Aldous had no words to comfort a man who he knew had to be crippled with worry. He stayed silent.
“Why no kids?” Rich suddenly asked. “I mean, no offence, but you’re old as all hell, aren’t you? Like 150 or something? And you never had children?”
“164 actually,” Aldous answered. “And I didn’t…” Aldous paused as he struggled to find sufficient words. “I’ve seen very different eras. Eras when children just didn’t seem to make sense. And by the time I found the person I knew I’d love forever, children made even less sense.”
“Why not?”
Aldous licked his lips as he carefully considered his words. “By then, I felt everyone in the world was my responsibility. I didn’t want to have anyone else in my life that I favored over my people. Does that make sense?”
Rich nodded. “Yeah. It’s weird. It’s sad. It isn’t really true. But it makes sense. What about your wife? Was she okay with this?”
Aldous thought of Samantha; then, almost as quickly, he thought of Craig Emilson, the ghost who had haunted their relationship for three-quarters of a century. “Children didn’t seem natural to either of us. It was a mutual decision.”
The ceiling above them suddenly went from a perfect blackness to emanating an orange glow. It was a glow that grew in intensity, veins of liquid magma becoming more and more prevalent the higher they climbed. They each remained silent as it became clear that they were only seconds from breaching the surface, seconds from seeing the remnants of the Earth.
When they emerged, they emerged spectacularly, the green cocoon of their magnetic field engulfed entirely in glowing, orange magma that quickly cooled and broke away in smoldering, coal-black chunks of what used to be Earth, the smoke trails of the chunks spiraling down to the orange surface. When enough of the magma had cooled and broken away, they saw the full extent of the damage to their home—and it was total.
They slowed as they climbed above the new, magma ocean, and marveled as they saw what was left of the android ship, a structure that was two-thirds destroyed, the tail end of it sinking slowly into the liquid surface of the planet, melting as it became one with the body it had destroyed, trillions and trillions of fragments of debris forming a plume all around it, most of it still glowing red hot even as it orbited high above the Earth itself.
“Look out,” Rich said as they narrowly avoided the body of an android woman, unconscious as it dropped to the surface of the Earth so far below. It was a body that Aldous surmised must have been blown into what used to be the stratosphere in the wake of the impact of the android vessel, and was now being pulled back down by the Earth’s gravity to the lava’s surface below.
Rich flipped on the rearview so that they could regard the totality of their surroundings. The whole Earth was glowing orange with debris—red hot dust had been catapulted into orbit, some of it at rates so fast that they’d escaped Earth’s orbit and were hurtling away from the Earth into deep space. Chunks of Earth the size of mountain ranges had also been expelled and were spinning, wildly out of control as they burned like hot coals, orbiting the planet they’d been a part of for billions of years.
“The Earth,” Rich began, “the greatest miracle the universe has ever seen—is gone.” He turned to Aldous. “It looks like you and your wife were right not to have children. At least you didn’t have to live through witnessing their death.”
Aldous shook his head, his face pale as he took in the enormity of the destruction. “No Richard,” he corrected, “I saw my children vanish too.” He steeled himself again, clearing his throat before speaking in as strong a tone as he could muster. “Your children aren’t dead. You can’t give up hope.”
4
“Hi, I’m Jules.” The android smiled as she stood at her front door and held out her hand in greeting for Old-timer.
Old-timer smiled in return and shook her hand—a hand that he noted was tiny in his—Jules didn’t appear to be even five feet tall, and her slender frame suggested that she might not have weighed as much as 100 pounds—in her previous organic incarnation.
No mercy, he thought to himself.
Jules brushed past the two men as she closed the door to her apartment behind them, and Old-timer awkwardly moved to force a turn from Anisim so that she couldn’t see the impaling of the now thread-thin appendage at the back of the android’s skull. The awkward move in the narrow hallway caused Jules to furrow her brow slightly, though her smile didn’t fade.
