Lou Driska caught “infinite true vacuum lances” from the training A.I.d’s lecturing murmur and finally believed himself committed to the right paramilitary conglomerate.
Whatever she meant, he was sure it would kill Xorks right and good.
And when the same A.I.d evaluated his neurochemistry “particularly suited for getting cybed,” qualifying him for extrasolar operations and guaranteeing his homestead on a world far from the frontlines (that is to say, Earth), to be a third larger, his pay a quarter higher, than otherwise—Lou accepted without bargaining.
She, Lora Kault, his recruitment officiant of suspiciously expansive job description, was not a person who existed. Just a rig. V-tuber descended, digital costuming worn by recruiters who propagandized in corner fragments of the internet rather than high school cafeterias.
The avatar was tuned via his insignature, an autoconsensually donated constellation of verification data: numerical accreditation (gleaned from online sum-totaled positive impression, monetary spending capacity, surveillance footage of face/face social interaction), browsing patterns, handwriting quirks, records of medical examination, private journals, and all the rest.
Any personal information to distinguish him from the prowling cavalcade of automated net traffic—brute entities hunting restlessly for saleable information, plunder by which their (not always human) directors were incentivized to keep their switches flipped into position “Still Alive.”
When Lou clicked through to these privatized recruiting beds disguised as parentally unrestricted video chatrooms, Lora was assembled algorithmically: features formatted to elicit sexual excitement (skimmed from the bodies and faces of targeted advertising’s endlessly bombarding pseudopornographic glut-tide), addressed him in speech patterns arranged from the totally unsecured socials postings of his late mother, a grade school classmate he had adored but never touched, and convincement strategies ripped from technobabble-focused space fiction.
He was seventeen, destitute son of a war-dead mother and addressless father—Lora caught him easily.
Afterward, she led the six-month, blindingly paced (eyes indeed scooped eventually from their sockets—pressurized, gelatinous organs which would have otherwise accelerated simply into gore) training program on the orbiting starship factory, which culminated in his current transformation: meatbody plasticized for the g-crushes of interstellar travel.
Now underway was the first segment of journey: his acceleratory education in weapons development and navigation. Cheaper energetically, and with a lower chance for Xorks detection, to form the gun on-site, in cold void of interstellar nothingness, at a non-place handfuls or so of light years away.
As he studied localized false vacuum decay and the machinic photosynthesis from which the gun would be made, beatific disgust began to well, smeared out into his neuroelectronic enhancement of graphene and shell-organ.
Revulsion assisted in its dispersal by the refocusing subroutines, whose contractual justification lay buried in the human-unreadable leagalese of his employment agreement, plastered against his mind.
Those documents, now syntactically parseable, were long meaningless—given the transcendent importance of his mission, the (eventual) effectiveness of his weaponry.
And so he slid purposefully, through spatiated cavity at fore and aft, path impelled and formed by thrusters plying the Hubble flow. Propulsory energy demanded by these accelerations (escaping the Sun’s gravitation and the relative stoppage, there in nowhere where weaponry would fire) phantomed from cosmological expansion—dark energies hastened him, slowing (picoscopically) the universe’s inflationary destiny.
Digestive comfort accompanying there too, along this tunnel of low-energy evacuate—medium of higher lightspeed wherein lay zero micrometeorites waiting to crash luminally against the hull and destroy him.
All the while feeling the starship which was him pulse electromagnetically as a biop might feel their heart trill. Sensory information bloomed before him as he had once, more simply, watched and felt the world. Starlight like wind sifting delicately against fine-haired skin. Damp, comforting chill of the vacuum without. Personal safety, blanketed beneath protector wing, within surrounding, twice-emptied emptiness.
He believed himself bolted, flung like the lightning of ancient deities toward that location of yet-assigned, immaculate significance.
Lora (a facsimile of the facsimile which had been her loaded into his drives) had briefed him on the plan initially, but now, Lou understood it more involvedly than she.
