Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

Securing the basket, she crosses the narrow porch toward the thundering sounds emanating nearby: the deep and faithful roar of six Theryls, galloping in their tireless way. She opens the small gate in the middle of the porch and moves out onto the gangway leading down the center of the harnessed team, three of the majestic beasts to a side.

Boo comes first, a habit she rationalizes as mere routine, but he really is her favorite; they’ve had too many adventures together to help from loving him more. The animal’s head swings over to nuzzle her, his nose like cold sandpaper brushing below her ear. Before she can even get the treat out of the basket, her old friend takes it from her, his coarse tongue scratching her palm. She slaps his neck fondly, and Boo squeals with delight, sounding like one of the worn axles below her feet.

Continuing down the tight boardwalk, she feeds each of the team members in turn, and they take their food and eat without breaking step. There’s more than enough calories in the bits of mysterious fruit to keep them galloping along for what she likes to consider a day. Another round of dumplings tomorrow will keep them going for that day, and so on and forever. Coupled with the overflow of water sloshing in the troughs ahead of each animal, the Theryls remain well-nourished, if over-worked.

She thanks each of them in turn and wishes them well before feeling her way back to the porch. Turning right, she moves between the two old trunks that face each other. The woman lowers herself to one—the one she never opens—and lifts the lid on the other. She places the basket inside and pulls out the old flightsuit, neatly folded. First, she shakes it out in front of her, feeling for the zipper, and then she works it over her thin legs.

The suit has plenty of room to spare, more with each passing day, it seems. She forces her stiff arms back and into the sleeves, then zips up the front. Next, she pulls out the old helmet. Her fingers brush over a dent; their wrinkled pads come across a deep scrape repaired with epoxy long ago, and those twin robbers return, tossing through her past and forcing her to gasp for air.

She remains still for a moment, only her hand moving as it rubs the smooth visor. Eventually, she remembers where she is. Reaching inside, she makes sure the red band is arranged just so—the seam in the back. The shell comes down over her head, the fit still nice and snug. She tucks her longish, wispy hair down into the collar of her flightsuit before locking the helmet into place.

The world outside falls pleasantly silent, reminding her of the vacuum of space. She enjoys the sensation for a moment before standing and pushing the side gate open. Keeping a grip on the rail, she steps out into the horizontal rain and works her way toward the front of the shack, the water droplets pelting her with more force than usual. They pop up and down her suit like gunfire, tingling and tickling. Now and then, a large drop explodes against her visor with a sharp crack. She ducks her head and pushes into it, her curiosity swelling even further.

At the front of her shack, she turns to follow the porch around the wall of tin and crouches down where the rail splits. Ahead of her, sticking out beyond the forwardmost axle of her home, lies a curved wooden frame covered in slick leather, like a saddle for her entire body. With practiced ease, she stretches out and slides across the wet surface, grasping the metal handles at the far edge.

Pulling herself into place, she wiggles until she feels comfortable enough to endure the unmoving hours. Once she’s perfectly settled, she gropes for the seeing-device mounted in front of her and makes a few adjustments. Lying on her belly at the front of her speeding cabin, she imagines she looks like a mermaid carved onto the prow of a ship, or a figurehead for some strange procession. She smiles and lifts her visor, the rain glancing off her back as she brings the old scope close to her helmet. Pressing the seeing-cups to her eyes, she lowers her chin to keep most of the driving rain out and blinks several times, her lashes whisking across the lenses they are so close.

With the cover on the front of the device closed, her world continues to be as pitch-black as ever to her blinded eyes. The irony of it all never gets old to her: she lives in a place called the Land of Light and can’t see a thing. Can’t, that is, unless she stares right into the source of it all: the singularity at the end of her cone-shaped world. It’s the point in hyperspace through which all photons in the universe flow. Through which all time moves.

The shack shudders again; she squeezes the saddle with her knees as it passes. On the other side of the cabin, the Theryls do a noble job of keeping her home in place, holding it against the inevitable slide back into the past. They toil while she watches. That’s their existence, hers and the animals’. It’s their lives at the edge of hyperspace: a daily vigil into all events, some of which have not yet happened. Her task is to sort through them, looking for the bad things, warning of them cryptically lest someone abuse the knowledge, lest things happen before they should.

Mostly, though, she remains on watch for the worst things she’s foretold, things she predicted long, long ago. She continues to observe, looking for any sign of them and hoping to be daily disappointed.

Rain streaks off the scope and flies back inside her helmet, a torment she has grown used to. The small drops gather forces, forming rivulets. They march in columns through her flightsuit, down her nakedness underneath and out the holes she’d cut in the bottom of the suit’s feet. She holds her eyes tight to the cups as she opens the cover at the end of the cylinder, letting the compressed photons slide through the tubes and their narrow slits.

Inside the device, quanta of time and light do remarkable things. Approaching the side-by-side slits, the particles multiply, dividing and reproducing in order to pass through every gap, obeying simple but strange laws of physics. On the other side of the filter—before the photons can coalesce and continue their journey as one—they are interrupted by the woman’s eyes. They bombard her blind orbs while they’re still split apart, and thereby reveal their inner mysteries.

The woman blinks reflexively, even though her ocular nerves no longer function properly. The visions that fill her head can be seen even with her lids closed. The sights move like neutrinos, boring straight through her skull and leaving hazy images behind. She sees visions of reflected events, of some things long-ago, and many things that have not yet happened.

Not yet .

She focuses on the day’s images while another bump rocks the cabin, the shudder followed by a sheet of thick rain. The woman watches the images blur together. The visions are like overlapping transparencies; bringing just one layer into focus requires a force of will, a practiced bit of mental gymnastics. It feels as if she must squeeze her concentration like a muscle.

The visuals shimmy before forming into solid pictures, confusing at first. They’re large and jarring, hitting her like a bump in time.

Her head comes away from the seeing device with a start, her lids blinking across brown eyes with their yellow starbursts at the center. She leans forward and peers into the light once again, wary from the many false positives she’s been fooled by in the past, the many strange things that always end up being nothing. Or at the very least, a different sort of something.

She studies the images intently, focusing her perception, needing to make sure… but there isn’t any doubt:

The Bern.

Thousands and thousands of ships, some of them carrying hundreds of smaller ships, are arranged in a grid for battle; they’re jumping into her land from a dozen different galaxies. She sees them crossing through hyperspace before forming up in the midlands—that part of the sideways cone where the snow flies. She sees them preparing to invade the Milky Way, sees them sliding through an open rift and out over a dry and dusty land. She sees death and destruction on a scale the universe normally reserves for the ends of time.