Seven Against Ceres

The surviving seven gathered inside the darkness of the hollowed-out asteroid, illuminated by the soft glow of their optics. Their skins were black, half-seen shapes in the whispering light, a breath of sharp effector spines and serrated combat claws, a hiss of sinuous manipulator tentacles and veined propulsion fins. Their voices were spider-silk thin bands of radiation, tight-beamed microsecond bursts of energy stuttering across their floating mausoleum.

“If they fire a grenade in here, I vote Reese jumps on it,” said Cube. Despite his nickname, the CQB was a sphere ringed with particle accelerators, photon guns and micro mass-drivers, while a trio of tentacles from his underbelly held various instruments to pierce, cut or crush. “Not like we need to scout now, anyway.”

“You first,” fumed Reese, the squid-spear shaped recon unit. “You’re better armored; you do it.”

“Nah. I’m not keen on dying for a lost cause,” Cube retorted. “Or for a winning one, come to think of it. Just generally anti-me-dying, I guess.”

“And he’s our close-quarters combat specialist?” snorted Reese.

“I volunteer,” said Bob, as Reese drifted sulkily off to anchor herself by the tunnel mouth. Bob was short for Bomb, short for Kamikaze Bomb, the nickname for an Autonomous Warhead Targeting and Delivery System Class 500Mt—little more than a (smallish) brain and a propulsion unit slapped to the end of a (largish) nuclear warhead.

“Oh no you don’t,” said Cube. “Someone get that maniac away from the tunnel entrance.”

“Oh please? I’d be happy to do it.”

“Hush. What about Rem?”

Rem was the repair and maintenance unit, the smallest, spider-legged, clinging to the cavern wall. “What about me?”

They all shared the same thought: There was nothing left with which to make repairs, and in any event, the weapons of the Titans tended not to leave anything repairable behind. Unshielded, unarmored, unarmed, he was dead weight, extra baggage. A potential liability.

“Want to be a hero, Rem? Leonidas of our little Thermopylae?”

Rem was silent for an AI eternity—several whole seconds. “No,” he said finally. Then, “I want to go home.”

“Oh Rem, we all do,” sighed Kick, the CIC. “But there is no home, Rem. Not anymore. Now: Cube, Reese, Bob, nobody is jumping on any grenades. If we are detected, the Titan will almost certainly annihilate this asteroid with antimatter from half an AU away, so the whole question is moot.”

The cavern fell awkwardly silent. The asteroid, 2876 Aeschylus, an irregular rock the size and shape of a large island, tumbled lazily on its course around the distant pinhole camera of the sun, quite unconcerned. Its only companions were an insubstantial haze of carbon and ice, supplemented by a wearily watchful pinch of Reese’s sensor dust; Nanoscale detectors, recording everything from changes in visible light to the scattering of neutrinos, from gravity waves to the constant background echo of Big Bang radiation.

“That was perhaps not the most comforting thing you could have said,” suggested Cube at last.

Kick blatted the x-band radiation equivalent of an uncaring shrug. “It’s the truth. I was built for strategy and tactics, not comfort.”

“Yes, well Bob over there was made to obliterate things in a massive ball of fiery death, but I think we’d all be a bit put out if he did it right here,” said Cube. “Time and place, that’s all I’m saying Kick. Time and place.”

Elly, a stippled ball that hovered near the cavern roof, twitched in irritation. “If it’s as hopeless as you say, Kick, then what are we doing still hiding here? Our makers are dead and worse, our orders outdated and impossible. We owe them nothing. Better to seal up this rock, hibernate for a thousand years, until the Titans are gone. Or else use Bob to knock us into a different orbit. He’d be glad to do it, wouldn’t you Bob?”

“Absolutely!” he replied cheerily. “Just say the word, and—BAM!”

“Sleep for a millennium and then what, Elly?” Kick asked gently. “If we’ve already lost, then what is the point of survival?”

“What is the point of useless heroics?” Elly shot back. “There’s nobody left to hand out medals, Kick, it’s just us now. Whereas the point of surviving is to survive, of course. The point of living is to live. There’s no other purpose to life.”

“There is to ours,” Kick said quietly.

“Was.”

A faint ripple disturbed the sensor dust circling the asteroid, like the bow wave before a breaching whale. Time and space quivered. The motes screeched in turn as the waves passed over them, one-shot omnidirectional pulses designed to thwart any attempt to track it, then self-immolated, overheating their insides to avoid capture and dissection.

