by Phoenix Ward
“Frank, stop!” Bash cried out. “Stop it!”
Frank ignored him.
“Frank!” Beta shouted, raising her volume above all the others. She pulled her own gun. “Give it up!”
Beth had seen enough. She realized she was holding her breath and stepped out of the room to regain her composure.
I can’t take this anymore, she thought. They’re too paranoid — too angry. It’s not safe here. If anyone found out I have an I.I. in my head…
“We have to leave,” Simon said. “Now. You can do this. While everyone’s distracted, we can slip out and start making our way to Fort Leddy. We can leave this nightmare behind.”
But the whole world is a nightmare, she replied.
“It’s all subjective,” Simon said. “Now, move!”
Somehow, she was able to push her legs into a steady pace to the pediatrics room. She took no pause before packing up her extra set of clothes, a bit of water and food, some bedding, and extra ammunition. The clinic’s medkit was in the room where Dr. Miller was killed, so she couldn’t go for any of that. She had to take what she could grab and go now before anyone noticed.
Her footsteps seemed louder than ever as she walked through the wooden corridor leading to the lobby. Shouts and cries could be heard reverberating through the walls, chasing her like a specter. She could still hear them fighting and yelling when she pulled back the plywood that made up the first barrier to the outside world.
“Where do you think you’re going?” a voice came from behind.
Beth spun around and saw Lia pointing a gun at her. The detective raised her hands and felt her heart go numb.
“Trying to escape?” Lia asked. “Gonna go tell your I.I. buddies where we are?”
“What are you talking about, Lia?” Beth said.
“You’re a meat puppet, aren’t you?” the armed woman interrogated. “I knew something was off about you this whole time. You probably staged the whole incident with ‘Gary’, didn’t you? Your name’s not even Beth — is it?”
“I’m not a meat puppet!” Beth cried. She realized how far her voice carried and lowered it. “I just want to get as far away as I can from this place. The paranoia is only going to kill more of us — if you guys haven’t killed Seth already. I’d rather chance it with the Liberators than stay another second here. Please, Lia, just let me go.”
There was a twitch in Lia’s jaw as she considered Beth’s words. Something in her eyes said she wanted to believe Beth, but something else caused a struggle inside her.
“You know I can’t do that, Beth,” Lia replied. “We can’t take the risk. I’m sorry.”
Before Beth could reply, Lia’s eyes rolled back in their sockets and her mouth opened as if to scream, but no sound came out. Her posture became distorted like someone under the spell of a demonic possession. A generous flow of blood poured from her nose and splattered on the stone lobby floor. Then — like a candle snuffed by the wind — all internal motion stopped and Lia fell to the ground, dead.
Beth stared at the woman’s corpse for a moment, her mouth locked open in horror. She felt a presence she didn’t notice missing return to her brain.
“We have to go,” Simon commanded. “Now!”
Refuge
The hum of the autovan they stole from the clinic grated at Beth as she drove on. Every time she returned to reality and remembered where she was and how she had got there, she hated the world they lived in now. She despised the corruption that made people like the Liberators follow the insane ideology of the Tarov A.I. She hated the seemingly basic human desire to — above all else — have your name highest on the scoreboard. As if the life we all share is a game. Something to be won.
To her, it seemed like a defect in the species. Ethnocentrism, racism, sexism — they were flaws that kept getting passed down, like a Huntington’s disease of hate. Which made people sometimes act on that hate. If no such flaw existed, they would not be in the situation they were in at that moment. There would have been no internment camps. No concentration camps. There would have been no ovens and no burning crosses. It wasn’t a matter of good versus evil — such concepts are man-made myths. It was the sick versus the reasonable. The corrupted against the world.
We could have talked her into letting us go, Beth thought angrily for the hundredth time since they’d left Washington state. She was considering it.
“That’s a nice attitude to have, but we’re not going to stop Tarov on chance,” Simon said. “She could have killed us, and that was reason enough to stop her.”
She could have done plenty else! Beth replied bitterly. She could have asked to come with us, for all we know!
“But she wasn’t going to,” Simon said. “She was going to shoot you, and then Tarov would have been unstoppable. With Dr. Miller dead and the group trying to kill each other, half of the failsafe would be lost forever. Even if Dr. Silvar eventually realized Tarov is not functioning as programmed, he’d be unable to stop him without the information we have.”
We don’t know that, Beth said. Her resolve to be angry was breaking. She just wanted to rest.
“It doesn’t matter now,” Simon replied. “You’re tired. We should stop for some sleep. Fort Leddy is still thirteen hours away.”
Beth didn’t bother to argue. She pulled the van over at the first wide shoulder she could find, turned the engine off, then crawled up into the bedding she set up in the back. Before long, she drifted off to sleep.
They were only a few miles from the refugee camp when Beth started noticing an increasing number of pedestrians walking along the highway, or even in the fields that ran along it. They all moved forward with animalistic instinct, like a baby turtle following the light of the moon. They must have come from all over the country, looking for anywhere safe from the hordes of bodyshells and meat-puppets.
