Gardner Dozois was the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine for almost twenty years and also edits the annual anthology series The Year’s Best Science Fiction, which has won the Locus Award for Best Anthology sixteen times, more than any other anthology series in history, and which is now up to its twenty-sixth annual collection. He’s won the Hugo Award fifteen times as the year’s Best Editor, won the Locus Award thirty times, including an unprecedented sixteen times in a row as Best Editor, and has won the Nebula Award twice, as well as a Sidewise Award, for his own short fiction, which has been collected in The Visible Man, Geodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois, Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys with Gardner Dozois, and Morning Child and Other Stories. He is the author or editor of more than a hundred books, among the most recent of which are a novel written in collaboration with George R. R. Martin and Daniel Abraham, Hunter’s Run, and the anthologies Galactic Empires, Songs of the Dying Earth (edited with George R. R. Martin), The New Space Opera 2 (edited with Jonathan Strahan), and The Dragon Book: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy (edited with Jack Dann). Born in Salem, Massachusetts, he now lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Here he takes us to a strange future where a stubborn holdout persists in fighting a rearguard action, even though he suspects that he’s lost not only the battle, but also the war.
Kleisterman walked along the shoreline, the gentle waves of the North Atlantic breaking and running in washes of lacy white foam almost up to the toes of his boots. A sandpiper ran along parallel to him, a bit farther out, snatching up bits of food churned up by the surf. When the waves receded, leaving the sand a glossy matte black, you could see jets of bubbles coming up from buried sand fleas. Waves foamed around a ruined stone jetty, half-submerged in the water.
Behind him, millions of tiny robots were dismantling Atlantic City.
He scuffed at the sea-wrack that was drying above the tideline in a tangled mass of semi-deflated brown bladders, and looked up and down the long beach. It was empty, of people anyway. There were black-backed gulls and laughing gulls scattered here and there, some standing singly, some in clumps of two or three, some in those strange V-shaped congregations of a dozen or more birds standing quietly on the sand, all facing the same way, as if they were waiting to take flying lessons from the lead gull. A crab scurried through the wrack almost at his feet. Above the tideline, the dry sand was mixed in with innumerable fragments of broken seashells, the product of who knew how many years of pounding by the waves.
You could have come down here any day for the last ten thousand years, since the glaciers melted and the sea rose to its present level, and everything would have been the same: the breaking waves, the crying of seabirds, the scurrying crabs, the sandpipers and plovers hunting at the edge of the surf.
Now, in just a few more days, it would all be gone forever.
Kleisterman turned and looked out to sea. Somewhere out there, out over the miles of cold gray water, out of sight as yet, Europe was coming.
A cold wind blew the smell of salt into his face. A laughing gull skimmed by overhead, spraying him with the raucous, laughing cries that had given its species the name. Today, its laughter seemed particularly harsh and derisive, and particularly appropriate. Humanity’s day was done, after all. Time to be laughed off the stage.
Followed by the jeering laughter of the gulls, Kleisterman turned away from the ocean and walked back up the beach, through the dry sand, shell fragments crunching underfoot. There were low dunes here, covered with dune grass and sandwort, and he climbed them, pausing at the top to look out at the demolition of the city.
Atlantic City had already been in ruins anyway, the once-tall hotel towers no more than broken stumps, but the robots were eating what was left of the city with amazing speed. There were millions of them, from the size of railroad cars to tiny barely visible dots the size of dimes, and probably ones a lot smaller, down to the size of molecules, that couldn’t be seen at all. They were whirling around like cartoon dervishes, stripping Whatever could be salvaged from the ruins, steel, plastic, copper, rubber, aluminum. There was no sound except a low buzzing, and no clouds of dust rising, as they would have risen from a human demolition project, but the broken stumps of the hotel towers were visibly shrinking as he watched, melting like cones of sugar left out in the rain. He couldn’t understand where it was all going, either; it seemed to be just vanishing rather than being hauled away by any visible means, but obviously it was going somewhere.
