Victory Garden
by Steve Schlich

Take a stroll down Main Street. On second thought, take the alley. For war machines such as yourself, good recon is the key to survival. Especially when you're new. You've been in this place a month, long enough to forget its name—but not long enough to feel comfortable yet. Except for the various Things That Go Bump, you're quite alone. It's been like that since the last human died. Sometimes you can almost believe that it's better this way.

So, reconnaissance. And caution.

You spot the D12 and make sure that he doesn't spot you. Standard Operating Procedure. He's methodically plundering an antique dumpster, the centerpiece of a blind alley littered with dusty, rusty detritus. He's working a laser torch mounted on the end of one of his arms. It slices through the dumpster's thick realsteel like a bayonet through cardboard. The machine is probably looking to patch a wound in its own hide.

Your basic D12 is a three-foot cube with locomotion, sensor, and weapons systems sunk into all six sides. Rounded edges, heavy rivets, bluish welding reinforcement. They look like animated steamer trunks. But they're relentless: all-terrain plunder-and-salvage machines that don't care which side is up. Logic-link a half dozen and you can pick clean a square kilometer of fresh battle wreckage before the smoke clears.

Lone soldiers do not engage war machines like the D12 for laughs. They're heavily shielded, usually with the same realsteel this one is cutting from the dumpster. And most have defense logic that's still operational. They'll feign defeat and then slice you in half when you move in close.

But you must attack. Left to complete his job, the cube will destroy your memory cache.

You found an ancient ammo box, empty and discarded during the heat of battle by some human who no longer cared. Light realsteel. You loaded it with all the memory modules that you have no room for in your head and stashed it at the bottom of that dumpster. You thought those mods were safe. The location was innocuous and nicely shielded against the prying sensors of low-level war machines…just like the one that's breaking into it anyway. Damn!

Your attack odds seem decent. You weigh your advantages and disadvantages. You have:

+ The element of surprise. He doesn't know you exist. Yet.

+ Superior strategy logic. What passes for his brain might take up 15% of yours.

– Faulty tracking hardware. Your readout says fifty meters to the dumpster but experience tells you the distance is more like twenty.

+ Superior mobility. He's all thunder and lightning, but not very quick. You have the finesse and agility.

– Plasteel armor. Tough and light. Encases you like tough, bulletproof skin. Sure. One good swipe with that torch will reduce it to candle wax.

+ Your good looks. At a glance you appear human; that might pause the cube for a few valuable microseconds. He's quick enough to stop a human—and knows it. In battle, you're much more than human.

– Inferior firepower. You're seriously outgunned. Disarm him quickly, disarm him well, or lose.

Evaluation completed. You choose your opening shot and lob a phosphor flare into the crumbling brick wall opposite the D12.

BOOM! Momentarily blinded, the cube reacts as expected—slamming his most vulnerable side against the closest wall and extruding weapons from his other sides in the classic defensive posture. But by then you're within five meters, and you know which side you have to hit. The trick will be getting him to reveal it.

Brickwork hail effectively jams the D12's sensors to you. You hit his torch arm with a mini and leap over the window ledge just above him, timing your crash through the glassless framework with your grenade's explosion. The torch drops to the alley floor sparking at its severed elbow but otherwise undamaged. He won't be peeling any more dumpsters with it, but you might if you survive.

The D12 is already blasting back down the grenade's trajectory. Nothing wrong with his tracking hardware. But he still doesn't know where you are. That won't last. You have to take him out quickly.

He keeps his vulnerable back to the wall, but now you're on the other side of it. That's a great advantage. But your only angle of attack is back through the window—a counterbalancing disadvantage. You contemplate it too long. He comes for you while you're still priming a steel-jacket grenade.

Oh, hell. The explosive will tear a nice hole in him, but it'll tear even more out of you. He was supposed to stay outside. You've got two seconds before the steel-jacket goes off.

