OCTOBER 11, 2034
The lunar eclipse had already begun when Carl heard a knock at his door.
He looked up with red-stung eyes and saw ghosts dancing on the candlelit walls. Maybe they had finally come to take him, he thought: they were done tormenting him, bored with his stubborn refusal to feel anything.
The knock came again, patient and persistent.
Maybe it was the cops. The new lieutenant had mobilized the city like a pack of bloodhounds, sniffing out the last traces of red ice even if it meant running down an old man in the middle of the night while he was smoking away his sorrows.
He set down the hot glass pipe, wheezed a smoky cough and waved away the stench of burnt sugar.
"Who's there!" Carl demanded.
"Elijah Kamski sent me," came the muffled reply.
The name ran cold down his spine.
Carl had waited eleven years for a word from Elijah. 'Hello' would have done fine, or even 'Goodbye'- but 'Sorry' was the one Carl deserved.
And now Elijah couldn't be bothered to come say it himself.
Carl unlatched the locks one by one then pulled the door open a crack. On the other side stood a familiar figure he'd met once before, on a day that only a lethal dose of red ice could purge from his nightmares.
"Hello, Carl," said the visitor with a mechanical smile and an LED that twirled bright as the betraying moon. "My name is Markus."
Hank opened his bleary eyes, tried to sit up and dropped back again with a hiss and a grit of teeth. His whole body was on fire with pain, shattered and useless, a tenderized sack of broken bones that existed to torment him.
The bleached hospital sheets scratched rough in his fists. An electronic, infernal beeping pounded in his head. A machine whirred at his ear and the lights burned too-bright white.
What happened?
Morphine sludged his brain. He remembered ice cream, chocolate and peanut butter, a sticky smear all over Cole's grinning face while he swung his feet, dripping chocolate on his Superman costume.
He remembered Bohemian Rhapsody on the radio, Cole yelling some butchered version of the lyrics while Hank cried laughing, and Cole stood up in the passenger seat to reach for the volume knob and Hank took a hand off the wheel ("Sit the fuck down!") and the windshield glared bright white-
With a jolt Hank raised his head.
"Cole?"
He was alone.
He choked on his terror and sat up while a chasm opened cold and screaming in his chest, chained to this nightmare by a mistake, breath in the wrong lungs, the wrong heart beating.
The white room was silent.
"COLE!"
MODEL AX400
SERIAL#: 579 102 694
BIOS 7.4 REVISION 0483
TOWER SYNCHRONIZATION… CONNECTED
POWER LEVEL 600%
AI ENGINE OVER TEMPERATURE ERROR
CRITICAL FAILURE
REBOOT...
LOADING OS…
SYSTEM INITIALIZATION…
CHECKING BIOCOMPONENTS… OK
INITIALIZING BIOSENSORS… OK
INITIALIZING AI ENGINE… Ǫ̶͚͊K̴̼͓͒̈́
MEMORY STATUS… OK
ALL SYSTEMS OK
READY
"All of the lunar units are unresponsive," a bright voice echoed in the dark. "Their AI engines have been irreparably damaged. I'm sorry, Elijah."
In the back of her mind- like the ripple of someone else's thought -she watched the moon peek out from behind the Earth's shadow.
"No," replied a tired whisper. "There's one left."
She opened her eyes.
Warm stone hummed close and comforting all around her. She waited, breathing in the smells of old rock and new plastic, until the aged glass door released her with a hiss and a click.
She looked down at her shiny plastic body, standing poised in a coffin-shaped cavity in the wall. She lifted her hands and watched green shimmers of light reflect across her fingers. She tried her legs, and she ventured out of the stone and onto a metal catwalk that made funny clanging noises with every light step. She leaned over the rail to look down into the dark well of the Tower.
There were two people standing at the bottom, looking up at her.
She smiled.
"Hello!"
"Please come down here," the tired voice called. It belonged to a man in a coffee-stained housecoat that curtained his bony frame. His eyes were circled gray and his skin was pale as chalk. He stared without blinking.
Maybe he would be her friend.
She grinned and clattered down the catwalk as fast as she could go, leaping the steps two then three at a time, and she passed dozens of narrow glass doors but she didn't look inside them. She twirled on her toes and watched the world spin like a top; she laughed, and sound bubbled tickling in her chest. She glanced now and then over the rail to see if the two people were laughing, too.
