Fic: Every Snowflake is a Drop of Water 7/?
Every Snowflake is a Drop of Water 7/?
Summary: SF AU, with cliches galore! Whee!
Parte the first
Parte the second
Parte the third
Parte the fourth
Parte the fifth
Parte the sixth
In case anyone gets an idea otherwise, this is gen. Absolutely. And will remain so.
Also, long explanation is loooooong. Holy crap.
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Every Snowflake… 7/?
Sam was pretty sure this wasn’t actually happening.
He wasn’t standing under a highway overpass with a gun in his hand, pointed at a man covered in blood and claiming to be his brother, while two corpses cooled rapidly nearby and a third, presumably, dangled from the concrete ceiling above.
Those sorts of things just didn’t happen in real life.
Sam didn’t have a brother.
“I don’t have a brother,” he said tightly, through his teeth. Dean still had his hands in the air and a rivulet of blood ran down the edge of his right hand and disappeared into his sleeve. The older man swallowed again, growing paler as Sam watched, blinking rapidly. His head was still bleeding.
These sorts of things didn’t happen to people. They didn’t happen.
“Go away and leave me alone.” He tried for authoritative. He had the gun, after all. Dean blinked heavily at him, and licked his lips. His words, when he spoke, were quiet.
“It’s my fault,” Dean said, “I know. It is. I-I’m sorry.”
Slowly, Sam lowered the viewer, hand hovering uncertainly near his hip. Then he tossed it away and renewed his grip on the heavy semiautomatic pistol, this time with both hands. He approached the other man slowly, sighting carefully along the barrel.
He knew how to fire it. How to hit wherever he aimed. He could put a bullet between Dean’s eyes if he had to. But Sam had never held a gun in his life.
His breath came slow, and steady. He thought he should be panicking, hyperventilating even. But he could feel, as if from a distance, the calm in his body, blossoming out from some cool, composed center he wasn’t even aware he possessed. His hands were steady, his mind was still.
Everything seemed so far away.
“Who are you?” he asked again, this time nearly whispering, standing close enough that he could see the way Dean’s eyes had widened and lost their focus. See the way he was swaying, ever so slightly. Bizarrely, Sam was struck by the sudden urge to reach out, grasp the other man’s shoulder. Steady him.
Instead he clenched his teeth slightly. Some of the things happening-some of them were real. The sweat under his arms, and rolling down his back. The dirt on his palms and face. The dryness in his mouth-these things were real. They belonged to Sam Winchester, the student, the boyfriend, the young man with his whole future ahead of him. The other things-the weight of the gun and the man covered in blood and the strange urge to help him-these things weren’t his. They were far away, distant. He was watching these things from behind a pane of glass.
“You know who I am,” Dean was saying, still softly, voice thickened with blood-loss and probably pain. “You have to. Sammy. Please. I didn’t-we didn’t know, man, we had no idea.”
“Didn’t know what?” he demanded sharply.
“Know you were here. We weren’t looking for you. We just wanted…to get away. Away. That’s all.”
Dean blinked again, slowly, and made what seemed an unconscious gesture toward his face, as if he meant to wipe his eyes. He swallowed again.
“Hey,” Sam said, gun wavering, eyeing the other man warily, “Hey. You better not puke.”
“Not gonna puke, Jesus.” He pressed his lips together. “You, uh-you got a towel, or something? I could just-” he waggled his fingers toward the still-bleeding wound in his head, but lost whatever he’d meant to say when his eyes rolled up and his knees buckled.
“Shit!” Sam blurted, dropping the gun instinctively and lunging for the older man. Dean full weight hit him like a sack of wet cement, slippery with blood. Sam cursed and struggled to grab his jacket and keep him from slipping and hitting the ground, finally dropping to his own knees and nearly cradling the other man’s body as his head lolled senselessly.
When he realized what he was doing, Sam nearly let go.
But he didn’t.
“Dean, shit, what the hell am I-I can’t stay here. We can’t-” he should leave. The smart thing to do would be to leave. This morning he’d been with his girlfriend, in their home. They had breakfast together. Sam had orange juice.
Dean’s eyelids fluttered, and Sam took a moment to reflect that he hadn’t actually thought that sort of thing happened in real life.
Real life. Right.
“’M okay. Geddoff. What th’…”
Sam wasn’t surprised that Dean was slurring, or that his eyes wandered when he finally managed to pry them open. From somewhere came an urge to continue holding on, keep the older man from pulling away, keep him immobilized until Sam could get the wound cleaned out, get it bandaged. Get them both cleaned up.
But Sam wasn’t responsible for Dean’s well-being. He wasn’t. Why did he keep feeling as though he was?
