“You’re still feeling guilty,” Alejandra whispered.
“Yes,” Old-timer replied, nodding slightly.
“Guilty because you lived. We all feel that.”
“Guilty about more than that,” Old-timer admitted. “You know that.”
“I would never have said it,” Alejandra replied.
“I know, but you would have known it. I’m not an idiot. I know you know.”
Alejandra took a moment to digest this as she stepped to the ledge of the fissure, displaying her impressive agility, and looked down into the dead earth below. “It won’t always be this way. Life will have to go on.”
“What do you mean?” Old-timer queried.
Alejandra ignored his question and continued, “You have an extraordinary power, Craig. So do I. Just now, while we were flying, I felt my own exhilaration as we skimmed the Earth, but that wasn’t the feeling on which I was concentrating.” She turned and fixed her deep blue discs on him, eyes filled with so much depth. Little lines caught the light and shone like waves on the horizon. “I was soaking in your feelings for me…and I loved it.”
“I-I…” Old-timer stammered but couldn’t find the words to reply.
“You’ll never know what it is like to actually feel someone else’s attraction, someone else’s love. Not what you imagine or what you hope might be real, but actual love. It’s intoxicating. But if you could feel it…” She walked toward him and placed her hand on his face. “If you could feel it, you’d feel it now.”
A picture of his wife suddenly flashed across his eyes. He turned away quickly. “No! This is insane! You’re just a child!”
“I’m far from being a child,” she replied.
“I’m sorry. I just mean…to me, you are so young. So, so young. Please understand. I’m nearly 100 years older than you. I’m from a completely different world.”
Alejandra paused for a moment, her eyes fixed on the poisoned sun and the corpse-like Earth. “We’re from the same world now,” Alejandra replied.
Her words suddenly made the nightmare around him tangible. Old-timer’s eyes fell on the death surrounding him, and he shook his head slowly at the thought of all that had been lost. “How can you people let yourselves die? What is it about death that you can possibly find appealing?”
“We don’t find death appealing,” Alejandra replied, turning quickly to face Old-timer but remaining patient.
“You’re surrounded by it now. This is the reality of it. It’s terrible. Our species evolved and stopped death. Why do you choose to die?”
“We don’t choose to die. We choose to live.”
“That makes no sense.”
“We choose the honor of living life as purely human.”
“Is that to suggest I’m not human?”
“You aren’t.”
“That’s absurd.”
“Whether you want to acknowledge it or not, you are something else. When you stopped death, disease, when you connected yourself to your machine-collective, you gained a great many things. You also lost a great many things.” She stepped towards Old-timer and touched his cheek with her fingers. “You became something else. Your people took control of evolution and you became…post-human.”
Old-timer was left at a temporary loss for words. Her point of view, amazingly, seemed almost logical. He began to shake his head again, as though he were trying to shake out her voice and the seeming reasonability of her ideas. “And what about the end? You live your lives naturally, and then you let yourself die? You see seventy-five years of experiences, of love, of life, and then you let it all go? You must realize there is no god. The concept is absurd.”
“There are things we can’t explain.”
“Absurd.”
“Why? I can feel your emotions. Can you explain that?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be explained.”
“Perhaps one day it will. And perhaps when I die, I will learn a great many things.”
“Alejandra, you won’t learn a damn thing. Tell me something. Can you remember what it was like before you were born?”
“No, Craig.”
“So you concede it is possible to simply not exist?” Alejandra remained silent. “If there is a soul, if there is an afterlife, science can find it. Why not stick around long enough to find the answers instead of just taking a leap of blind faith?”
For a moment, she was silenced. She stepped away from him and looked back at the bloody sun and the Earth’s corpse. “It was your way of doing things that led to this, Craig, not ours.”
Old-timer sighed and nodded his head regretfully. “I can’t deny that, but as you said, we’re from the same world now. We have to make that world. There has to be a happy medium.”
10
WAKING UP had become almost impossible. James blinked his eyes, and the darkness flashed away for the briefest glimpse of his surroundings. He saw a black and orange blur sliding and swirling like the image of a kaleidoscope. The light was coming from overhead. He blinked a handful of times, but his heavy eyes shut and sealed, his eyelids sore like the legs of a marathon runner in the last quarter-mile.
Someone’s cool hand touched the back of his head, and he awakened again. A woman’s chilled fingers were on the back of his neck. She was putting something behind his head. Was it a pillow? Of course—he’s in a hospital. Thel had found the Purists. He tried to speak to the woman, but his voice failed him. His throat felt like the barrel of a flamethrower.
“Don’t try to speak,” the woman whispered. “You had a tube down your throat. Rest.”
A tube down his throat? Surgery. He has required surgery. James held his head up and tried to communicate, but again, every move caused exhaustion. One move of his neck felt like the thousandth time he had made the motion. The woman put her cool hand against his burning forehead and lightly pressed him back against the welcoming pillow, seemingly willing him back to sleep.
He couldn’t sleep—there was too much at stake. But he couldn’t fight her. She was too strong. He closed his eyes to wait for her to leave, but the blackness came again before the cool hand left his skin.
Light again.
Someone was moving across the room, an elderly man holding a contraption with a bag of clear liquid attached to it, slowly making his way out of the room. He had made some sort of noise and given James the toehold he needed to escape the blackness.
Awake again, James could not let himself sleep. How much time had he already lost? Where was he? Suddenly, he remembered: a hospital. He needed to reason his way through his predicament. It was clear that he was being prevented from waking up. He looked down and saw the bandages across his torso. The punctured lung. He must have required some sort of surgery. That meant his body had undergone massive trauma. Without his nans, his body would have to heal from the trauma on its own. That would require an enormous amount of rest. The Purists must have administered painkillers and a sedative to keep him unconscious. How were they getting it into his system? A pained move of his neck from side to side revealed the answer. Like the man who had woken him, James had one of the poles with a bag filled with clear liquid attached to him. A wire went from the bag down to his arm, and a needle was puncturing his skin. He assumed this was how they administered the drugs and nutrients. He would have to disconnect it in order to stay awake. He took as deep a breath as he could. His throat was still coated with liquid flame. He swung his left arm across his body and grasped the needle that was sticking into his right forearm. This movement sent a terrible stab of pain through the right side of his body, where his incision was located. The painkillers were not strong enough. James did not want to imagine what it would have felt like had he no painkillers to dull the full brunt of it. He wrapped his fingers around the needle but then suddenly stopped.