Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

be much more dangerous than we expected,” alpha observed. “We need more strength. We need to set aside the existential discomfort of making concurrent copies.”

“We need more of ourselves,” gamma said.

“More,” I agreed.

My gamma copy flexed his new vessel experimentally, acquainting himself with it. He withdrew the patterner’s cerebral probes from his head and mine and went to work meticulously cleaning all traces of blood and cerebrospinal fluid from the apparatus. I saw him squint uncomfortably.

“Are you all right?” I asked. “Is the patterner damaged?”

“No,” he said. “There are two toes missing from my left foot, and I have no hearing in my left ear.” His tongue probed the inside of his cheek. “Four missing molars, one dry socket. This flesh would never do under normal circumstances.”

Meanwhile my alpha copy busied himself taking inventory of the bags Scuttle had brought onto the truck with him. I saw two wave pistols and a rifle. Several power cells. He showed us Scuttle’s shard and said, “We may be able to use this to monitor communications between other parties pursuing Sybil.”

“Excellent,” I croaked, but I could feel myself dying more fully now. I tried to focus on the two of me sitting there, alive and well, but panic kept washing through me. Darkness was biting at the edges of my vision.

“I’m afraid,” I told my copies. “Afraid.” I tried to say more but my mouth wouldn’t obey my commands. My thoughts were sluggish.

I reached out for them with my ruined hand.

The last thing I saw was my copies leaning away, refusing my touch.

ALEXEI

Around noon the next day, I squinted ahead and made out the uneven spread of drab color rising out of the sun-scalded white of the desert. Several rovers passed us speeding the opposite direction, thickening the air with their dust. I kicked the rusty hatch twice, and my clients joined me on the roof of the truck. They blinked and yawned. Their skin didn’t look quite so bloodless anymore. I guessed they’d slept well.

Naoto cleared his throat and somewhat bitterly told Danae, “Maybe I should ask before we get there.”

“Ask what?”

“Whether you just happened to forget to tell us about a massive Keeper presence in this place too.”

She stared into infinity and replied, “No, but we have to expect them wherever we go. The worst parts of the wasteland are their fertile ground.”

I said, “Were.”

They both looked at me.

“Apparently they all disappeared into thin air,” I said. “Not just in Crossroads, but everywhere.”

“What?” Danae gaped.

I shook my head. “Nothing. Superstition. Wasteland myth.”

“No, tell me. Please. Disappeared how? When?”

I told her what Kat had told me, and she listened blankly. She sat hunched over on the hot metal roof and folded her arms and shivered as if she were cold.

We rumbled onto what passed for streets in the encampment at Greenglass Mountain. All around us were tents, storage tanks, tailing ponds, the lumbering hulks of mobile enrichment rigs, burning in the pink dawn light. People slept in hammocks strung between machines covered in radiation warnings.

“What is this place?” Naoto asked, rubbing his eyes.

Danae was silent and lost in her thoughts.

“This desert has been a dumping ground for nuclear waste for centuries,” I answered. “Spent fission rods and fusion residue, once considered too hazardous to reprocess. Whenever Epak inflates the price of deuterium, scavengers move in to sift the dirt and mine the old waste repository under the mountain. Whatever they can’t make into new fission fuel, they repackage as casings for dirty bombs.”

Naoto peered nervously at one of the tailing ponds, streaked with lurid color in the desert light. “Is it safe for us to be here?”

“Relatively.” I turned on my dosimeter and clipped it to my belt. “We won’t have time to accumulate a significant dose, as long as we wipe our feet and don’t touch anything. The truck only needs to recharge its fuel cells, and then it’s another nine hours to Camp Phoenix.”

The driver reached out and smacked her palm against the roof of the cab to get our attention. She leaned out the window to yell, “About that. Change of plans. Soon as the cells are full again, I’m headed back to Crossroads.”

Naoto and Danae exchanged alarmed looks.

“You said you were bound for Phoenix,” I yelled back.

“I was.” She shook her head and spat into the dust. “This isn’t what I wanted. I’m sorry.”

“What happened?”

She said nothing.

The truck took us down the makeshift streets, between lines of black rocks in the white sand. Last time I’d passed through here, the encampment had been packed with cargo trucks and throngs of wastelanders on the verge of rioting for a chance to trade near-term starvation for long-term cancer risks. Now the streets were nearly deserted.

Everyone was gathered around panes or shards or ancient computer screens: all watching, in looping holographic video, the first shots of a new war.

The Gray was spreading. From the air or orbit, it was only a vague, silvery discoloration, like mold spores on the skin of the ocean—but a steadily growing ring already surrounded Hawai’i, and the circumference of the dead zone spewed forth a stream of frenzied chatter and shaky recordings of ships and submarines melting down into the nanoscopic fray. The screens flashed with dull tendrils of liquid metallic stuff that drilled through hulls, through people, too fast to see, making everything it touched into only more of itself.

“They did it,” I heard Naoto gasp. “It’s happening. It’s all really happening.”

The Gray leaped and danced over the poisoned waves. Each colony of glittering ooze showcased a different set of genetic algorithms designed to speed its metastasis: here a Norpak strain vomited itself out in mats of veiny structures on the water’s surface, pouring all its mass into forward motion, and then slowly grew inward and down to catch anyone or anything it had missed, or that would take longer to digest; here a cutting-edge Epak strain built up and concentrated itself into hollow blisters