by David Beers
Leon had put them both here. Caesar and himself. He put them here and now because of that, Caesar was being set up to...fail? Die? He didn’t know. He didn’t know what Manny wanted to do, only that he didn’t want anyone following Caesar. What could Leon do to stop it? He held no sway here, wasn’t even Caesar’s mascot. He was a joke.
And still, he couldn’t sit here and listen to this guy plot to reduce Caesar to a joke as well, to reduce Caesar to a mistake. But what could he do?
“You can stop Manny from talking,” he said aloud, sitting on his bed. “If he can’t talk, then he can’t plot against Caesar.”
Leon told Caesar when they first arrived here that he didn’t want to live anymore but that he didn’t have the guts to kill himself. He didn’t want to live now, either, but he still wasn’t going to kill himself. If someone killed him though? Would that give him what he wanted? No more nights thinking about April, no more dreams staring at her brutalized face. Maybe it would. Maybe if he could give these people here a good enough reason to kill him, he wouldn’t have to live anymore, and if he did it right, he could make sure that Manny wasn’t able to poison the well before Caesar returned. He could save himself from this life and save Caesar, all at once.
Chapter Sixteen
You realize we might have made a mistake, right?
Not yet. It’s too early to tell.
This was all a theory, not a fact. A theory that he might do what probabilities suggested he would. From the looks of the autistic, we may have miscalculated. We may have gone too far with his family. We may have pushed him to a limit that we can’t bring him back from.
Maybe, but what was the alternative? It’s just started; the autistic doesn’t mean anything. We knew what the first iteration would want to do with him, maybe we didn’t think the theory would go as far as he did, but it doesn’t mean he won’t see logic in the end. It doesn’t mean we can’t pull him back.
It does mean it’s going to be harder.
Everything we’ve done has been hard. We still did it. Humanity is still here and the Earth is in the best possible position. This will be no different. Hard, but not impossible.
I can’t tell if you’re I or purposefully avoiding the danger. This isn’t like the purge. This isn’t like the beginning. We won’t be guiding a group of people to our will. We’ll be talking to one man, one man that by the time he reaches us will be more powerful than all those people in the beginning combined. One man that will be our equal.
That’s what we wanted, isn’t it? That’s the entire theory.
Theories and realities are different things. We’re in reality now and the autistic doesn’t bode well for us. The autistic makes me think that if he isn’t too far gone now, then he certainly will be by the time he reaches us. We’ve got to tame him, or at least try to temper what the first iteration is doing if we want to have any chance.
How do we do that, exactly?
Make him compromise. Make him start compromising now. The first iteration wants a scorched earth policy, and if that’s the mentality the theory has when he arrives, then we’re done for. Then everything we’ve built is done for. If he compromises though, at least a little, and early, then we can mold him just as the first iteration is trying to do.
Fine. But where do we make him compromise? We don’t have his location. We have none of their locations.
We need to stop everything else right now. All research. All extraneous power. Everything needs to focus on this situation. Something will arise, something we might already be missing. When it arises, we seize it, and we make him compromise. But first, we have to start paying attention.
Chapter Seventeen
The knife felt awkward in Leon’s hand. It wasn’t that he hadn’t held a knife before, it was that he’d never held one for this purpose. That was the awkwardness of it.
He had never picked up a knife with the intent of killing someone. Until now.
Leon hadn’t slept; he had sat up thinking about when he would do this, about when he would kill Manny. Once he made up his mind to do it, he didn’t question himself anymore. It would set him free and help Caesar. No, he sat up not thinking about if he should, but about when would be the best time. Never put off anything until tomorrow that can be done today.
It wasn’t until he had the knife in his hand that he felt unsure of himself. When he actually held the blade, he finally understood he might not be able to do it. That plunging this cold steel into someone might be more than Leon could handle, more than he was capable of. He stood outside of Manny’s door. He knew that Manny’s wife and kid slept behind the door too, that Manny wasn’t alone in there.
Does that matter?
Of course it does. You’re going to kill him while he lies next to his wife, and his kid sleeps in a crib a few feet away?
He felt his stomach churn.
He stood barefoot and the floor beneath was cold, chilling his feet.
Are you going in?
The knife shook in his right hand. He looked down at it, the hallway lights casting a shivering shadow across the concrete floor. If April saw him now, what would she say? He smiled, knowing that she would turn him in the same way she had turned in Caesar. Murder? That was unheard of, not just uncalled for. That was something forbidden, something no one did, ever, and here was her husband standing with a knife ready to do just that.
But you’re not ready. That’s why you’re standing out here and not inside there.
“Damn it,” he whispered. He walked down here with a saint’s righteous surety, and now he couldn’t do it. Now, standing here with the knife, he was going to turn around. Because he couldn’t kill someone else any more than he could kill himself.
What happens to Caesar? What happens to him if you don’t do this?
He didn’t have to do it now. There was time. He could wait until Manny wasn’t sleeping next to his wife and child, could wait until Manny was running his mouth again. Do it then.
