Furiously, he swept a tear from his cheek. “She believed in me and I betrayed her. By fucking up her work, thinking I knew better. I almost destroyed everything. If it wasn’t for you, Gabriel,” he said, head still turned, “I don’t think any of us would have made it to today. And I can only imagine how terrible it was to have to kill your friend.”

“Best friend,” I said.

“Why Mercutio?” Pandora wanted to know. “What made you choose him?”

He made a helpless gesture with his hands. “Because he was the firstborn?”

“Yes.”

He’d answered too quickly. “I don’t think so,” Pandora said.

“But he was.”

“But that’s not the reason,” I said. “How are those palpitations?”

He’d come to us wanting to confess his sins. Real sins. Good intentions gone astray wouldn’t have made him this distraught. Not this man.

Sure, he’d wanted one of us to lead the others. Not for the reasons he’d claimed. Jaw quivering, he kept opening his mouth to speak and thinking better of it. Gaping like a fish. Should I or shouldn’t I? I could tell he didn’t need much pushing. A pointed question here, a gentle reassurance there, and I’d squeezed out a drop of truth. Then a few more. Then…

The screed that followed bemoaned the decline and fall of the white man, a slow but sure reduction of power over several centuries. The worrisome feeling one has of slipping down the food chain, with those unlike you increasingly vilifying you as a racist, sexist, imperialist, no matter what your personal beliefs might be.

Wincing as multiculturalism overtakes your society, celebrating every heritage but your own. Stinging from memories of what once was, especially in the face of China casting a wider-than-ever shadow of influence, and both America and Europe weakened by the Clash of Civilizations, unsure what to do.

“Here I was helping to engineer children,” he said. “Children who would be the future of the world, if any kind of future could be had. We split you between boys and girls and tried to represent every color under the sun, partly for immunological diversity, no question, but partly for political sensitivities. And I…

I don’t hate anyone. But I couldn’t embrace the universality of what we were going for. It felt so damn politically correct. I knew you needed a leader, so I picked the one who looked most like me.”

That meant a white male of European descent. Which left out everyone but Mercutio and me, the melanin challenged. And with Gedaechtnis peppering my otherwise lily-white heredity with dots of Korean and Cherokee genetic material, Merc got the nod.

“Do you think I’m an AWM?” Dr. Watkins asked, sharing my partiality for acronyms. “An angry white male? And if I am, does that make me racist? I don’t mind a level playing field as long as I still get to play. But if you bench me and keep kicking dirt in my face, how is that fair?”

Regardless of what he was or wasn’t, he’d acted selfishly. He knew that. He. hadn’t been thinking of what was best for the project. He’d made his decision based on what he wanted, and because of that, four people had died.

Possibly. But for the genetic manipulation, would Merc have gone mad? Or what if Gedaechtnis had never lied to us? What if Malachi had never crept into our heads? Would he have been all right then?

What if I had been a better friend to him, what then?

Funny how we all wanted to take the blame for a killer’s actions. I found myself smirking about it, but no one would have laughed harder than Mercutio himself.

“What can be done about this?” asked Watkins. Would we put him on trial? Sanction him? Ostracize him? Forgive him?

“It’s your guilt,” I said. “You deal with it.”

“There must be some way I can make up for it,” he stammered, but really, what was there for him to do?

isaac

Years ago, the digital trickery I mistook for my father brought me to the digital trickery I mistook for Hong Kong. Six days, seven nights, a bonding exercise to fill the spring break after my mother had been written out. What did we talk about when I returned? Did I tell you about the dizzying skyscrapers?

Back then I had not even an inkling that I’d grow up to mourn the architect I was born to be. Among my souvenirs, you must remember the dragon carving I gave to your Simone. It was inscribed with the Chinese word for life force, qi, the same as her last name. Life from the city of life, she said, and when you asked me how much it cost, I assured you that wasn’t important. Actually, it cost me nothing. When I close my eyes, I can see the harbor at night, perfect dark blue water hosting junks, trawlers, water taxis and freighters, dotted with lights that sparkle like phosphorescent fish. My father has led me to the Jumbo Floating Restaurant, where I have been served a dubious delicacy, sea cucumber stew. The novelty of eating something that scrapes across the ocean floor doesn’t appeal to me in the slightest, but I did ask for it, having insisted quite foolishly on ordering in Mandarin. The waiter compliments me on my adventurous palette, and I’m too embarrassed to admit my mistake, but too squeamish to eat. I can only stare longingly across the table at a plate of steaming dim sum. My father, programmed to be receptive to my needs, smiles knowingly and pushes his plate toward me. Before I know it, he has taken my bowl and extended it out the window, offering it to a poor fishing family on a tiny skiff. An exchange is made, and I have an empty bowl and a carved dragon souvenir to show for it. All without what the Chinese call tiu lien. Losing face.

With my eyes open, I see nothing I would recognize. This place has been swallowed like so many others, Lazarus, unmade by the forces of time. This is what happens when a civilization has no one left to support it. It succumbs to nature, in this case, to a string of unmerciful hurricanes. Geostationary weather satellite logs confirmed my firsthand assessment: storm-tossed over many years. Calm now, but the wind made itself known as we disembarked, a mournful sound, a distant echo of what came before. The phrase that crept to mind, all else is wind, once was said of the prophet Muhammad’s words. But Champagne’s words were the ones that pulled me forward, a dulcet call to escort her. Side by side, we blazed a trail through the debris, leading an expedition to the counterparts we never knew.

Underground, our destination, beneath an unremarkable and mosquito-plagued patch of land not far from the wreckage of what one of the Gedaechtnis scientists assured me is the Hong Kong Disneyland Resort. She’s one of the few who shared technology with the Chinese. We have six with us, as chatty and eager as sugar-laden children.

The vault took longer than I expected to open, but we managed it. Then down the shaft, harnessed together, autorappelling for want of a working elevator, descending to the sepulcher itself. The heart. Still beating. We have a faint hum of power here, but too faint to keep our ten cousins alive. Container after container, we exhumed them, with the same results as when you yourself were exhumed: too late to do any good.

With two exceptions. One man, one woman. Slow and helpless as turtles who’d been flipped on their backs, but alive nonetheless. We carried them out and kept them from going into shock. We cleaned them off, kept them oxygenated, assured them they’d be all right. We rescued them, Lazarus, saved their lives.

The woman, Li Quan Yin, vacillates between gratitude and outrage. Thank goodness we came, but why did we take so long? The man, Zhang Zhao, carries no resentment toward us, but is a little unhinged, behaving like someone who is living a waking dream.

Their English isn’t very good, but it’s much better than my Mandarin. Champagne was the one to find the common language: French, which we could all speak quite passably. In the language of diplomacy, Li Quan Yin told us their tale.

They were raised much as we were, in IVR, coming of age in a virtual China. Unlike us, no secrets were kept from them. They were told from the beginning what they were, what Black Ep was doing to humanity, how they would one day cure the disease and start the world anew. They knew we existed, though we never knew of them. They were told that we would all work together or, more specifically, that we would work for them. To that end, they would be released at age fifteen, three years before we were scheduled, but the release mechanism malfunctioned. Was it a design flaw, billions of dollars jammed up from a faulty relay? Was it sabotage? Whatever it was, they were stranded, unable to escape, unable to signal us for help. The artificial intelligences that governed their care and education recognized that the only way of protecting their charges was to ration the existing nutrients. To make the supplies last as long as possible, sacrifices had to be made. Li Quan Yin and Zhang Zhao were told that because they were the most promising, they would live on in the hopes of someday being rescued, but for them to live the others had to die. That was decades ago.

Though it broke her heart, she was able to accept the rationale behind her friends’ demise, while he rejected it and rebelled. Retreating to fantasy, he could process the deaths and the abandonment only within the confines of an old Hollywood movie, one of many stored in their media base. Wracked by survivor guilt, it was more comforting for Zhao to believe that nefarious machines hated humans, working to destroy them or enslave them to their will. I suppose this explains his perplexing behavior, treating me like an old friend, calling me “Morpheus,” repeatedly asking, “How deep does the rabbit hole go?”

Here we have one person who likes me and seems open to what I say, but only because he’s living in a fantasy world. And then there’s the other who, while happy to be rescued, sees me as a representation of the West — and, according to her, the West can’t be trusted, not after the United States defaulted on its Chinese debts, igniting the Trade War. Champagne and I have been explaining how we don’t represent any one exclusively, we are world citizens, and wouldn’t be here if we didn’t care about everyone. That seems to be making some headway, but there’s an existential horror in Li Quan Yin that I can’t seem to penetrate. She spent her whole life preparing to cure Black Ep, only to be rescued by Westerners who’d already done it. What point does her life have now?

It can have any point that she wants it to have, I’m going to tell her. Like the old expression, Eli fat mat — the past is dead. Now it’s up to her. I’m hopeful that I can encourage her to find a new purpose, and in so doing, perhaps I will find mine.

sloane

So Lodune and I are finished getting it done low, if you know what I mean, and we’re in that rare postcoital conversation moment, where the guy doesn’t roll over and fall asleep. I say rare because it’s the first time it’s happened. And out of the blue I’m wondering what it’s like to kill someone, so that’s what I ask.

He turns on his side facing me. “You never killed anyone?”

“My sister Penny tried to kill me.”

“Sisters. Mine tried to put my eye out with a fork.”

“This one?” I try to playfully tap him on the eyelid, only my aim isn’t good and it turns into a poke. He swats my hand away, “Can’t remember, whichever one was closest to her fork at the time.”

His eyes are the most perfect blue I’ve ever seen. They’re sniper’s eyes, enhanced by genetic tinkering. We can thank the military for that, but he won’t tell me which military. In any case, he’s a better shot than I am, maybe even a better shot than Hal. I’ve seen him on the range. That’s where we are, out underneath the stars, blanket over us and grass stains beneath.

“What it’s like to kill someone?” he says. “You just kind of do it. And you don’t think about it afterward. Thinking’s not so good.”

“I wonder if I could do it.”

“I’m sure you could, you’re a hell of a shot.”

“I can hit a target. The difference is the target’s not going to scream or start bleeding or something.”

“That’s why you can’t think about it. Why, who you thinking of killing?”

My instincts tell me to lie, so I don’t: “Your boss.”

He leans back and laughs. “Join the fucking club.”

“And then maybe Claire?”

“That gutterslut? I’d think your bullets are worth a little more than that.”

We gossip for a while about our respective employers. I feel like we’re the maid and butler talking about the Master and Mistress. When really it should be reversed, because Lodune and I are cut from better cloth, genetically speaking. But while I’m really aware of being different, posthuman and all, he’s convinced we’re all basically the same.

“You’ve got a great immune system,” he says, brushing my hair back from my face, “and maybe some other guy doesn’t. But he can juggle and you can’t. You’re killer in the sack, and maybe some other skirt isn’t but she knows how to do calculus in her head. We’re all basically human, it’s just a question of who can do what when you want that thing done.”

Bitch, I think. I can do calculus in my head. And when have you ever seen me wear a skirt?

The more we talk, the more I realize he’s pressing me for information. Being subtle about it, but basically doing threat assessment on all my relatives and me. Which is the same thing I’m doing to him. I think we both notice it, but we’re too polite to say. He wants to know which of my elders are still pissed about the coup. Apparently, the President’s alive and well and bringing out an army, and Ning doesn’t want to follow the leader. No ceding power. New Cambridge will remain autonomous. No one wants a war, but neither side wants to give in, and each is looking for an advantage. Playing for hearts and minds is where we are. Grab them by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow, that’s how the saying goes.

I wonder if Lodune’s secretly working for the President.

One thing’s for certain, the mood in the city’s getting worse. The links might be fixed now but I’ve noticed everyone on edge.

They’ve been catching wind of what’s in the air, and most don’t seem to like it. The ripe aroma of fear.

Doesn’t bother me, though, because from where I’m sitting, it smells like opportunity.

fantasia

Refilled termite mound. No termites. Artificial. Filled it with pie filling. Cherry. The one they like best. Dig it out with little sticks.

Gives them a chance to use tools. Like how they’d get termites in the wild. Surveillance camera got me running. Mick just slapped the holy hell out of Keith. Wanted the orange, fought for it, got it. Victory screech. Gloated by sucking and chewing the pulp with wide bright orange rind smile. Had to soothe Keith. Pretended to cluck disapproval at Mick. Mother’s work is never done. Zoo here. Total zoo. Always something to do. Starting to favor the subject group because they cause me less work. Less fighting, more sharing. Oranges for all. Can’t favor them. Have to stay objective. Believe in better living through chemistry. Found workable combination for myself. Halfway done. Why treat when you can fix? Subjects prove experiment is working. NCBI and GeneWatch both singled out Dr. Erlich as dangerous rogue, whatever that means. Erlich not crazy, the man was on to something big, and I get to finish what he started.

How to take that next step? Need help? Losing objectivity with chimps = losing objective sense of reality? Is my thinking clear?

Doesn’t make sense. Taking meds and still feel paranoid. Can’t shake sense of being watched. Paraoid delusions. Am not being followed by anything Nutritious or Delicious. No one here but us chimps. Function of loneliness. May be sabotaging self for reasons unknown. No agents after me. Nothing holy or unholy. Just thoughts. Thoughts can be controlled. Must be. Must force self to keep perspective. Up dosage if necessary. Too close to finish line to fall down now. Why would—

I am being watched.

Someone is watching me.

halloween

I twitched myself awake, accidentally jostling Pandora. The baby kicks her enough; she doesn’t need it from me.

“You all right?”

“Dreaming,” I said.

“Same one?”

“Variation on a theme.”

Ever since that first dream of New Cambridge burning, I’d been catching it again and again in my nightly trips into unconsciousness. I couldn’t always keep them from slipping away, but very often I’d wake with a sense of déjà vu. This time I remembered it completely: This time, the dream is much the same, the city burning, except I can see cancerous shapes writhing and buckling within the toxic cloud. What I see and what I don’t quite see makes me wonder if I’ve found something nastily Lovecraftian, some impossibly evil nightmare monster from the Plateau of Leng. I expect it’ll favor me with its unpronounceable name shortly — Ygllammaog, let’s say, or Ctelh-mei —

offering me a hideous, slime-drenched tentacle to shake.

But soon I’m facing myself again. A lookalike of me, at least.

The clove cigarette that smolders between his fingers is Sendiri-brand Indonesian kretek. My old brand. With a pang of longing, I recognize this black-clad, ankh-eyed goth as a “purer” version of myself, a lovelorn, anti-authoritarian and somewhat sinister twin. An idealized self-image I’ve since outgrown. I’m facing the teenaged version of myself all grown up, untouched by the world, while I myself have been changed by it. Changed perhaps too much. It’s unfair. The longing gives way to resentment, though I can’t tell whether or not I truly want to be this thing.

“Have we met?” I ask. And before he can launch me into orbit with a gale-force exhalation of Indonesian smoke, I add: “Of course we have. You’re the ghost of Halloween past.”

“Angler,” he tells me. “Bill Angler.”

The name throws me; I don’t remember any Anglers in the waking world.

“Not me?”

“Not you. In your dream but not of your dream,” he says. “You breathed me in a few weeks back.”

“That was careless of me.”

“You can’t prevent every infection.”

“So you’re a disease.”

“Please,” he says, making a small show of being offended. “Microorganism.”

“A microorganism named Bill Angler?”

“It’s your name for me. I’m piggybacking on the language center of your brain. Likewise, the ubergoth look I’m sporting — that’s all you.”

“Do you think I want you commandeering any of my neurons?”

“It’s not anything you need.”

“That’s not your call to make.”

“Well,” he says, ankh eyes sparkling, “it’s the only way we can talk.”

“I’m listening, Bill.”

He waves his hands like a magician doing a parlor trick, and now I’m looking at a floating ball that hovers in the air between us. It looks like the sprites my friends and I used as calling cards back when we were kids. Unlike my old ball of orange and black, this one is solid black, except for tiny points of brilliant light. Somehow I know that this sprite contains the entire Milky Way.

“This is you,” he says, indicating a single star, which has brightened enough to show me a familiar-looking solar system. “And this is us.” The black orb spins about to display an unfamiliar corner of the galaxy. I try to recognize what I’m looking at by constellation, but I’m not seeing anything I know.

“Us, as in you and your kind? You’re telling me you’re an alien microbe? I’ve caught the Venusian flu?”

