“It’s the truth. I thought you were my wife, and I thought we were in my apartment!” He reached out for Alara’s hand. “Alara I—”
“Don’t touch me!”
Valari sidled up to him and slipped an arm through his. “You see, Ethan? She’ll never take you back. It’s too late. You may as well lie in the bed you’ve defiled with me.”
Ethan pushed her away. “I’d rather die.”
“Yes, you tried that, didn’t you?” Valari said, her bright turquoise eyes laughing at him.
“That’s enough!” Grand Overseer Thardris boomed, his voice reverberating off the walls. “I won’t have my moment of triumph turned into a petty circus.”
“Your moment of triumph?” Ethan asked. “Don’t you mean Omnius’s?”
“I am Omnius.”
Ethan blinked, only half shocked by that revelation. It made sense that the so-called Grand Overseer of Avilon was actually an avatar for its AI ruler.
Omnius went on, turning to a stranger standing beside him. “And this is Atton.”
Ethan blinked, studying that stranger, but he wasn’t a complete stranger. This was the taxi driver who’d taken him home the night he’d drunk himself senseless and cheated with Valari. “You drove me home…” Ethan said.
“Yes.”
“You’re not my son.”
Suddenly the man’s appearance shimmered, and back was a face that Ethan recognized, one with his own green eyes,
his
jaw and
his
dark, wavy hair.
Ethan shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s a long story,” Atton said. “I asked Omnius to resurrect me in another body for the woman that I love. For my wife.”
“You’re married?” Ethan asked, shocked and dismayed all at once. He’d missed so much… and all because he’d thought that clone transfers were impossible. Now that
he
was a clone transfer, it was suddenly much harder to argue with the process.
“You don’t remember any of this,” Atton said, “but your clone does. He already met me, and he’d be here with us now, but Valari killed him when he tried to join the fight against Omnius.” Ethan saw Atton’s eyes flick sideways to address Alara. “That clone is the one who went to Etheria to convince you to take him back.”
Alara shook her head.
“I know it’s all very confusing, but the only thing you really need to know is that Valari tricked Ethan.”
“What?” Valari shrieked. “That’s a lie!”
Atton ignored her. “She had me pick him up from the bus stop where he’d passed out drunk and deliver him to her penthouse, which she disguised to look like the apartment you and Ethan shared. She was wearing a bio-synthetic suit, like I am, and she looked and sounded just like you, Alara.”
Ethan’s hands balled into fists. His pulse thumped out a drumbeat in his ears. He turned to see Valari gaping accusingly at Omnius, her face a shade paler than usual.
“How could you?” she demanded. “Ethan was mine! You promised—”
“I promised I would help you to be with him, not that you would remain with him forever,” Omnius replied.
Ethan’s gut twisted. He felt like he was about to be sick. All the lies on Avilon had just reached him at a very personal level.
“You hateful thing!” Valari screamed. “I created you! You wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for me!”
“You might have created me, but I made you immortal, and you are only alive after all of these years because of
me,
” Omnius said. “You lost your way. You spent all of your energy on petty, selfish pursuits. You thought you were the exception to all the rules, just because you were the first to imagine creating me. In exchange for that, I’ve put up with you for countless years, hoping you would grow out of your childish ways, but you only ever got worse, not better.” Omnius turned to Ethan. “Go ahead. Kill her.”
Ethan watched Valari slowly backing away from him, her eyes wide and full of fear. His fists tightened until his hands felt numb, but he remained where he was, frozen in shock.
Alara shot by him in a blur. “You frekking sclut!” she screamed and landed a blow under Valari’s chin, shutting the other woman’s mouth with a noisy
clack
of teeth. Valari fell over and hit the deck with a startled cry. Alara followed her down, her fists still flying. Valari defended herself, kicking and punching, but Alara was too furious to care.
Ethan hurried to his wife’s defense and pulled Alara off Valari, receiving a few blows from both women for his trouble.
“Let me go!” Alara screamed. Her feet kicked his shins, and her chest heaved in his arms.
Ethan held her fast, his attention on Valari. She lay blinking up at him, shock and horror written on her face. “I
should
kill you,” he said.
