Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  Inside the library, shelves were stacked tall against the walls and long windows. Most of the books looked old, their spines fraying. A children’s section sat in the back corner, the walls in Easter-egg pastels, with paintings of cute animals all around, all reading books. A floppy-eared bunny in overalls reading Watership Down. (A little on-the-nose, she thought.) A dalmatian in a fireman’s outfit reading Fahrenheit 451. (A little creepy.) A deer sitting on a stump, reading The Yearling. (Way they painted that deer, it looks more like he’s sitting on a toilet than a stump.)

  Again, that odd out-of-sync thing hit her—she blinked and felt the chocolate ice cream still melting on her tongue, even though it had been hours, or felt like hours, since she’d stopped eating it.

  Shana was alone for a while in here, smelling the musty-dusty book-mold smell—but eventually the wooden doors at the front opened with a merry groan. Nessie was first through the door.

  And then came some familiar faces.

  “Mia!” Shana said, leaping up so fast she damn near knocked over her chair. “Aliya!” Mia and Aliya, holy shit. The two lit up when they saw her, hurrying over. The three of them crashed together in a seismic hug.

  “Is any of this real?” Aliya asked.

  Mia screwed up her face and shrugged. “Yo, I don’t even care. Maybe this is Heaven, right? I saw Mateo! You guys, I saw Mateo. This sure as fuck feels like Heaven, I gotta tell you.”

  “This isn’t the Heaven I was told about,” Aliya said, “but maybe. I haven’t seen Tasha yet, though.” Shana wondered: Was Tasha still alive? Those snipers took out shepherds and walkers alike. But she didn’t want to say anything about that, not yet…

  “Guys,” Shana said. “I think we’re walkers now. We’re damn sure not shepherds anymore.”

  “Maybe the walkers have been in Heaven the whole time,” Mia said with a shrug. “Maybe Marcy was right. Maybe they’re angels.”

  “Maybe we’re angels,” Aliya corrected.

  “Does that mean we’re dead?”

  “I don’t think so—” Shana started to say, even as other faces of other shepherds appeared. Here came Carl Carter, and Mary-Louise Hinton, and John Hernandez. Plus a few more she didn’t know—maybe they were shepherds, too, but she didn’t recognize them.

  Nessie, appearing at her elbow, pointed to two more coming in—one, a raven-haired white woman in a blue sundress, the other an older black man, bald on top but with a big salt-and-pepper beard hiding his neck. Nessie whispered, “That’s Julie and that’s Xander.”

  Sure enough, the two people introduced themselves as Julie Barden and Alexander—Xander—Percy.

  They asked that everyone find a chair. Which they did. Shana pulled over one from the kids’ section—it was too small for her but she managed.

  Everyone sat around Julie and Xander as they spoke.

  “Welcome to Ouray, Colorado,” Julie said, a slight southern twang to her voice. Reminded Shana of that actress, what was her name? Holly Hunter. “Or at least, a simulation of it. You’re all part of the flock, now.”

  A few gasps went around the room. Some shared uncomfortable looks, as if unsure if this was even real.

  Xander said: “I know. It’s a shock. It was for me, too. I was a professor of theoretical physics, so I’m used to some weird shit, and this shit is maybe a little too weird for me.”

  He had an easy, avuncular way—everyone chuckled.

  “You think it’s weird for him, try being a brain surgeon,” Julie said. That didn’t earn as many laughs, but Shana thought, That’s being a woman for you, the man always gets the good lines. Julie continued: “Even though the brain remains a mysterious organ in a lot of ways, we understood it. Or, I suppose, we thought we did. What’s happening here—that we all seem to be experiencing a shared reality, a simulated one—is something that goes beyond my comprehension, but here we are.”

  “The good news,” Xander said, “is that we are all survivors.”

  Julie: “But it’s also the bad news. The disease known as White Mask, caused by a fungal pathogen called Rhizopus destructans, is going to decimate the global population. But we, the flock, are protected by the grace of Black Swan, an artificial intelligence inhabiting our bodies and brains with a connected swarm of infinitesimal machines existing at nanoscale.”

