(4)
 The Advocate saw God, here, in this cell: he read the unreadable Word in the stream of information spewing from her very DNA as she uploaded the program, the grayware, that she'd brought to elevate mankind, sent it out into— nothingness, past the beings it was meant for.
The guards in the door dropped their guns. They crouched fearfully, huddled together. Wind blew their hair as they staggered back, holding each other.
Laughing, crying, the Advocate held up his hands to thrash among the cyphers that floated like dying embers. In the morning, Sanitation would scrub the last evidence away. Even if they saved these wondrous writings, nobody here would ever understand them without the living Rosetta stone spinning in the center of the cell.
The woman's body burst into fire. Her garment flared and the burning tatters floated away, spinning, racked by fleeting gray shadows.
The charred corpse crashed to the floor by the drain. It was little more than a mass of runny charcoal. The brightness grew dimmer and dimmer, and the fleeting letters fainter. The air smelled, oddly, not of burning meat and bone but of cleansing ions after a rain.
The Advocate rose shakily to his feet and staggered over to where the guards gathered their guns up. One said: "Sir, was she a demon?"
The Advocate shook his head. "No," he said, clearing his throat.
"Then what was she, Sir?" Believers, they needed an answer.
The Advocate looked through them, past them. He would go to his office, put on street clothes and walk out of the city, looking for their enemies, in the hope of making peace. It was the one thing this woman had shown him how to do. If he ended up in their gas chambers, so be it.
He said to nobody in particular: "How blind of me not to have seen it, when I am the one charged with finding causes for Reprieve, and I missed this one."
"Was she a devil, Sir?"
"No," he said softly, with an immeasurable sense of permanent and total loss. "She was sent to be our Reprieve."
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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