Caesar breathed deep. “Just like Homer’s heroes.”

I nodded. “Freud said all technology is a prosthetic god, a set of tools we weak humans strap on to give ourselves the powers we crave: computers for omniscience; trackers for omnipresence; medicine for immortality; armor for invulnerability; guns for Heaven’s wrathful thunderbolts. Apollo just made that literal. Of course, Apollo didn’t really think the war over Mars in two hundred and fifty years would be fought with giant robots, it was just the only way they could describe a war that would be meaningful, conscionable, with space for human dignity. It was Apollo’s hope, the kind of soldier Apollo wished they could be, so they could die a hero, instead of faceless, one among a million. That’s why I had to face Apollo in battle head-on, not catch them by trickery as I did the others. It was foolish of me. Apollo could have won, killed me, and lived to make their war. I risked letting that happen, but I had to test myself, my future, against Apollo’s. Apollo deserved to fall like a hero.”

I will not solve the mystery, reader. I will not tell you of Apollo’s death. You know the facts. The eighth day of my rampage Saladin and I convinced Seine Mardi that the police who had her in protective custody were complicit in the murders. She fled, and sent word to Apollo, who was about to embark for the safety of the Moon, but he gave up his seat to Tully, and returned. He knew it was a trap, but knew too that, if he did not come, his love would suffer all my tortures, alone. The police found Seine dead of cyanide, one bullet in her side, with residue across her brow proving that she had worn Apollo’s vizor for a time, though whether before, during, or after death science cannot tell. Apollo’s body they found dismembered, sexually violated, and dead from blood loss, since my imperfect tourniquets could not prevent all leakage from the stumps of thighs and shoulders. His coat, vizor, and U-beast were gone, but in his stomach they found a placebo capsule, shaped just like Seine’s cyanide, and well-chewed bites of his own cooked flesh, which he had volunteered to taste as we feasted with him, one last experience. A second pellet of real poison waited out of reach in the gutter beneath. These are forensic facts. As for the truth? Who died first? Whether Apollo mistook the placebo for poison, or whether he chose the placebo and the pain that followed? Did Apollo lend Seine his vizor to aid her in combat? Or perhaps, before the battle, he shared with her a glimpse of his Utopian vision? Or placed the vizor on her dead eyes to make her rest more peaceful? These answers neither torture nor you can wring from me, reader. At first I kept them secret because I felt no outsider could understand, but there have been such exquisite versions of our story since, the plays, movies, paintings, poems, imagining different Seines, different Apollos, different Mycrofts, different great conflicts of our times played out as artists reenvision the tragedy of the Utopian who died for love. For me to set out a script of cold facts now would only block what has become the font of something greater. You will accuse me justly of hubris as I make this comparison, reader, but, if some base historian proved once and for all that there was no Achilles to drag Hector breaker of horses round and round the topless towers of Troy, the world would have lost something.