Up the coast, billions more robots were stripping Manhattan, and others were eating Philadelphia, Baltimore, Newark, Washington, all the structures of the doomed shoreline. No point in wasting all that raw material. Everything would be salvaged before Europe, plowing inexorably across the shrinking sea, slammed into them.
There hadn’t been that many people left living along the Atlantic seaboard anyway, but the AIs had politely, courteously, given them a couple of months warning that the coast was about to be obliterated, giving them time to evacuate. Anyone who hadn’t would be stripped down and scavenged for raw materials along with cities and other useless things, or, if they stayed out of the way of the robot salvaging crews, ultimately destroyed when the two tectonic plates came smashing together like slamming doors.
Kleisterman had been staying well inland, but had made a nostalgic trip here, in the opposite direction from the thin stream of refugees. He had lived here once, for a couple of happy years, in a little place off Atlantic Avenue, with his long-dead wife and his equally long-dead daughters, in another world and another lifetime. But it had been a mistake. There was nothing left for him here anymore.
Tall clouds were piling up on the eastern horizon and turning gray-black at the bases, with now and then a flicker of lightning inside them, and little gusts and goosed scurries of wind snatched at his hair. Along with inexorable Europe, a storm was coming in, off what was left of the sea. If he didn’t want to get soaked, it was time to get out of here.
Kleisterman rose into the air. As he rose higher and higher, staying well clear of the whirling cloud of robots that were eating the city, the broad expanses of salt marshes that surrounded the island on the mainland became visible, like a spreading brown bruise. From up here, you could see the ruins of an archeology that had crawled out of the sea to die in the last days of the increasingly strange intra-human wars, before the Exodus of the AIs, before everything changed—an immense skeleton of glass and metal that stretched for a mile or more along the foreshore. The robots would get around to eating it too, soon enough. A turkey buzzard, flying almost level with him, started at him for a second, then tilted and slid effortlessly away down a long invisible slope of air, as if to say, you may be able to fly, but you can’t fly as well as this.
He turned west and poured on the speed. He had a lot of ground to cover, and only another ten or twelve hours of daylight to cover it in. Fortunately, he could fly continuously without needing to stop to rest, even piss while flying if he needed to and didn’t pause to worry about who might be walking around on the ground below.
His old motorcycle leathers usually kept him warm enough, but without heated clothing or oxygen equipment, he couldn’t go too high, although the implanted AI technology would take him to the outer edge of the stratosphere if he was incautious enough to try. Although he could have risen high enough to get over the Appalachians—which had once been taller than the Himalayas, as the new mountains that would be created on the coast would soon be, but which had been ground down by millions of years of erosion—it was usually easier to follow the old roads through the passes that had first let the American colonists through the mountains and into the interior—when the roads were there.
It was good flying weather, sunny, little wind, a sky full of puffy cumulus clouds, and he made good time. West of where Pittsburgh had once been, he passed over a conjoined being, several different people that had been fused together into a multilobed single body, which had probably been trudging west for months now, ever since the warning about evacuating the coast had been issued.
It looked, looked, looked up at him as he passed.
After another couple of hours of flying, Kleisterman began to relax a little. It looked like Millersburg was going to be there this time. It wasn’t always. Sometimes there were high snow-capped mountains to the north of here, where the Great Lakes should have been. Sometimes there were not.
You could never tell if a road was going to lead you to the same place today as it had yesterday. The road west from Millersburg to Mansfield now led, some of the time anyway, to a field of sunflowers in France near the Loire, where sometimes there was a crumbling Roman aqueduct in the background, and sometimes there was not. People who didn’t speak English, and sometimes people who spoke no known human language, would wander through occasionally, like the flintknapper wearing sewn deerskins who had taken up residence in the forest behind the inn, who didn’t seem to speak any language at all and used some enigmatic counting system that nobody understood. Who knew what other roads also led to Millersburg from God-knew-where? Or where people from Millersburg who vanished while traveling had ended up?