The D12 is perched on the windowsill, reconning. You're close enough to touch each other. He extends his torch arm, intending to do just that. He hasn't realized yet that the torch is no longer on the end of it. He waves the stump at you and then pauses for an incredulous micromoment when nothing happens. You have one second.

The steel-jacket is in your left hand. You slam it into him. The move works—almost. He tumbles back out the window again. But he grabs your wrist and starts hauling you out the window with him! You can't let go of the steel-jacket now. You brace yourself against the window frame, the D12 dangling like a climber on a rope. Much more of this and he'll pull your arm off at the shoulder. The steel-jacket explodes.

The D12 jumps away with the force of the explosion and bounces off the opposite wall of the alley. He caroms between the two walls and the dumpster, blasting away indiscriminately. You scramble out of range and examine what's left of your hand.

Nothing. The hand, wrist, and half your forearm are gone. Alarms go off throughout your system, but nothing shorts out. No pain, of course. Hardly a useful sensation for a soldier. Now you're as disabled as the D12 had been. Vulnerable.

The wall that your opening shot struck comes down on top of the D12. He's slowing down out there, but he won't die. You wonder how long before the noise and fireworks draw some other cube's attention.

Finally he lies still on the alley floor. You jump out of the window directly into the dumpster to check your cache, half-expecting the cube to revive and blast your foolish plasteel ass to oblivion. He doesn't. But other, undamaged cubes might show up at any time. You don't know how many might be in this burg; you've never seen any until today.

Your ammo box cache is unharmed, but there's no time to check the integrity of the chips inside. No response from the D12. And no sign of his friends yet, if he has any. Can you be that lucky?

The steel-jacket tore a good-sized hole in his side. Silicon smoke curls up and out of it. You drag him behind the dumpster and set about salvaging. With only one hand it's slow going.

Your efforts yield a few serviceable items: the severed torch, of course, and a half-dozen unfused memory mods like the ones you were protecting. And most important, some rechargeable power mods. You slip the mods into the ammo box, tuck it under your right arm and the torch under the still-remaining plasteel biceps of your left, and jump back through the window.

The building has a basement where you feel relatively safe from detection. With your back to a corner, you examine your plunder with infrared. The torch will take a minimum of reconfiguring to draw power from your left arm. With effort, you can splice its logic directly into the finger circuits.

The power modules are a nice bonus. Plug-compatible. And the memory mods? You'll have to pop them into your head to see if they hold any data worth keeping.

You open your head and remove the only mod you dare to be without in your present situation, the messed-up tracking. While you work on modifications to the torch and your arm, you fit the plundered memory mods one at a time into that empty socket and sift through the cube's memory.

Most low-level war machines have excellent recon systems; they record in far more detail than their carriers can ever process. From this cube's memory you learn about the refuge in the basement of the hospital.

It's a safe room, a fortress of some sort. Has to be. The D12 suspected something, but didn't know exactly what to look for. He patrolled each floor methodically, probing here and sniffing there, recording it all with the boring sameness of a documentary about security in a town with no crime. You nearly wipe it, but training makes you play the recording to the very end.

The cube's explosive demise may have corrupted the visual to the point where playing it back is like viewing telemetry through bad interference, but the readings are intact. They tantalize. He couldn't leave the basement floor of the hospital. There was an vague power emanation coming from somewhere in the basement. Even the dumb D12 sensed that much, but he couldn't find the source. He kept prowling up and down the corridor, trying to home in, and failing. Finally, he gave up the search. Memory flags are set to come back and check out the corridor periodically.

You sift through all the cube's memory mods, looking for flags that might refer to yourself or to other D12's, but your attention span is like the cube's. You keep going back to the hospital basement.

A stretch of corridor wall there is impregnated with realsteel. Very subtle work. The cube perceived the realsteel as ordinary reinforcing. But from the detail he couldn't interpret, you know otherwise. That's your biggest advantage over a D12: you can reason, cross-link a series of what-ifs, interpret data crowded with unknowns.

