The A.I. laughed. “Ah, isn’t it wonderful?”
“What?” James asked with a resigned sigh.
“Sharing a secret. Secrets bring people together. We’re bonding.” The A.I.’s electronic laughter echoed in James’s ears as he watched the cloud of nans churning. He cringed as he thought of the conspiracy into which he’d been forced. How would he possibly be able to save humanity with Satan sitting on his shoulder?
14
Rich stood in front of what, just an hour earlier, had been his home in San Francisco. It was floating now, several meters above the ground on a cushion of magnetic energy. Rich’s mind’s eye was fully engaged, and he was desperately working his way through blueprints for building extensions; the home was about to become their life raft, and it was very possible that they would never be able to set foot outside of it again. Their evacuation group was going to include their own family, a group of nearly 100 people, as well as another 100 friends of the family. It was up to Rich to put together the home—he couldn’t afford to forget anything.
“The garden will need to be twice that size, Richard,” his wife, Linda, said. She was monitoring his construction efforts while multitasking; simultaneously she was guiding everyone who had already arrived into the main housing area of the ship (it was first come, first choice of lodging) while keeping one eye on Rich. It was clear to Rich that she didn’t trust his skills. “Edmund, Edmund darling will you please help your father with the construction? I think he needs…help.”
Edmund was Rich’s eldest son. Rich loved him very much and, like everyone in the family, they were very close—but he wasn’t going to be able to help his father—he just didn’t have the skill set. He would get in the way more than anything, and they both knew it. “I’ll see what I can do, Mum” Edmund replied. He never did come to his father’s aid—he was smart enough to placate his mother but stay out of Rich’s way.
Good boy, Rich thought to himself as he looked for a larger extension to the garden. As he flipped through designs, an unnatural feeling suddenly flooded his senses as a battery acid taste filled his mouth. Rich turned around and closed off his mind’s eye so he could get a clear view. It was a blue day in San Francisco, but something was happening above. A large area of the sky had suddenly changed color. A circular discoloration had emerged like an oil stain. “Dear God,” he whispered to himself as he looked around to see if anyone else had noticed it yet.
No one had.
He took a deep breath as he enjoyed the last moments before the smudge became real to the others and tried to push the nightmare out of his mind. He closed his eyes and tried to take in a few seconds of peace.
Someone screamed.
15
“This is the moment,” the A.I. said through his smile as he fixed his intense stare on James in the mainframe.
“I know,” James replied as he concentrated. He had built an enormous force of nans that were blasting toward the invasion force on a course to intercept them just before they enveloped Mars. The population of the red planet was still relatively low, not yet reaching 100 million, but the people there were the most vulnerable in the solar system. The alien machines would reach them within half an hour if he didn’t do something to stop them.
The nans had taken a formation that made them appear, from a distance, like a dark spear hurtling through space, a javelin on its way toward the heart of its prey. The fleet of microscopic warriors was, by far, the largest humanity had ever assembled, yet when it finally reached the invasion force, James feared it would be analogous to hurtling a pin at a charging bull.
“Are you ready for your first look?” the A.I. asked as he stalked back and forth in front of James.
“You’re enjoying this too much. What do you know?” James demanded as he continued concentrating on the impending confrontation.
“What you already know too,” the A.I. replied, his eyes becoming colder and blacker, his sharp teeth became longer and more difficult to hide.
James shook his head and sighed. “What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
The A.I. laughed. “You’re wondering if ‘He who made the lamb’ made me? It’s a complicated family tree, isn’t it? Your people made God. Then you made me. You’re the father, James. My fearful symmetry was made by your immortal hand.”
“I didn’t make you this way,” James asserted. “I don’t know what could create such an evil.”
The A.I. laughed again. The pitch of the laughter was becoming increasingly high and electronic, and it grated James’s quickly dissipating patience. “You know, James. You know it all. You just don’t want to admit it.”
“I’m engaging the alien forces in one minute,” James announced, changing the subject. He felt sure that the A.I. was trying to confuse him with mind games. Even when James had full access to the mainframe and maintained the operator’s position, he still felt that the A.I. was a step ahead of him. No matter how James tried to get around it, the human mind was simply at a disadvantage to artificial intelligence—at least in some ways.
“This is a crucial moment, James,” the A.I. began, his voice antarctic. “This is the very last moment of your existence in which you can call yourself even relatively pure. This is the moment of your ultimate corruption.”
James didn’t respond—he simply didn’t know how. The A.I. knew something, and he wasn’t sharing. Even with their mind’s intermingled as they were, James couldn’t access the thoughts of his nemesis. There was no turning back now, however. He had to give the people on Mars the time they needed to get off the planet—that was nonnegotiable.
“Contact in twenty seconds,” James commented as he prepared for the trillions of operational decisions that would have to be made every second once the battle began. “We can get our first clear look at them now.”
James switched to a viewer signal so he could see exactly what the nans in the forefront of the battle were seeing. The A.I.’s smile widened as an impossible vision appeared before them.
“No,” James whispered.
It wasn’t an army of metallic, insect-shaped machines hurtling toward them through space.
It was an eternity of people.
“Yes,” the A.I. replied.
16
“You monster,” James whispered. The sight was more astonishing than anything he had ever witnessed—and far more frightening. “You knew they were people!”
The A.I. laughed.
“Who are they?” James demanded. In less than ten seconds, the nans would be cutting a swathe through hundreds of billions—trillions—of people who were hurtling through space—people completely unprotected by spacesuits. “Who are they!?”
“The invasion force, one would assume. Not so easy to ‘destroy’ now, are they?”
James had to make his choice in an instant. The sight before him didn’t make sense. He’d been sure it would be a machine invasion, yet now he was looking at a vast sea, several times larger than the largest planet in the solar system, of what appeared to be people. They were flying through space at an incredible rate, seemingly unprotected by any magnetic fields or special flight gear. They were wearing dark clothing, but there didn’t appear to be a discernible uniform.
“To abort or not to abort, James. That is the question,” the A.I. said, drinking in the energy of the moment.