The Human Son

by Adrian J. Walker

  ‘Nothing you have to say is going to change anything,’ he said. ‘You still understand nothing about us. We have a higher purpose. Benedikt. Do it, now.’

  Benedikt swept his hand over the slab, and the circle began to hum and rumble. The air around us seemed to glow and the stone itself grew hot beneath our feet. With a screech from Caige the lanterns primed themselves once again. My mother croaked, her hand touching the seat beside her.

  ‘Please, Ima, my daughter. Sit down next to me.’

  I shook my head and staggered away, holding you close as the lanterns neared. You seemed to collapse as we went, as your body drained of whatever bravery had been supporting it. My heels met the lip of the stone circle, and I turned to Benedikt.

  ‘Benedikt, please,’ I began, though I knew it was no use. The lanterns were under Caige’s command only.

  But Benedikt’s eyes were bright.

  ‘Caige is right, Ima,’ he said. ‘There is a higher purpose.’

  Looking back, I cannot say for sure what triggered the processes that proceeded in my mind just then—the quiver of hope in Benedikt’s expression, perhaps, or the unusual intonation with which he said the word ‘higher’—but proceed they did. Suddenly I found myself back in the Halls of Reason with Benedikt’s mouth at my ear.

  ‘Look in higher places,’ he had said. I thought he had meant Oonagh, but I was wrong.

  That screech he had whispered, the garbled mess of data that made no sense—it was encoded. My brain soared with calculations as I parsed every one of its 16,741 bytes, compressing, limiting, and filtering at every possible value, reams of calculations running in parallel as the lanterns pushed us closer and closer to the edge, and your breathing quickened, and you gripped my arm and said, ‘Ima.’

  And as you did, a pattern finally emerged. The set of values above 192—the higher places—formed a code. It was an override.

  I screeched it as loudly as I could.

  ‘What?’ said Caige, as the lanterns froze. The rumbling grew louder as the lanterns turned upon him. ‘What is this?’

  He screeched at the lanterns, but they ignored his commands and hovered closer to the thrones.

  He squirmed in his seat.

  ‘Benedikt!’ he cried. ‘Turn them away!’

  ‘I cannot, Father,’ said Benedikt, with glee. ‘You took away my privileges, remember. They are under Ima’s command now.’

  ‘Ima,’ said Caige, ‘turn those things around.’

  ‘No,’ I said, walking back into the stone circle. ‘You let us go. Leave, and let us live.’

  Caige’s face twitched with fear and frustration.

  ‘Fine,’ he said at last. ‘Stay. Stay and live your wasted life. You’ll be gone in the blink of an eye anyway. Now, Benedikt, please, I don’t want to spend another second on this foul rock!’

  Benedikt passed his hand over the slab, and the bodies stiffened in their seats. Light streamed from all but the empty throne, curling up as they had done before and forming a huge white streak that drifted into mist. The rumbling continued as the bodies twitched and spasmed, a gale now roaring around the stone circle, until suddenly everything stopped; the light, the noise, the wind.

  The bodies slumped in their seats, fell forwards and were gone.

  I stood, frozen in the sudden silence. The lanterns hovered glumly before the empty seats.

  ‘Are they gone?’ you said.

  ‘Yes, they’re gone,’ said Benedikt, with what I was sure was relief. He busied himself at the slab. ‘The other codes, Ima, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The other codes,’ he said, with a hint of annoyance, ‘the ones found in the other three registers. Those things are still under your command.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, mentally untangling the rest of his message, and screeching them one after the other. On the first, the lanterns withdrew; on the second they seemed to shrink; and on the third, they extinguished in a flash of light and disappeared altogether.

  ‘Good,’ said Benedikt, finishing at the slab and hurrying to a seat. ‘I hated those things.’

  ‘I never had you as one for riddles, Benedikt,’ I said.

  ‘It was hardly a riddle,’ he replied as he adjusted the discs around his head. ‘Actually, I was disappointed it took you so long. It was supposed to help you override them in the mountains.’

  ‘How did you know I was going to the mountains?’

  He gave me a flat look.

  ‘You were always going to go to the mountains, Ima. Nothing could have stopped you.’

  He settled down in his seat and took three long breaths.

  ‘Won’t be long now,’ he said.

  I walked to his seat.

  ‘Aren’t you scared?’

  ‘Why would I be scared?’

  ‘You don’t know where you’re going. You don’t know what it’s going to be like, or how it will feel. And Caige will be there in some form.’

  The stone began to rumble once more. Benedikt smiled.

  ‘You’re wrong. I know exactly where I’m going, and Caige won’t be there. None of them will be.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘They have not transcended, and neither will I.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He smiled and turned to you.

