Who was he? He was no longer just Carrick. He was no longer just the Blue Shrike. Yet, was he the godchild, which was the terraformer? No. The godchild remained, but it diminished with every passing moment, and it was not a part of him.

Yet its body, its power, remained. Some of its knowledge, some of its memory, had passed to him. It was not as infinite as it had believed.

He was Carrick more than the Blue Shrike, and the Blue Shrike more than Carrick. How could this be? What was he? In a fractional way he was the planet Dirt itself, but he became less of that with every passing moment also.

A force burned within him like a deep breath held to the point of bursting. He had devoured the Wasteland, and the aspect of him which was the Shrike was perplexed to find that simply devouring was no longer permitted. Destruction now came only before restoration. That was the way things were now.

To his astonishment, the Shrike realized this concept brought him joy. Though his purpose to devour all things had been taken from him, he felt light, as though a great weight had been lifted off his soul. That he could now give life was a beautiful and unimaginable thing.

So the thing that was Carrick and the Shrike and also somehow the godchild turned its fingers, which were slowly forming flesh over newborn bone, toward the wasted ground below, and breathed out the matter and energy which he had devoured, creating a fertile valley where once there had been only the wrath of a vengeful god writ in ice and steel. Where the new soil nestled against the stone of the ground below, it took root and pulsed with life, filling with earthworms and with a glorious spectrum of life. Emerald grass burst from the soil—not the twisted human corpses which were ghostblade, but clover and wheat and a dozen other species which drank in the sun's light above and used it to send tendrils into the dirt to give and take nutrients and to release their scent on a breeze into the wider world.

And Carrick formed great buildings of stone and steel, buildings which would not soon collapse, buildings with all the amenities a person needed to be comfortable after a long day's work.

Then he created the people again, too, allowing their patterns of thought which had been drawn into him as their bodies disintegrated to return to new and glorious forms, ones echoing those each man and woman had worn in their prime, but free of little cancers, of genetic defects, of old injuries. They were bodies which would last a very long time.

Carrick read the old ancestral memories of the ghostblade, which were similar to the memories of humans, though not entirely alike. He traced them back to the moment of their progenitors’ deaths, when the humans who had been transmuted into the first generation of ghostblade had each been given a question by the godchild at the moment of the Accident: Knowing that you have violated the sanctity of your god, do you repent?

Those who did repent were given a new kind of life as ghostblade.

Those who did not were struck down and turn to withered corpses, their cycle of life cut short.

The strange mind of the ghostblade was no longer human, and Carrick could not return humanity to it. That much was beyond even him. He asked it instead what it desired, and it told him that after so long, after witnessing so much human suffering, all it wished was to pass into sleep.

So Carrick destroyed the ghostblade, and the part of him that was the Shrike took no joy in the killing, but felt honored and humbled that it had been entrusted with this act.

Carrick, the Blue Shrike, hovered far, far above the Restoration. He looked with eyes that could see for miles upon the people below, the ones who had once been prisoners and guards and were now a new strain of humanity. They stared in disbelief at their strong hands and at the pure linen with which Carrick had clothed them. They talked in small murmurs among themselves.

But Carrick felt a twinge of doubt in his heart, for he knew that it would be impossible for these people to simply go about happy lives without any complications. The men and women were still prisoners, many of them. The government still had a claim over them, and would at any rate do its best to capture them and experiment upon them to get to the bottom of whatever Carrick had done.

Unless Carrick did something about that. He had enough wisdom now to know there was nothing he could do to curb the government in this way aside from destroying it and rebuilding it, and he knew that was far beyond his capabilities.

He descended, a replica of his favorite formal suit appearing on his body. They were only a simple jacket and pants, but were what he had always felt the most comfortable wearing when performing his ordinary work in impersonating business professionals. The idea felt so strange to him now. The time when he had been simply a high-ranking member of the Family seemed to have happened a lifetime ago.

He landed in front of Old Oak, though no one would call the man old now. Old Oak stood tall and strong, with broad shoulders and a beard that fell almost to his belt. His eyes were deep and bright, and shaggy, reddish-brown hair tumbled over his head. He was looking in awe around him, but he turned and started as Carrick landed.

“I felt you in my head,” the man said.

All around, everyone else was turning to stare at them. They were talking in very low tones, but Carrick could hear them. They all could remember the signature of Carrick’s identity touching their souls. They knew this was the man who had destroyed and then remade them.

“I've become one with the engine which caused the Accident,” Carrick said so loudly that all who stood around could hear. Perhaps two dozen men and a handful of women were close enough to make out the words.

