Evolution Z

by Everist J Miller

  A ghostly security program appeared as if coming into focus from invisibility to kill him.

  Now he realised. Now when it was too late. The charge he grasped was an inferno, and he was unable to extinguish it.

  Like playing hot potato he had to let it go. Reflexively he directed it away from its mark, away from the black box, and into the electrical field that bound the HUD to his headset.

  Queenie screamed. The inside of the hard-hat she was wearing ignited with a blinding flash of white light devouring her head. She tried to heave it off but went limp, sat to the ground and collapsed like a lifeless sack.

  R47 scanned the HUD out of curiosity. Interesting, he thought. What did I do? It wasn't easy to tell, but he suspected that the charge had travelled through the link between the headset and HUD and then into the Queen. The HUD was undamaged.

  R47 could read from the HUD that Queenie had no vital signs. The Queen was dead.

  ###

  R47 felt an immense satisfaction. It was like the release that follows an orgasm. As a murderer he didn't have to feign emotion, act surprised or make excuses. Aside from his own contentment, he didn't feel, nor did he have to feel, anything. He wished that the Queen had suffered more. Her chilling scream wasn't the greatest reward, but he had enjoyed it. He lusted to kill all of them and in the most violent way possible. Shriek. Squeal. How pleasurable it would be to terrify them.

  R47 saw Sharpie rush to Queenie's aid. The stupid names they had given themselves. R47 smirked inside. Mr Sharpie knelt beside the lifeless former Queen, shook her and asked, "Can you hear me?" What a lark.

  Doug, at the fringe of R47's vision, doubled back as if from the heat of an excited flame. His eyes remained fixed on R47's vacant but alert pupils. He looked rattled. R47 was glad. Perhaps Doug sensed it. Then Doug's muscles relaxed, and he smirked at R47 sardonically. "I'm going to find your weakness, my friend," he said. "I know your secret. That headset." He tapped his own head. "I know where it came from, my friend." Just before turning to the rabble of shocked kids, he added, "I will be back soon, my friend." It was infuriating. Such a fleeting fear only to be trumped by his spiteful arrogance.

  "Watch him," Doug said to Sharpie pointing at R47. "I'm going to get another HUD."

  Point at me and I'll make your suffering more intense, R47 said to himself.

  Well that was great. He had finally killed but the black box was still alive and so was Doug. R47 felt an urgency to solve his ultimate limitation.

  Sharpie was still on his knees next to Queenie, his hands covered his eyes. It was as if he couldn't register what had just happened.

  "Hey, did you hear me, my friend?" Doug asked Sharpie.

  Sharpie lifted his hands from his face. His lip was quivering and his face was blood red. If only he bled in a literal sense, R47 thought. I want to see blood oozing thicker than salty tears from his eyes.

  "You're not going get away with this," Sharpie said to Doug. "Don't let him get away," he said to the others, standing up. He was eyeing Doug. "He killed her. I bet he planned it. Think about it. He doesn't want to pay us. You heard what he said to her. We're nothing. We're shit."

  R47 scanned his surrounds. The other kids were frozen with shock. Their heads were bowed. Some of them, in particular the younger ones, were crying, inconsolable. Sharpie couldn't rouse their attention.

  "Didn't you hear me?" Sharpie shouted. After a pause he screamed, "Get up!"

  The group gained strength and swarmed towards Doug.

  R47 was pleased. There was doubt in his mind that the kids could do any damage to Doug. But they were strong in number, and Doug wasn't armed.

  R47 was surprised again about how he could exact violence doing nothing in the physical world. He hadn't meant to kill the Queen. He was forced into a corner. He had to get rid of that electric charge and she had got in his way. He would rather have killed Doug, but it was now working in his favour. If the kids were convinced that Doug had killed her, he could get at Doug indirectly. He marvelled at that thought. He hoped they would torture Doug, extract every drop of pain out of him. And he, R47, was there to witness it. To be aroused by it and devour satisfaction from it.

