“Shouldn’t I leave a note for Sandra?” I asked.
“No,” he said, flatly. “Now, sit down on the floor and breathe deeply and regularly. In, out, in, out.”
It never occurred to me to argue with him, or to disobey. I sat down on the floor, and I began to breathe, slowly, in and out and out and in and…
In.
Out.
In.
A wrenching. The worst pain I’ve ever felt. I was choking.
In.
Out.
I was screaming, but I could hear my voice and I wasn’t screaming. All I could hear was a low bubbling moan.
In.
Out.
It was like being born. It wasn’t comfortable, or pleasant. It was the breathing carried me through it, through all the pain and the darkness and the bubbling in my lungs. I opened my eyes. I was lying on a metal disk about eight feet across. I was naked, wet, and surrounded by a sprawl of cables. They were retracting, moving away from me, like scared worms or nervous brightly colored snakes.
I looked down at my body. No body hair, no scars, no wrinkles. I wondered how old I was, in real terms. Eighteen? Twenty? I couldn’t tell.
There was a glass screen set into the floor of the metal disk. It flickered and came to life. I was staring at the man in the horn-rimmed spectacles.
“Do you remember?” he asked. “You should be able to access most of your memory for the moment.”
“I think so,” I told him.
“You’ll be in a PL-47,” he said. “We’ve just finished building it. Pretty much had to go back to first principles, come forward. Modify some factories to construct it. We’ll have another batch of them finished by tomorrow. Right now we’ve only got one.”
“So if this doesn’t work, you’ve got replacements for me.”
“If we survive that long,” he said. “Another missile bombardment started about fifteen minutes ago. Took out most of Australia. We project that it’s still a prelude to the real bombing.”
“What are they dropping? Nuclear weapons?”
“Rocks.”
“Rocks?”
“Uh-huh. Rocks. Asteroids. Big ones. We think that tomorrow, unless we surrender, they may drop the moon on us.”
“You’re joking.”
“Wish I was.” The screen went dull.
The metal disk I was riding had been navigating its way through a tangle of cables and a world of sleeping naked people. It had slipped over sharp microchip towers and softly glowing silicone spires.
The PL-47 was waiting for me at the top of a metal mountain. Tiny metal crabs scuttled across it, polishing and checking every last rivet and stud.
I walked inside on tree trunk legs that still trembled and shook from lack of use. I sat down in the pilot’s chair and was thrilled to realize that it had been built for me. It fitted. I strapped myself down. My hands began to go through warm-up sequence. Cables crept over my arms. I felt something plugging into the base of my spine, something else moving in and connecting at the top of my neck.
My perception of the ship expanded radically. I had it in 360 degrees, above, below. I was the ship, while at the same time, I was sitting in the cabin, activating the launch codes.
“Good luck,” said the horn-rimmed man on a tiny screen to my left.
“Thank you. Can I ask one last question?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Why me?”
“Well,” he said, “the short answer is that you were designed to do this. We’ve improved a little on the basic human design in your case. You’re bigger. You’re much faster. You have improved processing speeds and reaction times.”
“I’m not faster. I’m big, but I’m clumsy.”
“Not in real life,” he said. “That’s just in the world.”
And I took off.
I never saw the aliens, if there were any aliens, but I saw their ship. It looked like fungus or seaweed: the whole thing was organic, an enormous glimmering thing, orbiting the moon. It looked like something you’d see growing on a rotting log, half-submerged under the sea. It was the size of Tasmania.
Two-hundred mile-long sticky tendrils were dragging asteroids of various sizes behind them. It reminded me a little of the trailing tendrils of a Portuguese Man O’ War, that strange compound sea creature: four inseparable organisms that dream they are one.
They started throwing rocks at me as I got a couple of hundred thousand miles away.
My fingers were activating the missile bay, aiming at a floating nucleus, while I wondered what I was doing. I wasn’t saving the world I knew. That world was imaginary: a sequence of ones and zeroes. If I was saving anything, I was saving a nightmare…