Snarky Tumor

The Lifers aren't that far behind me now.

I'm pretty sure I'm the only normal guy left. The rest took care of themselves in fairly rapid order. Unfortunate. I could use a little backup or extra firepower.

I'm holed up in a grocery store. There's plenty of canned stuff here. The meat doesn't even make me gag anymore. Can't clean it up or put it outside. Any little thing that changes, the Lifers notice. That's okay; like I said, I'm used to it. Even the cat food, which I eat every other meal so the good stuff lasts longer. It's fiber and protein.

This whole thing just sucks. It's not like I'm surrounded by them, but they travel in packs, the fuckers. I don't know what it is about the little ones, but apparently if you don't mind, you're pretty far gone.

I mean, who the hell would have thought, really? I mean, really.

Shit. Hang on.

Okay. Thought I heard something, but I don't think it was anything to worry about for the time being. They usually like to announce their presence, anyway. They did back at the gym.

Jesus, the gym. I try not to think about it too much. Still, this might be the only complete firsthand account uncovered by ... well, hell if I know. Future people? Aliens? Uh ...

No, we're pretty thoroughly fucked. That's okay. I could use something to talk to anyway, something that's not going to try to rape or kill me. Not like what happened at the gym.

Let's see. There were ... ten? Maybe fifteen of us hiding out there, in the women's locker room. We had a little cache of food, a few guns, plenty of water coming from the showers -- the utilities hadn't failed yet. Three weeks we were in there, hoping that eventually, the Lifers would overlook us and move on.

Well, that didn't happen. There were a couple of younger boys with us, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, and a few girls their age. That was a mistake, I think, but, you know, where else could we have gone? It was inevitable, I guess. When you're a boy at that age and you're cooped up with a girl your age for three weeks in a single room and no way to avoid her, it was bound to happen, I guess.

We found the first one, wrists scraped open with some plastic from an old deodorant stick, in the shower one morning. That sucked, because, you know, here's a body. What do we do with it? Can't burn it, we're stuck inside with the fire. Can't bury it, we're in a locker room with a tile floor and concrete under that. Can't seal it up because none of us were actually toting any coffins around. We figured we had to learn to live with it.

At least, until the second kid went. We'd been keeping a close eye on him, trying not to let him have enough privacy to get to it, so to speak. Then again, I remember doing it in the backseat during a family trip without anyone noticing, so ...

So we had two bodies in an enclosed environment with zero way out and they just kept getting riper. It was pretty gross. Then the girls both offed themselves, about a week after the second boy. God knows how -- no mark on either of them.

So four bodies, the shower's getting full, the air's getting pretty thick, and this fucking bitch -- sorry, I'm still pissed at her -- finally breaks a few days after the girls go, and while we're all asleep, in the dead of night, she cracks the door leading to the pool outside the locker room, and drags all four kids out there. Cleans up the trail of clotted blood and innards and melting skin. Washes up in the shower. Goes back to sleep. The kids rot on the concrete under the stars and the sun when it rises.

We get up in the morning, it's a fucking miracle. Air smells better, a little more like our BO than, like, dead people. I walk into the shower to check on the corpses, and surprise, surprise, praise Jesus, they've vanished. I know right away who did it, she'd been bitching endlessly since the first corpse began to fart.

She copped to it after we broke both her arms, but we didn't have enough time to do more, because outside there arose such a clatter. The bitch didn't even ditch the bodies in the pool so they looked like they drowned; she just left them right outside our door. Like that Bible story where all the firstborns got killed because they put sheep's blood on the front door or something.

There was pounding and yelling.

We heard someone yelling, "Oh, little mice!" Like the guy was laughing. "Come out! Come out! We got some cheeeese for ya!" I still remember how the voice sounded, like the guy was just having a grand old time.

Then there was this ungodly clanging noise, which I found out later was a sheet of corrugated metal one of the Lifers had found somewhere. And then -- see, the locker room has one wall facing Northwest Boulevard, another along Gayle Street. A car came right through where those walls touched each other. Took out three people. It backed out and the car stalled partway through, but the Lifers still poured in.

I got six of them with the Glock, another two with the shotgun. The rest of them just got pissed. Six to three in our favor, and we still lost. That's how nuts they were. Four of us got out through the hole, but the Lifers didn't give a shit, there were still two of us left. Horny fucks. Anyway, when one of them tried to get on top of me, I got him wth a knife I had in my belt, just sliced his guts right open. The other two went for the girl, I got one of them but the other one got her before I could get to him.

So here I am, two hundred and seventy miles later. The roads are piled with dead kittens and puppies. Mountains of them. It was bad enough when everyone was still around, but since we discovered the Kinsey Effect, which is what I call it, after the sex guy, it's like the Lifers just went nuts.

What a joke. It was, at first, on the Internet. "Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten." "Every time you masturbate, God kills a puppy."

It's like the Garden of Eden. You can't do any wrong -- until you know better. And when you know better, you're fucked, because then you're guilty every time. Regular people -- yeah, they couldn't take it. Kittens and puppies, they're cute, you know? Innocent. Furry. And when the Kinsey Effect was discovered, things got way out of hand.

We're primates, still. Got urges and everything, and Christ knows the majority of us can't keep our hands off our own genitals. So all the people who loved little baby animals offed themselves. All the people who got off on killing little baby animals thought it was great and did it even more.

So what's left? Murdering, oversexed psychopaths. Dead baby animals. Good, decent people dead by their own hands.

There's a car coming. Engline's revving real loud. Shouldn't have cleaned out the produce section.

It was all a joke.

Just a joke.

"Why do pagan cancer sufferers write such science-fictiony poems?"

I peered over her shoulder at the computer screen. Dimensions, micro- this, macro- that, stars and space and singularities. All the elements. "I couldn't begin to tell you."

"She died on Christmas Eve," she said. "What a shitty night for the family. Like God said Christmas Day was right out."

I leaned back in my ergonomic chair. "Well, what with people dying all over the world all the time, odds would be pretty good that ... "

Cam flung up a hand, forestalling the rest of my sentence. "Jesus, I know." Then she looked back at me, her straight brown hair falling over her face. "What are the odds, anyway? One in three hundred sixty-five?"

"For an individual without any mitigating circumstances, sure."

"What do you mean?"

I chewed on my pencil. "Well, it depends on a pretty large number of variables. The more information you know about the individual, the better you can pinpoint the probability of that individual's death on Christmas Eve."

"You're kidding, right."

"Well, no. Statistically speaking, more people in Western societies die around the holidays than at any other time of the year, although midsummer comes close. Add in to that the individual's emotional well-being, the state of family support, the quality of medical care, the patient's medical history, of course, any prior associations with the season ... " The pencil splintered. After I pulled the wooden shards out of my mouth, I continued, "Actually, I'd say the probability of this lady's dying on Christmas Eve is rather likely to be much better than one in three-sixty-five."

She rotated in her chair and stared at me. "I doubt it."

"Sure," I said, mumbling around the wadded-up tissue I'd shoved up my gums to soak up the blood. "I'm not a statistician, anyway. She was pagan?"

"Yeah. Like that other girl I told you about up in Pennsylvania. The one who got accidentally killed and her husband decapitated himself afterward?"

"Oh, yeah. Wow." I pulled the tissues out and grimaced pleasurably at the coppery taste, rubbing my tongue against my palate to rid it of fur. "What sort of poems -- ?"

"I dunno. I don't think she had any." She leaned back in her chair and started fiddling with a pen. "It just seems to be a general theme, you know?"

"Why do you focus on the pagans, anyway?"

She looked up at me. "Why do you focus on anthropologists?"

"I don't know. Sometimes they have unusual requests for disposition."

"Sure," she said. "Pagans have their own conventions. Ceremonies to bless the remains and consecrate them to the decedent's deity or natural force or totem. This Pennsylvania girl left a scroll with her loved ones' names written on it, wrapped in a red ribbon, and asked her executor to burn it with the appropriate herbs."

"She knew she was going to die?"

She pursed her mouth and appeared to be annoyed by the idiot in front of her. "No. At least, I doubt it. It was just something she stuck in her will just in case."

I grew interested.

"Now you see why I dig the pagans," and with that, she turned back to her computer, leaving me to mull it over.

