“I will tell you,” he said. “Strangely enough, the very reason I am here in this abandoned city of Tokyo is because it is my duty to explain to another person the reason and the manner of the city’s fall into decline. You may very well be that other person.”
“You were . . . placed here to do this?”
“Tragedy visited this place in the year 2900. The dimming of the sun in the sky above was the first sign of our impending doom. The average temperature of this city, and across the surface of the earth, fell to minus sixty-eight degrees Celsius.”
“Minus sixty-eight degrees!”
“Indeed. After this, the earth began to dry. All the lands were transformed into deserts; shallow straits and inlets evaporated, leaving nothing but sand and salt flats behind.”
This explained the condition of the world outside—though it was still surprising that all of this could have happened in a mere one thousand years.
“This was planned, clearly,” Siddhārtha said, raising his head. “Orionae. Have you lived here then for these past one thousand years?”
Orionae nodded. “I have. For 1,180 years. I am a cyborg. As I said, I was placed here for the very purpose of recording this information and transmitting it to another.”
“Yes, your story. Might I hear it?”
Orionae’s companions, flitting like ghosts, had formed a circle around Siddhārtha and their leader while they talked. Siddhārtha wondered whether they were listening. Whenever they moved, their thin clothing gave off a faded luster that seemed to fit their ruined surroundings.
“Listen,” Orionae said. “The Inner Planetary Alliance—”
Suddenly, an alert system embedded in the artificial ear shells at either side of Siddhārtha’s head began to sound. Automatically, his metabolizer went into overdrive, preparing to pump oxygen and enzymes through his body. The supplementary processors embedded in each of his shoulders began scanning his surroundings. Finally, his tri-D sensor cell antenna indicated the presence of a dangerous enemy beyond the shattered wall directly behind him.
For a second, he regretted letting his guard down. It had been a mistake to divert his attention from his persistent follower, if only for a moment.
Orionae was a decoy!
In one bound, Siddhārtha leapt to the corner of the huge room to await the enemy’s arrival, taking cover beneath a giant metallic cylinder, red with rust, that resembled some sort of electrical rectifier. A moment later, silent beams of deep crimson light struck the wall on either side of him. Where they hit, the shattered wall was reduced to incandescent steam, leaving nothing but scorched holes behind. Siddhārtha narrowly dodged the attack, leaping up to hide himself in a large crevice between the wall and the ceiling. The room was filled with swirling flames and rising dust, reducing visibility to less than a meter. Out of the dust and confusion came fragments of the screams of Orionae’s people.
Siddhārtha gingerly extended his tri-D antenna from the crack in the wall, searching for his foe. He found him standing near a protrusion in the wall on the opposite side of the room. Orionae and the others were rapidly moving away, running down the corridor in a group. Though it would be a loss to let Orionae escape now, he could not risk exposing himself to his enemy in order to follow.
After what seemed like an interminable amount of time, the standoff ended when his enemy became tired of waiting and began to move.
Siddhārtha connected his tri-D antenna to his visual cortex.
A man was standing by the protrusion in the far wall. He wore dirty white cloth loosely wrapped around a thin, suntanned frame, and in his right hand he carried a short, strangely shaped weapon. It seemed odd to Siddhārtha that this man should be his enemy, in possession of such fearful technology. And yet he sensed a burning hatred directed toward himself.
His enemy moved suddenly, and another beam of crimson light erupted from the weapon in his hand, illuminating the corridor down which Orionae and his people were escaping. Siddhārtha sensed the group divide, separating into its individual members. Some of them vanished entirely.
Before the beam of light had ceased its cutting blast, Siddhārtha launched into motion. Energizing the micro-reactor embedded in his waist, he activated the discharge panel on his left wrist, propelling a large ball of yellow flame toward his enemy’s position. The fireball struck the wall behind the man, exploding into hundreds of thousands of sparks that scattered in all directions.
As his enemy ran silently beneath the spreading blaze, Siddhārtha let fly a second fireball. The room was suffused with pale light and the air trembled as though electrified. Even as the flames surrounded the stranger, he ducked into a side corridor through an opening in the wall. A smile appeared on the man’s chiseled brown face the moment before he disappeared, his eyes darting in Siddhārtha’s direction.
Twice crimson beams blasted holes in the corridor ceiling. Then there was silence.
Siddhārtha extended his antenna to find that his enemy had retreated to the lower levels of the city. He had not abandoned his attack entirely . . . but it would be some time before he found his next opportunity to strike.
Siddhārtha went down into the corridor to look for Orionae. He found three bodies beneath fallen sections of ceiling, as well as several large holes with singed edges, which he took to indicate people who had been evaporated along with the floor and walls around them.
Orionae was lying on the floor some thirty meters down the corridor.
Siddhārtha hurried to him, picking him up in his arms. “Orionae! Awaken!”
The cyborg’s eyelids fluttered open. Siddhārtha saw his own round head reflected in Orionae’s brown eyes.
“Ah yes, Siddhārtha. I had not finished my story. In the year 2902, the Solar Alliance determined that the energy loss within our solar region was part of a greater energy loss affecting the entire Milky Way galaxy.”
“You mean the entire galaxy was deteriorating?”
“Yes. Then, in 2905, at a summit of astrophysicists called by the Solar Alliance, an emergency committee formed to investigate the matter announced that a reduction in potential energy, its cause unknown, was affecting the entire known universe.”
“Orionae, stay with me,” Siddhārtha said, lifting the slumping cyborg off the ground. “You must tell me what happened next.”
“I’m all right . . . They soon discovered that every spiral galaxy in the visible universe was showing a rapid red shift.”
“Which would either mean the Doppler effect or a rapid reduction in potential energy.”
“It is as you say. However, we knew it was not the Doppler effect, for indeed all the energy in the universe was beginning to fade measurably.” A ragged cough sent spasms through Orionae’s body.
“But couldn’t it have been a diffusion of energy caused by rapid expansion?”
Orionae shook his head. “No. If that were the case then the Doppler effect would be sufficient to explain the red shift. But observe these drastically cold temperatures. Water and air are both rarefied, and nothing but a cyborg can even hope to survive on the planet’s surface. I wonder how they fare on other planets . . . whether any humans remain.”
The strength left Orionae’s body. Panicking, Siddhārtha shook him. “Don’t let go! You have not yet fulfilled your duty!”
Orionae barely managed to open his lightless eyes. “Siddhārtha. I have seen this with my own eyes: strange life-forms came from beyond our universe to develop this world—this was seven thousand years ago already.”
“From beyond our universe, you say?”
“They said this: ‘By the reckoning of the Twin Suns, from Blue 93 to the summer of Yellow 17 in the New Galactic Age . . . ’ ”
“ ‘ . . . the Planetary Development Committee on Astarta 50 received a directive from Shi to attempt a helio-ses-beta development on the third planet in the Ai System,’ ” Siddhārtha said, continuing the words that Orionae had started. “Orionae. Did you see these life-forms yourself?”
Orionae nodded slightly. It would have been dangerous to force him to speak any further, so Siddhārtha used his supplementary processors to extract the memories from him. The platinum electrodes implanted in Orionae’s skull activated his cerebrum with a shower of ultrashort waves. Then the extraction stimulation circuit from Siddhārtha’s supplementary processor fused with the remaining gray matter in the cyborg, converting his distant memories into faint electrical patterns, which it then transmitted into Siddhārtha’s neural web. Siddhārtha continued to walk quietly down the corridor, holding Orionae’s body in his arms.