David Williams - The Machinery of Light

“Time for your final lesson,” he says—just as Claire Haskell leaps from the pod—

—her body manipulating gravity itself as she throws herself onto his back like some kind of wildcat, biting and scratching and clawing while his mind reels back before her and she tells him exactly what’s on hers—

“Didn’t count on me getting out of jail, huh?”

“Whatever it takes to tame you,” he mutters, but the battle between them isn’t really a function of what’s going on between their bodies. Their minds surge into each other—hers billowing in from every direction, his coalescing around the core of Control that he’s absorbed—straining against each other, seeking even the most momentary of advantages as they navigate endless quantum architectures of no-space and no-time, begetting infinite numbers of progeny minds that swarm in upon one another, a growing cloud of probabilities as the no-room goes ever further out of control and the multiverses start to blur. Somehow Sinclair’s staying focused. She’s not. It’s as though he planned for this. Her mind’s unraveling through labyrinthine chains of universe, infinite regressions prior to the one she’s left, each universe a chunk of false time that hangs in the true reality, each one a fragment of some greater picture that’s still blurry. But through that haze she can see the Operative moving in—

“Stay back,” she mutters, knowing he won’t—

—can’t—as he grabs a piece of piping and swings it with all his might down upon the rear of Sinclair’s head—yet as it impacts with that skull, there’s a blinding flash as untold energies run along the pipe back into the Operative’s body; he’s blasted backward, vision collapsing in upon him, the last thing he sees is those two inhuman figures grappling—

—and it’s just the fraction of the merest instant, but she’s taking all she can get at this point—Sinclair’s distracted momentarily and she’s threading in through a wilderness of worlds to take advantage of that fact, diving in toward his center as—

—he sees what she’s doing and—

—shifts—

—gets past her—

—their positions reversed—

—her mind dropping back into her flesh—

—his accelerating out into the infinite—

—receding jaws snapping at her and missing—

—her brain blasting his body—

—which catches fire. What’s left of his meat is going up in smoke. She’s scarcely had time to process this when the entire no-room shudders—

—a force so great that even the Operative becomes aware of it, drifting back from death’s door, holding onto the writhing floor—

“Carson?” says a voice.

He opens his eyes. Haskell’s bending over him.

Except it’s not Haskell. It’s something that wears the face of every woman. Yet somehow all of them are the Claire he’s always known—

“Fuck,” he says.

“Easy,” she mutters.

“What’s happening?”

“Ever heard of a crash landing?”

She’s staggering out of the realms of no-space and it’s all she can do to maintain any kind of structural integrity as the wave-functions collapse and the membranes burn away and everything around her gets back to the business of being real , guiding this bubble universe back into the one that spawned it, infinite vectors all around and nearly all of them leading to the total destruction of her and everything else the Room contains. Her intuition’s now the only way out as she steers her own way back, all those existences flashing by until finally—

Fuck ,” screams the Operative—a huge muffled boom that seems to pervade his very soul. He stares up at the eyes of Haskell, sees the screens flicker back to life all around—sees something on them that he just can’t even begin to comprehend—

“What the fuck,” he mutters.

“We’re back,” she says.

With a bang. As they reoccupy the space within the depths of the Moon—or rather, become that space again—compressed energy flows outward, the disintegrating membranes channeling a force that, thanks to her guidance, has almost no impact on what’s inside the Room. But as to what’s beyond—

“Fuck,” whispers Carson.

She says nothing, just cradles his head in her lap, watches on the screens in the Room as the entire Moon disintegrates—along with everything on it: the Eurasian legions on the cusp of victory, the Americans fighting with their backs to the wall, all the refugees caught in all the levels of that rock—all of them snuffed out, their minds caught within hers by Sinclair’s infernal machinery, her consciousness swelling ever farther outward, expanding now as pieces of the Moon churn out in all directions and the Room starts to sprout more guns and engines than the Eurasian fleet combined—

Fuck,” he says again.

It’s really all he can muster. Because now he gets it. Sinclair planned for everything. He set up the Room as something that could become a bubble moving past realities. But he also configured it as something that could wreak havoc in any real world it dropped into—

“We’re in a fucking spaceship,” he says.

One that sports the Stars and Stripes. She doesn’t know whether that’s Sinclair’s joke or whether it meant something to him after all: and now it no longer matters, because she’s at the helm of a behemoth to end all others, armored on all sides by more than half a klick of moonrock, looking more like a planetoid than a ship, and far beyond anything the Eurasians have left to throw against it. The monstrosity emerging from the resultant asteroid-field of rock and chunks of cooling magma is several klicks long, plasma drives blazing as it vectors in toward the remainder of the Eastern ships. And Haskell’s mind is racing ahead of it. It’s no contest. Nothing can stand against her anymore. She shudders as she suddenly sees there’s only one future left to her.

“What’s wrong?” Carson asks.

“You’re dying,” she says.

“I know that,” he says.

“Jesus Christ, Carson. Jesus fucking Christ—”

“What happened to Sinclair?”

“I think he pulled it off.”

“Becoming God?”

“Going off to find Him.”

Maybe it was what he had in mind all along. Maybe he just improvised. Doesn’t matter—he got past her, changed places with her, became the nexus he’d created within her while she dropped back into the world she’d left. She’s scanning across this world for any sign of him, but she already knows he won’t be back. This place is a backwater compared to what he was going for. And she finally sees that he wasn’t even that interested in domination. It was all just a springboard for him. He was beyond the range of ordinary definition.