by Jake Bible
A couple days of testing and I was confident, as was Jack, that the tanks were safe. So, I hopped in and found myself in the Center. Jurgen Nemm had his tanks dialed in to that spot by default.
Ming, Trish, Coz, and Kip were there, sitting on the floor playing poker. At first, I thought it was strip poker, but it turned out that clothes were optional in the Center. I would later push for the not so optional part, especially when Sandra arrived.
Ming had created the Center and had reached out to Jurgen, but, of course, Jurgen was dead. Ming didn’t know that, so he kept the connection open. It just happened that I walked through instead. I stumbled upon four of the most brilliant programming minds the world had ever had. They’d survived the apocalypse and holed up in uber-gen setups like the one I had, each in a different part of the country. Eventually, Laura, Henry, Jeremy, and last, Sandra, would join us.
Laura was a hardcore gamer. Despite her mom jeans, she didn’t have kids because kids took time away from gaming. Somehow, while looking for new game worlds to explore, she had hacked into the Center and found us. Same with Jeremy. Henry was almost on the level of programming genius as Ming, Kip, Coz, and Trish, but not quite. He was good enough to find us, though.
Last came Sandra. At first, she wouldn’t say how she found the Center or where she was living. But, after some prying, it turned out that someone not very nice was using an immersion tank as a torture chamber on her. When she was “bad,” she would be put in there. Not even Ming knew how she found the Center, but she did.
It would be Sandra that sent us on our path to immortality.
Ming hypothesized, and Trish and Kip backed him up, that we could tweak the immersion tanks to fully integrate us permanently with the quantum matrix that was being housed on a million different servers across the globe. Each of us, except for Sandra, had server farms where we were living in real life, so we strengthened those, but we also connected to farms across the oceans as redundancies. That was hardware work. That I could help with.
Power wasn’t an issue. The solar cells and micro-wind turbines that powered the server farms were designed to last indefinitely. Couple that with my ability to make sure the maintenance bots were running at every location, after giving the others some long distance guidance on how to get theirs running properly, and the infrastructure was sound.
All we had to do was cheat death.
Ming had it all planned out. From what he knew about the blue gel inside the tanks, it integrated itself into our bodies. With extreme long-term exposure, the gel would eventually break down the human body. But, since the mind was being housed inside the quantum matrix, a person could conceivably live forever, just in a quantum world, not a physical one.
That’s where Holo came into the picture. I hated to do it, but there was no way I was going to leave him behind. It stood to reason that a dog could be immersed as much as a human could. So, one night, after a lot of self-loathing, I stuck Holo in his tank and slammed the lid down. I’ll never forget the look in his eyes as he drowned for the first time in the blue.
Then I immersed and found him having a full-on shouting match with Coz in the Center.
Holo can curse more than Trish, although he’s chilled out since, and he had a lot to say that night.
Turned out that since he wasn’t constrained by his canine physique in the Center, he could actually verbalize his thoughts. His quantum being looked exactly like him, as we all look exactly like us when there, but Ming immediately found a way to tweak his vocal cords.
Holo gave me an earful too for half an hour before he chilled out.
After that, it was only a matter of making the proper preparations before we were ready to permanently immerse ourselves and say goodbye to the undead-infested wasteland that the planet had become. We would live on forever inside quantum computers as gods.
Except three of us were missing. And that bothered me more than it should have.
Six
“Hey,” I said as I moved closer to Sandra. “You okay?”
“Yes,” she said in that quiet voice of hers. It wasn’t quite a whisper, but it wasn’t easy to hear either. It was like she was talking as loud as possible in order not to be heard. “You?”
“I’m good.” I smiled. “You sure?”
“No, of course I am not sure,” she replied. “The rest of you have secure places for your bodies. You will be left alone. My body is not mine to control. I had to do…something in order to make sure I’m not disturbed until my physical body dissolves into the blue.”
The way she said the word “something” gave me chills. Sandra was the kindest, most gentle person I had ever met. But there was a darkness inside her that even Ming couldn’t match. I’d seen it hiding just behind her eyes many times over the years. She never let it out, and never spoke of what exactly she had to endure in her reality, but I knew that if she was pushed far enough, things would not go well for the pusher.
“Are you locked in?” I asked. “Did you take all the precautions we’d planned?”
“I did what I had to,” she replied. “It was not…pleasant.”
“Right. Yeah. Sure. Of course it wasn’t,” I said. “But you’re safe? He can’t get to you?”
“No one can get to me,” Sandra said. “Not anymore.”
She tugged at the sleeves of her cardigan, a gesture I’d watched her do a thousand times, and the conversation was over. Sandra looked around at the others and her frown deepened.
“They should be here,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “No one else seems too concerned. Ming said he’d be coming and Jeremy is always late. But Henry? That does have me worried. This isn’t like him at all.”
She kept tugging at her sweater and I reached out and took her hand. She gasped and pulled away.
“Sorry, sorry,” I said. “I know you don’t like to be touched. Not sure why I did that. You just look so… Sorry, again. My bad.”
“No…it’s fine,” Sandra replied. “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. I…”
Her sentence fell away and I let it. I didn’t know what else to do.
