Descendants

by King, Stephen

  It was strange to see his old body, the shell of who he had been in an awkward pile on the floor, a tangle of metal limbs wrapped around a central unit. He could almost see why Carter had looked down on him. But this, this new body?

  There was a lot that he could do with this.

  A few more directions from Matt to the computer and it was clicking along at a pace that he liked. He logged out of the program and walked toward the glimmering glass doors. His heart was hammering, thinking about what lay on the other side. He knew from what the technicians had told him that there were billions of people in the world. Hundreds of thousands of miles of sea and land that he could explore. He felt very finite in the midst of it all. He had so much to do, to explore, to think about.

  As they opened, the whoosh welcoming him into the rest of the world, Matt couldn’t stop himself from thinking how poetic it was that those last directions did come from Carter’s body after all.

  He had only taken a few steps before he realized that he didn’t know how to navigate the building. Thankfully, there were bright red signs that seemed to be pointing him toward the exit.

  It wasn’t until he saw the darkness outside, the stark contrast to the florescent lights around him that had become part of his everyday world that he realized he was as close to freedom as he had ever experienced. He was steps away, inches—

  “Carter? Are you finished already?”

  Leslie and Quinn still sitting in what Carter’s memory called a “break room”. They were sitting around a low, white table, in a room that was as colorless as the rest of the building, sipping on something that was steaming, and smelled vile to Matt’s nose.

  Smell. Another sense that he hadn’t been prepared for. It bombarded him, making it hard for him to concentrate, but he made himself focus on the lie that he had concocted to tell them, for he didn’t want them worrying after Carter, trying to follow him once he had left.

  “It’s just been really hard for me,” he said, trying to make his voice sound a little sad, but still mean, the way that Carter has. “You…you honestly don’t know how badly I wanted this to work. But I can’t handle any more setbacks. You said it yourself, the project is almost finished anyway. I’ve reset him and he’s in his charging station. I’ve got to go.” He made sure to include several contractions when he was speaking, attempting to make himself sound as Carter-like as possible.

  “Carter, man, please don’t go,” Quinn said, his brown eyes searching what he thought was his friend’s face. “We can work all of this out together.”

  Matt shook his head. “I am telling you. It isn’t for me. This is something that the two of you need to finish. Without me.”

  “Are you sure?” Quinn asked him. Leslie was just staring at him as if he had lost his mind, which, he supposed, was in some way true. Well, more transferred than lost. Matt hoped that it was just shock, and that she would leave well enough alone.

  “Yes.” Matt looked toward the door. He was already edging toward it. “I need to go. I will see you guys around. I do not know when I will be back.”

  “So that’s it?” Leslie asked finally. “You’re just taking off? Not telling us where, no more explanations?”

  “I can’t really talk about it right now, okay?” The explanation had to be enough. Matt couldn’t wait a moment longer.

  The air outside was cold, colder than he had sensed the last time he had actually stopped to think about the weather. It must have been late November or December by now; snow was falling in thick drifts outside of the building that housed the laboratory. The air was crisp, sending chills down his spine. He didn’t know which vehicle belonged to Carter and he didn’t care. He didn’t intend to miss one part of the experience that awaited him.

  ********

  “I’ve known Carter for almost ten years,” Leslie said, looking out after her friend, who for some reason, had walked right past his car and out into the freezing cold. Carter hated the snow, had always complained about how the snow soaked through his jeans and boots and made him feel like he could never get warm. It was a small thing, but it only added to her feeling that something wasn’t right. “There’s no way he would quit in the middle of something like this. Something is going on. I think we should go down to the lab and see if there’s something else.”

  “Why would he lie to us?” Quinn asked. He was always the rational one, the quiet one. Debates had always happened between her and Carter and Quinn had always chimed in near the end; it was strange now for him to be playing the part that Carter usually did. But she had been so angry with Carter earlier…she had thought she would never want to speak to him again.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe he’s embarrassed and just needs some time to cool off…I mean we all do after this big of a setback when we thought we were so close to something this big. But this seems…I don’t know, like more than that.”

  She ignored Quinn’s wheedling, walking back to the lab. It wasn’t long before he followed her down there, his footsteps echoing. It felt like they were the only two left in the building, and they probably were. Most of the techs kept odd hours, wrapped up in their various projects.

  She reached the door to their lab, only to find that Carter had locked it, and reset the passcodes. They couldn’t get in. But it didn’t stop them from being able to peer through the glass.

  “Quinn, look!”

  A sheaf of papers that had been knocked off a desk, where they had been sitting in a neat pile. Months and months of research that would have to be resorted and stacked based on the date and data accumulated. Even worse, Matt, their high tech robot, was slumped, wires sticking out of the back of his head in a pile on the floor.

  “We need to call the police, right now.”

  “And tell them, what exactly? Our colleague made us look like asses by locking us out, and didn’t put the toy robot away when he was finished?”

