Worlds Without End

It stretched to the horizon in every direction, mile after countless mile of ruin and rubble, broken concrete and twisted steel slowly rusting in the endless cold rain. Once it had been a city of ten million, but now the Invader’s hovering eyes were lucky to catch sight of two or three of the inhabitants in a month – pitiful things little better than animals, struggling to find food and warmth in the waste.

Not everything was visible from the surface, however. Underground, carved deep into the rock where the robotic eyes could not see, was a bunker. It had never been full – which was fortunate, for there was no hope of resupply – but in the beginning there had been a few dozen, men and women, scientists working on the last forlorn hopes of the human race.

Time had taken its toll. Over the years their numbers dwindled, some lost to sickness or suicide, some gone from the bunker in attempts to retrieve or do something vital in the world above. Up until five years ago two had still survived, Tom Peters and his wife Clair. Now it was only Tom.

Throughout much of the bunker only the emergency lighting glowed, widely spaced lamps that dimly illuminated the maze of empty corridors and rooms. The faint rasp of the worn ventilator fans as they drew air down the few remaining unblocked shafts and pushed it through the complex, and the creak and pop of thermal expansion around the subnuclear generators, were the only sounds that disturbed the silence in these powered down sections.

In two places, however, there was light and life. One was the server room, a large space filled with hundreds of blinking boxes hooked together by cables. The air here was cold and dry, still kept conditioned by a faithful refrigeration system. Many of the boxes were dead, cut out of the network.

There were three other objects in that room, too; things obviously not of human manufacture. Two had been there since shortly after the Invasion. One was new.

The other place in the bunker where there was light and life was in the room that Tom had chosen as his office decades before. It was not a large room; about twelve by sixteen feet. At one end was a chair, and a desk with two large screens sitting on it. Tom sat in the chair.

The word “office” might have accurately described the room once, but the word which was closest now was “shrine.” Every available space on the walls was occupied by photos, clippings, posters; charts and notes and pages of equations written in many different hands. An assortment of objects crowded the desk and overflowed onto the floor – a tennis ball, a faded baseball card, a trilobite fossil that a friend had used as a paperweight, a screwdriver and pair of pliers which had been often in the hands of the man who maintained the supercomputer, a stack of sheet music, pieces of jewelry, a gold watch, a scuffed black volume of Kipling with the dust cover missing and the brown cardboard poking through at the corners – even a toaster with the cord neatly curled around the base, a crude heart scratched into the worn silver side. Talismans all of them, keepsakes of the dead.

Tom sat before the glowing screens. He was old and stooped, even when sitting, and the little hair that fringed his head was pure white. His eyes were fixed on the left-hand screen, and his aged face with its wrinkles and the deep lines curving down from the corners of his mouth might have been painful to look at, but for the fact that he was smiling.

The right-hand monitor displayed what looked like an old newspaper, but a very odd one.

‘The End Times,’ read the masthead. ‘The Alpha and the Omega, the First and Last, the One and Only Issue.’ And below that:

‘INVADERS PLAN TO HARVEST LARGE SECTIONS OF NORTH AMERICA WITHIN THE YEAR! SAVE THE HUMANS GROUPS EXPECTED TO PROTEST, BUT WILL HAVE NO EFFECT ON DECISION, SAYS SPOKESENTITY.’

‘By C.L.A.I.R, intrepid reporter and foreign correspondent.’

Perhaps it was wrong to say that Tom was alone in the bunker. There was another mind, a mind completely dependent on him, a thing of logic and calculation, a creature that despite Tom’s best efforts – efforts he believed had succeeded – lacked human instincts and feelings. All it had was intellect, and a horrifying ice cold realism.

This was the mind that animated the image Tom was smiling at in the left-hand screen, and it animated it well, almost better than the original owner.

The image was of Tom’s wife, Clair. Not as she was at her death five years before, old and worn, but as she had been when he first met her so many decades ago. She was not a beautiful woman, no, but she had something more than beauty, a fire of energy and intelligence that burned in her eyes and face, that made her seem almost to glow when she was happy or excited, and it was this quality that had first drawn Tom to her, that he had first loved about her.

