•
Alex screamed as sudden, unimaginable pain tore at his temples.
“Jen!” he cried, and then collapsed, arms cradling the housing of a sphere whose song rose in pitch as it spun faster, faster, faster…
Now she knows the truth — that the Net she has always thought a grand domain is only a province, a tendril of something larger. A being. An entire world. All it lacks is a guiding consciousness to bring it order!
She had resigned herself that the Net would end with the passing of Homo electronicus. Ten thousand hunter-gatherers couldn’t maintain anything so complex. She wouldn’t want them to.
But this new matrix will need no communications satellites, no pipelines crammed with optical fibers, no microwave towers or engineers to maintain them. Daisy wonders at the beauty she foresees once her task of winnowing humanity has been completed. There will be no limits to what she might accomplish through this medium. Ancient gods could only have dreamt of such power!
She’d rechannel aquifers and move rivers. She’d use sere bursts of energy to break apart man’s chemical poisons, fester-ing in clumps and sewers. She’d shake down dams and dissolve the empty cities, resurrecting the wasted topsoil hidden beneath parking lots. Under her guidance the world will soon be as it was before being brought near ruin by humankind.
Logan and Claire have stopped their futile hammering on the front door. Distractedly, she detects them via another monitor, clambering onto the roof in search of a way to reach her. There they might find entry somehow — or worse, disturb the antennae through which the next few minutes’ climactic struggle will be fought. Daisy reaches for a switch that will send deadly current surging through hidden wires.
But no. Her hand stops short. She knows her cautious husband. He’ll be judicious, polite, careful. In other words, he’ll give her plenty of time.
She checks her gravity resonators and sees they are doing well. With the Easter Island foe apparently knocked off-line, there will be no threats to her machines for several hundred seconds at least. By then it will be too late to interfere meaningfully with her accelerating cleansing of the continents. So far her death angels have barely reaped millions, but that would speed up with each new one she ripens and unleashes forth…
A whirl of color yanks her attention to the left, and her eyes widen in surprise at the sudden, silent battle depicted there — between a dragon and a great cat! What’s this doing on her simulation wall? This came from no TwenCen movie! The rending, tearing creatures bellow in mute, nostril-flared agony, amid flying scales and smoking fur more vivid by far than any real image.
Daisy suddenly recognizes the tiger motif of her worst enemy, whom she had thought already dead. “Wolling!” she gasps.
In an instant she knows the portent of this struggle. It isn’t just resonator against resonator anymore. The computational power of all those nodes below, outnumbering the combined circuits of all the Net — that was the ultimate prize, and someone else was after it! Whoever succeeded in establishing her program first would have it all!
Furiously Daisy turns to unleash all her minions. All her slave resonators swing inward, concentrating their power.
•
Teresa was reminded of an old riddle—
“The last man on Earth sits alone in a room. There is a knock on the door …”
At the unexpected sound, she dropped her tools and ran to the hatch. There, peering through the little, round, double-reinforced window, she gasped on seeing the familiar, absurd mustachioed visage of Pedro Manella. Teresa swore and yanked the hissing door release. “I thought you were a ghost!” she cried as he stepped inside.
“I might be, had I not taken shelter under your wing, so to speak. I only just gathered the nerve to try the stairs.”
“Are there any others? I mean—”
Pedro shook his head with a shiver. “It’s too horrible for words.” He looked around. “Is Lustig here? I assume so, since you and I are still alive.”
“He’s in back, fighting whatever it is. If only there were some way to help him—”
She cut short as the ship suddenly moaned around them. The deck rocked left, throwing her against Manella. Then Atlantis swayed the other way.
“Quakes!” Pedro cried. “I thought we’d finished with such simple-minded stuff.”
His wit wasn’t welcome. Teresa pushed him away and moved with a wide, catlike stance across the rocking deck. “Got to check on Alex. He could be…” Then she stopped, blinking. “Oh, no.”
The colors. They were back with a vengeance.
Teresa screamed over her shoulder at Manella. “Find a place to tie yourself down!” As the shaking grew in intensity, she fought her way through the airlock to find Alex slumped over at the resonator. She barely had time to strap him down before all hell broke loose.
Not far below Rapa Nui lay a hot, slender needle — an ancient, narrow plume of magma — part of the mantle’s grand recirculation system. This very needle had made the island many millennia ago, piercing through a scrap of crustal plate to erect this lonely outpost in the sea. For quite some time since then, however, it had lain quiescent.
Now the boil is squeezed by sudden, transient, titanic forces, pinching molten rock up the confined funnel at awesome pressures, driving it toward those old calderas.
And yet, even at the same moment, something else flies through the same space, traveling just ahead of that explosive constriction… something less coercive, subtler, whose fingers of laced gravity unfold like an opening hand.
•
Instinct took over amid the dazzle and roaring noise. Somehow she made it up the quivering ladder to the command deck, where she launched herself into the pilot’s seat and began flicking switches by pure rote. “Oh shit!” she cried, hearing the fateful prang of metal bolts popping free under strain. The ancient shuttle’s fractured spine complained with a horrible shriek as Teresa felt a sudden surge of acceleration — the seat-of-the-pants sensation of being airborne.
It can’t be! This ship can’t fly this ship can’t fly this ship can’t fly
The wings couldn’t bear launch loads. She’d seen X rays of the shuttle’s broken back — the reason Atlantis had been abandoned on a forlorn island in the first place.
An island that no longer existed, from what little she could see as she strained to turn her head. Atlantis rose atop a pillar of flame, but there was no rocket. Instead she hurtled just ahead of a towering volcanic plume, reawakened and roaring where only moments ago a tiny Polynesian islet had quietly defied the waves.
Grimacing from g-forces, Teresa nevertheless gripped the cockpit control sticks and felt a strange joy. Perhaps, in some corner of her mind, she had suspected all along it would come to this. Suddenly she feared nothing. After all, wasn’t this the best of all possible ways to go? Flying? In command of a sweet old bird that should never have been left corroding on a pedestal, but should only die in space?
Even the visceral sensations were grand. She felt as she had as a little girl, when her father used to throw her into the air, and she had known, with utter certainty, he would be there to catch her. Always there to sweep her out of harm’s way.
Out of harm’s way—
The words seemed to resonate inside her. And as she blinked, tears of happiness washed away those splashy colors, which thinned and merged and finally spread aside to resolve a black cosmos, overlain by a soft blanket of unwinking stars.