by J. D. Cavan
General Zim stepped into the circle and the Replica holding the injection device came with him, followed by a Replica holding huge metal cuffs. Myers stood behind them.
Her rage was not at Zim, but at Ben. “You’re a liar!” she spat her words out.
“I want you to come with us, Samantha, please.” Myers put his empty hands out toward her.
She locked her fists and felt like a vicious, cornered animal. There was a hurricane inside her. She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. Myers nodded his head, encouraging her to give up.
She took a step forward with her arms out to be cuffed, but then with lightning speed, she whipped around a Replica, and using his body as a shield, drew his weapon and blew away a bunch of Replica next to him. They returned the blasts, killing her Replica shield while she continued to fire, stepping backward.
She felt something enter her thigh, but it wasn’t bullet. She cried in pain and glanced down to see that the injection device was more like a spear gun. The tip of the giant needle was lodged in her leg. She dropped to the ground, the sedation paralyzing her immediately.
She felt the earth on her face. She could see Luca’s body lying next to her. She attempted to reach out to him, but her arm wouldn’t move. She tried to cry out, but nothing came from her. She fought the sedation but her vision went hazy and she knew she’d be out in seconds. She gazed up and the last thing she saw was Ben standing over her.
16
SAMANTHA FELT HERSELF WAKING up slowly and found that she was sitting upright in a metal folding chair. Her eyes cleared and she focused them.
She was incredibly groggy, but she could at least make out her surroundings. She was in a room filled with Replica. She counted quickly—there were twenty of them, locked and loaded, circled up around her. General Zim stood in the center. Some of the Replica parted and three older people dressed in dark suits stood with him. One of the Replica with his back to her appeared to be projecting the images of the three people from his eye-shield. She shook her head back and forth. It was like a bizarre dream.
But it wasn’t a dream, and reality hit her hard. Luca, she said to herself as the terrible realization of his death came back to her. She burned with rage and glared at Zim. Kill him now, she told herself before getting calm. She needed to assess the situation, let the intellect take over. She forced away the sickening loss she felt for Luca.
“Welcome Samantha,” one of them said. “My name is Bernard.”
“Where am I?” she mustered up the question.
“Aion. You’ve been captured,” he said. “We had to vary the sedations. You adapt very quickly, quite impressive.”
“You mean like a cockroach,” General Zim interjected.
“General Zim, we are conducting this interview,” an older woman said.
Samantha glared at Zim, and a dose of anger shot through her. She pulled it together again. “Where is Pete?”
“Your friend is of no use to us any longer,” Bernard replied. They clearly weren’t going to tell her where Pete was, if he was even alive.
“Why don’t you just finish me off too?” she said, testing them. “You hate our kind.”
“It’s not a matter of hate,” Bernard replied. “We don’t have emotions like that. We have goals, and our purpose is to accomplish them at any cost.”
“You mean your algorithmic program,” Samantha retorted, knowing that was all it was. “Purpose makes what you do sound honorable.” She was awake now and her mind was quick.
“Trying to help humanity is honorable,” the woman said.
Samantha felt her impatience and pressed them. “What do you want from me?”
“We don’t know much about what you are,” one of the other images spoke, “only as perverse anomalies. But we would guess that if you were truly evolutionary advancements, you would approach average people much like early Homo sapiens approached Neanderthal or Homo erectus—as inferior beings competing for resources. Excuse me for not introducing myself. My name is Dr. Carlyle.”
“We don’t see it that way,” Samantha replied. “They are our very recent, and still living, ancestors. We are close to humans.”
“So are we,” the woman said, and finally introduced herself as Silva.
Samantha pursed her lips. “Not exactly, I don’t want to get all Darwinian technical on you, so I’ll just stoop to the older form of assessment and say that I’m just not getting the feeling that Replica is all that close to human.”
“We use the term Great Beings now, not Replica,” said Dr. Carlyle. “We’ve just changed our terminology.”
“Great Beings?” Samantha said with a smirk. “Sounds a little defensive to me, like you’re trying hard to justify your existence.” She stood up and put her shoulders back. Replica responded by aiming weapons. She sniffed out something—it wasn’t fear, Replica didn’t have fear. It was more like an attempt toward manipulation in the face of some vulnerability in the system.
“We are not interested in debating evolutionary theory with you, young lady. We are here to make you an offer,” Bernard said.
“Offer?”
“Yes, Samantha. We are willing to Calculate you. That is our offer.”
“Sounds very appealing,” she said sarcastically.
“We need to asses you and we need your full cooperation,” Bernard continued.
“I’m not getting it, and I’m pretty smart.” She put her hands on her hips.
“Your kind is impervious to our influences, so you’d have to submit, and your type doesn’t do that very well, so all of this may be for naught.” Bernard’s virtual image walked across the room.
“It might help solve the problem,” Silva followed.
“What problem?” she asked, not letting on that she knew what it was already.
“To total human extinction,” Dr. Carlyle replied coldly.
A potent dose of misery ran through her. Even though she had seen firsthand the future, the truth from them made it real. “You have this so-called perfect system of mind control, which supposedly saved humanity, but now you need my help with your problem in preventing human extinction?”
