Epilogue

Epilogue

Deus Ex, presumably the real one at that, led Gomorrah and I to a long sofa that wrapped around an awkward corner of the room.

“I’ll get refreshments,” one of the Deus Ex… clones said. Were they clones? They certainly looked the part.

“Sit, sit! I have a lot of stuff to explain to you two, but I also have better things to do,” Deus Ex, the one in the flannel Pjs, said. She spun around and fell back onto the couch where she slumped there like someone who had never had back problems before.

“Right,” I said as I took a seat at the end facing her. Gomorrah sat next to me, legs together and rather demure. “So, you going to explain why there’s a bunch of you going around?”

“They’re meat puppets,” Deus Ex said. “It’s complicated, but basically they’re cloned bodies with part of a brain, but all the bits that make a person a person are just never grown. Instead there’s a computer that’s linked to one in my head. The clones only think thoughts that I’m thinking, basically.”

“That’s really fucked,” I said.

“It means I can be in many places at the same time, and I can do actions that might result in my demise without worrying about losing my actual body.”

“What if one of them wakes up?” Gomorrah asked. “Or develops a personality?”

“They‘re vat-grown without that part of the brain. It’s empty. So they can’t have anything like that,” Deus Ex said.

“But they are human, right?” Gomorrah asked.

The girl shrugged. “As human as anyone else, yeah.”

“Then what about their souls, their personhood?” Gomorrah asked.

“I can’t be bothered to care about something that doesn’t exist,” Deus Ex said. “But hey, if you bring me a jar-full of soul, or a cup of spirit, maybe I’ll change my tune. If the clones did develop a personality, which they can’t do because they don’t have the parts of the brain where that kind of thing is processed, then that would be interesting. I always wanted a little sister.”

“Really fucked,” I muttered.

“Give yourself a year or two,” she said. “Or visit some other Vanguard. You’ll find that this is pretty tame. But all that’s besides the point.”

A hologram appeared, floating between us. At least, I figured it was a hologram from the way it appeared and just floated there. It didn’t have any of that fuzziness that I associated with advertising holograms, and it was fully solid-looking. A brownish-red ball, part of it obscured in shadows. The surface was pitted, and there seemed to be something like clouds hovering over it.

“Mars,” Gomorrah said.

“Is it the colour that gave it away?” Deus Ex asked. “Yeah, that’s Mars. Real-time too. We have a lot of satellites around the planet right now.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because we were careless and stupid. There was this lull in the number of incursions about five and a half years ago. Maybe a bit more than that. Turns out there was an incursion in that time, a stealthier one. But it wasn’t aiming for Earth.”

“There are antithesis on Mars?” I asked.

“And they had a few years to settle in. Good news is, Mars isn’t exactly a jungle. The aliens had to make their own biomass from scratch. Bad news is, the Antithesis are good at doing just that.”

“How do you make biomass from scratch?” I asked.

Deus Ex gave me a look. “You need an education. Basically, on Earth, little creatures eat dirt and rocks and whatever, then bigger creatures eat them, then bigger ones eat those, and so on. Plants can pull nutrition out of the ground from base elements too. It’s all part of the very bottom of the food chain.”

“And the antithesis replicated that?” Gomorrah asked.