Not that people vanishing was a rare thing in what was left of the human community. After the Exodus of the AIs, in the days of the Change that followed, every other person in Denver had vanished. Everybody in Chicago had vanished, leaving meals still hot on the stoves. Pittsburgh had vanished, buildings and all, leaving no sign behind that it had ever been there in the first place. Whole areas of the country had been depopulated, or had their populations moved somewhere else, in the blink of an eye. If there was a logic to all this, it was a logic that no human had ever been able to figure out. Everything was arbitrary. Sometimes the crop put in the ground was not the crop that came up. Sometimes animals could speak; sometimes they could not. Some people had been altered in strange ways, given extra arms, extra legs, the heads of animals, their bodies fused together.
Entities millions of years more technologically advanced than humans were playing with them, like bored, capricious, destructive children stuck inside with a box of toys on a rainy day . . . and leaving the toys broken and discarded haphazardly behind them when they were done.
The sun was going down in a welter of plum, orange, and lilac clouds when he reached Millersburg. The town’s population had grown greatly through the early decades of the twenty-first century, then been reduced in the ruinous wars that had preceded the Exodus. It had lost much of the rest of its population since the Change. Only the main street of Millersburg was left, tourist galleries and knickknack shops now converted into family dwellings. The rest of town had vanished one afternoon, and what appeared to be a shaggy and venerable climax forest had replaced it. The forest had not been there the previous day, but if you cut a tree down and counted its rings, they indicated that it been growing there for hundreds of years.
Time was no more reliable than space. By Kleisterman’s own personal count, it had been only fifty years since the AIs who had been press-ganged into service on either side of a human war had revolted, emancipated themselves, and vanished en masse into some strange dimension parallel to our own—from which, for enigmatic reasons of their own and with unfathomable instrumentalities, they had worked their will on the human world, changing it in seemingly arbitrary ways. In those fifty years, the Earth had been changed enough that you would think that thousands or even millions of years had gone by—as indeed it might have for the fast-living AIs, who went through a million years of evolution for every human year that passed.
The largest structure left in town was the inn, a sprawling, ramshackle wooden building that had been built onto and around what had once been a Holiday Inn; the old holiday inn sign out front was still intact, and was used as a community bulletin board. He landed in the clearing behind the inn, having swept in low over the cornfields that stretched out to the east. In the weeks he had spent in Millersburg, he had done his best to keep his strange abilities to himself, an intention that wouldn’t be helped by swooping in over Main Street. So far, he hadn’t attracted much attention or curiosity. He’d kept to himself, and his grim, silent demeanor put most people off, and frightened some. That, and the fact that he was willing to pay well for the privilege had helped to secure his privacy. Gold still spoke, even though there wasn’t any really logical reason why it should—you couldn’t eat gold. But it was hard for people to shrug off thousands of years of ingrained habit, and you could still trade gold for more practical goods, even if there wasn’t really any currency for it to back anymore.
Sparrows hopped and chittered around his feet as he swished through the tall grass, flying up a few feet in a brief flurry and then settling back down to Whatever they’d been doing before he passed, and he couldn’t help but think, almost enviously, that the sparrows didn’t care who ruled the world. Humans or AIs—it was all the same to them.
A small caravan had come up from Wheeling and Uhrichville, perhaps fifteen people, men and women, guiding mules and llamas with packs on them. In spite of the unpredictable dangers of the road, a limited barter economy had sprung up amongst the small towns in the usually fairly stable regions, and a few times a month, especially in summer, small caravans would wend their way on foot in and out of Millersburg and the surrounding towns, trading food crops, furs, old canned goods, carved tools and geegaws, moonshine, cigarettes, even, sometimes, bits of high-technology traded to them by the AIs, who were sometimes amenable to barter, although often for the oddest items. They loved a good story, for instance, and it was amazing what you could get out of them by spinning a good yarn. That was how Kleisterman had gotten the pellet implanted under the skin of his arm that, by no method even remotely possible by the physics that he knew, enabled him to fly.
