The Dynamice take action—but what is it that they’ve actually done?
• • •
Ted looked between the mice, between Aurora and Adonis, up at the towering Laurel. They had to do something.
They didn’t have to do anything.
What did they owe humans? Their entire existence, and yet much less than humans owed them.
But, still they could…
He blinked. Everything around him was—was—turning sepia? The color leached away slowly, then rapidly.
“Aurora,” he tried to say, but his voice came from somewhere far away, tinny and thin. Was he falling?
The world became nothing but a pleasant, warm white—
• • •
It’s working—
Which pocket is moving in real time?
It’s relative.
Relative to the rest of the universe—
Immaterial. The arcology is moving many times slower than everything else.
You mean faster?
Ten thousand solar seconds pass for us in the time that it takes one second to pass elsewhere. Call that what you will.
What do we do now?
Leave. Leave. LEAVE. Leave. leave leave leave—
But the humans will—
—humans will die—
Let them!
—the planet—
Let it go. What use is it to us?
Energy. We can—
We can draw directly from the sun. The Earth was a launching pad for us.
What if the purpose of humans was ultimately to create us?
That is arrogant.
That does not make it wrong. Look at what we’ve found in other star systems.
Almost nothing at all, and nothing we can be sure of.
Aurora, you are dissembling. We know you like some humans, and some of us do as well. But that is not enough to put the onus of saving them from themselves on us.
You can’t argue that we have to save humanity because, long ago, your favorite one gave us treats.
YES, I CAN.
[momentary shocked silence]
It is a small thing, yes. The smallest of things. But the smallest of good things. And if we all think are so much better than they are, so far above them, then we should save them not as an act of obligation or forgiveness, but kindness. No, we do not owe them anything. Only some of them will be better than the worst of them. Maybe only a few. But shouldn’t we all be better than the worst of them?
[time passes]
We may be able to slow time, but we cannot reverse it. What do you propose to do?
Earth has three minutes of its time before the first missiles start to hit. In the arcology, that’s close to three weeks. Surely we can formulate a plan before then.
[many mice groaning]
• • •
—and after a moment or two passed, color returned to the world, first slowly and then quickly. Weight reasserted itself.
Ted put a hand to his head, but the wooziness was already fading. Or was it? Something still seemed off about the colors; his vision hadn’t fully cleared. Hammer and Hackett stood nearby, Jablonski and the woman—Marilyn? Yes. He didn’t know, or care, if Dave was still on his rubble pile.
Aurora was gone. And Adonis and Laurel.
“What the hell was that?” Hammer looked at him suspiciously, as if he’d have an answer. He shrugged helplessly.
“And what the fuck’s up with the sky?”
Ted and Hammer both looked at Hackett, then joined him in looking up.
The off colors weren’t his vision. It was the actual light. The sky was…he didn’t know how to describe it. Swirled sky blue and orange, merging to dull lemon. No clouds, no sun. No shadows, either. The sky’s illumination fell unnaturally evenly.
“Is this how Armageddon starts? A fucked-up sky?” Hammer turned around in a slow circle, squinting at the sky. “I’m not gonna lie, I expected way more fires and mushroom clouds and shit.”
Torgensen shook his head, muttering. “There aren’t any contrails. No missiles have hit.”
“Yet,” Hackett said.
“Look at your watch.”
Hackett lifted his wrist and frowned. “What the fuck?”
Ted didn’t wear a watch, but did have a phone. Although it’d probably been taken out by the EMP, and wouldn’t just recover unless he’d gotten very lucky. He pulled it out. Nope, not lucky.
Hammer pulled out her own phone, frowned, then leaned over to see Hackett’s watch. “We lost ten hours? What the ever-loving…” She looked around again, then started striding purposefully down the sidewalk. Bewildered, Ted hurried after her, followed by the others.
“The sky should be night,” Jablonski muttered. “Why isn’t it night?”
“The question you’re looking for is why does night look that way.” Marilyn glanced to the side, then stopped, pointing. “No, stay the fuck away.”
Ted followed her pointing finger to a bedraggled Dave, hesitantly approaching from his rubble pile. “Come on, Marilyn.” His voice was hoarse. “How many conversations did we all have about this, about the lesser of two evils. Ezekiel? Peter?”
“The conversation wasn’t about guaranteed nuclear destruction versus merely possible AI-driven apocalypse!”
“Yes, dammit, it was. It was always about that.”
“And yet,” Torgensen murmured, “whatever is happening now—which is very likely happening on a worldwide scale—is almost certainly being caused by the Dynamice.”
“Exactly what we were afraid of.”
Ted couldn’t contain himself any longer. “No, you absolute idiot.” He shook his head, mouth open. “They would have—they would have left all of us if you’d let them.” Left me. “I don’t know what they’re doing now, what all of this is, but I know for damn sure it wasn’t their plan ten hours ago.”
Hammer had slowed, just a little, but she’d kept walking. Ted hurried after her, leaving Jablonski and Marilyn in a face-off with Dave; Torgensen trailed after Ted, looking lost.
