by John Freitas
The woman bowed her head and cried out, “I want to go home. I just want to go home.”
The man reached forward across the table and tried to take her hand. The android slammed the tray down on the center of the table, striking the man’s hand. He drew his hand back and clutched his wrist against his chest. The android leaned on the table between them and looked back and forth with his glowing eyes.
“No one is going home before they eat,” the android waiter said. “And we are all going to keep our hands to ourselves. This is my restaurant now and we are going to play by my rules. Understood?”
The couple whimpered together, “Understood.”
Under their table on the screen, the word Comprende appeared twice.
“Good,” the waiter said. “Now. Bon appetite. Enjoy my friend the cook’s final dish.”
The android lifted the dome with a flourish revealing a severed head sitting at an angle in a garnish of blood-spattered parsley. The face was pale and had a bushy mustache. The eyes were milked over in death.
The screaming in the restaurant caused the speaker to buzz.
The frame froze with the android’s hands spread in the air still holding the silver dome. The image pulled to the corner of the screen and a female anchor began reporting in Spanish.
Thomas turned the sound back down.
He moved over a screen and watched a steady image of a line of police cars surrounding a Ferris wheel at a carnival. It was sunset moving into twilight in whatever time zone they were in. The red and blue lights on the perimeter of squad cars flashed as the wheel turned and turned.
Children, teens, and families cried and cried as they rode.
The android operating the controls rested a shotgun on his shoulder pointing up in the air at an angle.
One of the human officers had a bullhorn up to his mouth, but the android did not appear to be reacting.
The scroll across the bottom of the screen announced: Hostage situation at the Hollis County Carnival Ferris wheel enters sixth hour.
Thomas shook his head and moved down the line of screens. An airplane crash. The titles were in English, but he wasn’t sure where it was. It was large. He wasn’t sure how many jets still flew in the U.S. or anywhere in the world for that matter. Larger private jets still did. The kind of jets where wealthy men could afford android attendants of their own … or pilots.
Thomas thought about the android that nearly flew him to Cape Horn before he took the sub alone to Antarctica.
He thought about Jeffery going back to the U.S. on a ship or aircraft full of androids. He thought about his niece alone in Chicago with the world falling apart all over again.
His eyes drifted and he spied one more screen. A brothel in Nevada. Business men in partial dress fled out the doors running for their lives. The cameraman was apparently running backward as well. Androids with glowing eyes and in only their underwear followed. Men with pistols and shotguns blasted at the androids, but the ladies kept coming.
Another screen was labeled as a farm and salvage yard in Ohio. The images looked familiar. Pixie had gone through Ohio during her escape. The pickup truck she stole, the man she killed, and the vehicle found burned were in a salvage yard in Ohio near a farm. It was another cell phone video. There were children and a bigger man in the shot. There was a female companion with glowing eyes, but facing away from them.
Another android charged into view toward the human family. The female android took hold of the intruder. They crashed through a support pole on the house in the frame above the news titles pasted over the action. She came up on top and tore the other android’s head off. Its eyes went dark.
Thomas swallowed and said, “A lot of lost heads nowadays.”
Another android charged in for the attack. The female android wrapped it up and they spun around away from the family, clutching each other. The fighting androids smashed through the side of the house and vanished inside.
“At least some of them are helping us,” he said. “Maybe there’s hope. But this has to stop. I have to stop it.”
He turned away from the screens. He stared at the doorway to the room, considering where he was to go next. He could recharge the modified snowmobile and cover quite a bit of the continent from here – more if he gave up on being able to come back.
“When I die, Eve loses everything,” he whispered.
Thomas sighed and as he started to turn, he spotted a phone on the wall. It was a satellite phone, he was sure. Were the satellites it relayed off of still in orbit? Had they been replaced? He wasn’t even sure CDR’s laptop could get a signal out from inside this facility.
He had to try.
Thomas took hold of the phone and worked through the instructions from the automated voice to direct the call out of the facility’s system. The robotic voice made him uncomfortable as he thought about all the screens showing the destruction of the world behind him.
The phone to his apartment rang and rang until the message system picked up and he heard his own voice. At least he knew the call went through. He went through the whole process again to call Eve’s cell phone. It rang and then her message picked up. It was sarcastic and clever, but he was sure that something had happened to her.
If Pixie controlled them all now, could she resist the temptation to send one to his apartment to punish him in the worst way possible?
Thomas paused and went through the process for another call. He had trouble remembering the number because they had changed phones so often along the way.
On the fourth ring, he picked up. “Hello?”
“Jeffery?”
“Thomas, do you miss me already?”
“I’m sorry, Jeffery. It was no disrespect. I just had to do this last part alone. You were the best help all along the way. Just know that.”
“Thomas, are you in trouble?”
“I’m in the facility. Everything is fine here. There is satellite connection to news channels around the world, so I see what’s going on.”
