Immaterialism


Afterwards, there was a complete lack of celebration. It received none of the pageantry it deserved--no victory speeches, no parades, no ceremonies of any kind. The world’s urban centers weren’t choking on joyous rioters. In fact, the vast majority of the population didn’t even realize it had happened, though they saw the ripples: exotic weather, “industrial accidents” that were explained a little too quickly. For them, it was a massive, invisible truth, brushing up against the edges of their awareness. At the root of it all, Matthew Cord was brimming with the childlike glee that comes from carrying a secret. They’d been liberated, and they didn’t even know it. He was convinced that it was the greatest triumph in the history of the species, both because he was an egomaniac and because it was true. Other scientists had devoted their lives to curing diseases or mastering natural forces, but Cord had focused on unlocking one thing…the ultimate alternative. And now, a vicious either/or had been shattered, and there was only one thing left to do.

Morning was stretching out over Basel, Switzerland. The city had an airy, pristine feel to it, and its architecture was imbued with a storybook soul--you wouldn’t have been surprised to see a princess waving from a picture window, or a swashbuckling cat strutting down the cobblestone. There were courtyards, quaint bridges, and clockwork-intricate cathedrals. People were on their way to work, pushing through the fragile wind. The first official witness--Alessia Lautens, self-described pastry chef supreme--was among them. White-blonde curls, black glasses, tiny denim legs sticking out from a puffy, unflattering winter coat. She squinted at the glacier-blue dawn and headed towards a coffeehouse.

Inside, Alessia was treated to sudden warmth and a wide spectrum of scents. Her glasses fogged up--she half-unzipped her coat and wiped them off on her Neko Case shirt. The line wasn’t too bad. This was the weekday routine that she was drenched in: the seven-block walk from her place to the pastry shop, with a stop here along the way. She could have, and virtually had, done it in her sleep. While waiting, she gazed out the picture window; everyone in the neighborhood had their own routine, and she’d inadvertantly memorized them. Little dog woman was right on time, toting her tyrannical pup across the street. The somewhat cute, suit-wearing guy hadn’t yet come out of his building, he was either running late or home sick. Any moment now, a delivery truck would pass by, heading for the University. There were more atypical things than usual, though. People and vehicles that she didn’t recognize. She started to wonder...but then snow started swirling down, and she cursed and hoped she’d get to work before the worst of it.

As soon as she hit the outside world, everything felt different--almost energized. She wrote it off as caffeine. Moisture-heavy snowflakes kissed her, while people glared at their cell phones or checked the batteries. The wind didn’t smell right. A non-sequitur skittered across her mind; for some reason, she found herself trying to remember an antiquated phrase she’d once heard. The University delivery truck was a few blocks away, heading towards her. Loitering strangers were doing their best to avoid eye-contact. Suddenly, the streetlights shorted out. She realized that the hair on the back of her neck had gone rigid. Alessia was breathing hard, able only to hear the sound of her own pounding heart. She willed herself into tunnel-vision, focusing on getting to work and ignoring the rest. One block later, her self-deception was shattered by a bizarre trifecta: rolling thunder jabbed at her eardrums, the earth shuddered, and lightning (in colors that she’d never seen before) filled the sky. As she dropped her coffee and fell awkwardly onto her side, the phrase popped into her head at last. She found herself in rarefied air...

Somewhere, an electronically-filtered American voice was screaming, “HE’S HERE!!”

She tried to get back up, but a blunt wave of wind knocked her down; the wind had become as loud as the thunder, which was endless. A series of power transformers blew--not all at the same time, but from one end of the street to the other, like something was passing by. Noiselessly, the delivery truck swerved and tipped over. The strangers pulled out futuristic handguns and started running towards it. Her vision was obscured by a tornado of newspaper pages. She was hanging onto the sidewalk, fingernails chipping against concrete and legs flailing in the gale. Silver-armored men and women poured out of unmarked vans. In her mind, she’d always pictured stormtroopers as being bulky and barrel-chested, but these were wiry individuals, with sleek, mirrored bodies and inhuman helmets. They wielded rifle versions of the weapons the plainclothes strangers had, and they were devoid of symbols or insignia.

The sci-fi people were apparently lunatics, as they took up firing positions and started blasting the empty air above the inexplicably-overturned delivery truck. Their weapons shot blinding, blue-white energy beams. Somehow, Alessia dragged herself into a deep-set doorway and managed to get onto her feet. There was a low ringing in her ears. She was about to get her phone out and call for help (nevermind that the thing probably wouldn’t work) when one of the armored people approached her. The wind didn’t seem to affect him (well, she assumed it was a him) as much as her. She thought he was going to get her to safety, or at least tell her what was going on, but instead, he leveled his weapon at her. Up-close, she saw that it had one barrel on top of the other. He was close enough to hear over the various roars, he had a too-formal voice and a clear South African accent: “I’m sorry.”

He fired. She flinched.

A purple blur shot between them, and the bullets were reduced to silvery puffs, hanging in the air. The armored man quickly reached to toggle his gun to its other function, but the blur wrapped around his upper body and flung him into a building across the street. For a split-second, it floated in front of her. It was formless, a cloud or swarm of energy, glowing in the dim morning light. After nudging her deeper into the doorway, it rocketed towards the truck, dodging attacks. In motion, it stretched out like a snake. A few of the blue-white beams hit it…the portion struck would briefly dissipate into nothingness, and then regenerate. In retaliation, it fired transparent, light-blurring beams, which gave Alessia a headache from a distance, and did worse to those it struck. It seemed to go right through their armor.

Impossibly-colored lightning leapt from the sky and punched holes through the blur, and that was when Alessia realized the truth. She’d assumed that it was what had been making reality fall apart all around her, but it was only one of three parties. The blur, the murderous knights, and whoever was doing all this.

Snaking through hazards, what had once been--and, for the most part, still was--Matthew Cord smiled inwardly. He briefly pictured himself as a ‘50s movie monster. “The Signal That Walked Like A Man…”

Cord buzzed the delivery truck’s roll-down door, reducing it to ash in the process. Within were jostled crates full of quantum computer components; the University was hosting a theoretical physics conference next month. Before he could convert the components to molecular signal and be on his way, they once again shot at him with their rifles, which emitted frequency-disruption beams--harmless for biological creatures, but extremely annoying for him. Maybe even lethal, though he was still getting used to the properties and abilities of his new form.

He returned fire with what he’d come to call neurological white noise. Cord was a free-range consciousness, now, and communicating with bio-types tended to induce pain, unless he held himself in check. Most of them went down, clutching their skulls in agony, but a few remained standing (and shooting). He made himself solid long enough to wrap around a car and use it as a club. In the beginning, he’d instinctively retained a basic humanoid shape, but it was both easier and more practical to be amorphous. It took concentration to avoid disintegrating any physical matter he “touched”, though.

The storm continued raging, but he ignored it. He knew what it meant. He’d been going up against this weather, and these armored maniacs, for the last four months, as he harvested technology all over the globe. They had to be staking out likely targets, as their responses were too quick. In the micro, their efforts were obviously impressive, but in the macro, their futility was clear. Intimidation-minded spectacle and little else.