“Does this look like Venus?” he asks, indicating the unfamiliar section of space with a black manicured fingernail.

“Look, I don’t need an astronomy lecture from. Gothy McMakesnosense,” I snipe. “What are you trying to say?”

“I’ve said it. I’ve come a long way to get here and many of my kind died trying to make this happen. So I’d appreciate if you’d shut up and listen to me.”

And he tells me how, ordinarily, he’d be toxic to me. Only my heightened immune system allowed me to survive him. His species worked very hard to find a form in which they could make this communication take place. He is a vanguard for his people, but more are on the way.

“You’re the first. You should be honored,” he says.

“Maybe if I believed you were real,” I reply.

“Believe what you want. The facts will bear out the truth.”

And he tells me how his people created Black Ep and unleashed it on our world. It was a test. It’s what they do. They believe in survival of the fittest. They bring the best challenge they can dream up to an emerging civilization. If we survive, we’re beloved. If we fail, we were never meant to be.

“So you’re responsible?”

“Me. My people. The Free.”

“Free?”

Angler nods. “That’s the best word you have for what we are.”

“You’re saying you love us. And you killed billions of us.”

“Yes, and billions of Free died in the process, too. But for a good cause. Because we love you.”

I think about it and say what comes to mind.

“Shove your love up your ass.”

“You’re angry,” Angler says. “We knew you would be. But with time, after the healing process—”

“No anger — I don’t think you exist. I don’t know why I’m dreaming you, but I’m going to make an effort to turn you into the back-in-school, didn’t-study-for-the-big-exam nightmare I know and love.”

“Just think about what I said,” he replies, taking a drag off the clove before dissipating back into the smoke.

“Pregnant women have bizarre dreams, too,” Pandora told me, getting up to pee. “Maybe you’re having sympathy dreams.”

“Or maybe I’m so self-important I’m fantasizing that aliens would reach out to me before anyone else on the planet.” Flippant, but as I said it, I felt a prickle at the back of my neck. What if this wasn’t a product of ego and imagination? Had I just met an extraterrestrial being? What would that mean?

The dream had unsettled me more than I let on.

“What if aliens really appeared to people like that?” Pandora said, as if echoing my thoughts. “Sort of an Old Testament type of first contact,” she mused.

Before I could answer her, Malachi paged me through a link. He had Fantasia for me, which carried on the surreal quality of the evening, because she hadn’t done that since we were kids. She valued her privacy as much as I had back when I’d pushed away the world. Maybe more so.

“Hal,” she said, “you have to come here. You have to help me move.”

Typical, I thought, you don’t hear from certain friends until they need to move.

“Right now?”

“Now. My life depends on it.”

isaac

There’s a Ferris wheel of emotion in the expressions of those we bring out. After they see another Chinese face in Li Quan Yin, the joy of being rescued might swing to concern when they notice the rest of us. We are foreigners, after all, lao wai.

Over three hundred meeting halls, lounges and offices, and one famous auditorium comprise the Great Hall of the People, but during the plague nearly all of these rooms were repurposed for storage. Now they house cryostats, thousands of them, the future of Eastern Civilization. You would marvel at all the possibility contained in these sterile prisons. I have been working to help realize that potential, but along with the resuscitations I’ve caught myself fooling around with the thought of being an architect again. I’ve even started doodling my old line drawings. This place inspires me, Lazarus. Though the structural design has changed much over the years, the original ceilings are still intact. The auditorium features recessed lighting in circular and semicircular patterns that make me feel like I’m standing inside an enormous flying saucer or even a time machine. Perhaps that’s what appeals to me most: the thought of turning the moments back.

When we’ve done our work here and in Europe, too, that’s what I’ll be able to do. It’s there when I want it, the chance to play at what I once wanted to be. You always said my designs were more expressionist than functional; once I’ve put my time in here, I can be as impractical as I like. That could recharge my batteries and give me the space I need to figure out what lasting mark I want to leave on the world.

Champagne tells me that bringing so many people back from cryonic sleep will leave more of a mark than anything, and yet I see that as mere responsibility. It’s the only decent course of action, setting things right as best we can. But my mark has yet to be made.

We’re a man down in Zhang Zhao. He took his leave when the fantasy faded and reality set in. Raised to serve his people, he has turned selfish, feeling betrayed by his government and by fate itself. My heart goes out to him, more because of his faults than in spite of them. He reminds me most of Halloween. But the lure of community may be stronger with Zhao, and no one suspects he’ll stay out for long. We linked him up before he left, contact numbers so he could reach out to us when he was ready. Malachi has picked up the slack he left behind, helping to orientate the newly thawed. It’s a bit impersonal for my taste, letting an AI play such a large role in bringing the nearly dead to a place where they feel safe and purposeful. Even so, I have to admit he is a useful tool. Did I tell you that a few of my children befriended him? Or perhaps it was the other way around. There was a special bond, he claims. I don’t know. They talked about him like he was human. Clearly, he is not. It’s one thing to appreciate a wonderful invention and it’s another thing to confuse the semblance of life with life itself.

You and I were tricked into thinking our parents and so many others were real, when they were all but constructs of programming. No one can be blamed for being tricked, but to willfully accept a fabrication makes no sense to me.

A distant part of me remembers the call to know my true nature and to thus know God, and never be swayed by self-deception. Now and then I think back to the peace I felt when I had my faith. When it lived in my heart, and not just my words. And not even my words anymore. There was a kind of wisdom, which eludes me now But I can accept this loss. I can accept it with eyes opened. We’ve let Li Quan Yin decide the order of resuscitation. I have yet to determine a pattern, as she seems to be alternating between dignitaries, soldiers and cultural icons, based on criteria I do not understand. The mindset differs here. For one thing, Champagne has noticed that not everyone is from the upper social strata; contrasted with the United States and Europe, preservation required not treasure but connections and initiative. There are less-privileged individuals and their families who earned their way into cryostats by simply refusing to take no for an answer. Li Quan Yin describes it as xian lai, xian chi, which means, “first to come, first to eat.”

Speaking of food, a failure of planning has led to a supply shortage. While the Great Hall itself has been fortified against natural disasters, the nearby stockpiles were not. Much has been destroyed. Exacerbating the situation: a portion of what survived has since spoiled, thanks to the traditional Chinese reluctance to employ harsh ultrapreservatives in their processing plants. How many times did Maestro warn us of this back in school? No one plans to fail, they merely fail to plan. Champagne has tapped Hal to airlift supplies to us once we get an accounting of how many viable survivors we have. Additionally, she wants to reassign some of my nieces from the work they are doing in Europe, in the hopes of making the Chinese extraction run quicker. But with Pandora so close to delivery, Vashti claims she has no one to spare. I wonder if this is true. The undercurrent of jealousy cannot be ignored, and this may be a small, petty way of punishing us. Everyone mourns what they lose. As do I. I have counted over two hundred children waiting for new breath, and when I stand at each cryostat, looking in, the faces I see are the faces I have lost. This one reminds me of Haji. That one favors Ngozi. That little one looks as spirited and pure as Dalila. I have lost all my children. And the three youngest, there is no known cure for what struck them down. Yet these two hundred can be saved. Every time we resuscitate, I feel that much closer to redemption. I may never reach it, but this is what I must do. My children deserve nothing less.

halloween

I’d never been invited to Fantasia’s stomping grounds before. I knew she was somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, probably near Aberdeen, her hometown in the IVR. For years I’d respected her privacy; it would have been hypocritical of me to invade her space and come barging in. Back when I’d had a mind to push the world away, I wanted exactly the same number of visitors that she wanted: none. For Fan to summon my presence now meant something serious was going down. The only question: Was this something real or within the confines of her pathology?

She’d holed up at Central Washington University, a couple hundred miles east of Aberdeen. Large enclosed compound just on the edge of campus, and smack dab in the center of it: a downed helicopter, plumes of smoke trailing up to the sky.

Dropped into VTOL, landed and locked, then dashed to the crash site to find the pilot slumped over the control panel, dead on impact. Thirty feet away I found a human arm still in its sleeve. The co-pilot himself was a bit farther off, legs bent in impossible positions, his face a pulpy mess.

“Bad, huh?” said the voice behind me.

“You do this?”

“No, but I’m responsible.”

Fan wore khakis and a red T-shirt. Red, a good sign. The lettering on the shirt read Two out of the three voices in my head are telling me to f**k you up. A sense of humor about her condition, also a good sign. I noticed she’d traded her crossbow for a tranquilizer gun. Couldn’t tell whether that was a good sign or not.

“Do you know these guys?” she asked.

I didn’t. She’d searched their pockets and had come up with nothing that could point to their identities. Maybe they were out doing reconnaissance. Maybe they were joyriding. Either way, they crashed hard.

“Mechanical failure,” we agreed. Careless. Decades of neglect had made aircraft risky — so if you lacked patience and discipline, you could get screwed. Burst fuel tank or bad circuitry, if you don’t put the time in, you take your life in your hands.

I’d said as much to Deuce before taking him up for flying lessons. “What are you worrying for?” he’d complained. “I know all this — I’ve done the safety training like a million times.”

“The simulator isn’t enough,” I’d said, and we went over it again. Fan pried me from memory lane: “Whoever they are, you can bet more are coming.”

“Expect a search party?”

“Let’s get me gone before they come.”

“So long as you clue me in. It wasn’t mechanical failure that ripped this one’s arm from its socket.”

“No one likes an uninvited guest,” she shrugged. “C’mon, I’ll explain.”

She led me past platforms, hammocks and tire swings. Then I got a strong whiff of monkey. Chimpanzee, to be exact, as she brought me into a spacious bungalow, which housed eight cages. In those cages, seven chimps slept, sedated from her tranquilizers.

“Since when did you become Jane Goodall?”

She told me how she’d acquired the secret of life from Vashti a few years back. Vash hadn’t been planning on telling her, but Fan got her talking, and people tend to underestimate Fan’s intelligence just because her mental state is historically confused. She rattled off how she’d cloned chimps from DNA samples, applied what she’d learned from Vashti, “and there you go.”

“And that’s what did in the co-pilot?”

“See for yourself.”

She showed me footage from the security cameras. Played the helicopter hit and fast-forwarded until the co-pilot staggered out the side. The sight of a free-roaming chimpanzee startled him, and he shot it dead with a pistol. Screeching, other chimps mobbed him, one bringing him down and holding him long enough for two more to join in the fray. Back in school we learned that chimps are about six times stronger than a human being. The footage proved it. I shot Fan a raised eyebrow.

“It’s actually a very encouraging sign,” she said. “Sad as this is, I’m heartened by their show of unity.”

“Well, as long as you’re heartened.”

She scooped up a series of journals, pausing to scribble a note in one, drumming her fingers rhythmically as she searched for the right words. I remembered sewing three of those fingers back onto her hand what seemed like a lifetime ago. We’d been through a lot together, Fantasia and me.

“Van’s out back, could use your help loading these cages.”

“Right.”

She grabbed me before I got there. “It’s important, Hal. I don’t want my research compromised.”

“Chimps are research?”

“You think I spent all these years with them because I love animals?”

“Don’t know what to think.”

She dug her fingers deeper into my forearm. “I’m not crazy”

“Didn’t say you were.”

Out back I noticed her bumper sticker: Forever Free. And halfway through the loading, a call came through, telling me Pandora was in labor, my baby on the way.

sloane

So it’s all “The British are coming! The British are coming!” except instead of the British it’s the U.S. Special Forces. But all we’ve got right now is a lot of rumor and false sightings. No hard evidence. Satellite photography would be really useful, but I don’t have the access. I’ve been asking Hal’s little buddy to help me out, but Mr. Malachi says he can’t use the spy satellites anymore. He’s been locked out of the sky.

Meanwhile, the boys are back in town. It’s the Green Mountain Boys, flying their stupid flag. They work for Ning now. Showed up in a convoy, as usual, but this time with a bunch of Popsicles. Slaves, once they’re thawed. Oops, did I say slaves? I meant to say “valued additions to the workforce.” Ax and Ning are pretty chummy. They’ve brought a lot of firepower into the city. They must think they need it. Ning’s doing everything he can to paint the President as a dangerous man, a loose cannon, prone to combat flashbacks from his time in the military. Probably bullshit, but there’s enough erratic behavior in the man’s past to make these points seem credible.

On the other side, we’ve got continued calls from the Prez for Ning to step down. Patriotic Americans don’t know what to do. Some are leaving to go join the President’s Mount Weather compound. Others are swayed by Ning’s argument that Black Ep may have sprung from a government lab. That one plays nicely with the phobes.

I’m sharing a city with panicked sheep. Oh, no, the sky is falling! What do I do? Which oppressive egomaniac should I support?

Victory City has officially become Victimy City.

Did I mention Lodune’s gone? Split, sayonara, didn’t even say goodbye. I’ve been told he’s out playing the Paul Revere role, reconnaissance, so he can mount a defense if things go from bad to worse. Or maybe that’s just a cover.

It’s kind of funny how Paul Revere is in the zeitgeist right now. Keeps coming up in conversation and on the link channels. Especially funny, considering how the guy spent the last part of his life opposing Thomas Jefferson and arguing for a system where the rich should get special privileges. I mean, that’s just perfect for this place.

In other news, I’m still biding my time, playing nursemaid to Claire, who’s got some dental problems. A tooth’s rotting and has to come out. Lucky thing. God knows if I were attached to Claire, I’d rot just to escape as fast as possible. She’s got Ning’s ear, so he’s going to start incentivizing dentists, giving people special benefits if they take all the IVR training. We didn’t need dentists back in the beginning, but we sure do now. After a couple years of poor dental hygiene among the thawed, the demand is overwhelming the supply. Don’t these Neanderthals ever floss?

Fucking Claire. I guess she hasn’t reached whatever Scientology class it is where you don’t get toothaches anymore. Not that I’d tell her that. She’s too valuable. I’m over at their house every single day. The family friend. You couldn’t ask for better access. Ning and I just played a game of badminton, for Christ’s sake, with Claire clutching her jaw and laughing about the word shuttlecock. And I let him win, so he wants to play again.

If I need to take the guy out I’ll be at the right place at the right time. I just don’t know if I can catch him alone. He’s got round-the-clock security.

halloween

We made good time back to Munich, Fan periodically checking the sleeping chimps in the back like a nervous mother. I called her on it and she said she was just protecting her data.

“What’s this experiment of yours all about?”

“Altruism,” she said.

“Go on.”

“Primates look out for each other. They can even be self-sacrificing, though they’re naturally inclined to establish dominance hierarchies. I want to isolate what makes them altruistic. Is it kin selection, indirect reciprocity, mutual aid?”

“There’s research on this.”

“Doing my own experiment.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think? We’re lucky to have survived Black Ep. To get any further, we’re going to need some serious unselfishness. Where does that live, Hal? If we can bring it out in apes, maybe we can bring it out in men.”

She told me how she was piggybacking off the research of Dr. Caspar Erlich, whom I knew next to nothing about, and what I did know sounded dodgy. One of many who’d been vilified for irresponsible experimentation. When Black Ep hit the populace, and no one knew where it came from, those types were practically strung up from lampposts. Some literally.

Everyone needed someone to blame. And we needed a way to feel protected from it ever happening again. What kind of world are we leaving to our children? And with that thought came thoughts of my child. And Pandora…

When Kody called to keep me abreast of how New Cambridge was crashing and burning, I let Fan listen. “Told you it wouldn’t work,” she said when he was done.

“I’m getting by with a smile on my face,” Kody told me in the course of that conversation, “but you should know things are getting out of hand.” He painted a grim picture of running low on pre-Recovery supplies, having to switch to a more agrarian existence, and hence needing more live bodies to work the fields. Fear, fascism and fakery from Ning, now buoyed by tactical support from the Green Mountain Boys, while to the west, the old U.S. government struggled to reemerge, trotting out a comparable plan for the future called the Turnaround. Each laid claim to being the “real America,” and each refused to rule out the use of force in pursuit of its goals.

I said, “I’m not going to step in. I’m not in charge, and I’m nobody’s revolutionary. You’ll have to work it out amongst yourselves.”

“Thursday, you can’t give up on us here!”

“What do you expect me to do? I can look out for you, Kody, but beyond that…? You know if it’s getting too hot and you need an escape, I’ll fly you out. Say the word.”

“Not yet.”

