Nebula Awards Showcase 2016 by Mercedes Lackey Page A

can tell the kids that you’re still alive. And when, in a year or a decade from now, someone finds a cure, we’ll reconstruct you. You’ll see the kids again. Maybe I’ll have the pleasure of hearing you scold me for this.
    â€œI knew you’d never let me do this to you. You’d prefer to let yourself fade away. Well I can’t accept that. So I’m giving you a gift, Beth, the gift of tomorrow, whether you want it or not.”
    The Sloan pressed a button and the Beth slid into the cylinder. The humans stared at their screens as a turbine spun up, as a low hum quickly rose in pitch past hearing range. The Sloan covered her mouth with her hand and trembled once as the Beth flashed like a nova and vanished.
    â€œThis can’t be all there is!” blurted the Eye. “I must have made a mistake. There must be another message, somewhere.”
    â€œBut this feels like the truth,” the Meeker said. “The Sloan encoded the Beth to save her. To stop her suffering. It’s a very human thing to do.”
    â€œI will have to terminate all the Beths and begin again,” the Eye said. “I missed something.”
    â€œAnd repeat her suffering a quadrillion more times?”
    â€œTo find the answer.”
    â€œSo you agree, the Beths are suffering?”
    â€œMeeker, do not question me. I am the All-Seeing Eye!”
    â€œAnd I am the Meeker. I have stood beside you all these years and watched countless Beths die. Eye, I’m sorry, but I just can’t do it anymore.”
    The Eye shrunk into a point of light. “Pity. I thought I’d perfected the Meekers with you, 6655321. But I see now that I’ve given you too much autonomy of thought. Goodbye, Meeker.”
    â€œGoodbye? Wait, what—”
    The Meeker felt his body burning, as if he had become a newborn star.

    He stood in the Beth’s glass home as the afternoon sun streamed through the windows. After several minutes the Meeker thought, I am here . I am alive. He waited, for a time. For his entire life he had followed the Eye’s orders, and without her commands he didn’t know what to do. The wind picked up and died, and a brown leaf blew past, but the Eye never came.
    He stepped outside into the cool air.
    When no one stopped him, he took the path under the snow-covered pines and ascended the hill. He gazed at the white-capped mountains and the tree-lined valley and knew why the Beth had loved to come this way.
    â€œBeautiful, isn’t it?” The Beth was standing beside him as if she had always been there.
    â€œWhere did you come from?” he said.
    â€œI’m always here,” she said, “in one place or another.”
    â€œAm I dead?”
    â€œYes, but that can be to your advantage.”
    He had never really thought about non-existence before. He felt a wave of panic. “I’m dead?”
    â€œThe matter that constituted your body has been absorbed into the Great Corpus. But so too have your thoughts. We are both strange attractors in the far corners of the Eye’s mind.”
    â€œI don’t understand.”
    She smiled as she turned down the mountain path, and he leaped to follow. “The Eye has devoured millions of civilizations and incorporated their knowledge into her Corpus.” The snow crunched under her feet in a satisfying way. “A billion years ago, there was a galactic war to stop her. And she, of course, won.”
    The glass house, its roof dusted with snow, glared in the sun at the base of the valley. “Some of us survived, here and there, in pockets. We knew there was no escape. The only solution was to hide, to plan. The Eye’s greatest strength is her curiosity. But it’s also her greatest weakness. We found the human artifact long before the Eye had. And we encoded ourselves within it. We gave Beth a disease without a cure, gave her a story without an end. And as the Eye creates each new Beth, she