The Cherry Blossoms of Regulon V

               Zob Kane stood above the greatest floral spectacle in the galaxy: myriads of grottos and rosy shadows, elegant trunks with spines extended and quivering in the alien sunset. “Ah, Regulon V is so sublime, in its summer cycle. Can’t you feel the sublimity?” He sighed: the long, peaceful sigh of the Artist-In-His-Element. “I could paint here forever.”

               Perhaps, thought Will. But nothing good.

               They set up their tripods, planting the legs deep in the nitrous-rich earth. Sublime… What did this idiot know about sublime? They’d eaten burgers for breakfast, for Chrissake. But Will didn’t go for mockery—it wasn’t like his friend would’ve listened.

 “Very sublime,” he said.

               “They’re poisonous, when they come down. The blossoms. Did I tell you?”

                “I was the one who told you.”

               “Right, right. Just like you told me about that girl, back home. Good call there. She was fantastic.” His friend fumbled for the z-axis paints, failing: the mittens of his space-suit were soon stained in a clumsy rainbow. There were newer models, but Zob had insisted on “authentic” suits. He tried to preen his Dali mustache, couldn’t do it because of the bubble helmet, and settled for a raconteur pose. “Look at those blossoms, how rugose! That quintessential sunset! I think I’ll start in lime-pink. Lime-pink is so trendy.”

               “You do whatever feels right, man.” Will moved his easel several steps back; he didn’t want to get in the way of genius, after all.

               “I’m so glad we came. My Muse is with me, Will. She’s embracing me.”

               I brought you here. It was my money, my life. Given for you.

               Will painted a Regulan flatworm. He wasn’t sure why; it just seemed to fit the empty space, its features sharp and vicious. The colors came to life, wriggled free of the canvas, and started floating towards Zob. The pincers snapped, the stinger flashed and throbbed with menace.

Will was quite far along, in Z-axis painting—farther, he suspected, than anyone had ever gone. Without a better word for it, he supposed he was a god. It brought no joy; the girl had been the last in a series of insults that stretched for years. His hands trembled.

Regulan flatworms were ethereal; they wriggled right through the molecules of your clothes and skin, to suck your organs empty. It was a horrific way to die.

                Zob, the peacock, stayed oblivious. “They’ll hang this one in the gallery, just like my thesis. I can sense it.”

               Liar. That work was mine.

              The theft had been subtle: “a little help” on the final graduate assignment had required more and more work, until it was unparalleled. Now, Will’s piece hung in the alumni hall at Berkelee, a plaque naming it Bee’s Insides in Radical-Yellow… by Zob Kane. 

            The flatworm was very close.

You do whatever feels right, man. Was this the act of a just god? 

A loving god?

Will’s hands grew still. He painted a gentle breeze of lavender-indigo: it rose from the canvas, drifted and blew the flatworm away. Its delicate body tumbled over the leaves.

               “The petals! Oh, the petals!” Zob was painting, Will saw: really painting. Not well, but still. The pigments were a pale copy of the valley, but the first layer had promise; the second might well contain real technique. The third… Well, by the finish, his friend might have something. His very first non-plagiarism. “Look at those colors. I see what the religious types are about, now. God is great, and all that shit!”

               Will smiled. “Yes. He truly is.”

               Zob turned to him, and his cheeks were shining the color of the toxic blossoms. “What would you know? You haven’t even started yet.”

The Retcon

                “I used to be a hero.” I cleared my throat. “Well, a sidekick, technically. That’s the first step towards recovery, right? Admitting you had a problem.” There were quiet chuckles from the group around me, but the laughter didn’t reach their eyes. Under the ceiling bulb, in our circle of folding chairs, we looked like a bunch of monks in bright, trendy clothing. “You guys knew my mentor—Cellular Man. Re-shaped his own cells to shapeshift, fight crime, the whole routine.” I stared through my fingers at the floor. “Guess he thought having a ‘sidekick of color’ would pad out his resume, or something. Whatever his reasons, he hired me, and we made a good team. With my plant powers and his cell control, we changed the world—for the better.” I sighed. “He called me ‘Verdant Lass,’ and it stuck. Worst goddamned sidekick name in the…” I paused. “Sorry.”

