I gazed up through the dome's seamless glassy roof, up into the bluish Aeolian sky, the two brilliant suns reflecting onto the myriads of spherical white capsules, grey transporter ships, and twisted multi-tentacled warpcraft streaming over my head. Above them sat the old, black moon and the milky stream of the interstellar highway.
All the billions and trillions of dollars spent on decades and centuries of life extension seemed a vainglorious waste when an entire world could be ended in a storm of hellfire from the sky.
I knew Henry since days before we were cryogenically frozen and flown away from Earth.He had a big bold smile, white teeth. He was, among other things, a worldbuilder. He built software that built virtual realities. Worlds for the billions of people who lived lying on their backs, sucking on a feeding tube, gazing into virtual reality, pretending that they were somewhere else. Pretending they were having sex with beautiful people, or finely-crafted androids. Pretending they were back on Earth, back when war was something that young men with swords and shields went off to do, rather than something that emerged from the void, swarmed over your planet or asteroid or space station, and obliterated you.
After we defrosted, we lived in a circular apartment together in a big orange tower on the outskirts of a dome in the southern hemisphere of Aeolia. The view out of the dome stretched into a big, dusty, red horizon. I liked it.
There were two more: Michael, an American man who lived in the body of a fox with a big bushy tail, and Lucille, a blonde woman of unknown origin who had replaced most of her skin with transparent tubing, and most of her muscles with carbon fibre. They both moved out after and Henry and I got together. It got awkward. And with all the new construction, it wasn't like we were short for space.
Henry, too, had a thing for body modification. One night, I walked into the apartment after a long, gruelling day's flight around the moons of Cyderia to be met by a stout middle aged Latina in a flowery yellow dress, plopped on the couch watching a great space battle on the holotable and smoking a cigarillo.
"Who are you?", I asked. The woman looked up.
"My name is Cynthia", she said in a raspy, crackle.
"Where is Henry?" I asked.
"Henry is gone", she replied. She strutted over to the window, sassily, gazing out over the huge yellowish desert that lay beyond the dome's outer wall.
"Gone? Where did he go?" I asked.
"Henry left for Earth", she said,
"Earth?" I asked. Nobody went back to Earth. I knew he kept, in the closet beneath the stairs, a big black box that contained a swarm of bots that could perform surgeries on a whim, installing desire modification chips and slicing and splicing up his body into new appearances. He would spend hours entranced in a mist of surgical anaesthetic, as the robots evened out his skin, and grafted up his bones. A month ago I had been met by a muscular black man. A month before that, a slender elfin creature without a gender or (I later discovered) genitalia. Sometimes he even pretended to be Michael. I always played along with his weird games. He got a kick out of it. He said that physically becoming someone else far surpassed anything he had ever felt in virtual reality.
I sighed and I strutted up to her and kissed her neck. I never learned what Henry originally looked like. Normally, he took the form of an incredibly hairy ginger man with a great bushy moustache and Darwinian beard. But I didn't even know if he was biologically male or female. I never really got used to this bizarre identity shifting. Did that make me old fashioned?
His personality didn't change, though. He was demanding, whiny and selfish. He shouted when he didn't get his way. But it was good sex, when he bothered to pay as much attention to me as I tried to pay to him.
That was the spirit of the age. We had each been raised by spacefaring dreamers who told us endlessly to dream big and build big. To become the master of our own destiny. To chase our bliss.
Still, we both preferred to fuck each other than fuck automata. There was, at least, a thrill of a chase. Especially with Henry's constant identity changing. Plus, the androids always left an artificial taste in my mouth, just like printed food did. A nasty metallic twang. That's why I kept a greenhouse beneath the apartment balcony, where I grew meat and vegetables. Food you grow yourself at least has flavour.
And virtual reality? It always seemed flat and dead, no matter how much I calibrated the hardware. Maybe I envied those who could live out their existence gazing into computer-generated infinities. But it never did it for me. I could never transcend this plane of existence.
