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SABERTOOTH

"Now all becomes clear," the mayor sighed, relieved. "He’s just an AI."

José's jaw dropped, amazed.

"He can't be an AI," said Jackie. "He’s a real person, like me. Like everyone here."

"You can think what you want, but you cannot argue with the data in our archives." The mayor was adamant. "He is an AI, well programmed, but completely AI."

The three of them looked at me. The mayor impatiently, the Johnsons with something between anger and shock.

-"But you’re not an AI."

-"Of course not. And to think that not that long ago I, myself, had thought the Johnsons were AI, and that this whole world was one big AI going on in my head."

-"How could he be so wrong?"

"Artificial intelligence," José muttered. "You got me good, I must admit."

When I’m angry, I have trouble speaking. This accusation that I was an AI pissed me off more than anything thus far. Say I’m new, call me young, tell me I don’t have a clue - but don't you dare say I’m an artificial intelligence. I am not a machine, I'm not a program. I exist like any other person. I think, therefore I am. Simple as that.

As I searched for words, Jackie found them.

"Yes, Royal," she said sadly, "that explains everything. You have no memory of who you were downstairs because you were never there."

José clenched his fists. "This is unbelievable! Is this how you trick people?" he yelled at the mayor. "Do you know how much time we've invested in him? Guiding him, taking him…"

His face was very close to the mayor's and with each word spit sprayed from his mouth. But for some reason it didn't bother the mayor. He just stood there, completely serene, nodding his head in empathy.

Jackie, in the meantime, had started stroking my hand. She didn't ask permission, she didn't do it discreetly, she didn't even pretend that I had a choice in the matter. She just took my muscular hand and started stroking.

Although the sensation itself was pleasant, the reason for it was not.

"I’m not an AI!" I pushed her hands away from me. "I’m a real person!"

"There’s no doubt there must be some malfunction here," the mayor apologized to José, ignoring me completely.

"This is not a malfunction! This is an outrage!"

José's face was set like stone and he crossed his arms on his chest. "I want to know what you're going to do about this."

The mayor sighed and turned to me.

"I’m asking you to end now."

I think my brows went so high up, they left my face completely. I fought my growing desire to punch the gray old man right in the nose. Instead, I turned to the Johnsons, who were looking at me with anticipation. Probably expecting me to vanish into thin air or something.

"Tell me, is he serious?" I yelled.

"Actually, he’s also an AI," Jackie answered. "And you have to do what he asks, unfortunately."

The mayor got up off his chair and stood before me, exuding a calm strength that was indisputable. He looked deep into my eyes. "I am asking you again. End. Now."

I punched him in the face. Hard.

-"Yes! That's what you should have done to begin with!"

-"I think that until that moment, I hadn't really realized how strong I was. I mean, I saw my muscles and I could feel that my body was strong. I figured the punch would stun him, or knock him back a few steps. Or back a few dozen steps."

-"How far did you actually knock him back?"

-"That's not exactly the right question."

My fist sank deep into the gray head and vanished.

For a brief moment, the mayor just stood there, stunned. Then he shattered. Scattered into endless little gray fragments as if he was made of glass. His particles hovered in the air for a split second and then fell down to the ground like a little hail storm.

Jackie squealed and then brought her hand to her mouth. José took a step back fearfully. Then he pulled Jackie close, hugging her.

I was just as shocked. My hand remained in midair, like it didn't know what to do next. It felt weird, like I had punched through a concrete wall. On the one hand, my knuckles hurt very much, but on the other hand, it wasn't a bad kind of pain. I felt like finally my hand had done something it was meant to do.

I looked at it for a moment. My fist was still clenched, with not even a scratch, wound, or any other evidence of the fact that it had just busted a man into tiny little pieces. I looked at José and Jackie. As one, they took a small step back.

"What… what did you do to him?" José's voice shook.

It was the first time I saw the Johnsons fear me. I brought my hand back to my side, hiding it from them. I didn't want them to be scared of me.

