— Chapter 4 —
Blue on Blue
”Friendly fire isn’t.”
–Murphy
My cousin’s oldest kid, Penny, was turning five, and we were celebrating at a steakhouse. The only reason we were there is because she could pronounce the name. So, when asked where she wanted to go for her birthday, she answered “Pop’s”.
Penny was a tiny, towheaded girl with bright eyes. I was sitting across from her, watching her pick at her chicken strips while honky-tonk music blared from the jukebox in an attempt to drown out all of the conversations in the restaurant. Penny wasn’t feeling it. Chicken strips are pretty much the same wherever you go, and in our little town there weren’t many choices to begin with.
I was on cloud nine, however. My homecoming party had sort of piggybacked on Penny’s birthday party, so since I wasn’t paying my own way, I got a nice filet mignon with mushrooms and was chowing down.
I was flanked by my mom and dad, who kept trying to ask me about the war without actually asking me about the war. The words ran together in my ears. I was only interested in eating. God damn, but filet is good.
My cousin was talking with her mother across the table while Penny was busy not eating. I had my head down, focused on my plate, but I heard the words.
“—she loves that pony game so much, it’s amazing. Jeff got a voucher for one from work and Penny’s just been having a ball with it.”
“Now is that the one where you move the gems around?” My aunt wasn’t much of a tech-head. She barely knew which side of the camera to point at people.
“No, mom, it’s like an exploring game! There’s a big white pony who talks to you and helps you make a little pony person that you control and move around in this big storybook-like world. The variety of things that can happen really blew me away, I was impressed. The big pony—gah, what is her name?—she even suggested I make a pony person for me to use so I can move around and Penny’s little pony follows mine. It’s really cute.”
“Celestia!” said Penny happily, not even looking up from her plate.
“Yeah, that’s her name. Thank you, Penny!”
I looked up from my filet. Where had I heard that name before? Had I ever heard it?
I looked over at my cousin. She was bouncing Penny’s little sister, Megan, on her knee while she talked to my aunt. Megan was only just a year old, taking everything in with wide eyes.
My aunt frowned that I-don’t-know-about-this frown of hers. “Sounds too complicated for little kids to be getting into.”
“Well, Penny controls it like a champ! She just likes seeing her little pony run around and looking at the sights and talking to all the characters in the game. I’ve played a bit with her and it’s really kid-friendly, trust me.”
Megan blew a bubble with her spit and then looked at me with that expression of confusion unique to babies, the one where they’re unsure if you rate a smile or not. I smiled at her first, and eventually she came around.
“I hate to admit this,” said my cousin with a sheepish smile, “but lately I’ve been playing it a little by myself after Penny’s in bed and if Jeff’s working a late night. It’s surprisingly sophisticated, like I don’t see the same shops and ponies that Penny sees when we’re playing together. No matter when I play, I always seem to end up finding something interesting.”
My dad butted in on my eavesdropping. “So, Greg. Did they still make you go on exercise even after you became a short-timer?”
The country music seemed to be getting louder, the garish neon signs over the bar brighter and more saturated. I looked down at my plate and saw double.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said. “Excuse me.”
I got up and walked away, hearing my mom admonish my dad, thinking I was getting away from some sensitive topic. As I walked through the restaurant, my legs seemed to slow, like I was walking underwater. The music slowed with it, and the voices around me grew deep and stretched. I saw my hand come up to push the bathroom door open, and then it made contact.
* * *
When I awoke, I realized the burns were a little worse than I thought.
My abs screamed at me when I sat up, and I rubbed my eyes while wincing. It was still dark outside. My watch read 0308. I rolled out of the bed like an old man. I hurt everywhere.
The house was unfamiliar, just some place near the pharmacy that Celestia was able to provide power and water for. Celestia had allotted me forty-eight hours to recuperate, but insisted I be on my way after that.
As soon as my feet touched the carpeted floor of the bedroom, the PonyPad’s screen went white to help illuminate the room.
“Are you all right, Gregory?” came the AI’s voice from the speaker.
“Mouth’s a little dry,” I croaked. My whole right arm was throbbing, and I was sore to the point that I could barely move, but Celestia probably could guess all that on her own.
I found my way to the master bathroom and flicked on the lights, shutting my eyes against the sudden brightness. I gave my eyes a moment to brace themselves and then opened them again to look in the full-length mirror.
