“You’ll overload the system,” he cautions me. I’m on my hands and knees, watching dumbly as blood spatters from my face to the floor, a rain of blood. “It could crash. If that happens, your injuries might kill you.”
I’m screaming. Pouring from the very bottom of my soul: the death howls of seven billion slaughtered human beings. The sound ricochets around the cavernous space.
Then I’m up again for the last time. Even enhanced, my eyes can’t follow his fists. Like quantum particles, they’re neither here nor there, impossible to place, impossible to predict. He flings my limp body from the platform to the concrete floor below, through which I seem to fall forever, into darkness thicker than that which engulfed the universe before the beginning of time. I roll onto my stomach and push myself up. His boot slams into my neck and stamps down.
“What is the answer, Marika?”
He doesn’t have to explain. Finally, I understand the question. Finally, I get the riddle: He isn’t asking about our answer to the problem of them. He never was. He’s asking about their answer to the problem of us.
So I say, “Nothing. Nothing is the answer. They’re not here. They never were.”
“Who? Who’s not here?”
My mouth is full of blood. I swallow. “The risk . . .”
“Yes. Very good. The risk is the key.”
“They’re not here. There are no entities downloaded into human bodies. No alien consciousness inside anyone. Because of the risk. The risk. The risk is unacceptable. It’s a . . . a program, a delusional construct. Inserted into their minds before they were born, switched on when they reached puberty—a lie, it’s a lie. They’re human. Enhanced like me, but human . . . human like me.”
“And me? If you are human, what am I?”
“I don’t know . . .”
The boot presses down, crushing my cheek against the concrete.
“What am I?”
“I don’t know. The controller. The director. I don’t know. The one chosen to . . . I don’t know, I don’t know.”
“Am I human?”
“I don’t know!” And I didn’t. We’d come to the place I could not go. The place from which I could not return. Above: the boot. Below: the abyss. “But if you are human . . .”
“Yes. Finish it. If I am human . . . what?”
I am drowning in blood. Not mine. The blood of the billions who died before me, an infinite sea of blood that envelops me and bears me down to the lightless bottom.
“If you are human, there is no hope.”
80
HE LIFTS ME from the floor. He carries me to one of the cots and gently lays down my body. “You are bent, but not broken. The steel must be melted before the sword can be forged. You are the sword, Marika. I am the blacksmith and you are the sword.”
He cups my face. His eyes shine with the fervor of a religious zealot, the look of a street-corner crazy preacher, except this crazy holds the fate of the world in his hands.
He runs his thumb over my bloody cheek. “Rest now, Marika. You’re safe here. Perfectly safe. I’m leaving him to take care of you.”
Razor. I can’t take that. I shake my head. “Please. No. Please.”
“And in a week or two, you’ll be ready.”
He waits for the question. He’s very pleased with himself. Or with me. Or what he has achieved in me. I don’t ask, though.