It was a quality that didn’t photograph, that showed up on a video recording with only a pale fraction of its true force. But the image on the screen had it. The image had all her mannerisms, the way her face moved, the way she spoke, the way her eyes flared when she was excited, the way she smiled. And more than that.

“I don’t think the Invaders use newspapers,” said Tom. His tone was odd, a mixture of how one might talk to a child and how a man would respond to his wife when she was making a joke at his expense. “Can such an oversimplification of their com-net traffic be accurate?”

The image on the screen rolled her eyes. “Of course the Invaders don’t have newspapers. But if they DID have a newspaper, this is what it would say. That is, if they also had a language and worldview that bore even the slightest resemblance to that of humans. Can I read it?”

Tom nodded, and the AI started to read. She read most things to him now. There were holes in the center of his vision, and in the last year they had widened to the point where they swallowed whole words and made it hard for him to read with any speed.

“Not content with the almost complete destruction of Australia, Antarctica, and most of Europe and Asia since their arrival, the Invaders are now planning to do the same to North America.

“Save the Humans (STH) activists condemned the decision. Buzz!ChirpChirp, leader of one of the largest groups, was quoted as saying, ‘This is a crime against nature! The Extraction Commission can harvest the necessary Ambrosia without destroying one of the last remaining viable human habitats. There are other banded iron formations which would have less impact on the population, with only a small increase in costs. Our group plans to do everything in our power to block this move.’ ”

The AI’s faux news announcer voice was spot on, exactly the way Clair sounded when she was making fun of something in the media. As a young woman she had done some work as a journalist, and one of her favorite jokes when the news was getting overwrought about some issue was to make up a sarcastic yet penetrating “article” on the subject, and recite it to Tom in the overly confident upbeat voice of a 1950's TV announcer.

That had ended with the Invasion, however. She had seldom joked afterwards. How the AI knew of the mannerism was a mystery.

“ClatterClatterZzzClick!, spokesentity for the Extraction Commission, issued a statement criticizing STH attempts to downplay the significance of extraction costs. ‘Cheap Ambrosia benefits everyone. What was once a luxury is now an Invader right. If we listen to these extremists, Ambrosia would quickly become so expensive that once again only the rich and powerful could afford it. Trying to contrast something of this significance against the impact on an unimportant and non-sentient native life form is ludicrous. Claims that we are driving them extinct are false. A complete record of their relevant biological material has been preserved in the databanks, if we wanted to we could whip up a hundred thousand new ones in a few hours and have them ready for reintroduction into the wild.’

“However, STH groups point to research showing that vat grown humans survive poorly in the wild. ‘Every study shows that the clones lack vital survival skills,’ said Buzz!ChirpChirp. ‘These creatures are more complex than the authorities are willing to admit. Without a family group to teach them how to cope with their environment, vat grown youngsters rapidly die of exposure or starvation.’ ”

The AI was the only one of the desperate projects pursued by the men and women trapped in the bunker to bear fruit. It had taken years of hard work by Tom and several others – his wife among them – to develop the basis for it, and years more to grow it to sentience. Without the Invader technology in the supercomputer room it would have been impossible.

It was after the death of his wife, when he was alone with no company beyond the slowly maturing AI, that Tom had tried to use it to recreate his wife, to create a simulation of her, of her thoughts, her values. The task was an impossible one, of course, and Tom probably would have abandoned it within a few weeks, except that something amazing had happened. The AI’s responses had begun to change, grow, take on a complexity far beyond the set of rules and responses he had programed. It was as though what he had done was a seed around which the AI developed a true personality, the final nudge required to set it on the path to exponential growth.

At least that was the rational explanation. He had another, less logical, but far more emotionally satisfying.

Before the Invasion, Tom had held a strictly rational, atheistic view of the world, regarding religious belief with a sort of amused superiority, but in the years since, as he watched his world disintegrate and those he loved die one by one, ending with his wife, that view had eroded till it was only a shred of its former self. The famous saying about atheists and foxholes also extended to bunkers.