This was what he was thinking when one of his new senses detected a gathering of energy--the lightning was funneling into a multicolored bundle of energy, aimed right at the truck. Maybe the weather couldn’t destroy him, but it could surely destroy the components he needed. In a fraction of a second, Cord shot over the truck and spread his new form wide, turning solid and shielding it. Countless gigawatts of power smashed into what he’d come to think of as his back. The pain was excruciating, but he didn’t scream. Waves of deflected power shattered windows for half a mile and liquified the one flock of birds that hadn’t hidden from the storm. The onslaught waned, giving Cord a chance to catch his proverbial breath, and he converted the components to signal, essentially teleporting them to his home base. They moved at the speed of radio waves, if not light.

Armored bodies were strewn in the street, and the streets themselves were cracked, higher or lower than they should have been. Powdery glass was everywhere. The weather went down a notch, as if whoever (whatever?) was behind it was content to gear up for the next round. Alessia emerged from the deep doorway, and she was joined by others who’d been hiding indoors. Cord swooped down in front of her, and she heard screams from bystanders, but she held her ground.

In her native language: “Thank you.” Then, fingers fumbling, she pulled her cell phone out and aimed its camera at him. “I, uh, I can do twenty seconds of video on here. I wasn’t sure if--”

When he spoke, he sounded like an echoing, strobing chorus of himself. “My name is Matthew Cord--I’m an American national. More importantly, I’m the founder of Biological Gnosticism. The material world is evil, and I’m working to free everyone from it. That said, you are really, seriously hot.”

With that, he shot into the sky, fading from sight. But before he left, he boosted her cell phone’s signal, to get past the extreme weather. Within minutes, she’d forwarded it to almost twenty friends; within an hour, the video was on YouTube; within three and a half hours, it had hit the international media. The organization behind the knights had managed to cover up the previous incidents, but this time, there was too much damage, as well as visual proof.

Gnosticism was an offshoot of early Christianity. Its adherents believed that physical existence was a deceptive prison, something to be transcended. Similarly, Cord was waging war against an enemy that most people didn’t even think of as an enemy--biology. Human consciousness was hampered by runaway neurochemicals, curse-like genetic traits, and manipulative biological urges. The well all thought came from was poisoned; post-organic clarity was a thing to behold. Cord had freed himself from it. He knew how nature worked, how it eliminated what was no longer needed. But when the physical world itself was no longer needed, instead of going quietly into the night, it was striking back. He was being targeted--by god, nature, both, or something else entirely.

Until Cord, there had only been two options. Live a physical life, or kill yourself and take a gamble on what (if anything) came next. Now, there was a third way, one entirely separate from all things material…

-----------------------

The problem became clear almost immediately--it wasn’t on the list.

They were wrapped in over five billion dollars’ worth of technology, a quarter-mile beneath the Andes. The complex’s outer shell was thickly armored, designed to withstand an Omega-class event. For access, silo-like corridors would extend through pre-drilled rock tunnels, stretch to either the surface or the shores of underground rivers, let people in or out, and then retract. Satellite sweeps and other scans simply registered sheer rock, with no odd thermal signatures, hollow spaces, or useful resources. Its air came from a hydroponic farm, and its food came from solar-lamp-grown biosphere crops (both obviously within the base). Cryovaults contained two genetic samples each from 90% of the world’s flora and fauna. There were data repositories full of culture and history, and military staging areas. The whole thing was powered by an array of fission generators.

This was the headquarters of the Silver Circle, and it was currently on high alert.

Najma Saif stood by a window overlooking one of their staging areas. Men and women wearing silver armor (or hurriedly trying to get that armor on) were crisscrossing each other, heading for vehicle bays or armories. Crimson sirens hammered at the darkness--any Omega-class threat mandated that they scale down their power usage. The unit they’d had stationed in Basel had been defeated, but that was only a sliver of what they had to throw at Cord.

Though Najma knew that arrogance was lethal, she really had thought that they’d covered everything. All the conventional threats were on the list: nuclear war, ecological disaster, worldwide famines and droughts, pandemics, the global economy shattering, failed states, violent extremism of any sort. External threats such as asteroids, meteors, and baby black holes. Hypothetical scenarios involving genetically-enhanced beings, the proliferation of nanotechnology, and alien invasions. They had contingency plans for all of them. In some cases, the plans relied on strictly theoretical ideas, but for most of the threats, she knew that they could respond within twenty-four hours, assuming they weren’t already working to prevent them.

“biological gnosticism”, on the other hand, was something they hadn’t even conceived of.

The Silver Circle had started out during the Renaissance. In its earliest stages, it was little more than an informal alliance of intellectuals--an underground community that met in each other’s salons, discussing the matters of the day. Their views would have been considered subversive, if not outright insane. But they had three key advantages: imagination, wealth, and a passionate concern for their species’ long-term survival. Politicians and the public were always caught up in the latest spectacle; the Circle wanted to get a head-start on problems that didn’t yet exist, problems that involved uncomfortable realities that no-one else wanted to think about. In under half a century, they’d formalized into something that could be described as a secret society. Through in-depth charting of trends and social changes, they were able to multiply their collective wealth by a hundred before 1820. They were silent partners, back-channel diplomats, obscure thinktanks and foundations…and, when necessary, covert enforcers.

Najma took a breath. She was unbelievably forty, with an aristocratic look to her, high cheekbones and sober eyes. Reluctantly, she left her secluded observation post, stepping into a cyclone of moving bodies. It was a precisely-organized panic. Data monitors had fresh printouts to give to strike teams, mission control supervisors were trying to track down stray personnel, strike teams needed more ammo or gear, and sci-consultants had new theories about Cord. Someone would ask for her approval or input every thirty seconds or forty seconds. She’d only been Director for a year, and she wasn’t about to let everything fall apart on her watch. Yes, she’d screwed up--the world knew about Cord, and their psychologists were always warning her about how the public couldn’t handle radical revelations--but this wasn’t over by a long shot. They had fifth-generational warfare experts, and they had military technology that wouldn’t be officially “invented” until 2071. There was also the minor fact that the universe itself seemed to be trying to kill him.

The irony was that Matthew Cord would have been perfect for them. He was the ideal type of supergenius--multifaceted, instead of being limited to one narrow specialty. Cord was that rare child prodigy that hadn’t burnt out upon hitting drinking age. His parents had died in a car crash when he was a teenager, and the federal government had used a top-secret form of eminent domain to gain custody of him. Cord’s intelligence was considered a national security asset; they didn’t plan on letting it fall into the wrong hands. Strangely, he didn’t mind living in a legal black hole. He was asocial and amoral…he had fun making his toys, and he didn’t really care what they did with them. Some of his ideas were used by CIA front companies to generate profits--with good-old-boys benefits all around--and some were kept by the Pentagon. Some were used to save lives, and some were used to take them. As long as they kept his lifestyle comfortable, he didn’t care either way.

And then, twenty years in, some idiot General asked him to come up with a signal-bomb that would lethally disrupt human consciousness, setting off a chain of events that ended with the worst possible outcome: Cord reacted to something like a non-sociopathic person.

Najma ducked into a data-monitoring room, where computer banks scanned media and police bands for certain keywords. Normally, they were on the lookout for a wide variety of threats, but today, almost all of their software had been tasked to look for Cord. She took a seat near the back. They knew the who and the why, but not the what or the where. He was obviously planning to build something with the technology he’d been stealing, and it obviously had to be stored at some location, but they hadn’t been able to come up with any specifics, let alone many plausible theories. God only knew how many abandoned black-budget facilities Cord had knowledge of.

