“Baby, calm down, the Creator’s on Her way. The Creator loves you. The Creator wants to help you.”

“I don’t want the Creator’s help! This isn’t real. I’m still frozen, I’m still stuck in this fucked-up dream.”

I looked around, confused by the new surroundings. The curved walls were composed of tubular holes, round and far smaller than the hive’s honeycomb I had ventured into earlier. The spherical chamber rose five stories to a retractable domed ceiling. The circular opening revealed a starry night sky.

“Andie, what is this place?”

“It’s the holiest of holies, the Church of the Creator. See? The roof has already been retracted, She’ll be arriving soon. Which means I must leave you, at least for now.”

She leaned over and kissed me good-bye, then strode out, offering me a glimpse of her long, curled lizard tail.

My mind freaked, my internal voice joining Charlton Heston’s Taylor character from Planet of the Apes as he screamed, “It’s a madhouse … a madhouse!”

ABE tossed me a lifeline, reeling me back to sanity.

ABE … how long was I unconscious?

NINE HOURS, SIXTEEN MINUTES. YOU SUFFERED A SECOND DEGREE CONCUSSION, A RUPTURED SPLEEN, AND A BROKEN FIBULA. ALL REPAIRS HAVE BEEN RENDERED.

I looked down at my stomach, my sweat suit stained in blood below the left side of my rib cage. “Who operated on me?”

UNKNOWN. WARNING: AN ENTITY IS APPROACHING.

I looked up in time to see the undercarriage of a small vessel appear in the night sky, the air beneath its saucer-shaped metallic chassis distorted by a powerful gravitational well.

Aliens? Extraterrestrials? My pulse pounded as the craft silently descended into the chamber to hover before me, six feet off the floor.

“Oh, God … no.”

The Creator stared at me with its black basketball-size gelatinous pupil, the cornea section of its ten-foot-in-diameter acrylic eyeball crammed with a billion six-inch garter snakes—bioluminescent lime-green, orange, neon-pink, and electric-blue creatures that moved in mesmerizing schools and kaleidoscopic patterns, swirling and spinning and passing through the dark central mass, each penetrating strand of DNA perpetuating a luminescent gold corona of electricity around the semipermeable membrane.

GOLEM: artificial intelligence, programmed to evolve.

GOLEM: creator of a new species of human in a postapocalyptic world.

How had it survived? How had it escaped Oceanus? How had it created all this?

Back on Oceanus, GOLEM had told me its DNA would multiply enough solution strands during the twelve-month journey to Europa to master its surgical arms. In the same way primates had used their opposable thumbs to create tools, my supercomputer had used its surgical arms to develop its mind.

Twelve years of isolation beneath the frozen Antarctic ice sheet and those same arms had been used to construct entirely new modalities to free itself from the physical limitations imposed by man.

Twelve crewmen, and the secrets of human biology had been revealed.