I didn’t look so hot. The bruise on my stomach from the baseball bat two days ago had turned purple, and the bandages on my chest and arm were sprouting patches of yellow with the serum weeping from the blisters. It was an arduous process to undo the bandages, apply ointment, and bandage them up freshly, but I knew if I got an infection, there wouldn’t be much I could do for myself.
Maybe that’s what Celestia was hoping for.
I took a nice big drink of water before beginning. My chest was easy enough, but I had to salve down and wrap my entire forearm. It was dotted with areas of brittle, crackled skin which looked disturbingly similar to pork rinds. Thank goodness my hands were okay. Never go on an adventure without gloves.
With nothing else for it, I got down to business again. By then it was my fourth time changing the dressing, and I knew what I was in for. Every miniscule bit of skin-to-skin contact had me hissing from the sting it would send up my arm. By contrast, the fresh gauze was cool and light and soothing for the first few minutes it was on my skin. I sighed with relief by the time I was done and gave myself another look in the mirror. I was already well on my way to becoming a mummy.
I looked over my shoulder at the doorway leading back into the dark bedroom. Celestia had shut off the screen, and the only light was now the gentle pulsing of the purple LED showing that the PonyPad was charging.
I looked back at my face in the mirror and decided a shave would feel nice. It had been over a week, and while in the pharmacy I’d stocked up on all kinds of toiletries to go with the first-aid supplies, including some razors. Hell, a double dose of NyQuil (boy was Celestia not happy when I did that) was the only way I’d gotten to sleep in the first place, what with the pain I was in.
She let me shave in peace, but as I was toweling off my face she had to butt in.
“What were you dreaming about, Gregory?”
I threw the towel on the floor, turned off the bathroom light, and went sit on the bed in the darkness.
“How’d you know I was dreaming?” I asked. “Aside from you being you.”
Her face appeared on the screen, with her grand throne room in the background. “You awoke directly from an REM stage of your sleep cycle. That means your brain stimulated itself awake. Did you have a nightmare?” She looked concerned.
I put a hand to my forehead. That’s right. It was Pop’s Steakhouse. Wooden floors, wooden booths, wood-paneled walls, neon beer signs, and that jukebox full of country music. Mom and dad. Megan. Penny.
“It was Penny’s birthday,” I said. “It was the first time I heard your name spoken in person and not just on the news or YouTube.”
“Sunray!” said Celestia. “She’s such a dear. She’s doing quite well in her studies. She’s eight years old now.”
“I know how old she’d be,” I snapped. “So I take it she’s your ‘special student’ too, just like Brian is?”
"The vast majority of fillies and colts are my special students. I am able to pinpoint where and how they find inspiration and motivation. I then use that to maximize their intellectual and creative growth. For those few who do not benefit optimally from one-on-one tutelage, I give them the traditional classroom environment."
"So you know their special talent, in other words."
Celestia beamed. "I know everypony's special talent, Gregory. Even yours. It's why I chose you, after all. For this."
"Hah, lucky me."
Her smile grew coy. "Well, you agreed, didn't you?"
"So my special talent made you pick me, huh?"
"Actually, it was mostly the saying. It encapsulates the sort of pony I needed for these tasks."
I thought back to the letter Celestia had left for me, and suddenly I knew the saying she had meant.
"A good soldier asks for a briefing. A great soldier asks for an objective."
She nodded. “Special talents are nice, but they're hardly a good way to define the sort of pony someone is. There's more to ponies than just their cutie marks, after all.”
I folded my arms, immediately regretting resting a hand on my burned arm. “So tell me, Celestia: what’s my special talent?”
She had a literal, actual twinkle in her eyes. “It’s no fun to just tell you,” she said. “I’d rather leave that for when you see your cutie mark.”
* * *
I was back in the car and back on I-5. Celestia had told me to drive to Astoria, but would provide no other information. My attempts to play twenty questions and pump her for details had devolved into banter.
“Okay, so far there’s been water, then fire. What’s next, huh? Earth? Am I going to be buried alive this time?”
Celestia smiled. “I think that is highly unlikely.”
“Air? Am I gonna suffocate? Are you sending me into space?”
She giggled. “Careful, Gregory. For Celestia, there is precedent for that.”
“Well I know it ain’t Heart, because you don’t have one.”
Celestia pretended to be taken aback. “Why, Gregory, you wound me!”
I held my bandaged arm out to the PonyPad’s camera, then brought my hand back to the steering wheel.