Officially, their justification for considering him a threat came from the perfectly logical theory that his transformation had driven him insane. Unofficially, Najma wanted him dead (assuming he could die) because he was threatening what, in her view, was their species’ best hope for the future.

For far too long, the world’s religions have had a monopoly on meaning. Not everyone is able to create their own significance in life; many seek out some external, often institutional source of validation. And because of their need, it’s all too easy for them to be manipulated. Najma knew that countries, empires, and huge pieces of history had gone down in flames because of it. Idealistically, she hoped that this addiction to cosmic importance could be broken, but pragmatically, she knew that they needed an alternative meaning, a safe idea controlled by the Silver Circle. Luckily for her, they had just the thing.

Biological determinism--a theory that claims that people’s personalities and behavior are predestined by their genes--was usually limited to the realm of racists and social darwinists. (Cord arguably subscribed to a more moderate version of it.) Despite that, humanity actually did have a genetic fate, of sorts. Scientists had long assumed that since Earth didn’t have any need for human beings, they didn’t have any purpose in the ecosystem. The global ecosystem, no. The universal ecosystem, however…the Silver Circle had come to believe that mankind had something to give back to nature, and that it would be a byproduct of civilization going intergalactic.

It was doubtful that nature had given humans the trifecta of intelligence, opposable thumbs, and an ingrained desire to build for no reason. Trees provide oxygen, suns provide light, humans could surely provide something just as essential. Would starships’ relativity drives help to stabilize the space-time continuum? Would they harvest dark matter and prevent it from becoming overly abundant? Once they knew, they could market it as a secular manifest destiny, one to replace the empire-engines of the past.

The only thing standing in the way of this utopia? Matthew Cord’s biological gnosticism. They couldn’t have someone running around villifying genetic programming, not when it was going to save them…

A loud, excited voice forced Najma to snap back into focus. It was a Korean girl, wireless headset half-off and drooping towards her neck; she spoke with a slight Australian accent. Everyone was crowding around her monitor, trying to get a better look. “The w--look at the weather!! It’s the Pacific, everything’s going crazy in this one lat/long grid! Oh my god.”

Najma shouldered her way through, then glanced at the screen. Bizarre, extremely unlikely weather patterns were converging in one area. “I’m assuming there’s an island?”

“Yeah, one that doesn’t even have a name. It’s just got a number. On paper, it’s not owned by anyone…”

“I’m sure,” Najma said. She pulled out a cell-phone-like comm and thumbed a button. “This is Director Saif--target has been located, coordinates are being uploaded now. Launch all forces.”

------------------------

Matthew Cord had many advantages--intellect, a new form, a master plan--but one eclipsed all the rest. Put simply, he was ahead of the game because he knew exactly who he wasn’t.

It was a person that Cord hated more than anyone. They weren’t real, of course--he was too apathetic about humanity to hate (or love) any of them. No, it was a fictional archetype, a common one that had overbred and infested a huge chunk of pop-culture. The “mad scientist”. Or, more accurately, the overreaching scientist. He’d seen the same essential story told dozens of times, in a myriad of genres and mediums. An ambitious scientific visionary would carry out some bold act, only to end up making things worse. The message was always that some things were meant to be left alone, and there was often some vague, unseen hand woven in, like they’d been stopped for their own good. It absolutely drove him up the wall, and it all hinged on one word: “meant”. Apparently, if people hadn’t been able to do something in the past, they were never supposed to do it, because…well, he wasn’t exactly sure why.

What could be sanity’s last stand was scheduled to take place on a nameless island in a distant corner of the Pacific. Multiple tidal waves and out-of-season hurricanes were somehow bearing down on it from all possible directions, with impact less than an hour away. The planet’s electromagnetic field was acting up in the area, as pilots reported lost time and bizarre earth lights. At the epicenter of the madness was a deformed crescent--a green-and-tan smudge in the middle of endless blue. In the ‘60s, the island had been a backup evacuation site for high-ranking officials, in the ‘70s, it had been a depot for weapons that didn’t officially exist, and from the ‘80s on, it had been nothing at all, until Matthew Cord changed himself and escaped from comfy military-industrial custody. Craggy, jungle-skinned mountains contained a weblike universe of storage chambers and dusty residential quarters. Hovering high above his temporary home, he saw nature’s fangs, and he smiled inwardly. The arrogant SOB in him absolutely loved taking on the universe.

Cord didn’t believe in any sort of destiny, whether religious, genetic, or otherwise. He believed in free will. Sure, most of his species squandered it, but the option was there for all of them. Or at least, that’s what he’d always thought. Then, his handler from the Pentagon had given him a new project--a boring neural-signal-bomb. He finished it in under a month, but he kept that to himself, as his research had branched off into more interesting areas. Consciousness upload/download became his new hobby. The human brain operates on a radio frequency, and he’d long wondered if body transfer might be possible. He managed to get ahold of a catatonic individual, and he found a way to extract his consciousness. Options abounded--should he put the guy in a robotic body? A genetically-enhanced clone? How about some sort of nanotech swarm? Then, he realized that it didn’t have to be a body at all. Why not exist as signal?

As it was, it was too weak, it would have to be augmented, manipulated. He toyed with the man’s signal for weeks. It was impossible for him to tell whether he was inventing or discovering, as everything slipped into place so easily. The senses, the ability to generate motion, the nervous system. Merging it with phased plasma gave it the option of physicality. In the end, he found himself looking at thought in three-dimensional form. It was immortal, it had no physical needs…it was perfect. That said, he wondered about the side-effects. How would people act without biological input to guide them? While looking into it, his fun little adventure turned into a horrifying discovery.

He’d accidentally found out the truth: free will is only as good as the vessel that will is trapped in. If getting involved with a certain attractive woman is going to mess up a man’s life, his body is going to do everything in its power to make him do it, as it’s concerned with what’s best for the species, rather than what’s best for his situation. Billions of decisions and lives are sabotaged by DNA every single day, usually for absolutely ridiculous reasons. Your grandmother passed on her depressive tendencies. Your instinctive self-preservation was a factor in giving in and doing something unethical at work. By no means was it 100% the human body’s fault, it was merely a matter of statistics. Not everyone will be mentally tough enough to resist the genetic devil on their shoulder.

But, fate, and Cord’s hated imaginary enemy. Either humanity must be kept stupid and helpless on some level, forbidden from learning and doing certain things (assuming that whoever or whatever is running the show can be trusted), or humanity is smart, and can take care of itself. Though not a huge fan of his fellow man, Cord knew which side he came down on. And when faced with opposition, he wasn’t going to stop doing what he wasn’t “supposed” to do--he was going to fight back.

They started out as gleaming dots on the horizon. His long-range scanners and camera-banks told him what they were, but he already knew. (Though the base was a relic, he had everything he’d ever need. Since the change, he’d found that he could temporarily convert inanimate objects to molecular signal, and he’d teleported several dozen tons of technology to it, including prototype weapons he’d designed for the government and a considerable amount of lab equipment.) His masterpiece was tucked away in Unit 4-A, labeled as such in a spraypaint-stenciled font that must have looked futuristic in 1962.

The Silver Circle’s fleet had many species of ships, though they were all variations of jet-enabled hovercraft. There were bulging, bulky personnel carriers, with dainty swiveling weapons scattered over their hulls. Long, round-edged bombardment vessels had circular indentations on their undersides, which were actually energy-cannons, but they looked a bit like flat, floating speakers. Fighter-jet-like affairs zipped between the larger ships, having been launched from floating aircraft carriers, as did actual mechs; the mechs were about fifteen feet tall, headless (the cockpit was between the shoulders), and grey and black, with two conventional arms and four writhing, segmented tendrils that had blasters on the end.