"I don't know. I just wanted him to leave me alone. Did I end him?"

José looked at the gray remains. "It doesn't look like it. When an AI ends, it just… disappears."

Hmm.

"So I might have killed him?"

"He’s just an AI. You can't kill him."

"No one's ever tried," Jackie added over her husband's words. She looked a little less stressed and her words made me very curious.

"So you're saying that if he’d been a real person," I asked, "I could have killed him?"

The mere question made them take another step back. I looked around. Other people, who probably saw what I had done to the mayor, started gathering and whispering at a safe distance.

"Not that I want to kill anyone, of course," I assured them. "It's just interesting to know. Has anyone ever died here before?"

I remembered what the pale woman had said, that you couldn’t die in Heaven. But I couldn't be sure. Everything seemed more and more surreal. Waking up in Heaven, visiting the Plain of Souls, the entrance to the city, the fact I had no idea who I was or what I was doing there - all these made me start thinking, again, that maybe I was dreaming all this. Maybe I was lying, crushed, at the side of some road? And even if I wasn’t and Heaven wasn't this trippy, perhaps the pale woman had been a dream? Or at least some sort of AI?

"We’ve never heard of anyone dying here," Jackie said quietly.

"No. It’s never happened."

The Johnsons stood with their backs to the city, frozen in place. But behind them activity was stirring. Over the building an odd static hum started to rise, growing louder. The invisible energy dome I had crashed into changed its appearance. At first it had been completely transparent, but now it started to reflect the pink mountains, the clouds, the rainbow, and the blue sky.

A number of people noticed this change and pointed toward the city. After them a few more, and then, everyone. Jackie and José turned around and watched.

The humming got stronger and louder, until it became deafening.

And then they came out of the dome. Thousands of yellow-and-black dots, rapidly approaching us. My first thought was that they were wasps. Thousands of giant wasps, each one the size of my fist, with a vicious stinger and two yellow glowing eyes, focused only on me.

"Royal, I don't think you should stay -" I heard Jackie say.

I beamed far away from there.

From a mile away the city looked smaller and the humming sounded weaker. But then at once it grew louder. A black-and-yellow cloud manifested in the air eighty feet behind me. I didn't hesitate for a moment and beamed again, another mile forward. Then again. Then again. And then again.

I looked back. I was close to one of the mountaintops overlooking the valley. The city stood there glistening in the middle of the lake, small and distant. The humming had stopped.

And then it came back, weaker, a few hundred feet away from me. I took a deep breath and beamed again. This time I wasn't going to experiment and wait. I looked straight forward and started a series of beams, one after the other.

The scenery around me changed quickly. The green valley gave way to a chain of majestic mountains, the warm air changed into biting coldness, the rustic scenery changed to snow and ice. And still I beamed onward. I beamed over the highest mountain and then I stopped. This time I didn't look back. On the contrary. I looked straight forward, three hundred miles away, to the top of another mountain. A lower one.

Three hundred miles.

I took a deep breath, focusing on the top, and beamed forward.

I didn't expect to make it. The limit was one mile. I shouldn't be able beam farther. And even if I did succeed, I was sure it would take a little longer to get there.

I was surprised. Not only did I succeed, but it was easy. And the transit time continued to be immediate, with no relation to the distance traveled. For a moment I felt butterflies in my stomach, and then a different sensation. Warmer. I laughed out loud.

-"I’d laugh, too."

- "Yeah. It just felt right, breaking the rules. Being different. So I couldn't go into the cities in Heaven? So what? There would be a way around that. But if everyone could only beam a mile at a time and I could go farther… that was very interesting."

I landed in a mountainous area, only not quite so cold. The snow was melting slowly over black, granite rocks, the sound of dripping water came from every crevice. A gentle breeze whistled from within the rocks and a flock of green birds circled around the valley, not far from me. There was no sign or hum of the wasps. I was sure I had lost them along the way. In any case, I now knew I could evade them easily, if and when they finally found me. I calmed down.