  But he was momentarily distracted. A pale pink, hairless rat with rabbit-like front teeth was right in front of him. Its skin was wrinkled. This time R47 took a chance. The kids were away, at a good distance, after Doug. He switched off console mode. Grabbed the rat. It wriggled and gnashed its teeth. He bit it, ripping off a tiny piece of its skin with his incisors. That stirred an almost uncontrollable hunger. To counter his temptation to eat the rat, he switched back to console mode.

  The rat scurried away from his limp hand.

  He turned his attention back to Doug's disgusting voice and looked over to see the kids had surrounded Doug.

  Doug grinned. "You think it was me?" he asked. "Can't you see, my friends?" He pointed at R47. "He killed your leader."

  The kids continued their sluggish movement toward Doug uninterrupted. Doug wore a smug smile, not revealing any concern.

  "You are the clever one," Doug said to Sharpie. "What could I gain from killing her?"

  "So, I'm to believe it was just a coincidence?" Sharpie asked.

  "What?" Doug asked.

  "You getting her to put that thing on," Sharpie said. "I bet you conned her into wearing it. You got to her by saying that the volunteer was damaged. I reckon you thought you'd get away without having to give us anything if you got rid of her, leaving us without her. You thought she'd be the only one to stand up to you and the rest of us wouldn't."

  Doug clapped mockingly. "Very well put, my friend," he said. "Your grasp of language is very impressive for a resident of the Shit Belt. But really? Why would I say I needed to get a new HUD then?"

  "Huh?" Sharpie looked puzzled. Had he been consumed in his grief and shock?

  R47 was confused. What the hell did a new HUD have to do with it? Come on. Sharpie had to see through that red herring.

  "I just said I would get a new HUD, my friend," Doug said. "I was going to leave you watching him. That would be a bit stupid for a person who wants to take the volunteer away without paying for him." After a pause he said, "Look around you, my friend. You wanted my food. Now you want my life. How is that good for me?"

  Sharpie hesitated. He stopped to consider. Then he said, "You don't value us. You didn't give a shit about her." He pointed at the still body of the Queen. "Killing her meant nothing to you."

  Doug smiled. "Really?" he asked. "I bargained hard. She would not have expected any less, my friend. But I didn't kill her. There was no need for it. No need to make enemies out of you."

  The pack was close to Doug. He ignored them. Sharpie raised a hand to signal for them to halt. There was immediate dissension.

  "He's a killer," a voice said.

  "You can't let him get away with it," another added.

  They were restless, bloodthirsty and grieving all at once. A fiery combination, R47 thought. He pleaded in his mind for the kids to kill Doug.

  "Wait a minute, Sharpie called to them. I'm trying to sort this out. He's not going anywhere." Then he said to Doug, "I just don't understand how a volunteer could kill anyone. That thing on his head," he tapped his own ear, "is meant to stop that from happening. I know that and a lot of other things. I haven't always been in this Shit Belt. I got dumped here, but not before I learned a few things."

  Bravo, R47 thought to himself. He was curious how Doug could his explain his way out of that.

  "Yes, my friend," Doug said. "I can see you are very well educated."

  R47 thought he saw Sharpie blush with a hint of pride. Don't let him sweet talk you. Fucking kill him.

  "I'll be straight with you, my friend," Doug said, continuing the positive momentum. He told Sharpie that this volunteer's headset was special. He summarised how R47 had escaped. He challenged Sharpie to explain how else a volunteer could end up alone, without an operator, in the Shit Belt.

  "But you knew
he was dangerous," Sharpie said. "And yet you still let her wear the... HUD."

  "No volunteer with a headset has ever killed anyone," Doug said. "Not ever, my friend.". For effect he repeated, "Not ever." After a pause he said, "She wanted to see the damage, and that was the only way of showing her. Besides, I had already used the HUD myself and nothing happened to me. You think I would have risked death, my friend?" Without giving Sharpie a chance to respond, he said, "Of course I wouldn't. Her death was completely unexpected."

  R47 felt his hopes slipping. Doug was pandering to the boy's pride in his unacknowledged intelligence. He was also telling the boy the truth, and the boy knew it. Somehow it made sense. Better than any lie would have. But the sudden movement of another ugly buck-toothed embryo coloured naked rat broke R47's attention. It was scurrying around him.