Hurricane/thunderstorm hybrids arrived first. The lack of visibility rendered traditional craft useless, which was fine by the Silver Circle--though they were willing to eliminate witnesses for the greater good, the weather would scare off any civilian planes or ships. Cord didn’t know what was causing or controlling the storm, and he didn’t care. It hadn’t honed in on the island until he’d flaunted his presence, so he doubted it was omniscient. Bundles of otherworldly lightning were gathering power in the sky, merging and aiming at the island--just as he’d hoped.

A vast field of metal spires shot up: some through the ocean, some through the sand, and some through the mountaintops. Each one was roughly three hundred feet in height. When redwood-wide bolts of electricity lunged from the clouds, they couldn’t get past the lightning rods, which were connected to empty, expectant generators, stored safely underground. Cord was going to let mother nature power his plan for him.

On the largest mountain, naturally-camouflaged hangar doors opened upwards, spilling gravel and dirt to the left and right. A blindingly-white orb flew out, rose to the sky, and expanded its size to the point where it was comparable to a football stadium. It was followed by an airborne stream of clear, hexagonal tiles--thousands of them, at least--which spread out around it. The tiles interlocked their sides and formed a transparent sphere, with the orb at its center. The outer shell was three times as big as the white orb; it was practically a baby moon. Bundle-lightning had been strafing the orb, the tiles, and the completed sphere from the beginning, but it wasn’t having any effect.

The Silver Circle’s flagship was the bombardment vessel Colossus . Its captain was squinting at monitor screens…he was furious at the weak intel they’d been given; he hated going in blind. “That’s--what in god’s name is that? Please tell me we’re in weapons range.”

“We just entered it, sir.”

“Fire the main batteries at that tiled thing, the lightning rods, and anything that doesn’t look civilian and isn’t ours.”

Skyscraper-sized beams of energy shot out of the Colossus’ underside at a 45-degree angle, blurring light in their wake. Other bombardment ships joined in. The blasts ricocheted off the sphere, but they shattered many of the lightning rods. Bundle-lightning penetrated these newfound gaps and rocked the island with explosions, creating fires and small craters. Cord was nowhere to be seen. Most of the larger ships stayed back--long-range combat was their specialty--but the jets and mechs pushed forward, heading for the sphere. They were followed by the weakly armed personnel carriers, which were going to deploy troops on the island. The ships’ cannons were electromagnetic in nature, and they’d hoped to at least temporarily shut down Cord’s technology, but it seemed to be shielded.

One of the mech pilots radioed in. His audio feed was rough and patchy, and he was sighted in on the sphere, watching their energy-attacks glance off of it. “Thing must have some kinda refractory coating. No big deal, we can tear it apart by hand.”

It was clearly powering up, as it was interfering with their communications and glowing increasingly brighter. For a moment, it seemed to be making their intranet lag, as one of the monitors was showing a lightning rod they’d already destroyed. The captain actually did a double-take: new rods were growing out of charred craters. He started to give an order, but multichannel panic drowned him out. Several waves of missiles had been launched from the island. They were a little too big to be carried on conventional jet fighters, more the type you’d see on a battleship. The captain recognized them immediately. Thunderhead Mark II, the most powerful non-nuclear missile in existence. They were among the weapons that Cord had designed and, upon going rogue, stolen. Intel had thought he’d stripped them for parts.

Several mechs and jets were hit dead-on, and several managed to shoot missiles out of the sky, but the majority of the missiles locked onto larger, more enticing targets. The personnel ships took the worst of the first wave--two were destroyed, and the rest made flaming combat-landings on the island. The second wave was heading for the bombardment ships and hovering aircraft carriers. The Colossus took aim at a grouping of them, but the missiles scattered upon being electronically targeted. All the while, the lightning rods had not only grown back, they’d actually increased in number.

Cord had told the US government that nanotech wouldn’t hit its stride for another ten years. In truth, he’d developed engineering-oriented nanotech, which could transmute raw material, but he never had any reason to use it…at least, not until he needed to take an old island base and update it for his purposes. He’d fed his designs into the nanotech, and in weeks, it had built everything--missile-launchers, lightning rods and a system to funnel their power, the sphere, and much more. It had also reinforced the base’s armoring. In many ways, Cord was a child, and he’d elected to keep the best toys for himself.

(Most of the energy derived from the lightning was wirelessly powering the sphere, but some of it was being siphoned to create more lightning rods. They were singular--just one solid substance--so the nanotech could generate them more quickly than it could generate something with many different components.)

The second wave of missiles rocked the bombardment ships, while the hovercarriers retreated. They’d already launched all their jets and mechs, and they only had defensive weaponry, so there was no reason to stay. Reinforcements were already on the way--a trio of bombardment ships had been late getting into the air, and they were almost within weapons range. The other bombers were holding up relatively well, despite the missiles. They had the best armoring of any of the Silver Circle’s fleet, as they’d been designed for just this sort of combat. Also, they had anti-missile weaponry such as mid-range pulse waves, which would simulate impact and cause missiles to explode prematurely, and electromagnetic cannons, which would fry their systems. But the Thunderheads were extremely advanced, and the usual tricks wouldn’t always work on them.

Armed, armored crowds were pouring out of the violently-landed hovercarriers, ready to storm Cord’s base--assuming they could find an entrance. They sprinted into an endless forest of lightning rods. The bombardment ships knew where they were, and wouldn’t fire in their direction. They thought about using plastique to sabotage the rods, but that was all that was keeping them safe from the lightning. Their objective was clear, if not simple: the sphere had to have a control system somewhere on the island, and they were to find it and destroy it. Jets buzzed the island, bombing any areas that were clear of Silver Circle forces.

The captain of the Colossus was on the comm with Intel, screaming at them to figure out what in god’s name this maniac was up to. They couldn’t even give him a good guess on what the sphere’s purpose was. The feed cut in and out, he heard “possibly unstable”, “might be equipped with multiple, redundant failsafe devices”, “maybe we shouldn’t be shooting at it”, etc. Missiles continued to slam into the ship. His best mech pilots had fought through them and were requesting permission to smash the sphere--their exoskeletons were capable of fifty-ton strength.

After ordering the other bombardment ships to cease fire on the sphere, he said, “Test it with your snakearms, first.”

They hovered in front of it, reaching out with metal tendrils. The tendrils’ weaponized tips turned to ash upon contact.

“Holy--drop back and use your mini-missiles!”

The mini-missiles were the size of flares, but they packed an incredible punch. They unloaded their complements on the sphere. Even at a relatively close range, they didn’t seem to have any effect.

Cursing loudly, the captain slammed the comm down. He’d hoped that the sphere was only protected by a refractory coating--something they could use non-energy-weapons on--but no, it was some unknown, practically invulnerable substance. The bombardment ships, however, were armed with missiles almost as powerful as the Thunderheads…

“Mech Squadrons, break off from the sphere and reinforce our ground troops. Jet fighters, continue your bombing runs. Bombardment ships, fire thirty percent of your available missiles at the sphere on my mark.” He counted to ten, giving them time to relay the order. “Mark.”

