by Grant Piercy
But if they are allowed dominion over us, what then? The genocide of humanity. Our end, our apocalypse. They rise from the sea, this beast with seven heads. Each of the heads is one of them, but unified in purpose, and perhaps something more. Imagine a collective of consciousness, a compound mind. How would we even be able to stop them?
I’ll tell you how. We stop them before they even get moving. We can anticipate their moves and snuff them out before they have the opportunity. That means dedicating yourself to the fight, to supporting your humble Agent of Truth in his battle against the Transhumans. We must use every available tool to shut down NMAC and the technologies that allow mind upload to occur.
We need to show up at their buildings, in town squares, at state houses. We need to make our voices heard that we will not accept being replaced—we will not go gently into that good night! And we need them to know the penalties for ignoring the message!
Watch for our message! Heed our call! More to come!
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9: where do we go? (cassia)
“What’s your name?” he asked from the bed opposite mine. He kept worrying at the stump of his left arm, at times picking and peeling at its skin while at others tucking beneath his right.
Exhaustion and gravity pulled me downward, as though holding me in place. The tears made my eyes sting, the feeling in the pit of my stomach an almost existential level of nausea. They were a steady stream soaking the sheet beneath my head.
“ Mine ’s Charlie. Charlie Guthrie,” he said, peeling a small section from the wound. He didn’t reveal any measure of pain from the act—it seemed to be more curiosity than anything.
Occasionally, I twitched, but said nothing.
“At least, that’s what my name was before,” his voice barely above a whisper. “I suppose the real Charlie Guthrie is still out there somewhere. Maybe at home, sleeping in his real bed.”
I stared into the darkness, the pain in my stomach near unbearable.
“But why would we be put here just to suffer like this?”
“That’s life,” I said.
“So you do talk,” he responded, but I didn’t answer back.
I’d been returned to my cell, dragged by orderlies and tossed back into the room, the door locked behind me. There was no fight left in me afterward, after the thing in the darkness, with its voice like scraping metal. Did the pain last for minutes or hours? I couldn’t say. And beneath the physical pain and the endemic hopelessness, the knowledge that I was trapped in this body made it worse. The questions from Mr. Guthrie didn’t help.
“I meant, why would they go through the trouble of changing us just to cause the pain?”
“It needs resources,” I said. “It needed us.”
“ Sure, ” he answered, tossing a small strip of skin that he’d peeled off to the side. “It needs resources, but couldn’t it just get normal android models? Why does it need us to be in them? What’s the point?”
“What’s it matter?”
The void pressed hard against my chest, making it difficult to breathe. Why did I need to breathe? The questions were useless—they didn’t stop the pain or help us escape.
“Maybe something happens to the models when we’re copied into them,” he said.
“ Copied? ”
“Yes, copied. I mean, the body is where the mind lives, where the soul lives. You can’t just take it out—its far too complicated. What makes you you is a combination of biological and chemical makeup that cannot be independent of the human brain. But I bet they could make a nearly flawless copy and paste it into a model. The spark of consciousness exists on a continuum—maybe I experienced it as the real Charlie Guthrie, or maybe I was just created with all the memories of Charlie Guthrie so that I think I experience it. But that means I’m just a copy, right?”
The thought lessened my angst a little. Maybe there was another Cassia out there who was still living life the way she wanted. It was enough to make me lift my head and glance at Guthrie. I could make out his vague features in the gloom—he was blond, with shaggy hair and stubble on his face. He was missing the hand on his left arm, and he just kept picking at the stump where the hand was supposed to be. It occasionally leaked a mixture of milky and dark fluids.
“What happened to your hand?”
“The thing took it.”
“The thing. What do you think it is?”
“He likes to talk.”
“You think it’s a he.”
“And you don’t?” he asked.
I paused for a moment, sitting with my back up against the wall, clutching my still hurting stomach. We faced each other, him still picking at the open wound of his arm.
“He called himself the flaw in the microchip. He was the voice on the other end of those phone calls,” I said mostly to myself. “He was reaching out to me before I got here.”
“What phone calls?”
“I used to get these phantom phone calls on my business line. They were so random. They would come at all hours. Some were just ambient noise—no one would answer if you asked who was there, but it wasn’t, like, just someone breathing on the other end. Sometimes a voice would read passages from a book. Sometimes they were Bible verses.”
“Bible verses,” he repeated. “What business were you in before you got here?”
“I was a private detective.”
“No foolin’?”
“No foolin’.”
“I’ll be goddamned,” he said in an almost endearing drawl. “I didn’t think private detectives still existed.”
“Not a ton of us around. But lawyers still need investigators to gather information. Wives still want to know when their spouses are cheating. Families still want help with solving long dormant cold cases.”