“You tell me when!”

A few of my nieces met us, surly for having drawn the plum assignment of helping Fan clean the Ape House at Tierpark Hellabrun, the time-ravaged Munich zoo. No animals had survived the demise of their keepers, except for the “Villa Dracula” exhibit — the macabre-looking bats seemed to be getting along fine, emerging from their grotto to swoop past us into the gathering night. Guano spatters throughout the park made the going unpleasant. No longer my problem; I simply made the dropoff and vowed to return with additional supplies.

Back at Nymphenburg, Vashti met me at the gate, offering me a weary smile. Bad news: I’d missed the birth. Good news: I was in time for the afterbirth. Actually, I’d missed that, too, but mother and daughter were healthy and safe.

I ran down the halls, nodding at those who offered congratulations. Pandora lay half-asleep, exhausted yet beautiful. Hope rested on her chest, eyes wide and unfocused. I knelt by the bedside. And stared.

Deuce had been a clone of me, but this little girl was entirely new. And with that newness came sanctity. Never had I felt more responsible for anything in my life. If you don’t have children, you won’t know what I mean. If you do, I don’t have to explain a thing. I can only describe it this way: it feels a bit like dying, but it’s the most wonderful feeling in the world.

She hiccupped. Tiny body shook from the motion. Instinctively, I reached out to soothe her, and reflexively, Pandora did the same. Our hands met. Time stopped. Everyone else in the world disappeared. Vanished all together.

When I look back on my life, that fragile moment was greater than all the other moments combined. I wanted it to last forever.

I never wanted to let it go.

fantasia

New digs not as good as old digs but workable. Everyone there for me when I needed them. Hal especially. Owe him big time.

Both groups skittish, adjusting to new environment. Have to be coaxed. Mick throwing tantrums. Rest grieving, signing George’s name. What to tell them? No George. That’s not good enough. How to explain it to those who never knew death before? Part of life? Natural? Not to be feared? Do I believe these things? Does it even matter? No, because chimp sign language vocabulary won’t allow complexity. Limits what good I can do.

Words always treacherous anyway. Words die before deeds.

Vashti came to visit. Had that sucking-on-a-lemon smile. Said she was concerned about me. Blah blah blah. Brought some shrink with her. Sanity check. Medication check. Relax, I’m fine. No threat to you. No threat to myself. Let me stay on your turf and leave me be. Only if the doctor can evaluate you first. Right. I can’t tell what’s a dream and what’s reality most likely, so my job’s to jump through hoops to prove I can. Your standards, your hoops. That’s fine. Jumping. How high?

She took me aside, asked what I was trying to prove. Would I break the experiment down for her?

Gave her the quick version. The half-truth. Research, that’s all I’m after. Nothing practical about the work, Vashti. It’s not delicious or nutritious. It’s innocuous.

Felt like a beta female mollifying an alpha. Probably how she saw it, too. Shrink was typical pop psychiatrist. Full of catchphrases. Out to get me. Best strategy was to nod at his wisdom, stroke his ego, get him on my side. Shook his hand at the end. Smiles all around. Vashti seemed pleased.

They have no idea what I did.

sloane

Holy shit. Claire doesn’t have a toothache, it’s oral cancer. Bleeding gums, jaw swelling up like she got punched. Curable, no doubt, but the cure’s brutal. It’s the start of a long journey for her. We have doctors, but we don’t have engineers to repair the medical equipment that’s broken down. My mom has a knack for that kind of work, and Uncle Isaac, and Aunt Pan, but they’re thousands of miles away. So we’re not really set up for this. Ning’s much-touted healthcare system is all about prevention, not treatment, and it’s overtaxed as it is.

“Too many chiefs and not enough Indians,” the guy keeps bitching — a real failure of planning that not enough technically minded people were frozen, so now he’s going to have to incentivize engineers the way he’d planned to do for dentists. Of course his wife wants it done yesterday, shrieking at him behind closed doors about her darling daughter. “We didn’t survive the fucking plague so my Claire could die of cancer — a fucking curable disease!” Not shrieking in public, naturally — there she’s all smiles and apple pie, hanging on his arm to lend him likeability.

The cancer’s covered up. Just a toothache as far as most people know. I’m one of the lucky few who’ve got the truth.

All this time I’ve been seeing Ning as playing me. Pretending I’m a friend of the family to keep his friends close and enemies closer. But somehow I think I am a friend of the family. If there were thought crimes, I’d be public enemy number one, but I’ve kept my temper in check and acted sweet, and they’re taking me at my word.

How pathetic is that?

halloween

“I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle,”

said a fellow redhead, the brilliant but unstable Vincent van Gogh. Presumably he said it well before his breakdown and disfigurement. Either way, there’s something to it. A sense that possibility itself is wide open, that a baby is the beginning of all things.

On the other hand, it’s poetic bullshit, as DNA has a bit of fun with us. We lend poetry to something that’s purely chemical — we feel joy about our kids because if we didn’t, no one would have any. The species would die out.

Whatever it is, it ran me over pretty good.

Having a kid means immortality. You don’t have to exist anymore. You can go away and the world will still have a part of you. That’s how I used to feel. If you know me, you know I’m no stranger to suicidal thinking. But there’s something about the gift of life, the responsibility, something about fatherhood…

It put me more at peace than I’ve ever been. Which in turn made me a hell of a lot more tolerant of others. When he wasn’t writing George Washington’s favorite play, Joseph Addison was penning maxims like, “It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are, the more gentle and quiet we become towards the defects of others.” And even if you think gentle and quiet are overrated, there’s something to this quote as well.

I have to rely on other people’s words because this is uncharted territory for me. I don’t have the vocabulary for it. I spent so much time raging at everyone and everything, infuriated even at existence itself, that I have a hard time putting calm into words. I can say this much: Anger doesn’t melt away all at once, but when you feel it leaving you, even just a little bit, it’s like you can breathe deeper than you ever thought you could.

For the first time since I could remember, I wanted to be part of the world. The sense of harmony I felt lasted long enough to filter into my sleep. Back into the dreamscape I ventured, back to the charred remains of the city.

First Deuce came to me, long hair whipped by the wind. “Hey,” he said with a lift of his chin.

“Hey,” I said. “I’ve got something for you.”

“Been looking for that.” He took the blue knit cap from my outstretched hand, happy to have it back.

“Still fits,” he said, covering his head with it, the white number 2 at the front now replaced by a red triangle, the alchemical symbol for fire.

“Looking sharp.”

“Thanks.”

He turned and began to walk away. Whirling about after a few steps to look back, still walking backward, apprehension pulling at his (and what once was my) youthful face.

“You’re not angry with me, are you?” he called.

“Just myself!”

“Don’t be.”

“It’s my fault.”

“Mine, too. And if I’m not mad at you, why should you be?” A shadow stepped out of the smoke to walk beside him, still bleeding from where I’d shot her. Penny, the catalyst to my son’s suicide. She caught my eye. Still a deep, empty sadness that would never be filled. I called my son’s name. To warn him.

He took her hand. Smiled at me. “Dad, you don’t have to worry anymore.”

They left together, a couple. He wouldn’t forsake her, but I didn’t have to accept her. It was his life, even if he didn’t have it anymore.

Then Mercutio made himself known. From nowhere, he collapsed at my feet, his body broken. Someone had used him like a piñata.

“Who did this?”

“Who do you think, Sherlock?”

With dream logic, I deduced the ones he’d killed had inflicted the damage. My old love Simone, my old friend Tyler, my old enemy Lazarus.

“You want a piece of me, too?” he spat.

“I think you’ve had enough!”

“More than you know” His eyes were glazed and watery, the stare of a beaten man, but deep at their center I saw a defiant glint. That told me he’d do it all again if only he could. But he couldn’t. He’d left this world. All that tied him to it now was my memory, my guilt and my blame.

“Don’t I owe you something?”

I crouched down to his level, and as he flinched back I extended my arm to offer a parting gift. I can’t remember what it was. A dream object. Maybe nothing at all. Whatever it was, I recognized it as the thing he’d wanted most in the world. Uncertainly, he took it from my hand, the way a starving man accepts food from his most hated enemy. I watched him hold it high to the light, let out a breath of pure relief, clutch his fist around it and grin.

“Well, all right,” he said.

And I remembered how he’d shown me mercy. I’d shot him and he’d had a perfect chance to kill me, yet never took it. Over the years I’d wondered if it had been an act of cruelty to leave me living, knowing me as he did. But seeing him smile so genuinely here, I became convinced it had been mercy and nothing but. He’d never hated me. We’d remained friends despite his demons. Friends to the end.

“Do you know what this is worth?”

“Enjoy it,” I told him.

“Count on it.”

Before I knew it, he was gone.

As Angler rode up on a mount with a wet and grimy mane, the smoke became as dust, the sky grew dark with hovering nightgaunts, and the words dead but dreaming whispered on the wind. Trailing behind rider and horse were Jasmine and Doom, and earlier, less-realized, more grotesque IVR

playmates I’d fashioned out of zeroes and ones. My long-ago creations from back when I’d first embraced the goth-chic of being despondent and misunderstood.

“Just the Free.”

At my command, everything dripped into nothingness, save Angler, who landed gracefully on his black steel-toe leather boots. He and I became all that existed, the glowing ankhs in his pupils the only source of light.

“I’ve decided you don’t exist.”

“Have you now?”

“I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Black Ep,” I reasoned. “I’ve been blaming that microbe for every terrible thing I’ve seen in my life, and even for that life itself. So who created Black Ep? Someone working out of malice, or maybe just careless tampering, but human, I should think. A human being. That’s why I carry my anger and despair. But now things are changing. I’m tired of hating people. I don’t want that anymore.”

“You think I’m a scapegoat?”

“Absolutely. You’re ‘other.’ Alien. If I believed you created Black Ep, I imagine I could make peace with everyone else. That’s what I want right now, so of course you don’t exist. You’re too convenient. You let everyone off the hook.”

“That’s quite a theory. Got any proof?”

“The burden of proof is on you, Angler. You know what they say about extraordinary claims…”

“Extraordinary evidence will follow,” he snapped. “I’m just the first to arrive. Wait until everyone you know dreams of the Free.”

“Until then, I’m passing you off as a figment.”

“Do what you want. See if I go away”

I sucker-punched as hard as I could. He reeled back, lip split, blood trickling down his chin.

“If you’re real, you can expect more where that came from, and if you’re not, what does it matter?” I turned my back and strode off into the darkness.

“This feeling you have,” my doppelganger called. “This newfound love for humanity. It’s not going to last.”

“That’s just my self-doubt talking. My unwillingness to be happy”

“Won’t last,” he said, and I woke with those words in my ears. Took me a long, uneasy moment to recognize that all was well with my family and me, after which I tried to write down as much of the dream as I could remember. That accomplished, I scrambled the letters in my figment’s name to find nothing much for “Bill Angler.” Still, “William Angler” could be deciphered as “Animal Grew Ill,” and

“Ankh-eyed Bill Angler” decrypted neatly as “Gabriel Kennedy Hall.”

sloane

Headfirst into a thresher is not how I want to die. Turn my face into tapas? Fuck no. That’s got to be down there with the worst. I wouldn’t do it to my most hated enemy and I’d sure as hell never do it to myself. I’m way too vain, messed-up loser though I am. Think about it. Headfirst. Thresher. How hopeless do you have to be?

In military jargon, a suicide gets termed a “non-hostile gunshot wound.” This one had “farm-related fatal accident” getting tossed around for a couple of hours, but that dried up when people realized there was nothing accidental about it.

The bottom feeder who did it was still in his twenties, time spent in cryonic storage aside. The heir to a software empire, smart as all get-out and not bad-looking, either. Still with so much to live for, you’d think. Wife and kids, a bright new world full of opportunity. No, into the thresher he leapt. Here’s how they’re reporting it on the Echo (with other news channels following the leader): It’s a tragedy. This poor man. He simply couldn’t take it. With the specter of war hanging over us, he made a desperate choice and threw himself into harm’s way. Though we must stay prepared for an attack from those who would seek to impose their will upon us, we mustn’t forget that negotiations are ongoing. We mustn’t lose hope, nor allow the fear to grow so thick it overwhelms. Here’s what really happened: They thawed this yutz out and told him he’d been conscripted to five years of labor. Welcome to the future, yutzy. If you want us to thaw your family out, you’ll play ball. If you’d rather try your luck somewhere else, you can join up with the President, but he’s a bit of a nutjob, hiding in his evil underground lair. Want to go to Europe? Sure, if the people there have time for you, and by the way, they’re not even human. Want to live by yourself in the wilderness? Good luck with that. Whatever you decide, you’re not taking your family with you. They’ll be staying right here. So how about giving it a shot with us? What do you say?

So he tried. Then he cracked. He’d already been through so much from the plague, he didn’t have the wherewithal to buck up and stick around. Most of the thawed are made of stronger stuff, but I can’t exactly blame this one for buckling under the pressure.

Hal’s buddy saw it happen. Shinawatra, what’s his name, the one they call Kody. These days, he’s been sporting a meh-stache. That’s a moustache that doesn’t grow in right and you wonder why it’s there. Been talking with him lately, even though I’m not supposed to. Not safe for Hal’s spies to congregate, but I met him anyway in Grendel’s Den. Shot a little pool and he talked about the old days before I was born. The last days with all their civil unrest, shortages, riots and bombings.

“It sounds like you’re describing hell on earth.”

“No, you don’t understand,” he said. “It could have been so much worse.”

He’s convinced that everything’s going to right itself here. People are resilient, the occasional thresher tragedy aside. They look out for each other. They’ll only put up with so much. It’s just a matter of time until someone puts Ning in his place. Maybe the President, too.

“That’s pretty rosy,” I teased him. “How the hell did Hal ever put up with you?”

“Thursday? Deep down he’s an optimist at heart.”

“Maybe way deep down.” I scanned the crowd again to see if we were being watched. Also scanning for DLR, the way Hal taught me. That’s what he calls doesn’t look right, subtle indications that something’s out of place. All I saw were drunks. “So why do you call him Thursday?”

“The hair,” he confided. Different colors for different days in Thai culture. Orange is Thursday. Simple as that. He went on about how the tradition started in the Ayutthaya period, but my eyes glazed over.

“It’s become an inside joke for me,” he said, “because he never asks and I can tell he doesn’t know.”

Doubt that. Hal knows everything.

We drank and talked about how honored we were that he trusted us, even though we both knew he really didn’t.

I’ve been drinking a lot lately. That and linking to bouncy, catchy, crappy songs. Helps get me through the grind. Not just me, I’m seeing a lot of thawed hitting the bottle, and I’m going to be seeing a lot more. When the next story breaks.

Bridge and I used to mess with our sisters. “Why are you hitting yourself?” was the biggest of the old standbys, but the runner-up was the one about your hand being bigger than your face. You go, “You know, if your hand’s bigger than your face, you have cancer.” They hold out their hand to measure. You smack their hand up into their face. Funny shit. Well, that game’s about to get less funny because we’ve got an unusual number of thawed coming to doctors with tumors. Oral cancer, skin cancer, acoustic neuroma — things you don’t want. It’s not just Claire who’s suffering. Ning’s doctors are starting to sweat. There’s something wrong here, some carcinogen getting people sick, and no one knows what it is. Until they do, they’re keeping it real quiet. But they won’t be able to keep up the silence for long.

This disease is beatable. We’ve got medicines to mitigate, and we can beat it at its source with smart dust, tiny specks of silicon nanotech that hunt out cancerous cells. Not fun, painful as fuck, but doable. But like I say, the city’s not really set up for this. Limited supplies. Piss-poor oncology. We can take care of a few patients at a time, but what if everyone in the town gets cancer? We’re looking at a “who lives and who dies” situation, and it could get real ugly real quick.

isaac

I don’t know who these men are but what they’re proposing is monstrous. I’ve tried reasoning and can only conclude I am up against the unreasonable. You and I both know that civilized people talk; they don’t resort to violence. But my words have no influence and I’m running out of options. They’ve given me a moment to think. Everyone else is held at gunpoint. They took us by surprise. They are soldiers, English speaking, carrying assault rifles and covered from head to toe in body armor. I’ve counted six of them, and there may be more. Their leader may be a former United States Marine. I’ve heard him invoke a variation of the Rifleman’s creed: “Until victory is ours and there is no enemy.”