Jesus.
“Lemme up, Sam.”
He was still holding on.
He released the man with what was most definitely not a yelp, and scrambled backward, almost crab-walking, toward the dropped pistol. Dean made no move in his direction, just sat blearily slumped on the ground, one hand pressed to his wounded head, the other wavering up to push over his face.
“Okay,” he murmured thickly. “Christ. Okay. If you’re gonna shoot me get it the hell over with, because otherwise we got things we need to do.”
Sam’s chest rose and fell sharply, once, twice-all the panic he hadn’t had earlier while gripping the gun suddenly making itself known at the sight of the man claiming to be his brother clearly struggling to remain conscious. Sam didn’t want to know where the fear came from. Why it skittered under his skin, why he fought against shivers and an urge to reach out. To fix things, somehow. Try to make it better.
Dean looked up at him, face smeared in red, drawn and tired and distant-eyed. Sam swallowed hard.
He lowered the gun.
--
Answers. That’s what he was after.
That was why he’d followed Dean’s instructions to tip the bodies of the two men into the river.
Why he’d done his best to get them both cleaned up, why he’d slung Dean’s arm over his shoulder and helped him stagger up the bank, hotwired a little two-person transport, and with a little finagling managed to get them stashed in a motel better suited to certain types of excessively underdressed ladies (and gentlemen) and their very discriminating counterparts.
There was, of course, the little problem of the third body, the blonde girl who’d apparently freaking disappeared at some point while both Sam and Dean were distracted with their own…circumstances. Sam considered this to be something of a problem, but it was one he hadn’t shared with Dean yet.
So he wasn’t any closer to finding Jess at this point. He had at least two different sets of people out for a chunk of his flesh (he was pretty sure, anyway, that both Blondie and Gordon were gunning for him in a not-at-all nice way). He was sitting in a shit room with a bag of weapons on the floor and a stolen car parked not too far away (though far enough, he hoped, not to set the police on them if it happened to be discovered) and Dean was propped up on the room’s single bed with a bag of ice clapped to the side of his head, eyes shut and grimacing.
“Christ,” he said at one point, to no one in particular. His voice had a thin, distant quality that in anyone else Sam would’ve taken as a bad sign, but in this case was hoping would work to his advantage. He dragged the room’s single chair from over by the window and spun it so he could sit with his arms folded, resting on the back. Dean peeked at him from one eye, briefly, before shutting it again with a quiet groan.
“’M injured over here man, c’mon…”
“You’ll live,” Sam ground out, a little surprised by the callousness of his own voice. A little. But although Dean was less blood-covered than he’d been half an hour previously, and his head was bandaged, and lying on the bed he seemed less threatening and more defenseless than he had since Sam had met the man, none of it meant anything at all. Sam had collected both guns and the bloody knife Dean had dropped before fleeing the…the scene, really….and though they were all stashed in the weapons bag near the door, and currently bloodless, Sam was fully aware of their presence. He’d cleaned the knife himself, fighting his gag reflex the entire time.
“You killed those people,” he said. His voice didn’t tremble. That was something.
“They would’ve done the same to you, Sam. Worse.” Dean’s mouth barely moved as he spoke; the words were faint, riding on his exhale, tumbling into the room like dry leaves. “Not people an’way.”
“ ‘Not people’,” Sam repeated. “Jesus. They bled. They just-blood was everywhere. I never-I’ve never-”
Never had someone’s blood on me. Oh God.
“Jus’ calm down. Settle. ‘ll be all right. Okay? Jesus.” Dean squinted his eyes tighter, for a moment, and his face paled. A moment later his hand dropped and his features went slack, and Sam blew air out through his nose.
Okay. Interrogation would have to wait.
But not forever.
--
When Dean finally opened his eyes again, Sam was leaning against the door with his arms crossed and his lips pressed tightly together. Dean took one look at him and groaned a little groan, and Sam was across the room in an instant, looming over him, barely resisting the urge to grab the man by his hair and shake him.
“You killed those men.”
Dean stared up at him, face surprisingly calm for someone in his position. He went on staring until Sam backed off, resettling himself on the chair, this time turned around so he could scoot himself closer to the bed, hands on his knees, in a weird parody of attending a sickbed.
“You killed them,” he whispered.
Dean licked his lips. Opened and shut his eyes, briefly, then very softly said, “I saved your ass.”
“Did you-why did you have to kill them?”
Dean opened his eyes. “Ever see a zombie movie?”
“Ever-what? What are you-”
“Zombies. Shoot ‘em, stab ‘em, do whatever, they just keep coming. Can’t be killed, can’t be stopped, not unless you take the whole head clean off.”