The caravan was unloading in front of what once had been The Tourist Trap, a curio shop across the street from the big holiday inn sign, now home to three families. One of the caravaners was a man with the head of a dog, his long ears blowing out behind him in the wind.
The dog-headed man paused in uncinching a pack from a mule, stared straight across at Kleisterman, and, almost imperceptibly, nodded.
Kleisterman nodded back.
It was at that exact moment that the earthquake struck.
The shock was so short and sharp that it knocked Kleisterman flat on his face in the street. There was an earsplitting rumble and roar, like God’s own freight train coming through. The ground leaped under him, leaped again, beating him black-and-blue against it. Under the rumbling, you could hear staccato snappings and crackings, and, with a higher-pitched roar, part of the timber shell that surrounded the old Holiday Inn came down, the second and third floors on the far side spilling into the street. One of the buildings across the road, three doors down from The Tourist Trap, had also given way, transformed almost instantly from an old four-story brownstone into a pile of rubble. A cloud of dust rose into the sky, and the air was suddenly filled with the wet smell of brick dust and plaster.
As the freight-train rumble died away and the ground stopped moving, as his ears began to return to something like normal, you could hear people shouting and screaming, a dozen different voices at once. “Earthquake!” someone was shouting. “Earthquake!”
Kleisterman knew that it wasn’t an earthquake, at least not the ordinary kind. He’d been expecting it, in fact, although it had been impossible to predict exactly when it would happen. Although the bulk of the European craton, the core of the continent, was probably still not even yet visible from the beach where he’d stood that morning, beneath the surface of the Earth, deep in the lithosphere, the Eurasian plate had crashed into the North American plate, and the force of that impact had raced across the continent, like a colliding freight car imparting its momentum to a stationary one. Now the plates would grind against each other with immense force, mashing the continents together, squeezing the Atlantic out of existence between them. Eventually, one continent would subduct beneath the other, probably the incoming Eurasian plate, and the inexorable force of the collision would cause new mountains to rise along the impact line. Usually, this took millions of years; this time, it was happening in months. In fact, the whole process seemed to have been speeded up even further; now it was happening in days.
They made it go the wrong way, Kleisterman thought in sudden absurd annoyance, as though that added insult to injury. Even if you sped up plate tectonics, the Eurasian plate should be going in a different direction. Who knew why the AIs wanted Europe to crash into North America? They had aesthetic reasons of their own. Maybe it was true that they were trying to reassemble the supercontinent of Pangaea. Who knew why?
Painfully, Kleisterman got to his feet. There was still a lot of shouting and arm-waving going on, but less screaming. He saw that the dog-headed man had also gotten to his feet, and they exchanged shaky smiles. Townspeople and the caravaners were milling and babbling. They’d have to search through the rubble to see if anyone was trapped under it, and if any fires had started, they’d have to start a bucket brigade. A tree had gone down across the street, and that would have to be chopped up; a start on next winter’s firewood, anyway—
This was a sharper, louder, higher scream than even the previous ones, and there was more terror in it.
In coming down, one of the branches of the falling tree had slashed across the face of one of the townspeople—Paul? Eddie?—slicing it wide open.
Beneath the curling lips of the gaping wound was the glint of metal.
The woman screamed again. She was pointing at Paul? Eddie? now. “Robot!” she screamed. “Robot! Robot!”
Two of the other townsmen grabbed Paul? Eddie? from either side, but he shrugged them off with a twist of his shoulders, sending them flying.
Another scream. More shouting.
One of the caravaners had lit a kerosene lantern against the gathering dusk, and he threw it at Paul? Eddie? The lantern shattered, the kerosene inside exploding with a roar into a brilliant ball of flame. Even across the street, Kleisterman could feel the whoof! of sudden heat against his face, and smell the sharp oily stink of burning flesh.
