Suzanne had given in to a moment of panic. Erol’s words still echoed in her head.

“Drugged? Dissected? Sold?” she cried after escaping Bacchus’s Lair through a door left ajar.

What little confidence she had had in him was now permanently broken. The young woman wandered for most of the night. The meandering streets were in a constant state of chaos. She had no idea where she was nor what she should do. A sense of vertigo seized her at the bend of a small square shaded by columns of engraved stones. She put her sweaty, trembling hand on her forehead.

“That fucking Feuerhammer is such a liar! But what have I gotten myself into?” she cried out, leaning against a plastic barrel. “What an absolute mess!”

In less than twenty-four hours, Suzanne had crossed a country she no longer recognized, seen cities that bore no resemblance to the ones from her memories, and had perhaps escaped death once again. Octave’s face, crushed to the ground, kept returning to her mind. As did the faces of the Judge and that strange nun.

When morning arrived, she realized that the streets were full of flowers. Trees and wild vegetation decorated the wide sidewalks, sheltering pedestrians from horses and other exotic animals. Once in a while, Suzanne came across a bicycle whose drivers seemed to be struggling as much with the cobblestones as with their rusty equipment. They shared the pavement with security drones that zigzagged between passers-by and horses.

The uptown residents were better dressed than the dockside bystanders she had come across the other day. The men’s multicolored togas reminded her of Ancient History, while women wore loose, almost transparent dresses. Many held umbrellas to protect them from the fine yellow ashes that fell intermittently. No one wanted to dirty the abundant implants that were scattered across their bodies or replaced their limbs.

Their traveling clothes made visitors easily identifiable: they wore capes, boots, and wide-brimmed hats. For this group leather was de rigueur. They did not possess umbrellas, although occasionally some wore masks or scarves. They also had fewer implants and had made them more discreet.

Suzanne walked along the columns of the square until she reached an intersection when, out of nowhere, a rider almost ran her over.

“Putain! Look where you’re going, you idiot!” this one exclaimed, pulling on the reins of her beast with all her might. “Cross over, maintenant! Now!” She was in a hurry and had to point this out. Her rifle slipped from her shoulder and Suzanne noticed that she was missing an eye. Her apologies were lost in the hubbub of the street and the rider resumed her journey.

A hundred meters further down, the pleasant smell of brioche awakened the young woman’s taste buds. She now regretted having left the cabaret empty-handed. The sweet smell of warm bread wafted from a market in complete turmoil that sprawled under the shade of a large bell tower covered with scaffolding.

Around the tower, crowds of people did their shopping or chatted noisily while sitting on the numerous terraces of the neighboring inns and taverns. There were dozens of stalls. Half of them offered various types of mushrooms, some of which the young woman had never seen before in her life.

Suzanne burrowed into the rabble as discreetly as possible. But in the rush, no one seemed interested in her. Curiosity overcame hunger and she got lost in the heart of the market.

She passed by colorful stalls of spices and fruits. Some resembled the food she was used to, while others seemed to come from genetic labs like the stuff offered by Sileo.

After tasting something in a cup, she saw a rich merchant starting to harass the crowd. He placed a couple of featherless chickens with pig faces on a wooden crate, right in front of his audience. The monsters were squealing and flapping their stunted wings. Nothing, however, seemed to spoil the good mood of the passers-by, who laughed loudly at this comical spectacle before dispersing.

After witnessing the spectacle, something drew Suzanne’s attention. A little further away stood a mobile stall belonging to an old man. Two empty eye sockets stared at the young woman as she approached him. When she got closer, the black holes gave off a foul odor of carrion and medicine.

“May I help you?” asked the merchant between hiccups. His voice did not come from his mouth, but from a metal box welded to his throat.

Suzanne looked around the stall in front of her. Dozens of implants of all sizes decorated its walls. Most were made of plastic or metal, and the vast majority were very used, with a few still holding on to pieces of flesh in places. The smell was overwhelming. It was obvious that they already had several owners. Under the Indian DIY models, she recognized brand-new Euro products: “Aren’t these intracranial hearing implants from McGill? Do you know if they still work?”