                “Don’t apologize,” said the guy across from me, Toby Wires—aka Wire-Lad. Used to be, he could control metal cables. Why just metal cables? We never found out. Of course, now all he controlled were lattes, as a barista. “We’re not an ‘example’ anymore, Shawna. You don’t have to worry about the code of morals—you can speak freely.”

                “Right you are, fucker!” More laughter, and this time I saw some genuine smiles. “Damn, it feels good to curse. One good thing about the Rewrite, we finally get to act like people.”

                “Represent!” said Gamma Gal, pumping a fist.

                Toby put out a hand. “Okay, come on. Let the girl finish.”

                “Anyway, I’m no different than you guys. I still miss my old life. After…” I swallowed. The cement floor seemed to spin underneath me, as I tried to reconcile reality with who I used to be. The thing I used to care about. “After the Rewrite, when we ended up here, I went to see Cellular Man. A lot of heroes, they couldn’t deal with the loss of their powers. The villains were fine—they ran off to run governments, work on Wall Street, they fit right in. But Cellular Man…” I swallowed. I could still see the blood.

Every day, tried to wash it away, but it wouldn’t go. Out, damned spot, out. It was everywhere, staining my clothes, my sheets. But taking that horror and putting it into words was beyond me. “He tried to shapeshift… without powers,” I said, my voice shaking. “He cut off… pieces of himself, stapled or stitched them onto other body parts. It was…” I couldn’t finish. My throat was closing up. Toby got up, brought me a glass of water, and I choked it down. I found his hand on my shoulder.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to—”

“I want to,” I said, a little more fiercely than I’d intended. A couple ex-sidekicks winced. I must have looked a mess; eyes streaming, hair akimbo. But I needed to finish the story. All our lives had been cut short—I deserved that much. “I need this.”

“Okay.” He sat down.

“When the police came… the new police, not the kind we used to know, not the bumbling extras who would eat donuts and wait for us to show up… when the cops came, they threw me in a squad car. They were going to pin it on me. I was stupid enough to touch the knives, I tried to pull them out. They had fingerprints…” I focused on breathing, zoned in on a small hole in the concrete. A perforation. “They were convinced I did it. I was done for. And then he came.”

“The Storyteller,” said Toby.

I nodded. “Yes. With his cashmere sweater, and his pipe, and his stupid fucking…” They all blanched. “His… big glasses.” I wasn’t scared of him, not like they were. They all thought he was God, that he could kill any of us at any time, for speaking ill of him. I knew better.

If he’d wanted to kill us, he wouldn’t waste so much time torturing us.

“He walked into the police station. He wrote something on a piece of paper… Taped it to my cell. No one seemed to notice him. And the same officer who’d slammed my nose into the floor, broke it and wouldn’t give me a phone call, that officer opened the cell door. Smiled. Offered me… offered me coffee.” I fingered the crook in my nose where the splint had settled the bone. It still crunched, sometimes, when I poked it. “They said they were sorry, so sorry for the mix-up. That night they arrested some random guy, charged him with Cellular’s murder. Last I heard, he was doing fifty to life.”

Silence, around the ring of pale and frightened faces.

“I came back here. Back to the cul-de-sac, where all of us seem to end up—no matter what jobs we land, no matter who we once were. Villains, heroes, sidekicks, fucking henchmen… We all end up here.” I found I could breathe once more. Some great and awful weight was lifting from my joints, my spine, fleeing my guts like the sudden absence of a tumor. “Someone else moved into Cellular Man’s house, the week after. Like nothing happened.”

