“You’re right. We should play against each other next time. We can set a time period, like early nineteen hundreds, so we can pick only the types of guns available then and let the best man win,” Allan said, trying to appease his friends. They both nodded in agreement, rather quietly and slightly withdrawn, as if affected by the virtual destruction they caused, only to be defeated.
They left the oval room and the three dimensional image on the wall behind them, with its bright, blurred letters pulsing: Game over. Play again (Y/N)?
Together they left the Imaginarium and then separated, each of them going towards their respective homes.
Wearing the latest model of hyper-goggles, ear buds attached, Allan enjoyed the evening walk – one eye on a match of kickboxing, another on the road before him. In the safe neighborhood of the Elite Compound, he had not a worry in the world.
The War of Sovereign Nations game had left him feeling pleased with himself and yet at the same time vaguely disappointed. Such a sick idea to play that way, they never saw it coming.
The large mansions were illuminated; the street before him was immaculate and well-manicured. He would be home shortly, where he lived with his dad.
Suddenly, he felt a crushing blow to his head. He fell down and a succession of rapid kicks to his ribs and head caused him to writhe in pain, and finally sank him into darkness. Sometime later, he woke up for a brief moment to the sound of an ambulance, and then promptly lost consciousness again.
2
Jules was a Scrappie, a runaway Server. For three months, she had been living in the Scrappie Compound in an old house, repaired and inhabited by Tom, the tall, middle aged man who had found her half frozen in the forest and taken her into his home and heart. He soon became like the father she never knew.
She was sixteen, yet felt worn out, her whole world a terrible burden to be carried each day. She needed to work to support herself and her new family of sorts, and thus she had to pretend she was still a Server, even though she had run away from her abusive home. She had her old ID card and the fact that nobody had declared her gone helped keep her somewhat legitimate.
Coming out of the forest, she left behind the shade of the trees, and even farther away, the tall buildings in ruin, where the Scrappies lived. She moved towards a long row of apartment buildings in the Server Compound. From a shed nearby, she retrieved her red e-bike, the paint chipping on the sides. She put on a helmet hanging from the handle and climbed on the bike.
She was wearing a worn-out yellow T-shirt and blue jeans, black running shoes and a backpack, nothing ripped or stained; her blonde hair tied neatly in the back.
Jules could see the sun setting over the water as she crossed Golden Bridge, which separated the compound where most of the Servers lived from the other areas of the city. Soon the sun would disappear beyond the fog. She stopped for a moment.
Beautiful. Like magic come to life. A symphony of colors surrounded the setting sun. At this time of the day, everything seemed right in the world. Jules allowed herself a few moments of daydreaming. Reflections of the large Elite mansions trembled on the silvery waters of the wide canal. How would my life be if I were one of them? It must feel great to be rich and spoiled, to have friends I could meet at school, to feel safe, most of all. The reality of her own life brought up the inevitable question. What future will I have? There’s no future for me…
It was getting late. She made an effort to dismiss the fear gripping her heart and started again in the direction of the hospital, where she worked a couple of times each week, just a few hours a day. With so many Servers around, she was lucky to have a job, as menial as it was. There was no point in dreaming of what she couldn’t possibly have, and no point in worrying over what she could not control.
By the time she reached the Professionals’ compound, the street lights had already been turned on and the light was creating ethereal shadows of her body and the bike. They alternated; short, long, longer, disappearing and being re-created as she rode on. The houses on both sides of the road were large and well maintained – raised ranch houses with cathedral ceilings and chandeliers visible from the outside through the tall glass entrances. The trees were relatively small and widely spaced and the lawns looked freshly cut.
She could feel her pulse like a fast drumbeat under her skin and she realized she was scared, but she tried to convince herself there was no reason for her fear. No need to hide, I have an ID card to prove I belong here in the city.
The street was empty. Everybody was at home by now, watching their wall-sized digiscreens as they had their supper. A slim, middle aged woman in gym clothes had just turned the corner and was jogging towards her. She had hyper-goggles over her eyes so she could watch a hypernet show while still keeping an eye on her surroundings.
As Jules neared the hospital she could see an ambulance approaching fast, sirens blaring and lights blinking. An emergency was in progress. She wondered idly who was hurt and how it had happened. One thing was for sure: in this hospital only the Elites and the Professionals were admitted.
Walking her e-bike towards the side parking lot, she couldn’t help but see the stretcher being pushed through the sliding doors by two paramedics. On the stretcher, a young face was streaked with blood and dirt. The head was turned sideways towards her and she was struck with unimaginable sorrow for the young man. He opened his eyes and kept them on her even as they were moving him away.
Please don’t die! Don’t do this to me! Jules felt the horror as strongly as ever, fearing she would once again play an active role in the replacement of yet another human.
~~~
Siren noises woke him up again. Allan opened his eyes this time and saw strange faces looking at him with concern in their eyes. “Stay still,” a woman was saying as she leaned down towards him. “You’ll be fine.”
She placed a mask over his mouth and gently lifted him to stretch the elastic band around the back of his head. He could breathe easier immediately, but something was wrong. He couldn’t feel his body. He tried to move a finger, then a toe. Nothing.