“Are you saying-those people weren’t zombies! Jesus Christ!”
“No, they’re worse. ‘Cause zombies’re dumb. Those guys? They weren’t zombies and they sure as hell weren’t people, by the time I got there. Probably hadn’t been for a while. And they’re not dumb, either.”
Sam ground his teeth.
“And that makes it okay? And you-you kidnapped me and, and you beat up those guys in my house and those guys in the alley-every time I see you you’re hurting someone! And you want me to think you’re my-my brother? My brother? I don’t have a-”
“Sam.” Dean struggled to push himself up the headboard.
“Don’t have a brother, have any family, I came here to get a fresh start because my Dad died and I’m, I’m going to school, I can’t-I can’t do this, this crazy dead-people and kidnapping and lost-family-members shit, I can’t I-”
“Sam. Sam! Jesus Christ, Sam, shut the hell up, you’re giving me a headache!”
“No, I think it was being kicked in the head that’s giving you a headache!”
“You know something, you can get down off your high horse right the hell now. I’ve saved your ass twice in the last sixteen hours and this is the thanks I get? You got a real gratitude problem there, pal.”
“You left Jess behind.”
“I left Jimmy behind too. They’ll torture him. You know that? They will torture him. Gordon’s not gonna lay a finger on your pretty little girlfriend, but Jimmy’s being cut into ribbons right now. So get off my back. Jesus.”
Sam rocked back in the chair, blinking, shocked into silence. He thought of the dark-haired man he’d seen in the apartment, slender next to Dean’s bulk. Smaller. Suddenly couldn’t shake the image of blood on his face, on his hands. Tried not to imagine the sound of his screams.
“They wanted to do the same to you,” Dean told him softly. “They’ll cut you apart if they get you. Those men? That girl? Ten times more dangerous than Gordon. And the bodies I hacked up may be dead, but the intelligence that was inside-those are still very much alive.”
Sam looked up sharply. “What do you mean, ‘intelligence?’”
Dean groaned aloud, shutting his eyes briefly and pawing at his forehead. He shuffled a hand around on the bedcover and Sam, without really looking, pushed the nearly-melted ice-pack into his grasp. Dean plunked it back on the side of his head and cracked an eye to regard Sam.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I can’t, uh-I can’t really explain what’s happened today unless I give you some information you’re not actually allowed to have. Info nobody is really allowed to have. So what I’m telling you-it’s super-secret. I mean if it got out, it would probably cause mass panic, riots, God knows how many deaths. All right? So you keep this under your hat.”
Sam pressed his lips together tightly. Nodded.
“Okay, so. I guess…when you go outside, right? When you go outside at night, look up at the sky. What do you see?”
“Um…” Sam shrugged. “The…dome? The sky? The stars? Other platforms? The moon?”
“Yeah, okay. Those are the things you can see. Now. What are the things that you don’t see?”
“I don’t-”
“I mean, knowing what you know about technology, about society, about people. What would you expect to see in the sky, that isn’t there?”
Sam slowly shook his head, perplexed. Dean nodded. It seemed he’d expected as much.
“Traffic, Sam. Traffic. Not just the orbital elevators, or shuttles, people schlepping back and forth between platforms, Earth, the moon. I mean traffic beyond the Earth’s gravity well, traffic to other planets. You never see anything like that, do you? Or hear about it on the news? No shuttles to Mars, no new explorations of Jupiter or flybys past Saturn or Neptune or whatever? When’s the last time a craft was launched to the edge of the solar system? Your lifetime? Before that?”
“I…” Sam bit his lip. “What are you saying?”
Dean settled himself more comfortably on the bed. “No one really thinks about it because to most people, it’s not that important. Colonies on Mars. Who cares, right? If we were going to do it, we’d’ve done it by now, yeah?”
“I…yeah, I guess?”
Dean made a face. “You guess. Right. Well the thing is-we have the technology. We can build fully functioning biosphere platforms in space. In space. We could go to Mars if we wanted. We could probably terraform it, if we really tried. The thing is though…putting people there. That’s the problem. It takes a long damn time to get to Mars, and the human body isn’t designed to survive that kind of trip. Not well. A year in space would see all sorts of damage to a living human. And forget about settling on the moons of Saturn, or one of the other gas giants. Can’t be done. Not without some kind of advanced party. Some sort of scouts. Something non-organic, to be sent ahead, to fix things up nice. Clear the land, hang up curtains, whatever.”
“Advance…scouts?” Sam knew he wasn’t stupid. But he was having a hard time following the apparent jumps in Dean’s monologue, and no idea how it connected to the situation he found himself embroiled in.
