The End of All Things Read online

  I was still not comprehending well, and absent anything else was numbly carrying on with the conversation, waiting for the whole thing to make the slightest bit of sense to me.

  What do you need me to do? I thought.

  “Pilot your ship.”

  I need my mouth for that.

  “No you don’t.”

  How will I talk to the rest of the crew?

  “There is no other crew.”

  At this, something surged in my brain—something like a memory, but not an actual memory. A thought that I used to know what had happened to the crew of the Chandler, but now I didn’t, and that whatever had happened wasn’t good.

  Where is the rest of the crew, I thought.

  “They are dead. All of them.”

  How?

  “We killed them.”

  My sense of panic was back. I knew this was right, that the voice was telling me the truth. But I couldn’t picture how it had happened. I knew I used to know. I desperately wanted to know. But there was nothing in my mind that could tell me, nothing but an approaching wall of dread.

  Why did you kill them? I thought.

  “Because they weren’t needed.”

  You need a crew to run a ship.

  “No we don’t.”

  Why not?

  “Because we have you.”

  I can’t operate an entire ship by myself.

  “You will or you’ll die.”

  I can’t even fucking move, I thought, exasperated.

  “This will not be a problem.”

  How do you expect me to pilot and operate an entire ship when I can’t even move?

  “You are the ship now.”

  And then suddenly the complete incomprehension was back.

  Excuse me? I finally thought.

  “You are the ship now,” the voice repeated.

  I am the ship.

  “Yes.”

  I am the Chandler.

  “Yes.”

  What the fuck does that even mean?

  “We have removed your brain from your body,” the voice said. “We’ve integrated your brain with the Chandler. The ship is now your body. You will learn how to control your body.”

  I tried to process what I was being told and failed miserably. I could not imagine a single element of what I was being hit with. I could not imagine being a ship. I couldn’t imagine trying to control such a complex machine all on my own.

  And if I don’t? I thought. What happens if I can’t learn how to control it?

  “Then you will die,” the voice said.

  I don’t understand, I thought, again, and I imagined that the complete helplessness I felt was entirely obvious. Maybe that was the point.

  “It’s not important for you to understand,” the voice said.

  To which some part of my brain immediately said, Fuck you, asshole. But it didn’t appear to have been sent—or at least the voice didn’t respond to it. So I said something else to the voice instead.

  Why would you do this to me?

  “This ship needs a pilot. You are a pilot. You know this ship.”

  That doesn’t require taking my brain out of my goddamned skull, I thought.

  “It does.”

  Why?

  “It’s not important for you to know.”

  I disagree!

  “It doesn’t matter that you disagree.”

  It matters that I won’t pilot the ship. I won’t.

  “You will or you will die.”

  I’m already a brain in box, I thought. I don’t care if I die.

  I thought this was an excellent point, until a spasm of pain started.

  Remember that headache? That was a twinge compared to this. It felt like my entire body was turned in a seizing electrical cramp, and not even the wonder of feeling like I had a body again distracted me from just how much I hurt.

  Objectively, it can’t have gone on for more than a few seconds. Subjectively I think I aged a year through it.

  It stopped.

  “You do not have a body, but your brain does not know that,” the voice said. “All the pathways are still there. All the ways that your brain can still make you experience pain are ours to control. It’s very simple to do. All the settings are already programmed. If we were so inclined we could run them on a loop. Or we could simply leave you in the dark, deprived of every possible sensation, forever. So, yes. If you will not pilot and operate this ship, then you will die. But before you die you will learn just how far and how long your death can be delayed, and how much pain you can feel between now and then. And I assure you that you will care.”

  Who are you, I thought.

  “We are the only voice you will hear for the rest of your life, unless you do what we tell you.”

  Is that the royal we? I thought, not to the voice but to myself. I don’t know why the hell I thought that. I think being made to feel like I had a power station’s worth of electricity run through my nonexistent body might have made me a little loopy.

  The voice didn’t respond.

  Which was the second time that happened, when I didn’t think directly to the voice.

  Which was interesting.

  What happens if I do what you tell me? I asked, to the voice.

  “Then at the end of it you will get your body back. It’s a simple exchange. Do what you’re told, and you will be you again. Refuse and you will die, in pain.”

  What is it you want me to do?

  “Pilot and operate this ship. We have already told you this.”

  Where and for what purpose?

  “That comes later,” the voice said.

  What do I do now? I asked.

  “Now, you think,” the voice said. “You will think about what your choices are, and what the consequences of those choices will be. I will give you a day to think about it, here in the dark. It will be a long day. Good-bye.”

  Wait, I thought, but the voice was already gone.

  * * *

  So for the next day I thought.

  First thought: Definitely not dead. No need for a religious crisis. One small thing off the list of things to worry about. It was the only one, but anything would do at this point.