Allan was moved to a stretcher and people were rushing and pushing him towards the ER entrance. His head was leaning on the side and he felt utterly helpless as he tried to form a word. He couldn’t even move his lips. What’s wrong with me? He wanted to scream. Only his eyes were able to move and he scanned the perimeter bathed in electric lights.
He saw a girl by her e-bike, standing nearby with a hand over her mouth, looking at him. Her eyes were frightened and sad. He kept looking at her until they moved him past the sliding door of the emergency area, and she was gone from view.
Then everything happened very fast. Allan could not seem to think straight; a sheer terror at what was going to happen next gripped him. He heard someone say, “Bring him in here.” The stretcher was pushed into a large, immaculate room with a bright light emanating from the entire ceiling. Anti-gravity forces generated by the gravitron placed straight overhead lifted him up and placed him on a white block with cables and hoses and all kinds of instruments protruding from the sides. This was the operating cube. Allan ended up on his stomach, with his head tilted to one side.
“Is the C here yet?” the same voice asked.
“Almost here. Is this really necessary, doctor?” a younger woman’s voice questioned.
“Yes. Put him under now.”
A man in a blue operating gown was standing beside him. Allan couldn’t see his face, but he could smell an expensive musky fragrance coming from him. “Do not worry, dear boy, you’ll be fine when you wake up,” the surgeon was saying softly. His eyelids started to close and he sank into oblivion.
Allan regained consciousness slowly. With great effort he managed to open his eyes, and discovered that he was on his back, with his head leaning to the side. For a moment he was confused. Lying on another cube directly opposite him, he saw another man, one who looked exactly like him. It is C. The realization that he was being discarded began to sink
in. Terror enveloped him. He tried to get up but was unable to do so. He simply could not feel his body.
His eyes filled with tears and he hoped someone would see them running over the base of his nose and realize he was not dead. Then he reasoned that they must have known that already because they had instruments monitoring his vitals. The only conclusion he could conjure was that the decision had already been made to have him replaced. The thought of his father doing that to him was unbearable. Surely it‘s a mistake, it must be a mistake. Before he could ponder on this any longer, he saw some movement at the corner of his eye, green coveralls, and knew that his time was up. A few seconds later his world darkened into nothingness.
3
After seeing the stretcher pushed inside the ER reception area, Jules made her way towards Floor 2, which housed the Recovery wing, where her assignment would begin shortly. Her job tonight was to empty and wash all the bed pans, then remove the containers with bloody bandages and take them to the incinerator. After that she had to take the soiled hospital gowns and have them placed in the chutes to be recycled. More tasks of that nature would follow.
From the janitorial closet she grabbed a pair of coveralls, shoe covers, nitrile gloves, and a hair net. She put them on and then attached a face mask over her mouth. The hospital maintained strict regulations so the Servers wouldn’t contaminate the hyper clean environment, including the expensive medical creams and powders. She also knew it was for her own protection. Most of those substances contained nanobots specialized in so many different ways that one never knew what they were going to do upon contact with the skin. Nanobots could enter her body through just a simple scratch.
An hour or so into work, Emma, the floor head nurse, approached her. She was tall and willowy, bald headed, with green eyes matching her jumpsuit and goggles. “Julia, they need you in the OR now. Take the cleaning unit with you.”
Sensing the note of urgency in Emma’s voice, Jules rushed with the cleaning cart via the closest elevator to the operating room. Once inside, she saw the bodies of two young men laid down on two operating cubes. They were identical, except that one was bruised and bloody, the other immaculately clean and beautiful like a marble sculpture. It’s the man from the ambulance. He didn’t make it. She felt a sudden sadness. The other one was surely his clone.
Jules could see they both had headsets on, forming the pathway for memory transfer from one to the other. Magnetic nanobots in both brains, once activated, clustered and acted as an interface between their synapses.
A nurse with a mask on was signaling her to approach. “Wipe the mess from the floor, then take the body from here to the incinerator as soon as I’m done with it and I move it to the stretcher. Hurry up, the father will be here any minute to see his son.”
Obviously not his original son. She bit her tongue to stop herself from saying something she’d regret.
She proceeded to clean the floor as fast as possible, her entire focus on the task at hand. She was careful and efficient, cleaning as thoroughly as possible to assure future jobs here. In the meantime, the man to be discarded was being transported to the stretcher by invisible hands, as if levitating. She stole a glance at him: he looked like a fallen angel, a slim, bruised body floating through the air.
Once she finished with the floors, she put the cleaning unit away and went to the stretcher. The dead man was lying on his back, his dark locks falling over his bruised face, eyes closed as if asleep. He looked peaceful and handsome, Jules observed, tracing with her eyes his square jawline and dimpled chin, moving towards his full lips and straight-edged nose. What a pity! All his dreams shattered. Then she realized they were able to copy his memory onto the clone after all, given the nurse’s remarks.
She began to wonder if the clone would just wake up and resume his existence like the original, as if nothing has changed at all. They say that’s true, but how can that be? What happens to the soul? There was so much thinking and feeling inside her, she couldn’t imagine her essence being captured by a computer program.