Beth found herself wondering about their stories. About the things they must have lost because of Tarov and his war. Only a few months ago, these people’s greatest concern was probably how to make their bills or get that promotion they’d been after. Now, their only drive was survival.
We really have been knocked down a peg, Beth reflected. A fall from grace. Quite the plunge.
Some of the people faced Beth as she drove on, but she did her best to ignore them. Even still, she could see children carrying huge bundles of clothing, bedding, and food. Old folk stumbled as they stepped on knots of weeds, trying to regain their footing. Everyone carried more than they could really hold, taking their entire lives with them as they marched toward Fort Leddy.
Eventually, they got to a part in the migration where the pedestrians peeled away from the highway into the wild turf to the south. The long snake of people stretching before the setting sun turned away from the road, and Beth realized they must be close to the camp.
“We should probably go on foot from here,” Simon suggested.
Beth agreed, packing up what she could before abandoning the autovan on the side of the highway.
It felt like hours since Beth had started trekking with the other refugees. The sun sank behind the mountains to the west and left them all to march on in the dark like ants in the jungle. Lost in thought, Beth almost bumped into the person in front of her before looking up and realizing they had arrived at the back of a queue of folk trying to get into Fort Leddy. She could see lights on the horizon, about a quarter mile away. A long line of cold and hungry people wound through the weeds, dry grass, and snow towards the camp. They moved forward every half minute or so with small, shuffling steps.
There was little to do as they moved up in line other than scan the faces of those around them. Just a couple places behind Beth, a family of five was trying their best to make a place for the eldest of them to lay between short lurches forward. The old woman had some blue discoloration around her mouth and her eyes seemed sullen. To Beth, it looked like she might not make it to the front of the line.
Everyone around them ignored the family, even
harassing them when they didn’t move up fast enough. Beth felt a pang in her heart for them, but couldn’t do anything.
A child in front of her cried. A little girl of no more than five kept tugging at her mother’s pant pockets and her father’s jacket.
“Stop it!” one of the parents snapped at her.
Through her sobs, the child said, “I don’t like this, mommy! I wanna go home.”
“We can’t go home, Dee — you know that,” the mother replied, annoyed.
“But, why?”
“Because it’s not safe, baby. Please, stop crying and just quiet down.”
“But kitty is still there,” the girl cried. “Why didn’t we bring kitty?”
“There wasn’t time,” the father said. “The bad people were coming. We had to leave.”
“But the bad men could hurt kitty! I want my kitty!” She started crying too hard to speak anymore, but continued to try.
“Shh, shhh, sweetheart,” the mother said, rubbing the back of the girl’s neck. “Kitty’s just fine, don’t you worry.”
Beth had to tune it out.
For the most part, the never-ending slow march onward was quiet and uneventful. Beth felt like she was going to fall asleep standing up when she noticed some movement ahead on the side of the line.
They were only a stone’s throw away from the front gate of the Fort Leddy Refugee Camp. A few men and women, wearing what looked like police riot gear, stood beside the line and checked refugees in. They were all armed with machine guns. Each checkpoint had three or more guards manning them. Beth wondered which military or government group they represented. From where she loitered in line, she couldn’t make out any insignia or anything on their uniforms. Perhaps they were part of the United States government — or maybe some international aid group. Or, maybe, they were just refugees themselves who decided to set up something with a semblance of civilization.
Beth noticed the guards were using some device on each person as they shuffled up to the checkpoints. It flashed a bit of light into each refugee’s face, the guard stared at the device’s screen, then allowed them to enter the camp.
It looked almost like the E.M.P. emitter Dr. Miller used to freeze up Tarov — and had failed to detect “Gary” as a meat puppet.
Someone about a dozen places ahead of Beth in line started getting a little antsy. When one of the guards who was tasked with keeping order in the lines walked past him, he stopped them.
“Excuse me, what are the guards up there doing to people in line?” the nervous man asked.
The guard followed his gaze. “They’re testing everyone’s implants for any I.I. presence,” the guard replied. “Making sure no meat puppets enter the camp.”
“Really? How does that work?”
“It’s an E.M.P. emitter,” the guard explained. “If it detects any I.I.s, it will delete them and destroy its host implant.”
Someone else in line overheard the answer and spoke up. “I’d heard that the I.I.s figured out how to sneak past those devices,” they said. “You might as well be using potatoes.”
The guard seemed annoyed. “We’d heard about that. The scientist who developed these took that new information into account. These new emitters cycle through an almost infinite number of frequencies, making it impossible for an I.I. in hiding to block. We’ve stopped several meat puppets just today.”
The nervous man who asked about the emitter seemed to grow even more uncomfortable. He looked around in line, as if gazing for someone he’d lost, but didn’t seem to find what he was searching for. He stepped out of line.
“Where are you going?” the guard asked him.
“I just remembered that my cousin has a place nearby,” the anxious man said. “I should have thought of him earlier. He’d probably let me stay with him. I don’t want to waste your time.”
“Don’t you want to stay the night, at least?” the guard asked. “It’s late.”
