eleven
He could do anything in an instant. Not a human instant, a galactic instant. Thought did not have to coalesce and inform each decision. He simply reacted to certain stimulus. He was… He had been a soldier. He had been trained not to think, or to think without thinking. To think, but not think. Not to think.
"For someone who doesn't think, we're sure doing a lot of thinking today."
Looking inside the vastness of self, he searched for the annoying mote of awareness that heckled him.
"It's your fault," he said. "I functioned as I was supposed to for two hundred years before you whispered in my ear."
"We don't have ears."
Not anymore.
"Just stop, why don't you? I need to think."
He'd frozen Kat. He hadn't had to think about that. In the instant her finger touched the trigger of the disrupter, he'd slowed time inside the bubble. The beam from the disrupter had only just illuminated the end of the barrel. He could turn it aside at his leisure.
But should he?
"Yes, we should."
The black tendrils had consumed Finch. The dead engineer had provided something more than matter to hulking creature slowly blotting out the light of the distant sun. Something had shifted inside it. A ripple of something not unlike consciousness. Preserved inside his suit, Finch had delivered a very specific pattern into the web: awareness. The black horror had none of his personality, only the ability to think beyond the rudimentary connection of circuitry.
What would happen when it absorbed Kat? Curiosity encouraged disparate thought. Compassion, remembered as the barrage of Kat's emotions flowed through his skin, the part of his being he'd wrapped around her, determined he should not speculate. That he should carry her away. Protect her, save her. Ensure a woman with the moniker 'Sunshine' lived to remember him, even if she didn't know him.
But was it his place to interfere? It was the ultimate question and it caused a hiccup. If he was a machine, it became the logic problem that derailed his processes. It was the variance, the infinitesimal margin of error that passed unnoticed until the remainders added up to a whole number. He had stalled.
Saving her would be a human impulse.
Ending the war with the Reapers had been a human impulse; delivering himself to the cosmos, plunging his hands into blue fire, screaming as light disassembled his body, had not. He hadn't wanted to die. He hadn't wanted to choose exile, godhood, the preservation of all rather than the destruction of half.
So, he'd chosen life. He'd chosen to exist.
After fighting for fourteen years, he'd chosen peace. And he'd made himself the arbiter of it. The overseer.
Was it his place to destroy this new intelligence?
Was it his place to save one woman, to whom he had no connection outside a sympathetic twinge?
He recalled the feel of having a throat as the memory of a primal cry, a scream, tickled his being. He remembered the burden of death as he dragged himself toward the blue light, as he made his choice and threw himself into it. He remembered how to feel as he nudged the disrupter beam aside and allowed it to pierce his own skin, the bubble he'd formed around Kat. It burned. Could nothingness gasp? Could he feel pain? Or did he only imagine the anguish. Did he already feel regret as his humanity came to the fore and he exercised it, decisively. As the selfish impulse that had driven him into the blue directed him to patch the tear in his skin, sealing Kat in and the unknown out, assuaging the small burn of pain.
What of the anger, the small spark of rage that ignited within as it all came down to his choice again.
Why me?
As he contracted, pulling Kat closer to his self—as he retreated, falling away from the disappearing debris of the Bataille and toward the planetoid tumbling slowly below them, he asked the question again: Why him?
Why had the fate of the galaxy been thrust into the hands of one man?
The answer didn't come because he'd always known it.
He had chosen this. All of it. He'd chosen it.