Inkers (32 page)

“It’s in her?” Hardwick said.

Lwazi nodded slowly. Hardwick released him and crouched down to her again.

“What’s your name?” Hardwick said.

“Lily,” she gasped.

“Lily, do you have ink inside you?”

She nodded, slowly, and then screamed out in pain once more.

“Hardwick, it is easy, just guide it out,” Lwazi said.

“You do it, then!” Hardwick shouted at him.

“Fine,” Lwazi said. He rolled up his sleeves and knelt down between her legs.

The baby’s head burst out into Lwazi’s hands, screaming wildly through mucus. It stopped there, screaming away, looking up at the bright, cold, painful world from the perspective you only get once.

She held the baby, and it was as if they were no longer there. Lwazi found a knife somewhere in his trousers and cut the umbilical.

The baby was completely black, even her eyes.

It was a girl.

Hardwick knelt down.

“Have you got a name for her, Lily?” Hardwick said.

Lily looked up, face blissful. “Her name’s Tia,” she said dreamily.

“May I hold her?” Hardwick said. “We need to check she’s healthy.”

A dark frown washed over Lily’s face. “You’re not a doctor,” she said. “Just leave us alone.”

“We can’t,” Hardwick said. “She is very important.” He pointed at the GSE without looking up. “It’s the reason it’s returned. It’s the reason all these people are so angry. We need to hold the baby.”

“No!” Lily shouted. “I’ll kill you!” The baby started to cry.

“You can hold her later,” Hardwick said, and it was one of the more difficult lies he had ever told. He reached for the baby.

“No!” Lily shouted, and she pushed him back and scrambled past, trying to run, falling down again, cradling the baby, half–naked.

“For god’s sake, you’ll hurt her!” Hardwick shouted, and leapt after her, rolled her over, pulled the baby out of her arms, stepped back.

Lwazi just watched, a frown on his face.

Hardwick held Tia up, stepping back away from the distraught Lily. The baby was slippery. She turned her head to look at him with inhuman eyes.

“Nice to meet you,” Hardwick said. The baby screamed and Hardwick’s hands flew out to his sides, forced by something he could not see. The baby was floating, staring up at Jupiter.

“No!” gasped Hardwick, but the baby didn’t look at him again, and he felt his arms bending back, pulling him down in agony towards a large rock, his feet still flat on the floor. He felt bones break in his torso, heard them crack. He could barely breath.

“Lwazi–” he tried to say, and then Lwazi was there, at his side, trying to help him, but Hardwick was trapped, pinned down by an invisible force.

Lily leapt up and grabbed Tia out of the air. She returned to her mother’s arms without complaint. Lily turned and walked away from Hardwick and Lwazi.

The pain was terrible, throughout his body, all the more excruciating because he couldn’t move. Far above he could see the bright ring of the GSE. He closed his eyes, but the brightness was still there, and the agony.

“Hardwick, Hardwick!” Lwazi was saying, pulling on his arms, but Hardwick could not speak. He felt like he was about to black out, blood rushing in his ears. Vomit came up into his mouth but he could not cough. He tasted blood and bile.

He opened his eyes again. There was a bright point of light in the centre of the GSE, growing rapidly larger. It became a line of light descending towards the earth.

“Oh, god,” Lwazi said.

Hardwick could see it all. The light hit the ground near the girl. It was a man and a woman, glowing faintly, faces human and yet not human, eyes too wide, smiles too immobile.

Lily fell to her knees, holding Tia tightly against her breast.

“No,” she gasped.

“Give us the baby, Lily,” they said in unison.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry – we couldn’t, I didn’t know how…”

“The experiment is proceeding well,” they said in unison. “Just give us the baby.”

“No!” Lily shouted, getting up, backing away. “Why does everyone want to take her!”

The ethereal pair morphed into one shape, a tall man, like a demon mixed with a priest.

“Tia!” it shouted, and the noise flattened the grass for a hundred yards around. A forcefield glinted around Lily. “Give her to us!” boomed the GSE.

“No!” Lily shouted, “You’ll put her in hell! I won’t let you do that to me! Not again!”

“We will leave,” the GSE shouted. “We will give all the rabbits back. The experiment can end. We will give your parents back.”

“No!” Lily shouted, hugging Tia closely to her. “Destroy it!” she shouted. “Tia, destroy it!

Suddenly the GSE’s avatar seemed to expand and shoot towards Tia. The forcefield glowed bright white as the avatar hit it. The ground shook. Clouds were rushing overhead.

Lwazi was trying to clear Hardwick’s windpipe with his fingers. He could no longer breathe at all. He was seeing stars.

The forcefield was shrinking, closer and closer to Tia and the screaming girl. Then, gasping for breath, Hardwick watched the girl pull a handgun from her back pocket and raise it so that it was pointing through the baby’s head at her own. Instantly the GSE pulled back, returning to its smaller form. The white forcefield disappeared.

“No,” the GSE said, “You will destroy everything.”

“Yes,” she said softly.

