HUB

A hundred batches, maybe more—an expanse of humanity as large as the body of water had been in his dream, certainly more people than he had ever seen before, all in one place—passed by. Two or three hundred bare feet thrumming at the floor in a ragged rhythm while he remained lurking among defoliated trees, ludicrously hiding behind denuded trunks for what seemed like ages. He felt the energies in his own feet, coming up his legs.

Who would he have been, if he’d never left the pen, if choices had been different?

Above the crowd, a massive drone—blunt, airborne—rotated nose down, driving the mass, or at least watching over them. Paladins and drones and orbs.

When he’d first struggled up the ladders of the harrier, every part of him had screamed with pain. Watching the icon of the hands over the controls as it shimmered into view, he’d shoved his arms all the way into the holes and clenched his jaw—

She materialized now, to stand before him in all her beauty—while he gaped. With a light smile, she said, “Hello, Crospinal.”

His face itched where he had touched his cheek, then rubbed it, with the blood of the corpse. Both cheeks. Flaking off now, dried. He tried not to scratch or react for fear of drawing attention—though, when unable to resist the aggravation, he brushed at his face with the back of one hand and felt only his cool flesh, no crusty stigmata there at all.

At the site of the slaughter, Crospinal had tried to cover up the remains, but there was nothing in the vicinity of the man’s devastated body except for bare floor tiles, withered fragments of ancient composite panels, and dead trees. The volume of gore would remain as he had found it for a very long time, at odds with the landscape, an incongruity of composition whose presence and chronicle was a mystery and an affront. Nevertheless, arranging splintered bones, shifting coils of still-warm intestines into heaped loops, as if to trigger some hidden mechanism, or at least rebuild the fleeting miracle of life—if only he could get the patterns right—he turned the skull (with a shattered parietal bone, brains spilling free), face up, and stared into the pulped eyeballs, haunted by the thought he might have done this carnage himself; his last thought, before falling asleep, had been of murder.

Sailors and batches hissed in his veins.

What Crospinal now believed, hiding in the copse, watching the receding exodus, with what was undoubtedly a paladin spinning above, was that the world and events of his past had not occurred, nor been arranged, the way he presumed. What he remembered fearing the most—that he would drift in darkness until the creatures came for him—would happen. All he could trust was the immediate moment: what he saw, the breath in his lungs. His interpretations were as unreliable as everything he had been told, everything he thought he’d learned, including the years of his father’s advice, his lessons, and preparatory haptics.

Why had he come here?

The collar of his uniform slipped from around his throat and lay, writhing, at his feet. Whatever remained of a shield, if any shield remained at all, was now surely gone. No monitor scope, no comms.

In one hand, Crospinal retained the carbon rod. Had he bludgeoned the man with it?

What did he mean to accomplish?

Questions circled, the one constant in life.

A distant batch dropped to all fours and loped away from the group with an awkward, sideways gait, butt held high. Another lagged. Both sorts of stragglers dropped to the floor just as suddenly, twitching, only to get up and stagger back to take their places again. Did light feed them, like the walls and floors? Or their own flesh? Maybe they never ate, and lived for only a few days, despite what he had been told.

The flesh Crospinal had eaten sat in his stomach like an artifact. Sailors hummed quietly through his veins as he moved along the border of the dead garden in the opposite direction of the batches, staying within the spindly trunks for cover, though their cover was less than scant. Ironically, trees were tougher in death: they did not shatter as he passed or even as he grabbed at branches for balance. Between his toes, black tiles that had once sustained the root masses had crumbled to dust.

Soon, smoldering on the horizon, rose what could only be the source, or pen, of the paladins and batches both: an angular structure, heaving up from the floor, over which smaller drones and clusters of data orbs spiralled. Hazy with distant polymers, the mound grew quickly, as if approaching Crospinal at the same pace he approached it. He saw several large drones resting along the slopes on cradled facets, all streaming faint apparitions; shapes of light cascaded down the lower sides of the mound and spilled across the floor tiles before winking out. Some imagoes made it farther than others, as if attempting to escape, but all expired in brief flashes. Crospinal could not distinguish details. They were too vague, though he might have discerned the forms of people, or features of a face—an open mouth; narrowed eyes—rising, half-formed.

