The End Is Now

BLACK MONDAY Sarah Langan

On Display at the Amerasian Museum of Ancient Humanity, 14,201 C.E.

Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah!

It’s dusk on Black Monday. In six hours, Aporia Minor crashes into Antarctica. Three hours after that, Aporia Major obliterates the Ivory Coast. Anybody less than ten feet below ground dies in the hot dust showers. The one percent of humanity lucky enough to nab tickets to underground shelters is stuck there until the air clears—about a thousand years.

Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah!

The Northern Lights splatter-paint the sky like a Jackson Pollock. I’m about a hundred feet outside the front steps to the old Strategic Air Command installation in Offutt, Nebraska—the heartland of America. There’s this sweet spot right next to this retired B-52 that relays unsecured satellite waves.

Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah!

“What’s that? What’s happening?” my husband Jay asks.

“Air raid for the 55th Battalion. I heard the war moved into North Korea. It’s breaking down . . . Everybody’s been leaving their posts.”

“Same here. The Schwandts slaughtered their cattle,” Jay tells me. “Two thousand heads.”

“God, why?”

“They joined that rapture cult—the Dorothys. I think it was an offering to God.”

“I never liked those people. All that chintz in her kitchen,” I say.

Above me, behind me, in front of me, the Aurora sets the world aglow.

“What time do your Shelter Nine Tickets say you’re supposed to rendezvous?”

“They never delivered them,” Jay says.

I get this lump in my throat. “What do you mean you’ve got no Tickets?”

“I watched by the door since you left yesterday morning. No one’s come.”

“When were you going to tell me? After the Aporia Twins hit and you’re all dead?”

Under the sirens, I can hear Myles’ and Cash’s high-pitched hoots. Myles wants to say hello (Momma? Is that Momma? Give me the phone!). Cash is bouncing on the couch. “Jumpy-jump! Jumpy-jump!” he cries. Their voices are sweet confections I could lick.

“I’ve been calling you three times an hour for the last twenty-four hours,” Jay says, and I can tell he’s trying to be calm, not lash out, like I’m doing—like our marriage counselor told us is corrosive. This makes me totally crazy, because I am not calm.

“Fuck it. They made a mistake. There’s supposed to be a Bluebird on Crook Road tonight,” I say. “It’s the last one from outside. We’re a military family. They have to let you on.”

“Sounds like a plan. We’ll go as soon as I get the kids in shoes.” There’s no gas anymore. I realize they’ll be walking three miles through God knows what.

“Why did we rent off-base? I should be with you right now. I’m an idiot,” I say, and in my mind I’m holding one of the kids. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Myles or Cash, just so long as I’ve got something beloved in my arms.

“We’ve got this under control. You save the afterworld,” my husband hollers over the sirens. “I love you, Nicole.”

Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah!

I’m terrified all of a sudden. It’s because he said my name.

“Squeeze them for me. And yourself. I love you, too, Jay.”

By the time I’m back at my lab, the sirens are dead, and an RC-135 has crashed into a block of townhouses on General’s Row.

“Your family get Tickets?” I ask the rest of my crew in cybernetics. There’s six of us left. The rest of the building has been evacuated. We’ve volunteered to keep working because we think this is important.

Troy Miller doesn’t look up from his dendritic sample.

“How about you?” I ask Marc Rubin. Marc closet eats, can’t lose a pound, and breakdances at office parties. Before Aporia switched course for Earth last year, he’d taken his job just seriously enough not to get fired.

“It’s just my ex-girlfriend, Jenny Carpenter. She got her Ticket, didn’t she?” Marc asks. He’s given up the closet, and is munching cold hot dogs from the plastic pack. There’s a cafeteria on every floor here and they’re all still stocked. Aside from Shelter Nine, this is the best place to be when the Aporias hit.

“You?” I ask the rest of them.

Without comment, Jim Chen, Kris Heller, and Lee McQuaid all pull out their phones and check messages, forgetting that this is a secured building without external connections.

“I think my parents did. They must have,” Kris says.

