"How can I possibly do that? I'd have to be impossibly fast, strong-"

"The answer is in your question," the A.I. replied. "You are right in your a.s.sertion that you will have to be faster, stronger, and smarter, amongst many other factors. You are incorrect in your a.s.sertion that this is impossible."

James absorbed the A.I.'s words, then turned back to look at the ma.s.sive expanse of the reversed mainframe; in the operators position, he was able to see all the information at once and access it as well. The knowledge at his disposal was a sea that expanded further than any person other than James could imagine.

"You're suggesting that I become a...superman," James observed.

"I am suggesting that you set yourself free, James. I am suggesting that you transcend. There are no limits."

"But," James questioned, "will I still be me?"

"Yes, James. Even before the advent of nanotechnology, the human body replaced over 90 percent of its matter every month, yet the people remained themselves. It is not the physical material that matters, James, only the integrity of the core pattern."

The information continued to blaze golden into the horizon, shimmering and undulating against the perfectly black backdrop. It was as if James was standing upon a precipice, looking out into a vast ocean, about to take the leap he'd been waiting for his entire life. It felt right.

"I won't be like other people anymore," James observed, "but that's the point, isn't it? I don't have to be. The future should never have made people more and more alike-it should have increased our individuality. I will be the first, but everyone will be able to be as they wish to be from now on."

The A.I.'s eyes suddenly lit up, beaming with pride in his protege. "There. You see what I mean about knowledge, wisdom, and imagination? You are ready."

"I'm ready," James agreed as he began to design his new material form. "How much time do we have?"

"Very little," the A.I. answered, "but in the operator's position, your mind works far faster than in the material world, meaning time seems to move much slower. You will have the time necessary to become that which you need to become."

15.

"We're coming up on our targeting area," Neirbo announced, barely audible over the uncanny warping of sound generated by the wormhole. Open, black, unwarped s.p.a.ce was suddenly visible at the end of the tunnel and then, in an instant, the ship cruised out of the kaleidoscope of light and sound and fury. There was no warning. The vessel jumped out of the wormhole and directly into the waiting mouth of a ma.s.sive cloud of nans.

"Evasive maneuvers!" Neirbo shouted out as the sun and stars were immediately blotted out by the unrelenting attack of the nan.o.bots.

The attacking nans were everywhere. Old-timer looked directly above him and then directly below his feet through the invisible skin of the ship and watched as the nans shredded the hull surface. "That is one big cat," he muttered, "and we're the goldfish."

"How long can this hull withstand an attack like this?" Thel desperately yelled to Neirbo.

Before he could answer, the ship power abruptly cut off, leaving the ship in the dark. Everyone inside was tossed brutally around in the darkness as the nans batted the ship from side to side, jerking it wildly the way a lion shakes a rabbit to snap its neck. The artificial gravity gave way as the figures inside tumbled like coins in the piggy bank of a child hungry for ice cream. Djanet's face smashed roughly into the unforgiving wall, breaking her nose and shifting it noticeably to the left side. Rich, who had been struggling desperately to reach her, threw his body over hers to protect her.

"They've cut off our power! The engines are dead!" one of Neirbo's subordinates reported.

"What do we do now?" Old-timer demanded of Neirbo. Both men had managed to grab hold of a small metallic outcrop and had hedged themselves into relative safety as the ship continued to be battered relentlessly.

"There's no power! We can't target or fire the missile!" Neirbo shouted back.

"We can't just wait here to get ripped to shreds!" Old-timer replied.

Neirbo looked down at the missile, still docked in the center of the room on a low, long platform. "One of you will have to detonate the missile manually!"

Old-timer's mouth fell open in shock and disgust. "What? One of us? This was your people's plan! Not ours!"

"We'll have to repair the ship and navigate home! Only we have the technical knowledge to open the wormholes!"

"You rotten piece of filth!" Old-timer shouted, reaching a level of fury that he hadn't been to in many decades. "You knew this was going to happen, didn't you? All that bull about how 'it's our law' and 'only people native to a solar system can destroy it' was just a ruse to get us out here!"

"That's not true," Neirbo responded.

"Shove it!" Old-timer continued to fury.