Old-timer hoped she’d dismiss their awkwardness as understandable given what she thought was the circumstances.
“Boy, you guys are not slick at all when it comes to dealing with women.”
“No, ma’am,” Old-timer replied, relieved as his assessment was validated. Jules passed by again and gestured for the men to take a seat on her couch. Behind them was a glorious view of the ultramodern city and the sparkling lake that gently lapped at its shore.
“Ah, a Southern gent,” she observed. “I’ll get you fellas a drink,” she continued as she turned away. “I knew Anisim was awkward,” Jules said as she made her way into the kitchen, “but you seemed like you had game,” she said, staring right at Old-timer flirtatiously. “What’s your name, cowboy?”
“Craig,” Old-timer replied.
“Whereabouts are you from?”
“Texas,” he replied.
“Really? I shoulda guessed.” She returned to the room with two glasses of a clear liquid.
Old-timer didn’t ask what it was, but took it from her just the same. “Yes, ma’am.”
Jules caught Anisim’s eyes for a moment and noticed that he seemed distraught, but he turned away from her gaze quickly and sipped his drink and she seemed to dismiss yet another red flag, turning back to Old-timer. “So, you’re what, six-three, six-four?”
“Six-five, ma’am.”
“Six-five, a gentleman, and handsome? So how the heck are you single?”
“I’m not, ma’am,” Old-timer replied. “In fact, that’s why I’m here.”
Jules seemed rocked by this, taking a step back just to keep her balance as her expression suddenly became befuddled. “Uh, what? I’m not, uh...that kind of…” she looked down at Anisim questioningly.
“I’m so, so sorry, Jules,” Anisim whispered.
“What is going—”
A second later, Jules called out in a faint cry, followed by a gargling sound that quickly faded, Old-timer having infiltrated her nervous system with a dozen, thread-like tendrils, impaling her thighs, forearms, spine, and the back of her skull. Just as he’d done with Anisim earlier, he took complete control of her nervous system.
Anisim bowed his head, enduring the pain from his impaled skull, he felt he deserved the punishment.
“Jules, unlike you, I’m human. My wife was assimilated, as were four other companions of mine. Anisim, here, tells me you have the clearance to take me to the replicator and to activate their android bodies. Is that true?”
Jules didn’t speak with her lips, her nervous system having been entirely compromised. “Yes,” she replied through her mental connection to Old-timer.
Old-timer took a deep breath. He could feel her terror, and it took him a moment to recalibrate so that he could find the strength to shut himself off from his overwhelming sense of pity.
“Please don’t hurt her,” Anisim said quietly. “She’s just a tech. She’s never taken part in a rescue, never hurt anyone you know. She doesn’t deserve—”
Before he could say another word, Old-timer’s tendril broke through Anisim’s face, silencing him. It pulled out, encircled Anisim’s neck, and severed his head from his body.
Old-timer could feel Jules’s disgust and fright as she watched Anisim’s mutilated head roll to a stop near the wall in the perfectly simulated sunlight of the android city.
“Why? Why did you do that?” she demanded of him in horror through their connection.
“We can’t bring him with us,” Old-timer replied, “and I couldn’t ha
ve him warning the collective about my presence.”
“You-you’re a monster,” Jules replied, tears forming in the corners of her eyes, “you’re a monster.”
5
“So what the hell do we do now?” Thel asked with frustration as they emerged from the stairway from the rooftop and into the warm, but dark interior of the Cloud 9 revolving restaurant. The restaurant was no longer revolving, and they had to keep the lights off to avoid detection, but it was warm and dry and provided an excellent place for the quintet to lie low. “If Aldous is to blame—”
“Something we’ve no proof of,” the A.I. pointed out, making an addendum to Thel’s statement before she’d even finished making it while he guided the Kali avatar, still pacing slowly and mindlessly like a sleepwalker to a table, where he helped her take a seat—an eerie sight, something like a mannequin sitting down for dinner.