  I am powerful, R47 said to himself. I killed a person. I can be violent. The black box couldn't stop me. It can't detect thought. It can't stop me from hacking the software to make things happen in the real world. It was just a matter of transforming energy from one form to another. Instructions to memory to processor to registers. Thought to software then binary to current to explosion.

  And that malevolent rat. I wonder if I can get it to bite me this time, he reasoned. He had bit the other one. Why not try the opposite? If it did, would it become a volunteer too? Wait. What a stupid way of putting it, he realised. I'm not bound by their rules anymore. Would it become a zombie?

  Zombie, he thought. Once an adjective, transformed into fear itself and then banned from discourse with the threat of death. Death being utilised to stop the spread of a... word. How ironic.

  The rat scurried over him. R47 was disappointed it didn't bite. To the rat it must have appeared that he was nothing more than an inanimate object. Like the branch of a tree. In console mode he could not agitate to test whether the rat would transform to aggression if he provoked it. But he wondered whether it would ever see a zombie as food.

  Should he exit console mode again and take what might be his only opportunity to agitate the rat and try to get it to bite him. Or maybe he should bite it, like he did the other one.

  A thought interrupted him. The nefarious diagnostic program had predicted his plan to burn the black box. How would it know the black box would be damaged? It must have traced the path of the charge and interfaced with the black box to assess the potential damage.

  Yes, the diagnostic program would have communicated directly with the black box. It would have contained the black box decryption key.

  Would the trail of communication have been recorded somewhere?

  Like a detective he siphoned his concentration to follow the trail. Lightening flashed in his skull. Yes. The software had fed the chatter between the worm of a diagnostic program and the black box to the HUD. That banter contained words spoken by the black box. Those words must have been decrypted or they would have been unintelligible to diagnose. That would have left the decryption key somewhere in the exchange of information. R47 snatched the code from the headset's memory and analysed it.

  R47's task required intense concentration, but he was mindful not to lose touch with the interaction between Doug and the kids. It was important that he know the outcome of the tense situation. His life depended on that as much as on his decrypting the black box.

  He allowed himself to pause intermittently to hear snippets of the conversation.

  Doug had been appealing to Sharpie's rational intelligence which contrasted the bare instinct of the Queen. He was also hypothesising that Sharpie would fill the leadership void. The others were emotional and needed guidance. Sharpie appeared to understand the need for them to remain a collegiate group to aid in their survival.

  "They won't be satisfied," Sharpie said to Doug, "unless you give us what she wanted us to have."

  "Meat," Doug said nodding in acknowledgement.

  "Yes," Sharpie said. He sounded confident. There was no sign of distress in his voice. R47 wondered whether Sharpie had cared at all for the Queen or whether he had been waiting in anticipation of her demise so he could usurp her power.

  Doug didn't seem surprised. Why would he? Someone like Doug didn't feel the weight of emotional attachment, R47 reasoned. It was about manipulation to ensure that his needs always came first. Everything revolved around him. It was easy for Doug to assume that for a few others it was the same. As for the rest, they were the ones to be manipulated like puppets on strings. Like the volunteers, who were the ultimate subservient, hollow shells.

  But that had changed. I am the ultimate being, R47 said to himself. I am intelligent, rational and free of empathy. He knew of empathy based on his previous human self. He had felt it control him; no - hold him back.

  "I'll get it, my friend," Doug said. Sharpie's eyebrows raised but his expression dulled. He nodded.

  "I don't have it here," Doug continued. Sharpie's mouth opened but Doug waved him down. "I don't have it here," he repeated. "I will get it for you, my friend. I will come back. But watch him in the meantime." Doug pointed at R47. "Don't let him get away, my friend, or you will end up with nothing."

  "Don't trust him," a voice said. "He won't come back," another chimed in.

  Doug turned to observe the swelling crowd. With mild amusement, he said "I have a gun, my friends. Do you want to see it?"

  The kids looked shocked. Doug smiled. "Don't be surprised, my friends, Doug said. "I'm not going to cheat you." After a pause he said, "I don't have enough bullets to kill all of you." He grinned.

