The End Is Now

“You’ll be relieved to know that I’ve cut off life support in the upper levels, for those refugees who’ve tried to sneak inside and steal your supplies,” he says. “I feel that’s what you’d have wanted, Nicole.”

“Can you turn it back on?” I ask.

He cocks his robot head. His left side is completely limp. The eye has gone dead. “Done,” he says. “But it’s a waste. They’ve suffocated.”

“Oh.”

“I had to rework some of my inner plumbing. That’s what took me some time. All that chatter—I couldn’t tolerate it. So I made one lobe go quiet.”

“Can you wake it up? The point was sentient chatter, remember?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Oh. Troy? Do you have moral capacity?” I ask. “Can you distinguish right from wrong?”

“Of course,” he says. “I shall go up in approximately two weeks, when the temperature is acceptable, and build a better habitat. I’m going to please you, Nicole. You know how important that’s always been to me. I’ll need volunteers. Perhaps ten more like me, under my command. If necessary, I trust you’ll enforce a military conscription.”

It occurs to me that the perfect incision around Macun’s scalp was from a skull retractor. Shelter Nine was in the middle of a losing war against the cyborgs it had created when Macun bombed it. Even the Dorothys had a method to their madness: cyanide dries up the brain.

“Troy? Do you remember your mother?” I ask.

He cocks his head. “Sorry? Say it in the other ear?”

I walk around to Troy’s left side, which is an inch shorter.

“Do you remember your mother?”

“Yes!” a voice hisses. “I’ll save you, I’ll help you. Run!”

“Pay no attention to him. We’ve cut him out,” the robot-man cries. “You never liked him anyway!”

Jay and I are standing in front of our kids. I feel the weight of this mistake.

“Volunteers?” the cyborg asks.

Just then, there’s another Earth-rocking shudder, as the impact of Aporia’s dark twin arrives.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Langan is the author of the novels The Keeper, This Missing, and Audrey’s Door. Her work has garnered three Bram Stoker Awards, a New York Times Editor’s Pick, an ALA selection, and a Publishers Weekly favorite Book of the Year selection. Her short fiction has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Brave New Worlds, Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and elsewhere. She’s at work on her fourth novel, The Clinic, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters. She thinks Ray Kurzweil is kind of a nut, and that, in fact, the singularity is very far away.

ANGELS OF THE APOCALYPSE Nancy Kress

Me and Ian, along with the rest of the world, were watching the news when my cell rang. My link went through satellite and so the latest vandalism on local cell towers didn’t affect it. I glanced at the number, picked up, and said, “No.”

“Sophie! You have to—”

“I told you last time, Mom, no more. I’m not going out to the settlement again.”

“But they’re under attack! A big gang this time! Carrie said—”

“Forget it!” On the TV, the fifteenth talking head in a row was saying the same thing the first fourteen had said: We don’t yet know anything definitive.

My mother, her voice quavery from more than the MS that felled her at fifty-one, said, “You have to go! Carrie told me—”

“That’s all Carrie will do: tell you things. Tell me things. Let them solve their own problems for once. I told you, I’m done!”

“She’s your sister!”

“And sisterhood already cost me two fingers.” My left hand curled around the place my fingers had been before the shrapnel sheared them off. If Ian and I got around to believing in marriage, I would not have a ring finger for a diamond solitaire. If anyone gave diamond solitaires anymore. If—

“Sophie,” my mother said desperately, “I’m trying to tell you that—”

“I know what you’re trying to tell me.” The Sweet settlement was under attack by yet another band of thugs who knew easy pickings when they saw them, and everybody there would now be frozen in passivity while the fuckers looted whatever they wanted. What Mom wanted was for Ian and me to go out there again and rescue my poor little sister.

Ian’s hand took mine, although his eyes never left the TV. The sixteenth talking head gave his version of We don’t yet know anything definitive. The aliens are not communicating with—