Evolution's End

by Steven Spellman

  They pelted the robot with cans, with bottles, with soiled wads of newspaper, with rocks and broken brick and anything else they could hurl at it. Eventually, people began launching things from the tops of the buildings. None of the assaults left a scratch on Ed but a misguided brick catapulted from the top of one of the roofs caved in one of the cyborgs’ heads instantly. The fallen man had had an arm amputated and replaced with a brand new Titedelstein prosthesis. Unfortunately, the artificial arm was not the arm it had brought up to try to deflect the falling brick. When the man hit the ground dead the crowd whipped into a frenzy. More bricks, more bottles, more jagged rocks, began to fall from the tops of buildings like a stone hailstorm. People on the ground had plenty of trash to throw, but the people on the tops of the buildings didn’t have that endless supply of trash. Eventually they began dismantling the very roofs they stood upon for more bricks to use as ammunition.

  Soon, the crowd was so thick and violent that it looked like the entire city was here being driven crazy with fury at what this robot and its attendant cyborg represented. Meanwhile, Ed continued to stride forward in the same steady, smooth steps it always had but its cohorts were dropping off steadily. The tops of the buildings were becoming as crowded as the streets and in the blink of an eye, another of the cyborgs took a fatal blow, a gash to the neck from the shards of a broken bottle that some frenetic teenager had lobbed from the roof of one of the buildings. This cyborg was a woman and she didn’t hit the ground dead. She did hit the ground bleeding profusely and when she did hit the ground she remained there, bleeding out and choking on her own blood, until the crowd crushed her to death as they continued to follow behind Ed.

  There were two cyborgs left, both of them men. Both of them had new Titedelstein legs and when one watched the other get hit in the face with a wade of trash that had been covered in human waste, and then leapt upon and brutally beaten to death by the crowd as he struggled to clear his vision of excrement, he decided he wouldn’t go down so easily. The crowd was closing in quickly and as soon as the first person was close enough, the remaining cyborg kicked the guy in the gut with everything he had. The guy flew back with such force that he knocked seven other people down completely before he tumbled to a stop on the hard, hot pavement. When he finally did stop it was clear by the gaping indention that had hollowed out his midsection and left his spine broken in two and bulging out of his back, that he would never move again of his own free will. Fresh blood leaked from his mouth and the place in his back where his spine had been connected just minutes ago, and his eyes lulled so far back into his head that only the whites showed. The injured man coughed once, weakly, through the thick flow of blood and then nothing more. He was dead.

  The crowd roared but the crush of people gave the remaining cyborg nearly as much space as Ed. The lull in the violence didn’t last very long and as people began to move in again to assault the remaining cyborg with any and everything they could lay hands on, he began to kick wildly at anyone who dared to approach within kicking range. A short young woman—she was so short she might’ve been a child—caught a metal foot in the face so hard that her teeth were embedded directly into the back of her skull by the time she hit the ground. And still more enraged citizens closed in. The cyborg kicked with legs that were more powerful than a swinging wrecking ball and though the sound of shattering bones and flesh being pulverized couldn’t be heard above the din of the crowd, it was there. And still the assailants kept coming. With every wild hail Mary kick, the cyborg took out at least four people but still they kept coming. Eventually, a large man tackled the cyborg from behind to the ground. He hit the ground hard beneath the other man’s weight and white permeated his vision as he broke his nose and knocked out three teeth on the pavement.

  The cyborg over as quickly as he could, intending to kick for dear life but as soon as he managed to turn over the man who’d tackled him had a raised knife coming down fast into his chest. He watched the blade enter his body to the hilt almost as if it were a dream and he weren’t really here at all. The tip of the knife’s hilt, just above the man’s clinched fist, was the last thing the cyborg saw before everything went black. The assailant snatched the knife out and plunged it in again. And again. He didn’t stop until he collapsed in exhaustion onto the murdered cyborg. Meanwhile, Ed continued forward and the raucous crowd surged forward with it. It didn’t glance back once at its fallen comrades as its program directed it toward a building not far away. When it reached the building—an old library whose shelves of books had been ramshackled and destroyed long ago—it began to climb the building by hand. Most of the crowd stood shocked as Ed’s metal hands bit easily into brick and mortar so it could scale the façade of the building as no human or machine had ever scaled a building before.