I’m squeezing my forehead. The lab’s a mess. Monkey brains are scattered in steel pots like jellyfish in kids’ buckets at the beach. The examining tables are overturned, tools splayed, raw materials precariously propped along walls. The cleaning people haven’t come for weeks. Neither have any enlisted. They’re either trying to break into the shelters, or deserting this secret war America started fighting six months ago, against most of Asia. Nobody knows why it’s been happening, or why the Networks have been going down one by one.

“My family didn’t get their Tickets,” I say.

Troy Miller still doesn’t look up. He’s tall, wears a suit under his lab coat every day, and would be in charge around here if he wasn’t such an aspie. “Our families don’t need Tickets! Jeeze! It’s all fingerprint and voice recognition.”

“I hope you’re right,” I say. “Any progress?”

Troy points at an android that’s gone dark. Its lifeless body slumps against the freezer door. “If you want to call that progress.”

“Fail?” I ask.

“Epic. It went ape-shit. Literally,” Lee says. “It folded its articulations until its legs turned into stumps.”

Kris covers her face, remembering. “It tried to unscrew its head. We need an off switch. It kept screaming.”

“That’s it. We’re done with primate brains,” I say.

Troy looks up from his dendrite at last. “We shouldn’t use organic. This should be strictly AI.”

“We don’t have the time for AI. The Aporias hit in five hours. Let’s thaw the human samples out of cryo,” I say.

“Mmmm,” Troy grunts, which is his way of voicing dissent.

Lee, who’s turned rough around the edges from all this stress, noogie-knuckles Troy’s back, just between his shoulders. “Come on, buddy-boy! It’s a brain! Wrap it in Teflon and we’re good to go!”

Troy shrugs. Lee keeps knuckling the poor nerd.

“Cut it out, Lee,” I say.

“We can’t go human,” Kris says. “It’s wrong. Morally.”

“Come on, you bleeding hearts,” I say. “To the freezer.”

We thaw all nineteen brains. They’re shaped like the undersides of horseshoe crabs. The cold has dry-burned eleven beyond repair. Troy cinches a hemostatic forceps into Cadaver Nineteen’s desiccated parietal lobe. “This is what we’re losing in translation,” he tells me. “The higher order senses.” He’s got this high-pitched voice. It’s like talking to a cartoon character.

“Right,” I say. But the parietal’s the least of it. The real dilemma is left-right synthesis. In humans, lobes of the same brain experience and remember stimuli in different ways. They develop different personalities. When it comes time to make a decision, they chat, or even fight. The winner decides. In people with split lobes, you can actually see the fighting. One hand will grab a cigarette, the other hand will push it away. In drunks, one lobe takes over and the other tends to go dormant, which is why some people get so vicious after a pint of gin, and why brain damage victims might remember their families and long division, but not act quite the same, ever again.

Anyway, it’s this chatter between lobes that makes for better decisions. It’s this chatter that, in fact, accounts for sentience. We’ve been trying to reproduce it in our AI, but keep failing.

Troy plucks the closed forceps from Cadaver Seventeen’s postcentoral gyrus. There’s this mucky sound. “A human would go insane trapped inside a metal can,” he says. “Especially if it can’t talk or hear or feel someone’s touch. I’m telling you, we should stick with AI.”

“He’s got a point,” Kris says. Kris was born paraplegic, so she knows what’s she’s talking about. She built her own legs, grafting her neurons to limber plastic encasings, which is why she got chosen for this position out of ten thousand applicants, even though she’s only twenty-one years old.

“Guys,” I say. “Unless we figure something out, nobody’s going to survive down in those shelters. Who’s got a better idea?” They get quiet after that. I don’t hear any better ideas.

Just then, a keycard beeps and the airtight door hisses open. General Howard Macun charges in. He’s the head of Space Defense, and the highest ranking official at Offutt who isn’t in Nine by now. There’s this gash over his forehead. It’s a straight line from temple to temple, as if made by a factory machine.

Macun comes straight for me. I realize that my coat is wet with brain spatter. So is everyone else’s. We must look like a collection of butchers.