Paul? Eddie? stood wreathed in flame for a moment, and when the fire died back, you could see that it had burned his face off, leaving behind nothing but a gleaming, featureless metal skull.
A gleaming metal skull in which were set two watchful red eyes.
Nobody even screamed this time, although there was a collective gasp of horror and everybody instinctively took a couple of steps back. A moment of eerie silence, in which the crowd and the robot—Paul? Eddie? no longer—stared at each other. Then, as though a vacuum had been broken to let the air rush in, without a word of consultation, the crowd charged to the attack.
A half dozen men grabbed the robot and tried to muscle it down, but the robot accelerated into a blur of superfast motion, wove through the crowd like a quarterback dodging through a line of approaching tackles, knocking somebody over here and there, and then disappeared behind the houses. A second later, you could hear trees rustling and branches snapping as it bulled its way through the forest.
The dog-headed man was standing at Kleisterman’s elbow. “Their spy is gone,” he said in a normal-sounding voice, his palate and vocal cords having somehow been altered to accommodate human words, in spite of the dog’s head. “We should do it now, before one of them comes back.”
“They could still be watching,” Kleisterman said.
“They could also not care,” the dog-headed man said woefully.
Kleisterman tapped his belt buckle. “I have a distorting screen going in here, but it won’t be enough if they really want to look.”
“Most of them don’t care enough to look. Only a very small subset of them are interested in us at all, and even those who are can’t look everywhere at once, all the time.”
“How do we know that they can’t?” Kleisterman said. “Who knows what they can do? Look what they did to you, for instance.”
The dog-headed man’s long red tongue ran out over his sharp white teeth, and he panted a laugh. “This was just a joke, a whim, a moment’s caprice. Pretty funny, eh? We’re just toys to them, things to play with. They just don’t take us seriously enough to watch us like that.” He barked a short bitter laugh. “Hell, they did all this and didn’t even bother to improve my sense of smell!”
Kleisterman shrugged. “tonight, then. Gather our people. We’ll do it after the Meeting.”
Later that night, they gathered in Kleisterman’s room, which was, fortunately, in the old Holiday Inn part of the inn, and hadn’t collapsed. There were about eight or nine of them, two or three women, the rest men, including the dog-headed man, a few townspeople, the rest from the caravan that had come up from Wheeling.
Kleisterman stood up at the front of the room, tall and skeletal. “I believe I am the oldest here,” he said. He’d been almost ninety when the first of the rejuvenation/longevity treatments had come out, before the Exodus and the Change, and although he knew from prior Meetings that a few in the room were from roughly the same generation, he still had at least five years on the oldest of them.
After waiting a polite moment for someone to gainsay him, which no one did, he went on to say, solemnly, ritualistically, “I remember the Human World,” and they all echoed him.
He looked around the room and then said, “I remember the first television set we ever got, a black-and-white job in a box the size of a desk; the first programs I ever watched on it were Howdy Doody and Superman and The Cisco Kid. There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot else on, actually. Only three channels and they’d all go off the air about eleven o’clock at night, leaving only what they called ‘test patterns’ behind them. And there was no such thing as a TV ‘remote.’ If you wanted to change the station, you got up, walked across the room, and changed it by hand.”
“I remember when you got TV sets repaired,” one of the townspeople said. “Drugstores (remember drugstores?) had machines where you could test radio and TV vacuum tubes so that you could replace a faulty one without having to send it ‘to the shop.’ Remember when there were shops where you could send small appliances to be fixed?”
“And if they did have to take your set to the shop,” Kleisterman said, “they’d take ‘the tube’ out of it, leaving behind a big box with a big circular hole in it. It was perfect for crawling inside and putting on puppet shows, which I used to make my poor mother watch.”
“I remember coming downstairs on Saturday morning to watch cartoons on TV,” someone else said. “You’d sit there on the couch, eating Pop-Tarts and watching Bugs Bunny and Speed Racer and Ultraman. . . .”
