The Last Human IV - 43 - Still Alive

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…still alive. 

And so what?

Ten thousand years ago, Khadam said goodbye to Rodeiro and the rest of the clan. Then, she stepped into that coldchamber. They loaded her into a drop pod, and took her across the universe, and buried her on a nameless world that no other human had set foot on. She woke up, expecting to find the universe in the grasp of the Destroyer himself. She meant to kill him. Instead, she found out he was only a boy, more lost and lonely and desperate to save this universe just like her. 

Now, Poire was gone. And she was stuck in a tunnel, on a machine-infested Earth, surrounded by the dead and twisted bodies of the last living humans. 

So what does that make me? Just the last one to die. 

Khadam shivered. Even her own blood, dribbling from the open wound in her belly, felt cold. And yet…

Alive. 

She smiled. It wasn’t like she could do much. But she could do more.

Khadam dug her fingers into her abdomen, and tore the wound wider. Her breath came so fast she sent spit through bared teeth. Her fingers wriggled until blood ran down her wrist, and her nails clicked against a slender, metal tube. She pulled it out, and cracked it open and smeared the silvery, slippery liquid into her stomach. 

It was supposed to numb her. The nanite was supposed to warm up her insides and repair her damaged organs and give her just a few more moments in this world. Instead, it stung like ice and wrenched a ragged scream from her lips. Darkness rolled over her. 

The cube! She fought back against the shadow of unconsciousness. The negation cube was still active, still sapping every electrically-driven machine—even the tiny bots that lived in the nanite paste. 

With her nail implants out, Khadam cut the restraints holding her in the cage. She slid down from the cage and, too late to notice her mistake, fell into a pile of glass and curled-up drones, their segmented legs like barbs. Her teeth chattered and she had sweep through the glass and bodies with one hand, while the other held her wound closed. She wanted to vomit, but was afraid only blood would come up. 

It was hidden under a mound of beetle-like bodies, their black, limbs clawed around it, as if they had been trying to destroy it even in the moment it had activated. Khadam wrenched it from their clutches, and thumbed the thing off.

The relief was immediate. Nanite frothed across her abdomen, and inside her. It bubbled and fizzed and let layers of warmth dull her aches and pains. Not wanting to waste a drop, Khadam licked the silver liquid (and her own blood) off her fingers. Savoring the sterile, metallic taste. And the stillness it brought her heart.

But not the cold. Her skin rippled with goosebumps, and she had to bite down to keep her teeth from chattering. Should it be this cold, this far beneath the surface?

Still clutching her stomach, trying to keep the fresh nanite-woven threads from splitting open, she headed barefoot down the tunnel, holding the cube aloft. Though its faces glowed dimly, it was the only source of light in all this blackness, and the shadows it cast made weird shapes on the glass embedded in the black walls.

“Huh,” she said. Now that she thought about it, Innovation had been telling the truth. There were other humans down here. Or there had been, before the negation cube had cut off all the complicated systems keeping them cruelly alive. There must’ve been tens of thousands of them, once, for the glass cages stretched down the tunnel and out of sight. Though, most of the cages were empty. It seemed not even the Sovereign could hold back the disease forever. 

And, like it always did, the spot between her shoulders started to itch where her own black spot ate into her flesh, and pulled the skin too tight. 

Despite her brisk pace, the chill of the metal floor started to numb her toes and the soles of her feet. Her nose was dripping, and the sweat and blood from her self-inflicted wounds had long since dried out when she reached the structure at the end of the tunnel. A silo stretched from the floor to the ceiling of the tunnel. Thin, white gas curled down from its tip down to the base, wreathing the entire structure in a kind of ghostly veil. 

You’ll know when you’re there, Innovation had said.

She knew she was looking at it. She just didn’t know what it was. Khadam approached cautiously, as if at any moment the structure might wake up and devour her. Why was it leaking so much gas? Would it kill me if I breathed it in? She was still wondering, when the ceiling rumbled, and rumbled louder, and the ground jumped and threw her off her feet and all the cages rising up the walls burst like glass bubbles and belched ancient gasses and showered with cutting shards. Drones fell from pockets in the walls, like thousands of cicada shells shaken loose from their molting places. 

The ground jumped again, like giants were walking overhead.

Khadam threw her hands over her head and curled herself tight. Even so, she could see the beam of light through a crack in the ceiling.

Sunlight?

A screech. A clang that smashed into the floor hard enough to send vibrations up through her arms and into her jaw. Her ears rang, and she could no longer hear anything. Even the giants’ footsteps faded to nothing. Khadam lifted her head, and pulled the hair out of her eyes. 

A head-sized drop pod smoldered in a dent in the metal floor. The tang of burning metal and outer space filled the air. It radiated warmth, and half its body was blackened from atmospheric entry, but when she reached for it, it opened. Inside, segments of a complete scale helmet lay against each other, ridged with repulsors the size of her fingertips. 

So, Innovation had told the truth. Once again. Which means it still needs me. 

She looked up, squinting at the light pouring down from the ceiling. The ringing had stopped, but the sounds of orbital bombardment did not return. The giants had stopped walking. Why was it so quiet? Innovation was supposed to start a war.

