I Am Automaton

by Edward P. Cardillo

  This whole thing was so surreal. Apone would’ve shit his pants from laughter if he found out about any of this. Or would he have been horrified?

  As a matter of fact, Peter was hit with all of this so quickly, he was not sure about his own feelings. The idea of being around even one of those ID gave him the willies, particularly after his experience with the one in the Labyrinth. He pitied anyone designated as a target.

  But he and his men would supposedly be protected. There were the suits, the guns, and the MRI devices. It all seemed to make sense. Plus, the idea of getting those chicken-shit terrorists hiding in those caves made him salivate. He mused that maybe he wasn’t so different from the ID after all.

  The Navajas had something wicked coming their way. They were in for a rude awakening, and he would be leading the charge.

  Just then the monitor of his communicator was flashing. It was a call from home. He accepted.

  His father and mother’s faces popped up on the LED screen.

  “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.”

  “Hi, Pete.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Yes, everything’s fine,” Peter’s father said.

  “We talked Carl out of enlisting,” his mother beamed.

  “Well, that’s great, Mom.”

  “Yes, I’ve managed to get him a job in the mall at the coffee boutique.”

  “And he’s okay with that, Dad?”

  “No, you know your brother. But maybe if he can prove himself, corporate will notice and he can move up.”

  The notion was ridiculous. The job market was flooded with college graduates who couldn’t find work. He would just get lost in the white noise.

  “That’s great, Dad. I’m sure he will. He’s smart, smarter than me.”

  His father waved a dismissive hand. “We’re very proud of you, son.”

  But his mother was frowning, voting against her husband’s remark with her silence.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  He heard Carl’s voice in the background.

  “Oh, yes,” his father added. “Carl wants to know if Captain London asked about him.”

  “What? Dad, I have to go.”

  His father nodded his understanding, and Peter heard Carl’s protests in the background as he terminated the call.

  He picked the manual back up and read on about dividing platoons into four squads of ten, using two SWEEPERS (field engineers) with portable Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dubbed MR.UD) and coordinating sixty Insidious Drones.

  He imagined sixty of those things lumbering around in all directions as his platoon herded them along. Kluver-Bucy, his ass. He had never heard of such a thing. And where did they get sixty zombies from? Were there more? There had to be.

  Peter put down the book, his head spinning, and got ready to go to the mess hall. His stomach was rumbling terribly, and as he got up to leave, he wondered if the ID felt hunger the way he did.

  Part II

  The Rise of Carl

  Chapter 5

  Carl was sitting on his couch reading a book about nanotechnology when his father entered the room. He had his mini tablet laptop on, running a scan, and downloading updates.

  He had been online in the middle of a session on Popularity.soc (.soc was reserved for social networking websites), checking to see how many people were looking for him today. It was in the middle of tabulating his “Curiosity Count” and determining his place on the leader boards, when his computer detected new updates as it did every few minutes.

  “Carl, can you pick up your mother. She went to have her hair done, and it should be ‘did’ by now.”

  “Yeah, no problem, Dad.”

  Carl put his book down on the coffee table and absent-mindedly turned off the television in the middle of a report on poor air quality due to high ozone concentration and pollen count.

  He grabbed his coat out of the closet by the front door and a black umbrella with one broken spoke. He opened the door and ran outside into the driving rain.

  He opened the car door and flung himself into the driver’s seat, retracting the umbrella and tossing it on the floor of the passenger side. He activated the ignition with his Mini-com and pulled out of the driveway.

  The heavy raindrops pelted the roof of his car like bullets, nearly drowning out the Christmas songs on the radio.

  Now 10 minutes of music every hour on WTHZ FM, your official Christmas music station, WTHZ, Texas, that’s WTHZ, WTHZ FM…

  Carl detested Christmas, but it was his father’s car and the stations were preset. It was one of the many inconveniences of sharing one car, but given the economy and their finances, they had no choice. Besides, his parents got a 10G tax bonus every year that they used only one car.

  Carl remembered when his mother used to drive Pete and him to the mall, but in those days, the mall was a very different kind of place. There used to be stores.

  However, with advances in technology, internet commerce, and the increasingly unnecessary overhead of maintaining storefronts, the stores began to disappear. It began with bookstores. Print on demand replaced costly mass printings. Then clothing followed suit. Then electronics and appliances, and eventually even groceries. Everything was ordered online and shipped to your front door.

  At about the same time, air quality had begun to steadily decline. People no longer looked to venture out of their houses, except for work. Telecommuting had become commonplace for many jobs. The interesting thing about the decline in air quality was that its origin was surprising, ironic even. In the 1980’s, there was a lot of fuss about the ozone layer. In the 1990’s, the environmentalist movement gained momentum.

  At the turn of the millennium, the Democratic Party gave it legitimacy, and policy was drawn to reduce pollution from industry. Green was good, and everyone thought they were doing their part to help the environment. But the world, like anything else, appeared to swing on a great big pendulum.

