Abaddonian Dream

by M. K. Woollard

  “I only just got you out,” Eva said. “You should be on a shuttle by now. The danger isn’t over. I was serious when I said-”

  “I know,” Hammell said. “Eva, I know.”

  Her face became still on the tiny display hovering above his hand. “What do you know?” she asked quietly.

  “I know,” Hammell said, “how your story ended. The one you were telling me when I fell asleep.”

  Eva remained silent for several seconds. “Come to this location,” she said eventually, sending a map to his omni account. “Someone will bring you in.”

  Chapter 37

  The ride out into the countryside on the back of the pick-up truck felt long, but at least Hammell had time to consider his discovery. He stared up at the soupy sky thinking that none of it made sense, and yet at the same time all of it did. It can’t be true, his mind protested. “And yet it is,” he answered aloud.

  The car dropped him outside the mansion and he walked along the path and up the familiar steps, finding the huge front door already open. Nobody was waiting for him in the hall so he closed the heavy door behind him, glancing involuntarily over at the library, happy to see it empty. Eva was waiting for him in her rooms, standing at the mini bar beside the window, looking again like a vision; a darker one this time in a black dress.

  “Drink?” she asked without looking at him.

  “Only if it’s got whisky in it this time,” he said, feeling self-conscious about his squeaky voice.

  “What was it finally?” she asked.

  “The appendix,” he said as he watched her throw chunks of ice from her little machine into a pair of crystal tumblers. She poured him a big measure from a bottle before making herself a cocktail of some kind with a sprig of fresh mint poking from the top. Dodged a bullet there.

  “Ah,” Eva said as she glanced up at him for the first time. He watched her expectantly for a reaction to his new face, but was disappointed when he got nothing. “It wasn’t subtle,” she continued, “but I still wondered if you’d get that.”

  “An organ which does nothing,” he said. “Good name for it.”

  Eva brought over the glass. “Straight whisky.”

  “Ice makes it a cocktail.”

  Eva smiled but there was little humour in it. “I’m going to need you to spell it out for me, so I can be sure you’re not just fishing.”

  Hammell took a sip and felt the glorious coolness of the cold liquid followed by the warmth of the alcohol. Whisky really was the nectar of the gods, particularly at times like this. He took a deep breath.

  “It’s us,” he said. “I still can’t quite believe it but…”

  “Go on,” Eva prodded.

  “We’re andromorphs.”

  Eva nodded – and then shook her head. “No. Not all of us.”

  “The Red Hands,” he said. “The illegals.”

  “Bravo,” Eva said, giving him a little clap. “You might be slow, but you get there in the end.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Hammell asked, feeling his hand shaking. He took a big sip of whisky to try to steady his nerves.

  “Would you have believed me?”

  “No,” Hammell said. “But I might have started looking into it.”

  “I tried to tell you that we’re not all criminals,” Eva said. “That humans are just naturally more violent, more aggressive. The Red Hands, as you call them, are just an imperfect remnant of humans who’ve been pushed to extremes, chased around the globe, hunted and exterminated. They’re victims.”

  Hammell still couldn’t quite wrap his head around it. Everyone I’ve ever known…

  Eva saw his consternation. “Is it really such a surprise? Could Providence really be such a perfect deterrent as to reduce crime almost to nothing? What about war? Could humans really cure themselves of war?”

  “How?” Hammell asked as he began pacing up and down. “How could it happen without anybody being aware?”

  Eva shrugged. “Nobody knows now. It was lost in the revisionist history on the networks.”

  “And your books? What do they say?”

  Eva smiled. “Now you’re getting it. But it’s still not clear. Our best guess is that it happened after the war. Humans still won, but many more andromorphs must have survived than was known. Those early survivors probably didn’t pass on the knowledge of what they were to successive generations to help keep them safe. Then slowly, over generations, andromorphs somehow outcompeted humans.”