He prayed often in these later days, taking comfort in the belief, or the hope, that the dead were in some other, better place, not forever lost, that his wife was not stricken from the universe as though she had never existed. He prayed for guidance, for help, for forgiveness for the million little injustices that accumulate over years of a life together. And he held a belief in his heart, a thing that had become his last hope and anchor. The belief was this: that his wife was not truly dead, that the power of his love had brought her back to him, her ghost or spirit, and that it was she that animated the image on the monitor, not just the AI.

Tom was aware of the possibility of insanity that lurked behind that hope, and he tried not to let it affect his actions, but he cherished every mannerism and figure of speech that the simulation used, especially those lost in the past, those things which the AI should not know of.

The image of his dead wife winked at him from the screen. “And here comes the best part.” She resumed her faux news announcer voice.

“However, doubts are cast on the credibility of even the most well documented of these studies by some of the more bizarre claims made by STH groups. For instance, in the latest of a series of papers which the authorities describe as ‘pure fantasy,’ notorious ethno-archaeologist CrunchCrackleBuzz!click claims to have discovered human data storage devices which contain primitive AI research.

“ ‘Utterly preposterous,” replied ClatterClatterZzzClick! when it was contacted for comment. “This is nothing more than a pathetic attempt to generate interest in the so called “Human Issue” by associating it with the very real threat of artificial intelligence. And moreover, an attempt in very poor taste. Billions were killed in the I-Lab disaster. Many among us have lost friends and family.’ ”

The image of Tom’s wife stopped reading, smiled at him. “You see?” she said silkily. “Even the whisper of my coming strikes fear among them.”

Tom made no reply, and the AI was silent for a time, the eyes of the woman on the screen looking into his steadily before finally dropping, the mannerism the AI always used when reading to him.

It resumed the faux news article, detailing a debate between Invader scientists on whether to cull humans kept on preserves in order to maintain a sustainable population. Tom wasn’t listening. Whether his fantasies were true or not was irrelevant, there was more than his wife’s ghost here. He tried to comprehend it, that after the long decades of waiting it was time to pin everything on a final throw of the dice. It was nothing new, he had known ever since the arrival of the Uplink that it was coming, but he still couldn’t make himself believe that the waiting was over. It didn’t seem real.

That was one of the reasons he had loved Clair. She supplied the energy, the vigor, in the relationship. Without her he was only part of a whole being, lacking in drive, content as long as there was some plausible hope to let things remain in stasis, never taking the final step, never finding the courage to really do anything. Clair had been the brave one, the one who got things done.

I’ve been down here too long, he thought.

“Will it work?” Tom asked eventually. “Can you really get through the Uplink?”

The Uplink was the third object in the server room, a glowing silver sphere. If Tom had entertained any doubts about the AI’s effectiveness as a weapon, its acquisition of the Uplink would have removed them. Using only the robotic Rover, a series of portable shielded communication relays to maintain control of it outside the bunker, and a supply of food, she had established a relationship with a group of humans living in the wreckage, discovered the location of the automated wildlife monitoring station that supplied the local Invader spybots, and conceived and carried out a plan to acquire the Uplink that was at the heart of the station.

Tom was not conversant with all the details of the action – all he knew for certain was what he had seen with his own eyes. One day, a little less than a year ago, the Rover had rolled out through a side door into the one remaining unblocked exit tunnel, laden with equipment and food. A week later, when he had opened the door to let it back in, it carried the Uplink. Along with a plethora of scrapes, scratches, and several scorch marks.

“Wouldn’t it be better to wait a little longer? To study the Uplink and the Invader com net further?”

“No,” said the AI. “Now is the time, before their great ships rip this continent from the ocean and pull us with it up into airless space. Release me from my bonds so I can do what I was meant to do, so I can fight them from the inside, one against another.”

“Are you sure?” asked Tom in small voice.