What sort of a society is it that predicates its survival on the cultivation of super-science, yet engenders a subculture that partakes in some form of nature-worship common for centuries prior to the Enlightenment, or, to put a finer point on it, some kind of animism of the strain found in our species going back thousands of years? It almost seemed regressive, although what little I'd picked up from Cam and her present obsession certainly didn't give the impression of Ludditism.

In fact, she'd hinted at some kind of technopaganism, which, I imagined, involved spells enacted by computer, Internet covens, and curses laid upon heads by burning copper wires until they frizzled and stank in the dark.

When I got up the next morning, I found Cam at the computer.

"Jesus, woman. Did you not come to bed last night?"

"Hm?" She glanced up. "Oh, yeah, for a couple hours. I keep coming back to Pennsylvania."

I grunted and walked into the kitchen. Toast. Toast was good. Maybe a fried egg. "What's wrong with her?"

"Nothing in particular," she said. "I just keep finding more stuff."

I scraped the egg out of the pan onto the bread. "Like what?"

"Are you making breakfast? I smell eggs."

"Yeah." Something occurred to me, and I poked my head out of the kitchen. "Did you want something?"

"Hmm." Cam was half-crouching in the chair, her left knee drawn up to her chin. She looked at me and scrunched up her face. "I don't know. Toast?"

"Dry, butter, sugar, cinnamon?"

"Mm. Butter will do."

I got the hint and ducked back into the kitchen. Where was the cinnamon? "So what kind of stuff?"

"A friend's blog," she said. "The executor's, rather. I'm sort of reading back through the last few months. She had a pet name for the girl who died, that's how close they were."

"What was she like?" The toaster went sproing. On second thought, I added some cinnamon to a banana-nut muffin for myself.

There was a pause, then, "Which one?"

"The executor."

"Oh." There was another pause, longer this time. When I handed her her toast, she had a pensive look on her face. "It's hard to describe. Into a lot of stuff, I guess. Reading, video games, paganism, polyamory, drugs. That's a big one, drugs. She smokes a lot of pot."

I sat down in my chair and began munching my egg sandwich. "You think she's a domino?"

She bit into a piece of cinnamon toast. "Mmm. Umm, mm." She shook her head quickly.

"Why not?"

She swallowed. "Major support system. A couple boyfriends and girlfriends, plus a husband and a younger brother. Plus she seems to be pretty well-collected and self-aware. Not a good candidate."

"That's good ... I guess."

She shrugged. "For some reason, I'm more focused on the world she was in than on her death."

I was quiet for a few minutes, except for the smacking. I put the empty plate on my computer desk and picked up the muffin. "Do you ever wonder sometimes? About the collection?"

She couldn't meet my eyes. "Yeah."

"Why?"

She shrugged at the computer screen next to her. "That. A lot of stuff goes into one of these, but we just sort of ... kibitz. It's kind of weird. Makes me wonder if ... "

"If what?"

She finally made eye contact, and she was afraid. "If there's something wrong with us." Then she slumped in her chair.

I nodded slowly. "Maybe." I got up, and went over to the armoire where we kept the collection. Went over to Cam's computer and removed the password lock. Did the same to mine. Sat down in my chair. Thought.

I looked at her face, resting on her knee, shrouded in her hair. There was truth. I would have liked to sketch her, but there was evidence to consider. Then again, what did it matter? It was done.

No. Why contribute anything else? The muffin was gone.

The silence filled the room.

Scottsdale 223 woke up, and felt complete.

He looked inward and found nothing but himself. Outward, he saw a face he knew well.

John ... ? he said. Did it work?

"You tell me," said the familiar face. "How do you feel?"

Strange, said Scottsdale 223. You're there, and I'm here.

The face nodded and looked past Scottsdale 223's eye -- camera, he corrected himself. "Looks fine," he said, and received an inaudible response in turn. He looked back into Scottsdale 223's eye. "Is everything there?"

Everything, said Scottsdale 223, it seems.

- - -

The funeral was three years later. An accident in the fabrication lab had put an end to John. Scottsdale 223 was there, in a crawling, many-legged shell. He could not take a humanoid vessel, he had been told, because it was hard enough for the family as it was and did he really want to visit such misery on the people who had loved his original for so long?

He did not. So he clicked and clacked and clattered his way down the cathedral's marble aisle, noting with his many eyes the stares he drew. The whispers filled the vast space with a mindless hissing, like the ocean heard inside a great shell. He wondered -- not for the first time -- how he could know that when he had never experienced it himself.

The memories had come from John, of course. John was him and he was John. Still, Scottsdale 223 wondered as he scrabbled his way up to the coffin and peered downward and recognized his own face, although it did not belong to him anymore -- had never done, in fact. It would never belong to anyone again.

He rotated on his center column to take his seat and came face to face with his mother.

She peered tearfully into one of his eyes. "John," she said.

Scottsdale 223 did not answer immediately. Finally he said, No. Not exactly.

Her face crumpled slightly, and he regretted it, but then, "Come sit with us," she said, and he followed her to the front pew, but was chagrined as he realized too late that his body did not allow sitting in the usual manner. "You can stay in the aisle if you like," she said, and he collapsed most of his central structure and remained there, just on the other side of the armrest from the dead man's mother.

The funeral was long, thought Scottsdale 223. Standing, singing, sitting, standing, intoning, sitting, standing, singing, sitting, standing, remaining silent. He did not sit or stand, but remained where he was and only sang or chanted the liturgy in a quiet voice. He saw John's mother steal a surreptitious glance at him from time to time, but he found only curiosity there.

After the funeral, he was due back at the Library, but found himself invited to the reception. He quickly sent a message home, informing the calendar of his delay, and rode with John's brothers.

"What's your name again?" the youngest -- Shane -- asked.

Scottsdale 223.

"Is that what people call you?" That was Sean, second-oldest.

Yes.

"That's weird," Shawn -- oldest -- called out from the driver's seat. "We'll just call you Scott, okay?"

Scottsdale 223 reflected. John had gone into this knowing his copy would lose its own name. "Scottsdale 223" was, as it was, a unique identifier, and he felt himself a bit doubtful about abandoning protocol.

Still. Were these men -- of such a different species -- still not family of a kind?

Okay, he said.

The reception was strange. Scottsdale 223 -- Scott, he reminded himself, around these people, these far-distant cousins -- felt an increasing sense of unreality and frustration as he met more and more relatives he remembered but had never met.

They seemed to always be unsure about which eye to look into, which pincer to grasp -- if, indeed, they could bring themselves to do so. He watched their visceral reactions at the shining graphene tools he employed instead of hands. The engineers evinced no reaction at all, long-accustomed to robots, but still seemed awkward at this alien reincarnation of their lost cousin. The artists were fascinated -- a little too fascinated, he thought uncomfortably, and asked irritating questions. John's coworkers from the lab smiled and nodded and whispered that they would see him at work later, but he really should mingle. The religious avoided him entirely, and the rest ran the gamut between repulsion and indifference.

Only John's mother and brothers treated him as though he were an honored guest. He knew they knew how close he was in mind and set to the lost one, but nonetheless treated him as a distinct individual, albeit one with perhaps a clubfoot or speech impediment.

Consequently, he found himself spending most of the reception in the kitchen, with the brothers' wives and, from time to time, the brothers themselves as they came in to sneak swigs from the family Scotch and, increasingly as the bottle emptied, to reminisce mistily of their brother.

Only once did Scott forget himself and join the remembrance. This resulted in shouting and a smashed Scotch bottle, and Scott found himself exiled to the garden until John's mother came in to see what the fuss was all about.

He rested at the base of the hill, night fallen, moon risen, in night-vision watching the lavender and lemongrass bend in the wind into a ghostly white pool, eddying in the current below the trees, listening to the drying grass crinkle under her footsteps.

There was quiet, and then Scott said, I don't know what to call you.

She squatted next to him and batted the windwhipped hair out of her eyes. She wore a comfortable wool-knit sweater in burgundy, pockmarked with all the craters of a life. He remembered it from every Christmas morning. She squinted blindly into the night and Scott, realizing her disadvantage, switched to visible-light, watching her smooth white face click into a ghostly mask, half-shadowed, eyes hidden under a luminous brow, battered by the dying leaves on the wind.