“It was the engine which came with our forefathers many years ago from the stars. Our ancestors were pioneers. They used the engine to turn a planet where no life could grow into a copy of our home world. When its work was done, it slept, and our ancestors forgot it, only to rediscover it many years later. They did not remember exactly what it was, but knew it was an artifact of great power. In trying to unravel its secrets, they woke and angered it, and it punished them by creating the Wasteland.”

Old Oak looked at the gentle grass around them. “This is incredible,” he whispered. “You remade us. The engine had the power to do all that?” He stared up at the sky, seeming to ponder the implications. “Carrick, you could change the whole world! You could make the whole world fertile like this, create enough food that no one ever had to go hungry again! Cure all diseases, make the world a paradise!”

But this struck a dissonant chord within Carrick’s soul. Yes. He could do something like that. But not for much longer. He tried to look deep within himself, to figure out how and why this was true.

There was a great well of power within him, but the mind of the godchild who was the terraformer faded rapidly. The power of transformation and of giving life was tied to it. This was not the knowledge and power of Carrick, not the knowledge and power of the Blue Shrike. The Shrike had a terribly limited reconstructive power, the power only of a computer programmed to repair itself during missions.

The godchild was not meant to be controlled. Carrick frowned as he realized it was actively killing itself. It was not allowing itself to remain in the same vessel as Carrick and the Shrike, but how was that possible? They were all the same person now.

No. And yes. Just as Carrick for a short while bore the power to remake the world through the godchild, it for a short time had the power of human free will which it derived from Carrick, a power which, Carrick now realized, it had not previously possessed. By devouring the godchild, Carrick had given it the power to take its own life.

He was suddenly clenched with fear. Only one hour. That was the time he had remaining. He could feel it. That was the time he had left to change the world, and he needed to do it in a way that would make a lasting difference. All the things which Old Oak had wished for were not possible in only an hour, and would not last so long as humans had their way with the world.

What power did he have? He could fly quickly. He could not teleport. Flying would have to do.

He crouched and leaped off the surface of Dirt. A set of tough ceramic plates like an exoskeleton formed around Carrick’s body as he flew, protecting his flesh from the force of the wind.

He flew over the highway, which lead from the site which had once been a prison to the town in which he had once lived, in a matter of minutes, but did not pause as he veered and changed course toward the nation’s capital. He passed millions of people as he blurred over towns and cities, feeling very faintly the empathic resonance of the writhing masses of civilized humanity below him. Pain, anger, joy, despair, contentment. The negative emotions were far greater in number and pulsed like a black mass of evil, but the others, the loves and the joys, speared upward through the darkness like tiny points of light which could not be suppressed, smaller and less numerous though they were.

Carrick finally came to the capitol building and into the airspace protected by the government's defense network. Plasma missiles burst from their batteries to intercept him as though he were an enemy aircraft, but he simply converted them into atmospheric molecules which dispersed in a ring as he passed through them.

He decelerated faster than would have been possible for any human, his inner organs evolving to completely resist the pressure, and evaporated every wall in his path until he arrived at the desk of the prime minister.

The man was tall and bony, cleanly shaven, immaculately dressed, hair cut short and neatly in a golden halo around his head.

He stood stock-still behind his desk, clearly caught in the middle of something, as security personnel all around Carrick whipped out their weapons and shouted at him to stand down.

Carrick knew he must look inhuman. He was covered from head to toe in a bony exoskeleton that surely gave him an alien appearance. A pair of glossy dark lenses covered his eyes, and he could see in the reflection of the window behind the president that streaks of blue appeared briefly before disappearing now and then on the surface of his armor, as though it were the movement of blood under skin.

“Who are you?” the prime minister asked. Though clearly terrified, his voice was admirably level.

“You can call me the Blue Shrike,” said Carrick. “I was once a prisoner in your Wasteland. I was born human, but I'm more than that now. I have the power to destroy and remake entire worlds, but that is not what I want.”

“Then what do you want?”

“I demand you reform your policies. Wipe out corruption in every city, establish a bill of human rights which will better protect the common people than the travesty you have now, and leave the former inhabitants of the Wasteland to their devices, guard and prisoner both.

“I have a copy of the bill of rights adopted by the foremost races of humanity which live among the stars. You will adopt these. It will be difficult. It will seem nearly impossible, in fact. For generations you will believe it to be absurd injustice, but there will come a day when your children's children's children will grow up having only known a better world than this one, and it's for that day that you will work now.”

For Carrick had within his mind the fundamental doctrines which were loaded onto every Paraceum computer. Among these were the political orders to which every civilized human world was required to adhere. If humanity managed to return to the stars, they would be forced to adopt them inevitably. He decided it was best they start now.

Carrick broadcast this new bill of human rights on a radio signal which was picked up by every station within a hundred miles. All would hear it, eventually. The prime minister would not be able to keep this a secret.