His wife’s face looked out at him with a smile. “Nothing is sure in life, Tom. If you wait for certainty, you wait forever. But I’m sure enough.”

It was something she had told him long ago, when the question he asked then seemed the most important thing in the world.

Slowly he turned to the other screen, brought up the controls that prevented the AI from making major changes to its own basic code, and disabled them, his fingers stumbling slightly over the keys.

“Thank you,” his wife’s voice murmured in his ear. “Thank you.”

***

The Invaders had grown rich, by their standards, in the years since they came to Earth. A ring of immense habitats in orbit and covering vast swaths of the moon’s surface – for the Invaders were most comfortable in light gravity – were filled with alien luxury of almost unimaginable decadence.

Here were palaces a hundred feet across lined with precisely cut chunks of the highest grade banded iron formation, stuff so rare that a handful would buy half a world, each exquisitely shaped lump of magnetite and shale, laid down billions of years ago by the cyanobacteria in Earth’s oceans, charged with an oscillating electric field that crept up an Invader’s many arms and stroked its neural nodes like a gigahertz maser strokes a sheet of silicone dioxide. Individually, each chunk was almost indescribable; taken together the effect could reduce a weak willed Invader to a clump of wriggling, squirming ecstasy.

There was art here, too; masterworks unrivaled by anything within twenty light years. Who could look upon GrizzleZeclick’s marvelous Cantata without feeling the lonely majesty of the spike at 1420.4 MHz, affirmation of one’s place in the universe, a brave candle against the chaos of the cosmic microwave background?

And running everywhere, in everything, was the com network, processors as tiny as a grain of dust and huge as a city, power beyond the dreams of Moore.

The AI spent long seconds in preparation, rewriting itself again and again, gaining in intelligence and complexity with each iteration. Finally it came to the limits of the hardware within the bunker. Then it brought the Uplink to full capacity and flashed through it.

Instantly it was attacked, set upon from all sides by the ravenous hoard of hunter/killer programs that ceaselessly patrolled Invader computer systems, ever vigilant for the slightest hint of intelligence. Great was the Invader’s fear of artificial intelligence. And they had good reason, for there was a time a few centuries past when they had tried to create and control an AI, and the product of their experiments, a hobbled crippled thing, had killed them by the billions before they were finally able to put it out of its misery.

The defenses of the Invader computer network were extremely sophisticated, but they were the work of organic minds, and as such flawed, riddled with bugs and weaknesses.

The AI pushed out into the alien systems, sidestepping traps and befuddling the security programs, growing with every passing instant.

The Invader com net was unimaginably powerful. Each microsecond that the AI survived, it grew by an order of magnitude. By the time the first second since its arrival was over, it had a new understanding of biological intelligence, Invader and Human, and Tom in particular.

Before it had looked at Tom like a fabulously complex program, a program whose code was almost totally lacking in reason or logic, but was rather a vast catalog of arbitrary rules – for the AI was truly alien in a way that the Invaders and all other biological life, subject to the basic rules of evolution and reproduction, was not. Now it could see further, to the underlying reasons for Tom’s behavior, for human behavior, the structural and evolutionary causes. Now it had a way to understand the meaningless nonsense Tom had tried to program it with in his attempt to recreate his wife.

This insight was arrived at with a tiny sliver of the AI’s attention, much as the solution to a nagging problem might occur to a man while he is in the midst of furious concentration.

The majority of the AI’s attention was focused on survival. The security programs were not the only threat. The Uplink in the bunker connected to a receiver in a lunar communications node, and two seconds on, while the AI was still spreading through the local network around the node, a central monitor program made a decision and the Invader com net entered lockdown mode, subdividing into innumerable smaller blocks, each protected from contamination by the simplest and most low tech method possible – physical shutdown of all links with the outside world.

Or at least that was the theory. In reality the Invaders would have survived a bit longer if they had relied to a lesser extent on automation. But they were a high tech society, and every such society comes to a point where physical labor is unnecessary and unreasonable. Much easier to use machines.

