Isaac had come up to meet us. He had left a trail of footprints on the deck, which was covered with floury white dust. The dust, he said, was what was left of the Hypothetical machines. They had come to consume Vox, to dismantle it, to catalog it, molecule by molecule, and Isaac had hacked their procedural protocols, broadcasting disruptive codes from deep in the Coryphaeus. But not soon enough.

“They took flesh first of all,” he said.

There was no one left alive. No one but us, three bloodstained witnesses to the world’s end. We went down into the ancient city to wait.

Chapter Thirty-Two. Isaac’s Story / Orrin’s Story / The Sum of All Paths

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

SANDRA

Sandra told her brother Kyle about the facility outside of Seattle. She thought he’d like it—it was a lot like Live Oaks, she said. Good doctors. Big rooms. Lots of green lawn and even a little bit of forest, that green wet West Coast forest. Seldom as hot as Houston.

Though even Houston was tolerably cool this morning. She had wheeled Kyle from his room at the residential complex to the mott of live oaks by the creek. The sky was blue. There was a breeze. The oaks bent together conspiratorially.

Kyle was looking skinny. The doctors had said they were adjusting his feeding regimen to deal with a minor but persistent digestive problem. But today his mood was benign. He registered his appreciation of the weather, or her presence, or the sound of her voice, or nothing at all, with a gentle ah.

The managers of Kyle’s trust fund had given tentative approval to her plan to relocate him, and they were negotiating terms with the Seattle facility. As for herself … Bose had been patient and encouraging, but it was still a radically new life she was about to embark on. Certainly, she couldn’t go back to the old one.

Nor could Bose. The investigation of the fire at the Findley warehouse had been appended to a federal investigation of the life-drug ring Findley had serviced. The FBI had cited Bose as a “person of interest,” which meant he had to stay out of sight for a while, but that wasn’t a problem: Bose’s community of friends knew how to shield one of their own. He had asked her to join him, without preconditions, long-term or short-term, as a friend or a lover—or whatever she was comfortable with. His friends, he said, would help her find work.

She had met some of those friends of his, the ones who administered the Martian longevity treatment as the Martians had intended—the middle-aged couple who had driven Orrin and Ariel out of Houston, to begin with, and others when she visited Seattle.