Victor frowned. “The fate of humanity.”

Gabriel rubbed his eyes. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs out of his withered old mind. Wake up, old friend, old ball of grey matter. It’s showtime. He went to the SCHISTLING circle. He took out the plastic vial and glanced back at the slugs for confirmation. Michael nodded, and Gabriel popped the vial open. Scratchy whispers emanated from the blackness inside it. Oh, this is going to be bad.

Gabriel emptied the vial over the circle. The mucus-like substance dropped out and landed with a quiet splat. Gabriel stepped back. At first, nothing happened, then the black goo started squalling.

Something began to emerge from the puddle, a long, thin rod. As that one grew, others elongated, and a series of jagged-edged sticks sprouted from the goo. They stretched out and snapped forward, bending and contorting. The ooze expanded, gaining mass and growing taller and towering over Gabriel. The sticks fused together and arranged into a charcoal-black skeleton in the shape of a seven-foot-tall spider.

The black syrup flowed up and over the skeleton’s bones to form internal organs, musculature, and skin. Instead of terminating in points, the spider’s eight legs instead ended in five-fingered human hands complete with fingernails, knuckles, and opposable thumbs. The spider’s skull became a liquefied-tar face with features as disturbingly human as its hands. And as the face molded, it soon became clear who the Schistlings’ model was.

The face was that of a younger Gabriel Schist with only slight differences, like a heavier brow and a stronger chin. Feeling a bit nauseated, Gabriel realized that it could easily be the face of the son he never had.

The eyes opened. They were bright yellow, and pus leaked from the corners. The human lips spread, revealing a mouth filled with serrated teeth.

The Schist Ex Machina turned in its circle and tested the cloud-ground outside the spot with one leg. Once it determined the surface was traversable, the spider scuttled forward and grabbed Gabriel’s face with one human-handed spider limb. It stroked Gabriel’s cheeks and hair with one of its other hands.

“Oh, Schist,” the creature whispered. “We’ve missed you, Schist. We’ve missed you so much.”

The Schist Ex Machina reeked of sewage, and Gabriel nearly vomited from the stench and the feel of its cold, slimy fingers on his skin. Thunder rumbled below them. Abruptly, the spider let go and returned to its designated circle.

Gabriel walked over to his designated circle. This is insane. He stepped onto it, and the entire group—Schist, Schist Ex Machina, Death, and the slugs—stared at the sun. Lightning cracked, and long blue veins of electricity sizzled in the air.

“He’s coming,” Michael said.

Gabriel shivered, overwhelmed by either excitement or dread, perhaps a bit of both. The giant spider craned its neck, head tilted as if with curiosity. The sky began to swirl with colors.

A lightning storm was headed their way. The air crackled, and Gabriel felt every hair on his body stand on end. The sun started throbbing, pushing the electrical storm through the clouds. Suddenly, the air flashed with a brilliant white light. Gabriel trembled. He wasn’t ready. He would never be ready for whatever was coming.

The lightning formed into a fantastical ball of energy that moved through the sky. Flickering shadows swirled around the clouds. Gabriel squinted, trying to look through the radiance. His heart was pounding. This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening, this…

The sight was so alien that his consciousness was forced to expand before he could even process it. It was invisible, yet at the same time, the most visible thing in the universe. It was bigger than the Earth, yet somehow, it fit inside the Earth. Gabriel had never felt so small and insignificant as he did in the presence of the floating entity before him, an entity that, until that moment, he had never believed existed.

The Sky Amoeba was an enormous, electrified protozoa swirling with ultraviolet energies. Its translucent consistency was astoundingly beautiful, glistening and fluid, vaguely resembling an enormous jellyfish. But instead of holding organelles, the Sky Amoeba’s clear, gelatinous body was filled with… everything. Streaks of blue, pink, and purple electricity sizzled throughout its body and clung to the edges, reminding him of one of those plasma light globes. Gabriel saw rain, snow, winds, sunshine, asteroids, comets, and more things than he could begin to describe.