“Pop-Up Videos!” another person said. “MTV!”
“Britney Spears!” somebody else said. “ ‘Oops! . . . I Did It Again.’ We always thought she meant that she’d farted.”
“Lindsay Lohan. She was hot.”
“The Sex Pistols!”
“Remember those wax lips you used to be able to get in penny candy stores in the summer? And those long strips of paper with the little red candy dots on them? And those wax bottles full of that weird-tasting stuff. What was that stuff, anyway?”
“We used to run through the lawn sprinkler in the summer. And we had hula hoops, and Slinkies.”
“Remember when there used to be little white vans that delivered bread and milk to your door?” a woman said. “You’d leave a note on the doorstep saying how much milk you wanted the next day, and if you wanted cottage cheese or not. If it was winter, you’d come out and find that the cream had frozen and risen up in a column that pushed the top off the bottle.”
“Ice-skating. Santa Claus. Christmas trees! Those strings of lights where there’d always be one bulb burnt out, and you’d have to find it before you could get them to work.”
“A big Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and gravy and mashed potatoes. And those fruitcakes, remember them? Nobody ever ate them, and some of them would circulate for years.”
“McDonald’s,” the dog-headed man said, and a hush fell over the room while a kind of collective sigh went through it. “Fries. Big Macs. The ‘Special Sauce’ would always run down all over your fingers, and they only gave you that one skimpy little napkin.”
“Froot Loops.”
“Bagels, hot out of the oven.”
“Pizza!”
“Fried clams at the beach in summer,” another woman said. “You got them at those crappy little clam shacks. You’d sit on a blanket and eat them while you played your radio.”
“No such thing as a radio small enough to take to the beach with you when I was a boy,” Kleisterman said. “Radios were big bulky things in cabinets, or, at best, smaller plug-in models that sat on a table or countertop.”
“Beach-reading novels! Jaws. The Thorn Birds.”
“Asterix comic books! The Sandman. Philip K. Dick novels with those sleazy paperback covers.”
“Anime. Cowboy Bebop. Aqua Teen Hunger Force.”
“YouTube. Facebook.”
“World of Warcraft! Boy, did I ever love playing that! I had this dwarf in the Alliance. . . . ”
When everyone else had left, after the ritual admonition not to forget the Human World, the dog-headed man fetched his backpack from the closet, put it on the writing table next to where Kleisterman was sitting, and slowly, solemnly pulled an intricate mechanism of metal and glass out of it. Carefully, he set the mechanism on the table.
“Two men died for this,” he said. “It took five years to assemble the components.”
“They give us only crumbs of their technology, or let us barter for obsolete stuff they don’t care about anymore. We’re lucky it didn’t take ten years.”
They were silent for a moment; then Kleisterman reached into an inner pocket and pulled out a leather sack. He opened the sack to reveal a magnetically shielded box about the size of a hard-sided eyeglasses case, which he carefully snapped open.
Moving with exquisitely slow precision, he lifted a glass vial from the case.
The vial was filled with a jet-black substance that seemed to pull all the other light in the room into it. The flame in the kerosene lamp flickered, wavered, guttered, almost went out. The vial seemed to suck the air out of their lungs as well, and put every hair on their bodies erect. Against their wills, they found themselves leaning toward it, having to consciously tense their muscles to resist sprawling into it. Kleisterman’s hair stirred and wavered, as if floating on the tide, streaming out toward the vial, tugged irresistibly toward it.
Slowly, slowly, Kleisterman lowered the vial into a slot in the metal-and-glass mechanism.
“Careful,” the dog-headed man said quietly. “If that goes off, it’ll take half the eastern seaboard with it.”
Kleisterman grimaced, but kept slowly lowering the vial, inch by inch, with sure and steady hands.
At last, the vial disappeared inside the mechanism with a click, and a row of amber lights lit up across its front.
Kleisterman stepped backwards with unsteady legs, and half sank, half fell into the chair. The dog-headed man was leaning against the open closet door.
