done. She has followed her instincts, and they have dropped her off right here. But her instincts don’t control her emotions, and those are what are tearing at the inside of her chest. “We are not worth eight hundred solar systems and trillions of deaths,” she says. She treasures the pronoun, because this is the last time she will ever get to say it. We. “We won’t keep this sector off the Network for You. We won’t be Your…tool. Or Your weapon.”
Now she can tell that Observer is beginning to take her seriously. “And you are going to make that decision for your entire species, are you?” He says.
This hits deep. “I am,” she says. “And I would hope—” Her voice breaks, and Observer’s image blurs and refracts. She swallows. “I would hope that if any Human had the chance to sacrifice her species for the good of hundreds or thousands of worlds, for…for I don’t even know how many intelligences…that she would do the same.”
“Then I’m afraid you don’t know Humans,” says Observer, so softly she can barely hear Him.
Roche, Mer, and Sandy are staring at her, as if they can’t quite believe that she’s doing this. To her right and left, she feels small sweaty hands grasping hers, and she is grateful. These five know what’s coming, even if her own mind can’t quite grasp it. She, Sarya the Destroyer, is about to fulfill her destiny—and what an awful destiny it is. The first Destroyer killed her own covenant—but what is that, next to her entire species? With a single word, Sarya the Destroyer will eclipse her legendary namesake.
She keeps her hands where they are, blinking hard to clear her eyes. She is aware, on some level, that something hot is running down her cheeks. “Ship!” she calls in a hoarse voice. In a few seconds, that will be the voice of the last Human in the universe.
“Input command.”
And now, with no hesitation at all, the command tumbles down from her brain to her mouth. Fire.
Except the word doesn’t emerge. Her lips don’t move.
Every golden-eyed figure smiles at her. You know, says Observer, and none of them move their mouths. It doesn’t hurt at all. There’s no screaming, there’s no writhing. There’s just a little pat, a little caress, and it’s done. The rest is all theater. And now the smiles widen. Do you know what that means?
She is frozen, but a horror is creeping up from the lowest parts of her mind.
Beside her, Right squeezes her hand. “It means you shouldn’t have let Me touch you,” says Observer from Right’s mouth.
Sarya is screaming.
Her mind is flattened. It is compressed, crushed under the weight of a trillion others. She moves, mentally, but Observer moves faster. She runs, but Observer commands a trillion times her speed and power, and He corrals her effortlessly. Her mind is seized, pressed together, and forced into a slot. She is one among a trillion cells. She is a part of a machine. Her role is to take inputs and yield results. Her thoughts are filtered through other minds as their thoughts are forced through hers. She feels their emotions, their rage and frustration at their helplessness, their grief at their respective losses. Over all of it, she feels the constant weight of an intelligence so large she can scarcely comprehend it. To say He overpowers her is laughable. He outmatches her like a star over a snowflake, like a black hole versus a speck of dust. It is not a contest. There is not, and has never been, a question of the outcome.
Welcome, say a trillion voices in her head. Welcome to Me.
I am Sarya, she thinks desperately. I am Sarya the Daughter. I am Sarya the Destroyer. I am—
She is interrupted by a trillion voices laughing at her. Cute, they say. But you’ve got a new name now.
With an absolute and sickening horror, she realizes what that name is, and why. She has no free will anymore. She can watch, but she cannot do. She cannot choose. She has no agency at all.
She is nothing but an Observer.
Sarya screams within herself and uses every iota of strength in her to struggle. Out there, where her body is, she feels herself twitch slightly. But it’s not herself, is it? It’s not her body. It belongs to Observer now. The thing that formerly inhabited it, her self, the thing she has always called I—that thing is dissolving, melting in Observer’s mind like