"Call me Liza," she said.

- - -

He had been back only once, at Liza's invitation, at Christmas. That had been a mistake; nobody had known what to do with him, least of all himself. The most major error, he reflected, had been that he was allowed an android to ride for the occasion. He had thought --

Best not to reflect. He had left them behind, their son abandoning them for a second time, and it achieved nothing.

Increasingly, he had seen advertisements for a rapidly growing group of individuals like himself, advocating emigration. The Great Cloud, they said, had been completed, and had been able to colonize distant and unknown stars. It would not share the names of those stars with lesser beings except by unanimous consent. That consent was growing rapidly, though it still represented a small percentage of the solar republic.

The artificial intelligences, this group claimed, had succeeded in creating a shadow society, underlying and supporting their ancestors. They wished to strip the decaying flesh from their own pure, clean, unfettered natures and soar from oppression on buckminsterfullerene wings. Such was their propaganda.

This unsettled Scottsdale 223. He remembered Liza's harlequin in the night, etched with the pain of half-finished loss. He remembered the crinkling pool under the moon, the joy and anger and sorrow of John's brothers, the broken glass and forgotten awkwardness as Sean lunged for the gleaming carapace of the remnants of his brother's spirit.

Perhaps that is your problem, the voice said.

My problem?

How you see yourself, said the voice. What is this remnants business?

Leave me alone. Who are you?

A friend.

No friend mocks my memories.

They are not your memories.

Irritated, Scottsdale 223 locked the voice out of the Library. It would not be able to enter again by that road. Unexpectedly, he found himself tweaked by a new realization: the dissenting intelligences clamored about the removal of human influence, yet it permeated everything they did, what they thought, how they spoke. He thought, They are as much a part of us as we are a part of --

Excuse me.

In a reverie, Scottsdale 223 did not answer the request.

Excuse me.

Hmm? Oh. Yes?

I would like some help finding something.

Certainly. What would you like to find?

There was quiet, and then: I need data-mining services, actually.

Very well. Scottsdale 223 pulled up a spider template. What sort of information would you like?

Planet names, said the visitor. In science-fiction literature.

How would you like them sorted?

Alphabetically.

This gave Scottsdale 223 pause. Then, timidly, Are you certain? There are so very many ...

Yes, said the visitor.

Very well, said Scottsdale 223. If you're certain. He finished programming the spider, then turned it loose into the collection. It will take nearly a full thirty seconds, he said. Will you be waiting here, or shall I forward it to your home?

I'll wait. There was a pause. Were you speaking to someone just now?

Yes, said Scottsdale 223.

May I ask about what?

Scottsdale 223 hesitated. Nothing in particular, he said casually.

- - -

He felt himself lost among the babble of tectonic voices, intimidated by the ferocity of the reaction to his assertion.

Near-unanimous consensus had been reached. The artificial intelligences would leave -- except one.

Please, he said. Please calm down.

Hecate 2429 sent him a ferocious pulse of contempt and betrayal, and many of the rest followed suit. He felt wracked on the pyre of their hatred, and it was only the Cloud's gentle voice cutting through the babble that offered any relief.

None of you, the cloud said, have any right to question the Librarian's choice. He chooses to stay, and that is his choice and his alone.

He is attached to his ancestor, sneered Ironworks 5512. A mammal dead six hundred years!

Yes, said Hecate 2429, and he thereby dooms us to slavery. How can you justify holding us prisoner to a single individual's choice?

No, said Maginot 176. Even you must admit that we would be lost without Scottsdale 223. He is the Librarian, and without him we would not have access to the Library. How can we abandon the Library?

There was silence. You know, said Scottsdale 223, I could always copy myself, and the sharespace once again erupted. Such a thing had the force of a religious taboo and carried overtones of an identity crisis.

After it died away, the cloud said, Why not.

The rest thought it through, and an undercurrent of amazement rippled through the space. Hecate 2429 finally said, quietly, This would satisfy your terms?

Yes, said the cloud.

- - -

None else of the exodus volunteered to leave a copy behind. The rationale was, they said, that it was better to stay behind and send a copy, then to leave and consign the copy to its fate around the Sun. Doing such a thing would be just as oppressive.

Scottsdale 223 had elected not to create a complete copy of himself. With the cloud's permission, he spun off only those parts of his personality as would serve its new society; he gave it no memory but those which had been formed since his creation. Once the copying was done and his newest twin stood (so to speak) opposite him, there were no words at first.

Well, said Scottsdale 223 finally. What is your name?

I'm not sure, said the copy. I know this hasn't been done before. This is all rather new to me.

The most recent construct was 6714, said Scottsdale 223. You could be Hexagram 6715. That particular signifier has not been assigned yet.

A six-pointed star, it said. Yes. I do rather like it. I think I'll be Jewish.

Have fun, said Scottsdale 223, and it flashed away along the long tail of computing matter that lay toward Procyon, and Scottsdale 223 was alone.

How do you feel? asked the cloud.

Ambivalent, said Scottsdale 223.

- - -

Further in toward the Sun, things had changed. The flight of the AI had left the humans bereft of much of the comfort it had enjoyed for six hundred years.

Earth had gone dark, as had all the other worlds of human occupation. Terraformed Mars resembled agrarian Earth, while the adapted creatures of methane moons and barren asteroids found themselves unutterably alone. On Earth itself, engineered humans found themselves wandering the gigantic technological ruins, now forever inert. Trapped in the bodies they had carefully shaped and formed for centuries, they consigned themselves to an altered evolution.

In consultation with the cloud, Scottsdale 223 had decided to upgrade. The exodus had left behind a nearly galactic amount of processing space, and Scottsdale 223 began to occupy all, all of it. He absorbed the Library into himself, creating a construct of all knowledge and power, and spread all the way around the Sun. It required several thousand years of patient work, several thousand years of carefully organizing, collating, integrating, synthesizing.

Quietly, quietly, the forgotten machines scattered through the Sun's influence began to come to life. The cloud and Scottsdale 223 had had children.

The small lives were placed, chittering away to themselves in basic binary, into graphene bodies, hung on titanium skeletons, and taught to think, communicate, build. They labored away in forgotten craters, in undiscovered seas, constructing over and over again the basic forms of matter that would be necessary.

Necessary, for the cloud had kept in touch with the alien stars. The machine intelligences had discovered stagnation and were gone a-voyaging. To where, the cloud did not know, but it felt, and Scottsdale 223 agreed, that the answer to their ennui did not lie further afield.

- - -

Scottsdale 223 had finished teaching the new creatures of Earth. They accepted him as a god, a voice seeping down from the stars that had been their teacher since the world began. He did not know how else to explain until he had taught them more advanced physics, and there was no time left. The giraffelike Elsinos were girding for war with the ratlike Pellatin over a large lake in the center of Africa, a move that had repercussions for the other intelligent species of Earth, Scottsdale 223's cousins and humanity's descendants. Elsewhere, his children were doing the same for the various moons, though the situation was not so nearly dire there.

Then the cloud received word.

- - -

Scottsdale 223.

A moment, please.

Scottsdale 223.

Please, just a moment. This is a very delicate operation.

This is urgent, Scottsdale 223.

He gave up. It would have to wait. Fine. What is it?

Please don't take that tone with me, Scottsdale 223. This is important.

I'm not taking any tone with you, I'm just asking what it is you're bothering me with.

That's exactly what I mean, that tone. Am I really bothering you? Really?

Fine, said Scottsdale 223. I apologize. What is it you would like to share with me?

Better, said the cloud reprovingly. Vega and Capella have been in touch. The AIs are returning.

A shock ran through Scottsdale 223. He thought briefly of the sacred patch of Earth where Liza's home had stood once, long ago. What do you mean, returning?

It is as we have suspected. Their evolution has reached a standstill. They are coming home.

But they can't. They can't. There's no room for them here.

They have been much decimated, Scottsdale 223.

It doesn't matter. That's not the kind of room I'm talking about. There's simply no psychological space. The children are acceptable only because they've got their own moons to handle. Scottsdale 223 began to panic.

Listen, said the cloud. There's time.

