Before any of that, though, Oyin Da takes another shot at Kaaro…
Kaaro knew she would be back, and when she stands outside his nest and gently calls his name, he responds without any of the vitriol he thought he would have for a mass murderer. He drops the nest, turning the oversized twigs into sawdust, and preens himself before her.
“Can you turn human?” she asks. “I never know what you’re going to do in this form.”
“I’d never harm you,” says Kaaro.
“Huh. I saw you try to eat the xenosphere.”
“It made sense at the time.”
“If you say so.” She falls quiet. For a time they both look down at the hangar, the generators the illicit team has set up, the massive cables snaking everywhere. “Remember when we first met? You were covered in meat.”
“And you tried to kill me with a shotgun,” says Kaaro.
“Yes. You’re a pretty strong sensitive to have found your way into my head, my Lijad.”
“And you’re pretty decent yourself to have created such a place without even knowing you were doing it, and making others experience it too. You held a village in your head. Respect. No wonder you were into me.”
“Shut up.”
“Heh… with your head cocked to one side like a child with glue ear.”
“Shut up, Kaaro.” But she laughs and Kaaro knows she is after something difficult. That’s why they are both talking about simpler times, old awkwardness, difficulties they have already overcome.
“Just say it,” he says.
“It has to be you, Kaaro.”
“What is ‘it’, Oyin Da?”
“When we last spoke, we were thinking of taking Bad Fish’s code and inserting it into the prof’s brainoid with a virus. I spoke to Owen Gray. It won’t work, it’s been tried before. I checked Bad Fish’s work. I know he’s your friend, and I know he’s very confident, but… it isn’t going to work. You know what would work?”
“Don’t say it.”
“You are the only one who can do it, Kaaro. Eric can’t. He’s like a baby sensitive. And I can’t. I tried. But you. You’re the one who has possessed multiple reanimates at the same time. I can’t even possess one, and I’ve never heard of any sensitive doing it.”
“Please don’t ask me to do this.”
“It has to be you, Kaaro. You are our only hope.”
“Femi told you to say that.”
“She did not.”
“Ah, shit, Oyin Da.”
“I’m asking. I am the one asking. I want you to take that sheaf of papers that Bad Fish has scribbled his horrible writing on. I want you to memorise them. I want you to possess the brainoid.”
“No…”
“I want you to ride a reanimate into Rosewater and feign death, so that Koriko harvests the body.”
“And then what?”
“Entanglement works both ways,” says Oyin Da.
“I don’t want to.”
“I don’t care, Kaaro. This is the time to grow your hairy balls. Go to Rosewater, travel to Home, and destroy the data of billions of Homians in the servers. Kill them all, Kaaro. Kill them for humanity.”
Kaaro says nothing.
“I’m sorry to ask this, I truly am, and there is nothing I can do if you refuse. I can’t harm you, I can’t punish you, I can’t ostracise you because you’re already an asshole.”
“Great talk, boss lady.”
“Come on, you are an asshole. You know it. It’s the end of the world. At least let’s be honest with each other.”
“All right. I’ll do it.”
“What? You will? Why?”
Because a part of him wants Oyin Da to respect him. Because he is a coward but always wanted to be something else. Because he loves Aminat and wants her world to survive. And because he is curious to see where it takes him.
“Gift horse, Bicycle Girl. Gift horse. Leave my mouth alone.”
Together they walk down to the hangar. She reaches for his hand and squeezes in friendship.
With nothing to inhibit him, he learns the code and over-learns it. Bad Fish teaches him mnemonics and basics of virus design until it seems like second nature. There exists a distinct possibility that the alien servers will be too… alien and the mission will fail, but they cannot know that until they have tried. Nobody verbalises that Kaaro will pay the price if the virus can’t parse Homian systems. They don’t need to.
Tolu comes back with a body. The body.
The professor implants the brainoid, stitches and bandages the man’s head. When he is done, he says, “It just occurred to me that we didn’t need to implant it in the brain or even the skull. Anywhere with a blood supply would have been fine as long as I could tap a spinal fluid bath.”
Under the cover of night, waiting for the border bots to complete their run, Tolu smuggles the body into the city limits and it reanimates within half an hour. Kaaro takes control and says goodbye to Tolu and Oyin Da.
Like a ghoul, or Frankenstein’s creature, the reanimate Kaaro goes back to his own home and stares at Aminat with her brother Layi and sister Tomi. He watches their gentle laughter and he feels sad that he will never be part of it. He cannot go in because the ID chip on the reanimate will activate defences. He watches all night, and when a car almost squashes him against the property wall, he leaves.
He falls, but gets up, makes his way to the Honeycomb, where he lies down and sinks his consciousness deep, maybe firing one or two neurones in a loop. Koriko takes the bait and drags him, a Trojan horse, inside.
Gift horse, Trojan horse…
The aliens prepare his body. He feels lightness. Just as he is leaving, he flips Koriko the bird.
Fuck you, Space Invaders!
Time, of course, means nothing.
Humans don’t know where Home is, but it is surely interstellar.
Kaaro is broken down, put back together, broken down, re-formed. He has no idea where he is at any given time, or if he even exists any more. Perhaps he is dead. Again.
There is no pain.
He should concentrate, but any time he tries, his thoughts disintegrate.
He had a dog called Yaro and hopes it will be looked after. Can’t think of Aminat. Won’t.
He is moving, but it is more like rotating on an axis than forward motion. In a single rotation, he experiences the full spectrum of light and dark, and he knows he has made some form of progress towards his destination.
It takes years or it takes seconds, he does not know, but one minute he is in Rosewater, then he is on the Homian side of eternity.
Oh Bad Fish, you would have loved this.
The Homian systems resemble neurones, and are, in fact, xenosphere analogues, systems Kaaro is used to.
He can see them, the resting Homians, billions of them, asleep, confident that someone is coming to revive them and save their species. Safe. Not any more.
I am the Rat, the Termite, the Eater of Wealth, the Still One, the Quiet.
And I have come for you.
He starts from the nearest and he spreads into the neurones, realigning all the subatomic particles towards a null state. He transforms into the gryphon without thinking and feasts on the souls, alien, but tasty all the same. He splits into two, because it is taking too long, then he splits again, and divides himself exponentially as he consumes. The insects come, the guardians of data integrity, and he takes over their software. He experiences low-gravity flight and can see the extent of his task, the surface of the moon covered as far as the electric eye can see with servers. The insects register distress in a manner Kaaro’s Earth-formed mind cannot understand. They are simple machines, but programmed to be upset if they cannot achieve a proper checksum of the data they are created to protect.
All the gryphons that are Kaaro screech at the same time. This does not wake the sleeping Homians, but it drives the guardian programs and routines insane with panic. Kaaro eats them all and turns them into himself. He spreads like a wave of discontent and does not stop until all that is Homian becomes Kaaro.
When all is done, and the fail-safes kick in by trying to destroy infected servers, billions of them are gone, overwritten.
There is just Kaaro for eternity, the most successful mass murderer in history, alive after a fashion and alone on a moon light years from Earth. The gryphons rejoin, re-form into one again.
He rests for a minute or a year, it’s difficult to say.
Aminat.
I saved the world.
He activates the self-destruct sequences on the surviving servers, and Kaaro simply is no more.