These were the paladins’ dreams.

Chatter of the sailors became so loud he put his hands to his temples, expecting the cacophony could be heard from far away—the receding batches showed no sign of noticing, nor did the paladin, guiding the batches away, so minute now.

When he turned back, the mound seemed closer still. Filaments of light crackled from the peak—which appeared metallic from here, certainly non-composite—and shot up into the air. The pattern of features on the surface of the construction meant the formation was built more like the central pen, with grilles webbing polycarbonate girders.

Polymer mists directly above the mound were frantic with information gathering there. But this intrusion had been formed forever; a cyst at the core of the world, where struggles had gone on for so long they’d become symbiotic and inseparable.

Could this be the icon of his father’s memories? Was this the mountain he tried so often to recall?

“Hey, Crospinal!”

For a second, he thought his name was being called by one of the voices murmuring in his head, but wheeling at a secondary, rustling sound, he saw movement behind a dead root mass: something low, shiny, and quick.

When the metal rat stepped into view, between two leaning trunks, its red eyes glowed in the already bright day. They stared at each other for a long while. Crospinal clenched the carbon rod tighter. The air seemed suddenly hotter, and the elemental wavered, as if projected. Not likely, though, with these dead trees all around, unless the image came from some device Crospinal had not yet encountered.

Nodding toward the distant procession, the individuals of which were now no bigger than the last joint of his smallest finger, he asked, “Where are they going?”

“They’re being moved. All of them. That’s the year of constitution. The year of delivery and the year of bad timing have already been moved. The cortexes are leaving.”

“What?”

“Everything’s changing, Crospinal. That’s why I’m here. You need to come back with me. We’ve invested, well, a lot in you. I’ve been searching for days. You don’t emit anything. You need to come with me, now.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” He frowned at the distant crowd, a blur that might not even be moving; they appeared to be climbing, as if the floor curved up, and were all on the inside of a massive sphere. When he turned back, to meet the fixed red eyes, he said, “What do you mean?”

“We have to go. I’ll tell you as we travel back. I’m taking a big chance coming down here. I mean, if this shield dies, I’ll be toast. They’ll fry me in a second.”

“I thought you might be a haptic.”

“A haptic? Shit, no. That’s all neurons and human energy bullshit. I’m real. I got a shield on. This is a force. They don’t like us machines. Now let’s go. I’ll tell you everything you want to know once we get back.”

“Just leave me alone, rat.”

Rumbling shook the dead trees, but not from the engines. As if something equally hollow yet even more massive than the world ground gently against the other side of the floor. They both, elemental and man, looked toward the distant mound.

“We’re not biotic, you know,” the device said, after a moment. “So will you get that right? Look, Crospinal—”

A surge of frustration, or even anger: in sudden tears, he shouted, “I’m not going back! You’ll tell me I’m sick, or that I died, or some shit like that. You’ll tell me you’ve been looking for years and that I’m five hundred years old!”

“Keep it down!” Crouching low, the elemental became almost flat against the dried nutrient tiles. The shield wavered, curling over it, sheltering.

“Stop following me.”

“Crospinal, you are ill. That’s the thing. I’m telling you the truth. You really are. We want to help you.”

“Just stop.”

“Listen to me. This is important. I need to scan you. You’ve done a lot already, Crospinal, each time, but this one’s gone off the rails—”

“Shut up.”

“All right, all right, listen, Crospinal. Listen. All right. Just keep it down. The cockpit’s doubled in size. The crew you named—Richardson, and the other one, with the girl’s name, Clarissa—have brought back twenty seven more sailors. They’re coming up fast now. Other crew are named. A structure’s forming around them and the other pilot, the one like you, is awake again. She’s coming back. The journey’s almost over, Crospinal. We’re so close. But they need you up there. You need to be well. You need to get better. You need to suit up.”

“I killed someone.”

The metal rat, silenced now, cocked its head. “Who?”

“Back there.” He indicated with a nod the ridge where he’d found the remains. “On the far side of this garden.”

“You mean the sailor? The first sailor? Tattooed and dismembered?”

“I don’t know what tattooed means but, yeah, torn apart. I killed him.”

The elemental stared.

“Well? Did I? Did I tear him apart?”

