Inhuman(103)

Then, suddenly, he noticed fingers circling his hand, Samantha grasping on to him tightly, as she buried her face, distraught, in his arm. He looked down at her, this woman who’d lost her husband, and suddenly realized how much she had in common with the man he used to be—not Old-timer, but Craig. The man who’d woken up in a world where his wife wasn’t his wife any longer. That man who’d been frozen in time.

“There!” Djanet suddenly shouted, pointing. Her shout barely resonated for Old-timer, but her excited pointing did. The fissure reappeared, and though they’d been knocked toward the lower end of it, it was large enough that they were about to escape through the canyon-like crevice.

Once they were outside the rapidly fragmenting hull of the Constructor, their momentum carried them for several more seconds, and Old-timer opened the door of the pod. Together, the three of them exited.

He immediately turned his attention to finding his wife in the massive and growing debris field. Hundreds of thousands of bodies, most of the them not yet activated and likely never to be, floated into the vacuum of space. A few thousand more conscious androids, androids that had probably been relaxing in Eden when disaster struck, had been lucky enough to have made it out in the decompression. The massive cloud of bodies made it impossible for Old-timer to locate Daniella and Paine, and impossible to locate 1.

Samantha continued to grip Old-timer’s hand, and he didn’t force her to let go. He could hardly imagine what she was going through. He turned to Djanet and noticed her mouth moving as she seemed to be communicating. Old-timer suddenly remembered that she was connected to the collective. He gestured to her to grab her attention, and then pointed to the back of her neck, unfurling a tendril as he did so. He knew she’d seen him connect to Anisim earlier and would understand. She nodded and floated close enough for him to jack into the back of her head. She made a slight wince, but within seconds, Old-timer had a viable aural connection established.

“What’s happening? Are you in contact with Daniella?” he asked her.

“Yeah,” she replied. “That dude from 332 is with her, and they’re already going after 1. She made a beeline for Venus as soon as they made it out of the ship. I’m tracking them.”

“Venus?” Old-timer responded, perplexed. “Why? Why not head to one of her ships? What does she want with Venus?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the Purists?”

“Purists?” Samantha suddenly chimed in. “You have Purists in this universe too?”

Old-timer’s eyes narrowed, but he knew he didn’t have time to pursue her strange contribution.

Something else grabbed his full attention.

Over her shoulder, he saw something that struck him to his core—it was his first look at V-SINN.

She saw the look of awe and terror freezing his eyes and knew before she turned her head what he was looking at; she’d seen that look before on her husband’s face. She turned anyway, and the trio floated in silence as they were awestruck by the scale of the destruction to the Constructor.

V-SINN, or as 1 had called it, an infinity computer, had appeared at the tail end of the ship. As black holes went, it was tiny, much smaller than a naturally occurring stellar black hole, which was rarely smaller than at least a dozen kilometers wide. V-SINN, by comparison, wasn’t even large enough to be seen from their perspective, but the immense, nearly infinite gravity of the unholy machine made it unstoppable, and the sheer enormity of the accretion disk of destruction that was orbiting the black hole at an extraordinary rate of speed made it obvious where the infinity computer had parked itself. The picture was absurd, as the constructor ship had been the size of a small moon or a dwarf planet, yet the black hole was swallowing it, almost as though a beetle were swallowing an alligator. It would’ve been comical if not for the enormity of the destruction, the vessel having already imploded in the middle, millions of androids having been flung outside in the decompression, while billions more—the less lucky ones—remained inside, trapped, many of them still in Eden, their attempt at building Utopia, their lives mere seconds from ending.

“Old-timer,” Djanet began, “you do realize who was in those replicator pods, don’t you? Those were the assimilated people from our universe…our solar system. Those were our people. If we lost James and the A.I.—if we can’t get Trans-human working so we can undo this—”

“I know,” Old-timer replied. “Come on,” he said before he turned the trio around quickly. They began to fly on their new course in pursuit of Daniella and Paine. “We’re headed to Venus. If that really is 1’s destination, then you can bet there’s a reason for it.”