The old man seemed offended. He nibbled his almost non-existent lower lip, revealing his toothless gums where small black stumps were rotting. “Of course they’re functional! I don’t sell junk. The quality depends on the price. And the price includes installation.”

“Installation? You do the surgery on the market square? Among the animals?”

“We have the equipment for that,” answered the man in his slender voice while pointing to the tools on his belt. The utensils were all rusty except for the mechanical alloy arm hanging from his hip. “My tentacle does all the work and we clean it with synthetic alcohol. It limits the risk of bionic plague, you see?”

“And what does this one do?” Suzanne asked after a few seconds of silence. She pointed to a star-shaped implant the size of a coin. It was the cleanest one there, with only a slight oxidation stain on one of the sides. The gnome’s face lit up.

“It was a sense distorter! It’s very good. It was originally designed for deaf people. It translates a portion of your sight into sounds.”

Suzanne was not convinced. Especially since she still doubted the blind surgeon’s talents.

This latter must have read her mind, because he answered the young woman’s unasked question by pointing to his two orbits. “This? That’s nothing. Lost in the war. I didn’t fight, but I did some smuggling!”

At the end, the talking box ran out of juice and the last words turned into some kind of swearing as the merchant tapped his implant.

“I’m going to think about it and uh … ask my mother for the money,” the young woman apologized while looking for a way out of the situation.

“Shall I reserve it for you? I’m going to close for the day as people are restless right now. They’re not buying anything.”

The next eight booths were also implant stalls. There were temporal chips, mechanical prostheses, and even organ replacement modules. The quality was no better, but this time the vendors had both eyes. Some, however, did not have all ten fingers.

Suzanne was surprised that the people of Renaissance managed to keep themselves alive given the poor quality of the surgical services. The practice of sterilizing utensils and using antibiotics had visibly sunk like civilization itself.

There had to be more respectable businesses in the heart of the city, but the young woman left this quest aside for the moment. Erol must have started looking for her already and Octave’s warning still echoed in her mind.

So many questions were tormenting her. She tried to turn her temporal implant on, but nothing worked. It seemed to be permanently out of order.

“There’s no way I am going to get it fixed here,” she worried, thinking of the dealer’s rusty utensils.

Soon after, the city became more crowded. Everywhere the buildings melted into each other, crowds poured into the sidewalks, and the alleys were filled with carts, carriages, and military patrols.

All the smells mixed together: dung, blood, sweat, metal, spices, oil, and urine. A bazaar of street criers, merchants, and drunkards drummed on her eardrums.

The sky was turning from orange to yellow as a shower of rain replaced the parasols with proper rain umbrellas. The young woman was intoxicated by this feverish dance taking place among the narrower bowels of the capital. Breathless, she was finally pushed to the ground. Around her, the crowd moved aside and beneath the statues eaten away by the acid rain, the bystanders were walking up the largest street Suzanne had ever seen. Or at least remembered. The avenue led to a gigantic dome-shaped palace from which a banner bearing the split tree was flying.

“Do you often do things like this?”

The voice was deep, cavernous. Suzanne recognized it immediately. It was the voice of the man in the yellow suit. He stood in front of her and gave her a smile that was all teeth. The whiteness of his teeth contrasted with his black skin that was covered with freckles. Once again, he had a cup of hot chocolate in his hand. But this time the cup smelt of peanut butter.

Around her, the streets and alleys were empty. The sky had lost its veil. She could see the black cosmic body and its crown. The multicolored blocks turned and collided in perfect harmony.

“Who are you? And what is this place? Where is the city?” asked Suzanne, irritated by the many mysteries. “This is no longer the real world!”

“The real world? There it is, the real world,” he replied, pointing to the curious star and its gravitational belt.

“The real world, you said? No way!” Suzanne said. “What is that anyway?”

“I would like to discuss it, but unfortunately, there is something more urgent I need to take care of.”

Something akin to an orange lightning bolt struck behind his back and Suzanne jumped. “What is that again?” she asked.