He seems about to grab and shake me. Then, somehow remembering himself, he stops short and salutes. I’m civilian SCS, but from the looks of things, he’s lost his wits. He’s not the first. I play along, saluting back.

“Status, Captain?” he asks as he swipes the blood from his eyes. It’s falling fast enough to soak his clothes and pool by his feet, leaving a trail from the door.

I click my Keds for him. “Sir! We’re close. But I wonder, how are the other cybernetics teams progressing? I’d like to suggest we move our work and our families to Shelter Nine and join forces with the cybernetics team over there. This is no time for proprietary research.”

Macun scratches his scalp and comes back with a glistening red finger. He seems surprised by it. Then he looks down at the blood trail, and seems surprised by that, too.

“What happened to you, sir?” I ask. “Is there rioting out there?”

“Are these human brains?” Macun asks.

“They are. General Camper signed the warrants to open cryo-freeze.”

Macun grits his teeth in disgust.

“Sir,” I say, as calmly as I know how. I’m channeling my husband, on whose tongue butter doesn’t melt. “You must see—the shelters need aboveground caretakers. Satellites won’t work after impact—there won’t be any kind of remote control drones. It’s got to be something that can engage independently from us. How else will the human race survive?”

“We’re going back to AI as soon as we have more time,” Marc chimes in. “Long term versus short term, you know?”

“What happened to you, sir?” I ask.

“It was just a dream,” Macun mumbles.

“Is Nine compromised, or did that injury happen up here? Did you do it to yourself, sir?” I ask.

Macun finally notices that I’m talking. He notices the blood again, the brains again, and his eyes go wide.

“Who cut your head?” I ask.

Macun’s feet go pigeon-toed. His knees begin to bounce. “Shelter Nine! Why, we had to bomb Shelter Nine!” he says in giggling sing-song.

“You must be confused, General. Shelter Nine is the only shelter within five hundred miles. It would be a senseless place to bomb. You’d be obliterating the population of the entire Midwest,” I say. “Can I pour you a shot of bourbon and we can talk about all this?”

“They didn’t listen. The President didn’t listen. Korea didn’t listen. Shelter Nine didn’t listen. Do you know how to listen?” Macun asks.

I don’t have time to answer. Macun’s arms and legs twitch in a hysterical scarecrow’s dance. He grabs me by the bloody coat, shoving me back over a swivel chair. My ankle hits something metal with a crack!

Macun keeps going. He finds Troy’s forceps and chucks them. They land upright in Kris’ dead left leg.

“Hey!” I cry.

He flips a steel gurney, on which we’ve set three good brains. Splat! they go. He flips the next table—four more brains. Gentle Jim Landers gets him by the waist. Crazed, strong, and military trained, Macun lifts Jim up, knees him in the groin, breaks free, and flips the third table.

The last viable brains go splat. Formaldehyde sprays. All is lost.

General Howard Macun grins.

“I should kill you,” I mumble, and I don’t even realize I’ve said it.

Panting, smiling, blood dripping from his crown and down his brow into his eyes like sweat, he scuttles his compact, muscular body across the brain-riddled floor. Slides around. Does a gory kind of victory dance. The brains turn to pulp.

“Please hand me your AFB-Connect, General,” I say.

Panting, Macun peers out from the corners of his bloody eyes.

“General Macun? I’d like you to leave now,” I say. “We’ll be informing Shelter Nine and the US government of your treasonous actions.”

Macun’s wide-eyed, lunatic expression glazes. I get the feeling his crazy’s not gone, just resting.

“Get the hell out,” I say.

“Of course,” he says at last. His voice is normal. This could be a year ago, his Christmas invocation at the Chapel, where he told us that courage would see us through these trying times.

“Good. See you at Nine for your court-martial,” I say.

“No. I don’t think you will.” Macun opens his AFB-Connect, and starts typing as he follows his blood trail toward the door. Then he looks back, his expression oddly somber. “They’re all dead. Don’t take it too hard. It’s for the best.”