“What was on the piece of paper?” This was Remora Boy. He was sucking on a lollipop: slowly, compulsively. His way, I assumed, of dealing with the lack of his suction powers. I couldn’t judge. We all had our own ways of carrying the cross, the weight of a past world, one that had never existed.

“It had this elaborate, cursive handwriting. Very small, very precise. It said… ‘After the gruesome murder at Olympus Circuit Drive, young Shawna was falsely accused, another victim of our flawed criminal justice system. Luckily, a stop-and-frisk caught the real culprit with the victim’s blood and several murder weapons, that very night! Vindication never tasted so sweet.’”

“Our state doesn’t have stop-and-frisk,” said Toby.

“Exactly.” That tiny hole in the concrete seemed to swallow my world, as I delved into the memory, explored its nooks and crannies. Searching for any missing pieces. “There was more.”

They waited.

“‘The good people of Olympus Circuit welcomed her back with open arms.’” I’d kept the paper, pinned it to my fridge, to prove I wasn’t crazy. Memorized it. “‘Soon enough, the terrible act was forgotten, and life returned to normal. Shawna Mason continued her life as a landscaping designer… an ordinary, everyday hero, making the community more beautiful each day.’ And that’s why I came. Because… because no one remembered him. And that wasn’t right.” I broke up a little, and Remora Boy handed me a tissue box. I took it reluctantly, snorted into a Kleenex.

“Anybody got a trash can?”

“Over there,” said Gamma. I threw a mess of mucus and shame into the bin. Stared at the floor again.

“You say this was months ago,” Toby prompted me, softly. “Why now? If he made us forget, why did you need to share this with us now?”

My hands balled into fists. “Because… because I don’t think that’s the only thing he’s made us forget.”

Toby frowned. “What do you mean?”

There was a knock on the door. We all jumped. I knew who it was; I knew what was about to happen. For all we knew, it might have happened a hundred times—because none of us would remember. Not with our lives rewritten out from under our feet every morning.

“I think he’s Rewritten more than just our pasts,” I said, speaking over the sound. “I think he’s messing with us on purpose. Torturing us, building a Purgatory, for something the heroes did. Or something he thinks they did.”

“Shawna,” said Toby, rising, “maybe we shouldn’t—”

“No! Fuck this!” I rose. Pushed my chair in front of the door. The knocking grew louder; I tried to shut it out, tried to think of anything but that sound, my nails digging blood out of my fists. “We can’t let him do this! We were the good guys, damn it! We don’t deserve this!” Remora Boy was crying. The others had pulled away from me; their faces were sheep’s faces, panicked and wild-eyed.

“We have to fight back,” I said, and the knocking grew louder, and I could feel his influence slithering into the room like a fat slash of red ink through our lives. “He’s going to stop us meeting like this. He’s going to make us forget. But we need to hold on. He can’t rewrite everything! There has to be some hole—some way through his powers!”

Toby stepped forward. First I thought he was going to hit me, stop me from bringing the anger of our new God into this room, into our minds. But he just put a hand on my cheek.

“This has happened before,” he said. He was smiling, the genial expression of peace you might see on a saint. Or a martyr. “You gave us a phrase to repeat. A mantra. This time I remembered it.”

“I…” The hammering was thicker and now I recognized it for what it was: not a fist on wood, but the sound of a typewriter’s keys, old-fashioned and big as the stars, slamming down into us, changing the script. “What was it?”

“No one can break through the ceiling,” he said and then the Sidekicks decided to disband their quaint little meeting, for the good of all. There would be no more awkward confessions tonight. Because the old world was gone, and it was easier to forget it, let it pass. The comrades hugged, they cried, they ate crackers and cheese and slurped stale water from Toby’s kitchen tap. And then they went home, and fell into a deep, nourishing sleep, forgetting all dreams of returning to the old way. After all, their lives were better now: more meaningful, more human. No more silly costumes, no more playing dice with the fate of the earth. Their toys were broken, but they now had a chance to do real good. Lasting good.

