by Vern Buzarde
No, he willed the thought from his mind. The math was clear. It had been pounded into him on a daily basis by the Pterodactyl. But he couldn’t let himself believe he might have just ended the world.
Stijn was about to scream for help, but then he remembered the whole facility was mostly empty. There was a security alarm somewhere, but he couldn’t remember where. He was beginning to see movement in the container with his naked eyes—the numbers now had to be in the billions. He tried to calculate how much time it would take before the bots filled the room but was too frazzled to come up with an estimate. His legs felt like they’d been filled with concrete. His heart pounded like a jackhammer as the reality sank in.
In the monitor, Stijn saw Dora Hahn in the hallway at the main entrance. She was back early, not scheduled to return until the next day. He felt both relief and panic. Relief that she might be able to help him control the situation. Panic because he was about to be busted. If the whole world didn’t end first, he would certainly be fired. Or, knowing Dora, skinned alive, crucified. He tried to think of a way he might be able to blame it on her. Deny everything. That’s what his father always taught him. Never accept responsibility. Deny! Deny! De—
Dora came in and scanned the room. “Where the hell is everyone?” she barked. Stijn didn’t bother answering, thinking she probably didn’t realize it was Sunday and that the others had left before noon. Left on this Sunday, possibly their last on Earth.
Dora headed toward her workstation, then stopped. “What are you doing, Stijn?”
“Dora, uh, Dr. Hahn. There’s something happening that… well, I can’t— I don’t quite understand, but perhaps you could take a—”
Dora joined him and saw immediately something was wrong. She glared at him, and he wondered if she might not just pull the ax next to the fire extinguisher off the wall and bury it in his skull. “What the fuck are you doing, you ignorant weasel? You’re messing with the timing sequences. Tell me you haven’t—”
Stijn removed his glasses and nervously wiped his forehead with his hand. “Dr. Hahn, I realize the restrictions in the project’s statement of requirements specified—”
“Don’t give me your fucking excuses! I made it clear enough for even a simpleton like you to understand. We are in no way pursuing any mechanism that makes these bots self-replicating. End of story. Do you have any idea what could hap— My God! Tell me you didn’t—”
“Dora,” he stammered. He wanted to run away. “It’s not my fault. I was just trying to—”
Before he could finish, Dora’s face twisted in horror as she watched gooey metallic slime drip down the edge of the container.
“You fucking idiot! What have you done?”
14
Tess felt the familiar slap of humidity across her face when she exited the United Continental flight from Montrose, Colorado into Terminal C of the George H. Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. Walking through the concourse, she turned on her cell phone, glanced at the screen, and scrolled through the twenty-seven texts she’d received during the two-hour flight.
She was downloading her email when the phone rang. It was a NASA area code and prefix, something she found odd. She didn’t answer. The caller left a voicemail, one more added to the dozens already there. They would all have to wait. Focus was necessary, no room for distractions. Tess was entering another world now, one she’d tucked away. A box that now had to be opened, the consequences unknown and unpredictable.
She picked up a Toyota Camry at Hertz and made her way downtown to the Hotel Icon on Travis. Driving south on Interstate 45, she passed the familiar congested strip malls and forests of billboards, a stark contrast to the pristine Colorado mountains she’d grown to love. It was after eight p.m., so rush-hour traffic had mostly cleared, allowing for an easy trip that took less than forty-five minutes. Being in Houston was disorienting, and she had the strange sensation she’d never left. Everything looked and felt the same.
Tess checked into the Icon, plopped her bag on the luggage rack, and took inventory of the mini-bar, counting the undersized Smirnoff bottles in the tiny fridge. There were four, not nearly enough.
No problem, she thought. She had an unopened fifth in her bag, which she set on the small table. She had no intention of drinking at the hotel bar. There was no point in dealing with strangers, some needing to fill the lonely void of being on the road, others looking for more. She had zero interest.
Tess would drink alone tonight. She had anticipated her dark odyssey of grief might require fortification, not sure what to expect from closing out her previous life. She had come for a funeral. Theirs. Tess had acknowledged it was time to let go. But she needed to formalize it. Perform some final ritual.
She drew the curtains and looked out the window and nearly panicked. She had requested a room facing Travis Street, across from their old loft. She was facing the wrong direction, toward the baseball stadium. That wasn’t going to work. She had to see the place where they had lived together. The loft was the first and only property they had purchased together.
Ten minutes later, she was eye to eye with their former home, across the street on the fifth floor. The dark windows of the loft reflected the lights of the traffic and the bars below. Memories of some of the happier times there played like old 16mm film clips. Good memories that seemed so naïve in hindsight. She wanted to shout at her former self. Warn her to do something, anything to avoid what was to come.
Tess still owned the loft. Satoshi had offered to buy it at a significant premium, but she couldn’t bring herself to sell. As far as she knew, everything was exactly as she had left it. The full-time porter checked it once a week, and she continued to pay the mortgage, utilities, and association fees. The place was almost completely self-contained. Like she was now. She had no desire to step foot in it. Instead, she stared at the dark windows that reminded her now of the last glimpse of him in a wall-sized window into space.