  Ed climbed barehanded up the entire building, dislodging broken pieces of brick as it went along, until it stood high above facing the crowd from the roof. “Hear me, Science City!” the robot bellowed out high above the many upturned faces. The robot’s voice was as louder than a bullhorn, clearly audible to everyone in the crowd. Even those that were nearly a mile away. It was Marcus’ voice. The boom of it shocked the crowd into silence. It was difficult to reconcile the god-like voice erupting from this human sized robot. Ed raised its metal hands high above the shiny crown of its head—just in the way Professor Edelstein would’ve—and continued, “The time has come to relinquish your fears and embrace the future of mankind. There is hope for the injured and diseased. There is hope for the homeless. There is hope from the heat … I am that hope!”

  The crowd exploded. There were a few that wanted to hear what the robot had to say, but the vast majority of the crowd had apparently decided that they had heard enough. A cacophony of ‘No!’ and expletives and unintelligible grunts and yells rose from the crowd like a dense sonic cloud. Ed lowered its arms and remained silent. It could’ve amplified its voice enough to permanently deafen everyone within a thousand feet of the building but it remained where it was, mouth closed and eyes staring blankly ahead. Its program demanded that it stand down if the crowd rejected its message as vehemently as they had. And they had rejected its message, vehemently; the crowd was now chanting “NO … NO … NO … !” together with force of almost a half a million angry voices. They chanted “NO … NO … NO …!” for an hour, two hours, before the noise finally began to die down.

  Ed looked out over the crowd. It scanned every face it could detect with its special cameras, then it climbed down the building as easily as it had ascended it and began to return to the hospital just as its programming dictated. Along the way it passed the cyborgs that had been brutally murdered in its wake. The crowd gave Ed a wide birth and as it passed the cyborgs Marcus noticed that the only things left to them that weren’t beaten or crushed into a bloody pulp was their Titedelstein prostheses. It was a resonant sight seeing human beings who had been beaten and stomped so brutally that the only thing left to them that wasn’t completely destroyed was a pair of metal legs or a metal arm. Once Ed reached the hospital it backed itself tightly into a corner in one of the far rooms of the building and the footage on the television screen went black.

  “What happened?” Marcus asked Professor Edelstein.

  “That was the end of the demonstration. I programmed Ed to stand down in the event the crowd became chaotic. It’s waiting in the hospital for rover crew three to pick it up …” Professor Edelstein glanced down at his watch “In fact, rover crew three should be arriving back with Ed any moment, now.”

  “And what was this demonstration supposed to prove, Professor?”

  The professor didn’t answer. Instead, he rose from his chair and walked slowly towards the door. “It was supposed to demonstrate to the citizens of Science City that our robots were not the enemies.” Professor Edelstein’s bony shoulders slumped as if they were struggling to support a great weight. “I thought that if they saw the good Ed could do, if they beheld its capabilities up close they would begin to u
nderstand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “That this is the way of the future, of course.”

  “This is the way of the future, but the future hasn’t always been kind to these people, Edelstein. We need brain slices, Professor, but maybe this wasn’t the best way to go about it.”

  Professor Edelstein waved a hand, “Hindsight is always 20/20, Professor Willoughby. Besides that, everyone has seen this footage now. Somehow it was leaked from the robot’s cameras sometime while it being streamed here. I’m still not sure what happened …”

  Fortunately for Professor Edelstein he would discover soon just how the footage was leaked but unfortunately it would not be the last problem he would have concerning his namesake state of the art robot.