Henry left for Phrygia sixteen months ago to work for the one they called Lord Jonas. Worldbuilders were paid big. Yeah, there were plenty of AIs who could do it, but for authenticity, a human touch is critical, even if most of the work is just defining the work that the AI should do.
"I'll be back before the total eclipse," he told me, referring to the event, two years hence from that day, when the twin stars — the blue one, and the red one — would perfectly align in the sky.
I watched from the microscopic camera installed in Henry's eye as he gazed up around the soaring towers and through the huge dome's seamless glassy roof, up into the black pits of space. Sirens rang out around the city. I felt his heartbeat whir and splutter as a huge swirling mass of twisting and multiplying black and white and silver drones decloaked out of the darkness.
First came the disc-shaped carriers, the glowing bellies of which exploded with the unfurling coils of the wiry-limbed attack drones. The dome's defensive cannons opened fire almost instantaneously, unleashing a swirling barrage of red, green and blue pulses streaking across the sky. Yet the wave advanced, even as huge grey defensive gunships lifted up from the dome's base, firing off towering waves of scintillating colour. The metal kept uncoiling, eating up the empty space, a great curtain of iron shooting out imperceptibly quick pulses of blue laser fire. And in a matter of seconds, the dome's defenses were swiftly and unceremoniously burnt up.
I watched as Henry scrabbled down the marble-floored corridor of his apartment, past a bronze pair of symmetrical lion statues, toward a tiny white spherical escape pod. His breath was heavy. His hands were sweaty. He dived in, slouching down at the holoconsole. The door shut with an ethereal whoosh behind him, and the autopilot kicked in. In the sky above the glorious orangey towers soared thousands upon thousands of those tiny flickering capsules. Some carried panicked inhabitants, while others carried memories, data, artefacts. Anything that needed to escape. I listened to Henry's breath as the pod activated its electromagnetic cloak, melting into thin air. This was a last gasp defence mechanism against annihilation.
The dome ruptured with a mighty crack, and I teared up. I knew where this was going. The wave of metal continued inward, colliding with the towers, ripping them up floor by floor into a foggy brown haze of constituent chemical components. Food for the robot swarm. A single three-foot drone could enter a virgin system and mine up hundreds of domed megacities and billions of drones in less than a week. We lived at the mercy and protection of bloodthirsty oligarchs. The people who controlled the drones.
Henry's ship flew downward toward the ground, away from the carnage. His breath got heavier as the wave broke down the towers, consuming the remaining human inhabitants, their homes, their robots, their AI. Henry became increasingly panicked, his eyes darting around, his breath gasping.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity of gazing into the swimming, swirling void, a succession of angular red-eyed probes at the head of the swarm latched onto Henry's pod, ripping it apart. The visuals went dark. All I heard was crunching metal, a timid whimper, a blood-curdling scream. And the transmission ended. I bit my lip.
Henry died three systems away. Fifteen light years. The swarm could be here in a week.
I didn't know when it would come. But I knew I had to leave. I would fly out toward Delbequia, two systems in the opposite direction. There were warm worlds out there, with earthlike gravity. Worlds with real beaches and palm trees that didn't rely on holograms or synthetic landscaping. It would mean taking my chances in an escape pod in the bleakness of outer space.
Nobody was stopping us leaving. The city was in a state of disarray. The guardian council imposed a state of emergency. I opened an app and summoned a space cruiser rental. It would be here in two hours, and I would be away. I had nothing to pack. I notified the guardian council that there would be a vacancy.
The rumour on the infostream was that Lord Jonas — the builder of the interstellar highway — was dead, killed on Phyrgia. Slaughtered by the same fleet that took Henry. His five-hundred year old dominion smashed to pieces by the goddess, or so she pretentiously called herself. The woman with the metal face. She had offered him the chance to submit and live. And he refused.