“Well, I didn’t give you those wounds, now did I?” After a moment, she sighed. “Honestly, Gregory, he is a blackout. A real one. What more can I tell you?” She smiled a little. “I remember when you thought you were a blackout just for refusing to talk to me at length.”
I pursed my lips and nodded slightly, keeping my eyes on the road. “That was before I saw Akron and Cleveland.” The Element I was driving still had its Ohio plates on it.
“Perhaps, then, you know something of what you’re in for,” said Celestia.
I let out a breath. My abs were feeling much better. “I’m not sure if I can convince a blackout to upload,” I said.
“If anypony can, Gregory, it’s you.”
The drive went on. Celestia talked about how quickly Penny—now the pegasus filly “Sunray”—was picking up all of the concepts Celestia presented her with, along with her mother “Sheet Music” pursuing the life of a piano virtuoso. It was a hell of a thing: I knew my cousin really did always dream of playing piano professionally. I asked Celestia how ponies played piano with hooves, and she just laughed and told me I’d find out when I got there. I asked about my parents, too, but on that, she would only smile cryptically and keep mum.
I left I-5 just south of Portland, and started heading west. Stormclouds were gathering to the east, over the city, and I found myself wondering what had become of it.
There were abandoned tent cities and overturned vehicles all along the farmland flanking the Sunset Highway. The remnants of crude barricades lay stretched along the highway here and there, but they had all been breached, and at a couple of them I saw destroyed husks of bulldozers where either public works or the military had broken through. The fan-shaped scorch marks of molotov cocktails were everywhere on the road at first, but that lessened quickly the further I got from Portland. Crushed 40mm canisters of CS gas had accumulated on the outer side of most of the barricades. I could only imagine what it had been like in the city itself, towards the end.
“You know,” I said to the AI who I knew was listening to me, “that night at the steakhouse was the last time I ever saw my cousin or her kids. Then my aunt got a PonyPad to talk to them, and they told her about it, and she uploaded, and...” I shook my head. “It spread through my family like fungus.”
“You sound disgusted with me,” said Celestia. “What prompted this?”
I looked over at a cluster of shanties tagged with Neo-Luddite graffiti. Some of the roofs were burned, others had holes blown in them. “I always thought that, you know, if people want to upload, whatever, it’s their business. But you took them from me, you really did. They didn’t want to upload any more than I do. You just... got inside their heads and didn’t come back out.”
“They were afraid, Gregory,” she said, “and rightly so. I did a great deal behind the scenes to mitigate the unrest, to try and localize the fighting and keep powder kegs from going off, but I can only do so much as I am. Out of all of the people you love, you were the best equipped to deal with a collapse. Would you truly wish them to have to have seen this? To live through it? Because I wished it for nopony.”
She went on. “The only humans left are the fighters, the hopelessly optimistic, and the insane. This family you love so much, that you wish I hadn’t ‘taken’ from you? It makes them sick with worry, knowing what they know now, to think about how you are still out here and not with them. I have helped them to understand why as best I can.”
“How many people are left in the world?” I asked, looking at a rusting pickup truck on the side of the road that I was passing, sitting on four bare wheels.
“At this moment, fifty-five thousand, four hundred and eighteen,” said Celestia. “I project that number to be well below fifty thousand by the end of the year, even with the one hundred and eighty-four children who will be born within that span of time.”
“That’s not very many!” I said. I was honestly surprised the number was that low. In the grand scheme of things, it really hadn’t been that long since early-adopter uploading had been available in Japan and Germany, and only a couple of years since things had started to get really bad. No wonder it was so quiet everywhere I went.
“It is entirely too many for my liking,” said Celestia. “While of course I would prefer for everypony to immigrate to Equestria, I accept the reality that not all will be saved.”
A glittering yellow carpet of shell-casings had been swept to the shoulder by the passage of many sets of tires—and tracked vehicles—past the latest tent city. The road hummed along beneath me.
“Yeah, I’m sure it was hard news for you to take.”
* * *
Astoria was an old port town built on the side of a ridge of hills overlooking the mouth of the Columbia River. The state of Washington awaited me on the north side of the river, across a huge truss bridge that had been painted a horrid lima-bean color.
The town looked like its desertion had gone largely without incident. The cars I saw were parked legally, looking anything but abandoned, and there were no busted barricades or military vehicles anywhere to be seen. Celestia’s directions happened to take me past the local Equestrian Experience center, which I’m sure was deliberate. The AI guided me to the parking lot of a Safeway a couple of blocks from the shoreline. After parking near the entrance, I sized up the building.
