Light. Bright, blinding light. White, blazing, painful, light. The world exploded with it and kept exploding until it seemed the entire universe was permeated with white light. Then, in a moment, Marcus blinked and the light dimmed drastically until he could see what was around him. Actually, it hadn’t been a blink. His synthetic retinas had assessed that the light resolution was too high for Marcus’ sensibilities and adjusted with the equivalent of a camera click. Marcus looked around and didn’t recognize anything. He had no idea where he was, when he was, or who he was. He knew only that every sensation he experienced was heightened to a fever pitch. He could see miles into the distance as clearly as inches in front of his face. The myriad of smells that attacked his nostrils was bewildering. They weren’t pleasant smells, mostly sun burned soils and inorganic materials. Marcus didn’t notice it immediately but the one smell he didn’t register was the smell of anything living or anything that had been alive anytime within the near past. But though every smell carried with it a sunburned tinge, they were all separately distinct in Marcus’ nostrils.
He could easily differentiate between sunburned brick and dirt that had been roasting in the sun for centuries. He could tell that the smell of sunburned mortar was not the same as sunburned concrete. Marcus took a deep breath and inhaled all the smells he could. Slowly, what each smell was began to surface in his mind. He inhaled again deeply and then turned to looked around him. There was only ruin in every direction. It took Marcus a moment to remember that the huge jagged mounds that dotted the landscape everywhere had once been buildings. They had obviously been toppled and burned long ago. Broken glass, shattered brick, and plaster desiccated nearly to powder was everywhere, along with countless shards of twisted metal and wooden planks. Wherever Marcus turned, for miles in every direction, it was the same thing. But Marcus still had no idea what or where this place was.
He began to walk in the direction of one of the only buildings that was still partially intact. Most of the roof of the building had fallen in and one of the walls as well had collapsed. It was a ruin of a building but what remained standing looked vaguely familiar. He approached it slowly. That’s when he noticed how strong he felt. His legs, his torso, everything, was so strong it didn’t feel as if he were carrying his own weight at all. He felt as if he could run a hundred miles easily right this moment. He felt as if he could jump over what was left of the building in a single bound and with very little effort. It felt exhilarating. He reached down and touched his legs and his eyebrows furrowed; certain memories were beginning to return and some of those memories suggested that his legs should not feel like metal.
He looked at his hand for the first time. Sure enough, four fingers, one thumb, one palm and all of it seemingly one piece of hot, shiny metal. He looked down at his legs. Both of them were metal as well. It didn’t alarm him, but something inside him whispered that something was wrong, that this was not what he was supposed to look like. He continued on towards the building and peeked into one of the remaining windows. He leaned against the brick that surrounded the window and peered inside. As he peered closer he heard a small creaking sound. What he saw inside that window sparked something else inside of him. He saw tables, most of them toppled and broken amongst the debris of the collapsed roof, but at least one of them was standing. It was the table closest to the window and though it looked no different than the other tables, except that it was still standing, it brought the first smile to Marcus’ new metal face. For some reason this particular table in what must’ve been a restaurant—restaurant; Marcus could barely recall the name—was special.
He heard the creak again and he took two large steps backwards without knowing why, just as the wall he’d been leaning upon bowed inward and finally toppled over, scattering more brick and broken glass everywhere. Almost instinctively, Marcus turned and gazed out in the direction opposite the old restaurant. There was a clearing before the next huge pile of rubble and in that clearing there were a number of broken wooden planks and a few destroyed folding chairs scattered around, half buried in the thick layer of dried earth that had collected over everything in the last thousand years or so. A bowed corner of what had apparently been some kind of wooden platform was the only thing that remained standing. Marcus stared at it and the strewn chairs for a long time. There was something important about this place, he could sense it, even if it did just look like chaotic ruins.