  After decades of pollutants and smog being released into the environment, the air was significantly clearer. The vegetation subjugated by industry for so long, eventually rebounded, and with a vengeance. There was a steady increase in pollen count from all types of flora to the point that it was saturating the air. There was an epidemic of asthma, allergies, and a plethora of respiratory problems. People were actually choking on their fresh air.

  So when commerce went digital, it was no longer necessary to go out and shop. The economy was adversely affected. The disappearance of storefronts and the automation of exchanges meant fewer and fewer jobs. Fewer and fewer jobs meant less spending, which meant less commerce and fewer and fewer jobs.

  Malls had become venues for the only part of commerce that could not be executed on the internet—services. Car mechanics, doctors, hair stylists, and the DMV, were all now housed in these malls. Carl’s mother had gone for her usual Christmas Eve hair appointment. Her family was due this evening at the homestead, and she wanted to look her best.

  Carl pulled into the parking lot, and his Space Finder function popped up as a holograph on his windshield. He hated driving out to the mall on Christmas Eve because of the crowds, and there was never enough parking. A vacant space icon flashed red. He made it to the spot and pulled in as another spot poacher was coming down the row.

  The man in the blue car glared at him as he passed, and Carl thumbed his nose at him. The man’s expression was humorless.

  He turned off the ignition, grabbed his broken umbrella, braced himself for the deluge, and flung himself out of the car. He hastily made his way up the aisle as his face was spattered with rain. The umbrella offered little respite. As he crossed over onto the wide sidewalk in front of the mall, a car stopped short of hitting him.

  “Why don’t you be more careful?”

  The man just glared at him over the steering wheel. He was a scruffy-looking man with an olive complexion and dark eyes. He looked foreign, Mediterranean perhaps. For a moment, they stared each other down in the driving rain. At this point, Car
l’s umbrella was serving no purpose whatsoever as he stood there in the pouring rain looking rather stern and rather ridiculous.

  At last, the man in the blue car pulled around Carl and drove off in search of another parking spot.

  “Some people have no sense of humor,” Carl muttered to no one in particular.

  He stepped onto the wide patio area in front of the entrance to the mall, looked up, and saw his mother exiting the hair salon through the glass doors of the mall entrance. He waved to her, but she didn’t see him. He walked toward the front doors, tossing his lame umbrella into a garbage bin on the way. As he entered through the glass doors, the high-powered blowers did a good job of drying him as he passed through.

  He strode past the gaudy fountain by the entrance where a mother was changing her infant’s diaper on a bench, and he put himself in his mother’s line of sight. It took only a moment for her to see him, and then another to recognize him. They met in front of a doctor’s office.

  “So, your father saw it fit to send you out in this rain.”

  “I wasn’t doing anything anyway, Mom. Your hair looks great.”

  She coifed her hair gently in the hood of her coat. “Yeah, well not when the rain gets through with it.”

  “Why didn’t you cancel the appointment?”

  “Carl, do you have any idea how difficult it is to get an appointment this time of year between Christmas and New Year’s? Besides…”

  “I know. It’s tradition.”

  “You know I always get my hair done for Christmas Eve.”

  At that moment, Carl felt bad for his mother. She used to manage a whole team of employees, and now all she had to manage was her Christmas Eve hair appointment. “Well, you look great.”

  He glanced over her shoulder at the army recruitment center. Every mall in America had one. His mother’s expression soured when she detected his not so furtive glance.

  “Don’t even think about it, Carl.”

  “What, Mom? Think about what?”

  “I saw you look over at that army recruitment station.”

  “I just looked…”

  “I thought we discussed this.”

  “We did. You forbade me from even thinking about enlisting.”

  “And yet here you are thinking about it, right in front of me no less.”

  “Listen…” Passersby were looking at the escalating conversation. Carl took a moment to maintain the conversational volume of his voice while conveying his annoyance. “Do we have to discuss this here?”

  She paused, looking him up and down, sizing him up. After a moment, she had apparently decided that the mall was not the time or place to have this discussion. Some of her friends might be there and overhear them. “No, I suppose we don’t. Let’s just leave.”

  “I’ll pull the car up so you won’t have far to go in the rain. But first, I just have to use the restroom.”

  “Oh, okay,” she huffed, “I’ll wait by the fountain.” She stomped off to stand by the water fountain.

  “Okay,” he muttered behind her.

  Carl stalked over to the men’s room and relieved his almost bursting bladder. As he washed his hands, he appraised himself in the mirror. He knew he was going to hear more about the army recruitment center in the car. It was going to be a long ride home.

  He detested unemployment and living with his parents. He felt so helpless. It was humiliating, even if the vast majority of his cohort was in the very same position. Here he stood, a grown intelligent man, and he was afraid of his mommy. Afraid to be a man and choose his own destiny, even if it was in the army.

  He left the restroom and walked towards the water fountain. His mother stood there glaring at the glass doors to the parking lot. As he approached her, he was not sure if she was still annoyed with him or if she was annoyed at the rain for threatening her newly done hair.

  “I’m going to get the car and pull around.”

  She only glared in response.