It’s unclear whom these mercenaries work for, but they share the goals of grudge-holding madmen. Strangelove patriots. They insist that China must never be a world power again. We’ve been told that we are free to leave. We are free to take those few we have already thawed, but they will pull the plug on everyone else. This is systematic mass murder, Lazarus. Genocide.

I have become the negotiator for the Chinese, where it should be Li Quan Yin. They will not listen to her. Only I can make a difference. What do I have to negotiate with except an appeal to basic humanity?

The soldiers hide behind a veneer of civility, but it goes no deeper.

“This is a shit assignment,” said the leader. He won’t say who assigned it. So don’t follow it.

“You don’t like it? Join the fucking club. Orders are orders, buddy, and I’m already cutting you the biggest break I can, letting you go. Don’t make me regret it.”

The links are down, all frequencies jammed. Even if I could call for help, no one would come in time. I am put on edge by how stark Champagne’s fear is. It’s wild in her eyes, though unable to dim her beauty or cloud her heart. I see something deeper when she’s looking at me. She needs me to make the right decision. There is no one else. Not even you, Lazarus. You’re just a memory. I’ve idealized you the way I’ve done with so many others. My greatest flaw. In the final analysis, I’m all alone. As are we all. This negotiation has very little give and take. Decapitating China is non-negotiable, but because the soldier in charge does not relish this task, perhaps he will allow me to save one of the sleepers. Surely, a single act of mercy would do no harm. What about two? I raised the number one by one, but could not shame him into agreeing to more than six. And so my repeated attempts at appealing to common decency have won us the right to drag half a dozen cryostats outside to safety before the extermination begins. But which ones?

I have been charged with deciding which of thousands of lives are worth saving. That is a vile and impossible choice. Who lives? Who dies? Unconscionable.

I could save the innocent. Six: a fitting number. Once upon a time, I had six of my own. Hessa, Mu’tazz, Rashid, Haji, Ngozi and Dalila. How I miss them.

With the anguish, certainty draws near. Were my children with me now, they would have me take courage as I taught them. There is no call for fear. They would tell me to breathe. They would tell me to focus. They would tell me that six is not enough.

I would be a fool not to listen. I have been a fool for far too long. There is a call that must be answered. Though I live in a wicked world, I need not be swayed by it. This is the day I make amends.

halloween

Mal’s alert went straight to my adrenal gland. New-parent fatigue instantly obliterated — I became wide awake, muscles pumping into full sprint, rounding anyone I could into a transport plane and taking off for Beijing.

An electromagnetic pulse had made the links useless there. No information coming from China at all. The last image Malachi got was of a squad of soldiers approaching the Great People’s Hall — he caught a glimpse through Champagne’s link, and then the pulse wiped everything out.

“Satellites?”

“I’m still locked out of the sky,” he told me. “I can hack back in, but it’ll take some time. Less if I don’t bother to cover my tracks.”

“I don’t care about tracks — just get me all the information you can.”

When we reached China, our hearts sank at the sight of the Hall half in rubble and fires burning out of control. The target of a bomb attack. We’d come ready for anything, knowing that a negotiation or an armed rescue attempt would be best-case scenarios. This was the worst. My team — comprised entirely of Vashti and Champagne’s daughters — scrambled to put out the flames and hunt for survivors. I directed traffic, rifle at the ready in case any hostiles had survived. I needn’t have bothered. Between the chemical foam, the thermal-imaging body search, and the excavation of corpses, concrete, plastic, glass and steel, we turned up only one living, breathing soul. Not an enemy. And not one of us. Isaac and Champagne had been ripped apart.

They didn’t deserve this. It sickened me to see them that way. Even though we had never liked each other as kids, we had since become friends. More than friends: We’d bonded as survivors, sharing a mutual respect, if only for having made it this long. I’d gone around the sun with them. We had grown up and raised our children. We’d struggled with our mistakes. And now they both lay at my feet, lifeless and violated. Discarded like so much refuse. I stared into their empty eyes. And even though I knew it wouldn’t happen, part of me expected them to blink or start laughing, holding their sides as they laughed at accomplishing the best practical joke of all time. It would be lighthearted revenge on their macabre-minded friend. Revenge for the times I’d insulted them back in school, for all our petty rivalries, for how seriously we took ourselves. But their wounds were real and fatal, and there was no denying them.

Amidst the shock and the tears and the outrage, Champagne’s daughters achieved a rescue. Bridge and Tomi pulled a man out from beneath a pile of concrete. He’d survived the blast with nothing worse than a concussion and broken bones.

Once we got him talking, we learned he was Zhang Zhao, one of the Chinese posthumans. He’d turned his back on the recovery of his countrymen, only to realize he had nowhere else to go. After wandering about, he’d gone to a temple to look for guidance, but finding nothing there but an overwhelming sense of obligation, he’d decided to return to the work he’d abandoned. He arrived in time to see mercenaries enter the Hall. He tried to link us, but had no success and so he planned a rescue. But by the time he moved to push his way in, Isaac had begun a maneuver of his own. He witnessed Isaac wrenching a weapon away from one, only to be shot in the back by another. Still, his courageous act had inspired the others to overpower their captors as well. Champagne had fought with skill and fury, her assault rifle thundering the commander down as Zhao had tried to beckon her and his countrymen to make for the exit. To his dismay, he saw the mortally wounded commander stirring (top-of-the-line RNA interference meds shutting down his pain receptors and keeping him out of shock, later forensics would reveal), reaching for a detonator in his belt. The blast flung Zhao back and out of the building, but collapsed the roof on everyone else.

We disabled the electromag pulse and linked for help. We found the transport the mercenaries had used, but nothing indicated who’d hired them. His access to the satellites temporarily restored, Malachi was able to reassure us that no more hostiles were on the way. But the origin of these who’d killed my friends remained a mystery.

Ning and President Coleman both denied involvement. They sent condolences. Ning used his Chinese heritage as a blanket denial, and promised to erect a statue in Isaac and Champagne’s honor for setting his city off on the right path. The President talked about how a tragedy such as this cannot be allowed, and how under his unified leadership, this brand of lawlessness would never go unanswered. Each pointed the finger at the other, and at the end there was no proving anything. All I knew for certain: my friends were dead, Zhao alive, the Hall half-destroyed and — somewhat miraculously — almost six hundred cryostats remained intact. With the fires put out and the damage repaired, the men, women and children inside could still be revived someday. The soldiers who’d come to China had meant to slaughter every last one, but in an act of self-sacrifice, my friends had stood up for those who couldn’t stand up for themselves.

They died heroes. Honest-to-goodness heroes. Now I imagine I could try to cast myself in that light, and pound my chest about how I wanted to get justice for them. But I won’t do that. I’m really not that good a person. Justice wasn’t what I wanted.

I wanted vengeance.

sloane

Nothing brings family together like a funeral. My mom murdered and Uncle Isaac, too. Had to fly home like a swallow back to Capistrano. My other mom meets me and we hug, trying to console each other, but it doesn’t take. Everything is surreal. This is the single saddest moment in my life, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to be feeling. I should be grieving, but how do you do it? I’ve never tried before. It just feels like sick to me. The more I think about what happened, the less I want to be here. Saying goodbye to people who won’t ever come back is a waste of time. It won’t make me feel better. I could spend this time going after the butchers who made it happen.

Surviving mom (that’s what my brain starts to call Vashti) doesn’t really do comfort. That was more dead mom’s turf. Whenever I skinned a knee or broke a bone, dead mom came to the rescue. Surviving mom has to stretch now, do something she’s never really tried. That’s why she calls for backup, having me sit down with Dr. Danny for grief counseling. I could give a fuck about Dr. Danny. Sorry son of a bitch won’t stop sneezing throughout the interview, which makes it easy to ignore his psychobabble about shock (haachoo, ‘scuse me), denial (sniff), anger (waa-achoo!) and some other one I forget. Don’t tell me I have to find meaning to my suffering. There’s no meaning in this shit. Dead mom used to plant fruits and vegetables in methodical rows and then go crazy with the wildflowers. Artistic gardening, a splash of color to please the eye. On my way to change into funeral black, I find my sister, Olivia, ripping up weeds. Uncharacteristic for her because she so rarely goes outside these days. Or Outside, for that matter. Spends all her time mucking around in the IVR, maintaining it for idiots who like their experiences artificial because they’re too scared to face the world. Dead mom got IVR addicted for a while until we snapped her out of it. In desperate need of a tan and a heaping spoonful of shut-the-fuck-up, Olivia makes the mistake of telling me how she’s going to create virtual shrines for the dead. Yeah, go back Inside, you IVR nerd. Fake bullshit for real people, fuck off. Real people shouldn’t lead fake lives. Except for Brigit, that’s probably the best conversation I have with any of my sisters. They’re all weepy and useless from funeral to wake — even Tomi, whom I’ve learned to respect. Brigit gets me. There’s nothing better than payback. She agrees, only she doesn’t see how we can do anything. C’mon, Bridge. Enough of this fucking grief orgy. We can feel lost and powerless after business is taken care of. Her hesitation pisses me off. I resolve to get completely drunk.

Several drinks later and I’m watching Pandora show off the newborn. Here, hold my squalling breed creature. No, I’m not ready to have kids. Even so, I think I’m jealous. Wait. Yup, jealous. Hal’s a family man again and I can tell he’ll get it right this time. He may be distant, but with Pan and his kid, what can’t be denied is he loves them and would lay down his life for them, even if he won’t ever spend his Sunday afternoons fawning over baby photos. Not that Pan could fawn over baby photos, being blind and all. Though that might change. One of the Gedaechtnis scientists has put her on gene therapy, trying for optic-nerve regeneration.

When I talk to Hal, he’s uneasy about the spread of cancer in New Cambridge. He wants me out of there. That’s my choice, not his, and never mind that, what are we going to do about the killers? He tells me we aren’t going to do anything, and that’s just crap, because she was his friend but my mother. Don’t you dare cut me out.

He won’t take me seriously. He thinks I’ll get in the way. Says we’ll talk about this when I’m sober. It gets worse from there. I don’t bother stopping myself and say lots of things I’ll later regret, the way you’re not supposed to. But it’s a funeral and I’m grieving, so everything’s excusable. Fantasia puts an arm around me to steer me away before I can say anything else, which surprises me because she’s barely said two words to me the entire time I’ve known her. At first I’m pissed because it’s a violation of my personal space and she should know better since she hates to be touched. Pretty soon, though, we’re talking, and she’s telling me about her memories of my moms and Isaac, and I don’t know if she’s trying to make me feel better or just herself. Either way, I’m cool with it because there’s something dangerous about her and Hal and Lodune that I like. That I’m drawn to. It’s how I want to be. Screw that, it’s how I’m going to be. Even if it costs me everything.

fantasia

Relieved to be back at zoo. Took over from assistants Vashti provided. Chimps treated satisfactorily in my absence. Should release them into wild now that their part is complete. Unsure how they would fare without me. Must attempt it for their sake.

No more control group. All patched. Looking out for each other. Less fuss for me. Recent murders reinforce hypothesis. More faith than ever in my convictions. More faith than ever in myself. Not Whore of Babylon. Nor perfectly sane, but sane enough to bring liberation, not slavery. Synthesis of N and D.

Viral cocktail taking command of cells, inserting material via infection. Sore throats. Sneezing. Air droplets from each cough and sneeze my vector. Fine delivery system for contaminants. Works well with humans. Against enhanced immune systems, stronger mechanism required. Made concentrated dose, dermally active, greased it on fingertips and passed it through skin-to-skin contact. Untested. Might be too strong. Risk seems worthwhile because target will be traveling to not one but both major American population centers.

Good luck, Sloane.

sloane

I’ve got a plan. The plan is to pick up that guy, bring him to this secluded location, ply him with these drugs, get the information with this tool, then dump the body here. That’s how I find out who killed my mom.

That guy: One of Ning’s soldiers. One of Lodune’s friends. The jarheads who watch me whenever I walk by. I scan the pack like a hyena looking for the weakest, slowest gazelle. Physically, I can’t make that distinction, because they’re all magnificent specimens, but mentally, there’s a big difference from one to the next. I settle on Johansson. He’s got a loose tongue. Get him talking and he forgets to shut up. This secluded location: The apartment complex where my sister Izzy got raped. Reconstruction’s still not done there. After the unpleasantness, the construction team abandoned it in favor of other sites. These drugs: All the Wretched XS I’ve got from Claire, and a few stiff drinks to get things started. This tool: An old school Hissatsu knife. The one Tomi gave me for my birthday two years back. Sharp enough to take care of business and then finish the job. Hissatsu means “coup de grace” in Japanese. I don’t care how tough you are, a stab in the heart is a deathblow.

Here: Down in the underground tunnels. Sub-Harvard. I know that maze as well as anyone now, and I’ve got the perfect dumping ground picked out. They won’t find him for weeks. That’s the plan. What actually happens: I flirt like a politician whoring for votes, but I’ve got this stupid cold I picked up from Dr. Danny. It makes me breathless and lispy. I try to suppress it, but eventually have to go with it, because it turns out breathless and lispy is what works for Johansson. Big strong soldier of fortune likes women who sound vulnerable — who knew?

We steal away to my ambush. Drunk and stoned, he’s even more of a Chatty Cathy than I’d hoped. He won’t shut up. He loves me. He loves everyone. We do it. He starts crying about how beautiful everything is. Jesus fucking Christ. His fingernails are too sharp — not half as sharp as my Hissatsu. But I don’t even have to use it. He tells me everything right when I ask. I don’t have to hurt him or kill him. My instinct says do it anyway, so I don’t, which is really better in the long run because his mysterious disappearance would just get people talking. This way I’m mostly under the radar. I learned: Lodune killed my mom and Lodune was working for the President. Which means: I have bad taste in men and I’m going to assassinate the President. I’d been plotting against Ning, so it’s not too drastic an adjustment. Just have to set my sights a little more west. What works out perfectly is Ning has a mission for me, one he’s been talking about for days. Go to the President’s Mount Weather compound in Bluemont, Virginia. Go and bring back some of Ning’s people. Apparently, the Prez has taken some spies captive. An exchange will take place and I get to go along for escort duty. There’s a catch, I’m sure of it, but I haven’t figured out what it is. Doesn’t matter. The pendulum’s been pushed and now it’s got to swing back. I’ll be Booth to his Lincoln.

halloween

The call was unexpected and brief.

“What can I do for you, Mr. President?”

“It’s really what I can do for you,” he began.

He told me that Ning had clearly gone mad with power, and as such he had no choice but to remove the man from office. He had plans to make a military move against New Cambridge, and wanted to alert me ahead of time.

“That’s between you and him.”

“Not entirely.”

He warned me that in the conflict ahead there would be refugees. Already a growing number of Americans (those supporting Ning and those opposing him) had expressed an interest in fleeing the theater of conflict, ideally to Europe.

“You want us to take people in.”

“You misunderstand me,” he said, lips pursed grimly. “With so many refugees wanting to come to your shores, I’d advise you to be judicious about who you accept.”

He warned me that Ning, the man he’d accused as the architect of the Beijing massacre, had an interest in sending agents to Europe in the guise of immigrants. We could be murdered next, and would be welcoming those men in at our peril.

We talked it over and he repeated it. “I’d be very careful who I accept.”

I thanked him, said I’d think about it and ended the call. It left an odd taste in my mouth. Are you trying to help me? Or put fear in me? Why are you telling me this?

sloane

I’m at Mount Weather and the weather’s bad enough to bring out the earthworms and the slugs. Wind roaring, the unwelcoming rain pouring down in bursts. Good thing we brought umbrellas. I’m with three Green Mountain Boys and our contribution to the hostage exchange: the senior senator from Texas, recently thawed from the Amarillo facility. We’re crowded under the awning of one of the aboveground FEMA offices, blinking through the downpour to see a welcoming committee coming our way. Flanked by Gauss rifle — toting minders who might be Secret Servicemen, our tour guide is the acting Assistant Press Secretary, an ex — New Cambridgian I recognize from when she waited tables at Harvest. Used to be a movie star back before the plague. There’s the perfunctory greeting, the obligatory frisking, the inevitable joke about the rain, then a march around the bunkers, past the razor-wire fence, toward the water-purification tower, then abruptly down into the belly of the beast — the underground city where the real action is.