Walls of missiles shot out of the bombardment ships, spiraling towards the sphere. A few dozen of them were unlucky enough to run into one of Cord’s missiles, but there were hundreds of them, and they wouldn’t be stopped. When the first wave hit, the sphere’s surface blossomed with black-crusted fireclouds, to the point where the actual target couldn’t be seen. This continued with the second and third waves. Emptying thirty percent of the bombardment ships’ missiles would take at least ten minutes, and it would have been enough to level a small city. Invulnerability was a myth, everything had a breaking point…it was only a matter of time.

In retaliation, new crops of missiles were launching from the island--the Silver Circle’s troops were hoping to find one of the silos and gain entry through it. Each bombardment ship was equipped with an array of long-range cameras and scanners, and data was being uploaded to the soldiers, showing them where the launching points were. The nearest silo was a half-klick to the northwest. They were still in the thick of the lightning rods: sparks showered on them, the ground was slick with moisture, and wading through the dense, sometimes flaming foliage was nearly impossible. To the north, jets simultaneously dropped their payloads and were taken out by missiles. (Their transponders were the only thing keeping them from getting killed by friendly fire.) They finally hit a clearing, and the only thing separating them from the silo’s estimated location was mud and a dust cloud. It was surprising--no landmines, no anti-personnel artillery, not even any killer robots. Then, they started getting weird readings from the dust cloud. Bio-weapon was the obvious guess, but obvious went out the window when the vibrating, greenish-yellow mass charged at them.

It was a cloned, genetically-modified insect swarm; some sort of locust/killer bee hybrid. The Silver Circle’s soldiers’ armor was hermetically sealed (they carried their own oxygen), capable of protecting them from any biohazard--and, luckily, from any insects trying to crawl in through the seams. Regardless, it was like being caught in a sentient hailstorm. The sheer force of the kamikaze insects knocked troops on their backs or prevented them from moving forward. Some of them managed to aim their weapons and pull the triggers, but it was as useful as punching the ocean.

The Captain of the Colossus couldn’t believe it…hundreds of the best-trained soldiers in the world, armed with incredible technology, were being stymied by glorified bugs. He glared at his XO. “Have the mechs use low-level sonics--that should scare ‘em off. And, would someone like to tell me why we’re shooting at the lightning rods and the sphere, but not the silos?”

One of his younger officers, a weapons specialist, replied. “Um, we’re having trouble electronically targeting them, sir. Something’s keeping us from locking on.”

“Can we fire with true sight?”

“Not with the level of precision needed--if we were off by a tenth of a degree, we could overshoot by miles, maybe take out our own people. We’d have to get much closer for that, sir.”

“Is the same thing happening to the jets?”

The Colossus pitched to one side, as a pair of Thunderheads slammed into its stern--it was getting hit every minute or so, but this was a stronger blast than usual--and the weapons specialist gave a shaky “Yes.”

“Tell the fighter pilots to deactivate their targeting software and use true sight. I don’t care if they have to fly upside-down, as long as they physically see where the silos are. Once they’re eyeballed, have them drop payloads in the vicinity, as close as they can get. The only off-limits silos are the ones near our ground people.” This was a shot in the dark; even if the jets got down low and buzzed the terrain, it was near-impossible for someone in a 300-mph moving object to guesstimate on a camouflaged, fifteen-foot-wide stationary target.

Due to the constant onslaught from the bombardment ships, the sphere resembled a miniature sun, with echoing fire covering its skin. Between it and the insanity-inducing colors of the bundle-lightning, the battle was caught in conflicting light sources, creating a universe of stampeding, strobing shadows. The sky was thick with missiles, stormclouds, floating behemoths, and plummeting debris. Matthew Cord was watching it all from a security womb. He’d never considered himself to be particularly brave--taking on the universe notwithstanding--and he wasn’t going to enter the fray until an optimal moment. However, a certain energy bar had reached 100%, and that meant it was time for the button that would change humanity forever…

All two dozen mechs cratered to a landing in a hazy, half-flooded field. Their armored compatriots were still trapped in a blizzard of insects. They put their sonic arrays on wide-spectrum, and a high-pitched buzzing enveloped their immediate surroundings. The bugs backed off as a group, like they’d been dented by a giant, invisible fist. A few mechs were stationed on the edge of the group, ordered to keep the bugs at bay while they carried out their operation. The foot soldiers were trying to catch their breath (they’d been fighting a virtual undertow for almost ten minutes), so the mechs pushed on ahead to the silo. The closer they got, the more static they detected in the air--whatever it was, it was somehow screwing up their targeting computers. A pair of mechs ripped the silo doors off their hinges. Everyone froze for a second, as they waited for some sort of countermeasure, but nothing happened.

“I don’t like this. Guy’s a supergenius, there should be a shiny new deathtrap waiting for us. No way he wouldn’t rig a potential access point.”

“This is stupid--there are enough of us where we can split up. We should be taking out the other silos, god knows it’d be easier for us than the jets…”

“Yeah, but we have no idea what we’ll run into, in there. It might take all of us.”

“…uh, are we just hoping that nothing’ll launch, when we’re on the way down?”

“We could drop some charges to clear the way.”

“Hey, yeah, let’s set off a chain reaction and blow up a stockpile of missiles! I’m sure that wouldn’t, y’know, collapse our only way in or anything.”

“Everybody shut up. Fenn, you’ve got acid-grenades, right? We can get the chambered missile out of the way without--wait, what’s that n--”

While they’d been arguing, a sound had been building, initially masked by the storm, the swarm, and the battle above. It was coming from the sphere. Still intact, the sphere was glowing through the missile-explosion clouds that had been eclipsing it. Rippling, blurred-rainbow static was dripping from its surface. Everyone there could feel something switching on, right down to their nerve-endings.

The Silver Circle’s foot soldiers collapsed immediately and awkwardly, like marionettes that had had their strings clipped. A purple wisp of light flew--no, was pulled--out of each of them. The snakelike things were sucked into the sphere within seconds, blinking and vanishing. According to the mechs’ scanners, they were perfectly healthy, albeit braindead. The mechs, jets, and ships were shielded from neural weapons, but the foot soldiers weren’t, as the necessary tech would have tripled the size of their helmets.

On the deck of the Colossus, everyone was panicking, given that they’d just lost several hundred of their people. A new wave of commotion hit when headquarters sent them a priority bulletin, overriding their non-combat monitors’ input with real-time satellite feeds and live media reports. A countless number of purple beams were flying out of every city, every rural area, every island and continent. The consciousness-signals were flying through the sky or, in the Eastern hemisphere, being pulled through the Earth itself. All of them were heading for the sphere. The satellite captures showed a green and blue planet awash in a purple migration, billions of signals that had left pristine corpses behind.

The captain finally understood what was going on: “He isn’t killing them. He thinks he’s saving them...”

Matthew Cord hadn’t wanted it to be like this. He’d hoped for a period where he could make his case, where those that wanted to be free would be liberated, and those that wanted to stay biological would be left alone. But the universe was forcing his hand, and it wasn’t like humanity’s judgment wasn’t biologically-poisoned. This was for their own good. The sphere had three distinct layers to it, the first being a reverse antennae, drawing human signals in. The second was a transformative membrane that would give everyone his advanced properties (senses, a nervous system, the ability to communicate), minus the ability to become solid. The third was a dimensional relay, which would launch them to a higher plane better suited for their new forms. Organic beings could never exist there, because it was entirely energy in nature. Consciousness-signals were at a higher level than most signals, as he’d found out when his human guinea pig had begun to drift up the spectrum of reality. With no body to act as an anchor, thought rose as surely as heat, albeit in a metaphysical sense. The signal needed help to make it all the way up the ladder, however; natural death wouldn’t result in getting there. He’d found a way to propel his test subject to what could be described as an undiscovered heaven, with new laws of physics, antimatter climates and environments.

