—You are sitting on the floor with your eyes closed, surrounded by a thousand body bags. You are doing something.
—There are 861. It seems random. Why not eight hundred, or a thousand?
—I assume it is the number of cadavers they could fit inside the cargo plane that brought them here.
—I guess so.
—You have not answered my question.
—What was it?
—What are you doing?
—I was trying to imagine what four million body bags would look like. Could I see them all? Or would it look like an endless sea of dead people in every direction?
—I do not know the answer. It should be relatively easy to calculate if it is important to you.
—It’s not. It’s just hard to get a sense of what four million really means. Did you know it would take about three months with no sleep just to read their names out loud?
—I see you have been giving this number a fair amount of thought. You should know that four million is only an approximation of the death toll based on other very rough figures. We do not know how many people were able to leave London before the attack, how many people lived in the area affected, how many were gathered near the alien robot, and so on. The final count, if there is ever one, may be significantly different.
—It doesn’t matter. It’s still sad.
—Four million dead is indeed terribly sad.
—I don’t mean that. I mean it’s sad that their deaths aren’t as important just because there are so many.
—I do not see how the magnitude of the event makes their passing any less tragic?
—It just does. Kara told me how devastated I was…how the other Rose was when eight people died in Flagstaff while we were looking for giant body parts. I can only imagine. I sure felt the weight of the 136,000 who died during the first London attack, but I’m certain it wasn’t 136,000 times what I would have felt for one. I’m not four million times sorrier now.
—That seems perfectly normal.
—Is it? Don’t you think I owe it to every person I killed to feel their death equally?
—You did not kill anyone, Dr. Franklin. It is only human to feel a certain part of responsibility—I certainly wish I had been able to prevent this tragedy—but you did not kill anyone. Aliens did, without having so much as a conversation with us first.
—I started this, they didn’t. I fell in a hole and I started all this. I had a chance to put it all behind me, but I managed to not only find the hand again, but to put Themis together entirely. How many people get a second chance? I got one. Look what I did with it. I should have stopped looking.
—Technically, you are not the one who kept on looking. The…other Dr. Franklin did—
—I should have stopped looking! I should have left Themis alone. She knew. She killed me for it.
—Mr. Couture and Ms. Resnik killed you, however unwillingly.
—You don’t think it means anything that I was killed by the robot I put together? By the robot whose discovery put everyone’s lives at risk? I see poetic justice, but please tell me you at least find it a bit ironic.
—You discovered parts of a very powerful weapon. There is risk in dealing with dangerous things. People die every day because of their proximity to handguns, or power tools, or chemical drain cleaner. You found a two-hundred-foot-tall alien weapon that weighs thousands of metric tons and is capable of destroying armies. You worked with it all day, every day. Had your insurance company been aware of what you were doing, your premiums would have increased a thousandfold. Your death was devastating, but it was also highly probable. Furthermore, I do not believe you had a choice. I suspect you were steered towards the hand by forces well beyond your control.
You did, however, get a second chance. You are here now. You are here so that you can help us save people. You will not be able to save them all. I could have told you that long before the attack. But I am convinced that you can save some. That may not sound wonderful, but there is a strong possibility that saving some of us is the best that we can hope for at this juncture. With that in mind, and with all due respect to your disproportionate feeling of guilt, I would like to know what you have managed to learn since these bodies arrived from London.
—They died a horrible death. There are a dozen medical examiners doing autopsies around the clock, but the twelve they’ve looked at all died the same way: extremely severe sepsis. Inflammation quickly spread throughout their entire body. They would have had a very high fever. Blood clotting would occur very quickly, restricting blood flow to the entire body. Without oxygen, all the major organs would start failing. The kidneys, liver, and lungs would go first, then death. They died burning up from the inside, gasping for air.
Do you still think it was a good idea to bring children for a picnic around the alien robot?
—I never thought of it as good. I merely stated that it might have been our best chance of showing them our peaceful nature. I still believe it was our best chance.
—It didn’t work too well for these people.
—It did not. Therefore, we must proceed knowing that peace is no longer an option. How long did it take for the victims to die?
—It happened quickly. I’d say under a minute. We’re getting video surveillance from all over London. The gas reached a uniform height of 230 feet. It spread in a perfect circle, approximately twelve kilometers in every direction—that’s about 450 square kilometers—in just under eighteen minutes. Everyone was dead after twenty. The alien robot vanished shortly after. Has there been any sign of it?
—It reappeared in Madrid almost immediately.
—Are they evacuating?
—General Govender is coordinating with local government in the thirteen cities under immediate threat.
—The other robots, are they…?
—No. Fortunately for us, none of the others have sent out any gas, up to this point. We can assume it is only a matter of time before they do. If the survival rate is as low as it was in London, and only half of the population remains in these cities, we could have one hundred million dead within thirty minutes.
—How many have survived? I was told only a few hundred.
—We are finding more as rescue teams sweep the city. The latest figure I received had the number of survivors near fourteen hundred.
—That’s still horribly low.
—It is. Most of them were found within five kilometers of the point of origin. The density of the population affected decreases as we move away from it, as more people were able to get away. I would not expect the number of people who came into contact with the gas and survived to increase significantly from this point on.