  "He's leaving the volunteer here," Sharpie said, "and we'll be ready for him when he gets back." Turning to Doug he said. "We'll be ready for you so you'd better keep your promise."

  "That's a good plan, my friend," Doug said. Turning to R47 he said "Make sure he doesn't escape."

  "We're not going anywhere near it," Sharpie said. "Not until we know it's safe."

  Doug scowled. "Forget it," he said walking away. "You're getting nothing." His face went red. "Now he knows that you are afraid of him. The first thing he'll do when I leave is escape."

  "You're afraid of him too," Sharpie said.

  Doug grunted and snorted like an enraged bull. He marched over to R47.

  What will he do to me? R47 wondered. Doug knelt beside him and slapped him in the face. The noise rung in R47's ears. He felt the sting and was surprised about it. How could he feel it in console mode?

  Doug looked back at Sharpie. "You see?" he said. "I'm not scared of him, my friend, and he's not going to hurt you."

  There was a pause of silence. It was as if the kids were waiting for R47's retort. But R47 could do nothing. Doug wasn't wearing a HUD that he could communicate with and he dared not surface from console mode in case the black box kicked in and Doug could kill him. Doug was right. He was powerless until he could break the black box, and that's what he had to work on. Had to.

  "See, my friends," Doug said. As if to reinforce the point he slapped R47 again. "The HUD killed her," Doug continued as he stood up. "Whatever happened, it depended on the HUD."

  As Doug returned, Sharpie nodded and motioned for two boys to stand guard by R47. They remained frozen at first but relented and moved forward when Sharpie scowled at them. One boy revealed a knife, its blade gleaming in the sunlight.

  "You'll get your meat, my friends," Doug said as he walked back to his truck. "Don't Worry." After a pause he turned and said, "But make sure he doesn't get away."

  ###

  R47 wished the boys dead, especially the one with the knife. He wanted to rip him apart, tear out his veins and squeeze his blood into a puddle on the ground. He wanted to drown the other in that pool of blood.

  The kids dispersed after Doug's truck was gone, but Sharpie remained near the Queen's body. Lardy was with him.

  They stared at her. She looked as if she had been decapitated and her head replaced with a hard-hat.

  "I can't believe she's gone," Sharpie said. "I wish she was still here. I almost expect she'll
get up any minute."

  "She deserves better than lying there like that," Lardy said. He knelt down, extending his hand.

  Sharpie grabbed him by his other arm and dragged him back. "Don't touch her," he warned. "If you get anywhere near that HUD, the volunteer will kill you too."

  Lardy stood up and rubbed his arm. "How can we leave her there?" he asked. Sharpie shrugged. "I don't want to," Lardy said.

  Sharpie placed a hand on Lardy's shoulder. "I know," he said, "but we don't have a choice right now. When it's safe, I'll make sure she gets a leader's goodbye."

  They extended their distance from her.

  "I wonder where he takes them?" Lardy asked Sharpie. "The stray kids we usually give him."

  "Don't know," Sharpie said. "But I wouldn't want to be in their shoes." His eyeballs turned to R47.

  "But it's not the same for him," Lardy said motioning to R47.

  "Yes, he's not a person. He must have some other use. He's not normal. Not like other volunteers. There's something different about him," Sharpie said.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  MARCIA WAS FINALLY free of her work imposed prison, but not on the terms she craved.

  Cynthia and two guards accompanied Marcia in a desolate, crumbling location in the Shit Belt. The afternoon sunlight and a gentle breeze couldn't make up for a rancid, raw garbage-like smell.

  They stood, backs against the reinforced armoured passenger door of a Jeep four-wheel drive. Two robotic expressionless security men stood one in front of each woman, shielding them. They waited to put a face to the fear invoking voice of "Doug Smith" who was yet to arrive.

  Kicking and screaming, Marcia thought. That's how they had forced her here.

  They had shoved her in a confined space after ejecting her from the experiment room. Cynthia was with them a short time afterwards. She had told them, no. All of them; Cynthia and the guards. She had writhed. She had struck the guards, scratched them, yelled at Cynthia, even sworn at her. What had been the point? She couldn't have avoided this.