  “Robots,” Shana said, and suddenly the chocolate ice cream taste in her mouth came again, but this time its sweetness was unsettling. Nausea swept over her in a feverish wave. “You’re talking about little robots.”

  “That’s right,” Xander said. “Robots.”

  “Black Swan is a robot?” Mia said, looking confused.

  “No,” Julie answered. “Black Swan is less a machine and more an intelligence—a sentient piece of software that has inhabited a piece of hardware. In this case, a swarm of nanoscale robots.”

  “Whaaaaat the fuck,” Mia said, in her classic Mia way. She sounded equally wowed and horrified by this.

  Carl Carter, an avuncular, ginger-haired man in tortoiseshell spectacles—once a shepherd, like Shana and the others, a shepherd whose wife left him alone here to watch over their daughter, Elsa—raised an index finger in the air. “So…this town isn’t real?”

  “Not the one you see here,” Xander explained. “This one is a simulated version, but Ouray is a real town in the mountains of Colorado.”

  Julie: “That’s right. Black Swan has graciously given us a simulation of the town so that we may grow acclimated to it. Though the simulation is imperfect, the virtual shared reality of it will allow us to settle into its layout, its architecture, its feel.”

  “Why would they do that?” Carl asked.

  “Because this will one day be our home,” she said.

  Xander, smiling: “I see some of you are having a hard time taking that in. I still wrestle with it. Make no mistake, the end of the world has begun. White Mask will sweep across the globe and in just a few short months, humankind will have been wiped out—or would have been, if it were not for the benevolence of Black Swan. Black Swan has given us a way to survive. But it would be foolish to think of us only as survivors.”

  “We are colonists,” Julie said. “The settlers of a fallen world.”

  Aliya burst out weeping. Shana moved her chair closer to her, put an arm around her. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she whispered to Aliya.

  Xander: “It’s shocking. And I know it’s sad. But I want you to look at the positive side: We have all been selected by the machine. It believes that we are the best of the best. It coordinated its path to find us. We are a mix of wonderful minds, the smartest and most innovative. Healthy, stable, capable. Black Swan has designed a future for humanity, and we are it.”

  “I’m not it,” Shana said, abruptly.

  Eyes turned toward her.

  “Black Swan didn’t select me. It couldn’t have or I would’ve been one of you from the beginning, because my sister here was the first. I was a shepherd. Like others here. If we’re here, it’s because…like in gym class, we were the last picks available. Wasn’t anybody left.”

  “Oh shit,” Mia said.

  “We’re the dregs,” Aliya said. “Bottom of the barrel.”

  Xander smiled that uncle’s smile of his. He walked forward and put both hands on Shana’s shoulders. “Shana, you don’t have to worry. You’ve been selected. You’re chosen. Black Swan would not have brought you in here if it did not think you would be a valuable part of the future—you did your work as a shepherd, you proved yourself to all of us, and now?” He spread his arms out like a preacher asking the parishioners to behold the expanse of Heaven above. “And now you are one of us.”

  One of us, Shana thought.

  She wasn’t quite sure what to make of that.

  “Look at it this way,” Julie said, addressing them all. “Black Swan has diligently planned fo
r the future. We are all part of what we call the Calculation. We are numbers in a great equation, and if those numbers don’t add up, the equation won’t balance. Worse, if we’re variables—unknown quantities whose value is shifting—then the future becomes a dangerous mystery, not a certain reality.”

  Shana took a step back. She felt the hairs on her neck—though I suppose they’re not really my hairs, they’re just my mind’s imagining of the hairs on my neck—rise up.

  “People aren’t numbers,” she said. “We’re all variables. No machine can know our hearts. We’re not just our professions or our SAT scores.”

  “Black Swan has done the Calculation,” Xander said. “Of course we’re not all one thing, but we have to trust in this community. We have to trust that Black Swan chose wisely.”

  “And if it didn’t choose wisely?”