  CHAPTER 13

  Professor Edelstein knew that Ed’s data stream had been hacked. It was the only way the footage he and Marcus had watched could have been leaked to the public at large. He just didn’t yet know how it had been done. He also had no idea that once the robot had edged itself into a corner and powered down its recording devices, disgruntled lieutenants from The Freedom Movement had charged in with guns and grenades and laptops. Four of the men stood guard outside the hospital room door while other men examined the robot minutely and wrote down everything they could about it in exacting detail. The Freedom Movement’s top general was there as well, working feverishly upon the laptop. He was a tall, fat, hairy man named Pao who lived for nothing more but to witness the death and destruction of his enemies within the campuses. It had been Pao that had masterminded the attack on the Willoughby building. Pao possessed top secret information on Ed’s design. A robot like Ed could really give The Freedom Movement the upper hand in the war against the machines, but the general could not figure out how to reprogram the robot. The best he could do was add a few instructions to the robot’s existing programing and not many instructions at that.

  He decided that he would add something to the robot’s program and if things went as planned it might deal a greater blow to the campuses and everything they represented, more than if he were able to reprogram it. Pao tapped into Ed’s wireless communication system and embedded two new instructions into the robot’s program schedule and then slammed the laptop closed. He gestured to his men that the job was done and it was time to leave and they marched out of the room with machine gun muzzles raised at the heads of anyone who might block their path. Outside, they loaded into vehicles and roared away from the hospital and left only the pungent stench of burned tire rubber in their wake. When rover crew three arrived to retrieve Ed, they had no idea that anything had been changed about the robot. They transported it back into the campuses as they had been personally instructed by Professor Edelstein himself to do, and returned to the dangerous work that would probably claim their lives.

  It didn’t occur to the professor to check Ed’s programming schematic for tampering—Edelstein would’ve scoffed at the idea that anyone living in the outskirts would possess the knowhow to compromise programming that he had written himself—and so Pao’s little additions went unnoticed. Meanwhile, Professor Edelstein sent the robot wireless instructions to return to standby mode before it arrived back at the Willoughby Building. And so, the rover crew delivered Ed back to the campuses where it stood motionless, eyes staring blankly ahead of it in its storage room, while Professor Edelstein worked on programming that the robot would need for the next stage in his plan.

  On the other side of the campuses, Marcus sat on his living room couch beside Denna, working on some plans of his own. He held in his hand a brilliant yellow rose, in full bloom, with a lush green stem but no thorns. The rose was plated in a layer of Titedelstein so thin that it made the flower shimmer in the light like it had been freshly spritzed with morning dew. It gave it a metallic sheen that made it look futuristic if you held it in the light just so. Still, its carefully engineered color shone through clearly. It was beautiful and Denna had never seen anything like it. Marcus offered it to her. She took it hesitantly. “This was the last flower I found intact from our botanical garden that wasn’t destroyed in the attack on the Willoughby building. I helped plant this particular variety of roses with my own hands …” Marcus’ eyes glistened as he looked on at the flower “I would be honored if you would accept it.”

  Denna raised the flower into a bright ray of sunlight that spilled in through a small opening in the Marcus’ living room curtains and admired the explosion of sparkles that happened anywhere the light hit the metal plating. She turned it over in her hand and turned it over again, admiring the unique beauty of it. “And it will never fade, it will never deteriorate, it will never break. This yellow rose will last for the equivalent of many human lifetimes. It will still be here millions of years from now and it will always be exactly as it is now …”

  “But why?” Denna asked.

  Marcus looked confused. “Well, because the Titedelstein will preserve it indefinitely and because the rose is sealed off from the oxygen and bacteria in the environment it will never decompose …”

  “No, I mean why are you giving this to me?”

  Marcus slapped his forehead. “For a professor, I can be downright stupid sometimes. Everything’s just been happening so quickly …” He looked up quickly into Denna’s face. “What I meant to say was,” he took both of Denna’s hands, with the yellow rose still in them, into his own and gazed pointedly into her eyes “Denna, will you marry me?”

