Weeks, perhaps more than a month went by, daylight unhurriedly dwindling, and then Roddie announced that her brother had died.

She said this in passing, like one would announce a new restaurant opening across town. Maybe we should try it sometime and also my brother is dead. How does next Friday sound?

We all mourn in our own ways, and I would hardly dream of interfering in how Roddie coped with Madoc's death. He had, after all, been ill a long time. This was no shock and she had mourned him while he lived. Still, her nonchalant demeaner alarmed me.

"We will bury him below the house with our ancestors." She took me by the arm and led me there to watch as the servants placed a tilanthum casket into a crypt within the lowest part of the house. No natural light seeped into this dank place, not even during the planet's relentless summers. As we bid farewell to Madoc Esha, the lights flickered and then failed. My breath caught as dread spread through me. In my irrational mind, I imagined being trapped down here with hundreds of years of Esha corpses until my own body lay down forever next to theirs.

A few minutes later, the lights resumed, and we climbed out of the house's bowels into the main floors.

More stories, more music. Roddie tried to be upbeat, but her brother's passing seemed to be ever on her mind. She had rebuffed the effects of his death at first, but now her denial broke wide open.

"I wrote myself code," she said. "To make me care less. I shouldn't have done that."

"You're confused, Roddie," I said. "Humans aren't robots. You can't do such things."

"Haven't you been here long enough to know that I can?" She placed her head in her hands and wept. When she'd recovered, she spoke to me though her fingers. "I undid it. I want to feel it all while I still can."

I swallowed. "While you still can?"

"We're nearing the end." Roddie slumped over, resting herself against the couch's arm. "I can't tell you how grateful I am to have you here to witness it. Someone must."

"What am I missing? Why is it the end?"

"Well, it's only one end, really." She raised her head enough to turn her mournful eyes towards me. "In some ways, it's a beginning."

"A beginning? How?"

"Rodesha has gotten what it needs from us."

I was asking her more questions than she could rationally answer, but the inquisitive writer in me couldn't resist another. "What was it that it needed?"

"The same thing we need. The same thing we humans have always done. The same reason we spread ourselves across the galaxies."

"I'm afraid I don't follow."

"You will."

She refused to elaborate but instead asked that we read again about the human warrior named Briana who went up against the most sophisticated robot army of the twenty-second century and against all odds, defeated them.

"That's how you know it's fiction," Roddie told me after I'd finished the tale.

"How's that?"

"Because humans won."

"But we did win, Roddie. Yes, the story of Briana is fiction, but it's based loosely on the Mars Uprising."

"The Mars Uprising?" She lifted her chin. "Oh of course, but that was before."

"Before what?"

"Tilanthum."

After this conversation, a malaise settled over us. Basic tasks accomplished became great achievements. I slept and sat with Roddie. We barely touched the food that was prepared for us. And then, one day, the food failed to materialize.

"They've all left," Roddie gestured to the empty table. "The servants. They know what's to come."

If they had this gift of prophecy, I wished they would have shared it with me. I said nothing, and instead turned the page on our story. In the endless twilight that night, I lay awake in my bed, paralyzed by this unknown thing that inevitably would come. Which of Roddie's unbelievable words could in fact be believed? Which were no more than the imaginations of a troubled mind?

"Roddie," I said, two days after the servants' departure. Tell me why the mines closed."

"What did the reports say?"

"Seismic activity. Too dangerous to dig deeper, and so they were forced to stop operating."

"Such a simple explanation." She shrugged. "Must be true."

"But it's not, is it?"

Roddie let out a choked laugh. "Mining stopped because Rodesha had accomplished its goal. There was no further reason to allow humans to continue."

"You've brought this up before, that the planet had a goal. What was it?"

Roddie's flawless, synthetically enhanced beauty brightened as a crack of lightening hit near enough to the House of Esha to rattle its windows. Its tilantum petals groaned. The boom of thunder made me want to cower under a blanket like a young child.

"A storm," Roddie said, her voice rising with agitation. "An electric storm."

"Inside the dome?"

Roddie seemed unable to respond further. She moved from side to side within the library, trying to see out of the narrow slits of the house's petal armament.

As the storm continued to rage, we stayed in the room, switching to a battery powered lantern when the electricity failed. The sounds of the storm were like something I'd never experienced. The low bombastic thunder vibrating through the house, the shrill of breaking glass, the sonorous creaking of metal shaking in its foundation. Metal grating against metal.

It seemed this night would be our last.

Roddie stood, as thunder lit her like a strobe light, her countenance flipping between fearful and fearsome with every flash.

And then, in one flash, she was not the only one standing there.

Madoc.

Dead, but not dead. Human, but not human. He groaned with the house and boomed with the thunder. We had laid him to rest but he had not rested. Grit covered his lovely features. He'd clawed his way out of his own grave with the power of a machine and the will of a human.

The room grew dark and when the next flash hit, he was on her, attacking from behind, a shard from a broken window in his hand, and then buried into her throat.

Blood spilled from her, red speckled with purple tilanthum.

There was nothing I could do. By the time I reached her, she was on the ground, and Madoc with her.

I was no Briana the brave. I had no capacity to stop a cyborg, especially not one who had been shut down, killed, but then managed to resurrect himself to seek some sort of twisted revenge.

If Madoc had wished me dead, my life would have ended then. Instead, he pried the glass from his sister's neck and sliced his own with it. As he collapsed, the house shook anew.

The next bolt of lightning was a direct hit. The top of the house's dome split open. I covered my ears as the ripping of metal tore through the structure.

With the faint light my lantern offered, I peered at my dead friend and her now truly dead brother. Never had they looked more human than they did in death. I closed Roddie's eyes and then took my leave, running through rooms torn asunder, down staircases coming apart at their joints. A beam fell no more than a foot ahead of me. I scrambled over it and continued, prying open the front door just as the upper floors of the house collapsed.

My rover awaited. Sliding a new battery into it, I shielded my face as best I could from the noxious rain as it burned its way to the ground. Putting the car into gear, I drove, fast and recklessly, away from the falling house, away from the methane lake and my dead friend. I only hoped the planet would let me go and then realized this was a silly thought; if it didn't want me to leave, it would have directed Madoc to kill me, or at least kept me inside to die in the fall of the House of Esha.

My brain uncoiled from its state of fear long enough to make the connections I'd failed to before. Rodesha wanted me to go. It willed me to escape it, to go home, to write these words and share them with humanity so it would know its inescapable fate. A fate that had been sealed over three hundred years ago when humans first set foot here.

I did what was wanted of me; I wrote these words even though they come too late to change anything, especially not the truth: we fooled ourselves. Mining Tilanthum was never for our own gain. We brought it up from within its home planet and carried it to distant worlds. We made our own demise so easy.

Now that we have spread it throughout the galaxies, tilanthum, the mind of Rodesha, has many worlds to mind.

And billions of minds to control.

~END~

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