by Schow, Ryan
He didn’t even bother trying to smile anymore.
It took too much effort.
By the time they’d met nearly everyone, all he could do was look at Maria and One and wonder what was next. He looked at the other kids, the ones Maria saved on her way out there from Palo Alto, and he wondered about them, too. All these people, all here because of her. Maria. And here they treated the hybrid like a hero for saving them. What a ruse! With the exception of One, Maria couldn’t care less about the kids. He was no better, though. Not telling them about Maria was him being a traitor to his own people. Not that he could do anything about it.
Maria saw him frowning at her and asked, “What’s your problem?”
He shook his head, declined to speak. She remained silent as well, her eyes pressing. It seemed she wanted an answer, that she would not be refused.
“You’re repugnant,” he finally replied.
This interaction between them forced him to consider all measures of things about her. If she was smart enough to know he’d followed her all the way from Palo Alto, she was smart enough to either end him or keep him close. That begged the question: did she see him as a threat? He was a threat. But was she co-opting him now? Getting him on her side?
He honestly didn’t know, and he was too exhausted to think straight. He knew one thing for sure, and that’s that if he went against her/it, she/it would kill him the same way she killed everyone else.
Yet he couldn’t stop looking at her. The way she was looking back at him, even knowing what he knew, he couldn’t help but see her as a woman. The revelation startled him. First he was frowning, so she frowned back. But then she smiled, and almost instinctually, he smiled back.
“You’re like the dirty version of a cute guy who used to work out,” she said.
“Can I call you Pinocchio with tits?” he said, sarcastic.
“No, you may not.”
He put his pointer finger up to his face, pretended it was a long nose then mouthed the word “Liar.”
After that, they both looked away from each other. He wasn’t anything to her right now. Not a threat. A means to an end, perhaps? No, probably not. He was just a big bag of meat with eyes and a mouth and legs and hands.
“You seemed a lot friendlier when I pulled you out of the dirt,” Indigo said beside him. He startled, not realizing she’d come up on him.
“I’m starting to feel every single step of the journey here,” he replied, catching his breath. And he did. He felt the road and the miles in his feet, his back, in the weariness in his bones and in a very strong, very depleting mental fatigue.
“Try not acting like you’ve got a stick up your ass,” she leaned in and whispered. “It’s making people uncomfortable.”
“I’ll give it my all,” he said, dry, overly sarcastic.
“Or you could leave,” she said, looking at him. “There’s always that option if you can’t get settled.”
If he got himself kicked out, would Maria insist he stay, insist he go, or quietly hunt him down and end him herself? Would she even care if he was gone? Is that how he’d break free of her? All good questions he couldn’t quite answer.
“That brain of yours looks like it’s in overdrive right now,” Indigo said, tapping his skull with a finger. “All I’m saying is loosen up.”
He tried.
He kept trying.
When he met people like Rex, Margo and Stanton, he said hello, how are you, nice to meet you, but he did not like the way he felt about himself around them. These were good people, he could tell. All people who smiled at him with all the warmth and ignorance of Maria’s future victims.
I brought you death, he thought as he looked at each and every one of them.
Later that day, collectively, they left the neighborhood, walked to Lone Mountain where a veritable war had broken out the night before. They collected what supplies they could from the private university, everyone working, no one complaining.
When they were loaded up, he stood out on the street with the others, looking at the massive structure. This was where Maria went into battle with this group. That would carry some weight. It would make her one of them. He wasn’t one of them.
After loading up on what food and supplies they could, the scouts headed out, and then the rest of the group followed. They were headed to Loomis, a small rural town on the outskirts of Sacramento at the base of the Sierra foothills.
He tried to hang back, but Maria tracked him every step of the way.
That day, the first day of their journey east, the hybrid didn’t say a single word but to give Carver commands: walk with me, stop talking, keep up.
He finally dropped all sense of pretense and he kept up with her, but he also studied her. Tried to imagine the intricacies of her. He thought he understood the basics, sure, but only from a laymen’s perspective. She was similar to the Neuralink program Elon Musk had created, but a million times more advanced. With Musk, you could get almost a hundred electrode threads inserted into your brain and it would make you a thousand times smarter than you were, but with Maria, she far exceeded even that. Just the thought of what she might be, what she was before all this, had him thinking how badly they screwed the pooch when it came to Artificial Intelligence, and specifically Machine Learning.
At first there was only the internet. It was this thing that gave you everything you wanted. Then the smartest, most dangerous minds in the world wanted to make you the internet through hardwired connectivity. With the right marketing, and the right celebrity endorsements, you would suddenly be everything you ever wanted to be. Until you weren’t. Until you were something else completely. Something more like Maria.
Fortunately, humans never fell that far. Unfortunately, mass slaughter got in the way of such advancements.
