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98
THE SEVEN BILLION BILLION
WE ARE HUMANITY.
We are one.
We are the girl with the broken back sprawled in an empty room, waiting for the end to come.
We are the man who’s fallen a half mile away, and the only thing still living in us is not alive, but an alien device that directs every resource at its disposal to saving our body lying on the cold stone, to shock our heart back to life. There is no difference between us and the system. The 12th System is us and we are the 12th System. If one should fail, the other will die.
We are the prisoners aboard the Black Hawk helicopter that circles the base while its fuel runs low, swinging over a broad river, its waters black and swift, and our voices are quelled by the wind that roars through the open hold, and our hands are clasped; we are bound to one another in an unbroken chain.
We are the recruits hustling to our battle stations, the rescued ones, the winnowed ones, the harvest gathered into buses and separated into groups in which our bodies were hardened and our souls emptied only to be filled with hate and hope, and we know as we break from our bunkers that dawn approaches and with it the war, and this is what we’ve longed for and dreaded, the end of winter, the end of us. We remember Razor and the price he paid; we carved the initials VQP into our bodies in his honor. We remember the dead but we can’t remember our own names.
We are the lost ones, the solitary ones, the ones who did not board those buses chugging down the highways, the empty city streets, the lonely country roads. We dug in for the winter and watched the skies and trusted no stranger. Those of us who did not die from starvation or the bitter cold or simple infections that antibiotics we did not have could have relieved, we endured. We bent, but we did not break.
We are the lonely hunters designed by our makers to drive survivors onto the buses that scavenge the countryside and to kill those who refuse. We are special, we are apart, we are Other. We have been awakened into a lie so compelling that to not believe it would be madness. Now our work is done and we watch the skies, waiting for a deliverance that will never come.
We are the seven billion who were sacrificed, our bodies stripped down to our bones. We are the ones swept aside, the discarded ones, our names forgotten, our faces lost to wind and earth and sand. No one will remember us, our footprints erased, our legacies wiped out, our children and their children and their children’s children at war against one another unto the last generation, to the end of the world.
We are humanity. Our name is Cassiopeia.
In us the rage, in us the grief, in us the fear.
In us the faith, the hope, the love.
We are the vessel of ten thousand souls. We carry them; we hold them; we keep them. We bear their burden, and through us, their lives are redeemed.
They rest in us and we in them. Our heart contains all others. One heart, one life, on the advent of a mayfly’s final flight.
CASSIE
ALIENS ARE STUPID.
Ten thousand years to pick us apart, to know us down to the last electron, and they still don’t get it. They still don’t understand.
Dumbasses.
The pod rests on a raised platform three stairsteps off the floor. Egg-shaped, tortoiseshell-green, about the size of a big SUV, like a Suburban or an Escalade. The hatch is closed, but I’ve got the key. I press the pad of Vosch’s severed thumb against the round sensor beside the door and the hatch soundlessly slides open. Lights flicker on, bathing the interior in a wash of iridescent green. Inside, a single seat and another touchpad and that’s it. No instrument panel. No little monitors. Nothing but the chair, the pad, and a small window through which I guess you can wave good-bye.
Evan
was wrong and he was right. He believed all their lies but he knew the only truth that matters. The one truth that mattered before they came, when they came, after they came.
They had no answer for love.
They thought they could crush it out of us, burn it from our brains, replace love with its opposite—not hate, indifference. They thought they could turn men into sharks.
But they couldn’t account for that one little thing. They had no answer for it because it wasn’t answerable. It wasn’t even a question.
The problem of that damned bear.
RINGER
AFTER CASSIE LEAVES, I drop the gun.
I don’t need it. I have Vosch’s gift in my pocket.
