>Must of been some nanos in the bread I ate before this hot sour taste rose up in my throat and I started choking real bad.

>It stabbed me with an antenna, a big surprise because I thought it was one of those mechs that only used microwave pulsers.

>It was at the very end of the campaign and I was tired out and lay down to catch a few snores and this slow thing came by, I didn’t pay it any mind.

>We were going real fast to get away.

>She went first and made the jump clean as you like and I did too but my leggings busted out and I lost my Goddamn balance.

Riding in his upper spine he carried an advisor Aspect of great antiquity named Arthur.

By then Paris was listened to in ’Sembly gatherings, though he was still fairly young. Arthur always urged moderation in diplomacy with the mechs and gave examples from ancient human history. When Paris questioned the hardships Arthur related from the Olden Times when humans had first come to Galactic Center, Arthur huffily replied,

Let us say it was not precisely tea with the Queen.

Every now and then Arthur would use these archaic expressions from the Old Time and nobody knew what they meant, but Arthur never seemed to notice. He had others, such as

Warts and all—some big enough to hang a hat on.

When plasma discharges sent burnt-gold lattices across the entire sector of the night sky, Arthur observed

Any sufficiently advanced technology at the Center will appear to be a natural phenomenon.

He was right, of course. Mech constructions swam in gossamer profusion within a few light-years. No one knew what the mechs were doing at Galactic Center, beyond the obvious point that here the raw energies and particle fluxes favored their kind. Not only were they less vulnerable to the cutting climate, they seemed to have a larger purpose.

Arthur regaled Paris with tales of how grand the earlier human eras had been, one of his more irritating habits. Still, his Aspect-stilted advice was useful in dealing with the roving mechs who now pestered the ’Sembly’s days.

Mechs were moving in and they made arrogant displays of their contempt for mere mongrel humans. Dried-up carcasses of animals and humans alike—for to mechs they were alike—dangled on rubbery ties from some mechs’ legs, so that they bounced and swayed with walking or just in the wind. Some thought this was just another way to terrorize humans, but Paris sensed in it the mech sense of humor, or something like it, for none of it of course was funny to humans.

So the mechs came: Snouts, Lancers, Scrabblers, Stalkers, Rattlers, Baba Yagas, Zappers, Dusters, Luggos. Humanity had paid a high price for each name, each word calling up in a sensorium an instant, resonant, precise catalog of traits and vulnerabilities the mech had, facets won by many deaths.

Beneath a smoldering sky where there was never truly a night—for dozens of nearby stars brimmed with furious glows, giving a simmering, nebula-lit sense of spreading immensity—mech ships descended like locusts.

Paris fought in the sprawling, terrible, year-long battle that destroyed the principal mech units on Isis. In that year he wore a wolfish grin, all sharp edges and strung wire. He distinguished himself beneath the Walmsley statue, an ancient shaped mountain. There was a small village and some shacks built into the foot of the memorial monument; that’s how big it was. There Paris deduced the mech maneuverings before they could execute them, and so won the day.

Not that the men serving under him found him warm. By then his increasing distance had become legendary. “Tight bastard, couldn’t fart without a shoehorn,” he overheard, and took it as a term of respect.

By then he saw that a machine was a man turned inside out. It could describe all the details but in its flood of data it missed the sum of it all, the experience plucked from the endless stream. A vital secret of humans lay in their filters, what they chose to ignore.

He did not feel degrees Kelvin or liters per second or kilograms; he felt heat or cold, flows, heaviness. He knew love and hate, fear and hunger all beyond measure. Beyond the realm of digits.

Their defeat of the mechs on Isis was surely only temporary. Everyone knew it.

So the ’Sembly—grown to many millions now by immigration and fast-breeding—convened to celebrate the continuity they honored. It might be the last chance they had to do so.

In a communal linkage the entire ’Sembly resurrected the Ole Bros—Personae so complete that some interpreted their very twilight existence as evidence for an afterlife. The Ole Bros advised that the ’Sembly strike back at the mechs in deep space, where they dwelled. Only by taking the fight to them could humans hope to survive.

Paris believed this. Plan on being surprised, the Ole Bros said, and then unaccountably laughed. Paris took up their cause. He had many followers by this time, and women came to him easily, but he was not distracted. Something in the dire situation of his time called to him. He used the ’Sembly’s reverence for the Ole Bros to sway them, while not for a moment believing the theology surrounding the ’Sembly’s reverence for digital resurrections, for the implied afterlife in some remote analytical heaven.

This turned Paris to a question many had asked in adversity. Of what use to humanity was religion?

He knew this was not how the others of ’Sembly Noachian saw the world. But part of him insisted: Bare a benefit, explain the behavior. Why he thought automatically in terms of this rule he did not know, but he felt the shadow-self move in himself.

For the ’Sembly, religion was a social cement. In its extreme form it could even get the believer to go off on crusades. Was it all based on a theory and solution to the greatest human problem, death? The power of theology among people around him then seemed to come from that shared, looming menace. He could see how this notion would spread readily, since in himself he, too, felt the hunger to resolve the anxiety brought on by the fear of death.

But religion had no apparent feedback from the world; God did not answer his mail. Miracles are few and not reproducible. So why does religion persist, even grow?

His mechanistic explanations, cutting and skeptical as a young man’s can be, did not seem to capture the essence of religion. There were big questions about the origins of the universe and of natural law. These science gripped only tentatively, converging on the grand riddle: why was there something, with all its order, rather than nothing? Chaos seemed as likely an outcome as the scrupulous, singing harmonies revealed by science.

If Mind brought humans forth from Matter, enabling the universe to comprehend itself to do its own homework—then religion manifested this underlying purpose, this evolution. But then, why did the mechs have no religion?

To Paris, such abstract ways of envisioning the deep, devout impulse in humanity did not quite capture the heart-thumping urgency of faith. Something was missing.

This, more than rituals and the ’Sembly’s celebrations of human triumphs over mechs, formed for Paris the convoluted condition of being human.

THE COLLECTED

>First thing I knew was, I was here and been turned into some kind of flowerpot.

>I was in pieces all over but still able to think in little short pieces like this.

>The pain that was it, and then they made less of it and I could stand it for longer but my arm was still on backwards.

>It had written my name on my face which I thought was for identification until I saw the hologram of me standing right next door with my dick in the middle of the back of my head and hard all the time even though I couldn’t feel it at all when this thing like a woman climbed onto my neck.