I don’t know it, but I’m chasing him down the hall. The air raid sirens sound again. A newly downed plane, or a nuke, or another all-out war.

Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah!

“General, I demand an explanation!”

He looks back with this bewildered expression. For just a second, I get the feeling he’s remembering the role he used to play: A house on General’s Row, six grandkids, a drunk wife, papers piled high on his desk from heads of state that all required his careful eye. But then the bewilderment is gone. He’s not that guy anymore.

“Sir. What have you done? We have families headed for Shelter Nine.”

General Macun wipes the blood from his temples, and salutes. “They’re dead. You’re dismissed,” he says.

It’s Troy Miller who chucks the skull hammer. A nerd his whole life, he probably never expected it to bullseye into the center of Macun’s forehead. The tough bastard stands for at least a minute, hemorrhaging even more blood, before he falls.

Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah!

The rest of them don’t want to touch General Macun’s body because they’re squeamish. I’m just afraid he’s not really dead. “We need his AFB-Connect,” I say.

The old Strat Com looks like a 1950s public school. The equipment is state of the art, but the building is post-war junky, from the fluorescent lights to the one-dollar Wonderbread baloney sandwiches at the contract employees’ cafeteria. We’re standing in a tiled hall, our voices echoing.

Marc bends down, gracefully arranging his moccasins so that Macun’s blood river runs between his bulky legs. “I smell whiskey.”

“Drunk jerk,” Jim says. He’s outside the circle we’ve made, leaning against the hall. His balls must still hurt. “I’m not going to jail for this.”

“There is no jail anymore,” Kris answers. “And what if Nine’s gone? What are we supposed to do with a caretaker when there’s nothing to take care of? We don’t even have any more brains!”

I squat next to Marc. Brown foam bubbles from Macun’s lips.

Seeing this foam, Lee announces, “I’m so fucking done.”

I use my foot as a fulcrum to turn Macun over. Marc helps. The steel skull hammer clangs, reverberating inside Macun’s forebrain. An AFB-Connect, about the size of a deck of cards, falls from his clenched hand, skidding in blood. Marc uses his lab coat to pick it up and wipe it clean.

“What’s on your mind?” I ask Troy while Marc prods the port. I do this because Troy is openly weeping.

“I killed a guy,” he says.

“Yeah. But he deserved it.”

Troy presses his face against the tiled wall to hide his tears. “I heard you say it!—that we should kill him. This is a military installation. You’re my superior. You gave an order. You made me!”

I consider patting the guy’s back but he’s such a cold fish I can’t imagine he’ll appreciate it. “I’m fine with the blame. We needed his AFB.”

“You don’t understand. I killed him for you.”

“I’m glad you did it, okay? Thanks. Much appreciated. Now, do you want to keep trying for a caretaker or do you need to get out of here?”

“Home is gone,” he says. “I never had a home. Only you. You’ve been my boss six years. That’s family, too. I bet you never even thought of me that way, did you . . . ? My mom died. Not from this. I didn’t kill her. She died when I was little. She choked and it was just me with her. We were eating pineapple. I was making her laugh and something got stuck. I was too little to call the police. I just sat with her the whole time. I bruised her, trying to wake her up. Like, boxing, you know? I boxed her. She was beat-up by the time my dad came home from work. So he always said it was me that did it. I killed her. He never believed she choked. Did you know that about me?”

“Okay,” I say, finally patting his back. “You’re okay.”

He kind of melts under my touch, like it’s the thing he’s been waiting for. “It’s over. That was a long time ago.”

I’m expecting the others to say something, or at least be paying attention, but they’re all down their own, personal rabbit holes. It occurs to me that we’ve all gone mad and are hiding it as best we can.

“I can’t crack this,” Marc calls, holding the stained AFB-Connect. “It’s a five-digit passcode.”

I’m shrugging. Sweating. The air-raid sirens aren’t sounding, but it feels like that inside of me. Maybe I’m going to die right now, from fear and shock and guilt and just plain stress.

“Try one-two-three-four-five,” says Kris. “Also, two-five-two-five-two. They’re the most common.”