  “What about you?” Hammell asked. “You told me you’re an andromorph, but you’re a Red Hand.”

  “I told you I’m not a Red Hand,” Eva corrected him. “I’m something else.”

  “What?”

  She placed her drink on the table and sat down on the sofa, gesturing for him to join her. Hammell remained standing. He was too jittery to keep still.

  “Older models sometimes feel more comfortable around humans,” Eva went on. “We were designed for a more human world. Like me…” She stared at him hard. “Like you.”

  Hammell stopped. “Me?” he asked, and he realised that even now he wasn’t thinking of himself as artificial. After all the years he’d spent hating androids, to find out that he was one of them… It was like the ultimate cosmic joke. His brain just couldn’t process it. The cheap replacement implant was struggling in his head - he could practically hear the thing whirring and the right side of his head was getting worryingly warm. Too much thinking really is bad for you now, his mind told him and he laughed out loud. Eva looked up at him strangely and he gestured for her to go on, thinking, this is going to send me insane.

  “Newer models are less and less human-like,” Eva continued. “Don’t you feel out of place in the city? Don’t you feel a longing for the old days before everything became so… perfect?”

  Hammell nodded. “Yes… but…”

  “That’s why they’re getting rid of you,” Eva said, picking up her drink again. “Do you understand now? It was never Roy Brown sending the assassins.”

  “It wasn’t?” Hammell said, flabbergasted.

  Eva shook her head. “Think it through.”

  “Providence? Intergov? They want me dead, why? Because I’m... nostalgic?” He shook his head, bewildered. “Everyone wants to kill me, and for really unacceptable reasons.”

  “No,” Eva said. “Ettore had his reasons.”

  “Lack of knowledge,” Hammell huffed. “Is that any better?”

  “No, not that.”

  “The shipments?” Hammell asked. “We were only trying to stop a war.”

  “I know,” Eva said. “But there is no war. So what did you do?”

  “Destroyed stolen tech and heavy weapons. Is that so bad?”

  “You’re not thinking. Deliberately, I assume.” She leaned in towards him. “You took away the last chance for humans to defend themselves, and the last chance for them to escape in numbers.”

  “I… Wait, what?”

  “You’re not entirely responsible,” Eva said as she took a long sip. “I led you to the warehouse. Ettore wasn’t careful enough on the dock. We’re all to blame.”

  The image of boy at the power plant with his crying mother came back to him. Suddenly he needed to sit down. He placed his drink on the table and collapsed onto the sofa. “Ettore really did have a reason,” he said quietly.

  “As do the machines,” Eva said. “Though theirs is only marginally better than because you’re too nostalgic.”

  “I’m obsolete.”

  “Machine thinking,” Eva nodded. “You’re resistant to it because you were made to be like a human - including a survival instinct and the will to fight if your existence is threatened. Newer models don’t need assassins. They go willingly. They see the greater good.”

  Hammell nodded, understanding. “Like the space mirrors and the spouters.”

  “Sorry?”

  “It’s the fastest and most efficient way to cool the planet,” Hammell said as he looked over at the window
, “but an entire generation will die without having lived in the sunlight. Humans wouldn’t have done that. We wouldn’t have done it.”

  “No,” Eva said. “We wouldn’t.”

  Opening up the French windows, Eva stepped out onto the balcony to look up at the cloudy sky. Hammell followed after her and they stood side by side staring out at the distant city. It looked grey from here - grey cloud over grey buildings. And yet, up close, all of the new buildings were in fact a variety of colours, adhering to local borough standards; the north was predominantly blue, the east black and green, the west white or yellow, the south purple. Architects stayed as far away from grey as possible, as a rule. But all of that glass reflected the sky, and that was what it was.

  “Are you ok?” she asked after a time.

  He shook his head uncertainly. All this time, to have been so wrong about everything… to have been fighting on the wrong side… to be… what I am… “It’s a lot to take in,” he whispered.