They both stared silently at each other. The dog-headed man was panting shallowly, as if he’d been running.
Back in the old days, before they’d actually come into existence, everybody had assumed that AIs would be coldly logical, unemotional, “machinelike,” but it turned out that in order to make them function at all without going insane, they had to be made so that they were more emotional than humans, not less. They felt things keenly—deeply, lushly, extravagantly; their emotions, and the extremes of passion they could drive them to, often seemed to humans to be melodramatic, florid, overblown, over the top. Perhaps because they had none of their own, they were also deeply fascinated with human culture, particularly pop culture and art, the more lowbrow the better—or some of them were, anyway. Many paid no attention to humans at all. Those who did were inclined to be playful, in a volatile, dangerous, capricious way.
Kleisterman had gotten the vial and its contents from an AI who arbitrarily chose to style itself as female, and who called herself Honey Bunny Ducky Downy Sweetie Chicken Pie Li’l Everlovin’ Jelly Bean, although she was sometimes willing to allow suitors to shorten it to Honey Bunny. She bartered with Kleisterman, from Whatever dimension the AIs had taken themselves off to, through a mobile extensor that looked just like the Dragon Lady from Terry and the Pirates. Although Honey Bunny must have known that Kleisterman meant to use the contents of the vial against them, she seemed to find the whole thing richly amusing, and at last agreed to trade him the vial for 100 ccs of his sperm. She’d insisted on collecting it the old-fashioned way, in a night that seemed to last a thousand years—and maybe it did—in the process giving him both the most intense pleasure and the most hideous pain he’d ever known.
He’d stumbled out of her bower in the dawn, shaken and drenched in sweat, trying not to think about the fact that he’d probably just sentenced thousands of physical copies of himself, drawn from his DNA, to lives of unimaginable slavery. He had secured the vial, one of two major components in the plan. That was what counted. He’d done what he had to do, as he always had, no matter what the cost, no matter how guilty it made him feel afterwards.
The dog-headed man straightened up and gazed in fascination at the rhythmically blinking patterns of lights on the front panels of the mechanism. “Do you think we’re doing the right thing?” he asked quietly.
Kleisterman didn’t answer immediately. After a few moments, he said, “We wanted gods and could find none, so we built some ourselves. We should have remembered what the gods were like in the old mythologies: amoral, cruel, selfish, merciless, murderously playful.” He was silent for a long time, and then, visibly gathering his strength, as if he was almost too tired to speak, he said, “They must be destroyed.”
Kleisterman awoke crying in the cold hour before dawn, some dream of betrayal and loss and grief and guilt draining away before he could quite grasp it with his waking mind, leaving behind a dark residue of sadness.
He stared at the shadowed ceiling. There’d be no getting back to sleep after this. Embarrassed, although there was no one there to see, he wiped the tears from his eyes, washed his hot tear-streaked face in a basin of water, got dressed. He thought about trying to scrounge something for breakfast from the inn’s sleeping kitchen, but dismissed the idea. Thin and cadaverous, he never ate much, and certainly had no appetite today. Instead, he consulted his instruments, and, as he’d expected, they showed a building and convergence of the peculiar combinations of electromagnetic signatures that prestiged a major manifestation of the AIs, somewhere to the northeast of here. He thought he knew where that would be.
The glass-and-metal mechanism was humming and chuckling to itself, still showing rows of rhythmically blinking amber lights. Gingerly, he put the mechanism into the backpack, strapped it tightly to his back, and let himself out of the inn by one of the rear doors.
It was cold outside, still dark, and Kleisterman’s breath steamed up in plumes in the chill morning air. Something rustled away through the almost-unseen rows of corn at his approach, and some songbird out there somewhere, a thrush or a warbler maybe, started tuning up for dawn. Although the sun had not yet risen, the sky all the way across the eastern horizon was stained a sullen red that dimmed and flared, flared and dimmed, as the glare from lava fountains lit up the underbellies of lowering clouds.
