“Forgive me,” Prumble said, “but it was pretty funny.”

Tania’s expression flashed to disgust. “I don’t think you understand—”

“Can we let her talk?” Skyler said. He hadn’t intended the words to plunge the room into silence. They did. He ran a hand over his face. “Let’s hear her out first.”

“Thank you,” Eve said. “There’s just one more … ah, here she comes.”

Skyler turned.

Ana stood at the corner of the intersection, one hand resting lightly on the wall.

“Skyler,” she whispered, tears on her cheeks. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”

“Me neither,” he said. “Come sit,” Skyler said. “She’s about to explain.”

Eve looked at each of them in turn, framed by the view of Earth outside the window behind her.

“For lack of a better term,” she said carefully, “I am an Emissary.”

“For the Builders?” Tim asked.

Eve shook her head. “For this vessel.” Her eyes went up, looked around, implying the ship around them. “And, yes, perhaps for who you imagine the Builders to be, in an indirect way.”

“Skip to the part where you make sense,” Sam said.

If Sam’s tone bothered the girl, she didn’t show it. Eve looked at each of them in turn. “Technically speaking, I am the projected visual representation of a simulated mind.”

“Like a robot,” Skadz said.

“No. More like an artificial intelligence.”

Skadz nodded as if he understood. “Respect.”

“I am activated by this ship whenever we meet a candidate that is suitable.”

Skyler lifted a hand to stay the question poised on all of their faces, the same question he wanted to ask.

“And, in a sense,” Eve went on, “I am all of you, compiled from what you’ve taught me. My visual appearance is an amalgamation of all your features. We find this makes first contact … easier.”

Silence settled over the room. Skyler felt Ana’s hand tighten around his.

“You were each placed into a kind of stasis. Thirteen minutes passed out here, but the flow of time inside your spheres varied depending on your injuries, or simply how much you wanted to teach me.”

“Sorry,” Tania said. “Wanted to teach you?”

Eve nodded, visibly gathered herself. “I suspect your minds interpreted this as dreams. That’s one area where your species is still somewhat primitive.”

“Excuse the fuck out of us,” Sam said.

Skadz leaned forward. “Will you let it talk?”

Sam folded her arms.

“Dreams,” the Emissary went on, “are easily forgotten, but some of you may recall portions. Raising me. Teaching me. As Nigel … Mr. Prumble, indicated, I hold copious knowledge but little wisdom. You’ve all helped me understand.”

Skyler glanced at Tania, saw her face flush, her eyes close, as some recollection crossed her face.

“So you’ve been in our heads,” Skyler said. “You know everything that we do.”

Eve turned to face him. She shook her head, her expression almost sad. “Each of you taught me, but in terms of information I have access only to some of Tania’s mind and, to a much lesser extent, Prumble, in that regard.”

Skyler shot a glance at Tania. Her face had gone white and utterly still.

“Why me?” she whispered. “Why not the others?”

Eve’s eyes flickered from side to side, as if searching for words. “Tim and Vaughn were never in contact with the gleaners. And the rest of you are immune—a mystery to us in every sense, I’ll admit. But you, you and Prumble, though in his case only for a few seconds, were exposed to the … the disease known here as SUBS. ‘Disease’ is not quite accurate, though.”

“It is from where we’re sitting,” the man named Vaughn said.

“What would be accurate?” Tania asked, nonplussed. “You said ‘gleaners’ a second ago. It’s an uncommon word.”

“I will share details in time,” the Emissary said. “Suffice to say, I am able to draw upon the memories, thoughts, and feelings of all those who contracted the disease you call SUBS. The two of you, and roughly nine billion others.”

The words, the number, sent a pall across the room like a curtain drawn. Skyler kept his gaze on Tania’s stony face. Anger, or something like it, simmered just beneath the surface. Gradually it melted.

Tania blinked and spoke very quietly, barely a whisper. “My mother is in there?”

“She is.”

