He was halfway through an argument, a spun theory, which reeked of practice, why the two of them should care, when he saw it on my screen. His voice trailed off as he and Bergman each read the name in turn.

“Y…yeah?” Ramsay ventured. They still saw it whole, I gathered. My holo. They still saw it as they had, healthy and complete, the way I’d seen Britt’s and Rauch’s. It was only in my mind it crumbled. “What is it?”

And then I could see again. Hazy at first, just blobs of color in a field of light and dark, but resolving quickly. Clearer than I’d seen before, in fact; there wasn’t any visplate now, nothing to distort the view. But…there was something strange about it nonetheless. The angles and lights were stiff and clunky, with blank spaces in the field. Almost like scenes that were still being rendered. Like calculated views of what they thought I should be seeing, based on Ram and Bergman’s views.

A form lay prone in front of me. Face-first, sterine-clad, a channel of arterial red seeping from somewhere on its chest. An entry wound, fresh and open, pinpricked on its upturned back. A rifle and accoutrements lay scattered by its outstretched hands.

So. That was why Banks hadn’t joined the argument. The second shot hadn’t been meant for me at all. I analyzed the angle of his fall and the way the blood was oozing across the floor, and confirmed what I already should have known. My rant got through to someone after all…

But I had no time for this. Rapacious fog clutched at my ankles, shins, knees and thighs, wrapping its tendrils around the sterine, tugging at it with their picks. It found its way into my suit and closed itself around my skin, causing me to twist and cringe. It was warm against my legs. Warm, and hungry, the exhale of a slavering hound. It felt like it to want to drag me in, to wrap me up and swallow me whole, absorb me into its empty nothing…but not until it probed me first. Not until it tasted me.

RAMSAY!

I fought against it with everything I had, blasting his name across the holo.

Ramsay! I repeated, making sure I had his attention. It was coming easier now. Speaking through the screen, I mean. It was still a struggle to keep it from flaking, but the connection seemed to be established. I only needed to hold it together a few seconds more…

Ramsay, it’s not too late! I granted you the access, and the packet’s all queued up! I watched the message scroll across the jagged section of the holo I could still manipulate. Ramsay crept a little closer, edging Bergman to one side as he squinted at the shrunken text. You can touch the LifeStat now! You can finish what we started! All you have to do is hook in with your biosignature and…

I felt the licks of mist grow stronger, responding to my wild thrashing. They circled my waist, enrobed my chest, pinned my arms behind my back, and lashed against my neck and face, forming webs that oozed and flowed, choking nostrils, ears, and throat. They moved like some volitional oil.

…hook in with your signature and…

A new scene puddled into existence somewhere just outside my vision. Not in the holo, not in my mind, but in the field of mist itself. A far-future premonition, beyond the years of mass destruction, beyond the death, the people at each other’s throats, the beatings in the morning sun and wasting away in panic rooms, beyond the extinction of the race, beyond the ensuing adaptation…a world not destroyed by the epidemic we had just unleashed, but one transformed by it, and cleansed. Gutted, shaped, and built anew. A world ruled by cybernetics.

Massive amalgams of carbon and silica dominated the scene. Most were stationary – part of the landscape, forming a skyline, things without a need to move. A few were motile, zooming this way and that on errands I could not imagine, mostly in the sky. Their methods of propulsion were a mystery to me. Some sort of energy field, magnetized perhaps, or perhaps advanced gravitics. There were no roads. Nor trains, trams, or automobiles of any kind. Ground transportation had been obsoleted. Instead, smaller amalgams of carbon and silica moved – fluidly, without the weight-shifting, energy-wasting gimp of walking – through tubes that connected the larger structures. Tubes that felt more grown than built. There was something in the way they moved that bothered me at first. I watched a moment longer, trying to figure out what it was, then it hit me. Their starts and stops coordinated perfectly. When a cluster of them started to move, they all started to move, at the same time, at the same pace, in the exact same direction, without the buffering of men. Each knew what the others intended, precisely when they intended it, and each reacted with the utmost confidence that those intentions would not change, risking each others’ lives and limbs should this assumption prove unfounded. Many destroyed themselves as I watched. Some ventured into restricted areas of the complex and imploded after a sudden pressure change. Some dissolved into carriers of unimaginable amounts of data. Some converted sunlight to sugars, sugars to proteins, and proteins into living tissue, while some performed more advanced digestions, undreamed of in our time, to form such exotic materials as gold, diamonds, titanium, even small amounts of neutronium in some of the outlying vessels, and denser things I could not name, and many perished in the process. Some gave themselves for big, idealistic reasons, like generating vaccinations against diseases of that age, while others died for nothing more than transporting a quantity of materials at faster than the normal speeds. I watched as one of the largest structures simply collapsed itself, deflating like a leaky bladder, so another could begin anew. All could be sacrificed, and would be, without hesitation, the second there was cause for such, with no greater a tear being shed then I had for the death of, say, the cells in the fingers of my dominant hand. Hive mentality. The extinction of the organism, and the birth of the swarm.

Just a possibility, I told myself. Nothing more.

All you have to do is hook in with your signature and…

The mists closed around my eyes, the last of me it left exposed. I saw them dragging at my vision, blurring edges, twisting fields, and skewing them beyond all use, then darting rudely towards its center, taking even that from me. With one final eruption of will I tried to force the words to come, to fight the swirls of mist and fog and squeeze out one last line or two that might yet fix what had been broken.

…and…and…

But this time the words refused. I pushed at them from every angle, trying to find a way to move them, to jam them through the closing mist and hurtle them outwards, towards the screen, but I didn’t have the strength. I fell, exhausted, into the mist, losing myself to it completely, and ceded back control of the holo, leaving it to the bots’ designs. It accepted me without reproach, and forgave my struggles against it the way a medic might a stubborn patient’s, as it assimilated me.

It’s funny how the mind reacts in a crisis. Sometimes it springs awake, injecting shots of adrenaline into the body in an attempt to spur an action, any action, to try and somehow solve the issue. Sometimes it grows cold, and analytical, its sense of awareness heightened well beyond its normal levels so crucial details aren’t missed. Sometimes it shuts down entirely, leaving the body to fend for itself, its only concern protecting itself from whatever danger it perceives. And sometimes, every once in a while, when the shit really hits the fan, and it finds itself stuck in the blades, it shows us how we really feel.

Well, I saw my holo read, as the last slits in the eyes closed in, and the light of the world winked out forever, isn’t that funny? Didn’t see that one coming. Didn’t see that one at all... I smiled and shook my imagined head, watching the letters form themselves with cold, academic wonder. Turns out, way down deep, in my secret heart of hearts, I don’t really want to say.

The End