A small creature stood in a corner of the room. His skin was white, almost transparent. She could see his azure blue blood circulating. His brown hair was randomly spread over his skull. His bulging eyes, wet with tears, were staring at her. His limbs were horribly atrophied and he was missing a good part of his torso and jaw.

Yet Tom was able to talk to her. “Suzanne. Suzanne, it’s me.”

“I know it’s you, you idiot.”

She approached her former lover. She could finally remember. Touching what was left of him with her left arm, she turned to the man in the yellow suit, but he was already gone.

“Suzanne. It’s good to see you again.” Tom’s voice was so weak that she almost had to put her ear to his mouth to listen to the rest of his words. “I don’t have much time left. I need to show you something.”

“Wait, Tom. What are you doing here? Why are you … like this?”

“Oh Suzanne,” he moaned. “Like you I wandered in the darkness, trying to understand where I was and why I was there. I wanted to understand what had happened to our planet, because I saw what had become of it…”

“I’m—”

“Don’t you remember? It’s not a big deal. It took me a long time to remember too. Even your face, it took me a hundred years, so imagine the rest…”

“Tom…”

“Just like I told you. I’m running out of time. I’m being chased by something and I don’t know what it is. Our conversations will have to be—brief and fleeting, I’m afraid. If you’re trying to understand what happened, let me give you something I recently discovered.”

“Let me see it.”

With his almost full right hand, Tom touched the young woman’s temple. It’s where her implant was located; her implant that until now had remained silent. A ball of lead grew in her stomach and a blinding flash of lightning burned her retina.

NeoParis and its lights were already a distant memory when Suzanne finally got out of the Brussels/Europa City train station. The aero-tube usually had this effect on her. Her brain still hadn’t gotten used to traveling nearly 450 kilometers in less than 20 minutes.

Guided by the orientation system provided by her temporal implant, she reached the security gates and retrieved her backpack. An android with a female face smiled at her. It wished her a good day in eight different languages, which were automatically translated by a special program.

The corridors and escalators leading to the underground were a parade of colorful and aggressive advertisements. Under the light of the high-definition screens, no one paid attention to the forceful arrest that took place at the bend of a corridor.

Suddenly, a police drone stopped her dead in her tracks. Its blue and red flashing lights blinded her eyes, which she hid behind her right arm. “Please remove your arm. This is an identity check,” shouted a small loudspeaker over an optical lens as big as an eye.

“My apologies,” Suzanne replied, making sure her eyes were wide open.

“I should be the one to apologize, Suzanne Courtois. Born on the 24th of June 2069, in Angoulême. Apologies for the inconvenience. Good day to you.”

The age of corporations had miraculously made drones much politer than half of the world’s population.

Once the retinal control was complete, the droid ran its engines at full speed and disappeared in another tunnel. Suzanne resumed her journey. The billboards indicated that the next train would be arriving in two minutes. Her orientation system corrected it to three minutes, before a small audible alert informed her that her news feed had been updated. The subject of a group of hackers gave way to the news of the day: Tom Lionheardt’s hearing would begin in a few hours at the Grand European Parliament under the supervision of the United Nations. Suzanne picked up the pace and finally reached the platform of the station.

Europa City’s subway metro system resembled those found in large Asian cities. It was clean, well lit, and quiet. After several minutes of travel, her implant invited her to get off. She had arrived at the Parliament, an imposing fifty-story blue glass cube. On that day, the United Nations flag flew alongside the thirty-six-star crown. It was hot, but the sun was hidden behind the gigantic towers of international and interplanetary conglomerates, including Lionheardt’s. Aegon Limited, Hanzo-Kobayashi, Novan-Kamiru, Renault-EUROSTAR, H3l4n Industries, Blackrock, SpaceX, Boewer&Hoch … all overlooked this lost diplomatic body in the heart of the world’s second financial district. The third in the solar system.

A human tide was gathering in front of the building. Slogans and signs were calling for an agreement on the climate. For a fairer world. An end to poverty. An end to the forced cryogenics of political opponents.

An alert appeared on the left corner of her field of vision. It was a message from Tom. He asked about her and told her that Jéricho had gone to meet her. The interface provided by her implant revealed a map of the square. An orange dot flashed in front of the security controls.

