Later I’m with a family. The parents give me some of their food, though I make a feeble attempt to turn it down. I ask what they’re going to do. The mother—the two boys are asleep at this point—just nods and looks away. Then when the silence seems unbearable, she turns back and points at me, saying that she’s seen me on posters. The father coughs. She brushes him off and says she knows me. Knows about me and Turing.
I flinch. How much has been said out here among the refugees? Will all my fellow humans reject me? That thought tears and tumbles about my chest.
The husband points at me, “I used to work with Dalcia before she was chased out...” His pause, to me, sounds like an accusation of the betrayed. “I used to read you.”
I wait for the punch that never materializes.
“You always wrote about not taking sides, didn’t you?”
I shrug, nothing else to defend myself with.
He chuckles angrily. “And now all the side want you dead. How’s that?”
“And so it goes,” I manage to say.
They both stare at me. I feel immediately stupid. Somewhere in the distance a missile shriek and explosion stirs the air.
“But you did take sides against your friends, didn’t you?”
The woman’s accusation is enough for me to shrink in place. Something in her words pulls out a memory of my wife. I can hardly maintain eye contact with them. I take leave soon after, the thought of my wife hangs like an apparition above my head.
The next few days are a blur, the rubble and the distant-then-close, gun battles fill the silence. The remnants of my labyrinth appear like apparitions, but they are all just part of the war zone. The people I meet, refugees and militias, sometimes both, talk of hope, talk of the coming light filled era. I try to understand, to hear of the single parts of society that need to be cleansed, then I leave, knowing that they too will be fighting soon. Sometimes I watch battles from a distance. Human on human. Robot on human. And every mix of those two that one can conceive. I wonder how I ever thought I had a grasp of this.
On a rainy day I find myself in St John the Divine. It’s the only standing building in the area. I remember its secular origins. I step inside and make my way to the alter. I’m surprised that it’s empty. I wonder if that’s because everyone in the neighborhood is dead. I kneel at the altar and clasp my hands for a prayer. But there is no God to pray to. I wonder what I can say that will help me. So I pray to humanity, to the ancestors of yore. I look for guidance, but in my heart and in my mind there is nothing but silence.
The door behind me opens. I don’t look at first, but when metallic footsteps close in from behind me, a screeching sound shaking my spine, I open my eyes and turn. It’s Turing, dragging behind him a large metallic blade that leaves a deep trench in the stone floor, and there are a few birds flying and landing around him. “Georgie, boy,” Turing says. He smiles, and the metallic glint almost blinds me. I notice the glint all over his body. I turn back to the altar, wondering what I can say. Then I remember that there’s no one listening. But I still mutter a few hopeful outcomes for humanity before Turing is by my side.
He stinks of rotting flesh, but beneath that is a cleaner more metallic smell that’s slowly winning over, something like a new car smell. Pieces of flesh have been torn off his exterior exposing the bright and shiny metal that is the real him, and birds, one sitting on his shoulder, pick away at the flesh, cawing, satisfied. “Hello Georgie.”
I stare, scared, wondering what’s going through the machine. What will it do next? But, oh, I know the answer to that already. “Turing,” I whisper. My eyes fall on the large industrial sized blade. It’s been sharpened recently. The rest of it is rusty and bloody.
“Georgie. Traitor.” He whistles, like calling a dog.
I stare at the rotting flesh then into his eyes. Cold black eyes. Lenses. He’s falling back to his roots. I remember that there’s one more prayer to humanity that I need to make. Need to make to no one. I turn, bow my head and mutter.
“Oh, this is fitting,” Turing says, chuckles his voice cut up with fricatives more at home in a dialup tone than a human’s range.
I hear the blade cut through the air.
The Labyrinth of Souls Page 50
