XII

I can hear things now. Lots of voices. Men, women. My hearing seems to be more acute than I can remember. I can hear someone scratching at an itch buried under a starched uniform. Someone chuckles, a bag of chips crinkles, someone sips water. There is typing on keyboards, clearing of throats, whispers into microphones of coordinates, I think. And raspy, metallic replies from somewhere else. Then my ear finds a familiar voice. Male, deep. And the snippet of a conversation:

shouldn’t wake up after that last dose. pretty much out.
has the zone been cleared
yes all the bodies have been recovered
what about the girl
dead like the rest i guess the swap didn’t go off the way
that’ll be all corporal

The conversation ends and now I can pick up my head. There is a massive wall facing me covered with an illuminated projection of the world. S-shaped lines show orbits, I think. There are countries colored blue and others red. There are a dozen or more people in uniform walking, sitting, typing, reading reports, all as if on a giant stage. I am the lone audience, seated in my own special chair. The ceiling of the place is lost in the semi-darkness above. There’s some sort of machinery up there that I can’t quite make out.

Then I realize why I can’t move. There are straps on my ankles and wrists. Not that I could do much if they were removed, but I think that’s strange, being strapped down. And the straps are tight, especially around my ankles. The chair itself is comfortable but my feet are beginning to tingle. Soon they’ll be numb enough to match the rest of me. I’m drooling now and watching a small skinny slug of saliva drop slowly, slowly, slowly down until it hits my shirt. Something is wrong, but I can’t think… There is a silver tray lined with plastic needles a few feet away. Hospital. Syringes. Think…think… Then that familiar voice again. I crane my head up and look. I know that I know who he is but I can’t make my brain put a name with the face. What the fuck is wrong with me? I watch as he walks around the room, listening to the reports of the other men, then finally he looks up at me. Who is he? I know but I can’t make myself know.

Something new is happening. There is a deep humming sound coming from behind and above me. And there is something on my head, cool and light. But then something else. Like the acute hearing now but only visual and far away, but somehow close all the same. Cold…metal…patterns…thrust vectors…MIRV’s… The words flash into my head and somehow I am part of some strange machine. There is a part of me that intimately knows what to do, how to guide all these elements together but if you ask me to explain it, forget it. I can see streaks of light as a bunch of, well, rockets take off, all controlled by me. Rockets? My brain won’t function the way I want it to, I can’t recall anything, I can’t make it do anything, but someone seems to have taken the trouble to make it do a whole lot, except that I don’t really know what the fuck that is although it’s happening now and I can feel that I am controlling a large number of the rockets. I want to make them hit a set of targets. This is familiar – like a game. And I know that I am good at it.

Suddenly there is a general clearing of things.. My senses spike and I don’t feel sick or drowsy anymore. I’m playing the game the way they want me to play it, that much I’m certain of, but now I’m coming slowly back. I can remember –

yes all the bodies have been recovered
what about the girl
dead like the rest i guess the swap didn’t go off the way

Aisling.

Everything comes back with the force of a jack hammered fist slamming into a wall. Everything. And I put it all together with those overhead words, and I know for a fact and without a single doubt that she is dead. I don’t know how or exactly when, but I know she didn’t make it out alive from the swap. The knowledge flows through me like black wave, extinguishing all the lights of my life one by one. The last flickers to be overwhelmed are the human certainties that tomorrow will bring more possibilities than today – I see it drowned, throttled and discarded by the black mass of grief that stuffs me like a scarecrow, pushing out at the seams. I can’t scream, or cry, or yell. I can’t feel anger, or remorse, or hatred, or much of anything. There is an overwhelming desire in me to simply End Things. Not just my life, but all life – all living. A small voice is telling me that this technological warfare is the summit of what being human really is, and in an instant, I pass judgment on everything.

Clarity: I am interfacing with an orbiting platform where no orbiting platform should be, loaded with enough nukes to set human evolution back to leggy fish. My mind is the only one that can finely control all of the simultaneous launches. It seems that the enemy has a pretty tough missile defense and that even their biggest supercomputers would not have made much of a difference. Instead, throughout the past few minutes I’ve been outwitting pretty much everything the enemy has seen fit to throw at me and from the looks on all the faces in the room, it seems that my missile dance is a big hit. Time to finish things.

The power surges through me, fully in control. Part of me is eradicated as I channel still more and more. Through this power my senses sweep around the entire globe. I am amassing the misery, hatred and despair of every living human being, collecting it like a giant cup catching rain from a hurricane. The energy gathers in a place I cannot see but suddenly I transmute it and place that energy around each of the nukes, magnifying their destructive power. The megatonnage now headed at humanity is thousands of times higher than previously expected. When it comes down, there won’t be much of us left. I have precise control of them all now, and I beckon to their flight systems, calling them home.

A new set of blinking lights joins the show on the big map. No one notices at first – they’re still congratulating each other – but then I see a few hands pointing and a few people start running. That’s funny. Where can they run to? Aisling’s father is shouting at no one until finally he pulls his sidearm and starts towards me, giving me flat sounding orders. He’s very impressive in his full blown military authority but he is talking to a god now and before he can reach me he’s three feet off the ground with his own gun moving towards his head. He’s shouting something at me, but I can’t make it out. I bring him down to about a foot off the ground and three feet away. He stops talking, which is good. I look at him curiously, like a medical researcher looks at a rat after squeezing drops of shampoo in its eyes. When I’m finally bored, the gun goes off and a fine red mist billows out behind him. I let him drop limp, like a puppet whose strings have been rudely cut. The nukes are flying true and they don’t need my attention anymore. Not after I’ve disabled our entire missile defense systems. Share and share alike, I think. I calmly unbuckle myself, remove the electrode cap and stand up. The funny thing is that I can still feel all the nukes, like a herd of unruly children, hurtling downward, unstoppable. I can feel the air rushing over them as they hurtle through the atmosphere. The room is deserted now so I slowly rise and melt a tunnel straight up to the surface. I float out of the facility and gently set down on the roof. In the distance dozens of mushroom clouds rise majestically up, up, impossibly high. Cities will be falling soon, their streets cracking open. Billions will be calling on their gods for forgiveness and protection while the last fire cleanses everything. The blast waves should reach the facility soon, and then it will all be finally over. Just like that soldier said back at the front – and in my dream.

And then out of my storm of action, a gentle memory surfaces. It is of Aisling and me, sitting on top of our rock, that rainy evening. Her eyes are bright with joy and she’s holding my hand as we press our foreheads together. Her head is wet from the rain and her hands are cold. So cold.

I look up. The wave is coming. I can see even from this distance the light haze running before the blast – made up of pulverized human beings and the civilization they have made.

I breathe out slowly.