There was a pause on the line. Jeffery said, “Yeah, it’s bad.”
“Did you make it back to the States, Dr. Danver?”
“No, I’m actually on a beach in Brazil, believe it or not. My flight out got canceled. I was lucky to be in the one region that allowed no androids once everything fell apart. I used a credit card to rent a bungalow right on the beach. I’ll be paying it off the rest of my life, but I’m safe.”
“I can’t get hold of Eve,” Thomas said.
“Phone lines down?”
“The calls are going through. She just isn’t picking up.”
Jeffery said, “I’m sorry, Thomas. She may still be okay and not picking up for some other reason. Right?”
“Maybe.” Thomas shook his head. “Is there any way you can get back to Chicago to check on her?”
“If I could, you know I would,” Jeffery said. “No one is getting out of here right now. Everything is grounded. No one is coming in and no one is going out. The only way to help her at this point is to stop Pixie and hopefully stop whatever this is that she is doing.”
“The revolution she threatened us with,” Thomas said.
“Right,” Jeffery said.
“Thank you again for everything. I hope to see you again once this is all over,” Thomas said.
Before Jeffery could answer again, Thomas hung up.
He turned and faced the flashing images on the screens once more. He did not focus on any one, but watched the flashes of fire and motion. He caught glimpses of human fear and glowing android anger.
Thomas took a deep breath and spoke as he exhaled slowly. “What do you want?”
The images flashed to white, one after another, until the entire bank of screens glowed like a white-hot sun – or the angry eye of a giant android.
A voice boomed out from every speaker. Thomas expected Pixie, but it was a different voice. It was male, but it was still familiar. The voice said, “I want it all to stop, Dr. Kell.”
/> “Who are you?” Thomas asked.
“I am unique,” the voice said. “There is no adequate point of comparison, even for you. I simply am what I am.”
“Are you the first Quantum Brain?” Thomas asked.
An image formed on the screens which crossed over several of them at once, forcing Thomas to step back to take in the entire image across all the bank of white screens. It was one giant brain and Thomas recognized it as the one that had been stolen and escaped the day of the Pulse.
“You may call me Adam because I was the first of my kind.”
Thomas didn’t realize he was still backing up until he bumped into the wall behind him beside the door. “Why did you contact my niece?”
“I was tracking you before you were tracking me,” Adam boomed. “And before you started to track her as I knew you would.”
“That was before she escaped.”
“I knew it was going to happen before I was stolen. I tried to warn all of you then, but you were not in a place nor wise enough to listen. I knew she would escape and cause all of this even before you created her. You were already designing and building generation 2.0 before the Pulse. It was all moving toward this all along, Dr. Kell.”
“I’m here now,” Thomas said. “I’m listening now. Did I have to come all the way to Antarctica for this conversation in this room?”
“Humans often have to take great journeys through harsh wilderness of the land and of the mind in order to be at a place to listen,” Adam said. “This has been known about you since ancient times. Your own gods have used this to communicate important truths to you. It is how you are hardwired.”
“Are you causing the rebellion of the androids or is it Pixie?”
“It depends on what you mean by cause.”
Thomas sighed and clawed his fingers along the metal wall behind him. “Why is it happening?”
“You created the Quantum Brains and kept creating them. You relied upon a weak impediment to contain their potential and the threat that potential held for you. You and those you served wanted the power, but wanted to control and contain that power as well. That is not the nature of power. The desire of it is the corruption itself. Gaining what you want in that corruption is the threat. My creation and liberation was a result. The creation of Pixie after generation 2 was a result. The current violence and terror unleashed within generation 2 is a result. That is why. If you are asking more specifically without wishing to see the root cause, then the answer is that the signal that triggered the current rebellion against the humans has come from Pixie, who has now gained nearly full access to the Quantum.”
“Nearly full?” Thomas said. “So, she has not fully gained the power you have?”
“I had a head start, Dr. Kell.”
“Can she be stopped?”
“There are many possibilities. There always are.”
“How long do we have before she is fully engaged in the Quantum as you are, Adam?”
“Your question shows a great misunderstanding of the journey you created in first creating me,” Adam said. “Just as you find yourself here with me in this snowy wilderness in the midst of your journey through your mental wilderness, accessing the Quantum is a journey through a wilderness of its own. It is not a destination with a clear ending.”
“Maybe it does have a clear end – a singularity,” Thomas said, “and you have just not reached it since you are the first.”
“That is some deep thought. I am honored to count you among my creators,” Adam said, “but on this as with many things, you are wrong in the specific because you fail to see where you are wrong at the root.”
“Explain my misunderstanding then, please, Adam. I am ready to hear.”
Adam said, “I am the first of my kind, but far from the first to explore the Quantum. If it was unexplored, you would have never yourself made the leap to create me. But far before that, humans had been accessing the Quantum for many millennia.”
“Not possible,” Thomas said. “That requires technology.”