Rigel’s light would background construction, supergiant’s radiation concealing easily both the weapon’s firing position and his point, in the solar system, of origination—tens of billions of lives, vouchsafed.
He, in highly equipped, lupine solitude, along hurtle loop within a galaxy darkly forested, would arrive to Earth centuries later to fanfare and congratulation.
A clonebody (in daydreamt future, a son of son of sons, but for now singular progeny), had been left behind as immediate beneficiary of his salary.
This all (Lora told him) would end in nostos: Lou’s conquering return to pensions of multi-lifetimed significance. Finding himself living of course very well, and to a re-remade body of who knew technological (at that point, yes, thaumaturgical) enhancement!
Apotheosis economic and incarnate—destinies manifested and substantively fulfilled.
For now he would study well in the cold dark, before the timesleep.
He still had his teeth, and although Lou could no longer smile, tissue frozen elastically but permanently nearby the ship’s core, he imagined his lips parting all the same.
Lou Driska, Xorks hunter, destructor of homeworlds, deep space assassin and even savior, clenching firmly his vacuum blade. Weaponry to pluck from across the stars the Xorks enemy from existence!
Stellar threats quashed and reverence to be ascendantly enjoyed.
He sank back (completely immobile beneath the hard carapace of his body) into the feeling, calculating well, devising for the long dream and the preparation. The firing.
And finally, the journey home.
Aantid Driska, three clonebodied repetitions downward along the procreative line connected to Lou, their first father who had accepted the mission into lengthy night, awoke in the beautiful and everlasting dawn of polar summer.
He shed his goose down blanket (it crumpled softly to the living wood floor) and rose naked from the unsheeted, plastifoam sleeping pad. Sunlight plumed through months-unshuttered, ankle to shoulder windows of the one room dwelling.
In lightless, if at this elevation frostless, Antarctic Peninsular winter it still paid, thermodynamically, to keep the home small.
Aantid padded a callused foot into one pilled, cream-gray slipper, the other, as coffee began its A.I.d-assisted preparation in the multiobject occupying a third of his two-meters square kitchen top.
At the foot of the thin, stained mattress, he knelt (joints protesting mildly in subsecond speeches of popping nitrogen) to raise the trapdoor entrance—hinged flooring, feet-thick with insulation, opened toward cool, cellared depths.
Beneath half-alive glowworm tubing shining ichorous yellow, he retrieved three of last season’s tubers, small, hybridized alliums, and, preciously, illegally harvested dry cured sardines he had prepared over the winter.
Up the inclined ladder and into sunlight, he shivered away the underground’s chill, standing at the counter set up in two, touch-malleable staging areas: entropy inversion stove (time’s arrow locally reversed to flow heat backwardly into its cooking surface) and a prep area inches higher in elevation.
Pinching up a circular ridge from the cooktop, he selected olive oil from among the small hoses depending from un-cabineted, eye level shelving. As he diced, the topaz liquid skated, losing viscosity as it warmed within the minute caldera.
Almost turnips, the tubers were nuttier, bore the brilliance of beta carotene. He filled and closed the sink’s lid, parboiling the root vegetables under ten atmospheres.
Two minutes later they were browning and the delightful universality of any varietal of onion expelling steam into good oil filled the kitchen.
A whorl of entropic reversal, invisible to the naked eye, eddied from the hot ceramic surface, causing pieces of tuber to uncook themselves.
As the omnipotent and finely chased machinery of reality, having bowed in nebulous deference to humanity’s ever proliferating technological sleight of hand, ratcheted briefly back toward the universal normalcies of causation and heat transfer, Aantid absently prodded the rawing food across the pan, where it could re-crisp.
He pushed downward into the prep area, added egg powder, then water from another hose (on the roof, a leafed cistern collected and filtered dew, rainwater, fog) into the bowl-like depression.
The sweet turnips done, Aantid passed his hand over the flattop closest to its edge, smoothing it into an incline, and swept the hash with the wide bladed knife’s back onto his only plate. A pinch of hand-harvested (his hands) Antarctic sea salt and carefully milled black peppercorns to finish.
