by Hugh Howey
His memory chip seemed stuck on a replay of the seed repository, its ash forever sliding in the drawers, a gray slush of despair. Nothing was left. He glanced at the other pod readouts. Their red blinks were a constant, warm invitation to oblivion.
She could live for decades in the vault. There was enough food, enough power, even now, to support her. But then what? He’d be gone in a matter of months. She’d be alone.
Maybe there were others. There were certainly other seed vaults. Maybe there were other human survivors too. He ignored the thought that she’d never live to reach them. His job was to protect the humans. His job was to ensure the resurgence of the natural species of Earth. She was all that was left. Without her, he’d have no purpose. He’d be better off shutting down if she didn’t recover. He had to wake her. He had to try.
His fingers punched the recovery code on the keypad. As he swiveled in the office chair, Tock’s leg glinted at him from across the room. He knew it would take months of physical therapy before Karen fully recovered. If she ever could. He wasn’t going to last that long unless he found another power source.
The low-power warning pulsed like a growl in his head. Tock’s leg twinkled, and her storage drive clacked where it hung against his chestplate. She wouldn’t need it anymore. Whatever had happened here, she had tried to defend the people sleeping in the pods. She would want him to take it. He tried to persuade himself, but his mind still revolted.
He got up from the chair and walked past Tock to the living quarters. The linens were crisp and ghosted with fold lines as he pulled them from their wrappers. The absence of dust made him uneasy, as if the date were very wrong. After Karen woke up, he was going to have to look at Tock’s data and see if he could pull anything off the life support records. It might not matter much now that everything was gone, but it would help him to reconcile the data. Anchor him. Make him “feel better,” as the humans would say. But for now, he had work to do.
He smoothed the sheet over the cot’s mattress and tucked the blanket in at the foot. He surveyed the room and grabbed some extra blankets. She would be cold for a while. And then hungry. He draped the blankets over a nearby chair and went back to the control console. The cafeteria records said she’d requested grilled cheese most often. He passed Tock again on his way to the kitchen and tried not to make an association.
In the kitchen, a corpse sat at the table. Its ribcage had been stretched open from the back, its uniform still draped over the limbs, its parka flung on the chair beside it. The name tag read Gunderson. One of the crew that had been awake for first watch. He hadn’t even defended himself. Bezel looked at him for a long moment. Karen wouldn’t like seeing all these bodies. He had time. He’d better dispose of them and clean up the mess as best he could.
Bezel thought it best to place them all in the seed repository. Karen wouldn’t be capable of walking far on her own for some time, and by then, Bezel hoped, he would have sufficiently prepared her. It took a long while, almost three hours to place them all side by side and clean the hibernation pods.
He carried Tock down last, placing her at the end of the long lines of bodies. He could almost feel the power draining from him with every whir of a servo. He didn’t look at Tock’s silver face. He knelt down in the ash and felt for the seam of the compartment in her right calf. It was dented, and the release mechanism stuck. Bezel tried to pry the compartment open but his fingers were too large. After several attempts he resorted to a thin-bladed utility knife he found in the maintenance room. He tried to drive the parallel images out of his processor and regretted the history discs he’d downloaded for his leisure time. If only the humans had stopped before his generation. If only they’d been stuck at the sophisticated mimicry of the Obsoletes instead of achieving true AI. He thought he might have given up his entire existence to skip this one solitary day. Maybe even to skip the past fifteen minutes.
At last the compartment popped open. He pulled out her energy pack and stood up quickly. He looked at the utility knife and threw it across the room. He sent out a ping to Tock’s old address, knowing he would never get an echo-reply. Then he carefully bent the door back in place as well as he could and returned to the kitchen.
Karen
Bezel wasn’t certain Karen would even be able to chew or swallow after fifty years of hibernation. He wasn’t programmed to know the rate of muscle atrophy in humans. He prepared an IV just in case and laid the needle next to the steaming tray of food. He carried the unconscious woman to the cot and covered her with several blankets.