“Of course not, Crospinal. He’s been there, well, since the beginning. Can we please go? I’ll tell you later, I promise.”

“Who was he?”

“The first passenger. The first sailor. There were no dispensers then. Us elementals were dormant. No one was set to wake up. No one had any idea what had happened. But he woke others and helped them find food and water, and ways to stay alive. He woke us. You were named after him.”

“He had a name?”

“All sailors did.”

“And his name was Crospinal?”

“Yes.”

“You know what? Stop talking, okay? You’ve lied to me so much. You’re a shitty fucking liar. He would have told me that Crospinal was his name when I said who I was. He would have told me.”

Again the elemental paused. Delicately, it said, “Except he’s dead, Crospinal. He’s been dead for thousands of years. He can’t tell you anything.”

About to point out the fresh blood he’d smeared onto his face, the lesions he’d seen on the man’s arms, the shreds of meat hanging from sharp carbon rods as he ate, Crospinal turned away instead, disgusted. The batches were no longer visible, nor was the paladin. A mist of polymers blew lackluster from the trees, catching on the bare branches and twinkling like grey streamers.

He walked away.

“Crospinal!” Following swiftly in leaps, the elemental would not be left behind. “You have no idea what you’re doing. We’ve been trying to help you. Every generation. That’s why we’re here. We want to help you get better because you can fly this thing! With Luella. I need to bring you back. Please, Crospinal. Listen.”

The end of the garden was nigh. Fractals of apparitions from the paladins straggled as far as his feet now. Without stopping, he passed through the lights and they broke apart upon his shins. There were faces, stern and shocked, and forms of beasts that could never have lived in a corporeal world.

Quaking again: Crospinal felt the thrum, a familiar surge, pressure building in strength as the engines, wherever they were, turned over very slowly. And ceased.

“Shit,” said the metal rat. “Aw, fuck—”

Through eruptions of light, haptics too virulent to contain, and mercurial projections, Crospinal watched the giant drones spinning slowly in their sloped recesses. They were as large as the pen. He remembered seeing them before, in the haptic the first metal rat had shown him. Being guided on the dolly. From where he stood there were three visible, and the limned outline of a fourth, against a nearly hidden facet. On another side, as he circled slowly, a greyer, calmer façade of the mound meant the paladin was gone. Had he just watched it leave? Was his girlfriend inside one of these, projecting out into the world? Glowing apparitions and the crackling lights they rode were hard to look at and caused the essences inside him to agitate.

He waded knee deep through haptics now.

The metal rat, running within the amalgam of lights, had to leap to clear the luminous carpet. “If you don’t eat pellets, or don’t drink water from a spigot, you’ll revert. Everything will be lost. You understand that? It might be too late already.”

Crospinal was only half listening. He actually felt a modicum of relief at the idea he might not have committed murder, though he had once contemplated it. Could he? Could everyone? Had that aberration been instilled in him as part of his education? That’s all he wanted to know. Yet everything the metal rat said might be lies. He felt his heart slowing, his body grow less tense. He said without turning: “What about you, then, rat? Where do machines stand?”

The housings where the cabinets of the paladins were docked took up most of his field of vision, a massive formation that rose hundreds of metres above the hub floor. The remaining drones pivoted slowly, wreathed in their own light.

“Personally? I’m a doctor,” said the elemental, jumping clear and dipping in again. “A contrivance from before this disaster unfolded. So I’m here, risking everything, to retrieve you from your unfathomable quest.”

“The first sailor told me I’m not human. Is that true?”

“For goodness sake, Crospinal, you couldn’t’ve spoken with him. He’s long gone. He’s dead. But I can assure you that you’re human. Please stop walking. You’ll get us both killed.”

He did stop. Just for a bit. He was out of breath. “So, that’s like, like a shield you have on? You’re an elemental, wearing a sort of shield?”

“Yes. And it’s depleting my batteries pretty quick.”

“So go dormant. Conserve energy.” Crospinal tugged at the girdle, which had started to sag now the collar was gone—the catheter stung, likes pins in his groin. Pulling free a length of gortex piping made the entire unit cant further on his hips. “How did he die?”

“Who?”

“You know. The other Crospinal.”