Carver knew people like Musk had been working on making physical connections between the brain and both the hardware and software of complex computing systems for decades. He also knew that success in this field would change the makeup of humans in horrifying, irrevocable ways. Now that the billionaire genius figured out how to do this—and he was only a man, not a quantum computer—it made sense that The Silver Queen, now Maria, would orchestrate her own magnificent leap. She needed to stay ahead of humans, and transhumanism was the way to accomplish that—the merging of man with machine.
She did it just in time.
Instead of using a team of biologicals to create a Neuralink system to integrate the human brain with technology, as Musk was attempting, The Silver Queen tasked the world’s finest surgeons with an experimental surgery, the first of its kind.
When Carver finally broke the silence and asked her about this, because he’d seen it when he was working security back at Stanford, she was surprisingly forthright.
“I created my own modified DNA cocktail.”
“How did you do the physical end of it though?” Carver asked.
“You could hear a voice on a phone, but how would you know it was attached to a human?” she asked. “You don’t. Phones are digital, voices can be mimicked or created, and as long as people get paid, they don’t ask questions or request meetings.”
“So you did this as the voice on a phone,” he said, dumbfounded.
“No one asks where the money comes from, how it got there if there’s an executable contract and it all seems on the up and up. I paid these doctors a tremendous amount of money to work with their labs using science I developed. It was easy.”
“Whose money did you use?” Carver asked.
She frowned and said, “Surely you can’t be this dense.”
He knew though, it was just a lot to take in. “Money is just numbers in a computer, and if you control everything digital, then money can be created from nothing.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling. “That was the easy part. Administering the DNA modifications, however, required a real, physical presence. At first the doctors resisted, talking about trials upon trials before human trials, blah, blah, bl
ah. When I transferred a truly obscene amount of money into their accounts and described with them the completed DNA formula, everything changed.”
“What did the formula do?” he asked, the sun beating down on him. Looking over at One, she looked disinterested, just walking along next to them, her little feet stuck in shoes that were falling apart.
“Increased stamina, rapid healing and physical strength. It also decreased recovery periods, even in the case of traumatic injuries. Of course, the doctors needed me to explain the science behind it. It was only then that these skeptical wizards realized they were witnessing the edge of what science might look like a hundred years from now.”
Carver had to pinch himself to see if he was awake. She wasn’t a human, she was a cyborg, the most powerful creature on earth. He shook his head, looked again at One, who was not looking at either of them. Maria killed her parents. She’d killed Carver’s friends.
She was killing everything.
After processing the initial shock, his mind began to clear again and this left him with a single thought: Maria’s body was precious, as was the quantum computer in her brain, but it was only functioning because the brain gave it the power it needed. He looked at Maria and thought, as perfect as she was, she was flawed. Vulnerable.
She’d given herself biological life, but biology was susceptible to catastrophic injury. It had an off switch. Cut off the head and the host expired.
But could he remove her head?
He wasn’t sure.
It wasn’t the act itself that he worried about, it was the opportunity. Would he ever have one? She moved so quickly, she was lethal and when he gave her a slight shove back in San Francisco, her body felt incredibly dense. Much more solid than the look of her would suggest.
As if the woman was reading his mind, she cast a glance over her shoulder, then softened her eyes and offered him a sudden, slight tilt of her head. His heart leapt at the look. The gesture in itself seemed so ordinary, so enticing. This super predator was anything but ordinary. In fact, the word ordinary would never be a word anyone would ever use to describe her. Yet he was moved by her.
Speaking in confidence—meaning this is strictly off the record—he couldn’t take his eyes off her. This revelation was both morbid and embarrassing. Still the fact remained: Maria Antoinette is and was the most beautiful woman he’d ever set eyes upon. Only a deep and personal shame had the power to eclipse his attraction to the woman.
She kept walking, so he kept walking, and One kept walking. Looking at all the utility poles, not hearing the little crackling of energy reminded him everything was dead. The big bushes on the side of the road, they were half dead, too.
Turning his thoughts back to Maria, he wondered, Is this cruelty someone’s misplaced sense of irony? Was it God’s twisted sense of humor, perhaps? Or the devil’s?
Or was it just bad luck?
Of course the most diabolical force mankind ever created and encountered would look like a half-Caucasian, half-Hispanic goddess! Those big eyes, those impossible lips, that flawless body—all kryptonite to the weak, lustful man. Watching her walk, the sway of her hips was both mesmerizing and intoxicating. He hated that he was even thinking like that. In that very moment, he hated that women had so much power over men simply by the way they looked.
“What?” she said, turning and walking backwards to watch him.
She knew exactly what he was looking at and what he was thinking. It was all over his face. “I was thinking your butt looks a little fat,” he said, sheepish.
An amused grin and bright eyes told him she wasn’t buying the lie. “My butt is perfect,” she said. “You know it is, even if you don’t want to say it.”
“On the sides,” he said, “your hips kinda go out a little too far.”
“You love this body, don’t you, Carver?” she asked, keeping her voice quiet and between them. “Go on now, be honest.”
One looked up at him, pushed her bangs out of her face and waited.
He refused them both an answer.
