Read The Man Who Ended the World for Free Online Page A

begins to rain. 
    The rain falls lightly, then the volume increases until it's fairly pounding the ground around him. A thin mist rises upward, building a fog bank that clings to the trees and shrubbery.
    Steven's no sadist, whatever Stacy may think of him. He double-stomps the earth beneath his feet, and the rain ceases to fall on the few square feet where he stands.
    Stacy chides, That's not exactly preserving the illusion. 
    What do you know about illusions? You're practically one yourself. 
    Maybe one day I'll be a real girl, Stacy says. 
    He can almost hear a tone of wishfulness in her words. 
    You're not becoming sentient on me, are you? he asks. 
    Stacy doesn't reply. 
    He'll have to consider whether that counts as a yes.
    •   •   •
    Level two may be his favorite. It certainly was the most complicated to design and build. Unlike the other three levels, Steven had to stay mostly out of the labs and allow the experts to plan this level for him. The complexities of simulated ecosystems were outside of his area of expertise. 
    But he could certainly program interfaces and behaviors into the room, such as the ability to disable weather in small grids at will. So he did. 
    He sometimes calls this level the bay, because it reminds him of an anonymous bay that his parents visited once when he was too small to collect many details, such as its name. 
    There are evergreen trees on the north end of the space, collected organically to create a woods he can wander through. For now, they are not much taller than Steven himself, but over time they will grow, and he is curious what the bay will look like in ten years, or twenty. When he walks between the trees now, he feels a bit like a giant. 
    The trees are in a meadow that gives way to sand and sawgrass, and as the space moves south, the land succumbs to sea. It is not a great sea, only an approximation of one. But the water here is cycled separately from the rest of the space station, and injected with salt. Artificial winds carry the tang of its scent across the entire vast room, so that even when Steven is out of sight of the ocean, he is able to smell it. The water laps at the shore, sometimes surging at it, powered by wave machines and supported with additional sound effects. If he wanted to, he could swim here, but he has always been afraid of the ocean, and he preserves that fear by staying out of his own false sea. 
    There are no walking paths or benches. The ceiling of this room is higher than the others, and the artists who designed it have cleverly designed it to appear even more distant than it is, through a combination of layered weather elements, cycled artwork and natural, random light patterns.
    There are birds here, but they are the only wildlife he would allow. He discussed the possibility of introducing more species -- the idea of riding a horse on his beach was appealing -- but ultimately concluded that the risk and maintenance requirements were too great. What would he do when one of his animals killed and ate another? It would happen. The idea worried his stomach. And so birds are all he allows. Their sounds comfort him. The birds are acclimating slowly to the environment. All of the deceptions he has constructed to make the space appear larger than it is have taken a toll on the birds, whose sad corpses he often finds strewn about, rendered lifeless by collisions with the walls or the ceiling, or, on at least two occasions, from flying into the atmosphere generators. If this continues, maybe he will not replace the birds. 
    He is always amazed by the realness of the space, even the artificial clouds and rain. Here, it is always late fall, never winter, never summer. This room is the quiet space that, until now, has always existed deep within his own mind. 
    He may call it the bay, but level two is Steven's Rama.
    •   •   •
    The various levels of the space station are connected by a warren of secret passageways, service tunnels and