“We’re in so much trouble,” says Jim. “I really don’t want to go to jail.”

“This is jail,” Lee says. “Even if we survive impact and the heat, we’re trapped underground forever.”

“I tried all the usual codes. What do I look like, a rube?” Marc asks.

Lee takes the AFB-Connect from Marc. Punches some numbers. The interface unlocks. “Impact date,” he says: 1-14-31. He hands it back to Marc and starts walking down the hall, into the dark.

Kris chases after him. They’ve been having an affair for a few weeks now. It’s faux-love. Fear-love. I feel sorry for Lee’s wife and kids, who deserve better.

“Where are you going?” I call.

“I meant it. I’m done!” Lee shouts over his shoulder. He and Kris keep going until they’re just shadows. After a while, they go dark.

I let myself watch them an extra second, as a kind of farewell.

Then I turn to Marc, who’s scrolling. “Okay, here’s the history. Macun ordered explosives detonated into Shelter Nine about twenty minutes ago.”

“Did they detonate?”

“I think so. Nine went dark after that.”

“Holy God,” I say. My knees buckle. Troy is back from the wall, holding me up by the shoulder. I’m surprised he’s got the wherewithal.

“Why blow up Nine?” Troy asks.

Marc types. “I can’t see. It looks like a couple of other shelters got hit, too. There’s a chance our people are still waiting at Crook Road.”

“Order the Bluebird to reconnoiter there. Tell it to take them here instead of Nine,” I say. “Maybe we can make this place work as our shelter.”

“Assuming this Connect’s intranet signal is strong enough for the Bluebird’s driver to get the message,” Jim says.

“Don’t be such a Dorothy Downer,” Marc tells him as he grabs another hot dog from his back pocket, then drops it when he sees he’s smeared it with blood. “This is going to be so much better. No generals to cramp our style. It’s like in Dawn of the Dead when they live in the shopping mall.”

“You’re making jokes because you can’t admit that we’re all going to die,” Jim says.

We all stand there. General Macun’s body keeps spurting foam and blood. He’s a fucking pod person or something.

“Let’s go deeper,” I say. “Maybe we’ll live.”

Strat Com was built seventy years ago and can withstand a hydrogen bomb. It fell out of use once uranium and terrorism outpaced The Cold War. But it’s a good bunker from which to face an asteroid hit. The ground floor is sealed with six feet of cement. I’ve never had enough clearance, but I’ve heard that the tunnels go a mile down. To disorient visitors, none of the elevators go down more than a few flights at a time, and the halls are shaped like interconnected conch shells. With enough supplies, we might be able to make it work.

We use Macun’s AFB to navigate. It’s got a map. Robotics is easy—the same room as cybernetics, two floors beneath the cement boundary. We take the equipment we think we’ll need. Then we press 6 on the elevator and hope we find surgical. My ears pop. For the first time in a long while, gravity feels right again. The air gets dense and wet.

“I could live with this,” Marc says. “If Jenny takes me back.”

“You gave your only Ticket to your ex-girlfriend. I don’t know if that’s love, but it’s definitely something,” I say.

The elevator pings. We stagger out. Troy licks his finger and lets it dry in the air to test humidity. I keep picturing him as a toddler, sitting on his dead mom’s lap.

The doors open to winding cinderblock halls and doors without windows. This is as far as the AFB map reads. It’s past Macun’s clearance. We go left because I’m a lefty. Marc takes notes like sprinkling bread crumbs, so we can find our way back.

“It’s cold. This is so stupid. We’re all going to die,” Jim says. “At least if we were above we could watch it happen.”

“When we’re actually dying, are you going to brag that you were right? I’m just curious,” Marc says.

“Shut up,” I tell them.

The ceiling lights hum on half-power. It’s darker than I’m used to, especially after the Aurora Borealis. I’m blinking and feeling my way with my hands.

We find another elevator. Beckon it. This one goes down to 14.

At the very bottom, a chatter along with the click-clack of hard shoes slows us down.

“People?” Marc asks.