  Denna gasped and would’ve cupped her hands to her mouth in shock, expect that Marcus still held them firmly in his own. “Marcus … I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say, yes.” Marcus answered instantly. “I love you Denna. I’m certain of it. It’s all right if you don’t love me yet, you hardly know anything about me. Hopefully, you can learn to love me one day …”

  “Yes.”

  “I promise you, I have a lot more to offer than meets the eye and …What did you say?”

  “Yes, Marcus I will marry you.”

  Marcus breathed a sigh of relief. “You have made me the happiest man in Science City today.” He released Denna’s hands and she sat the rose down carefully on the coffee table in front of them. She watched it as if it might fly away the moment she took her eyes off it. Finally, she turned to Marcus. “Denna,” he said seriously “I need to tell you something. Things are happening out there,” he gestured beyond his home “and I don’t know exactly where they’ll end up, but I want you and I to have a clean start with no secrets.”

  “Okay.” Denna answered, and then swallowed hard.

  “I know that at least in the beginning you were only interested in me as a possible place to stay, a way to not get kicked out of the campuses.” Denna swallowed again, and then after a moment slowly opened her mouth as if she would say something, but Marcus interrupted her with a raised finger “It’s all right. It really is. I have no idea what I would do if I were in your position. I only know that I would definitely not want to return to the outskirts. I also know that I love you and I if I can help I would like to see that you’re never kicked out of the campuses as well.”

  Marcus held his arms out and Denna leaned forward into them. He hugged her tightly, with all his strength, for a long moment before letting her go. Then he kissed her on the cheek, then the mouth. She returned his kiss with passion, and soon hands were beginning to rove. Then, she gently drew back. “When?” she asked.

  “You mean, the wedding?”

  She nodded her head. “I was thinking maybe … tomorrow.” Denna did not look as surprised as Marcus might’ve expected. When she spoke she certainly sounded like it, though.

  “Tomorrow!” she screeched. “That’s not fair! I need a dress, I need shoes, I need to pick the food …!”

  Marcus only watched Denna and smiled. Then she began to smile too, albeit a defeated smile. She realized the absurdity of what she expected from a wedding. Weddings did take place in the campuses but they were infrequent and never lavish. This wasn�
�t a world for anything lavish. When people tied the knot in the campuses it was usually for survival, not love, and bone bare survival never got the fanfare that true love did. It was a surprise to Marcus that Denna expected a big wedding; that was like expecting non-laboratory synthesized food to show up on a plate when you ordered food anywhere.

  “If it were possible I would give you the largest, most ornate wedding the world has ever seen … if it were possible.”

  “I know.” Denna answered “Don’t mind me. It’s just always been a childhood dream of mine to have a big, ridiculous wedding.” Marcus didn’t answer, since he couldn’t relate. His childhood dream had always been to save the world. What was a mere wedding compared to that? “Everyone I saw was always worried over something or hurrying somewhere so they could worry over something different. No one was ever happy and it was like people had forgotten what love was. But a wedding …” Denna’s eyes stared off into the distance, at something at which Marcus could only guess “a wedding is a celebration of love. Everyone is happy at a wedding.” Denna stared down at her knees. “The last time I remember anybody in my family smiling was at my mother’s wedding when I was a kid. I was probably about six years old and I remember thinking that weddings were magical things. Perhaps the last magic left anywhere. Weddings had to be magic if they could make my family members stop yelling and fussing and fighting each other long enough to remember that they were a family. I remember thinking that I was going to have the biggest, most magical wedding ever. It would be so big and so magical that everyone would be so happy that they would never fight again and the earth would be happy and it wouldn’t be so hot all the time anymore. My wedding was going to be so magical that even God would be so happy that He would make things right with the world and no one would hurt or die every again.”