“Okay, bro, I’m worried,” Holo said as he trotted over to us. “Not like Henry to be late. Has anyone tried calling him?”
“I got here the same time as you did,” I said to Holo. “When would I have called him?”
“Sandra?” Holo asked. “Have you taken a break from your emo marathon to check on Henry?”
That stung her and she showed it. Holo didn’t seem to care. He was a good dog, but he didn’t always grasp the subtleties of human communication. Dogs tell it like it is.
“Man,” I said. “Not cool.”
“Didn’t mean anything by it, babe,” Holo said to Sandra. “But, have you?”
“No,” Sandra said and walked off.
“Nice one,” I said to Holo.
“If she could sit on her haunches and lick her own privates, she’d be much happier, bro,” Holo said. “She should work on that.”
“Jesus,” I said and cleared my voice. “Hey! Has anyone called Henry? Anyone?”
Trish and Kip were in a conversation about something to do with the Domains they’d created, and Laura and Coz were talking about cheat codes for Sucker Shot XII, a first-person shooter that was never lucky enough to make it to unlucky number XIII. The world ended first.
“Hey! Assholes!” Holo barked.
Heads turned and eyebrows went up.
“There ya go, bro,” Holo said then walked over to the couch and hopped up next to Kip.
“Has anyone called Henry?” I asked for the umpteenth time.
“No,” Coz said. “We were waiting for Ming to show.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because maybe he knows why Henry and Jeremy aren’t here,” Trish said, the tone in her voice fully in the “Duh” zone. “You know how Ming gets when we try to make too many decisions on our own.”
“Yeah, well, Ming ain’t the boss,” I said.
> “Pretty close, dude,” Coz said. “None of this would be this without him.”
“I’m not saying the guy doesn’t have skills,” I said. “There’s no better programmer left alive.”
“Hey,” Trish said.
“Bite me,” Kip grumbled.
“You’re into that sort of thing?” Holo asked, scooting a couple of inches away from Kip.
“Ha ha,” Kip said and swatted at Holo.
“You know what I mean,” I said. “Ming is great with what Ming is great with. But people are not part of his greatness. Odds are he’s going to say screw Henry and Jeremy because he hates it when people are late to his party. Doesn’t matter that he’s late, too.”
There was a quiet chime and Ming appeared in the center of the Center. Dressed in a kimono. Why the hell was he dressed in a kimono?
“Greetings, fellow travelers,” he said and bowed. “It is good of you to join me on our journey into forever.”
He straightened up and smiled at all of us.
Pudgy, but not exactly fat, Ming was in his mid-fifties and had known nothing but programming for the immersion tanks his entire life. His father had been one of the pioneers in the early days of the tech. Ming grew up eating, drinking, breathing immersion architecture. It was arguable that Trish or Kip could be better overall programmers than Ming, but no one knew immersion like Ming did.
And he was the first person to tell you so.
“What’s with the kimono, bro?” Holo asked.
“Yeah,” Kip said.
“I felt ceremonial on this fine day in our lives,” Ming said.
He clapped his hands and a tray appeared on the huge coffee table in front of the couch. It was centered perfectly on the Lazy Susan and filled with various types of sake. Ming loved sake.
“Please. Friends. Enjoy. We should…” He turned in a circle. “I see we are not all here. Is there a reason Henry and Jeremy are late?”
“See,” I said and made a point of pointing at everyone else. “I told you.”
“Yeah, bro, you’re so smart,” Holo said.
“I take it that no one has tried calling either of them?” Ming asked, but didn’t really ask. He waved his hand and shook his head. “I will do so now.”
Ming placed a finger to his left ear, which was a silly affectation he had since our existence in the Center was completely quantum and he could initiate communication without moving a muscle.
“Henry? Please respond,” he said. He also didn’t have to talk out loud. “Henry? Are you there?”
His face grew puzzled.
“Let me try,” Trish said.
“There is no need for two of us trying at the same time,” Ming said. “Henry will respond or he will not respond. Bombarding him with communication requests will not hurry the process.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want to talk to you,” Coz suggested. “You did make fun of his kilt last time we were together.”
“Now he can make fun of your kimono,” Holo said. “Someone IM him that.”
“Yeah,” Kip said.
“I’ll try Jeremy,” Laura said.
“No, no, I’m already doing that,” Ming said. He squinted so hard his eyes nearly closed before shaking his head again. “The connection is dead.”
“What do you mean it’s dead?” Coz asked.
“I mean it is dead,” Ming said. “It has been destroyed, not merely turned off. Come inside and see for yourself.”
Everyone connected to the comms and we could instantly see what he meant. There was a black spot where Jeremy’s connection usually was. If he’d been offline or had simply severed the connection, it would have been a red X. This was a complete lack of anything. Jeremy was gone.
“Should we be worried?” Sandra asked, voicing what we were all feeling.
“Black spot means his system is destroyed,” Coz said.
“His whole fucking building is gone or we’d get a ping from some of the infrastructure,” Trish said. “We aren’t even seeing residual feedback from the wiring. There’s always residual feedback from the wiring even if the servers are fried.”