In the quiet of Olympus Drive, there remained only the stillness of night, and the ripe possibilities of a slowly approaching dawn.

I woke up screaming. The scary part was, I didn’t know why.

My throat was raw. My hands were scabbed over with fingernail marks.

             I got out of bed, tried to wash the blood off my hands.

             No one can break through the ceiling.

             There was a note on the fridge.

THE GUARDS ARE TALKING BACKWARDS

                Getting up there was easy. The UN had pooled resources to send a mission up to the vessel; we didn’t have a name it then, but a lot of folks in the Army were just calling it the Craft. Capital C—not ‘a’ craft, THE Craft. Real dramatic, those army boys.

                They came with me, Patterson and Trace—we were Contact Team Nine. Eight had gone inside, none had come out. Around this time, the UN -consul general finally admitted it was time to arm their “diplomats.” Took them too long, if you ask me. A twenty-mile-wide, alien craft hovering over New Jersey, and the welcome party didn’t bring any weapons? My brother is a hostage negotiator for the police, and he told me something: if you want something, manners are important, but a gun is easier—long as they don’t see it coming.

                We jumped up into orbit, on these sweet-ass space planes… retrofitted shuttle paneling, horizontal takeoff, the works. They were made for ferrying rich tourists to space. They were a little beat up from the first eight teams, but they were our only ride.

                Inside, time seemed to stretch… It’s still stretching. I’ve been experiencing events backward for some time now. You can’t see it, but that’s what I’m doing. Every moment and event begins with its own results, then folds backward into previous events… and that shape folds into itself, and on and on and on, without ever getting any smaller. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. Who told me that?

                They told me.

                Not in so many words, of course. But I want you to understand it’s important for you to know I am experiencing all of this in rewind—did I say this already? My lips are flapping as they sound out a word that makes no logic to me, that my backwards mind cannot accept because every neuron is twisted inside out, retracing its own pathways. No, I wouldn’t call it strange.

                Together, we exited the space plane. It was damn dangerous: even though we were in low orbit next to the Craft, they didn’t give us an airlock to get into the thing. No. We were pushed from the opened hatch of the plane into a smooth, round hole in the rock of its side. We knew it was made of rock: that much was evident from the pits and crags on its surface. But how does a rock hover 20 miles over New Jersey, unmoving, for thirty days? Based on the imaging we’ve obtained from sonar, we knew the thing is hollow. It was understood prior to… prior to… God, I’m doing it again, aren’t I? We are fifty-three days before the day I’m talking about, the day we went in, but in the wrong direction. It’s all folded to me, the memories bunched into a sleeve… gotta work my way through the creases. Fifty-three days ago we made a solemn vow not to hurt anything we found inside. They got me in on this pact, even though I didn’t agree. Even though I thought it was a pussy to do. The last eight teams hadn’t made it out for a reason, and here these goddamn fools were promising to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. Well, I wasn’t drinking the Kool-Aid.

                We were heavily armed. We were supposed to defend ourselves, if push came to shove. They’re showing me my childhood, ever since that moment: Autumn leaves crunching dry-crisp beneath our feet. The backyard. The air is chilly and me, my sister and I, are jumping… in…

                The sun hung low-slung and deep-set, those days. In the days of apple cider and cinnamon shaved fresh all over glazed buns. The smell of molasses from the barn. It’s food I remember most, and I guess it makes sense. It’s the only thing I’m allowed to savor, from those days. Everyone is gone.

                The inside was smooth and curved up towards a green light. We approached it… we didn’t know what else to do. We were drawn to it, like deep-sea fish glimpsing an angler for the first time. We each wanted to be the big kahuna, the first one to talk to an alien species…

They aren’t better than us. They make mistakes. We went through, and to each of us the ecosystem inside was something different—superseded over our own perceptions and filters of reality. Our histories, laid out for us, woven from our own minds.

