FAREWELL PARTY

They found Will Zucker in his office, sitting behind his desk, glass of champagne still in hand. His eyes were somewhat glassy, but focused as Allen swung him around in his chair. A music cube playing John Coltrane paused as they came in.

     “What have you done?” Stewart demanded, his voice shaking.

     Zucker smiled at them. There were four of them in all-Allen, Stewart, Linda, and Gil, the only ones to have made it this far. Everyone else was gone, lost outside, or dying from targeted radiation poisoning. “It’s quite a show, isn’t it?” He swept a hand at the panorama window that overlooked the smoking Seattle skyline. Somewhere in the upper atmosphere, they knew that a mothership was watching, hidden behind a light-bending

“skin.”

     “He asked you a question,” Gil said. As the most assertive of the group, he’d become their unofficial leader, leading the charge up the stairs, into Zucker’s office. “Why are we still alive? Why hasn’t the tower fallen? Why the hell are you still here, for that matter?”

     Zucker lowered his head. The one-time “billionaire boy wonder” who’d made his first fortune with a single App, now looked much older than just shy of thirty. “It had to be this way,” he said quietly. “Enhancement of the human experience...the next stage of evolution...”

     “He’s lost it,” Stewart said with contempt.

     “No,” Linda replied. “He’s trying to tell us something.” Linda leaned forward. “Look at me, Will. What happened? What did you do?”

     Zucker smiled at her. “Just part of the upgrade,” he said. His eyes had a faraway look in them, but they were still oddly focused. “They agreed to take it in trade. It was a final sales option...”

     Realization hit Allen then. “Our AI research. You gave it to them, didn’t you? But why the invasion? They could have just stolen it from us, with their hacking abilities. That’s how they made ‘contact’ with us in the first place, after all.”

     Zucker shook his head. “It’s not enough. They need the experience, not just the knowledge. They need us. Our minds, our wonderful untapped potential.” He sighed. “The final upgrade,” he added.

     He blinked, his pupils suddenly dilating.

     “He’s still in direct contact with them!” Linda suddenly realized. “The chip implants in his corneas...”

     “They have given me eyes to see,” Zucker whispered. “Minds greater than ours, older...” He stopped speaking, his eyes finally sightless, his breath shallow.

     The room shook then, as a heat-based plasma weapon of some sort struck the building. It held, however, the tower’s smart materials adapting to the temperature changes.

     “We need to leave, now,” Gil said.

     “What about him?” Stewart asked, pointing at the now-motionless Zucker.

     “He’s gone, “ Linda replied. “Whatever he did, they shortchanged him in the end. He’s paid his price. They...don’t need him anymore.”

     Allen wasn’t sure what to think. The aliens hadn’t attacked Seattle until now; their first targets had been those world capitols that had originally retaliated with force-Washington, Beijing. They didn’t care about territory the way humans did; this was a war for information, for intellectual resources-an information war fought with real weapons.

     They made their way through the hallways, up the stairs, the building shaking ut still holding.

     “Where are we headed?” Linda asked.

     “The roof,” Gil answered. “The SOB had teams working on something up there before the invasion started; I guess he thought he’d had a way out.”

     They reached the roof, coming out where corporate helicopters usually landed. For a moment, they paused-they’d never seen the actual invasion itself until now. Dart-shaped drones were trying, without much success, to attack the alien spheres they’d seen on news broadcasts before the networks and Internet went offline. The spheres were radiating EMP signals in steady bursts and waves, lighting up the sky overhead with lightning-like discharges. In the distance, Allen could see the ruins of the Space Needle still smoldering. “I don’t see anything here,” he said.

     “It wouldn’t be visible to the naked eye,” Stewart replied. “It was all based on theory...”

     “I see something.” Linda squinted through her glasses. “It looks like some kind of an energy field.”

     Whatever it was, it seemed to be unfolding like Origami paper. Allen could see definite edges and boundaries that looked familiar. “Is that...it looks like a tesseract.”

     “A hypercube?” Gil, who had a similar background in mathematics, frowned. “That’s our way out?”

     “I don’t think we have much of a choice,” Linda said. “Another planet, another universe-anything’s got to be better than what we’ve got here.”

     A muffled roar shook the tower, its foundation finally vulnerable to alien heat beams. “We don’t have a choice,” Gil said. “This thing will close in on itself and disappear from our universe if we don’s use it, right now.”

     They went in together, a team like always. Whatever happens, we’re always a team, Allen thought. That was one thing Zucker never understood about them. And it was something the aliens didn’t understand about humans, as well.

     They went through as one, as their old world fell behind them.

THE END

© 2015 Matthew Spence

E-mail: Matthew Spence

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