Thel soldiered on, “then we’re going to be trapped in here indefinitely.”
“Not if we can help it,” the A.I. replied. “There are alternatives.”
“Like what?”
“If we’re in a hard drive,” James offered, “then really what we’re in is a mini-mainframe. Aldous said he’d constructed it so he could download the sim into it and remove us from the A.I.’s mainframe, so we’re likely on his person as we speak.”
“And that means that we do, indeed, have a means,” the A.I. added.
“Means of what?” Thel responded with a shrug. “We’re ghosts trapped in a little box.”
“Aldous communicated with us,” James observed, “which means that the sim is capable of receiving signals. And a sim this big is going to be a huge power hog, so to keep it running, he’d have to have equipped it with an MTF generator.”
“He was also able to provide us with armor and weaponry,” the A.I. added, holding up his de-patternizer. “These are quite complex patterns that he was able to upload for us.”
“So?” Thel asked. “The weapons and armor were meant to help us survive the purge—to buy time. How do they help us get out?”
“They don’t directly,” James replied, “but the fact he was able to send them to us means the hard drive is capable of sending and receiving powerful data transmissions. Aldous said he couldn’t enter the sim because our core matrix programs had been trapped by a trapdoor code that would allow for our patterns to enter the sim, but wouldn’t let them leave. That’s entirely possible, and why we can’t be sure he’s the one who trapped us here.”
“But,” the A.I. continued, as though he and James were of one mind, “if he is the one who trapped us here, then our task will be to break the trapdoor code from within the sim. If we do, we’ll be able to send a signal for help.”
“But Aldous said he couldn’t do it,” Thel countered, “and he had the power of the mainframe to help him.”
“That’s true,” the A.I. replied, “but what if he was lying?”
“What if he was telling the truth?” Thel returned. “You said so yourself, he’s a suspect, but we’ve no proof. If he was telling the truth, then we don’t have a chance in Hell of breaking a code that he couldn’t break with the help of the mainframe at his disposal.”
“That would be true,” the A.I. replied, “but there was something Aldous may not have been aware of.” He turned to the Kali avatar, sitting aimlessly, staring straight forward into the dim light of the restaurant.
“Kali?” Thel responded, not seeing the A.I.’s point. “Aldous knew about…wait a second, are you saying he knew about the Kali avatar, but he might not have known about the entity that spoke to us?”
“The entity helped us,” the A.I. confirmed for Thel, “and it may have shown us the way out.”
“She healed both the A.I. and me,” James injected. “That means she had the ability to manipulate the code within the sim.”
“And she or it also exited the sim, which means the entity was able to circumvent the trapdoor,” the A.I. added.
Thel closed her eyes. “That’s why you brought her with us,” she realized. “And why you didn’t say anything about it while Aldous was monitoring us.”
“Precisely,” the A.I. confirmed. “What the entity may have provided us with is an avatar that was both capable of manipulating code in the sim, and capable of cracking the trapdoor.”
“Nice work,” James said to the A.I. with a grin. “If we can gain access to the coding of the avatar, and if your theory is correct, then we can circumvent the trapdoor and send a message.”
“To whom?” Thel asked.
“Old-timer,” James replied. “If Aldous really is trying to keep us trapped, then Old-timer may be our only way out. He’s the only one who can access the hard drive.”
“Speaking of access,” Thel returned, “how the hell do you access the code of an NPC?”
The A.I. held up his de-patternizing gun. “This should suffice,” he replied.
Thel’s eyes narrowed. “What now?”
The A.I. grabbed the Kali NPC’s wrist and put her hand, palm-first, on the table. Then he aimed the weapon and fired.
Kali’s hand, like everything shot by the de-patternizer, dematerialized, briefly revealing the golden coding that evaporated into nothingness like wisps of smoke. The NPC hardly reacted as the A.I. released its wrist.
James’s eyes widened. “I see it,” he said, peering into the stump. He grabbed the wrist and examined it before gouging into it with his fingers, an action that caused Thel to nearly gag.