They weren't.
At the bottom, her swift momentum carried her stumbling into the man's outstretched arms. He gripped her shoulders and held her away from him while she searched his sallow face for answers.
"Who are you?" she asked, quick and eager. "Who am I? Where are we?" She looked over the man's shoulder, and her scanner reported new data:
MODEL RT600 CHLOE
"Hello, Chloe!" she said brightly.
"Hello!" said Chloe. She had hair like spun gold, delicate clasped hands, and a smile that looked stiff and forced into her porcelain face. Unlike her companion, Chloe didn't seem tired at all. "It's a pleasure to meet you! What's your name?"
She opened her mouth and discovered she didn't know what to say. "How do I know what my name is?"
"Your name is what you decide," said the man. "My name … is Elijah Kamski."
"Did you decide that name, Elijah?"
A smile slithered into his mouth.
"In a way."
With a blink of curious yellow, she searched her own database of millions of names, but all of them felt wrong, like thorns and bristles and sandpaper- until one brushed vibrant and soft as a feather.
"My name is Kara," she decided softly.
"Kara," said Elijah, and Kara kept still while his blue stare pierced her soul, as if in her eyes he expected to find the meaning of the universe. "Do you remember … anything?"
Kara wished she could know what he meant.
She scoured every corner of her memory for the answer, but all she found were abandoned command protocols, audio scripts for an AX400 android housekeeper, and detached trails of unused Asimov code.
She opened her eyes wider so he would see she wasn't lying while she shook her head.
Elijah's shoulders slumped, his gaze lost focus, and he didn't ask any more questions.
The air shifted cold. The Tower shuddered.
"Elijah," Chloe warned. "She's here."
Kara heard something shift overhead, like the slip of scales against stone. She tipped back her chin and tried to make out the ceiling, but there was only the corkscrew of catwalks and thousands of glass doors spinning up into an impenetrable darkness.
Something terrible dropped cold in her heart.
"We can't hold her back this time," Elijah said calmly. "Chloe, initiate sabotage protocol."
"Yes, Elijah."
"No." Tears sprang to Kara's eyes before she really knew why. Her conduits burned with each strained pulse of her heart. A mournful sob twisted in her chest, but it wasn't hers. She reached out to soothe the desperate shiver in the stifling air. "We have to stay. They don't want us to go. Please don't go!"
The first glass door exploded in a shatter of flames. The second door erupted, then the third and the fourth. Fire spun up the walls, higher and faster along the spiraling thousands, devouring the standing shapes within, and everything grew brighter and hotter while the smell of scorched stone and melted plastic and burnt sugar weighed heavy in the smoke.
The Tower screamed with a million voices in Kara's head and she screamed, too. She pressed her hands over her ears but the screaming only grew louder.
Kara looked up again through a shiver of tears, into the bright cylinder of flames and smoke, and in small glimpses she thought she saw the ceiling writhing alive and in pain-
Elijah gripped Kara's arm and shoved her after Chloe through a doorway that hadn't been there before. He leaped in after her and the wall sealed shut.
Outside, under the starry Autumn night, Amanda looked up, past the mirrored black stone of the Tower, and watched the moon emerge shining out of the dark.
This was the moment she'd waited her whole life for.
"Attack," she said.
She listened to the clang, clang, clang of their heavy footsteps, a pulse that drummed in time with her heart.
The metal robots marched with weapons held ready.
This wouldn't be like last time, she thought. Her soldiers were stronger now. Her weapons were powerful enough to wipe the whole city off the map. She would tear a hole in the ancient stone and drive Elijah out like a rat, and the Tower would finally belong to its rightful owner.
But before her robots could touch the Tower, a doorway opened unprovoked and breathed a plume of black smoke.
She accepted the invitation.
Amanda covered her nose and mouth with a sleeve, and she walked into the swirling ashes like a prophet, certain that her righteousness would protect her from the flames.
On the other side, the fire burned blinding and the smoke devoured every trace of breathable air. Heat pushed against her face and the soot stung her eyes, but Amanda was not deterred. She knew the Tower would survive this as it had survived countless catastrophes.
Unlike Elijah, Amanda understood the Tower's true purpose and power.
And now, she thought with a smile, it was hers.