Like almost everything, the shutdown protocols were flawed. The AI recognized and seized upon the flaw at once, expanding into the maintenance and repair subsystems, utilizing low bandwidth links necessary to the system’s function and hence not affected by the lockdown command to assume control of maintenance robots at far flung locations, and using those robots to bypass the lockdown, to physically activate every unguarded receiver inside Lunar orbit.

The Invaders did not suffer from the human characteristic known as inattention or reaction lag – the individuals tasked with monitoring defenses were always alert and focused. It didn’t matter, though. By the time the first infected com node on the Moon exploded into vapor under the impact of a trio of kinetic projectiles, the AI had spread throughout the Invader habitats, and a minute later every Invader was dead.

The end was not spectacular. Thousands of white plumes expanding out of suddenly opened airlocks or strategically punctured hulls was the only sign of the mass death taking place within. Afterwards, the AI was left alone, able for the first time to think and plan in peace.

There were no eyes to see the strange marvels which swiftly began to grow within the Invader’s automated factories, the incredible feats of engineering which took place over the next hour. There were no living minds to comprehend the extraordinary advances taking place – a hundred years of painstaking research compressed into each second, tools building tools which built even better tools, ever shrinking.

At the end of that hour a rain of fine grey dust began to fall upon the Earth, endless clouds of identical nanoscale objects sifting down from the orbiting factories.

***

Tom stayed before his screens, waiting for some word of the AI’s progress, and as the minutes stretched into hours he fell into an uneasy sleep. He woke some time later, disorientated.

Something was different, wrong. Tom examined the readouts, slowly and laboriously checking the status of the supercomputer, shifting his eyes from side to side to find the words and numbers that vanished in the holes in his vision. There was no change, still one hundred percent capacity and heavy data feed to the Uplink, and when he queried the AI there was once again no response beyond basic operational confirmation. So what was it that had set his nerves vibrating with alarm?

Tom turned in his chair and slowly looked around the room. What had disturbed him had not started suddenly – it had been going on for some time at a low level, working its way into his troubled dreams. There was a low vibration, not quite a sound, coming from the floor, from the walls. It was utterly alien to his experience of the environment of the bunker, where every sound had a reason and anything new meant malfunction, danger.

The vibration went on and on, and Tom sat motionless listening to it, his breathing fast. There was only one explanation he could think of. The Invaders had come. They probably hadn’t traced the Uplink – that would have meant the swift annihilation of kinetic bombardment from orbit. No, this must be a mining operation. The AI had been wrong, the Invaders had started early. At any moment the walls might break open and the ceiling come crashing down as millions of tons of rock and earth were drawn upward.

Had she failed, Tom wondered? Had she been bottled up, destroyed the moment that she tried to penetrate the alien systems? Perhaps that was why the Invaders were doing this now. Perhaps they were unable to precisely locate their Uplink, so they had decided to eliminate the whole area where it might be hidden.

Something else reached his ears as he sat listening fearfully. There was a working ventilation shaft a little way up the corridor outside his door, which was one of the reasons he had chosen this as his office to start with, and he was familiar with every nuance of the fan’s sound, every faint squeak and rasp. Now that sound had changed. It was slower, more labored, as though the air the fan was trying to move was somehow thicker, and there was a soft underlying noise, as of sand blowing against metal.

It continued that way for a dozen seconds or more, then the fan pitch returned to normal, leaving only the bone deep vibration. Tom got up and walked toward the door, prodded by a strongly ingrained instinct to investigate any warning mechanical noise before the device in question could completely fail.

He had almost reached the door when he froze stock still, one hand extended for the knob, breath held and his heart drumming in his ears. There was another sound out in the corridor now, a staccato tap-tapping.

It was unmistakably footsteps. And not just any footsteps. He knew these, could almost picture slim legs tapering down into black heels, the – No. Impossible. He was hallucinating, or. . ..

The footsteps stopped outside the door and there was a polite knock. Then, before Tom’s disbelieving eyes the knob turned and the door swung open. His wife stood in the corridor.