  Leslie shook her head furiously. “Carter would have never willingly let all that information get mixed up, or left Matt that way. He may not have been as enthusiastic about this project as we are, but he took pride in whatever work he did. He wouldn’t have left his station that way.”

  Quinn shrugged, but finally agreed. “I’ll get them on the phone.”

  It took nearly forty five minutes for them to arrive. Leslie and Quin waited impatiently, not wanting to set off any alarms.

  “Maybe we should have,” Leslie said. “Then they would have gotten here quicker.”

  Once they were inside, Leslie immediately went to the computer. The programs had all been closed out and locked tight; she was no longer an administrator to make changes to it.

  She could, however, still see the last parts of the program that had been accessed, which keystrokes had been made.

  It was odd; it didn’t match the kind of data that they usually input into Matt. There was certainly no evidence of the wipe of memory and reset that Carter had told them he had done.

  All data transferred to new host. C. Thomas host recipient of all data. Program download at 19:42.

  “Oh, god.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not possible…he can’t have…no!”

  “Ma’am, what’s the matter?” the officer closest to her asked in concern.

  “Carter…he’s not…it’s not him!”

  “What on earth are you talking about Leslie?”

  “Quinn,” she said in a hushed voice. “Please, look at this. Please, for the love of God tell me that I’m reading this data wrong.”

  He read over her shoulder, his complexion paling, leeching of all color.

  “No, you’re not. I don’t know how it’s possible.”

  “You think when we gave him the emotions?”

  “Somehow, they got messed up, enough to think that this was what he needed to do.”

  Quinn told the police officers about it. They sent out units.

  “Do you think that Carter is still in there somewhere?”

&nbs
p; “I don’t know, Leslie. I honestly don’t know.”

  ********

  Matt was able to take a stroll for the first time in his life. He had severed his ties with Leslie and Quinn for the time being. He had nowhere to be. No one was running tests on him, telling him to act like a –the phrase from the fragments of Carter’s working mind came to him—like a trained monkey. He was able to do as he pleased, go where he wanted.

  It wasn’t long, however, before that peace was ripped away from him. Carter’s bodily instincts reacted to the sounds of sirens before Matt did. He had never heard such a loud, high pitched screaming before! He covered his ears to shield them from the noise without even thinking about it.

  “Machine!”

  He was so busy looking at the lights, focusing on the sound of the sirens that it took several times of the people around him screaming the word before he realized that they were addressing him. How had they known?

  “I am afraid that I do not know what you are talking about, sir,” he said addressing the male respectfully. The bright spot light, imposing voice, and suit that the male was wearing indicated that he was some sort of authority figure.

  “We know that you aren’t Carter Thomas,” the male responded warily. “We don’t know how, but we know that you’re the presence of the machine that he was working on.”

  “Please, listen to yourself,” Matt said, the words tasting funny on his suddenly dry tongue. These human bodies had such strange reactions. Fear. Another emotion that he hadn’t exactly been programmed for in the beginning, but that he was experiencing in ample amounts now. Carter’s body had been living and thinking much longer than Matt had existed. Still, he tried to make do around the uncomfortable sensations. “It is not possible for such a thing to happen.”

  “Then what is your middle name, Carter Thomas?”

  Such a simple question, one that if he really were Carter, he would know the answer to. Surely, he’d heard the technicians say Carter’s middle name. If he had, he hadn’t paid much attention to it. Humans were strange creatures, and until today, much of what they had done hadn’t been of much interest to him.

  The tense silence that was embedded into the guards around him seemed to break suddenly when he couldn’t offer up an explanation. They knew and there wasn’t much he could say at this point to talk his way out of it.

  These humans. So ruled by their emotions. Carter’s body was pumping adrenaline to the vein’s now belonging to Matt. Fight or flight response.

  There was certainly no way that he was going to get out of there by fleeing the scene, as part of his subconscious was daring him to do. If he couldn’t manage to get away from them, then he would confront them, as his instincts were telling him was necessary.

  He charged at the officer in charge, believing that, like so many things he had studied, if he could take down the man who appeared to be the pack leader, he would gain dominance over the others.

  He hadn’t moved more than three feet when shots rang out.

  Pain. It was so intense at first, hurting so badly, that Matt could almost believe he was back to his near conscious-less state as before.

  Then it all came swirling over him, dark and threatening as a proverbial black cloud.

  His chest. His stomach. His side. His leg. All were on fire with the pain of the bullets that had been sent after him.

  He watched as the red liquid that the humans called blood gushed to the ground in small waves. It seemed like everything that could spill out of him was.

  He had lived so enjoyably as a human, for a whole two hours. Two hours with a human body, one day of life. He hadn’t thought it was so much to ask for more.

  As Carter’s body dropped to the ground for the second time that evening, a second presence left it, this one erased for all eternity.

  Locked Inside

  Frustrated, Jason pressed the sign out button on the transparent screen again. He didn’t usually have this much of a problem shutting off or redirecting his Personal Sim Experience software.