We find around thirty settlers squatting in the cafeteria. They’ve made their own shelter, stocked with giant boxes from Wal-Mart, gallon-sized liters of gasoline stolen from the AFB gas stations, and scores of ivy and palm plants, which strikes me as brilliant—they’ll scrub the air. I walk into the room like I’m supposed to be there. Nobody raises a gun, which I take as a good sign. My guess is, they’re the families of cleaning staff and enlisted.

“Do you know where the executive hospital’s at?” I ask a young woman who’s texting on a phone that can’t possibly get reception. She shrugs. The phone’s screen is dark.

Two young soldiers approach. They’re privates, in their twenties, both fresh-faced. They’ve emptied several sleeves of beef jerky and neatly arranged the plastic into a rubber-banded circular wad. “We can show you, ma’am!”

I smile, like it’s the old world. “Great. I’m fixing to see if we can’t build a nice robot for when we need work done Above. That okay by you soldiers?”

They not only point out the hospital, but bust down Operating Room One’s door for us, and carry our robotics equipment inside.

“Like us to stand guard, ma’am?” they ask.

“Of course I would!” I say, and they do just that.

When we get to a good stopping point, I head out to my usual post. It’s dark now. Two hours until impact. Gravity’s light. I imagine Aporia’s twins across the world. Aporia Minor would be low on the horizon, just a half-moon invisible against the daylight sun. Aporia Major would seem huge by comparison, her rocky moons streaming around her like crumbs.

I place the call to Jay, but it doesn’t connect.

It occurs to me that even if we survive, we’ll evolve differently in the dark, without fresh air. I ought to give up this notion of a caretaker, who’ll turn the lights back on and usher us through our dark ages. We ought to meet our fate out in the open, with our children in our arms.

My tenth—or who knows, twentieth?—call goes through. It’s a small miracle, and I decide it’s a sign from God. I’m Midwestern, so I believe in all that. The Holy Trinity, transubstantiation, the virgin birth. Why not?

“Hey,” I say. “I love you. I hope you get this and come find me at Strat Com.” Then I’m looking at the phone, even though the connection’s still live. I ought to be saying all the right, last things, but I can’t bring myself to surrender.

“I’m going to do something desperate,” I say. “But it’s for you. And me. And the boys. No. that’s not true. It’s because I don’t know what else to do.”

“Volunteers?” I ask. It’s a bad joke. I’m back in surgical. News has traveled that there’s an operational shelter with open doors. The settlement has grown to about one hundred. My team’s been sent by someone in charge to save them. Inside the operating room, it’s just Jim, Marc, and Troy, who’s been readying the metal casings, and me.

“You really slowed us down, insisting on AI. I’d have solved the singularity by now if it wasn’t for you,” Troy says. The entire right side of his face is twitching.

“Okay. How’s your progress?” I ask.

“I think it makes sense to eliminate the parietal. It’s worse feeling the loss. They might develop phantom limb syndrome. The Network interface should provide plenty of sensory feedback.”

“You sure?” I ask. “I’m worried it’ll shock them too much, psychologically.”

Troy looks up at the cement ceiling, then around the operating room. “You’re worried about psychology?”

“Do what works for you, Troy.”

Jim and Marc show me some intercepted transmissions they’ve hacked from Shelter Nine’s network, which we’ve imported into this installation and plan to use for automation. It’s scary stuff. Before Macun’s nukes brought the whole thing down, the Dorothy cult convinced some thousand people to down cyanide pills. The National Security Council and Joint Chiefs were murdered by Shelter Nine scientists, led by the cybernetics department.

“Jesus,” I say. “What a clusterfuck. Our families? Are they gone, too?”

“The itinerary’s complete and our people weren’t listed. Looks like they made the Bluebird, but that’s all I can figure out.”

I send another enlisted out to look for them, then head back to surgical. “Volunteers?” I ask again.

Nobody answers. As their leader, it should be me. But I’m not a martyr. I want to see my family. “You’d get to live forever,” I say.

Marc lifts his hot-dog greasy fingers from the keypad. “You can’t spare me. I have the best hands.”

