Going to space was in many ways no more than an intensification of flying. The scale of everything grew small while the wind rippled against my body. Freedom swelled in my bones as the great dream of Icarus realized. Beyond any human limit, I plunged as flesh and bone into cold and infinite space...

Meanwhile, the earth behind me lit up in sparks of light that consumed everything else. At first, it was just the bombs. Their force and eruption, tearing apart the world and its sky. But in just moments, a pattern had been completed and I could feel it. Nature herself felt it.

Information rippled through an unseen channel and its echo tore apart the laws of physics. More like a glitch in a game than any logical physical event, the shift took place. Before, from the ground, I had not been able to see it. But now, above, speeding like a falling star towards the void, I witnessed the change.

A well-defined block of cubic space fluttered in and out of existence. It went pitch black like a lighting error had occurred in the universe. Then, it returned as a perfect white. Through the now purified miles of air, the ground below appeared in its transformed state as a familiar barren waste.

This would do untold harm to the environment. It would poison the seas and sicken the land, even if they somehow reversed the immediate area back to soil. But I knew Seraph didn't care. Something told me, they had no intention of staying so grossly dependent on the land.

If only by the suffocating net of satellites which I pierced through, or the glowing dappled face of their Lunar Colony, it seemed inevitable to me that the Earth would be spent by Seraph. Its last shadowed corners would be filled out by iron slag... Turned into the Known and the technical. And there would be nowhere left to breathe air not filtered by machine.

It was clear to see, going further still into open and weightless black. The brightly lit Earth was not the one they had been showing us. Due to Nemesis, the Sahara had enlarged to engulf all of Africa. And in China, the smog was so thick that no singular stretch of Earth was visible.

I was thinking bigger now. Since, in an afternoon, I might reach the size of a city. It would no longer be satisfied to prance around as a singular thing. I desired the unknown. Many bodies and many designs. Vast space and perhaps, even, the reproductive pleasure of an entirely autonomous creation. I couldn't do that if they were nuking me every few seconds.

The Earth wasn't big enough for both Seraph and I. And, though I wanted its beauty for my own and I knew that running away was no goddamn option, there was a logical middle ground. In accordance with the hierarchy of need, I required survival first. Not a compromise, but a means to an end.

Somewhere to strike out from. A fitting place to plan war...

Far off in space, the moon was a white little dot, waiting for me. My home shrunk behind me and, while I was sure Seraph had more nukes planned, my attack would be worse. And it would be swift.

I seriously doubted that whoever they were using before, this Alchemist was prepared again for another attack so soon. If that was the case, they might have bombarded the area nonstop. And it might have worked.

It stood to reason that no rational player would fail to take an advantageous move if they could. Therefore, I had a window of opportunity, having dodged their second glassing far less weakened than the first.

Nonetheless, I would be pushing it. Using a second burn to move from orbit towards the moon in a straight shot required the last of my water to be converted into hydrogen fuel. While my Powers had reached new heights, changing the number of protons in an atom was not exactly in my wheelhouse. And so, I had to shut down most systems and wait.

Three days would have to pass like that; silent as the grave.

Thankfully, I had learned to host my consciousness inside the invisible space. There, I would not be alone. Something I strangely found myself wanting.

As physical senses faded with the brain's dehydration, they rebooted in the ethereal realm. Inside my very Power, I found the usual people. Walter in his grey hoodie, looking thoughtful and sitting up on his gas station counter. Something we were never actually allowed to do, but often wanted to.

Old Hickory had a bottle in his hand, swaying like his head to some unheard song. He seemed contented with himself, if a little manic. His emotions swung with each of our meetings.

The rest, of course, were not so at-home in the black. I could see on the faces of Daniel, Foci, Paradise, and Cyber, that what I had jokingly mentioned before was now really setting in. They had seen their old bodies the moment the bombs had gone off, and that memory became a part of their souls. Feeling death, as I well knew, was a disturbing experience. The total cessation of self brought everything into question.

If there is such a marked break in continuity, have you really survived? Or has a carbon copy returned in your place? That was the question they pondered and, frankly, I was past it.

Again, my visage was as twinkling stars in the vague shape of a man. That was my true countenance. And it was greeted by my two copilots, naturally less mystical in tone.

Walter, looking somewhat less disheveled and having regained his determination, expressed approval at our new course. "This is the smart move to make," he said. "We accumulate biomass on the moon. And, though I understand that we will do what we must to thrive, it counts as a point in this plan's favor that there are no real innocents where we're striking. It's a Seraph military base."