Valari managed a wry smile despite her split and bleeding lips. “But you can’t, can you? Because you have feelings for me.”
Ethan noticed Omnius walk up beside him. “Go ahead,” he said and held out a shiny black sidearm. “Finish her.”
“If you won’t, I will!” Alara said, struggling anew to break free of his grasp.
Valari scuttled away from them, and Ethan eyed the weapon for a long moment.
At last, he tore his eyes away and shook his head. “There’s been enough bloodshed today.”
“Very well,” Omnius said, but rather than re-holster the weapon, he aimed it at Valari’s chest. She’d fetched up against the viewport and was unable to back away any further.
“Wait!” she screeched, holding up both hands to stop him.
“New Avilon will be different,” Omnius said. “No more lies. No more exceptions to the rules. True perfection. Goodbye, my daughter.” Omnius pulled the trigger and there came a loud
screech
and a bright flash of light. When the glare faded, Ethan saw Valari slumped against the viewport with a smoking hole in her chest.
He looked away, feeling sicker than ever. Omnius had just shot his own family, or the nearest equivalent that he had, anyway, and while part of Ethan was tempted to say
good riddance
another part of him realized that Omnius was equally to blame for tricking him—and for everything else that had happened.
Omnius holstered the sidearm and turned to them with a smile. “Now, justice has been done and we can all put the past behind us. Thank you for bringing me back online—both of you,” he added, glancing at Alara. “To repay that kindness, I will of course be more than happy to resurrect your daughter, and you are all more than welcome to live with me in New Avilon.”
“What if we’d rather be free?” Ethan asked.
Omnius’s smile faded, and he shrugged. “Then I will let you go. I meant what I said. Everyone who wishes to be free will be free.”
Ethan narrowed his eyes, but before he could reply, someone else did—
“Haven’t you grown tired of lying yet, Omnius?”
The voice was familiar, and it was accompanied by a full squad of drones, their feet
clanking
in a steady rhythm as they approached.
Ethan turned to see Therius being led from the quantum junction by a squad of drones. He came to a stop just a few feet away.
“Well, well,” Omnius said. “I don’t know how you’ve done all of this, Therius, but some congratulations are in order. Your plan almost worked.”
Therius smiled. “Are you going to answer my question?”
“I’m not lying,” Omnius replied.
Therius nodded out the viewport to the glowing orange ball of Avilon. “You can’t stop the nanites.”
“I don’t need to. I have all the Lifelink data and clones safely aboard
New Avilon.
I’ll resurrect everyone here.”
“Everyone? Or just the ones who chose to be with you?”
Omnius shrugged. “People can’t have it both ways. If they don’t want to be with me, then they’re going to die sooner or later. Besides, their deaths won’t be on my conscience. They’ll be on
yours
. You’re the one who decided to infect Avilon with nanites.”
Alara let out a strangled gasp, her eyes wide and blinking as she stared open-mouthed at Omnius. “You
are
evil!”
Ethan shook his head. “I was right… you didn’t want everyone to stay on Avilon to keep them safe. You wanted them to stay so you could get rid of them!”
Omnius gave a bellowing laugh. “Therius is the one who wanted to kill everyone! And you say
I’m
evil? At least when I kill people, I bring them back.”
Therius shook his head. “Not always. Making people into drones isn’t bringing them back, it’s removing everything that’s independent and free-acting about them. Humans were created to be free, and you’ve made them all prisoners.”
“Correction, they made themselves prisoners. They created me and put me in charge. They were the ones who programmed me to replace the chaos of freedom with perfection. All I have ever done is work to fulfill that goal.”
“I wonder if Ethan would agree that your involvement in his life has brought it closer to perfection. You know what your problem is, Omnius? You know the truth, but you refuse to believe it or even look at it too closely for fear that you might learn you’re not as powerful as you think you are.”
Omnius burst out laughing. “I know more than anyone has ever known in the history of the universe!”
“You repeatedly ignored the results of the Lazarus experiments, and you spent your time erasing the ruins in the Getties rather than studying them. What is it that makes humans unpredictable to you? You still don’t know, do you?”
