The mist cleared, revealing an object floating beneath our transport. It was gray and bloated, drifting on the lake’s placid surface—an island among dozens more—a cephaloped carcass.

Did I report dozens? As I looked closer I saw thousands of dead cephalopeds littering the placid surface, their tortured remains evidence of an evil that rivaled the crimes at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Treblinka, and Theresienstadt.

My throat constricted. “Andria, what happened to them?”

“There’s nothing to be concerned about, Ike. It’s all part of the cleansing process.”

Cleansing process. Final Solution.

For evil to flourish, it required a conspiracy of silence among the locals, the acts reduced to a language of euphemisms designed to render mass murder more digestible. Hitler had used anti-Semitism to gain power and fuel his own irrational need for conquest.

Terror threats. Weapons of mass destruction.

Eight decades after the Third Reich, political extremists had fueled anti-Islamic fears to perpetrate a Middle East oil grab that had led to another world war and the Great Die-Off.

Twelve million years after mankind’s annihilation, a man-made machine was using hatred to subdue the free will of its own creations.

The transport accelerated again. In the distance I could hear the tortured shrieks of pan flutes.

“Andria, open the pod.”

“Ike—”

“Do it!”

She passed her right palm across the top of the trap, generating a spark of blue electricity. With a depressurizing hiss, the oval container split open, spilling Oscar on to the flattop.

I gathered the cephaloped’s head in my lap, pressing one of its tentacle palms in my hands. ABE, is there a pulse?

THERE ARE THREE PULSES, ALL EXTREMELY WEAK. OSCAR IS DYING.

The transport lurched ahead, its bow bumping into a wooden pier. Spotlights mounted on unseen buildings blinded me. Shadows moved toward us.

“Ike, we’re here. Turn Oscar over to the Hunter-Sentries and we can return to the farm.”

“Sorry, Andria, that’s not going to happen.”

“Ike, the cleansing camps are not for humans. Now leave the damn octoped and let’s go!”

“We all have character flaws, Andria. God knows I have my anger issues, you cheated on me … at least the original Andie did. But I am not abandoning a friend to the Creator’s ghouls, and if that floating ball of chemicals tries to separate us, then you can kiss me and my sperm good-bye.”

Five adult Nosferatus stormed the transport, their clawed hands gripping my elbows, dragging me to my feet. Oscar held on, wrapping his tentacles around my upper torso as the pale, hairless, bat-winged transhumans led us across the dock to the gates of death.

Chapter 31

31

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties—but right through every human heart—and all human hearts.

—ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN, The Gulag Archipelago