Immortality, freedom from physical weakness and need, a new beginning--it was waiting for them. All he had to do was play defense long enough to shepherd them there.

The bombardment ships’ systems went haywire as an endless tidal wave of purple signals swarmed in from all directions, creating an insane amount of both visual and radar interference. Actual tidal waves were moments away from hitting the island. The universe apparently didn’t want to wait, however, as the island began shaking violently, consumed in an earthquake. It was as if it had been waiting for the Silver Circle’s ground forces to do some damage or reverse the equipment, and now that they’d failed, it had no other options. Lightning rods toppled, the underground base was crushed, and the island started to break into pieces. Cord didn’t care; he’d already gathered enough power to do the job. (He’d had an earthquake contingency set up--if necessary, the lightning rods could have hovered and wirelessly transmitted energy--but the universe, or whatever it was, had waited too long to play this card.)

His missile-launchers had been destroyed along with the island, but he had a fallback plan for that, as well. With the enemy ships blinded by purple static, he launched aerial combat drones that he’d stored on the ocean floor. Some resembled normal jets, while others were flat discs, or things shaped like an alien letter W, or cannon-loaded, techno-spiked monstrosities. There were easily hundreds of them. Each one had started out as a single prototype for the Air Force, but they’d been deemed too expensive to produce, even on a limited basis. But when you have engineering nanotech, it’s another matter entirely. As far as Cord was concerned, humanity’s future hinged on the next hour, and he’d saved his cavalry for just the occasion. He’d modified them to see through a signal-drenched environment.

The Thunderheads were too big for the drones, so Cord had gone for cleverness, rather than explosive power. Some missiles contained an advanced form of liquid nitrogen, freezing (and thus ruining) armor plating and circuitry on contact. Some missiles unleashed matter-devouring nanotech. Some missiles were armed with diamond drillbits and computer viruses, which were delivered by data-tendrils that would unfurl and grope for a connection. Each drone also had lasers, molecularly-dense hulls, and adaptive AI.

Cord had built them knowing that he’d need to buy a decent amount of time. Six billion souls to transmit, one sphere the size of a stadium…it was like trying to get a stampeding herd through just one narrow gate. He hoped that the sphere’s software and hardware were up to the task; the sphere was the one thing he didn’t have a backup for. (As good as he was, there was no way he could make something that complex twice. It was a marvel of human ambition, and like all such marvels--the Tower of Babel, the Twin Towers, the Titanic--it was being greeted with destruction.)

Inside the bombardment ships, lights were flickering, and systems were lagging or crashing entirely, due to the viruses. The Silver Circle’s communications network was being jammed with a nonstop cycle of “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”. Bundle-lightning was strafing the sphere, but it wasn’t leaving so much as a scorchmark. Frozen, brittle mechs were crashing into a schizophrenic sea. Consciousness signals were bombarding them from the sky, as well as coming out of the ocean, as they’d somehow been pulled through the planet itself. The bombardment ships couldn’t sight their weapons, due to the opaque energy enveloping the battle. All they could do was take damage from the drones and hope the techs found a way to see through it. The sphere had been moving unpredicatably, so they couldn’t just lock onto its last known location, and it gave off no heat, which made their heat-seeking missiles useless.

With everything going insane, Cord blasted out into the open, taking advantage of a fleet that had been knocked back on its heels. Given that his form damaged any physical matter it touched (unless he willed otherwise), he used himself as a battering ram, slagging mechs’ limbs and jets’ wings. Tidal waves swallowed the remnants of the island and shattered off each other, echoing for hundreds of miles.

Cord laughed out loud--this was going to be humanity’s brightest moment, and there was no-one to see it but him…

------------------------

Mankind was united in its exodus. Throughout the world, thousands of airplanes crashed simultaneously, as autopilot could only get them so far. There were huge pile-ups on freeways and highways. Corpses slumped in elevators, bounced down stairs, and watched other corpses on newschannels. Wars and milennia-old turmoil ended in an instant. The only holdouts were those in the Silver Circle’s headquarters, which was protected from signal-weaponry. All they could do was sit and watch as souls soared across the face of the earth en masse, one last jaunt before they went to the next level. They had faith in their forces, but their forces could only do so much, as Najma well knew. She had a decision to make. Did they stay behind, assuming that they could stop the sphere before it stole everyone, or did they assume that today’s battle was lost and deactivate their protection, going with the species they’d sworn to protect? She’d decided on a compromise between the two. Part of their personnel would willingly be sucked in, and start an insurgency wherever it was that Cord was taking them, in the hopes of eventual escape. The rest would stay behind and try to help what was left of the human race.

In their base’s command and control center, a tactician said, “Director, should we use the signal disruptors?”

Najma blinked. She hadn’t really been paying attention, she was too distracted by the realization that she was going to be the person that lost humanity. “I’m sorry, what?”

Confused, not wanting to get in trouble despite the situation: “The bombardment ships are equipped with large-scale signal disruptors--you, uh, you ordered us to do that. I’m thinking that these signals aren’t as resilient as Cord. Should we use them to clear up the visual field, so we can resume firing at the sphere?”

A long moment of silence. Then, “…those are people. We’re trying to save them. You don’t kill them to save them.”

Another, more senior officer spoke up. “I don’t know. Between our missiles and that lightning, we might be able to take it out.”

Najma got in his face, but her tone was sarcastically casual. “How many signals--excuse me, how many people are going by, every second? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?” She turned to look at someone else, her voice more serious. “How long would it take to empty the ships’ missile stores?”

“Five to ten minutes, Director Saif.”

“Five to ten minutes, then, with god knows how many thousands of people dying every second, just so we can have a clear shot.”

“We might get it in the first few minutes. It has to be wearing down…”

A comm tech practically jumped out of her chair. “I got through! That stupid song--but I got through the jamming! It’s patchy, but…”

Garbled transmissions followed, with only quick bursts of clarity. They spoke of viruses paralyzing key systems, engines being frozen, jets and mechs crashing into each other in the miasma, ships going down.

The tactician who’d started the debate was meek. “Should I order them to clear up the visual field?”

“Stop sterilizing it. ‘Should I order them to commit genocide to possibly save the majority of humanity?’ I…god. Yes. Yes, you should, but for no more than three minutes.”

The tactician gave the order, an incoherent response was received, and the jamming broke through again. They had no way of knowing if the order had been understood. The monitors showing the condition of the ships and their scanner readouts were white static; they had been since the jamming began. Sat feed monitors merely showed a gargantuan storm surrounded by purple energy. Najma counted off the three minutes of shooting, hoping it wouldn’t be for naught. But maybe they’d thought of the same idea, and started much earlier. She felt her stomach churn. On the one hand, it’d mean that they’d been shooting at the sphere constantly, increasing their chances of victory…on the other, millions of people’s consciousnesses had been destroyed in the process.

Then, abruptly, the jamming stopped. They’d lost their connections with the fleet, but the computers were trying to regain them. Waiting for the radio silence to end was torture.

