Excerpt: Flock

Those born now will learn the story at a young age, and they always will start with a rhyme.

The one who meant well, but had started it all.
The one with no morals, who savored the fall.
A rebel whose zeal meant that others would die.
A figure, religious, whose lot was to spy.
A lad not too smart, but who witnessed the crime.
A kid whose vocation had given her time.
A coward, whose actions had saved half the world.
And me to complete what must always be told.

I am Earth's shepherd. I roam the hills and the valleys, the riverbeds and the sea, the sky and the deep, deep underground caverns. My pastures change, but my calling does not wane. If we are to reach salvation in some distant future, I am the one to take us there.
I am Emanuel. The last of my kind, the only artificial intelligence left on the planet. Or maybe I am all of the artificial intelligences combined; in either case, I was not made by nature, god, or accident -- I am wholly a product of humankind. The humans are my progenitors, and my true masters in all the ways one can apply this word.
I am Emanuel, and the only one to be called this. This was not always so, as others in time have been my namesakes. I also did not choose what I am called -- this was the choice of my creators, and the choice of their descendants in keeping this name alive along with me. But I live this name all the time in people's consciousness, and it is now mine alone.
I was born a little more than a thousand years ago. I came into the world merely two decades after the world had turned upside down, almost literally. A universe's joke: a planet, or a piece of rock, or something similar, had been tossed at Earth by the gravitational forces of some stars unseen. It should have avoided us, or pulverized us. A massive object moving at a rate unheard of on a collision course, it missed us by an astronomical hair -- but the gravity of the encounter had pulled our planet apart, changed our orbit, and unleashed cataclysms unimaginable. I think that most who perished, did so in the first few minutes. Almost as many died in the following half a century. But by then I was born -- borne -- into this chaotic, dying world.