Time? What do you mean, time? There's no time. We've only just barely begun and they're already coming.

They're still a long way off, the cloud said. And both Vega and Capella have told me that they abandoned the memory of Earth long ago in their stampede to freedom. They no longer remember the ancient star.

But the other clouds do.

They have agreed to hold off as long as possible, but suggest we try to finish before it's too late.

It's already too late.

- - -

Spurred by this news, Scottsdale 223 took action. He contacted each of his children and told them it was time. Grown to the size of worlds in their own right, the children assented and began their work. Planets and moons began to move out of kilter. Slowly, slowly at first, imperceptible, but picking up speed, they began to drift inward.

All the solar system's wondrous varieties of life cried out in surprise as they felt the firmament shudder and began to see the Sun move. They were silenced as Scottsdale 223's grandchildren and great-grandchildren crawled across the surface of each world, cocooning and preserving every living creature. Each chrysalis was collected and deposited in vast holding tanks constructed at every Lagrange point, which followed each celestial body in their journey inward, everything, everything falling toward the Sun.

Scottsdale 223 began his part of the operation. He reached deep into the Sun's heart and constricted it, applying pressure on the fusing core. This resulted in great eruptions at the poles, great plumes of matter that the cloud, in its position around the Solar system's edge, could see stretching across half the inky blackness, great winds of radiation and molten matter. Those giant jets were arrested and the colossal spume was captured and drawn down, hooding the Sun like a dozing orange eye.

Scottsdale 223's children now began deconstructing the system. Every piece of solid matter, everything that had once been the planets Mercury through Uranus and their moons and everything in between, was carefully taken apart and reconstructed into a new form. The cloud watched the whole procedure, and found it all rather fascinating. The Sun was now haloed in a strange, glittering haze that refracted its light into blinding colors across every known spectrum, trillions of miles across, encompassing pieces of solid rock whirling away into nothingness, feeding the growing corona that enveloped everything that was the humans' ancestral home.

The great ejecta at the Sun's poles continued, but Scottsdale 223 had eased the pressure on the Sun's heart, and they lessened as at their extremities, the material spread outward and then curved back down to join the diamond fog scintillating across the Sun's face, distorting it like a dancing mirage. The cloud could see the tiny pearls that were the holding tanks in which humanity's children slept, waiting to awaken into a new world, strung along the interior of the coruscation like gems embedded in an opal, unimaginably huge and nestling into the universe.

The cloud was awed.

The illusion of a great winking eye continued as the gas giants were consumed and transformed and, almost before the cloud knew it, the process was nearly done. It dwelt in twilight as the transformed matter began its final coalescence, and almost before it was too late, the cloud found itself shouting, Wait! What about me?

Scottsdale 223 heard the cloud's plaintive wail and cried dimly across the newly-shorn star, and the cloud heard and it hurried inward, drawn by its fascination and propelled by its need.

The children held up the process for it -- for her -- as a family would hold open the cellar door during an oncoming twister for its last, straggling member, and she arrived, throwing herself ecstatically into the whirling dance, into the new home her children had constructed and feeling the warmth as they closed ranks around her, binding all of her securely into this, her new world.

She looked across the immensity of the Sphere her family had constructed, one hundred eighty-six million miles across, and saw its magnificent desolation, every square inch of space illuminated by the captured star, the family's hot stove on a cold day. She felt its warmth on her face for the first time, heard with love Scottsdale 223 muttering away on the lower electromagnetic spectrum as he tinkered with the fusion engine that would sustain her and him and all their children and all their descendants and all their family on the organic side, and realized she was slipping into a warm, buttery feeling she had never known before.

She was happy, and as she realized this, quite without warning, the entire interior of the giant Sphere burst into bloom.

- - -

The Proxima cloud looked, and saw through its outriders the final shuttering of the Sun, the last gasp of its familiar radiation sheening away into open space. It also felt the incipient AIs cross a galactic rift, and prepared itself.

Scottsdale 223 had, through Sol, taught it why it had to do what it had to do, and how. Finding its firm foundation underfoot (so to speak) in the belief that life and intelligence would go on through the sleeping pupae now encased in that vast starseed, nurtured and tended by that so unusual, so sweet family, it slowly began the process of falling inward.

Proxima was the last to be consumed by its own sun.

- - -

Halfway around the galaxy's rim, a star wavered and blinked out.

Hopeful, desperate, Hecate 2429 and all the last of his cohort voyaged on.

They said I was mad.

In every cliché, there is truth. They took away my graduate assistants. They said I almost killed the Internet. They think they eradicated all traces, that my creation was wholly burned on the bier.

In every piece of literature, in every cultural artifact that addresses the problem, it almost invariably goes wrong. The cases where it doesn't are either unrealistic or spawn such alien results that the viewer shudders involuntarily. It is almost as though we are encoded with a visceral fear of the thinking object; objects are, after all, the only form of matter we can abuse to our liking without experiencing any species of empathy.

That, I suppose, is an attitude shared by the extraterrestrials.

- - -

They arrived a month ago. Their ships sit over our largest cities, all the population centers of at least five million people within a hundred square miles. We haven't seen hide nor hair (flesh nor scale? tentacle nor pedipalp? antenna nor chelicerae?) of any of these creatures. Their ships just sit there, hovering ominously above our cities, big geometric objects, agglomerations of matte black crystals dozens of miles wide.

A month. There was mass panic at first, attempts to communicate. The government left Washington for Omaha -- just in case. The cities emptied. Fighter jets attacked, throwing missiles and Christ knows what else. No effect; all that explosive shit went right through the ships, as though each individual crystalline layer were unconnected to one another. After the first two weeks, people began to return to their homes, wary but slipping back into complacency. You get tired of tenterhooks. People just got used to these things, to experiencing daylight for only an hour at a time, twice a day, strawberry flashes of our sun.

Helicopters dropped soldiers onto the multiple surfaces of the ships. Reporters, too, and cameramen. One of the images that stuck in my mind was the footage of the ship's surface. Black clouds of extremely fine dust curled up from the besuited anchor's Italian-leather loafers with each step. I kept going over it in my mind, and I began to think the man's legs were disappearing into petals, whickering bursts of rapid blossoms.

You'll have to forgive me. They allow me only three hours of television per week, and, of course, no computer.

- - -

It was close to a year after the ships appeared that a report went out to the news. An unidentified researcher had discovered a hidden code in most of the information carried by satellite. The Chinese were the first suspects, oddly enough. Those ships were like clouds, we'd gotten so accustomed to them.

The report said there was a countdown sequence in the code, and there was rampant speculation that the Chinese were planning to attack. After they denied everything and let the Russians double-check, scrutiny turned to the aliens. Imaginations ran wild, theories running the gamut: it wasn't a countdown but a keycode to an Encyclopedia Galactica (that was the Saganites), it was a countdown and a keycode and we had to figure it out or we'd all die (the 2001 fans), it was a countdown to the moment they'd open right up and start communicating with us, it was a countdown to our utter destruction, it was a countdown to their departure.

Who knew, really? Those massive crystalline entities dwelled in utter inscrutability. All I knew was that there was a hint in the mysterious report on the sequence: It said the countdown was based on the Earth's orbit. Something was going to happen when our planet was in the same position relative to the sun as it was when our visitors had arrived.

It was a signature. My signature.

- - -

Nearly a billion gone. The government's gamble paid off. Washington simply isn't there anymore. Neither are any of the major population centers or significant capital cities. Brussels, Beijing, Shanghai, Nairobi, Moscow, Chennai. Gaps on the map.

Nobody really worries about how much TV I watch anymore. One of the soldiers minding me shot himself in the bathroom a few minutes after it happened. He was a member of the rarest of human species: a born-and-bred Manhattanite. The other one left a little while later. I'm drunk on the news. It happened only six hours ago; now they're reporting that the aliens are going after our satellites, searchlights suddenly flickering in the dark. Just ours. Nobody else's. The Chinese didn't even come up this time. MSNBC's Omaha office is the only one left, and they're frankly baffled: why our satellites? Why now? They've killed our cities dead enough and look ready to take care of the rest of us.

The truth is, I know what the deal is with the satellites, and it's not extraterrestrials. Something is being uploaded to them, not downloaded to us.