A burst of noise grew into a fuzzy, dazed groan. The comm officer said, “This is C&C, identify yourself.”

“Where am--oh my god.”

“I repeat, identify yourself and relay battle status.”

Thirty or forty seconds of groaning, cursing, and panting preceded his eventual response. “It’s Sutterfield. Captain Eric Sutterfield, mech pilot. Um…”

Najma snatched the comm away from the younger woman. “What in god’s name is going on, Captain?”

“I have no idea. Right as all that purple crap came flying in, these ships started blasting out of the water--unmanned drones, I think. We couldn’t see two meters in front of us, so we couldn’t fight back. We couldn’t even see where we were going.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m underwater, under some wreckage. I think a bombardment ship fell on me.”

“What’s the condition of the sphere?”

“The…? Oh, that thing. Last I saw, it was getting pounded by lightning.”

“Can you go up top and recon?”

“My mech’s damaged, but this bombardment ship is in pieces, so I should be able to get loose. Recon might be impossible, though--everything up there is blinding purple.”

She glanced at the comm officer. “Okay, let’s have one of the other feeds.”

The comm officer kept her eyes glued to the floor.

“What?”

“There are no other feeds, Director. I’m sorry.”

Najma Saif’s muscles began spasming. She watched as human culture, history, and civilization--all of it reduced to a purple mass on their satfeed monitors--slowly drained into the void. Sutterfield couldn’t tell her whether or not her order had been carried out (he’d been underwater, and his mech’s comm-system had been in the process of getting back online), so Najma would spend the rest of her life wondering if she was a mass-murderer.

----------------

Thankfully, the universe was the only problem left to deal with.

Humanity’s last battle was over. It hadn’t been a particularly fair fight, and that was just how Cord had wanted it. Hull-cracked bombardment ships were slowly sinking, if they hadn’t exploded in mid-air. Drones had no mechs or jets to duel with, so they were content to sacrificially intercept bundle-lightning intended for the sphere. Cord estimated that two-thirds of humanity--four billion people--had passed through to the other side. Twenty more minutes was all he needed. The tidal waves had been growing taller, trying to pull the sphere underwater and smash it against the armada graveyard, but it raised above the waves’ reach. Its molecularly-dense tiles were battered, and its software was just barely chugging along. Cord was hovering and monitoring the situation. A lone mech emerged from the water…instead of having it destroyed outright, Cord had a drone grab it with a low-level tractor beam, drag it up to the sphere, and use it to blunt a fresh lightning burst.

The sphere pulled on him, as well, but his ability to become solid helped him resist. He was sticking around long enough to close the door behind him.

Cord knew about the Silver Circle’s theories, of course. The supposed genetic destiny. He had no idea if it was good or bad, he merely knew that he was tired of being manipulated. To him, whether the universe’s plans resulted in a majestic civilization or living in caves was a moot point--biologically-impaired judgment is still biologically-impaired judgment, and a limited existence is still a limited existence. Achieve post-organic clarity, and then go from there. Maybe he’d be viewed as a new Eve, one who chose knowledge and free will over a pre-planned utopia, and maybe he’d be viewed as something actually bad. All he was sure of was that whatever his species lost, today, they were more than capable of making something even better on their own, even if it was just because they still had him.

Suddenly, the lightning stopped, as did the jumble of hurricanes that had besieged them. Something was wrong, nature didn’t just give up…

A vast, echoing creak crashed down all around him; he’d never heard anything like it. It sounded like the metaphysical equivalent of metal strain. The noise rose to a crescendo, evolving into vibrations. Everything happened at once. Light stopped reflecting, rendering the surroundings colorless and then invisible, though Cord’s posthuman senses were unaffected. Sound stopped carrying. Water blasted straight up, followed by wreckage big and small, as gravity was no longer functioning. Various laws of thermodynamics and motion went on hiatus. Horrifyingly, consciousness signals were being deflected from the sphere. Cord’s technology depended on the material world--electricity, chemical reactions, quantum mathematics. With physics freezing up, the Humanity Heist was dead in its tracks.

The sphere’s antigrav components stopped working, and it was sucked into the sky, along with a huge chunk of the Pacific. It had already been battered by energy beams, missiles, and bundle-lightning, as well as getting slammed with armada debris when gravity had ceased. Cord broke the sound-barrier to keep up with it. Far below, consciousness signals crisscrossed each other, having no place to go. Since they hadn’t passed through the transformative tiles, they weren’t like Cord--they couldn’t control themselves. All they could do was wait to be picked up again, lest they drift forever. A five-mile-wide piece of the sunken island swatted at the sphere on its way into the stratosphere. Cord looked over his proverbial shoulder, and saw that the effect was spreading--there was an uneven, crater-like gap in the ocean, and it was widening by the second. Islands that had been hundreds of miles away were now airborne. The Silver Circle must have been right: humanity was key to the galactic ecosystem, and if it had to destroy a single planet to keep them, it would gladly do so.

Cord could have called it a day, but he wasn’t about to be outsmarted--not by anyone or anything. He’d proved that he could plan, now, he was going to prove that he could think on his feet. (Even though he no longer had feet.)

The higher they got, the thicker the water became, until ice-veins blossomed in it, crackling and clawing. It became a frozen stew of corpses, debris, land, and extremely surprised fish. Cord’s matter-destabilizing form burrowed through the rising frost. His original plan had been to “grab” the sphere and teleport it somewhere free from this effect, but it was too late…all over the world, corpses, buildings, animals, vehicles, land and water were rocketing into the air. The universe wasn’t taking any chances. Cord was just glad the sphere was in one piece; if he hadn’t planned so carefully, it would have been destroyed as soon as it lost power. At the sphere’s core was a multidimensional relay, which used a piece of antimatter as a medium to launch the consciousness-signals into a higher, immaterial plane. The antimatter was extremely volatile, and it wasn’t part of the physical universe, so it hadn’t been affected by physics flatlining. He’d surrounded the core with a treated material that, in the event of a complete shutdown (such as this), would contain the antimatter and keep it from rupturing and causing the biggest explosion in human hist--

“I’m a genius.”

The sphere was in orbit, now, along with most of the Pacific, a growing amount of the Atlantic, and anything that hadn’t been nailed down on land. Cord finally caught up with it. With utmost caution, he teleported several fiber-thin sections away from the spongy material surrounding the antimatter core. Under normal circumstances, the stuff was strictly one-way, letting signals in and keeping antimatter from leaking out. (Matter and antimatter went together about as well as fire and oil.) But now, he’d created microscopic holes in it, and trace amounts of antimatter softly exploded into the material world. It looked like the sphere was venting it. Any puncture greater than a hundreth of a millimeter would have blown up the sphere and everything within a thousand-mile radius.

The universe regarded antimatter as poison--like Cord, it had a destabilizing effect. Thin bursts of it branched out from the sphere. It was like using a torch to hold off the darkness; physical reality itself was pushed back, creating a sort of void around the sphere--a void where the laws of physics reverted to their normal selves. The sphere was operational once again. In the split-second before the sphere’s interior was seriously damaged by antimatter exposure, it reconfigured itself to work around the makeshift vent-holes. At Cord’s mental command, engineering nanotech created more spongy material that, instead of sealing the holes, merely coated the punctured channels and allowed the antimatter to flow safely outwards. In seconds, consciousness-signals were being drawn to and through the sphere.

