They walked hand-in-hand out across the same powder blue terramonide veranda that they had walked to after making lust for the past 503 years, he in his botcloth tights, and her, as she ever was, gloriously naked. They came to the habitat’s gold-banded membrane as one troubled entity. They gazed out at the Humanity Endeavour, being fitted with its final sealant.
His voice felt rich, “She will be magnetized in one fleeting year, and we shall board, My Dear: Odysseus and Circe, free of both gods and men, to strike out beyond!”
She drawled without malice, “My Dear, this entire planet was not enough for our lust. How shall we feed for 540 years upon the mere thousands that shall inhabit your Asteroid Ark?”
He squeezed her hand to comfort her. She was, if not fully human, still his mate, and it was about time he confided in her about their destiny. “We shall sleep eight years two one, to be risen and called to the cull by our dutiful worshippers. Nine of their generations shall fall away to ash before we are risen to embark. Then will Eden rise under a red sun.”
Whenever he spoke of the journey that he had designed her for she ironically grew nostalgic for the planet of her birth. This time she walked him some hundreds of paces to the other side of the concourse. Peeling away beneath and behind them, the earth’s atmosphere swirled as if it could have cared less.
Perhaps She is best rid of us?
What if the old rock does have a mind?
Is there an older version of Old Know-it-all that just can’t wait for her brat son and his monster bitch to finally move out on our own?
Siren nudged him with her golden shoulder and he was reminded of her immense strength by the way his own shoulder squished in. She sighed as they looked down through the buoy array and she called for magnetic imaging over what had been New York. The rock that was Manhattan was visible, but the crumbled debris that had been the manmade city was little more than a trail of crumbs scraped across the Pennsylvania piedmont beneath the primordial ice, a giant risen to cleanse the earth of an overgrown breed of tropical apes who had spread like locusts.
She then hugged him tenderly. “What a hunt that was. Our first! Those augmented faɡɡots sure gave us a run, Baby.”
He hugged her close and kissed her forehead. “Good times will come to us again, Siren. We should have listened to Shuei and enjoyed regularly scheduled comas. Who would have thought that we could really hunt the planet out? Unintended consequences are a bane to the ageless.”
She wriggled free with a pout on her lips. “You know Sheui and Epson would have torched us if we went into coma, and neither one of us could bear to be alone. We did what we had to do. Do you really trust Tina to stay on mission and keep them compliant in the advance frame?”
“They believe in Second Genesis. We believe in the Humanity Endeavor. There is no conflict of interest. They’ll upload to the Division Core and time-jump to PTW before we hit the K-belt. Besides, they are all just replicants now. I’m the last man, Adam. And you, Baby, are the Eve that I ripped from my own body.”
She hugged him loosely with asking hands as she focused the array on the Mount Vernon Relief Engine, the last operational uploading platform of the twelve nodes of the Division Core [which, he resented as Old-Know-it-all]. Her voice was hurt and sulky. “That bitch is down there with the most interesting man in history. Richard could be my best kiss. She does not deserve him!”
He hugged her, no-longer hurt or even troubled by her monumental lusts, which, after all, he had engineered into her. “Well, Baby, I suppose you will just have to continue to make do with the most powerful man in history.”
She snorted disdainfully, “It’s not the same. I want to be used by a man who is doomed—and who thinks I care!”
She was getting manic again so he calmed her with the gentle touch of his chin to her temple. Instantly, she became ‘nesty’ and compliant, going over the security array at the base of their tower, where Richmond once sprawled through the lazy Mid-Atlantic nights. Her voice was unusually human.
“You know, Tina is the sneakiest of us four. I don’t trust her down there. Wait: that is not her. That time-crease that folded yesterday—that was not a looper but a brancher. It’s the Indian kid that merged with the Third Branch Capacitor. He’s in the base housing, headed for the lift. Look at him, how pretty!” she said as her long-fingered right hand manipulated the array index.
Hyman commanded, “Life-size” and the index that hovered like a translucent ‘head-sized’ bubble before her elegant hand, expanded to a size that might have accommodated an elephant—if one had survived the 21st Century. There, before him, hovered the divine image of a beautiful, naked boy, on the cusp of a ruinous manhood, perhaps twenty years of age, with a red-copper tint to his skin and a shockingly perfect head of square cut hair, down to his brows in the front and past his soldiers in the back. His lean torso had not a hair upon it, and around his waist, at the navel, a golden band indicated that this was indeed Three-Rivers, the 16th Century Seneca savant who somehow merged with a branch of the Division Core; a beautiful young man who was, in actual fact, a self-aware Chronological Replication Device.
Siren snarled, “Tasty looking morsel he is—and Tina’s pet besides. Let’s fuck him and shuck him, Baby.”
What a horrid beast she is.
Hyman calmed her with his chin again, “He is a subordinate program to Old Know-it-all. He must have merged ritualistically. I need to determine if this could happen again. He has replicated as the very person who had been sought by the chrono-recovery team. Look, he is the mythic image of Hiawatha. But he seems to have enough feminine qualities for me to disable through access seduction.”
Her voice was incredulous, “I still can’t fathom the fact that this cutie is a Chrono-navigation link. But, you are ‘The Master.’ Please, serve him to me when you’re done.”
I hate it when she mocks me!
No, I love her for it. She keeps me grounded.
“Done, done, and done, my sweat Siren, my sultry Circe. Have my avatar guide him, he’s still not making technical deductions and does not comprehend the lift. What an amazing disaster he is!”