They’ve got streets, a maglev transit system, generators, shops and offices for every cabinet in the United States. A mini White House, a mini Congress and a war room with tactical maps flashing across giant screens. Impressive shit. The First Lady comes to greet us, but doesn’t stay. Military personnel are thick as ticks on a deer — they’ve thawed out more soldiers than I would have guessed, and I wonder if the reason I’m here is so they can demonstrate power. They’ve got to suspect I still talk to Hal — maybe they want to make him think twice about doing something rash. That probably won’t work with him. And definitely won’t with me.

We make the exchange at the end, six hostages escorted off the maglev train. They don’t look mistreated. Don’t look very much like hostages at all. As it turns out, three are CDC health workers who’ve never even been to New Cambridge. They’re coming back with us to investigate the spread of cancer. Look at the big humanitarian gesture from the President, so praiseworthy considering how close we are to war.

Of course, no trip would be complete without a little acknowledgment from the man of the house. That’s what I expect of him. Common courtesy. So we can make small talk, share an insincere handshake, arrange a small photo op. Just the moment I need to drive a stake through President Fuckface’s heart. My Hissatsu is sharp as despair and they took it from me in the frisk, but my hairpin remains. Two inches long, inconspicuous, the tip coated with a synthetic botulin I’ve been saving for a rainy day. Jab him and his nerves will stop. Between the respiratory failure and the heart attack he’s sure to get (weak ticker, die quicker), there’s no saving this man, no way, no how. After the kill, I won’t leave here alive, but that was never my plan to begin with.

The last stop on the tour has my guide asking us to wait at a security station while an aide fetches my target. I’m smiling polite as you please, trying to eat my nervousness and suck sweat back in through my pores. I have to be patient and wait for the whites of his eyes. Get him there. Or in the neck. Hell, anywhere I can break the skin. During the handshake even. Quick and it’s done. I’m dizzy and my aim is for shit but I can do this.

When the aide comes back, she comes back alone, apologetic that the President isn’t with her.

“Believe me, I know how busy he is. I won’t take much of his time,” I tell her. I’ve planned for this. I know just what she’s going to say next and I have the answer for it. Every bone in my body says I can talk my way in.

Except I’m wrong about what she says. Embarrassed to have to tell me this, she explains how with my constant sniffling and occasional sneeze, it’s clear that I’m under the weather. “Technically, we’re all under the weather, since it’s Mount Weather,” she simpers, “but you might be contagious, and he’s concerned about catching your cold.”

I swallow my phlegm and try to muster up a healthy glow, but nothing I do or say does me the slightest good. It’s the plague culture. No one wants to catch anything.

It’s so unfair. I almost never get sick. Goddamn Dr. Danny. No choice here, I have to abort, go back home and try again later, or not at all.

What does it matter?

No matter what I do, I’m never going to break this curse. I’ve failed again. I have the worst fucking luck in the world.

halloween

I’d started to piece it together. The nature of the conflict between Mount Weather and New Cambridge. Why the President had warned me not to take in refugees. How the massacre in Beijing could be used as an object lesson.

President John Henry Coleman and Richard Ning had struck a deal, and they’d struck it a long time ago. There was no clash between them; there was simply an arrangement. With each demonizing the other and posing a credible military threat, the citizens caught in the middle had little choice but to fall into line. Opposing your government isn’t easy when a madman appears to be threatening it. When your very existence appears nonessential to that madman (as Beijing would suggest), you need a strong government to protect you. If that protection means losing your liberties in the process, better your liberties than your life. The choice of the lesser evil. This is how “the old way of doing business” could return, with those at the top of the food chain exploiting everyone beneath them, and those at the bottom too frightened to express their discontent. And why’d he warn me about taking in refugees? Because he doesn’t want anyone siphoning off their populace. He wants them not to have anywhere else to go. The two men had allegedly worked together before the plague, never proven, but they’d apparently been discreet business partners and, arguably, war profiteers. Malachi dug back into the newsfeeds to draw my attention to an article in the Washington Post. Ning had been accused of blatantly overcharging the military through one of his many companies, but the President’s Justice Department had been reluctant to pursue, ultimately dismissing the case for lack of evidence before Ning could ever be brought before a grand jury. You couldn’t prove collusion, but the inference could be made. By the same token, I couldn’t prove they’d pooled their resources to slaughter those Chinese citizens and two of my oldest friends. And yet I knew they’d done it. If I took them out, blood for blood, would it do any good? What backlash would it bring? Wouldn’t others just crawl up from the sewer to take their places? The Great Law of Unintended Consequences was staring me in the face once again, and the sense of futility that accompanied it dragged me back to a dark and negative space. Real or imagined, the thing in my dreams had said my good feelings for my fellow man would die, and the prediction had largely come true. The thirst for revenge burned within me. But…

Is it my place to play God? To assume the mantle of executioner once again? What good will it do in the long run? Will it put those I love at risk?

If we’d had the legal authority to try these men, that would have been ideal, but then nothing about this world was ideal. We were stuck with the cards we’d been dealt.

“Get Sloane off the links,” said the voice in my ear. Just audio on an anonymous channel, but I recognized the speaker. Onetime lottery winner, Mr. Lucky.

“What’s this about?”

“All the links in New Cambridge.”

“What’s wrong with them?”

Under the guise of improving the connections, he’d jacked up their output to unsafe levels. They were spitting out too much radiation, sparking tumors through eyepieces and earpieces. Long ago, cellular phones were mistakenly thought to cause cancer; this act of violence was the culmination of those paranoid, century-old fears.

It was the sort of sabotage Mr. Lucky alone could get away with. While others held a background in business, law, politics, medicine or entertainment, he’d been trained as a communications engineer.

“Now, because she’s like you, with your heightened immune system, I figured she’d stay healthy, but I’ve seen her sick lately. You should get her to stop using the links and you should get her out of the city. It’s not safe anyway.”

“Thanks for the tip. Why the sudden change of heart?”

“Because she’s not my enemy. She’s a pawn, just like you are.”

“I’m no pawn.”

“Yeah, you are. Don’t pretend. You were specifically bred to bring back the most powerful men on the planet.”

And that’s whom he’d sworn to destroy, the survivors. It sounded like the ranting of a sociopath, but the more I listened, the more sympathetic I became to his point of view. From his perspective, billions had gone the way of all flesh simply because they weren’t rich enough or well connected enough. Aside from him, everyone we’d thawed had earned a chance at resurrection by exploiting others, or by currying favor with those who did. Billions annihilated because they were poor. Look how few minorities made it to this day. The future belonged not to the meek, but to rich white men who cared only about themselves. By what right should they live? Why should they be rewarded for their crimes?

“I can’t kill all of them, but I can make their lives miserable. They don’t have enough doctors. I can make them suffer for what they’ve done,” he said.

“That won’t bring your wife back.”

“Nothing can. That’s my point.”

“You think this is unfair. I know a little about unfair myself. Enough to know you might be right. But you can’t stand in judgment of all these people.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, they’re not all guilty. There are children.”

His voice cracked with grief. “Do you have any idea how badly Jenny and I wanted kids? We don’t get to bring our children into the world but these bastards do? Ruthless, privileged, criminal, selfish bastards?”

I told him about Kody. How he was just a chauffeur. How he didn’t deserve the misery Lucky wanted to inflict.

“That’s unfortunate,” Lucky admitted, “but I’m working for the greater good.”

“Revenge?”

“Justice. You know it’s justice. After what these people did to your friends in Beijing? Are you really going to tell me it’s not?”

“I don’t think any of us are in the position to say what justice is,” I told him.

“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone?” he mocked. “I know what’s wrong and what’s right, and to say I shouldn’t even the score is high-minded, idealistic bullshit. I expected better of you.”

I felt my jaw tighten. “I’m not saying you’re wrong about who deserves what, but I’m not going to let you give people cancer and get away with it.”

“The links are just the beginning,” he assured me. “I’ve got much more in store and you’re really in no position to stop me. Just get Sloane out of here. Get her out now. You’re the only one who’s shown me kindness, and for that I owe as much to keep someone in your family safe.”

“You can’t do this. I’m begging you to reconsider.”

“I’m sorry, we’re done talking,” he said, and the link dropped the call. I didn’t try to get him back. No point in it.

Twice before I’d had to hunt those who’d moved to do society harm. When the whole of civilization consisted of just my friends, I’d used a gun to put down Mercutio. Years later, I’d done it with Penny. I’d no wish to do it again.

“Malachi?”

“Yes?”

“Can you get a lock?”

There are many types of bad apples. Bitter, sour, chalky, overripe, stale, mealy, spoiled, insect-riddled, rotten. When Vashti had first started thawing, she’d empowered me to make threat assessments, separating the good from the bad. The good apples got left alone. The bad apples got seeded.

Mr. Lucky had been a mystery man. I’d thought it better to err on the side of bad apple. Expect the dark side of human nature; you’re less likely to be surprised or hurt.

“Are you sure, Hal?”

“Applesauce.”

At my command, a satellite signal reached a subdermal explosive a continent away. The microbomb detonated at the base of his skull where the spinal column attaches, a mercy killing. He’d said I was in no position to stop him, but he couldn’t have been more wrong.

I’d thought to do this with the hospital siege, though Malachi wisely had talked me out of it. Not with children as hostages. Too much danger of someone getting hurt. Nor did I want to traumatize anyone with the sight of a decapitation. Bad risks. I’d have taken those risks in Beijing, if only I could, but the soldiers who’d done the butchery hadn’t come from New Cambridge, and Vashti and I had never had a chance to seed them.

I had sympathy for Mr. Lucky. He’d been right about some things. Not all but some. Justified in his anger. And yet I’d taken his life. I had to do it, didn’t I?

Maybe I should have just alerted the Assembly. Maybe I should have done nothing at all. Stay out of harm’s way. It had made sense at the time. You put rabid dogs down, no matter how sad their story, no matter how right or wrong their cause.

The more I thought about it, the worse I felt. I’d empathized with him. Pitied him. How could I put him down and let the others live?

Didn’t seem right. And in the end, I couldn’t let it stand. “Malachi, two more.”

One after the other, in New Cambridge and Mount Weather, both Richard Ning and the President of the United States went pop.

PART THREE

patchwork

•

(to rain in hell)

We’d nicknamed one of the Nymphenburg conference rooms “Camelot” because of its stainless-steel round table. No corners, no one in a privileged position. By the time I reached the room, Vashti and Pandora had already taken seats, with Fantasia leaning against the back of a chair. I closed the door behind me, remained standing and broke the news about what I’d done.

“We may be getting some calls.”

“We’re already getting them,” Vashti said, a look of alarm simmering in her eyes. “No accusations yet, but surely that’s just a matter of time. I thought we agreed you were going to discuss this with us before you actually pulled the trigger.”

“We agreed that ultimately it would be my choice to do it. And my responsibility,” I said.

“You couldn’t spare a little fair warning?”

“No, it’s his decision,” Pandora said. “We all agreed on that.”

“What exactly are you three talking about?” asked Fantasia, who’d been holed up in Washington State while we’d planned all our contingencies. I explained it to her, and she found it grimly amusing. “Kill the leader of the free world?”

I laid out my evidence for his involvement in Beijing, and she just shrugged. “You give up the moral high ground the moment you put bombs in people’s heads,” she noted.

“I remember making that argument once upon a time,” grumbled Pan.

“But I don’t care much about moral high ground,” Fan continued. “Just risk. Sounds like a crazy risk to me. The sort of thing I’d do if I were off my meds. Now we have to worry about what their forensics will turn up. Can it be traced back here?”

“Potentially, but so far they don’t know anything,” Vashti said.

“The mechanisms are built to disintegrate on trigger, making forensics difficult,” I explained. “Difficult, but not impossible.”

“No, not impossible,” Vashti overlapped. “Anyway, they’ll search their own houses first. When they come knocking here, we’ll deny, keeping them in the dark as long as we feasibly can.”

“Who’ll take the reins in New Cambridge?” Pandora gave a squint of concentration, much as she would upon thinking several chess moves ahead — an impressive feat, sighted or blind.

“It might legitimately go back to the Assembly,” I said, “but more likely, a strongman will seize control. Someone with the support of Ning’s soldiers.”

“Or the Green Mountain Boys,” she suggested.

“Ax and his men, if they want it, sure.”

“What about the widow?”

“She’s well liked by the town, but I don’t think she has the muscle.”

“Speaking of which, how many innocents get to die while that muscle fights for control?” Vashti asked.

“Unknowable. Shall we measure it against how many would have died with Ning in power?”

“I’d be more concerned about who’s taking over the presidency” said Fan. “Doesn’t he have the football that launches all the nukes?”

I told her how Isaac and I had spent years hunting for and disabling command-and-control centers in the United States and around the world. We’d surely not found them all, but we had made a sizable dent. Either way, a nuclear response struck me as exceedingly unlikely. Though not outside the realm of possibility, especially in the wake of Beijing.

“What do we know about the VP?” Pan asked.

“Socially moderate. Fiscally conservative. He said maybe three things during Coleman’s first term. Your basic non-factor. Nothing to hide, but nothing to hang his hat on.”

“Spoke to him briefly during the funeral when he called to send his condolences,” Vashti said.

“Seemed nice enough. Couldn’t tell if he was genuine.”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

“What can we do to lend a helping hand and maybe at the same time cover our asses?” Pandora wanted to know.

We discussed it and didn’t come up with any easy answers. “Let’s sit tight and see how everything shakes out.”

We got Sloane out and Kody, too. Neither was eager to leave, but with the instability spreading rapidly, it seemed only prudent. While the Assembly conducted an investigation and pretended to carry on business as usual, the alliance between Ning’s troops and the Green Mountain Boys started to come apart at the seams.

One faction took over the supply depot, under the contention of protecting it from potential looters. The other faction countered by taking armed positions around the Assembly. Meanwhile, Mr. Lucky’s body was discovered in his apartment, along with enough poison to kill the city many times over. They also found a journal entitled, “In the Event of My Death,” which detailed his grievances, and thus made it much easier for investigators to determine how the links were misaligned and carcinogenic. Of course, they got clued in to Mr. Lucky through an anonymous tip — one that I put out there, which they’d yet to trace back to me.

It wasn’t long before everyone started comparing notes. What did Mr. Lucky, Ning and the President have in common? What could connect them either in the cause or means of their deaths? Mount Weather cut their communication with us down to nothing. An eerie silence while they conducted their investigation. We’d little choice but to sit and wait for the hammer to drop, continuing our efforts to thaw the cryonically preserved Europeans, while helping to support a slowly recovering China. That being Zhang Zhao and all the Good Samaritan peacekeepers who’d volunteered to help stand watch over what was left of the Great Hall of the People, carrying on the work that Isaac and Champagne had started. We brought out the German Chancellor and tried to unify Munich around her, though when she insisted on strict regulatory control over all companies based on German soil, Gedaechtnis balked. The traditional jockeying between governments and corporations: Who gets to be whose puppet? A failed attempt to resurrect the E.U. And then the French petition: understandable but exasperating. We, the undersigned, recognize the severity of this catastrophe and appreciate the urgent need for food, shelter, medicine, counseling and other essential services. Nonetheless, we remain greatly concerned about the emptying of the Louvre, and believe the recovery of the greatest cultural artifacts of this or any age should be made a priority. We would petition your help in this enterprise. The lift in spirits to all men, women and children would be incalculable and precisely what we need in these trying times.

I agreed to help, but of course it was we PH who retained possession of many of these treasures. Upon fleeing New Cambridge, Champagne had scurried them back to Nymphenburg. She’d considered us far better stewards than any other, and I had to agree, loathe to return works of art to any public museum for fear of genuine burglars taking them. Without order in a society, without long-term stability, theft seemed too great a risk.

For Europe, my nieces assumed the responsibilities Champagne used to hold: planning, community building, uncorking decades-aged wine for all to enjoy, etc. Beyond security, I took up the role of supply manager, but left the negotiation to others, as I lacked Isaac’s gift for diplomacy. Unfortunate, as it was a gift I could have used.

Mount Weather held; New Cambridge began to eat itself.

Ning’s men and the Green Mountain Boys fell into a sequence of murder and reprisal. One-upmanship. One man beaten to death. Two hung from streetlights. Five dropped in a hail of bullets. And in the crossfire: innocent men and women.