                You’ve been calling them “creatures,” the things that made the Craft. You would be wrong; they aren’t alive, not in the way we know. They are sentient light, beings made of frozen photons running through a certain type of ice, which naturally forms in cubist structures on their planet. Ha! I’m kidding. Just kidding. Sentient ice! Ha, the look on your face, you really believed me! I’m not telling you shit, you government goon. You put us in there. You did this to our minds!

                I’m sorry, have we met before?

                Alive… yes, they are alive. Alive and full of love. And rage. And confusion. They are the essence of thought, distilled and zipping around on air currents. They’re also astronomically large worms, each one as long as a solar system. They are anything that has ever evolved, in this galaxy: they have moved past us on a quantum level, they are entangled with everything. Everything! From the day you were born, they knew your name. “Even before I shaped you in the womb, I knew you.”

Dimensions lie in layers over them, baked into their tissue, their limbs. They are so far from us that we may as well be atoms under their microscopes. And yet, they love us.

                I knew we had to bomb the thing.

My wife? She had divorced me the month before I left the Revivalist movement in New York. The good brothers and sisters thought the Craft was Jesus, was His chariot come to deliver Him. Like a pizza! Ridiculous. We had a “disagreement,” and if I’m being honest, I knew it would come down like that. That damn cult split me from my wife. I needed to prove she was wrong about it… about the Craft being divine. You can’t kill God, right? He’s eternal. I wanted to test that theory. Why do you think I worked so hard—wormed my way into security detail? I killed one man—just one. He knew my secret, and I wasn’t having it.

No, Maria, the dishes are in the sink.

               

These things… see, they aren’t eternal. They aren’t immortal. They are the past, the instant flash-bang of a species’ final steps away from the one from before it, and before it, and before it. They are less than an instant of life. Their life-span ticks off in attoseconds.

                They showed me the technology that made them like this: they showed how to see inside a star, how to watch the sub-atomic dance unfold. They taught me that every single second happens at the same time, every moment of every world. They showed me things my mind could not have grasped if given a lifetime to contemplate the reaches of my irrelevance.

                Sir, I don’t reckon good human beings need to see things like that.

                Our power is in our brevity. Our short lives, our limited hands and limbs and eyes are what define us—what make us the clever, original, cunning and dangerous apes that we are. If we were handed this gift, this Pandora’s box, we would have lost ourselves. Any hope of identity would have disappeared—one human mind, one human spirit. One human moment spread across countless millennia, with no frame of reference for what is heroic, or evil, or the meaning of kindness. Kindness requires a physical shape.

                Kindness requires a soul.

                So yes, I killed it. A week inside the Craft, and then I blew it to pulp. You can blame me, call me a lunatic. You can say I sabotaged our only attempt at contact with another species.

                But I stand by what I did. Those idiots on my team stood around slack-jawed in the billowing infinity, consumed in the light of orgasmic comprehension. Transported by it. No different than the religious sheep my wife is following: the light made them blind. Stupid. We can’t worship these things; we simply can’t afford to. We didn’t evolve to interact with them: the human mind can’t survive it.

                I see. You want to know why they came? Why they taunt us with their presence, if we can’t talk to them in ways that don’t turn our minds to soup?

                I think it’s because one of us… one of our future versions… the Earth that could be, that Earth is ready for them, because it is so much like them, a brilliant mesh of infinite possibilities not held back by doubt or fear… And they are forever seeking Earths like this, and destroying the rest by contact with them. No, I can’t prove this. You can’t prove a feeling.

                You think you can contain the fragments… But they are loose now, no longer bound into one concept, one idea. And the human mind loves ideas: ideas are like candy, rotting your head to a husk if you have enough of them.