“Look.” Dean gestured with his free hand. “It’s simple, okay? About forty-five years ago, an international venture to colonize the solar system began. They knew it would be impossible to send people, organic humans, to the far reaches of the solar system, or even to a relatively hospitable planet like Mars. That would be too damn risky, not to mention labor intensive and expensive. What they needed was a non-organic means to blaze a trail. Make these places hospitable. They needed machines that could do the work, that could survive and function in places of extreme gravity, heat, cold, whatever. So they made them.
“They’re basically nanobots. Trillions and trillions of nanobots. They’re self-replicating and in sufficient numbers-a couple billion-they become intelligent. These intelligences are clouds of super-resilient machines that can’t be destroyed by fire, by cold, or by gravity. And they were sent out into the solar system to colonize it for the human race.”
There was a long silence. Dean let his eyes slide shut for a moment, mouth tight with pain. Sam stared at him wordlessly, then lifted his eyes to the far wall.
“Oh,” he said eventually. Dean shifted, drew a breath, opened his eyes again.
“So okay. Uncounted numbers of clouds of machines intelligences, launched into space. And they did what they were supposed to do. They colonized. They did it very well. They were designed for it. But they got…I dunno, at some point they got sick of taking orders, maybe. They’re intelligent, they’re physically superior in every way to humans, they’re not bounded by little things like organic needs since they can basically subsist on sunlight and atmosphere and solid rock…and they got to thinking, ‘Baby, we could own this town.’”
“This…you mean the-the solar system.”
Dean pointed a finger and grinned tiredly. “Yahtzee.”
“So wait, let me get this straight-evil machines bent on dominating the solar system have rebelled against their human masters and…what, are bent on enslaving the Earth and its human population?”
Dean grinned a little, gaze flicking up to the water-stained ceiling. “Something like that. Except, instead of ‘enslave,’ read ‘exterminate.’ Yeah. There’s a war going on. Has been for years. Decades. The moon is basically the front line. Earth and the platforms-that’s it. We’re it. The entire solar system is controlled by machine intelligences. All we have is the Earth. We’re barely keeping them at bay. Any day could be the day when they finally manage to snuff us out.”
Sam pressed his lips together. He had a sudden horrifying image in his mind of the entire solar system, laid out like one of the science projects grade-schoolers made, engulfed in darkness. A huge cloud of roiling black, cold and brilliant and utterly without mercy. And the Earth like a candle, tiny and fragile. Naked and unprotected.
“So those men…the ones you…”
“Yeah. The…clouds, um. Did you ever see The Exorcist? Or, I dunno, some show where like a demon gets inside somebody, makes ‘em do things they wouldn’t normally? Like they’re puppets, or like, suits?”
“Like, people-suits?”
“Meatsuits. Yeah. Like that. The…well, they’re like demons. They get inside people and walk around in their bodies. And they can keep the body going even if you shoot it or stick a chunk of metal in its heart. But it’s damn hard to be convincing as a person if your head is detached from your neck, or gushing blood, or whatever. I can’t kill them. I didn’t kill the thing inside. But I made the body so inhospitable they had to leave. Abandon them. That’s what that noise was. The uh, the demons. Leaving the body.”
Sam said, “Holy shit.”
“Yeah.”
Sam scowled. He folded his arms tightly across his chest. Forget the whole ‘spattered in blood, long-lost brother’ thing. That was mundane. Totally believable. Completely sane. Normal even. The solar system being overrun by intelligent clouds of microscopic machines? That was just a bad science fiction movie waiting to happen.
And wait. Something about the story didn’t make sense. If the…the nanobots, the clouds, the…whatever, were essentially unstoppable…if the war had continued for decades….Why did the Earth still have a human population? Why were they even sitting in this room, having this conversation?
“Hang on, wait a minute. You said…‘any day.’ Any day they could snuff us out. But…they haven’t. Right? They haven’t done it yet. Why? What’s holding them back?”
And here Dean’s grinned huge and genuine, the exhaustion falling briefly from his features.
“We are. Or, well, we’re not. But the other ones, the ones like us. Like you, like me, like Jimmy and Claire. That’s what we’re for. It’s what we do. We’re the first, last, and only real defense the Earth has. Without us, the whole thing goes kablooey.”
He paused, and his grin faded. Added, “Except, you know. We all ran away.”
_________________________
Tbc…
Part 8
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Notes: I pretty much write these in two days and don’t really edit them or anything. I was tired today so there are probably some things in this chapter I could’ve done better re: emotion and revelations and stuff. I’ll try to get whatever I missed in the next chapter.
Also I did not mean for this to be so long. Sheesh.