“No, I do,” Jim says. “I have a doctorate in medicine! I’ve actually performed brain surgery!”

“Should we ask a soldier?” Marc asks.

“No. We’ll lose their trust if it goes wrong,” I say.

We all get quiet. I smell the ammonia and metal grease. The surgical lamps are bright and I picture what’s to come. I remember reading about leeching in the 18^th century, and doctors who didn’t wash their hands between surgeries. Lobotomies. Botched tracheotomies. My knees lose their lock and I’m propping myself over a surgical table.

“This is crazy. I don’t want to go out like a butcher,” I say.

There are tears in my eyes. It might be the first time I’ve cried this week. I can’t remember. It occurs to me that my family might be dead, or lost, and instead of looking for them, I’m in a mile-deep basement, parsing dendrites.

“Let’s kill ourselves,” Jim says.

Marc punches the wall.

“It’ll be easy. We’ll do it together,” Jim says.

“I want to see Jenny,” Marc says. “I was wrong when we broke up. I never told her I love her.”

I’m still crying. “This is too hard,” I say. “I can’t take it.”

Troy stands up. He pats my back, awkwardly. I don’t know what possesses me, but I hug him. “It’s okay,” I say. “We did our best. You, especially. It’s okay. I’m proud of all of you.”

“I’ll do it,” Troy says. “I volunteer.”

“No,” I say. “I won’t let you.”

“I’ve decided.”

“It’s 99.9% likely to fail,” I say.

Troy sneers. He’s terrified. “Let me do this. It’s all I’ve got.”

We do it. We insert Troy’s brain into an articulated steel husk with oxygen gills and tiny needle holes through which he can inject his own calorie serums. We connect his spine and central nerves within rubberized sheaths. When we’re done, his body’s an empty husk on the table.

I run my hand along the steel casing. We’ve pulled its articulations so that it’s exactly Troy’s height: 6’2”. Its face is carved like a human face, with camera-lens eyes that in monkeys have provided successful peripheral and central vision. Small flaps under its sharp chin open and close to intake air. The air is drawn into its chest, where it’s filtered and if necessary, converted to oxygen, then returned to the head, where it circulates through its organic brain.

I’m thinking about Troy’s mom, for some reason. Did he dream of her, watching him from the very chair in which she died, for the rest of his life? What dreams will come now?

Jim injects the calorie solution. Marc inserts the battery within the robot’s chest, then screws it closed. We’ve got plenty more suits. Plenty of parts. I can hear the crowd outside surgical. The settlement is excited. It’s something to take their mind off the Aporias.

It occurs to me that whether we succeed or not, the human race is over. Something new and quite different is about to grow from these sterile halls.

We wait. There’s no “on” button. Either Troy’s nervous system will take to the suit, or it won’t.

I find myself nauseous. This is drastic and insane. Unkind. Troy’s gills open.

Soundlessly, his articulations freshly oiled, he stands. “Troy? Can you hear me?”

Troy’s camera-lens eyes look down. He stands straight, but his shoulders hunch just slightly. The left half of his face seems slower and slumped. It doesn’t react as quickly to stimuli. But if he could sneer his sneer, he would. It’s him.

“Are you connected? Can you hear me?”

The cyborg’s mouth opens. He makes this gagged sound: “Mmmmmm!” I think he’s trying to scream.

“How bad is it?” I ask. I touch his cold, left hand. His parietal’s not connected, and he can’t possibly feel my heat through his metal. Still, he grips back. It’s an oddly human connection, and one I’ve been missing for a long time.

“Troy,” I say. “I’m with you. You’re not alone.”

The lights flash and go bright—he’s online. “Mmmmmm!” he screams. The lights flicker. Troy collapses. His gills go still.

Failure.

It’s minutes before impact. I’m between the steps and the missile again. Calling Jay. It doesn’t go through. Then I’m looking at pictures of them, my family. Scrolling, scrolling.

