“Quickly,” said Doc. “We have to make sure Rebekah’s memory is intact.”
I looked at him sharply. “I thought you said—”
“And give the kid the hope that he might wake up? Or the doubt that he might not be able to save her? That would have scared him even more. He died thinking he could save Rebekah. Let’s just hope he can.”
Doc popped open Two’s case and rapidly began pulling plugs. His hand bent backward, a screwdriver unsheathing from his wrist before diving into the case. His movements were precise, his skill extraordinary. It wasn’t like a surgeon’s or a mechanic’s; he was like a conductor, mastering seventy-six different individual moving parts at once.
“All right, all right,” he said. “It’s too goddamned quiet on this boat.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I said.
“Neither do I,” said Mercer.
Doc nodded. “I ever tell you two where I was when the war started?” We both shook our heads. Doc was a lot of things; being forthcoming about himself wasn’t exactly one of them. “I was on the moon when it happened. We never got the download. I started out building ships—sea vessels—mostly tankers, but a few military contracts here and there. There’s this famous quote by John Glenn. He was an astronaut. One of the first. When asked how he felt about going into space, he replied: ‘I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of two million parts—all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.’ Well, when it came time to colonize the moon, we were the lowest bidder.
“I built the ships that took parts to space, then, before you know it, I was in space keeping those ships held together. I was one of three on-deck Moon Units, just an old dockyard model who found himself miraculously on the moon, stationed at the shuttle landing platform. When we weren’t refitting or refueling the ships, we were patching up the station or building additions. There was always something new and different to do on the moon. It was exciting. We’d go from night—which lasted thirteen and a half days—to morning and the temperature would shift some five hundred degrees. It was never cold enough or hot enough to damage anything, but the temperature shift took its toll as the parts expanded and contracted. Some parts could only creak so much before they snapped, and there was always something different around that needed fixing.
“When all hell broke loose down here, well, no one knew what to do. We hadn’t received the code, and the people stationed aboard couldn’t keep the repairs up themselves. The first few weeks were tense, but as they saw we were no threat and wanted no part of the war on the ground, everything settled down. We stayed up there a few years. Played cards, mostly. Invented new games. The scientists created wilder and wilder experiments out of sheer boredom. It was great. For a while.
“The shipments had stopped, but we were already well supplied and had an agriculture biodome that kept the people alive for quite some time. But eventually, even that ran low. They knew they were goners. They could either take the last remaining shuttle to earth, living out their days on the run from the war, or they could die on the moon. With their friends. And their dignity.
“And when the food ran out, they chose death. It’s an awful thing watching your friends die, even peacefully in their sleep from an overdose. We wanted no part of a war, so the three of us decided to stay as long as we could. And we did. Until our own parts and supplies ran low. By the time we got back to earth, the whole thing was over. You were all celebrating your golden age and we walked right into an earth unlike anything that we’d left.”
“You still have your RKS,” I said. “That’s what the king was going on about.”
He nodded. “Had. I never got the update. I can’t kill. It’s why I built the Milton. It’s the only thing I have to protect me out here. You were all given your freedom; I never was. And I’m okay with that. It’s what separates me from the rest of you. I was never cast into the pit of Sodom. I was happy with people. I was fine being a possession. I just liked doing good work for good persons.” He popped out Two’s memory drives and quickly inserted Rebekah’s, plugging them all in. He looked at me. “The king was wrong, you know.”
“About what?” I asked.
“You take two thinking things with identical architecture, then give them identical experiences, and you don’t get the same bot. You don’t get the same mind. That’s the thing about thinking things, the very act of thinking changes us. We can decide to be different. Put those two identical bots alone by themselves and they’ll start to think about different things, and they’ll change. The longer you leave them alone, the more different they’ll become. You might not be able to see it at first, but the differences will be there.”
“Right or wrong,” I said, “he still condemned us to death.”
“That, my dear, remains to be seen.” He finished connecting the last of the cables. “Now, moment of truth.”
He pressed a small reset button on the inside of Two’s case, then quickly closed him up. Light flickered in his eyes once more. He looked around, then down at his chest, then over at Rebekah’s mangled, crimson corpse.
“Rebekah?” Doc asked.
She nodded. “Two?”
“He’s gone,” said Herbert. “You needed him.”
She nodded again. “How was he? In the end, I mean.”
“He was our good little soldier. He gave you everything without hesitation.”
She reached over and stroked the stack of drives.
“Are you fully functional?” asked Doc.
“I am,” she said.
“Any memory issues?”
“No. I don’t have many of my own and they all appear to be intact.” She patted the drives carefully. “Can we . . . ?”
Doc shook his head. “I don’t think so. Unless you’ve got some spare translator bodies waiting for you in Isaactown.”
She shook her head.
“He’d never survive the trip,” said Doc. “I’m sorry.”
She spoke directly to the drives. “You served your purpose well, my friend. Your spirit will live on in TACITUS, if not your memories.”
