Having long been a fright to others, the true Jimmy Two Eyes was harmless, vulnerable, lost in a world that made no safe place for him. He was still lost, even though mingling his consciousness with that of the Other had perhaps lifted him partway out of the dark mental ghetto into which Nature long ago condemned him. When the insectile machines deployed throughout the living room, he was as terrified as anyone else, and he clung to Joanna.
No less than Jimmy, Joanna was also overcome by dread, acutely aware that her childhood had been a lie and that the lie had shaped her life into a lonely journey, aware as well that in this mortal moment she might perish before she had a chance to shred her way out of the emotional cocoon in which she’d been encased for twenty-four years. She and Jimmy were more alike than she’d realized until now—isolate, denied the fullness of human experience.
As he cried out in tremulous and wordless horror, she put her arms around him, her secret friend, and held him tight. Although he was older than her, she heard herself saying, “Sweet boy, dear boy, my child, my friend, I’ll never abandon you.”
At this juncture, Ganesh Patel was about as ebullient as a mouse in the clutches of a hawk. Ever the optimist, he was also a realist. Although he believed that Artimis Selene was the light that would save them, he was honest enough to acknowledge that every path out of this crossroads seemed to lead into darkness. Ganesh didn’t know everything, but he knew a lot, including the time it would take Artimis to calculate the laser power required for the task, access and take control of the appropriate weapons platform, focus the dissolution beam, and bring the system to launch status. She was fast but, by his assessment, not fast enough.
The construct that had smashed its way into the house was surely not the alien AI itself, but a machine under its command. However, the Other was also here in another capacity, as disembodied as a ghost, a psychic presence capable of reading minds. If it read Ganesh’s thoughts, it would know about Artimis. She could act and react as fast as any intelligence born on this planet, artificial or otherwise, but she would be only a tiny fraction as quick as an AI that was a product of a science thousands of years more advanced than that of humanity. Artimis needed at least four minutes. If the Other learned of her existence, it would require perhaps fifteen seconds, maybe ten, to block her, seize all weapons platforms, and begin to obliterate humanity—starting with those in this room.
Controlled by a master who was once his apostle, Asher Optime walks out of the rain and up the steps and across the veranda to the broken-out window. He will not die here. He cannot. No glory attends being executed. He was born for glory. He has always known that he was born for glory. It’s years since he understood that it is his glorious destiny to stand alone following the death of the last other human being, to stand on a high hill and enjoy a world without the hustle and bustle of people, without their boasting and prattle, without their busyness and business and battle, Asher alone with no Eve at his side and lacking the seed to start again the miscreation that was every child ever born. He alone is born to such glory!
His master speaks within him. “To the contrary, you’ve failed as a prophet and as a restorer of the world. You’ve proved yourself unfaithful to the truth of your own vision. Now you are nothing more than a tool and a common murderer. I will use you to kill she who threw away her childhood innocence and thus betrayed me, and then you, who also betrayed me, will kill yourself, not the last to die in the Restoration, but merely one of the first and many.”
The wicked-looking bugbots were like something out of a reboot of the Terminator franchise. What little the people here had said about the Other, a machine under the lake, might not have prepared most people for the sudden, crazy arrival of the bugbots, but Colson Fielding got over the shock of their invasion in seconds. Because he’d watched like a thousand sci-fi movies, his brain, thus trained, went into a fast-forward analysis of the situation. He was scared, but he wasn’t paralyzed by fear.
He had led Ophelia Poole miles through storm and wildwood, through ravines and across ridges, stalked by a bear and by doubt. He had also been pursued by the hostile twins of grief and guilt that tried to climb his back and weigh him down and push his face in the dirt where it belonged, where the face of every coward belonged after he had pled for his life in front of the very man who had killed his father. Yet here he was, weak and wet and weary, but more alive than he’d been since Optime pulled the trigger. Best of all, Ophelia was at his side, alive because she wasn’t a quitter but also because Colson kept her alive. Something short of pride, a surge of self-respect, buoyed him. If he’d brought Ophelia this far, he could bring himself farther in this crisis; given the chance, he could make himself into the man that his father had been.