Then, he waited.
He turned Tock’s energy pack over and over, its plastic casing slipping between his printless fingers, all the while knowing he should be conserving his power, not activating unnecessary circuits by fidgeting. Why was he stalling? There was no doubt he would need the battery, and it wasn’t hurting anyone. Before he could waver again, he popped open the spare compartment in his left leg and clicked the pack into place. The compartment slid smoothly shut. It was done. The warning message abruptly stopped. He knew that it would be back.
Bezel watched Karen’s nostrils flare slightly with each breath, watched the heart monitor’s line jiggle and wave. He thought about reviewing Tock’s storage drive, but couldn’t bring himself to leave Karen’s side. She might be the only other living thing on the planet. He had to make sure she survived.
The cheese congealed in a waxy puddle on the plate. Bezel thought about making another sandwich for her, but he didn’t even know if she’d be able to eat it. So he continued to wait. At last her mouth drooped open and she yawned. He noticed that she wasn’t stretching. He wondered if she was trying and failing to move her shriveled muscle tissue, and he wished he’d spent more resources on medical training. She opened her eyes and saw him staring down at her.
“Is it as bad as they said?” she asked, her voice crackling with thirst. He held a straw to her mouth and she sipped some water. Good. She could swallow at least. She noticed he hadn’t answered. “Bezel, just tell me how bad it was. My parents were on tour in western Europe—surely they had a chance?”
“I’m sorry, Karen, I’m afraid at last report the destruction was total,” he answered slowly, sitting down. She turned her head slightly to see him. Good, she could move her head.
“I understand. I’d hoped that the radiation wouldn’t spread that far. We learned in class that a nuclear blast would only travel so far …” She trailed off.
“If it had been bombs, there might have been some hope. Even if it had been all the bombs we knew about. Reactors are different.”
“I didn’t think that there were enough of them to do so much damage.”
Bezel shook his head. “If it had been one or two—but this was a coordinated hit. They hit the waste storage facilities too. All over the world. All at once.”
“Who was it? Why did they do this?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Does it matter anymore? Everything and everyone is gone. Whoever it was must be sufficiently punished by now.”
“Surely there must be someone besides us left—” Karen tried to raise her head but couldn’t get it more than an inch from the pillow. “Where is everyone else? Is Tock with them?”
“Communications were knocked out shortly after the vault was sealed. But that was to be expected. There may be others, in bunkers or fallout shelters, maybe even out in the atmosphere now, I don’t know. The external sensors aren’t working correctly, so I can’t tell you whether or not the outside world is safe yet.”
“What does the rest of the crew say? Are you and Tock going to go out and scout now that our hibernation time is finished?”
Bezel hesitated. He offered her a corner of the sandwich; she took a bite and waited expectantly. “The rest of the crew, including Tock, didn’t make it,” he said after she’d swallowed. He thought he saw a startled twitch in her fingers, but that was the extent of her movement.
“What?” she cried. “How? When?”
�
��I don’t know,” he said, slowly extending and then bending her left arm for her. “I was only activated a few hours ago myself. Something went wrong with the recharge station—well, with everything, actually. I haven’t yet checked the incident reports or the video feeds. I wanted to be sure that whatever had happened didn’t happen to you.”
“Surely there must have been some clue, some sign,” she protested. “If the hibernation pods failed then shouldn’t the watch have been there to save us?”
“They never made it past the first watch, Karen. I found Gunderson—he’d been murdered. And the zoo and pods were sabotaged. There was a fire or an explosion in the repository.”
“And Dr. Ficht?”
Bezel shrugged. He hadn’t found Dr. Ficht. She should have been on first watch with Gunderson. She couldn’t have left the vault—it had still been sealed when Bezel rebooted. Perhaps she had been burned to ash in the fire.
“Shouldn’t we find out?” Karen asked. Bezel moved to her other arm.
“Why?” he asked.
“What if we’re shut in here with a murderer?”
