The-Infinite-Sea-Pdf

79
THERE’S LITTLE DIFFERENCE between what happens next and our chess game. He knows how I think. He
knows my strengths, my weaknesses. Knows every move before I make it. He pays particular attention
to my injuries: my wrist, my ribs, my face. Blood streams from the reopened wound on my forehead,
steaming in the subzero air, running into my mouth, my eyes; the world turns crimson behind a bloody
curtain. After I fall a third time, he says, “Enough. Stay down, Marika.”
I get up. He puts me down a fourth time.
“You’ll overload the system,” he cautions me. I’m on my hands and knees, watching dumbly as blood
spatters from my face to the floor, a rain of blood. “It could crash. If that happens, your injuries might
kill you.”
I’m screaming. Pouring from the very bottom of my soul: the death howls of seven billion
slaughtered human beings. The sound ricochets around the cavernous space.
Then I’m up again for the last time. Even enhanced, my eyes can’t follow his fists. Like quantum
particles, they’re neither here nor there, impossible to place, impossible to predict. He flings my limp
body from the platform to the concrete floor below, through which I seem to fall forever, into darkness
thicker than that which engulfed the universe before the beginning of time. I roll onto my stomach and
push myself up. His boot slams into my neck and stamps down.
“What is the answer, Marika?”
He doesn’t have to explain. Finally, I understand the question. Finally, I get the riddle: He isn’t asking
about our answer to the problem of them. He never was. He’s asking about their answer to the problem
of us.
So I say, “Nothing. Nothing is the answer. They’re not here. They never were.”
“Who? Who’s not here?”
My mouth is full of blood. I swallow. “The risk . . .”
“Yes. Very good. The risk is the key.”
“They’re not here. There are no entities downloaded into human bodies. No alien consciousness
inside anyone. Because of the risk. The risk. The risk is unacceptable. It’s a . . . a program, a delusional
construct. Inserted into their minds before they were born, switched on when they reached puberty—a
lie, it’s a lie. They’re human. Enhanced like me, but human . . . human like me.”
“And me? If you are human, what am I?”
“I don’t know . . .”
The boot presses down, crushing my cheek against the concrete.
“What am I?”
“I don’t know. The controller. The director. I don’t know. The one chosen to . . . I don’t know, I don’t
know.”
“Am I human?”
“I don’t know!” And I didn’t. We’d come to the place I could not go. The place from which I could
not return. Above: the boot. Below: the abyss. “But if you are human . . .”
“Yes. Finish it. If I am human . . . what?”