At that Tania’s eyes closed. She sat very still.

Skyler slumped back, the chair morphing to support him. His thoughts turned back to his fall into the aura generator below Nightcliff, how it had felt like all of his memories had been laid out on a table, and yet he could focus on no specific one. Immunity had been a surprise to them, and still was, apparently.

The silence went on a long time before he realized that everyone, save Tania, was looking at him. He met Eve’s gaze and took a long breath before he found the nerve to speak. “What do you want from us, Eve? Why are you here?”

“I represent the race you think of as the Builders. And we need your help.”

EPILOGUE

Taken from This Dire Earth—A Memoir in Letters and Speeches

TRANSCRIPT OF A SPEECH TITLED “THE TRUE GIFT,” GIVEN BEFORE THE ONE EARTH ASSEMBLY ON THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEPARTURE, APRIL 2, 2335

It’s odd to think, now some fifty years since we met the Emissary, that for Skyler and the others only a few minutes have passed.

By the time they arrive Skyler will only be a few hours older, perhaps just starting to get hungry. Back here, though, Earth will have celebrated the year 3000, and I’ll be long dead. My ashes, which I’ve asked to be scattered into the Pará upon my passing, will have long dispersed into the currents of the Atlantic and beyond, eventually perhaps consumed by the distant descendants of our resettlement colonies.

Or maybe we’ll have long since failed, and Earth will finally get some rest, waiting for a new species to rise and try again. Perhaps a Builder ship will come for them, too, if Skyler and the others fail at their task like so many apparently have before.

I digress. To be quite honest, I’m stalling. The Emissary, and the entirety of what it told us, is the information I wish to finally share with you today. It has been fifty years, after all, and I'm an old woman now.

I’m still not sure I entirely understand or forgive their tactics. Their motives. Nevertheless, it should not die with me, and I hope this information helps those who may one day welcome Skyler and the others home.

I’ve tried before to document this. Three times, actually, but each time I could not bring myself to do it. Time may have clouded some of the details, but it’s also given me the chance to distance myself from the emotional aspect, and the farewells I had to say. Besides, I’m the only remaining witness to what was said in that alien place. The only Earthbound witness alive, I mean, now that Skadz has passed. The others all agreed to help them, a decision many of you have openly questioned and, until today, I have stayed mostly silent about. This was selfish of me, and unfair to those who left as well as all of you. Still I cannot bring myself to regret not sharing this sooner. I hope you will understand.

So, the Builders …

First, I should get the confusing part out of the way. We always assumed that the “Builders” were an alien race sending automated ships to Earth. This is not exactly true. The “Builders” are the automated ships. They are a collection of intelligent machines that have scoured our galactic neighborhood for millennia, searching for the help they require.

To use the Emissary’s choice of word, the “Creators” are the species behind these robotic vessels. Only, these Creators did not send the ships to Earth. Indeed, they have no idea their creations came to us, or the hundreds of other subject worlds that were tested.

Perhaps I should back up a bit.

The Creators are a species from a planet orbiting the star known as Kepler-22. Their recorded history spans at least one hundred thousand years, and as we know, their technology far exceeds ours.

For much of that history they’ve been a space-faring race. One technological hurdle they could never get around, however, was the distances involved. Visiting other worlds in person proved a ridiculous waste of resources, and machines were the answer. A machine does not age, can easily build copies of itself—even improve on its own design. Software can be installed and reinstalled again and again, and the size and shapes that machines can take on are, well, limitless.

So they created, and dispersed, machines. Machines we call the “Builders.” These ships ventured out, multiplied, even evolved. And every now and then, they would converge back on the home world to report what they’d found. They were explorers back then, nothing more.