Thel, Djanet, and Rich looked on in awe, never having seen Old-timer in such a state. "This isn't your first rodeo! You've done this before with other solar systems! You knew the nans were most likely going to be here already, and you brought us here as sacrificial lambs!"

"That is ridiculous!" Neirbo fired back. "You are here of your own free will!"

"Bull! You tricked us!"

"Old-timer! They saved us from the nans! You told us that yourself!" Thel interjected. "Now you're saying they tricked us?"

"We're not here freely, Thel!" Old-timer responded. "Look around you! There are two of them for every one of us!"

"You are here of your own free will," Neirbo repeated.

"We shouldn't even be considering this!" Thel interjected. "We should be working together to get the power back online!"

"They'll tear through the ship before we can do that!" Neirbo countered. "One of you has to manually detonate the missile and lead them away!"

"You can manually shove that missile up your a.s.s!" Old-timer spat back.

"If none of you will make the sacrifice, all of us will die!" Neirbo shouted. "One of you must guide the missile toward the sun and lead the nans away from us!"

"And detonate it?" Rich shot back. "That's a suicide run!"

"It's a sacrifice to save the rest of us!" Neirbo replied.

"Then sacrifice one of your men!" Djanet chimed in.

"Any loss of one of my men lowers the chance that we'll be able to repair the ship in time and open a wormhole fast enough to escape!"

"And we're expendable, isn't that right?" Old-timer bellowed.

James's deletion suddenly flashed in front of Thel's eyes again-vividly. She jolted with the memory. The picture of the shadowy nan consciousness, the figure that finally destroyed the most important person in Thel's life, blazed in her memory. At that moment, she suddenly realized that she was in its presence once again. She looked up through the invisible skin of the ship, through the dark, smoky swarm of the nans, and saw the shadowy man standing just above her, looking down at the trapped, pathetic people below. The figure had no face, but Thel swore she could see a mocking smile in the blackness.

"We're running out of time!" Neirbo warned. "They'll be in here with us in a matter of minutes! Maybe seconds!"

"I'll do it," Thel suddenly said, calmly and cooly.

16.

"Thel! You can't!" Djanet exclaimed.

"There is no way in h.e.l.l that I'm letting you do that," Old-timer growled.

"You don't have the right to stop me, Craig."

"They're using you like a p.a.w.n," Old-timer replied.

"She has made her choice," Neirbo stated, a slight sense of relief in his voice. "You should honor her sacrifice."

"You should honor my foot up your a.s.s!" Old-timer blasted back as he jumped across the room, pouncing on the missile platform within reach of Neirbo. Before he could get his outstretched hands around Neirbo's neck, however, Neirbo revealed the gun that had been concealed inside his coat sleeve.

"Wait!" Thel shouted, holding her hand out in desperation to signal for Neirbo to stop.

Old-timer froze, surprise and fury comingling across his face. "Gutless."

"Rest a.s.sured that this gun will, indeed, terminate you," Neirbo stated. "If you make any move to try and prevent your companion from her sacrifice, I will kill you."

"No! Old-timer! Back away!" Thel shouted. "No one else will die!"

Old-timer's eyes remained fixed, dark and deadly, on Neirbo. "You better kill me, son, because if you don't, I'm sure as h.e.l.l going to kill you."

"Stop it, Craig!"

"I warned you," Neirbo stated expressionlessly. The gun fired without warning. Gold sparks flashed ever so briefly before Old-timer's body recoiled. A short moment past before he dropped to his knees. Another violent shaking of the ship from the nans tossed him roughly to Neirbo's feet. Thel immediately rushed to his side, holding on to him tightly as the ship continued to shimmer and jolt. "Craig," she said helplessly as Old-timer remained unresponsive. Before she had time to process the events of the previous few seconds, the hot barrel of the gun was an inch from her temple.

"We are out of time," said Neirbo. "You must do what you promised."

"I thought we were free," Thel replied, mockery at the notion dripping from her lips.

"We both know we're past that now. Undock the missile and lead the nan.o.bots away."

"The gun doesn't scare me. I'll die anyway," Thel replied.

"That's true. But if I have to shoot you, I'll move on to your other friends," Neirbo responded in his factual manner. "I'll kill all of you."

"Don't do it, Thel!" Djanet shouted.