“The problem isn’t ours at all,” Bernard said. “The humans have been degrading rapidly. The damage they’ve inflicted on their ecosystems, including their own physical and psychological health, has been lethal. So it is the Human Problem for which we already have a solution.”
“Dr. Myers, would you explain, please?” Dr. Carlyle asked.
Myers nodded and glanced over at her. She looked away from him. “Currently, Aion has determined that the solution to the Human Problem is no longer biotechnical nanocontrols, but extinction phases. And once that’s been Calculated, the program shifts to human extinction as the primary goal.”
“If you’re supposed to save people, if that’s your program—I’m sorry, purpose—why would the answer be to kill them?” Samantha was honestly perplexed.
“Our purpose is not the survival of humans. It never was, not even when Aion started all of this to begin with. It was to ensure the health and happiness of the species. To be specific, Aion’s exact program instruction was to ensure life, health, and the pursuit of happiness.” Bernard virtual image walked closer to her.
She noted the obvious change, the omission of liberty and the addition of health. There could be no liberty with Aion—it was all control no freedom.
“How is exterminating everyone ensuring health and happiness? Dead doesn’t sound healthy to me, it sounds dead,” Samantha announced. “And it doesn’t take a genius to see that it totally violates the life part of the program.”
Bernard tried to answer her but Carlyle interrupted him. “Have you ever owned a pet, Samantha? Perhaps before you were an Ereb?”
Samantha sighed impatiently. “Yeah, a cat, once. I found it in the park.”
“It died, didn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“It was hit by a car in front of me,” sh
e recalled the rotten memory.
“Did it die there?”
“No, I had to take to a vet and they put it to sleep,” she replied.
“It was suffering, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was,” she said, anger mounting in her voice.
“And there was nothing they could do to save it?” Dr. Carlyle continued his line of questioning.
“Correct, and please get to your point,” she snapped.
There was a silent pause for a moment before Bernard spoke up. “I think the point has been made, Samantha.”
Stupid, she thought to herself. “So to end human suffering, you’re going to murder them?”
“We prefer the term euthanize,” Bernard replied.
“So could this—” she stopped for a moment, searching for the word they used. “This Calculation help?”
Myers jumped back into the conversation. “It’s possible that your rapid evolution is in direct relationship to what’s happening. That Ereb adaptations are in response to the destruction your living human ancestors have caused. It is possible that you are, in a sense, nature’s solution.”
After Myers spoke, it was silent.
“I don’t want to disrespect anyone, but if that’s the case, then why wipe us out? Let the Ereb proliferate—unless, of course, you’re saying that Aion made a mistake.”
“Aion doesn’t make mistakes,” Silva replied. “Only Calculations.”
“This is Dr. Myers’s theory,” Bernard said. “It is an alternative to your termination, as well as to that of all the humans. It is a very loose theory, however—it hasn’t been tested or measured or assessed. That is why we are making this one and only offer. Dr. Myers, would you mind explaining further?”
Myers nodded. “Aion has analyzed every possible factor in the environment to come up with a solution to the Human Problem, as we’ve discussed. Based on an exhaustive search across every inch and bit of the planet, human extinction phases are the only Calculated opinion. However, there is one variable in the environment that has not been included in the Calculation by Aion.”
“And that variable is me,” Samantha said.
Myers smiled. “Yes, a high-status Ereb could yield some useful information, and there’s only one left on the planet.”
Silva added, “You could save the human race, young lady.”
Samantha paused for a moment and processed it all. “You’ll have excuse me for a second. This is all really hard to choke down, especially since I’ve spent just about every waking moment since I became my true self fighting you. Do you know how many of us I’ve watched you slaughter? He just murdered four of my kind!” She pointed at Zim in anger, and tears formed in her eyes. A memory of Luca came back to her, his fallen body. It had been five murders, but she kept blocking out and forgetting Luca’s death.
Samantha shook her head dismissively. “Now you hand me some theory about how we’re all trapped with Aion’s sick program of human destruction that we can’t change, but maybe I offer something because I’m an unknown variable in the current equation of calculated craziness. How am I supposed to take that?” It was silent for a moment again.
“We could end the Ereb species right here, in this moment. Try and remember that, Samantha.” Dr. Carlyle motioned to the heavily armed Replica that circled the room. General Zim nodded his head as if he was eager to do just that.
“And maybe I’ll melt their guns and break their necks,” she replied.
“Yes, and maybe if you’re lucky, you can escape this compound, reach your Ereb friends, and then get to watch the extinction of the human race first hand. All that love you have in your evolved heart, it would destroy you,” Dr. Carlyle stated coldly.
They actually didn’t know her very well, because she also had a ton of strength and a reservoir of aggression underneath, but she wasn’t going to show them. She hated to admit it, but Carlyle was exactly right—witnessing the destruction of everyone would be unimaginably excruciating for her. All of this suddenly seemed all too real.
“Perhaps all of us could understand that this is quite a bit to digest at once for her.” Silva smiled warmly toward Samantha but she felt nothing in response. “We’ll give you a little time to make your decision. Not that there’s much of a decision to make darling, if you think about it,” Silva said.