Over there, Jéricho was waiting for her. Despite its purple robot eyes, Jéricho was not an android in the strict sense of the word. As Tom liked to boast, his creation had a unique decentralized AI. It operated from Lionheardt’s geostationary servers. It didn’t have access to all of the companies of the corporation, but it was currently managing whatever work Tom felt was most important.

“Greetings, Suzanne. Did you have a good trip?” the steel puppet politely asked her.

“Hello Jéricho. I hope I didn’t keep you waiting for too long?”

“Just enough for me to count how many birds there are around here.” It was an astonishing answer, but Suzanne didn’t dare to imagine how the mind of an AI worked. “Unfortunately, there are only four of them.”

The young woman smiled sadly. The emotion in Jéricho’s voice was just a program. But an unusually well-designed program.

The android then invited her to climb the steps of the Parliament. Several security drones flew overhead, but Jéricho chased them off with a wave of its hand. The Lionheardt, like all other corporations, was her home.

“Does Thomas feel ready? He has mentioned this project very briefly. I don’t think it has anything to do with what he recruited me for a few months ago. I don’t even know what I’m really doing here,” Suzanne asked after going through the automatic glass doors.

“Thomas really appreciates you. Since his race to the stars is on standby, this project is the most important project of his life. I’m even a little jealous of it.”

Jéricho grimaced. There must have been a problem with the program managing its zygoma, but the result still made Suzanne uncomfortable. The AI noticed and the puppet readjusted its features.

“Do you know why he called me in?”

Slowing down its walk, Jéricho turned its gaze to Suzanne. Its purple eyes probed her. It smiled, but this time without a hitch. “Just between us, I think he needed you around him. It’s a delicate exercise. A familiar and friendly presence was necessary.”

The climb was short. The elevator doors opened and Jéricho guided her up through a narrower corridor. They passed several diplomats and the leaders of influential lobbies.

On the screens fixed to the walls, the Director General of the United Nations, a tall man with brown skin and unlikely gray hair, sat behind a desk. He was talking about global warming and the rising sea levels that wiped out half of the Netherlands and the Keys last winter.

She could not hear the rest of the speech. Jéricho had now stepped up to a door at the end of the corridor. It was guarded by two female-face androids of the Lionheardt.

Beside them stood a large man with metal arms hidden under an appalling suit. The gorilla grimaced, revealing wrinkles and surgical scars. Suzanne wondered if there was anything left of his original body. Behind them, three security drones had appeared out of nowhere.

“The crowd outside makes them nervous,” Jéricho said before making room for the scientist. “And military androids are not allowed in the parliament.”

Inside, Tom was standing behind a glass desk overloaded with files and laptops. He was dressed in a gray-green suit with a mandarin collar. He had put on the glasses he kept for special occasions. They were a gift from his father.

At the sight of Suzanne, the billionaire smiled before stopping the hologram emanating from the wall projector with a gesture of the hand. With another gesture, he turned off the TV screen on her right.

“Suzanne! Finally!” he exclaimed. “Please, sit down.” Before going around his desk, her host pointed to a faux leather chair and offered her a glass of juice, which she refused. The last time they had seen each other in person was during the summer, when Tom had stopped by her lab between trips. Since then, it had been radio silence on his part. Thomas had the habit of disappearing for extended periods of time and picking up a conversation that had been interrupted months before at the very spot where it had stopped. For Suzanne, this had been one of the main reasons behind their break-up. “I’m really sorry to bring you here from Switzerland for this. Especially since we could have met again in Lucerne before all—all this fuss.”

“Why am I here, Tom?”

“My goodness, Suzanne. Have you finally learned to enjoy Switzerland so much that you don’t want to leave it anymore?” She glared at him. “Don’t you ever watch the news? There is a worldwide crisis. Our far too small planet is dying,” Tom said, turning on the holographic projector. The Swiss Alps appeared on the desk. Suzanne recognized the city of Lucerne and that of Altdorf. The plans for an immense underground compound under the Dammastock were drawn up. They included new annexes of titanic proportions. “What I’m trying to build touches every continent. In addition to the Dammastock, I have begun building similar infrastructures in the Mojave Desert and on the outskirts of Lhasa, near the existing center.”