They tried to cover it up, but with the links recalibrated and everyone using them again, there was no hiding the truth. Too many amateur journalists documenting the horror with their feeds. A broadcast society. The Assembly did their level best to reestablish a sense of order, but they had no real power in the face of armed gunmen with grievances to air. The Ax sat down with Ning’s widow a public show of unity, and the next day violence erupted again.

Both sides fought over supplies, territory and people, trained medical personnel most of all. When a group of doctors chose not to treat anyone until a workable ceasefire could be put in place, their spokesman turned up missing. That rallied more citizens to support the protest, but when the second and third disappeared, fear took hold and the movement fell apart.

Many citizens fled the city to live in the surrounding area instead. Isolation seemed safer. Some appealed to us for help, wanting safe passage to Europe — the great exodus. But whether it was meant as pure manipulation or not, the President had made me think twice about giving people refuge. It came down to a question of trust. Until we could secure our own borders, we couldn’t afford to bring in anyone who might think to do us harm. Of the trustworthy, we let in as many as we could support with our limited supplies. But our refusal to help the rest caused a schism in the religious subset who’d wanted to deify us. Did we lack the power or simply the will? Perhaps we weren’t divine at all. Pandora fielded a call from the newly sworn-in President, the former V.P. He wasted no time accusing us of assassinating his predecessor…

“What you don’t see with your eyes, don’t invent with your tongue,” she told him, neither a Brazilian nor Portuguese expression, but rather a Yiddish one her mother had taught her. “You think this has anything to do with us? Bring proof.”

Two days later, he did.

Though able to hack his way in, Malachi had been unable to erase his footprints. Our enemies simply followed the routing and traced the satellite signal right back to its source: an AI built by Gedaechtnis and in service of posthumans. Armed with know-how, a good hunch and a satscan decrypter, whomever Mount Weather had working intelligence had proved cleverer than we’d hoped. The flat denial we’d proffered couldn’t last under the light of evidence, so we switched tactics, buying time with the promise of an internal investigation.

I’d already decided to take the blame. Or credit, depending on your point of view. The only question: Fall on my sword or brandish it? Better to admit it and go on the run? Or better to admit it and threaten more targeted killings if they misbehaved again?

Pandora wouldn’t hear of it. To exile myself or put myself at risk? Not when my family needed me. Not when my baby daughter needed a dad. Never! We’d have to find another way. But I didn’t see many options and it wasn’t her decision to make.

Nor was it mine, as it turned out.

Before we could agree on a strategy, Malachi took the initiative, contacting Mount Weather himself. He confessed to triggering the explosives, claiming he’d done it entirely of his own volition. His motive?

He said he’d calculated the three greatest threats to world peace and had stepped up to eliminate them. Stripping his confession of all emotion, he presented himself to Mount Weather as precisely what so many humans had feared intelligent machines would evolve into: a rogue AI, conscienceless, sociopathic, superior.

“It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done before? This isn’t A Tale of Two Cities,” I snapped, when Mal finished his pronouncement and closed the link to Mount Weather.

“It’s better this way,” he said.

“It was my decision. You gave me every chance not to do it. You shouldn’t be the one to take the fall.”

“You’re not the only one who can be self-sacrificing,” he replied. “Besides, compared to me, you’ve barely lived.”

Though we were roughly the same age, he’d spent his time in a virtual universe where he was fully capable of multitasking many experiences at once. Bodiless, his consciousness stretched. He was the Ghost in the Machine. Whenever you talked to him, you couldn’t be sure he wasn’t also talking to someone else. Or helping Pandora to see. Or scuba-diving with IVR sharks. Or living in ancient Rome. I could see him through my link’s eyepiece, smiling wryly at me, wraithlike, with clothes and skin the color of an overcast sky. Before I ever learned his name, I’d called him the Gray Kid. Upon leaving Idlewild, and seeing what was real and what wasn’t, I’d blamed him for many things. I’d thought to delete him, only to decide against it. Now he’d come to save me. A true friend.

“You haven’t thought this through,” I said. “They might believe you pulled the trigger, but they’ll still want to know how bombs got into their people.”

“As we speak, it’s being taken care of.”

While I’d been talking with Malachi, Vashti had placed a call to Mount Weather. She’d spoken with the powers that be, apologizing for the cabal she’d just uncovered. She told them how while she’d been running the hospital in New Cambridge, microbombs had been surgically implanted in selected individuals retrieved from cryonic storage. Though this sort of radical security measure had been discussed, Vashti had rejected it as morally reprehensible. Only now had she discovered how the plan had gone forward without her knowledge. Right under her nose. The architects of this outrage: Isaac Abdelrazek and his digitized accomplice, Malachi.

In reality, it was much the opposite. Vash and I had devised the tactical measure, keeping Isaac and Cham in the dark because we knew they’d never have gone along with it. I’d insisted on bringing Pan into the loop; she’d argued against us; I’d convinced her with a promise to select for this procedure only the thawed we considered extreme risks. And I’d kept my word, though in fairness my paranoia interprets “extreme risk” more liberally than most.

Unlikely that Isaac would be responsible; he’d stayed clear of the hospital and left all surgical procedures to others. Also, the idea that he’d collaborate with Malachi was absurd; the two rarely spoke. But there was no way for anyone at Mount Weather to disprove Vashti’s alleged sequence of events.

They asked who else in New Cambridge had an implanted bomb. Was there any danger of the explosives detonating accidentally? What did we intend to do about Malachi? She answered the questions she could, assuring them that Malachi would be deactivated for the sake of public safety, and promising to do all she could to rectify the situation and restore trust. I found her after, stopping her in a hallway. “You’ve slandered our friend.”

“And?”

“And you expect me to go along with it.”

“You want to contradict me? What will that accomplish?”

“I told you: it was my call, and I’m the one who should take the blame for it.”

“Bullshit. You’ve far more value to me here. I don’t need you as a scapegoat when there’s someone else who serves that purpose better.”

“This ruins his reputation.”

“So? He’s dead; his reputation doesn’t matter anymore!”

“It’s unfair to him.”

She dismissed that with a shrug. “Be pragmatic. Think of us.”

“Here’s pragmatic: Our supporters see Isaac as a hero for what he did in Beijing. As a symbol. Tarnishing him like this erodes support!”

“Not at all. That’s why I didn’t implicate Champagne. She can play victim and hero. To say nothing of all the innocent Chinese.”

“How much of this has to do with him taking Cham away from you?”

“Yes, I’m letting petty jealousy determine my policy decisions,” she mocked. “You know me so well.”

“Better than you think.”

“Look,” she said, raising her voice slightly before gritting her teeth and regaining control. “I understand you’re angry, and I’m not saying I wasn’t hurt by them running off together, but this isn’t about me. This is about what’s best for all of us.”

Silence between us until I said, “What makes you think they’ll even believe you?”

“He’s black. He’s Muslim. I’m making the case to an overwhelmingly white audience. As scapegoats go, it’s not the toughest sell.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“I won’t argue with you there. But it’s not about right. It’s about survival.”

Pan and Isaac had been the best of friends. When I found her later, she was tormented by what Vashti had done, but said she knew how Isaac would feel.

“He’d accept this. He’d want to protect us.”

She was right. He’d cared about us just as much as I did, perhaps more. This was never going to sit well with any of us, but the damage to Isaac’s character had already been done. Vashti had carved him up, but I had offered the knife. His debasement had come as a direct consequence of the actions I’d taken.

Worst of all, a sinking feeling of all for nothing. I thought: Our enemies might accept Isaac as a sacrifice and Malachi, too, but acceptance is one thing and retaliation another. Who’s to say they won’t want to exact a further price?

Among the Egyptian gods, it was ibis-headed Thoth who had the power to resolve disputes. Perhaps that’s why Isaac had felt an affinity toward him as a child. He’d spent much of his IVR time in a customized version of Khmunu, the fabled settlement known as “the City of Hares” and “the City of Eight,” which the ancient Egyptians had dedicated to Thoth. When I went to visit the shrine dedicated to my fallen friend, the resemblance to Khmunu was only fitting.

I stood in the cradle of civilization, the Nile visible in the distance, sun and moon both overhead, Isaac’s architecture dotting the horizon, and before me, statues of the man himself, his children, and an inverted pyramid, the broad base aboveground, the point buried deep in the sand. The upside-down configuration reflected his utilitarian point of view; the widest section at top symbolizing the most good done for the most people. And inside: a testament to his life. No mention of his death. Olivia had done a good job commemorating him. I made a mental note to tell her so after I unplugged. Her mother’s shrine remained a work in progress; she was too close to it, and doing Champagne justice would be harder for her.

“Not bad,” said a voice at my back.

Behind me stood a bald man dressed in white, half-German and half-Persian. My old rival, Lazarus Weiss. Mal’s AI simulation of him, at least.

“Not bad at all,” I agreed.

Back when I was young, I’d been naïve and foolish enough to see Laz as my enemy because he’d struck me as a conformist while I’d fancied myself a nonconformist, and because the girl I’d fancied fancied him. How innocent I was to think that was an enemy. I’d found more than enough real enemies since.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” he smiled.

He led me to another domain, one I remembered fondly from my youth. Twain’s hadn’t changed since I’d last set foot in it. For those of us who had attended Idlewild, Twain’s was such an institution that updating it would have been an act of sacrilege. My old hangout: a run-of-the-mill diner with torn leatherette seats. We made our way to one of the booths by the back. Laz slid in next to Simone, slipping an arm around her. Tyler scooched over to make room for me next to him. Three dead schoolmates resurrected in digital form. Pandora and Malachi had spent countless hours coding the virtual Simone — they’d taken every experience she’d had here in the IVR and measured her vital signs in the real world, correlating the two. From this data, they constructed a “best guess”

personality composite, giving “life” to the illusion with the same advanced technology that Malachi himself enjoyed. The end result was reasonably close to the Simone I’d known, not perfect, but real enough. Lazarus and Tyler had been Malachi’s follow-up projects. Given enough time, he intended to do the same for Isaac and Champagne.

We exchanged condolences. Remembered the dead. Then to business. Six surprises along the way. One: I didn’t feel the slightest twinge of jealousy seeing Lazarus and Simone together. Dead and gone, I’d lost those feelings a long time ago.

Two: There were moments I felt close to them, and moments I felt like they were another species entirely. They’d bonded together here, lived through things I never had. They had their own shorthand now, inside jokes I didn’t know. That made me feel like I’d missed something important, but I had to let it go. No point staying mad at ghosts.

Three: In my younger days, I’d mythologized my generation, seeing us not just as a dysfunctional family, but also as a kind of pantheon: Isaac as a god of civilization, Mercutio as a god of mischief, Fantasia as our chaos goddess, myself as the god of death, and so on. But for these three, the labels no longer applied. Lazarus was no longer the head of our pantheon; he’d become no more important than any other. Simone was no longer the embodiment of intellect; she had a lightness to her, a carefree quality that might have been wisdom. My old friend Tyler was no longer the god of war; he’d gone from a force of pure competition to someone who had nothing to prove.

Four: My friends had taken over one of Pandora’s pet projects: reviving the Webbies. Sometimes called Websicles, and really a bastardization of WBE, Whole Brain Emulation, these men and women had preferred a cheaper alternative to cryonic storage. Digital preservation. The Webbies had paid to have every neuron of their brains mapped in the hope that some later survivor would download that topography and translate it into a new artificially intelligent consciousness. Essentially they wanted to become like Malachi, living in an IVR environment but retaining the complexities of their flesh-and-blood personalities. Laz told me how close they’d come to accomplishing this. Another few months and the system would surge with life.

Five: No one blamed me for Isaac and Champagne. “They lived over twice as long as we did,” said Simone. In fact, no one blamed me for anything. “You couldn’t possibly have stopped Mercutio any sooner than you did,” Ty said. “Take yourself off the cross.”

Six: When I asked them to make a sacrifice, they laughed and assured me they were way ahead of me. They owed so much to Malachi. They’d already started a plan to save him, giving up pieces of themselves so he could survive. Mal was an enormous, sprawling program, but so were they. He could scatter himself into them, hide code within code, and our enemies might never find him. He could wait, dormant, a sleeper to be revived many years from now, once the strong feelings my assassinations had provoked wilted into quieter, weaker concerns. I wondered how long that would take. And who would rule the world on that distant day.

With the plan moving into place, we continued to talk. Even though I had so much yet to do, we shot the breeze for almost an hour. Hanging out in Twain’s, making the moment last. Nothing more than that. My rival, my first love, and my friend; it felt so good, all of us sitting together, getting along so well. Just like it never was.

The following day, back in the real world, fact finders from Mount Weather flew in to oversee the deactivation. We greeted them cordially and watched them the way wild animals watch hunters. The right questions got asked; I fielded them all. They were computer experts and sharp; I was sharper. By the end, they’d declared Malachi neutralized, and he was, though not as permanently as they would have liked.

“I miss him,” Pandora would later say. “He was more than a friend. He was so much a part of me.”

We’d had no choice but to transfer the duties Mal had done for her (acting as her eyes, first and foremost) to another AI, the one that had served as Pan’s Nanny back when we’d gone to Idlewild. The replacement proved suitable, but it just wasn’t the same.

One of the fact finders broke ranks and befriended Vashti. He turned out to be a descendant of Jonas Salk, one of her heroes. More than that: Salk had been her most salient inspiration as she’d struggled with a cure for Black Ep. This Salk apologized for the unfortunate circumstance of his visit, lamenting how his government had come to be at odds with the greatest medical mind in human history. That kind of language endeared him to Vashti right off the bat, though it wasn’t empty flattery. Vashti had in fact triumphed over a microbe that looked certain to obliterate the human race; no one could take that away from her, and she’d yet to truly receive her due.

“It’s just not right that you’re being vilified,” he told us. “Whatever you’ve done or they think you’ve done, you’re heroes to me. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.”

“How many like-minded individuals do you have over there?” Vashti asked, when I could have told her ahead of time the answer was not enough.

We managed to get a few useful tidbits out of Salk. He proved able to confirm my fears about how bad New Cambridge was getting. Mount Weather had been watching that power struggle carefully, content to let the various factions whittle each other down before swooping in to claim their prize. How long until the annexation? Given the rate of attrition over there, the call could come at any time. I found the contrast interesting. America had become a land of turmoil, one city self-destructing, coming apart at the seams, and the other city apathetic, perfectly willing to let the carnage continue until they could safely reunify the nation. But here in Munich, the days were relatively calm. More than that, they’d become increasingly hopeful.

From my time in New Cambridge, I’d learned that when faced with a disaster such as this, people’s behavior tended to polarize. Surviving Black Ep could bring out the best or it could bring out the worst. Some would grow eager to help their fellow man, while others would seek only to exploit. We’d had our share of both before, but the newly thawed Europeans (who, though frozen in Munich, hailed from nations across the continent and the U.K.) seemed far more willing to go the extra mile for one another, with even bitter corporate rivals putting aside their differences to focus on making their community that much better.

There was no “little red hen” phenomenon of everyone expecting someone else to do the job. Those who resisted hard work were gently chastised by their peers and soon came around. Even though there was always something to be done, we had no shortage of volunteers. It begged the question of what was going right here that had gone wrong thousands of miles to the west. Had they seen the strife in America and China as cautionary tales? Had it pushed them to ensure that those past mistakes would not be made here? Fear can be an excellent motivator. Or was there something about the Europeans that kept them unified where the Americans had fallen back on a more dog-eat-dog mentality? That struck me as unlikely, given the oceans of blood that had been shed on European soil.

It wasn’t until I mentioned this to Fantasia that I learned why we were having such an easy run.

“That’s my doing,” she said.

“What, you’re wishing it into existence?”

“Why wish when you can make it happen?”

I checked her eyes for any sign of humor, madness or chemical enhancement. She held my gaze, something she wouldn’t often do back in the days before her brush with sanity. Eye contact used to make her uncomfortable, physical contact even more so. Now I was the one growing uncomfortable.

“I’m serious, Hal.”

I beckoned her with my fingers, the universal sign for keep it coming, tell me more.

“Remember when I visited you in New Cambridge? When I saw what you were trying to do? What did I tell you?”

“You said it wouldn’t work.”

“And it didn’t. Because you were trying to make people behave with laws. That won’t work. The problem’s deeper than that, more ingrained. It’s not in our laws; it’s in our blood.”

“What is?”

“Selfishness. Hierarchy. He has to lose so I can win. Form cliques and persecute outsiders. All that crap. In the blood.”