Like any normal amoeba, the Sky Amoeba did have a nucleus. And staring into that glowing ball of light, Gabriel felt all five senses activating simultaneously. He smelled everything: seawater, fire, ice, rain, fresh tomato sauce, red wine, ice cream, asparagus, honey, rust, stone, flesh, blood, ink, baking soda, sunflowers, puppies, and tree sap. He tasted every food he’d ever had and a million more that he hadn’t. On his fingertips, he felt roughness, softness, smoothness, squishiness, stiffness. He heard birds squawking, rivers flowing, monkeys hollering, and volcanoes exploding. And he saw himself, the being that he was, little more than a dot in an entire universe of other dots. Inside the nucleus, Gabriel rediscovered every microsecond of his entire life, all at once: his successes, his failures, his greatest achievements, all threaded together on a single beaded cord. He couldn’t decide whether to be excited, shocked, or saddened. He was so terribly small.

Within that nucleus, Gabriel witnessed moments from the lives of every single person on Earth. Everyone existed in there, not just him. The history of the universe played out before his eyes, and he was frozen by a sensation of sheer wonder. He saw the Big Bang, the birth of the sun, and the creation of Earth. He saw it all, instantaneously and simultaneously. It was too much to even begin to comprehend. He closed his eyes, struggling to understand what he’d just seen.

He couldn’t. There could be no understanding, no answers that made sense. But a single feeling emanated from the Sky Amoeba’s center that Gabriel did understand, a feeling that overtook all other emotions. That feeling was love. Gabriel felt love, warmth, understanding, forgiveness, and acceptance of everything that he stood for and everything that he’d ever done in his life.

Gabriel opened his eyes and peered over at the inhuman spider-creature beside him, the Schist Ex Machina. The spider squinted at the Sky Amoeba with a confused expression, then it looked over at Gabriel with its sickly yellow eyes.

“Gentlemen,” Michael announced, “it’s time to state your cases.”

Gabriel trembled. He couldn’t understand how he was supposed to state his lowly case to the indefinable entity floating before him. “How? What do I say?”

“Explain who you are,” Michael replied. “And explain why you have come here and why you believe humanity should survive.”

Gabriel thought about what to say. He had to find a way to explain. That was why he’d come there, to speak to the Sky Amoeba. He hobbled forward and stepped outside of his circle, quivering with anxiety. He faced the Sky Amoeba and stared into the its pulsating nucleus for as long as he could stand it.

Finally, before he was forced to avert his eyes, he said, “I hate you.”

Chapter 51:

Within

Cities, mathematical principles, and entire galaxies swirled within the Sky Amoeba’s body. Streaks of electricity sizzled. Warmth radiated out and embraced Gabriel with affection, understanding, and love.

“You heard me,” Gabriel said. “I hate you. Before we begin, I just want you to understand that. I came here not for you but because I believe that humanity shouldn’t be exterminated. But you know who I am. You know what you’ve done to me. And for that, I want you to know that I hate you.”

The Schist Ex Machina swiveled around to face him, its yellow eyes blinking. Michael and the other slugs lowered their heads. Victor’s face disappeared in the shadow of his hood. But the Sky Amoeba did nothing but exude those same loving beams of forgiveness and acceptance.

Gabriel was disgusted. A strong part of him, a small red ball of coal that had been burning since childhood, wanted to be struck by lightning in an irate fit of Zeus-ian rage, to be fried for his blasphemy. That would justify his anger and mean he was right on some level.

Instead, he got acceptance.

Gabriel glared at the Sky Amoeba. “Why me?” he screamed. “Tell me why!”

There was no answer.

“How dare you do this to me?” Gabriel shook with rage. “What did I ever do to deserve the horrible treatment you have given me? You took away everything I had! You turned my body into a mushy pile of atrophied muscles, you took away my ocean, my sailboat, everything I enjoyed about life… gone! The love of my life… gone. If you’re the one that created me, if you are the one who was responsible, then what you created was a shell of a person, and you left that shell to rot on this godforsaken earth. You cursed me. And then, as the final cherry on top, you gave me only one gift, just one thing to get me by, and that thing was what Gareth called ‘a brilliant mind.’”

