She looked up at him. “Not a superman. Not the world’s hero. No one can ask that of you, Craig. You didn’t sign up for that.”
Old-timer smiled. “The world doesn’t need me to be superman.” He put his arm around her shoulder and they walked back into their home. “The world’s already got that job covered.”
2
James Keats walked out of the A.I.’s mainframe building, utilizing the senses of his chrome-colored, dramatically enhanced body, his glowing, azure eyes scanning the night sky, his lips pulled back into a grimace.
“This is troubling to say the least,” the A.I. commented to James, both through James’s mind’s eye and also in the A.I.’s operator position, a position that James shared with him in cyberspace. As was now usual, James concomitantly controlled his superhuman body in the real world.
“Indeed,” James replied, waiting as he narrowed his eyes as he examined the picture that was forming in his mind’s eye, thanks to the millions of measurements his new body sent out into the space around him. “I can sense them. They think they’re getting the drop on us, but they’re disturbing space-time, and there are ripples in the gravitational field.”
“It’s an unexpected development,” the A.I. observed.
“It is,” James agreed, “which means we need to be careful. If we couldn’t predict this beforehand, then we’re missing crucial information.” James’s eyes shifted slightly, and he held his arm up, facing his palm up toward the night sky. “Something major is playing out,” he continued as he seemed to prepare for an arrival, “and we need to know what it is.”
An instant later, a wormhole opened up in the atmosphere, just dozens of meters from where James stood and above the mainframe. In real time, the events occurred faster than a blink of an eye, but when James shared the operator’s position in the mainframe, he could slow down his perception of time dramatically: his electric-fast thinking capacity allowing him to perceive the android ship, remarkably similar to the one the androids had used when trying to destroy the sun with an anti-matter missile just weeks earlier. Like the previous ship, its skin was translucent, and James could see the androids who’d either been forced or manipulated into volunteering, bracing for impact as they performed their suicide mission, the plan obviously to crash into the A.I.’s mainframe and destroy it, like kamikazes. James examined the contents of the ship and noted that it contained yet another anti-matter missile. Had he not detected it and intercepted it, this would’ve not only destroyed the mainframe—it would’ve destroyed the entire planet.
Fortunately, his early-warning system had allowed him to anticipate the exact moment the wormhole was about to open and to warp the gravitational field around the ship, creating a nearly impenetrable vice of space-time, catching the ship as though in a gigantic, invisible baseball glove. Unfortunately, he also knew he had to crush the ship and the device before it could detonate, and he closed the vice until all that was left was a tiny marble that appeared perfectly black. It floated gently into James’s gleaming hand as he further manipulated the gravitational field around it, drawing it toward him. James examined it when it reached him, almost expressionlessly, but the A.I. could see the pain in the post-human’s eyes.
“You had no choice,” the A.I. pointed out, his tone consoling. “If the anti-matter missile had detonated, not even your warp bubble could’ve contained it. You just saved every life in the solar system.”
“I know,” James replied, “but I just killed five people.”
“You had no choice,” the A.I. repeated softly. “And their patterns were no doubt recorded and uploaded to the collective before they set forth on this suicide run.”
“The fact that there are copies of these people being rebuilt by the android collective makes the deaths of these individual entities no less tragic,” James replied. “They’re still dead...by my hand.”
“My son, since we’ve yet to determine the mechanism they use to upload their patterns to the collective, we can’t be sure that these bodies they’re sending on suicide missions are not the copies, so to speak. You may have just terminated drones and nothing more.”
“You’re grasping at straws.”
“Regardless, even if these androids have died, their deaths are on another’s hands, and we both know who that almost certainly is.”
James closed his eyes for a moment before he turned and walked back toward the mainframe, most of his attention returning to his pattern, next to the A.I. in the operator’s position. There, his appearance mirrored his biological human form, the form he still preferred to present himself in when in cyberspace. “Yes, we do. 1 clearly survived my destruction of her body, yet I haven’t been able to detect her pattern in the android armada.”