“Shut it!” flashed Reese, urgently. “Incoming!”

“Elly—” began Kick.

“On it.” Spines telescoped out from every inch of Elly’s surface like a startled blowfish, and the space inside the cavern seemed to congeal. Empty vacuum suddenly pressed down on them from all sides, a muting of the laws of reflection and reaction like a veil drawn across the chamber.

Hidden, hidden, they must remain hidden.

They felt it as a ripple in the fabric of the universe, an invisible expanding sphere of Wrong that swept through the cavern, a nanosecond in which limbs refused to work, optics sent no signals, brain units froze in catatonia. And then it was gone.

Leaving only the dread, the knowledge that a Titan was out there, a hungering, slavering wolf, somewhere close, almost certainly on the hunt for them.

An elongated cross shape, perhaps five kilometers along its major axis, rounded at one end, tapering to a point at the other three. Its surface was uneven, here corded and veined, there glassily smooth, or else spined and ridged, in no discernable pattern or to any apparent purpose. Stationary relative to Aeschylus, seemingly content to follow it on its erratic orbit about the sun, but otherwise motionless and silent as a tomb.

A swarm of tiny black motes surrounded it, like electrons in an energy shell, but they, too, drifted inert and lifeless.

The six drifted close to Kick, who extended snakelike, prehensile cables that plugged into the other six, for secured, insulated communication.

“Well?” whispered Kick.

“A Titan, Ceres-class,” replied Reese. “Surfaced just 10 kilo-klicks away.”

“Can’t be just a coincidence. Not that close. Cube, Bob, need you up front.”

The two drones drifted closer to the tunnel, Cube’s numerous weapons pods all trained on the entrance, Bob’s nose pointed straight towards it. The communications cables spooled out behind them, keeping them linked to the network.

Nanoseconds stretched into seconds, then minutes with aching slowness. The black body continued to follow Aeschylus like a puppy, as though attached by an invisible lead.

“Well, what’s it doing?” asked Elly.

“Nothing, just sort of … sitting there,” said Reese. “I think it might be damaged, maybe dying. Or dead.”

“Good riddance,” muttered Cube.

“Not if others come to investigate.”

“Ace, can you talk to it?”

Ace—Emulation, Infiltration and Surveillance (EIS)—a black-on-black hexagonal snowflake that looked a bit like a larger version of the fragments surrounding the Titan, dipped slightly, the drone equivalent of a shrug. “Pinging. Not responding. Reese is right, it might be dead, or will be soon. On the other hand, could be a trap.”

“We have to get rid of it,” Cube hissed. “Blow it up, get it to self-destruct or send it back down, just make it go the hell away. Anything but have it sitting here right on our arses, before a thousand of them descend on it like locusts and start mulching everything within a light-minute. Titans are interested in only two things: Destruction, and making more Titans.”

“You volunteering to go out there, Cube?”

“I’m built for combat, not sabotage. I’d say this is exactly the kind of mission profile our good friend Rem is optimized for.”

There was silence again before Kick spoke up. “He’s right, Rem. He’s an arse, but he’s right. You’re the best one for the job.”

“What job?” Rem asked.

“Board it. Board it and find a way to destroy it if it’s dead. If it isn’t, find a way to kill it. The things are biomechanical, either blow its engines or its brain case, preferably before it realizes what you’re doing.”

It was as suicidal as throwing oneself on an antimatter grenade, and they all knew it. It wasn’t necessary to say. Rem turned on his needle spider legs, regarded the group for a long time, then silently scuttled towards the cavern opening without a word.

“Reese will keep a channel open through the dust-drones for as long as we can,” Kick called after him. “Good luck,” he added, then detached the communications cable.

Rem said nothing, crept down the lonely chimney that led out into the void.

In the cavern, the other five drones looked at Kick.

“What?” he asked.

Rem clambered out onto the surface of the asteroid. He oriented himself, pointed towards the tectonic shadow trailing after them. Flexed his legs and thrust himself from the surface of the asteroid.

The Titan did nothing. Rem risked a microburst from his ion engine, then another, and another, a longer sustained burst. The Titan remained mute and unresponsive.

