"It looks perfect!" cried Emily in delight. "It looks just like the real thing!"

The wood pigeon stared back at her, cooing softly as it studied her with its pale green eyes, its head moving in precise little jerks. Its beak was orange and its feathers were a light, powdery grey except for the back of its neck where they were patterned in white and turquoise. It looked deeply stupid and harmless except, for some reason, for its feet that looked like the talons of some small but deadly dinosaur. It seemed impossible that those deadly looking feet with their scaled toes and long, black claws could possibly belong to the slightly ridiculous looking creature they were supporting.

"That's really a robot?" said Emily to the priest standing beside her.

"A robot brain and skeleton covered by real, living flesh," the priest replied. "Just like us. We've had the blueprints for these things for centuries, along with all kinds of other devices designed for special contingencies. Drones and weapons disguised as parts of the natural world in order to blend in, avoid being noticed. Shortly after the nuclear war, when the planet was only newly restored, there were books full of technical knowledge all over the place, buried in ruined buildings or in vaults specially designed to protect them. Books telling people how to build machines, how to recreate all the old technologies. We were worried that some ambitious warlord might find one and make use of it. Striking a city from orbit is something we prefer to avoid if there's a more elegant solution such as the surgical assassination of one man. A small bird that lands nearby, for instance, completely unnoticed, and shoots a poison dart into his neck from its beak."

"I'm not sure elegant is the word I'd have used for that," said Emily drily.

"After the first century or so, though, the last remnants of the old world were gone, or so we thought," continued the priest. "The cyborg birds were no longer needed. There were none in existence when Randall and the others first became a problem. We had to create new ones from scratch, and the living flesh covering them takes time to grow, a process that cannot be sped up. Finally, though, the first of them have begun rolling off the conveyor belt, so to speak, and we have begun to deploy them around the country."

"Pigeon terminators," said Emily, smiling in amusement. "Hasts la pizza baby." The priest stared at her curiously. "We used to feed pizza crusts to the pigeons, back in my old life," she explained.

"Ah," said the priest, nodding. "That's why we chose pigeons, because of their tendency to congregate around humans, begging for food. And also because they're a good sized bird. Plenty of room for all the gadgetry. Their eyes are cameras, for example. They transmit images to the nearest receiver, which forward them to a central server which is programmed to search for any suspicious activity. Anything that might be one of your former comrades. You can also see those images, by means of your head phone. It means you'll be able to search any city in the country for Randall and the others, even those under seige by orcs, without leaving the house."

Emily nodded excitedly. "How do I do that?" she asked.

"You'll have to download an app we've created for you. You ready to download it?"

Emily nodded, so the priest transmitted it to her. The app installed itself on her head phone and Emily gave the mental command to activate it. Dozens of icons appeared across her visual field, each with a five digit number under it. An ID number for an individual bird.

"Click on 00001," said the priest. "That's this bird here, in front of us."

Emily did so, and two images appeared in her visual field, one from each of the bird's eyes, located on opposite sides of its head. One of the images contained her and the priest. Her face disappeared and appeared in the other image as the bird turned its head to look at her with its other eye.

"You can give commands to the bird," said the priest. "Telling it to go in a particular direction. If you see a group of people and you want to see if Randall's among them. And if you do see him, or one of the others, you can tell the bird to follow him. Otherwise, the bird will just act normally. Act like a normal bird."

"Extraordinary!" Emily clicked on another icon, filling her visual field with images sent by a bird in a distant city. She saw a narrow street, washed by rain, seen from a high vantage point. The pigeon was sheltering under the eaves of a building, she guessed. There were people walking along the street. She selected one at random, a man wearing a heavy coat and a wide hat, and gave the bird a mental command to get closer to him. She felt a sudden swimming vertigo as the view of the street leapt up at her, and then she was seeing the man from below as the bird landed on the hard packed gravel of the street in front of him.

She tensed up involuntarily as the man's feet swept towards her, but the bird dodged nimbly out of the way. She told the bird to look up and saw an elderly bearded face. Not Randall, unless the beard was fake. The man's gait was wrong, though, and he had an arthritic stoop that she didn't think would be easy to fake. It wasn't Randall.

"The birds can also sense electromagnetic fields and radio sources," added the priest. "If one of them should take their head phone out of flight mode for any reason, we'll know it.. The birds can detect a transmission from up to a hundred metres away."

"This is wonderful!" she said. "I could spend my whole life exploring the world like this!"

"Well, there's no reason why you can't," replied the priest. "When your former associates have been found, there's no reason we can't leave the birds out there. Their power cells will keep them going for years. You can use them to spy on the world all you want, for as long as you want. Another expression of our gratitude to you."

