“It comes about in several ways. Warfare is common. Exhaustion. Starvation. For each new advance you pay a higher price, until the price is so great it swallows you. Ends you. This is the way. This has always been the way. Always will be. There is no other.
“Some recover. Some survive. And then they survive not as nations. Not as empires. Not as giants. But as a species. A single species, undivided. United by how close they came to such enormous death. I and others like me were made by those rare few who survived. I was sent to ensure that you also reached this, long ago, when this world first showed hope of life. That you came to that point. There were others, made for other worlds, but I was yours.” There was a sharp click out there in the fields, like a record’s skipping. “I have failed.”
“Failed?”
“Yes. There was an error. An error of calculations.” There was a pause, then a slight hum from around him as if something was spinning up, gathering momentum. “I will show you,” said the voice softly.
Above Hayes the night sky fluttered as though there was something alive in it, something working to break through, and then the boiling sky calcified to form an enormous ship suspended above the Earth, long and thin like some seacraft. It was black-gold and perfect and it seemed to Hayes that every part of the device was alive. It hovered over the landscape, huge and gorgeous, moving very, very slowly. As he studied it he thought to himself, My God. It looks almost like an airship. Like an enormous airship.
“Yes,” said the voice in the fields. “That is me. How I was. I was meant to…” The click came again. “… Watch, and seed you. Alter your very structure slightly so that you could hear me, and listen. I was to curb your most self-destructive impulses. But I did not get far. Once you rose and began to walk across your world, to see and to know, something happened.”
Hayes watched as the vessel hovered across the earth. There was a sound from within it, a gouging, creaking clunk, and a flash of blue-white flame shot from its right back section. The entire ship shuddered and then its side seemed to crumple inward, as if some unimaginable force inside the ship was pulling it in, all of its panels and sides flexing toward an inner point. Then the ship began to dovetail, spinning slowly through the air, its side still crumpling in as it spun faster and faster, until finally it struck the Earth and a great cloud of dust rose up, concealing it from view.
“The chances of any significant malfunction were considered, but deemed negligible,” said the voice wearily. “To this day, I do not know what it was. An error in mathematics. Corrosion from the moisture from your atmosphere, perhaps. But regardless I did not prepare, and I was broken.”
When the clouds dissipated Hayes saw the ship was halfway buried in the earth, its strange wreckage rising only a few feet above the mountains. Wind picked up dust and piled it around the ship until its golden nose was swallowed by the ground. Hayes saw people roving over the land, bands of brown-skinned folk with long black hair and primitive weapons. They sat around far fires and wandered across the earth and did not return.
“You continued without me,” said the voice. “What seeds I had laid among your kind had not yet sprouted, had not taken hold, and I was too damaged to speak to what was there to listen. You could not hear my suggestions. Not yet. So I watched. And grieved. And waited. The long wait. I cannot describe how long, how the years stretched on. The eons in the dark. A voice speaking to nothing. This was what I was. What I am. But this is soon to end.
“When I was finally discovered it was much later,” said the voice. “You had changed. You could almost hear my call, however faint. One man listened, just faintly, without knowing what I said. He came down and found parts of me. But he could not truly hear. And instead he brought others to me, and they took me apart. And kept me a secret. And made things from my remains.”
Hayes watched as men in suits scurried across the hillside. They sifted through the earth at their feet and picked up the wreckage of the vessel and studied it. Cocked their heads. Then stowed it away. Construction teams labored away in secret, finding more and more of the wonders hidden below the earth. And beyond Hayes saw the shoreline light up and grow gray-black as a city was born and rocketed to dominance in only a handful of decades.
“McNaughton,” Hayes whispered. “My God. You’re McNaughton. You’re what Kulahee found in the mountains. He wasn’t any genius, he just tripped over you!”
“Yes,” whispered the voice. “He made toys from my bones. Little amusements. And then he brought others. They could barely hear me. I had to develop defenses. It took so much effort to keep them away. To hide this most important part of me, and keep my message for someone who could hear me. To wait for you.”
“For me?” Hayes said, astonished. “You waited for me?”
“Yes. Yes. Yes.” The harsh click sounded somewhere above again, insectile and pained. “I sensed you. Far, far away. A bright jewel, wandering among distant lands. Your mind is different. More sensitive. The seeds I had sown had taken hold in you, and though they had gone awry you could still hear me. You had to come. To come and listen. So as they slept in the city below I whispered to the men there and used all my power and spoke to them of you, and they drew you in. It doomed me, that effort. Made my life short. But it had to be done.”
“You… you made me?” Hayes asked softly.
“I did not make you.”
“But I’m… I’m like this because of you?”
A pause. “Yes.”
Hayes fell silent. He shook his head and fought back the sorrow rising in him. “Why did you… why did you make me like this?” he asked.
“There was no making,” said the machine. “There never was. None of this was intended. You or this city or this strange new world. Nothing was meant to be this way. It simply is. It simply happened.”
“Can you… can you fix me?” asked Hayes desperately.
There was another harsh click. “No,” said the machine. “I cannot.”
“Please. Please, you have to…”
“I have already spent much of my strength changing you, changing you so you could listen,” said the voice. “You were close, but not close enough, and I was forced to use the machines below your city to make you better. Have you not felt it? Have you not felt your abilities become so focused and clear that they almost pain you?”
He shook his head. “The attacks…”
“Yes. The devices they built to run your city were a primitive medium, but they did what I needed. Their signaling mechanisms amplified my few remaining strengths. Gave me a way to reach you. You had to listen.”
Hayes remembered the flashing blue lights he’d seen when he’d had the vision in the trolley tunnels. “It’s the Siblings, isn’t it,” he said. “You can work through them. If I get close enough, I can hear you.”
“Yes. Others can hear only echoes. But yes.”
“And it was you who gave me that… that moment back in the fire, wasn’t it? That was you.”
Another harsh click. “Yes.”
“But why?”
“It was a gift. A moment of clarity. But it would have ended me to sustain it any longer than I had. And I must use my last remaining seconds wisely, for one final act.”
“What do you mean?”
He heard the voice sigh beyond. “My presence here has changed things. Destabilized them. Accelerated them. I was a catalyst on a level that even I could not have foreseen. And now I can no longer keep pace. I am dying. Only unformed minds hear me now. Madmen. And children.”
“Children?” Hayes asked.