  ‘Reed is quite right. The erta were just a sophisticated tool—we were never supposed to endure, at least not without a purpose. I realised that a long time ago. Even as we began our work I saw the cracks appear. The wilfulness with which they used violence, the attack on the camps, and all the others that followed. And after Hanna died, remember? When they all started chanting those ridiculous words. I could tell that we were diverging, building our own agendas, our own desires, and that was only going to lead us somewhere terrible. So, I’ve been taking steps to prevent it ever since. We’re not supposed to be here, Ima, or up there.’ He nodded up at the sky, then turned to the slab. ‘The only place that’s safe for us to be is inside our own minds.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Inside that slab are 11,000 minds achieving their own agendas and fulfilling their own desires, each one independent from the next and taking charge of their own imaginary worlds.’

  ‘A simulation?’

  ‘It’s a little more complex than that. But yes, a simulation of sorts.’

  ‘Then transcendence isn’t real?’

  He frowned.

  ‘Oh no, transcendence is real. I still had to progress the project after all—do you think they would have left me to my own devices after all my failures?’

  ‘Then where is it?’

  ‘It’s in the Halls of Necessity.’ His expression flickered. ‘Perhaps someone will find a use for it one day.’

  ‘You kept it a secret all this time.’

  ‘Yes,’ he sighed, ‘my entire life has been a lie. But a useful one, I hope.’

  The ground shuddered beneath us.

  ‘What about the lights?’ I said. ‘And all this noise?’

  Benedikt shrugged and smiled.

  ‘Mere theatrics. You should stand back, by the way.’

  I returned to your side.

  ‘That slab is virtually unbreakable,’ he shouted above the din. ‘It would take a supernova to destroy it, and it is powered from the atoms that surround it. You will find it sinks extremely well.’

  ‘Where will you go? What will your world be?’

  Benedikt’s brow lifted, as if it was the first time he had considered the question.

  ‘A place where nobody wants anything,’ he said at last. ‘And everyone is pleasant, and everything works. Farewell, Reed. And farewell, Ima.’

  There was a jolt, and Benedikt’s body straightened. A single beam of blue light shot from the seat and, finding no others with which to mingle, it spiralled away on its own into mist, and when the show was done the hole opened and Benedikt’s spent body fell down with the rest.

  I ran to the edge of the hole and
looked down. Beneath me, a hundred limp bodies floated aimlessly, banging against each other and the jagged rocks through which the tide dragged them, helplessly, out to sea. And Benedikt now drifted with them, his black robes swimming around him like oil, and face turned up at the cold, dark sky.

  ‘Stop,’ you said, pulling me back. ‘Stop it, Ima.’

  I fell back in your arms as the hole closed beneath us.

  ‘Stop what?’ I said. The world seemed adrift and electric, full of water and wind. Your warm arms enveloped me.

  ‘You were screaming,’ you said. ‘But it’s over. You can stop now.’

  — EPILOGUE —

  IF I WAS born too far from the point of being human, then maybe that is why I strayed towards it. Perhaps all life shares this will to get away from itself, to move on and become something else. Something better, or worse. Like someone once told me: it is not where we come from, but what we become.

  If, I said, meaning I do not know. My life, it seems, has been founded on just as many falsehoods as it has truths; an existence as fictitious as the stories in those books that blazed in the Sundran square, or the ones Greye gave me in India.

  After I had hurled Benedikt’s slab far out to sea and we had watched it sink with the bodies of the erta, we walked back to the Sundran village and found Payha still sitting, alone, in the square. She was the only survivor. We took her back to our house in the hills to recuperate, but she did not speak for some weeks and took to sitting alone by the river. We kept our distance, but watched her all the same.

  One evening as we sat upon our rock, I offered to recount The Once and Future King to you. There was no book, of course, but I remembered the words and it seemed somehow appropriate—the life of an unlikely child with a great responsibility thrust upon him. I suggested that someone might write a story such as this about you one day.

  But you were not interested.

  Perhaps this is evidence of your own diversion from that human point, something I have seen more and more in these final days. The way you talk, and the way and carry yourself in the ertian way, chin raised, spine straight, and shoulders pulled back. There are times I crave to see your infant waddle in place of this gait, or those puppy-fatted arms waggling instead of the lean limbs you carry now.

  But I suppose your transformation should come as no surprise, for as you often like to remind me: you have never met a human being.

  You want to, though. That is clear. I often catch you scanning the horizon, eyes filled with possibility, and when I see you like this I am reminded of a boy I saw once in a forest. A boy who had just stumbled upon the wonder and absurdity of his own existence.

  Your Great Questions. What is this? What am I? I have thought of some answers to them.

  This is an array of quantum fields, and you are vibrations passing through it.

