Rich’s brow furrowed instantly. “Whoa, wait a sec’! Where’s James’s body?”
“I couldn’t carry both of them,” Aldous replied as he tilted his head toward the unconscious Thel before kneeling and laying her on the soft earth. He turned to the small ship Rich had arrived in. “We need to get her on board—”
“I’ll get him!” Rich shouted, cutting Aldous off as he started to fly toward the mainframe building. Aldous grabbed his ankle to stop him, pulling him back to the ground where the duo thudded hard to the ground, sending a plume of dust up around them. Rich noted that Aldous was stronger than he looked.
“No! There isn’t time! Look!” Aldous shouted as he pointed up to the canopy of the mainframe’s force-field.
Rich looked up to see the nanobot storm that had been defending them dispersing, the wisps of microscopic robotic warriors now blowing away, clearing like dust in the wind. When the dust cleared enough, Rich’s mouth dropped and he, likewise dropped to his knees. “For the love of God.”
The entire sky, right to the horizon line, was now taken up by the rust-colored, pockmarked hull of the android ship.
“I’m sorry, my friend,” Aldous uttered. “I should’ve asked you to help me transport James’s body, but I didn’t realize the material it was made of would be so dense—it was heavier than you could imagine—I couldn’t move him an inch, even with all my might. But don’t worry,” he patted the black, square object that was attached to him via a black strap over his shoulder. “I downloaded their sim into this hard drive. It contains their patterns. We may lose James’s body and the mainframe, but we’ll all survive this. I swear it.”
Rich couldn’t respond. He looked up, wide-eyed, at the monstrous spacecraft, a ship that looked to him to be the size of an entire world—and watched the object that was about to destroy his home planet get closer and closer by the second.
“Djanet?” he finally managed to call out weakly through his mind’s eye. There was no response. “Edmund?” he asked. “Linda?” he spoke. No one spoke back.
“Richard,” Aldous finally said, in an unnervingly calm tone. “Do you trust me?”
Rich turned to him, still unable to speak or even nod his head in response.
“The mainframe’s magnetic field will fail because the mainframe is embedded in the earth, and when that monstrosity collides with it, the ground will be obliterated.” Aldous grabbed Rich’s shoulders and tried to get the dazed man to look him in the eye as he continued, “But your magnetic field can withstand this. We need to get Thel on board and then you’ll need to cocoon the ship. The android ship is moving at four kilometers per second and will hit us in twelve seconds. It’ll be the first giant impact the Earth has experienced in four and a half billion years and, just like the last time, an incident that gave birth to our current moon, it’ll vaporize the water in the oceans and cause the Earth’s surface to become an ocean of magma.”
“Are you—what the fu—“ Rich uttered, his lips quivering.
“Listen to me, Richard!” Aldous shouted as he dragged him with one hand while literally dragging Thel with the other. Rich was aware enough to know to help him, and together, they began dragging Thel’s unconscious body onto the ship. “We can do this! Are you ready?”
“No,” Rich replied as the platform raised up into the ship, taking Aldous and Thel with it.
Aldous sighed.
“Too bad,” he replied through their mind’s eye as Rich stood alone in the darkness, outside the ship. “We’re out of time. Use your magnetic field, Richard. Save us.”
Rich, in a trance-like state, ignited his cocoon, making sure that he protected the entire ship, along with himself.
In the next instant, the whole world flashed white as though they were on the surface of the sun, Rich was knocked upside down, and a second later he was in utter darkness.
PART 3
1
“What the hell am I seeing?” Old-timer asked as he stopped, images from the shared android collective communication network streaming into his field of vision.
The images appeared to be of Earth, after the impact of an android ship the size of Brazil, right on the western shore of North America. The giant impact was so intense that a shockwave of superheated, red-hot gas was surrounding the globe, eating away the blue oceans and the green, living continents and leaving a smoldering-hot magma glowing in its wake. Giant pieces of debris, some of them the size of entire countries were being flung from the surface, and the android ship was in the process of disappearing completely, partially embedding itself under the crust of the Earth and partially disintegrating due to the force of impact and the unimaginable heat and destructive energy produced in the collision. Androids all over the serene setting of the city hidden safely at the center of the Constructor cheered as though they’d won an important battle in a war.