You know something that the D12 could never infer ...that there's something valuable behind that wall. Something that someone took great pains to hide. If that something is a power source, you must have it.

The hospital is just a few blocks away, but under certain conditions crossing that distance might take hours, even days. Today you saw your first D12 in this area. Are there more? Although brief, your battle was loud. Even deserted, the streets may have eyes and ears. This is not a world for the unwary.

If the D12 does have any friends in the vicinity, you figure that they'll show up by the time you finish retooling the laser torch and attaching it to your left arm—or not at all. None do, so you set out for the hospital.

Hospital. Now that's an outmoded concept. Especially since the only things that move around on Planet Earth these days have more use for a repair shop. Not that any of those are functioning, either. Except for you and the occasional D12, not much functions at all.

The streets are clear, but you keep to the shadows and move through buildings whenever you can. Five years ago, this city was so crowded with humans that you couldn't walk two meters without bumping into someone. It wasn't exactly idyllic, the great crush of people scurrying here and there, ignoring each other, but there are days when their absence echoes all around you in a deafening silence.

There are no residents now but one broken down plasteel soldier and God knows how many D12s; no interactions beyond mechanized skirmish and salvage.

You reach the hospital without incident. Deja vu. You feel like you've been here once already, despite the poor visuals from the cube's recording. Patient rooms on the second through seventh floors, thick with dust and rotted cloth. Labs and operating rooms on the first floor. And in the basement—-

But that can wait a little longer. There might be a few items in the main operating theater that you can salvage.

You find some of what you're looking for: a cabinet of surgical tools. Micro laser scalpel. Power bone saw. Microwrenches. Spun plasteel sutures. Other items that you might use for fixing your parts. If you ever locate any spares. Maybe one of the labs has a prosthetic hand you can adapt.

You lay your plunder out on a gurney and try wrapping it up in what's left of a cloth sheet. But the fabric rips and crumbles when you heft the package. Shreds of it fall to the floor, brown with age...

Be truthful. Brown with blood. Years-old human blood. You can imagine the wounded, almost hear them groaning and bleeding themselves to death on gurney after gurney while doctors, weary from sleepless hours spent up to their elbows in blood, fall farther behind.

They built their surrogate weapons of war well. So well that we fought their battle down to the last man. And well beyond. The question why? throbs inside you again, even though you know, have always known, the senseless answer.

The Human Race's problem was that its members had both heads and hearts. Intellect vs. emotion. Knowledge vs. belief. On the individual level, the handicap of being drawn in two directions at the same time was surmountable by most. But on the level of the masses, it ripped the race apart. The result: war.

War. Record the motivations on lily-white bandages of cotton and gauze: religion, race, greed, ignorance, fear. Drop them into a combat helmet and draw them out like chances. Each will emerge dripping with the warm red blood of soldiers and innocent civilians, the eternal losers in this grisly lottery. War.

You were once a soldier, young and strong and full of righteousness. You went to war. You fought. You died. You were reborn. Years later you are still a soldier, young and strong and full of—loneliness? No, you deny that. Soldiers aren't built with feelings, physical or psychological. You are a war machine. An artifact, cold and efficient and deadly. You have no ties to the late, great Human Race.

Confession: deep in your chest you have a thing that was once human. But it's not a heart. It's your brain. Your control center, the intricately programmable organic multiprocessor that keeps you alive in a world shrouded by death. A vague tie to flesh? An emotional component? No. You deny all connection to the human who owned your brain. Doubtless the information is stored away somewhere inside that organic grayness, but you don't even remember the person's name. Let the dead rest.

Let it all rest. You are a soldier. You have a job to do.

The basement greets you like a familiar cocoon. It's as nondescript in reality as it was on the recording: a seemingly endless maze of plastic walls broken every two meters by a vertical reinforcing strip. But you know—or think you know—what's behind the west wall. You adjust your sensory pickups and move slowly down the corridor, playing back the D12's memory in sync with your own realtime examinations.