  Second thought: Whoever it was who had me had captured my ship, killed my crew, taken my brain out of my body, and now expected me to run the ship entirely on my own, for their own purposes, and would kill me if I didn’t.

  Third thought: The hell with these people. There was no way I was going to do anything for them.

  In which case they would be more than happy to torture me just for the fun of it. As I knew from experience. Which was an actual consideration I had to take into account.

  Fourth thought: Why me?

  As in, why did they take me and not someone else? I was third pilot of the Chandler. I was literally the newest crew member. They could have picked anyone else from that ship and they would have made a better choice, in terms of knowing the ship, how it works, and what its capabilities were. I was not the obvious choice.

  Identify your pilots.

  The sentence barreled out of my subconscious and stood in front of me, daring me to give it some sort of context. My memory was still spotty; I knew it had been spoken, but not by whom, or when. I would need to rack my brain to figure it out.

  The thing was, I had time.

  And in time an image popped into my head: a creature dressed in black, knees going the wrong way, giving the order to Captain Thao and shooting Lee Han when she questioned the order.

  A Rraey. The Rraey had taken me. That answered the question of who these people were. But it didn’t answer the question of why me. The captain hadn’t identified me as a pilot. She hadn’t identified anyone as anything. Someone else did that.

  Secretary Ocampo.

  Suddenly the image of that bastard pointing me out blazed into my consciousness, clear as if I were reliving the moment.

  And then all the rest of it came back too—every blank spot in the memory
suddenly filled with hard force, almost painfully jammed in.

  I had to stop.

  I had to stop to grieve for the crew of the Chandler. To grieve for the few friends I had made there, and for everyone else who I did not know but who did not deserve to die, just as I did not deserve to live instead of them.

  It took some time. But as I said before, I had the time.

  I took it.

  And then when I was done I started fiddling with the problem again.

  Why was I taken? Because Secretary Ocampo knew me. He’d been introduced to me even before we’d gotten to the Chandler, we took the shuttle ride over, and I came to him when I had questions about our change of destination.

  He knew I was a pilot, but he also knew me as a person—probably the only person he knew on the Chandler other than Captain Thao and Vera Briggs.

  It’s possible he picked me simply because he knew I was a pilot. He knew there were other pilots on the ship—he’d probably seen Bolduc on the bridge—but I was the first that came to mind. Because he’d met me. He knew me. Or thought he did.

  So maybe he didn’t just pick me because I was a pilot. Maybe he picked me because he knew me as more than a random crew member. Maybe he saved me because there was a personal connection there.

  And wasn’t there? Didn’t I feel like I could go to his stateroom and ask him about the orders he’d given the captain? Wasn’t he at least a little impressed that I had figured it out?

  So, yes. Maybe he picked me because he knew me. Maybe because he liked me. Maybe he even thought he was saving me. Maybe he thought he was doing me a favor.

  Picking you to have your brain plucked out of your body is not my idea of a favor, some part of my brain said.

  Good point, brain, I thought, ignoring that I was now speaking to myself. But the point is not what I thought of it, it was what Ocampo thought of it, and me. I wasn’t flattering myself that I was important to Ocampo—I thought back to him telling Commander Tvann it was up to him whether or not to tell Vera Briggs to stay out of the lifepods. If Ocampo was like that with his own assistant, who he’d worked with for years, he wasn’t going to care much if I got uppity and troublesome.

  But until then, there might be something there to work with.

  What? And for what purpose?

  I didn’t know yet.

  That wasn’t the point. The point was that I was now listing my potential assets. And one of those assets was that Ocampo, for whatever reason, picked me to pilot the Chandler—to become the Chandler.

  So that was one thing.

  Another possible asset: what Ocampo didn’t know about me.

  He knew my name. He knew my face. He knew I was a pilot.

  And … that was it.

  Which meant what?

  It could mean nothing. Or it could mean that when they hooked me up to the Chandler’s systems, they wouldn’t know how much I already knew about the systems. Or how to use them.

  Don’t get too excited, that other part of my brain said. You’re a brain in a box now. And they can see everything you do. They’re probably looking at you thinking all this right now.

  You’re depressing, I said to that other part of my brain.

  At least I’m not talking to myself, it said back. And anyway you know I’m right.

  It was a fair point. I had to accept that leaving me alone with my thoughts could be part of a test that I was being given, to see how I would respond. If they were able to follow my thoughts right now, I had to accept that they would use that information to decide what to do with me—kill me or torture me or whatever.

  But I had a feeling they weren’t. I had a feeling that the day alone with my thoughts was for another purpose entirely. It was to dominate me. To terrify me. To remind me how alone I was and how helpless I was. How utterly dependent I was on them now for my survival.

  And you know what? They would be right about that. I was alone. I was dependent on them for survival. I was terrified.

  But I wasn’t going to be dominated.

  Yes, I was isolated. Yes, I was scared.

  But I was also really, really pissed off.

