One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Author:Adrian Tchaikovsky [Tchaikovsky, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781781088746
Google: X6WZzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Solaris
Published: 2021-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

THERE FOLLOWS A fairly eventful week of attempted homicide. Zoe proves remarkably adept at this, which makes me wonder just what nasty little backrooms her utopia harbours. I send prehistoric monsters and she domesticates them. She re-wires my robot assassins, fouls the targeting of my drones, disarms my traps and avoids stepping on my landmines. When I drop a Buick on her camp from low orbit, she gets out just before the impact. And she doesn’t even touch the tempting but lethally poisonous picnic basket I leave out in a tranquil glade for her to find.

And in between trying to exterminate her, I’m having to do quite a bit of dodging myself. There are venomous spiders in my shoes when I get up in the morning and speckled serpents in my bed when I put my head down at night. When I take a tour of the fields, a couple of the agricultural robots do their level best to decapitate me with their threshing attachments. The next day, I feel the Soviet Speedster isn’t running quite right and find that’s because of a bomb wired to the rev counter. The only thing that saves me is that Zoe’s set it to explode once I reach a certain speed which this particular Son of Communism has never really approached. When I stand up after disarming the device, a stray shot from a long-distance rifle puts a hole in my straw hat. Life on the farm is getting really quite bracing.

That night, I take stock. Zoe is out there somewhere, probably engaged in similar strategising. She has, to date, not managed to kill me, but in the minus column of the ledger she remains aggravatingly un-killed in turn. I feel the match between us remains at a solid no-score draw so far, but given that it’s only best of one, that doesn’t help either of us.

And I’ve been murdering errant time travellers for quite a while, not to mention my wartime career of state- or faction-sanctioned mass murder before that—and indeed the genocide of entire timelines every time I swatted an insect I wasn’t supposed to. Zoe, on the other hand, has turned out to be an extremely gifted amateur who’s in serious danger of challenging me for the end-times all-comer murder trophy.

And I am surprised to find that I feel relatively chill about it. Not that I’m exactly cheering her on, but at least the worst that can happen is still better than the way things are going to go if we don’t murder each other. Which is to say, even if I slip up and she gets me, that still means that Smantha and Weldon’s precious Utopia doesn’t happen. My ultimate sacrifice will actually mean something (technically it will mean the absence of something, but that’s still more meaning than anything in the war).

Eventually, though, I admit to myself that I need help. I’ve been the proverbial lone wolf for a long time. I am, after all, the sole survivor of humanity to make it to the end times, the one living veteran of the Causality War.

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