Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

“So why are you flanking with us now?” Cole asked. “Give us our twenty billion years and leave our galaxy alone.”

Byrne shook his head. “No can do, Chosen One. Everything is different now. Past mutations were a mere bump in the road compared to what happened in your Milky Way. The rules have been rewritten. Our entire empire has been thrown into discord. This isn’t one of those changes we log in the master program and tweak our next go-around.”

“I don’t understand. What’s different? And why do you keep calling me the Chosen One?”

“Hyperspace is what’s different. We never knew it was there. A twenty-fifth dimension? It made no sense. Twenty-four is such a perfect number. Now, keep in mind, my ancestors were just like you thousands of iterations ago. They were a single species trapped inside the gravity well of their home galaxy with no chance of escape. When they realized the end of the universe was approaching, they could watch the Big Crunch coming—mathematically, of course, not visibly—but they were powerless to stop it. But then the seeds were invented, and the first program was written.

“And what looked like a problem at first, the Big Crunch, actually turned out to be a golden opportunity. Travelling between galaxies was prohibitively expensive. Space begins stretching faster than you can cross it, so there’s no way for one species to spread out and ensure their survival. Even if you got there, what had you accomplished? Long term, I mean? Even galaxies are doomed as they collide into one another. That means no one place is safe, and even with hyperspace, not all places can be reached. How much better, then, to wait until all places come to you!” Byrne beamed at Cole, clearly excited to be having the conversation.

“The first seed made the next universe even more conducive to life. The very laws of nature were tweaked. Carbon was made more eager to chain with itself. Water was given a wider range of fluid temperatures. The primordial elements, the building blocks of life, were put into place ahead of time. Everything needed to create more Bern and to educate them, to prepare them for the next trip around—”

“I’m sorry,” Cole interrupted, “even if all this is true, I don’t see what it has to do with us . Besides, why didn’t we stumble onto this Program? If we were made just like you, why don’t we know this stuff?”

“You do stumble onto them,” Byrne said. “Fragments, anyway. You see them in visions and dreams, and you hear them as voices in your heads. They are the very elements of your religions and your superstitions. This is why so many of them have so much in common. Your species plays these slices of our instructions over and over, but you hear only small chunks, and you hear them out of order. You inspect shards of the Program as if they were the whole.”

“You say that like we’re some sort of computer drive.”

“That’s a perfect analogy. Only, we write with four bits instead of two, and we coil them together in what you call DNA. The problem is, your drives are fragmented. Everything is haphazard, even as you continue to read them sequentially.” Byrne laughed. “The priceless irony is that you label as junk the most important parts of your DNA!”

Cole shook his head. “That’s not possible.”

“Look around you and say that again.”

Cole didn’t have to. It sounded foolish and naive the first time he had said it.

“This entire cluster of galaxies is infected. That’s why you’re different, why our code didn’t take, not fast enough anyway. There’s a mutation here that threatens everything. Everything my people—billions of generations of them over thousands of cycles—have worked to create.”

“What?” Cole placed a hand on his chest. “ Us? We’re the mutation?” He crossed his arms, shoving his hands in his pits to keep them warm. “So being the Chosen One isn’t really a compliment, huh?”

“Not from our perspective, no. The Drenards in your galaxy named you that. They hold out hope for our extinction, thinking a Human will be the one to effect it. Some crazy old bat foresaw the end of our entire race. A complete impossibility, of course, but enough of her other predictions hit home that some of my people became worried. As this Prophecy spread, it made many of us nervous. We began looking for the signs, for someone both a Human and Drenard. We had a few scares, years ago, but now—after thousands of years—things are finally playing out in our favor. And as everything falls together, new programs are being written for the next passing, new defenses erected in case of—”

“Defenses? Against us ? Or against the Drenards?”

“The Drenards?” Byrne laughed. “They are a non-issue. There’s always a few species that evolve and put up a noble fight. None of them matter, even if they defeat an entire galaxy full of Bern. What is their conquest? Temporary lordship over a small cluster of stars for twenty billion years? The end will consume them, and our seeds will spread on the winds of finality.

“No, the real threat is much smaller and more nefarious. It’s the substance that polluted this entire galaxy, the mutation that threatens all of creation—” Byrne’s voice climbed and continued to climb as he went on, “—it’s the foul slime that coats and smothers our program, eating all!”

Cole leaned away from the outburst, pulling his arms tighter to his chest.

“Cyclidinous,” Byrne hissed, his voice full of venom.

“Do what? ”

“The organisms, the single-celled monsters that move the stuff of life through hyperspace, spreading throughout your cluster of galaxies. Cyclidinious is what they’re called. That’s the mutation I speak of, not you.”

“Never heard of it,” Cole said. “But if it’s screwing you guys and helping us, I’m a fan.”

“Oh, you’ve heard of it,” Byrne said. “You reek of it. It’s your damned fusion fuel! That’s what it’s made of.”

Byrne’s angry words drifted off, swirling in a pocket of calm air around the mast. And in a land where time did not agree, where events did not always happen at the same time, at the same pace, or in the proper order, it was an unusual and lucky circumstance for his annoyed utterance to linger at that very moment.

For the very substance Byrne cursed, the answer to a riddle that had gravely puzzled Cole, suddenly brought forth a small group of armed men. A raid—a suicidal mission through hyperspace—being launched against the very first group to ever attempt such a thing.

They came, focused, clad in white and wielding invisible swords. They were looking for the One, not knowing it was far too late for prophecies.

Or perhaps, just unwilling to accept it.

While Anlyn guided the Bern ship toward one of the distant structures, Edison repeated his speech one more time, just in case anyone was listening. Anlyn felt soothed by his sonorous voice, even though the words sounded like complete gibberish. Unlike his English , she laughed to herself, which only sounds like half gibberish .

Anlyn had arbitrarily chosen the middle of the three major stations to head toward. Each of them was covered with long docking arms to accept massive ships; as a result, they looked like pincushions with the needles inserted at precise intervals. What really looked odd about the stations, however, was that they all stood perfectly empty.

Anlyn glanced over at Edison as he wrapped up his speech one more time. They waited.