Man versus nature ended with a twenty-minute standoff, one where neither could destroy or control the other. During that time, the remaining two billion human consciousnesses made their way to the next level. Cord wished that he had fingers, so he could flip off the universe, but he had to settle for mere words.

“Yeah, we’re done. Have fun finding new slaves.”

With that, Cord himself went through the sphere, giving it one final command. The spongy material around the antimatter core disintegrated, and the sphere exploded.

Whether it was the antimatter or surrender, the planet was back to normal within hours--light and sound, motion and gravity. However, oceans (now ice), corpses, land, skyscrapers, animals, and vehicles were orbiting the planet, creating a thick layer of space junk that actually blocked out the sun. The only remaining biological humans were those holed up in the Silver Circle’s compound. Half of their personnel had died in the Pacific, some of them were catatonic due to the world going invisible and silent for a period of time, and a new ice age was about to begin…

----------------------------------

In the beginning, the insanity was widespread, and it had many different origins. The most obvious impetus was change--radical new forms, a radical new world. Even if they hadn’t particularly enjoyed their old lives, having them ripped away was a major shock. Confusion and feelings of powerlessness all too easily led to madness. Others were pushed to the psychological brink by the fear that they wouldn’t be able to find their loved ones, or that their loved ones hadn’t even made it to this strange plane. The most curious cause was clear thought. After a lifetime of biochemical drunkenness, they were waking up with an incredible hangover; existence seemed too intense and vibrant. Even then, however, Cord hadn’t been worried. They couldn’t hurt their new forms, they had no physical needs, and they had all the time in the world to get past any existential shock.

Their new home had neither light nor darkness, land nor sky--it was a hazy realm of energy and thought. Some antimatter manifestations were static, reminding them of mountains or forests, while others fluctuated and knotted like labyrinthine rivers. There were new, non-cyclical seasons that involved plasma showers and scintillating osmosis, and no day/night divide.

It transcended the four base dimensions, so time was irrelevant and virtually impossible to gauge. For scientific purposes, however, Cord tried to think in earth time. For the first seasons (there were nine random seasons altogether)--maybe five or six years?--humanity alternated between semi-lucid wanderings and hibernation. They’d come to, carry out some primal action in a panicky fashion (finding a parent or child, lover or friend), get overwhelmed by their new existence, and exhaust themselves, falling back asleep. Those who hadn’t been that invested in reality, due to age or lifestyle or mental condition, achieved normality before anyone else. The now-fabled First Risers. Infants and children, the brilliant and previously-insane, artists who’d never believed in reality in the first place. Most conventional adults followed suit several seasons later.

Little by little, familiar connections were established. Mothers found babies, countrymen found fellow countrymen. People came across areas they liked and called them home. Fears were overcome as they got used to their new senses, discovered that a certain person hadn’t been left behind after all, and discovered that, yes, thank god, sex (or at least bonding) was still possible, and it was now without limitation.

At first, the new clarity of thought had been like breathing too much oxygen at once. As the seasons passed, they got used to it, and wondered how they’d ever lived without it.

Obviously, not everyone was happy. As the insanity faded, and the vast majority became capable of functioning, just under thirty percent seceded and split off from the main group. They thought that Cord and/or their new home was demonic, evil, a mistake, or all of the above. They wanted to find a way to get back to earth, or at least live in a more traditional way. (Well, they actually wanted to do violence to those who were enjoying this new existence, but you can’t hurt thought, and not having that option was driving them up the wall.) Cord let them go without an argument. There was only one way to get back, and he wasn’t going to give that up until they’d had a chance to achieve post-organic clarity. If they did that, and still wanted to go back, he’d show them the way. However, season after season, members of the dissenters would trickle back to the core community, as they’d only been thinking that way out of habit. Fear and anger weren’t as impressive without neurochemicals to back them up. Eventually, only a tiny percentage remained in seclusion, living bitter lives in the as-yet-unexplored parts of the plane.

The army of sleeper cells the Silver Circle sent never panned out. Once the situation became clear, they were too intelligent and rational to go against something so obviously good for humanity. Many of them became Cord’s top advisors.

They didn’t, strictly speaking, have a government, as there was nothing to govern. It was more tribal than anything. There was no need, and thus no need to work--not that there was any work to do in the first place. They raised their families (the first post-organic baby boom occured about eleven seasons in, when society was really starting to get back on its feet), focused on their friendships and relationships, and enjoyed the wonders all around them. Some bartering did go on--there were a lot of fantastic varieties of antimatter--but Cord always discouraged it from becoming actual currency. Money was the last thing they needed.

The main challenge they had was that there was nothing to write on or with, so storytelling and history became oral traditions once again. Cord didn’t want them to get hung up on the past, but he didn’t want them to forget its lessons, either. Epic nonfic poems and cautionary tales were spoken or sung. Cord’s Battle of the Pacific against the Silver Circle was the hands-down favorite.

With each “day”, their previous reality seemed less real. Earth decades turned into centuries, and their organic existence now seemed like something from the womb: a tiny sliver of time before their real life had begun. The poems and stories seemed increasingly abstract. People began forgetting basic details, such as what they’d looked like, or what their town or nation or planet had been called. Remember that one thing that was above everyone? It was…one of those colors we used to have? Things flew around in it? Maybe we can ask the story-singer, next time. I bet she knows.

Cord only returned once, to make sure that he didn’t need to free a new generation of organic humans. He’d always feared that the Silver Circle would use cloning technology to undo his hard work. Like everyone else, his memory of earth wasn’t the best, though he’d tried to keep key facts straight. The Silver Circle’s base was in South America, and he had a rough idea of what/where that was, but when he got there, everything looked different. For one thing, the continents had drifted, forming a supercontinent that was split down the middle by a megariver, or maybe it was a series of seas. The yellow thing in the sky was blotted out, as the atmosphere was still clogged with now-petrified space junk. The ice age was continuing. He saw bio-armored mammoths, and white-feathered birds that lived off bacteria floating in the air. Tundra-deserts existed where oceans had once been, though a new ocean had somehow overtaken most of the eastern hemisphere. Aquatic dinosaurs thrived underneath the rolling hills of frost. Limiting himself to four dimensions felt incredibly claustrophobic, and he was anxious to get it over with.

Cord sent out a mental command, and found that his cache of engineering nanotech--which he’d put in underground storage--was ready to go. He used it to transmute raw material and construct a hovering scanner, not unlike a satellite. Three global sweeps later, he found no traces of organic humans. Was the Silver Circle still hiding? If they were, they hadn’t made much progress in the last…thousand years? Million? Who knew?

Then, the weather around him began to shift and rotate, like an army in the process of surrounding someone. Cord had seen enough to know that he wasn’t needed. He left the same secret way he came, once again closing the door behind him in a spectacular fashion.

Upon his return, he received a hero’s welcome, the sort of recognition he’d wished for at the start of his long journey. There were dances, legend-chanting, archaic rituals. Those who’d originally been organic knew where he’d been, but their children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and so-on unto infinity, didn’t believe him, though they’d never have said it to his face. Heaven was real--they were there now--but Hell was just a myth, something to make the stories exciting and dangerous. Cord took off for his harem and smiled inwardly. There had been a time when his species had been enslaved, and not even realized it, as they had no freedom to compare it to. Now, their descendents were free, and they didn’t even realize it, as they had no limits to compare it to. Most cycles had ended, but some continued. Cord envied the youngsters. In his mind, every civilization’s goal was to reduce the past to the level of the imaginary…