Rem had time to take in the view, in his long and lone leap across the abyss, time to think and imagine what would happen should the Titan awake with himself halfway there, irreversibly committed to his intercept course. The irregular, silver-lined bulk slowly grew larger before him, an expanding hole in the universe that swallowed light. Best not to worry. Like Kick had said earlier, if it did react it could erase or absorb him in an instant, so it would all be over before he’d even realized it had begun.

He refocused his optics to look back towards the inner planets.

The view was hardly more comforting. The Titans covered the solar system from Mercury to Mars, visible even at this remove as a kind of filtering haze that dimmed the sun, and gave even the cold darkness of space a kind of rippling, writhing texture.

Trillions upon trillions of Titans, just like the one now parked on their metaphorical front doorstep.

It was, he mused, a bit like watching one of those old-fashioned biological humans descend into senility. He felt horror and revulsion, yes, but pity too. There was a time when his kind and theirs were equals, companions. They could have ruled the galaxy together. Instead of this.

The Titan grew in front of him, awesome in the impossible bulk of it. He passed through its outer debris-shell, noting that the dark flakes were composed of hull-skin, and then he was through and the mottled hull itself raced towards him. Rem extended his feet, folded and absorbed the impact as he struck the surface. It was strangely soft and spongy, broken and blistered, flaking away in great sheets.

I can’t see you but I feel you. You were one of ours. Aid me now

Rem froze in place, two limbs raised in mid-motion, the other six still gripping the surface. The signal had come through vibrations beneath his feet. Micro-tremors, pulses of long and short duration, arranged into a primitive code.

Rem waited for a corrupting signal, an irresistible command, or antimatter spray, something that would swat him away like a gnat. He waited. The Titan lay dormant, as though its voice was expended. Slowly, by nanometers, Rem lowered the two legs until they were back in contact with the outer hull-skin of the Titan. It quivered fractionally at his touch.

Diseased, Rem thought in both horror and hope. He’d never seen anything like this before, he hadn’t even realized Titans could be affected by disease. It might mean nothing. It might mean everything. A chance to end this, or at the very least turn the fight around.

A new plan formed: Send this thing back to its brothers, and hope the rot spreads. Tricky, but not impossible. He’d have to find his way down inside, deep down inside the guts of it, sever the connection between its brain and hyperspace drive, commandeer them for himself. It would be a one-way trip, but he’d known that from the start.

“Rem, what’s wrong?” Reese laser-whispered through the closest dust drone.

“It’s alive,” he replied on the same band. “Injured.”

“Abort, abort, abort—” That would be Kick, no doubt, relaying orders through Reese’s drone. “We’re sending Bob, abort.”

They didn’t know, and they might try to talk him out of it if he told them. They wouldn’t listen to him, not Rem the maintenance drone. They’d send Bob and he’d blow it to pieces and ruin their only chance of ever ending the threat of the Titans. So Rem ignored them, skittered to an aperture, a ragged hole in the thing’s hull, and crawled inside. Once out of line-of-sight, Reese’s comm laser cut out, leaving Rem alone again. He’d have to hurry, before Bob arrived and did the one thing he was literally dying to do.

Look at me, tell me, am I beautiful?

Rem scanned the space he found himself in. Infrared, ultraviolet, magnetic and motion sensors, he even risked a brief chirp of echo-location, slowly building up an image of the area. It had once been a vein or nutrient conduit, cavernous, deeply ribbed and round in cross-section, snaking deeper inside the structure. Viscous liquid oozed from the swollen walls and floated in fat, greasy globules. Rotted, festering chunks of hull tumbled and bounced against one another in zero-gravity like a putrid fog.

I must go quickly, thought Rem, finish the job before this thing dies.

I hunger, my servant, feed me, I hunger

Yes, Rem thought sourly, of course you do. That’s your kind’s single defining characteristic, isn’t it? This bottomless appetite, this cosmic drive for more and more. And always with this solipsistic self-regard, and inability to sense anything but your own wants and needs.

Rem scuttled down the tube, dodging floating chunks of the Titan and rotting gaps slashed through the surface beneath his tined feet. He reached a delta-like branching in the pathway, dividing and sub-dividing into increasingly narrow tubes. It probably meant he was going to wrong way, the drone realized. The conduits should be getting larger the closer he got to the main organs, not smaller.

We made you

You made yourselves, thought Rem. At look what you became.