“So why did you end up in this place?”
“I followed a case a little too far. Missing person—a son wanting to know what happened to his father without accepting the official story.”
He grunted. “I guess I can relate. Who was the missing person?”
“An author, went by the name T.H. Stockton. You know him?”
“Can’t say that I do.”
“He’d disappeared after supposedly murdering his wife.”
“The boy’s mother?”
“No, no. Step-mother, I guess. But he just didn’t believe it, didn’t believe it was something his father was capable of. But honestly, you never know what you’re capable of.”
“That mean you think he did it?”
“I don’t know. Don’t even know if it matters. But just going into his house was enough to get me sent here. What about you?”
“Long story, I guess,” he said. “I’m from a small town in Tennessee called Willow Hills. The local nickname for it was Widow Hills because all the men from the area died in the Civil War. Right there’ s an NMAC supply chain facility —you know, like, it’s the spot where the coolant,” he raised his left stump, leaking fluids, “is manufactured, so then it gets shipped to other locations in those big fluid container semis. That’s where I work.”
“Sounds riveting,” I said.
“There were monuments in town to the Confederate men who had died in the war for southern independence. A big bronze statue that showed a major leading a charge on a big horse, his sword pointed northward, a bunch of other soldiers to his sides following his command. A plaque on the plinth of the statue has the Confederate flag, the stars and bars, and the names of the husbands who had died in the war. The widows of Widow Hills erected it for their lost. It’s a behemoth at a park in the center of town, this little historic district. It’s a statue of failure and genocide, an eyesore commemorating these men who gave their lives so they could own other human beings. I didn’t even get to tear the fucker down or protest or nothing. I started a petition that would be turned into the town council so they could vote on removing it.”
“You started a petition. That’s why you’re here.”
“That I’m one of them? This isn’t my body. This isn’t what I look like. I’m supposed to be a woman.”
“No shit?” he responded.
“No shit. And I worked hard for that body. I put a lot into it. And it was just... gone. I don’t think I knew that I was synthetic, but I knew something was wrong.”
“So what’s your name?”
“ Cassia Luna. ”
“ Cassia Luna, it ’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said, bowing his head.
“And you, Charlie. I appreciate it. I really needed the pick-me-up.”
I shifted in my seat, adjusting myself to sit straighter. He continued picking at the skin of his stump. “It’s not actually skin,” he said. “It’s like a plastic/latex thing. It just feels like skin. Better than the real thing.”
I nodded, glancing up at the camera that watched us from the corner of the ceiling, its red light a constant irritant in the darkness.
“ So Cassia Luna, ” he said. “How the fuck are we going to get out of here?”
“You really think we can? We’re locked in here. And we’d need to get past those orderlies. The thing seems to control them.”
“The next time they come for one of us, we could bumrush them.”
“You really expect that to work? There must be another way.” I said. It was such a man thing to think we could just overcome them with force and speed.
“Think of this. We aren’t human anymore. We can move faster. We don’t really have to worry about our body parts. There must be a way to replace them if we really want to.”
“I’m not going to suicide run at mindless brutes bigger and faster than me, who fucking outnumber me. We don’t know how many of them are out there.”
Charlie sighed. “All right, fine. Maybe we don’t bumrush them, but what other options do we have?”
“Maybe we could use some spycraft. I have a few ideas, I think.”
“But once we escape, where do we go? What do we do? We’re fucking robots now. It’s not like we can just resume our lives.”
“Why not?”
Charlie didn’t say anything.
“You said you think you were copied, but you don’t know. What if we find ourselves? What if we find our real bodies?”
10: earthly delights (regina)
Beverly gave me the address.
I approached the nondescript house at the appointed time, the equipment in the backpack on my shoulder. It was a random suburban neighborhood, right where you would never expect something like this to be happening.
492 Maple Canyon.
In the dark, you could barely tell the paneling of the house was hunter green. There was a front door, but you weren’t supposed to approach that. Random cars peppered the street, but no more than you’d expect in such a neighborhood. Maybe more people got Rydes so they wouldn’t have to drive. A two-car attached garage opened on a long driveway with a basketball hoop towering over it. Just another mom must’ve lived there with her kids. Where were they? Where was the dad?
When I thought about what was in the backpack, I wondered how much it really mattered.
I walked up the driveway toward the fully lit garage. There were voices coming from the backyard, through a door in the rear—laughter and drinks. I knocked on the door just inside the garage to the right.
A middle-aged white woman opened the door, a drink in her hand. She had short brunette hair and a bland turquoise button-down shirt, her eyes brown behind rectangular, dark-rimmed glasses. “Yes?”