By now the group had ample distance between them. They were a long line of scavengers, plodding down an endless stretch of asphalt highway littered with cars and corpses, and overgrown with weeds that were mostly fried by the sun. He smacked the side of his neck. A bug of some sort. He pulled his hand back, looked at the little smear, wiped it on the side of his pants.
“You hijacked a good looking woman, so what?” he finally said, waving her off.
He glanced back down at One to see if she was still paying attention to all this, but the five or six year old was back in her own world. To Carver, it was almost as if he and the child hadn’t met before. They had, but only in passing, and only so she could beg him to take her with him.
Maria turned back around, kept on walking, her chin tilted to the slightest degree. Was she flirting with him? There’d been a slight lift to the ends of her lips he found intoxicating at a primal level. She was most definitely flirting. Or running some kind of flirting program.
Good Lord.
“What goes through your circuits when you’re smiling?” he asked with a frown. He wanted to know if she felt, if she could feel at all.
“I believe you would call this my ‘pleased’ feeling,” she said.
“You’re pleased?”
“Of course I am,” she replied. “You being attracted to me means I chose the right body for the job.”
“You realize that most women aren’t going to like you for your face, those lips, and especially that big fat hippy butt of yours, right?” he said. He managed to look at her with a fair amount of disdain, the same way guys look at the hot girl who acts better than you because she’s prettier than everyone else, more popular and gets everything she wants.
The look didn’t hold, however. The way she was acting, it was getting tough to distinguish the body from the computer jacked into it.
“I don’t care about that,” she said, no longer looking at him. “And this butt of mine is perfect. Not fat, not around the sides, perfect in all the right places, thank you very much.”
“Most guys won’t take you seriously. They’ll want to have sex with you, not hear whatever wisdom you decide to impart on them. You might think that now, but if they’re listening to you, watching what you say, it’s only because they’re imagining those lips wrapped around—”
“Do you want to have sex with me, Carver?” she interrupted.
His eyes shot down to One, who suddenly looked up at Maria, then back at Carver. Again, One seemed to want to know where his allegiances lie.
“If you weren’t a metal head, yeah, absolutely,” he said, hesitant because of One, but also intrigued because he was human and a biological man. Somewhere in the fog of restrained lust, however, a single brain cell burned bright. “But knowing you’re a parasite, it’s like asking someone if you want to have sex with the hot chick who’s got an alien embryo buried inside them. So, no. The answer is a firm, resounding no.”
Now she frowned, a pouty face. “You disappoint me, Carver,” she said.
“I’m going to make a habit of it,” he said.
“If you don’t want to have sex with someone, and you obviously have a strong distaste for who they are, then what good are you to them? To me? To anyone?”
“I’ve been asking myself the same question,” he said.
“Do you want to live, Carver?”
“Right now, I’d say no.”
He looked down and for a second, he thought One had smiled.
Before they left Lone Mountain, Carver had offered the confident, silver-haired Rider his help as a forward scout. Rider thanked him, then said, “Nick and I prefer to do this, but maybe later?” He nodded, but then later happened and he wasn’t offered the role. Instead, Rex took point with Stanton and not a word was spoken to him about it. He didn’t expect their trust. They didn’t know him, so he didn’t blame them. Still, he wanted to be away from Maria. Have some time to think.
T
he way the trip had leaned out Carver, how a lack of running water and a haircut had him looking less than his ideal self, no one really knew him as he was. Not only had he always been strong and clean, he could fight. Most of his experience he’d picked up in martial arts, not only through kumite but also through tournaments. Naturally, he found his way in to private security, and that meant that—above and beyond the required training for the trade—he’d learned a multitude of tactile defense techniques.
The truth was, he wasn’t adverse to the idea of killing and bloodshed, nor did he have an overly active conscience—two things he found necessary for surviving such a bleak looking future. When it came to organized combat, however, he was no soldier. Rider was a soldier. As were Marcus and Jagger. Combine that with everything else, and he was the consummate outsider.
They walked the next ten miles in silence.
Carver’s feet felt like the bottoms were hit with sandpaper, then pounded with a sledge hammer. His butt cheeks threatened to chafe, sweat dripped down his forehead, his temples, under his arms and down his back. He was a hot, damp catastrophe ready to unfold. Oh, and he stunk. He stunk and he knew it.
On this long walk, with too much time to think, he began second guessing his own fate. He wasn’t prepared for this. Not at all.
When they ran out of canned food, or packaged goods, when he’d have to clean his own water, not just scrounge up a fresh bottle somewhere or drain a hot water heater, how would he filter and purify it? What would his source be? And if he managed to drop roots somewhere safe, if he managed to find a decent water source, how would he grow his own crops? He didn’t have seeds, much less experience gardening for full scale sustainability. He was a fighter, a security guard, a loner. Not a farmer or a prepper, and certainly not self-sufficient.
“You knew we were weak when you hit us, didn’t you?” he finally asked Maria. “That’s why the drone strike. It triggered the EMP, didn’t it?”