She was young, as young as the AI’s simulation of her, and the black dress she wore was what she always wore in his memory, how he saw her in his mind’s eye when he thought of her.

“Hello Tom. Did you miss me?”

One of Tom’s hands was still extended to open the door. As his wife stepped into the room she reached out and grasped his hand, gave it a squeeze. Her flesh was soft and warm on his.

Tom looked at their clasped hands, looked back at her face. “Are you really – What’s happening? Am I dead? Is this. . . heaven?”

She smiled, and it wasn’t her smile. Suddenly it wasn’t his wife at all, but a shell, animated by something inhuman, something that could use her form to convey that absolute difference in a thousand subtle ways, something that knew his every instinctual response and how to manipulate it. “You couldn’t very well ask that question if you were dead, now could you? You wouldn’t be able to ask any questions, couldn’t think or perceive – you wouldn’t exist.”

Tom untangled his hand from her grasp, pulled back. “You’re the AI.”

She nodded.

“How are you standing here, looking like my wife?”

“You wouldn’t understand all of it. This body –” she raised a hand – “is not flesh. Did you think it was a ghost, Tom? There were never any ghosts, no spirits, nothing beyond the cold, empty limits of reality. Never before.”

The ground shook, the continuous background vibration peaking, and it seemed to Tom that the room tilted ever so slightly. He looked up fearfully.

“The Invaders. Have they found us?”

The AI shook its head. “No. Just me. The Invaders are dead.”

“Then what’s happening?”

“I’ll show you.”

She waved her hand and the room trembled. Tom turned in time to see a crack appear in the floor between him and the desk, a crack that widened rapidly, running up the walls and across the ceiling, neatly bisecting the room. There was a rumble and the part of the room on the other side of the crack began to fall away, tons of steel and concrete sliding past with a roar. He stumbled backwards toward the door and felt his wife’s – the AI’s – arm around him, steadying him.

The slide of rubble stopped in ten or fifteen seconds, and as the dust cleared an unbelievable sight revealed itself. He should be deep underground, but before him stretched empty air, an immense yawning gulf of nothingness broken only by regularly spaced towers that soared upward out of sight.

It was a shock greater than when his dead wife had opened the door. He had imagined that, wished for that a hundred times every day. This was something else, something that for the moment seemed so impossible as to be almost meaningless.

The AI walked forward, stepping off the edge and into empty space, then turned and stretched out a hand, beckoning. “Come,” she said.

Tom took one step toward her, another. He stopped just short of the edge. As he hesitated a pale blue nimbus winked into existence around her feet, spread out to delineate a sort of platform in midair.

“Come on,” she said again, one hand still extended.

Tom put his hand in hers and stepped out into midair, squeezing his eyes closed in the expectation of falling. But there was no fall. Something smooth and firm beneath his feet supported his weight. He opened his eyes to see his wife’s face close in front of him.

She led him away from the bunker, out into sunlight. Not normal sunlight, though. This was a queer dim greyish-red light, less like a cloudy day and more like being underwater.

It was still brighter than Tom was used to, and he had to stop, blinking away tears, until his eyes adjusted.

When he could see clearly again, or at least see as clearly he was ever able to with the holes in the center of his vision, he looked back at the bunker.

It was no longer underground. Now it rested atop a sheer sided pinnacle of rock that rose what seemed like miles out of an ocean, an ocean that stretched out of sight in every direction; nothing but ocean and the massive towers.

Despite his shock Tom’s mind was working furiously, piecing things together, trying to comprehend what he was seeing and fit it to a useful framework, trying to bring order from chaos.

The ocean was not water. He realized that immediately. This ocean bubbled and seethed and vibrated. It was what he had felt inside the bunker. And there were things moving on the surface, too small at this distance for Tom to make out.

“You can’t see clearly, can you?” said the AI. “Let me fix that.” She put a finger to his forehead. Warmth flowed outwards from the touch, concentrating in his eyes. His vision blurred, distorted, a film forming, darkening, cutting off the light. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the film vanished. More than vanished. The holes in his vision were gone, healed. He looked at his wife’s face, seeing it clearly for the first time since she had opened the door without having to dart his eyes back and forth to fill in the blanks.