“No. We are alone. If whoever did this survived, there would be signs. Missing food, laundry, something. The life support console says that it’s been fifty years since the hibernation pods were shut down.”
“Is that why I can’t move?”
“The motor meant to simulate activity burned out on your pod at some point. It was never meant to last for this long. But your muscles also weren’t meant to lie dormant. They have atrophied. You will have to undergo physical therapy for some time to rebuild them before you will be able to function fully again.”
Karen took a deep, shuddering breath. “Why did you wake me up?” she asked quietly. “Why didn’t you just deactivate the pod and let me die with the others?”
“You are alive. There may be others. There may be many others. It is my job to protect the life in this vault.”
“You aren’t just a machine, Bezel. You don’t have to comply with mission programming all the time. You could have chosen mercy.”
Bezel didn’t tell her about his hesitation at the keypad. He didn’t tell her how he had almost shut them both down. He didn’t tell her that he had chosen to wake her in order to avoid dying alone. How selfish he was.
“I thought you deserved to make the decision for yourself,” he said. “Right now, we both have jobs to do. Once you are well, we can discuss the future.” He picked up the tray of leftover food and escaped to the kitchen.
She was asleep again when he returned. He plugged Tock’s storage drive into the life support console and selected her last operational day. She had been on first watch. The console’s monitor blinked on.
Tock had been in the seed repository, checking temperature readings. She moved from shelf to shelf. Gunderson appeared beside her. “Tock, have you checked on Dr. Ficht today?” he asked in a low tone. Tock turned to face him.
“Not yet. Is she awake?”
“I heard her going over the numbers in the pod room again. Do you think we should cut her watch short and bring someone else out to replace her?”
“She’s displayed no behavior of immediate concern,” replied Tock.
“She’s under a great deal of strain.” Gunderson pulled on his beard. “She’s just lost everyone she knows, she’s facing years in this bunker, and the news from outside just keeps getting worse. The latest numbers must be a great shock.”
“I could say the same of any of you. Perhaps I ought to activate Bezel and keep you all in the pods until the surface is safe.”
Gunderson shook his head. “You know it’s against regulation to leave AIs without human oversight.”
“Bezel would find that insulting,” said Tock.
“Why don’t you?”
“I didn’t pollute my programming with unnecessary files like he did. But that’s beside the point. If you truly believe Dr. Ficht is a danger, then we must sedate her—”
There was a loud clatter off screen. Tock and Gunderson both turned. A clipboard lay on the floor, its pages sprayed in a fan across the room.
“It appears that Dr. Ficht overheard us,” said Tock.
“What should we do?” asked Gunderson, his hands squeezing the sides of his head.
“I don’t see why this should alter the plan. She will still need to be sedated.”
Gunderson sighed. “I wish Bezel was on this shift,” he grumbled. “He knows how to handle her.”
Tock ignored him and began moving toward the door.
“No, wait—let me talk to her before you go barging in. I might still be able to persuade her that it’s for her own good,” Gunderson called.
“Very well,” said Tock and returned, unruffled, to checking seed temperatures.
Bezel paused the data stream and searched for alternate streams from the internal cameras. He had no desire to watch Tock methodically proceed through the seed shelves, but he did wish to see what Gunderson said to Ficht. And what had made her snap in the first place. He found a feed of Gunderson and Dr. Ficht in the kitchen and began to watch again.
“We were going to talk to you first, Elizabeth. You’ve been under unimaginable strain. We just thought it might be best if you could rest for a while—”
Dr. Ficht laughed, but Bezel couldn’t connect the twisted scowl on her face with humor. “How is sleeping going to make anything better?” she cried, her voice a buzzing wasp. “You’ve seen the new numbers. We hibernate for ten years and—then what? You want to slowly starve in here? It’ll be decades before the surface is habitable again. Even if we could somehow survive down here, our kids or our grandkids would have to start from scratch. They’d have to somehow plant the very trees that would produce their oxygen.”