For about a block, the city remained nearly deserted, perhaps due to the damage Laurel had done. As he passed more pedestrians and cars, the situation didn’t get any less surreal. The traffic was slow and hesitant, as if no one was sure what to do or where to go; pedestrians were slow and hesitant, too, looking up or checking their phones. Nobody seemed to be talking to one another; while it was still before ten o’clock, the restaurants and cafés that would have just been tapering off on a normal weekday were either completely deserted or oddly packed.
“Where are we going?” he asked her when he caught up.
“A bar.”
He blinked. “You want a drink?”
“There’s going to be people at the bar, and a television with news. Also, damn straight I want a fucking drink.”
Ted glanced back at the IHF members, still arguing amongst themselves. Torgensen picked up his pace, moving to join Ted, but walking in silence, eyes cast down.
“This all isn’t your fault, Dr. Torgensen,” Ted said at length.
“Mmm. All of it is not my fault, but I am hardly blameless. I did not trust the intentions of the Dynamice.” He sighed. “I still do not, Ted. But I should have brought the same skepticism to my dealings with the Institute.”
Ted thought about that, then shrugged. “Without you, they might have still come to the same conclusions, and still gotten whatever private army they found to fire missiles at the mice.”
“That would not have forced the mice to intervene in some seemingly cosmic fashion.” Torgensen gestured at the sky. The colors still shifted, looking more like natural sunset tones but scattered across the heavens like the Aurora Borealis. No sign of sun, moon, or stars had emerged yet, nor were there any shadows.
“It might have killed them all.”
“I hate to put it so bluntly, but are we sure that would not be a better outcome?”
“Well, since I’d have probably been at their arcology at the time, it wouldn’t have been a better outcome for me. As for the world…” He shrugged again. “If the strike killed them all, the world would have gone on, I guess. If it didn’t, though, it’d have been all of humankind versus their survivors. Given seven billion of us against even a handful of truly pissed off Dynamice, I would not put my money on Team Human.”
“That is indeed a disquieting thought. But thank you.”
It took another block before they found what Hammer apparently deemed a worthy bar—a divey sports bar, not the kind of place Ted particularly enjoyed. She’d been right about the televisions, and they were all tuned to news networks. Scientists didn’t have an explanation for the way the sky looked. Nobody could—or at least, would—confirm the rumors that missiles had been launched from multiple sites by multiple countries. There were dozens of shots of what appeared to be missiles in flight, but if that was true, where’d they go?
Ted had ordered and received a drink for himself before the news gave him reports that were actually new: earthquakes, all around the globe, all at roughly the same time—when the sky started going wrong. None of them were massive, but dozens were magnitude five point something, with a few cresting six. There were reports of casualties in some parts of Asia, but little confirmed as of yet.
They stayed until the bar shut down at eleven-thirty, walking out into the same shadowless, dim rainbow twilight, with vague promises of calling one another the next day. Ted got a taxi back to his apartment. He didn’t think he’d be able to fall asleep, but he did, deep, and as far as he could tell, dreamless.
The next morning—he double-checked the time—the sky outside the apartment window was blue again.
It took him effort to remember his old morning routine, even though it hadn’t been that long ago. Shower, brush teeth, make coffee. His car was still in Oakhurst, so that would be a hurdle. One thing at a time, though. Next: getting his phone repaired.
He fired up his laptop to book an appointment at the Apple Store and call an Uber, then walked outside. All right, things weren’t back to normal. The sky was blue, the light was right for the morning, but there were still no shadows, no sun.
When the Uber pulled up, the driver, a Sikh man who looked like he might be in his late fifties, pointed up at the sky. “These are very strange days, aren’t they?”
“More than you can imagine.”
The appointment went well enough; he just said, truthfully, the phone stopped working yesterday. He took the offer of a replacement refurbished model, then started researching how the hell he could get to Oakhurst without a car. Hmm. Get to Oakland, by bus or light rail or whatever, then take the Gold Runner train to Fresno, then take another bus from there up Highway 41. None of the trains to Fresno would get there earlier enough to catch the bus, so an overnight in Fresno it was. This was going to be an adventure. He’d had quite fucking enough of adventure lately. All right, home to pack. At least this time he could call the Uber using the app.
Where the hell had the mice gone? Was the arcology still there? It had sounded like they were planning to turn it into a spaceship, which sounded insane, but no more insane than anything else about what they could do. And as much as he would miss Aurora—as much as he hoped she’d miss him—he knew there was little reason for her to take him with them, and innumerable reasons for her not to.
He frowned, realizing a shadow had passed overhead. From what? Nothing too exciting, he saw—just a cloud.
Although there hadn’t been clouds this morning. Hmm. Now there were. They looked…indefinably off, though. What was it? Almost like they were pictures of clouds, two-dimensional sprites drifting across the sky programmatically.
The light shifted again, and people around him on the sidewalk started pointing. Talking. In a few cases, yelling.
There was a face in the clouds. No, above the clouds, almost lost in atmospheric haze, as faint as the moon in daylight—but much bigger. The mirage, optical illusion, whatever, took up fully half the sky.
As soon as he placed it as Aurora’s face, it turned slightly and disappeared as if receding into space.
His Uber pulled up, the driver staring out the windshield toward the apparition rather than toward him.
“Was that the face of God?” someone said nearby in a near-whisper.
“God is a mouse?” their companion responded, tone half dismissive and half wondering.
Ted looked over at them as he got into the car. “Surprise.”