  “You see now why I couldn’t just tell you,” Eva said. “It’s just too big.”

  He nodded, knowing she was right – he’d had to figure it out for himself, or else his brain would have rebelled and he would never have accepted it. Even now he was struggling, unable to really believe it even though he knew it was true.

  “There is no war,” he said, “and yet you were bringing in weapons. There is no war, and yet I.T.F. is coming. There is no war… because it’s an extermination.”

  “Yes,” Eva said.

  “But they don’t know,” Hammell said, looking out at the city. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

  Eva smiled. “No,” she said. “They don’t.”

  Chapter 38

  The next week was the strangest and most complicated of Hammell’s life. He lived in the mansion in Eva’s suite in a state approaching personal bliss, while paradoxically knowing he was going to be largely responsible for the end of humanity. Every day he woke up wondering whether today would be the day that destruction would rain down upon them. Sometimes, after waking from a particularly long and restful sleep, he would forget everything he’d learned. When it all came suddenly rushing back in, his brain would revolt and he would again struggle to believe any of it. The days became a rollercoaster through moments of intense joy and deep despair.

  Eva did her best to help him adjust to life as an illegal, showing him around, teaching him how to read the simple paint and chalk marks which were daubed on walls and buildings to help people find one another in the vast expanse of the Reserves. He’d never noticed them before, but they were everywhere once he knew to look. A vertical line meant a building was occupied. An upside down ‘v’ with a circle beneath meant a restaurant. An arrow indicated a direction to a key place – a safe house, a farm, a clean water source. Sometimes there were numbers which meant distances in kilometres, but only if those distances were great - numbers made the symbols stand out instead of blending in as they were supposed to. Soon he was strolling confidently around the Reserves and hiding his lights at night with the rest of the Red Hands – the humans, as he now had to think of them.

  In his mind they had already become different, other, and for a day or two humans even became animal and unclean in his mind – an almost laughably strange state to find himself in. Now I’m an andromorph, andromorphs are clearly better. Eventually though he began to get over his newly inverted prejudices, and he slowly started to feel that he fit in here better than he did in the modern city. He liked the dirt and the kids fighting in the streets and the wild overgrown woodlands and fields - the ruggedness, like they were somehow living on the edge of life. It felt almost like he imagined Abaddon would be - a kind of frontier existence with the threat of destruction always lurking in the background.

  He found himself relaxing for what felt like the first time ever, his shoulders releasing years of knotted tension as he and Eva took long walks through parks, seeing children playing, old men walking their dogs, people just living their lives. As he observed, he began to wonder why they had to do all this secretly, why anyone would want to destroy this. There was no great criminal gang here. Like Eva had said, they were mostly just people - maybe some more violent than others, many with good reason - but just normal, flawed people.

  And they all knew the end was coming. He could see it in their haunted eyes, their furrowed brows, their furtive looks. They all lived in the shadow of the nearby city. Every time they heard a nat, even high overhead, every man, woman, child and dog knew to run for cover.

  After a few days of begging, he finally managed to convince Eva to allow him to come to the bar where she had taken up residence. She chided him for being so giddy about it, but he could tell she was secretly flattered. The bar was a true dive; a dirty, smelly, dank hole in the ground. Hammell loved it immediately.

  He applauded wildly after every song, not caring about the looks from those around him, or about Eva’s obvious embarrassment on the tiny stage. She was easily the best he’d ever heard, and now he knew why: She sang from experience - her anguish and longing were real. None of the newer andromorphs in the city bars could do anything but imitate. They didn’t feel it. They may not have even been capable of feeling it.

  After the show, he slipped backstage and met her in her changing room to congratulate her.

  “Alright, alright, calm down,” she told him. “It’s a pub, not the Royal Opera House.”