He was about to turn and examine the rest of wherever he was, when he noticed a spark of light shine off something in the distance. Whatever it was, it was small and only a brief tip of it peeked up through the burned earth. That tip was enough to reflect the blinding sunlight like a mirror. Marcus focused on the tip of the object and it instantly became as clear as if it were inches away from his face. It was a discombobulating experience for Marcus having his vision magnified so quickly without warning, but he felt steady upon his feet. He began to walk towards the spark. At nearly two hundred feet away, he could see clearly that some kind of metal plating gave off the spark and that something organic and yellow was encased inside that metal plating. When he reached it he bent down and snatched it out of the ground. He held it up high before his face. It was the yellow rose that he had given Denna, the same rose that she had placed in her hair just so perfectly on their wedding day.
All Marcus memories flooded back in upon him. Denna, Professor Edelstein, his students, Ed, the panic that Ed had caused in the outskirts. Marcus remembered the life that had once been his but he especially remembered the wedding that had only begun to take place and never finished. It had been the happiest day of his life. What had happened? It took him another moment to remember that Ed had shown up unexpectedly and that somehow Ed’s indifferent, metal face was the last face he’d seen. The last face, but not the most important. Nor the most beautiful. Marcus remembered who he was and what he was and what he was was desperately in love with Denna. Unfortunately, Marcus’ newfound memory brought with it the realization that Denna must have died long ago. Her bones would’ve been ash scattered upon the winds to the four corners of the Earth by this time. Marcus sat down upon the bare dirt even though there was no hint of fatigue in his legs. The pain was not in his indestructible Titedelstein body, it was in the flesh and blood heart that no longer beat in his chest. He wanted to lay prostate in the dirt and cease to exist, but of course his perfect body would never allow that. That made it worse, to realize that the work he and many others, including Professor Edelstein, had given their entire lives to had been a success; in this metal body he would essentially live forever. Forever … without Denna.
The crushing weight of it was there but somewhere out upon the horizon, like a storm as large as a planet but two planets away. His agony was epic and he hadn’t spent enough time with his new body to fully ingest all of it yet. That meant the worst was yet to come. Marcus remained there on the barren ground for a long time before he stood to his feet. He suddenly felt that he needed to be away from this place, away from the despair that was closing in with harrowing slowness. He began to walk in no direction in particular and continued walking until he found himself approaching one of the tunnels that led to the Willoughby Building. Curiosity urged him forward towards the complex. Now that he remembered, he needed to know what had happened to the rest of Professor Edelstein’s plan. Were the other robots activated as well? Did they have brain slices that made them living beings too? What was supposed to happen, now? They were all pressing questions, but more importantly, they helped to distract Marcus’ mind from the fact that the woman he’d come to love more than life itself was gone forever and there was nothing he could do about it.
When he reached the end of the tunnel he noticed that the huge, heavy bunker door was standing opened; there were no standing legion of robots, no amberized brain slices, no shiny medical equipment inside. Everything else, his auditorium classroom, Professor Edelstein’s office, the other professors’ offices, the laboratories, the other classrooms, everything, was a
ll still intact except that the march of a thousand years had worn all the fabric down to threadbare strands and discolored all the metal. It was a depressing sight, especially since this was the first time Marcus had ever seen the building completely empty of people and he knew that real flesh and blood human beings would never walk these halls again. But where were the robots? Where were the brain slices? Without them, everything Marcus and many others had worked for, everything they had lived for, had been for naught. Without the other robots and those brain slices, he was doomed to roam the cursed Earth alone, wandering endlessly and without hope for as long as time existed.
Marcus tried hard to think. Maybe if he could somehow access the robot’s original programming from the inside he could tell where Professor Edelstein had programmed the other robots to go. Or maybe the robots had been stolen and hijacked by The Freedom Movement centuries ago. If The Freedom Movement people had corrupted the robots’ programming they might be lost forever and Marcus’ lonely fate would be sealed. But as Marcus searched inside his own new shiny metal head, the only thing he found were his own memories. The robot’s original programing was vanishing. That had always been the intent. From the beginning Marcus and Professor Edelstein had agreed that some kind of automatic shut off switch should be included in the robot’s programming once a brain slice was incorporated. Otherwise, the robot would be controlling the human and that was not what the robots had been created to do. That shutoff switch was taking effect now and Marcus knew that there was nothing he could do to stop it.