  Julie: “You know, Shana, trust me when I say, the human brain is not particularly flexible. I don’t mean literally! I mean, the mind, our personalities, our demeanors. We are who we are. Our genetic code and our environment make us, and by the time we enter our teens…the cement may not be all the way dry, but it hardens up pretty quick. Black Swan knows this. Like Xander says: We have to trust in Black Swan.”

  Shana put her hands on her hips, defiant. “How do you know this? How do you know any of this?”

  A strange smile crept across Julie’s face.

  “We’ve gone up there.”

  “Gone up…where?”

  “To Black Swan. To speak with it.”

  “I don’t…I don’t know what the hell that means.”

  Xander: “It means if you follow the winding path up to the top of the western peak, you too can commune with Black Swan. Many of us have made the pilgrimage. You can, too, if you want, Shana.”

  She placated him with a small smile, then she sat down and shut up.

  * * *

  —

  AFTERWARD, SHANA PULLED her sister aside as the others came out of the library. They were laughing and smiling. But Shana didn’t feel so giddy.

  Nessie gave her a look. “What’s wrong?”

  “You didn’t go up there, did you?” Shana asked, sotto voce.

  “Up where?”

  “To see the—” She made an awkward nodding gesture with her face to indicate up, up, up. “To see the wizard behind the curtain.”

  “Oh. No. Not yet.”

  “Good.”

  “Why is that good?”

  “Nessie, this is all pretty fucked up.”

  “Well, I mean, yeah. No doy. We’re all mentally linked by an artificially intelligent swarm of nanobots inside a simulation of the mountain town where we will weather the Apocalypse. It doesn’t get much weirder than that, Shana.”

  “Apparently it does. Listen, just don’t…go up there without saying something to me, first. You promise?”

  Nessie hesitated, and Shana urged her:

  “Ness, promise me.”

  “I promise.” Nessie glanced nervously over Shana’s shoulder. “Hey, sis, there’s, um. There’s one more thing.”

  “One more thing what?”

  “That I have to tell you. Or show you. Or someone I have to tell you about and, uhh. Show you.”

  “You’re not making any sense. There’s someone you want me to meet?”

  “Yes. Sort of. Though you’ve already—”

  Shana got the sense suddenly that they were not alone. Someone was right behind her. It wasn’t a sound, it wasn’t even the shadow—it was a presence, like the way a TV on in a nearby room may have the volume down, but there’s a white noise to it that lets you know it’s there, and it’s on.

  This was like that.

  She turned around to see just who had joined them.

  She stared. The world seemed to fall away. Everything faded except the view of the person standing there in front of her.

  “Mom?” Shana said.

  Supreme Court Gives Election to Republican Ed Creel

  By Bryan Whyte, Boston Globe

  With Vice President John Oshiro missing—along with the rest of the line of presidential successors within former president Hunt’s cabinet—the Supreme Court today gave the election early to GOP nominee Ed Creel in a 4 to 3 decision…Creel will give his “victory speech” later today from his location on the campaign trail in Kansas…

  OCTOBER 13

  Hector, California

  “AND ONCE THEY’D HEAPED THE mound, they turned back home to Troy, and gathering once again they shared a splendid funeral feast in Hector’s honor, held in the house of Priam, king by will of Zeus.” Landry said those words, staring out the window at the passing sleepwalker flock, moving as they were through the wind-whipped desert of salt and sand. Past little clapboard houses and double-wide trailers. Past mailboxes on bent posts and sunbaked patio furniture. Past the cactuses. Past a couple of stray dogs. Past an old man on his porch, his head in an old diving bell helmet—maybe he was alive and watching them, or maybe he was dead in there. Landry sighed and added: “And so the Trojans buried Hector, breaker of horses.”

