Marked From Birth
Up was no longer toward the stars; up was into the mouth of the machine.
Audrey stood on the jagged surface of Sector-C, her boots magnetically locked to the sintered silica. Around her, the "Moon-Glass" structures they had worked so hard to build were being ripped from the ground. Smaller fragments of the moon were already being sucked upward, colliding with each other in a chaotic grinding of rock and metal. Through her silver-link, she could hear the "Digital-Scream" of the World-Ship—a high-frequency command for the universe to be orderly, to be cataloged, and to be still.