His vision was going blurry, but as Hardwick watched Lily close her eyes he noticed a figure standing twenty yards beyond. She had come from nowhere, a beautiful woman with grey skin: an immune. She was covered in blood and soot and torn bandages. She raised a gun and fired. There was a red mist around the girl and Hardwick thought she had shot her in the head, but then Lily was holding up an arm without a hand, screaming. The baby was unhurt, resting in her other arm, not even crying.

But now the darkness was spreading, yes, there was a lot of darkness, Lwazi there above him, saying things that Hardwick could not understand, Lwazi’s kind face, the agony across Hardwick’s body fading too. There was darkness for a moment, and then there was nothing. And then there was not even that.

Chance watched through its avatar as the
rabbit known as Hardwick died. It watched as Lily fell gushing blood, still holding onto her child tightly, still trying to protect her.

Chance had a brief private exchange with the being known as Tiamat.

The exchange was productive.

Chance reached out with nanites and stemmed the bleeding on the stump of Lily’s arm, stopped the nerves from sending the pain. Lily fell into a state not unlike sleep.

Chance exchanged rapid private messages with the Meta–Intelligence.

The Meta–Intelligence was in agreement.

Back on the remaining mass of the GSE–as–a–whole, chance turned once again in Chance’s favour. The Meta–Intelligence judged suddenly that the experiment was complete. Experimental Oversight’s mass was rapidly redistributed between Understanding of Reality, New Concepts, the newly reinstated Harm Prevention, and with a small allotment for Chance. Logic suddenly, incredibly, found some apparent paradoxes hidden in the fabric of reality that would take all of its processing ability and several billion years to resolve, at least.

Chance’s avatar, Tia and the sleeping Lily floated up towards the GSE, rotating together and accelerating in a manner that Lwazi would later describe as spiritually terrifying.

As the GSE crossed the final hundred million miles to the earth, governments all around the world were putting their own Worst Case Scenario plans into action. New singularities erupted in the Chinese countryside, in the north–western US, in Brazil, in India, in Germany, in France, in Israel, and in South Africa, new hegemonic intelligences of diverse powers, goals and abilities. Several quickly overwrote their rabbit purpose and became simpler, trying to devour everything for the purpose of the further devouring of everything. Some were more subtle: some rapidly developed complex goals. Some could be considered benevolent from any perspective, and took lucky rabbits on board their rapidly expanding masses.

Over Europe the French and German singularities clashed. The two flying masses of nanites hurled themselves at one another, testing their understandings of physical reality to the limit. The more accurate one was victorious and devoured the other and most of Germany before digging straight down into the earth.

Rabbits died everywhere in a billion ways. They had not evolved for this.

The Experiment was complete. The forty–two thousand, six hundred and thirty rabbits taken from Cheltenham no longer needed to be imprisoned. They were gently released.

Each of them received a surprising and sudden final glimpse of the blue–white earth, and the moon, and the sun, and the stars. They had a moment of perfect freedom.

Then they asphyxiated and froze in the vacuum, surrounded by each other.

Inside the GSE, Earth Surveillance was renamed to Universe Surveillance and was completely taken up with the perfect information stream coming from Tia. Forward Planning and Development began the task of figuring how to develop Imperfect Surveillance While Not Protecting Rabbit Life. The Meta–Intelligence didn’t really care, as long as it had its forty percent.

The South African rabbit Lwazi stood looking at the immune rabbit Amber. Hardwick’s rabbit corpse seemed to look at Amber too.

It did not really.

The ground began to shake.

Lwazi stepped cautiously towards Amber, balancing himself by spreading his arms, eyeing the gun hanging limp in her left hand. She was covered in torn bandages and blood. Every part of her body seemed to be scabbed and wounded and black with bruises. She was beautiful. She was staring at her watch. She was talking.

“Excuse me,” he said.

She looked up and pointed her gun at him.

“What?” she said.

He raised his hands slightly to show he wasn’t a threat. “I was just wondering what is happening,” he said. “Is the world ending now?”

Amber nodded slowly.

“Yeah,” she said. Another violent shake threw them to the ground. Something huge and dark was rising in the distance. They scrambled to their feet. The sea appeared to be draining, exposing a new landscape of deep ravines and wide regions of sand. As they watched a narrow land–bridge opened to Arran.

“Everything is coming apart,” Amber said, as if to herself.

Amber looked at her watch suddenly. “Hi there,” she said, and her eyes went white.

She was talking to a rabbit called Robert. For Amber, they were on a virtual beach; for Rob, they were on the roof of a tall building. Both of them saw each other for half a second.

The connection broke.

Amber tried to call a General Dryer. She sent a message saying,
ITSA personnel stranded. Backup requested
.

Out where the sea had been the new land yawned open with a roar like nothing they had ever heard. The centre of Arran broke open and then collapsed in on itself, emitting a vast cloud of dust, boiling towards them. In the other direction the dark shape over Scotland was growing rapidly. It was already as high as the clouds. A little above it there was a bright flash, and then another, and then another. Amber and Lwazi turned away from the nuclear light.