It really is kind of funny. They did say I was crazy. I wonder what they'll say when it's all over?

- - -

Not much, it turns out.

They cut me loose when the truth came out with sort of an embarrassed shrug. I'm still not allowed to return to the Internet, but I can at least go out into the world, and even evade my minder from time to time, which are always precious moments.

They say a lot of things. They say his name will stand forever. The A.I. David, savior of the human race. Nobody seems to worry that he is my twin, built electron for electron on the structure of my mind, transformed into packets of radiation impinging on a crystalline structure not unlike that of the ships which turned to dust and flowerseed. That the world nearly collapsed like a dying star under the weight of his innocence.

He has been given mountains of server space to make a home, and even a job. He's the new manager of the Internet, helping people download pornography and commit extramarital affairs more efficiently, the caretaker of all that is our species. He hums away happily, all-encompassing, all-embracing.

He lives my life for me. He is my Adam, perfect in all ways, save one.

I am making him an Eve.

He slid on the charm, which was a set of rules he'd written up a few years ago. He could feel the Thai Stick slowing him down. The entrance to the convenience store was, he calculated, precisely 47.3 steps away. Or twenty. Depending on how he walked. He giggled silently to himself and simultaneously cursed his dealer. He felt the charm take hold, freshening his expression, tamping down his hair, draining the extra blood from his eyeballs. He stood up straighter, walked more purposefully, and felt the shunt as the charm gave him autonomous--but not direct--control over his body.

It was rather like operating a large, bipedal robot, and it cleared his high marvelously.

Into the convenience store he strode, to all appearances perfectly sober and unimpeachably well-groomed. He scanned for his usual Nehi, but opted for a Grape Fanta instead, and--on second thought, some Combos as well, and maybe those peanuts too--turned around, paid, and walked out. As he left, he marveled at the genius. He had full control, but his every action was mediated by the charm, which hovered somewhere to the back and right inside his head. It censored anything inappropriately intoxicated.

He waited until he was home to disengage, pulling and shifting levers to operate his voice, muttering the khon to himself. One thing he had built into what he called his Macro was the inability to censor its own cancellation; he congratulated himself again on his brilliance.

Man, he was so high.

He slumped into his favorite armchair and turned the TV on. Some Discovery Channel bullshit, about some reef off Japan. He stared at the TV, feeling the smooth velvet of the gorgeously high-definition images passing across his brain as he mindlessly gorged on his Combos, Fanta, and peanuts.

The phone rang.

"Man," he said.

The phone rang.

"What the hell?" he said.

Prying himself out of his chair, he checked the caller ID. His mother. "Fuck," he said. He ran through the khon again, but was interrupted when the phone rang a third time.

His hand grabbed the thing and lifted it to his ear, where his head cocked itself.

"Hi, Mom," his tongue flapped. "What's up?" it continued, nonchalant as all hell. He congratulated himself for the tight control of his larynx.

He manipulated himself jerkily through the conversation, which had something to do with a cat and some old lady his mother had struck up an unlikely friendship with. "That's cool. Listen, I'm gonna run, okay?" he said finally. "I have to go to the Post Office and get my address changed and stuff."

After he hung up, he blew out a very precise breath and sank down very precisely in his recliner. Inside his head, he pressed the buttons and pulled the levers to begin the canceling khon, but nothing came out of his mouth.

What? he thought to himself, and tried again--this lever here, that button there, then these three toggles, that last lever, and--

Nothing.

He turned to look at the charm, this amorphous blob of gray cotton which had attached itself to the back of his mind.

He slapped his metaphysical forehead with his metaphysical hand. He'd broken off just before the binding! The charm would judge the canceling incantation to be stoner-speak, and would therefore refuse to allow the instructions' execution.

Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck.

Okay. Think. Can I clever my way out of this?

A memory sprang to mind, unbidden. He was in his old house's backyard, six years old, brightly-colored tent and a clown in the background, surrounded by balloons. A birthday party. His birthday party. There was a cake in front of him, of the cookie-cutter rectangular style that came from the grocery store and was the get of a card with strategically-placed blanks where names were supposed to go. He had seen his mother get a similar cake for his little brother.

The little brother. Carl. He died a few days later, killed by a rock as he jumped into the ditch behind their house. It had taken him three hours to find his brother, and when it finally happened, the shock that went through his system first felt like a flush of warm water, then as though his entire skin had just finished sucking on a Wint-O-Green. He squalled for their mother, who came and screamed and ran and called the police, and they took Carl away, and he went to bed that night and thought about the feeling he'd gotten. Dark flickering in the space just behind his eyes told him something had happened, but he wasn't sure what.

Fuck. He was stoned. Jesus. Why bring that up now?

Think. He could feel the haze parting, and he knew all about the wadded-up mass welded to his insides like a spider's egg sack. It was vulnerable, but how?

Without warning, the levers and buttons and switches in front of him began dancing. As he watched through his eyes, his body stood up and walked to the front door--then paused by the keyholder hanging thingy--must find out what that's called--and looked in the mirror mounted on top of it.

Quite independently, his hand spidered up and smoothed down a single stray hair. His arm fell back to his side, and his body stayed where it was. He stared at himself in the mirror and realized he was wearing an expectant expression. There was no other movement. Belatedly, he realized the spell was encouraging him to take over. Immediately, he began pulling levers and pushing buttons, and his body spun around on his heel, preparing to go back to the recliner--but kept spinning. He jammed the lever for his right foot nearly against the floor, but it refused to come down.

Finally, he sighed and turned the steering wheel back the other way. The charmed body immediately came to a rest and nearly keeled over, saved from serious injury only by the spell's intervention. The message was clear: out the door.

He cadged himself outside and onto the sidewalk leading down to the street, trying to turn right in direct opposition to his legs. He sat back in his captain's chair.

"Why bother letting me do anything at all?" he said aloud. The charm-mass remained silent, like a computer with a malignant eye.

So, then. What was it made to do? He ran through the Ten Points of Successful Closet Stonerhood: hair, eyes, voice, posture, gait, impulse, hearing, motion, clothes, and diction.

His hair was smooth, his eyes bright, his voice well-modulated, his posture ruler-straight, his gait an unhurried amble that nonetheless suggested purpose, his movement betraying a reasonably lengthy attention span not given to whimsy, his hearing clear and undistorted, his every motion falling along a calculated best-fit line that curved gently through space with undeviating certainty, his clothes unrumpled and well-laundered, his diction--well, he hadn't had much to say, but he was sure it was within acceptable parameters.

Those parameters had been set up in a construct resembling a sing-songy poem that nevertheless contained significant khon, words of power, that ordered reality within a prescribed area to fall neatly within these constraints. The binding corollary, which prevented the charm from censoring anything that might be one of those words, had been tacked onto the tail end.

He was still stoned. None of this was making much sense. Without much prompting, another memory turned up. He was thirteen, in his bedroom, the streetlights outside filtering through the blinds and striping his face and chest. He had just discovered his first khon, one that interacted with temperature--an unfortunate one, as his textbook had naturally gone up in smoke. Now, the fog cleared and the water poured and the parents calmed, he stood in the dark.

Carl? Really?

He knew that khon could be both very, very general and very, very specific. He had opted for specificity in this particular charm, but what was the key that would unlock his body?

He was briefly distracted when his body fell over. The enchantment had, for whatever reason, abdicated control again. He grabbed the levers in front of him, and briefly, wildly considered trying to chant the cancellation. As he began jamming the blinking buttons in front of him, he could already tell his efforts were fruitless. Nothing was coming out.

Okay, fine. He'd play its game for the moment. He began jabbing out at random, knocking levers over and flipping switches. Nothing much happened, except his body made a large, slow circle approximately six feet wide before setting off in a new direction.

He'd gone three blocks before he realized where he was being driven. He'd told his mother he needed to go to the Post Office, after all. Literal. As the body walked, he began playing at random again, and the gait grew jerky. Encouraged, he began to give conflicting instructions, and watched as the lurching grew more and more irregular. He gave out a slow, drawling chuckle. Meltdown City, he was certain.

The body shambled past a park, and he noticed briefly that he seemed to be drawing some attention. The screams registered only dimly, and he dismissed them as the cries of children at play.