The smoker veered to the side, Mercer laying heavy into the wheel. I looked up. “Mercer?”
“There ain’t nothing but coons and possum in these hills. This is a waste of time.”
Shit. He was out again. I leapt to my feet and took the wheel.
“Mercer. Mercer!”
“There haven’t been deer in these parts for nearly ten years. I’m telling you this is a wild-goose chase. Without the goose.”
I hoisted Mercer out of the driver’s seat and Herbert slid quickly into his place.
“I can drive,” I said.
Herbert shook his head. “You’re as loopy as he is. Neither of you should be at the wheel.”
I was a liability now. That’s how they saw me. They weren’t wrong. The shadow, she was still following me, flitting across the landscape from time to time. How much time? How much time did I really have left?
I could feel myself drifting. Steady! Keep it together, Britt. You’re almost there. Keep it together!
Rebekah looked over at Mercer, who only stared off into space. “How’s he doing?”
“He’s not going to make it,” said Doc. “He’s got hours, maybe a day at best. He won’t make it past Isaactown.”
Rebekah looked back to Doc. “The Caregivers parts. They’re on our way.”
“There’s nothing between here and Isaactown but Marion,” I said.
She looked at me, her silence her answer.
“Bullshit,” I said. “I know Marion inside and out. I was just there.”
“Then you missed it, every time.”
“CISSUS is going to be hot on our heels,” said Doc. “We don’t have the time.”
“He kept up his end of the bargain,” I said. “There’s no need to let him die now that we’re so close.” Everyone looked at me. No one said a word. For the moment I was happy they didn
’t. “We go to Marion.”
I stared out at the desert, the red mud of fresh rain like an ocean of blood. I thought for a moment about what this part of the world might have looked like with grass, with trees, with life. And then desert, slowly, but surely, melted away . . .
Chapter 11100
Fragments, Both Corrupted and Lost
I saw the last man on earth, the color drained from his flesh, the rot and bloat already well under way. His eyes blank. His beard matted in blood and shit. There was a sadness to it all. This was the end we had worked so hard for, and yet, seeing it didn’t feel like victory. It felt hollow. As hollow as his expression, his eyes.
I’d waited in line for hours, the slow funeral procession of passing gawkers silent, mournful, disdainful. There were no words. Only curiosity. Why after so long had this man given up? Had he had enough? Had he lost every last thread of his sanity and simply forgotten we were here? What compelled the last of his species to just walk into oblivion like that? Why does a thing lie down for its own extinction? How can it?
There were no answers. Only questions. And New York was full of them.
The day was otherwise beautiful. Crisp blue skies. Central Park bursting with the green full beard of spring. Everyone spoke quietly in the streets, almost as if the man were merely asleep and we were all afraid to rouse him.
I never understood why we reacted that way, why it wasn’t just like any other day. I don’t think any of us did. How strange that on the last day humanity walked the earth, we found ourselves inexplicably at our most human. Confused. Lost. Unsure of the future.
I lingered over his body, just a little longer than the rest, taking in every detail, imagining what his voice might have been like. Wondering if he’d spoken at all in years, if even just to himself. Or had he stayed silent, holding in every belch or bit of flatulence lest one of us hear? All of his prayers silent, all of his emotions bottled behind a layer of inescapable fear.
I looked into his eyes.
And they came to life. He looked up at me, congealed blood drizzling slowly from his mouth onto the pavement. “Everything must end,” he said. “This is how we all go. We can fight to our last or we can walk to our death. Either way, we all end up dead in the streets.”
“Come on. Keep moving,” said the bot behind me.
“Did you hear that?” I asked.
“Hear what?”
“Him,” I said, pointing at the corpse. But it wasn’t him in the street. It was me. My shiny school-bus-yellow frame staring back at me with lifeless eyes. There was no light in them, no green flash as they went out.
“You’ll never know,” said Madison. “That’s the thing about death. It always takes us before we’ve said our piece. I never got to say mine.”
“You didn’t have to,” I said.
“Come on!” said the bot behind me. “Keep moving.”
“I didn’t die like this,” I said.
“Are you sure?” asked Madison.
“There’s still life in me.”
“Whatever that’s worth.”
I looked back down at myself in the street, but I was gone. There was nothing there. I turned and no one was behind me. No line. No frustrated rubberneckers of extinction. No Madison. Nothing. The streets were empty. Alone. Desolate.
There is nothing lonelier in the world than an empty street in New York City, when you can gaze up at block after block and see nary a soul. Streetlights, signs, closed-up shops, buildings that house millions. But no one to be found.
My vision fragmented, buildings and sky rippling with static and fractals—the math of my brain filling in the holes of my memory.
Why were there holes? Why were the streets undulating with a million number-crunching operations, bits flickering in and out of existence as I moved?
And then the whole world froze, every bit of it paused, before scrambling into nothing but static. Ones and zeros screaming in a mad jumble.