Tess tried to muster the will to open the bottle of vodka. She sat on the bed, retracing the two-year journey, wondering how she’d survived it and not completely sure she had. Even though she’d intended to make it a celebration of sorts, she just couldn’t muster the desire to go through with the drinking part. She decided it would be like showing up drunk at a gravesite. Understandable, maybe, but ultimately selfish.
By 11:15, Tess was horizontal on the bed, still dressed, having achieved the familiar half sleep she’d come to expect. By 3:15, she was wide awake, nearly panicking about what came next. But the thing she had avoided for so long had to be confronted. She got up, dressed, laced up her running shoes, and headed to the car. The trip to Memorial Park took less than ten minutes.
The only illumination in the park emanated from dim streetlights. She took a minute to let it all wash over her. She had thought about this moment too many times, wondering how she would respond emotionally. And here she was, holding the last piece of what had been them. A place understood only by the two wandering spirits they had become. But there was a strange disconnect, as if she’d been gone for twenty years instead of two. The place she knew before was gone.
Tess closed her eyes in a last effort to prepare. She bowed her head and placed a hand on her forehead. Tears welled up but she held them back. The time had come to close the circle.
More than anywhere else, she had avoided this park, a place so personal and part of them. But on this, the second anniversary of Ryan’s death, returning was necessary in the process of continuing with her life. In order to truly honor him, by not letting his loss destroy her, facing this place was a crucial step in the mourning process. She was finally ready to lay bare her emotions, even though it scared her.
This was our place. At 3:57 a.m., there wouldn’t be many witnesses if she did break down. The new sports bra was more than disappointing. In fact, it truly sucks.
The chafing on her left side was getting worse with ever
y stride—almost from the start, in this, the first in the six-mile homage to the deceased entity they had been. The phone holster was supposedly designed to be out of the way, but subjected to an actual field test, it jerked and bounced like a sprung bobblehead. Poorly designed activewear just wasn’t something she could tolerate. Am I really supposed to? Especially now?
The park was quiet during this hour, which was technically morning but blacker than night. It was peaceful in a way never realized any other time, when herds of runners and walkers of every imaginable construct stampeded through the clogged path like spooked cattle in a lightning storm. Although mostly empty now, the park hadn’t changed much. Some trees had been removed, others had grown. The track had been resurfaced, which meant a new layer of dirt. Dirt covering his DNA-filled sweat. It was grave-like, appropriate.
Two years. The Tess who last ran here was gone now. Died the same second he did. She wanted to feel one more time anything that was left, keep as much as possible of what they’d had before it all began to fade.
No, Ryan, I won’t stop. His final image continued to repeat in her mind, and she thought once again about the fact that those last words were spoken seven minutes before she heard them that day, layering everything with an added nuance of emotional complexity, as if even that moment had somehow been exploited by fate. It wasn’t consistent with the natural order of things, therefore couldn’t be resolved by nature’s intended mourning process.
Small details surfaced in her mind. The way he smelled. The way he snored. The total infatuation their beloved dog, Bruce, displayed every time he entered the room.
Bruce. She’d heard Ryan crying in the shower after the dog had to be put down, the only time he’d tried to hide anything from her.
She missed the heat, the warmth of his body. So warm she sometimes had to kick her covers off in the middle of the night. He wasn’t perfect. He could be moody and introspective. His temper sometimes flared unexpectedly. But those things were infrequent. It made him more human. Honest, real. The most human human being she’d ever known.
I will never stop.
The time they spent together here at the park was the anchor, the source of their spiritual bond and another example of their uncanny compatibility. Here, they were close in a different way. Here, they ran through the suffocating heat of summer and the frigid winter cold, together. Each run strengthening an unbreakable bond.
Gliding over the same track they had shared so many times, she felt closer to him than she had since that day. After Ryan’s death, running had saved her life, offering the only relief she could find and the perfect counterbalance to her inclination to numb herself with vodka. Maintaining sanity was impossible without it, even though there was a physical toll to pay. But not here. Coming here without him had seemed a betrayal. Until now.
Tess thought runners were no different than high-functioning alcoholics, both willing to endure personal pain and damage in order to get their fix regardless of the consequences. Runners often found themselves limp-skipping, ligaments torn, pulled muscles, popping knees and crumbling cartilage crackling like static.
It was what she had come here for. The pain, the sweat, the pounding of her heart. They would make her stronger. The pre-dawn air was a steamy blanket wrapped like a wet straitjacket.
This was our place. She could feel him. This was his graveyard, their funeral. There was no other place with anything left of him.
No casket buried under profound, elegant words carefully etched onto a granite gravestone. No tasteful urn sitting on a mantel, demanding attention and reverence. No sacred ground with anything of him to place flowers, pull the weeds, brush the leaves and contemplate the past or what might have been. The only physical part of him left on earth was here, in this soil. His only grave. She felt him close.
Her legs were heavier now, yet more powerful. This was her purge. She was running through flames, incinerating everything hiding her pain, cauterizing the gaping wound. Two years.