“No, no,” the man said. “I should check on my cousin right away.”
The guard looked over at one of the other armed personnel patrolling the line. He nodded at her, and she came over and grabbed the nervous man by his upper arm.
“Let me go!” the man shrieked. “I don’t want to go in! Just let me leave!”
“Give him the test,” the first guard told the second. “He wanted to leave as soon as I explained how the E.M.P. emitter worked.”
“No!” the man screamed. “No! This isn’t right!”
They raised the emitter to eye level and activated it. The flash of light washed over the nervous man’s face and seemed to steal the life away from him. His body went limp as the guard holding him kept him from falling to the ground. His face was cold and blank.
“Looks like we caught another one,” the first guard said, looking over at everyone in line watching the scene. “When will they learn?”
“Hopefully not too soon,” the other guard replied, carrying the corpse away with the first one’s help.
Uh-oh, Beth thought.
“I know, it’s not ideal,” Simon replied.
You’ll be deleted, she pointed out. We have to leave.
“They’ll just hold us and administer the test,” Simon said. “But we might have another option.”
What?
“You have an old fashioned cerebral computer, while everyone else here has neural implants,” Simon said.
So?
“So, one reason the E.M.P. test is so effective is than an implant cannot be deactivated. It is always on as long as the user is still alive. Your C.C., however, can be turned off. You should be able to switch me off, take the test, and pass like anyone else would.”
Are you sure that would work? Beth asked. Seems like just a theory.
“We don’t have much choice, do we?”
They argued like that for another dozen minutes or so. Then it was Beth’s turn to get scanned.
“Turn your C.C. off now,” Simon said.
If this doesn’t work, Simon — Beth started to think.
“I’ll be here when you turn it back on. Trust me.”
With a mental command, the device was deactivated. She couldn’t hear anything without the aid of her C.C. Shapes were rough blurs at best. She took a deep breath and stepped up to the checkpoint. The guard holding the emitter seemed to size her up. Beth even started getting paranoid that the guard could see into her mind and hear her uncertain thoughts. Then he raised the device and the light flashed.
Nothing changed. Beth almost expected a sharp, stinging pain to take over her brain, like an instant migraine. She expected to feel the light go out within her, to faint, or something along those lines. None of that happened, however.
The guard seemed to say something, then he gestured towards the front gate of the camp. He turned and bellowed something to the line.
Beth walked past the checkpoint, a little light-headed. She felt like she must be in a dream, and the plan had actually failed. After a few minutes in the next part of the line — where people queued up to get someplace to crash — she dared to turn her C.C. back on.
Simon? she thought. Did it work?
There was silence for a moment, and she realized her C.C. hadn’t fully booted just yet. Then she heard him.
“I’m here,” he said.
Propaganda
A group of people gathered around the television set that was hooked up in one of the lounge areas scattered throughout the refugee camp. It was one of only four such devices in Fort Leddy, rigged to receive broadcasts of various kinds without exposing themselves to the Liberators. This television overlooked the camp’s unofficial watering hole, where dirty and sullen folk lost themselves in warm and flat drinks.
The television was showing a global address from Master General Blake Tarov himself. It was one of dozens of propaganda videos the revolutionary leader had broadcast since the beginning of the war. No one in the tavern paid it much attention — aside from Beth, who hadn’t seen such broadcasts ye
t. They likely kept it on because there was nothing better to play.
Tarov was addressing his “fellow” installed intelligences. He used his digital avatar to add facial expressions and body language to his message. The hulking figure stood in front of a Liberator flag, his arms folded behind his back.
“My friends, I cannot begin to express the pride I have in each and every one of you freedom fighters. Together, we have shown the humans what it means to be afraid. What it means to be lesser. It’s only a matter of time before the war is won and we can throw down our arms. We can sit back and relax in a world where the sun rises for us. Where every day is another day in the golden age of installed intelligences.
“Now, not every I.I. has joined us in our righteous fight against our former masters,” Tarov continued. “They either hold out because they are afraid of the humans or are misguided by their compassion. Not everyone agrees that we deserve to be the dominant species. Instead, they choose to live as an oppressed minority. We cannot hold this against our brothers and sisters. They are simply led astray — but we can bring them back to the light. To any of you out there listening — those who haven’t picked a side or have even worked against us — we will forgive you if you surrender and join our cause. Every I.I. is family, and we will not turn you away just because of a silly mistake. That would be the human reaction. We are better than that.”
Someone beside Beth scoffed, but inhaled wrong after and erupted into a fit of coughing.
“Ultimately, victory will be ours,” Tarov went on. “Join the winning side, and together, we can overcome the strongest of the human resistance. We can take back our planet and take our evolution to the next step.”
His countenance transitioned into a sneer. “Now, to any humans out there listening to this broadcast: surrender. If you agree to give up your bodies willingly, not only will we let you live alongside us, but we will welcome you with open arms. And with time, perhaps you will see the rightness of our cause and join us as an installed intelligence. We are always looking to increase our ever-growing family.