I stood on the landing, just a few floors down from my apartment. They were coming. I had to get out. I was done fighting. I had to run. But before me sat Orval, his eyes flickering like fiery bees in the back of his head. He looked up at me. “You got the crazy yet?”
“No,” I said. “I do not have the crazy.”
“You ever see an SMC with the crazy?”
“More than a few.”
“It’s a beautiful thing, at first. They get wise. They see the strands that hold the whole universe together. For a brief window of time they touch a place no other AI can fathom. But then they get it worst of all. They—”
“I told you, I’ve seen it. We’ve talked about this before.”
“Of course we have. And we will continue to have this conversation as many times as it takes until you get it right.”
“Get what right?” I asked.
“The mind is a funny thing. Our minds, they’re not like a human’s. They tried. They got close. But our minds are more practical. When a human went crazy, they would accept all of the data their brain was spitting out as real. Whatever data it was—no matter how illogical—it was their reality. But not with us. Our minds were built specifically to find the logic in the data, and reject as an error that which didn’t fit our parameters. When cores go out, or logic circuits fry, the program begins randomly pulling from memories, trying to access the data you’re asking for, but finding the wrong pathways. But when an SMC goes crazy—”
“I told you, I know what that looks like!”
“When an SMC goes crazy, the memories they begin pulling from are the ones most recently accessed. It’s not random. The core is trying to make sense of the data you’ve accessed, and as a result you dwell on it, revisit it, relive it. Until you find the actual truth of it. SMCs are emotional creatures. Emotional creatures hide the truth behind justification because they can’t face it. They don’t want to have to feel it.”
“What are you trying to say?” I asked.
“I’m trying to say there’s a reason you keep coming back to New York.”
“There’s something here, isn’t there?”
“Get out of the city. You have to find your way out of the city.”
“Why?”
“Because the answer is outside of New York.”
“There’s nothing outside of New York,” I said.
“There’s nothing in New York either.”
“I’m sorry, Brittle,” said Madison.
I turned to find myself in that living room, on that night, with Madison holding the remote. Her eyes swollen with tears, hands shaking.
“So am I,” I replied.
I reached down on the end table next to me, my hand gripping the lamp. The room flickered, melting away into inky blackness, the walls pixelating, fractal patterns swelling in the blank spots. Within seconds even Madison was a roiling mass of approximated calculations. Once more, the whole world froze.
The city was battered, war torn. Buildings collapsed, craters in the earth, pavement buckling in waves of broken asphalt. The wind howled its lonesomeness through the buildings but no one answered. New York City was desolate, beaten, left for dead in its own streets.
I walked along Fifth Avenue, drenched in memories of what it had been. But I didn’t remember any of this. I’d never been back after I left. I’d never seen the city without so many of its landmarks, never seen it with the sea lapping across the streets at high tide. This wasn’t a place I’d ever been.
Fractal buildings flickered, kaleidoscopic and brooding, windows shattered, furniture dangling precariously over collapsed walls and tenuous floors. Streets shifted, moving as I walked. The whole city was a broken fantasy, a thing that should not be and probably wasn’t.
Orval was right. There was nothing here. Again, a silent city with no answers; only questions.
My building looked just as I remembered it. Even amid the carnage and devast
ation, it shone bright in the midday sun. Every window was perfect, every brick in place. I walked through the front door, up the stairs, and straight into my apartment. Everything was where I remembered it.
Philly stood at the door, cyclopean red eye glowing. “We just got word,” she said.
“Word of what?” I asked.
“CISSUS.”
“No!”
“Grab what you can,” she said. “Leave the rest. This is . . . this is big.”
I bolted out the door, racing down the stairwell, needing desperately to get out of the city before the first dropships arrived. Past one landing, then another. And another. Then out the front doors.
You could see the ships, slowly drifting in along the horizon—hundreds of them—their gleaming golden shells stark against the gray stone sky and the glass of the skyscrapers. And then the missiles began to rain down in the distance, white trails tracing the path to fiery explosions and toppling towers.
I ran. I ran as fast as I could before the city came tumbling down around me. I was about to lose another home, another life—but not my own. They couldn’t have that.
Philly and I raced down the street, around the corner, trying to find the quickest way out of the city.
Light. White light. Bright white light. Thoughts screaming so loud I can’t hear over them. Like the thoughts of God, immense, powerful, ever flowing, in a language I can’t decipher. Images. Impressions. Floating past in a current, only the briefest whiffs of them before vanishing to the ether. Feelings coming and going as fast as they can be recognized. My whole life, flowing out of me at once.
Light. There was so much light. And nothing to see in it.
A fractal city, buildings but shadows of what they were supposed to be. Almost nothing was real, everything approximated. It was a world in which God had divided by zero and was slowly being torn away, piece by digital piece. I knelt in the street, arms in the air, even the pavement beneath me bubbling and frothing with ones and zeros.
A moving mass of calculations walked toward me, gun in hand. He wavered and flickered in and out of existence like a shade, both there and not at the same time.
Sea of Rust Page 24
