The Machine's Child
Kage Baker
 At the end of The Life of the World to Come, Alec Checkerfield, aboard his schooner the Captain Morgan, crewed and piloted by the eponymous AI he created from a teaching computer given to him as a child, had escaped from Dr. Zeus' installation on Santa Catalina Island with information stolen from the Company databases. Using this information the Captain turned the ship into a time machine, leaving the year 2351 to hide in history. Along the way Alec found and lost Mendoza, unwittingly downloaded his alter egos into his own brain, and equally unwittingly was party to one of the most infamous massacres in human history, the destruction of the colony Mars Two by terrorists. As a result Alec is racked with guilt, and thus weakened he falls prey to the other personalities, especially the former assassin Edward. In a bizarre joint effort they break in and steal from the Nuevo Inklings in 2351 more information in the form of a buke, a 24th century notebook computer. Thus fortified they disappear into time to plot the rescue of Mendoza. The Captain begins talking to the personalities individually as he creates the plan. Mendoza is in "Options Research", 300,000 years in the past. This is a facility dedicated to finding ways to kill cyborgs, using Preservers who have lost their will to live as guinea pigs. Only one Company operative is there, but it is Marco, the only Enforcer other than Budu to remain free once the Enforcers original mission was completed. Instead of being placed in suspended animation like the other Enforcers, he was sent to run Options Research where he systematically disassembles cyborgs and subjects them to horrendous treatments in an attempt to destroy them. Alec and the Captain arrive from the future, with Edward in control of their body to carry out the mission. This is fortunate, as the horrors created by Marco sicken Nicholas and Alec. They find Mendoza, who has been lying in a steel coffin for 900 years, disabling Marco in the process. The Captain has duplicated the virus that brought down Budu, although Edward is only able to inject it by sheer luck. Mendoza is in dreadful condition; her coffin is only 1 meter long. In the year 2317, Joseph is still waiting for Budu to finish regenerating after rescuing him in 2276. He lives in a corner of the revival facility under Mount Tamalpais, near San Francisco, stealing food, clothing and other equipment as he needs them. Lately he has been playing the role of visiting handyman and lover to Mavis, the landlady of the nearby Pelican Inn. Budu finally awakes, despite being blind and unable to communicate. Joseph steals a vocoder and hooks it into Budu's systems so he can hear and talk. Budu tells his story about what happened to him after he escaped from Company custody in 1099. Becoming a rogue like Joseph, he roamed Europe until the Black Death gave him the idea of using disease to cull humanity of its violent members. Contacting his various recruits, like Labienus, he formed the Plague Cabal, which began creating diseases designed to kill target populations quickly and then die out before spreading to the rest of humanity. Labienus, however, had visions of reducing human population on a global scale, committing genocide, and caused Budu's downfall at the hands of Victor, who had unwittingly been made into a carrier of targeted viruses. Joseph finds a time-travel capsule that Budu had hidden on Morro Rock and goes to Options Research in search of Mendoza. He arrives well after Alec has left, and is attacked by Marco even as he lies ill with the virus. After Marco calms down, he tells Joseph what happened, before wading into the sea, presumably to hide himself from the Company, who he now believes is after him. Joseph, horrified by what he sees and failing to find Mendoza, returns to the 24th century and contacts Suleyman, who mounts a mission to rescue the cyborgs held at Options Research and expose it to all the other active Company operatives still alive. With knowledge supplied by Budu, Joseph begins to ransack Company databases for information about Mendoza, his friend Lewis, and the Adonai project which created Alec, Edward and Nicholas. Over the last few decades he had lost some of his grip on reality and thus became obsessed with destroying Adonai. Knowing that Alec is born in 2320, he brings Alec's "parents", the Earl and Countess of Finsbury, to the Pelican so he can prevent Alec's conception. To his dismay he finds that they had long ago decided not to have children and Roger had been medically sterilized. In reality, Alec was born to a host mother and given to the Checkerfields by the Company. Alec and his phantom companions are finally able to hold their beloved once the Captain, using his own version of the Company revival tank, rebuilds her. She has lost most of her memories, though there are indications the Captain may have blocked them to protect her sanity. One side effect is that the Company conditioning which suppressed her paranormal abilities has been removed, and she constantly creates temporal anomalies around her when her emotions are aroused. The typical result is that plants seem to grow with incredible speed. The ship is soon a floating greenhouse. The Captain meanwhile has been digesting the Company data. He can make Alec immortal like Mendoza, who thinks he is already immortal like her. He can create devices using nanotechnology that the Company, slow and bureaucratic, had never thought to build. Alec and Mendoza proceed to drop small time-bombs in the form of collections of nanobots throughout history. Meanwhile a search for Alec's original genetic template, which the Captain needs for the immortality treatment, turns up the mortal remains of both Edward and Nicholas, hidden in Company repositories; this is a shock for each of Alec's mental passengers. Eventually they locate Alpha-Omega, a secret facility where genetic templates for all operatives, and indeed every kind of human who has ever existed, are stored. Before doing this Alec insists on a vacation, and since he is obsessed with his romantic vision of pirates, he decides to go to Port Royal, Jamaica, in its heyday before being destroyed by an earthquake in 1692. Joseph and Budu have been studying Alec, and have realized that he is likely to visit Port Royal. Joseph sets himself up in the less rowdy inland community of Spanish Town, ready to wait years for their arrival, equipped with a device that can detect and jam the Captain's signals. Alec arrives with Mendoza, though he is quickly repelled by the place, and is only able to continue with help from Edward and Nicholas, who are not bothered by such horrors as abbatoirs, meat markets, pet animals, thugs and pirates. By way of celebrating their impending triumph over Dr. Zeus, Alec and Mendoza, helped considerably by Nicholas' passion and poetry, marry themselves and enjoy a belated honeymoon in a harbor inn. Joseph has had the misfortune to be away from his home when his alarm is activated, and when he returns the couple are gone. After an exhausting journey he finds the Captain Morgan at anchor and sneaks aboard, after disabling the Captain with a signal jammer. Confronting the man he thinks of as Alec Checkerfield, he is astonished to be attacked by the Nicholas personality. Knocking Alec out, he interrogates him when he revives, but finds himself dealing with Edward. At that point Mendoza erupts from the cabin of the ship, and the Captain defeats the jamming and activates the ship's defenses. Mendoza does not recognize Joseph, who realizes that whatever he thinks, Alec, Edward and Nicholas genuinely love her. He flees and returns to Budu. From Budu's point of view, Joseph has been gone a few days. From Joseph's viewpoint, it has been 20 years. Alec's injuries from the fight require even more recuperation. In a resort in 2276 they play a violent video game that is illegal in Alec's time. Edward beats the game, literally burning it out. As a result he becomes Alec's equal in cyberspace, though this is unknown to the others. Finally raiding Alpha-Omega, on an island in 500,000 BCE, they bypass the AI and the single human attendant it protects, and recover the Adonai genetic template. With the Captain distracted by the other AI, Edward takes over Alec and confines the other personalities to a virtual prison. His bravado is short-lived, however. Alec and Nicholas attempt to escape, distracting Edward when he is attacked by an ichthyosaur while wading into the sea. Gravely injured, he attempts to transfer his personality into Mendoza's systems, but the result leaves her catatonic. The Captain is left to pick up the pieces. The final scene is enigmatic, and a cliff hanger. Mendoza is "rebooted", but the Captain seems to have obtained human form. He implies that Alec and Nicholas are still trapped in Mendoza's mind and, strangely, calls her "mother".