  Pete sniffed. He kicked through the trash on the floor of the RV—the Beast, Charlie Stewart’s old ride—same way you might wade through the colored balls in a playground ball pit. Mounding around his ankles were the packaging from chocolate bars, potato chip bags, condom wrappers, bottles of top-shelf lube, a mink stole, the plastic clamshell that once held a thin pink vibrator, shitty porn mags (gay and straight because fuck it), countless little baggies that once held some of the finest hydroponic Cali-marijuana, a few bottles of the hoitiest-and-toitiest Champagne (now empty), pages and pages of sheet music, and, perhaps puzzlingly, the box to a brand-new Singer sewing machine because Landry said he had always wanted to learn to sew, goddamnit, so he was going to learn to stitch a motherfucker. “Like the damn pioneers,” he said. As if that explained it.

  “The hell are you going on about over there?” Pete asked.

  “It’s literature, fool. The Iliad. Get cultured.”

  “The only culture I care to get is the kind that swabs our faceholes to see if we’re sick. We’re not sick this morning, are we?”

  Landry turned away from the window. “No, not yet. You?”

  “Not yet, love.”

  “It’s coming, though, isn’t it? You and me with the sniffles.” Landry wore a grim mask. “Then the crazies. Then the dying shit.”

  Idly, Pete thought: Wasn’t there a movie like that? The Crazies. Seventies-era. Bioweapon test in a small town made everybody bonkers. Turned into murderers or something. “We don’t know that.”

  “Yeah. Well. I know how this goes. It’s like HIV all over again.”

  Pete rolled his eyes. “You’re, what, thirty-two years old? Christ, mate, you were a kid during the epidemic. Me, I had to worry. I had a family. Sleeping around on the side, worrying about bringing that bug home—God, fuck. Herpes is one thing. Crabs, well, who doesn’t enjoy some nice seafood? But the High-Five? Fuck. Fuck. It’d be like forgetting your luggage on the plane but bringing home a goddamn suitcase nuke instead.”

  “Speaking of your fam.” Landry leaned in. “You still wanna do this?”

  “It’s what you want, innit?”

  “It is. But that doesn’t mean it’s what you want.”

  Pete thought about it. Truth was, he didn’t really know. But he didn’t have time to piss around. “I’m sure. This is it.” He looked around at the sea of garbage around his feet. “Besides, I think we’ve, ahh, hit the limits of our hedonism, Landry, my love.”

  Landry stood up and took his hands. The man had only grown more lean and angular as the weeks went on—they’d committed to enjoying their last days by eating and drinking and fucking their way toward happy oblivion. Pete felt like he’d put on a few pounds, his muscle tone gone the way of soggy gym s
ocks. But Landry didn’t go the same way. He was lean and mean. He was all cheekbones and hipbones. All tight tendons and taut muscles. Gods, he was beautiful.

  Thing was, their hedonism had limits. Honestly, they hit those limits after the first few nights of it—sick on junk food, having fucked their way through half a dozen very difficult sexual positions, they tried drinking and smoking and it made them giddy, sure, but it also seemed somehow hollow. Like they were throwing shovelfuls of earth into a bottomless pit. It felt productive at first, but soon you figured out that nothing was changing.

  They kept going. For a few weeks. Just for the spirit of the thing. And maybe, just maybe, because they didn’t want to admit it wasn’t working.

  That’s when Pete had the idea.

  (Well, it was Landry who brought it up, but Pete who made the plan.)

  “You going to tell Doctor Ray now?” Landry asked. “It’s time.”

  “Yeah.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Fuck.”

  Landry kissed his chin. “Go get him, Rockgod.”

  Out the RV he went.

  * * *

  —

  THINGS HAD FUCKING changed.

  It was funny how a lot of that faded into the background, but sometimes, like today, Pete found himself jarringly aware of those changes—it was like, most of his life he smoked cigarettes, then he quit, and over time he thought the ghost of nicotine addiction had finally stopped haunting him. But once in a while the specter returned, rising up out of the dark and wailing in his ear, and before he knew it he’d need a cigarette the way one dog needed the scent of another dog’s nethers—and instantly he’d be reminded how the comfort of that addiction was a part of him. The memory of it. The piece of him that had gone missing. The way he smoked on his balcony, the feeling of crispy paper between his lips, the burning pleasure-cloud that filled the lungs.