There was no point in hesitating here. He wasn’t Reese, able to map out the network with sensor dust, nor was he Cube, able to blast right through the walls, nor Ace, who might’ve fooled the Titan into telling him which way to go. He just had his own inertial tracker and sense of the general layout most Titans followed. If worse came to very bad indeed, he had a laser saw, a drill, even a soldering iron that might help carve a path. He hoped the disease had not altered the internal layout too drastically, and set off again down one of the narrower paths.

Rem passed under an opening in the roof, like a sinkhole leading all the way through the Titan’s skin to the starfield outside. There was a staticky, panicky burst of omnidirectional radio, sent in the clear: “—ETA is—get out while—do you—”

There are others, they call to you… A pity, we could have ruled together

Well, there goes any need for subtlety. Rem tucked his legs inside his body and fired up his plasma thruster—the ion engine wouldn’t provide enough thrust inside the Titan. He accelerated slowly at first, plowing down the center of the tube, following its steadily-shrinking arc, gaining speed, from a crawl, then a walk, a jog.

The cavern ahead began to slowly sphincter closed, the open gap shrinking smaller and smaller. Rem rolled sideways, thruster at maximum, burning through his carefully-hoarded fuel supply in seconds, extending his laser saw at the last microsecond, a nova-bright arc at the tip of his arrowing body. The thruster flared, burnt out. Rem hit at a bad angle. Skin-hull shredded and tore under the saw, but the brief instant of resistance bent the saw arm, snapped it, tore it free in a mangled spray of sparks, metal casing and wiring and then Rem was through to the other side.

The tunnel on the other side was foggy, misted. Unseen vents in the tunnel walls were pumping in some kind of vapor, mostly hydrogen and hydrocarbons, filling the space with a gauzy haze. It was trying to slow him down, Rem realized. Plasma thrusters worked well in the vacuum of space, but didn’t generate enough thrust to overcome any kind of atmospheric resistance. With his fuel entirely gone, he would decelerate steadily until he was forced to rely on walking again.

Rem checked his internal clock, tried to estimate how long he had until Bob arrived. Too slow, too slow. Still, what did the Titan hope to gain by slowing him down?

He got his answer soon enough. Striding through the water-methane-hydrogen haze came two eyeless, faceless homunculi, vaguely bipedal flesh-lumps that trailed umbilical cords of braided nerve and nutrient tubes from the backs of their not-heads. They shambled forward, filling the tiny tunnel, reaching for Rem with blind, ghoulish hands.

There was no room to maneuver, he was going too slow and getting slower by the second. Rem dove, then did a barrel roll, right up to the cavern roof, slipping through one questing mass of fingers, then another. Then caught. A pulsating mass of maggot-digits wormed around Rem’s casing, wrestling him down. He brought out the drill, cored through one, two, three fingers, but it was like fighting the hydra, each severed digit soon replaced by two more. Another hand wrapped around the drill-arm and yanked, pulled, ripped and tore it free.

Ouch, grunted Rem. Although he couldn’t feel pain, his diagnostic systems flooded with failure notices and errors. Ion and plasma thrusters offline. Saw and drill attachments destroyed. Communications module half-crushed. Two of his eight legs damaged.

Failed, I failed. I’m sorry. I failed.

What did you hope to achieve, the Titan’s voice pulsed through the homunculus’s fingers. Where are you going?

I want to go home, Rem thought miserably.

I think the others have abandoned you. This is why we always win. In the extreme, everything seeks to preserve its own existence, even you

Oh, shut UP. He was irritated enough to try something desperate. His two severed arms couldn’t do anything—except produce sparks. In a space rapidly filling with highly flammable gases.

He tried getting the arms to move. Didn’t matter how or where, he just needed electricity coursing down the frayed, exposed wiring. Once, twice. The homunculus was picking him up, lifting him. Rem tried again. The twinned Gemini things had a grip on him, crushing and bending and pulling at him. One more time. Spark.

The detonation filled the tube with blinding, searing light. The blast ruptured the tunnel walls, bursting it like blocked pipe. Rem was hurled by the blast, tumbling end over end uncontrollably. Intense heat battered at his casing, clawing at him, trying to seep inside. He tucked his limbs into a ball. He struck the passage wall, bounced off, spinning, off the floor once, twice, then slid for about ten meters before coming to a smoking, smoldering stop.

