“One of what?” Djanet shot back as she, too, held on for dear life, her feet being sucked to some unseen point at the back of the ship, which felt as though it were pointing nose up when it should’ve been floating steadily in deep space.
“An infinity computer!” Jules answered, yelling over the nearly deafening sound of the extraordinarily large ship’s hull buckling in billions of places at once. “It’s what the nanobots always eventually build. Perfectly, mathematically, predictable—it’s a tiny black hole, but even a black hole just a few meters across is powerful enough to swallow the entire ship!”
“This is where the bodies are built, right?” Paine confirmed with Jules.
Jules nodded. “Yes, ninety-nine percent of our collective’s replication capability is in the Constructor.”
Paine turned to Old-timer. “It’s a strategic strike,” he said. “V-SINN’s not appearing here by accident. It wants to make sure these androids can’t rebuild.”
“V-SINN never does anything by accident,” Samantha added in agreement. “It’s always pure, unfeeling, mathematical precision. It’s strategy. Paine’s right, this ship’s finished!”
“And we’ll be finished if we can’t figure out a way to escape this gravity well!” Djanet shouted. “If we can’t fly out of here, what can we do?”
Jules turned her head and watched with an expression of awe and horror as she saw the monolithic towers of the replicator swaying, some of them beginning to crack, their metallic frames fracturing, splitting in half from the gravity’s extreme pressure, now focused on their midpoints as they were horizontal in orientation. “There’s one chance!” she shouted over the sound of the unimaginable destruction.
“What?” Old-timer asked desperately.
“Large portions of the ship have atmospheric controls—the most concentrated are in Eden but there’s atmospheric control in the replicator too!”
“Oh my God,” Djanet responded, putting two and two together. “You can’t seriously be suggesting—”
“Look!” Jules shouted, as she pointed far into the distance. As the pillars collapsed, one by one, the ship’s hull, nearly a dozen kilometers from their current position, came into view.
They each turned their heads to see what she was referring to. A giant zipper crack, so long that it was, by the second, resembling more and more a canyon, was suddenly in clear view.
“When the hull breaches,” Jules shouted, “if the breach is big enough, there’s going to be an explosive decompression! It might give us the propulsion we need to escape the gravity well!”
“Yeah,” Djanet shouted back, “if we survive being sucked out of the ship through a debris field of jagged metal objects moving at speeds that could even slice an android in half!”
“We’ll survive!” Old-timer shouted. “Every one, stay close to me. When the decompression happens, I can protect us.”
Daniella’s panicked expression was instantly replaced with disbelief. “Craig! Even you can’t—”
“I can!” Old-timer shouted, determinedly. “I can save us! Trust me! Just get close—”
Before he could finish his sentence, he was interrupted by a bullet whizzing unexpectedly past his face from above, a bullet that cut right through the center of the catwalk, slicing it cleanly in two and causing it to buckle, sending the entire group plunging toward their deaths below them in the heart of darkness that was the infinity computer.
3
Aldous turned to Rich, who struggled to get back to his feet. They were both cocooned now in their magnetic fields, their communication shifting to their mind’s eyes. “Richard, I’m sorry, but I must ask you to return the hard drive to me.”
“No can do, Chief,” Rich said, his voice beginning to shake with panic.
“What’s going on?” James shouted.
“The chief’s trying to kill us!” Rich shouted to him in return.
Aldous’s face suddenly changed as he heard Rich’s communication with James. He shook his head. “I’m not trying to kill you, Richard, and I’m not trying to kill James or the A.I. But Richard, they can never leave that simulation. That was the agreement I made and a duty that I alone can carry out. Do you understand?”
“Keep him talking, Rich,” James said. “Buy us some time.”
“Yeah, I understand,” Rich replied. “You’re a traitor. I get it.”
“Normal ethics don’t apply in this situation, Richard. To you, I’m a traitor, but to everyone in this solar system who lives to see the future because of my actions today, I’m a savior.”