“The first one? Shit, you know, I could just take you back. I could drop you in your tracks right now and get you carted away. Force feed you. Cram you back into a suit. But I want you to decide. I want you to make the right choice.”

“How did he die?”

“He fell. He fell from somewhere up there, and he splattered where you saw him.”

Projections and the entangled figures of light seemed to coil up his thighs. He pulled another strip of his girdle free—plastic rivets popped away—then rubbed his fingers to let the sheet of fabric drift away.

Voices added to the clutter and chatter in his head.

“You helped us long ago. In the year of naming. And now we want to help you.”

“What did I do?”

“In the anterior passage, where the bridge once was, you gave two of us—”

The impact of the carbon rod chipped the tiny elemental right out from under its shield, out from under the apparitions, arcing the titanium body up with a resounding thwack. The machine’s scream was delicate, high-pitched as it rose; before the device had been swallowed again by the paladin’s dreams, let alone before it hit the tiles—as the shield leapt frantically to catch its host—he started to lope.

An arc of lightning from the nearest data orb, blackening the titanium frame and skin, sending the ruins skittering through the ghosts to rest immobile.

Crospinal dropped the carbon rod: clattering, it, too, was swallowed by phantasms.

Wading round an arc of the base through increasingly agitated projections, he faced another facet, exposed now, also empty, and dimmer because of the emptiness. The structure beneath was polymethyl, a web comprised of hard plastic beams like those behind the throne of his father, like the girder that had fallen on the dream cabinets he used to visit. He stared for a moment, overwhelmed by disparate and surprisingly moving fragments of his past.

Flanking the cradle where the huge drone had nestled, inlaid sets of consoles rose up, levels of them, meeting at a peak: a dais that would have been covered, had the paladin, like those adjacent, been docked. There were four score.

As he approached the consoles, a susurrus of voices from within egged him on. He was not struck by lightning, though orbs clustered over his head. He moved aside the cover of the lowest console, exposing the pair of holes.

The icon of hands, palms together, rose and spun before him.

Pushing his bare fists in, the energy was a soft explosion. He wondered if he would be annihilated for good, but he stood, sagging, the hum moving up his arms—

“Crospinal? Crospinal?”

For a second, he was back in bed. Clarissa had woken him. She had breakfast on a tray. A crepe; berries; coffee. It was his birthday.

But that was swept away, and when he woke this time, his girlfriend was with him, in her dark uniform and dark boots, her hair pulled back tight. She regarded him with such concern and affection he felt light enough to rise off the floor, transcend the world. He had found her. The image was so strong, clear. He could almost touch her. He wanted to drop to his knees, wrap his arms around her legs, rest his head against her forever.

“You came so far,” she said.

Love was a force, pushing through him, like lumens, with information glorious and threatening both. He was barely able to speak. He was bursting with love. “How can you see me? You’re the only one . . .”

“Of course I see you.” A beatific smile, though her expression belied elements of resignation, fear, even a futility of events. (And her eyes, Crospinal realized, were . . . green!) “I always see you. You once belonged to me. I watched the passenger take you away. I watched you in the place the passenger found. You came to me when I called. Remember? Our visits?”

“Yes.” He was falling into her eyes.

“I did what I could. I should have stopped it. But I was so proud of you. They wanted me to stop it, but I couldn’t bear the thought. I got in trouble.” Her smile faltered.

“Is this endtime?” He was trying to swallow a hard shape that had formed in his throat.

“Yes, Crospinal, it is.” She reached for him, as if she had forgotten he was untouchable. “For better or worse. We’ve arrived.”

“But the . . . the sailors? The crew?”

“They tried to return to a time and place that could never exist again. Reasons are flawed. We want you to thrive, Crospinal. Lead a good life.”

“Paladins tried to kill me.”

“No, Crospinal. Not you.”

He gazed at her for a long while. Finally, with great difficulty, he told her how much he loved her.

“I love you, too,” she said. “Always know that.” Smiling, showing white teeth, she looked, for a moment, happy. “But you’re on your own now. I can’t take you with me. Not like that. You’re free.”

“I tried to—” What? What had he learned? What, indeed, had he tried to do?

When he lifted his fists free—as images rushed him—a shove sent him sprawling. Lying on his back under the carpeting of apparitions—for a moment startled by the vignettes and images of faces and bodies and landscapes that streamed over him—he did not rise until the thought that breathing in these strange projections without filters might be harmful.