The Sky Amoeba offered no answers. It made no violent declarations.

“My mind was the only thing I ever had, the one thing that kept me going. That was it! Don’t you see? And you! You took it away from me. You poisoned it. You destroyed the only gift I had, filled my mind with holes and left it to rot. What gave you to right to torture me like that? Answer me!”

Acceptance. Warmth. Love. In the nucleus, people ran, played, and laughed, people who, if not for the Schist vaccine, would have been dead. He saw himself, a younger Gabriel, sailing off into the horizon with a blissful smile on his face.

“I could have helped more people if you hadn’t cursed me with this cognitive disease,” Gabriel said. “I could’ve done more. I could’ve helped. I—”

Gabriel’s jaw dropped at the sight of Bright New Day’s lobby in the nucleus. He saw himself and Edna Foster sitting beside the fish tank. He was helping her drink tea, holding the cup for her then holding her hand. All five years of his time at Bright New Day flashed before his eyes. He watched himself interacting with Mickey Minkovsky, Bernard, the Crooner, and others. He saw Harry Brenton’s intelligent, optimistic eyes. And then, once again, he saw Edna holding his hand. Someday, I’m gonna walk again. I’m gonna just stand up and walk right out of this place. Just you watch.

“Stop confusing me,” Gabriel said. “Listen, those people, they’re the reason that I’m here.”

A younger Melanie appeared in the nucleus, riding at the front of the sailboat. Yvonne threw Gabriel’s beer bottle across the beach, underneath a black sky filled with flashing colors, and embraced him. Father Gareth—still young, strong, and with a brown beard—stood with a shy little redheaded boy in front of a blackboard covered by equations.

“Perhaps I deserve the cruel twists of fate,” Gabriel said. “Perhaps, if you are the one who created me, you did so as a joke. A half-man, half-robot, with a genius mind that also makes him an idiot. But everyone else, the people down there, they deserve a better fate than the Black Virus. Maybe I’ve never been very good at interacting with people, and maybe I once said they were predictable, but in life, I’ve learned that they’re anything but predictable.

“The only woman I ever loved showed me what it was to live, how every moment could be special. My daughter proved to me that life truly mattered, that I mattered. When I lost hope as a boy, it was returned to me by an old priest who decided it was somehow worth his time to form a friendship with an atheist child. And as an old man, I had hope returned to me by an old woman with Parkinson’s, an incredible woman with a stronger will than anyone I’ve ever known, a woman I’m proud to call my friend.

“No, people aren’t predictable. Not simple, not boring, none of that. It took me a long time to learn that, but I have. People have surprised me every step of the way. They deserve better than to just die off as a result of my creation.”

Gabriel hobbled back to his labeled circle. “The slugs say that this negotiation will be decided between me and that creature over there. I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, as usual. I don’t quite understand whether I should be directing this at you or at them. But I want to say that, right now, I come to you, hoping you might understand, because from what the slugs have told me, I get the impression that you create life. And if you create life, then you also create happiness. For that, I give you credit.

“Look, I don’t know what you are. I don’t know if you’re God, Brahma, the universe, an alien overlord, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. For all I know, maybe you’re all of those things. I’m a man of science, and I can’t pretend to understand something like this. But what I do know is that you create. What I do believe in, as much as I don’t want to, is that feeling inside you, that love. I hate that I can sense it so sharply, but it’s there. And I have to accept that. But I don’t know. I just don’t know. I didn’t ask to be born. I wish you had never created me.”

Gabriel fell silent. The Sky Amoeba didn’t respond. Does it even understand English?

Michael looked at him then at the Schist Ex Machina. “Okay,” Michael said. “Now it’s the Schistling’s turn to speak.”