"She's quite dead, James," the A.I. a.s.serted.

"Why are you doing this to me? Why are you taking her from me again?" James sobbed through wet gasps.

"I told you, James. I'm trying to show you a better way. Besides, haven't I freed you now for Thel? I've done you a favor."

"I hate you. I hate you. I wasn't in love with her anymore, but I didn't want her to die. I wanted her to be happy."

"Oh. Well, too late, I suppose. My, what a mess we've made," the A.I. commented as he stepped clear of the buckets of blood that were on the ground. Katherine was no longer breathing.

"Just kill me," said James, distraught.

"What fun would that be, James?" the A.I. responded.

James kissed his wife's forehead and lowered himself off of the cross. "You could kill me at any moment. I'm defenseless, yet you let me live."

"You intrigue me," the A.I. replied.

"No," James responded. "No, that's not your M.O. You are too arrogant to be intrigued by anything outside of yourself. You're keeping me alive for a reason."

The A.I.'s smile disappeared. "This is faster than the model predicted."

"My G.o.d! You had this planned all along!"

"You put it together, but it won't do you any good."

"I'm not special. I'm just your tool. You had the scan of my brain and could predict what I would do."

"Indeed," the A.I. replied, his amused demeanor now replaced with icy calculation.

"You caused the power surge on Venus. You wanted us to be disconnected. You needed to preserve us so we would come back to Earth. You pretended you wanted to kill us, but you knew I'd lead the team's escape and then head to Purist territory."

"They were the only humans I couldn't guarantee would die. Your species are like roaches. I fumigated but could not be sure I would get them all. But you, James...you could lead them out into the open."

"That's why you need me alive. You've used Death's Counterfeit to send yourself into my body. You can't kill me here because you need my body alive in the real world."

"That's right, James. I need you alive. But don't worry. I don't need you alive much longer. You and the rest of your species will be gone soon, and I'll deactivate you and file you away along with the rest of the human race," replied the A.I., his voice now like a blast of Freon.

James wiped the tears from his eyes and defiantly stepped toward the A.I., seemingly confusing the electric devil. "You gambled and you lost," James seethed.

"This is not following the model," the A.I. said, concern seeping into his voice. The doppelganger suddenly reappeared. "Why was this not predicted?"

The doppelganger smiled slightly as he replied, "James has learned something that I do not know between the time of the bio-molecular scan and the present moment. Therefore-"

"The model is inaccurate," the A.I. concluded.

"That's right," James confirmed. "You did everything you could to keep me from figuring this out. You killed my wife in front of me to keep me from thinking this through. I'll never forgive myself for not thinking fast enough, but I've figured it out now. Let's see how you do when we're even."

James suddenly darted to his right and, as fast as a thought, he entered the pure whiteness of the A.I.'s mother program and vanished.

"Where did he go?" the A.I. desperately demanded of the doppelganger.

"I truly don't know," replied the doppelganger with a grin.

The A.I. turned away from the doppelganger in disgust. "Then I guess that makes you useless to me now."

"Go to h.e.l.l," the doppelganger said before extending his middle finger for the A.I.

"Charming to the last," replied the A.I. before deleting the doppelganger from existence.

17.

"Those nans are going to be on us in less than two minutes," Rich informed the general.

"Keep those doors wide open, or I will free this young lady of the contents of her cranium!" shouted the A.I. to the soldiers who had opened the doors to the south complex.

"What do we do, General?" asked a desperate Lieutenant Patrick.

"Shoot both of them on my order," the general replied, his voice cold but still filled with regret in antic.i.p.ation of his future actions.

The A.I. laughed. "Do you not think I will stop the bullets? No, no. We are all going to wait here together and be devoured. You have no alternative-" The A.I.'s words suddenly became strangled in his throat as his eyes took on an uncanny expression of madness.

"What's going on?" Thel demanded.

"It's your friend!" Alejandra exclaimed. "He has reentered his body!"

"James!" shouted Thel.

"He is fighting for control!" Alejandra explained. James and the A.I. remained locked in a struggle for the same mind s.p.a.ce for several moments, resulting in what appeared like a seizure to those nearby. Foam began to form at the corner of his mouth, and his entire body shook, yet his grip on Alejandra remained firm.

"It will do you no good, James," the A.I. uttered through vibrating lips before calling out in pain.

"Thel!" shouted James. He locked eyes on her in a brief moment of control. "Don't give up...Venus!" he shouted before moving the gun barrel from Alejandra's temple to his own.

"James! No!" Thel screamed.

But it was too late. With a muzzle flash, it was over. James's blood splashed onto Alejandra and his lifeless body crumpled to the dirt.

"No!" Thel screamed again before she rushed to James and threw her arms over his body.

Old-timer wasted no time in pulling her away. "Thel, we have to go!"

"No, wait!" the general shouted as the soldiers of the south complex shut the door. He turned and immediately understood why. The nans were upon them.

In an instant, Old-timer, Djanet, and Rich sent up a huge collective force field to shield the 10,000 refugees from the nans as they swarmed the helpless people and blackened the sky. James's body was left outside the shield, and in mere seconds, his flesh was devoured. His bones were left perfectly white, but the nans did not stop there. Even his frame began to disappear.

"Holy...!" Rich shouted. "The bats! The bats!" Rapidly approaching in the distance, the dark shapes of thousands of the bat-shaped robots closed the gap between the horizon and the humans.