I look out through the flashing solar lights and there they are: my family. Jay’s carrying both kids. With the Aporias’ scrambled gravity, they must be light as feathers. I’m running toward them. We’re hugging. I’m crying. I’m smelling them, tasting them. Even Jay, his sweaty musk, his calmness in the face of calamity that I’ve always found infuriating until now.

Behind them are a line of others from the Bluebird: Jim’s family; Marc’s ex, who’s shockingly gorgeous and apparently still in love with him; security officers; Air Force cadets; Troy’s sixty-eight year-old father, for whom I have so many questions.

We hurry back inside to the settlement. There’s room. There’s even food for another year. Maybe, if we crack into the dirt and learn to eat worms and extract water, that will be enough.

We don’t feel Aporia Minor for about two minutes after she strikes. Strangers and friends, we’re cramped tight and terrified on the cafeteria floor.

Everything shakes.

We wait an hour, then two, for the hot rain. It doesn’t seep through, but something goes wrong, because the vents cut out. Electricity winds down. Everything goes dark.

No one but the children make noise—chatter and cries and occasional giggles. I imagine the surprised birds up above, the char of their wings. It’s not the asteroid, but the impact plume that springs into space and comes back down again, spreading globally, that will get them.

Someone has the idea of passing out buttered bread and water, and then everyone’s sharing what they have. Hands touching, saying words of gratitude, we eat in the dark.

Ten minutes later, cell phone lights start working again. I stand and everyone is quiet. “I’d invite you to conserve your energy until we figure out how to get the power back on.”

“We need someone to reboot the Network,” Jim whispers. “We’ll run out of air.”

But then, suddenly, the lights do return. The vents hum.

I’m holding my kids, standing with my husband, and everyone’s clapping, like we’re the First Family. They’re smiling with hysterical gratitude. I look to Marc, full of smiles, his girl in his arms, the happiest man in the post-apocalypse, then to Jim, who knows better.

We’re up, headed to surgical. Jay and the kids won’t let me go alone, so they come along. There’s Troy, standing in the doorway.

He’s made himself taller. About seven feet.

“You know what’s strange?” he asks. His deeper-than-usual voice booms through the Network intercoms. They can hear him in the shelter. “I’m not sad anymore. I don’t feel anything. I can see now, why you never liked me. It all makes sense.”

It occurs to me that having no “off” button was a really bad idea.

“You’ll be relieved to know that I’ve cut off life support in the upper levels, for those refugees who’ve tried to sneak inside and steal your supplies,” he says. “I feel that’s what you’d have wanted, Nicole.”

“Can you turn it back on?” I ask.

He cocks his robot head. His left side is completely limp. The eye has gone dead. “Done,” he says. “But it’s a waste. They’ve suffocated.”

“Oh.”

“I had to rework some of my inner plumbing. That’s what took me some time. All that chatter—I couldn’t tolerate it. So I made one lobe go quiet.”

“Can you wake it up? The point was sentient chatter, remember?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Oh. Troy? Do you have moral capacity?” I ask. “Can you distinguish right from wrong?”

“Of course,” he says. “I shall go up in approximately two weeks, when the temperature is acceptable, and build a better habitat. I’m going to please you, Nicole. You know how important that’s always been to me. I’ll need volunteers. Perhaps ten more like me, under my command. If necessary, I trust you’ll enforce a military conscription.”

It occurs to me that the perfect incision around Macun’s scalp was from a skull retractor. Shelter Nine was in the middle of a losing war against the cyborgs it had created when Macun bombed it. Even the Dorothys had a method to their madness: cyanide dries up the brain.

“Troy? Do you remember your mother?” I ask.

He cocks his head. “Sorry? Say it in the other ear?”

I walk around to Troy’s left side, which is an inch shorter.

“Do you remember your mother?”

“Yes!” a voice hisses. “I’ll save you, I’ll help you. Run!”

“Pay no attention to him. We’ve cut him out,” the robot-man cries. “You never liked him anyway!”

Jay and I are standing in front of our kids. I feel the weight of this mistake.

“Volunteers?” the cyborg asks.

Just then, there’s another Earth-rocking shudder, as the impact of Aporia’s dark twin arrives.