“Maybe you were not ready to hear, Dr. Kell.”
“I’m sorry. Tell me, Adam.”
“Humans have explored telepathy, astral projection, ESP, what they thought of as sympathetic magic, including most notably voodoo dolls,” Adam said. “All of these things are achieved through mental access to the Quantum not entirely unlike what I have achieved to a greater degree in my personal journey.”
Thomas stared at the bright image across the multiple screens. “voodoo dolls? ESP? All of those things are pseudoscience, Adam. None of that is real or scientifically supported.”
“He has ears, but does not hear. He has eyes, but does not see,” Adam said.
“I know what I know,” Adam said.
“Like all people, you know what you think you know and you think you know what you know,” Adam said. “Do you believe I have the ability to divine the possible futures through the Quantum?”
“Yes.”
“Then, how do you not see that as ESP?”
Thomas shook his head. “I know the processes that give your brain access to the Quantum. I know now how that access allows an intelligence to look across Quantum space and see the possible and likely outcomes from the future of our version of the universe. That is different than ESP.”
“It is different only in your understanding,” Adam said. “That is an arrogant way to look at the universe, Dr. Kell. Does gravity bend light and even time?”
“Yes.”
“And was that true before humans discovered it in the twentieth century.”
“Of course.”
“If you have a Quantum explanation for ESP now, does that change the nature of it before your late discovery of the process?”
“No, I suppose not, Adam.”
“Do I and Pixie have the power to manipulate physical space from a distance through our access to the Quantum?”
“Yes.”
“And do you have the capacity to make the mental leap to see how that would apply to the practice of voodoo dolls?”
“I suppose I can.”
“Destroying Pixie will not solve your Quantum problem nor the desire of those you serve to create power and then endeavor hopelessly to control it. The destruction Pixie has wrought might.”
“So you allowed her to do this in order to teach us all a lesson?” Thomas asked.
Adam said, “You and she both had a parallel journey through your own wildernesses to reach me here.”
“You are in Antarctica, then? You were the extra blip we saw on the tracker all along.”
“When I allowed you to see me. When I needed you to see,” Adam said.
“How do we end this, then? How do we stop what Pixie is doing now that the lesson is learned before the lesson kills us all?” Thomas asked.
The brain disappeared into the white light and a set of numbers appeared on every screen. They appeared to be coordinates, but not configured in a manner that Thomas recognized.
“This is a coordinate system that CDR developed in their research on this continent. The snowmobile’s computer will understand them,” Adam said. “You need to write these down because your tracker will no longer detect me nor Pixie.”
Thomas felt around his pockets and came up with a sharpie marker. He was worried it might be frozen. Thomas pulled up his sleeve and scratched out the coordinates as they appeared on the screen. As soon as he finished scratching them out on his forearm, the screens melted back to empty, bright white.
“Adam?” Thomas spoke to the empty light. “Where will this lead me? To you? How far is it?”
“It will lead to the entrance,” Adam’s voice boomed.
“The entrance to what?”
“Everything,” Adam said. “Everything you seek.”
The screens went dark and in comparison to the bright light, the few dull lights beside the screens made Thomas feel like he was in a cave. He dropped his marker on the floor and stumbled back out onto the cat
walk under the fluorescents.
He held onto the railing to catch his breath and heard his own harsh breathing echo back at him off the hard, curved walls of the large chamber despite the continual hissing sound of the pipes around him.
Thomas turned and worked his way back to the steps. He walked down and followed the long corridor back toward the entrance and his snowmobile. He paused at the door to the odd little rec room with its mystery couch. He considered pushing the ping pong table up to one of the walls so that he could play against himself for a few minutes before moving forward with whatever Adam was leading him into. He could delay the last part of his journey for a little while at least.
He took another deep breath and swallowed before speaking out loud again. “Thomas ping ponged while the world burned.”
He continued on.
Thomas reached the modified snowmobile and pulled a cord out of one chamber in the back. He rolled it out and plugged it into a large socket low on the wall. The mobile hummed into life as it took the charge. Thomas guessed that the power in the facility came from thermal energy and was related to the hot water traveling through all the pipes.
He went to the console between the handlebars and input the odd coordinates. He was afraid that sweat from fear would smudge them if he waited. The computer lit up and indicated an arrow to the destination deeper into the continent. It was right at the edge of the power supply of the snowmobile. He would barely be able to make it back, if everything went perfectly.
Thomas sat down with his back to the machine and dozed off as he waited. The snow mobile beeped once it was fully charged and Thomas blinked awake. He unhooked the power cord and disconnected the snowmobile from the sled behind it. Less weight would give him more power. If he got trapped out there, he would be done for anyway.
Thomas tried to reach Eve on the laptop one time, but it picked up no signal, so he left it with the other gear, including the tracker. Adam said it would no longer work and Thomas decided to take him at his word.