Also also, a nanite is (among other things) a self assembling cluster of Ruby daemons. Awesome.
Summary: SF AU, with cliches galore! Whee!
Parte the first
Parte the second
Parte the third
Parte the fourth
Parte the fifth
Parte the sixth
In case anyone gets an idea otherwise, this is gen. Absolutely. And will remain so.
Also, long explanation is loooooong. Holy crap.
_____________________________
Every Snowflake… 7/?
Sam was pretty sure this wasn’t actually happening.
He wasn’t standing under a highway overpass with a gun in his hand, pointed at a man covered in blood and claiming to be his brother, while two corpses cooled rapidly nearby and a third, presumably, dangled from the concrete ceiling above.
Those sorts of things just didn’t happen in real life.
Sam didn’t have a brother.
“I don’t have a brother,” he said tightly, through his teeth. Dean still had his hands in the air and a rivulet of blood ran down the edge of his right hand and disappeared into his sleeve. The older man swallowed again, growing paler as Sam watched, blinking rapidly. His head was still bleeding.
These sorts of things didn’t happen to people. They didn’t happen.
“Go away and leave me alone.” He tried for authoritative. He had the gun, after all. Dean blinked heavily at him, and licked his lips. His words, when he spoke, were quiet.
“It’s my fault,” Dean said, “I know. It is. I-I’m sorry.”
Slowly, Sam lowered the viewer, hand hovering uncertainly near his hip. Then he tossed it away and renewed his grip on the heavy semiautomatic pistol, this time with both hands. He approached the other man slowly, sighting carefully along the barrel.
He knew how to fire it. How to hit wherever he aimed. He could put a bullet between Dean’s eyes if he had to. But Sam had never held a gun in his life.
His breath came slow, and steady. He thought he should be panicking, hyperventilating even. But he could feel, as if from a distance, the calm in his body, blossoming out from some cool, composed center he wasn’t even aware he possessed. His hands were steady, his mind was still.
Everything seemed so far away.
“Who are you?” he asked again, this time nearly whispering, standing close enough that he could see the way Dean’s eyes had widened and lost their focus. See the way he was swaying, ever so slightly. Bizarrely, Sam was struck by the sudden urge to reach out, grasp the other man’s shoulder. Steady him.
Instead he clenched his teeth slightly. Some of the things happening-some of them were real. The sweat under his arms, and rolling down his back. The dirt on his palms and face. The dryness in his mouth-these things were real. They belonged to Sam Winchester, the student, the boyfriend, the young man with his whole future ahead of him. The other things-the weight of the gun and the man covered in blood and the strange urge to help him-these things weren’t his. They were far away, distant. He was watching these things from behind a pane of glass.
“You know who I am,” Dean was saying, still softly, voice thickened with blood-loss and probably pain. “You have to. Sammy. Please. I didn’t-we didn’t know, man, we had no idea.”
“Didn’t know what?” he demanded sharply.
“Know you were here. We weren’t looking for you. We just wanted…to get away. Away. That’s all.”
Dean blinked again, slowly, and made what seemed an unconscious gesture toward his face, as if he meant to wipe his eyes. He swallowed again.
“Hey,” Sam said, gun wavering, eyeing the other man warily, “Hey. You better not puke.”
“Not gonna puke, Jesus.” He pressed his lips together. “You, uh-you got a towel, or something? I could just-” he waggled his fingers toward the still-bleeding wound in his head, but lost whatever he’d meant to say when his eyes rolled up and his knees buckled.
“Shit!” Sam blurted, dropping the gun instinctively and lunging for the older man. Dean full weight hit him like a sack of wet cement, slippery with blood. Sam cursed and struggled to grab his jacket and keep him from slipping and hitting the ground, finally dropping to his own knees and nearly cradling the other man’s body as his head lolled senselessly.
When he realized what he was doing, Sam nearly let go.
But he didn’t.
“Dean, shit, what the hell am I-I can’t stay here. We can’t-” he should leave. The smart thing to do would be to leave. This morning he’d been with his girlfriend, in their home. They had breakfast together. Sam had orange juice.
Dean’s eyelids fluttered, and Sam took a moment to reflect that he hadn’t actually thought that sort of thing happened in real life.
Real life. Right.
“’M okay. Geddoff. What th’…”
Sam wasn’t surprised that Dean was slurring, or that his eyes wandered when he finally managed to pry them open. From somewhere came an urge to continue holding on, keep the older man from pulling away, keep him immobilized until Sam could get the wound cleaned out, get it bandaged. Get them both cleaned up.
But Sam wasn’t responsible for Dean’s well-being. He wasn’t. Why did he keep feeling as though he was?
Jesus.