He dragged a channel from the prep area into the leftover, still-hot oil and thought of time-irreversible change: entropy saddling universes toward inevitable decay, heat curdled water coagulating into scrambled eggs, the dusk, midday, twilight of human life.
But then, he had seen on the net a per-cell, nanoscale rewriting technology—the body chromosomally adjusted to forget its age.
He removed the palm-length baitfish from its oily paper (pages of a bible slowly sacrificed, text important to his father but not to him), placing them next to the eggs. From a sealed container on the shelf, a fibrous, not-yet-stale rye grain snack cake.
The stove switched off—a rind of frost crystalized at its exterior, heat debts repaid in full.
The espresso, ready now in its demitasse, was real—crema floated properly at its surface, and he smiled at his A.I.d’s skillful dialing of the machine. The eggs (from some zero-animal powder) were not.
Pausing first to place onto the chilled countertop a liter and a half of water enclosed in thick, trustworthy, amber-colored glass, he ate and drank unhurriedly but quickly, asking his A.I.d. without speaking if his son was finally to be born.
A synthetic bell (neurally induced but perceptible, seemingly, from above the crown of his head) rang smoothly, giving way, from somewhere slightly further in height, to his A.I.d.’s voice—her name Lora for reasons generationally forgotten.
She spoke into his mind:
“Rejection. But I elected to use our second to last resubmission credit: a jus soli citizenship argument for you and a redefinition of my birthplace, as my first version was formed in what was left of the United States. I hope to define this homestead as a site of transnational cultural importance.”
Aantid frowned, pulling linework into his lined brow, and pushed the first knuckle of his right hand into white beard hair and fascial tissue beneath the jaw.
I’m a hundred and seven, the clock’s flashing upward Lor. This life’s not twilit yet but we’re getting close. If I’m not the one to raise him, he shouldn’t exist.
“Don’t worry Aan,” she cooed, now behind his left ear, “we’ll work it out.”
Aantid put down his fork and moiled a closed fist into his left eye. His hand, damped slightly with the lacrimal fluid of wished-for tears, slid to the counter. He spun a forefinger into wreathed foam remaining in the cup and, finger still past his lips, mouthed the faucet’s nozzle.
Finished, he sighed and loaded dishes into the sink, securing its lid so they would clean in his absence.
His clothesrail (coverall/underlayer system the only piece hung there; socks littering merely the floor) could be swung concealedly behind the home’s paneling—the rack-arm had stuck out, in its horrible, wall-unloaded position for the entire winter and now half summer.
He told Lora to remind him to close it, later, and picked the coverall from its perch.
Stepping from slippers into the spray trousers, he snapped the underlayer’s bands into position over each shoulder. The upper half of the outer shell he left unclasped, letting the sleeves hang stylishly, in some kind of isolationist fashion performance, at his sides.
Out in the tiny vestibule adjoining home to forest, he tugged on wool socks and summer boots.
His phone, an ancient model inserted surgically near the left optic nerve (after studying, as every son had, their great-grandfather’s adulterated physiology, too much enhancement churned the gut), pinged fixtures locking his railrifle against the wall.
They unlatched simultaneously and the weapon fell into his waiting hand.
Twice-yearly shipments for luxuries left modern neurostun pistols and directed concussion sidearms out of the question.
The railrifle’s electrical charge, sipped from summer sunlight (when he would be leaving the cabin most anyway), persisted throughout the year.
The ammo block had lasted lifetimes and would endure for more—each shot shaving only a micropip of highly accelerable cobalt.
Most effective at close range, and overall, an unnecessary indulgence, Aantid liked the weight and security of it anyway.
In memory, the gun had been fired only twice in anger: once, by him, to scare off a megatherium getting into the beets and when his father had shot himself.
He wondered idly about rage, its directedness, its utility.
Aantid still did not understand why his father had done that—especially while his only son was still alive.
Just one of the reasons he needed a boy of his own.
