“Craig, she’s my wife,” Aldous protested.
Old-timer shook his head. “She’s not,” he replied. “Your wife is dead—for good this time—and it was by your hand,” he related, his tone filled to the brim with vitriol.
Aldous turned to Old-timer, his eyes disbelieving. “No. It can’t be true.”
“It is,” Old-timer replied. “But you know that already, Aldous. You know that better than anyone.”
A second later, Old-timer plunged one of his tendrils through the chief’s throat, the microscopic filaments attaching quickly to the chief’s android brainstem.
“And now,” Old-timer began as the chief struggled fruitlessly, the appendage impaling him through his Adam’s apple, “I want to know the whole story. I want to see why you betrayed us.”
“Aldous is an android?” Djanet reacted, aghast as she saw the chief twitching, impaled through his throat by Old-timer. “But…when?”
“Since the start,” Old-timer growled. He gestured with his head toward 1, who was standing nearby, watching events unravel, wordlessly. “Make sure she doesn’t try anything.”
Djanet crossed quickly to her, but 1 put her hand up to stop her.
“If I wanted to ‘try’ something, I’d have done it already,” she stated, sounding insulted by the insinuation that she could be stopped by the company in question. “I’ve already achieved what I wanted to here.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Djanet said as Colonel Paine ambled up beside her, doing his best to help cordon off the dangerous leader of the androids, even though his right arm was useless. “What’s she talking about Old-timer?”
“I’m about to find out,” Old-timer replied as he closed his eyes and let himself drift into Aldous’s memories.
13
Old-timer could feel the dread within Aldous as he inhabited the chief’s memories.
Aldous sat down in the situation room of the governing council, having just watched a live image of James crushing the body of 1 into dust in his mind’s eye. Aldous wearily uttered to himself, “We live in momentous times.”
Old-timer skipped forward.
Aldous fretted in the master bedroom of his penthouse in downtown Seattle on a stunning evening, the sun having dropped below the horizon an hour earlier, yet the indigo glow remained on the sky while the post-human world, his world, bustled about efficiently before him as though nothing had happened—as though it wasn’t threatened—as though it weren’t about to end.
He turned to face the bed. Samantha was already asleep. She went to sleep content, thinking Aldous had set his nans so that he’d fall asleep beside her for the night, but he’d awoken soon after they’d closed their eyes, a preplanned waking, as he stepped out of bed and paced by the luxurious floor-to-ceiling window, watching the green cocoons of the people dance by like fireflies on a summer night. He wanted to share his terror with her, confide in her the truth, but he knew her too well. She won’t have it, he thought. She won’t listen to reason. He already knew how it would end.
He knew how the end would begin as well.
Old-timer skipped forward again.
Despite fears of an overwhelming wave of defections from the android collective in the hours and days after James’s pronouncement that they were welcome to stay with the post-humans as long as the androids abandoned the collective, only a scant few thousand actually chose to make their way to Earth, the moon, and Mars to join the post-human world. Aldous chose one of these few enclaves that had made their way to San Diego just hours after James had killed 1 and made his invitation. It didn’t take much detective work; just a few well-placed questions to locals, for Aldous to find a group of two dozen androids in the downtown area near the gas lamp district that, unlike much of the city, had largely survived the devastating nuclear bombardment of World War III. They’d taken up residence in what had been little more than a historical oddity, abandoned by the locals for the anachronism that it was, the Courtyard Marriott hotel. With worldwide travel accessible to every post-human within minutes, the notion of a hotel was foreign, laughable and to some, including Aldous, even pathetic. But there was irony in the fact that more than half a century since it had seen its last visitor, the hotel was indeed serving its intended purpose once again, temporarily housing visitors who were a long, long way from home.
Aldous walked into the lobby and, instantly, androids came to attention, recognizing whose presence they were in almost as though they’d been expecting him. One android, a female, remained sitting on a red, velvet couch—a couch that Aldous surmised was nearly 200 years old, just like the lobby that housed it. It was perhaps fitting that the entity that the android body housed might have been even older.