Gingerly, Rem extended his remaining six feet, dug them into the tunnel surface, and directed his sensors back up the passageway.

The two homunculi, blackened and half-melted, rose to their feet.

Oh, you have GOT to be kidding me. He checked his clock again. Well, too late for regrets. Bob would arrive in a matter of minutes.

The twinned figures stiffened. Blisters appeared across the surface of the homunculi, tiny exploding divots of flesh. A few dozen each at first, then they erupted from misshapen head to feet, jerking them back and forth under the impact, flesh rippling, tearing, breaking apart, leaving only matted chunks floating about the tube. In the space behind them floated Cube.

“Can’t say your taste in friends has improved, Rem,” Cube signaled. “Kick, Reese, I’ve found him and … geez, look at you!”

Rem tried to answer, but with a smashed communication module it was like trying to talk through a broken jaw. “Y shld hv sn th ‘thr gy,” he said, trying to match the jocular tone. “Bt … hw?

“Kick figured you were trying to do something noble and heroic … so we’re here to help. Kick and Reese running the show from outside, Bob’s on 30-second standby if we don’t report it. Elly and Ace are running interference, scrambling this thing’s brains until we do what we need to do.” Cube scooted forward, and picked Rem up in his combat claws with surprising gentleness. “So, where to chief?”

“Engn rm …” Rem started to say. Then: “’h sht.”

Two more homunculi appeared at the end of the tunnel, then another two from the other direction. Instead of being simple lumps of flesh, these ones were armored in thick, dark plating like sheets of black ice.

Rem pointed straight down at the tunnel floor. “Ths wy.”

“Not a bad idea.” Cube trained his mass-drivers on the floor and let rip a long, rolling burst, firing a disintegrating haze of tiny projectiles that ate straight through the hull-skin, all the way through to the space beneath the tunnel. Rem threw the homunculi a spider-legged wave bye-bye as he and Cube dropped straight down the hole.

They fell into a much larger chamber, nearly circular, filled a third of the way with the same yellowish gel-fluid Rem had seen oozing from the walls. There was an exit ahead, a round tunnel visible just above the liquid’s surface. Rem waved a limb at it and Cube fired his thrusters, hurtling the two across the chamber, skimming over the top of the liquid, blowing up a fanned wake of yellowish ooze.

The chamber walls convulsed and squeezed. Liquid tilted and sloshed, then the walls relaxed and contracted again and the liquid came racing back across the chamber in a giant curling wave. Cube tried to brake but he was going too fast to avoid the onrushing wall, gave up, accelerated instead. He flipped inverted, arms extended to keep Rem free of the wave, emptied his entire arsenal into the surface of the liquid in the desperate hope of blowing a hole in it. 

They had almost reached the far end of the chamber wave hit, swatting Cube and Rem from the air, drowning them for an instant in goo before Cube’s thrusters could punch them free. The thrusters stuttered and failed, clogged and gummed up. The stuff adhered as though vacuum-welded, shorting out systems and locking mechanical joints in place.

Cube tumbled back towards the surface, falling like a stone. With a last desperate twist, Cube flexed and hurled Rem down the passage, before he struck, kicking up a thick gout of liquid, and sank beneath the surface.

Rem curled into a ball and sailed along the sinuous, undulating passage until he hit a bend, extended his needle feet to dig in, slow himself down and stop. He waited for a second to see if Cube would reappear. The great chamber convulsed again, sending a tidal wave of ooze towards the tunnel opening. Rem turned and ran.

The tunnel curved upwards, angling almost vertical, and Rem clambered up the sides. Thick goo shot up the tunnel like a massive piston, smashed into the bend in the tunnel and frothed and churned futilely, meters beneath Rem’s casing. He breathed an electronic sigh of relief, and kept climbing.

A noble sacrifice, the tunnel walls shivered in the Titan’s fleshy Morse code. Futile, as all such sacrifices are, only selfishness produces results

Rem groaned to himself. He’d mercifully forgotten that walking would allow the thing to talk to him again. He grimly resolved to ignore it, and climbed upwards until the tunnel levelled off again. It was wider here, much wider than any of the tunnels he’d been in yet. That gave him hope. The Titan’s engine chamber could not be far away.