This was what she’d waited for. Boil away the pain, melt the nerves, and burn the dark, disturbing dreams. The Essex… the Essex, Prajna, the petty demands and emotional deficiencies of the team, a seemingly infinite number of lines of code. All reduced to nothingness.
Her ponytail was damp, slapping her neck like a cable. She was in the zone, had the rhythm. That’s it, turn it all the way up now. Bring it. Bring on the misery. Make it count!
Ryan used to read comic books in bed, wondering why all the villains seemed so happy. Who else would think of something like that?
And she was pounding. Firing on all cylinders now. Past the four-mile mark, she sensed an emotional door close.
Tess began to cry. A dam inside was breaking, a flood of energy and emotion. Would we have had children? She asked herself almost every day. At one of her lowest points, she even named them. Half a mile to go. So this is what it feels like to say goodbye. The tears, the sweat, the rhythmic sound of her feet, closing the circle for this lifetime. Goodbye!
She felt like she was floating. Dawn came, starting with light too weak to reflect off the trees, more like the brackish water of a marsh, everything brushed in a thousand monochrome shades. She was nearly at the end, wondering what would become of her, not sure if she’d been reborn or died. Or both.
Her endorphins surged, something familiar but impossible to capture in a memory. Her brain hummed with a runner’s high, and she was crying again, healthy crying that felt good. The thing was nearly done. She would move forward. There was a future for her. One without him.
Part 3
Sentience
15
Dora tore a ten-pound Uline fire extinguisher off the wall, yanked the safety pin, and squeezed the trigger like she was choking a rattlesnake. The thrust from the blast caused the nozzle to rise, spraying white powder above the work table. She forced it down, coating everything in a blizzard of chemicals designed to suck the life out of anything that required oxygen.
“Yes!” Stijn shouted. “The CO2 might stop them. Brilliant, Dr. Hahn!”
She didn’t answer. The room filled with a dense white cloud, blinding them both and making breathing difficult. When the extinguisher’s pressure waned, she dropped it on the floor. The hollow, low-pitched clanging echoed through the room. They waited for the fog to settle.
The air around the work table began to clear, revealing an eerie white grave, the microscope a crumbled tombstone. They watched and waited in a too-still silence. Nothing moved. Dora pulled out her phone, then held it, waiting for verification the bots were dead.
The white powder dulled, taking on a silver tint that darkened into a metallic gray.
“No!” Dora exclaimed.
Stijn ran to the laptop and typed frantically. The CO2 residue made the keys difficult to make out. The program manipulated the hybrids’ ability to process light, the mechanism by which he had been temporarily able to control them. He tried decreasing the life-cycle numbers. The values were rejected. He attempted to turn off the replicators. None of the commands worked. The bots were not responding. Something had overridden the programming, deleting the control parameters.
Dora shoved him aside and screamed, “Where’s the original file? There must be an uncorrupted version. Where did you hide it?”
Stijn realized she was right. Maybe he could load the original program, reinitialize, and stop them, at least temporarily. But his secrets would be exposed. All the brilliant work he’d done. The unlimited opportunities were still within his grasp.
“We’re running out of time, you stupid asshole!” Dora shouted again. “Where’s the file?”
Stijn moved in and began typing with shaky hands. When the file opened, he reinitialized and waited. The progress bar moved at a snail’s pace. Twelve seconds later, it was done. He replaced the values, resetting the replication rate to zero and the destruct sequence to thirty seconds, the minimum. S
tijn held his breath, watching the thick mass ooze toward the edge of the desk as if eager to escape its confined world. Stijn and Dora waited. Just as it reached the end, ready to spill over and onto the floor, it stalled.
The goo seemed to stabilize. The gouged laminate of the desk was covered in dry metallic flakes. The original canister and the base of the microscope were gone.
Stijn wanted to high-five Dora, and he offered an awkward, clammy hand. She dismissed him as if he were a bug. It didn’t matter. He felt like a god again, holding mankind’s fate in his hands. He was the creator and the destroyer, a fitting role for someone of his dedication and intellect.
After four minutes, the mass had shrunk by half. Although elated at having saved the world and disregarding the fact he’d almost ended it, Stijn’s mind turned to how he might salvage his entrepreneurial ambitions. He’d have to think fast. The Pterodactyl would definitely be in killing mode, and the carnage would be brutal. She knew everything. There would be little left of his reputation or future prospects if he allowed things to run their natural course. His window of opportunity was almost closed.
Dora picked up the phone. “Connect me with security.”
Stijn set the self-destruct number to zero. He had no idea how the program had been corrupted but would have to figure that out later. Maybe it was just a glitch. If he was going to salvage his creation, there would be only one chance. He heard Dora asking for Garrett Oakley. He thought of the yacht. The life he could live…like a king. This was it. The opportunity that would never come again.
There was no other alternative.
Stijn came up behind Dora, raising the empty fire extinguisher over her head. Dora sensed movement and turned just as Stijn slammed it down. She leapt back, dropping the phone, but didn’t move far enough. The bottom edge of the extinguisher grazed her forehead, opening a gash that oozed blood that matched the amber canister.