  He stepped through the glass doors and into the deluge, but his face was hot from the exchange with his mother and his own humiliation, so he didn’t feel the drops assaulting his face.

  He looked down at his Mini-com and activated the Car-search function. It began to beep and flash arrows directing him to his father’s car. He stepped into the parking lot and briskly walked down his aisle. He flung the door open to his car and jumped into the driver’s seat.

  He turned on the car and blasted the heat. The Christmas station immediately began to blare, but this time Carl turned it off. Enough noise for one day. He looked behind him and backed out into the aisle. A woman in another car quickly took his place. Carl wondered if the woman would jump into his grave so quickly.

  He pulled up to the front of the mall and stopped off to the side. He was looking in and saw his mother looking down at her Mini-com. He honked the horn, but to no avail.

  In the parking lot behind him, some impatient jerk was revving his engine. Boy did Carl hate Christmas.

  His mother looked up and saw him. She waved.

  But Carl heard tires screech and an engine gunning. He turned around in time to see a car careening right towards the front of the mall…

  …and he was right in its path.

  Carl took a split second to assess the unbelievable nature of the scenario unfolding before him, and realizing that the driver intended to drive right through the glass doors and into the mall, he backed up just in time as it flew past him.

  It was a knee-jerk reaction for self-preservation, and he was in that instant unaware that his removal of himself from the car’s path opened another path into the mall entrance…

  …right into his mother.

  In the seconds that passed, Carl registered that it was that jerk in the blue car. The car jumped the curb, slid through the entrance on its own momentum, and there was a great flash of light.

  Suddenly Carl felt like he was punched in the face, he was upside down and his ears were ringing. His head was throbbing from the cacophonous blast and the car was sliding into the parking lot on its roof.

  He felt the sting of broken glass and nitrogen from his deployed air bag, and he heard the muffled sounds of people screaming. After some undetermined period of time that felt like several minutes, some man had opened the door to his car, disengaged the seat belt, and pulled him out.

  He got to his feet, and the man was shouting something to him, but he could not make out what it was. People were standing in the parking lot in the rain staring at a rather gaping hole in the front of the mall where the elegant glass entrance had once been.

  Smoke was billowing out of the yawning gap, and the uneven concrete around the opening was black. It took Carl a moment to get his bearings, when he remembered his mother. He began to walk towards the smoking mall. A few other onlookers passed him, brushing his shoulders as they ran up to the scene.

  Where was his mother? He thought back to before the blast. Was she standing by the glass doors when the blue car drove through? Did she get out of the way?

  It was impossible to see through the gray smoke pouring out of the mall. There was a hysterical woman crying and tugging on his arm. She might have been shouting at him, or shouting at no one in particular and simply hysterical, but he did not hear her words.

  He choked on the smoke and dust that filled the air as he strained to look for his mother. It appeared that only the entrance had been hit. The bulk of the mall appeared to be unaffected, and Carl foolishly hoped that his mother was somewhere in the recesses of the structure, scared out of her wits.

  He heard on-lookers calling various names into the smoke—husbands, wives, brothers, and sisters. However, at the moment, he only cared about one. So he joined the panicked chorus.

  “Mom. MOOOOOM. MARLA. MAAAARLAAAA.”

  Ash wafted in the air like snowflakes drowning out the rain all around them.

  “MAAAARLAAAAA!”

  His eyes welled up with hot tears as he choked back a horrible inevitability
that he did not want to accept.

  To add insult to injury, part of the roof collapsed, sending the onlookers reeling back towards the parking lot. Concrete and steel crashed down into the smoke and on top of the bodies of those whose names were being called out.

  There was more screaming and sobbing as the smoke reflected flashing red and blue lights. The first responders had arrived. Police officers pulled people back away from the mall as firefighters rushed into the smoke and disappeared, consumed in clouds of gray and black.

  A police officer, around his age, pulled Carl back. He was a man in his early twenties with a buzz cut and a frightened expression on his face. He was led into the arms of a paramedic who wrapped a blanked around him and led him over to an ambulance.

  Carl gazed in horror as police officers set up a perimeter and firefighters fought the blaze. The interior of the mall was still obscured by smoke, dust, and debris.

  A paramedic was talking to him, but to Carl it sounded like they were underwater. The man checked the cuts on his face from broken glass as more ambulances piled into the parking lot, which had become quite the scene. The press arrived only moments later. The whole scene had become some kind of circus.

  A police officer came over. “Are you alright, sir?”

  That was not why he came over. “Yes, I’m okay.”

  “Did you see anything?”

  Ah, there it was. “There was a man in a blue car.”

  “A man in a blue car?”

  Carl’s Mini-com was vibrating. It was his father. “Yes, a blue car. Hold on a moment…” He answered the phone. “Hello…hello?”

  He couldn’t hear his father over the phone. The ringing in his ears was too loud. He passed the phone over to the officer.

  The officer took it. “Yes…yes…hold on, sir…” He looked at Carl. “Are you Carl?”

  Carl nodded. The officer spoke into the phone. “Yes…yes, sir…he’s okay…what…who…” The officer put down the phone. “Where’s your mother?”