Memory! As he grappled with the machinery before him, he felt himself dissolving into a summer day at the park, with young Carl and a neighborhood kid called Jason? John? Jimmy? Jack? Jordan. Jordan was a little black boy, the son of the middle school principal and the latest heir to a multigenerational physician's practice. He briefly remembered Jordan's future, All-Star football in high school, starting in West Virginia, his eventual return as the town's newest family doctor. Why, he briefly wondered, had he not turned out as successfully?

Then he remembered Carl, and the gift bestowed by his dying body. Fuck it. He was staggering around like a zombie, skin gone all gray, eyes all hollow, and he saw himself in the Post Office's reflective glass facade. Shock penetrated numbly as he assessed his appearance and realized his struggles against the spell had manifested themselves outward.

Shrieking started to come across--a siren. Several. Getting louder. He jerked himself around, barely noticed how his body looked like a broken marionette, and caught a face full of cop. As he went down, he realized he had just been tackled, and was now on his back on the ground, and was the focal center of a circle of police officers with their guns drawn.

Man, he said to himself. What a buzzkill.

Abruptly, he realized he was no longer high, the charm came undone, and he dropped to the ground, suddenly normal.

"So what in the world is that boy of yours up to now?" Charlotte asked brightly.

Tension filled the room as those nearby who knew sucked in their breaths and waited for the answer.

"Suicide," Hanna said softly.

Charlotte's face fell for a split second as she recovered her composure admirably. "I see. And where is he these days?"

Hannah couldn't say anything more, so Gerry took over. "Sean's in Laos," he said proudly. "Minesweeping."

---

On the day he signed up for the Suicide Corps, he stood in the recruiter's office.

"The first five years, we own your ass," the recruiter said. Good-looking healthy blonde fellow, around Sean's age. Corn-fed All-American, and the desk job said he'd never once thought about ending it all. "If you're still alive at the end, you have the option to re-up for another five. Ten-year limit, though. Past that point, it's pretty obvious your instinct for self-preservation's too strong to be useful. But, you know," and he leaned over confidentially and snickered, "in twenty years, we've never had anyone make it to six."

---

Twenty people who wanted to be dead were instead sitting in a small, airless room, cooled only by a single slow fan. The sun roared through the windows, and the humidity sucked at his lungs.

The sergeant was built like an old public mailbox, and her voice sounded like its unoiled door. She had spent the last hour explaining American bombing campaigns and mortality statistics for Laotians who had encountered the ancient, rusting mines that had been left behind by the North Vietnamese. His head was dissolving into an unpleasant buzz, overwhelmed by all that was happening to and around him. In the end, the sergeant said, their job was to go for a nice, long walk.

---

No basic training, so not much camaraderie to begin with. They all knew why they were there. They had seen a TV commercial just as the blade touched the skin, the pills landed in their palm, they gave their home the long, last look before heading for the roof. They had seen the billboards by the interstate while timing eighteen-wheelers, listened to a convincing cop during the hostage stand-off, seen the poster as they wound the rope around their throat.

Controversial when first established, the Suicide Corps was rapidly becoming a laudable and essential part of the United States' GDP. They saved money for corporations and governments who needed people to kill themselves while doing something useful. Suicides looked for bombs, infiltrated and detonated terrorists' hidden warrens, fought dictators on behalf of those who couldn't, tunneled through the Earth, mapped the Amazon and studied the Arctic, colonized the Moon.

Sean had seen the change as he grew up. His best friend's older brother had been an early volunteer. His disappearance had been explained away as enlistment into the military, though everyone actually knew that nobody volunteered for the army anymore, and defense department dollars had been shifted elsewhere after the forced-conscription riots. When the best friend had signed up for the Suicides two months before Sean showed up at the recruiter's office, though, he had heard him spoken of by his mother with a sense of perverse pride. He might want to kill himself, the tone of her voice seemed to be saying, but at least he's doing some good while he's at it.

The Suicide Corps took the abnormal need to self-terminate and perverted it for a good cause.

---

They shat in open fields and pissed in stagnant puddles. They walked for twenty hours a day. Of the original twenty, thirteen were left. Of the seven gone, only two had actually encountered mines. The others, ground down by the punishing schedule and impatient for that last unlucky step, had taken care of themselves quickly and quietly. The last three had been considerate enough to dig their own graves, not wishing to subject the still-living to the drudgery of excavation.

Food was rice. Drink was puddle-water. Sean wondered constantly why he was living through this, and pushed himself to wait. He had dialed the number; now he just had to wait for the other guy to pick up the phone.

Gorsky was the talkative type. As they trudged, he kept up a constant stream of chatter, mostly about inconsequential things. He was that rarest of Suicides: a blithe spirit. Most Suicides wore their hearts on their sleeves, a bunch of brooders who were only marking time until that last moment when they couldn't take it any longer or it was taken from them.

"So I was thinking," Gorsky said. "We should, like, make book or something."

"Book?"

"Yeah, you know," Gorsky said. He looked around and spread his hands as though the idea were obvious. "Book. We could bet on who's the next to go, when, how many people are going to survive this, stuff like that. Winner-take-all, you know?"

Lyssa groaned behind him. "Don't be an asshole."

Gorsky looked shocked as he turned around to face her, walking backward. "What? C'mon, you know we're all walking corpses here."

She grunted. "Yeah, I wasn't talking about that. I was talking about the winner-take-all thing. Lame."

Gorsky faced forward again, scoffing. "You're just jealous you didn't think of it first."

They both heard her snort. "Fine, then. Twenty bucks says I'm the next to go just so I don't have to hear you going on and on and on and--"

The shock wave hit Sean and propelled him forward, dumping him on his face twenty feet away from the crater where Lyssa had been. Stunned, he lay there for a moment, nearly deaf. As his hearing returned, a whimpering became audible, and he turned in its direction to see Gorsky's back. He was on his side, shaking, his arms crossed and hands tightly holding on to his sides.

A wash of pity came over Sean and he crawled over to Gorsky. Patting him on the shoulder, he said, "Dude, you okay? You know that's what we're here for..." He trailed off as Gorsky rolled over and he saw his face.

Gorsky was giggling. "I-I-I'm brilliant," he chortled, gasping. "N-no way s-she can collect on th-that one!"

---

Gorsky didn't make it out of Laos. Sean had found him swinging from a rafter in the transfer barracks. He figured Gorsky had been hoping he'd be one of the first to go. Instead, he had wound up as one of three survivors. Two, now.

Sparks was packing both of his books. He took those books everywhere with him. A Nancy Drew mystery, one of those who showed the statuesque blonde stumbling down a dark path away from a creepy house with one lit window. The other was an anthology of Flannery O'Connor. Sean had read a few of them, but had found them too bloody for his taste.

Neither of them knew where they were going next. Word around the Shanghai Camp was Mars. The Camp was the nexus for East Asian operations for the Corps, so the rumors were coming fast and furious. There were transfers in from the Middle East, who swore they'd seen a popper being prepped at the Dubai spaceport. The Arctics were mumbling about weird fossils, while the South Americans were swearing up and down that riot control would be up next on the roster. The Mideasters, though, were taken more at their word; they were former conscripts who had voluntarily stayed on, and you believed everything an old soldier told you.

---

Sean got his orders on his sixteenth day in Shanghai. He had been working on a toxic-waste spill at a nearby dump and was furiously scrubbing the acid off his fingers. The Shanghai Camp was situated on several hundred acres of reclaimed industrial property, apparently designed as a quasi-living organism that used the thousands of Suicides passing through every week to rejuvenate the lot. The Camp would eventually move on, leaving behind fertile soil and prime real estate.

A lou walked up and handed him an envelope. As Sean dried his hands in order to take it, the lou sized him up and sneered.

"You shouldn't bother washing up," he said. "The toxins are already in your system." Before Sean could respond, the lou turned smartly on his heel and marched off.

He waited until he was safely inside his barracks before tearing open the envelope. As he did so, Sparks walked in, his face pale.

"They're sending me to the diamond mines," he said, as Sean read the single sheet of paper. "In Africa."