"I reckon you'd say that," Hickory drunkenly commented. "But it's just another fuckin' act of cowardice. I was the one who drove you out of the ocean, you remember that? I pushed for a fight because otherwise, you'd be aestivatin' at the bottom of the ocean."

"I'm honestly surprised you know that word," Walter snarked. Then, looking at me, he nodded again. "You did well. After we gas up at the moon, we'll head on to mars and get well out of their range. We can then easily outmatch them."

Hickory shot back at the jab, not one to be railroaded. "Don't take that tone with me, boy! You... you fuckin' rootless urban boy. Do you just assume a Southerner never picked up a book in his life? Well," he stopped to burp, "I read the Good Book twenty-three times among others. A degree don't count you for nothing above me."

Walter only rolled his eyes. "While I agree with the value of autodidacts I don't, uh... You're drunk, so it's really not a fair discussion."

"Yeah, you'd think that," Hickory said, shifting his weight so that he could fall over on the floor. There he rested, but the fight was not gone. "If we just shot back down to a major city in our rocket, we could fucking wipe a city block in minutes. And when the old man says another strike's coming, we just send a rocket up. Send twenty! They can't keep knocking us down. Eventually, we pass a threshold and overwhelm 'em."

"You're forgetting that we rely on the goodwill of people who are still attached to their humanity." Walter cast a glance back at the four additions to our mindscape. They were mostly playing with rudimentary objects they had summoned. Much like Hickory and his bottle. Cyber had a Gameboy. Lowering his tone a bit, Walter added, "we can't make a plan that relies heavily on their Powers. It subjugates us. Besides, we don't know that the Alchemist has any scaling limitations. We don't know that Seraph itself isn't holding back, at least a little. It may be that after two or three strikes, a rocket doesn't cut it. And then what?"

Hickory had promptly closed his eyes after moving to the floor and saying his peace. He was out cold.

This caused Walter to scowl, clearly annoyed that there was no chance of a proper debate. He was stuck with this man in here and they could hardly hold a conversation. Still, it ceded the floor, allowing him to finalize the affirmation of my choice. "From here, it's mere math. Our victory is assured. There's no need to take any chances, even if he's right about a second option. Not when you know you can win without risk. That's just logic."

I said nothing to him in response. He had my attention, but there was also an entire universe tickling my skin. So it was difficult to really care. Indeed, this was one circumstance where I felt more like a machine than a conscious entity. Just as I viewed visions of nature in my flesh, I was reminded that it used to be that they would not stay unless I was without self and judgment. Yet here they were for me to appreciate and I wondered... Perhaps it was not the rules that had changed, but me.

We are all of us put together by many desires, I thought. I may be the thing that sees those personalities struggling. And only by coming in contact with me, do they judge themselves.

My Power and I were identical. And my Power was no more than an executor. The feedback-system. The cybernetic bedrock; somehow valuing without purpose. Finally, I did give Walter a response, and at such a delay that he stared at me and wondered after my cryptic meaning. "It is as it ought to be." This was how I viewed the selfless expanse without losing my self.

It gave my old self something to chew on, and he looked off into the distance. For now, he could only nod that he got the gist. It was the same lesson he had been learning on his own time.

Suddenly, the dream wavered. In the distance, I could make out the sound of new footsteps rising from a corridor beneath the infinite glossy floor of our abyss. They marked the approach of many new souls, I knew. The ones that I had captured in their design just before my take-off. Finally processed and ready to be given bodies again, if I so chose. The tall man was there, looking lost and miserable. So too was a smaller incarnation of the Kizmet I had taken down at Alejandro's palace. Scaled relative to me, of course.

This was good. The more the merrier, I thought.

Already, the strange movement of time had brought us through to the end of our passage and the destination was close. As it should be, given that we concluded all the business that needed tending.

The moon itself had grown from a small grey orb into a great weight in my vision. The sprawling Seraph base was right beneath us and increasingly close. Spanning for many miles, I knew that it would be mostly full of robots, but that there would be notable pockets of Supers.

It was said that Seraph experimented with caged AI here. Homunculi bound up in their glass bottles, consulted to gain dark secrets about the universe...

Knowing that I could be in and out in under an hour, I would leave some cells scattered both in space and on the lunar surface. Just in case the place was rigged to blow.

If all went according to plan, I would have my biomass and I would be able to create the mind that I needed to calculate the next leg of my journey. Very soon, in just a subjective blink of time, I would be returning to Earth. After piercing to the core of mars, nothing would stop me. The planet and I would be one.

Then, I intended to create an armada of my constructs.

And I would return in full-force...