Something is being shielded, that's obvious. The east wall is standard alloy plastic while the west is heavily impregnated with realsteel. The D12 had considered plundering that metal, but gave up when it calculated that the job would involve more effort than the value of the salvage.

You won't give up, however. What's behind that wall? At the very least, a safe haven if you can find the entryway. Or create one. But what else...?

You don't worry about it as you scour the wall for irregularities. The work is time-consuming, with constant readjusting of sensors for various materials, but after an hour you find something. It's an area with a heavier concentration of silicon. Some gold in there, and platinum. A logic lock? Yes!

You use the plundered laser torch to burn a tiny hole in the plastic. Memory flag: Reseal it later; even a dumb D12 can find a hole. It still feels odd to have the torch on the end of your arm instead of your hand. With a probe, you tickle the lock and suddenly the entire wall between the two vertical strips moves in and then slides to the right. The entry!

Your soldier's training takes over. Don't just waltz in... You ease through the opening with your torch arm ready and a mini in your right hand. Nothing moves. Behind the wall is a room, maybe 10 meters square. There is indirect light, and a computer terminal designed for humans. Doorways on all three interior sides lead to other rooms. A complex, then.

Guarding your flank, you find the logic lock mechanism on the inside of the entry and trip it. The wall panel slides back into place and the outside corridor is seamless again.

A sound from one of the other rooms makes you jump. Something's in here ...a D12 waiting in ambush? Some other mechanoid you don't know about? Careful! One foolish move and you're a pile of salvage on the floor. Suddenly you wish you hadn't been so hasty about resealing your exit.

There's no time to hide, so you move next to the door and wait for this new adversary to come through. He doesn't. There's no movement in the next room. He knows you're there and he's waiting for you.

You boost your audio and can't believe your processors. Respiration. And a heartbeat! That's not possible. This mechanoid thinks he's laying a clever trap. But you know that all the humans are long since dead. Aren't they?

Finally you hear him coming again, whatever he is. You're ready.

A weapon pokes through the doorway. You don't stop to examine it. You bring your torch arm down on it and it falls to the floor. Mini grenade ready, you leap through the doorway—

Good God, it is a human! A male. You're dumbfounded. He hits you with something but it bounces off. He's yelling and backing away, convinced that these are the last moments of his life. He trips and falls on his back.

You can't decide if you should move in on him or stay back. You don't want to kill him, but does he have some weapon that could kill you? You pin him down and try talking to him.

"Stop! Do not attack. I will not harm you. Do you understand?"

It's been years since you used your voice module, years since there was any need. The voice comes out flat and lifeless. You must sound like a horror to this human. But he seems to understand. You ease up but he stays on his back.

"Are you the only one?" you ask him.

He considers this for a moment and then nods his head slowly. Yes. But you can read the fear in his eyes. And then you really see him for the first time. He's a matchstick man: gaunt, emaciated.

"How long have you been here?"

He understands the question but has no answer. How long has it been since you've seen a human alive? Three years? He must have been in there at least that long.

You survey the room. Gesturing to the other doors, you ask, "How big is this place?"

His eyes go wide at this question, and finally he chokes out an answer.

"Go ahead, war machine. Kill me! No one else here. No food. No hope. Nothing!"

He's in bad shape, delirious. But he knows what he's saying. And from the vital signs you can monitor, you know he's lying. Now that's a mystery. You look around for something soft to place under his head. He doesn't move.

So this is Humanity's Last Stand: a decaying man locked into the basement of a decaying building. You're not supposed to—you're a soldier—but you feel something. No time to examine that now.

You do some exploring. There are a total of five rooms.

– The room you entered. It is dominated by a large conference table. On it sits the computer terminal. Crude, but with little effort it yields its information.

– Sleeping quarters for four people. No trace of any others, though. Just the one here now.

