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 ice in water. She is being violated, systematically and thoroughly—and because she is part of Him, she feels His pleasure as He roots through her and takes what He pleases.
A village, under a sky made of trees—
A child, learning to walk in the grass—
A stone, in a pool by the river—
Observer sighs. Oh, that’s good, say a trillion voices.
Sarya, with her mother and her father and a fire—
Sarya, chasing glowing insects in the grass—
Sarya, watching her mother and father being eviscerated by Shenya the Widow—
Observer moans. Oh, say a trillion voices. Exquisite.
And now the memories accelerate. They flick through her mind almost too quickly to see—but not too quickly for Observer, who welcomes them into Himself with a cacophony of pleasure. She feels His every reaction as He shreds her mind and takes every part of her. She feels His appreciation for a childhood that spanned lightyears outside the Network. His delight only heightens as she relives her adolescence on a water-mining station. And now the blur of memories slows again as it nears the present. Riptide, with Eleven and Ace and Roche and Mer and Sandy…the quick detour into her mother’s memories—which Observer consumes with passion—and then Observer stops. A single image hangs frozen in His massive mind.
An infinite sea, a dead sky, and a gleaming stone in her hand.
She is part of His mind now, which means His shockwave of astonishment passes through her as well. It takes an eternal fraction of a second for the realization to spread across His entire enormous self, out from this point to His farthest cube.
Impossible, say a trillion voices.
Sarya fights, but it makes so little difference that Observer doesn’t even notice. She focuses every splinter of her strength on hiding that particular memory, and it makes absolutely zero difference.
All this time, breathes Observer, staring at the image. That’s how It was beating Me.
Sarya’s head turns against her will. Her eyes move without her control. Through the haze of holograms and her own furious tears, shocked beyond thought, she watches as her own body moves without her permission or intent. She sits forward in her seat. “Hey, ship!” she says to her absolute horror.
“Input command,” says the ship.
“Stand down all weapons,” she says, and she says it cheerfully. And then she feels herself grin. “And prepare the faster-than-light drive.”
“All weapons systems standing down,” says the ship. “FTL drive online. Please input spacetime re-entry coordinates.”
She hears its answer through more than one set of ears. Through Observer’s eyes, she sees her own hair rise up off her shoulders. She looks like a goddess, hair floating in the light of the holograms that frame her. Only with Observer’s many senses could one tell that her eyes are not her own. They are Observer’s. She stares at them from the outside as the mouth moves. “No re-entry,” says her mouth, and it smiles. “I doubt we’re coming back.”