Read An End for Free Online Page A

neon green carpet, the room itself faded, dissolved. Fleur and Mother were left alone in the true Center Earth, which appeared from the fog of illusion that Mother had created for her guests.
    They hung in the center of an expanse that dwarfed the Vegas tunnel, its walls lined with machines of limited sentience that skittered about insectlike, gigantic machines the size of mountains roaring along on Mother’s orders of processing the interior of the planet. Fleur’s throat closed in as she saw what the majority of the machines were working on. Mother remained in her child form, and playfully swam over to where the silver balls that were Whistler, Nine, and Hank floated. She grabbed all three and placed them in the pocket of her overalls.
    [like my ship?]
    Ship was an understatement. A vessel the size of a continent was being constructed out of the carcass of planet Earth in its very interior. Hundreds, thousands of Mother’s machines swarmed over its surface, which sparkled with countless welding blasts, shrieks of metal, the reverberating clang of miles-long segments of the vessel slamming into place as the machines hurriedly constructed it.
    Fleur was wordless. She had seen the vessels of the Extinction Fleet, but never anything like this. She had only heard of one larger vessel—
    [zero’s vessel was bigger, yes. almost the size of an entire system. but it just didn’t have the vitality of mine. of ours.]
    “Where—Where are we going?”
    Mother swam over to Fleur, held her hand gently. Her smile was wide and terrifying in its implications. Before she said a word, Fleur knew her answer.
    [we’re going home, little flower.]
     
     
    Zero tried not to be disturbed by the line of black-clad men that walked in silence on either side of him. The Stranger was at his side, walking at his slow, exhausted pace. Zero was beginning to suffer the adverse effects of gravity re-entry. His body ached for the fluid enclosure of the bowl, the warm comfort of liquid space. The only sound in this passage was the shuffled steps of hundreds of feet. The men walked in silence down the slightly-canted corridor, constructed entirely of matte plastic? metal? something, curving upward so that he couldn’t see the end.
    “Your Machine has been dissembled and absorbed into—” The Stranger paused, Zero feeling the search for the correct term (essence singularity soul parent) “—Heaven.”
    Zero’s watched as the Stranger reacted to his expression of confusion, and found it reflected in the man’s face. He stopped walking. “Heaven?”
    “Our creator... and benefactor. You will experience it. It is ineffable. Difficult to name.”
    “And you? What should I call you?”
    Again, that disarming grin. “Stranger will do. My name doesn’t matter.” A reassuring squeeze of the shoulder, and they walked on, flanked on both sides by black and silence. Soon, they came to the end of the corridor, which opened out into an impossible expanse that took Zero’s breath away, almost quite literally.
    The walkway extended out to an airlock, at which was docked a shiver vessel of uncertain design. The airlock was the only blemish on the surface of a clear globe, the walls of which were constructed of miles of transparent, glassy plastic. On the other side of the clear shield was an enclosed solar system, millions of miles wide. At its center, shimmering weakly, was a dying star. Zero turned to Stranger, his face broadcasting his amazement at the phenomenon that he was witnessing.
    “It was a binary system. When your Extinction Fleet first made an appearance, we were able to hide one of our stars here. This vessel is all we have left.”
    Zero touched the miles of glass before him, which greeted his fingertips with a cool, static attraction. The airlock door cycled open beside him.
    “You have the technology to place a solar system inside of a vessel?”
    Stranger scoffed. “Not the entire system. Just one star and forty planets. The others