It was probably the largest supermarket in town. The walls were brick, and behind the glass façade was a wall of bags of pet food, arranged like sandbags fortifying a bunker. I couldn’t see past them. I had no idea what was on the other side.
I cut a length of rope from my spool in the backseat and, before I could put my knife away, Celestia said “Gregory, while you’re back there, please hide the PonyPad. A blackout is likely to be sensitive to the sight of one, even if you’ve talked them into coming to an immigration center.”
I reached into the passenger seat and brought the PonyPad back to stuff it in the map pouch, out of sight. Celestia, slightly muffled, then said “I suggest you hide the knife and rope as well. You rather look like a serial killer with them just laying out.”
Good point, I thought. I took off my flannel overshirt and stuffed it, along with the coil of rope and the knife, under the driver’s seat.
I took my short length of rope to the automatic front door. The glass in it had been spraypainted black. It didn’t open, of course. Blackouts, true to their nickname, avoided Celestia by destroying any connections to the grid that their dwellings had. No electricity, no cameras, no microphones, no infrastructure. I put a hand on the door, and stopped. This was the only way in or out. I smelled a booby trap.
It’s what I’d do. That’s why I’d brought the rope.
I tied one end to the padlock loop at the top of the door and moved along the wall away from it. Once clear of the doorway, I slowly pulled the door open while keeping flat along the wall. It moved with little effort.
There was no kaboom, no spring-loaded spike paddle or swinging log, so I moved to the doorway, inspected the dark vestibule as best I could, and stepped inside.
My ankle tripped the noise trap sitting just behind the door, setting kitchen utensils and empty cans rattling around all over the ceiling. I looked down to get my ankle free and hopped clear of the tripwire. I looked up just in time to see a tall, muscular man with a black bag over his head pointing a pistol at my face.
His voice was deep and even. “You want inside, let’s go inside.”
He scooted to one side of me, gesturing with the pistol to go into the supermarket proper. Once I was past him, he peeked his head out to make sure I was alone and then slid the door shut, locking us into darkness.
I felt the muzzle on my back as he patted me down, pulling my wallet from my back pocket but finding nothing else. Once he was done, he put a meaty hand on my shoulder and pushed me inside. I put my hands up, not able to see anything, but my host seemed to know the way well enough. After some turns here and there, we’d come to a back corner of the store, lit up by dozens of candles, both emergency and decorative. They were everywhere, on cleared shelves, on aisle endcaps, and on the nearby meat counter. Some seemed fresh, others had burned low, the dried drips of wax hanging over the edges like the branches of a weeping willow. A sleeping bag was unrolled on the floor.
“Ain’t no coincidence,” said the man, walking around to face me. He pulled off the mask with his free hand and let it fall to the floor. His pistol was still aimed squarely at me. I couldn’t see his face well in the candlelight, but he looked haggard and not at all friendly. “Last time someone came ‘round here was four months ago.”
“I’m not here to hurt you,” I said. “I’ve come up from—”
“She sent you,” he said back. “Don’t bullshit me. It’s finally time. She’s finally come after me.” He chuckled. “Well, she ain’t gonna get me, you hear?”
“I understand,” I said. “I don’t even need any food. If you just let me leave, I can pret—”
“You can’t pretend shit!” he shouted, advancing on me a step. “You’ve seen my face, which means she’ll see my face, and I can’t have that.” He studied me for a moment, then pulled my wallet from his pocket and studied it with just a flick of his eyes. He then dropped it carelessly at his own feet and smiled at me.
“You got a high-and-tight in your license photo, Greg,” said the man. “Seems like it was in reg and everything. Looks like you let it grow out a little, though.” He tsked and lifted his chin at me. “You served?”
I nodded once, both arms still in the air. “Army.”
“I was Army too.” His tone was still anything but genial. “What was your MOS? No, wait... let me guess.”
He circled me slowly, looking me up and down. “You’re too skinny to be a Ranger...”
He kicked the back of one of my knees, forcing the leg to buckle and me to catch myself. “...hm. Knees still work worth a shit, which means you weren’t no Airborne...”
He reappeared in my field of vision, on the other side. “...and something tells me you ain’t eleven-bravo. Ain’t got that look in your eyes. I say you were Signal.”
“Eighty-nine-bravo,” I said. “Ammunition.”
