head, staring into the black depths of an invisible ceiling and waiting for sleep to come. He'd been living in Tupamaro Arcology for seven months now, and sometimes wondered why he'd come. He and Vana were more or less living together, as much as anyone ever did in the free-wheeling life of a modern urban monad, but it was a troublesome state. She came and went as she pleased and his complaints about her behavior were not only ignored, they seemed to go unnoticed.
He reached down under the comforting sheets and rubbed a hand slowly across his crotch, feeling a responsive stiffening, and wondered about himself. I'm a human itch, he thought reflectively, waiting to be scratched. He grinned in the darkness and took his hand away, enjoying the weight of an unused erection. Couldn't do it in Key West, he remembered. Couldn't do it at all. I wonder why? Was it the racing?
An image came to him that filled the world with light. He was walking along a corridor in Tupamaro's ElComPod complex, carrying a bag of tools, headed for the engineer's station. He'd been hired to come here and fix up some waveguide panels by a contractor, and he came to get the purchasing credit for his work.
He entered the immaculate room and stared. The engineer was a slim, beautiful Spanish woman with strikingly intelligent eyes clad in a crisp linen dress that highlighted her eye-clutching breasts. He stared at her, eyes sweeping up and down her frame. God! She was a total beauty! "Engineer Methol?" he asked, a catch in his voice. She nodded, turning away, and he felt slightly nauseous, lust tearing at him against his will. How could he work with something like this?
There was another woman there, sitting in the corner behind a console, and when he turned to look at her they locked eyes, his head canting sharply downward to face her, as if forced by a hand. He stared into her black-dark eyes, almost oblivious to the ripeness of her somewhat stocky form. Her arms were brown and supple.
This woman grinned at him. "Hi!" she said. "I'm Ariane's friend, Vana Berenguer!" The door of his bedroom popped open suddenly, spilling light from the hall and calling him back from his dreamland. It was Vana, springing lightly toward him, shedding clothes as she came. The door closed by itself, plunging them into darkness again, but the rustle of cloth continued. She sprang on the bed, bouncing and naked, and nuzzled against the skin of his chest. She was hot, drenched with sweat, and he wondered where she'd been. She ran her face down his chest, nibbling at his stomach and giggling.
Rhythmic motions drew him out of himself and made him unable to think, made him a slave. He didn't mind at all just then. . . .
What he felt, as her hips pounded up and down atop him, was a sense of belonging, not just to her but to the human race. It gave him a delicate sense of self-worth to know that this woman desired his flesh, when she could have any flesh that she wanted. He laughed into the face of the night and clasped her writhing form tight against him, feeling the muscles of her back straining under his hands. She was panting, short, sharp breaths through her open mouth. At these moments he knew he loved her above all else in the world.
It overcame him. His orgasm began, throbbing heavily, and she cried out briefly, shuddering as she settled down into a quiet, sweating stillness.
Unaccountably, they said nothing more, and Prynne imagined that it was because nothing needed to be said. After a while Vana got up and went to the bathroom. She came backto bed with a snack, crackers, cheese, and some sweet beverage. They shared it and he dozed in her arms.
Seven Red Anchorelles hovered a long way from the battle, watching carefully through the amplified senses of his old work vacuole. He knew it wasn't the same one, that reality was a long time dead, but it seemed the same and that was all that counted. His released oil circulated in the narrow space outside his shell and reported to him all that was happening.
The defensive spheres were gathered about the invaders now, subunits of Centrum's newly expanded consciousness attacking the alien program segments in swift movements of artificial thought. Like me, thought 7red, things of the imagination. The invaders fought back with their own electronic weaponry, bending the inner world to their will, providing an imagery that satisfied their mysterious needs. By all rights, the spheres should win, for they were closer to the source of their power. And yet ... Something was happening. A sense of greater power at immense distance pervaded the scene. It was as if a giant, invisible cable stretched upward to near infinity, providing a link with some massive entity lurking beyond the gentle blue of the sky. 7red expanded his horizons.