Feather wastes no time in plucking the skin and musculature off my holographic form. I catch Levi’s eye. I wonder what he thinks about all this. He has put our rifles in the corner with our packs. He is standing with his arms folded, his brows knitted together, and his full lips stolen by a thin-lined grimace. For just a split second, all this fades away and it is only the two of us. The two Citadels who know the truth behind our strength and speed. We are as alone as we had been back on that deserted island. I almost want to reach out for him, just to steady me, to hold me fast to where we are, but that would be inappropriate and would likely trigger the Blood Lust. Instead, I bring my fist up to my heart and push down, hoping there will be some kind of comfort in the pressure.
“Ahh. Yes. There. Your orbital socket has a small hairline fracture. We do not have anything that can repair this quickly, but I will assign one of my colleagues to look into it.”
“Thank you,” I tell him honestly. They may be weird, but they are helping. They are playing by the rules, and more importantly, Feather has not appeared even remotely judgmental about his discoveries. As my own genome begins to display, I watch with rapt fascination as it unfurls around the room. I barely notice as Feather dismisses Shrine to presumably make up our anti-radiation cocktail.
I see the same blinking and alerts on certain bands of the code. The parts of me that are alien, the molecular rips and cuts that have been twisted around DNA that I can only begin to imagine. Feather cocks his head and examines a strip more closely. He reaches into the band and expands it. In doing so, he enlarges the microscopic images into a panel that we can all see. The vicious helix spins but half the ladder is bright orange.
“You and Levi share the same DNA alteration except for here; this is a mutation that he does not possess. Do you have some sort of ability that he does not?”
“A slightly higher tolerance to certain medications,” I offer.
Feather’s face remains passive. He stares at the spinning gene for quite a while. And then, he looks at me directly, his silver eyes boring into me. “I do not think that is what this is.”
Shrine administered a series of shots, making sure to show us on her tablet the atomic structures of each ingredient in the compound that she included. Which was all very nice and good, but it’s not like we would have any idea if that was what she was actually dosing us with—or what any of that stuff meant, anyway. At that point, given all that we’d seen, I chose to accept that they were being honest. If they wanted to harm us, they already had plenty of chances.
When that was done, Thunder escorted us into the elevator (which had no buttons or displays) and up into the doyenne’s office. Unlike the minimalism of the rest of the building, this space had a rug, a bookshelf with real books, and paintings on the wall. It wasn’t exactly warm, but it had a slightly Scandinavian feel, and since I’m half Swedish, there was something almost familiar about it.
What was not familiar, though, was the doyenne. I half expected her to be J. K. Rowling or maybe Judi Dench, but she looked like an ordinary woman, pretty in an old-fashioned kind of way. She reminded me of the film stars you see in black-and-white movies. I didn’t recognize her, which was a good thing, because I might have to push back a little, and that would be difficult if she looked like Ellen DeGeneres or, even worse, Buffy Summers. I’m pretty sure I’d cave under the Vampire Slayer’s steely gaze. Too much of a fangirl—probably has to do with our shared world-saving agenda and whatnot.
“My name is Cosmos. Please, sit,” she says kindly, offering us a seat on a buttery suede couch. She sits down in an upholstered armchair across from us. There is something about her, something unlike the rest of the people here. She has the same silver eyes, but her face has a touch more character. It’s not that she has lines or age spots or anything, it’s that she actually expresses. Not a lot, hardly at all, really, but her smile reaches her eyes, which is more than I can say for the others. “The water is for you.” She gestures to the two glasses sweating on the small table in front of us.
“Thank you,” I say, taking a sip. I notice there is a ring mark on the table and I wipe it up with the sleeve of my uniform.
“Now, I know you must have questions. My story may well answer most of your queries. It will also sound unbelievable, perhaps, but I cannot lie. It is not in our nature to lie. Can I begin?” Levi and I both nod. She smiles. “Good. To begin, you know that we are not human?”
“Well, apparently, we aren’t entirely human, either, so …” I say, trying to find some common ground, which might make things easier when it’s our turn to ask the questions.
Cosmos does not smile at this. In fact, she looks downright grim in that moment. “Yes. I saw that.”
“I’m just gonna say it. You guys are robots, right?” Levi asks, leaning back somewhat on the couch. I look down to the floor for just a minute. So smooth, Levi. But then it hits me that I’d be no better if I had been the one to broach this topic, and I have a revelation: We aren’t great at this. We’re spectacular fighters, insanely good liars, but this kind of thing? We don’t do this. The people back at ARC have a legion of anthropologists and zoologists and psychologists who specialize in this first-contact sort of thing. We’re just the muscle. Which lately has begun to piss me off more and more. They could have trained us for this. We’re smart enough, but they didn’t. They didn’t want to give us so much power in the system. They only wanted fighters, someone they could keep sending to the front lines of the Rift.
They never meant for us to be in this situation.
And, in a way, that thought makes me feel good about our decision to be here.
“You are correct, Levi. We are robots … but we do not call ourselves robots. The word has a fairly primitive connotation.” At this, Cosmos smiles.
“So what do you call yourselves, then?” Levi throws out. Okay, so he guessed right, but still, I’m going to have to give him an elbow nudge if he doesn’t chill with the tone.
“SenMachs, an abbreviation of ‘sentient machines.’ Are you aware of something called the singularity?”
I nod assertively. “Yes. It’s the projected point in time when artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence. Most people on our Earth imagine it as a kind of doomsday scenario.”
Cosmos’s eyes change. They aren’t any less kind, but they seem to focus on something else. Something far away or long ago that still pains her. “I assure you, the loss of humanity was a great tragedy to us. Humans are our creators. In many ways we revere them in the same way that your kind worships gods. And … you are the first human beings we have seen in two thousand years.”
“Really?” I ask hesitantly. “Are you one hundred percent sure there are no humans on this planet? Because the Earth is very big. And the Amazon, for example. I mean, tribes existed and still exist in isolation for thousands of years in the rainforests down there.” In that moment, I don’t want to be the only humans on this planet. It makes me feel uneasy, like having a sliver of glass embedded in my foot. The kind that still hurts when you walk on it, even after you’re sure that you’ve picked it out.
Cosmos’s shoulders drop just a fraction. “You are not from the Amazon. You are not indigenous people, except maybe to the European continent. I assure you. We have searched. We have covered every square inch of this planet’s surface on foot and in the air, even from space. We monitor everything that happens here, especially anomalies, which is why we knew the moment you arrived. We have always theorized that a sentient species on an alternate Earth could open a doorway through the Multiverse, but the statistical probability