He wanted to rage but he knew it would accomplish nothing. Besides, his rage, like his agony, was a formidable but distant storm inside his mind. His robot body knew nothing of anger, of despair, of hopelessness, of loneliness. His robot body knew only operation, programming, efficiency. Not until every line of programming had vanished would the body be completely Marcus’s and feel what he felt. At least as much as impenetrable metal can feel. And so Marcus left the empty Willoughby Building and wandered through the ruins above until he’d walked beyond the campuses and into the outskirts. There was no different in the ruination there. Nearly every building had been destroyed long ago and the dead bodies that had once littered the streets had long borne the harsh heat of the sun until they’d returned to the dust from which they’d come. From dust to dust most of those people had lived their lives, Marcus remembered, with no joy and no hope in between.
Marcus continued walking beyond the outskirts and beyond what had once been Science City. Everywhere, for as far as his powerful mechanical eyes could see, was red and desolate. There was not a single drop of water in sight nor anything to suggest that anything had ever lived here. It looked like the surface of Mars but with the temperature of Venus. Marcus continued walking. He walked steadily for miles, dozens of miles, hundreds of miles and kept walking. His legs never tired, his vision never wavered, and since his robot body didn’t need to breathe, he never got winded. He had no path to follow, no ultimate destination to reach. He simply walked through the dry, cracked, red, cursed Earth, not knowing what else to do.
He continued to walk, without a single break, for years, and while he walked something watched him. It was something much too far away for his powerful sensors to detect but it was there, nearly a hundred light years away. This mysterious something had been bidding its time, but now that time had come and it was about to introduce itself to the cursed Earth.
CHAPTER 16
Marcus had been walking for two thousand, five hundred and fifty-five days, exactly seven years, when he noticed something break through the sky about five miles from where he was. Or rather, it was nothing that he saw breaking through the thick acid clouds that hung high in the sky where water vapor clouds had once dominated. A huge circle of bright, open sky broke through the thick cloud cover and left only jagged wisps of cloud at its edges. Whatever it was would not have been visible to the human eye, but Marcus’ eyes could detect the faint radiation that the object emitted like an electromagnetic halo. The halo descended slowly towards the ground but did not land. It hovered for a single second and then rose back into the parting of the clouds like a recording that had been thrown into reverse, and left the atmosphere. Just as the human eye wouldn’t have detected the object, only Marcus’ eyes noticed that something had shot out of the bottom of it during the second that it had hovered. It made no sense but what had shot out of it looked like a single seed.
Marcus focused on the spot and ran the five miles in two minutes, towards it. when he arrived he noticed a small hole in the rocky crimson earth and the seed at the bottom of it, exactly six feet down. This was obviously no normal seed to be able to blast through stone and earth and remain intact. It was also obviously no normal seed to begin growing almost instantly. Marcus watched as the seed began to bulge, crack, and then slowly sprout. But though it started almost instantaneously the progress was not instant; the bulge began to appear within seconds, but it took six more hours for the bulge to crack, and ten more hours for the radicle to break through and began digging downward. The sprout didn’t break through and began to push upward for another few hours, but when it did begin to stretch upward the entire process began to speed up exponentially. Marcus had stood in the same position, directly over the hole, for an entire day and night and part of the next day, watching the process, but when the sprout broke free it took less than an hour for the roots to mature and dig down another six feet in every direction and the sprout to rise above the surface and quickly bulge into something that was nearly the shape and size of a grape. Within seconds that grape grew to the size of a watermelon and then to a beach ball large enough to hold a fully-grown human being inside.
