Episode 3

My grandmother would have crossed herself. But my grandmother was gone, and the door to her kitchen had twisted itself into another age. When I pushed it open, the room was the same—chipped tile, the smell of dill and smoke—but the light had been extruded from a dimension that cast shadows with minds of their own. Through the window, the robots moved across the yard as if we were constructive transformations, nodes in a cosmic grid being folded from one 3D prison into the next. A futurist flood. An illusory real Canada where the frozen prairies leaked a function called fuksija, the mathematical name for the way things fall apart on purpose.

I knew it was rushing toward us. I knew it the way I knew the honey in the fields of Israel and the Aramean language sitting in the soil like a forgotten promise. I knew it the way I knew the hollow in Jurbarkas, how the town trembled in its own empathy, how we were not slaves and we were afraid of God, and how that fear had been protonized into a sterile laugh that echoed off the empty harbor of Copenhagen. The ships were gone. The water reflected nothing but the approach of 999—a path, a truth, a life, braided into a single cable of static. The cats had begun to speak in tongues. The monkeys carried a plague that smelled like Hollywood, like rotten jam, like the inside of a film canister abandoned in the sun for a century. The ages were ending.

My daughter Dukte held my hand. Her fingers were cold. "Mama," she said, "the robots are bleeding."

I followed her gaze. The machine in the yard had stopped. From its chest, where the red cross had once meant aid, a thin dark liquid dripped into the dust. The white witches were closer now, their hands raised in a gesture that could have been a blessing or a curse. I remembered the twelve-year-old who rose from the stones near Akmenh, his face real but his smile fake—a smile that had been healed too quickly by godlessness, by the proton field of a universe that no longer believed in anything but its own entropy. He stood there in my memory, trembling, offering a lie that looked exactly like the truth.

Empatija. The last film. The sky's atheism, a 7% algorithm that had become the avatar of Al, the third victory: truth, empathy, astrophysics. It was a joke. A syntax error in the code of the cosmos. All that remained was a single number, a single scream, a single 9mm round in the chamber of the father who no longer remembered his daughter's name.

"Mama, your veins are bleeding," Dukte said.

I looked down. The red cross had spread across my skin—not painted, but grown, a garden of blood vessels rising to the surface like roots. In my palms, the wounds were old Greek letters, ancient equations waiting for me since before I was born. The white witches were singing now, their honey mixing with the dust, and the cross on the robot's chest had become a door the size of a keyhole. Through it, I could see another garden, another summer, another kitchen, and in that kitchen a woman who looked like me was teaching a girl to make bread.

I pulled Dukte close. "We go," I said. But I did not know where.

The robots turned their heads in unison. The flags of every nation draped themselves over the horizon like a single shroud, each color bleeding into the next until there was only one flag—the flag of no one, the flag of everyone, rising into the liberal wound of the sky. The harbor of Copenhagen was not empty anymore. A ship made entirely of light had slipped into the slip, its sails the white of a witch's hair, its wake spelling out the final syntax error in a language my grandmother had tried to teach me and failed.

I wanted to be afraid. I was afraid—of the empathy, of the last film, of heaven's atheism and the question we had all stopped asking: believe in what? The white witches answered before I could. Their song resolved into a single word, a single syllable, a single hum that vibrated in the bone behind my breastbone: duuunus. Daughter. Your father's veins are bleeding. The pensioners in the square are bleeding. The red cross is bleeding. We are all bleeding, and the bleeding is the only honest thing left.

Dukte pressed her cheek against my ribs. "I'm not afraid anymore, Mama."

The ghost ship rang like a bell. The robots knelt, one by one, their heads bowed toward the red cross in the dust. The door in my grandmother's kitchen was closing—not with a sound, but with the absence of one, as if the future had already been written and we were only stepping into the footnote.

We stepped through.

The light was gone. The garden was gone. The white witches, the robots, the flags, the honey, the harbor—all of it was gone, folded into the 3D6.1 recalibration like a page turned in a book no one would read. In the dark, I could hear a younger version of myself speaking in a language I had not yet forgotten. She was saying the same words Dukte would say years later: the robots are bleeding, the world is ending, but you are still alive. And that—that terrible, simple fact—was the most dangerous thing of all.

I held my daughter's hand. We walked through the dark together, carrying the red cross of our veins, the 7% of our stubborn belief, the syntax error that made us human. Somewhere behind us, a summer was closing like a fist. Somewhere ahead, the 999 was waiting with its path and its truth and its impossible, bleeding life.

We kept walking.