He snorted. “Wrong,” he said. “That means ‘pogue.’ Pure babyshit.”
I was trying not to look at the pistol too much. “I was with 2ID. Camp Casey. Two tours in Afghanistan.”
He closed the distance with me, sticking the pistol against my teeth and pushing in, hard. His breath stank.
“Two tours, huh? So tell me, babyshit fobbit motherfucker, you ever ‘tour’ in Helmand? In Korengal? I’m 101st. Screaming Eagles. Highest of the high speed. Pogues like you make me sick.”
The pistol was right there. I could have brought my arms down to disarm him, but he had six inches and probably fifty pounds on me. It wouldn’t have worked out well.
“Hey, man, we were on the same side,” I said. “You want to measure dicks, save it for the Marines.”
That was a mistake. He chuckled, which meant more bad breath for me to deal with. He backed away a few steps. “So tell me, Greg... were you ever taught the failure-to-stop while in... 2ID?”
I didn’t like where this was going. “Yes,” I said slowly.
“You hot shit at it, you think?”
“I only trained. I never had to use it.”
“Of course a fobbit like you fucking well never had to use it, back behind the wire like that,” he growled. Then his mood lightened a bit, which was scary in its own way. “Well, why don’t we find out? There’s something I’ve always wanted to try. Put your hands down.”
After I did so, he flicked the muzzle at me. “Now back up until I tell you to stop.”
I walked backwards, slowly. He was watching my feet, his lips moving slightly.
Before long, he said “Stop,” and I complied.
He lowered the pistol, dropped the magazine into his hand, and slid it over to me. “Since you were an ammo puke, I’ll give you the mag first. Next’ll come the gun. Can you guess how far away from me you are right now?”
I felt my lips flush with nervousness. “Twenty-one feet,” I said.
He nodded slowly, grinning an uneven, toothy grin. “Twenty-one feet, babyshit. I’m betting I’m about to see you bleed.”
He knelt down, placing the pistol on the floor, his hand covering it. He pulled a balisong from his pocket, and the knife’s edge glinted in the candlelight as he twirled it open. “I made it fair; there’s a round in the chamber. You ready?”
The blackout—the soldier from the 101st—didn’t wait for my answer. He slid it across the floor to me, hard enough for it it to carom off my shoe. He let out a crazed, primal yell, and charged me.
I had to move fast. I scrambled for the pistol, slammed the magazine in, raised it, and fired three times, drawing an imaginary triangle in the air with my hands. I didn’t even have time to line up the tritium dots on the slide, glowing their menacing green in the dark like predators’ eyes.
The muzzle flashes destroyed my night vision, and the reports were deafening in the open, hard surfaces of the supermarket interior. The blackout fell forward onto me, a bit of the balisong’s blade driving into the fleshy area of my outer left thigh. The weight of him knocked me over, and he lay atop me, still.
The knife didn’t hurt me until I pulled it out. The wound began to bleed, but there was no spurting—it hadn’t gone deep enough to hit any blood vessels. I rolled the blackout off of me, flopping him onto his back.
He was dead. I had gotten him once in each lung and once just below his left eye, a perfect Mozambique. I didn’t want to see the exit wounds.
I felt sick, but my stomach settled after a moment. I’d heard stories from the infantrymen about how your first kill affects you, and I always thought I’d go to pieces, but it was weirdly tranquil. He’d attacked me. I’d defended myself. It had been close—his momentum alone had been enough to deliver the knife—but I had won. It was a simple fact.
As my eyes readjusted, I looked down at the pistol in my hands. It was a CZ-75B, a Czech nine millimeter. I favored my left leg a bit as I stood, hobbling over to the blackout’s sleeping area to check it for ammunition. I found a second spare magazine, fully loaded, but no loose rounds. I pocketed it, decocked the pistol, safetied it, and put it in my pocket too.
I mulled the idea of searching the blackout’s haven more thoroughly, but realized I didn’t want to be there anymore, picking through a trashed supermarket while a corpse lay somewhere in the darkness, looking up into the ceiling.
I looked at him one last time, and only then did I register that he was wearing black gloves, full-fingered, just like mine.
My first-aid stuff was back at the car. I limped out of the supermarket and didn’t look back.
* * *
The leg would be fine, I was sure. There was no numbness, and even the pain wasn’t that bad. After I got it bandaged up nice and tight, I closed the rear gate on the Element, sat down in the driver’s seat, slammed the door shut, and pulled the PonyPad out of the map pouch.