We are so lucky. Where am I? They will change us all for the better—no, be quiet, shut up!! They will change us all, each diaper-shitting child and crumbling adult, each schizophrenic and depressive and obsessive, they will mold us into the infinite forms beyond this single, dry, turd-reality. We are the chosen ones. We are nothing, we are everyone.

               

I stand by what’s done. Maybe, if I’d left them in the Craft… if I hadn’t scattered their ur-flesh all over the landscape. But I stand by what’s done. It’s all you can do, right? You have to stick to your guns, in time of crisis. God help us.

My mother says it’s time to get up. I never kissed that girl behind the quad—no, no way. Not her, Dad. It’s my fault, I burned the bread. Where’s my scar? I used to have a scar… The guards are talking backwards. You might want to hear what the guards have to say. The guards are talking backwards.

               

I bet you’ll find them quite illuminated.

The Traitor

An excerpt from one of the books I'm working on, called "Plague of Steel."

            My name is Jamie Dhukkan, and I am about to become a terrorist.

            When the first refugees arrived, my husband and I campaigned to deport them. It was ironic: we were both second-gen immigrants, his parents from Kolkata and mine from Sri Lanka, and here we were petitioning to try and reject frightened, scared people from our shores. America is beautiful, yes… but as they say, you must pay the toll to get in, and the toll was far too high for these people, escapees of the first infestations in Ukriaine, in Sierra Leone, in Indonesia. My husband overheard the military discussing the plague; they thought might have been “delivered” to developing nations on purpose. “Developing”… Well, they developed under Silver’s influence. Very quickly. They developed into angry hives of furious, faceless half-machine monsters, their last sliver of humanity allowing them to understand the pain and betrayal of border closures, UN firing squads, the last resorts of a terrified Europe. Can anyone be blamed for trying to run from these things?

            If we had permitted a few more to make landfall, if we’d seen the face of the disease instead of sharpening bayonets and building higher fences, we might’ve managed a cure. We might have had enough time, enough human specimens to work on. Applied EMP bursts worked temporarily for pushing back the infected, but it was like using a sledgehammer against a swarm of gnats—by the time the FDA had approved the manufacture of EMP belts and necklaces, Florida was already neck-deep in nanites, and the first cases had surfaced in New York. We waited too long; we saw only in the short term, planning for today instead of thinking of tomorrow. Now we’ll pay for it.

            My husband has been gone for three weeks.

He was working on Project Kessen—a “breakthrough” he claimed would turn the tide of the plague. Two days ago the Army came and confiscated all his work, right down to the last sample. I was furious; I demanded they tell me where he was, what had happened. They served me a death certificate on the spot, like stone-faced magicians producing a rabbit. Reach into the black top hat and poof, Annie, your husband is gone. So sorry. An accident at the lab, casualty of the war, these things happen.

They stripped the lab and left me standing in the kitchen, hyperventilating like an idiot. I sucked life from my inhaler, struggled for air as they piled into an armored truck and pulled away. I wish I’d fought them on it, asked more questions, forced my hand… but would it have helped? We all know what happens when you ask too many questions about the nanites. About where they came from. The president has stopped issuing denials—Silver is a federal experiment gone wrong, and everyone knows it. My Farook wouldn’t say so—but I saw the guilt in him. The shame. The terrible knowledge that his adopted country had unleashed something on the world, something that was eating men and women and children alive. Changing them. That kind of guilt can’t be shaken off—you live with it all your life.

I should know; I’m a cellular biologist, like my mother before me. When I was five, she was working on malaria for the Sri Lankan government, trying to neuter infected mosquitoes. Somehow a single insect escaped from the lab—my mother would never say how, but she suspected that someone simply left a door open. One fault in a specimen cage, one door left ajar, and hundreds of people died from a completely preventable disease. The elderly, the weak, and the poor died in droves. Such are the wages of knowledge.

