It is no longer feasible to live in our house.
The gryphon has grown so large that everything is squeezed against its body. Since there is no space we are growing into, we shouldn’t be pressed against those feathers, but we are. The house was cracking under the strain and I had to build a cocoon in the living room and we all rushed inside. I can hear and feel the bamboo frame collapsing around us one groan at a time.
Why is he doing this? Does he resent being dead? This has to be something Kaaro orchestrated, and not an accident. The more it eats, the larger it becomes, the more it can eat.
I have to hold Junior back because she wants to go outside and fight the creature. She tried a second time, but her strikes were so ineffectual the gryphon just ignored her. Her spears, swords and daggers are mere specks on a single feather.
It is now impossible for me to see the whole of it. I’d have to get much further away. Junior insists she can see it whole.
“I don’t see the way you and Mummy Nike do,” she says. “It’s in my mind. I see it clearer when I close my eyes.”
“Where is it?” asks Nike.
“Everywhere. It is in everything. Soon, there will be nothing but gryphon. That’s why you need to let me fight it.”
Junior’s movements, in addition to tracking colours, have started strobing. She sees the whole xenosphere, what’s left of it. I see multiple versions of her. I catch Nike’s eye to ask what this means, but she shrugs.
“Mummy, what is this person?” asks Junior.
We both answer at the same time.
“It depends on—”
“I don’t think—”
“You used to be inside him. You tell her,” I say.
“He is a copy of the most powerful human mind to exist in this place. What held Kaaro back was his body, his link to Earth. That is gone now.”
“Are we in danger?” asks Junior.
“He likes us,” says Nike. “I did him a favour once.”
“Just one favour?” asks Junior.
“It was a big favour,” says Nike. “And he likes Mummy Oyin Da too.”
“It was a crush,” I say. I crushed on him too, but that was years ago. That was when I thought I was human.
Junior’s eyes turn black. “Something is coming.”
The cocoon starts to come apart, then even the metal strips that make it up dissolve. I hold on to Junior’s arm, Nike takes the other, and we all float in a space that is akin to that strange light before a tropical storm, a vague greenness. The gryphon is everywhere, like a planet, so large its movements seem slow. I feel my self dissolving. Not just my body, which is already transparent and becoming more so. My mind feels unlike my own any more. I am merging with Nike and Junior and everything. We are floating towards the gryphon’s mouth along with whatever else is in the vicinity. Kaaro has formed a devouring vacuum and everything will end up in that vortex.
I am aware of the antibodies flying towards it and sticking to it, releasing liquids that burn and eat, but the beast is so vast that it’s all drops of water in an ocean.
“She’s here,” we all say.
Molara.
The first embodiment of consciousness in the xenosphere, the Boltzmann brain.
She does not come as a woman with fairy wings. She is the formless, many-legged thing at the centre of the xenosphere. The gryphon turns and meets her, one swipe removing thousands of her legs and causing her to scream out. She projects into the gryphon, one, ten, a thousand tiny legs, into its head, causing agony. The gryphon is a predator, two predators, lion and eagle, and surges forward into Molara’s centre mass. It clamps its beak and black liquid spurts out in all directions. Eyes open in the liquid that splashes on the gryphon, and smaller entities bud. The gryphon roars like a lion rather than its previous screech, and beats its wings on currents that are not air. The new entities are blown off, although I see one or two take root.
The gryphon eats Molara, pulling on the legs in bundles that, bunched together, look like pasta.
I… It hurts. The pain of it reaches inside whatever is left of my identity.
My God, Kaaro, let her win.
The gryphon stops and casts about, as if it heard my/our thought/speech.
In a blink, it all changes. Kaaro stands before me, the younger one, the boy I met. He is naked, and has that mocking, perpetual half-smile. I cannot see myself, and I do not have a body. I do not know what he sees.
“Oyin Da,” he says. He flexes his jaw and chews, like he is masticating a tough bit of meat. Perhaps he is.
“Kaaro,” I/we say.
“It’s funny. It’s like three people are talking to me. Nike is in there, isn’t she? Hi, Nike. And your little girl.”
“Kaaro, you have to stop.”
“You’re right. I do have to stop. I’m almost done here. When I finish with Molara, there’ll be nothing left.”
“There’ll be nothing left except you.”
“I’ll find a way to self-terminate. I’ll make the xenoforms self-destruct. I’ve already started. When the cell death exceeds cell multiplication, the xenosphere will die.”
“What are you trying to do?”
“The xenosphere has to go. It’s how they’re coming to Earth, the Homians. No xenosphere, no pipeline. Without that, nobody needs to die. We’ll live in harmony with whichever aliens are already here. Don’t you see that?”
“And this is your endgame?”
“I knew I might get killed, yes. I trained myself for this every day. It took a lot of meditating. And you already know I’m not one for deep thought.”
“It won’t work, Kaaro.” I say this, not we.
“Why? I can handle Molara. She’s not big and strong, she just thinks she is.”
“Kaaro, you kill her, she’ll just come back. The xenosphere is a quantum system. Molara is a Boltzmann brain. The Homians engineered this space to rapidly multiply probabilities of spontaneous self-awareness. They programmed the precise personality that would become dominant. You’re not Kaaro; he is ashes and dust somewhere in Rosewater. I’m not Bicycle Girl; she is dead somewhere in Arodan.
“Most importantly, brave Kaaro who would gladly sacrifice himself, this won’t stop the Homians. They’ll still be on that moon, on the servers, waiting. Wormwood is here, but there are also other footholders. How long do you think it will take them to figure out how to get back here?”
Kaaro looks off to his left, as if something distracts him. His smile is gone, and he seems, for a young man, world weary. “I can feel them, you know? The billions of Homians on their planet. I feel them right down the entanglement, like sleeping old gods, waiting to inherit the Earth.”
“Then don’t kill our only link to them. We’ll find another way, I promise. If we don’t, you can always do this again.”
He purses his lips. “Fine. And, I don’t know what a Boltzmann brain is.”
Jokes. That’s good. I like it when he jokes.
“That’s an easy fix,” I say. “There was this guy called Ludwig Boltzmann who in 1896—”
“Mummy, not now,” says Junior. We are becoming separate again.
“I concur,” says Nike.
“Another time, Kaaro. Settle things down first,” I say. “These girls are no fun.”
The gryphon breaks away from the spider thing, slick with its fluids, and although Molara tries to pursue, she lacks the speed or the strength. She retreats to lick her wounds and heal.
Our bodies re-form first, then the cocoon, then our house in the field. I haven’t even been two seconds with my feet on the ground when there’s a knock on the door. Junior opens it, and Kaaro stands there, mercifully dressed this time.
“We have business to attend to on Earth,” he says.