His fist punched empty air. The momentum nearly carried him off his feet.
Vosch had vanished.
67
THOUGH HE REMAINED UPRIGHT, he had the sensation of falling from a great height. The room spun, the walls faded in and out of focus. Across the chamber, a figure stood in the doorway, a visual anchor that steadied him. He took a hesitant step forward and stopped.
“What do you remember?” Vosch called from the threshold. “Was I standing right beside you? Did I place my hand upon your shoulder? What are our memories but the ultimate proof that we exist? What if I were to tell you that everything you remember since we stepped into this room, all of it, is a lie, a false memory transmitted into your brain by that ‘owl’ behind you?”
“I know it’s a lie,” Evan answered. “I know who I am.” He was shaking. He was colder than he’d been in the white room beneath the icy spray.
“Oh, what you ‘heard’ was the truth. It’s the memory that’s false.” Vosch sighed. “You are a stubborn one, aren’t you?”
“Why should I believe you?” Evan cried. “Who are you that I should believe?”
“Because I am one of the chosen. I have been entrusted with the greatest mission in human history: the salvation of our species. Like you, I’ve known since I was a boy what was coming. Unlike you, I knew the truth.”
Vosch’s eyes strayed to the pod. His tone shifted from stern to wistful. “It’s impossible to express how lonely I have been. Only a handful of us know the truth. In a blind world, only we had eyes to see. We were not given a choice—you must understand—there was no choice. I am not responsible. I am a victim as much as they are, as much as you!” His voice rose in fury. “This is the cost! This is the price! And I have paid. I have done everything that was demanded of me. I have fulfilled my promise, and now my work is done.”
He held out his hand.
“Come with me. Allow me to grant you one last gift. Come with me, Evan Walker, and lay down your burden.”
68
HE FOLLOWED VOSCH—what choice did he have?—back down the long corridor to the green door. The technician rose when they entered and said, “I’ve run the test three times, Commander, and I still can’t find any anomalies in the program. Do you want me to run it again?”
“Yes,” Vosch answered. “But not now.” He turned to Evan. “Please sit.”
He nodded to the tech, who strapped Evan back into the reclining chair. The hydraulics whined; he rotated back, his face toward the featureless white ceiling. He heard the door open. The same woman who had examined him in the white room entered, wheeling before her a gleaming stainless-steel cart. On it, laid out in a neat row, were thirteen syringes filled with an amber-colored fluid.
“You know what this is,” Vosch said.
Evan nodded. The 12th System. The gift. But why return it?
“Because I’m an optimist, an incurable romantic, like you,” Vosch said, as if he had read Evan’s mind. “I believe where there is life, there is hope.” He smiled. “But mostly because five young men are dead, which means she may still be alive. And if she lives, there is only one option left for her.”
“Ringer?”
Vosch nodded. “She is what I have made her; and she is coming to demand that I answer for what I’ve done.”
He leaned over Evan’s face, and his eyes burned with iridescent fire, and the blue flames seared him down to his bones.
“You will be my answer.”
He turned to the tech, who flinched under the intensity of his glare. “She may be right: Love may be the singularity, the inexplicable, ungovernable, ineffable mystery, impossible to predict or control, the virus that crashed a program designed by beings next to which we are no more evolved than a cockroach.” Then back to Evan: “So I will do my duty; I will burn down the village in order to save it.”
He stepped back. “Download him again. Then erase it.”
“Erase it, sir?”
“Erase the human. Leave the rest.” The commander’s voice filled the tiny room. “We cannot love what we do not remember.”
69
IN THE AUTUMN WOODS there was a tent, and in that tent there was a girl who slept with a rifle in one hand and a teddy bear in the other. And while she slept, a hunter kept vigil over her, an unseen companion who retreated when she woke. He had come to end her life; she was there to save his.
And the endless arguments with himself, the vanity of his own reason posing the unanswerable question, Why must one live while the world itself perished? The more he reached for that answer, the farther the answer retreated from his grasp.
He was a finisher who could not finish. His was the heart of a hunter who lacked the heart to kill.
In her journal she had written I am humanity, and something in those three words splintered him in two.
She was the mayfly, here for a day, then gone. She was the last star, burning bright in a sea of limitless black.
Erase the human.
In a burst of blinding light, the star Cassiopeia exploded, and the world went black.
Evan Walker had been undone.
70
CASSIE
NOT TEN MINUTES into it and I’m starting to think this whole mission-impossible, killing-Vosch-and-rescuing-Evan thingy was a very bad idea.
Bob the one-eyed pilot shouts, “Ten seconds!” Ringer closes her eyes, and in an awful, sickening instant, I’m convinced we’ve been set up. This has been her plan all along. Leave Ben and the kids defenseless, then get the two of us killed kamikaze style at five thousand feet, because who gives a shit? There’s a copy of her that lives in Wonderland. She’ll just be downloaded into a new body once we’re all dead.