My name is Isaac Dvali, and this is what happened after the end of the world.

*   *   *

In the end, Vox was mine. Its people (whom I had hated) were dead (which I regretted), and there was no one left alive but Turk Findley and the impersona of Allison Pearl.

Do you blame me for hating Vox?

The people of Vox had resurrected me when all I wanted was to die. They had believed I was something more than human, when in fact I was something less. All I had ever received at their hands was pain and incomprehension.

I had been among the Hypotheticals, my captors insisted, the Hypotheticals had “touched” me; but that wasn’t true. Because the Hypotheticals (as Vox imagined them) simply didn’t exist.

My father had made me so that I could hear the Hypotheticals talking to themselves, the whispers they sent between stars and planets, and what I had learned was that the Hypotheticals were a process—an ecology, not an organism. I could have told my captors so … but it was a truth they would have rejected, and it would have changed nothing.

*   *   *

The Hypotheticals were already billions of years old when they first intervened in human history.

They had originated with the first sentient biological civilizations to arise in the galaxy, long before the Earth and its sun condensed from interstellar dust. Like the first shoots rising from a wheat field in the spring, those forerunner civilizations were fragile, vulnerable, and alone. None of them survived the exhaustion and ecological collapse of their host planets.

But before they died they launched fleets of self-replicating machines into interstellar space. The machines were designed to explore nearby stars and broadcast home whatever data they acquired, and they did that, patiently and faithfully, long after their creators had ceased to exist. They moved from star to star, competing for scarce heavy elements, exchanging behavioral templates and fractions of operating code, changing and evolving over time. They were, in a sense, intelligent, but they were never (and would never become) self-aware.

What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency—chaos, complexity, life.

*   *   *

I hated the people of Vox—whom I could hate collectively, because they behaved collectively—for their deeply embedded limbic superstitions, and for calling me back from the indifference of death into the pain of my physical body. But I could not hate Turk Findley or the woman who had come to call herself Allison Pearl.

Turk and Allison were broken and imperfect things—like me. Like me, they had been created or summoned by the will of Vox. And, like me, they proved to be something more and less than Vox had anticipated.