“Lemme up, Sam.”
He was still holding on.
He released the man with what was most definitely not a yelp, and scrambled backward, almost crab-walking, toward the dropped pistol. Dean made no move in his direction, just sat blearily slumped on the ground, one hand pressed to his wounded head, the other wavering up to push over his face.
“Okay,” he murmured thickly. “Christ. Okay. If you’re gonna shoot me get it the hell over with, because otherwise we got things we need to do.”
Sam’s chest rose and fell sharply, once, twice-all the panic he hadn’t had earlier while gripping the gun suddenly making itself known at the sight of the man claiming to be his brother clearly struggling to remain conscious. Sam didn’t want to know where the fear came from. Why it skittered under his skin, why he fought against shivers and an urge to reach out. To fix things, somehow. Try to make it better.
Dean looked up at him, face smeared in red, drawn and tired and distant-eyed. Sam swallowed hard.
He lowered the gun.
--
Answers. That’s what he was after.
That was why he’d followed Dean’s instructions to tip the bodies of the two men into the river.
Why he’d done his best to get them both cleaned up, why he’d slung Dean’s arm over his shoulder and helped him stagger up the bank, hotwired a little two-person transport, and with a little finagling managed to get them stashed in a motel better suited to certain types of excessively underdressed ladies (and gentlemen) and their very discriminating counterparts.
There was, of course, the little problem of the third body, the blonde girl who’d apparently freaking disappeared at some point while both Sam and Dean were distracted with their own…circumstances. Sam considered this to be something of a problem, but it was one he hadn’t shared with Dean yet.
So he wasn’t any closer to finding Jess at this point. He had at least two different sets of people out for a chunk of his flesh (he was pretty sure, anyway, that both Blondie and Gordon were gunning for him in a not-at-all nice way). He was sitting in a shit room with a bag of weapons on the floor and a stolen car parked not too far away (though far enough, he hoped, not to set the police on them if it happened to be discovered) and Dean was propped up on the room’s single bed with a bag of ice clapped to the side of his head, eyes shut and grimacing.
“Christ,” he said at one point, to no one in particular. His voice had a thin, distant quality that in anyone else Sam would’ve taken as a bad sign, but in this case was hoping would work to his advantage. He dragged the room’s single chair from over by the window and spun it so he could sit with his arms folded, resting on the back. Dean peeked at him from one eye, briefly, before shutting it again with a quiet groan.
“’M injured over here man, c’mon…”
“You’ll live,” Sam ground out, a little surprised by the callousness of his own voice. A little. But although Dean was less blood-covered than he’d been half an hour previously, and his head was bandaged, and lying on the bed he seemed less threatening and more defenseless than he had since Sam had met the man, none of it meant anything at all. Sam had collected both guns and the bloody knife Dean had dropped before fleeing the…the scene, really….and though they were all stashed in the weapons bag near the door, and currently bloodless, Sam was fully aware of their presence. He’d cleaned the knife himself, fighting his gag reflex the entire time.
“You killed those people,” he said. His voice didn’t tremble. That was something.
“They would’ve done the same to you, Sam. Worse.” Dean’s mouth barely moved as he spoke; the words were faint, riding on his exhale, tumbling into the room like dry leaves. “Not people an’way.”
“ ‘Not people’,” Sam repeated. “Jesus. They bled. They just-blood was everywhere. I never-I’ve never-”
Never had someone’s blood on me. Oh God.
“Jus’ calm down. Settle. ‘ll be all right. Okay? Jesus.” Dean squinted his eyes tighter, for a moment, and his face paled. A moment later his hand dropped and his features went slack, and Sam blew air out through his nose.
Okay. Interrogation would have to wait.
But not forever.
--
When Dean finally opened his eyes again, Sam was leaning against the door with his arms crossed and his lips pressed tightly together. Dean took one look at him and groaned a little groan, and Sam was across the room in an instant, looming over him, barely resisting the urge to grab the man by his hair and shake him.
“You killed those men.”
Dean stared up at him, face surprisingly calm for someone in his position. He went on staring until Sam backed off, resettling himself on the chair, this time turned around so he could scoot himself closer to the bed, hands on his knees, in a weird parody of attending a sickbed.
“You killed them,” he whispered.
Dean licked his lips. Opened and shut his eyes, briefly, then very softly said, “I saved your ass.”
“Did you-why did you have to kill them?”
Dean opened his eyes. “Ever see a zombie movie?”
“Ever-what? What are you-”
“Zombies. Shoot ‘em, stab ‘em, do whatever, they just keep coming. Can’t be killed, can’t be stopped, not unless you take the whole head clean off.”
