“I want to talk to you about loss. Loss, and revenge.”

The Butcher had not moved when she entered the room, had not reacted to her presence in any way she could detect, but he raised his head as she spoke.

She wondered how close Andreas had come to hitting the button at the movement. The others had protested when she announced she was going back in to talk the Butcher, but the fact that Eu was on her side seemed to calm them faster than would otherwise have been the case. She hoped this would continue.

“You survived all this time. Survived when they did not,” Keri said. “That could drive anyone crazy. How are you still alive when the others… the others like you are gone?”

The Butcher’s eyes narrowed, pure silver.

“Gone? Slaughtered would be more accurate. Their own bodies tearing themselves apart when not torn apart by the hands of another. Yet it is we who are called the Butchers.”

His voice was mixed with anger and resignation.

“Have you been awake all this time?” Keri asked. “You look young. Some kind of stasis?”

She felt foolish even as she said it. No such technology had existed even at the height of the fourth technological revolution - the Body Butcher era, as she had known it all her life, though she now knew that it had been termed the former by those that lived through it.

“No, I was awake for all of it. I watched it all fall, and have been watching ever since. I could do nothing but watch as everything we built turned to dust and debris, as rust coated all we had made, and as the memory of those I knew was turned into abomination and horror.”

“How..?”

The Butcher cut her off.

“And now you go farther than we ever dared. Now you dream of uploading your very beings, of leaving the flesh behind entirely. You go further than we were ever allowed.”

The Butcher chuckled, though the sound was so alien that she took a few seconds to realise it. It was spiteful and metallic.

“So that’s why you’re chasing us? To stop people uploading? We don’t even know how many will choose to do it!”

“You’ve felt it, haven’t you?” said the Butcher, as Keri saw herself reflected in its silver eyes. “I can tell. You’ve changed, even in the short time since we spoke. You know.”

The shine of the eyes of the augmented man faded, metallic colour draining away, turning first matte then gradually revealing brown irises and dark pupils.

“Did you know that the vast majority of organisms can sense magnetism? Bacteria do so, as do most of the few mammals and birds that still live. As can I. Yet base humanity has no such sense. To lose this sense, to me, would be as if I lost my eyes: and would you choose to live blind if you had seen?”

Keri thought she understood.

Restrictions on the length and usage of sphere time had always been a source of frustration, of anger, for her and everyone she knew, but the desperate, gnawing feeling of need after disconnecting from the hardpoint was orders of magnitudes greater than anything she had felt before. Even though the insanity that was her current world was keeping her distracted, she felt the hunger; she didn’t want to think about how she would feel on an average, empty day.

“You think everyone will choose to upload,” she said.

“Everyone, or close to everyone.”

“So it’s revenge? You want to stop them, to get revenge against the children of those who hurt you?”

If she thought this would faze him, she was wrong. Instead, what he said in response fazed her.

“Perhaps. Perhaps it is only revenge, but someone wants me to take it.”

She stared, not knowing what to say, and looked into the Butcher’s now human eyes. The sadness from before remained, but there was something else in there. A light she had seen in the eyes of others before him, the same light that flickered in the eyes of Kilgore and Pearce. The light of burning purpose.

“Someone?” she asked, blinking. An image rose up in her mind. “The other Butcher, right? There’s another one of you alive, isn’t there?”

This was the first time she had seen any emotion on the Butcher’s face aside from dull tiredness or anger. He looked… confused. Only for a brief second, but it was there.

“Another?” he said, and she heard disbelief in his voice. Disbelief, and hope.

Careful, she told herself. She remembered again that some augmentations were developed specifically for the user to mimic such tells in order to mislead and deceive.

“You haven’t seen him?” she asked.

Again, suspicion on the face of the Butcher.

“I was the only one who survived. Once they destroyed every source of antirejection drugs on the planet, I was the only one who could.”

Keri suddenly knew where he had been.

“The space elevator. That’s where you were. All this time, you’ve been on the space elevator.”

The Butcher paused, then nodded.

“It is what my augments were designed for, what I had dreamt of since my parents brought me to its base and I saw it towering towards the stars. As early as I could I altered myself to manipulate large mass and harness inertia in zero gravity, to repair machinery smashed by space debris, to mould and bend and shape the materials that were supposed to take us from this rock and out towards the stars. And I was trapped there when everything fell apart back on the surface, unable to do anything but watch as the world tore itself apart.”

“You had a supply of antirejection drugs?”

“A self-renewing source, installed just for me. Viable for a practical eternity, but only for one. Even had I been able to tell the others, I could not. To share with another would have merely reduced the supply to a level that would cause rejection in both of us.”

“So that’s how you survived.”

Keri saw in her mind’s eye an image of the Butcher looking down from far above the earth, alone and impotent as everything he knew fell apart.

“You say you were trapped?”

“I was. All this time, able to receive almost every broadcast but unable to broadcast myself, prisoner in an inactive facility, only living until the day the recyc-function finally gave in to entropy or an untracked piece of debris dealt enough damage to shatter my prison and spill me into cold vacuum. Or so I thought, until the elevator activated itself.”

“After all this time?”

“After all this time.”

There was a long pause in which each watched the other.

“What could activate it after so long?”

“That I do not know.”

Keri sighed.

“You know we're not going to let you have the data sphere,” she said.

It was the one thing of which she was certain.

“That is unfortunate.”

“You think you can stop us?”

“You think you can stop me?”