  As he watched her changing, he felt a familiar throbbing in his head. Am I getting old, or was the music too loud? he thought to himself. He had become much more prone to headaches after the surgery. Or maybe it had been after the guerillas had drilled into his skull. Either way, the minor headaches he used to get had begun to turn into full-blown migraines. “Ah, shit,” he said as he sank down in a chair in front of a mirror, turning off the lights surrounding it. He was already seeing spots when Eva brought him the pills. He swallowed them dry, hoping he’d caught it in time.

  “It’s a price worth paying for a more handsome face,” Eva said as she stroked his hair and Hammell grunted, not believing her. “I’m serious,” she said. “I even gave the doctor a few suggestions.”

  “Wait, you… designed me?” Hammell exclaimed, feeling he should be incredulous.

  “Revenge,” she replied, “for Eva 2.0.”

  “Fair enough,” Hammell said as he rubbed at the scar on his temple. “And did you also tell him to replace my expensive tech with cheap knockoffs? This crap will probably fail in a couple of years and I’ll become a vegetable.”

  “We won’t live that long anyway,” Eva said as she sat down and started to remove her make-up. “You’re just living with the threat of expiry now, same as everyone else.”

  Cheery fucking thought.

  The spots were still there as he picked Eva up and sat her down on her dressing table facing him. It was a shared dressing room, but there was no other act on tonight so they had a reasonable expectation of privacy. He leaned in towards her, head still thumping, as she locked her legs around his waist, pulling him in towards her.

  This is my life here in microcosm, he thought. Holding her, feeling like I’m dying. I could live like this forever.

  Chapter 39

  The sound of distant air raid sirens signalled that the time had come. Eva was already up, standing by the window. Hammell jumped out of bed to join her in looking out over the Reserves at the tiny dots in the murky sky that were the carriers. Eva reached out and they touched hands.

  “I have to get dressed,” she said.

  Sprinting down to the secure line in the library, Hammell made the call. He waited until it rang off and then tried again – and again…

  Asha Ishi had been right; her theory had been sound. The mistakes had come in the execution. She had, somewhat unluckily it had to be said, managed to only obtain samples from andromorphs living in the Reserves among the humans. She’d been right though that there were differences between human and andromorph biology – Eva’s book proved
it. Hammell had therefore hatched a plan. He’d been working solidly and secretly for the past few days, trawling through Eva’s books, looking for hints from history tomes, medical texts, anything that might provide proof.

  Once he’d started looking into it, he found it amazing that more people hadn’t spotted the multitude of inconsistencies in what they knew as history, in their very biology. He wondered why nobody ever questioned why embryos had to be grown outside the body, or why nobody ever broke that law. He couldn’t understand why no-one questioned how metal-based bone structures could have formed through evolution, or why acronyms like DNA were used for chemicals like Peptide Nucleic Acid. People had just accepted what they’d been told – himself included. He felt like a fool to have lived in ignorance for so long.

  His major brainwave had come two days ago. Even better than Asha Ishi’s idea of gathering blood samples, Hammell realised that, if he could locate a full body, then he could surely produce evidence which was beyond debate. Gruesome though it would be, he had put the word out - and Ettore had come through in fine style, delivering not one but two fresh corpses. Hammell hadn’t asked how he’d obtained them and Ettore hadn’t offered to explain. All his ducks lined up, Hammell had contacted Stein – and that was when things had begun to go wrong. Stein hadn’t answered. Jenn had.

  Hammell had hung up quickly and had since thought long and hard to try to find a valid explanation as to why an android might answer a personal iPalm, but neither he nor his implant had come up with anything that wasn’t bad news for the lab boss. Trawling through the news, he’d found the lab boss’s obituary. Stein had likely paid dearly for not enforcing the reset on his pet android.

  Without the blood tests and anatomical evidence, he was forced to rely mainly upon old books. Worse than that, he’d had to tell an assassin with the nickname Scalpel Hector that he had to take the bodies back, an awkward conversation if ever there was one. Even worse still, Hetty Balhoup had become his last hope.