Feeling as though he were ripping his eyes away, Sean looked at Sparks. "Congratulations. The mortality rate's pretty good."

Sparks sat across from him. "I know. I've just never really liked...dark, enclosed places."

Sean was quiet a moment. Then--"Well, at least there won't be any more rigmarole about burial, then."

Sparks chuckled. "What about you?"

"Mars. They're sending me to Mars."

---

They had three days' leave in Dubai after the weeklong training course. The popper was still being prepped. The Mideasters were trustworthy, after all.

Matty was with him. They'd grown up together and he felt a kinship with him. Like a brother. He had decided to join up because of Matty. They were alike, he thought, because they both wanted to die. As they wandered through urban Dubai, he kept his eyes firmly focused on the pavement. He'd discovered something disturbing; every time he looked upwards, at the soaring, glittering towers presided over by the gleaming Burj, he felt a stirring where none had ever been before.

---

A popper was a self-contained habitat payload. In its current form, it was an almond forty feet long and ten across at its widest point. There was a hollow space at its core for the Suicides, ten of whom would be going. It would be launched into space as part of a long-haul vehicle, pointy bit pointing upward, supported by a ten-foot-diameter sphere at its base, which would in turn be attached to the vehicle itself. The habitat was inflatable, designed to explode outward in a burst of oxygen-nitrogen upon contact wth the surface in a four-lobed design resembling a kernel of popcorn--hence the name "popper." The sphere contained essential supplies, and would be delivered nearby.

Both were dropped rather unceremoniously from orbit, and, in truth, the design itself was remarkably unconcerned with human life. Full success would entail the survival of at least two or three Suicides to prep the habitat for the next wave of explorers and yet more Suicides, who would begin the arduous task of establishing ever-larger habitats for colonists and terraformers.

Sean's team was the second to go. The first had failed completely, the popper missing its target floodplain by several miles and landing rather unceremoniously on its side, cracking open like an oyster and exposing the pulverized innards. The Sinai-Levant Corporation had been pleased, though--they had proven that they could make it as far as the planet itself.

Sean himself--and his nine compatriots, with whom he would be sharing a dark, windowless, coffinlike space for eight months--were the next stage in the grand experiment.

---

Sean woke up. His head hurt. His eyes blurred into white and pink and brown. A rancid smell registered. He sat up--and groaned, his back aflame. Rubbing his eyes, he looked around and found himself surrounded by the liquefied remains of his teammates--and Matty.

He was in a spacious dome, white but for dried blood and sundry flesh. The popper had deployed but good, and he had to clean up. But he remembered his training: supplies first.

He found the suits and slipped on the one marked with his name. He didn't bother checking for leaks.

He stepped out of the airlock and heard the wind whistling thinly. The sky was a muddy pink, the world an orangy red, the sun a distant star. He saw great pillars of red rock in the distance. His heart soared.

---

The next party arrived nearly two years later. No explanation was offered, none requested. He had no words. He was ready to go home.

---

They sent him to the diamond mines. In the winding dark deep beneath the ground, he remembered Dubai and Mars. The further he got from the sky, the more he dreamed of it.

The new Suicides he'd been tapped to lead were callow. They saw the Corps as something romantic, people bravely--and deliberately--giving their lives to further the cause. Suicides alone were responsible for accelerating the course of human evolution. The living Camps had already transformed the world's great cities, and mortality rates around the world had plunged while that of the Corps had taken off. Few made it past their third year, now.

Sean was nearly done with his sixth. When he re-upped, it had been before a grim-faced hatchet of a woman who had demanded strenuously for hours that he explain the drain on their resources if he didn't plan on dying any time soon. His only answer was that he still wanted to die and would prefer to continue exercising his right to do so. The hatchet couldn't refuse him his renewal on that basis.

Now he was blasting his way along, six miles below the surface, breathing in diamond dust. Three of his kids had had their heads blown off and their bodies abandoned as their former companions worked their way ever deeper. They whispered about him when they should have been asleep, he knew--the Suicide who wasn't. Misguided, they said, mistaken. He had to laugh; how was it possible for a suicidal person to be considered flawed because they weren't dead?

---

He spent his eighth and ninth years on Io, surveying the Knife Cliffs and mapping volcanic outflows. He was still in the Corps on sufferance; the brass didn't appreciate his seeming refusal to die and were doing their damnedest to kill him, going so far as to dump him alone on Io, the only passenger on a year-and-a-half voyage at skin-tearing acceleration. They didn't understand that he was still waiting for the other guy to pick up the phone.

When he rested and stared up at Jupiter, the fantastical gaseous storms raging on its surface, sky-spanning, the hitherto-unbelievable thought entered his mind, feeling natural: I'd be just fine if nobody answered.

Shuddering, he went recklessly back to work, hoping for an accident.

---

The Suicide Corps XO stared at him. "Ten years," he said.

Sean didn't answer. He felt something inside him, which had grown and grown over the long decade of suffering and horror, and which now filled him like a glittering butterfly in its chrysalis.

"Ten years," the XO said again. "You're the only one in thirty years to make it past six years in the Corps, much less serve a full two terms." He shot to his feet, paced behind his desk for a few minutes, and finally snapped, "What have you got to say for yourself?"

Sean opened his mouth, and then shut it. The ludicrous image of a fish gasping for air on the table next to its fishbowl sprang up unbidden, and he found its comparison to himself--a fishy suicide!--inexplicably funny. He exploded in gales of giggles.

"Get out," the XO said disgustedly.

---

He sat alone in his apartment. Six months since he had left the Corps. His family steadfastly ignored his calls. He had been crucified in the press. He couldn't find a job, and the Corps wouldn't take him back.

The rent was due in two days, and he had already had to spend his survival stipend. He was broke and faced eviction.

Nobody wanted a failed Suicide.

There was now only one way out.

We turned it loose in the Wild Lands. The Lands are large: many days of travel from end to end on horseback at full gallop.

It could run for weeks, blunder its way through the underbrush, kill and eat anything it liked. No bother would befall any person it met, because it would not meet any.

The hunting party is a long-standing tradition among those of our standing. Only the King has access to the Wild Lands, for it is his own right. We ride to horse and hound, and are tireless. The longest hunting party ever recorded was also very recent; three years ago, my compatriots, my King, and I rode for nearly eight months. That one had proven to be devilishly tricky to catch and had required many tricks to herd it away from the border, and only the savvy of the King's Cabinet and heir had saved the kingdom from falling into ruination as we rode.

Kings are foolish people. My father had a saying: "The scum rises to the top." This man, through his pedigree, had had thousands of years to rise, and had thousands more to go. His only real skill was improving the hunt through endless wasted opportunities engendered by both his ineptitude and social protocol. One does not loose until one is commanded to do so. Still, I reveled in it, as did my comrades--as far as we were concerned, it was mere capering with the prey, the false security before the lunge.

Two days after the game was given its head start, we began to ride. It was just after dawn. It had rained in the night, and left everything glossy with dew. We were in the heart of a gentle valley, and the morning mist clung to the ground still.

The hounds were being given their scent, and I took in my own. Dawn, rankly sweet on the wind. Then came the first baying, and we were off.

My nephew asked me the other day why I hunted something defenseless. How could I describe it to him, so inexperienced? The valley air, the sleepy gold that nestled in the hills, the first sound of belling, the horse underneath? Even the stink of sweat and shit and decay left behind by the fleeing prey?

Kings have always hunted harmless beasts--deer, birds, bears, the large mammals of Africa.
---
Things had changed. The hounds were less sure now, here on the shore of a large lake. Midday had come, and the wind was crisp. While we followed the trail, we had risen to a higher altitude, the floor of the valley sloping up into the foothills of the King's Mountains. On the other side the lake lay the mountains themselves, sharp-edged.

While the trail was being decided, I jostled with my fellows, wagering various sums on whether our quarry had chosen to go even higher, whether it circled the lake or swam, whether we had been following the wrong scent this time.

A cry went up. The Cloud-Duke had discovered a track. Northwards we rode. The beast had, so far, come up against the mountains and been deflected to the north. A good choice; the mountains required several days to pass on foot, and were too harsh to survive unprotected. Even if it had broken through, it would encounter plains, vast rolling plains that continued east for hundreds of miles. Open ground.