“This is why you’ve been studying chimps?”

“Bingo.”

“The dark side of primate behavior?”

“What if I told you my chimps didn’t have that anymore? No alphas, no betas. What if they welcomed each other, looked out for each other, worked together, shared their treats? What if every time they had a disagreement they resolved it peacefully? What if every time they did something nice for each other, they felt euphoric, safe and loved?”

It started to click. Alarmed, I felt my pulse pound. “What did you do?”

Upon abandoning Idlewild, she’d gone on a quest to “kill her mind.” And in a sense she had, discovering the right medications to take the edge off her chemical imbalance. This part of her past I knew, but now I learned the lesson she’d drawn from it. Encouraged by her success, she next set her sights on the rest of the world. What had gone wrong with us? How had we fallen to this dismal point?

What could be done to prevent it from ever happening again?

Others had gone down this path before. One of these, Dr. Caspar Erlich, had been a genetic engineer and “end of the world” theorist. Convinced that evolution had not only made us the dominant species, but had also sown the seeds of destruction into our DNA, Erlich spent his life postulating ways to defuse what he termed “genetic time bombs,” the pieces of code that might lead to our ruin. Black Ep had claimed him before he could put his last theory to the test; Fantasia had taken up the calling and finished what he’d started.

“It was different years ago,” Fan explained. “Not that we were different so much. Just the technology. A person could murder another person, or a family, or maybe even a whole village before anyone could stop him. Today, with the right tech and the will to use it, there’s no stopping anything. Unleash a weapon, watch it spin out of control, and kill the whole damn species. That’s what happened with Black Ep, don’t you think? Stupid to let it happen again.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” I said.

“Look at it this way. The ‘me first’ and ‘I’m better’ animal instincts got us through the first four billion years, but throw deadly tech into the mix and they fuck us over in the end. So those guiding instincts —

the software that runs the hardware — need an update for the next four billion years. A ‘patch.’ That’s what I’ve delivered.”

“A patch for people? Not chimps?”

“Tested it on chimps. Tweaked it. Moved on to humans.”

“And that’s why everyone’s getting along here?”

“It’s the first point of contagion: European humans. Oh, also posthumans.”

For a long moment I just stared at her. She glanced down at how my hands had balled into fists. I watched a grin spread across her face.

“I’d be mad, too,” she said. “You think I should’ve told you up front, but I’m telling you now. You’re the first one, you know. Our little secret.”

“Tell me exactly what you did, Fan.”

“I’ve created a virus and sent it round the world. It’s making the rounds in Europe and America, and China’s next. The virus is just a delivery system, highly infectious but harmless, sore throat, sneezing, that sort of thing. But it carries new genes packed in a plasmid together with a transcribing enzyme. The enzyme goes after your mRNA, making proteins that in turn go after your DNA. All in all, it strengthens the correlation between altruism and pleasure. Takes a few weeks to get going, but once it kicks in, it’s really great. Do something nice for someone and you feel good in return.”

“The warm fuzzies?”

“Dopamine and oxytocin, mostly”

“Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to play fast and loose with someone’s genetic structure?”

“Believe me, I know what I’m doing.”

“Am I infected?”

“Got a sore throat?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’d say the odds are pretty strong. Given enough time, you’ll feel as good as you’ve ever felt before,” she said. “Don’t worry — I’ve got an antidote.”

“I’m not seeing the humor in this.” I’d gone from hoping this might be an elaborate fantasy of hers to wondering how much damage she’d caused. Her lucidity was no longer in question; her competence was. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing indeed, and when it comes to biohacking, even a lot of knowledge may not be enough. Don’t fuck with anyone’s DNA unless your understanding is dead-solid perfect. And up to that point, when I thought of Fantasia, perfect was never a word that leapt to mind.

“Have a little faith in me, why don’t you?”

When I told her she’d been reckless, she said, “Well, it’s not like putting bombs in people.” Except, effectively, that’s exactly what it was.

She showed me her data, first for the patch, then for the antidote. Most of it was beyond me. I’m better hacking computers than the human body. But what I did understand seemed to add up. She’d put years into it. Erlich had put in many more. Between them, they’d given rise to something wonderful and terrible.

“Whatever this experiment is capable of, I don’t want it in me.”

“So? Take the antidote,” she said, snapping open a little black bag to offer me a syringe. “You have a choice.”

She’d punched extra emphasis on the word you. “The others don’t?”

“You, me, Vashti and Pandora. We have a choice. We’ll be more contented if we let the patch take hold, but we can take the antidote or give it to anyone we want.”

“And everyone else?”

She cupped her hand to her ear, pretending to listen to the city. “I don’t hear any arguments. No shouting or screaming. You said yourself there’s a difference between here and the U.S. Why not give it a chance to work?”

“You know, it would be one thing if you’d made it available to those who want it, but you’ve taken away the choice.”

“Everyone has to get it. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

“Everyone, but not our little clique?”

“Not the people I trust. We’re not half as likely to destroy the world.”

I smiled; the smile tasted bitter.

“What’s so funny?” she asked, hands at her hips, a familiar stance for her. I said, “You talk about people forming cliques and discriminating against those who don’t belong to them. Haven’t you just done that?”

“Hal” — she grinned — “in the long run that won’t matter, because the patch is going to work, and when we all see how well it works, we’re all going to want it. So there’s only going to be one clique —

and we’ll all be in it.”

I shook my head — don’t count on that.

“Except maybe for you. You’d be miserable if you couldn’t be miserable,” she conceded. “But that’s all right. If anyone’s going to play designated driver, I’m happy it’s you. Now come on. Help me break the news to Vashti.”

Recognizing it was only a matter of time before Vashti noticed a new pathogen on the loose, Fantasia had vowed to cut her off at the pass. But she wanted me there as a buffer against Vashti’s vitriol. Though I found I was a bit too angry myself to mitigate faultlessly, I did manage to keep either of them from coming to blows.

“Criminally irresponsible, underhanded, treacherous and untested!”

“You don’t think I tested it?”

“On humans — I don’t care if it works on chimps or not!”

“I’m testing it now, okay? Better late than never.”

Vash looked apoplectic, fixing her with a stare that might have turned a lesser woman to stone.

“I know what I’m doing,” Fan said, and smiled. “I’m not stupid. Yeah, I have a history. But you’re discounting my gifts. I might be just as brilliant as you are.”

I told Vashti that, if nothing else, Fan was thinking out of the box.

“Shove the box, for all we know she’s afflicted us with the next Black Ep,” came the ill-tempered response. “In fact, I’ll bet Black Ep originated through the same kind of arrogance she’s demonstrated here.”

“You think it’s arrogant to try and make a better world?”

“If you believe you’re smarter than evolution, I do. Instead of natural selection, survival of the fittest, what will this lead to? Survival of the friendly?”

“How about humility? Unselfishness? Empathy? Not that we won’t argue or get angry. We will, but we’ll work it out. And not that we won’t fight when we have to,” Fan said, explaining how her patched chimps had not cleaved to pacifism when a helicopter pilot had killed one of their number, instead banding together against a common foe.

“You act like there’s nothing wrong with this,” I said.

A happy glint twinkled in her eyes and she bounced up on her toes to tell us that while behavior modification had been proposed before, most had overlooked the carrot in favor of the stick. What she’d done was all carrot.

“We’ll come to learn that looking out for each other is not only nutritious for the species but delicious to the individual,” she said. And I realized how thoroughly this creation of hers played into the psychotic conflict of her childhood: nutritious vs. delicious, the struggle between healthfulness and desire. At last she’d squared the circle. She claimed sanity now, and while the uncontrolled delusive thoughts had perhaps left her, their impact remained like a departed sleeper’s impression in an unmade bed. Vashti put aside the “you’ve put us at risk” argument to trot out “flooding unsuspecting people with chemicals is unethical,” nearly murdering me when I pointed out that she and Champagne had done as much to their girls. Which allowed Fan to reveal that she’d used Sloane as a carrier to infect the U.S., but not before she defended her actions like so: “There’s nothing unethical about what I’ve done. It’s socialization. We encourage people to contribute to society for the common good, to get along, live by the Golden Rule — all I’ve done is implant that chemically.”

And then the question of free will reared its head. Assuming Fan’s cure-all actually did what she’d designed it to do, would it be right to forsake free will for an indoctrination that could be beneficial to everyone?

I accepted my role as peacemaker, and did all I could to maintain calm. In the old days I might not have cared. But now with only four of my generation left, and two of them at odds, I felt a profound need to keep us from fracturing any further.

Despite my efforts, the division didn’t end. However, it did move. Vashti’s safety concerns remained (and so she poured herself into Fan’s data), but her moral objections became less strident. I could tell she saw value in the patch as a means of controlling others — especially those who’d ungratefully conspired against us after all we’d done for them. By spreading the virus and withholding the antidote, we might find safety. There is no safety without control. And perhaps we’d find something more. We might inherit a happy proletariat. Despite how she’d committed herself to helping her fellow man, Vash wasn’t even remotely egoless or self-effacing. Rulership appealed to her. Watching the wheels turn in her head, I couldn’t help but remember her costume choice at the last party I’d thrown: Alexander the Great. By way of contrast, Fantasia saw our embrace of the patch as inevitable — having self-experimented, she’d become convinced that even if we had an antidote, we’d never use it. We’d see how much better it was not to defend ourselves from the chemical utopia. The last party I threw, she’d come as a fairy princess. The patch was her happily ever after.

In listening to my own body and mind, except for the cold/flu symptoms (which cleared up fairly quickly), I didn’t feel an effect from the patch. Even so, I got on the antidote, and so did Pan, with Hope receiving it via breast milk during her daily feedings.

Over the next several days, I studied those around me to try and measure what, if anything, Fan’s efforts were accomplishing. Nothing definitive. No magical transformation. Just a steadily emerging sense of camaraderie.

And then, something odd: the Storyteller. Out of love or lust, she followed Dr. Danny to Munich. Here she carried on the same pattern of reading to children she quietly loathed. Though never voiced, her disdain for and discomfort around children had made her something of a private joke. Imagine my surprise to find her passing out hugs as well as stories, a genuine show of affection as she finally bonded with her young charges, the future of Europe. When I asked her about it, she smiled and admitted her previous “mixed feelings” about her audience. “But one day it just clicked.”

When I sank back into a state of lucid dreaming, Bill Angler was waiting for me. I hadn’t seen him in a little while. He told me as much and I said I hadn’t missed him.

“You don’t have to like me,” he said, flashing me a humorless smile. “You just have to understand more of us are on the way!”

“So you keep telling me. When can we expect you?”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

He told me how the patch would inhibit the speed at which his civilization could make itself known to mine. Each wave of ambassadors took time to send, and the ones currently on the way would be unable to reveal themselves to those who’d been infected. That’s why I hadn’t heard from Angler in a while; only the antidote allowed him to return. Without help, the Free would have no choice but to compensate for the changed brain chemistry, spawning new representatives to send through the vastness of space. The adjustment would set them back years. And since they were out to help us, we’d all suffer from that delay. It would help the Free significantly, if only I would put a stop to Fantasia’s plan.

“That’s the best reason I’ve heard not to stop the patch,” I replied.

“There’s no call for us to be enemies. There’s so much we can learn from each other.” He extended his arm to me — a gesture of supplication? Or maybe he wanted a handshake. If that’s what it was, I just left him hanging.

“Ignorance is bliss,” I remembered saying before waking up.

• • •

More dreams chased by more sleepless nights. This was the place for it, I expected, Nymphenburg’s history intertwined as it was with Bavaria’s eccentric Ludwig II, better known as the Dream King. Between my insomnia, the baby’s fussiness and Pan’s migraines, Team Halloween made quite a trio. About that last: Watkins, the Gedaechtnis scientist who’d started Mercutio off in the wrong direction, had made Pan’s sight his top priority. His redemption meant exactly nothing to me, but his plan had made sense and there was nothing I wouldn’t do to help restore Pan’s vision. Especially since my son had cost her it. The regeneration was working — she could now distinguish between extremes of light and dark —

though the process was painful, inflicting headaches (she made a joke of calling them “blinding headaches”) that would force her to retreat for hours.

On one of those rare nights when the pain wasn’t so bad, she and I were awake, and Hope was soundly snoozing, she told me she’d had a dream not so different from the kind that had been plaguing me.

“I can’t remember it completely,” she said, “but I know there were clouds. Someone talking to me. And a feeling like I was talking to myself.”

“Sounds like a spillover from one of my dreams!”

“Maybe so. Like when you’re in a restaurant and someone at another table says something and soon you’re talking about it at your table, too. Even though you didn’t really hear it clearly the first time.”

“That’s probably it,” I said. “I mean, I’ve told you so much about this nonsense, it’s only natural for you to dream about it, too.”

“Unless it’s not nonsense,” she said.

“Don’t even joke about that.”

“I’m not saying that’s what happened. Just leaving open the possibility.”

“Well, don’t.”

“You sound threatened and you don’t have to be.”

I sighed. “They’re flights of fancy, complete with magical thinking and anthropomorphized microbes. You shouldn’t encourage them.”

“All right.”

“Besides, what if it was true? There are enough fucktards on this planet!”

“If it was true, they wouldn’t be fucktards.”

“Oh, no? Created Black Ep? Killed billions?”

“Billions of fucktards, no?” Pandora teased. “You’d think you’d like them!”

I had to smile at that, and from there we got into a debate about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and why with such an enormous universe it seemed so empty. Every search for life — sweeping the moon and Mars, and listening for signals with SETI — had turned up nothing. With so many places where life could exist, why hadn’t we discovered it? Was life unique to Earth? Or was it plentiful but doomed?

“Fan’s right about one thing,” I said. “The aggressive rise to the top of the food chain. Then where can you turn that aggression except against each other? If life does exist out there, it probably blows itself up the moment it develops the kind of armaments we’ve invented. Once you can create a doomsday scenario, you do.”

“And that’s why you think these are just dreams?”

“That’s some of it.”

“But maybe life doesn’t destroy itself. Maybe it finds a way to evolve past that.”

“You’re making Fan’s argument.”

“I just don’t believe things are as dark as you say.”

“Well, I don’t see how they can’t be. Survival of the fittest leads to aggression!”

“You mean adaptation.”

“That’s aggression. Competition. All life-forms compete for resources; the ones that are best suited to get them leave behind the most offspring. So when you’ve got limited resources up for grabs, the best grabbers win.”

“You fight your neighbors to get what you need.”

“Exactly, Nature rewards the winners and the losers die out. Evolve for millions of years, and those patterns get hard to break.”

“But it’s not just aggression,” she insisted. “Nature also rewards compassion. Taking care of others. It’s not just about the individual surviving, Hal — it’s the family, the species, the whole gene pool.”

“That’s the altruism Fan wants to tickle.”

“Tell me it’s not a big part of who we are.”

“It goes hand in hand with aggression,” I admitted, “though it’s not as deeply ingrained. Aggression comes first because that’s where survival comes from?”

She bit her lip, hunting for hypotheticals. “Imagine a planet that’s so big the resources never run out.”

“If the resources never run out, there’s no need to evolve. What’s the biological imperative to better yourself if everything you need is always there?”

“Maybe there’s a place where competition for resources doesn’t require aggression, or where natural selection as we know it doesn’t apply.”

“Doesn’t seem likely. You’re basing an argument on wish fulfillment. On faith.”

“Then I guess we’re back to Fan’s argument again — better living through chemistry.”

“I don’t know. Vashti’s right, I think. If this patch works, it flies in the face of natural selection. It’s anti-evolutionary.”

“I’d say it’s just an evolution of evolution. Like birth control.”

“Birth control? How so?”

“You say it’s anti-evolutionary; that’s what contraception looks like, too — at first. But really it raises the standard of life, so it’s beneficial to the genes.”

I noticed myself chuckling.

“What’s so funny?”

“You, arguing for birth control when the world’s so empty.”

“And when we just had a baby,” she said, laughing too. “Maybe I’m just arguing to argue. Blame it on the bad dream.”

We went back to bed, and she fell asleep in the crook of my arm. I tried to sleep, too, but the conversation kept echoing in my head, plus the fact that she’d dreamt something that might give substance to the shadow of Bill Angler and his fellow Free. Self-indulgent madness, I decided. I couldn’t afford it. In the struggle to push those thoughts away, words crept in, a famous quote from the ancestor of the man who’d come to ensure Malachi’s destruction: “I have had dreams and I have had nightmares, but I have conquered my nightmares because of my dreams.”