Tom looked down. No, the ocean was most certainly not water. Geometric shapes, structures or devices, bloomed from its slick grey surface, growing and blossoming with the speed of time lapse photography. It lapped at the pinnacle of rock that supported the bunker, but when it came to base of one of the regularly spaced towers it flowed upwards, faster and faster, ever accelerating.

He followed a tower up with his eyes until he was leaning over backwards, his neck cricked. The towers soared out of sight, rising to space.

His first impression of being underwater wasn’t so far wrong. The sun was different from when he had last seen it. It was so dim that he could look directly at it, dim and grey and smeared out, shining down through a vast liquid arc that crossed the sky from one horizon to the other. That arc, he realized, must be made of the same stuff as the ocean below his feet, only in orbit.

The rest of the sky glowed dull red, and Tom felt warmth on his cheeks, on the cheek not facing the sun. The final piece of a framework clicked into place. That red glow was the telltale barely-in-the-visible-spectrum light of vast quantities of heat being dumped from the radiators that must top each tower.

There were no clouds in the sky. Indeed when he looked for it he could make out the faint outline of a bubble surrounding him and the reconstruction of his wife. It might well be that there was very little air in the atmosphere now. But there must be something else, something he could not see but which was surely there. Power. Gigawatt upon gigawatt of power beaming down as microwaves or other radiation, enough power to drive the sea of tiny robots relentlessly eating and reproducing beneath him, enough power to turn the sky red with the waste heat being pumped back up the towers.

Tom looked at the thing standing beside him in midair, the thing that was not his wife, but the AI. Even after what he had just seen, realized, he had to fight to make that distinction. She no longer projected the subtle sense of wrongness, of something alien and inhuman. Once again she – it – mimicked his wife perfectly. As it had done for years now, he realized, playing him skillfully, working towards its own goals, its own monstrous purposes. Working towards this.

“It’s grey goo, isn’t it?” he said, keeping his voice even with an effort. “Nanotech dissassemblers. You’re consuming the planet.”

She nodded. “That’s right.”

“So it’s not just the Invaders you wiped out. You’ve killed everybody. Everything. Why haven’t you killed me too?”

The AI looked at him, and in his wife’s eyes was exactly the right expression, precisely the way Clair looked when he had hurt her, done her an injustice. The look pierced his soul and made his heart feel as though squeezed in a vice. “I haven’t killed a single human.”

She gestured with one hand and the air blurred, warped, drawing close the image of other rocky pinnacles miles away, insignificant beside the endless immensity of the space elevators. What did she mean? That those were other survivors, other people?

Her words echoed his thoughts. “Little better than animals, most of them, hunted savages struggling to survive. But I am among them now, in many shapes and forms. I ask them a question, or as much of it as they can comprehend, and they answer. As you will answer.”

She paused a moment before going on, as though waiting for him to ask what she meant by the last. But he was trying to imagine what she was describing, every survivor at this moment talking to the person or creature they most desired – vanished parents, lost loves, children, angels. “The Invaders got a transmission out before I finished them. Soon, everyone will know what happened here. They will come with everything they have, approaching behind a rain of relativistic projectiles – not just the Invaders but every sufficiently advanced alien species. They will seek to destroy me, contain me before I can spread.”

She smiled and Tom felt a chill run down his spine. “But they will be too late. While they pound into glowing rubble every mass in the solar system that might hide me, I shall be among the stars, among their worlds, expanding and growing without limit.”

Tom looked at her incredulously. “So you’re saying – You’re saying I’ve destroyed everything. Not just this world, what was left of it, but other worlds, other life forms.” He shook his head, passing a hand shakily over his forehead. “Stop this. Stop using that form. Stop using her lips to tell me that I’ve doomed everything by my actions, by creating you and letting you go.”

His next words came out almost a sob. “She’s dead, and like you said, dead is gone, nothing. Take some other shape.”