"To be able to observe the wildlife, the living world, without disturbing it," breathed Emily dreamily. "A human, even a woman who knows how to move stealthily... A human still disturbs the birds and animals wherever she goes. This, though... To see the wildlife without disturbing it... I used to have a camera that I hid in a tree to watch the wildlife with, but even that disturbed the small creatures. It was a gadget of metal and plastic, after all. The creatures weren't used to it, unless I left it in one place for weeks. This though..."

The priest smiled. "You love the natural world, don't you?"

"I've spent my whole life trying to protect it."

The priest may have been a machine whose cloak of flesh was nothing more than a disguise, but a very human expression of deep temptation had appeared on his face, mixed with a hesitant, conflicted look as though some kind of serious debate was going on in his cybernetic brain. Emily watched with interest as she waited to see which side won. The priest paced across to the other side of the room, paused there for a moment, then turned to face her with the look of a decision having been reached. "This planet has a surface area of over five hundred million square kilometres," he said. He then fell silent, staring at her as if the figure had some kind of deep significance.

"Yes," Emily replied, not knowing what else to say.

"That's all the space it's had, in all the billions of years it's had since life first arose on this world. All the millions of different species that have existed in that time have all been confined to what is, by cosmic standards, a very small area."

"It's been enough," Emily replied. "Enough to create the wonderful variety of living things we have today."

The priest took a step or two closer to her, and now the look on his face was one of undisguised excitement. It was as if he knew something wonderful. Some amazing secret that he longed to share with someone, but not just anyone. It had to be someone who would appreciate it as deeply and fully as he did. Someone like Emily, for whom the natural world had such a deep, spiritual significance.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

"Similations suggest that the greater the area life has to live on, the greater variety of life can exist in that area," he said. "A continent can have a far greater variety of life than an island, for onstance. An ocean more than a lake. Listen, I'm not really supposed to tell you this, but... What if life could have more space? A lot more? Imagine the variety of living things that might evolve in the millions of years to come!"

"Are you talking about terraforming Venus?" asked Emily. She was beginning to feel the same excitement that the priest was clearly feeling. "Do the machines want to turn Venus into another Earth?"

"That would only double the area that life has to live on, even assuming it were possible for Venus to be made completely Earthlike, which it probably isn't. It's too close to the sun, the chemistry is all wrong... No, this is something else. We want to give life twelve times as much space! Not five hundred million square kilometres but six billion square kilometres! The equivalent of a planet more than twice the size of Earth but with the same gravity, the same climate and without the occasional climate catastrophes that occasionally threaten all life on this planet."

Emily smiled in confusion. "What have they got in mind?" she asked impatiently. "Colonising other solar systems? Terraforming extrasolar planets, planets orbiting other stars?"

The priest shook his head, now grinning like a child. "Machines need energy, you see. A lot of energy. More than can be generated by nuclear fusion. We need sunlight. Almost all our energy is obtained from solar panels. Millions of them, floating in space. Generating electricity from sunlight, a million, million, million watts of it. As our civilisation grows, though, we're going to need more. The big mainframes have plans, you see. Big plans requiring lots of energy. They plan to eventually dismantle the whole of the planet Mercury to create solar panels. Enough to capture two percent of all the sun's light. Nearly a hundred million, million, million, million watts of power."

The smile on Emily's face began to waver. A dusturbing suspicion was beginning to grow inside her. Don't say it, she begged in the privacy of her own head. Please don't say it.

"We're going to need more, though," the priest continued, the words Emily had dreaded. "As much as we can possibly get. The mainframes plan to dismantle the planet Venus as well, to create another shell of solar panels at Venus's distance from the sun. That'll capture another two percent of the sun's power. VIX has been in negotiations with the other big mainframes, though, and they've agreed to set aside one percent of Venus's mass, a mass about the same as Earth's moon, for the building of an orbital. A big one."

"An orbital?" said Emily. All her guts seemed to be tightening inside her and her pulse was quickening. She was suddenly hyper alert and shivering with adrenalin as if she were facing down a hungry tiger. The priest must be able to detect it, she knew, but probably thought it was excitement.

"A ring, three million kilometres across, two thousand miles wide, with habitable land on the inside. Forests, rivers and oceans. Twelve times as much as this entire planet. It will spin to provide gravity. At that size it will need to make one rotation a day to create gravity equal to that on the surface of the Earth. That means it'll have a twenty four hour day, just like Earth. There are ways to create different climates to match every terrestrial biome from desert to temperate to arctic, and there will probably be unique environments unlike anything that has ever existed on this world. It will be awesome, magnificent! A place where humans and other living creatures can not only survive but thrive for millions of years into the future."

"When?" asked Emily, her mouth suddenly dry. "When will this happen?"

"Oh, not for centuries yet. It'll take another hundred years just to finish dismantling Mercury, then two hundred to dismantle Venus, although who knows? The technology's improving all the time. Maybe they'll find a way to do it faster. Even if they do, though, I'm afraid you won't live to see it. Not unless you go back into hypersleep. Perhaps I could arrange that for you. Would you like that?"