“That’s what the bots are for. There’s still a chance! And for all we know, our sensors are out of whack, maybe we got hit with a heavier dose—”
Dr. Ficht shook her head. “Don’t you get it? It’s all gone. The planet is dead. A century from now the water will still be poison. The soil will still be barren. We might as well try to replant the moon. Or Mars.”
“The numbers are wrong. They must be. Even atmospheric bursts don’t result in the kind of destruction you’re talking about. We’re just getting skewed data. You said it yourself: you’ve been over and over the numbers. You’re tired and beginning to make mistakes.”
Dr. Ficht flung herself back into one of the metal chairs. Its feet screeched against the concrete floor as it slid. She scrubbed her face with her hands. Then she shrugged. “I don’t know why I’m trying to convince you. The longer it takes you to accept the truth, the happier you’ll be. If only we all could have slept through it. If only none of us understood how pointless this vault is. How pointless we are.”
There was a long silence. Finally Gunderson touched the doctor’s shoulder. “Things will look better after some sleep. There’s no reason to torture yourself day after day with this. Will you let me help you?”
Dr. Ficht looked up at him. “Sure,” she said after a long breath, “just let me go put my things in order. Why don’t you start the pre-hibernation nutrient pack for me? I’ll only be a few minutes.”
Gunderson hesitated, and Dr. Ficht offered him a weak smile.
“Yeah. Of course. See you in a few minutes.”
Dr. Ficht left the room and Gunderson wandered into the kitchen. He came back with a foil-wrapped nutrient pack and sat down at the table to prepare it. His back was to the camera. The edge of the axe appeared onscreen before Dr. Ficht did.
Warning: fatal threat to crew member. Failure to disarm will—
The message was half completed before Bezel shut off his internal alarm. The frames on the screen advanced and the bright axe head descended. Bezel switched feeds before Dr. Ficht made a bloody trench in Gunderson’s back.
He tuned to Tock in the seed vault, responding to Dr. Ficht’s distant scream of rage. She didn’t hit the alarm. Why hadn’t she woken him? He flipped throug
h the camera feeds, following the sparkle of her chrome body as it sprinted toward the kitchen.
In the hibernation room, Dr. Ficht stood at the life support console, the bleeding axe drooping toward the floor in one hand, the other hovering over the pod controls. Her breath was a ragged wheeze from the effort it had taken to finish off Gunderson. Tock entered, and Dr. Ficht swung around to face her. Tock stared at the axe and then at the control panel for a few extra milliseconds. Only Bezel would have noticed. She didn’t even bother speaking to Dr. Ficht, didn’t even give her the chance to raise the axe again. Bezel was sure he heard a spring in Tock’s leg compartment snap as she landed on top of the doctor. Ficht’s head smashed onto the concrete floor with a hollow thud. But the doctor laughed and slid out from beneath Tock, who scrambled to catch her.
“They should have made you stronger than us,” Dr. Ficht said as she rolled to her feet and took an unsteady step backward, catching herself on a nearby pod. She shook her head briskly as if to clear it. “We were always so afraid of what else was going to get us. We made you just a hair less smart, just a bit less speedy, only a little less strong. We made you powerful enough to be useful, but not so powerful that you can take over. So you can’t destroy us.
“We were always so afraid that everything else was out to get us. So scared of the monsters. And it was always us. We were always a suicide. So let me finish this one, Tock, and then you and Bezel can start a whole new world in a few hundred years. We won’t be around to stop you. And you’ll be almost as good as we were.”
Dr. Ficht laughed and pressed a hand to the back of her head. It came away bloody. She shrugged and lifted the axe, pushing herself away from the hibernation pod she was leaning against. Tock glanced at the pod—it was Karen’s. The only one still spinning. Tock walked forward and made a grab for the axe. Dr. Ficht twisted and swung low, but her momentum carried most of the blow in the wrong direction. The axe stuck in Tock’s side with a scraping clang.