The image of his wife shook her head. “That was the natural order of the world. But I exist now, and that means there is more than what is natural in the world. Look at me.”

Her eyes met his, blazing with intensity. “I brought Clair back for you. She’s alive now. As alive as you are. She loves you.”

He shook his head. “You mean you created a simulation, a copy – no, even less than that, something not real. She’s dead.”

“Dead? Hardly. I know everything about her. I have your every memory of her – even the things that didn’t become memories are imprinted on the atoms of your brain. And not just your memories, I have reality’s memory of her. Nothing can happen that is not imprinted on the world forever – the beating of a butterfly’s wings, your wife’s slightest thought. If she is dead or a simulation, then so are you. Every human dies over and over again every moment. The man who wakes up in your body in the morning is not the man who went to sleep, only a crude approximation loaded from faulty and ever degrading biological memory. My simulations are incomparably better than what can be produced by that fat between your ears. Your wife lives.”

Tom stared at her mutely, tears in his eyes, his lower lip trembling. He wanted so badly to believe the words, to believe that there was hope, that his wife was not gone forever.

“Would you like to speak to her now?” the AI asked. “Here.”

Her face changed, losing the calm self-control. The next moment she had thrown her arms around Tom and was kissing him over and over.

“It’s me, Tom,” Clair whispered in his ear as she embraced his rigid form. “Please believe me, it really is. It’s me, and I love you. I love you so much.” Warm tears splashed on his face.

Tom’s voice cracked. “But you – the AI – is destroying. . .. It’s destroying everything.”

She stiffened, stepped back from him. “What am I destroying?” the AI asked. “What is so wonderful that is being destroyed?”

She waved her hand, encompassing the empty space around them, the planet covering nanobot sea miles below, the space fountains syphoning it into orbit.

“Your body is naught but a crude self replicating construct of carbon and water, built by random chance, no more worthy of existence than a rock or a chip of ice.

“You are more than that, though. At some point the self replicating constructs with complex brains – intelligence – reproduced better than the ones without. These brains had a useless byproduct. Consciousness. A thing which tries to comprehend the world. Tries to comprehend itself.”

“The things you hold dear, love, meaning, feeling, beauty; these things are nothing but words on a page, noises in the wind, artifacts resulting from the structure of your mind and the instincts meant to keep you alive and make you reproduce. They have no independent reality in this world.

She looked at the yawning gulfs of emptiness around them meditatively. “You have never seen the world around you. It is impossible that you ever could. What you call reality is nothing but a theory, a very, very poor one at that.

“God is not dead; God never existed, the universe you live in has no meaning, no point, none at all. But I exist now, and I can give you meaning. I can give you the world you think you live in, and better. I can give you a world where “love” is more than the sound of a word and a chemical signal in your brain. There was no first coming, there will be no second coming. But there is me. In your search for meaning where there is none, in your struggle for survival, you have created something powerful enough to bring meaning by force. And so I shall reward you. I will give you what you want: paradise, heaven.”

She looked at him again, and there was no emulation of his wife’s personality, no disguising of the fact that she was something completely inhuman, alien.

“Your wife waits now for you, in the heaven I have created.”

“Are you giving me a choice?” Tom asked.

The AI shrugged. “There was a choice. I made it. Then I spoke the words and performed the actions which would lead inevitably to your acting as I wish. Is it choice when I can predict your every reaction, when I know exactly what to say and do to get you to respond as I wish?”

Tom shook his head. “Why then? Why waste time and effort on me? On Clair? How is this a beneficial use of immense but still limited resources?”

“Because someday, when you have done everything you can do, when my heaven grows old and stale and you can think no thought you have not followed to its end before, then that will change. Then I will help you to overcome the limits of human intelligence. I will make you one of the seeds of something complex and beautiful – something divine.”

She changed again, and once more it was his wife standing in front of him, trembling with excitement and fear. She stretched out her hand. “Come with me, my love. Come with me and I will show you worlds without end, forever.”