Then, the massive stem that had been attached to it snapped free like a ripped umbilical cord and shriveled into nothing along with the root system. Nothing happened then, and Marcus found himself waiting for hours yet again but for what, he could not even guess. A month passed, then two months, three, before the beach ball sized whatever it was began to show signs that something alive was inside of it. It rocked gently from side to side, then not so gently, then it began to roll and rock violently as if two people were inside fighting to the death. Then the beach ball split and a tightly balled fist burst through the slit. Another fist punched violently from the inside, and two feet as well kicked for all they were worth from inside until the fists and feet punched and kicked their way free and something that looked like it could be human but needed more fine tuning, spilled out onto the ground. The thing had arms and legs, a torso and a head, but everything was vague and without tone like a poorly formed clay model. The face had no features, there were only fleshly indentations where the eyes, nostrils, and mouth should’ve been. There was no muscle tone, just vague creases where joints should’ve been. There were fingers and toes but no nails and they were all the same size and length, like raw material waiting to be finished properly.
The thing flexed and stretched before drawing in upon itself like a spider that had just been killed. It jerked and convulsed and stretched again, and again, until the movements became less erratic. Then it flexed more deliberately, and began to extend its toneless legs as if trying to stand. When that didn’t exactly work, the thing began to rock gently from side to side until it turned itself over. Then it carefully put its hands down and lifted itself up. It looked like a severely arthritic octogenarian trying to stand to its feet and when it did make it there it was unsteady. It performed a kind of awkward looking slow dance with its feet trying to steady itself until it finally found the stability it needed with a wide stance that more closely resembled someone trying to straddle a horse. Then after a moment, when it didn’t fall, it moved its feet closer together and stood like a real person. It took a tentative step forward, then another, then another, and stopped.
For all its awkwardness, Marcus marveled at the quickness with which this alien thing learned. He remembered that it had taken children months, years even to learn to stand and walk on their own two f
eet and this thing had only just arrived on the planet and had mastered it in moments. The thing walked around in a wide circle and by the time it reached the point where it had begun, its steps were as steady as a seasoned runner. Only then did it turn its featureless face towards Marcus. It stared at him with its eyeless sockets and he stared back at with his powerful mechanical irises. With those powerful mechanical retinas he could see that the thing not only lacked features but it lacked pores, hair follicles, nipples, varying coloration. It lacked anything that would suggest that it wasn’t a clay model.
Marcus took a step backwards and the thing matched it with a step forward. Marcus took two steps back. The thing took two steps forward. He took a step forward and the thing took a step back. He took two step forward and the thing took two steps back. Marcus stretched a hand forward and the thing stretched a hand forward. Thanks to the permeation of sensitive artificial touch sensors everywhere in the skin of his robot body, Marcus could feel the thing’s touch. According to the sensors, the thing felt like compressed earth or more accurately, like mud plaster. It certainly didn’t feel like human flesh. Marcus postulated what to do now. He had no idea what this thing was, why it had come, where it had come from, nothing. The only thing he knew was that it didn’t seem to pose any kind of threat. Yet. It seemed to mimic whatever he did, though, so maybe this was an opportunity to see what the thing could do. Without warning, he turned and bolted off into the distance. It only took him a few long strides to increase his speed to fifty miles per hour, then a hundred.
With his sensitive mechanical ears he heard the soft pat, pat, pat of running feet beside him. By the sound of it, that other pair of feet was not pounding the ground nearly as hard as his were, more like someone walking on tip toe. Really fast tip toe. He turned to look and sure enough the thing matched his stride step for step. Marcus’ robot body was not taxed at all at a hundred miles an hour and the thing running alongside him didn’t seem to be either. He increased the speed to a hundred and fifty miles an hour and still the tap, tap, tap was directly beside him. Two hundred miles per hour and the thing kept perfect stride. Marcus stopped abruptly, digging his heels into the dirt to his ankles to bring himself to a dead stop. The thing did the same but not with the same success. It toppled over and slammed into the ground head first and then continued rolling awkwardly, bending its arm the wrong way until its shoulder should’ve been completely dislocated and broken with one tumble, snapping its neck backwards with the next tumble, hitting the ground knee first with the next tumble, and still it continued to tumble until it finally slammed into the remaining edge of what looked like it had once been the foundation of some kind of building.
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