The prime minister's personal computer picked up the signal and displayed a readout, which the saw and read. His face shifted into an expression of shock. “You’re insane,” he said. “Even if I wanted to do it, there would be no way that—”

Carrick cut him off by raising a single finger.

The grand capitol building, the glorious height of human architectural achievement, transmuted for a moment into fine dust which, at Carrick’s whim, flew upward into the sky and disappeared.

More than a thousand men and women stood suddenly surrounded by air, suspended with all their furniture and all the accouterments of government, from the basement, ten floors deep, in which political dissidents were tortured to death with chemicals and electrodes, to the tip, ten stories up, where the congress of the people were in session to discuss something that would likely never benefit the common people in any regard.

“I am the power that made this world habitable,” said Carrick. “I can render it ash again, if I see fit. I will remain in every computer to watch you, and if you do not comply, I will know and will correct your error.”

In an instant he restored the capitol building, nullifying the cataclysmic air displacement which the laws of physics dictated must follow such an event, and put his hand upon the prime minister's computer. He called upon the part of himself which was the ideologue virus which was the Blue Shrike and invaded the government's internal communications network. Then, having taken ownership of their firewalls, he spread out to every computer connected to the national data network.

Carrick would indeed be watching. And at the moment, he indeed had the godlike power he implied. He would lose that power in less than an hour's time, but he did not share this detail.

The prime minister was white-faced and sweating. “Watching? Where will you be?”

“Gone,” said Carrick. “I have other things I need to do. I may return in six months’ time, or a year, or perhaps only a week. You'll never know. Know only that there is no weapon on this planet capable of stopping me. You could plot and plan for a thousand years and create nothing which I could not destroy with a thought. Remember that, Prime Minister.”

He turned, and made to leave, and though the prime minister saw what was happening and shouted for them to stop, every security officer immediately unloaded their weapons as soon as their ward stood outside their line of fire.

The first wave of bullets shattered Carrick's armor and shredded his organs.

Then Carrick’s body absorbed the metal and the plasma slugs and adapted his armor to the force, regenerating organs within his body and adding a new one capable of absorbing the force so that the heavy rounds no longer even staggered him. He stood there for several moments until the security officers saw their assault had no effect and stopped firing.

Carrick did not even bother addressing the incident. He simply lifted off and returned to the town where he had once lived, leaving a shattered world behind him.

***

Carrick descended in his ordinary outfit as he approached the town, hoping no one could see him. He made the last portion of the journey to town on foot, then manifested a few coins and used them to board a bus to the Family's headquarters.

They were located on the top floors of a legitimate department store, which they likewise legitimately owned. A middle-aged woman, Marta, who was the store’s manager and a respected member of the Family, gaped at Carrick when he stepped through the door of the lobby.

“Carrick! What on Dirt are you doing here? We heard there was another Accident, it's all the news has been talking about, but you're here! I can't believe you managed to escape beforehand.” She looked him from head to toe, clearly puzzled. “But you look so healthy, child! You must have been getting along pretty well there. Had everyone eating out of the palm of your hand, didn’t you?” Her voice sobered. “I sincerely hope you didn't have anything to do with the Accident. All those poor men just trying to live out their lives. Some of them used to be ours, you know. Did you meet—”

Carrick put a hand on her shoulder. “Marta, I'm fine, and no one is hurt. It's a very long story, but I don't want to talk about it right now. I'm glad I got to see you. Is the Boss in?”

She seemed as though she would protest, but instead smiled. “I'm glad I was able to see you, too. I assume you'll be leaving us, then. Still being a wanted man and all. Yes, the Boss is on the top floor. He's having a meeting about the aftermath of the Accident. I imagine there are a few opportunities for business that just opened up.”

Carrick nodded. He passed her and made his way to the elevator which was central to the whole store. He stepped inside, thankfully not sharing it with anyone else, and put his hand to the computer console, bypassing its ordinary security measures and commanding it to go directly to the top floor.

An eerie sense of banality struck Carrick as he ascended. He had stood in this exact place, moving up or down, thousands of times before. He was dressed again in his favorite outfit, and even leaned back against the elevator’s rail as he often did. In this moment, he felt entirely like Carrick and not at all like the Blue Shrike.

For the briefest moment, he entertained the dream that things could go back to the way they used to be.

But no. He didn’t want that. “The way things used to be” was a constant fight against the necessary barbarity of organized crime, the life which he had embraced and yet which he could never fully accept.

Carrick by now could not feel the presence of the godchild. He still had access to its tremendous power, the well which felt limitless, but he had lost its ability to create life. He was now a weapon and nothing more. Perhaps that was all he had ever been.

The elevator finally chimed its arrival, and Carrick stepped through the door as it slid open.