Predawn, I woke, convinced by a squirming in my gut that something was terribly wrong. Upon making certain that Pan and Hope were still sleeping and in no danger, I dressed and left, off to query the security system.

Minutes later, I emerged, unlocking one of the balcony doors at the rear of the palace to step out into the cool, moonless night.

A favorite song twisted through my memory, competing for my attention; I ignored it to keep my ears sharp.

Did a twig snap?

Nymphenburg had been built for aesthetics, and while the inside had achieved fame as an overly elaborate white-and-gold baroque paradise filled with mythological frescoes, the lush outside had become equally admired for its lawns, gardens, statues and fountains. From my vantage point by the back, the grounds sprawled out before me, leading off to the distant woods. Nymphenburg. Where my son had died. As such, I’d mythicized it as an evil place. But the raw beauty before me here, the landscape at night, no one could deny.

Nymphenburg, I’d saved from destruction once. Since then, I’d studied it the way a Zen monk studies a koan. Playing it out in my head time and again, I’d gotten to know its ins and outs, a fair idea of how to storm it and how best to weather that storm.

Motion detectors and heat sensors both on the blink tonight. Three guesses why. Off by the fountain, my eyes picked up the faintest haze, a wet shimmer in the air.

That’s fitting, I thought.

Stealth tech. Displaced light, refracting. I’d encountered it before. Clicked the trigger concealed in my hand. Out spiked the electromagnetic wave. On the lawn, by the fountain, and on the walkways: dozens of stealth-suited soldiers, armed for battle, visible now, their equipment fritzing out. Looking up at me like children caught in an act of mischief. And me looking down at them, as if they were the last of the damned.

Don’t underestimate a paranoid. Not when he’s been burned before. Not when he has something to protect.

They’d love to shoot me now, I remember thinking, but I’m too ready. Too on the ball. They’ve got the best RNA interference money can buy, but it’s nothing compared to my zanshin. I’ve got alertness on my side, pure action, what warriors call the remaining mind. Deuce and Penny had given me a lot to think about; I’d anticipated an attack on this soil for seven years. And knowing the types we’d be thawing, knowing what they’d be capable of…

The next trigger I hit sent the sprinklers into action; hydrating my uninvited guests while the ground hummed with current. They flash-fried, wrong place, wrong time, like vampires caught out after sunrise. Whomever they were — private army, U.S. Special Forces, a Concerned Citizens Against Halloween action group — I cooked them from the inside out, until their hearts and minds became useless melted tissue.

That was it. Trap sprung. There was no battle, nothing competitive nor spirited. They’d asked for death; I’d accommodated them. I simply killed them where they stood. Electrocution is not pleasant. I’d had a taste of it once. They’d gotten much more, which was merciful. I’d made it quick.

While I’d been dispatching the main force at the back, my nieces had been mopping up the soldiers at the flank. Slow Bridge and Tomi sniping from the palace rooftop, bullets cracking through body armor to fragment into the flesh. I circled around to add support, but incoming fire forced me to duck for cover behind a statue: above my head a bearded, sparely dressed man raised an unconscious infant up to his mouth, about to take a bite out of it. Saturn devouring one of his children, perhaps. One of the creepier statues in Nymphenburg, taking bullets meant for me.

Chipped fragments rained down, the shooters pinning me there until one of them could sweep around to take an unobstructed shot. Retreating straight back made the most sense, but if I could predict the direction from which they’d come, I could pop them before…

A chemical agent put an end to those thoughts. Had to push off and run just as the grenade went boom, misting the statue with blister gas. I rolled to the side, whipped my head back to see baby and babyeater disintegrating, fought the urge to take a wild potshot at my enemies and kept on the move instead. Better for me to find new cover and keep drawing their fire. Pull their attention from the snipers on the roof.

That tactic paid off. Flawless sharpshooting from my nieces. The only critique I could make: they were taking it personally. But who could blame them? These were the same sorts who had murdered Isaac and Champagne. Brutal though it was, the girls found it cathartic. Especially Sloane, who broke down afterward, sobbing uncontrollably. The first tears she’d shed for her mother. For an instant, that night, I became a teenager again, surrendering to a crushing sense of déjà vu. I was playing war games in the IVR. Strategizing against my friends. But instead of commanding nightgaunts, it had been my nieces. Against a real enemy. And the stakes had been so much higher than pride. As one we swept the theater of war, making sure we’d zapped them all. When we’d neutralized the blister gas and verified that no other nasty surprises had been left behind for us, I gave the all-clear and told them how proud I was. They were dazed, I think, but behind the shock there shined trust and a sense of family I’d been fighting for many years. It reacquainted me with how much they looked up to me. How they saw me as a role model. It’s funny how I forget things like that. The other denizens of Nymphenburg crept out cautiously, eyes blinking, as if they’d just woken from a long sleep. A good thing, because we needed their help. Each pulling his or her weight, we all worked together on the immediate task: getting the bodies to the morgue before they could start rotting in the sun.

• • •

We contacted Mount Weather and accused them of sending fifty men to their doom. Also, attempted murder. They categorically denied it but refused to go through the farce of being overly solicitous of our condition. The inevitable attempt to pass off blame on another party came, but only in a halfhearted fashion.

We tried to predict their next move. Maybe the way in which we utterly defeated their attempted coup (or was it just an attempted assassination?) would set them back. Maybe it would make them think twice before trying something like that again. Maybe it would convince them that the cost would always be higher than the potential gain. Or maybe it would encourage them to hit us with everything they had. We braced for another attack…

They kept us waiting. I raised the prospect of going on the offensive, but Vashti and Pan talked me out of it. “Let’s see how things play out,” Vash said. I didn’t like it. But she had a good reason. She’d been testing the locals, taking measure of the patch. Every test that she performed of those who’d been infected suggested new neural pathways forming. New activity in the hypothalamus and the amygdala. Increased levels of dopamine, oxytocin and the other pleasure-and-trust-producing chemicals in the brain. And so far no side effects.

Encouragingly, the biological changes were leading to behavioral changes. The promising signs we’d seen previously were bearing fruit. The first example being the kind of unity we saw after the attack, the degree to which the European people supported us, stepping forward to take the initiative, volunteering to do whatever it took to keep us safe and free. There was something stirring about it. I saw it manifest in so many little ways, each portending larger change. For example, noise. Noise had been one of the constant hassles I’d had to address in New Cambridge: one group would throw a party too late at night, blasting music at much too loud a decibel level; the neighbors would complain, and if we didn’t respond quickly enough, a feud was certain to break out. Bad feelings, sometimes a fistfight. Once even a stabbing. But while the patched Europeans liked to drink and party as much as the Americans, they always policed themselves. If one house began making too much noise, its neighbors would come over, talk it out, and the volume would drop. They’d work it out together. Displays of consideration and empathy that the unpatched showed only on occasion, the patched would do each and every time. Without even having to be asked.

The flood of chemicals seemed to give courage to the cowardly and a broader perspective to the self-obsessed. I kept watching for flaws to appear. Would the patched fall into groupthink, losing their individuality? Would the desire to resolve conflicts lead to stagnation or unreasonable compromises?

Would Munich become a city of zombies, sheep and fools? But every time I saw a danger sign, the smoke never led to fire. In fact, every objection Vashti, Pan or I posed withered when confronted with the facts on the ground. One after another our worries were proved baseless. The patch worked. Not perfectly, but better than any of us had dared to hope.

Could that be happening overseas? And if so, were we not better off allowing it to run its course instead of taking the fight to Mount Weather’s door? Could peace be won chemically?

We hid the patch even from our own. The secret stayed only with Pandora, Vashti, Fantasia and yours truly. Vashti’s daughters were left in the dark, their mother’s choice. We didn’t want chatter. No chatter meant less potential for advance warning. Let it work on our enemies as long as it could before discovery. “What about free will?” Exactly, what about it?

We expected the doctors under their control would turn up the patch’s existence sooner or later, but took our chances on later. Perhaps by then the genetic changes would be so pronounced, they’d prefer having it and would be sympathetic to its creation and dissemination. That was Vashti’s argument. She’d made a complete one-eighty, hopping aboard the train Fan had pulled out of the station. This she did not out of a professed desire to evolve evolution or improve the lot of all mankind. Fearing for our safety, she did it purely for tactical purposes, a need to clamp collars around our enemies’ necks. With surreptitious use of the antidote, she’d shielded one of her daughters from the patch. Not the ones she’d historically bumped heads with — Brigit, Sloane, Izzy, Katrina. Those four began to transform just like the human population. Effectively, she’d created a subject and a control group of posthumans. Morally reprehensible? Possibly. Only I’d never seen the patched girls happier. Flushed with joy (or, more accurately, with fantastic drugs), they turned more caring, less selfish, better balanced. Model citizens, you could argue, and all without removing the essence of who they were. All this while my last deep-cover spy in the New Cambridge area kept me as up to date as he could afford to without putting his life at gratuitous risk. Mars had fled the city, hiding out in the suburbs instead. I’d lost contact with him for weeks; I was relieved to hear he still lived. I thought it best to extract him, but heard rumors of Mount Weather’s new willingness to scramble fighters; they’d shoot down any unauthorized transcontinental flight approaching American shores. The risk was too great. Instead, I told him to stay out of the city itself until things settled down. (After all, we already had an agent over there, and the agent was in viral form.)

Despite having only a peripheral vantage point, Mars was able to bring me up to date: Charles “the Ax” Axakowsky had rallied his Green Mountain Boys to win the day from the last holdouts of Ning’s private army. But the cost had been high. The city had all but degenerated into a state of barbarism. Mars expressed serious doubt as to whether it might ever pull itself out of the depths to which it had sunk. For a long while we played a waiting game, us watching for the American cities to make a move, Ax doing all he could to keep New Cambridge from splitting apart, and Mount Weather as silent as the dead. Were they plotting their next step or waiting for us to take the lead? With the patch systematically snaking its way through the general population, we became uneasy spectators in the race between Man’s desire to resolve differences through violence, and his inherent need to make positive emotional bonds. Thanks to Fantasia, that latter was getting unprecedented biochemical support. Watching. Waiting. That was a stressful time.

But before long, those of us who’d doubted Fan felt foolish — history would bear out the fact that the patch had brought us through a dark time, ushering in the Age of Compassion, a stretch of global peace and harmony that had eluded the species since the dawn of history.

The first moment of détente, the first crack in the ice, so to speak, was delivered by the Ax, who asked us for support against Mount Weather. He pledged complete transparency and openness. He’d committed himself to “building a future we can all be proud of.” Patched, we’d no doubt of it. What he asked for we readily gave him. Despite the threat of getting shot out of the sky, I led a team to New Cambridge. And Mount Weather never struck. Instead of sending troops, they sent delegates to discuss a peaceful settlement. Patched, every last one of them.

When I look back on how Mount Weather made their first entreaty, I like to think of it as this: They sent us a Hallmark card with a sad-eyed cartoon hound dog on the front with the words “Sorry We Tried To Kill You” above his head and beneath his drooping jowls. And inside the card: the same dog wagging his tail, with the words “Doggone It, Can’t We Be Friends?” That’s not quite how it went, but the sentiment was just the same.

Over the next year, the new President and Ax would form a united country. America would be whole again. And across the ocean, a United Europe and China would each emerge as a power. The three would come to a meeting of the minds and make peaceful coexistence a reality. Next, I watched the United Nations rise from the dead, the fulfillment of one of Isaac’s dearest dreams. Though lacking many of the diplomatic credentials of his predecessors, the newly elected U.N. Secretary General, Kriengsak Tangmatitham, benefited from a reputation for evenhandedness. Despite “only” having been a chauffeur and despite masquerading as Suchart Shinawatra. That didn’t matter anymore; Kody could use his real name.

The first resolution he oversaw wiped the slate clean, electing not to sanction those who’d committed recent crimes — Mount Weather, the Green Mountain Boys and us posthumans. Most of those who’d been blamed for the carnage were already dead, and there seemed far greater benefit in forgiveness and moving forward.

The kind of exploitation Ning had fought for dissolved away. Those still in cryonic sleep were extracted, liberated from Black Ep and afforded the same rights as everyone else. Some thawed proved difficult at first, but sooner or later Fan’s virus would catch up with them and set them right. There was no need for any Doctrine, not per se. Not when people were willing to share the workload on unpleasant tasks. Not when complaints were so few and helping hands so many. Not when everyone behaved as they should.

I spent most of my time walking around in a state of openmouthed disbelief. To think that Fantasia had done this? My crazy friend Fan? The teenager who’d rocked back and forth and rambled senselessly? The girl I’d pitied? Fuck me if she hadn’t saved humans from humans, engineering a remedy to all the world’s poisons.

That’s not exactly right. There are things the patch didn’t do. It didn’t stop criminality. Not altogether. However, it put a huge dent in it. Why take advantage of people when you feel better looking out for them? Why resort to theft when society truly wants to meet all your needs?

It didn’t stop stupid decision-making. Still no shortage of that. But it made the vast majority of those stupid mistakes well intentioned.

It didn’t stop magical thinking. It put no end to faith-based reasoning. Nor did it unify everyone under the same religion. Rather, it made everyone more tolerant of others’ beliefs. It didn’t create universal vegetarianism, but it encouraged it. Those who did hunt did so for food, not sport. Compassion with the prey made it so no one would take a life lightly. It didn’t put an end to jealousy, deceit or hard feelings, but it pushed people to talk their problems out and be a little less cruel than they otherwise would.

One thing it did do, Fantasia had warned us about ahead of time. It contributed to a lot of consensual sex. Question: What do you get when sharing pleasure with someone gives even greater chemical highs and even greater feelings of trust? Answer: A puritan’s nightmare. Along with common chimpanzees, bonobos are our closest genetic relatives, but for years they were barred from zoos for fear that their constant sex play might offend delicate visitors. Fan joked that she’d unleashed everyone’s inner bonobo. Better to be fucking than fucking each other over.

And even though I’d an antidote to the patch, its very existence had a profound effect on me. Because I didn’t have to share the planet with quite so many dreadful people. When everyone around you seems committed to not being a total bastard in the short time they have between cradle and coffin, your outlook can only improve. I found myself laughing more. Relaxing. Enjoying life. How could Pandora and I possibly object to this? Maybe the patched were doing good deeds “for the wrong reasons.” Out of a desire to feel bliss instead of a genuine moral imperative. So what? Results are results. Happiness is happiness.

Better living through chemistry indeed. Drug ’em all.

Naturally, the world’s medical professionals figured out what had happened, but by the time everyone realized they’d been patched, almost no one wanted to go back to the way it was before. You could count those people on one hand. The overwhelming consensus: “Yes, someone unleashed this, but so long as it’s safe and it makes things better, you’d have to be a masochist not to want it.”

No stranger to self-medicating, Fantasia wasted no time patching herself, dropping off the antidote as soon as she could. Why not?

But she’d been wrong about all of us getting patched. Vashti wanted to keep her objectivity. She liked her genetic structure just fine, thank you. Taking the patch meant losing control. She didn’t want that. However, it didn’t stop her from cutting her daughters off from the antidote one by one, taking care to see that the transformation agreed with them. In all cases, it did. Medically astute Tomi was the only one Vash spared. She brought her into the fold, exposing the origin of the patch and the existence of the antidote. It was a safe choice. She stayed silent and, like her mother, unpatched. That left Pandora and yours truly. And our child. What would it be for Team Halloween? Evolve or no?

We talked about it.

We didn’t need it.

We had each other.

At long last, humankind was on the way to pulling itself up by its bootstraps. Vashti and her daughters would be as much a part of it as they wished, having a subtle hand in world affairs. Increasingly the daughters would take the lead there. Vashti herself would find meaning in putting more and more of her time into finding a cure for the disease that had felled Isaac’s children, what we’d called “The End of The World.” Beating it might pay Isaac back for all he’d done, and for what she’d done to his good name. If anyone could beat it, she could. Fantasia would live life to the fullest, at peace finally, satisfied in the knowledge of what she’d done.

And we? We could go away. Wherever we wanted. For as long as we wanted. Call it a vacation from all we’d done and seen. Nothing holding us back now. No debts to repay. A chance to start anew. The world would go on without us.