He backed away from the mound, away from the paladins, away from the cascading images.

Rumbling, another paladin lifted off, streaming light as it rose.

And he saw batches, when the lights dimmed, dozens of them, standing at the consoles that had been uncovered, moving, coming awake. They withdrew their arms in a symmetrical pattern, and turned, climbing down. They were naked. Their faces were slack, void; their bodies thin and smooth. The giant drone waited, quaking the air, rife with the stench of ozone.

The mound was a gate, a font of knowledge.

Engines trembled again, a high-pitched whine, and the world stilled.

Under the diminishing lights from the paladin’s dreams, a shift in the refraction of the floor revealed ranks of younger batches laying side by side, eyes closed. Children, infants, grey and curled with their mouths open, under the tiles—

He stood there, trembling, one hand outreached, for some time, culpable, if not for other deaths, then certainly for the death of the tiny elemental.

Younger than he and his sister had been in the first haptics, the infants beneath his feet were immersed, jaws moving, suckling. Thin conduits, up from the structure, visible beneath the floor, ran into the temples of each baby. He saw tiny inlays in their forearms, a darker insignia in the skin. One had a withered hand. Another, the enlarged head of hydrocephalia, adjacent to a third, legs curled by rickets.

These were his girlfriend’s batch: the crippled, the rejects.

On his knees, he peeled aside the rough, translucent tile, and reached into the cold, cold fluid to snap the conduits free. He tore them clear away from the foundation. Somewhere, his girlfriend was watching over him, though he couldn’t see her, and would never see her again. The sailors made a chorus of voices. He felt strong, alive, though saddened by what little he had learned. Icy liquid spattered him, dripping from his skin as he stood. He cradled two slowly twisting babies. They began to warm at his touch, and mewl.

A series of remote concussions shuddered the world. He smelled and heard configurations shifting. Far above were lights, flashing less and less. When he turned to look over his shoulder, he no longer saw the mound, but another paladin had angled out over the floor, driving away yet another year of batches.

Was the angry paladin inside this one?

He belonged to neither batches, nor crew.

Cradled against Crospinal’s chest, one on each forearm, the infants, breathing by themselves now, sleeping, would soon need to eat.

Toward a series of columns, disappearing upward as far as he could see, he got a whiff of the pylon, the smell of the void, from the sky station. The old sailor, dying of cancer there, like his own father; the men that lived inside, absconded from this configuration of living altogether. Difficult to see the opening, or exit, for pylons were vacuums, illusions, like so much else. He hesitated. Was the world breaking apart? Composites and plastics both dissolving?

He had no means to feed himself, let alone the infants.

The stench of the vacuum was foul.

Before searching the time-scoured debris directly under the broad opening, which must have drifted from the void of the pylon, he placed the children down gently and, as he did so, felt his girdle cant, lurch, and finally dislodge. The processor was inert. Pulled from his urethra, where the suit had once seeded, the catheter slid, and he felt blood welling already, coursing down his groin and thighs. The blood seemed so hot. He didn’t look, yet red droplets fell upon the infants and the floor where he’d laid them. Crospinal could not tell if the children were boys or girls or one of each. Their limbs moved sluggishly. They seemed ill-formed, and weak.

Symbiotes were easy to find. They waited sluggishly under the detritus, doing nothing to avoid Crospinal when he uncovered them. He wondered as he turned the smallest one over, and the legs clacked back against each other, if these beasts were part machine: their tiny eyes were red, unreadable, like an elemental’s.

He placed the carapace very gently against the back of an infant’s head, watching the legs wrap slowly around the thin neck and shoulders. The baby struggled feebly only when the longest limb, the tube unfolding, found the baby’s mouth, and pushed inside.

The tiny chest filled, emptied, and filled again—

Then he did the same to the other child.

Finally, picking up the largest creature, he flipped it over and slung it in one motion, like he’d done this before, behind his own head. The legs were cool as they gripped him, and the carapace against the back of his head was not hard. He opened his mouth to let the tube seek his throat. A blue aura erupted from the mite. The legs gripped his haloed head.

Retrieving the children, lungs pumped full with cool air, he leapt up.