“Troubling, to say the least,” Ming said and waved his hands.
A map of the country came up, showing all of our physical locations. He pinched in until he found Jeremy’s place. He tapped it and a bright red circle surrounded the building where Jeremy lived. Then he zoomed out and found Henry’s location which happened to only be about two hours away from Jeremy’s. He put a green circle around that.
“What do we have between?” he asked. None of us answered. We all knew when Ming was talking to himself. “What terrain do we have?”
Any one of us could have answered that for him. Henry and Jeremy lived in the middle of the country. The plains. Nothing but flatland and old, dried-up farms. Once the growing vats took over agriculture in the country, those plains states were no longer needed for crops. The land dried up and turned to dust as soon as the forced irrigation ended. Took less than two years.
But, for those that didn’t exactly like what civilization had become, those wide-open states were super cheap and provided the isolation some folks craved. And since all quantum communication was via the air waves, infrastructure wasn’t an issue when it came to being the programmers they were.
“Tasking satellites,” Ming announced.
“Dude,” Coz said.
“Getting a little ahead of yourself, bro,” Holo said.
“Goddammit, Ming. When was the last time you tasked a satellite?” Trish asked.
“You’re going to break it,” Laura warned.
“Yeah,” Kip said.
But Ming was Ming, and he brought the closest surveillance satellite online and aimed it directly at Jeremy’s place. He zoomed in closer. Then closer. Then closer.
The collective breath went out of our collective lungs.
“Holy shit,” Trish said.
“You ain’t kidding about it being gone,” Coz said.
“Even I couldn’t dig a hole like that,” Holo said.
There was a crater instead of a building. A black hole that had to be at least a hundred yards deep.
“He did that,” Ming said. “That’s his fallback. He blew his system up instead of letting it get into the wrong hands.”
“What wrong hands?” Sandra asked quietly. “Who would be out there?”
“Let us find out,” Ming said and the image began to rewind.
Ming took us back three hours until we saw the explosion collapse in on itself and Jeremy’s building reassemble back in one piece. Sort of.
“Oh, Jesus,” I said.
Undead. Thousands and thousands of them had converged on Jeremy’s place. No idea why they found him, but they did. They overran the building and then ten minutes later it exploded, vaporizing anything within five hundred yards.
“Henry,” I said.
Ming nodded and moved the satellite. They were two hours apart by road and visited each other when they could. Henry liked to go for long drives despite the danger. Not that I’m one to talk since I nearly got eaten by undead rats in order to find bourbon.
Henry’s place was still intact.
Ming rewound until he saw Henry’s Jeep racing backwards away from the compound that Henry had built. He stopped and went forward then froze the image and zoomed all the way in. Henry was driving and Jeremy was slumped in the passenger’s seat.
“Keep zooming,” I said and stared hard at the image.
“No,” Sandra whispered. “Don’t.”
She and Jeremy had been close. An almost brother/sister bond. She didn’t want to see what we all expected to see.
Ming zoomed in until we had perfect detail of what had happened to Jeremy.
There was a deep, dark stain on his left shoulder and flesh hung from his neck in gooey flaps. He’d been attacked by the undead and wasn’t doing well.
“Why the fuck would Henry take him back to his compound?” Trish asked, her voice filled with frustrated an
ger. “That idiot.”
“Maybe Jeremy wasn’t infected?” Laura said. “Maybe that happened some other way.”
No one responded to her. No need. She knew what she was saying was bullshit.
“Jesus,” I said again.
“He ain’t gonna be able to help, bro,” Holo said.
Sandra flashed him a quick look of anger then looked at me. I saw the truth in her eyes just as everyone else caught on to what might have happened to Henry.
“We write them off,” Coz said. “It’s cold, sure, but no way Jeremy is surviving that. And if Henry was dumb enough to take an infected person into his compound, then the odds of him still being alive are zero.”
Then a chime rang out and Henry connected to the Center.
Seven
“I’m sorry,” Henry said. He coughed for a good thirty seconds, cleared his throat, failed, coughed some more, then looked at all of us. “I screwed up. I screwed up bad.”
“Henry, what happened?” Trish asked.
“We know what happened,” Coz said.
“Yeah,” Kip agreed.
“Shut up,” Laura said.
“They got Jeremy,” Henry said.
“We know,” I said. “We checked out the satellite surveillance.”
Henry nodded. He was in his late thirties and skinnier than Coz. His head was shaved bald and he wore a tank top and cargo shorts. A spot on his right forearm kept flickering in and out of focus. I turned to Ming and saw the guy was staring at the flickering spot with great interest.
“I…” Henry coughed some more. “I tried to save him. I figured maybe if I got him here early, you know…before.”
“Henry? What did you fucking do?” Trish asked.
“I used my spare immersion tank,” Henry continued. “I put Jeremy in it.”
“While he was infected?” Coz shouted. “Have you lost your mind?”
“I’ve been working on a program that I thought could filter out the infection,” Henry said. “There’s no reason that the quantum transference has to transfer the infection when it transfers the consciousness.”