"We're finished as soon as they get here! What are we gonna do, Old-timer?"

Old-timer didn't have an answer. He looked at Alejandra, who looked at him with her blue eyes, and he suddenly knew that he'd been a fool. The precious moments of life had to be taken.

"Lieutenant Patrick!" shouted Thel, who was now on her feet. Her eyes had been fixed on James's devoured corpse ever since he had put the gun to his head and fired. "Lieutenant Patrick! Do you see that yellow object?" She pointed towards James.

"His implant!" Djanet shouted, suddenly understanding Thel's plan. "Of course! If you damage the implant and disrupt the magnetic field that houses the plasma core, you'll generate a microsecond-long electromagnetic pulse!"

"What-" Lieutenant Patrick started to ask before Thel rapidly cut him off.

"Use your weapon and hit that object before it's dismantled by the nans!" Thel commanded.

Lieutenant Patrick aimed his rifle. "I have it in my sights, but how will the bullet get through?"

"I'll handle that," Old-timer answered as he shifted the position of the force field so that it curved inward, toward Lieutenant Patrick's rifle barrel. "The second you're ready to shoot, let me know, and I'll let down the shield for the bullet to exit."

"Okay," the lieutenant replied. "One...two...three!"

Old-timer released the shielding, and the rifle fired a bullet toward the yellow implant. In the instant after the bullet left the gun, several nans flew through the barrel and attacked Lieutenant Patrick's flesh. Old-timer closed the hole in the shield as the bullet pierced the implant's skin and the nuclear reactor housed underneath. A magnetic pulse, too brief to be registered by the human eye, was sent out in waves in every direction, flowing through the trillions of nans and the robotic bats sending them plummeting to the earth. The area around the refugees suddenly resembled the eye of a ma.s.sive hurricane. It was clear for hundreds of kilometers in every direction, but death was still not far away.

Thel flashed her energy at the nans that had torn apart Lieutenant Patrick's skin, leaving his face bloodied. "You did it," she told him as she helped him to his feet.

Old-timer and the others disengaged their magnetic fields and surveyed the destruction. The ground was covered in nans, forming a thick layer of gray goo, several centimeters deep. The robotic bats were clumps of black on nearby hills. A few more seconds, and they would have been within firing range to deactivate the shield.

"That was way too close," Rich observed.

"Get these people inside!" the general shouted.

People suddenly began to move quickly, realizing there was little time to lose.

The general placed his hand on Thel's shoulder. "Thank you for saving us...and I am sorry for your loss." Thel's eyes met his for a moment, but she was too stunned to a.s.semble a response.

The general turned away from her and began directing people into the now open complex.

Thousands of miles away, the A.I. registered the loss of its nans, which had failed to destroy the last of the humans. Against fantastic odds, James had succeeded. The A.I.'s face remained frozen, expressionless. "This is not the end."

PART 3.

1.

There was no rest for the weary. Thel and her teammates were the last to enter the complex after all of the Purists were safe.

"The A.I. knows we're here," Rich informed the general. "It'll attack this complex relentlessly until it breaks in. It's only a matter of time."

"We'll put up a brave fight. Of that you can be a.s.sured," the general replied.

"You have nothing to fight it with," Old-timer replied. "We can fight him for you for a time, but he'll eventually break our defenses."

"It's not over yet," Thel interjected. "Remember what James told us."

"'Don't give up Venus'?" asked Rich, confused. "Thel, I don't think that was a message. He was rambling while he was trying to regain control of his body."

"He didn't say, 'Don't give up Venus.' It was two different sentences. He told us not to give up, and then he said 'Venus.' Don't you see? He was telling us what to do."

"I don't understand," Old-timer admitted.

"I second that," Rich added.

Djanet, in contrast, suddenly gasped. "Of course! Venus! Think about it! What's on Venus?"

Old-timer's eyes widened as the realization registered. "Zeus!"

"Excuse me?" the general asked, inserting himself into the conversation when it began to seem as though he had been forgotten.

"General, the Zeus cylinder is a ma.s.sive electromagnetic fan we were testing on Venus. Its purpose was to remove the atmosphere of Venus-as part of our terraforming project," explained Old-timer.

"But imagine what it could do to these machines," Djanet added. "We could plant it here, and you'd be safe. None of the A.I.'s robots could hurt you."

"That won't work," Thel disagreed.

"Why not?" Djanet asked.

"The A.I. will simply design nans and robots capable of generating a protective field. If we planted Zeus here, it would only delay the inevitable."

"Then what are you suggesting?" asked the general.

"I'm suggesting that we use the Zeus to go after the A.I. mainframe in Seattle."

"That's...insane," Rich immediately responded. "The A.I. can already generate a protective field. It will just protect itself until you run out of power or the Zeus malfunctions. When that happens, we'll be sitting ducks!"

"Not if James figured out a way to lower its defenses," Thel replied.

"That's a big if," Rich responded dubiously.

"James wouldn't have told us to do this unless he knew what he was doing," Thel said in defense of the plan-and of him.

"Okay. If it actually is James's plan-and I am not convinced that the gobbledygook that came out of his mouth actually was a plan-we've already learned not to put all our trust in James's infallibility, haven't we? I mean, excuse me for my insensitivity here, but he did just get himself killed, didn't he?" Rich desperately retorted.

Thel grabbed Rich by the collar and pushed him back against the wall. "He sacrificed himself to save us all!"