I stared for just a moment, thinking that I should probably just leave. This wasn’t right, this was not the thing I should be doing. A stronger urge somewhere inside forced the words from my mouth: “Earthly delights.”
She eyed me up and down, unsure what to make of me. “Come on in, sweetheart.”
Beverly told me the password, told me everything I needed to know about what was happening in this house. Beverly had the suggestion: “If you want to know, go to this place at this time.” A hub was what she called it.
The door opened directly to another door, but the middle-aged woman veered off to the right, into a combination kitchen and dining room. There were a pile of shoes next to the door and a tabby cat staring up at me, tail pouncing back and forth. “I’m Cindy,” the woman said, opening the refrigerator and pulling out what looked to be a margarita mixer. A few random bottles of alcohol lined the kitchen counter.
“I’ m Regina, ” I croaked, my voice hoarse from anxiety. “Is this your house?”
She spun around to face me, her eyes glazed, and downed the last of whatever was in her glass. “ Nope. ”
“Beverly told me to come here,” I said.
“Who’s Beverly?” she asked.
I didn’t even know how to answer. I’d told Beverly about my suspicions and really thought about how to proceed, or even if my suspicions mattered in any real way. I mean, Opal wasn’t a person, not really. But the pit of my stomach said something different. Nausea washed over me as I described it to her. She told me about 492 Maple Canyon. “Tell Devon to watch the kids for a night,” she said. “Or have them spend the night at a friend’s house. You can argue that you need a night out—I’m sure he won’t put up much of a fight.” He didn’t.
“So whose house is this?”
“Does it matter?” Cindy said. “The party’s downstairs. Through that door.” She pointed to the door across from where I had entered. I could hear hushed voices, the occasional cry. I pulled the bag from my shoulder and let it fall to the floor. The tabby cat was surprised enough to stand up on all fours and yowl softly.
My implant glitched static. I rubbed behind my ear, feeling the stiff bump beneath the skin. I cancelled my appointment with my ENT, and four follow-ups. I didn’t know if I would actually replace it. Voices and melodies danced in and out of the interference—I was used to it now. Sometimes the way the voices rambled and meandered even helped me get to sleep.
And sometimes it spoke to me.
The numbers were the first time I knew. They were an address, and I got to know the address. When I logged into the Knowledgebase to search for the IP address, I got to know those numbers intimately. And I’d know them even more intimately before this night was through.
What would the consequences be for ignoring the voice?
I decided not to find out. I purchased what was in the backpack in the back room of an adult store. They called it an apparatus ; it involved a VR headset, bodysuit, and a sex toy attachment.
I picked up the bag from the floor and walked toward the door.
On the other side, murmuring. Moans.
The tabby cat watched me with interest, it’s tail continuing back and forth.
The door opened to a carpeted staircase. I descended slowly. The moaning and murmuring and whispering mingled together, creating a symphony of incoherent indulgence. It was a completely finished basement, but furniture had clearly been moved to make room for the bodies circled on the floor. A couch was pushed up against the wall with a half-clothed woman laying on it, a headset secure over her eyes. The others wore similar devices on their heads while in various states of undress. They writhed on the floor, breathing heavily and choking their voices back.
Beverly had to
ld me what this place was. She’d come here more than once.
She said if I wanted to know, use the address and use the apparatus.
There was a small area off to the left from the stairs. I walked over and dropped the bookbag on the floor. I began to get undressed quickly. I put on the body suit and gingerly attached the toy that came with it.
In the main section of the basement, the chorus of whimpers and breaths continued. I found a space between two of them and sat down. The apparatus was jailbroken—I had instructions to use a command line prompt to dial the address once connected to the network. It occurred to me that this hub must be using a ton of bandwidth, streaming live video to all these headsets, but maybe the owner had a way to mask it. Didn’t matter.
The earbuds built into the headset blocked out the incoherent mess of moaning and whimpering.
I was able to open up the remoting protocol and enter the IP address from the transmission. 94.77.63.34.
My eyes opened on my husband.
Devon.
His back was turned from me. He appeared to be kneeling in front of something, but I wasn’t sure what.
I turned her head, glancing about the room. Opal sat in the same spot we’d left her, in our own rec room, out of the children’s sight, so they wouldn’t see the lifeless husk that had been their nanny.
My hand and hers moved in sync. The sensation sent little goose bumps up and down my arm as we each waved lightly in the air.
Devon ’s head turned slightly, and he noticed I was moving.
“Opal?” he asked.
I stared at him as though he should recognize that it wasn’t her, it was me. But that wasn’t a reasonable reaction. My head must have tilted slightly. He smiled.
“Opal, do you recognize me? I was just trying to patch your firmware, get you straightened out. You were statued.”