“It was difficult to convince the Chinese, but Tibet suited them better than Xinjiang,” Jéricho commented.

“What are you trying to make? And why present it here, with the UN?”

A spark appeared in the eyes of the man. Suzanne knew this look and it preceded her former boyfriend’s favorite exercise: the long prophetic monologue. She had opened Pandora’s box.

“Do you remember what they said about the year 2050? Then 2100? A mirage! By 2150, it doesn’t matter how many colonies the old Musk builds on Mars. It doesn’t matter if NASA, the CNSA, or the European agency reaches the asteroid belt, because we will all be dead.”

“Are you finally going to tell me what this is all about?”

He pointed at the hologram. “Rockets. Gigantic ballistic machines with hydrofuel.”

The annexes of the compound included a silo. It was the largest silo the young woman had ever seen. It was symbolically named Josiah-01. Then, the hologram vanished and another three-dimensional image began to load.

“How could they regulate global warming?” asked Suzanne. “Have you gone back to this crazy project of sending us all drifting in the void in search of a New World?”

Thomas chuckled. His Noah’s Ark for the twenty-second century was clearly not the subject of their discussion. He had moved on from the project permanently and that was rather curious.

The plans for the underground compound had now completely disappeared and the blue planet appeared, floating in the air a few centimeters from the surface of the office occupied by Tom.

With a wave of his hand, he zoomed in on the various launch sites, first Switzerland, then the United States, and finally Tibet. A luminous line was drawn from the Chinese base, rising into the stratosphere. Josias-03 looked like a bloated atomic head. Arriving at an altitude of forty-five kilometers, it exploded releasing a myriad of sparks.

The hologram then highlighted the chemical structure of this rain of stars. They were mysterious compounds whose nature Suzanne was unaware of. And there was a considerable quantity of them. A calculation took place in the background. Once the sky was covered with its new mantle of constellations, the temperature of the planet stabilized. It had now returned to the climatic age preceding the Industrial Revolution.

Finally, the simulation went haywire and Tom turned off the projector.

“It’s still not very well balanced, but it’s the best we can do to freeze the melting of the ice by removing almost all the carbon dioxide chemically.”

“Rockets? They’re more like missiles. How much is this project going to cost?” asked Suzanne.

“Three times the planet’s GDP.”

“And the Moon’s. Combined,” Jéricho added.

Lionheardt’s terminal rang. She recognized the music, it was one of their favorites while in college. An android appeared on the screen. It announced to Thomas that his speech was about to begin and that he had to go to the auditorium.

Suzanne found it curious that the request wasn’t made directly via her temporal implant, but then she remembered that her former boyfriend didn’t like anyone getting inside his head.

“And so?” Suzanne asked while Tom was putting away one of his laptops. “So, what’s the point of bringing me here?

“This project is just the first stepping stone. One of the vertices of a triangle!” he replied, pointing to the computers and notepads still littering the office. “The rest of the plan will depend largely on you.”

“Me?” Suzanne wondered.

Facing the window, Tom readjusted the collar of his suit. He swallowed and then spoke: “How is your work progressing? Do you like the Dammastock compound?”

“The program is progressing, yes. The projections are good. Everyone is struggling—and without an AI to snoop around in our files we are doing very well. I don’t see the link with your rockets, though…”

Tom was now rubbing his temple while staring at the glass. Blood stained his fingertips. “Is everything alright, Tom?” she asked as he coughed.

“A little sick,” he confided. He looked at her through his reflection. For a moment, she thought she saw a strange spark in his gaze before the small screen of the glass terminal flickered. The android reappeared, but Tom cut off the transmission. “Suzanne,” he resumed. “I didn’t bring you here to validate that our common project was on the right track. I could have done it via a holo-conference. And to be honest, I already knew the answer.” He paused. “Stay for the speech. I need to see you in the room. I beg you.”

As he smiled at her and she realized how much she missed that smile. She thought she saw tears in the hollows of his blue eyes.