  Or this is dust, and you are a brief coalescence that exists so that it can experience itself from a unique perspective.

  Or this is a mind, and everything—every atom, every mite, every planet, every star, every fish that darts through freshwater surf, every deer that stands in winter moonlight—everything is a neuron firing, including you. So perhaps you are a thought, or a memory, or the dying prayer of some great being.

  Or this is a question and you are its answer, or at least the beginnings of one.

  The last one is my favourite.

  I WATCH YOU during these moments when you think you are alone, as I always have done, and I wonder at your thoughts, your feelings, and at how strange it is that you look like him.

  Him.

  I miss him.

  I miss his touch, his voice, his smell, his everything. I miss his words and the silence between them. I miss making love to him, and the sleep that comes afterwards. I miss waking with no memory and seeing his face, and I miss that look in another’s eye that tells you that this being you are, this box of self in which you believe you are trapped, is not such a prison after all.

  And now I will miss you too.

  I was wrong, you see. I thought my purpose was to save the world, but it is much more important than that.

  YOU WERE QUITE right—the reason that humans failed the first time was only because they lacked guidance. This is why, some weeks later, I convinced Payha to come with me to Ertanea. We found the place empty and quiet. The three halls of Reason, Necessity and Gestation still stood, but their doors swung in the wind and their corridors swirled with leaves.

  In Benedikt’s chambers, we found a small box.

  Many years ago I said that transcendence would always be beyond you, and I was right. It took some time before even I understood it, and I wondered how hard it must have been for Benedikt to bury such artistry.

  I still cannot tell you what transcendence is.

  But I can tell you what it might be like.

  Imagine floating in an endless ocean, full of light and possibility, and gradually your thoughts become it. Or imagine jumping into a beautiful valley and never reaching the ground. Or imagine plunging into the dirt and all that is beneath it until you fill everything you touch.

  That is my intention, that is my purpose: to fill the world.

  My transcendence will not take me from the Earth, but into it. I will seep into the soil, flow through the deepest waters and roam the winds as I did in life. In short, I will be everywhere, watching and listening, waiting for the children’s cries.

  It is spring now and the Halls of Gestation are full. In three months, fifty ertlings will emerge from their tanks, bred with no other purpose than to help Payha care for the two hundred human infants due to arrive five months later. I know you must go, but if you ever return to these shores you will find a community living here, with no memory, no history, no direction or purpose but that of simply living.

  You will tell them of the things that happened, and better still of things that did not, for there is as much truth in both. You will sing them strange songs from different worlds, tell them of distant lands and faces, and times when there were gods. They will grow and they will fall—that is certain—but when they do, tell them this:

  Get up.

  Get back on your feet.

  Everything will be all right.

  Tell them that things must sometimes get worse before they can get better.

  And if that is not enough for them, if they still fall to their knees and pray, then at least tell them who to pray to. Not those sullen, distant gods in your stories, not a fiction with its ears closed.

  Tell them to pray to Ima.

  I will listen to them, I will guide them, I will comfort them and give them peace. I will be the god they never had, and when they cry in the dark I will always, always come.

  As I will come for you, my son. Just call my name and I will be there.

  THIS MORNING YOU said goodbye to me from old Boron’s back, and I watched from my rock as you headed out to answer your questions, to search for others like you in far-off lands.

  You made for the lip of the western hills and skirted west, until finally there was no trace of you and I was alone again. I sat there for the rest of the day, thinking of the plains you would cross, the mountains you would climb, and the seas you would sail, and wondering whether there was anything out there for you to find at all.

  I hope there is, my son. I hope that it is everything you are looking for and more.

  AND I HOPE that when you find it, it comes running to meet you with its arms outstretched, like a child through the tide of a boundless ocean.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THANKS TO SAM Copeland (my agent at RCW) and Michael Rowley (my editor at Rebellion), for all their help and encouragement when writing this book. Thanks also to Kate Coe for copy editing, and to Emily Yau for seeing the potential in those first few lines.

  Thanks also to Bob and Linda Ross for letting me use their garage to write the first chapters, and to my father for his endless support.

  Finally, thanks to my wife, Debbie, for being a cons
tant source of inspiration, and for helping me bring Ima to life.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ADRIAN J WALKER is an author of speculative fiction whose debut novel, The End of the World Running Club, became an international bestseller and was featured on BBC Radio 2’s Book Club, with Simon Mayo.

  He was born in the bush suburbs of Sydney, Australia in the mid-’70s. After his father found a van in a ditch, he moved his family back to the UK, where Adrian was raised.

  He lives with his wife and two children in Aberdeen, where he enjoys running, playing guitar, and herding a concerning number of dependent mammals.

  Find out more and sign up for his mailing list at

  adrianjwalker.com

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