“Are you saying-those people weren’t zombies! Jesus Christ!”
“No, they’re worse. ‘Cause zombies’re dumb. Those guys? They weren’t zombies and they sure as hell weren’t people, by the time I got there. Probably hadn’t been for a while. And they’re not dumb, either.”
Sam ground his teeth.
“And that makes it okay? And you-you kidnapped me and, and you beat up those guys in my house and those guys in the alley-every time I see you you’re hurting someone! And you want me to think you’re my-my brother? My brother? I don’t have a-”
“Sam.” Dean struggled to push himself up the headboard.
“Don’t have a brother, have any family, I came here to get a fresh start because my Dad died and I’m, I’m going to school, I can’t-I can’t do this, this crazy dead-people and kidnapping and lost-family-members shit, I can’t I-”
“Sam. Sam! Jesus Christ, Sam, shut the hell up, you’re giving me a headache!”
“No, I think it was being kicked in the head that’s giving you a headache!”
“You know something, you can get down off your high horse right the hell now. I’ve saved your ass twice in the last sixteen hours and this is the thanks I get? You got a real gratitude problem there, pal.”
“You left Jess behind.”
“I left Jimmy behind too. They’ll torture him. You know that? They will torture him. Gordon’s not gonna lay a finger on your pretty little girlfriend, but Jimmy’s being cut into ribbons right now. So get off my back. Jesus.”
Sam rocked back in the chair, blinking, shocked into silence. He thought of the dark-haired man he’d seen in the apartment, slender next to Dean’s bulk. Smaller. Suddenly couldn’t shake the image of blood on his face, on his hands. Tried not to imagine the sound of his screams.
“They wanted to do the same to you,” Dean told him softly. “They’ll cut you apart if they get you. Those men? That girl? Ten times more dangerous than Gordon. And the bodies I hacked up may be dead, but the intelligence that was inside-those are still very much alive.”
Sam looked up sharply. “What do you mean, ‘intelligence?’”
Dean groaned aloud, shutting his eyes briefly and pawing at his forehead. He shuffled a hand around on the bedcover and Sam, without really looking, pushed the nearly-melted ice-pack into his grasp. Dean plunked it back on the side of his head and cracked an eye to regard Sam.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I can’t, uh-I can’t really explain what’s happened today unless I give you some information you’re not actually allowed to have. Info nobody is really allowed to have. So what I’m telling you-it’s super-secret. I mean if it got out, it would probably cause mass panic, riots, God knows how many deaths. All right? So you keep this under your hat.”
Sam pressed his lips together tightly. Nodded.
“Okay, so. I guess…when you go outside, right? When you go outside at night, look up at the sky. What do you see?”
“Um…” Sam shrugged. “The…dome? The sky? The stars? Other platforms? The moon?”
“Yeah, okay. Those are the things you can see. Now. What are the things that you don’t see?”
“I don’t-”
“I mean, knowing what you know about technology, about society, about people. What would you expect to see in the sky, that isn’t there?”
Sam slowly shook his head, perplexed. Dean nodded. It seemed he’d expected as much.
“Traffic, Sam. Traffic. Not just the orbital elevators, or shuttles, people schlepping back and forth between platforms, Earth, the moon. I mean traffic beyond the Earth’s gravity well, traffic to other planets. You never see anything like that, do you? Or hear about it on the news? No shuttles to Mars, no new explorations of Jupiter or flybys past Saturn or Neptune or whatever? When’s the last time a craft was launched to the edge of the solar system? Your lifetime? Before that?”
“I…” Sam bit his lip. “What are you saying?”
Dean settled himself more comfortably on the bed. “No one really thinks about it because to most people, it’s not that important. Colonies on Mars. Who cares, right? If we were going to do it, we’d’ve done it by now, yeah?”
“I…yeah, I guess?”
Dean made a face. “You guess. Right. Well the thing is-we have the technology. We can build fully functioning biosphere platforms in space. In space. We could go to Mars if we wanted. We could probably terraform it, if we really tried. The thing is though…putting people there. That’s the problem. It takes a long damn time to get to Mars, and the human body isn’t designed to survive that kind of trip. Not well. A year in space would see all sorts of damage to a living human. And forget about settling on the moons of Saturn, or one of the other gas giants. Can’t be done. Not without some kind of advanced party. Some sort of scouts. Something non-organic, to be sent ahead, to fix things up nice. Clear the land, hang up curtains, whatever.”
“Advance…scouts?” Sam knew he wasn’t stupid. But he was having a hard time following the apparent jumps in Dean’s monologue, and no idea how it connected to the situation he found himself embroiled in.