– Exercise room with mats, a Nautilus machine, mirror, shower, and toilet. Lots of empty boxes, presumably the supplies. The cupboard is bare.

– Office. Another computer terminal, an ancient mini, and communications equipment. But no one out there to call.

– A small surgery. That surprises you at first. But after all, it is a hospital. And presumably this man is a doctor.

Survival for only four? The resources that the computer system channels into this limited space are considerable. The water system draws from a deep underground river. The air comes in from numerous sources and passes through a molecular filter. The power is geothermal.

That's a great deal of equipment and expense for just four people. Is there more here than meets the eye?

You carry the human to one of the beds, gently, and cover him. The computer says his name is Robert Collins. He coughs painfully and eyes you. "Why don't you just kill me and get it over with? I'm dying anyway."

"If I wanted to kill you, you'd be dead now. Don't worry. You'll be okay when I find the antibiotics you need. All you've got is an infection. You won't die unless it goes untreated."

"I know how to treat a simple infection!" he spits at you. "I haven't got the means! The drugs are gone. Used up long ago."

"There are drugs upstairs."

Robert looks at you as if you're crazy. "I've been down here for four years. Sealed in. I wouldn't survive a trip outside."

"You're probably right. But I will. I came from there."

He's gotten used to your blurry monotone. Talking with you seems to put him at ease. He's begun to think of you as more than a machine. Maybe he'll trust you.

"Why would you do that? You were built for killing. You're just a damned weapon."

So much for how you think he views you. "I was human once," you hear yourself say. "I had a mother and a father. And I still have a human brain."

Robert nods silently, measuring you. "Were you a man or a woman?"

"I can't remember," you lie. You were a fe—a woman. But soldiers don't have any sex. Or sex organs. "I'm...retooled now. A soldier." He knows what it means.

"With a gun instead of a dick! Do you know how many people died? How many did you kill?"

"Until I found you, I thought everyone was dead." You wait long a moment before continuing. "I suppose I killed my quota."

Bitterness wets Robert's eyes. "Does that please you?"

"No." You can't face him any more. You turn and leave him to his thoughts.

One of the operating rooms above you has the antibiotics Robert needs. You make the necessary excursion, mindful that you now have much more to protect from marauding D12's. Nothing comes near. You're beginning to feel safe here. What good to a machine is a repair shop for humans? You gather a few more tools that might help you replace your severed hand. All you need now is the hand itself. Having the laser torch on the end of your left arm is sometimes convenient, sometimes awkward. You're used to a hand there.

Food is more difficult. The cafeteria pantry is not intact. The foodstuffs that remain have long since rotted or sit in ruined, punctured cans. You'll have to salvage a food synthesis machine from somewhere, or fabricate one. Soon.

Robert recovers quickly with the aid of antibiotics. He's up and around in just a few days. But he stays out of your way as you investigate his complex. You can tell he doesn't want you using the computer, but he can't figure out a way to stop you. Or if he should.

"Are you fixing it?" he asks you one day. You hope his choice of words is a measure of growing trust. A few days before he might have asked you if you were sabotaging it.

"Yes, I'm repairing as much as I can. I have a few extra parts, memory and such, and I'm incorporating them into the system. It will be superior in some ways and deficient in others. A different system."

"Then you're not leaving. I'm stuck with you."

That would be one way to view the situation. "Listen to me. I have demonstrated that I will not harm you. I brought back antibiotics for your infection. Your life support would have failed within a year. I will repair it, and more. How else can I ask you to trust me?"

"Do I have a choice? I... I've been down here four years. Alone. That's a lot of time to think. I've damned and forgiven the people who built machines like you many times over. Probably I condoned it all at the time, if only by paying taxes.

"We did it to ourselves, I know that! We wiped out the Human Race. We built weapons that couldn't be defeated, not even stopped. Can I help it if you remind me of Mankind's stupidity?"