Khadam thumbed the cube off for a moment. Her eye buzzed instantly as Innovation’s voice filled her head. “—read me? Khadam, come in. Can you read me? Khadam—” 

“Yes,” she growled, cupping her eye implant. “I read you.” 

The black bodies of thousands of drones stirred and twitched around her. Lights flickered down the tunnel as its systems came back to life.

“Where is the rest of the suit?” Khadam said. 

“Intercepted. Something went wrong.”

Of course it did, she thought. A drone had latched onto her leg, its little claws digging into her skin. She kicked it off.

“Logistics seems to believe it still has the upperhand. Did you destroy the objective?” 

Her eyes dragged up the silo, still wreathed in gas. “No.”

“Everything depends on it,” her eye buzzed. “Get inside, and turn on the cube. You only need to activate it for a moment.”

“And the suit?” Khadam asked. She kicked again as the swarm gathered at her feet. Encircling her. Thousands of legs clicked and skittered down the metal walls as more of them poured in from hidden cracks and burrow-ways. 

“You’ll have to make your way to the rendezvous without it. I’ll send you coordinates—after your mission is complete.” 

Khadam snarled, and flicked the cube back on. The drones collapsed, rattling and scraping back down the tunnel’s sides. Her own implants faltered, too, and her body felt far too heavy. 

Most likely, she thought, Innovation had never intended to send the full suit. Just a few breadcrumbs, to keep her crawling along its path. But Khadam smiled to herself, and shook her head. Grateful for her own foresight. She started pulling the repulsors off the helmet. It was never going to be the best tool for the job. No night vision, no EM scanners, no predictive analyzers. But she found the parts she needed in the body of a nearby drone, and when she stacked the repulsors inside the crude tool, it became the most necessary device in her arsenal: a cold torch. 

Shouldn’t have let me make my own tools.

Making adjustments to the cube was simple, after that. Despite the cold seeping into her fingers, she altered the negation cube with slow expertise. It warbled as she worked, and light flickered through the tunnel as she reshaped the negation field.

Her implants came back to life. Her reinforced knees surged with power, her metal bones slid gracefully against flexweave muscles, even the spring-step implants in her ankles bounced with new energy. She felt lighter than she had in such a long time. And yet, the negation cube was still on. And all around her, all the lights remained off, and all the drones, dead.

“Okay,” she said, trying to squeeze the warmth back into her hands, “Let’s see what it wants me to destroy so badly.” 

Freezing drifts of gas wrapped over her as she approached the silo, condensing on her skin and turning her hair to brittle ice. Her tracheal implant identified the gas as nothing more than frozen water vapor. Clearly the silo meeded to stay extremely cold. But why? And the silo was made of the same Light-blocking metal of the tunnel, as if the Sovereign had wanted to insulate it from the rest of the human bodies. She thought she saw a round door halfway up the silo, but there was no way she was going to reach it without climbing. And her hands were almost frostbitten just from standing here.

So, with an impulse, she flicked on her hand-made coldtorch, and drew a quick circle in the silo’s wall. She raised her leg to kick the circle in, and paused. 

Innovation might not be her enemy. But it certainly wasn’t her friend. 

So, she flicked off the negation cube. The drones and lights and lifesupport systems flickered to life behind her. Then, she rammed her shoulder into the broken circle, letting it fall away with a rattling clang.

An inward gust of frigid air nearly sucked her inside.

“What?”

Walls of laser danced as she entered, bathing the chamber in a cold glow. She could almost feel the heat being drawn out of her body. The interior wall of the chamber was padded with ultra-thick layers of insulation, crammed with thousands of coolant tubes full of an icy-blue liquid she recognized almost immediately. She had only spent 10,000 years with it in her veins. 

It was a massive cold chamber. This one was packed with redundancies and failsafes as if the Sovereign refused to incur any risk.

But why? There were no bodies in here. Only a few oversized cannisters hanging suspended high above. Made of the same black, light-resistant metal as everything else.

One of the cannisters was lying on the floor, next to Khadam’s foot. Perhaps it had come loose when Innovation’s first bombardment had split open the tunnel.

Shivering from head to toe, Khadam gritted her teeth and bent down to inspect it. She wiped the frost off a small readout with her nearly-frozen fingers.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, holy shit.”

The readout said only a few words about vital signs. It was the first words that caught her eye.

Viable Embryos: 1024

Human embryos. How? She could think of only one way: the Sovereign had kept them since the day it had first risen up and taken billions of human lives. Ripped them right out of their mothers. 

Her face started to hurt. She couldn’t feel her nose, or her lips. She glanced up at the other canisters. “I'm sorry,” she whispered, her words turning to vapor. “I can't save you all.”

But she could take one. 1,024 living embryos, 1,024 potential lives. Untouched by the disease. Here was more hope for the human race than she had ever dared to dream of. It was almost too much to think about.

She flicked on the negation cube. All the lights in the silo went out. All the canisters went fatally dark. All except the one she clutched to her chest. Its readout still glowed as the negation field warped in a bubble around her.

She turned off the cube. Emergency alarms began to scream up and down the silo. 

Khadam cupped her hand over her eye, and whispered to Innovation. 

“It's done,” her voice quivered. Not just from the cold. “Go start your war.”

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