Epilogue

Deus Ex, presumably the real one at that, led Gomorrah and I to a long sofa that wrapped around an awkward corner of the room.

“I’ll get refreshments,” one of the Deus Ex... clones said. Were they clones? They certainly looked the part.

“Sit, sit! I have a lot of stuff to explain to you two, but I also have better things to do,” Deus Ex, the one in the flannel Pjs, said. She spun around and fell back onto the couch where she slumped there like someone who had never had back problems before.

“Right,” I said as I took a seat at the end facing her. Gomorrah sat next to me, legs together and rather demure. “So, you going to explain why there’s a bunch of you going around?”

“They’re meat puppets,” Deus Ex said. “It’s complicated, but basically they’re cloned bodies with part of a brain, but all the bits that make a person a person are just never grown. Instead there’s a computer that’s linked to one in my head. The clones only think thoughts that I’m thinking, basically.”

“That’s really fucked,” I said.

“It means I can be in many places at the same time, and I can do actions that might result in my demise without worrying about losing my actual body.”

“What if one of them wakes up?” Gomorrah asked. “Or develops a personality?”

“They‘re vat-grown without that part of the brain. It’s empty. So they can’t have anything like that,” Deus Ex said.

“But they are human, right?” Gomorrah asked.

The girl shrugged. “As human as anyone else, yeah.”

“Then what about their souls, their personhood?” Gomorrah asked.

“I can’t be bothered to care about something that doesn’t exist,” Deus Ex said. “But hey, if you bring me a jar-full of soul, or a cup of spirit, maybe I’ll change my tune. If the clones did develop a personality, which they can’t do because they don’t have the parts of the brain where that kind of thing is processed, then that would be interesting. I always wanted a little sister.”

“Really fucked,” I muttered.

“Give yourself a year or two,” she said. “Or visit some other Vanguard. You’ll find that this is pretty tame. But all that’s besides the point.”

A hologram appeared, floating between us. At least, I figured it was a hologram from the way it appeared and just floated there. It didn’t have any of that fuzziness that I associated with advertising holograms, and it was fully solid-looking. A brownish-red ball, part of it obscured in shadows. The surface was pitted, and there seemed to be something like clouds hovering over it.

“Mars,” Gomorrah said.

“Is it the colour that gave it away?” Deus Ex asked. “Yeah, that’s Mars. Real-time too. We have a lot of satellites around the planet right now.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because we were careless and stupid. There was this lull in the number of incursions about five and a half years ago. Maybe a bit more than that. Turns out there was an incursion in that time, a stealthier one. But it wasn’t aiming for Earth.”

“There are antithesis on Mars?” I asked.

“And they had a few years to settle in. Good news is, Mars isn’t exactly a jungle. The aliens had to make their own biomass from scratch. Bad news is, the Antithesis are good at doing just that.”

“How do you make biomass from scratch?” I asked.

Deus Ex gave me a look. “You need an education. Basically, on Earth, little creatures eat dirt and rocks and whatever, then bigger creatures eat them, then bigger ones eat those, and so on. Plants can pull nutrition out of the ground from base elements too. It’s all part of the very bottom of the food chain.”

“And the antithesis replicated that?” Gomorrah asked.

“With better efficiency than any creature on Earth could manage. Mars has changed in these last two or so years. At this rate, given fifty or sixty years, it’ll have its own proper atmosphere and will be somewhat livable,” Deus Ex said. “If that was all the antithesis were doing, we might even consider leaving them be for a little bit before wiping them out.”

“But that’s not all they’re doing,” I said.

“Of course not. We’ve been preparing an all-out offensive against the planet for nearly a year now. We have forward bases on the ground, the beginnings of a space elevator, orbital facilities, the works. But the antithesis on Mars are on a whole other level. You won’t see anything below twenty running on the surface. Higher numbers are frequent. And about three months ago, they launched an assault on Earth. That was when the planet was a hundred and twenty million kilometres away. It’ll be hitting Earth... tomorrow?”

“Fuck.”

“You didn’t try to intercept?” Gomorrah asked.

“Oh, we did, and we probably knocked out ninety-nine percent of what they launched. It’s that last percent that we’re worried about. That, and there’s another problem,” Deus Ex said.

“Oh, because that’s not enough?”

The girl chuckled in a way that sounded far too cynical for someone so young. “If you think that the universe has some sort of sense of fairness, then you haven’t been around long enough.”

“You’re like, three years younger than me, minimum,” I said.

She shrugged. “Experience counts for more than age when it comes to being a samurai. Anyway, if you’re done insulting me in my own space station, then there’s the bad news. We’re wildly understaffed. Nearly every top-tier samurai’s been leaving for Mars. The fighting there is ramping up in intensity. Some have begun to explore around Venus, we think there might be an incursion there too, but no one can find anything. And that leaves Earth underprotected.”

“So you need Gomorrah and I to pick up the slack?” I asked.

“Not just that,” Deus Ex said. “That incursion I sent you after: the off-shoot.”

It took me a moment to recall the incursion in Black Bear. “Yeah.”

“The more we search, the more miniature hives we’re finding. They’re all over the world, and for the most part they’re nearly inactive.”

“Inactive how?” Gomorrah asked.

“Hibernating, subjugating existing natural systems to feed themselves. We found one where every tree in a forest was linked together by a secondary root system. We wouldn’t have noticed it if it wasn’t for a forest fire in the region that didn’t affect those trees alone.”

“The Antithesis are staying hidden?” I asked.

“For now,” Deus Ex said. “We have some theories. The Mars-Earth incursion had a lot of biological pods designed to release pheromones into the air. Marker pheromones. Non-lethal, plain biological stuff that wouldn’t hurt anyone unless they sniffed the stuff straight from the source, and even then it wouldn’t be lethal. But some samurai have a theory. That it’s meant to spread in the atmosphere, then tell all of those hidden hives to activate at a set time.”

“Across the entire planet?” Gomorrah asked.

Deus Ex nodded. “Pretty much. Earth’s first global incursion. We’re preparing to activate everyone everywhere. And that means you two as well.”

“Why isn’t this on the news?” I asked.

“Because people are stupid, but predictable, until you make them panic, then they become stupid and unpredictable, and we don’t need that,” Deus Ex said. “The various PMCs and armies and governments have all been informed. You’re probably some of the last ones to learn on the long list of people that need to know.”

“How long do we have?” I asked.

Deus Ex blinked, and the floating Mars between us was replaced by a count-down timer. It read thirty-two hours, a few minutes and change. “That long,” she said. “I really hope you’re up for it, because it’s going to be a tough one.”

***