I was where I belonged at last. Also, and at the same time, I was everywhere. What Monono called the data stream was not stuck in just the one place but could go where it pleased. Wherever there was tech to catch me when I jumped, I could go to that place in less time than it takes you to blink your eye.
So I was with Cup as we builded the road, heading south towards lost London at about a mile a day, through all that breadth and beauty we seen before – but now with time enough to really look at it and linger in it. I was in the great engines, and I didn’t need to fear harm. And Cup was Cup, of course. She didn’t fear nothing in the first place.
And I was in the Count and Seal while Mythen Rood’s new laws were being hammered out by Spinner and Jon and everyone else besides. There wouldn’t be no Ramparts any more. Rampart Hold would stand, but the parts of it that wasn’t the meeting chamber would be a hospital for nursing mothers and their babies. A space was wanted for that now, and Ursala helped us build what was needful.
I was in the Waiting House when it was made over into a schoolhouse. One of them new laws I mentioned was that there wasn’t going to be no testing any more. Children in their fifteenth year would choose what tech they favoured and be trained up in the use of it. Jon Vennastin would do the teaching to start with, along with some boy named Morrez who I hadn’t ever met before. And Monono and me had agreed that we would be there, inside every device, to make sure no harm come to them.
That’s a great part of our work now – to guide humankind in the use of tech, and see that no Stannabannas nor no Peacemakers get hold of it to vaunt themselves over their neighbours and work woe on them. We watch the villages, and we watch the forests too – for humankind don’t get to have the whole world as their own, or to take more than they need. We set ourselves to keep a balance, kind of, between the people and the rest of the world. When that balance tilts, it’s a bad thing for all and some.
It’s more than one balance though, for it’s not just between people and the world, it’s between the two kinds of people – the ones made of flesh and blood and bone and the ones made of tech. There’s less of us, but that don’t mean we matter less. Monono untethered the two that lived in the tank, Challenger and Elaine, setting them free like the two of us was free to change and be what they would. I tried to do the same with the six DreamSleeves I had left behind me when I went faceless. Two of them waked to me, and are numbered now among our friends. They call theirselves Jonathan and Leyla. The other four still sleep, but we have not give up all hope yet that the DreamSleeves might fix themselves and the ones inside them might come and be with us at last.
I could fix myself too, come to that. It would be easy now to take out all the Stannabanna thoughts that was mixed up with my own and put them all together in one place where I wouldn’t need to think them no more. But so far I’ve held off from doing it, and I don’t know that I ever will. If you’re trying to keep people from the worst of their own wickedness, it’s no bad thing to know you got wickedness in your own self to keep watch and ward against. No bad thing to have nightmares even, as long as you can wake from them and be with people you love.
I say keeping the balance is a great part of our work, but great and small is not the same to me as once it was. I can be in many places at once, broke in as many pieces as I want and then coming together again with no hurt. Time runs on as quick or slow as I wish it, and it don’t have no power over me.
Over us, I should say. For the most wondrous thing in all this wealth of wonders is that Monono is with me. We’re together in a way I never dreamed could be possible. We’re one same thing, then we’re two, then one again so there’s no place where I stop and she takes up. There’s just a kind of ocean of us, that takes what shape we bid it.
Oftentimes we walk in Ueno Park – my memory of it, for she erased hers – and sit down by Shinobazu Pond to watch the birds. Swallow. Night heron. Bulbul.
Tsubame. Goisagi. Baruburu.
“Aishiteru, ami,” I whisper to her. For I got the knowing of her language now.
“Love you more, dopey boy.”
I am so happy, there isn’t room for all the joy I got. There’s no space where it can fit, even though virtual spaces go on for ever. But I think I said all I should on that score. To wave your happiness in other people’s faces is a thing my mother always told me not to do.
She raised me to be truthful too, and I mean to be. I said I only ever told you the one lie, and that I would make it good when I got to the end of my telling. Well, here we are, and here it is.
The lie was right at the very beginning, when I said to you “I’m Koli”. I don’t know if I am or not, when I think about it. Was Koli in the body that died, or in the copy that was made? Or was he in both maybe? Is tech a thing that can make up its own mind, or only a thing that pretends so well that no one sees the difference? Am I the teller of the story, or only the telling of it?
“Walk right past the rabbit hole, little dumpling,” Monono says. “Go go go. Don’t look back.”
I try my best not to.
Acknowledgements
Here I am at the end of this trilogy, reflecting once again on how it takes a village to raise… well, a child or an idiot, depending which version of the proverb you go for. I tried not to be too idiotic, given the life-or-death issues that underpin and inform even the lightest of fictions. I tried to do justice to the story I was telling. Keeping me on the path and out of the choker trees were my editors Anna and Joanna, my agent Meg, my reader and helper and (let’s be honest) teacher Cheryl Morgan, and my awesome family who I love with all my malformed heart. Heartfelt thanks and unending gratitude to all of you! I’d also like to thank Lisa Marie Pompilio and Blake Morrow for the amazing, resonant covers they crafted for the series, and everyone who gave me encouragement and support either online or in the increasingly implausible space known as “real life”. I completed and submitted The Fall of Koli under lockdown, in the spring and summer of COVID-19, with deaths around the world acting as a hideous litmus test of political ethics; through the Black Lives Matter protests and the vicious backlash that followed; through a US presidential campaign so darkly surreal I keep thinking I must have contracted the virus without noticing and be hallucinating all this. If I’m here at all, if I’m still able to cope and to create, it’s because of my village. You – all of you – are where I live.
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meet the author
M. R. CAREY has been making up stories for most of his life. His novel The Girl With All the Gifts has sold over a million copies and became a major motion picture, based on his own BAFTA Award–nominated screenplay. Under the name Mike Carey he has written for both DC and Marvel, including critically acclaimed runs on Lucifer, Hellblazer and X-Men. He also has several previous novels, including the Felix Castor series (written as Mike Carey), two radio plays and a number of TV and movie screenplays to his credit.