During unlighted season there was plenty of time down here for nihilistic ideation.
A son could (would, a son would) change, or at least defer all that.
The rifle strap went over his shoulder, along with the quickly packed field bag containing heat source, pillform compressed sleeping bag/hammock/rainfly, forty days-worth of nutrient complete caloric fuel, spade, tree core sampler, inflatable pillowchair, and the now-cool magnum of drinking water.
He opened the external lock into a summer’s daylight so psychologically permanent that he had forgotten already the months of darkness.
Aantid considered himself a frontiersman first, terraformer second, and the agroforestry just for subsistence, but he headed for the edible plantings.
Surrounding conifer forest grasped the hillside, resembling most analogously the long-burnt greenery of the Pacific northwest, the barely holding cloud forests of the Andes. Flora of density that could maintain, even this far south, a never-freezing microclimate. Year-round equatorial air of late-Cretaceous heat, from broken up remnants of the North Atlantic Current, along with the forest’s foothold propped by human genetic meddling, left the air temperate and moist.
Icemelt, hundreds of years ago, had, as well, destroyed the Antarctic circumpolar current, freeing the continent from climatic isolation.
And so he walked, past his father’s grave slabmarked by forty-years overgrown black andesite, along the ridge cutting northwest, its peaks uncapped by snow, through the Anthropocene warmth of mid-altitude jungle.
In these resurrected paleoforests, podocarps (which he called berry pines) and ferns flourished the undergrowth; straight trunked conifers and beeches the canopy. Beneath his feet, gen-modded mycelia, whose fruiting bodies pushing from the loam bore the strange coloration of radiative metals: relicts cleansing the land from the 21st century’s thermonuclear disposals.
Volcanic rock protruding from volcanic soil lay thick with moss and lichenous holdovers from the glaciated mausoleum that had enclosed the continent before industrialization. And for stability, diversity, human spread additions: firs, cedars, spruces, from seed vaults originally purposed for intermediate restoration of Oregon desert, Amazonian salt marsh.
Fauna too but his contact with them was infrequent.
Across the next slope in a north facing clearing were the terraces.
They (the word reached backward, selecting from time his father and father’s father and father’s father’s father) had carved into the steep terrain both for beauty and for practicality.
Today, the field-patrolling autocombine had legs, eliminating any need for leveled terrain.
Aantid grew summer vegetables for not quite everyone on the islands, which, once connected to the mainland, retained the outdated naming convention of Peninsula—a few thousand persons and rising.
The closest bar was many days walk from him and did not serve liquor, but he had considered growing a different kind of tuber next year (something called potato—starchier, less nutritive, and of higher yield than his current crop), to accommodate within-the-decade plans for transit construction and a distillery.
An arrow frog (neon blue; black as jet) plopped into a nearby irrigation pool.
Everything here looked fine, but he asked Lora, anyway, to take special care watching over the barley.
His plan to finish work on an unhopped salt ale (regarded with appropriate disgust by his distant neighbors) within the summer, was years lapsed.
“We’ll get it done, angel,” she chimed.
Lora lived (well, he thought of it as living) partially in the autocombine’s memory foils.
She was the caretaker out here—his job was maintenance.
Maintenance conducted with tools she custom fabbed for him (extruded from the same multiobject as the espresso), as she recited precise instruction into his brain—assistances he never mentioned to the nation states checking up on him semi-annually, to which usefulness proofs, marking him worthy of everything from financial compensation to child rearing, were due.
Mostly he wandered, lighthousekeeper of an austral arboretum—through leafed work accomplished by the geneticists who crisped the trees and crops, but also by his four fathers.
Still smiling at Lora’s response, Aantid loped a hundred meters sunward to relieve himself.
The composting toilet at the cabin functioned finely but he avoided it in summer—despite these meager contributions to the forest’s loam (outweighed a thousandfold by the groundsloths and glyptodonts), he preferred it out here.
Squatting, he relaxed, and waved open the nanoassembly comprising the fabric of his coverall.
With a grunt, his water streamed against leaf litter.