On one such convergence a surprise awaited the machines, however. Their home world had gone dark, and upon arriving the Builders found that their beloved Creators had fallen to an invasion. The entire planet, indeed their solar system, had been captured and cut off from the Universe. Many Builder machines were destroyed in their attempts to assess the situation there. Every attempt to physically approach the blockade resulted in destruction. Sure, some defenses were bypassed, but never all of them, and whoever these invaders were, their ability to reconfigure their traps and barriers was, we were told, remarkable.

The Builder ships discovered certain weaknesses, though. Chinks in the proverbial armor. Chief among these was that the invaders assumed that only machines would attempt to penetrate their blockade. A few probing tests with some primitive life-forms showed something of a blind spot, though the Emissary was vague on any specifics. Suffice to say, the machines realized they needed to find biological life that could aid them.

They needed to do something, and so they did. They sought help. Being machines, they went about this in a systematic way. They developed a sorting algorithm.

What the Builders did to Earth, to humanity, is unforgivable. Deplorable, disgusting, heartless … all this is true, and yet seen from the context of an emotionless machine just trying to filter target species through a list of selection criteria, it oddly makes sense.

When I think now about all the billions of humans who died here, and couple that with the realization that the same thing has probably happened on hundreds of other worlds, I must admit it gives me a strange sense of peace about the whole thing.

It took me many years to reach this understanding. Skyler and all the rest of them only needed a few minutes of discussion before they all agreed to go. All except Skadz, I mean. He said it then and repeated it to me, many years later. “I had enough of wandering, and I had promises to keep. Besides, someone has to stay and tell people what happened.”

Only we didn’t tell you. Not everything. We both pretended not to know certain details. We were worried, quite frankly, about what humanity would do with the … with what they’ve given us. I hope you will understand, or at least find a way to forgive us.

The machines needed to find a species that could bypass the defenses that keep their Creators imprisoned, and so they devised a series of tests that would help weed out unsuitable candidates. The Emissary told us, almost as a side note of inconsequential interest, of life’s incredible abundance in the Universe. Their problem was not finding life, but that they found too much. They needed a way to whittle down the list.

They altered their tactics. Joined together and began to launch preprogrammed vessels in a carefully designed sequence to as many stars as possible, all searching for a target species with the capabilities they required.

Unfortunately for us, we fit the profile.

The Emissary did not explain, at least when I was present, what the various stages of their actions against Earth were designed to test. All I know is they’ve spent thousands of years perfecting this sequence of trials, and that insertion of the five keys into the arc ship before the date of the final event signifies, to the Builders at least, that they’ve finally found their best chance at breaking the siege of their home world.

And that was it. She asked us to decide, right then and there, if we would go. The test was over, we’d passed. Their plague forge was shutdown. Our planet—what was left of it—given back.

I must admit, I was livid. I tried to point out that in order to end the siege of their home they’d laid siege to hundreds of other planets, probably wiping most of them out in the process. In hindsight, I was too harsh. The Emissary—Eve, she named herself—was truly an emissary, innocent in all of this.

What galled me then, and still keeps me up at night even now, was that the others agreed to go so readily. And for it to all start with Skyler, agreeing to go practically the instant the Emissary agreed to his single demand.

Everyone else fell in line pretty quickly. Everyone but Skadz and me.

Since then, many have vilified Skyler and the others for choosing to help, given the immeasurable damage the Builders inflicted on our world. Those same people have often tried to turn us into some kind of heroes. They said we put Earth first, that we stayed to help rebuild and renew our own world rather than dash off across the cosmos to assist our enemies in some kind of bizarre Stockholm syndrome scenario.

So for the record, helping Earth was the furthest thing from my mind in that moment the offer was made. I simply knew I couldn’t help them. I couldn’t forgive. They took everything from me: My parents, my aunts and uncles, my friends. My childhood, and Davi’s.

The fact remains that it’s Skyler and the others who are helping Earth. This cannot be understated, and I should have said it before. I should have explained. Instead Skadz and I agreed to wait. We wanted to see what happened in the aftermath, to make sure the survivors on Earth were ready for what Skyler negotiated on their behalf.