Sorry, I’m rambling. I’m getting bitter in my old age. Just forty, and I’ve lost my husband, my career, my government grants. No golden years for us, no peaceful retirement—it’s not like there’s a Florida or an Arizona for us to retire to, anyway. But I refuse to believe I lost him in some idiotic accident. Farook wasn’t like the other Army hire-outs, the ones who sucked the CDC’s teats and outsourced their work to agencies that didn’t even wash their petri dishes. Farook was smart. He could sense a change in the wind before anyone else—it’s how he survived the budget cuts, the havoc at DARPA when funding for his cellular automata disappeared. He never quit, naturally: he was patient, he was precise, and above all he was committed. He loved the whole concept of nanobots, I took to making fun of him for it. “Don’t make anything that can think,” I would warn him, and pinch his ear. Oh, how he hated that.

Guess the joke’s on me. Because if he didn’t have a hand in making Silver, who did? Some backwoods Iranian engineer? Those madmen in Pyongyang? I don’t think so. These machines are not logical; they do things to human cells that shouldn’t be possible, that defy the laws of physics. They move so quickly and evolve so fast it borders on—I hate to say it—magic. If human hands were behind this thing, I’ll eat my doctorate.

The Army is running out of doctors. Silver cases among the enlisted are through the roof, and of course the nanites can chew through a clean-suit now. They’ll do anything to get at a vulnerable human host. Which makes no sense; the wet, hot environment of human organs should be anathema to machines. We should be inhospitable to them. But the ‘why’ of the disease is no longer important. The plague’s hunger is my ticket into Farook’s Army base.

It’s been a long time since I left med school for epidemiology. I didn’t have the heart for being a medical doctor… Watching people sicken, watching them die. I wasn’t strong enough to watch for that, because I knew for every man or woman I saved, there would always be two more who died of leukemia, or bone marrow cancer. No, that life was not for me. Until now.

               

I found a man who will forge me credentials. He smells strange, like curry gone rotten, and doesn’t speak much. But he’s ex special-forces and he knows what they look for—the personality quirks they check you for. He thinks he can get me into the base, to “treat” their sick. As if anything can stop the machines, once they take root.

                There’s an on-site lab, very secure, hidden below fifty feet of bomb-proof elevator shaft. I have Farook’s codes. I took them, before the army came. I thought he might want them, if… if he ever came back.

                I’m packing now. I’m leaving this tape recorder because, well, once I get in there I can’t guarantee what will happen. If they disappear me, if they wipe me from the records and ship me to Guantanamo or some other blacksite, Chicago maybe, at least someone might find this. At least someone will know why I did what I did, why I turned traitor. It wasn’t for a big agenda, not for fundamentalism or money. It’s just love. I loved that ridiculous, eccentric, occasionally stupid husband of mine, and I am going to get him back or find his body. One way or the other.

                Project Kessel… They think they’re so clever. They think just because I’m a biologist by training, there’s no chance I could have understood his notes. They didn’t even take me in for questioning. But I know what they’re up to.

                They’re trying to tame it. Turn it to their side, or a piece of it, or a colony. And then… what? Weaponize it? This thing has already threatened us as a species. How many more will die when they try to turn it loose, a dog on a very brittle chain? Right now, the machines convert people at random. It’s all arbitrary. Some hosts merely get sick; others warp into monsters with gears for teeth and titanium fingernails. But if we make it angry, threaten it… It’s not stupid. It can respond to stimuli, evolve. If we declare war on this thing, turn nanite on nanite, how long can our species survive?

                I’m going. I don’t know what I’m going to find, but I know this will be the last time I see the house. The photographs in the hall; the shrine near the coat-rack. All of it, I must hold in my memory. When they catch me, and waterboard me, and put battery clamps on my loins, it will be this house I think of. Our peace that we built, here, in spite of the plague. In spite of a lack of children. We made this house our child, and it breathes in and out with the essence of us. The essence of what we were.

                I’m coming, Farook. Wherever you are, please don’t give up.

                It’ll take more than a little plague, to stop me loving you.