“Great,” I thought wryly. “As long as it isn’t a long shot.”
“The good news is that if you can force them out, they’ll be out forever. Assuming you don’t invite them back. But this feat will require all the focus and will you’ve ever mustered.
“We suggest you imagine the Swarm are bacterial invaders moments away from devouring your brain, and you’re a military general desperately marshaling an army of antibodies to destroy them. We need all of your fear, and hope, and rage, and focus, and will—all devoted to a herculean level of effort toward this task. As if the fate of the galaxy hangs in the balance. We’ll amplify and direct your efforts for their best effect.”
I thought about what was required of me, trying not to dwell on the odds, and took a deep mental breath. “Understood,” I said, “and ready.”
“Good. Begin on our mark. Three . . . two . . . one . . . mark!”
46
I threw everything I had into expelling the Swarm. All of my outrage at being violated, all of my hatred of what they represented, and all of my fear regarding the stakes involved, including my own life. I imagined commanding an army of ravenous antibodies, directing them with my rage-fueled thoughts to envelope bacteria in my brain and crush them before moving on to the next victims. I imagined my forces slaughtering the enemy within, applying relentless pressure to kill them all, prevent them from bringing on torment and death, not just for me, but for countless billions of others.
I maintained a savage intensity, a ferocity, long past what should have been the limits of my endurance, a man continuing to lift a brutally heavy boulder as his arms begged for mercy, screamed in pain, and felt as if they were being torn from their sockets.
“Did you just attempt to push us out?” said the Swarm in disbelief. “We can’t be sure, because all we felt was a tiny itch. If it was an attack, it was an embarrassing one.”
I didn’t reply. There was nothing to say. I had tried to pretend that a one percent chance of success didn’t really mean a one percent chance—but of course it did.
I ceased my efforts, dropping the metaphorical boulder I was straining to carry, the Swarm’s smug words breaking my will to endure the excruciating pain.
I had failed. Miserably and totally.
“Your body is starting to come to,” announced the hive-mind, as if my attempt to expel it from my brain wasn’t even worthy of further mention. “You’ve been out for almost thirty seconds of real-time. But we can now finally continue the implementation of our plans.”
I suddenly heard the voice of Tessa, distraught, emotional, and panicked. “Jason,” she was saying. “Please wake up! Why did you do that to yourself? Jason, come on! Snap out of it!”
The Swarm opened my eyes just a slit, and I could see Tessa kneeling down, as close to the wall of force between us as she could get, her face a mask of fear.
“And now we’ll do what we were pushing you to do. Kill Tessa Barrett. We’ll demonstrate just how helpless you are before we bring you to meet Nick in the hangar. You’ll truly understand that you’ll be nothing more than a passenger in your own mind and body for the rest of your short life. And that the faith you place in your species’ passion is misguided.
“Love doesn’t conquer all,” added the Swarm. “We do.”
I felt my body rising to a standing position without any orders from me.
“Jason, thank God you’re okay!” said Tessa. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“What do you think is going on?” said my voice, dripping with contempt. “I’m going to finish what I was about to do just a minute ago. End your life.”
“You’re angry that I lied about my origins,” said Tessa anxiously. “Hurt and confused. I get that. But this isn’t you, Jason. If it was, you’d never have cracked a gun against your own skull. The real you would never hurt me no matter what. We’ve meant far too much to each other. So talk to me,” she pleaded. “Tell me why you think you have to do this.”
My hand retrieved the gun I had dropped on the floor, and my arm rose to once again point the weapon at Tessa’s head from just a few feet away. The wall of force was still in place, but the base’s AI had programmed it to let bullets through.
I threw all of my will at my hand, desperately trying to make it drop the gun, but I had no influence whatsoever. This wasn’t a tug-of-war like before. I had become a ghost trying to make my presence felt in the corporeal world. It wasn’t my hand I had to control. It was my brain.
“Goodbye, Tessa,” I heard myself say. “It’s been . . . educational.”
“Nooooo!” I bellowed out, issuing a primal scream from within, and directing all the panic, all the hatred, all the focus, and all the will I had ever felt directly at the Swarm. A visceral, unthinking lashing out at the being who was an instant away from ending the life of the most wonderful woman I had ever known, a woman I had come to love with a depth that scared me. I couldn’t lose her. I refused to.
Suddenly, my internal scream became an actual one. The scream continued, seemingly forever, a shriek reflective of superhuman effort, searing my lungs and vocal chords both, as the nanites amplified my surge of determination to stop the hive-mind, whatever the cost.
And then I realized what it meant that I was using my lungs and my vocal chords.
The Swarm was out. I had ejected it from my consciousness.
But just as it had lost its final grip on my mind, it exerted the last force required to fully depress the gun’s trigger. As my primal scream continued, I yanked the gun to the left, just as a bullet shot from the barrel and dug a shallow groove across the side of Tessa’s skull, just above her left ear.
I had done it! Incredibly, I had eradicated the Swarm and saved Tessa’s life.
My mind raced. No time to congratulate myself, as we had a long way to go.