I wasn't ready for the sabertooth tiger's attack.

It started as a giant tooth coming out of my chest, lifting me like a crane and shaking me from side to side, tearing me from within.

At this point I felt no pain, only surprise. I understood I was in the jaws of something, and I remembered the creatures I had seen underwater in the lake around Midlake.

In the meantime, the tiger's jaw clamped down on me from behind, and then came the pain. Harsh, paralyzing. I tried to grab on to something with my hands, kick with my legs, but there was nothing I could do. Except one thing.

I beamed forward. Not much. Not more than twenty feet. But that was enough. It was almost funny seeing the giant cat with nothing but air in his mouth, while I, his prey, was plastered to a rock, shooting jets of bright blood everywhere.

It roared and charged again. Four hundred and forty pounds of a nightmare, extinct from the world for some ten thousand years, resurrected here in Heaven, with fangs a foot long. The first leap brought him about ten feet away from me. His second leap introduced him to my fist.

-"The mighty fist strikes again."

-"Precisely."

-"How did you know it would work?"

-"Desperation? Gamer's instinct? Anyway, it worked. I punched the nose of an angry, ten-foot-long sabertooth tiger. Not a lot of people can say that."

The fist went straight into the giant cat and it turned into gray fragments of dust. Just like the mayor before it. The gray cloud drifted slowly down to the ground, painted by the dark jets of blood still coming out of my body. The cliffs around me continued to echo the tiger's roar.

I was seriously wounded. And very tired.

I tried to stop the bleeding from my chest with my hand. I couldn't. The bite had come through my back, and there was no way I could reach the entrance wound. I could only lean on one of the rocks and ponder, once again, what the pale woman had told me about death in Heaven. I was about to find out if it was even possible. And anyway, if Heaven's system didn't recognize me, what exactly would happen? Would I become gray dust like the AI?

Perhaps I would just end and vanish.

And then… then I came up with a new idea. Perhaps the mayor was right? Perhaps I was an AI that had somehow grown a personality and become real? The Pedia was feeding my mind old and irrelevant information about Kurzweil's singularity, but I wasn't in the mood to dwell on the subject. I was dying and the pain was undoubtedly real.

The blood loss was real too, judging by the wave of weakness crawling through my body.

To my right came a loud chirp. I glanced around briefly. One of the green birds had landed a few feet away from me was examining me through yellow eyes. It chirped again and opened its sharp beak, which contained a row of even sharper teeth. A long tongue flicked across them and the beak snapped shut.

Another bird landed next to it, then another. The pace of their beaks snapping grew in rhythm and strength. Above me, more green birds started circling, surrounding me. I felt trapped. I was ready to accept being bitten to death by a sabertooth tiger, but not being pecked to death by a flock of birds with sharp beaks. I felt around on the ground with my free hand until I found a stone big enough. I threw it at the first bird I saw. In actuality, I didn't throw it. It was more like a shot. The stone shot out of my hand and turned the bird into a gray dust cloud.

The other birds didn't react at all. Perhaps they were happy one of their competitors was out of the picture, leaving a bigger portion for the rest. They started approaching me with little bounces. I started throwing rocks faster and faster and, one after another, they turned into dust.

I was quickly running out of stones, but more importantly, I was running out of time. My vision was becoming blurry and the jets of blood shooting out of me had slowed and turned into a slow seep. I guessed I didn't have a lot of blood left. Still, I was pretty sure I could destroy every bird that came near me. As long as I could stay conscious. As long as I was not too tired to fight.

And then I heard it again. The humming.

Within seconds they were upon me. Hundreds of wasps coming from all directions, jamming hundreds of painful pitchforks into me.

Up close I saw that they weren't exactly wasps. Although they had black-and-yellow bodies, their form was human – female - aside from their transparent wings. Like fairies. Angry fairies. I managed to squash a few, but the rest kept stabbing me with more and more little pitchforks, each one of them no bigger than a toothpick, but very painful.

My vision flickered a few times and then went dark.