There’s time, he thought. There’ll be another time.
Leon turned away from the door and walked back down the hallway. He had come here to kill a man and hadn’t been able to. He didn’t sleep the rest of the night, and instead kept asking himself if he would ever be able to do it.
* * *
Manny put the coffee to his lips, tasting it for the first time in years. He held it in his mouth for a moment before swallowing. It was like everything else The Genesis put out, fake, false, a hollow imitation of how things should have been. It lacked the taste, the integrity, of the coffee they made at the compound. Manny wasn’t even sure they used beans here in this city, even genetically engineered beans.
He sat in the city Caesar had been born in: Allencine. No one knew he was here; he told no one at the compound, not even his wife. He packed a bag and slipped out before the sun came up. It took him six hours to get here, and if anyone checked, there was a missing vehicle at the compound. They would check, eventually, but they wouldn’t come looking.
He wanted to see the city Caesar grew up in. Paige had been picked for the mission, to come here and find Caesar, to lure him in. Manny hadn’t seen a city in twenty years. He hadn’t wanted to see one again, not ever, if he could help it. These things were constructs of the mind as much as anything physical. Miles and miles of air-conditioned, artificial life. People getting in and on trains, going to work that they didn’t choose and would never have the chance to alter. The whole idea was maddening. When Jerry found him, he had saved Manny’s life. Now that he had life, why would he ever go back to death?
Except, here he was. Looking at Caesar’s birthplace. And there was nothing special about it. Nothing that hadn’t been the same in his own city all those years ago. Sure, some technological advances. The trains were all transparent now, which might look interesting, but not worth the whole of humanity’s soul.
Manny thought a lot about Leon over the past day. Thought about what the man had said, I’ll kill you. And maybe he would. The more M
anny thought about it, the more he thought Leon wasn’t lying. He didn’t have anything to live for to begin with, and now, with a dead wife and being held captive by a group of people he couldn’t hope to ever understand or really converse with, what else was there? Caesar. That’s the only answer Manny could find. So, yeah, Leon might try to kill him if Manny kept this up.
When he reached that conclusion in the early morning, he packed his bag and left for Allencine.
His plan had been to convince The Eight that Caesar wasn’t what Jerry thought. But, the more he considered it, the more he thought he would end up dead. If not at Leon’s hands, then at Jerry’s. Jerry would kill for Caesar; Manny had no doubt about that. Caesar still had to be stopped, but Manny had to look after his wife and kid in doing it. He wasn’t going to leave them without a husband and father. So how else could he stop Caesar while keeping himself safe?
The answer was blasphemy but truth at the same time.
He had to tell The Genesis.
He knew what they were looking for, Caesar and Jerry. He only need tell The Genesis what they wanted, and when they arrived, The Genesis would grab Caesar and that would end the whole mess. Jerry wouldn’t be able to go with him, not that far in, not around applications that might sense him—The Genesis would control the chip in his head within a few seconds of knowing where he was. Caesar would be alone and shortly after, he would die. It was the safest way, and really, the most humane. Why start some kind of internal war at the compound? Why risk his own life and those of his family for someone that was a mistake? That was an accident, whose very presence created a danger that need not exist.
He glanced around the coffee shop. No one looked at him, not even with his slightly strange clothes—they were so caught up in their own lives, in their own pathetic existences, that they couldn’t see anything else around them.
The Eight would continue; that’s what Manny knew. Even if Caesar died, The Eight would go on, and nothing else mattered.
Chapter Eighteen
Jerry closed his eyes and leaned back against the tree. Caesar had walked off a few minutes ago, and Jerry understood why. What he did today would take time to come to terms with, would take time to understand the necessity of it. He would understand it though, just as he had ended up committing the act.
Caesar was distressed, to say the least, but Jerry felt happy for the first time in a long time. He had chosen right and his choice had been vindicated today. Everything else that came next would be easier because of what Caesar did today; everything that came next would be possible because of what he’d done.
Caesar would be okay. Jerry remembered the first time he had to kill someone, and the first time was the hardest, without a doubt. Time would heal it. Time would make it easier to kill again. They got over this first hump, this first major issue; that was important. Manny would see now. The Named would see that everything they had searched for would be realized inside Caesar. Soon now...soon they would finish what they had all searched for.
Caesar was hurting and Jerry sympathized with it, some. He couldn’t let himself be overrun by emotion though. Caesar was what they needed, but even so, he still had to be coached. He had to be ready when the time came. If one autistic could stand in his way, The Genesis certainly wouldn’t crumble before him. Necessary. That’s what the act had been and Caesar would come to realize it just as Jerry did. Caesar would come to realize that the ends justified the means.
“JERRY!” The word screeched across the airwaves, sounding like an animal close to dying, dashing Jerry’s contemplations to pieces.
It was Caesar. In trouble.