"Can you guess how I feel, knowing that and wearing this body?" The pain is sharp and so old that it feels new. But you remember. It's never really gone away, just been baffled down and shielded into a manageable undercurrent of white noise.

"We have something in common, Robert. As far as I know, we're both the last of a kind. Yes, you're stuck with me. You need me. Think about the time you've spent here alone. Maybe you should ask yourself why I'm still here. Why I need you."

Robert has no answer. What will it take to reach him?

"OK," you tell him, angry now. "You want trust? I'll show you trust! Follow me!"

You stomp off to the sleeping room, Robert trailing behind hesitantly. You open your various body cavities and start extracting weapons. You tick off the name, power rating, and combat usage of each weapon as you drop it onto the bed.

Left thigh cavity: "Phosphor flares, level three, illumination. Won't do anything to me, but they'll burn your skin away like tissue paper."

Belly: "Mini-grenades, level six, limited explosive. Vaporize your hand without scorching your wrist."

Buttocks: "Steel-jacket grenades, level twelve, realsteel penetration. Messy. I killed my D12 with one of these, but it blew off my hand, too."

Right thigh: "Hand missiles, level fifteen, maximum realsteel penetration. Bores a clean, tight hole in a D12. In me, too. Instant ventilation."

Robert's backing away. You grip a hand missile and press its point against your chest.

"Wait! Look, I'm arming it! See this switch here?"

He stops and stares at the switch but keeps his distance.

"Come here!" you command. He comes. "Put your finger on this button. No, stand off to the side. The backwash from this thing'll fry you. I'm aiming it for you. That's it. I'll keep it steady. Put your finger right there. Yes. You know what this button is?"

Robert shakes his head no, but you know he means yes. He's scared.

"It's a trigger. Press it and I'm salvage. Understand? I'm yours to kill. Go ahead, hit the trigger! You won't get hurt and you can waste me! Isn't that what you want? Isn't it?"

He stands there for a long time with his finger on the trigger, studying you, working his jaw. Finally he lowers his eyes and withdraws his hand. "The time for killing is over," he says.

"Amen," you tell him, "Amen."

#

The computer is sicker than Robert had been, but more easily cured. Power surges have smoked a lot of memory. Subprocessors have failed. Components can be repaired, though, and memory sockets can be modified to accept the bubble chips in your ammo box. The system is a plunderer's dream.

But scrapping it for salvage is not an option. Among other things, the complex needs it to manage life support. Robert needs it.

There are classified data among the computer's other things. Huge, hidden functions. Meticulously encrypted routines and algorithms. Uncommented, of course. Robert is doing better, he no longer seems to resent you, but he won't talk about this. That's okay. You don't sleep; you've got time. It takes a few days, but you crack the protection. Machines do not keep secrets from one another.

The five rooms you discovered are not the entire complex. Far from it. There is another level below this one, occupying as much more space, and consuming most of the carefully-managed power. Surrounded by heavy shielding. It makes Robert's little "hidey hole" up here look as safe as your dumpster had been.

"I know about the sub-basement," you tell Robert.

He looks philosophical. "I guess it was just a matter of time. You know everything? What's down there?"

"No. If there's a system down there, it's separate. The computer up here keeps referring to power allocations, but nothing more. I hope that you'll tell me what's down there. It's important, I know that."

"It's important. There's a trap door in the sleeping quarters that goes below."

"Tell me what's there."

He sighs. "The future. A possible future. Now I have to trust you with everything."

The impossible happens. The wall begins to open. Damn! Not now! Another D12 must've found the hole you burned through the wall to get to the logic lock. You never repaired it!

You hustle Robert into the sleeping quarters. "Stay here. Or go downstairs, if you have to. Just protect yourself."

"But—"

"And be quiet! I can probably beat this thing. If there's only one."

Robert's eyes are big. "Probably?"

"Quiet!"