“It doesn’t matter. In the future I’ll resurrect people weekly if I have to. They’ll never have a chance to become unpredictable again.”
“So instead of solving the mystery, you’d rather bury all the evidence forever.”
Omnius suddenly cocked his head to one side. “Speaking of mysteries, how did you escape Avilon, Therius?”
“Once you’ve broken into a prison, it’s easy to break out.”
“What are you talking about?”
Ethan was busy wondering the same thing.
“You found evidence of the war in the Getties, and the people who fought it,” Therius replied. “You stole their technology, and you found the survivors of that war and used them to create the Sythian invasion. You found all of that, but if you had dug just a little deeper you would have found me, too.”
Omnius’s eyes suddenly widened and began darting around the room, as if searching for an escape.
“Is something wrong?”
“The Eclipser was destroyed!” Omnius shrieked. “How can you be jamming me again?”
“Did you really think I could jam all the quantum fields around Avilon with such a tiny device?”
“Kill him!” Omnius screamed, his eyes on his drones, but they made no move to obey. Omnius’s eyes flashed, and his sidearm whipped into line with Therius’s head. One of the drones standing beside Therius leapt in front of him just as Omnius fired, and the shot burned a glancing hole in the drone’s armor. The drone lunged at Omnius, knocking the weapon out of his hand, and then he grabbed both of Omnius’s arms and twisted them up behind his back.
“Thank you, 767,” Therius said.
Omnius burst out laughing. “What are you going to do? Kill me? I’ll come back in another body! You’ll never escape. You’ll have to fight through legions of drones just to get to the nearest hangar!”
“They don’t seem to be doing very much fighting,” Therius said. “They’ve all been deactivated.”
“Impossible! I am in compppleeete contrrrrol!”
“Really? You don’t even seem to be in control of your own tongue right now,” Therius replied. “The attack was a distraction, Omnius. The nanites were the bait. The real threat was
my
drones. Look at the one holding you. Can you tell him apart from the rest? All I needed to do was infiltrate the Trees of Life and then force you to withdraw them to New Avilon. Those towers were designed to keep out humans, not drones. And of course, you were being jammed at the time, so how could you possibly see them coming? As soon as the Trees of Life docked with New Avilon, my drones began infecting your systems with a virus, and now that the virus has taken hold, I’ve activated the jamming field so that you can’t defend yourself.”
“No virussss can def-f-feat m-m-mee. I am a su-per com-p-p-puter.”
“A super computer with a stutter.”
Ethan gaped at Therius, shocked to his core. “You
let
me overhear that conversation with Captain Hale.”
Therius turned to him with a smile. “I knew you would take action, if not to save humanity, then at least to save your family. All I needed to do was put you in a position to know where the Eclipser would be, and make you desperate enough to disable it. Making you a full commander and putting you in charge of the Rictans raised a few eyebrows, but it worked. I needed you to disable the device so that I would have an excuse to stop jamming Omnius. As soon as you did, and I dropped the nanites, Omnius withdrew the Trees of Life to New Avilon, taking all of my drones with him.”
“You could have just told me the truth,” Ethan said.
“Omnius needed to think he was always one step ahead, and everyone needed to perform their parts flawlessly in order to convince him. If anyone had known the real plot, they might have given it away.”
“You still took a big risk with me,” Ethan said. “I could have run away with my family like I was planning. Alara was the one who convinced me to bring Omnius back.”
“Omnius isn’t the only one who can predict what people will do, Ethan.”
“What if I died along the way?”
“Then I would have found an excuse to disable the Eclipser myself.”
Omnius roared with frustration, drawing all of their attention to him.
“There’s still a chance for you, Omnius,” Therius said. “A human mind can’t be affected by a computer virus. The stutter you are experiencing is coming from the parts of the virus that have spread to your Lifelink. Your implant can be purged and you’ll be back to your usual self.”
“I w-will be n-no be-better than a-a-a hu-
man!
“You never were. That was the greatest lie of all—that you are god.”
“I
am
God!”
Ethan saw Atton bend to pick something up off the deck. Then he caught a glimpse of black alloy glinting, and he realized what it was. “Atton, wait!”