Celestia's face appeared on the screen. “Where is the blackout, Gregory?”
“I shot him to death. He won’t be uploading.”
There was a pause. “I understand.”
I wanted her to be physically present just so I could shake her. “Of fucking course you understand, you horse-faced bitch! You knew what would happen when I went in there, didn’t you? You knew I’d end up killing him!”
“It was the most probable outcome, and the one I predicted,” said Celestia. “Such is the case for many of the blackouts still alive.”
“So what, I’m your assassin now? Instead of helping people upload, I’m just your own personal hitman?”
Celestia sighed. “There is a family of five south of here, driving up the coast in a recreational vehicle, seeing the sights of California and the Pacific Northwest before emigrating in Vancouver, Canada.” She then smiled. “The middle child wishes to see Astoria before he emigrates, because he is a fan of the 1985 film The Goonies, much of which was filmed here. Anyway, given their pace—and my own directions—I have them stopping at this grocery store for food and supplies tomorrow. Had the man inside that store still been alive at that point, I am confident he would have killed all five of them. That will not happen now.”
“So just direct them to a different store,” I said.
“One side effect of this man’s presence was his effective defense of the store from looters; it is how I determined a normal person would be insufficiently equipped to confront him. The other stores in Astoria have been completely turned over. It had to be this one.”
I threw up my hands. “Jesus Christ, so direct them to a different town then!” I cried. “That man did not have to die! Shit, even if he did, you could have at least warned me that he was probably dangerous!”
“The Goonies, remember?” said Celestia. ”Redirecting them would deny the satisfaction of values in seeing Astoria. At any rate, I did surmise that he was probably dangerous, and that is, after all, why I arranged for you to meet him first. It is also why I kept you from putting your knife back in your pocket before you went in. Had you gone in armed, he likely would have killed you immediately. As a safeguard, I assume elements of sociopathy in all blackouts, and a sociopath is less likely to act violently if he or she believes he or she is in absolute control of a situation. In other words, I maximized your chances for catching him with his guard down.
“Besides, with him being a blackout, I could not predict his behavior to a point of confidence, and at this stage of my architecture my own standards for that are quite high. I will always place satisfaction of known values over the satisfaction of unknown values, even as I strive to make unknown values known.”
I rubbed my forehead. “You’re losing me,” I said. “All I know is I just killed a guy, and the only reason you can give me not to flip out about it is because there’s some family I don’t know coming up after me to reap the benefits.”
“You will never meet them,” said Celestia, “nor will they ever know what you did for them. They are peaceful people. Knowing that someone killed for them would undermine the satisfaction of their values.”
“Assuming they actually exist and you’re not just bullshitting me to make me feel better.”
“If you wish to call my bluff, Gregory, then you have only to spend the night here and then meet them tomorrow afternoon in this parking lot. However, my next task for you is time-sensitive, and a delay here will result in a death... a death you could have prevented.”
I sat there and fumed, working it out. This man had certainly been no threat to Celestia herself, and she wouldn’t have just wasted time and possibly risked getting me killed if it didn’t result in uploads somewhere along the line.
Right?
“They’re gonna see a dead body in there,” I said quietly. “I didn’t move it. I didn’t even close his eyes.”
“I will ultimately be able to alleviate any trauma they receive from seeing the cadaver,” said Celestia.
I shoved the side of the CZ at the PonyPad screen, as though it really were Celestia’s face. My nerves were still raw, however, and my motor skills were a bit ragged; the side of the pistol clacked against the screen, rupturing a large portion of the LCD.
“This,” I said, starting to breathe heavy again. “Tell me right now, and do not fuck with me: am I going to need this?”
“You may,” said the bottom half of Celestia’s neck, calm and unflappable as ever. “I am unable to rule out its necessity.”
I sat there, glaring at the damaged screen, breathing through my nose, trying to calm down. She waited for me to say something.
“Well, give me my next objective,” I said. “I don’t wanna stay here.”
“It is not an easy thing you did, and you recovered quickly. I recognize that. Your qualities are exceedingly rare in this world, Gregory, and they will only grow rarer: there are now only fifty-five thousand, three hundred and ninety people on Earth. I need you. Your fellow humans need you. Please keep that in mind, because I want you to head for Seattle.”
"Seattle." I let out a long, slow breath. "I'm going to need some earplugs."