She placed a cover on the body and started pushing it out of the room. How many times have I done this? She counted six or seven. It never got any easier, no matter how many times she did it, seeing how Elites were disposed of so casually. Who else could afford to keep one or two bodies around, just in case? But are they sure it’s truly their own self coming back to life? No one had ever said any differently.
The incinerator was in the basement. After exiting the maintenance elevator, she pushed the stretcher slowly, feeling like she could somehow delay the inevitable. Everything was done through the back corridors. “No need to show our patients or visitors the unpleasant side of the business, Julia,” Emma had told her once. She opened the door to the incinerator and pushed the button to pneumatically lift one side of the stretcher.
All of a sudden Jules saw some movement underneath the cover, and it looked like the blanket came to life, lifting and sliding away. On the stretcher, the young man was lowering one arm, having let go of the discarded cover, face up and eyes looking pleadingly at her.
“You are alive!” she exclaimed, hands shaking in shock. Her knees became wobbly.
He stared at her. His lips moved but no words came out.
She pulled the stretcher away from the incinerator and hurried to the other side of it so she could face him and, afraid that somebody might catch them, blurted out, “I was supposed to take you away and incinerate you. You were badly damaged and a clone is probably talking to your father right now. You do not exist anymore, do you understand me?”
He looked in her eyes for a few seconds, the situation sinking in for him, and he nodded. He understood.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked, at a loss for a solution.
His eyes were filling with tears, he was scared or lost, she didn’t know. His lips moved again and she heard a whisper, “Bad?”
“You mean how badly you were injured?” She looked at his body, trying hard to avoid her sudden embarrassment at seeing him naked. “Some swelling in the ribs area, head bloody, bruises all over. Can you feel your body?”
He nodded yes.
”Then you might have a chance to recover, unless there are some massive internal injuries I cannot see,” she added. Why would they discard an able human being? And did they forget to inject him with the deadly serum? Or they didn’t care… Her mind raced as she forced herself to come back to the pressing issue at hand. “I don’t know what to do. Do you want me to call somebody to come take you away?”
He thought for a few seconds and shook his head in negation.
“What, then? You have any idea?”
A jagged whisper came out of his mouth, “Away.”
“You want me to take you away?” she asked incredulously.
He nodded yes.
“You don’t understand. Where can I take you? I’m not actually a valid Server, I’m—“She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’m a Scrappie. We can’t possibly get to where I live in your condition. It’s too dangerous for both of us. Besides, you need medical care. You’d be better off with a friend or family member.” She was out of breath and felt totally overwhelmed.
“Away,” he whispered again.
She could see the fear in his eyes. Who could blame him? He would be discarded, killed, simply because someone else had already taken his place in the world. He was supposed to be ashes by now. She had to decide. Either take charge of him or let somebody at the hospital know of the situation.
Before she could decide what to do, the door opened and a man in blue overalls, pushing a container on wheels, came in.
“Oh, Bruce, it’s you!” she exclaimed. “You scared me out of my skin.”
The utility man was an older, stocky guy who always had a smile on his round face and a gentle manner. He stopped, swept the room with his baby-blue watery eyes and seemed to have grasped the truth immediately.
“How come he’s alive?” he asked.
“I don’t
know. They brought him to Emergency, had his memory copied to the C, and I was just carrying him here to… you know…” she pointed to the incinerator. “And he woke up.”
“And just what were you going to do with him?”
“I don’t know. Help, if possible. What can I do?”
He shook his head disapprovingly. “My dear Jules, this is trouble. Nobody is allowed to walk away.”
Jules felt torn apart between the desire to save that man and the horror of being caught and taken to the Happy Endings clinic. Oh, God, what can I do? If somebody finds out what I am doing, I’m history. But how can I let this human being be put to death? But then, maybe they wouldn’t put him to death when they found out he’s not dead. What if she was wrong? She remembered how only hours earlier she had thought she had no future anyway. What difference would it make if they caught her now or later? At least she could save someone’s life.
Jules’ mind worked frenetically to come up with a solution. The man was an Elite, therefore his body could speed up the recovery. She had seen it happen with the Elites in the hospital. If she could just take him away from there and hide him for a while, until he would be able to move. All of a sudden an idea popped up on her mind. “The utility vehicle! Let’s get him inside and then you can drop us at the forest. I’ll take it from there.”
Bruce scratched his chin in doubt. “Jules, that’s madness. We’ll be caught and that will be the end of us. Get a hold of yourself, and let the nurse know what happened here. That’s for the best, sweetie.”
“I can’t do that to him, Bruce,” she pleaded with the older man. “Think how you’ll feel in the future knowing you could have saved somebody and yet you chose not to do anything at all? Think Bruce, what a difference you made in my life. Without you, I’d probably be out there being hunted down, or I would have killed myself. But you helped me once, in fact, more than once. Do it again, please Bruce? Help me save this one.” Her tears flowed freely as she talked, every second making the difference between life and death to that young man.
Elysian Fields Page 2