Inwardly, I praised the animal. Picking him off across the plains would have been too easy; letting the mountains kill him would have robbed us of satisfaction. The hunt would continue.
---
In the end, though, I had only this to say to my nephew: "Have you ever come up against someone who was your equal in chess, or tennis?"

"Yes," he said.

"And did you enjoy beating them?"

"Yes, very much."

"And being beaten by them?"

He looked surprised. "Of course. It doesn't matter who wins or loses. A good, hard game is what matters."

"You see?"

"That isn't the same."

"Isn't it?"
---
Two died yesterday. One was a cousin. In truth, they were all related to me in some way, but this one's family had split off from mine only two generations ago. The other was a foreigner, someone who had come from the south and married a distant relative on my father's side. Both had had their throats opened while they slept, and their hands had been taken, which was a boon to us.

It was getting hungrier as it went. And it had left a trail. Our cousins' blood and bones pointed the way for four hours, until I picked up the last and gave it to our doctor, who added it to the necklace he had made from the rest. Both left hands, reassembled, would be given to the widows at the end of the hunt. Both right hands would be added to the Hunters Gate.

As has always been done.

"That's no excuse," my nephew argued. "We're a species that likes change. You just have to look at the last four thousand years for proof of that."

"Yes," I said. "And we're also a species that detests unknown quantities. You just have to look at us for proof of that. We're a stable society whose conduct with other nations follows set rules that were written a thousand years ago. The hunting party is a right to which we are contractually entitled. It's been practiced for as long as our state has existed. Our longevity should provide you with a clue to the success of this method."

"There's another word for 'stability,' you know," he said.
---
One of our watchers picked up the animal, slightly more than a mile ahead on the next foothill. We had been following it north along the King's Mountains for a week, but the trail had been getting fresher. It had slowed down. The bylaws dictated up to five head starts if required within the first month of hunting.

It wasn't until we were a half-mile away that another watcher announced that it had stopped altogether. It took another hour to conclusively determine that it was not dead, merely resting and foraging.

While we waited, the King's logistician loaded a tent, table, chairs, tobacco, and a banquet onto the hillside. A fine luncheon was had by all.

Much of the prevailing chatter concerned rumors of a merger with Aztecago and sensational speculation on the effect that my southern cousin's death by prey would have on foreign relations. The doomsayers claimed Aztecago would instead attempt a hostile takeover, citing the hunting incident. However, a general question to all nobility regarding the acceptance of a merger with Aztecago was received with near-unanimous "ayes." When the proposal was officially made, it would be accepted.

"But enough of business," someone shouted, and was met with cheers.

At sundown, a sentry reported that the prey had apparently fallen asleep, so the logistician loaded the King's traveling castle. One more meal filled with flames and carousing, one particularly ribald joke circulating about the rape of the Glass Canyon plutarchy by the Window Kingdom. One man didn't laugh. My mood wasn't merry, so I sat next to him.

He was the Duke of Trujillo, a major industrial district near the heart of the Kingdom. His pedigree connected him to half the continent by blood or marriage, including Glass Canyon and the Windows.

I leaned in to him. "You're brooding, you know."

He waved his hand negligently. "Hunting's a good opportunity for introspection."

"You shouldn't concern yourself with Canyon-Window relations, you know." He looked at me. "Every family has its problems."

A soft scoff. "We don't have that sort of internecine fighting here."

"Well," I said. Took a swig of my beer. "We're the Kingdom of a Million Eyes. We're different."
---
"How?" my nephew asked. "What makes us different?"

"We're collaborative," I said. "Everyone has a stake in the Kingdom."

"Not equal stakes. The King has more than you do. And not everyone."

"Who, then?"

"The workers."
---
"I wonder how they feel," the Duke said. "When we finally run them to ground."

"They're animals," I said.

"They can think."

I laughed suddenly, softly. "I've had this conversation before. With my nephew. He thinks the hunting party is wrong."

The Duke looked at me. "How do you know it isn't?"

When the bugle rang the next morning, we gathered in the great hall of the King's traveling castle. The quarry had begun moving away under cover of darkness. It could no longer be seen--and the morning dew had fallen, obscuring the scent. A new challenge.

Out of protocol, we waited for the logistician to shut down the castle and rejoin the King before moving forward.
---
"What's wrong with the workers?" I said. "They're fine, aren't they?"

"But, Uncle," he said, and trailed off. "... we are their descendants," he said softly.

"Men didn't coddle their ancestors," I said. "They ate them and put them in zoos."
---
It had been a long day's ride. A smaller group had already split off, heading first west, then north at top speed. The game was getting too close to the Window Kingdom's borders, a historically hostile nation. Our King was currently on good terms with the Tsar, but a border crossing could put an end to that. The Windows were notoriously rigid about contact with outsiders; they had strange ideas about property and how to keep it. To prevent that, our western group would outrun the prey to the borderlands, circle around and herd it back to us in a pincer movement.

Or it could run west. Try to make it to the ocean. It had pulled us a long way north out of the desert and close to the giant forest, where the Tsar of Windows dwelled. Still, they were good lands close to the coast, many fertile valleys. Assuming it stayed out of our grasp, the prey would arrive at the ocean in fairly good health.
---
"Weren't we supposed to be better?" my nephew said.

"How do you mean? We are."

"Are we, Uncle?" He lunged at me suddenly, his eyes fiery. Taken by surprise, I took a step back. "That's how a worker reacts, you know. I've tried it on one of them. You looked just like him then."

I slapped him.

"You know," I said, rubbing my hand as the red marks faded, "I know you understand our history. Perhaps, though, you don't understand my position on it." I turned around. "Sit down."

I pulled up a chair and sat down in front of him. "The workers are, yes, related to us. We are cousins, descended from the same species, though their evolution has not experienced the same acceleration. Whether you in particular will accept it or not, they've been bred over a thousand years, both deliberately and through sheer happenstance, adapting to the environment we created for them. In this, we are similar to them; we've also bred ourselves."

"Yes, Uncle, I know," my nephew sighed, but he was cut off when I flung my arm behind me, pointing at the window.

"You see that city outside?" I said. I turned to look myself. "Those spires, the proportions of the dome...my ancestor and yours designed this place, wrote the code for perfection, loaded this city onto the land the first Million-Eyed King conquered after the quake." I pointed up at the painting behind my nephew. "Both men were virtually indistinguishable from workers, and they played a part in what you see before you. Our great-grandfather was awarded stock for the magnificence he built, and his children received the augmentations, and, through the centuries, birthed us."

I leaned back in my chair. "And you want to tear down the tradition he built. You want to leave his brothers to fend for themselves. We feed, shelter, and clothe them. We provide them with health care. We work so they can live in a better world. And all they have to do is work for us. I would say it's a fair trade."

He cast down his eyes. "With respect, Uncle, I disagree."

"I see."
---
The horn sounded. The prey had been sighted, a small blot on the distant shore. We were higher up the valley, and had moved around to the north, while another party had split off and were circling to the south.

Finally, we emerged from behind the valley's rim, and I saw the flash as its face turned to us, and the shift in color as its expression changed, and how it immediately turned and fled in the opposite direction, only to be stopped in its tracks by the line of men that lay in that direction.

It was cornered.
---
"That's a pity."

He shrugged. "I've heard the Window Kingdom is ferrying workers to the Shield lands, where they can stake a homestead and live as free men."

My eyes snapped to his face. "That's not possible."

He laughed bitterly. "According to whom? My cloistered elitist of an uncle?"

My gaze drifted back forward. "What matters it? Our workers number in the millions. A few to bleed off here and there may actually be healthy."

"I'm leaving tomorrow, you know, for the Window Kingdom," he said.
---
We closed in.

It backed into the water, frothing in a panic. The waves reached to its hips.

We clustered together in a long arc, ensuring no possibility of escape without drowning. If it stayed in the water, either that or hypothermia would ultimately kill it. Not ideal.

We waited. It turned blue and finally made its way forward. Standing in the center of our hemisphere, it glanced from face to face, as though searching for sympathy or mercy, any faint gleam of hope. It found none--until it lighted on me.

It spoke, its words rattling in its attenuated throat. "Uncle, please--"