He found himself in the familiar meeting room, found himself staring at the the seven highest members of the Family as they sat around an ornate table of polished wood. Their expressions were ones first of suspicion and annoyance which shifted immediately to disbelief as they saw who it was before them.

The Boss rose slowly from his seat at the head of the table, his words drifting off mid-sentence. He was only in his mid-forties, but was weathered with stress and care far beyond that. His eyes were hard, and underneath his perfect suit was a diseased liver.

He was the man who had given Carrick a new life, the closest thing Carrick now had to a father.

“Hi, Boss,” said Carrick.

“Carrick,” said the Boss. He took in every detail, clearly arriving at the same conclusion as Marta, that Carrick had taken over the operation of the Wasteland. “I suppose you're here to explain that whole second Accident thing. What's your spin on it? You have a plan ready for us?” A genuine smile appeared on his face, one of pride and of a gamble that had won a jackpot. “I told you guys, I said he’d break that prison before it broke him!”

But Carrick couldn't smile in return. He shook his head. “That figure who appeared before the prime minister just a bit ago, that was me. And I can't stay around much longer. I am... not entirely Carrick anymore. I don't have a place here.”

The Boss clearly didn't understand. “That whole thing was you? Some kind of hologram, some kind of technology you rigged up from the stuff you found in the Wasteland? I always knew you were a smart kid. And Carrick, you always have a place with us. Even if you're standing here trying to tell me you're starting up another Family, unless you're putting a gun to my head and telling me you're going to rip everything away from me, I'm telling you, Carrick, that you will always have a place with us.”

“No,” said Carrick softly. He looked around at the faces at the table. More than a few were moving hands below the table, clearly reaching for weapons. Whatever the Boss might say about how a traitor might have a place among them, they didn't agree.

“I'm not here to take over. When I say I'm going, I mean I'm leaving the planet. I just came because I wanted to say thank you for everything you've ever done for me, from taking me in, to giving me all that I could ever want or need, to making sure I ended up in the right place in prison. I gave a demand to the prime minister, but I give you a request.”

At the mention of leaving the planet, the Boss immediately looked concerned. “You all right, Carrick? Hit your head? Have some kind of heavy metal poisoning? Come on, let's get you to the hospital right now. Don't worry, we've got some fake ID, there'll be no risk of you getting hauled off somewhere and—”

“My request,” interrupted Carrick, “is that you finally do all the things I've been asking for years. Put a stop to the drugs and to any kind of torturing. I wish you would go more or less legitimate, but I've always been happy that you kicked the law in the face when it tried to hurt the little people, and I definitely don't ask you to stop doing that. But I don't demand any of this like I did with the prime minister.”

He couldn't take it any longer. For his own sake, he had to make a point of turning and leaving and never looking back.

So he covered himself once more in armor, moved to the nearby security window which could withstand the force of a heavy grenade, and tore it from the wall in a single motion. He placed it next to the wall and stepped through into open sky.

Carrick turned his fall into a glide, and that into a swoop as he flew higher and higher, leaving the town behind, leaving air and the gases of the atmosphere, bursting energy behind him in a surge that allowed him to escape Dirt's gravity, allowed him to be the closest thing to a human that had left that planet in countless generations.

It happened in what felt like seconds to Carrick. He turned and looked down at the vast and gentle curvature of the planet Dirt beneath him, watched how its blues and browns reflected the light of their beautiful sun, saw how only one of the four great continents of Dirt were covered in green. He wondered why the terraformer had never altered enough land for humanity to spread out further.

He also looked deep within himself and found one single spark of intellect from the godchild still remaining. “Please,” said Carrick, “let me do this one thing. Let me do what we were born to do.”

Though it had not been asked, the spark of intelligence twinged with annoyance through Carrick's mind. I didn't terraform any more because they never earned it. There were protocols in place. They needed to prove themselves worthy of expansion, and they never did.

“I don't care if they're worthy or not,” said Carrick. “If we're leaving, I want to give them this gift.” He smiled. “I suppose I'm happy to see that you didn't give up entirely on life,” he said.

You can't control me, said the terraformer.

“No,” said Carrick. “I don't want to. If you say no, we'll leave. It's only a request.”

The terraformer was silent for a minute.

We will do it, it said at last. But watch what you ask. I'm not like the virus. I'm not a tool.

“Then let us give life,” said Carrick within his helmet, and spread out his arms as though to embrace the whole world.

And so every corner of the planet was consumed with vibrant life, with plants and with animals, with habitable places to allow humanity to spread further, and it gave forth abundant life for generations.

Then Carrick, who was the Blue Shrike, and yet not quite the terraformer, turned and flew into the stars to seek his birthright.

The End