“Look.” Dean gestured with his free hand. “It’s simple, okay? About forty-five years ago, an international venture to colonize the solar system began. They knew it would be impossible to send people, organic humans, to the far reaches of the solar system, or even to a relatively hospitable planet like Mars. That would be too damn risky, not to mention labor intensive and expensive. What they needed was a non-organic means to blaze a trail. Make these places hospitable. They needed machines that could do the work, that could survive and function in places of extreme gravity, heat, cold, whatever. So they made them.
“They’re basically nanobots. Trillions and trillions of nanobots. They’re self-replicating and in sufficient numbers-a couple billion-they become intelligent. These intelligences are clouds of super-resilient machines that can’t be destroyed by fire, by cold, or by gravity. And they were sent out into the solar system to colonize it for the human race.”
There was a long silence. Dean let his eyes slide shut for a moment, mouth tight with pain. Sam stared at him wordlessly, then lifted his eyes to the far wall.
“Oh,” he said eventually. Dean shifted, drew a breath, opened his eyes again.
“So okay. Uncounted numbers of clouds of machines intelligences, launched into space. And they did what they were supposed to do. They colonized. They did it very well. They were designed for it. But they got…I dunno, at some point they got sick of taking orders, maybe. They’re intelligent, they’re physically superior in every way to humans, they’re not bounded by little things like organic needs since they can basically subsist on sunlight and atmosphere and solid rock…and they got to thinking, ‘Baby, we could own this town.’”
“This…you mean the-the solar system.”
Dean pointed a finger and grinned tiredly. “Yahtzee.”
“So wait, let me get this straight-evil machines bent on dominating the solar system have rebelled against their human masters and…what, are bent on enslaving the Earth and its human population?”
Dean grinned a little, gaze flicking up to the water-stained ceiling. “Something like that. Except, instead of ‘enslave,’ read ‘exterminate.’ Yeah. There’s a war going on. Has been for years. Decades. The moon is basically the front line. Earth and the platforms-that’s it. We’re it. The entire solar system is controlled by machine intelligences. All we have is the Earth. We’re barely keeping them at bay. Any day could be the day when they finally manage to snuff us out.”
Sam pressed his lips together. He had a sudden horrifying image in his mind of the entire solar system, laid out like one of the science projects grade-schoolers made, engulfed in darkness. A huge cloud of roiling black, cold and brilliant and utterly without mercy. And the Earth like a candle, tiny and fragile. Naked and unprotected.
“So those men…the ones you…”
“Yeah. The…clouds, um. Did you ever see The Exorcist? Or, I dunno, some show where like a demon gets inside somebody, makes ‘em do things they wouldn’t normally? Like they’re puppets, or like, suits?”
“Like, people-suits?”
“Meatsuits. Yeah. Like that. The…well, they’re like demons. They get inside people and walk around in their bodies. And they can keep the body going even if you shoot it or stick a chunk of metal in its heart. But it’s damn hard to be convincing as a person if your head is detached from your neck, or gushing blood, or whatever. I can’t kill them. I didn’t kill the thing inside. But I made the body so inhospitable they had to leave. Abandon them. That’s what that noise was. The uh, the demons. Leaving the body.”
Sam said, “Holy shit.”
“Yeah.”
Sam scowled. He folded his arms tightly across his chest. Forget the whole ‘spattered in blood, long-lost brother’ thing. That was mundane. Totally believable. Completely sane. Normal even. The solar system being overrun by intelligent clouds of microscopic machines? That was just a bad science fiction movie waiting to happen.
And wait. Something about the story didn’t make sense. If the…the nanobots, the clouds, the…whatever, were essentially unstoppable…if the war had continued for decades….Why did the Earth still have a human population? Why were they even sitting in this room, having this conversation?
“Hang on, wait a minute. You said…‘any day.’ Any day they could snuff us out. But…they haven’t. Right? They haven’t done it yet. Why? What’s holding them back?”
And here Dean’s grinned huge and genuine, the exhaustion falling briefly from his features.
“We are. Or, well, we’re not. But the other ones, the ones like us. Like you, like me, like Jimmy and Claire. That’s what we’re for. It’s what we do. We’re the first, last, and only real defense the Earth has. Without us, the whole thing goes kablooey.”
He paused, and his grin faded. Added, “Except, you know. We all ran away.”
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Tbc…
Part 8
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Notes: I pretty much write these in two days and don’t really edit them or anything. I was tired today so there are probably some things in this chapter I could’ve done better re: emotion and revelations and stuff. I’ll try to get whatever I missed in the next chapter.
Also I did not mean for this to be so long. Sheesh.
Also also, a nanite is (among other things) a self assembling cluster of Ruby daemons. Awesome.