Samantha crossed her arms and threw her shoulders back even further. Some of the Replica flinched and shifted their guns as if they expected her to make a violent move.
“How much time?” she asked.
“You have until tomorrow morning. I know that doesn’t seem like much for you, but for us it’s an eternity,” Silva told her.
The virtual Bernard looked at her levelly. “You either decide to go into a Calculation, cooperating fully, or you and the human race perish.”
17
SAMANTHA SAT ON A cot in a steel-walled room. There was a small barred window looking out over a flat landscape. She could see multiple high fences with barbed wire, and a giant wall that surrounded the outer perimeter of the compound. Off in the distance, she could see familiar trees. She was still down south somewhere.
This would have been Luca’s worst nightmare. Her captured by Aion and held at one of their military compounds. It suddenly hit her like a tsunami, and she put her face in her hands and wept. The grief was tremendous. Luca, she moaned.
She cut the pain off when there was murmuring outside her cell. The door opened and Ben Myers walked inside. He shut and locked the door behind him.
“How are you feeling,” he asked. He looked down at the floor, refusing eye contact.
“They really underestimate me, letting you in here alone,” she glared at him.
“Go ahead and hurt me if it makes you feel better. I didn’t want it to go down that way, I tried to tell you.” He paused for a moment and then dropped his defensiveness. “I’m sorry you lost Luca—”
“Shut up! Don’t ever say his name.” She fought back angry tears. “You have no idea what he meant to me, who he was to me!” They came anyway, the tears running down her cheeks. The grief was unbearable.
“You’re right, I don’t, but this isn’t about you or me. This is about everyone.”
She wasn’t ready for his supposed altruism. She was full of rage. “Go!” she snapped.
“I had no idea about Pete, that was all Zim. I would have never let that happen.”
“And I’m supposed to trust you? He killed them in cold blood. They were kids!” she shouted, the image of the four newly Actualized Ereb lying dead on the ground in her mind.
“I would have stopped him if I could have,” he said. “You have to believe me.”
“I don’t have to believe anything.” There was a pause. “Is Pete alive?” she asked him.
“I don’t know.” Myers put his head down. It was silent. “When you’re ready, we need to talk—”
“Get out!” she screamed at him. She could hear Replica opening the door. They were probably wondering what the commotion was all about. Myers stood there for a few moments before walking out.
She stood up and went over to her little caged window and gazed out. The sun was falling and she thought about escape again. She could rip the door off its hinges and kill a bunch of Replica guards and probably make it outside. There were Replica stationed all over the outer compound, in high towers and walking the grounds with assault vehicles everywhere.
It’d be some battle, she thought. Where was James McDaniel when you needed him? She smiled to herself, thinking about him, Dani, and Janey. She missed them big time, and Pete too, of course, wherever he was.
Luca, she said to herself again. A lump formed in her throat and she put a hand on her forehead and rubbed it. Then she heard a knocking on her door.
She didn’t say anything but then heard a Replica’s voice. It was monotone, lifeless. “You have a message from the Order, Ms. Silva Myers. Would you like to take it? It is recommended.”
She waited for moment. “Okay,�
�� she replied and the door opened.
A Replica walked in with a projected virtual image of Silva Myers coming from his eye-shield. The door shut and locked behind them.
“Hello Samantha, I wanted to check in on you. This is all so much, I’m sure. Putting the fate of the world on your shoulders, my goodness.” She smiled warmly.
She was a pretty woman for an AI robot, Samantha thought. Her white hair was neatly styled, and she had an elegant way about her.
“Myers?” Samantha said.
“Oh, yes. Ben is my son. It wasn’t unexpected to find that some of the Originals were related, but what a wonderful surprise for Ben and I. Unfortunately not for his father and my loving husband. He died during the experimentation phases. We saw what we were doing as so incredibly important for humanity that it was worth risking it all.”
Samantha was curious to know more about the Myers family and their early relationship to Aion, but she wasn’t in the mood right now for a family history lesson. Plus, she wasn’t going to give much away. She needed to read this machine and see what Silva wanted, so she just stood by the window and waited quietly.
“Come over here, have a seat next to me,” Silva spoke politely as she sat down on the cot, virtually tapping the space next her. Samantha walked over and sat down next to the image. “Do you know how we live? Us civilians, we don’t’ live like the military. We live in a beautiful community.”
“No one knows how you live, but I imagine it has high walls and gates and Replica guards to protect your mansions and all your money.”
“That sounds a little cynical,” Silva replied.
“Think so?” Samantha said sarcastically.
“How would you like to see it?” Silva asked. “I think it will help you.”
Samantha didn’t say a word, but fought her own curiosity.
The Replica reached into his jacket and pulled out an eye-shield. “Put this on and you can stroll around our Great Community, take a look. Any time you’d like end your visit, just take it off,” Silva Myers said causally, as if it didn’t matter either way to her what Samantha did.
Samantha was tired of thinking so much, so she reached over and took the eyewear. She glanced at Silva and then put it on. She felt guilty at first, anything on her body that was Replica felt treasonous to her.