* * *
Caesar heard the thing behind him, sounding like he imagined a god would, had it come to Earth and decided to track him down. It moved with a surety, a strength that tried to hide nothing, that said if anything wanted to stop it then to come on, because it moved as it wished.
He had last screamed five seconds ago.
There wasn’t any more reason to scream. There wasn’t any reason to bring Jerry into this, to have him come into these woods and die right next to Caesar. Jerry, in all his strength, wasn’t going to stop what now chased Caesar.
He quit running and turned around. His chest heaved up and down, sucking in giant gulps of air as if his lungs hadn’t gotten the memo that he would die in a few seconds so there wasn’t any need to do all this work.
The limbs and trees before him bent and broke as the thing closed in. Some of the branches snapped back into place and others fell to the ground, but the thing still kept coming, hidden by the foliage separating it and Caesar.
Caesar saw a glimpse, the quickest look he could get right before something slammed into his side and sent him sprawling into the dirt, hitting his shoulder hard on the ground and skidding five or six feet across the roots and weeds.
He saw black eyes sitting inside steel, but not eyes like Jerry’s, not an eye with a thousand different lenses in it, but a single orb that looked out like a marble.
Caesar whipped around, scampering to find his feet, to see what had burst through the woods on both sides of him, the black eyed creature and whatever tossed him to the ground.
Jerry stood in front of him. Caesar only saw his back, but Jerry was in position to kill: his knees bent, his hands out in front of him, the muscles along his back bulging at the simple shirt covering them. Caesar looked to the other, the thing that chased him. The black eyes didn’t move, or maybe they did and Caesar simply couldn’t tell. They either focused on everything at once or saw nothing, because the thing stood still, not moving towards or away from the two people in front of it. The thing was a head taller than Jerry, but thinner, somehow. It stood on two legs and had arms, long arms though, arms that ended well below its knees. The joints were all encased in some kind of clear, transparent structure. Caesar could see directly through its elbow, like only a plastic case holding air instead of machinery or bone. Metal hid the rest of it, all except the areas where movement with another piece took place. Its wrists, its knees, its neck, they were all air filled spaces in which Caesar could see the woods on the other side of it. Androgynous, whether male or female or something in between, Caesar couldn’t tell.
His mind took it all in almost passively, judging the scene around him with the calmness of a mountain. The front of his mind still scrambled, still tried to find somewhere to protect his body and secondly, to protect Jerry.
Jerry took a step forward, his knees still bent, ready to pounce.
The thing that had run through the woods stood with its arms at its side. Caesar saw that it didn’t have a mouth, just eyes that looked out on the world. Had Caesar not heard it crashing through the trees behind him, he would have thought the thing a statue, unable to move.
“Wait,” Grace said, still next to Caesar but speaking louder now, speaking so that Jerry could hear her. “Wait, don’t hurt it.”
Jerry didn’t turn around, but he didn’t advance. “It’s trying to communicate to me. It recognizes I’m here.”
Caesar finally reached his feet. He stood, feeling stupid, dirt covering his whole body and not knowing what to do, not knowing whether to flee or fight.
“It wants to talk,” Grace said.
“How the hell do you know?” Jerry shot back.
“It’s telling me why it’s here, why it found us.”
Caesar heard Grace’s sincerity. She wasn’t lying. Whatever this thing was telling her, she believed it to be the truth, but still Jerry stood there, ready to kill it, or try to. Ready to die, if that’s what was needed. Caesar walked forward, around Jerry, stepping in between the two of them. The machine didn’t move in the slightest, didn’t even lower its head to look at the new person in front of it.
“You’re not here to hurt us?” Caesar asked.
The thing looked down then, its black, dead eyes looking on him for the first time. It raised a hand, slowly, palm facing up, toward him. Caesar looked down at it, the machine’s hand dwarfing hi
s own. If he placed his hand in its grip, Jerry would be able to do nothing if it squeezed down. It would destroy his hand and no matter how quickly Jerry arrived, it would rip him apart.
“Go ahead,” Grace said. “It’s okay.”
Caesar placed his hand on the machine’s palm.
* * *
“She’s going to die,” Grace said.
Caesar looked at the machine in front of him, a machine now, but before this just another application.
“How do you know?”
“The Genesis knows she unhooked. Knows she went offline. Applications are tracking her now, trying to bring her in for assimilation, deletion.”
Caesar sat with his back against the tree he and Jerry had sat alone at an hour before. His knees were bent against his chest, and Jerry sat to his right, his knees folded Indian-style. The machine sat a few feet away from them, its arms still resting on its own knees, but now no one touching its palms.
They had sat in this circle, hands resting on each other’s, listening to her speak in the only way she could.
Caesar’s eyes narrowed. “Why? Why did you come out here if you knew it meant death?”
The machine didn’t move at all, incapable of showing any human emotion. Perhaps that was the newness of the machine to this application, having basically hijacked it to get out here, to find them. Caesar placed his hand back onto the machine’s and watched as Jerry did the same, wanting to hear the answer as well.