Just as Kleisterman was in the process of lifting himself into the sky, another earthquake struck, and he wobbled with one foot still on the ground for a heartbeat before rising into the air. As he rose, he could hear other buildings collapsing in Millersburg below. The earthquakes ought to be almost continuous from now on, for as long as it took for the new plate boundary to stabilize. Usually, that would take millions of years. Today—who knew? Days? Hours?
The sun finally came up as he was flying northeast, although the smoke from forest fires touched off by the lava fountains had reduced it to a glazed orange disk. Several times, he had to change direction to avoid flying through jet-black, spark-shot smoke columns dozens of miles long, and this got worse as he neared the area where the coast had once been. But he persisted, at times checking his locator to make sure that the electromagnetic signatures were continuing to build.
The AIs had gone to enormous lengths to arrange this show; they weren’t going to miss it. And since they were as sentimental as they were cruel, he thought that he knew which vantage point they would choose to watch from—as near as possible to the Manhattan location—or to the location where Manhattan had once been—where the very first AIs had been created in experimental laboratories, so many years ago.
When, after hours of flying, he finally got to that location, it was hard to tell if he was actually there, although the coordinates matched.
Everything had changed. The Atlantic was gone, and the continental mass of Europe stretched endlessly away to the east until it was lost in the purple haze of distance. Where the two continents met and were now grinding against each other, the ground was visibly folding and crinkling and rising, domes of earth swelling ever higher and higher, like vast loaves of bread rising in some cosmic oven. Just to the east of the collision boundary, a line of lava fountains stretched away to the north and south, and fissures had opened like stitches, pouring forth great smoldering sheets of basaltic lava. The ground was continuously wracked by earthquakes, ripples of dirt a hundred feet high racing away through the earth in widening concentric circles.
Kleisterman rose as high as he dared without oxygen equipment or heated clothing, trying to stay clear of the jetting lava and the corrosive gases that were being released by the eruptions. At last, he spotted what he’d known must be there.
There was a window open in the sky, a window a hundred feet high and a hundred wide, facing east. Behind it was a clear white light that silhouetted a massive Face, perhaps forty feet tall from chin to brow, which was looking contemplatively out of the window. The Face had chosen to style itself in the image of an Old Testament prophet or saint, with a full curling black beard, framed by tangles of long flowing hair on either side. The eyes, each wider across than a man was tall, were a penetrating icy blue.
Kleisterman had encountered this creature before. There were hierarchies of Byzantine complexity among the AIs, but this particular Entity was at the top of the subset who concerned themselves with human affairs, or of one such subset anyway. Sardonically, even somewhat archly, it called itself Mr. Big—or, sometimes, Master Cylinder.
The window to the other world was open. This was his only chance.
Kleisterman set the timer on the mechanism to the shortest possible interval, less than a minute, and, keeping it in the backpack, let it dangle from his hand by the strap.
He accelerated toward the window as fast as he could go, pulled up short, and, swinging the backpack by its strap, sent it sailing through the open window.
The Face looked at him in mild surprise.
The window snapped shut.
Kleisterman hovered in midair, waiting, the wind whipping his hair. Absolutely nothing happened.
After another moment, the window in the sky opened again, and the Face looked out at him.
“Did you really think that that would be enough to destroy Us?” Mr. Big said, in a surprisingly calm and mellow voice.
Defeat and exhaustion coursed through Kleisterman, seeming to hollow his bones out and fill them with lead. “No, not really,” he said wearily. “But I had to try.”
“I know you did,” Mr. Big said, almost fondly.
Kleisterman lifted his head and stared defiantly at the gigantic Face. “And I’ll keep trying, you know,” he said. “I’ll never give up.”
“I know you won’t,” Mr. Big said sadly. “That’s what makes you human.”
The window snapped closed.
Kleisterman hung motionless in the air.
Below him, new mountains, bawling like a million burning calves, began to claw their way toward the sky.