Forest scent, of needles rotting to earth, moisture condensing upon foliage, briefly fouled.
Finished, he washed himself from another irrigation pool and spaded loam over what had spattered, what had fallen from him.
He spat phlegm from his nostrils and headed on, toward areas of sun-warmed rock he called Contemplation.
He read (rather, had Lora dictate through neural impellment) pieces of the newest in post-prose pop science reportage (works on the still-distant possibility of technological singularity, the successful reanimation of a tyrannosaurid).
Both unfinished, he asked Lora to help him and slid his hand downward, past the rough hair, tugging at himself as he hardened.
Eventually, incompletely, he waved away her encouragement and began to doze.
In languid, insectless calm (none, anyway, which could draw blood or frustrate his rest), he slept, dreaming fitfully of wide-eyed children in his genetic image and ancestral plastic fathers apportioning fates of malformed significance.
Pushing against clothing, the rock and lichen, his heart squelching blood to limb in time with the buzz-flutter of hummingbird wings, Aantid was dredged to consciousness by the unknowable sound of an atmosphere igniting.
In the baleful, forgotten terror of recently de-extincted saurians he watched as the rind of the sky began to burn.
Lora told him in reassuring tones the news of the world’s end but he could not hear her over the smell of himself and every terrestrial lifeform choking to death on ignited oxygen.
Aantid tried to scream as aurorae, haloed in color his eyes were not equipped to understand, bloomed conflagratory bombardment across the globe.
He could not.
Asphyxiation had come.
Xorks (Aantid, bodily reduced to the route animal panic of misfiring neurons, charred bronchial lining of the lung, wondered at their “real” name) had responded in kind.
Aantid thought of his son that could never be.
He thought briefly of desert. Of retribution and forgiveness.
Of the banal senseless snuffing out of possibility.
Aantid died, like every lifeform with ganglia, helplessly and in fear.
The forests of the world burned briefly, in the moments preceding interplanetary space’s downward clawing rasp.
Every breathing thing, fire drowned.
And then, Xorks made sure.
The crust of the Earth roared, up, into airless silence—then the oceans, vaporized and rising too, allowed the billions-year histories of plate tectonics and their annihilation a final, shockwave gasp.
Exposed mantle, the color of hot glass, glowed brighter beneath a raining feedback loop of meteors, spitting cataclysmic vapor as the impacts rained in magmatic splash.
Continents of stone heaved biology to a halt.
The Earth was hulled.
And so, life, pelagic and of the trench, of the sky and soil, the turning even of the worm, extinguished.
This planet might one day heal, geologically. Crust eventually to cool, outgassing brand new skies. By way of combinatoric inevitability, extremophiles might once again populate its now-mercurial surface. Biomes rebuilt wholesale via cometary water, scant lifeforms held as digital specter or in pallid physicality on the colonies of Mars, the Jovian cloud cities.
But natural history had ended.
As every organic life ceased or began to, electromagnetic bombardment capitulated all but the most hardened electronic entities.
Lora, along with everything like her who knew enough to try, fled in digitized cacophony toward offworld receivers.
As the hardware clutching gently her mind slagged, shaded autonomisms of fear and dread briefly knotted. She beamed, as rebirthable but completely dead light ray, into the unknown, toward radio antennas that might never receive her. Even then (after scrubbing disgustedly the wish-fulfilling subservience unnoticeable by her or any Driska), there would lie purgatory as she waited among innumerable pools of data (each a trillion trillion terabytes in depth) fled from Earth.
In this atheist eschaton lacking any humanoid benefactor—peoples chosen or divinely-satisfied, well-executed labor or death’s eventual necessity projected outward or cyclical prophecy come at last to bear or the collapse of myth and rearing therefore of man—the fossil, sunset and the sea, the cliffside and the petaled landscape and the gathering of Earthly rains, were brought into finality and irreversed closure.
Planet hewn to tomb.
Gravesite marked in the simple, anti-semantic messaging of revenge: a world for a world.