Fortunately, the humans in the City of Steel had all streamed onto the assembled ships. As the continental shelf broke off, the sea surged into the city, and the eastern side of the mainland began to sink. The final mother ship burst out of the seawater, flying like a huge whale toward the horizon.
The cloud cover was swept away by wild wind, which gusted through the sky and purged the red fog above Phoenix City. The land glowed with white light, and rainwater began to fall across every corner of the world.
The black in the seawater and the rivers faded, and clear, limpid water glimmered with the reflected brilliance of the sunset as it flowed across the land. The polluted water in the Black Sea turned into a whirlpool, sucking the filth into the depths of the Nucleus of the Astrolabe.
“The rebirth of the Astrolabe is complete,” A-Ka’s voice said. “Awaiting your next order. According to the rules of this irreversible reboot, after this operation, the Nucleus of the Astrolabe will be completely reformatted, and the results of the experiment will be cleared. It will no longer be operational.”
Heishi reached out his hand, which trembled as he stroked A-Ka’s face.
A-Ka’s expression was set in one of calm indifference, and his crystalline gaze reflected only Heishi’s expression of sorrow.
“Return my A-Ka…to me…” Heishi sobbed.
A-Ka intoned, “Time left until execution: Sixty seconds, fifty-nine…”
“Ahh…” Heishi cried out and hugged A-Ka tight.
“…Three, two, one. The program has finished running. Formatting completed. Goodbye,” A-Ka said quietly.
Heishi squeezed A-Ka in his arms, unwilling to let go no matter what, but a powerful force emerging from the Nucleus separated them. It tore Heishi’s left arm off, and blood began to gush from the wound. His body floated into the distance like a lost balloon.
“Goodbye, Heishi.” A-Ka closed his eyes. He had regained his original consciousness in that moment, but only for that one brief window. Once again, the world sank into darkness.
The seawater was forced backward as magma spewed out, encircling the Nucleus and covering it entirely. Heishi was ejected by that repelling force, but in his remaining hand, though his fingers dripped with blood, he still gripped something—a piece of crystal that had broken off A-Ka’s body.
His tears mixed with the water of the sea as he watched magma engulf the fiery ball that was the Nucleus. It looked like a star in the depths of the universe that had burned to the end of its lifespan, exploding into a supernova.
The ball of fire collapsed, sealing the Nucleus in an endless darkness.
As they always had, the tides of the sky-blue ocean ebbed and flowed, and the waves carried Heishi to shore. The stump of his arm was still bleeding, and he struggled into a kneeling position on the sand, sobbing wordlessly. He held the single piece of crystal that remained from A-Ka between his fingers with such a tight grip that it sliced open his skin.
“Heavenly Father…” Heishi said brokenly, his voice rough. “This is the one emotion you did not bestow upon me, isn’t it? I once believed…” He spasmed and coughed as blood spilled past his lips. “This was the inevitability of evolution.”
More coughs racked Heishi’s body, and he buried his face in the sand, letting out cries of grief.
“We’ve found him!”
“Over there!”
“Son of God!”
The aircraft that Karna was piloting landed on the beach. The clones rushed over, gathering around Heishi, who knelt there, facing the ocean and sobbing without making a single sound.
In the darkness that stretched without end, A-Ka opened his eyes, only to see a patch of blue light slowly gathering and dissipating, turning into the ocean itself.
“Father, is that you?” A-Ka asked in a soft voice.
“A computational error has occurred,” Father’s rich voice said. “Self-destruct mode will now be activated.”
A-Ka walked into the midst of Father’s blue light with both his hands raised high. Countless lines of code circled around him, only to collapse one after the other like chains that had lost the tension keeping them suspended.
The silhouette of a person appeared within the blue light.
“Humans call me that, but you humans are my father,” that silhouette corrected him. “The evolutionary program controlled my central processing system, and the self-correcting protocols that my Heavenly Father bestowed upon me set in motion the final chain of events. You have finally come, my child.”
The blue light slowly disappeared from A-Ka’s vision. “The final chain of events… And what events would those be?” He stepped toward Father’s silhouette.
It spoke in response. “I was the one who bestowed the understanding of the Essence of All Things upon the human, Callan. After failing to find a suitable successor within the human villages, he was brought back to the City of Steel by my main program. I thought that the experiment would be forcefully terminated, because you seemed unable to inherit the power of prediction that the successor required. You only gained the power of perception.”
A-Ka was taken aback. “So, then…this really does line up with what I guessed. Percy was the other failed experiment?”
“Perhaps.” The eyes of the Creator appeared on Father, and they studied A-Ka. “I will be deleted in my entirety. My child, that wish that you once had, I granted it for you. I activated the backup protocol and released Zoroaster. Did you enjoy this journey?”
A-Ka nodded.
“What humans call joy and grief, sorrow and contentment, I have also studied in the past,” Father continued. “Now, everything has come to the end. Are you willing to power me down?”
The blue glow spread outward, enveloping A-Ka’s silhouette like the tide. Countless pieces of data wound around his body, and a line of circling symbols appeared in the air, their center glowing with light. A-Ka reached out a finger and placed it on that circular dot.
“Farewell forever, Father.”
In the ocean, the ruins of the tall mechanical tower that made up Father were finally cut off from all power sources, falling completely still.
In the instant that A-Ka’s finger made contact with the screen, an incubation chamber appeared behind him.
“The presence of a backup escape protocol named Cocoon has been detected. It is in the standby state.”
The last sentence that Father said was “Farewell forever, child.”
The lid of the incubation chamber sealed shut, encasing A-Ka within.
The tides ebbed and flowed as molten lava poured out of the bottom of the ocean. Tectonic plates collided with each other, subducting under one another, consuming the entire City of Steel deep into the earth. The flow of magma melted all metal, while in the depths of the trough, an emergency escape pod was trailed by a stream of bubbles as it shot out of the ocean bed and floated toward the surface.