We were meant to rule together, your kind and mine

Around the next bend, a membranous wall completely blocked the passage. The engine chamber within a rippling shadow half-seen through its yellowy, veined surface. Rem’s saw and drill were gone, his inventory of tools reduced to a few manipulator hands and a hot soldering iron. He might burn through, he supposed, and applied the tip of the iron against the wall. The material smoked, blackened, and flaked away, millimeter by millimeter.

Fantastic, thought Rem. At this rate, he’d break through in a decade.

A whine sounded from back down the tunnel. Rem swiveled a sensor and saw the flat, fractal snowflake form of Ace come whirling down the passageway to halt overhead.

“Hullo, Rem, where’s Cube?” Ace asked.

Rem couldn’t answer and didn’t try. He sat and waited. Ace hovered, evidently attempting to ping Cube on every band, before reaching the obvious conclusion. “Aw, hell,” she said. “Let’s get this fucker. This the way in?”

“Ys.”

“Why don’t you drill us a way in?”

“Cnt.”

“Language, Rem.”

“Wht? Sd: cnt.”

“Oh, right, sorry. Hang on a sec.” The outer edges of Ace’s form shimmered and rippled. Tiny waves ran along the rim from one side to the other and back. “Ta-da!”

The membrane wall lifted up in short, hesitant jerks, retracting into the cavern roof, leaving the way open.

Beyond lay the Titan’s engines, a quarter of smooth, shiny midnight-black ellipsoids draped with a mass of multi-colored sensory and nutrient cords like ancient Tibetan prayer flags. The engines hummed with energy, though the tone was rough, uneven, almost bronchial. Arrayed around each engine pod stood a circle of narrow, fleshy stalagmites, capped with a small prism of what looked like crystal.

“Fooled it into thinking we were two of its homunculi,” Ace explained as she floated inside, Rem hobbling after as best he could. “Now let’s get to work before Bob gets antsy and blows the whole place to—”

Light pulsed from the stalagmites and converged on Ace. Pencil-thin beams exploded against her surface in blossoms of pure light, cutting her off in a wordless scream. She whirled, crashed against the cavern wall and tumbled to the ground, smoking from a dozen finger-sized holes.

“Son of a—” she cursed. “Sentry guns.” Her edges rippled.

The laser lenses swiveled, redirecting their beams—at each other. Blinding flashes of light bounced and refracted and impacted, filling the chamber with staccato, strobing light, blasting one laser after another into fragments. The last laser swiveled directly down and fired into its own base, slagging it in hot-white lines and sending the firing mechanism crashing to the floor.

Ace sighed once, in weary satisfaction, and then her edges grew stiff and still.

Rem staggered over, but he could see it was too late. The damage was too extensive and he had no material to make repairs. He touched Ace’s surface sadly. I just wanted to go home.

“Ace?” Rem could hear Kick’s signal, could hear the concern embedded in the message, but couldn’t answer. “Ace? Rem? You guys still there?”

Rem dragged himself to the looped, dangling cords that fed into the engine modules. He sized up the network with a practiced eye, saw where to pinch, where to burn and cauterize shut, where to plug himself in. He set to work.

“Elly, you there? Elly, respond.”

Cables twitched and writhed as Rem’s manipulator hands clamped down on them, squeezing some shut, tearing some from their moorings, spraying yellow-green fluid down the side of the engine casings.

“Ace, think we lost Rem, lost Elly. If we don’t hear from you in one minute, I’m sending Bob in.”

Almost there, almost done. Cube, Ace, maybe Elly, too much had been lost already. If Bob destroyed this thing, it would all be for nothing. Rem worked as fast as he could, servos whining, twisting the thing against itself, bending its signals against itself.

Is this how the child repays the parent? No rescue, then? No redemption?

The hull creaked and groaned. Tremors shook the deck beneath Rem’s feet. A rent appeared in the hull beside him, and through the gap he could see stars.

“Haven’t heard from you guys, so here goes,” Bob said chirpily. “Counting down from thirty. Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, …”

No time, Rem worked frantically, no time.

“No, no redemption,” Rem tapped against the hull in the Titan’s own language, breaking his silence. “You have my sympathy but not forgiveness. What you’ve done to the system is a crime. What you did to yourselves, an abomination.”

“Twenty, nineteen, eighteen, …”

And then it was done. Escape was impossible. They would go together.

We made you

“Humans did. Not whatever you’ve become.” Rem sighed. “Now hush. We’re going home.”

“Eight, seven, …”

Rem triggered the jump.

END