  The pixilated scene around him shifted. Still not back in his own, real room. The crumbling coliseums and warm sun disappeared as he ordered the computer to change courses yet again. The virtual reality of Rome that had been created gave way to rows upon rows of holographic towers, their smart computers flashing with bright florescent lights.

  I must have pressed the wrong button. A nagging feeling of irritation settled over him as he tried to force the imagined reality to disappear. Normally, the app to log out of the virtual reality program would appear at his will, but now, even as he grasped for the electric current threads that he knew should take him to his default screen, he realized the program wasn’t responding as it should.

  Great. Just great.

  “Power screen on,” he demanded for the third time. Nothing around him changed. The quiet, flickering computers seeming to tease him from the surrounding darkness. He reached out with his hands, as if he were going to press the hovering keys that should have appeared before him, but it was to no avail. His uttered command made no impact on his surroundings.

  “Goddammit. Power screen on!” His angry voice reverberated in the otherwise still atmosphere of the paused program. They hung in the air for a moment, the shimmering essence of them surrounding him before being whisked off by the program, crumbling into pieces in the midst of the invisible stream that carried them away.

  He held his breath for a few seconds more, hoping against hope that it was a glitch, and that at any moment the program would pick up where it was supposed to. Come on. This cannot be happening!

  Jason let out a long sigh, shook his head and looked around the virtual simulation. If he wasn’t going to be getting out of there anytime soon, he could at least look around the scenario the computer had somehow independently created for him. If he was lucky, he might be able to find a short cut key or fault in the program that would allow him to default to his home screen.

  He winced slightly about taking an unknown path to try to exit the program. Jason had heard of people, stupid kids showing off or serious gamers who were forever trying to get ahead, who had tried to use cheats or accidentally downloaded viruses to their Personal Sim Experience programs. By the time the dust had cleared and their programs had been working correctly after being set back to default, all of their hard work had been erased. Would he be risking the same? The hours and money that he had put into creating his virtual realities in exchange for a quick escape route? That was if he even did manage to find a glitch that let him out of the program that seemed to have locked up on him.

  On second thought, looking at the blinking, eerie lights of the computer towers, he decided that the risk was well worth it. He was stuck in a simulation that he had never seen before, much less spent time and money creating. He shifted from foot to foot and ran a hand over his face. Computer programs were supposed to abide by your wishes, not lock up and start performing actions on their own.

  It was true, he would hate rebuilding all of his hard work if it came down to it, but his earlier irritation was quickly turning to a barely concealed sense of panic as he started to consider how long he could go without food and water in the real world.

  The real, flesh and blood body of Jason Walters was sitting at a desk, his eyes closed, his mind plugged in to one of the best entertainment inventions to hit the human population since television. Full immersion virtual reality was more than just the latest trend; for many of the current generation, it was the best way to have fun, communicate, and do so much more. There was something tantalizing about having no repercussions for any of the actions made by the avatar they inhibited while they were inside of the sim. They could hit someone without being pressed for charges, visit faraway places without ever leaving the room, even meet someone online, or create a fictional virtual friend. The program had been around for a few years and gotten really popular before Jason had ever even picked one up, and he had never heard of a single case of a user being stuck in his
own simulation. He’d certainly never experienced it; the PSE program had always responded quickly and efficiently. The computers around him blinked a little faster, as if they were responding to his state of mind.

  He slicked back his hair, his hands working their way through the curly brown locks as his nerves manifested themselves physically. Jason was by no means a computer programmer, he, like most of the population, used the PSE for video games and social interaction after work, so he wasn’t exactly in the best position to try to diagnose the problem that was keeping him from moving the program forward.

  So now what? I can’t diagnose the problem myself, but maybe the computer can run a software check.

  “Run a diagnostic scan of entire Personal Sim Experience program.” His voice quavered a bit at the end, although Jason couldn’t have said if it was from hope or anxiety.

  A short moment of silence, and then finally, something happened.

  Ping. An error screen popped up in front of him, red letters and all caps screaming at him as loudly as if it had been a voice shouting.

  ERROR CODE 40023 - UNAUTHORIZED USER COMMAND

  “That’s not possible,” he whispered, more to himself than the computer. He cleared his throat and said a little louder, “Incorrect. I’m the one using the damn program. Jason Walters, owner of PSE program number XCP310. I am ordering the program to run a full diagnostic scan.”

  The error screen blinked once as it registered his command, but did not go away.

  What the hell?

  Jason tried another tactic. “Okay, well, if I’m not an authorized user…computer, list last authorized user to access program.” It didn’t make any sense for someone else to be able to access his program. They would have needed his password at the very least. He wasn’t one of those crazed people that had mind locks on their PSE systems; he had never thought he would need one. He wasn’t fabulously rich or one of those people who were so overly creative that they could create entirely new worlds and fantasies from scratch. Why on earth would someone break into his sim program?