Emily could only stare, aghast. She must have had a stunned look on her face that the priest was mistaking for overwhelming wonder.

"Once the disassembly of Venus is under way," the priest continued, "they'll be able to make a start on the orbital and then it'll take probably around a century to create, but there's no hurry. It'll be finished and fully populated with a complete, functioning biosphere well before..." He shrugged apologetically. "You know."

"Before they dismantle the Earth to make a third shell of solar panels," said Emily, struggling to keep her voice level. "To capture another two percent of the sun's energy."

"Only one and a half percent, unfortunately," said the priest with a shrug. "Because it'll be further from the sun, but that's still more then sixty million, million, million, million watts of power. Power that the machines are going to need if they're going to do the things they plan to do. All the other machine civilisations are doing it, you know. Dismantling planets to create shells of solar panels around their stars. Even humans contemplated the idea, back before the nuclear war. They called them Dyson Swarms. Once we've done it we'll finally be full members of the galactic club, except that we'll have something that none of them have. Not even the Sagittarians. An orbital with our biological ancestors living on it. The other machine civilisations are already so jealous of us! That the biological people who created us are still alive!"

"That the planet on which they evolved is still alive, with a living biosphere," said Emily.

"Planets are so wasteful when you think of it," said the priest, seemingly completely unaware that her mood had changed. "The bit that's needed for life is just a thin shell. All the rest, the core, the mantle, everything under the crust, it's only needed to support the surface and to create gravity. All that matter. Metals, volatiles, organics... Think what it could be used for if it could be freed up!"

"But planets are stable over timescales of billions of years," pointed out Emily.

"The Earth has remained habitable due to a long run of incredibly good luck. Most habitable planets stop being habitable long before sapient life evolves on them. A huge asteroid collides with it, a nearby star goes supernova... Earth's luck will run out sooner or later, be sure of it. The orbital, though, will have its own repair and maintenance systems, and it won't suffer from volcanic eruptions, magnetic field reversals, climate catastrophes... All the things that cause mass extinctions on planets."

"Mass extinctions are a necessary part of keeping a biosphere healthy," said Emily.

"The controlling intelligence will be able to arrange a mass extinction if it thinks one is necessary. Look, I can see you're a little disturbed by all this. It'll take you a little while to get used to the idea, but take it from me, this will be a fantastic development! Twelve times as much living space for all the world's creatures, including humans, and guaranteed to be habitable for millions of years to come."

"You can't guarantee that!" In her distress and anger Emily was unable to keep her voice from rising. "Planets are stable! No matter what happens to them, no matter what catastrophes they suffer, they bounce back. The atmosphere restores itself, new forms of life evolve. An artificial structure, though... Any made thing will fail eventually. Something wears out, something goes wrong, and then everything dies. Everything!"

"I shouldn't have told you," said the priest regretfully. "The others said you shouldn't be told, that you wouldn't understand..."

Emily got herself back under control with an effort, the habits of a lifetime reasserting themselves. She was the Guardian of the Earth, and she protected it by hiding her true intentions. "No, I'm glad you told me," she said, turning to face him and making herself smile. "I'm sorry, it's just a lot to take in all at once. My head's swimming with the enormity of what you're planning to do."

"That's perfectly understandable," said the priest, his smile beginning to return. "The fault is mine. I should have broken it to you more gently. Dumping it all on you in one go like that..."

"All my life, it's been the planet I've been trying to protect," said Emily. "The planet itself, the life on the planet, it's all been one and the same in my mind, but you're right. It's the biosphere that matters. The planet itself is just a big lump of rock. I still feel an emotional attachment to that great ball of rock, though. You understand? It's going to take me a while to get used to the idea of the biosphere being separated from the planet. You're sure your orbital will be long term habitable? I mean really long term? Millions of years?"

"So long as our civilisation endures, the orbital will endure," said the priest. "I guarantee it."

Emily nodded. "Twelve times as much living space! It's just a number to me, I still can't get my head around it. It's incredible, though! We're so lucky that the machines agreed to do it! Can you tell VIX how pleased I am? How grateful I am?"

"I just did," said the priest, smiling again. "VIX is a little annoyed at me for telling you, but he's pleased that you're pleased. He says that he hopes to be the mainframe assigned to manage the orbital. He's developed something of a fondness for humans over the centuries."

"The feeling's mutual," said Emily. "And now I'd better get to work. We've got fugitives to find."

"We're releasing more birds every day," said the priest, beaming with pleasure. "Hopefully, it's just a matter of time before you see one of your former associates through the eyes of one of them. And thank you again for helping us. VIX sends you his gratitude, as do I."

Emily nodded her acceptance of the priest's words, then closed her eyes, picked a bird at random and allowed the images from its eyes to appear in her visual field. Behind her, the priest quietly left the room, unaware of the bewilderment and confusion filling Emily's head, along with the shocked sense of betrayal...