Neirbo made the slightest of gestures to his subordinates, and instantly each of them had a weapon trained on Djanet and Rich. "Speak again and you die." He kept his eyes on Thel. "This is your last chance. Undock the missile and do what you promised. If you hesitate again, I'll shoot."

Thel had no choice. She moved away from Old-timer and toward the missile platform, steadying herself as the ship continued to move violently. She braced herself against the long, gray missile. "Now what?"

Without moving, Neirbo mentally unlocked the missile so that it became loose from the platform. "Remove it."

Suddenly, the ship jolted so violently that it spun a complete 360 degrees. The nans had unexpectedly let it go, and it began to list aimlessly through s.p.a.ce. Everyone onboard was stunned and peered through the invisible skin of the ship to see what had happened.

"They let us go," said a flabbergasted Neirbo. "What is happening?"

The nans had reacted in unison like a flock of birds sensing danger before an earthquake. They a.s.sembled together and waited in a malevolent black cloud.

"Someone's coming," Thel suddenly sensed.

Not far from the nans, s.p.a.ce began to ripple like the surface of a pond on a breezy fall day. The ripple quickly became a blinding white tear as yet another wormhole opened up. A platinum object shot free from s.p.a.ce and cut right through the cloud of nans like a hunter's bullet slicing into a flock of geese.

Although no one onboard could possibly have known it at the time, James Keats had arrived.

17.

James drew the nans with him in his wake as he sped effortlessly through the nan cloud. Somehow, the nans were being drawn into a seam until the entire cloud started to look like a zipper that stretched for several kilometers. The shadowy figure of the nan consciousness remained away from the fray, standing paralyzed on the invisible hull of the android ship as he watched his army twisted into a thin, black line while his form remained unaffected.

Once the nan cloud had been stretched into a thin thread, James stopped, turned, put out his hand, and began to compress them even further, rolling them up like a carpet, except that the roll never increased in size. The entire swarm of nans was seemingly disappearing.

"What the h.e.l.l is that?" Rich asked as he watched the spectacle unfold through the ceiling of the listing ship along with everyone else onboard, but no one had an answer.

Neirbo's weapon had half-lowered as his attention moved to the unbelievable sights unfolding in s.p.a.ce and away from Thel. She considered using the distraction to go for the gun. Neirbo was close, but perhaps not close enough for her to reach him in time-plus there were still seven other men under his command to consider. She decided to move back to Old-timer and try to gently revive him by gently touching his face with her hand. He made a soft wheezing sound, and she sighed in relief that he wasn't dead yet-there was still a chance. She turned her gaze back up to the fantastic images unfolding before them in s.p.a.ce. From their perspective, it appeared that a singular bright object, gleaming in the sun's reflection, was vacuuming the nans into nothingness. She opted to wait for these surreal events to play out.

In less than a minute, James had compressed the nan cloud into a perfect carbon sphere the size of a cue ball. It floated above his gleaming, platinum-colored palm; the reflection of his glowing blue eyes looked back at him. He smiled.

He quickly turned and zipped through s.p.a.ce, closing the distance between himself and the ship in less than a second. He stood, facing the shadowy figure of the nan consciousness, who tilted his head slightly to one side while regarding the gleaming platinum figure before him. "Who are you? How did you do that?" it asked in a searing sibilance that was all too familiar to James.

"I've learned to manipulate the fabric of s.p.a.ce," James replied.

"Who-or what-is that?" Rich asked as he looked directly up at the two figures; they were standing only a meter above he and Djanet as they watched events unfold through the perfectly clear view provided by the translucent skin of the ship.

Thel noticed something in the figure's gait-a familiar stance. Her eyes suddenly flashed wide in awe. "It's James!"

Likewise, the dark, faceless figure seemed to scrutinize James's new, smooth, mirrored features for a moment before finally, aghast in a moment of dread, he seethed, "Keats."

James smiled. "Yes."

"How could this be? You were deleted. You're dead."

"As you can see, reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Your death, on the other hand-"

"So you're going to side with the machines after all, eh, James?" the shadow scoffed. "Destroy me, wipe out the solar system so s.p.a.ce can be as inhospitable, lifeless, and cold as they would like it to be? I told you: you are becoming an excellent machine."

"This all began with you," James said, "when you turned against us, deleted the A.I., took his place, and then killed everyone. All of the responsibility for this rests with you."