  And that was the thing I decided I was going to work with.

  If they were listening to me when I was thinking this, they could kill me at any time. In which case they could get on with it, because otherwise they were just wasting my time and theirs.

  But I didn’t think they were.

  I don’t think they thought they had to.

  Which was another possible asset. They assumed they had the upper hand in dealing with me.

  Again, fair enough. I was a brain in a box and they could kill me or torture me any time they wanted. That’s a pretty good definition of having the upper hand.

  But the fact was, they needed me.

  They needed a pilot for the Chandler. They had me.

  And they had only me. Everyone else in the crew they had killed off, suffocating them in those lifepods. They were so sure they had the upper hand with me that they didn’t bother with a spare.

  Which said to me either they had never done this before, and had no idea what they were doing, or they had done this a lot, and the response by their pilot victims was always the same.

  I thought about the Rraey saying that their engineers could repair the ship and get it going again because this was something they were used to. I thought of their efficient way of dealing with the crew, to cow them and get what they wanted.

  It was clear this wasn’t something they were new to.

  They had done this before. And maybe were right now doing it with pilots other than me. They expected the pilots to be desperate and to be willing to do anything to get their bodies back. They were so used to the response they didn’t really think any other response was possible.

  So no, I didn’t think they were listening in on me right then. I didn’t think they thought they had to. I could be wrong, but it was an assumption I was willing to go on.

  That gave me free time to think. And plan. Another asset that I had. For now, anyway.

  Then there was the final asset I had:

  I knew I was already dead.

  By which I mean I knew that their promise to return me to my body was almost 100 percent certain to be complete bullshit. There was no way that was going to happen.

  I knew that because they killed the crew of the Chandler. I knew it because of what Ocampo said when I pleaded with him to send the skip drone back to Phoenix Station to save the crew. I knew it because of how they lied to the crew to lead them willingly to their deaths.

  They had no intention of putting me back into my body. I was as close to certain as I could be that my body was already gone—incinerated or tossed into space or put into a stew because the Rraey had a reputation for eating humans when they had the chance.

  I thought about my body in a very large pot, simmering.

  I actually found it blackly amusing.

  Whatever was done with it, my body was history. I was sure of it.

  I was also sure that whatever it was that Ocampo and the Rraey—or whatever it was they were working for—wanted me to do, when I was done with it they would flip whatever switch they had and simply murder me then.

  That is, if whatever mission they were going to have me do wasn’t already a suicide mission. Which I suspected it probably would be. Or at least, they wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep if I didn’t come back.

  I was under no illusion that my fate wasn’t the same as that of the rest of the Chandler’s crew. It was just a question of when. And the answer of “when” was: when they were done using me for whatever it was they had planned.

  Which meant that I had whatever time existed between now and then to, in no particular order, find out who they were (besides Ocampo and a bunch of Rraey soldiers), discover what they had planned, learn how to stop them, and kill the hell out of all of them.

  All of them, that is, except Ocampo. If there was some way to bring him back to Colonial Union
space, I was going to do it. Because no matter what else, I think they were going to be very interested in what it was he was wrapped up in.

  And because he didn’t deserve to get off as easy as him dying would let him.

  You’re pretty ambitious for a disembodied brain, that other part of my brain said again.

  I’ve got nothing else to do, I replied. Because it was true. All I had right now were my thoughts, and time. Lots of time.

  So I took it.

  * * *

  At some point I think I slept. It’s hard to tell when you have no outside frame of reference to let you know if you’re actually asleep.

  I do know I didn’t dream. I was okay with that.

  And at some point the voice came back.

  “You have had time to think on your situation,” the voice said. “Now it is time to make your decision.”

  The voice was right: it was time to make my decision.

  Not whether or not I would decide to stay alive. I’d already decided that one early on.

  What I was deciding now was how to act in front of the voice.

  Should I be cowed and afraid? Should I be defiant and rebellious, but still willing to do what they wanted? Should I just remain silent and do only what the voice told me to?

  This was an important decision because how I responded to the voice now would establish what our relationship was and possibly what would be allowed me in the future—and what I might be able to get away with.

  If I picked the wrong attitude that would have negative consequences. If I was too complacent maybe they would simply treat me as the machine they made me into. Too rebellious and I’d spend all my spare time getting zapped. Neither was what I wanted, especially getting zapped. Once was enough.

  “What is your decision?” the voice asked.

  I have questions, I thought, suddenly. Which wasn’t how I was expecting to go, but, okay, let’s see what happens next.

  “Your questions are not relevant,” the voice said.

  Let me rephrase that, I said. I’m going to do what you want. I’ve decided that. But it would help me if I knew a few things as well. I understand I can’t force you to answer any questions. But it would help me be helpful to you if you would consider answering them.

  There was an actual pause here. “What are your questions?”

  I have three, I said. Which again, was news to me, but I could come up with three questions, right?