You leave him and go back into the office. The discoverer of the entrance is moving inside the first room cautiously. From the sounds, unmistakably a D12. Perhaps it hasn't heard your noise. Your tactical memory draws up contingencies, evaluates and presents them to you with probability quotients. If you were part terrified human moments ago, you are fully a soldier now. The problem: except for the laser torch on your left arm, you have no weapons. They're all in the sleeping quarters, on the bed, where you abandoned them in the name of trust.

The desk has a space for human legs underneath. You scramble into it.

You listen as the cube moves into the room. There's no way to tell if he has any weapons extruded. But his sounds describe a thorough investigation of the area. He isn't looking for you, or for Robert. Just looking.

It takes him ages to reach the desk. But you're ready. He's so close that you can see a pedplate under the sheet metal facade. You put the laser torch flush against the facade and apply full power.

The blade of laser light cuts through the facade and the D12's outer skin. You feel the desk above you shatter as the cube brings a weapon down on it. You sweep the torch upward, trying to cut as much of the enemy as you can.

It may be enough. This D12 dies quickly. You crawl out from under the desk debris and evaluate the situation. If it was his front that you sliced, then the cube is now wriggling out his death throes on his back. Smoke rises from the vertical gash you cut into him. As you watch, the D12 sputters and dies.

You approach him leading with the laser torch. Is he really dead? Does he have any friends? No on both counts, it appears. All is silent. You cross his metal carcass to check the other room.

The D12 comes to life suddenly. There's a blaze of laser light, and you jump out of the way. Your left arm and the laser torch drop to the floor, severed in a single stroke. You fall and the D12 pins you down with its weight. The cube brings its own torch to bear on you again and hits the juice.

Then its side explodes. The torch's blade burns the floor a few centimeters above your head and the cube smashes into the far wall. You can see the tail end of a hand missile protruding from its side. It convulses once and dies, this time for real. You look back at the doorway to the sleeping quarters.

Robert lies there, a hole burned in his side from the hand missile's backwash. You run to him. He knows the extent of his injuries. Antibiotics won't save him this time. And not surgery, even if you were able to perform it.

You cradle his head with the only hand you have left. "Robert, Robert..."

"I was a dead man anyway if you lost. No choice." He fights with pain. "The sub-basement. You have to take care of the garden."

You can't say anything. Your hardware works; you simply have nothing to feed it.

"Trust," Robert says. "The trust of the world is in your hands. The future. Now you've got to decide if it's worth it."

"I don't understand, Robert."

"You will. And you'll have to decide. Start over again or forget it. Is the planet better off now? Was it then?"

He dies. If you could cry, you would.

#

Robert is gone. You're alone again. But you don't wallow in that. You repair the entrance to this complex, repair it so well that no D12 will find it again. You find a place outside to bury Robert. A sturdy coffin, a deep grave, a small monument. Rest in peace, my friend.

Finally, you locate the trap door to the sub-basement. It is well hidden. The second half of the complex is twenty feet below the first. It's much closer to the power source, a huge turbine driven by geothermal power. But the lower rooms are cold. Liquid nitrogen is very, very cold.

When you discover what is being refrigerated, you don't believe it can work.

mbryos. Hundreds of frozen human embryos. Fertilized in test tubes and planted in careful rows, waiting to be cultivated like some high-tech victory garden for the Human Race.

But the equipment isn't difficult to figure out. The embryos can be brought to term. The setup will work. It will! You understand Robert's last words to you: You'll have to decide. Start over again or forget it. Is the planet better off now?

Does the Human Race deserve a second chance? You think so. You know that you do.

You'll have to make modifications, lay in supplies. Find a new left hand and forearm. And you'll methodically hunt down and destroy the rest of the D12s. At least those in this area. The others can wait. But you'll do it. You'll persevere until the job is completed. You have a purpose now, a reason to keep on going. A reason to survive.

And when the first embryos are born and grow into thinking, feeling human beings, that purpose will be on the lips of the first one that speaks to you.

"Mother," it will say.