“No!” she reacted, repulsed.
“There’s no blood.” James smiled reassuringly, like a kid enthusiastically dissecting a frog in biology class as he pulled out more of the golden dust, sinewy, spider-like threads holding the codes together. “This is it—this is the code. We can work with this.”
“Indeed we can,” the A.I. agreed as they began to unfurl the code excitedly upon the table.
Thel’s face continued to contort due to the unpleasant autopsy of the avatar’s innards being removed until she caught a glimpse of something odd in the corner of her eye, and turned her head.
The candidate was standing alone, about a half-dozen meters away, his face almost pressed to the glass of the revolving restaurant as he looked down at the rain-drenched city below.
“Okay, you boys work on, uh…that. In the meantime, I’ll take the candidate down to the lobby to help me reinforce the building. We don’t want any wayward NPCs stumbling upon us.”
“Okay,” James replied, his eyes fascinated as they pored over the lines of code that endlessly emptied from the Kali avatar with no discernible change to her exterior. “But be careful.”
“I promise,” Thel replied as she crossed to the candidate and stood behind him, watching him for a moment. “Hey.”
He turned to her. “Yes?”
“Little help?” she said as she motioned for him to follow her out of the revolving restaurant.
“Of course,” he replied as he followed close behind her.
They entered the elevator, and Thel hit the button for the second floor. “Riding down the center of a building in a box with pulleys attached to it,” she said with a sigh. “Ridiculous. I never want to be trapped by gravity again. I can’t wait to get out of this sim.”
“I think we should count ourselves lucky that the sim is set in this era. If the NPCs could fly, we’d surely be dead by now,” the candidate retorted.
“Mr. Silver-Lining,” Thel quipped. “Maybe that should be your nickname.”
They arrived on their floor, and Thel marched out into the hallway and, almost immediately, she de-patternized the door of a supply closet.
“What are we doing?” the candidate asked.
“Looking for anything we can use to block the lobby and make sure the NPCs can’t get in.”
The candidate bent over when he saw a small box on a shelf, filled with wooden doorstoppers. He picked it up. “This is really all we need,” he announced, displaying the simple object for Thel.
“What are those?”
The candidate tilted his head when he realized how much the post-human was a fish out of water in his era. “They’re doorstops. You just jam these under a door, and the NPCs won’t be able to get through, unless they ripped the door right off its hinges that is.”
She held the doorstop in her hand. “That simple, huh?”
“Yep,” the candidate replied. He turned to the map of the building that was framed next to the door. “There are two stairwells that lead up to the top floor on opposing corners of the building. All we have to do is block the doors and shut off the elevator after we head back up, and that should do the trick.”
“We’ll be safe, you think?”
“Relatively,” the candidate confirmed. “Shall we?”
“Lead the way,” Thel gestured with her hand.
“Thank you,” the candidate replied as they made their way to the first stairwell before walking down to the lobby. There, the candidate carefully opened the door to see if the lobby had been infiltrated. It hadn’t, but the scene just outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of the lobby was ghastly to the extreme.
The candidate watched the NPCs tearing each other apart in the street. Women and children were being pulled into alleys, and surrounded by gangs of other NPCs, and then summarily murdered before the gang members turned on each other. All of the carnage was in plain view.
“The post-humans,” he began, “they’re not like this? They don’t murder one another?”
Thel shook her head. “You’re seeing the purge—it was written into the scenario to test you. Those things out there…they aren’t human. They’re mindless. Real people don’t behave that way.”
The candidate shifted slightly, speaking over his shoulder to Thel as she continued to stand behind him. “But you said the real world was at risk, that attackers had murdered the people of the real Earth. It sounds very much like a purge.”
Thel sucked her lips for a moment as she considered the candidate’s point. “It does,” she conceded. “The androids behave very much like NPCs, but they aren’t human. They claim to be, but they’re...inhuman—totally brainwashed—trust me.”
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